Featural Alphabet

A featural alphabet is an alphabet wherein the shapes of the letters are not arbitrary, but encode phonological features of the phonemes they represent. The term featural was introduced by Geoffrey Sampson to describe Hangul and Pitman Shorthand. Examples of featural alphabet include the following:

• Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics
• Gregg Shorthand
• Duployan Shorthand
• Hangul — Korean
• Shavian alphabet
• Tengwar (a fictional script invented by J. R. R. Tolkien)
• Visible Speech (a phonetic script)
• SignWriting (a script for writing sign languages; technically not an alphabet)
• SpeechWriting (Mundbildschrift: a script for writing mouth movements of voiced words)

Other alphabets may have limited featural elements. Many languages written in the Latin alphabet make use of additional letters with diacritics, which are sometimes considered separate letters. The Polish alphabet, for example, indicates a palatal articulation of some consonants with an acute accent. The Turkish alphabet uses the presence of one or two dots above a vowel to indicate that it is a front vowel. The Japanese kana syllabaries indicate voiced consonants with marks known as dakuten. The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) also has some featural elements, for example in the hooks and tails that are characteristic of implosives, ɓ ɗ ʄ ɠ ʛ, and retroflex consonants, ʈ ɖ ʂ ʐ ɳ ɻ ɽ ɭ. The IPA diacritics are also featural. The Fraser alphabet used for Lisu rotates the letters for the tenuis consonants P /p/, T /t/, F /ts/, C /tʃ/, and K /k/ 180° to indicate aspiration.