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…
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 )