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 […]
The first monthly meeting of the Writing Beyond Writing Book Club (Western Hemisphere edition) was an utter blast. We journeyed through fonts based on one’s own handwriting; low-energy and high-energy writing systems; Hungarian runic script redesigned as Netflix logos; the burning of books to establish a script to unify an empire; Latin manuscripts containing paintings, […]
Since Writing Beyond Writing was officially published last month, I’ve led several phenomenally successful talks about the Endangered Alphabets Project in general and the book in particular, and something has struck me each time: every question asked by someone in the audience led directly to a chapter in the book. Somehow, in writing a book […]
Dear friends of the Endangered Alphabets and also of puzzles and games: World Endangered Writing Day 2024 was a huge success, and continues to be a success as people flock to our YouTube channel to catch the videos of talks they didn’t manage to see live, or that have been recommended to them by friends […]
If we reach our Kickstarter goal–$15,000 by 7 a.m. Saturday, only 36 hours away–I’m going to give away one of the most extraordinary carvings I have ever made. Measuring roughly 15″ high by 8″ wide, and carved in incredible bubinga wood, it says “Writing” in the endangered Kulitan script from the islands now called the […]
Our Kickstarter campaign, which was trotting along nicely, has apparently stopped to nibble grass beside the road, and cajoling seems to do no good. We have significant ground to catch up–in fact, we need a thousand-dollar weekend. You know what we do; you know it is vital and worth supporting. Please back us, or […]
Here’s a great illustration of what we’re trying to do, and why we’re trying to do it. This extraordinary writing in the photo above, inscribed by hand in bamboo, is from the Mangyan people of the Philippines, and it is an ambahan, their own remarkable form of poetry. Both the poetry itself and the […]
Dear fans of languages and puzzles: Every Sunday while our Kickstarter campaign (https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/endangeredatlas/endangered-alphabets-sudoku) is running, I’m going to post an endangered alphabet sudoku on my social media to give you a taste of the fun and the challenge. Have a go, DM it to me if you finish it, and there will be prizes for […]
Right now I ought to be spending every waking moment promoting our Kickstarter campaign , just as you should be spending every moment backing it, but I can’t help taking time out to promote one of the most remarkable books of poetry I’ve ever seen: Bamboo Whispers, an anthology of Mangyan poetry from the island […]
Today–yes, this very day–we’re launching our next Kickstarter campaign: a book of Endangered Alphabets sudoku. Here’s the thinking. The entire idea of endangered alphabets is so, um, foreign to most people in the West I have to use every means at my disposal to introduce these remarkable scripts from around the world, and to make […]
