Languages and scripts do not just die out. Invariably, the loss of a language or a script is the result of policy. It’s the result of invasion, it’s possibly genocide, possibly economic invasion where one culture finds that it cannot survive without taking on the guise of a more powerful culture nearby.
Tim Brookes
While the art got it all started, the realization of the implications for human lives and well-being, in the brain of a compassionate communicator, transformed a carved gift of beauty into a world-wide awareness and rescue.
Welcome to the Endangered Alphabets Project.
Welcome to new awareness of the role of scripts in capturing and transmitting the language and cultural experiences of all humans, with a focus, this time, on the marginalized and endangered ones.
Welcome to the awareness that the endangerment of scripts reflects raw cultural and ethnic power plays throughout human history.
So when [children] first go to school, they don’t understand what the teacher is saying. And the government’s attitude then, and I think to some extent probably still is, we’re doing them a favor by forcing them to learn our language. (16:36)
Becoming aware of this dynamic is the first step to engaging with ways to bring that awareness to others, and to developing actions and policies that support and honor, rather than destroy and dishonor, the role of alphabets and languages in the essential identity of individuals and communities.
For Tim Brookes, the path opened through the beauty of an art gift project undertaken in 2009. Tim carved a graceful script he did not understand into beautiful wood. The combination of reflecting on the beauty of the piece and the meaning of the script — hidden from him, but clear to others — set him on a journey to understand more. That journey led to a commitment to an as-yet unserved aspect of human culture and justice.
Art and beauty have a very curious impact on people. They have the ability both to capture people’s attention and also to, in a sense, elevate their sense of correspondence to that thing. And so it became a way of giving respect to the un-respected or disrespected or whatever. So the carving continues to this day, and I’ve done carvings for individuals, I’ve done carvings for organizations, for libraries, and many of them are on display in areas of the world where that carving essentially says, you belong, you have the right to a foothold on this Earth….An endangered script you can see. It has that iconicity of being right there. 20:48.6
In listening attentively to this podcast, you’ll see in your mind’s eye, I’m convinced, a path open for you, too. Your awareness of scripts’ beauty and their role in human lives will be enlarged. Perhaps also your heart will be touched to do something within the sphere of interests and influence that you have in your life.
I have suggestions! Watch and listen to the amazing speakers from all over the world of the Endangered Writing Day event. Find out more at endangeredalphabets.com. Look at the map at endangeredalphabets.net. Take a look at the gifts, carvings, games, educational materials, and books on Tim’s website, and purchase some items for yourself and others you think should experience and understand this concept more. Donate on the site, too — it’s a 501c3 and our contributions and purchases help.
In Tim’s own words:
[At the Endangered Writing event] all of these are people who are doing just remarkable things that most people just don’t know are happening. So part of my job then is to shine a spotlight on them. It’s the relaunch of the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets at endangeredalphabets.net. It’s the official publication date of Writing Beyond Writing. And yes, I would love it if people would stampede over to endangeredalphabets.com and you click on shop. And the drop down menu says Writing Beyond Writing, you go there.
What I’m hoping is that people will get in touch with me and say, you didn’t do this. You forgot this. Did you not know that this is going on over here? Because all of the research we do is limited by the fact that we’re working to understand the most marginalized people in the world who have the smallest internet footprint. (47:34)
Enjoy the podcast. Come join Tim on the journey, however you can.
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Tim Brookes’ Bio and Resource links
Tim Brookes is the author of many books, including Catching My Breath: An Asthmatic Explores his Illness; Signs of Life: A Memoir of Hospice; A Hell of a Place to Lose a Cow: A Hitch-Hiking Odyssey; Practical Freelancing; Guitar: An American Life; The Driveway Diaries: A Dirt Road Almanac; Behind the Mask: How the World Survived SARS; A Warning Shot; Behind the Mask; Thirty Percent Chance of Enlightenment; Best Student Travel Writing; The Short, Sweet Guide to Dialogue; Best Student Creative Non-Fiction; Practical Freelancing; Stonehenge; The Story So Far: Essays on Publishing at the Start of the Twenty-First Century; Pulitzer or Bust; Endangered Alphabets; First-Time Author; First-Time Publisher; The Ghosts of Good Intentions; Endangered Alphabets Word Search Puzzles; Writing Beyond Writing; and Endangered Alphabets Sudoku.
His writing has also appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, National Geographic, Outside, and more than 100 other newspapers and magazines.
From 1989-2010 he was a regular essayist for National Public Radio.
He has given talks and exhibited his Endangered Alphabets carvings at The Smithsonian Institution, The Library of Congress, Harvard, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, First Nations University, and more than 100 other universities, colleges, libraries, and museums.
