Don Osborn wrote:

>
> 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).

There's at least two Peters in this thread ...

I happen to have two pamphlets published by the folks who came up with
the Africa Alphabet in the 1930s (two editions), but I don't remember
where else I've seen it. I was annoyed that Bendor-Samuel didn't put a
table for it in WWS.

It's discussed but not with a table in Tucker's chapter in Current
Trends 7.

> 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.

I've tried to find examples of languages that straddle borders between
colonies that would have a standard French-based orthography and a
standard English-based orthography in different countries, but couldn't.

> 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@...