The Water Calligraphy Device

Weird and cool.

The Endangered Alphabets Project

The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.

Top Ten Invented Languages

The list, care of Top Tenz.

From the piece...

Enochian

This language appeared in the 16th century in a series of books by astrologer John Dee and seer Edward Kelley. According to Dee, it was the language used by God to create the world, which had gradually ‘devolved’ over time to become the Biblical Hebrew of the Old Testament. Luckily for them, this language was taught to Dee and Kelley by angels. Enochian also came with an alphabet, which Dee and Kelley used to write their books detailing magical practices.

Modern skeptics have since pointed out that Enochian has far more in common grammatically with English than any form of Hebrew. Still, the language became popular again in the 20th century, and it’s still used by some occultists today.