This page brings together basic information about the Bamum script and its use for the Bamun language. It aims to provide a brief, descriptive summary of the modern, printed orthography and typographic features, and to advise how to write Bamun using Unicode. This page restricts itself to discussion of the modern syllabary, and does not cover earlier pictograms and logograms.
Sample
Select part of this sample text to show a list of characters, with links to more details. Change size: 28px
The Bamum script was used for administrative and educational purposes and documentation until the 1930s, when the script's inventor, King Nyoja, was exiled by the French and German colonial powers. The libraries and the printing press were destroyed, many of the books in the Bamum script were also destroyed, and the teaching of the script in schools was banned.
After Cameroon became independent in 1960, Seidou Njimoluh the son and heir of the script's inventor, King Nyoja, collected the Bamum manuscripts and other materials that survived and put them in his father's museum.o
Today the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project is trying to revive the Bamum script by teaching it to young people. o
ꚠ ꚡ ꚢ ꚣa-ka-u-ku (A name for the script, using its first 4 letters.)
The Bamum script was invented by King Ibrahim Njoya (r. 1895 – 1931). It was originally a collection of around 500 logographs, adapted over 5 major revisions, and sometimes written vertically, top to bottom. No significant works are thought to have survived from this period, and we do not examine these characters here. Their use appears to have been restricted to only a few members of the palace.ws
A final overhaul of the script in 1910 reduced the characters to the syllabic set described here. The koqndon and tukwentis diacritics were introduced at that time to extend the repertoire.
The Bamum script is a syllabary. Letters typically represent a combination of consonants and vowels. See the table to the right for a brief overview of features for the modern Bamum orthography.
Bamum text runs left to right in horizontal lines.
Words are separated by spaces.
Bamum has 80 syllabic characters. The number of syllables can be taken to 160 by the use of a circumflex-like combining mark that modifies the sound.
Another combining mark kills the vowel sound, to provide 12 syllable-final consonant sounds.
The spoken language is tonal, but tones are not written, although some syllables may be dedicated to a particular tone.
Bamum has its own set of punctuation marks.
Ten of the syllables are also used to represent numbers.
These characters have the Unicode general category of number, but also serve as ordinary syllables.
Punctuation
Show꛲␣꛳␣꛴␣꛵␣꛶␣꛷
Items to show in lists
Structure
Most Bamum words are syllables of the form CV(C).d,584
The closing consonant of a syllable can only be one of p t m n ŋ.d,584
Phonology
These are sounds of the Bamun language.
Click on the sounds to reveal locations in this document where they are mentioned.
Phones in a lighter colour are non-native or allophones. Source Wikipedia.
Vowel sounds
Plain vowels
Open syllables have vowels of normal length, but vowels followed by a glottal stop are half-long /ˑ/.
Consonant sounds
labial
dental
alveolar
post-
alveolar
palatal
velar
labialized velar
labio-velar
glottal
stops
pb
td
kɡ
kʷɡʷ
k͡pg͡b
ʔ
pre-nasalised
ᵐpᵐb
ⁿtⁿd
ᵑkᵑɡ
ᵑkʷᵑɡʷ
ᵑ͡ᵐk͡pᵑ͡ᵐg͡b
fricatives
fv
sz
ʃʒ
xɣ
pre-nasalised
ᵐfᵐv
ⁿsⁿz
ᶮʃ ᶮʒ
nasal
m
n
ɲ
ŋ
ŋʷ
ŋ͡m
approximant
w
l
j
trill/flap
r
Some transcriptions include an x to indicate a slight voiceless velar fricative (according to Ward) that occasionally follows ɯ and other close vowels. It has been omitted here.r
Tones
Bamum has 5 tones: à low, á high, ā mid, ǎ rising, â falling.wl,#Tones
Observation: Evidence needed as to whether or not they are indicated in the orthography.
Syllables
Observation: It was difficult to find information about the Bamum syllabary, and the phonetic values of the symbols had to be interpreted from different transcriptions, which occasionally appeared to be inconsistent. The lists below use Wikipedia as the basis for the plain syllables and those with diacritics. There appear to be some anomalies in the Wikipedia data and an attempt was made to address those. The information about digraphs comes from Omniglot. The following should be considered a best estimate of the correspondences between letters and sounds, given the information available.
Click on the characters in the lists for detailed information.
The 80 syllabic symbols of the Bamum syllabary are not sufficient to cover all the sounds of the Bamun language. To extend the repertoire, 3 approaches are used.
꛰ [U+A6F0 BAMUM COMBINING MARK KOQNDON] changes the sound of a syllable. This most commonly involves shortening the vowel and adding a final glottal stop while removing any existing syllable-final consonants, eg. compareꚻkɛtꚻ꛰kɛʔ
Sometimes prenasalisation is also removed,ws,266 eg. compareꛇⁿteꛇ꛰teʔ
In other cases, the sound change involves syllable-final nasalisation rather than a glottal stop, eg. compareꛝpiꛝ꛰pĩ
In a number of other cases, the change is much more idiosyncratic, eg. compareꛙfɔmꛙ꛰ᵐvɔp
This section brings together information about the following topics:
writing styles;
cursive text;
context-based shaping;
context-based positioning;
baselines, line height, etc.;
font styles;
case & other character transforms.
Apart from the placement of the two diacritics above characters, there is no interaction between the glyphs of the Bamum syllable set.
Bamum has no special requirements for baseline alignment between mixed scripts or in general.
The orthography has no case distinction.
Font styling & weight
tbd
Graphemes
Grapheme clusters
Unicode grapheme clusters can be applied to Bamum without problems. There are no special issues related to operations that use grapheme clusters as their basic unit of text.
Punctuation & inline features
Word boundaries
tbd
Spaces are used to separate words in Bamum.
Bamum uses hyphens inside words, eg. these 2 words are from the sample above ꛧ-ꚳꛊꚤmᵇᵃᵃ-mpᵉembaa-mpeeꛨ-ꛅꚧ꛱tᵋᵗ-pᵚˣɔ͓tɛt-pɯʔ
Phrase & section boundaries
꛵␣꛶␣꛴␣꛳␣꛷
Bamum has its own punctuation marks. The punctuation marks correspond closely to Western equivalents, probably because the Western punctuation was the inspiration.
꛲ [U+A6F2 BAMUM NJAEMLI] introduces proper-nouns, or can be used to disambiguate homographs.
Other inline text decoration
tbd
Line & paragraph layout
Line breaking & hyphenation
By default, lines are broken at inter-word spaces. As in almost all writing systems, certain punctuation characters should not appear at the end or the start of a line.
This section looks at ways in which spacing is applied between characters over and above that which is introduced during justification.
Baselines, line height, etc.
tbd
Bamum uses the so-called 'alphabetic' baseline, which is the same as for Latin and many other scripts.
Counters, lists, etc.
tbd
Styling initials
tbd
Page & book layout
This section is for any features that are specific to Bamum and that relate to the following topics:
general page layout & progression;
grids & tables;
notes, footnotes, etc;
forms & user interaction;
page numbering, running headers, etc.
