Why it exists

The particular ways a people says things are going. This is what homogenisation looks like up close: children grow up out of what their families came from without anyone deciding it, and a town learns to sell a shortened version of itself. Much of what was said survives only in collections almost nobody opens.

What it is for

Teltu sets those sayings down properly and puts them where people now read. The aim is that every people with a printed collection has a card, and that the people who know each tradition are the ones correcting it.

A reader meets somebody else’s saying each day, in that people’s own words, and comes away with the particular thing rather than a lesson about how everyone is the same. A child and a retired professor can read the same card and both take something from it.

What it will not do

It will not fold one tradition into another, or tidy an original into something more convenient. It will not guess at a people when the collector could not name one; where nothing survives, it says so. It will not put anyone’s name on a card without asking. And it will not carry advertising, because a card built to hold your attention is a worse card.

Given, not taken

Most of what reaches a person in a day is built to extract something from them. Attention is harvested rather than fed.

A card is the other kind of thing. One saying, its own words, who wrote it down and when. You read it, you learn something true, and it is finished.

Nothing is trying to keep you.

How the work is done

Every book is checked for its terms before a line is taken from it. Where a collection is still in copyright, the aim is to pay for permission rather than leave a tradition out because its best book is too recent to be free, and that is where the money goes first as Teltu grows. The collector whose name is on the spine is named, and so are the people who gave him the sayings, where the record keeps them, including those later editions dropped. Anyone who helps us now is named on the card if they want to be, and not if they do not.

The price

$3.99 a month, or $29.99 a year. It is not free, because free would mean advertising, and advertising would make the card worse. Subscriptions keep the work going. Donations go further: permissions, translations, a scholar’s time.

Who pays

Teltu is paid, and the price is set for people who can afford it. Where it is genuinely out of reach, we would rather find a way than let cost be the reason somebody never sees this, and that is done through schools and charities, which open it for the people they serve. Someone paying a few pounds a month in London is part of why a classroom somewhere else gets it for nothing. None of this is in place yet.

In more than English

Teltu should be read in more than English. A Twi proverb glossed in English and read by a Ghanaian reader has gone through one more language than it needed to. The intention is cards in other languages, written by people who speak them, which means paying translators and editors rather than running text through a machine. Nothing is in place yet, and it is one of the things donations are for.

The name

The name is the Akkadian word for a proverb, têltu. Akkadian was written on clay in Mesopotamia, where scribes kept the oldest proverb collections yet found, nearly four thousand years ago.