Fwd: Endangered alphabets and scripts in Bangladesh

[Randy LaPolla]

From: "Brookes, Tim" <brookes at champlain.edu>
Subject: Endangered alphabets and scripts in Bangladesh
Date: September 16, 2012 2:31:59 AM GMT+08:00

Dear Colleagues,
As some of you know, I've been developing my Endangered Alphabets carving project for three years, and much of it is now visible at http://www.endangeredalphabets.com. Just recently, though, I met a young man named Maung from the Chittagong Hill Tracts in Bangladesh who has undertaken a heroic quest. First, he got himself an education—an achievement in itself, as he is from one of the 13 or so indigenous groups in the CHT, and all education was in bengali, which he could not speak. Second, largely self-educated and taught by his mother, he got into Harvard to study engineering. Then, once he had graduated, he went back to the CHT and built a school for his people. But that still wasn't enough. He understood that the kids, who were growing up unable to read or write their own traditional documents and were rapidly being separated from their own cultural traditions, needed school books and reading materials in their own scripts—Mro, Marma, Chakma, Tripura, and so on. So he went back to Harvard to do a graduate degree in education so he'd be qualified and skilled enough to create appropriate materials.
I mat him by chance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and he and I have started a project that will bring together artists and academics from across the world to create those books—a process that will involve carving, calligraphy, typography and other design skills.
If you'd like to know more about him and his heroic endeavors, I suggest you contact the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
If you'd like to contribute to the fundraiser we're running to try to achieve all this, please visit http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1496420787/endangered-alphabets-ii-saving-languages-in-bangla.
As always, we're all open to suggestions, connections, feedback, and so on.
Thanks!

Tim Brookes

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