Bassa Vah, also known as simply ('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 people in Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Phonology Consonants * /ʄ/ can be heard as a glide intervocalically within compound words. * /ɡ͡b/ when followed by a ...

of Liberia. As an old system nearing extinction in the 1900s, it was rediscovered among Bassa in

Brazil Brazil ( pt, Brasil; ), officially the Federative Republic of Brazil (Portuguese: ), is the largest country in both South America and Latin America. At and with over 217 million people, Brazil is the world's fifth-largest country by area ...

and the

West Indies The West Indies is a subregion of North America, surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea that includes 13 independent island countries and 18 dependencies and other territories in three major archipelagos: the Greate ...

, then revived in Liberia, by . Type was cast for it, and an association for its promotion was formed in Liberia in 1959. It is not used today and has been classified as a failed script.

Letters

Vah is written from left to right. It 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. A fullstop/period is represented with 𖫵.

Tones

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 Tonality is the arrangement of pitches and/or chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived relations, stabilities, attractions and directionality. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or triadic chord with the greatest stability is ca ...

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

Unicode

Bassa Vah 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, wh ...

Standard in June 2014 with the release of version 7.0. The Unicode block for Bassa Vah is U+16AD0–U+16AFF:

References

External links

Bassa
an

at

Omniglot Omniglot () is an online encyclopedia focused on languages and writing systems. Etymology The name "Omniglot" comes from the Latin prefix ''omnis'' (meaning "all") and the Greek root γλωσσα (''glossa'', meaning "tongue"). History The we ...

* From the Bassa Vah Association (all links archived): :
Bassa "Vah" Alphabet
:
Keyboard chart for their beta-test Bassa Vah font
:

{{DEFAULTSORT:Bassa Vah alphabet Bassa language Writing systems of Africa Scripts with ISO 15924 four-letter codes