 It's my great pleasure today to introduce Tim Brooks, who is going to talk to us about endangered alphabets. I know that when you're a good host, you have to say that you're pleased to welcome the person, but I am truly pleased today because Tim Brooks is a famous writer, so he's, well, according to the Goodreads, your Goodreads page tells me that you're famous. You've got some very nice, numerous nice commentaries on that page. So Tim Brooks is a British writer, but he lives in the United States. He has written an impressive number of books, so again, according to the Goodreads page, it's more than 20 books. 16. Yeah, I mean, there were some books on how to use the iPhone 7. I didn't think that was you. I thought that was another Tim Brooks. Right. Well, yeah, so that's like seven books that you didn't write. Exactly. Yes. But you wrote on a number of the topics. I'm not going to go through them all, but he wrote about the monsoon. He wrote about vaccination against the polio across the world. He wrote something about the history of the guitar. And one, yeah, this one, you know, readers seem to like this one about the guitar, so I think you should read it if you don't know what to read. And there's also another book that you might find interesting if you're writing your energy dissertation or your polio PhD dissertation. It's called First Author. Also, are you getting to that? Okay, good deal. Yes. Thank you very much. She's like, okay. Oh, nice. He also wrote a book about endangered alphabets and he's going to tell us about it. There you go. Thank you. Nobody has ever plugged my book, First Time Author, at one of these occasions. So this is great news. Okay, thank you so much for that encyclopedic and enthusiastic introduction. Yes. I sort of stumbled into this project because as you said, by background, I'm actually a writer and a guitarist rather than a woodwork or a linguist. Every person in this room has already forgotten more about linguistics than I know at all. And then I'll talk about what I'm working on right now, which is a series of project collaborations experiments with the aim of not just documenting or preserving, but working with a variety of people to try and revive endangered languages or endangered writing systems or both. So what I'm going to do is, because as we were saying, this is an extraordinarily low-tech operation, I'm actually going to hold up some of these carvings and then pass them around. And my standard warning here is that unless you get out something very sharp and go like this, you're probably not going to damage them. But if you drop one on your foot, it may damage you. So for that reason, please be careful. So let's go back to the beginning. In 2009, Christmas was coming up, and I had no money. And I grew up in London and in the Midlands. I grew up very poor, and we always made each other Christmas presents. And so I thought, I'll make my family Christmas presents. And my then-wife, who was a therapist, said, could I make her a sign to go hang outside her office? And I thought, I'll give it a try. And so I went to the local wood shop and bought a piece of what technically is called Curly Maple, which is a little bit like this. This is, in fact, Maple. This ripple effect here is what is called Curly. This particular piece that I bought was about six feet long, and it had bark on both sides, what's called Live Edge. And I cut a piece off the end about this big, and I figured out that if I took her name and I blew it up and I used carbon paper, seriously, I went into the office supply shop and I said, there used to be this stuff called carbon paper, and they said, I'll one. Seriously, the worst sale they ever made because a pack of carbon paper has a hundred sheets. I'm still using that same pack of carbon paper. And so I transferred the name to the piece of wood and then I bought myself a set of hand gouges. You can come up and look at these afterwards. And started carving. And while I was doing this and just sort of learning as I went and basically cursing and trying not to stick the gouge through my hand, my older daughter came in and she was in her senior year at the Rhode Island School of Design, which is a spectacular design school. And they have this great tradition that in your senior show you actually have a table and you can sell your work. And she has a great business sense and she said, I want my table to stand out from everyone else's. Will you make me a sign too that says Design by Zoe. And so I started working on hers. And then my younger daughter who has no reason to have a sign whatsoever and in fact was 15 at the time said she wanted a sign that said Maddie Brooks fine and performing arts. As if people who wanted to buy fine and performing arts would sort of stop by and purchase some from her. So depending on who was in the room, I would work on one or the other of these. And then I realized that my brother-in-law who at the time lived down in the West Country had a recording studio he needed a sign. And then my other brother-in-law who has a photo studio he needed a sign. So it was like that was it Christmas. Everything was taken care of. And the way that all great ideas develop of course is by kind of naivety and ignorance and foolishness. And what happened next was I had really enjoyed doing this carving and the people who had been given these seem to enjoy them as well. And after Christmas we had a hole in the living room wall. This wasn't one of these, you know, someone punched a hole through the wall. I had actually built a sort of a niche to put a sound system in there and the sound system turned out to be awful. So there was just kind of a hole in the wall. And by chance it happens to be more vertical than horizontal. And I thought, you know what, if I were in Manhattan I would have like a little bud vase with an orchid in there or something like that. But instead I thought I'll do a carving and I'll see if I can sort of wedge it in there. And I thought, you know, it's vertically aligned Chinese. Why not? And so I looked up the Chinese characters for House of Music and Art and I carved those and with a certain amount of sanding and swearing I got those to fit in there and it actually looked really good. Every so often I'm going to say something that actually makes sense and is important so I'll put my hand up just in case you actually need to know when these things are because they're indistinguishable from everything else that I'm saying. But the Chinese turned out to be a really, really important for a reason that may not be apparent and that is that when I had essentially been copying various bits of typography in the Latin alphabet what I realized was that it was a very mechanical act because the way we understand writing is actually very much based on Euclidean principles. Lines should be parallel, there should be symmetry, there should be right angles. It's an