Hello, everyone!
My name is Joshua Kueh and I'm a
Southeast Asia reference librarian in
the Asian Division of the Library of
Congress.
Today, I would like to welcome you to a
lecture by Tim Brookes,
"Southeast Asian Scripts: From the Centers
to the Margins."
This lecture is co-sponsored by the
Library of Congress
Asian Division and the Endangered
Alphabets Project
of which Tim is the director. It's also
the third and final talk of the lecture
series Endangered Alphabets and Why We
Write.
For the last three weeks, Tim has taken
us on a fascinating journey
exploring endangered scripts in Africa
and South Asia.
Videos of these lectures along with
today's talk will be
available on the Library of Congress
website in the near future.
Speaking of videos please note that we
are recording the lectures in this
series.
If you choose to participate, any of your
comments or
questions will be included in the
recording as part of the record.
Please also note that following Tim's
presentation there will be a question
and answer session.
So please use the Q & A box at the bottom
of your screen here
on Zoom to pose your questions and we
will read them for Tim
at the end of his presentation. Finally, I
also want to bring to your attention
that there has been a slight change to
how we will go about today's lecture.
Tim had originally planned to deliver
his lecture live today
but because he is recovering from a
recent surgery
we will be playing a recording of his
talk. This will then be followed by a
live
Q & A session where Tim will answer your
questions.
We thank you for your understanding.
Before we begin our journey into the
world of Southeast Asian scripts,
my colleague Ryan Wolfson-Ford and I
would like to say a few words about the
Library's Asian Reading Room
and also highlight some materials in the
Southeast Asian collection
and the Library's Asian Division.
Hello! I'm Ryan Wolfson-Ford, a Southeast
Asia reference librarian at the Asian
Division.
The Library's Asian Reading
Room provides access to more than four
million physical items
and eight collections for China, Japan,
Korea, Mongolia, South asia,
Southeast Asia, Tibet and Asian Americans
and Pacific Islanders.
While the Library is temporarily closed
to the public
due to the Covid-19 pandemic
anyone can access the Library's digital
resources via
loc.gov. The Asian Division recently
launched a new and improved
Asian Reading Room website. The new
site makes it easy to explore
Asian collections, research guides,
databases
and other resources as well as upcoming
news and events.
Since today's lecture features
endangered scripts from Southeast Asia,
we would like to mention that the
Library's Southeast Asian collection
holds titles in more than 86 languages
originating in Southeast Asia.
Of these, nine are national languages. In
addition to these languages, there are
holdings in 77 other languages.
Titles in some of these languages or
language groupings
are less commonly found in libraries and
archives in the United States.
Among them are Hmong, Batak, Karen,
Hanunuo and Balinese. In addition to being
linguistically diverse,
the Southeast Asian collection also
holds many non-Latin scripts
some of which might be considered
endangered.
Pictured here are a few examples of such
scripts.
From insular Southeast Asia we have the
Lontara script of the Bugis people
whose homeland is the Indonesian island
of Sulawesi.
The example shown is from the Southeast
Asian rare book collection
and comes from a volume collected for
the Wilkes Expedition,
a 19th century U.S. exploring
mission to the Pacific.
It contains an episode from the epic
Bugis creation myth La Galigo.
Other endangered scripts in the
collection are the Hanunuo and Tagbanua
scripts from the Philippines.
The image shown comes from the Mindoro
Palawan bamboo collection.
The collection consists of 70 slats of
half bamboo etched in Hanunuo script that
speak of daily rituals,
life under Spanish occupation, and also
love songs.
It also contains six full bamboo tubes
covered with prose in Tagbanua script
and offers a peek into Tagbanua society
and customs.
This next slide shows the Batak script,
pictured on the left of the slide,
and the Balinese script pictured on the
right.
The example of the Batak script shown
appears in a Porhalaan
or calendar used for divination and
comes from
north central Sumatra in Indonesia.
The cover is made of animal bone with a
carved gecko,
symbol of the earth deity and the
accordion style pages are made of
bark. As for the example of Balinese
script shown it appears in a palm leaf
manuscript called a lontar
and comes from the Indonesian island of
Bali. As you can see,
the script appears in the context of an
illustrated story
akin to A Thousand and One Nights. The
Southeast Asian collection holds more
than
500 Balinese manuscripts covering a
range of topics from
folk tales to magical mantras and
cooking recipes.
