The Split of Root Languages: Glagolitsa and Computer Language

Fred Wilson wrote on his blog, about being bored with Web 2.0. He mentioned he was going to Europe. I wrote a reply, which as I did so, reminded me of Glagolitsa. I am including part of my comment here, just for reference later.

If you are going to include Eastern Europe, it would be worth talking to Peter Tomas Dobrila, in Maribor, Slovenia. He has run the KIBLA lab for a while, and knows the intersection of the web and culture in Slovenia. Also Poland would be a very interesting place to talk to others about issues and how they understand the web and what it serves. Jan Berdyszak, is in Poznan, south of Warsaw. He is in the center of the art world there. He is well connected and a cultural hero in many ways.  Both of these places are emerging from a place that is on the other side of our economy. Their interests and depth, (particularly those in Poland, as their country has been trampled and pulled by so many interests over the past century), are very provocative. They can form communities and make great work with nothing. Their minds are engaged in very different ways, and in part this might be because of the split in root languages.

OK, here is an interesting tidbit, just to shift ideas around a bit:

Jan Berdyszak was the person who first mentioned Glagolitsa to me, as I was interested in the relation of language to programming. Glagolitsa is a Cyrllic language. It’s letters were also used as numbers, and it was referred to as “the signs which speak”. In addition, the visual forms of the letters are made of the forms of ones and zeros.

Eventually, this language died, as Latin became dominant.

But isn’t it interesting that those who spoke the dominant Latin-based languages, produced computer languages? And in a sense, computer languages are based on the same symbols of Glagolitsa?

 

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