alphabet of ideal forms at least in the capital letters. And in Chinese what I realized was that in the script itself, in the characters themselves, you see the drama of the act of writing. You see where the brush hits the page and kind of goes pound, fattens out. You can see the movement of the rest. And this means two things. It means that on one hand it's not exactly that there are no such things as mistakes but it's a much more forgiving script in that sense. And secondly, it's one that works much better with the movement of the rest. And that was although I didn't realize it at the time when I started to begin to think about the difference between a typographic form and a script form, one that actually is an extension of the natural movements of the human body. So I really enjoyed this Chinese carving so I asked everyone I knew to come up with a monogram that they felt represented themselves. And then I would cut off a piece from this rapidly shrinking piece of wood and I would carve them a monogram and I would give it to them. And this project essentially ran out because first of all, it was, bless you, I had nobody else to give bits of wood with Chinese monograms on. And secondly, the piece of wood I was using was getting smaller and smaller and the last one was actually about this big. So at that point I thought, I've really started to enjoy this carving thing. Bless you again. But now I want to do something different because this is the next thing about how ideas develop. I am very easily bored. And so what I did was I had been in southern India on assignment for National Geographic. I had been in Kerala. And as some of you probably know because you're all linguists, in Kerala they have a language and a script called Malayalam. And to my eye, when I was there on assignment, I had never seen anything like this. It looked like a series of enthusiastically bent paper clips. And I thought, I love that script. I'm going to see if I maybe carve something in that. And so I just, of course, I just googled Malayalam, you know, and I found Omniglot.com. And many of you, I'm sure, know this site already. If you don't know it, check it out. It is essentially an online encyclopedia of the world's writing systems. And as I was going through this, several things struck me. One was, I'm a pretty well-traveled person but I had never heard of literally nine-tenths of these languages and scripts. Secondly, the variety and range of them, from a purely visual sense, was staggering. There are some that were extraordinarily fluid and there are others that were extraordinarily angular. And just the question of how writing systems should evolve in all of these different forms was sort of completely new to me. The third thing was that as I'm reading about each of these scripts, what keeps coming up is no longer taught in schools, no longer used for official purposes, officially suppressed, only used in, say, certain kinds of documents like maps maybe, only used by women to write secret love letters. So I'm going through this and I was also struck by the fact that there were relatively few alphabets. And I realize they're not all alphabets. This is kind of shorthand for writing systems. There are relatively few. As we know, there are six or seven thousand languages in the world. There are probably depending on how you define them between about 100 and 140 writing systems. So that was also odd to me because these are the virtues of ignorance. This was new to me and this was like, well, really. So in Omniglot, the example they use in most cases to show what a piece of text looks like in this writing system is Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Partly because the UN has been steadily translating this into a wide variety of languages. Interestingly, nobody at the UN thought, you know what, let's also use the traditional script of this culture. So in many cases, it's actually there in the Latin alphabet rather than, for example, the Balinese alphabet or the Javanese alphabet, something along those lines. Anyway, and of course, as you know, Article 1 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights says, all people were created alike in dignity and respect. They were endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. And I thought this was a really interesting example in this context because on the one hand, it's a very noble sentiment. But on the other hand, many of these scripts are endangered precisely because people don't behave towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. And so I thought I will try and carve Article 1 in a number of these endangered scripts, initially just as a means of preserving them. I had no idea what I was really going to do with this, except that I knew this was going to be an infinitely more ambitious project than anything I'd done in terms of carving before. And so I thought I need an incentive to keep going rather than just to give up halfway through. So I arranged at my college for an entire exhibition of artwork by faculty and students. And this was going to be in the middle, so I couldn't not do it. And I had no idea how long it would take me or how many of these I could do. I set up this exhibition for 14 months down the road and I thought maybe I might do eight. And in the end, I actually did 13. And there was no getting out of it. And so I cannot tell you the number of times, you know, I would, for example, I would be painting in this incredibly detailed and painstaking way. And by the end of the evening, I would have done like a word. And it was like, why did I decide to do this? Anyway, when that exhibition went up, two things happened that I wasn't expecting. One was people came to me and said, this is important. I had essentially seen it as being like a prescenile monomania. You know, like people who go out to the garage and they make a scale model of Notre Dame with toothpicks, you know, and stuff like that. And, you know, I just thought this was a sign that I was just kind of going batty, you know, in my corner. So the fact that people said, no, this is actually worthwhile was an immense relief. The other thing that I wasn't expecting was that people said, this is art. And because I had no background as a visual artist, even though my mother is an artist and both my daughters are artists, I had kind of assumed this had just skipped a generation. So this issue of someone saying this is art turns out to actually be really kind of important, hand up, because the fact that I wasn't, and I'm still not, a linguist. And so therefore I could not read or pronounce or know anything about the behavior of any of these languages or even individual letters. It meant that I was looking at them from a different point of view. I was looking at them from what technically is called an asemic or asemic point of view. In other words, a purely graphic point of view. A point of view without