Neoglyphic: a non-spoken language

Before we can start communicating with people in the future we need to have some idea of what we can and cannot take for granted about them, their technology, and their culture. They might well have time-keeping devices, but that doesn't mean they would sport the familiar clock face with hands, or the equally familiar digital display. It's unlikely that would even divide the day into 24 hours, or the hours into 60 minutes each.

Glancing through a book entitle German Through Pictures it seems like it would be reasonably easy to follow that approach with the language we are trying to teach our distant descendants. The problem is that so much of what is in a picture book like that one is heavily dependent on specific aspects of our culture which are not likely to last a few more decades, let alone ten or a hundred thousand years. In the first 6 pages of that book we see pictures of a hat, a bottle, and a chair. Even if we were to assume that future humans might have objects that fulfill those functions, we can't assume that any of those things would exist in a form similar to any picture we might draw today. Even the distinction between male and female figures in this 1953 book is based on clothing stereotypes which are already becoming obsolete (and would not work at all in ancient Rome, or Greece, or medieval Scotland, not to mention the present-day Middle East).

The language of mathematics is, of course, common to all times and places anywhere in the known universe and beyond. The problem is in knowing what we can assume about the mathematical sophistication of our target audience. In spite of their engineering marvels, the ancient Romans, Greeks and Egyptians knew nothing of simple calculus, and were not even familiar with the notion of place-valued numbering systems like decimal. How would we communicate in decimal notation with a culture that only used something like Roman numerals? Especially if that culture had never even been exposed to anything like the decimal number system.

If we do use mathematics, we must assume that not only do we need to teach them our symbols for the numbers, we have to teach them how to count using place-notation. In other words, we cannot assume that they would know that "3" in 803 has the value three, while "3" in "537" has the value thirty, and "3" in 3479 has the value three thousand. The same symbol, "3", can mean many different things depending on where it appears in the string of digits. And we must be sure that if they didn't understand that concept before, they must understand it when they reach that point in our document.

If we use care we should be able to teach the number system and our symbols for basic mathematical concepts like addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

LINCOS, a Universal Language for Communicating with Extraterrestrials, and Similar Projects

Hans Freudenthal, a Dutch mathematician studied in depth the problem of communicating with aliens when we share no language with them. His language, LINCOS, begins with elementary mathematical concepts and builds on that to teach the aliens how to converse with humans. To browse a few excerpts from the book, LINCOS, Follow this link.

Other attempts to create a self-teaching language/message include Lancelot Hogben's "Astraglossa", CosmicOS, and a list of others which all share the assumption that the beings on the receiving end have advanced scientific knowledge. Although they do not serve our present purpose, because they do not share our present assumptions (human plus scientifically naive vs non-human plus scientifically advanced), they are interesting in their own right, and bear further consideration.

To see an interesting example of a complete message to aliens, take a look at the 23-page Dutil-Dumas message.

The next most obvious class of words to teach our eager pupils is the class of common nouns for tangible objects we suspect might be recognizable to our distant descendants. Clearly, the objects we choose to depict should be of natural origin rather than man-made artifacts. The place to look for candidates is in the wild: trees, flowers, rivers, mountains, clouds, the moon, sun, and stars, for example.

The pictures themselves should be easily stamped or pressed into the writing medium the same way the language characters are. Only simple line drawings would meet that requirement.

Let's take as an example, the task of teaching the word for flower. We might use a drawing of a flower with the indented symbol included within the border that encloses the picture, as in the example at right.

In using this approach, however, we need to be sure that the reader does not make the mistake of taking the symbol to mean a particular species of flower. To accomplish this we might use several flower pictures, like those shown at left, each accompanied by the same "flower" symbol.

Once we establish the word for "flower" we might take the flower apart and learn the words for "petal", "stem" or "leaf". A similar technique could be used to assign a symbol for "person", which could then be used to name the parts like "head", "nose", "ear", "hand", "finger", and so on.

If, however, as was mentioned on page one, our intention is to preserve our advanced scientific and technical knowledge for future generations, we have to wonder just how far we can get with pictures of flowers and fingers? Somewhere along the line we will need to figure out how to build a decent working vocabulary of scientific and technological terms.

In order to do so we will need to understand the limitations of our medium, so that we will know just how detailed an illustration we can manage to include. Remember that to preserve this knowledge for thousands of years we cannot simply print it on a surface like paper, plastic, or metal. So we will need to select a method of recording the data, determine the probable manner in which that medium will degrade over thousands of years, and design a method of encoding that will withstand that degradation.

One of the first tangible steps, therefore, should be to explore which mediums are available, and perform some experiments in marking each medium and testing those marking for durability. Other first steps would include settling on a method of marking the medium, and deciding where the finished messages should be placed to keep them safe for a few thousand years. So before getting too far ahead of ourselves, we should take a little time to enumerate the various issues that need to be explored.

My first candidate is ceramic tiles, probably porcelain or stoneware, impressed with the text and then fired to its vitrification point. The first step, therefore, is to learn something about the process of working with and firing various types of clay, as well as the strength and durability characteristic of each clay. Of particular interest will be such characteristics as porosity, since any absorbed water subject to a freeze-thaw cycle will cause the tile to crack and crumble.

Several people have suggested using some corrosion-resistant metal such as stainless steel. My concern with that is re-usability of metals in general. If the tiles or plates can be cut, beaten, or melted into knife blades or arrow heads they are unlikely to survive. I would think it best to use a material that either cannot be easily adapted to another purpose, or which if so adapted would be used whole and unbroken. If the tiles were used to tile a floor or make a garden path, at least they would be more likely to be preserved in their original form, and so would still be available long after the secondary use was abandoned.

