> While they were teenagers in the late 1980s, brothers Ibrahima and Abdoulaye Barry devised the alphabetic script to transcribe the Fulani language.[3][6] One method they used involved them closing their eyes and drawing lines. After looking at their drawn shapes, they would pick which ones would look the most to them like a good glyph for a letter, and associate it with whatever sound they felt it would represent.
I'm not sure if I should be impressed that this has turned into an actual script, or disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea.
Hot take: artificially creating new scripts that need to be taught from scratch to everybody and require new fonts, layout engines, etc hinders language adoption/preservation instead of helping it.
> disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea
Perhaps it's more that Fulani speakers truly appreciated having an alphabetic script that is able to adequately represent the distinct sounds of their language without ambiguities, which had not been the case with the Latin or Arabic scripts. Cultural pride also would have played a factor, there's a reason South Korea has a special holiday to commemorate the creation of Hangul script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul_Day
Uh yeah it is. A writing system needs a flat surface, a writing implement, and a mind prepared to learn. If enough people think that the new alphabet is a good idea, fonts and layout engines will follow. For Adlam, they did. (Another invented system which took off indigenously: Cherokee syllabary[1].)
I'm not sure if I should be impressed that this has turned into an actual script, or disappointed that so many people thought this was a good idea.
Hot take: artificially creating new scripts that need to be taught from scratch to everybody and require new fonts, layout engines, etc hinders language adoption/preservation instead of helping it.