September is always the busiest month for the Alphabets, and the rush began this past weekend with the first of three major public appearances: in the Sterling Hardwoods wood shop on Pine Street as part of the South End Art Hop in Burlington, Vermont. (For the other two events, see the end of this article.) […]
I learn all kinds of things by carving the Alphabets—about various cultures, about writing itself, about spirituality, about physics, about the history of technology. Nothing prepared me, though, for cumaru. A couple of weeks ago I got a commission to carve the chant “Om Mani Padme Hum” in Tibetan, as articulated by the calligrapher Tashi […]
Phew! Thanks to generous support from several of you and a week of carving, painting, and finishing, eight pieces of maple, 6″x6″, are on their way to my friend Maung in Cambridge, and then with him to the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh. Each is to be mounted on the door of a classroom in […]
When the Endangered Alphabets team was at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival this summer in Washington D.C., the tent next to ours was occupied by singers and dancers of the Kalmyk Republic, also known as Kalmykia. The Kalmyks, who originally came west with Genghis Khan and settled in the Caucasus, are a remarkable people in many […]
Between October 2-4, a group of some of the world’s top experts on indigenous languages met in Ottawa under the auspices of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Some of the research presented at the conference is of direct and urgent relevance to the Chittagong Hill Tracts Project, a collaboration of the Endangered Alphabets and the Champlain […]
Between October 2-4, a group of some of the world’s top experts on indigenous languages met in Ottawa under the auspices of the Foundation for Endangered Languages. Some of the research presented at the conference is of direct and urgent relevance to the Chittagong Hill Tracts Project, a collaboration of the Endangered Alphabets and the […]
Terrence Sehr just sent me an article by Ali Eteraz on the decline and endangerment of the traditional Urdu script called nastaliq. It’s a great article, and it parallels what has been happening with both Chinese and Arabic–namely, the movement away from a script that embodies the movement of the human hand toward a simplified version […]
Yes, thanks to the wonderful photography of Tom Way, who even helped me carry the table up the impossibly steep and rickety staircase to his studio, you can finally see the dining table I started more than a year ago. Here’s the story. When I moved into my rather anonymous little townhouse, I promised myself […]
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 […]
