I have a two videos in the works about conlanging in the future, one going over two of my personal conlangs, and another about a conlang I tried making with a group of friends.

@@TrueSchwar That's great! Looking forward to it.

Can you write Ithkuil or latinized Klingon already? 🤣

Same!

@@whohan779 nope

I saw that, but honestly don't think King Sejong would have done it all himself. While I can definitely see it being the case that he didn't order scholars to do it, I also don't really see the case that he made it himself. He had to have some support from the scholars, even a small minority. How else would the script have spread. King Sejong may have been great, but I doubt he himself would go out and spread the script he invented by himself. He would need at least some support from some scholars who may have supported his vision.

@@TrueSchwar Creating the alphabet and spreading it are two different things, and at issue here is who created the alphabet. In fact, naïvely one may think that it is easier for a king to spread a newly created alphabet than to invent one himself. The Sejong Sillok (세종실록), the official annals of the king's reign, records in December 1443 that he 'personally created (chinje 친제) the twenty-eight letters of the vernacular script.' There is no record of the alphabet before this entry, meaning that it was probably announced only after the letters were already created. Out of all the accomplishments of his reign, this was the only instance in which the king was personally credited. From the records, we also know that the king was greatly interested in Chinese phonetics and phonemics, and when there was a petition against the new alphabet from Choe Malli, the king is recorded to have replied 'What do you know about phonology?' 'Analysis of the Debate Surrounding the Inventor of Hunminjeongeum' by Myeonghui Cheon (2019) gives a detailed overview of the current state of scholarship. Sejong's sole invention is the majority position supported by historical records and researchers: 'Denying the sole invention of Hunminjeongeum by King Sejong without presenting any evidence that can override the veracity of the historical resources of the official records and publications can be defined as the results of unscientific imagination.'

@@challalla huh, fascinating. Guess I have to do a bit more personal research into the origin of Hangul I guess.

@@TrueSchwar but a king coming up with an entire script sounds a lot like political propaganda. It could've happened, and historically speaking, weirder things have happened, but it just seems too on the nose

@@challalla I think either way it would have been beneficial to attribute it to the king himself, to shield it and commoners who would use it from the nobles' discontent. But if you are going to say that, then you could just as well have the king personally create it. It would be an extremely simple job for the king to choose the symbols as long as the base logic was thought through, and that you can easily count as the king creating it. However, I also have to say that the decision to publish it and to let the common people use it speaks much more about his virtues as a king, than whether or not it was his own personal pet project that he made entirely by himself.

Haha, thanks for the warm welcome. I have a few video ideas about the Chinese writing system and related scripts in the works, so stay tuned!

Interesting, from my readings, I had gathered the traditional Yi logography has been dead since the 1973 reform. It's nice to know that the logography is still alive, even if it's only to a small extant in religious and scholarly communities. Unfortunately in 40~50 years, the traditional script may disappear as it appears that use is declining. Though I would love to hear if what little research I did is wrong as well. Are you a speaker of Yi, or just an enthusiast?

@@TrueSchwar I'm Chinese and I happen to run into an enthusiast on Bilibili who is from the Yi ethnicity and culture so he talked a lot about the script in his videos but I don't know too much myself. It's unfortunate how poorly publicized the Yi script is even domestically in China.

An even better example for another logographic system would be the Naxi Dongba script.

@@deacudaniel1635 I think its more of a mnemonic system and not quite a complete writing system tho

@@My-nl6sg I didn't know logographic Yi is still used today.I've only seen Yi sillabary until now...I guess, so I didn't count Yi as a logographic script still used today.However, although Naxi symbols are not considered a true writing system, it resembles a logographic script a lot, in the way it's structured.

When you say you finished learning Cyrillic, did you learn all the usages? Like Serbian, Kazakh, Tatar? A lot of people who say they have learned Cyrillic, has only learned the Russian usage of it.

