The symbols of the indigenous people are being transformed into letters. Credit: Momolu Massaquoi.
The world's first invention of writing took place over 5000 years ago in the Middle East. Today, almost all human activities are done using this technology.
We don't know much about how writing evolved in its earliest years. The first traces of writing are missing because there are so few sites of origin.
A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Jena, Germany, found that writing quickly becomes hard to read.
They turned to a rare African writing system that has fascinated outsiders since the early 19th century to arrive at this insight.
Dr. Piers Kelly is the lead author of the book "The Vai script of Liberia was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely uneducated men who wrote in ink made from crushed berries." The language had never been written down before.
Bai Leesor Sherman said that the script was taught informally from a literate teacher to a single student. Today it is used to communicate health messages.
The British Library has a manuscript by Vai. The British Library.
"Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop up until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing develops over short periods of time," says Kelly.
There is a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to signs. There are many letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted that signs would become simpler across generations of writers and readers.
The team looked at manuscripts in archives in the United States and Europe. They traced the evolution of the script from 1834 onwards by analyzing year-by-year changes in its 200 syllabic letters. They found that the letters became simpler over time.
The inventors were inspired by dreams to design signs for their language. One is a pregnant woman and the other is a chained slave. Kelly says that when these signs were applied to writing spoken syllables, they became simpler, more systematic and more similar to one another.
Over 175 years, the animated evolution of the Vai letters 'bhi', 'tho' and 'fi'. Julia Bespamnykh was credited.
This pattern of simplification can be observed over long time scales for ancient writing systems.
If you're creating a new writing system, visual complexity is helpful. You help the uneducated by generating more clues and greater contrasts between signs. Kelly says that the complexity fades away because it gets in the way of efficient reading and reproduction.
In West Africa, new writing systems are being invented in Nigeria and Senegal, while reverse-engineering is still being done for languages in Africa. Nigerian philosopher Henry Ibekwe commented on the study, saying that African indigenous scripts are a vast, unexplored repository of semiotic and symbolic information. There are many questions to be asked.
The Predictable Evolution of Letter Shapes was written by Piers Kelly. It's titled: 10.1086/717779.
The journal contains information about current anthropology.
There are clues to the evolution of writing in the rare African script.
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