Nom, the pre-colonial script of Vietnam
The Endangered Alphabets Project is out of the gates and running!
The exhibition of carvings is going to perform the unlikely feat of appearing in two places at once.
As of September 13th, a mini-version of the show will be on display at the annual expo of the Foundation for Endangered Languages at the University of Wales in Carmarthen, Wales, a high honor indeed.
Meanwhile, the majority of the boards will be one of the features of the Burlington Book Festival in Burlington, Vermont. They’ll be on view from September 24-October 22, and I’ll be giving a talk about them as part of the Book Festival on Saturday, September 25.
The Endangered Alphabets book is already past the proof stage and should be leaving the printers any day now. Copies will be available wherever the boards are displayed, and through this website.
What is the Endangered Alphabets project? The world has more than 6,000 languages, but in every respect that number and that variety is dwindling rapidly. Half are expected to be extinct by the end of this century.
But another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written. Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, fully a third are endangered. The Latin alphabet—the ABC of the West—has gone from being the alphabet of military empire to the alphabet of economic empires and, most recently, of the Internet. On a global scale, writing is already dominated by as few as five major alphabets: Latin, Arabic, Cyrillic, Chinese and Japanese.
The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to address this issue.
Work on the Endangered Alphabets Project has been supported by Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont, by Sterling Hardwoods, also in Burlington, and also by the many researchers, linguists, scholars and correspondents who have helped me track down these rare and vanishing scripts.
By the way: the exhibition is already booked at various venues through next spring, but my dream is for the exhibition to go on a grand World Tour, visiting every country represented in the show. Clearly, I can’t come close to affording this myself, and I doubt whether many of the peoples whose scripts are endangered can afford to fund their own leg of the world tour. The only way this is going to happen is if some major foundation, government or corporation funds it. If anyone has any suggestions who that might be, don’t be shy about suggesting them!
Manchu
July 27th, 2010
The latest of the EA family comes thanks to the efforts of the poet John Balaban, who has made a substantial reputation for himself by translating Vietnamese poetry into English, and has continued his work by founding a non-profit organization dedicated to reviving Nom, the traditional Vietnamese calligraphic script that was suppressed by the French in the 1920s.
“Nom keeps a flavor of a culture washed away with the language of the Roman alphabet,” Balaban told the New York Times. “There are real literary treasures, and still a lot of texts that have not been translated.”
He has also helped gather young Vietnamese “font carvers” who have digitized the script and his foundation has compiled a Nom dictionary, a collection of 20,000 characters, which he says can be more difficult to master than Chinese.
Carving it has certainly been more demanding than any of the other EA boards. Balaban himself reads and writes the contemporary Vietnamese script, but in order to get Article One translated into Nom he called on the services of Lê Văn Cường, of the Vietnamese Nôm Preservation Foundation in Hanoi. Here’s a glimpse of Nom in progress:
Maay Maay
May 30, 2010
When I was carving the Endangered Alphabets, I was looking ahead to the first exhibition of the boards, due to take place in Winooski, Vermont, in May 2010. Winooski is one of the focal points for refugee resettlement in the United States, and I wondered what connections might exist between the EA and the residents of Winooski.
At first, I hoped I might find someone in Winooski who actually read and wrote in one of my chosen EA languages/scripts, but that seemed not to be the case. Visiting the various resettlement organizations, though, I heard of Maay Maay, the language of the Somali Bantu.
The Somali Bantu have been marginalized and enslaved by other tribes and groups up and down East Africa, I was told, and even those who have made it to relative security in Vermont face another issue of cultural disenfranchisement: as their children assimilate, quickly picking up American English, their parents’ Maay Maay is no longer a means of connection and the inheritance of tradition, but a sign of the widening gap between parents and their children.
Even though Maay Maay isn’t written with its own (endangered) alphabet, I decided to include it in the EA exhibition to draw attention to this unfortunate but common feature of immigration and assimilation. And then give the board to the Somali Bantu Association so they can hang it in their headquarters where Article One sounds less like a utopian dream by a world body and more like a proud, even defiant statement by a people determined to find its feet at last.
This morning I cycled over to 130 West Canal Street, Winooski, to hand the board to the Somali Bantu Association, but something unexpected got added to that simple experience.
