What 𖧻 means
“Ma” is its letter name, not a word it spells alone.
King Ibrahim Njoya, ruler of the Bamum Kingdom, and his scribes developed the Bamum script around 1896 to write the Bamum language in western Cameroon. Early signs stood for objects and actions; writers later used some signs for their sounds. That shift helped revisions turn the script into a syllabary, a system whose characters represent syllables.
No substantial works from the first phase are believed to survive. Later texts from 1906–1908 include letters and an agricultural calendar. By 1910, Njoya’s A-ka-u-ku overhaul had produced the modern Phase-G syllabary. Phase-E characters belong to the older sequence: historians and language specialists use them to read and study historical Bamum, while most Bamum writers use Phase G.
Archival and specialist: this character belongs to an earlier stage of Bamum writing.
The matching “Ma” label does not make historical 𖧻 a substitute for the modern Phase-G letter ꛣ.
Part of collections
Who writes 𖧻
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Related characters
1
Questions people ask
1Why does this Bamum character show as a box?
The app lacks a font that covers this historical Bamum character. On Windows 11, Microsoft lists Segoe UI Historic for Bamum Supplement; an app using a font without that coverage may show a missing-glyph box.
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How to type or find 𖧻
- Search it as
- bamun · bamoun · bamoum · shumom · shupamum · old bamum ma · bamum ma · phase e ma
- Shows up in
- Anything that takes text · its shape is whatever your font draws
𖧻\169FBCodes and encoding1 code points
A visible symbol can contain several code points. JS .length counts UTF-16 units; UTF-8 counts bytes.