Writing is radical
Writing’s effects are radical—its emergence, its intimate role in our culture and consciousness, its very appearance strike at the roots of language, memory, and civilization. But that’s what radical means, of course—it’s from the Latin radix, for root.
In semantic terms, a word’s uninflected meaning is termed its radical. Chinese dictionaries are organized according to fundamental graphic units out of which characters are compounded; the Chinese word for this is bùshǒu, or index character, but in Chinese-English dictionaries, these base characters are called radicals. But this usage is a bit of a misnomer; these radicals aren’t semantically or etymologically fundamental to the words they play a role in representing, or the characters they compose.
What are the roots of writing? What makes it look like it does? Despite vast differences in their appearance and in the systems that govern them, most forms of written characters share profoundly similar traits: they’re made of lines that cross, connect, and loop, and they arrange themselves into linear sets. Why is this the case? Why don’t we have writing systems that convey meaning by, say, color or hue, or size, or relative location?
In a 2006 article called “The Structures of Letters and Symbols are Selected to Match Those Found in Objects in Natural Scenes” (M. Changizi, Q. Zhang, H. Ye, S. Shimojo. American Naturalist, 167:5), the authors compare the structure of Chinese characters, alphabetic letters, and corporate logos, finding great similarities in the topology of signs. By topology they mean the essential shapes or configurations—we could say the true graphic roots—of the conjoined marks that compose the letterforms. Of these there are remarkably few—the cross, the circle, the line, to name most of them—which together give scope to considerable meaning-laden variation.
The authors go on to suggest that the basis or stock of such topological formulae consists in “natural scenes”—especially in the junctures or overlappings of forms in human visual experience. The skeins of roots and limbs in the forest; the long curl of the river across the plain; the scatter of tracks made by birds in wet sand; such are the templates of writing, in the authors’ conjecture. Specifically, they argue that the shapes of characters “have been selected (by cultural evolution or by trial-and-error design) so that more common configuration types among visual signs are the more common configuration types among natural scenes, thereby exploiting what humans have evolved to be good at visually processing.” The authors admit that if their hypothesis is true, visual signs should prove difficult to detect—they would essentially be camouflaged. On the other hand, letterforms “have been selected to be read and distinguished from bare sand, plain soil, paper, papyrus, walls, and so on, not distinguished from natural scene backgrounds.” It’s such constraints—striking a balance between standout novelty and the inefficiencies of invention, between familiarity and transparency—that drive evolution, be it of memes or genes.
But is topology significant? Are we somehow “tuned” to be especially discriminating about topological arrangements? Is this a universal in visual perception, or something privileged by human vision?
All this speculation about the roots of perception glosses over the basic history of graphic signs: whether alphabetic or ideographic, they start out as pictures of things. The fundamentals of perception provide a basis for understanding why writing works for us, and why it has conserved these signs so well over these three millennia. It’s remarkably conservative, the alphabet, at a root/radical/topological level. And this, too: characters don’t evolve only to be seen and read, but made. Written. And line is a handy tool for this kind of making.
The question is, are letters like roots—or are they more like flowers?
I want to say that we’re wired for writing—although it’s likely more accurate to say that writing employs our wiring, as it must do. Were we wired like dragonflies, or even dogs, our writing would take remarkably different forms.
And yet this is our world, not that of dragonflies—there are no natural scenes, no standard configurations, without our particular perceptions. We are fibered together out of the world that our fibers weave.
