Demonstrating how easily the Arabic script can be repurposed for Soomaali

[somalipatriot]

@The alchemist is a big brain somali. I'm always proud to read his brainy, wordy lines of text.

Delete your profile photo sayid maxamed xasan AUN was a Somali nationalist and Somali hero who inspired many Somali politicians in the 20th century till present he was the complete opposite of what you’re spreading and saying

 

[Shimbiris]

Delete your profile photo sayid maxamed xasan AUN was a Somali nationalist and Somali hero who inspired many Somali politicians in the 20th century till present he was the complete opposite of what you’re spreading and saying

Watch out, everybody! Mom is on the war path. This nigga out here with the audacity to tell people what profile photos to use. The absolute audacity...



Also, this has to be the funniest thing I've read all week. The sheer lack of awareness, man... like you don't know that the Sayyid used the Arabic script (and ARABIC) to write on a regular basis:

https://saxafimedia.com/letter-sayyid-muhammad-abdallah-hasan-british-governor-somaliland/

You realize that more than half of his entire thing was that he hated gaal influences on Somalis and was very religious? He would have absolutely DESPISED the idea of using the Latin script over something like the Arabic script. Man would have been fuming. He didn't have much regard for carabs like most Somalis of his time (unlike current Somalis who often bootyclap, unfortunately) but what does that have to do with anything? I am not suggesting Somalis Arabize at all so I don't get it if that's your gripe. You are literally fighting a strawman if that is the case.

With that being said, the picture I'm using isn't him. It's a misattribution to him from what I've seen. No idea what he looks like. I chose it because I like the get-up title holders like him use and because the saaxiib resembles my aabo right down to the skin tone.

 

[The alchemist]

@The alchemist is a big brain somali. I'm always proud to read his brainy, wordy lines of text.

Thank you. I value the content you guys provide on this forum using better precise language, enriching with a better knowledge base about things I know little about.

 

[somalipatriot]

Watch out, everybody! Mom is on the war path. This nigga out here with the audacity to tell people what profile photos to use. The absolute audacity...



Also, this has to be the funniest thing I've read all week. The sheer lack of awareness, man... like you don't know that the Sayyid used the Arabic script (and ARABIC) to write on a regular basis:

https://saxafimedia.com/letter-sayyid-muhammad-abdallah-hasan-british-governor-somaliland/

You realize that more than half of his entire thing was that he hated gaal influences on Somalis and was very religious? He would have absolutely DESPISED the idea of using the Latin script over something like the Arabic script. Man would have been fuming. He didn't have much regard for carabs like most Somalis of his time (unlike current Somalis who often bootyclap, unfortunately) but what does that have to do with anything? I am not suggesting Somalis Arabize at all so I don't get it if that's your gripe. You are literally fighting a strawman if that is the case.

With that being said, the picture I'm using isn't him. It's a misattribution to him from what I've seen. No idea what he looks like. I chose it because I like the get-up title holders like him use and because the saaxiib resembles my aabo right down to the skin tone.

Probably because he went to Mecca and studied Arabic? Remember this was the 19th century he died in 1920 there was no script of the Somali language and he opposed colonialism and you can’t give the opinion of a person that didn’t live to see it that he would despise the Somali script Latin that absolutely makes no sense and to give you a little advice don’t use foul language it only makes you sound stereotyping

 

[Shimbiris]

Probably because he went to Mecca and studied Arabic? Remember this was the 19th century he died in 1920 there was no script of the Somali language and he opposed colonialism and you can’t give the opinion of a person that didn’t live to see it that he would despise the Somali script Latin that absolutely makes no sense and to give you a little advice don’t use foul language it only makes you sound stereotyping

I'm gonna get a bit snippy when you have the audacity to demand I stop using my profile pic, walaal. Who do you think you are? Don't be ridiculous. But anyway, I'd bet good money he would be disgusted by the use of the Latin script. The common narrative for why he partly began fighting colonial powers was that he encountered Somali boys under French colonial influence who told him they belonged to the church when he asked them about their qabiil.