He is the founder and executive director of The Endangered Alphabets Project, a federal 501c3 non-profit based in Vermont. The online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, launched in 2019, has received more than half a million visitors from over 170 countries.
The Endangered Alphabets Project
A federal 501c3 non-profit
and The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets at
Twitter: @EAlphabets
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/1190077011746159
Instagram: @EndangeredAlphasPlease support our work at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/how-to-support-us/
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Transcript
0:00:00.2 Norah Jones: What do you think of when you think of endangered? There’s talk, of course, about endangered animals and plants and whole ecosystems. My guest this week, Tim Brookes, invites us all to think about what happens to endangered alphabets that are then endangered languages, endangered cultures, endangered ways of people seeing. Tim Brookes is the author of many books, writings in New York Times magazine, Atlantic Monthly, and over 100 other magazines, and a regular essayist for National Public Radio from 1989 to 2010.
0:00:49.3 Norah Jones: Tim has established a foundation to focus on the endangered lives of alphabets and the languages and cultures that they represent. Join me for this fascinating interview on this important topic that touches on all our lives globally. Enjoy this podcast with my guest, Tim Brookes.
0:01:13.4 Speaker 2: Welcome to the It’s About Language Podcast, where language comes to life. Join your host, Norah Lulich Jones, as she explores the fascinating world of language and how language is instrumental in the lives of individuals and communities around the world. Let’s get into episode 118.
0:01:33.8 Norah Jones: Well, you’re in for an excellent and fun conversation today. I’m already excited about it, we’ve hardly gotten started. Hi, Tim Brookes, welcome to It’s About Language.
0:01:43.0 Tim Brookes: Thank you so much for inviting me.
0:01:44.8 Norah Jones: It’s a pleasure ahead of time, and I’m eager to begin to share with listeners around the world some of the things that I’ve been indulging myself in and understanding about what you’re doing, who you are, and the impact that you and the foundation are having on languages around the world, but one aspect of the timing of this podcast that I would like to bring the attention to of listeners, that this podcast will also be referring to an event that is happening on January 23rd, 2024, and it will be a World Endangered Writing Day. I’d like you to put that on your calendars, and Tim, you have said to me that even if someone is listening to this podcast or may have missed World Endangered Writing Day on January 23rd, 2024, that they can still access that information.
0:02:39.1 Tim Brookes: Yes, that’s true. So they can get registration information and details about the upcoming event at endangeredwriting.world. Turns out that dot world is a suffix we can now use, so endangeredwriting.world. So that’s what you go for information for registration, and that’s where we will also give links to the recorded conversations, discussions, videos, etcetera, that are going to be happening throughout the day.
0:03:14.4 Norah Jones: Wonderful news, wonderful news. Now, for those of you that are listening that do know Tim Brookes, that we’re hearing the words endangered writing, or what I’m about to say about endangered alphabets, will make sense to you, but Tim, there are many new fans from this podcast, no doubt, that will be like endangered alphabets? So could you tell us about yourself and about that phrase? And how those are connected.
0:03:42.4 Tim Brookes: I think it’s probably best to begin at the beginning as they say. So I do not have a background as a professional linguist or anthropologist, and it all started in 2009 when I was picking Christmas presents, and I decided I would try carving signage for people–shingles or signs that my various family members could hang up outside their door, their business or whatever, and that went down well. And then I went through a phase of carving Chinese characters for everybody like signature characters. So all of this was really my only training in wood carving, but I was having a great time doing it. And I ran out of people to carve things for, and I also thought I’ll try some kind of different language now. And when I had been in Southern India on assignment for National Geographic, I had seen signs in Malayalam, which is the dominant language and script in the southern state of Kerala, and I thought I found it fascinating. Because like most people in the west, my knowledge of script is extremely narrow.
0:05:05.7 Tim Brookes: I know the Latin alphabet, which we use. I can recognize Cyrillic, although I can’t read it, I can recognize Chinese and Japanese. Everything else to me is new and exotic, and the Malayalam script looked to me like a series of elaborately bent paper clips, and I thought maybe I’ll try some carving in that, and I went to omniglot.com quite by chance, I just Googled Malayalam, and many of your listeners probably already know Omniglot, which is sort of like an online encyclopedia of the world’s writing systems. And when I got there, I was sort of fascinated by several things. One was that there were so many scripts that I had never heard of, and I’m a fairly well-traveled person. And secondly, when I went to those pages, so many of them were, to my untrained eye, strange or exotic or really beautiful or just visually a surprise.
