Re: [O] OT: collage of scripts [was: Re: table alignment failed for Asian characters]

[Jambunathan K]

> 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.

Book seems like an interesting read. For me to go from frame message ->
outer message -> inner message, I think I need to read the whole book
and not just a fragment of it :-)

Just curious, is the book a standard regular or supplementary reading
for courses in US. If yes, courses here could improve a lot. Such
readings will make CS/Mathematics fun, fascinating and mysterious.

> 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
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