How do you think he would react if he heard that Somalis are now using the writing script of those same French people? Or the Brits and Italians he was sworn against? He fought and died in part to prevent westerners from perverting our culture, which he clearly did not feel writing in Arabic was not a part of, he would no doubt be disgusted and see it as a symbolic defeat that we are using their writing system today.

 

[Som]

That's not true. It seems the practice of using the Arabic script to transcribe Somali or impromptu throwing Somali words into Arabic written sentences existed as far back as the 1100s given that it's origin is commonly attributed to a well-known and accounted for Somali ("Barbari") man from that period by the local Somalis who greeted western scholars during periods like the 19th and 20th centuries. If you're going to then leap up and claim there's no proof of this then I don't know what to tell you. The Somalis of periods like the 18th-19th centuries claim as much and were already clearly using Arabic to transcribe Somali in a manner that didn't look like they just made it up on the spot. You're just going to look like some dude with cuqdad if you claim they were apparently lying. Honestly, I think types like you would deny Wadaad's writing existed at all if we didn't have clear, undeniable examples that it did like below:

We have no written documents or inscription in af somali written in Arabic before the late 1800s. Nothing. It's very weird that a script allegedly used since the middle ages never appeared anywhere for 700-800 years. I'm aware of the tradition that attributes wadaad script to Aw Barkhadle but there is no evidence this is true. Literate people did exist in Somalia for a long time, but they used Arabic instead of af somali written with far wadaad.The video you posted shows a very recent wadaad script example from last century.

 

[Som]

That's not true. It seems the practice of using the Arabic script to transcribe Somali or impromptu throwing Somali words into Arabic written sentences existed as far back as the 1100s given that it's origin is commonly attributed to a well-known and accounted for Somali ("Barbari") man from that period by the local Somalis who greeted western scholars during periods like the 19th and 20th centuries. If you're going to then leap up and claim there's no proof of this then I don't know what to tell you. The Somalis of periods like the 18th-19th centuries claim as much and were already clearly using Arabic to transcribe Somali in a manner that didn't look like they just made it up on the spot. You're just going to look like some dude with cuqdad if you claim they were apparently lying. Honestly, I think types like you would deny Wadaad's writing existed at all if we didn't have clear, undeniable examples that it did like below:

Anyway I haven't nothing against wadaad script. If you show me one example of wadaad script dating before the 1850s I'll retract my statements and agree with you.
Right now my position is that wadaad script is a recent adaptation that preceded latin alphabet by just one 100 years at most.

 

[Shimbiris]

We have no written documents or inscription in af somali written in Arabic before the late 1800s. Nothing. It's very weird that a script allegedly used since the middle ages never appeared anywhere for 700-800 years. I'm aware of the tradition that attributes wadaad script to Aw Barkhadle but there is no evidence this is true. Literate people did exist in Somalia for a long time, but they used Arabic instead of af somali written with far wadaad.The video you posted shows a very recent wadaad script example from last century.

Feels like you're being genuinely religious about the idea of "absence of evidence = evidence of absence". There's not much evidence of texts before the 1800s because there's not much of any surviving texts from the entire eastern Horn before that outside of some pockets like Harar or some old Koonfur cities and some private collections I've heard of that still need translating which, by the way, is where a lot of the recent revelations we keep getting about people like Barkhadle or dynasties like the Walashma. Would you then claim Somalis never used to write Arabic at all because you can't find much of any texts before the year 1800?

You'd look pretty foolish when you see accounts like that of Battuta's or from several other Islamic world sources talking about random Somali ("Barbari") scholars from various port-towns across our coast, no? Right there you'd erase a huge part of Somali culture and history because some papers didn't locally survive for a few centuries. But that being said, Somalis from the early modern era seem to plainly state to the ajanabi anthropologists they met that Wadaad's writing is an old tradition going back generations and attribute it to Aw Barkhadle whom we find out through other sources was a real person who was in fact a scholar and preacher which fits with what the Somalis claimed he did. What reason is there to doubt all of this?

