As regular visitors to this blog may remember, I've been supporting the Endangered Alphabets Project since its inception in 2011 or so, when I read an article about its originator, Tim Brookes, in the New York Times.
The first Kickstarter project I ever supported was designed to gain the Alphabets a wider audience and to fund an exhibition of Tim's beautiful carvings of passages from languages whose writing systems are in danger of disappearing. I describe this effort in some detail, and my reasons for getting behind it in this post from November 15, 2011: Losing Languages. That campaign was highly successful, and ever since then I've been happy to back every campaign Tim has launched. My favorite has been The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, but the range of projects has included games (like ULUS: Legends of the Nomads), teaching and learning materials, and even a Sudoku puzzle book.
World Endangered Writing Day represents an international holiday devoted to the projects and results of all these efforts (and many more). At this main link you can find the rationale behind the holiday, the events that will ensue, and ways to support the continuing work to save these remarkable expressions of human intelligence, creativity, and community.
Except for encouraging folks to participate in various Endangered Alphabets Kickstarter campaigns, I don't usually solicit monetary contributions. But I do urge you to visit the WEWD sites linked to the main page, and consider contributing, even in a small way. The primary purpose of this whole, long, worthwhile endeavor is to preserve the art of writing (and thus help stem the tide of losing traditional languages) and in doing so to keep the histories of these people from disappearing.
In addition, if you're at all interested in the history of writing and its associated technologies, as many of my former graphic design and humanities students have been, please consider purchasing this latest book by Tim Brookes, Writing Beyond Writing: Lessons from Endangered Alphabets. It's available for sale in multiple formats at the link. World Endangered Writing Day coincides with the book's official publication date.
This whole topic becomes all the more important as literacy in general appears to be declining in this particular political and technological landscape. Try to contribute if you can, but even by looking through the linked materials you should be able to enrich your understanding of the critical nature of writing as a vehicle of cultural survival.
2 comments:
Alphabets are an art as much as a communication. If language is developed as a response to environment and resources, then so too are writing systems a reflection of the expression of a cultural response to the place people find themselves forming communities. Efforts to save writing systems must be up against the computer age as education and development gives small groups with discreet alphabets access to a world of information, but only if they abandon their heritage and adopt the common denominator.
It is remarkable that literacy is declining as this technology develops. Is it really? So much of our world now depends on people being literate in order to 'participate' via technology - messaging, online information gathering etc.
Sad to think about so many languages (and cultures) going extinct so quickly. And how many have we lost already? It must be a large number.
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