Forum du petit sténographe

mttiro · Inscrit le: 27 Sep 2011 Messages: 969

Voici une étude sur la complexité des caractères d’un grand nombre d’écritures.

Character complexity and redundancy in writing systems over human history
Mark A. Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo (2005)

Conclusions :

A writing system is a visual notation system wherein a repertoire of marks, or strokes, is used to build a repertoire of characters. Are there any commonalities across writing systems concerning the rules governing how strokes combine into characters; commonalities that might help us identify selection pressures on the development of written language?

In an effort to answer this question we examined how strokes combine to make characters in more than 100 writing systems over human history, ranging from about 10 to 200 characters, and including numerals, abjads, abugidas, alphabets and syllabaries from five major taxa: Ancient Near-Eastern, European, Middle Eastern, South Asian, Southeast Asian. We discovered underlying similarities in two fundamental respects.

(1) The number of strokes per characters is approximately three, independent of the number of characters in the writing system; numeral systems are the exception, having on average only two strokes per character.

(2) Characters are ca. 50% redundant, independent of writing system size; intuitively, this means that a character’s identity can be determined even when half of its strokes are removed.
Because writing systems are under selective pressure to have characters that are easy for the visual system to recognize and for the motor system to write, these fundamental commonalities may be a fingerprint of mechanisms underlying the visuo–motor system.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1634970/

Attention : cette étude porte sur l’écriture imprimée. Ainsi, pour l’alphabet latin, il s’agit des lettres de l’imprimerie, et non des lettres manuscrites, en anglaise, ou en script, ou en tout autre style.

Pour les lettres minuscules de l’alphabet latin ainsi défini, les auteurs indiquent que le nombre moyen de traits est de 2,08 ; le nombre de types de traits différents est de 14 ; le nombre total de « edges » est de 68. On imagine évidemment quelqu’un écriant en script, écriture manuscrite imitant l’impression, et qui doit assembler tant de traits.