Talk:Abugida

Tengwar

Are the tengwar abugidas? -- Error

They can be, depending on the mode. If you write vowels with dots, they're an abugida. If you write them with separate letters (e.g. mode of Beleriand), they're more alphabet-like (especially if you use separate characters for each vowel rather than a generic vowel character which bears marks). A bit like the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish: both use the same script, but Hebrew uses it as an abjad (if you ignore matres lectionis) while Yiddish uses it as an alphabet. -- pne 15:10, 21 May 2004 (UTC)

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The usage of consonant characters without an inherent vowel in Brahmi scripts

As me and Gwalla have both reverted from our respective edits now, I thought it best to bring the matter do discussion.

In my opinion, the formulation that the vowelless characters are used in consonant clusters and syllable-finally is redundant and, more importantly, perhaps unclear to larger audience. I am not familiar with how South Asian scholars describe them, but in an encyclopedic article that isn't important. My point is that saying that they are used in consonant clusters and word-finally, it should be clear and unambiguous to most what is meant, and there is no need to resort to the notion of syllable, which has no clear and universally agreed status even among linguists.

Of course, I am open to correction and clarification of the opposing view, but until then, I hope that passage wouldn't be further edited. ---Oghmoir 11:01, 5 Feb 2005 (UTC)

A consonant cluster is a group of adjacent consonants in the same syllable, like the /st/ in "start" or the /dz/ in "kids". A syllable-final consonant is like the /m/ in "hamburger". Linguists differentiate between them because some languages allow the latter but not the former. — Gwalla | Talk 01:14, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

In every discussion on phonology that I have encountered during my linguistics studies, consonant clusters have been defined as any kind of a group of adjacent consonants, regardless of syllable boundaries. For example, the The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics defines consonant clusters as: "A sequence of consonants before, after, or between vowels. E.g. [str] is a medial consonant cluster in words like astray." Anyway, many linguists would say that the /s/ in "start" and /z/ in "kids" are syllables of their own, because they are higher on the sonority hierarchy, but many wouldn't. ---Oghmoir 09:32, 6 Feb 2005 (UTC)

Abugida in Ge'ez

Does anyone know the Ge'ez characters for A-bu-gi-da? Thank you. --Immanuel Giel 14:29, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Not sure if you're still looking for answers, but A-bu-di-da is spelled out in Ge'ez and Amharic in the intro of the page. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Peelinglayers (talk • contribs) 02:17, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Syllabaries

The obvious contrast is with syllabaries, which have one distinct symbol per possible syllable, and the signs for each syllable have no systematic graphic similarity.

But Korean hangul is a syllabary, is it not? And the syllables for (say) ka, ki, ku, ke, ko are all similar. Rcaetano 18:12, 25 Jun 2005 (UTC)

No, it's an alphabet. --Immanuel Giel 28 June 2005 12:40 (UTC)

Just that the individual letters are combined in squares, read as syllables.

Tamil script *not* a true abugida

Mainly because it *does* possess pure consonants, marked by a dot on top of the consonant. If there is no contention, I will remove it from the list of "true" abugidas. Kingsleyj 00:21, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

This is the case for most Indic and Ethiopic scripts. Tamil does not have letters for plain consonants; for that it needs a diacritic. That's a defining feature of abugidas. kwami 05:52, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Actually, the Ethiopian script doesn't have a letter for pure consonants anymore. Formerly, the first form was a pure consonant (when it was an abjad), but the sadis (sixth) form which can be used for consonants is technically "Cə" rather than an inherent consonant. It can be a consonant in some cases (usually word-final, except sometimes when connected in a phrase), but the basic letter form is for a vowel. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 21:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Hebrew

Why classical hebrew is not a abugidas? —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 86.205.105.82 (talk • contribs) 09:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Wasn't classical Hebrew still an abjad? I thought that it was all consonants with perhaps diacritics to mark vowels (like Arabic), but not actual modification of the letter forms (or reorientation, etc.). Actually, I guess if the diacritics were necessary in all writing, then it would be an abugida, but since it's extraneous to the writing of Hebrew, then it wouldn't be an Abugida. — ዮም (Yom) | contribs • Talk 21:15, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Hebrew is written with an abjad system. Vowels and consonants are written seperately whereas in an abugida system, basic characters combine both consonant and vowel. In an abugida, it requires a special symbol to remove the vowel inherent in the character. Interlingua 21:51, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

"akshara"

"In the family of abugidas known as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, vowels are indicated by rotation and / or inversion of the akshara. For example, Inuktitut ᐱ pi, ᐳ pu, ᐸ pa; ᑎ ti, ᑐ tu, ᑕ ta."

The word akshara is used without being defined or linked. Wikipedia's own page is not very helpful:

• in Sanskrit grammar, "syllable", see Shiksha
• a grapheme of script of the Brahmic family.
• in philosophical terms is the opposite of the word kṣara "perishable", a name of Brahma.

As used in this article, it evidently refers to the abstraction consisting of the shape of a glyph without reference to its orientation: a definition close to but not identical with the second one above. If this definition is standard in some community, it should be

1. added to the akshara article and
2. referenced from this page.

If not, it should be either defined here or, better, replaced by an explanation that doesn't require a hapax legomenon.

Thnidu 20:27, 20 February 2007 (UTC)

Plain "consonant" would be better in this case. --JWB (talk) 21:01, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Evolution

From the article:

"Evolution

As the term alphasyllabary suggests, abugidas have been considered an intermediate step between alphabets and syllabaries."

The idea that various writing systems fit on a single evolutionary scale (coincidentally with alphabet being on top, nonetheless) seems rather inaccurate. Different writing systems have different strengths and weaknesses, as opposed to one writing system being more "advanced" than the other. Whether a particular writing system is better suitable depends on several factors including phonology. I think syllabics fit Japanese just fine, for example. It's more of an apples vs oranges or spoon vs fork comparison. One didn't necessarily evolve from another, nor is there a particular predetermined evolutionary sequence. For example, Pitman shorthand is listed as abugida-like despite being derived from the English alphabet. —Tokek 23:38, 7 March 2007 (UTC)

I agree. In any case, there seems to be more of a connection between abjads and abugidas, and between syllabaries and logographic writing systems. I can't think of an abugida that evolved from an alphabet. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me) 04:13, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Other use of virama

Description

For text information processing on computer, other means of expressing these functions include special conjunct forms in which two or more consonant characters are merged to express a cluster, (...) This expedient is used by ISCII and South Asian scripts of Unicode.

