Writing English With Writing Systems You're Not Supposed To

I was bored one day, so I made cursed adaptations of English but written with different writing systems.

[@avyalie3182]

As an India, we love to write English words in Devnagari script and Hindi words in Alphabetical script all the time 😅😅😅

[@FlyingSagittarius]

Mere pativar hamesha English varnamaalaa ke saath Hindi likhate hain

[@Ro99]

I’ve learnt to read devanagri (and I’m trying to learn Hindi) and I like writing English (and I sometimes try German but obviously that’s more difficult as the Latin equivalents reflect English pronunciation and not German’s and there aresome sounds like /ç/ like in Kaninchen or Mädchen that I can only really represent with the weird Sh so कानिन्षन und मैड्षन) in devanagri. The one sound I don’t know how to do is /æ/ and also getting the schwa at the end of words to be pronounced (cobra कोब्र). Also English has so many consonant clusters that it can become very messy but still look cool eg skript - स्क्रिप्ट looks cool but strengths स्ट्रेन्क्थ्स looks ugly and using थ for the unvoiced th isn’t really a perfect match. German isn’t much better here letztes - लेट्स्टज़ or Pferd - प्फ़ेर्ड.

[@avyalie3182]

@@Ro99 i totally understand your point. I teach Korean and can read and write Chinese. I can play around with Hindi English and Korean words in each other's scripts but I have a really hard time doing that with Chinese since it's so pictorial and has tones which makes its really difficult like the Cobra can be कोब्रा 코브라 but becomes 错吧 (cuòba) in Chinese. Why???😭😭😭

[@LearnRunes]

​@@FlyingSagittariusYou mean the Latin alphabet. The native English alphabet is called futhorc because its first six characters are ᚠᚢᚦᚩᚱᚳ.

[@MostInterestingChannel]

my family uses hinglish

[@ItsPForPea]

Using Thai script to write English: 1. Give all Thai consonants its original Indic pronunciation. 2. Do whatever you did with Devanagari 3. Profit.

[@servantofaeie1569]

That's what I've done for years. แธดฺสฺวไดภฺทนฺผฺฤยีรฺซฺ. Is that readable to you?

[@azzertant]

What's about แธฺสวัทไอวฺดัฺนฟอรฺเยียรฺ?

[@servantofaeie1569]

@@azzertant I read that as /ðsæ w?dʌ ajw tn? vʌʔʌɹ jiejr/. I'm only used to the Thai script as it's used for Sanskrit, that's really hard to read for me.

[@ItsPForPea]

@@servantofaeie1569 Not really, no. I can *try* to make out most of the sentences, but I don't really understand the "what I've" part. My version would be: แธฺทส วอํท ไอฟฺ ดัํน ฟอร เยียส Where I use ฺ only for consonants and ํ for vowels that does not exist in Thai. However, if I were to use the Sanskrit inventory, it would be something like ธฺถฺส วถฺ ไอพฺ ทนฺ เผฺร ยีรฺสฺ where ฺ has to work both as extra consonant AND inherent vowel stopper. It gets quite messy.

[@servantofaeie1569]

@@ItsPForPea Breaking it down into morae, it is this แธ ðæ ดฺ t สฺ s ว wʌ ได taj ภฺ v ท dʌ นฺ n ผฺฤ fɚ ยี ji รฺ ɹ ซฺ z Maybe because I wrote the T at the end of "what" as if it were the beginning of "I've"? Is วดฺไอภฺ better?

[@nickzardiashvili624]

As a Georgian, I often have to switch between Georgian and English keyboards which often produces English sentences with Georgian alphabet such as ჯუსტ ინ ცასე, ანდ ბყ ტჰე წაყ, ჰოწ არე ყოუ and so on. These combinations of Georgian letters can be read out in Georgian, especially as Georgian is an extremely straightforward script and one letter only ever represents one sound, with very few exceptions. Of course, the resulting "language" is neither Georgian nor English and to my ears sounds like some language ever more consonant heavy than Georgian, perhaps like one of the North Caucasian languages or something. I've had a lot of fun randomly starting to talk in that "language" with my friends and seeing how long it takes them to figure it out, or even talking with it with my wife when I don't want other Georgian speakers to understand me.

[@mrmimeisfunny]

It's interesting how the Georgian keyboard layout is just the Latin keyboard layout with Georgian letters. Usually you get stuff like "Ashchf Lshtshfum" when trying to type Latin when your keyboard is not set to it.

[@Kiyoliki]

I'm georgian and same thing here lol. But to me that "language" sounds more native American due to very cursed consonant clusters. Georgian consonant clusters are (for the most part) "melodic".

[@nickzardiashvili624]

@@Kiyoliki წელლ, ტჰე ცონსონანტ ცლუსტერს მაყ სეემ მელოდიც ტო უს, ბუტ წე'რე ნატივე სპეაკერს სო ტჰატ ონლყ მაკეს სენსე. ონე წაყ ორ ანოტჰერ იტ ჰას ა ვერყ წეირდ, ეერიე ფეელინგ ტო იტ :დ

[@nickzardiashvili624]

@@mrmimeisfunny Yeah, it's relatively straightforward in that respect, but you do get some very weird sounding words since English, more or less vowel sounding letters such as w or y are mapped to very sharp consonant on the Georgian keyboard.

[@Liggliluff]

_"Georgian is an extremely straightforward script and one letter only ever represents one sound"_ This is a meaningless statement. Scripts don't have sounds, orthographies does. The orthography of the Georgian language has one sound per letter, using the Georgian script. But so does for example the orthography of the Croatian language using the Latin script, if we count /ɲ/ and /ʎ/ as the sequence /nj/ and /lj/ respectively. But there are also other languages that use scripts more straightforward too, and languages that doesn't use scripts straightforward. But your comment implies that the Latin script doesn't have one sound per letter when it just as well can have. Hawaiian would be a much better example of this.

[@user-vn1yw1ow4f]

For me as a Russian person this is perfect. English written with Cyrillic script with slight Tajik influence

[@AndreaColombo-fx1wh]

Gimme and example!

