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A king's script that became a syllabary.
Also known as: Shu Mom, Njoya's script
The Cameroonian script created around 1896 by King Njoya, revised repeatedly from pictographs toward a syllabary.
Writes the Bamum language of western Cameroon.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
Revised through six successive versions in about thirty years, moving from several hundred pictographic signs toward a syllabary of about eighty — a compression from picture to sound that most scripts took centuries to make and that is documented here within one reign.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
The successive versions were recorded as they were made, so the script is among the few places where the pictograph-to-syllabary transition can be observed directly rather than reconstructed.
Contexts: Language and transcription, History
Glyphs built from curves, dots and enclosed figures, the later versions much simplified from the pictorial forms of the first.