A Profusion Of Characters

The chromatic Benin-Edo Script

Yesterday‘s post was on the question of whether the English version of the Latin alphabet would look odd to someone who couldn’t read English. In other words, to see ourselves as others see us. Today’s is about scripts more widely, particularly those of West Afrika and South Asia, but elsewhere as well.

The geographic and population-related distribution of different scripts is very uneven. In terms of number of written languages, Latin is obviously the most widely-used script. I’m guessing that that’s also true in terms of population. Fifteen hundred million people speak the twelve most commonly spoken languages written in Latin script. This is, I’m guessing, followed by Chinese, which as well as being used on its own to write Chinese “dialects” (actually languages), also gets used to write Japanese in part and has historically used to write many other languages. After that is probably Arabic script, which is actually used in China too, followed by Cyrillic, at least in terms of number of languages, and then probably Devanagari, the script used to write Hindi. After that, Hebrew square script is used to write several languages, though Hebrew itself dominates there, and historically Greek has been used for Greek, Coptic and Gothic and is also ancestral to Latin and Cyrillic. After that, I’m not aware of scripts which are widely used. Hangul, the Korean script, is also used to write the Austronesian language Cia-Cia, and has also been used for Hokkien in Taiwan. That said, it seems that the majority of remaining scripts, of which there are many, are each associated with a single language.

There’s a lot of politics in script choice, and Arabic in particular, which works excellently for the Arabic language itself and also for other Semitic tongues and those which have borrowed lots of Semitic words, is often applied to languages for which it’s unsuitable. The distinctive feature of Semitic, and possibly other Afro-Asiatic, languages is that they have roots based on three consonants which are then modified grammatically by vowels, and sometimes by other consonants. Hence salaam – peace, islam – surrender, muslim – person who has surrendered, for example. The closely related Hebrew language does the same thing. There is an issue with how Arabic script is read, because studies have shown that readers take longer to read each letter than they do with Latin because the shapes are simple and often distinguished using dots above or below them. The official adoption of Arabic script is often a political statement.

In the former Soviet Union, Cyrillic was used in most places, the exceptions being the Jewish Autonomous Oblast in the Far East of the country and the Baltic and Caucasian states. There seems to have been a deliberate policy to introduce differences in the scripts for neighbouring Turkic-speaking nations in particular in order to prevent communication between them. One which particularly sticks in my mind actually used an ampersand for a particular vowel. Mongolian is also officially written in Cyrillic although it used a number of other scripts including the vertical traditional script and another non-cursive vertical script, and ‘Phags Pa, as is also used to write Tibetan. The fact that Cyrillic is used to write such diverse languages means that in theory it could be used for a huge range of tongues which have never been written in Cyrillic, and this brings me to one particular idée fixée of mine, that the Q-Celtic languages should be written using Cyrillic because like Russian and other Slavic languages they have palatised and non-palatised versions of many of their consonants, and it works better than what is done at the moment for any of them. Unfortunately, if you look at place names in Ireland, for example, written in Cyrillic, they just seem to be transliterations of the English versions of those words.

The Americas have their own systems of writing even though Latin scripts dominate, and they really fall into two categories historically. One is the pre-Columbian writing systems used by the Mayans and Aztecs, with an honourable mention for the quipu system of knotted threads used by the Inca. Runes have also been used by Nordic people in North America in the first Christian millennium. There may be others but I’m not aware of them. These are not used much today, although they are in some very limited situations such as on flags and in commercial logos. For instance, the Mexican flag includes a glyph from the Nahuatl script.

The other category constitutes scripts which were consciously invented to represent languages and include Cree syllabics, used for instance to write Inuktitut, Ojibwe and Cree, and the remarkable Cherokee syllabary invented by Sequoyah, an up until that point illiterate native American, which reminds me of clichéed old Western “WANTED” posters but is a valid script in itself. I assume it looks that way because of the kind of font which was popular at the time.

