Episode Transcript
[00:00:03] Speaker A: It's a fact that we all know a truth wherever we go. The sun in the afternoon will be setting very soon.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: Today we're having an amazing conversation. Our guest, Tim Brooks is the president of the Endangered Alphabets Project and also the author of An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets. We're looking to understand more about what an endangered Alphabet is and how we can protect them and if it's even necessary to protect them.
[00:00:45] Speaker A: Thank you so much for inviting me.
[00:00:47] Speaker B: It is fantastic to have you here. And you know, I listened to your conversation with Talker and I was really inspired to ask a few different questions. But first of all, congratulations. A new book. I actually was looking at Amazon and I want to get this book and I have a proposal for you right here. Anyone who is listening to this conversation today, I want you to send us a message of why you would want a copy of an atlas of endangered alphabets. A multilingual magazine is going to send it to you for free anywhere around the world. What do you think about that, Tim?
[00:01:28] Speaker A: I am staggered. I'm blown away. That's extremely generous of you. So those of you who are listening, send those messages in.
[00:01:36] Speaker B: Yes, we want as many messages as possible. Why? Why would you want a copy of an Atlas of Endangered Alphabets by Tim Brooks? And we will send it to you anywhere around the world, completely free from multilingual magazine. Tim, this is not the first time we have a conversation. This is the first time we have a recorded conversation and I'm very excited to have it.
[00:01:57] Speaker A: Me too. So far away with your tough questions.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: I don't think they are very tough questions. But last time we spoke, we probably spoke for over an hour. It was supposed to be a 30 minute catch up to get to know one another and then we ended up talking for over an hour. But Tim, why, why did you decide to. And of course you've been, you've been talking about endangerment like alphabets for a while. We know your work. For those that don't know, we'll probably get to talk a little bit more about that. But why did you decide to create this compilation of Atlas of an atlas or an atlas of endangered Alphabets?
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Yeah, so confusingly it's, it's the first book in a three book series, a trilogy, but it actually came out second.
So if we back up to say 2019.
I had been running the Endangered alphabets project at that point for about nine years and what I was doing was exploring, really. I was exploring the world to find all of these communities that had their own script that was endangered, threatened, virtually extinct for various reasons. And discovering why that was important, which we'll get into a second.
And so one of the things that I did was to actually start carving pieces of text in these remarkable scripts in wood, in beautiful pieces of wood. And then I would exhibit them and I would talk about them. And so I would go to a college or a university or a library, and I would explain why these were important to their communities and what was fascinating about them as scripts. And at the end of the talk, people would always say, this is amazing. I had never thought about this before. Where can I find more about this? And I would have to say, there is nowhere, there's no place where there is a central repository of information about alphabets and scripts and other forms of writing.
And I thought I had better create one. And so I created, first of all, an online Atlas with about 100 different minority scripts from around the world. And you can go there right now at endangeredalphabets, all1word.net. And there's a map and there's pins. You know, the usual Google fashion. You click on them and you find out the stories behind all these amazing alphabets.
And then I got contacted by a publisher in London saying, this is amazing. We want to do a book version of this. And I was like, good, let's do it. And then Covid hit.
And so in the meantime, I was working on my second book, which asks the question, having done these journeys to these amazing places and found these extraordinary alphabets and writing systems, what do they tell us about writing itself?
And that became my book, Writing Beyond Writing.
And as I published that myself, I managed to get ahead of the first book, which is coming out just now, as you say. So the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets is really the voyage outward, the one that says, this is what's happening around the world. Here is a script which is only used to write poetry for male children's circumcision rituals. Here is a script that is only used by women to write secret love letters. You know, these. These really amazing things.
And that's. I decided to organize it as an atlas because it really was and continues to be a global journey and a voyage of exploration and understanding.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: And that's fantastic. Thank you so much for telling us that backstory. So this is the first published second of a trilogy. So we go with the first an atlas of endangered alphabets, then the second one, Writing Beyond Writing. And what's the third one?
[00:06:38] Speaker A: The third one actually is starting to appear already in multilingual magazine.
