Even though I do not quite understand the connection between this text and our course material, it is a very interesting read.
With gradual improvement of a system, at some point of history, one improvement would make the system “universal”, gives the system ability to cover every possible instance and potential problem.
However, I do not particularly agree with the author on one point regarding the “universality” of language. My first language Chinese is one of the few languages in the world that do not have an alphabet. Yet I believe it is just as “universal” as any other alphabet based language. One of the points the author brought up is that an alphabet can accommodate all potential words in a language and it would help people to pronounce a foreign word. I have not heard of anyone creating a new character in my life, yet new words and concepts are imported into the system everyday. We do this by combining existing concepts together or transliterate a foreign word using characters that have similar sounds. Perhaps in the old times when people did have the need to create new characters. However, I do not see the difference between that and the time when Shakespeare coined a whole bunch of new words for the English language.