İ have relotinship georgia so easy ifrom Azerbajan and i can speak, ewrhite gerga lezgi udin Azerbajan all turkish japenese arabic german and end rusan i have 2 citzen
@@storylearning I am on the trial for Teacher AI. I'd never used AI before and it's weird. Still useful, but weird. Flunks the Turing test for sure lol. It told me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave", and my name isn't even Dave! Daisy, Daisy.... Jokes aside, at first it kept reading Japanese kanji in Mandarin with the tones and everything. I was about to cancel after like 5 minutes. Then I switched teacher personas, and the error rate dropped. Now I use it a lot more. I built a little fantasy world with a dragon that shot fire from its cloaca and mangaka elf that was bad at drawing but good at... something that was not allowed. It stops you if it considers something to be "adult content". After it told me the Japanese pronunciation of "cloaca", it confused that very same word with "kuro aka" and started going on about what a nice color scheme black and red would be for a dragon 🙄
@@storylearning Waiting for Thai. Interestingly, the Japanese AI "teachers" seem to recognize Thai when I speak it but can't respond. "Kenji Sato" is the name they gave my "teacher" AI persona. EDIT I did cancel before the trial expired. Japanese kanji characters, with their multiple context-dependent pronunciations, proved too much for ChatGPT. It could not produce the correct reading consistently enough to trust it. You'd probably be OK with alphabetic writing systems.
I tried to learn some Georgian, it's incredibly complicated, but the alphabet is easy. 33 letters, no lower or upper case, no ligatures, you spell as you pronounce and vice versa.
It is very very easy haha, many Dagestani ethnicities took into consideration to use Georgian and Armenian based alphabets to replace the Arabic-Persian based scripts since our languages were even too complicated for it. However most languages just ended up using Cyrillic while less than a handful uses both Cyrillic and Tselbik(წէլბიქⲊა) which has more letters than the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. Most Dagestani Cyrillic varieties also have more letters than other Cyrillics. Typically between 40-50 letters. The pronunciations are definitely what makes it hard since many of the languages have 30+ vowels and a more than a few sounds that don’t really exist anywhere else
@BoxerBoy-gs8eq Well, languages simplify over time. Tibetan has drastically changed pronunciation wise. When Tibetan was first scripted, it featured consonant clusters which were marked in the writing, but my guess is that people found them very difficult to pronounce, so they changed. The language has much less consonants than before. But Tibetan people struggle with reading their own language just as much as we do. NativLang made a video about Thai and Tibetan writing.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eq มันก็ไม่ได้เป็นไรหรอก (I mean it is ok it isn't hard much) It was actually harder before then some like ฆ ฌ ญ ฎ ฏ ฐ ฑ ฒ ณ ธ ศ and ษ was harder pronunciation. We tried.
@@teesteakDuring my learn at Thai i confuse why one voice but have many character. But if you learn Rishi Panini/Brahmi system actually Thai is the same with Hindi, Khmer, Javanese, etc and Thai having Great Languange shift.
I'm Bengali and Ive noticed that how the Tibetan script works is very similar to how the Bengali script or other North Indian scripts work, except, Tibetan has a lot of silent letters. Its like the French of South Asia lol
Tibetan is a horror among scripts, you could think of it like, writing Encyclopedia but you pronounce it Bus... It doesn't make sense. Literally the least sensible script in the world.
For Mandarin： 月 is moon and 半 is half, but in the case of 胖 the 月 part is represents “body/body part.” 月 is used to represent “body/body parts” in many other words too. 朋友 is “friend” and the first character is two 月s put together to represent “2 close bodies.”
When I learned Tibetan, it didn't seem as hard as you make it sound, although everything you said about it is true! But there are rules. It's not arbitrary at all. And if you can deal with English and its silent letters and spellings rooted in the past, you can deal with Tibetan.
I bet you all cant differentiate between:- 1) Odia- ଖ,ଗ,ଘ/ଡ,ଢ / ଳ,ଲ /ଚ,ଚ୍ଚ,ଚ୍ଛ /ଯ,ୟ /ଙ୍କ,ଙ୍ଖ,ଙ୍ଗ,ଙ୍ଘ 2) Telugu- ప,ఫ,వ/ ఝ,య /ఘ,మ 3) Tamil- ஒ,ஓ/ எ,ஏ/௵இ 😂 We Indians deal with them every day tho, i think it all boils down to practice.
I learnt to read Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada with little to no effort, and that proves a lot. Once you learn to read the script of one Indian language, the similarities of other Indian languages start popping up everywhere, thus becoming easy to learn. However, it all depends on your age, cultural knowledge, mother's tongue, and how many languages you're proficient in. But even after referring to my previous statement, no matter what criteria you fall into Mandarin Chinese is hard asf
Maybe there is a chance to see part 2 of writing systems? There are lots of writings that weren't mentioned like Armenian, Assyrian, Thamil, Inuktitut syllabics and others
Thai but also Lao. Many letters in the Lao alphabet look similar enough to their Thai counterparts that if you know how to read Thai, you can figure out Lao, but anytime I try to explain the Lao alphabet to English speakers, they look at me like I have two heads 😅
There are a few letters that are different but most of them you can guess. The Lao government also simplified the spelling making it more phonetic. I think dumping all those silent letters at the ends of words for the sake of simplicity comes at a cost, though. They differentiate homophones and have an aesthetic value, as well.
yes right, it can be guessed. and the Lao simplification means, the connection to the historical pronounciations is lost. so, e.g., words that use s Sala or s Ruesi bec. their original sh- sound originates mostly from Sanskrit or Pali, in Lao they only use your equivalent of s Suea. a step sad for historically interested folks, but sure a great simplification for the broad population.
@@frankmaeder4358Exactly. If you know the mapping, you can look at the Thai script and know what the spelling and pronunciation in Sanskrit or Pali would be. Modern Lao has lost that; they sacrificed information for learnability.
My first language is Yiddish, so I grew up with a modified phonetic(ish) Hebrew alphabet (though I had to learn the modified SOVIET version lol), then I had to learn Russian, but mum spoke German & Kaschubian, so by the time I was 10 I had to know three wildly different writing systems lol Then we lived in Ethiopia... you ARE right, Olly - writing a language REALLY helps you learn it. My mum tossed me into a local school, so I HAD to learn Amharic quickly just to keep my lunch money lol It's actually a lot easier to read/write than it would seem. Awesome video! Thank you!
As someone who reads Tibetan and sees the written language on a daily basis, I was so confused for a moment when I saw your thumbnail. Like- uh, yes it is a word... did someone say it's not??? lol
I think the crazy part about Tibetan is the fact that they actually used to speak it like that. Like, some of those initial consonant clusters are utterly deranged. Old Chinese is similar in this regard. Wonder why every language in that family dropped them so consistently
In Thai you only write "vowel e" when you are writing the name of the vowel or spelling something out loud, not when you actually use it in a word! Another thing, there is no punctuation so your example sentence should not have a period. Also you showed Thai letters when talking about Khmer at 16:30
I, as a Thai person, I confirm that Thai writing system is very hard even many Thai people still have problems lol, as your example , our aspirated k has ขค same constant but different tone and also even letters have group so you have to conjugate to get tone precisely ,and there’re some exceptions, yet in exception got an exception 😂😂 Btw. I’m pretty sure this 16:23 is Thai vowels,not Khmer
I had the feeling too that there was a wrong script shown, Thai and khmer being somewhat similar. I tried to get into the Thai writing, but didn't find enough time ... yet. (after getting into Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and partly Devanagari.)
There was some writing system out of Africa that always struck me as being super strange. I don’t know if it’s an alphabet, abjad, abugida or whatever - but it’s just a line that makes seemingly random 90 degree turns at random spots. Different patterns of turns and such indicate different sounds. It was super weird looking but apparently it was big enough to have books printed in it. I’m sifting through the Wikipedia article I found it in trying to find the name of it again. Edit: Thank you to my girlfriend, she found it. It’s called Madombe - and it looks insane.
