La Méthodologie de la Nouvelle Écriture Africaine “Bété”

<p>Originally written on a Toyota diary/day-planner, which is faithfully reproduced for this edition, <em>La Méthodologie de la Nouvelle Écriture Africaine “Bété”</em> is Fréderic Bruly Bouabré’s work with what he calls the “primordial tool” at the base of all human creation: language. Having discovered that syllables are the “vital organs” of all human diction, he set about creating a kind of alphabet for syllabic pronunciation. Composed of anthropomorphic hieroglyphs, this African Alphabetic System was first created in 1956 and published in 1958. This book, written to teach others, was completed in 1984 but was not released until now. Sixty pages of handwritten texts and their corresponding syllabic representations are followed by twenty-one “un-translated” syllabic texts for students to work on. At the back of the book the West African Alphabet is spelled and sounded out for systematic study.</p>