10 ms·

Why are letters shaped the way they are?

58 points by elsewhen 5y ago

fuzzfactor 5y ago
>Why are letters shaped the way they are? If they looked much different we wouldn't recognize them!
euske 5y ago
I'm curious of the eventual consequence of emoji development. Early Chinese characters were pretty much like pictograms. They have developed into a highly sophisticated abstract language / writing system, but its emoji-like aspects still remain today. The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. It's interesting that the world is basically reinventing the same thing a few millenniums later.
- watwut 5y ago
  > The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. That is major advantage if that would prevent adoption as replacement for alphabet.
- s3tz 5y ago
  To me it seems like we haven't reinvented the same thing, but semi-adapted an existing process of communication to the technology available. It's almost like emoji's are the next step of pictograms, however they're mostly used to provide (extra) context to the existing form of commucation. It's a bit like doing this: "It was a very sunny day." <- regular sentence "It was a very [sun emoji] day." <- same thing "It was a very sunny day. [happy face emoji]" <- v3 pictos that (implicitly?) communicate extra context "It was a very sunny day. [高兴]" <- same thing, but v1 pictos
  - wongarsu 5y ago
    In the western context they evolved from the attempt to convey emotion in text form. Writing systems are mostly meant to convey facts, while the emotion that we encode in intonation is completely lost. That lead to problems in pure text communication, so we invented emotes to convey the difference between "It was a very sunny day :)" "It was a very sunny day :\" "It was a very sunny day ;)" Some web forums started replacing them with images which lead to designers inventing more emojis, and due to Japanese carriers wanting the same for SMS those got incorporated in character encodings. What seems strange to me is that most emoji that exist are completely useless for the purpose of conveying emotion, or encoding any useful information that can't be expressed in a word. It's like some designer had to fulfill a quota or someone wanted to just "have more emojis". Yet the most popular emojis are clearly still used to convey emotion [1]. 1: https://emojipedia.org/stats/ https://emojipedia.org/stats/
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- tdeck 5y ago
  There's actually a chat system / social network called iConji that tries to create a new language based on emoji-like symbols. I'm not sure how many users (if any) it has, but as an experiment it's interesting. http://www.iconji.com/ http://www.iconji.com/
  - teddyh 5y ago
    See also UPCOM in Captain Blood (the 1988 video game).
  - teddyh 5y ago
    See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
- pinephoneguy 5y ago
  I wish instead of emojis they just included a “sixel” strip codepage with one character for every combination of 1x6 pixel strip (this only needs 64 code points.) You could draw your emojis and the editor would then compose these strips to send them. People do it with Braille now but this would make the images much smaller and get rid of the space between the pixels.
IIAOPSW 5y ago
Here's an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Nearly all of our glyph's can be written as is on a 7 segment display like you would see on a microwave. With just a tiny amount of redesign, our writing system would be exactly 7 bits. Meaning, without any intent or understanding of information theory, our ancestors gradually gravitated towards a writing system that has just 1.36 bits of extraneous code space. This is far to efficient to ignore. It wasn't until the digital revolution that the 7-segment pattern belying most letters was apparent. There is no "7 segment font" for the Guttenburg printing press. Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Vocabulary almost certainly has evolved in a way that efficiently compresses semantic information. We just haven't noticed the 7 segments yet.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- ianstormtaylor 5y ago
  That's a really nice mental model for it. I learned a similar concept in Typography class... for an assignment to design a new number. I was a little indecisive and apologized when I showed up to critique with two different number drawings [0]. My professor (Cyrus Highsmith [1]) looked at them and said not to worry because they were the same number anyways. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes after sitting back down I realized what he meant, and it's stuck with me ever since. Using the 7-segment display as an example would have been a great way to explain the concept to me at the time. I'll remember that for next time! Also a cool way to think about it, because it begs the question of which 7-segment permutations don't map to existing symbols, for whenever someone needs to design a new one in the future. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith
  - IIAOPSW 5y ago
akomtu 5y ago