 

[Som]

Feels like you're being genuinely religious about the idea of "absence of evidence = evidence of absence". There's not much evidence of texts before the 1800s because there's not much of any surviving texts from the entire eastern Horn before that outside of some pockets like Harar or some old Koonfur cities and some private collections I've heard of that still need translating which, by the way, is where a lot of the recent revelations we keep getting about people like Barkhadle or dynasties like the Walashma. Would you then claim Somalis never used to write Arabic at all because you can't find much of any texts before the year 1800?

You'd look pretty foolish when you see accounts like that of Battuta's or from several other Islamic world sources talking about random Somali ("Barbari") scholars from various port-towns across our coast, no? Right there you'd erase a huge part of Somali culture and history because some papers didn't locally survive for a few centuries. But that being said, Somalis from the early modern era seem to plainly state to the ajanabi anthropologists they met that Wadaad's writing is an old tradition going back generations and attribute it to Aw Barkhadle whom we find out through other sources was a real person who was in fact a scholar and preacher which fits with what the Somalis claimed he did. What reason is there to doubt all of this?

Ok good objection, it's true that lack of evidence is different from evidence of absence. The point is that the fact we have no evidence of pre 1800s wadaad script means that somalis didn't use that very often.
Ibn battuta mentioned the somali sultan of Mogadishu and described him as being able to speak both Mogadishan (somali) and Arabic. It's likely that Somali elites used the Arabic language in written documents the nomadic masses were mostly illiterate. Even in recent times (1800s) some Somali shaykhs or merchants still used Arabic to comunicate with other somalis in the written form.
So Wadaad script was never widespread and was confined to few educated people in the last 150 years. We have Arabic script based african languages like Swahili, Harari , some west African languages etc that have some texts dating back hundreds of years before the earliest examples of wadaad script. If we are going to change the somali script for nationalistic or cultural reasons why use a foreign script that never became widespread? Remember changing everything is costly , i don't know of any country that abbandoned the latin alphabet to switch to another one in recent times. Wadaad script is not codified, we would need a special commission to standardize it. It's too much work for something we don't need

 

[Som]

Feels like you're being genuinely religious about the idea of "absence of evidence = evidence of absence". There's not much evidence of texts before the 1800s because there's not much of any surviving texts from the entire eastern Horn before that outside of some pockets like Harar or some old Koonfur cities and some private collections I've heard of that still need translating which, by the way, is where a lot of the recent revelations we keep getting about people like Barkhadle or dynasties like the Walashma. Would you then claim Somalis never used to write Arabic at all because you can't find much of any texts before the year 1800?

You'd look pretty foolish when you see accounts like that of Battuta's or from several other Islamic world sources talking about random Somali ("Barbari") scholars from various port-towns across our coast, no? Right there you'd erase a huge part of Somali culture and history because some papers didn't locally survive for a few centuries. But that being said, Somalis from the early modern era seem to plainly state to the ajanabi anthropologists they met that Wadaad's writing is an old tradition going back generations and attribute it to Aw Barkhadle whom we find out through other sources was a real person who was in fact a scholar and preacher which fits with what the Somalis claimed he did. What reason is there to doubt all of this?

Anyway I'm not claiming somalis didn't write Arabic. I'm saying they didn't write Somali in Arabic letters untill relatively recently.
Somalia certainly needs more archeological research no doubt. Maybe we have some evidence waiting to be discovered but the fact af Somali has zero written evidence before the 1800s probably means it was never a written language. This is not shameful or anything like that. There are many languages even in Europe that never had their own alphabet and speakers of those languages used german, Italian, french or Latin in the written form.

 

[Apollo]

Speaking of languages, I comprehend this video much much better than I do Af-Maay, yet Yiddish is considered a separate language from German.

All politics what makes a dialect or a language. @Shimbiris @reer

 

[Apollo]

I want to see a version of this with Arabs and Ancient Egyptians.

