The Endangered Alphabets Project

Work in progress

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 carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue–and to do so by creating unforgettable, enigmatic artwork.

Every one of the Endangered Alphabets 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.

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 Alphabets have been exhibited at Yale, Harvard, Cambridge (England), Barcelona, Rutgers, Middlebury, the University of Vermont, Champlain College, Central Connecticut State University, and other colleges, universities and libraries throughout the United States. In June 2013 they will be featured at the Smithsonian.

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

Marma Proverb

Proverb plus stove

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 men are often the best workers.”

The wood is cocobolo, from Rockler in Cambridge, and the carving is drying in my own version of a fume hood: on the stove, with the extractor fan turned on!

By the way: Maung will be joining me at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival to talk about the endangered peoples of the Hill Tracts. The conversation will be moderated by David Harrison, author of When Languages Die and perhaps the world’s leading expert on endangered languages. The event is not yet scheduled but will probably take place on June 27 or 28.

Proverb plus stove

And There Was Light

Genesis 1:3. Ivy courtesy of the Maltext Building, Pine Street, Burlington.

Not long ago, I wanted to present a carving to a filmmaker–something suitable in text and, according to her preference, carved in ebony. I chose the Biblical phrase “and there was light”–the point being that a filmmaker depends on light, and is in a sense a creator of, or in, light. In her particular case, filmmaking was also about shedding light in the sense of telling truth.

My friend and general expert Charles Häberl of Rutgers sent me the quote from the Aramaic Bible in Syriac, and the carving turned out well enough, though to my surprise I hated working in ebony, which was like carving coal. I decided that at the first opportunity I’d make another carving of the Biblical phrase, but the wood had to be right: I wanted something that implied the primeval chaos that existed before light, or before the word.

For the umpteenth time, Dave Wilson of Sterling Hardwoods came through. He handed me an offcut from the end of a board of sapele–an amazing piece with grain like a weather map. I did the carving, but it’s always impossible to tell exactly what wood will look like after finishing, and to my astonishment the polyurethane revealed vein after vein of gold in the wood. And, in every respect, there was light.