The hieroglyph for time is actually a determinative and can also be used in the Old/Middle Egyptian word 'zp' (for example 2 zp means twice, literally two times). It is not a button though, the image provided here is a bit weird, it is supposed to be a moon. Even though the alphabet was inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, their sounds/interpretations are not of the same value as in Middle Egyptian. For example the Canaanites assigned the value/sound 'M' to the wavy water sign, in original Middle Egyptian it was an 'N'. The hand sign for the 'K' was originally in standard Middle Egyptian a dj-sound like in 'jungle'. On the topic of Canaanite-Egyptian work relations and the origin of the alphabet, I recommend the work of Ludwig D. Morenz. And looking up the Hathor-Ba'alat sphinx which looks pretty cool.
The image for time it's meant to be a moon? Or more specifically the phases of the moon? I thought that it should be the phases of the moon or the sun turning around the earth (or both) right away!!
I'm no linguist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but The reason so many of these characters seem to flip horizontally, is, I believe, because some of those ancient languages could be written both left-to-right, and right-to-left. So instead of starting over on a new line when you get to the end of one like we do now, they would continue on the next line going the other way. And when this was done, they also wrote the characters backwards (probably so you could tell which way to read them). And the backward version of those characters just stuck.
I'm French and it just clicked that Y is called 'greek i'! We spelled it igrec in school but they never taught us its 'i - grec'. The evolution of language is so fascinating, love the videos!
It’s pretty clear the Romans were very artistic. All the changes they made to the letters were to create uniformity in shape and format, so they all occupy the same space, they all have similar vertical lines, horizontal lines, and angles and curves, and most importantly, the minimum amount of strokes. Would love to see a video about that. This one was pretty enlightening Thank you.
Just to inform you: The so-called "Latin" Alphabet was brought to Italy by the Greeks. More specifically from Kymi, a city in the so-called "Euboea" Island (correct: Evia).
@@PlanetIscandar False, the euboean alphabet is not the latin alphabet, they are not even written in the same direction. Evolution is not the same as "greeks brought the latin alphabet"
and in any case it is the Latin alphabet that is the most widespread in the world, not the Greek one, demonstrating the powerful cultural impact of Roman civilization
One of the important things behind the C/G split (and the C/K doublet) is the path from Greek to Latin via Etruscan. Etruscan didn't have voiced stops, so both Greek kappa and Greek gamma represented the same sound. Kappa evolved to K, while Gamma evolved to C. Latin did have voiced stops, so they made the G to make the distinction again.
I don't know about Ancient Greek, but in modern Greek Gamma is unstopped at the back of the throat, different from Kappa; a bit "breathier", if you will.
@@WaterShowsProd Ancient Greek has a three-way distinction in stops: voiced, voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated. The gamma was a voiced velar stop, where kappa was a voiceless unaspirated stop, and chi was a voiceless aspirate stop. It's with time that the system became a two-way fricative system with the third item becoming a voiceless stop (where gamma and chi are pairs, and kappa is now the isolate). It happened to beta/phi//pi and delta/theta//tau as well. (Modern Greek now also has reborrowed /b/ and /d/ in initial position and kept it pre-nasalised in native words).
@@peabody1976 Thank you. Interestingly I found that The Karen Language-an ethnic group which lives along the Thailand-Myanmar border-or at least The Pwo Karen, not sure about Sgaw, has a voiced velar sound, like Gamma. I noticed it listening to some people speaking in Karen.
I love the fact that my child (who is six and still in the process of learning to read) and I can watch your videos together - and we both learn something new.
I started off by introducing only capital letters to my daughter, and in the form of those magnetic plastic one's, that she played with on the refridgerator, while I was cooking meals. Then, I went on not only introducing minor letters, but also at the same time introducing the idea that how exactly you write a letter (sound), is a matter of convention, and what you personally like. (I prefer an old style "a" rather than the modern "o"-like with a straight stroke added.) I did this by adding other sets of magnetic letters, that looked different. Also since she also of course also rather quickly needed several copies of letters for spelling. This clarifyed I think a lot about spelling and and other concepts to come. Or perhaps rather started thinking processes around conventions and successful communication. Which made it easier to later add confusing letters not really used in Swedish, like "W", "Z" and "Q", and just for fun, the German "double 'S", as it is supposed to be used in our family's sirname. (Incidentally, the name should also end with two "n's", but that doesn't make sense in Swedish, so my father's generation dropped it, but it's still on the headstone on the family grave.) I want to stress the whole process was driven by my daughter's curiosity, and carried out as just fun, playing around. In her case, this meant she could read and write by the time she was four, but different children want to learn things in different ways and orders, and in my view, there is little point in stressing the process.
Don't teach your child to learn from youtube, because it will never learn or it will learn it wrong. Teach it how to learn. The way to learn. This is the best teaching and will train its mind at the same time.
Nothing hits the spot quite like a new RobWords video first thing on Saturday morning. It's been exciting and rewarding to see this channel continue to grow. Keep up the great work, sir!
as a german native speaker who learns greek and bulgarian at the same time, i have to thank you. your vid cleared the big confusion in my head! thank you!
Arabic not Hebrew/caanathing. Hebrew is too mumbled. (lost b for p, v and no h just kh, no s just sh) as opposed to Arabic which retained all the original consonants, infact julius caesar's Arabic pronunciation is identical to the one presented.
@Tyler Ricci, I remember once my professor mentioned that letters were originally designed to mimic different genital postions. He said that's why certain letters in certain dialects are considered masculine or feminine, such as in Spanish. As a linguist have you ever heard of this or was he just blowing smoke up our azzes.
In addition to your artful alliteration, I really want to commend you/your editor for the brilliant letter transformation animations - it really helped conceptualise how a seemingly abstract hieroglyphic pictograph transformed into a letter
One thing I found most surprising about our alphabet was that when you look at the sequence O P Q R, the first two letters (O and P) are followed by pretty much the same two letters with "tails" (Q and R). What surprised me even more was that I didn't notice this until relatively recently!
It seems a lot of these letters were just made up through the communities cultural environment & a little imagination. Others seems like it evolve over time & their dialect. Thus the consideration expression, "English As The As The Bastard Language"
What I find really interesting is that a lot of the changes over the years came from the tools that they were used in their writing. It would be neat to see a follow up that talks about this interesting point that if poorly shared with the world.
Yes. Roman alphabet used straight lines like "V" for U. The Romans carved letters into stone so straight lines were needed. It would be very interesting to have a video which covers this topic.
@@westzed23 That's why I thought (and was taught in school, I think) the U looked like a V in Roman writing. However, they could have easily made a flat-based U with three straight lines (basically a rectangle with the top line missing) to distinguish it from V if such a distinction made sense to them like it does to us. So, the explanation that the Romans saw U and V as the same makes a lot more sense to me.
@@westzed23 Yet there are plenty of Cs, Ds, Gs, Os, Ps, Qs, Rs, and especially Ss, carved in stone with perfect curves. And on modern stone buildings (like American banks and courthouses), Js and Us also. The modern examples of U-to-V carving (such as BANK AND TRVST, or BANK & TRVST) are imitations of Roman carvings.
Yes there were curved letters but I think it was just quicker in ancient Rome to carve straight lines when they could. Their alphabet wasn't like the Norse runes which had no curves.
the flipping of letters left-to-right and vice versa comes from the fact that even in ancient Greek (and other languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics), it was quite acceptable to write and read left to right or right to left and this was determined case-by-case per sentence by the direction that the assymetric symbols were facing. Hieroglyphs could also read top-down, but not down-to-top.
In ancient Greek, one line in a text would be written from left to right, and the next line written from right to left, and so on repeating the pattern. This was called boustrophedon, which means "as the ox plows." The letters in one line would face in one direction, and the letters in the next line would be mirror images of those in the first line.
@@bigscarysteve I thought I had heard that happened. Wasn't sure if I remembered that correctly. Seems confusing from today's perspective. How did they write going the other direction??? I think my head hurts just from thinking about it
@@rebeccarebeccaa2515 How did they write going the other direction? When they got to the end of a line, they just moved down to the next line--without going back to the other side of the paper--and wrote in the other direction. My brother had trouble with this when he was learning to write in the first grade. Of course, if you write in boustrophedon fashion, then everybody has the problem that only left-handed people have today--namely, that you smear the ink of what you've just written as you continue to write further.
@@bigscarysteve I'm a lefty that hated the ink smear. It mostly ended up on the side of my hand. Usually happened in grade school when I was made to use erasable ink pens back in the late 80s. Thankfully most pens don't cause this problem.
@@indigobunting5041 I'm about twenty years older than you, I'd guess. Erasable ink wasn't a thing when I was in school. Luckily for me, I'm right-handed so I didn't suffer the ink smear problems, but I saw the lefties suffer as you did. My father was a high school shop teacher in the 1950's. His classroom was set up with work benches that could only be used in a right-handed fashion. My father had a student who was left-handed, and who rightly complained that he couldn't use his work bench. My father didn't know what to do, so he told the kid to try to learn to work right-handed because "it's a right-handed world." The kid went to the principal and complained about what my father had said. The principal came back to my father and yelled at him. "You can't tell him it's a right-handed world!" For the rest of his life, my father always noticed every southpaw he came across. He'd always say to them, "I see you're left-handed. You know, it's a right-handed world." I love the fact that you said "ink pen." I grew up literally just a couple blocks north of the line between a dialect that distinguishes "pen" from "pin" and a dialect that doesn't. The kids in my school were in two different camps: those who said "ink pen" and those who just said "pen."
