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I love the idea of a once enthusiastic and sophisticated scribe being relegated to inscribing redundant hieroglyphics thinking "I'm a poet surrounded by idiots..."
The progression of language is always an interesting matter to consider. We often take speech and a written language for granted, but it has been key to the development of civilization and more.
As someone who actually learned to decipher those as part of training in Egyptology and Assyriology, this is fairly accurate, although I would add the following important information to what was said. As stated, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were in use for three millennia. Naturally, like every language, it was subjected to language drift. The way they were written, the rules of language, and even the vocabulary shifted in that time. So when translating hieroglyphics, you have to understand that scholars typically don't treat them as a single language, for it would be as nonsensical as trying to match say French with Latin. Similar but different enough to cause problems. So you separate these in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian. Roughly, Old Egyptian is the pyramid texts (Old Kingdom). Middle Egyptian matches the apex of Egyptian culture (Middle Kingdom) coinciding with the Ramesside epoch which saw an incredibly large production of written material in hieroglyphics, and Late Egyptian pretty much what was found on the Rosetta stone and things of that era. That still covers centuries each time. But it is already more reliable and accurate than just treating the language as singular. It evolved a lot naturally, especially with external influences.
Does this explain the inconsistencies with reading direction, or is that not an aspect language drift would change? (I guess Latin did stay in their lane for the past 2000 or so years)
@@vale.antoni Actually it does not. The reading direction is as far as I am aware, still a mystery. It seems relatively safe to assume that "searching for the direction the figure is looking" is not the way the people of that era figured it out. So there is most likely a contextual elemental that has been overlooked, but so far that's the best we have.
Wow, it's pretty awesome to have insight from someone who actually studied the Egyptian language. Thanks for providing the additional info and context!
I remember at school we were assigned to read "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (which I thought was pronounced "Irr" Tolkien because of the font used to print his name!) Anyway I was intrigued by the language printed around the end sheet papers of the book, and set out to translate them. I was delighted to find that they made sense in English! I don't think I could do it today (it's been about 60 years!) but of course now I know that Professor Tolkien's mastery was not just literature but language as well. In fact I understand that he and his brother had invented worlds and languages to play with as children!
This reminds me of a history class project we did at school back in the 1980's. We were all tasked with creating a mini newspaper from the perspective of Egyptions long ago. Everyone wrote articles in different scripts. It was a lot of fun creating our own hieroglyphics.
I'm Egyptian, we still use words from the ancient Egyptian language in our dialect of Arabic, the most common example is the word for woman, in Arabic its "imra'ah" but in our dialect we say "set" which means woman but in the ancient Egyptian language
Honestly, every so often I just so happen on a link between a Coptic word and an Egyptian Arabic one, and my mind gets blown. It helps that I am an Egyptian with Coptic proficiency, of course. That said, many of these are possibly coincidental, but if the meanings line up, and I can't see how the Arabic word is actually formal Arabic, then it's not unlikely that the Arabic word originates in the Coptic one. For example, I just so happened on the word "forg" (ϥⲱⲣϫ, I believe) that is very similar to Egyptian vernacular, both having some sense of "view" or "watchable" (I'm being very rough in translation).
Arabic I believe comes from the demotic script, I dont think muslims had a script until they reached Egypt and they used the demotic form to create their own. Shoot I just found out there's a ton of different types of Arabic
@@danielbarry5547 this is easy to refute if you've ever heard of the Nabatean script, a natively arabian script from around modern Jordan that predates Islam by at least a century. It's far from the only one, too, it just so happens to be eerily similar to modern Arabic script.
I’m glad I was busy for a while so now I can come back and binge multiple videos from this channel. I love the narrator and animations. They chose interesting topics as well!
I heard somewhere that the modern study of emojis is being taken seriously because of its potential translation problems within disputes in court cases. I thought it was a BS story, but apparently people are using emojis instead of words in situations that are beyond just sending funny texts. The world is a crazy place sometimes. 😅 p.s. adding a joke... Some people actually just like eggplant. Real eggplant. Like for food. 😂
Chinese works like this sorta with its phonosemantic compounds. 時, 侍, and 詩 for instance all mean completely different things but are pronounced similarly to 寺
As an indonesian, i thank you for providing knowledge about the origins of our ancient script, which comes from Brahmi. And our ancient script are Kawi, Javanese, Lontara, old sundanese & Sundanese
Reminds me of the little bit of Japanese I've studied: phonetic characters (two sets of them!) mixed with logographic kanji, which sometimes have the pronunciations written next to them if the kanji is thought to be too obscure.
It's also important to note that not havings simbols for vowels was quite common in tge middle east. You can see it also in hebrew and arabic for example
@@williamvunga7397i think it has to do with the idea that "Consonants" at the time were viewed as whole "Syllables". Like in Spanish: B(be) C(se) F(efe) S(ese) M(em) L(el) etc.
@@MalekitGJ but the spanish letters don't represent syllables, only single phonemes... Many languages use several phonemes to spell a specific letter, that doesn't mean that they represent whole syllables
@@el_ias2094 i know rational thinking is becoming a scarce resource but: Really? Think about what i wrote and how the Spanish alphabet "pronounce" those consonants, now extrapolate to how this would be similar to how ancient people through about their own written language.
@@williamvunga7397The Afroasiatic languages all share a unique feature of consonant "stems" in words, where you use the same set of consonants for an idea and then swap out the vowels for the different words or conjugations and what have you. So "ktb" is "writing" and kitab is the word for book. They also generally have a low number of vowels (arabic has like, 3). Then you can just recognize the words because of context.
As an Egyptian Pharaoh who ruled 2 slaves and 1 palm tree at my heyday during 420 BC (and proud landowner of a 2 meter tall pyramid for 7 minutes until it was used as a nuclear testing site for the USSR), I can confirm that your video is accurate.
As a real archeologist working for an environmental solutions firm, I recommend looking into getting the credentials anyway. That's what anyone cares about, sadly.
