2016 RCA Dissertation

A picture alongside a thousand words: An investigation on visual and linguistic communication and how their collaboration benefits modern communication

Jiyun (Karen) Sung Under supervision of Monika Parrinder Visual Communication 2016 Word count: 7390

Jiyun Sung, Visual Communication 2016

Chapters

Illustrations ... 2 Introduction … 4 The dawn of thought: brain evolution in humans … 4 Language development … 5 Verbal communication … 6 The meat of the matter: what is happening in the brain … 8 Language, literally and linguistically … 12 Global language … 13 On second thought: issues with global language … 14 Alternative global language … 16 Picture communication as global communication … 17 Purely picture communication … 21 Picture language in the era of technology … 24 Conclusion … 26 Bibliography … 28

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Illustrations

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Images used

Citation Art of Sulawesi, Indonesia. Digital image. ​National Geographic. <​http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/10/141008-cave-art-s ulawesi-hand-science/>

Bradshaw Foundation, Digital image. ​Chauvet Cave Painting. 2010, <​http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/index.php>.

Etruscan Tomb Art, Digital image. ​FerreBeeKeeper.com, 2014 <https://ferrebeekeeper.wordpress.com/2014/06/13/etruscan-painting/ >

JYM458 painting, Digital image, C ​ hina Heritage Quarterly, 2007 <http://www.chinaheritagequarterly.org/features.php?searchterm=011_ murals.inc&issue=011>

Cerebral hemisphere, Digital Image, ​Wikipedia, 2016 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerebral_hemisphere>

The split brain, Digital image, ​Nature: International weekly journal of science, 2012 <http://www.nature.com/news/the-split-brain-a-tale-of-two-halves-1.102 13>

Unfinished Egyptian tomb, Digital image, ​BBC, 2010 <http://news.bbc.co.uk/local/suffolk/hi/people_and_places/history/new sid_8897000/8897751.stm>

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Egyptian hieroglyphs, Digital image, ​Heritage daily, 2014 <http://www.heritagedaily.com/2014/07/sale-of-sekhemka-statue-at-ch risties-icom-cipeg-expresses-concern/104104>

Egyptian hieroglyphs, Digital image, ​Ancient HIstory Encyclopedia, 2015 <http://www.ancient.eu/Egyptian_Hieroglyphs/>

Oracle bone script, Digital image, ​Wikipedia, 2016 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_bone_script>

Isotype, Digital Image, ​Wikipedia, <https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/da/Basic_by_Isot ype.jpg>

ICONSPEAK, Digital image, ​ICONSPEAK, 2016 <https://iconspeak.world/blogs/main>

Scratch software, Digital image, ​Scratch MiT, 2016 <https://scratch.mit.edu/projects/editor/?tip_bar=home>

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Introduction I always joked that I can speak five languages: Korean, New Zealand English, Canadian English, American English and British English. It never failed to make people chuckle, whether the person spoke one language or seven. For me, the number of learned language seemed to indicate how many people one can communicate with.

Surely, as a bilingual (all varieties of English aside), I could communicate with more people than a monolingual, and less than a hepta-lingual. I wanted to talk to more people and, in my desperation, would stretch my one language: English. It was easier than learning an entirely new one. In this logic, it is such a daunting task to learn so many languages just to communicate with fellow people. One language is hard enough to master, and seemingly unintuitive. When communication is so important as a community and species, why is it so hard to achieve? Is spoken and written language the only way to communicate?

In this essay, I travel through various aspects of language to determine what makes it so essential and unique to people. Through history, biology, linguistics, philosophy and art history, I hope to draw a clear picture on language, what it is and how we got it, and discover more options of communication that can collaborate with existing languages so that, in time, there is be a true universal language. The essay weaves through the aspect of reading pictures, another unique ability of people, and evaluate its potential as a stand-alone language. My ultimate goal is to be able to communicate with everyone, and I hope to find a way to do so without memorizing unfamiliar words and practicing dialogues through a book.

The dawn of thought: brain evolution in humans Before anything of language is mentioned, it is important to clarify what made humans the way they are. And the beginning comes from the unlikeliest aspect: eating. Biologist Richard Wrangham at Harvard university has risen a theory that states “fire is the main player which allowed the human brain to concentrate less on acquiring and digesting food and developed more intellectual system such as language”1. Indeed, no other animals are known to cook their food with fire. Michael 1

​Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human​ (Profile Books, 2010), p. 9

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Pollan, author of ​Cooked: A natural history of transformation, explains that without the cooking process, which breaks down animal muscle and plant fibre, an animal needs to dedicate vast amounts of blood and energy to the stomach. This results in less attention to the brain and more to the gut. This is why bovines have four stomachs: to extract as much nutrient from their food as possible, rather four brains. Not the case with humans. Through fire, the food is already partially broken down before consumption and human’s stomach do not have to spend as much time or blood to acquire energy from the same food. With this development, the unused energy went back into the brain. The stomachs shrank and brains expanded and grew more complex. Humans have acquired brain power to think rather than eat.

Language development With a more complex processing brain, humans were able to create more sophisticated hunting strategies, build larger communities and devise a better way to communicate with the growing population. One evidence of this creativity can be seen through cave paintings. Two things are notable about cave paintings. The first is that such paintings are found everywhere, in every time period since 40,000 years ago. The oldest known cave painting2 is found in the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, this particular painting consisting of series of hand stencils from people who were alive 40,800 years ago.

