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Ferguson, Charles A.; Libert, Alan Reed; Lass, Roger; Faingold, Eduardo D.; Haspelmath, Martín; Downing, Angela; Fagan, David; Song, Seok Choong; Ishikawa, Masataka; Drołc, Ursula; Cook, Eung‐Do; Peeters, Bert; Peck, Charles; Simões, Antônio Roberto Monteiro; Gelderen, Elly van

doi:10.1080/00437956.1995.11435939

Cited by 1 publication

(2 citation statements)

References 29 publications

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“…6 Both Tylor (1878Tylor ( [1865) and Kroeber (1940) recognized the potential of emergent systems to illustrate general processes of cultural borrowing, diffusion, and change. Other scholars, meanwhile, argued that they might also serve as heuristics for probing the origin and evolution of writing itself across deep timescales (Dalby 1967;Diringer 1968Diringer [1948Ferguson 1995;Gelb 1963Gelb [1952; Kotei 1972). Isolated reinventions of writing serve as naturalistic transmission experiments in script change since the nonliterate inventors taught their systems to new generations of nonliterates who have in turn passed their knowledge to subsequent generations.…”

Section: Emergent Writing Systems and What They Might Tell Usmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For nonliterates to invent a writing system from scratch is an extraordinary cognitive achievement. Writing systems have been described as cognitive tools for the analysis of linguistic sound in the way that they model, and sometimes reify, phonological and morphological structure (Ferguson 1995;Harris 1986;Mattingly 1987Mattingly , 1992Watson and Horowitz 2011). Without such tools at their disposal, nonliterate inventors must figure out how to segment strings of spoken language into meaningful units, lacking any means of taking notes or drawing up sound values in a reference chart.…”

Section: A Coordination Problem For Nonliterate Inventorsmentioning

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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