 

[Shimbiris]

Ok good objection, it's true that lack of evidence is different from evidence of absence. The point is that the fact we have no evidence of pre 1800s wadaad script means that somalis didn't use that very often.
Ibn battuta mentioned the somali sultan of Mogadishu and described him as being able to speak both Mogadishan (somali) and Arabic. It's likely that Somali elites used the Arabic language in written documents the nomadic masses were mostly illiterate. Even in recent times (1800s) some Somali shaykhs or merchants still used Arabic to comunicate with other somalis in the written form.
So Wadaad script was never widespread and was confined to few educated people in the last 150 years. We have Arabic script based african languages like Swahili, Harari , some west African languages etc that have some texts dating back hundreds of years before the earliest examples of wadaad script. If we are going to change the somali script for nationalistic or cultural reasons why use a foreign script that never became widespread? Remember changing everything is costly , i don't know of any country that abbandoned the latin alphabet to switch to another one in recent times. Wadaad script is not codified, we would need a special commission to standardize it. It's too much work for something we don't need

I don't really buy that most of the reer miyi were illiterate. This not even true of the last 200 years. They were functionally illiterate in that they could not read and write in a language they actually understood but it seems like, as you can see with some of the examples I shared in this thread's opening post, it was fairly common as it is today for young children to be taught how to read and write the Qur'an by travelling Wadaads using those wooden boards and this practice seemed already mature, common and well-established by the 19th century, alluding to it being quite old but who knows. This is common across the Muslim world, by the way. A lot of rural Muslims across the Sahara and Nile Valley, for example, were actually "literate" and were similarly taught to read the Qur'an.

Anyway, I dunno, walaal. Whether or not it was super popular is kind of irrelevant? We're arguing about whether or not we historically used the script to write in Somali. We have a clear established history of it being used in the last 200 years and seeming developed and mature by that point then people locally claim this has been going on for generations, we already know Arabic itself has been used for a millennia and have many accounts to corroborate this, and the guy they attribute Far Wadaad to turns out to be real and a proven real by sources completely outside the Horn itself. I have no reason to assume they were lying especially since it all makes sense and lines up. Why do you insist on thinking they did? And for the record, Hararis only really began transcribing their language in the Arabic script, if we are to be religious about accounts and how far the corpus goes back, around the early modern era barely a century before when you insist Somalis did. There's no account that their language or ethnic group even existed before around the 17th century. They are not even mentioned once as a people in the Futux al-Xabasha (16th century) are not seemingly the Harla who appear to be a totally distinct group who are not from Harar.

All that aside, I hate to personalize discussions like this but it feels like you have a general pattern of diminishing your own folk, walaal. I've seen an old thread of yours where you were implying Somalis were never seafarers and outside tradesmen until you were presented with pictorial and written evidence to the contrary. Some simple googling should have shown you as much that Somalis traded across the Indian Ocean quite regularly and were definitely seafarers:

Not to mention accounts from medieval Arabs and classical Greeks describing extensive trade with outside groups and the exact same kinds of sewn Indian ocean boats that we, Arabs, Indians and Swahili coast folk have used for at least 2,000 years. Without these accounts I guess you'd start claiming Somalis only started fishing, seafaring and venturing to foreign ports during the 17th-18th centuries? This is not how historical study and inquiry is conducted, walaal. Everything isn't about written accounts. Some amount of logic, archaeological evidence, comparative linguistics and several other avenues are considered along with historical texts to form the big picture. Even oral traditions, believe it or not, are not useless but in fact often highly indispensable. To be honest, you'd be shocked how intense even something like oral traditions can be. You have Aborigines seeming to account events that occurred thousands of years ago in their myths:

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

Somali and Arab oral traditions are even more legit given that these are societies who arguably even more highly value preserving oral traditions and not corrupting them. If you're going to try and debunk this with the qabiil origin myths; those were most likely intentionally told the way they were told to make Somalis closer to Islam but even those people couldn't help but weave in highly illuminating historical insights like Waaqist story elements and give away our pre-Islamic faith to some extent.

A lot of young suugo scientists who don't know how historical study works come in with this "Chinese whispers" nonsense and think that means all oral traditions are useless. Very silly stuff. You'd be surprised how much Somali history in Koonfur some scholars were able to reconstruct I would argue very accurately, along with some written texts here and there from the early modern era and middle ages, by linking it with what clans lived in which settlements like coastal towns and interior villages, local linguistics, archaeology and cultural anthropology.

