Introduction

Abstract

It’s an obvious point once made: if we habitually wrote with brushes or by notching bamboo, our letters would be very different. Brushes would long ago have curved the angles of letters like <M>, for instance; carving curves on bamboo is virtually impossible, and <O> would long since have become a lozenge. By the same token, if the human hand were radically different that factor too would have influenced the shape of our written symbols. For example the conventional way of holding the pen requires the services of three digits (thumb, forefinger, middle finger), with the hand resting on the other two; were the standard issue but three fingers in toto, as according to the 1953 movie “War of the Worlds” is the case for Martians, we would probably have to find some other way of doing things, which would probably affect the final result. (The standard issue is five fingers per hand because in the Devonian period the pectoral fins of certain ancestral ganoid fishes, for no known good reason, had five phalangeal bones.) Of course as I sit here at my PC I could be producing letters of any shape at all with equal ease; but the shapes of the letters were determined long ago, when writing materials were more physiological and more immediate. The modern letter-shapes are fossilized indicators of the nature of those materials.