Among all the vessels humanity has invented to carry knowledge across time and space, language remains the most versatile. It compresses vast experiential reality into transmissible symbols, enabling one mind to reconstruct the mental states of another. Algorithmic information theory formalizes this: the information content of an object is the length of its shortest description. Formal language theory provides a mathematical lens: a language is a set of well-formed strings generated by finite rules over a finite alphabet. This framework reveals both the power and limits of symbolic expression—a finite grammar can generate unbounded expressions, yet the class of grammar determines what structures can be encoded. Wittgenstein traced the arc of this insight across his career: his early work held that the limits of language are the limits of thought—what cannot be expressed cannot be known; his later work revealed that meaning is not fixed but emerges from use—language is a form of life, a set of games whose rules are learned through practice. This compression is lossy but remarkably efficient, allowing complex ideas to propagate across generations and continents with sufficient fidelity to build cumulative understanding.