As a West African, I didn't even know Soninke had a written form untill I went to the village my parents grew up in Senegal. It was soo confusing to know how to speak a language, but not read it. Shit broke my brain a lil bit.
One of the most interesting things about the start of this, is that a couple of kids, just 10 and 14, would decide to invent a writing system to sound out their language, based on what they knew of another one, but inventing their own original one, not as a secret code, but to write normally, so it's easy for their own people and language. Really great, really smart, and it goes to show that kids/teens can be as smart or smarter than the adults around them, just as much as they might also screw up and lack experience, they can create, invent, and can know and do, without it being a problem that they are "just kids or just teens."
Agreed! What's equally amazing is that the adults respected the teens and saw the usefulness of the writing system enough to allow it to spread rapidly.
@@new-lviv more so they are untainted by the pollution of western media. The more I travel fhe more I noticed that the less English people speak and understand (on a society whole) the less bigotry, biases and elitist behaviors are pervasive in that culture.
It is children, due to their plastic brains, that appear to have made almost all of the languages that exist. When a bunch of cultures are thrown together, a messy pidgin evolves. It takes the next generation of children to regularize this into a fully fledged Creol with a consistant grammer and amazingly this happens completely organically.
"without it being a problem that they are "just kids or just teens."" The young-uns need some kind of 'coaching', for sure (well, we all do haha), but I agree, they need not be treated like 'children', but people. I say this because at the age of 35 there are still members of my family that don't take me for an 'adult', and yet make greater mistakes. One thing that comes up often around the fire/meeting place, amongst all age groups, is that no matter how much we learn and progress through life 'you' are always 'you', doesn't matter if you're 9 or 99.
When you said the meaning of the acronym "Adlam" ("The letters that protect the people from vanishing"), I got thrilled. What a deep meaning that carries. Language is indeed a way to keep the culture of a people alive.
@Weasel Yep. Sprach. Also; I think, the phonetic transcription should read: ”ʃpraç”; since, in German, the sibilant [s] becomes post-alveolar [ʃ], before a voiceless plosive, at the start of a word / syllable 🤔. Also; the ”bay” should read: ”bai”; [y], in the IPA, represents the same sound, as the German ”Ü”; *_NOT:_* [j].
I'm sorry, but are we just going to gloss over the fact that one of the languages appears to rely on *color* to convey information? Can we get a video on THAT beautiful beast please?
I really appreaciate the focus you put on less covered geographic areas, Central Asia, West Africa, the Caucasus and the like. Not that the linguistics of more familiar areas aren't interesting, but it's wonderful to hear stories from elsewhere, to give context and flavour and personality to places and peoples so often glossed over, or bunched together into one, despite massive differences that'd make all of our European world's variety seem insignificantly small.
History is being written ... Writing being historied? Writing is making history? History making writing? Writing history? History in the writing? Oh well, lets just say this is a very historical moment
the way you illustrated falling, rising, low, high by actually tonalizing these words in the way it functions was brilliant. this is such a great video. wow. wow wow. i truly appreciate this.
I actually invented my own writing system that I use for my language (Shona🇿🇼🇿🇼) 🤣🤣 I have many of them. I run them by my brother to see if he thinks they look "african" and if he agrees then I use it. It started with conlangs for my novel, but then I realised I wanna take notes about other stuff👀👀 without raising eyebrows so I was I made one. I have Alphabetic, Abugidas, Abjads (arabic), and featural (Korean type - written in blocks).
Back when I was little when I used to keep a journal , I learned how to read and write in Cyrillic so that nobody other than me could read it lmao , I imagine a lot of scripts are born for reasons like that
i did that too, but for my final exams and to write notes on my dictionary (the only object we could use). i ended up not needing the notes, but i felt like a secret agent
Lol, when I was younger I learned to write in cyrilic and adapted it to spanish (my mother tongue), eventually, adapting writing scripts to my own language has become my hobby, I have cyrilic, greek, glagolitic, arabic, hebrew, and I tried hindi and tibetan but they are somewhat difficult
English has a better script(Shavian) English isn't a an overly difficult language to write down we just try to mash a script that dosent work for it (the Latin script)
English spelling has nothing to do with it's writting system. Tibetan and Thai also have non-phonetic spelling even tho they don't use Latin script. Languages like English, Thai, Tibetan have etymological spelling and haven't been reformed for a long time.
English used to be phonetic. English later went through phonetic changes but English never changed its writing to match modern spelling and thus modern English spelling reflects pronounciation from hundreds of years ago.
@@Memezuii I think the Latin alphabet is fine for English, however we do really need to decide on one way for spelling sounds (-ough, -oe, -ew, -oo, etc.) instead of the mish-mash of French, Latin, Dutch, Celtic, Spanish, Greek, etc. that we have now.
