When a language becomes extinct, it takes with it more than just its words to a silent grave. With it disappear millennia of culture, knowledge, and tradition. Its unique interpretation of the world unravels and dies.

In Lost Words Lost Worlds, artist and literary translator Peter Constantine visually explores the alarming issue of language extinction through artworks he produced in 2022 and 2023. Along with the ecological catastrophe of animal and plant extinction, he warns against an Armageddon of two or three languages vying for supremacy, moving toward a barren monoculture of one world, one language.

In his artworks, human figures interact with extinct and lost words from Bronze Age Greece. There are explosions of color as these figures engage with ancient and forgotten hieroglyphs and logograms that emerged more than a millennium before the alphabet.

Photos © Sebastian Fröhlich

In some cases, we know a word’s meaning, but no longer its sound.

In some cases, we know a word’s sound, but no longer its meaning.

In some cases, we know neither its sound nor its meaning; all that remains are the silent lines and loops of the hieroglyph cut into stone or clay.

Each of Constantine’s works is an attempt to reach into and fathom a lost meaning. The extinct ancient words are returning to warn us of many more thousand language deaths if we do not take action.

Hardcover
24 x 24cm | 136 pages
ISBN: 978-3-947764-13-6
Publication date: 15.12.2024