http://mgafrica.com/article/2014-06-11-in-the-race-between-african-scripts-and-the-latin-alphabet-only-ethiopia-and-eritrea-are-in-the-game/
In the race between African scripts and the Latin alphabet, only
Ethiopia and Eritrea are in the game
11 Jun 2014 13:00Christine Mungai
Ge’ez is the only original African script taught and used widely in
everyday interaction - in Ethiopia and Eritrea. It is also the most
successful.
Followers of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church. The native African script
of Ge'ez is itself extinct, used only on the liturgy of Ethiopian and
Eritrean Orthodox churches. (AFP)
Last weekend, a Kenyan made the news by announcing he had developed an
indigenous script for the Luo language. In no time, #WritingLuo was
the top trending topic in Kenya on Twitter.
The developer, Kefa Ombewa, said he was out to “de-Latinise” the Luo
language, arguing that African languages needed indigenous symbols to
express their nuances that the Roman alphabet simply cannot capture.
Reception on social media so far has largely treated the development
of the script as just another flamboyant curiosity, but could Ombewa
be on to something?
The desire to express African languages in locally developed symbols
has been strong through the decades. Written language embodies
historical identity and cultural power—thus when Israel became a state
in 1948, it revived the Hebrew language from near-oblivion, not just
as a tool of unifying modern Jews, but also as a political symbol of
their claim of a connection to ancient Israel.
Today, most African languages are written in the Latin or Arabic alphabets.
However, Latin and Arabic themselves developed from ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics. Despite the modern diversity of writing systems,
historians believe that ancient writing developed independently in
only four places—Egypt, Iran/Iraq, China, and Mesoamerica (the
cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central
Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and
northern Costa Rica).
Ge’ez in the mix
All other scripts are derivatives or influences of these four: For
example, Arabic is derived from ancient writing in Iran/Iraq; Japanese
and Korean and derived from Chinese, and Latin alphabet is derived
from ancient Greek, which adopted its alphabet from Egyptian
hieroglyphics.
Thus it could be argued that European languages today are written in
script derived from Africa—not the other way around.
Although Africa is known for its oral traditions, there have also been
several indigenous African writing systems, some of which are still in
use today.
Used in Ethiopia and Eritrea, Ge’ez is the only native African script
taught in school today used widely in everyday interactions. Dating
back to the 9th century BC, Ge’ez itself is an extinct language, much
like Latin, only used in the liturgy of the Ethiopian and Eritrean
Orthodox churches.
But the Ge’ez script is used to write Amharic, Tigrinya, Tigre and
most other languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea. And with a population of
over 90 million residing in those two countries, Ge’ez is the most
successful native African script today.
Ge’ez probably developed over the course of several centuries. But
another native African script, Vai in Liberia and Sierra Leone, is
credited to one man, who invented the Vai writing system in the 1830s,
a Liberian named Momolu Duwalu Bukele.
It is said the script was revealed to him in a dream, though it is
more likely that the Cherokee syllabary in North America provided a
model for the design of Vai writing. At the time, many Cherokee had
migrated to Liberia in the early 1830s, just at the time when Cherokee
itself was developing its written script.
Cameroon’s Bamum
Another script developed in modern times is the Bamum script, invented
by King Ibrahim Njoya, the 17th king of the Bamum of West Cameroon in
1896. The script, also named A-ka-u-ku after its first four letters,
is rarely used today, but a fair amount of material written in this
script still exists.
But King Njoya’s grandson and current sultan of Bamum, Ibrahim Mbombo
Njoya, has since transformed his palace into a school to re-teach the
Bamum script, initiating The Bamum Scripts and Archives Project in
2005 to bring it back from the brink of extinction.
Further south in Malawi is the Mwangwego alphabet developed in 1977
for Malawian languages by Nolence Mwangwego. But it is not used widely
in everyday interactions. Other African scripts, such as Nubian and
Meroitic, have fallen into disuse and are considered extinct.
But most African languages today, particularly south of the Sahara,
are written using the Latin alphabet. This presents many difficulties
in expressing some sounds that are not found in European languages.
In the 1960s and 1970s, UNESCO hosted several “expert meetings” on the
subject, including a seminal meeting in Bamako in 1966, and one in
Niamey in 1978, where a standard African alphabet—using Latin letters
but incorporating many other non-Latin sounds—was proposed. But it is
yet to be widely adopted.
Received on Thu Oct 23 2014 - 22:03:50 EDT