İ have relotinship georgia so easy ifrom Azerbajan and i can speak, ewrhite gerga lezgi udin Azerbajan all turkish japenese arabic german and end rusan i have 2 citzen
@@storylearning I am on the trial for Teacher AI. I'd never used AI before and it's weird. Still useful, but weird. Flunks the Turing test for sure lol. It told me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave", and my name isn't even Dave! Daisy, Daisy.... Jokes aside, at first it kept reading Japanese kanji in Mandarin with the tones and everything. I was about to cancel after like 5 minutes. Then I switched teacher personas, and the error rate dropped. Now I use it a lot more. I built a little fantasy world with a dragon that shot fire from its cloaca and mangaka elf that was bad at drawing but good at... something that was not allowed. It stops you if it considers something to be "adult content". After it told me the Japanese pronunciation of "cloaca", it confused that very same word with "kuro aka" and started going on about what a nice color scheme black and red would be for a dragon 🙄
@BoxerBoy-gs8eq Well, languages simplify over time. Tibetan has drastically changed pronunciation wise. When Tibetan was first scripted, it featured consonant clusters which were marked in the writing, but my guess is that people found them very difficult to pronounce, so they changed. The language has much less consonants than before. But Tibetan people struggle with reading their own language just as much as we do. NativLang made a video about Thai and Tibetan writing.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eq มันก็ไม่ได้เป็นไรหรอก (I mean it is ok it isn't hard much) It was actually harder before then some like ฆ ฌ ญ ฎ ฏ ฐ ฑ ฒ ณ ธ ศ and ษ was harder pronunciation. We tried.
@@teesteakDuring my learn at Thai i confuse why one voice but have many character. But if you learn Rishi Panini/Brahmi system actually Thai is the same with Hindi, Khmer, Javanese, etc and Thai having Great Languange shift.
I tried to learn some Georgian, it's incredibly complicated, but the alphabet is easy. 33 letters, no lower or upper case, no ligatures, you spell as you pronounce and vice versa.
It is very very easy haha, many Dagestani ethnicities took into consideration to use Georgian and Armenian based alphabets to replace the Arabic-Persian based scripts since our languages were even too complicated for it. However most languages just ended up using Cyrillic while less than a handful uses both Cyrillic and Tselbik(წէլბიქⲊა) which has more letters than the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. Most Dagestani Cyrillic varieties also have more letters than other Cyrillics. Typically between 40-50 letters. The pronunciations are definitely what makes it hard since many of the languages have 30+ vowels and a more than a few sounds that don’t really exist anywhere else
I bet you all cant differentiate between:- 1) Odia- ଖ,ଗ,ଘ/ଡ,ଢ / ଳ,ଲ /ଚ,ଚ୍ଚ,ଚ୍ଛ /ଯ,ୟ /ଙ୍କ,ଙ୍ଖ,ଙ୍ଗ,ଙ୍ଘ 2) Telugu- ప,ఫ,వ/ ఝ,య /ఘ,మ 3) Tamil- ஒ,ஓ/ எ,ஏ/௵இ 😂 We Indians deal with them every day tho, i think it all boils down to practice.
I learnt to read Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada with little to no effort, and that proves a lot. Once you learn to read the script of one Indian language, the similarities of other Indian languages start popping up everywhere, thus becoming easy to learn. However, it all depends on your age, cultural knowledge, mother's tongue, and how many languages you're proficient in. But even after referring to my previous statement, no matter what criteria you fall into Mandarin Chinese is hard asf
For Mandarin： 月 is moon and 半 is half, but in the case of 胖 the 月 part is represents “body/body part.” 月 is used to represent “body/body parts” in many other words too. 朋友 is “friend” and the first character is two 月s put together to represent “2 close bodies.”
I'm Bengali and Ive noticed that how the Tibetan script works is very similar to how the Bengali script or other North Indian scripts work, except, Tibetan has a lot of silent letters. Its like the French of South Asia lol
Tibetan is a horror among scripts, you could think of it like, writing Encyclopedia but you pronounce it Bus... It doesn't make sense. Literally the least sensible script in the world.
When I learned Tibetan, it didn't seem as hard as you make it sound, although everything you said about it is true! But there are rules. It's not arbitrary at all. And if you can deal with English and its silent letters and spellings rooted in the past, you can deal with Tibetan.
My first language is Yiddish, so I grew up with a modified phonetic(ish) Hebrew alphabet (though I had to learn the modified SOVIET version lol), then I had to learn Russian, but mum spoke German & Kaschubian, so by the time I was 10 I had to know three wildly different writing systems lol Then we lived in Ethiopia... you ARE right, Olly - writing a language REALLY helps you learn it. My mum tossed me into a local school, so I HAD to learn Amharic quickly just to keep my lunch money lol It's actually a lot easier to read/write than it would seem. Awesome video! Thank you!
Thai but also Lao. Many letters in the Lao alphabet look similar enough to their Thai counterparts that if you know how to read Thai, you can figure out Lao, but anytime I try to explain the Lao alphabet to English speakers, they look at me like I have two heads 😅
There are a few letters that are different but most of them you can guess. The Lao government also simplified the spelling making it more phonetic. I think dumping all those silent letters at the ends of words for the sake of simplicity comes at a cost, though. They differentiate homophones and have an aesthetic value, as well.
Maybe there is a chance to see part 2 of writing systems? There are lots of writings that weren't mentioned like Armenian, Assyrian, Thamil, Inuktitut syllabics and others
I, as a Thai person, I confirm that Thai writing system is very hard even many Thai people still have problems lol, as your example , our aspirated k has ขค same constant but different tone and also even letters have group so you have to conjugate to get tone precisely ,and there’re some exceptions, yet in exception got an exception 😂😂 Btw. I’m pretty sure this 16:23 is Thai vowels,not Khmer
I had the feeling too that there was a wrong script shown, Thai and khmer being somewhat similar. I tried to get into the Thai writing, but didn't find enough time ... yet. (after getting into Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and partly Devanagari.)
As someone who reads Tibetan and sees the written language on a daily basis, I was so confused for a moment when I saw your thumbnail. Like- uh, yes it is a word... did someone say it's not??? lol
There was some writing system out of Africa that always struck me as being super strange. I don’t know if it’s an alphabet, abjad, abugida or whatever - but it’s just a line that makes seemingly random 90 degree turns at random spots. Different patterns of turns and such indicate different sounds. It was super weird looking but apparently it was big enough to have books printed in it. I’m sifting through the Wikipedia article I found it in trying to find the name of it again. Edit: Thank you to my girlfriend, she found it. It’s called Madombe - and it looks insane.
In Thai you only write "vowel e" when you are writing the name of the vowel or spelling something out loud, not when you actually use it in a word! Another thing, there is no punctuation so your example sentence should not have a period. Also you showed Thai letters when talking about Khmer at 16:30
18:28 胖 is not moon (月) but meat ⺼(from 肉) While 明 is indeed an ideogrammic compound (日+月 or sun+moon), 胖 like many other characters is a phono-semantic compound, with 肉 being the semantic part and 半 being phonetic
Mongolian isn't exactly unique with top to bottom language in Asia. Chinese was traditionally written Top to Bottom as well, the only difference is that Mongolian is Left to Right while Traditional Chinese was Right to Left, which is opposite how they write today. Hanunoo in Phillipines is interesting as it's traditionally written bottom to top, just like Old Irish script Ogham.
