The Bété

syllabary 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 ...

was created for the Bété language of

Ivory Coast Ivory Coast, also known as Côte d'Ivoire, officially the Republic of Côte d'Ivoire, is a country on the southern coast of West Africa. Its capital is Yamoussoukro, in the centre of the country, while its largest city and economic centre is ...

(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 the 1950s by artist

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, also known as Cheik Nadro (11 March 1923 – 28 January 2014), was an Ivorian artist. Life and career Bouabré was born in Zépréguhé, Ivory Coast, and was among the first Ivorians to be educated by the French colo ...

. It consists of about 440

pictograph A pictogram, also called a pictogramme, pictograph, or simply picto, and in computer usage an icon, is a graphic symbol that conveys its meaning through its pictorial resemblance to a physical object. Pictographs are often used in writing and gr ...

ic characters, which represent scenes from life and stand for syllables in Bété. Bouabré created it to help Bété people learn to read in their language. File:Bete-syllable bhɛ.png, bhɛ File:Bete-syllable dje.png, dje File:Bete-syllable dji.png, dji File:Bete-syllable kpɛ.png, kpɛ

History

Bété language

6,000, 000 Bétés live in the

, and their language is not taught in schools. There was no writing system for Bété before this one; all education is in French. There are five main dialects of Bété. Syllabaries are generally used for languages with simple rules of syllabic combination; English, for example, would not work well for a syllabary because there are over ten-thousand different possibilities for individual syllables.

Frédéric Bruly Bouabré

Bouabré was among the first to be educated by the French government. While working as a civil servant, he completed hundreds of small sketches, drawing from local folklore and also his own visions. He ceased his work as a civil servant in 1948, due to a vision he received on March 11 of that year, to dedicate himself to art entirely. His earlier art drew heavily on a desire to preserve and catalogue Bété culture. Art critic Yacouba Konate mentions that after the vision he had received, he realised that he needed to develop an African writing system to work in. Believing that it would allow him to better catalogue Bété culture. ''La Méthodologie de la Nouvelle Écriture Africaine “Bété”'', the work in which Bouabré first catalogued his syllabary, was originally written in a Toyota notebook. His major encyclopedic work, for which he called himself “Cheik Nadro”, meaning “the one who never forgets," is composed of 400 small pictures drawn with ballpoint pens and crayons. These cards display symbolic imagery with text surrounding it.

Current use

Bouabré intended his syllabary to achieve universal use - not just for Bété, but for the world. However it has not achieved any such use. His artwork, however, has received general praise along these lines; Schuster described it as presenting the universal nature of being human. His syllabary has been used for educational purposes – to teach Bété people to learn Bété. A Latinate alphabet is still, however, the most widely used. Dodo Bai, a student of Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, produced a handwritten translation of a French Wikipedia article into Bouabré's syllabary. It is still not possible to produce a computer-generated version: there is still not unicode Bouabré's Bété syllabary, though there is a PUA version, which gives some indication of what an official Unicode version might look like. Debbie Anderson from the Script Encoding Initiave at UC Berkeley has made an official proposal to enter Bouabré's Bété syllabary in the Unicode.Working documents on the Bété script
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Typology

In a syllabary, a syllable is generally represented by a character. There are several kinds of characters in Bété. 1. A single character (denote this ‘A’) – the majority are of this kind. 2. A double character repeated twice horizontally, ‘AA’ 3. A double character produced by repeating a single character any way other than horizontally 4. A double character produced by repeating two different single characters ‘AB’ 5. Marks to indicate stress or pronunciation. The ↝ acts as a hyphenation mark, thereby distinguishing a double character from two single characters. There are over 20 characters which are double characters for which no single character exists.

Examples

Note how the arrow ↝ here acts to separate a single character from a double character made of that single character: that is, A+AA, instead of AAA (which would be ungrammatical). Bété_Syllabary_two

Here is a showcase of how it works. Spaces are not part of the syllabary. The last character ''fer'' meaning iron, and ''et'' meaning ''and''. The character corresponding to ''and'' is composed of two single characters for which there is not a single character represented. In both cases, note how the characters are pictograms of what they mean. However, this is a syllabary, so that ''ra'', for example, is not a word but a syllable (see

rebus principle A rebus () is a puzzle device that combines the use of illustrated pictures with individual letters to depict words or phrases. For example: the word "been" might be depicted by a rebus showing an illustrated bumblebee next to a plus sign (+) ...

). The syllable ''Dis.'' This syllable for example, also means ''say.''

References

La méthodologie de la nouvelle écriture africaine Onestar Press PDF
* ttps://hyperallergic.com/473986/frederic-bruly-bouabre-cantor-arts-center Schuster, Clayton, "A Visual Alphabet for an Oral Language from the Ivory Coast", ''Hyperallergic'', December 5, 2018br>First Run Icarus Films (brochure) "Bruly Bouabré's Alphabet: A Film by Nurith Aviv"
* ttps://www.printedmatter.org/catalog/16981/ La Méthodologie de la Nouvelle Écriture Africaine “Bété”br>Unicode Technical report Report on the Bété script, Charles Riley, September 9, 2017