Explainer: What Determines the Complexity of Writing Systems? (VIDEO)
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How do writing systems change over time -- and what forces drive that evolution?
Santa Fe Institute Fellow Helena Miton and Olivier Morin at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History recently used computer-aided methods to test the conclusions of previous research into the complexity of scripts and characters.
Prior work suggests two pressures that may push writing to get simpler over time: 1) More complex characters require more effort to distinguish from each other (making them more difficult to copy without error); and 2) Figures with more strokes require more movement to create. In short, simple letters are not only easier to read, but easier to make -- up to some lower bound at which characters are too simple to tell apart. Also, cultural transmission research shows that in lab experiments, complex drawings simplify as they are copied. Conufusingly, previous studies found both a universal average of three strokes per character AND an increase in complexity as the inventory of scripts grow.
In their new paper in the journal Cognition, Miton and Morin offer several hypotheses to test with their analysis:
1 - Scripts with more characters will have more complex symbols.
2 - Most variance in character complexity between scripts is caused by the script (rather than the type of script).
3 - Parentless, newly-invented (or idiosyncratic) scripts are more complex than ancient scripts.
4 - Parent scripts have more complex characters than their offspring.
5 - Contrary to earlier psychology experiments that suggest the lefthand side of characters is always simpler, the authors suspect that characters are more complex on the side that comes first when read and written (i.e., on the right if the language is read right to left).
Their data set they analyzed comprises nearly 48,000 characters from 133 scripts. Miton and Morin measured two kinds of complexity: perimetric complexity, the ratio of a given character's "coastline" to its area, or how twisty it is; and algorithmic complexity, or how much code is required to store a compressed image file of each character.
The variables they tracked included script sources, size, family, type, direction, and whether or not they were "idiosyncratic" (made up from scratch by known persons less than 200 years ago). The authors predicted idiosyncractic scripts would be less subject to evolutionary pressures and historical constraints. But are they? Likewise, branching events in written language would seem to provide the perfect occasion to "improve" a script by simplifying it. But do they?
Here are their findings:
- The more characters in a script, the more complex the characters. BUT removing scripts of over 200 characters, mostly East Asian scripts that use logograms instead of letters, voids this result. It turns out that the TYPE of script -- the linguistic units encoded by its characters -- matters more than the script itself.
- Characters from idiosyncratic scripts are generally no more complex than characters from any other. (But this might be because they quickly simplify, and the study used "late data points.")
- There is no tendency for scripts to be simpler than their ancestors, suggesting a minimal viable complexity for written language.
- The first half of a character as it is read or written -- left-first or right-first -- is in fact more complex.
Through the lens of cultural evolution, their results support a growing body of work on the ways in which letter shapes fit subtle cognitive and perceptual biases with roots in the visual and motor constraints on reading and writing. Or, in the words of Albert Einstein, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."
Credit
Michael Garfield/Santa Fe Institute
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