Great video (and I've subscribed!) but you've fallen for the trap of adding a Tuvan throat singer to the Mongolian section of the video. Tuvan itself is super interesting - Turkic language buried in the Altai mountains - but it isn't Mongolian and their throat singing tradition is different in a number of ways to the styles found over the border, though coming from a semi-nomadic pastoral culture, borders were a mere inconvenience back in the day...
There's a lot of people that complain about kanji and how difficult it is, but I find the complexity and history of the writing system to be incredibly interesting and it brings a lot of flavor to the language. If we just write Japanese with standard Roman letters it would remove so history and beauty from the language. Simpler and easier is not always better.
But ᶜArabic itself is not difficult at all, nor does the script except its variety of the spoken ᶜArabic make it difficult. Otherwise, its structural triliteral root-pattern is excellently logical!
Polish person here: I think the reason why Polish people claim that Polish super difficult comes from the fact that we usually only learn Germanic or Romance languages as foreign languages and their structure is definitely easier than Slavic. Also, we don’t consider other Slavic languages difficult because the difficult features are very similar to Polish. So in essence, Polish is roughly as difficult as any other Slavic language. It might have a bit trickier phonology that the others but it’s not a massive difference. As far as writing is concerned, Polish is straightforward and consistent for the most part. The only real difficulty is that some sounds can be represented in two ways and you need to remember which one is the correct one for a specific word.
@marikothecheetah9342 Al-Lisaanu Al-ᶜArabiyyu Al-Afṣaḥu = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Tongue / Language or Al-Luḡatu Al-ᶜArabiyyatu Al-Fuṣḥaa = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Speech or the Classical ᶜArabic or the Modern Standard ᶜArabic
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 So okay I learn the super easy grammar, I can read Arabic text, I go to one of Arabic countries and go on a merry way communication with locals anywhere in Arabic world?
I'm a native Khmer, the letters you showed earlier were actually Thai. Being a writing system with the most letters in the world is already crazy, the Khmer language is also rich in vowel sounds. Diacritics and other characters make Khmer even has tons of characters overall. Diacritics are very important in Khmer spelling. Some of them have the role in tone (although Khmer isn't a tonal language), some to change the consonant sounds from "O" to "A" or from "A" to "O", some to k*ll the consonant ( the consonant that contain them are dead and won't be pronounced, only for writing), and so many others. Thai and Laos developed from old Khmer, so they look a lot like Khmer although consonants are not rich in sounds (many of them sound the same) while Khmer had developed into 2 consonant groups. You will find loads of Khmero- Sanskrit and Khmero- Pali words in Thai and Lao that had been Khmerised before integrated into these languages.
I think the crazy part about Tibetan is the fact that they actually used to speak it like that. Like, some of those initial consonant clusters are utterly deranged. Old Chinese is similar in this regard. Wonder why every language in that family dropped them so consistently
Balinese also has the same historical spelling issues. They call it as "pasang pageh" ᬧᬲᬂ ᬧᬕᭂᬄ literally means "a strict way of writing". But fortunately, Balinese is not a tonal language, so it is a lot easier than Thai etc. Those historical spellings are for writing Sanskrit or Old Javanese words. Examples, if I wanna write "asta", i need to know which one it is: (h)asta ᬳᬲ᭄ᬢ "hand", astha ᬅᬲ᭄ᬣ "bone", or aṣṭa ᬅᬱ᭄ᬝ "eight". Since, all of these words are just spelt "asta" in modern Balinese Latin transliteration.
@@埊 Balinese and Javanese are from the same source script, Kawi. And Kawi is the descendant of ancient script, Brahmic. So, it shares the same shape. It also shares similar rules of writing. If you compare several Brahmic script, you'll notice a lot of similar shapes. Some shapes are stylized further, becoming harder to observe the similarity directly. brahmic: 𑀲 devanagari: स khmer: ស thai: ส kawi: 𑼱 jawa: ꦱ bali: ᬲ batak: ᯘ myanmar: သ
As someone who picked up Japanese as my 3rd language. Their writing system is indeed terrifying. But once you are used to it. The comvination of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji does make sense. I will try Simplified Chinese as my 4th language.
I learned Georgian 2020-2022 over the course of 2.5 years. The alphabet was actually the easier part of it, the grammar is by far the hardest of any language I know, also differentiating between animate and inanimate, fun fact “brown” is also “coffee colour) ყავისფერი I learned Farsi from 2023 up until this summer, the lack of vowels still gets me. But very beautiful script and the sounds are lovely, luckily the grammar is easier than other languages I tried.
Interesting! In Romanian there is also a "coffee colour" - "cafeniu". This is the name for the nuance of brown that looks like coffee. And "castaniu" is "the colour of the horsenut". Does Georgian has a main brown and also the coffee colour, or the two nuances are just one word? (I incline to think the latter).
@@plazmagaming2182 The Pallava script is primarily for Sanskrit. It has the letters kha ga gha chha jha tha da dha pha ba bha etc which are absent in Tamil
Not for Sanskrit, but you should say modified for Sanskrit. The first indic script "Brahmi" was derived by inspiration from aramaic by Ashoka, to write prakrit ( the commoner's language), Sanskrit (liturgical language) was never written for some more centuries..
@@alfonsmelenhorst9672Primarily for script yes, but it was invented and used by the tamils, and those sounds are indeed still present throught the grantha script
I love learning Thai is is definitely my favourite language to study. Thai people really appreciate and are very encouraging when a farang learns their language. Thais are the sweetest people ❤️
Eventho Thai is difficult, it has rules, complicated as they are. Written English has no rules, only patterns, traditions and conventions which requires a great amount of memory to know when they apply. Excellent English spellers rely on memory alone.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Armenian - an entire alphabet which tries really hard to deceive you with letters like Տ է ս ո ւ ց, each of which represent a sound you least expect from them. Join me learning it
What do you think would be easiest alphabets to learn? And if we then have to take out the ones that aren't easy due to grammar, which alphabeths do you think would be left over? I had 1 lesson Armenian, but don't think we did much in regards to the alphabet. Fascinating language though.
The Philippines has a unique writting called Baybayin that was lost because of all the colonialization that happened. I really love the writing because it looks like art.
Hi Olly, I’m currently learning Albanian and would love to have a set of beginner short stories like you have in other languages, ever considered writing one for this unique and beautiful language? I believe there’s a gap in the market 😎
Here in tunisia, it's not uncommon for kids, if they don't know a word, to not have to pronounce the vowels. Like, say a kid doesn't know ketab as book, they might just pronounce the consonant cluster ktb and then an adult will tell them the vowels. Really helps, since most kids struggle with the abjad, especially for obscurer words. Hell, even I in my 20s sometimes have to look up the vowels for words, and if I have to say the word without knowing the vowels, I still do the whole consonant clustering thing.
Prof. Norbu allways teased us, when we where totally uncapable to read one of these in all direction stacked Symbols, if we did not learn he would teach us Tibetan and Mongol at the same time. He was brought to Europe in the early sixties by the great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci
Great video! The script you have scrolling during the Khmer segment is Thai. They are related (not wading into the drama about if either derived from the other - both from Mon and ultimately from Brahmi).
