The brain uses different areas to process numbers and language. In purely visual terms the two processes merge in octomatics and hangul, shown above. Each involves (in the case of hangul, had involved) an entirely new way of thinking about how we translate throught into writing. Speaking as a designer, both systems are extremely elegant, frugal and beautiful. Whether or not they surpass other models will be for you to decide. 

OCTOMATICS

From Digg "What do you think: Why do we have the decimal system in our western world? Because of our 10 fingers? Why do we have 7 days a week? Why are 60 seconds 1 minute and 60 minutes 1 hour? Why do we have 24 hours a day and 31 or 30 days a month? Do you think that's a really good solution? Well, here is another one: Welcome to octomatics!

"The octomatics-project is about a new number system which has a lot of advantages over our old decimal system. The name comes from the mixture of 'octal' and 'mathematics'."

HANGUL 

Many written language experts still awe at the both the simplicity and complexity of the Korean written language known as Hangul.

Korean writing is an alphabet, a syllabary and logographs all at once. Each word is made from alphabet letters that combine into syllables,which are combined into a compact character block.

The hangul script, literally, the 'Great Letters', sometimes called Onmun, shows the ingenuity possible when an orthography is carefully designed to be frendly to its users at every point. Letter names signify their sounds, and the shape of each symbol was supposedly designed to represent its phonetic articulation (although others claim anecdotally that the shapes were taken fortuitously from the design of a lattice that happened to be around.)

The simple 24 letters of the script represent the phonemes of the language. They build up logically to make about 120 very common syllables and nearly 400 in common use, making around 2000 altogether of mostly square-framed syllable blocks, by stacking the geometric shapes of the consonants on to the bar shapes of the vowels, either horizontally or vertically, The blocks have the memorable visual qualities of gestalts, like simple Chinese characters, but with very different constituents.

This orthography suits the Korean language, which is composed mostly of polysyllabic morphemes, with an elaborate inflexional system based on suffixes. I. Taylor (1980) found that the three levels of complexity in hangul characters were better for discriminating and recognising syllable blocks than single levels. The syllables then string into words, with wider spacing between the words, and this facilitates word recognition within the sentences. Logical distinctions reduce homographs. Western scholars have admired its phonetic accuracy, perfect match to the language, internal structure and its 'sheer creativeness'. Dictionaries are not needed for spelling.

Information
Infoverse. Octomatics
Essay. The 'Great Letters' of the Korean writing system