Bamum Supplement (Old Bamum Letters)

The Bamum script did not appear in one piece. Around 1896 Njoya, ruler of the Bamum kingdom at Foumban in the Grassfields of western Cameroon, set his scribes to work on a writing system of their own, and over the next two decades they revised it six times. The first stage, Lewa ("book"), was a store of some 500 pictures and word-signs, each standing for a thing or a word rather than a sound. Each revision after it, Mbima ("mixed") from about 1899, Nyi Nyi Nfa' from about 1902, Rii Nyi Nsha Mfw' and Rii Nyi Mfw' Men from about 1907 to 1908, threw signs out and gave surviving ones new jobs as syllables. The decisive break came with A Ka U Ku, about 1910, which is almost entirely syllabic, and the last revision, Mfemfe ("new"), about 1918, cut the set to the 80 letters still taught in Foumban today.

Unicode calls the first six stages Phases A to F and the modern script Phase G. Phase G is the Bamum block, U+A6A0 to U+A6FF, encoded in Unicode 5.2 in 2009; it is what the Bamum Script page shows. Everything older went into the Bamum Supplement, U+16800 to U+16A3F, 569 letters added in Unicode 6.0 in 2010 on a proposal by Michael Everson, Charles Riley and Konrad Tuchscherer, prepared with the Bamum Scripts and Archives Project in the Palace of the Bamum Kings at Foumban and the Script Encoding Initiative at Berkeley. In June 2008 the whole repertoire was gone through sign by sign in the palace with local experts before it was submitted. The block sits in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane, which is why so many devices show it as boxes.

The point of encoding a script nobody writes any more is the manuscripts. Hundreds of Old Bamum texts survive: histories of the kingdom, treatises on traditional medicine, maps, letters and illustrated folktales, kept in the palace archives at Foumban and scattered through museums such as the Quai Branly in Paris, often catalogued by little more than an accession number. With the old signs in Unicode a text can be transcribed exactly as written, phase and all, searched, and matched to the right manuscript.

How the block is organised: Unicode order, phases and names

The grid above runs in code point order, which follows the standard reference on the script, Idelette Dugast and M. D. W. Jeffreys' L'écriture des Bamum of 1950, divided into the six phases: 87 letters for Phase A (U+16800 to U+16856), 56 for B, 98 for C, 117 for D, 157 for E and 54 for F (U+16A03 to U+16A38). The phase in a name is the last stage in which that sign appears. So 𖠳 PHASE-A KET was dropped after Lewa, while 𖦷 PHASE-E KET may have served from the beginning until the syllabic reform; ket is written five different ways across the block, 𖠳 𖣉 𖤄 𖦷 𖨗, and 66 other names repeat in the same way: 𖠕 𖥒 𖨒 suu, 𖡏 𖥍 𖨉 nyi, 𖢌 𖧻 𖨲 ma, 𖥟 𖧸 𖨮 loq. The chart glyphs are the earliest form of each sign, mostly as drawn in Phase A, which is why the whole block looks older than the tidy modern letters.

A name is the sound of the word the sign wrote, transcribed from Dugast and Jeffreys' phonetic notation into plain letters: ae is the vowel of English "the", eu a back unrounded u, ue the French u, q a glottal stop, gh a voiced throat fricative, sh and j as in "ship" and "vision", ng as in "sing". Where two signs shared a sound the name carries a one-word gloss to tell them apart: 𖧒 fu call and 𖧵 fu remedy, 𖣩 ken law and 𖣪 ken fatigue, 𖣣 mbaa picket and 𖢞 mbaa cabbage-tree, 𖥠 ren much, 𖡻 ngguoq large beside 𖡺 ngguoq. One sign, 𖡄 in Phase A, is simply called unknown. The same sound can hide different histories: 𖥜 PHASE-D SHOQ served from A to D, 𖧴 PHASE-E SHOQ replaced it in E, and from Phase F on the word is spelled with 𖨩 sho plus the combining mark koqndon ꛰ from the modern set.

A reused shape is not a reused meaning. The proposal's own example is 𖥮 PHASE-E RAQ: through Phases A to E it wrote raʔ, "reconciled", and in Phase F the same drawing was handed the syllable ŋa, "here". Many Phase F letters likewise keep a word value from an earlier stage, which is why Unicode calls every character in the block a LETTER rather than choosing between ideograph and syllable. Old Bamum texts also have no punctuation and no digits: numbers were written out as words, and the ten digit-letters ꛦ to ꛯ belong to the modern script.

Typing Bamum Supplement letters and which fonts show them

No keyboard layout types Old Bamum, and no spell-checker knows it. The practical way in is this page: click a letter and it is copied and its own page opens with the code point, the name and the phase. If you prefer code points, every letter here is five hex digits long, U+16800 to U+16A38, so use the hex entry your system offers (Ctrl+Shift+U on Linux, Alt+X in Word) rather than a four-digit shortcut.

Seeing them is the harder part. The free Noto Sans Bamum covers both the Bamum block and the Bamum Supplement and is the font to install or embed; without a Bamum font a phone or browser draws a hollow box for every letter, and some chat apps strip the block entirely. The modern letters fare better because a few system fonts include them, but Old Bamum is Noto or nothing, so check on the device your reader will use before putting a Phase-A sign in a title or a username.

Three signs from this block have escaped into general use as decorations: 𖤐 PHASE-D NGKEURI passes for a pentagram in goth bios, 𖦹 PHASE-E NGKAAMI is the internet's favourite text spiral and 𖥔 PHASE-D SHII turns up as a sparkle. They are ordinary Old Bamum letters with ordinary Bamum readings, and a Bamum reader sees a word, not a symbol. Use them if you like the shape, but know that they depend on the same font support as the rest of this page.