 So thank you and thank the board for inviting me here. I've actually been in Brookfield I think three times and I've never taken this turn. So one of the great things I love about doing this program is it's taken me in areas all around the state that otherwise I wouldn't have seen, which is wonderful. So what I'm going to do is to talk about how this project got started, why it's important, what I'm up to now and the nature of genius. And I should say that this talk is normally nine hours long. And in compressing it somewhat, I had a choice between leaving out some of the facts or leaving out some of the jokes and so consequently, you'll see. This project began and this is part of my mini lecture on how genius works. This project began completely by accident and by luck and through absolutely no pre-existing skill. And in fact, this is a wonderful illustration of the powers of ignorance and naivety, which I recommend highly under these circumstances. Because up until 2009, I had no background in linguistics or anthropology. I was also not a visual artist, and I had never done any wood carving, which just goes to show that if you can start a project like this at the age of 55, there's hope for anybody at any time in their lives. So the way this all began, I've spent most of my adult life as a writer, as a teacher of writing, as a soccer coach and as a guitarist. And so this all came about through a series of sort of ridiculous happenstances, which of course I refer to as genius, but are in fact dumb luck and chance. So we were approaching Christmas in 2009, at the time I was married and Christmas was coming up, but we had no money and I grew up very poor in England. And so we would always make Christmas presents for the family. And so it was like, okay, I'll make Christmas presents. And as it happened, my then wife was a therapist and she wanted a shingle, a sign for her office. And I thought, well, maybe I'll do that. And my mother had, my mother who was an artist and a wood carver and a silversmith and a bunch of other things. And she had this great attitude, which I'm probably not going to need to convince you about at all, which is you can do anything as long as you take a book out of the library. Exactly. The board is kind of going like this right now. Yes, exactly. And so I had just finished writing a book on the history of the guitar in America, which featured my looking over the shoulder of a guitar maker as he made me a guitar. So I had kind of rediscovered my love of wood just in watching him do this, but I had no skill in wood, I should add. So I went to the local hardwood shop and I bought a piece of wood that was pretty much exactly like this. So it was curly maple. It's what they call live edge. It has bark on the top and bottom. And so I printed out her name and the little initials that prove that she's professionally qualified and all that kind of stuff. And I went to King Coast. King Coast plays a very important part in the role of genius, by the way, very important. And sort of blew it up until it was roughly the right size. And I thought, how am I going to get the text onto the piece of wood to carve it? Because I'd ordered myself a set of little wood gouges, but I didn't know how to do this. And I contacted one of my daughters who's a professional graphic designer and artist at in Seattle. And she told me all these complicated things that I'd do with oil of winter green and things like that. Anyway, so I went into staples. Staples you'll also be pleased to know is a very important part of the workings of genius. And I said, you know, there used to be this stuff called carbon paper. And they said, I'll one. And I thought, what? You know, nobody uses typewriters, but they're still selling carbon paper, don't they realize? And so I bought a packet of carbon paper, worst sale staples ever made. I am still using that carbon paper, you know, it was eight years later, you know, and I've still got half the sheets left. So I used carbon paper and I transferred the writing to the piece of wood and I started carving it. And so as I was doing this, my older daughter, Zoe, who was at the time a senior at the Rhode Island School of Design, said, oh, we have a senior show coming up soon. Can you make me a sign as well? And can it say designed by Zoe? Because she's very business minded and she thought she wants to have her table stand out from all the other seniors tables, you know. So I thought, OK, so I started working on that when she wasn't in the room. And then my younger daughter, who had no reason whatsoever to have a sign, she was a sophomore in high school, said, oh, I want a sign as well. I wanted to say, Maddie Brooks, fine and performing arts, because she's an artist and she's a singer and all these things. And so depending on who actually walked into the room, I would like whip one of the pieces of wood out and hide it and then work on a different one. And then I realized that one of my sisters in England, her husband has his own home recording studio, so they needed a sign. Then my other sister in England, her boyfriend has his own photography studio, so they needed a sign. So it was like the Christmas of signage. And so I essentially bought, I got the sterling hardwoods to cut more and more pieces of this eight-foot piece of maple they had. And I would go in and ask for another one and start working on that. So these went down pretty well, considering that I had no idea what I was doing and I was kind of teaching myself as I went along. And then after Christmas, the next stroke of genius took place, which was that in the living room wall, there was a hole. And I had actually, we had not been living very long in this house, and I wanted to have a sound system, but I wanted it to be like a Star Trek kind of sound system where instead of it actually standing out, it was like recessed. And you just kind of waved at it as you went past, and it started playing music and things like this. And so I realized I needed to build a niche to set it into. I'd never built a niche before. If you go in the yellow pages and look for niche builders, it's not there. And so I had worked pretty hard at this, and I'd done some sawing, and it was a plaster and lath ball, so I had to cut through all of that stuff, and I worked with kind of sheet rock and painted it. It looked great. Put the sound system in, it sounded horrible. It was awful. It was just a really cheap, awful sound system, so we took it back out again. And so we had a hole in the living room wall. And it just so happened that the hole was taller than it was wide because of the shape of the thing that I wanted to push into it. So I thought if I were living in Manhattan, I would have like a little vase in there with an orchid. But I'm living in Vermont, so that's not going to happen. But I wanted to do something arty with it, and I thought maybe I'll carve something and I'll put that in there. And I thought it's more vertical than horizontal. I'll carve something in Chinese, right? It's a vertical script. And so I looked up the Chinese characters for house of music and art, and I got another piece of wood that was roughly the right size, and I carved those with a certain amount of swearing and sanding and stuff. It fitted into the hole, and it actually looked pretty good. And I realized, oh, every so often I'm going to say something that's actually intelligent and I'm going to put my hand up when that happens, just in case you don't think you're getting value for money. So what I realized in carving Chinese was that there was a crucial difference between our alphabet and the Chinese alphabet, which was that if you're carving our alphabet and even though this is Cherokee, it