The uniskript glyphs used to represent the vowel in Figure \ref{332645} employ the following visual-featural indexicality and sound-shape congruency correspondences:
- Lines to represent the air flowing freely.
- A different number of lines to represent different degrees of opening of the mouth.
- Curves at the left side of the glyphs to indicate tongue backness.
- An angle at the right side of the front closed vowel represents sharpness.
Long Vowels and Semivowels
Long vowels are made by combining one of the short vowels above with one of the two semivowels present in the English inventory of phonemes. In order to explain the long vowels, we need to look at the semivowels first, displayed in the chart below.