[@AndreaColombo-fx1wh]

an*

[@user-cc9mo4ou6u]

I have also made an English Cyrillic system that was pretty much identical to this in consonants (I only used ж with a descender instead of ч with a descender, х instead of h and j rather than й) but drastically differed in vowels. Longer versions tended to be represented by macrons

[@JmKrokY]

Cool

[@borjaslamic]

As someone who only knows how to read cyrilic the missmatch with it being in english made my brain fry

[@darkalligraph]

As someone who learns a bunch of scripts for no reason, this is something I do all the time to practice them (especially cyrillic, hangul and devanagari), since I don't actually know many words from the languages that use these scripts. I guess this is the perfect video for me

[@syndicalistspeedsolver]

That sounds fun! Do you think hangul was harder or easier than devanagari. I learned devanagari and want to learn hangul but it looks hard

[@kako128]

@@syndicalistspeedsolverHangul is widely considered to be the easiest script to learn! You can learn it in just a few minutes.

[@equilibrum999]

and Chinese and Japanese are considered to be the easiest ones also? minus the katakana and hiragana of Japanese?@@kako128

[@gabrielgallardo5078]

​@@syndicalistspeedsolverit's easier than latin alphabet

[@LotsOfS]

@@syndicalistspeedsolver Hangul is by far the most difficult script I've tried to learn. All the characters look too similar to one another hindering recognizability, and represent sounds that differ very minimally from one another or in ways that is hard to distinguish for an English speaker since the distinction between the sounds is not made in it and other similar European languages. Combine that with a romanization standard that makes absolutely 0 sense, and I just want to tear my dictionary apart.

[@purplesingingbanana2228]

as a Kazakh, ur version of english in cyrillic was great and easy to read !

[@mastersafari5349]

Reading Cyrillic English unintentionally made my Russian accent super thick. Even with the Tatar letters added in I prefer the original Latin script. It's so much more familiar at this point.

[@pxzzvc6357]

салам

[@user-pr7ih3el6q]

as a Ukrainian, it was a nightmare to read. but I like it anyway

[@NeonBeeCat]

As an american it took me 5 minutes to read the text cause im used to reading cyrillic in russian only lol.

[@a_Certain_Scientific_Absurdist]

@@user-pr7ih3el6q Тоже заметил. Ведь получается, что тот же "Iнглиш", будет читаться, как "Инглыш". Хотя я понимаю, что перепутать "И" и "Ы" - довольно легко для англо-говорящего человека)

[@ABD_Zwei]

I hate it, please do more

[@cluesagi]

Stuff like this really illustrates how arbitrary our scripts are. Like the only reason Cyrillic English doesn't seem as natural as Latin English is because we're not used to it

[@LearnRunes]

ᚪᛡ᛫​ᚹᚢᛞ‍ᛞ᛫​ᚱᚪᚦᛟᚱ᛫​ᚱᚪᛡᛏ᛫​ᛁᚾ‍ᚾ᛫​ᚦᛟ᛫​ᚾᛖᛡᛏᛁᚠ‍ᚠ᛫​ᛁᛝᚸᛚᛁᛋᚳ᛫​ᛋᛣᚱᛁᛈᛏ᛬​᛬​ᚱᚢᚾᛉ᛬​ I would rather write in the native English script - runes.

[@hearingninja]

That would be cool as hell lol

[@servantofaeie1569]

ᛁᚷ ᛬ ᚹᚩᛚᛞ ᛬ ᚻᚱᚫᚦᚩᚱ ᛬ ᚹᚱᛁᛏ ᛬ ᚹᛁᚦ ᛬ ᚱᚣᚢᚾᚫᛋ ᛬ ᛗᚪᚱᚫ ᛬ ᛖᛏᚣᛗᚩᛚᚩᚷᚷᛁᛣᚫᛚᛖᚷ I would rather write with runes more etymologically

[@LearnRunes]

@@hearingninja Come join us. We're working on publishing a few books.

[@EMEKC]

Іт олүејз мејкс ми хѣпи ту си аҙәр пипәл трај рајтің Іңліш ін Сірілік, ајв бін дуің іт фор ӥрз наү. Ивн іф іц ә біт інфлуәнсд бај мај Џәрмән ѣксәнт, френдз кѣн ѕіл андәрѕѣнд ми :) It always makes me happy to see other people try writing English in Cyrillic, I've been doing it for years now. Even if it's a bit influenced by my German accent, friends can still understand me :)

[@weirdlanguageguy]

I taught my little brother to write English Cyrillic over the holidays and it was quite fun! By the way, are you using Cyrillic as /st/? Why’d you decide to do that?

[@EMEKC]

​@@weirdlanguageguy That's awesome! :D About the , I used to use for that, but I wanted to move away from the diacritic. So I just seeked the next neat looking thing. Sometimes I look on Wikipedia to see what sounds a character is usually used for, but sometimes I just go for the looks. 🙃

[@irakli-2k]

I had a stroke while reading this message in cyrylic.

[@EMEKC]

@@irakli-2k I guess that's to be expected, considering there's not just one way to use Cyrillic

[@F_A_F123]

Ўай йюз ү әнд j (х)ўэн ѳер ар ў әнд й

[@sunnymishra1057]

6:57 As hindi speaker we usually use द(da) for "the" instead of ध(dha)

[@SunnySJamil]

Yes, that is because the word "the" is mispronounced by our co-linguists. The "th" sound in English is heard by Hindi-Urdu speakers as a "d" while it is a vibrating version of "dh."

[@alyanahzoe]

​@@SunnySJamil are you serious?

[@goo_pita]

イッツソーサッドダットユードントハブイーストエイジャンライティングシステム😂 It’s so sad that you don’t have east Asian writing systems. While writing with Hangul or Katakana is relatively easy as they are phonetic letters, writing with Chinese characters are very challenging and the most interesting. Chinese character has its own meaning in each letter, so you have multiple choices representing the same sound and that must be very fun!

[@thealgeriantank2587]

The short vowels diacritics are optional in Arabic because how the word is pronounced is highly predictable due to the nature of the Arabic language where words are derived from roots into familiar templates, while English relies on affixes, so I guess if it is going to be written in an Arabo-Persian script, then short vowel diacritics must be written all the time.

