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Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

smithsonianmag.com

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

#51

Post by buildsjets »

austin-cheney wrote: post #40
reissbaker wrote: post #22

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…

Another counter-example is Phags Pa Script. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script

Explain. The wiki you linked to specifically states that it is descended from Tibetan script, which is in turn descended from Proto-Sinaitic script.

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

#52

Post by lmm »

colechristensen wrote: post #34
dataflow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.

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

#53

Post by ummonk »

reissbaker wrote: post #22
torben-friis wrote: post #4

>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…

"This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language" - nonsense. That's just because modern Hebrew is based on the written language and thus reflects spelling pronunciation rather than historical pronunciation.

Also, proto-Sinaitic is not an alphabet. That's why Persian writing became harder to read when they switched from the nearly alphabetic Old Persian cuneiform to Aramaic abjad descended from proto-Sinaitic.

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

#54

Post by ummonk »

reissbaker wrote: post #33
rayiner wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”).

Egyptian heiroglyphs were not an alphabet, even if they had alphabetic elements (in addition to pictographic ones). Scholars generally agree that proto-Sinaitic was the first alphabet, and all subsequent alphabets used today are either direct descendants or directly inspired by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet

Protp-Sinaitic was an abjad not an alphabet.

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

#55

Post by zhoBEENG »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #43

Now you have me wondering what is theoretically the most compact and efficient language, without using compression

Claude Shannon talks about this in A Mathematical Theory of Communication. He defines redundancy as one minus relative entropy, where relative entropy is the ratio of the language's actual average uncertainty per symbol to the maximum possible uncertainty if all alphabet symbols were completely random and equally likely.

He gives some rather cute examples, like the language of Finnegans Wake by Joyce being very low redundancy (high efficiency in your words). He also states that crossword puzzles don't work in a perfectly efficient language, that 50% redundancy is pretty good for 2-d puzzles, and 33% redundancy good for 3-d puzzles. This has always been one of my favorite and in my mind most random corollaries in a paper.

https://people.math.harvard.edu/~ctm/home/text/others/shanno...

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

#56

Post by alex0015 »

retroflexzy wrote: post #39
alex0015 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

> A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. This is, for better or worse, what is being done to incorporate aboriginal names into things like streets and bridges in places like Vancouver. - [stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stal%CC%95%C9%99w%CC%93as%C9%9... ) - [šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street]( https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/musqueamview-street-sig…

That's not quite what I meant by unusably bad, though that does have its own set of challenges for sure. I was just in Toronto for the first time and appreciated the designers of the Ojibwe Latin alphabet for pulling it off without diacritics.

What's happening with your example is just that the symbols chosen for the phonemic transcription are non-Latin so they're unfamiliar to read aloud and harder to type for non-speakers. What I meant was if we all wrote with all of our individual idiosyncrasies of speech without converging on a prescribed standard (a writing system separate from speech transcription).

"Amnu ge sum'm frum upsterz, gimmi u sek" but even more so, with IPA characters for all the 40-odd individual sounds of my dialect of English - then you write your response in the same level of phonetic detail. Exactly what a writing system shouldn't do.

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

#57

Post by ummonk »

colechristensen wrote: post #34
dataflow wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

>only 26 letters with no accents on a keyboard This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.

You just press backspace and hit the accent mark key or for a printing press stack the accent mark on top of the letter. People ditched accents because they were rarely used in English writing (only really being used for some loanwords), not because simplifications were forced by typewriters or the printing press (which handle non-English languages just fine).

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

#58

Post by krapp »

HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #43

Now you have me wondering what is theoretically the most compact and efficient language, without using compression

It's not a real language and I don't know what "compression" means in this context but I'll throw Ithkuil against the wall and see if it sticks[0,1]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29036441

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

#59

Post by QuiDortDine »

reissbaker wrote: post #22
torben-friis wrote: post #4

>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…

"and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible": That is the definition of a dialect.

Also, I don't know how you can claim Hebrew is phonetically represented by its alphabet rather than the other way around, as a revived language the pronunciations are largely a matter of convention based on Yiddish. It would be more accurate to say that modern Hebrew uses an ancient writing system, which happens to be closely related to the ancestor of modern European alphabets.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language

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

#60

Post by andsoitis »

applicative wrote: post #44
andsoitis wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels). Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.” Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language. The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded i…

Canaanite and its abjad have been in continuous use, in various versions, for more than 2,800 years. It's true there's no Linear B.

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