Mandombe is a writing system created in 1978 by David Wabeladio Payi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was inspired by a dream and is used to write several national languages of the Congo, including Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba, and Swahili. The script is taught in schools run by the Kimbanguist Church and is promoted by the Centre de l'Écriture Négro-Africaine.
Used to live/work in China and speak Chinese, and it is true that it doesn't really have "words." The characters are just their own concept altogether, but one way you can think about it that is sort of helpful is by imagining a language of prefixes and suffixes that you put together to form new meanings. Each character has meaning in its own right, just like "pre-" or "aqua-" have meaning in their own right in English, but they are commonly put together with other things to make a larger meaning. But characters themselves are not "words." Sometimes they can be used individually, and function the same way as a word would in English, like 吃 for "eat." But sometimes not, like 了，which is used to make things past-tense. So 吃了 would be "ate," so “了” is not really functioning as a word here, it's functioning more like the English "-ed".
Mongolian isn't exactly unique with top to bottom language in Asia. Chinese was traditionally written Top to Bottom as well, the only difference is that Mongolian is Left to Right while Traditional Chinese was Right to Left, which is opposite how they write today. Hanunoo in Phillipines is interesting as it's traditionally written bottom to top, just like Old Irish script Ogham.
15:34 Mongolian is officially used with the traditional script in Inner Mongolia region of China which has more Mongolian speaker than the country of Mongolia
18:28 胖 is not moon (月) but meat ⺼(from 肉) While 明 is indeed an ideogrammic compound (日+月 or sun+moon), 胖 like many other characters is a phono-semantic compound, with 肉 being the semantic part and 半 being phonetic
Great video (and I've subscribed!) but you've fallen for the trap of adding a Tuvan throat singer to the Mongolian section of the video. Tuvan itself is super interesting - Turkic language buried in the Altai mountains - but it isn't Mongolian and their throat singing tradition is different in a number of ways to the styles found over the border, though coming from a semi-nomadic pastoral culture, borders were a mere inconvenience back in the day...
But ᶜArabic itself is not difficult at all, nor does the script except its variety of the spoken ᶜArabic make it difficult. Otherwise, its structural triliteral root-pattern is excellently logical!
Polish person here: I think the reason why Polish people claim that Polish super difficult comes from the fact that we usually only learn Germanic or Romance languages as foreign languages and their structure is definitely easier than Slavic. Also, we don’t consider other Slavic languages difficult because the difficult features are very similar to Polish. So in essence, Polish is roughly as difficult as any other Slavic language. It might have a bit trickier phonology that the others but it’s not a massive difference. As far as writing is concerned, Polish is straightforward and consistent for the most part. The only real difficulty is that some sounds can be represented in two ways and you need to remember which one is the correct one for a specific word.
@marikothecheetah9342 Al-Lisaanu Al-ᶜArabiyyu Al-Afṣaḥu = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Tongue / Language or Al-Luḡatu Al-ᶜArabiyyatu Al-Fuṣḥaa = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Speech or the Classical ᶜArabic or the Modern Standard ᶜArabic
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 So okay I learn the super easy grammar, I can read Arabic text, I go to one of Arabic countries and go on a merry way communication with locals anywhere in Arabic world?
As someone who picked up Japanese as my 3rd language. Their writing system is indeed terrifying. But once you are used to it. The comvination of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji does make sense. I will try Simplified Chinese as my 4th language.
At 5:00 you kinda mixed two concepts together. The Ethiopian *language* has arabic roots, but the script (from the Ga'ez language) pre-dates Arab arrival in Ethiopa by several centuries. It comes from Christians living there in the first centuries AD.
The script goes back to its origins in the Musnad Script = Ancient South ᶜArabian Script, and its religion well before Christianity! Not only the script but also the type of Semitic languages they speak goes back to Ancient South ᶜArabian languages!
Balinese also has the same historical spelling issues. They call it as "pasang pageh" ᬧᬲᬂ ᬧᬕᭂᬄ literally means "a strict way of writing". But fortunately, Balinese is not a tonal language, so it is a lot easier than Thai etc. Those historical spellings are for writing Sanskrit or Old Javanese words. Examples, if I wanna write "asta", i need to know which one it is: (h)asta ᬳᬲ᭄ᬢ "hand", astha ᬅᬲ᭄ᬣ "bone", or aṣṭa ᬅᬱ᭄ᬝ "eight". Since, all of these words are just spelt "asta" in modern Balinese Latin transliteration.
@@埊 Balinese and Javanese are from the same source script, Kawi. And Kawi is the descendant of ancient script, Brahmic. So, it shares the same shape. It also shares similar rules of writing. If you compare several Brahmic script, you'll notice a lot of similar shapes. Some shapes are stylized further, becoming harder to observe the similarity directly. brahmic: 𑀲 devanagari: स khmer: ស thai: ส kawi: 𑼱 jawa: ꦱ bali: ᬲ batak: ᯘ myanmar: သ
I'm a native Khmer, the letters you showed earlier were actually Thai. Being a writing system with the most letters in the world is already crazy, the Khmer language is also rich in vowel sounds. Diacritics and other characters make Khmer even has tons of characters overall. Diacritics are very important in Khmer spelling. Some of them have the role in tone (although Khmer isn't a tonal language), some to change the consonant sounds from "O" to "A" or from "A" to "O", some to k*ll the consonant ( the consonant that contain them are dead and won't be pronounced, only for writing), and so many others. Thai and Laos developed from old Khmer, so they look a lot like Khmer although consonants are not rich in sounds (many of them sound the same) while Khmer had developed into 2 consonant groups. You will find loads of Khmero- Sanskrit and Khmero- Pali words in Thai and Lao that had been Khmerised before integrated into these languages.
Here in tunisia, it's not uncommon for kids, if they don't know a word, to not have to pronounce the vowels. Like, say a kid doesn't know ketab as book, they might just pronounce the consonant cluster ktb and then an adult will tell them the vowels. Really helps, since most kids struggle with the abjad, especially for obscurer words. Hell, even I in my 20s sometimes have to look up the vowels for words, and if I have to say the word without knowing the vowels, I still do the whole consonant clustering thing.
@@plazmagaming2182 The Pallava script is primarily for Sanskrit. It has the letters kha ga gha chha jha tha da dha pha ba bha etc which are absent in Tamil
Not for Sanskrit, but you should say modified for Sanskrit. The first indic script "Brahmi" was derived by inspiration from aramaic by Ashoka, to write prakrit ( the commoner's language), Sanskrit (liturgical language) was never written for some more centuries..
@@alfonsmelenhorst9672Primarily for script yes, but it was invented and used by the tamils, and those sounds are indeed still present throught the grantha script
18:26 according to a Japanese person I know the "moon" sign 月 in Chinese is also known as the meat radical; meat l肉 when abbreviated does look like the moon in Chinese 月, so it's more likely half and meat than half and moon!
Prof. Norbu allways teased us, when we where totally uncapable to read one of these in all direction stacked Symbols, if we did not learn he would teach us Tibetan and Mongol at the same time. He was brought to Europe in the early sixties by the great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci
I learned Georgian 2020-2022 over the course of 2.5 years. The alphabet was actually the easier part of it, the grammar is by far the hardest of any language I know, also differentiating between animate and inanimate, fun fact “brown” is also “coffee colour) ყავისფერი I learned Farsi from 2023 up until this summer, the lack of vowels still gets me. But very beautiful script and the sounds are lovely, luckily the grammar is easier than other languages I tried.
Interesting! In Romanian there is also a "coffee colour" - "cafeniu". This is the name for the nuance of brown that looks like coffee. And "castaniu" is "the colour of the horsenut". Does Georgian has a main brown and also the coffee colour, or the two nuances are just one word? (I incline to think the latter).
