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- Joined
- May 14, 2019
I have been learning useless scripts lately, especially as I set out with the big project of learning Morse and Cyrillic and wound up doing them in two days each.
The four that I could read at some point, learned, or am learning:
CHEROKEE
Cherokee is one of my favorite scripts, but it is also completely useless. The story of Cherokee goes back to Sequoyah, who was, like all great Indians, part White. The Cherokee were sort of the master race of the Indian South, which is no coincidence as they were a faction of the Iroquois (the master race of the Indian North) that drifted south to colonize the Southern Appalachians. Their potential for growth really kicked off at their subordination to the United States, when they underwent what can only be described as a miniature Meiji Restoration with the tribe developing its own constitutional republic, mass conversion to Christianity, plantation slavery and market economies, and, indeed, the development of their own script that they achieved 100% literacy in in a matter of years. The Cherokee were, at the time of the Trail of Tears, essentially brown-skinned Europeans that wore top hats and Bible societies. They had a very heavy contingent of Scottish blood.
In Seminole culture there is a myth that in ancient times the Great Spirit made three races of men from the clay. The first batch he baked in the oven too little, and they came out sickly, undercooked and pale, and these were White men. The second batch he overdid and they came out burnt and addled in the head, and they were Black men. The last batch he got just right, and they came out the perfect human beings, red Indians. Great Spirit then offered them three gifts. The Black man went first and greedily and stupidly demanded the biggest present, only to find it was a plow and his curse would be to work the land forever. The White man was clever and conniving and chose the smallest gift, receiving talking leaves with which he'd command the Black man and make his living off of deceit. The Indian received a bow and arrow, as is befitting of a free man.
Sequoyah, an illiterate, did not know how to read but did understand the concept of reading. Cherokee as a language has the feature of being syllabic: there is a tightly defined list of syllables consisting of a consonant/diphthong followed by a vowel, and there's not that many of them (only five vowels). As such, Sequyoah didn't think to create an alphabet but instead a syllabary: the syllable would be represented by a symbol. This made it incredibly easy to learn, but also completely useless for writing anything other than Cherokee in since languages like English use an unfathomably wider range of syllables.
To date Sequoyah remains the only man to independently invent a writing system without being able to read or write.
DESERET
Deseret was, like a lot of features of the Mormon religion, a project of Yankee utopianism that has been forgotten outside of its context (although it informs much of what makes Mormonism distinctive, just like understanding Christianity as a product of Hellenistic Judea). Mormonism as a movement was, in my opinion, the Northern version of what Mark Twain observed in antebellum Southern society with the Fire Eaters and Romanticism: a hard turn towards infantile Medievalism. Whereas Southerners wanted to LARP as lords and ladies from Sir Walter Scott novels, Northerners, a much more religious people, wanted to LARP as Biblical patriarchs, Church Fathers and Popes. So you have this stretch of New England (the Burned Over District) that is rocked with constant intense religious revivals and denominational fracturing, and in steps Joseph Smith who cobbles together a new religion out of various theological ideas that have been circulating around (especially heavy use of Swedenborgianism, which had a contingent in Pennsylvania nearby), driven by his personal ambition of becoming American Muhammad and psychologically sold as a way to let Manifest Destiny America recenter the Biblical story on itself.
Given this goal of LARPing, and the Yankee penchant for retarded utopian social engineering, it was inevitable that they would have to create a new script. The justification was orthographic reform to make it easier to teach literacy to the many different immigrant groups in Deseret. The real reason was, again, probably performative LARPing and Jew-like self-segregation from broader society. Either way, Brigham Young has this bullshit cooked up that looks ancient-ish.
Similar to Sequoyah, this wasn't a syllabary but it was a phonemic alphabet. In theory, each sound in the English language gets its own letter. In practice, this is harder than it sounds due to coarticulation, likewise a little messy across dialects. But the point remains, you write things exactly as they sound, and it has the interesting consequence that dialect and accent are rendered precisely.
