Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur

Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur
الشيخ عبد الرحمن نور
Born Borama, Somalia
Ethnicity Somali
Occupation teacher, judge

Abdurahman Sheikh Nuur (Somali: Abduuraxmaan Sheekh Nuur, Arabic: الشيخ عبد الرحمن نور‎) was a Somali religious leader and the inventor of the Borama script for the Somali language.[1][2]

Biography

Nuur grew up in Borama, Somalia in a Gadabuursi Dir family.[3]

He was a Qur'anic teacher in the British Somaliland protectorate, and the son of the local qadi (judge) of Borama. Sheikh Nuur would later follow in his father's footsteps by also becoming a qadi, albeit of the entire northern British Somaliland region.[3]

In 1933, Nuur devised a quite phonetically accurate new orthography for transcribing the Somali language. While the script enjoyed considerable currency in his hometown, the Sheikh harbored no illusions as to its widespread adoption, writing in a publication of his wherein he employed the script itself that "I publish it here with no intention of attempting to contribute to the already abundant confusion in the choice of a standard orthography for Somali".[3]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ I.M. Lewis (1958), The Gadabuursi Somali Script, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, Vol. 21, pp. 134–156.
  2. ↑ Somali alphabets, pronunciation and language
  3. 1 2 3 David D. Laitin, Politics, Language, and Thought: The Somali Experience, (University Of Chicago Press: 1977), pp.86-87.

References

External links


This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Tuesday, September 15, 2015. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.