The Endangered Alphabets Project

Manchu

The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. 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 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.

Every one of the Endangered Alphabets (Inuktitut, Baybayin, Manchu, Bugis, Bassa Vah, Cherokee, Samaritan, Mandaic, Syriac, Khmer, Pahauh Hmong, Balinese, Tifinagh and Nom), carved and painted into a slab of Vermont curly maple, challenges our assumptions about language, about beauty, about the fascinating interplay between function and grace that takes place when we invent symbols for the sounds we speak, and when we put a word on a page—or a piece of bamboo, or a palm leaf.

In each case, the text is the same–namely, Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in 1948 at the foundation of the United Nations: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” The irony, of course, is that many of these forms of writing are endangered precisely because human beings do not always act towards one another in that spirit.

The Endangered Alphabets are not only a unique and vivid way of demonstrating the issue of disappearing languages and the global loss of cultural diversity, they are also remarkable and thought-provoking pieces of art. These two threads interweave to raise all kinds of questions about writing itself: how it developed, how it spread across the globe, how the same alphabet took on radically different forms, like Darwin’s finches, on neighboring islands, and how developments in technology affected writing, and vice versa.

The exhibition was a centerpiece at the 2010 Foundation for Endangered Languages annual conference in Wales, and has appeared at Rutgers University, Middlebury College, the University of Vermont, Champlain College, Central Connecticut State University, and several libraries throughout New England.

Wonderful news about the Kickstarter fundraiser

Supporters and backers all over the world chipped in to donate nearly $18,000 to make the Alphabets World Tour a reality. Once the Kickstarter and Amazon fees are subtracted, along with the cost of the books and mugs I’m going to be staggering down to the post office with, the project still raised some $12,000. My most sincere gratitude to all concerned.

To read more about the exhibition of carvings, or to get booking information, click here.

To read more about the book, Endangered Alphabets, or to order it, click here.

To read more about my next carving project involving endangered alphabets, click here.

To check out my occasional blog on endangered alphabets and languages, click here.

Your comments and suggestions are always welcome.

Tim

Third Panel Complete

After a delay of nearly five months while I’ve been dealing with the astounding fallout of the Kickstarter fundraiser, I finally got back, right before Christmas, to my long-incomplete Endangered Poem Project. It provided all kinds of challenges I haven’t had to deal with for a while. The recent work has been large, in familiar endangered scripts, and in all kinds of exotic woods. This latest phase took me back to familiar wood but unfamiliar letters–what’s more, unfamiliar tiny letters. And all that sent me back to research, one of the driving forces of the project that I’ve neglected all these months. So here are photos of the panel; and in the next couple of days I’ll add an update on the scripts themselves, including thanks to the amazingly helpful people who did the translations for me, and the creation process, which as always has its own excitements and challenges.

The third panel of four--or maybe five!

Okay, so let’s take a closer look at each of the five scripts….

Eskayan

Credit to Piers Kelly for contacting me, introducing me to Eskayan (which, as with most of these scripts, I’d never heard of), then arranging for Maria Dano and Decena Nida Salingay to translate the poem from English and then Nida to write it out in the Eskayan script. Eskayan is spoken on the Philippine island of Bohol.

Chakma

Credit here to Shantimoy Chakma, who met me in Dhaka and subsequently sent me the poem in both Chakma and (below) Mro, the unique scripts of the Chakma and Mro people of the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh.

Mro

Javanese

Javanese, or more properly Aksara Jawa, came to me via Nurbaini McKosky, with the actual translation being by Dr. Sastri S. Sweeney. As with all of these scripts, any mistakes are mine rather than theirs!

Thaana

Thaana is the traditional script of the Maldives, and it appears here thanks to the contribution of Maryam Mariya. In a sense the script is not endangered, as it is the script in use by the roughly 300,000 inhabitants of the Maldives, but given that in the 1970s the president decreed that Latin script should be used in all official correspondence (a ruling subsequently overturned), it’s clearly vulnerable. I’ve also included it because it has all kinds of fascinating features, just one of which is that words are written from right to left, denoting the script’s Arabic roots, but numbers are written from left to right!

Endangered Tableware

The Endangered Trivet

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 underside to protect the table from scratches. The text, in Mandaic, is from my friend the indefatigable Charles Haberl of Rutgers, and it means, “May the name of Life and the Knowledge of Life (Manda d’Hayyi) be pronounced over you, o Good (Food)!”