@@himesilva Well yes, but actually no. "th" did not mean /ð/ / /θ/. It meant /tʰ/ in other languages. þ & ð were better letters as they could separate the voice and voiceless. Old English did not, it just said that any þ's or ð's at the beginning or end of a word were voiceless, and only voiceless in the middle if it was doubled up, but that was 1000 years ago, that's *Old* English. We can make so that þ is /θ/ & ð as /ð/. Maybe not supplant the latin alphabet entirely, maybe just add some diacritics that make sense & remove a lot of historical spelling
I've been on a NativLang binge lately, just watched the full Thoth's Pill documentary yesterday (finally), amazingly done! I'm glad you've uploaded again.
He always posts! It just takes a month or two between videos (to which I am very grateful as the quality is always top tier). My favorite channel* ever!
The person who said that sentence "African voices are like those of the birds - impossible to transcribe" didn't think about it properly. Because if we wanted to, we COULD even transcribe the singing of birds. It's not impossible at all! Now I'm just thinking someone should do that, create a Bird writing system, just for fun.
I'm not too sure about English but even it has some basic animal expressions which are based on sounds being transcribed so yeah.... I speak a language that has plenty of bird songs 'written down', not just lone sounds.
People can and do transcribe birdsong, the tones of other animals, random city noise and anything that can produce sound basically. They usually use regular music notation for things like that though. It's pretty cool.
@@cymtastique Exactly. Since most animals don't 'talk' by themselves in the human sense, but rather shout, bark or sing a band notation with all usual musical elements like drumset, regular tones, tremolo and more are probably enough for >90% of animal sounds at least as we hear them.
@@crazydragy4233 Here in East Africa we have tribes that can actually speak to the birds so that the birds can show them where honey can be found in exchange for a piece of the honey comb... Interesting relationship really.
The Nsịbịdị script used to be the writing system of Igbo language but was not popularized,it was mainly used by scholars and elites until Latin script came and took over the language.
Not only Igbo and Igbo adapted it from the calabar people groups, it was a writing script of calabar peoples all the way to ethnicities of Cameroon. It's not an Igbo script, it's shared by several ethnicities, it's wrong to claim what you didn't originate.
@@windsurfer8824 It's an Igbo script, same way Kanji is a Japanese script. he never claimed that Igbo invented it. Only said it was the writing system of the Igbo language which is true. And also, Calabar people didn't invent the script, it's believed to be Ejagham that invented it. Will you then say it's not a Calabar script? It just sounds like you want to be a contrarian against Igbos.
Even if it's for a conlang, it's commendable. I have been trying to do so for how many years but I haven't really put REALLY any effort to it, so... there's that.
You should do a video on how letters and writing systems are transcribed into computers. It seems to me you can basically find any letter you want. Even with Chinese you can find any of tens of thousands of characters, so how is it that they were programmed into a computer?
Probably with Chinese they are mostly just vector graphics whose radical elements can either be squished to fit in the context of a complicated character or in edge-cases are individually completely redrawn. Either way since you cannot have that many fonts with most non-alphabetic scripts (even Arabic is limited in that regard) standard Chinese may not even take much more storage space than all common Latin fonts if not less. The fact that most non-middle Eastern scripts are written left-to-right might also help. As for ancient Chinese cursive or Mongolian there is no extensive support for top-to-bottom scripts in unicode even though some characters can be quite tall trough diacritics or by themselves like ﷻ.
*Hardware level* (you can skip this) I'm not going to explain how electrical circuits and SSD/HDD storages work in full detail, but when a computer is on, there's electric current that's flowing through all the components of the computer. Computer components consist of many "logic gates", which manipulate the electric flow. There's a certain voltage on the output, which represents information. This information is either TRUE (e.g. high voltage) or FALSE (e.g. low voltage). When you save a text document on your hard drive, it is stored in multiple "cells", each cell containing either TRUE or FALSE information. In terms of math, you can interpret this information as a number: TRUE as 1, FALSE as 0. *Binary* (you can skip this one too) We usually work with base-10 positional numeral system. That means we have 10 symbols (0 to 9) to represent numbers. We use 10 unique symbols for the first 10 numbers (starting from 0): 0, 1, 2, 3... And when the number is higher than the last symbol we have (9), we simply put the second symbol (1) to the second position and start the first position all over again: 10, 11, 12, 13... But having only 2 possible values to represent information, we don't need 10 symbols, but just 2. So in the "binary" system, we use base-2 positional numeral system. It goes: 0, 1. That's it. These ones and zeros are called binary digits (a.k.a. bits). *Data* While the hardware only "sees" one of two possible values, software can "see" much more. How does it do it? By combining these TRUE/FALSE informations (or bits) in groups. These groups are called bytes. A byte is a sequence of 8 bits. That means you have 8 available positions and when you start counting in binary, you go: 0, 1, 10, 11, 100, 101, 110... until you get to the highest number, 11111111, which is number 255 in decimal (base-10). So with 1 byte you can have 256 unique combinations that can represent 256 unique values. *Data encoding* 256 is enough high number to represent letters/characters of the Latin alphabet (uppercase and lowercase), digits from 0 to 9, some symbols and some control characters (e.g. newline character that lets us have