To put it another way, suggests founder of the Endangered Alphabets Project Tim Brookes, writing can feel less vital to humanity than speaking. Even by the middle of the 19th Century, only 10% of adults knew how to write, and there are only about 140 scripts in use today. Language is innate to all humans, but scripts have to be invented and actively learned. This might have something to do with the artificiality of alphabets. Unveiling a website devoted to the project, the organisation warned of the need to “preserve, revitalise and promote indigenous languages around the world”.īut while many have focused on the spoken word, how different cultures write is often ignored. In August 2018, Unesco proudly announced that 2019 would be its year of indigenous languages. Just as impressive is the length people will go to save their scripts – or invent whole new alphabets and spread them to the world. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. The key to cracking long-dead languagesĪlong with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script.What is the best age to learn a foreign language?.Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. He spends much of his time in the hills where he grew up, where he founded Our Golden Hour – a nonprofit fighting to keep Marma and a flurry of other scripts alive.
Yet Nyeu never forgot his early schooldays. Now he is pursuing a doctorate at Harvard. After learning Bengali at home, he returned to school and went to university.
Written, it is all curls, like messy locks of hair.Įventually Nyeu managed to escape this cycle of bewilderment and beatings. Although 98% of Bangladeshis speak Bengali as a first language, Nyeu grew up with Marma, one of several minority tongues in the region. It was simply that Nyeu could not understand what the teacher was saying, or what was written in his textbooks. etc.On his first two days of school, in a village above the Bangladeshi port of Chittagong, Maung Nyeu was hit with a cane.
The IPA transcriptions are the letters and other symbols which appear in square bracketts, like this. Transcriptions in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) are used extensively throughout this website.
0 kommentar(er)
