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African Script Sheds Light on Evolution of Writing

New research confirms that letter shapes become predictably simpler over time to make reading and writing more efficient.

ByCody Cottier
Recent research analyzed the script for the Vai language, invented in Liberia in the early 19th century.Credit: British Library/Wikimedia Commons

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The first letter in the English alphabet is famously thought to be descended from a 4,000-year-old ox’s head. Over millennia, minor stylistic shifts slowly reshaped an ornate Egyptian hieroglyph into the austere “A” we see today. For centuries scholars have suggested that all letters follow the same trajectory: They start out as iconic representations of real objects, then gradually morph into simpler abstract shapes. But the forces that guide these transformations still remain poorly understood.

To fully decipher the process, you’d need an unbroken record of those incremental changes — in other words, every variation between the ox and the A. Since only fragments survive from the earliest phases of writing (which was invented independently four times, in Mesopotamia, Egypt, China and Central America), it’s likely impossible to trace the complete history of most writing systems.

The unusual origins of one West African script, however, may offer a unique window ...

  • Cody Cottier

    Cody Cottier is a freelance journalist for Discover Magazine, who frequently covers new scientific studies about animal behavior, human evolution, consciousness, astrophysics, and the environment. 

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