Osage script

Vowels

The 2014 vowel letters are as follows:

Long vowels are indicated with a macron, high tone by an acute accent, and a long vowel with high tone by a double acute accent: e.g. oral ⟨𐒰̄ 𐓘̄⟩ Ā ā, ⟨𐒰́ 𐓘́⟩ Á á, ⟨𐒰̋ 𐓘̋⟩ Ā́ ā́, nasal ⟨𐒰̄͘ 𐓘̄͘⟩ Ą̄ ą̄, ⟨𐒰́͘ 𐓘́͘⟩ Ą́ ą́, ⟨𐒰̋͘ 𐓘̋͘⟩ Ą̄́ ą̄́.

All vowel letters can take the nasal dot, but ⟨𐒷 𐓟⟩ and ⟨𐓎 𐓶⟩ almost never do (although ⟨𐒷 𐓟⟩ is nasalised in ⟨𐒸 𐓠⟩). All inflected forms are:

Ə and Ə̨ are not phonemic, but unstressed allophones of A and Ą.

The a comes from Latin ⟨A⟩ (without the crossbar, as in the NASA insignia "worm" logo), e from Latin cursive ⟨Ɑ⟩ (the 'long' sound of the English letter a is rather like Osage e). The source for i is obscure, though Latin ⟨I⟩ does appear inside ⟨Λ⟩ for the diphthong ai.

Consonants

The 2014 consonant letters and digraphs are as follows. As in Latin orthography, the ejective consonants are written with a diacritic, and the strongly aspirated stops with digraphs. The pre-aspirated stops were originally written as digraphs with h, but since they vary by dialect with geminates, the 2014 revision included new letters for them derived by adding a cross-bar.

Px and pš are allophones, as are kx ~ kš and tx ~ ch (tsh). Hy and ky are sequences rather than single consonants.

The source of 𐓄 is Latin ⟨P⟩ + ⟨b⟩, that of 𐓈 is Latin ⟨T⟩ + ⟨D⟩, 𐒼 from ⟨K⟩ + ⟨g⟩, 𐒴 from ⟨b⟩ + ⟨R⟩. 𐓆 and 𐓒 are the top halves of ⟨S⟩ and ⟨Z⟩. 𐓊 is from Osage ⟨𐓈⟩ + ⟨𐓆⟩. 𐒵, 𐓍, 𐓇 and 𐓓 are derived from Latin ⟨C⟩, ⟨T⟩, ⟨S⟩, and ⟨Z⟩ respectively, + ⟨h⟩. 𐓀, 𐓁 and 𐒿 appear to be from their cursive Latin forms. 𐓏 is a partial ⟨W⟩. 𐓐 is from cursive ⟨X⟩; it was originally at a 45-degree (x-like) angle before it was split into 𐓐 and inverted 𐓑. 𐒹 is possibly from the Spanish use of ⟨J⟩ as /x/; alternatively 𐒺 may be from the ⟨S⟩ of ⟨𐓇⟩, and 𐒹 from 𐒺. Ligatures for sc (sts) and sk were retired when the alphabet was reformed for Unicode encoding.

Words are separated by a space. Syllables were originally separated by a full stop, but that practice has ceased with increasing literacy.

A meeting to reform the script in 2014 in preparation for Unicode encoding agreed on five changes:

• Casing pairs were introduced.
• Digraphs hC (or superscript ʰC) for the pre-aspirate consonants were replaced with dedicated letters, Ꞓ.
• Ligatures for sc (sts) and sk were retired.
• The nasal marks (ˆ following the letter for monophthongs, an underscore for diphthongs) were replaced by a dot (above-right for monophthongs, internally for diphthongs)
• The ambiguous letter x, originally set at a 45-degree angle, was split into two letters, upright 𐓸 x and inverted 𐓹 gh.

The Osage alphabet was added to the Unicode Standard in June 2016 with the release of version 9.0.

The Unicode block for Osage is U+104B0, U+104FF: