Writing Systems, Graphemes and Scripts - Decipherment Club #3

We’ve been digging into the decipherment of ancient scripts. But do you really know what “writing” means?
Take a few minutes to think about writing the way decipherers do. Along the way, learn about:
graphemes & allographs
glyphs & diacritics
scripts & writing systems
graphemics & graphetics
The word writing can mean any of these!
I want to put some art and thought into the history of writing. Expect more on this topic in the upcoming months.
UPDATE - more indeed! It's called Thoth's Pill:
• Thoth's Pill: an Anima...
Audio, art and animation by NativLang
CC 3.0 image attributions:
Louvre Hieroglyphs, Neithsabes, modified by NativLang
Korykian Cave Inscription, Zde
Music:
The Voyage, Jason Shaw (audionautix.com)

[@willscathlocke2512]

Although it is distinctly counter-intuitive, the simple principle by which all decipherment of an unidentified language in an unidentified script proceeds is this: First, you have to know what the text says. Then you can decipher it. Yes, I know: It just seems wrong to say it this way; obviously, in order to know what a text says, you must first decipher it, but, as it turns out, if you don't know what a text says, you cannot possibly decipher it; and even if by dumb luck you should hit upon the correct phonetic values for the signs and the correct meanings for the words, you will be unable to prove that you have done so. Take the decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs. It proceeded from a trilingual text, the Rosetta Stone, which presented the same text in three languages, one of which, Greek, was perfectly well known. Since the hieroglyphic text said the same thing in Egyptian which the Greek text said in Greek, everybody knew exactly what the hieroglyphic text said. It was a conceptually simple (albeit practically highly difficult) matter of assigning meanings to groups of hieroglyphs and phonetic values to individual hieroglyphs so that all together they would match the meaning of the Greek text. Take the decipherment of Babylonian (Akkadian, if you prefer). It proceeded from the trilingual inscription at Behistun, a text of Darius I's in Old Persian, Elamite, and Babylonian. Once the Old Persian Text could be read, everybody knew what the Babylonian text said, and away people went. As for the initial decipherment of the Old Persian text, well, here it gets slightly more complicated. Otto Grotefend, a German schoolmaster, posited that the Behistun inscription (as well as other Old Persian inscriptions) began with the titles of the Old Persian kings and that the titles of the Old Persians were identical with those used by the much later Parthian kings in Greek inscriptions. Grotefend was right, and since he then "knew" what the opening lines of the inscriptions said, he was able to assign phonetic values to the signs and meanings to the words. Conceptually easy, of course; but fiendlishly difficult in practice. Once Babylonian was deciphered, Sumerian could be deciphered -- why? Because the Babylonians had compiled Babylonian-Sumerian dictionaries. One column was Babylonian, the next was Sumerian -- and, once again, everybody knew what a given entry in the Sumerian column said, because it was identical to what stood in the Babylonian column opposite. (There were also other full bilinguals and effective bilinguals.) Again, in practice it was a work of enormous complexity. Ah, but Linear B was deciphered w/out a bilingual inscription of any sort, right? Well, not exactly. Linear B texts consist largely of lists of commodities and people -- with the thing written in words on the left and often enough a plainly recognisable ideogramme (e.g. a jar or an animal head or a wheel or a little stick man) on the right. The lists were quasi bilinguals in and of themselves! Another little quirk of the Linear B texts: many came from Crete and those contained a few words that never occurred in the texts from the mainland. Ventris and Chadwick correctly guessed that the words in question were Cretan toponyms -- i.e. "knew" what these sign-groups said. As with Old Persian, small bilingual handholds could be found. Now, let me back up one more assertion: that if you do not know what a text says, you cannot prove that you have deciphered it. Take the Phaistos Disk. We haven't a clue as to what it says. You can assign phonetic values to the signs and meanings to the words, and with much effort you will eventually be able to get it all to come out to a sensible text (whether in a known language or not). But consider what test you could use to prove that your decipherment is correct? (I have here confined myself to the decipherment of unidentified languages written in unidentified scripts. It is a conceptually very different matter to work with what amounts to a known language written in what is a known script -- say with Old Bactrian [an Iranian language] written with Greek letters or the like. This is not to say that making sense of Old Bactrian inscriptions was easy. Likewise Hittite -- when these texts were found, the cuneiform signs could be read; the Sumerian logogrammes together with the Akkadogrammes made the gist of many sentences clear; and it was an Indo-European language after all. Little known fact: the first person to read a Hittite text correctly was not Bedrich Hrozny, but J.A. Knudtzon in his first edition of the Amarna Letters.)

