Thread spill is a bad thing. It detracts from the readability of individual topics, makes it impossible for others to follow the original thread that is spilling over and also leads to bad blood as people end up unable to separate an argument from the poster. If you want to carry on arguing about offices, I'm still waiting in the Offices thread for anyone to dispute my point with actual RAW.

Now on the subject of this actual thread. I don't see verbal language going away but I do see a very large role for visual imagery to be woven in. I think this would be very handy in a lot of ways, especially for purposes of debate and conveying complex arguments. Example - you know how in a forum argument one person will list five or six reasons in favour of something and then the respondant attacks two of the weaker ones and ignoring the four. others. Suppose someone when setting out an argument accompanies it by a visual image that remains there, perhaps as a wall with separate blobs of the wall representing the different points. Even perhaps blobs in proportion to how significant they were to the argument. Touch a blob and up pops the point in detail. The other person's attack on two points is visually represented so the degree to which the argument is demolished can be seen.

This is an example of something that would take root in the business world, where news ways of decision making can really take off. The various parties in a business meeting create such an AR/VR diagram and there's a negotiation period over the proportionality of various factors and then a process of constructive argument begins.

This is just an example off the top of my head of how VR and AR would blend into language, supplementing and supporting the reasoning process with visual representation. I see these things originating in academia, flourishing in business and finally coming down to both schools and general society.

I don't see it replacing language in most scenarios however, though I make no distinction between spoken and written language in this case. The two would be interchangeable depending on location and social context.

-Khadim.

Oh, I'm afraid that I wandered away from the issue of hieroglyphics for a moment there into the broader subject of what visual supplement to words could mean generally.

Hieroglyphics are just a primitive form of letters. I suspect the original poster meant icons or pictograms, where the image portrays the thing it represents.

Modern alphabets are far superior. With just 26 letters in the English alphabet (more in the arabic one), you can join them together in sequences that makes a never ending list of available symbols called "words." Not only that, but using some simple(ish) rules each word contains within itself instructions for how it should be pronounced. It can even convey hints at it's meaning. You might not know the difference between psychology and psychiatry, but you can make educated guesses as to their meaning from their relationship to other words. "iatry" is usally some form of treatment. "ology" is a science or study. And psyche we've learnt is to do with the mind, even if we don't speak greek. Compare that to pictures of people looking at heads.

Actually, the last example was pictography, where the image has a relationship to the meaning. Hieroglyphics, as noted, are just less evolved letters.

I can see a lot of use made of icons / pictograms in SR2070, but not really supplanting language for anything sophisticated that you want to communicate.

I should link this.

More than not.

Amusing, Think I can use this. A possible outcome of overuse of Matrix communication. Although it appears to stray a bit from subject.

Was wondering if an elitist group of people could form where they decide to only communicate by COMM-Link because they feel that other methods are vastly inferior,and refuse to lower themselves to do it. Creating their own language as they do so.

Esperanto eat you heart out.

It figures this has already been discussed before.

Not exactly sure about the everything being automatically translatable. Why else would they sell Lingua-Softs. We say that one language must be known to the character for the Lingua-Soft to work. So that Italian to German program does you no good if you don't speak either. If a group with a secret language decides not allow a creation of such a Lingua-Soft then I can't see anyone outside the group knowing it.