The Fraser or Old Lisu script is an

artificial Artificiality (the state of being artificial, anthropogenic, or man-made) is the state of being the product of intentional human manufacture, rather than occurring naturally through processes not involving or requiring human activity. Connotati ...

abugida An abugida (; from Geʽez: , )sometimes also called alphasyllabary, neosyllabary, or pseudo-alphabetis a segmental Writing systems#Segmental writing system, writing system in which consonant–vowel sequences are written as units; each unit ...

for the

Lisu language Lisu ( Fraser alphabet: , or ; Latin: ; Lisu syllabary: ; zh, c=傈僳语, p=Lìsùyǔ; , ) is a tonal Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan (Southwestern China), Northern Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand and a small part of India. Along with ...

invented around 1915 by Sara Ba Thaw, a Karen preacher from

Myanmar Myanmar, officially the Republic of the Union of Myanmar; and also referred to as Burma (the official English name until 1989), is a country in northwest Southeast Asia. It is the largest country by area in Mainland Southeast Asia and has ...

, and improved by the

missionary A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group who is sent into an area in order to promote its faith or provide services to people, such as education, literacy, social justice, health care, and economic development.Thoma ...

James O. Fraser. It is a single-

case Case or CASE may refer to: Instances * Instantiation (disambiguation), a realization of a concept, theme, or design * Special case, an instance that differs in a certain way from others of the type Containers * Case (goods), a package of relate ...

(

unicameral Unicameralism (from ''uni''- "one" + Latin ''camera'' "chamber") is a type of legislature consisting of one house or assembly that legislates and votes as one. Unicameralism has become an increasingly common type of legislature, making up nearly ...

)

alphabet An alphabet is a standard set of letter (alphabet), letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from a ...

. It was also used for the

Naxi language Naxi (), also known as ''Nakhi'', ''Nasi'', ''Lomi'', ''Moso'', or ''Mo-su'', is a Sino-Tibetan language or group of languages spoken by approximately 310,000 Nakhi people, most of whom live in or around Yulong Naxi Autonomous County in the pr ...

, e.g. in the 1932 Naxi Gospel of Mark, and used in the Zaiwa or Atsi language, e.g. in the 1938 Atsi Gospel of Mark. The script uses uppercase letters from the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as the Roman script, is a writing system based on the letters of the classical Latin alphabet, derived from a form of the Greek alphabet which was in use in the ancient Greek city of Cumae in Magna Graecia. The Gree ...

(except for the letter Q) and rotated versions thereof (except for the letters M, Q and W) to write

consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract, except for the h sound, which is pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Examples are and pronou ...

s and

vowel A vowel is a speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract, forming the nucleus of a syllable. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness a ...

s. Tones and

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation in British English) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . ...

are written with Roman

punctuation Punctuation marks are marks indicating how a piece of writing, written text should be read (silently or aloud) and, consequently, understood. The oldest known examples of punctuation marks were found in the Mesha Stele from the 9th century BC, c ...

marks, identical to those found on a typewriter. Like the Indic

s, the vowel is not written. However, unlike those scripts, the other vowels are written with full letters. The local Chinese government in Nujiang ''de facto'' recognized the script in 1992 as the

official script An official is someone who holds an office (function or mandate, regardless of whether it carries an actual working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority (either their own or that of the ...

for writing in Lisu, although other Lisu autonomous territories continue to use the New Lisu (Latin script) for official matters.

Consonants

Note: You may need to download a Lisu-capable Unicode font if not all characters display. #Initial glottal stop is only written when the inherent vowel follows, and just like all consonants, the inherent vowel suffix must not be written as that would indicate another follows ( instead of ). It is automatic before all initial vowels but and . # represents a "vowel" in the Naxi language, presumably a

medial Medial may refer to: Mathematics * Medial magma, a mathematical identity in algebra Geometry * Medial axis, in geometry the set of all points having more than one closest point on an object's boundary * Medial graph, another graph that repr ...

