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Comment by trompetenaccoun | Hacker News Reader

Apart from Ethiopia, are there any places where they don't use either Latin or Arabic scripts in everyday life? There are technically a whole bunch of alphabets of course but they aren't used much afaik. Maybe the Tuareg script? Is that used by people in North Africa beyond bilingual signs?

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There is Adlam for Fulani [1]. Widely spoken in west Africa. However, I'm still trying to familiarize myself with the writing system. The word for "yes" in fulani does not translate in writing. The best way I can write it is HIiiII. Imagine the lowercase i goes down in tone. Then the last two uppercase i shoots up. I don't know if any writing system supports this.

[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adlam_script

If there are no two words that are only distinguished by tone, it might be unnecessary to mark it in writing, except as a learning aid for people who're not fluent enough in the language to predict this information from context.

E.g. in English, questions are marked by rising pitch, but that intonation is not indicated in writing.

FWIW, Japanese has tonal minimal pairs (ha'shi chopsticks, hashi' bridge, hashi edge), but doesn't bother marking them in (kana) writing. Although the Chinese characters are obviously different.

> but that intonation is not indicated in writing

Oh?

Using the phonetic representation (IPA), you can obtain a writing system similar to the pinyin.

Hanyu Pinyin Hànyǔ Pīnyīn Fāng'àn

Bopomofo ㄏㄢˋ ㄩˇ ㄆㄧㄣㄧㄣㄈㄤㄢˋ

IPA [xân.ỳ pʰín.ín fáŋ.ân]

Cameroonian dialect are written using the GACL who is similar to the IPA.

Clafrica: Pookai2t peu2nze2e2 n*kut !

Shʉ̄pāpə̀m (Bamoun): Pookɛ́t pә́nzéé ŋkut !

> Cameroonian dialect are written using the GACL who is similar to the IPA.

What exactly is the GACL? Trying to find information on it returns this HN comment as the top result, and a bunch of language-unrelated results after that.

From another comment, it's the General Alphabet of Cameroon Languages.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Alphabet_of_Cameroon_L...

> While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.[3][6] One method they used involved them closing their eyes and drawing lines. After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent.

I'm not sure if I should be impressed that this has turned into an actual script, or disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea.

Hot take: artificially creating new scripts that need to be taught from scratch to everybody and require new fonts, layout engines, etc hinders language adoption/preservation instead of helping it.

> disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea

Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day

Hangul and the corresponding Japanese syllabaries made sense because Chinese characters are very poorly suited to writing Korean and Japanese.

Latin and Arabic, on the other hand, have a long history of being used for other languages and can be adapted to represent basically anything.

> Hot take

Uh yeah it is. A writing system needs a flat surface, a writing implement, and a mind prepared to learn. If enough people think that the new alphabet is a good idea, fonts and layout engines will follow. For Adlam, they did. (Another invented system which took off indigenously: Cherokee syllabary[1].)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writing_systems_of_Africa

I don't think any have very widespread use outside of Ge'ez (Ethiopian, etc). Maybe Tifinagh.

I do notice that iOS has built-in keyboards for N'Ko and Tamazight (Tifinagh) - pretty cool to try out if you have an iphone.

North african here! For Moroccan arabic dialect, we mostly use latin alphabets and some numbers to replace some sounds/letters

It looks a little bit similar to the working of the clafrica code to type in General Alphabet of Cameroonian languages.

Clafrica: Pookai2t peu2nze2e2 n*kut !

Shʉ̄pāpə̀m (Bamoun): Pookɛ́t pә́nzéé ŋkut !

Very interesting. Is that to avoid confusion with standard Arabic?

see: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41428987

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