ONLY FIVE DAYS LEFT to help us reach our goal of $11,500 to fund the launch of our project to create a Red List of Endangered and Emerging Alphabets. We are more than halfway there, but now the race is on. Please check out the video and back this groundbreaking work at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/how-to-support-us/. Meanwhile, let […]
Dear Friend of the Endangered Alphabets: I wish I could sit down with you, one on one, and explain just how radical a change we are trying to effect with the upcoming Red List project. (I have a short video in which I try to do just that, but the file’s too big to insert […]
Dear Friends of the Endangered Alphabets: I’m writing in the hope that you will support our next initiative, one that is not only our most ambitious to date but that will change the way the world sees writing, and writing systems, and the people—especially indigenous and minority people—who use them. Here’s the situation. I’m sure […]
By my calculations, at least a hundred new scripts have been created in the past half-century. I’m not talking about scripts created for private use, or for use in fiction, film, or television, but scripts intended to give practical visual identity to a language that had previously been using a script imported from, or imposed […]
If you like chocolate, you ultimately owe it to the Aztecs, who would drink a cocoa-based beverage called chocolatl. You may also have heard other words, such as Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec Empire), Quetzalcoatl (an Aztec deity, after whom the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus is named), or atlatl (a device used to throw spears). All […]
By my calculations, at least a hundred new scripts have been created in the past century. I’m not talking about scripts created for private use, or for use in fiction, film, or television, but scripts intended to give practical visual identity to a language that had previously been using a script imported from, or imposed […]
Welcome to the latest monthly Endangered Alphabets feature about calligraphy and type design–in indigenous and minority writing systems. Here’s the point. If a script exists only in historical documents, engravings, and inscriptions, it is all too easy to assume it is no longer in use, and the culture that created it has also been lost. […]
Welcome to the latest monthly Endangered Alphabets feature about calligraphy and type design–in indigenous and minority writing systems. Here’s the point. If a script exists only in historical documents, engravings, and inscriptions, it is all too easy to assume it is no longer in use, and the culture that created it has also been lost. […]
Every time I claim that a script I write about is the newest writing system in the world, I have to eat my own words. Over the past two weeks I’ve been told about two new writing systems in development in South America, a continent remarkable for the essential obliteration, thanks to the Spanish conquest, […]
A month ago I wrote about a new script, called Caytu, for the Wolof language of Senegal, the Gambia and Mauritania. In the continued upheaval of moving and resettling the operations of the Endangered Alphabets (a phrase that sounds far grander than the reality deserves) it has taken me longer than I hoped to actually […]
