Today’s post is an appeal for your help from Tim Brookes.

Dear fellow linguists, anthropologists and scholars in general all across the planet:

Having finished my original Endangered Alphabets Project, I’m now starting a similar carving project whose aim once again is to draw attention to the world’s vanishing scripts — and I need your help.

The project will have many different outcomes. If all goes well, it will result in endangered scripts being combined with an endangered languages poetry project, being carved and displayed throughout the U.S. and in other countries, and even being projected onto the sides of major U.S. buildings.

For this to happen, though, I need to be in touch with people who can read and write these disappearing scripts well enough to be able to translate a short text for me.

Here are the scripts in which I am especially interested, and as yet have nobody who can act as a translator:

Redjang
Bamum
Balinese
Manchu
Nushu
Ranjana/Lantsa
N’Ko
Buhid
Tai Dam
Javanese
Maldivian/Thaana

If you happen to be able to read and write in one or more of these scripts and are interested in joining me in this project by translating a four-line poem, please contact me at brookes@champlain.edu. Needless to say, I’ll credit you in all written materials.

If you think you may know of someone else who may be able to help, please forward this appeal to him or her.

Thanks so much, and best wishes,
Tim Brookes
brookes@champlain.edu