Yes. Many local languages spoken in Thailand don't actually have a writing system so they borrow the standard Thai script. For eg my wife is Kuy (กูย), there was a writing system developed in the 21st century for Kuy people but it is not used or understood my almost all of them.
18:26 according to a Japanese person I know the "moon" sign 月 in Chinese is also known as the meat radical; meat l肉 when abbreviated does look like the moon in Chinese 月, so it's more likely half and meat than half and moon!
In Arabic sometimes there are a few diacritics they add to clarify what word you are reading and also the last letter of a word could change diacritics depending on its position in a sentence.
At 5:00 you kinda mixed two concepts together. The Ethiopian *language* has arabic roots, but the script (from the Ga'ez language) pre-dates Arab arrival in Ethiopa by several centuries. It comes from Christians living there in the first centuries AD.
The script goes back to its origins in the Musnad Script = Ancient South ᶜArabian Script, and its religion well before Christianity! Not only the script but also the type of Semitic languages they speak goes back to Ancient South ᶜArabian languages!
YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!! YOU SPOKE ABOUT CHEROKEE!!!!! I have been studying this endangered language, and I think the syllabary writing system is actually really simple. The writing system makes so much sense. Each symbol makes a sound that is the same each time (with some variation for colloquial pronunciation). Not to mention it is beautiful to look at. I love this language and the whole culture.
Used to live/work in China and speak Chinese, and it is true that it doesn't really have "words." The characters are just their own concept altogether, but one way you can think about it that is sort of helpful is by imagining a language of prefixes and suffixes that you put together to form new meanings. Each character has meaning in its own right, just like "pre-" or "aqua-" have meaning in their own right in English, but they are commonly put together with other things to make a larger meaning. But characters themselves are not "words." Sometimes they can be used individually, and function the same way as a word would in English, like 吃 for "eat." But sometimes not, like 了，which is used to make things past-tense. So 吃了 would be "ate," so “了” is not really functioning as a word here, it's functioning more like the English "-ed".
When I studied in Naples Italy I met the Tibetan and Mongolian language and history teacher Choegyal Namkhai Norbu at the instituto orientale. I tried to learn the alphabet, but like most of his students I never pronounced it right. Not even the Tibetol8gy majors. So in the end he was pissed off by the bastarization of his beloved language by his obtuse Utalian students and he created a phonetic guide for the chants and Mantras to sound right. But even with this help many butchered it, especially the tonal part with ka kha ga etc. The first sound is an A
Btw. If you learn Tibetan its a bit like elvish. Because its at least threa languages. Vulgar for everyday life. honorific and very honorific. And then there are many dialects. The word that a central Tibetan would pronounce Vajra a eastern Tibetan pronounces Benza and so on.
I was surprised you included Georgian. It's a complex language, but the writing system is straightforward. It has a lot of letters but is has a lot of sounds. The sounds are difficult, but the alphabet is phonetic and not that mysterious.
@@TheGaragelifterI’m so jealous of you😭😭 I’m an American-born Thai, and I’ve been really fortunate with being able to speak Thai with near native fluency. I just can’t read or write. Every time I see videos like this, mentioning how hard the Thai alphabet is, I get super discouraged lol
As a native Hindi speaker I think when I started to learn Bengali it made so hard especially its half letters even if both languages share so much similarities on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and language family ❤
I am learning Khmer now. It is a bit difficult. I think it is more difficult than Chinese. Reading and writing is difficult but speaking is easier. It uses the same word order as English which is great but there are a number of sounds not found in the English language. It's a very fun language to learn for sure!
The reason why you cannot understand the logic of "胖", is becasue it is a phono-semantic compound. Which is one of the major category of Chinese characters. This character is composed with two parts: a sematic component "月", which is a radical that often relates to the meaning of bodies; and a phonetic component "半", which represents the pronounciation of this character. It was inferred that when this character was created, the way people say "Fat" is similar to how they say "Half", but these two character are now pronounced differetly in mandarin because language is always developing.
the tibetan language in cities are starting to develope more tones very drastically compared to villages and nomadic dialects....especially within tibetan communities outside tibet....
15:34 Mongolian is officially used with the traditional script in Inner Mongolia region of China which has more Mongolian speaker than the country of Mongolia
Japanese kanji will drive you nuts. For example the English verb “to excel” is pronounced “masaru”. There are two ways to write this: 「勝る」 and 「優る」. The first implies excellence at sports, academics, career, etc., and the second implies aesthetic excellence. Both are pronounced the same way, and the distinction is not given in any learner’s dictionaries. And many Japanese just ignore the difference and only use the first writing, as this is just one of many words with identical pronunciation and almost identical meanings, but can be written differently to shade the nuance. And then there are kanji that are written identically but pronounced differently depending on the meaning. For example, 「外」can be pronounced “soto” if you mean to say “outside” or “hoka” if you mean to say “another”. Once in a while you will come across words that take forever to decipher. 「牣」 came up in a reading once, but it was not in any dictionary I had on hand . I finally found it to be “Jin” meaning “strong but flexible”. A great word, but very rare in this form.
ผมพูดไทยได้ครับ I lived in Thailand for 8 years and can confidentiality speak, read and write. Now living in china. 我会说一点儿汉语 I am an American and don't let anyone tell you can't learn new languages. They're much easier than you think.
I don't think it's hard like Chinese Han script. Tibetan belongs to Brahmi system included many scripts in India and Southeast Asia. I learnt Tibetan nagari, Thai, rachana, lao, khmer( included ancient khmers ).
Georgian alphabet is not that terrible to learn, took me less than a week to start reading words. It's phonetic, you say exactly how you write, which must be a hard to grasp concept for the anglophones, but once you get used to it you enjoy it. Also the k', p', and t' ejective sounds have recently become popular in British and American English at the word final position.
I've learned that you can approximate those sounds by softening them and keeping them deep in the throat. 'ts = dz 'p = b 'q = g Georgians would object, but it comes pretty close.
learning the ge'ez alphabet was so muchhhh fun all the patterns carry through all the letters so ig youre technically learning 200+ letters but youre rlly only learning like 33 if i remember correctly how many base letters there are
A lot of Southeast Asian languages uses "alphabets" that are quite strange, like Thai and Cambodian mentioned in the video, but also Javanese, and the old Philippines script.
I want to learn the Cherokee alphabet (my grandmother is on the Dawes rolls), but I only ever see the alphabet displayed in font style. I have looked and looked for a chart of the Cherokee alphabet written by hand, but have never seen one.
Cherokee is wild. I am learning Navajo right now. At least it has an easy writing system. It's still a hard language though. They didn't have a writing system for a long time.