I'm surprised you didn't mention Armenian - an entire alphabet which tries really hard to deceive you with letters like Տ է ս ո ւ ց, each of which represent a sound you least expect from them. Join me learning it
What do you think would be easiest alphabets to learn? And if we then have to take out the ones that aren't easy due to grammar, which alphabeths do you think would be left over? I had 1 lesson Armenian, but don't think we did much in regards to the alphabet. Fascinating language though.
There's a lot of people that complain about kanji and how difficult it is, but I find the complexity and history of the writing system to be incredibly interesting and it brings a lot of flavor to the language. If we just write Japanese with standard Roman letters it would remove so history and beauty from the language. Simpler and easier is not always better.
Tibetan is so much like a synthesizer! Modulating a base sound, having silent modifiers that affect all other syllables, having the letters pass through "stages" of change to arrive at the final pronunciation. I wish you read the example text though, might've helped us correlate sound and script. Except for Georgian...
In Arabic sometimes there are a few diacritics they add to clarify what word you are reading and also the last letter of a word could change diacritics depending on its position in a sentence.
Great video! The script you have scrolling during the Khmer segment is Thai. They are related (not wading into the drama about if either derived from the other - both from Mon and ultimately from Brahmi).
I understand the title was sort of meant to be clickbait, but you might have pointed out that none of the scripts in this video, besides Georgian, are actually alphabets.
I am from India, and from first grade, we were taught about three types of writing systems: the alphabet, abjad, and abugida. - **English** uses Latin alphabets. - **Urdu** employs Arabic alphabets but is written in a Persian script called Nastaliq, along with Naskh script for Arabic. - **Hindi** and **Marathi** use the Devanagari script, which is completely phonetic. However, writing in Devanagari takes more time compared to Latin and Arabic scripts. i have also learnt,Hebrew,syriac,Greek and Cyrrilic script.
Hi Olly, I’m currently learning Albanian and would love to have a set of beginner short stories like you have in other languages, ever considered writing one for this unique and beautiful language? I believe there’s a gap in the market 😎
I love learning Thai is is definitely my favourite language to study. Thai people really appreciate and are very encouraging when a farang learns their language. Thais are the sweetest people ❤️
Eventho Thai is difficult, it has rules, complicated as they are. Written English has no rules, only patterns, traditions and conventions which requires a great amount of memory to know when they apply. Excellent English spellers rely on memory alone.
The reason why you cannot understand the logic of "胖", is becasue it is a phono-semantic compound. Which is one of the major category of Chinese characters. This character is composed with two parts: a sematic component "月", which is a radical that often relates to the meaning of bodies; and a phonetic component "半", which represents the pronounciation of this character. It was inferred that when this character was created, the way people say "Fat" is similar to how they say "Half", but these two character are now pronounced differetly in mandarin because language is always developing.
The english/european alphabet is actually not that easy if you consider that there is lower case, upper case, cursive lower case, cursive upper case and some letter variations between fonts and handwriting like in a. You have to learn all those to be sufficient in writing.
YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!! YOU SPOKE ABOUT CHEROKEE!!!!! I have been studying this endangered language, and I think the syllabary writing system is actually really simple. The writing system makes so much sense. Each symbol makes a sound that is the same each time (with some variation for colloquial pronunciation). Not to mention it is beautiful to look at. I love this language and the whole culture.
I want to learn the Cherokee alphabet (my grandmother is on the Dawes rolls), but I only ever see the alphabet displayed in font style. I have looked and looked for a chart of the Cherokee alphabet written by hand, but have never seen one.
@@TheGaragelifterI’m so jealous of you😭😭 I’m an American-born Thai, and I’ve been really fortunate with being able to speak Thai with near native fluency. I just can’t read or write. Every time I see videos like this, mentioning how hard the Thai alphabet is, I get super discouraged lol
The Philippines has a unique writting called Baybayin that was lost because of all the colonialization that happened. I really love the writing because it looks like art.
Yes. Many local languages spoken in Thailand don't actually have a writing system so they borrow the standard Thai script. For eg my wife is Kuy (กูย), there was a writing system developed in the 21st century for Kuy people but it is not used or understood my almost all of them.
Thai, Arabic and Japanese speaker here. Yes, Thai is the most difficult "Alphabet" because the reading rules make absolutely no sense. R becomes N at the end of a word, two R's become "aan", Y also becomes N at the end of the word, there are 5 's' letters in the language, all with different tones, 3 different 'k' letters, S can also become T at the end of a word, there are no spaces, there are 16 different vowels with different tones, there are hidden vowels, there are silent letters, there are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations. It really is the alphabet that pulls out all the stops. And it doesnt help that Thai script was created from combining Khmer, Lao, Chinese, Sanskrit, and local languages all together into one alphabet.
As a native Hindi speaker I think when I started to learn Bengali it made so hard especially its half letters even if both languages share so much similarities on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and language family ❤
Languages with impossibles SCRIPTS. Not all scripts are alphabets. Also the video shows only modern languages. Honorable mentions hieroglyphic egyptian, Aztecscript, cuneiform Sumerian and pre-alphabetic Greek. (Linear' B Greek)
I think the point is to capture the interest of people who don't know anything about writing systems. Those people need context, and might only know the word 'alphabet', so Olly is right to do it this way. And what a boring and ambiguous word 'scripts' is - who'd want to watch a video about 'scripts'?? No-one except us language freaks. In the video Olly tells everyone what's an alphabet and what's not an alphabet, and gives all the correct names.
another nice thing with the thai system is the position of the vowels. they are either before, after, under or above the corresponding consonant, or unwritten at all (short a and short o)
Btw. If you learn Tibetan its a bit like elvish. Because its at least threa languages. Vulgar for everyday life. honorific and very honorific. And then there are many dialects. The word that a central Tibetan would pronounce Vajra a eastern Tibetan pronounces Benza and so on.
Japanese kanji will drive you nuts. For example the English verb “to excel” is pronounced “masaru”. There are two ways to write this: 「勝る」 and 「優る」. The first implies excellence at sports, academics, career, etc., and the second implies aesthetic excellence. Both are pronounced the same way, and the distinction is not given in any learner’s dictionaries. And many Japanese just ignore the difference and only use the first writing, as this is just one of many words with identical pronunciation and almost identical meanings, but can be written differently to shade the nuance. And then there are kanji that are written identically but pronounced differently depending on the meaning. For example, 「外」can be pronounced “soto” if you mean to say “outside” or “hoka” if you mean to say “another”. Once in a while you will come across words that take forever to decipher. 「牣」 came up in a reading once, but it was not in any dictionary I had on hand . I finally found it to be “Jin” meaning “strong but flexible”. A great word, but very rare in this form.
When I studied in Naples Italy I met the Tibetan and Mongolian language and history teacher Choegyal Namkhai Norbu at the instituto orientale. I tried to learn the alphabet, but like most of his students I never pronounced it right. Not even the Tibetol8gy majors. So in the end he was pissed off by the bastarization of his beloved language by his obtuse Utalian students and he created a phonetic guide for the chants and Mantras to sound right. But even with this help many butchered it, especially the tonal part with ka kha ga etc. The first sound is an A
the tibetan language in cities are starting to develope more tones very drastically compared to villages and nomadic dialects....especially within tibetan communities outside tibet....
I am learning Khmer now. It is a bit difficult. I think it is more difficult than Chinese. Reading and writing is difficult but speaking is easier. It uses the same word order as English which is great but there are a number of sounds not found in the English language. It's a very fun language to learn for sure!
Cherokee is wild. I am learning Navajo right now. At least it has an easy writing system. It's still a hard language though. They didn't have a writing system for a long time.