actually looks somewhat like ours, then you have certain problems. You have to make sure that the width of the letter stroke, for example, is consistent. You have to make sure that if it's a roundish character of some kind, it's symmetrical. And with Chinese, because it is a brush-based script, you don't have to do that. And in fact, it actually works really well with the movement of the wrist, because it's based on the movement of the wrist. And in terms of how thick or wide the individual brush strokes are, it doesn't matter. And so it actually worked really well, and it enabled me to be much more expressive. As opposed to just kind of copying letters and trying to get them right, it became more expressive. I hadn't realized at the time, but that was actually going to turn out to be a really important element in all of this. At the time, I just thought, I'm having a good time doing this. This is really fun. And so I invited people to choose a Chinese character, a kanji, that they thought in some way represented them. And so I would then carve it and give it to them. And by now, Sterling Hardwoods is running out of pieces of wood. So these are getting smaller and smaller and smaller. The largest was literally about this big. So the last of them was literally about this big. So I had run out of wood, and I had run out of people to give little pieces of Chinese stuff too. And again, this is how genius works. So I thought, now what am I going to do? And in 2002, I was in southern India doing an article for National Geographic. And while I was there, I had seen Malayalam. So this is the language that's spoken in the state of Kerala in southern India. It's also the world's longest naturally occurring palindrome. Malayalam, Malayalam. This is the reason why you come to the library in the evening to learn these things. You can just drop it, cocktail parties, you know, when you do. Anyway, and Malayalam is a fascinating script. It looks like a series of elaborately bent paper clips. And I thought, maybe I'll carve something in Malayalam. So I just googled Malayalam. And it took me right to this website called Omniglot.com. This is where the story really gets underway. All the rest, everything I've said up until now was just like prelude and jokes and stuff. So I found this website called Omniglot.com, which had all of the world's writing systems. I'd never even seen the phrase writing system before. So I'm going through this. And several things struck me in quick succession. One was there were way more languages than I had ever heard of. I'm a pretty well-traveled guy, and I'd literally not heard of seven eighths or nine tenths of all the ones that were there. Secondly, many of these scripts were really, really beautiful or really odd or really unfamiliar. Obviously, they're not odd to the people who use them, but to my eye they were strange and fascinating. And I'm going, whoa! The third thing that struck me was that time and again as I'm kind of paging through this website, it keeps saying no longer used for official purposes, no longer taught in schools, only used by priests, only used by map makers, only used by women to write secret love letters. And that was when, I mean, I had no idea that writing systems could become extinct. Obviously, everybody's heard of endangered languages now. This has been a major study, an area of study and concern for the last 15, 20 years. But endangered alphabets? It turns out I was actually the person who coined the phrase endangered alphabets without even realizing it was a new phrase. I was assuming that somebody else must know all about it. And being of a journalistic background, I would call them up and ask them. But as I'm going through this, it becomes apparent that an extraordinary percentage of the world's writing systems are endangered. And there are something like 6,000, 6,500 languages. There are only about 120 or so writing systems or alphabets. And all of this was new to me, and so I'm kind of going, why? Until I start thinking, you know, there really is only one alphabet used in all of South America. Because when the Spanish went there, anybody who used any other kind of alphabet, you know, that was automatically a heathen writing system, and they were going to replace it with, you know, the alphabet of God, so to speak. Anyway, another of the things that struck me as I was going through Omniglot was that the sample that was being used to show what a chunk of this writing looks like was actually Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was published by the UN after World War II. And it says, all peoples are created alike in dignity and respect. They were endowed with reason and conscience and should act toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. And I thought, that's a very, very noble sentiment, but on the other hand it's deeply ironic because it turns out that many of these alphabets are endangered precisely because people don't behave toward one another in a spirit of brotherhood. And you either have, say for example, an ethnic minority that is being marginalized or actively oppressed, or a writing system has been suppressed because it is seen as being politically subversive because it's associated, you know, with a culture or a movement, or it's a victim of globalization as more and more cultures start thinking, well, you know, we need to have correspondence with, in the broader sense, the wealthy, so we need to write the way they write. And so I thought, wow, maybe I will carve those two sentences, Article 1, in some of these endangered writing systems. And I had no idea how long it would take me to do it. This is my sub-lecture on genius, again, just going over there for a second. So what I did was to set up an exhibition at Champlain College of work by faculty and students and this would be the centerpiece. So that way I couldn't stop, right, I couldn't give up because then I would be letting everybody else down, highly recommended. And I thought maybe I would, and I set out for 14 months down the road and I thought maybe I would have time to carve eight in that time. And in the end I wound up doing 13. And some of those are here, I'm going to talk about them in a minute. What I hadn't, there are several things that I hadn't expected. And again, this is how genius works, life comes and kicks you in the side of the head when you're doing something else, right? So as I started carving these, I haven't really done any research into these because research is sort of what I do as part of my professional life and this was a hobby, right? This was something different, this was relief. But as I started carving them, I began to notice certain things just by carving them. So when you're carving, you have to move pretty slowly and carefully. And so you've got a lot of time to look at what you're doing. But you've also got a lot of time to ask yourself, why is it like this? And because I'm not a linguist and I didn't speak any of these languages, this actually opened up a whole series of lines of inquiry which turned out to be new. So writing a letter typically has three qualities. So it has a phonetic quality. You see this shape and it's pronounced or something like that. It has a semantic quality. If you see this cluster of letter shapes, it has this meaning. Because I didn't speak any of these languages, I was relieved of those burdens. And I wasn't thinking, ha, you know, that's interesting because that's like the so-and-so and this other language over here because I didn't know any of those other languages. All I was left with was a graphic dimension, which is the third quality, which is why is it this shape? And that turns out to be very, very