Many of you wrote in appreciation (or simply in humor) about Hans de Wolf’s column about the slippery 25th Dutch letter, which might be an ij digraph. Or not. Well, it’s time to raise the stakes, and I wouldn’t dare venture into this territory (especially as a bloody Englishman) without the guidance of David Stifter, […]
In another blog post, I have written about four people who were killed for having created writing systems for their people. We know of others, though, who have been persecuted for their work and, though not actually assassinated, died as a result of that persecution. One is Sultan Ibrahim Njoya; another is Sheikh Bakri Sapalo. […]
This will be my next carving…. …because it expresses so perfectly what the Endangered Alphabets is all about. Sent to me by the Australian linguist Stephen Morey, who does groundbreaking work with minority cultures in northeast India, it is part of a song, sung by the Tai Phake people, a tiny community of about 250 […]
This column aims to celebrate and draw attention to people doing original calligraphy and type design in their traditional minority script. In most cases, this act of revitalization is taking place in South Asia, Southeast Asia, Indonesia or Africa, as these are the regions with the greatest number of minority scripts. Today, though, we’re celebrating […]
In my past life as a film reviewer, people sent me movies all the time for review; thirty years later, it was a surprise and a pleasure to be sent The Volunteer Archivists by Subhashish Panigrahi, the film’s cameraperson, sound recordist, director and producer and a longtime advocate for open-source media about cultural and linguistic […]
Switching between languages? Hard enough. How about switching between scripts? Even after working on the Endangered Alphabets for 12 years, I’m still just starting to understand how Eurocentric and provincial my own thinking, like that of most of us in the West, has been, and continues to be. Despite all my work in scores of […]
This is a facsimile of the title page of a book, but you can think of it also as being like the map in a tale of lost cities, not so much the Lost City of Z as the Lost Alphabet of N. Initially noticed by Marcia Tiede, a librarian at Northwestern, and forwarded to […]
Few things make my work more delightful than the discovery of a new individual or group working on reviving their culture through its alphabet, or the discovery of an entirely new (to me) script. What better, then, than an email out of the blue that offers both? The script has three qualities that are found […]
Spoken languages can die. When the last speaker passes on, unless extensive recordings have been made, not only the vocabulary but the tones, the emphases, the rhythms and the syntax, the internal cohesion and structure of the language, can be impossible to reconstruct. Written languages bare different. The linkages between sound and symbol may be […]
Here at the Endangered Alphabets Project we are always glad to hear news of new font developments in indigenous/minority scripts, and the latest such news concerns a collaboration between Typotheque and indigenous communities in Canada. The Syllabics Project (see the mini-documentary here) involves launching a series of Unified Canadian Syllabics fonts that support Indigenous language […]
