We’re used to reading the sad news that the last speaker of a language has died, and with them we lose not only that language’s vocabulary but its subtler infrastructure: its syntax, its tones, its use of tenses and sequences that may never have been recorded, or documented. The world of scripts is just as […]
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 […]