, and a consonant in the Lisu language. , and are likewise ambiguous. # only occurs in an imperative

particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscle in older texts) is a small localized object which can be described by several physical or chemical properties, such as volume, density, or mass. They vary greatly in size or quantity, from s ...

. It is an

allophone In phonology, an allophone (; from the Greek , , 'other' and , , 'voice, sound') is one of multiple possible spoken soundsor '' phones''used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language. For example, in English, the voiceless plos ...

of , which causes nasalization to the syllable. # , and are used only in Lisu language. # is used only in Naxi language.

Vowels

Manuscripts in the Yunnan Nationalities Museum - DSC03963

:**Only written after a syllable (consonant letter) to indicate a second vowel. Other vowels do not have special letters to emphasize a secondary vowel without glottal stop initial, such as () is not written as and can only be distinguished from () by a space. For example, is , while is . When consonant ꓠꓬ, ꓬ is used with vowel ꓬꓱ, ꓬ, without being ambiguous only one ꓬ is written. When transcribing diphthongs and nasal codas, letters ꓮ and ꓬ can work like vowels just like English letter Y, making Fraser script behave like an abjadic alphabet like the

Roman Roman or Romans most often refers to: *Rome, the capital city of Italy *Ancient Rome, Roman civilization from 8th century BC to 5th century AD *Roman people, the people of Roman civilization *Epistle to the Romans, shortened to Romans, a letter w ...

instead of an abugida like Tibetan; meanwhile space works like a delimiter like a Tibetan tseg, making a final consonant (such as ꓠ) possible without necessity of a halanta sign: 凉粉 reads as rather than as .

Tones

Tones are written with standard punctuation. Lisu punctuation therefore differs from international norms: the comma is (hyphen period) and the full stop is (equal sign). :*It is not clear how the mid tone differs from the unmarked mid tone. The tones , , , may be combined with and as compound tones. However, the only compound tone still in common use is . The apostrophe indicates

. It is combined with tone marks. The low macron indicates the Lisu "A glide", a contraction of without an intervening glottal stop. The tone is not always falling, depending on the environment, but is written regardless.

Letter forms

Although Fraser published a

serif In typography, a serif () is a small line or stroke regularly attached to the end of a larger stroke in a letter or symbol within a particular font or family of fonts. A typeface or "font family" making use of serifs is called a serif typeface ( ...

form of the script,James Fraser (1922) ''Handbook of the Lisu (Yawyin) language''. Superintendent, Government printing, Rangoon almost all typesetting today is done in a

sans-serif In typography and lettering, a sans-serif, sans serif (), gothic, or simply sans letterform is one that does not have extending features called "serifs" at the end of strokes. Sans-serif typefaces tend to have less stroke width variation than ...

typeface.

Unicode

The Fraser script was added to the

Unicode Unicode or ''The Unicode Standard'' or TUS is a character encoding standard maintained by the Unicode Consortium designed to support the use of text in all of the world's writing systems that can be digitized. Version 16.0 defines 154,998 Char ...

Standard in October, 2009 with the release of version 5.2. The Unicode block for the Fraser script, called 'Lisu', is U+A4D0–U+A4FF: An additional character, the inverted Y used in the

, was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2020 with the release of version 13.0. It is in the Lisu Supplement block (U+11FB0–U+11FBF):

References

External links

''Omniglot'' entry on Fraser scriptProposal for encoding the Old Lisu script in the BMP of the UCS

Issues in orthography development and reform
by David Bradley
Sample text
from

Michael Everson Michael Everson (born January 1963) is an American and Irish linguistics, linguist, Character encoding, script encoder, typesetting, typesetter, type designer and Publishing, publisher. He runs a publishing company called Evertype, through which ...

's website {{list of writing systems Alphabets Loloish languages Languages of China Languages of India Languages of Myanmar Languages of Thailand