The Pollard script, also known as Pollard Miao () or Miao, is an
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 ...
loosely based on the Latin alphabet and invented by
Methodist
Methodism, also called the Methodist movement, is a Protestant Christianity, Christian Christian tradition, tradition whose origins, doctrine and practice derive from the life and teachings of John Wesley. George Whitefield and John's brother ...
missionary Sam Pollard. Pollard invented the script for use with
A-Hmao, one of several
Miao languages spoken in
southeast Asia
Southeast Asia is the geographical United Nations geoscheme for Asia#South-eastern Asia, southeastern region of Asia, consisting of the regions that are situated south of China, east of the Indian subcontinent, and northwest of the Mainland Au ...
. The script underwent a series of revisions until 1936, when a translation of the
New Testament
The New Testament (NT) is the second division of the Christian biblical canon. It discusses the teachings and person of Jesus in Christianity, Jesus, as well as events relating to Christianity in the 1st century, first-century Christianit ...
was published using it.
Pollard credited the basic idea of the script to the
Cree syllabics designed by
James Evans in 1838–1841: "While working out the problem, we remembered the case of the syllabics used by a Methodist missionary among the Indians of North America, and resolved to do as he had done." He also gave credit to a Chinese pastor: "Stephen Lee assisted me very ably in this matter, and at last we arrived at a system."
The introduction of Christian materials in the script that Pollard invented had a great impact among the
Miao people. Part of the reason was that they had a legend about how their ancestors had possessed a script but lost it. According to the legend, the script would be brought back some day. When the script was introduced, many Miao came from far away to see and learn it.
[Enwall 1994] Changing politics in
China
China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. With population of China, a population exceeding 1.4 billion, it is the list of countries by population (United Nations), second-most populous country after ...
led to the use of several competing scripts, most of which were
romanization
In linguistics, romanization is the conversion of text from a different writing system to the Latin script, Roman (Latin) script, or a system for doing so. Methods of romanization include transliteration, for representing written text, and tra ...
s. The Pollard script remains popular among
Hmong people in China, although Hmong outside China tend to use one of the alternative scripts. A revision of the script was completed in 1988, which remains in use.
As with most other abugidas, the Pollard letters represent
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, whereas
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 are indicated by
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. Uniquely, however, the position of this diacritic is varied to represent
tone. For example, in Western Hmong, placing the vowel diacritic above the consonant letter indicates that the syllable has a high tone, whereas placing it at the bottom right indicates a low tone.
Characters
The script was originally developed for A-Hmao, and adopted early for
Lipo. There is also a
Nasu alphabet using Pollard script.
Consonants
Vowels and finals
Positioning tone marks
Baseline tone marks
Archaic baseline tone marks
Unicode
The Pollard script was first proposed for inclusion in
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 ...
by John Jenkins in 1997.
It took many years to reach a final proposal in 2010.
It was added to the Unicode Standard in January, 2012 with the release of version 6.1.
The Unicode block for Pollard script, called Miao, is U+16F00–U+16F9F:
Published sources
*
*
*
* Reprinted in
References
External links
*
* Dingle describes how Sam Pollard used positioning of vowel marks relative to consonants to indicate
tones.
*
Preliminary proposal for additions for Hei Yi to Miao block
{{list of writing systems
Writing systems introduced in 1936
Abugida writing systems
West Hmongic languages