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 […]
One of the great delights of this project is being sent a script I’ve been trying to track down for years. One of the greater delights is being sent a script I didn’t even know existed. A month or so ago I got an email from Tazim Kassam, who teaches at Syracuse University. He […]
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 […]
Struck by an idea–and the almost incurable itch to carve endangered scripts into pieces of beautiful wood–I have invented the Endangered Trivet. Intended to keep food and drink stains off our beautiful cherry table, it’s made of mahogany, and I glued a piece of green pool-table-style felt (what in England is called baize) on the […]
Just because I’m working with endangered alphabets doesn’t mean they are static relics, dry as desert sand. In fact, many are being tugged one way or the other every day: some are being studied by academics, some are the subject of efforts at revival, some are the targets of political repression. Some are all three […]
Ever since I started thinking of writing as a spiritual act (see the section beginning on page 136 in my book Endangered Alphabets) I’ve been fascinated by the sentence, from the opening of the Gospel According to St. John, “In the beginning was the word.” A couple of months ago, thinking ahead to the 2011 […]
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 […]
