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Mandombe or Mandombé is a script proposed in 1978 in
Mbanza-Ngungu Mbanza-Ngungu, formerly known as Thysville or Thysstad, named after Albert Thys, is a city and territory in Kongo Central Province in the western part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, lying on a short branch off the Matadi-Kinshasa Railway. I ...
in the
Bas-Congo Kongo Central ( kg, Kongo dia Kati ), formerly Bas-Congo is one of the 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Its capital is Matadi. History At the time of independence, the area now encompassing Kongo Central was part of the g ...
province of the
Democratic Republic of the Congo The Democratic Republic of the Congo (french: République démocratique du Congo (RDC), colloquially "La RDC" ), informally Congo-Kinshasa, DR Congo, the DRC, the DROC, or the Congo, and formerly and also colloquially Zaire, is a country in ...
by Wabeladio Payi, who related that it was revealed to him in a dream by
Simon Kimbangu Simon Kimbangu (September 12, 1887 – October 12, 1951) was a Democratic Republic of Congo, Congolese religious leader who founded the Christianity, Christian new religious movement Kimbanguism. Kimbanguists consider him to be an incarnation of ...
, the prophet of the
Kimbanguist Church , native_name_lang = , image = Simon Kibangu.jpg , imagewidth = , alt = , caption = Simon Kimbangu , abbreviation = , type = New christian religious movement ...
. Mandombe is based on the sacred shapes and , and intended for writing African languages such as
Kikongo Kongo or Kikongo is one of the Bantu languages spoken by the Kongo people living in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Republic of the Congo, Gabon and Angola. It is a tonal language. It was spoken by many of those who were taken from th ...
, as well as the four national languages of the Congo, Kikongo ya leta,
Lingala Lingala (Ngala) (Lingala: ''Lingála'') is a Bantu language spoken in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the northern half of the Republic of the Congo, in their capitals, Kinshasa and Brazzaville, and to a lesser degree in ...
, Tshiluba and Swahili, though it does not have enough vowels to write Lingala fully. It is taught in Kimbanguist church schools in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also promoted by the Kimbanguist ''Centre de l’Écriture Négro-Africaine'' (CENA). The Mandombe Academy at CENA is currently working on transcribing other African languages in the script. It has been classified as the third most viable indigenous script of recent indigenous west African scripts, behind only the
Vai syllabary The Vai syllabary is a syllabic writing system devised for the Vai language by Momolu Duwalu Bukele of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. Bukele is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the s ...
and the
N'Ko alphabet N'Ko () is a script devised by Solomana Kante in 1949, as a modern writing system for the Mandé languages of West Africa. The term ''N'Ko'', which means ''I say'' in all Mandé languages, is also used for the Mandé literary standard written ...
. A preliminary proposal has been made to include this script in the combined character encoding
ISO 10646 ISO is the most common abbreviation for the International Organization for Standardization. ISO or Iso may also refer to: Business and finance * Iso (supermarket), a chain of Danish supermarkets incorporated into the SuperBest chain in 2007 * Iso ...
/
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...
. A revise
Unicode proposal
was written in February 2016 by Andrij Rovenchak, Helma Pasch, Charles Riley, and Nandefo Robert Wazi.


Structure

Mandombe has consonant letters and vowel letters which are combined into syllabic blocks, rather like
hangul The Korean alphabet, known as Hangul, . Hangul may also be written as following South Korea's standard Romanization. ( ) in South Korea and Chosŏn'gŭl in North Korea, is the modern official writing system for the Korean language. The le ...
. All letters are based on a square S or 5 shape. The six vowels are distinguished by numerals added to the right of the 5-shape. The consonants fall into four 'groups', or shapes, which are distinguished by adding a short stroke to the 5-shape for three of the groups; and into four 'families', or orientations, which are distinguished by reflecting and rotating the letter shapes. The four families of consonants are attached to the same corner of the vowel, which is reflected or rotated to match the consonant, so that the consonant resides in a different corner of the syllabic block depending on its orientation. Unlike
Pitman shorthand Pitman shorthand is a system of shorthand for the English language developed by Englishman Sir Isaac Pitman (1813–1897), who first presented it in 1837. Like most systems of shorthand, it is a phonetic system; the symbols do not represent lett ...
, which also distinguishes consonants by rotation, in Mandombe the groups and families do not form natural classes, apart from a fifth group of fricatives and affricates made by inverting one of the four basic groups. Vowel sequences and nasal vowels are created with diacritics, prenasalized consonants by prefixing ''n'' (the basic 5-shape), and consonant clusters by infixing a consonant between the two parts of the vowel (between the 5-shape and the additional strokes).