Just one small add on the writing sequence (from left to right (L2R) or right to left (R2L), there is also the boustrophedon way, where you alternate from one to the other each line, like a "snake". That way, it minimizes the length of your eyes reading it. Also, Egypcians could write so that 2 texts faced the center of the temple, for aesthetic reasons.
~9:55 Nfr was probably pronounced something like "Nafir" in Old Egyptian and "Nafi'" in Middle Egyptian, "Nefer" is Egyptological pronunciation. Egyptological pronunciation is not meant to be accurate, it just fills in the vowel spaces with a default "e" to make it easier to read Egyptian words out-loud without knowing how they were originally said.
I think that my knowledge of hieroglyphs has increased by an order of magnitude thanks to this video! And there i thought that Sidequest videos--which ive misses greatly--were just for fun!
This is pretty close to how Old Norse runes work as well. There was no defined spelling at first, and was pretty much sounded out, but the Futhark runes aren't meant for Norse, and because of that, spoken runes do not sound like Norse. For example, a popular variation of the runes lacked a G sound, so they just used a K. the Old Norse word for king is konungr, but if you seen it in runes, it would sound like kunukR (the R is stressed). So if you take something written in runes and SPEAK in those runes, it'll sound mostly like gibberish. Writting in Old Norse does have a few weird rules, one of which I know of is you don't write the same rune twice in a row in a word. Like the name Gunnfús in Runes would only be spelled k-u-n-f-u-s in runes. Theres no real reason we know of why they do it, but I'm willing to bet its to save time and space.
I’ve read somewhere that Egyptologists get around the lack of vowels in written Egyptian by adding an “e” when in doubt. If it seems like some ancient Egyptian words or names have a lot of e’s, they’re technically just placeholders for vowels.
This is very similar to Coptic's symbol "jenkim", which by default has an e sound (it is the Coptic symbol for a glottal stop, attaching to the letter after it as an apostrophe. It carries the following letter's sound if it is a vowel, and is otherwise a preceding e sound, at least in Lower Egyptian Coptic). I bet that this is from where the tradition began in modern academia, although I doubt the veracity of it being original ancient pronounciation at the frequency that it is used. Fun fact, the same happens whenever even a modern Egyptian feels that there are too few vowels, which happens to be a lot due to the frequency of vowels that Arabic speakers expect to pronounce (abjad scripts tend to do that to you). Since we don't feel comfortable with 2 consonant sounds in a row except separated by a syllable break (mostly), we tend to add e sounds all over the word in pronounciations, even where the pronounciation becomes incorrect, such as in a foreign language. For example, "spicy" may be rendered as "esbicy" or "sebicy". Funnily enough, this happens even to Coptic itself, as, much like other alphabet languages, it wasn't designed for the Arabic speaker to always be comfortable pronouncing it correctly. This tends to the addition of apocryphal jenkims. By the way, this trend exists with non-Egyptian Arabs as well, and may well be independent of Egyptian culture.
I studied thru art history instead of languages. I have noticed that the vowel choices have changed over a couple modern decades. Amen became Amun, for example.
An art professor taught me that the direction of the writing and etched figures had to do with how a surface was approached. When entering a decorated space it would be wrong to have anything displayed backwards. Heading inside a tomb for example, reading starts from where you start... So on your right, the figures face right. In the left, they face left. In both cases, you start reading from what is closest. To them it made no sense to go inside then read toward the exit. Especially if the intended reader is the tomb occupant. The dead person would be heading inside only once. The words and pictures might be prayers or instructions on how to deal with Anubis or Ammit, among many other challenges. No one wants to be heading into the afterlife having read backwards, half the cheat sheet as complete, jibberish. There is no telling the beasts and demons... oh wait. I need to go back out and read the other half of my tomb. A big modern issue with understanding this was that so many pieces of ancient Egyptian art was yanked out of their original locations. It was also probably considered rude to turn backwards to the Pharaoh. Etched figures, be they little birds or great big deities were meant to greet the ruler face to face. Gods do not hand out tickets to eternity backwards. Everything on the walls faced the entry to face the approaching dead. A God with its back turned is not handing you an ankh.
Glad that Jawi, Kawi, Sundaneese and javanese (hanacaraka) is recognized.. I study hanacaraka for 4 years in elementary and junior high school. But never mastered it.. Too bad..
Well, when it comes to pronunciation we cannot tell exactly - we know that it changed during millenia even in Latin. So modern Latin, medieval Latin or classical Latin sounded different despite using almost the same spelling. Luckily we can trace this evolution.
“Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.” ― James Henry Breasted,
"the christians burned all non-christian temples" "After the Islamic conquest the christians let Coptic survive as a liturgical language - Yay christianity" ...we forgot about the first part VERY quickly...
Thanks Soeakly for sponsoring this video. These video’s are really good. Why would I need an annual subscription when I can be fluent in a language in 3 months? I really doubt myself on learning 4 languages in a year.
Definetly was fascinated by hieroglyphs as a kid but have since switched to glagolitic, greek and runes. Love writing texts with them as is just has a great look to it and might get into some more scripts to comprise a text of all sorts of glyphs. Maybe we can get a video on the history of the cyrilic writing system? It is quite an interesting topic and if theres a video about hierohlyphs might as well go through other writing systems.
@julianr2736 sort of... Cuneiform. You asked about other Rosetta like stones creating big break thoughs? It is not a single big revealing stone, but cuneiform is finally being translated. It was so hard to read because it is not a single language. Apparently, it is a purely phonetic script used for several languages. A "P" sound is a P sound. T is a T, etc. So in cuneiform, the scribe could hear a Sumerian say NuT... and write that down. They could next hear a Egyptian say NuT, same thing, same spelling... but the Sumerian might mean a seed from a tree, while the Egyptian with the same sounds meant the primordial sky goddess of creation, Ra's mother (the Milkyway). Context is everything. There are a lot of cuneiform tablets that still need translating and I am not sure what languages are included. Above was just an example. Seems like AI is letting us finally read the clay tablets.
