The Afaka script ( afaka sikifi) is a syllabary of 56 letters devised in 1910 for the Ndyuka language, an English-based creole language of Suriname. The script is named after its inventor, Afáka Atumisi. It continues to be used to write Ndyuka in the 21st century, but the literacy rate in the language for all scripts is under 10%.
Afaka is the only script in use that was designed specifically for a creole.
Typology
Afaka is a
defective script. Tone is
phoneme but not written. Final consonants (the nasal n) are not written, but long vowels are, by adding a vowel letter. Prenasalized stops and
voiced consonant are written with the same letters, and syllables with the vowels u and o are seldom distinguished: The syllables o/u, po/pu, and to/tu have separate letters, but syllables starting with the consonants b, do not. Thus the Afaka rendition of
Ndyuka could also be read as
Dyoka. In four cases syllables with e and i are not distinguished (after the consonants l,); a single letter is used for both ba and pa, and another for both u and ku. Several consonants have only one glyph assigned to them. These are ty, which only has a glyph for tya; kw (also kp), which only has kwa; ny, which only has nya (though older records report that letter pulled double duty for nyu); and dy, which only has dyu/dyo. There are no glyphs assigned specifically to the consonant gw ~ gb. The result of these conflations is that the only syllables for which there is no ambiguity (except for tone) are those beginning with the consonant t.
There is a single punctuation mark, the Vertical bar or |, which corresponds to a comma or a Full stop. Afaka initially used spaces between words, but not all writers have continued to do so.
Etymology
The origins of many of the letters are obscure, though several appear to be
acrophony , with many of these being symbols from Africa.
["Now here is the mystery: thirty-four of Afaka's signs are found in the script of the Vai tribe of Liberia." V.S. Naipaul, The Middle Passage (1962), p. 204 (Penguin ed.).] Examples of rebuses include a curl with a dot in it representing a
baby in the
belly (in Ndyuka,
a abi beli, lit. "she has belly", means "she's pregnant"), which stands for be; two hands outstretched to
give (Ndyuka
gi) stand for gi; iconic symbols for
come (Ndyuka
kon) and
go to represent ko or kon and go; two linked circles for
we stand for wi, while yu is an inversion of mi, corresponding to the pronouns
you and
me; letters like Roman numerals
two and
four are tu and fo. (which would be like writing "2 4get" for 'to forget' in English.) ka and pi are said to represent feces (Ndyuka
kaka) and urine (
pisi). A "+" sign stands for ne or nen, from the word
name (Ndyuka
nen), derived from the practice of signing one's name with an X. The odd conflation of u and ku is due to the letter being a pair of hooks, which is
uku in Ndyuka.
[In fact, Dubelaar and Pakosie imply that this letter also stands for uku, making it a logogram.] The only letters which appear to correspond to the
Latin alphabet are the vowels
a,
o, and maybe
e, though
o is justified as the shape of the mouth when pronouncing it.
[ E, which resembles a capital Latin letter M, may be acrophonic for the name of the letter "em".]
Variants and syllabic order
Texts in Afaka's own hand show significant variation in the letters. A good number are rotated a quarter turn, and sometimes inverted as well; these are
be,
di,
dyo,
fi,
ga,
ge,
ye,
ni,
nya,
pu,
se,
so,
te, and
tu,
while
lo,
ba/
pa, and
wa may be in mirror-image and
sa,
to may be simply inverted.
Others have curved vs angular variants:
do,
fa,
ge,
go,
ko, and
kwa. In yet others, the variants appear to reflect differences in stroke order.
The traditional mnemonic order (alphabetic order) may partially reflect the origins of some of the signs. For example, tu and fo ("two" and "four", respectively), yu and mi ("you" and "me"), and ko and go ("come" and "go") are placed near each other. Other syllables are placed near each other to spell out words: futu ("foot"), odi ("hello"), and ati ("heart"), or even phrases: a moke un taki ("it gives us speech"), masa gado te baka ben ye ("Lord God, that the white/black(?) man heard").
Computer encoding
The Afaka script has been proposed for inclusion in the
Unicode Standard.
The codepoints U+16C80 through U+16CCF have been tentatively designated for the script.
Sample text
This is apparently the first letter written by Afaka. It was copied into the
Patili Molosi Buku .
| | kee mi gadu. mi masaa. mi bigin na ini a wowtu .
fu a pampila di yu be gi afaka. ma mi de
anga siki fu dede. fa mi sa du. oli wowtu. mi go
na pamalibo na lanti ati oso. tu boo . di mi ná abi
moni. den yaki mi. den taki mi mu oloko moni fosi.
mi sa go na ati osu. da(n) na dati mi e begi. masaa
gadu fu a sa gi mi ana. fu mi deesi. a
siki fu mi. ma mi sa taki abena. a sa kon tyai
paati go na ndyuka. e(n)ke fa paati taki a bun
gi wi. ma mi de anga pen na mi ede. ala
mi nosu poli na ini. da(n) mi ná abi
losutu ye. |
Notes
-
Dubelaar, Cornelis & André Pakosie, Het Afakaschrift van de Tapanahoni rivier in Suriname. Utrecht 1999. .
-
Gonggryp, J. W. 1960. The Evolution of a Djuka-Script in Surinam. Nieuwe West-Indische Gids 40:63-72.
-
Huttar, George. 1987. The Afaka script: an indigenous creole syllabary. In The Thirteenth LACUS Forum, pp. 167–177.
-
Huttar, George. 1992. Afaka and his creole syllabary: the social context of a writing system. Language in Context: essays for Robert E. Longacre, ed. by Shin Ja Hwang and William Merrifield, pp. 593–604. Dallas: SIL and University of Texas at Arlington.
External links
