Signs and (Mis)Communications

Posted on Thu 20th Jun, 2019 @ 2:06pm by Anne da Silva

613 words; about a 3 minute read

Mission: A Diplomatic Affair
Location: Shake 'n' Slake Diner, Tivoli Gardens
Timeline: MD 4, 17:10

There was an awkward silence between Aiko and Yucholl as Anne walked away with their order. Yucholl fiddled with the menu. "It's difficult to come up with a completely new thing," she commented.

"Sorry?" Aiko responded.

"Take writing, for example. Every writing system of which I am aware is two-dimensional. Maybe two and a half, if you take into account incised or raised inscriptions. But we live in a society where holography is common-place. Wouldn't you think that someone would come up with truly three-dimensional glyphs? Not just extrusions of the two-dimensional versions?"

Aiko gave the question serious consideration. "One of the writing systems used by my ancestors used ideographs." She wet her fingertip and drew the character 雨 on the counter. "That's 'rain.' You can see the doors, and the roof of the house, and looking out at the falling drops."

Yucholl tilted her head, considering the glyph, and nodded.

"I'm not sure that adding a third dimension would add to the information content." Aiko sketched the character 木. "Tree," she explained. "You could rotate it, but would that tell you more than the flat character does?"

Yucholl took a serviette and wiped the counter, looking thoughtful. "But what if you used that third dimension to encode additional information, like the species of the tree, or the season of the year in which you are viewing, or have viewed, the tree?"

Aiko shrugged. "One of the reasons that writing system," she indicated the counter where her watery sigils had been, "isn't used anymore is that it's not very flexible. You have to know thousands of characters to discuss philosophy or physics or any other complicated topic. When you read, there's a lot of picking up indirect cues to the author's meaning. I think the kind of writing you're talking about would be even more...." She frowned, trying to come up with the right word.

Anne had begun rolling sets of silverware into napkins while the two girls conversed. By now she had a neat pile of six bundles and now started on a seventh one. "I think I agree with Aiko here," she said. "Writing needs to be fast and efficient. If you're telling me you want bacon and eggs, you want me to note the information and get that food out to you fast. You don't want me to have to specify within each symbol bacon from pigs raised on Earth, versus any other possible origin world, or brown eggs versus white, cage-free versus farm-raised, or whatever. What you're talking about might be useful for archived information, if you want to convey the most data with the fewest penstrokes or keystrokes. Otherwise, simple alphabets work really well for conveying information. Once you have an alphabet, the next big hurdle to overcome is making the grammar as streamlined and efficient as possible."

She tucked the napkin ends into another bundle of silverware. "What I mean by that is, even when grammar is substandard, we can often understand what a person is trying to say. So that kind of tells us that some parts of grammar are unnecessarily complicated or just plain unnecessary. The Russian language on Earth, for instance, doesn't use articles. I suspect Klingon Battle Language is the same, isn't it?"

Yucholl shrugged. "I'm not Klingon; I wouldn't know." She sounded, Aiko thought, a little dispirited that her idea had been shot down so quickly and thoroughly.

Aiko took a sip of her water, cleared her throat, and said, "Yucholl, listen..." before trailing off, stymied by the enormity of the things she had to say.

"You keep saying that," Yucholl observed dryly. "But Aiko, I am always listening to you."

 

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