The paper discusses a short program in BASIC and its textual output, both con- tained in Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, with the aim of highlighting the semiotic complexity of programming languages. First, the specific enunciative regime installed by the novel is discussed, including the narrative and the code layers. Starting from enunciation issues, the problem of the status of the code as a replica or pseudo–replica is introduced, according to Eco’s theory of modes of sign production. To this end, the BASIC language is shortly presented, and the program is analyzed in relation to the many BASIC dialects. Then, the relation between expression and content is taken into account, starting from a translation perspective that compares the actual program with other implementations, both in BASIC and in other languages. Finally, the program is discussed as a result of a writing practice that governs its functioning and

This contribution discusses the notion of an ideal language and its implications for the development of knowledge organization theory. We explore the notion of an ideal language from both a historical and a formal perspective and seek to clarify the key concepts involved. An overview of some of the momentous attempts to produce an ideal language is combined with an elucidation of the consequences the idea had in modern thought. We reveal the possibilities that the idea opened up and go into some detail to explain the theoretical boundaries it ran into.

In The Instruction of Imagination, Daniel Dor offers a new perspective on the essence of human language. This enormous achievement of our species is best characterized as a communication technology - not unlike the social media on the Net today - that was collectively invented by ancient humans for a very particular communicative function: the instruction of imagination. While all other systems of communication in the biological world target the interlocutors’ senses, language allows speakers to systematically instruct their interlocutors in the process of imagining the intended meaning, instead of directly experiencing it. This revolutionary function changed human life forever, and in this book it operates as a unifying concept around which a new general theory of language gradually emerges. Dor identifies a set of fundamental problems in the linguistic sciences: the nature of words; the complexities of syntax; the interface between semantics and pragmatics; the causal relationship between language and thought; language processing; the dialectics of universality and variability; the intricacies of language and power; knowledge of language and its acquisition; the fragility of linguistic communication; and the origins and evolution of language. Dor then shows how the theory provides fresh answers to these problems, resolves persistent difficulties in existing accounts, enhances the significance of empirical and theoretical achievements in the field, and identifies new directions for empirical research. The theory thus opens a new path toward the unification of the linguistic sciences - on both sides of the cognitive-social divide.

This paper proposes to use the tools of literary analysis (the reference to subtexts) and of linguistics (metaphor and metonymy) to shed light on the work/labour controversy and, beyond that, to map the galaxy of representations of work/labour through a study of the meanings associated with work/labour in several languages. It aims to provide a set of theoretical tools that can be used to find a common language in order to discuss digital work/labour issues as a subcategory of work/labour issues in general. Acknowledgement: In addition to the dictionaries mentioned in the bibliography, I have relied on the help of several friends and colleagues who were more familiar than me with the languages I have tried to approach, and to recognized experts in the field of linguistics. In particular, I would like to express my warm thanks to my colleagues Professors Leo Carruthers (Old English), Pierre Cotte (Linguistics), Frédéric Lagrange (Arabic), Laure Troubetzkoy and Stéphane Viellard (Russian) Dr. Eran Fischer (Hebrew), to my doctoral student Medina Niang (Woloff), to my friends Shuai Zhang (Chinese) and Daniel Koechlin (Sanskrit and Gaelic), and to my son David (Lingala and Swahili). Special thanks to my friend and colleague Dr. Barbara Lelan, who, among her many other insights, especially regarding sign languages, has led me along the path to metonymy as fractal compression, and Ursula Huws, who directed me to relevant sources for the vocabulary of digital work and labour, and the reviewers of this paper, who forced me to answer very interesting questions.

Within a culture of persistent efficiency, ambiguous imagery represents a critical alternative. This thesis bridges studies in technology history, network and political theory, and art history. It attempts to account for contemporary artistic practices that critically address some of the objectionable tendencies within digital culture. These practices, this thesis proposes, may be best characterized by their radical use of ambiguity and un-certainty – qualities at clear odds with the rational, efficient nature of digital technologies. This thesis indicates a lineage of this nature in computer and Internet history, twentieth-century cybernetics, and larger philosophic histories. Rooted in symbolic logic, digital technologies carry a heritage of disambiguation—a dominancy of overdetermined, reason-based principles writ furtively in algorithms and protocols. They thus espouse ideologies via systematized calculation and centralized command, despite the commonly-perceived transparency, fluidity and egalitarianism of the Net. Working within-but-against these surreptitious structures are radical practices that critique, undermine, leverage, and offer alternatives to ideologies of disambiguation. In opposition to a contracted, answers-fixated dominant culture, artists are advantageously positioned to point back to the realm of questions – in all of its arable uncertainty, inquisitiveness and ambiguity. This thesis is structured around case-studies of artwork made by Constant Dullaart, Rosa Menkman, Jon Rafman, Internet Surfing Clubs, Ryan Trecartin, and Oliver Laric. Their practices contest the disambiguous nature of digital technologies to open up critical fissures in the semantic structure of digital culture.

A spectre is haunting Maya epigraphy, the spectre of sign properties and orthographic premises – both a constant source of vexation and argument in recent years. A functional classification into cenemic and pleremic signs has long been established. New classes of graphemes and underlying representational rules were proposed since then, debating the nature of Maya writing: diacritics, determinatives, or morphosyllables; to name only a few. Some of these have and continue to cause considerable epigraphic debate and confusion. A 2011 “Written Language & Literacy” issue was devoted to methodologies to define writing system typologies and advocated a stronger comparative approach, a recommendation this paper fully supports in its discussion of Maya hieroglyphic writing. Comparative graphematics is not entirely new in Maya epigraphy. But instead of using arguments from other writing systems for a line of support, it is worthwhile to take a more multi-faceted approach with comparisons, thereby obtaining a clearer classificatory benefit. For example, homophony and determinatives graphematically differ in Maya, Egyptian, or Cuneiform writing; as diverging emanations of a logo-syllabic system. Contrasting all three systems leads to a clear understanding of similarities as well as differences and leads to a more precise typology.