Types of Writing Systems (correction in the description)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 12 ม.ค. 2014
- CORRECTION: It's actually sort of unclear whether or not there are polysyllabic Chinese words represented by one character. The real reason Chinese is considered a logography is that they have a whole lot of homophones, and those homophones are always distinguished with different characters. This means that Chinese can't be a syllabary because it has lots of syllables represented by different characters depending on the meaning in that context.
The next video can be found here:
• World's Easiest Writin...
. . . does anyone else think my intonation sounds weird in this video? I almost re-recorded the whole thing. Anyway, I'll try to make it sound more natural in later videos.
Into song: "Pink Clouds and Sticky Rain" by Cloud Nova
• Pink Clouds and Sticky...
Outro song: Wonderbolt by dBPony feat. Prince
Whateverer
• Wonderbolt - dBPony (f...
![fellow fellow - Proud [OFFICIAL MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/9uZF7BlUQPE/mqdefault.jpg)
I had hoped that the made up writing system message at 1:01 would contain a secret message... instead I got "AWMGAWMGAWM"....
It's actually 'AWMGE AWMGEWM'.
That means "fuck you" in xid language
@@krishnamaggarwal9167 Haha؟
Aisha Ahmed my man actually used the proposed sarcasm sign, nice/s
I am learning french, and this "I'm looking at you french" part had me laughing so hard
And don't even get started on accents àáâä èéêë ïî òôœő üúû ç ñ
C'est vrai que le français est difficile... sauf quand on est natif😁
Quebec or France french
@RFT I can confirm. Spanish has ñ (and I think portuguese too). I studied a very very little french and I don't remember any "ñ" at all
queue.
The French joke is so true. I'm learning it in school, and I swear, EVERY OTHER LETTER IS SILENT!!!
Désolé.
- French language
day-so-lay?
Chocolatnave123 Day so Lays lol
no
Fortnight = quinze jours
Quinze jours = 15 days
And a fortnight is two weeks or 14 days
We don't use only long words at all. Meinungsverschiedenheitsmitteilung.
เสกส้มกทถมาค ึากทไ
But these long words just exist, because in German, you can just put words together, without showing you had done that. Like in English its necessary to but in a "-", like in "self-confident"(in German "selbstbewusst"). Also you can words together instead of use a Genitive. Like in "Unabhänigkeitserklärung" (Example of the video) which means "declaration of independence". Or words put together instead of using to words, like in "train station" what is call "Bahnhof" in German.
FactoryofRedstone in french, we have "anticonstitutionnellement", which basically anti+constitutionnel+ement (adverd suffix), so it's not really a compound word. Do we win ?
Don't get me wrong, that are normal words, which when not used together, would not be understandable the most time. And in your example I think, you can also split the praefix anti away from the word, and use a simply negation.
What about antidisestablishmentarianism? That one's a classic.
Xidnaf: Chinese works well with a logography because it is difficult to capture features such as tone in a phonetic script.
Thai: _And I took that personally._
Interesting and filled with a lot of nice humour. Very good! :)
Just two things: It is "Hiragana", not "Hirigana" ひらがな (hi ra ga na)
And the symbol: 東 is made out of 木 and 田 (日 just secondarily)
I think 日 & 木 makes more sense.
丨
一曰一，the sun rises upon a tree
丿丨╲
It's 木＋日. Though we do have 果, which is 田＋木.
***** 果=田＋木. But the 田 doesn't mean rice field, it represents the shape of the fruit.
www.qingsongcha.com/hanziyanbian_guo_1859.html
John Smith Did I say it meant ricefield?
Indian abugidas do have individual letters for vowels which are used when the vowel does not come after a consonant ;)
And you don't write the vowel for -a right? -a is implied, and you have to use a vowel-suppressing character on the consonant if you want only the consonant.
@@Liggliluff you are absolutely right.
@@Liggliluff Too late but, in cases where there is no vowel with a consonant, even when there is no "-a sound", we mark the letter with a short slant line in the bottom to denote that this just consonant and nothing else. It's uncommon in Hindi, though very common in Sanskrit.
@@Liggliluff actually each consonant that doesn't have a vowel is denoted by a slant line below the consonant.
When there's no line below it, but no vowel 'marks/symbols' it has a sound 'a' which is very unnoticeable. When there's a 'I' line after the consonant it's a 'aa' sound.
@@anuradha7437 Exactly this was one of my first experience to slight difference between Hindi and Nepali when I migrated to Nepal. As Nepali has that broken leg (we call it that 😄), it started making more sense pronunciation wise.
If you hate silent letters, never learn Scottish Gaelic, from memory, about half the letters are silent.
+Howitzer 0 I can't respond to your comment directly for some reason, but yeah, French is just as bad.
+A Turn In The Game Of... Il est vrai que le français a beaucoup de lettres muettes, mais il y a parfois une logique derrière. (It is true that French has alot of silent letters, but there is sometimes a logic behind it.)
For instance, in French, there is a gender system, like, I think, all romance languages. And the thing is that adjectives and articles agree with the gender of the noun.
Plus, nouns sometimes can have a changing gender, like for jobs or nationality, for instance.
Masculine is always the standard of a word, and to "feminize" a word, most of the time, you just add an "e".
Example : Français (masculine) - Française (feminine) And then, the silent "s" is no longer silent! The E is, though. But not 100% silent. When a S is in-between two vowels, it is pronounced /z/, and not /s/. If the E was really silent, the S would be pronounced /s/ in "française", but it isn't. It's pronounced /z/.
Sometimes, you double the previously-silent consonnant, like "Muet" --> "Muette". Because.
Yeah, ok, sometimes, it's not logic at all. Like "loup" (wolf) become "louve" (female wolf). But every language has its own weird things. =)
(NB : We also have a weird habit to keep letters just because of latin, like "loup", we keep the "p" only because in latin, it's "lupus"...I think that's idiotic, we should change that)
+Mercure250 There is definitely logic behind all silent letters, even in English. However, it is an extra barrier that must be crossed.
A Turn In The Game Of... Yup. Surtout parce-que le français est une langue magnifique =3 (Especially because french is a beautiful language)
+A Turn In The Game Of... Yeah, silent letters in French are silly, but they are spelling developed in the past, when the language was pronounced differently. If French is SUNG, some silent e's become pronounced again so it's like time-travel. You are going back about 400 years! The "Avignon Bridge" song has the ninja-purpose of teaching the larvae nasal vowels, but notice how they say "On y chant-e, on y dans-e" with definite "uh" sounds where silent e's are normally. That is the old French!
CORRECTION: It's actually sort of unclear whether or not there are polysyllabic Chinese words represented by one character. The real reason Chinese is considered a logography is that they have a whole lot of homophones, and those homophones are always distinguished with different characters. This means that Chinese can't be a syllabary because it has lots of syllables represented by different characters depending on the meaning in that context.
You should take a look at cuneiform. Specifically as it was used by speakers of Akkadian.
Cuneiform did originate with the Sumerians, but our knowledge of Sumerian is filtered through our knowledge of Akkadian, which is itself built off the foundations of our knowledge of the semitic languages.
In any case, the way cuneiform works is that there are logograms (which are complete Sumerian words) as well as syllabic signs.
FUN FACT: There are writing systems for Chinese that are NOT comprised of Chinese characters!
1) Nüshu----women’s writing
Nüshu is a female-only writing system developed by the women of Jiangyong in Hunan province. In the old times, the women’s opportunities for education were limited, and Nüshu formed a communication tool for women (especially among sworn sisters and sisters-in-law). The script is phonetic instead of logographic like standard Chinese characters, making it a syllabary.
To learn more: nushu.world.coocan.jp/home.htm
2) Xiao’erjing----when the Arabic script meets Chinese
Xaio’erjing was used by some Chinese Muslim ethnic minorities to write Chinese in Arabic script. It was first developed as a way for these Muslims to study Islam and the Quran. Since the vowel is important in Chinese, both long and short vowels are explicitly marked in Xiao’erjing (a unique characteristic for an Arabic script-based writing system).