But anyway, I'm going off topic. Point is, it often feels like you try to diminish/downplay Somalis quite a bit though I don't think this comes from any maliciousness but rather cuqdad and an inability to believe Somalis achieved much throughout history that borders on wanting it to be that way masquerading as healthy skepticism. Can't blame you. The last 30 years have been rough but don't let that make you see your people as qasaro or something, walaal. If I have strawmanned you with this then apologies in advance and forgive me.

Remember changing everything is costly , i don't know of any country that abbandoned the latin alphabet to switch to another one in recent times. Wadaad script is not codified, we would need a special commission to standardize it. It's too much work for something we don't need

It's not the 1970s. The world is digital now. It's not remotely as costly to make a script change and it could work to even boost literacy as many even reer miyi can read some Arabic let alone reer tuulo iyo magaal who go to dugsi. Periplus is correct in that more people in Somaliweyn right now most likely know how to read the Arabic script than the Latin script and in a more complex Qur'anic form than what I am suggesting. For a lot of people it wouldn't even be a script change.

 

[Shimbiris]

I want to see a version of this with Arabs and Ancient Egyptians.

Latin along with its Romance descendants are my favorite sounding languages along with, and I admit I'm biased in this, phonologically conservative Afro-Asiatic languages. I like my Cas, Xas, Khas and Ghas, walaal. It's distinguished. But these Romance languages flow like biyo off the tongue.

 

[Apollo]

Latin along with its Romance descendants are my favorite sounding languages along with, and I admit I'm biased in this, phonologically conservative Afro-Asiatic languages. I like my Cas, Xas, Khas and Ghas, walaal. It's distinguished. But these Romance languages flow like biyo off the tongue.

Sadly, in Europe the only ''prestigious'' Romance/Neo-Latin language is French, which is the least Latin/Roman of them all. Even less than Romanian. Gaulish (Celtic) and Frankish (Germanic) barbarians butchered it, especially in pronunciation.

Italian and Spanish are apparently much closer to Latin.

 

[Shimbiris]

Sadly, in Europe the only ''prestigious'' Romance/Neo-Latin language is French, which is the least Latin/Roman of them all. Even less than Romanian. Gaulish (Celtic) and Frankish (Germanic) barbarians butchered it, especially in pronunciation.

Italian and Spanish are apparently much closer to Latin.

I've head the same, especially about Italian. This guy right here is a delightful tl;dr source for everything Latin and sometimes also Ancient Greek:



You can definitely tell even as a layman that something is funky about French given how distinct it sounds from the others.

 

[Apollo]

@Shimbiris

While we are on the topic of linguistics, do you think Fusha Arabic will ever become a vernacular like how Israel turned a literary/liturgical language into a spoken vernacular?

If not, what factors do you think prevent this?

 

[Som]

I don't really buy that most of the reer miyi were illiterate. This not even true of the last 200 years. They were functionally illiterate in that they could not read and write in a language they actually understood but it seems like, as you can see with some of the examples I shared in this thread's opening post, it was fairly common as it is today for young children to be taught how to read and write the Qur'an by travelling Wadaads using those wooden boards and this practice seemed already mature, common and well-established by the 19th century, alluding to it being quite old but who knows. This is common across the Muslim world, by the way. A lot of rural Muslims across the Sahara and Nile Valley, for example, were actually "literate" and were similarly taught to read the Qur'an.

Anyway, I dunno, walaal. Whether or not it was super popular is kind of irrelevant? We're arguing about whether or not we historically used the script to write in Somali. We have a clear established history of it being used in the last 200 years and seeming developed and mature by that point then people locally claim this has been going on for generations, we already know Arabic itself has been used for a millennia and have many accounts to corroborate this, and the guy they attribute Far Wadaad to turns out to be real and a proven real by sources completely outside the Horn itself. I have no reason to assume they were lying especially since it all makes sense and lines up. Why do you insist on thinking they did? And for the record, Hararis only really began transcribing their language in the Arabic script, if we are to be religious about accounts and how far the corpus goes back, around the early modern era barely a century before when you insist Somalis did. There's no account that their language or ethnic group even existed before around the 17th century. They are not even mentioned once as a people in the Futux al-Xabasha (16th century) are not seemingly the Harla who appear to be a totally distinct group who are not from Harar.

