ABSTRACT
The logic of language carries us to the middle of the stream and drops us there. Arbitrary and conventional is a fitting description of distinctive sounds, less so of words, even less of sentences, and beyond that scarcely fits at all. The larger the scope, the looser and less arbitrary the structure. By digitizing the bottom layer into a tight system of signs, human communicators stumbled on a way to open the upper layers to more and more creative symbolism. The difference between a sign and a symbol, says the anthropologist Victor Turner, is that 'in symbols there is always some kind of likeness, in signs there need be no likeness'. Most signs were originally symbols, becoming signs as the original relationships began to fade. The letter A, from Greek alpha which was in turn from the Semitic aleph, originally represented the head of an ox; but as a letter of the alphabet it lost the useless metaphor.
