Cherokee Numerals

> 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

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...)