the lorm alphabet. [memories]

the lorm aphabet

just recently i found this little slip of paper again, with the alphabet on it that was invented by hieronymus lorm. named after him, lorm is a hand-touch alphabet that was developed for deafblind people in the 19th century and is still used today, predominently in german speaking countries. 

when i looked at the alphabet i had to think of my sister. growing up, my siblings and i invented our own secret alphabet that we were soon able to write and read pretty well - although writing with our own alphabet has always been much easier that reading it afterwards. so we wrote each other notes and letters that were not decipherable by our parents. not that we ever wrote something in these notes that truly needed to be kept secret but oh were we proud of being able to do so anyway. 

my very first tattoo

for me our alphabet is inextricably linked to my childhood, the place where i grew up and to my brother and my sister. when i decided on what my first tattoo was going to be i knew it had to be written in these letters that were invented by us. i don't know if my brother would still be able to use them, however, my sister and i sure am. just recently i included a piece of writing in our alphabet as a clue during a scavenger hunt and she had no trouble understanding the note. both of us have always been interested in communication or rather in ways of communication we were not used to such as sign language, braille writing, morse code and so on. she now is a speech therapist while i study linguistics.... 

anyway, i can remember vividly how my sister and i were sitting in the train to zurich a couple years back, trying to write in each others hands - using the lorm alphabet. it was challenging, to say the least. i have always been more of a visual person and taking that sense away and suddenly focusing on another one that we were so not used to is difficult and we soon gave up on trying to communicate this way. however, i feel like it is a worthwhile thing to try to learn and master new things. so let's get started with it yet again! i do hope to be more persistent this time around.