Thanks for your interesting video and nice presentation (I wish I could do this too), I myself am trying to understand the Vietnamese script. They have used the visually based logographic script for a few thousand years and their language is also grammatically shaped by that, but about a hundred years ago they were forced by the French occupiers to use the audio-based alphabetic script. As expected, this gives rise to conflicts about which I have already made a few videos. In my new video (to be released early November 2024) I will address the question: "alphabetic vs logographic script ... which is easier?". You understand, I believe that the logographic script is more logical and efficient. Anyone who knows the characters needed for reasonable basic communication, which are indeed about 3,000, can communicate with people who speak a completely different language. For the same text you need to know about 8,000 words in English! Then you have the same basis ... but only for English! If you want to communicate with a German or a Swede, you have to learn thousands of new words. And are characters that complicated? In my video I also give some English words like Tsktsk, Euouae, Floccinaucinihilipilification, how many English speaking viewers of your video know these words? While they are really English words and not even exceptional. In my video I also explain how centuries ago the misconception arose that the logographic script is more difficult than the alphabetic script.. and why it has continued to live on. Among other things because people who make interesting videos still say with a sad face that Chinese has 50,000 characters... Characters are like words.. how many words does English have? Something like 700,000? With 50,000 characters you can make a text for which English needs more than 100,000 words! Incidentally, in answer to your question about the Mongolian script from top to bottom. that is not so surprising, is it? Before the Chinese started using paper, they used bamboo strips, just like they used in India and all sorts of other countries, and those bamboo strips were held vertically and written on from top to bottom. Why not horizontally? Possibly because if you have to hold a whole roll and you don't hold it properly, everything rolls out at once. roby
I used to have a New Testament translated into Cherokee. Also the Tibetan Lange looks gorgeous. But believe me…Hebrew & Aramaic are much easier for me to read & understand!
Languages with impossibles SCRIPTS. Not all scripts are alphabets. Also the video shows only modern languages. Honorable mentions hieroglyphic egyptian, Aztecscript, cuneiform Sumerian and pre-alphabetic Greek. (Linear' B Greek)
I think the point is to capture the interest of people who don't know anything about writing systems. Those people need context, and might only know the word 'alphabet', so Olly is right to do it this way. And what a boring and ambiguous word 'scripts' is - who'd want to watch a video about 'scripts'?? No-one except us language freaks. In the video Olly tells everyone what's an alphabet and what's not an alphabet, and gives all the correct names.
A really interesting topic, indeed ㅡ but sorry, I had to leave after some minutes, because I wasn't able to bear the jumps of the images from far to near and back any longer - here really the saying "Less is more" suits quite well...
Thai for the win! I still remember teaching myself to read and write it back in the 1980's when I had lots more neuroplasticity. Now I study Japanese for fun but it's a losing battle. At one time I passed the 6th grade equivalency exam in Thai, and learned quite a bit more after that. On the other hand, I recently bought Doraemon Vol. 0 in Japanese. It had stories aimed at different grade levels, from preschool to sixth grade. After years of study, I struggled to read the preschool level😢 So even though Olly rated Thai the hardest, I find Japanese a lot harder.
Sanskrit is the spice of Thai :) Tones actually get relatively easy if you can push through 2 hours per week in 6 months period, the main problem of Thai tends to be same tone same sound words :) or same tone, same ending sound with different letter :D but it is the most fun language out there since people really do help you out, I find it more progressive/inclusive than Chinese or Japanese due to the culture.
You should do one about Hebrew… Also in modern Hebrew we(most of us) pronounce the throat letters the same way as regular letters e.g. ע and א אני (me or I) vs עני (poor ) Ani אור (light🔦) vs עור( leather) Or
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Yes,
ॐ did exist before the universe......😌
İ have relotinship georgia so easy ifrom Azerbajan and i can speak, ewrhite gerga lezgi udin Azerbajan all turkish japenese arabic german and end rusan i have 2 citzen
please for Burmese-Mon Alphabet and Indian Alphabets
@@storylearning I am on the trial for Teacher AI. I'd never used AI before and it's weird. Still useful, but weird. Flunks the Turing test for sure lol. It told me, "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave", and my name isn't even Dave! Daisy, Daisy.... Jokes aside, at first it kept reading Japanese kanji in Mandarin with the tones and everything. I was about to cancel after like 5 minutes. Then I switched teacher personas, and the error rate dropped. Now I use it a lot more. I built a little fantasy world with a dragon that shot fire from its cloaca and mangaka elf that was bad at drawing but good at... something that was not allowed. It stops you if it considers something to be "adult content". After it told me the Japanese pronunciation of "cloaca", it confused that very same word with "kuro aka" and started going on about what a nice color scheme black and red would be for a dragon 🙄
no
Thai and Tibetan writing are very difficult to read because their writing hasn't changed for centuries; yet, people still use them to this day.
Shouldn't that make them easier to read?
@BoxerBoy-gs8eq Well, languages simplify over time. Tibetan has drastically changed pronunciation wise. When Tibetan was first scripted, it featured consonant clusters which were marked in the writing, but my guess is that people found them very difficult to pronounce, so they changed. The language has much less consonants than before. But Tibetan people struggle with reading their own language just as much as we do. NativLang made a video about Thai and Tibetan writing.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eq มันก็ไม่ได้เป็นไรหรอก (I mean it is ok it isn't hard much)
It was actually harder before then some like ฆ ฌ ญ ฎ ฏ ฐ ฑ ฒ ณ ธ ศ and ษ was harder pronunciation. We tried.
@@BoxerBoy-gs8eqbut that wasn't hard to read much
@@teesteakDuring my learn at Thai i confuse why one voice but have many character. But if you learn Rishi Panini/Brahmi system actually Thai is the same with Hindi, Khmer, Javanese, etc and Thai having Great Languange shift.
I tried to learn some Georgian, it's incredibly complicated, but the alphabet is easy. 33 letters, no lower or upper case, no ligatures, you spell as you pronounce and vice versa.
The pronunciation is the difficult part
It is very very easy haha, many Dagestani ethnicities took into consideration to use Georgian and Armenian based alphabets to replace the Arabic-Persian based scripts since our languages were even too complicated for it. However most languages just ended up using Cyrillic while less than a handful uses both Cyrillic and Tselbik(წէլბიქⲊა) which has more letters than the Georgian and Armenian alphabets. Most Dagestani Cyrillic varieties also have more letters than other Cyrillics. Typically between 40-50 letters. The pronunciations are definitely what makes it hard since many of the languages have 30+ vowels and a more than a few sounds that don’t really exist anywhere else
@@kotovalexarianPronunciation is pretty easy for me. Grammar? Vai me!
Seriously, I will add uppercase and lowercase to Georgian.
@@Naaastya.ŷraev13even Sanskrit has 54 letters in the Devanagari script, i think many Caucasian ethnicities use Arabic and Cyrillic more tho.
I bet you all cant differentiate between:-
1) Odia- ଖ,ଗ,ଘ/ଡ,ଢ / ଳ,ଲ /ଚ,ଚ୍ଚ,ଚ୍ଛ /ଯ,ୟ /ଙ୍କ,ଙ୍ଖ,ଙ୍ଗ,ଙ୍ଘ
2) Telugu- ప,ఫ,వ/ ఝ,య /ఘ,మ
3) Tamil- ஒ,ஓ/ எ,ஏ/௵இ 😂
We Indians deal with them every day tho, i think it all boils down to practice.
Bruh the Tamil one is just 💀
@@justsomeguywithasmolmustac9476 it has atleast been used for the last 1400 years lol.
The above ones are also over 1000-1200 years old.
I am Tamil
Umm? 😂@@justsomeguywithasmolmustac9476
I learnt to read Tamil, Hindi, Telugu, and Kannada with little to no effort, and that proves a lot. Once you learn to read the script of one Indian language, the similarities of other Indian languages start popping up everywhere, thus becoming easy to learn. However, it all depends on your age, cultural knowledge, mother's tongue, and how many languages you're proficient in. But even after referring to my previous statement, no matter what criteria you fall into Mandarin Chinese is hard asf
For Mandarin： 月 is moon and 半 is half, but in the case of 胖 the 月 part is represents “body/body part.” 月 is used to represent “body/body parts” in many other words too. 朋友 is “friend” and the first character is two 月s put together to represent “2 close bodies.”