All that aside, I hate to personalize discussions like this but it feels like you have a general pattern of diminishing your own folk, walaal. I've seen an old thread of yours where you were implying Somalis were never seafarers and outside tradesmen until you were presented with pictorial and written evidence to the contrary. Some simple googling should have shown you as much that Somalis traded across the Indian Ocean quite regularly and were definitely seafarers:

Not to mention accounts from medieval Arabs and classical Greeks describing extensive trade with outside groups and the exact same kinds of sewn Indian ocean boats that we, Arabs, Indians and Swahili coast folk have used for at least 2,000 years. Without these accounts I guess you'd start claiming Somalis only started fishing, seafaring and venturing to foreign ports during the 17th-18th centuries? This is not how historical study and inquiry is conducted, walaal. Everything isn't about written accounts. Some amount of logic, archaeological evidence, comparative linguistics and several other avenues are considered along with historical texts to form the big picture. Even oral traditions, believe it or not, are not useless but in fact often highly indispensable. To be honest, you'd be shocked how intense even something like oral traditions can be. You have Aborigines seeming to account events that occurred thousands of years ago in their myths:

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

Somali and Arab oral traditions are even more legit given that these are societies who arguably even more highly value preserving oral traditions and not corrupting them. If you're going to try and debunk this with the qabiil origin myths; those were most likely intentionally told the way they were told to make Somalis closer to Islam but even those people couldn't help but weave in highly illuminating historical insights like Waaqist story elements and give away our pre-Islamic faith to some extent.

A lot of young suugo scientists who don't know how historical study works come in with this "Chinese whispers" nonsense and think that means all oral traditions are useless. Very silly stuff. You'd be surprised how much Somali history in Koonfur some scholars were able to reconstruct I would argue very accurately, along with some written texts here and there from the early modern era and middle ages, by linking it with what clans lived in which settlements like coastal towns and interior villages, local linguistics, archaeology and cultural anthropology.

But anyway, I'm going off topic. Point is, it often feels like you try to diminish/downplay Somalis quite a bit though I don't think this comes from any maliciousness but rather cuqdad and an inability to believe Somalis achieved much throughout history that borders on wanting it to be that way masquerading as healthy skepticism. Can't blame you. The last 30 years have been rough but don't let that make you see your people as qasaro or something, walaal. If I have strawmanned you with this then apologies in advance and forgive me.



It's not the 1970s. The world is digital now. It's not remotely as costly to make a script change and it could work to even boost literacy as many even reer miyi can read some Arabic let alone reer tuulo iyo magaal who go to dugsi. Periplus is correct in that more people in Somaliweyn right now most likely know how to read the Arabic script than the Latin script and in a more complex Qur'anic form than what I am suggesting. For a lot of people it wouldn't even be a script change.

Bro i think you didn't pay enough attention to my threads. I'm a staunch pansomalist and would never undermine my own people BUT as a history enthusiast I care about being accurate. I've discussed many times against anti somali posters who falsely overestimated Arab influence in Xamar and stuff like that so I'm not somebody who would look down on somali history. My post about seafaring somali culture was a legitimate question because sources about somalis going to places outside of Arabia and the horn are very very scarce, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen but it's from the evidence we have it doesn't seem like somalis travelled to India on a regular basis. The answers in that thread were very interesting and provided me with more information to increase my knowledge on the subject, when I ask something like " did somalis ever do this or that" I'm simply asking for evidence to know more about our people's History.In the same Wadaad script evidence is very recent and non existent before the late 1800s therefore I dismiss adopting it for both cultural, historical and practical reasons. That's my personal opinion though, I wouldn't be totally against it if we had good plan to tackle illiteracy and evidence that suggests wadaad script is more practical and useful than our latin based script.
To conclude my point, as a diaspora somali my self I feel like we western born/raised somalis don't understand the concept of being proud to be Somali. In our culture a somali always thinks he is the best, but unlike europeans he doesn't need any evidence of great civilizations or kingdoms. The most poor backward Somali will always feel proud to be somali and doesn't need to brag about the past to be proud of his people. My ancestor and your ancestors were probably camel herders but they still felt like they were better than the queen of England and the entire European nobility because of their Somali lineage and ancestry. This attitude is both the strength and the curse of somalis because it's great to be proud of who you are but sometimes we become arrogant.
Anyway of course we had complex civilizations and kingdoms but there's people who had greater civilizations than us, does this make us inferior? Not at all. I would be proud to be Somali even if we only had stone age history because being somali is enough for me to be proud.
I hope you get my point.