To learn more: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xiao'erjing
3) Phags-pa script----when a Tibetan-designed script meets Chinese
Phags-pa script was designed by a Tibetan monk (by modification of the Tibetan script) during the Yuan dynasty as the unified script for the empire’s various written languages (Chinese included). The script’s use was, however, limited during the Yuan dynasty, and fell out of use after the dynasty fell. It is possible that this script was an influence on the development of the Korean Hangul.
To learn more: www.omniglot.com/writing/phagspa.htm
4) Dungan alphabet----when the Cyrillic alphabet meets Chinese in Central Asia
The Dungan people comprise a sub-group of the Hui people from China who moved to Central Asia (mainly Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) during the 19th-century. Because of the Russian influence, their Chinese variety (a variety of Mandarin that was originally written in Xiao’erjing) is written using the Cyrillic alphabet. Mutual intelligibility between Dungan and other Mandarin varieties varies in degree.
To learn more: www.omniglot.com/chinese/dungan.htm
5) Latinxua Sin Wenz----an experiment to replace the Chinese characters with the Latin alphabet
In the early 20th century, to improve literacy among the Chinese populations in the Russian Far East, Sin Wenz was developed by scholars to write Chinese using just the Latin alphabet. This romanization system is remarkable since it does not mark tones (it is assumed that the tones can be figured out by context). The system was once used in Communist-controlled areas in northern China to improve literacy, but eventually the Communists stopped using it in favor of Chinese characters. After the Communists won the civil war, a new romanization system, Hanyu Pinyin, was developed. Unlike Sin Wenz, Pinyin is not a replacement of Chinese characters.
To learn more: www.theworldofchinese.com/2012/03/latinxua-sin-wenz-the-prequel-to-pinyin/
Chinese words are usually comprise of a consonant and a vowel, like ni, wo, ta, and with some having 2 to 3 consonants like shen, sheng, shen, sen. And there's a special case like 'nv', pronouncing as nuei ( can't really descript it with english)
As a native Cantonese and Mandarin speaker, I have not seen or read any polysyllabic Chinese character. All characters represent one syllable each. Nothing more, nothing less.
I also think that it would be a bad idea to completely romanize any Sinitic language, as some words with completely different meanings are pronounced the same way. If we only show the phonetic element, it may cause confusion.
I agree with Hans Lee. As Chinese speakers, when we read romanization, we are basically reading the words out loud in our heads or matching the sound with the corresponding characters. FYI. Also in Chinese writing system, hanzi, some hanzi characters have multiple pronunciations based on their meaning and usage. If you only look from a romanization perspective, you will miss this.
Mandarin has 4 tones. Other Chinese "dialects" (languages) have more than the number that you mentioned. For example, Cantonese can have anywhere from 6 to 9 tones depending on who you ask
Nice
Fuck. I like languages and find them fascinating. And now that I found your channel, I'm gonna have to watch every single video in one setting.
Rest in peace, my sleep schedule.
You are right, I also love languages but he does not upload videos anymore. Which is really sad and I hope is fine and will make more videos.
"Chinese tends to indicate things by putting together a lot of small words rather than using a few big ones like German"
But German does the same thing. For example:
Take the word "电脑" in Chinese which means computer:
That word is composed of multiple smaller words/characters put together:
电 = electricity
脑 = brain
Put that together and you get "electric brain" which is a good description for a computer.
Now take the word "Panzerkampfwagen" in German which means tank:
That long word is composed of multiple smaller words put together:
Panzer = armor
Kampf = fight/battle
Wagen = car/vehicle
Put that together and you get "armored battle vehicle" or something like that but there's no spaces between them so they look like 1 long and intimidating word instead of multiple small ones.
You get that in English too. Think of the word "aftershave". That word is composed of 2 smaller words which have no spaces between them. It's the same thing in German.
Additionally, even though words like 电 and 脑 in these contexts mean electric and brain, in my experience it's a bad idea then assume that all chinese characters have an independent meaning. Most have some sort of dictionary definition, but uttering them alone is extremely ambiguous due to the number of homophones in the language (even with 4-5 tones per syllable). It's better to simply think of them as syllables first, then equate the meaning with them after. One of my biggest problems first learning Mandarin Chinese was obsessively asking what each individual character in a noun, verb, etc. meant. When in realty the children learn words in groups, just like we learn words as children.
That's true in most germanic languages, except for english.
What he's referring to in the video is the fact that Mandarin is an Analytic language--in most languages words have different forms to indicate the gender, number, social status, etc. of the specific object the word refers to. Mandarin Chinese words don't do that. Ever. To tell whether you are referring to a girl dog or a boy dog or one dog, or a hundred dogs in Mandarin you must "put together a bunch of small words" to describe it. It's not that German doesn't have compound words, it's that in Mandarin ALL additional information other than the noun itself must be conveyed by adding adjectives or helping words to the sentence.
On another note ***** English puts lots of small words together in that way too, we just notate it differently. Where in German you pretty much always write compound words by removing the space between the component words, in English this is only done for words used so frequently together that people think of them like one word (for instance, "cannot"). English still has other compound words but notates them either with a hyphen (as in "city-state") or a space (as in "compound words," which is grammatically treated as a single noun despite being made up of two nouns). And you can validly make compounds just as long in English as in German, with longer phases usually notated with a combination of hyphens and spaces--such as under-sea boat or woodland-solitude feeling, grammatically correct English analogs to the German "unterseeboot" and "waldeinsamkeit."
It is true however that English writers take advantage of long compound words less often than their German counterparts, in part because the difference in notation causes English speakers to see compound words as a "new grouping of existing words" where a German speaker would see them as a "new word made from existingwords," but this is merely a matter of taste, not of actual linguistic difference.
Also have you noticed that most Chinese characters consist of smaller ones? the ABC's of Chinese, Chinese learning system has a channel here on TH-cam explaining this. Chinese is also a bit of a pictographic language, take for example the word fire in Chinese which looks like this 火 doesn't it kinda look like a fire or tree/wood 木 this symbol kinda looks like a pine tree just simplified. Some Chinese characters are ideographs and some pictographs pictographs are simplified pictures of just anything (obviously) and ideographs are just an idea so some Chinese characters look weird because there just an idea like have 有 its (IMO) a hand which is on the top with the object on the bottom but that's just my opinion and chinese may be hard to translate so some of my characters may have very diffrent translations
Aj Cala And again i didn't listen to the whole video and that comment is kinda useless *sigh* but still a good explanation right?
Vietnamese is tonal language using the alphabet.
+Koit „Wolkun“ Wolken I have no clue about the Vietnamese language but its romanized writing system looks like a total mess.
+Евгений Увин That's Vietnamese.
+Isacc142 Romanized?
+origamilover01 Vietnamese is only written in romanized way, the vietnamese officialy use latin alphabet
Yea I know, I'm vietnamese, just wasn't sure what he mean by that like the actual writing or the writing base on sound. That's all :P
Being interested in linguistics, it is difficult to find videos like this. Thank you! I can't wait for the next one.
:) This is the reason I make these videos! I wanted to see videos like this myself, but no one was making them, so I decided to make them myself! Glad you like them!
@@Xidnaf Wow!!! That's some real dedication towards learning languages, I also want to make my own videos and learn more languages. Also, where are you? Why don't you upload videos anymore?
Now that I'm getting deep into worldbuilding, this is really helping a lot with developing conlangs. Thank you for covering this! It's very understandable. I love it.
That Mandarin mostly is made up of monosyllabic words was true maybe a couple hundred years ago. Nowadays, because of vast reduction in the number of sounds (and their positional flexibility within syllables) and therefore syllables, two syllables per word are most often necessary to communicate clearly. Individual syllables of disyllabic words can however hold the meaning of the complete words when combined with other syllables into other words or sayings.
When you talked about simply inventing a writing system, I really wished you'd mentioned Sequoyah, a Cherokee man who did EXACTLY THAT. And it is a syllabary.
