Abjad facts for kids

An abjad is an alphabet in which all its letters are consonants. Even though vowels can be added in some abjads, they are not needed to write a word correctly. Well-known examples of abjads are the Arabic alphabet and the Hebrew alphabet.

Abjads are the first writing systems that were made only to show a word's pronunciation, instead of its meaning, unlike ideographs or ideograms, and they were created before full alphabets, like the Greek alphabet, which have letters for both consonants and vowels.

The earliest known abjad in the world is the Phoenician alphabet. Since in Afro-Asiatic languages, the root meaning of a word is found in its consonants, abjads are widely used in those languages. There are also languages without consonant roots that use abjads, such as Persian and Urdu, which both use the Arabic alphabet.

Images for kids

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  A specimen of Proto-Sinaitic script containing a phrase which may mean 'to Baalat'. The line running from the upper left to lower right reads mt l bclt.

See also

In Spanish: Alfabeto consonántico para niños