View the h-hausa Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in h-hausa's April 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in h-hausa's April 2005 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the h-hausa home page.
Charles Riley has come up with an answer: Apparently this alphabet was created by a (market literature) writing/publishing group, Raina Kama within the last 20 years. See Graham Furniss's article "Documenting Hausa Popular Literature" (pp. 7-8) at http://hausa.soas.ac.uk/hausa.pdf . Part of the reason for the interest is in determing needs for encoding minority African scripts in Unicode.* Many of you may be aware that encoding of Tifinagh was completed last year (though there may be some amendments). N'ko is on the way to approval in the next version of Unicode/ISO-10646. There are other projects for Vai and other scripts in the research or talking stages. The upshot of all this, of course, will be the ability to use these scripts more easily on computers and the internet. In the case of invented alphabets, there is (at least in my mind) the question of whether their actual use (historic and/or present) merits their encoding. A next question about this Raina Kama alphabet is whether and to what degree it caught on... * Unicode is a project for a single coding system for all the world's scripts. More info is available at http://www.unicode.org Wannan wasik'ar i-mel ce daga H-Hausa, inda za'a cigaba da hira game da harshe da al'adu da tarihi da sauran lamura na Hausawa da mak'wabtansu.
|