Described as a "poetic riddle" emphasizing the importance that language holds in our lives today, and the fragile position that it increasingly occupies, What Makes Us Human is a book filled with gentle surprises. Beginning with a time when the idea of a language was still new, to the breathtakingly beautiful spread that shows how … Continue reading #WORLDKIDLITWEDNESDAY: What Makes Us Human
A table of Buginese cypher script with equivalent in standard Buginese script cited by B F Matthes in his book "Eenige proeven van Boegineesche en Makassaarsche Poëzie", 1883. Source: Wikipedia In a sense, every script is a code, comprehensible to some, incomprehensible to those who don't know its workings. We tend to think that writing … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: When Alphabets Are Codes
Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in Pahauh Hmong script One of the most interesting discoveries results of research by the Endangered Alphabets Project is that fully half of all scripts in use around the world today were not adopted and/or adapted from an existing script—they were invented by an individual or … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Another Script Author Murdered
In 2021, I started a podcast interviewing a different woman each month asking her twenty questions. You can listen to the podcast here. As a thank you gift, I bought each woman a copy of this book. This is one of my favourite discoveries in this project, a wonderful anthology on the world’s languages/dialects that … Continue reading Fiji 🇫🇯: A Privileged Life Denied by Sarote Fotfiri Erasito (tr. Sarote Fotfiri Erasito) in Poems from the Edge of Extinction: An Anthology of Poetry in Endangered Languages (Ed. Chris McCabe)
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 