Th Fnny Thng

The human mind is an amazing thing, and we don’t give ourselves enough credit. Take something as simple as reading and understanding text.

In our English speaking world we take for granted that sounds can be transliterated into phonemes formed by (more or less) predictable combinations of letters, that the phonemes can be jammed together in (more or less) logical patterns, and the whole may be reduced to pages of writing that anyone with a Grade Four education can cipher.

Generally speaking, in English and most Western languages we have the notion that each idea should have its own word, and that words should stand independently. But this pattern is not universal. Many languages are agglomerative, that is, they mash many ideas together into a single word, roughly comparable to an English phrase. Still, they’re composed of letters, so you can more or less sound them out.

But while most Indo-European languages use sound-based alphabets, perhaps half of all humans use writing systems based on symbols that stand for ideas, unrelated to their sound. Thus, the Japanese word yama and the Mandarin word shan both mean mountain, are represented by the same symbol, but clearly are spoken very differently. If you find this odd, consider that I will look at a red octagon and think “Stop!”, and a francophone will think “arrête”. But both of us will step on the brakes and bring our cars to a halt. Same symbol, different sounds, same idea, same result.

There may even be more to the story. We have available to us thousands of examples of complex knotwork from the Inca civilization (https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg23931972-600-we-thought-the-incas-couldnt-write-these-knots-change-everything/) , plainly used for sophisticated accounting and communicating, but in the absence of a Rosetta Stone, we have little idea what they mean, or even much of a clue where to begin. If we can’t decipher what these fellow humans were saying, why would we think we could become penpals with the Romulan Galaxy?

Although we do prefer things to be predictable and to follow the rules, when it comes to communicating, the turth is tht our minds are nmble enogh to srot it out evn wehn th ruels ar nto follwed.