So I got really interested in the fact that in many of these cultures where their script has been in some cases banned and people could be thrown in jail for using it, they are reviving their script by teaching calligraphy in that script. And I thought, this is really interesting because here we have these minority communities scattered around the world. They're. They're kind of besieged on all sides, and they are teaching calligraphy. And if you look at us, we are letting the art of handwriting just die and shifting more and more towards the digital realm and having bots that will write for us. And I thought, this is a fascinating situation, and it's really all about the future of writing. So the third book is going to be called Endangered Alphabets Calligraphy. But it really asks the question, what is the future of writing? And in particular, what is it about writing by hand that is so meaningful and so important?
[00:08:00] Speaker B: And it's very interesting how you put it right. So you're saying, first, we have an atlas, kind of like a map of what it is out there in terms of Alphabet, Then what is the meaning of having these writings? And then what's the future of finding? Why don't we focus a little bit then on the first book published? Second, the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets. For those of us that are going to read it, are going to have it, are, you know, our tabletops at our houses at different places. What are we going to find there?
[00:08:33] Speaker A: The first thing you're going to find is really the first thing that I found back in 2009, 2010, when I first started doing this research and I started carving some of these scripts, which is that there are an amazing range of forms of writing, many of them very strange to our eyes, many of them extraordinarily beautiful.
And immediately they raise all these fascinating questions. Why did this particular writing system wind up looking like this? And that turns it to be a great question because it has to do with history and trade and religion and even climate, believe it or not. So if there is a particular place, like say, the Philippines, where bamboo grows really, really well, people write on bamboo. If there is a place like Indonesia, where palm leaves grow really well, people write on palm leaves. And that shapes the letters themselves and the way people think about writing.
So the first thing people are going to see are these extraordinary symbols that are just really graphically powerful. You look at it and you kind of go, I don't know how to pronounce that. I don't know what that letter is, but it is. There's something about it that says, this has design, this has meaning, this has intent.
And then as they go through the atlas, we move through different regions of the world, and you also start realizing that writing has behaved differently in different regions and it is used differently in different cultures and our own. I think hopefully what the reader will go is, wow, I've been sitting here at home using the Latin Alphabet, the Arab Alphabet, the Cyrillic Alphabet, something very mainstream. But what's going on out there in the world not only looks different and behaves differently, but really means something very, very important to the people who use it, which is hard for us to understand because we only use one Alphabet.
[00:11:03] Speaker B: And, Tim, in terms of your experience, and you mentioned 2019, and which really got my attention, 2019, you start looking into these alphabets and you start carving. Meaning you had not. You did not have any experience in calligraphy of endangered alphabets previous 2019, or do you have any previous experience carving or doing calligraphy previous to 2019?
[00:11:29] Speaker A: So 2019 actually was when I started creating the online Atlas. It was 2009 when I started work on the. The Endangered Alphabets project. And no, I had no background. I mean, all of your listeners have more background in linguistics and languages than I did. And I also had no background in either calligraphy or woodwork.
So this is really all comes from my mother, who's a great believer that you can do anything in the world as long as you get a good book out of the library first.
[00:12:04] Speaker B: And I'm assuming we are all getting a really good book now in terms of alphabets and calligraphy. But, Tim, I have a question then, as you start carving. And you know, I would love to be a good writer. When I was at school, I really understood that it was really about practicing and really trying. And I remember some people being really, really good at their writing. For me, it wasn't really as easy as, you know, it came to other people. In your specific case, as you are carving these alphabets, what started happening to your brain? What was happening in terms of your understanding of the intricacies of these alphabets? And how difficult was it to really get a grasp of the curves and the lines and the dots and all the different elements that calligraphy actually has to make it work properly?
[00:13:01] Speaker A: Eddie, I have been waiting 10 years for someone to ask me that question.
You just become like interviewer number one.