Greek and latin letters are symbols for some prominent ideas. A is a part of the pentagram (aka the symbol of microcosm), O is a circle (the symbol of time or matter), Delta is a triangle (too many meanings), there's also the inverse delta (dropped feom most alphabets) and so on. Letters are ordered in a certain way, so important words would have proper "checksums". Such letters allow subtle modifications to encode additional meaning, e.g. a small dash in the O letter (Q) would have an obvious meaning, but if the dash is placed on the other side it would have another obvious meaning. Chinese apparently liked this idea and decided to pack entire words in a single glyph.
- natroniks 5y ago
  Ancient Greek and Latin letters ultimately go back to a Semitic alphabet. Any meaning of the names and shapes of letters must go back to Proto-Semitic eg Aleph looked like an oxhead and means ox; Bet (originally) looked like and means House. This is akin to if the first letter of our system were called apple and looked like an apple and produced the short "a" sound; The sound "b" was represented by a letter that looked like and was called banana; etc. Greek (and others) adopted the letter shapes and kept the names (Aleph=>Alpha, Bet=>Beta, Gimel=>Gamma, etc) even though Alpha Beta etc bear no meaning in Ancient Greek outside of the letter name. More importantly Greek (and others) adapted the letter shapes (graphemes) to fit their letter sounds (phonemes). For instance, ancient (and modern) Semitic alphabets do not include vowels. Ancient Greek really needed to write vowels. Semitic used glottal stops that Ancient Greek didn't. So, Ancient Greek took the letters of unused sounds (like Aleph, which was originally not the vowel "a" but a glottal stop not used in Ancient Greek) and attributed a vowel sound to it. After appropriating the breathy sound of Het to the long "A" sound of Eta, and a few other vowels, Greek still needed more. So they invented Omicron and Omega, which are just self-explanatory names of "small (ie short) o" and "big (ie long) O." Likewise Upsilon and Epsilon (psilon in Greek means naked/plain; so "plain uh" and "plain eh") All of this is to say that the meanings attributed to Greek or Roman or Etruscan letter shapes in those respective languages were appointed after the fact. To get at the original meaning of these letter shapes, one must refer to its Semitic origins. If interested, one may read what Theo Vennemann has to say about how the Futhark Runes may reflect a direct adoption of the Semitic alphabet by Germanic peoples rather than the more commonly held belief that Germanic tribes got the alphabet from Greeks, Etruscans and Italians.
Grustaf 5y ago
This is very fascinating stuff, but it's not really that relevant for the question posed in the title. Our Latin letters got their shapes from the Greek alphabet, by way of Etruscan. Greek in turn is based on the Semitic abjads (consonantal alphabets) which in turn likely go back to Hieroglyphics. B comes from Beta, from Beth/Bayt in Semitic languages, going back to a Hieroglyph for "house". Of course beth also means house in Hebrew, as in Bethlehem. This is not a mystery, and since the modern letters ultimately got their shapes from pictographic drawings, there is no real connection between shape and sound anymore. At most it may have influenced how the letters have been simplified over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter)
- goodlifeodyssey 5y ago
  I believe the letter “b” it traces back to the hieroglyph for “foot”, not the one for a “house.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(hieroglyph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(hieroglyph) It even looks like a foot, which is fun. I took my daughter to the Met this weekend looked at some Egyptian artifacts and was watching some videos about hieroglyphs after, so I don’t actually know much about them, but they happened to have mentioned this on one of the lectures.
  - Grustaf 5y ago
    No, this is something different. This glyph may be a "B", but not in the same sense that our Latin B is a B, or even in the same sense that Hebrew bayt is a B. Remember, most Hieroglyphs had two or three consonants, and there was no Ancient Egyptian "alphabet", that is something they made up for tattoo's and tourists. When you wrote something in Egyptian, you didn't just combine a bunch of characters that each had a single consonant sound, that was an innovation of the semites. Then later the Greeks come up with the concept of vowels. Apart from being shaped vaguely like a house, another clue is in the name. Semitic B's have a name that means house.
    - innolitics 5y ago
      Hmm, take a look at minute 3:40 from this video: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/wonders-ancient-egypt/hieroglyphs-part-7-ZdcP0 https://www.coursera.org/lecture/wonders-ancient-egypt/hiero... I don't know too much about this, so I definitely could be mistaken, but the professor seems to say this hieroglyphic may be connected with our current letter "B". Also, I think he said something about "house" on another video and I believe it was different.