0:06:18.1 Tim Brookes: The third thing was that in reading Simon’s profiles, time and again, there would be these phrases no longer used for official purposes, no longer taught in schools, only used by a few priests, only used by map makers, only used by women to write secret love letters, and I thought this was sort of fascinating. And as an example of these scripts on most cases, he puts article one of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, mostly because the UN has translated that into many, many different languages.
0:06:58.0 Tim Brookes: And so that became my template and I decided that I would try carving some of these two-sentence declarations in some of these scripts that were entirely new to me. And it was appallingly difficult, and I was woefully under-skilled, but I thought rather than quit, what I’m going to do is make sure that I can’t quit. And so I set up an exhibition for about 14 months in the future, May 2010, and I said, “This is what I’m going to do, and my students and my colleagues at Champlain College are also going to be invited to contribute to this exhibition.”
0:07:47.3 Tim Brookes: And so I couldn’t let everybody down, it was like, I was in it. And so I did, I think, 13 of these carvings mostly in Vermont maple, because I felt that there was like a bridge between myself… The carving would be a bridge between myself in Vermont and these other places around the world, and these other people and cultures around the world. And when that first exhibition went out, people said two things to me that I wasn’t expecting.
0:08:20.8 Tim Brookes: One was, “This is art.” I had thought of it as being documentation or preservation. If I put something in wood then it’s least it has some physicality to it. And then the other thing they said was, “This is really important, you must keep doing this.” And I had sort of seen it as being a kind of pre-senile monomania, like people who go off into their garages and they make scale models of Chartres Cathedral with match sticks. But that’s when it started coming home to me that this was actually something that other people saw as being worthwhile, and then subsequently, when I actually met people from these cultures that had endangered scripts and realized what it was like on the other side, then it was like, okay, this is your life’s work, this is what you now have to do.
0:09:23.2 Norah Jones: What a powerful and important statement of specific empowerment for individuals? You alluded to the fact that you began by using the two sentences that are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, what are those sentences and what is it that led you to those choices? How does that relate to your work impact?
0:09:51.7 Tim Brookes: So the two sentences I may be mis-quoting slightly, this is from the founding of the UN right after World War II, and they are, “All peoples are alike in dignity and respect. They are endowed with reason and conscience, and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.” And several things struck me about that, one was that many of these are endangered because people don’t act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood. So this is actually the first really substantial point that I would like to make, languages and scripts do not just die out. The way in which the narrative is often written is exactly the same as the way in which the extinction of species used to be written.
0:10:35.3 Tim Brookes: Namely that this animal died out, these birds died out. Invariably, the loss of a language or a script is the result of policy. It’s the result of invasion, it’s possibly genocide, possibly economic invasion where one culture finds that it cannot survive without taking on the guise of a more powerful culture nearby. And consequently, these really high-minded statements in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights are really being violated even more so, if you… A much less well known is the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. And there is this declaration, which of course is signed by all member nations that basically says that indigenous people have the right to name their own places, to use their own language and their own script, if it exists, to maintain their own ceremonies, etcetera.
0:11:57.3 Tim Brookes: And as far as I know, there is not a single country in the world that fulfills the spirit and letter of that declaration. So there’s this saying that linguistic rights are human rights, and that is absolutely true, and endangered scripts are always the sign of some kind of aggression against human rights or some kind of violation of social and human justice.
0:12:28.7 Norah Jones: When you say so clearly, linguistic rights are human rights, and with your work with National Geographic, you had named specifically, you are an essayist for several decades for NPR, you’ve written for the Atlantic, and so forth. So you have all sorts of exposure to working with words and talking about what you’ve experienced in your travels and experiences, help all to understand a little bit more in depth, a little bit more the urgency that you are speaking of here. When you do speak of that linguistic justice is actually human justice.
0:13:13.9 Tim Brookes: Yes, so I guess the first thing I want to say is that because I had no background as a linguist or an anthropologist, when I started carving these pieces of text, I couldn’t read them. So if you think about it, letters exist sort of in three dimensions, they exist in a phonetic dimension, we see a letter and as long as we know what it is, we can assign a sound to it, they exist in a semantic dimension. So if we have a group of those sounds, it therefore has some kind of meaning to us, but it also has a graphic dimension, has a visual dimension. And because I didn’t speak any of these languages, I couldn’t read them. What I was looking at then was the writing as a visual phenomenon. And so I was asking myself why, for example, this letter is shaped this way? Why this entire alphabet consists of variations on this particular shape? Why this particular script is so thin, why this one is so geometric?
