Possible psychological universals. A fascinating connection between visual and verbal pattern recognition.
Morin found, on average, that about 61% of lines across all scripts were either horizontal or vertical, higher than chance would predict. (That number rises to 70% for the Latin alphabet, in which English is written.) And vertically symmetrical characters accounted for 70% of all the symmetrical characters. Together, the findings suggest that humans are drawn to these characteristics in writing, Morin says.
But did written scripts evolve to have more of these features over time, as language users selected for certain shapes and orientations of a script? To find out, Morin looked at a subset of 93 scripts that descended from—or gave birth to—another script in the study. Morin found no evidence that scripts tend to become more horizontal or vertical over time, suggesting that the scribes who created them baked human preferences into the written word from the beginning, he reported last month in Cognitive Science.
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/11/why-written-languages-look-alike-world-over
Ummm....
ReplyDelete"They left out so-called logographic writing systems like Chinese and Sumerian cuneiform, which they say have too many characters and are too visually complex to easily analyze."
So I guess a billion people are just genetic mutants?
Almost all of these alphabetic and syllabic systems are direct descendents of Egyptian hieroglyphs. Of course they look similar! The only writing system used today that didn't evolve from Egyptian hieroglyphs is the Chinese character system.
ReplyDeleteAsher Wood which is conveniently left out from the study.
ReplyDeleteChris Greene maybe I’ve lost some detail along the way... aren’t the Chinese characters also composed of a majority of vertical and horizontal strokes?
ReplyDeleteAlso, if your hand is moving horizontally, it’s natural to have a strong horizontal component, and the vertical lines are the second easiest to do without moving your hand back.
Also, quills are finicky instruments with directional preferences.
Jose Pina Coelho most Chinese characters are not vertically symmetric.
ReplyDelete"Also, quills are finicky instruments with directional preferences."
Which isn't a psychological reason.
There are are very few independent writing systems in the world as Asher Wood points out; it's a bit like saying that the dominance of Material UI on Android Phones is due to universal human cognition and aesthetics.
Chris Greene no, not symmetric. But then again, I was talking about horizontal and vertical strokes.
ReplyDeleteAs to the quills, I proposed no relation to psychology. I was merely noting that the preference for horizontal/vertical lines may be a technological/biomechanical effect instead of psychological-only.
PS: Don't get me started on user interfaces... :-)
I was thinking that horizontal and vertical lines are just easier to distinguish than, say, lines which are 31 and 32 degrees apart.
ReplyDeleteRhys Taylor maybe you need glasses B)
ReplyDeleteAsher Wood to distinguish between two strokes, separated by one degree, in the space of one character, we all need glasses. :-)
ReplyDelete