Swimming against the Current

I want to talk today (in English, I’m afraid) about what I believe is a consistent tendency in the historical evolution of scripts around the world. I shan’t call it a “linguistic universal”, because I don’t believe in Chomskyan biological universals of language. Languages are purely cultural products, and like other cultural products their development isn’t controlled by scientific laws. But the tendency I have in mind does seem to hold quite widely, and it can be explained, in terms of the demographic changes we associate with modernity. The reason why this topic may make a suitable opening for your conference is that the one unexplained exception to the tendency which I know of is in fact Korean script. But I’ll come to the case of Korean after I’ve spent some time discussing the tendency more generally.