Sunday, February 3, 2008

Zaghawa

In light of the impending overthrow of Idriss Deby, the world's richest Zaghawa, and the continuing violence in Chad (most likely supported by Sudan) I wanted to write a follow-up post on Zaghawa. I was finally able to get the sound values for the Zaghawa Beria Alphabet that I wrote about before:

A B P S CD E F G H I J K L M N X O R T U Y W Z

A b p s c d e f g h i j k l m n x o r t u y w z

a b p s š/ʃ d e f g h i j k l m n ɲ/ñ o r t u y w ŋ

These are taken from camel brandings, as I mentioned earlier, and I can not figure out why there would be capital letters and lowercase letters, but in the only text I have access to, it seems to be used as it would in French (Chad being a francophone country). This one text I have, entitled "La Vendeuse de Lait" starts:

Kubayni, bagu oh barta ni geni ru / key key-gini. Ber kettié, oh kigo / narení.

More on the rest of the text, and some translation later, when I have a chance to talk to one of my Zaghawa staff people who has informed me that he, like other Beria, are a very different group of Zaghawa than the "wange" power mongerers like Deby and Minni Minnawi (whom he considers traitors for having signed the Bogus peace deal with Khartoum).

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

it seems as though the zaghawa font does not appear on my computer... how can I view this properly?

jdm said...

the font can be downloaded at this site (which I cited in my first post on Zaghawa)...
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&item_id=ZaghawaBeria_Home

I read recently that the only two writing systems that are actually autochthonous to Africa and in use today are Amharic and Tifinagh/Tamazight, which would make this the 3rd if it actually catches on... though I do wonder if there is any connection with the Tifinagh script (it wouldn't be so far-fetched geographically speaking). Though I suppose there may be others that are just beginning to gain currency somewhere else... who knows?

Anonymous said...

I was wondering if you do any translation work or if you know of anyone who does translation? Our client has 44 hours worth of video that needs to be translated into english....

jdm said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
tchad.org said...

Did you know that the Beria-English Dictionary can be found at www.zaghawa.org?
If anyone finds any errors, please let me know. There is a link on the website to do so.

For the advancement of Beria,
David Faris
Linguist, APLB/ADESK