meaning. So there's no phonetic content. There's no semantic content. I'm looking at it and I'm saying things like, why does this script look so mathematical? At that particular point, Canadian Aboriginal syllabics. Extremely mathematical type of script. Or for that matter, Tiffany from the Berber people in North Africa. Why does that look so blocky? It's extremely blunt. Why? Barbayan, the traditional pre-Spanish Filipino script or one of them. Why is it so thin and so really, really hard to carve? Because it doesn't make sense, you know? One of the things about writing is that it has to be functional. So therefore the look of the script must have something to do with the way it's used or has been used or the technology that was used to develop it or is still used. So Tiffany, for example, is often written in sand. If you're going to write in sand, you want a script that is as clear and bold as possible because otherwise it's going to be incomprehensible. There's also a tradition because there are a number of countries where the Berber people have been rigidly and rigorously repressed. There's a tradition that if one person in a crowd wants to pass on a message to another in secret, you can do so by writing on the palm of their hand, which again requires that it needs to be a very simple, very bold script. And it also starts to hint at the fact that an endangered writing system may well be the kind of code in a distant way to the Navajo code talkers of World War II, I'm sure you'll know that. I didn't know any of this, but the great thing about carving is it takes a long time and so while you're doing it, you're thinking. It's also a very interesting exercise because it slows language down at a time when we're all generally trying to speed language up and as soon as that kind of bouleversumon takes place, I'm not sure what the English word would be, upheaval, overturning, thank you, when that takes place you start asking different questions, you start seeing things from a different point of view. So at that point I started keeping a journal as I was carving that first exhibition and asking questions, many of which were occurring to me on a subliminal level. Now that may sound like kind of a woo-woo thing to say, but this is so true, I'll give you an example. So I was working on Samaritan. So Samaritan is a Semitic language, it's a close, it's a cousin, in fact the Samaritans refer to it as ancient Hebrew. The Samaritans were once a numerous people, probably a million or more, but as a result of a series of attacks and depredations, by the end of the 19th century there were literally four families left. But the Middle East being the Middle East, the sense of the need to survive and to retain one's identity as a means of surviving, extraordinarily strong, and so even when there were only four families left there was always a librarian, somebody whose job was to maintain the language and the script. So I'm carving this Samaritan stuff and the word that occurs to me as I'm carving it is gnarly. It is a strange script in that what occurred to me was that over time you would think that individual letters would be like stones in a stream. They would be sort of eroded and worn to a point where they have reached a kind of functional beauty, a kind of smoothness and kind of movement. And Samaritan is absolutely not like that. It looks like, each letter looks like part of a thorn bush. And as I was carving this, I kept on thinking Sherlock Holmes. And I had no idea why I was thinking Sherlock Holmes but as I'm carving it, the phrase Sherlock Holmes kept occurring to me and eventually I realized that it was because of the case of the dancing men. So those of you who know your Sherlock Holmes stories, case of the dancing men, there's basically, it's a cipher. One set of bad guys is communicating with another set of bad guys by drawing stick figures. And so there's this and there's this and there's this. This kind of thing. But I couldn't figure out why I was thinking about the case of the dancing men until I realized that the Samaritan letters do not behave according to the laws of stability and symmetry. In other words, the bottom line may well, if there is an implied line, may well not be horizontal. They seem to be tipped and moving. And this really shows two things. One about Samaritan and one about our own assumptions about writing. What it shows about Samaritan is the Samaritans believe that theirs is the original Hebrew, which means, ready for this, it is the handwriting of God. It is the script that Moses brought down from the mountain. And you don't mess with the handwriting of God. You don't sort of go, OK, let's have Curls, M.T. Samaritan. Let's have Joker Man Samaritan. This is when I started realizing how deeply connected scripts and traditions are in fact. On the other hand, the fact that we believe and tend to enact the belief that writing should be symmetrical and stable is because our script traditions are heavily based on monuments and specifically monuments to Greek and then Roman emperors where the values that you want to embody are stability, permanence, reliability. They are the aesthetic values of a military empire, permanence. So these are the things that I'm asking myself as I'm going through all of this. And all of this stuff turns up in my book, Endangered Alphabets. So now I'm going to skip over the next few years because I want to talk more about what it is I'm up to now. Over the next few years, I started looking into more writing systems. I also started looking more and more at individual letters or individual words because the more text you have, the more it tends to come across as a lump. And as an act of preservation, that makes a whole lot of sense. But in terms of the question of how does a script look the way it does or why, then that gets lost the more text you have. So I started looking more and more at individual letters, in particular words. I also got really involved with a variety of cultures all over the world whose culture is essentially under siege or even being economically, politically or militarily suppressed. This is in particular because I had been to Bangladesh. I was there actually doing some public health work. And I, yeah, come on in. I asked ahead of time whether there were any endangered alphabets in Bangladesh. And what I discovered was there's an entire area of Bangladesh called the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which is home to 13 indigenous peoples. But the whole area is sealed off by the army. And the government has up until very recently denied that Bangladesh has any indigenous people. Or, flip side, if there are any indigenous people, they are not Bangladeshi because they don't speak Bangla. And so they're denied a whole series of civic rights and human rights on this basis. So I met a guy. I had done some carving in some of these scripts. And I got contacted