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Body Language & Banter 89

simplified Chinese. Take a look and normally you will find them to be
quite different. Each example in the figure is my best attempt to translate
the phrase “Hello Reader” into a script and the corresponding language.

Symbols of the World
English is one of the most irritating script languages of all. It commonly
uses etymological elements, showing the history or origin of the word
that has nothing to do with the sound of the word. A word like school
has the ‘k’ sound spelt ‘ch’, showing its historical derivation from the
Greek, but confusing for pronunciation. English has 53 sounds derived
from only 26 letters, so there are plenty of letter combinations, many of
which are irregular. Because the language favors historical convention
over simplicity, sugar is pronounced “shu-gar” whereas sand is strictly
phonetic. As for Leicestershire I’ll leave that as a test for the American
readers amongst you. If you’re British, try Mattapoisett, a town in
Massachusetts named in Native American.

Yet English is also a ‘lovely’ language. Because of its richness there
are often twenty different ways to say something, and a dozen words
to choose on any topic. One of my own favorite words is ‘jump’. It is
phonetic, but also onomatopoeic and even pictographic. Jump both
sounds like a jump and looks like a jump.

Two scripts that puzzled scholars for many years are Linear-b and
Hieroglyphics. Linear-b – found on clay tablets on the Island of Crete –
turned out to be a coded form of ancient Greek with some slight quirks,
such as dropping the letter ‘s’ from the ends of words. The ‘s’ is superfluous
in most Greek words, and dropping it saved precious clay space!

Hieroglyphics was a real puzzle. It looks so like a pictographic
language that it fooled many people for centuries. The Rosetta Stone was
discovered in 1799 and became the key to their deciphering. This stone
had the same edict written out in 3 languages – Greek, Egyptian and
Demotic. The French adventurer Jean-François Champollion decoded
hieroglyphics in 1822 and although it looks pictographic, it was found to
be predominantly phonetic. Linear-a, another script found on the Island
of Crete has yet to be decoded and remains one of the world’s great
unsolved mysteries.

All these different ways to code ideas into symbols present the
children of the world a great learning challenge. Because written language
is so young, in evolutionary terms, our brains have not had enough time
to evolve to master it. Instead words co-opt parts of our brains originally

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