The term Phaj hauj means "to unite," "to resist division," or "to have peace" in Hmong.

This is an indication that Shong conceived of the rimes as primary; Pahawh Hmong might therefore be thought of as a vowel-centered abugida.

The word rau, with mid-tone au as the rime, is normally written as a bare onset r, and indeed this is the case for the second instance in this sentence.

However, Cwjmem retains the Daw values for Njua and adds a pipe (|) to the left of kab kam kad kaj etc.

In addition to phonetic elements, Pahawh Hmong has a minor logographic component, with characters for Punctuation is derived from the Roman alphabet, presumably through French or Lao,[3] except for a sign introduced by one of Shong's disciples that replaced Shong's ⟨!⟩, but also includes a native sign for reduplication and a native cantillation mark.

[4] An illiterate peasant, Shong claimed to be the Son of God, messiah of the Hmong and Khmu people, and that God had revealed Pahawh to him in 1959, in northern Vietnam near the border with Laos, to restore writing to the Hmong and Khmu people.

Over the next twelve years he and his disciples taught it as part of a Hmong cultural revival movement, mostly in Laos after Shong had fled Communist Vietnam.

Shong continually modified the Hmong script, producing four increasingly sophisticated versions, until he was assassinated by Laotian soldiers in 1971 to stop his growing influence as part of the opposition resistance.

Knowledge of the later stages of Pahawh come to us through his disciple Chia Koua Vang, who corresponded with Shong in prison.

[citation needed] However, for some educated Hmong, Pahawh is considered an embarrassing remnant of a superstitious past (Smalley et al. 1990:165).

[4] Since 1975 until today, the Hmong Chao Fa, isolated from the rest of the world, has been heavily persecuted by the Lao People's Democratic Republic, nonstop and without resolution.

The Pahawh Hmong diacritics were devised by Shong Lue Yang in isolation, and have no genetic relation to similar-looking punctuation in the European tradition (DOT ABOVE, DIAERESIS, MACRON).

The Hmong pronominal system distinguishes between three grammatical persons and three numbers – singular, dual, and plural.

Larger numbers can thus be written two ways, using just 0–9 with place value being understood or by using the positional notation characters.

[citation needed] Not only do the forms of the majority of the letters in the oldest stage of Pahawh closely resemble the letters of the local Lao alphabet and missionary scripts such as Pollard and Fraser, though they are independent in sound value (much like the relationship between Roman and Cherokee), but the appearance of vowel and tone diacritics in those scripts, which would appear nearly random to the illiterate, may explain the idiosyncratic use of diacritics in early Pahawh.

The later stages of Pahawh became typologically more like Lao and the Roman alphabet, suggesting that perhaps they influenced its evolution.

By breaking each syllable in two in the fashion of Chinese phonetics, Shong was able to write Hmong, in his original version, with a mere 60+91 = 151 letters.