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Literal symbols for a post-literate world
Tim Lee
March 09, 2025
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Our cultural landscape is looking more and more like a post-literate desert. We are losing the intrinsic meaning of words, struggling to define something as basic as “woman” without lapsing into circular reasoning or solipsistic definitions like “someone who identifies as a woman.”
Overuse of technology is turning out a generation more at home with emojis than the alphabet. Messages in semi-literate sentences are displacing face-to-face or phone conversations. And writing an email or (gasp!) a letter with more than a few coherent sentences is a dying art.
Our cultural and technological silos of Babel are splintering our heritage of language, leaving us unable to understand one another at the most basic level. Some people use words with quite different meanings from what they meant yesterday. But words are important. They are the building blocks of rationality and communication. A paradox of the global village is that we are increasingly dealing with one another across linguistic chasms.
Can a universal script be developed using symbols to denote concepts independent of their sounds in spoken language? This idea is at least 400 years old. The 17th century philosopher and mathematician Leibniz envisaged a universal written language (characteristica universalis) akin to the notations for maths or music in their respective domains:
“And although learned men have long since thought of some kind of language or universal characteristic by which all concepts and things can be put into beautiful order, and with whose help different nations might communicate their thoughts and each read in his own language what another has written in his, yet no one has attempted a language or characteristic which includes at once both the arts of discovery and judgement, that is, one whose signs and characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers, and algebraic signs for quantities taken abstractly. Yet it does seem that since God has bestowed these two sciences on mankind, he has sought to notify us that a far greater secret lies hidden in our understanding, of which these are but the shadows.”
The 900 pictograms of Blissymbols are perhaps the nearest thing there is to a “purely visual, speech-less language”. It found a niche as a bridge to spoken language for children with cerebral palsy. A more recent invention is iConji, a set of apps built around 1,200 icons “culled from base words used in common daily communications, word frequency lists, often-used mathematical and logical symbols, punctuation symbols, and the flags of all nations.”
None of these invented languages has proven to be elegant and intuitive enough to attract a critical mass of users. Modern developments like the emojis used for text messaging do not constitute a self-contained language.
Without attempting to emulate these projects, I have developed a simple but not simplistic framework of pictographic logic as the basis for a universal script. My book Symese – Universal Symbolic Script, due to be published by mid-year, outlines an initial set of a thousand base symbols as the core of a script with an elegance and coherence lacking in a modern pictographic-rooted script like Chinese, whose glyphs have lost much of their pictographic lineage.
Following a set of principles based on English vocabulary but consistent with mentalese, Symese uses a set of root syms (Symese symbols) to represent basic concepts. The syms are modified, augmented or combined into derivative or compound syms.
Symese may evolve into a living language or it may fill a niche as an auxiliary tool for cross-cultural communication. As with doodling and emojis, it offers a visual gateway to thought, with back-to-basics semantics that cuts through layers of complexity embedded in natural languages, like the complex spelling and etymological nuances of many English words.
Written language developed along two streams – phonographic and pictographic. In the first stream, alphabets denote the sound of words, as in English, Greek or Arabic. In the second stream, glyphs (symbols) represent whole words or concepts. Chinese and hieroglyphics are nominally pictographic with phonetic elements. Hieroglyphs are a mix of pictograms and rebus words that use glyphs for their phonetic value. Most Chinese characters consist of a pictographic-rooted radical and a phonetic component.
No modern language is purely pictographic. Phonographic scripts have the advantage of a simple framework in which a small set of alphabets (24 in Greek, 26 in English, 28 in Arabic) are combined into thousands of words and provide a direct link to spoken language. Pictographic scripts bridge the tangible and intangible with symbols derived from images. As proto-pictographic scripts developed across time and space, they were stylised and expanded to represent sophisticated concepts, with their pictographic roots all but indiscernible.
My quest to develop a universal symbolic script has been inspired by the beauty of hieroglyphics and the Chinese script. The latter bridges many spoken dialects and appear even in other languages like Japanese and Korean. Notwithstanding syntactical and semantic differences in the use of Chinese characters across dialects and languages, can we achieve today on a global scale what ancient civilisations did at a local level?
The lack of a direct link to the spoken word explains both the complexity and the beauty of a language like Chinese. In a stylised pictogram like 人 (person), 大 (big) and 天 (sky), we can discern the outline of a person on two legs, a horizontal stroke (outstretched arms) added to denote “big” and a second horizontal stroke (the expanse above) added to denote “sky”. The pictographic roots of other characters like 上, 下, 口and 中 (up, down, mouth and middle) are also quite obvious. To deal with the difficulty of representing abstract concepts, the pictograms were increasingly stylised and a phonetic component was introduced. The pictographic roots of most Chinese characters are a lot less evident than in the examples here.
Is it possible to construct a simple system of symbols with a pictographic link to the concept denoted by each symbol? To denote basic concepts with a few hundred symbols that can be augmented or combined into thousands of compound symbols to represent more complex concepts? To develop a script whose logic is self-evident and elegant enough to attract a critical mass of users? To capture the poetry of words in the sound of silence?
Yes, it is.
Find out more from my website, which provides a sample of basic symbols and an opportunity to be involved in the evolution of a universal language. You may leave a comment or subscribe to be part of the conversation. https://www.symese.com
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Tim Lee is the Comments Editor for Mercator.
Image credits: Egyptian hieroglyph on limestone 1500-1200 BC / Bigstock
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Tim Lee published this page in The Latest 2025-03-09 20:47:34 +1100
