Cherokee Numerals

Wow, this is dense.

> From the Egyptian hieratic numerals used in almost all the quotidian tasks of the Egyptian state, to the traditional Sinhalese numerals of south India and Sri Lanka, or the Siniform numerals developed for the Jurchin script in 12th-century China, ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent.

In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian, and the whole sentence is terrifying. I'm fine with looking up definitions, but as a native speaker who's pretty well-read, I find this text really hard to read without a dictionary. There were many words undefined (even by context) in the text that I really don't think even most above-average readers know: syllabary, biscriptal, intelligentsia, interlocutor, grapheme, elided.

Made me think of a recent PG essay: http://paulgraham.com/simply.html

There's a very simple trick: for an overview reading, it doesn't matter what those words mean.

Just skip over them: From the Egyptian some-class-of numerals used in almost all the some-kind-of tasks of the Egyptian state, etc.

(Also, welcome to reading a text for which you are perhaps not the target audience. Now think about all the computing jargon that we tend to just take for granted in our own writing...)

> In that sentence, the article hasn't defined hieratic or quotidian

I suspect the author is a native French speaker? Where "quotidien" is an every-day word.

It’s also a non-archaic English word.

My point is that there is a difference that creates a category of error in bilingual speakers.

French speakers are likely to use the word fairly commonly; whereas, people with English as their first language are unlikely to know it.

So, via translation, the readability level has changed considerably.

The article was adapted from the book. I think we can expect a linguistic anthropologist's history of numerical notations to be above a Grade 9 reading level.

These words appear rather frequently in academic writing on anthropology and linguistics. If you were in grad school studying in these fields it is likely that you would be using most of these words in your own writing. Computer scientists have their own arcane vocabulary, e.g. cryptography, Turing machine, monoid

Consider quotidian (meaning daily), this is an old word that has become more popular in past forty years and has now made its way out of academic writing into ordinary English and appeared about 35 times in HN comments in the past year. It is roughly as common in ordinary English as the word cryptography, but "cryptography" appeared about 49 times in HN comments in the past month.

Google ngram viewer gives a nice comparison of word frequencies in Google's corpus of scanned books. See [1] for a frequency comparison of the some of the words mentioned and the CS words cryptography, Turing machine, Unicode. (Sorry about the link size!)

[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cryptography%2...

I had a roommate in college that always looked up every word he didn't know in the dictionary. I adopted this method of improving my vocabulary and recommend it to people that wish to have a broader vocabulary.

It is especially easy to use the MacOS dictionary feature by simply right clicking on any word to bring up a context menu to lookup the word.

It's interesting that you want to panic over "hieratic" but not "Sinhalese". Those two words are fully parallel; they are both names, and their meaning is "the thing of which <this> is the name".

The context of the use is pretty strong in this case, too, where "Egyptian hieratic numerals" [numerals used in Egyptian hieratic] is grammatically coordinated with "traditional Sinhalese numerals" [numerals related to Sinhala] and "Siniform numerals" [numerals similar to Chinese [numerals]].

You don't need to get caught in the minutae. It isn't particularly relevant which items are compared, since the intent is to show the results of the comparison, "ciphered-additive numeration is cross-culturally recurrent."

All those words are familiar to me, in part because some of them are entirely quotidian in Spanish, though not in English, but in part because they're common terms of art in linguistics. Well, except for "Siniform", which is new to me and whose top search hit is this very article, suggesting that, like "ciphered-additive", the author made it up for this book (though it is etymologically straightforward), and "Jurchin", which is presumably a misspelling of "Jurchen".

But maybe after studying different languages I'm less terrified by seeing things I don't understand. I mean, I already know I'm ignorant; why should further evidence of that be terrifying?

Is there a good browser extension for looking things like this up in Wikipedia? I recall when I was in Venezuela sometimes I found cyber-cafés that had a browser extension that would pop up a Spanish translation of any English word you moused over.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hieratic https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quotidian (though Wikipedia is happy to redirect you here if you try to look up "quotidian" in Wikipedia instead) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_script (though this is sort of defined in the article) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_script#Numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinhala_numerals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sri_Lanka ("For the American alternative rock band, see Sri Lanka (band).") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grapheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlocutor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligentsia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digraphia (a Wikipedia search result for "biscriptal") https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syllabary

Yeah, my girlfriend—a native Spanish speaker—was astounded when I told her most English speakers didn't know the word "quotidian", although its calque "everyday" is quotidian.