Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except many native cultures in the Americas had written languages, going back thousands of years. I think the large scale genocide was a bit more sad. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...
There's only so much you can pass on without writing. It's a massive benefit to a society to not have to keep everything in people's heads.
Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
131–135 of 135 posts
Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
#132Earlier 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…
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 writing had phonetic elements (as does the modern Chinese writing system) but it was not an alphabet in the strict linguistic sense that individual symbols indicated individual phonemes.
Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
And yet other languages have managed to resist those simplifications. So it's clearly not 100% forced.
Who says other languages haven't undergone significant changes?
Some have. But certainly many continue to use letters beyond those 26, despite the difficulty of using those letters in various technologies.
Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 Hebrew is built on Biblical Hebrew, on Mishnaic Hebrew, on Medieval Hebrew, on Yiddish, and has influence from many other languages. However, there is nothing similar to how English and other native languages evolved. Between the 2nd or 3rd centuries CE and the 20th century, there were no native monolingual speakers of Hebrew - even Mishnaic Hebrew was used only as a second language; while Medieval Hebrew was a lingua franca that Jewish populations speaking other languages would use for communication, not a native language to any of them.
Also, while the creation of Modern Hebrew began around the 1880s, it was an extremely niche phenomenon until much later - at least according to Wikipedia, in 1900 there were fewer than 10 families even in Ottoman Palestine speaking Modern Hebrew currently.
Re: Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
I think your point about the loss of case generally stands, but surely the genitive isn't lost?
True, although it used to be a suffix and now it's (just) a clitic. ("The king of England's crown" would have had the genitive marking on 'king' instead of 'England'.)