Mankon For Beginners

The purpose of this book is to develop the Mankon language. It is designed to serve as an introductory text for anyone learning to speak or write Mankon-Ngeumba

The orthography of Mankon-Ngeumba in this book uses the International Phonetic Alphabets (IPA). The authors believe that the IPA is a lot easier to use in writing a tonal language like Mankon-Ngeumba because each alphabet has a very distinct sound. Once the decision to use the IPA was arrived at by the authors, a subset of 37 IPA characters was identified from 107 IPA characters for use in developing the language.

This book thus consists of 37 IPA character frames. The goal in each frame is to introduce the sound of each IPA character to the learner. To this end, a short story or folk tale is presented below the masthead of each character frame. Interspersed below the masthead are words and/or pictures of objects, containing the IPA characters that are the subject matter of the frame. Each frame thus enables the learner to learn the sound of the IPA character by associating the character sound with a picture containing the character.

If you are looking for a book on the Mankon language, here is one that has been written by a team of authors who are well-versed with the language. You will find that the book adds a lot of insights to your knowledge of Mankon-Ngeumba as a learner or teacher. Many of you may have creative suggestions and constructive criticisms of value to the authors. As always, we welcome and will embody the best suggestions in future editions.

ʃwɨ̀rɨ́ àdé
sòʔò àdé fɔ̀bùdzóŋ
sam tsìnə̀ tsé fɔ̀ntɛ̀ʔɛ́