In Europe, Chauvet Cave3 in France houses paintings representing hunting bulls, dating back about 26,000 years. The Chauvet Cave painting, unlike the stencils of Sulawesi, was drawn. This painting is a imagined and represented imagery by someone with a purpose rather than an

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Dan Vergano, 'Cave Paintings in Indonesia Redraw Picture of Earliest Art',​ National Geographic,(OCTOBER 8, 2014), 3 ​More at <http://www.bradshawfoundation.com/chauvet/>

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imprint. Other examples of such paintings can be found in Etruscans, dating back to 700 B.C. around Italy who drew in tombs to decorate and represent the glory of the passed individual. Korea has such tomb paintings as well. JYM4584 is a scene of tiger hunting with hunters dressed in fine robes and using elegant hunting tools, to express the old Koreansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; fierce nature and power.

The second marvellous aspect of cave paintings is that they are so clear as to what they are. Through these paintings, even when people today have never seen a bull or attend tiger hunting, are able to learn about them. Paintings made thousands of years ago are still able to hold and transfer information about what it was like back then. They act as time machines through their imagery. This is a form of communication. It is visual communication. Visual communication is an ability as unique to humans as verbal communication, otherwise known as language. And it holds very different characteristics and advantages to language, both obviously and surprisingly.

Verbal communication Humansâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; languages are so complicated and diverse. Language makes them unique, even better as a species than other animals on Earth. The biggest believer of 4

â&#x20AC;&#x2039;Hyung-Shick, Shin,

(Seoul, Korea: Ewha University Press, 2003), p. 365.

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this theory was a linguist named Max Muller, whose career was dedicated to finding the origin of language. His other active practice during his time was to discredit a superstar in the world of biology, Charles Darwin.

Muller and Darwin were contemporaries at the peak time of biological discoveries in the Victorian era at the end of 19th century. Although they were not in complete disagreement - Darwin5 and Muller6 both noted that fire and language is what made people distinct from other animals in the means of natural selection - what they did not agree on was whether the characteristic of human evolution was enough to raise humans above other animals as superior species. The feud started after the “Origin of Species(1859)” was first published. According to Natural Selection7 , species with more beneficial characteristics had better chances at supplying genes for future generations, making animals and plants have a lopsided evolution to best fit their environment. The most famous example is that of mouse that have either brown or black coats8. If the mouse live in sandy areas, therefore a brown environment, the black mouse will be more noticeable and be hunted more frequently. Then, the brown mouse will survive in larger numbers and their preceding generations will have more brown coats than black. This was a revelation, and with all great discoveries, it was met with fierce and enthusiastic opposition. Many chose not to believe the essay. The biggest ‘problem’ it had was the lack of mention on human superiority. It broke down the theory of evolution with animals and plants alike. Darwin claimed that man "differs less from the chimpanzee or the orang, than these do even from the monkeys, and that the difference between the brain of the chimpanzee and of man is almost insignificant, when compared with that between the chimpanzee brain and that of a Lemur.”9 In response to Darwin, Muller gave three lectures at the British Institution, where he articulated that “language is the Rubicon which divides man from beast, and

​Charles Darwin, ​The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st edn (United Kingdom: John Murray , 1871).

6 ​Lectures on the Science of Language: Delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain in April, May, & June, 1861, Volume 1 7 ​Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species , ed. by Morse Peckham, 1st edn (United Kingdom: John Murray, 1859), p. 93-144.

8 ​'The Making of the Fittest: Natural Selection and Adaptation, dir. by Biointeractive (Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjeSEngKGrg, 2014).

9 ​Charles Darwin, ​The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st edn (United Kingdom: John Murray , 1871) ​p 202.

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no animal will ever come cross it.”10 He later published his findings of linguistic history in “Lectures on the science of language (1861),” in full belief that language is proof of human superiority, a fact that should not be disputed.

Darwin had been avoiding this in his first essay. He needed more work on the subject of man as he will be most confronted on the matter. Fifteen years after the first edition of “Origins of Species,” He proceeded to publish “The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex(1871),” an essay with close analysis on evolution in humans. In his book, Darwin does acknowledge that “the brain of all the apes, even the highest, differs from that of man”11. He was not about to forfeit on his idea that humans have evolved alike other animals. However, it is important to note that Darwin never undermined the distinct uniqueness of human language: “it is not the human speech, but their large power of connecting definite sounds with definite ideas.12 ” In other words, humans have the ability to think about an abstract idea without the aid of present reality and successfully communicate it to other humans.

Darwin doesn’t mention anything about pictures in his essays. His feud with Muller was all based around the speech, the words, and verbal language. No person during the Victorian era had the breath to say ‘but good sir, what about the pictures?’

For such a decorated era and location, Victorian era in England, it is almost strange to think that they disregarded pictures as a result of human evolution. With two centuries behind, other scientific departments seek to prove that pictures are just as special to human communication as words. Its importance and uniqueness has just been unrevealed, even when humans had always had pictures by their sides.

The meat of the matter: what is happening in the brain Researchers of Neurolinguistics, the study behind brain and language, has proven that Darwin’s opinion is correct. A man’s brain has different regions, one of ​W. Tecumseh Fitch, ​The Evolution of Language(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, April 2010), p. 395.

11 ​Charles Darwin, ​The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1st edn (United Kingdom: John Murray , 1871) ​p 134.

12 ​W. Tecumseh Fitch, ​The Evolution of Language(Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, April 2010), p. 471.

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them being language, within the brain that collaborate to process complex thoughts.

Primates, such as chimpanzees, also have a specialized part of their brain, similar to humans’ language center. However, unlike our language centre, the primate’s brain region is only concerned with its vocal sounds. Chimpanzees can laugh, sob, cry, scream and hiss, just as their brain is evolved to do. Human children can also make such cries of expression. They babble, make strange noises that only the mother can interpret. In this essence, as Darwin mentioned, this is not unlike the songbirds and beetles. Then, past the infant stage, human brains change. Humans develop the ability to think of objects, situations or people that are non-existent, or purely subjective, and transfer that information through speech.