Today Deseret is the official state alphabet of the Republic of Molossia ('member when microstates were still interesting/funny? like back when you were 12?).
SHAVIAN
Shavian was the same shit but dreamed up by George Bernard Shaw, a Globohomo playwright so arrogant that he commissioned an alphabet in his name that he himself could not be bothered to write.
Whatever you think of him today, Glenn Beck was my introduction to "cultural Marxism" (the Frankfurt School and other adjacent intellectuals like Gramsci and postmodernism) and he bitched about Shaw all the time. Shaw was what a Fabian, the Fabian Society being this creepy-ass Illuminati type group that wanted to (in contrast to Marxism-Leninism's open revolutions) gradually reform capitalist society into socialism. They took their name from Fabian tactics (Fabius' giving ground to wear Hannibal down with attrition before decisive battle) and used a wolf wearing a sheepskin as their symbol. So, while this came along a fair bit later, think of Shavian as being to writing systems what Esperanto was meant to be to languages: a faggot socialist project to destroy what is unique and traditional in a culture. His theoretical justification for this bullshit was that we spend too much ink and time on writing.
As a writing system, Shavian has many interesting features since it was a project of R A T I O N A L I T Y. Phonemes come in pairs, usually voiced and unvoiced but sometimes other themes if appropriate, where you'll write one one way and then the symbol for the other is a symmetrical transformation of the other. So in theory you can learn pairs, and it's an interesting exercise to find the Shavian transform of a word or name and say it aloud, like Pig Latin for Giga-Brains. It absolutely has a logic.
Looks easy? Eh. It turns out that letters being complex figures makes them easier to remember. Honestly, the more I work in it, the more I have contempt for this retard, classic case of an intellectual not understanding the reasons behind why we do things the way we do.
CYRILLIC
A heavily adapted version of Greek for Slavic languages developed bySaint Cyril some other dead faggot. This one I chose for the theoretical use of it, one day, with Russian. You can kind of do English with it, but English has an abnormally large range of phonemes, and Russian a narrow one, so you wind up having to make up conventions to transliterate English words from Roman to Cyrillic. At least it's useful for reading Russian words to say aloud - I always hated how online translators tended to spit back resuts in Cyrillic, what the fuck am I supposed to do wtih this - and I can test it on Cyrillic place names, people names and when watching Russian movies/playing Slavjank games.
The four that I could read at some point, learned, or am learning:
CHEROKEE
Cherokee is one of my favorite scripts, but it is also completely useless. The story of Cherokee goes back to Sequoyah, who was, like all great Indians, part White. The Cherokee were sort of the master race of the Indian South, which is no coincidence as they were a faction of the Iroquois (the master race of the Indian North) that drifted south to colonize the Southern Appalachians. Their potential for growth really kicked off at their subordination to the United States, when they underwent what can only be described as a miniature Meiji Restoration with the tribe developing its own constitutional republic, mass conversion to Christianity, plantation slavery and market economies, and, indeed, the development of their own script that they achieved 100% literacy in in a matter of years. The Cherokee were, at the time of the Trail of Tears, essentially brown-skinned Europeans that wore top hats and Bible societies. They had a very heavy contingent of Scottish blood.
In Seminole culture there is a myth that in ancient times the Great Spirit made three races of men from the clay. The first batch he baked in the oven too little, and they came out sickly, undercooked and pale, and these were White men. The second batch he overdid and they came out burnt and addled in the head, and they were Black men. The last batch he got just right, and they came out the perfect human beings, red Indians. Great Spirit then offered them three gifts. The Black man went first and greedily and stupidly demanded the biggest present, only to find it was a plow and his curse would be to work the land forever. The White man was clever and conniving and chose the smallest gift, receiving talking leaves with which he'd command the Black man and make his living off of deceit. The Indian received a bow and arrow, as is befitting of a free man.
