The shape of a letter is usually treated as a matter of convention, and to a large extent it is. But writing systems designed for a specific material carry that…
There is a question that sounds naive and turns out to open a real research problem: does everybody divide colours up the same way?
The physical answer is that the…
The number of signs a writing system requires is not a technical detail. It determines who can be literate.
A system with several thousand signs can be learned, and learning…
Source: Wikipedia
Decipherment requires a bilingual text — the same content in a script you can read and one you cannot — and the number of such texts is very small,…
There is a persistent belief that some people speak with an accent and others speak normally.
It is not true in any technical sense, and the belief itself is worth…
Source: Wikipedia
Writing is rarer than it looks.
Almost every script in use today descends from a small number of original inventions, spreading and adapting rather than being independently devised. Real…