Vowels

Vowel letters are composed of two parts: the basic 5-shape of the Mandombe script plus a numeral, or—in the case of ''ü'' ()—by modifying the basic ''u'' vowel letter. Vowel 1 is ''i'', vowel 2 ''u'', vowel 3 ''e'', vowel 4 ''o'', and vowel 5 ''a''. A
vowel A vowel is a syllabic speech sound pronounced without any stricture in the vocal tract. Vowels are one of the two principal classes of speech sounds, the other being the consonant. Vowels vary in quality, in loudness and also in quantity (leng ...
can be written individually and form a syllable on its own. In a vowel sequence or diphthong, however, a
diacritic A diacritic (also diacritical mark, diacritical point, diacritical sign, or accent) is a glyph added to a letter or to a basic glyph. The term derives from the Ancient Greek (, "distinguishing"), from (, "to distinguish"). The word ''diacriti ...
is used for the second vowel or part of the vowel. That is, ''lio'' (two syllables) is written ''li'' plus the diacritic for ''o'', while ''mwa'' (one syllable) is written ''mu'' plus the diacritic for ''a''. Diacritics come at the end of the last stroke of the vowel. While there is a diacritic for ''u'', sequences ending in ''u'' are instead generally written as two full syllables, the second being ''wu''. This strategy is apparently also employed in some other cases rather than using diacritics. ''Ü'' is . It has no diacritic.


Consonants groups and families

There are four basic
consonant In articulatory phonetics, a consonant is a speech sound that is articulated with complete or partial closure of the vocal tract. Examples are and pronounced with the lips; and pronounced with the front of the tongue; and pronounced wi ...
shapes. Each shape (base character) can be reflected horizontally, vertically, or both to represent a different consonant; the four consonants thus formed are considered to be a group, and consonants reflected in the same way are considered to be a family. These consonants are combined with vowels, which are similarly reflected, to create syllables. ; Family 1: The consonant with the basic orientation is attached to the lower left of the vowel ; Family 2: The consonant-plus-vowel is reflected both horizontally and vertically (rotated 180°) ; Family 3: The consonant-plus-vowel is reflected horizontally ; Family 4: The consonant-plus-vowel is reflected vertically Vowel diacritics are reflected along with the main vowel. The use of geometric transformation is also present in Pitman shorthand and Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, though Mandombe consonants in the same group do not seem to have any phonological relationship (except the fifth group named ''mazita ma zindinga'', in which all consonants are affricates and
fricative A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case of ; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in t ...
s).


Examples


Complex characters

* Prenasalisation of consonants is indicated with a variation on (n) disconnected from the vowel. This always joins the consonant body, else certain signs could be read in more than one way. *
Nasalisation In phonetics, nasalization (or nasalisation) is the production of a sound while the velum is lowered, so that some air escapes through the nose during the production of the sound by the mouth. An archetypal nasal sound is . In the Internatio ...
of the vowel is marked by an attached diacritic: . * If is placed between the two separable parts of the vowel glyph, it represents an intervening /r/.


Examples of complex syllables


Tones


Digits

The digit for 1 resembles the
Arabic numeral Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers such as ...
1, and 2–5 are based on this shape. 6 and 9 are square versions of Arabic 6 and 9, and 7–8 are formed by reflecting them. 1–5 are also the shapes used for the vowels i u e o a.


Punctuation

A period is used as a
word divider In punctuation, a word divider is a glyph that separates written words. In languages which use the Latin, Cyrillic, and Arabic alphabets, as well as other scripts of Europe and West Asia, the word divider is a blank space, or ''whitespace''. ...
to separate words. The punctuation corresponds to that of the Roman alphabet. A comma has the form of a short line, , a period a turned vee, , like the diacritic for ''o'', and a colon and semicolon combinations of these (semicolon î, colon double ). The exclamation mark is like a lambda, λ, and the question mark is like a turned Y, ⅄.


See also

* Syllabary *
Africa Alphabet The Africa Alphabet (also International African Alphabet or IAI alphabet) was developed by the International Institute of African Languages and Cultures in 1928, with the help of some Africans led by Diedrich Hermann Westermann, who served as d ...
*
African reference alphabet An African reference alphabet was first proposed in 1978 by a UNESCO-organized conference held in Niamey, Niger, and the proposed alphabet was revised in 1982. The conference recommended the use of single letters for a sound (that is, a phoneme) ...


External links


L'écriture Mandombe

Mandombe scriptPasch describing the script, its origins, and its uses


References

{{list of writing systems Abugida writing systems Writing systems of Africa Writing systems introduced in 1978