Yes. 月 was a variation of the character肉。
yeah basically cuz 月looks like 肉字旁 (moon but the center horizontal lines are diagonal)
⺼ is the radical. Notice the difference between ⺼and 月
月 and ⺼（肉） are different.
@@RaltsGang yes but as a radical it looks like 月
I'm Bengali and Ive noticed that how the Tibetan script works is very similar to how the Bengali script or other North Indian scripts work, except, Tibetan has a lot of silent letters. Its like the French of South Asia lol
North Indian scripts are for the most part abugidas.
Tibetan is a horror among scripts, you could think of it like, writing Encyclopedia but you pronounce it Bus... It doesn't make sense. Literally the least sensible script in the world.
@@livedandletdie bro he's saying that both are abugidas. that's the similarity he means
ঠিক বলেছেন
Tibetan, bangla, axomiya, kaithi, devanagari are all abugidas based on brahmi
When I learned Tibetan, it didn't seem as hard as you make it sound, although everything you said about it is true! But there are rules. It's not arbitrary at all. And if you can deal with English and its silent letters and spellings rooted in the past, you can deal with Tibetan.
My first language is Yiddish, so I grew up with a modified phonetic(ish) Hebrew alphabet (though I had to learn the modified SOVIET version lol), then I had to learn Russian, but mum spoke German & Kaschubian, so by the time I was 10 I had to know three wildly different writing systems lol Then we lived in Ethiopia... you ARE right, Olly - writing a language REALLY helps you learn it. My mum tossed me into a local school, so I HAD to learn Amharic quickly just to keep my lunch money lol It's actually a lot easier to read/write than it would seem. Awesome video! Thank you!
The traditional Mongol script is beautiful 👀👍
The language sounds beautiful as well.
looks like Arabic
@@mujemoabraham6522nah it doesn't one you know both of the alphabets
@@JaredtheRabbit Gurun Ulus.
@@SirCapyTheSecondStop crying
Thai but also Lao. Many letters in the Lao alphabet look similar enough to their Thai counterparts that if you know how to read Thai, you can figure out Lao, but anytime I try to explain the Lao alphabet to English speakers, they look at me like I have two heads 😅
There are a few letters that are different but most of them you can guess. The Lao government also simplified the spelling making it more phonetic. I think dumping all those silent letters at the ends of words for the sake of simplicity comes at a cost, though. They differentiate homophones and have an aesthetic value, as well.
Maybe there is a chance to see part 2 of writing systems? There are lots of writings that weren't mentioned like Armenian, Assyrian, Thamil, Inuktitut syllabics and others
I, as a Thai person, I confirm that Thai writing system is very hard even many Thai people still have problems lol, as your example , our aspirated k has ขค same constant but different tone and also even letters have group so you have to conjugate to get tone precisely ,and there’re some exceptions, yet in exception got an exception 😂😂
Btw. I’m pretty sure this 16:23 is Thai vowels,not Khmer
I had the feeling too that there was a wrong script shown, Thai and khmer being somewhat similar.
I tried to get into the Thai writing, but didn't find enough time ... yet. (after getting into Greek, Cyrillic, Japanese, Korean and partly Devanagari.)
As a Thai, I can say that the Thai script spells Thai words logically when you understand them clearly.
That is thai script for sure, even though they look 90% identical.
Thai is more like the mixture of chinese and hindi 😂
@@samomanawatOnce you learn the rules it's not terrible, but still pretty hard. ไม่ไง่. I probab,y spelled even that wrong 555.
Seeing Lisa in this video is enough to encourage me to continue dabbling in Thai every day.
As someone who reads Tibetan and sees the written language on a daily basis, I was so confused for a moment when I saw your thumbnail. Like- uh, yes it is a word... did someone say it's not??? lol
What was that word?
what does the sgrubs mean???
@@renecro1007its "penis" in tibetan.
@@renecro1007means yak’s nipple
@@rizkyadiyanto7922Thank you!
There was some writing system out of Africa that always struck me as being super strange. I don’t know if it’s an alphabet, abjad, abugida or whatever - but it’s just a line that makes seemingly random 90 degree turns at random spots. Different patterns of turns and such indicate different sounds. It was super weird looking but apparently it was big enough to have books printed in it. I’m sifting through the Wikipedia article I found it in trying to find the name of it again.
Edit: Thank you to my girlfriend, she found it. It’s called Madombe - and it looks insane.
Thanks. I'm gonna check this out now
In Thai you only write "vowel e" when you are writing the name of the vowel or spelling something out loud, not when you actually use it in a word! Another thing, there is no punctuation so your example sentence should not have a period. Also you showed Thai letters when talking about Khmer at 16:30
He killed the khmer section, all he did was explain the easiest parts of khmer and he even pronounced khmer wrong.
18:28 胖 is not moon (月) but meat ⺼(from 肉)
While 明 is indeed an ideogrammic compound (日+月 or sun+moon),
胖 like many other characters is a phono-semantic compound, with 肉 being the semantic part and 半 being phonetic
18:27 The left side of 胖 is not moon(月）, is meat(⺼）. The center between these two words has subtle differences.
Mongolian isn't exactly unique with top to bottom language in Asia. Chinese was traditionally written Top to Bottom as well, the only difference is that Mongolian is Left to Right while Traditional Chinese was Right to Left, which is opposite how they write today.
Hanunoo in Phillipines is interesting as it's traditionally written bottom to top, just like Old Irish script Ogham.
Great video (and I've subscribed!) but you've fallen for the trap of adding a Tuvan throat singer to the Mongolian section of the video. Tuvan itself is super interesting - Turkic language buried in the Altai mountains - but it isn't Mongolian and their throat singing tradition is different in a number of ways to the styles found over the border, though coming from a semi-nomadic pastoral culture, borders were a mere inconvenience back in the day...
There's a lot of people that complain about kanji and how difficult it is, but I find the complexity and history of the writing system to be incredibly interesting and it brings a lot of flavor to the language. If we just write Japanese with standard Roman letters it would remove so history and beauty from the language. Simpler and easier is not always better.
Said khmer had 74 letters, proceeds to show the Thai alphabet. 😂
Naw it's cool to see khmer get some recognition.
Editing mistake :)
Apologies! Check out the fixed version here: ua-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A?feature=share
“ Georgia is the only country that ever didn’t have a relative to another language” Korea “Am I a joke to you?”
Japan too
Technically
0:28 Joseph Stalin
2:26 Dalai Lama
4:38 The Weeknd
7:34 Hayao Miyazaki
9:06 DJ Khaled
12:44 Sequoyah
13:55 Genghis Khan
15:36 Pol Pot
17:26 Jackie Chan
19:45 Lisa
Waiting for Polish people, claiming Polish is sooooo difficult. : |
Arabic person, when I asked them about diacritics: yeah, we don't use them :D
But ᶜArabic itself is not difficult at all, nor does the script except its variety of the spoken ᶜArabic make it difficult.
Otherwise, its structural triliteral root-pattern is excellently logical!