What I love about how we talk about letters has so much to do with printing. For example upper and lower case letters were literally stored in the upper and lower cases of the font, which was the storage for a specific typeface, which could be the slanty italian or italic style! And we mind the leading of the text with tabs of lead. It’s just cool to me how much of it is carried over despite not having a lick of anything to do with physically pressing lead letters to paper.
I just stumbled upon your channel and am delighted. As a language illiterate myself, I have found your videos enlightening and entertaining. I have an entire new appreciation for language. Bravo!
The letter H is is in Dutch used for Hek, meaning fence. It’s almost the same as the Phoenician sound for fence. Fascinating. In Dutch we also have the letter IJ, or the Dutch ypsilon. Written as two letters, but used as one letter, the 25th together with the Y. The Y is used in originally foreign words and the IJ in originally Dutch words. When we learn to write in elementary school, we write the lower caption as one letter by connecting the bottom of the i with an arc to the j (a sort of u glued to the j with two dots above the i and j). It isn’t written as such anymore, because it isn’t on keyboards, it’s now the two letters i and j.
When my father was a soldier in the Second World War, he was stationed in Antwerp. He was amazed that all the typewriters there had a key for "IJ' in addition to the keys for "I" and "J" individually.
In swedish we have "häck" for hedge, which is also pronounced the same as "Hek"! Also, it sounds like the written ij just ends up being ü? which either is a very opportune coincidence or an interesting bit of etymology.
"ij" is present in Unicode as a single ligature. IJ uppercase (When an initial capital, both are capitalized, e.g. IJsselmeer) ij lowercase The "IJ digraph" wiki page has fascinating info about the usage and history in Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans.
Alef is still used for the letter A in Arabic, and the w that turned to S in Roman is actually still very similar in the Arabic س for ‘S’ and Cyrillic ш for ‘Sh’
Ur right, S still has 3 upward-going lines in Arabic, Arabic alphabet came from nabatean, nabatean came from aramaic, and aramaic came from phoenician/canaanite
As someone who speaks Hebrew, it was really interesting to watch this video, because the words that these ancient letters where representing that led to their modern sounds are still used today. B was a house, a "bayit", D from a door or fish, "delet" or "dag." The source of WYUVF comes from a picture of an arm, or "yad." M was a picture of water, or "mayim." It's really amazing to be able to understand the logic behind where all these letters came from.
And what's extra cool is that the Latin and Hebrew scripts have a common ancestor in the Phoenician script (which, IIRC, was also used to write Paleo-Hebrew). While the Phoenician script did evolve into the Greek script (which itself gave rise to the Latin, Runic, Irish, Gothic, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts), it also evolved in a completely different direction within the Levant, giving rise to the Aramaic script, which itself is the common ancestor of the modern Hebrew, Arabic, Mongolian, and Syrian scripts, as well as a bunch of Indian scripts
@@skibidipop Also in Russian and Slavic languages in general "morye" , means a large body of water which in modern Russian refers to a sea (and I think in Spanish and Portugese too), And I suppose that in English you have the word "marine" which probably had the same origin.
A: Sınır demektir B: Güvenlik demektir C: Ekleme - eklenme E: Uygun olan D: Ölçü demektir. ....... M: fayda demektir Arapça, Türkçe, öyle sanıyorum ki ibranice de buna dahildir, ingilizce hepsinin kökeninde bu yazdığım evrensel dil temel mantığı vardır. Daha ayrıntı isteyen varsa yazsın verelim.
Thank you so much for all of your videos. Our 5 year old loves your channel! He has always been fascinated with the alphabet and reading and making words in general. Needless to say our driveway is covered in much of your teaching!
We had a print shop in the school I went to, and the trays that held the uppercase letters were in alphabetical order, except J and U which were at the end. This was a holdover from when J and U weren't yet in the alphabet. That the sorting survived to this day always fascinated me! (The lowercase letters were not sorted alphabetically, probably more in line with their frequency of use).
I'm a history buff and I never realized the long and storied history behind 26 simple shapes that have helped create and shape the world around me. FASCINATING DOCUMENTARY! THANKS FOR MAKING IT!
Thank you. I'm an English teacher in Japan and I think this video will be interesting to some of my high school students. Kanji is obviously still ideo/pictogramatic and may as well be bloody hieroglyphs, but hiragana and katakana have come from similar transformations that our alphabet underwent. I'm not saying it will help them learn the language, it won't, but at their level, it's just some interesting facts.
True! I'm here in China at a uni and also did the same. The students found it extremely interesting, plus you know Chinese language also uses Pinyin, which is the latin letter transcription of Hanzi 汉字. It's really intriguing to see all these connections nearly everywhere.
I disagree about kanji- as you know the kana are derived from cursive kanji. The kanji themselves have these stories often. Thanks for the video. Super informative and I never knew past aleph
Having watched this I can now see why some of the letters of the semitic language Amharic (= main Ethiopian language) look like they do. Very informative episode!
some Chinese similarities 7:03 door 門 11:53 hand手 14:15 lush/plentiful 丰 three三 Could be coincidence, but with all the recent discoveries around humanity's history being lost around cataclysmic events, i would bet there was a pictographic language that spread to those ancient peoples
I certainly don't buy into Graham Hancock's or any of his fellow travelers' 'Catastrophism' nonsense, but there is a TED talk by a lady who talked about Ice Age symbols showing remarkable similarities over very large distances, basically across Eurasia and North Africa, at least, possibly hinting at long-distance trade and also a possible common starting point for all Old World writing systems.
Having the same/similar symbol for "hand" or numbers is no wonderful. Every human has hands, and count small numbers almost the same way (usually with fingers, in a decimal system). This can be applied to more abstract ideas to a lesser degree (e.g. lush/plentiful can be paired with a tree full of fruit) No need for complex theories of lost (even alien) civilizations and whatnot, apply Occam's razor.
@@thealmightyaku-4153 It could also point to the near-extinction of the homo species, when the ice age pushed humanity to the brink and left only a few 10s of thousands of our ancestors, though I guess that supports the common starting point theory. You know what's really remarkable? Cat's Cradle string play exists almost everywhere humans have settled. What is it about Cat's Cradle that makes it so ubiquitous across almost all cultures?
In the language of the 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰰 people 𐰕𐰰 > Öküz = Ox 𐰀𐰞𐰯-𐰼 > Alp Er= ox-headed man (warrior) Alper Tunga > Afrasiab > Frāsiyāv 𐰌 > Eb > ev = Home 𐱃 > At = Horse 𐱅 > Et = Meat 𐰼 >Er = Male /soldier 𐰠 >El = Hand 𐰴 >Keyik = Deer 𐰖 >Ay = Moon
Fascinating! When I studied linguistics I learned stone carvers would work from right to left so they could better judge the spacing of the letters since the left hand held the chisel and covered the text. Scribes using ink would work left to right using the right hand so the ink would not smear. That may explain some of the verticle transposition in letters. Very few poeple could read at this time and since so many "letters" were just symbols of everyday objects (gate, ox goad, ox, house, etc) which had no left right orientation anyway.
In arabic the first word in the alphabet is still called Aleph and the second Ba, The name for house is also "Bet". I think because it is also a semitic language.
As an American who’s been studying Chinese I found this fascinating to see how the characters of the Roman alphabet changed from their original forms just as Chinese characters have evolved. Great video thanks
And also that the window that became our H is so like their ri symbol for sun (which you'd see through a window)... Which struck me particularly because when learning (introductory) Chinese the links to pictures was central to memorising, even though there are so many uses where the meaning eventually has nothing to do with that origin - maybe just suggesting the sound. I had never considered my own letters in the same way. Funny that I remember kinder level teaching of our letters as "bat and ball" for "b" or "drum and drumstick" for "d" - I'm sure children around the world have been taught various pictorial mnemonics for our letters.... Maybe they could just stick with the real ones though it does seem A is for Ox is a harder sell.
Japanese kanji is also pretty interesting, with some Chinese characters still used today that China has since revised, and vice-versa with lots of Chinese characters that Japanese revised. Then there are the hiragana and katakana syllabaries based on kanji.
Europe had its own indigenous writing system from the Minoans, but it's such a shame they had to adopt from the Afro-Asiatics due to the Late Bronze Age collapse.
As a graphic designer, I love type, letters, symbols, and their origins. This was fun to watch and now I need to go and buy a book. Thanks for this. Loved it.
This brings me back to elementary school days when I was still getting more familiar with English, I ran into calligraphy books which is next to a bunch of language learning books. I didn't really read it just skimming enough to understand what it as about. It was interesting to see how some of the letters and characters are all so similar yet pronounced and used differently for each language.
i can say in all honesty if i had u as my English teacher way back in the dark ages i may have taken a lot more notice and interest, rather than the dull, dry and boring lessons i remember u bring things to life with stories and colour in subjects that are usually a drab grey, cheers for all the time and effort u put into these its much appreciated
Back around 1960 or so, I learned the Phoenician alphabet from the encyclopedia in order to write in a diary I had that wouldn't lock. I also taught the alphabet to some of my friends at school for note writing that couldn't be deciphered by teachers. Some of my friends ended up getting detentions for it, but they said they were well worth it. Years later, I went to Israel and learned Hebrew. By then, it was easy.
