Writing Beyond Writing

Megan and Carrie talk with Tim Brookes about his newest book, Writing Beyond Writing, what writing is, his journey to caring about Endangered Alphabets and his favourite scripts.

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Chapters

• 8:19 Interview with Tim

Transcript

Megan Figueroa: Hi, and welcome to The Vocal Fries Podcast, the podcast about linguistic discrimination. 

Carrie Gillon: I'm Carrie Gillon.

Megan: And I'm Megan Figueroa. How's it going over there? 

Carrie: It's nice. It's a beautiful, sunny July day. It's full-on summer now. 

Megan: A sunny July day, that is not something that's true here.

Carrie: Sometimes, it's beautiful. It's just grossly hot. 

Megan: Yes, that's true. Yeah, I guess a day could be beautiful even if it's hot. 

Carrie: Yes. Anyway, so I was just Googling to see what interesting things are happening in language, and literally, actually using Google because of their Google News.

Megan: Yeah, the Google news, it's pretty good. 

Carrie: I don't use Google very much as a search engine anymore. 

Megan: Do you use DuckDuckGo?

Carrie: Yeah. Which is slightly better. But for the news piece, Google is so good. Who knows how much longer that's going to last? But for now, it's still good. Anyway, so IndigiNews has an article about a new album that's recorded entirely in Nuxalk, which is a Salish language spoken in Bella Coola, British Columbia. It's like on the coast of North, I don't know, a few hours north of Vancouver. To drive there, it takes 12 hours because you have to go inland quite away because the coast is so not... you can't drive.

Megan: 12 hours, wow. Not worth it driving it, is what I'm hearing. 

Carrie: Well, it depends. Apparently, it's quite beautiful there. I haven't been there, but... So, there's a 12 song album entirely in Nuxalk.

Megan: That is very cool.

Carrie: Yeah. It's called Nusximta, I think. I don't know. Someone who actually speaks Nuxalk could tell me how to pronounce that right.

Megan: I wonder if we had any new Nuxalk speakers and listeners. That would be cool. 

Carrie: It would be very cool and it's not entirely impossible. 

Megan: Yeah. It's not entirely impossible. 

Carrie: One of our friends is Nuxalk.

Megan: Oh, yeah. Okay.

Carrie: So, yeah, it's the ten-year anniversary of the radio station in Bella Coola, and there's a radio program called Nuxalk Radio. It's their ten-year anniversary. And there's, according to this, only four first language speakers left.

Megan: Oh, wow.

Carrie: Yeah. So, this is a way to help people learn. We all know that we remember lyrics better than we just remember random snippets of language.

Megan: Oh, okay. So, if you're learning a new language, this is true of it, too?

Carrie: That's part of the reason why we use songs to teach children.

Megan: Oh, okay. I didn't realize that.

Carrie: I will always remember the lyrics to Frere Jacques.

Megan: Yeah. Funny. Okay.

Carrie: There's probably, like, neuroscience behind that. I've never read up on it.

Megan: Yeah. I'm sure there are studies.

Carrie: For a long time, the radio station, they would play indigenous music, but there wasn't really that much Nuxalk because [inaudible].

Megan: There's like four first language speakers.

Carrie: True. But also, just how much music has been recorded in the past? Not that much. That would be broadcastable. So, they decided, "Hey, let's just create our own. Let's create some music." 

Megan: Wow. These are like, folk songs for them in a way, or are they new written songs?

Carrie: I don't think they're traditional songs. 

Megan: Traditional, that's the word I was looking for.

Carrie: I assume they'd have to be new.

Megan: I'm just curious about who wrote these songs.

Carrie: Yeah, me too. Me too. Whatever songs they used, they used a language coordinator and a fluent speaker to help translate the lyrics into Nuxalk. But it's not clear which songs they started out with.

Megan: So, they started out with English songs?

Carrie: I also don't even know that. I don't know what the language was, but probably English just based on context, but I don't actually know that.

Megan: Okay. So, it could have been songs that already existed.

Carrie: It sounds like that's the case, but I don't know.

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: And then the team who worked on it ranged in age from 8 to 67.

Megan: Oh, that's darling. I love it.

Carrie: I know. I love it. Oh, okay. There's slow ballads, upbeat tempos. They also have raven calls, thunder, breaking glass.

Megan: Oh. Breaking glass?

Carrie: Yeah. There's piano but also deer antlers. Like rattles, probably.

Megan: Okay.

Carrie: And hooves. Oh, sorry, I'm not sure what the antlers would be used for, but I think the hooves are used as rattles, cedar sticks and a log drum.

