Several years ago I was visiting UNESCO headquarters in Paris, meeting with the official in charge of language revitalization. When the conversation turned to my area of interest—endangered alphabets—she asked “How would you save a dying script?” One answer, as it turns out, is…recycling bins. Right before Christmas, I was sent a photo that Andrew […]
Why am I planning to include the Meitei Mayek script in the “Right to Speak, Right to Read, Right to Write” sculpture I’m going to carve, if our Kickstarter campaign is successful? Because it shows dramatically, even violently, what the Endangered Alphabets are all about. I’ll explain. It’s almost impossible for us in the West […]
People often ask me, how does an alphabet become endangered? Assuming my Kickstarter campaign is successful, I’m going to include the Bamum script on my large statement sculpture to illustrate one all-too-common way. Starting around 1896, twenty-five-year-old King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom in Cameroon invented a writing system for his people’s language. He […]
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 […]
