Hey, everyone. Work on the free online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets is proceeding briskly with research into the scripts themselves (at current count, 120!), images of the scripts in use, links to fonts/apps/keyboard software/organizations working to preserve the scripts, and so on as we promised during our recent successful Kickstarter campaign. HERE’S THE NEXT STAGE. […]
After a year in the designing, re-designing, testing, re-redesigning, and so on, Glagolitic Abbey is finally ready for production. Surely the first board game ever created with the aim of reviving interest in an endangered alphabet, the game is something like a cross between Clue (Cluedo, if you’re British) and Umberto Eco’s novel The Name of […]
As I start gathering information for the Word Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, calling on friends and contacts and experts all over the world to amplify the little I know, I’ve also been carving a short text in Samaritan, one of the strangest and most interesting of the world’s writing systems. So strange and interesting, in […]
This afternoon it was my pleasure and privilege to present a carving of “We are still here” in Abenaki to Tom Beck on behalf of the Nulhegan Band at their cultural center in beautiful Barnet, Vermont. Tom was also kind enough to show us the remarkable garden of endangered and heirloom vegetables being grown from […]
Here’s the press release, in suitably official press release language: Half the world’s languages are in imminent danger of extinction—but Chittenden County word game lovers have the chance to help stop that decline. On Wednesday, December 13, area residents of the Champlain Valley region are invited to join the non-profit Endangered Alphabets Project at the […]
A few months ago I was contacted by Ivan Brenes, an English-language instructor at Osaka University, Japan, who told me about a minority culture I’d never heard of: the Ainu. According to the Ainu Museum website, the word “Ainu” means “human.” Ainu culture flourished in the northern islands of Japan, especially Hokkaido, from about 1400-1700. As the […]
Some amazing news. Thanks to the help of Dan Kaufman of the Endangered Language Alliance, I’ve finally managed to contact someone who knows Bamum. Here’s the backstory. I’ve been looking for someone who can read and write Bamum, a script from one of the many districts of Cameroon, ever since I started the Alphabets more […]
As you may know, some of my Tibetan carvings are based on the calligraphy of Tashi Mannox, and whenever one of them is bought I contribute 20% of the profits to Rokpa International, an NGO that cares for sick, homeless and orphaned children in the Himalayas. Here’s the latest bulletin from Rokpa on the earthquake […]
My amazing students at Champlain College are once more breaking new ground in support of education for indigenous children in Bangladesh. In addition to publishing school materials in the endangered alphabets of Marma, Mro, and Chakma, they are working to compile the first-ever anthology of stories from the Marma people–stories collected by the children themselves […]
As I was saying in Part I of this extremely short series of posts about Our Golden Hour, on Sunday morning I met with Maung Nyeu (the founder of this wonderful non-profit) at Algiers Cafe on Brattle Street in Cambridge. I handed over the materials created by some of my students in the Champlain College […]
