abugidats

Abugidats, also known as alphasyllabaries, are a type of writing system where consonant-vowel sequences are written as a unit. Unlike an alphabet where vowels and consonants are written as separate letters, or a syllabary where each symbol represents a syllable, an abugida has a base consonant symbol that is modified to represent different vowels. Typically, a vowel sound is inherent to the base consonant symbol, and diacritics or modifications to the consonant symbol indicate other vowel sounds.

This system is common in many scripts of South Asia and Southeast Asia, including Brahmic scripts like Devanagari, Tamil, and Thai, as well as the Ge'ez script of Ethiopia. The structure of an abugida allows for a relatively small set of symbols to represent a large number of syllables, making it efficient for languages with many CV (consonant-vowel) combinations. The development of abugidats is thought to have originated from the Brahmi script, which itself has roots in Aramaic. Abugidats are distinct from abjads, which primarily write consonants and indicate vowels optionally or not at all. The term "abugida" itself is derived from the first four characters of the Ge'ez script: ä, bu, gi, da.