Symese
A script that uses symbols to denote concepts independent of their sounds in spoken language
What is Symese?
Symese (pronounced "sai-mees") is a universal symbolic script that is simple but not simplistic. It has an elegance and coherence lacking in modern pictographic-rooted scripts whose glyphs (symbols or icons), stylised and expanded over time to denote sophisticated concepts, have lost much of their pictographic lineage.
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Author Bio & Blurb
Tim Lee speaks three languages – his mother tongue (Chinese), the language of his country of birth (Malay) and English, the closest thing there is to a global language. He also speaks the language of the heart (music) – self-taught, with no formal music education.
As a Business Analyst, he discovered the elegance of capturing business logic and processes in computer code. Finally, his grandchildren taught him to speak babese and toddlese.
Integrating his experience of language into a whole that is more than the sum of its parts, he embarked on a decade-long quest to invent a universal symbolic script –
Symese (pronounced “sai-mees”) – the language of symbols.
Tim thinks he has succeeded in developing a logical framework for a script that can become a living universal language. Such a labour of love is an age-old quest with hundreds of offspring and Esperanto coming closest to maturity but without achieving the critical mass needed to become self-sustaining. Has Tim succeeded? You be the judge.
The creation of an entirely new script is a rare event. Academics rhapsodize about how an illiterate Alaskan genius, Uyaquq, invented a script to communicate in his central Alaskan language Yup’ik. The Cherokee genius Sequoyah became famous for inventing a script for his native tongue which survives today. But Tim Lee is even more ambitious. Uyaquq and Sequoyah created scripts for their own languages. Symese could become a medium of communication uniting all cultures. In quest of this noble aim, Tim’s claim to have developed a rigorously logical and intuitive system of communication deserves to be examined.
Michael Cook, Author & Journalist
Rationale & Philosophy
Without the advantage of historical evolution within a cultural context, a universal script must be simple enough for a non-linguist to learn without undue effort yet versatile enough to express a viable range of concepts, with a core set of glyphs that can be compounded to represent derivative concepts.
"And although learned men have long since thought of some kind of language or universal characteristic by which all concepts and things can be put into beautiful order, and with whose help different nations might communicate their thoughts and each read in his own language what another has written in his, yet no one has attempted a language or characteristic which includes at once both the arts of discovery and judgement, that is, one whose signs and characters serve the same purpose that arithmetical signs serve for numbers, and algebraic signs for quantities taken abstractly. Yet it does seem that since God has bestowed these two sciences on mankind, he has sought to notify us that a far greater secret lies hidden in our understanding, of which these are but the shadows.
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Mathematician & Philosopher
Sample of Base Concepts
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Philosophy
Without the advantage of historical evolution within a cultural context, a universal script must be simple enough for a non-linguist to learn without undue effort yet versatile enough to express a viable range of concepts, with a core set of glyphs that can be compounded to represent derivative concepts.