This says about rendering of glyphs on the information processing, but doesn't say about written scripts: the virama character for this use won't be visible/writable character. It might be described in ISCII or Unicode#Ligatures. --Hatukanezumi 03:54, 11 March 2007 (UTC)

Pronunciation

How is Abugida pronounced? It is not to be found at webster.com on in my American Heritage dictionary application.

Asian languages?

What about written Japanese such as Hiragana/Katakana? They employ consonants followed by vowels with the exception of the stand-alone "n" sound... are these considered abugidas as well or have I misunderstood the category?

Hiragana and Katakana are pure syllabaries. They have separate, unrelated characters for each CV (consonant-vowel) combination, whereas abugidas use the same character for each syllable where the consonant is the same, marking the vowel with a diacritic or other means (this makes abugidas sound like alphabets but I'm just trying to make clear how they differ from syllabaries). So when you look at a Hiragana chart, you'll notice that the characters for ki and ke, for example, look completely different. But if you look how those same syllables are written in Devanagari, for instance, you'll see that they use the same base character (for the consonant) but a different diacritic (for the vowel). (ka in Devanagari would be written without any diacritics, which makes it an abugida, not an ordinary alphabet.) Hope this helps :) Oghmoir 22:58, 26 July 2007 (UTC)

Semi-syllabaries?

From the intro:

Others, however, prefer to consider such systems of writing syllabaries, "semi-syllabaries", or "alpha-syllabaries".

It is not clear what "such" refers to here. What systems are called semi-syllabaries? AxelBoldt 02:38, 3 December 2007 (UTC)

Abugidas. kwami (talk) 07:00, 7 January 2008 (UTC)

Pronunciation

Could someone add an IPA pronunciation for this word? I have never heard it spoken and it is so obscure that not a single online dictionary has it. −Woodstone (talk) 09:43, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

I haven't been able to find anything. Put the question up on the Ge'ez article. kwami (talk) 16:13, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

In Amharic it's [əbuɡida]. Evidently stress is not phonemic. I've always stressed the gi, but that's just me. kwami (talk) 09:58, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Nope, the first vowel is most definitely not ə, in Amharic. It is a, the long a, as in Father. One experience that is worth hearing is an Ethiopian singing the ABC song (the one to the tune of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star) with the Abugida. "Ah, bu, gi, da, hey, wuh, zo... beh, gu, di, ha, wey, zih, zho..." etc. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 11:28, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

By the way, in Ge'ez, as noted in the article, the first vowel is ä (not ə, and not a as it is in Amharic either!) Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 11:38, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Amharic "ä" is [ə] (we don't really know about Ge'ez, of course). Amharic "ə" is [ɨ], not [ə]. kwami (talk) 17:39, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Ge`ez or Amharic

Following the editing disagreement between Kwamikagami and Til Eulenspiegel over the source of the word "abugida", I referred the question to Peter T. Daniels, who replied, "I adopted it (at Wolf Leslau's suggestion) from Ethiopic. It occurs in both Ge`ez and Amharic. Solomonic, no?" He also asked, "Please get them to spell Ge`ez correctly" and mentioned that "shwa is misleading in Ethiopic transcriptions, because it's not a reduced vowel, it's a high central vowel". —12.109.41.2 (talk) 18:50, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for that!

We should also ask which syllable is stressed.

I don't understand what he means by "spell Ge`ez correctly". True, "Gə‘əz" is confusing for someone trained in the IPA, but it is the standard transliteration. "Ge‘ez" is wrong both in the IPA and the standard transliteration, so I don't see how it's any more "correct". kwami (talk) 19:01, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Yes, that's actually the alternative spelling he noted, with the schwa symbols, before his comment about how it can be misleading. I think he was talking somewhat tongue-in-cheek. There isn't any reason why the English name for a language has to be a transliteration of that language's name for itself at all. 12.109.41.2 (talk) 19:10, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

Re stress: "Secondary stress on a-, primary stress on -gi-." Good to know, I'd assumed primary stress was on the -bu-. Probably because it sounded like "boogity". 12.109.41.2 (talk) 21:14, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

It's really too bad you cannot accept the word of fluent Amharic speakers that there is no such concept as stressed syllables in Amharic, and must turn to those who know zero Amharic, to get a second opinion about the language that is in fact quite incorrect. I can dig up actual quotes from one of the world's foremost Amharic experts, Dr. Amsalu Aklilu, stating there is no such thing as syllabic stress, since you won't believe me. Til Eulenspiegel (talk) 21:32, 2 May 2008 (UTC)

You're off on a tangent. We aren't talking about Amharic. We're talking about the English word "abugida", written in English letters and spoken with English phonetics by people who are using the word while writing or speaking in English. Amharic speakers are not the authority on how words are pronounced in English. When I use the word "abugida", not to mention the words "Ge'ez" or "Amharic" or "Ethiopia", while speaking English, I will no more avoid stress (or otherwise feign a knowledge of Amharic phonetics) than I will pronounce the word "schwa" as [ʃvɑ] on account of it being borrowed from German or the word "alphabet" as a Greek would say it or the word "abjad" with an Arabic accent. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.34.101.226 (talk) 00:23, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Til Eulenspiegel, it's not possible to avoid stress in English. If a word comes from a language without stress, such as Japanese or French, we invent the stress placement. The question is where would be best. Daniels' answer happens to match my intuition, but it could easily have been something else. kwami (talk) 17:58, 3 May 2008 (UTC)

