[6/17 bonus chapter for the Alliance Leader]
The number one, the smallest positive integer, was neither prime nor composite, and could divide every integer...
"Number one" was a concept. Whether it was written as "one," "1," "①," "△," or "□," it did not affect the concept of "number one."
That was what those symbols conveyed. Regardless of how they were written or how their forms changed, they all pointed to that number which was "neither prime nor composite and could divide every integer."
Any "language" was necessarily a conventionally established system of symbols. Every symbol had a distinction between the "signified" and the "signifier." The "signifier" referred to the sound-image of language, the material form of a symbol, composed of sounds and images. The "signified" referred to the concept of the thing reflected by language—to the meaning of language itself.
And no matter how the symbols changed, so long as the concepts they pointed to were the same, the symbols themselves could be regarded as equivalent.
The reason modern Chinese people could use modern simplified Chinese characters to understand texts written in seal script by ancients thousands of years ago was also because, although the character forms had changed beyond all recognition and their pronunciations had long changed many times over, the concepts those characters pointed to had never changed.
The form of a symbol was not important.
"This Nan Clan language, put bluntly, is a set of three-dimensional writing. Then, this set of three-dimensional writing uses a special 'stroke order' as a constraint, and
that stroke order happens to conform to knot theory."
"In truth, knot theory has not even a hair's breadth of connection to the actual meaning of these characters. It is merely that the characters happen to conform to knot theory. It is like text within