NOW HEAR THIS! I've discovered a field of enquiry in which almost nothing has been done. And I'm giving you first chirse.If you search the literature, as I have over the years, you'll find practically nothing about THE ORIGINS OF OUR NUMERIC AND LETTER WRITING. (The label, "calligraphy", referents "the art of handwriting".) There is a definitve book, The History of Mathematical Notations, by Florian Cajori, a 2-volume binding, Dover Publishers; but it doesn't discuss origins. I'll give a few examples I've read about or discovered.
But first, I wish to motivate you. You don't need to go into jungles or desert to be an archaeologist. A school or public library, along with online search-engines, may be enough to determine the origins of the numerals and letters which we use.
NUMERALS FROM ICONS
The term "icon" has become popular with the advent of "windows"programming for the desk-top computer. You should all be aware that this is better understood in the work of the great American logician-mathematician, Charles Saunders Peirce ("purse", x-y), in his "Semiotics: The Theory of Signs". (This notion is implicit in our word, "signify".)An icon is a sign that resembles or suggests its referent.
I hope to involve some of you in a great effort to "dig into the liaterary past" of our ancestors, to find the ORIGIN OF OUR NUMERALS IN ICONS INSPIRED BY DAILY EXPERIENCE.
I haven't the time -- with all the other subjects and projects I'm juggling -- to do more than introduce this "adventure" with a few cases.
Consider the numeral for three: 3.Our ancestors noticed that birds all seem to have three-toed feet. So, they used this as a "coordinate" for similar numerosities. The first specification was ORAL: "as many as a bird has toes". This shifted to writing, drawing a bird's foot, with its three extended toes -- an ICON to signify the cardinality of a set of people, or goats, or apples, or jars, or spears, or whatever.
In time, this ICON became abstracted to our numeral, 3. (Do you see the bird's toes in it?)
The English word "fist" is related to the numeric word, "five", as is the German numeric, "füat;nf", both meaning "a fistful". And, looking at my own fist, I seemed to see the ICON for the Hindu-Arabic symbol, 5.Turn your left hand with palm upward; bend you thumb; curl you fingers. Do you now see a shape resembling 5: the outward thumb (roughly in 2-D with the palm) as top of this numeral; and imagine the curled fingers as projecting back into the 2-D of the palm and thumb, for the backward curl of the numeral, 5.
Somewhere in the literature, I found an explanation of the origin of the numeral 1. It mentions a type of vase or jar which has a projecting lip, and a flat surcer base. Slant down that lip and you have the downward bend of the numeral, 1.
How about getting to work!