text by Tim Brookes
texte de Tim Brookes
Latin alphabet is the world’s bully
Even a brief study of the roughly 300 scripts currently in use on Earth will show that the Balinese script is more graceful than the Latin alphabet, the Siddham script more spiritually significant, the Hangul script easier to learn, the Kulitan script more suited to the movements of the hand and wrist, the Ditema script more colorful. The Cham script is so deeply embedded in the culture and beliefs of the Cham people that if a member of the Cham community dies without having learned to read and write the traditional script, as part of a four-day cremation ceremony a priest will kneel down beside the corpse and teach them their Cham letters. Only after the human spirit has acquired skills in reading and writing are they seen as being ready to be cremated and equipped to pass on to the afterlife.
Compared to these and many others, the Latin alphabet is narrow, dull, and utilitarian. It is the writing equivalent of duct tape. The only reason the Latin alphabet is so widely used is because at crucial moments in history it had more guns, money and lawyers.
[:ls -20]Surely one of the most complex and interesting script in history was that of the Maya, which combines what we think of as graphic elements with what we think of as semantic/phonetic elements in a variety of non-linear ways that we are still struggling to understand. Unlike the Latin alphabet, it has a visual éclat that both commands attention and demands interpretation. It is possible that the act of manifesting (the words “writing” and “drawing” are both inexact and inadequate) some of the glyphs may have been seen as essential to prevent the destruction of the world.[/ls]
As part of his campaign to eradicate pagan rites and impose Spanish as a language written in the Latin alphabet, in 1562 Bishop Diego de Landa ordered an Inquisition ending with an auto-da-fé in which a large number of Maya codices and approximately 5000 Maya images were burned. Only three pre-Columbian books of Mayan script survived intact. The Mayan writing system was functionally extinct within fifty years.
History is written in the alphabet of the winners. This is especially true of the Latin alphabet, of course, but let’s look at a different example. Perhaps the most elegant script in history was the proto-Khmer version of the Pallava script used over a thousand years ago in the great spiritual centre at Angkor, in what is now Cambodia. The Thais invaded and destroyed Angkor, the ancient Khmer empire's capital, and stole most of its artisans and scribes. More than a million Khmer still live in Thailand as Indigenous peoples under a colonial master, but the Thai outlawed the Khmer script a century ago. Like the Ainu and the Ryukyu of Japan, they are only allowed to write in the script of their own conquerors.
The very definition of writing is a colonial prerogative. For centuries, linguistic theory, written by Europeans, has held that writing evolved from pictograms through ideograms and syllabaries to the Latin alphabet. Not only is there no evidence for this, but the word “evolution,” then, is a circular argument of self-justification: if an alphabet is the most evolved form of writing and we use an alphabet (it is astonishing how many writers, even today, say “the alphabet” as if there were only one), then we are the most evolved people. In short, there’s an element of colonialism, even racism, in this paradigm of linguistic evolution.
The Adinkra symbols of Ghana exist in a broad hinterland of writing forms that lies beyond the clear, organized, well-defined street maps of alphabets. Their use goes well beyond the page or the computer screen, and they flourish in woodcuts, screen prints, architectural design, clothing fabrics, gold weights, jewelry, and even furniture. Adinkra are not simply visual designs or patterns. Individual Adinkra symbols represent concepts, sayings, or proverbs, and as such are bearers of traditional wisdom.
Such meaning systems are even today regarded by many Western linguists as not being writing because they don’t have the one-letter-one-sound correspondence of “true” alphabets. But pictograms and ideograms have significant advantages, especially in areas where multiple languages are spoken: the very fact that the symbols don’t indicate specific spoken sounds enables them to travel beyond the borders of specific language groups, like passports of meaning. This is exactly why Europe has universal traffic signs that display symbols rather than give verbal instructions.
Beyond writing
Writing is an astonishing, transdimensional act. It takes something invisible, intangible, interior, evanescent—a thought—and makes it visible, even tangible. It extrudes from the immaterial world into the material world, where it pauses, shimmering with the power of a fact or an idea that can affect, even transform someone else’s interior life, and thus their material life. Even the life of a nation.
[:ls -20]The Mandaeans have possibly the most exquisite awareness of the importance of writing in the material and immaterial worlds, which they see as been united, in fact, by writing. For them, writing has, in effect, its own cosmology. The Mandaeans are Gnostics. In fact, just as the word “gnostic” comes from the Greek word gnosis, meaning “knowledge,” the Mandaean word manda means “knowledge,” so both peoples referred to themselves as “the people of knowledge.” But in both cases, the words refer to a very particular kind of knowledge—that is, direct mystical apprehension of the divine. The ability to “know” God.[/ls]
For the Mandaeans, this knowledge is intimately and inextricably connected to language, specifically to writing. In Mandaic, each individual letter has its own mystical meaning. Moreover, the alphabet consists of the 22 separate functional letters of the Aramaic alphabet—but then adds on another two letters to make the total up to 24, the number of hours from sunset to sunset, and therefore a mystical number. One of the added letters is a ligature of two characters, something like an ampersand; the final letter is simply the first letter, repeated, to give the impression that the alphabet is not linear and finite but, like the day, repeats every 24th time. A mandala of an alphabet.
