Vai Syllabary
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The Vai syllabary is a
syllabic writing system In the linguistic study of written languages, a syllabary is a set of written symbols that represent the syllables or (more frequently) moras which make up words. A symbol in a syllabary, called a syllabogram, typically represents an (optiona ...
devised for the
Vai language The Vai language, also called Vy or Gallinas, is a Mande language spoken by the Vai people, roughly 104,000 in Liberia, and by smaller populations, some 15,500, in Sierra Leone. Writing system Vai is noteworthy for being one of the few African ...
by
Momolu Duwalu Bukele Momolu Duwalu Bukele (sometimes known as Momolu Duala Bukare, or spelled as Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ) (30 September 1788 – 1 October 1888) was the inventor of the Vai syllabary used for writing the Vai language of Liberia—one of several Afric ...
of Jondu, in what is now
Grand Cape Mount County Grand Cape Mount is a county in the northwestern portion of the West African nation of Liberia. One of 15 counties that constitute the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has five districts. Robertsport serves as the capital ...
,
Liberia Liberia (), officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. It is bordered by Sierra Leone to Liberia–Sierra Leone border, its northwest, Guinea to its north, Ivory Coast to its east, and the Atlantic Ocean ...
. Bukele is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary's inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s. It is one of the two most successful indigenous scripts in
West Africa West Africa or Western Africa is the westernmost region of Africa. The United Nations defines Western Africa as the 16 countries of Benin, Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, The Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Ivory Coast, Liberia, Mali, Maurit ...
in terms of the number of current users and the availability of literature written in the script, the other being
N'Ko 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 i ...
.


Structure of the script

Vai is a syllabic script written from left to right that represents CV
syllables A syllable is a unit of organization for a sequence of speech sounds typically made up of a syllable nucleus (most often a vowel) with optional initial and final margins (typically, consonants). Syllables are often considered the phonological "bu ...
; a final nasal is written with the same glyph as the Vai syllabic nasal. Originally there were separate glyphs for syllables ending in a nasal, such as ''don,'' with a long vowel, such as ''soo,'' with a diphthong, such as ''bai,'' as well as ''bili'' and ''sɛli.'' However, these have been dropped from the modern script. The syllabary did not distinguish all the syllables of the
Vai language The Vai language, also called Vy or Gallinas, is a Mande language spoken by the Vai people, roughly 104,000 in Liberia, and by smaller populations, some 15,500, in Sierra Leone. Writing system Vai is noteworthy for being one of the few African ...
until the 1960s when the
University of Liberia The University of Liberia (UL or LU in older versions of abbreviation) is a publicly funded institution of higher learning located in Monrovia, Liberia. Authorized by the national government in 1851, the university opened in 1862 as Liberia Coll ...
added distinctions by modifying certain glyphs with dots or extra strokes to cover all CV syllables in use. There are relatively few glyphs for nasal vowels because only a few occur with each consonant. The symbols used to write words evolved to become visually simpler over time, and an analysis has shown that they can do so over just a few generations.


Possible link with Cherokee

In the 1960s evidence emerged suggesting that the
Cherokee syllabary The Cherokee syllabary is a syllabary invented by Sequoyah in the late 1810s and early 1820s to write the Cherokee language. His creation of the syllabary is particularly noteworthy as he was illiterate until the creation of his syllabary. He f ...
of North America provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary in Liberia. The Vai syllabary emerged about 1832/33. This was at a time when American missionaries were working to use the Cherokee syllabary as a model for writing Liberian languages. Another link may have been
Cherokee The Cherokee (; chr, ᎠᏂᏴᏫᏯᎢ, translit=Aniyvwiyaʔi or Anigiduwagi, or chr, ᏣᎳᎩ, links=no, translit=Tsalagi) are one of the indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands of the United States. Prior to the 18th century, t ...
who emigrated to Liberia after the invention of the Cherokee syllabary (which in its early years spread rapidly among the Cherokee) but before the invention of the Vai syllabary. One such man, Cherokee Austin Curtis, married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The romantic "inscription on a house" that first drew the world's attention to the existence of the Vai script was in fact on the home of Curtis, a Cherokee.
What we can be reasonably sure about is that Curtis was not only a well-connected and influential man within the Vai community, but one who spoke the Vai language and adopted Vai customs, who settled in Vai country some four years before the invention of the Vai script, and who later appears to have welcomed the use of the script on his house. ''If'' Curtis was informed about the Cherokee script, ''if'' he was already resident at Cape Mount by 1827/28, and ''if'' he made contact with any of the mission party at Big Town - Revey or even his Vai-speaking assistants – it is conceivable that the notion of a syllabary reached the Vai by this route – but perhaps not very likely. Finally, whether the argument from coincidence should have any weight is difficult to say, but that two new scripts sharing the same basic structure, invented a continent apart within little more than a decade of each other, can each be linked, however tenuously (given the limited evidence), to the same individual, may reasonably be regarded as at least singular. (Tuchscherer and Hair 2002)


Syllables


Additional syllables


Punctuation

Vai has distinct basic punctuation marks: Additional punctuation marks are taken from European usage.


