LinkedIn Post — Week 1

In 1949, in the city of Kankan, Guinea, a self-taught linguist named Solomana Kante sat down and designed a writing system from scratch. He was frustrated by a claim he'd read: that African languages were inherently unsuitable for writing. He spoke Manding, a family of languages used by over 40 million people across West Africa. Bambara in Mali, Maninka in Guinea, Dioula in Cote d'Ivoire. These languages had been written in Arabic script for centuries, and in Latin script since colonization. Neither was designed for them. Arabic doesn't capture Manding vowel distinctions. Latin doesn't encode its tonal system. Here's what makes N'Ko different from English, French, Arabic, or any other major writing system: Every character maps to exactly one sound. Every sound maps to exactly one character. This is called bijective mapping. English doesn't have it ("ough" has six pronunciations, "knight" has six letters and two sounds). French doesn't have it. Arabic doesn't have it. Kante engineered it deliberately. He also encoded tone directly into the script. In Manding, the word "ba" means mother, goat, or river depending on pitch. In Latin Bambara, all three look identical: "ba." In N'Ko, each one is written differently using combining diacritical marks for high, low, and mid tone. The semantic information is in the text, not left for the reader to guess from context.