Writing makes worlds

Super interested in Joshua Foer's New Yorker article on article on Ithkuil inventer John Quijada. Like all New Yorker articles, it's a two day investment for me these days, but found a lot to groove on in the first section, which gave an overview of invented languages and seemed like a complement to Joanna Drucker's Alphabetic Labyrinth, which I have been struggling with for about a month. Most interesting me - because it connects up to some work that's going on in the studio - is the reference to ideas put forward by Descartes and Leibnitz (which I am still trying to wrap my head around) that suggest numbers may be a more precise mens of constructing written language than phonetically-driven formula we use. 

The use of numbers to replace words may have first come to my attention with the CD 10-codes of the 1970s (I remember a plastic trash bag you were supposed to hang in the car that I insisted on memorizing because it had a list of these codes...and it should be immediately obvious that we had no CB radio in the family). But I remember Target getting some bad press for selling shirts that were emblazoned with an 88 some years back, and then I started to realize that written language might work a few different ways...

Anyway, looking forward to finishing this, and I'd be happy to hear from anyone who is a native Esperanto speaker or has other language issues to share...