Definition

Use of presence of a default inherent vowel as the sole or primary criterion should be deemphasized. Placing vowels relative to a consonant rather than simply as part of a liner sequence is a more basic feature. --JWB (talk) 21:07, 12 June 2008 (UTC)

Agreed. Abugidas are segmental scripts where vowels are obligatory but take second billing. Rather like tone most Roman alphabet adaptations (in Hanyu Pinyin all full tones are written, but 'neutral' tone is not; in Tongyong Pinyin it is the high tone that is not written). kwami (talk) 00:02, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

How's that? kwami (talk) 00:17, 13 June 2008 (UTC)

Description

I'm not sure what to say to edit the "Description" section, other than that I highly disagree with the table with the Features listed for the "Canadian":

• Initial vowel letter(s): Zero consonant >> depending on the consonant, it is either a Zero consonant or Glottal stop
• Absence of vowel sign: Vowel indication obligatory >> ... but not for the Medials ᐧ ᐦ ᓬ ᕒ
• Consonant ligatures: None >> wrong!, ᕓᕕᕗᕙ and ᕞᕠᕤᕦ are ligatures, as with these: ᕿ ᖁ ᖃ ᖏ ᖑ ᖓ ᔉ ᔊ. Also, in NW Ontario, there are the L and R series written with ᓀᓂᓄᓇ with ᓫ or ᕑ above them, which are also ligatures. When we head west to the Athapaskan forms, they are completely full of ligatures!
• Distinct final forms: Western only >> no. ᐤ is a distinct final form found in Cree and Ojibwe in both eastern and western orthographies.
• Final consonant position: Inline, small, raised >> Only true in the Cree-Ojibwe-Inuktitut and Blackfoot forms. In the Athapaskan forms, they're Inline, small, but can be raised, mid-line or lowered, depending on the final.

I tried to edit the table and it just became a mess, so I'm going to let someone who can say this a bit more eloquently do the edits. CJLippert (talk) 02:30, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll take a look at it. Not sure exactly what your first point means, though. --JWB (talk) 03:06, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

These points are misleading or wrong.

• The 'medials' are marginal, at least in Eastern Cree. L & R only occur in English & French loans, and init H only occurs in one native word. In dialects which have L or R, there are separate C series. Normal words rotate the C. But it doesn't matter, because vowel marking is obligatory regardless. You can't leave the V off an init H; if you did, it would be read as a final H.
• There are no consonant ligatures. ᕿ is not a ligature for /rki/, but a digraph for /qi/. ᕓ is not even a digraph.
• As there is no initial /w/, it's hard to argue that the final form is distinct from the initial. The ᐤ could just as easily be said to be a diacritic to mark a /u/ diphthong. But that's a minor point and it was okay the way JWB had it.
• The only Athabaskan final which is not raised, at least in the Unicode fonts, is the mid dot for glottal stop. None are lowered. A comment like we had for final /w/ would be okay here, but either CJ's claim is wrong, or else Unicode got it wrong.

I also don't understand what is meant by the consonant being zero or a glottal stop depending on the consonant.

I took out hangul again. We may not state that it's an abugida, but putting it in a table comparing abugidas certainly implies that it is one. The characterization was also wrong: Hangul does not use diacritics to mark vowels, for example, and doesn't have special final C forms. kwami (talk) 07:19, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Adding Latin alphabet to the comparison makes it very clear that not all are necessarily abugidas. Hangul does put vowels in various vowel-specific positions relative to the initial consonant (like the abugidas) and final consonants below everything else (somewhat like the Canadian Syllabic finals that are small, raised versions of the initial consonant signs). Hangul is unique only in not having fixed sizes for each letter but compressing all letters of a syllable to fit in a square block, and some recent Hangul fonts even drop this in favor of fixed-size letters and irregular, variable syllabic blocks, though the blocks themselves are kerned as fixed width not variable width, at least as far as I've seen. --JWB (talk) 11:57, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Depending on the dialect, ᐁᐃᐅᐊ is either treated either as the zero-consonant or as a glottal stop as a consonant. If in the initial position, then it is always assumed zero-consonant. For example, in Ojibwe, ᒪᓯᓇᐃᑲᓐ is mazina'igan and not mazinaigan, but ᐅᐅᐤ is o'ow and ᐦᐋᐤ is haaw and not 'aaw. And yes, UniCode is most definitely wrong in treatment of Canadian syllabics because it unifies all of it into a single block. Yes, Cree-Ojibwe-Inuktitut group can be merged into a unified set, but you can't do that with the Blackfoot group, and the demands of the Athapaskan groups are very different from that of the other two groups. UniCode completely omits the ᓀᓂᓄᓇ with the overscript ᓬ and ᕒ for the Ojibwe (see my Freelang Ojibwe readme). Unicode ignores the Athapaskan finals that are mid-line and low-line positions. However, this is not really UniCode's problem because they just adopted pDam's recommendations, and pDam was focused on Cree with everything else being ancillary. Even the ᕃᕆᕈᕋ, if pDam would have taken the historical context into consideration, would instead have ᕃᕂᕄᕆ; or if the form was of concern ᕂᕆᕈᕋ would have been the preferred order. CJLippert (talk) 15:28, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

The ᕓᕕᕗᕙ and ᕞᕠᕤᕦ developed from the rotation of ᕙ and ᕦ, which most definitely are ligatures of the digraphs ᐸᐦ and ᑕᐦ. In the Island Lake dialect of Oji-Cree, they still use ᑌᐦᑎᐦᑐᐦᑕᐦ instead of ᕞᕠᕤᕦ.

The Athapaskan groups most definitely do have high-line, mid-line and low-line. For examples online, see Languagegeek's Syllabic Variation page. CJLippert (talk) 15:46, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

That's not what we mean by 'ligature' here. We're talking about ligatures being used to indicate the lack of a vowel. ᐸᐦ and ᑕᐦ are simply digraphs calqued from English, and ᕙ and ᕦ are new letters created to replace them. Whether or not the loops in ᕙ and ᕦ derive from the letter ᐦ is perhaps debatable, but in any case is irrelevant, as even if they do, that is a historical detail that has no effect on the functioning of the script. kwami (talk) 18:14, 27 July 2008 (UTC)

Correct, the article should use the more specific term conjunct consonants meaning ligature specifically to indicate lack of a vowel, rather than "ligature" in general.

