The Bagam or Eghap script is a partially deciphered Cameroonian script of several hundred characters. It was invented by King Pufong of the Bagam (Eghap) people, c. 1900, and used for letters and records, though it was never in wide use. It is reputedly based on the

Bamum script The Bamum scripts are an evolutionary series of six scripts created for the Bamum language by Ibrahim Njoya, King of Bamum (now western Cameroon) at the turn of the 19th century. They are notable for evolving from a pictographic system to a s ...

, though the numerals show more resemblance to Bamum than the

syllabograms Syllabograms are signs used to write the syllables (or morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols represent phonemes, or a logograph ...

do, and it does not appear to be a direct descendant. The only attested example is a paper by Louis Malcolm, a British officer who served in Cameroon in World War I. This was published without the characters in 1921, and the manuscript with characters was deposited in the library of Cambridge University. This was published in full in Tuchscherer (1999). A hundred characters are recorded, though it is thought the script had several hundred more. These include

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, ...

s, some used phonetically,

syllabogram Syllabograms are signs used to write the syllables (or morae) of words. This term is most often used in the context of a writing system otherwise organized on different principles—an alphabet where most symbols represent phonemes, or a logograph ...

s (for CV and CVC syllables), as well as independent consonants and vowels.

References

* Andrij Rovenchak, 2009
'Towards the decipherment of the Bagam script'
, Afrikanistik Online
Bagam (Eghap)
Script Source * Konrad Tuchscherer, 1999. 'The Lost Script of the Bagam'. ''African Affairs, The Journal of the Royal African Society,'' London, 98 (390): 55–77. * David Dalby, 1970. ''Language and history in Africa''. p. 113. {{List of writing systems Syllabary writing systems Writing systems of Africa Constructed scripts