--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Don Osborn" <dzo@...> wrote:

>because of the history of that
> continent, indigenous alphabets are for many a potential source of
> identity and authenticity that was compromised by colonial

occupation

> etc. However, too many new alphabets would seem to be
> counterproductive to larger goals of education, communication, and
> regional unity.

Don, you mention some very good points. The tension between the
goals of identity and those of wider communication is classic. (The
sentimental vs. the instrumental goals of language and script.)
Certainly, it is an ongoing debate in Canada, on many different
levels.

> In the case of Mandombe, it does appear to one seeing it for the

first

> time to be an impossibly complex maze. Understanding a little more
> about its tightly logical organization, ... By that I
> mean that with many small changes on a base, you can have many
> different sounds, but the resulting similarity of everything meant

you

> had to pay very rapt attention to each form in order to read text

in

> it (or so it seemed to me; this was not like Chinese characters

which

> have many unique forms and resulting combinations, but rather used
> positioning and number of dots and straight lines to make the
> distinctions, as I recall).

I have been reading research on literacy in Canadian syllabics for
years, and more recently the effects on literacy of Phags-pa, and
Hangul as well as Syllabics. All of them use orientation to some
extent. This does not impede literacy, on the contrary the
organization of alphabetic units into syllables is common to all
these scripts as well, and has had a more significant effect in the
opposite direction.

For Syllabics, Phags-pa and Hangul there was a well-recognized
positive effect on literacy. Unfortunately no one has yet found a
suitable way to write English in syllables to test whether it would
have a positive effect on literacy in North America. However, there
are always researchers who suspect that this would be the case.

I have been sharing notes with Denis and personally found that
Mandombe is very readable. It certainly took me less time to learn
Mandombe than Tamil. The descenders and ascenders, if that is the
right term, help create very distinct word shapes and I was able to
recongnize words very quickly, given that I had the Lord's Prayer in
Roman and Mandombe script. I would have no concerns about teaching
literacy with this script. Recognizing the fused prenasalization is
the only trick and once that is learned the pattern emerges.

Dare I mention the obvious - it would take considerably longer to
learn to read Chinese than Mandombe. Probabaly 8 years compared to 8
hours.

>
> However the proof is in the usage. Patrick raised a question about

the

> script a while back, but at the time few people in cyberspace had
> answers and it was easy not to give much attention to the issue,

I had seen it over a year ago, don't know where, but it was its
similarity, in technical ways not overall appearance, to Syllabics,
and other scripts that caught my attention. In light of the other
research I was involved with, it immediately struck me as very
readable although problematic from a font development point of view
which I know nothing about.

and

> even to think it may be just another wishful attempt to introduce a
> new writing system. However he and Denis Jacquerye have researched

it

> a little more to bring additional info to our attention. So, if

this

> script is indeed actively used for one or more languages in central
> Africa, then it certainly can't and shouldn't be ignored in the
> Unicode process.
>
> This shouldn't imply that every script proposed should be in the
> standard, but I think we all agree on that.

I think it might be worth looking at the Canadian experience. About
20 years ago linguists were intent on creating dictionaries and
school resources in Cree and wanted to use the English alphabet.
They had little patience with Syllabics. Syllabics was seen
as 'unreadable', 'inexact', 'dying out', 'identified with the
church', 'not really native anyway' 'impeding modernization' and
generally 'slowing everything down' for the non-native linguists. It
was only under intense pressure from the First Nations that
linguists changed their minds and resigned themselves to Syllabics.
The irony is that in retrospect they now consider themselves great
advocates of the system. But there was a time when things were iffy.

Unicode has encoded Syllabics for 5 or 6 distinct writing systems
but the population who speak First Nations languages in Canada is
around a 120,000 and readers of Syllabics a small portion of that.
Some of the symbols surely have very few users in terms of a first
literacy but they have been considered essential to the goals of
identity and cultural expression.

Certainly, 'not as real as klingon', is 'unreadable' and is
an 'artificial script' cannot be taken seriously. I would hope to
see Mandombe be given the opportunity to be encoded based on
whatever the criteria were for encoding other scripts which have
already been accepted, which has to be pretty flexible given what I
have seen.

Don, thank you for responding at length. I hope that jumbled up in
the above you will discern my genuine interest in this script.

Suzanne

PS Nicholas, I hope you will take this as a partial reponse to your
excellent post.