More Alphabets

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I posted a graphic about the evolution of our western alphabet recently and received some interest, so here is some more along the same lines.

Specialists have been studying an alphabet created in 1834 in Liberia, Africa. It was devised to write down the Vai language which previously had been purely oral.

“According to Vai teacher Bai Leesor Sherman, the script was always taught informally from a literate teacher to a single apprentice student. It remains so successful that today it is even used to communicate pandemic health messages.”

The studies are looking at how the alphabet has evolved over time to see if general characteristics of alphabet evolution can be adduced.

“There’s a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs. But there are also plenty of abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted, instead, that signs will start off as relatively complex and then become simpler across new generations of writers and readers … applying computational tools for measuring visual complexity, they found that the letters really did become visually simpler with each passing year.”

Elsewhere in West Africa, illiterate inventors have reverse-engineered writing for languages spoken in Mali and Cameroon, while new writing systems are still being invented in Nigeria and Senegal.

Image: Philadelphia #1

The Coup In Hawai’i

Today is the 130th anniversary of the takeover of the Hawai’i Islands by American trading interests, overthrowing the native kingdom.

America already had a long history of violent and genocidal imperialist annexation (“Manifest Destiny”) on the mainland.  The coup in Honolulu was a logical, if long, step of the same impulse into the Pacific.

Muhammed Ali — The Greatest

Muhammed Ali would have been 80 years old today.

The men in my family always loved boxing. As a kid I regularly saw fights on BBC TV and I listened at night to American Forces Radio to follow the American boxers. In May 1966 my Dad spent good money to take my grandfather and me to Highbury Stadium in London to watch the rematch between Muhammed Ali, by then world champion, and Britain’s hero Henry Cooper. I was already a (secret in that crowd) Ali supporter and wasn’t surprised when he stopped Cooper. It was a great night (even from a very long way from the ring) and a memory I shall cherish always.

Soon after, Ali was challenging the draft and the Vietnam War (“No Viet Cong ever called me a nigger”) and the establishment itself, and he was even more of a hero to me. His pride and his sacrifice for his beliefs were inspirations for us all.  As was his calm demeanour while facing a future with Parkinson’s.  He deserved every moment of glory he ever received. Hard to believe there will be another anything like him in my lifetime.

I am saddened to lose him, but glad that his trials are over.

Poem: Fog

 

The smog-laden tangerine fog

tinted by a million lamplights

lays heavy tonight;

the busy rustle of the city’s moves

lost in its depths

like the delicate harmonies of a dulcimer

played in the attic as heard in the basement.

Closer, much closer, I hear

the lazy rustle of the scorpion

picking carelessly at a pecan shell.

I blink in the orange darkness.