Field Journal 2: Alphabet

I guess you could say I had a full circle moment when I was reading chapter one. While reading about how the Egyptians use the rebus principle to communicate what they wanted to say, reminded me of an art class I took. One of our assignments was to take a song and turn it into a rebus, replacing any words that we could with a symbol for them instead. It is exciting to learn more about where the rebus concept from my art class came from and learning about it more from a visual communication aspect.

I find it extremely interesting how most visual communication is a way for the symbols to represent the sounds of the spoken language, yet China’s alphabet does not correlate in the same way. I feel as though it would be difficult to learn a language where the symbols and sounds were different from each other, it would be as if you are learning two completely different languages. To think that after all of these years, a country’s prime way of communicating is through symbols and not letters.

When thinking about how the American language has taken most of its words from the majority of Latin words, it was fun to read about the progression of the Latin alphabet. To think that there were only 21 letters in the initial alphabet and that they eventually added letters like J and U completing the alphabet to have 26 letters as it does today. What would we have done without those letters? Would we still have all the words we have today? Or would we still have the same words we have now but have them be spelled differently? It is fascinating to think about how our written language would be if we didn’t have all the letters of the alphabet. Maybe without all the letters we would have to still use symbols to communicate? These chapters got me thinking that symbols may be more effective in communicating something than trying to communicate through words. Like with logos, take the Pepsi logo for instance, when you see it you instantly know that that is the logo for Pepsi which is a soft drink that is very popular among Americans. Who knows, maybe symbols could start to become more prominently used sometime in the future.

This shows the original Latin alphabet compared to Hebrew letters.

http://ohlundonline.blogspot.com/2008/10/oldest-hebrew-text-discovered-at-king.html