markus meecham
Banned
with an anime version of princess fox on as the video thumbnail. (sorry)For some reason it's the....nightcore version
with an anime version of princess fox on as the video thumbnail. (sorry)For some reason it's the....nightcore version
Speaking of music, I almost automstically have the song Africa by Toto stuck in my head when I visit this thread. I think I might have a problem
I bless the rains down in Aaaafricaaaaa.That's the other secret goal of this thread - to have a Somali band perform a cover of Africa by Toto while actually on Mt. Kilimanjaro above the Serengeti.
Like you say, Italians seemed to have less hang-ups about marrying their former colonial subjects than most Europeans
Why is that? That is very interesting.
Honestly, I don't know why this was, only that it seemed to be true just from colonial censuses taken in Italian Somaliland and Italian Eritrea. Maybe @Neoteros can solve this one for us?
Nothing South Arabian?
Don't apologize! It's an interesting topic and one I've been thinking about quite a bit, in fact. The common wisdom is that Somali didn't have an alphabet until the creation of the Latin orthography, but this is untrue. Somali didn't have a standard alphabet, which is a very different thing from not having an alphabet at all. Somali civilizations and scholars produced a number of alphabets over time:
1) The Lowland East Cushite Alphabet: This alphabet is old - at least as old as New Kingdom Pharaonic Egypt.This is the cryptic writing adorning the cairns and steles that dot the northern Somali highlands but very little is known about it (or the people who made it for that matter; chances are good that the builders of the stone tombs are not the ancestors of the current Somalis - who modern researchers have begun to consider descendants of a migrating wave of pastoralists from NW Africa) and linguists are still working it out.
2) Wadaad Writing: Wadaad writing is not so much a singular alphabet, but is instead a catch-all term for the various homecooked Arabic transliterative alphabets used to write Somali. Somali culture has been quite oral for most of its history, but Sufi scholars and legal petitions (pre-modern pastoral Somali society has often been called a kritarchy, rather accurately in my opinion, since the only authority a nomad family acknowledged was the Xeer customary law system) required a writing system, so Somali Arabic(s) were made that varied in particulars from location to location. The linguist Muuse Xaaji Ismaaciil Galaal codified it into one version in the 1950s - this is one of the four big competitors for the title of The Somali Alphabet when the Communists looked to standardize an alphabet.
3) Osmanya Alphabet - The Osmanya alphabet was created in 1922 by Cusmaan Yuusuf Keenadiid, a Sufi scholar, the brother of the Sultan of Obbia, and an amateur linguist. The first of the Native standardized alphabets for Somali, the Osmanya alphabet was the one initially pushed by the nationalists of the Somali Youth League. This is the second of the four heavyweight competitors for the role of official alphabet.
View attachment 3887584) The Kaddare Alphabet: My favorite Somali alphabet aesthetically speaking, Kaddare was made was made by Sheikh (not a literal sheikh like Sheikh Keenadiid, this is just his name) Kaddare in 1952. It only ever catches on amongst his clansfolk in the Hawiye (cue everybody looking through the tribes update to remember who the hell the Hawiye are ) and is basically a non-starter compared to the other ones. Shame, cause it looks pretty cool.
Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in the Osmanya script
5) The Latin Alphabet: Do I really have to explain this one? It's the Latin alphabet you all know and (presumably) love - adapted to the wonky vowels and glottal stops of Somali. The brains behind this one is linguistics professor and XHKS member Shire Jaamac Axmed and a small team of grad students at Somali National University - Mogadishu. It gets selected for practicality, as @ETA50M stated; the Somali government could buy tons of surplus office equipment, typewriters, and other supplies from the West and put it to good use if they shared an alphabet. It also facilitated the learning of other languages if students didn't have to relearn an alphabet from scratch. Pragmatic as ever, the Somali Communists announced that Shire Axmed's proposal was accepted and here we are today.
EDIT: Expect the horror film mini-update tomorrow - I know the last time I said that there would be a "short update" it turned into the behemoth post on Somali culture, but I promise that it'll actually be short this time!
Was Cyrillic ever considered? I know Somalia had close connections to the USSR, I wonder how well it conveys Somalian sounds.
The Kaddare script vaguely looks like the Glagolitic one; it's a pity it didn't catch on, since I'm quite fond of the Cyrillic alphabet's predecessor. By the way, did Somali communist law include elements of Xeer in it, or did they try to stamp out every trace of nomadic/pastoralist custom?
simplification is for schmucks, not somalis.They should do what the Japanese do. Two native alphabets, one logographic system and occasionally also use the Latin alphabet.
Are you implying that the workers are too stupid to learn more than one script? Bourgeois elitism!Simplifiication is more accessible -- stratified literacy is for reactionaries!