multiple lines in our text document). In order to have your system read the text file from your hard drive correctly, it has to follow some standard which tells the software what character each byte represents. One of these standards is ASCII. Earlier ASCII used 7 bits (128 unique combinations, which was still enough) to represent characters. It was before the standardization of the length of 1 byte being 8 bits. Later on, another standard called Extended ASCII used 8 bits to represent characters. It included some letters with diacritics, so multiple European languages could be written using this encoding. When you save a text document to your hard drive using the ASCII encoding, each character takes 1 byte of memory. But ASCII wasn't enough. Computers started being used all over the world and people wanted to be able to write in their own languages on them. Computer engineers, programmers and institutions from around the world started developing many new standards. But there was another problem. What if you wanted to write in multiple languages in one text document? A new standard was needed, which would encode multiple languages at once. *Universal encoding* Unicode was a new standard aiming to encode as many languages (or writing systems) as possible. The current capacity of the Unicode table is more than 1 million characters, while only about 150 000 characters are actually defined/assigned. There are multiple encodings which follow the Unicode standard, the most popular being UTF-8. In order to be able to represent thousands or even millions of different characters, UTF-8 uses combinations of bytes to represent characters. It can use 1 or a combination of up to 4 bytes to encode characters and can possibly encode up to around 2 million characters (twice the size of the Unicode table). The most used languages/writing systems are located at the beginning of the table and can be represented with less bytes. When you save a text document to your hard drive using the UTF-8 encoding, each character takes 1 to 4 bytes of memory. Unicode also assigns emoji characters to the table and there's more and more of them every year. But not all of them are encoded as separate characters. Many of them (such as country flags or all those faces with different skin color) are achieved by combining multiple emoji characters together. *Fonts* Fonts are files containing information about shapes of letters, their sizes, ligatures, kerning, a bunch of tables with additional information, etc. A character in a font file is called glyph. A font creator is hypothetically able to create glyphs for all Unicode code points, including all writing systems and all Chinese characters. Sometimes, when font creators create a new writing system, like some sort of an alien language for a movie or a video game, they assign the glyphs to Latin Unicode code points, so you're able to write this script using English keyboard. When you open your text document in a text editor, basically what happens is: 1. a sequence of bits are read from the hard drive; 2. they're grouped into bytes; 3. bytes are converted to characters based on the encoding used (ASCII, UTF-8, etc.); 4. a font rendering software reads a font file; 5. the font rendering software takes the text and retrieves respective glyphs from the font file according to the characters in the text, performs additional tasks if needed (e.g. anti-aliasing) and renders the result; 6. the result is printed out on the screen.
That topic is a world unto itself! The encodings alone were the outcome of many years of evolution and debate. I remember the days when most computers you could buy in the West could only display a simple Latin character set that was usually some idiosyncratic variant of ASCII. Just getting some diacritical marks in was a major advance.
I was thinking about that. And how unnecessarily difficult it would be to write and erase physical text with it. Do you need to carry all colours of pencils and keep switching between them in order to write? And how would that work in computer fonts?
@@ynntari2775 They probably use paints or some other medium to write it in- not every language is written on paper with a stylus, and thus not every one is designed to be easy that way! That said- I can imagine this language might be ceremonial or religious to mitigate it...
Yes, it seems really interesting, but also inconvenient for everyday use for anyone, regardless of culture, as multiple colored pens, pencils, or paints are not easily available at all times, in all situations.
@@anonymooseanonymouse6371 True. So instead of just colors, you could use shades. Let's say they use tones. Black is for the main lines. Dark gray/red is for low tones. Mid-gray/blue is for falling tones. Light gray/green is for rising tones. White/yellow is for high tones.
@@YaAllahswt I don't think they meant it in a bad way, "elementary geometric shapes" have a beautiful minimalist design and looks very modern, science fiction-like. It's also easier to learn to read and write. Korean writing is also geometric shapes like boxes and circles, but have hundreds of years of history and are very easy to learn, N'Ko is the same.
I myself crafted my own writing system for my Diary, because even before I am fascinated with different writing system, I was wondering why we filipinos do not use our own writing system like what our ASEAN brothers do and so I created one for my personal use...as you could say it is more like for my personal and aesthetic of my diary....I called it "Likhamai" from filipino words "Likha" means creation and "Kamay" which means "Hand". It is based from Philippine Baybayin Script which is a member of the Brahmic script family. But unlike baybayin, this script is not Abugida but an Alphabet. Recently I created its cursive style.
Not only is this a revolutionary moment in the written language and preservation of history, but this a beautiful treasure trove of inspiration for conlang. Thanks for spreading the word of this historical moment mate! :)
I'm learning Chinese (even moved to Taiwan to help) and there are times, so so so many times, when I just want to give up and quit. Your videos help rekindle my love of languages and the challenge that is Chinese. So keep it up!