The only problem is that to answer that properly is going to take you like, probably another book. But, yes, actually some of that stuff is going to turn up in the endangered Alphabet calligraphy book. So one of the first things I realized was that the very, very first script I carved is a script that was created by a missionary for Canadian first nations languages. And it's based very much on simple, strong, kind of geometrical shapes. So, in fact, one of the characters is, in fact, a triangle. And I thought, oh, this looks pretty easy. I'll start with this one. And what I discovered straight away was that if you think about a triangle or square or particularly a circle, to carve it, you have to do two circles, two concentric circles, both of them. Absolutely. Exactly. And the thickness or distance between those two lines has to be identical all the way around. And if you make the slightest mistake, it's immediately visible. And the only way you can fix it is by making the letter larger, which now means it's bigger than all the other letters by a fraction. And this was a struggle and a sweat. And it wasn't until I first started, actually almost more like a hobby, side branch carving stuff in Chinese, that I realized that the Chinese script is much more forgiving because it's not based on printing. So our.
I'm looking at your name on my screen, for example, and it's in, I think, Arial, maybe. And every letter is sort of geometrical and precise and upright, and it really demands a mechanical reproduction for it to look good. So with Chinese, because there is such a breadth of expression that's allowed, and because you're using a brush which has a breadth of different breadth of stroke, you know, as you. As it hits the paper or as it leaves the paper, it means you can be straight away much, much more expressive, and you can sort of take pleasure in those.
Those curves and those. Those beautiful kind of intersections.
And that was really the first time I started thinking, like, what is it about writing? How does writing wind up looking the way it does? How is writing an expression of the human body as opposed to a feature of design? What does it have to do with gravity? Because gravity actually affects the way everybody writes.
What does it have to do with the tools? We're talking about printing and a brush, but we could also be talking about a stylus or a pen. And all of these things have very, very rarely been considered as worth thinking about and studying. And as those tools are a feature of the culture that uses them, then the way every Alphabet looks is actually as much a cultural product of that community as its traditional dance or its artwork or its music.
[00:17:07] Speaker B: A very interesting way of looking at it, Tim. And of course, if you remember the first experiences doing carving versus calligraphy. Because the question that's popping up in my head right now is your understanding of each Alphabet and its calligraphy.
How is it affected when you look at it, if it was primarily done for writing on a paper or a papyrus, or if it was intended to be carved in a wood or if it was intended to be carved in stone? I don't know if it's, say, in English, carved in stone, but you know what I mean. Have you experienced all of those? Or which forms, rather, would be the right questions? Which forms of calligraphy of endangered alphabets have you experienced that have got you closer to these endangered alphabets we're talking about?
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah, that's really, really interesting.
So as we're talking on the. On my desk right next to me, I'm holding this up so that your. Your listeners can't see. It is a carving in Nushu, which was a script that was used exclusively by women in a small group of villages in southern China. And it's not clear whether it was actually forbidden for them to be able to write, but they certainly weren't taught to write, and it was not expected that they could write. And they were given no writing materials.
And so they had to create their own, which they. They created in kind of soot, for example. And they didn't have, you know, a nice, beautiful calligraphy brush. They had a sliver of bamboo, and they didn't have paper, which, of course, is very expensive. And so they would often write on available materials, such as, for example, a fan. And the great advantage of writing down the panel of a fan is that if someone came into the room and you didn't want them to see this, you could disclose the fan and no one would be the wiser. So what's really interesting in terms of your question about this is that the characters are loosely based on traditional Chinese characters. But the fact that they were using these vernacular materials that were what was available to them mean that there's a lot of strong, simple vertical strokes. And the characters, individual characters, as you know, most Chinese characters are very, very, very roughly kind of square.
So these characters are much taller and thinner. And in fact, the women from this particular community referred to it as mosquito writing because each character looks like a tall insect with long legs.
So when you look at this and you realize everything comes together, right? Their calligraphy practice, their materials, the restrictions on their movement, the restrictions on their education, and the fact that they were essentially creating a code, right? Because if someone can read something but somebody else can't, it's Kind of a code. So they were creating a code within their culture so that they could talk to each other about the things that mattered to them. And that's why it's so hard for us. And I said, by us, I mean people who, by and large, use the Latin Alphabet to understand why endangered alphabets are so important. Because ours is not only not endangered, the Latin Alphabet is used more than all the other scripts in the world combined. But it's actually the bully. It's actually the one that is driving other scripts into lesser and lesser usage. And so it's a power issue, really. We look at the Latin Alphabet and we see it everywhere. And so it never occurs to us that it is more than just, you know, like, it's a technology. People say, oh, writing, It's a technology. It isn't just a technology. It's an expression of a particular culture, unless it's used by so many cultures like the Latin Alphabet, that it no longer has that connection. So we have Catalans who say, I want to speak Catalan, and we understand that. We have Bretons who say, I want to speak Briton. We understand the importance of a minority spoken language to its community, but we just don't get the importance of a written language to its community. So there are quite a few cultures for whom calligraphy and poetry and singing and writing all come together and create a form that is unique to their culture and incredibly meaningful because this is who they are, this is about their life, and even this is. This is their philosophy. So I want to tell you about the Manyan people who live on Mindoro, one of the islands of the group we now call the Philippines.