interesting. And that is seven of the nine hours of talk that I'm not giving you this evening. We're just going to dip into that little bits and pieces here and there. So I want to give you a couple of illustrations, though, of the questions that kind of ran across my mind. And as I started looking into these, every one of these scripts began to start blossoming in terms of revealing a culture and its history and its relationship with technology, its relationship with its neighbors, the evolution of writing, the evolution of calligraphy, the physics of writing, the spiritual nature of writing. And I've given whole talks just on the physics of writing and the spiritual nature of writing. And if you're interested and you want to ask questions about those at the end, I will absolutely give you like little bits to take away about those. But let me right now give you an illustration of how I was essentially asking questions out of ignorance and how useful that actually was. So the second, is that right? Yes. So the second one I carved was this one here. So, by the way, when I'm done talking about each of these, I'm going to pass them out and you can touch them and pass them around to each other, et cetera. You're very unlikely to damage these. If some bark comes off, I don't worry about that. They are, however, likely to damage you. So if you drop them on your foot, it will hurt. The other thing is that they have picture wire on the back and as I'm sure you know, the ends of the wire are extraordinarily sharp if you stick a finger into them. So do be careful how you handle these for your own sake, not mine. So this is a traditional pre-colonial writing system from the Philippines. It's called babayin, B-A-Y, B-A-Y-I-N. And you can look at this more closely and I'll pass it around. And instead of asking myself really good questions like, what does babayin mean or what is the history of language in the Philippines or anything like that, I was thinking, why is this so thin? It was so hard to carve. I was using my thinnest gouge and having all kinds of difficulty and then the painting, later someone said to me, you do realize you could just hit it with spray paint and then run it through a sander. I'm kind of, oh. And I said, that's not my aesthetic. Anyway, so this was when I started to do some research and I started saying, why is this script so thin? And it turns out that actually this script here, can I, in this, your service is just for a sec? You want to stand up like right there, facing in that direction and hold that one because I only told two at the same time. It turns out that that script there and this one here, which is actually Bugis, it's from Sulawesi in what is now Indonesia, are actually the same script. And you kind of go, no, they're not, don't be silly. At least if you're English, that's what you would say. And this is just a great illustration of how writing travels and traveled. So the Bugis people, they learned writing from the spread of Buddhism. So Buddhism spread throughout East Asia and South Asia, down through Southeast Asia, into the islands that we now call Indonesia, but not the Philippines. And it was the Bugis people who were great travelers and traders and seafarers who traveled up to the Philippines and introduced the people there to this stuff that they were doing. But the difference is that, as in most of Southeast Asia and in Indonesia, they wrote on palm leaves. And in fact, if you look at this, and as I'm carving this, I'm thinking, there is a strange thing going on here. There's a repeating shape here. If you notice, there's the shape here that looks a little bit like a boomerang. And then there are some characters like there's a double boomerang and he has two boomerangs next to each other and one on top of each other. It's like, why is that? And at the time I thought, this is an island script. Each letter looks like an island. I was completely wrong. Has nothing to do with that whatsoever. There is a weird basis of that way back in the early history of writing. It has nothing to do with this whatsoever. But it turns out that if you're writing on palm leaves, they're very easy to damage. So consequently, you need certain very simple shapes and you need not to be able to press very hard and to cut through the veins and the skeletal structure of the leaf. And so all of the scripts that are written on palm leaves look a little tiny bit alike. When they went to the Philippines and the Filipinos kind of go, ooh, this looks good, we'll try this. They used bamboo because it grows, you know, epidemically and is there. And what they did was to take the point of a knife or some other very sharp object and incise it into the bamboo. And that's why it's so thin. And why there's no straight lines, right? Bamboo is being tubular. It's almost impossible to do any kind of straight lines in. And so everything's curly. And there is a particular letter, which is this one here. And you'll see when I pass this around. So it's like a jellyfish. There's this semicircle. And then there's a line down, which goes wiggle like this. That's exactly the same letter as this one here, which is the boomerang with the dot underneath. And the fact is you can't do that if you're using the point of a knife. If you did a dot, you wouldn't be able to see it, right? There'd be no substance to it. So they used the sharp knife and the bamboo. And then when they were done, they would take a handful of ash from the fire and rub it up and down the bamboo, which would make the letters stand out more clearly. And this was sort of my first introduction to, whoa, this is really interesting. So thank you very much for your help. If you wanna pass that around in that direction, I'm gonna pass this one around in this direction. This one actually, once again, has a sharp little thing sticking out there. So be careful how you can go there. So as I'm working through these, I'm actually starting to do research, which is telling me a number of things that I didn't expect it. Some of which have to do with the history of writing and the way it's transmitted and the tools and the technology, such as I was just talking about. But some of what I was learning was entirely different and was social, cultural, historical, philosophical, a bunch of other things. And we're gonna touch on a number of those here. So one of the other, I think this is the third script I did. So this is Cherokee. And as I was starting to work on Cherokee, so this is still really early in the project, I began to realize what I was saying earlier, which is how really, really, really hard it is to hand carve letters that are essentially like the Roman alphabet that we use. And in particular, I hated the serifs. So you know what a serif is on a letter. It's the little kind of notch at the end. So this is a serif, that little line there. This is a serif here, that line. These are serifs, those are the little kind of things there. And they are ridiculously hard to do because they're very small, because they all have to be exactly the same length, because they have to be parallel, you know, all this kind of stuff. And I'm gonna tell you a little about Cherokee in a minute, but what this started to teach me, especially given the fact that I had been carving Chinese beforehand, was that there's a real difference between an alphabet that has developed by hand and an alphabet that has developed by machine, or by mechanical aid. So the origins of the Roman or Latin alphabet that we use go back to the memorials to Roman emperors. And the thing about Roman emperors is that every Roman emperor was by definition divine, was a god. Now the Romans actually had an alphabet that they used for daily purposes. It