The number of signs a writing system requires is not a technical detail. It determines who can be literate.
A system with several thousand signs can be learned, and learning…
There is an assumption that things used routinely are understood, and it does not hold in general.
A great many effective interventions were established empirically — somebody noticed that something…
The distinction that organises the whole subject is between comparing and measuring. A balance compares; a scale measures a force. Almost every difference between weighing devices follows from which one…
The useful way to read any station is to work out which of two plans it is, then look at how the roof is held up. Those two facts explain…
A quarry is a negative space that explains a positive one. The buildings, the walls, the roofs and the roads of an area all came from the ground somewhere in…
Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment requires a bilingual text — the same content in a script you can read and one you cannot — and the number of such texts is very small,…