Featural alphabet

Featural alphabet

A featural alphabet is an alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent. Examples include the following:

*Gregg Shorthand
*Hangul — Korean
*Shavian alphabet
*Tengwar (a fictional script invented by J. R. R. Tolkien)
*Visible Speech (a phonetic script)
*SignWriting (a script for writing the world's sign languages; technically this is not an alphabet)
*SpeechWriting (Mundbildschrift: a script for writing mouth movements of voiced words)

Other alphabets may have limited featural elements. For example, the Fraser alphabet used for Lisu rotates the letters for the tenuis consonants P IPA|/p/, T IPA|/t/, F IPA|/ts/, C IPA|/tʃ/, and K IPA|/k/ 180° to indicate aspiration. The International Phonetic Alphabet also has some featural elements, for example in the hooks and tails that are characteristic of implosives, IPA|ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ ʛ, and retroflex consonants, IPA|ʈ ɖ ʂ ʐ ɳ ɻ ɽ ɭ. The IPA diacritics are also featural.


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