0:14:26.7 Tim Brookes: So it turned out that I was asking questions that are not generally asked. In fact, David Crystal, who many of your listeners will know about, he’s like the David Attenborough of language, he said to me, “You’re the only person in the world who’s studying script loss”; and I was sort of looking around, who?
0:14:52.7 Tim Brookes: There must surely be other people who are doing this that I can read their books or whatever, and it’s an interesting gap in the middle of language study, that language study has been so specifically directed toward the study of a spoken language. And I had sort of walked into or fallen into a hole in the middle of that. And there I was thinking, I am totally unqualified to do this, but I’m… On the other hand, it needs to be done. So I’m going to blunder my way around in here, and to answer your question more directly, when I had been working on the alphabets for about a year and a half, I was actually going for a completely different reason to Bangladesh. I was actually doing some public health work there. And before I left, I put the word out to the Internet at large, are there any endangered alphabets in Bangladesh?
0:15:55.4 Tim Brookes: And fortunately, a couple of people not only got back to me, but actually gave me some contacts. And so I arrived at Dhaka in the middle of the monsoon, which is an experience in itself. And I get visited by representatives of three ethnic groups who are indigenous groups, living in the Chittagong Hill Tracts of Southern/Southeastern Bangladesh, who are essentially entirely marginalized and actually kind of disavowed by the government as a whole, so much so that there is no education that is delivered to them in their language.
0:16:36.6 Tim Brookes: So when they first go to school, they don’t understand what the teacher is saying. And the government’s attitude then, and I think to some extent probably still is, we’re doing them a favor by forcing them to learn our language. In terms of scripts, there were actually two or three scripts that were specific to these groups, but what was fascinating was that none of the people who visited me could write anything for me in them.
0:17:11.2 Tim Brookes: I was going to say, I will carve something for you in your script, none of them could do it. One of them was actually a TV producer in Dhaka, a successful person, a Chakma, an ethnic Chakma. But he couldn’t read and write Chakma, because despite the fact that his father had been the greatest living Chakma writer and had the largest collection of Chakma books and manuscripts in the world, but the Army had come in, killed his father and burned the house down. And so he grew up not being able to read and write his own script. And I began to realize, this is what it’s like to be on the other side. And from then on, instead of being an exercise in curiosity and intellectual adventure, it then became the endangered alphabets really became an exercise in advocacy and in attempting to find all of these cultures, many of whom are very much off the radar, precisely because they are marginalized in this way.
0:18:28.7 Tim Brookes: Most people in Bangladesh have no idea what’s happening in the Chittagong Hill Tracts. And so the end of that particular story is I wound up working with somebody who became a good friend of mine who was from that area, and we created books and posters and rubber stamps and stuff, so that the kids in a school that he had started in a ruined temple could learn their letters.
0:18:57.9 Norah Jones: Therein lies a beginning of an answer to the question that was forming in my mind, do you have this advocacy that you have been… That’s arrived at your door step as it were, because if you’re paying attention and how then… What steps are you taking? So here, you’re talking about having written, prepared books that current speakers can begin to learn more formally with the writing, spoken correspondence. Talk more about that, if you wish, and about some of the other steps that you are taking and that others might be participating in.
0:19:42.6 Tim Brookes: Yeah, so the first step was the carving, and I hadn’t really thought about it when I started this, but when you have something… When you have signage, especially when you have signage that is made with a certain degree of care or is unusual, then it has two qualities that are really valuable. One is that it’s authoritative. So if you put a piece of writing up on a wall, the only stuff that goes up on a wall in terms of signage is stuff that is important, right? It’s because the teacher or the local government administrator or whatever has to have approved it or even created it. And so for many of these kids to see their own writing, their own script up on the wall was new and inspiring so much so that we had to get the head master of the school to take the sign down from his office and put it up in the school where the kids could see it.
0:20:48.6 Tim Brookes: The other thing it does is that if it’s regarded as art, then art and beauty have a very curious impact on people. They have the ability both to capture people’s attention and also to, in a sense, elevate their sense of correspondence to that thing. And so it became a way of giving respect to the un-respected or disrespected or whatever. So the carving continues to this day, and I’ve done carvings for individuals, I’ve done carvings for organizations, for libraries, and many of them are on display in areas of the world where that carving essentially says, you belong, you have the right to a foothold on this Earth, and that’s one great difference between an endangered language and an endangered script. An endangered script you can see it. It has that iconicity of being right there.
