Here I'll be exploring pictographs as if they were part of an actual language, comparing them to real-life names and real-life linguistic concepts. I'll explain it all for you and link you to Wikipedia when I don't feel like typing a huge thing out.

This idea was inspired by Hereticrick's House of O idea. Hereticrick's fawn Ohn has chosen to identify with other deer in the forest who have pictographs similar to his own, which is dominated by a large circle—an O.


It's very nice to have a name, don't you think? I wouldn't like it if I went through life without my own specific name (even though I've met other Alisons and a Robin or two here and there). People would still recognize me if I didn't have one, but what would they call me? Probably adjectives, and none of those would feel unique.

Names are a convenience that we take for granted. They are a special kind of sacred, a symbol of self and something in which we can take pride. Giving names is a great responsibility over which caregivers can spend a long time agonizing. It is usually agreed that there is a “right” name for an individual baby, but the trick is finding it.

I'm sure you remember when you had your pictographs given to you. The Gods would offer you one, and you would carefully look it over. If you decided that it was just right, you kept it. If it wasn't you, you could ask for a different one. I see many people, myself included, proudly brandishing our personal pictographs in our signatures and avatars, and most deer biographies link you to a page with nothing but their name on it.

Think about your Pictograph... It feels good, doesn't it? It feels right. It belongs with your deer. I bet you thought pretty carefully about naming your deer, too. I can't imagine my La being called anything else.

Some people were so important in the shaping of the world that the mention of their names becomes deeply powerful. Abraham Lincoln—I hear his name and I think of the Gettysburg Address and the Emancipation Proclamation. I hear the name Crazy Horse, and I think of a man who stood up to defend his people and his culture. Conversely, when I hear the name Adolf Hitler, I feel a great anger and a deep sadness. Have you ever met anyone named Hitler? I haven't. I think they all changed their names. Similarly, I've never met anyone named Judas. Who wants to name their child after a man who is arguably the most famous traitor in the Western World? Even non-Christians would probably be reluctant to call their kid Judas.


“Our pictographs look like petroglyphs” is a fun tongue twister, and it's also quite true. Our pictographs are made of a combination of lines (curved or straight) and shapes. All strokes are the same width, which separates us from languages like Chinese or Japanese. Likewise, the complexity of the pictographs separates us from the Latin Alphabet, the Greek Alphabet, the Cyrillic alphabet, and other such writing systems. Arabic, while a beautiful and flowing script, is too connected and always appears to be moving. In the end I could find no writing system that really resembled the look of our Pictographs though Bengali, Thai, Korean, Ancient Egyptian, and Hebrew came closest in my opinion.
Update: PLK217 pointed out that many glyphs resemble letters from the Runic Alphabet, and I have to agree with him.


I took a second look at Japanese. I had already decided that our pictographs don't look much like Japanese at all, this time I was looking less at the writing for aesthetics than the structure of an individual kanji. A kanji is a single character in Japanese with a specific meaning and not just a sound reading. The character for fish is sakana. The characters for whale and lobster (two of many possible examples) have the fish character incorporated into them.


Yes, yes, I know that whales and lobsters aren't fish, but they are animals living in the water, and I didn't make up the language. My point is that Japanese (and Chinese) use parts from other kanji to build new kanji. I often see other deer with glyphs in their Pictograph that look like my glyphs.Think of each little glyph in your Pictograph as the fish. Your entire name is like the whale or lobster. The more glyphs you have in common with someone, the more similar your names are.

If you looked at it with sounds in names that are common in my country, Alison and Alice are very similar; Frank and Fred or Bianca and Jessica are a bit similar, and Louise and Ben have no similarities.

This ties back to The House of O idea, that deer are connected to each other by their glyphs, that there are webs of pictograph “families” out there, where a deer is connected by their pictograph to many “Houses” (to borrow a term from Hereticrick). There could be a House of the Box, a House of the Tall Isosceles, a House of the Clockwise Spiral.

While each deer belongs to four Houses, the other members in their House are connected to yet more houses, and so on until it becomes clear that everyone is connected by their names.



Etymology: The study of word origins and how words are put together to make meanings.

Glyph: Defined by Wikipedia aptly as "an element of writing: an individual mark ... that contributes to the meaning of what is written." I give glyphs arbitrary names mostly according to geometry.Do you see your pictograph as being a combination of glyphs or as an image as a whole? There's also the idea that all deer sharing a glyph may have something in common. For my purposes interpreting glyphs and pictographs, I like to think of each glyph as a morpheme.

Morpheme: A unit of language that contains a single meaning. The word "houses" has two morphemes: "house" to identify what it is, and the suffix "-s" to tell you that it is plural. Each pictograph has four glyphs, which I equate to four morphemes, though I leave it up to each player/deer to choose meaning for themselves.

Pictograph: This word and its synonym pictogram are used when talking about writing systems. A pictograph is am image that means what it looks like.Our pictographs in The Endless Forest are abstract, although some people have less abstract pictographs than others. La's pictograph, for instance, does not literally mean "two circles and two triangles." Pictographs are mostly used in modern time with warning labels, such as images of flames on flammable objects to warn people that they might catch fire. Do you see your pictograph as literal, abstract, or somewhere in between?

Reduplication: Sounds bizarre but I promise it's a word. Chances are if you aren't studying or haven't studied linguistics in the past, you've never needed to use it. Reduplication is the process of repeating a word or part of it in some way to alter meaning. It occurs in many languages across the globe. In The Endless Forest's pictograph names, I use the word reduplication to refer to scenarios in which a pictograph has two or more similar glyphs. La's pictograph, for example, has reduplicating circles and triangles. Wikipedia article with good real world examples here. Does your pictograph have any glyphs that reduplicate?

Overlapping: The connection of lack of connection between glyphs. Sometimes two glyphs can overlay and look like they are actually one. Because of this, some pictographs look like they have fewer than four. Is your pictograph all connected, or are its elements distinct? Is it somewhere in between? Not any sort of real thing, but a concept I've thought about.


I hope to have left people thinking of pictographs in a different way, or at least amused. Please let me know of any suggestions, thoughts, and comments.

My eventual goal is to catalog every glyph, but that will no doubt be a lengthy process that I will work on over time. The catalog, currently up to date, can be found here.

Since January 2014 I have been adding more information and more questions for people to think about and consider within the pictograph-language metaphor. I've cleaned up the page and tried to make it a bit more professional looking and more streamlined to deliver information more quickly.

Fainalotea made a thread discussing pictographs here.