Mountains, trees inspired alphabet When you pick up a pen and
write you're not simply scratching down a set of abstract marks,
but representing the trees, mountains and horizons that
surrounded your forebears, according to new research. The
research, which will be published in next month's issue of The
American Naturalist, looked at more than 100 writing systems
throughout history. It concludes that all letters, and symbols
like trademarks, share universal shapes and forms based on
patterns found in nature. "These classes of human visual signs
... possess a similar signature in their configuration ...
suggesting that there are underlying principles governing the
shapes of human visual signs," the team from the California
Institute of Technology writes. The researchers say their work
provides evidence that we select our visual signs to match the
contours of natural scenes. This is because we have evolved to
be good at visually processing these forms, the researchers say,
and the shapes we use in writing are ch