Osage

Letters

Combining marks

Punctuation

Symbols

Other

Vowel sounds

Consonant sounds

	labial	dental	alveolar	post- alveolar	velar	glottal
stop	p pˀ ʰp px pʃ br		t ʰt		k kˀ ʰk kx kʃ kʲ	ʔ
affricate			t͡s t͡sˀ ʰt͡s t͡sʰ tx	t͡ʃ ʰt͡ʃ
fricative		ð	s z	ʃ ʒ	x ɣ	h hʲ
nasal	m		n
approximant	w		l
trill/flap			r

Many sounds are described in terms of voiced and unvoiced, however Quintero says "The feature distinguishing s and š from z and ž is probably tenseness vs. laxness more than voicelessness vs. voicing." The sounds represented here as p, t, and k, are realised as an unaspirated sound that is halfway between voiced and unvoiced. In some words the sound may be more like one than the other.

The br sequence contains the only clearly voiced plosive phone. It appears infrequently, except in verb forms.wl,#Stop_series

As well as ejectives, the table lists pre-aspirated stops and affricates, and the sound sequences that now represent historical post-aspiration, ie. consonants followed by x or ʃ. The pre-aspirated consonants are pronounced as geminates in some dialects.

For more details, see Wikipedia and Quintero.

Tone

tbd

Structure

Osage is based on syllables of the form:wl,#Consonant_clusters

(C)(C)V(V)

Consonant clusters never appear in word-final position; only word-initial or word-medial.wl,#Consonant_clusters

Vowel summary table

This table summarises basic vowel to character assignments.

Precise spelling may use additional combining marks to indicate vowel length and tone (not shown here).

For additional details see vowel_mappings.

Post-consonant vowels

Vowels following consonants are written using 10 vowel letters (20 in total), including some diphthongs. Nasalisation is very common and is marked.

Three other combining marks can be used to indicate vowel length or accent, although they are not commonly used. None of the marks combine with their base characters to form precomposed shapes.

Pitch accents

To signal pitch accents use 0301, eg. 𐓡𐓘́𐓬𐓘

This list shows the set of non-lengthened vowels with pitch accents.

The Osage Nation does not use these accent marks in their online language courses. They are likely to be used only for precise phonetic labelling of words, such as one might find in a dictionary.

Vowel sounds to characters

Consonant summary table

This table summarises basic consonant to character assignments.

For additional details see consonant_mappings.

Basic consonants

Basic consonant sounds in Bengali are written using the following letters.

Click on each letter for more details and for examples of usage.

Ejectives

Ejectives are written using ʼ, eg. compare 𐓲ʼ𐓟𐓤𐓘 𐓲𐓟𐓤𐓘 There are only 3 ejective sounds.

Aspiration

Consonant clusters

Consonant clusters do occur in the Osage script, per the conventions of the syllable structure (see structure), but are not indicated in any special way.

Consonant sounds to characters

Digits

Osage uses ASCII digits.

Context-based shaping & positioning

Osage letters don't interact, so no special shaping is needed.

Base characters carry combining mark, which need to be positioned correctly.

Case & character transforms

Osage is bicameral, and applications may need to enable transforms to allow the user to switch between cases.

Word boundaries

Osage words are separated by spaces.

In the early stages of the use of the Osage script syllables within a word were separated by periods, eg. 𐓧𐓘.𐓬𐓸𐓘͘.𐓤𐓟. This is no longer the case. Syllable boundaries are, in any case, easily identified in Osage text.

Graphemes

Phrase & section boundaries

Osage uses standard ASCII punctuation for phrase boundaries.

The following dashes are used.

Quotations & citations

Osage texts use quotation marks around quotations instead. Of course, due to keyboard design, quotations may also be surrounded by ASCII double and single quote marks.

The default quote marks for Osage are “ at the start, and ” at the end.

When an additional quote is embedded within the first, the quote marks are ‘ and ’.

Abbreviation, ellipsis & repetition

Line breaking & hyphenation

tbd

Lines are primarily broken at word boundaries.

Baselines, line height, etc.

Osage uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.

Osage has ascenders and descenders, and diacritics that sit above and below the base letters. However, the metrics match those of the Latin script.

To give an approximate idea, fig_baselines compares Latin and Osage glyphs from the Noto Sans Osage font. All the metrics can be seen to be about the same.

fig_baselines_other shows similar comparisons for the Barnsdall font.

Counters, lists, etc.

Osage uses a decimal numeric counter style with ASCII digits. The default separator is a full stop + space.

Orthographic development & variants

Changes introduced in 2014 include the following:e

1. The introduction of case pairs.
2. 'Pre-aspirate' consonants were changed from digraphs to single characters. eg. 𐓡𐓬 hp became 𐓭 pʰ
3. Two ligatures representing consonant clusters were abolished: st͡s became 𐓮𐓲; and sk became 𐓮𐓤.
4. Nasalisation was previously indicated in one of 2 ways: using ^ after a vowel or using _ below a diphthong, eg. 𐓘^ a^ ɑ̃ 𐓘̱ a̱ aĩThis was replaced by a dot, generally placed at the upper right side of the vowel using a combining character, or appearing within the letter for a diphthong, in which case a new letter was created, eg. 𐓘͘ a˜ ɑ̃
5. The sounds x and ɣ were previously both represented by a single character. The reform created a separate letter form for each, ie. 𐓸 x x 𐓹 ɣ ɣ

Another recent change in the orthography sees the discontinuation of the practice of separating syllables within a word by periods, eg. the formerly written 𐓷𐓘.𐓮𐓘.𐓬𐓟 is now written 𐓷𐓘𐓮𐓘𐓬𐓟