This page brings together basic information about the Lisu (Fraser) script and its use for the Lisu language. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Lisu using Unicode.
According to ScriptSource, "there are 630,000 Lisu people in China, mainly in the regions of Nujiang, Diqing, Lijiang, Dehong, Baoshan, Kunming and Chuxiong in the Yunnan Province. Another 350,000 Lisu live in Myanmar, Thailand and India. Other user communities are mostly Christians from the Dulong, the Nu and the Bai nationalities in China."
The Chinese government recognized the alphabet in 1992 as the official script for writing in Lisu.
Around 200,000 Lisu in China use the Lisu script and about 160,000 in the other countries are literate in it. The Lisu script is widely used in China in education, publishing, the media and religion, and various schools and universities at the national, provincial and prefectural levels have been offering Lisu courses for many years. Globally, the script is also widely used in a variety of Lisu literature.
ꓡꓲ-ꓢꓴli-suLisu
The script was invented around 1815 by a Karen preacher from Myanmar, Sara Ba Thaw, and revised by the missionary James Fraser.
Because there are newer, Latin-based orthographies for writing the Lisu language, this is sometimes called the Old Lisu script.
The script is an abugida. Consonants carry an inherent vowel which can be modified by appending vowel signs to the consonant. See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the modern Lisu orthography.
The Lisu script combines characteristics of an abugida and an alphabet, in that it uses vowel letters rather than vowel signs to override the inherent vowel.
The script is based on a fairly simple syllabic structure.
Many Lisu characters look like Latin characters, but they are not unified. There is no case distinction.
Generally, syllables are separated by spaces, whether or not they are part of a multisyllabic word, and text is wrapped at spaces regardless of word boundaries. Syllables in proper nouns, however, are separated by hyphens and wrapped as a unit.
Lisu is tonal and has 6 tone marks (which resemble Latin punctuation). Tones are written at the end of the syllable, using what look like western punctuation marks. ❯ tones
Punctuation mixes western and Chinese characters with a couple of Lisu-only characters. ASCII digits are used.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones. Source Wikipedia.
Vowel sounds
Plain vowels.
Consonant sounds
labial
dental
alveolar
post-
alveolar
palatal
velar
glottal
stops
pb
td
kɡ
aspirated
pʰ
tʰ
kʰ
affricates
t͡sd͡z
t͡ɕd͡ʑ
aspirated
t͡sʰ
t͡ɕʰ
fricatives
fv
sz
ɕ
xɣ
h̃
nasals
m
n
ɲ
ŋ
approximants
w
l
j
Tone
Wikipedia gives the following description of Lisu tones.wf,#Tones
ꓝ
tsɑ̄˧
ꓝꓸ
tsɑ́˥˥
ꓝꓹ
tsɑ̌xxx
ꓝꓻ
tsɑ̄ˀ˧
ꓝꓺ
tsɑ̄ˀxxx
ꓝʼ
tsɑ̄̃xxx
ꓝꓼ
tsɑ̂ˀxxx
ꓝꓽ
tsɑ̂xxx
ꓝˍ
tsɑ̄ɑ̂xxx
It also has the following, but it's not clear how they match.
Lisu has six tones: high [˥], mid creaky [˦ˀ], mid [˧], low [˨˩], rising [˧˥] and low checked [˨˩ʔ] (that is, [tá ta̰ ta tà tǎ tàʔ]). In some dialects the creaky tone is higher than mid tone, in others they are equal. The rising tone is infrequent, but common in baby talk (which has a stereotypical disyllabic low–rising pattern); both high and rising tone are uncommon after voiced consonants.wl,#Tones
Vowels
Vowel summary
Three consonants apparently have a vowel function, but more research is needed to clarify what sounds they map to (not shown here). See also nasalisation and tones.
All:
ꓲ␣ꓵ␣ꓶ␣ꓴ
ꓰ␣ꓱ␣ꓳ
ꓷ
ꓯ
ꓮ␣ˍ
Inherent vowel
ꓗ
kaU+A4D7 LISU LETTER KA
ɑ following a consonant is not written, but is seen as an inherent part of the consonant letter, so kɑ is written by simply using the consonant letter.
