Having written before about hand-drawn maps I was delighted to find this beautiful one, drawn by the missionary, Samuel Pond, in 1834, when he and his brother, Gideon, first started to work in Chief Cloud Man's village near Lake Calhoun. There they devised a way of writing the Dakota language - the 'Pond-Dakota alphabet' - which seems astonishingly obliging of them, given our previous discussions about alphabets and transcription. Like a lot of missionaries, the Pond brothers went into a kind of self-imposed exile in order to bring Christianity to the people they had chosen as 'theirs' (although admittedly Fort Snelling wasn't very far away). But, a few years later, Chief Cloud Man and his people were forced into a more radical exile because of conflicts with the Ojibwe, who themselves had been displaced by settlement further east. There's a good site on the Pond brothers here.
Showing posts with label alphabets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label alphabets. Show all posts
Tuesday, 12 May 2009
The Dakota
Since it is the Minnesota part of the journey that I'm going to do, I've been giving a little more attention to that stretch of the river and I think the interaction between settlers and Native Americans, particularly the Dakota, is going to be very interesting.
Having written before about hand-drawn maps I was delighted to find this beautiful one, drawn by the missionary, Samuel Pond, in 1834, when he and his brother, Gideon, first started to work in Chief Cloud Man's village near Lake Calhoun. There they devised a way of writing the Dakota language - the 'Pond-Dakota alphabet' - which seems astonishingly obliging of them, given our previous discussions about alphabets and transcription. Like a lot of missionaries, the Pond brothers went into a kind of self-imposed exile in order to bring Christianity to the people they had chosen as 'theirs' (although admittedly Fort Snelling wasn't very far away). But, a few years later, Chief Cloud Man and his people were forced into a more radical exile because of conflicts with the Ojibwe, who themselves had been displaced by settlement further east. There's a good site on the Pond brothers here.
Having written before about hand-drawn maps I was delighted to find this beautiful one, drawn by the missionary, Samuel Pond, in 1834, when he and his brother, Gideon, first started to work in Chief Cloud Man's village near Lake Calhoun. There they devised a way of writing the Dakota language - the 'Pond-Dakota alphabet' - which seems astonishingly obliging of them, given our previous discussions about alphabets and transcription. Like a lot of missionaries, the Pond brothers went into a kind of self-imposed exile in order to bring Christianity to the people they had chosen as 'theirs' (although admittedly Fort Snelling wasn't very far away). But, a few years later, Chief Cloud Man and his people were forced into a more radical exile because of conflicts with the Ojibwe, who themselves had been displaced by settlement further east. There's a good site on the Pond brothers here.
Wednesday, 15 April 2009
pictures
While I was in Istanbul, I took some photos of inscriptions in the different scripts that have been the city's official form of writing at different times. Here are a couple:
Sunday, 5 April 2009
comments
I tried to comment on your last two posts, but they disappear into thin air, so I'm going to just write a new post and hope for the best!
regarding the images from the train station, I really like them: I like the washed out color combined with the really clear and clean typography, which makes me feel I ought to be able to read what the signs say, even though I don't know those alphabets...
regarding collections and mistranslation (two posts ago), I'm thinking how an alphabet is itself a collection, of how part of the strangeness of Chinese for anyone not literate in Chinese is the character system, which is not an alphabet in the way Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. are. what other character systems are there than Chinese? or is everything else currently in use an actual alphabet? how are archaic writing systems different from Chinese, hieroglyphs, etc? I don't know anything at all about this stuff, and I'm curious if you can give me a bit of an overview...
xoxox
regarding the images from the train station, I really like them: I like the washed out color combined with the really clear and clean typography, which makes me feel I ought to be able to read what the signs say, even though I don't know those alphabets...
regarding collections and mistranslation (two posts ago), I'm thinking how an alphabet is itself a collection, of how part of the strangeness of Chinese for anyone not literate in Chinese is the character system, which is not an alphabet in the way Greek, Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, etc. are. what other character systems are there than Chinese? or is everything else currently in use an actual alphabet? how are archaic writing systems different from Chinese, hieroglyphs, etc? I don't know anything at all about this stuff, and I'm curious if you can give me a bit of an overview...
xoxox
Saturday, 4 April 2009
other scripts
I've been thinking a lot about your Chinese material and about encounters with other languages in general. At the railway station here in Sheffield there are some big blue posters welcoming visitors to the city in a variety of languages. The posters are at the ends of the platforms and they are pretty old now and rather faded. On impulse, I went to the station and took some photos of the different scripts. I kind of like them because of the way they present the 'other' languages.
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