Ndebe

It was created by Lotanna Igwe-Odunze, who designed it to fit Igbo rather than to fit Igbo into the Latin alphabet. That is the whole idea. Igbo is written today with letters borrowed from a language it is not related to, and the borrowing shows: the marks under the vowels, the tone marks above them, and the fact that a letter can mean several different sounds depending on the word. A syllabary starts from the syllable instead, which is the unit Igbo actually counts in.

The script is built from a grid. There are 42 consonant bodies and 9 vowels — a ẹ ị ọ ụ and e i o u — and every consonant-and-vowel pair has its own character. A character also carries its tone, of which Igbo has three: high, mid and low. The result is that a Ndebe spelling can say exactly how a word is pronounced, including the tone, without any marks added on top.

There are 1,134 syllables in the grid, and every one of them is mapped.

Every syllable the script can write, as the script draws it. Read across for the vowel and down for the consonant, the way the script's own chart is set out: the row is the body — the consonant or consonant cluster the syllable begins with, and a when it stands alone — and the column is the vowel that follows it.

The forms below are the mid-tone ones, which are the shapes a reader meets most. Every syllable has a high form and a low form as well, and the tone is part of the character rather than a mark added to it. Press any syllable to see all three and the words here that use it.

A syllabary only works if the syllables are the right ones, so three rules decide how a word is written. They come from the script itself, not from this site:

• A word cannot end in a consonant, with one exception: m. So a final consonant has to resolve into a syllable that Igbo actually allows.
• A vowel that is elided in speech is elided in writing. Where two vowels meet and one is swallowed, the spelling keeps only the one that is said — Nwaanyi is written Nw’ayi, the way it is spoken.
• The tone of the whole word has to be right. This is the rule that makes the writing system worth having and the one that is easiest to get wrong: replacing one character with another of the same sound but a different tone does not produce a misspelling, it produces a different word.

Every Igbo entry that can be written in Ndebe carries the spelling on its page, under the headword and above the meanings. That is 12,052 of the 12,228 Igbo entries published here — 99%. The rest are words the grid cannot write: a word that is not Igbo to begin with, or one whose spelling cannot be resolved into legal syllables without inventing something.

Those entries show nothing rather than an approximation. A script line that is nearly right is worse than no script line, because a reader who cannot check it will take it as the spelling.

Names carry it too: 2,820 spellings across the name dictionary, written the same way and by the same rules.

Look up a word · Read the names

If Ndebe is new to you, the entry pages are a reasonable place to start, because each one puts the spelling directly under the word it belongs to and the pronunciation is available as a recording beside it. Read the syllable, listen to the word, and the mapping between the two is what the script is for.

To go further with it, the script's own project is at ndebe.org — the source for the grid, the rules and the character set used here. And if what you want is to write in it rather than read it, typendebe.com is a keyboard for it.

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