Megan: These are probably traditional ways of making music for them.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah.

Carrie: Oh, one of the songs was written by one of the children's mother. So maybe they are new songs. It's really unclear.

Megan: It could be a mix.

Carrie: Could be a mix.

Megan: Unclear.

Carrie: Yeah.

Megan: That's really, really neat.

Carrie: Cool. Yeah.

Megan: That's a good idea. They should have more of that happening. It's very clever.

Carrie: Yeah, I think this is something that a lot of communities are starting to do. And so much easier now too. Like recording music used to be very...

Megan: Oh, like a niche thing.

Carrie: ...very difficult. Yeah. It feels more approachable these days.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. The equipment is much cheaper. 

Carrie: Yeah. 

Megan: Very cool. I love hearing stories like that. Sometimes, we do not [inaudible] feeling stories, but this is a really good one.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly. This is a nice one. It's definitely a nice one.

Megan: Very cool. Should we remind people that we have a Patreon?

Carrie: Yeah, sure. We definitely should. We have a Patreon. It's www.patreon.com/vocalfriespod. We have stickers and bonus episodes and mugs. And you also separately have created some nice insufferable tweet[?] t-shirts.

Megan: Yes, I have on Redbubble and on our storefront. You can find that by searching Vocal Fries on there, too.

Carrie: Yeah. If you're feeling the need to say insufferable tweets across your chest.

Megan: Yeah. Or stickers. There are stickers too.

Carrie: Yes, there's definitely stickers. If you just feel like you want some stickers, there are definitely some stickers on our Redbubble account as well. So, yeah, that's good. Today's episode is a very interesting.

Megan: Very interesting. I learned everything because I knew nothing.

Carrie: I just realized just how, I guess, narrow my understanding of writing was.

Megan: Oh, yeah, absolutely. Me, too.

Carrie: I really wish that I had more artistic bones in my body, because I really feel like it would be such a cool thing to be a part of. It's what our guest is a part of.

Megan: Exactly. Absolutely. So, I hope you enjoy.

Carrie: Enjoy. Okay, so today. we're very excited to have Tim Brookes, who has an MA from Oxford University and who founded the Endangered Alphabets Project in 2009. He's also the author of the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, and most recently, Writing Beyond Writing, Lessons from Endangered Alphabets. He is recognized as the world's leading figure in script endangerment and revitalization. The Endangered Alphabets Project is a federal 501c3 nonprofit based in Vermont. Its mission is to preserve and revitalize endangered cultures by researching, cataloging, and promoting their indigenous writing systems and using them to create educational materials, games, and artwork. So welcome, welcome.

Tim Brookes: Thank you very much for inviting me.

Carrie: Yes, I'm so excited. I thought this was a lovely, lovely book. I really enjoyed reading it. So, our first question is, why did you want to write Writing Beyond Writing, Lessons from Endangered Alphabets and why now?

Tim: I think of the Endangered Alphabets and my work in it as the voyage out and the voyage back. I started the whole thing as, believe it or not, a wood carving project back in 2009, which was exhibited in 2010. While I was carving 13 pieces of text in different minority scripts, I got fascinated by the look of them. I had no background in linguistics or in anthropology, and so I wasn't really going, "Oh, that letter here reminds me of this particular script that's used in Krakatoa." Instead, I was asking questions that were really wood carver questions or graphic questions such as, why is it so much harder to carve this script than the other one? Why is this one so thin? Why is this one so geometrical? And so, without realizing it, I was already starting to look at the connection between a culture and its script. This is something which is very rarely considered. In fact, if a culture has its own script, it is as unique to and as expressive of that culture as their music, their dance, their traditional skills. 

So, that began the process of research, because as a writer, whenever I'm doing anything, I keep a journal specifically on that subject. I was just making notes and I was finding out about Cherokee. I went to Oklahoma and met the Cherokee Nation people, all this kind of stuff. And that was the voyage out. So, the voyage out was really looking all over the world to find examples of minority scripts and to learn what was fascinating about them, why they were endangered, why they were expressive of their particular culture of origin. About two and a half years ago, I did a carving which was actually one of the Adinkra symbols from Ghana. These are not phonetic symbols. These are ideographic symbols. In other words, they're symbols where they give information rather than replicating the sound of a word being spoken. And in particular, they give information that is traditional wisdom or is proverbial. I did one of these carvings. They're absolutely beautiful, and they've been used on fabrics and in furniture and stuff like that. I posted it on Facebook, as I tend to, and somebody who's a very well-known and respected linguist responded, "That's very nice, but it's not writing."

Carrie: Ooh.

Megan: Oh, no.