@Liggliluff I only want to learn Russian though. The reason I wanted to learn the scripts are just I can recognize the words and type them with my keyboard so I can google something in Russian. Well to get a level of fluency in that language is probably too hard for me and takes so much time.

i don't think they intended to show all of them, because there are की and a lot more.

flag of South Sudan as a pfp? interesting lol

Thanks for the sub, and thank you for the comment! Though, can I really call myself underrated when I only have two videos posted?

@@TrueSchwar Absolutely you can

@@n0us. I just like the design 🤷‍♂️

Ah! Thanks for pointing that out.

​@@TrueSchwar Hello again. did a little research and found out that "кириличен" is the word Cyrillic as an adjective in the Macedonian language.(the noun is almost the same "кирилица") So technically you are correct. It's just that in ordinary speech (I think in almost all Slavic languages ​​using this alphabet) they use the noun Cyrillic and not the phrase Cyrillic alphabet. So this got me confused. sorry :)

May I Know Why Brahmi Script is Weird ?

@@bhangura3026 No, no, Brahmi script doesn't do this, it's just the basis for tibetan. Hence me going ???? Why are you suddenly putting letters on top or below?

Kadazan and Hungarian have vowel harmony. So does that mean they're related too?

Don’t know why I didn’t see this comment chain earlier, but now I’m curious about why Tibetan has those letters above and below… let me look into that and I’ll get back to you. Also, yes, vowel harmony was part of the reason Mongolic, Turkish, Tungusic, and Koreanic language groups were theorized to be part of a larger language family called Altaic. However, the Altaic family has been fairly disproven at this point, especially from one of its first and earliest supporters, so there’s probably no genetic relation between Korean and Mongolian. However, the vowel harmony + agglutinative grammar, and similar morphological patterns points to another, not wide spread idea outside of linguistics, of the Sprachbund (language area). This concept is the idea that languages in close proximity, can influence each other in various ways; whether they’re related or not. A good example of this would be the indo-Iranian branch of PIE. The Iranian branch phonologically doesn’t have retroflex consonants as a major distinction, but the Indo-Aryan branch developed one after contact with the Dravidian languages.

I’ve made a comment below about the Altaic languages. The Uralic languages, like Hungarian and Finnish, were included in this hypothetical family. But as I mentioned there, the language family is now mostly debunk, meaning Hungarian and Finnish are not genetically related to Mongolian, Korean, or any of the other Altaic language groups that we know of.

To be fair, they are Chinese characters, except for と.

Japanese also uses older/more traditional Chinese characters from Modern Chinese because Japanese writing comes from an era where Middle Chinese was dominant. They look the same, but hard to tell the meaning if you're Chinese 😅

The first character means Chinese

漢 is used to mean "China" or "Chinese" in both Japanese and in mixed Korean script (although mixed Korean is very rarely used nowadays). と is just pronounced 'to' and has no inherent meaning, being a Japanese kana character. In this case, however, it's a single-character word that means "and" or "with". The Japanese syllabaries are typically organised into the "50 sounds table", the 五十音 (gojuuon). It only contains 46 sounds, though, since yi, ye, wi, wu, and we are missing, and an extra n/ng/m character was added. There used to be characters for wi and we, but they were removed because the sounds disappeared from the language. And of course, each syllable is there twice - once as a hiragana and once as a katakana, so あ and ア are both pronounced 'a'. Fun fact, 聞く in Japanese means "to hear", but 聞 in Mandarin Chinese means "to smell" - this is because in Chinese, the meaning used to be "hear" as indicated by the 耳 radical, but then the meaning changed to first "to sense" and then "to smell".

Tell me you're learning simplified, w/o telling me, lol. The 漢 indeed sees no modern use in simplified, but is crucial for traditional and derivatives as one of the first characters to learn. As wasmic5z already eluded to the と is atypical for Chinese as it's mostly round (which exactly only the character 〇 is) and isn't composed of common Chinese radicals because it's a Japanese syllabary. Rule of thumb: any Chinese character (but 〇) can be written angular without looking wrong.

