Starting an Online Concordance for Indigenous African Scripts: the Case of Vai

STARTING AN ONLINE CONCORDANCE FOR INDIGENOUS AFRICAN SCRIPTS: THE CASE OF VAI

Andrij Rovenchak Ivan Franko National University of Lviv, Ukraine E-mail: [email protected]

Introduction In the course of 19th and 20th centuries, numerous writing systems were created across the Sub- Saharan Africa to record indigenous languages. One can count about thirty such scripts, and this list seems not to be complete (Tuchscherer 2005; 2007). Some of them have gained wide currency within respective ethnic groups while other remaine a personal form of writing. Most of these scripts were created for languages belonging to the Niger-Congo family and probably most significant split between two main groups, Mande and Atlantic-Congo languages (see Table 1).

Table 1: Indigenous African scripts. Niger-Congo  Mande Vai Mende Loma Kpelle Mandingo Bambara [Guro]  Atlantic-Congo Bamum Eghap Bassa Wolof Bété Fula (2) [Gola] Afro-Asiatic  Kushitic Somali(3) Oromo(2)  Chadic Hausa(2) Legend: Xxxxx — more or less widely used script Xxxxx — individual form of writing Xxxxx — script linked with some organization [Xxxxx] — unclear status of the script Numbers are shown in parentheses if more than one script was created for the respective language.

Unfortunately, the material available in many scripts is very limited and dispersed over various places. Making it accessible via Internet can be helpful for the studies on these writing systems.

Vai script Vai is a Western Mande language spoken by some 120,000 people in Liberia and another 20,000 in Sierra Leone (where most are Mende speakers, however). While the Roman-based Vai orthography exists, an indigenous script is also used to some extent. The Vai syllabary was created in 1820s–30s by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ (?–1850) from Jondu (Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia), who was assisted by his five friends (Dalby 1967). The Vai script was widely used for correspondence and record-keeping, there are translations of Qur’an and Bible. The Vai script has survived until today, in 1970s every fifth Vai man living in a town was literate in it (Singler 1983; Tuchscherer 2005). It is assumed that the Vai script became a direct stimulus for the creation of several other indigenous writing systems in the Western Africa, in particular Mende, Loma, Kpelle (Dalby 1967), and Bambara (Galtier 1987).

The Vai syllabary became a part of the Unicode Standard starting from version 5.1. This fact facilitates the exchange of Vai texts, in particular, their representation in online sources.

Concordance implementation It is likely that the basic unit in the concordance will be either line (for older texts) or paragraph (for modern ones). One specific feature of the Vai script is that the word division can be left unmarked. This suggests – on the preliminary stages – the searchability in the concordance by syllables or groups of syllables unless the word division is marked manually as there is no possibility to create an automated algorithm due to a limited material. At present, two texts are represented in the concordance. The first one is The Book of Ndole, known also as The Book of Rora (Rora 1845) and the second one is The Universal Declaration 1 of Human Rights (UDHR in Unicode). Below, the sources are shown in a simplified XML-like encoding (ellipsis ‘...’ denotes omitted parts).

Text 1 (hexadecimal character codes):

The Book of Ndole

ꗏꗷꗏꕺ... ꘃ ... ꕞ

ꔵꖨ ...

Text 2 (decimal character codes):

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

ꕺꖃ ꘈꗢ ꗪ ...ꕎ

ꕢꕎꕌ ꔖꔜꕯꕊ ...

Several input conventions can be proposed, the simplest one is to use only standard Roman letters. This issue, however, is not crucial as other input schemes can be implemented with little technical efforts.

For the output, the so-called KWIC, Key Word In Context (Sinclair 1991: 173), form is proposed with up to ten syllables shown both left- and rightwards from the searched item within the basic unit (line or paragraph).

A trial version of the concordance is available at http://www.ktf.franko.lviv.ua/~andrij/vai-concord.html Note that this version has a limited functionality: only several sections of each text are accessible and only certain syllables can be searched.

The input window is shown in Fig. 1, and the output for the syllable MI is given in Fig. 2. In future, it might be useful to add the transliterations below the output lines.

2 Figure 1: Input form of the online concordance for Vai.

Figure 2: Output from the online concordance for Vai showing the syllable MI.

To summarize, a research tool is proposed for the study of indigenous African writing systems. For the time being, a trial version covers only the Vai script, but the inclusion of other scripts can be easily made. The collection of texts is one of the most significant tasks in this direction and must be made in close collaboration with scientists working in this domain.

Acknowledgement. I am grateful to Charles Riley for numerous discussions on the presented issues.

References Dalby, David (1967): ‘A survey of the indigenous scripts of Liberia and Sierra Leone: Vai, Mende, Loma, Kpelle and Bassa’. African Language Studies. Vol. 8, pp. 1–51. Galtier, Gérard (1987): ‘Un exemple d’écriture traditionnelle mandingue: le “Masaba” des Bambara- Masasi du Mali’. Journal des Africanistes. Vol. 57, Num. 1, pp. 255–266. Rora (1845): Rora. Narrative of everyday life: manuscript, ca. 1845. Houghton MS Vai 2. Houghton Library, Harvard University Sinclair, John (1991): Corpus. Concordance. Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Singler, John Victor (1983): [Review of] The Psychology of Literacy. By Sylvia Scribner and Michael Cole. Language. Vol. 59, No. 4, pp. 893-901. Singler, John Victor. (1996): ‘Scripts of West Africa’. In: The World’s Writing Systems / Ed. by Peter T. Daniels and William Bright. Oxford University Press, pp. 593–598. Tuchscherer, Konrad (2005): ‘History of Writing in Africa’. In: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience (second edition) / Ed. by Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 476–480. Tuchscherer, Konrad (2007): ‘Recording, Communicating and Making Visible: A History of Writing and Systems of Graphic Symbolism in Africa’. In: Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art. Smithsonian Institution, pp. 37–53. UDHR in Unicode: http://unicode.org/udhr/