Back at my desk, so to speak, after four weeks of fundraising, the first order of business is to bring to your attention a very unusual but significant form of graphic language, both highly endangered and a great illustration of the intimate relationship between graphic systems and their culture of origin: Okinawan women’s hand-tattoos. The […]
The latest reward in our Kickstarter campaign is one of my carvings in the only script in the world known to have been invented and used by women, almost entirely in secret in rural China. The Nüshu script was painted or embroidered, often on domestic objects such as fans–hence the shape of this carving. Read […]
When I first started working on the Endangered Alphabets Project, the pre-eminent linguist David Crystal told me that although many scholars were studying language loss, nobody, as far as he knew, was studying script loss. This is still true 12 years later. How are scripts lost? Are certain kinds of script more vulnerable than others, […]
Several years ago I was visiting UNESCO headquarters in Paris, meeting with the official in charge of language revitalization. When the conversation turned to my area of interest—endangered alphabets—she asked “How would you save a dying script?” One answer, as it turns out, is…recycling bins. Right before Christmas, I was sent a photo that Andrew […]
Why am I planning to include the Meitei Mayek script in the “Right to Speak, Right to Read, Right to Write” sculpture I’m going to carve, if our Kickstarter campaign is successful? Because it shows dramatically, even violently, what the Endangered Alphabets are all about. I’ll explain. It’s almost impossible for us in the West […]
People often ask me, how does an alphabet become endangered? Assuming my Kickstarter campaign is successful, I’m going to include the Bamum script on my large statement sculpture to illustrate one all-too-common way. Starting around 1896, twenty-five-year-old King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom in Cameroon invented a writing system for his people’s language. He […]
Our just-launched Kickstarter campaign aims to create a large public sculpture that says, in English and three different endangered alphabets, “The Right to Speak, the Right to Read, the Right to Write.” Language, spoken and written, is a human rights issue, a social justice issue–and each of the three scripts tells its own story of […]
Coming soon–our 2022 Kickstarter! I want to raise the money to create a larger-than-life-size carving in spectacular wood that says “The Right to Speak, the Right to Read, the Right to Write” in English and three different scripts whose communities have at various times been denied the chance to speak, read, or write their own […]
This past week has seen a very agreeable mini-boom in sales of our tabletop game Ulus: Legends of the Nomads, but I was a bit surprised that nobody had ordered our Ulus travel mugs. Today I realized–I’d forgotten to put them up on our storefront! So here is what the mugs look like (they depict […]
Last weekend, I drove down to the New York metro area to introduce Ulus to the gaming community and to introduce some of the Ulus design team to each other. It was a wonderful trip, and the highpoint was a meeting on Sunday on the Rutgers University campus with Togochog Enghebatu, the director of the […]
