{"id":8,"date":"2016-05-01T12:29:39","date_gmt":"2016-05-01T12:29:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/?p=8"},"modified":"2016-05-31T21:07:23","modified_gmt":"2016-05-31T21:07:23","slug":"how-did-this-get-started","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/how-did-this-get-started\/","title":{"rendered":"How did this get started?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some years ago, I was in New York, visiting my brother. One day we went to the local library and he found a book called A grammar of Vai<\/em> (or something similar as I could recall) and as our old family name comes from Vai we decided to look it up. Unfortunately we couldn’t borrow it as it was a “read on site only” copy<\/p>\n

Some years later my girlfriend, now turned wife, Lena gave me a reprint of S.W. Koelle<\/span>’s Outlines of a grammar of the Vei language : together with a Vei-English vocabulary : and an account of the discovery and nature of the Vei mode of syllabic writing<\/em><\/a> that she had tracked down for my birthday (yes, the title’s a mouthful, so we’ll just abbreviate it to Outlines <\/em>onwards, okay?). Unfortunately Outlines<\/em> wasn’t the book my brother’d discovered, but it was still interesting (not in the least that it’s the first known orthography of the Vai language). Later on I found that the book we’d been looking for was called A Grammar of Vai<\/em>, written by W.E. Welmers, but couldn’t find it anywhere (except libraries that, naturally, didn’t do overseas looans).<\/p>\n

Come 2016 and I had a job with a bit of passive travel time getting there and back, so finally I had the time to do some reading without distractions! So I started going though Outlines<\/em> seriously, trying to learn a bit. Also, I started searching online for more info than was on Wikipedia, and a random search on the syllable ꕉ on Twitter led me to a user called @zenodotous who had quoted a Vai proverb<\/a>. Checking his timeline I saw he, Charles Riley, was working on an English- Vai dictionary and got immensly excited! No less so when he asked if I would like to help out with checking the list for errors. So my travel time for the next three months went into (sort of) proof reading a list of 15 220 terms written in English, Vai and phonetical Vai – from “abandon” (ꕧ ꕪ \/ ꗃ ꔬꕩ [já ka]\/[ɓɔ fíyá]) to “zygote” (ꔞꔤ [kéí]). I read the Vai script before the phonetic, so while it took way longer than the other way around, it made the syllabary stick better.<\/p>\n

During that time I also found A Grammar of Vai<\/a> online, scanned by Google and available in full, which I’m currently going through.<\/p>\n

Hopefully I’ll learn the grammar enough to be able to do more than just have some words in Vai here soon, instead going for whole sentences or pages!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some years ago, I was in New York, visiting my brother. One day we went to the local library and he found a book called A grammar of Vai (or something similar as I could recall) and as our old family name comes from Vai we decided to look it up. Unfortunately we couldn’t borrow …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-meta"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":94,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8\/revisions\/94"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/andre.mabande.se\/vai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}