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The Art of Language 1 Preview

THE ART OF

CONTENTS

Introduction 4 ‘ez 52 Syriac 100 Georgian 56 Tamil 104 8 Greek 60 Thai 108 Armenian 14 64 Tibetan 112 Bengali 18 Hanunó’ 68 116 Burmese 22 Hebrew 72 Vai 120 26 Japanese 76 Chinese 30 Javanese 82 Glossary 124 Cree 36 Khmer 88 Contributor’ bios 126 Cyrillic 40 Mongolian 92 Bibliography and thanks 127 46 ’ 96 Acknowledgments 128

3 THE ART OF LANGUAGE Right: carving that reads ’Everything happens for a reason’, based on the Tibetan of the Buddhist monk Tashi Mannox. INTRODUCTION It’s a great loss that, matter how open we are to new and interesting teach best practices and model usage. country’s official . Nobody uses the Glagolitic any more, but sights and sounds and tastes when we travel, oftentimes our attitude As got curious about why the scripts had evolved the way they had, there are at least two sculpture trails in that wind between vast toward is completely different. I discovered their stories are as compelling as their mystery: the man stone Glagolitic letters, as if Croatia were the Easter Island of Eastern As soon as we leave the - world, we feel lost, who was assassinated for bringing to his people; the alphabet Europe. are literally woven into (and printed on) frustrated, anxious. It doesn’t matter how elaborate or graceful the whose every has a secret mystical meaning; and the culture that fabrics in , and one of the most popular tattoo designs in is local script is: we stare at it, not even able to turn letters into sounds, esteems writing so highly that if someone dies without learning to read the in the beautifully fluid but endangered script. thinking, Just tell me how to get to the darn railway station. and write, the priest teaches those skills to the corpse so it can pass If you practise the calligraphy exercises offered in this book, you I admit, I was just as uncomprehending and impatient when faced successfully into the afterlife. may realise something arguably even deeper about writing. Writing with non-Latin scripts until, quite by chance, I started carving the Each culture’s script is an expression of that people’s history, its is an expression of its cultural origins, but the act of writing is an world’s rarest and most endangered scripts in wood. (Brief note of religion, its tools, its experience of wars won and lost – even its flora extension of the body, of the turn of the human wrist. It’s a form of explanation: I’ not a linguist by training, nor even a wood-carver. I’ and climate, for writing on palm leaves produces a vastly different grace, almost a dance. When I lecture on the Endangered I just stumbled across some of these – to me – exotic and astounding script than incising writing into . As this book will show you, have the audience trace a single Balinese letter in the air, with the tip of scripts and learned that perhaps 85 percent of the world’s alphabets writing is like a slow-growing local plant whose roots are astonishingly their index finger. And it dawns on them: the movements of their hand are on the verge of extinction. So I decided to preserve a few in wood. deep. A traveller who ignores local writing is missing as much as one are the gestures of a Balinese dancer. As one does.) After a year or so of this, I founded the Endangered who ignores local architecture. Expanding your knowledge of the world’s non-Latin scripts, and your Alphabets Project, with the goal of helping indigenous and minority Consequently, I came to realise that writing conveys a great deal love of practising them, is inherently empathetic. It immediately breaks cultures revitalise their traditional scripts, some of which have been in more than sound and meaning. The very shapes of the letters are part down that ‘Why can’t everyone else like us?’ mentality. It may not use for over a thousand years. of the landscape. A culture’s traditional script may be as beloved as its help you find the railway station, and you may, in fact, miss your train In the process I discovered – as you will, by this book – flag, even when nobody can still read it. And as this book shows, many copying down an piece of street signage, in all its complex, some things about writing. From the get-go, I was fascinated by the scripts have managed to thrive in our information age even as Latin sinuous beauty, into the pages of your travel journal. enigmatic shapes of the letters and words themselves. It was like letters have overtaken others. We should celebrate their success and But that’s why we travel, isn’t it? puzzling over the vast bluestones at Stonehenge: you can tell they engage with them. have shape, design, purpose – but you can’t work out what it is. In less Soyombo, one of the scripts invented to write Mongolian, has not TIM BROOKES commonly used scripts, it’s an intriguing mystery to unravel; in others, been generally used for more than a century, yet it is so deeply part of THE ENDANGERED ALPHABETS PROJECT robust communities of millions of native speakers (and readers) exist to the country’s identity that a Soyombo letter is front and centre in the BURLINGTON, VERMONT © Tim Brookes