was kind of a semi-cursive alphabet that looks nothing like the one that we use. The whole point was they needed a writing system that was suitable for the glory of a god. And so consequently, they created a wholly artificial system. And by artificial system I mean, you cannot write it by hand. And I do this occasionally when I'm giving talks. I'll call somebody up and say, you look like a learned gent. Here is a whiteboard. Here is a marker. Could you please draw me a capital E? And you're like, yes. And so you go up and you do the capital E and I say, great. But the horizontals are not quite horizontal. Could you just tidy those up? And at this point you're starting to realize how annoying I am. And so you do this and you tie it. I say, that's really nice. Could you make them all the same length? So you do that. And then I say, this is great. They're not quite at right angles to the upright though. Could you just, and so by now you're really realizing how annoying I am and how much you're regretting volunteering this. The point is it cannot be done. You can't even, if I were to give you a marker and I say, I would like you to draw a straight horizontal line on this whiteboard. You can't do it. And the tendency in fact is to do this. And the reason is that's how your shoulder is built. So what the Romans did was to use what are called ideal forms or Euclidean geometrical forms. Namely circles and ovals and right angles and parallels. All of which are things that are called ideal because they represent an idea rather than ones that exist in nature. The Chinese script on the other hand totally exists in nature. You can actually see where the brush hits the paper or the silk and how it moves and what the drama of the letter actually is. So more and more I've started getting interested in what are the values, I'm sorry, important point. What are the values inherent in or embedded in an alphabet? So when we look at our capital letters and we say yes, they look like they look right. What we're really doing is we're saying they embody the same values that the Romans were trying to embody. Namely permanence, a sense of rightness, a sense of actually law and order. These are the virtues of empire. And if you look at the A, for example, the thing that's so interesting about it is how symmetrical and balanced it is. If you were to make it in three dimensions, it would stand up. Those letters embody the permanence and the enduring quality of the Roman empire. And it's only when you start looking at a script like Balinese, which has no interest whatsoever in symmetry and right angles and all that kind of stuff, you sort of go, oh, or at least I did. Back to Cherokee. So what I discovered about Cherokee was in an entirely different realm. So Cherokee is the only writing system that was created by a Native American for his own people. There are a couple that were created by missionaries, but the fact is that when the Europeans arrived, writing was seen by the locals as a form of witchcraft and they didn't want to have anything to do with it whatsoever. But right around the year 1800, a Cherokee named either Sequoia or George Guess. That was, he had a Cherokee name and a sort of, I guess you would call it an international name that he used in dealing with the white people. He decided to create a writing system for his people, which is one of the great intellectual acts of all time, given that he himself could not read or write. And his tradition was that this was a form of witchcraft. And he made several extraordinary conceptual jumps. So one was he realized that what he needed to do was to create what's called a syllabary. So a syllabary, every letter doesn't stand for a sound, it stands for a syllable. So Gar would have a different character than Git, for example. And he could do this because, as with many Native American languages and also languages in say, for example, Southeast Asia, Cherokee was very syllabic. So it goes consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel. And you still see this, for example, as I'm sure you all know, if you look at the roster of the Sri Lankan cricket team, as I'm sure you do on a regular basis, right? So what you see is that all their names, except those that are derived from Portuguese, are very syllabic. So you have Samarawira, Jayasuriya, Gunaratika. So these are very, very syllabic. So under those circumstances, you can actually create a very working writing system that is actually a syllabary rather than an alphabet. So that was one of the things he realized. And he experimented with this alone in his cabin for years and in fact to the point where, according to Cherokee history, his wife set fire to his cabin with him in it. Now, it's not clear whether she actually wanted to incinerate him or just all of the work that he was doing because she was so sick of it. But the good news was that, even though his wife was obviously a little less than tolerant of his intellectual endeavors, he taught his syllabary to his daughter, whose name was Ayoka. And again, very syllabic, Ayoka. And so when he presented his syllabary to the Tribal Council and they promptly put him on trial for witchcraft, the Tribal Council actually did something, again, extraordinarily smart, like way smarter than anything that I've been doing in this exploration of genius here. They said, this is what we're gonna do. We don't know whether this is just meaningless scribble that you are just saying it means this. So they separated Sequoia and Ayoka. They put them in different areas and they gave them dictation. And then they switched it over and said, now read it back. And they passed. And then the Cherokee did this extraordinary thing where they immediately decreed that all of their young men and boys and subsequently girls should learn the syllabary. And the Cherokee achieved literacy more rapidly than any other people we know of in history. Within 10 years, they had achieved 90% literacy, which was considerably higher than many of the whites who were living in the same area. Unfortunately, oh, and also at that time, this caught the attention of a missionary called the Reverend Samuel Worcester who decided that this was so important, an achievement that he wanted to create a type-based version of Sequoia's syllabary. In doing so, interestingly enough, he made it look a lot more Western. And so a number of these letters, you would say, well, that's an H, that's one of our letters. And the answer is no, that isn't a D. It's something that didn't even look like a D when Sequoia created it, but when the Reverend Worcester put it together, he sort of Latinized it to some extent and then proceeded to print Bibles and prayer books and a newspaper called the Cherokee Phoenix, which had a circulation at its peak of 3,000. So bear in mind, this is 1828, roughly speaking, and was circulated as far afield as London because it was proof of the educability of the red man. And this was Sequoia's achievement, even impressed the US government to the point that he was awarded a medal and a prize of 4,000 pounds, although it doesn't seem as if he was ever actually paid. This is gonna come as no surprise to anybody, right? Excuse me. And in fact, when the National Hall of Statuary was established in Washington, DC, and each state nominated two of its native sons to have their bust in the National Statuary Hall, Sequoia was one of two Oklahomans represented in that. However, as you will know, in any tale has anything to do with Native Americans, nothing turned out as well as you hoped it might do. And almost immediately, the Indian Removal Act of 1830 was passed, which made it legal to drive the Cherokee and a number of other nations from