Twenty-eight years ago, I was living on West Canal Street myself, newly married to an American girl and thus a new immigrant myself. Both of us were new to the area, both of us were hoping to make it as writers, doing whatever we could to stay afloat: she tended bar, I coached soccer, and we both delivered bundles of newspapers from a Honda Civic that we wrecked simply by making so many stops and jumping in and out so often.
We divorced twenty-five years ago and she moved to Seattle, but we stay in touch. Over time I guess we both established ourselves, both as writers and as parents, and even though I still have some of the contours of my English accent, you’d have to say we’ve both assimilated into this strange, patchwork American culture in which everyone is from somewhere else anyway.
As I cycled away from the Somali Bantu offices I wondered where that board will be in 25 years. I carved them in thick slabs of maple in order to make them durable (and in order to forge the connection to Vermont), but language itself may change more rapidly than wood. With luck, the Somali Bantu will have prospered in their new homeland, and will have something a little more substantial than a couple of small, dark, rented rooms to call their headquarters. But assimilation is a two-edged sword: what will be the good of the board and its trenchant statement if nobody can read it?
Work in progress: Baybayin (left) and Mandaic
May 26th
While half of the Endangered Alphabets exhibition continues on display at the Emergent Media Center in the Champlain Mill in Winooski, another version, or branch, or offshoot of the project is due to make its way to the Champlain College Library.
Thanks to the enthusiasm of Janet Cottrell, librarian extraordinaire, a plan is afoot to hang a number of cherry boards (probably six) around the library, above the stacks and tables. On one side they’ll have a word in English that draws attention to the intrinsic qualities of libraries, and of writing in general: book, knowledge, wisdom, imagination–that sort of thing. On the other side will be the same word, but in one of the Endangered Alphabets.
What we like about this project is that the boards will present a visual challenge to the reader–What the heck is that? Is it even writing?–that can be answered only in the classic library way: by following one’s curiosity, by asking questions.
So far, things are coming along nicely–but as always, my challenge is to find people who can not only understand and speak the exotic languages I’ve chosen, but can translate my library-virtue words into the traditional script. Is there anyone out there who can help me with Bugis? Samaritan? Balinese? Redjang? Sundanese? Makassarese? Anyone? Please?
May 26th,2010
Endangered Alphabets: The Blog | tags:
Balinese,
Baybayin,
Bugis,
endangered alphabets,
endangered languages,
Makassarese,
Manchu,
Mandaic,
Redjang,
Samaritan,
Sundanese |
2 Comments
Baybayin
May 14, 2010
The interest in the Endangered Alphabets Project continues to amaze me. Since May 1, this site has registered more than 6,000 hits. The opening exhibition, at the Champlain Mill in Winooski, Vermont, drew great interest and as a result the Project is the subject of two video documentaries in progress. I had planned to take it down, but enough people prevailed on me to keep it in the public eye that half the show will remain on display at Champlain College’s Emergent Media Center, also in the Champlain Mill.
Meanwhile, two wonderful articles about the Alphabets, one in the Barre-Montpelier Times-Argus and the Rutland Herald and the other in Seven Days helped spread the word to such good effect that plans are afoot to show the Alphabets at Middlebury College, Rutgers University and Central Connecticut State University, as well as at least two exhibitions in the U.K.: the annual conference of the Foundation for Endangered Languages in Wales, and the School for African and Oriental Studies in London. The Vermont Humanities Council has also endorsed the Project, which means I’ll be able to show it all around the state.
Lindsay Webster and Emily Regis, two outstanding designers from the Champlain College Publishing Initiative, are putting the finishing touches to the book version, which features photos by the outstanding studio photographer Glenn Moody.
As I say elsewhere, I couldn’t even have begun this project without the encyclopedic work of Simon Ager at Omniglot.com, and the collaboration of dozens of linguists, writers, librarians and teachers all around the world. I wish them all the success in their endeavors that I seem to be having in mine.
Bagatha
May 1, 2010
Scrolling through Omniglot.com for the ten thousandth time, I came across some scripts I’d never seen before. Simon Ager, the sage behind Omniglot, told me they were the work of Dr Prasanna Sree of Andhra University in Andhra Pradesh, India….
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