I watched your video about the Thai writing system and I learned about how complicated abugidas are. Now I'm realizing my mother tongue, Tamil, is an abugida. We add weird lines to consonants to make vowel sounds. It looks hard but it's actually really simple. The only problem is, Tamil has a lot of sounds that don't exist in English, which makes it hard for English speakers to learn it. So, the romanization looks pretty weird. பழம் is written as pazham in the English alphabet but the zh actually makes a sound between r and... Yeah that's why it's confusing. However, knowing Tamil has helped me a bit with my Korean pronunciation. I'm definitely better at it than my white friends (but I still suck according to my Korean friend lol).
The Tamil writing system is beautiful! It and Tibetan are probably my favorites.
Japanese is not only language in the world which use a syllabary. Curent syllabaries are used for Cherokee, Inuit and Vai languages.
Polynesian can use syllabaries
The Inuit (Inuktitut) syllabary (and the Cree syllabary which is closely related) are technically abugidas, not syllabaries, because you tip the consonant symbol around to represent different vowels. Also, Inuktitut especially is a *terrible* fit for a syllabary - I mean, just look at the name of the language, Inu*k*titu*t*. A four syllable word including one V, two CVC and only one CV syllable. As a result, Inuktitut writing has and makes heavy use of tiny versions of the consonant symbol to represent an ending consonant - you basically can't write anything in Inuktitut without those.
The long words you listed for german are actually just a bunch of "smaller" words written together, which kind of makes german also a bit analyitc?
For example:
Krankenhaus (hospital) contains Krank (sick, ill) and Haus (house), which makes it a house for ill people and that fits the description of a hospital.
And I love languages like that. Those compound words are just a naturally product of flexibility of the language itself. It's elegant, it works, and it conveys it's meaning succinctly.
@115040041031619384439 Actually it's "Kranken" (plural of "Kranker", an ill person) and "Haus". So a house for ill people.
But other than that, you're right ;-)
Indonesian is like that too
Example: Rumah Sakit(hospital)contains Rumah(house)And Sakit (sick/hurt/ill), (insert last three lines of Kunstrikit's comment)
German is a fusional language.
But if a language is fusional or analytic doesn't depend on compound words AFAIK, but on how it inflects words.
@@kasane1337 It would actually be Kranke-n-haus if you want to fully segment it. Because now you have the Morphemes of the word. Translated it would be Ill.person-Accusative-house (or something like that. European languages do this thing called 'Portemanteaumorphemes' where you have one Morpheme (something that conveys a meaning, be it the meaning of a word or just a case marker) and it represents several things at once (like 'Plural' and 'Accusative') and they are a bit wierd to transcribe.
Kind regards - A linguistics student with too much time on her hands.
You seem to have a few misconceptions about (Mandarin) Chinese that I've seen you repeat several times.
Chinese characters do NOT represent words, they represent concepts and/or morphemes. This is quite obvious to anyone who knows some Chinese, as Mandarin words are overwhelmingly BIsyllabic, not monosyllabic. You are conflating syllable and word, which is not true in the case of Mandarin. Each syllable does have a meaning, but trying to use an individual character as that meaning will end up in confusion most of the time. Compound words are extremely common, and often the meaning of the compound word is *not* necessarily intuitive based on the meanings of the individual characters. It would be like saying "logography" is 3 words because logo, graph, and y are each individual words. (Fun fact: the word "logograph" in Chinese is 4 characters long). Of course, it doesn't help that there's no definitive, agreed upon cross-linguistic definition of "word"...because languages like Chinese tend to make it a lot messier than it appears to be at first.
Characters are not strictly a syllabary, imo, due to the high amount of homophones (even taking into consideration initials, finals AND tones...this is why it's overwhelmingly bisyllabic). Technically each character represents 1 syllable and ONLY 1 syllable- there aren't any cases where 1 character represents several syllables as you seem to imply. But it isn't a case like Japanese where 1 symbol = 1 syllable, it's more like 1 syllable = many different symbols that vary depending on meaning.
as you rightfully say, the definition of a "word" gets fuzzy when applied to other languages, especially Chinese. for all intents and purposes, each character DOES represent a word or a particle, not just a syllable. those bisyllabic words are mostly compound words, sometimes made out of synonyms to compensate for homophony.
ye I've been in Chinese for like 4 months and I was like wot m8
ritchieyah511 你是华人吗？
the word for "nautical miles" in Chinese is 浬, sometimes pronounced "hai lee" that's two syllables in one character
@@wayneyam1262 Looking up 浬 on Wiktionary, it looks to be an abbreviation of 海里 (hǎilǐ), which is two monosyllabic characters. So I guess we could expect to see this more? The character is marked as dated, so not really used nowadays.
I'm going to invent an Abugida for english!
Good luck! ^_^
Mike Brown I did
:D
Xidnaf Yeah! Good luck! I've written a story in which I created a language. I, then, attempted to create a writing system for the language and, unknown to me, decided to use an abugida system for the written language. It was difficult at best. I found it easier to use Latin lettering and make all the sounds be represented by one letter and one letter only. In other words, G is always pronounced the same way and that's the sound heard in the word great. I also didn't use letters that could be represented by one, or more, of other letters. By that, I mean Q, X and C (except in Ch) were eliminated from the written language. I know I got into a bit of a long winded explanation of my created language, but I believed that I should explain the difficulty in creating abugida, abugidas(?).
drivernjax
व्हाई नॉट टराय देवनागरी अबुगिद टू व्राईट ईन इंग्लिश ।
Why not try Devanagari abugida to write in english
There is no memorizing at all in devnagri .. isn't it ?
bhavin katira I typed that into Google Translate and hit the speaker button. Sounded like she was drunk :-)
This is such a great video. I am amazed at the amount of research that goes into it,
BTW those chinese characters you showed were actually japanese interpretations of Hanzi. I noticed that there was the symbol 滝, with is a Kanji unique to Japanese, in chinese it would be 瀧 or 泷. The 竜 component of the character, pronounced ryū, is a Japanese simplification of 龍, the chinese simplified version is 龙. They all mean dragon. 黒, also a japanese simplification is 黑 in chinese
Errmaigawd I didn't even know this and I'm Chinese who really likes Anime. Hahaha hahaha I'm stupid
+NyanNyanSwag No you're not. It means two things. Either you learned the Japanese versions without noticing that you did. And because you learned the Japanese versions, your brain recognizes those symbols and understands what those mean, and so you don't notice that they're Japanese.
Or, because they're so similar, your brain either understands it's meaning or you just didn't notice the difference.
+Bertuğ Manavoğlu u sayin I not chi m8
TheHaibao123 So Japanese has simplified the Chinese ideograms in their own way? I thought that the simplification the Chinese government introduced last century was also applied for the Japanese Kanji.
滝 just don't be used after simplified. doesn't mean it not contained in traditional Chinese character.
Yeah, Japanese is complicated. It's really a combination of a syllabary and a logography. It uses a combination of pictograms based on Chinese characters, called _kanji_, and syllabic _hiragana_ and _katakana._ Although the entire language could theoretically be written in hiragana, many words sound the same. For example, _kami_ (かみ in hiragana) could mean paper (紙), hair (髪), or god (神). Homophones like these almost always have different kanji, and some have no kanji at all. This allows the reader to tell them apart if context is not enough.
IMO, the Japanese's tendency to capture and borrow ideas from other cultures really did their writing system in. Instead of 1 unified writing system, it has 2 (I'm counting Hiragana and Katakana as one since they represent the exact same thing, just with 2 different character sets). Now we have an extremely bastardized and inelegant system, where the Kanjis rarely ever have the same meaning as it's Chinese counterpart, verbs are written in kanji then a string of hirigans, foreign loans words are liberally thrown in, and it's almost completely impossible to create NEW words because e entire writing system is completely non-interchangeable, which is the complete opposite of Chinese, so to introduce any new or foreign ideas that came after the creation if the Japanese writing system, you just... sound it out using an already rigid syllabary. It's so utterly ugly and clunky, I wonder just what the hell went wrong in history.
