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…
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