Hi Peter, A belated follow up here.
If you find the '27 text I'd be very interested in what it says, and
even more, in seeing it. My understanding is that the '30 editions
were basically improvements on the original.
Denis Jacquereye has located a copy of the French version of the '30
edition, which is also of great interest. This should be made more
widely available as part of the history of development of African
writing systems.
Re the typography, I'm most interested in who made decisions like B
with hook rather than Cyrillic-style capital. I suspect that is in
John Philips book on Hausa.
Re Dalby and Mann's take on the African Reference Alphabet from the
1978 Niamey meeting, it and the ARA were discussed in some different
threads in 2003 on the a12n-collaboration list -
http://lists.kabissa.org/lists/archives/public/a12n-collaboration/
(see "Capital forms "not used"?" in March 2003 and some later titles
on Niamey and African Reference Alphabet - Ctrl-F the terms). The
concept of lower-case only Latin transcriptions - whatever its virtues
or vices were - never got any traction and as far as I know is not
seriously discussed now.
Don
--- In qalam@yahoogroups.com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@...> wrote:
>
> Until a few weeks ago I could have told you what's in the first
edition (1927) of the Africa Alphabet, but I moved the pamphlets from
where they always used to be (tucked into Albright's history of the
IPA, in fact) to somewere more logical, and now I can't find them.
>
> But it's very unlikely that you'll learn the name of either the
designer or the typographer of the characters: that was craft, done
anonymously.
>
> Note that the more recent Africa writing-scheme (which may have come
out of the Niamey conference?), published in a big green book
coauthored by Dalby, eschews capitals entirely. (A bad idea, I say.)
> --
> Peter T. Daniels grammatim@...
>
> ----- Original Message ----
> From: Don Osborn <dzo@...>
> To: qalam@yahoogroups.com
> Sent: Thursday, August 16, 2007 9:09:55 AM
> Subject: Re: Origin of Æ?
>
> Thanks Peter. What I'm especially interested to know is who designed
> the upper case letters and how it was decided to do so and pair them
> with the lower case ones (in this case, yes, phonetic IPA characters
> that have been adopted into various orthographies) .
>
> It's a question about the history, that's all. My assumption based on
> the Africa Alphabet document is that this decision had not been made
> before 1930.
>
> The 1966 Bamako meeting doesn't illustrate upper case versions of the
> hooked letters. (Actually the discussions re upper case were mostly
> about whether to use, say, the uppercase B for the implosive b rather
> than the hooked lowercase Ã" - this convention was never adopted but
> you will still see this kind of workaround these days in e-mail and
such).
>
> There were frequent references to the system used by Bargery, which
> apparently was published in 1934. (I don't have a copy to verify the
> form of uppercase letters)
>
> By the time of the 1978 Niamey coference (and the apparently
> unconnected work on ISO-6438), the current usage of uppercase hooked
> letters was established.
>
> So, where between 1930 and 1978 was the current convention
> established? As early as 1934?
>
> (I'll also pass the question on to John Philips of Hirosaki
> University, who has studied the history of Hausa orthographies. )
>
> Don
>
> --- In qalam@... com, "Peter T. Daniels" <grammatim@ ..>
wrote:
> >
> > Phonetic characters don't come in capital and lowercase forms, so
> when the hooked letters were adopted into the Africa Alphabet, someone
> decided to make capitals to go along with them.
>