And they have a tradition of writing poetry, sung poetry, called ambahan. And the ambahan are fascinating because they are engraved with the point of a knife in bamboo, and each line is seven syllables long. So when you look at it on the bamboo, each line has seven characters. So it has this beautiful kind of symmetry to it.
And the sung poetry is especially fascinating because it is really straightforward and simple, but very deep and very powerfully felt. And so I'm going to read you a couple of poems. They're very short. These are ambahan, and obviously I'm reading them in translation.
So it's very common for the men to have to travel away from the village, often being away for extended periods of time. And so this is an ambahan that would have been sung by a woman left behind.
So you will be going now, starting on a long journey where your sight will be enriched by the many lands you cross But I who will stay behind here within this small abode, what thoughts could I entertain?
Just looking up at the roof, just looking down at the floor.
That's devastating. Just so simple and so moving.
Another feature of Ambahan is that they tell stories about the natural world around them as metaphors for their own lives.
But they never say, this is a metaphor, this is a simile. It's as if they recognize that they and the world around them are all the same. They're all part of the same community, the natural world.
They're all part of the same community, the natural world. So this is a poem which is about a young man who has been turned down by the girl that he was fond of and sees her again later. And this is like his feelings when he sees her again, says the bee despondently, if the place was not burned down, I would have built my house there.
I just love that. And then I've got one last one which is about old age.
And again, it's very simple and very moving, almost like haiku, many of these.
It's a fact that we all know a truth wherever we go. The sun in the afternoon will be setting very soon. So those are Ambahan, and they are very much an endangered literary form. The Manyans themselves, their land rights have been violated. They are sort of being pushed further and further up into the mountains.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that I like to explore and to write about.
And this is the kind of territory that the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets takes us into.
And it's the kind of territory that I'm also exploring in this series of articles for Multilingual Magazine, which are coming out every two months right now.
[00:27:34] Speaker B: Yeah. And thank you. I think along the way we've understood this dynamic, Right. That alphabets become language enablers. They allow for the constructs to take place. And of course, we start getting into the calligraphy elements of it. And those points are so particular. Right. They feel so matter of fact, yet so poetic.
But they are extremely matter of fact. They are to the point, right. They're like profound, essential things. Like the one that you mentioned, like, if the place wouldn't have burned down, I would have been my house there.
[00:28:16] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:28:16] Speaker B: It talks to this soul seeking conversation. Right. And everyone who's had a heartbreak can relate to it, have been like, I would have built my house there for sure. But it didn't happen. Right. It's like it's. It's so matter of fact, yet so profound. So it almost feels like it leaves you with an echo. With like that drumming that they have. That, yes, leaves you with an echo. It's like, this is sad. And it's just like as is. Like whoever understands, understands, and whoever doesn't like it just wouldn't it just how you transmit that to future. To the future in the most simple manner. So that's very beautiful. And in this atlas of Endangered alphabets, of course, all these stories are ingrained from that experience you've had, right. You start carving, you start writing, you start learning about these stories, you start learning about these messages. What could surprise us in the atlas? Like, what commonalities have you seen that you'd say when you start seeing this in the atlas, you start realizing the effect that these alphabets have in our culture. What are some of those reverberating, I'd say, things and themes that you see across when you look at the atlas?
