Olivier Morin
Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History, Jena
Solving the Puzzle of Ideography
Abstract
Ideographic signs (±,☺,1, $, ©) encode a concept without encoding a specific word in a natural language. Unlike spoken or signed words, they are enduring static images. Unlike the core symbols of writing systems, they do not represent the words, morphemes or phonemes of a spoken language. Ideographic signs may be used as complements to a writing system (as in the sentence "this iPad© cost $1000"), or they may be organised into stand-alone codes, like musical or mathematical notations.
Such ideographic codes differ from writing systems in two ways. First, most of them are narrowly domain-specific: musical notations can only encode music; mathematical notations, road signs, are similarly restricted. Second, those rare ideographic codes that can encode information on a wide range of topics (e.g., the pictographic notations used to encode shamanic chants in several cultures) tend to serve mnemonic purposes rather than communicative ones. The codes once considered to be all-purpose ideographic systems turn out to be regular writing systems, where the vast majority of frequently used symbols encode words, morphemes or phonemes, not directly ideas. (Some Chinese characters may stand for one word and its translation in several other languages, but that is thanks either to auxiliary linguistic notations, or to substantial morpheme-level similarities between related Sinitic-languages words.) The near-absence of widespread, all-purpose ideographic codes is a puzzle. This talk will discuss two types of solutions to it. The first type emphasises the practical difficulties of using an all-purpose ideography. A typical spoken language has distinct lexemes numbering in the tens of thousands. All known writing systems (including Chinese) manage to reduce this complexity drastically by encoding words at the level of morphemes, syllables, or phonemes. This would not be an option for an ideographic code: its users would need to memorise a vast number of distinct shapes, each one complex enough to be distinctive; to store them mentally in such a way that they could easily be recalled; to spend energy and resources inscribing them on suitable material.
This talk will argue that these obstacles are not insuperable. Instead, it will claim that general-purpose ideographies, though viable, struggle to evolve, because the form of communication they are most adapted to is not suited to the collaborative design and gradual improvement of symbols that interactive conversations allow. The main advantage of graphic communication, compared to speaking or signing, is asynchrony: the capacity to transmit information in one go across vast distances of time or space. Yet asynchrony does not allow for repair; it makes pragmatic disambiguation and interactive alignment difficult. The conventions for using graphic symbols thus cannot evolve spontaneously, but must be explicitly taught and maintained. Codes specialised to represent numbers, musical notes, or the sounds of languages may be established in this way, but not the vast, complex repertoire of pictographs that would constitute a general-purpose ideography.
