Osage Small Letter Tsha

It marks one Osage consonant: “ts” with a puff of breath. The “ts” is like the end of the English word “cats,” followed by a little extra air; linguists write the sound as [tsʰ]. It differs from Osage Tsa 𐓲, which has the same “ts” start without the puff.

The Osage alphabet grew from changing spellings

Before the modern Osage script, people wrote the language with several inconsistent Latin-letter spellings. An early record is a transcription from around 1851 attributed to Jesuit priest Father Ponziglione; Osage spellings and transcriptions served Bible translation, language documentation, and study. This exact modern letter belongs to the later Osage script, not that nineteenth-century transcription.

In 2004, the Osage Nation launched a language program without a shared spelling standard. By 2006, the program director and advanced learners had designed practical letterforms by modifying or fusing Latin letters; familiar English letter sounds were getting in the way of learning Osage pronunciations, so the community treated the new forms as a separate script. Students and teachers took it up quickly, and it was in regular use across the Osage Nation by 2006. Starting in 2012, speakers and linguists reviewed the letter set, leading to adoption of its current form in 2014.