Symbols do not come from nowhere. Not at first. Early hieroglyphic systems have connections to the world. Even in the highly sophisticated and abstracted hanzi characters of the modern Chinese logographic system, we see the traces of those relations—like the character for person, 人, which depicts a figure, however simplified, recognizably related to a standing human. Language is abstract, yes—but it emerges from real relations with real things in the world and bears the traces of that ancient relationship. These traces will be the keys to deciphering the symbols of another species—if only we
...more
