Indigenous script in Western North America?

It's known that East Asian ships (with their crews alive, dead, or simply vanished) have washed up on the shores of the West Coast of North America for centuries and certainly longer, thanks to the currents in the North Pacific.

Now, let's say that one of these ships happen to survive the journey, and with the ship includes something with Chinese characters written on it. Now, I'm not sure why something like that might be on what is no doubt a smallscale vessel. Now, perhaps one of the fishermen or whoever also survived the journey. Somehow, the local Indians he encounters are able to get from him (once they nurse him back to health) that the paper effectively "talks", even if the man himself can't read it (he probably can't).

Here's where we run into the problem of need. What would these people get out of it that they would need it? The West Coast didn't have agriculture, though it did have populations which were at the limit for how much the lifestyle of the indigenous peoples could support (about 300,000 to a million). It also is a region of incredible linguistic diversity. The best place might be the Pacific Northwest, rather than California, which I believe had more organised civilisations, although still nowhere near the level of organisation seen elsewhere. The Salishan languages native there also have more consistent phonology (which seems to be insanely complex for English speakers, but that's beside the point).

So what happens next? My guess is (for the sake of this topic) this Asian man encounters a certain individual who ends up obsessed with the idea, and this person starts fooling around with it whenever they have the time to. Within a few years, they have a workable script, which is occasionally used here and there (grafitti?). Perhaps it spreads far, in mutated form, to people who have even more need of it, like the Mississippians. To do so, you'd have to cross the trade routes through the Great Plains, meaning anything that reaches there would probably be highly different. I know I mentioned it being the Pacific Northwest, but if it were in Central/Southern California (thus our castaway lands among maybe the Chumash or Tongva), it would be easier to get it to the Ancestral Puebloans in the Southwest, who might also find it useful.

My guess is the actual script would be vaguely Chinese looking, probably resembling most whatever characters were found on the ship. The most common form would be engravings on stone and bark, meaning it would be very square looking and angular. Yes, I'm going for a sort of Sequoyah approach here (and I don't mean the Sequoyah tree), though there's plenty of other interesting examples (Vai, inspired by Sequoyah, also Hmong). It seems these can be as simple or complex as needed to fit the language. The Hmong script in particular seems to have gone through a couple of revisions, which no doubt this one would.

Is this necessarily plausible? Is this a case of the right individuals meeting at the right time and thus changing the world forever?

Any thoughts, discussion? Just something I mostly came up with on the fly.
 
It's known that East Asian ships (with their crews alive, dead, or simply vanished) have washed up on the shores of the West Coast of North America for centuries and certainly longer, thanks to the currents in the North Pacific.

Now, let's say that one of these ships happen to survive the journey, and with the ship includes something with Chinese characters written on it. Now, I'm not sure why something like that might be on what is no doubt a smallscale vessel. Now, perhaps one of the fishermen or whoever also survived the journey. Somehow, the local Indians he encounters are able to get from him (once they nurse him back to health) that the paper effectively "talks", even if the man himself can't read it (he probably can't).

Here's where we run into the problem of need. What would these people get out of it that they would need it? The West Coast didn't have agriculture, though it did have populations which were at the limit for how much the lifestyle of the indigenous peoples could support (about 300,000 to a million). It also is a region of incredible linguistic diversity. The best place might be the Pacific Northwest, rather than California, which I believe had more organised civilisations, although still nowhere near the level of organisation seen elsewhere. The Salishan languages native there also have more consistent phonology (which seems to be insanely complex for English speakers, but that's beside the point).

So what happens next? My guess is (for the sake of this topic) this Asian man encounters a certain individual who ends up obsessed with the idea, and this person starts fooling around with it whenever they have the time to. Within a few years, they have a workable script, which is occasionally used here and there (grafitti?). Perhaps it spreads far, in mutated form, to people who have even more need of it, like the Mississippians. To do so, you'd have to cross the trade routes through the Great Plains, meaning anything that reaches there would probably be highly different. I know I mentioned it being the Pacific Northwest, but if it were in Central/Southern California (thus our castaway lands among maybe the Chumash or Tongva), it would be easier to get it to the Ancestral Puebloans in the Southwest, who might also find it useful.