This script is so similar to South Indian scripts, I thought it is written in that language. Btw I don’t know any South Indian language

Always a good use of time. Ping me on reddit when you finish it, I'd love to see it. I'll be adding a link to my reddit in my bio later this week.

As I’ve mentioned in other places, it’s our best accept and most supported theory at the moment, as we have yet to actually make any substantial connection between the Indus script and Brahmi. Not to mention the fact that we aren’t sure if the Indus script was a script yet or a form of Proto-Writing.

Yeah there are very few Semitic characters that have any semblance to Brahmi characters. Brahmi characters are also organised in an entirely different arrangement based on their place on articulation

Go ahead! Are you the teacher or one of the students?

I didn’t know that, what a funny coincidence… I mean that was 100% intentional. Though honestly my name refers to the rhoticized schwa Symbole ə˞, which is called Schwar, and became a sort of running joke among my friends and I.

Haha, the it was hard to choose which system to do.

Oh cool, I never new they were called Matra in Hindi. Should probably just call them that in English to better differentiate them from diacritics in Alphabets.

That's interesting. In Bengali the matra refers to the bar put above the syllabary. The bar chains different syllabaries into words, with the end of the bar indicating the word has ended. In Bengali, glyphs are called kārôk like া(ākār), ো(ôkār), etc.

@@satyakisil9711 can you give an example? I'm now wondering if I'm dumb and didn't understand the video correctly. I was referring to the this: Take the word "भूख" (hunger) (Bhook in literal translation), the letters used are Bhə (भ), (ऊ) oo's matra which below "भ", and then "ख" (khə).

@@shu830 the ऊ = ू example which you mentioned is called আকার(ākār), not মাত্রা(mātra). The mātra refers to the line drawn above the word, that touches the top of the syllabaries.

@@satyakisil9711 hmm, Bengali is different in that regard then. Because both in Hindi and In Punjabi, which is my native language, that is what we call a matra.

I made a post on my community tab, if you wanna check that out.

Ya, not really great at endings…

True, I just defaulted to Umlaut due to the fact that I'm both learning German and Chinese, as well as my general involvement with Germanic linguistics.

I didn't realize until after I uploaded the video that I left the Mongolic script up... If it's any consolation, I plan on doing a series later about various different scripts, their histories, and how they are used in the modern day. Though I'm still in the planning stages of that, so it'll be a while before they come to light.

Mongolian script is interesting, because it's one of the few scripts, only script? That is still used for a major language that must be written top to bottom. Mongolia uses Cyrillic though, but Inner Mongolia uses Mongolian. Supporting top to bottom scripts is very limited.

Probably as a mix between a logography and a featural system.

@@TrueSchwar It's definitely featural. Not so sure about the logography.

Wondering one Someone would catch that. It was originally a place holder slide I made quickly as I worked on the other parts of the video. Forgot to update it before posting.

Very unlikely to appear naturally, as many concepts and words used in daily language are hard to put into a concept that can easily be represented with a picture or ideograph. But if people sat down, and put their minds to creating a logography without any rebus used, then it might be possible. But that'll take enormous amounts of time, resources, and efforts.

Yep, that was there to show that و worked as a vowel and consonant.

There of course are some differences in writing speed, but probably not as drastic as you think. Scripts with more complex characters often encode more information in a single character, so you don’t have to write as many characters in Chinese then say English. But the reverse is also true scripts with simpler characters don’t encode nearly as much information in a single character, so they have to write more characters per word or phrase. This doesn’t even include the fact that while each script has a standardized form, people often develop short cuts to write faster, weather it be the Latin or Chinese. All languages have a keyboard input of some sort, some of the scripts with more many more characters than Latin’s 26, say Japanese, may have systems where you type in Latin script and the computer converts the Latin into Japanese characters. This is necessary for Chinese. Though Chinese also has drawing input for Trackpads and drawing Tablets, so you can literally write the characters like that.

