Why Are There So Many Alphabets in the World's Languages?

Рет қаралды 13,199

3 жыл бұрын

So many writing systems exist in the world's languages, but did you know that we can categorize these into six main different categories? This video will cover everything about the writing systems of the world's languages. This video will explain the Korean alphabet, the Latin, Cyrillic, Armenian, and Greek alphabets, the Arabic and Hebrew alphabet, as well as the writing systems of Japanese and Chinese. We will explore the three different writing systems of Japanese: Kanji, Hiragana, and Katagana as well as Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics.
The main orthographic categories that we look at are alphabets, abugidas, abjads, syllabaries, logosyllabaries and featural alphabets.
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Borgwaldt, Susanne R. (Ed.). (2013). Typology of Writing Systems. John Benjamins Publishing Company.
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Пікірлер: 61

@TheTravellingLinguist 2 жыл бұрын

Which writing system do the languages that you know use? 😄✍

@parmaxolotl 3 жыл бұрын

Actually, what makes Hangeul featural is not the letter blocks, but the fact that the letters have smaller parts describing their sounds. Many characters add an extra line to show that they are aspirated (have an "h" sound after them), and they are mostly shaped roughly like your mouth while making the sounds. The Latin alphabet has some of this, as G was originally created by adding a line to C, and j was created by adding a tail to i (j originally made the "y" sound, and i originally made the "ee" sound, which are pretty similar and therefore were not written differently by the Romans).

@orionasmb 3 жыл бұрын

I love this channel, keep up the good work :)

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Thank you!

@cheyenne3882 3 жыл бұрын

Good stuff, thanks for what you do!

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for watching! :) Glad you enjoyed!

@kike9315 3 жыл бұрын

Great video dude! Very interesting content :D

@JmKrokY Жыл бұрын

1:10 Bosnia and Herzrgovina uses *both* Cyrilic and Latin actually, and more of them use Latin alphabet

@kalamay 3 жыл бұрын

You deserve a lot of subscribers!

@AhmadLad 3 жыл бұрын

Amazing channel. I've just watched all your vids. To be "frank", I think you should rename it to "Le Traveling Linguist" as for now it's mostly about french.

@nanaramishvili4499 Жыл бұрын

You missed Georgien alphabet they have three kind of writing sistems ,the encient in the world .they are called Nukkuri .xkucuri and Mkhedruli.but today they use only Mkhedruli.

@alegoncalves472 Жыл бұрын

Amazing video! Greetings from Venezuela :)

@wierdo-jc7xv 2 жыл бұрын

1:14 you missed the Georgian Mkhedruli Alphabet.

@user-hp9dd1iq9b 3 жыл бұрын

1:06 Also Serbian, Montenegrin, Belarusian, Kazakhstanian, Kyrgyzstanian, Mongolian, Tajikistanian, Uzbekistanian and around 100 others languages! :)

@basiCKschool 8 ай бұрын

Merci. Obrigado

@RonaldMcPaul 3 жыл бұрын

Interesting that Korean is kind of in it's own category.

@FryJones Жыл бұрын

The Korean writing system is my all-time favorite. It's such a testament to efficiency, cooperation, logic and progress

@ashaydwivedi420 3 жыл бұрын

très bien 👍

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Merci Ashay! :)

@ashaydwivedi420 3 жыл бұрын

@@TheTravellingLinguist hey this is sorta random but I'm a Hindi speaker and oh my god, you pronounced Devanagari so perfectly. Keep shining buddy

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

@@ashaydwivedi420 I spent several minutes trying to make sure I got the pronunciation right haha! Glad I nailed it - thank you! 😅

@wanwall151 Жыл бұрын

When the Arabic language is shown I was wondering why is the word for book (Kitab) so weirdly spelled then I noticed it was written left to right 😅

@obsidionwolf9052 3 жыл бұрын

Woot Woot!

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Agreed!!

@SchmulKrieger 3 жыл бұрын

I thought the video was »Why« are there so many and not Which.

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Possible future video! I'm pretty sure that the alphabet came out of an abjad. Phoenecian (I believe) was an abjad and the Greek alphabet came from the Phoenecian alphabet. Ancient Greeks felt they weren't able to effectively write Greek in an abjad, so the alphabet was created. Again, if I'm remembering this correctly

@SchmulKrieger 3 жыл бұрын

@@TheTravellingLinguist, what's about the Mycenaean syllabic script?