Contrast that with Chinese, where the number of individual symbols might seem intimidating, but the rules and logics behind how to write each character, and how each character can fit around each other, makes it literally as easy as putting Legos together. Now imagine Japanese as a game of Tetris, where aside from a very rigid, predefined way characters can fit together, nothing else can be created.
Then we have Korean, where iirc, takes the best of both worlds: it's characters contain all the information needed to sound each word out, ala Japanese and English, and the words can also be freely switched around to change the meaning of the compound word, ala Chinese. Whoever decided to give the Korean system a complete and LOGICAL overhaul this last century really deserve the biggest props.
JapanForSale yeah, the japanese writing system(s) is/are way hella contrived but i think it/they work(s) well for the language
kanji give the meaning of the word and the kana give grammatical function
and you forgot to mention that a single kanji can have one reading or ten
but anyway, i think thats all i wanted say
it just works for japanese, even if its kind of
out there
***** Whether it "works" or not is fairly subjective and depends entirely on the demographic.
How they handle loan words is a prime example. Even after you've sounded the loan words out in romaji, you'd be hard pressed to know just what in the fuck meant unless you already knew what the meaning in their original languages. For example, コンピュータ, テレビ, or コンビニ.
The Kanji situation is even worse. The exact SAME Kanji can be read many different ways depending on the context and syntax. It's baffling. Even public officials and speakers sometimes mix up and forget the correct pronunciation, and these are educated, public figures, who're relied upon in a society that demands perfection and doesn't tolerate any public slip ups.
After all is said and done, we can all agree on one thing though: that the Japanese language is absolutely, 100% Japanese; very rigid and unbending. It works beautifully as long as it's going down the straight and narrow, but any disturbance or kink in the road and the entire system grinds to a halt.
JapanForSale the only problem I see is the kanji
if they were more regular, such as one Chinese derived reading and one native reading, plus maybe a couple of irregulars (a couple meaning maybe like 150 or so), then it would be a much less
messy? language
and I guess that's just due to the looooong history of periodic borrowing from China that there is more than one Chinese reading per kanji
+JapanForSale
computer, tv, combine...errare humanum est.
hebrew and arabic native spekers don't really write like that. like arabic IS more rounded than hebrew and all (most) of the letters connect to each other but the pictures of arabic you've shone in this video are caligraphy and no one writes like that and same in hebrew, the pictures you've shown are in print form which is only written in computers (and by 1st graders) and when we write we write in handwriting form which is more rounded yet it the letters are'nt cconnected (unless you don't give a damn and write really fast like me) and the pictures are like what is only written in prints of the bible and is full with fancy letter designs and stuff. this is what print form looks like: אבגדהוזחטיכךלמםנןסעפףצץקרשת so hebrew and arabic abjads are not that diefferent
oh, and hebrew and arabic have vowels, we only write some of them but for new learner people sometimes add dots and lines around the letters so they will know what to read, for example: מַ = /ma/, מׂ = /mo/
In Arabic we write only three vowels و ، ا ، ي that you can consider them as a constants .
We also have Harakat د we write them on letters Bā' ب can be Buh بُ/ Bah بَ/ Bih بِ/BBah بّ/ B بْ/ Bun بٌ/ Ban بً/ Bin بٍ ( they're letters not words) Usually we don't use them in daily writing we only use them in Important or religious or literature texts. We know the vowels by knowing the word like the verb "he writes" [يكتب yktb] is Yaktubu/ "She writes" [تكتب Tktb] Taktubu/ "they both write" (m.) [يكتبان yktban] Yaktuban / "they both write"(F.) [تكتبان tktban] Taktuban/ "they all write"(m.) [يكتبون yktbon] Yaktuboon/ "they all write"(f.) [يكتبن yktbn] Yaktubna and many other like we can have hundreds of words from the same root [k_t_b] like
Kitaab book
kutub books
Maktabah Library
Maktab office
Maktoob message
Katib clerk, writer
Kateebah battalion
And so on .... :)
Is it the same in Hebrew?
@@th9827 yes, hebrew has a few letters that can be used as vowels א ו י and there's niqqud which is similar to Arabic harakat, although we have around 10 niqqud symbols
@@shpilbass5743 does Niqqud means dots?! The word is similar to the Arabic word "Niqqat" and Actually there is something in Arabic called Tanqqeet which means "to put dots" they invented it to make Arabic easier to be learnt by non Arabs and do differentiate between constants like S and Sh were written like س & س but with tanqqeet it's ش & س
This is so interesting! You're the most interesting channel in TH-cam, well different people may have different interest, but amazing, there are so much information put into 9 minutes of video. Thank you.
thank you so much for these language videos, ive been looking for videos on langauge and havent found that many, and these are amazing.
Hebrew has two sets of letters, one has straight lines but the second has curved lines which is the daily used
(1:55) However, ا و ي are vowels; the middle one can be pronounced as /w/ sometimes, but the other two are always vowels. So you do write some vowels, and considering Arabic has a 3-vowel system, you have a letter for each vowel. For the word for Arabic in Arabic: العربية you got A-L-H-R-B-I-H, but pronounced /alʕarabija/. So some vowels are implied while others are written out. This is why Arabic isn't considered a pure abjad. This is why Arabic better works as an alphabet, but with several vowels just not written.
No, ي can also be pronounced as Y (/j/ in IPA). As for ا, that one is a vowel except when it occurs in word-initial position, in that case, it's an epenthetic glottal stop. So, al-Arabiyyah العربية is ʔ-L-ʕ-R-B-Y-H.
I love this video, just found your channel. Please don't stop making videos like this. Language is awesome and you pack a lot of information into one video.
I can tell how much effort u put on ur videos !! They're awesome..thank u for making them
Hey... I love Devanagiri script. We have very precise pronunciations which cannot be translated in English.
Dal - दल - group
Dal - दाल - lentils
Dal - डाल - branch
Dal - डाल - put in
Dhal - ढ़ल - to set
Dhal - ढ़ाल - sheild
Also there are complex one letter words like
मैं - "me", but the pronunciation "main" is not as it looks like in english. Its a nasal word where the 'n' is silent. There's another such word
में - pronounced as "mein", the 'n' is silent. This word is an adjective, so it is used almost in every sentence. It means "in".
So, Hindi NEEDS Devanagiri. Not for historical purpose, but for practical purpose. Its a very advanced writing system and it serves the complexity of our language very well.
All the words you wrote there can be written with Abjad though. In fact we have the same variations of this word in Urdu and all of them are written in Abjad. Here are some of these
دل، دال ڈال، ڈھال، ڈھل
@@sayamqazi but you have to learn the vowel in these words as Abjad doesn't show the vowels like Abugidas do, it is one of the problems of Abjad writing system, you don't know the vowel in the word unless you are a native speaker. This doesn't occur in an Abugida like Devnagari.
@@infinite5795 His point was hindi "needs" divangari if that was the case than how come Urdu exists. I am not saying it would not be hard etc I am just saying that it is not an argument.
I'm not sure if you've learned about it, but conjunct characters in Devanagari are pretty cool. As a native english speaker it blew my mind when I learned about how they work.
I love your channel Xidnaf! please never stop of doing videos.
Wow, I am learning SO MUCH from your videos! Thank you for making them!
Damm 8 years ago.
I love the but where you say "learn a separate symbol for every word" for English! Because that rings so true! I remember looking at some writing of mine from 6th grade, and I misspelling so many words that I now considered too easy to misspell.
I have just found this channel and it is AWESOME!
We haven't caught up with this channel in a long time. Great work Xidnaf. I love your videos on linguistics. Keep up the good work.
I loved this video! You put it all in perfect perspective!
I'm a Korean, i didn't not realize that i was watching this and undertanding almost perfectly without subtitle until i watch this about 80%. Thanks so much for your clear pronunciation. :) your explanation is also very easy to understand.
that’s such a great feeling when your studies pay off and you can watch videos in your target language!
just a heads up though, it’s “didn’t realize” not “didn’t not realize”, you don’t need to add a second negative to the phrase.
