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…
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 )
I agree about how languages leave out groups that can indicate a lot about the script and its people.
And imposing scripts do kill that implicit.
But don’t you think that’s how most new languages are created. I’m assuming there must have been so many language impositions throughout history.
In fact hindi was created by Brits because hindi was not a single language till 1600s
Having said that, what was the core question that you wanted to address?