Gold Coast alphabet


The Gold Coast alphabet also Gold Coast language was a Latin alphabet used to write the Akan language during the Gold Coast era, now Ghana. It differed from the current Akan alphabet in several ways, of which the most fundamental was in vowel notation.

Vowels

Akan has nine vowels, four pairs that differ whether they have an advanced tongue root, and, which is -neutral. In the Gold Coast script, the non- vowels were written with the five vowels of the Latin script, a e i o u, and the vowels by adding a subscript dot to these. In modern Akan, seven vowel letters are used, with two of them being ambiguous. In addition, the Gold Coast script used a tilde to mark nasal vowels, which are not marked in modern Akan.
PhonemeSoundGold
Coast		Modern
Akan
i̘i̘ịi
iɪie
e̘e̘ẹe
eɛeɛ
aaaa
ɐ *aa
oɔoɔ
o̘o̘ọo
uʊuo
u̘u̘ụu

* The allophone of produced by vowel harmony with vowels is not itself in Asante dialect, but nonetheless is markedly distinct from the allophone. It is not distinguished from in either orthography. In the Fante dialect, it has merged with.