[O] OT: collage of scripts [was: Re: table alignment failed for Asian characters]

[Nick Dokos]

[I hope you'll forgive me the off-topic ruminations]

Jambunathan K <address@hidden> wrote:

> If you do a 
> 
> C-h C-\ RET tamil-itrans RET 
> 
> you will see a nicely aligned table which gives translation table for
> tamil characters - (OK, Tamil is the language I speak) - which look like
> 
> http://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?msg=56;filename=temp.png;att=1;bug=9336
> 

Jambunathan's mention of Tamil brought to mind a picture that
I had seen long ago and found mysterious, beautiful and fascinating.
It is Fig. 40, p. 168, in Hofstadter's "Gödel, Escher, Bach": I looked
for a copy on the web, but I only found the complete book.

The picture is a collage of scripts, from the undeciphered (at least
in 1980, the time of publication) script of Easter Island to Tamil
to Assyrian cuneiform.

I have no idea what each snippet says - yet there are people around
today (and in some cases, perhaps, there *were* people some time ago,
but no longer) who can (or could) extract meaning from each of these
snippets. Conversely, there are scripts that I can extract meaning from,
that other people find mysterious. I can't help the feeling that there
is something deep going on here, I just don't know *what*!

Nick