[00:29:37] Speaker A: Well, several, really. One is that so much of this issue of language or script endangerment used to be described, and still people think in these terms as like a natural phenomenon, you know, as if a language or a script, well, like a tree, well, you know, grows up, it dies. But in fact, in virtually every case, this is the result of one culture being overrun by another and in many other cases, overlapping. It's also about what happens when don't have an equal level of respect. So one of the things that I hope people come away from, away with, from this book, is just a sense that even though this may be a small community, in some cases only a few hundred people, in some cases only a few thousand, they deserve as much respect as anybody else, and they haven't been given it. And so much of what I try and do is to write and talk about each of these communities as A, an equal on an equal part, and B, as a people that have all kinds of fascinating qualities that are their own, that if we were smart, we would try and learn about and learn from for our own good, let alone as a means of respecting theirs.
And then I think the other thing is the extraordinary depth of feeling that each of these communities has for the visual icons that are their letters or their characters. So there are many cultures where the forms of the letters or the characters are maintained in the Mongolian state seal or in tourist trinkets or in sculptures, even though people can no longer read them. So more than just as a vehicle for spoken language, written language is as much an aspect of a culture's iconography as its flag or its coins or As I say, its traditional artwork. And so when we encounter people who say, wouldn't it be more convenient and everyone spoke the same language or used the Latin Alphabet, the answer is, yeah, it'd be much more convenient for us. But what you're asking is for all these minority people to give up the very things that give them a sense of their own identity, their own history, their own value, their own right to walk on this earth.
[00:32:43] Speaker B: Tim, thank you for sharing, of course, the path and the common elements that you've seen at the Atlas. If you were to also mention some of the really interesting cultures similar to the ones. And of course, we don't have to get into a lot of detail, but if you could kind of like give us one per continent, is there. Is there a way to do that?
[00:33:05] Speaker A: I'll give you a few off the top of my head. The Cham people used to have their own kingdom, which is more or less where the center of Vietnam now is. They got overrun by the king of Vietnam in the 19th century. Their script is so important to them that if somebody dies before they're able to read and write their script, the priest will sit next to the corpse and in the period between death and cremation, will teach the corpse its letters, because only then is the person ready to go on to the afterlife. You know, that's a level of kind of meaning and respect that we, you know, we can't even begin to guess at.
In North America, there are very few authentic traditional scripts because Native American and First nations people had other ways of communicating information. But you have to say that I want to name two people now. One is Sequoia, whom some of your listeners will have heard of, and the other is Xianglui Yang. So Sequoia and Xiong Lui Yang, who was among Southeast Asia, both of them created scripts for their people, even though they didn't know how to read and write. So, you know, obviously the term illiterate is a very pejorative term. They were very bright, skillful people in a variety of ways. They just hadn't sort of done that symbol to sound conversion thing. But both of them sort of taught themselves what writing and reading must be and then created symbols for their people to use. And in both cases, Sequoia with the Cherokee and Xiang Ruoyang with the Hmong, they became forces of enormous energy for their people. And that's what really shows why writing and having your own writing is important. It raises you to the status of those around you who write and who've been looking down on you up until now. And so when Sequoia created the Cherokee syllabary, it had a sort of a galvanizing effect on the cherokee, who achieved 90% literacy within a couple of years. It may be the fastest that any peoples have ever achieved that degree of literacy. And Shang Luoyang became such a figure, a messiah figure really, for the Hmong, that the Hmong sense of self respect grew and rose to such a level that they actually became a threat instead of just like a primitive nuisance to the governments in the area. And in fact, he was eventually assassinated because he had brought writing to his people and that had moved the Hmong out of this kind of despised minority into a culture with belief and with self belief and a sense of purpose.
And that really is just an incredible illustration of how important writing is in general. Yes. But also to a particular community who now have their own writing.
[00:37:10] Speaker B: Yeah. That's incredible what you start seeing in terms of what writing actually provides. It's interesting the whole conversation. Of course, for those that want to get the book, the book is available on all of the platforms where you would normally get books, is currently at $33 with the hardcover on Amazon and it's $15 on Kindle. So if you have the Kindle pass you, you can just add it. Right. And if you are a listener of multilingual and you tell us why you want this book, Tim Brooks, will. Will you sign it, Tim? Will you. Will you say thank you so much for listening to Localization today? Tim Brooks loves you. Would you write something like that, Tim?
[00:38:01] Speaker A: I don't know how I would actually get it into the book. But I tell you what, I will.
