Cherokee Numerals | slacker news

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

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.