Final answer:
Historical scribes had the freedom to creatively adjust their writing, but over time, the development of dictionaries and rules has provided structure to how letters and words are used. The canonical order in writing is often followed for clarity, with departures made for effect. The development of writing has been intricately connected to cultural agreements on the meaning of signs and symbols.
Step-by-step explanation:
The constraints on letter placement and order imposed over time by scribes and dictionary writers is a topic that touches upon the historical development of written language and its orthographic conventions. The English alphabet, consisting of twenty-six letters, and its usage rules, have evolved through the meticulous work of scribes and the creators of dictionaries.
Historical scribes had a fair amount of leeway in their writing, with techniques like mashq allowing for the horizontal elongation of letters to balance line length and the adjustment of spacing between words and letters. They also trained rigorously to memorize and produce consistent proportions in their pen strokes, which was a reflection of their skill and dedication to creating unified and precise manuscripts. However, with the advent of dictionaries, more systematic rules were established. These rules are reflected in modern writing where the canonical order of sentence elements generally prevails but can depart from this norm for stylistic reasons or to provide emphasis. This order is observed even as we unconsciously recognize the correct arrangement of words to form coherent sentences, a process similar to underlying mathematical intuition. Semiotics, the study of signs and symbols as elements of communicative behavior, also plays a role in this historical development of writing. From the first pictographic forms in ancient Mesopotamia to Egyptian hieroglyphics, the evolution of writing has been about the codification and agreement on the meaning of signs within particular cultural contexts.