Jamms316: Another Mouth Raker Naxo juju run leave chief priest oh wen dem boys take stab am die..... Meanwhile check my signature I sell wholesale Flash Drive and Memory Card
NA SO, SARs GUN GO MISSFIRE, WEN AREA BOYZ HOLLAM.
wants everyone to write Igbo with freedom. The Latin alphabet, she says, has too many limitations and is a “deep source of frustration for everyone who has ever tried to read or write” Igbo. So she invented Ndebe, a script that pays homage to “the old Nsibidi logographs.”
Ndebe is not Nsibidi, she is quick to remind people. “It is completely unrelated,” she told this reporter during a 30-minute Zoom call in July. While the latter was invented more than 1,500 years ago and is generally considered too complex or indecipherable to be used by present-day Igbo people, Ndebe is designed to “overcome the design problems” of a writing system “every Igbo person could use simultaneously.”
The Ndebe script is visually striking. It consists of 1,174 characters, each of which represents a particular sound in Igbo. People necessarily don’t have to memorise all the characters to be able to read or write the script because there is a formula, a scientific logic – consciously embedded by Lotanna – to ease the difficulty of assimilation, especially for busy adults.
Ndebe solves two important problems of Igbo language literacy. One, it eliminates the confusion that often arises when two Igbo speakers with different dialects try to communicate via the written page. Two, it forces Igbo to be written with the appropriate tones.
Ndebe is “a writing system that addresses the tonal peculiarities of Nigerian languages, pleasing to the eye, which might carry the burden of our literary and academic aspirations,” linguist Kola Tubosun wrote recently.
Tubosun, whose work with Yoruba won him the Premio Ostana prize in 2016, also sees Ndebe, partly on the basis of its “visual allure”, being “used along with English or other language texts on signposts throughout the country.”
“ . . . where I think the script most succeeds is in its opening of a new vista for the revitalization of Igbo as a written language both on the page and on the web, for literacy, and for culture,” he wrote.
At some point, early this July, more than 300 people were tweeting about Ndebe. Lotanna had just unveiled the new script on a dedicated website. “This is brilliant,” one person tweeted. “This should be widely adopted.” Others praised Lotanna’s brilliance. “Oyinbos lied to Africans with Western education & we all believed without doing research,” another person wrote. “They said Africans only have oral history and no form of writing. Ethiopians have Geez script and South East Nigeria had Nsibidi which is 4000yrs old, thanks @sugabelly for educating us all.” The excitement was palpable.
An Ndebe Character. Photo Credit: The Ndebe Project An Ndebe Character. Photo Credit: The Ndebe Project
When Lotanna started working on Ndebe in 2008, she was 19, studying Business Administration at Canisius College, a private Jesuit university in Buffalo, New York. The school had a lot of international students. “I used to hang out with a lot of Japanese students,” she said. Her Japanese communion piqued her interest in the East Asian nation’s culture, enough to begin considering learning Japanese.
Lotanna was a linguistic prodigy. As a child, she spoke Igbo and English, learned Yoruba in primary school, Hausa in secondary and taught herself Spanish. But it was Japanese, with its syllabic writing system, that crystallised her frustration with how African languages, especially her native Igbo, were written.
“Ever since I first learned to write Igbo in school, I have been infuriated with Samuel Ajayi Crowther,” she blogged in 2009. “The Roman system of writing was obviously never designed to accommodate African languages, but Mr. Crowther nevertheless proceeded to use it to write down all three major Nigerian languages, thereby bringing untold agony and exasperation on all future generations of young Nigerians.”
“For the Roman script, the tone marking is a big issue for me, especially because of Yoruba and the way we write,” Tubosun said during a phone interview. “There is also the technology, when we don’t have the tools to write it.” For example, Unicode is famous for incorrectly rendering certain Yoruba vowels. “So maybe if we have some other way of writing that can bypass the obstacles that Unicode presents. It might give us a new way of writing these languages.”
