Humans are fundamentally defined by our socially transmitted, often long-lived,
sophisticated cultural traits. The nature of cultural transmission is the subject of ongoing …

Cattle brands (ownership marks left on animals) are subject to forces influencing other
graphic codes: the copying of constituent parts, pressure for distinctiveness and pressure for …

An ideography is a general-purpose code made of pictures that do not encode language,
which can be used autonomously–not just as a mnemonic prop–to encode information on a …

Coinage, the practice of minting small bits of metal with distinctive marks, appearing in the
second half of the 7 th century BCE, had a transformative impact upon ancient economies …

Zipf's law of abbreviation, relating more frequent signals to shorter signal lengths, applies to
sounds in a variety of communication systems, both human and non-human. It also applies …

The Chinese writing system is unique in its implementation of graphemic, phonological,
morphological, and semantic features. We add nuances to its portrait in the target article and …

Cultural evolutionary theory provides a framework for explaining change in population-level
distributions. A consistent finding in the literature is that multiple transmission episodes …

In this commentary article to'The Puzzle of Ideography'by Morin, we put forth a new cognitive
account of the puzzle of ideography, that complements the standardization account of Morin …

Notations are cognitive systems involving distinctive psychological functions, behaviors, and
material forms. Seen through this lens, two main types—semasiography and visible …

This paper argues that writing evolved gradually and in piecemeal fashion. Literacy as we
know and use it is made up of at least three distinct features: it is a glottography (a notation …