For Khmer, 16:23 to 16:34 You misunderstond and put thai script instead. Plus, Khmer script has two versions: the traditional version which is called "Aksar Moul" meaning round script, and the simplified version which is called "Aksar Chrieng" that literally means italic script but the script is not really italicized. The version you showed in this video is Aksar Chrieng. Both of them are diffrent from each other only in its shape, while rules and pronunciation are the same. You may see both version appear on a formal letters or documents. Aksar Moul, the traditional version, is usually used on the top as a heading or use in the text to emphasize or depict something important. Besides, there are 15 more vowels that can stand on its own without a consonant before them. They are អ អា ឥ ឦ ឧ ឩ ឪ ឫ ឬ ឭ ឮ ឯ ឰ ឱ ឳ ។ Additionally, for vowels that need consonant sound as a starting sound of the syllable, Khmer has not only 23 vowels sounds, but a few additional vowels sound. What Is MORE, most of the 23 vowel, can change their sound depending on the consonant it is spelt with, for example, when you use the vowel "ា" [aa sound] with this consonant "ខ"[kh sound], it becomes "ខា" [Khaa] but when you use "ា" with"ឃ"[Kh sound also], the "ា"change the sound to [ea soundsl lik the the English word EAR. What we get is "ឃា" pronounced as [Khea like Kh sound+the word EAR]. Please note that "ឃា" is not yet a real word. You have to add a consonant or more to make the word you want like "ឃាត" a noun meaning killing, or destroying. Vowels that change their sound are ា ិ ី ឹ ឺ ុ ូ េី េ ែ ៃ ោ ៅ ំ ុំ ាំ ះ ុះ េះ ោះ។ the wovels ួ ឿ ៀ dont change their sound nomatter what consonant is.
learning the ge'ez alphabet was so muchhhh fun all the patterns carry through all the letters so ig youre technically learning 200+ letters but youre rlly only learning like 33 if i remember correctly how many base letters there are
I was surprised you included Georgian. It's a complex language, but the writing system is straightforward. It has a lot of letters but is has a lot of sounds. The sounds are difficult, but the alphabet is phonetic and not that mysterious.
A lot of Southeast Asian languages uses "alphabets" that are quite strange, like Thai and Cambodian mentioned in the video, but also Javanese, and the old Philippines script.
A really interesting topic, indeed ㅡ but sorry, I had to leave after some minutes, because I wasn't able to bear the jumps of the images from far to near and back any longer - here really the saying "Less is more" suits quite well...
And I thought music notation was inefficient when I was younger. Now it looks like the most elegant thing in the world after seeing some of these other languages.
I don't think it's hard like Chinese Han script. Tibetan belongs to Brahmi system included many scripts in India and Southeast Asia. I learnt Tibetan nagari, Thai, rachana, lao, khmer( included ancient khmers ).
But the 26 letters in our Latin alphabet (and in some languages more, like the ene in Spanish, or the Grosse S in German) must be combined in thousands of ways, which we have to memorize. It's all about your perspective in what alphabet and/or writing is native to you.
I am surprised to see Thai being listed as the most difficult writing system. I learnt the script in three weeks when I was 32, a lot quicker than I learnt the Devanagari script at the age of 16. Of course my knowledge of Sanskrit helped a bit to understand the archaic symbols that represent old Sanskrit letters. I found Arabic much more challenging. It is frustrating not to be able to read a word fully without knowing the language. The pronunciation of most Thai words can be inferred from the spelling including the tone whereas most Chinese characters at first sight don't give any clue as to how they are pronounced. I think it's just a matter of opinion.
The burmese alphabet is definitely harder than Thai, because like Tibetan, it used a very old spelling and the spelling of words does not correspond to its pronunciation, for exemple ပြီးပြည့်စုံမှု is pronounced pipyezomu (perfection) but spelled priiprahñjumhuu.
Hebrew is like Arabic, but letters don't combine so it is a little easier. Korean is an alphabet, with the twist that it is written in syllable blocks. One of the easiest and most logical scripts.
I used to have a New Testament translated into Cherokee. Also the Tibetan Lange looks gorgeous. But believe me…Hebrew & Aramaic are much easier for me to read & understand!
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Yes,
ॐ did exist before the universe......😌
İ have relotinship georgia so easy ifrom Azerbajan and i can speak, ewrhite gerga lezgi udin Azerbajan all turkish japenese arabic german and end rusan i have 2 citzen
please for Burmese-Mon Alphabet and Indian Alphabets
@@storylearning I am on the trial for Teacher AI. I'd never used AI before and it's weird. Still useful, but weird. Flunks the Turing test for sure lol. It told me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave", and my name isn't even Dave! Daisy, Daisy.... Jokes aside, at first it kept reading Japanese kanji in Mandarin with the tones and everything. I was about to cancel after like 5 minutes. Then I switched teacher personas, and the error rate dropped. Now I use it a lot more. I built a little fantasy world with a dragon that shot fire from its cloaca and mangaka elf that was bad at drawing but good at... something that was not allowed. It stops you if it considers something to be "adult content". After it told me the Japanese pronunciation of "cloaca", it confused that very same word with "kuro aka" and started going on about what a nice color scheme black and red would be for a dragon 🙄
@@storylearning Waiting for Thai. Interestingly, the Japanese AI "teachers" seem to recognize Thai when I speak it but can't respond. "Kenji Sato" is the name they gave my "teacher" AI persona. EDIT I did cancel before the trial expired. Japanese kanji characters, with their multiple context-dependent pronunciations, proved too much for ChatGPT. It could not produce the correct reading consistently enough to trust it. You'd probably be OK with alphabetic writing systems.
I tried to learn some Georgian, it's incredibly complicated, but the alphabet is easy. 33 letters, no lower or upper case, no ligatures, you spell as you pronounce and vice versa.
The pronunciation is the difficult part
It is very very easy haha, many Dagestani ethnicities took into consideration to use Georgian and Armenian based alphabets to replace the Arabic-Persian based scripts since our languages were even too complicated for it. However most languages just ended up using Cyrillic while less than a handful uses both Cyrillic and Tselbik(წէլბიქⲊა) which has more letters than the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. Most Dagestani Cyrillic varieties also have more letters than other Cyrillics. Typically between 40-50 letters. The pronunciations are definitely what makes it hard since many of the languages have 30+ vowels and a more than a few sounds that don’t really exist anywhere else
@@kotovalexarianPronunciation is pretty easy for me. Grammar? Vai me!
Seriously, I will add uppercase and lowercase to Georgian.
@@Naaastya.ŷraev13even Sanskrit has 54 letters in the Devanagari script, i think many Caucasian ethnicities use Arabic and Cyrillic more tho.
Thai and Tibetan writing are very difficult to read because their writing hasn't changed for centuries; yet, people still use them to this day.
Shouldn't that make them easier to read?
@BoxerBoy-gs8eq Well, languages simplify over time. Tibetan has drastically changed pronunciation wise. When Tibetan was first scripted, it featured consonant clusters which were marked in the writing, but my guess is that people found them very difficult to pronounce, so they changed. The language has much less consonants than before. But Tibetan people struggle with reading their own language just as much as we do. NativLang made a video about Thai and Tibetan writing.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eq มันก็ไม่ได้เป็นไรหรอก (I mean it is ok it isn't hard much)
It was actually harder before then some like ฆ ฌ ญ ฎ ฏ ฐ ฑ ฒ ณ ธ ศ and ษ was harder pronunciation. We tried.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eqbut that wasn't hard to read much
@@teesteakDuring my learn at Thai i confuse why one voice but have many character. But if you learn Rishi Panini/Brahmi system actually Thai is the same with Hindi, Khmer, Javanese, etc and Thai having Great Languange shift.
I'm Bengali and Ive noticed that how the Tibetan script works is very similar to how the Bengali script or other North Indian scripts work, except, Tibetan has a lot of silent letters. Its like the French of South Asia lol
North Indian scripts are for the most part abugidas.
Tibetan is a horror among scripts, you could think of it like, writing Encyclopedia but you pronounce it Bus... It doesn't make sense. Literally the least sensible script in the world.
@@livedandletdie bro he's saying that both are abugidas. that's the similarity he means
ঠিক বলেছেন
Tibetan, bangla, axomiya, kaithi, devanagari are all abugidas based on brahmi
For Mandarin： 月 is moon and 半 is half, but in the case of 胖 the 月 part is represents “body/body part.” 月 is used to represent “body/body parts” in many other words too. 朋友 is “friend” and the first character is two 月s put together to represent “2 close bodies.”
