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9 lines
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9 lines
1.5 KiB
Plaintext
Bamum is a Unicode block containing the characters used for the modern script of the Bamum language (western Cameroon). The characters for old spellings (stages A-F) are in the Bamum supplement block.
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The Bamum scripts are a series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by King Njoya of Cameroon in the early twentieth century. They are notable for [b]evolving from a pictographic system to an alphabetic syllabic writing[/b] over 14 years, from 1896 to 1910. The Bamum alphabet was introduced in 1918, but the script died out in 1931.
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It's a really funny fact that [b]Njoya was not satisfied with the writing and changed it 6 times[/b]. If the first variant was purely ideographic, the last was a syllabic script. At first, the signs were just drawings, then gradually they began to be used as riddles until their lexical meaning was lost.
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[b]The goal of the writing reforms was to reduce the number of signs. However, Njoya did not think about the side effects of this decision.[/b] For example, he ignored that Bamum is a tonal language. As a result, many homographs appeared in the text. [i]Homographs are words that were spelled the same way but differed in pronunciation due to tones, which, therefore, led to semantic confusion.[/i]
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After the French arrived in Cameroon in 1918, they treated Njoya badly, as he had a good relationship with the German administration. That's why Njoya went to the greatest exile, and the Bamum alphabet was banned. The writing is currently on the verge of extinction. |