Blurb:

The third chapter introduces the first of the new concepts necessary for my approach, the abjad or consonant-only writing system. It was found in pure form only in Phoenician and South Arabian, but it was from Phoenician that the other West Semitic abjads developed—most prominently, the wide variety of Aramaic scripts. Two ways of notating vowels developed for abjads. The scripts of pre-Islamic Iran, again, have never, and of Inner Asia, culminating in Mongolian and Manchu, have rarely, been presented to the general reader.