"To be in Unicode. That is my main goal.”"

November 18, 2016 9:10 PM

The Alphabet That Will Save a People From Disappearing - "“Why do Fulani people not have their own writing system?” Abdoulaye Barry remembers asking his father one day in elementary school. The variety of writing styles made it difficult for families and friends who lived in different countries to communicate easily. Abdoulaye’s father, who learned Arabic in Koranic schools, often helped friends and family in Nzérékoré—Guinea’s second-largest city—decipher letters they received, reading aloud the idiosyncratically modified Arabic scripts. As they grew older, Abdoulaye and his brother Ibrahima began to translate letters, too. “Those letters were very difficult to read even if you were educated in Arabic,” Abdoulaye said. “You could hardly make out what was written.” So, in 1990, the brothers started coming up with an alternative. Abdoulaye was 10 years old; Ibrahima was 14."

How Alphabet Changes Culture:
Setting the stage: Lettering Arts and Calligraphy today
When Artistic Theory Meets Practical Reality
Opposition to ADLaM

posted by the man of twists and turns (10 comments total)

This is amazing, thanks for posting this!
posted by cats are weird at 10:17 PM on November 18, 2016 [1 favorite]

I'm amazed it traveled so widely so quickly. There have to be other languages out there hungry for an adequate writing system.
posted by downtohisturtles at 10:45 PM on November 18, 2016

The first two links don't actually say what the letters are... you can find that here. Interesting that they seem to have made the shapes themselves without modifying Arabic or Roman script. (The numerals seem to be loose adaptations of the Arabic ones, though.)
posted by zompist at 11:25 PM on November 18, 2016 [2 favorites]

I don't have any sources for this offhand, but I attended a talk years ago by an archaeologist who fell into the subject. According to that talk, this kind of wholesale script invention is probably most common in West Africa in the nineteenth and twentieth century. There are instances of people adapting the Arabic script--basically just using the components to make an entirely new alphabet that doesn't correspond at all. But in West Africa there is a pattern of just completely new alphabets like this.

Consider, for instance, the Vai script, which was most likely invented around 1830. One distinction between ADLaM and other invented scripts: usually purely invented scripts are syllabaries—one theory is that these are more natural and intuitive for someone who is inventing a script from scratch. But ADLaM is alphabetic, with separate letters for vowels.
posted by Stilling Still Dreaming at 1:27 AM on November 19, 2016 [4 favorites]

Interesting, a lot of their letters are named after Arabic ones, but they had to add ones for the sounds that Arabic doesn't have. I wonder if their letter pè is named after the similar one from Hebrew or other Western Semitic languages, or whether they came up with it on their own.
posted by Joe in Australia at 2:47 AM on November 19, 2016

You can still find some materials in N'Ko, although most speakers who write in one of its languages use a Latin-based alphabet. This is made easier because Mande languages tend not to have many more sounds than European languages. You just have to add a few additional characters, which are all already supported in Unicode and available in most standard fonts.

(There are, of course, input issues if they're not part of a standard keyboard. I had to create a custom keyboard for my laptop.)

Neither the Arabic nor the Latin alphabets could accurately spell Fulani words that require producing a “b” or a “d” sound while gulping in air

These are known as "implosive" sounds. Describing them as "gulping" makes it sound much more extreme and odd than it actually is!

I think the article is a little confused here. You can represent implosive sounds with a Latin alphabet. Fula itself has an alphabet that does so; you add a little hook: ɓ, ɗ. These characters are used in phonetic transcription and in other languages with implosives, so they're not new.

That's not to poo-poo what these two have done. There is a lot to be said for having a script that is your own. And part of the issue of inconsistency with Fula writing in the Latin alphabet is that there are, essentially, competing standards. Do you spell something the way you would in French? Do spell it using its "standard" alphabet, which isn't widely taught and might have input barriers? And so on. With a completely new alphabet that has a 1-1 mapping, there's no such ambiguity. The fact that it's spread so far shows it's filling a need people have.

Also it looks cool.
posted by Kutsuwamushi at 6:20 AM on November 19, 2016 [7 favorites]

This is a very interesting article, but I wish they'd explored what they meant by the acronym that Adlam represents, and the headline. The Fulani ethnic group is not really in danger of disappearing, and Fula is spoken by a really large number of people in multiple countries. It's an official language in several countries, and spoken widely in others.
posted by ChuraChura at 6:28 AM on November 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

Here's the 2014 Unicode proposal which includes a bunch of samples from real world usage, starting around page 13. As the article notes Adlam made it into Unicode 9.0, around U+1E900. Here's a sample web page, but my Chrome on MacOS doesn't have a font for it. (Or much of anything else that's new in Unicode 9.0.)
posted by Nelson at 6:32 AM on November 19, 2016 [1 favorite]

is there an IndieGoGo or GoFundMe for this? that would be useful.

it is exciting to me that Unicode can include so many language type sets, and from reading this I wish it were a bit more efficient to acquire adoption of type sets.
posted by gkr at 1:58 AM on November 20, 2016

Also it looks cool.

It really does!

It's interesting to think about the very contingent path that our alphabet took to reach its present point, and the way we consequently need to use different forms for different purposes - capitals for high visibility, minuscules for comfortable reading, cursive for quick writing. Theirs looks as though it can be comfortably written as a cursive, even without changing the letters from their printed forms. I suppose it's a bit late now, but I wonder if the same could be done for English: whether there's a good script form that's also easy to print and easy to read.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:14 PM on November 20, 2016 [1 favorite]