Osage script

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.

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.

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⟩, that of t is Latin ⟨D⟩ (an alternative transcription of Osage t), č is from ⟨Ch⟩, k from ⟨K⟩. C is from ⟨T⟩ with the Osage s. S and z are the top halves of ⟨S⟩ and ⟨Z⟩; š and ž are derived from adding a tail to the full letters, much like Latin ⟨ʒ⟩. Br is a ligatures of the letters br. M, n and l appear to be from their cursive Latin forms, and ð is a ligature of ⟨Th⟩, which is how it is often transcribed. W is a partial ⟨w⟩. X is from cursive ⟨x⟩; it was originally at a 45-degree (x-like) angle before it was split into x and inverted gh. H is obscure, but hy may be from the ⟨s⟩ of ⟨sh⟩, and h from hy. 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 letter x, originally set at a 45-degree angle, was made two letters, upright x and inverted 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:

• 2014 Language Presentation at Osage Nation, includes non-native sound files for some letters
• Presentation at Native-languages.org, along with various romanizations
• "Saving a language, a people". College of Design, University of Minnesota. October 30, 2013. Archived from the original on February 27, 2014. Retrieved February 21, 2014.
• Interview with Herman Mongrain Lookout on invention of the script on Invisible Nations, KOSU