Flag Project

Abe's Flag Project

ABSTRACT:The text below describes the flag project that I hope to pursue in some detail. It is set in the context of my greater and subsequent hobby activity - the creation of a proper Dictionary (or Glossary or Encyclopaedia) of Glyphs.

This paper is a very short and early statement of the project. I start with the idea that it would be very desirable to have a means (either a book or a computer system, maybe accessible from my home page) of starting with a flag and finding quickly, using ONLY its basic design, some information about it: but ONLY the institution for which is stands. Others who are more learned than am I have done much work in telling the story of the flags and their institutions. Unfortunately to avail oneself of this information, one must know the Name of the institution and it is my goal to make this easily obtained from simply the flag, its design and colours.

This project continues to give me enormous amounts of pleasure. I have devised a scheme to assign to each flag two defining integers, each of five digits. These two numbers purport to denote the design of the flag so that when they are sorted, the flags that correspond to the numbers are also sorted in a manner that will be easy to search when one wants to identify the jurisdiction or organization for which the flag stands. I may be re-inventing the wheel, but the only reference I can find (and this by word of mouth from Whitney Smith in the USA who seems to be a dean of flags there) is to work done by the British Admiralty. I have made preliminary attempts to locate the cited work ("Flags of the World"???) but without any success.

I really hope to learn some things about the way one can describe "things" by assigning code numbers to each so that that they will sort sensibly (for easy and intuituve retrieval). This is, perhaps, the approach that I will take when I attack, finally, the major opus of my retired life - the encyclopaedia of glyphs. In other words, the flag project is the precursor of later "glyph" project. Now I have just been told, also by Whitney Smith, that there is some work already done in the area of glyphs: Walter Shepherd, Shepherd’s Glossary of Graphic Signs and Symbols (early 1970s). I have found this book and looked at it in the local university library. It lives in their reference section so is not available for study at my leisure off site, but I will set aside half days to go and study it there. My preliminary impression is that his choice of sources for the glyphs that he catalogues (using his own scheme which is contrast to that of Liungmann, a Swede, who wrote a little later) is not the same as mine - he has sources that I can use, and I have some that he does not include. I will attach as a postword to this note the list of sources that I have compiled for my work. It will be annotated eventually to include those from Shepherd that I had omitted and consider appropriate.

A Preliminary List of Sources of Glyphs:

1. Editing Marks
2. Musical Notation
3. Playing Cards, Amusements (printed?), Tarot
4. Alchemy
5. Astrology
6. Mathematics (incl APL) {esp. infinity}
7. Punctuation in various languages; diacritical marks
8. Pharmacy - Prescription scripts
9. Heraldry (English, European, Japanese, ....?)
10. Jungian ARAS (Archive for Research into Architypal Symbols)
11. Artistic Glyphs (Mayan, African, Polynesian, Inuit, ...)
12. National Language Alphabets, incl Chinese, Japanese, Sanskrit,..
13. Calendars - Aztek, Maya. etc
14. Brands on Livestock (with generating granmmar? - NO!)
15. Sailing flags

If you have any comments or questions about this, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Return to Abe's Document Index.
Return to Abe Luochs's Home at SoHo 2692.