When we talk about "the English alphabet", for example, we mean the set of letters needed to write English, in a particular order, with a spelling name for each one: "Ay Bee Cee ...". The ICAO or NATO alphabet has different names for those same letters: "Alfa Bravo Charlie ...".

The Musa alphabet works a little differently. First of all, there's no definitive list of all possible letters: each language just uses the letters it needs. However, there is a definitive list of shapes, and the shapes have names. Thus, the name of a letter is two syllables, the names of the two shapes - one on top and one on the bottom - that combine to form the letter. For vowels, one of them may be a space or an accent.

You may find it odd that the letter names don't include the sound that the letter represents, but if you think about it, that makes sense. If you didn't quite catch what the other person said, you can ask him to repeat it, but if you can't hear which sound he's saying, you need him to specify the letter some other way: by its shape.

We see the same thing, for example, in Spanish, where the letters b and v are pronounced alike. The first is called b alta, "high b", and the second is called v baja, "low v" - it would make no sense just to repeat the sound. The names of many letters in the Greek alphabet work the same way: epsilon is "simple e" (not αι), omicron is "small o" while omega is "large o", etc. We even say "double u" in English.

The vowels in the shape names below are pronounce with "continental" values, not English values. Ti is pronounced like English tea, Tu is pronounced like English too, and Ta rhymes with bra.

Shape	Name	Alone	Suffix	As Top	As Bottom
	 ya	Space		low vowel	high vowel
	 fi	 punctuation	Brackets	low rising tone	high rising tone
	 fa			low level tone	high level tone
	 fu			low falling tone	high falling tone
	 yu	 Long Mark	 Break	semivowel or suffix	coronal
	 nu	 Nasal	 Prenasal	nasal
	 mu	 eu	 Velarized	click	labial-velar
	 pu	 uh	 Backing	lateral	lateral release
	 na	 ih	 Stiff	devoiced nasal
	 pa	 ueh	 Fronting	devoiced approximant
	 ka	 eah	 Retracted	voiced plosive	dorsal
	 ta	 e	 Slack	held plosive
	 sa	 o	 Lowered	voiced fricative	hushing sibilant
	 wa	 oeh		orthophonic position	orthophonic manner
	 ma	 euh		start of orthophonic voicing	end of orthophonic voicing
	 li	 u	 Labialized	approximant	labialized
	 wi	 oe	 Endolabial	aspirated plosive	labiodental or labial-velar
	 si	 o	 Raised	ejective fricative	hissing sibilant
	 ti	 ee	 Advanced	ejective plosive	bilabial
	 ki	 ea	 Centering	implosive	uvular
	 pi	 ue	 Labiopalatal	devoiced lateral	palatal sibilant
	 ni	 i	 Palatalized	devoiced tap, flap or trill	palatal
	 su	 ah	 Opening	unvoiced fricative	retroflex sibilant
	 ku	 a	 Glottalized	breathy plosive	glottal
	 tu	 ae	 Emphatic	unvoiced plosive	pharyngeal
	 ru	 er	 Rhotic	tap, flap or trill	retroflex

The name of a letter is then just the name of the top followed by the name of the bottom, with the stress on the second syllable. So for example, the word Musa  would be spelled out loud as "nuti liya susi yaku". Note that a high vowel is read as vowel+space, and a low vowel is read as space+vowel; accents work the same way. Also note that you can pronounce the names voiced or aspirated - you can say "bi" or "pʰi" - without ambiguity, if that's easier.

The last four columns - what each shape means in each position - is the real "alphabet" : what you have to learn to read and write Musa.

Here is a simplified version of that chart to help you learn the shape names.

And here are charts that organize the shapes according to their use as tops and bottoms of consonants:

Foreign Names

Names of places, people and other things in foreign languages may include sounds that you don't have in your language, spelled with Musa letters that aren't familiar.

For example, the French name Paris  has a guttural r that doesn't occur in English. (At least, in Musa, it doesn't have the silent s at the end.) But the zigzag top of the Musa letter helps you recognize it as a "type of r", and you'll be understood by other English speakers if you pronounce it with your normal English r: that's effectively "the English name for Paris". But it's spelled the same as in French.

In English, we call the German city of Köln as if it were spelled "Colone", but we spell it as do the French: Cologne. In English, we don't have the ö sound, and we can't pronounce the light l after a vowel or before an n. We also lack the ny sound of the French name. But English speakers can pronounce Kolln, with the o of dog and the l of all. So that's what we call Köln, even though we spell it the German way.

Abbreviations

Since the names of Musa letters are two syllables, it makes no sense to abbreviate longer phrases by their initial letters. We never make a new word from the initials, either (like URL pronounced url). Instead, we abbreviate them by their initial syllables, as is done now in Russian (Komsomol) or the US Navy (CincPac). So instead of saying you-ess-ay for USA, we'd say you-STAY-am and write . The stress of the new word falls on the first syllable that was stressed in the original, and final consonants can be kept or not - it could be you-STATES-am .

However, written abbreviations like kg for kilogram are fine. When you read kg aloud, you say kilogram, not kay gee - no problem.

Alphabetic Order

The order of the shapes above is alphabetical order. It's based on the numeric values of each shape, so that numbers and letters sort by the same criteria. (That isn't true in English, where 100 sorts before 99.)

As in many languages, the alphabet can be sung as a song:

Spaces and punctuation (accents without vowels) sort before letters, so shorter words sort before longer words:

Vowels sort before consonants, so:

High vowels sort before low vowels, and accents in the order none-rising-level-falling:

Consonants sort by top before bottom:

The end result is that letters sort in order of their encodings, which you can see on the next page. That makes sorting very easy to implement.

< Gaits

Letter Reference >