Not so if the book has been translated into Arabic. Now the reader can discern no meaning in the letters. The text conveys almost no information to the reader, yet the linguistic information contained in the book is virtually the same as in the English original. The reader, familiar with books, will still recognize two things, however: first, that the book is a book; second, that the squiggles on the page represent a pattern of abstractions which probably makes sense to someone who understands the meaning of those squiggles. Therefore, the book as such will still have some meaning for the English reader, even if the content of the text has none. Let us go to a more extreme case. Not a book, but a stone, or a rock with engravings in an ancient language no longer understood by anyone alive. Does such a stone not contain human information even if it is not decipherable?.