Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee

smithsonianmag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 135 posts

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

#81

Post by dang »

rayiner wrote: post #79
dang wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, we've changed the title using more representative language from the article. It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!

I didn’t mean to criticize the HN title—it accurately reflected the title on the linked page. I just thought the article’s choice of title was interesting given the rest of the story.

On the contrary, your point was a great one and we want HN titles to be accurate! This is implicit in the ancient PG lore: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

It's helpful when HN readers do the actual work of understanding for us because we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here (and my capacity for even that is declining monotonically). But we're always happy to swap a title when someone posts an apt observation.

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

#82

Post by colechristensen »

yellowapple wrote: post #66
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)

Good languages borrow, great languages steal?

More like the repressed underclasses who kept getting conquered by foreign powers didn't overthrow their new masters but assimilated them and part of their language instead. Many times. Romans, early German-ish people, early norwegians, early french, early french who had been conquered by early norwegians, etc. (historical sticklers give me a break, it's two sentences not a doctoral thesis)

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

#83

Post by TedDoesntTalk »

rayiner wrote: post #37
Modified3019 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The notion that Sequoyah was a monolingual Cherokee is dubious. He had a European father (though he was raised with his mother) and worked as a trader and served in the U.S. Army. His cousin, to whom he presented his syllabary, was also half European, “George Lowery.” He had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, his syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. Part of the story is that…

I found it interesting that you used the term European several times, but never once the term American. He served in the American military, lived in America, had an American father (according to the article).

So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?

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

#84

Post by komali2 »

amluto wrote: post #26
nvader wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think the idea is that since the inventers of bopomofo were exposed to other alphabets, it's still considered a descendant alphabet. I usually think of descendant as something that visibly manifests its ancestry, so for example modern traditional characters look somewhat like the earliest Chinese characters, or, all romance languages sharing some sounds or even words. So maybe we need a different way to describe things like wheels and alphabets.

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

#85

Post by krapp »

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.

Come now. English can be understood well enough through tough thorough thought.

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

#87

Post by austin-cheney »

cwnyth wrote: post #73
austin-cheney wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said nothing like that. It was an original script invented by a Tibetan monk at the paid directions of Kublai Khan. > Descending from Tibetan script, it is part of the Brahmic family of scripts, which includes Devanagari and scripts used throughout Southeast Asia and Central Asia.[5] It is unique among Brahmic scripts in that it is written from top to bottom,[5] as how classical Chinese used to be written…

"but probably not": Actually, probably so. The scholars who favor the indigenous explanation are a small minority outside of India. It's possible it was independent, but very, very doubtful, and none can explain the enormous gap in time between the Indus script and later Brahmic scripts.

What does it matter if some scholars are from outside of India? All I am seeing are conclusions from unstated assumptions that appear to be drawn from a bias.

My conclusions are coming directly from the Wikipedia articles that I linked to. If I am that wrong then edit the Wikipedia articles.

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

#88

Post by colechristensen »

ummonk wrote: post #57
colechristensen wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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).

For printing presses we're talking about the influence of the first printing presses hundreds of years before industrialization which were imported from Germany and even when they started making their own in England they were more like clones and used imported designs and parts. The early machines had a heavy influence on the written language particularly at times when under 1 in 10 people could write, and with the advent of movable type the people who learned to write were heavily influenced by what they read... books printed on German-design machines. You really only need one generation in a situation like that to dramatically change the language. Losing þ, æ, and ð

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

#89

Post by mrandish »

dang wrote: post #81
rayiner wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t mean to criticize the HN title—it accurately reflected the title on the linked page. I just thought the article’s choice of title was interesting given the rest of the story.

On the contrary, your point was a great one and we want HN titles to be accurate! This is implicit in the ancient PG lore: " Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait ( https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html ) It's helpful when HN readers do the actual work of understanding for us because we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here (and my capacity for even that is d…

> we can't read even a tiny fraction of what gets posted here

I'll bet it's exhausting but your note did make ponder: If a soul was condemned to the eternal torment of reading nothing but all the user posts of one social media site for all eternity, HN would be a pretty excellent choice. I shudder to think of the alternatives.

Post reply on HN