Category: Writing, fonts & typography

Language of icons

By Simon

Example of Xu Bing's Language of Icons

Any ideas what these symbols/icons might mean?

According to an article I came across today, this text means:

Chinese artist Xu Bing has ideas about how people communicate. Different people in different countries should speak one language. Xu Bing wrote a new language. It uses pictures not words. It looks like Egyptian script meets Madison Avenue.

This text was produced by software developed by a Chinese artist called Xu Bing, who has also produced a storybook written entirely with this script. He was inspired by the icons that appear on the safety cards you find in aeroplanes and by icons and symbols found on various products, which aim to get their message across graphically without using any particular language. He believes that, “Regardless of cultural background, one should be able understand the text as long as one is thoroughly entangled in modern life.” Would you agree?

Yesterday I tried to work out which of the symbols on my washing machine means ‘spin’, and managed to do so, though the meanings of the other symbols are not immediately obvious. I eventually tracked down a copy of the instruction manual online, so now know what they all mean.

There are been various attempts to create universal symbolic writing systems comprehensible to anybody regardless of which language(s) they speak, especially during the 19th century. The only one that is currently used, that I’m aware of, is Blissymbolics. They tend to accumulate huge numbers of symbols and have trouble representing abstract concepts, and they are often inspired by the Chinese script, based on the mistaken idea that written Chinese respresents ideas rather than sounds and is comprehensible to all literate Chinese people, no matter which variety of Chinese they speak.

Musket inscription puzzle

By Simon

Here is a mysterious inscription on a musket that was posted on the Omniglot fan club recently:

Mysterious musket inscription

See a larger version of this image.

The person who sent this in the asked me to post the image here with this analysis from Christopher Ray Miller:

I think this is more likely in the Kaithi script, which is closely related to modern Gujarati script, both being descended from informal styles of writing Nāgarī (before it gained the “Deva-” prefix). Although in most 19th and 20th century examples of Kaithi, the ‹l› letter looks more or less like a cursive Greek Theta, there are a few examples of it with the same ‘C-I’ shape as Gujarati that we see herein the second and fourth positions from the end.

What makes me think this is probably Kaithi is the ‹v› just below the right end of the metallic attachment on the top of the gun. It is the same basic shape as ‹w› in Gujarati and Devanagari, but has a small circle below it, which corresponds to the dot/nuqta diacritic for ‹v› in Kaithi, the only thing distinguishing it from ‹b›. (The two letters merged because in most languages of northeastern India, the older distinct /v/ and /b/ phonemes merged into /b/, just like in Spanish, for example.

The letter just above the second ‘0’ and above and to the left of the ‘9’ shape (probably the numeral ‘1’) seems to be an early version of ‹j›, more similar to the old Nāgarī shape than the 19th-20th century Kaithi shape, which is like a ‘S’ rotated 90º. The letter just to the right of the putative ‹j› looks very much to be the Kaithi ‹a› letter.

I imagine this is in one of the languages of northeastern India that commonly used Kaithi script, e.g. Bhojpuri, Maithili, Awadhi and others.

Can anybody translate the inscription and/or add anything to this?

Txtng n N’ko

By Simon

There’s an interesting article in the New York Times about how it is now possible to send text messages and emails in N’Ko, an alphabet invented in 1949 to write Mande languages of Guinea, Mali and Ivory Coast. Thanks to various iPhone apps and other software use of this alphabet is increasing. It also helps that N’Ko is included in Unicode – here are some examples.

N’ko Unicode fonts are available here and here.