[EDLING:1493] Alphabets are as simple as...

[Francis M Hult]

via lg-policy...

> Alphabets are as simple as...
> (Filed: 18/04/2006)
> 
> Writing systems may look very different, but they all use the same basic
> building blocks of familiar natural shapes, reports Roger Highfield
> 
> If there is one quality that marks out the scientific mind, it is an
> unquenchable curiosity. Even when it comes to things that are everyday and
> so familiar they seem beyond question, scientists see puzzles and
> mysteries.  Familar form: letters have been shaped by everyday sights such
> a the crescent moon Look at the letters in the words of this sentence, for
> example. Why are they shaped the way that they are? Why did we come up
> with As, Ms and Zs and the other characters of the alphabet? And is there
> any underlying similarity between the many kinds of alphabet used on the
> planet?
> 
> To find out, scientists have pooled the common features of 100 different
> writing systems, including true alphabets such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul
> and our own; so-called abjads that include Arabic and others that only use
> characters for consonants; Sanskrit, Tamil and other "abugidas", which use
> characters for consonants and accents for vowels; and Japanese and other
> syllabaries, which use symbols that approximate syllables, which make up
> words. Remarkably, the study has concluded that the letters we use can be
> viewed as a mirror of the features of the natural world, from trees and
> mountains to meandering streams and urban cityscapes.
> 
> The shapes of letters are not dictated by the ease of writing them,
> economy of pen strokes and so on, but their underlying familiarity and the
> ease of recognising them. We use certain letters because our brains are
> particularly good at seeing them, even if our hands find it hard to write
> them down. In turn, we are good at seeing certain shapes because they
> reflect common facets of the natural world. This, the underlying logic of
> letters, will be explored next month in The American Naturalist, by Mark
> Changizi, Qiang Zhang, Hao Ye, and Shinsuke Shimojo from the California
> Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The analysis is simplistic but, none
> the less, offers an intriguing glimpse into why we tend to prefer some
> shapes over others when we communicate by writing.
> 
> The team set out to explore the idea that the visual signs we use have
> been selected, whatever the culture, to reflect common contours,
> landscapes and shapes in natural scenes that human brains have evolved to
> be good at seeing. "Writing should look like nature, in a way," said Dr
> Changizi, explaining how similar reasoning has been used to explain the
> sounds, signs and colours that animals, insects and so on use to tell each
> other they are, for example, receptive to sex. To be able to compare
> Cyrillic, Arabic or whatever, they turned to the mathematics of topology,
> which focuses on the way elements are connected together in a letter
> rather than overall shape, so that fonts do not matter and nor does
> handwriting, whether neat calligraphy or crudely written with a crayon
> grasped in a clenched fist.
> 
> For example, each time you see a T, geometrical features and frills such
> as serifs may differ according to the font or handwriting but the topology
> remains the same. By the same token, L, T, and X represent the three
> topologically distinct configurations that can be built with exactly two
> segments. And, to a topological mind, an L is the same as a V. In this
> way, the team could classify different configurations of strokes, or
> segments, to boil an alphabet of alphabets down to their essentials.
> Across 115 writing systems to emerge over human history, varying in number
> of characters from about 10 to 200, the average number of strokes per
> character is approximately three and does not appear to vary as a function
> of writing system size. Sticking to letters that can be drawn with three
> strokes or fewer, the team found that about 36 distinct characters is the
> universe of letters in a theoretical alphabet.
> 
> Remarkably, the study revealed regularities in the distribution of
> (topological) shapes across approximately 100 phonemic (non-logographic)
> writing systems, where characters stand for sounds, and across symbols.
> "Whether you use Chinese or physics symbols, the shapes that are common in
> one are common in the others," said Dr Changizi. For comparison, the team
> studied the shapes found in the real world, such as the Y shapes seen at
> the corner of a cube, or the simpler L and T shapes found in the branches
> of trees, yurts, huts, tepees and simple dwellings and so on. They
> analysed the frequency of the shapes in 27 photographs of savannas and
> tribal life, 40 miscellaneous photographs of rural and small-town life and
> 40 computer-generated images of buildings. Much to their surprise, whether
> analysing the shapes in an urban landscape, or those in a leafy
> wilderness, they had very similar distributions of configurations and
> shapes.
> 
> Most striking of all, the team found a high correlation between the most
> common contour combinations found in nature and the most common contours
> found in letters and symbols across cultures. For example, contours
> resembling an "L" or "X" are more common in both human visual signs and
> natural scenes than anything resembling an asterisk (*). When the
> popularity of each shape was plotted, a wiggly curve emerged that closely
> matched that of the popularity of the forms and architectures found in
> nature: the most common letter shapes mirrored common real-world shapes.
> As a check that they had found something truly significant, they looked at
> the distribution of shapes found in trademark symbols. Once again, they
> follow the same plot, again suggesting that it is looks that matter, as
> one would expect for a logo, not ease of writing. The idealised flower
> used by BP may be hard to write but is easy to recognise because it
> mirrors a natural shape.
> 
> For comparison, they applied the same analysis to the shapes found in the
> scribbles of children and six kinds of shorthand, where it is ease of
> writing that is paramount. Now the distribution of shapes is not the same
> as found in nature. The easiest shapes to scribble are not the most
> common. Thus, the reason the letters of the alphabet are shaped as they
> are is to be in harmony with the mental machinery we have evolved to
> analyse the patterns of the natural world, not for ease of writing, said
> Dr Changizi. "Vertebrates have evolved for tens of millions of years with
> their visual systems having to be good at recognising the configurations
> that are common out there in nature," he said. "We don't have really good
> mechanisms for recognising shapes that don't often occur in nature." As a
> result, letters and symbols based on rare natural shapes are themselves
> rarities.
> 
> Given how the distribution of features in our world is so similar, whether
> from an urban or a rural environment, the team would not expect writing
> systems that evolved among peoples who lived in desert regions to differ
> much from those of tribes in tropical rainforests. Nor does he expect
> keyboards to have much impact: "Despite the growth in the number of fonts,
> almost none of which is written by hand any more, they appear to possess
> the same shapes as they always did."
> 
> There is a cosmic dimension to this study. Dr Changizi speculates that if
> there is intelligent alien life in the universe, then so long as these
> creatures live, like us, among "macroscopic opaque objects strewn about",
> they will evolve writing symbols like our own. Alphabets on a planet
> orbiting another sun will, if materials, light and shade are similar to
> our own world, have features in common with those used on Earth: if ET
> writes home, we may think there is something familiar about his
> handwriting.
> 
> http://www.telegraph.co.uk/connected/main.jhtml;jsessionid=KRWZXIBGZXHJBQFIQMGCFGGAVCBQUIV0?xml=/connected/2006/04/18/ecalpha18.xml&sSheet=/connected/2006/04/18/ixconnrite.html