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Cherokee Numerals

(thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)
91 points horseradish | 1 comments | 20 Mar 21 02:59 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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mod ◴[20 Mar 21 09:34 UTC] No.26521856[source]▶
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

replies(7): >>26521887 #>>26522605 #>>26523389 #>>26523665 #>>26524386 #>>26525067 #>>26525284 #
1. todd8 ◴[20 Mar 21 15:04 UTC] No.26523665[source]▶
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...