There appears to be a connection between the Cherokee syllabary and the Vai one, shown above. Vai is spoken in Liberia and Sierra Leone, and these two countries have particular histories which may be relevant. Liberia was set up as the goal of the “Back To Africa” movement, where freed slaves went to Afrika to found a nation. Eleven percent of the population is descended from American slaves and the official language is English. It has an oddly American atmosphere to it, but when the ex-slaves colonised it there were tribes already there and were enslaved by the ex-slaves and not considered citizens of the country. Sierra Leone, next door, was also founded by former slaves, this time loyalists who fought on the British side in the American War of Independence and ended up in Nova Scotia and also some Black Londoners who were resettled. There was also Sengbe Pieh, who was the leader of the only successful slave rebellion on a ship which resulted in a court case in the US and their return to Afrika. Hence both of these countries have a peculiar relationship with the West and the US compared to other Afrikan nations. The Vai syllabary was in use by 1833, and prior to that a number of Cherokee had emigrated to Liberia, one of whom, Austin Curtis, had married into a Vai family and become a chief, so it’s possible that the inspiration is Cherokee. Vai was actually first used by Momolu Duwalu Bukele, but he claimed that he received it in a vision, and this is where things get a bit confusing.

There are many claims that different West Afrikan scripts, of which there are a couple of dozen, were received by divine revelation or a vision, but also there are claims that many of them have been found to have ancient origins long before they were used by their apparent inventors, and it isn’t clear whether the scripts are ancient, invented consciously or received in visions. This makes their origins obscure. It’s also notable that there’s a remarkably large number of them. It’s also probable that there was a strong motivation for indigenous West Afrikan scripts to be promoted in order to refute the idea that Black people were inferior, either by inventing the writing themselves in response to this or as discoveries of ancient scripts to demonstrate that ancient Afrikans south of the Sahara were not illiterate. Having said that, I don’t consider it problematic that a script could appear fully-formed in someone’s mind because the same kind of thing happens to me in other situations, and I don’t think I’m unusual in that respect. Vai script was also alleged to have been secret and Bukele may have invented the dream explanation as a cover story. It was apparently used by Afrikan slaves in Suriname before it was supposèdly invented or revealed to Bukele. Then again, the writing in Suriname is said to be due to spirit possession. The whole thing is very confusing, at least to an outsider. All of this is very interesting, but it means that the scripts need to be considered in their own right rather than in terms of their origin in order not to lead to confusion. That said, there are a number of scripts in England which are said to have resulted from the same phenomenon such as Celestial and Enochian.

One of the most striking scripts is illustrated at the top of this post: Benin-Edo. Edo was the main language of the Benin Empire in what is now southern Nigeria, founded in 1180 CE. I haven’t yet been able to find out much about it but it doesn’t appear to be ancient. It existed by 1999 CE though.

An incomplete list of West Afrikan scripts includes: Yorùbá Holy Script, Bassa, N’Ko, Nisbidi, Mende, Bamun, Kukakui and Shumom. One of the issues with writing these languages in the Latin alphabet is that the systems so far invented for them, which I would guess were invented by Christian missionaries, don’t do justice to their phonology. Although there are several widely-spoken and major exceptions to this tendency, most languages which originated in Afrika south of the Sahara are tonal, and this is often not well-represented in the Latin scripts. Moreover, there are a number of sounds in West Afrikan languages, such as the double-articulated “gb” and “kp” and the prenasalised stops such as “ngk” and “mb” (my representation, not part of the actual spelling) which are contrasted with the actual consonant clusters forming completely different words. That is, there can be an N followed by a D or an “ND” sound, and they’re two different things. Syllables represented by vowels can also be poorly represented. Hence there are a number of factors involved in the use of widely varying scripts in West Afrika. I also wonder whether they constitute an important part of the tribes’ identity, and this brings me to South Asia.

