I've heard language can be defined as 'a system of signs commonly recognized by a group of individuals'.

However loose the definition, it suggests that if we identified these signs by making a wide sociological survey (including children and the aged of various cultures), we would have created a primitive human language commonly understood by nearly everyone in the world, no matter what is their mother tongue.

Put the images into a wiki, let people suggest new images for further surveys to collect a larger database.

The process of updating the wiki harboring these images could result in a useful universally intelligible language.

Eventually, the pictures could be assigned to unicode, and the input method editors (IMEs) developed to input the images by inputting the words of one's own mother tongue.
-- Inyuki, Mar 27 2008

Blissymbolics http://www.omniglot...g/blissymbolics.htm
Is this kinda' what you're going for? [Iidhaegn, Mar 27 2008]

Semasiography https://en.wikipedi.../wiki/Semasiography
Oh look—another idea this link fits on [notexactly, Apr 16 2018]

1 We're missing the "system" part. This method will get a bunch of signs, but without a grammar connecting them, they're very limited in what they can express.

2 There are a lot of useful words that it's hard to make a drawing for. ("Today", "be", "I".) We can all come up with signs for those, but not with ones that everybody will understand in the same way that they'll understand "flower".

3 Putting things into a Wiki does not automatically evolve them. *Using* things evolves them. Groups who use communication systems have a tendency to exclude others: deliberately or accidentally, they make shortcuts for themselves that outsiders don't understand. Existing languages are the endpoints of such evolutions.
-- jutta, Mar 27 2008


You're also assuming that for any given concept it will be possible to find an "image" which will be "understood by diverse range of people" - I don't see why it should be.
-- hippo, Mar 27 2008


So something like ISO hieroglyphics used on signage, then?
-- RayfordSteele, Mar 27 2008


That definition //signs commonly recognized// is a bit weaselly. Consider a sort of neighing sound. It may be recognized by a Greek, a Netherlander, and a Japanese. However, they will recognize the same sound as meaning "yes", "no" and "innit?". Or possibly "I am a horse".

If you ask your diverse range of people "Do you understand this sign, yes or no?" then you will hit this problem. If, on the other hand, you ask them "What do you understand this sign to mean?" then your new language will simply be a remapping of whichever language you used to compare their answers.
-- pertinax, Apr 17 2018



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