I chose to excerpt several paragraphs from this article because it provided such a wealth of fascinating material about a recent scientific study that attempts to understand why writing systems employ the symbols that they do. The scientists in the study even theorize about how extraterrestrial organisms might write, if such beings evolved in a similar environment to ours. Here is a link to the original paper, located on the lead researcher's web page (which is full of a lot of wonderful concepts and writing for those who are generally curious about the world in which we live.) The study on writing is one of many investigations into language, cognition and evolution.

...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.

Tags: writing | alphabets | letters