ARABIC, Bengali and Cherokee scripts look utterly different, but in fact have much in common. And the shared characteristics of these and other scripts may tell us something about the limits of our visual system.
Because writing systems have to be easy to write, and even easier to read, Mark Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena decided to investigate how this influenced the number of strokes required to draw characters within different scripts.
The pair studied 115 different alphabets, from the ancient and evolved to the modern and invented. They found that most languages…
