Runes and How Language Gets in The Way

I was reading about the origin and history of the letter "K" yesterday. It's interesting to meditate on the meaning of the letters rather than words, because the letters used to have quite a lot of significance themselves. I was reading about it, because I want to put some decorative trim on my work shop roof facade and I thought I'd form it into a rune.

I have a bunch of posts about language as form of lossy compression. The gist of that is language is a low bit rate form of information transmission about a shared dictionary of concepts.

The letters themselves are raw information, at least to us today. They're a 2 dimensional encoding mechanism. Morse code is another 2D encoding mechanism. An underlying idea with letters and Morse code is that the form of the character should be sufficiently distinct from the other forms so they're easy to distinguish.

Typically, of course, letters are formed into words, and there's only a handful of words, relative to the possible combination of letters, so human beings can readily reject incorrect letters within an otherwise correct word or phrase. (aka the shared language dictionary) In fact, now that people are writing little messages all the time with crappy keyboards, only elderly people care about grammar and spelling. 

The information contained in the letters individually, apart from the shared dictionary of concepts of words and phrases, is more fundamental and in touch with realms of metaphysics because it's outside concepts that are arrived at through cultural accretion where there's an authoritative or agreed upon understanding of what a word like "cow" means.

It's something of a paradox that the letters "c" "o" "w" really don't have any culturally agreed upon concept. In an ancient era, the letters had their own meanings. There's a rune for Aurochs for example, which is the precursor of "u" (uruz), which maybe was onomatopoeic "mooooooo", and the letter "F" is the descendant of the letter that represented wealth and cattle--Fehu. 

In a very weird way, there's more knowledge and meaning present in the letter "k" than in the word "kick" and weirdly, contrary to what a grammar teacher tells you, there's more meaning in the phonetically spelled word "kik" than the word "kick".

A man who promoted the concept of phonetic spelling of English influenced the naming of some institutions in the Adirondak (phonetically spelled) Mountains. One institution is the Adirondak Loj. It really stuck me that seeing that word spelled phonetically on a sign was sort of magical. It kind of slaps your brain when you see it. There's more information present in that word "Loj" than in "Lodge". It somehow unlocks the word and concept from the culturally agreed upon meanings and is more direct.