Time for a little light-hearted break, I think. When I first went on Omniglot.com, I was struck by so many things, among them the number of languages I’d never heard of, and the number of languages that either seemed to have been made up recently for intellectual amusement or seemed to be altogether fictitious. So […]
If you are wearing shoes, Step on thorns and open A path for your children and grandchildren. –Advice from Ahiqar, sage and advisor to the Assyrian king Sennacherib, to his nephew. A month ago, George Bet-Shlimon sent me four text fragments from his personal library of Assyrian documents, written out by hand in the Syriac […]
Just thought you might like to see another carving, and yet another glimpse into the high-tech operation that is the Endangered Alphabets. This sign is a present for the poet John Balaban, renowned for his translations of Vietnamese poetry. He is also one of the founders of the Vietnamese Nom Preservation Foundation, “founded in 1999 […]
For the past couple of months, Charles Riley at Yale has been sending me proverbs in (mostly) endangered alphabets from West Africa. I’m hoping to set up a proper gallery for them shortly, including translations, but I couldn’t resist posting some hasty cell-phone pictures before driving down to Connecticut tomorrow. The wood is just that […]
