Tim Brookes is the founder and president of the non-profit Endangered Alphabets Project (endangeredalphabets.com). His new book, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets, can be found at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/.
Erik Shonstrom is an associate professor at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont and the author of I Probably Should’ve Brought a Tent, Wisdom of the Body, and Wild Curiosity.
Erik Shonstrom: I’m so excited about Writing Beyond Writing. It’s such a fantastic book. I have to say before we start, it reminds me of your book on asthma, because you took the most banal thing in the world, breathing in the first instance, and then in the second instance, just the letters that we look at every day, and you do this deep dive into this world that paragraph after paragraph I was like, “Wow, I’ve never even thought of that.”
Okay. A lot has been written about how language connects to culture, but not as much about the way alphabets affect culture and vice versa. What can an alphabet tell us about the people that use it and how does that alphabet potentially reflect cultural identity?
Tim Brookes: That really is at the heart of not only my book, but I’m going to use the word “script” rather than “alphabet” because one of the interesting things about the Endangered Alphabets (and why it’s such a misnomer) is that the vast majority of minority and indigenous scripts are not alphabets–which has led Western thinkers to regard them as being inferior, incomplete, unevolved.
But to speak to your question, let me give you an example. Just this morning I was writing about the Beria script, which was created by the Zaghawa people, who live in Chad and Western Sudan. It’s an extraordinarily arid area, and consequently, their cultural symbiosis with the camel is profound. Not only is the camel a beast of burden, or a form of transportation, but they also do camel racing, and they have camel beauty contests…. In order to denote ownership of camels, as in the American West, they brand them with a branding iron.
And as you know, a branding iron is essentially just a metal rod of uniform thickness, which at the end has been bent into a particular symbol. About 60 years ago, a school teacher created a script for the Zaghawa language, which became known as Beria Branding Script because he used symbols that were similar to the branding marks on the necks of the camels. Subsequently, that script was then revised by, of course, a vet.
So talk about indigenously appropriate technologies here. So you have not only a technology, the branding iron, that is already in place and a medium, a substrate, namely the camel’s poor neck, which is already in place, but you also have created a symbol system which is familiar, which is unique to the people, and which is not Arabic. You can actually see the similarity to cattle brands by looking at the letterforms, which are distinct rather than connected and uniform in thickness—they look stamped rather than written.
So these are a people who I’m sure most of them speak Arabic out of necessity, but Zaghawa is their language. And the fact that they also have a script which represents their cultural uniqueness is what illustrates the importance of the Beria Branding Script.
That notion of a script that is unique to us, that whose appearance is familiar to us, and which arises out of our own daily lives, our daily perceptions, the landscape literally that we see, that is extraordinarily profound.
To simply see a script as a phonetic system of abstract symbols and say, “Okay, here is a symbol–what sound does it represent?” massively underestimates the importance of the visual iconography of a script and its meaning to the people–which in this case not only fits in with their language, but their geography, their history, even their climate. And as such, it’s a linguistic-anthropological-graphic-semantic confluence.
A script is the product and manifestation of its culture, and it embodies and displays the aesthetics, the values, the history and the beliefs, the materials, the tools, even the climate, that have shaped it. You can never sensibly discuss a script without its human context, just as you can never remove a script from its people without incalculable loss.
ES: It’s fascinating. It reminds me of the part in your book where you talk about a specific kind of palm leaf that affected the way people wrote on it, because hard, sharp strokes would tear the leaf, so the writing became more rounded– another example of the way in which these scripts end up so deeply enmeshed in the environment and culture of the people.
TB: That’s also why the people who best understand this are typographers and type designers, especially non-Latin typographers, because they recognize this visual element of writing. As you know, a letter can have a phonetic component, it can have a semantic component in conjunction with other letters, but what tends to be massively undervalued is the graphic, or visual component.
