#ajami

[gothhabiba]

For centuries, scholars’ understanding of sub-Saharan Africa derived from the written records of European colonialists, who gave the impression that sub-Saharan Africans had no native written languages of their own. In fact, says Fallou Ngom, who grew up in Senegal, people in sub-Saharan Africa have used a written system derived from Arabic to record the details of their daily lives since at least the 10th century.

That script, Ajami, is still flourishing; people throughout Africa use it to write phonetic renderings of about a dozen languages, including Swahili, Wolof, and Hausa. But because texts written in Ajami are often passed down through families where they can be lost over generations, many are inaccessible to scholars, few of whom can read the script anyway. Those who know about Ajami texts often dismiss them as mundane, with little scholarly value. Ngom, director of Boston University’s African Studies Center, disagrees. He is digitizing more than 18,000 of these indigenous texts—including those in Ajami, Arabic, and Ajami-Arabic—and making them widely available to offer scholars new insight into African history, literature, culture, medicine, and everyday life.

The BU College of Arts & Sciences professor of anthropology partnered with the West African Research Center in Dakar, Senegal, on a 15-month project funded by the British Library’s Endangered Archives Programme. Ngom gained access to the documents through an elder in the Casamance region of Senegal who helped him compile a list of locals with Ajami manuscripts. The elder made introductions and facilitated approvals for the research team.

[ID: a page of Ajami handwritten text above a large red and black geometric decoration. The text, which is written with full diacritics, looks like classical Arabic script with several extra or different letterforms and diacritics. End ID]

“It’s human knowledge,” Ngom says. “It’s everything. And it’s a grassroots tradition. They’re handwriting these materials, making copies, and sharing them in the community. In many cases, this is the only form of literacy they have. So that’s what they use to document their lives.” The texts reveal “the interests of these people, their preoccupations.”

These everyday interests and writings expand scholars’ comprehension of the region’s people beyond the history and traditions emphasized in postcolonial literature, which Ngom says gave “the false impression that only oral traditions exist in sub-Saharan Africa.” In Senegal, the official language is French, in which only half of the population is literate; French literacy is restricted to a minority educated group in urban areas. The absence of Ajami in the history of sub-Saharan Africa “makes invisible centuries-old traditions of producing knowledge.”

Lara Ehrlich, "Digitizing Ajami, a Centuries-Old African Script." The Brink. 2020.

[whenicaniwill]

Era pra gente ter sido mágica, fomos apenas truque.

Ajami: Marcello Gugu

[infrogmation]

Extensive thousand year literary tradition only recently noticed

Wow. People of Sengal long called "illiterate". Because they didn't know how to write in French. But they've been writing in their own language with their own alphabet (modified from Arabic), Ajami.

A century of French Colonial rulers apparently never bothered to notice. 

Western academia only found out when Boston University College professor Fallou Ngom started studying old papers left by his Senegalese father.

https://www.bu.edu/articles/2022/fallou-ngom-discovers-ajami-african-writing-system/

[justnowayaroundit]

Although written records are rarely regarded as part of sub-Saharan Africa’s heritage, important bodies of Ajami texts (records of African languages written in Arabic script) have existed in Africa for centuries. Ajami writing traditions around the world follow the geography of Islam and are varied. They have played critical roles in the spread of Islam in Muslim communities beyond Arabia and continue to be used for both religious and non-religious writings. Ajami sources document intellectual traditions, histories, belief systems, and cultures of non-Arab Muslims around the world. Despite similar origins in spreading Islam, each Ajami system followed its own trajectory shaped by local cultural, social and political factors. The neglect of African Ajami traditions is due to a number of factors, including the lack of an Ajami public depository, the limited number of scholars with the necessary skills to study Ajami manuscripts, and the pervasive overemphasis on African oral traditions in academia.

[todaycoza]

-Anywhere 51-

24 September 2023

1743 x 2326 Digital Unedited

[orwellsunderpants]

This is so important.

[feminineflavors]

🐇🥥🧸

[gothhabiba]

Over 46 million people in Nigeria, Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, etc speak the Hausa [hau] language. Although Hausa has been written using the Latin script since about 1880, and it has had an official orthography in use since the 1930s, Hausa still does not have an adequate standard orthography (Warren-Rothlin, page 274). Additionally, the Latin-script orthographies in Nigeria and Niger are slightly different. Regarding both the Latin orthography and the Arabic script (ajami) orthography, Warren-Rothlin says “…it is perhaps surprising that even Roman-script Hausa, far predominant over ajamin Hausa, does not yet have an adequate standard orthography. Hausa is also the language most liable to appear in both standard Arabic-script orthographies—Ḥafṣ in the printed Al-Fijir newspaper (with adaptations marked by hand on the front page and only irregularly inside), and Warš in the handwritten Tijaniyya booklets…” Wikipedia agrees: “Hausa has also been written in ajami, an Arabic alphabet, since the early 17th century. There is no standard system of using ajami, and different writers may use letters with different values.” Warren-Rothlin’s explanation that both the Ḥafṣ and Warš traditions (orthographic traditions of the Qur’ān) are used for Hausa enables us to understand a bit better why there are differences in ajami orthographies.