@@VectorJW9260 Rather obvious: So that other people (usually gossipy females in the house / dormitory) do not read the writer's thoughts / secrets / ideas / dreams.
The Phoenician, Canaanite and ancient Hebrew alphabets were pretty much identical. The descendants of the ancient Israelites('Samaritans' in English)from the northern kingdom of Israel who never left the land but became a tiny minority after the Byzantine Empire killed off many of them and they became a minority by the time the Arab Islamic conquest but till this day the Samaritans still use the ancient Hebrew alphabet for their own religious and cultural studies and literature. They are the last living population to use the oldest alphabet in the world.
I would have never thought I would say something like this, but I was absolutely enthralled learning the history of Roman letters - exclusively due to your witty side notes and thoroughly-informed knowledge base. First time seeing your channel. I am very impressed. Keep up the great work sir. Cheers from the other side of the pond!
Regarding Zee/Zed. I'm an American, but I'd argue for Zed! Here's why... I used to work in graphic design and database publishing. Sometimes the programmer would have to walk me through some procedure using DOS commands whenever he updated the process. He spoke English, but had an accent. (He was from an island in Finland where they only speak Swedish.) When he said Control-Z, it sounded just like Control-C. Those commands did VERY different things!
There is of course no right or wrong way for a culture to pronounce their letters, but I have to defend the use of "zee" in American English. "Zee" follows the custom for several letters who's names mimic the sound that they make and ending with an "ee" sound: bee, cee, dee, eee, gee, pee, tee, vee. "Zed" on the other hand, isn't consistent with any other letter name in the English speaking alphabet. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with calling it zed. Just as double-u is unique, zed doesn't _have_ to fit any pattern. And if we are concerned about being misunderstood in speech then we are going to have to change a lot more than just the "Z."
In Spanish we kept the name for “Zete” pretty much unchanged as “Zeta”, also Y was called “I griega” (Greek “I”) but now is “Ye” since people started unnecessarily calling I “I Latina” (Latin “I”) so just to end the confusion we went with I (ee) and Y (yeh). Another odd decision was to eliminate “Ll” called “elle” from our alphabet since it’s a digraph for L but makes the same sound as “Y” but since no one spells a word with double L’s as “Ele, ele” now they say “doble L” (double “L”) instead making it more contrived than just saying “elle” in the first place. The digraph Rr (called Erre) for the rolled R sound also got removed but now people are always confused on wether a word is spelled with one or two R’s since we got rid of the Rr (erre) digraph but gave it’s name to the letter R (formerly known as “ere”). V and B are both called “beh” but people would distinguish them as “v de Vaca” or “b de Burro” (“bee” as in cow vs “bee” as in donkey) while others call them “bee” and “u bee” or “b grande o v chica” (tall B vs short V). W suffers from the same thing is called either “doble u” or “double v” and people get really heated on which name is the right one. Q’s official name is “coo” but since it’s used in short hand and texting for the word “que” younger generations now refer to the letter as “keh” instead.
The words for the early alphabet, ox house, hook, water snake, etc, are still the same in Hebrew, the words star, still today with the corresponding letters - water is maiym, head is rosh etc
Oy vey, I was about to say that. Bayit is house ב. Gamal is camel ג. Rob also mentioned that D might’ve been fish, or dag ד. Coincidence? My Israeli father mentioned that kaf כ looks like a hand. Ayin is eye ע. Qof is monkey, ape ק. תודה רבה!
Yeah, where do you write it, in Thai they use exact this things (but hedge is hen) as visual symbols to learn the first letter for the alphabet. Thai have 44 consonants and around 10 vocals (many used for loan words). Interesting details.
Zionist Hebrew is a reinvented language, which means that it is based on what we know today and not necessarily how it was in the past. The Israelite ("Samaritan") Hebrew is different.
I had a friend whose last name was Linda. She said her ancestors came to America from Germany and their name was Zinde. But the way they wrote their z’s looked more like L’s to Americans so their name got changed (likely by census takers) to Linda.
It happened quite a lot with the first settlers in America, as well as displaced people (e.g. Jews fleeing Europe in the 20th century). When people were "processed" at the borders, or in censuses, their names were written by hand on long lists. Due to unclear writing, or poor recognition skills, the names ended up getting mangled on official documents, leading people's names being officially changed by accident. (It even happens on birth certificates sometimes. I've come across people whose official name is spelled wrong because of an error by a parent, or a typo by a registrar.)
Linda means “pretty” or “cute” in Spanish, but not in German. The name her ancestors came to the US was “Zinde”. It hot changed to “Linda” by Americans who thought the Z was an L.
It's been historically proven that names were not changes at the census, but rather by immigrants due to pressure to adapt to American culture and nomenclature
In Latin, the K went before A: kalendas, kardo, Kartago, etc. most of these got replaced with C later on. Q was used before U only when the U was followed by a vowel: aqua, equester, loqui, quorum, antiquus, etc.
In older inscriptions (i.e. during the Republican period) the letter Q was used before all instances of U/V, e.g. the word for ‘money’ was commonly written as PEQVNIA, but by the Imperial period the rule you mention came into effect and so this began to be spelled PECVNIA
In the version of Latin I learned at school there was no K, the Latin alphabet had only 24 characters, I was taught (obviously the language evolved and changed throughout its lifetime). I'm not sure which one the other unused letter was, I think W. The Q-before-U rule is the reason I don't understand why we have Q at all. It's completely redundant in all languages I learned that have it, German, Latin and English. EDIT: coming to think of it, Z is also redundant in German, it could be perfectly replaced by TS in every instance...
@@LRM12o8 That was the same standard I was exposed to in High School and College, and it’s a standardization that developed in 1800’s Britain, not ancient Rome. Unfortunately the way that Latin is commonly taught often leaves students woefully unprepared to read ancient inscriptions, although part of the issue is due to the fact that ancient inscriptions tend to make heavy use of abbreviations, which requires the reader to have a very thorough knowledge of Latin in order to fill in those gaps.
The queer quiet queen quickly queried and quartered the quota of quinces and quarrelled with the quartermaster about the questionable quality and quantity of kumquats and quail from Quebec.And quipped if I had a quid for every Q I’d be quids in then quit.
Just to add, P and Rho were written quite the same, as the sound /p/ in Greek was given by the letter Π pi, so Romans decided that the sound for trilled or alveolar tap /r/ should be a P with another leg: R. Another story: labiodental /f/ was a quite uncommon sound, Greek had bilabial letter phi, and i can't recall any Etruscan word with this phoneme until the emerging of the Roman Republic. Firstly, for /f/ Etruscans spelled with an H, since their letter F sounded like /w/ from Phoenician waw / Greek upsilon. So, The ancient city of felsna was pronounced uelsina, but written felsna/velsina. Neo Etruscan alphabet brought a letter shaped like an 8 for this F sound spoken by their neighbors. While U was already doing its job in Latin, no need to differ F with a digraph FH, and then this is how F emerged in latin from Y.
The Etruscan alphabet came from the Cumean alphabet, which was a western variant of Greek alphabet before it standardized using the Ionic (eastern) variant, and many letters looks more similar to the current Latin alphabet ones rather than standard Greek ones. The letter rho actually had another leg in that variant like the latin R if you look closely at older inscriptions.
Greek had an F, waw, also called digamma (as in ‘double gamma’, one transposed over the other) and was used in words like boFos, ‘ox’. When no longer used, it was spelled ‘bous’, using the upsilon form of the letter. In the generic case, ‘boos’… was pronounced as if the F was still there: bowos.
@@setheisenberg7150the name digamma shows actually that the Greeks who used it sometimes had forgotten the name and thought of it as looking like two gammas. And now you know why Y is called -psilon. Because it's the retracted version of F digamma, and Y was once closer to German ü than u or w.
This was AMAZING!! Seriously, Rob, I will watch this at least half a dozen more times to actually take in all of the facts and trivia that you just, almost literally, blew my mind with. Being both *very* intellectual and *highly* visual, this relatively tiny video is worth hours of contemplation. I wish I could hit the like button at least 26 times.
I'm so glad I ran across your channel a few months ago. Been catching up on some of the older material. I love linguistics channels and think yours is one of the best around. Thanks for doing what you do!
As an Hebrew speaker it's cool to see how sound of word remained in the letter, for example the letter R that come from head is making sense to me because the Hebrew word for head is "ROSH" which starts with the letter R .Also the letter M that came from water, and water in Hebrew is "MAYIM" yet again starts with the letter M. BTW the letters ALEF and BET are also the first 2 letters in Hebrew.
And in Hebrew Ba-eet is a house while bet is the letter. In the bible, the word Aleph and Alaphim many times mean ox and oxes. O which comes from Ain is the Hebrew word for Eye and also happens to be an hieroglyph of an Eye.
The hebrew didn't invent anything, they just took the existing Phoenician alphabet. ALEPH doesn't mean OX even though the symbol is a ox HEAD, it means all Pet animals, the ox was the king of pet animals because it was the most helpful for its agricultural work. And 3Ayn means originally SOURCE symbolized by an Eye in the egyptian hieroglyphs, 3Ayn is a source of water and a source of light (EYE).