4 5 CRILLIC (BelarusRussiaUkraine)

MONGOLIAN (Mongolia) GEORGIAN (Georgia) CHEROKEECREE (North America) ARMENIAN (Armenia) GREEK HANGUL () JAPANESE (Greece) CHINESE () (Japan) HEBRESRIAC (Middle East) TIBETAN (SE Asia) TIINAGH (North Africa) DEVANAGARI ARABIC BENGALITAMIL (AfricaMiddle East) SCRIPTS (Bangladesh)

KHMERBURMESETHAI NKO (SE Asia) PER CONTINENT HANUNOO (West Africa) GE (Philippines) (Ethiopia) TAMIL VAI () (Sierra Leone)

AFRICA IJAVANESE NORTH AMERICA () Arabic (p8), Ge’ez (p52), N’Ko (p96), Tifinagh Cherokee (p26), Cree (p36) (p116), Vai (p120) MIDDLE Arabic (p8), Hebrew (p72), Syriac (p100) Bengali (p18), Burmese (p22), Chinese (p30), Cyrillic (p40), Devanagari (p46), Hangul (p64), EUROPE Hanuno’o (p68), Japanese (p76), Kawi-Javanese Armenian (p14), Cyrillic (p40), Georgian (p56), (p82), Khmer (p88), Mongolian (p92), Tamil Greek (p60) (p104), Thai (p108), Tibetan (p112)

6 7 THE ART OF LANGUAGE ARABIC ARABIC

WHO & WHERE The third-most-common writing in the is used by more than double that amount: Typically, Arabic is spelled according to ‘true’, world, after the and Chinese approximately 660 million people. historic pronunciation – but informal writing, characters, is . Its vast reach Arabic letters have their roots in in text messages and online, is increasingly reflects that of Islam, which starting in the Phoenician, by way of Syriac and Nabataean. spelled as spoken, and sometimes this shows 7th century spread the holy Arabic text of The earliest known inscriptions are thought up in commercial slogans and political ads. the Quran along with the more workaday to be from the 3rd or 4th century AD, As iconography was disfavoured in Islam, HOW TO USE IT Arabic of trade and record keeping. Scores found in what is now Jordan and Saudi calligraphy developed as one of the empire’s Strictly speaking, Arabic is not an alphabet but an , the term a somewhat angular shape even when later written with a reed of adopted Arabic writing and Arabia. At first, letter forms were limited, principal decorative arts, with graceful Arabic for systems in which notation is limited. Written right to left, pen on parchment. When paper was brought to the caliphal court developed variations on the alphabet. and used only to aid recall of oral poems letters adorning manuscripts as well as the abjad has 25 and three long , two of which in Baghdad in the 8th century, the smooth new writing surface Persian, Dari and use a version with or trade agreements. The system was monumental buildings. During the Ottoman double as consonants (oo and ; ee and ). All short vowels are inspired more flowing shapes, including the concise writing style additional letters and a distinct style, while made fully phonetic – one letter for one Empire, Istanbul took up the mantle of Islamic indicated with small symbols called harakat (motions) above and called naskh (copying), used for many of the and some African languages such as Mandinka, sound – in order to reproduce the Quran, culture, and the city is still considered the below the letters – in theory, at least. In practice, the harakat are texts produced during the Islamic Empire’s golden age, as well Hausa and Swahili are sometimes written considered the literal word of God, with capital of – even after 1928, used only in children’s books and the Quran. A good Arabic reader as copies of the Quran. This fundamental style and the graceful in a system called Ajami. In , the utmost precision. That phonetic quality when Kemal Atatürk decreed that Turkish can differentiate identical combinations of consonants from context: thuluth (‘one-third’, used above and, more elaborately, on p12) ,for instance, can were standardised by a vizier in the Baghdad court, Ibn Muqlah ,ب and ك ,ت an Arabic-based script called Jawi is used is somewhat hypothetical, however, as be written in Latin letters. Arabic typeface Without vowel marks, the letters for Malay, and even farther east, for Tausug Arabic is highly diglossic – that is, the design, a more recent creative endeavour, represent a verb, kataba ( wrote), or a noun, kutub (books), while who established rules still used today, in which the letter’s size is ,together could mean ‘poetry’ (pronounced proportional to that of the dots made by the reed pen tip. He also ر and ش ,ع in the Philippines. As a result, while the written language (called fusha, ‘eloquent’) flourishes especially in Beirut, building on the the letters Arabic language is spoken by about 300 is markedly different, in both pronunciation legacy of Maronite monks who imported the ’) or ‘hair’ (shi’r). according to legend, kept working on his art even after losing a million people worldwide, the Arabic script and structure, from its many spoken dialects. first printing press to the Middle East in 1610. In its earliest form, Arabic was carved in stone, and letters had hand as punishment for court intrigue.

