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 … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Final Post: An Adventure, A Doughnut Hole, A New Curriculum, An Appeal
#EndangeredAlphabets: Where Are We Going, Where Have We Been?
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?
#EndangeredAlphabets: How Do You Go About Reviving a Traditional Script? Case Study: Bali
"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
#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: 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 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
#EndangeredAlphabets: Whatever You Do, Don’t Call It Picture-Writing
Papyrus painting. Photo by the author. Today this column ventures through not only space but time—to ancient Egypt, or more accurately to a papyrus painting in the style of Egyptian hieroglyphics, kindly given to me by the parents of a student graduating from my writing program, a decade ago. Like most people, I know … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Whatever You Do, Don’t Call It Picture-Writing
#EndangeredAlphabets: Consider the Mermaid
We have no idea what we don't know about writing until we see someone doing something else with it. And it's my great good fortune that in voyaging about among the endangered alphabets, I've found people doing things with writing that change the very definition of writing. This delightful image, for example, is a detail … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: Consider the Mermaid
Exploring the World of Endangered Alphabets
Fourteen years ago, for reasons so odd and random they don’t bear explaining in brief, I began to carve pieces of text in endangered alphabets. I couldn’t read or pronounce any of the words or phrases I was carving. I wasn’t an anthropologist or a linguist—I wasn’t even a woodworker. What I didn’t yet suspect … Continue reading Exploring the World of Endangered Alphabets
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 