[aboriginal pedagogy and language]

I've just started reading Robert Bringhurst's The Solid Form of Language. A fantastic read and the book itself is a beatiful artifact, all texture and typography, just demanding to be touched.The image of the book on the left is from phil dokas on flickr. He's done a great job of capturing the texture of the book. "Drop a word in the ocean of meaning and concentric ripples form. To define a single word means to try to catch those ripples. No one’s hands are fast enough." ... poet, typographer and linguist Robert Bringhurst presents a brief history of writing and a new way of classifying and understanding the relationship between script and meaning.

Beginning with the original relationship between a language and its written script, Bringhurst takes us on a history of reading and writing that begins with the interpretation of animal tracks and fast-forwards up to the typographical abundance of more recent times. The first four sections of the essay describe the earliest creation of scripts, their movement across the globe and the typographic developments within and across languages.

In the fifth and final section of the essay, Bringhurst introduces his system of classifying scripts. Placing four established categories of written language – semographic, syllabic, alphabetic and prosodic – on a wheel adjacent to one another, he uses the location, size and shape of points on the wheel to show the degree to which individual world languages incorporate these aspects of recorded meaning. Bringhurst’s system is based on an appreciation that indeed no one’s hands are fast enough and that no single script adheres to or can be understood within the confines of a single method of transcription."

As I'm reading this book on typographic and linguistic developments I also have learnt that First Nations peoples of Manitoba (I wonder if this is true for all First Nations peoples?) prefer to use language as their main identifier:

For me this seems to highlight the importance of an oral culture and the tradition of passing on history, stories, teachings - a kind of "collective memory" that wouldn't get passed on if there wasn't the knowledge of language.

Image above of "Plains Cree Inscription" at the Forks Park in Winnipeg, found on wikipedia.