Bassa Vah, also known as simply ''vah'' ('throwing a sign' in Bassa) is an

alphabet An alphabet is a standardized set of basic written graphemes (called letters) that represent the phonemes of certain spoken languages. Not all writing systems represent language in this way; in a syllabary, each character represents a syllab ...

ic script for writing the

Bassa language The Bassa language is a Kru language spoken by about 600,000 Bassa people in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Phonology Consonants * /ʄ/ can be heard as a glide intervocalically within compound words. * /ɡ͡b/ when followed by a ...

Liberia Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to Guinea–Liberia border, its north, Ivory Coast to Ivory Coast� ...

. It was invented by . Type was cast for it, and an association for its promotion was formed in Liberia in 1959. It is not used contemporarily and has been classified as a failed script.Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In ''The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press. ''Vah'' is a true alphabet, with 23 consonant letters, 7 vowel letters, and 5 tone

diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacrit ...

s, which are placed inside the vowels. It also has its own marks for commas and periods.

Letters

The Bassa Vah script is written from left to right. A fullstop/period is represented with 𖫵.

Letters

Tones

Bassa Vah uses 5 diacritical marks to denote

tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is ca ...

of its vowels. It distinguishes five tones: high, low, mid, mid-rising, and falling.

Unicode

The Bassa Vah alphabet was added to the

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, ...

Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for the Bassa alphabet is U+16AD0–U+16AFF:

References

*Coulmas (1999) ''The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Writing Systems''

External links

Omniglot.com
* Proof of some of the origin

* ww.yinda.de/bassa/script_history.html!-- link fixed(?) not checked; 01-03-2021 --> {{DEFAULTSORT:Bassa Script Bassa language Writing systems of Africa Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes