Aebajiogbe A Writing System Of The Yorubas
By Charles Oladipo Akinde
In this essay, I will use writing system rather than alphabet because the former seems to explain what we are talking about better.
A writing system is defined as a set of symbols used to represent spoken sounds of a language.
From what we can see so far, there are about 50 written languages from antiquity until now. Our Aebajiogbe may fit into one of these with enough scrutiny.
In the writing system of the world, as projected by Matt Baker, there are five classifications for these world languages.
They are:
Alphabets. 2. Abujads 3. Abujidas 4. Syllabaries 5. Logo-syllabaris.
According to his explanation, In alphabets each letter represents a single sound which can be either a consonant or a vowel. English alphabet is modern latin which are also used in other European countries. Latin has its roots in ancient Greek alphabet. It evolved into Cyrillic alphabet which is used in Eastern European countries such as Russia.
It follows that all these Latin – Greek – Cryillic work in similar way because they share a common origin. But Abujads also known as consonant alphabets are made up primarily of consonants the example of which is The Hebrew and The Arabic the two abujads used today. Their uniqueness is that they are read from right to left instead of from left to right as in English. Can our Aebajiogbe be linked with these two languages?
Mr. Matt Baker said that Latin – Greek – Cyrillic – Heb rew and Arabic have Phoenician origin. Can we we say this also of our Aebajiogbe?
Furthermore, from the Phoenicians came Aramaic which gave birth to Arabic, Hebrew and South Asian scripts.
According to Matt Baker, the other type is Syllabaries, the Japanese is a good example. In Japanese, Hiragana is in native Japanese and Katagana is used for foreign technical words.
In Syllabary each character represents an entire syllable rather than a single sound. A syllable generally means one consonant and one vowel. A Korean writing system called Hangul is also a syllabary system.
Chinese falls into another category called Logo-syllabary where single character can stand not for a unique syllable but for an idea.
In summary The classification of writing systems is as follows:
Alphabets in which each letter represents single sound be it consonant or vowel.
Abujads have character for each consonant as well as for each vowel.
Syllabaries have characters for each syllable or consonant-vowel combination.
Logo-syllabries have characters for each major word or word part.
Abujidas falls somewhere between alphabets and syllabaries. It is also called syllabic alphabets. These are primarily used in India and South East Asia and Ethiopia. Abujidas like alphabets have unique characters for both consonants and vowels. Hindi is an example of Abujidas system.
Perhaps when we discover other writings on objects or even caves we will be clearer about which system group our Aebajiogbe belongs. The search has to be intensified by scholars of different disciplines especially archaeology, these may also highlight some of the blurred aspect of our history.
Our contact with Europe and slave trading in us have destroyed many of our past. With some efforts, which by no means easy, we may have some insights about who we actually are.
The end.
By Charles Oladipo Akinde (Jan.2023)
In this essay, I will use writing system rather than alphabet because the former seems to explain what we are talking about better.
A writing system is defined as a set of symbols used to represent spoken sounds of a language.
From what we can see so far, there are about 50 written languages from antiquity until now. Our Aebajiogbe may fit into one of these with enough scrutiny.
In the writing system of the world, as projected by Matt Baker, there are five classifications for these world languages.
They are:
Alphabets. 2. Abujads 3. Abujidas 4. Syllabaries 5. Logo-syllabaris.
Ac
By Charles Oladipo Akinde (Jan.2023)