Sequoyah’s syllabary created a written language for the Cherokee
smithsonianmag.com
smithsonianmag.com
They look like something right out of some Sci-Fi.
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.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....
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.
This article does a good job of reviewing the conflicting narratives of his history: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26467045. It’s all very uncertain, and there’s a lot of mythology.
So you consider 19th century America to be Europe, or is there another reason for your choice of words?
Foreigners can serve in the US Army. Native Americans weren't automatically US citizens until 1924, but were considered citizens of their sovereign tribe.
European here clearly means both "from Europe" (eg, Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters are European, not American), as well as "European Americans" (ie, Americans of European ancestry, and often with cultural ties to Europe.) Just like how "Asian" doesn't always mean "born in Asia", or how "Anglo" can refer to non-Hispanic white Americans rather than being specifically related to England.
Trading with the Spanish in Florida, English ships, or French trappers would all count as "contact with Europeans", and not simply "Americans".
Finally, recall that at the time "American" was a state of mind. A Loyalist at the time would not consider themselves "American", and a Patriot considered a Loyalist to be "inimical to the liberties of America". How do you know if Sequoyah’s father was an American or a Loyalist?
It's plenty interesting without superfluous claims!
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.
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.
Maybe the symbols themselves aren't new.
You (or anyone else here) might enjoy Omniglot, an old web 1.0 site that was amazing for its comprehensive treatment of all writing scripts:
Beautiful glyph. I love it. Thanks for the link!
Sure, the Smithsonian has a nice article with a flowing narrative. But we want facts. Let's look up this Sequoyah chap:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sequoyah
> In 1821, Sequoyah completed his Cherokee syllabary, enabling reading and writing in the Cherokee language.
The link is right there, you can move right on to learning about what he created.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_syllabary
- His original script: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Original_Cherokee_Syllaba...
- More readable table: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Cherokee_Syllabary.svg
- Sample text: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherokee_language#Samples
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitter_Tears:_Ballads_of_the_A...
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.
*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)
This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.
In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.
"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.
"ye" in "ye Olde mill" is actually just "the" but originally "þe"/"þee". The first printing presses to England were imported from Germany, which never used þ, so printers used something that looked sorta similar, thus "y".
"Ye" was a different word, the 2nd person non-formal version of "you" (which was historically formal: see-Shakespeare and how he played with "ye" and "you"). Thorn was on its way out along with "ð" both of which were in Middle English. The sounds didn't leave English, but we merged it into one letter cluster "th" (think "that" and "the", which have different th sounds).
Welsh suffered more: it used to be full of "k"s. When the first Welsh Bible was printed, the English printer did not have enough "k"s, and substituted "c", and the language now does not use "k" at all. Apparently the printer's note on the matter still exists.
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.
-ooze -oose -ews -ues -use -oes -uise
You can do this purely with prefixes ending in consonants, i.e. not by turning -use into -ouse, for example.
[1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...
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 shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.
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-signs...)
I see the practicalities of adopting this IPA-lite form, but it's a struggle to use, even though I've previously been trained in IPA.
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.
Bottom line: writing systems that are easy for native speakers to use, usually represent the phonemes of the language, not each phone.
Phonetic alphabets were introduced to most of Asia by various Brahmic scripts; the most widely-used (albeit briefly-used) one being the Mongolian Phags-pa script [2], derived from Tibetan, derived from various Brahmic scripts, derived from Aramaic, derived from Phoenician, derived from — sure enough — proto-Sinaitic. Thai and Khmer are derived from Pallava [3], which is derived from Tamil-Brahmi, derived from other Brahmic scripts, again derived from Aramaic and thus eventually from proto-Sinaitic; etc etc.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
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 in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
> 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, and as the Mongolian alphabet or later Manchu alphabet is still written.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
> The origin of the script is still much debated, with most scholars stating that Brahmi was derived from or at least influenced by one or more contemporary Semitic scripts. Some scholars favour the idea of an indigenous origin,[19] or connection to the much older and as yet undeciphered Indus script[20][21] but the evidence is insufficient at best.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmi_script
So maybe, but probably not and this particular language though it has roots elsewhere of debated origin was an original spontaneous creation.
My conclusions are coming directly from the Wikipedia articles that I linked to. If I am that wrong then edit the Wikipedia articles.
https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B
Episode 2 then covers the printing press.
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.
Can you please make your substantive points without directing pejoratives at the other? This is covered in the site guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):
"When disagreeing, please reply to the argument instead of calling names. 'That is idiotic; 1 + 1 is 2, not 3' can be shortened to '1 + 1 is 2, not 3."
Your comment would be just fine (indeed, excellent) without that bit.
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
I dunno, some English dialects don't seem particularly intelligible to me, and I'm a natively fluent speaker of it.
That said, two people who understand each other are, by any reasonable definition, speaking dialects of the same tongue (if not, obviously, the very same dialect).
Also, not all colloquial dialects are mutually intelligible. Different Chinese dialects are still often referred to as "dialects," despite not being mutually intelligible (e.g. Cantonese vs Mandarin). While that's typically mostly the case for Western languages, there's a spectrum even there.
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.
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.
Linguists elide over the whole thing by using the term “language variety.”
Counterexample: Korean Hangul [0]
It most certainly does not!
I think you could more or less accurately make that claim about Standard Arabic, which has preserved a distinct sound for each letter and only rarely does things that you wouldn’t expect (tanween…).
Modern Hebrew, by contrast, has merged many consonant sounds without merging their letters (sin and samekh, tav and tet), dropped the ayin sound and left the letter as a pseudo-vowel, and decoupled long vowel sounds from their long vowel carrier letters to the point that they’re essentially arbitrary (for each letter, you can find an example of it representing every single vowel sound).
To your main point, though, the main commonality between Semitic scripts and western Latin/Greek-derived scripts is the rough order of the letters and some of the shapes. Latin alphabet isn’t an abjad, it has lots of letters that have no equivalent in Semitic… and it actually represents many languages very faithfully! English is an outlier. So I am not convinced by your argument.
Wasn't Hebrew dead for like 2000 years or something until the Israeli state was set up? Not hard to have a faithful alphabet when your spoken language is frozen in time. Hell, even evolving languages, like Spanish, can have somewhat phonetically accurate alphabets. As said in the other comment, English is more of an exception in that regard.
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.
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.
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...