Languages Revised
We have reached a common consensus that design is a language just as French and German are languages 2. To act in a foreign environment, one must know the language of the environment to communicate efficiently. Similarly, if one wants to use design to communicate, one has to be visually literate. For a better understanding of visual communication, we should study verbal communication. An understanding of foreign languages may add to an improved comprehension of one’s own language. Similarly, the awareness of linguistics improves the rendering of a language—that is, typography. Therefore, in the first part of this study I will discuss language in general.
As the German philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt recognized early in the nineteenth century, language involves “infinite use of finite means”.3 With 26 signs we can represent virtually anything, and with a limited number of words we can express a limitless number of things. The great Swiss linguist and founder of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure pointed out that the primary problem of language is the arbitrary nature of symbolic relation.4 In his Course in General Linguistics, Saussure emphasized that a sign has no inherent meaning, and the relationship between a signifier of language (sound) and signified (meaning) is arbitrary. If it were not so, there would not be as many languages as there are today. In fact, there would be only one language, which would be based on the motivational relation representing the truth.
There are roughly 5000 different human languages spoken today all around the world. But for some people this is not enough. They are creating new languages. More than 700 artificial languages have been created. The arbitrariness of sound and meaning is the reason for the proliferation of new languages: there has always been the utopian idea of inventing an ultimate language, one which would overcome inherent communication barriers. Esperanto, the world’s leading artificial language, invented in 1887 by Polish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof, was promising. However, Esperanto failed to become the universal standard in communication. The quest for the language used before an angry God destroyed the tower of Babel, and confounded all the languages, continued. The quest was driven by the false belief that there could be a universal language, a kind of global communication solution. It is false because there are over 5 billion people around the world. We are all different and situations are different. The uniqueness of human character requires individual solutions.
The language that we consider most often is a spoken language. There are also non-verbal languages which do not have the faults of spoken communication. Unlike spoken languages, the non-verbal ones do not face the direct problem of arbitrariness of meaning. A signifier relates directly to the signified. Visual communication is one such non-verbal language. But visual communication still uses the process of coding and decoding messages through learned or instinctive association. Visual communication is not the ultimate universal language since it is culture-specific. The same image or visual symbol may have a different meaning to a different culture at a specific time. A swastika meant something completely different 70 years ago, and it still does to members of distant cultures. The same thing that is true of other languages is true of visual communication: one must know the code to understand the meaning. Images are non-linear, and are, therefore, subject to ambiguous interpretation. A pictogram of a person in a skirt on a bathroom door might be interpreted differently by members of other cultures. In many African tribes men wear skirts, so they would probably misunderstand who the bathroom is for.
Visual symbols, like the alphabet, must be learned to be evident. “This means that to know a particular language is to have encoded in the mind/brain a certain generative procedure, an algorithm, which assigns a specific interpretation to every possible expression,” observes MIT professor Noam Chomsky. Children can communicate perfectly well without conscious understanding of the grammar of the language. Using this generative procedure, children can also create grammatically correct sentences from words which they have never heard together.
Hence an alphabet is more efficient if it contains fewer components. The smaller the vocabulary of a language, the less dependent the user of the language is. Regularity and brevity of a language are important criteria in creating artificial languages.
According to Saussure there are only two kinds of writing—the abstract phonetic and the depicting ideographic system. Whereas an ideogram depicts a concept and relates to the particular word, phonetic systems merely represent sound. An example of the ideographic style is Chinese writing. English is an example of a phonetic system. Western linguists claim that the phonetic system is the most advanced system of writing. However, there are not too many languages that precisely reproduce the sound. Real phonetic systems of writing reproduce each sound by a sign, and eliminates ambiguity in spelling. Many of today’s Western ‘phonetic’ languages, with their irrational spellings, are far from an ideal form of language. Phonetic systems don’t use silent letters, all the letters are pronounced. A more true phonetic writing is used by the Eastern-European languages. The Slavic languages use more characters in order to avoid ambiguities in spelling. The Slovak language, for example, uses up to 44 signs, nearly twice as many as English. Although written Slovak is closely linked to its pronunciation, Slovak too has a significant number of exceptions in writing. A “real” phonetic language would probably use even more characters.
I recall a lecture by the French artist Pierre di Sciullo at the FUSE conference in Berlin. A designer labeled an “extreme experimenter” decided to go the opposite way in studying language. Following formal experiments of Kurt Schwitters and Jan Tschichold, Di Sciullo designed Sintetik, a typeface where silent letters are eliminated and similar sounds are reduced to a common shape. Sintetik is a phonetic typeface for the French language and contains as little as 15 letters. “Reduction and an economic use of signs are likely evolution of our language.”
The experiment of Di Sciullo demonstrates the possibilities of language. In history, we can find even more significant solutions. Italian futurists pushed the boundaries of language to the extreme. F.T. Marinetti for instance, refused conventional text. He rejected the traditional sentence and replaced it with a series of infinitives. Eliminating prepositions and conjunctions, he developed a compressed system of expressing oneself that was adequate to the age of machines. Marinetti called his experiment “free words”, and according to him, they could capture more of the industrialized world.
Language is a social product and therefore it reflects changes in the society. Languages, no matter whether they are verbal or visual, should not be considered as finished and closed. On the contrary, they are mechanisms open for further evolution.

2
Jon Wozencroft
The Graphic Language of Neville Brody
Thames and Hudson, 1988

3
Noam Chomsky
Ways of Communicating: Language and Mind
Edited by D H Mellor, Cambridge University Press, 1990

4
Ferdinand de Saussure
Kurz obecné lingvistiky
Academia Praha 1996

5
Noam Chomsky
Ways of Communicating: Language and Mind
Edited by D H Mellor, Cambridge University Press, 1990