... In the genius of the Tifinagh letter
The revival of the Tifinagh letter in our contemporary time is a true miracle... Most African peoples have lost their traditional alphabets to the tide of Latin and Germanic languages. The Lama people (the most ancient and most civilized of the American peoples) lost their notation system based on the use of agate. In the twentieth century, Mongolia lost its ancient traditional script, replacing it with Latin and then Russian. English has its old script known as Furthuk... As for the Amazigh script, Tifinagh, it has conquered time and its people and conquered them all...
Tifinagh is an ancient alphabetical system dating back more than 5,000 years. The Tawargs have maintained the tradition of using it in writing to this day. Tifinagh is the only system in the world that was not a development of another alphabetical system. It is not like the Latin script derived from the Phoenician script, nor is it like the Arabic script derived from the Aramaic script, nor is it like the Japanese script derived from the Chinese script of the fifth century, and it is not like the Coptic script derived from the Greek script inlaid with the Demotic system that was used in the Nile Delta... and it is what conclusively proves that This historical authenticity, the likes of which we do not know, is that specialists discovered an inscription in Tunisia called the Toga inscription, preserved to this day in the British Museum, in which texts in Phoenician appear next to texts in the Tifinagh letter,...which means that Tifinagh is not derived from the Phoenician letters that were prevalent. In southern Europe and North Africa, as is the case with the Hellenic, Latin and other systems.
After the desperate struggles of the Amazigh movement against the traditional opponents of the Amazigh component of Moroccan identity and after the intense academic work of the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture, King Mohammed VI prevailed in January 2003 on the Amazigh position calling for the reuse of the Tifinagh system for writing the Amazigh language. The Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture adopted a formula for the Tifinagh script that neutralizes dialect phonetic variations while preserving the letters that indicate sounds that cannot be predicted by the phonological rules of the Amazigh language, within the framework of a comprehensive standardization of this language.
One of the advantages of the Tifinagh system is that it most accurately expresses the sounds of the language it represents? He distinguishes between clear sounds and loud sounds (he distinguishes between clear sounds and loud sounds), And between the simplified and rounded sounds (such as his distinction between the simplified ghīn and the rounded ghīn), and between the perfect vowels and the sounded vowels that are barely perceptible to the ear of a non-Amazigh speaker... and this is what makes Tifinagh superior to the written system in some Germanic languages such as English, in which the written text differs from what is read in a way that complicates the learning function. In a way that even the people of the English language themselves are not satisfied with.
One of the functional advantages of this writing system is that each Amazigh phoneme has one letter that represents it, so the forms of this representation do not differ between small and large, as is the case in Latin, where we make a useless distinction between magiskol and miniskol, and its forms do not differ according to its position in the word, as It is the case in Arabic where the letter takes different shapes according to its position in the word, which complicates the students’ task of learning.
One of the features of the Tifinagh script is that it is the most harmonious alphabetic system in its geometric structure. All the letters of this system can be reduced to a square whose diagonals divide it into equal squares, and which three small circles divide into two equal halves. Another of its geometric features (which distinguishes it from all alphabetical systems in the world) is that it can be written from left to right, and from right to left. Bottom to top and top to bottom, although the standard formula is written from left to right.
To see a documented history of the history of Tifinagh in Morocco, the reader can refer to the book Tirra aux origines de l’écriture au Maroc, which was published by the Royal Institute of Amazigh Culture in 2003, and was written by Al-Sakunti, Al-Majidi, and Naim.
a summary
Tifinagh is not just a writing system, but rather a manifestation of the genius of the peoples of North Africa. Therefore, we should pay special attention to it at the national and international levels as well.
Abdullah Al-Helwi
An Amazigh actor, head of the English Studies Department at Cadi Ayyad University, and a doctor in linguistics
Source: websites