Photo credit: Matt Thorsen
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Before I started the Endangered Alphabets project, I thought of myself as being multilingual: good
French, decent German, solid Latin, tourist Spanish and Italian,
toasts in Russian and obscenities in half a dozen languages.
Now, after seven years of carving the
world’s most obscure and endangered writing systems, it’s clear
what a novice I am. I just received a Facebook birthday card from a
colleague who wrote in a dozen languages, most of them endangered.
And my ethnocentricity has been challenged head-on by the fact that
in doing more than 100 carvings in more than 30 different minority
scripts I can now read precisely one word in a non-Latin script: the
Balinese word suksma,
meaning ‘thank you’.
The
Balinese word “suksma”
(‘thank you’).
Carved
in cherry
Photo
credit: Tom Way
|
Yet oddly enough my insular limitations
have also been a strength in this ongoing project, or at least have
offered me perspectives that might otherwise be hard to come by. My first exhibition of carvings, all of
which featured Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights in endangered writing systems, grew out of my stumbling upon
Omniglot, the online encyclopedia of writing
systems and languages. It was a revelation. I thought of myself as
fairly well-traveled and widely-read, yet I’d never heard of
probably 85% of the languages on Omniglot. And the texts themselves
were all Greek to me – well, more than Greek, given that in many
cases I couldn’t pronounce a single glyph or understand a single
word-cluster.
In a way, that was an advantage. I saw
those languages not in terms of the communication of meaning but as a
series of symbols that had evolved (or in some instances been
created) for a reason, or a series of reasons. My ignorance led me to
ask questions that might never occur to someone versed in that
language. Why was the Inuktitut script so mathematical? Why was
Baybayin so damn thin it was hard to carve and even harder to paint?
The
phrase “mother tongue” in Baybayin, the pre-colonial script of
the Philippines,
based
on calligraphy/graffiti by Kristian Kabuay.
Carved
in flame cherry
Photo
credit: Tom Way
|
Why were the letters of Samaritan off
balance? Why did Cherokee have serifs on curves – and come to think
of it, why did it have serifs at all?
And the more I looked at these
unfamiliar scripts, the more I realized we English-speakers never
stop and ask ourselves basic questions about our own language and alphabet.
Why were we so smitten with the Latin alphabet – to such an extent
that the default academic font was called Times New Roman? Why were
we so keen on parallels, right angels, circles, the Euclidean forms
that are in fact impossible to write freehand? What does English have
against diacritics,
when other languages embrace them to such an extent that some scripts
look like a large wet black dog shaking itself?
But the really interesting questions
were about language itself, and the way people instinctively think
about it. For example: it has been fascinating to me how often people
look at my Alphabet carvings and say, “That one looks like an alien script”.
I even though so myself when I first started. I’ve come to think of
this as the Stonehenge phenomenon: when people look at Stonehenge
they see pattern and therefore intent but they can’t
see meaning. That’s a powerful, magnetic phenomenon. They
can’t look away or stop wondering what it means and why it was
created.
I think an “alien” alphabet has the
same qualities: we can see it has shape and purpose and therefore
intent, but it’s so utterly unfamiliar we can’t understand it,
and we can’t even imagine understanding it. So we assume it must
not be of this Earth. More and more, I find myself thinking in such
galactic terms and seeing and hearing language as a series of
variations on the concept of pattern.
“Happy
New Year” in Mongolian calligraphy,
based
on the work of Sukhbaatar.
Carved
in pau amarillo
Photo
credit: Tom Way
|
Let me explain. When I’ve finished
carving and painting one of my scripts into, say, a piece of curly
maple and then I add the first coat of tung oil, an extraordinary
three-dimensional change takes place. The wood acquires both luster
and depth, as if rising and sinking at the same time. Faint shadows
become deep currents. Knots become cyclones. The grain ripens one
way, but in the same instant a different set of ripples will often
appear running perpendicular to it. The wood becomes anatomical,
muscular. And the black text seems to float both in and above it, as
if it is both part and not part of the wood.
The first time I really looked at this
transformation, it struck me that something fascinating was taking
place in terms of pattern. The grain in the wood and the ripples
running more or less perpendicular to it, looking like patterns in
wet sand, are expressions of the rhythms running through everything.
The verb “la” (‘to
be’) in Nom, the pre-colonial script of Vietnam.
Carved in quilted maple
Photo
credit: Tom Way
|
Trees have been on this planet for some
370 million years, and the patterns in the grain – well, they
illustrate forces that have been acting on matter since the dawn of
the universe.
Part of the human condition, though, is
to try to see the shape and drift of those forces. We’re
pattern-seeking creatures, after all. And what struck me about
languages, especially when carved in wood, is that they show our own
efforts to understand the world by creating patterns – patterns
that others can recognize and convert into speech, into ideas –
overlaid on the deeper, older, more complex patterns that have made
us what we are.
Tim Brookes is the founder of the Endangered Alphabets project, whose carvings have been exhibited all over North America including at Harvard, Yale, and the Smithsonian Institution. He is also the author of 16 books, details of which can be found at his homepage.
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