Tim: Personally, I felt kind of slapped across the face. In other words, why are you misbehaving? But then I felt that the culture of origin was also being slapped across the face. So, I started asking myself, "Uh-oh, this is what I get for not having a PhD in linguistics. I don't even really know what writing is. How does he say this is not writing? Where are the boundaries? What's the definition?" What I discovered was that smack bang in the heart of, in our definition of writing, and by our, I mean the Western world, Western Europe, North America, right in the heart of our definition is a kind of discrimination, right there. And what I found was that when the Europeans and subsequently the Americans, went off exploring and conquering and sending missionaries and all this kind of stuff, they encountered all kinds of methods of conveying information visually and manually all over the world. Their mentality, though, was twofold. One, if it is in any sense graphic or pictorial, it's childish. It's a sign of cultural intellectual immaturity. Because of course, in our Western culture, when we are children, we are allowed to draw, but after that, we're forced to write. Writing therefore becomes de facto a sign of maturity. 

But the other thing was, and this has to do with power. I mean, so much of this is about power. When you have European culture from, say, the 16th century onwards, sending out emissaries around the world, there is this underlying assumption we are better than whoever we encounter. We are superior, and we can show you that we are superior by shelling your port. If we are superior, then we must be superior in many ways, including the way in which we write. And actually, until remarkably recently, there was a train of thought that said the Latin alphabet or its preceding, the Greek alphabet was the thing that enabled human beings to think because it consisted of abstract symbols, and therefore, it made abstract thought possible. Of course, this was news to the Chinese, who were using a completely different system, that is not straightforward, phonetic, and abstract. And Confucius was writing philosophy when the ancient Britons were painting themselves blue with woad and trying to repel invaders. It was an entirely self-serving definition. If we are superior to you, our writing system must be superior to you, and therefore, your versions must be inferior, which shows that ours is superior. It's all about that process of feeling superior and having the power or the might to be able to enforce that.

Megan: Do you have a better definition of writing that you've come up with?

Tim: Oh, that's a great challenge. I don't. I really don't, but I have an analogy which is going to have to do for now. And of course, you see, by nature, I'm not a scholar, I'm an essayist. And so, I have the freedom to say, "Here's an idea," and I kind of throw it out there and let people play with it, rather than saying, "I've done the hard work and this is the answer." Okay, so here's what I say, when COVID hit, and I started doing Zoom video talks and stuff like that, I went to a friend of mine called Patricia Julian, who is a professor of composition at the University of Vermont. I said, "Could you compose some theme music?" This will be our ID, like the Doctor Who music, still used 60 years later or whatever. She said, "okay, so what kind of field do you want it to have?" And I said, "I kind of like it to have an island feel," because so many of, for example, the islands of Indonesia had their own traditional script, which is now highly endangered or not in use at all. And so, in my mind, when I'm thinking endangered alphabets, I'm thinking of islands, particularly because an endangered alphabet is almost always a symptom of an endangered culture. And so that business of isolation and islandness[?] is part of that. 

She came back with this wonderful, wonderful thing that you can hear on the Endangered Alphabets YouTube channel. There are some waves, and then there's some sounds that could be birds. Oh, I also said, "I kind of like the Javanese or Balinese gamelan orchestra type of music." And so there's some gentle gong type stuff going on. As I was writing 'Writing Beyond Writing', and I was asking myself exactly the same question you just asked, I thought about what is the definition of music? And I thought, in 1900, in the West, the most popular form of music was marches, military marches. And so you would have defined music as being, this is what the scale needs to be, these are the rhythms that are permissible, this is the instrumentation that we accept. And what has happened to music in the last 100, 120 years is that it's really become much more of a big tent. It started embracing world music. We've got different rhythms. We've got different instrumentation.  We've got different sounds, so sound effects, unless you count Tchaikovsky's 1812, sound effects, would not have been seen as being true music. 

Music has really expanded to embrace all of these qualities that can be brought together to produce something that is interesting, that is moving, that is dynamic, etc. And really, I'm on this campaign to do the same kind of thing for writing. There are various kinds of writing that are not phonetic but are nevertheless ways of conveying complex information very quickly and clearly. There are ways of writing that actually use tactile information. Quipu, actually, in the Andes use different fabrics to indicate different things. You've got this beautiful tactile thing, and then there are various forms of writing that are really part of what we would call performance. And so, in addition to something that looks like a letter or a word, you also have a narrative. You have movement. You may have music. You may have dance. It's a complex form that, again, we tend to look down on because our definition of writing is so narrow. 

