‪How Do We Decipher Forgotten Languages?‬ 

Language buff here. I find the Turkish form of the Latin alphabet to be one of the smartest writing systems ever devised. Unlike English, you have one letter per sound--simple.

Same with Cyrillic

@@DarDarBinks1986 Except thats not true. Although many languages might seemingly seem to have the 1 sound=1 symbol rule, it is often broken. Using Turkish as an example, the "e" symbol can represent both the /æ/ and /e/ phonetic sound, as in the difference between the e's in the word "erker". "g" can represent both /g/ and /ɟ/, in gam vs in gerçek as an example. "k" can represent /k/ and /c/ (kabak vs şekil). "l" can be /l/ or /ɫ/ (bilinç vs kulak). "n" can be /n/, /ɲ/ or /ŋ/ (nense vs eNgin vs yaNgın). "v" can represent /v/ and /β/ (çivi vs vücut). And finally, "ğ" can represent /j/ like in "düğün" or be silent. So obviously its not as big of a thing as in English, but it still exists.

I think the Latin alphabet is the least probable to fall out of use.

@@olbiomoiros and why do you think that?

ikr

people have been graffiti'ing ruins since ancient times lmao

they want to be part of history

@@parmaxolotl Yep, vandalism is as old as humanity!

To be (slightly) fair this was the Witch‘s Castle in Forest Part in Portland. I really wish there wasn‘t graffiti on it, but it‘s not really an ancient ruin, it‘s literally just an unfinished public restroom from the 30‘s or 40‘s

Michael Ventris deciphered Linear B. It’s Greek. Read John Chadwick's The Deciphering of Linear B, it’s a short and very entertaining read. Ventris was a unique genius.

@@patmorris9692 yes but linear B has still not been fully deciphered. Almost 1/3 of the characters remain a mystery

@@georgios_5342 still better than linear A's situation

Linear A is Minoan

@@kyrav.6920 Putatively. It remains undeciphered but is probably Indo-European.

source

@@goShinigami phil

Lmao

Loved the archelogy look!

@@andrewromine1909 that is just the inner Loyd every one has coming out (Lindy Beige)

@@sirBrouwer god i love that guy

@@BigBoss-sm9xj g8

thanks for the idea

well the first "Your mom" joke is from ancient times so thats possible

Yes this would be so great

Ooh yes, that would be interesting! Like first contact, but of the pre-sci fi kind!

Indeed!! Keep it up man 💪

It would mostly go back to the more old style of talking with hand and foot. and pointing at things.

YES, YES, PLEASE! (screaming like a little girl)

Is Kabujiya related to Kamboja?

@@FirstLast-hz8ut Possibly! A connection has been proposed, but we can't be entirely sure since the etymology of Kamboja isn't recorded anywhere.

Interesting why did he do this😠

@@Amharizz You mean why did KhAnubis only give the Greek versions of those names? Probably just for time.

They didn't even try with Xerxes. Feels like they just tried to translate the Shayarsh part and left kh and a out.

Thanks

not necessarily czech, that can be bassicaly most of the slavic laungages. boze means god and bo tobie samemu is something along the lines of "to you". and im not even czech

@@TheRU-vidCrusader01 It is an actual czech from around 16-17th century. You can find some czech exclusive letters such as Ř or Ě

E

2:11 cuneiform

@@shadowseeker97 There must be other ancient inscriptions that predate cuneiform.

@@rickriffel6246 Nothing we have deciphered yet.

Because, for the purposes of classifying an undeciphered script, an abugida is a syllabary the syllabograms of which have a particular relationship among each other. No one ever talks about "featural alphabets," which are to alphabets as abugidas are to syllabaries. Unless, of course, one is talking about the Korean script (the one real-world example) or a random conscript (the vast majority of conscripts are featural, if only because it's easier to a conlanger to make them up).

@@wtrmute hmm

Looking AT your hair. TO?? Sounds a bit odd

Actually it was Forest Park in Portland

Or be replaced with something else

Cuneiform is a writing system. People stopped writing in cuneiform, and started using other symbols. English is a language. That's a different thing - language and writing system are independent of each other. English could theoretically die out, as well, of course, but that works not in the same way as a writing system.

