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 […]
It’s true–we now have a Patreon! Come behind the scenes of the Endangered Alphabets Project and see how we create artwork and games to help save some of the world’s most endangered forms of writing and the cultures that depend on them. Four levels of engagement start at $5 per month. All of them offer […]
Here’s my best brief explanation of why we’ve chosen the Bamum script as the subject for our very first spring fundraiser. Upload limits meant there’s one important element you don’t hear about–namely, that saving endangered alphabets isn’t simply a linguistic exercise involving unfamiliar letters. Saving a script is part of saving a culture, especially on […]
Here we go! We’re heading into the final week of our spring fundraiser, and we’re going to use our blog page here to keep you posted as you (and certainly we) bite our nails. Our goal is $17,500, which will go part of the way to supporting a multi-phase, multi-year effort to help revive the […]
Spring is the time of rebirth, renewal—exactly what we are trying to do for many of the world’s minority cultures by supporting their writing systems. So this is our pledge: each year we’ll commit to a spring fundraiser dedicated to helping rejuvenate, revitalize and revivify a specific endangered alphabet, near or far. This year’s Spring […]
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 […]
As some of you know, I’ve launched the Red List initiative—the effort by the Endangered Alphabets Project to identify every script in current use and assess to what degree each one is thriving or threatened. Much of what we’re finding is highly-focused and local—fascinating scripts we never knew existed. But we’re also making some even more […]
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 […]
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 […]
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, […]