by a guy who was actually at the Graduate School of Education in Harvard. He was an ethnic Marma, M-A-R-M-A, from the Chittagong Hill Tracts. And he was the first people, first of the Marma people actually to end up in the United States. He had then gone back to Bangladesh to start first one and now three mother language schools so that the indigenous kids could be educated at least in the first instance in their own languages. And the reason for this was because officially education takes place in Bangla, which people in the Hill Tracts don't speak, not even as a second language. And so educationally it's a disaster. Fewer than 2% of indigenous children in the Hill Tracts complete their education. Fewer than 2%, dropout rate of 98%. Fewer than half are still in any form of education at the age of 11. And so what that means is they are essentially being brought up for a life of manual labour or prostitution. And this is part of an overt campaign to essentially ethnically cleanse that region. Before we start getting, especially I, before I start getting preachy about this, this is of course exactly what happened in the United States and in Canada with residential schools in Canada, with reservation schools in the United States. It's obviously something that has occurred and continues to occur all over the world. So I started working with him initially to do some carvings in these endangered scripts because when you carve something and put it on the wall it attains two qualities. One, it becomes signage and signage is authoritative. Most of these kids have never seen a sign in their own writing system, in their own language. And the second thing is it becomes art which means it gains respect and people look at it differently. So first of all I did some carvings and then he and I began to work together on a project of which this is an example. So what happens in these schools is that, so these are schools with novice sources so when you see the kids, they're all sitting on the ground. We're not talking about tables and chairs, we're talking about kids. The first school was in fact a ruined Buddhist temple that had been burned by the military and it became a boarding school where many of the parents paid for their kids' fees in food, in grain, in barter. So what they started doing was asking the kids, go home to your village and ask your grandparents or your village elders to tell you a story they heard when they were a kid and bring that story back. So they would do that and they would come back to the classroom and then the kids would stand up in front of class and tell these stories. So as I'm sure many of you know, in the developing world it's very, very unusual for kids to even be heard in the classroom and certainly to take a position of authority in the classroom. In many of these schools it's actually regarded as bad behavior for the child to look at the teacher. So for the kid to be in front of the classroom telling a story is a radical act in itself. So the storytelling was videotaped and the individual stories were selected by the teachers and then sent out actually to me and to my students at Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. And so what we would do is we would do editing and layout and design and illustration and then send them back for proofreading because of course we had no idea what we were doing. And then whenever things was okayed we'd run a Kickstarter campaign, a crowdfunding campaign, and publish these books. So typically what we would do is we would publish a small number in the United States which were used for fundraising purposes and then the PDFs were sent to Indio or Bangladesh where more were printed at a cost of much cheaper rate, shipping much cheaper, so they could be used in the schools. So what you have then is validation, you have cultural validation. You know these are kids, my friend who's from the Hiltrads, when he was in school, his education in terms of reading was to memorize William Wordsworth's poem Daffodils. And of course there are no Daffodils in the Hiltrads and so he memorized the whole thing because they would be beaten if they made mistakes. But he had absolutely no idea what a Daffodil was. So and of course this is part of the whole kind of cultural reinforcement, it's sort of imperial education that is regarded as being education and literature in traditional Bangladesh education. So to have these kids reading a story in their own language, that has the iconography of their own culture because the illustrations as much as possible were done with reference to Hiltrads culture. It was really something pretty remarkable. This language by the way is Mrow. There are probably only about 20,000 Mrow left in order for us to get something translated into Mrow up until very recently we had to email the text to somebody in Bandaban which is the only town of any size in Hiltrads and then somebody would have to go off on foot for two days to get to a village where there was somebody who could still read and write in the Mrow script. So this is when I started getting more and more involved in revival activities that one of the next projects that we did was to create a dictionary. And dictionaries are problematic in a wide range of reasons and I'm sure you all know this stuff. And in particular one of the things that we wanted to avoid was the notion of just a sort of a two-way translation you know English to Chakma or Bangla to Mrow. And we also wanted to avoid a sense of cultural hierarchy. And so what we did and the final thing we wanted to do was to recognize that this is a language community in the Hiltrads. So if for example you're a Chakma you speak Chakma in the home but you also probably speak maybe Trippara and Mrow as well to some extent because it is the assumption is that these are people who live and work and transact in close proximity. And so to extract an individual language from that group sort of does violence to the language fabric of the region. And so what we did was to get a bunch of actually a hundred illustrations and then we circled the illustration with that word in Mrow, Marma, Chakma, Trippara, Bangla the national language and English. Because of course there is also this question if you have somebody who speaks a traditional or indigenous language and that's the only language they're speaking by the end of their education have you limited their ability to move and negotiate and transact with a greater community? Interestingly enough, slightly aside here there's some fascinating research coming out of mother language schools in Canada. So there are a number of Inuit community schools in Quebec and I think also in Ontario where what they do is they centre the school within the community and when I say I realise these are buzz words what they do is they make sure that the school is an extension of the home and so traditional practices such as hunting