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The puzzle of ideography
1Max Planck Institute for Geoanthropology, Minds and Traditions Research Group, Jena, Germany morin@shh.mpg.de; https://www.shh.mpg.de/94549/themintgroup.
The Behavioral and Brain Sciences
|October 18, 2022
Summary
Creating general-purpose picture codes (ideographies) is challenging because they require standardization. Unlike spoken languages, graphic codes lack easy communication repair, necessitating narrow specialization for viability.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
- Semiotics
Background:
- Ideographies are general-purpose picture codes for information encoding.
- Viable ideographies are rare, suggesting inherent difficulties in their creation.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate why fully generalist graphic codes are difficult to develop.
- To propose an alternative explanation for the challenges in creating ideographies.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual analysis of graphic codes and writing systems.
- Comparison of communication properties between graphic codes, spoken languages, and signed languages.
Main Results:
- Self-sufficient ideographies must be narrowly specialized.
- Writing systems are specialized notations of spoken language, not truly generalist graphic codes.
- The primary difficulty in creating graphic codes is standardization, not learnability.
Conclusions:
- The lack of easy online repair and reliance on shared context makes standardization difficult for graphic codes.
- Spoken and signed languages overcome standardization issues through transient signals and face-to-face interaction.
- Graphic codes are consequently more specialized and limited in scope.
Keywords:
graphic communicationideographyliteracynumerical notationsrepairsemasiographysemioticssign languagewritingMore Related Videos
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