It is not the avoidance of redundancy that is the key to 
the phonetic alphabet and its effects on person and society. 
“Redundancy” is a “content” concept, itself a legacy of 
alphabetic technology. That is, any phonetic writing is a visual 
code for speech. Speech is the “content” of phonetic writing. 
But it is not the content of any other kind of writing. 
Pictographic and ideographic varieties of writing are Gestalts or 
snapshots of various situations, personal or social. In fact, we 
can get a good idea of nonalphabetic forms of writing from 
modern mathematical equations like E = MC2  or from the 
ancient Greek and Roman “figures of rhetoric.” Such equations 
or figures have no content but are structures like an individual 
melody which evoke their own world. The figures of rhetoric are 
postures of the mind, as hyperbole, or irony, or litotes, or 
simile, or paranomasia. Picture writing of all kinds is a ballet of 
such postures which delights our modern bias towards