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May 1, 2006
Why Does Writing Have The Shapes It Has?
I ran across an abnormally interesting article on natural influence on the frequency of shapes of the writing topology in some 115 nonlogographic writing systems. The burden of the article by Mark A. Changizi of Cal Tech and his team is well summarized in this paragraph from Live Science,
"Evolution has shaped our visual system to be good at seeing the structures we commonly encounter in nature, and culture has apparently selected our writing systems and visual signs to have these same shapes," Changizi said.
The title of the Article is "The Structures of Letters and Symbols throughout Human History Are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes" and it will appear soon in The American Naturalist. Either no registration is required or I accidentally found a back door to the article.
The summary above seems reasonably intuitive to me but I do worry about an example that is not among the 115 writing systems considered in the study. Here is how they state the goals of their study.
First, we will ask whether there are any empirical regularities governing the shapes of human visual signs. In an effort to answer this, we will identify a wide array of topologically distinct contour configurations and will measure the relative frequency of these configurations as they occur in letters across 100 writing systems over human history, Chinese characters, and nonlinguistic symbols. We will demonstrate that there are strong correlations among the configuration distributions of these three classes of visual sign, suggesting that the configuration distribution for human visual signs tends to possess a characteristic signature. Second, we will show that this signature correlates highly with the configuration distribution found in trademark symbols (signs that are selected primarily for visual recognition, not for the motor system) and with measures of visual stimulus complexity but that the visual sign signature correlates poorly with the configuration distribution found in scribbles and shorthand (drawings that are selected primarily for motor execution, not for visual recognition) and with measures of motor complexity. We will conclude from this that visual sign shapes are selected for optimization of visual recognition, not motor execution. Finally, we will test an ecological hypothesis that the shapes of visual signs have been selected to resemble the conglomerations of contours found in natural scenes, thereby tapping into our already-existing object recognition mechanisms, somewhat akin to sensory exploitation hypotheses in animal signaling. We will provide evidence that the more common configuration types found in natural scenes tend to be the more common ones found in human visual signs. [references omitted]
I don't intend to rehearse the whole paper here but it is based on very detailed statistical analysis of the topology of writing systems and natural forms. Below is one of many charts the authors use to summarize their data.
Please read the whole study and form your own opinion.
Four interesting definitions come out of this study.
abjads - characters for consonants but not for vowels
abugidas -characters for consonants but diacritical marks for vowels
alphabets - characters for consonants and vowels
syllabaries - characters for syllables
Of course, Ugaritc does not clearly fit any of these categories although it is closest to a abjads with some elements of an alphabet or a syllabary.
Of the 115 writing systems analyzed, as far as I can tell, not a single one was a cuneiform system; neither abjad or syllabary. And when I look at a cuneiform wedge, a smallest topographic element in the system it appears to me to fall more among those shapes with a frequency in the 10-3 range rather than the 10-1 range. Perhaps one could argue that the wedges were "visualized" as groups of three straight lines and therefore fall within the shapes with greatest visual frequency. But somehow, I think the readers of texts written in cuneiform saw wedges rather than lines. But, you say, perhaps cuneiform writing systems became extinct because the basic topology was of low visual frequency. I will simple note that cuneiform systems lived and evolved over thousands of years and were adapted to dozen of distant languages and many more dialects. Even though cuneiform systems lingered for a few hundred years after his conquests, my own view is that Alexander the Great had more to do with the demise of cuneiform writing than any natural visual bias.
Via Life Science
Posted by Duane Smith at May 1, 2006 3:30 PM | Read more on Science - General |
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