The Pau Cin Hau scripts, known as Pau Cin Hau lai ('Pau Cin Hau script'), or Zo tual lai ('Zo indigenous script') in Zomi, are two scripts, a logographic script and an

alphabetic script 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 syl ...

created by Pau Cin Hau, a Zomi religious leader from Chin State,

Burma Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...

. The logographic script consists of 1,050 characters, which is a traditionally significant number based on the number of characters appearing in a religious text. The alphabetic script is a simplified script of 57 characters, which is divided into 21 consonants, 7 vowels, 9 final consonants, and 20 tone, length, and glottal marks. The original script was produced in 1902, but it is thought to have undergone at least two revisions, of which the first revision produced the logographic script. The logographic script has not been encoded, but the alphabetic script has been encoded in Unicode 7.0. The characters in the script seem to resemble characters in the

Latin script The Latin script, also known as Roman script, is an alphabetic 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 southern ...

and in the

Burmese script Burmese may refer to: * Something of, from, or related to Myanmar, a country in Southeast Asia * Burmese people * Burmese language * Burmese alphabet * Burmese cuisine * Burmese culture Animals * Burmese cat * Burmese chicken * Burmese (horse), ...

in a way similar to the relationship between Pahawh Hmong and both

Lao script Lao script or Akson Lao ( lo, ອັກສອນລາວ, links=no ) is the primary script used to write the Lao language and other minority languages in Laos. Its earlier form, the Tai Noi script, was also used to write the Isan language, b ...

and

. They are glyphically similar but encode different phonological values. The script was designed for the Zomi language but is able to transcribe other Zo languages, as there are additional letters and tone marks to represent sounds present in other Chin languages but not present in Zomi. The script also had limited use for Christian literature in the region, as is evidenced by some Baptist documents produced in 1931-32 in Burma.

Unicode

The Pau Cin Hau 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 Pau Cin Hau alphabet is U+11AC0–U+11AFF:

Fonts

Google's

Noto fonts Noto is a font family comprising over 100 individual fonts, which are together designed to cover all the scripts encoded in the Unicode standard. , Noto fonts cover all 93 scripts defined in Unicode version 6.1 (April 2012), although fewer than ...

have developed a font, Noto Sans Pau Cin Hau, which supports the Pau Cin Hau script. Download here:

References

External links

Noto Sans Pau Cin Hau
{{Kuki-Chin-Naga languages Kuki-Chin languages Writing systems of Asia