I like the syllabary. Japanese being the frame of reference, it makes a language sound very appealing and sophisticated, the opposite of guttural and primitive.
+Northern Fried Chicken ??
เป is impossible to pronounce
How can a language sound primitive, as apposed to refined and sophisticated?
hi_itsNathan well maybe it's just me, but I doubt it. Whenever cave people 'speak' in films etc, their language is usually made up of short, awkward grunts with few vowels, usually just 'oo'.
Northern Fried Chicken I didn't mean to be blunt, but your original comment was very "prescriptive" and not good for the general theory of language. The idea that certain languages are better than others is a very old one, often tied with race. The concept that any language is "better" than any other, objectively, is very hard to prove and detrimental to linguistics overall. Most linguists prefer to use terms like "is more successful" rather than "better".
What your first comment implied is that certain languages sounded, and therefore were, less sophisticated systems of communication; which is very untrue. Even languages like Arabic, which employ large amounts of sounds articulated in backer parts of the mouth and throat, the system is still true; the same semantics is still conveyed.
All these laguange videos are REALLY interesting in my opinion and the way you talk and how you explain the laguanges and words in such a simple Way even though they are not, are really wholsome.
A really cool series!!
I'm so glad to have found your channel, I'm interested in languages too and i find your work fascinating!
If I may correct something you said about Arabic, you weren't totally right about the vowel/consonant thing
Here is the more detailed story:
In Arabic, there are 3 main vowel, quite clearly said vowels: A (fAn), EE(frEE), U(rUle)
(So, in that image at 2:01 where it says "all consonants" is not right, the list does include those 3 vowels ا و ي:)) - first character and the last 2 -) (now I see that you almost corrected that at the end of the video but more on it later)
what you were talking about here, is what is called "movements", short vowels are considered a movement between "letters" (since, as mentioned, short vowels aren't considered letters in Arabic but rather "movements")
Actually, I would say that although much simpler, it's not very different from the abugeda you described in the video:
كَتَبَ kataba (he wrote)
كٌتِبَ kutiba (it's been written)
And even the idea of the short vowel being a characteristic wouldn't fall far from the Arabic-Writing system either, since if the consonant "doesn't move", something like the degree-symbol " ْ" is written above it, e.g:
مَكْتَبة maktaba (meaning, "library") notice the "t" comes right after the "k" so the k is not moving per say, (we say: it's "still" )
(as shown, all Arabic movement state symbols are written above the letter كَـ كـُ كْـ except for one كِـ) )
This system seems smart when you learn a new language for example and you don't find the place of "stress"or"accent" intuitive. There is no such thing as stress in Arabic. It doesn't make sense in this system.
However, almost no one writes those "movements", and unfortunately there are MANY places where you do need to know the movement in order to get the meaning (this also applies even with Facebook comments written in non-formal Arabic dialects), (so with 2:16 , I wouldn't agree so much)
BUT still as you implied in the video, the Arabic has much less vowel sounds so still it's not as impossible to understand as it would be in the case of English you hypothesized in the video
---
I wrote this while watching the video (with a pause of course :)) ), now that I reached 7:49 you put the letters as if they are the "movements" or the modifications as you called it, which is not the case. (if you didn't put an X on the pic it would be correct in the sense that it corrected what has been mentioned earlier about not having vowel letters :D )
one last thing, the word Abjad, I'm sure you know but worth mentioning, is almost exactly the word "Alphabet". In the sense that "alpha-beta" came a word since they're the 1st letters. "A b j d" came the words because in those ancient days they order of the letters usually was said in a word like series (abjd hoz hty klmn ..), in Arabic the literal translation to "Alphabet" is "Abjadeya", the "eyya" at the end is just a sort of a suffix.
Your videos are so interesting I'm not sure if I will be able to go sleep or just keep watching :))
Keep up the awesome work (Y)
Ripples Hi, thank you for watching my videos, I'm really glad you like them!In response to your criticism about Arabic, this is something other Arabic speakers have pointed out, as well as something I am very interested in since I am learning Arabic in college right now.
The way it was originally explained to me (and as such the way that I've become rather emotionally attached to thinking according to) is that Arabic has three short vowels (or "movements" as you call them) and three long vowels. The short vowels are written with كَـ كـُ and كِـ (am am having a lot of trouble typing them, so I'll just call them the short vowel diacritics from here on). But I also learned that you write the long vowels by writing the short vowel diacritic, followed by ا و or ي, but that most of the time these short vowel diacritics are dropped in these contexts. Whether these short vowels markers are, or are not actually implied in these contexts is something I've received mixed information about.
It seems to me that sometimes, Arabic is written with half the vowels written as diacritics (the short vowel diacritics) and half of the vowels written as letters (ا و and ي), but that most of the time half the vowels are written as letters (ا و and ي) and half are just left out. Perhaps, then, it would be appropriate to say that Arabic is usually written as a mix between an alphabet and an abjad, with an alternative system which is half alphabet and half abugida. Would that sound reasonable to you?
Xidnaf Hi again, I watched half of your videos last night, I'll finish them today. :D
I have to say again how much I appreciate them and glad to see such a channel
Regarding Arabic:
You received mixed information whether the "movement" (I'll still to this literal translation of the Arabic name because it imposes the Arabic sense of what it is) is implied before the the vowel letter (the long one) because it most of the time is, but not necessarily all the time.
I can give your examples right away but I don't want you to hate the language.
Here is the example :P , take that long breath you usually do in the videos
(warning to readers other than Xidnaf, this paragraph is kinda complicated that you might hate a lot of innocent things after reading it, like your screen for example )
Before the vowel "aa" you can only us fatha (I noticed from other comments you know their Arabic names), I guess it's obvious it's impossible to do anything else.
but before the vowel letter (uu), although mostly there would be a damma before it, it might be a fat.ha (put the dash before the h so it wouldn't seem like a "th"),
If you have a verb that ends with the "aa" vowel -here will be written as a "ya" without 2 dots below it for complicated reasons that are out of the scope of this comment, you just have to know that his is still an "aleph" - :
رمى RaMA (small letter "a" for a movement/fat-ha not a vowel letter like the last one in capital)
which means in the past tense (he threw), if I wanna say "they threw" I have to add the suffix for "the waw which indicates the plural", alright?
now because there will be a "waw"- the suffix - to add, the "aa"/"aleph" will be omitted BUT a fat.ha will be the movement of the last consonant coming before the "waw" suffix, so it will RaMaU رَمَوا (I'd say it's the Arabic version of diphthongs :D )
oh yes, that silent (only-written-but-not-spoken) "aleph" letter at the end...well, just to make things more compliated, an "aleph" in Arabic is added to the waw-suffix so it would be distinguished from other "waw"s that originally belong to the verb.
I hope that cleared a bit why although mostly likely the movement before the vowel letter will be a total match, ft.ha before aleph, kasra before ya, damma before waw, it is not always the case. (I think in many dialects we don't have the exceptions and just use the general easy case. In Syrian we'd simply say "رَمُو", I'll keep thinking of this 'cause I haven't thought about it before)
So, I think you know this, but worth mentioning, Arabic writing has always been leaning towards not writing what can be implied from the context, even the dots above or below the letter were only added late in the language's history imagine that YaKTuBu يكتب(he writes) and TaKTuBu تكتب(You write) used to be written exactly the same before the dotting system: ىكىب (even the B at the end should not have a dot below it when representing the older writing system but I can't do that on a keyboard)
So generalize that on "movements" too, no one writes them in normal daily or practical life. In fact they're given their total worth as part of the language only in written texts regarding religions and literature. Still, it's VERY rare to see some text with every single movement written, it'd feel probably annoying to almost any Arab.
What I'm trying to push here is that in Arabic you gotta treat movements and letters(vowels here) quite differently and distinguish between them when hearing speech.
Do you feel like that is easy thing for a non-Arab?
