The Kpelle syllabary was invented c. 1935 by Chief Gbili of Sanoyie, Liberia. It was intended for writing the Kpelle language, a member of the Mande group of Niger-Congo languages spoken by about 490,000 people in Liberia and around 300,000 people in Guinea at that time.[1]

According to Omniglot, the syllabary consists of 88 graphemes.[1] The Unicode proposal consists 106 non-numerical symbols.[2] The script is written from left-to-right in horizontal rows. Many of the character have allographs.

The script has 10 known numerals, they go from one to ten, there is no known character for zero.[2]

It was used to some extent by speakers of the Kpelle language in Liberia and Guinea during the 1930s and early 1940s but never achieved popular acceptance.[1] It has been classed as a failed script.[3]

Today Kpelle is written with a version of the Latin alphabet.

References

  1. 1 2 3 "Kpelle syllabary". Omniglot.com. Retrieved 2012-01-31.
  2. 1 2 Michael Everson and Charles Riley (2010-02-23). “N3762: Preliminary proposal for encoding the Kpelle script in the SMP of the UCS” Retrieved 10 April 2026.
  3. ↑ Unseth, Peter. 2011. Invention of Scripts in West Africa for Ethnic Revitalization. In The Success-Failure Continuum in Language and Ethnic Identity Efforts, ed. by Joshua A. Fishman and Ofelia García, pp. 23-32. New York: Oxford University Press.


allikas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kpelle_syllabary