Unraveling the mechanical logic behind ancient scripts, phonetic vowel harmony, abjad root permutation, and the evolution of human writing systems.
Discovered on the banks of the Orkhon River, the 8th-century Turkic inscriptions reveal a writing system mathematically engineered around front and back vowel harmony.
Promulgated in 1446, the Korean Hangul script is widely celebrated as the world's most scientifically engineered alphabet, directly mapping letter shapes to articulatory organs.
Around 1200 BCE, maritime merchants in Byblos, Tyre, and Sidon stripped writing down to 22 consonantal symbols, democratizing literacy and giving birth to Greek, Latin, Arabic, and Cyrillic.