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

@@SchmulKrieger From a quick search, it looks like possibly a syllabary. It would be super cool to do a video on writing systems of ancient languages! I'll add it to my list :)

@sealdew5348 3 жыл бұрын

A neww videooo

@kirilvelinov7774 Жыл бұрын

Some areas of Thailand use Hindi letters

@kirilvelinov7774 Жыл бұрын

So technically Thainagari is an Abjad

@BBarNavi 3 жыл бұрын

kanji doesn't rhyme with candy

@adriennefloreen 3 жыл бұрын

Why are Hiragana and Katakana syllabaries not abugidas? Because some of the symbols with the same vowels or consonants don't look similar enough to each other? Some, on the other hand, do, though. Also, why do they call the Hebrew and Arabic writing systems "an alphabet" when they teach them in textbooks? I always explained Arabic as an "alphabet" that was written in cursive where some of the vowels were not always written, when explaining how to write Arabic to people who haven't studied it, but I always write in fully vocalized Arabic meaning including the little accent marks for vowels that aren't always written so people who aren't fully literate in Arabic can read what I am writing. The only texts that are always vocalized in countries where Arabic is spoken are religious texts where prayers and stuff have to be pronounced perfectly and books meant to teach young children to read. But adults who didn't get a good education can still struggle to read things like newspapers. For the same reason I can't understand why Japan still uses Kanji when they have two perfectly good phonetic writing systems. (Or for that matter why English and French haven't gone phonetic...) Anyway I was chuckling when I watched this video because you used a bunch of languages as examples that I talked about in my last video that I sent you a link to, even Georgian. Glad you enjoyed my video and were inspired by it!

@TheTravellingLinguist 3 жыл бұрын

Thanks for sharing! I don't recall receiving any messages or video links from you so it sounds like pure coincidence. My info comes from a book (references in the description). Feel free to share anything you think is cool though. Instagram is usually the best way to get a hold of me :)

@adriennefloreen 3 жыл бұрын

@@TheTravellingLinguist Here is a link to my most recent video which was about this weird toy we got my son that claimed to teach the body parts in 12 languages including 9 written in the Latin alphabet, Russian, Japanese, and Chinese, but came without the Chinese cards. Also by the way came with no pronunciation guide for the child or parents who might not speak all 12 (or 11) languages. After reading several Russian words because I can read Russian or the Cyrillic alphabet, I went on a long rant about the toy and suggested that they should include a pronunciation guide and also suggested numerous other languages they should make cards for including several you featured in your video such as Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, and even the somewhat obscure Georgian language. Here is a link to my video. kzfaq.info/get/bejne/jq-hjap51qeop4U.html

@parmaxolotl 3 жыл бұрын

Abugidas have base characters for syllables, and the vowel can be changed with special marks. Let's say the letter "o" makes the "ka" sound, but you want to make a "ke" sound. What do you do? You can use a mark like ~ for the "e" sound, so "õ". Japanese's solution to this problem would be to use an entirely different letter. Mostly. Sometimes, Japanese behaves like an abugida. To make the syllable "ti", which only appears in foreign words, you get the symbol for "te", and put a tiny "i" next to it. Also, abugidas often have a vowel-cancelling symbol, in case you wanted to just write a "k" instead of a "ka".

@adriennefloreen 3 жыл бұрын

@@parmaxolotl I noticed that in Japanese the words with similar vowels had some of the same or similar characteristics vs Hindi where the similarities were in the consonants and differences were in the vowels. For example all the symbols in Katakana that end in an "I" (ee) have a double line in them. There's also for example, he, be, pe, and gu in Katakana, look at the symbols and you'll understand what I'm saying, they are related to each other, just not linearly like in Hindi for example. In my opinion it's an Abugida from a different perspective.

@parmaxolotl 3 жыл бұрын

@@adriennefloreen I'll have to disagree with you there. It's coincidental, as all the kana were derived from simplified kanji.

@Naruto-hc7oo 2 жыл бұрын

where is Georgian 🇬🇪 we have 3 type of alphabets

@amymcalexander4370 Жыл бұрын

合理囖

@indiafirst3676 2 жыл бұрын

🇮🇳भारत से आपको नमस्ते🙏

@mariamcogill45 Ай бұрын

🀄

@nikagavtadze6267 10 ай бұрын

Georgian language?

@warbearin 2 жыл бұрын

It seems some of these writing systems are just overly complicated. I'm sure they all have their own way of working but the latin alphabet seems the most efficitent.

@Hayan_Yeou Жыл бұрын

Latin isn't the most efficient. Because the meaning of being efficient can be vary from people to people. For example, Chinese letters, while they have god knows how many letters in their system, all got meaning for each letter. This means they can usually convey more message with less letter. Korean on the other hand, is more efficient when typing. Left side of the keyboard are consonants. Right side are the vowels. Unlike LATIN keyboards, this allows us to type left right left right, meaning we can type faster and more efficient without any need to use one side of the keyboard all the time. Further, the writing system itself is easy to learn. It was designed to be like that in the first place. I'm not even gonna talk about other languages since I do not know much about them. But you do need to come out of your tiny world where latin alphabet is seemingly most efficient.