their traditional lands. The Cherokee were not one of the first to be driven, but they were the first to be put into concentration camps which had been invented specifically for the purpose and were then driven across the trail of tears to Oklahoma with, of course, many of them dying of disease and starvation along the way. And what this meant was that Cherokee, as a written language, really went underground for about 150 years. And it was preserved in those Bibles. And so when the Cherokee Cultural Revival, and in fact, the native cultural revival in this country begins roughly speaking in the 70s and early 80s, the Cherokee turned to those Bibles as a way of relearning their own writing. Sequoia's script had by now pretty much been lost because any documents that have been written in that crucial 10-year period by hand were much more likely to have been lost or damaged or destroyed than Bibles. The Bibles at least were seen by the authorities as a means of Christianizing the savages. And of course, in many cases, when they were educated, they were forbidden to speak their own language in school. It sort of remained in the home. But now Cherokee has this extraordinary distinction of being relearned backwards with the printed form, taking precedence over the cursive form, the handwritten form. So when I did this carving, and I went out to Tahlequah, Oklahoma to the Cherokee Nation, and I sat down with one of the translators, and I thought, this was so hard to carve, there must be a simpler form because otherwise you would die before you finished writing anything of any length. And I said to this translator, could you possibly write this out for me by hand? And he said, I could do that because the Cherokee always think a lot before they talk. It's one of their wonderful qualities. I love about them. So on a whim, I looked at my watch as he started to write on a piece of paper, the pencil. It took him 14 minutes to write this because he was copying out every serif because this is sort of the official version. So the simplified, cursive, handwritten version is still kind of evolving. So I'm gonna pass, why don't I take that one out of you? Yeah, why not? So, oh, thank you. I'm actually gonna move those to one side so I know what I've talked about, what I haven't. The only other piece here I have now from that original exhibition. So this is another great example of how my sort of research and discovery practice had absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with genius. I can reveal this one now, by the way. There is no genius involved here whatsoever. So this is Samaritan, as in the good Samaritan. And I was really interested in this because this has become almost as close to extinction as any writing system ever. There's one exception which I'm gonna show you. At one point at the end of the 19th century, there were only four Samaritan families left from a population of somewhere between a million and a million and a half back in biblical times. That's a story that if you wanna know about, by the way, it's in my book, as they say. There's some copies of the book right back there. But as I'm carving this, something strange started running through my head. I kept thinking Sherlock Holmes. And I couldn't figure out why I was thinking Sherlock Holmes. But it kept on bugging me. Go ahead. Dancing Men. Exactly. Genius. So one of Sherlock Holmes' stories is called The Case of the Dancing Men. And so this is essentially, it's a code. It's almost like semaphore, actually. One group of bad people are sending a message in code to another group of bad people and they're doing it with stick figures, right? So consequently, you know, they're like this, this, this, this, this, right? So to get a whole alphabet, you gotta have a whole lot of different positions of those stick figures. And that was what had really struck me unconsciously, really, as I was carving these, is they were off balance. So a lot of these letters, if you look at them, they don't have a flat bottom. They don't have that Latin quality of, you know, having sort of two legs that would make it stand up, et cetera, and some of them, the bottoms are clearly sort of sloping or uneven. And I kept on wanting to like tilt them so that they would actually sit properly. So the reason why Samaritan looks like this, there's actually several reasons, which I don't have time to go into entirely right now. Again, they're in the book. All of them are really interesting, but I just want to talk about one of them. So the Samaritans are from Samaria, which was, you know, Middle Eastern kingdom. And they are closely related to the Israelites, the Jews, the Hebrew nation. There are genetic connections, but they are separate people and they're very fiercely, proudly separate people. And when the Jews were exiled into Babylon, that period of exile changed Hebrew, the Hebrew language. And the Samaritans therefore claim that theirs, they actually call their language ancient Hebrew. In other words, this is the true Hebrew and what you're using is a corrupt version, which of course doesn't make them very popular. And it's just one of the reasons why not only the Jews, but also the Christians and the Arabs would slaughter the Samaritans at any given opportunity, which is why their population dwindled so much. But I'm going to ask a different question, which is what also occurred to me was most things that are used over and over again over a long period of time get simplified. They get smoothed out so they're more convenient for everyday use, you know, like a pebble in the stream. This is the gnarliest of all of the scripts that I've ever carved. You know, it's really spiky. And I'm thinking, why did that survive? You know, why is it like that? So this is how it goes. If you go back to Old Testament times and you look at history of that era and that area through the eyes of the Bible, then what you realize is that the Israelites are really one of a number of semi-nomadic people who are kind of wandering around the Middle East. They have enemies on all sides. They fight the Canaanites and the Midianites. It's, you know, it's the classic Middle East story of how you're going to survive in the face of all these different, you know, hostile neighbors. And I use the word neighbors advisedly, as you'll see in a second. So not only that, but after Moses has led them out of Egypt and they are now no longer captive there, they're kind of a rabble. They keep on disputing his leadership. They keep on second guessing all decisions that are made. They keep on wandering off and like saying, oh no, we actually feel like worshiping this golden calf over here for a while. So it's kind of a mess. And in despair, Moses goes up onto the mountain to talk to God and God gives him writing. And he comes back down from the mountain with the tablets and that is not only the law of God, which establishes monotheism and role of succession and dietary issues and all those other kinds of necessary for sort of social and cultural survival things, but it's the handwriting of God. And the reason why Samaritan has not changed and has resisted change is because they regard it as this is ancient Hebrew, which means this is the handwriting of God and you do not mess with the handwriting of God. So consequently, you have this fascinating ancient looking script which has survived all of this extraordinary kind of oppression and dislike. And now the population of Samaritans has risen back up to about 900. And one of the reasons why it's still here, and you'll be very pleased to hear this, is because even when they were at their lowest ebb, one of them was always the librarian. And the librarian's job was to keep ancient