Digital Lunch Seminar Series: Evolution of Writing Systems

Digital Lunch Seminar Series

Evolution of Writing Systems: How the Material Choice and Phenomenology of Handwriting Shaped Southeast Asian Scripts

Małgorzata Grzelec, Laura Gallardo, and Elisa Barney Smith

The graphical forms of handwriting are thought to develop under the influence of multiple factors, including the tools and materials used in their production. Certain Southeast Asian writing systems are believed to have evolved into more “rounded” forms as a result of being incised on palm leaves, which were historically used in the region as a writing substrate. It is commonly argued that the morphology of the leaf surface facilitates incising of curved rather than straight lines, and that rounded incisions are less likely to compromise the mechanical integrity of the leaf.

The talk will summarize the current state of the interdisciplinary project aimed at testing of these two hypotheses. We started by mathematically characterizing the shape of characters across different writing systems to evaluate whether palm-leaf scripts exhibit higher degree of curvature. Simultaneously, in order to connect script geometry to the material support, confocal laser microscopy was performed at DESY, to characterize the three-dimensional features of the incisions in selected manuscript folios, which revealed the relationship of line orientation and curvature to the depth of incisions. To further comprehend how the material support determines the features of the script, the engineers from DESY developed a mechanical setup to monitor writing forces needed to incise various shapes in the palm leaf substrate. Samples produced with this device will subsequently undergo mechanical testing and measurements at the synchrotron to understand the impact of incision type on mechanical properties of the material. Results of the investigation are interpreted in cooperation with scholars researching South East Asian manuscript cultures, and tied to the historical and geographical distribution of writing systems in the region.