Writing is an act of illumination. The word “illuminated,” as in “illuminated manuscript,” is often seen as meaning “decorated,” as if the artwork—often performed by the same scribe—were simply an element added to make the text more interesting or grander. In many scripts, though, illumination is a feature of the writing itself. In other words, the writing is not only illuminated but illuminating. It offers illumination—or, to use a different word with the same meaning, enlightenment. The writing in spiritual texts incorporates light so the reader may see the light, and become illuminated or enlightened in their turn.
Sĕrat Jaya Lengkara, is a Javanese poem—a poem of some length and, crucially, to be performed aloud, like much of the traditional poetry of Java and Bali. So what looks like writing, to be read as we think of reading—that is, alone and in silence with little or no regard for cadence—is actually a lyric, to be chanted in a communal gathering called a sekaha pesantian. In this poem, we can spot a mermaid. Or possibly one of the Javanese sea-goddesses, but for simplicity’s sake we’ll call it a mermaid. At first glance we would assume that this is a piece of writing with an illustration, because we have long drawn a sharp distinction between writing and art, but we would be wrong on both counts.
The mermaid is neither an illustration, nor an decorated letter like those in medieval Christian manuscripts. It is something quite unknown in Western/Latin texts. It is a madyapada, or canto marker.
Javanese poetry was, and still is, more like music than what we in the West generally consider writing, in that each canto or section is to be recited in its own rhythm, like movements in a symphony marked allegro or vivace. This analogy with music is especially apt, because Javanese writing developed and incorporated characters that are more like musical notation than punctuation. The most charming and vivid of these was the pada or canto marker, small paintings inserted between one canto and the next, and by no means random. The larger madyapada often contained a clue or phrase that indicated to the singer the rhythm of the next canto. Which makes sense: when needing to convey information, a graphic image is understood much more quickly than a written word.
Writing can be the record of a performance. Is calligraphy a visual art, or a performing art? The question is a trap. In northern Europe in particular, the Reformation redefined writing in increasingly secular terms, and with the rise of printing, writing was increasingly considered a technology, so nowadays it is common to frown and say that writing is not an art at all.
On the other hand, let us consider a particular endangered alphabet—a writing practice that is not from a threatened minority culture, but from a majority culture that threatens itself: 18th-century Japanese calligraphy, in some respects the pinnacle of writing.
Calligraphy was and still is taken far more seriously in Japan than in the West, and it challenges our understand of writing in many ways. In general, the calligrapher did not compose an original piece of writing, but, like a pianist playing a classical concert, performed familiar, important, sometimes sacred, what we might call “classic” pieces of writing. As such, the writer paid homage to their tradition by the quality of their calligraphy.
Unlike printed or digital text, a pen has an extraordinary ability to represent the moods and energies of the writer; the brush does so even more. The four panels at the head of this section are from Shin Usuyuki monogatari (1716) by Rankeishi . It’s a story told in the form of letters written by a young woman. As the tale progresses, her mood undergoes significant, even dramatic changes, which are perfectly visible even to someone who can’t read Japanese. The latitude for expressiveness was so great, in fact, that even scholars of Japanese calligraphy have difficulty reading the individual words. The calligrapher’s use of white space, of the placement of the words on the page, of long and elaborate descenders, make the piece much more like a dance than a text. It’s not surprising, then, that part of a calligrapher’s training was in rhythm, in posture, in breath control, in the performance of the act of writing.
What remains is not a text to be studied for its semantic content, but a glimpse of the calligrapher in full motion, which in turn is a performance of the original poem. I would recommend that every type designer consider this. What you are creating is not a thing in itself; it is an attempt to transport the reader to a performance by someone else, long ago and far away.
Conclusion
My work researching, carving, promoting, publishing and advocating for the world’s minority scripts and their communities has shown me that viewing every script as simply an interchangeable code in which letters stand for sounds—a core belief in the linguistics field for the past century—is at best dry and abstract, and at worst lofty and even imperial.
Wars have been fought over scripts; inventors of scripts for their own community have been executed or exiled. Every glyph, letter, or character glows with significance; every curve in a community’s script represents some aspect of its traditional tools and materials, its history of ideas, communications and technologies, and its relationship with religions or with trading partners. All of these have influenced what that community sees as beautiful and important—a profound connection that is all the stronger if their writing system is truly their own and nobody else’s.
une inquisition qui se termina par un autodafé au cours duquel un grand nombre de codex mayas et environ 5 000 images, furent brûlés. Seuls trois livres précolombiens en écriture maya ont été préservés intacts. L’usage du système d'écriture maya, lui, a disparu en moins de cinquante ans.
Pour les Mandéens, cette connaissance est liée de manière intime et indissociable à la langue — et plus précisément à l’écriture, qui y possède sa propre cosmologie où chaque lettre possède une signification mystique. L’alphabet comprend les 22 lettres fonctionnelles de l’alphabet araméen, mais en ajoute deux autres pour atteindre le total de 24 — nombre magique correspondant aux 24 heures allant d’un coucher du soleil au suivant. L’une des lettres ajoutées est une ligature de deux caractères, un peu comme une esperluette ; la dernière lettre est une répétition de la première, donnant à l’alphabet une structure cyclique plutôt que linéaire, un mandala alphabétique.
