:<i>Logic and the Art of Memory: The Quest for a Universal Language</i>

Serjeantson, Richard; Rossi, Paolo; Clucas, Stephen

doi:10.2307/20061616

Cited by 14 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The signed languages developed in silent monastic communities (Banham, 2015;Quay, 2015) belong to this category, although they were arguably less generalist and expressive, consisting in hundreds of symbols at the most, with little in the way of syntax or morphology. The potential of visual languages (gestured or visual) to bypass the barriers of language has long been recognized: People can use these codes without sharing a spoken idiom (Knowlson, 1965;Rossi, 2000).…”

Section: Unpacking the Puzzle Of Ideographymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The notion of a complete language consisting entirely of images referring directly to ideas without encoding words was until fairly recently a commonplace. Western philosophers such as Leibniz or Bacon were convinced that Chinese characters or Egyptian hieroglyphs were ideographic (Rossi, 2000). That is, the meanings they encoded were thought to be understood directly by anyone literate in these symbols, even without knowing the Egyptian or Chinese language.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…These ideographic languages proved exceedingly difficult to use for anyone, including their makers. John Wilkins's "philosophical language," Charles Bliss's Bliss symbolic, or Otto Neurath's picture language are the most famous examples (Lin & Biggs, 2006;Rossi, 2000). These multiple failures resulted in the widespread linguistic intuition, echoed in Chiang's short story, that full-blown ideographies are impossible.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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The puzzle of ideography

Morin

2022

Behav Brain Sci

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An ideography is a general-purpose code made of pictures that do not encode language, which can be used autonomously – not just as a mnemonic prop – to encode information on a broad range of topics. Why are viable ideographies so hard to find? I contend that self-sufficient graphic codes need to be narrowly specialized. Writing systems are only an apparent exception: at their core, they are notations of a spoken language. Even if they also encode non-linguistic information, they are useless to someone who lacks linguistic competence in the encoded language or a related one. The versatility of writing is thus vicarious: writing borrows it from spoken language. Why is it so difficult to build a fully generalist graphic code? The most widespread answer points to a learnability problem. We possess specialized cognitive resources for learning spoken language, but lack them for graphic codes. I argue in favor of a different account: what is difficult about graphic codes is not so much learning or teaching them as getting every user to learn and teach the same code. This standardization problem does not affect spoken or signed languages as much. Those are based on cheap and transient signals, allowing for easy online repairing of miscommunication, and require face-to-face interactions where the advantages of common ground are maximized. Graphic codes lack these advantages, which makes them smaller in size and more specialized.

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