The Diary of Boima Kiakpomgbo from Mando Town (Liberia): A Quantitative Study of a Vai Text

Abstract

We analyse a Liberian text from the first quarter of the twentieth century written in Vai, a Mande language of West Africa, using an indigenous syllabic script. Rank–frequency distributions of syllabic symbols and words are studied. The distribution of symbols is well-fitted by the 1-displaced negative hypergeometric distribution, confirming previous studies on alphabetic scripts, with a similar interpretation of parameters. Two regimes are discovered for the saturation of symbols in the text (growth of the number of types approaching the complete set versus the number of tokens). For the distribution of words, the Zipf–Mandelbrot law is found to be a proper model rather than the simple Zipfian dependence.

Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Valentin Vydrin for feedback.