@@zimrielyou mean Taiwanese Hokkien? Min is a huge branch and possibly the oldest branch of Chinese. Taiwanese Hokkien is probably not even the only Min variety spoken in Taiwan.
@@zimriel What are you talking about? The general consensus is that Armenian is modelled after the Greek alphabet, supplemented with letters from a different source or sources for Armenian sounds not found in Greek.
@@maxwiencek oh, really? Then try to get a Greek speaker to see if he can recognize any of the letters. They won’t, not a single one. I love how full of themselves western scientists get when dealing with civilizations they’ve deemed not worth a damn. 🙄
@@ramik81 There are many calligraphic hands in Latin scripts, especially old ones, that a contemporary reader would never be able to read as they are so different from what we know as Latin letters. Moreover, Armenian alphabet is MODELLED AFTER and not BORROWED FROM. Just like Latin and cyrylic alphabets come from Greek, Greek comes from Phoenician, Phoenician comes from Egyptian... Hebrew and Arabic scripts also are derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs.
BRO this is SO COOL. I've always been interested in script-making as an extension of linguistics, so I'm definitely going to have to research this more.
(4:00) That colorful writing is very unexpected! I have thought about such things before, but at the same time it also feels like something sci-fi writers would do to have a very alien script, yet reality will always be stranger than fiction.
6:28 "Nmgba" is "No" in Igbo I guess😁 I'm from Yakurr, (we speak Lokaa) a tribe in Nigeria. We also have pre-nasalised consonants gb, kp, ng, mb, nd, mg, nn and nm. I remember the first time I noticed people from other parts of the world couldn't pronounced "gb" and "kp" when I was a kid, it felt strange 😅. I love your videos NativLang 👍🏾
Do you know that it never occurred to me that mba should actually be spelt (or even pronounced) mgba? But in this moment I just realized that my part of the country, we pronounce gb stronger than your side. Your gb is straight up like our b. Spent my whole life saying mm-bah, rather than mm'gbah. Is well. 😌
For the word, no, the word is mba, not mgba... Although in ancient Ìgbò, the b in mba came from ɓ, which then broke down to b and w. This is why no is mba in some dialects and ụwa/awa in some others
I fully believe that this is the best channel on RU-vid. Growing up in a monolingual English speaking community these kinds of things are criminally under reported on, it wasn't until university linguistics that I found my passion for language and your channel has been a big part of that
I think latins pretty boring at this point, little over saturated. came up with my own writing system for my comic books just cause i think it’s time for a change ya know
I agree, though I still vehemently believe that the actual practicality of these things takes first place. There's only so much you can do to the wheel to 'spice it up' before its functionality starts plummeting.
If you're interested in making more videos on the topic, I can suggest you to make some research on Tenevil's writing system for the Chukchi language. It never caught off, as it was used only between him and his family, but it's linguistically important because it has been created in complete isolation without any outside influence from other scripts.
Hope we do get to hear more of those stories you teased. Especially the Rainbow Oracle Script's, you can't have something so distinct in the background and not even mention it!
I had no idea this has been an ongoing thing for decades. And yet I feel so proud of the speakers who come up with the new scripts! Fascinating and admirable!
Assuming that the illustrations in this video were correct, it turned out that the amazingly unique feature of this new writing system that enabled the distinction between the two different words "hindu" and "hindu" was... a small vertical line suspended above the gap between two consecutive letters. In essence, a simple apostrophe. Interestingly, an apostrophe is often used in romaji transcriptions of Japanese to distinguish syllable-final (moraic) "n" from syllable-initial "n". This is not exactly the same thing, but it's another example of the humble apostrophe being used in conjunction with the Latin alphabet to disambiguate words in languages for which the Latin alphabet is almost, but not entirely, suitable.
Yeah I think the solution of adding an apostrophe between the syllables would work just fine with Latin script honestly... I mean Vietnamese uses the Latin script with *heavy* modifications, so you can definitely adapt it
When you said that most people can't name that many scripts outside africa (0:10), i took it as a challenge. I counted to 27 different writing systems outside of africa from memory. I love your videos btw.
@@MrCrashDavi As fun it is to hate on the nonexistence of pronunciation rules in English, It's kinda moot to argue that there is a "proper" way of representing phonemes, with all the languages having their own distinct quirks, unless you want us all to write in phonetic symbols like we're in a dictionary
Indeed, I like how these videos feature languages from less familiar parts of the world. And @Oliver Anderson, is that the Kurtzgesagt duck in your avie? ☺
Thank you. This was remarkably illuminating. It never occurred to me that West Africans are creating and revising their own unique scripts for the languages they speak. There is a perception that only European and middle eastern scripts are available. I also understand more clearly now why Europeans who went to Africa were led to force their languages on the people they met. It would have been impossible for the vast majority of those who went to Africa from Europe to even conceptualize the complexity of these languages, much less learn them. And that is putting aside the traditional European bias toward their own cultural superiority.
