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Sweet Potato

The main symbol in this painting is taken from the language Yerkish.

Yerkish is a language of lexigrams developed by Ernst von Glasersfeld to communicate with primates. A lexigram is a symbol that represents a word or idea.

There are 384 lexigrams in Yerkish. The symbol in the painting above means 'sweet potato'.

The ability of chimpanzees to communicate using workds and symbols is fascinating to me. It shows humans are not the only animal capable of communicating using symbols. What does this tell us about consciousness?