[@MB-nx9tq]

I’d advocate only writing the short vowels when they are on the stressed syllable of the word.

[@aishaahmed3736]

May not be necessary. Urdu uses vowel diacritics ever so slightly more than Arabic and yet is still readable, even though it does not use the consonantal root system and instead uses functional morphology.

[@user-28qhfk65]

Like Jawi (Malay & Indo language) script? I'm Malay and have used it quite sometime (modern Malay uses Rumi/Romanized script). For example: Hari = هاري Makan = ماکن In Malay, there's a lot of words that is borrowed directly into English, and we have convert them into Jawi script. For example: Restoran = Restaurant ريستورن Jus = Juice = جوس Though Jawi also has characters thats not available in Arabic like ݢ=G ڤ=P ڽ=Nya ڠ=Nga So I guess it can't be use. I'm not a linguist, Malay is just my mother tongue so sorry if my explanation isn't clear.

[@diamdante]

Sebenarnye awak cakap yg betul. When adapting English to the Arabic script, it may be more suitable to look at Jawi, as the Jawi alphabet itself was already adapted by the old Malay scribes in some ways @@user-28qhfk65

[@tinypenguinhk]

Now imagine this: using Chinese characters to represent English, but keeping the Latin alphabet whenever there is a suffix to modify a word, similar to how Japanese does it. This kinda makes sense because in Japanese, Kanji is often only meaningful in its meaning but not in its pronunciation, so although the text will become just like classical Chinese it actually does not change the fact that it is English. And a character can just be multi-syllabic like Japanese. This is how it would look like: 此乃實ly英lish文，僅其其見如秦ese。 (This)(is)(actual)ly(Eng)lish, (just)(that)(it)(looks)(like)(Chin)ese. 雖乃其難至底立，東亞n民可ould或ly為能至取上一點之其s意ing與out學ing一他字母。 (Although)(it)(is)(hard)(to)(under)(stand), (East)(Asia)n(people)(could)(possibly)(be)(able)(to)(pick)(up)(a)(bit)(of)(it)s(mean)ing(with)out(learn)ing(an)(other)(alpha)(bet). 此乃真ly幾物其君應不為至英lish。 (This)(is)(real)ly(some)(thing)(that)(you)(should)(not)(do)(to)(Eng)lish. 其乃全ly意ingless但趣ing至思關。 (This)(is)(total)(ly)(mean)ingless(but)(interest)ing(to)(think)(about).

[@nayutaito9421]

As a Japanese speaker, I fully support this idea.

[@potatoindespair4494]

底立 for "understand" is cracking me up

[@kreuner11]

​@@potatoindespair4494is it literally under and stand?

[@TeslabladePlaysMC]

As a (English native) Japanese learner who's started to pick up Chinese, I see a lot of flaws with this. Just because Chinese doesn't have suffix modifiers like English does, it doesn't mean that they don't exist in meaning. For example, "此乃實ly英lish文，僅其其見如秦ese。" would more sound like, "this is reallyly englishlish, only it it see as Qin ese", since 英文 is already "english", 實 can mean "really", etc. It's a logographic and phonic nightmare, for, as what I see, no gain over just learning Chinese... unless you're trying to make the most difficult conlang for the western world!

[@bocbinsgames6745]

As a bilingual english chinese speaker, often I will just insert a chinese verb (conjugated in english) into a sentence when it's easier to think about

[@rayexception4590]

As an Urdu speaker, I am surprised you were talking about the Perso-Arabic script in great detail but completely neglected mentioning the Pakistani "toy" marker, being ٹ , ڈ , and ڑ . This marker typically expresses those typical stereotypical Indian accent "hard" d, t, and rolled r sounds. Using it would've made the Perso-Arabic transcription of the North Wind and the Sun a lot easier to read, but either way, great video!

[@talismantatetristan]

I have learned most of cyrillic, and it is the perfect alphabet for every language. With some mutations every language can be written in it. It may seem strange at the beginning, but if you're getting used to it, it is just great.

[@quakxy_dukx]

Cyrillic confuses me so much. With how identical some of the characters are, it’s really disorienting when you find they produce completely different sounds. The only other writing system I’ve learned is Hangul

[@an3_omx]

Is Cyrillic any more perfect than any other large script, like…uh, the Indic one he covered in the video? Really, Latin could actually be used well, like in Vietnamese

[@lred1383]

i feel like you can say that about any other script too, especially Latin because of how many different languages already are written in it. And idk if it's just the unfamiliarity, but this Cyrillic English is incredibly cursed and took me several times longer to parse than any actual Cyrillic language

[@linfyuan6754]

I think I have seen English ideographs based on Chinese characters somewhere. Now there is English abjads; plus there are already English syllabary (katakana), basically there should be no limitations of how to write a language

[@quakxy_dukx]

I believe you’re thinking of square word calligraphy

[@Vifnis]

"basically there should be no limitations of how to write a language" haha inb4 IPA evangalists force use all to use some sort of bastardized 200 letter alphabet that will just look like complete word vomit XD XD

[@Ellary_Rosewood]

My Georgian friend and I LOVE to message each other in English using the Georgian alphabet. It's so much fun. ❤️🇬🇪

[@aishaahmed3736]

Indian language speakers message each other in their own native languages written in Latin script all the time.

[@Vifnis]

@@aishaahmed3736 this is literally what Viet is, and it is so funny... the whole region is based in Brahmi scripts, and then Vietnam just decides to adopt an alphabet from a thousand miles away... XD

[@DarkShadow-tx8mo]

As someone who speaks Marathi , Hindi and English ; I like how much more straight forward Devanagari script is to read and write compared to the Latin script.

[@Liggliluff]

I will admit I don't know how to read the Devanagari script and I would like to know how it is more straightforward. Properly written Latin script in a language would define each sound by a shape, and then sound them out one by one. Example would be Hawaiian: "E ʻonipaʻa kākou i ka ʻimi naʻauao" /e ʔonipaʔa kaːkou̯ i ka ʔimi naʔau̯ao̯/ I think this is very straightforward, just read the sounds one by one. I could see the diphthongs 'ou', 'au' and 'ao' as perhaps not perfectly straightforward, and they should perhaps considering writing /v~w/ as V instead, and using W as the diphthong ending /u̯/, and some other letter for the diphthong ending /o̯/.

