Of all my adventures around the world of writing, the most startling and revealing happened closest to my home.
Googling “Linguistics Program” took me to the University of Massachusetts (Amherst), which offers an amazing range of linguistics courses, including, but not limited to:
Computational Linguistics
Discourse Analysis
Eye-tracking
Field work
First Language Acquisition
Historical Socio-linguistics
Morphology
Neurolinguistics
Phonetics
Phonology
Pragmatics
Prosodic Annotation
Prosody
Psycholinguistics
Semantics
Sociolinguistics
Speech Processing
Syntax
Transformational Grammar
Deep Learning
Topics in Sluicing.
Spoken language has been studied and taught from an admirable range of viewpoints, and to extraordinary depths. Written language, and the broader subject of writing in all its forms, is almost entirely missing from the curriculum, especially in the West, especially in the United States.
The more I searched, the more it became clear that there is a hole in the educational doughnut. Linguistics, anthropology, communications, semiotics, graphic design, digital humanities, typography, ethnology, history, publishing—they all circle around writing, touching it in many, many ways, but right in the middle is…nothing.
Nothing about the psychology of writing as an act. Nothing about the global economics of writing. Nothing about writing and human rights. Nothing about the physics of writing. Nothing about writing as a weapon of empire. Very little about the aesthetics of writing. Almost nothing about the neuropsychology of writing. Nothing about the role of writing in magic, divination and spirituality. Absolutely nothing about how scripts are lost, and the impact of that loss.
There are courses on the typology of writing systems, but they are remarkable for the number of questions they don’t address rather than those they do.
There are plenty of writing programs, but they are all concerned with what may be done with writing rather than what writing is.
And frankly it is staring everyone in the face. Every time I have done a one-off presentation on a college or university campus, faculty and students alike have been more than enthusiastic, and I keep waiting for someone to invite me to set up a program, or even a course—but I go back home and the hole I just filled, briefly and partially, seems to have become invisible again to everyone who just glimpsed it.
Ever since starting the Endangered Alphabets Project I’ve believed that this vital and unexplored area should be in more capable hands than mine, but for now I am all there is. And for better or worse, the place to start is with the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets (online, and due to appear in print later in the year) and my new book Writing Beyond Writing, which considers all the scripts I’ve encountered in my travels and asks, “Yes, but what do they tell us about writing itself?”
It’s a self-serving appeal, I know, but I urge you to buy Writing Beyond Writing and expand the conversation around this missing subject and help develop this missing curriculum, which in 20 years’ time, I hope, will have begun to explore regions I haven’t even thought about.
This column concludes Tim Brookes’ stewardship of the blog. He wishes to extend his sincere gratitude to Karen Van Drie for inviting him to guest curate a month of #EndangeredAlphabets posts, and he hopes to encounter you all again one day in another context, for another conversation.
We suggest the following videos that extend the range of these discussions:
The Final Word: World Endangered Writing Day final session.
Africa: Writing Beyond Writing, a talk for the Library of Congress
Southeast Asian Scripts, a talk for the Library ofCongress
Script Invention and revitalization in India, a talk for the Library of Congress
Also….
It has been a pleasure and a privilege to guest-curate the GLLI blog for the month of February 2024. Here is an index to the columns I’ve written and presented this month; by all means dive into them, and by all means contact me to continue discussing them!
Another Script Author Murdered
Fully half the world’s scripts were invented by people who want to give their own community’s language a visual system that fits with their own traditions and identity. All too often, this has been seen as a subversive, even dangerous act.
In which an alphabet is created by a veterinarian.
Ogham? Ogam? And in Any Case How Do You Pronounce it?
The Irish had one of the world’s few three-dimensional scripts.
Introducing a theme that will run throughout these short essays: there are far more ways of expressing meaning than simply trying to translate speech into letters. The Adinkra symbols of Ghana, for example.
Here’s an idea to blow conventional ideas about writing clear out of the water: an alphabet whose every letter has its own mystical meaning, an alphabet that represents enlightenment itself.
Coders today are constantly asking how to get as much information into as little data as possible. Here we meet possibly the most extraordinary coder of all time. Oh, and she was also a princess, a translator, a poet and a revolutionary.
Whatever You Do, Don’t Call It Picture-Writing
Western scholars, following the practices of colonial explorers, administrators, and missionaries, have an entrenched prejudice against writing that includes graphic elements to convey dimensions of meaning. Time to stop that.
Here’s yet another idea that will resurface during this series—that many forms of writing around the world include elements we have lost, forgotten, or never imagined.
Especially in Africa, colonized cultures have gone to extraordinary lengths to create ther own scripts for their own languages. At best it’s an uphill struggle; at worst, it invites disaster.
Two incredibly local, astonishingly specific scripts from rural China, used for just one purpose: to capture the essence of songs.
A meditation on Christianity, rock, and the Glagolitic alphabet.
In a region of conflict and crisis lasting more than 2,000 years, the Samaritan script shows an extraordinary determination to survive.
Many cultures believe that writing was invented by a deity and given to humankind as a gift. Actually, so (in a sense) do we.
The Man Who Invented Everything
As we’ve seen in this series, many scripts are invented rather than adapted or adopted. In Sarawak, one man went ahead and invented everything else as well.
We think of writing as being utilitarian, almost universal, the linguistic equivalent of duct tape. But two scripts exist, or have existed, almost entirely to express particular emotions.
Yes, it’s a delightful mystery, but are we drawn to the Rapa Nui (Easter Island) script for the wrong reasons?
Why on Earth are we proud of using a writing system imposed on us by the military empire that overran us?
Writing and magic
How to Revive a Traditional Script?
A case in point from Bali.
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 