0:22:03.6 Tim Brookes: So the second thing I did, as you say, was to start working developing educational materials. I also had begun researching, so having found some of these scripts, I then became curious, like what others are there, and at the time, I think Omniglot had something like 30 scripts that you could call threatened to some degree. And Simon has expanded the site a lot since then, but as it’s become entirely my focus, I can now tell you there are more than 300 scripts currently to some degree in use in the world, and 90% of those roughly are to some degree, threatened, and that is a significantly higher percentage than the percentage of threatened languages.
0:23:03.7 Tim Brookes: Although I don’t want to make this a competition, but it’s interesting that the effect of the endangered languages movement saying one language dies every two weeks and we may lose half of the world’s languages by the end of this century, was valuable. It was dramatic. It was immediate. What I’m trying to do is to say, “And here’s the other half of that statistic in terms of written scripts.”
0:23:31.1 Tim Brookes: After that, what I did was to start creating games. If you’re going to revitalize a language written or spoken, you pretty much have to start with children, and if you’re going to start with children, you better have games they can play. And so I invented some card games and some board games, I’ve got a couple of different board games I’ve invented, and I invented a book of word search puzzles in endangered scripts, and I’m working on a book of sudoku puzzles in endangered scripts.
0:24:12.9 Tim Brookes: Because with sudoku, as long as you have nine different symbols, you’re done, they can be letters, there could be numbers, whatever. And a part of this I have to say it’s just because it’s fun, and you have to have something that in your day is something you… It’s fun. But part of it also is very much from the sense that the hardest part of my job is to get people on the privileged side of the abyss of privilege to understand what it’s like for those on the other side, it’s routine, and I’m sure you know this very, very well. And your listeners do, it’s routine to hear people say, “Oh, why can’t everyone speak English? It’d be so much more convenient.” And the answer is convenient for you, yes, right? [laughter]
0:25:03.0 Norah Jones: Yes.
0:25:06.5 Tim Brookes: But to get people to see why it is so vital for cultures that have their own script to be enabled to use it is very… It’s a very much of a challenge. And in particular, there is this weird math that has to get flipped around where in academic circles, it’s been very common to say there are very few users of that script, therefore we’re not going to bother with it.
0:25:38.9 Tim Brookes: And of course, what the Endangered Species Act has done and the Endangered Languages Movement has done, is to say, “Whoa, reverse that, the fewer speakers there are, the more you ought to be concerned with it and researching it and helping sustain it,” et cetera.
0:25:55.2 Tim Brookes: And so really, a lot of the work that I do now actually is a kind of invisible online advocacy where I am connecting people around the world, someone will say to me,“I want some help digitizing my script,” or someone will say, “I want to create a dictionary,” and by now, I have enough context to be able to say, “Ah, so you need to talk to Craig Cornelius at Google, I will introduce the two of you to each other.” And that really happens literally every day.
0:26:31.1 Norah Jones: What are some other partners that you work with or those that are connected so intimately that you work with them on a regular basis in case, or specifically, because some of the listeners here may be reflecting on their own insights, their own experience, and will certainly want to connect up with you on endangeredalphabets.com, but also may be inspired by the kinds of connections that you already are working your magic with.
0:27:00.0 Tim Brookes: First of all, I appreciate the very professional sliding in of the URL right there endangeredalphabets.com. It’s easy enough to remember. Yes, [laughter] but I should also say endangeredalphabets.net is something that I’m especially proud of, which is the atlas of endangered alphabets.
0:27:22.9 Tim Brookes: So when I was giving talks, people would say to me, “This is fascinating. This is like really, really, really significant. Where can I go to find out more about this?” And the answer was, there isn’t anywhere. And so in 2019, I working with an intern, we put together an interactive Atlas of about 100 scripts around the world with a profile and photographs and various links.
0:27:55.0 Tim Brookes: And by the way, as part of the activities on World Endangered Writing Day on the 23rd of January, we are going to do this second wave launch of the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets because in the intervening four years, four, five years, I have found another 100 scripts and I’ve written those up, and so those are going up as well. None of which answers your question.
0:28:23.9 Norah Jones: That’s quite all right, yeah, I’m sure you will get there. [laughter]
0:28:27.8 Tim Brookes: Yes, yes, yes. In the end, yes, we may all be very old and gray, oh, wait a second, I already am. By then, so other partners I work with, that’s a very interesting question because so few people, either on an individual basis or on an institutional basis are doing this work. So for example, I cannot understand why I haven’t been contacted by a major university saying, the endanger alphabets, we want that, we want that on campus here, we want to be the only place in the world doing this, this is really significant. But that isn’t happening. There is not a single course in higher education that I’m aware of that studies script loss or even that is interested in the anthropology of writing systems in the way that I am. It’s really completely missing.