A lot of languages were deliberately stamped out when there was a change of religion. When the Roman empire adopted Christianity, infidels were forbidden to teach and the Church was given the power to destroy forbidden literature. By then, Etruscan, Egyptian and Babylonian were mainly used by the superseded religions, so they could no longer be taught. That happened to the Easter Island script in the 19th century: missionaries forbade its use, and the elites who could read it were taken off to other islands as slaves. Even today, once missionaries ban the old songs and stories, the old language loses much of its relevance. The state boarding schools for natives of Canada and Australia eradicated language as well as culture and religion. The Linear B records we have are principally accounts kept by store-keepers. They suggest that at the end of their use the island was facing defeat by invaders. Many societies at that time did without writing, and it seems the conquerors did not re-employ the old scribes. The Indus Valley script seems to have gone out of use without any incursion from outside. One theory is that there was a change of religion, since the short inscriptions usually came with a drawing of some sort of animal or human, which could have been a totem or god.

@@faithlesshound5621 "When the Roman empire adopted Christianity, infidels were forbidden to teach and the Church was given the power to destroy forbidden literature. By then, Etruscan, Egyptian and Babylonian were mainly used by the superseded religions, so they could no longer be taught." Sorry, that's so very much not true. In the western half of the Roman Empire, Latin had already mostly supplanted the local languages in the cities by the time Christianity gained any traction there. In rural areas, languages like Punic and Gaulish survived until well after the fall of the Empire. In Egypt, Egyptian (in its "modern" form Coptic) even became the language of the Egyptian church, and is still used for ceremonial purposes today. Etruscan was basically dead in the 1st century CE. Christianity had absolutely nothing to do with that. Babylonian (i.e. Akkadian) fell out of use even earlier, in pre-Christian times, and was replaced by Aramaic. It lingered on as a literary language into the 1st century CE, and knowledge of it among some scholars _maybe_ into the 3rd, but that's already pushing it. When Rome "adopted Christianity" (when exactly?), it had been dead already for centuries. Not to mention the fact that Mesopotamia wasn't even _in_ the Roman Empire. And that thing about "forbidden to teach" is not true, either. Certainly not on the level of learning a language. Neither Rome nor "the Church" (there are several...) was a modern nation-state that cares about suppressing languages.

@@varana Spoken languages are difficult to ban, but the teaching of scripts certainly can be forbidden, along with unapproved subjects like the "seven forbidden arts." Etruscan may still have been in use by priests, who were in competition with the Christians in Italy. Although the tongue fell out of daily use, we know that the emperor Claudius wrote several works on Etruscan subjects, none of which have survived. While Coptic survived, knowledge of Egyptian hieroglyphics did not. By then the hieroglyphic script had become immensely complicated, so prolonged study would have been necessary: I would imagine the teaching would have been accompanied by study of religious texts and done by priests. Babylonian and Assyrian may have been in use in temples in Syria as well as Mesopotamia. Syria became part of the Roman empire. Mesopotamia would have gone through a Christian phase before the rise of Islam. The ban on teaching began under Constantine and was reimposed on pain of death by Justinian, who closed down all pagan higher learning, including the schools of Athens and Alexandria. When he promulgated his new codes of law he also ordered the destruction of older legal texts, but we know some of those survived. The Ten Tables did not. Destroying old books and killing scholars was not unique to Christian rulers: the Yellow Emperor did the same.

Portuguese traders had already had contact with China. Chinese was the lingua franca in East Asia. The Portuguese had been in India for a few decades before contact with Japan and had had plenty of time to absorb Chinese.

@@jeffreyestahl Nice, thanks 😀

Isn't Egyptian an abjad?

@@dizzydaisy909 A fact that, apparently, UsefulCharts, who I got it from, got wrong. Did anyone correct him on his video about the Latin alphabet's origins?

Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs are the two oldest

If you count the Vinca symbols or the Jiahu symbols as writing then it would be those two, at around 8,000 to 7,000 years old.

The Witch's Castle in Forest Park (at least the grafitti-free parts of it I could find)