@@Malik_Sylvus aleph doesn't mean ox, but aluph dose. Aluph in hebrew is a champion but in ancient hebrew it means the head of an ox, ancient hebrew is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, as Phoenician is. Phoenician is a Greek name, at the time the language was not called Phoenician, and both languages ancient hebrew and proto-hebrew (Phoenician) was rather similar
@@-Belshazzar- old hebrew is a creolic language made of different semetic egyptian and greek idioms, just like nowadays hebrew is a creolic language made of Arabic dialects and several others languages, so if you want to be accurate don't try to find the real meanning of a semetic word by referring to Hebrew. By the way tons of semetic words used in hebrew language are given false meannings.
@@Malik_Sylvus no, ancient hebrew was spoken before the Greek ever got to the area. ancient hebrew letters, (because we are talking about letters, the spoken language was different obviously) were mostly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and proto-hebrew (Phoenician) Greek came to the area later. The Greek took the Ancient Hebrew letters and maybe some Phoenician not the other way around. Ancient hebrew was chisled on stone and since most people are right handed it was chisled from right to left. The greek used paper and ink, and so when they took the hebrew alphabet they wrote it from left to write because otherwise the hand would smear the ink, you can see many Greek letters are actually ancient hebrew letters only flipped. Arabic is a semit language that was developed from hebrew and Aramaic, modern day hebrew uses hebrew and Arabic but the Arabic itself originated from hebrew. I as a hebrew speaker can read Aramaic and understand some (my grandfather was fluent in Aramaic) Arabic people can't read a word in aramic
Love this video. I teach Spanish and so much I see in pronunciation of their alphabet letters. Fun to see how things moved from one culture/language to subsequent ones, who in turn adopted and morphed the letters.
Thank you so much, Rob. I have only praise for this video. I come from Cyprus, and ever since I was a kid we were constantly told "the Greeks invented everything" and yet there is archeological evidence that shows there was civilizations with languages of their own dating back to the Canaanites and the Phoenicians before the Greeks set foot on the island. Again, good work, Rob. 👏👏👏👏👏👏
The Phoenicians were Canaanites also known as Philistines. The Greeks called them Phoenicians after the Phoenix or Chinese Golden Partridge. As they became a world wide seafaring nation other races joined them like the Hittites and they became quite an ethnic mix. The Carthaginian Royalty boasted their Philistine ethnic connection.
i haven't heard anyone say that the Greeks invented everything (im greek). But we do take pride for how much we have contributed to the world. The fact that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet is no secret and is taught in schools and most people who know some history know this. Though its not like Greeks did not contribute anything to the alphabet. They made changes and improvements, and then the Etruscans adopted it and thats where Latin started. So Latin was based on the upgraded Greek "version" of the alphabet and not the Phoenician. For example, the phoenician alphabet did not have lowercase letters. The Greeks invented them. Greeks have not invented everything, but they have created and contributed so many many things
@@dieselgeezer18 - if it wasn't for the Greeks most of the ancient knowledge would probably have vanished. Alexander's library was a repository for knowledge of plants, chemistry, mathematics, geography, and physics. The Bible says " the Greeks gave us Logic. In which case no logic or Boolean algebra = NO MODERN COMPUTERS
I'm glad to hear you pronounce the H as eych, not as heych. To me, as a speaker of Italian and French, the modern prepend of the h sound feels like the trampling down of etymology.
Every one of those letters except for X has relatives in modern Semitic, some are used in Arabic or Hebrew in a very similar way to how it was used in ancient dialects. The letters U, V and W are represented with the same letter in Hebrew, also in Arabic although it doesn't have the sound of V at all, some native Arabic speakers tend to pronounce it like F which might explain something. also the letter Q looks about the same in modern Semitic as in ancient dialects, in Arabic and Yemenite Hebrew it's easy to notice the difference between Quf and Kaf. I'm hoping to watch more videos on the subject, especially if you can make the same review on Russian alphabet. Thank you very much.
X is kind of an oddball letter in the languages I'm familiar with, English being primary. In most cases in North AM English it's spoken as KS. I know there must be a story on the internet about why that is, but I haven't taken the time to hunt it down. Xavier in spanich is Ha-bi-er, and in RP it's ZAY-vyer. But I hate, absolutely hate when my countrymen call Xavier, "ex-AY-vyer." "Where did you go to Uni? " "Francis ex-AY-vyer."
Fun fact: the first letter of the Arabic alphabet is "أ" which is pronounced as "Aleph" , and it's a direct equivalent to the letter A when paired with other letters to make a word
As someone who speaks both English and Hebrew, it's interesting to see the transition. Most of the symbol make sense to me because the word in Hebrew is still the same. After all, many words in Hebrew didn't really change since ancient times. The head in "R" for example, probably refers to the word "Rosh" which is.... well... head in hebrew. Same for the D in "Dag" (fish) and many others.
England was invaded by so many different folk (Saxons, Picts, Vandals, Vikings, Normans etc) that its weird it retained any from its Celtic roots (afaik that's the most ancient part there), not to mention the conscious (forced) changes the language had. On the other hand, people native in Hebrew (=jews) did a great effort to preserve the language as part of the cultural identity.
5:38 In Hebrew, the letter that makes the "R" sound is called "Reish", which derives from the word "Rosh" meaning head. My correct prediction was therefore not unexpected. And at 6:42, that letter looks like the Hebrew "Shin", which makes the "S/Sh" sound. Besides A and B, the English letters D, I/J, and M, correspond to the Hebrew letters "Dalet", "Yud", and "Mem", which come from the words Delet (door), Yad (hand), and Mayim (water). It's really amazing to see traces of older languages especially ones that I can speak or have knowledge about in the English language / Latin alphabet!
I wholeheartedly believe the Hebrews of old gave us our modern writing systems and took cues from the Egyptians hieroglyphics because they had just escaped slavery from them just as the Bible says.
@@UncleUncleRj you are not mistaken. Hebrew is a Canaanite language, so everything discussed in this video derived from the ancient Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet.
@ravinmarokef That's because Hebrew is the language of the letters that can be referred to as Phoenician or ancient Hebrew (or ancient Aramaic, etc). Literally, every letter's make you heard as Phoenician is the Hebrew name of the letter. The thing about D possibly coming from door or fish? Definitely door, as Dalet is literally coming from delet, Hebrew for door.
I'm learning a bit of Arabic and I spotted some similarities as well. My initial impression is Semitic languages stuck more closely to older versions of the characters whereas the European languages needed to adapt them more.
@@matan4ilit's way more complicated than that. Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect related to but distinct from Phoenician. Other Canaanite dialects in early inscriptions used a clear fish with fins for the D sound. Aramaic is somewhat mutually intelligible but an entirely different language spoken by a different culture, the Aramaeans and Chaldeans (founders of the Neo-Babylonian empire after migrating from Syria to southern Mesopotamia). Hebrew did not give us writing, Egyptian did via Phoenician and other early Canaanite dialects of polytheistic peoples in Sinai and the Levant.
A content writer who is currently learning Old English here.. Just want to say that I would like to give a round of applause for your script writer! The presentation of the content is just fascinating!
The ox morphing into a mark for the a sound like in call and so on makes total sense, so I'm not surprised that it worked out like this. The R coming from a head isnt that odd, either, with the top curved area being the head and the straight line & angled line being indicators for the torso. But some of these are pretty fascinating, for sure! Thanks for all you do - here's a well-deserved like and comment for the care & feeding of the Almighty Algorithm! ❤❤
Rob, you always amaze me with your research and explanations. Are you a professor ? You should be if not. You are a great teacher. You are where you're supposed to be. Great work, as always!
in German, a lot of old heads write an I like a J in handwriting when it comes at the beginning of a sentence. Like "Jsland" .. always wondered why that is
I love this channel! I studied linguistics but so rarely get the chance anymore to talk about these things with other language nerds! My language students are definitely not as excited about the alphabet and linguistics as I am
Not mentioned here is the reason why letters keep getting reversed and rotated. When right-left reading order languages were appropriated by cultures who preferred left-right, it was easier to reverse the character with the direction than it was to keep the character. So from Egyptian (RL) to Greek (LR) to Etruscan (RL) to Roman (LR) we basically have a story of each culture reversing and simplifying the characters.
You are absolutely brilliant. Then you add the excellent graphics, your amazing and entertaining delivery, the unique and fascinating subject,the well-done editing, and your channel is certainly unmatched. Thank you!! Also, your accent is very appealing❤
I think it is interesting how some letters that came from Ancient Egypt, not only mutated in shape, but also changed sounds. For example: the B from Egyptian reed hut has more of a modern "h" sound. The wavy line of M, is almost exactly the Egyptian shape, but theirs usually had 4 peaks and had the sound of our modern letter "n". There are several others.
Because the Canaanites didn't care for Egyptian sounds. They had their own language with their own sounds. The point was just to use a system of symbols to represent it in writing.