The South Asian scripts are all descended from Brahmi. In Northern India and Nepal, these scripts are often characterised by a horizontal line joining the letters or characters in a word together. This is because they were originally written on palm leaves and the line is a vein in the monocotyledonous leaf with its parallel venation. In South India and elsewhere, and in a few scripts in North India, the characters are discrete, being neither cursive nor joined by the line. South Asian scripts are abugidas. Each consonantal character includes an intrinsic vowel, often schwa but sometimes, as with Bengali, a short O, which has to be specifically shown not to be present with a cancelling sign or a vowel modifying the letter placed to the left, right, above or below the consonant. Some also have conjunct consonants, which mix two or three letters together. Gurumukhi, used to write Punjabi, uses a line but lacks conjunct consonants and is particularly clearly written. Gujurati is one exception to the use of the line in a North Indian language, and uses separate characters without an associated line. In South India the letters are always separated. The scrpts extended well beyond India and were modified. Particularly notable is ‘Phags Pa, used to write Tibetan, which although it’s written left to right horizontally like the others, also tends to pile letters up vertically, and is far from being phonetic. Southeast Asia, with the exception of Vietnam, uses Brahmi-derived scripts as well, including the apparently longest alphabet of all, Khmer, used to write Cambodian with sixty-three letters, although this claim seems to have been rescinded as there are now said to be only thirty-three. Khmer uses a lot of letters with the same sound because they were used in Sanskrit and have fallen together.

The situation in South Asia, particularly India, seems to be that every language deserves its own script, which again I would attribute to some kind of identity politics. Not all South Asian languages have a long literary tradition. For instance, Burushaski, a language isolate spoken in Pakistan, may have had a written form which died out, and is written in both Latin and Arabic. Ol Cemet’ is an alphabet as opposed to an abugida or abjad (Arabic and Hebrew) invented in 1925, and is used to write Santali, a Munda language.

This isn’t intended to be an exhaustive survey of the writing systems of the world so much as a sketch of the situation. It seems to obey some kind of 80:20-like distribution and resembles the distribution of languages, although not in the same areas. Most of the Islamic world uses Arabic, most of the Russian- and Slavic-influenced world Cyrillic, and South Asia has a plethora of scripts of its own. East Asia has a number of Chinese-influenced scripts with the exception of Hangul which is logically organised as opposed to having evolved without conscious influence. West Afrika in particular has a large number of scripts due to a variety of factors. The Americas have had scripts which are now extinct and are now dominated by Latin, but also have some non-Latin scripts which were consciously designed. Finally, most of Europe, Afrika and Oceania use the Latin script, though Arabic and Tifinagh are used in North Afrika and the first was historically used further south. The usual 80:20 type rule can be applied to this, where the majority of languages use a small number of scripts but a fair proportion also have their own, but it’s notable that outside South Asia, which has both a large number of languages and a large number of scripts, often one per language, most scripts are only used by one or two languages, and they do not correspond to areas of great linguistic diversity. It’s also clearly a lot easier for a constructed script to be adopted than a constructed language such as Esperanto.

Millets

As I covered cassava the other day, it would be unbalanced of me not to cover millets at some point. As far as many White Brits are concerned, millet is just this grain you give to budgies, not something I’ve ever done owing to not encountering the birds much in my everyday life, except once outside Leicester Prison, drinking from a puddle. That said, I did go through a phase of cooking with millet. I treated it exactly as I would couscous or bulgur, so I wasn’t exactly adventurous with it. But just as cassava is the go-to energy crop in the wet, millet is in the dry, and unlike manioc it is quite nutritious in terms of micronutrients. However, there isn’t just one millet but at least a dozen different cultivated species, depending on how you count them, and again unlike yuca, some millet is native to temperate regions.