I think we've been deciphering cuneiform for a long time now, and have made big strides in it. Cueniform I heard is mostly part Syllabic and part Ideographic (contrast with Egyptian which is part Abjad and part ideographic). However, this of course depends on the language you're reading. Ugaritic for example is purely an Abjad, but Sumerian, Akkadian, and Persian I believe use Syllabics. I was taught the big breakthrough for deciphering Cuneiform was finding tablets in Persian and working our way through (especially using names, much like for Egyptian). Persian is still spoken today (with many changes ofc), so that was really lucky. Then we're working our way through Akkadian which although it's extinct, it was a Semitic language, so had many cousins still alive today (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, etc.). Then we're working our way through Sumerian, which is probably a bit harder due to it being an Isolate (not known to be related to any other language). This is of course oversimplified and likely outdated, so I suggest you do your own reading on it
@lardgedarkrooster6371 , greetings. You are right, experts (above my pay grade) have been translating cuneiform for a while now. I will not give that credit to AI. What does excite me about AI in this case is the sheer volume of cuneiform tablets that have not been translated yet. Still so much to learn. 😊 p.s. Took your advice. Began studying Sumeria specifically. Fascinating. Their potential origins especially. Thank you.
@@OublietteTight yep. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian (a Semitic language), and then that was replaced mainly by Aramaic, which was replaced mainly by Arabic. A bit sad that Sumerian is no longer spoken but I'm glad linguists are relearning it and glad you took my advice. I hope you find it as interesting as I do
@@largedarkrooster6371 I do find it quite interesting. I am only a history hobbyist, not a professional. My angle of approach is thru art history. The accomplishments of these ancient peoples are wonderful. I often find it frustrating that so much that is dug up is assumed to have religious contexts. The finding of recipes is so refreshing to me. Real people used cuneiform for real life... and we get to hear from them ages later? Again, wonderful. The educated guess that the Sumerian people came from a location that is now far beneath sea water has my curiosity peaked. How much of their advanced ideas were actually old for them? We may never know, but trying to find out is so worth the effort. p.s. my real passion is investigating other early homonid species, especially Neanderthals. How did they communicate? And 1000+ other questions.
In all likelihood hieroglyphs probably evolved to mean different things at different times, especially after the introduction of Greek, thus making it near impossible to know exactly what they meant depending on the era.
Re: inside verses outside art... context matters. I cannot tell the meaning of an ibis verses a goose, but there were intentional differences when the priests saw hieroglyphics inside verses the public outside. The temple walls included secret sacred instructions inside. Outside was propaganda. This is useful for items that are no longer in their original location in modern times. Script meant for the temple workers daily temple jobs with the Deities or meant for a tomb has a very different intent then something outside for the unwashed masses to view but not read. Such differences have a massive influence on context and therefore can help inform scholars like yourself on just what the heck they are trying to translate. Light is/was the major factor in this simple difference. Outside light in Egypt is harsh, unforgiving, it can make a surface tough to read. When looking at a pale beige wall with slightly raised details under the unrelenting sun they can just disappear. External carvings were incised, not raised. With an incised edge done deeply enough, there will always be a shadow that remains visible. But inside... incising is a nightmare to read. The spaces are already super dark, black even. Pushing a carving deep into a wall and adding more shadow while reading under flickering torch light will not work. Interior carvings were bumped up off the wall surface. They were raised, rounded subtly, meant to catch the low light and possibly appear to spring to life. Being raised made them readable and magically empowered. So so so many works of art were pulled out of their original locations before archeology became less of a rich hobby and now is about science. It helps that the ancient Egyptian sun was consistently overwhelming... verses the absolute blackness of a tomb. Ra and Kek be praised. 😊
They should rename the title. I would actually like to learn the hieroglyphics, not wait until the end to hear that I just wasted my time, sitting thru a cartoon
@tywinlannister8015 It is fascinating to read your information being shared by a word smith. Perspective is a beautiful thing. I cannot read hieroglyphics. Instead, I studied these same sources from the view point of art. I wish I could read the words as well as the pictures. I can explain why Tut's tomb has ancient mold in the paint, or why the head dresses got fancier a time passed, but I often feel illiterate. Thank you. 😊
Sorry Apple, ancient Egyptians used tablets long before you! In fact, nearby, the Ten Commandments were actually written on TWO tablets---God-Inspired! Moses broke the first and had to return for the second. Thank God, again, they were wireless!
The ad blurb about Speakly sounds like it actually is useful as a foreign language learning tool compared to that owl scammer. Any Speakly users have any feedback about it?
I enjoyed the video but the background music, *especially* after the 5 minute mark, was really really awful. It was okay at first but eventually it kind of overpowered the rest of the video.
Actually, we do not know how Latin originally sounded. Yes, Latin was constantly used during the last 2000 years, after the Roman Empire ended, but not as a spoken language.
