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The Revelation: The earliest known use of ʿajamī as a label

The interlinear glosses written in African languages of West Africa often have a descriptive metalinguistic marker, asserting the presence of an Ajami segment.

Our blog has the acronym A-LABEL: we deal a lot with the African languages between the lines. But why “label”? This is because the interlinear glosses written in African languages of West Africa often have a descriptive metalinguistic marker, asserting the presence of an Ajami segment. This marker is typically a graphic variation of the word ʿajamī (عجمي – the form written on our logo) or ʿajam. Another way of the metalinguistic labelling of the Ajami glosses found in the manuscripts is the Arabic phrase fī kalāminā ‘in our language’ (في كلامنا) and its variations (for the use of ʿajamī and fī kalāminā in Soninke and other Mande manuscripts see Ogorodnikova 2017: 122-125).[1]

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Fur Ajami: an invisible tradition

More on “invisible” Ajami from our colleague Nikolay Dobronravin who already wrote for our Ajami Lab a piece on invisibility of Ajami writing in Nigeria, Chad and Sudan. This time he takes us to Darfur (‘the land of the Fur’) to explore a history of Ajami writing in Fur, a Nilo-Sahran language spoken in the west of the Republic of the Sudan.   

Read his fascinating account of Fur Ajami: The Fur (For, Fūranq bilī, Poor’íŋ belé) variety of Ajami: an invisible tradition.

Following Nikolay’s lead outlined in the above paper, I am heading to London next week to consult Kītāb Dālī , the mysterious Fur law book. Who knows, maybe we are just a short flight from another Ajami discovery.  

Transliterating Ajami into the Latin script

The conventions we use to transliterate African languages from Arabic to Latin script.

One of the hardest things about working on Ajami manuscripts is interpreting the African language that is written in the Arabic script. This is because oftentimes certain contrastive sounds (phonemes, nasalization, tone) are not marked.

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How to use Tropy to analyze Ajami manuscripts

Working through Ajami manuscripts can be slow-going. Here is a standard workflow using Tropy that can make it a little easier.

Working through Ajami manuscripts can be slow-going. One important tool in our workflow is the open-source software Tropy from the same people behind everyone’s favorite reference management software Zotero.

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