Dear Friend of the Endangered Alphabets: I wish I could sit down with you, one on one, and explain just how radical a change we are trying to effect with the upcoming Red List project. (I have a short video in which I try to do just that, but the file’s too big to insert […]
Dear Friends of the Endangered Alphabets: I’m writing in the hope that you will support our next initiative, one that is not only our most ambitious to date but that will change the way the world sees writing, and writing systems, and the people—especially indigenous and minority people—who use them. Here’s the situation. I’m sure […]
By my calculations, at least a hundred new scripts have been created in the past half-century. I’m not talking about scripts created for private use, or for use in fiction, film, or television, but scripts intended to give practical visual identity to a language that had previously been using a script imported from, or imposed […]
If you like chocolate, you ultimately owe it to the Aztecs, who would drink a cocoa-based beverage called chocolatl. You may also have heard other words, such as Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec Empire), Quetzalcoatl (an Aztec deity, after whom the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus is named), or atlatl (a device used to throw spears). All […]
