The world, Fox shows in More than words, tends to be a lot more open-ended than we imagine, with more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of, not just in our philosophy but also our philology. As a student of Javanese literature, I had encountered glimpses of this open-endedness on the pages of manuscripts where we sometimes find little dots on top of Javanese letters. These dots often appear in the literature of Islamic Java written in the carakan alphabet. Known to us as diacritics, they are used for originally Arabic words to produce sounds for which there is no letter in Javanese. Not all originally Arabic words get dots in Javanese texts: while a significant percentage of the Javanese vocabulary is adopted from Arabic, many words have become naturalised to the extent that their origin has become invisible. Sometimes, however, one does find dotted letters, marking words as somehow different from the other Javanese words around them. With Fox's analysis in More than words, I want to ask: how do we understand these dots? And what should we do with them?

福克斯在《不止文字》中表明，世界往往比我们想象的要开放得多，天地间的事物比我们想象的要多，不仅在我们的哲学中，而且在我们的语言学中。作为一名学习爪哇文学的学生，我曾在手稿页面上看到过这种开放性，有时我们会在爪哇字母上发现一些小点。这些点经常出现在用卡拉坎书写的伊斯兰爪哇文学中字母。我们将它们称为变音符号，它们用于最初的阿拉伯语单词以产生爪哇语中没有字母的声音。并非所有最初的阿拉伯语单词在爪哇语文本中都有点：虽然很大一部分爪哇语词汇是从阿拉伯语中采用的，但许多单词已经被自然化，以至于它们的起源变得不可见。然而，有时确实会发现点状字母，将单词标记为与周围的其他爪哇语单词有所不同。有了 Fox 在《不仅仅是文字》中的分析，我想问：我们如何理解这些点？我们应该如何处理它们？