Arguably, Latin is still used today as multipke spoken languages, thise being the Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Sardinian, Romagnol, Sicilian, Romansh, Romanian, etc.). However, obviously these are not what we think of when we say Latin. You're right in that we do not know EXACTLY how Latin sounded, but we can make a good educated guess based on the modern Romance languages, poetry, and spelling errors, plus someone who was contemporary to the time when Classical Latin was used literally wrote a pronunciation guide. I suggest you check out Polymathy and ScorpioMartianus, he does some great work on Latin and Greek language, history, and culture on TH-cam
@@largedarkrooster6371 That's like saying you know how German should be pronounced because you speak English and both are Germanic languages. Hollywood shows time and time again that this is absolutely not the case when they have an English-speaking actor (who obviously neither speaks nor understands German) speaking German in a movie. This generally sounds like their grandma's hairdresser's friend's brother's cleaning lady once heard German and is so bad that I as a German have actually problems understanding what they're trying to say most of the time. Even a pronounciation guide isn't really that much help, because you'd have to get a base line of pronounciations, which is kind of problematic if different letters are pronounced differently.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo that is not at all comparable. Latin is a direct ancestor of the Romance languages. English is not an ancestor of German, but of Proto-Germanic. It WOULD be like if 1000 years in the future, people had no audio recordings for how our modern English sounds, but reconstructed the pronunciation using literary works (especially poems, which usually have a certain prose and rhyming structure), misspellings, and knowledge of the future English languages that will have evolved from modern English dialects. Even better however if they come across a text describing English phonetics, as we have for Latin. Take the following limerick: "There once was a man in Perú Who dreamed he was eating a shoe He woke with a fright In the middle of the night To see that his dream was true." A future linguist could infer that "Peru, shoe, and true" all rhyme with each other and that "fright and night" rhyme. The reconstruction of the precise sounds would however have to be guessed at by looking at the future dialects (since they have no recordings in this hypothetical) and making connections with sound change patterns. Take the following text, possibly written by someone uneducated in "proper" English spelling (a child, someone who had a poor education, or perhaps simply an L2 English speaker): "The doctor told me I'm allergic to crushed Asians and to not eat crabs, shrimp, and lobsters." We can infer from context they are talking about crustaceans and not Asian people who have been crushed, however the two clearly sound very similar in speech as implied by the mix-up. These are very similar to how we figured out the pronunciation of Latin and why we are so sure that our understanding of Latin phonology is mostly correct. There are of course minor details to be debated on, such as the precise qualities of the vowels for instance, but we are sure of roughly where in the mouth they are produced, and again we literally have grammar and pronunciation books that are CONTEMPORARY to when Classical Latin was spoken that have shown us that most of our hypotheses on Latin pronunciation are correct. These describe how to make proper Latin sounds (such as describing final M as nasalisation of a preceding vowel).
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo not at all comparable. The Romance languages COME from Latin. English DOESN'T come from German (nor the other way around). Also, again we can tell roughly what Latin sounded like because of poems, misspellings, and a literal CONTEMPORANEOUS pronunciation guide for the Latin language, which was written because people were annoyed that foreigners were pronouncing Latin words incorrectly. The sounds of modern Romance language give us a clue as to the exact pronunciation of certain sounds that we are unsure of by seeing the patterns in cognates and reconstructing the word it came from. There are still some debates on specifics, like what is the EXACT quality of certain letters (E is generally accepted to probably be [e̞], but could probably be something like [ɛ] or [e], which in all honesty aren't that far apart to really matter in the case of Latin, which only has 5 vowels anyway)
@@largedarkrooster6371 Sorry, I stopped reading after your second sentence, because that is completely misguided. English and German are parallel languages on the same language tree, both derived from West Germanic.
p.s. Hieroglyphs = big state art in stone Hieratic = Formal documents on papyrus Demotic = short hand, quick notes, inventories, on whatever is handy Coptic = "It's all Greek to me" Super oversimplified. Wink.
![โรงเรียนดัดสันดาน นักเรียนเถื่อน..!! [โรงเรียนไดเม่]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/vRKPeXn4Fl4/mqdefault.jpg)
![Egyptian hieroglyphic alphabet [and how to write your name in hieroglyphs accurately!]](/img/n.gif)
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But I am Stalin And You are Sauce
Just started watching, I hope mjw is in it 😍
Thank you for keeping with B.C. & A.D. btw keep up the good work.
@@SirWhiskersThe3rd BCE and CE.
I love the idea of a once enthusiastic and sophisticated scribe being relegated to inscribing redundant hieroglyphics thinking "I'm a poet surrounded by idiots..."
in british english sounds better
The progression of language is always an interesting matter to consider. We often take speech and a written language for granted, but it has been key to the development of civilization and more.
As someone who actually learned to decipher those as part of training in Egyptology and Assyriology, this is fairly accurate, although I would add the following important information to what was said.
As stated, the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics were in use for three millennia. Naturally, like every language, it was subjected to language drift. The way they were written, the rules of language, and even the vocabulary shifted in that time.
So when translating hieroglyphics, you have to understand that scholars typically don't treat them as a single language, for it would be as nonsensical as trying to match say French with Latin. Similar but different enough to cause problems.
So you separate these in Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, Late Egyptian. Roughly, Old Egyptian is the pyramid texts (Old Kingdom). Middle Egyptian matches the apex of Egyptian culture (Middle Kingdom) coinciding with the Ramesside epoch which saw an incredibly large production of written material in hieroglyphics, and Late Egyptian pretty much what was found on the Rosetta stone and things of that era.
That still covers centuries each time. But it is already more reliable and accurate than just treating the language as singular. It evolved a lot naturally, especially with external influences.
Does this explain the inconsistencies with reading direction, or is that not an aspect language drift would change? (I guess Latin did stay in their lane for the past 2000 or so years)
@@vale.antoni Actually it does not. The reading direction is as far as I am aware, still a mystery.
It seems relatively safe to assume that "searching for the direction the figure is looking" is not the way the people of that era figured it out.
So there is most likely a contextual elemental that has been overlooked, but so far that's the best we have.
Wow, it's pretty awesome to have insight from someone who actually studied the Egyptian language. Thanks for providing the additional info and context!
Yeah, thanks for explaining it to us.
ive never seen someone so wrong before
I remember at school we were assigned to read "The Hobbit" by J.R.R. Tolkien (which I thought was pronounced "Irr" Tolkien because of the font used to print his name!) Anyway I was intrigued by the language printed around the end sheet papers of the book, and set out to translate them. I was delighted to find that they made sense in English! I don't think I could do it today (it's been about 60 years!) but of course now I know that Professor Tolkien's mastery was not just literature but language as well. In fact I understand that he and his brother had invented worlds and languages to play with as children!