[@beeble2003]

It's not entirely true that you can't decipher a language unless you have a known text, as long as you have a good amount of text. For example, if you build up a "dictionary" from one collection of texts, you can apply that to a new text and see if the translation it suggests makes sense. If it does, that's evidence that your dictionary is correct; if it doesn't, your dictionary is probably wrong. Of course, you can never know for sure that you're correct, but you can amass consistent evidence. In theory, at least.

[@ChrisSmith-um8uj]

I find it amazing that evry weighting system had a distinct shape, Hanzi is so complex and straight, Greek is so curved and elegant.

[@thecypressstation7470]

I am so glad I found this channel! Subscribed

[@NativLang]

The Cypress Station I'm glad you found me, too! Thanks for leaving such a positive comment!

[@metumortis6323]

I really do love your content but it feels like this whole series could have been one episode.

[@OmegaHex1]

Agreed, I’m very late to this comment but I just had to agree

[@ModCrafterBot]

I see that possibly you will talk about Rongo Rongo?? I'm so excited for that! Keep up the great videos! (I loved thoths pill btw)

[@NativLang]

+ModCrafterBot Thank you! I want to restart this series, but I'm having trouble getting back to it. Thoth's Pill was quite a detour... sooo worth it!

[@personifiedmarvel]

@@NativLang This series is very interesting!

[@ChristianJiang]

Thank you for uploading! That was very interesting!!

[@anfalmjomhax.2519]

Thanx, he answered all my questions ❤

[@criticallit]

Loved this!

[@NativLang]

Critical Lit Thanks, that's encouraging! Which is exactly what I need to keep this up. Well, that, and more time in a day.

[@criticallit]

Same! Haha. So little time...

[@TaraBryn]

Would kanji radicals be considered graphemes, since they're often not characters in their own right (at least in the context of Japanese)?

[@georgepapadimitriou4965]

You deserve 1.000.000 views!!!!!

[@Adtonius]

You've begun to sound like Hank Green, the way he stutters out words and puts much force on the consonants. Don't know if it's good or bad, but I personally don't like how it sounds. Decent video overall, excellent graphics and animations, however the amount of sound effects were over the top, preferably they should be cut down. Otherwise good going!

[@NativLang]

Erik Karlsson Funny, I haven't noticed myself speaking more like other KZbinrs. I wonder if that's the case. On the other hand, I have been building up my sfx library. I enjoy the audio-visual connection they add (often find it missing in other videos). It really helps my mind understand the movement/animation and solidify key points. I'll pay attention and see how much that's just my quirks, though.

[@toldeneye007]

So, a grapheme is the theoretical form from which representations of a character are derived? Like, in handwriting, you probably wont find two glyphs that are exactly the same, but you can always point to one representing 'v' as the grapheme 'v', however the writer happened to render the glyph? A 'grapheme' is the vague, general idea of the form, that probably doesnt have an actual (100%)specific standard, and a specific representation of that is a glyph?

[@NativLang]

インフィニチキウィ Yep, I think you're getting the hang of this! The glyphs used to represent one grapheme (like 'V') are allographs of that grapheme. In this sense, 'glyph' is a general term for any single written or printed character. (Some fun logic here: all allographs of the grapheme "v" are glyphs, but not all glyphs are allographs of the grapheme "v". Wow, that's a mouthful!) Linguists love these "eme" and "allo" terms. The "emes" are conceptual and abstract ("the letter v"). The "allos" are specific variants (v serif, v sans serif, cursive v, capital v, lowercase v, ...). Some glyphs do get standardized (this happened long ago for Han Characters), but even those standard allographs compete with other allographs (like rough script / "grass script" forms).

[@TobyKral007]

we share a common interest for discovering languages. please make more of these

[@NativLang]

Toby Kral I plan to! Thanks for your comment.

[@Dracopol]

1:17 The tilde (used as a nasal mark in this case) is not written the right way over the A. You wrote it with a downward wave first then going up again.