for example are part of the activities of the school so that the kids can do those things with their parents or their uncles and aunts or whatever. So there's that sense of education as being something which happens naturally within any kind of family then within a broader community, within a region. When the kids are I think it's the age of 9 maybe 10, they then transition to an English language school by law in fact. What they've discovered is that of the children who are reading above grade level at the age of 11 more than half are Inuit so they're actually reading in their second language more successfully than kids who are reading in English as their first language and there's all kinds of theories as to why this is and that's something which I can direct you to research on that but what it really shows to show is that mother language education first of all is very important but secondly it's not a hindrance to then learning a broader national or regional language. Anyhow, so last summer about this time last year I sort of got hit by a thought that I'm really embarrassed that it never occurred to me before which is that even though I've just been talking about education education is not the answer and in order to explain what I mean I need to introduce you to a phrase which those from the United States will understand very well is high school Spanish exactly right now pretty much everybody in the United States takes Spanish and nobody remembers a bloody word of it so the phrase high school Spanish means I took it for two years and I do not speak it at all you know I may be able to make sounds but that's about it anyway so what I realized about a year ago is that when you revive a language you have to start with kids and if you want to start with kids you have to create games because and this is where I'm going to start pulling out a couple of these so let's these carvings here are sort of faux scrabble tiles each of them has a letter and a number and each of interesting enough scripts also has a traditional number system and in each case they're also endangered if you think about it numbers are even more global than scripts are so I started thinking about scrabble and the fact that scrabble is an extraordinary exercise in rehearsal it means that it's not just a question of recognizing letters and recognizing words it's much more sophisticated in that it means that we need to be able to recognize letter clusters and manipulate letter clusters mentally in the same way that we do arithmetic in our heads it means that we need to do extremely rapid and efficient movements through the liquid of written language and we only do this well because we've done it often and if you think about games that we've played you know from childhood hangman everybody's played hangman and so you learn certain essentials about your language over and over again and you have fun doing so it's not as if in Bali for example in elementary school everybody spends a year learning the traditional language and script but it's like high school Spanish after that nobody does it it's gone you know you can fire a cannon down a street in Bali and not hit anybody who can still read and write their traditional script which is this one by the way I personally find extraordinarily beautiful the other thing about Scrabble is that the fact that Scrabble is available in a commercial form in a number of different scripts I don't know how many is a sign of how the world is moving towards a kind of functional minimal range of writing systems in the same way that Facebook now supports I think it is maybe 16 different writing systems but many of my Facebook friends or people in Facebook groups if they write to me it just comes out in tofu squares because that's not a script that's you know supported the fact that many keyboards for example don't support you know more than a sort of a functional minimum of scripts means that on the one hand it looks as if we're globalizing and we're respecting a diversity but in practice what's happening is that there's a shrinkage that's taking place down to this sort of transactional critical mass so I thought what I'll do is I will start creating games in endangered alphabets and Scrabble was the first one I thought about and it was a disaster Scrabble is not a good idea so and I got completely fooled one of my contacts in Java had created in Corel draw a picture of a Scrabble board with a series of tiles in Javanese and I think this is amazing he's ahead of me he's doing all this stuff already I need to catch up and see what other scripts I can use but here's the thing in many of the world scripts especially those in South Asia, Southeast Asia and you know further across that sort of Brahmi sweep the scripts essentially the way they indicate vowels is by modifying is either by having silvers or by modifying consonants and so instead of having an alphabet of a small number of letters like we do and have those letters be extremely flexible in terms of how they're pronounced you actually have a system whereby you have a much larger number of characters each of which is much more specific in the way it's pronounced but it means that you would have to have like 70 or 80 different tiles in order to have a Scrabble set which is just completely impractical and so I contacted this guy and I said you know I've been working on this now for months trying to figure out how you've done it a Javanese Scrabble and he said oh it can't be done that was just an art project exactly you also have a situation in for example Mongolian so Mongolian is a fascinating script because it is inherently calligraphic so in Mongolian every letter has three forms depending on where it appears in the word so if it is an initial position then it has one of a series of really kind of interesting swoops that kind of leads into the word if it's in the middle of the word it has really simple functional characteristics like a spike here or a loop but if it appears at the end of the letter once again there is this wonderful kind of flourish quality to it and so it's a vertical script again if you were to try and do a Scrabble game in Mongolian you would need three versions of each letter which once again produces like a completely unmanageable series of tiles so instead what I've been doing since then is working on a couple of other things here well actually some of you I gave out these postcards we have jigsaw puzzles with each of these this is in fact Marma very similar to the Burmese alphabet so the kids in the Chitagong Hill Tracks now have jigsaw puzzles where they can make mango storm, leaf and a number of others but the thing about jigsaw puzzles is you lose one piece and you know it's the whole thing is destroyed so I've been trying a number of other approaches this is as far as I know the first endangered alphabet board game so I was at a conference last year in Barcelona