This reminds me of a history class project we did at school back in the 1980's. We were all tasked with creating a mini newspaper from the perspective of Egyptions long ago. Everyone wrote articles in different scripts. It was a lot of fun creating our own hieroglyphics.
wait, so you didn't use the actual hieroglyphs, just made up your own?
boy that doesn't sound frustrating to read at all 🙂
I'm Egyptian, we still use words from the ancient Egyptian language in our dialect of Arabic, the most common example is the word for woman, in Arabic its "imra'ah" but in our dialect we say "set" which means woman but in the ancient Egyptian language
Better write those down for science lol
Honestly, every so often I just so happen on a link between a Coptic word and an Egyptian Arabic one, and my mind gets blown. It helps that I am an Egyptian with Coptic proficiency, of course. That said, many of these are possibly coincidental, but if the meanings line up, and I can't see how the Arabic word is actually formal Arabic, then it's not unlikely that the Arabic word originates in the Coptic one. For example, I just so happened on the word "forg" (ϥⲱⲣϫ, I believe) that is very similar to Egyptian vernacular, both having some sense of "view" or "watchable" (I'm being very rough in translation).
Arabic I believe comes from the demotic script, I dont think muslims had a script until they reached Egypt and they used the demotic form to create their own. Shoot I just found out there's a ton of different types of Arabic
@@danielbarry5547 this is easy to refute if you've ever heard of the Nabatean script, a natively arabian script from around modern Jordan that predates Islam by at least a century. It's far from the only one, too, it just so happens to be eerily similar to modern Arabic script.
@@minamagdy4126 I see what you mean, all three looked alike!
I’m glad I was busy for a while so now I can come back and binge multiple videos from this channel. I love the narrator and animations. They chose interesting topics as well!
I’ve been learning this for two years, so proud to be able to read this. Now i can finally understand the emojis my egyptian friend sends me
I heard somewhere that the modern study of emojis is being taken seriously because of its potential translation problems within disputes in court cases. I thought it was a BS story, but apparently people are using emojis instead of words in situations that are beyond just sending funny texts. The world is a crazy place sometimes. 😅
p.s. adding a joke...
Some people actually just like eggplant. Real eggplant. Like for food. 😂
Chinese works like this sorta with its phonosemantic compounds. 時, 侍, and 詩 for instance all mean completely different things but are pronounced similarly to 寺
As an indonesian, i thank you for providing knowledge about the origins of our ancient script, which comes from Brahmi. And our ancient script are Kawi, Javanese, Lontara, old sundanese & Sundanese
Reminds me of the little bit of Japanese I've studied: phonetic characters (two sets of them!) mixed with logographic kanji, which sometimes have the pronunciations written next to them if the kanji is thought to be too obscure.
It's also important to note that not havings simbols for vowels was quite common in tge middle east. You can see it also in hebrew and arabic for example
Why is that?
@@williamvunga7397i think it has to do with the idea that "Consonants" at the time were viewed as whole "Syllables".
Like in Spanish: B(be) C(se) F(efe) S(ese) M(em) L(el) etc.
@@MalekitGJ but the spanish letters don't represent syllables, only single phonemes... Many languages use several phonemes to spell a specific letter, that doesn't mean that they represent whole syllables
@@el_ias2094 i know rational thinking is becoming a scarce resource but:
Really? Think about what i wrote and how the Spanish alphabet "pronounce" those consonants, now extrapolate to how this would be similar to how ancient people through about their own written language.
@@williamvunga7397The Afroasiatic languages all share a unique feature of consonant "stems" in words, where you use the same set of consonants for an idea and then swap out the vowels for the different words or conjugations and what have you. So "ktb" is "writing" and kitab is the word for book. They also generally have a low number of vowels (arabic has like, 3). Then you can just recognize the words because of context.
As an Egyptian Pharaoh who ruled 2 slaves and 1 palm tree at my heyday during 420 BC (and proud landowner of a 2 meter tall pyramid for 7 minutes until it was used as a nuclear testing site for the USSR), I can confirm that your video is accurate.
420 every year!!
Interesting username you got there
Agreed
@@malegria9641 Yup, want one? I can give you 20% off if you buy 2 packets lol
@@malegria9641 Buy 3 get 1 for free :D
I can finally become an archeologist without college debt
Better off an Egyptologist. Archaeology is a tad too broad.
@@RipRLeeErmey Egyptology is a pyramid scheme. You learn it, realize its useless, study for PhD, teach others.
As a real archeologist working for an environmental solutions firm, I recommend looking into getting the credentials anyway. That's what anyone cares about, sadly.
Still, I feel for you for not accumulating the college debt. 😅
hahahahahaha, funny, debt, student, american, funny american kid with college debt, funny, upvote for you funny american kid, you are funny
Just one small add on the writing sequence (from left to right (L2R) or right to left (R2L), there is also the boustrophedon way, where you alternate from one to the other each line, like a "snake". That way, it minimizes the length of your eyes reading it.
Also, Egypcians could write so that 2 texts faced the center of the temple, for aesthetic reasons.
Well put.
~9:55 Nfr was probably pronounced something like "Nafir" in Old Egyptian and "Nafi'" in Middle Egyptian, "Nefer" is Egyptological pronunciation. Egyptological pronunciation is not meant to be accurate, it just fills in the vowel spaces with a default "e" to make it easier to read Egyptian words out-loud without knowing how they were originally said.
Priceless 😂😂. I grew up on the backend of Empire. His wit, humour & charm takes me back.
Another absolutely fascinating SideQuest story! Thank you, can't wait for the next one!
I think that my knowledge of hieroglyphs has increased by an order of magnitude thanks to this video! And there i thought that Sidequest videos--which ive misses greatly--were just for fun!
One of the best videos on TH-cam about the hieroglyphs.
This is pretty close to how Old Norse runes work as well. There was no defined spelling at first, and was pretty much sounded out, but the Futhark runes aren't meant for Norse, and because of that, spoken runes do not sound like Norse. For example, a popular variation of the runes lacked a G sound, so they just used a K. the Old Norse word for king is konungr, but if you seen it in runes, it would sound like kunukR (the R is stressed). So if you take something written in runes and SPEAK in those runes, it'll sound mostly like gibberish.
Writting in Old Norse does have a few weird rules, one of which I know of is you don't write the same rune twice in a row in a word. Like the name Gunnfús in Runes would only be spelled k-u-n-f-u-s in runes. Theres no real reason we know of why they do it, but I'm willing to bet its to save time and space.