I've added information at Hangul#Block shape on recent Hangul typography emphasizing consistent letter size rather than consistent block size.

I think it is better to focus on living writing systems, and it sounds like Athapaskan syllabics went out of use some time ago. --JWB (talk) 00:12, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

Yes, but if they are functionally different than living scripts, we should at least make a note of that. kwami (talk) 00:40, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

The new Korean fonts are weird. I can see why they're not used for full texts. kwami (talk) 00:57, 28 July 2008 (UTC)

They looked weird at first to me, but I think the increased visual variation in block shape corresponds with characteristics of Latin-alphabet mixed-case typography (descenders, ascenders, whitespace) that are said to promote legibility and faster reading. --JWB (talk) 06:21, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

That makes sense, actually. The only reservation I've ever had about hangul (besides the impracticality of applying it to other languages) is wondering how visually distinct the blocks would be to a fluent reader. kwami (talk) 06:40, 4 August 2008 (UTC)

Hello, I am literate in Korean and wanted to comment. I think the way hangul assembles jamo into syllabic blocks work well for the Korean language, because 1) Korean has several vowels, and 2) Korean is agglutinative. As an agglutinative language, a Korean word can be potentially very long, but unlike fusional languages, a word can be segmented into morphemes pretty easily. Due to the large vowel inventory, a syllabic structure naturally arises, and (given that one wants a morphophonemic orthography) it is possible and relatively easy to map morphemes onto one or more syllables.

What this entails is that a syllable boundary, orthgraphically, can also be a morpheme boundary, and thus segmentation is done at the text level rather than in the reader's mind. Further, since a syllable boundary is implicit (i.e. does not require additional symbol or whitespace), the compactness of the orthography is not lessened. Due to these, I hypothesise that the syllabic assembly makes reading Korean texts easier.

So, about your comment about the impracticality of applying hangul to other languages.... It is obviously impractical for languages in which denoting vowels can be superfluous, like Arabic, or for languages that are syllable-less.

It is also not very practical for analytic or fusional languages--words in analytic languages are short enough that the complexity of syllable assembly outweighs the benefit of morpheme segmentation (although it might work well with analytic languages with high number of monosyllabic words, such as Vietnamese, as it would compact the writing by rendering whitespaces unnecessary); and morphemes in fusional languages are difficult to segment, and even if they can be segmented, I doubt whether there will be a close correspondence between speech and orthography.

However, for agglutinative languages with large vowel inventory, I think a system similar to hangul's will work better than a linear alphabetic system.

As for visual distinction of blocks.... Despite the fact that the syllables are forced into uniform squares, the individual jamos in the block change in position and size as the font designer balances them that, I think, there is enough variation within the block to make most blocks distinct from each other. Frankly, I don't think this is much of an issue, since one can disambiguate by looking at surrounding syllables. And like in most other written languages, a fluent reader in Korean would not read every letter on a page.

Talnemo fonts are cool, but the extreme ones are, for me, to fixed-block fonts as Courier New is to Arial, so I don't think many people would choose to use it exclusively. As I previously mentioned, it seems to me that the variation within the block is a main factor in making a syllable distinct, so syllables with similar graphic structure, such as 를, 롤, and 룰, out of context, are inherently difficult to distinguish, whether you use a Talnemo font or not. The modern, less extreme Talnemo fonts tend to be designed based on ergonomics (i.e. "how long can you read before tiring out?", "how quickly can you recognise the symbol?" etc.) or to achieve inter-jamo balance (i.e. regularity of space between jamo) as much as inter-syllable balance (i.e. regularity of the block size). If you can read hangul, here's one such rationale.[1] -- AZ, 09 Sept 2008 —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.84.167.225 (talk) 10:13, 9 September 2008 (UTC)

Alphasyllabary vs. Abugida

These are two different concepts

According to both Daniels and Bright (in discussions on the qalam mailing list, roughly 2001), these two concepts are not the same. There are scripts which are abugidas but not alphasyllabaries, and vice versa. I'm not sure whether that necessarily means the article needs to be split in two, as they were clearly trying to capture roughly the same thing, but the way the article is written now it makes it seems as if these are two different names for the same class. That's not the case. Technically speaking, both the intentions and the extensions, of these classes are different. LarsMarius (talk) 21:08, 21 December 2010 (UTC)

Seperate section required for brahmi script

many authors have said that the brahmi script of india is not an "abugida"

Who? It is the prototypical abugida. kwami (talk)

the views of the current article are not accepted by a lot of respectable script authors.

Who? kwami (talk)

suggest creation of seperate article for the brahmi script.

There is one. kwami (talk)

i will add sources later to this effect. LanguageExpert (talk) 07:18, 13 September 2009 (UTC)

Please make sure you're familiar with WP:RS. kwami (talk) 07:00, 14 September 2009 (UTC)

"Alphasyllabary" is more correct than "abugida"?

Abugida, syllabic alphabet, semi-syllabary, alphasyllabary—those can mean the same thing, and each of them is actually used, more or less. However, in recent versions, it seems that too much emphasis is put on the term “alphasyllabary”. Currently the article even states that abugida is commonly called as alphasyllabary. Sometimes called, yes. Also known as, yes. But commonly called? I have nothing against the term alphasyllabary itself, but those edits are maybe a bit too much, not only repetitive and wordy, but biased: by search engine test, perhaps abugida is most common, followed by syllabic alphabet, semi-syllabary, alphasyllabary, pseudo-alphabet, neosyllabary roughly in this order. Alphasyllabary is a recognized term, but abugida is a correct term too,[2] and imho actually more commonly used. Would it be okay to undo some of those edits that are apparently based on the unsourced view or personal preference that alphasyllabary is the “more correct” term? Or is it actually more correct? Thank you in advance for any suggestions.—Gyopi (talk) 10:34, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Already done. "Abugida" has been consensus wording for years. If LE wishes to change it, he can bring it up for discussion. kwami (talk) 10:41, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

"Abugida" is a fairly recent coinage. It's approximately as old as the Internet and is popular there. I'm not as sure about published sources. It might be predominant in recently published sources.