58 points by elsewhen 5y ago

>Why are letters shaped the way they are? If they looked much different we wouldn't recognize them!

I'm curious of the eventual consequence of emoji development. Early Chinese characters were pretty much like pictograms. They have developed into a highly sophisticated abstract language / writing system, but its emoji-like aspects still remain today. The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. It's interesting that the world is basically reinventing the same thing a few millenniums later.

watwut 5y ago
> The major shortcoming of today's emojis is that they are too hardware dependent and not hand-writable. That is major advantage if that would prevent adoption as replacement for alphabet.
s3tz 5y ago
To me it seems like we haven't reinvented the same thing, but semi-adapted an existing process of communication to the technology available. It's almost like emoji's are the next step of pictograms, however they're mostly used to provide (extra) context to the existing form of commucation. It's a bit like doing this: "It was a very sunny day." <- regular sentence "It was a very [sun emoji] day." <- same thing "It was a very sunny day. [happy face emoji]" <- v3 pictos that (implicitly?) communicate extra context "It was a very sunny day. [高兴]" <- same thing, but v1 pictos
- wongarsu 5y ago
  In the western context they evolved from the attempt to convey emotion in text form. Writing systems are mostly meant to convey facts, while the emotion that we encode in intonation is completely lost. That lead to problems in pure text communication, so we invented emotes to convey the difference between "It was a very sunny day :)" "It was a very sunny day :\" "It was a very sunny day ;)" Some web forums started replacing them with images which lead to designers inventing more emojis, and due to Japanese carriers wanting the same for SMS those got incorporated in character encodings. What seems strange to me is that most emoji that exist are completely useless for the purpose of conveying emotion, or encoding any useful information that can't be expressed in a word. It's like some designer had to fulfill a quota or someone wanted to just "have more emojis". Yet the most popular emojis are clearly still used to convey emotion [1]. 1: https://emojipedia.org/stats/ https://emojipedia.org/stats/
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
tdeck 5y ago
There's actually a chat system / social network called iConji that tries to create a new language based on emoji-like symbols. I'm not sure how many users (if any) it has, but as an experiment it's interesting. http://www.iconji.com/ http://www.iconji.com/
- teddyh 5y ago
  See also UPCOM in Captain Blood (the 1988 video game).
- teddyh 5y ago
  See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blissymbols
pinephoneguy 5y ago
I wish instead of emojis they just included a “sixel” strip codepage with one character for every combination of 1x6 pixel strip (this only needs 64 code points.) You could draw your emojis and the editor would then compose these strips to send them. People do it with Braille now but this would make the images much smaller and get rid of the space between the pixels.

IIAOPSW 5y ago

Here's an interesting revelation that likely has something to do with why letters are shaped the way they are. We have a 26 letter alphabet, plus space, plus 10 numbers, plus the punctuation !?.,;:/-+#()". That's 50 symbols in total which works out to a bit rate of about 5.64 bits per letter. Nearly all of our glyph's can be written as is on a 7 segment display like you would see on a microwave. With just a tiny amount of redesign, our writing system would be exactly 7 bits. Meaning, without any intent or understanding of information theory, our ancestors gradually gravitated towards a writing system that has just 1.36 bits of extraneous code space. This is far to efficient to ignore. It wasn't until the digital revolution that the 7-segment pattern belying most letters was apparent. There is no "7 segment font" for the Guttenburg printing press. Most of people through most of history would not have consciously known there were atoms of writing smaller than a single letter. Vocabulary almost certainly has evolved in a way that efficiently compresses semantic information. We just haven't noticed the 7 segments yet.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ianstormtaylor 5y ago
That's a really nice mental model for it. I learned a similar concept in Typography class... for an assignment to design a new number. I was a little indecisive and apologized when I showed up to critique with two different number drawings [0]. My professor (Cyrus Highsmith [1]) looked at them and said not to worry because they were the same number anyways. I didn't get it at first, but a few minutes after sitting back down I realized what he meant, and it's stuck with me ever since. Using the 7-segment display as an example would have been a great way to explain the concept to me at the time. I'll remember that for next time! Also a cool way to think about it, because it begs the question of which 7-segment permutations don't map to existing symbols, for whenever someone needs to design a new one in the future. [0]: https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png https://i.imgur.com/8zB44gi.png [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrus_Highsmith
- IIAOPSW 5y ago

akomtu 5y ago

Greek and latin letters are symbols for some prominent ideas. A is a part of the pentagram (aka the symbol of microcosm), O is a circle (the symbol of time or matter), Delta is a triangle (too many meanings), there's also the inverse delta (dropped feom most alphabets) and so on. Letters are ordered in a certain way, so important words would have proper "checksums". Such letters allow subtle modifications to encode additional meaning, e.g. a small dash in the O letter (Q) would have an obvious meaning, but if the dash is placed on the other side it would have another obvious meaning. Chinese apparently liked this idea and decided to pack entire words in a single glyph.