I’m anxiously waiting for Unicode to encode Ditema tsa Dinoko, I’d love to be able to type it Also, 2:31 - a Lebanese journalist speaking with a French accent is too perfect
It's interesting that writing was invented in Africa and it still continues to innovate new ones, fascinating. The first known language ever was a proto-language on the African continent, and the first known proto-writing system was created in Nigeria.
I like their stories because they don't think history is something that happened in the past and that we reached the end of it , that nothing new need to be invented , created , that nothing can be changed and there's no possibility of another future. They instead decided to be history , to make history , to change the future , to conceive the possibilities of another future , to write history on their own , their own history with their own hands ( and tell it with their own language) and do like the dude who invented the russian alphabet , the one who invented the Devanagari , tge one who invented greek alphabet , the roman alphabet and its evolution , and tge arabic and ge'ez one too ; with the stagnation ideas that " the history is done" , none of those scripts would actually exist.
I must say it's refreshing to hear someone say long and short vowels to actually MEAN long and short vowels, not hard and soft like what we have in English.
What do you mean? The concepts of "hardness" and "softness" are applicable to materials and are meaningless in the context of phonemes. The difference between the vowels in "cut" and "cart", or "sod" and "sword", is mostly a distinction of length. There might be, to some extent, a distinction in quality, too, but that extent would depend on your accent, I suppose. There is certainly no distinction in terms that could be measured using the Mohs scale.
@@omp199google is free. Hard and soft vowels exist as a reference to something. It isn’t an academic term, but it can be as well defined as any other.
This was fascinating, I never thought about the connection between West African linguistics features and the new writing systems that have emerged there before. Also the musical elements from Thoth's pill take me back to when I first came across this channel. Mmm, nostalgia!
0:14 I decided to accept that challenge and I have indeed, named 26 scripts outside Africa. Although, I really just did it for fun. 1. Latin 2. Cyrillic 3. Greek 4. Pahawh Hmong 5. Hiragana 6. Katakana 7. Hanzi 8. Hangeul 9. Arabic 10. Hebrew 11. Bengali 12. Devanagari 13. Burmese 14. Cherokee 15. Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics 16. Thai 17. Lao 18. Khmer 19. Marathi 20. Oriya 21. Gujarati 22. Georgian 23. Armenian 24. Tibetan 25. Ol Chiki 26. Malayalam
Here's my challenge 1 Latin 2 Greek 3 Cyrillic 4 Sinhala 5 Hindi 6 Thai 7 Burmese 8 Chinese traditional 9 Chinese simplified 10 Hiragana 11 Katakana 12 Kanji 13 Hanzi 14 Hangeul 15 Tibetan 16 Armenian 17 Georgian 18 Arabic 19 Cherokee 20 Sanskrit 21 Tamil? 22 Bengali 23 Old English (not in use) 24 Khmer 25 Hebrew 26 Phoenician (not in use)
I misremembered and did outside of Europe and Africa and didn't mention Latin since I had also assumed it wasn't ok . Misremembering made this challenge a lot harder than it needed to be . Anyways, 1 . Kana 2 . Hangeul 3 . Chinese characters 4 . Thai script 5 . Lao script 6 . Khmer script 7 . Mongolian script / Manchu ? 8 . Tibetan script 9 . Burmese script 10 . Javanese 11 . Lontara 12 . Sundanese 13 . Maldivian script 14 . Odia script 15 . Bengali script 16 . Devanagari 17 . Gurmukhi 18 . Tamil script 19 . Arabic script 20 . Cherokee syllabary 21 . Canadian indigenous syllabary 22 . Maya glyphs 23 . Ba Shu script 24 . Rongorongo script 25 . Assamese script 26 . Sindhi script 27 . Malayalam script 😊
I’ve looked at the Wikipedia article on the phonology of !Xóõ, a Khoisan language, and am extremely curious how a writing system made for such a language would work.
