Is this the earliest writing in Mesoamerica? 

I'm a spanish native speaker and I consider my english level high enough to get to understand your videos but sometimes I have pause the video up and read each word of the CC. I love watching your videos because I have a crush on languages too and I'm learning french and portuguese since I like them very much. Your videos help me to improve my english every day. Thanks a lot and greetings from Colombia.

I think we have a MAJOR MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING on our hands here

2:14 One takes the pronunciation of other languages for granted, but that shift in English accent for "Oxford" took me off guard.

One of my coworkers at a past job was from Oaxaca and he actually natively spoke a Zapotec language and had learned both Spanish and English as second languages.

Someone is talking to us from over 2000 years ago. We have to hear them out :)

This guy pronounces Spanish and mexican names absolutely PERFECT. I have never heard a gringo talk like that. MASSIVE RESPECT SIR!

That is really neat, Mesoamerica still has a lot of history waiting to be told.

So many beautiful glyphs!

“Is that a pineapple?”

Mexican here. Your pronunciation on spanish/prehispanic words is pretty natural, I never expect english speakers to be so fluent on spanish words when speaking english, specially with words of indigenous origin. You clearly know what you're talking about, loved your video

I've deciphered it. It reads "We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended waranty"

I'm mexican and I'm always so sad when learning about all these things. So much destruction, so much was lost, and yet people still defend it

NativLang Thank you so much for this video. As a kid I was always made fun of for my love of history and language. Your channel has helped me realize that so many others have the same interests. Thank you.

The writing on the the light blue Maya cup says " Best dad in the world "

Mesoamerican cultures are soo fascinating

Damn, this guy is so obsessed with Mesoamerica. I love it!!

I’m a simple man. Nativelang uploads, and I put everything on hold to watch the video.

Do we only know of writing in Mesoamerica, or are there other, more geographically distant cultures in the Americas that we know had writing?

The image at 1:49 looks to me like some kind of fever dream where a mayan scribe has to play tetris against this serpent human. Cracks me up. Great video though!

It never ceases to amaze me how well-researched and how attentive to detail your videos are. I find it even more special when the new video talks about the history and culture of my home country. By the way, you truly sound like a native when you do the Spanish bits.

Mexico has such an interesting history. The pyramids of Teotihuacán are so cool

@NativLang , thanks for the video, I’ve been a huge fan for some time! If you are planning on going into Nahua language more, especially in terms of modern speakers, as an indigenous speaker of these languages and fellow linguist, I’d be happy to help answer any questions you might have!

As a mexican I'm so glad every time I see my country in your videos and the interest people have in all the civilizations that exist and existed here

Its pretty sad how many written artifacts have been lost to war

Few months ago I requested a video only about writing systems. I had to wait for it, but it definitely worth it :D

7:15 That's Atzompa! Yo lo visté el año pasado con un amigo arquitecto oaxaqueño y hablamos con los arqueólogos excavándolo! Fue descubierto apenas hace 5 años, y estiman que el sitio existió hace 2,800 años. Otra cosa interesante de los nahuatl es la relación de los sufijos de muchas ciudades en la región que indica un pueblo más expansivo de lo que pensamos actualmente. El uso de -tepec en México, -tepeque de Guatemala, El Salvador, y Honduras, y finalmente -tepe comunmemte usado hasta su punto más sureño, la isla de Ometepe en medio del Lago Cocibolca. Do you know anything about this correlation? Love your channel!

One thing that excites me about this region though is how little we have scratched the surface in unearthing the vast(in land area and in time) history of the Americas. Seeing the LiDAR images of huge ancient city structures buried beneath the jungle canopy makes you wonder what else is buried with them.

I love the speakers' easy movement into different beautiful accents. Looking for more with this narrator! So enjoyable. Edited to add: I just looked at the playlist for NativLang.....holy cow! Just found my new happy place!

so many lives and so much knowledge has been lost to colonization, destroyed purposefully in the path to conquest. it's so good to hear people finding new pieces to reassemble some of that history and tradition. thank you for spotlighting this

I hope to see these in the Unicode Standard!

Great video! And I'm always amazed by your pronunciation. KEEP UP THE GREAT WORK!!

This channel is so good! I love your animation and content, it’s so fun coming around.

This is a fantastic overview! Always love to see you cover American writing systems!