Lotanna started to research African writing systems and found out about Nsibidi which originated from the Cross river valley (south-east Nigeria) and consists of inscriptions in sanctuaries and special forms of language used among members of certain secret societies.
Precolonial sub-Saharan Africa is largely perceived, by western sources, as without a history of writing systems. But systems such as Nsibidi and Gicandi from the Kikuyu of Kenya, even if arcane, say otherwise. The Ge’ez script has also been in use in Ethiopia since 500 B.C. Since the 1800s, more African scripts – Mende in southern Sierra Leone, Loma in northern Liberia, Bamum in Cameroon – have been devised to perpetuate local lingua.
Armed with the knowledge that it was possible to create a writing system unique to Igbo, Lotanna, in 2008, started work.
At first, she planned to revive Nsibidi and supplement it with Ndebe. So, Igbo would be written in two scripts. (Japanese is notably written in three)
She completed the first iteration of Ndebe during the American winter break of 2008, bleeding into 2009 when she first wrote about the project on her blog. Then she was 20 and wanted to start an “Igbo Academy”.
“My goal is for the Igbo Academy to expand Igbo vastly by developing additions and modifications to the Igbo language that will greatly encourage its use in everyday life by Igbos and non-Igbos alike, and that will make Igbo relevant and expansive enough to be regularly used in business, politics, fashion, news, literature, dialogue, and in every other sphere of life,” she wrote at the time.
“I was a bit naive,” she told this reporter. “Everyone said it’s a great idea, but nobody wanted to do the work.” When she posted it on Nairaland, a Nigerian digital newsboard, “a lot of people insulted and laughed at me. Especially a lot of Igbo people. They said this is rubbish. And I got into very heated arguments with people over it. So I ended up doing all the work by myself.”
After designing the Ndebe script, she started researching how to create new symbols from Nsibidi, posting online, looking for help.
But, around 2011, she concluded that Nsibidi was not suited for the kind of script she wanted. Like Chinese, Nsibidi characters represent an idea. So it was quite possible that there would be no limit for the number of characters to be created. In its present form, the Chinese script consists of over 50,000 characters. If her project was going to be successful, she reckoned, “it had to be easy for people to learn.”
So she went back to the initial Ndebe script she had worked on. “In its original form, Ndebe was designed as an assistant to Nsibidi. So I had to start from scratch and re-designed the whole thing.”
Some of the big changes she made was to move from an alphabetic system to a syllabary, which is harder to learn. To compensate, she worked in a formula to write the script.
“The way Ndebe works is that there is a scientific logic to how you put the pieces of the characters together,” she said. “And so because of that, when you are reading or writing Ndebe, you don’t have to have memorised the entire script. You basically have to follow the logic, and you can use the logic to understand.”
She also left out many of the design flourishes of the initial script. “The original script is a lot more beautiful than the published script,” she said, a touch of sadness in her voice. “I had to sacrifice elegance for simplicity.”
Stanley Eke, a technology entrepreneur, had seen the earlier versions of Ndebe. “At that time, it looked complex and hard to grasp,” he told this reporter. But after Lotanna published the new script in July, he practised for two hours and wrote her a ‘thank you’ note in Ndebe. “Not super accurate and I missed the ‘m’ end syllable in the first sentence,” he tweeted. “But okay enough, I think.” She was floored. “I can’t get over how quickly you adapted to writing it,” she replied. “This is amazing.”
Eke, who continues to perfect his understanding of the script, said Ndebe should become popular in the Igbo language community.
“It is authentic,” he stressed. “This is an Igbo woman who came up with this. One of ours came up with it. It simplifies the language and makes it easy to standardise, and it gives the language a visual identity. This is how Igbo should be written.”
But how many will write with it? When this reporter reached out to a few Igbo writers and educators, it was the first time they were hearing of Ndebe. “Never heard of the new script,” one award-winning Igbo author texted in response to an interview request.
