I wrote “in most languages” specifically thinking of Arabic-derived scripts, but don’t know of any others. Older scripts, and those descended from other roots,

I wrote “in most languages” specifically thinking of Arabic-derived scripts, but don’t know of any others. Older scripts, and those descended from other roots, seem to have this property. Of course in practice Arabic writing is as easy or hard for humans to learn as any other system, so the evolutionary pressure/affordance to get rid of hard parts still applies. But the theory of early visual system affordance could in principle be studied (though I don’t think fmri is really solid enough yet). Any historical implications of course will always have to remain theoretical. Writing has technological constraints as well; look at cuneiform vs, say, Pali. Since Arabic evolved after predecessor systems already existed, technological affordances clearly had a, or the, major influence. Edit: I read your comment again, and just to be clear: your question is really “why is Arabic different”. Latin, Georgian, Aramaic, Brahmic, Chinese, Egyptian Hieroglyphs, Maya pictographs, all have roughly the same form factor.