It's not some old writings in Mesoamerica, it's a Major moments in the history of writing

This is a fantastic video. Really well done, sir. I sat rapt for the duration.

Very interesting and informative video. I hope you post sequels to this excellent video.

I love watching your videos! You present the information in a way that’s very interesting and easy to understand.

facinating video. Thank you for your hard work researching such an interesting subject.

Excellent video. Thank you for all your hard work, you do great work

Thank you! This is amazing news and your videos offer excellent information.

Superb as always. I found this one really interesting.

I love your videos. They're interesting, fascinating and very well made. But, when the video reaches its peak, it ends. I would love if your videos were like an hour long! Please keep doing what you're doing! Thank you.

Fantastic! Fascinating and informative! Thank you!

Beautiful illumination of the evidence, thank you so much for your video!

Tu pronunciación de los nombres en español es estupenda. Gran video, como siempre.

Thanks for sharing. Good and informative video.

OMG, I was missing your videos!

i did not know about many of these. thank you for this visually educational video

Love these! :) I hope we end up deciphering these glyphs in our lifetime, they seem quite interesting.

Great content. Thank you!

It is good to see that in your sources are citing both, texts in Spanish and English! It would be great if you continued like this, with updated content!

Nice work mate, enjoy your channel very much🖖🏼

Thank you for making content about the new world. In ten years, new discoveries will probably illuminate much more than we know now. It's an exciting time! 😊😊

really interesting! I still feel like there's a weird taboo in America with archeology when it comes to "for how long people have been living in America" but it's nice to see we have many examples in this area!

Great video, as always. how about a video about the Pedra do Ingá in Paraíba, Brazil?

8:31 is no gonna talk about how that one glyph looks like a earth globe ?

Good video! I did some work on scripts in the americas a while a go. Incan qhuipus are a very contentious but interesting example of a potential way of transferring information. Some have even argued it could function as a script!

Fascinating, as always.

Great video once again NativLang! The quest for the early origins of Mesoamerican writing is indeed a thrilling and puzzling one. The discoveries made of over the past few decades increasingly push the origins of writing back further back in time. But one should not only take the dating of the artifacts in mind, but also the appearance and structure of the glyphs themselves. For example, the earliest forms of cuneiform can be traced back to a proto-script - tags and tokens that depict animals and other goods, simply for identification and accounting - before developing in a hieroglyphic script and eventuelly the wedge-shaped signs that gave cuneiform its name. Similarly, Chinese writing can be traced back to the early Oracle Bone symbols. While still largely undeciphered, some glyphs are definitely recognisable as precursors to later and even modern Chinese characters. In Mesoamerica however, we lack such a clear line of development from the simple (i.e. proto-writing) to the complex. Take for example the earliest Maya writing thus far found, the small painted glyphs inside a Preclassic pyramid in San Bartolo. They date to about 300 BCE, but the glyphs constitute an already (fully) developed script. Similarly, the earliest Zapotec writing comes from around 600 BCE and is made up of two glyphs (the San Jose Mogote monument). Yet just a few centuries later, more elaborate inscriptions appear at Monte Alban, the new regional capital founded around 500 BCE. With the Cascajal block, we finally may have found the "proto-script" or precursor to the development of later scripts, assuming(!) that it indeed functions as a precursor. With so many different scripts and cultures close together, it is hard to pinpoint who influenced who. Still o much to debate and discover.

OMG, it is always so nice when you talk about native languages of Americas. Greetings from Mexico!

this is super nerdy 🤓 and fascinating. thanks for making it. 😍

Neat animation video! Thanks for uploading!

Your videos have really made me interested in taking up classes about language history. My husband has a masters in Asian and African religious studies and history so he knows a lot about native languages and such! Maybe he can also help! Lol

Great video! Love it👍

Also, please make a video about vowel harmony 'cause I want to understand it or maybe 1 about the native languages of Africa

Yess I’m finally early. Great job!!!

Good to see you again

Great work

Ooh! I studied about those for our AP ( _Araling Panlipunan_ [Social Studies] ) Class. Well, _some_ of them. We were rushing lessons so the class was divided into groups and my group was tasked by making a brochure about Ancient/Classical Mesoamerica. I even "vectorized" the Zapotec writing. I didn't have time to make the entire picture from Wikipedia into a clear vector tho. The picture's still saved as a PNG file on my laptop just in case I decide to vectorize the whole thing on either PowerPoint or Inkscape.

