Musa Alphabet (Musabet)

Musa

The Musa Alphabet was invented by The Musa Academy and is intended to be a universal script, one that can be used to write any language. It is phonetic, but not at as low a level as the IPA - they call it allophonic. It was formerly known as Shwa.

Notable features

Musa offers a huge selection of letters - almost 200 - so every sound can have its own letter. This richness is made manageable by two features. First, the letters are featural, their shape indicates their sound. And second, each consonant is composed of two shapes drawn from a small set. Because of this, a Musa keyboard has only 26 keys (see below).
Musa can be written as an alphabet, as an abjad, as a syllabary, as characters, with or without a topline, and in several other gaits. This enables Musa to match graphemes to morphemes, and to make Musa seem familiar to users of many different writing systems. Even so, Musa in any gait should be readable by anybody.
Musa includes notation for intonation, thus supplanting emoticons.
Musa is Unicode-compatible (in the private use area) and works well in the digital world.

The utility of such a script will be obvious. Not only will people be able to pronounce names now written in scripts they don't know, but they will also be able to read aloud names written in scripts they DO know, but whose spelling is different. For example, the letter j represents an affricate dj in English, a sibilant zh in French, a semivowel y in German, and a fricative kh in Spanish. And it solves the problem of trying to write, for example, French on an English keyboard. And wouldn't it be nice for travelers to be able to pronounce the names of towns, streets and sites wherever they are?

Perhaps most important, Musa will enable the 6000+ languages of the world which have never been written to denote their sounds without either inventing new letters or assigning new interpretations to existing letters. This will enable their speakers to participate fully in the benefits of word processors, printers, text messages and the other tools of modern technology without abandoning their languages. Hopefully, that will help preserve the many endangered languages.

Finally, speakers of languages like English, French and Japanese, whose writing systems are far removed from the spoken language, will be able to learn to write with fewer years of study. That applies to children learning to write the first time as well as to adults learning a foreign language.

Musa alphabet chart (with IPA)

Vowels and Diphthongs

Musa alphabet - Vowels and Diphthongs

Consonants

Musa alphabet - Consonants

See a larger version of this image

Sample text in Musa (the poem "He Tells Her", by Wendy Cope)

Sample text in Musa (the poem 'He Tells Her', by Wendy Cope)

Transliteration

He Tells Her

He tells her that the Earth is flat—
He knows the facts, and that is that.
In altercations fierce and long
She tries her best to prove him wrong.
But he has learned to argue well.
He calls her arguments unsound
And often asks her not to yell.
She cannot win. He stands his ground.

The planet goes on being round.

More information about the Musa Alphabet
http://musa.bet

Musa fonts
https://www.musa.bet/fonts.htm

[top]

You can support this site by Buying Me A Coffee, and if you like what you see on this page, you can use the buttons below to share it with people you know.

If you like this site and find it useful, you can support it by making a donation via PayPal or Patreon, or by contributing in other ways. Omniglot is how I make my living.

Note: all links on this site to Amazon.com, Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.fr are affiliate links. This means I earn a commission if you click on any of them and buy something. So by clicking on these links you can help to support this site.

[top]