'Cz when we try a non-Arabic word in Arabic letter it's not always easy to agree on the vowels vs movements thing
Also, I'd like to ask you, was it hard for your to spot the weird Arabic consonants like ط ظ ص and distinguish them from their softer counterparts ت ذ س ?
On final question, which was the hardest letter for you to pronounce in Arabic? I heard your ع in some videos and it's not bad compared to how my non-Arabic friends say it :))
I started caring about languages mostly in the search of a well-engineered way of constructing the perfect language since Natural Languages are far from perfect. I see that you like Lojban (Y) . I don't speak it but it's my favorite among constructed languages. Can't wait to watch your video about it.
Hope this comment was helpful to you and to any reader, your channel is awesome and I will keep watching.
Peace
Ripples :D That's so cool, I hope you like them!And thanks for your explanation of Arabic vowels, this is a complicated topic that I'm trying to learn more about.
And yes, it is VERY hard for me to tell the difference between the emphatic consonants (ط ظ ض ص ) and tell them apart from their non-emphatic counterparts (ت ذ د س). The vowel quality seems to change around them, but it's still hard to hear a lot of the time.
I'd say that by far, the hardest sounds to learn in Arabic were those four, ط ,ظ ,ض, and ع .ص and ح were also pretty hard, but I think I got the hang of them much quicker. I'm very thankful for my knowledge of phonetics, if I wasn't able to read online about what people are actually doing with their mouthes when they make these sounds it would have been much harder for me to learn them.
Xidnaf I just finished all your videos :)
Whenever you have a question about Arabic just let me know I'll do my best to explain.
You can also head to my channel to hear some Syrian dialect whenever you feel like comparing things or testing how close Syrian is to formal Arabic (it is claimed to be the closest among Arabic dialects. But somehow I don't trust that 100% )
Xidnaf We in Serbia have a unique rule that every sound is one letter no matter what. Also, there are no double letters that create one sound (atleast not in our main alphabet- Cyrillic), nor there are any silent letters. Also we use both Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, so you can choose which one you are going to use. (it's advised you know them both, though).
i've watched a few of your other writing related videos in addition to this one, and unfortunately they contain a lot of errors and misinformation. you could really use to do more thorough research.
+mad dusa When I make big mistakes I do my best to correct them with annotations. I don't always do that, but for some of the more annoying mistakes you might want to check that you have annotations on.
+Xidnaf Quick Question, ARE there any actual languages nowadays that dont have a writing system?
***** Probably. Like, there are groups of people that haven't made contact with modern society yet. They probably speak languages we know nothing about and that no one's ever written down.
Xidnaf Thanks for responding! An you're talking about the people like on North Senteniel Island and stuff?
+Xidnaf Dude, most languages in the world now do not have writing systems. There are THOUSANDS of languages in the world, some of which haven't fully been documented.
Wow. Just discovered your channel, and I already love it. Can't wait to see the video on the beauty of Hangul, as I happen to be learning Korean ;D
Actually, I've already made that video! And also three others. There should be an annotation in the video that goes to that video, or you can go through my channel. Or go here:
World's Easiest Writing System: The Origin of Hangul
Glad you like my channel!
Very useful teaching tool! Lots of clear information in a very short time.
You are the most amazing person on youtube...did I mention that? This is now my absolute favorite channel on youtube. Wow.
He only has 28 videos.
Nice video.. Arabic uses small symbols on letters to indicate vowels, but there are mostly used in Arabic learning ressources for children or for the sake of clarity because you can deduce the pronouciation from word patterns and sentence stracture.
Reminds me of furigana for Japanese, which are mini-hiragana put over kanji (and sometimes katakana) in many learning resources for children or foreigners.
i only watched 2 vids of yours
but i am already sure i will eitch all of your vids this day.
cuz sleep is fo' da weak.
Great vid! You always explain stuff really well with interesting insights!
btw Hiragana*, and Chinese... well... can be said as a syllabary but then it would be one with tens of characters representing one syllable (tones included), and sometimes one character for a couple of different syllables.
Writing systems are just so messy. That's why they are 'so weird and so fascinating and so unique (Xidnaf, 2014)'!
Are there writing systems where vowels are the main part, and consonants are marked?
Probably not, as their are much more varied consonants than vowels, but I'm not sure.
777
maybe you could make one for languages with lots of vowels and lesser amount of consonants, like hawaiian or māori?
Syllabary must be the easiest language type to write poetry in since poetry is based on structured syllables
+Cyborg Koala Funnily enough, from what I know of Japanese, they almost never try to rhyme in their songs and poems because of how ridiculously easy it is to rhyme in Japanese. If you did rhyme in Japanese nobody would notice, just like if you had a comma in your sentence nobody would be impressed because it's just how the language works.
Instead I think a lot of Japanese poetry focuses more on fitting a certain number of syllables and words into each sentence.
CypherDVoid oh so that's why haikus don't always rhyme but they are always 5-7-5!
Chineese is nice too. The grammar has things like verb-object pairs, where something means the same thing. For example, 睡觉 translates to sleep some sleep, which means in poetry you can specifically refer to the action of sleeping or the state of sleeping seperately. Actually, much of the American modernist poetry movement was inspired by a guy named li bai who wrote in this fragmentary style.
The Black Eagle yeah and listen to Japanese music. They will always move the verb from the end (verbs always end in Japanese) because all verbs end the same in Japanese if they are in the same tense and aspect and all that. For example, all present or future negative verbs end in -nai and so do adjectives in the negative. So they try to move the verb to somewhere else which is technically incorrect, but it sounds better
Thank you for sharing these knowledgeable things with us!
Dear +Xidnaf,
Thank you SO much for starting this channel and blinding us with your aura of information. I thoroughly enjoy ever single video of yours because they're clear, easy to understand and we'll narrated. Keep up the good work, that amazing fact spongey brain and your doodles. You are one of my favourite channels and btw nice hat.
Louis
The problem is that although he generally seems good at a high level, he gets a lot of details wrong.... So take anything you see here with a grain of salt.
+Miles Bader thanks, I'll check what's said and needs to in the videos.
Miles Bader yes. He also contradicts himself. Like saying that Arabic doesn't differentiate words with vowels that much and then showing how vowels differentiate inflections a few seconds later.
I enjoyed your video. It was a nice introduction to the main types of writing systems around the world. I do have some issues with your presentation of Chinese though, which it seems like you corrected later on. Namely, the one-to-one ratio between word and character. Every character is a syllable and many characters can exist as independent words in Chinese, but usually a Chinese word is disyllabic. Some of the words are fairly transparent (e.g. 海洋 'ocean' from 海 'sea' + 洋 'ocean), but others are pretty obtuse (矛盾 'contradiction' from 矛 'spear' + 盾 ‘shield'). So it's really unfair to say that there aren't that many words in Chinese - it is fair to say that there are a rather fixed set of characters (50,000+?), but it's still rather amazing what this fixed set can yield. Chinese isn't in fact a true logography, but, as you eventually concluded, is nearer to a syllabary; more appropriately, a morpho-syllabic system.
+nuyarralek I think the word 矛盾 actually derives from the idiom 自相矛盾
You were mostly correct in your description of the Japanese language. It isn't consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel. It's consonant sound, vowel. The Japanese language uses the ch and sh sounds AND the n sound doesn't necessarily need a vowel modifier. For example, the Japanese word for newspaper is shinbun. Also, there is a fourth writing style in Japan. It's called Romanji. This, however, is nothing more than Japanese words written with Latin lettering. Admittedly, this system is rarely used outside of the larger cities, but it is still there.
Sh and Ch are just sounds that the English language does not have a defined character for.
*****
Along with both pronunciations of th. However, I believe that the letter c should be removed from the alphabet due to the fact that it doesn't have it's own pronunciation. But, we could use it for the ch sound. We could also place an additional mark on the letter s to make the sh sound, like the French do with c to make the s sound as in facade.
drivernjax
I have long thought about something similar.
c becomes ch
Q becomes sh
X becomes th
After that, you would have to add letters for more unique sounds.
