The part about there being a limited number of strokes for making letters made me think about this video of Claude Closky’s 100-letter Alphabet. The 26 we know plus 74 new letters that in their way look weirdly familiar.

When you think disability, free yourself from the sob-story crap, all the oversize shrieking about people praying for miracles and walking again, or triumphing against the odds. Instead, think puppets. At a basic level, physical disability is really just a form of puppetry. If you’ve ever marveled at how someone can bring a smudged sock puppet to life or talked back to Elmo and Grover, then intellectually you’re nearly there. Puppetry is the original brain-machine interface. It entertains because it shows you how this interface can be ported to different platforms.

If puppetry is the clever mapping of human characteristics onto a nonhuman object, then disability is the same mapping onto a still-human object. Making the body work regardless of physical deficit is not a challenge I would wish on anyone, but getting good at being disabled is like discovering an alternative platform. It’s closer to puppetry than anything else I can think of. I should know: I’ve been at it for 25 years. I have lots of moving parts. Two of them are not my legs. When you think John Hockenberry, think wheelchair. Think alternative platform. Think puppet.

Also, great post.

However, over time, as literacy education increases and cultures become more used to the recognition of these characters (with maybe — maybe — some evolutionary/socialrealpolitik advantage given to those whose “letterbox” portions of the cortex prove especially adaptable), the characters become more abstract, driven more by ease/simplicity of script than mimetic readability?

There’s also a social evolution here: when writing is the specialized province of scribes (with reading, even in a limited sense, perhaps slightly more common), then script can afford to be highly complex. The pressures of teaching more and more people who are not necessarily specialists — Phoenician merchants, let’s say — creates a pressure (not evolutionary in a biological sense, but socially, sure) to simplify characters, if only to make them easier to teach.

Just a thought.

This short story idea is great and I know this guy who would probably do a great job writing it too…

Not such a big deal, but I have to take issue with:

For instance, the neu­ro­sci­en­tists Marc Changizi and Shin­suke Shi­mojo have demon­strated that the vast major­ity of char­ac­ters in 115 dif­fer­ent writ­ing sys­tems are com­posed of three dis­tinct strokes, which likely reflect the sen­sory lim­i­ta­tions of cells in the retina.

This is apparently Lehrer interpreting Deheane interpretating the original papers. Unfortunately it’s a rather gross mis –interpretation/-representation. There is no evidence in these papers that the number of strokes used in written characters is constrained by the visual system. The authors do make the wild (but interesting) conjecture that this reflects constraints in the wiring of visual/association cortex, but they don’t say anything about the retina, and as a retinal scientist I would say the idea that the retina constrains characters to 3 strokes is highly implausible (in so many words: wrong). I wonder whether Deheane/Lehrer’s mistaken reference to the retina is due to not understanding that the word “retinotopic” refers to cortical areas.

Overall I don’t find this line of work on the “evolution” of writing systems very compelling. The authors waffle a bit about what they mean by “evolution”, although they certainly co-opt a lot of the classic vocabulary like “selection pressures”. These papers provide no data on any profound inner workings of the eye/brain. The data go no farther than “writing systems: probably optimized for readability and writability, maybe more for readability”. If these authors really wanted to make a point about “selection pressures” on the development of writing, they ought to have looked at changes in writing systems over time, but they haven’t as far as I can see. What little I know about the evolution of Chinese characters suggests that the opposite is true: more change has occurred over time to optimize writing ease than reading ease. Furthermore, I suspect that if you ran their analysis on ancient versus modern Chinese characters, you would find no increase in optimization for shapes common in the visual world.

Perhaps the authors’ arguments are supposed to apply to earlier periods in the development of writing, but at least for Chinese/Egyptian characters their argument then becomes a ridiculous tautology: “very early characters have a lot of features in common with objects in the natural world” (my version of what this argument would look like, not a real quote from them). Okay guys, but they’re pictograms… (Obviously there are more subtleties here, like the huge visual difference between natural objects and line drawings of natural objects, but the authors don’t seem to have given this much attention.)

Finally, as an aside, I’m going to follow Kenneth Miller and mention that the ultimate “Panda’s Thumb” for human evolution is probably Human Chromosome 2.

I’ve had that Changizi paper Dehaene cites (about natural shapes & written characters) on my desk for two years! It’s deep in the DNA of Urge of the Letter.