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by yorwba 2192 days ago
Writing developed in America long before Europeans showed up and continued to be used until Europeans showed up, but the Europeans destroyed most books they could find and forced the natives to learn the colonizers' languages. That's the main cause why so many native languages are dying/extinct.

Further reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_writing_systems
2 comments
anonAndOn 2192 days ago
It looks like writing developed in present-day Mexico and never made it north of the desert border (Mojave/ Sonoran/ Chihuahua). So NONE of the estimated 296 languages spoken by natives in US and Canada had a written language that we have evidence of. [0]

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigenous_languages_of_the_Am...

link
perl4ever 2191 days ago
The article says near the top:

"An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script."

It also says:

"The Florentine Codex, compiled 1545-1590 by Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún includes a history of the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire from the Mexica viewpoint"

link