All human brains possess two hemispheres in their brains, left and right. Infants use the whole brain for both speech and conceptual. Then, they separate to each hemisphere of the brain: speech to the left and conceptual to the right. Humans are sometimes referred to as “lopsided apes” for divided usage of the brain13. As the brain develops with time, and the gulf between two hemispheres deepen, the ability to articulate language and understand pictures improves separately and, as a result, each side of the divided brain acquires very well-developed senses that would have been muddled in an unseparated brain.

The left14 is concerned with the logical, step-by-step forms. Time is one example of left hemisphere's tasks. Time is counted with numbers to calculate the position of the sun. Numbers have definite hierarchy: one is lower than two, which is Tanya Lewis, Staff Writer, 'Humans Evolved Flexible, Lopsided Brains', ​Live Science, (April 2013), in​<http://www.livescience.com/28986-humans-evolved-asymmetric-brains.html> .

14 ​Joseph B. Hellige, ​Hemispheric Asymmetry: What's Right and What's Left ([n.p.]: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 169.

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lower than three. Time and numbers start at one point and moves in a singular direction. Language is linear as well. Albeit the written form, which moves in a linear direction regardless of whether it moves from left to right, right to left or top to bottom, language has rules as to what comes first in a sentence and what comes last.

Every language has its unique rule, and different criteria for articulation. Verbal communication is like math. It is the alignment of words that deliver a successful result. Articulation is defined by the ability to string appropriate words with the right syntax. The ability to pinpoint a fleeting thought in the brain, and to be able to give correct clauses and syntax that is accurate enough for listeners to understand, is what shaped homo sapiens as the masters of communication.

The right15 is primarily concerned with the spatial, abstract forms. When one stands in the living room, one knows that the bathroom is to the right and the bedroom is to one’s back without looking around thanks to the right hemisphere.

Music and pictures is another example of right hemisphere. Their flow, and its progression is somewhat ‘three-dimensional.’ Music and art does not have a direction: it fills a space, our bodies and brain. Yuval Harari, author of ​Sapien: A brief history of mankind, states that this awareness of the unseen is what enabled humankind to create fictions16 . If humans are able to feel the presence of what is behind them, say a bathroom, it is not a big leap to feel the presence of the intangible, such as God, emotion and atmosphere. This is otherwise known as fiction, or sympathy. The right hemisphere is what allows individuals to not only be aware of intangible factors such as music and emotion, but also imagine and sympathize with others’ situations and feelings. The right hemisphere’s visual-spatial ability is very fit in a community structure like that of humans.

Two hemisphere communicates and collaborates with each other for one to be fully aware of one’s surroundings and articulate one’s thought. Roger Sperry17 has dealt with patients with impaired Corpus Callosum: the middle-gulf of the brain where

​Joseph B. Hellige, ​Hemispheric Asymmetry: What's Right and What's Left ([n.p.]: Harvard University Press, 1993), p. 169.

16 ​Yuval Noah Harari, ​Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind ([n.p.]: Harvill Secker, 2014), p. 20-40 17 ​Roger Sperry, ​The Split Brain Experiments <https://www.nobelprize.org/educational/medicine/split-brain/background.html>.

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two hemispheres communicate with each other. He conducted experiments with patients with Corpus Callosum impairment were labeled as ‘split-brain’ patients, and various experiments with them revealed many functions of the two brain hemispheres.

One of the experiment18 provided the split-brain patients with two different images to each of the eyes, sending different information to each side of the brain.

The left eye (connected to the right brain) was shown a picture of a snowstorm, and the right eye was shown a picture of a dog. The patient was then asked to pick out the images they have just seen. All of them could pick out the dog, and articulated that they had seen a dog. Then, interestingly, they did pick out pictures relating to snow, but they could not articulate why they picked out the snow.

Since their two split brains were not communicating, the left hemisphere could not recognise that the right hemisphere had seen a picture at all.

Sperry published this findings in Scientific American in 1967, titled “The Split Man in Brain.19” Yes, humans are animals of language. And that includes the ability to comprehend pictures and music. Sometimes, it is hard to translate art to words and align it from right to left. This does not mean that one mode of communication and interpretation is more used than the other. Linguistics has been focusing on the origins of the language, when they really mean the history of verbal communication.

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​"​The Split Brain Experiments"​. Nobel Media. Retrieved April 2014. ​Roger Sperry, 'The split brain in man', S​ cientific American, 217.2, (1967).

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Just as verbal communication functions perfectly without pictures, picture communication is also a stand-alone method of human interaction.

Language, literally and linguistically Here we are. Today, humans use about 8000 languages, with about 100 extinct.20 It is strange to think that people cannot communicate with one another just because of location differences. Dogs of different breeds seem to be able to communicate with one another21, then why not people?

According to the Bible, humans used to have one common language, which they used to build the tower of Babylon: a tower that would be tall enough to reach the heavens. Then God punished them by making humans speak different languages: “That is why it was called Babel(‘confused’ in Hebrew)—because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth.22”. Scientifically, this story is not entirely unfounded.

TedTalk presenter and an evolutionary biologist, Mark Pagel explains that through the use of language, humans gained the power to share experiences with each other23 and,as a result, a community could divide labour according to the needs: one could hunt, while others gather, and so on. This spread of responsibility, built upon each other’s ideas and skills, led people to explore other parts of the world to make tools unconceived by other animals such as a knife, a wheel, a steam engine and a smartphone. While cooperation made humans the most adaptable species on the planet, some information were kept exclusively, shared and inherited among a few participants. According Pagel, this is what triggered the un-universal language. “The irony is that language has formed so that we can’t communicate with each other.24” Another aspect is the capacity of a language. According to Malcolm Gladwell, author of ​The Tipping Point, the maximum number for a human-based system to work ​Stephen R. Anderson, 'How many languages are there in the world?', ​Linguistic Society of America, (2010), in <http://www.linguisticsociety.org/content/how-many-languages-are-there-world>.