With the exception of maize, grain crops often resemble one common grass or another which grows wild. I have to admit I’m not good at identifying species of grass. I presume the grasses that look like millet are in the eragrostidæ, which all use C₄ photosynthesis which means they could outlast other plants when the carbon dioxide levels drop in a few hundred million years time if they’re still around by then. Some of them can also be used to absorb cæsium, a common and particularly hazardous pollutant from nuclear power disasters such as the one at Cernobyl, but obviously those are not going to be used as food. They are, however, used as food for grazing animals such as bovids and sheep, though the ones concerned don’t look much like millet. Apart from sorghum, which isn’t always counted, millets have small grains. Sorghum used to fascinate me as a child because it is for some reason not widely used in England compared to the other cereals, and being drawn to the obscure, I often used to wonder about it. During the ’70s there were attempts to cross-breed sorghum and wheat. I’ll revisit sorghum in a bit, because it’s quite distinctive.

The millets are useful crops in dry conditions, because they will often grow in poor soil with low rainfall. They can also be stored for a long time. This kind of puts them in the same position as manioc in different regions owing to their similar characteristics in this respect, but unlike tapioca they don’t need to be waxed to preserve them and they’re way better nutritionally. However, because they tend to be grown on marginal land, their yields tend to be quite low, although when they are grown in better conditions this is not so.

First then, sorghum. Sorghum is also known as great millet and guinea corn, and grows between one and five metres high. They look like maize before flowering, with somewhat broader leaves, though narrower than Zea mays, but unlike maize the root system is more extensive, allowing the plant to absorb more water. The variety in the illustration is red-grained and has a bitter taste, and is therefore more likely to be used to brew beer than be eaten directly. It originated in Afrika but has been cultivated in India and China for millennia as well, in more arid areas. It’s a very important food crop in these regions and the parts of Afrika where the conditions are similar. Like cassava, it isn’t traded internationally much. In the US and Australia it’s used as fodder for farm animals, but the stems can be used to extract a syrup like that of sugar cane, which can be used in cooking, and this is done in the US, where it’s called sorghum molasses. This just reminds me of sucking and chewing grass stalks, so I presume the same kind of thing could be done with the likes of fescue or any other grass with a relatively tall stalk, although with a smaller grass it would be pretty labour intensive. Nigeria is the leading producer of sorghum by a narrow margin, growing about an eighth of the world’s supply, followed by India, Mexico and the US, but this could be misleading as Nigeria is only half the size of Mexico. Due to its C₄ photosynthesis, sorghum uses less water than most other plants, although not other millets, allowing it to compete more successfully in dry conditions with other plants. It also becomes dormant in drought conditions and rolls its leaves to prevent transpiration. The grain is covered by a husk which has to be removed to make it edible, and this was one of the tasks done by women slaves during the era of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. Due to the sugar-rich sap, it can also be used to produce alcoholic liquor and therefore ethanol for biofuel. Attempts to cross it with other cereals are motivated by the desire to grow it in colder climates, and at this point I feel there’s some missing information because there are of course temperate millets.

Bulrush millet is probably illustrated at the top of the post although I’m not sure. At this point I’m going to permit myself a bit of a digression, on the subject of the word “bulrush” and the evolution of grasses. Firstly, there’s a pedantic tendency, though I’ve not seen it recently, to “correct” people on the use of the word “bulrush” to refer to reed maces. This is silly. Words change their meanings as time goes by and if people are habitually going to call a particular plant a “bulrush”, that’s simply what it is. It also seems to be an American vs. British usage issue. Secondly, bulrushes are sedges, i.e. monocotyledonous grass-like plants which grow near or in water. I haven’t looked that deeply into it, but I’m aware that dinosaur dung shows the indigestible remnants of grasses way back into the Cretaceous, although grasses were initially just another herbaceous plant among many and actual grasslands didn’t appear until the Miocene, which is an epoch of the current geological period, the Neogene. However, back in the Mesozoic, I suspect the situation was that some sedges gradually became better at tolerating drier conditions and they began to grow away from water, becoming grasses, but that’s really just a guess.

