The “Universal” Rebus Principle and Phonosemantic Compounding

Abstract

The general public views hieroglyphs as “picture-writing”. Why does this view persist after Champollion showed that the key to reading hieroglyphs is phonetic? This article argues that this misinterpretation is a historical remnant of the transmission and reception of a single text, the Hieroglyphica of Horapollo. The content of Hieroglyphica is reinterpreted as a conflation of the rebus principle with Egyptian ideas of sound symbolism. The reception of this text in the late Renaissance created the idea of a universal language as an unambiguous pictorial writing system, which has never existed for natural language. Sound symbolism, or phonosemantics is discussed with a particular eye towards the challenges of creating universal languages, including both the difficulty of representing abstract concepts, and the strain on the memory of the reader. The article discusses a solution to these problems of ambiguity in the construction of an artificial rebus principle. A prototype for a set of pictographic universal concepts mapped to characters in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is then proposed and discussed. These pictograms are based on a swadesh list that was extended by the very large lexicon PanLex, and make use of both hieroglyphs and emoji as glyphs.