Agreed. One could argue that modern "design thinking" involves the creation and extension of non-alphabetic, visual language. Someone unfamiliar with modern logos (e.g. share icons) and UI conventions (e.g. "hamburger" icon) may view these symbols like they would view Egyptian hieroglyphics.
2nd-order cybernetics is about observing the observer, which includes observing the limitations of communication. Studying different languages helps identify the limitations of each, i.e the untranslateables. There's a great book on this topic (we need an equivalent for software), a 1300 page "Dictionary of Untranslateables".
"This depends on what one means by “untranslatable.” Cassin and her team believe that an “untranslatable” word is not one that cannot be translated, but rather a word we can’t stop trying to translate, aware always that we haven’t quite hit it, that it isn’t right."
That's a great comment. The thread about Unicode 7.0 last month had a long, interesting discussion about the new emoji codepoints vs. logograms and ideograms, with a range of opinions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7903877
2nd-order cybernetics is about observing the observer, which includes observing the limitations of communication. Studying different languages helps identify the limitations of each, i.e the untranslateables. There's a great book on this topic (we need an equivalent for software), a 1300 page "Dictionary of Untranslateables".
http://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2014/07/16/h...
"This depends on what one means by “untranslatable.” Cassin and her team believe that an “untranslatable” word is not one that cannot be translated, but rather a word we can’t stop trying to translate, aware always that we haven’t quite hit it, that it isn’t right."