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and a Spaniard were all watching a street performer. The street performer asks his audience if everyone can see well enough. To which they reply: Yes Oui Si Ja
Very interesting as always... it is very nice to see the actual similarity between letters which are entirely different nowadays. Some of these letters have the same names in modern Hebrew by the way... A is still 'Alef' and B is 'Beyt', which is very similar to the word 'Ba'it' that means home. We kept the G sound in the third letter and most of the order is practically the same. But the shapes took a very different turn and bare almost no similarities.... some looks identical to Cananites letters... with similar pronunciations
Zee/zed is like aks/ask both are historically correct pronunciations it just depends on what neighborhood you were raised in. Language is a fascinating dynamic thing. Anyone that thinks it's static is a fool.
This was my absolute favorite episode yet. Whenever I see that little red notification icon for your videos it becomes something of a mini celebration in my mind. Keep up the astoundingly great work, Mr Rob Edit- I wonder if Veritasium knows he should pronounce his channel name as ‘Weritasium’…? 🤔
About the last part, I got some fun info for you. There are two latin pronunciations today. One called Classical, and one called Ecclesiastical. Ecclesiastical is basically reading Latin as if it was medieval Italian, and is the official of the Catholic Church. The most widely used pronunciation by far as you may guess, is that one. Most Latin learners and speakers use that one and songs are sung and Vatican comms are written with it everyday. So Veritasium with the labiodental is also kind of correct, even if the old Romans wouldn't have pronounced it that way...
@@crusaderACR that's really interesting, especially since my teachers used to give me texts with u and not v and i and not j (or the other way round)! We were also taught to pronounce v as u and j and i!
@@camillechauve1352 Then your teachers preferred Classical pronunciation. Except Classical has more differences than that. And that the U shouldn't have been used at all. Main one is the so called long and short vowels. 5 short and 5 long, for each written vowel. In texts you will often not see them marked differently (if it does it looks like this: Veritāsium) which is endlessly confusing, and makes Ecclesiastical MUCH simpler. Ecclesiastical, like Italian and most other major Romanic languages, has only short 5 vowels, the long versions being dead. Like this: Gāius Ivlivs Caesar vs. Gaius Julius Caesar. Pronunciation-wise, Caesar in Classical is pronounced Kaisar, and in Ecc it's Chesar (ch like in cheese) Hmm maybe your teacher writes it with U to make sure you don't mistake the pronunciation? Because both the U and the J are medieval inventions.
@Alonso B In the world of choral music, we study [at least] two variants of Latin's pronunciations: Italian style and German style. We use one or the other depending on who the composer was, or whe they were living when the music was composed, or what period/style the piece belongs to... sometimes the choice is rather subjective, to be honest.
@@epuerta5967 That was the hardest letter to learn in the Spanish Alphabet, and probably exacerbated by the fact that it was at the end and we didn't have nearly as much practice with it. If only our teacher told us that "ee ga dee egg a" was spelled "ygriega" and meant "Greek i", it would've been a lot easier to remember its name and know why it has such a complicated name compared to all the other letters.
@@carultch I see why that would be the case lol (I've known most teachers to just present rather than instruct and thereby turn people off certain subjects). Having come from Spanish background in a English/French country, the French helped essentially take the concept for granted (I didn't realize until much later that the "grec/griega" meant "Greek" lol). Well, at least it's Ye now, as it should be (or at least similar- not sure if Ye does it justice)
@@epuerta5967 I'm guessing she probably didn't know herself, about the etymology of ygriega, and had bigger tasks to complete when teaching the class to us.
Hi Rob First, thank you for referring to them as HIEROGLYPHS and not "hieroglyphics"!! Second, I think you and I are kindred spirits. Growing up, we had a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I used to spend hours looking through them. I memorized the characters behind each letter and would write in my diary using Egyptian, Semitic, and Phonecian characters. It was fun having this language that noone else understood.
I've always been fascinated with the origins of our alphabets ever since, as a student, I read Robert Graves' "The White Goddess". It seems clear that the Greeks took their iota from the Canaanite and Phoenician yod (י) which was pronounced like "yah", "yoh", or "yoo" depending on the vowel markings underneath the consonant. In ancient Greek the iota looked like an apostrophe. In Canaanite and Phoenician there is a letter "shin" (ש) the Greeks skipped over but when the Russian monks took their Cyrillic alphabet from the Greek alphabet, the Russians added the shin (ш) pronouncing it as "sh..." just like in Hebrew, Phoenician, and Canaanite. I enjoy your videos!
One of your most enjoyable videos! So many details and stories but also really light hearted 😄Do please cover the lower case letters, or even other scripts! (Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac maybe?)
Thank you for the hours you must spend crafting a script that sounds so conversational, but is thoroughly delightful. “P: A vaguely bendy line that gained confidence over time”….Love it!
Another reason why alphabets with a limited number of symbols became so popular was that it was easier to learn to read, which was really handy if you're a traveling merchant. Cuneiform writing was immensely popular for so long because you could use it to write in any language, if it was still around, you could easily use it for either English or Chinese. But it was a pain to learn and keep accurate which was not so fun for merchants making out bills of sale in the hopes of getting paid properly. But with written language that only had 26 or 30 symbols, you could be a lot more accurate about how much was being transported and how much you expected to get paid.
I've been told that there are as many as 19 separate languages in China but that they all use the same characters in their written languages. So two people from different Chinese cultures may not understand each other verbally, but they can read each other's writing. I think that's cool!
I am Egyptian ,yes from Egypt 🇪🇬where it all begins 😸..Great video but I would like to point out something about the letter M ,water is called in Arabic مياه Meiah and in Egyptian baby talk مو مو Mo Mo ,still used till today when we talk to babies to refer to water . Speaking of Egypt and Egyptian dialect Arabs and Egyptians call Egypt 'Mother of the World ' أم الدنيا , because every thing begins here ❤🙏🇪🇬
When I was in high school, I researched the same subject myself from encyclopedias for a long time. I took notes, tried to find out where each letter came from and why it was written like that. Of course, there was no youtube back then 😁
Wow!🤩 I didn't think we humans knew how the letters came to be. To watch this and finally learn after living on this rock for over 40 years that Egyptians used symbols to represent sounds to instruct foreign workers is just fantastic I'm so glad i picked this video to watch,. thank you Rob!
The two F sounds is actually very common and can be found for almost every sound in the IPA (international phonetic alphabet). Examples of this are D and T, P and B, and S and Z. Each pair of sounds is made the exact way with the only difference being one is voiced and one isn't voiced. You can actually feel the difference with the S and Z example. If you put your hand over your throat like you would if you were choking yourself, of course don't choke yourself. Just place your have there and make a continuous s sound and then a continuous z sound. You should notice that your mouth is doing the same thing in both instances but when you make the z sound you should feel your throat vibrating. And that's the only difference in each of those pairs of sounds.
What you feel when saying "z" is the vibration of the glottal folds. It's also really easy to hear the vibration in your voice when comparing "f" to "v" or "s" to "z".
I started thinking about this after learning to mix and produce music. If you cut too much low frequencies out of a vocal track, G's will start to sound like C's, etc.
I LOVE your enthusiasm and joy you have for language! It is SO wholesome to watch your videos seeing your excitement! Thank you so much! And I didn't even know, that Part of my Internet Name was once a letter ❤🤩
I’m an language enthusiast, been interested in languages for years; and I’ve never known why the letter Q is used. I knew there was a reason. And I’ve been asked so many times why the letter Q exists, and now thanks to this very interesting and informative video - I can tell them.
As for epsilon, the name is not because it lost it's /h/ sound. The letters E and Y were called originally "ei" and "hy" or "y", but later changes in Greek caused AI and OI to be pronounced the same and that's why they renamed the letters "e psilon" "simple E - not AI" and "y psilon" "simple Y - not OI". For the same reason letters H, U and Ż are sometimes called in Polish "samo H", "U otwarte" and "Ż z kropką" - "only H - not CH", "open U - not Ó", "Ż with a dot - not RZ". Also, it wasn't Romans who moved Y to the back of alphabet first, it was the Greeks - the original spot was occupied by F, so Greeks put the extra letter after T, which was the last letter for the Pheonicians. That's why Latin V is also after T.
Arabic not Hebrew/cananite/phoneician/etc. Hebrew is too mumbled. (lost b for p, v and no h just kh, no s just sh) as opposed to Arabic which retained all the original consonants, infact julius caesar's Arabic pronunciation is identical to the one presented.
5:01 About that Greek letter Ε ε. Its original Ancient name was just εἶ _eî_ (/eː/ or /ei/). From my understanding, its current name ἒ ψιλόν _è psīlón_ (i.e. “simple e”) came about not because the Greeks stripped the letter from its /h/ but because in Middle Ages a need arose to distinguish it from the diphtong ΑΙ αι _ai_ which came to be pronounced as /e/. Thus: *Ε ε* (e), i.e. “simple e” vs *ΑΙ αι* (ai), i.e. “diphthong e”. As an aside, the analogous naming process was applied to the following Greek letters as well due to pronunciation changes: 1. *Υ υ* ὖ _ŷ_ (/yː/) → ὖ ψιλόν _ŷ psīlón_ (i.e. “simple y”) vs *ΟΙ οι* _oi_ (i.e. “diphthong y”), because the latter came to be pronounced as the former (/y/), 2. *Ω ω* ὦ _ô_ (/ɔː/) → ὦ μέγα _ô méga_ (i.e. “big o”) vs *Ο ο* οὖ _oû_ (/oː/ or /ou/) → ὂ μικρόν _ò mikrón_ (i.e. “small o”), because the long vowel /ɔː/ that the letter Ω ω represented became shortened to /o/ &, thus, indistinguishable from the sound that was represented by the letter Ο ο.