Oh and another thing I would do, make G only make the hard G sound (like Golf) and let all the soft J sounds move over to where they should be, in J.
I would also add more vowels, to help indicate which sound is being used (hard, soft, diphthong, etc.).
*****
Interesting. However, I would use Q for the ch sound, since Q is used for the gutteral ch sound when we write other languages. Since C is pronounced S as often as K, I would use it for the sh sound. X, since it is pronounced chi (ki) in the original Greek, would be a difficult sell for the th sound, either of them. However, since the "English" alphabet borrowed heavily from the Greek alphabet for its letters, we could borrow another one for the th sound, theta.
As for the vowels, in English there are seven vowel sounds, but we only have five letters to make those sounds. The sounds are ah, eh ih, oh, oo, uh, and ee, most, if not all, other vowel sounds are actually diphthongs, the combination of two sounds to make one. For example, ehee (long a), ahee (long i), ohoo (long o), etc. I wrote a sci-fi book, it hasn't been published so don't ask about it, and created a language in which I show the different vowel sounds. I also show how, in English, we don't need a lot of the letters we currently use AND how certain letters could be replaced with others and have the same sounds. (I'm hoping to get the book published one day.)
***** I'm familiar with Swahili and a lot of Japanese words sound like Swahili.Some Japanese place like "kumamoto" is really bad words for Swahili speakers.
Very interesting, and I love Wonderbolt at the end.
This is very intriguing! Thanks for the videos :D
Korean, from what I hear, is an alphabet. Just a unique one.
Yep, I'm learning it. It's called Hangul. It's really cool!
It's kind of a semi-syllabary
@@ThisIsAlmondz It's actually just the way letters are arranged - into syllable blocks. But each block can be broken into letters.
@@carmelocellupica3235 but the letters don't work if they are used independently, they need at least one consonant and one vowel to make a sound and make sense.
The chinese ma part isn't fully correct
ma (1) = mother
ma (2) = yeah it's toad
ma (3) = horse
ma (4) = yeah it means to scold
actually yeah you are correct with that one. took me some time to figure out which word you are actually pointing to. sry
I really like your videos. They remind me of CGP Grey. Keep up the good work, man :)
:D CGP Grey is my favorite TH-camr ever and he is by far the biggest single inspiration for these videos, so this is literally the best compliment possible!!!
Your videos are presented like CGPGrey's, but for languages. Both of you are great! Subscribing.
Japanese has a fourth writting system: Romaji. It literally is just writting their words with the latin alphabet (like the phonetic translation sample you did). Fun fact: the earliest form of romaji was based on portuguese, since we were the first europeans to maintain regular contact with them.
way too many 東 in this video...
"dong"...perhaps he likes guy.
东*
loved the video. keep'em coming.
Maaaaan, Really good video and shows how knowledge can just take ours fears away! Made me understand a lot in few minutes and for an youtube channel independently made it is perfect!
Haters gonna hate.
Are there any languages that is like abjad or abugida, but with the vowels being the main thing, and the consonants are not written or just an adding?
Julien TSP ....aeuioéőáűúóüöí? I think there are more consonants than 14. My language consists of 44 sounds, and even if you remove the identicals, you still have 40, and 40-14 is 26, which is I think more than 14, and my language doesn't even have sounds like "th" or "ch", nor a nasal R (and a lot more ofc).
Máté Kovács Sorry "The problem is that there are too many consonants."
My bad
Julien TSP Now that is a fair argument...altough, if you choose to not use that much consonants as well, then you can make it work I guess....well, I'm making a fantasy world, so might as well make a language that does this.
Máté Kovács Yeah, for sure! You can with a constructed language.^^ But most of all "normal" languages have too much vowels to write it with an "alphabet vocalique" (sorry I don't know how to say it in English^^)
So, for your language, use more vowels (and diphthongs) than consonants^^
Yes, there is such a WRITING SYSTEM (not a language). Or at least very similar to what you're looking for. It is the writing system for the Hmong language. It was created by a single person, Shong Lue Yang, because all other attempts were not fitted for the language and he wanted to create an easier writing system. The syllables in the Hmong language are almost always CV, but he believed that the vowel is the most important part of the syllable. Because of that, in his writing system the symbol for the vowel is written first and then the one for the consonant (even though the consonant is the first sound and vowel - the second).
it's hirAgana, but otherwise a great vid!
one of the best channels ive seen around. sadly he stopped uploading. hopefully this person lives a good life
The syllable style of the Japanese language is why I love it so much! As long as if you can read hiragana, you can figure out how to say just about any word!
Some notes for the next version of your video:
1) English does NOT have a one-to-one correspondence between sounds and letters.
2) Arabic and hebrew DO in fact write the long vowels, just not short ones (normally, as you mention at the end). It is a common misconception that adjads have no vowels whatsoever.
3) Chinese tones CAN and in fact ARE written in the standard system of romanization of Chinese (pinyin, see: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin)
4) Hanzi (Chinese logograms) are NOT a syllabary. Different characters are used for the same syllable (even taking tones into account) depending on the meaning.
You put so much work into the video, and it's a very good idea. But perhaps you should learn a bit more about the subject matter first, or consult someone knowledgeable of linguistics. It doesn't do anyone any good to spread misconceptions.
1) When did I say it does? Actually, I explicitly talk about how it doesn't at 7:24.
2) I've been learning Arabic for a couple years now, and the way I learned it is that Alif, Waw and Ya all modify fathas, dammas and kasras to represent long vowels instead of short ones, and this is consistent with everything I have learned since. I am aware that most of the time these vowel markers aren't written, but the interpretation I learned was that these letters still modify the implied, omitted vowel markings. However, I had also heard your interpretation as well, so I presented an extremely simplified version of what I learned in order to demonstrate the basic definition of an "abjad" while alluding to the fact that it was much more complicated at 7:42.
3) I never said that Chinese couldn't be written with an alphabet. I knew about pinyin when I made this video. What I said was that tones make writing phonetically harder, which I recognize is kind of a vague, subjective statement.
4) I said Chinese is a cross between a logography and syllabary, I never said it was a syllabary, and I maintain that this is a reasonably accurate approximation of how the Chinese writing system works. The whole point of that segment at the end was to indicate that all of these terms are rough approximations that don't fully describe the mechanics of any writing system.
Thank you for your feedback. Seriously, I learn a lot and have made numerous corrections because of your guys' feedback. However, I have no intention of remaking this video.
1:05 says "Awmgeawmgew" I don't get it but someone out there will.
What alphabet is that? I don't recognize it.
ninsegtari I don't know, but I just looked at the table shown.
It's the Atlantean alphabet devised for Atlantis: The Lost Empire. They had the linguist who created Klingon try to formulate a common ancestor for every modern language. It's ridiculously underused in the actual movie, but they wanted to make a full franchise with it.
Being a speaker of three languages... well, two and a half :oD.. And each from a different language family, i've grown to become fascinated by languages and have been enjoying your videos :o)
شكرا لك :ه) وسلام عليك
3:02 correction: this is the "printed abjad" of hebrew. There's a (mostly similar) abjad, called the "written abjad" that we write with.
The written abjad is much more curvy than the printed abjad
Small note: we don't actually call it an abjad when talking, we call it an "alephbet", because the first two characters are called aleph and bet
Arabic is really hard
6:27
Ah, I thought you'd write :
*"Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz"*
But no, you didn't.
It wouldn't fit in the frame, anyway XD
But he used „Donaudampfschiffahrtsgesekschaftskapitänsmütze“
this made me laugh! thank you for such a great video, iam french and i learned english about 6 years ago upon moving from france to america. On the other hand, out of a fascination with japanese culture iam now learning japanese. I love the idea of being able to communicate with more people by being able to talk in multiple languages and just the simple feeling of learning a new language is amazing! This mustve taken alot of effort to research and understand all of these facts, thank you for sharing :D
I love this powerpoint-like video XD
1:02 says,
'Awmgeawmgaw...'
It's just 'awmge' repeated.
