Sunday, July 30, 2006

We usually think of alphabets as the building blocks of language, not as languages in themselves. We know many languages that are made from essentially the same alphabet, and after all, what would "a" or "b" mean? Which is exactly the point to consider. What if "a" or "b" had a meaning in addition to phonetic value? Then each letter of a word would contain its own significance, as well as contributing meaning to the whole. What if "a" or "b" had spellings themselves, with recursive hyperlinks to the meanings of those letters, and the letters of those letters? And what if it were necessary to read a word from both directions, or in different permutations of letters to understand its meaning? The best description for such a language might be "hyperlanguage" since all its components are hyperlinked to other components in nested recursions. Formal definition of the word "hyperlanguage" may not exist. One of Google's few general descriptions may suggest why:
Hyperlanguages transcend human languages in the same manner which human languages transcend the protolanguages of chimpanzees.

posted by Si_COMM @ 7/30/2006 11:37:00 AM

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