0:29:23.8 Tim Brookes: What this means is that there are individuals who are doing amazing work, although typically they work with individual communities or individual script. So for example, there is a French anthropologist Cécile Guillaume-Pey who’s done spectacular research in Northeastern India into a culture that has created a spiritual alphabet that it worships, and that the way in which they connect with the immaterial world is by reciting this alphabet, each of each of which letters are the initial letters of one of the local animist spirits there or some feature of their spiritual Panorama. And Cécile has spent time with them and do great work with that.
0:30:29.6 Tim Brookes: And then there’s a guy called Piers Kelly, who’s an Australian anthropologist, and I love Australian anthropologists, because they just bust it out of there and go all the way across the Pacific, and he has done… He very unusually, has done a lot of research into newly created alphabets or writing systems. And so he’s asking the question, “Why would a culture create its own script?” And that is a phenomenally interesting and important question, which I devote at least two chapters in my book, Writing Beyond Writing, too because it is so central to our understanding of what a script means to its people.
0:31:16.9 Tim Brookes: We have difficulty understanding that because our script is used by everybody, the Latin alphabet is used by more people than all the other alphabets in the world, all the other scripts in the world put together. And so our connection to it doesn’t have anything like the intimacy or the profundity of scripts that are particular to an individual community. We understand a language, we say, oh no, if you’re a Manx or if you’re Breton, if you’re Catalan, we understand your connection to your spoken language, we will wave the banner for you, but we don’t understand scripts because by and large, most people in the Western hemisphere just use one.
0:32:07.8 Norah Jones: Indeed, we do. And I’m thinking about the indigenous cultures here, even in North America, that were developing some scripts in order to be able to express if they had not already had them, and would a powerful cultural statement and stand, that has been, you can only imagine how it appears across the world as you have just shared.
0:32:32.9 Tim Brookes: Yes, exactly. And as a result, and this is one of the most remarkable findings of the research that I’ve done. So of those roughly 300 scripts that are to some extent in use in the world right now, 150 of them have been created by an individual or small group for their community. So next time you see one of those family trees that shows how the Indo-European scripts spread across the world, what they don’t show, is that in fact, even though those scripts are used by more people, there are more scripts that are not included on that tree, than there are included on that tree.
0:33:21.6 Norah Jones: Such a good reminder, and I even go back in that moment to repeat back, that the attitude of if there are a few speakers or writers then, oh, well, that shift that says, oh no, this is when we’re about to lose the insights, the cultural history, the belief systems, even the attitudes towards the way that writing systems look and act in the world because of these loss of systems.
0:33:58.6 Tim Brookes: So I want to pick up on one very short word that you just said, which is we. So I just got a message through Twitter from a very, very bright, very well-read person who asked the question, “What do we gain from these minority scripts?” And I’m kind of going, “It’s not we. It’s they,” right? So you have to understand what it is. There is such an entrenched notion that we are in charge of the world and the world is there for us to exploit or to study. That it’s not until you get to the other side of that abyss that I was talking about, where you kind of go, “Okay, so let’s take a culture where the government has decided that it’s more forward-thinking to abandon the local traditional scripts and use the Latin alphabet, and that’s a way of connecting us to the global market and the world, whatever, right?
0:35:07.1 Tim Brookes: So within two generations, the only people who will still be able to read and write in that script will be elderly, and yet that script is the accumulated written record of that Culture’s history. And if you don’t have that, you don’t have that culture, you essentially become somebody who’s imitating somebody richer or more powerful or more threatening nearby. And I’ll give you a brilliant illustration of this. I got an email just when I was finishing up my work on Writing Beyond Writing, from a young woman in Indonesia, actually in Java, and she… I had asked her about the changes that were happening in Java in terms of beginning to re-introduce this traditional Javanese script, which is really beautiful and more interesting than I have time to go into now and more interesting and rich than the Latin alphabet by several levels.
0:36:18.1 Tim Brookes: And what she then went on to say was that she had found letters from, I think, her grandfather. And her grandfather had actually been a soldier in the Indonesian war of independence. And she really wanted to be able to read these, not only to connect with him personally, but also to understand what it meant for her people to go through this extraordinary and dangerous upheaval. But she couldn’t read them because they were written in the Javanese script.
0:36:55.7 Tim Brookes: So her sense of herself as part of a continuum, as part of a culture, as part of a family, had been kind of cut off at the knees, by the decision of the new Indonesian government to use the Latin alphabet throughout the 17,000 islands that constitute Indonesia, many of which have their own script. And that script therefore was automatically doomed as soon as that decision was made.
