“Years ago, in a Bosnian town, a woman tried repeatedly to speak to me, though the words she knew and trusted were words I did not understand,” recalls the writer Robert Bringhurst. “At length, in desperation, she gave me an egg,” and so began a lifelong fascination with language, gesture, and meaning. In this thought-provoking extended essay, Bringhurst combines his knowledge of linguistics, cultural history, typography, and book design to describe how languages and their written forms interact and change over time.

A script can catch some but never all of a language in its net, but as most writers will attest, the journey from speech and gesture to the solid form of language can feel like crossing an actual physical space. In response to this challenge, Bringhurst explains how languages have developed different scriptural techniques for conveying meaning. Korean and Cherokee, for instance, try to find ways to imitate the sound of speech, organizing themselves through syllables. Others, like English, look for ways to represent the act of thinking itself, turning to punctuation to recreate the rhythm of ideas. Languages that are practically devoid of punctuation, like classical Chinese, prefer streams of characters with multiple meanings. Getting to the point is actually considered crude and a sign of literary incompetence.

Charts of some of the basic characters from Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Cree are included. These are a treat to look at on 70-pound paper – all dots, daggers, and whiplash curves. To the non-speaker, still seeking out every wisp of pictorial residue, they are as impenetrable as advanced algebra. But that’s part of the book’s appeal.

Decidedly less appealing are Bringhurst’s discussions on the evolution of these scripts, written in the private language of the academic linguist (accompanying diagrams, called “taxonomic wheels,” don’t offer much clarification). Still, there are enough eggs in this exotic basket whose beauty and poetic simplicity will carry the general reader through to the end.