The Pau Cin Hau scripts, known as Pau Cin Hau lai ('Pau Cin Hau script'), or Zo tual lai ('Zo indigenous script') in

Zomi The Zomi are an ethnic group which can be found in India, Myanmar and in Chittagong hill tracks of Bangladesh. The word Zomi is used to describe an ethnic group, which is also known as the Chin people, Chin, the Mizo people, Mizo, the Kuki peop ...

, are two scripts, a

logographic script In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...

and an alphabetic script created by

Pau Cin Hau Pau Cin Hau is the founder and the name of a religion followed by some Tedim, Hakha in Chin state and Kale in Sagaing division in the north-western part of Myanmar. Pau Cin Hau was born in the Tedim (Tiddim) in 1859; and lived until 1948. He sta ...

, a

religious leader from

Chin State Chin State (, ) is a state in western Myanmar. The Chin State is bordered by Sagaing Division and Magway Division to the east, Rakhine State to the south, Bangladesh to the south-west, and the Indian states of Mizoram to the west and Manipur t ...

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 Wells explai ...

. 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 Italy ...

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), a ...

in a way similar to the relationship between

Pahawh Hmong Pahawh Hmong ( RPA: Phaj hauj Hmoob , Pahawh: ; known also as ''Ntawv Pahawh, Ntawv Keeb, Ntawv Caub Fab, Ntawv Soob Lwj'') is an indigenous semi-syllabic script, invented in 1959 by Shong Lue Yang, to write two Hmong languages, Hmong Daw ''( ...

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 Northern Kuki-Chin (or Northeastern Kuki-Chin) is a branch of Kuki-Chin languages. It is called ''Northeastern Kuki-Chin'' by Peterson (2017) to distinguish it from the Northwestern Kuki-Chin languages. VanBik (2009:31) also calls the branch ''No ...

but is able to transcribe other

Zo languages Northern Kuki-Chin (or Northeastern Kuki-Chin) is a branch of Kuki-Chin languages. It is called ''Northeastern Kuki-Chin'' by Peterson (2017) to distinguish it from the Northwestern Kuki-Chin languages. VanBik (2009:31) also calls the branch ''No ...

, as there are additional letters and tone marks to represent sounds present in other Chin languages but not present in

. 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 Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...

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