A similar consideration makes me think that it would be wise to impress the same message on both sides of each tile so that the message would not be lost by being buried face down in mortar. Even serving as floor tiles, their message would still be visible.

Then various methods for storing the tiles will need to be explored. For example, if porosity and freeze-thaw is an issue then it might be advisable to store the tiles in an oil bath of some kind. Of course that raises the question of how to contain the oil and tiles in a vessel that would last for thousands of years. Regardless of what material were to be chosen, consideration needs to be given to where the tablets or tiles would be placed for long-term storage. Man-made monuments and structures may not fair well over the course of thousands of years. On the other hand, there are cave paintings that were made over 32,000 years ago. Natural caves, therefor, are excellent candidates for hiding places for the tiles. Dry caves, especially, are naturally climate controlled, avoiding the hazards of freezing and thawing.

Another question is how to mark the ceramic tiles. Applying surface paints or glazes would not be satisfactory, since these would soon wear off. Pressing the glyphs and drawings into wet clay is one possibility. Another is carving them into dry but unfired clay. This could even be done with a computer controlled milling machine or router with a tiny bit. Perhaps a Dremel tool mounted to an x-y motion control device that could lift and drop the tool bit into the green clay as well as move it around in the necessary directions to draw the glyphs.

If the message is to have any chance of being preserved for thousands of years, and of being discovered thousands of years hence, there would have to be as many copies as possible of the message, stored in as many places as possible around the globe. Once a master copy of each tile had been carved with the markings, a mold could be created from which hundreds or thousands of copies could be mass produced by pouring slip (liquid clay) into the molds and firing the resulting copies.

Key to the success of this endeavor would be having a language that could be learned from scratch from nothing more than the documents themselves, yet which was sophisticated enough to explain reasonably advanced scientific and technological concepts. Designing and testing this language would be a major undertaking.

The final task would involve deciding which pieces of modern knowledge to preserve, and how to write the text that would teach that bit of knowledge to the future. Much of what today's society deems important, such as which celebrity is cheating on which other celebrity, or which political party is up to what kind of questionable conduct, would be of no practical value whatsoever to the future, and can safely be ignored as the meaningless noise it is.

Trying to teach religion to the future would likewise be a pointless waste of resources. They will have created their own religion by that time, and they might regard anything we tell them as ancient superstition, much the way we regard the Norse or Roman Gods and Goddesses. Worse yet, they might see our religious message as dangerous or blasphemous, motivating them to destroy the entirety of the text to protect their culture from "false gods".

As to whether scientific or technological knowledge is more important, that would depend on the circumstances the future readers of the document find themselves. At one point in the evolution of their culture and civilization it might be of vital importance for them to get the most efficiency possible out of their cooking and heating fuel, so teaching them to build a simple rocket stove might be appropriate. Whether the earth is round or flat might not make a bit of practical difference to them in such circumstances.

Pure science, for its own sake, should take a back seat to survival skills. The periodic table should be presented well after the workings of the steam engine have been documented. I'm sure many would argue with this philosophy, giving pure science a higher priority, but as a matter of practical reality, the study of abstract knowledge can only occur where those who might study such matters are surviving and reasonably well fed and housed. Survival and comfort must, therefore, be the first priority, since the study of science and philosophy is only possible where those higher priorities have already been met.

To make it easier to translate existing knowledge into a form that can be carved or stamped into clay tablets, we should use an existing language as the basis of the texts. What I propose is to use a simplified form of Basic English, a version of English that uses a small vocabulary of a thousand words or so, and a streamlined grammar that avoids all the complexities of full-blown English.

The most significant difference would be that instead of spelling words with the Roman alphabet we would assign one Neoglyphic symbol or glyph to each Basic English word. We can do this without worrying too much because a thousand years into the future there won't be a single soul living on the planet who understands English anyway, so there is no advantage to using our ridiculous system of English spelling, which would only confuse future generations. Using glyphs instead of an alphabet we could pack as much as 5 to 6 times as much text into the same space. Since the grammar and vocabulary is so closely related to English the translation could be done by computer, and the results printed out using the Zegments.ttf font. Or the text could be directly etched into the clay by a computer-controlled milling machine.

Some simple sentences might look something like this:

Note: if you are seeing strange letter strings like "DL MOH bLX UcP..." then your browser does not support embedded fonts, and you will have to download and install Zegments.ttf to see the glyphs. If your browser does support embedded fonts then the sentences above should look like this:

If that approach is used then the most difficult part of the entire project would be designing the "Rosetta Stone" that would teach future generations how to read the rest of the text.

The tiles should be small and compact, and thick relative to their size so they won't be fragile. Maybe something along the lines of a 3 by 5 file card size would do. The tiles need to be numbered so they can be learned in the correct order, and must be marked in some way to show which end is up. If the first few cards introduced the integer number symbols, and perhaps a picture of the moon and sun, identified by their shape and a horizon line, that would suffice to establish the page numbering system and show which edge is the top of the tile.

Although we are accustomed to rectangular sheets of paper, billboards, and television screens, when it comes to ceramic tiles, round might be better for the simple reason that there are no sharp corners to break off or wear down. A round, or at least an oval tile might be more durable in the long run.

Another alternative is rectangular tiles with rounded corners. Thses would still be somewhat resistant to having sharp corners break off.


Tile 1. The number symbols, and "is" or "=".	Tile 2. Plus, Minus, Times, Divide, Moon, Sun and 1 moon = 28 suns (days).