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Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

smithsonianmag.com

21–30 of 135 posts

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

em dash and also "moving reminders of how a single individual’s brilliance and tenacity can change the world". It's such a lazy writing pattern

I read The Smithsonian Magazine decades ago. That kind of writing isn't new for them, IIRC. Now, if you want to say that they wrote in the same annoyingly pretentious way that AIs often do, I could agree with that...

LLMs got it from somewhere

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#22

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#23

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who…

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#24

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who…

Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#25
post #9
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The em dash gave it away

Here's an article in the Smithsonian magazine from 1995 with an em-dash: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-the-pr... Where do you think LLM's learned these things from ? They are widely used in literary writing. Like magazines and books.

You are citing a single use of em-dashes in a single 30 year old article as proof of something.

If anything, the length of that article shows how rarely em-dashes were used by most writers. They're like exclamatory versions of semicolons, a contrived sudden interruption, a sort of inversion of the three dot "…" elipsis. Maybe the em-dash cracked and fell on the floor.

The reason LLMs use a lot of em-dashes is because that's a format they've chosen for output. Thinking that LLMs have a lot of em-dashes because works in the wild have a lot of em-dashes is like thinking that LLM output has a lot of emoticons because a lot of essayists use emoticons to mark subject divisions in the text.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#26
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who…

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

It's not quite in the same category, but there's also Zhuyin Fuhao:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#27
post #20

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

There's an International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech literally.[1] Automation is now available. Languages to IPA, IPA to various languages, text to speech, speech to text, evaluation of pronunciation. [1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...

The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.

A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#28

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other. *(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)

Might be a mess linguistically, but it's sure nice to have only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#29

>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English. I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who…

My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.

Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

#30
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who…

At least one counter-example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul is technically an alphabet, and is non-Canaanite derived.

It wasn't directly cribbed (unlike Western alphabets), but given that Hangul was invented in the 1400s after exposure to Western alphabets, most scholars still consider alphabets to have only been invented once [1] and then copied, much like the wheel. Although I suppose that's true of Cherokee too!

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

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