Yes. 月 was a variation of the character肉。
yeah basically cuz 月looks like 肉字旁 (moon but the center horizontal lines are diagonal)
⺼ is the radical. Notice the difference between ⺼and 月
月 and ⺼（肉） are different.
@@RaltsGang yes but as a radical it looks like 月
When I learned Tibetan, it didn't seem as hard as you make it sound, although everything you said about it is true! But there are rules. It's not arbitrary at all. And if you can deal with English and its silent letters and spellings rooted in the past, you can deal with Tibetan.
I bet you all cant differentiate between:-
1) Odia- ଖ,ଗ,ଘ/ଡ,ଢ / ଳ,ଲ /ଚ,ଚ୍ଚ,ଚ୍ଛ /ଯ,ୟ /ଙ୍କ,ଙ୍ଖ,ଙ୍ଗ,ଙ୍ଘ
2) Telugu- ప,ఫ,వ/ ఝ,య /ఘ,మ
3) Tamil- ஒ,ஓ/ எ,ஏ/௵இ 😂
We Indians deal with them every day tho, i think it all boils down to practice.
Bruh the Tamil one is just 💀
@@justsomeguywithasmolmustac9476 it has atleast been used for the last 1400 years lol.
The above ones are also over 1000-1200 years old.
I am Tamil
Umm? 😂@@justsomeguywithasmolmustac9476
I learnt to read Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada with little to no effort, and that proves a lot. Once you learn to read the script of one Indian language, the similarities of other Indian languages start popping up everywhere, thus becoming easy to learn. However, it all depends on your age, cultural knowledge, mother's tongue, and how many languages you're proficient in. But even after referring to my previous statement, no matter what criteria you fall into Mandarin Chinese is hard asf
Maybe there is a chance to see part 2 of writing systems? There are lots of writings that weren't mentioned like Armenian, Assyrian, Thamil, Inuktitut syllabics and others
Thai but also Lao. Many letters in the Lao alphabet look similar enough to their Thai counterparts that if you know how to read Thai, you can figure out Lao, but anytime I try to explain the Lao alphabet to English speakers, they look at me like I have two heads 😅
There are a few letters that are different but most of them you can guess. The Lao government also simplified the spelling making it more phonetic. I think dumping all those silent letters at the ends of words for the sake of simplicity comes at a cost, though. They differentiate homophones and have an aesthetic value, as well.
yes right, it can be guessed. and the Lao simplification means, the connection to the historical pronounciations is lost. so, e.g., words that use s Sala or s Ruesi bec. their original sh- sound originates mostly from Sanskrit or Pali, in Lao they only use your equivalent of s Suea. a step sad for historically interested folks, but sure a great simplification for the broad population.
@@frankmaeder4358Exactly. If you know the mapping, you can look at the Thai script and know what the spelling and pronunciation in Sanskrit or Pali would be. Modern Lao has lost that; they sacrificed information for learnability.
My first language is Yiddish, so I grew up with a modified phonetic(ish) Hebrew alphabet (though I had to learn the modified SOVIET version lol), then I had to learn Russian, but mum spoke German & Kaschubian, so by the time I was 10 I had to know three wildly different writing systems lol Then we lived in Ethiopia... you ARE right, Olly - writing a language REALLY helps you learn it. My mum tossed me into a local school, so I HAD to learn Amharic quickly just to keep my lunch money lol It's actually a lot easier to read/write than it would seem. Awesome video! Thank you!
The traditional Mongol script is beautiful 👀👍
The language sounds beautiful as well.
looks like Arabic
@@mujemoabraham6522nah it doesn't one you know both of the alphabets
@@JaredtheRabbit Gurun Ulus.
@@SirCapyTheSecondStop crying
As someone who reads Tibetan and sees the written language on a daily basis, I was so confused for a moment when I saw your thumbnail. Like- uh, yes it is a word... did someone say it's not??? lol
What was that word?
what does the sgrubs mean???
@@renecro1007its "penis" in tibetan.
@@renecro1007means yak’s nipple
@@rizkyadiyanto7922Thank you!
Seeing Lisa in this video is enough to encourage me to continue dabbling in Thai every day.
I think the crazy part about Tibetan is the fact that they actually used to speak it like that. Like, some of those initial consonant clusters are utterly deranged. Old Chinese is similar in this regard. Wonder why every language in that family dropped them so consistently
In Thai you only write "vowel e" when you are writing the name of the vowel or spelling something out loud, not when you actually use it in a word! Another thing, there is no punctuation so your example sentence should not have a period. Also you showed Thai letters when talking about Khmer at 16:30
He killed the khmer section, all he did was explain the easiest parts of khmer and he even pronounced khmer wrong.
I, as a Thai person, I confirm that Thai writing system is very hard even many Thai people still have problems lol, as your example , our aspirated k has ขค same constant but different tone and also even letters have group so you have to conjugate to get tone precisely ,and there’re some exceptions, yet in exception got an exception 😂😂
Btw. I’m pretty sure this 16:23 is Thai vowels,not Khmer
I had the feeling too that there was a wrong script shown, Thai and khmer being somewhat similar.
I tried to get into the Thai writing, but didn't find enough time ... yet. (after getting into Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and partly Devanagari.)
As a Thai, I can say that the Thai script spells Thai words logically when you understand them clearly.
That is thai script for sure, even though they look 90% identical.
Thai is more like the mixture of chinese and hindi 😂
@@samomanawatOnce you learn the rules it's not terrible, but still pretty hard. ไม่ไง่. I probab,y spelled even that wrong 555.
There was some writing system out of Africa that always struck me as being super strange. I don’t know if it’s an alphabet, abjad, abugida or whatever - but it’s just a line that makes seemingly random 90 degree turns at random spots. Different patterns of turns and such indicate different sounds. It was super weird looking but apparently it was big enough to have books printed in it. I’m sifting through the Wikipedia article I found it in trying to find the name of it again.
Edit: Thank you to my girlfriend, she found it. It’s called Madombe - and it looks insane.
Thanks. I'm gonna check this out now
Mandombe is a writing system created in 1978 by David Wabeladio Payi from the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It was inspired by a dream and is used to write several national languages of the Congo, including Kikongo, Lingala, Tshiluba, and Swahili. The script is taught in schools run by the Kimbanguist Church and is promoted by the Centre de l'Écriture Négro-Africaine.
Used to live/work in China and speak Chinese, and it is true that it doesn't really have "words." The characters are just their own concept altogether, but one way you can think about it that is sort of helpful is by imagining a language of prefixes and suffixes that you put together to form new meanings. Each character has meaning in its own right, just like "pre-" or "aqua-" have meaning in their own right in English, but they are commonly put together with other things to make a larger meaning. But characters themselves are not "words." Sometimes they can be used individually, and function the same way as a word would in English, like 吃 for "eat." But sometimes not, like 了，which is used to make things past-tense. So 吃了 would be "ate," so “了” is not really functioning as a word here, it's functioning more like the English "-ed".
Mongolian isn't exactly unique with top to bottom language in Asia. Chinese was traditionally written Top to Bottom as well, the only difference is that Mongolian is Left to Right while Traditional Chinese was Right to Left, which is opposite how they write today.
Hanunoo in Phillipines is interesting as it's traditionally written bottom to top, just like Old Irish script Ogham.
0:28 Joseph Stalin
2:26 Dalai Lama
4:38 The Weeknd
7:34 Hayao Miyazaki
9:06 DJ Khaled
12:44 Sequoyah
13:55 Genghis Khan
15:36 Pol Pot
17:26 Jackie Chan
19:45 Lisa
Haha😂
Said khmer had 74 letters, proceeds to show the Thai alphabet. 😂
Naw it's cool to see khmer get some recognition.
Editing mistake :)
Apologies! Check out the fixed version here: th-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A?feature=share
18:27 The left side of 胖 is not moon(月）, is meat(⺼）. The center between these two words has subtle differences.
