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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

#41

Post by paxcoder »

alex0015 wrote: post #27
Animats wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sh…

[dead]

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

#42

Post by pocksuppet »

dataflow wrote: post #28
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)

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

long s and thorn would like to have a word with you, but they can't because they were removed from the keyboard

In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.

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

#44

Post by applicative »

andsoitis wrote: post #36
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…

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.

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

#45

Post by mootothemax »

dataflow wrote: post #28
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)

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.

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

#46

Post by tedd4u »

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…

Very enjoyable documentary on this alphabetic development with relevant on-site visits.

https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B

Episode 2 then covers the printing press.

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

#48

Post by Wowfunhappy »

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 has more words, each word is more precise, and fewer words can be used to express an idea—but is that efficiency? You're just relying on the reader having more preexisting knowledge.

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

#49

Post by colechristensen »

pocksuppet wrote: post #42
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.

long s and thorn would like to have a word with you, but they can't because they were removed from the keyboard In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.

"Ye Olde Mill" or whatever archaic silliness you'll find at fairs and whatnot was the result of the printing press dropping þ (as in þe, þ is just th-) and was never supposed to be pronounced with a "y" sound.

"Ye Olde" ye was not the same word as "Hear ye, hear ye!", that ye is a plural 'you' basically the same word as "y'all" and never had a thorn.

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

#50

Post by IIAOPSW »

Modified3019 wrote: post #35
rayiner wrote: post #18

The article’s title is misleading: “The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic.” His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeog…

For those just encountering this like me, the man in question was Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. His own tribe put him on trial, being overseen by his Chief. Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment. Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.

Its a real shame we don't have any transcripts or other court records from that hearing...for obvious reasons.
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