The article’s title is misleading: “The Man Who Created a Written Language for the Cherokee Did It So Efficiently and Elegantly, His Peers Thought It Was Magic.”
His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....
For those just encountering this like me, the man in question was Sequoyah, a monolingual Cherokee. His own tribe put him on trial, being overseen by his Chief.
Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.
Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.
The notion that Sequoyah was a monolingual Cherokee is dubious. He had a European father (though he was raised with his mother) and worked as a trader and served in the U.S. Army. He developed his syllabary in “Willstown”—a Cherokee trading post named after Will Weber, who was also half Cherokee and half European. These were people who had extensive contact with Europeans. Moreover, the syllabary includes adaptations of Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic letters. He was obviously exposed to a variety of European writing. It seems highly unlikely that someone who was so linguistically gifted to be able to invent a syllabary would not have picked up some familiarity with spoken and written English through that exposure.
>The syllabary was widely lauded, as its phonetic accuracy and simplicity made it far easier to grasp than English.
I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.
Fun fact: all (non-Cherokee?) alphabets in use today stem from an ancient Canaanite alphabet called the proto-Sinaitic script [1]. This is why Hebrew's alphabet near-perfectly phonetically represents the spoken language: Hebrew is just a dialect of Canaanite, and all Canaanite dialects are mutually intelligible, and alphabets were invented to represent spoken Canaanite. As the alphabet was cribbed by the Greeks (who were taught a simplified version by seafaring Canaanites — the Phoenicians — and termed it the "Phoenician alphabet" [2] despite the Phoenicians not specifically inventing it), significant alterations had to be made and it's been an imperfect match for most Western languages ever since.
It wasn't directly cribbed (unlike Western alphabets), but given that Hangul was invented in the 1400s after exposure to Western alphabets, most scholars still consider alphabets to have only been invented once [1] and then copied, much like the wheel. Although I suppose that's true of Cherokee too!
My understanding is it’s the earliest known alphabet but not the ancestor to all alphabetic languages as there are Asian and other alphabetic languages that are not derived from western or Arabic alphabets. Specifically Greek and Latin alphabets and their descendants are based on it. Specifically Japanese Hiragana and Katakana are syllabic alphabets derived from kanji (and Chinese pictograms) as a simplification of the pictographic language and not derived from proto sinaitic. Others are possibly linked, like Thai, Khmer, etc through an Aramaic -> Brami-> Pallava->Khmer linkage but the Brami link is not fully established to be true.
No: most scholars believe alphabets were only invented once, much like the wheel. All Western alphabets are direct descendants, and the non-Western alphabets were directly inspired by it. [1]
Phonetic alphabets were introduced to most of Asia by various Brahmic scripts; the most widely-used (albeit briefly-used) one being the Mongolian Phags-pa script [2], derived from Tibetan, derived from various Brahmic scripts, derived from Aramaic, derived from Phoenician, derived from — sure enough — proto-Sinaitic. Thai and Khmer are derived from Pallava [3], which is derived from Tamil-Brahmi, derived from other Brahmic scripts, again derived from Aramaic and thus eventually from proto-Sinaitic; etc etc.
Technically, the proto-Sinaitic script is an abjad, with the Greek alphabet being the first true alphabet (symbols for both consonants and vowels).
Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”
Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.
The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
Egyptian hieroglyphics already had alphabetic elements, and the canaanites borrowed those: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_hieroglyphs (“Egyptian hieroglyphs are the ultimate ancestor of the Phoenician alphabet, the first widely adopted phonetic writing system”).
Egyptian heiroglyphs were not an alphabet, even if they had alphabetic elements (in addition to pictographic ones). Scholars generally agree that proto-Sinaitic was the first alphabet, and all subsequent alphabets used today are either direct descendants or directly inspired by it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
There's an International Phonetic Alphabet for transcribing speech literally.[1]
Automation is now available. Languages to IPA, IPA to various languages, text to speech, speech to text, evaluation of pronunciation.
The IPA still relies on convention to transcribe sounds. There's plenty of academic papers out there describing lesser studied languages and, if those conventions don't yet exist, the papers often contradict each other.
A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.
English is three* languages in a trenchcoat, all languages borrow but English in particular is a cobbled together mess. Like a salors' pidgin language except instead of sailors, driven by the ruling class of Britain at the boundary of several language families who kept conquering each other.
It’s great compression: Y sometimes a vowel, sometimes a consonant.
