From laptop phone to the K sound…

Child’s play (No 237, January – February 2004)

How to replace the use of the “ K” sound in our alphabet by a new letter.

By witticism, but also because it can enable us to create comparisons on other types of analysis, let us dust with pleasure our modern alphabet which is made up of many useless letters that generate the same sounds.

For instance, let’s imagine we would like to graphically present the guttural sound produced by the letter “q” and that, consequently, we would be looking to replace the consonants, which, according to their combination inside a word, are euphonically close to it like the “c” or the “k”.

In taking upon our selves the implementation of the archetypes that prevail over letters, logos and tags, we could then choose the abstract substantive “communication”, recurring term of our modern environment. The phoneme of this word-concept wells up from the first letter.

So as not to focus on an abstract notion, let us use a system dear to our ancestors, and let us decide on the object belonging to our daily life that best corresponds to the term “communication” by the frequency with which we use it by its proximity. We chose the “mobile phone”. Through drawing, let us reduce it to a sign, that is to say, a letter.