My guess is the actual script would be vaguely Chinese looking, probably resembling most whatever characters were found on the ship. The most common form would be engravings on stone and bark, meaning it would be very square looking and angular. Yes, I'm going for a sort of Sequoyah approach here (and I don't mean the Sequoyah tree), though there's plenty of other interesting examples (Vai, inspired by Sequoyah, also Hmong). It seems these can be as simple or complex as needed to fit the language. The Hmong script in particular seems to have gone through a couple of revisions, which no doubt this one would.

Is this necessarily plausible? Is this a case of the right individuals meeting at the right time and thus changing the world forever?

Any thoughts, discussion? Just something I mostly came up with on the fly.

The Puebloans were clearly in contact with Mesoamerica, but they don't appear to have ever taken up writing (or numbering) from there. Then, writing in Mesoamerica was probably pretty thing on the ground esp. outside Classic Maya heartland.
 

PhilippeO

Banned
No.

to succeed the writing has to fulfill some local need, and there doesn't seem such local need exist.

And Chinese script is not alphabetic, and variety of language in West Coast, creation of easy to learn alphabetic script is very unlikely.
either the script difficult to learn, but unconected to sound like Chinese, or the script only apply to single language.
 
No.

to succeed the writing has to fulfill some local need, and there doesn't seem such local need exist.

And Chinese script is not alphabetic, and variety of language in West Coast, creation of easy to learn alphabetic script is very unlikely.
either the script difficult to learn, but unconected to sound like Chinese, or the script only apply to single language.

Cherokee, Vai, and Hmong are not alphabetic scripts either. Vai is based on Cherokee, and Hmong is apparently based on Lao. "Easy to learn", I don't know, but the Cherokee certainly benefitted from the literacy, and when the Canadian syllabic script was introduced (by European inventors, granted), many people there became literate quickly and traditions were even invented about it being an indigenous invention.

Now what you would write down--I don't know, some manner of organising people and slaves in the region?
 

PhilippeO

Banned
alphabetic is my mistake, it should be phonetic (sounds based) which include syllabary and alphabetic.

easy to learn writing system must be phonetic, to reduce number of character/glyphs to several dozen.

while ideographic (based on meaning) writing like chinese have thousands of character.

if writing system is phonetics, it wouldnt work unless lingua franca already exist, creating writing for one language while there are hundred of languages exist in NA west coast.

if writing system, follow example of chinese, is non phonetic than difficulty of learning would also prevent adoption.

existence of hundred of languages in California show that there is No local need, otherwise some imperial language or trade language would exist and replace them. writing syste! in such places simply have no future.
 
alphabetic is my mistake, it should be phonetic (sounds based) which include syllabary and alphabetic.

easy to learn writing system must be phonetic, to reduce number of character/glyphs to several dozen.

while ideographic (based on meaning) writing like chinese have thousands of character.

if writing system is phonetics, it wouldnt work unless lingua franca already exist, creating writing for one language while there are hundred of languages exist in NA west coast.

if writing system, follow example of chinese, is non phonetic than difficulty of learning would also prevent adoption.

existence of hundred of languages in California show that there is No local need, otherwise some imperial language or trade language would exist and replace them. writing syste! in such places simply have no future.

I pointed out that Salishan languages already have consistent phonology, so you wouldn't need much variation of the script from its initial point. In Oregon, there was apparently a predecessor to Chinook Jargon which was used as a trade language. I'd imagine that trade languages existed in some form in California as well.

No, it would not be an ideographic script, it would merely resemble Chinese (think of the kana in Japanese). It would end up being a syllabary, not ideographic, and thus as easy to learn as Cherokee, Aboriginal syllabics, etc.
 
The Cherokee had a state by the time the script was adopted. I don't know much about Vai, but considering its West African location it was almost definitely a state. There were no states on the Pacific coastline. I doubt the PNW polities even qualify as complex chiefdoms.

