Re: Site about alphabets

[Dennis <tsalagi@xxxxxxxx>]

Jorge Stolfi wrote:
> 
> Here is an interesting site about ancient writing systems:
> 
>   http://www.proel.org/alfabetos.html  (in Spanish)

	Very interesting.  Due to my work on Hamptonese, I've read about the
indigenous African writing systems (but I no longer believe that Hampton
made use of these systems; I know of no precedents for  his writing
system).  

	Here's a web site  I wrote about the African systems: 

Indigenous African Syllabic and Phonemic Writing Systems
http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/african/

It's interesting to note that usually an individual invented each
script, just as Sequoyah invented the Cherokee script.  Once they
recognized that one can write language and that this is a powerful tool,
a gifted individual created a writing system for his people.  Usually
these scripts were syllabaries; each character is a stylized picture of
something that is a short word in the language, and one uses the rebus
principle to write out larger words.  

Cornell Univ. has a list of African scripts:
http://www.library.cornell.edu/africana/Writing_Systems/List_of_Scripts.html

as does the Bibliotheque Nationale de France:
http://www.bnf.fr/web-bnf/pedagos/dossiecr/sp-afri1.htm


	Some things that the alfabetos page mentions (such as Ndibisi in West
Africa) are a different matter entirely.  These are somewhere between
morphographic systems like Chinese and pictographic systems; they
consist of stylized pictograms that people of many languages can
understand.  Here's my Web site on this:

The Symbols of Mankind
http://www.geocities.com/ctesibos/symbols/index.html

Note that some of these systems are quite practical for the modern
era!!!

Dennis