Writing Systems

How long have we been writing? What sorts of character systems do we use? In this week's episode, we look at our written languages: where they came from, the varieties of systems that we developed, and how different alphabets have evolved over time.
Also, happy April Fool's Day! Watch out for octopi.
This is Topic #29!
This week's tag language: Luxembourgish!
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Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-29/
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!

[@9726eric]

I keep paying attention to the octopus,waiting for it to eat you lol. Thank you for the video:P

[@thelingspace]

kino mamoru You have to watch out for those tricky octopi! They're dangerous. Thanks for watching! ^_^

[@KathyTrithardt]

Me too!

[@Amphibiot]

Octopuses or octopodes. Shame on you. A linguist should know better than writing octopi.

[@definitelynotethan7959]

kanji casually killing and maming the poor octopus... princess bubblegum having to step in to save the day.... this weirdly enough helped me concentrate so well, knowing you're an SMT fan now makes me feel much more connected to your content :)

[@jerrykoh9692]

"They look turtley" got me laughing! Being Chinese, it really is weird all 3 words made the voice in my head go "gui1" without thinking about it. Amazing stuff. Thanks for this video, I enjoyed it!

[@thelingspace]

+Jia Jun Koh Interesting! Glad you liked it. I talked with a few of my Chinese-speaking friends about this, and they agree with you - no matter which character, the same word pops up. But for me - I only speak Japanese - the two Chinese ones take a bit of decoding before I get the right word. It's pretty cool! Thanks for having me think about this, too. ^_^

[@GroundedSaugage]

Totally digging the Strider shirt

[@thelingspace]

GroundedSaugage Glad you like it! I have shirts for both Striders, but I sort of like this one a bit more. ^_^

[@amb600cd0]

seeing the shirt in the thumbnail was the coldest splash of water

[@emceetriskit9949]

Haha! Those characters in the back were on one today! Pretty high quality content you got here! I would love to hear your perspective on how the phonetic alphabet can be used to interpret/break down the lyric form that we see in popular music.

[@thelingspace]

Emcee Triskit Yep, they really got around! And thanks. ^_^ Using IPA to deal with breaking down lyrics can definitely highlight what the meter is; how things rhyme even if in regular orthography, it doesn't look like we do; and why particular combinations of syllables and sounds work better than others. I think other knowledge about how phonology work can also be helpful in those situations! Like, understanding about stress clash helps explain a commonly misheard line in Taylor Swift's Blank Space. You can read about that here: languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16169 So yeah, IPA can help us understand stuff, and if you throw in some other knowledge about phonology, you can get a pretty good understanding about music. ^_^

[@shaineshipp2997]

Really glad the rainbow unicorn saved the cat from the octopus. Watched the video twice because I was heavily invested in the octopus lol.

[@BruceAramayo]

I like your videos, they're informative and entertaining. The "live" background of this one was great. Good job!

[@thelingspace]

Bruce Aramayo Thanks! Glad you're liking them. Doing the background for this one was a lot of fun, too. ^_^

[@NixG97]

I really like the way you explain things. Thanks for the videos!

[@hamidrezaseilabadi839]

Such a great video.

[@sadafkhan1679]

U make everything much easier to comprehend.Thanks a lot.

[@juancarlossolano8347]

This dude summarizes 50 pages of my weekly reading in 9 minutes. I try to keep the pace but he speaks too fast and then I find myself lost and paying attention to the moving stuffed animals. Great stuff though, which I knew half what you do.