I would not pick "abugida" if I were Peter Daniels making up these names. The word akṣára is known both in India and in Southeast Asia which are much larger than Ethiopia and Eritrea.

Also, Ethiopic is derived from a Semitic abjad and the extant Semitic abjads both have vowel diacritics that make them functionally equivalent to abugidas and are fully used in some contexts like scripture, but even the voweled versions of the scripts are never referred to as abugidas. This seems inconsistent. --JWB (talk) 13:26, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

I think Peter Daniels picked "abugida" rather than "alphasyllabary" for a very good reason: abugidas are neither alphabets nor syllablaries, so it would be misleading to imply that they're somehow a mixture of the two. And whatever the most popular term may have been 20 years ago, it's clear that nowadays – both in the Internet and in paper books – "abugida" is the preferred term. In fact, before Daniels pushed through the term "abugida", there probably was no common name for them in English (otherwise he wouldn't have needed to coin one). +Angr 13:39, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

you can read the discussion below, the term "abugida" is not established at all. abugida is just a name it does not denote anything and peter daniels made that term a long time ago. since then many better terms have been used. the best one among them would be alpha syllabary. LanguageExpert (talk) 13:54, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

How can it be accurate to call it any kind of syllabary? Look at the Hindi example in the article for the word "cricket", "krikeţ". While the syllabary-centered analysis is that a syllable represented by /k/ + virama is followed by /ri/, the fact that the /i/ is written at the beginning of the word indicates that the spelling is treated as {kr} + /i/. Unless one is prepared to speak of syllables-within-syllables, the {k} can't be taken as a syllable. —Largo Plazo (talk) 14:12, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

gyopi you need to refine the search as i will explain below LanguageExpert (talk) 13:39, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Google Books gives 73 for alphasyllabary vs. 159 for abugida, and 680 for the phrase "syllabic alphabet". There might be more for other variations. --JWB (talk) 14:27, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

Google Scholar: 153 abugida, 112 alphasyllabary, 287 "syllabic alphabet". --JWB (talk) 14:42, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

It seems the abugida and syllabary (or alphasyllabary) are different writing systems, and as to their distinguishable roles in linguistic typology, unless few concepts are clarified in terms of ‘what it is not’ rather than ‘what it is’, there will be ambiguities.

So what is it not? The abugida is nothing else than a writing system that indicates the vowels by modifying consonants in rotation, diacritics, or orientation.

So what is the syllabary? The syllabary has two main characters in a writing system--a) it seeks to complement consonants in a CV form rather than as a single consonant, and b) it can take vowels as distinct syllables.

Thus, a language (whether it is of a script or of an alphabet or of both) can be of an abugida character or of a syllabary character or of both. Are these correct? Nevill Fernando (talk) 04:37, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

The name "alphasyllabary" was coined for the Indic scripts, and is meant to suggest that it's part-way between an alphabet and a syllabary. It may not be an exact synonym for "abugida", but any difference is abstruse, and I've never seen them contrasted in any meaningful way. kwami (talk) 05:42, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Thank you, JWB, for you edits [3]. LanguageExpert, I can see your point. Abugida is a weird, non-descriptive name. I too would prefer a name that suggests the writing system is partly syllable-based and partly phoneme-based. But what I'd prefer is irrelevant here. Also, I didn't say the word "alphasyllabary" was biased; the edit is biased if you say something is "commonly called X" when it is not so commonly called X. Anyway, what should be written in Wikipedia is not what things should be, but what things actually are. I left a short message in your talk page.—Gyopi (talk) 08:09, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Current changes

the canadian box is put along with the canadian aboriginal section, i dont know why it was put in the very beginning far away from its section?

it is not just 3, there are other scripts that are being discovered hence the use of "different" or if you want "various"

alphasyllabary is the recognized, neutral and functional term. there is no need to for being biased and use wordings from different scripts when there is a neutral, functional, common term.LanguageExpert (talk) 12:39, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

"Abugida" is biased or non-neutral, but unlike "alphasyllabary" it's actually an established term in the study of writing systems. +Angr 13:24, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

no its not established at all. the correct way to search would be to give a space like - alpha syllabary. a refined search done will show that the term alpha syllabary and semi syllabary are used 3 or 4 times more compared to "abugida".

when using grammar people are more familiar with syllabaries, semi syllabaries or alpha syllabaries not at all with the term "abugida". i agree with jwb that his term is better. people from asean(thailand, malaysia, vietnam, cambodia etc.), india,tibet and all other asian countries would definitely not be comfortable with a non-neutral, biased, unestablished term like "abugida"

the best neutral term would be alphasyllabary or alpha syllabary. LanguageExpert (talk) 13:50, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

No, simply inserting a space between "alpha" and "syllabary" will yield all pages with "alpha" and "syllabary" independently anywhere on the page. You need to put double quotes around them ("alpha syllabary") or link them with punctuation (alpha-syllabary) to get that kind of search, and then there are only 394 hits.

You keep saying over and over and over what people are more familiar with without providing any support for your claims other than invalid Google searches. —Largo Plazo (talk) 14:17, 5 October 2009 (UTC)

No it did not not take it as two seperate edits. it mostly had alpha and immediately after that syllabary simply put alpha syllabary. this resulted in more search hits than "abugida". we can discuss that in the next section since this heading was made for something else. LanguageExpert (talk) 09:01, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

I think you need to read up on how Google search works.

"alpha-syllabaries" OR "alpha-syllabary" returns 60 English-language hits, including "alpha/syllabary" and "alpha syllabary", of which 39 do not include the term abugida.

alphasyllabary (which picks up the plural as well) returns 475 hits on English-language sites, of which only 220 do not also contain the term abugida.

abugida returns 329 hits on English-language sites which do not include the term alphasyllabary, though a few of those mean specifically Ethiopic. (We need to restrict the search to English, because abugida is also used in languages like German, while alphasyllabary is not.)

