Writing in the Margins

A year ago this week I finished work on my book Writing Beyond Writing and sent it off to my art director, Alec Julien, for layout. Even then I knew it was the culmination of my life’s work, not only with the Endangered Alphabets Project but as a writer. What I didn’t know, like all authors, how it would be received.

What I would discover was a paradox: that it would be received with five stars on Amazon, and the most widely-published linguist in the world would hail it as visionary, unprecedented, unique, “much-needed” and “a game-changer”--yet I suspect that you, dear reader, have never heard of it.

Because my book examines writing in ways in which most people don't even suspect it can be examined--writing as art, writing as divination, writing as a manifestation of cultural identity, writing as magic, writing as spiritual practice--it is so far ahead of its curve nobody knows there's even a curve there.

During this week I’m going to be doing daily posts about WBW: excerpts from the text, examples of the remarkable original artwork, photographs, and comments from reviewers.

This may seem like rampant self-promotion, but I see it more as a crusade: the issues and ideas in the book are if anything even more urgent and important than they were last July, and every reading and exhibition I have done since the book appeared in physical form have reinforced the sense that a fascinating and vital subject is right under everyone’s noses, unnoticed, waiting to be discovered.

Part 2: Why do we have such a blind spot when it comes to writing?

It took me more than a decade of work on the Endangered Alphabets Project to realize that those who, like me, grew up in the privileged West, are actually the least qualified to understand writing.

One: we never had to learn another script, so we know almost nothing about the range of possibilities of writing. The Latin alphabet is used by more people than every other script combined. That has caused us to go around telling everyone else that the world would be a better place if we all used the same language, and the same alphabet. (This is known as the myth of the lingua franca, or the scripta franca.) It would be more convenient for us, but less so for everyone else, especially as English is a notoriously hard language to learn, partly because the Latin alphabet fits it so poorly. But the most toxic (or perhaps ignorant) part of this argument is that it assumes that ether (a) the Latin alphabet is just better than everyone else's, or (b) that writing is just a set of symbols, and you can just replace one set with another, no harm done. Ha! Please read on....

Two: research shows that if you ever learn only one script, you find it much harder to learn a second, let alone a third. Educated South Asians have no difficulty at all writing or reading four or more scripts. It's our own limited capacity that makes us advocate for a one-script world. Pretty much everyone else on the planet handles multiple scripts better than we do.

Three: we were given our script so long ago we've forgotten that it came as part of a military invasion and occupation. Ah, but the Romans gave us straight roads/aqueducts/baths, we say. Not to mention that the wisdom of the Ancient Greeks came via the Latin alphabet. Any nation or culture that was invaded more recently is more aware that the writing they learn in school is that of the people who overran them, in many instances with great brutality. Tibet is now part of China, so they should write Chinese? Ditto the Mongols in Inner Mongolia, right? Well, some Tibetans and many Mongols would dispute that. We are curiously blind to the importance of writing as an expression of a culture's history....

...which is strange when most of us (again, those in the privileged West) understand and often even support movements to revive minority spoken languages such as Catalan, Breton, Welsh, Manx, Basque, and so on. But we all use the Latin alphabet, so it doesn't even occur to us that there might be those who struggle to maintain their own scripts. Hence there are now courses and even degree programs in endangered spoken languages, but not a single class anywhere, as far as I know, in endangered scripts.

Above all, we have no especial allegiance to the Latin alphabet precisely because it is used so widely for so many mundane purposes. It's all we know, it's what we use. It is linguistic duct tape. So we have no idea what it means to a people, especially a marginalized people, to have their own unique script, a visible token that they exist, that they have a history, and a right to a place on this planet.

One of the central aims of Writing Beyond Writing, then, is simply to take the reader beyond the Latin alphabet and to show you something of the array of other remarkable written forms that are in use in the world today, in the hope that you might glimpse why they may be so important to those who developed them and made them their own. And that in turn may send you to my Atlas of Endangered Alphabets to discover the stories behind these scripts, stories that somehow nobody ever told you.

Writing Beyond Writing is for sale on Amazon, and also at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/, where in addition to the hardback and paperback editions you can also buy the digital edition, a popular option for those living outside the U.S.

Tim Brookes is the author of 20 books, all of them alas in the English language and the Latin alphabet, and the founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project.