[@thelingspace]

+2sheol Stephenson is well worth the read! I'm partial to Snow Crash and Diamond Age, but Anathem is good, too. ^_^

[@NadiaAlmiraSagitta]

Hahaha I love your dolls! Those keep moving around. :D Btw, nice topic about writing system. ^^

[@thelingspace]

Nadia Almira Sagitta Thanks! Glad you liked the video and the movements. We had a lot of fun making this one. ^_^

[@frankharr9466]

My understanding is that Chinese, Mayan and other characters are essentially syllabries too. Here's why, Chinese characters started out as being pictures of things, but most didn't stay that way. The overwhelming majority of charactes have two parts, one that gives a clue to its pronunciation and part to give a semantic clue. The reason they're only clues is because often a character is much older than the current pronunciation of the word and so sound changes are not represented. At 5:35, you'll notice the two characters have a part that's exactly the same, and that would be the semantic part. A better discussion of this is at Zomprist: www.zompist.com/yingzi/yingzi.htm And there's a whole book on the system written by someone who knows what they're talking about MUCH more than me: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Chinese_Language:_Fact_and_Fantasy

[@CeoLogJM]

Fantastic as always.

[@thelingspace]

ויאמר סבבה! Thanks for the kind words! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[@notoriouswhitemoth]

@1:30 No you don't. Before the invention of writing - and in some cultures, for millennia after the invention of writing - history was passed down orally, usually in the form of long, intricate poems, memorized by rote. The whole reason poetry exists is that repetition makes things easier to remember. Before written language became popular, a poet and an historian were the same thing - and when someone new came into power and they wanted to 'reset' society like Pol Pot tried to do, their first order was usually to have all the poets executed... but why research when you can guess?

[@pleinair6318]

Every writing system is beautiful on how they're used, my favorites are Chu Nom vietnamese script, Latin, and Runic. what are your favorites?

[@thelingspace]

Sai22 I'm partial to Japanese (all the mixing!), Arabic, and Devanagari scripts, but as you say, using the systems and seeing what people do with them is the place where all the interest is. ^_^

[@qclod]

Cool video and shirt.

[@thelingspace]

+ufojob Thanks! Glad you like both of them. ^_^

[@cndlmst]

Homestuck is great

[@onlyforwatchingvids2086]

love the toy battle

[@Wandrative]

HOW can you not mention Korean....WTH. You mention Japanese and all other stuff, but not Korean which is extremely significant in the history of writing.

[@rakshumi]

hello, ling space. is this topic based on henry rogers's work? (also, please correct me on the use of apostrophe and prepositions!)

[@thelingspace]

Luisa Marsiglio Thanks for the question! We didn't base it off of his work, no, but I'm a big fan of his - I've used his phonetics textbook to teach before, and his work on writing systems looks very interesting. I'll have to track down his book and give it a read. And your use of apostrophes and prepositions was fine there. ^_^

[@Frahamen]

Why aren't there any Abugida scripts based on vowels? I would work pretty good for, instance in Japanese.

[@thelingspace]

+Frahamen This is a good question, and I haven't thought about this before! My guess is that probably, it's that there tend to be a lot more consonants in a language than vowels. So it'd require a greater variety of notations to signify all the consonants, rather than the vowels, and that'd be challenging. Even for Japanese, you've got 5 vowels, but almost 3 times as many consonant phonemes. So it'd just be harder to manage than the other way around - making 5 variations on a base character is easier. ^_^

[@Frahamen]

The Ling Space I guess you're right. I'm making a conlang, using a vowel-based Abugido, an I've ended up using an "empty vowel" to make it less rigid.

[@thelingspace]

+Frahamen Yeah, there's nothing theoretically keeping it from happening! It's worth noting that typologically, it's also the case that languages favour syllables with onset consonants, rather than just opening with a vowel. So that may be another push that way. But having a vowel-based abugida is definitely plausible. Sounds pretty cool. ^_^

[@pleinair6318]

That bookcase!!

[@thelingspace]

Sai22 Yeah, there was a pretty epic battle back there!

[@livedandletdie]

Well I need to make a simple writing system for English now. vel aj nid to mejk a siɱpel vrajtiŋ system får iŋlic naov. I mean it could not be that hard to do right? aj min it kud nåt bi þat had to do rajt? Though I thought that with simpler spelling it would get easier to learn. þo aj fåt þat wið siɱpla spEliŋ it vod get isia to lön. See it's not too hard to do right?

[@Xx_BoogieBomber_xX]

Wouldn't the third one be: ðo aj þåt ðat wið siɱpla spEliŋ it vod get isia to lön. ?

