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Incunabula

19 Jan, 9 tweets, 5 min read

Imagine there was a script INVENTED FROM SCRATCH BY ONE MAN in the 20th century, now used by hundreds of thousands of people and becoming the defacto standard for a language spoken by 7 million people - and you'd never heard of it.

It's called Ol Chiki - ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ. 1/6

The Ol Chiki (ᱚᱞ ᱪᱤᱠᱤ) script is the official writing system for Santali, an Austroasiatic language recognized as a regional language in India. It has 30 letters, the forms of which are intended to evoke natural shapes. Ol Chiki script is written from left to right. 2/6

Ol Chiki was created in 1925 by Raghunath Murmu for the Santali language, and publicized first in 1939 at a Mayurbhanj State exhibition. Previously, Santali had been written with the Latin script. However, Santali is not an Indo-Aryan language... 3/6

..... and Indic scripts did not have letters for all of Santali's phonemes, especially its stop consonants and vowels, which made writing the language accurately in an unmodified Indic script difficult. Unlike most Indic scripts, Ol Chiki is an alphabet, not an abugida. 4/6

Ol Chiki has benefited from the same surge in North East Indian regional nationalism that has benefited Meetei Mayek in nearby Manipur. There is now a thriving vernacular publishing industry in Ol Chiki, with poetry, epics, romance novels, histories & primers all appearing. 5/6

Raghunath Murmu is today a revered figure amongst Santali's, and his invention is now undoubtedly the most successful and widely adopted script developed by a single man in the last 5 centuries, or since King Sejong the Great created Hangul in Korea in 1443. 6/6

With most minority scripts, almost everything published is sponsored by government agencies or NGOs. What's really striking about Ol Chiki is how much privately produced vernacular printing there is from small independent publishers - a sign of real and growing grassroots demand.

@EndangeredAlpha

You can read more about Ol Chiki on @EndangeredAlpha's excellent Atlas of Endangered Alphabets:
endangeredalphabets.net/alphabets/ol-c…

See also the page on the Ol Chiki script at the portal for Santals website here:
wesanthals.tripod.com/id45.html

Nishaant Choksi explores the deployment of Santali scripts, including Ol Chiki, in Bengali-dominated local markets, the education system and in the circulation of print media. bloomsbury.com/uk/graphic-pol…

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More from @incunabula

Incunabula

@incunabula

18 Jan

On of the most impressive works of bibliography published in the last decade, these three massive volumes celebrate the work of Samuel Bogusław Chyliński(1631–1668), translator and publisher of the first translation of the Bible into Lithuanian. 1/6

Three copies of the printed version of Chyliński's Old Testament survived into the 20th century: They are known as the Stettin (Berlin), London and Vilnius copies respectively, after the places were they were discovered. 2/6

The Berlin copy was lost in World War II. The Vilnius copy was taken to St Petersburg & was destroyed by fire there. The only extant copy today is the one held by the British Museum in London (shelfmark C 51b.13). This is Vol I, a facsimile of the BL copy, published in 2008. 3/6

Read 7 tweets

Incunabula

@incunabula

16 Jan

Remember when Rio Tinto, after blasting the 46 000 year-old sacred Aboriginal site in Juukan Gorge, promised that the company would "never again" destroy sites of "exceptional archaeological and cultural significance" during mining operations?
theguardian.com/environment/20…

"Thousands of feet beneath Oak Flat is a copper deposit estimated to be one of the largest in the world and worth more than $1bn. If the mine goes forward as planned, it will consume 11 square miles, including Apache burial grounds, sacred sites, petroglyphs & medicinal plants."

"For the project to proceed, Rio requires control of more than 10 sq km of national forest used by 11 tribes, where mining was previously prohibited. This would mark the first time the US government has given a sacred site to a foreign mining company."
ft.com/content/496324…

Read 11 tweets

Incunabula

@incunabula

14 Jan

A colossal hand-bound book, with no printing, no writing of any kind, no illustrations of any kind..... 908 pages of blank paper.

So why is Olafur Eliasson's "Your House" regarded as one of the most technically accomplished and influential artist's book of the 21st century? 1/9

Because of what's NOT there! It's the empty spaces cut out of the paper that make this book so remarkable. The subject is Eliasson’s house in Denmark, rendered in a vertical cross section through an elaborate laser die-cut process of each page. 2/9

The format of the book allows Eliasson the space to fully realize his idea on a scale of 85:1, so that each leaf corresponds to 2.2 centimeters of the actual house. 3/9

Read 11 tweets

Incunabula

@incunabula

19 Dec 20

The only known copy of the world’s first electronic computer manual.

Operating & maintenance manual for the BINAC binary automatic computer built for Northrop Aircraft Corporation 1949. Eckert-Mauchly Computer Corp, Philadelphia 1949. Written by Joseph Chapline (1920-2011). 1/5

This is the only known copy of the world’s first electronic computer manual, and the only record of how the BINAC actually operated. It is also the model for the countless numbers of operating manuals for computers that were written in the following decades. 2/5

OCLC records no copies of this work in libraries, and there was no copy in the Origins of Cyberspace collection. As only one BINAC was ever built, it is likely that only a handful of copies of the manual were ever produced. 3/5

Read 10 tweets

Incunabula

@incunabula

17 Dec 20

BREAKING RUNESTONE NEWS

The runestone shown in the middle foreground in this engraving from Ole Worm's 1643 Danicorum Monumentorum was buried and lost in the 18th century.

Roadworkers just accidentally found and dug it up ON WEDNESDAY MORNING THIS WEEK!

svt.se/nyheter/lokalt…

"On Wednesday morning, a sensational archaeological find was made during excavation work outside Ystad. One of the missing Hunnestadsstenarna was found after having been missing since the 18th century."

svt.se/nyheter/lokalt…

"A fantastic fun find, which you did not think would happen. This stone has been gone for so long that we thought it was destroyed", said Magnus Källström, runologist at the Swedish National Heritage Board.

Read 6 tweets

Incunabula

@incunabula

27 Sep 20

This extract barely scratches the surface of the misinformation, vested interests, political maneuvering, and even outright duplicity surrounding the claimed looting of the libraries of Timbuktu. The real story of what happened has not yet been written.
dailymaverick.co.za/article/2020-0…

I have some first-hand knowledge about this. When reading about the Timbuktu libraries, bear in mind three things:

1. The news in 2013 was almost pure catnip to NGOs and cultural charities, instantly confirmed the world-view....1/2

of right-leaning ones (ISIS are culture-destroying Islamofascists) AND left leaning ones (Africa is the repository of ancient wisdom). You could hardly, even in theory, conjure up a set of circumstances more likely to engage the interests of NGOs & philanthropic foundations. 2/2

Read 10 tweets

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