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Mean perimetric complexity from 1834 to 2005. Error bars correspond to 95% confidence intervals (bootstrapped).
Source publication
A familiar story about the evolution of alphabets is that individual letters originated in iconic representations of real things. Over time, these naturalistic pictures became simplified into abstract forms. Thus the iconic ox’s head of Egyptian hieroglyphics transformed into the Phoenician and eventually the Roman letter A. In this vein, attempts...
Context in source publication
Context 1
... at a time when there was little change in writing media, indicates that shifts in writing technology cannot be the full story. Even the transition from a handwritten system to a font, between 1980 and 2005, does not show a dramatically steeper decline in visual complexity than comparable time periods elsewhere in the history of the script (see figs. 2, 3). Thus, while it is a possibility that letter inscription technology has influenced the compression of the script, this cannot explain our results. After its invention, the Vai script gained popularity and became circulated more widely among Vai speakers entering into new contexts, domains, and genres. Accordingly, changes in the ...
