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 […]
The Sancha family of scripts have been used in the peaceful valleys of Kashmir as early as 9th CE and now are mostly used in present day Himachal Pradesh in India in the Sirmour, Solan and Shimla areas where they form an integral part of the heritage of these lands, especially in the practice of […]
As I’m sure you can imagine, I spend much of my time (and my amazing volunteers spend much of their time) looking for scripts that have little or no Internet footprint, that may or may not still exist, that may be symptoms of marginalized or even oppressed cultures, forced to live out on the fringes, […]
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, […]
The newest member of the far-flung EndangeredAlphabets family is a young man in Bangladesh who may well hold the world record for the number of scripts he can write, and write with accuracy and grace. That number is… Wait for it…. 342. It says a great deal about the way we, especially those in […]
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. […]
Not exactly an endangered alphabet, but certainly a confused letter. Or two. A guest blog by Hans de Wolf. Do you know that there is a well-educated civilized country in north-western part Europe, with a very high literacy rate, of which the language is spoken by about 23 million people – but were there is […]