21 ​Pat Miller, 'How Dogs Communicate With Each Other', ​The Whole Dog Journal, 9.4, (April 2006) 22 The ​Bible, New International Version, Genesis 11: 1-9 23 ​'How language transformed humanity, dir. by Mark Pagel (TED.com, ).

24 ​'How language transformed humanity, dir. by Mark Pagel (TED.com, ).

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fluently is 150.25 This number is especially important in a community, including living communities and corporate environments. Below the number, everyone is able to know of everyone else in the group, having no ‘strangers’ who are potentially untrustworthy. Above 150, however, not everyone is able to know of everyone else, having pockets of people who are unfamiliar. In terms of language, within a community above 150, erects people who use different words and pronunciation to another, making communication and a sense of familiarity difficult. China is a good example: within the umbrella of the word ‘Chinese,’ around 200 dialects exist26; a greater number to begin with than 150 capacity. Language was not made with the recent phenomenon of globalization in mind. There are 44.7 million users of the internet in the UK alone.27 To deal with it, a language was designated to unify communication. The new global language, one that could allow humans to finish the tower of Babylon, is English.

Global language It is a dishonor to talk about globalization without talking about English. Today, two-thirds of all scientific papers are written in English. More than half of all business deals in Europe are conducted in English, and more than seventy percent of world’s mail is in English. An estimated number of 330 million native speakers of English are live today 28. While it is the official global language, it is not the most commonly spoken language. Chinese, especially Mandarin, has about 750 million native speakers. Just by numbers, Mandarin should be dominating the world in its travel books, language centres and translated Bible prints. Yet, go to Italy or Korea, there are as many number of English learning centres as there are supermarkets. More people may be born to Chinese tongue, but English is undoubtedly the most global

​Gladwell, Malcolm. ;​The Tipping Point’. Boston: Little, Brown, 2000. Print. p 148-155 Services, Accredited. "What Are The Different Types Of Spoken Chinese?". ​ALSINTL. N.p., 2016. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

27 "Internet Users- Office For National Statistics". O ​ ns.gov.uk. N.p., 2016. Web. 29 Sept. 2016.

28 ​David Crystal, ​“English as a Global Language” (Cambridge University Press, 1997) 25 26

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language. Why is this so? The secret may be in the structure of English itself, with its simplicity and flexibility, that made non-English countries fall over their heels.

English is easy. No, really, it is. In ​The Mother Tongue, author Bill Bryson explains that English has abandoned case forms: an additive to nouns according to its nominative, accusative, illative, inessive, comitative or other grammatical conditions.

French has genders assigned to the nouns and verbs that accompany it29, German has sixteen forms of the word ‘ride’ whereas English as five. Finnish has up to fifteen case forms to choose in order to describe one noun. The simplification of English grammar language can be traced back to its origin, Britain, where tribes from Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Angles, Romans, Jutes and many more have come to start new kingdoms. Back then, English was only spoken among the peasants. While French had utter determination to maintain its language to the purest form30, no one was concerned with the development of English. Baugh and Cable wrote in T ​ he History of English Language: “By making English the language mainly of uneducated people, the Norman conquest made it easier for grammatical changes to go forward.31” English shamelessly borrowed words from all tribes to converse with merchants and residents alike, who had varied backgrounds and native tongues. Through endless trades and battles, the language from all over Europe must have cross pollinated to develop the most inclusive language system.

English vocabulary is the result of such inclusive approach. English words can be very precise; it is able to distinguish a house from home, sensual and sensuous, childish and childlike, and masterful and masterly32 . And it benefits from a world of synonyms so vast that it requires a separate dictionary of synonyms called a thesaurus. This comes from the accessibility of creating words in English: according to linguist Otto Jespersen, words are formed in one of four ways: by adding, subtracting, by making them up and doing nothing to them33. Prefixes and suffixes, additive characters at the beginning or at the end of words to alter meanings, is used to

​Bill Bryson,​‘Mother Tongue’ (Penguin Books, 1990) ​More at http://www.academie-francaise.fr/linstitution/lhistoire 31 ​Albert Croll Baugh, Thomas Cable, ​A History of the English Language ([n.p.]: Routledge, 2012), p. 200.

32 ​Bill Bryson,​‘Mother Tongue’ (Penguin Books, 1990), p 13 33 ​Otto Jespersen, ​An International Language ( Feedbooks, 1928).

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express an idea without knowing new vocabulary. Some new words sound silly, often unrealistic, such as thingamabob, as in “what is it called… the thingamabob…” Such word can be traced to mere babbles when someone is trying to remember a specific word. Enough people had said it, and it has been used long enough for Cambridge Dictionary to accept it as a legitimate word of its own34 . In short, English is a free-style, mix-and-match language that can amend to anyone’s needs, culture and context to correctly communicate with anyone in need of a dialogue. However, whether English is the most sufficient method of communication in today’s population, and in today’s technology is up to evaluation.

On second thought: issues with global language Knowing English, the international language, anyone can communicate with everyone, everywhere. Not quite true. Language has to account for so many more factors than it used to be. People think differently, and there are just so many people.

Is it that tricky to communicate one’s articulated thoughts from one to another?

The first issue rises with the relationship between language and thought process. Language development shapes the way we think, and every language shapes the thoughts differently. In fact, a study35 showed that multilingual individuals often portray multiple personalities, one assigned to each spoken language. This means that people could have different interpretations on intangible factors as time and colour depending on how each language represents them. Lera Boroditsky at Stanford University studied the cognitive development of language users such as English, German, Turkish, Russian and Indian and found that English and Hindi speakers have a vast gap between their concept of time. English speakers were able to distinct the tenses in verbs (​speaking, spoke) while Hindi speakers gave a separate tense word added to the sentence (​do speak, did speak in translation)36. In other cases, English speakers and Russian speakers couldn’t decide on the exact tone of ​http://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/thingamabob ​Levinson,​ Space in Language and Cognition: Explorations in Cognitive Diversity (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

36 Lera Boroditsky, "​Do English and Mandarin Speakers Think Differently About Time?" Proceedings of the 48th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society (2007): 34.