“That people don’t know about it is an issue, but it’s not a big issue,” the linguist, Tubosun said. “I assume that scripts that are invented take time before they become widely accepted.” One, it has to find its way into popular culture in vehicles such as film, music, books, visual art; and, two, it has to be standardised by academics, enough to be teachable in classrooms.
“So there’s a lot of work for the inventor to do and for people who care about it as well.”
Lotanna, Ndebe’s inventor, has slightly different ideas on how she wants the script to be adopted.
“A lot of people have said, we need to get into the educational curriculum or develop some computer program with this,” she said. “I actually don’t believe that we do. I think that adoption takes personal effort. And what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people are lazy. People don’t want to make the effort to do things. They kinda just want to snap their fingers and just want it to appear. And what I want with this script – there are cultural aspirations behind it as well, otherwise I won’t have spent 11 years of my life developing it – I want to spark a change in attitude amongst people. I am trying to foster the attitude that making the effort is important. I made the effort to improve the way Igbo is written, and in return I would like to see individual Igbo people making the effort to master the script. And they should do that outside of a certain cultural pride. Not about ‘what’s in it for me’ or ‘trying to make a quick buck’. Writing in Ndebe should be its own reward. You should get a sense of enjoyment from expressing yourself using the script.”
She has put out a copyright notice on the script and has said ‘no’ (“My standard response”, she calls it) to people who have approached her to feature the script in some elaborate project.
“Because a lot of people who have made the requests haven’t taken the time to learn the script,” she added.
“The uses I’ve been most interested in, ever since I’ve launched the script, is to see individual people on Twitter who are taking the time and effort to learn the script. That has been very heartening for me to see. We’ve also had a writing competition. People got out their notebooks and pieces of paper and wrote a few sentences. Some people even wrote like a whole page. And that’s an amazing effort.
“A lot of people are kinda jumping the gun.
“The whole point of the Ndebe script is, it is supposed to be for everyone’s private, daily use. You want to write a letter, use Ndebe, you want to write a grocery list, use Ndebe. If you want to jot down your daydreams, use Ndebe. If you want to write in a diary, use Ndebe. And I think that these uses of the writing system are far more important than commercial uses that seem flashy and after a while, everybody loses interest.
“How a language gets passed on and persists into the future, is not through the flashy uses of the language, it’s through the boring, daily use of that language. And that’s what I really want people to focus on.
“I don’t mind if, in terms of adoption, progress is slow. I care more about the quality of progress that we are making.”
Whether her approach is the right one is anyone’s guess, but her journey is evidence enough that she’s in it for the long haul.
“I do feel relieved that I’ve done it and it’s out,” she said of the script’s release into the world. “But there’s still quite a lot of work to be done. And it’s like there is definitely a weight on my shoulders, because now that the general public knows about the script that I’ve invented, I also have the responsibility to ensure that the script is being used in a way that I envisioned, and to guide the project to fulfil its goals.
“There are goals that I’ll like to be fulfilled in terms of adoption, digitisation, the use of the script, reforming the Igbo language. I do think that it might be something of a lifelong project for me.”
IGBOSON1: See how they've been cheating Anambra of its 13% derivation payments! It's mentioned in the clip that the oil and gas bearing communities in Anambra have been cheated since 2011 when oil exploitation commenced, and the latest is the one a oil coy called SEEPCO is doing...since 2016, they've been stealing Anambra oil through underground pipes and directing it to their sites in Delta State. To my understanding, this invariably means that Delta State is collecting financial benefits due to Anambra since Anambra oil bearing communities are complaining and the state is yet to receive shishi by way of 13% derivation!
Anambra that has proven oil and gas reserves is getting nothing, yet the Buhari gov't is spending hundreds of millions of dollars looking for oil and gas in the north to exploit! When i argue that the political-economy of 'one Nigeria' is evil and anti-Igbo, this is a good example to buttress my point! It's like this because some Igbo hating bigots just can't sleep at night if they know Alaigbo is benefitting maximally from its hydrocarbon deposits. I'm sure it's these same envious bastards that remotely engineered the boundary issues between Anambra and Kogi....which to this day is yet to be settled almost a decade after it started!
