A lot of excellent observations.
But you did answer your question when you mentioned most older scripts were illiterate (in the academic sense).
Illiterate scripts inherently carry a lot of information whose priority is to convey the message independent of the listener (I'm guessing)
I think languages that can convey tone are awesome. It makes the language richer and less ambiguous
In 2025, just try and see.
I am pretty sure like algol like languages FP isn't a monolith it is a broad stroke combination of the following things
functions, types and values are often on the same plane (like Lean, Coq, etc) or types and (functions + values) have a clear separation but one can create multiple hierarchies in those 2 levels (OCaml, Haskell, etc)
they often use immutable data structures or explicitly state if it is mutable
every line is a program is an expression, when it is a statement it still returns some signal (usually unit)
lispy langs or other gradually typed languages are not statically type checked and ML like langs are statically type checked
Also all these features are ime just how I want to do programming. It is merely a subjective thing which I find comfortable to program in.
Hindi or any Indic languages (popular ones) have any case differentiation.
Mostly because emphasis on any word is not literal it is tonal.
So there are these things called - matra (12 matras in hindi)
They are symbols representing inflection/emphasis etc. and we can combine them with each character of the alphabet and convey tone.
Would be nice to include boycat vpn