Meroitic was a type of alphabet called an
abugida: The vowel /a/ was not normally written; rather it was assumed whenever a consonant was written alone. That is, the single letter
m was read /ma/. All other vowels were overtly written: the letters
mi, for example, stood for the syllable /mi/, just as in the Latin alphabet. This system is broadly similar to the
Indian abugidas that arose around the same time as Meroitic.
Griffith and Hintze Griffith identified the essential abugida nature of Meroitic when he deciphered the script in 1911. He noted in 1916 that certain consonant letters were never followed by a vowel letter, and varied with other consonant letters. He interpreted them as
syllabic, with the values
ne, se, te, and
to. Ne, for example, varied with
na. Na could be followed by the vowels
i and
o to write the syllables
ni and
no, but was never followed by the vowel
e. He also noted that the vowel
e was often omitted. It often occurred at the ends of Egyptian loanwords that had no final vowel in
Coptic. He believed that
e functioned both as a
schwa and a
"killer" mark that marked the absence of a vowel. That is, the letter
m by itself was read , while the sequence
me was read or . This is how
Ethiopic works today. Later scholars such as Hitze and Rilly accepted this argument, or modified it so that
e could represent either or schwa–zero. It has long been puzzling to epigraphers why the syllabic principles that underlie the script, where every consonant is assumed to be followed by a vowel
a, should have special letters for consonants followed by
e. Such a mixed abugida–syllabary is not found among the abugidas of India, nor in Ethiopic.
Old Persian cuneiform script is somewhat similar, with more than one inherent vowel, but is not an abugida because the non-inherent vowels are written with full letters, and are often redundantly written after an inherent vowel other than /a/.
Millet and Rowan Millet (1970) proposed that Meroitic
e was in fact an
epenthetic vowel used to break up Egyptian
consonant clusters that could not be pronounced in the Meroitic language, or appeared after final Egyptian consonants such as
m and
k which could not occur finally in Meroitic. Rowan (2006) takes this further and proposes that the glyphs
se, ne, and
te were not syllabic at all, but stood for consonants , , and at the end of a word or morpheme (as when followed by the
determiner -l; she proposes Meroitic finals were restricted to
alveolar consonants such as these. An example is the Coptic word
prit "the agent", which in Meroitic was transliterated
perite (pa-e-ra-i-te). If Rowan is right and this was pronounced , then Meroitic would have been a fairly typical abugida. She proposes that Meroitic had three vowels, , and that was raised to something like or after the alveolar consonants , explaining the lack of orthographic
t, s, n followed by the vowel letter
e. Very rarely does one find the sequence
CVC, where the C's are both labials or both velars. This is similar to consonant restrictions found throughout the Afro-Asiatic language family, suggesting to Rowan that there is a good chance Meroitic was an
Afro-Asiatic language like Egyptian. Rowan is not convinced that the system was completely alphabetic, and suggests that the glyph
te also may have functioned as a
determinative for place names, as it frequently occurs at the end of place names that are known not to have a /t/ in them. Similarly,
ne may have marked royal or divine names. ==Letters==