"Suksma," or "Thank you," in the traditional Balinese language and script. Photo and carving by the author. Fairly often I get asked: what does it take to revive a traditional script that has been unused, or largely unused, for years? Decades? Centuries? Much less often, I actually have a clear, detailed answer. In this case, … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: How Do You Go About Reviving a Traditional Script? Case Study: Bali
Articles
#EndangeredAlphabets: Impeaching the Ghosts: Writing and Magic
Batak pustaha. Image courtesy of the Incunabula Library. I was on Twitter the other day and came across a tweet from Philip Boyes of the University of Cambridge, an archaeologist and linguist working on the Bronze and Iron Age Levant. He had been researching early Chinese handwriting manuals and came across this passage: “Strangely, it … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Impeaching the Ghosts: Writing and Magic
#EndangeredAlphabets: Roman Column
Endangered Alphabets Project poster, 2020. Design by Alec Julien, carving and photo by the author. The elegant maps that illustrate the spread of writing take at best a satellite’s-eye view of what really happens when one culture adopts writing from another. It may look as though writing spreads like a good idea (and there are … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Roman Column
International Mother (Written) Language Day
International Mother Language Day, February 21st, is a kind of well-intentioned bureaucratic expansion of the Bangladesh observance of National Martyrs Day, a remembrance of the day in 1952 when five people were killed for protesting their right to speak Bengali (Bangla) rather than Urdu, the official language of the new state of Pakistan. What came … Continue reading International Mother (Written) Language Day
#WorldKidLit Wednesday: Ironhead, or, Once a Young Lady
1808. The Napoleonic wars. In Ghent, a draft for the Emperor’s army is looming and the respectable Hoste family is in financial trouble. From the very first sentence, Ironhead, or, Once a Young Lady is the engaging story of the two oldest Hoste siblings, 18-year-old Constance ("Stance") and her entitled 14-year-old brother Pieter (Piers), whom … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: Ironhead, or, Once a Young Lady
#EndangeredAlphabets: God’s Handwriting
Rembrandt, Moses, stone, God's handwriting Our sense of the extraordinary qualities of writing has sunk so much in the past century that when we hear how many cultures have traditionally regarded writing as a divine creation, a gift to the human race by a deity, we shrug it off as superstition and ignorance. In a … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: God’s Handwriting
#EndangeredAlphabets: Two Cheers for Rongorongo
Rongorongo. Source: Wikipedia. Even though my work is more about endangered scripts than those no longer in use, I love Rongorongo, a glyph system discovered over a century ago on Rapa Nui, a.k.a. Easter Island., which recently returned to the news through a rather breathless article in Smithsonian magazine. What makes Rongorongo, which has so … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Two Cheers for Rongorongo
#EndangeredAlphabets: The Survivor Script
Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Samaritan. Carving and photo by the author. During the current catastrophe in the Middle East, it may be reassuring to hear a story of survival. Let’s go back two thousand years to the region confusingly called the Holy Land—confusing, because it was (and is) considered … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: The Survivor Script
#EndangeredAlphabets: Succeed at Your Peril
Topographic map in the Bamum script from early 20th-century Cameroon. Image courtesy of the Incunabula Library. Creating a new script for an indigenous people during a colonial era is a two-edged sword. The desire to claim and assert one’s cultural identity may provide the driving force that sustains an author through the long, hard work … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Succeed at Your Peril
#EndangeredAlphabets: The Songbook Scripts
Zhuang Musicians in Longzhou. Source: Wikipedia Those of us from Western Europe and the Americas use a script that is so widely used we barely recognize it as a script. In fact, we often refer to it as “the” alphabet, as though there were only one. For us, our script is writing itself; most of … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: The Songbook Scripts
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 