Alphabets are as simple as...

[Harold F. Schiffman]

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