And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such.
Amazing "By 1825, the majority of Cherokees could read and write in their newly developed orthography.[5]". It even has a reference so it must be true.
You are citing a single use of em-dashes in a single 30 year old article as proof of something.
If anything, the length of that article shows how rarely em-dashes were used by most writers. They're like exclamatory versions of semicolons, a contrived sudden interruption, a sort of inversion of the three dot "…" elipsis. Maybe the em-dash cracked and fell on the floor.
The reason LLMs use a lot of em-dashes is because that's a format they've chosen for output. Thinking that LLMs have a lot of em-dashes because works in the wild have a lot of em-dashes is like thinking that LLM output has a lot of emoticons because a lot of essayists use emoticons to mark subject divisions in the text.
If you read a lot of books, particularly older ones, you'll find em dashes in all kinds of writing and used often. It's functional punctuation that once you understand you may even find yourself using it (and then being accused of being an AI, lol)
His peers thought it was magic because they were unfamiliar with the concept of writing, not because his writing system was so efficient. He was put on trial for witchcraft because people thought he was communicating via magic. https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/sequoyah-a....
Slightly different from what I’d normally assume had happened from just reading the above comment.
Really impressive on his part, basically saw it was possible and looked as some examples of what others had done, then got to work.
I mean, that feels like it's bound to happen when an alphabet is built to represent current language or pronunciation. English is notoriously awful for not doing that.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proto-Sinaitic_script
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phoenician_alphabet
https://www.amazon.com/A-to-Z-Season-1/dp/B0CWCHTM3B
Episode 2 then covers the printing press.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bopomofo
Phonetic alphabets were introduced to most of Asia by various Brahmic scripts; the most widely-used (albeit briefly-used) one being the Mongolian Phags-pa script [2], derived from Tibetan, derived from various Brahmic scripts, derived from Aramaic, derived from Phoenician, derived from — sure enough — proto-Sinaitic. Thai and Khmer are derived from Pallava [3], which is derived from Tamil-Brahmi, derived from other Brahmic scripts, again derived from Aramaic and thus eventually from proto-Sinaitic; etc etc.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_alphabet
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pallava_script
Proto-Sinaitic/Phoenician can be described as the “first alphabetic system,” Greek the “first true alphabet.”
Fun fact: Greek is the world’s oldest recorded living language.
The Greek alphabet has been in use for approximately 2,800 years; previously, Greek was recorded in writing systems such as Linear B and the Cypriot syllabary.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CA%BCPhags-pa_script
[1] https://easypronunciation.com/en/english-phonetic-transcript...
A writing system that used strict phonetic transcription for everything would be unusably bad. Everyone pronounces words differently than the writing system prescribes, in every language. Words are shortened and blended together constantly in connected speech.
This is, for better or worse, what is being done to incorporate aboriginal names into things like streets and bridges in places like Vancouver.
- [stal̕əw̓asəm Bridge](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stal%CC%95%C9%99w%CC%93as%C9%9...) - [šxʷməθkʷəy̓əmasəm Street](https://vancouver.ca/news-calendar/musqueamview-street-signs...)
I see the practicalities of adopting this IPA-lite form, but it's a struggle to use, even though I've previously been trained in IPA.
*(or 7 or whatever number makes you feel best)
And while not encoded on a keyboard, it still blows my mind that English has a crazy number of past tenses - and a such a bad hack of a future tense that it’s hard to classify as such.
Linguistics is fun. The accents are alright.
In Unicode, that's ſ and þ. Both historical English letters that are no longer used.
This was caused by the printing press and the typewriter (keyboard) both of which forced simplifications in the written English language.
Now, if you want to say that they wrote in the same annoyingly pretentious way that AIs often do, I could agree with that...
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/review-of-the-pr...
Where do you think LLM's learned these things from? They are widely used in literary writing. Like magazines and books.
If anything, the length of that article shows how rarely em-dashes were used by most writers. They're like exclamatory versions of semicolons, a contrived sudden interruption, a sort of inversion of the three dot "…" elipsis. Maybe the em-dash cracked and fell on the floor.
The reason LLMs use a lot of em-dashes is because that's a format they've chosen for output. Thinking that LLMs have a lot of em-dashes because works in the wild have a lot of em-dashes is like thinking that LLM output has a lot of emoticons because a lot of essayists use emoticons to mark subject divisions in the text.