https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/writing-beyond-writing/

Erik Shonstrom: Writing Beyond Writing is such a mind-blowing book. You took the most banal thing in the world, the letters that we look at every day, and you do this deep dive into this world. Paragraph after paragraph I was like, “Wow, I’ve never even thought of that.”

What can a script tell us about the people who use it, and how does that script potentially reflect cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: A script is the product and manifestation of its culture, and it embodies and displays the aesthetics, the values, the history and the beliefs, the materials, the tools, even the climate, that have shaped it. You can never sensibly discuss a script without its human context, just as you can never remove a script from its people without incalculable loss.   Let me give you an example. The Beria script was created by the Zaghawa people, who live in Chad and Western Sudan. It’s an extraordinarily arid area, and consequently, their cultural symbiosis with the camel is profound. Not only is the camel a beast of burden, or a form of transportation, but they also do camel racing, and they have camel beauty contests…. In order to denote ownership of camels, as in the American West, they brand them with a branding iron.

In the 1950s a school teacher created a script for the Zaghawa language, which became known as Beria Branding Script because he used symbols that were similar to the branding marks on the necks of the camels. Subsequently, that script was revised by, of course, a vet. Talk about indigenously appropriate technologies! You have not only a technology, the branding iron, that is already in place and a substrate, namely the camel’s poor neck, which is already in place, but you also have a symbol system which is familiar and unique to the people.

That notion of a script that is unique to us, that whose appearance is familiar to us, and which arises out of our own daily lives, our daily perceptions, the landscape literally that we see, that is extraordinarily profound.   To simply see a script as a phonetic system of abstract symbols and say, “Okay, here is a symbol–what sound does it represent?” massively underestimates the importance of the visual iconography of a script and its meaning to the people–which in this case not only fits in with their language, but their geography, their history, even their climate. And as such, it’s a linguistic-anthropological-graphic-semantic confluence.

Erik Shonstrom: One of the parts of Writing Beyond Writing that really blew my mind is how many different groups have devised scripts for their languages. Why would that be a powerful way to either retain or enhance cultural identity?

Tim Brookes: Yes, our research shows that half of all scripts currently in use were created rather than inherited. Half. Yet indigenously-created scripts are often looked down on in academia. They are described as “artificial” or “secondary,” and it’s taken as a sign of their failure that many newly-created scripts don’t survive their creator.

This attitude is both condescending and unfair, because so much inertia works against a newly created script. Often, the script is being created by a minority or an ethnic group the government doesn’t like, so they see the script as potentially dangerous, as a kind of iconic self-presentation that gives the minority group more of a sense of dignity, more of a sense of identity or coherence.

We know of at least four people who have been executed for creating a script for their people.

There are linguistic reasons for creating one’s own script—because the established colonial or missionary script, for example, doesn’t adequately represent all the sounds of the language–but more often it has to do with power. If a culture has been overrun or dominated by another culture that has imposed its own script, sooner or later, people start saying, “Enough.” That’s especially true in the last 20 to 30 years when it’s become increasingly possible to use digital tools to create a workable script, and even to digitize it and then start printing or texting in it.

Erik Shonstrom: Is the internet good or bad for endangered alphabets?

Tim Brookes: It cuts both ways. If you go to the very core of computing, namely the writing of code, virtually all of that is in the Latin alphabet.   On the other hand the Internet has given access and functionality to people who otherwise wouldn’t be able to get in touch with each other at all.  

There’s a very active world Mongol association, for example, and the fact that they can use their script to represent their language and talk to each other is, I would imagine, extraordinarily powerful and reassuring.  

I know of Facebook groups and WhatsApp groups that are teaching either traditional scripts or, more commonly, new scripts, and in some instances creating YouTube videos as well.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.  

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes.   What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens.   As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.

Erik Shonstrom: Something I found fascinating about Writing Beyond Writing was that there is a difference between the printed alphabet and the handwritten one. What, for example, does a Chinese character demonstrate for us about the way in which a handwritten alphabet differs from the printed or computer-generated word?

Tim Brookes: When I started carving, I found that the very scripts I thought would be easiest to carve, namely the ones that are most geometrical, such as the Latin alphabet, were actually the hardest because the discipline required—exact symmetries, exact parallels, exact right-angles–is literally superhuman. These are letters that were created mechanically, not by hand.

As soon as I started carving Chinese characters, I had far more freedom for expression. When you’re carving a brushstroke you can make it a little thinner, or a little thicker, and in fact, because Chinese has always valued calligraphy, they’re used to people varying their brushstrokes.   What’s more, in a brush-written script such as Chinese you can actually see the drama of the act of writing. You can see the initial attack, where the brush meets the page, because the initial contact is that much more rounded and rich. And where you have a double stroke that goes, for example, to the right and then down, it has this really distinctive elbow where the brush re-engages with the page at the point of turning.

