From the Biologic Institute blog:
What do Han Chinese characters and proteins have in common? Both can be thought of as two- or three-dimensional functional shapes. Change their shapes significantly and you change what they mean or do.
For proteins the flow of functional information goes like this:
protein coding sequence ⇒ 3-D structure ⇒ function
If a code could be devised that specifies Han character traces in vector space, then the Han character set would have a similar information flow:
Han coding sequence ⇒ 2-D structure ⇒ meaning
And suddenly all the parallels between genetic code and language become a rich environment in which to test evolutionary scenarios.