The lost script: 1000-year-old African/Arabic writing system | Hacker News Reader

The lost script: 1000-year-old African/Arabic writing system

boston.com

53 pointsdavi17 comments

This is slightly misleading, Ajami hasn't been particularly ignored. There are a huge number of african manuscripts in a variety of languages including Arabic which haven't been studied, it's been estimated that in Mali alone there are something like 250,000 - 500,000 manuscripts from 1100-1800 AD in private hands. Just in Timbuktu it's estimated their are upwards of 100,000+ manuscripts (Wikipedia has more details if people are interested).

The official libraries struggle to even catalogue the material they have. The Ahmed Baba Institute is trying to digitize it's collection but has only manage a tiny fraction of the 18,000 manuscripts they hold.

Largely it's a problem of money and staff, obtaining, preserving and cataloguing these manuscripts isn't cheap, let alone studying them all. Even preliminary analysis of the manuscripts available in libraries is a task that will take millions of man-hours.

Hmm, I was under the impression Africa had no native written languages (besides ancient Egyptian). Please tell me I'm wrong.

Writing may not have been developed indigenously in non-Egyptian Africa, but that doesn't mean it couldn't have been imported—and early on, too. Like anywhere else, you have a spectrum running from languages written in an imported script (Arabic) to languages written in a script modified from an imported script (Ajami) to languages written in totally new scripts (nevertheless originally derived from imported scripts—Ge'ez)

Are you kidding me? Ethiopia alone has multiple scripts. Amazighi family of languages has a written form that's older than anything in use today.

Well known are Amharic :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amharic

and Tifinagh (now taught in Morocco and Algeria) :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tifinagh

Unfortunately, I'm not. Growing up in the inner-city (Detroit), the ONLY thing we learned about our ancestors' history was slavery. No desire to thread-jack, but being influenced by such an education system does wonders for one's self-esteem (especially at such a young age)... Seems I have a research topic for the day!

">I was under the impression Africa had no native written languages

Are you kidding me? Ethiopia alone has multiple scripts."

Ah well, when I was living in the United States people used to ask me if we all used elephants for transport in India. I used to answer "Sure, we had this big stable of elephants and I went to school on one, as did all the kids in the neighbourhood. Actually I went to the airport for my trip here on the house elephant .. "

(Fwiw, my great grandfather did own an elephant in the early 1900s but it used to haul lumber and take part in temple processions, not so much provide transport from point A to B ... )

Tifinagh and Ge'ez are two prime examples, Sabaean might count as well depending on how you define native.

http://www.omniglot.com/writing/tifinagh.htm http://www.omniglot.com/writing/ethiopic.htm

Someone already pointed out examples from East Africa. In west Africa, there is the native pictographs of Adinkra of Ghana. There is also the native Bagam writing system of Cameroon (extinct). In Nigeria, there was a script known as Nsibidi.

Unfortunately, it's a common misconception that Africa had no writing systems or math.

That's kind of a bogus question to begin with. Africa is not exactly culturally homogenous, and in fact Egypt (and a lot of nearby civilizations) would be more appropriately regarded as part of the ancient Middle East, owing to the fact that it was easier to cross the Red Sea than the Sahara.

I'm not sure what you mean by "bogus question." How would you classify these: Does Asia have any native writing systems? Or Europe? I consider them quite straight-forward. I am well aware of the cultural make-up of Africa. In regard to your statements about ancient Egypt, isn't that up for debate. You speak with a certainty that even most Egyptologist lack.

Yeah, a lot of languages have a history of Arabic-script literacy which is far less studied than Ajami. Dongxiang (aka Sarta, a Mongolic language) comes to mind --- "Dongxiang Xiao'erjing" manuscripts are almost completely ignored among Anglophone scholars, and the only publications about it are in obscure regional journals in Gansu. Certainly no one has taken advantage of them to do diachronic studies of the language or literary criticism, as has been done for Wolofal [1] ...

Digitisation of all these kinds of Arabic-script manuscripts would be somewhat easier if the Arabic block in Unicode had more combining marks, the way the Latin and Cyrillic blocks have done for pretty much all the various tails and tildes and slash marks.

[1] e.g. http://www.jstor.org/pss/3821001 http://www.reference-global.com/doi/abs/10.1515/ijsl.2002.05...

Not true. Why is it then ignored or overlooked in virtually all the accounts of African history written by Europeans or Arabs? The true and sad fact is that both Europeans and Arabs, in accordance with with their racist stereotypes of Black Africans, had and still have no interest in legitimizing an intellectual written traditions that is not theirs, particularly of Black Africa. I suggest that you dig deeper beyond the superficial financial issues you raised.

The BBC had a good intro to this subject called "The Lost Libraries of Timbuktu". At least I liked it, but I had no idea about any of this stuff before I watched it. It was repeated a few days ago and is available on iPlayer for one more day:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00hkb0z

I'm assuming that it was the inspiration for the new series, The Lost Kingdoms of Africa which just started and focusses more on art history:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00pv1m4

Remember that when Ventris figured out Linear B, the text turned out to be mostly warehouse inventories.

http://www.omniglot.com/

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