World Endangered Writing Day (23 January)

https://wewday.webflow.io/

This just in from the LinguistList:

All of the the talks and discussion sessions that comprised World
Endangered Writing Day (on January 23rd) have been recorded and are
available at

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLYG37Sb2buKjaMtjztHjDc5pSS1a1jorr

They include talks on the latest research in khipu, redefinitions of
writing from the viewpoint of grapholinguistics, language and script
study and support in the pluralistic state of Sikkim (India), the
relationship between cultural identity and typeface design, Unicode and
the digitization of neographies, instructional design for teaching the
Dongba script of Lijiang, China, via MOOC, the lessons to be learned
about script endangerment from lost scripts of the ancient world, and a
case study in mother-tongue and mother-script education and revival
among indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Discussion also included the tension between the development of ChatGPT and writing as a manual art.

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April 26, which is the feast day of Stephen of Perm, is celebrated as
Old Permic Alphabet Day.

Not mentioned by Crystal. A passing reference by Geoffrey Sampson, in a LinguistList review of a book on Uralic languages, led me to it.

It was invented in 1372 by the said Saint, in order to write (Old) Komi
(aka Old Zyrian), a Permic (Uralic) language (making it one of the
earliest scripts used in that family). It is a rather radical re-shaping
of Cyrillic, with some elements from other sources. Its use continued
for about three centuries, after which it was replaced by more normal
Cyrillic.

All this and more at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Permic_script

We've already mentioned Hangul Day, celebrated in Korea. Any other
holidays dedicated to particular scripts?

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Ar an triú lá de mí Bealtaine, scríobh Ross Clark:

[...] We've already mentioned Hangul Day, celebrated in Korea. Any other holidays dedicated to particular scripts?

You mentioned World Braille Day already. None other that I’m aware of.

--
‘As I sat looking up at the Guinness ad, I could never figure out /
How your man stayed up on the surfboard after fourteen pints of stout’
(C. Moore)

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On 4/05/2024 1:46 a.m., ulf_kutzner wrote:

Ross Clark wrote:

April 26, which is the feast day of Stephen of Perm, is celebrated as
Old Permic Alphabet Day.

Not mentioned by Crystal. A passing reference by Geoffrey Sampson, in
a LinguistList review of a book on Uralic languages, led me to it.

It was invented in 1372 by the said Saint, in order to write (Old)
Komi (aka Old Zyrian), a Permic (Uralic) language (making it one of
the earliest scripts used in that family). It is a rather radical
re-shaping

of Cyrillic, with some elements from other sources. Its use continued
for about three centuries, after which it was replaced by more normal
Cyrillic.

All this and more at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Permic_script

We've already mentioned Hangul Day, celebrated in Korea. Any other
holidays dedicated to particular scripts?

What about this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_Slavonic_Alphabet,_Bulgarian_Enlightenment_and_Culture

Regards, ULF

Yes, thank you! And it's May 24, the feast day of Sts. Cyril and
Methodius, 9th-century Byzantine brothers from Thessalonica, who
invented this alphabet and took the Gospel to the Slavs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyril_and_Methodius

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sv_Kiril_Metodij_Zahari_Zograf_Trojanski_mon_1848.jpg

"In 1980, the first Slav pope, Pope John Paul II declared them co-patron
saints of Europe, together with Benedict of Nursia."

There was a Serbian restaurant at one time in Auckland (though Croatians
are much more numerous here), and the one time we ate there, I remember
seeing, pinned to the wall, a little poem about "Наша Кириллица" (Our
(dear?) Cyrillic alphabet). Googling that phrase brings up a lot of
Russian sites with similar sentiments.

Looking further into it will show that while the above is basically
true, it is a lot more complicated.

(i) They have several different feast days depending on which church you
ask.

(ii) They invented two quite different alphabets -- Glagolitic, which
looks a bit like Elvish; and Cyrillic, which is simpler and more
obviously based on Greek, and has lasted longer.

(iii) And maybe they didn't invent them just like that...but such is the
way of writing systems.

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On 04/05/24 20:13, Ross Clark wrote:

There was a Serbian restaurant at one time in Auckland (though
Croatians are much more numerous here), and the one time we ate
there, I remember seeing, pinned to the wall, a little poem about
"Наша Кириллица" (Our (dear?) Cyrillic alphabet). Googling that phrase brings up a lot of Russian sites with similar sentiments.

Looking further into it will show that while the above is basically
true, it is a lot more complicated.

(i) They have several different feast days depending on which church
you ask.

(ii) They invented two quite different alphabets -- Glagolitic, which
looks a bit like Elvish; and Cyrillic, which is simpler and more
obviously based on Greek, and has lasted longer.

(iii) And maybe they didn't invent them just like that...but such is
the way of writing systems.

Yike! I see what you mean by Elvish. The users of Glagolitic must have
had low reading speeds.

Now that I've looked it up, I see that I've had a false belief for
years. I had always believed that Cyrillic was invented by the Greek
monk Cyril (and, perhaps, his partner Methodius). Now I see that Cyril introduced Glagolitic, and that others later modified his script to turn
it into Cyrillic.

That's a little surprising. You'd expect a Greek, faced with the problem
of creating an alphabet for the Slavs, to come up with something similar
to the Greek alphabet. (With, of course, additions to deal with the fact
that the Greek alphabet is too small.) Indeed, Cyrillic does show
obvious derivation from Greek, but Glagolitic does not.

--
Peter Moylan http://www.pmoylan.org
Newcastle, NSW

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On 4/05/2024 10:38 p.m., Peter Moylan wrote:

On 04/05/24 20:13, Ross Clark wrote:

There was a Serbian restaurant at one time in Auckland (though
Croatians are much more numerous here), and the one time we ate
there, I remember seeing, pinned to the wall, a little poem about
"Наша Кириллица" (Our (dear?) Cyrillic alphabet). Googling that >> phrase brings up a lot of Russian sites with similar sentiments.

Looking further into it will show that while the above is basically
true, it is a lot more complicated.

(i) They have several different feast days depending on which church
you ask.

(ii) They invented two quite different alphabets -- Glagolitic, which
 looks a bit like Elvish; and Cyrillic, which is simpler and more
obviously based on Greek, and has lasted longer.

(iii) And maybe they didn't invent them just like that...but such is
the way of writing systems.

Yike! I see what you mean by Elvish. The users of Glagolitic must have
had low reading speeds.

Now that I've looked it up, I see that I've had a false belief for
years. I had always believed that Cyrillic was invented by the Greek
monk Cyril (and, perhaps, his partner Methodius). Now I see that Cyril introduced Glagolitic, and that others later modified his script to turn
it into Cyrillic.

That's a little surprising. You'd expect a Greek, faced with the problem
of creating an alphabet for the Slavs, to come up with something similar
to the Greek alphabet. (With, of course, additions to deal with the fact
that the Greek alphabet is too small.) Indeed, Cyrillic does show
obvious derivation from Greek, but Glagolitic does not.

A lot of Glagolitic can be derived from Greek cursive forms, whereas
Cyrillic is from the uncials. For sounds found in Slavic but not in
Greek, Armenian may be a source for Glagolitic, and Coptic for Cyrillic.
I'm taking this from the discussion by Paul Cubberley in The World's
Writing Systems (pp.346ff.). He suggests that at least the Greek part of Glagolitic had been devised by Slavic speakers in western Macedonia
before C&M came along. Cyril "formalized" it and added some letters.
Some decades later, followers of his decided they needed a "more
dignified" (and probably easier to read) alphabet and created Cyrillic.

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