I will sign a bunch of nice little postcards of thanks and I will send them to you and then you can take them into the books that people can then use them as bookmarks.
[00:38:18] Speaker B: Great idea. If we can get some nice calligraphy paper, we can send you some paper. What's the best place to get calligraphy paper, Tim?
Where do you get. I imagine now that you are in the endangered alphabets, you have an appreciation for the original forms of writing. Some endangered alphabets. So what are the things that are used? Bamboo. What else do you write on? What else are these alphabets?
[00:38:43] Speaker A: So off the top of my head, we're talking clay, stone, papyrus, wood horns or ribs of water, buffalo, animal hides, metal, bark, palm leaves, bamboo, and human skin. So a number of tattoo traditions are really within the kind of the broad definition of writing traditions.
[00:39:19] Speaker B: Oh, that's incredible. I had not considered. When you said skin, human skin, that sounded so bad.
But thanks for clarifying. We've seen way too many movies lately, I guess. Yes, it's the thing. It's the thing. But, yeah, like I was saying, you can find it on Amazon, you can add it to your Kindle and you'll say that it says it's a global exploration of the many writing systems that are. In fact, I'm going to share this in case Mila wants to do something with it or Matteo wants to do something with it. Right. So we'll do that.
So if you go to your Amazon and if you have Amazon prime, you can add it right to your thing. And Atlas and Danger says a global exploration of the many writing systems that are on the verge of vanishing and the stories and cultures they carry with them. If something is important, we write it down. Yet 85% of the world's writing systems are on the verge of vanishing. Not granted official status, not taught in schools, discouraged and dismissed. When a culture is forced to abandon its traditional script, everything it has written for a hundred years, sacred text, poems, personal correspondence, legal documents, the collective experience, wisdom and identity of the people is lost. And you can read more about this. I think this would be a.
This would be a great debate, right, Because, Tim, I started the conversation a bit more provocatively, but I didn't engage later. So. But I have, I have, you know what I was thinking about, I'd say, and we talked about it off the mic. We were talking about the idea that, you know, inevitably some languages will disappear, but there are some languages that shouldn't disappear. If there is a strong cultural and geographical connection, it wouldn't be nice to lose the cultural nuances that can be gotten from this type of wisdom. Right? And we are just even scratching the surface when we look at these, at these alphabets. But how many endangered alphabets are there? And we are losing. What do you say? How many alphabets are we losing every year? It's kind of like the. When you say endangered species, right, you get a number of them that you will lose every year. I haven't checked what the numbers are on species we've lost. But what do you think is the rate for languages, alphabets, rather, Tim.
[00:41:58] Speaker A: So first of all, I have to go back and challenge your use of the word inevitably.
So the country that has lost most languages is Australia.
And if you were to say those languages were lost inevitably, then you would have to say that colonization and genocide are inevitable.
It's. It's a very dangerous word. To use there is it. I'm thinking about something that I say when I'm giving talks. I say, you know, if we say, you know, oh, if the spotted owl were to die out, it would be a shame. We're talking about it as if we own the world and the loss of the spotted owl to us is the only thing that matters to us, it might be a shame. To the spotted owl, it's a catastrophe. It's the worst thing that could possibly happen. So up until recently, there has been this unfortunate attitude in linguistics and in other areas that, yes, languages and scripts, they, you know, they are bound to die out. I say that's nonsense.
Invariably it's because of the exercise of power of one culture being more powerful than another. In answer to your question, though, there are about 300 scripts to some degree in use in the world today. It's impossible to know how many because nobody actually includes writing systems in a census.
Of those roughly 300, only about 30 to 35, I would say, are guaranteed to be in existence and kind of in good health over, say, the next 50 years. I'm guessing again, this is all kind of rough numbers and rough guesswork.
But if you look at the way in which our use of the Latin Alphabet as expanded over the globe and continues to expand, and the rate at which other scripts or other cultures use their own script less and less, and the Latin Alphabet more and more, you've got to say that actually relatively few, and I'm estimating 30 to 35 are actually safe in the long run.
[00:44:50] Speaker B: Oh, wow, 30, 35% or 30 to 35 of the 300 total. In total, also about like 10 to 15% is what you think will survive.
[00:45:01] Speaker A: Yeah, exactly.
