Recent studies of meaning-sound systematicity haveconsistently found a small but significant positive correlationbetween semantics and phonology. The current study addsfurther evidence from an etymologically distinct language,Korean. Through multiple methods, the study shows thatsimilar sounds tend to have similar meanings in Koreanmonosyllables. Several cultural aspects of the language are alsoquantified. Pure Korean words return stronger meaning-soundcorrelation than Sino-Korean words, which is attributable tothe higher portion of homonyms in Sino-Korean. The mostfrequent words show the strongest systematicity, whichpermeates all of the monosyllables. Certain types of vowelsseem to contribute to this effect.

Do letter-shapes predict in any way the canonical sounds they represent? Does the letter a in any sense visually predictits canonical pronunciation //? We extended existing quantitative approaches to measuring systematicity between phonol-ogy and semantics. We quantified all pairwise visual distances between letters, using Hausdorff distance. We took thecorresponding canonical pronunciations of the letters and quantified all pairwise distances between their feature-level rep-resentations, using edit distance and Euclidean distance. We defined letter-sound systematicity as a correlation betweenthese two lists of distances. We confirmed Korean as the gold standard for letter-sound systematicity; it was designed in the15C to have exactly this characteristic. We found small but significant correlations in Arabic, Cyrillic, English, Finnish,Greek and Hebrew orthographies, with Courier New giving the most consistent correlations. Pitmans English shorthandand the Shavian shorthand alphabet also showed robust systematicity, and baseline fictitious orthographies showed nosystematicity, validating our approach.

It was recently found that letter-shapes have a non-arbitrary relation with their canonical pronunciations, in multiple orthographies and quantified across the whole of each orthography: letters that look similar tend to have similar pronunciations. Similarly, there is phonosemantic systematicity at the word level: words that sound similar tend to have similar meanings. We investigated for the first time whether a similar systematicity exists in Chinese characters. We measured all the pairwise phonological distances and all the pairwise orthographic distances of the 58 Chinese pictographic characters that are taught to year 1 and 2 in Chinese primary schools. The correlation was tested between the two lists of distances and verified by a Mantel test. We found a significant negative correlation between characters and their segmental pronunciations: characters that look similar tend to have dissimilar segmental pronunciations. This contrasts with the positive correlations found in previous similar research with alphabetic writing. We conclude, first, that questions of systematicity in the Chinese writing system are tractable in the same terms and by the same methodology as that applied to alphabetic writing systems. Second, segment-based processing requires to be augmented by tones for there to be systematicity that is comparable to that found in alphabetic writing systems. Any non-arbitrary relation between letter shapes and sounds may help bootstrap the acquisition of literacy.