Mandombe script

Congolese writing system

Mandombe or Mandombé is a script proposed in 1978 in Mbanza Ngungu in the Bas Congo province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo by Wabeladio Payi, who related that it was revealed to him in a dream by Simon Kimbangu, the prophet of the Kimbanguist Church. Mandombe is based on the sacred shapes and , and intended for writing African languages such as Kikongo, as well as the four national languages of the Congo, Kikongo ya leta, Lingala, Tshiluba and Swahili, though it does not have enough vowels to write Lingala fully. It is taught in Kimbanguist church schools in Angola, the Republic of the Congo, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is also promoted by the Kimbanguist Centre de l’Écriture Négro Africaine (CENA). The Mandombe Academy at CENA is currently working on transcribing other African languages in the script. It has been classified as the third most viable indigenous script of recent indigenous west African scripts, behind only the Vai syllabary and the N'Ko alphabet. A preliminary proposal has been made to include this script in the combined character encoding ISO 10646/Unicode. A revised Unicode proposal was written in February 2016 by Andrij Rovenchak, Helma Pasch, Charles Riley, and Nandefo Robert Wazi.

Mandombe has consonant letters and vowel letters which are combined into syllabic blocks, rather like hangul. All letters are based on a square S or 5 shape. The six vowels are distinguished by numerals added to the right of the 5 shape. The consonants fall into four 'groups', or shapes, which are distinguished by adding a short stroke to the 5 shape for three of the groups; and into four 'families', or orientations, which are distinguished by reflecting and rotating the letter shapes. The four families of consonants are attached to the same corner of the vowel, which is reflected or rotated to match the consonant, so that the consonant resides in a different corner of the syllabic block depending on its orientation. Unlike Pitman shorthand, which also distinguishes consonants by rotation, in Mandombe the groups and families do not form natural classes, apart from a fifth group of fricatives and affricates made by inverting one of the four basic groups. Vowel sequences and nasal vowels are created with diacritics, prenasalized consonants by prefixing n (the basic 5 shape), and consonant clusters by inserting a consonant between the two parts of the vowel (between the 5 shape and the additional strokes).

Prenasalisation of consonants is indicated with a variation on (n) disconnected from the vowel. This always joins the consonant body, else certain signs could be read in more than one way. Nasalisation of the vowel is marked by an attached diacritic: If is placed between the two separable parts of the vowel glyph, it represents an intervening /r/.

A period is used as a word divider to separate words. The punctuation corresponds to that of the Roman alphabet. A comma has the form of a short line, , a period a turned vee, , like the diacritic for o, and a colon and semicolon combinations of these (semicolon î, colon double ). The exclamation mark is like a lambda, λ, and the question mark is like a turned Y, ⅄.