15:34 Mongolian is officially used with the traditional script in Inner Mongolia region of China which has more Mongolian speaker than the country of Mongolia
18:28 胖 is not moon (月) but meat ⺼(from 肉)
While 明 is indeed an ideogrammic compound (日+月 or sun+moon),
胖 like many other characters is a phono-semantic compound, with 肉 being the semantic part and 半 being phonetic
Great video (and I've subscribed!) but you've fallen for the trap of adding a Tuvan throat singer to the Mongolian section of the video. Tuvan itself is super interesting - Turkic language buried in the Altai mountains - but it isn't Mongolian and their throat singing tradition is different in a number of ways to the styles found over the border, though coming from a semi-nomadic pastoral culture, borders were a mere inconvenience back in the day...
Waiting for Polish people, claiming Polish is sooooo difficult. : |
Arabic person, when I asked them about diacritics: yeah, we don't use them :D
But ᶜArabic itself is not difficult at all, nor does the script except its variety of the spoken ᶜArabic make it difficult.
Otherwise, its structural triliteral root-pattern is excellently logical!
Polish person here: I think the reason why Polish people claim that Polish super difficult comes from the fact that we usually only learn Germanic or Romance languages as foreign languages and their structure is definitely easier than Slavic. Also, we don’t consider other Slavic languages difficult because the difficult features are very similar to Polish.
So in essence, Polish is roughly as difficult as any other Slavic language. It might have a bit trickier phonology that the others but it’s not a massive difference.
As far as writing is concerned, Polish is straightforward and consistent for the most part. The only real difficulty is that some sounds can be represented in two ways and you need to remember which one is the correct one for a specific word.
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 just one question: which Arabic did you describe? :)
@marikothecheetah9342
Al-Lisaanu Al-ᶜArabiyyu Al-Afṣaḥu = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Tongue / Language or Al-Luḡatu Al-ᶜArabiyyatu Al-Fuṣḥaa = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Speech or the Classical ᶜArabic or the Modern Standard ᶜArabic
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 So okay I learn the super easy grammar, I can read Arabic text, I go to one of Arabic countries and go on a merry way communication with locals anywhere in Arabic world?
Georgian alphabet is pretty much perfect. Grammar? Verbs?? You gotta love Georgia/Georgian to really learn it.
As someone who picked up Japanese as my 3rd language.
Their writing system is indeed terrifying. But once you are used to it. The comvination of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji does make sense.
I will try Simplified Chinese as my 4th language.
2:02 slightly off topic, but I always forget that Joseph Stalin was from Georgia and that was his 1st language, not Russian
I forget too sometimes
MACON GEORGIA
And he made everybody suffer
stalin, putin, and erdogan are all from georgia.
Beria too. And Shevardnadze.
At 5:00 you kinda mixed two concepts together. The Ethiopian *language* has arabic roots, but the script (from the Ga'ez language) pre-dates Arab arrival in Ethiopa by several centuries. It comes from Christians living there in the first centuries AD.
The script goes back to its origins in the Musnad Script = Ancient South ᶜArabian Script, and its religion well before Christianity!
Not only the script but also the type of Semitic languages they speak goes back to Ancient South ᶜArabian languages!
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 Arab conquest 600-700 AD
So basically I am learning Mongolian, Japanese, Georgian at the same time.
Balinese also has the same historical spelling issues. They call it as "pasang pageh" ᬧᬲᬂ ᬧᬕᭂᬄ literally means "a strict way of writing". But fortunately, Balinese is not a tonal language, so it is a lot easier than Thai etc. Those historical spellings are for writing Sanskrit or Old Javanese words.
Examples, if I wanna write "asta", i need to know which one it is: (h)asta ᬳᬲ᭄ᬢ "hand", astha ᬅᬲ᭄ᬣ "bone", or aṣṭa ᬅᬱ᭄ᬝ "eight". Since, all of these words are just spelt "asta" in modern Balinese Latin transliteration.
Balinese still writing sanskrit way, Javanese abandon it anyway and turn unused letter as capital
why the ᬲ᭄ letter looks like that?
@@埊why not?
@@埊 Balinese and Javanese are from the same source script, Kawi. And Kawi is the descendant of ancient script, Brahmic. So, it shares the same shape. It also shares similar rules of writing. If you compare several Brahmic script, you'll notice a lot of similar shapes. Some shapes are stylized further, becoming harder to observe the similarity directly.
brahmic: 𑀲
devanagari: स
khmer: ស
thai: ส
kawi: 𑼱
jawa: ꦱ
bali: ᬲ
batak: ᯘ
myanmar: သ
@@wolfthunder2526 all the scripts: have their own letters
kawi: i am 囗011F31.
“ Georgia is the only country that ever didn’t have a relative to another language” Korea “Am I a joke to you?”
Japan too
Technically
Even though Thai has tone markers, it doesn't mean you can always rely on them to pronounce words correctly 😅
Yeah, the 3 consonants classes affect the tone, too. It's so hard for me lol
ไม่จริงเลยน่ะครับ ❤
I'm a native Khmer, the letters you showed earlier were actually Thai. Being a writing system with the most letters in the world is already crazy, the Khmer language is also rich in vowel sounds. Diacritics and other characters make Khmer even has tons of characters overall. Diacritics are very important in Khmer spelling. Some of them have the role in tone (although Khmer isn't a tonal language), some to change the consonant sounds from "O" to "A" or from "A" to "O", some to k*ll the consonant ( the consonant that contain them are dead and won't be pronounced, only for writing), and so many others. Thai and Laos developed from old Khmer, so they look a lot like Khmer although consonants are not rich in sounds (many of them sound the same) while Khmer had developed into 2 consonant groups. You will find loads of Khmero- Sanskrit and Khmero- Pali words in Thai and Lao that had been Khmerised before integrated into these languages.
Good catch with Khmer! The correction can be found here: th-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A
Here in tunisia, it's not uncommon for kids, if they don't know a word, to not have to pronounce the vowels. Like, say a kid doesn't know ketab as book, they might just pronounce the consonant cluster ktb and then an adult will tell them the vowels. Really helps, since most kids struggle with the abjad, especially for obscurer words. Hell, even I in my 20s sometimes have to look up the vowels for words, and if I have to say the word without knowing the vowels, I still do the whole consonant clustering thing.
Three of these alphabets come from an alphabet for writing Sanskrit, namely Tibetan, Khmer and Thai.
Incorrect: Khmer and Thai come from the Pallava script for Tamil
@@plazmagaming2182 The Pallava script is primarily for Sanskrit. It has the letters kha ga gha chha jha tha da dha pha ba bha etc which are absent in Tamil
Not for Sanskrit, but you should say modified for Sanskrit.
The first indic script "Brahmi" was derived by inspiration from aramaic by Ashoka, to write prakrit ( the commoner's language), Sanskrit (liturgical language) was never written for some more centuries..
And Sanskrit Devnagri script originated from Phoenician, same as Greek, Arabic and Latin
@@alfonsmelenhorst9672Primarily for script yes, but it was invented and used by the tamils, and those sounds are indeed still present throught the grantha script
18:26 according to a Japanese person I know the "moon" sign 月 in Chinese is also known as the meat radical; meat l肉 when abbreviated does look like the moon in Chinese 月, so it's more likely half and meat than half and moon!
Yes, moon (月) and meat （⺼ ）writes differently in Chinese.
Prof. Norbu allways teased us, when we where totally uncapable to read one of these in all direction stacked Symbols, if we did not learn he would teach us Tibetan and Mongol at the same time. He was brought to Europe in the early sixties by the great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci
Olly, have you ever investigated the Arctic syllabary of Alaska and Canada?
Amharic for my cursed conlang!
28 letters abjad plus vowel equivalents:
Alef(a)
Ha(e)
Ta marbuttah(œ)
Ayin(o)
Waw(u)
Ya(i)
Just like the letters in the Cherokee language are syllabaries the Hiragana and the Katakana letters of Japanese are also syllabaries.