natroniks 5y ago
Ancient Greek and Latin letters ultimately go back to a Semitic alphabet. Any meaning of the names and shapes of letters must go back to Proto-Semitic eg Aleph looked like an oxhead and means ox; Bet (originally) looked like and means House. This is akin to if the first letter of our system were called apple and looked like an apple and produced the short "a" sound; The sound "b" was represented by a letter that looked like and was called banana; etc. Greek (and others) adopted the letter shapes and kept the names (Aleph=>Alpha, Bet=>Beta, Gimel=>Gamma, etc) even though Alpha Beta etc bear no meaning in Ancient Greek outside of the letter name. More importantly Greek (and others) adapted the letter shapes (graphemes) to fit their letter sounds (phonemes). For instance, ancient (and modern) Semitic alphabets do not include vowels. Ancient Greek really needed to write vowels. Semitic used glottal stops that Ancient Greek didn't. So, Ancient Greek took the letters of unused sounds (like Aleph, which was originally not the vowel "a" but a glottal stop not used in Ancient Greek) and attributed a vowel sound to it. After appropriating the breathy sound of Het to the long "A" sound of Eta, and a few other vowels, Greek still needed more. So they invented Omicron and Omega, which are just self-explanatory names of "small (ie short) o" and "big (ie long) O." Likewise Upsilon and Epsilon (psilon in Greek means naked/plain; so "plain uh" and "plain eh") All of this is to say that the meanings attributed to Greek or Roman or Etruscan letter shapes in those respective languages were appointed after the fact. To get at the original meaning of these letter shapes, one must refer to its Semitic origins. If interested, one may read what Theo Vennemann has to say about how the Futhark Runes may reflect a direct adoption of the Semitic alphabet by Germanic peoples rather than the more commonly held belief that Germanic tribes got the alphabet from Greeks, Etruscans and Italians.

Grustaf 5y ago

This is very fascinating stuff, but it's not really that relevant for the question posed in the title. Our Latin letters got their shapes from the Greek alphabet, by way of Etruscan. Greek in turn is based on the Semitic abjads (consonantal alphabets) which in turn likely go back to Hieroglyphics. B comes from Beta, from Beth/Bayt in Semitic languages, going back to a Hieroglyph for "house". Of course beth also means house in Hebrew, as in Bethlehem. This is not a mystery, and since the modern letters ultimately got their shapes from pictographic drawings, there is no real connection between shape and sound anymore. At most it may have influenced how the letters have been simplified over time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bet_(letter)

goodlifeodyssey 5y ago
I believe the letter “b” it traces back to the hieroglyph for “foot”, not the one for a “house.” See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(hieroglyph) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B_(hieroglyph) It even looks like a foot, which is fun. I took my daughter to the Met this weekend looked at some Egyptian artifacts and was watching some videos about hieroglyphs after, so I don’t actually know much about them, but they happened to have mentioned this on one of the lectures.
- Grustaf 5y ago
  No, this is something different. This glyph may be a "B", but not in the same sense that our Latin B is a B, or even in the same sense that Hebrew bayt is a B. Remember, most Hieroglyphs had two or three consonants, and there was no Ancient Egyptian "alphabet", that is something they made up for tattoo's and tourists. When you wrote something in Egyptian, you didn't just combine a bunch of characters that each had a single consonant sound, that was an innovation of the semites. Then later the Greeks come up with the concept of vowels. Apart from being shaped vaguely like a house, another clue is in the name. Semitic B's have a name that means house.
  - innolitics 5y ago
    Hmm, take a look at minute 3:40 from this video: https://www.coursera.org/lecture/wonders-ancient-egypt/hieroglyphs-part-7-ZdcP0 https://www.coursera.org/lecture/wonders-ancient-egypt/hiero... I don't know too much about this, so I definitely could be mistaken, but the professor seems to say this hieroglyphic may be connected with our current letter "B". Also, I think he said something about "house" on another video and I believe it was different.