Nice look into this ancient language
I find it pleasantly fitting that I could actually imagine a posh Victorian gentleman give a talk on a subject like “the history of hieroglyphics”
Big fan of Ancient Egypt and Side Quest (also those jokes at the end made me chuckle)
I Love your voice, it is so calming.
i learned Sundanese and Javanese in school, too! The alphabet was quite complicated, but nice
Are you from Jakarta?
@raidernation2163 Bogor to be precise, but my place are kinda weird, it stands on 3 city border, Bogor, Bekasi, and Jakarta
I’ve read somewhere that Egyptologists get around the lack of vowels in written Egyptian by adding an “e” when in doubt. If it seems like some ancient Egyptian words or names have a lot of e’s, they’re technically just placeholders for vowels.
This is very similar to Coptic's symbol "jenkim", which by default has an e sound (it is the Coptic symbol for a glottal stop, attaching to the letter after it as an apostrophe. It carries the following letter's sound if it is a vowel, and is otherwise a preceding e sound, at least in Lower Egyptian Coptic). I bet that this is from where the tradition began in modern academia, although I doubt the veracity of it being original ancient pronounciation at the frequency that it is used.
Fun fact, the same happens whenever even a modern Egyptian feels that there are too few vowels, which happens to be a lot due to the frequency of vowels that Arabic speakers expect to pronounce (abjad scripts tend to do that to you). Since we don't feel comfortable with 2 consonant sounds in a row except separated by a syllable break (mostly), we tend to add e sounds all over the word in pronounciations, even where the pronounciation becomes incorrect, such as in a foreign language. For example, "spicy" may be rendered as "esbicy" or "sebicy". Funnily enough, this happens even to Coptic itself, as, much like other alphabet languages, it wasn't designed for the Arabic speaker to always be comfortable pronouncing it correctly. This tends to the addition of apocryphal jenkims. By the way, this trend exists with non-Egyptian Arabs as well, and may well be independent of Egyptian culture.
I studied thru art history instead of languages. I have noticed that the vowel choices have changed over a couple modern decades. Amen became Amun, for example.
An art professor taught me that the direction of the writing and etched figures had to do with how a surface was approached. When entering a decorated space it would be wrong to have anything displayed backwards. Heading inside a tomb for example, reading starts from where you start...
So on your right, the figures face right. In the left, they face left. In both cases, you start reading from what is closest. To them it made no sense to go inside then read toward the exit. Especially if the intended reader is the tomb occupant. The dead person would be heading inside only once. The words and pictures might be prayers or instructions on how to deal with Anubis or Ammit, among many other challenges. No one wants to be heading into the afterlife having read backwards, half the cheat sheet as complete, jibberish. There is no telling the beasts and demons... oh wait. I need to go back out and read the other half of my tomb.
A big modern issue with understanding this was that so many pieces of ancient Egyptian art was yanked out of their original locations.
It was also probably considered rude to turn backwards to the Pharaoh. Etched figures, be they little birds or great big deities were meant to greet the ruler face to face. Gods do not hand out tickets to eternity backwards. Everything on the walls faced the entry to face the approaching dead. A God with its back turned is not handing you an ankh.
Honestly one of the best most educational videos I have ever watched. And I recently survived going thru chem in college and passed Organic Chem 2.
I didn't recognize "oodj-ah" when you said it, but I did recognize the hieroglyphs as part of "`anx, wdja, sneb".
Side quest continues to make amazing videos!
Glad that Jawi, Kawi, Sundaneese and javanese (hanacaraka) is recognized..
I study hanacaraka for 4 years in elementary and junior high school.
But never mastered it.. Too bad..
@@muhammadazrilnaufalmakmur Nah, senasib..
Meski kita nyampai dilevel medioker.. Tapi kan kita sudah ikut berperan aktif melestarikan.. He he he
Well, when it comes to pronunciation we cannot tell exactly - we know that it changed during millenia even in Latin. So modern Latin, medieval Latin or classical Latin sounded different despite using almost the same spelling. Luckily we can trace this evolution.
Good work
Thanks
A good day to start off with a SideQuest video.
2:42 the most zased sentence spoken on this channel.
Jokes aside, lovely video!
favorite video ever
Good show sidequest. Have my thumbs up as usual...
“Very often conditions are recorded as observable "under thy fingers" [...] Among such observations it is important to notice that the pulsations of the human heart are observed.”
― James Henry Breasted,
"the christians burned all non-christian temples"
"After the Islamic conquest the christians let Coptic survive as a liturgical language - Yay christianity"
...we forgot about the first part VERY quickly...
yeah, i usually like this guy's videos but he inserted his own personal religious beliefs into this one way too much.
This is a very very elaborate add!
Hooray for SideQuest
God, I love this channel
So you're saying that beauty could be pronounced 25 different ways, including Nafar, Nifir, Nofor, and Nufur, but we just chose Nefer?
Good Show 🧐
Lots of great information in this
Thanks Soeakly for sponsoring this video. These video’s are really good. Why would I need an annual subscription when I can be fluent in a language in 3 months? I really doubt myself on learning 4 languages in a year.
Or you could learn a language 4 times
LOL
Definetly was fascinated by hieroglyphs as a kid but have since switched to glagolitic, greek and runes. Love writing texts with them as is just has a great look to it and might get into some more scripts to comprise a text of all sorts of glyphs.
Maybe we can get a video on the history of the cyrilic writing system? It is quite an interesting topic and if theres a video about hierohlyphs might as well go through other writing systems.
@julianr2736 sort of... Cuneiform. You asked about other Rosetta like stones creating big break thoughs? It is not a single big revealing stone, but cuneiform is finally being translated. It was so hard to read because it is not a single language.
Apparently, it is a purely phonetic script used for several languages.
A "P" sound is a P sound. T is a T, etc.
So in cuneiform, the scribe could hear a Sumerian say NuT... and write that down. They could next hear a Egyptian say NuT, same thing, same spelling... but the Sumerian might mean a seed from a tree, while the Egyptian with the same sounds meant the primordial sky goddess of creation, Ra's mother (the Milkyway).