[@Ida-xe8pg]

I know to read 6 different writing systems now im learning the Arabic script

[@hglundahl]

Glyph and grapheme. Tengwar would have just the right number of diacritics to be an abjad. Even more : glyphs of tengwar are, most of them, very correlated with phonetic traits of phonemes. Would a decipherment of tengwar have been theoretically possible, especially with two languages available, like Adunaic and an Elvish one, with diverse use of certain glyphs or even series of them? If so, perhaps we do rely on tradition (from publisher, newspapers, biographers etc) that Tolkien was inventing the stories.

[@basilforth]

very enjoyable!

[@johannes-euquerofalaralema4374]

Fantástico

[@blaircolquhoun7780]

What about deciphering Linear A and Linear B?

[@AlexIncarnate911]

What's the difference between a Phoneme and a letter?

[@NativLang]

AlexIncarnate911 Graphemics and phonology. 'Letters' are written marks (usually the graphemes of an alphabet). 'Phonemes' are sounds (regardless of the writing system). Some written languages are touted as 'phonemic', their alphabets mapping 1:1 to their phonemes. This is what teachers mean when they say something like, "Spanish is a phonetic language." Such an odd sentence, but one I've heard many times!

[@AlexIncarnate911]

***** But aren't Phones supposed to be the sounds?? Edit: I looked it up. I think I understand what it means, apparently Phones are the sounds without giving them their semantic functionality in a language. While Phonemes are also the sounds but in relation to a specific language and their role in giving meaning to a language. For example the difference between Scan and Span is phonemic resulting in the change of meaning. So, in conclusion, Phonemes are sounds in relation to meaning in a certain language. Am I right?

[@NativLang]

That's it! :)

[@georgepapadimitriou4965]

Phoni (φωνή ) its a sound, or the voise of a person in greek....

[@hglundahl]

V and N are obviously very different as graphemes. But they are somewhat similar as glyphs. Take NODENS. Scratch off the first line. You are basically left with VODENS. Druidic theory of identity of Odin, of course, not Hebrew one, though also not excluding it. Nodens is a Gaulish and Brithonic deity, which could have been the Teutates of some Gaulish tribe in the time of Caesar. Vodens is one possibility for 1:st C pronunciation of Wotan, Woden, Odhinn etc.

[@Angel33Demon666]

But the thing is, in chinese writing, you have these things called a downward dot (點), upward dot (撇), a horizontal bar (劃), and many other elements that make up a character, wouldn't those be your 'glyphs' and those compose a character? When I learnt the language, I learnt it as the 'characters' being on the same 'level' as 'words' in English, because frankly, in Chinese the same word (字) is used for both.

[@NativLang]

Angel33Demon666 My glyphs? ;) I like the "emic" Hanzi perspective. It's even a good touchstone for other writing systems. Scholars of writing seem to use "glyph" or "grapheme" on the level of 字. That is, for them, each "zì" is an example of a grapheme and, therefore, a glyph. Consider also that Mandarin equivalents of European vocabulary may contain multiple characters (similar to "compounding" in Germanic languages). Smaller components like strokes and radicals are still super important, but don't meet that traditional cutoff of "consistently standing alone as a meaningful unit" (a common theme in linguistics).

[@NativLang]

***** Thinking about it, 'glyph' doesn't stand opposed to 'words'. The theoretical 'word' is lexical, semantic, maybe morphosyntactic. That intersects with the study of writing, but may be a stronger term for some languages (like written English) than others (like Arabic or Syriac, where glyphs and spaces are sensitive to other features like the shape of preceding or following glyphs, or like Chinese and Mayan, where glyphs may be quite complex on their own). Your question's pretty interesting at second glance. Thanks for thinking about this and commenting!

[@Pinkstarclan]

finally, i get to learn about language from the kid from limbo

[@stickystick_stick]

i thought the title said graphmemes

[@Panlew2]

That just means you're a fucking idiot.

[@MakLife]

r00d

[@krutikastudio]

Thank you #krutikakidsworld

[@Pedrosa2541]

I'm studying polynesian culture, and I feel sad that we will never read rongorongo scripts.

[@rz2374]

First! Dont believe me? If there are other comments just select "newest first" rather than "most popular" in the "sort by" menu. Also is there another part?

[@Adtonius]

Edit: Rewatched the vid and the voice stutter isn't bad at all, I guess the sound effects made me remember you voice as annoying... xD

[@bencruz563]

stip making one episode into many. Your content is good but you are losing me anyway.

[@penelopejohnson8042]

When your trying to decipher English language that’s written very badly