[@nHans]

It's not a problem of the Latin script _per se._ It's perfectly adequate for Latin 🤣. The problem is that the Latin script has been used for writing a whole bunch of languages-not just in Europe, but all over the world. These languages have sounds that don't have alphabets in Latin. So each language developed its own conventions to represent non-Latin sounds. Such conventions include diacritics, consonant clusters, silent alphabets and so on. English, during its long evolution from Old English, absorbed several words that originated in Greek, Latin, other Romance languages, Germanic languages etc. Each of these words came with its own non-Latin sounds, with its spelling reflecting its original language's convention. And that's what makes English spelling inconsistent and ambiguous. Add to that American v. British spelling differences. It's truly maddening! The problem is not so bad with Spanish, German, and French. (I've studied all 3 to varying extents.) They also use the Latin alphabet, but each in its own different way. Furthermore, unlike English, they use diacritics liberally-also in different ways. However, once you learn the spelling rules of a particular language, it's pretty straightforward to read what's written _in that language._ Unfortunately, writing what you hear is more difficult-particularly in French. In that sense, they're not phonetic. Whereas Sanskrit-written in Indic scripts such as Devanagari, Kannada, Telugu etc.-is truly phonetic: you pronounce text exactly as it's written and vice-versa. This applies to a slightly lesser degree to Hindi and Marathi, where schwa elision causes a minor hiccup. But Devanagari is far from perfect. My biggest complaint is that it is unnecessarily complicated, particularly for writing consonant clusters-which this video pointed out. I learnt both the Latin alphabet and Devanagari formally in school (neither is my native language's script). Yet, I can read Sanskrit and Hindi much faster when written using Latin rather than Devanagari. Obviously, the fastest I can read is my native language written in its native script. Likewise, if you learnt to write your native language using Devanagari (instead of Modi), then it's not surprising that you find Devanagari easier to read compared to any other script that you learnt later in life.

[@Allan_son]

The problem isn't that Latin script is not straightforward. It works pretty well for Latin. The problem is that most modern European languages have far more sounds than Latin. English is a double mess. It has 26 letters to describe something like 40 sounds, AND for historical reasons it does not follow its own spelling rules.

[@weepingscorpion8739]

Oh... I am not even sure the Latin script worked for Latin... no length distinction in vowels (although I guess the apex was mandatory at one early point), three letters for /k/, no writing distinction between /i/ and /j/ nor /u/ and /w/. And I suppose that was meant to be read as /y/ but do we know if this was even done by all? Likewise for and /s/ vs /z/. Oh, ? So yeah, even Latin had/s issues. I guess adequate or pretty well works as descriptors but it's not perfect. :)

[@Anhonime]

@@nHans yeah, it's all about how you adapt the alphabet to your language and keeping the spellings up-to-date Polish (my native language), despite its scary appearance, is really straight-forward (all the sz, cz etc. are just digraphs, like English sh and ch but entirely regular; Czech did it better imo with their š, č, but we're not bad either), there's only one way to read a word and there aren't that many different ways to spell an unknown word you've heard (there are 3 sounds that can have different spellings for historical reasons: u/ó, rz/ż, ch/h; and then the end of the word is always voiceless ("dog" would be pronounced "dok") and all consonant clusters need to agree in voiceness (in pronunciation but not necessarily spelling, but the "exceptions" (i.e. voiceness mismatch in spelling) are mostly common words, e.g. the sound of "pš" can be spelled "psz" or "prz")) it mostly has to do with the fact that people get attached to spellings (but pronunciations evolve fast) and some languages have a longer literary tradition that others e.g. Old French was pretty much spelled exactly as spoken, but sounds changed, letters became silent and people stuck with the same spellings cos they got used to them, so you end up with these bizarre spellings (which are fairly easy to decode because pronunciation changes were fairly regular, but hard/impossible to re-encode cos you'd need to know the sounds which were there X centuries ago, but became silent with time) it feels bizarre to change a spelling of a word (if it's written in the same alphabet), so foreign spellings make things worse: English words are spelled like in English within Polish (e.g. we spell it "weekend", not "łikend" or "team" not "tim") and if we kept adding these borrowings and ended up with a giant amount of them from all over the place, we'd end up with a spaghetti spelling like English English borrowed words from all over the place while keeping the spellings more or less intact, so you end up with this weird mix of conventions within the same language, and on top of that, English has a long literary tradition and the pronunciation changed very significantly while the spellings haven't been updated, so you end up with foreign spellings + archaic spellings historical spellings and foreign spellings sometimes have their advantages cos they protect against some homophones (words pronounced the same but with different meanings, etymology) e.g. meet vs meat in English, or team vs tim/Tim in Polish (we don't distinguish between the English "i as in bit" and "ee as in beet" sound, so "team" and "Tim" would end up having the same spellings if we wrote them out in Polish conventions) - there are upsides and downsides, the case is actually very similar to the pros and cons of switching to hangul/hiragana/katakana instead of using hanja/kanji (Chinese ideographic script vs native Japanese/Korean syllabaries) I went with the Latin alphabet for my conlang cos Latin, Greek and Cyrillic are very easy and convenient scripts if you adopt them right (my conlang's spelling is basically one letter = one sound, almost like writing in IPA but using more common prettier glyphs and conventions to make things easier and more readable) Devanagari is beautiful and still pretty straight-forward, but I'd say the Latin alphabet is as easy as it gets (if you keep the spellings phonetic and conventions sane), English being the dominant language isn't the only reason it was adopted first for computers, it's also just very very easy, you can't go much easier than just stacking letters one after another - Hangul has more logical glyphs and is in some way arguably easier, but forming a syllable is a more complex operation and it's not as easy to encode in a computer as the Latin alphabet

[@MRCSANY]

As a scriptsman, I cant count on both hands how many times I've mapped english onto other scripts 😂 thanks for this!

