Tim Brookes: The man, who preserves endangered alphabets

I guess there are not so many people who preserve dying languages. There about 14 dead already per day, if statistics are right. What about Your investigations? Do You investigate only endangered scripts or also languages? How did You come to this interesting investigation? Are You a polyglot? What is Your background?

You have to understand, I'm neither a linguist nor an anthropologist by profession, nor an artist nor a woodworker--throughout my adult life I've been a writer, a guitarist, a teacher and a football coach. I stumbled into this field almost entirely by accident. I started carving signs as Christmas presents for members of my family, and then discovered I enjoyed carving so much I started carving Chinese characters as monograms for friends and family, and then quite by chance, in searching for other writing systems to carve, found Omniglot.com and was struck by the number of scripts that are no longer taught in schools or used for official purposes, and that made me think to carve some as a way of preserving them. I assumed lots of other people were studying endangered writing systems, and was astonished to find this was not the case.

I'm not a polyglot--I speak a small amount of a small number of languages. I have enormous respect for those who study, document and work to preserve endangered languages, but what I do has some overlap, but also some differences. Cherokee, for example, is endangered in both its spoken and written form, whereas most of the Indonesian languages are still fairly widely spoken in their native islands but very, very few people can still read and write the traditional scripts. The field of endangered languages is already well served by highly qualified and dedicated people, so I'm quite happy to leave it to them, and keep exploring endangered, minority and indigenous writing systems.

Have You already published any works about endangered scripts?

Yes, when I first started my initial major carving project, which consisted of Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 13 different endangered scripts, I found myself asking all kinds of questions for which there were no easy and obvious answers. So I kept a journal as I went, and began researching, and the result was my book Endangered Alphabets, which was first published in the autumn of 2010. But it is not a scholarly book, nor purely factual--I call it "an essay on writing," because like an essay it is intended to provoke thought and questions rather than to provide purely factual material. The second (expanded) edition of that book should be out in about a month.

How many are there scripts on Earth that we know already? I mean from the very beginning of writing. I how many of them are alive now? Which ones are disappearing and why?

If you go to Scriptsource.org, they identify something between 130 and 150 scripts, though (as with languages) some are so closely related to others it is almost a matter of opinion whether they are one or two. Likewise, it's a matter of opinion whether a writing system is endangered. My own rule of thumb, supported (I contend) by history, is that if a writing system is not officially recognized and not taught in schools, it is almost certainly doomed to a slow or swift decline. As to which decline and why, it's very simple: one culture dominates another. This may be a military, religious or political domination, it may be an economic domination, and the domination may appear to be an act of force and repression or simply one of convenience (many countries have minority scripts, for example, for which there are no keyboards or digitized fonts, or are simply not represented on Facebook), but once it is in the interests of a culture to abandon its traditional script, then sooner or later--sometimes over the course of centuries, sometimes within two generations--the dominant culture's script will become the de facto script of choice for commerce, law, government, education. From then on the minority script will shrink until it is used only be specific subgroups (priests, scholars, or the elderly, for example).
Interestingly, the past five years have seen a surge of interest in traditional cultures and languages, and in a number of countries organizations or individuals have mobilized around saving and using the traditional script. It's not clear whether this will mean it ever becomes the writing system of choice, but it may well survive as an art form, in tattoos, jewelry or calligraphy, for example.

What has to be done to stop dying scripts and languages? Are there any schools, virtual or "real'?

I support schools in Bangladesh that have been set up to teach indigenous children in their own languages, and a number of Native American peoples have started teaching their languages (and in the case of the Cherokee, their script) to children as young as six months up through college age. What your readers need to understand is that what is lost is not simply the language.

I tried to explain this in the introduction to my recent Kickstarter crowdfunding campaign:

In countries all over the world, members of indigenous cultures have their own spoken and written languages—languages they have developed to express their own beliefs, their own experiences, their understanding of their world. What they have collectively written in those languages is the sum of their cultural identity: spiritual texts, historical documents, deeds, letters between family members, poems, songs.

In scores of countries, though, those languages are unofficial, suppressed, ignored, even illegal. Children sit through classes listening to teachers they can barely understand; adults have to speak a second or even a third language to get government services or deal with the law.

Denying members of a minority culture the right to read, write and speak in its mother tongue defines them as inferior and unimportant, and leaves them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse. Levels of education and quality of life go down, levels of suicide, homelessness and incarceration go up.

Our response is to dignify those languages by showing their inherent fascination and beauty—in other words, by making them art.
My goal is to create the most ambitious and significant set of Endangered Alphabets carvings yet—20 separate carvings of the phrase “mother tongue” in the traditional written languages of those cultures, carved in woods native to those cultures.

These will make up a major exhibition to open on International Mother Language Day, February 21st, 2017, the largest and most high-profile display of the Alphabets so far. The aim is to spur public discussion and awareness of the importance of inter-cultural respect, and the dangers of language loss.

And once the exhibition has run its course, each of the carvings will be donated to an organization in the United States or overseas dedicated to preserving that culture’s language and identity. We have already done this for the Somali Bantu, the Ainu of Japan and the Mro, Marma and Chakma of Bangladesh, and now we’re extending this work many times over.

Thank You and good luck preserving Culture.

Links:

http://endangeredalphabets.com/

http://everwideningcircles.com/2016/06/29/exploring-endangered-alphabets/