abjad

[ ab-jad ]

Phonetic (Standard)IPA

noun

, Linguistics.

a system of writing, as in Hebrew and Arabic scripts, in which each symbol represents a consonantal sound, with few or no vowels being represented in the basic characters. abugida ( def ).

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Word History and Origins

From Arabic ʾa(lif), b(āʾ), j(īm), d(āl), the first four letters of the Arabic script in its historical order; coined by U.S. linguist Peter T. Daniels (born 1951) in Fundamentals of Grammatology (1990); abugida ( def )

Abitibi abject

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