and a guy from Bulgaria came over to me and he said do you think you could create a game that uses the glagalitic alphabet which was as I'm sure many of you know one of two alphabets created by Greek missionaries to write Old Church Slavonic as they were moving up through the Balkans and Eastern Europe towards Russia the other being Cyrillic and he said you know I would love to start a revival of the glagalitic alphabet which small sidestep the glagalitic alphabet came as close to extinction as any other that has ever been created as far as I know so it was used ecclesiastically quite widely up until around 12 or 1300 and then less and less and less until eventually by 1980 say it was only being used on a regular basis by two priests on the island of Kruk and they were so conservative that even the notion of a Latin mass was too you know newfangled for them they were still using glagalitic which also meant that when a fisherman bought a new boat he would have the name of the boat written on the boat in glagalitic because of course it's the holy script it implies divine protection so as we got towards 1990 the two priests died and so you would think right that's it end of end of glagalitic and glagalitic was saved by the most peculiar occurrence namely Yugoslav civil war so as you know early 1990s Yugoslavia Tito dies Yugoslavia begins to fall apart we have an extremely bloody conflict which takes place for several years when the dust settles the entire region which depends very heavily on tourism has an image problem which is that a particular new country for example may be widely known as oh yes that's the country whose former military leader is now on trial in the Hague for crimes against humanity like very bad press and so Croatia decided in the stroke of genius to kind of give this visual sense of historical legitimacy by including glagalitic script in its tourism materials so it sort of implies visually all of this recent nonsense is nothing to do with us you know we've been here for centuries we are this ancient nation and everything is fine there's actually a park called glagalitic park where you can walk between large sculptures of the individual glagalitic letters anyhow so my friend I made in Barcelona said make me a game that revives glagalitic and so here we have the board game glagalitic abbey which you're all invited to come up and have a look at afterwards essentially it's a board game in which you're looking for treasure in a Bulgarian abbey in the year 1200 and fighting the other people who are looking for the treasure and in order to advance you have to collect letter cards each of which has a glagalitic letter on it and the conceit of the game is that each monk in his cell is entrusted with one letter and he studies and meditates on for the rest of his life and you have to persuade the monks to give you their letters one by one and that eventually reveals where the treasure is so good news is this is now in Bulgaria being test driven by Bulgarians and they're going to have their hands full A making sure the game actually works and B translating my jokes into Bulgarian because it's full of jokes the other thing that I'm doing is creating playing card games so we've now done five different scripts this one is Chakma from the Chitagong Hilltracks this is Kree my Kree contacts are in Eastern Canada and I've created a number of playing card games that can be played by children or adults of various levels and ages again the idea being that it's got to be something that's fun, it's got to be something that's easy relatively cheap, easy to ship and as mother language schools are developing then I'm trying to work with them to give them classroom materials because of course the problem is that A, there are very few people who speak or can teach many of these languages and B, the government is certainly not going to provide educational classroom materials in these languages similarly, in the region where I live in Vermont the indigenous people are the abnaki there is only one person who can teach abnaki only one there are something in the order of 1000 people who trace abnaki ancestry most of them cannot read and write abnaki, most of them can't speak abnaki and so what I've started doing is things like and in fact this is so dire that most people don't know there are any abnaki left at all and so I created this postcard that I hand out all over the place and it says we are still here in abnaki because their first goal this is kind of interesting for you as linguists is not to try and revive their language but simply to let people know they actually still exist the other thing that we did is that we had a look at their artwork they don't have their own writing system but they have strong artwork traditions and my graphic designer and I created a font based on their artwork styles and so they are now as far as I'm aware only the second Native American people to have their own custom font so I'm now doing a series of carvings for the various tribal headquarters around the state that says we are still here and I've done a carving which says people of the dawn are the first abnaki means that is going up in the Vermont state house later this year and will be the first visual or visible representation of the existence of the abnaki in the state house so that's what I'm working on and I will pause now and take questions now actually before I do that I want to make a pitch so all of this work that I'm doing is essentially funded out of my own pocket I've created a non-profit to do all this stuff I'm retiring from my day job this year and so painful though it may be I have to give a financial pitch anywhere I go to say please support what's going on here and you can do this in a number of different ways you can go to endangeredalphabet.com and buy a copy of the book Endangered Alphabets periodically, typically once a year I run a Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign and I'm also out soliciting sponsorships from translation companies and to my astonishment and delight individual people make donations which they can do again through the endangeredalphabets.com website what I'm going to do is to put this at the back and invite you if you're interested in staying in touch to put your name and email on here I'm going to park this right here so you can see it on the way out and now I will take questions go for it and first of all tell me your name nice to meet you yeah yeah exactly I do not know how they would have done that I think Scrabble is I know Scrabble yes it's in at least a dozen scripts and apparently they're open to others so this is more of a symbolic gesture than a kind of to Scrabble very interesting I'll look into that nice live research okay so one of my favorite script is Sinhala from Sri Lanka and I'm amazed at how many of the letters actually look like those really uncomfortable chairs like Italian