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…
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