I had never thought of writing as having that dramatic quality, or even of being a human action. As a writer, like you, I had thought of it in terms of “What can I do with these letters? How can I make people laugh, how can I make people think?” I thought of letters as pre-existing products, as givens.   As soon as I started seeing writing as a human act, a manual art, I realized that writing is a way by which I take something of myself and create, with my hands, something I can offer you.

In this sense, writing is a gift–not in the sense of being a talent, but in the sense of being a spiritual transaction from my spirit to yours. The Bible talks about the Word made flesh; writing is the Word made ink, if you like, or the Word made paint. And when someone reads it, it affects them. This is how the Mandaeans see writing—as a spiritual medium, a vehicle for passing on enlightenment.  

Erik Schonstrom: In the closing chapter you talk in depth about pencils. I loved your insight that the way in which you use a pencil reenacts the way in which thinking happens. Thinking is iterative, just like sketching something out with a pencil, which I found totally fascinating and made me immediately want to sit down and write in pencil again.

Tim Brookes: Yes. The pencil is also perfect for the muscular coordination that is involved in the act of writing. We talk about handwriting, but writing involves shoulder, elbow, wrist, hand, finger—and as each joint and muscle affects the final product, it means that the pencil is extraordinarily sensitive to our bodies as well as our minds. Not only does handwriting very from one person to another, it even reflects our mood and our level of energy. In fact, the word autograph, if you take it to its roots, means self-portrait: this is the way we display who we are.

Erik Schonstrom: The idea of the evolution of scripts still seems to be common within the world of communication. You spend quite a bit of time soundly thrashing that inherently colonialist notion that the Latin alphabet is a more evolved means of writing.

Tim Brookes: It’s seductive, because the people who make that argument are actually praising themselves. If I say the Latin script has evolved from other, more “primitive” scripts, it means that I’m more evolved. And by the way, the same argument was made to assert that the Chinese script is primitive, even though Confucius was writing philosophy while the Ancient Britons were still painting themselves blue with woad.

Writing does change and evolve in certain ways. When the Bugis people of Southeast Asia went to the islands we now call the Philippines, they exported their writing. But the two locations used different local materials. So writing that had been on palm leaves and whose letters had very distinctive shapes so as to avoid angular strokes that would damage the leaf, now took on different curly letterforms because they were being incised with a point of a knife in a hard bamboo tube.

That’s very different from a culture saying, “Wow, the Latin alphabet is much more sophisticated than our syllabary or abugida. Let’s use that instead.” The occasions when one script was replaced wholesale by another are almost always because of power. The Mongols did not choose to write with the Cyrillic alphabet rather than with their own script because it was a better alphabet. They chose it because the Russians had tanks pointing in their direction. What we call evolution, because it suits us to see it that way, is more often a form of cultural genocide.

Everybody knows the phrase “History is written by the winners.” I extend it say “History is written by the winners in the alphabet of the winners.” The only reason why the Latin alphabet is so dominant–it’s now used by more people than all the other writing systems in the world put together–is because at various critical junctures, the Latin alphabet had more lawyers, guns, and money than somebody else.

Erik Schonstrom: Throughout the book, I got this sense of a dichotomy between the ease and efficiency of printed or digital writing as opposed to the greater difficulty but greater expressiveness of handwriting. When we celebrate and support these endangered alphabets, what we’re really celebrating and supporting is this expressive view of writing.

Tim Brookes: All of that crystallizes in the debate about ChatGPT and AI-generated text. If you regard writing as a commodity or an industrial product, something that you have to get done, then you’re defining writing as a chore. As soon as you define writing as a chore, then you look for ways to reduce that labor or give it to somebody else—or to a robot. ChatGPT is the robot that can do writing for you.

Imagine teaching writing not in English class, but in art class. Imagine a teacher saying, “Why don’t you find a way to practice with whatever tool you choose—pen, pencil, spray paint–to get to the point where you like what you’re doing, it represents who you are at the moment, and is legible to somebody else.

The opposite of the ChatGPT is the little kid who draws a picture of their house in crayon and writes “Mommy” or “Daddy,” and does that out of joy. They give it to the parent as a gift, and then the parent puts it up on the fridge, also out of joy.  

Where did we lose that joy in writing?

In my book I actually spell out exactly how we lose that joy in writing because of the way in which we have defined what writing is, and is for.

The dichotomy that you’re talking about is the crisis that is facing us right now–and the only reason it’s a crisis is because our thumb is so heavily on defining writing as an industrial-commercial-technical product that we want to use as easily and quickly as possible, that we want to be able to distribute infinitely and store forever.

That’s fine as long as it’s balanced by understanding writing in human terms—in terms of its value to the people who use it. It’s just like respecting a writer for the quality of their writing instead of the quantity of their output. You’ve heard of the Slow Food Movement? I’m endorsing the Slow Writing Movement.