Get the latest tech news
The Script Creator
Pau Cin Hau dreamt of an alphabet for a language that had never been written down. So began the religion of Laipianism
‘I stood alone in my faith for three years during which time the members of my own family, even, reviled instead of encouraging me,’ Pau Cin Hau told J J Bennison, the superintendent of census operations in Burma, recounting the early days of the movement. Pau Cin Hau’s monotheistic teachings had already popularised the idea of one supreme being, Pathian, and made the community ready to accept the missionary translators’ semantic reconfiguration of the term to refer to the Christian God. Writing in 1967, Banks had suggested that Pau Cin Hau’s script is a case of ‘stimulus diffusion’: a local adaptation of the missionary idea of the centrality of the text in preaching the gospel, drawn from the Protestant theological doctrine of ‘ sola scriptura ’.
Or read this on Hacker News