So the results of dedicated use are 260 to 330, in favor of abugida, which given the unreliability of Google search, is an effective tie.

At Google Books, we have 135 hits for abugida(s) vs. 54 for alpha(-)syllabary(s); 117 of the former and 45 of the latter do not contain the opposite term. kwami (talk) 09:34, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

you dont need to use such complicated way of talking, just go on google, type the word and see the search hits. when i typed alpha syllabary and semi syllabary yesterday i got more than 96,000 compared to abugida which had 36,000. today abugida has 42 k hits and alpha syllabary has less. the google search hits are not very steady from time to time. either way how is 40 k a "well established" term. even normal terms have got google hits in the million. LanguageExpert (talk) 09:45, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

So, not only do you not know how to search Google, but you aren't willing to learn.

BTW, Google Scholar: 153 hits abugida(s), 113 alpha(-)syllabary(s), of which 129 & 85 do not use the other term. kwami (talk) 09:54, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

For plain web search, the first page has 6 Ethiopian-specific results (2 video) and 5 writing system typology results.

For Books and Scholar it's also useful to put in cutoff dates - all 40 Books results for abugida before 1990 refer to Ethiopic, for example.

"Syllabic alphabet" got far more Books or Scholar results than either abugida or alphasyllabary, unless many of the results were bogus. --JWB (talk) 10:25, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Ah yes, I'd thought of cut-off dates and then forgot all about it.

abugida -alphasyllabary since 2000: 37 previewable hits on Books, of which 8 are Webster's quotes, 2 are in foreign languages, and one is the name of an NGO, →26 hits.

alphasyllabary -abugida since 2000: 27 hits, of which 2 are foreign, and several others do not actually contain the word.

syllabic alphabet w/o the other two: 132 hits. However, among the "syllabic alphabets" are not only abugidas but Japanese, Cherokee, zhuyin, Chinese ("the 40,000 characters of the Chinese syllabic alphabet"), Sumerian, hangul, Maya, Linear B, Vai, and several cases where I can't decipher what they mean. Even a linguistics text define "syllabic alphabet" as a syllabary (Kornai, Mathematical linguistics). kwami (talk) 11:05, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

First web hit for "syllabic alphabet" is Omniglot which equates it with abugida and alphasyllabary and uses "syllabic alphabet" as the primary term. Most of the top 10 also agree that "syllabic alphabet" does not mean syllabary, but #9 and #10 are about Japanese kana and Cherokee and use the term. "Syllabic alphabet" is not as unambiguous a term because it is polluted by some usage for syllabaries, but clearly its primary current usage is a term used for abugida / alphasyllabary including by some notable authorities. --JWB (talk) 00:30, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Well established?? says who??

i dont understand why some people say well established??

there are a lot of people who understand syllabary and semi syllabary or alpha syllabary but hardly any of them have ever heard of the term "abugida". the term abugida is just a name that represents a particular grammatical type, it does not mean anything of itself. it was just coined by a person. moreover the brahmi scripts and its descendants are believed by and large to be descended from aramaic, geez on the other hand does not descend from aramaic but from south arabian.

"abugida" has a meagre 40 thousand hits on google. how is that well established?? even some normal terms have got a million hits. if you look above in the section "Semi-syllabaries?" you can see that kwami says to another person as well that abugidas are called semi syllabaries. why do we need to use a biased term when we already have a neutral term. LanguageExpert (talk) 09:32, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

No, you haven't heard of "abugida". You aren't everyone. kwami (talk) 09:34, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Grammatical type? —Largo Plazo (talk) 10:57, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

can you atleast wait for me to finish editing before you jump in start replying? atleast a bit of courtesy? LanguageExpert (talk) 09:41, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

How am I supposed to know you've not finished editing? If you sign off, you're telling me that you have finished.

40,000 hits? Go to the last page and watch what happens to the count. You'll see that most of those are ghosts.

For you it would seem that "biased" means "I don't use this word", whereas "neutral" means "I do use this word". Once again, you aren't everyone. We saw above an editor who mistakenly thought an "alpha-syllabary" was a type of syllabary. Obviously, the term isn't as clear or universal as you seem to think. kwami (talk) 09:44, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

you are obviously working from a biased perspective even when there is a perfectly normal neutral term that exists. if you see above in the section "semi syllabary?" you said it yourself that abugidas are semi syllabaries.

biased means that you are purposefully favoring one word because of your ethnicity or other issues, neutral means that you are using a word that does not favor anyone and is neutral which is in strict accordance with wikipedia policy. LanguageExpert (talk) 09:50, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

And you have zero evidence for your claims, so this is a waste of time. Good bye. kwami (talk) 09:56, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

zero evidence? what are you talking about? the main article itself says that William Bright coined the world alphasyllabary as a formal definition. you are obviously working from a biased perspective. LanguageExpert (talk) 10:38, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Um, why don't you reread what you wrote. Then you might understand my answer. You claim one term is neutral, and the other is biased. You've presented zero evidence. You say that because I disagree with you, I must be biased, and hint that that's due to my ethnicity. You've presented zero evidence. Bright did not coin alphasyllabary as a "formal definition"; you might want to read that passage again. I did not say that abugidas are semi syllabaries; I said that the word "such systems" refers to abugidas. kwami (talk) 11:13, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Please, everyone, read Bright2000 first. It’s been a while since I read it, but it discusses the naming problem quite well.

Of course there are arguments to be made for and against basically any scientific term. Personally, I do not like abugida and abjad' – or alphabet (or abecedary) for that matter, but I do like the harmony of these terms. We do not have such a nice sequence with (segmentary), consonantary and syllabary.

Daniels has influenced the terminology of (Western) English-writing authors quite a bit. His terms are known to say the least, i.e. they are established. Other terms exist though, but they can originate in and be used with slightly different meanings.

