From: Don Osborn (dzo@bisharat.net)
Date: Sun Nov 09 2003 - 01:44:37 EST
Catching up with this belatedly...
Swahili, like a number of languages just south of the Sahara, was - and I
would guess still is by some - written using Arabic characters (Ajami). The
Latin alphabet is indeed now dominant (and certainly "official") for
Swahili, and it uses ASCII characters (though not sure if it has an
apostrophe which might perhaps ideally be standardized as the letter
apostrophe). In West Africa, where I am more familiar with the local
practices, it is not that uncommon to find people who read and write their
language in Ajami (Hausa, Fula, Manding languages...), even though the
official orthographies are based on the Latin alphabet with extended
characters.
As for other African scripts, they are most notable in the western and
northern parts of the continent. Tifinagh and N'ko are in the process of
being encoded. I just had a conversation with someone the other day who
recounted seeing a letter written in Tifinagh script in a rural part of
northern Niger written by someone to a local chief - quietly this script
continues to be used. N'ko of course is much more recent but is promoted by
an active grassroots movement. Of Vai and Bamum I know less; and there are
other minor ones, for instance, for Wolof and Bambara. I am also checking
into another alphabet I heard of but recently saw for the first time (more
on that if the info merits).
It doesn't take much imagination to think about the potentials of Unicode
for facilitating computing and web content in such languages whose speakers
as a whole use two (or even three) scripts.
Hope this helps.
Don
----- Original Message -----
From: "Marco Cimarosti" <marco.cimarosti@essetre.it>
To: "'Philippe Verdy'" <verdy_p@wanadoo.fr>; <unicode@unicode.org>
Sent: Monday, October 20, 2003 1:23 PM
Subject: RE: Swahili & Banthu
> Philippe Verdy wrote:
> > As Africa has been influenced by many foreign invasions,
> > there may in fact exist other scripts to represent this
> > language [...]
>
> Yes: until a recent past, Swahili was also commonly written in the Arabic
> alphabet.
>
> _ Marco
>
>
>
>
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