0:37:31.1 Norah Jones: Well, thank you for the very rich catch of my small word and the implications of awareness and for that excellent story. Can you share a story of an especially powerful recuperation of a script and what the impact has been in a person’s life or in a group’s life?
0:37:57.5 Tim Brookes: So World Endangered Writing Day is happening on January the 23rd for a very particular reason. It actually happens to be National Handwriting Day because I believe it’s the birthday of John Hancock, but that was actually sort of invented by the pen and pencil industry to boost their sales. January the 23rd. Okay, so let’s go back 250 years to Northeastern India to an area which is now the state of Manipur.
0:38:34.1 Tim Brookes: So the Meitei people had their own script, and it was a very interesting script because one of the things that held them together was their particular religion, which focused on a particular deity and each letter in the script corresponded to a body part of the deity. Now, this is not that unusual. Writing and sacredness and worship are very, very, deeply rooted together. So a sort of a traveling priest converted the King to Hinduism, and the king’s son ordered everything written in the Meitei Mayek script, which is this sort of sacred script that existed already, to be destroyed, to be burned.
0:39:35.7 Tim Brookes: And we talk about book burnings, and it’s an assault on content. Here, what you’re talking about is an assault on culture and belief, and also on history. And from what we can tell of the only account that exists, this was a kind of not only cultural genocide, but spiritual genocide as well. It’s self-inflicted. And so the Meitei Mayek script was not used for approximately 200 years.
0:40:14.5 Tim Brookes: After World War II, you start getting… And after World War II, something very interesting happens where the administrative divisions of India are based on language. They’re based to some extent on geography, but they’re also based on language. All of a sudden, because there are over a thousand languages in India, and you don’t have a thousand administrative divisions or states, you get a lot of people starting to say, we are not represented in the state in which we live. The official language or the official script of this state is not ours. And you start getting a ferment of people who are either trying to create new scripts for themselves or to revive ancient scripts.
0:41:07.3 Tim Brookes: And this ferment became so, how can I put it, intense that there were people who were burning documents in Hindi, in the Devanagari script, because it didn’t represent who they were. There was some civil disobedience going on, believe me. And in addition to this, there were scholars who were looking at this traditional script, which hadn’t been used for two centuries, and trying to update it so it met the needs of the contemporary spoken language. And eventually, the confluence of these forces meant that Meitei Mayek is now one of the official scripts of the state of Manipur. And January the 23rd is the day that has been observed as the day of the burning of the Puyas.
0:42:10.0 Tim Brookes: And the Puyas are these sacred documents way back at the end of the 18th century. And that has been the commemoration day. And so I have rebranded it as the day that we’re going to use to identify this turning of the tide, and to give energy to the movement to rediscover one’s cultural identity through writing.
0:42:41.1 Norah Jones: Excellent. Thank you for that history. That was far more exciting and informative than I ever expected. And what a great, great story. There are so many things that are going to be going on during that day. There’s actually sort of three areas which I’d at least like to have you start with. One is that you have, with your website, both the endangeredalphabets.com and endangeredalphabets.net with that wonderful map. It’s just phenomenal and so evocative. You have information. You also have, do you not, some of these games, some of these tools that you have been speaking of, you have your book, Writing Beyond Writing, that is your most recent, if I understand correctly, your most recent publication specifically about that and bringing in this linguistic rights and human rights along with many other interesting things. And then you have the day itself. Can you kind of provide a variety of places that people can go and experience these and more that you would share?
0:43:45.8 Tim Brookes: Well, I guess the first thing I have to say, I would hope, is that they don’t visit me in hospital. Because essentially, I’m the sort of energizing force behind all of this. And if I am sick on January 23rd, who knows what’s going to happen?
0:44:05.1 Norah Jones: We will bring in the good vibrations for you.
0:44:07.4 Tim Brookes: Thank you very much. So yes, endangeredwriting.world, that’s where you can see, amongst other things, the schedule of events, talks, etcetera, during the day. I was sort of astounded that I made a bucket list of the people whom I wanted to invite, who really are either scholars who are absolutely eminent in their particular fields, such as Sabine Hyland, who is one of the great scholars of the Andean khipu, the knotted string system. Or they’re members of communities that are working to revive their script. So the keynote speaker is my friend Maung Nyeu from the Hill Tracts of Bangladesh, whom I worked with and who founded this school. Now these schools that are mother tongue schools for indigenous kids.