Vowel letters
Dedicated vowel letters
ꓗꓲ
kiU+A4D7 LISU LETTER KA + U+A4F2 LISU LETTER I
Non-inherent vowel sounds that follow a consonant can be represented using vowel signs.
Lisu is unusual for an abugida. Normally, abugidas produce a different vowel than the inherent one by attaching vowel signs to the base consonant. Lisu instead uses ordinary spacing letters after the consonant to represent vowels, so it looks very much like an alphabet except where the inherent vowel is used.
It appearswf,#Tones that ꓬ is used as a glide for diphthongs.
According to Wikipedia, 3 consonants are sometimes used as vowels for the Naxi language, but are consonants when writing Lisu.
ꓪ␣ꓬ␣ꓭ
Vowel-related modifiers
ˍ
ˍ [U+02CD MODIFIER LETTER LOW MACRON] marks various aspects of verbal forms. It is pronounced ɑ with a falling 31 tone, and is written at the end of a syllable.
Lisu uses the following signs, which look like western punctuation, to represent the tone of a syllable. The Unicode Standard says that they may use the same fixed-width spacing as the letters.
ꓸ␣ꓹ␣ꓺ␣ꓻ␣ꓼ␣ꓽ
The expected typing and storage position for tone marks is after all other elements in a syllable.
The first four tone letters can be used in combination with the last two to represent certain combination tones. Of the various possibilities, only the following is still in use; the rest are now rarely seen in China.u,;
This section brings together information about the following topics:
writing styles;
cursive text;
context-based shaping;
context-based positioning;
baselines, line height, etc.;
font styles;
case & other character transforms.
There is no glyph shaping or positioning required for Lisu. Nor is it cursive.
Lisu is a monocameral script, and no transforms are needed to convert between different forms of a given letter.
Font styling & weight
tbd
Graphemes
Grapheme clusters
Since there are no combining marks or decompositions, graphemes correspond to individual characters.
Unicode grapheme clusters can be applied to Lisu without problems. There are no special issues related to operations that use grapheme clusters as their basic unit of text.
Punctuation & inline features
Word boundaries
Syllables are separated by spaces, however where syllables combine to form a proper noun, a hyphen is used to bind the syllables together.u,754
For multi-syllable words the inter-syllable space is still used. Because of difficulties determining which syllable sequences correspond to multi-syllablic words, except when dealing with proper nouns, the syllable is normally taken to be the basic unit for text processing.u,754
Hyphens.As just mentioned, - [U+002D HYPHEN-MINUS] is used between the syllables that compose a proper noun. The Unicode Standard suggests the use of ‐ [U+2010 HYPHEN] instead, as its semantics are less ambiguous.
Phrase & section boundaries
꓾␣:␣;␣꓿␣!␣?
Lisu uses a mixture of ASCII and native punctuation.
Chapter and verse in biblical texts tend to be separated by the ASCII colon and semicolon. The numeric context helps distinguish these separators from the Lisu tone marks.
The space between syllables provides the primary break opportunity for wrapping text, even where that occurs in the middle of a multi-syllable word, since the syllables are separated by spaces (see word).u,754
Line breaks are not allowed inside a syllable, or before a punctuation mark (even if that is separated from the previous syllable by a space).u,753
A multi-syllable proper noun, where syllables are separated by a hyphen, can be wrapped after the hyphen.u,754
Since syllables are not split during line wrapping, and there are spaces or hyphens between syllables, there is no need for automatic hyphenation.u,754
Text alignment & justification
tbd
Text spacing
tbd
This section looks at ways in which spacing is applied between characters over and above that which is introduced during justification.
Baselines, line height, etc.
tbd
Lisu uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.
Counters, lists, etc.
tbd
Styling initials
tbd
Page & book layout
This section is for any features that are specific to Lisu and that relate to the following topics:
general page layout & progression;
grids & tables;
notes, footnotes, etc;
forms & user interaction;
page numbering, running headers, etc.
