Friend of the Museum Tim Brookes has published a book of Sudoku puzzles using endangered alphabets. He has shared a sample with us for your puzzle-solving fun. The introduction to this book explains more.
Introduction
Why endangered alphabet sudoku?
In almost every corner of the world, there are communities with their own writing system — alphabets, pictographs, other forms of writing — that has been forced to the brink of extinction.
More than 90% of the world’s writing systems are in this critical situation. When a script falls into disuse, the entire written record of that culture — sacred texts, poems, personal correspondence, histories, the collective collected wisdom of that people — is lost. And with it goes much of their sense of history, identity, self-respect, and purpose.
It’s a cultural and spiritual catastrophe. Research all over the world shows that under these circumstances the extent and quality. of education, average birth weight and life expectancy go down, while levels of infant mortality, homelessness and incarceration, and even suicide go up.
Conversely, some communities have tried to gain a sense of linguistic pride and cultural identity by inventing their own writing systems, but those scripts struggle for acceptance in the face of those of more powerful neighbors.
The Endangered Alphabets Project is the only organization in the world promoting and supporting marginalized scripts. We do that by compiling the Atlas of Endangered Alphabets (endangeredalphabets.net), by raising awareness, by providing technical help, by promoting the artwork of typographers and calligraphers breathing new life into their culture’s letterforms — and by making games …
. . .like these sudoku, which open the player’s eyes to what it must be like to be out of our depth in a country that uses a different language or script. An endangered alphabet sudoku shows us all too vividly how hard it is to process unfamiliar written symbols. It’s hard enough to recognize and identify the symbols themselves one by one, but trying to scan the mass of glyphs to pick up likely combinations is extraordinarily difficult. We may feel baffled, overwhelmed, angry, foolish, resentful. This is the challenge many minorities, refugees and immigrants face every day.
Hint: in the face of this challenge, I tackle these puzzles by assigning each symbol a number from 1-9, solve the puzzle using symbols I know well, then convert them back to the endangered alphabet symbols. But you may not want to
take such short cuts!
Either way, have fun, fellow geeks!
Tim Brookes
Founder, the Endangered Alphabets Project
www.endangeredalphabets.com
Sudoku is a number puzzle where the goal is to fill in a 9×9 grid with numbers 1–9 so that each row, column, and 3×3 quadrant has exactly one of each number.
In Tim’s version, instead of the numbers 1-9 you have nine different letters or characters from a particular minority script. But you’re still trying to do the same thing: make sure that each row, column, and 3×3 quadrant has exactly one of each symbol. For your convenience, the pdf below may be printed or print the sudoku grid here.
Balinese Alphabet SudokuText and puzzle © Endangered Alphabets Sudoku by Tim Brookes – Percentage Possibility Publications $17.95 Available at https://www.endangeredalphabets.com/endangered-alphabetsmerchandise/