[00:45:02] Speaker B: And because this is very interesting because there are two points there, and I agree with you, using the word inevitable, it's dangerous. I'm just trying to judge in what kind of like what they call. And I'm just reading this, right, the natural baseline rate. So there is, for example, for extinction of species, Right. It should be about looking at, like, fossil records. And I'm just reading. This is from Natural History, the Smithsonian. So we'll share this link as well. But it's related to what you're mentioning, right? It says for a species, right? Like animals is one species per 1 million species per year. So you are right. Like if we are to lose 90% of our languages in like, the span of like five years, that would just deny us the opportunity to learn, like, to, to expand like our understanding of the universe. That's just. It's just. It would be like an unnaturally, like, crazy curve. Right.
It's the situation that these languages are on based on biological deaths, or is it through, let's say, Westernization, which I've seen. I remember the first time I went to Parque tyrona almost like 20 to 25 years ago in Santa Marta, Colombia.
I would not see the indigenous people. I would not. Like. It was really hard to find them. The second time I went, like, 10 years later, they would be selling coconuts with a cell phone, and they would have a cell phone, and they would be dressed in traditional clothing. And then I don't know what the situation is right now, but I know it's crowded, meaning so many people have walked through there.
I am not sure if they had any type of writing. I know they had a language. Probably they have some writing. If they didn't, they immediately adopted the Latin to write their language, probably.
In which case, then we come back to that conversation, right, Tim? Like, is this.
Are they disappearing, I guess because of globalization and Westernization, or what are the main reasons why this is happening?
[00:47:26] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, it's sort of like habitat loss.
So one of the forces that creates reduction in numbers or extinction of species is the fact that we drain the swamps and we knock down the trees and we build things.
And that's human intervention. Right. That's not ancestral extinction in the fossil record. That's stuff that's happening right now.
So, yeah, the same kind of thing very much happens today.
For example, Indonesia is an extraordinarily rich country in languages and scripts, partly because as it's made up of so many islands, islands have that effect of creating these kind of little hermetic cultures of their own. When Indonesia achieved independence after World War II and became a country, as opposed to the Dutch East Indies, one of the first things the government did was to say, well, we need to communicate with the world. We need to trade with the world. We need to be respected by the world. Therefore, we are going to adopt the Latin Alphabet as the national Alphabet, even though there are at least 20 scripts in use around Indonesia. And so, of course, immediately, anybody who wants to get ahead in Indonesian society societies learns the Latin Alphabet so they can get the better jobs and be involved.
And the schools stop teaching the traditional alphabets, and they may still be speaking their traditional languages, but the official Alphabet that they're learning in schools is the Latin Alphabet. And so that means you wind up in a situation where I was communicating with a young woman in Java, and she has this wonderful. She's found this wonderful trove of letters from her grandfather who was actually involved in the Indonesian War of Independence, and she would love to read them, but they're written in traditional Javanese script and she can't read it.
[00:49:46] Speaker B: Okay, Tim, before we go, any final notes, comments, suggestions for those that are going to read your book?
[00:49:54] Speaker A: Yeah, I would love to hear from people. I would love to hear from people who agree with me, who disagree with me, who have questions about all of these cultures, who want to know about other things that I've written and the various video talks that I've done. I'd love to hear people ask questions about writing in general and the future of writing. I've done my best to put what I can in this book, but it's not everything that I have to offer and I would love that conversation to continue.
[00:50:29] Speaker B: Fantastic, Tim. And thank you so much for sharing the poems. Thank you so much for sharing your time and perspective. We've left a lot of questions on Asked, but that's really good. We'll probably have you back in the future to read more about your book, perhaps, and as well the articles that you're writing for Multilingual. So with us once again was Mr. Tim Brooks. And Tim is the president of the Endangered Alphabets Project and also the author of An Atlas of Endangered Alphabets. Tim, thank you so much for joining us today.
[00:51:06] Speaker A: Thank you for inviting me and thank you for asking such great questions.
[00:51:10] Speaker B: Fantastic.
My name is Eddie Arrieta. I'm the CEO of Multilingual Magazine, and this was Localization Today. Thank you so much for listening. Until the next time. Goodbye.
