Starting an Online Concordance for Indigenous African Scripts: The Case of Vai
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Starting an Online Concordance for Indigenous African Scripts: The Case of VaiAndrij Rovenchak Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine E-mail: andrij.rovenchak@gmail.com IntroductionIn the course of 19th and 20th centuries, numerous writing systems were created across the Sub-Saharan Africa to record indigenous languages. One can count about thirty such scripts, and this list seems not to be complete (Tuchscherer 2005; 2007). Some of them have gained wide currency within respective ethnic groups while other remaine a personal form of writing. Most of these scripts were created for languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family and probably most significant split between two main groups, Mande and Atlantic-Congo languages (see Table 1). Table 1: Indigenous African scripts.
Legend: Xxxxx — more or less widely used script Xxxxx — individual form of writing Xxxxx — script linked with some organization [Xxxxx] — unclear status of the script Numbers are shown in parentheses if more than one script was created for the respective language. Unfortunately, the material available in many scripts is very limited and dispersed over various places. Making it accessible via Internet can be helpful for the studies on these writing systems. Vai scriptVai is a Western Mande language spoken by some 120,000 people in Liberia and another 20,000 in Sierra Leone (where most are Mende speakers, however). While the Roman-based Vai orthography exists, an indigenous script is also used to some extent. The Vai syllabary was created in 1820s–30s by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ (?–1850) from Jondu (Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia), who was assisted by his five friends (Dalby 1967). The Vai script was widely used for correspondence and record-keeping, there are translations of Qur’an and Bible. The Vai script has survived until today, in 1970s every fifth Vai man living in a town was literate in it (Singler 1983; Tuchscherer 2005). It is assumed that the Vai script became a direct stimulus for the creation of several other indigenous writing systems in the Western Africa, in particular Mende, Loma, Kpelle (Dalby 1967), and Bambara (Galtier 1987). The Vai syllabary became a part of the Unicode Standard starting from version 5.1. This fact facilitates the exchange of Vai texts, in particular, their representation in online sources. Concordance implementationIt is likely that the basic unit in the concordance will be either line (for older texts) or paragraph (for modern ones). One specific feature of the Vai script is that the word division can be left unmarked. This suggests – on the preliminary stages – the searchability in the concordance by syllables or groups of syllables unless the word division is marked manually as there is no possibility to create an automated algorithm due to a limited material. At present, two texts are represented in the concordance. The first one is The Book of Ndole, known also as The Book of Rora (Rora 1845) and the second one is The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR in Unicode). Below, the sources are shown in a simplified XML-like encoding (ellipsis ‘...’ denotes omitted parts). Text 1 (hexadecimal character codes): ...
... Directory: files files -> Answer True False 2 points Question 2 files -> Integer programming and game theory files -> 4 Integer Programming files -> Bpa vehicle Window Repair Scenario #1 task: Procure vehicle window relacement. Objective files -> Pop Warner History files -> North Carolina Inclusion Initiative Mapping Where Children with ieps are Being Served Purpose files -> Fall 2013 Spring 2014 Program Data: Standard 1 Exhibit 4d files -> Hanban – asia society confucius classrooms network 2010 request for proposal files -> Northern England’s set-jetting locations Download 162.99 Kb. Share with your friends:
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