We may all take the written word for granted these days, but researchers still don’t know for sure exactly how it all evolved. As far as science knows, writing was invented about 5,000 years ago in the Middle East and then created over and over again. Moreover, new writing systems are still being set up in places like Nigeria and Senegal. This is why the findings of a study just published are so exciting.
This is how writing can develop in the short term
written almost out of nowhere around 1834 by eight completely illiterate men who “wrote” with crushed berry ink.
Because of its isolation and evolution to date, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing could evolve in a short amount of time , said Piers Kelly of New England, Australia. University linguist anthropologist for the ScienceAlert online science portal
Researchers believe that even the earliest writing systems could have been created by small groups in a single generation within, as does the vai spelling. However, as they have “progressed” for generations, the systems have become simpler over time.
Experts assume that “letters have evolved into abstract signs from images.”The iconic ox head of the Egyptian hieroglyphs is Phoenician It was finally transformed into the letter A , the team explained. – But there are also plenty of abstract fonts in early writing; so we believe that the signs will start to be relatively complex and then simpler for new generations of writers and readers.
The eight composers of Liberian Vai writing are said to have been inspired by a dream to design symbols for each syllable in their language. Their chosen symbols depicted physical things such as the pregnant woman, water and balls, and more abstract, traditional signs. They were then taught informally by a literate teacher, who passed on his knowledge of the manuscripts, which contained two hundred individual letters.
They quickly optimized their writing system
Kelly and the staff of the Max Planck Institute analyzed the 200-syllable alphabet of the vai people from 1834 onwards using the archives of several countries. The following animations were observed in three of the vai letters: ꔫ ‘bhi’, ꗌ ‘tho’, and ꔱ ‘fi’. It was found that during the first 171 years of its history, vai writing really became more and more concise. Simplification has taken place over generations of users; the symbols of the greatest complexity have been simplified the most.
MS17817 . First page of manuscript Vai Source: The British Library
These changes are by no means random – explained by the research team at 
Current Anthropology
in a study published in the journal. – Languages go through a kind of natural selection process through memory and learning, where the most difficult-to-recall features do not persist
Kelly and her team found that as letters became less complex, they became more uniform. .
Experts believe that changes in tools, from new writing instruments and the invention of paper to computer use, are likely to play a role in simplifying languages.
Although the speed of this writing system seems quite remarkable, researchers say it may have been because its inventors and users already knew what writing was capable of because it knew how to use it in other cultures. This may have encouraged vai writing users to “quickly optimize their writing system”.
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