Celebrating Sequoyah and his Cherokee alphabet

There are about 7,000 languages currently spoken on this planet. By the end of this century, all but 600 will have disappeared – the inevitable result of an unstoppable process as the last speakers of the world’s little languages die out, usually leaving no trace, for the vast majority are spoken only, with no written record. But even languages which have had the good fortune to be written down face their own extinction as their individual writing systems struggle to survive. Hundreds and hundreds of unique alphabets, as much as 90 per cent, face oblivion. Enter their gallant rescuer Tim Brookes, a British-born, Vermont-based writer, who is on a one-man mission, having set up his Endangered Alphabets Project in 2010 and is now offering this splendid sampling of some of the world’s threatened scripts.

They may be dicing with death but the weird and wonderful alphabets in this book do have the great advantage over ours of being written for the language they are recording. The price of the Latin alphabet’s dominance in Europe – and barring a few runes, that dominance has been total for the last 1,000 years – is that each language has had to fiddle, amend and bodge its written conventions. There are variations within each accent, of course, but the usual estimate is that English has between 14 and 20 more vowels and consonants than there are letters in our alphabet. The result is that, for example, a serves for the long and short vowels in RP’s bar and cat; ch and ng are drafted in to denote consonants which have their own symbols in the phonetic alphabet, and th for the sounds in both either and ether. As for the much maligned glottal stop, that’s just completely ignored.