Historical symbols


Logograms

The oldest Vai texts used various
logogram In a written language, a logogram, logograph, or lexigraph is a written character that represents a word or morpheme. Chinese characters (pronounced ''hanzi'' in Mandarin, ''kanji'' in Japanese, ''hanja'' in Korean) are generally logograms, as ...
s. Of these, only and are still in use. * Modern ; at the time now-obsolete ꘑ was used for .


Digits

Vai uses
Arabic numerals Arabic numerals are the ten numerical digits: , , , , , , , , and . They are the most commonly used symbols to write Decimal, decimal numbers. They are also used for writing numbers in other systems such as octal, and for writing identifiers ...
(0–9). In the 1920s Vai-specific digits were developed but never adopted:


Book of Rora

One of
Momolu Duwalu Bukele Momolu Duwalu Bukele (sometimes known as Momolu Duala Bukare, or spelled as Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ) (30 September 1788 – 1 October 1888) was the inventor of the Vai syllabary used for writing the Vai language of Liberia—one of several Afric ...
's cousins, Kaali Bala Ndole Wano, wrote a long manuscript around 1845 called the ''Book of Ndole'' or ''Book of Rora'' under the
pen name A pen name, also called a ''nom de plume'' or a literary double, is a pseudonym (or, in some cases, a variant form of a real name) adopted by an author and printed on the title page or by-line of their works in place of their real name. A pen na ...
Rora. This roughly fifty page manuscript contains several now obsolete symbols:


Unicode

The Vai syllabary was added to the
Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
Standard in April, 2008 with the release of version 5.1. In Windows 7 and earlier, since this version only gives names for characters released in Unicode 5.0 and earlier, the names will either be blank (Microsoft Word applications) or "Undefined" (Character Map). The Unicode block for Vai is U+A500–U+A63F:


Notes


Further reading

* *
Fatima Massaquoi-Fahnbulleh Fatima Massaquoi-Fahnbulleh (; 25 December 1912 – 26 November 1978) was a Liberian writer and academic. After completing her education in the United States, she returned to Liberia in 1946, making significant contributions to the cultural and ...
. 1963. "The Seminar on the Standardization of the Vai script," in ''University of Liberia Journal'' Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 15–37. * * Kelly, Piers, James Winters, Helena Miton, and Olivier Morin. "The predictable evolution of letter shapes: An emergent script of West Africa recapitulates historical change in writing systems." ''Current Anthropology'' 62, no. 6 (2021).
n simplifications over time for Vai symbols N, or n, is the fourteenth letter in the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''en'' (pronounced ), plural ''ens''. History ...
* 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 Kwame Akroma-Ampim Kusi Anthony Appiah ( ; born 8 May 1954) is a philosopher, cultural theorist, and novelist whose interests include political and moral theory, the philosophy of language and mind, and African intellectual history. Appiah wa ...
and
Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Henry Louis "Skip" Gates Jr. (born September 16, 1950) is an American literary critic, professor, historian, and filmmaker, who serves as the Alphonse Fletcher University Professor and Director of the Hutchins Center for African and African Amer ...
, pp. 476–480. New York: Oxford University Press. * Tuchscherer, Konrad. 2002 (with P.E.H. Hair). "Cherokee and West Africa: Examining the Origins of the Vai Script," ''History in Africa'', 29, pp. 427–486. * Tuchscherer, Konrad. 2001. "The Vai Script," in ''Liberia: Africa's First Republic'' (Footsteps magazine). Petersborough, NH: Cobblestone Press. * Tykhostup, Olena and Piers Kelly. 2017. "A diachronic comparison of the Vai script of Liberia (1834–2005)." ''Journal of Open Humanities Data'' 4:2. .


External links


Ethnologue on VaiInput tool and Unicode font for using Vai on Windows XPSIL on Vai
{{list of writing systems Syllabary writing systems Writing systems of Africa Vai language Constructed scripts 1830 introductions 1830 establishments in Africa Writing systems introduced in the 19th century