THE ART OF LANGUAGE CONTENTS Introduction 4 Ge‘ez 52 Syriac 100 Georgian 56 Tamil 104 Arabic 8 Greek 60 Thai 108 Armenian 14 Hangul 64 Tibetan 112 Bengali 18 Hanunó’o 68 Tifinagh 116 Burmese 22 Hebrew 72 Vai 120 Cherokee 26 Japanese 76 Chinese 30 Javanese 82 Glossary 124 Cree 36 Khmer 88 Contributor’s bios 126 Cyrillic 40 Mongolian 92 Bibliography and thanks 127 Devanagari 46 N’Ko 96 Acknowledgments 128 3 THE ART OF LANGUAGE Right: a carving that reads ’Everything happens for a reason’, based on the Tibetan calligraphy of the Buddhist monk Tashi Mannox. INTRODUCTION It’s a great loss that, no matter how open we are to new and interesting teach best practices and model usage. country’s official seal. Nobody uses the Glagolitic script any more, but sights and sounds and tastes when we travel, oftentimes our attitude As I got curious about why the scripts had evolved the way they had, there are at least two sculpture trails in Croatia that wind between vast toward writing 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 Latin-alphabet world, we feel lost, who was assassinated for bringing literacy to his people; the alphabet Europe. Adinkra symbols are literally woven into (and printed on) frustrated, anxious. It doesn’t matter how elaborate or graceful the whose every letter has a secret mystical meaning; and the culture that fabrics in Ghana, and one of the most popular tattoo designs in Bali 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 om symbol in the beautifully fluid but endangered Balinese 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’m not a linguist by training, nor even a wood-carver. I’d and climate, for writing on palm leaves produces a vastly different grace, almost a dance. When I lecture on the Endangered Alphabets I just stumbled across some of these – to me – exotic and astounding script than incising writing into bamboo. 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 be 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 reading this book – flag, even when nobody can still read it. And as this book shows, many copying down an ordinary 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 (BelarusGeorgiaRussiaUkraine) MONGOLIAN (Mongolia) GEORGIAN (Georgia) CHEROKEECREE (North America) ARMENIAN (Armenia) GREEK HANGUL (Korea) JAPANESE (Greece) CHINESE (China) (Japan) HEBRESRIAC (Middle East) TIBETAN (SE Asia) TIINAGH (North Africa) DEVANAGARI ARABIC BENGALITAMIL (AfricaMiddle East) SCRIPTS (IndiaBangladesh) KHMERBURMESETHAI NKO (SE Asia) PER CONTINENT HANUNOO (West Africa) GEE (Philippines) (Ethiopia) TAMIL VAI (Sri Lanka) (Sierra LeoneLiberia) AFRICA KAIJAVANESE NORTH AMERICA (Indonesia) Arabic (p8), Ge’ez (p52), N’Ko (p96), Tifinagh Cherokee (p26), Cree (p36) (p116), Vai (p120) MIDDLE EAST ASIA 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 system in the is used by more than double that amount: Typically, Arabic is spelled according to ‘true’, world, after the Latin alphabet and Chinese approximately 660 million people. historic pronunciation – but informal writing, characters, is Arabic script. 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 abjad, the term a somewhat angular shape even when later written with a reed of languages adopted Arabic writing and Arabia. At first, letter forms were limited, principal decorative arts, with graceful Arabic for systems in which vowel 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 consonants and three long vowels, two of which in Baghdad in the 8th century, the smooth new writing surface Persian, Dari and Urdu use a version with or trade agreements. The system was monumental buildings. During the Ottoman double as consonants (oo and w; ee and y). 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 translations 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 Arabic calligraphy – 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 Southeast Asia, 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 (he 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.