8 9 THE ART OF LANGUAGE BENGALI BENGALI

WHO & WHERE has a diverse language ecosystem, and one major won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his works in Bengali. branch within the Indo-Aryan family is Bengali, or Bangla. Close The movement crystallised in 1947, when partition created the to 275 million people in India and neighbouring Bangladesh use state of Pakistan, two noncontiguous provinces on either side of bangla lipi (Bangla script) to write the , as well as India. Immediately, leaders in the new nation’s capital of Karachi Assamese, Sylheti and Manipuri (also called Meitei). In fact, it is by moved to make Urdu, spoken in West Pakistan, the sole state most estimates the world’s fifth-most-used – just after language, over the protests of some 44 million Bengali speakers Devanagari, to which it is related. in East Pakistan (later to become Bangladesh). Despite Bengali Bengali script – sometimes referred to as Eastern Nagari, speakers’ majority, Karachi politicians insisted ‘Urdu, and only Urdu’ HOW TO USE IT although this is technically a predecessor of the modern script – would unify the new Muslim nation, because Urdu was written Like many other scripts of South Asia, Vidyasagar tailored the script to – much the same way developed over several centuries in the eastern part of India, where in the same script as Arabic, the language of the Quran. Even a Bengali is an alphasyllabary, also known as better fit Bengali. He reduced the set of are written in an implicit square. Sometimes it was used to write and many other languages between the compromise of writing Bengali in Arabic script was denied. an . That is, each symbol letters, removing many that were used these combined consonants are clear, but Himalayas and the Bay of Bengal. By the 11th century, it became the On 21 February 1952 the military used lethal force to put down has an (o, in this case); other primarily for Sanskrit, and devising three there are also many irregular combinations, recognisable system it is today, and over the two hundred years of University of Dhaka student demonstrations against the Pakistani vowels are represented with stand-alone new ones to reflect Bengali pronunciation. which means a bit more to memorise; the the Islamic kingdom of the Bengal Sultanate, beginning in 1335, it government’s language policy, and massive unrest followed. Finally, letters or, more commonly, that The script now has 11 vowels (the top row total set consists of about 350 shapes. In came to be associated primarily with the Bengali language. in 1956, Bengali was ratified as a second official language – but are placed below or on either side of the above) and 32 consonants (the remaining some Bengali writing, the spaces are very Later, Bengal lost its independence and was ruled at a distance, by then the rift was too deep, and in 1972 Bangladesh became consonant. Writing runs left to right, with no three rows). small, but you can generally distinguish via edicts in Arabic, and English. In the late 19th century, a an independent country. 21 February is now a national holiday in capital letters. Bengali consonants can combine into between words by looking for the breaks movement began to promote the Bengali script and language – Bangladesh, honoured as Language Movement Day, and in 1999, The writing system was standardised in one (a single written symbol), in the matra – the headline that connects most famously through the work of poet Rabindranath Tagore, who UNESCO named the date International Mother Language Day. the 1800s, when teacher and writer Ishwar compressed into a kind of invisible rectangle . A vertical line marks a .

