Afaka is a defective script. Tone is phonemic but not written. Final consonants are not written, but long vowels are, by adding a vowel letter. Prenasalized stops and voiced stops are written with the same letters, and syllables with the vowels and are seldom distinguished: The syllables /, /, and / have separate letters, but syllables starting with the consonants do not. Thus the Afaka rendition of Ndyuka could also be read as Dyoka. In four cases syllables with and are not distinguished ; a single letter is used for both and , and another for both and . Several consonants have only one glyph assigned to them. These are , which only has a glyph for ; , which only has ; , which only has ; and , which only has . There are no glyphs assigned specifically to the consonant ~ . The result of these conflations is that the only syllables for which there is no ambiguity are those beginning with the consonant . There is a single punctuation mark, the pipe, which corresponds to a comma or a period. Afaka initially used spaces between words, but not all writers have continued to do so.
Etymology
The origins of many of the letters are obscure, though several appear to be acrophonic rebuses, with many of these being symbols from Africa. Examples of rebuses include a curl with a dot in it representing a baby in the belly, which stands for ; two hands outstretched to give stand for ; iconic symbols for come and go to represent or and ; two linked circles for we stand for , while is an inversion of , corresponding to the pronouns you and me; letters like Roman numeralstwo and four are and . and are said to represent feces and urine. A "+" sign stands for or , from the wordname, derived from the practice of signing one's name with an X. The odd conflation of and is due to the letter being a pair of hooks, which is uku in Ndyuka. The only letters which appear to correspond to the Latin alphabet are the vowels a, o, and maybe e, though o is justified as the shape of the mouth when pronouncing it.
Variants and syllabic order
Texts in Afaka's own hand show significant variation in the letters. A good number are rotated a quarter turn, and sometimes inverted as well; these are be, di, dyo, fi, ga, ge, ye, ni, nya, pu, se, so, te, and tu, while lo, ba/pa, and wa may be in mirror-image and sa, to may be simply inverted. Others have curved vs angular variants: do, fa, ge, go, ko, and kwa. In yet others, the variants appear to reflect differences in stroke order. The traditional mnemonic order may partially reflect the origins of some of the signs. For example, tu and fo, yu and mi, and ko and go are placed near each other. Other syllables are placed near each other to spell out words: futu, odi, and ati, or even phrases: a moke un taki, masa gado te baka ben ye. s can be seen in comparing these two syllabaries, with some letters rotated and others more angular in the mid syllabary. The bottom order is arranged top-to-bottom according to the Dutch alphabetic order, reflecting the Dutch spellings j and oe for modern Ndyuka y and u, respectively.
Sample text
This is apparently the first letter written by Afaka. It was copied into the Patili Molosi Buku c. 1917.
