Named to the 2024 Global Literature in Libraries Initiative Translated Young Adult Book Prize shortlist, The Boy from Clearwater tells the story of Tsai Kun-Lin, "an ordinary boy" born in Qingshui District on the western coast of Taiwan. Tsai Kun-Lin's story, however, is nothing short of extraordinary. It is a story of surviving military occupation, … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: The Boy from Clearwater, Book 1
For all the hand wringing about young people not liking to read or even reading proficiently, there sure is a lot of gatekeeping by adults around what is and what is not appropriate for young people to read. Bracketing and suspending for a moment current book banning efforts in the United States, there are adults … Continue reading #WorldKidLit Wednesday: Movements and Moments
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6J-lQuyr0Yw&list=PLYG37Sb2buKjaMtjztHjDc5pSS1a1jorr&index=12 My month here is almost over, and I've taken you all to so many places around the world, and brought up so many ideas about the nature and purpose of writing that it's not easy to wrap everything up. So I'm going to steal from myself, and offer you the wrap-up I created for … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
"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
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
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 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
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
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
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 