Context is everything. There are a lot of cuneiform tablets that still need translating and I am not sure what languages are included. Above was just an example. Seems like AI is letting us finally read the clay tablets.
I think we've been deciphering cuneiform for a long time now, and have made big strides in it. Cueniform I heard is mostly part Syllabic and part Ideographic (contrast with Egyptian which is part Abjad and part ideographic). However, this of course depends on the language you're reading. Ugaritic for example is purely an Abjad, but Sumerian, Akkadian, and Persian I believe use Syllabics. I was taught the big breakthrough for deciphering Cuneiform was finding tablets in Persian and working our way through (especially using names, much like for Egyptian). Persian is still spoken today (with many changes ofc), so that was really lucky. Then we're working our way through Akkadian which although it's extinct, it was a Semitic language, so had many cousins still alive today (Arabic, Hebrew, Aramaic, Amharic, etc.). Then we're working our way through Sumerian, which is probably a bit harder due to it being an Isolate (not known to be related to any other language). This is of course oversimplified and likely outdated, so I suggest you do your own reading on it
@@largedarkrooster6371 Influential Sumerian had no derivative languages? Wild.
@lardgedarkrooster6371 , greetings. You are right, experts (above my pay grade) have been translating cuneiform for a while now. I will not give that credit to AI. What does excite me about AI in this case is the sheer volume of cuneiform tablets that have not been translated yet. Still so much to learn. 😊
p.s. Took your advice. Began studying Sumeria specifically. Fascinating. Their potential origins especially. Thank you.
@@OublietteTight yep. It was gradually replaced by Akkadian (a Semitic language), and then that was replaced mainly by Aramaic, which was replaced mainly by Arabic. A bit sad that Sumerian is no longer spoken but I'm glad linguists are relearning it and glad you took my advice. I hope you find it as interesting as I do
@@largedarkrooster6371 I do find it quite interesting. I am only a history hobbyist, not a professional. My angle of approach is thru art history. The accomplishments of these ancient peoples are wonderful. I often find it frustrating that so much that is dug up is assumed to have religious contexts. The finding of recipes is so refreshing to me. Real people used cuneiform for real life... and we get to hear from them ages later? Again, wonderful.
The educated guess that the Sumerian people came from a location that is now far beneath sea water has my curiosity peaked. How much of their advanced ideas were actually old for them? We may never know, but trying to find out is so worth the effort.
p.s. my real passion is investigating other early homonid species, especially Neanderthals. How did they communicate? And 1000+ other questions.
Something on Pahlavi or Cuneiform please!
9:05 'Wildly inconsistent' is another way to say 'artistic' 😏
Couldn't come with a good-it's all Greek to me joke 😁
Great video clearing up how Egyptians complicated their own language 😁
In all likelihood hieroglyphs probably evolved to mean different things at different times, especially after the introduction of Greek, thus making it near impossible to know exactly what they meant depending on the era.
Re: inside verses outside art... context matters. I cannot tell the meaning of an ibis verses a goose, but there were intentional differences when the priests saw hieroglyphics inside verses the public outside. The temple walls included secret sacred instructions inside. Outside was propaganda.
This is useful for items that are no longer in their original location in modern times. Script meant for the temple workers daily temple jobs with the Deities or meant for a tomb has a very different intent then something outside for the unwashed masses to view but not read. Such differences have a massive influence on context and therefore can help inform scholars like yourself on just what the heck they are trying to translate.
Light is/was the major factor in this simple difference. Outside light in Egypt is harsh, unforgiving, it can make a surface tough to read. When looking at a pale beige wall with slightly raised details under the unrelenting sun they can just disappear. External carvings were incised, not raised. With an incised edge done deeply enough, there will always be a shadow that remains visible.
But inside... incising is a nightmare to read. The spaces are already super dark, black even. Pushing a carving deep into a wall and adding more shadow while reading under flickering torch light will not work. Interior carvings were bumped up off the wall surface. They were raised, rounded subtly, meant to catch the low light and possibly appear to spring to life. Being raised made them readable and magically empowered.
So so so many works of art were pulled out of their original locations before archeology became less of a rich hobby and now is about science. It helps that the ancient Egyptian sun was consistently overwhelming... verses the absolute blackness of a tomb. Ra and Kek be praised. 😊
Now we know how to talk like an Egyptian I want to walk like an Egyptian
Bangles style or Steve Martin? 😅
I don't get why you don't have more subscribers. Great videos!
This early hoorah!!
"Nefaar" means beauty, but sounds like the perfect name for a Disney villain 😂❤
Nefaarious
Nefer made me imagine the word mirror...
As in reflect or observe...
wow, wild. so interesting
They should rename the title. I would actually like to learn the hieroglyphics, not wait until the end to hear that I just wasted my time, sitting thru a cartoon
You said it,so condescending towards us curious beans
@tywinlannister8015
It is fascinating to read your information being shared by a word smith. Perspective is a beautiful thing. I cannot read hieroglyphics. Instead, I studied these same sources from the view point of art. I wish I could read the words as well as the pictures. I can explain why Tut's tomb has ancient mold in the paint, or why the head dresses got fancier a time passed, but I often feel illiterate. Thank you. 😊
I know some hieroglyphics horned viper,lake,unknown,shelter,loaf of bread,folded cloth,vulture,quail chick,reed leaf,stool,hot stand,fore arm,leg,hand,mouth,rope,hobble rope,owl,hillside,basket,snake,cow belly,water,double reed leaf,door bolt,
legendary
I love egypt
AWESOME
Yes
Interesting!
This reminds me of Really Wild Animals with Dudley Moore
Nicee i love the ancient history , is really crazy the Mummy we're used for train 🚂 fuel , medicine 🧪 or paint ...
It can be used as a reference for my exam.
I can feel myself becoming smarter while watching this video
Sorry Apple, ancient Egyptians used tablets long before you! In fact, nearby, the Ten Commandments were actually written on TWO tablets---God-Inspired! Moses broke the first and had to return for the second. Thank God, again, they were wireless!