Hebrew, keep the script alive and not allow it to be modified or kind of commingled with other scripts in the region. There are a bunch of really other interesting things about Samaritan, but as I say, I'm gonna have to move on. I will pass this one over to you so you can. These other interesting things are in the book, right? Oh yes, yes, yes, absolutely. These and many other interesting things. Okay, so I'm confusing myself. Now this one we've already done, yes? Yes, good. So I mentioned to you that the Samaritan had come almost as close as any other script that I've come across to extinction. But there's one that has come even closer to extinction and that's this one here. So this is Gligolytic, which even sounds like, like a geologic era. Just after the Carboniferous, there was the Gligolytic, right? So the story of Gligolytic is just fascinating and yet another direction that I found this project taking me off on. So as I'm sure you know, in the early Christian church, there were two centers of authority, Greece and Rome. And because by then the Roman military empire was by far the superior of the two and because the Romans had spread essentially north and west, they had all the warm climates. And when the Greek missionaries set out, they were kind of left with the Eastern end of Europe and in fact, they made their way up to Russia and they founded the Russian Orthodox Church. And as they set out on their work, they were very scornful of the writing systems they encountered. In fact, we have a letter from one saying that the local writing system in the Balkans is nothing but sticks and dots. It's like. And they wanted a writing system that was more reflective of the glory of God and they invented two. So the first was traditionally said to have been invented by but may simply be attributed to Saint Cyril, which of course became the alphabet that we now are known as Cyrillic, very good. And ironically then became the alphabet of the Godless Soviet Union and all that kind of stuff. And the other one was named after the Serbian and Croatian word glagolica meaning writing and that was glagoletic. And it's really an extraordinarily elaborate script. It's similar to Greek, but it's like each letter, you can almost imagine it being like a little icon embedded with jewels, it's very ornate. And that turned out to be its undoing because over the centuries, it turned out to be much less adaptable for local different languages than Cyrillic did. And probably also much harder to write. So you will actually see it carved in the walls of churches throughout Eastern Europe. But over the centuries, it's used dwindled until we eventually got to about 1970. And by 1970, there were only two priests who were still using glagoletic on a day-to-day liturgical manner. So whatever they wrote, they wrote using the glagoletic script. And they were on the island of Kruk off the Dalmatian coast. And they were so conservative that the whole idea, you know, we think the Latin mass is conservative. They were like, no, we're having nothing to do with anything newfangled like that. We're gonna stick with glagoletic. And local fishermen, if they had a new boat, they would write the name of their boat in the glagoletic script because of course that implies divine protection. So eventually it got to the point where we got to the end of the 20th century and the two priests died. And so you would think that at this point, glagoletic is, you know, it's now officially a writing system of the past. It was saved by the most extraordinary mechanism. So around the same time that the priest died, Tito died. So as you know, Tito was the dictator who was sort of holding together all of these really enemy nations that had been kind of welded together to form Yugoslavia. And so fairly soon you have war between Serbia and Croatia and then it spreads. You have the Yugoslav civil war, lots of bloodshed, terrible things happen. When the dust settles and you have these new nation states that have been sort of subdivided and formed out of the former Yugoslavia, some of them have a big PR problem because they're thinking, okay, so one of the, you know, we have a sort of a shattered economy, let's at least try and start rebuilding our economy through tourism. It's really hard to attract people to a country where it's principally known as the country whose former military dictator is now on trial for war crimes a day. It's just not a good PR. And Croatia addressed this in a sort of a fascinating manner. They started using little bits of glagolitic in their tourist literature because what that kind of implies is, you know what, we were a nation long before all of this recent kind of upheaval and mess, that wasn't our fault anyway. We have this historical legitimacy as you can see in our use of glagolitic. Now in fact, glagolitic was used much more widely than that but Croatia was the first nation to kind of go bam, this is ours. And so, and now even though most people cannot read the glagolitic script, it's right there. It's part of national identity and cultural identity which is a huge, there's a really deep connection between writing and a sense of identity in place. And so, glagolitic is the only script I know that was saved from extinction by genocide. I think we're due to start, oh, oh, you've got one there. All right, so I'll give you this one and I will take, no, that one's still going around. Okay, I wanna talk about just, this one I've talked about very briefly, I'm talking about briefly again. But the other thing that I started realizing as I was doing this project is that alphabets also embody ideas. If you have an idea in your culture, you need a means of recording it and discussing it and transacting with it. And as I started going through this, I started discovering that our own sense of what ideas exist is really very narrow and other cultures embody all sorts of other ideas in their very writing system. And so here's a really good example of this. This is from Bali. Once again, Bali having nothing to do with parallel lines and right angles and stuff like that. Everything is very, very fluid. But this is a character that isn't even a letter. I'm not really sure how to describe it. I guess you could say it's sort of a form of punctuation. It's also a little bit like HTML as it happens. So when it's a bit like HTML, and I'll explain that in just a second. Don't worry about it. So in traditional Balinese writing, when they write out a sacred text, they put a character at the beginning of it to say you are now about to read a sacred text, a spiritual text. And this is the character that they put there. At the end, there is a similar character which says that sacred text has now ended. That's why it's like HTML, right? It turns on the command. It turns off the command at the end of it. And I thought this is an extraordinary notion. The idea that you should say to somebody, read this with an open heart. Read this in a different way than you would read the grocery list or your letter from your grandparents or whatever. And the fact that it should be such a beautiful character as well and it should be totally without parallel in our culture, I think kind of shows us up. They also have another character which says this is the beginning of a poem. And so again, there is a sense that you're gonna process these characters and the way you take them in and the way you understand language itself differently because of this character. The last one I wanna talk to you about briefly raises a question that segues into the very last part of my talk and then I'm gonna stop and take questions. So this looks like Chinese except that of course it's written horizontally. It's not Chinese. Many