So there's this idea that abugidas are just like alphabets, where each base character represents a consonant and all vowels are marked with diacritics. What I'm saying is wrong is the idea that the base character is only representing a consonant, as the base character actually has an inherent vowel, in Sanskrit and Hindi, this is /ǝ/. So क isn't just /k/, most of the time, but is instead /kǝ/. Look at the word नकली for example. broken down it would be nǝ-kǝ-lī (न-क-ली). The only vowel marker in that word is the /ī/, which replaces the inherent /ǝ/ in ल /lǝ/. For the other two characters, only the base glyph is written as the /ǝ/ sound is inherently part of the same glyph as न /nǝ/ and क /kǝ/.) The r is considered a consonant, what I'm pointing out there is the trilateral root system of semitic languages. In the first word, náfir, the root n-f-r is inserted into a template of _ā_i_, which represents a masculine adjective. When it becomes a feminine adjective, the root n-f-r is inserted into a template of _a_ _t. The only consistency with these words is that root n-f-r. That's what I meant by the consonants don't change.

@@TrueSchwar I see now, thanks a lot :) I didn't realise what you meant by "inherent vowel" and that each symbol is a syllable in its own right, even without modification, I didn't notice either.

Or capital upside down schwa

It is, I just kept the characters in Hiragana to make it easier for people who don't know hiragana or katakana to make a connection between them.

I love the Hebrew script as well! Though not as big a fan as the Niqqud System.

They're great, aren't they!

क् has a diacritic underneath it known as a vowel suppressor, it’s purpose is to show that the inherent vowel in क is suppressed. क also isn’t the result of adding अ to क्, because क inherently has a vowel. Hence the need to specially mark when the vowel isn’t pronounced.

While that is a common belief, Korean doesn’t qualify as an alphabetic-syllabary (abugida/alpha-syllabary) for one reason. To be an alpha-syllabary, its consonantal letters need an inherent or base vowel. But they don’t, ㄱ is just /k/ and ㄷ is just /d/. This is in contrast to say, Devanagari, where basically every consonant has an unmarked /ə/ with it.

The thing about featural systems, or features (pun intended) is that they provide a clue as to how a character is pronounced. Korean is just extra in that it maps the vocal equipment of the human biology. In this sense, dakuten is 100% featural as the mark is deliberately added to characters in order to show that the character is voiced. It’s similar to how the tilde mark shows nasalization of a vowel. You see a dakuten, you know it’s voiced, you see a tilde on a vowel, you know it’s nasalized.

No?

@@TrueSchwar On screen you spell it "hiccouph" instead of "hiccough". Was that intentional?

@@LearnRunes!!!!!!!! How the hell did I miss that!

@@TrueSchwar Do you use a Dvorak keyboard?

@@LearnRunes nope, I’m using a Japanese keyboard though. Why? Cause I was wondering about different keyboard layouts, then like a month later, I needed to order a new keyboard, and the shopping site I used to by the keyboard had saved on the Japanese keyboard and was to lazy to replace it.

It’s a logo-syllabary. It’s a logography with syllabic tendencies. It does later develop into a syllabary for Sumerian and other languages like Akkadian however.

It inherently possesses a schwa sound /ǝ/, the problem with my dialect of English is that it's hard for me to make a schwa sound as it just becomes either /ʌ/ word internally or /a/ word finally.

@@TrueSchwar that's interesting

@@TrueSchwar does that have anything to do with your name??

@@ThurusTaiKedillo nope, my name is actually the result of an inside joke with my friends.

Nope

While it is disputed that the Brahmi scripts are descended from Aramaic or another system related to Aramaic, it is currently our most accepted and best supported theory at the moment. Though that might change if we ever crack the Indus script, but that day may take a while still.

My understanding of 日本語

Honestly, I’ve seen most people who’ve learned Japanese hate Katakana with a passion, and prefer Hiragana or Kanji.