18 19 THE ART OF LANGUAGE BENGALI

PROVERB TRY ON THIS PAGE

CALLIGRAPHY TOOLS USED: SEE THE FESTIVAL AND SELL THE BANANAS. Chisel tipped marker pen (25-30 degree slant)

20 21 THE ART OF LANGUAGE CHEROKEE

HOW TO USE IT CHEROKEE The Cherokee consists of 85 characters. ’s original version had one more symbol (now obsolete) and was handwritten in elegant loops and curls that looked a bit like old-style English penmanship. The system used now, however, is almost entirely different. There’s no record of why the syllabary changed so drastically, but one plausible reason is that Sequoyah found that his first system could not easily – or at least cheaply – be adapted for use on a printing press. So it’s possible that he devised the new WHO & WHERE syllabary, in which many letters resemble One of the most influential scripts of the the script to Cherokee from Georgia to and ‘deserved’ to stay on its land. To no Latin or Greek letters or numerals, because last two centuries was invented not by a Arkansas. Sequoyah would ask each elder avail: in 1838, 20,000 Cherokee were force- these were what a printer would have had linguist or a scholar, but by a blacksmith to say a word, which he would write, then marched to , the tribe’s present available, and been able to modify with who did not read in any language – at summon Ayoka to read the words aloud. home. Sequoyah died in 1843, on a trip additional bars or serifs. least not at first. Born in Tennessee around Doubters accused him of sorcery or simply to teach his script to a far-flung group of This printed system sacrificed a little 1770, Sequoyah, also known as George , but he’s said to have insisted, Cherokee in Mexico. clarity – the two W shapes, for example, Gist, was impressed by the ‘talking leaves’ ‘The white man is no magician’. Sequoyah’s legacy is far-reaching. His can give students some trouble, as can (meaning letters) that white men used to In 1825, the adopted syllabary certainly inspired in the fact that ‘familiar’ English letters have communicate over long distances. So he the syllabary and wrote its bylaws in it. A Canada (which in turn inspired a system in completely different sounds in Cherokee. set out to develop a similar system for his few years later came a constitution and the China), and possibly some scripts in West But it did enable Cherokee to spread widely native Cherokee. weekly newspaper, in Africa. His cabin in Sallisaw, Oklahoma, is and quickly through newspapers and other Sequoyah worked for a wasted decade Cherokee and English. Soon the Cherokee a designated Literary Landmark, and the printed material. on an unwieldy system of , but people’s literacy rate equalled that of giant redwood, Sequoia giganteum, bears For a time, both the script and printed eventually had the breakthrough of dividing their white neighbours. In the 1830s, as his name. As for the , versions were in use, but now the print set is words into . Over about a month in the federal government pressured Native it’s still spoken by about 22,000 people what’s taught in schools, both for handwriting 1821, he devised a set of characters, which Americans to move west, the syllabary and is one of the few remaining Iroquoian and printing. Writing runs left to right, and he taught to his six-year-old daughter, was cited as evidence that the tribe was, languages not to be critically endangered – capital letters, not consistently used, are Ayoka. Together they demonstrated according to white supporters, ‘advancing’ thanks in part to two centuries of literacy. simply larger versions of standard letters.

26 27 THE ART OF LANGUAGE CHEROKEE

PRAYER TRY ON THIS PAGE

SKY OUR GRANDFATHER, SUN OUR GRANDMOTHER, EARTH OUR MOTHER, CALLIGRAPHY TOOLS USED: I AM THANKFUL YOU LOVE US. WE ARE ALL THANKFUL. Black non-waterproof ink and Pilot Parallel Pen 3.8mm

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