Hi! I’m Joel and this is The Glossary, a bi-weekly supplement to Learned. This week, we're thinking about deep time.
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Spend enough time trying to learn Japanese and sooner or later you’ll be presented with the fact that the many kanji used to write the language come from pictures. In other words, the character used to write day began as a drawing of the sun which was revised and reduced over the centuries until it became a logograph - a picture used to represent a word, e.g. hi (pronounced like hee) the Japanese word for day. But not all logographs become words.
These days, pictographs are being produced by design firms all over the planet. Just recently, Nippon Design Center released a very cool set of pictographs designed to help tourists make their way around Japan. In other words, were book, sign, and map makers to use these new symbols, tourists would be able to easily and clearly understand needed information without necessarily having to understand the Japanese language.
And there’s the key difference: the logograph 日 may have started out as a drawing of the sun, but it came to represent the sound “hi” (among others) and to mean “day.” But the pictograph of a cloud in my weather app just means that clouds may be present during the day.
The Long Now Foundation is a think tank dedicated to long-term thinking. Like, thousands of years from now long-term thinking. In a blog post a few years ago, Ahmed Kabil brings up the issue of deep time and nuclear waste: given that nuclear waste can be dangerous for hundreds of thousands of years, how can we mark it so that the symbols (e.g. pictographs) will still be understood so far in the future? Bear in mind that 10,000 years ago, the last ice age was just ending and Jericho, the first town, was just being settled.
In that far future, it’s possible that some of these new pictographs will eventually acquire new sounds in a new language thus becoming logographs and bringing the past firmly into the future present.
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Learned Volume 4 starts on Monday. I look forward to seeing you there. Until then, stay strong, stay curious. Learn something.
Joel