I remember doing a poetry reading back when I used to write poetry, and I was teaching in the University of Vermont, and one of the senior faculty came up to me afterwards and said, "It's very hard to tell how good your poetry is because you read it so well." And I realized that was an insult. So, the whole notion of performance was seen as being a distraction from that hyper narrow, rigorous word on the page only. And yet, when Chaucer was performing The Canterbury Tales, he was doing it live. I'm sure he was doing the voices. He's doing the Wife of Bath's voice. He's doing the knight's voice, all this kind of stuff. And that has been lost and therefore, it's been cut out. Instead, we have a definition which is more mechanical, more academic, more unemotional, and we congratulate ourselves on having done that on the grounds that somehow, it's superior or more mature.

Carrie: It's so bizarre because so many people would claim that Shakespeare is the greatest writer in English language, and he wrote plays. Those were performed. The other thing that comes to mind as you were talking was about the Eastern Cham script. Is that how you say it?

Tim: Yes, Cham.

Carrie: And when you're drawing it in the air, it's actually, you said, "It's what Thai dancers are doing." And I just thought that was so lovely. Anyway, the writing doesn't have to just be one thing. 

Tim: No. In fact, I have this argument that we, in the West, are actually the least qualified to judge writing and the least able to understand it because our own writing has been entirely transformed and mechanized by printing more than any other script in the world. I was writing this thing yesterday about this very subject, and I looked around me downstairs in the kitchen, dining room area, and I made a list of all of the kinds of writing I could see where it was. There was writing on an air conditioner. There was writing on a box that had just arrived through the mail and all this kind of stuff. And the only writing I could see that had been done by hand was my dining table, because I had carved a mantra in Tibetan into the top of this round dining table. Everything else, when you looked at it, you say, "Oh, there's writing on that box," what you really mean is, there's printing on that box. And printing really gravitated us towards certain limitations and necessities of the industry. You're dealing with metal, so you've got the ability to have really crisp, clean lines. You can do right angles. You can do parallel lines. And those are things that with your hand, you can't do. 

As you know, in the book, I talk about the fact that I have people come up to the whiteboard or the blackboard or whatever and say, like, "Can you draw two parallel lines?" And they say, "Yeah, of course I can." Wham, wham! And they're not even straight, let alone parallel. It's so much a loss when we sever the connection between the human body, the human mind, the hand, the writing implement, and what we call writing, which is now printing. And then with digital writing, it's not even called writing anymore, it's called content. I'm a content creator. I'm a content producer. 

Megan: I never thought of that. But, yeah, I totally conflate writing and printing.

Tim: Yeah. And I had never thought about it either. In fact, I actually gave a Zoom talk in a series called "What is Writing?" And the first one was called Writing is Not Printing. Again, we were talking about this before the show started. This is like a black hole in the middle of conventional academic disciplines, because it touches on linguistics and anthropology and the history of communication and the history of ideas and the history of religion, all this kind of stuff. Smack in the middle is all this stuff about writing and the comment I get more often than any other one I give a talk is, "Huh, I never thought about that. It's right up under my nose, but I never thought about that."

Carrie: Yeah, I think you've discovered like a whole new academic field at the time when universities are shutting down departments.

Tim: Yes.

Carrie: How many scripts are currently in use around the world and how many are endangered?

Tim: Yeah, great question. The true answer is nobody will know because there are no censuses that I'm aware of that actually include a question about what script do you use. In addition to that, in much of the world, unlike Western Europe and the North America, people use multiple scripts. If you're an educated South Asian, every single day, you're likely to use 3 or 4 different scripts. So, that doesn't make sense. When I started this research and this work, and I started working from omniglot.com, at the time, I thought... And I have to give a shout out to Simon because he was the guy who started it and keeps it up because it's a one-man job and he's been doing amazing work ever since. At the time, I think there were only about 30 scripts in his A to Z index that you could call minority or endangered. 

Now, Omniglot has grown, but there's also a lot more beyond that. We reckon there are probably between 300 and 320 scripts in use in the world, and there are some that we have no idea if anyone is still using them, and we won't know unless we go to Ethiopia and go door to door. I mean, literally, you wouldn't know. There are some that are in this embryonic stage where somebody has just created one, but nobody else is using it yet. So, we've got to have a criterion there, and my criterion is, are you teaching it? Is anybody learning it? If we call it 300 for a round number, there are probably only 20 to 30 scripts that are safe. Because I was talking with a friend of mine who was Greek last week, and he said his kids write in Greeklish and they speak Greeklish. Greek is a major script with an incredible history. But given its position in Europe, the invitation to abandon traditional Greek script is powerful to overwhelming. And that's Greek.