[@LeafpoolTheMedCat]

English in the Arabic script with actual vowels would be a good shorthand script

[@ohajohaha]

Arabic with vowels looks cursed

[@Liggliluff]

@@ohajohaha Then don't look at languages using Arabic with vowels: Serbo-Croatian, Sorani, Kashmiri, Mandarin Chinese, Uyghur, now some of these languages have other scripts that they are more commonly written in, but Arabic variants exists.

[@ohajohaha]

@@Liggliluff and they are ugly. At this point why bother using improper arabic instead of latin smh (You've missed Belarusian and Polish Arabic used by Tatars like 400 years ago)

[@myspleenisbursting4825]

​@@Liggliluff Jawi too, and we have a reason to use it and not just because we're a bored conlanger trying to be qUiRkY

[@Dottyy]

سومتيمس ي اكشواللي ريت مي ناوتس ليك ثيس، يت اكشواللي وركس قويت والل

[@ahentargs]

I tried writing Spanish with Tengwar, IT WAS PERFECT

[@Jool4832]

You could also write it with the Greek alphabet no problem.

[@Liggliluff]

You can write most languages in most scrips, by first breaking down the language by its sounds (preferably IPA). For Spanish, we could still use Latin, but we have to convert it from Spanish to have consistent consonants. For example quiero has "qu" represent just K, "ie" is a diphthong and would be good to rewrite that, say ŷe for now, so "kŷero" would be a consistent spelling. Then you can convert that to a script, say Cyrillic: k > к, ŷe > е, r > р, o > о, quiero > керо (note that Russian е is /je/). queso > keso > кэсо. calle > kaye > кајэ. You could argue it should be ''кае", but there's a slight difference between "lle" and "ie" in Spanish, and maybe this difference should be preserved. This was just a funny experiment to do in the comments.

[@pawel198812]

​@Liggliluff I would personally opt for къеро, or maybe some other way to indicate that the [k] and [j] should be distinct and audible rather than merging into something like [kʲ] or [c]. The letter Е represents the /je/ sequence only if it's preceded by another vowel, a soft or hard sign, or at the beginning of a word, after consonant letters it indicates palatalization (sometimes only historically)

[@servantofaeie1569]

@@Liggliluff Spanish ll should be Љ. јэ looks cursed as hell.

[@servantofaeie1569]

@@pawel198812 Spanish doesn't have /c/ so it doesn't matter.

[@justaduck1664]

You have inspired me to create a script for egyptian arabic which would be a mix of coptic greek and latin scripts

[@quakxy_dukx]

That’s a really cool idea

[@weepingscorpion8739]

Oh, wow. Awesome! I am not literate enough in Devanagari or (Perso-)Arabic to comment on those but the Cyrillic looked sweet. About /æ/ and /jæ/, Ossetic has the letter (yes, a Cyrillic Ææ) and an older version of the Mordvinic alphabet had the letter so if you need two more letters, there you go. :) Looking forward to your other writing systems for English. ;)

[@unclebozo9845]

There's also the Yat (Ѣ ѣ) and its iodated version (Ꙓ ꙓ) that used to represent a vowel close to /æ/ in old Russian and church slavonic.

[@Ithirahad]

If not for the political and practical issues we should all just **use** your Cyrillic one. It's really nice. Though I'd probably not bother with the Slavic palatalized vowels; they make 'sense' but from first principles they're sort of redundant when you have to just use y for a ton of vowels anyway. It's good either way though.

[@lightningpotato8660]

ive actually been writing english in the manchu script for my personal notes and i feel like this is like the one occasion i can share that fact on

[@k0valus585]

i'm a russian speaker, and i love confusing other russians by writing english in the russian cyrillic script, and sometimes serbian cyrillic script алуайс вери фонни ту ду

[@schroedingersband]

This is horrific, do more pls

[@mrblake4598]

In Turkish we have jokes that made of some Turkish sentences written according to some English words' spellings. That means a reverse example of the thing in the video. For example: I run each team. ( You are reading it as "Ay ran iiç tiim" according to Turkish Latin, which means 'I drank ayran", "Ayran içtim". So "I run each team" is actually a Turkish sentence written in English Latin.)

[@Bombardier7906]

Having already attempted this exact thing myself, its really interesting to see how someone else would go about it. Great video!

[@ogabrielalbar]

I'd love to see English written in hangul in a part two

[@martinomasolo8833]

Amazing work. As a side note I wouldn't have used ه both for the consonant h and the vowel æ, to avoid confusion, but for the rest of the vowels, MAN did you do a good job. It flows very good, with those rules in mind I didnt have trouble reading the passage even without diacritics.

[@Liggliluff]

In Unicode, ه combining as هلهله is /h/ But ە combining as ەلەلە is /æ/ So they can still appear visually different. Their isolated and final forms are identical, but they have different initial and medial forms (where /æ/ doesn't connect to the next letter so it doesn't have a medial and instead using a final form)

[@Moses_VII]

Using that letter as a vowel like Sorani does is so confusing for me.

[@devotionalhindurussiansong4507]

As an Indian who knows Hindi and Devanagari. I write English in Cyrillic for some reason

[@o_s-24]

Was I the only one who read the cyrillic one with a russian accent 😂

[@chintumoghe6134]

Cool idea, but as a speaker of devanagari based languages I have a few suggestions: 1. No English accent has a good pronunciation of the "ध" in Devanagari, so I'd suggest going back to using "द" (for words like "the", lit. "द"), "थ" (for words like "thumb", lit. "थंब‌्") and "ड" (for words like "drum", lit. "ड्रम्") 2. English words are often transcribed in Indian contexts in Devanagari, so picking up the established notions could be helpful (i.e. please do not get rid of the "भ", we use it) 3. Few random words as I would transcribe them: Wind: विंड Strongest: स्ट्रॉन्गेस्ट Traveller: ट्रैवलर Making: मेकिंग् Immediately: इमीडीएटली And so on. Fun vid

[@dasha_in_vibe]

I think that merging /x/ and /h/ in cyrillic to makes sense, because /x/ is not that common in English outside of some dialects. Slavic languages don't use for /h/ because a lot of them just don't have that phoneme, + English words are usually transcribed with in russian

[@dasha_in_vibe]

are there even minimal pairs for /x/ and /h/?

