When I was in Bangladesh last week, meeting members of some of the country’s indigenous peoples and thinking a great deal about endangered alphabets, I found myself thinking about issues of script loss even in my down time—in other words, when I was watching television. A naïve visitor to a developing country (or, indeed, any […]
As alert readers of this blog know, I’m in Bangladesh in search of an endangered alphabet. To be specific, any one of the scripts used by one of the indigenous peoples living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts in south-eastern Bangladesh, over toward the border with Myanmar. Straight away, it’s only fair to say that I’ve […]
(Double-click on these images to see larger versions.) Well, here’s stage one of the Alphabets World Tour: a trip to Bangladesh in the hope of tracking down a script that is certainly in tiny-minority usage and may well be endangered: Mro, a tribal language and script used in the Chittagong Hill District. (Thanks to […]
Despite the best efforts of global warming, the second of the four panes of the Endangered Poem Sculpture is now finished, and is leaning against my dining-room wall like a shady character outside the National Museum in Cairo, ready at a moment’s notice to step forward and accost the unwary visitor in half-a-dozen languages. The […]