Whatever its ancestry, bulrush millet is smaller-seeded than sorghum and the plant is about the same height as maize. Unsurprisingly its inflorescences resemble those of bulrushes, but unlike those it’s the most drought-resistant of all millets and the most widely grown crop of any kind in dry tropical areas. It’s Afrikan in origin and provides most of the food for humans in the Sudan, the north of Nigeria and the fringe of the Sahara.

Finger millet, Eleusine coracana, is so called because its ears tend to have groups of five spikes, radiating a little like a hand. It’s grown in South Asia and also in Afrika from Zimbabwe to the Sudan. Unthreshed, it can be stored for as long as five years and is again a food crop on which many of the Afrikan people in the regions where it’s grown rely in what would otherwise be times of famine. It’s often planted as the first crop after forest clearance as it can extract the minerals from ashes well. Again, finger millet is rarely traded outside its regions.

Ethiopia has its own distinct millet known as “teff”, Eragrostis abysinnica. In the Jos Plateau of Nigeria, a species known as “hungry rice”, Digitaria exilis, is cultivated, which is local to West Afrika. Then there’s Job’s Tears, Coix lachryma-jobi:

CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7114

This is, like sorghum, a little apart from the others. It originates from Southeast Asia, where it’s mainly grown, and has unusually large grains for a millet which are used for decorative and ritual purposes as beads. However, they are also edible and has a very minor and apparently now extinct tradition of use in TCM.

I haven’t been at all adventurous in my own use of millet, generally just using it as a substitute for couscous when I was short of money. I don’t even know which species I used. Nutritionally, there have already been hints that the plant is good at extracting minerals from its environment because of the use of ash as manure and the clearance of cæsium-137 from polluted locales. It’s one of those plants which could easily be fed to humans instead of bovids and sheep, bypassing the inefficient use of animal products for food, particularly in parts of the world where the land isn’t particularly good for raising ungulates. It sounds like it contributes to deforestation in a similar way to the related bamboo in China, and this could be reduced by eating it directly rather than employing it as fodder for other species. Nutritionally, millet is high in manganese, although many of the minerals involved depend on the species. An individual species may be high in some minerals which are low in others and vice versa. It’s also got three times the calories of cassava and is also high in B vitamins. Being gluten-free, it can substitute for wheat in many foods. Finger millet is particularly high in calcium, bulrush millet in iron and most are comparable to wheat in protein content. They have a low glycæmic index, making them useful in preventing diabetes. Millets cannot, however, be eaten raw.

Around ninety million people in Afrika and Asia depend on millet as food. A little over half of it is produced in Afrika, forty percent in Asia and in Europe the figure is only three percent, although I will be covering temperate millets today as well. They don’t need irrigation and their funding is less dependent on pesticides and fertilisers than many other crops, which of course means that big business may not be able to make as much money out of them and therefore that they may not be promoted as much as some other food plants. One problem with millet is that development of other grains is often preferred by governments. For instance, the “Green Revolution” in South Asia concentrated on wheat and rice and supported its planting when they are in fact less nutritious than millet, leading to health problems further down the line. Rice in particular is a bit rubbish, even though I eat loads of it and enjoy it. Diets also become more like those of the developed world, and wheat, rice and maize are also easier to sell on the world market, meaning that farmers are often more likely to prefer them to millet. Millets also have a high carbon content, meaning that to some extent they can be used as carbon sinks, an influence which would be greater if more of them were grown. To this end, the UN has declared 2023 to be the International Year Of Millets (it’s currently the International Year Of Fruits and Vegetables).

One of the big dishes made from millet is Hausa koko, a West Afrikan food which is described as a kind of spicy porridge common in Ghana. It consists of millet flour boiled in water with added ginger, garlic, pepper and cloves, and is a street food sold for breakfast often eaten with koose, spicy cakes made from blackeyed beans. It can also be lightly toasted before being boiled in stock, as it is in Nasarawa, a state next to Plateau in central Nigeria, where the aforementioned Jos Plateau is located. What I do with it is closer to Thiakry, except that I don’t use milk, condensed or otherwise. Thiakry is similar to couscous but includes spices such as nutmeg , raisins and desiccated coconut, so it’s going in the sweet direction. It’s prepared like that in Senegal and therefore I presume The Gambia. However, it doesn’t seem to be eaten much in Cabo Verde, I imagine because of the Portuguese influence.