Elsewhere in the world, you find scripts that are used by literally a handful of people, and it's hard to believe that they will survive. Although, and I'm sure you know this and you're going to ask me about this in a while, there's also this counter movement going on in terms of revitalization, which was not the case 15 years ago. Absolutely not.

Carrie: Yeah. Tell us about the revitalization movement.

Tim: There's just wonderful examples of this because they're all so passionate and they're all so human. Also, they also tend to come from the bottom up. So, a script is endangered from the top down when one government sends in an army basically. And you're talking about Cham, the kingdom of Champa was overrun by the Emperor of Vietnam. Bam. So, endangerment happens top down. Revitalization happens bottom up. I got an email message from a young guy called Al-Sadiq Sadiq, and he is one of the Zaghawa people. The Zaghawa live on the borders of Sudan and Chad. Very, very poor, very arid. The camel is extraordinarily important to them, as you would expect. So, about 60 years ago, a veterinarian created a script for the Zaghawa language based on the branding marks used on camels. You've seen brands in the West, right? So, typically, you have a branding iron, which is a rod that is then bent into some configuration at the end. Therefore, every aspect of the letter is exactly the same width. It has to be contiguous. 

For listeners, what I'm doing is, I have my finger raised here and I'm doing like a wobbly W, like a the end of a potato masher. Because if you're going to brand with a branding iron, that defines the shape of the letters. And so that's what the script looked like. Then subsequently, it was updated somewhat, but it wasn't available in any kind of digitized form. Instead, if they wanted to communicate with each other, they had to go through Arabic. Now, the Zaghawa are not an Arabic people. They are one of many people across North Africa who were subjugated by the Arabs starting a thousand plus years ago. And so, they had to go through the script of the Conqueror in order to communicate with each other. And he was crowdfunding a campaign to raise the money to digitize the script, which is called Berea. I publicized it and I did a carving in Berea, and I showed it to the people, and he raised the money. The script is now in the process of going through the Unicode. 

Carrie: Oh, wow.

Megan: Oh, wow.

Tim: There are things like that happening in Bali. The governor of Bali has actually set aside a whole series of provisions for revitalizing the traditional Balinese language and literature, because what he realizes is if you revitalize the language but people can't read anything that was written 50 years ago or more, then your entire literature is lost. When Indonesia attained independence after World War II, 17,000 islands, what are you going to do? Six major religions, all these different languages and scripts. And so they said, "Okay, we're going to have one official language," which essentially was Malay, "And we're going to have one official script," which is the Latin alphabet. And immediately, in the schools, people stop teaching their traditional scripts, and they started teaching the Latin alphabet. But now, in Bali, they're making conscious efforts to turn that around. They have festivals. They have this wonderful tradition there, of doing essentially like poetry slams, where the entire village will get together, and people will recite either their own poetry or often traditional poetry. It is alive in a way that we cannot conceive writing being alive.

Carrie: Oh, that is amazing. It's so beautiful.

Megan: It's beautiful.

Tim: And it's writing beyond writing.

Carrie: Yes, exactly.

Megan: I mean, the idea of writing being alive, it's... Yeah, I got goosebumps.

Tim: Excellent.

Carrie: This remind me, I thought one course, a Conlang course. So, all the students had to create their own language. And one of the pieces was, they also had to create some kind of writing system. The creativity there was through the roof, like one of my students came up with his whole people were these androids, the sole remaining, human-like creatures. His writing system was based on, like, electrical signals. 

Tim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Carrie: Anyway, the branding iron just reminded me of that. That's so cool.

Megan: And that goes back to the idea that writing is related to culture, right?

Tim: You just took the words out of my mouth. That's exactly right. Because again, in the privileged West, we understand that the relationship between spoken language and culture. And so, when the Britons or the Catalans, for example, or the Welsh, say, "Wait a second, we're not English, we're Welsh, it makes sense to us." But because everybody uses the Latin alphabet, we don't have a sense of how much the script might mean to people who have their own script. In fact, I wrote this Monty Python-like sketch just recently because it suddenly struck me as being so bizarre that the Romans overran all of Western Europe. And instead of feeling indignant or angry or resentful, we're kind of like, "See that Roman road? That's as straight as they come. Don't make roads like that anymore." And I thought, boy, this is like Stockholm syndrome, only, it's sort of worse. In fact, that's what the Chinese are doing in Tibet, for example.

Carrie: And Africa..