After all these millennia evolving languages we now going back to the logogramic language
Babe wake up, sidequest droped a vid, lets goooo
Hahaha
The only reason to learn Egyptian hieroglyphs is to teach it to other people; in other words, it's a pyramid scheme.
can I learn coptic with speakly?
3:23 don't know how many layers of irony that is
4:00 Yes, as all things eventually do for some reason, it wound up in Britain.
God save the ̶Q̶u̶e̶e̶n̶ King.
(I’ll never get used to that.)
EPIC VIDEO ! NEXT: GREEK
It's funny that their writing is so similar to how I take notes.
The ad blurb about Speakly sounds like it actually is useful as a foreign language learning tool compared to that owl scammer. Any Speakly users have any feedback about it?
10:05 the scribes probably charged by the hieroglyph?
who knew that emojis could be historically relevant?
I enjoyed the video but the background music, *especially* after the 5 minute mark, was really really awful. It was okay at first but eventually it kind of overpowered the rest of the video.
love you
Thanks bro
Can you do a video on asian kingdoms or empires
Actually, we do not know how Latin originally sounded. Yes, Latin was constantly used during the last 2000 years, after the Roman Empire ended, but not as a spoken language.
Arguably, Latin is still used today as multipke spoken languages, thise being the Romance languages (Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, French, Occitan, Italian, Sardinian, Romagnol, Sicilian, Romansh, Romanian, etc.). However, obviously these are not what we think of when we say Latin. You're right in that we do not know EXACTLY how Latin sounded, but we can make a good educated guess based on the modern Romance languages, poetry, and spelling errors, plus someone who was contemporary to the time when Classical Latin was used literally wrote a pronunciation guide. I suggest you check out Polymathy and ScorpioMartianus, he does some great work on Latin and Greek language, history, and culture on TH-cam
@@largedarkrooster6371 That's like saying you know how German should be pronounced because you speak English and both are Germanic languages. Hollywood shows time and time again that this is absolutely not the case when they have an English-speaking actor (who obviously neither speaks nor understands German) speaking German in a movie. This generally sounds like their grandma's hairdresser's friend's brother's cleaning lady once heard German and is so bad that I as a German have actually problems understanding what they're trying to say most of the time. Even a pronounciation guide isn't really that much help, because you'd have to get a base line of pronounciations, which is kind of problematic if different letters are pronounced differently.
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo that is not at all comparable. Latin is a direct ancestor of the Romance languages. English is not an ancestor of German, but of Proto-Germanic. It WOULD be like if 1000 years in the future, people had no audio recordings for how our modern English sounds, but reconstructed the pronunciation using literary works (especially poems, which usually have a certain prose and rhyming structure), misspellings, and knowledge of the future English languages that will have evolved from modern English dialects. Even better however if they come across a text describing English phonetics, as we have for Latin.
Take the following limerick:
"There once was a man in Perú
Who dreamed he was eating a shoe
He woke with a fright
In the middle of the night
To see that his dream was true."
A future linguist could infer that "Peru, shoe, and true" all rhyme with each other and that "fright and night" rhyme. The reconstruction of the precise sounds would however have to be guessed at by looking at the future dialects (since they have no recordings in this hypothetical) and making connections with sound change patterns.
Take the following text, possibly written by someone uneducated in "proper" English spelling (a child, someone who had a poor education, or perhaps simply an L2 English speaker):
"The doctor told me I'm allergic to crushed Asians and to not eat crabs, shrimp, and lobsters."
We can infer from context they are talking about crustaceans and not Asian people who have been crushed, however the two clearly sound very similar in speech as implied by the mix-up.
These are very similar to how we figured out the pronunciation of Latin and why we are so sure that our understanding of Latin phonology is mostly correct. There are of course minor details to be debated on, such as the precise qualities of the vowels for instance, but we are sure of roughly where in the mouth they are produced, and again we literally have grammar and pronunciation books that are CONTEMPORARY to when Classical Latin was spoken that have shown us that most of our hypotheses on Latin pronunciation are correct. These describe how to make proper Latin sounds (such as describing final M as nasalisation of a preceding vowel).
@@MyRegardsToTheDodo not at all comparable. The Romance languages COME from Latin. English DOESN'T come from German (nor the other way around). Also, again we can tell roughly what Latin sounded like because of poems, misspellings, and a literal CONTEMPORANEOUS pronunciation guide for the Latin language, which was written because people were annoyed that foreigners were pronouncing Latin words incorrectly. The sounds of modern Romance language give us a clue as to the exact pronunciation of certain sounds that we are unsure of by seeing the patterns in cognates and reconstructing the word it came from. There are still some debates on specifics, like what is the EXACT quality of certain letters (E is generally accepted to probably be [e̞], but could probably be something like [ɛ] or [e], which in all honesty aren't that far apart to really matter in the case of Latin, which only has 5 vowels anyway)
@@largedarkrooster6371 Sorry, I stopped reading after your second sentence, because that is completely misguided. English and German are parallel languages on the same language tree, both derived from West Germanic.
been a while since this video. hope everything is ok
and how factor the Goa'uld into this?
If you want to know how ancient egypcian sounded, just watch the movie _Stargate_ 😎
Something is sus i can feel it, 2 vids in 1 month
p.s. Hieroglyphs = big state art in stone
Hieratic = Formal documents on papyrus
Demotic = short hand, quick notes, inventories, on whatever is handy
Coptic = "It's all Greek to me"
Super oversimplified. Wink.
He sounds like the guy from the Stanley parable
👍🏻
Considering practically no ancient egyptian can read, even the Pharoah. Heiroglyphics is more akin to vandalism on walls than a written language.
Hold on...did I just see you say that Korean Hangul came from Tibetan Phags Pa? Snapping my fingers everywhere in the air right now ತ_ತ
Why didn't the Ancient Egyptians have Microsoft Word?
Because it was a pain writing the program in hieroglyphs
❤❤❤❤