Sequoyah, an illiterate, did not know how to read but did understand the concept of reading. Cherokee as a language has the feature of being syllabic: there is a tightly defined list of syllables consisting of a consonant/diphthong followed by a vowel, and there's not that many of them (only five vowels). As such, Sequyoah didn't think to create an alphabet but instead a syllabary: the syllable would be represented by a symbol. This made it incredibly easy to learn, but also completely useless for writing anything other than Cherokee in since languages like English use an unfathomably wider range of syllables.
To date Sequoyah remains the only man to independently invent a writing system without being able to read or write.
DESERET
Deseret was, like a lot of features of the Mormon religion, a project of Yankee utopianism that has been forgotten outside of its context (although it informs much of what makes Mormonism distinctive, just like understanding Christianity as a product of Hellenistic Judea). Mormonism as a movement was, in my opinion, the Northern version of what Mark Twain observed in antebellum Southern society with the Fire Eaters and Romanticism: a hard turn towards infantile Medievalism. Whereas Southerners wanted to LARP as lords and ladies from Sir Walter Scott novels, Northerners, a much more religious people, wanted to LARP as Biblical patriarchs, Church Fathers and Popes. So you have this stretch of New England (the Burned Over District) that is rocked with constant intense religious revivals and denominational fracturing, and in steps Joseph Smith who cobbles together a new religion out of various theological ideas that have been circulating around (especially heavy use of Swedenborgianism, which had a contingent in Pennsylvania nearby), driven by his personal ambition of becoming American Muhammad and psychologically sold as a way to let Manifest Destiny America recenter the Biblical story on itself.
Given this goal of LARPing, and the Yankee penchant for retarded utopian social engineering, it was inevitable that they would have to create a new script. The justification was orthographic reform to make it easier to teach literacy to the many different immigrant groups in Deseret. The real reason was, again, probably performative LARPing and Jew-like self-segregation from broader society. Either way, Brigham Young has this bullshit cooked up that looks ancient-ish.
Similar to Sequoyah, this wasn't a syllabary but it was a phonemic alphabet. In theory, each sound in the English language gets its own letter. In practice, this is harder than it sounds due to coarticulation, likewise a little messy across dialects. But the point remains, you write things exactly as they sound, and it has the interesting consequence that dialect and accent are rendered precisely.
Today Deseret is the official state alphabet of the Republic of Molossia ('member when microstates were still interesting/funny? like back when you were 12?).
SHAVIAN
Shavian was the same shit but dreamed up by George Bernard Shaw, a Globohomo playwright so arrogant that he commissioned an alphabet in his name that he himself could not be bothered to write.
Whatever you think of him today, Glenn Beck was my introduction to "cultural Marxism" (the Frankfurt School and other adjacent intellectuals like Gramsci and postmodernism) and he bitched about Shaw all the time. Shaw was what a Fabian, the Fabian Society being this creepy-ass Illuminati type group that wanted to (in contrast to Marxism-Leninism's open revolutions) gradually reform capitalist society into socialism. They took their name from Fabian tactics (Fabius' giving ground to wear Hannibal down with attrition before decisive battle) and used a wolf wearing a sheepskin as their symbol. So, while this came along a fair bit later, think of Shavian as being to writing systems what Esperanto was meant to be to languages: a faggot socialist project to destroy what is unique and traditional in a culture. His theoretical justification for this bullshit was that we spend too much ink and time on writing.
As a writing system, Shavian has many interesting features since it was a project of R A T I O N A L I T Y. Phonemes come in pairs, usually voiced and unvoiced but sometimes other themes if appropriate, where you'll write one one way and then the symbol for the other is a symmetrical transformation of the other. So in theory you can learn pairs, and it's an interesting exercise to find the Shavian transform of a word or name and say it aloud, like Pig Latin for Giga-Brains. It absolutely has a logic.
Looks easy? Eh. It turns out that letters being complex figures makes them easier to remember. Honestly, the more I work in it, the more I have contempt for this retard, classic case of an intellectual not understanding the reasons behind why we do things the way we do.
CYRILLIC
A heavily adapted version of Greek for Slavic languages developed by
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