The Lost Language Recovery Trick - counting an undeciphered script 

By the way, in English, "series" is both singular and plural -- it's not the plural of "serie", which isn't a word.

I think it was either just a simple misspelling or a joke indicating that the series hasn't been finishe

@@ellies_silly_zoo No, it's almost certainly just a mistake. In many Romance langauges (I was aware of French and Italian, but Spanish and Portuguese also do this), the singular noun is "serie". That coupled with the fact that "series" looks like a plural in English leads many speakers of Romance languages to assume that "serie" is the English singular, too. I wouldn't have even mentioned it, if it wasn't such a highly characteristic error of Romance-speakers using English as a second language -- even people whose English is near-perfect very often make this mistake.

@@beeble2003 Yo I'm not arguing about something this unimportant

@@ellies_silly_zoo lmao. Interesting mistake, though not worth arguing abou

As a linguist I can confirm that yes, we use the same term.

In frequency analysis you also consider which symbol or group of symbols is there more often. For example the word "the" is pretty often in english texts.

@@Caesim9 Yes, this can work with words and symbols.

Working hard not to be the underdog anymore :D Thank you!!

Especially when it eats the other languages and spits out numbers!

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Eh. Having the exact amount of whitespace between two "words" be significant is a really bad idea, IMO. And not having to declare variables is a great way to introduce bugs into programs.

+PluT0iD 733 I strive to make these as distracting as possible! :D

Very meta!

if the comments with the hiragana, kanji etc are part of ther script logographic/logophonetic, else alphabetic

+Christian Jiang Whew, just in time! I'd hate to leave you wondering.

+Rohan Pandey Thanks for the feedback! It was fun (and exhausting!) to have YT push us to try something new, but I'm very comfortable getting back to normal. :D

for some reason when I first read of it I got scared

@@hectordanielsanchezcobo7713 Scared? Why?

@@sion8 idk, maybe the unknown scared me back then

@@hectordanielsanchezcobo7713 It's just writing, just like Egyptian hieroglyphs or Sumerian Cuneiform.

@@sion8 yeah idk

Yoav Shati The same thing was once thought about Mayan writing, but that turned out to not be entirely correct.

Maybe some symbols are diphthongs or trifthongs, how do you think about that?

+Mark Stoleson 'A'ole pilikia! I enjoyed reading your thoughts on Tahitian and Hawaiian taboo systems and look forward to having you watch in the future. A hui hou.

Thank you! I have another video coming out on Friday, too!

+Zulhilmi Ghouse (Bubbles) Thanks for being a regular commenter! :D

+uneliasmarsu Thank you!! Have you seen the Thoth's Pill "alphasyllabaries" episode? Creating that, I thought of getting more into the differences between scripts. It got messy fast. Such an intriguing family of scripts. Thanks for the suggestion!

Thanks for sharing a bit about your creation! What are your letters styled like - any particular script? Are they something entirely unique? So happy you like Thoth's Pill and hope to keep you watching :D

+NativLang I have styled them in accordance to their IPA description. For example, the letter "m" is a voiced nasal plosive so you write a loop before writing a curve. The entire writing system is designed to show how each phoneme is pronounced. I could send you my written version. As for the system, it functikns similar to an Arabic abjad, there is an isolate, final, central and initial style however vowels are written above of the consonant if they are fronted and at the bottom if they are backed. But the vowels themselves have individual symbols so my writing system functions as an alphasyllabary (abuguida), an alphabet and somewhat like an abjad! A three-ish way system!

+NativLang I absolutely love your videos as tgey inspired me to write my own language called "Sorrelic"

Smart! Sounds more linguistic than any of the writing systems I've created. What kind of language is Sorrelic?

+NativLang It's a language my great grandfather invented and passed it down. I am a fourth generation Sorrelic speaker. We used only the Roman Alphabet so I, being the youngest among us Sorrelic speaker, was tasked with creating the system. Here are a few examples. Hello - Adra Bye - Avte Goodbye - Avtetakt (farewell) And a few long words Airplane - Aerantrasinette (Aerial transport) Democracy - Takamrivaleaosnasit (Controlled by the people) We have only 5000-7500 true pure words. Any other words beside those are defined by prefixes and suffixes but we have some loan words. Government - Gaverenementi Technology - Tekkonolohiaga

