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Kpelle Syllabary
The Kpelle syllabary was invented c. 1935 by Chief Gbili of Sanoyie, Liberia. It was intended for writing the Kpelle language, a member of the Mande group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 490,000 people in Liberia and around 300,000 people in Guinea at that time. The syllabary consists of 88 graphemes and is written from left to right in horizontal rows. Many of the glyphs have more than one form. It was used to some extent by speakers of Kpelle in Liberia and Guinea during the 1930s and early 1940s but never achieved popular acceptance. It has been classed as a failed script.Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In ''The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts'', ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press. Today Kpelle is written with a version of the Latin alphabet The Latin alphabet or Roman alphabet is the collection of letters origi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Kpelle Language
The Kpelle language ( endonym: "Kpɛlɛɛ") is spoken by the Kpelle people of Liberia, Guinea and Ivory Coast and is part of the Mande family of languages. Guinean Kpelle (also known as ''Guerze'' in French), spoken by half a million people, concentrated primarily, but not exclusively, in the forest regions of Guinea, whose capital, Nzérékoré, is the third largest city in Guinea and the largest city in the Guinée forestière region of south-eastern Guinea bordering Liberia, Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone. Half a million Liberians speak Liberian Kpelle, which is taught in Liberian schools. Sample The Lord's Prayer The Lord's Prayer, also called the Our Father or Pater Noster, is a central Christian prayer which Jesus taught as the way to pray. Two versions of this prayer are recorded in the gospels: a longer form within the Sermon on the Mount in the Gosp ... in Kpelle: :Kunâŋ gáa ŋele sui, :Tɔɔ ku iláai siɣe a maa waa. :Tɔɔ Ikâloŋ-laai é pá, :Tɔɔ ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |