Month: October 2017

Hair as a Medium for Communication

One’s hairstyle projects one’s status. Female hair telegraphs availability. Certain styles indicate “not yet: this wearer is too young to bear children.” Early communication was often about a female’s ability to carry offspring.

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Fig. 2 We don't recognize the alphabet's Times Roman capital “B” as related to "mother," but four other cultures do. The Chinese character for “milk” has the "female" radical on the left, and a “B”-shape on right. The Chinese character for “pregnant” has a “B” shape with the word for "child" emerging from its bottom. The Ancient Egyptian hieroglyph for “milk,” rotated 90° clockwise to facilitate comparison was pronounced /irtt/ or "to make TT" which sounds a lot like "tit" or "teat." The Thai character for “mother” has two lower case "b's," which resemble the word "boobs" as well as the actual appendages. The last character is Sumerian for "child," one who sucks milk from her mother. All of these words have both “B” shapes and meanings that relate to "mother." The breast imagery has been highlighted in blue.

乳房，阴道以及工具: 对英语字母系统的思考

如果你要向彼此语言不通的人描述一件事情，最简单的传达意思的方法就是画一张图。

“一图胜过万语千言”，因为不需要任何约定俗成的书面或口语表达就可以将信息传达出去。这种视觉的交流方式不需要面对面的互动，任何人都可以画一幅图，其他任何人都能够看到这幅图。只要信息发出者与接收者的思维方式大致相同：那么，传输完毕。现代人就都满足这样的要求，因为我们都是通过自然选择进化而来的，这个过程既不是民主选择又不是个人独断，而是方向始终如一，不可阻挡的进化过程。从几十万年前起，人类就一直延续着基因上的相似性，因此，我们的基本需求是一样的。早期人类将其反应在字母的形状和发音上，也就是说，我们的字母表就是人类基本需要的层级图。

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