Letters mirror natural world

Is there some similarity underlying the world's diverse alphabet-based writing systems? According to some scientists, there is ...

Letters Mirror Natural Word: Study examines alphabets' logic

by Roger Highfield (London Daily Telegraph)

(The Gazette, Montreal, April 19, 2006)

LONDON - Look at the letters in the words of this sentence. 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 similariry between the many kinds of alphabet used on the planet?

To find out, scientists pooled the common features of 100 different writing systems, including true alphabetes such as Cyrillic, Korean Hangul and Roman, and the 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 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 reorganizing 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 Shimono from the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. The anlaysis offers an intriguing glimpse into why we tend to prefer some shapes over others when we write.

"Writing should look like nature, in a way," said Changizi, explaining how simialr reasoning has been used to explain the sounds, signs, and colours that animals, insents, and so on use to tell each other they are, for example, receptive to sex.

To be able to compare Curillic, 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 grapsed 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 exaclty two segments.

Across 115 writing systems to emerge over human history, varying th number of characters from 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," Changizi said.

While this thread is about the possible underlying universality of the regularities of the "shape" of various alphabetic writing systems, Ramachandaran (2004) draws our attention to the universality of the "sounds" that those individual letters represent.

For instance, imagine that in front of you is a bulbous amoeboid shape on which are many undulating curves, and right next to it imagine a jagged shape - like a piece of shattered glass with sharp jagged edges. These shapes are the first two letters of the Martian alphabet. One of these shapes is kiki and the other is booba, and you ahve to decide which is which. In experiments, 98% of people say the jagged shape is kiki and the bulbous amoeboid shape is booba.

Other shapes can also be paired with sounds in this manner: for example, if you show a blurred or smudged line and a sawtooth and ask people which is "rrrrr" and which is "shhhhh", they spontaneously pair the former with "shhhhh" and the latter with "rrrrr".

In other words, most of us are synesthetics, and the implication of such a conclusion is huge especially regarding the evolution of language.

"Let's begin with the lexicon. How did  we evolve a shared vocabulary - such a huge repertoire of thousands of words? Did our ancestral hominds sit around the fire and say, "Everybody call that object an axe?" Of course not. But if they didn't do that, what did they do? The booba/kiki example provides the clue. It shows there is a pre-existing, non-arbitrary translation between the visual appearance of an object represented in the fusiform gyrus and the auditory representation in the auditory cortex. In other words, a synesthetic cross-modal abstraction is already going on, a preexisting translation, if you like, between visual appearance and auditory representation. Admittedly, this is a very small bias, but that is all that is required in evolution to get something started." (p. 77)

Ramachandran, V.S. (2004) A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness (Pi Press; New York).

I have done this simpel demonstration in my "Cultural Psychology" class. I compile a list of word pairs that describe contrasting attributes (e.g. beautiful - ugly; kind - mean; happy - sad) in different languages. I then ask my students to guess which word (in the foreign language) corresponds to, say, beautiful and which corresponds to ugly. Most of the time, the majority of my students can "guess" the answers correctly even if they have no knowledge of those foreign languages. This tends to provide some elemental support for Ramanchandran's claim that (1) most of us are synesthetic and (2) there is something universal about all human languages.