Polish person here: I think the reason why Polish people claim that Polish super difficult comes from the fact that we usually only learn Germanic or Romance languages as foreign languages and their structure is definitely easier than Slavic. Also, we don’t consider other Slavic languages difficult because the difficult features are very similar to Polish.
So in essence, Polish is roughly as difficult as any other Slavic language. It might have a bit trickier phonology that the others but it’s not a massive difference.
As far as writing is concerned, Polish is straightforward and consistent for the most part. The only real difficulty is that some sounds can be represented in two ways and you need to remember which one is the correct one for a specific word.
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 just one question: which Arabic did you describe? :)
@marikothecheetah9342
Al-Lisaanu Al-ᶜArabiyyu Al-Afṣaḥu = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Tongue / Language or Al-Luḡatu Al-ᶜArabiyyatu Al-Fuṣḥaa = the Eloquent / Clear ᶜArabic Speech or the Classical ᶜArabic or the Modern Standard ᶜArabic
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 So okay I learn the super easy grammar, I can read Arabic text, I go to one of Arabic countries and go on a merry way communication with locals anywhere in Arabic world?
I'm a native Khmer, the letters you showed earlier were actually Thai. Being a writing system with the most letters in the world is already crazy, the Khmer language is also rich in vowel sounds. Diacritics and other characters make Khmer even has tons of characters overall. Diacritics are very important in Khmer spelling. Some of them have the role in tone (although Khmer isn't a tonal language), some to change the consonant sounds from "O" to "A" or from "A" to "O", some to k*ll the consonant ( the consonant that contain them are dead and won't be pronounced, only for writing), and so many others. Thai and Laos developed from old Khmer, so they look a lot like Khmer although consonants are not rich in sounds (many of them sound the same) while Khmer had developed into 2 consonant groups. You will find loads of Khmero- Sanskrit and Khmero- Pali words in Thai and Lao that had been Khmerised before integrated into these languages.
Good catch with Khmer! The correction can be found here: ua-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A
Amharic for my cursed conlang!
28 letters abjad plus vowel equivalents:
Alef(a)
Ha(e)
Ta marbuttah(œ)
Ayin(o)
Waw(u)
Ya(i)
I think the crazy part about Tibetan is the fact that they actually used to speak it like that. Like, some of those initial consonant clusters are utterly deranged. Old Chinese is similar in this regard. Wonder why every language in that family dropped them so consistently
Balinese also has the same historical spelling issues. They call it as "pasang pageh" ᬧᬲᬂ ᬧᬕᭂᬄ literally means "a strict way of writing". But fortunately, Balinese is not a tonal language, so it is a lot easier than Thai etc. Those historical spellings are for writing Sanskrit or Old Javanese words.
Examples, if I wanna write "asta", i need to know which one it is: (h)asta ᬳᬲ᭄ᬢ "hand", astha ᬅᬲ᭄ᬣ "bone", or aṣṭa ᬅᬱ᭄ᬝ "eight". Since, all of these words are just spelt "asta" in modern Balinese Latin transliteration.
Balinese still writing sanskrit way, Javanese abandon it anyway and turn unused letter as capital
why the ᬲ᭄ letter looks like that?
@@埊why not?
@@埊 Balinese and Javanese are from the same source script, Kawi. And Kawi is the descendant of ancient script, Brahmic. So, it shares the same shape. It also shares similar rules of writing. If you compare several Brahmic script, you'll notice a lot of similar shapes. Some shapes are stylized further, becoming harder to observe the similarity directly.
brahmic: 𑀲
devanagari: स
khmer: ស
thai: ส
kawi: 𑼱
jawa: ꦱ
bali: ᬲ
batak: ᯘ
myanmar: သ
@@wolfthunder2526 all the scripts: have their own letters
kawi: i am 囗011F31.
As someone who picked up Japanese as my 3rd language.
Their writing system is indeed terrifying. But once you are used to it. The comvination of Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji does make sense.
I will try Simplified Chinese as my 4th language.
I learned Georgian 2020-2022 over the course of 2.5 years. The alphabet was actually the easier part of it, the grammar is by far the hardest of any language I know, also differentiating between animate and inanimate, fun fact “brown” is also “coffee colour) ყავისფერი
I learned Farsi from 2023 up until this summer, the lack of vowels still gets me. But very beautiful script and the sounds are lovely, luckily the grammar is easier than other languages I tried.
Interesting! In Romanian there is also a "coffee colour" - "cafeniu". This is the name for the nuance of brown that looks like coffee. And "castaniu" is "the colour of the horsenut". Does Georgian has a main brown and also the coffee colour, or the two nuances are just one word? (I incline to think the latter).
@@eeaotly No but it has two blues, one called “lurji” dark blue and “tsisperi” (sky colour). Also “vardisperi” (pink) colour of a rose.
Exactly same with Turkish; brown=kahverengi (coffee color).
Interesting fact. In Japanese brown is 茶色 (chairo=tea color)
interesting. in indonesian brown is "chocolate".
In Finnish the colour brown is "ruskea", and they have a specific word for the foliage in early autumn before the leaves fall, called "ruska".
Even though Thai has tone markers, it doesn't mean you can always rely on them to pronounce words correctly 😅
Yeah, the 3 consonants classes affect the tone, too. It's so hard for me lol
Three of these alphabets come from an alphabet for writing Sanskrit, namely Tibetan, Khmer and Thai.
Incorrect: Khmer and Thai come from the Pallava script for Tamil
@@plazmagaming2182 The Pallava script is primarily for Sanskrit. It has the letters kha ga gha chha jha tha da dha pha ba bha etc which are absent in Tamil
Not for Sanskrit, but you should say modified for Sanskrit.
The first indic script "Brahmi" was derived by inspiration from aramaic by Ashoka, to write prakrit ( the commoner's language), Sanskrit (liturgical language) was never written for some more centuries..
And Sanskrit Devnagri script originated from Phoenician, same as Greek, Arabic and Latin
@@alfonsmelenhorst9672Primarily for script yes, but it was invented and used by the tamils, and those sounds are indeed still present throught the grantha script
2:02 slightly off topic, but I always forget that Joseph Stalin was from Georgia and that was his 1st language, not Russian
I forget too sometimes
MACON GEORGIA
And he made everybody suffer
stalin, putin, and erdogan are all from georgia.
Beria too. And Shevardnadze.
I'm Thai and I know our language is really hard to study but if you know you know.
I love learning Thai is is definitely my favourite language to study. Thai people really appreciate and are very encouraging when a farang learns their language. Thais are the sweetest people ❤️
Eventho Thai is difficult, it has rules, complicated as they are. Written English has no rules, only patterns, traditions and conventions which requires a great amount of memory to know when they apply. Excellent English spellers rely on memory alone.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Armenian - an entire alphabet which tries really hard to deceive you with letters like Տ է ս ո ւ ց, each of which represent a sound you least expect from them. Join me learning it
It's "Tesuts"? I leaned the Armenian alphabet two times, but I always forget it.
What do you think would be easiest alphabets to learn? And if we then have to take out the ones that aren't easy due to grammar, which alphabeths do you think would be left over?
I had 1 lesson Armenian, but don't think we did much in regards to the alphabet. Fascinating language though.
@@woutvanostaden1299 korean has hangul. you should check it out.
Just like the letters in the Cherokee language are syllabaries the Hiragana and the Katakana letters of Japanese are also syllabaries.