Tim: There are various places in Africa where it's happening and of course, Inner Mongolia, where the Mongols, there's essentially a campaign of cultural genocide to not only erase Mongolian language and script, but also to rewrite history so that nobody knows that way back when, the Mongols actually overran the Chinese. There was this extraordinary thing that happened in 2020. It actually made me invent a board game that turned out to be quite successful, called ULUS: Legends of the Nomads, which was all about Mongol culture. But while I was working on that, there was an exhibition planned in France, in Rennes, I think, and the exhibition was of Genghis Khan and the Mongols. Of course, much of the funding was coming from the Chinese government, and they insisted that the exhibition not mention the Mongol conquest of China and not mention the name Genghis Khan. And the French, bless them, said, "We're going to postpone this exhibition indefinitely."

Carrie: Yeah, those are ridiculous requests. I'm sorry, it's way too late to erase that, that history, at least in my opinion. 

Tim: But no, it's happening right now. It is absolutely happening right now.

Carrie: Yeah, they're definitely trying. I mean, maybe there, it's working.

Tim: Yes, exactly.

Carrie: But outside, no. So, you've kind of implicitly said this, but why does it matter that scripts are being lost?

Tim: It matters in several ways. One of the things that you have to understand is what the attitude of the privileged culture is towards loss. For example, we have this interesting attitude towards species loss. The dodo is now the kind of paradigm of stupidity because on the island of Mauritius, they were too stupid to run away. So, what that does, of course, is to remove any responsibility from us for having done this. Straight away, you have to look at yourself. So, right around here, there's a whole lot of deer. If somebody runs into a deer, then it's the deer's fault. What's the deer doing on the road, kind of thing. So, that's the first thing, is any time we're talking about loss or extinction, you need to bear in mind that we are going to whitewash our own part in that. 

Second thing is, again, if you look at species extinction and you say, "Oh, the spotted owl, there's only seven spotted owls left. It would be a shame if the spotted owl were to go." And you kind of go, "It would be a shame to you. To the spotted owl, it would be a catastrophe. It would be the worst thing that could possibly happen." So, we're also used to judging loss by its effect on us, rather than understanding what it means to those that are threatened. The next part of it is this business of the relationship between writing and culture. There are lots of people, and in my mind, I have this 19th century Englishman or this 20th century American businessman saying, "Oh, why can't they all speak English? Wouldn't it be much more convenient? It'd be better for business. It'd be better for them if everyone spoke the same language." And of course, it would certainly be more convenient for the colonial Englishman or the American businessman, but it would be much less convenient for the people who they're working with. 

Finally, we get to the notion that if we feel we are superior to somebody else, then to eradicate their language or their script or their customs or whatever is actually a good thing because we're doing them a favor. Again, this is like the Romans giving the Britons straight roads and aqueducts and stuff like that. It's like, "Oh, yeah, they overran us, and they used our captives' heads for kicking around their camps, and that's how football was invented. But they gave us straight roads." So, when you see it from the other point of view, you realize that the situation is almost inexpressibly different, and I didn't really understand this until 2012, when I went to Bangladesh. I was doing some public health work, and I met some people from some of the minority cultures in Bangladesh who had not only been refused the opportunity to learn their own language in school because there was, now, a national language they had to learn. All their own script, but their land was being taken away and given to majority settlers, very much like the settlements in Israel and Palestine.

I met this one guy who was from the Chakma people. The Chakma are very established minority who were so highly regarded by the British during the British Raj in India, that they allowed the Chakma to essentially run their own business, to have their own legislature, to have their own courts, to have their own self-governance. But when Bangladesh became independent, the Chakma, like many others, were defined as being not Bangladesh citizens because they didn't speak Bangla or Bengali, the official language. Anyway, this guy was telling me, and this guy is now a fairly prosperous middle-aged guy, living in Dhaka, the capital. When he was a boy, he was living in a village in the Chittagong Hill Tracts, which is in the southeastern part of the country, and these are small villages in wooded and farmed areas. He said his father was the greatest living Chakma writer. He was the Shakespeare of the Chakma people. His father had collected an unparalleled collection of Chakma writings, some of which had been published actually during British occupation. 

I actually saw a phrase book, a book of proverbs in English and in Chakma that had been printed in the mid 19th century or late 19th century. And so, his father had collected all of these materials. This guy said to me, "The army came into our village twice. The second time, they killed my father and burned the house down." And he grew up never seeing the Chakma script and the family, they spoke Chakma, but at school, he had to learn Bengali. Now, he's in the capital, he's doing well, but he cannot read or write Chakma, his own language. So, at a stroke, his connection to his family and his connection to his historical culture was erased. When that happens, essentially, you become somebody else's poor cousin, because it's exactly like prejudice towards, say, for example, Mexicans in the southern US States, let's say post Second World War. even if the person you're meeting is educated and speaks English well, then you're still going to recognize a trace of an accent. You're still going to say, "Ah, yes, this person looks Mexican." 

