The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets by Tim Brookes.
From the Kickstarter page:
Dear lovers of language, supporters of human rights, and Kickstarter allies past, present and future:
When I give exhibitions and talks on the Endangered Alphabets Project, everyone is fascinated. They want to know more about the scripts I carve, where they come from, the cultures that have created them and, above all, they ask, “How can we help?”
But here’s the problem: there’s no one source for such information. And when information remains scattered and hard to find, both the problems and the solutions seem vague, distant, over the horizon.
So I’m in the process of creating a free online Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, and I need your help. But first I need to explain why endangered alphabets are so important.
Every culture has its own spoken language, and many have their own written languages, too—languages they have developed to express their own beliefs, their own experiences, their understanding of their world. What they have collectively written in those languages is the record of their cultural identity: spiritual texts, historical documents, land deeds, letters between family members, poems.
In scores of countries, though, those minority languages are untaught, unofficial, suppressed, ignored, even illegal, and everything is transacted in the alphabets of the dominant cultures, even the conquerors. And when that happens, within two generations everything important enough to be written down becomes incomprehensible, and is lost.
Denying members of a minority culture the right to read, write and speak in their mother tongue defines them as inferior and unimportant, and leaves them vulnerable, marginalized, and open to abuse. The extent and quality of education go down, while levels of homelessness and incarceration, and even suicide go up—the kind of situation that has led to the endangerment or eradication of hundreds of Aboriginal languages in Australia and Native American languages in the U.S.
It’s my aim to help reverse that global loss, and the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets is my most ambitious and far-reaching effort in that direction.(You can hear me talking about the Atlas and the Endangered Alphabets Project, by the way, in a public radio interview HERE.)
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Although the US intelligence community is often stymied by mainstream languages such as Arabic, Chinese, Russian, AI-assisted language tools will eventually bring them an elementary understanding of texts in those languages.
Begin preparing for that unhappy day by supporting the The Atlas of Endangered Alphabets!
Using endangered alphabets puts you in a position similar to the Navaho code talkers in WWII. Your enemies know it is a communication, that it is in a language, but their knowledge ends at that point. No AI tools to assist them.
If you don’t find the reasons Brookes advances compelling enough to support this project, consider the potential to stymy world class intelligence operations as an additional one. Interested now?