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 […]
If you’ve been following this blog or reading the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, you’ll be well aware of the Adinkra symbols of Ghana. Nearby, though, there is another and much less well-known set of symbols. Darius Adjong has been researching them for a guest column for the Endangered Alphabets. He writes: Like the Adinkra symbols […]
2021 has been a bizarrely contradictory one for the Endangered Alphabets. On the one hand, it has been our most ambitious and successful year of our 11-year life. Highlights include: * the creation of Ulus: Legends of the Nomads, an entirely original tabletop game designed to promote traditional Mongolian culture, language, and calligraphy that is […]
The Sancha Lipi—that is, Sancha scripts—are a family of related scripts from northern India. They were brought to my attention by the ever-vigilant Biswajit Mandal. An elementary teacher from Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, he is also a linguist, font creator, and linguistic content supplier for Omniglot and the Endangered Alphabets. He was one […]
At this very moment, someone is working to create a new, unique script for their culture and their language. We know of more than 125 scripts that were created by individuals on behalf of their people, most of which have struggled to gain acceptance and wide and prolonged usage, and for that reason they are […]
We’re used to reading the sad news that the last speaker of a language has died, and with them we lose not only that language’s vocabulary but its subtler infrastructure: its syntax, its tones, its use of tenses and sequences that may never have been recorded, or documented. The world of scripts is just as […]
Here’s the news several of you have already asked about: I think we met our Red List launch goal. Or rather you met our goal. (All I did was send out the annoying emails.) I can’t be entirely sure, as some of you chose to send checks rather than go through electronic transfers, and they […]