There's no way that bridge of cultural superiority is ever really going to be crossed, and people are killing themselves in trying to cross, or else, the alternative, and this is really kind of shocking, it's possibly the most shocking thing I've heard in all the time working on the alphabets. I was giving a talk about literacy campaigns and how they're really a double-edged sword because what they often do is to replace an indigenous language or an indigenous script with a more regional script or global script. And at the back of the room, this is a talk I was giving in a military academy, which by and large went down very well, but at the back of the room, this guy speaks up and he says, 'You want them to spend the rest of their lives in the mud?"

Carrie: Wow.

Tim: Yes. And again, that's the attitude, we're doing them a favor by taking away their culture, their history, giving them the possibility of opportunity at the fringes of our superior culture.

Carrie: You know what this reminds me of, this kind of rhetoric? It reminds me of the episode we had with Amanda Montell about her cults book, the thought-terminating clichés, just like, "Oh, we're saving them. We're helping them. We're saving them from the mud." Just like the thought-terminating cliché.

Megan: Very cult-like.

Carrie: It is. We're all part of a cult. And of course, I kind of knew that, but this pulls this out for me. Wow. It's kind of scary.

Tim: Yeah. And unbelievably, deeply ingrained.

Carrie: For sure.

Megan: Yes, definitely.

Carrie: Yeah. Like we're so heavily propagandized.

Tim: And obviously, in Canada you've been facing and trying to deal with this in a number of ways, in terms of the residential schools, in terms of language rights, all that kind of thing. I have to say, the fact that this is proving to be so difficult is actually a sign that someone's trying to do something about it, because when there is no such conflict and you don't have protests, etc., it's really a sign that nobody can really see there's a problem, or the people that are suffering the problem are not given a voice, or they've come to the point where they're saying, "Well..." For example, I interviewed the guy who created the Osage script in Oklahoma, and right at the end of the 20th century, his own father said to him, "Don't bother trying to learn Osage. It's a dying language. It's a waste of time." So, he actually created a script for Osage, in part to keep the spoken language alive. 

Carrie: That's so cool.

Megan: It is really cool. We just think about revitalization when it comes to spoken language so much, but now, you've opened my eyes to the written part. It's just not what I've thought about before.

Tim: Yes, and the reason why, you can see this, but your listeners can't, I'm appearing before you in such threadbare rags is because since the birth of the awareness of endangered languages, which really dates back to 1992, and the growing awareness of the need to document them, the need to teach them, the need to revitalize them, you actually have a certain amount of grant money or foundation money that is there for that kind of work. Since I started work on the Endangered Alphabets, I have constantly been looking for sources of funding for script revitalization or even script research, and there is none. It is just not in people's consciousness yet. The Endangered Alphabet survives entirely on individual donations and the sales of books and carvings and whatnot, hence threadbare rags.

Carrie: Yeah. I mean, even when there is grant money, you're spending a lot of time just going after that money.

Tim: Absolutely.

Carrie: It's exhausting. But, yes, the fact that there isn't anything is quite shocking, although not really, because we don't think about it that much. 

Tim: Exactly.

Megan: Hopefully there's a tide shift soon, especially with your book and more growing awareness.

Tim: Interestingly enough, the tide shift is happening, but it's happening elsewhere. South Asians are much more aware of this than we are because when India was redefined after partition, obviously there were many things about that that were catastrophic, but the basis of geopolitical determinacy was language. And so, that meant that you have statehood and funding given to regional languages, which of course, in Europe, you would enter a lot of trouble. I think of Gerard Piqué being booed when Barcelona were playing or when he was playing for Spain because he was pro-Catalan. But in India, there are more languages every time anyone goes out to Catalan, but there are well over a thousand. And so, this issue of, what rights am I entitled to because of my identity, what respect is my people are my people. What respect do my people deserve? [inaudible] my people. Because we have a cultural tradition going back a thousand years, and that's a very heated debate in India at the moment. But the fact that there's a heated debate at all, again, is a good sign.

Carrie: Yes.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely.

Carrie: I'm a little bit worried about what's going on in India politically, but it's cool that this is happening because I do think it's a good conversation to have, for sure. 

Tim: Right. In fact, you're absolutely right, there is a right wing, all India movement, which basically says, "Hindi should be the national language and Devanagari should be the national script." Interestingly enough, Gandhi advocated for that, but he advocated it as a means of unifying India against the British. This is obviously a very different situation.

