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Do languages that use non-Latin alphabets (Asian, Cyrillic, Greek, Hebrew) have upper and lower case letters? What about serif or sans-serif? How do they show emphasis? (aussie.zone)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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[–] 1 point 1 year ago (4 children)

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...

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago* (3 children)

    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

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago (2 children)

    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 )

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    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?

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    A language's script MUST be engineered to communicate ALL the required-dimensions of that language.

    There is no exception to that, that I can imagine.

    IF tonal, THEN tonality MUST be indicated..

    simple principle, right?

    in the cases of the Semitic languages, which leave-out vowels, their intent was to lock-out outsiders.

    NOT-communicating with others, was part of the intent.

    & .. well, that's their right, but it's created problems..

    Not just the obious-ones:

    When you force a population more-completely into memorization-paradigm, you make thinking-paradigm less-default

    ( the 2 modes compete for brain-resources: culturally, pick 1, & let the other be secondary )

    So, the Semitic languages with the left-out defaults pushed memorization more heavily,

    & .. that affects/alters/shapes history!

    ALL language-choices have consequences..

    ( I'd actually want the ideal-culture to have at-least 5 different languages, simultaneously, by default:

    • Engineering / English or German
    • social-relativism / Japanese
    • Indigenous-perspective/understanding, / probably Maya?
    • scripture, origins / Sanskrit ( language-of-origins, not language-of-effects/symptoms, multiple people fluent in it have agreed )
    • programming / Haskell ( get people to think correctly! )
    • emotion / Arabic
    • math

    something like that..

    Just switch languages/modes, to communicate within that-language's domain.

    _ /\ _

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