[UA-discuss] World Endangered Writing Day, 2024 January 23

[Jim DeLaHunt]

UASG Colleagues:

You may be interested to know of World Endangered Writing Day, on 2024 
January 23. If UA Day is promoting of Universal Acceptance, and 
Universal Acceptance is "All domain names and all email addresses work 
in all software applications", then Word Endangered Writing Day is a 
more radical form of universal acceptance: all languages and all scripts 
should survive and thrive well enough to be used as domain names and 
email addresses.

What is World Endangered Writing Day, and why does it matter? The 
answer, from <https://www.endangeredwriting.world/about>:

> Half of the world’s 7,000-odd languages are endangered, and may be 
> extinct by the end of this century.
>
> Some 90% of the world’s 300-plus alphabets are likewise threatened. 
> Yet that statistic means almost nothing to those of us in Western 
> Europe and North America.
>
> For one thing, we had no idea there were all that many alphabets 
> anyway. For another, the whole concept of an alphabet being endangered 
> is baffling because our own, the Latin or Roman alphabet, is so 
> secure. It’s used by more people around the world than every other 
> script combined.
>
> How are so many forms of writing endangered, and why does that matter?
>
> The answers are throughout [the Endangered Alphabets website 
> <http://endangeredalphabets.com/>], our online Atlas of Endangered 
> Alphabets [<http://endangeredalphabets.net/>], and our YouTube channel 
> [<https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCCsKW7O5nNNUyqhf0Jphubw>].
World Endangered Writing Day itself appears to consist of a number of 
presentations to be delivered for free over the internet on Tuesday, 
January 23, 2024. Schedule at <https://www.endangeredwriting.world/events>.

The talk most closely related to UA is perhaps:

*The Digital Future: On Digitizing Scripts for Electronic Devices*

Does digitizing minority scripts, so they can be used on electronic 
devices, help to save them? What is the process, and what are the 
challenges?

Speakers: Anshuman Pandey and Deborah Anderson, of the Script Encoding 
Initiative, University of California at Berkeley, USA.

I wonder if some of you thinking about UA Day events, might also advance 
your causes by creating related World Endangered Writing Day events.

Best regards,
      —Jim DeLaHunt, Vancouver, Canada [writing in the not-at-all 
endangered Latin script]

-- 
     --Jim DeLaHunt,jdlh at jdlh.com      http://blog.jdlh.com/  (http://jdlh.com/)
       multilingual websites consultant, Vancouver, Canada
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