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 )