Re: Antoine Casanova's research

[Dennis <ixohoxi@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

	I can't resist.  Here's a list of several indigenous
African scripts:

http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/List_of_Scripts.html

	Vai and Mende are syllabic scripts.  Bassa is a
phonemic script - a very beautiful one.

http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/Amharic.html
has an interesting circle diagram, like a Lull diagram
with Amharic characters.

	This site, in French, shows several other systems:
http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/pedagos/dossiecr/sp-afri1.htm

	At 
http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/pedagos/dossiecr/ci-afriq.htm
	It notes:  "The principal properly African alphabets
(Vai, Mende, Bamoun, and Bassa) were born in the 19th
century.   They drew on millenary traditions for their
graphics....  Most of the African systems gave way to
Romanized transcriptions at the beginning of the 20th
century, except for Vai, which is still in use."

	To me, this sounds like the essential insight of
Sequoyah: the simple fact that language can be
written.  Once someone in an illiterate culture has
this insight, that person can devise a writing system
out of whatever is available.  

	I found these scripts while working on Hamptonese. 
Previously I thought that sub-Saharan Africans had only
written their own languages in Arabic script; I was
pleased to find these native scripts.

	The symbols for po^ and bo^ in the Vai syllabary look
somewhat Voynich-like to me.  

Jorge Stolfi wrote:

> 
> Consider for instance the Sequoyah script: the symbol shapes and
> writing direction are inspired on European letters, yet it is a
> syllabary and not an alphabet, and the sounds and language could
> hardly be more non-European.
> 
> So I don't think that we can exclude African (or any other) language
> just because the script is European-looking.

	Yes!

Dennis