 

[Som]

I don't really buy that most of the reer miyi were illiterate. This not even true of the last 200 years. They were functionally illiterate in that they could not read and write in a language they actually understood but it seems like, as you can see with some of the examples I shared in this thread's opening post, it was fairly common as it is today for young children to be taught how to read and write the Qur'an by travelling Wadaads using those wooden boards and this practice seemed already mature, common and well-established by the 19th century, alluding to it being quite old but who knows. This is common across the Muslim world, by the way. A lot of rural Muslims across the Sahara and Nile Valley, for example, were actually "literate" and were similarly taught to read the Qur'an.

Anyway, I dunno, walaal. Whether or not it was super popular is kind of irrelevant? We're arguing about whether or not we historically used the script to write in Somali. We have a clear established history of it being used in the last 200 years and seeming developed and mature by that point then people locally claim this has been going on for generations, we already know Arabic itself has been used for a millennia and have many accounts to corroborate this, and the guy they attribute Far Wadaad to turns out to be real and a proven real by sources completely outside the Horn itself. I have no reason to assume they were lying especially since it all makes sense and lines up. Why do you insist on thinking they did? And for the record, Hararis only really began transcribing their language in the Arabic script, if we are to be religious about accounts and how far the corpus goes back, around the early modern era barely a century before when you insist Somalis did. There's no account that their language or ethnic group even existed before around the 17th century. They are not even mentioned once as a people in the Futux al-Xabasha (16th century) are not seemingly the Harla who appear to be a totally distinct group who are not from Harar.

All that aside, I hate to personalize discussions like this but it feels like you have a general pattern of diminishing your own folk, walaal. I've seen an old thread of yours where you were implying Somalis were never seafarers and outside tradesmen until you were presented with pictorial and written evidence to the contrary. Some simple googling should have shown you as much that Somalis traded across the Indian Ocean quite regularly and were definitely seafarers:

Not to mention accounts from medieval Arabs and classical Greeks describing extensive trade with outside groups and the exact same kinds of sewn Indian ocean boats that we, Arabs, Indians and Swahili coast folk have used for at least 2,000 years. Without these accounts I guess you'd start claiming Somalis only started fishing, seafaring and venturing to foreign ports during the 17th-18th centuries? This is not how historical study and inquiry is conducted, walaal. Everything isn't about written accounts. Some amount of logic, archaeological evidence, comparative linguistics and several other avenues are considered along with historical texts to form the big picture. Even oral traditions, believe it or not, are not useless but in fact often highly indispensable. To be honest, you'd be shocked how intense even something like oral traditions can be. You have Aborigines seeming to account events that occurred thousands of years ago in their myths:

Science | AAAS

www.science.org

Somali and Arab oral traditions are even more legit given that these are societies who arguably even more highly value preserving oral traditions and not corrupting them. If you're going to try and debunk this with the qabiil origin myths; those were most likely intentionally told the way they were told to make Somalis closer to Islam but even those people couldn't help but weave in highly illuminating historical insights like Waaqist story elements and give away our pre-Islamic faith to some extent.