Anyhow, there is not yet a universal or even universally accepted typology of scripts and writing systems, so there are competing terms to be expected. (Add to that outdated theories still believed in and taught: Wikipedia, for instance, somewhere still calls the Korean script “featural” and, worse, classifies it by that term.)

In my studies I’m dealing with computer scientists, typographers, linguists, sociologists, psychologists and, luckily not too often, palaeographists (I will ignore teachers for their own good); they all have very different (often justified, sometimes just wrong) ideas about what writing (and reading) is, which shows in the typologies, theories and terminologies they prefer (= know). In each of the fields there are of course several schools to choose from, often predetermined by one’s cultural background. — Christoph Päper 21:56, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

Bright says that "alphasyllabary" is defined graphically, meaning that the vowel symbols are dependent, while Daniels' "abugida", according to Bright, is defined by presence of an inherent vowel. In the past I've edited this article to deemphasize the inherent vowel sound as the main criterion and emphasize the graphically dependent vowel signs. --JWB (talk) 01:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

D&B together define abugida letters as having an inherent vowel, with diacritics indicating other vowels, so it would seem the graphic component is relevant for both.

PS. What's wrong with calling hangul 'featural'? It's even presented that way in Korea. kwami (talk) 03:43, 8 October 2009 (UTC)

Then, the militating factors in the taxonomy are the priorities, namely, in typology--on whether priority is to be given to the presence of inherent vowels or to the graphic arrangements.

When in fact the writing systems are orthogonal (linear orders corresponding to the order of utterance in a uniform position), then the classification schema is less complicated. That is, we can say that the language Swampy Cree (a language of Algonquian alphabet) and Tamil (a language of Tamil alphabet) are abugidas but are varied in their vowel modifications, i.e. by rotations in Swampy Cree and by orientations in Tamil.

A note on Swampy Cree: I do not know the language other than their morphosyntactic structures in linguistics (I just begin to learn). The abugida character in Swampy Cree (according to easy sources) only refers to the alphabet that had been evolved since the adaptation of the first advocacy in literacy for written language which has lately been replaced by the Roman alphabet. Nevill Fernando (talk) 04:09, 14 May 2010 (UTC)

Error in describing Canadian Syllabics in the "Description" section.

I have a problem with the table found in "Description" section, but not sure how to fix it. The current table says Canadian: Final consonant position: Small, raised. For Inuktitut, Cree, Ojibwe and Blackfoot, this is generally true, but the statement is utterly false if you're describing one of several different varieties used by the Carrier languages. While most are written as a smaller, raised glyph, in the Carrier varieties, finals can be in the raised, mid-line or lowered positions, with each position assigned to a different consonant value, so they are not interchangable. Also, in some text, such as in this one in Ojibwe, other than in the initial title (and the small raised "sh" in the "shk" clusters through-out the document), the finals are not written as a small, raised text! (they are shown as full-sized i-vowel forms). CJLippert (talk) 00:26, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Yes, we should make it clear that this describes the original system. kwami (talk) 05:50, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

Minor error in Ref. 3?

I see the title as "Tpology"; probably should be "Typology". Left it as is because I don't know how to edit references, and have not found it easy to learn how; also, because that could have been an intentional spelling. If it was just a typo, after fixing it, this section might as well be deleted to reduce clutter. Regards, Nikevich (talk) 09:30, 10 January 2010 (UTC)

Origin of Brahmi : new paper

i am pleased to announce the publication of my fifth research paper in a peer-reviewed journal

this deals with the origin of Brahmi . this is a logical and self-explanatory paper and is written using a multi-disciplinary approach. it is written in such a way that anybody can cross-verify the conclusions.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/127306265/Sujay-Post-Harappan-Literacy-Final-Final-Final

sujay rao mandavilli — Preceding unsigned comment added by 182.72.239.115 (talk) 09:38, 26 February 2013 (UTC)

Self-promotional announcements are not permitted in Wikipedia, even if they relate to an article's subject matter. This section should be removed. David Spector (talk)

Literacy in Pre-Buddhist India

Literacy in pre-Buddhist India (before 600 BC)

Please find my collection of papers on literacy in Pre-Buddhist India

Before mature phase of Indus valley civilization (before 2600 BC)

- There are some potters marks but none qualify as full writing

Indus valley civilization (2600 BC to 1900 BC)

1. The reconfirmation and reinforcement of the Indus script thesis (very logical and self explanatory paper)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/46387240/Sujay-Indus-Script-Final-Version-Final-Final

2. The reintroduction of the lost manuscript hypothesis (the case for this thesis has obviously become much stronger in the recent past)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/111707419/Sujay-Indus-Reintroducing-Lost-Manuscript-Hypothesis

Post-Harappan India (1600 BC to 600 BC)

1. Literacy in post-Harappan india (obviously literacy in post-Harappan India existed in certain pockets & were limited to very small sections of society- alphabetic scripts were brought from West Asia and the Indus script also continued – this a very logical and self-explanatory paper and anyone can cross-verify the conclusions)

http://www.scribd.com/doc/127306265/Sujay-Post-Harappan-Literacy-and-origin-of-Brahmi

Sujay Rao Mandavilli 182.72.239.115 (talk) 09:05, 5 March 2013 (UTC)

Self-promotional announcements are not permitted in Wikipedia, even if they relate to an article's subject matter. This section should be removed. David Spector (talk)

Error in comparison chart graphic.

