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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

#111

Post by tengwar2 »

mootothemax wrote: post #45
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.

It’s great compression: Y sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant. And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such. Linguistics is fun. The accents are alright.

Or English has only two tenses (present and past perfect) and everything else is done with modifiers.

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

#112

Post by rafram »

QuiDortDine wrote: post #59
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…

"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…

No, there is no linguistic definition of a dialect. It’s a purely political term. Hindi and Urdu are “languages” despite being nearly identical in their spoken forms; Moroccan Arabic is a “dialect” even though Lebanese Arabic speakers can’t understand it; Galician and Portuguese are separate “languages,” with a mysteriously precise dividing line right at the Portuguese border!

Linguists elide over the whole thing by using the term “language variety.”

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

#113

Post by junon »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #71
steve-atx-7600 wrote: post #62

Not even an example of the glyphs??? Smithsonian must be another repository of clickbait like Forbes.

It's on wikipedia. I had thought everyone's seen these, but maybe I was the weird kid who'd read the encyclopedia for fun. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary#Unicode

I love writing systems and had never seen or heard of this. Also thought it was strange that Smithsonian of all things didn't include it.

Beautiful glyph. I love it. Thanks for the link!

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

#114

Post by rafram »

simiones wrote: post #102
reissbaker wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hebrew is not based on Yiddish, lol; only Ashkenazi Hebrew pronunciation was influenced by Yiddish. Modern Israeli Hebrew uses primarily Sephardi pronunciation, and Ashkenazi is mocked (i.e. Shabbat is Sephardi, Shabbos is Ashkenazi; modern Israeli Hebrew uses Shabbat). I grew up around Ashkenazi pronunciation in America, and had to unlearn it when I spent time in Israel. Nonetheless, Yemenite, Sephardi, and Ashkenaz…

> And a modern Hebrew speaker can easily understand Biblical Hebrew — they're closer than even Modern English and Shakespearean. Of course, because modern Hebrew was constructed based on (the modern understanding of) Biblical Hebrew around the 1920s or slightly earlier, whereas Modern English naturally evolved for ~400 years from Shakespearean English and other forms of English.

That’s simply incorrect. Most of the innovations in Modern Hebrew (relative to Biblical Hebrew) came in the Mishnaic period, early CE. Hebrew continued to be used as a liturgical language, and occasionally a business language, both in its Biblical and Mishnaic forms, until the 1880s (not 1920s), when the Zionist movement brought it back into use for casual speech. The Hebrew used in the Mishnah is quite close to the modern written language, though it lacks modern words and some very recent innovations like topic-first sentences.

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

#115

Post by yorwba »

nvader wrote: post #23
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…

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

The Wikipedia article on Hangul has been rewritten over the years to deemphasize the evidence for a not-purely-de-novo origin, but you can still find it if you click the right links: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Origin_of_Hangul#Hypothesized_...

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

#116

Post by mcswell »

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…

I'm not the person you're responding to, but I think what he meant when he said that a "strict phonetic transcription" would be bad is phonetic vs. phonemic. Most writing systems (apart from things like Chinese) represent (some of) the phonemes of the language, not the phones (not phonetic). For example, in English we have two kinds of p-sounds: one is found in words like 'pill', the other in words like 'spill'. We write them both the same, because which sound the letter should take is determined by the environment: after an /s/, it's pronounced without a puff of air, elsewhere (or mostly elsewhere) it's pronounced followed by a puff of air. It's actually hard for most native speakers of English to tell the difference, although speakers of languages like Thai, where the two sounds can appear in the same environment and can be used to distinguish different words, can hear the difference just fine.

Bottom line: writing systems that are easy for native speakers to use, usually represent the phonemes of the language, not each phone.

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

#117

Post by mcswell »

ianburrell wrote: post #69
colechristensen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

English is a West Germanic language with vocabulary from other languages, primarily French and Latin. But most of the core words are Germanic. It is not a pidgin whose defining feature is simplified grammar.

English has sometimes been called a creole, i.e. what was a pidgin language but after it has been spoken by several generations of native speakers. One thing it lost some time around the Norman Conquest was the case marking phonology (apart from some pronouns).

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

#118

Post by mcswell »

Dylan16807 wrote: post #78
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.

The pronunciation is so bad though. The consonants are mostly fine, but the way we write vowels is a total mess. We'd need at least a dozen vowel letters to sanely represent English. And we could cut a couple consonant letters to help make room, for maybe 30 letters total, still no accents.

Blame that on Latin, which had only five vowels (not counting the long and short vowels separately).

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

#119

Post by mcswell »

paleotrope wrote: post #14
CPLX wrote: post #2

In case anyone is curious: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary

Amazing "By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.[5]". It even has a reference so it must be true.

Around the same time, Christian missionaries introduced writing (using an adapted Latin alphabet) to Hawai`i. Within ten years nearly the entire population (I would guess with the exception of older people) was literate. Mark Twain remarked on Hawai`ian literacy a few decades later.

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

#120

Post by mcswell »

Wowfunhappy wrote: post #48
HoldOnAMinute wrote: post #43

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

I feel like you're going to run up against the definitions of "efficient" and "compression". For example, a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more in fewer characters. Is that more efficient? Similarly, you could think of each word as a sort of lookup table for information in the mind of the reader. We don't define words as we're writing, we expect the speaker to know them already. If a language…

> a language with a larger alphabet will be able to express more > in fewer characters.

True, although it's not really the alphabet that determines this, it's the number of phonemes (distinctive sounds) in the language. For example, writing /s/ (the sound) sometimes with 's' and sometimes with 'c' does nothing to shorten words in English or Spanish.

But in general, languages with fewer phonemes tend to have longer words (and tone languages often have very short words---in a sense, they have more phonemes than non-tone languages). Morphology (particularly compounding) often obscures this.

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