ENDANGERED ALPHABETS - Key Persons
Earvin Christian Pelagio is a graduate student of Linguistics in the University of the Philippines Diliman. He is a Philippine linguist currently affiliated with Commission on the Filipino Language, the Philippines' language agency. While his work focuses mainly on creating Latin script-based orthographies, he also wants to learn more about indigenous scripts and their importance in the empowerment and recognition of indigenous/minoritized communities of the Philippines. Besides scripts, his research interests are multilingualism, language documentation, language policies and support, and languages in the Philippines in general (both signed and spoken).
Evan is a recent graduate of New College of Florida, where she majored in Anthropology and Art History. She is interested in archival and museum collections, and especially the process by which the past is created and preserved in the present through tangible and intangible heritage. She is extremely excited to become involved in this project and looks forward to the opportunity to work with the Endangered Alphabets team to further its aim to keep languages alive and accessible.
Ewen holds a BA in Linguistics and German Studies, and specializes in endangered language documentation and revitalization. His research interests are mainly centered around phonetics and phonology, and his ultimate goal is to work on under-documented Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas and its surrounding regions. For the Endangered Alphabets Project, he will predominantly be handling the scripts of South Asia.
Ishita studies mathematics and linguistics, and loves to learn. She is passionate about food, language and culture, and is always looking to find out more. She loves to read and enjoys solving math problems, and will be delighted if you ask for help with math homework. When she's not reading or doing math, you will find her (a) cooking, (b) binging Netflix or (c) curled up by the window with her dog in her lap and a cold coffee in her hand, looking at vintage fashion from around the world.
Miranda is a lifelong language learner, a true-bred Missourian, and a shameless promoter of all things Faroese. After studying and working in Journalism, she now teaches World Languages on Capitol Hill in Washington, DC. She loves to spend her summer breaks traveling abroad, meeting new people, tasting new foods and collecting memories and adventures. This year, while the world stands still, she is excited to help catalogue, celebrate and promote special scripts with the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets.
Born almost fifty years ago, grew up in Poland and Soviet Union. Lecturer in Chinese and Linguistics at Warsaw University. Studied both in China and Poland. Majored in Anthropology and Sinology. Currently mostly a language teacher, yet working on writing systems and their interaction with speech from semiotic, cognitive, linguistic and visual art perspective in Sign and Symbol research group. Amateur calligrapher, stage performer, poetry lover and SF aficionado.
Walter is a Brazilian linguist who specialises in writing systems-both his Master's Thesis and PhD Dissertation were devoted to developing a romanization (transcription, transliteration) system from the Arabic abjad to the Latin alphabet. His first contact with a non-Latin script was during his childhood, when he started learning Japanese and realised letters such as A, B, and C weren't everything there was to written communication. He hasn't stopped since and up until now has, to a greater or lesser extent, expanded his knowledge of writing systems to encompass alphabets, abjads, syllabaries and even music notation ♪