What is the place of writing in human civilization? The beginning, origin, or discovery of writing represents a critical phase in human civilization. “Writing has been part of human culture and history for thousands of years. It was originally developed as a way for people to keep records of economic transactions, but it soon diversified and was used for other purposes. The first writing system was developed in ancient Mesopotamia and was cuneiform.”
The cuneiform system of writing was used in the ancient Middle East. The name was coined from Latin and French roots and means “wedge-shaped”. It has been the modern designation from the early 18th century onward. Cuneiform was the most widespread and historically significant writing system in the ancient Middle East. Cuneiform writing is therefore one of the oldest forms of writing known because people write it using a reed stylus cut to make a wedge-shaped mark on a clay table.
According to available information, “The world’s very first invention of writing took place over 5000 years ago in the Middle East before it was reinvented in China and Central America. Today, almost all human activities education political systems and computer code rely on this technology.”
Although writing was started elsewhere in the world, Africa has also a share of its contribution to the development of the first written communication known in history. In a study just published in Current Anthropology, a team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, showed that writing very quickly becomes ‘compressed’ for efficient reading and writing.
To arrive at this insight they turned to a rare African writing system that has fascinated outsiders since the early 19th century.
“The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries,” says lead author Dr. Piers Kelly, now at the University of New England, Australia. The Vai language had never before been written down.
According to Vai teacher Bai Leesor Sherman, the script was always taught informally from a literate teacher to a single apprentice student. It remains so successful that today it is even used to communicate pandemic health messages.
“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs. But there are also plenty of abstract letter shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers.”
From the above quotation we learn that the Vai script of Liberia was created in the early 19th century. At this point, it would be legitimate to ask what the place of Ethiopian ancient Ge’ez script which is thousands of years old and why the people who conducted the above research have overlooked or did not mention the contribution of Ethiopian ancient wisdom to the development of African script. According to sources, Ge’ez is “a script used as an abugida for several Afro-Asiatic and Nilo-Saharan languages of Ethiopia and Eritrea.” “Furthermore, Ge’ez was derived from the Ancient South Arabian script from the region.” Ge’ez dates back at least from the second century and belongs to the only part of Africa that was never colonized by a European power.”
Another source indicates that “The Ge’ez language is believed by scholars to be 5000 years old making it the oldest of all languages. It is also considered, “the father of languages”. According to this information, Ge’ez is older than the first written script in the world. Ge’ez it at least as old as the first script that was invented in the Middle East. It is only 5000 years old. Why did the researchers of the above-quoted article have overlooked the place Ge’ez occupies in the history of the development of the written scrip in Africa? It is unfair to overlook Ethiopia’s contribution to the rise and evolution of African written languages.
“The Ge’ez language is considered even older than the Hebrew language and other such Northern Semitic languages like Arabic. Scholars believe the language to be around 5000 years old. It is the father of all languages, and it is still spoken in Ethiopia, used as the liturgical language by Orthodox Christianity in the region.” According to the above quotations, Ge’ez, which is the forbearer Amharic, which is the national language of Ethiopia, one of Africa’s oldest civilizations.
Research into the origin of African scripts as well as in African languages in general should be conducted fairly, accurately and objectively. Failure to conduct linguistic development without accuracy or objectivity tends to undermine the status of original written languages like Ge’ez we saw in the above example while it unnecessarily elevates other minor languages or scripts thereby creating an unbalanced or a subjective approach that would undermine the plausibility of the research results. Such research biases can result either from the research methodology or the lack of adequate information in the research process itself.
Let us take another example closely related to the above issue. How many national languages are there in Africa? According to available data, “There are 36 different official languages across Africa and it was identified that the major and dominant official languages in Africa are English, French, Arabic, Portuguese and Swahili.” There are at least two inaccuracies in the above quotation. The first is that English, French and Portuguese are not African languages.
These languages were only chosen as mediums of official communications. As such they do not represent languages spoken in Africa by Africans. In Ethiopia for instance, English is widely spoken but it is not a national language simply because the country has never been colonized by a European power. That is why Amharic has become the official language of the country.
The second inaccuracy in the above quotation is that only Swahili is considered one of the dominant official languages in Africa. Although it is true that Swahili is an official language, it is not however an official language spoken by the majority of the people of a country. Swahili is spoken is East African countries and that is true. By the same token, Amharic and Afan Oromo or Oromiffa should be considered two of the most dominant national languages in Ethiopia and should be indicated in the research results. Amharic and Oromiffa both can become the official languages of the country. There are 180 countries in the world that have official languages while out of these countries 80 of them have designated more than one language as official. A country can even have more than two languages as official languages.
This does not however mean that many Africa countries have their own alphabets or scripts. For that matter and according to official sources, “Ethiopia is the only African country with its own alphabet. It’s also the world’s oldest living alphabet, which is called Ethiopic. This is also one of the longest scripts with 345 letters.” There are 293 known writing systems in the world. The Ge’ez script which is the oldest in Africa was born around 8-9 century for writing the Ge’ez language. The script is used today in Ethiopia and Eritrea, for the Amharic, Tigrigna and several other languages.
The impact of written scripts on the development of literature in Africa is quite obvious. It is estimated that African literature has origins dating back to thousands of years. It was started in ancient Egypt with hieroglyphs or writing which uses pictures to represent words. The oldest literary works in Africa date from about the 4th century. However African literature as such dates from the 20th century or later. According to available data, there are three distinct periods in African literature. They are, the colonial, the post-colonial and contemporary periods.
Many countries in Africa do not have literature produced by their national languages. Most of the written literature of sub-Saharan Africa has been produced by two major colonizing movements; that of Islamic Arabs in the 7th century and that of Christian Europeans in the 19th century. “African literature then expanded to include hymns, romance, epic, poetry fictional narratives, epistles, diaries, philosophy, biography and autobiography. It should be noted here that written African literature is a relatively latecomer and has caught up with European literature in what be considered a relatively short time. While oral literature across Africa dates back to earlier periods, modern literature in Ethiopia is also a relatively recent phenomenon although the country can legitimately boast as being the “cradle” of written script in Africa.
BY MULUGETA GUDETA
THE ETHIOPIAN HERALD WEDNESDAY 16 OCTOBER 2024
