The Fraser or Old Lisu script is an

artificial Artificiality (the state of being artificial or manmade) is the state of being the product of intentional human manufacture, rather than occurring naturally through processes not involving or requiring human activity. Connotations Artificiality ...

abugida An abugida (, from Ge'ez: ), sometimes known as alphasyllabary, neosyllabary or pseudo-alphabet, is a segmental writing system in which consonant-vowel sequences are written as units; each unit is based on a consonant letter, and vowel no ...

invented around 1915 by Sara Ba Thaw, a

Karen Karen may refer to: * Karen (name), a given name and surname * Karen (slang), a term and meme for a demanding woman displaying certain behaviors People * Karen people, an ethnic group in Myanmar and Thailand ** Karen languages or Karenic la ...

preacher from

Myanmar 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 Wells explai ...

and improved by the

missionary A missionary is a member of a Religious denomination, religious group which 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.Tho ...

James O. Fraser James Outram Fraser (Chinese: 富能仁; 1886–1938) was a British Protestant Christian missionary to China with the China Inland Mission. He pioneered work among the Lisu people, of Southwestern China, in the early part of the 20th century. H ...

, to write the

Lisu language Lisu ( Fraser alphabet: , or ; New Lisu script: ; zh, c=傈僳语, p=Lìsùyǔ; my, လီဆူဘာသာစကား, ) is a tonal Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Yunnan (Southwestern China), Northern Burma (Myanmar) and Thailand and ...

. It is a single-

case Case or CASE may refer to: Containers * Case (goods), a package of related merchandise * Cartridge case or casing, a firearm cartridge component * Bookcase, a piece of furniture used to store books * Briefcase or attaché case, a narrow box to ca ...

( unicameral)

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 ...

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

(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. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced w ...

s and

vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (len ...

s. Tones and

nasalization In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) 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 . In the Internation ...

are written with Roman

punctuation Punctuation (or sometimes interpunction) is the use of spacing, conventional signs (called punctuation marks), and certain typographical devices as aids to the understanding and correct reading of written text, whether read silently or aloud. A ...

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 for writing in Lisu, although other Lisu autonomous territories continue to use the New Lisu.

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 inherit vowel follows, and just like all consonants, the inherit 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 , and a consonant in the

. , and are likewise ambiguous. # only occurs in an imperative

particle In the physical sciences, a particle (or corpuscule 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 ...

. It is an

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

of , which causes nasalization to the syllable. # , and are used only in

. # 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 does 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 exotic rimes (diphthongs or nasal endings), 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 ancient Rome *''Epistle to the Romans'', shortened to ''Romans'', a lett ...

instead of an abugida like

Tibetan Tibetan may mean: * of, from, or related to Tibet * Tibetan people, an ethnic group * Tibetan language: ** Classical Tibetan, the classical language used also as a contemporary written standard ** Standard Tibetan, the most widely used spoken diale ...

; 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 one still in common use is . The apostrophe indicates

. It is combined with tone marks. The understrike (optionally a 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.

Unicode

The Fraser script 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 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 Naxi language, 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 UCSIssues in orthography development and reform
by David Bradley
Sample text
from Michael Everson's website {{list of writing systems Alphabets Loloish languages Languages of China Languages of India Languages of Myanmar Languages of Thailand