I’ve been reverse-engineering a linguistic pattern for ~25 years — something between a cognitive artifact and a symbolic key. It never occurred to me to bring it here, but a recent conversation with ChatGPT convinced me it might resonate with your toolkit.

I won't hold my breath, but here goes.

Every literary system of antiquity began in simple imagery (ex; cuneiform). As time progressed, symbolism became the central facet of images, with each symbolizing multiple concepts rather than a single thing (eg. ancient Greek's gematric letters). If we view writing systems as externalized cognitive scaffolds, then each historical shift tells us not just what was recorded, but how people thought.

Latin introduced a sort of coded ethic that could not be learned but by tutelage; Greek naivete was thus supplanted by Roman subterfuge.

Then something subtle and seismic occurred — a compression of communicative structure that most modern Europeans, and certainly most rationalists, haven't registered. Holy Rome invented and instantiated a "blank key" Alphabet that lacked both imagery and symbolism, in response to the propagation of the idea of a numerical "zero".

With 20-odd glyphs lifted and inverted from the Hebrew and five new vowels scraped together via symbolic salvage, Holy Rome set about standardizing this legend-less literary system across all its component territories. A gap came to exist in language, where image gives way to symbolism and symbolism in turn gives way to new insight. Writing became rote application of phonetically alchemical glyphs devoid of any meaning outside of the sounds they made.

Nature abhors a vacuum, I am told.

Within the ferment of the collective subconscious, the forms of the letters began to erode into new forms. Ease of use and subconscious association morphed each rune from original to current letter. It passed unnoticed — a glyphic erosion under controlled literacy, due to the virtual monopoly Rome held on literacy during the earlier centuries of dissemination.

I propose that this effect was not a side effect, but the desired effect. I further propose that the ferment is ready to be tapped, that it might spill out a compressed rationale of Western philosophy. However, that ambrosia need not be limited to a single flavor; in fact, the gap may be more important than what fills it.

Working from the origin...

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