@@TrueSchwar those are either joke-time learners because kanji is 100x worse than katakana. even japanese themselves are not fond of learning kanji

@@Agent-ie3uv learned, not learning. Once a second language learner of Japanese reaches a certain level, reading Kanji and Hiragana are often easier than reading Katakana, only due to the fact that words in Katakana are loans words. So especially for English speakers, it can be hard to understand what a word in Katakana is because it’s been changed so much from English. Also because words in Katakana often just take up so much space..

@@TrueSchwar most words written in katakana are english nonetheless lol. It is strange that a Japanese learner can read thousands of kanjis with ease but struggling with katakana?🙄🤣 Never heard of non native Japanese learner with such condition. Is that from your personal experience or just base on anecdote? I speak Japanese and has no problem with katakana but kanji and verbs gives me pain in the 4$$

We aren't quite sure how Brahmi developed, however our best guess is that it is descended from the Semitic scripts, as not only are there graphical/phonetic similarities between the two, it's the closest scripts to the region that could possibly be related. As I mentioned in another comment, the other closest contender of originator of the Brahmi systems is the Indus script, however, there is no where near enough evidence to support that fact as there is too large of a time gap between the last vestiges of the Indus script and the beginning of Brahmi, and we have yet to decipher the script.

​@@TrueSchwar That's all fine, the Semitic origin is a hypothesis, one that is subscribed by many (most? 51%? 99%?) of Western scholars, unlike Kharosthi, which is clearly derived from Aramaic. What I'm saying is that Brahmi in many ways is also very different from Aramaic, and there are probably more differences than there are similarities. So to put it as a descendant of Proto-Sinaitic in the same way as Phoenician and modern Semitic abjads is a little weird.

Yaaa, I had no idea how to video and audio edit in this video. Still no idea now, but I think my later videos are better.

ㅅ shape is the joint shape of tongue and front teeth. and, this shape is alveolar.

At least they didn't due Mongolian in the traditional script...

I probably should have specified that I was talking about English. But that section was about how Alphabets aren’t one to one between letter and phoneme, and since most of my audience would be English speakers, seemed best to use it as an example.

Unfortunately I left out a small bit about how the segmental scripts (alphabet, abjad, and abugida) are all often lumped under the term alphabet. To a larger extent, syllabaries and logographies also get lumped under the term. So it’s both correct and incorrect to call the Arabic abjad an alphabet. Casual term in reference to the specific letters and orthography of a language’s script or the scientific specific definition one’ll see used among linguists.

While they do have a common ancestor, the Runic alphabet of the Germanic languages (I think that's what you mean by runic) predates the earliest examples of Turkic runes, which are found in Mongolia. Despite looking very similar to Germanic runes, Turkic runes are more closely related to Sogdian and Mongolic scripts.

they do, but it was for transcribing chinese, and is not common anymore. why would they need a letter to represent a sound they don't have?

Did I say it was perfect? If I did, I probably meant "perceived as perfect". It's a common misconception that Hangul is perfect, only because the writing system had such a high degree of featural parts, matched the language basically 1-to-1 (this is no longer the exact case), and is so easy to learn. But of course that doesn't make it perfect, as nothing in this world can be perfect. Hangul as a system quickly falls apart when you try applying it to languages that aren't similar to Korean, like English or Russian which make use of consonant clusters in their phonology. Also, as Meow mentioned, Korean did have an /f/ character, but it wasn't part of Hangul but its predecessor Hunminjeong'eum, the actual invention of King Sejeong and his court that encoded not just Korean phonology, but also classical Chinese phonology.

@@TrueSchwar Or maybe did also Korean itself had "f" in the past? Because I've seen old Hangul has some obsolete letters that are not used now anymore because of phonetic changes.I know that they had the Z sound dropped off from their language.Some people also believe that Old Korean had tones, but not sure about "f".

@@deacudaniel1635 They had a /v/ type sound from what I remember, but that had a different character than for /f/ used in Chinese, so it's unlikely that Middle Korean had an /f/ sound.

@@TrueSchwar Thanks for clarifying.So they had an "f" only for Sino-Korean words.