Week 1: Signs That Move

Framing the course's central question before any Chinese-specific content arrives

22 February 2027

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What a sign system needs in order to represent change, not just categories — worked through three comparison cases (a traffic light, a musical score, a binary digit) before the course’s own notation is introduced, and each case’s specific failure to notate change becomes the yardstick the rest of the semester is measured against.

Outline#

• what “representing change” means, as distinct from naming a fixed state
• three comparison cases and where each one’s transition rule actually lives (outside the notation, in every case)
• the course’s central question, and how the next eleven weeks answer it