Bassa Vah, also known as simply ''vah'' ('throwing a sign' in Bassa) is an alphabetic script for writing the

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

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 its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...

. It was invented by .

Type Type may refer to: Science and technology Computing * Typing, producing text via a keyboard, typewriter, etc. * Data type, collection of values used for computations. * File type * TYPE (DOS command), a command to display contents of a file. * Ty ...

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 ''diacriti ...

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 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 ''diacriti ...

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

Unicode

The Bassa Vah alphabet was added to the Unicode 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