I think shoebum was saying that “Hindi, or any Indic languages ( Devanagari-based ones ) do not have any case differentiation.”
I tried learning Sanskrit ( because it seems to be THE language that scripture ought be in ) … and … ugh.
Devanagari is a syllabari, not an alphabet ( each character is a syllable ), and they hide letters among other letters, in a way that only a child could learn.
My old brain’s too wooden to learn that stuff at anything-like a useful speed.
Nobody’s mentioned, though, that the absence of upper/lower case variants breaks CamelCase programming for those languages.
This means that people whose primary language doesn’t have upper/lower case characters, they probably have a harder time understanding program-code that is written that way.
There’s a programming-language Citrine which is intentionally designed so that everybody can program in their own language, with it, so apparently it’s the same programming-language, but in zillions of different scripts & languages…
I’ve no idea if there are matras in Sanskrit: I never got that far ( learning the basic characters, & their pronunciation, defeated me, the 2-3 times I tried learning it ), but that seems brilliant…
There’s a yt channel on it which has some good help: Sanskrit is engineered to make each sound distinct from the others, in a scientific/systematic way, & so it uses one’s mouth/formants scientifically… they show … it’s something like 5 sounds times 5 variations, or something ( been a couple years since I tried last )…
but the basic-question: is there some visual emphasis which is global, instead-of only in specific scripts…
honestly, I can’t think of any…
I’ve read ( in Gleick’s “The Information” ) that African languages are usually tonal, & Chinese is tonal ( so “ma” and “ma” in different notes means 2 different things ) … hey!
I just remembered: many languages are illiterate languages, to begin with.
that … partially breaks the question, because many languages have a foreign symbol-system just stuck onto them, then…
Like all the American Indian languages that hadn’t evolved their own symbols, when we stuck symbols on their languages, that … broke the natural-language-evolution process?
Or is it that it is natural for only a percentage of a world’s languages to have any writing?
hmm…
foreign/imposed writing-systems would, though, be significantly less likely to have an appropriate system-of-emphasis, is this point…
My point is that when we imposed scripts on languages-which-are-tonal, & our script doesn’t indicate tone, then we sabotaged all communications done in the resulting language-script pairing.
That that mismatch damages all communication which goes through that specific mis-engineered “channel”.
& that each language is going to have its own pattern of what’s-important/what-isn’t-important, & that having a script which mismatches THAT language’s paradigm is going to damage communications in it, automatically …
& that all imposed-script-on-language situations are significantly more likely to mismatch, than are self-evolved scripts.
( that being said, the Semitic languages, both Hebrew & Arabic, have the nasty habit of leaving out the vowels from script, because “of course everybody already knows which vowels we mean: we do, so therefor everybody does!”
which trashes our ability to be certain about ancient texts…
I’ve read that for ages the Masoretic version of the “book of Job” had the guy end-up with thousands of gold pieces, because in Hebrew the non-vowels for “sheep” and “gold-pieces” are identical…
so their script didn’t value identifying that, because in the writer’s minds “everybody already knows”…
but in the Aramaic text, the words are not identical-in-nonvowels, so therefore it was shown, through the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the whole Masoretic “gold-pieces” claim, in that book was different from the original text/meaning/rendition.
So, scripts that include what the language’s people find to be important … can sometimes leave-out critical information!
But, if what was important to the original-language people was excluding outsiders … then, of course that’d be effective-means!
& group-identity is one of the functions of languages, so … that has to be kept in mind, too…
Hindi or any Indic languages (popular ones) have any case differentiation.
Mostly because emphasis on any word is not literal it is tonal.
So there are these things called - matra (12 matras in hindi)
They are symbols representing inflection/emphasis etc. and we can combine them with each character of the alphabet and convey tone.
I think shoebum was saying that “Hindi, or any Indic languages ( Devanagari-based ones ) do not have any case differentiation.”
I tried learning Sanskrit ( because it seems to be THE language that scripture ought be in ) … and … ugh.
Devanagari is a syllabari, not an alphabet ( each character is a syllable ), and they hide letters among other letters, in a way that only a child could learn.
My old brain’s too wooden to learn that stuff at anything-like a useful speed.
Nobody’s mentioned, though, that the absence of upper/lower case variants breaks CamelCase programming for those languages.
This means that people whose primary language doesn’t have upper/lower case characters, they probably have a harder time understanding program-code that is written that way.
There’s a programming-language Citrine which is intentionally designed so that everybody can program in their own language, with it, so apparently it’s the same programming-language, but in zillions of different scripts & languages…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citrine_(programming_language)
https://www.citrine-lang.org/
I’ve no idea if there are matras in Sanskrit: I never got that far ( learning the basic characters, & their pronunciation, defeated me, the 2-3 times I tried learning it ), but that seems brilliant…
There’s a yt channel on it which has some good help: Sanskrit is engineered to make each sound distinct from the others, in a scientific/systematic way, & so it uses one’s mouth/formants scientifically… they show … it’s something like 5 sounds times 5 variations, or something ( been a couple years since I tried last )…
but the basic-question: is there some visual emphasis which is global, instead-of only in specific scripts…
honestly, I can’t think of any…
I’ve read ( in Gleick’s “The Information” ) that African languages are usually tonal, & Chinese is tonal ( so “ma” and “ma” in different notes means 2 different things ) … hey!
I just remembered: many languages are illiterate languages, to begin with.
that … partially breaks the question, because many languages have a foreign symbol-system just stuck onto them, then…
Like all the American Indian languages that hadn’t evolved their own symbols, when we stuck symbols on their languages, that … broke the natural-language-evolution process?
Or is it that it is natural for only a percentage of a world’s languages to have any writing?
hmm…
foreign/imposed writing-systems would, though, be significantly less likely to have an appropriate system-of-emphasis, is this point…
_ /\ _
A lot of excellent observations.
But you did answer your question when you mentioned most older scripts were illiterate (in the academic sense).
Illiterate scripts inherently carry a lot of information whose priority is to convey the message independent of the listener (I’m guessing)
I think languages that can convey tone are awesome. It makes the language richer and less ambiguous
My point is that when we imposed scripts on languages-which-are-tonal, & our script doesn’t indicate tone, then we sabotaged all communications done in the resulting language-script pairing.
That that mismatch damages all communication which goes through that specific mis-engineered “channel”.
& that each language is going to have its own pattern of what’s-important/what-isn’t-important, & that having a script which mismatches THAT language’s paradigm is going to damage communications in it, automatically …
& that all imposed-script-on-language situations are significantly more likely to mismatch, than are self-evolved scripts.
( that being said, the Semitic languages, both Hebrew & Arabic, have the nasty habit of leaving out the vowels from script, because “of course everybody already knows which vowels we mean: we do, so therefor everybody does!”
which trashes our ability to be certain about ancient texts…
I’ve read that for ages the Masoretic version of the “book of Job” had the guy end-up with thousands of gold pieces, because in Hebrew the non-vowels for “sheep” and “gold-pieces” are identical…
so their script didn’t value identifying that, because in the writer’s minds “everybody already knows”…
but in the Aramaic text, the words are not identical-in-nonvowels, so therefore it was shown, through the Dead Sea Scrolls, that the whole Masoretic “gold-pieces” claim, in that book was different from the original text/meaning/rendition.
So, scripts that include what the language’s people find to be important … can sometimes leave-out critical information!
But, if what was important to the original-language people was excluding outsiders … then, of course that’d be effective-means!
& group-identity is one of the functions of languages, so … that has to be kept in mind, too…
sigh )