modernist chairs made in like 1960 that you couldn't sit on comfortably and so I've done a bunch of carvings in Sinhala just because I want to and I discovered that they have a really interesting number system which is not strictly decimal because are you going to have a different character for say a thousand and five thousand you know this kind of stuff and it turns out to be an endangered number system because the pressure on international commerce or computing or whatever all of it implies you're not going to pass these out I promised I would pass these out and I never did so there you go that is sort of the commercial pressures on simplification of numbers are even greater than they are on letters or universalization of numbers and letters other questions yeah go for it oh yes yes yes no yes absolutely and Saletti is really interesting because again it's another script it's another sort of Bangladeshi script that even though Bangladesh was founded on the principle of mother tongue because of the civil war with West Pakistan no sooner had Bangladesh or East Pakistan achieved independence than it immediately said this is going to be our official mother Bangladesh is going to be our official language and any regional or minority or indigenous languages and scripts simply don't it's not only they don't count, they don't exist and so my friend from the Hilltracks uses this phrase that I'm sure you've heard before which is how quickly the oppressed become the oppressors so you know what I should be passing these out with their handy little car because nobody knows what these are otherwise they wouldn't be in danger okay hang on a second give me just a second I want to catch up so that you know what is going with which okay this one goes with that thank you yes your question my view is that adult teaching is actually more urgent because you don't have any fluent adults let me clarify what I was saying I think what I'm saying is that yes the issue of teachers is obviously vital in Cherokee they talk about relearners because there are so few people who've spoken Cherokee continuously since birth that it's really people who are committed to the language and the culture who've relearned it, who are passing usually very humbly what they've relearned on same true with Abnaki I think the distinction that I was looking at was if all you produce for those teachers and for those role models is stuff which is clearly school material then what it's not doing is making its way out into the community so what I'm really ideally doing is I would love to be able to do stuff that actually goes home so that in the home they are using the plane cars because it's actually often the parents generation that is the one that is most impoverished quite often that grandparents generation they have actually been speaking throughout so my question then is is how are we going to get it out into the hands of people who are going to use it over and over again irrespective of the resources of the local school so I'm not disagreeing with you in the slightest yes exactly that's exactly right yes okay next one okay other questions yes yes exactly exactly oh no no no no that's fine also don't leave without getting some postcards yeah some postcards so yeah this is very true and in fact I asked the question why are the strokes in babayans so thin and so hard to carve and there are two interesting things I discovered one is that it's because traditionally babayan was incised with the point of a knife in bamboo and so it's going to be extremely thin which is going to affect a bunch of things first of all it means that that's actually really hard to read so what they would do is they would take a handful of ash from the fire and rub it into the incised letter so it would stand out more and the other was that this was a script probably inherited from further south maybe from the bogey's people but because they were using a palm leaf script that you often get a character which essentially is like a boomerang with a dot underneath it you cannot do a dot with the point of a knife because it would be impossible to see it would be so small and so it got replaced by a cross which is you know more distinct the other thing is that what this also means and this goes back to your technology question is that it's actually really dangerous like if you have a round hard wood like bamboo and you're working with the tip of a knife the chances of you cutting open your own wrist are pretty good and so what they would do is they would hold the bamboo away from themselves at an angle which makes perfect sense right when the first anthropologists studied this they assumed that a bovine was a vertical script because of the way the bamboo was being held but it's actually a horizontal script plus physical safety so yes the technology issue turns out to be enormously influential other questions yes in light of the things a few embarrassing seconds further on the childhood institute of linguists something's not never heard until today don't assume that I know what I'm talking about I may do but it's not a guarantee not about linguistics but about culture, peoples and so especially the American Indians can I write it can I write up here A-B-E-N-A-K-I I know that hundreds of languages have become extinct since the occupation called it colonialization of this continent of America's Africa and Asia and Australia which is more important but script I do know that they had their own scripts the American Indians so most did not one of the great intellectual adventures of all time was the creation of a Cherokee script by Sequoia at the beginning of the 19th century because at the time the widespread belief was that writing was a form of witchcraft so most Native American peoples did not have their own writing systems some indigenous old script correct and in fact that is also echoed especially in West Africa where there are a number of so to speak anti-colonial or post-colonial scripts that were created specifically to give a people their own writing system as opposed to that of the colonial overlords which brings me to the question of the writing systems of the Mongolians as our colleague mentioned I did not know that their own specific writing system and obviously that of the language peoples of the language and their culture and as you mentioned it's written vertically which is similar to how Chinese written script was written and you mentioned that the letters changed therefore in a Cherokee which is the same in Arabic as well yes so was that also indigenous writing system or have they been influenced by the Muslim Arabs and the Chinese and therefore they have this system based why is it written horizontally yes above, above, below and some state at the same level so that's one of the other questions and in general if I may carry on is obviously aware of the indigenous languages are you in contact with them