By Jschnable – Own work, CC BY 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76094729

Although millets are thought of as primarily dry tropical crops, there are also temperate species. Proso millet, also known as broomcorn or hog millet, Panicum miliaceum, has been cultivated since the Neolithic in Eurasia, including southern Europe. Ezekiel 4:9 refers to a recipe for bread including this along with lentils and some other ingredients:

 וְאַתָּ֣ה קַח־לְךָ֡ חִטִּ֡ין וּ֠שְׂעֹרִים וּפ֨וֹל וַעֲדָשִׁ֜ים וְדֹ֣חַן וְכֻסְּמִ֗ים וְנָתַתָּ֤ה אוֹתָם֙ בִּכְלִ֣י אֶחָ֔ד וְעָשִׂ֧יתָ אוֹתָ֛ם לְךָ֖ לְלָ֑חֶם מִסְפַּ֨ר הַיָּמִ֜ים אֲשֶׁר־אַתָּ֣ה׀ שׁוֹכֵ֣ב עַֽל־צִדְּךָ֗ שְׁלֹשׁ־מֵא֧וֹת וְתִשְׁעִ֛ים י֖וֹם תֹּאכֲלֶֽנּוּ׃

• “Take wheat and barley, beans and lentils, millet and spelt; put them in a storage jar and use them to make bread for yourself. You are to eat it during the 390 days you lie on your side. “

It was also eaten by the Romans as milium. It’s actually ten percent protein and four percent fat, so it’s very nutritious in terms of macronutrients. This is the millet which is fed to budgerigars, and is an annual, growing about a metre in height. It tends to be found on landfill sites, probably germinated from bird seed. Another species in this genus, little millet, Panicum miliare, is shorter and is grown in South Asia on the edge of the tropics.

By STRONGlk7 – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=20727314

Setaria italica, foxtail millet, is annual and the most popular millet in Asia, where it originated, but its English names often refer to it as Italian, German or Hungarian. This species is entirely domesticated – it either evolved while being cultivated or its wild version died out. It appears to be descended from Setaria viridis, which is a common weed. In Russia it’s used for beer and elsewhere for silage and hay. Like broomcorn it’s used as bird seed in Britain.

By James Schnable – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41655596

Echinochloa frumentacea, Japanese millet, is grown in warm regions, particularly in Japan and Korea, where it’s made into porridge. Once again it’s used for birdseed in Britain and turns up on landfill sites. It grows up to 1.4 metres in height with a fifteen centimetre ear, and produces a brown to purple grain. In India it’s eaten during religious fasting. It’s closely related to cockspur grass:

This grows in these isles and is also known as “barnyard millet”, but unfortunately is one of the worst weeds, a weed being a plant growing in a place where a human doesn’t want it to, because it tends to remove large amounts of nitrogen from the soil. It can and is, however, eaten, which I imagine would be a controversial thing to do due to its invasiveness.

Having written all that, I’m now thinking this post will get fewer eyeballs than the one on cassava, and that’s a shame because unlike cassava, millet is highly nutritious across the board and although tapioca too is vital to the survival of many people, it’s also instrumental in causing kwashiorkor or protein-energy malnutrition. If it’s all that can be grown, fair enough, but it really seems that the millets have a much healthier profile and are sadly neglected. That said, in political terms manioc and the millets can be grouped together as crops on which much of the tropical population relies and are not traded much beyond that region, meaning they are less “cash-croppy”. In the case of millets this is less so than yuca because although the former can be used to make ethanol for fuel, it seems less exploited and at the moment they seem relatively free of genetic modification and all the issues that brings with it. So I would celebrate millet, and feel a lot more enthusiastic about it than its corresponding crop in wet tropical regions, cassava.