In code we trust: the concept of Rumūz in Andalusī alchemical literature and related texts

In the medieval Arabic tradition of the so-called occult sciences, the concept of ramz (symbol, code) has acquired an important role in the way the authors were considering and reading the texts of their predecessors and writing their owns. This term, closely related to the notion of secret, covered various ideas of code: from allegories and allusions to codenames and secret alphabets. Above all, the alchemists made ramz a real topos of their literature. In this paper, we focus on the Rutbat al-ḥakīm of Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī (written in 339–342/950–953) and some of its main sources, such as the corpus of texts attributed to Jābir b. Ḥayyān, Ibn Waḥshiyya’s Filāḥa Nabaṭiyya, the Rasā’il Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ and the Risāla Jāmiʿa. We argue that Maslama produced a detailed definition of ramz, conceived a true typology of it, and proposed his own key to reading the alchemical ramz. This rich development is not found in any of the other texts that we have examined here. This observation confirms that Maslama b. Qāsim al-Qurṭubī, far from being a simple transmitter of Eastern ideas and practices to the Western Arab-Muslim world, was an original and innovative milestone in the transfer of knowledge.

SACRED SEMANTICS OF TUVAN TRADITIONAL COSTUME

The relevance of the work is due to the need to study the features of the cut and decoration of the Tuvan costume, which are, on the one hand, a bright unique ethnic image, and on the other hand, carry the universal laws of the Universe inherent in the cultures of all the peoples of the Earth. The traditional costume is included in the “cultural core” of the Tuvan people and contributes to the preservation of its national identity. The aim of the work is to study the sacred semantics of a traditional costume. The object of research is the Tuvan folk costume, the subject is the sign-symbolic nature of the traditional Tuvan costume. The study uses a cultural-historical analysis that reveals the specifics of the Tuvan national clothing and its types, as well as the structural-semiotic method, which allows you to explore the features of the symbolic and symbolic nature of national clothing. National clothing is a complex structure that includes numerous types of upper and lower clothes, hats, shoes, jewelry, personal items and hairstyles. Tuvan clothes are classified according to their age and sex and eight traditional types are distinguished: children’s, girls’s suits, boys’s suits, bridesmaids suits, women’s suits, men's suits, and older’s suits. The traditional costume of Tuvans is a ritual object that has rich sacred semantics. The Tuvan costume is considered not only as a thing, but also as a symbolic sacred form, a sign in the context of culture. This semantic status of folk clothes was to be read and understood both by its owner and other members of traditional cultural communities, as a “sign (symbol, code, artistic image), composed of clothing, shoes, accessories, external behaviors, characteristics of the figure and human personality. The costume language is an image of the real world, the accumulated spiritual experience of people, the practical and aesthetic values of previous generations. Each element of the traditional costume had both functional significance and sacred semantics. The forms of cut and elements of the traditional Tuvan costume acquired particular semantic significance and translated the unity of the “earthly” and “sacred” worlds of mythological consciousness. The traditional Tuvan costume as the most important element of the material culture of the Tuvan people is a “mirror of myth”, reflecting various spheres of life, both material and spiritual. The traditional costume captures the diversity of all aspects of human life, the complexity of social relations and human behavior patterns in material embodiment. The entire costume complex is an integral system of ordered and interconnected signs and symbols, through which the accumulation, organization and transfer of cultural experience is carried out. The result of the study is the systematization of the cultural types of costume and the identification of their symbolic sound in a specific material expression (form, cut, decoration elements).

Seven Aspects of the Great Steppe in the Modern Kazakh Prose – the National Conception of Eternal Nation and Art Discourse

This research aims to identify the role and place of the ideological concepts of the “Eternal Nation” and “The Great Steppe” in Kazakh literature. For this, it uses methods of stylistic analysis of literary works from the perspective of identifying communication symbols in prose. Additional research methods are the method of historical analysis of the ideological concepts formation and a cross-disciplinary approach to the interpretation of the content of works. The reasons for the strong influence of these concepts on the culture of modern Kazakhstan are justified. A symbol code is discovered through which writers reflected the state of public life in Kazakhstan. The research is one of the first attempts to review and analyse the stories of Kazakh literature published in the 21st century. The stories are specially classified in the thematic and content context, the scientific conclusions for the artistic world of the works, language and style features of the works are presented, whereby the authors of the study set a precedent for systematising disparate knowledge of modern Kazakh literature.

An Analysis of the Efficiency of Existing Kanji Indexes and Development of a Coding-based Index

Considering the problems faced by learners of Japanese from non-kanji background, the present paper discusses the characteristics of 15 existing kanji dictionary indexes. In order to compare the relative efficiency of these indexes, the concept of selectivity is defined, and the selectivity coefficient of the kanji indexes is computed and compared. Furthermore, new indexes developed by the present authors and based on an alphabetical code, a symbol code, a semantic code, and a radical and stroke number code are presented and their use and efficiency are explained.

The Knowledge Society Applications

Like in the human mind marked by rationality, goals, and purposeful actions, knowledge in advanced computer systems and intelligent agents is thought to constitute a distinct level lying above the symbol (computational), the logical (algorithmic), and the physical (biological, mechanical) levels (Newell, 1980; Newell, 1990; Newell, 1993). The symbol or code level with its two kinds of representations, data structures (contents) and processes (codes and procedures), is considered to be a representational medium level realizing knowledge content and actuating the agent’s thoughts and decisions. Accordingly, all inquiries of AI usually are arranged as a separate contribution either to the symbol (code) level or to the knowledge (semantic) level. Any sort of logic, whatever may be its generality, contributes little directly to the knowledge level, since “no matter how general a logic is, it is not at the knowledge level” (Newell, 1980). Logical principles are by nature merely rules of reasoning, deductive arguments, and demonstration, they are not principles of real knowledge. So, being neutral to their subjects, formal logical systems neither describe nor represent, nor explain, nor predict any real phenomena. Consequently, nothing substantive can be deduced from the logical axioms or postulates regarding the nature and order of things in the real world. Nevertheless, despite the public fact that logic says nothing about any real thing, and that it is all about proposition and inference forms, there is an established habit to combine formal logic languages with entity taxonomies and typologies so that to construct a general representational language for the DA, in particular, and knowledge technologies, in general (Ontology and Taxonomies, 2001). Nowadays, such versions of logical formalisms and languages as semantic networks, rule systems, fuzzy logic, frame models, predicate calcuThe lus, or situation calculus still constitute all the thrust of current knowledge and reasoning applications. Some AI practitioners feel concern about this conceptual confusion, and urge on replacing “form-oriented AI research” with “content-directed AI Research,” whereby substituting knowledge engineering with ontological (domain knowledge) engineering, thus, underlining the higher value of content theories in comparison with so-called logical mechanism theories (Mizoguchi, 1998).