Desecrating signs:

Ferrara, Silvia

doi:10.2307/j.ctvqmp101.13

Cited by 1 publication

(3 citation statements)

References 6 publications

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“…Consider, for example, the richness of Christian illuminated manuscripts, Islamic calligraphy, the Maya codices, or the monumental temple inscriptions of Egypt. These kinds of texts are not designed primarily to be read so much as displayed for the admiration of literate and nonliterate alike (Ferrara 2015;Guillaume-Pey 2016;Houston 2004a;Olivier 1981). By contrast, mundane or secular genres of writing often take a more simplified form, as witnessed in the bureaucratic handwriting of the hieratic and demotic scripts, or the Simplified Characters of modern China first promoted by the ultra-secularist May Fourth Movement.…”

Section: Domains and Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…That the Vai script was created in a conscious act by named inventors does not invalidate it as a historical heuristic. As many paleographers now claim, the first writing systems are also likely to have been developed by small groups of individual specialists in the space of single generation (Boltz 1986:28;DeFrancis 1989: 216;Ferrara 2015;Glassner 2003;Handel 2016;Houston 2004b;Michalowski 1994; but for a contrary view see Bottéro 1995). There is, after all, no such thing as a natural writing system in the same sense that we understand natural languages.…”

Section: Relevance Of Findings To Other Writing Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…. As SilviaFerrara (2014) put it, "Incipits of all script are invisible, as our points of departure are irrevocably not 'the first' attestations, but the 'earliest' that the vagaries of archaeological preservation has made available to us" (75).…”

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confidence: 99%

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The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes

Kelly¹,

Winters²,

Miton³

et al. 2021

Current Anthropology

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A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus, the iconic ox's head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts to theorize the evolution of writing have tended to propose variations on a model of unilinear and unidirectional progression. According to this progressivist formula, pictorial scripts will tend to become more schematic while their systems will target smaller linguistic units. Objections to this theory point to absent, fragmentary, or contrary paleographic evidence, especially for predicted transitions in the underlying grammatical systems of writing. However, the forms of individual signs, such as the letter A, are nonetheless observed to change incrementally over time. We claim that such changes are predictable and that scripts will in fact become visually simpler in the course of their use, a hypothesis regularly confirmed in transmission chain experiments that use graphic stimuli. To test the wider validity of this finding, we turn to the Vai script of Liberia, a syllabic writing system invented in relative isolation by nonliterates in ca. 1833. Unlike the earliest systems of the ancient world, Vai has the advantage of having been systematically documented from its earliest beginnings until the present day. Using established methods for quantifying visual complexity, we find that the Vai script has become increasingly compressed over the first 171 years of its history, complementing earlier claims and partial evidence that similar processes were at work in early writing systems. As predicted, letters simplified to a greater extent when their initial complexity was higher.

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Section: Domains and Mediamentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Relevance Of Findings To Other Writing Systemsmentioning

confidence: 99%