WITH EYES WIDE OPEN
D. N. Bezboruah
Ever since I was a child, I have been fascited by alphabets of different languages. Along with the urge to be able to speak in different languages, there has been a strong desire to be able to read what is written in different languages. I discovered early enough that though the European languages were different, they shared a common script with minor changes in some of the languages. This was similar to the situation in India, where three languages share the common Devagari script: Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi. In the same way, Assamese and Bangla share a common script with only about three differences. But it is amazing to think of the number of European languages that share the common ‘Roman script’ with some minor differences. At the same time, it will not do to overlook the fact that the letters of the alphabets of the different European languages are pronounced very differently. What is read as ‘aye, bee, see, dee’ in English is pronounced very differently when a French or German child reads the letters of the alphabet. It is interesting to discover, for instance, that the letter W is pronounced as “double-U” in English but as “double-vay” in French. The British see the letter W as two U’s while the French see it as two V’s.
As expected, I am far more familiar with Indian languages than European ones. At different periods of my life, I have been exposed to Hindi, Bangla, Tamil and Kanda. Assamese being my mother tongue, has always been a part of my life. But subsequent exposure to the scripts of different languages has made me sensitive to the vast differences that exist in the scripts of different languages. What is interesting is that not all languages are read from left to right. Several languages that are linked to Arabic in one way or another are read from right to left. The alphabet devised in 1949 by Souleymane Kante of Kankan, Guinea for the language known as N’Ko is read from right to left. I shall have more to say about N’Ko.
Accustomed as I am to the neat ordering of Indian alphabets, I have never ceased to be amazed at the total chaos that exists in the most important language of the world going by the number of foreign language learners of that language. As you might have rightly guessed, I am referring to English. The language has an alphabet of 26 letters that are a disorganized mix of consonts and vowels (having to represent 44 speech sounds) without any kind of order. And this is true of the alphabets of other European languages as well. The alphabets of Indian languages are much better organized. The consonts and vowels are separated. And the consonts are so arranged that the horizontal rows have all the letters with the same place of articulation while the vertical columns indicate the manner of articulation. For instance, all the velar consonts (ka, kha, ga, gha, nga) are in the same horizontal row just as the palatal, retroflex, dental and bilabial consonts are in the same rows. In the vertical columns we have the voiceless uspirated consonts followed by the voiceless aspirated consonts, the voiced uspirated consonts, the voiced aspirated consonts and the sal consonts. For years, I remained aghast at the alphabet of English that had none of the order and systematic presentation that Indian alphabets have. The English alphabet has a few characters like q and x that are redundant. Q represents the /k/ sound and cannot function without the letter u in writing. X represents a combition of /k+s/ or /g+z/. We have extra redundant letters in the Assamese alphabet as well. Since the distinction between the dantya (dental) and the moordhanya (retroflex) sounds are not made in our speech, we might have maged very well with just one set of these consonts. We would then have made fewer spelling mistakes in writing. Likewise, since the distinction between the short /i/ and the long /i:/ or the short /u/ and the long /u:/ is not made in speech, we might have been better off dispensing with the redundant signs for the long vowels in our writing. However, one must accept that no writing system is quite perfect. Since spoken languages preceded their written forms by thousands of years, the ideal set for all writing systems—that one speech sound should be represented by one letter alone—is seldom perfect. Perhaps the only language that is perfect in this one-to-one requirement is Sanskrit. Hindi and Marathi too get very close to the ideal. But English, with 26 letters of its alphabet having to represent the 44 phonemes or contrastive speech sounds of the language, is very far from the one-to-one ideal. Without inflicting too many examples, one can point to the c+h combition of English. It has three sounds. There is /k/ sound in cholera and Christmas, the /t?/ sound in children and cheap, and the /?/ sound as in machine and chiffon. One can also think of the different pronunciations of the ough combition of letters in words like bough, tough, cough, through, thorough and hiccough. How arbitrary can the spelling of a language be! And yet it is the language with the largest number of foreign language learners in the world. Some people all over the world (including many in Assam) have even given up their mother tongue in order to adopt English as their first language.
What is of interest to most students of language is that the alphabet of a language gets designed and developed thousands of years after the widespread use of its spoken form. Even in the case of Konkani, a language spoken in south-west India for centuries, its alphabet got designed and accepted only in the later part of the 20th century. It is in this context that N’Ko deserves some notice when we are talking about alphabets. N’Ko is both a script devised by Souleymane Kante in 1949, as a writing system for the Mandang languages of west Africa, and the me of the literary language written in that script. The term N’Ko means I say in all Mandang languages. The script has a few similarities to the Arabic script, notably its direction (right to left) and the letters which are connected at the base. Unlike Arabic (and many other languages) it obligatorily marks both tone and vowels. N’Ko tones are marked as diacritics, in a similar manner to the marking of some vowels in Arabic. [In Arabic, the vowels are often not indicated. They are supposed to be evident from the collocation of the consonts. This is a typical case of the reader of a language being required to intelligently guess the vowels that precede and follow a consont.] The N’Ko alphabet is mainly used by speakers of Mannika, Bambara, Dyula and their dialects in Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Born in 1922, Kante was angered when he read that some foreigners considered Africans to be cultureless because they didn’t have an indigenous writing system. In response, he developed N’Ko to give African people their own alphabet to record their cultures and histories in their tive languages. He wrote hundreds of educatiol materials in Mannika using their own language. He wrote introductory books on subjects as diverse as astrology, economics, history and religion. Many of his works are still available from l’Association ICRA- N’Ko. The reference to N’Ko is relevant in any discussion on alphabets largely because it is an alphabet devised only 68 years ago not for just one language but for three, mely Maninka (Maninkakan), Dioula (Julukan) and Bambara (Bamankan). As a consequence, N’Ko has given a writing system to about nine million speakers of these three languages that did not have an alphabet. The sharing of a common alphabet among speakers of three languages can be compared to the use of the Devagari script for Sanskrit, Hindi and Marathi in India. The N’Ko alphabet has 27 letters (consonts and vowels) and 16 extra letters for loan words from European languages and Arabic. This is perhaps a unique feature for any language. The N’Ko alphabet also has 10 punctuation marks for the fullstop and comma, and eight tone markers. It has no comma, exclamation mark or question mark, with the tone markers performing the functions of some of the other punctuation marks that we have in English. Some of the letters of the N’Ko alphabet are clearly borrowed from English with minor changes. For instance it has supine B turned 45°, an inverted 7, inverted F, P and letters like l, o and N. Letters for the/p/, /t/ and /k/ sounds exist, though not for the /g/ sound except in clusters. The N’Ko alphabet gives us an idea of what it takes to devise an alphabet for languages that have been spoken for centuries but without alphabets of their own. The alphabet devised for them has ebled the languages to preserve their literature and their culture in the written form.
Far more interesting are the writing systems of Chinese and Japanese. There are reasons why they cannot really be called alphabets. The space available to me clearly suggests that I should devote a separate column for these two languages.