are you because alphabet is important but language is even important you can write any language in any alphabet and the peoples who speak it are even more important than the language but all of them are important and none of them should become extinct and you said you contacted the translation companies and all that these are all commercial entities where you contacted the Cherokee State of Language the State of Translation and Interpreting and this time it would be more out of thought understanding of your course which is very commendable okay so I counted nine questions there okay so going through them backwards in order yes there's no doubt that I've worked with a variety of people and organizations and companies and the reason why I'm going after translation companies is specifically commercial because I want money for them so the playing cards are sponsored by a translation company but I'm also working with a variety of people who are either individuals or members of organizations who are working to revive and preserve their own language their own culture and I totally agree with you that the people are more important put it that way rather more important I say yes well what I say is that the endangered alphabets are a subset of endangered languages which are a subset of endangered cultures and preserving or reviving language is one of the ways of helping to reinforce a sense of cultural identity but it's not the only one what were the other questions Mongolian was adapted from an older writing system I believe around 1200 it spread west with the Great Khan interesting enough another quick side step here so this is what my life has become this is how strange my life has become I got an email from a guy who is Kaumik Kaumik K-A-L-M-Y-K so the Kaumiks are the last descendants of the Mongols at their furthest point west so when the Mongols as you know made it all the way to the borders of Europe so over the course of the next several centuries they retreated there were various places where they were overthrown but in a small area near the Caspian Sea there was a group of Mongols who survived and their their word for themselves was Kaumik and they still write or few of them still write in the Toto-Bitchig vertical traditional Mongolian style and they practice Tibetan Buddhism they are the only nation in Europe whose dominant religion is Tibetan Buddhism during the Second World War when Hitler drove south through the Romanian oil fields and then back up towards Russia the Kaumiks were right in the way and some fled east into Russia and some fled west and some of those who fled west ended up in New Jersey which is actually an extraordinarily complex linguistic environment and they brought Tibetan Buddhism to the United States so the first celebrants of Tibetan Buddhism in the United States were descendants of the Mongols and this guy emailed me and he said I'm coming up to Vermont with my family to go skiing over New Year's do you want to meet up in the Sheraton Hotel and have a drink on New Year's Eve in this kind of stupid, ridiculous gold painted chairs ballroom at the Sheraton Hotel in South Burlington with a Kaumik family who are telling me about their efforts to publish children's books in Kaumik in Toto-Bitchig so that's the kind of exciting life I live these days very interesting actually there's a question or comment coming from behind you I too was in India earlier this year in my sort of conference workshop and one of the people in that workshop was actually working on endangered number systems oh really I would love to, that sounds fascinating and the other thing of course is that there is a theory this comes back to another of your questions I think it was question three that in fact Mongolian is actually the Devanagri script turned through 90 degrees so it's actually this exactly they went through 90 degrees and in Greek actually also 180 degrees but when I saw this I thought no wonder this is the writing system of Genghis Khan it looks like a series of weapons it's all these stabbing things but actually if you turn it through 90 degrees it actually has a very strong similarity to the northern south Asian Devanagri scripts yes go ahead and that brings us to the amazing work of Dr Prasanna Shree who maybe was at that conference so in India the degree as you say the degree of snobbery is toxic they have this word tribal which essentially means primitive yes exactly so Dr Prasanna Shree who is at the University of Andhra Pradesh what she does is she goes to the contribe because of course the most conservative areas linguistically are always in the hills and she says what is a culturally iconic image for this particular people so let's say it's the tamarin tree which is used for shade and for wood and for fruit and you know all of these things and so she will create a stylized tamarin tree and then create a writing system based on that kind of central iconic image so that even the visual look of this writing system feels like yeah this is who we are this is what we do and you're absolutely right the sense that they are a more proud and legitimate people once they have their own writing system is apparently universal obviously I'm taking her word for it but it makes a whole lot of sense to me I think what she's doing is not only intellectually but also physically heroic in a variety of ways let's do one more question what the heck and the comment also there we call Mandik in the case of Bangladesh these hill people are they different ethnically as well as linguistically are they Indian people or are they more Chinese or why is that or is it because they speak Urdu and Urdu was always only ever a minority language even in West Pakistan yes so in the hill tracts there are 13 genetically distinct groups some of them have more in common linguistically and or genetically with the Burmese some of them actually move back and forth across the border with Myanmar either on a seasonal basis or because they are being pursued by military or a variety of reasons some have more in common with for example the state of Tripura in India which is also just across the border so I don't know their history going back you know more than a few generations interesting enough when the British would colonize that area they were very content to let that these people largely be self governing and so I've seen books in Chakma and Marma from the 19th century books I've seen a collection of proverbs for example collected by a British anthropologist there was more of a sense of recognition and tolerance within the overall colonial umbrella than there has been subsequently which is I would say something that deserves to be remedied anyway that's just me thank you so much for your questions and your attention and all those other things and you can play with these things and take postcards and sign up on the sheet and enjoy the rest of your day as they say