[@NikhileshSurve]

7:12 Unsimplified? You mean 'Traditional'?

[@livedandletdie]

Well I was gonna continue on my first conlang but I had an idea for a simplistic Scandinavian constructed language. I'll call it æþir. That should be a lot simpler to make compared to inventing a whole new language and concepts out of thin air. It's been going really well converting Swedish words into æþir, the only real problem is that æþir lacks a lot of the vowels and consonants that Swedish has. It's interesting though. It's the same word order and sentence structure as Swedish.

[@florbengorben7651]

Is it a full relex or are you changing the grammar?

[@qwertyTRiG]

No mention of Valerie Sutton or William Stokoe? HamNoSys or Si5?

[@qwertyTRiG]

Sorry. That's Si5s.

[@lgriot]

Enough with the plush toy battle! I can't concentrate on the content! :-)

[@thelingspace]

+Laurent Griot Yeah, we were a bit worried about that when we were making it, but we wanted to do something fun for April Fool's, and so we just went with it. ^_^

[@dianedavidson5283]

Why did you put an octopus on your head?

[@thelingspace]

+Diane Davidson Haha, it was an April Fool's Day thing. That's when this video originally went up. We were just having a fun time with it. ^_^

[@frankharr9466]

+The Ling Space Not fun! AAAAAAAA! Very funny.

[@joie393]

Subbed for the shirt..

[@Keepedia99]

tnx 4 da octapus

[@thelingspace]

It was fun to do! ^^

[@jdlenl]

My friend Jeffrey has that shirt. xD

[@thelingspace]

JDLENL Your friend Jeffrey must have good taste, then! ^_^

[@gedgar]

nice

[@josephduffy5423]

Why does this guy talk like Marvin the Martian?

[@divicool72]

h OMESTUCK?!!!? (i havent watched the episode yet but of course thats my immediate reaction)

[@thelingspace]

Divi Yep, we're definitely fans. We did a Homestuck episode a while back, too, with the Dirk Strider shirt instead. But this was pretty fun. ^_^

[@adrin181]

if i didnt already subscribe 5 episodes ago i would do it now

[@redactedwatkins6195]

is that a uuuuuuuuuhhhhhhhh homestuck shirt

[@latashaturner9477]

Tvx

[@miwiarts]

:O

[@traktortarik8224]

Mayan wasn't logographic, it was syllabic

[@thelingspace]

+Tarikius Thanks for bringing this up! More specifically, Mayan had both, in much the way that Japanese has two syllabaries plus the logographic system today. Mayan had a syllabary, but also had an additional system of several hundred logographs to represent full words. There's some more discussion and links to sources about this here: www.omniglot.com/writing/mayan.htm

[@capsloccs4852]

YAY, HOMESTUCK!

[@HAngeli]

It's sad that we used to actually 'make' figures with graphic signs, but now we have emoji... Back in the old days we could write =] =) :] :) and now it's all the same happy face. It takes all the creativite away.

[@vjorp5332]

I heard english has "only" 15 000 sylables that are used Considering Chinese has 8000 that still should be learnable XD

[@envythejelly6034]

* Looks at Japanese * 50. Only really have 50. Welp. This should be easy. * Three weeks later * Oh.

[@vjorp5332]

Dylan Thomas That's why I'm learning Korean :D 30 min to learn reading hangul 3 hours to write in it.

[@envythejelly6034]

+Vjorp Meh. I'm more of a conlanger than a learner. I've got English, French, German and a bit of Japanese and Chinese under my belt, but I prefer making my own.

[@vjorp5332]

Dylan Thomas I'm currently mendling in conlangs as well, though I don't know why but making a conscript is the most fun part XD I have twice as many conscripts compared to conlangs.

[@envythejelly6034]

+Vjorp I tried conscripting and failed awfully XD I'm not artistic enough to pull it off.

[@felicvik9456]

🏃🏻🐻🦊🕴🐨🐕

[@obiomablair780]

You're speaking too fast