The invention, transmission and evolution of writing: Insights from the new scripts of West Africa

Abstract

West Africa is a fertile zone for the invention of new scripts. As many as 20 have been devised since the 1830s (Dalby 1967, 1968, 1969, inter alia) including one created as recently as 2002 (Mbaye 2011). Talented individuals with no formal literacy are likely to have invented at least three of these scripts, suggesting that they had reverse-engineered the ‘idea of writing’ on the same pattern as the Cherokee script, i.e. with minimal external input. Influential scholars like Edward Tylor, A. L. Kroeber and I. J. Gelb were to approach West African scripts as naturalistic experiments in which the variable of explicit literacy instruction was eliminated. Thus, writing systems such as Vai and Bamum were invoked as productive models for theorising the dynamics of cultural evolution (Tylor [1865] 1878, Gelb [1952] 1963), the diffusion of novel technologies (Kroeber 1940), the acquisition of literacy (Forbes 1850, Migeod 1911, Scribner and Cole 1981) the cognitive processing of language (Kroeber 1940, Gelb [1952] 1963), and the evolution of writing itself (Gelb [1952] 1963; Dalby 1967, 2). This paper revisits the three West African scripts that are known to have been devised by non-literates. By comparing the linguistic, semiotic and sociohistorical contexts of each known case I suggest various circumstances that may have favoured their invention, transmission and diffusion. I argue that while the originators of scripts drew inspiration from known systems such as Roman and Arabic, they are likely to have drawn on indigenous pictorial culture and annotation systems to develop their own scripts. Once established, their creations were used to circumscribe an alternative politico-religious discourse in direct opposition to the discourses of colonial administrations. The appeal of these scripts were thus tied more to their relative indexical power than their apparent technological or cognitive advantages. Just as earlier theorists imagined, I contend that West African scripts do have the potential to illuminate historical processes of creativity, transmission and evolution, but only when local particularities are given due consideration.

Standardisation and heritage language maintenance: preliminary interdisciplinary considerations with a case-based approach

“…Actually, besides the international attempts of Bamako and Niamey, some alternative scripts like Fula Dita and Fula Ba were devised from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s. However, as in the case of the African Reference Alphabet, they did not gain acceptance by Fula speakers (Kelly 2018), who still preferred to use local orthographic variants.…”

Style and Rebus in an Emergent Script from Bolivia: The Koati Variant of Andean Pictographic Writing

“…Emergent scripts, like Andean pictographic writing, tend to develop in situations of "graphic pluralism," where multiple systems of inscription were used within the same linguistic community (Salomon and Hyland 2010). Such scripts are often seen as replicating the conditions for the original development of writing (Kelly 2018; see also Bohaker 2010).…”

“…The Koati characters will then be compared to the pictographic scripts from the nearby communities of Sampaya and the Island of the Sun, revealing the degree to which the script styles appear to correspond closely to the political and ritual ties among regional groups. Understanding the social dimension of an emergent script, in its historic and ethnographic contexts, is a necessary complement to linguistic analysis (Kelly 2018).…”

The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems

“…On the phonological level, all emergent scripts that are known to us have targeted syllables as the central unit of phonetic representation, with varying degrees of primacy. Further, they have emphasised the representation of consonants while underspecifying vowels (Kelly 2018). Logosyllabograms-or signs standing for monosyllabic morphemes-have also featured widely in the earliest beginnings of many emergent systems wherever the documentation has survived.…”