I've recently been reading a classic called 'The Maya' by Michael D. Coe, I'd really recommend it to anyone wanting to the Early to Classic Mesoamerican Civilizations.

I like it. Careful, and puts things in context.

Love your work and videos! I was surprised though that for this stone you did not mention that there appear to be some repeating patterns with some of the symbols, which could give more weight to it being a writing system. For example, the "pineapple" and blunted "pineapple" glyphs follow a two-lipped plant glyph more than once. And the upside down "pinapple" gylph follows a "corn" glyph twice as well. There are probably even some other examples.

This is amazing! Still, as far as I know, only the Maya script has been identified as a true writing system, while the rest of the Mesoamerican scripts are considered to be proto-writing. But that's just what I was taught, maybe new information has been found concerning those scripts.

mesoamerican scholar here. Great job! (a bit late though, since the Cascajal block was found in the late 90s and first formaly published about in 2006). I really liked your Maya, San Bartolo, update. Now let me see if there are some questions in the other comments that I can answer..

Your spanish pronunciation surprises me! Saludos desde Panama City!

You have no idea how happy these videos make me😭

Great video.

Nunca dejará de sorprenderme gratamente tu perfecta pronunciación en español mexicano.

Wonderful video! I wonder how one gets involved in the archaeology of ancient writing or linguistic anthropology.

Some Kid: draws a pineapple in a rock Archeologists 3000 years later: "Of course, this is a religious text that says they viewed pineapples as gods"

Awwww yeahhh Mesoamerican content is my drug

Could you do a video on the uto aztecan language family. Mainly the takic branch

if you're using blender for your 3d animations, i'd recommend scaling in edit mode or applying location, rotation and scale to get rid of the stretching/squashing in your rock textures here

this may sound dumb and self-centric, I just wanted to thank you because you are one of the youtube channels that made me decide I want to be an archeologist. I start college next year, your content is amazing, thank you so much

This is non-relavent to this video, but could you do a conlang video or multiple ones? It popped up on my RU-vid feed couple days ago and now I'm interested!

the glyphs on that stone remind me a bit of the carvings on the "Ingá Stone"/"Pedra do Ingá" in Paraíba, Brazil - a similarly debatable chunk of carvings that may or may not be writing. granted, it's more likely to be artistic representations of flora/fauna/constellations/other unidentified symbols than actual writing. (note: there are unfortunately a lot of pseudoscientific theories - 'archaeoastronomy'/ancient-aliens shenanigans - as to the origins of the stone, but ignoring all that it's still an intriguingly mysterious pre-columbian artifact)

Chiapas and Oaxaca are both such beautiful regions. The beaches, the rivers, the plants, the mountains are incredible as well as the people. Beautiful beautiful beautiful !!! 💜💚💛

*ears perk up at the name Whittaker* I had to check, and indeed, it is Gordon Whittaker. The man has been on a crusade to "prove" that Sumerian is descended from Proto-Indo-European. Us Sumerologists try to ignore him, sometimes we laugh at his antics, but cannot take him serious as a scholar. I fervently hope that his work on Nahua writing is of a better quality!

Last time I was this early, Mayan writings were contemporary

I've been thinking on man and communication, fabric weaving, knotted string and tattoo are possible rich areas for expression of thought.

Amazing!

More please!!!

I didn't expect this but I love it!

Lovely, beautiful glyphs

Thinking about complex or interesting sprachbunds I would love to see a video or several on the Balkan sprachbund (both ancient historical [i.e. pre-slavic] and more modern [i.e. post slavic and magyar arrival]). Additionally a video on the various "Romanian Languages" (Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, etc.) and their history. Or perhaps on Dacian and its possible links to Albanian...

Did the Inuktitut writing system form by itself or did outsiders create it for them? Curious

Let me give you a little advice: if you mark chapters in description only by start, RU-vid will provide your video with automatic bookmarks. And thank you for great channel!

I have a suggestion: how about some videos for Africa's languages? I know you already did a video on the lost African romance language, but there's a lot more to talk about. Here are some ideas: - The Ge'ez script and the languages of Ethiopia. - Tifinagh/Tamazight and the Berber languages. - The language families of Africa. - Indoeuropean African languages like Afrikaans. I'm subscribed because of your amazing videos on languages but I can't wait to see more about Africa.

First of all that Spanish pronunciation was flawless

👍 good video