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, […]
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 […]
