> Two examples from the paper really stuck with me. In one, he discusses the importance of spaces for encoding language, something which I had never really cons

> Two examples from the paper really stuck with me. In one, he discusses the importance of spaces for encoding language, something which I had never really considered before. As a westerner who has studied quite a few writing systems this is kind of hard to interpret. Verbally however, the timing of pauses are important in all languages I've learned. This would be a more coherent argument to place at the pan-lingual level than one related to written representation, which is pretty arbitrary (many languages have migrated scripts over the years, see for example the dual mode devanagari/arabic hindu/urdu divide, many other languages migrating to arabic, phagspa, vietnamese moving from chinese to french diacritics, etc.). > In the second, he discusses how it is the redundancy of language that allows for crosswords, and that a less redundant language would make it harder to design these (unless we started making them 3D!). It made me think more deeply about communication as a whole. Yeah, good luck making a Chinese crossword. Not sure "redundancy" is the right term, however. Perhaps "frequent [even tediously repetitive?] glyph reuse".