Re: Mandombe

On Tuesday 09 January 2007 20:44, Philip Newton wrote:

> Someone recently brought Mandombe (
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mandombe ) to my attention.
> Wow, how's that for a writing system. And apparently it's really in
> use. (I wonder how dyslexics cope.)
Well, first Wikipedia made a gross error in glueing together all the symbols
of the only word they present. It made also wonder how anybody could even
read this.

Besides, they highlighted the wrong part of the symbol in the
prenasalisation example. It makes it difficult to understand that Mandombe
is written "ma-(n)do-(n)be"

Disregard the religious aspect of the text and look at this example:

http://www.hapax.qc.ca/pdf/notre-p%e8re-kikongo.pdf

I found it quite legible. Even without knowing all the possible symbols I
had no difficulty to guess in what direction were constructed the ones I
could see.

The big problem IMHO is the blocky shapes of the symbols. Writing a single
line must kill your wrist!

Any way, I rather like the idea. It has some "alien" features.  ;-)

--
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Remi Villatel
maxilys_@_tele2.fr
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