Georgian alphabet is pretty much perfect. Grammar? Verbs?? You gotta love Georgia/Georgian to really learn it.
The Philippines has a unique writting called Baybayin that was lost because of all the colonialization that happened. I really love the writing because it looks like art.
Hi Olly, I’m currently learning Albanian and would love to have a set of beginner short stories like you have in other languages, ever considered writing one for this unique and beautiful language? I believe there’s a gap in the market 😎
Here in tunisia, it's not uncommon for kids, if they don't know a word, to not have to pronounce the vowels. Like, say a kid doesn't know ketab as book, they might just pronounce the consonant cluster ktb and then an adult will tell them the vowels. Really helps, since most kids struggle with the abjad, especially for obscurer words. Hell, even I in my 20s sometimes have to look up the vowels for words, and if I have to say the word without knowing the vowels, I still do the whole consonant clustering thing.
Prof. Norbu allways teased us, when we where totally uncapable to read one of these in all direction stacked Symbols, if we did not learn he would teach us Tibetan and Mongol at the same time. He was brought to Europe in the early sixties by the great Tibetologist Giuseppe Tucci
Great video! The script you have scrolling during the Khmer segment is Thai. They are related (not wading into the drama about if either derived from the other - both from Mon and ultimately from Brahmi).
Thai spelling is logical and can be read in different Dialects or even different Languages in the Southwestern Tai branch of the Kra-Dai family.
Yes. Many local languages spoken in Thailand don't actually have a writing system so they borrow the standard Thai script. For eg my wife is Kuy (กูย), there was a writing system developed in the 21st century for Kuy people but it is not used or understood my almost all of them.
18:26 according to a Japanese person I know the "moon" sign 月 in Chinese is also known as the meat radical; meat l肉 when abbreviated does look like the moon in Chinese 月, so it's more likely half and meat than half and moon!
Yes, moon (月) and meat （⺼ ）writes differently in Chinese.
can you make a video about macedonian? i think it would be really interesting
In Arabic sometimes there are a few diacritics they add to clarify what word you are reading and also the last letter of a word could change diacritics depending on its position in a sentence.
At 5:00 you kinda mixed two concepts together. The Ethiopian *language* has arabic roots, but the script (from the Ga'ez language) pre-dates Arab arrival in Ethiopa by several centuries. It comes from Christians living there in the first centuries AD.
The script goes back to its origins in the Musnad Script = Ancient South ᶜArabian Script, and its religion well before Christianity!
Not only the script but also the type of Semitic languages they speak goes back to Ancient South ᶜArabian languages!
@@samantarmaxammadsaciid5156 Arab conquest 600-700 AD
5:59 The preface colon is lookin...
YEEEEEESSSSS!!!!! YOU SPOKE ABOUT CHEROKEE!!!!! I have been studying this endangered language, and I think the syllabary writing system is actually really simple. The writing system makes so much sense. Each symbol makes a sound that is the same each time (with some variation for colloquial pronunciation). Not to mention it is beautiful to look at. I love this language and the whole culture.
In Bulgarian we have a letter in the alphabet that is never used by itself. It always goes with the letter 'o' after it - ьо
In German, q cannot be used without -u
Nice video.
Dont forget the malayalam or tamil abugida....they are pretty hard to write
Olly, have you ever investigated the Arctic syllabary of Alaska and Canada?
Used to live/work in China and speak Chinese, and it is true that it doesn't really have "words." The characters are just their own concept altogether, but one way you can think about it that is sort of helpful is by imagining a language of prefixes and suffixes that you put together to form new meanings. Each character has meaning in its own right, just like "pre-" or "aqua-" have meaning in their own right in English, but they are commonly put together with other things to make a larger meaning. But characters themselves are not "words." Sometimes they can be used individually, and function the same way as a word would in English, like 吃 for "eat." But sometimes not, like 了，which is used to make things past-tense. So 吃了 would be "ate," so “了” is not really functioning as a word here, it's functioning more like the English "-ed".
When I studied in Naples Italy I met the Tibetan and Mongolian language and history teacher Choegyal Namkhai Norbu at the instituto orientale. I tried to learn the alphabet, but like most of his students I never pronounced it right. Not even the Tibetol8gy majors. So in the end he was pissed off by the bastarization of his beloved language by his obtuse Utalian students and he created a phonetic guide for the chants and Mantras to sound right. But even with this help many butchered it, especially the tonal part with ka kha ga etc. The first sound is an A
Btw. If you learn Tibetan its a bit like elvish. Because its at least threa languages. Vulgar for everyday life. honorific and very honorific. And then there are many dialects. The word that a central Tibetan would pronounce Vajra a eastern Tibetan pronounces Benza and so on.
I was surprised you included Georgian. It's a complex language, but the writing system is straightforward. It has a lot of letters but is has a lot of sounds. The sounds are difficult, but the alphabet is phonetic and not that mysterious.
19:47 when i heard thai, i remembering lisa. this language is beautiful. for me, the alphabet is easy, VERY
I agree. I learnt the alphabet and how to read in 2 weeks. Its really not difficult at all.
@@TheGaragelifterI’m so jealous of you😭😭 I’m an American-born Thai, and I’ve been really fortunate with being able to speak Thai with near native fluency. I just can’t read or write. Every time I see videos like this, mentioning how hard the Thai alphabet is, I get super discouraged lol
5:00 Africa infact has over 30 indigenous writing scripts currently in use. The oldest being Nsibidi from Nigeria (2000 B.C).
Your tibetan translation in the start was wrong. Instead of Tibetan language it was translated to Tibetan person
As a native Hindi speaker I think when I started to learn Bengali it made so hard especially its half letters even if both languages share so much similarities on the basis of grammar, vocabulary and language family ❤
Language learning is easy. Immersive translate is a commendable for it.
The Khmer alphabet looks like something I’d draw in my math class notes when I’m bored
Tibetan is like fancier version of devnagari script
As a person who studied ancient Sanskrit, the 2nd & the 3rd languages are not difficult at all ...
I am learning Khmer now. It is a bit difficult. I think it is more difficult than Chinese. Reading and writing is difficult but speaking is easier. It uses the same word order as English which is great but there are a number of sounds not found in the English language. It's a very fun language to learn for sure!
"Gim is the lever at the gym" is the worst memorizing technique I have ever seen LOL
Georgian is a tough language but the alphabet is actually extremely easy to learn and it does not belong on this list, it’s completely phonetic
I evolved an alphabet from Thai
Vowels
W with tilde=u
Y with tilde=i
Glottal with tilde=a
H with tilde=œ
The vowel table listed at 16:32 is Thai not Khmer
Good catch! See our correction here: Is the Cambodian Alphabet Impossible?
ua-cam.com/users/shortsUoYtVh5Nl2A?feature=share
The reason why you cannot understand the logic of "胖", is becasue it is a phono-semantic compound. Which is one of the major category of Chinese characters. This character is composed with two parts: a sematic component "月", which is a radical that often relates to the meaning of bodies; and a phonetic component "半", which represents the pronounciation of this character. It was inferred that when this character was created, the way people say "Fat" is similar to how they say "Half", but these two character are now pronounced differetly in mandarin because language is always developing.
It is surprising in the distant past, Swahili was once written in the Arabic script
hey, I’m Thai too
the tibetan language in cities are starting to develope more tones very drastically compared to villages and nomadic dialects....especially within tibetan communities outside tibet....
