Baybayin originally was carved with the tip of a knife in bamboo, so the letters of this alphabet from the Philippines are thin and curving.

Bugis, or Buginese, avoids long straight lines and circles, because it was once carved into palm leaves by the people of Sulawesi; long strokes would cut through the fabric of the leaves, and circles would leave a hole.

Inuktitut, created to represent the languages of the Cree and Ojibwa of Canada, looks a bit like math, perhaps because it was developed by an English missionary who was trained in shorthand.

Each of these alphabets has a unique personality and often an elegant beauty, yet each also is in danger of extinction as globalization — and especially the spread of computers — increasingly has us speaking and writing the same few languages.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, spearheaded by Vermont-based travel writer Tim Brookes, is an attempt to keep these rare creatures alive by calling attention to their peril.

Over the last year or so, Brookes has gathered sample text in 13 rare alphabets from around the world and carved and painted each example by hand onto individual slabs of Vermont maple. The 13 completed plaques will be displayed together for the first time next weekend in the Champlain Mill in Winooski.

The reactions of those who've had a sneak preview of the plaques, in person or on the Web, reveal a fascination with the obscure writing, says Brookes. He explains it with "sort of the Stonehenge theory."

As with the ancient slabs there, we don't know what these symbols mean, but clearly they mean something.

"They challenge you to sort of understand, while at the same time remaining forever mysterious," Brookes says.

The act of trying to make sense of them is magnetic, he has discovered.

A companion book scheduled for publication in June will take the mystery further, exploring the nature of writing itself: how it develops, what it expresses beyond the words' meaning, and how rapid changes in technology are affecting it.

According to Brookes, who also teaches and heads the publishing program at Champlain College in Burlington, half of the world's more than 6,000 languages are expected to be extinct by the end of this century. Already, those 6,000-plus languages are written using fewer than 100 alphabets, of which about a third are considered endangered — that is, no longer used in public life or taught in schools, or understood by only a few elders.

What's being lost are the "ornamental-barbed-wire configuration," as Brookes describes it, of Manchu, which he says it's estimated only 20 people can read and write; the wave-like undulations of Baybayin; and the 74 "ornate and complicated" letters of Khmer, from Cambodia.

In addition to these, the project has preserved samples of Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, Bassa Vah, Bugis, Cherokee, Inuktitut, Mandaic, Pauauh Hmong, Samaritan, Tifinagh and Balinese.

Brookes has described the alphabets as "a fascinating expression of the culture (or, in some cases, the individual) who created them." In a blog entry about the project, he explains how the origins of Bugis, Inuktitut and other alphabets influenced their forms, whether via the equivalents of pen and paper first used for them or the process by which they were developed.

The 13 alphabets in the exhibit (which includes a 14th language that may die out locally; more about that later) made the cut based on how endangered they are and whether a sample could be found depicting the standard wording he wanted to use. It's Article One of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted in 1948 by the United Nations: "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood."

Sort of a Cherokee or Manchu version of "The quick brown fox …" but with far more meaning. Indeed, global cooperation among strangers is what made the project possible, and the lack of it is one reason these languages are dying, Brookes notes.

His interest in endangered alphabets grew out of his penchant for making Christmas gifts. For the holiday in 2008 he carved an old-fashioned wooden "shingle" for his wife to hang outside her therapy practice. Soon he got into Chinese characters and made everyone in his family a Chinese monogram.

A search for another language to carve led him to the website omniglot.com, a guide to the writing systems and languages of the world. Many of them, it explains, are in danger of extinction.

To Brookes, the solid permanence of a thick piece of Vermont maple seemed like the perfect medium for a last-ditch effort to raise awareness: "These languages are endangered – let's create something that's lasting," he says of the impulse.

(The plaques are pretty much unbreakable, he says, noting that he's dropped several of them.)

And here's where the tale encounters a paradox that's not lost on him. The same forces of technology that are killing off languages are in other ways contributing to saving them.

Many alphabets that are hanging on survive because someone was hired to create a standardized version for computer use, Brookes says. And e-mail was crucial to his collecting examples. Many bits of sample text found online, often Article One of the rights declaration, use the same Latin alphabet that we do instead of the particular language's own letters.

Brookes e-mailed anyone he could find connected with endangered languages. Someone in Bali who can still write Balinese supplied that script. Bassa Vah, which was once used in Liberia, also came from a person still literate in the language, who wrote it out, scanned it and e-mailed it to him.

Brookes would enlarge each printout and use carbon paper to transfer it to the slab for carving.

He's still hoping to add more.

A contact in Africa is working on getting him a sample of Shü-mom. It may have to come directly from the son of the late king of the Bamum people in Cameroon, who invented the language in 1896 while the country was under German control, according to omniglot.com. The king asked his people to send in samples of symbols he could use as letters, says Brookes. "Even though he was the king doing it, it was incredibly democratic."

In the early 20th century Cameroon passed into French control, and the French saw the language as a threat, leading to the exile of the king and the destruction of the library and printing press he had established.

Now the king's son is trying to preserve the language and surviving documents.

As Brookes has added each sample, he's faced a quandary: How does he know it's accurate? When he can't understand any of these languages, he's dependent on trust in others and in technology.

He knows of two mistakes in his Cherokee plaque because he carved it from a badly pixilated sample found on a website. But to Brookes, that's part of the point. "What they show is how fragile a script is by the time it becomes endangered," because almost no one can say whether it's right.

That's what's starting to happen right in Vermont with Maay Maay, the language of Somali Bantu refugees who have settled in Winooski and the 14th tongue represented in next weekend's exhibit.

As Brookes relates it, the Somali Bantu have long been marginalized, and now their children are turning to English instead of their native language. To honor them and their heritage, he made a plaque showing Article One in Maay Maay, although it's done in Latin letters. Someday, it may no longer be spoken in Vermont.

"There's actually gong to be language endangerment taking place in our own back yard," he says.