Carrie: Yes, very different. Yeah, Hindu nationalism scares me. So, on a lighter topic, do you have a favorite script?

Tim: Gosh, I have many different kinds of favorite. I have favorite stories. I have favorite ones to carve. I'm very fortunate to have a great connection with one of the top calligraphers in Mongolia, and I love carving Mongolian script. Again, I'm going to, with my hand in the air, imagine this, listeners, it's a vertical script, and so it runs downwards like this. And because it's a brush [inaudible] script, you can see what I call the drama of the act of writing. You can see where the brush hits, the paper or the silk or whatever, and then where it lifts. It's extraordinarily graceful, but also very dynamic. The other thing about Mongolian, which I think is unique, is that for each letter, there are three different forms depending on whether it is the first letter in the word, whether it occurs somewhere in the middle of the word, or whether it's the last letter in the word. These are called initial, medial, final. 

The initial form is kind of like a fanfare, if you can imagine, like an Elizabethan courtier taking off his hat and doing the kind of the bow and the flourish with the hat, with the feather in it. Many of the initial forms of letters have that kind of graceful swoosh, and then it dives into the rest of the word. The medial form is often very, very simple. It's like a little spike going out one side or the other, or a little loop. Then the final form often has this kind of whoosh. Again, you can't see what I'm doing in my hand here, but it's like kind of going around and down. And as a result, it means that every single word has this kind of announcement at the beginning, and then this kind of functional bada bada bada in the middle, and then this beautiful kind of sign off at the end. The script itself is inherently calligraphic. It recognizes that the act of writing is part of the act of conveying meaning through writing.

Carrie: Oh, that is so beautiful.

Megan: That is. Absolutely. Well, I guess we have time for one more question. What does writing tell us about who we are?

Tim: Oh, gosh. I mean, it depends how you're writing. A number of years ago, my best friend from high school sent me an email, and his email address was one that could have been anybody. It was a made-up thing. He said, "I want to see if you can guess who I am." And it was extraordinarily compulsive and creepy because I didn't know if it was a he or a she, I didn't know their motivation. I didn't know why they were doing this or what they wanted for me. They would only reveal bits of information here and there And that is, like, writing without writing, if you like. That's what happens if you entirely digitize writing and remove it from the writer. What writing says about ourselves if we write by hand, first of all, it tells something about the culture. 

If you go to France, or actually, even Montreal, and you go to a green grocers, and you look at the signs that are in among the fruits and veg, that could only be French. There is the two[?] and then there's the [inaudible], there's a cultural component, as there is to German and etc., etc. It tells us something about our education. It tells us something about our mood and our level of energy. If we are a little frantic, our writing is really just kind of uneven and broken and less legible. On the other hand, it can absolutely tell us if we are somewhat anal retentive, if everything is perfectly written, like this. And the word autograph means self-portrait. One of the things that I'm constantly asking myself is, how would I teach writing now if I were in charge of a school district? I know how I wouldn't do it, which is to say, "This is important and you're going to need to know how to do this when you grow up," because that's how most kids are taught most things. And instead, I think I might teach it in art class and give kids a whole variety of media, like chalk, a can of spray paint, a big thick marker, and a quill, a feather, and say, "Play around with this until it feels comfortable in your hand." 

A guy who runs the best typography program in the world said to me, "Kids come to us, they don't know how to doodle anymore because everything is done with their thumbs, on their device." We have to teach them how to doodle in order to get a sense of where that manual manifestation of all of those muscles and all of those bones in the arm, where that comes from and how it plays out upon the page.

Carrie: That is so shocking. I just still doodle to this day. It's so shocking that kids are not doodling.

Megan: Yeah, it's good for the brain, too, for thinking. 

Tim: Yeah.

Megan: Yeah, absolutely. Well, this has been fantastic. You've really expanded my mind when it comes to writing. Yeah, absolutely. We really appreciate you being here with us today. Thank you.

Tim: This has been so much fun.

Carrie: Oh, good.

Megan: It's been so fun.

Tim: Yeah. Also, I'm really glad that you've given the show this much time, because one thing I've discovered is that you cannot explain endangered alphabets in less than 15 minutes.

Carrie: Right.

Megan: Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Tim: Or especially why it's important.

Carrie: Yeah, exactly. 100%. Well, we always leave our listeners with one final message.

Megan: Don't be an asshole. 

Carrie: Don't be an asshole. The Vocal Fries podcast is produced by me, Carrie Gillon. Theme music by Nick Granum. You can find us on Tumblr, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram @vocalfriespod. You can email us at vocalfriespod@gmail.com and our website is vocalfriespod.com.

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