Agsin and again I am drawn back to the aesthetic appeal of Ditema tsa Dinoko, also known as Isbheqe Sohlamvu. A good aesthetic is an excellent tool for promotion and its overlay of the IPA chart on the indigenous symbols assures me that this is a result of international syncretism. The iconography is sufficiently simple to allow combinations of sounds and (where appropriate) to compose syllable clusters, which the eye and mind of native speakers can process as a word. The extensive system of prefixes and suffixes in Bantu languages no doubt facilitates this process. It would be fascinating to see a study on the relative speed of comprehension for Ditema tsa Dinoko versus Roman orthography.
There are, however, two questions that come to mind. The first is that of the order of the syllables in the visual medium. If the syllables fit more harmoniously in a non-concatenative order, it is sensible to order them in such a way; but there must be some sequences whoch could be reade in more than order, even if the noun class prefix is clear from the surrounding context. The second question is not so much a question as an observation. Direma tsa Dinoko, along with Mandombe and other African and indigenous scripts, depend on rotational symmetry. Although the reduction of shapes simplifies the number of design components needed to create the specialized font, quite a few persons have difficulty with rotation and reversal, especially when the orthography is so heavily dependent on these processes. Perhaps it is a challenge overcome by practice, but this challenge illustrates the conflict between simplicity of composition and simplicity of comprehension.
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