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The Fraser or Old Lisu script is an artificial abugida for the Lisu language invented around 1915 by Sara Ba Thaw, a Karen people preacher from Myanmar, and improved by the missionary James O. Fraser. It is a single-letter case (Unicase) alphabet. It was also used for the Naxi language, e.g. in the 1932 Naxi Gospel of Mark, and used in the Zaiwa or Zaiwa language, e.g. in the 1938 Atsi Gospel of Mark.
The script uses uppercase letters from the Latin script (except for the letter Q) and rotated versions thereof (except for the letters M, Q and W) to write and . Tonal language and nasalization are written with Roman punctuation marks, identical to those found on a typewriter. Like the Indic , the vowel is not written. However, unlike those scripts, the other vowels are written with full letters.
The local Chinese government in Nujiang de facto recognized the script in 1992 as the official script for writing in Lisu, although other Lisu autonomous territories continue to use the New Lisu (Latin script) for official matters.
| +Fraser consonants |
| +Fraser vowels |
For example, is , while is .
When consonant ꓠꓬ, ꓬ is used with vowel ꓬꓱ, ꓬ, without being ambiguous only one ꓬ is written.
When transcribing diphthongs and nasal codas, letters ꓮ and ꓬ can work like vowels just like English letter Y, making Fraser script behave like an matres lectionis alphabet like the Roman alphabet instead of an abugida like Tibetan script; meanwhile space works like a delimiter like a Tibetan tseg, making a final consonant (such as ꓠ) possible without necessity of a virama: 凉粉 reads as rather than as .
| +Diacritics on the syllable |
The apostrophe indicates nasalization. It is combined with tone marks.
The low macron indicates the Lisu "A glide", a contraction of without an intervening glottal stop. The tone is not always falling, depending on the environment, but is written regardless.
The Unicode block for the Fraser script, called 'Lisu', is U+A4D0–U+A4FF:
An additional character, the inverted Y used in the Naxi language, was added to the Unicode Standard in March, 2020 with the release of version 13.0. It is in the Lisu Supplement block (U+11FB0–U+11FBF):
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