@@pazelpazel1926 Interesting. Also, according to the Liddell-Scott-Jones Dictionary, ψιλός _psīlós_ was an adjective that was used to describe the unaspirated voiceless stop consonants (litterae tenues) π /p/, κ /k/, & τ /t/ as opposed to the aspirated ones: φ /pʰ/, χ /kʰ/, & θ /tʰ/. It is also in the name ψιλὸν πνεῦμα _psīlòn pneûma_ (the smooth breathing, i.e. the absence of aspiration).
@@MattakiUtsuro that was my initial thought but what are the "aspired counterparts" of epsilon and ypsilon? Also ypsilon is always aspired at the beginning of the word while epsilon can be either aspired on unaspired. It's a bit confusing.
I would love a video from you about the phonetic alphabet 😊 I'm not a native English speaker and never learned/ ever been taught about phonetic alphabet. Can you imagine my confusion when I saw new words, looked up their pronunciation and the letters are utter gibberish. Almost 14 years of living in England and I still baffle and amuse the native speakers with my interpretation of words I only read and not heard (at least didn't recognise them as such) 😂 Your humour and delivery would be so fun to watch 😂
Well, I am not a native English speaker either, but I found an excellent way to look up the pronunciation of words: just type in for example "cucumber pronunciation" into the googly eyed search engine, and there you can listen to the sounds of most words, in British and in American pronunciation, and in slow version too.
''A is for ox''! BRILLIANT! I absolutely love how you present your features Rob. A very simple, humble, clear talk with personal character only supporting rather than getting in the way of the message. Very beautiful. Interestingly, it is said quite cleverly, that what is denoted by the Tower of Babylon story is that the original alphabet as we know it was semetic and at it's most classic form, in my opinion, Hebrew and it is after Babylon a schism happened in language. It is said by some Rabbis and Tzadikim that that original language was the Hebrew form of the alphabet. It's a really lovely way to view that story whether as a believer or sheer interest.
The idea of alphabetical order always puzzles me. I'd love to know the story of how the letters of the alphabet came to be arranged in their current order.
Well, the Canaanites created the alphabet because they were intrepid merchants. They needed to sort through their lists of clientele and quickly look through their inventory to see how much of a certain product they were carrying in their ships.
There were (and are) different sequences used by different cultures in different languages. For example, in Hebrew (I’m not sure about Arabic) and Phoenician, G (Gimel) came after B/V (Beit, with or without a central dot), and in Greek, Gamma also came after Alpha and Beta, as all physicists know. And Zeta comes after Epsilon, but the Romans added it to the end.
I can confirm that J and I where inseparable at that time, because in Greek, such words as "Julius" and "Japan" are carried from the Romans and are still written with a Greek I (Makes an E sound), being pronounced as "ee-ooh-lee-os" (Ιούλιος) and "ee-ah-po-ni-ah" (Ιαπωνία) Great video overall!
Very interesting video ! I'd like to add that for the letter D , the two symbols of a door an fish as shown in the video, are borrowed from the Hebrew words Delet = Door , and Dag -=Fish. The letter D in Hebrew is pronounced Dalet , similar to Delet (Door)
Rob, thank you for teaching us linguistics here on UA-cam. Every video you've made is incredibly interesting, educational, but also very entertaining. Same as with every video you've made, this one was highly enjoyable to watch. I am very happy to have found your channel and I look forward to sticking around and seeing what videos you'll produce in the future!
I think F was related to P due to the P being sounded as F. Also at 13:44 we can see the figure 8 which of course sounds like Aitch. Also H is the 8th letter of the Aphabet. So numbers also relate to the alphabet. A is 1 as in ‘A pig’ one pig B is 2 as in ‘Bi’ C is 3 (C and G same letter) 3 is a stylised old handwritten small g. D is 4 and we can see the ‘Delta’ shape in the number. 👍
Yeah, some languages do not have numbers and use letter instead with a "code word" - or both. The thai folk use numbers (copy from Indian Sanskrit) but write 1st hour, 2nd hour, 3rd hour, 4th hour for time; then start again till 24 hours (a day) is around - all with writing letters and a special code word for "early morning" (1-4), "morning" (5-8) aso. Meetings at "three morning" mean 7th hour at 24 hour clock. 🤣🙄 For not confusing Buddhist rules most Buddhist temples use 24 hour clock at talking (in European and Asia room exists 24h mechanics clocks or digital clocks). Do you see it in English and German with "a/ein" for representing "1" - one point where many foreigner struggles if they are older - kids just accept it easily. Then "too/two/zwei" for the second count "2". As kid I ask my teacher for this simple same between writing - but they not known it. These days we know that many folks count her/his own hands "1,2,3,4,many" - sure do you see the point. In Germany we talk it "Arabische Ziffern" (Arab numbers) - now we known that the Arab steal them self from India. But Sanskrit as "writing documents" came over the "Zigeuner/traveler's" on-the-landway into our European room too. For Arab or Aramaic it is crazy too - they use near same writing but different meaning. Same in German with "Millionen/Milliarden/Billionen" but English "millions/billions/trillions" so are 1/a billion not 1/eine Billion. 😉 Todays are many information are in English language and many German *educated professors* translated it wrong. 🤮
A is used to represent 1 but so is I and both are diphthongs. i is derived from the lower case e the dot above being the top circle of the e. ‘Mutation’ by scribes writing quickly. A, E and I are closely related. B is the consonant version of O. At one point B was more circular like a spiral representing a house (Beth) from which we get - bed and berth in English. Also represents 2. Also F, P, U, V, W are closely related so get used interchangeably in languages. Welsh is a great example where the same word can have different letters even if repeated in the same sentence. The alphabet probably started with only a few letters, the rest being added as languages changed and fed back to each other. i and j are a good example. Both the same letter but j being the mirror image of i in hand writing. Due to direction of writing.
I'm no expert, but I believe they are are all classed together as the Indo-European language family, and all derive from a common linguistic ancestor. This group comprises almost all of the European languages (including Russian), Iranian languages and those of the northern part of the Indian sub-continent.
@@artifax1407 The alphabet originated in the Semitic language group, then migrated to the IE languages through Greek. I believe Arabic letters evolved from these early Semitic scripts, then was adopted by Urdu speakers through Islam. Same for Persian (also IE). Devanagari is used to write Hindi, which is essentially the same language as Urdu.
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I am interested in the origin of words, letters and languages and this was illuminating, and funny in parts. I'm going to check out your recommended video now. Thank you so much! Whilst I think of it, have you done a video on the origins of punctuation marks? That would be great. Best wishes to you from Australia.
The hieroglyph for time is actually a determinative and can also be used in the Old/Middle Egyptian word 'zp' (for example 2 zp means twice, literally two times). It is not a button though, the image provided here is a bit weird, it is supposed to be a moon.
Even though the alphabet was inspired by the Egyptian hieroglyphs, their sounds/interpretations are not of the same value as in Middle Egyptian. For example the Canaanites assigned the value/sound 'M' to the wavy water sign, in original Middle Egyptian it was an 'N'. The hand sign for the 'K' was originally in standard Middle Egyptian a dj-sound like in 'jungle'.
On the topic of Canaanite-Egyptian work relations and the origin of the alphabet, I recommend the work of Ludwig D. Morenz. And looking up the Hathor-Ba'alat sphinx which looks pretty cool.
Wonderful, thank you
0x
Dyslexic, I thought you wrote "a man's poet!" 😅
It depicts the 7 day week cycle inside the metonic cycle of 19 years.
As close to the True Scriptural calendar as the calculations of man can get.
The image for time it's meant to be a moon? Or more specifically the phases of the moon? I thought that it should be the phases of the moon or the sun turning around the earth (or both) right away!!
I'm no linguist, so correct me if I'm wrong, but
The reason so many of these characters seem to flip horizontally, is, I believe, because some of those ancient languages could be written both left-to-right, and right-to-left. So instead of starting over on a new line when you get to the end of one like we do now, they would continue on the next line going the other way. And when this was done, they also wrote the characters backwards (probably so you could tell which way to read them). And the backward version of those characters just stuck.
You are absolutely correct
Yes. In ancient Greek, this phenomenon was called "boustrophedon," meaning "as the ox plows."
This comment is one reason why comment sections are so useful. Thanks! I had no idea.
Really cool
That's fascinating, thanks. but why do they all seem to flip vertically over their transition journey?
Rob's tasteful alliterations around each example are done just right, man's a poet
Rob's artful alliterations around all archetypes are assembled adroitly
@@swedneck I intended identical, if inferior, illustration.
Here's some world class alliteration for you. 😂
"Bells" Monty Python comedy skit
ua-cam.com/video/Vud0sD7X4jA/v-deo.html
Apparently good enough to get him a job as a host in the German news channel DW.
He's fantastic!
I'm French and it just clicked that Y is called 'greek i'! We spelled it igrec in school but they never taught us its 'i - grec'. The evolution of language is so fascinating, love the videos!
To us Greeks it’s ύψιλον Υ what you call igrec
same in Polish, Y is callled igrek
im not french but the realization hit me too! 9 yr old me used to wonder why it was called that
It's quite the same in Spanish, we call it "i griega", and I also just realized that we call it literally "greek i"
Funny enough in Spanish is also called igriega and it wasn't until years later where I realized why it was called that.
