Documenting Endangered Alphabets
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Documenting endangered alphabets Industry Focus Tim Brookes Three years ago, acting on a notion so whimsi- cal I assumed it was a kind of presenile monoma- nia, I began carving endangered alphabets. The Tdisclaimers start right away. I’m not a linguist, an anthropologist, a cultural historian or even a woodworker. I’m a writer — but I had recently started carving signs for friends and family, and I stumbled on Omniglot.com, an online encyclo- pedia of the world’s writing systems, and several things had struck me forcibly. For a start, even though the world has more than 6,000 Figure 1: Tifinagh. languages (some of which will be extinct even by the time this article goes to press), it has fewer than 100 scripts, and perhaps a passing them on as a series of items for consideration and dis- third of those are endangered. cussion. For example, what does a written language — any writ- Working with a set of gouges and a paintbrush, I started to ten language — look like? The Endangered Alphabets highlight document as many of these scripts as I could find, creating three this question in a number of interesting ways. As the forces of exhibitions and several dozen individual pieces that depicted globalism erode scripts such as these, the number of people who words, phrases, sentences or poems in Syriac, Bugis, Baybayin, can write them dwindles, and the range of examples of each Samaritan, Makassarese, Balinese, Javanese, Batak, Sui, Nom, script is reduced. My carvings may well be the only examples Cherokee, Inuktitut, Glagolitic, Vai, Bassa Vah, Tai Dam, Pahauh of, say, Samaritan script or Tifinagh that my visitors ever see. Hmong, Tifinagh, Mro, Chakma, Dongpa and Maldivian. These At once we’re faced with the fact that what written language have been shown at colleges, universities and libraries across looks like and means now is very, very different from what it the United States, and later in 2012 will be displayed in Eng- looked like and meant in its infancy. When I saw Tifinagh on land, Spain, Thailand and Australia. the Omniglot website, it looked weird and cool. When I tracked The Endangered Alphabets project has raised a series of fas- down photographs of it in its natural habitat, I realized I was cinating questions and dilemmas about language, culture and looking at the most extraordinary writing in the world. the forces that act on each of them. I can’t pretend to have The natural habitat in question is the wall of a cave deep solved any of these riddles, but it may at least be worthwhile in the Sahara desert, at a site called the Wadi Matkhandouch Prehistoric Art Gallery, near Germa in Libya. It’s startling to find any evidence of human presence in such an inhospitable place, so far from what we think of as civilization. And, frankly, the Tifinagh didn’t look much like what we think of as writing. It Tim Brookes is director of the Professional was a meandering string of simple symbols (Figure 1), some of Writing Program at Champlain College in which looked more like mathematics than writing. There was no Burlington, Vermont, and author of the attempt to include pictograms, though in fact the same set of book Endangered Alphabets. rocks and caves has an incredible array of carvings of animals: 16 | MultiLingual October/November 2012 [email protected] 16-20 Brookes #131.indd 16 9/20/12 10:50 AM Industry Focus giraffes, lions, crocodiles, elephants, ostriches and two cats apparently fight- ing. Or perhaps it represented a kind of code, for this twisting strand of language looked so old and so deep it might just be the DNA of writing. Did I mention that the symbols or letters were in such a strange and vivid red pigment that they looked as if they’d been written in blood? To me, it wasn’t just a series of symbols intended to convey sound and meaning, though in fact these fantastical scraps of writing are actually messages from one caravan to another, giving directions, passing on the location of water. It was, however, like a missing link, the verbal equivalent of the famous prehistoric cave paintings at Lascaux in southwestern France. Written language was here, it Figure 2: Carving Inuktitut. said, long before anyone thought to write in straight and level lines. Parsing out scripts wrist, so dependent on perfect equilateral The individual letters had the same When I started the project, though, the triangles, circles and straight lines, none combination of angular purpose yet question of what a script looks like never of which occur in nature. You try draw- prehistoric crudity that challenge the even occurred to me. I could download ing a perfect equilateral triangle some sense at Stonehenge. Something was the representative sample of text from time. As an act of writing, it just doesn’t being born. That writing was a defining Omniglot, which in many cases was make sense. Much later, I would come to moment in human intellectual history: Article One from the Universal Declara- think of this syllabary (the creation of not just a representation of a panorama tion of Human Rights: “All human beings James Evans, a missionary) as a fasci- of hunting, but early, early, unbelievably are born free and equal in dignity and nating and unusual manifestation of a early symbolism. It was like the inven- rights. They are endowed with reason particular impulse to globalism. By bas- tion of meaning itself. and conscience and should act towards ing his script, originally created for the If I sound as if I’m in danger of being one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” Cree, partly on geometrical symbols, and carried away here, it’s because those pho- I could simply print this out, take it to in particular by using the conceit that tographs also showed two vital aspects Kinko’s, blow it up to an 11x17 sheet, the same symbol would be pronounced of written language. One, that writing trace the lettering onto my wood using differently when pointing in different is steeped, as if in blood, in the history, carbon paper, and start carving. That was directions, Evans was relying on a kind geography, hydrology, technology, poli- de facto what the writing system looked of Euclidian globalism. tics and economics of its writers. These like, and as I am no linguist and could Certain ideal shapes, he seems to have symbols on the cave wall were not words neither speak nor read any of these lan- believed, were universal, an idea pursued abstracted onto a page. These were words, guages, I was simply following orders. much more recently by Stanislas Dehaene as I say, in the full and complex entangle- Omniglot didn’t have Article One in in his book Reading in the Brain. But ment of their natural habitat. And two, every single script. As I wanted each whereas Dehaene was associating primal that writing shows how profoundly we board to say the same thing, I started visual forms with the firing of individual are pattern-seeking and pattern-making with the scripts I could just pull off the neurons, Evans was creating a script that animals. Nearly everyone who looks at web, meanwhile starting an e-mail cam- had more in common with musical nota- my own lame representation of Tifinagh, paign all over the globe to track down tion or mathematical language than with which I carved on an especially distressed people who could still read and write writing systems that have been invented piece of maple, and for once allowed the Balinese, Sundanese or Bassa Vah. collectively, evolving over time. Each of text to meander like the text on those The first script I carved was Inukti- his syllabic symbols had its own logic, a Saharan walls, is transfixed by it. Again tut — because it was available, and also foundation so strong that even 150 years like Stonehenge, it clearly exhibits pat- because it looked easy. Within minutes I later Inuktitut still has its sharp edges, tern, which in turn represents meaning sensed I had fallen into a trap, possibly unmodified by time and use. And while — but what the hell does it mean? And several traps. First of all, Inuktitut is its users were, by all accounts, delighted our need to identify and understand pat- actually a language; the script is more to have their own script, it was a script tern is so strong that people will stand correctly known as Canadian Aboriginal that owed almost nothing to indigenous looking at my carving for five, even ten Syllabics. Second, it wasn’t easy at all. cultural elements and almost everything minutes, saying how it looks Greek, how I cursed my way through my carving to the ideal forms of classical Greece and it looks alien, how it looks both ancient (Figure 2), wondering why on Earth any Rome. and futuristic at the same time, trying to culture would have a written language By the time I’d finished the Inuktitut puzzle it out. so inimical to the movement of hand and board, which took me a month or more, www.multilingual.com October/November 2012 MultiLingual | 17 16-20 Brookes #131.indd 17 9/20/12 10:50 AM Industry Focus Baybayin (Figure 3) on the left and Bassa Vah (Figure 4) on the right. I was dying to work on a script that his mood. Every character was, in effect, number of (differing) Baybayin typefaces really was a script — that is, was written.