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| Alphabets and the Principle of Least Effort | page 47-62 | ||
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Alphabet systems have made the recording of information an efficient matter.
As a consequence, they have made it possible for human civilizations to progress
quickly and expansively. Alphabet characters are derivatives of pictographs,
allowing for a more condensed means of recording and transmitting knowledge.
The purpose of this paper is to argue that alphabets came about, in fact, to do
just this — namely, to make knowledge representation efficient.
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One of the first
to study the “efficient” nature of letters empirically was the Harvard linguist
George Kingsley Zipf, who demonstrated that there is universally a correlation
between the length of a specific word (in number of letters) and its rank order
in a language. This paper will look at Zipf ’s work and assess its importance to
semiotic theory, especially as it relates to the nature of signs and how they
express meaning.
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| keywords: alphabets, semiotic theory, Zipf's law, | |||
