A very pretty writing system: Vai ꕥ

09 Jun, 2023

This blog post contains special characters. If you can't see the nose of the bear below...

ʕ •ꕊ•ʔ ...I'm afraid that it might be difficult to read. Still, thank you for visiting!

I do like computering and stuff related to it so when I discovered amp-what website, I was ecstatic. This website, for free, makes you browse thousands and thousands of unicode characters. That's how I discovered vai syllables.

Here are a few examples:

... I wouldn't have guessed they all belong to the same system. Yet, they are all part of Vai syllabary writing system.

I wish I knew more about how much this writing system is used but I can't seem to find any website in vai language that is not about vai language.

• Maybe it's just that they are not indexed by Google.
• Maybe the latin alphabet took over as it is slowly doing elsewhere online due to practicality (keyboards factory)
• Or maybe there is some anglocentrism from major corporations, accentuated by the growing grasp of english on the Internet. Recent example features Discord (a communication app) who recently gave up on Unicode identifiers for its users but instead forced them to adopt a single handle with english default latin character (a→z) and numbers. No accents. No non-latin characters that don't belong to modern english. What a step back in the past. ...

Anyway, I like pretty things. Thank you, Unicode, for supporting so many language. May you support more and more.

ꗻꗥ꘎꘎

^(Sem!)

^{I especially like how this writing system has ꘎꘎ instead of ! , for some reason it seems stronger.}

• Want to try to write your own name in Vai syllabary? Try using the Wikipedia chart here.
• You may want to read more about vai language in this extended blogpost from thelanguagecloset.
• Or simply browse the Wikipedia page which also contains a recording of Vai speakers.

#interests