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‘blue.37’ “It’s not that they don’t know about these [missing words],” says Lera, “it’s just that they don’t talk about it.38 ” In other words, a language assigns different weight to certain words, concepts and ideas. Mere interpretation does not guarantee a successful communication. And a language is more than just reading and speaking.

For some language, such as Greek, gestures are as important in speaking as speech39 . A serious consideration needs to be placed while learning a language, in interpretation and translation. And people’s thought process may need more synchronization than words. As conference interpreter Lourdes De Rioja writes for Oxford Dictionary that “[translation] is an activity that requires time, reflection, and constant rewriting to ensure nothing is ‘lost in translation’... [interpretation] involves taking a bird’s eye view of the original utterance in order to capture its essence.40” Another issue of global language is its audience. Never have a language been created with the intention of this many audience. Language was not prepared for the advent of the computer, and the internet; devices that allow immediate exchange of thought and information among people from all over the world, regardless of age or culture. Its accessibility and abundance of information has connected users around the globe that have once settled into their own pockets of the world with their own language and methodology. Most languages people speak now have been created before globalization, and certainly before the advent of communicative devices. With new technology and old communication structure, a new language is needed that can not only be interpreted across all cultures with the same mindset to accurately communicate thoughts across, but also be as easy and inclusive as English is.

Alternative global language

​D. Casasanto et al., "​How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English, Indonesian Greek, and Spanish," Proceedings of the 26th Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society (2004): 38 ​Lera Boroditsky, 'How does our language shape the way we think?', ​Edge Magazine, , (November 2009), , in​<https://www.edge.org/conversation/lera_boroditsky-how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think> 39 ​D. Casasanto et al., "​How Deep Are Effects of Language on Thought? Time Estimation in Speakers of English, Indonesian Greek, and Spanish," (2004) 40 ​Lourdes De Rioja, 'What is the difference between translation and interpreting?', ​Oxford Dictionaries , , (2015), , in​<http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/04/difference-interpreting-translation/> 37

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Quest for alternative languages have existed. A good example of a universal language, a designed language to serve the entirety of people, is called Esperanto. It was created by an eye doctor named L. L. Zamenhof in 1880s, Poland. The first World War broke out in 1914, and although Poland was yet an independent state at the time, its geological location, between Germany and Russia, forced the state to be fully wrangled in the mess of the war41 . Zamenhof’s goal was to serve his country, which at the time was teeming with immigrants and bursting in sudden crashes in culture. He dreamed of a language so simple and practical that human race would not suffer much time in learning a new language and be able to fully understand one another.

Esperanto alphabet follows one-sound one-letter rule. The words are mainly constructed from Indo-European structures, with no irregular word forms. An easy language with no surprises. Yet, English is still the international language followed by French. No country has appointed Esperanto as its second or official language. While Esperanto is not a officially dead language, it is certainly not enjoying the glory that it should. The reason for this is many, in debate, such as the lack of opportunities for acquisition and vague target audience. There are up to two million speakers of Esperanto, even when the main form of education is self-learning42. As with anything new, in religion, government, and language -- it takes a great effort to take over what has already been established, and Esperanto did not have the guns to go after English or French. Arika Okrent in his book I​ n the Land of Invented Languages points out: “they put too much effort into product development and not enough into marketing.43 ” However “little investment” it is to learn Esperanto, it is a new task. In desperate times, people are going to fall back to something familiar. Esperanto is not in great need, and no event happened radical enough to consider a new version of what is essentially like any other language.

​More at <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Poland_during_World_War_I> ​Lu Wunsch-Rolshoven , ​How could a universal language be constructed in such a way that it succeeds where other constructed languages such as Esperanto failed? (2015) <https://www.quora.com/How-could-a-universal-language-be-constructed-in-such-a-way-that-it-succeeds-wher e-other-constructed-languages-such-as-Esperanto-failed> 43 ​Arika Okrent, ​In the Land of Invented Languages([n.p.]: Random House Publishing Group, May 2009).

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Picture communication as global communication Do pictures stand a chance of becoming a global language? As mentioned before, the visual-spatial part of the brain is literally situated at the opposite side of the brain to the linguistic: the left hemisphere of the brain regulates the speech, and the right controls the visuals. Words and pictures are not processed the same.

Reading pictures is handled differently to a written sentence. The common adage ‘pictures say a thousand word’ is a misconception. What the adage got right was the amount of information contained in pictures. The strengths of pictures are its simplicity and commonality: and in deeper, scientific interpretation, this is more than just an underestimation. MIT neuroscientists44 have discovered in 2014 that human eye is able to process images seen as fast as 13 milliseconds, much faster than the previous known fact of 100 milliseconds. Seeing a picture in a thousandth of a second is hard to perceive. “What vision does is find concepts,” says Mary Potter, professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT. “The job of the eyes is not to get the information into the brain, but to allow the brain to think about it rapidly enough to know what you should look at next.45” In other words, the strength of picture reading is the ability of the human eye to flow through many thoughts rather than having one static idea, written and condensed into one sentence. Donna Wilson, Ph.D and founder of Brain-Based Teaching, states in ​Edutopia that learning information through mental images has a profound effect in retaining information, encouraging multiple perspectives and enjoying the studies; “by tapping in both verbal and visual aspects of the brain, [the participants are] making abstract concept more concrete and thus more meaningful and memorable.46 ” The past has also shown us some examples where picture and verbal language came together. Egyptian hieroglyphs is perhaps the most famous example of picture language, otherwise known as pictograms. Art of ancient Egypt dates from ​Mary C. Potter, Brad Wyble, Carl Erick Hagmann, Emily S. McCourt, 'Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per second', ​Attention, Perception & Psychophysics , 76.2, (2013), 270-279, in​<http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13414-013-0605-z> 45 ​Mary C. Potter, Brad Wyble, Carl Erick Hagmann, Emily S. McCourt, 'Detecting meaning in RSVP at 13 ms per second', ​Attention, Perception & Psychophysics , 76.2, (2013), 270-279, in​<http://link.springer.com/article/10.3758%2Fs13414-013-0605-z> 46 ​Donna Wilson, Ph.D, 'Brain Movies: When Readers Can Picture It, They Understand It', ​Edutopia, (2014), in <http://www.edutopia.org/blog/brain-movies-visualize-reading-comprehension-donna-wilson> 44