[@ohajohaha]

​@@dasha_in_vibeголод vs холод

[@maxriering]

in Ukrainian г is h whereas ґ is g

[@vladyslavpidlisnyi]

@@maxriering Ukrainian г isn't /h/, because it is voiced

[@d_lta]

@@maxrieringukraining г is a gh sound though, not h

[@oopdi]

Wow this is so well done. Great video!

[@Elriuhilu]

There's a subreddit called Juropijan Speling in which everyone writes in English using the writing system of their native language. The idea is that it should sound like spoken English if you read the text correctly for the non-English language it is written in.

[@zakuraiyadesu]

Love the videos, man. Keep it up!!!

[@degenerals6127]

I still cannot believe that I was able to flawlessly read all of the scripts.

[@linnea8753]

Ooh I love this. I dont know the cyrillic or devanagari scrips well enough, but I am surprised by how I could read the Arabic one without too much trouble. And it also helped me (a Swedish speaker) with where I should say the dh and z sounds. Although I think it depends alot on you being able to guess what word it is, or recognize it, to fill in the correct short vowel. And always using the diacritics takes a lot of effort, and it gets very messy to read unless its in big print. The way Arabic works its a lot easier to guess the correct vowels.

[@Belaus3332]

Now try this with greek alphabet, hangeul, mongolian script and georgian alphabet Good video, inspired me on something atrocious

[@nabeel8633]

In Pakistan shops with english names are written with Urdu characters, let's say if you found a shop called "toy shop" - like that's the name of the brand - then it would appear on signs as ٹوئی شاپ (To-ii shaap)

[@aishaahmed3736]

Wa alaikum salaam.

[@Ayaan13550]

Toy shop is ٹوئے شاپ not ٹوئی شاپ

[@martinomasolo8833]

I did it too! I've already ideated a perso-arabic script for Italian that works pretty well, it's so much fun😂

[@czfuchs]

Me encantó la anécdota. Muchas gracias, profesor

[@damianmatras8568]

I really liked this video. Great job. Could you make a video on British English written in *modern* Runic Alphabet?

[@hispanicaircat81]

This reminds me of me writing languages in scripts of other languages for fun. For igsámpal, in Espanis, inne Frintche, orr Dschörmen.

[@driksarkar6675]

5:26 aren’t त, थ etc. dental? I think they do this because Hindi’s “retroflex” consonants are really just (post)-alveolar, so English’s stops are right in-between.

[@gunngg908]

for cyrillic i would personally use х for /h/ because i don't see any reason not to

[@Vifnis]

I think he wanted to avoid confusion since Cyrillic uses the Greek type of 'x' as in 'chi', while 'x' was uncommonly used in Latin as the the Greek 'ks', and instead the English 'x' was turned into the Greek 'ks' sound as well... I think this might be why some Gaelic sounds so funny in English. So it wouldn't read like "wkso, wksat, wksen, wksere, wksy..."

[@gunngg908]

​@@Vifnis but it's still a different script so it can't have exactly the same letters, and what about other letters like у, н and и which make different sounds in latin and cyrillic?

[@asitwaghmare8144]

As a Marathi person, For devanagari English, I would suggest using ट and ड instead of त and द for /t/ and /d/ respectively. We already use ट and ड for writing English t amd d. त and द sound like Spanish t and d respectively.

[@silasbrainard2987]

I agree. He incorrectly states that त and द are alveolar when they are actually dental (probably because IPA transcribes alveolar and dental the same, t and d for both, maybe showing a European bias of the IPA. IPA does have diacritics to optionally distinguish them, but has separate letters for the retroflex consonants: ʈ and ɖ ). It is good he used the aspirated dentals थ and ध for the English dental fricatives though. There were also a lot of mistakes applying his own system in the transcription of the North wind and the Sun. Still, I enjoyed the video a lot. Devanagari is great for English vowels, better than Latin. When Nepali people write English in Devanagari, they also use भ for v, since व is w or b. I also liked his idea of using visarga for word final schwa. The last confusing thing is that English stops are usually aspirated. So it could make sense to use ठ and ढ. But since they aren't aspirated in all contexts, I think it makes sense to use the simpler unaspirated consonants, and save the aspirated ones for fricatives and such.

[@vatsalj7535]

​@@silasbrainard2987 व is never b, it's only w

[@visi9856]

@@vatsalj7535 व is pronounced as "B" in Bengali and Rajasthani. Vijay - Bijoy in bengali and Bije in Rajasthani

[@TheStickCollector]

I would love to develop an arabic or Mongolian script for it Mainly to help with shorthand writing. Interesting to see your take on these

[@cardboard_hat]

As an individual who is not capable of speaking of the Germanic tongue known as English that well, I confirm this video is based

[@FrickinFrickative]

The extended Cyrillic alphabet has a letter for the mid central vowel sound, Ă, used in the Chuvash language, but it breaks in many fonts. The Ы letter is used for the mid central vowel sound in some languages too.

[@Garfield_Minecraft]

เวน ไรติง อิงลิช อิน เดอะ ไรติง ซิสเตม แดด ยู นอท สัปโพส ทู วูด บี เวรี พรอเบลิมเมติก

[@servantofaeie1569]

"Wane writing Englidge in tay'a writing zystem tat you nu'ud supboas do woot pee wery bara'abaylimamaytic" huh?

[@mawkernewek]

Have you thought of an adaptation of the Linear B syllabary?

[@josephschubert6561]

That Hangulized English by Michael Chen is actually really cool. Probably a few kinks to work out, but I was able to read the entire sample passage with only a little difficulty since I have prior practice with hangul.

[@drivers99]

Wait. 1:39 The RP vs GA difference in where vowels change in alternating places is mind blowing. I need a video about that.

