top of page

What is Symese?

Symese 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. 

Anchor 1
Get in touch!
... or tell your friends!
editor@symese.com

Rationale

The idea of a universal script that uses symbols to denote concepts independent of their sounds in spoken language is at least four hundred years old.

​

“Some people, beginning with the philosopher and mathematician Leibniz in the 17th century, even like to imagine that we can invent an entire written language for universal communication… independent of any of the spoken languages of the world, dependent only upon the concepts essential to high-level philosophical, political and scientific communication. If music and mathematics can achieve it, so the thought goes – why not more generally?” (from The Story of Writing by Andrew Robinson, Thames & Hudson 1995)

Sample of Base Concepts

0001-0006.bmp
0021-0028.bmp
0119-0126.bmp
0135-0142.bmp
0127-0134.bmp
image.png

Feedback

Comments (3)
Invitado
18 ago 2023

Looks good! Very scripty..😎

Like
Invitado
18 ago 2023

Interesting - how is it going to work in the "real world" ?

Like
Editor
Editor
24 ago 2023
Contestando a

There is joke about a CEO in the 1970s being offered an email solution before most people had heard of the now-ubiquitous business tool. He half-jokingly asked if they could have “femail” instead of “hemail” but agreed to try it out for a month or two. In that time, he and his team found it useful beyond their expectations. My vision for Symese is as a tool that, once in use, feels so natural that one wonders why it took so long to see the light of day!


Symese may evolve into a living language or it may fill a niche as an auxiliary tool for cross-cultural communication, focussed on a set of basic concepts that can be augmented or combined into more complex ones. As with doodling and emojis, it is a thinking aid that taps the power of a visual gateway to thought, with back-to-basics semantics that cuts through layers of complexity embedded in natural languages, like the complex spelling and nuances of many English words.

Like

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. 

bottom of page