page_title: Ditema tsa Dinoko
section_title: Vowels
hierarchical_section_title: Ditema tsa Dinoko / Vowels
caption_attribution_description: English: [pʰaːntsʼi] written in the Isibheqe Sohlamvu writing system for sintu languages (Southern Bantu)
context_page_description: Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known by its IsiZulu name, Isibheqe Sohlamvu, and various other related names in different languages, is a constructed writing system designed in the early 2010s for the siNtu or Southern Bantu languages, developed from antecedent ideographic traditions of the Southern African region. Its visual appearance is inspired by these, including the traditional litema arts style.
  The Ditema / Isibheqe syllabary has the capacity to represent the full phonological range of these sintu languages consistently under one orthography.
  This includes languages that are unstandardised in the Latin alphabet such as the East Sotho languages, or the Tekela languages, which, with the exception of SiSwati, are not official languages. Orthographic support for these languages is for instance evidenced in the ingungwana grapheme, which indicates vowel nasality — a feature of Tekela languages.
context_section_description: The vowel graphemes (onkamisa) form the basis of each ibheqe or syllable block, as the nucleus of each syllable, with the ongwaqa or consonant graphemes positioned in and around them. 
  The direction of each ibheqe indicates the quality of the vowel for each of the seven vowel phonemes:
  •     Intombi, the upward facing triangle: /i/
  •     Isoka, the downward facing triangle: /a/
  •     Umkhonto, the upward facing chevron: /u/
  •     The leftward facing triangle: /ɛ/ 
  •     The rightward facing triangle: /ɔ/
  •     The leftward facing chevron: /e/ 
  •     The rightward facing chevron: /o/
  There is an eighth "vowel" represented by the downward facing chevron, which is an empty vowel, and is mostly used for foreign words to represent a standalone consonant, often as a syllable coda, which does not occur in sintu languages having CV phonology.
  The apex of the triangle or chevron corresponds to vowel height or frontedness, with high vowels /i/ and /u/ pointing upwards and the low vowel /a/ pointing downwards. Likewise, the front vowels /ɛ/ and /e/ point leftwards and the back vowels /ɔ/ and /o/ point rightwards. 
  Vowel nasality is indicated with the ingungwana grapheme, which is a solid dot outside the triangle separated from the apex, as in the word phãsi below:
caption: pʰaːntsʼi
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