mmoa_writes

One of the things that has always frustrated me is the charge that throughout the long (longer, in fact, than anywhere else might I add) history of homo sapiens in Africa, there has never been a written script indigenous to the population (Ancient Coptic/hieroglyphs don't count). Now as it happens there have been, but the one I am most interested in - for obvious reasons - is the one that would have been used by Igbos of bygone times.

Nsibidi.

It just demonstrates the amazing thing about the internet, how new information can be spread so quickly and is there just waiting to be discovered if you're open minded enough and brave the wilderness of counter opinions and barbarians. Sometimes you don't even have to brave that far. Wikipedia will do it for you.

What's particularly interesting is that the last I'd read, the nsibidi script had been used by religious cults and their initiates. I had no idea that, similar to other scripts such as Hiragana, there was also a public version which could be used by women and those outside the boundaries of the cult. This confirmed a suspicion of mine - in traditional Igbo society, women were charged with the responsibility of making money for the family; they would trade with other women in the markets and their profits would go towards the upkeep of the family (A/N: This is actually a pattern typical of pre-industrial settled ie. non-nomadic societies) and, for all even today we're brought up expected to have prodigious memories (...), I couldn't see why no merchant wife would have never thought of setting accounts, debts and deals on tablet/stone/animal skin as it were.

Obviously once the status quo changed and it became more important to be able to read and write in Roman script, knowledge of Nsibidi dwindled. It would be interesting to find out if there's anyone left in the family who can still read and write it.

I also find the fact it was widespread amongst several different ethnic groups rather intriguing. It certainly reveals that disparate peoples traded and had some means of communication that transcended their linguistic and cultural differences.

Sometimes I wish I studied the arts for a degree, because there are all sorts of things you don't realise until someone points them out to you.

For instance, in the latest Newsnight Review, during an interview with Colm Toibin about his new book, he mentioned how he wanted to write the novel in a linear, pared down style similar to Jane Austen's - no flashbacks, very few descriptions of people's expressions etc.

In the case of facial descriptions, one result is that it becomes clear to the reader that people may not be saying precisely what they mean, that they may be concealing their personal thoughts and opinions as they outwardly proclaim another.

Now obviously there are many techniques that arrive at the same effect, but I found this very interesting because of it's simplicity (and also because I hadn't noticed this before, even though I'd read most of Austen's output and paid - by my reckoning - a lot of attention to them). This was so interesting that I began to think how I could implement this technique when writing from certain characters povs.( Read more... )

So post-exam season is going to be a lot of fun, I can tell!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender-neutral_pronoun - What it says on the tin. I honestly can't believe how long it's been since I made a linguistics post. Shameful, really.