LoCoS (short for Lovers Communication System) is a

pictorial language An international auxiliary language (sometimes acronymized as IAL or contracted as auxlang) is a language meant for communication between people from all different nations, who do not share a common first language. An auxiliary language is primaril ...

developed by

Yukio Ota is a Japanese graphic designer best known for his work on the ISO Standard exit sign and the pictorial language LoCoS (language), LoCoS. Biography Yukio Ota was born in 1939. He graduated from the Tama Art University in 1962. He went on to de ...

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the north ...

in 1964. It was meant as communication for the deaf and mute as well as for the

illiterate Literacy in its broadest sense describes "particular ways of thinking about and doing reading and writing" with the purpose of understanding or expressing thoughts or ideas in written form in some specific context of use. In other words, hum ...

. It is a universal and simple language, and as Ota put it, "It should emphasize the importance of communication among all the people of all the countries of the world."

Symbols

There are 8 major symbols in LoCoS. There is the Sun or day, represented by a circle. There is man, represented by a ring shape. There is a thing, represented by a square. There is thought, represented by a triangle with a slightly cut off top. There is feeling, represented by a heart. There is land or place, represented by a low straight line. There is the

question A question is an utterance which serves as a request for information. Questions are sometimes distinguished from interrogatives, which are the grammar, grammatical forms typically used to express them. Rhetorical questions, for instance, are inte ...

indicator, a question mark. There is, lastly, a point or existence, represented by a single point.

Words

Words are made by combining different symbols in different ways. For example if you put a dot inside a circle it will represent today, or if you put a fish in a ring shape it will be a fisherman. There are around 80 words that are official according to

. Words can be created as long as they follow the basic word

syntax In linguistics, syntax () is the study of how words and morphemes combine to form larger units such as phrases and sentences. Central concerns of syntax include word order, grammatical relations, hierarchical sentence structure ( constituency) ...

Sentences

Sentences are formed by a combination of certain words. There are three rows that you use when writing sentences. The middle row is used for the core words (

nouns A noun () is a word that generally functions as the name of a specific object or set of objects, such as living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, or ideas.Example nouns for: * Living creatures (including people, alive, d ...

verbs A verb () is a word (part of speech) that in syntax generally conveys an action (''bring'', ''read'', ''walk'', ''run'', ''learn''), an occurrence (''happen'', ''become''), or a state of being (''be'', ''exist'', ''stand''). In the usual descrip ...

, and direct/indirect objects). The top row is used to modify verbs with adverbs. The bottom row is used to modify nouns using

adjectives In linguistics, an adjective (abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the mai ...

Bibliography

* Bliss, C.K. (1965). Semantography (Blissymbolocs). Sydney, Australia: Semantography Publications, second edition, 882 pp. The book presents a system for universal writing, or pasigraphy. * Ota, Yukio (1973). «LoCoS: An Experimental Pictorial Language.» Icographic, No. 6, pp. 15-19. Published by ICOGRADA, the International Council of Graphic Design Associations, based in London. * Ota, Yukio (1987). Pictogram Design, Kashiwashobo, Tokyo, {{ISBN, 4-7601-0300-7, 1987. The author presents a world-wide collection of case studies in visible language signage systems, including LoCoS. Sign systems Constructed languages