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around 3000 BC to 30 BC47, and the work throughout the three thousand year reign is remarkably similar as if they had a set system of picture making already in place.

Indeed, this was just the case. Some unfinished Theban Tombs48 , perhaps the death of the paintier mid-progress, preserved red and black lines that guide precisely how big each characters, objects and writing were on the wall.

All figures were 18 “fists” tall, unless the figure was Pharaoh or God, in which case he will be bigger, and little attention is given to depth or any kind of realistic interpretation.

These paintings had rules. Unlike the ancient cave paintings of Indonesia, Egyptian paintings were systematic, mathematical with a definite purpose: to preserve knowledge and glory of the Pharaoh for him to take with him to the Heavens.

The Egyptians also had a written language form. The pictograph is also very symbolic, consisting of birds, grainery, earth, water and insects.

These letters were not so intuitive, however, just like an unlearned language. The code to its order may not have been found were it not for Jean-François Champollion 49

, a linguist in the Napoleon era at the end of the 18th century, who decoded the

​Smith, W. Stevenson, and Simpson, William Kelly. T ​ he Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, 3rd edn. 1998, Yale University Press (Penguin/Yale History of Art) 48 ​Smith, W. Stevenson, and Simpson, William Kelly. T ​ he Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, p 172-173 49 ​BBC, ​Historic figures, 2014 <​http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/champollion_jean.shtml> 47

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Rosetta stone - “a stone with writing on it in two languages (Egyptian and Greek), using three scripts (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek)50 ” - that detailed the order of the language. Egyptian is not only pictographic but also syllabic: linguists know that Egyptian alphabet represented vowels and consonants, but they do not know what sound is represented by which letter. That has been lost with the times. Of course, most visitors to Egypt do not know how to read the alphabets. That has not stopped anyone from going to Cairo, visiting the Pyramid and tombs and appreciate the pictures drawn alongside the writing. It is not a big hinder that the writing is obscure to the uneducated: the pictures hold so much meaning, information and atmosphere of what it was like two thousand years ago. Reading is an added bonus, not an essential task. The ancient civilization was lost with its language, but the visual recording remained and still communicates its information with people today.

Chinese also has its roots in pictographic language, and the only one among these that is still used today51 . Some of the oldest remain of Chinese writing is carved into stones and pottery, unearthed from around the 3rd millennium BCE52.

Just as one writes her name on her possessions, they were expressions of ownership, much like crests of powerful families in Europe. This was needed as the possessions had to be protected from theft not only from other families, but also peasants who were illiterate. These crests evolved to a comprehensible language system around the

50 51 52

​The British Museum, Ancient Egypt, 1999, <​http://www.ancientegypt.co.uk/writing/rosetta.html> ​Norman, Jerry​, ‘​Chinese’. Cambridge University Press, (1988) ​McNaughton, William; Ying, Li . ​Reading and Writing Chinese. Tuttle Publishing, (1999)​.

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Shang dynasty around second millennium BC53 . The letter for sun looked like the sun( 日​); the symbol for the river, with three wavy lines, looked like rivers(​川​). And some symbols were combined together to make new meanings, such as combining sun(​日​) and moon(​月​) together to represent brightness(​明​). With more time, with a greater need for more words and meaning to convey new objects and things intangible, the symbols became more linear, systemised and ‘simplified’ - for easier writing, just as mechanical writing replaced cursive writing. The symbols have become very stylized.

Many modern letters do not look like its original form. A typical word in Chinese is a combination of its simplified pictograms. This is otherwise known as 字 ​zì, referring to the complex letters comprised of multiple letters. For example, 晴 ​qíng "clear/fair (weather)", is composed of 日 ​rì "sun", and 青 ​q ng "blue/green."

Reading Chinese for non-Chinese users can be a daunting task as the letters have no correlation to the pronunciations. It is purely Logographic, where the symbols only represented the meaning and had no relation to speech. Just by looking at the symbols, or knowing a few do not give any hints to pronunciation. The developed system is closer to a fully formed verbal language than pictographic. Understanding each components’ pictographic representations, however, can lead the reader to the meaning of the letter. Drawing picture is the fastest way for Western learners to grasp the language. A Chinese-immigrant and a web developer54 in London has picked up on this aspect. She makes a picture-based Chinese learning program called ​Chineasy to teach Chinese letters people, especially to her children who were born in London and did not have a natural way to learn their mother’s language. The program shows a letter in Chinese with an illustration of what the character represents. The young learners understands them immediately and would not forget. Not only is it a brilliant learning device for non-native speakers, it is also “to bridge the gap between the East and West that often causes misunderstandings and tension.” “I want to give the West a real understanding and knowledge of China and Chinese culture through their own

