Peter T. Daniels is a scholar of writing systems. He is notable for being co-editor (with William Bright) of the book The World's Writing Systems (1996), and popularising the terms abjad (an "alphabet" with no vowel letters) and abugida (a system partly alphabetic, partly syllabic). A writing system, also called a script, is a type of symbolic communication system used to represent elements or statements expressible in some spoken language, for the purpose of communication. ... An abjad is a type of writing system where there is one symbol per consonantal phoneme, sometimes also called a consonantary. ... An alphasyllabary or abugida is a writing system whose basic signs denote consonants with an inherent vowel and where consistent modifications of the basic sign indicate other following vowels than the inherent one (or, in some cases, the lack of a vowel, for example as the final consonant in a...

Bibliography

• Peter T. Daniels, William Bright: The World's Writing Systems, Oxford University Press 1996, ISBN 0195079930