Bassa Vah, also known as simply ('throwing a sign' in Bassa) is an

alphabetic script An alphabet is a standard set of letters written to represent particular sounds in a spoken language. Specifically, letters largely correspond to phonemes as the smallest sound segments that can distinguish one word from another in a given ...

for writing the Bassa language of

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

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and the

West Indies The West Indies is an island subregion of the Americas, surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean, North Atlantic Ocean and the Caribbean Sea, which comprises 13 independent island country, island countries and 19 dependent territory, dependencies in thr ...

, then revived in Liberia, 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. * ...

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, seven vowels and five 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 ''diacrit ...

s. A fullstop/period is represented with .

Tones

Vah uses five diacritical marks to denote

tonality Tonality is the arrangement of pitch (music), pitches and / or chord (music), chords of a musical work in a hierarchy of perceived ''relations'', ''stabilities'', ''attractions'', and ''directionality''. In this hierarchy, the single pitch or ...

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

Unicode

Bassa Vah was added to the

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 ...

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 (meaning "all") and the Greek root (, meaning "tongue"). History The website was launched by British ...

* 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