I learned Georgian 2020-2022 over the course of 2.5 years. The alphabet was actually the easier part of it, the grammar is by far the hardest of any language I know, also differentiating between animate and inanimate, fun fact “brown” is also “coffee colour) ყავისფერი
I learned Farsi from 2023 up until this summer, the lack of vowels still gets me. But very beautiful script and the sounds are lovely, luckily the grammar is easier than other languages I tried.
Interesting! In Romanian there is also a "coffee colour" - "cafeniu". This is the name for the nuance of brown that looks like coffee. And "castaniu" is "the colour of the horsenut". Does Georgian has a main brown and also the coffee colour, or the two nuances are just one word? (I incline to think the latter).
@@eeaotly No but it has two blues, one called “lurji” dark blue and “tsisperi” (sky colour). Also “vardisperi” (pink) colour of a rose.
Exactly same with Turkish; brown=kahverengi (coffee color).
Interesting fact. In Japanese brown is 茶色 (chairo=tea color)
interesting. in indonesian brown is "chocolate".
In Finnish the colour brown is "ruskea", and they have a specific word for the foliage in early autumn before the leaves fall, called "ruska".
I'm surprised you didn't mention Armenian - an entire alphabet which tries really hard to deceive you with letters like Տ է ս ո ւ ց, each of which represent a sound you least expect from them. Join me learning it
It's "Tesuts"? I leaned the Armenian alphabet two times, but I always forget it.
What do you think would be easiest alphabets to learn? And if we then have to take out the ones that aren't easy due to grammar, which alphabeths do you think would be left over?
I had 1 lesson Armenian, but don't think we did much in regards to the alphabet. Fascinating language though.
@@woutvanostaden1299 korean has hangul. you should check it out.
It is surprising in the distant past, Swahili was once written in the Arabic script
Nice video.
There's a lot of people that complain about kanji and how difficult it is, but I find the complexity and history of the writing system to be incredibly interesting and it brings a lot of flavor to the language. If we just write Japanese with standard Roman letters it would remove so history and beauty from the language. Simpler and easier is not always better.
Tibetan is so much like a synthesizer! Modulating a base sound, having silent modifiers that affect all other syllables, having the letters pass through "stages" of change to arrive at the final pronunciation. I wish you read the example text though, might've helped us correlate sound and script. Except for Georgian...
In Arabic sometimes there are a few diacritics they add to clarify what word you are reading and also the last letter of a word could change diacritics depending on its position in a sentence.
Great video! The script you have scrolling during the Khmer segment is Thai. They are related (not wading into the drama about if either derived from the other - both from Mon and ultimately from Brahmi).
In Bulgarian we have a letter in the alphabet that is never used by itself. It always goes with the letter 'o' after it - ьо
In German, q cannot be used without -u
I understand the title was sort of meant to be clickbait, but you might have pointed out that none of the scripts in this video, besides Georgian, are actually alphabets.
can you make a video about macedonian? i think it would be really interesting
I am from India, and from first grade, we were taught about three types of writing systems: the alphabet, abjad, and abugida.
- **English** uses Latin alphabets.
- **Urdu** employs Arabic alphabets but is written in a Persian script called Nastaliq, along with Naskh script for Arabic.
- **Hindi** and **Marathi** use the Devanagari script, which is completely phonetic. However, writing in Devanagari takes more time compared to Latin and Arabic scripts.
i have also learnt,Hebrew,syriac,Greek and Cyrrilic script.
Hi Olly, I’m currently learning Albanian and would love to have a set of beginner short stories like you have in other languages, ever considered writing one for this unique and beautiful language? I believe there’s a gap in the market 😎
I'm Thai and I know our language is really hard to study but if you know you know.
I love learning Thai is is definitely my favourite language to study. Thai people really appreciate and are very encouraging when a farang learns their language. Thais are the sweetest people ❤️
Eventho Thai is difficult, it has rules, complicated as they are. Written English has no rules, only patterns, traditions and conventions which requires a great amount of memory to know when they apply. Excellent English spellers rely on memory alone.
The reason why you cannot understand the logic of "胖", is becasue it is a phono-semantic compound. Which is one of the major category of Chinese characters. This character is composed with two parts: a sematic component "月", which is a radical that often relates to the meaning of bodies; and a phonetic component "半", which represents the pronounciation of this character. It was inferred that when this character was created, the way people say "Fat" is similar to how they say "Half", but these two character are now pronounced differetly in mandarin because language is always developing.
May I know what is ancient English alphabet or how they speak or write
Tibetan is like fancier version of devnagari script
5:00 Africa infact has over 30 indigenous writing scripts currently in use. The oldest being Nsibidi from Nigeria (2000 B.C).
The english/european alphabet is actually not that easy if you consider that there is lower case, upper case, cursive lower case, cursive upper case and some letter variations between fonts and handwriting like in a. You have to learn all those to be sufficient in writing.
YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!! YOU SPOKE ABOUT CHEROKEE!!!!! I have been studying this endangered language, and I think the syllabary writing system is actually really simple. The writing system makes so much sense. Each symbol makes a sound that is the same each time (with some variation for colloquial pronunciation). Not to mention it is beautiful to look at. I love this language and the whole culture.
As a person who studied ancient Sanskrit, the 2nd & the 3rd languages are not difficult at all ...
I want to learn the Cherokee alphabet (my grandmother is on the Dawes rolls), but I only ever see the alphabet displayed in font style. I have looked and looked for a chart of the Cherokee alphabet written by hand, but have never seen one.
00:41 don't know about others but when i look at georgian language script, it look similar to #Vatteluttu or #Vattezhuthu, an ancient dravidian script
19:47 when i heard thai, i remembering lisa. this language is beautiful. for me, the alphabet is easy, VERY
I agree. I learnt the alphabet and how to read in 2 weeks. Its really not difficult at all.
@@TheGaragelifterI’m so jealous of you😭😭 I’m an American-born Thai, and I’ve been really fortunate with being able to speak Thai with near native fluency. I just can’t read or write. Every time I see videos like this, mentioning how hard the Thai alphabet is, I get super discouraged lol
The Philippines has a unique writting called Baybayin that was lost because of all the colonialization that happened. I really love the writing because it looks like art.
Thai spelling is logical and can be read in different Dialects or even different Languages in the Southwestern Tai branch of the Kra-Dai family.
Yes. Many local languages spoken in Thailand don't actually have a writing system so they borrow the standard Thai script. For eg my wife is Kuy (กูย), there was a writing system developed in the 21st century for Kuy people but it is not used or understood my almost all of them.
Thai, Arabic and Japanese speaker here. Yes, Thai is the most difficult "Alphabet" because the reading rules make absolutely no sense. R becomes N at the end of a word, two R's become "aan", Y also becomes N at the end of the word, there are 5 's' letters in the language, all with different tones, 3 different 'k' letters, S can also become T at the end of a word, there are no spaces, there are 16 different vowels with different tones, there are hidden vowels, there are silent letters, there are words that are spelled the same but have different pronunciations. It really is the alphabet that pulls out all the stops. And it doesnt help that Thai script was created from combining Khmer, Lao, Chinese, Sanskrit, and local languages all together into one alphabet.
As a native Hindi speaker I think when I started to learn Bengali it made so hard especially its half letters even if both languages share so much similarities on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and language family ❤
Thanks for letting us know which 10 languages not to learn! :)
Languages with impossibles SCRIPTS. Not all scripts are alphabets.
Also the video shows only modern languages.
Honorable mentions
hieroglyphic egyptian, Aztecscript, cuneiform Sumerian and pre-alphabetic Greek. (Linear' B Greek)
I think the point is to capture the interest of people who don't know anything about writing systems. Those people need context, and might only know the word 'alphabet', so Olly is right to do it this way. And what a boring and ambiguous word 'scripts' is - who'd want to watch a video about 'scripts'?? No-one except us language freaks. In the video Olly tells everyone what's an alphabet and what's not an alphabet, and gives all the correct names.