​Emily Mark, ‘Shang Dynasty,’ ​Ancient History Encyclopedia, (January 2016), in <http://www.ancient.eu/Shang_Dynasty/> 54 ​ShaoLan , ​Chineasy (2016) <http://www.chineasy.com/> 53

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eyes,” she says. “Rather than through layers of packaging, manipulation or loss in translation.55”

Purely picture communication Egyptian and Chinese both utilised pictograms very well. Art Historian and cross-disciplinary professor Barbara Stafford56 deeply believes in the benefit of pictures and confronting picture languages. In order to understand a picture, whether aesthetically or linguistically, one must stop to interpret. “Pictures have the power to hesitate in the era of impulse,”57 she states. Pictures hold meaning and information that cannot be acquired by mere presence. “There is a difference between attentiveness and captive without being aware,” she says, “when they really look… then, we are struck, and we slow down, and hesitate. We think, investigate and wonder.58” Perhaps pictures have been undermined, because of the innate interpretation of them. Looking at a figure painting, for example, one never has a hard time recognizing the figure, where a language must be attended and learned in order to be understood. In some cases, like the paintings of the Renaissance, the piece is such a masterpiece that the sheer awe is the purpose of a picture: the sensation, not a situation.

The two languages developed from pictures to fully logical languages, so much so that they were no longer considered picture languages. Is there a language system that is fully picture-based? There is. It is called Isotypes, icon-based structure commonly

​Liz Stinson, 'A Brilliant Way to Learn Chinese Through Pictures', Wired.com, , (March 2014), , in<https://www.wired.com/2014/03/chineasy/> 56 <​http://www.barbaramariastafford.com/> 57 ​'Iconic Turn: Prof. Dr. Barbara Maria Stafford - Towards a Cognitive Image History, dir. by Prof. Dr. Manfred Faßler (Hubert Burda Stiftung, YouTube, August 2012).

58 ​'Iconic Turn: Prof. Dr. Barbara Maria Stafford - Towards a Cognitive Image History, dir. by Prof. Dr. Manfred Faßler (Hubert Burda Stiftung, YouTube, August 2012).

55

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seen in traffic symbols. If you recognize the sign with a man and child holding hands adjacent to a walkway, you have seen isotypes.

They were first made in Vienna by a group of graphic designers in 1920s, lead by a man named Otto Neurah. He wanted a better system of communication. Vienna had just gone through World War One. There were great matters to be discussed: food, resources, housing, public health and inflation59. And they needed to be communicated to everyone, to adults and children, whose educational background varied widely. Otto believed that visual communication had an advantage not only in widespread understanding but also in its structure. Whereas language had to be written in linear fashion, making the thought process linear as well, picture language could be written in other axises to widen the speaker’s thinking. The icons could be arranged not only from left to right, but also top to bottom, at the same time. The start point of reading Isotypes did not matter, as long as the whole picture was seen. The symbols were later adapted to the American system to explain their housing crisis of The Depression60 . Nowadays, international travel symbols utilize the isotypes as a form of universal ‘warning signs.’ While it had a great potential of becoming its own language, Otto never intended Isotypes to become independent. He believed its primary purpose was “helping language,61 ” as a side option for already existing languages.

A contemporary clothing brand has also taken pictograms as the only source of language. ICONSPEAK has made series of apparel that embeds a set of symbols.

These are meant for travellers who encounter a language or culture that are not theirs. All she has to do is point to the right symbol on her bag or t-shirt to communicate her needs with others.

​Jordi Cat, 'Otto Neurath', ​Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (August 2010), in <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/neurath/> 60 ​Otto Neurah, ‘World planning and the USA’, ​Survey Graphic, (1932), p 621-28 61 ​Otto Neurath, ‘​From hieroglyphics to Isotype: a visual autobiography.’ London, ​Hyphen Press​, 2010 59

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The creators, Florian, Georg and Steven, were inspired by the difficulty of communication while traveling the World themselves. In places with limited electronics, often lacking any, ICONSPEAK is printed on clothing to avoid misplacement, lack of battery or available software. Not only do the icons help with communication, but also spark new interaction. Icons are used between both interactors, pointing back and forth to transfer their information. The purpose of ICONSPEAK, according to Georg, is very specific. “​Some of the places we came across are really far from modern civilization and not many strangers go there. Hence there are not too many situations where language barriers need to be overcome.”

The ultimate use of the icons is for strangers to meet and converse. It is an excellent supplementary item to other forms of nonverbal exchange, such as gestures and facial emotions.​ “The art is to design icons for where they are superior to the spoken language and do make those designs universally understood.62 ”

Picture Language in the era of technology Contemporarily, many inventions have been made that have never existed before, such as the internet and electronic communication devices, moving into virtual

62

https://iconspeak.world/

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reality. In the age of impulse, where answers are waiting behind the fingertips of a screen, written language is going through significant changes. Texting, for example, has taken a beating as a form of degeneration of the written language63 , with its short and grammatically fragile structure. It revolts some people to learn that Oxford Dictionary has added abbreviated words such as OMG and LOL into their archive in 201164 . Oxford Dictionary is not ashamed of this fact. In fact, a TEDtalk speaker and linguist John McWhorter has suggested that text messaging is a new form of dialogue and not a retardation of written language. “Texting, with its grammar-less structure and one-word exchange, doesn’t seem like writing,” he explains, “it seems more like talking.65” Texting is simply a form of dialogue. And emoji, that digitally illustrates the gestures and body language of a person, utilises one of the most common intuition among all individuals: reading facial expressions. Paul Ekman, a psychologist who has spent his career pioneering the study of emotions and facial expressions writes in his book ​Unmasking the Face (1975) that facial expression is an innate ability of humans to express themselves that is unique to them as much as verbal language is. As an example, blind people know how to smile, despite the fact that they have never learned that expressing happiness is to widen one’s mouth side to side66.