of the characters are very similar to or even coincide with Chinese characters but it's actually classical Vietnamese. So for about a thousand years, the Vietnamese used a writing system that was very closely derived from the Chinese neighbors. And during that period of time which lasted right up until the end of the 19th century, some of the great works of Vietnamese literature were written including some extraordinary poetry written by a woman in the 18th century. So I'm sure I don't need to tell you how unusual that is. Especially as she was writing very openly about her own experiences, her own feelings about sex. She was like the Sappho of Vietnam. And because she was writing in this script which the Vietnamese then abandoned in favor of using the script of the missionaries and the script of the Western imperialists. It's almost impossible to translate her poetry with all of its full nuance into either into English or even into contemporary Vietnamese script because a lot of that sense of subtlety of meaning is lost. There's a guy called John Balaban at the University of North Carolina who does do those translations but he's the first person to acknowledge that it's not the same thing. So the reason why I'm showing you this is because one of the first exhibitions I did of the endangered alphabets was actually at a prep school and a very bright Chinese student who was at that prep school came up to me and he said, how can this be an endangered alphabet if I can read it? And I said, because the Vietnamese can't. Now, so what we're talking about now is what happens when a culture loses the ability to read everything that has been recorded in its recorded history. So every single document is written in a script that people can no longer understand. And so in a sense, here's my third library reference of the evening, the entire library of that culture has been destroyed. And sometimes that has happened deliberately by one authority trying to essentially kind of culturally castrate another. Sometimes it's happened out of convenience and people saying, I want to be part of the wealthy Western world rather than my own traditional world and not realizing what they're losing by the process. And the reason I bring this up now at the very end is because I wanna tell you what it is that I'm working on now. So having started out with this project of so to speak preserving and sort of illustrating some of these traditional scripts, increasingly what I'm involved in now is efforts to try and revive traditional languages and traditional scripts. I've been doing a lot of work with a friend of mine who has three schools and he started in Bangladesh which are mother tongue schools where indigenous people, kids are being educated in their own language as opposed to being educated in the national language, the official language which they don't speak. And so not surprisingly, education is a catastrophe in that region. So as I've been working on this for a number of years now but just recently it occurred to me, if you want to revive a language you have to start with the children. And if you want to engage children you gotta invent games. So we grow up playing word games like Hangman and Scrabble and Boggle and word search type things. And those are enormously important because it's not just that they teach us our letters, it's that we start recognizing letter combinations quickly. We start recognizing what letter combinations are habitual and which ones look wrong which is how we learn how to spell. They teach syntax and word combinations and so they are actually enormously important to our becoming sufficiently engaged in writing that we can read. So if we try and read something where we're literally having to look up not only every word but every letter, the act of reading becomes so onerous that we're just not gonna do it. We're either not gonna learn to read or we're going to use some other alphabet that is being offered to us or forced upon us. So what I've just started doing about three months ago now is some fundraising and some gathering together of a variety of people who are interested in games or design games or are graphic designers or are language fans or just love playing word games. And I'm starting to figure out how to create games that work for different languages because different writing systems require different games. Some games just don't work in certain kinds of writing systems. And also what materials? So if you're in a really humid area, you don't want stuff that's based on paper or cardboard, which is why the Philippine knows used the bamboo, the etching in the bamboo. At some point down the road, we may be developing app-based games so that kids can play them on their phones because they are areas in the world where you have no internet connection but you do have cell phone stuff. Some of the people I'm working with, they don't have tables, so you can't have tabletop games in the schools. Some of them, they don't have paper and pencils, so you gotta figure out what materials you can use. So for example, in a culture like that, you could have a dominoes-based game. So you have very durable tiles, but instead of having two numbers, you could have two letters so you could play it just like dominoes but with connecting stuff up that way. So we're just beginning all of this and the back, you'll see several things, copies of my book as I have plugged several times. In Danger Alphabet's postcards, feel free to take one. It's got the website on there. You can contact me through the website. I've run out of business cards which is why you get the premium version, namely the postcard. And there's also a sign-up sheet and that's really for people who say, yes, I'm interested in games and I would love to be involved in this discussion about what kind of game you would create in this language for this particular age group, for example. What kind of games have you played that you think we might be able to adapt? That kind of conversation is really taken off right now. Second possibility is you may actually have friends or relatives who are living in an area in the world where there is an endangered language or an endangered writing system and you can put me in touch with somebody who is teaching in a school who would love to collaborate on a project like this. And then thirdly, and this is gonna come as no surprise, this is a continuous fundraising process and if you're interested in making donations then you can sign up there and I can contact you. We've raised $10,000 so far. That probably is gonna pay for research and design and development and prototyping of one and possibly two games. We're gonna send them out into the field, have kids play them, hear how they went down, do some tweaking and then ship out a limited number of sets so that we're actually providing the sets. And then if they really take off, they can manufacture them locally which of course is gonna be way cheaper than what we can do here. And I would pass over the intellectual property to them so that they can then go ahead and develop that themselves. So that's the future of the Endangered Alphabet's project as it stands right now and I am happy to take any and all questions for the next 15 minutes or so. Yes, go for it. The third, first, are you aware that the Czech composer, Janáček wrote a mass called the Glagolitik mass? Now you mention it, I absolutely was. That's, yes. And that word crops up every so often. So interesting enough that Glagolitik was not used that much as far north as Czechoslovakia but it was in places, yeah. He was Moravian on the southern end, so all of that. That would make much more sense. That would mean Bohemian. Exactly, which