ABSTRACT
Differing language systems provide clear evidence of the effects that various notational options bring about. Let us begin with a repertoire of simple, angular strokes, as shown here. With them we can approximate the word for “flower” in English and Chinese/Japanese:
An examination of the elements in these two representations clarifies an important distinction between them. In English, the marks (1) are used to create letters (2) which combine into the correct phonemes (3) to make up a word (4) that represents an unambiguous class of objects (or a process). If we note the possible linearly consistent combinations of phonemes that can be extracted from the whole word “flower,” however, we see that they have no necessary connection to each other: flower, flow, lower, low, owe, ow, we.
