[I hope you'll forgive me the off-topic ruminations] Jambunathan K <kjambunat...@gmail.com> 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