The experience of seeing unfamiliar writing or code

Suppose this were another form of writing seen only on frosty days.

Full disclosure: the photo is morning frost on a car hood. It is not a newly discovered rune or other form of written notation.

Imagination is a powerful thing, sometimes leading down the corridors of fear and paranoia, or the opposite direction to a place of confidence and sense of connectedness to all other sentient beings large or small. Taking this photo as a writing prompt: imagine that this pattern of sometimes perpendicular, sometimes linear, and sometimes angled lines represented music or computer code or, indeed, spoken language. What, then, is the experience of seeing unfamiliar writing?

Several responses come to mind to begin with: (a) this contains secret meaning and possibly is a sign of communication powers that exceed our own system, (b) what is it about; and might it be a threat or a benefit affecting me directly or in a more indirect way, (c) maybe it describes subjects that we in our own writing and thinking so far have not touched, (d) aesthetically, is this instance typical, low-brow or high-brow in learnedness, beauteous or instead inelegant, (e) with regard to the experience of reading this message, what does it "sound" like.

Taking the experience of reading a paragraph or entire short story in English, a beginning reader moves from syllable to syllable or from word to word. An intermediate reader jumps from phrase to phrase, from predicate to predicate. The most practiced reader operates at the level of whole ideas or threads of discussion, barely noticing words or even paragraphs as the entirety plays out in the mind's eye. In the same way for this "text" in the photograph, if one were an advanced reader of this language painted in the cold dark night to be revealed briefly before the morning sun makes it invisible again, then what would the message tell the reader?

Something less than 7,000 human languages exist now, down from a much, much larger number before the time of industrialization, mass-migrations and extraction of natural resources from land and sea. Every 2 weeks another language goes extinct when the last speaker has no one to listen, according to K. David Harrison, When Languages Die. Only about 120 of the languages have a writing system; all the others use the spoken and chanted and shouted and sung word to communicate across the generations. So the imaginary experiences sketched above as "the experience of seeing unfamiliar writing or code" probably happens here and there when people accustomed to life without writing do finally encounter a piece of text that is written by hand or has been printed.

Expanding on this linkage of abstract marks that can be interpreted to entire worlds of meaning, perhaps the day will come with the aid of AI and fast PC processors that we can "read" the chorus of birdsong, the melodies of whales and the other sea mammals, or even "listen to" the trees and fungi in their yammering and soughing.