Something Emma wrote You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view. took me back to one of my minor courses at university, comparative linguistics. It was mostly an introduction to the discipline and its history rather than actual comparative linguistics. Anyway, one of the things I found most fascinating was the reason why we obtained grammars and descriptions of many unique languages of native tribes.
That reason is the belief that every human must learn about Jesus.
Missionaries had no way to communicate with these people. Their language was unknown to the outside world, and vice versa. So they would go there, integrate into the tribe, and learn their language by pointing and asking for bits of vocabulary, building from there. Even though I think teaching native tribes about the crucifixion of a Jew and his resurrection 2000 years ago is an absurd and unnecessary ambition, these missionaries and their grammars provided a treasure of information for comparative linguistics.
In the Middle Ages there were also missionaries, and they also had to overcome linguistic hurdles. For example, Stephen of Perm set out to convert the Komi people in Russia, speakers of an Uralic language. We know that in 1372, he introduced You are not allowed to view links.
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Login to view.. This script was based on Cyrillic and Greek, but also included Komi "runes", the inclusion of which "aided the script to greater acceptance among the medieval Permic speakers of the time."
The fact that missionaries could be driven to the creation of scripts is new to me, but in a way it makes sense. You want to find acceptance with the local populace, so you might look for something in the middle ground between what you know and what they know. A script that works for you and finds connection to the mainstream, but in which they also recognize something of their own.
I am not opposed to Emma's idea of a culture's emerging literacy, but what I find even more appealing is the idea of someone trying to write a language foreign to him, which he only knows in spoken form. This is a good way to lose some entropy, because he may not recognize all minimal pairs. Native speakers on the other hand, are by definition masters of their language.
So why no Bible? Well, the region to be converted would be non-Christian. If it was hostile to foreign religions or disapproved of the depiction of realistic human figures, it might be wise to disguise one's writings as a book of natural science or what have you.