One of the speakers we have on World Endangered Writing Day is a graduate student in the great program at the University of Reading in England, and she is researching her roots as a Chakma. So the Chakma people live in India and Bangladesh, and they are sufficiently marginalized that the Chakma, especially those in Bangladesh, grow up not being able to read and write their own script because it’s not taught in schools, it’s not official. It’s very, very marginalized. And so she wants to design a Chakma font as part of the cultural revitalization of her people.
But she has spent a year doing research into her own background and her own culture’s past, partly because this program requires it because they’re very smart, but also partly because she realizes that if you just go in there and say, “Okay, so here’s a bunch of symbols that are going to get recognized by people as letters and can be read,” then you’re doing violence to the relationship between the script and the culture. And the research that she has been doing is into things like, “What is the intellectual history of this culture? What is its relationship with religion?” Because as we know, there are very, very strong graphic identities associated with particular religions. “What is its relationship with trading partners?” Because many of the scripts in Southeast Asia have gravitated down there from Gujarati trading scripts.
So all of these are an expression of not only what the script is, but who the people are and have been. Now, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t design a traditional script in a new way. So some of my favorite type designers are in Indonesia where they’re saying, “Okay, so here is this traditional Sundanese script, let’s do it in the style of a Coke ad, or in the style of a Marlboro ad,” or all of this playful stuff, all of which brings energy and life and creativity that any writing system needs.
ES: Your last statement actually leads into my next question, which is perfect, because one of the parts of Writing Beyond Writing that really blew my mind is where you delve into the more recent creation of alphabets.
When I thought about “endangered alphabets,” I immediately thought of antiquated scripts that various marginalized people have used around the world for eons, but what was surprising about your book is that you get into ways in which different groups have very recently in fact begun to devise scripts in their languages. Why would that be a powerful way for these groups to either retain or enhance cultural identity?
TB: The first point I want to make is that newly created, indigenous scripts are actually looked down on in academia because they’re seen as being artificial. Well, the fact is, all scripts are artificial! All scripts have been created at some point.
ES: You’re telling me that academia is divisive, and I’m shocked by that statement.
TB: Also there is a strong tradition of not giving newly a created script credibility for two reasons, actually. One, because they don’t reflect the natural adoption and adaption of an existing script, but they introduce a new intellectual design. And two, because if they’re new, they haven’t proven themselves, and that in fact most newly created scripts don’t survive the lifespan of their creator.
This attitude is both condescending and unfair, because so much inertia works against a newly created script. Often, the script is being created by a minority or an ethnic group the government doesn’t like, so they see the script as potentially dangerous, as a kind of iconic self-presentation that gives the minority group more of a sense of dignity, more of a sense of identity or coherence. We know of at least four people, maybe as many as six, who have been killed for creating a script for their people.
To be sure, there are linguistic reasons for creating one’s own script, because the established colonial or missionary script, for example, doesn’t adequately represent all the sounds of the language A good example of this is the Barry brothers who created the ADLaM script in Guinea. Their father was the letter reader. He would be the person in the market that people would bring their letters to and he would read them, because not everybody could read and write. The letters were by and large written in Arabic script, and it was quite hard to read them because you’re taking these sounds and you’re trying to piece them together to represent the local language.
More often it has to do with power. If a culture has been overrun or dominated by another culture that has imposed its own script, sooner or later, people start saying, “Enough.” That’s especially true in the last 20 to 30 years when it’s become increasingly possible to use digital tools to create a workable script, and even to digitize it and then start printing or texting in it.
And in fact the script they created, ADLaM, is a great example of the inertia I was talking about, the difficulties in breaking new ground. When the Barry brothers created ADLaM, back in the Eighties, they realized there had to be content written in this script, otherwise why would anyone read it? Why would anyone learn it? So they used their script to write books of useful information that people would want to read, and they had to write them by hand, because there were no fonts, there were no typefaces.