Mainland Southeast asia has many
non-Latin scripts. As colonialism came
later to the Mainland than the Islands
more societies retained their scripts
like the Burmese,
Thai, Lao and Khmer. While colonialism
challenged these scripts Christian
missionaries brought
scripts to those who never had writing
before
like the Karen and Hmong thus bolstering
the position of their languages
vis-a-vis Mainland centers.
The Hmong have many scripts, at least
four of which are held by the Library,
including the Romanized Popular Alphabet,
a La script and scripts of their own
making like the Pahawh
and Der Phoua Zu (ntawv puaj txwm) scripts, both of which are
religious in nature. The Der Phoua
Zy script is seen on the left in a
language
primer created by Jhou Me New in 1962 and
1963.
This language primer is also a
collection of the
religious teachings of the movement of
followers that grew up around the script
creator. Pahawh,
an invented messianic script, was created
in 1959 by
Shong Lue Yang and you can see an
example of that [script]
in the center. For the Lao script
the Library has a Hmong New Testament
Bible on the right.
The [pre-1975] Lao government tried to impose Lao
script on the Hmong
which partly spurred efforts to create
their own scripts.
And on this slide on the left we have
the S'gaw Karen script
which was created by American missionary
Jonathan Wade in 1830.
The Library has some of the oldest works
in the script including a religious
tract
from 1838 and a vocabulary from 1849.
Two other scripts are highlighted on
this slide
from the center of Mainland Southeast
Asia.
In Vietnam, Nom was the primary script
to write
Vietnamese texts before the 20th century.
This gazetteer on the right
was composed in the 19th century in the
Nom script.
Tham script was used in northern Tai
states prior to the 20th century
including Lan Na.
In the 20th century as these places were
incorporated
into nation states Tham script was
challenged by national scripts.
While literacy in tham used to be
widespread among most men
now far less know it and those who do are
getting older while younger generations
do not learn it as much.
As you can see we have an example of Tham
script in the center of this slide.
The library of Congress has rich
holdings ready for serious research or
for their general interests about this
topic.
To start your search at the Library
please contact me or Joshua through the
Ask-a-Librarian service.
Okay, and now for the main event we are
delighted to introduce today's speaker
Tim Brookes, a world authority on
endangered writing systems.
For nearly a decade, Tim has led the
non-profit
Endangered Alphabets Project in the
creation of educational materials
in a number of minority and indigenous
languages.
Everyone is encouraged to check out
their website at endangeredalphabets.com.
I've also included a screenshot of
another one of tim's websites
the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets, a
project launched
in 2019 with curated information on
nearly
100 endangered writing systems. The atlas
is available
at endangeredalphabets.net. As one can
see from the indicators on the atlas,
Tim and his team of researchers have
done an amazing amount of work in
Southeast Asia.
In addition, their work also encompasses
the geographic areas of
Africa and South Asia. Finally i'll also
note that Tim is an accomplished artist
and woodworker and many of his carvings
in endangered scripts have been featured
in exhibitions
around the world. I'm sure we are all
excited to hear what Tim has to say
and so I'll stop with this introduction
and let's get straight
to Tim's talk. I've used this slide on my
my previous talks.
Thomas Carlyle writing about 150 years
ago:
Scotsman, writer, philosopher. "Certainly
the art of writing
is the most miraculous of all things
man has devised."
And to us nowadays, that sounds perhaps a
little exaggerated; a little...a little
poetic.
And in fact we're actually rather more
used to seeing
statements like this.
So this is sort of an encyclopedic
definition of the origins of writing
and its development.
And it sounds, it
it sounds, believable. "Writing-- a system of
graphic
marks representing the units of a
specific language--
has been invented independently in the
Near East,
China and Mesoamerica. The cuneiform
script created in Mesopotamia,
present-day Iraq,
around 3200 BC, was first.
It's also the only writing system which
can be traced to its earliest
prehistoric origin. This antecedent of
the cuneiform script was a system of
counting and recording
goods with clay tokens. The evolution of
writing from
tokens to pictography, syllabary and
alphabet
illustrates the development of
information processing
to deal with larger amounts of data in
ever
greater abstraction." So,
as I say, this sounds convincing
and I would invite you to
particularly look at the way in which
this definition
sounds super modern because it's talking
in terms of
writing as information processing and
data and abstraction.
And the danger of thinking in these
terms
is that it really illustrates
how we think about writing today
and therefore how we may be projecting
backwards our assumptions and our
beliefs
on this one particular
point of origin of writing and that
is not only dangerous.
It's also extremely misleading and very