0:45:07.4 Tim Brookes: So there’s that schedule which you can go to and you can register for these talks. But there’s also something else which I felt very strongly about where this is a thankless task for the people who are doing this work in the field. And so I wanted an opportunity to recognize them. And even though I don’t have any money to give them some kind of award or certificate or whatever, that says, look at what this person is doing. And so we have Professor Prasanna Sree, for example, from Andhra University in East India, who lives with what are called Adivasi or indigenous groups and creates writing systems for them. And she’s created about 20.
0:45:50.9 Tim Brookes: We have someone like Kristian Kabuay, who does performance art and graffiti and all kinds of other things to energize the Baybayin script from his native Philippines. So and then this amazing publishing company up in Nunavut called Inhabit Media that publishes children’s books and adult books that are in English and in Inuktitut and in many cases use the Inuktitut Canadian syllabics.
0:46:23.4 Tim Brookes: So all of these are people who are doing just remarkable things that most people just don’t know are happening. So part of my job then is to shine a spotlight on them. As you say, it’s the relaunch of the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets at endangeredalphabets.net. It’s the official publication date of Writing Beyond Writing. And yes, I would love it if people would stampede over to endangeredalphabets.com and you click on shop. And the drop down menu says Writing Beyond Writing, you go there.
0:47:00.8 Tim Brookes: So yeah, there’s, and I think, to speak to your question really directly, what I’m hoping is that people will get in touch with me and say, you didn’t do this. You forgot this. Did you not know that this is going on over here? Because all of the research we do is limited by the fact that we’re working to understand the most marginalized people in the world who have the smallest internet footprint.
0:47:34.6 Tim Brookes: And although we’ve done a lot of work and we’ve made a lot of good connections, I have probably discovered four scripts that I didn’t know about since the beginning of December. And the stories behind them are always fascinating and often heartbreaking, precisely because, as I say in the book, an endangered alphabet is often the sign of a lost kingdom. It’s the sign of a people who have been dispossessed in maybe slow, maybe fast, often brutal ways of their land, their identity, their status, their sense, as I said before, that they have a right to belong on this earth.
0:48:27.9 Norah Jones: I invite all of our listeners to stop for a moment and think about what is implied in the potential that you personally would be finding your culture, your beliefs, your history, your place on the planet threatened because you were not able to express yourself or pass that expression through to those in your community and your family and your inheritance through script and to become sensitized to what’s being spoken about here.
0:49:05.0 Norah Jones: Tim, what is the last thing that you would like to make sure that maybe I’ve asked about it and you wish to repeat or maybe there’s something that’s still in your heart that you didn’t get a chance to express? What do you want to leave with the listeners here for the end of this podcast?
0:49:26.9 Tim Brookes: Well, I’m going to actually leave you with two phrases that I have coined and I use in Writing Beyond Writing and I have to say they’re kind of radical and I make no apology for that. So the first is everybody knows the phrase history is written by the winners. So I’ve sort of extended it to history is written by the winners in the alphabet of the winners. So the history that you read is not everybody’s history and the history of most people has not been written.
0:50:06.1 Tim Brookes: The second thing is, throughout the 20th century and actually even since before that, there was a kind of truism in academic circles that the Latin alphabet had become the world’s alphabet because it was intrinsically superior, that it was the most evolved script.
0:50:32.3 Tim Brookes: And this is total hogwash and I say the only reason the Latin alphabet is the dominant alphabet in the world is because at various crucial junctures, it had more lawyers, guns and money than somebody else.
0:50:53.0 Norah Jones: Absolutely. The language, as we have said in other places, that language is dialect with an army and it certainly happens with the script as well. Fascinating that what we assume about things and how you have raised our consciousness on this. Tim, I am looking forward to the experience of your World Endangered Writing Day. Now even more so that I know the very exciting history of it and your cute way of making sure that it’s commemorated. I’m looking forward to the ongoing connections with what you’re offering on the various sites and especially to hearing more successes and more touched lives as individuals find their place on the planet proof that they belong, through the script that encapsulates their language. Thank you so much for sharing all of this with the listeners today.
0:52:00.0 Tim Brookes: Thank you so much for inviting me and for asking such great questions.
0:52:01.4 Norah Jones: Take care, Tim.
0:52:02.5 Tim Brookes: Take care.
0:52:03.5 Norah Jones: Thanks for listening to this podcast with my guest, Tim Brookes. Please do go to my website, fluency.consulting, to learn more about Tim, the Endangered Writing Workshop, the Endangered Alphabets Project, about the Omniglot Map, about the gifts for purchase and the opportunities to donate and participate in this project that is such a matter of human rights, of public health, and in some countries, as Tim says so clearly, a matter of life and death. Thanks again for listening. I look forward to welcoming you for my next episode of It’s About Language.
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