So the inertia facing these indigenously created scripts is so great that I include them in the notion of endangered alphabets because they’re endangered in the way that a baby bird is endangered. It faces so many dangers in the nest and when it starts to fly that it’s endangered until it’s out there making nests of its own.
ES: One of the arguments that’s being made, I think persuasively, is that digital connectedness globally—the Internet–has flattened many of the ways in which language can be used. It’s predominantly in English and a few of the main languages. So we’ve oftentimes heard the alarm bells, if you will, that digital connectedness is creating a more uniform platform for languages, and for cultures. However, as you just mentioned, many of the endangered scripts that are out there have used some of the tools and abilities in the internet to promote themselves and to be able to take these scripts to the next level. So this is my loaded question. Is the internet good or bad for endangered alphabets?
TB: The impact of the internet always goes in two opposite directions at the same time. If you go to the very core of computing, namely the writing of code, virtually all of that is in the Latin alphabet. So in that sense, it really says, “If you want to be a digital player, you’ve got to play by our rules in our script.” On the other hand, as you say, the same tools have, in some instances perhaps by accident, given access and functionality to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get in touch with each other at all.There’s a very active world Mongol association, for example, and the fact that they can use their script to represent their language and talk to each other is, I would imagine, extraordinarily powerful and reassuring.
On a more local level, I know of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups that are teaching either traditional scripts or, more commonly, new scripts, and in some instances creating YouTube videos as well.
ES: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?
TB: This is a great question and one that most people don’t think about at all, although, once again, typographers do. When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.
As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people va As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying the way they execute their brushstrokes.
What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.
I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens.
As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.
In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—-as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.
ES: It reminds me of the closing chapter where you talk in depth about pencils. I love a good pencil, I love a good pen. As someone who writes, I’m all about the clerical aspects. I love going to Staples, it’s one of my favorite stores. But I loved that investigation of the pencil and I loved your insight that the way in which you use a pencil reenacts the way in which thinking happens. Thinking is iterative, just like sketching something out with a pencil, which I found totally fascinating and made me immediately want to sit down and write in pencil again.
TB: Yes. The pencil is also perfect for the muscular coordination that is involved in the act of writing. We talk about handwriting, but writing involves shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, finger—and as each joint and muscle affects the final product, it means that the pencil is extraordinarily sensitive to our bodies as well as our minds. Not only does handwriting very from one person to another, it even reflects our mood and our level of energy. In fact, the word autograph, if you take it to its roots, means self-portrait: this is the way we display who we are.
ES: Historically, there has been a colonialist belief that culture develops in a linear fashion towards higher and more complex forms that eventually, of course, end in Western culture or Western civilization. Obviously that idea has been completely upended and we’ve realized that that’s faulty at best, racist at worst. But the idea of the evolution of scripts still seems to be very common within the world of communication. And you spend quite a bit of time soundly thrashing that inherently colonialist notion that the Latin alphabet is a more evolved means of writing. I wonder if you could just expand on that thinking, which is that the Latin alphabet isn’t the most perfect alphabet, it just happens to be the alphabet or the script that we use because there’s been more effective militaries and businesses that have used it?
TB: Yes, this whole notion of evolution is a seductive pile of crap. It’s seductive because the people who make that argument are actually praising themselves by making that argument. If I say the Latin script has evolved from other, more “primitive” scripts, it means that I’m more evolved. And by the way, the same argument was made to assert that the Chinese script is primitive, even though Confucius was writing philosophy while the Ancient Britons were still painting themselves blue with woad.
The fact is, writing does change and it does evolve in certain ways. When the Bugis people of Southeast Asia went to the islands we now call the Philippines, they exported their writing. But the two locations used different local materials. So writing that had been on palm leaves and whose letters had very distinctive shapes so as to avoid angular strokes that would damage the leaf, now took on different curly letterforms because they were being incised with a point of a knife in a hard bamboo tube.
