The Oromo orthography of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō

Abstract

The existence of a totally indigenous Oromo writing system is not something that is very widely known about among Éithiopisants, and our present description of this remarkable achievement is written in the belief that the subject has never before received attention. Remarkable achievements are generally the achievements of remarkable men, and before embarking on a consideration of the writing system itself, it has seemed only appropriate to devote the first section of this paper to a short biographical sketch of the man who devised the system. At this point we are bound to acknowledge our great indebtedness to Shaykh Mahammad Rashād, a student of Shaykh Bakri Saṗalō, who not only gave us copious information about the life of his teacher, but generously provided us with copies of a number of manuscripts, among which is one (shown in Figs. 2–5) which sets out in a clear way the principles of Shaykh Bakri's orthography. Without the Amharic and Arabic explanations of this key we should have been involved in a work of decipherment, and the present study might well have proved impossible. We are likewise indebted to Dīmā Yōnīs, who took great pains on our behalf in interviewing former students and friends of Shaykh Bakri, and subsequently translated into English and typed out the information he collected.

The Ethiopic Script: Linguistic Features and Socio-cultural Connotations

“…In addition, Sheikh Bakri Saṗalō invented an alphasyllabary for Oromo during the 1950s, which differs from the Ethiopic script in the form of the syllabographs and contains diacritics for vowel length and gemination (cf. Hayward & Mohammed 1981). Sheikh Bakri Saṗalō was probably influenced by indigenous scripts for Somali from the 1920s and 1930s, like the Osmania or Gadabuursi scripts (cf.…”

Buna

“…One dear friend has her coffee on Tuesday, the day that traditionally honors Shaykh Hussein of Bale. Discussions of Shaykh Hussein and his particular importance for Oromo and other peoples in the Horn of Africa are found in Andrzejewski (1972Andrzejewski ( , 1974, Baxter (1987), and Hayward and Hassen (1981). Since the women have moved into a broader Islamic circle in America, this older traditional Oromo practice has been lost, and explicit remembrance and honoring of the Shaykh at the service of coffee is no longer maintained.…”

The Struggle for Knowledge: The Case of Emergent Oromo Studies

“…12 Until 1974, when the Haile Selassie government was overthrown, writing in the Oromo language was prohibited in Ethiopia. Sheik Bakri Saphaloo invented an Oromo alphabet in the mid-twentieth century; but it was suppressed by the Haile Selassie government (Hayward and Hassen, 1983). Haile Fida and the Oromo students study group in Europe (1973), the Oromo Liberation Front (OLF), Gene B.…”