A lot of young suugo scientists who don't know how historical study works come in with this "Chinese whispers" nonsense and think that means all oral traditions are useless. Very silly stuff. You'd be surprised how much Somali history in Koonfur some scholars were able to reconstruct I would argue very accurately, along with some written texts here and there from the early modern era and middle ages, by linking it with what clans lived in which settlements like coastal towns and interior villages, local linguistics, archaeology and cultural anthropology.

But anyway, I'm going off topic. Point is, it often feels like you try to diminish/downplay Somalis quite a bit though I don't think this comes from any maliciousness but rather cuqdad and an inability to believe Somalis achieved much throughout history that borders on wanting it to be that way masquerading as healthy skepticism. Can't blame you. The last 30 years have been rough but don't let that make you see your people as qasaro or something, walaal. If I have strawmanned you with this then apologies in advance and forgive me.



It's not the 1970s. The world is digital now. It's not remotely as costly to make a script change and it could work to even boost literacy as many even reer miyi can read some Arabic let alone reer tuulo iyo magaal who go to dugsi. Periplus is correct in that more people in Somaliweyn right now most likely know how to read the Arabic script than the Latin script and in a more complex Qur'anic form than what I am suggesting. For a lot of people it wouldn't even be a script change.

Anyway. Somali oral history can be a boomerang sometimes especially when it comes to pre Islamic history. Somalis usually claim any pre Islamic site was built by foreign gaalos to detach themselves from non-muslims while in reality it was a product of pre Islamic somalis. Saada mire explains this very well in her book when she asks northern somalis about the pre Islamic and christian burial sites, people said all sorts of madness like it was built by oromos or any other foreign non muslim and suggested somalis came later and found those burial sites . Modern scholarship debunks those claims and suggests those archeological sites are the product of pre Islamic somalis. So this is an example of how Somali oral history can be sometimes unreliable. We should be careful to distinguish what is true and what isn't.

 

[Shimbiris]

Bro i think you didn't pay enough attention to my threads. I'm a staunch pansomalist and would never undermine my own people BUT as a history enthusiast I care about being accurate. I've discussed many times against anti somali posters who falsely overestimated Arab influence in Xamar and stuff like that so I'm not somebody who would look down on somali history. My post about seafaring somali culture was a legitimate question because sources about somalis going to places outside of Arabia and the horn are very very scarce, it doesn't mean that it didn't happen but it's from the evidence we have it doesn't seem like somalis travelled to India on a regular basis. The answers in that thread were very interesting and provided me with more information to increase my knowledge on the subject, when I ask something like " did somalis ever do this or that" I'm simply asking for evidence to know more about our people's History.In the same Wadaad script evidence is very recent and non existent before the late 1800s therefore I dismiss adopting it for both cultural, historical and practical reasons. That's my personal opinion though, I wouldn't be totally against it if we had good plan to tackle illiteracy and evidence that suggests wadaad script is more practical and useful than our latin based script.
To conclude my point, as a diaspora somali my self I feel like we western born/raised somalis don't understand the concept of being proud to be Somali. In our culture a somali always thinks he is the best, but unlike europeans he doesn't need any evidence of great civilizations or kingdoms. The most poor backward Somali will always feel proud to be somali and doesn't need to brag about the past to be proud of his people. My ancestor and your ancestors were probably camel herders but they still felt like they were better than the queen of England and the entire European nobility because of their Somali lineage and ancestry. This attitude is both the strength and the curse of somalis because it's great to be proud of who you are but sometimes we become arrogant.
Anyway of course we had complex civilizations and kingdoms but there's people who had greater civilizations than us, does this make us inferior? Not at all. I would be proud to be Somali even if we only had stone age history because being somali is enough for me to be proud.
I hope you get my point.

Nacalaa... You sent this right as I was about to post:

@Som

It seems I straw-manned and misunderstood you. I apologize, walaal. I got around to reading this thread more and it seems to me you are not the reductionist or self-hater I got into my head that you are. Sincerest apologies. Seems the reductionist is actually @Grant who seemed to claim to me recently via DMs, with no proof, that all Somali vessels used to travel outside of the Somali coast were from the Omanis.

The sheer coincidence.