Bamum Letter Phase-E Po

It is a historical Bamum character identified by the transliteration “po.”

King Ibrahim Njoya and palace advisers developed the Bamum script between 1896–1910. A surviving manuscript in its first form is dated 1897. Early signs represented objects and actions as memory prompts; later revisions reused signs for their sounds, making the system represent speech more directly.

𖦘 belongs to Phase E, an earlier stage of the script. The modern form is Phase G, a syllabary: a writing system in which each sign represents a syllable. This exact Phase-E form belongs in historical Bamum text or script study.

How did the Bamum script change?

Njoya’s court reshaped a large set of signs into a syllabary.

The first signs stood for things and actions rather than speech sounds. Over several revisions, scribes reused signs for the sounds of words they represented and simplified the system. It eventually became the A-ka-u-ku syllabary, the modern Phase-G form.

The evolving script carried histories, court records, administration, maps, and teaching material. Its shift from object signs toward syllabic writing resembles one broad development in Liberia’s Vai script; that comparison does not establish that Bamum was copied from Vai.