[@malegria9641]

Non native Chechen speaker here. In Chechen, to represent /h/, they use х1/хӀ. Edit: something else cool, in Chechen and Ingush Arabic scripts, they write out every. Single. Vowel. And not just using those little diacritics either, they have a separate letter for each vowel. You can see why it was replaced by Latin and Cyrillic, since these two have the highest vowels of any north Caucasus language 😭 Edit 2: هارا نوٓخچيّن موٓتّ.

[@sergejbozinovic6096]

2:36 Regarding cyrillic "Х" as a [h]. My native dialect of Serbo-Croatian reads it exactly like that! Many speakers (if not the majority) use [x] and [h] interchangeably though [x] is the official pronunciation. I was quite surprised in school when we were taught phonology and the teacher exaggeratedly pronounced every sound for clarification. The "harshness" of her "X" stuck out as I said it completely differently. This is not a criticism just interesting. Fun video!

[@servantofaeie1569]

I don't think I've ever made a Cyrillic alphabet for English where /h/ wasn't X

[@BinglesP]

I wondered a lot about this. Especially since I know Japanese in particular does this regularly, using Katakana script.

[@XVYQ_EY]

Ok. 1. cot is pronunced with rounded, not unrounded wovel. 2. cot - caught merging leans to open-mid vowel, not the other way around

[@fywus_3299]

the cot-caught merger generally results in the unrounded full-open vowel /ɑ/ in america. it does merɡe into /ɔ/ in scottish enɡlish but that is not the topic of the video

[@aoscf77]

the cyrillic english alphabet is actually fire tho

[@sweathogstickerpicker]

How absurd and wonderfully chaotic. Wug-approved.

[@happyelephant5384]

Зис ... Зис воз магнифисент .. Олмост Май айс ар стіл блідін

[@ohajohaha]

Уос/Уоз 😂😂 гуд

[@amanda-we9fv]

гуд))

[@user-dv3wo7sb6w]

Смесь из монгольского и казахского какая-то!)))))

[@servantofaeie1569]

​@@ohajohahaАт лист райт уоз уыҙ о З

[@sameerpharma4906]

देयम ब्रो डेट्स क्रेज।

[@aishaahmed3736]

क्रेज़ी**

[@sameerpharma4906]

@@aishaahmed3736 थैंक्स फॉर द करेक्शन !

[@James-vw9yy]

Would you think about making a video about Chinook wawa/jargon? It was a huge trade language in the Pacific Northwest of North America, and for a while used Duployan shorthand as it's writing system! Would be interesting to talk about the history of it. It is technically not extinct but quite close, some publicity would help a lot.

[@modmaker7617]

Now write English with Classical Chinese Characters.

[@jeffreysommer3292]

I used to take notes in high school writing English in Feanorean Script, from Tolkien.

[@Squaretable22]

English orthography is so fossilised. The transition from Old Romanian Cyrillic into Latin transformed the language from having one of the most complex orthographies in europe (Romanian kept many letters from Old Church Slavonic way after its neighbours) to one of the simplest. English has a lot more sounds than Romanian but honestly imposing another languages system and working out the details after would probably be preferable at this stage. ^^"

[@KabalFromMK9]

Wait until you see Tibetan orthography

[@torrawel]

The solution is simple : Aztec and other Mesoamerican scripts: For sounds that you don't have, use a logogram or a pictograph😂

[@poetrait941]

아이 러브 유어 채널. 땡큐 포 디스 비디오!

[@alyanahzoe]

ㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋㅋ 😂😂😂

[@martinomasolo8833]

Shavian is the GOAT

[@LearnRunes]

Shavian isn't bad but it's trouble is that, in an effort to be accurate, it tries to be more precise about sounds than English speakers need our language to be. That results in speakers of different dialects being unable to understand each other. On the other hand, English's native writing system (i.e. futhorc runes) incorporates sufficient ambiguity to minimise confusion across accents while still relying primarily on how words sound to the listener.

[@thefateshavewarned]

For Cyrillic, you could also use Old Church Slavonic theta to represent /θ/. Makes sense since it descends from Greek theta, but was abandoned since /θ/ doesn’t occur in Slavic languages.

[@Jool4832]

The only problem is that the Greek θ looks too much like the Mongolian Ө.

[@thefateshavewarned]

@@Jool4832 Good point. Completely forgot about that.

[@StardustAnlia]

I remember figuring out in my Anlai Conlang that English has a phonotactic that ng could not be in the beginning of a syllable without being reduced in speech. In Anlai, this is also the case, but h may appear at the ends of words. Also the African loan lg letter is pronounced gl in the beginnings of syllables and lg at the ends. A separate g and l letter at the end of a word means an isolated ul syllable. Lh and Lk are common syllable endings, but are written as letter pairs.

[@romanwolfli6273]

When I’m bored in class, I just make up my own writing systems and then write all my classmates’ names in them… heh, I should probably pay more attention 😅

[@z4-bakedpotato399]

as someone with slavic friends ive been doing this since they taught me the cyrillic alphabet, but i just write it as id say it in english with a few replaced letters (в = w or v, дж = j, etc) and limiting myself to the 5 base vowel sounds аиуео (usually opting for й in diphthongs)

[@citrusblast4372]

Try the Cherokee syllabary lol

[@MolotovVids]

An interesting example of something like this I found was excerpts of The Bible written via the Armenian Alphabet but in the Ottoman Turkish language which was kinda ziggy zaggy to see at first

[@mikayeru]

I think Armenian script would suit well for this purpose, since we have 39 letters that cover most of the needs of English, except maybe for things like "th". And yes, we often write English words or short phrases in Armenian script while chatting :D

[@VictorTheVictini]

English needs a new writing system 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

What's wrong with returning to our old one?

[@abarette_]

not really, just add more letters ffs

[@VictorTheVictini]

@@abarette_ True, I have done something like that w/my own alphabet reformation thingie

[@abarette_]

@@VictorTheVictini I'm a huge syllabaryfag so I had to merge vowels significantly - and yet, I ended up with 9 vowels which is still more than the English alphabet has

[@servantofaeie1569]

@@Ggdivhjkjl Sumþing lík þis? Vóld beo pritteg cól.