The example phrase in Roman does not match with those in Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Gurumukhi, Oriya. The 3rd word in Roman starts "girvārṇa ", ie, g + small-i + r + v + long-ah + r + ṇ + short-a. All the transliterated text show long-i instead of short-i, and the second r is missing from all. Either the Roman is correct, or all the transliterated ones are correct. Vedabit (talk) 08:19, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

You should probably better raise that issue on Wikimedia Commons. The picture seems to suffer (or have been suffered) from several other errors as well. — Christoph Päper 13:58, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Broken reference

^ Peter T. Daniels (Oct–Dec 1990), "Fundamentals of Grammatology", Journal of the American Oriental Society 119 (4): 727–731, JSTOR 602899

The path: http://isites.harvard.edu/fs/docs/icb.topic129948.files/Daniels.pdf no longer exists. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 166.170.32.110 (talk) 21:27, 27 January 2015 (UTC)

Abugida vs Alphasyllabary (contd)

Distinction recorded in introduction today. RichardW57 (talk) 23:10, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

This last addition to the article makes the intro rather overblown. It should be moved downwards into the article. Additionally, the definition of alphasyllabaries is not very precise. It would class English script as such. There are many vowels not written in speech order. For example the vowel /e/ in "make" is written <aCe>, around the final consonant. −Woodstone (talk) 04:29, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

I had hoped this would be covered by the examples of wan, gem and war. The idea is that the script represents /make/, and then reading rules, which are often just a gross distortion of sound changes, converts it to /meIk/. I'd like to claim that <a> in an open syllable becomes /eI/, as in bacon, but that's not how most English people read. A parallel example is Thai นม v. นมะ, which one take as literally indicating /nomo/ and /noma/, but are then converted by Thai reading rules to /nom/ and /nama/. I wouldn't like to argue that this Thai pair makes Thai an alphasyllabary because of the action at a distance of ะ.

Here you confuse me. Isn't Thai considered an alphasyllabary already? The English example still shows that the definition given is insufficient. −Woodstone (talk) 06:21, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

What easily make Thai an alphasyllabary are the preposed, subscript and superscript vowel symbols. Had Rama Khamhaeng been bolder and his linearisation followed, they would have been eliminated. Thai would still be an abugida.

I'm not sure how to progress this. I think action at a distance is not relevant to the definition of an alphasyllabary as a category of writing systems which can be viewed as organised by syllables. It may be relevant, though - there is the burden of not simply reading forward. Is Latin organised by syllables? (Obviously the syllables decompose into consonants and vowels.) What about stress? One often has action at a distance simply due to stress. The Ethiopic script doesn't mark geminate consonants, and one could use that as an argument that abugidas aren't necessarily syllabic. While valid, it isn't helpful. Do you know of a better citable definition of an alphasyllabary? The article needs one or more citable definitions. There is a danger of reporting original research. Do we add English as a borderline alphasyllabary? - RichardW57 (talk) 05:05, 9 January 2016 (UTC)

I agree the addition would be better in the 'description' section. See my comments on that in the relevant section. RichardW57 (talk) 21:32, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The introduction to the 'Description' section is getting too big. I think part of the solution is to split it into 'General Description' and 'Family-Specific Features'. RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

General Description

The contrast of the definitions of abugida and alphasyllabary should be moved to this new section, which was the general part of the description. The fact that they are different should be left in the introduction. - RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

So edited. - RichardW57 (talk) 22:17, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

I think the description of the handling of vowels without consonants and consonants without vowels would be clearer if we talked about phonetic structures CV, C, V, CCV and CVC. One should remark that more complex cases are handled by combining solutions for simpler cases. We can remark that orthographic and phonetic syllables need not coincide.RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

The use of syllable structures to clarify inherent vowels would certainly be helpful. −Woodstone (talk) 06:21, 7 January 2016 (UTC)

Changed in accordance with my suggestions. - RichardW57 (talk) 22:17, 11 January 2016 (UTC)

Family-Specific Features

The comparative table of features is not universally applicable for mainland SE Asia. Would it make sense just to list the oversimplifications in notes? RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

It seems wrong that this has more detail than Brahmic family. Should we cross-reference from Brahmic family to here, move information from here to there, or copy information? RichardW57 (talk) 22:22, 6 January 2016 (UTC)

Akshara

The following statement makes no sense.

The mora a consonant letter represents, either with or without a marked vowel, is called an akshara.

I have moved the definition of the akshara to the introduction, and corrected it to refer to the unit of an abugida. - RichardW57 (talk) 21:45, 13 January 2016 (UTC)

Korean / Hangul

Shouldn't Hangul used in Korean be included in the article? It is syllabically organized but alphabetically analysed — there is a letter for each phoneme, but they are clustered together into syllables (with the vowel to the right or beneath the consonant). The clustering changes the proportions of the symbols (though not the shape to any drastic extent). To me, that's an abugida.David Cannon (talk) 01:52, 15 November 2018 (UTC)

I came here, to write this. Yes, it’s also a very nice abugida, as it seems to be free of quirks, and adding additional features like an order of letters in the syllables. — 2A02:908:4C16:A740:0:0:0:3 (talk) 23:36, 5 December 2018 (UTC)

From the standpoint of Wikipedia, isn't the question whether any reliable source analyzes Hangul as an abugida, as opposed to, say, an alphabet with some interesting kerning rules? My impression is that the answer is "no". Nitpicking polish (talk) 18:47, 6 December 2018 (UTC)

Alphasyllabary?

I have removed "alphasyllabary" from the lede, per:

• Daniels, Peter T.; Bright, William (1996). The World's Writing Systems. Oxford University Press. pp. 4–. ISBN 978-0-19-507993-7. Bright's alphasyllabary (see SECTION 31) is apparently not intended as an equivalent of these functional terms, but refers to the formal propeny of denoting vowels by marks that are not of the same status as consonants

Onceinawhile (talk) 15:29, 28 September 2020 (UTC)

I have now added it back with sources explaining some of the debate. Onceinawhile (talk) 08:12, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

I tried to read this

Honestly, if anything I came out of this more confused than when I went in. I'm sorry, I'd fix this if I could, but I'm totally lost. At a bare minimum, would it be too much to ask for an in-line example of an abugida with an accompanying in-line explanation? The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 04:47, 21 January 2022 (UTC)

@The Blade of the Northern Lights: I have tried to do something about that. Is it better now, do you have any suggestions? --Glennznl (talk) 09:58, 7 May 2023 (UTC)

It is definitely an improvement. I'll take a look at it later and maybe do some copyediting, but it makes much more sense now. Thank you so much for your work! The Blade of the Northern Lights (話して下さい) 17:45, 7 May 2023 (UTC)