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Welcome to the documentation (Wiki) for the USOILC transcode.
We refer to it as a transcode because the corpus here has been transcoded (typed, hand-coded or copied) and stands independent of the monograph which is a purchasable booklet. In this respect you should think of these adapted pages as 'scholar's notes made accessible for a web audience.
- About the Manuscript
- Contents & Structure
- History & Overview
- Access Guides: quick suggestions
- Real world links to the actual manuscript
- Citations
Standard Igbo (SI or Igbo Izugbe) has supervened for half a century. In 1961 Dr Onwu's name (secretary of SPILC - Society for the Promotion of Igbo Language and Culture/Custom) lent his name to the writing orthography of Igbo. This standard Igbo was adequate for most uses private and academic but it wasn't without some unique weaknesses. One such weakness was the lack of symbols for all possible speech sounds (a phonemic weakness). There were others. Standard Igbo however has been used by teachers and by others to train graduates and adepts of Igbo Language since its promulgation. By 2011 (50 years after 1961) it had become evident that a new developmental push was necessary to harmonize Igbo's direction. The Unified Standard Orthography for the Igbo Language Cluster was the result of that push. Professor Ohiri in her 2013 book, Igbo Speech Varieties describes some of the occasions of its unique history and some justification for its introduction.
'History of the USOILC (pages from Igbo Speech Varieties)'
P.52. One of the criticisms levelled against the official (Ọnwụ) Igbo Orthography of 1961 is that it does not represent some important sounds in many Igbo speech varieties. This is especially so with regard to aspiration and nasalisation which are distinctive in the speech of many groups. An opportunity came to remedy this situation when, in 2011, the Centre for Advanced Studies of African Society (CASAS) based in Cape Town, South Africa included Igbo in its Africa-wide harmonisation and standardisation of African languages project.¹
The harmonisation of the Igbo P.53. cluster alongside Hausa, Ijaw and Yoruba formed part of the Nigerian component of the Africa-wide work. In Nigeria, CASAS executed the project in collaboration with the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilization (CBAAC), an arm of the Federal Ministry of Tourism, Culture and National Orientation.
The Igbo technical orthographic team consisted of the following university staff: Prof. E. Nolue Emenanjo, Prof. Ozo-Mekuri Ndimele, Prof. Ohiri-Aniche, Dr.(Mrs.) Roseline Alerechi, Dr. (Mrs.) C.Eme, Miss Justina Ogbonna and Miss Franca Okumo. They collaborated in the work with the following staff of CBAAC, Lagos: Dr. Anthony C.Onwumah, Director CBAAC, as well as with Dr. Anderson Chebanne, a language expert nominated by CASAS. The Yoruba team included representatives from Nigeria, Benin and Togo while the Hausa team had representatives from Nigeria, Niger, Cameroon, Ghana and Chad. After a series of workshops held in Lagos and Port Harcourt between October and November 2011 by the Igbo team, a draft harmonized and standardized orthography of the Igbo language cluster was produced. This draft was finally examined and critiqued at a workshop held in Johannesburg. South Africa in December 2011. The workshop brought together the representatives of each of the four Nigerian orthography teams (viz: Hausa, Igbo, Ijaw and Yoruba) and language experts who have been working on the CASAS Africa-wide harmonization and standardization of African languages project.²
P.54. The Igbo cluster unified orthography tried to harmonize all existing Igbo varieties orthographies. For instance, the existing 36 alphabetic symbols of the official Igbo (Ọnwụ) orthography are kept intact while symbols from the orthographies of other speech varieties of the cluster are incorporated. As explained on page 3 of the harmonized orthography booklet: "This harmonization does not entail proscribing varieties and any speech form that people currently speak: rather it provides a writing resource for those related varieties. It also seeks to provide an orthography for those varieties that hitherto have not been reduced to writing". The monograph added that the orthography was essentially a (sic) reference material for teachers, writers, publishers, researchers and all others who need it for whatever purpose including dialect study, oral literature, historical research, etc.³
This repository contains files, transcoded manuscripts, links and downloadable portable document files. There are also transcriptions and high-resolution images (pages) of the USOILC manuscript...
This transcode keeps faith and page-parity with the monograph. So that page 1 in the monograph booklet is page 1 in the transcode until the 'Afterword' section of the transcode which provides a justification for its existence. There is one correction of the word Tiger in the monograph which is correctly incorrectly translated as agụ in the sample text. Agụ is the animal referred to as leopard in the language and culture and those corrections are made in the transcoded text, deliberately. This is really the only material difference in the re-rendered text in the transcode.
Multimodal. ____
Access methods to the manuscript include direct access on the repository (GitHub site) by clicking on corpus.pdf and viewing the pages directly on the repository.
Alternatively corpus.pdf can be downloaded for offsite, offline viewing, printing etc.
Downloading the file usoilc.zip provides access to all the pages of the manuscript as independent pages. Unzipping the contents of the zipped folder into a folder on your computer or your device and then accessing index.html via a browser gives you the whole manuscript (transcoded) in an eBook format. However accessing the images folder within the zipped file grants you page by page access (as images) for special citeability or extra portability.
The same page by page access might be afforded to viewers who prefer to view the material online without having to download any things. Space may be restricted on target, end or edge systems or they may not owners of the systems at use during that time, then, access may be enjoyed through using the link embedded and accessible via the ReadMe page here at the repository. This should lead to an online USOILC document viewer. These particularly pages are hosted in a decentralised manner across the wider internet through the interplanetary file system (or IPFS). Whatever may be thought of all these methods, they afford wide means of access for the transcoded notes and are aimed at providing the most access for the manuscript.
Truly multimodal.
The booklet can be procured for money or by following these links to libraries and bookstores that stock them:
¹,²,³ Chinyere Ohiri, Igbo Speech Varieties, pp [52-54], first published 2013, SOLO media International Ltd. ISBN 978-978-933-587-9, published by Centre for Igbo Arts and Culture, 6, Bamako Crescent, Wuse Zone 1 Abuja.
The Meta language guide describing the older orthography on which SI is based is housed here too. Please look for it as a pdf file labelled Ọnwụ's Orthography. This manuscript or the transcode (usoilc) may be considered analogous. The older orthography's inclusion here carries special citation status. This copy was digitised by madam Nkiru Frances W. Pritchett of of SPILCA. It is of fairly wide distribution having been made into many copies, using digital technologies.