Why Are Letters Shaped the Way They Are?

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.vice.com/en/article/4awqz3/why-are-letters-shaped-the-way-they-are


To tell a friend your favorite color, you might say the word, “blue,” or text them the letters: “r-e-d.” But what if you had to communicate a color to another person using only these symbols?:

Which would you choose? Are there any that seem more inherently blue, pink, red, or yellow? These are questions that players of The Color Game grappled with, which was developed to study the evolution of language by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History.

The Color Game app was downloaded by more than 4,000 people who spoke more than 70 languages from more than 100 countries. Over time, since it launched in 2018, the symbols acquired meaning as people used them to talk to one another—the players were creating their own language. Using an online survey, the researchers found that some symbols did evoke certain colors more than others, and the associations between symbols and colors were stronger in people who played regularly.

The Color Game did more than show how languages form over time, it violated a long-standing rule in linguistics: the rule of arbitrariness. In the subject of semiotics, or the use of signs and symbols to convey meaning, most students are taught about the theories of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure. He wrote that the letters and words in many writing and language systems have no relationship to what they refer to. The word “cat” doesn’t have anything particularly cat-like about it. The reason that “cat” means cat is because English speakers have decided so—it’s a social convention, not anything ingrained in the letters c-a-t. (According to Saussure, a language like Chinese, where each written character stands for a whole word, was a separate writing system, and his ideas were directed towards writing systems made up of letters or syllables.)

*snip*

[SheltieLover]

1. Wow!

[lagomorph777]

2. Writing is a hell of a lot older than most people realize.

https://digventures.com/2015/12/these-32-symbols-are-found-in-ice-age-caves-across-europe-but-what-do-they-mean/

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Don’t let the animals distract you…
Among the elaborate horses, bulls, bears and hunters, there are some other rather less captivating designs – small geometric motifs, etched onto the walls. Until now, they’ve not received much attention. But as it turns out, these humble designs conceal a much more intriguing mystery.

Von Petzinger and her photographer-husband visited 52 caves across Europe recording every instance of these symbols that they could see. They found new, undocumented examples at 75% of the caves they visited, and found the symbols far outnumbered the human and animal images. But the amazing thing was that however many caves they visited, they found the same 32 shapes being used again and again and again.

Ice Age alphabet?
The fact that the same 32 symbols are repeated across sites that span 30,000 years and an entire content is nothing less than mindblowing. But what do they actually mean?

The oldest written texts appear well over 5,000 years ago, and these symbols appear some 25,000 years earlier than that, but they don’t quite seem to form a written language – there are neither enough characters to represent all their spoken words, nor do they repeat often enough to be some sort of alphabet.