Later now bigots will be screaming that Alaigbo is barren and isn't contributing anything to the federation! Meanwhile, they sneak behind our backs to steal the little we have! Does anyone think this would be the case if the same amount of hydrocarbons were found in say Katsina State...that almost a decade after exploitation began, they would still not be receiving 13% derivation payments?
I'm also angry with the Anambra state gov't which doesn't seem to be taking this issue as seriously as it should! All we hear is bloody grammar with nothing concrete to hold on to! Also, will the thieving federal gov't and SEEPCO back-date their payments to Anambra and cough up all the one they've been stealing since 2011 to date?
ChimaAdeoye: SEEPCO is a known crooked company owned by Pakistanis. However, there is every evidence that the present theft was orchestrated by Federal Government. Imagine drilling across River Niger just to hide their pipes under water and deny Anambra of her oil revenue? This is totally wicked!
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U ARE COMPLAINING ALOT THESE DAYZ oooO...
ARE U SURE YOUR PAYMASTER HAVE NOT PAIID U TO CONTINUE SINGING PRAISES AND TUNING A BLIND EYE TO FRAUDULENT ACTS?
post=94580915: Serious I don't know what most of you normally smoke and come here and be typing rubbish, the sooner you realise your rant here doesn't hold water the better for your mind.[/s]
WELL, IT WONT STOP US TELLING YOU, THOSE UNCOMFORTABLE TRUTHS THAT U DONT WANT TO HEAR.
WE ARE NOT PRAISE SINGERS OR PAID EMPLOYEES, WE ARE NATIVE, NDI ANAMBRA AND IF U CHOOSE TO UNDERATE OUR RESOLVES, U AND YOUR PAY MASTERS DO SO AT YOUR OWN PERIL.
ChimaAdeoye: More than 15 years after Uyo intl. airport was inaugurated and functioning from a bungalow terminal building, it is finally building the permanent terminal building. This is how to build an airport sustainably.
They understood the correct order of facilities for an airport to develop sustainably was:
the control tower, runway, basic building to process passengers for arrivals & departures, navigational equipment, taxiway and permanent massive terminal building.
In that order.
ARE U DONE SUPPORTING OBIANO, 12 MONTHS BUS GARAGE CONSTRUCTION AT UMU ERI?
BY THE TIME UMAHI IS DONE, WITH EBONYI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT, THAT THING OBIANO IS BUILDING WILL BE AN EYESORE.
emkz: There is one thing I hate in a relationship. Bringing the issues to the public, making a video of what is going on, recording phone conversations, then conveniently making everything public when the relationship goes south
EXACTLY!
THEY SHOULD START SHOWING US, FROM THE START AND EVEN THEIR MARATHON SEX.
MARRIAGE IS NO SMALL FEET AND WOMEN ARE THE GREATEST CHALLENGE TO MAN.
THEY CAN BE SO SWEET, ACCOMMODATING AND TOLERATING BUT AT THE FLICK OF A SWITCH, THEY BECOME YOUR ADVERSARY, CHALLENGING YOU FOR THE FUN OF IT AND LEADING YOU UNTO AN UNCONTROLABLE FIT OF RAGE.
THE TEST HERE IS FOR MEN TO WALK AWAY AND NOT WALK INTO HER WITH A CLENCHED FIST OR SLAP.
FFK, CLEARLY WALKED INTO HER IN A FIT OF RAGE AND WAS CAUGHT ON CAMERA, SO NO DENYING.
pandax: Hmmm, looking at these steel beams, I could see quality. I am hoping that Obiano will surprise me for once and deliver a world class project with this Anambra International Conference Centre Building. We do not criticize for nothing, it is for O di mma Anambra!
cc: hammer3 Cjrane2 Ahamefuna0001 mktinsight +++ other progressives
EXACTLY NWANNE, IF WE WANT TO DO ANYTHING, LET US BRING OUT OUR HEART AND DO IT VERY WELL, BECOS WE WILL BE THE PEOPLE USING IT.