[@little-wytch]

Do you think you'll do a video about some of the conscripts designed for English? I'm rather fond of Shavian lol.

[@gamermapper]

As a native Russian speaker, here's what I'll tell you about your proposed Cyrillic script. It really looks like how obscure Indigenous Siberian languages are written lol. That's how it would be written if English was such a language. It's really good for linguists to represent literally ALL the existing sounds and make it easier for foreigners to pronounce but it also looks to be very complicated to read and write because while it's more convinient, it's more complicated. But honestly speaking can't decide if it's a good idea or not. Maybe it is, cuz a lot of languages have complex and weird IPA like writing because it's created recently. Like Latin script for West African languages, or Cyrillic for Central Asian ones. While less "historic" and "elegant", it's undoubtedly really practical.

[@gabriezoid]

i write filipino in the cryillic alphabet in my rant notebook

[@DarkLeftarion]

​@@cuddles1767 Bro what is he supposed to do? Randomly add tones, diacritics and/or create a new writing system just because Filipino doesn't have all of that? You can say absolutely the same thing about English. It has (almost) no diacritics, more than half of the words are from French/Latin and has no interesting letters like other Germanic languages

[@gunngg908]

кавили-вилиҥ идейа ито

[@gabriezoid]

oh, i dont quite understand what youre trying to convey but i respect your opinion but i use cyrillic and thats what im used to

[@myspleenisbursting4825]

​@@cuddles1767 because it's not a conlang

[@jeongbun2386]

So proud of I was able to read most of the thumbnail

[@mchagawa1615]

Thia is so cool :D thank you for sharing

[@serfit1]

we gotta make more letters is what I learned here

[@degenerals6127]

As a speaker of Hindi, English, Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Punjabi and also someone who can read the Cyrillic script, I was able to read all of the scripts given in the video.

[@georgios_5342]

You could easily make one with Greek, but you'd probably have to come up with a few digraphs, because Greek doesn't have many of the sounds of English, and vice versa

[@thatnishcray]

Worth noting that ‘t’ in English is actually best approximated by ट and not त - the latter being a dental IPA ‘t̪’ rather than a retroflex IPA ‘ʈ’ (ie the noise is made against the back of the teeth with the tongue rather than the top of the palate as in most forms of English). Likewise, the character ध is less useful than द which can be pronounced almost identically to the word ‘the’ in English. This makes it quite strange to read the Devanagari version at 07:00. There’s also a few outright errors, such as the way you’ve approximated ‘disputing’ which I would personally transcribe with डिस्प्यूटिंग - your guess would probably be closer to “this-pyu-tidh’ in Anglophone Latin. Regardless, I want to applaud you on the depth of your research and for producing a very informative video, I enjoyed it heaps!

[@_shivam_vij]

Damn. Learning languages seems so difficult after watching your videos for some reason

[@sonicwaveinfinitymiddwelle8555]

0:59 ❇ blud be 🚬that zaza ✨

[@Czyszy]

When I read the Cyrillic English text, I can't help but read it with a thick foreign accent.

[@65inthy]

i do that every time i learn a new alphabet, get myself adjusted to writing faster

[@plexusGD]

You should have pronounced е as "e" not "ye", as it is pronounced that way in the majority of cyrillic languages. Also when you're talking about Bulgarian please never call the letter ъ the "hard sign"! It is called "ер голям" /ɛr golʲam/

[@LazieKat]

Arabic speaker here. Very interesting to see how this would be approached by a non Arabic speaker. I usually tend to write English in Arabic letters when I am texting someone in Arabic but want to use some English expressions. I do not depend on diacritic and end up using the letters as an alphabet rather than an abjad. I found the one you made way harder to read, and sometimes unfitting to the native Arabic letter phonology or way of pronunciation, even in Farsi too to some degree. Some letters were also not needed, for example you can write "ch" as تش and "ng" as نغ and "g" as غ which delivers the same pronunciation with roughly easier time reading. I would write the passage as such, keep in mind I did not use the letters for P, and V as they are more or less clear from the context. ذ نورث ويند اند ذ سان وير ديسبيوتينغ ويتش واز ذ سترونغست, وين ا ترافيلار كيم الونغ رابد ان ا وورم كلوك. ذي اغرييد ذات ذ وان فيرست ساكسييديد ان ميكينغ ذ ترافيلار تيك هيز كلوك اوف شود بي كونسيدرد سترونغر ذان ذ اذر. ذين ذ نورث ويند بلو از هارد از هي كود بات ذ مور هي بلو ذ مور كلوسلي ديد ذ ترافيلار فولد هيز كلوك اراوند هيم, اند ات لاست ذ نورث ويند غيف اب ذ اتيمبت. ذين ذ سان شايند اوت وورملي اند ايميدياتلي ذ تلافيللار تووك اوف هيز كلوك. اند سو ذ نورث ويند واز اوبلايجد تو كونفيس ذات ذ سان واز سترونغر اوف ذ تو.

[@DrScherzo]

Brb, have to go adapt the Burmese script to English now

[@davidfrischknecht8261]

I'd like to see Hangul adapted to write English.

[@ChasMusic]

I sometimes see signs in Korean where part of it is a transcription of English. For example, the East Bay Church of the Light in Fremont, CA, uses 이스트베 for "East Bay" instead of the Korean words for "East Bay". But the rest of it gets translated, or so I think - I don't know Korean. So, 이스트베이한빛교회 (if I've typed it correctly, which is not a given).

[@AthanasiosJapan]

Cyrillic is an alphabetic writing system, similar to currently used for English. For this reason, a more precise title is "Writing English with Scripts You're Not Supposed To." The Arabic script, is mostly used as an impure abjad writing system, but in Kurdish it is alphabetic. So, I think that Devanagari script (an abugida) is actually the only Writing System that should be in this video.

[@mujemoabraham6522]

I suggest to write English with combination of Latin and Cyrillic letters e.g to borrow some letters from Cyrillic to represent sounds of the letters like TH in This and TH in Think and so on.

[@celty5858]

I like the cyrillic script. I’ve tried rewriting spelling rules and using other systems as a fun project but it’s frustrating honestly lol nothing feels like it goes.