That’s very different from a culture saying, “Wow, the Latin alphabet is much more sophisticated than our syllabary or abugida. Let’s use that instead.” The occasions when one script was replaced wholesale by another are almost always because of power. The Mongols did not choose to write with the Cyrillic alphabet rather than with their own script because it was a better alphabet. They chose it because the Russians had tanks pointing in their direction. What we call evolution, because it suits us to see it that way, is more often a form of cultural genocide.
Everybody knows the phrase “History is written by the winners.” I extend it say “History is written by the winners in the alphabet of the winners.” The only reason why the Latin alphabet is so dominant–it’s now used by more people than all the other writing systems in the world put together–is because at various critical junctures, the Latin alphabet had more lawyers, guns, and money than somebody else.
ES: Throughout the book, I got this sense about a dichotomy between ease and efficiency on one side and difficulty and expressiveness on the other. And I have to say, after reading your book and then hopping into bed at night and getting ready to read whatever novel I was reading, I looked at the page and I got a little sad. I did. Even though I was excited to read this book, I got a little sad because it is very uniform, it is very efficient, the Latin alphabet.
I’d love to hear you talk more about that push and pull between ease and efficiency, and difficulty and expressiveness, which you talked about earlier, the way that we autograph ourselves in our writing, I found that to be like a thread that ran through your book, that when we celebrate and support these endangered alphabets, what we’re really celebrating and supporting is this expressive idea of both the individual and culture.
TB: All of that crystallizes in the debate about ChatGPT and AI-generated text. If you regard writing as a commodity or an industrial product, something that you have to get done, then you’re defining writing as a chore. As soon as you define writing as a chore, then you look for ways to reduce that labor or give it to somebody else—or to a robot. ChatGPT is the robot that can do writing for you.
If the question, for example, is, “How do I prevent my students from doing all of their papers using ChatGPT?” the answer is, if you want your students to demonstrate what they’ve learned, have them do so in a way that they don’t regard as a chore!
Imagine teaching writing not in English class, but in art class. Imagine a teacher saying, “Why don’t you find a way to practice with whatever tool you choose—pen, pencil, spray paint–to get to the point where you like what you’re doing, it represents who you are at the moment, and is legible to somebody else.
The opposite of ChatGPT is the little kid who draws a picture of their house in crayon and writes “Mommy” or “Daddy,” and does that out of joy. They give it to the parent as a gift, and then the parent puts it up on the fridge, also out of joy.
Where did we lose that joy in writing?
And, as you know, in one of the early chapters in my book I actually spell out exactly how we lose that joy in writing because of the way in which we have defined what writing is. So that dichotomy you’re talking about is really the crisis that is facing us right now. And the only reason it’s a crisis rather than a simple choice, or a range of options, is because our thumb is so heavily on defining writing as an industrial-commercial-technical product that we want to use as easily and quickly as possible, that we want to be able to distribute infinitely and store forever.
Hence the Chinese taking their beautiful script and simplifying it into a series of straight lines, or the Arabic script, which is another of the great manual scripts in the world, also being simplified. I’m not so conservative to say we need to go back to writing entirely without devices, but I am saying that the very way in which we define writing already predisposes us in a certain direction.
ES: Writing Beyond Writing is out, so what’s next both for you and for Endangered Alphabets?
TB: I’m always going to be carving because that has tapped into some kind of manual relationship with materials that is so deep I can’t stop doing it. We have World Endangered Writing Day coming up on January the 23rd, which I hope is going to continue every year, and I hope it’s going to become much more interactive and broader and less based in the English language.
I have another book in mind, an introductory book for people who are taking linguistics or anthropology courses–something like 20 short chapters, each of which asks, “What do we learn about the relationship between script and culture from this particular script?”
And there must be a university somewhere that will say, “Hey, nobody else in the world is researching or teaching this. We want to be the home of the endangered alphabets.” And while I’m waiting for that, I am always going to have a carving tool in one hand and a pencil behind my ear.