Hmong scripts used today are apparently all very modern.
 
The Cherokee had a state by the time the script was adopted. I don't know much about Vai, but considering its West African location it was almost definitely a state. There were no states on the Pacific coastline. I doubt the PNW polities even qualify as complex chiefdoms.

Hmong scripts used today are apparently all very modern.

The Vai were in the jungles (though were an agricultural people). I don't know if they had a state or not or if they were more along the lines of the Igbo in not really having any form of organisation outside of villages and towns. I've read that the PNW peoples were basically at the upper limit of complexity for what was basically a hunter-gatherer civilisation, enabled in large part because of how easy it was to get food.
 
The Puebloans were clearly in contact with Mesoamerica, but they don't appear to have ever taken up writing (or numbering) from there. Then, writing in Mesoamerica was probably pretty thing on the ground esp. outside Classic Maya heartland.

The only way I can see writing developing in the region is from Mesoamerica. If not via the Pueblo, then maybe some other tribe in the southern border area? All the maps google is throwing at me are poor quality, so (sp?) for all: Chcicaua, Opata, Yaqui, Tomo. Maybe the Apaches?

And about the scripts, I can see a syllabic script developing. An alphabetic is one step further while an abjad wouldn't suit the local languages.
Alternately (and the only way I can see a non-phonetic system developing) is that the guy who sees the paper with Chinese characters is from further north and knows Plains Indian Sign. The Plains Indian Sign being a way for people from different tribes to communicate, and signing being not phonetic but based on individual concepts... well, you can see where I'm going with it. A lingua franca that is used in the Plains, scratched on trees, drawn in dust, whatever, which then spreads out of the Plains area.
 
The only way I can see writing developing in the region is from Mesoamerica. If not via the Pueblo, then maybe some other tribe in the southern border area? All the maps google is throwing at me are poor quality, so (sp?) for all: Chcicaua, Opata, Yaqui, Tomo. Maybe the Apaches?

And about the scripts, I can see a syllabic script developing. An alphabetic is one step further while an abjad wouldn't suit the local languages.
Alternately (and the only way I can see a non-phonetic system developing) is that the guy who sees the paper with Chinese characters is from further north and knows Plains Indian Sign. The Plains Indian Sign being a way for people from different tribes to communicate, and signing being not phonetic but based on individual concepts... well, you can see where I'm going with it. A lingua franca that is used in the Plains, scratched on trees, drawn in dust, whatever, which then spreads out of the Plains area.
Navajo would be more likely, they were decent farmers and herders, but the question is why would they do it if there was no need before?
 
The diversity of languages along the west coast (which is indeed extremely high) would not necessarily be a barrier to the extension of writing - precisely because of the kaleidoscope of languages, most tribes in the region were extensively multilingual. Add to that the likely use of some languages as wider trade languages, and the presence of pidgins (like the later Chinook Jargon), and there's potentially a large audience for a writing system.

The main issue, as other have pointed out, is need. These are cultures that have never had a concept of writing, employing at most petroglyph designs. They have a very strong oral tradition, like most cultures of the Americas, and so one of the fundamental uses of writing - making records of past events - is already taken up by speech. Where writing did spontaneously develop in history, it was in the context of an already-existing agrarian state society, and was initially used mostly for commerce and accounting. This type of society did not yet exist along the west coast, although several societies were getting close, most notably the Salishan-speaking tribes mentioned upthread. One potential jumping-off point for writing in OP's scenario is our Chinese castaway teaching local people the concept of abstract numeral writing. All of the languages of the region had complex number systems, and most tribes were involved in commerce and trade, especially centered around dentalium shell beads as a form of currency. Creating a system of written numbers could fulfill a more immediate need for these cultures than creating written language would.
 
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It's known that East Asian ships (with their crews alive, dead, or simply vanished) have washed up on the shores of the West Coast of North America for centuries and certainly longer, thanks to the currents in the North Pacific.

Is it? Didn't know that, can I have links to sources on that, please?
 
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