Peter, Do you have a reference for the "Africa Alphabet"? The only
mention I have for it is in the proceedings of the Niamey conference
at http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/Niamey78en.htm (in reference to
Ugandan languages).

As for the extended alphabet, Mann and Dalby did not come it all on
their own. There are different strands to the history of the use of
modified characters in languages of Africa (esp. the western part).
As I understand it, one of these had to do with the development of
Latin orthography for Hausa in Northern Nigeria under British rule.
Later on in 1966, a key "expert meeting" of linguists and other
specialists both from Africa and specialized in African languages was
held in Bamako under UNESCO auspices. The conclusions of this
meeting concerning transcription have been a reference point ever
since.

The Niamey "expert meeting" in 1978 was in effect part of a series of
conferences that ensued (a partial list is at
http://www.bisharat.net/Documents/ ) dealing in large part with how
to "harmonize transcriptions." Africa's borders of course divide
virtually every language community, and it made sense for there to be
a comparing of notes and if possible common approaches among
different national literacy & applied linguistics authorities.

One thing that came out of the Niamey conference was a
bicameral "African reference alphabet" (ARA). One of the problems,
of course, with using an extended character set is that traditional
typewriters had no place for the extended characters. I suppose that
there could be different ways of dealing with that - at about the
same time Mann and Dalby suggested getting rid of the upper case, the
IBM Selectric would permit using interchangeable typeballs with
whatever configuration of characters you wanted (in theory).

I'm not sure on what "authority" Mann and Dalby adapted the ARA in
the way they did. Not having read the "Thesaurus" I'm not aware of
what kind of collaboration and communication they may have been
involved in on the different propositions made.

On the face of it, though (two decades later), it would seem that a
technical focus that did not disaggregate "keyboard" from "typebars"
was inopportune. In addition to the possibilities afforded by IBM's
replacement of the typebars with a typeball, it was also possible to
have typebars with changeable letters (I had one way back when on
which one typebar could be so modified). And then all this was on
the eve of the personal computer revolution with a completely
different set of possibilities and problems (in which the
typebar/ball is replaced by fonts and keyboard drivers).

There's a lot of history in this which would be interesting to see
pulled together in one place.

Don Osborn
Bisharat.net


--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...>
wrote:
[ . . . ]

>
> I've always found the Mann & Dalby book perversely fascinating (but

I

> photocopied only a handful of pages presenting some orthographic
> specimens and language classifications). For some reason they got

it in

> their heads that it would be a Good Thing to discard the
> more-than-50-year-old Africa Alphabet, which has been adapted to

quite a

> few languages, in favor of a completely new scheme that would

require

> not only that everyone learn a bunch of new symbols, many of which

would

> not be used in their particular language, but that every typewriter

in

> Africa be junked. The absense of capitals in what is still a roman-

based

> script is especially problematic since it has no _other_ device for
> distinctive marking of boundaries or the other things capitals do in
> roman -- such as Arabic script accomplishes by flourishing many

final

> letters, or Javanese does by using a distinctive form anywhere in an
> affected word. (Now maybe if their missionaries had come from

mainland

> Southeast Asia ...)
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...