So I just tried this out of curiosity, and I was able to code something similar to what you have in 11 lines of lua code local function f(str, cuts, types) local chars={} for char in str:gmatch"[^%s]" do table.insert(chars, char) end for i=#cuts,1,-1 do if #chars>cuts[i] then return types[i] end end return types[0] end print(f("this is a test string"), {5,10,20}, {"5 or more", "10 or more", "20 or more", [0]="less than 5"})

DarkWiiPlayer he did the code in python. here is my pythonese one in just 4 lines. with open(input("file location")) as file: c=len(set(list(file.read())) if c

Emily Cairns It really depends on your grammar. If there's little to no inflection than a logographic script like Chinese would be an option. If you have a simple syllable structure and only' a few syllables than a syllabary like katakana would work. On the other hand if all else fails than go with an alphabet.

+Adriaan Ater Haha, is it that eerie? Almost always Blender.

+NativLang Well the more i looked at it the worse it became every ''symbol'' worries me lol its like'' they'' the characters in powerful poses created the language around there environment and i know who does that lol that aside every human seems to be either downing,being eaten,mutilated or or tied up under water with pipes from the surface keeping them alive (for snacks later?) at least on the tablet i am looking at. I was already afraid of the ocean hehe. Weird to see a what looks like a whale hooked up to the same pipe structure. The pipes don't seem to connect to the more fish like humanoids.There's lot of information embedded in them much like in sumerain but more crude in the worst way. When i come across a tablet i have not seen i sculpt it out in zbrush but not this one i can smell the ocean from where i sit not that brave lol. Was hoping to one day go to easter island so i am glad i learned of the rondo rondo before i went to the island that would have been bad jeez i would have slowly backed away all the way to the boat lol. As someone who loves to be creative i can make up a few stories of what i think might be happening but i did see what looks like the symbol for metal and for sending metal up. Similar to old sumerain tokens signs. Do you know if there are similar glyphs in native american carvings? feel like i have seen some before haha but maybe it was in the call of cthulhu game on the walls lol. I use blender too well done on the render !!

Thank you! I don't know of any undeciphered Native American scripts outside of Mesoamerica. None of the petroglyphs remind me of these tablets. Making connections between Polynesia and the Americas gets into a whole thing academically, especially when speculating about cultural contact. There have been many attempts at cracking this script. I might tell its story sometime.

Lucile Francois. U are nothing.

@@cassiekoenigshofer9321 no u

+Seth Langston Could we have guessed it's an alphasyllabary without knowing? It does have similar-looking glyphs and special marks (in a way, like Japanese kana diacritics). For me, the Yi syllabary is a real outlier for this trick.

True. It's critical to know what's being counted, and - for this algorithm - to pare it down to the linguistic info. Interestingly, mathematical notation may be "discovered" within an undeciphered text even before the rest is cracked, like Maya. Understanding which glyphs are variants and which are distinct graphemes definitely matters.

That seems to be putting the cart before the horse. If you know the A=a or G=g, you probably already know that English has an alphabet as opposed to a syllabary..

The cases I'm aware of build up slowly, with long lists of variants grouped by index number. You might hypothesize that A and a represent distinct syllables, while a colleague asserts that sequences like "Apple" show up after a dot, while "apple" appears in the middle of other letters, suggesting that the two symbols are just variants. Then you show instances of "Apple" not preceded by a dot. The colleague replies that his count would fit known bicameral alphabets so well, while yours would be a poor syllabary for writing a late Germanic language, which this is suspected to be.

also do you have a github? profile

sindhi is written in a modified version of the perso-arabic script. so its not an alphabet rather an abjad

If you count letters as if Nagari were an alphabet (e.g. दण्ड has five letters, including two short a's), there are about 50 letters, the exact number depending on the language (some have retroflex l, some have long vocalic r, Sanskrit has vocalic l in forms of one word). An unusually large syllabary is General Chinese Xonn-dzih (=Hàn zì), which has 2082 characters, because it represents two words differently if they are different in some Chinese language.

It was never finished.

+Vanessa C. Got it! Thanks for watching. RU-vid's been a great outlet for me but barely a success. Moving away from the business side and scaling down to gain back some time. I appreciate your message though!

ESPERANTO!

+Duck Good enough for Heian novels, good enough for me! Oh Japanese writing, why are you systems within systems?!?

Vietnamese is an alphabet. They use the Roman letters.

+ferretyluv I know, just wondering if that script will see the massive amount of diacritics and think it is a syllabary

I know Vietnamese, it used to be different with the modern vietnamese though