IPA (which is really a form of Latin). For example: qa̰a ǃaǀi ʼaʰn̩ Boroǁxao ʼaʰn̩ uʰasa ǃaʰeʰ oi ʼǂŋa̰an isu ǃaʰeʰ ku ǀa̰alute tu ǀŋəu ǀuǂŋumate ci dao tsʰoe ku. uʰǁei ǂŋʉm ka ba ʼǂŋɜʰn̩te ǃgõ ǃgʉʼma i ǀŋe ǂa̰asa i ǃʉbekuǂŋʉm ci ǁuʘa te ǀi ce ce ǃŋəu tsʰoe biǂŋu ǀʔa ǀa i ǁʰoa ba ǀgʉma ǁŋute. uʰǁei ǂgʉm sa ce te buǁei ba ǂʔɜnʼse ǀa qaisa i ǂgõʰõʰ ce tʉ̰ʉm̩ kã ǀʰũ ceǀe beŋkele ǀi ei ʼǂŋa̰an ce. xabeka ǃaǀi ǁʉ̰ʉn̩ i tẽʼẽ eʰǂʼãõku ci dza̰ai ce ʘaɟe i kaneka ǃaʰeʰ ku ǀa̰alute te iʼe ʘaɟe eʰka̰ ba ʼao ʼahn̩ i ba sa tsʼɜnci ǁuʘa ʔiqatʲe Boroǁxao ǂgʉm ce xabeka ǂa̰asa ǁʉ̰ʉn i tẽʼẽ n̩ʼn̩ ce ǃxa̰a kuǂŋʉmʼu n̩ʼn̩ ǀgʉma tʰani. iʰǁei ka ba qatʲi ǁuʘa iǀŋe ǃŋa̰a ta ǁalika isa ǂgõʰõʰ ka tʰani kã ǀʰũ ci ʔǂŋa̰an̩ i ǂgõʰõʰ kã ʼãnsa iʼe iǁhoa ci dza̰ai. Boroǁxao ʘʰaite ǂa̰asa itẽʼẽ ǀe ǁʰoa ǁgoe ba kaneci ʼǃaʰeʰ eʰ ka ci dza̰ai; ǀe kã ǀʰũ kun̩ ce ǂabe be ǂgõʰõʰ ce ǀa ʼãnsa i ǁʰoa ǃaʰeʰ cɜn. ǂa̰asa seʼeɲa qaɲa ǀŋuǁeiǂŋum i ǃʉbeku sa ǃaʰeʰ. eʰʼe na te ba ǀŋa ǃŋa̰a ce; ǁʰoa kuǁei n̩a. tu ka ǂxõĩsa ku; isa ci ǁuʘa ce ǃŋəutsʰoe. Source: archive.phonetics.ucla.edu/Language/NMN/nmn.html on the bottom where it says "story"
GwazaJuse !Ui-Taa isn't a synonym for it, it's a subgroup. I thought linguists stopped using the term because they realized it was multiple families rather than a single family, not because it was derogatory…
I have to admit I knew nothing about this topic before I watched your video. Fascinating! Having a native script, especially if it's phonetic and/or featural, probably also safeguards against phonetic change imposed by a dominant language. Minority lanugages in Europe (most prominently in Russia), seem to lose their unique phonetic features early on in their extinction process and I'm curious as to what role the script (especially if it's shared with the dominant language) plays in this process. I'm sure many would say it is the dominant language itself that exerts the necessary influence for the sound change to occur, but in the 21st century so much of language is textual and it's impossible for me to rule out that possibility. I'm curious whether certain language features such as tonality are affected among young speakers in West Africa due to the influence of local varieties of English and French and whether the Latin alphabet(s) has anything to do with it.
It depends. English lost the letters but not the sounds of the voiced and unvoiced 'th', due to them not being part of the lettersets imported from Germany for printing presses. Icelandic and iirc also Faroese kept them. Finnish used to have the voiced 'th' sound natively (and iirc a voiced guttural 'gh' type sound), but representing it with (due to the same printing press issue/the Norse Eth character not being part of the standard Latin script) resulted in its pronunciation also changing to the same d sound most European languages use.
As a Hungarian we have been using Latin alphabet for a thousand years, yet our language didn't change that much (or the changes that occurred weren't due to the alphabet). You can add letters to the Latin alphabet, and you can pronounce the letters as you wish. Just look at English, their pronunciation doesn't have anything to do with how Latin letters should be pronounced (Hungarian which doesn't have any roots to Latin is far closer than English to being phonetic) and they still haven't changed their pronunciation or writing. So I don't think a native script is that important in culture or language preservation, though it is possible it can add an additional layer, but mostly when your language is close to extinction. I would even say, that creating a new script for your language, only hinders the will of foreigners to learn your language and make you more isolated, which only causes the youngs to not learn or forget their native tongues (which is now connected to a script) altogether if they wish to participate in the global economy, where they will use other languages anyway. A new script also makes it harder and more effortful, to integrate lone words and keep up with technological advancements, making the native script obsolete. I might be wrong, but I think, that in a globalized world dominated by English, Chinese, Portuguese etc., creating new alphabets for languages only hastens the disappearance of those languages, because with their own script, the separation between their language and the developed world/technological advancement will be clearer, and the personal effort needed to use and preserve the language while using global languages as well (which are more useful for the person) will be greater.
West Africa and several parts around Africa has always get writing system, but it was used for secret society and initiation, not allow everyone to use as usual as other continent, the same context as Soudan abandoned their native writings to adopt arabic languages and writing, the native writings was treated as paganism and evil by alien religions. It was even forbidden to give their ancestors spiritual name to a new born.
