Recently, I have found myself back in the mood of learning te reo Māori more seriously, as I take larger strides in learning and familiarising myself with the words of the language. While some words sound like loanwords that have entered Māori, some others remind me of languages like Malay or Indonesian. But there is … Continue reading Trying to understand Māori months
tradition
The rise and fall of the Tōyō kanji
To say that Japanese has a convoluted writing system is a rather huge understatement. More accurately described as three writing systems in an orthographical trenchcoat, filtering out which kanji to use, teach, and write in Japanese has posed as a persistent challenge since its first mention in the Meiji period. Previously, we have seen the … Continue reading The rise and fall of the Tōyō kanji
Writing in Africa — Neo-Nsibidi’s “kana”
Disclaimer: This post describes an ongoing project to modernise the Nsibidi script, which as of writing, is not the finalised form. The accuracy of information is true as of 29 July 2020, so several things would have changed in the project by the time of this post. We will update this post when more information … Continue reading Writing in Africa — Neo-Nsibidi’s “kana”
Writing in Africa — Modernising Nsibidi
Disclaimer: This post describes an ongoing project to modernise the Nsibidi script, which as of writing, is not the finalised form. The accuracy of information is true as of 29 July 2020, so several things would have changed in the project by the time of this post. We will update this post when more information … Continue reading Writing in Africa — Modernising Nsibidi
Writing in Africa — Ńdébé
Using the Latin alphabet to write some languages brings a lot of challenges, since 26 letters may not always be enough to capture all the sounds in a language. Tones, nasal vowels, some consonants may be omitted, or have to adopt clunky digraphs like "gb", "ngg", and "ndl". This is true for many languages in … Continue reading Writing in Africa — Ńdébé
The Language Closet 