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.

Biography

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

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.

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".

See also

• Osmanya script
• Borama script
• Kaddare script
• Somali alphabet
• Wadaad's writing
• Osman Yusuf Kenadid
• Shire Jama Ahmed
• Hussein Sheikh Ahmed Kaddare

References

• David D. Laitin, Politics, language, and thought: the Somali experience, (University of Chicago Press: 1977)
• 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.

External links

• Osmanya, Borama, Wadaad's writing and the Somali language
• The Gadabuursi Somali Script - qasidas in Gadabuursi/Borama