Peter McCarey is grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for a residency at Bellagio in summer 2015, and to the Hawthornden Castle Trust for a fellowship in the spring of that year.

He thanks Eric Hamlin for the programming and digital design.

Special thanks are due to Richard Price for staunch support over decades, and for regularly publishing extracts from the work in Painted, Spoken.

Other extracts have appeared in many anthologies and publications, whose editors are thanked.

Parts have been performed in Scotland, Switzerland, Italy, England, France, Portugal, Germany, Russia, Montenegro, Macao/China and the United States of America. The author thanks the translators for their hard work.

In its last month, version three was viewed in twenty countries in Europe, and across the globe from Palau to Iceland, from Thailand to Brazil. My greetings to the readers in Mali.

The Syllabary is dedicated to Mariarosaria Cardines, without whom...