Graphical language

Graphical Language is an emergent concept, whose definition is being attempted here for the first time.

Language and its written forms is a system of communication and reasoning using representation, metaphor, logical grammar and symbolic expression which is the sine qua non of civilization itself. Language as it has always been commonly understood is based on the meaning that humans attach to and derive from the sounds that they make with their voices.

It is the ease with which we humans make sounds and attach significance and meaning to them which characterizes the process of creating and using the various spoken languages. As the ease with which we acquired the ability to create a written record of spoken language developed we subsequently extended the usefulness and the potential of spoken language. New types of civilizations themselves became possible, then real, with the advent of written languages.

Now, in the personal computer and Internet era, we have acquired the ability to easily create graphical objects on displays, to attach significance and meaning to them, to instantaneously share graphical creations with others in every corner of the globe, and to assemble these in ever more complex ways according to rules that we are spontaneously developing. This creative process unfolds in a way that is similar to the fashion in which spoken languages were created by people in ages long ago, people who used their abilities to make sounds to build systems of communication based on the meaning and significance that could be associated with sounds.

Graphical languages are counterparts to spoken languages and are thereby useful. A graphical language which is devised as a counterpart to a spoken language is not constrained by some of the limitations of spoken languages and can extend the usefulness of the spoken language as the written extension of the spoken language is.

Graphical languages exist on graphical displays and allow people to use the displays to interact with the displays, communicating without regard to the limitations of distance and not bound by the limitations inherent in the static nature of a spoken or written word.

People who would communicate but who do not share spoken languages can communicate with graphical languages.

Other primates, including Gorillas and Chimpanzees, have learned to communicate with humans using graphical languages.