In collaboration with Adinkra SARL, a COVID-19 sensitisation booklet has been translated into the Mmuock language. It is titled Salè 12 lèlok ndáhté Koròwnàváíros ḿbúo Pȃngnkœó (12 boards to explain to kids what coronavirus is). You too can download the booklet and help stop the spread of the virus.
A video animation, with English and French subtitles, is available on youtube.
A series of charts is being developed to aid a better understanding of the Mmuock alphabet as documented by the Mmuock Language Society. The very first chart is for the letters of the alphabet. Take a look.
There are eight days in the Mmuock week. Using the simplified alphabet, we write them as follows:
Ngangè is the first day of the week and is generally a day of rest. Mbeqgnúá is the big market day, while Fa’à is the “small” market day. The other days may have different significance in different Mmuock communities.
One can create a Mmuock calendar by visiting the Mmuock calendar website.
Mmuock is a tonal language. This means: in addition to the letters (from A to Z), you must also indicate the tone of the sound. For example: Ngōng means “world”, while Ngóng means “farming”. The difference between the two words, lies on the tone on the letter ⟨o⟩. Another notable example is Njiè (clothing) and Njíé (smoke).
There are sixteen (16) tones in our Mmuock alphabet, and they are numbered from 0 to 15. The tones are summarised on the alphabet page . Fifteen of the tones are each represented by a particular symbol, giving a total of 15 tone symbols. (The second tone needs no symbol.)
Fifteen symbols seems like quite a lot. Secondly, not all the symbols might be found on the standard keyboard.
Fortunately, in the simplified alphabet, one needs just 4 symbols in order to indicate all 15 tones. That is because 10 tones can alternatively be represented by combining the first 5 tone symbols (tone 0 to tone 4). Therefore, when a symbol is not found on the keyboard, one may use other symbols as indicated in the summary of tones. For example, Mǔ (female parent), which uses tone 5 on ⟨u⟩, may be written as Muù, using tones 2 and 4.
In the remainder of this post, we describe how to produce those first 5 tone symbols on a standard Android keyboard. We consider only the tone on vowel sounds.
The first five tones— from 0 to 4 respectively— are, by letter of the alphabet, indicated as follows:
These symbols can be produced on nearly all keyboards.
[Note: Tones are required also on other vowel letters such as ⟨ø⟩, ⟨æ⟩, ⟨ɛ⟩, ⟨ǝ⟩, etc. Those letters may be absent from your phone. However, they can be written using ⟨a⟩, ⟨e⟩, ⟨i⟩, ⟨o⟩, and ⟨u⟩, as mentioned on the alphabet page.)
Figure 1: Tone marks on tap-and-hold
Question: What if the 4 symbols (ô, ō, ó, ò) are not there?
If the symbols are not present after performing step (1) above, you may have to activate the following keyboards:
Activation is easy if your device is already using Google’s Gboard app. The process is described on their website.
For help with particular phones or tablets, ask.
Contact: info@mmuock.org