It’s pretty clear the Romans were very artistic. All the changes they made to the letters were to create uniformity in shape and format, so they all occupy the same space, they all have similar vertical lines, horizontal lines, and angles and curves, and most importantly, the minimum amount of strokes.
Would love to see a video about that. This one was pretty enlightening Thank you.
It make sense for an alphabet used on monuments and carved in stones. The Romans also had cursive writing, which is much more messy.
you're thinking of the creation of fonts.
Just to inform you: The so-called "Latin" Alphabet was brought to Italy by the Greeks. More specifically from Kymi, a city in the so-called "Euboea" Island (correct: Evia).
@@PlanetIscandar False, the euboean alphabet is not the latin alphabet, they are not even written in the same direction. Evolution is not the same as "greeks brought the latin alphabet"
and in any case it is the Latin alphabet that is the most widespread in the world, not the Greek one, demonstrating the powerful cultural impact of Roman civilization
One of the important things behind the C/G split (and the C/K doublet) is the path from Greek to Latin via Etruscan. Etruscan didn't have voiced stops, so both Greek kappa and Greek gamma represented the same sound. Kappa evolved to K, while Gamma evolved to C. Latin did have voiced stops, so they made the G to make the distinction again.
I don't know about Ancient Greek, but in modern Greek Gamma is unstopped at the back of the throat, different from Kappa; a bit "breathier", if you will.
@@WaterShowsProd Ancient Greek has a three-way distinction in stops: voiced, voiceless unaspirated, voiceless aspirated. The gamma was a voiced velar stop, where kappa was a voiceless unaspirated stop, and chi was a voiceless aspirate stop. It's with time that the system became a two-way fricative system with the third item becoming a voiceless stop (where gamma and chi are pairs, and kappa is now the isolate). It happened to beta/phi//pi and delta/theta//tau as well. (Modern Greek now also has reborrowed /b/ and /d/ in initial position and kept it pre-nasalised in native words).
@@peabody1976 Thank you. Interestingly I found that The Karen Language-an ethnic group which lives along the Thailand-Myanmar border-or at least The Pwo Karen, not sure about Sgaw, has a voiced velar sound, like Gamma. I noticed it listening to some people speaking in Karen.
Rob you are misleading people on this subject matter and the A is nothing what you say it is........an "A" upside-down bull....BS more like.
@@oceanwavexwhat do you mean?
I love the fact that my child (who is six and still in the process of learning to read) and I can watch your videos together - and we both learn something new.
Perfect!
I started off by introducing only capital letters to my daughter, and in the form of those magnetic plastic one's, that she played with on the refridgerator, while I was cooking meals. Then, I went on not only introducing minor letters, but also at the same time introducing the idea that how exactly you write a letter (sound), is a matter of convention, and what you personally like. (I prefer an old style "a" rather than the modern "o"-like with a straight stroke added.) I did this by adding other sets of magnetic letters, that looked different. Also since she also of course also rather quickly needed several copies of letters for spelling.
This clarifyed I think a lot about spelling and and other concepts to come. Or perhaps rather started thinking processes around conventions and successful communication. Which made it easier to later add confusing letters not really used in Swedish, like "W", "Z" and "Q", and just for fun, the German "double 'S", as it is supposed to be used in our family's sirname. (Incidentally, the name should also end with two "n's", but that doesn't make sense in Swedish, so my father's generation dropped it, but it's still on the headstone on the family grave.)
I want to stress the whole process was driven by my daughter's curiosity, and carried out as just fun, playing around. In her case, this meant she could read and write by the time she was four, but different children want to learn things in different ways and orders, and in my view, there is little point in stressing the process.
Don't teach your child to learn from youtube, because it will never learn or it will learn it wrong. Teach it how to learn. The way to learn. This is the best teaching and will train its mind at the same time.
Same !!! Mine is 5. ❤
@@nkscou9008 What does that even mean?
Nothing hits the spot quite like a new RobWords video first thing on Saturday morning. It's been exciting and rewarding to see this channel continue to grow. Keep up the great work, sir!
What did the leopard say after watching the latest Robwords video? “That hit the spot”😂😂 I’ll show myself out….😂
Rob you are misleading people on this subject matter and the A is nothing what you say it is........an "A" upside-down bull....BS more like.
ua-cam.com/video/JEecFAJVRFU/v-deo.html
Well after looking at this I really think that Indian languages are a much more advanced
as a german native speaker who learns greek and bulgarian at the same time, i have to thank you. your vid cleared the big confusion in my head! thank you!
I am a linguist and glad someone made a simple video to explain several years of my undergrad studies.
well.. that's not something you hear everyday
Perhaps you could have a go at my question, Tyler?
@@GlenCarne I am no linguist nor Tyler but what is your question Glen?
Arabic not Hebrew/caanathing. Hebrew is too mumbled. (lost b for p, v and no h just kh, no s just sh) as opposed to Arabic which retained all the original consonants, infact julius caesar's Arabic pronunciation is identical to the one presented.
@Tyler Ricci, I remember once my professor mentioned that letters were originally designed to mimic different genital postions. He said that's why certain letters in certain dialects are considered masculine or feminine, such as in Spanish. As a linguist have you ever heard of this or was he just blowing smoke up our azzes.
In addition to your artful alliteration, I really want to commend you/your editor for the brilliant letter transformation animations - it really helped conceptualise how a seemingly abstract hieroglyphic pictograph transformed into a letter
yeah that was really cool to watch
Spitting facts that was very helpful indeed
One thing I found most surprising about our alphabet was that when you look at the sequence O P Q R, the first two letters (O and P) are followed by pretty much the same two letters with "tails" (Q and R). What surprised me even more was that I didn't notice this until relatively recently!
You're so right, I never realized that! That's a kind of thing I notice when learning another alphabet but never even saw in my own language
It seems a lot of these letters were just made up through the communities cultural environment & a little imagination. Others seems like it evolve over time & their dialect. Thus the consideration expression, "English As The As The Bastard Language"
OQ PR JIL CG FE VY... DB?
@@RubelliteFae HA HA!
@@RubelliteFae NM dbpq ijy (K IC) 🤨
i love so much that this chanel exists. everytime i feel like media is killing my brain cells i come here to recover
What I find really interesting is that a lot of the changes over the years came from the tools that they were used in their writing. It would be neat to see a follow up that talks about this interesting point that if poorly shared with the world.
Yes. Roman alphabet used straight lines like "V" for U. The Romans carved letters into stone so straight lines were needed. It would be very interesting to have a video which covers this topic.
@@westzed23 That's why I thought (and was taught in school, I think) the U looked like a V in Roman writing.
However, they could have easily made a flat-based U with three straight lines (basically a rectangle with the top line missing) to distinguish it from V if such a distinction made sense to them like it does to us. So, the explanation that the Romans saw U and V as the same makes a lot more sense to me.
@@westzed23 Yet there are plenty of Cs, Ds, Gs, Os, Ps, Qs, Rs, and especially Ss, carved in stone with perfect curves. And on modern stone buildings (like American banks and courthouses), Js and Us also. The modern examples of U-to-V carving (such as BANK AND TRVST, or BANK & TRVST) are imitations of Roman carvings.
Yes there were curved letters but I think it was just quicker in ancient Rome to carve straight lines when they could. Their alphabet wasn't like the Norse runes which had no curves.
the flipping of letters left-to-right and vice versa comes from the fact that even in ancient Greek (and other languages like Egyptian hieroglyphics), it was quite acceptable to write and read left to right or right to left and this was determined case-by-case per sentence by the direction that the assymetric symbols were facing. Hieroglyphs could also read top-down, but not down-to-top.
In ancient Greek, one line in a text would be written from left to right, and the next line written from right to left, and so on repeating the pattern. This was called boustrophedon, which means "as the ox plows." The letters in one line would face in one direction, and the letters in the next line would be mirror images of those in the first line.
@@bigscarysteve I thought I had heard that happened. Wasn't sure if I remembered that correctly. Seems confusing from today's perspective. How did they write going the other direction??? I think my head hurts just from thinking about it
@@rebeccarebeccaa2515 How did they write going the other direction? When they got to the end of a line, they just moved down to the next line--without going back to the other side of the paper--and wrote in the other direction. My brother had trouble with this when he was learning to write in the first grade. Of course, if you write in boustrophedon fashion, then everybody has the problem that only left-handed people have today--namely, that you smear the ink of what you've just written as you continue to write further.
@@bigscarysteve I'm a lefty that hated the ink smear. It mostly ended up on the side of my hand. Usually happened in grade school when I was made to use erasable ink pens back in the late 80s. Thankfully most pens don't cause this problem.
@@indigobunting5041 I'm about twenty years older than you, I'd guess. Erasable ink wasn't a thing when I was in school. Luckily for me, I'm right-handed so I didn't suffer the ink smear problems, but I saw the lefties suffer as you did.