15:34 Mongolian is officially used with the traditional script in Inner Mongolia region of China which has more Mongolian speaker than the country of Mongolia
Japanese kanji will drive you nuts. For example the English verb “to excel” is pronounced “masaru”. There are two ways to write this: 「勝る」 and 「優る」. The first implies excellence at sports, academics, career, etc., and the second implies aesthetic excellence. Both are pronounced the same way, and the distinction is not given in any learner’s dictionaries. And many Japanese just ignore the difference and only use the first writing, as this is just one of many words with identical pronunciation and almost identical meanings, but can be written differently to shade the nuance.
And then there are kanji that are written identically but pronounced differently depending on the meaning. For example, 「外」can be pronounced “soto” if you mean to say “outside” or “hoka” if you mean to say “another”.
Once in a while you will come across words that take forever to decipher. 「牣」 came up in a reading once, but it was not in any dictionary I had on hand . I finally found it to be “Jin” meaning “strong but flexible”. A great word, but very rare in this form.
I'm absolutely in love with Tako from trio mandili. Georgian sounds so melodious to my ears.
16:23 In the pink frame that you showed, it is not a Khmer alphabet but a Thai one, but the other is correct.
ผมพูดไทยได้ครับ I lived in Thailand for 8 years and can confidentiality speak, read and write. Now living in china. 我会说一点儿汉语 I am an American and don't let anyone tell you can't learn new languages. They're much easier than you think.
I don't think it's hard like Chinese Han script. Tibetan belongs to Brahmi system included many scripts in India and Southeast Asia. I learnt Tibetan nagari, Thai, rachana, lao, khmer( included ancient khmers ).
Georgian alphabet is not that terrible to learn, took me less than a week to start reading words. It's phonetic, you say exactly how you write, which must be a hard to grasp concept for the anglophones, but once you get used to it you enjoy it. Also the k', p', and t' ejective sounds have recently become popular in British and American English at the word final position.
I've learned that you can approximate those sounds by softening them and keeping them deep in the throat.
'ts = dz
'p = b
'q = g
Georgians would object, but it comes pretty close.
@@bearlh40 rather 'k = g, q' is further down the throat like the German "ch" in "Acht"
learning the ge'ez alphabet was so muchhhh fun all the patterns carry through all the letters so ig youre technically learning 200+ letters but youre rlly only learning like 33 if i remember correctly how many base letters there are
4:08 "and touch the sound
of silence"
A lot of Southeast Asian languages uses "alphabets" that are quite strange, like Thai and Cambodian mentioned in the video, but also Javanese, and the old Philippines script.
I want to learn the Cherokee alphabet (my grandmother is on the Dawes rolls), but I only ever see the alphabet displayed in font style. I have looked and looked for a chart of the Cherokee alphabet written by hand, but have never seen one.
Cherokee is wild. I am learning Navajo right now. At least it has an easy writing system. It's still a hard language though. They didn't have a writing system for a long time.
Thanks for your interesting video and nice presentation (I wish I could do this too), I myself am trying to understand the Vietnamese script. They have used the visually based logographic script for a few thousand years and their language is also grammatically shaped by that, but about a hundred years ago they were forced by the French occupiers to use the audio-based alphabetic script. As expected, this gives rise to conflicts about which I have already made a few videos.
In my new video (to be released early November 2024) I will address the question: "alphabetic vs logographic script ... which is easier?".
You understand, I believe that the logographic script is more logical and efficient. Anyone who knows the characters needed for reasonable basic communication, which are indeed about 3,000, can communicate with people who speak a completely different language. For the same text you need to know about 8,000 words in English! Then you have the same basis ... but only for English! If you want to communicate with a German or a Swede, you have to learn thousands of new words.
And are characters that complicated? In my video I also give some English words like Tsktsk, Euouae, Floccinaucinihilipilification, how many English speaking viewers of your video know these words? While they are really English words and not even exceptional.
In my video I also explain how centuries ago the misconception arose that the logographic script is more difficult than the alphabetic script.. and why it has continued to live on.
Among other things because people who make interesting videos still say with a sad face that Chinese has 50,000 characters... Characters are like words.. how many words does English have? Something like 700,000? With 50,000 characters you can make a text for which English needs more than 100,000 words!
Incidentally, in answer to your question about the Mongolian script from top to bottom. that is not so surprising, is it? Before the Chinese started using paper, they used bamboo strips, just like they used in India and all sorts of other countries, and those bamboo strips were held vertically and written on from top to bottom. Why not horizontally? Possibly because if you have to hold a whole roll and you don't hold it properly, everything rolls out at once.
roby
I used to have a New Testament translated into Cherokee. Also the Tibetan Lange looks gorgeous. But believe me…Hebrew & Aramaic are much easier for me to read & understand!
Languages with impossibles SCRIPTS. Not all scripts are alphabets.
Also the video shows only modern languages.
Honorable mentions
hieroglyphic egyptian, Aztecscript, cuneiform Sumerian and pre-alphabetic Greek. (Linear' B Greek)
I think the point is to capture the interest of people who don't know anything about writing systems. Those people need context, and might only know the word 'alphabet', so Olly is right to do it this way. And what a boring and ambiguous word 'scripts' is - who'd want to watch a video about 'scripts'?? No-one except us language freaks. In the video Olly tells everyone what's an alphabet and what's not an alphabet, and gives all the correct names.
A really interesting topic, indeed
ㅡ but sorry, I had to leave after
some minutes, because I wasn't
able to bear the jumps of the
images from far to near and back
any longer - here really the saying
"Less is more" suits quite well...
Thai for the win! I still remember teaching myself to read and write it back in the 1980's when I had lots more neuroplasticity. Now I study Japanese for fun but it's a losing battle. At one time I passed the 6th grade equivalency exam in Thai, and learned quite a bit more after that. On the other hand, I recently bought Doraemon Vol. 0 in Japanese. It had stories aimed at different grade levels, from preschool to sixth grade. After years of study, I struggled to read the preschool level😢 So even though Olly rated Thai the hardest, I find Japanese a lot harder.
I learned Chinese Mandarin-Cantonese-Japanese-Georgian
21:34 quick correction, we don’t do that, the “vowel” is just for writing out the vowels separately, normally is merged into the word
Which language is this 👇
ଯଦି ଅନୁବାଦ କଲ ତାହା ହେଲେ ମୋତେ କମେଣ୍ଟ କର
Odia
𝖥𝗋𝖾𝖾 𝖯𝖺𝗅𝖾𝗌𝗍𝗂𝗇𝖾🇵🇸🍉✨
At 16:26 I hope you can correct it, you're showing Thai letters on the Khmer section.
Sanskrit is the spice of Thai :) Tones actually get relatively easy if you can push through 2 hours per week in 6 months period, the main problem of Thai tends to be same tone same sound words :) or same tone, same ending sound with different letter :D but it is the most fun language out there since people really do help you out, I find it more progressive/inclusive than Chinese or Japanese due to the culture.
Learning 3,000 characters seems possible but memorizing the exact correct stroke order to write them is just insane.
May I know what is ancient English alphabet or how they speak or write
You should do one about Hebrew…
Also in modern Hebrew we(most of us) pronounce the throat letters the same way as regular letters e.g. ע and א
אני (me or I) vs עני (poor ) Ani
אור (light🔦) vs עור( leather) Or