The Khmer alphabet looks like something I’d draw in my math class notes when I’m bored
The vowel table listed at 16:32 is Thai not Khmer
Good catch! See our correction here: Is the Cambodian Alphabet Impossible?
th-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A?feature=share
another nice thing with the thai system is the position of the vowels. they are either before, after, under or above the corresponding consonant, or unwritten at all (short a and short o)
Your tibetan translation in the start was wrong. Instead of Tibetan language it was translated to Tibetan person
Btw. If you learn Tibetan its a bit like elvish. Because its at least threa languages. Vulgar for everyday life. honorific and very honorific. And then there are many dialects. The word that a central Tibetan would pronounce Vajra a eastern Tibetan pronounces Benza and so on.
Japanese kanji will drive you nuts. For example the English verb “to excel” is pronounced “masaru”. There are two ways to write this: 「勝る」 and 「優る」. The first implies excellence at sports, academics, career, etc., and the second implies aesthetic excellence. Both are pronounced the same way, and the distinction is not given in any learner’s dictionaries. And many Japanese just ignore the difference and only use the first writing, as this is just one of many words with identical pronunciation and almost identical meanings, but can be written differently to shade the nuance.
And then there are kanji that are written identically but pronounced differently depending on the meaning. For example, 「外」can be pronounced “soto” if you mean to say “outside” or “hoka” if you mean to say “another”.
Once in a while you will come across words that take forever to decipher. 「牣」 came up in a reading once, but it was not in any dictionary I had on hand . I finally found it to be “Jin” meaning “strong but flexible”. A great word, but very rare in this form.
When I studied in Naples Italy I met the Tibetan and Mongolian language and history teacher Choegyal Namkhai Norbu at the instituto orientale. I tried to learn the alphabet, but like most of his students I never pronounced it right. Not even the Tibetol8gy majors. So in the end he was pissed off by the bastarization of his beloved language by his obtuse Utalian students and he created a phonetic guide for the chants and Mantras to sound right. But even with this help many butchered it, especially the tonal part with ka kha ga etc. The first sound is an A
the tibetan language in cities are starting to develope more tones very drastically compared to villages and nomadic dialects....especially within tibetan communities outside tibet....
At 16:26 I hope you can correct it, you're showing Thai letters on the Khmer section.
Learning 3,000 characters seems possible but memorizing the exact correct stroke order to write them is just insane.
Which language is this 👇
ଯଦି ଅନୁବାଦ କଲ ତାହା ହେଲେ ମୋତେ କମେଣ୍ଟ କର
Odia
𝖥𝗋𝖾𝖾 𝖯𝖺𝗅𝖾𝗌𝗍𝗂𝗇𝖾🇵🇸🍉✨
@@williswameyo5737 Odia, to me, is the most beautiful. Like cartoon script.
I am learning Khmer now. It is a bit difficult. I think it is more difficult than Chinese. Reading and writing is difficult but speaking is easier. It uses the same word order as English which is great but there are a number of sounds not found in the English language. It's a very fun language to learn for sure!
Cherokee is wild. I am learning Navajo right now. At least it has an easy writing system. It's still a hard language though. They didn't have a writing system for a long time.
For Khmer, 16:23 to 16:34 You misunderstond and put thai script instead. Plus, Khmer script has two versions: the traditional version which is called "Aksar Moul" meaning round script, and the simplified version which is called "Aksar Chrieng" that literally means italic script but the script is not really italicized. The version you showed in this video is Aksar Chrieng. Both of them are diffrent from each other only in its shape, while rules and pronunciation are the same.
You may see both version appear on a formal letters or documents. Aksar Moul, the traditional version, is usually used on the top as a heading or use in the text to emphasize or depict something important.
Besides, there are 15 more vowels that can stand on its own without a consonant before them. They are អ អា ឥ ឦ ឧ ឩ ឪ ឫ ឬ ឭ ឮ ឯ ឰ ឱ ឳ ។
Additionally, for vowels that need consonant sound as a starting sound of the syllable, Khmer has not only 23 vowels sounds,
but a few additional vowels sound. What Is MORE, most of the 23 vowel, can change their sound depending on the consonant it is spelt with, for example, when you use the vowel "ា" [aa sound] with this consonant "ខ"[kh sound], it becomes "ខា" [Khaa] but when you use "ា" with"ឃ"[Kh sound also], the "ា"change the sound to [ea soundsl lik the the English word EAR. What we get is "ឃា" pronounced as [Khea like Kh sound+the word EAR]. Please note that "ឃា" is not yet a real word. You have to add a consonant or more to make the word you want like "ឃាត" a noun meaning killing, or destroying.
Vowels that change their sound are
ា ិ ី ឹ ឺ ុ ូ េី េ ែ ៃ ោ ៅ ំ ុំ ាំ ះ ុះ េះ ោះ។ the wovels ួ ឿ ៀ dont change their sound nomatter what consonant is.
Good catch. See our correction here: Is the Cambodian Alphabet Impossible?
th-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A?feature=share
learning the ge'ez alphabet was so muchhhh fun all the patterns carry through all the letters so ig youre technically learning 200+ letters but youre rlly only learning like 33 if i remember correctly how many base letters there are
I was surprised you included Georgian. It's a complex language, but the writing system is straightforward. It has a lot of letters but is has a lot of sounds. The sounds are difficult, but the alphabet is phonetic and not that mysterious.
A lot of Southeast Asian languages uses "alphabets" that are quite strange, like Thai and Cambodian mentioned in the video, but also Javanese, and the old Philippines script.
A really interesting topic, indeed
ㅡ but sorry, I had to leave after
some minutes, because I wasn't
able to bear the jumps of the
images from far to near and back
any longer - here really the saying
"Less is more" suits quite well...
And I thought music notation was inefficient when I was younger. Now it looks like the most elegant thing in the world after seeing some of these other languages.
I don't think it's hard like Chinese Han script. Tibetan belongs to Brahmi system included many scripts in India and Southeast Asia. I learnt Tibetan nagari, Thai, rachana, lao, khmer( included ancient khmers ).
But the 26 letters in our Latin alphabet (and in some languages more, like the ene in Spanish, or the Grosse S in German) must be combined in thousands of ways, which we have to memorize. It's all about your perspective in what alphabet and/or writing is native to you.
I am surprised to see Thai being listed as the most difficult writing system. I learnt the script in three weeks when I was 32, a lot quicker than I learnt the Devanagari script at the age of 16. Of course my knowledge of Sanskrit helped a bit to understand the archaic symbols that represent old Sanskrit letters. I found Arabic much more challenging. It is frustrating not to be able to read a word fully without knowing the language. The pronunciation of most Thai words can be inferred from the spelling including the tone whereas most Chinese characters at first sight don't give any clue as to how they are pronounced. I think it's just a matter of opinion.
The burmese alphabet is definitely harder than Thai, because like Tibetan, it used a very old spelling and the spelling of words does not correspond to its pronunciation, for exemple ပြီးပြည့်စုံမှု is pronounced pipyezomu (perfection) but spelled priiprahñjumhuu.
Burmese alphabet is the Mon alphabet that isn't your real alphabet bro.
You skipped Hindi?
Thanks for the content.
Keep up the good work.
בס'ד
I evolved an alphabet from Thai
Vowels
W with tilde=u
Y with tilde=i
Glottal with tilde=a
H with tilde=œ
21:34 quick correction, we don’t do that, the “vowel” is just for writing out the vowels separately, normally is merged into the word
What about Hebrew and Korean?
Hebrew is like Arabic, but letters don't combine so it is a little easier.
Korean is an alphabet, with the twist that it is written in syllable blocks. One of the easiest and most logical scripts.
@@AthanasiosJapanwhich language came first arabic or Hebrew, 😂😂😂. U r so gullible, arabic is like Hebrew and korean came from Chinese. Nothing else.
I used to have a New Testament translated into Cherokee. Also the Tibetan Lange looks gorgeous. But believe me…Hebrew & Aramaic are much easier for me to read & understand!