I think it says Oh my god
Huh weird. In Hebrew we call it "the Hebrew a-b" (a-b is like the English a-b-c and it just means alphabet. Interestingly it's pronounced alephbet)
WOW...great video...Thank you for making it and share it...
I once made a reversed abugida for my conlang (for context every word would start with a vowel and then some consonants) and it worked by taking a vowel block, and adding consonants on it
Second 'ma' at 5:58 is horse, not toad.
Japan, I will only say this once in regards to your writing systems; PICK ONE!
Completely agree!
Robert Gibson Have fun learning then. They don't have spaces in between words.
No they have to use the three,or the whole system would be recreated
kana is such a nice script, i learn japanese, memorized all hiragana, will learn katakana, and will learn kanji(chinese characters). i am not japanese but i like kana because i learn it
When the Chinese writing system is invented, it was not a tonal language. The sound elements in the language are profound, more so in ancient times but still hold up to a good extent as of today.
Does the text at around 1:00 mean anything? I tried to transliterate it and came up with AWMGE AWM GEW.
nope. pretty sure i was just putting some random characters. no easter egg here :P
It means, awmgeawmgewm.
Xidnaf yeah right...
Why doesn't hawaiian use a sillibary?
@Adam Soli pretty sure the writing system was introduced way before the king of hawaii was deposed
7:02 hahah, italian is so simple about spelling that one just have to hear the wprd to know how to wrote it.
Except for accents sometimes, it goes the same for knowing how to say a word only having read it.
The way it evolved from vernacular languages is really useful
Subbed. As a history guy who knows nothing about this, this is super-fascinating.
Good stuff, but please, can't you speak a little more slowly? It would really help us process the information more deeply, and make it less daunting for people whose first language isn't English.
Use the subtitles! It works fine for me! (They aren't perfect, though)
This may be why I tend to watch the good ones more than once. There's a lot of good ones.
Slow down the video. Xidnaf's voice is pretty high pitched in these videos so it won't sound terrible.
How is Arabic an abjad? Vowels are written as diacritics similar to devanagari which is an abugida, so shouldn't it be considered an abugida? Hebrew on the other hand does actually omit vowels.
+bahrta sai Those vowel diacritic marks are rarely actually written. From what I've experienced, they only ever use them in two circumstances: in beginner texts for foreigners learning Arabic and for children, and in the Koran.
I've heard that in classical arabic, there were very few diacritics. Most of them are new additions to the writing system to make comprehension easier
Arabic is mostly written without diacritics(which do work very simlarily to abuguidas), the only time it is written with them is when you learn a word, and most newspapers and books do not use them, because once you know the word, you don't need the diacritics.
+Xidnaf Hebrew is the same on that account, but won't that classify them both as a cross of Abjad and Abugida? its true that they are rarely used, but they can be used.
also, most poems in Hebrew are written with diacritics.
Hello! :) Arabic native speaker here! For my whole life learning and studying my language in Saudi Arabia I've always been taught that Arabic is an Abjad. I'm guessing diacritics are the "Harakat", which are the little lines/shapes under and above the letters, am I correct? If they are, then I can confirm that we NEVER use them while writing unless it's used teaching children or in the Quran, other than that they're usually omitted. After a while you memorize the words and your brain automatically assumes the word depending on the context.
So, I've been watching these videos so that I can have a deeper understanding of other languages so that I can learn to speak and write them (right now, I'm working on Tolkien Elvish and the Hylian Syllabary, since I used to be a native speaker of Elvish but then forgot it; I shit you not, my dad spoke Elvish around me when I was little to try to get me to learn it. And Hylian; well, that's because it's kind of a cross between a syllabary and an alphabet, specifically a cross between Japanese and English, but with new characters). This has definitely cleared stuff up for me a bit, and now I'm even more interested in language. I might go back and finish developing the first version of Tetcalan (fictional abjad I tried to make a few years ago).
That was a really good video. Subscribing!
What about the Cyrillic alphabet?
The Cyrillic alphabet of Russia was taken from the Greek alphabet with the addition of extra letters for the extra sounds of the Russian language that aren't in the Hellenic language. One of my favorite things about the English language is the usage of certain letter combination, th for example, that have similar, but noticeably different pronunciations. Take, for example, the words three and they. Similar but different pronunciations of the th in each word.
drivernjax Wasn't it taken from the latin alphabet with some extra letters? There are letters in the cyrillic alphabet that look like the ones of the latin but they're pronounced differently. E.g. the letter "p" in Russian sounds like an "r".
SilverWave
No, I read this some years back. The Russian "P" is the Greek Rho also "P". If you Google a comparison of the Greek and Cyrillic alphabets, you'll see how close the two alphabets are. The Cyrillic alphabet was named after St. Cyril, aka St. Constantine, a Greek missionary who went to Moravia in the 9th Century. There are several different, yet similar, Cyrillic alphabets used in the area of Europe and Asia that, at one time or another, were under Russian influence.
SilverWave It's just using different symbols for the same letters.
Cyrillic and Latin are pretty much the same alphabets. (They have the same ancestor, anyway)
What bugs me is that there are no native European writing systems, all of Europe uses a Semitic writing system.
MortuusCruor
Am I wrong or isn't Nordic Runes a wholly European writing system?
vietnamese is a tonal language, how are they able to use the latin alphabet?
They use accents which indicate which tone should be used. The Chinese language can be written in pinyin which is our alphabet with tone marks
lamo543
the point of my question was to say that, despite claims that chinese can't use anything other than logography, they can, they just choose not to.
+rankco357 Their consonants are way more compatible with latin, making it basically only a matter of creating a system for the tones themselves. Also, their old lexicon was derrived from Chinese so not only didn't fit the original system not well enough, the alphabet was easily enough adapted to make it a language that worked better, especially with globalisation and international business.
Technically, china could just change to full pinyin to suit loan words better, but China has a whole different problem: across the country, spoken language differs far too much to unify this in a non-logographical language. It already is torn into two languages (traditional and simplified), but), but with a little outside of the box thinking, you can read a traditional text as a simplified 'native', and with ease the opposite is possible as well. If they were to change to a sound-based system, no matter which one, the language barrier between many provinces would be bigger than german and dutch or spanish and italian. This could even lead to civil wars.
+PrimaPunchy i don't like the impulse of foreigners and even some natives trying to change Chinese writing. for the sake of ease of learning, but that means giving up legibility.
let me ask people 2 questions.
1. Many languages use Latin alphabet. But can they read each others languages? That is, can an English person read German and vice versa? Can a Spanish person read French and vice versa.
Furthermore can English and Russian read each other's writing? That is, why do we need more than one alphabet when they're all functionally the same?
Counter-argument: Mandarin and Cantonese speaking people can understand each other through common Chinese writing.
2. Can a layman (an average person) in Europe read and understand ancient and classical texts from 500 years, 1000 years, or even 2000 years ago? That is without special or intense courses. For example, can an average European understand ancient Roman documents and writings?
Counter-argument: Modern Chinese people can read and understand most books and poems written from 2000 years ago without special training.
Based on these 2 questions, how can one say definitively that alphabets are better than logographic writing systems?
+PrimaPunchy i don't like the impulse of foreigners and even some natives trying to change Chinese writing. for the sake of ease of learning, but that means giving up legibility.
let me ask people 2 questions.
1. Many languages use Latin alphabet. But can they read each others languages? That is, can an English person read German and vice versa? Can a Spanish person read French and vice versa.
Furthermore can English and Russian read each other's writing? That is, why do we need more than one alphabet when they're all functionally the same?
Counter-argument: Mandarin and Cantonese speaking people can understand each other through common Chinese writing.
2. Can a layman (an average person) in Europe read and understand ancient and classical texts from 500 years, 1000 years, or even 2000 years ago? That is without special or intense courses. For example, can an average European understand ancient Roman documents and writings?
Counter-argument: Modern Chinese people can read and understand most books and poems written from 2000 years ago without special training.
Based on these 2 questions, how can one say definitively that alphabets are better than logographic writing systems?
Man, this is a real time capsule.