In Vitro Scriptogenesis: Inventing Writing in a Classroom
By: Felipe Rojas and Stephen Houston
For the past ten years, the authors have co-taught a class at Brown University on the history of writing systems. As a final class project, they have required their students to invent their own logo-syllabic scripts. Currently, the authors have an archive of over one hundred newly invented systems produced in this artificial and tightly controlled academic setting.
Using that archive, we analyze patterns and exceptions in the types of scripts produced by students. We also compare these systems to other secondary script inventions, both those logo-syllabic scripts invented in situations of highly asymmetrical cultural contact (e.g., in 19th-century Africa or in the colonial Americas) and so-called “con-scripts”, invented for the fantasy worlds of movies and video-games.