Hausa characters needed

This proposal is for two characters as used in the Hausa orthography. Both of the characters have a small 3 dot wagaf above them. “Wagaf” is the Hausa form of the Arabic word وقغة,” full stop, period”. The Hausa orthography has six characters with the small wagaf above them (however, four of them are already encoded in Unicode). Warren-Rothlin (p. 275) calls all the characters using the wagaf “glottalized”. He says “This term is used here to refer to a range of sounds, common in Afroasiatic languages, which may be realized as implosives or ejectives.” Warren-Rothlin (p. 276) says “three dots usually smaller than standard nuqat may be added above for labialization and below for palatalization.” [...] Table 2 illustrates the contrast between the basic character and the new characters with wagaf.

In 2015 a committee of the Ajamin Hausa Bible Translation Project of the Bible Society of Nigeria met to decide on the Hausa ajami orthography that they would use for publishing the Bible and other religious literature. Figures 1 and 2 are photos of the whiteboard where they came to agreement on the wagaf characters. They made it clear that the vowel must position directly above the wagaf (despite the fact that many of our samples have the wagaf shifted in order to avoid collisions and some examples have the wagaf below). However, they also made it clear that they consider the wagaf to be a modifier letter rather than part of the base character.

The following characters are proposed for adding to Unicode. Since the ajami style of writing for this region is so different, we have included a column to assist with recognizing the characters in the samples.

[ID: A table showing the two characters proposed, "Arabic letter ghain with three dots above" (IPA symbol /gy/), and "African qaf with three dots above" (/ƙy/). A column on the left shows each character in "standard naskh style" in isolate, initial, medial, and final position; a column on the left shows the same characters but in "Kano/Maghribi" ajami style, which is more angular and boxy and uses a downward point instead of a deep left-facing bowl for the ghain. End ID]

The following characters are also used in this orthography. The size of the three dots above is smaller than for all other characters. However, we believe they are glyph variants to characters already encoded in Unicode.

[ID: The same as above, but for the characters "Arabic letter beh with dot below and three dots above" (IPA symbol /ɓ/) "tah with three dots above" (/ts/), "keheh with three dots above" (/ky/), and "Farsi yeh with three dots above" (/ƴ/). End ID]

[...] Figure 4: Spellbook C, page 3. Arabic letter tah with three dots above (initial), Arabic letter keheh with three dots above (initial and medial), “kwarjini”, “tsamiya”, and “kwana”.

[ID: Handwritten text in black on white paper in the Kano/Maghribi style showing examples of the characters above named. End ID]

Figure 5: Spellbook C, page 7. Arabic letter tah with three dots above (initial), Arabic letter farsi yeh with three dots above (initial), “tsari” and “'ya'ya”.

Lorna Priest Evans and Andy Warren-Rothlin, "Proposal to encode additional Arabic script characters for Hausa to the UCS." 2018. Unicode document L2/18-094.

[missfitbarbie]

[culmaer]

yeah, I think especially for people just skimming over the headline and the first few paragraphs, it sounds like Ngom (the researcher) discovered this whole new writing system. but Ajami as a concept is well-known ; Ngom has simply "discovered"/ brought to academia's attention the use of an Ajami system in a specific region of Senegal. the article feels rather exaggerated

but it does seem like this has lead to training researchers outside linguistics, who might otherwise have ignored sources in Ajami, to recognise and engage with the texts. and that's still a Good and Positive thing !

and as a side note, some of the earliest written examples of Afrikaans are in an Ajami system (although here it's called Jawi like in the Malay tradition, or "Arabic-Afrikaans" in contemporary literature). white Afrikaners who were literate, learnt to read and write Standard Dutch until like the early 20th century. Afrikaans wasn't recognised as a language by them until the late 19th century. but since the early-mid 19th century at least (after the abolition of slavery) brown folks, who could only get educated at the Cape's madrasa, had started writing the vernacular language (ie. Afrikaans) in modified Arabic script

This is awesome and also makes me so sad and angry at colonizers. I hope this revolutionizes African Studies as much as it sounds like it will.

[qissoqisso3]

[teshadraws]

you have utterly destroyed me. i am sobbing. i am grieving with Tobias. how dare you make me have feelings ;_;

on a serious note, this makes me have a lot of questions about the death of his family. like... Asra had a family and felt guilty about what happened to Tobias. he left his team. that's not something a harden outlaw does. and it doesn't feel like he was hiding too hard if he stayed near his hometown.

was team Zenith really a group of outlaws...?

the plot thickens

Yesss...YES! Grieve with the fire boy! >:D

And no spoilers on your theory, but you certainly aren't the only one thinking the same thing! 👀

[todaycoza]

-Givat Aliyah Voëlie | Die Donker Kant-

27 April 2024

1292 x 1579 Digital Lightness Endarkened