Researchers have found that women who have Botox treatment often report the lack of emotions in their daily lives67 . This comes from the theory that emotions are triggered by facial movements, not the other way round: the famous paradox of ‘smile because you’re happy, or happy because you’re smiling?’ The facial muscle is a direct representation of brain’s emotion. And people have evolved to be able to interpret one another’s facial expression, thus the emotion, despite age, gender, race and culture. And Emoji captures just that. Emoji is used like isotypes, pictograms alongside language to create a more perfect conversation. It is worth noting that the Oxford Dictionary has chosen a emoji, ​Face with Tears of Joy, as its word of the year back in

​'Texting is killing language. JK!!, dir. by John McWhorter (TED.com, ) ​Vyvyan Evans, 'Beyond Language: how language-like is emoji?', ​Oxford Dictionaries blog, , (2015), , in​<http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/emoji-language/> 65 ​'Texting is killing language. JK!!, dir. by John McWhorter (TED.com, ) 66 ​Paul Ekman, ​Unmasking the Face: A Guide to Recognizing Emotions from Facial Clues ([n.p.]: Malor Books, April 2015) ​p 32 67 Eric Finzi, ​The Face of Emotion: How Botox Affects Our Moods and Relationships ([n.p.]: Palgrave Macmillan, January 2013).

63 64

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201568. Needless to say, this was its first time choosing a word that is not actually a word. “Emojis are no longer the preserve of texting teens – instead, they have been embraced as a nuanced form of expression, and one which can cross language barriers.69” Looks like emoji is doing well in the new era.

Coding has taken a liking to picture language as well. For the most part, computer engineering uses sets of English words, numbers and mathematic symbols.

It is wonderfully universal in one sense, and quite limiting in other. While the command words, used by all engineers, are self-explanatory for English speakers, they make little sense to those who don’t speak the language, more likely to misspell, opening doors for more errors. The more counterintuitive aspect of coding is the format between picture and verbal; lines of codes are written, often thousands, to literally spell out a visual web presence. Thousands of codes have to be written to manipulate a single image, just like explaining a picture with a thousand words.

Engineers act as the Corpus Callosum, juggling in between the written codes and pictorial outcome. Just like the split-brain, this is not a smooth task. “Even when only using valid words, only an extremely small portion of what can be written in a text file is valid source code for a given language, and an even smaller portion makes up a program that produces any output.70” In response from the need to make coding more intuitive and accessible, Visual Programming Language emerged. It uses shapes to mix and match commands in a puzzle-like form.

This eliminates unnecessary codings that do not help the output, lifting the weights off of the programmers and be more friendly to growing talents. The visual layout of the code itself makes debugging easier and allow developers to test the program easily. Where these factors are ​Oxford dictionaries , 'Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…', ​Oxfordword Blogs, (2015), in​<http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/> 69 ​Oxford dictionaries , 'Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2015 is…', ​Oxfordword Blogs, (2015), in​<http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2015/11/word-of-the-year-2015-emoji/> 70 ​Rémi Dehouck, 'The maturity of visual programming',​Craft ai, (2015), in <http://www.craft.ai/blog/the-maturity-of-visual-programming/>.

68

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not the most attractive alternative to current programmers, who are used to the existing syntax and its language, it is a big improvement for those who want to become a programmer. Mitch Resnick, MiT developer of Scratch explains in his TEDTalk that “children are not natives of digitals. They have lots of experience interacting [with digital technology], like they know how to read something but not write it.71 ” In order to move forward, coding needs to become significantly easier and be more intuitive. Google saw potential in visual coding and launched its own Virtual Private Network (VPN) service called Blocky, which lead to MiT Media Lab’s ‘Scratch.’

Scratch was developed for children who want to code. The app has a number of functions that are shaped like puzzle. A child can link the puzzles together to ‘write’ a command that can be viewed as a live web page. As of September 2016, Scratch has more than 16,000,000 projects shared on their website, with creators mostly of individuals aged between 10 and 1672 . Past coding is like starting a big painting with minute details, where VPN works from the big picture. A marriage of the two language is pushing the coding world forward.

Conclusion Humans are gifted with multiple methods of communication. Our brains evolved to handle different interpretations of our surroundings, and found the best method to learn from one another. People are communicative animals: that was their best survival tactic, and the brain was split in two to properly develop different aspects of communication. The logical side of the brain was able to articulate one’s thought into a linear sentence for best transfer of knowledge. Such ability to share information correctly has led to varieties of language, forming different sounds and alphabets to communicate one’s thought to their immediate communities. In an inclusive environment, however, where people from anywhere can talk to anyone, the variety of language is preventing further communication and learning. Everyone has a different definition of logic, among cultures and surroundings. The left, visual side of the brain can surpass such issues. Because people’s tongue is not liberated enough 71 72

​'TedTalk: Let's teach kids to code, dir. by Mitch Resnick (TedGlobal, 2012). ​https://scratch.mit.edu/statistics/

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to articulate the conceptual side of the brain, language has dominated communication as if verbal communication is peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s only method of interaction. This not true.

Human brains have two methods of communication, and both are well developed. It is essential to use the other side of the brain in communication as well.

Of course, picture communication is not the only option for humans to use.

Taking only one method of communication is as unnatural as the split-brain patients, acting as if people lack Corpus Callosum. Collaboration with words will benefit visual communication. As seen in the tech industry, visual communication is better suited for todayâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s large audience. Very complex systems such as coding is made easy and inclusive through visual creation. In modern society, further development in Virtual Reality technology and investigating nearby planets involves more people, knowledge and collaboration. Such delicate yet grandiose projects require a perfect communication among participants that are from all over the world. Picture communication will be a key player in pushing such developments that will benefit more people than verbal communication.

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