My fiance is Nigerian, Idoma tribe, thank you for this great information. I am a historian and also got an anthropology degree in college with some light linguistics along the way. Always wish I got more, so excited to find more related to my new family! 🥰📚🇳🇬
الأعداد : 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Actually that is how the number in arabic were written originally from right to left like the arabic script, also the ancient way of saying a number would start from the smallest number which some writers still do today.. For example : 1891 : we say " one and ninety and eight hundred and Thousand" واحد و تسعون و ثمانمئة و ألف 1891 - - - - >
English spelling is a nightmare for someone that have as a first language portuguese that although kinda complex and confusing, at least makes sense. English doesn't make sense at all for me.
@@zakazany1945 In Portuguese it is clear what is the stressed syllable an that is really nice (for instance, in English, how do we know if we should pronounce DEvelopment, deVElopment, deveLOpment, developMENt?). But Portuguese also has some problems, though. For example, there are less letters for the vowels than the actual number of vowels, so the same letter, like e or o, have different sounds depending on the word, like the imperative mood of the verb "meter", that is "meta", which is pronounced with a "closed e" while "meta" (goal) is pronounced with an "open e".
I am proud to say that I was able to name 26 non-African scripts off the top of my head! They aren’t all used anymore though. Inuktitut syllabics Cherokee Mayan Characters Futhark Gothic Glagolitic Cyrillic Greek Phoenician Etruscan Latin Ogham Cretan Hieroglyphs Linear A Linear B Georgian Armenian Hebrew Arabic Devanagari Tamil Khmer ThaI Hangul Tibetan Manchu
I'm in Turkey, so my mind went more to Hittite hieroglyphs, Turkic runes, Phrygian, Luvian, Urartu, and then to India and Malayalam, and... oops, can't think of any more! LOL
you've got hangul there, if you go a little further west you can get two more for free with katakana + hiragana and also another for any of the names for using chinese characters ie hanja/kanji/chữ hán
Here's my list of 26 scripts from outside of africa: latin cyrillic greek arabic bengali georgian armenian burmese devanagari sinhala japanese korean chinese thai khmer lao javanese sundanese cherokee inuktitut syllabics pahlavi tibetan mongolian kannada malayalam balinese
Man, imagine how many languages and number systems we would have if it weren't for globalization. I'm from Brazil, and we had so many diverse tribes just like in Africa before the "Age of Exploration"... It would be so rich to have that multiple of unique language dialects... Too bad a lot of the indian's culture is disappearing from Brazil with a few exceptions like the Yanomami and the Guarani. Really changes our perspective on how different cultures view the world.
@@zakazany1945 who said that? you do know during the age of colonization most societies were purged from their libraries and forced to adopt Latin script in Africa? Don’t make egregious statements like that without stopping your reach
Edo Oracle Rainbow script INSTANTLY caught my eye, I've just never even thought of a script using color to denote sound/meaning. I'd really like to learn more about that one if possible.
latin has things to represent these sounds. a'med is the nasal. Then Chinese shows tone in Latin well enough with pinyin. And that other sound, sounds like something you'd find in German or possibly Russian. I can understand wanting to create a script to find a cultural identity, but Latin has ways to describe these sounds. And if it doesn't, it's usually ok to add something to it to represent it.
Agree!! And I can assure you there is absolutely no need to create a new script for oir language Fulah. We have adopted Latin most knowingly. Actually there are only 4 sounds that don't exist in basic Latin. So they were createe: ɗ, ɓ, ƴ, ŋ simply by adding hooks. And that, way before these guys were even born.
The "problem" of short and long vowels has lots of different solutions around the world, some of which to me (finnish person) seem strangely complicated. In finnish we mark the long vowel by just using two letters. Like the example in the video would be pular or pulaar.
Honestly, people really need to pay more attention to the languages outside of western Europe. You get beauties like these! Yeah, it may be harder than ol' Spanish or French, but get out of your comfort zone! You'll be rewarded greatly. This is why I want to study the scripts and phonology of the languages people probably have never heard of. Thank you, NativLang, for shedding light to these languages.
Yes. When western scholers agree that sanskrit is most perfect classical language Because it was designed by greatest linguist of antiquity Panini , sanskrit script is most systemic script , letters are arrange accordingly to their sounds and how they we produce sounds by our tongue. Westerners don't care about literature from Asia. I mean what is special in Iliad and Odyssey? Ancient indian sanskrit epic poem Mahabharata is 10 times bigger than Iliad and Odyssey combined.
its so cool that some of these were made up just a few decades ago and now they have their own wikipedias! I realize the language behind it is of course much, much older - all the more reason to write it down.
When I think of these two guys in a room thinking up another language the Tower of Babel comes to mind. Africa needs a law that says; "No more languages" Things here are confusing enough.
When I was a kid I sometimes made up my own alphabets just for fun to use as “secret codes” lol. But wow this was way more meaningful than that and was super interesting!
This video not only widened my knowledge but my education (German: Bildung). Thank you very much for showing me something I had not the slightest idea of - and sich is so important.
I am very happy for West Africa. It's well past time that we get away from the scripts of the empires of history that everybody tries to fit to their language. Down with Latin and Hanzi! 8) Bring back þhe þorn and ðhe eð and teach us english speakers which to use where!
