The Vai syllabary was devised by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. He is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary’s inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s.
In 1967 two scholars, working independently, suggested that the Cherokee syllabary of 1819 provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer 2002). One of them, ...
more
The Vai syllabary was devised by Mɔmɔlu Duwalu Bukɛlɛ of Jondu, in what is now Grand Cape Mount County, Liberia. He is regarded within the Vai community, as well as by most scholars, as the syllabary’s inventor and chief promoter when it was first documented in the 1830s.
In 1967 two scholars, working independently, suggested that the Cherokee syllabary of 1819 provided a model for the design of the Vai syllabary (Tuchscherer 2002). One of them, P.E.H. Hair, suggested that the link was missionary groups working with both peoples. A different link was suggested by Svend Holsoe, who discovered a Cherokee (possibly half-Cherokee) man named Augustus or Austin Curtis who had settled in the Vai region at least four years before the invention of the script. He married into a prominent Vai family and became an important Vai chief himself. The "inscription on a house" that drew the world's attention to existence of the Vai syllabary was in fact on the home of Curtis. Both ideas have been...
less
