Ask Lemmy

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 )