"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
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
#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: When Alphabets Are Codes
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
#EndangeredAlphabets: The Saddest Scripts
"Thank you all" written in the Nüshu syllabary. Photo and carving by the author. Over the past decade, my research for the Endangered Alphabets project has found scripts that are exclusively sacred or spiritual, others used only for magic and divination, some employed solely for accounting and bookkeeping, some even for notating songs. Writing, then, … Continue reading #EndangeredAlphabets: The Saddest Scripts
Global Literature in Libraries Initiative 