Zo/Zou script

  Zo/Zou script

Zoulai is a script for the Zou language created by M. Siahzathang of
Churachandpur, Manipur in 1952. Zou (or Zo or Zomi) is a northern
Kukish language of the Tibeto-Burman family, spoken by hill tribes in
NE India and Myanmar. Missionaries were introducing the Latin alphabet
at this time and, in contrast with neighbouring Mong and Akha, this proved
quite adequate for reading and writing. Zoulai has had little uptake, and
information is virtually absent from Zou culture websites.

The Alphabet

The script is an alphabet where vowels may sometimes join to the bottom or
lower-right side of their consonant. The glyphs seem to match individual
phonemes in most cases, but there is some sense of the alphabet being cyphers
for the newly introduced Latin letters. This can be observed in the similarities
between letters which would lie next to each other in the Latin alphabet,
such as A–B, E–F, K–L, M–N and S–Sh.
The alphabet does not show any tonal information.

Main letters

This shows the letter shapes and letter names, as published
by Zou Laiteng Sai Pawl. The larger forms to
the left are possibly capitals.

Ligatures and numerals

There are some extra consonantal phoneme glyphs, and some letter
combinations with a
special form: diphthongs, and a few consonant+vowel cases.
Numerals six and nine are the same as Burmese.

Letter assemblies

Unfortunately there is very little information about the language, let alone the
script, to present a complete picture of the alphabet in use. In Manipur,
some books were produced in Zoulai, but no details are currently
accessible via the internet. Here is Mattias Persson’s chart of glyphs,
showing known vowel combinations with
tentative phoneme labels:

view larger image

A Font for Zoulai

There is an interesting assortment of letter shapes, which would
potentially look
good in printed form (the sources we have seen are handwritten).
But there is also a lack of inherent unity among the shapes, in
particular the vertical positioning of features, the general shape outlines,
and the irregular attachment of certain vowels.

This made creating a nice-looking font very challenging. It was necessary to
accentuate common features, and take away some non-essential tails and
swashes. I also took the liberty of rationalizing the vowel system to a
maximum of one alternative. For vowels A, Ou, O' and U, consonants which
have right-hand descenders take a full inline form of the vowel, and those which
don’t, take a small form underneath (curiously these subscripts look like 0 1 2
and 3). For want of meaningful text, I have simply printed out
consonants and vowels in alternation.

Aa be dea rou gi ho fo' nu
ja che shea kou pi kho mo' ngu
sa te vea zou yi lo tho'
ga nou no' nu nie.

All material on this page : Ian James, unless otherwise stated. Last modified Apr.1,2012