@@davidjoelsson4929 I am happy that West Africans are developing their own scripts that actually fit their spoken languages. Societies have been trying to fit foreign scripts to their spoken tongues for too long, specifically the scripts of Rome (the latin alphabet) and China (hanzi, the characters of written chinese). the letters I used that look like a weird 'p' and a curvy crossed 'd' are called 'thorn' and 'eth' respectively. They are letters that English used to have but slowly slipped out of use after the invention of the printing press because the sets of type were made for latin and so didn't have thorn or eth. As you might guess thorn and eth were used for 'th' with one being voiced and the other not; which is a difficult thing for English speakers to differentiate because we don't usually think of them as different even though they are. Anything I missed? As a side note, the loss of thorn and eth is where we get things like "ye olde tavern". They would use a 'y' to stand in for the thorn that wasn't available in the set of movable type which eventually became the norm even outside of printing.
@@davidjoelsson4929 except it can't. Your example is that your native language /modified/ the latin script because it didn't do a good enough job at differentiating vowel sounds. Which is what pretty much every language has had to do or they have just ignored the issues like English does. The only reason we "all" use the latin script is because of how large the Roman Empire was and how long it lasted. The history of language is fascinating but it very clearly shows that people adapt the script of the dominant power in the region to their own language, even if it's a poor fit.
@@gildedbear5355 If you come across Joel's other comments and responses you will quickly realise that you are conversing with a bigot who wants to claim some sort of superiority over other cultures so he can better sleep at night.
You could just as easily say that English has numbers written in the reverse direction of the text. Just depends on whether you think ascending powers of the base or descending powers are better.
“...and numbers read in the same direction as the script....Arabic!” 😅 Scripts written by actual speakers of the language who are already literate, seems the best way to go. Quite a contrast to languages whose scripts were invented by well-meaning linguists and look like an introduction to the IPA (Coast Salish) or by Portuguese Jesuits and are a mass of diacritics (Vietnamese). A “why does Vietnamese look like that?” video would actually be really interesting. Not only the choice of letters and marks for certain sounds, but also the way people perceive them. It seems a classic case where they could have had a nearly phonetic script, but then in come the rules like “A before NH (which is just pronounced N on the end if a word) is pronounced like Â,” etc. I would love to have been a fly on the wall as they were deciding how to latinize that language...
@@wordart_guian Yes I’m aware that there were also some consonant clusters that disappeared and gave way to different sounds in the north and south. I’d love to see a more detailed look at what happened, and when.
3:54 'Southern African' From the start of the video a thought I had years ago came to mind: (I live in KwaZulu-Natal) the Zulu language is not well represented in latin script, it works, but I think there could be a better script. What inspired this thought was the phonetic runic script, specifically the Elder Futhark. I found it, or it found me, at 12 years old. That was easy to learn, and to use to write English in a sort of half phonetic/half transcribed way. I have failed to learn Zulu (I would love to speak it), but a few years ago I wondered if isiZulu could benefit from it's own form of writing. It makes sense that such a script would suite most Southern African languages. I don't know if Ditema tsa Dinoko script is the answer, but I'm certainly going to have to look into it. The reason I thought of this is that Runes have the sounds, 'ng', 'th', 'ei', represented as one symbol, I'm obviously no expert in isiZulu, but there are a lot of Zulu sounds which I feel could be better represented being written in it's own script. For example, the word 'hlalanathi', the 'hl' and the 'th' sounds are their own thing. (If you're wondering, 'hl'= rest a flat tip of your tongue on the top pallete behind your teeth and let the air move around either side of your tongue; 'th'= it's almost a combination of an English 't' and 'd' sound, but gently. Best I could do :D Oh, and in isiZulu, the stress is always on the second to last vowel, which is also lengthened; 'hla-la-n*aaa*-thi'. I really love the way Zulu and similar languages sound.) I work at a muthi store (please don't judge me so harshly for having still not learned the language!) so I read a lot of Zulu even though I don't understand it. My coworkers say I read very well and sound convincing. But I understand less than a 3 year old :( Sorry for the long post. potato
Why are so many people bullying Africa in the comments? If you go back far enough, you had illiterate ancestors that weren't aware of writing until another civilization introduced it to them. Sub-Saharan Africa was cut off from the rest of the world because of the Sahara Desert. Even then, it's not like they were completly unaware of writing. Adinkra and Nsibidi are proto-writing systems, which means they were in the process of making a writing system before any foreigner showed up. It probably would have taken them another 200 years before they completed a "writing system." It's much harder to create something that you are unsure how it will turn it, compared to if someone showed you how it should turn out. Unless you are a Sumerian/person of Iraqi descent, you have no right to bully Africa. Because your ancestors were most likely in their position until they became aware of writing. Stop bullying Afrika and Afrikans because you might make them more uncomfortable/less excited and make them feel weaker about creating their own writing system. Let them figure it out and adjust to their homeland languages.
