Bassa_alphabet

Bassa Vah alphabet

Bassa Vah alphabet

Alphabet for the Bassa language of Liberia

Bassa Vah, also known as simply Vah ('throwing a sign' in Bassa) is an alphabetic script for writing the Bassa language of Liberia.[2] As an old system nearing extinction in the 1900s, it was rediscovered among Bassa in Brazil and the West Indies, then revived in Liberia, by Thomas Flo Lewis.[3] Type was cast for it, and an association for its promotion was formed in Liberia in 1959.[1] It is not used today and has been classified as a failed script.[4]

Quick Facts Bassa Vah 𖫔𖫧𖫱𖫒𖫨𖫴 𖫣𖫧𖫱, Script type ...
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The Bassa Vah alphabet.

Letters

Vah is written from left to right. It is a true alphabet, with 23 consonant letters, 7 vowel letters and 5 tone diacritics, which are placed inside the vowels. A fullstop/period is represented with π–«΅.

More information IPA, Latin ...

Tones

Vah uses 5 diacritical marks to denote tonality of its vowels. It distinguishes five tones: high, low, mid, mid-rising, and falling.

More information IPA, Latin with a ...

Unicode

Main article: Bassa Vah (Unicode block)

Bassa Vah was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0.

The Unicode block for Bassa Vah is U+16AD0–U+16AFF:

Bassa Vah[1][2]
Official Unicode Consortium code chart (PDF)
 0123456789ABCDEF
U+16ADx 𖫐 π–«‘ π–«’ π–«“ π–«” π–«• π–«– π–«— π–«˜ π–«™ π–«š π–«› π–«œ 𖫝 π–«ž π–«Ÿ
U+16AEx π–«  π–«‘ π–«’ π–«£ π–«€ π–«₯ 𖫦 𖫧 𖫨 π–«© π–«ͺ π–«« 𖫬 π–«­
U+16AFx π–«° π–«± π–«² π–«³ π–«΄ π–«΅
Notes
1.^ As of Unicode version 15.1
2.^ Grey areas indicate non-assigned code points

References

  1. [1]
    Everson, Michael; Riley, Charles (2010). "Final proposal for encoding the Bassa Vah script in the SMP of the UCS" (PDF).
  2. [2]
    Coulmas, Florian, ed. (1999). "Bassa alphabet". The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems. Hoboken, New Jersey: Wiley. p. 39. doi:10.1002/9781118932667.ch2. ISBN 9780631214816.
  3. [3]
    "History of the Bassa Script". Bassa Vah Association. Archived from the original on 2007-02-22.
  4. [4]
    Unseth, Peter (2011). "Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization". In Joshua A. Fishman; Ofelia GarcΓ­a (eds.). Handbook of Language and Ethnic Identity: The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 23–32. ISBN 9780199837991.
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