If you’ve been following this blog or reading the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, you’ll be well aware of the Adinkra symbols of Ghana. Nearby, though, there is another and much less well-known set of symbols. Darius Adjong has been researching them for a guest column for the Endangered Alphabets. He writes: Like the Adinkra symbols […]
The Sancha Lipi—that is, Sancha scripts—are a family of related scripts from northern India. They were brought to my attention by the ever-vigilant Biswajit Mandal. An elementary teacher from Port Blair, Andaman & Nicobar Islands, he is also a linguist, font creator, and linguistic content supplier for Omniglot and the Endangered Alphabets. He was one […]
At this very moment, someone is working to create a new, unique script for their culture and their language. We know of more than 125 scripts that were created by individuals on behalf of their people, most of which have struggled to gain acceptance and wide and prolonged usage, and for that reason they are […]
By my calculations, at least a hundred new scripts have been created in the past half-century. I’m not talking about scripts created for private use, or for use in fiction, film, or television, but scripts intended to give practical visual identity to a language that had previously been using a script imported from, or imposed […]
If you like chocolate, you ultimately owe it to the Aztecs, who would drink a cocoa-based beverage called chocolatl. You may also have heard other words, such as Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Aztec Empire), Quetzalcoatl (an Aztec deity, after whom the pterosaur Quetzalcoatlus is named), or atlatl (a device used to throw spears). All […]
By my calculations, at least a hundred new scripts have been created in the past century. I’m not talking about scripts created for private use, or for use in fiction, film, or television, but scripts intended to give practical visual identity to a language that had previously been using a script imported from, or imposed […]
Every time I claim that a script I write about is the newest writing system in the world, I have to eat my own words. Over the past two weeks I’ve been told about two new writing systems in development in South America, a continent remarkable for the essential obliteration, thanks to the Spanish conquest, […]
A month ago I wrote about a new script, called Caytu, for the Wolof language of Senegal, the Gambia and Mauritania. In the continued upheaval of moving and resettling the operations of the Endangered Alphabets (a phrase that sounds far grander than the reality deserves) it has taken me longer than I hoped to actually […]
It is still remarkably rare for scholars to get involved in creating and promoting new writing systems, so it seems all the more worthwhile to pass along to you an article by Stephen Morey, an Australian scholar and expert in the Tai languages and scripts of South China, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. And as […]
