Featural Alphabet

In a featural alphabet the shapes of the symbols are not arbitrary but reflect the phonetic features of the sounds they represent.

## Orish Featural Alphabet

Orish is officially written in a Latin script because in Unicode there is no enough efficient featural set of characters and Or Hoshmand wanted Orish to be possible to write in an electronic media with no special font, but it can also be written in a featural alphabet. The featural alphabet was created by Or Hoshmand in 2019 when he thought about alternative ways to write in Orish, and he discovered that the shapes of the symbols can also be built so that they reflect the phonetic features of the sounds they represent.

### Consonants

In the Orish featural alphabet, consonant letters are normally built from a vertical line and a horizontal line. the vertical line represents the place of articulation and the horizontal line represents the manner of articulation. In the initial planning, right vertical line represents the labial place of articulation, central vertical line represents the alveolar place of articulation and left vertical line represents the velar place of articulation; top horizontal line represents the plosive manner of articulation and bottom horizontal line represents the fricative manner of articulation. To complete this rule so that all consonants will have a featural letter, more units were added: the horizontal lines without the half circle represent an unvoiced phonation and the half circle was added to represent a voiced phonation, a short vertical line was added to the half circle of the top horizontal line to represent a nasal manner of articulation, a circle was added to the middle of the central vertical line to represent the postalveolar place of articulation, and the top and bottom horizontal lines were combined to represent an affricate manner of articulation. However, there are three letters that each one of them represents a consonant with an exclusive phonetic feature: L which represents a lateral approximant, R which represents a rhoric phoneme and H which represents a glottal consonant; because the sound of the letter L is alveolar it still has a central vertical line in its featural form and because the sound of the letter H is fricative it still has a bottom horizontal line in its featural form, but other details that build them are arbitrary, and because the letter R represents a phoneme that can be pronounced in many different ways with no common place or manner articulation it has an arbitrary shape even in its featural form, but such that looks typographically similar to other letters in their featural forms.

### Vowels

In the Orish featural alphabet, vowel letters normally have a triangle shape. In the initial planning, the triangles are equilateral, and the place of the vertex against the base relative to the triangle represents the position of the vowel, bottom vertex represents a low vowel, left vertex represents a front vowel and right vertex represents a back vowel. For the high vowels, which are on the corners of the vowel trapeze, the vertex in their mid counterparts was raised so that its height will be the same as the height of the top vertex next to the base, and they became right isosceles triangles in which the position of the vertex between the hypotenuse and the horizontal side of the triangle. Because in Orish the roundness of a vowel comes together with its backness, roundness of vowels is not reflected in the Orish featural alphabet. For the semivowels the vertical side of the high vowel letters was removed and for Ə there is a square rather than a triangle because this is a neutral vowel. For the primary stress a circle that surrounds the vowel letters was added and for the secondary stress a dot inside the vowel letters was added.

### Table

 **Digraphs**
 **Diacritics**
 **Suggested Letters**
 **Others**