Vai romanization table

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Vai romanization table (2011)
The Library of Congress

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4200840Vai romanization table2011The Library of Congress

Vai

Syllables

Syllablic nasal	Syllabic lengthener
ꘋŋ	ꘌ[preceding vowel, repeated]

Notes

The use of extended Latin characters in this document leverages use of the Unicode standard, as approved by the NDMSO office of the Library of Congress in December, 2007, while remaining usable for libraries using MARC-8 as well. Within a strictly MARC-8 environment, the double underscore may continue to be applied to a base character, following LCRI 1.0E for the characters ɓ, ɗ, ɛ, ŋ, ɲ, and ɔ: b̳, d̳, e̳, n̳, n̳ and o̳. The resulting ambiguity of n̳, however, illustrates the advantage of extended Latin, the use of which is longstanding in the Vai tradition of transcribing the script.
Four categories of rarely used Vai characters have not been included in the current table: archaic logograms, innovations by Momolu Massaquoi circa 1911, digits, and punctuation. In the case of logograms, not all of the semantic values have yet been determined. Massaquoi’s innovations were proposed primarily for representing foreign sounds, and are rarely attested in texts. For the latter two categories, Western characters are usually preferred in practice. If usage were to warrant addition of these characters to the table in the future, the table may be revised to include some or all of these categories with no impact on the phonetic values presented in this version.