page_title: Afaka syllabary
section_title: Variants and syllabic order
hierarchical_section_title: Afaka syllabary / Variants and syllabic order
caption_attribution_description: English: The Afaka script as transcribed by C. Bonne in 1920. The orthography has been converted to modern usage.
context_page_description: The Afaka script is a syllabary of 56 letters devised in 1910 for the Ndyuka language, an English-based creole of Suriname. The script is named after its inventor, Afáka Atumisi. It continues to be used to write Ndyuka in the 21st century, but the literacy rate in the language for all scripts is under 10%.
  Afaka is the only script in use that was designed specifically for a creole or for a form of English. It has been proposed for inclusion in the Unicode Standard.
context_section_description: Texts in Afaka's own hand show significant variation in the letters. A good number are rotated a quarter turn, and sometimes inverted as well; these are 
  be, di, dyo, fi, ga, ge, ye, ni, nya, pu, se, so, te, and tu, 
  while lo, ba/pa, and wa may be in mirror-image and sa, to may be simply inverted.
  Others have curved vs angular variants: do, fa, ge, go, ko, and kwa. In yet others, the variants appear to reflect differences in stroke order.
  The traditional mnemonic order (alphabetic order) may partially reflect the origins of some of the signs. For example, tu and fo ("two" and "four", respectively), yu and mi ("you" and "me"), and ko and go ("come" and "go") are placed near each other. Other syllables are placed near each other to spell out words: futu ("foot"), odi ("hello"), and ati ("heart"), or even phrases: a moke un taki ("it gives us speech"), masa gado te baka ben ye ("Lord God, that the white/black(?) man heard").
caption: The syllabary as recorded in 1920. The order is the original except that a comes first. There are three errors: kwa is missing; te(n) in column 4 was written ti(ng), though ti appears again in column 6; and di in column 6 was transcribed ba, though it duplicates di in column 5. (Ba/pa in column 5 had only been transcribed as pa. It should also be closed at the bottom; perhaps this is an inking error.) Also, accounts from the second half of the 20th century no longer give nyu as an alternate reading of nya.
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