Communication requires:

* A sender.
* A receiver.
* A message.

Because the message must be comprehensible to the receiver, the message must be transmitted over a code which both understand.

Deaf and mute people use sign language. To many hearing and speaking people, that is incomprehensible.

Conversely, hearing people use speech. To many deaf, that is incomprehensible.

For specialized purposes, people use the Morse code. For people without that training, dots and dashes are just dots and dashes.

For other specialized purposes, people use the aeronautical alphabet. Again, without that training, those are just lists of words.

For music, a special form of writing is used. For people without that training, once again, those are just funny lines and dots.

Most spoken languages have definite writing systems. For illiterate people, those writing systems are incomprehensible. Since there isn't "one" writing system, even, common to all languages, people may not even understand one language's writing as writing: English speakers may recognize the Latin writing of other West European and native colonial languages, and even the related Greek, Cyrillic, Coptic, Runic and ancient Gothic alphabets. But more distantly related writing systems, as Hebrew, Aramaic, Arabic, Amharic, Georgian, Armenian and Tifinagh, strain visually the limits of what intuitively looks like writing. Even more distant forms of writing, as Indian systems, Thai, Chinese, Mongol, Korean, Japanese, the contemporary Native American syllabary, ancient Mayan, ancient Egyptian, and ancient Mesopotamian start to look like art more than writing.

Some languages have been written in more than one writing system. Today South Slavic (Serbian, Serbo-Croat; I'll leave that debate for later) is written in both Latin and Cyrillic. About 100 years ago Turkish switched from Arabic to Latin. (And Spanish did so too about 1000 years ago). Due to the whims of history, some Indian languages have been written in both Arabic (by Muslim peoples or rulers) and native Indian systems (by Hindus). Yiddish has been written in both Latin and Hebrew, as has Ladino (Ladino has even been written in Arabic, Greek and Cyrillic). Malay today is written in Latin, but historically was written in Arabic (and some truly old classical writings in ancestral languages are even in Indian systems); Malay slaves in 19th century South Africa even wrote Afrikaans (a genetically European language) in Arabic. "Muslim Chinese" (Hui) write in Chinese in China but in Cyrillic in Russia and Kazakhstan...

When a sender sends out a message in sign language to someone who doesn't sign; in Morse to someone who doesn't Morse; in aeronautical to someone who doesn't do aeronautical; in writing to someone illiterate; in speech to someone deaf; or even in speech in one language to someone who does not command that language... it doesn't mean there is no message. There is no meaningful communication, that much is true. But there is a message. It is just not received because its coding is not understood and thus it seems to be background noise.


To me the message is there. It is, I could say, everywhere.

People who don't see any message are just not understanding the coding language.