Rocksvibes234: I see u re not happy with the new terminal. We all knows that the terminal and apron beautifies an airport. But no worries. Let's wait for completion.
2ndly, one of the the airport roads lies on Onitsha -Awka, Enugu road. So they will consider it, even Umueri is developing now, alot of housing and industrial estates will soon set up there. Thousands are buy lands there now bcoz of the airport. Go and see your self . It's a welcome development
I HOPE, AM UNDERSTOOD HERE BECAUSE I BELIEVE I HAD BEEN VERY CLEAR.
I MORE THAN ANYBODY HERE WANT TO SEE ANAMBRA DOING WELL AND LEADING OTHER STATES IN THE SE.
I JUST EXPECT THAT WHEN THINGS ARE DONE, TO BE DONE VERY WELL.
WHY DRAW UP TWO PLAN FOR AN AIRPORT AND WASTE MONEY, WEN U CAN CUT DOWN WAT YOU BUILD INITIALLY TO THE BARE ESSENTIALS AND THEN GRADUALLY EXECUTE THE REST OF THE PROJECT PAINSTAKINGLY OVER THE COMING YEARS.
NOTHING GOOD COMES EASY, AND IF WE ARE TO CLOSE THE GAP WITH LAGOS AND ABUJA THEN WE HAVE TO BE FULLY COMMITTED.
THIS IS WAT I AM SAYING, NOT THAT UMUERI IS NOT GOOD ENOUGH OR THE AIRPORT SHOULD NOT BE NAMED AFTER OBIANO.
MY POSITION IS NOT PERSONAL BUT RATHER OBJECTIVE.
WE CAN BUILD THE CONTROL TOWER AND START WORK ON THE FIRST TERMINAL NEXT TO IT, LEAVING THE REST FOR 50 YEARS COMPLETION.
AIRPORTS ARE NOT BUILT IN 1 YEAR, OVER NIGHT, NOBODY EXPECT THAT.
ChimaAdeoye: Countries put in their best in their international airports. It is different from their public mass transportation facilities. Although the standard is still waaay above what we build in Nigeria, these countries don't particularly pay too much attention to them as they aren't really image makers like say Atlanta, Chicago, Houston, Los Angeles, Miami, Dallas,Fort Lauderdale, New York , Denver, Newark, Philadelphia, Orlando, Tampa,Detroit, Boston etc airports. I expect Nigeria's 5 international airports to at the minimum resemble south African airports.
My point is that in Nigeria, we have so downgraded the basic standard thinking Lagos is a standard for anything. The way someone mentioned here once that Nnewi should "develop" to become Onitsha. Because we think the closest best thing we have is actually what it should be.
We should outgrow the mindset that anything in Lagos meets global standard. In truth, Lagos is a horrid slum and Nigeria is notorious in building substandard things. That is why i grieve when our highest aspiration is always "Lagos" as if it meets even the basic standard globally. Exactly the reason why our people are so wowed when they visit even Iran or Egypt.
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ARE U THE PERSON ADVICING OBIANO?
Y AM ASKING IS BECOS ALL THIS ONE U ARE SAYING HERE, IS VERY MISLEADING.
THE FACTS ON GROUND IS THAT WE HAVE AN INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN ASABA.
WE HAVE ANOTHER INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IN ENUGU.
FOR ANYBODY TO EVEN CONSIDER UMUERI AIRPORT, MEANS IT HAS TO BE STATE OF THE ART.
Crime › Re: Ughelli Youths Vow To Kill SARS Officials Over Brutality (Video) by hammer3: 4:51pm On Oct 04, 2020