was much more German, Habsburg, Austrian influence, yeah. So that was at the beginning of the 20th century that he wrote that. Brilliant, thank you. Number two. I was busy looking at Glagolitik so I missed some of what you said about Vietnamese. Is that recoverable, a classical Vietnamese song? So that's one of the great imponderables. Nobody knows how much this drift is reversible. So it's interesting to see that there are a number of Native American peoples who have addressed this question themselves. And some have said they're gonna attempt full scale revival of their own traditional language. Some have said we're gonna keep a number of traditional words that are really important to us culturally and part of our identity but we're not gonna try and bring everything back because we do need to transact with the rest of the world. I focus mostly on kind of more immediate things. So these kids at these schools in Bangladesh, their life is being transformed and their futures are being transformed by the fact that they are now having an education they can understand. My students at Champlain College and I have now created more than a half a dozen different educational materials that they can use that are in their own languages, including what I believe is the first multi-language children's pictorial dictionary in the world. So there's a picture, it's like tiger, you know, and then there's the word tiger in four of the indigenous languages of the region and in Bangla, which is the official national language and in English around it. So it can be used for a wide variety of purposes at different age ranges. Those books are now in the schools, they arrived there about three weeks ago and we're gonna be building that so there's a bigger word count with each different addition. So there's no doubt that their lives are being affected by it. Whether that's also gonna be true of every culture all over the world there's no way of knowing. I guess my question was more specific and that was that you were talking about the classical Vietnamese. Yes. And that could be read by a Chinese student but nobody in Vietnamese could read it and you were talking about the library, that being a library of ancient texts, it was large. Right, so there's a group of scholars in Hanoi who are sort of working on translations who are trying to bring those documents into contemporary Vietnamese as much as possible. Whether there's also the converse, in other words, people in Vietnam learning the Chinese based traditional Chu Nam script so that they can read their own historical documents, that I don't know. You'll very quickly in the Q and A realize that there's awful lot that I don't know. Final question. Yes, yes. Am I mistaken in thinking that the recordings also had their own alphabet or was it really a pictorial? I wouldn't want to use the word merely. Sorry, I don't know. There are a number of... It would mean it to be demagogical. Yes, there are a number of symbolic writing systems that were used to differing degrees by differing Native American peoples. None of them had an alphabet in the sense that we understand an alphabet. In other words, if you know the sounds represented by each of these symbols, you can actually read, text, you can pronounce things. It's an organized system with a given order to it, et cetera. So I don't believe they had what we would have called an alphabet, but there are actually several in New England that they're discovering that are, I guess you would call them proto-writing systems or proto-alphabets. Other questions? Yeah. A question similar to this Vietnamese example. How does an alphabet or a lost language like linear B fit into this paradigm? I mean, they used Greek as their alphabet, but the language was lost until it was translated. The Chinese is not an alphabet. Correct. It's characters. And how do you handle the phonetic aspect of that? Okay, let me answer this question first. And then I'm gonna force you to write a capital E just to punish you. So I realized really early on that if I started looking into dead languages and dead writing systems, the amount of work involved will be so great that I would just never survive. So I've chosen to limit myself to writing systems that are likely to be endangered within, likely to be extinct within the next two generations or are already at such a point that they can only be understood by scholars or specialists. So even though I've read this book called Gliff Breakers, which is about the deciphering of the linear B tab and all this kind of stuff, I know even less about that than I know about many of the other things that I'm pretending to know about. Yes, you're right. Chinese is an entirely different basis. They actually have had a series of writing systems over the course of the last 5,000 years. There's a thing called seal script. And there's, again, I've had to lay that one outside of my area of study just because I'm sort of sticking to this. Having said that, I carve stuff in Chinese all the time just because I love it. It is such, the act of just making the characters is such a satisfying and relaxing kind of thing that every so often I carve something in Chinese. Some of the characters are descriptive just by themselves, particularly the character of war, fire. It's, it's like flames. But others, and of course you were talking about the Koreans use when they weren't impressive for people or whatever, they use characters. The Japanese use the characters when they weren't impressed before. Neither one of them are tonal languages, so it makes no sense for you to use these characters other than the sound of whatever it is. And in fact, you know, you actually have a combination of as many as four different types of script used in contemporary Japanese for different purposes. Yes, but again, I hesitate to say anything about this because the ocean of my ignorance is unfathomable at this point. And I would hate to mislead you. Have you looked in the pinion with a Chinese or a Chinese or a Chinese or a Chinese or a Chinese character? No, because again, I think that really lies outside my self-imposed brief. However, I'm really interested in Nushu, which is the secret Chinese women's language, secret Chinese women's language and script. So this was, the women were forbidden and education in China. However, in certain areas in particular, they created their own writing system, which they would keep secret by for example, writing on a fan. So if a man walked into the room, they could just do this and it would disappear. It's called Nushu. It's absolutely fascinating. I'm still trying to find somebody who can actually, who knows Nushu well enough to give me something that I can carve. I found one Nushu proverb, which I've carved and I'm still sort of working on this, but it was sufficiently secret that nobody outside of the people who used it even knew it existed until 1984. And the last fluent Nushu speaker and user died in I think 98 or something like that. But there's a tremendous amount of interest in it right now. That one is sort of, you know, it's about as in dangers as you can get. So that one I'm really interested in. And as always, the hard part is not the carving, it's the finding it and finding somebody who can, you know, who can give me text in it. Did you find a female scholar to look for the vision? Yes. So the world's leading authority is in Beijing. Her name is Dr. Liming. And there's a couple of scholars in this country who are sort of studying through her. One's in Berkeley, one is in Skidmore. I will take one more question and then it'll be time to wrap up and head back towards the popcorn. Too slow. Okay, thank you so much for your attention and your interest.