A script from a language in Africa has provided new insights into how languages evolve.
Piers Kelly is a linguistic anthropologist at the University of New England, Australia, and he says that the Vai script was created from scratch in about 1834 by eight completely uneducated men.
"Because of its isolation, and the way it has continued to develop until the present day, we thought it might tell us something important about how writing develops over short spaces of time."
Kelly et al. Anthropol.
The script dated to 1834 and the passages written in the modern version of the text are the same.
We might all take the written word for granted these days, but researchers still don't know how this early human technology came to develop into the ubiquitous necessity that it is today.
The invention of writing occurred in the Middle East around 5,000 years ago and has been reinvented many times. New writing systems are being created in places like Nigeria.
The earliest writing systems are thought to have been formed by small groups of people within a single generation.
Kelly says there's a famous hypothesis that letters evolve from pictures to abstract signs.
The ox's head of Egyptian hieroglyphics became the Phoenician aleph and eventually the Roman letter A, according to the team.
The ScienceAlert is adapted from the encyclopedia.
There are many abstract letter-shapes in early writing. We predicted that signs would become simpler across generations of writers and readers.
The symbols for each of the language's syllables were inspired by a dream. They chose symbols that represented things like a pregnant woman, water, and bullets.
The letters are different. Momolu Massaquoi was born in 1911.
It was informally taught by a teacher who had knowledge of the script and 200 individual letters that must have been a challenge to remember. The written language is now used to communicate health messages.
Kelly and colleagues from the Max Planck Institute analyzed the 200-syllabic alphabet of the Vai people from 1834 onwards. The animation shows what they observed for three of the Vai letters.
The script became increasingly compressed over the first 171 years of its existence. The symbols with the highest complexity were simplified the most.
The research team said that the changes are not random. The hardest to recall features are the ones that are passed on via memory and learning.
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.
Kelly and team found that the letters became more uniform as they became less complex. The language has never been used for mass production or for bureaucratic needs. Mesopotamia's writing standardization coincides with the implementation of state-wide systems.
The invention of paper to use with computers and changes in writing implements are likely to play a role in the simplification of languages.
The researchers say that the fact that Vai continued to compress over the entire length of the 19th century indicates that shifts in writing technology cannot be the full story.
The rapidness of this writing system's evolution seems rather remarkable, but the researchers think it happened because the inventors and users already knew what writing could do. This may have encouraged people to improve their system.
Some scripts hold on to complexity because of the compromise between simplification and ensuring each symbol remains distinctive. The researchers want to explore this further.
Current Anthropology published this research.
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