I’ve been icing my knee in the hope it’ll hold out for the five-hour drive to the annual Foundation for Endangered Languages (FEL) conference in Ottawa. Presentation on Thursday, amputation on Friday. Seriously, though, I’m looking forward to meeting a whole raft of people I’ve been corresponding with for the past four years, who have […]
While other members of our team are developing digitized font versions of endangered alphabets and coloring books for Bangladesh, I’ve been recovering from knee replacement surgery in the usual way–by carving. Thanks to the excellent Tom Way of Tom Way Photography, here are a few of the results, all of which are available on our […]
Wow. Even as your intrepid Endangered Alphabets team (Maung Nyeu, our friend and collaborator from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh, calligrapher/printer Jamie Kutner, Cindy Barnes, myself, and invisible back-in-Vermont laser-dude Paul Ledak) are recovering from several weeks of intense exertion and excitement, it’s time to tell you what actually happened down there on the National Mall. […]
My collaborator and friend Maung Nyeu found a book of Marma proverbs (he himself is of the Marma people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Bangladesh) and sent me a scan of one page. This is one of my favorites. It reads: “The body of a frog, but the voice of an ox. Small […]
When I started the Endangered Alphabets Project, I hoped it would take me to many strange places and lead to many unusual experiences. Eating squirrel was not on my list. Nor was Iceland. My flight paused at Keflavik, the island capital’s airport, and I was looking forward to seeing, if only from the air on […]
The Alphabets have had an amazing week and a half: their first European tour. Many adventures to tell, but the first challenge was simply getting them there. To ship the original exhibition in its trunk would have cost nearly $1,000 each way, so I created The Alphabets Lite: twelve slightly smaller carvings in curly maple, […]
Let’s face it, even the name sounds like a genus of dinosaur: Glagolyticus paleographus. In fact, showing my usual oceanic ignorance, I didn’t even include the Glagolitic script in the original Endangered Alphabets exhibition because I thought it was extinct. All this changed because of an intervention from a most unlikely source: Will Shortz, the […]
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 […]
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 […]
One of the most stunning woods in the world is paduak (pronounced pa-duke, at least in Vermont, and confusingly spelled “padauk” as often as not), an exotic tropical hardwood from central and West Africa and Southeast Asia. In its raw, sanded form it’s a brilliant tigerish orange striped with gold and darker reds and browns. […]