My father was a high school shop teacher in the 1950's. His classroom was set up with work benches that could only be used in a right-handed fashion. My father had a student who was left-handed, and who rightly complained that he couldn't use his work bench. My father didn't know what to do, so he told the kid to try to learn to work right-handed because "it's a right-handed world." The kid went to the principal and complained about what my father had said. The principal came back to my father and yelled at him. "You can't tell him it's a right-handed world!" For the rest of his life, my father always noticed every southpaw he came across. He'd always say to them, "I see you're left-handed. You know, it's a right-handed world."
I love the fact that you said "ink pen." I grew up literally just a couple blocks north of the line between a dialect that distinguishes "pen" from "pin" and a dialect that doesn't. The kids in my school were in two different camps: those who said "ink pen" and those who just said "pen."
What I love about how we talk about letters has so much to do with printing.
For example upper and lower case letters were literally stored in the upper and lower cases of the font, which was the storage for a specific typeface, which could be the slanty italian or italic style! And we mind the leading of the text with tabs of lead.
It’s just cool to me how much of it is carried over despite not having a lick of anything to do with physically pressing lead letters to paper.
A cliche came from the same typeset. This kind of printing was still in use in the 1970s as far as I know.
Didn't "italics" develop from the latin-script-based late medieval Italian humanist writing as opposed to the Germanic fracture blackletter?
@@robinrehlinghaus1944 yep the German fonts started as carved wood then copper.
I just stumbled upon your channel and am delighted. As a language illiterate myself, I have found your videos enlightening and entertaining. I have an entire new appreciation for language. Bravo!
The letter H is is in Dutch used for Hek, meaning fence. It’s almost the same as the Phoenician sound for fence. Fascinating. In Dutch we also have the letter IJ, or the Dutch ypsilon. Written as two letters, but used as one letter, the 25th together with the Y. The Y is used in originally foreign words and the IJ in originally Dutch words. When we learn to write in elementary school, we write the lower caption as one letter by connecting the bottom of the i with an arc to the j (a sort of u glued to the j with two dots above the i and j). It isn’t written as such anymore, because it isn’t on keyboards, it’s now the two letters i and j.
When my father was a soldier in the Second World War, he was stationed in Antwerp. He was amazed that all the typewriters there had a key for "IJ' in addition to the keys for "I" and "J" individually.
In swedish we have "häck" for hedge, which is also pronounced the same as "Hek"!
Also, it sounds like the written ij just ends up being ü? which either is a very opportune coincidence or an interesting bit of etymology.
Old English Hecg. Meaning any Fence or hedge.
@@swedneck it looks much more like a lower case y with the two dots above.
"ij" is present in Unicode as a single ligature.
IJ uppercase (When an initial capital, both are capitalized, e.g. IJsselmeer)
ij lowercase
The "IJ digraph" wiki page has fascinating info about the usage and history in Dutch, Flemish, and Afrikaans.
Alef is still used for the letter A in Arabic, and the w that turned to S in Roman is actually still very similar in the Arabic س for ‘S’ and Cyrillic ш for ‘Sh’
The Arabic letter Shein is the “sh” sound to and the Seen letter is just S
Ur right, S still has 3 upward-going lines in Arabic, Arabic alphabet came from nabatean, nabatean came from aramaic, and aramaic came from phoenician/canaanite
Cyryllic ш probably came directly from Hebrew ש
And Hebrew sh and s ש
Cyrillic is basically just derived from the Greek alphabet.
As someone who speaks Hebrew, it was really interesting to watch this video, because the words that these ancient letters where representing that led to their modern sounds are still used today. B was a house, a "bayit", D from a door or fish, "delet" or "dag." The source of WYUVF comes from a picture of an arm, or "yad." M was a picture of water, or "mayim." It's really amazing to be able to understand the logic behind where all these letters came from.
If i am not wrong, ancient egyptian "water" or "sea" had a very close spelling as "mayim"
I'm also speaking hebrow so I can tell this is what I sense too
And what's extra cool is that the Latin and Hebrew scripts have a common ancestor in the Phoenician script (which, IIRC, was also used to write Paleo-Hebrew). While the Phoenician script did evolve into the Greek script (which itself gave rise to the Latin, Runic, Irish, Gothic, Coptic, and Cyrillic scripts), it also evolved in a completely different direction within the Levant, giving rise to the Aramaic script, which itself is the common ancestor of the modern Hebrew, Arabic, Mongolian, and Syrian scripts, as well as a bunch of Indian scripts
@@skibidipop Also in Russian and Slavic languages in general "morye" , means a large body of water which in modern Russian refers to a sea (and I think in Spanish and Portugese too), And I suppose that in English you have the word "marine" which probably had the same origin.
A: Sınır demektir
B: Güvenlik demektir
C: Ekleme - eklenme
E: Uygun olan
D: Ölçü demektir.
.......
M: fayda demektir
Arapça, Türkçe, öyle sanıyorum ki ibranice de buna dahildir, ingilizce hepsinin kökeninde bu yazdığım evrensel dil temel mantığı vardır. Daha ayrıntı isteyen varsa yazsın verelim.
Thank you so much for all of your videos. Our 5 year old loves your channel! He has always been fascinated with the alphabet and reading and making words in general. Needless to say our driveway is covered in much of your teaching!
We had a print shop in the school I went to, and the trays that held the uppercase letters were in alphabetical order, except J and U which were at the end. This was a holdover from when J and U weren't yet in the alphabet. That the sorting survived to this day always fascinated me! (The lowercase letters were not sorted alphabetically, probably more in line with their frequency of use).
As a former printer ❤
I'm a history buff and I never realized the long and storied history behind 26 simple shapes that have helped create and shape the world around me. FASCINATING DOCUMENTARY! THANKS FOR MAKING IT!
Thank you. I'm an English teacher in Japan and I think this video will be interesting to some of my high school students. Kanji is obviously still ideo/pictogramatic and may as well be bloody hieroglyphs, but hiragana and katakana have come from similar transformations that our alphabet underwent. I'm not saying it will help them learn the language, it won't, but at their level, it's just some interesting facts.
True! I'm here in China at a uni and also did the same. The students found it extremely interesting, plus you know Chinese language also uses Pinyin, which is the latin letter transcription of Hanzi 汉字. It's really intriguing to see all these connections nearly everywhere.
Yes, definitely present this to your students. They will (most of them) find it interesting and useful.
I disagree about kanji- as you know the kana are derived from cursive kanji. The kanji themselves have these stories often. Thanks for the video. Super informative and I never knew past aleph
I just realised that hiragana came from cursive kanji lol.
Having watched this I can now see why some of the letters of the semitic language Amharic (= main Ethiopian language) look like they do. Very informative episode!
some Chinese similarities 7:03 door 門 11:53 hand手 14:15 lush/plentiful 丰 three三 Could be coincidence, but with all the recent discoveries around humanity's history being lost around cataclysmic events, i would bet there was a pictographic language that spread to those ancient peoples
13:34 sun 日
I certainly don't buy into Graham Hancock's or any of his fellow travelers' 'Catastrophism' nonsense, but there is a TED talk by a lady who talked about Ice Age symbols showing remarkable similarities over very large distances, basically across Eurasia and North Africa, at least, possibly hinting at long-distance trade and also a possible common starting point for all Old World writing systems.
Having the same/similar symbol for "hand" or numbers is no wonderful. Every human has hands, and count small numbers almost the same way (usually with fingers, in a decimal system). This can be applied to more abstract ideas to a lesser degree (e.g. lush/plentiful can be paired with a tree full of fruit)
No need for complex theories of lost (even alien) civilizations and whatnot, apply Occam's razor.
@@thealmightyaku-4153 It could also point to the near-extinction of the homo species, when the ice age pushed humanity to the brink and left only a few 10s of thousands of our ancestors, though I guess that supports the common starting point theory. You know what's really remarkable? Cat's Cradle string play exists almost everywhere humans have settled. What is it about Cat's Cradle that makes it so ubiquitous across almost all cultures?
In the language of the 𐱅𐰇𐰼𐰰 people
𐰕𐰰 > Öküz = Ox
𐰀𐰞𐰯-𐰼 > Alp Er= ox-headed man (warrior)
Alper Tunga > Afrasiab > Frāsiyāv
𐰌 > Eb > ev = Home
𐱃 > At = Horse
𐱅 > Et = Meat
𐰼 >Er = Male /soldier
𐰠 >El = Hand
𐰴 >Keyik = Deer
𐰖 >Ay = Moon
Fascinating! When I studied linguistics I learned stone carvers would work from right to left so they could better judge the spacing of the letters since the left hand held the chisel and covered the text. Scribes using ink would work left to right using the right hand so the ink would not smear. That may explain some of the verticle transposition in letters. Very few poeple could read at this time and since so many "letters" were just symbols of everyday objects (gate, ox goad, ox, house, etc) which had no left right orientation anyway.
In arabic the first word in the alphabet is still called Aleph and the second Ba, The name for house is also "Bet". I think because it is also a semitic language.
As an American who’s been studying Chinese I found this fascinating to see how the characters of the Roman alphabet changed from their original forms just as Chinese characters have evolved. Great video thanks
And also that the window that became our H is so like their ri symbol for sun (which you'd see through a window)... Which struck me particularly because when learning (introductory) Chinese the links to pictures was central to memorising, even though there are so many uses where the meaning eventually has nothing to do with that origin - maybe just suggesting the sound.
I had never considered my own letters in the same way.
Funny that I remember kinder level teaching of our letters as "bat and ball" for "b" or "drum and drumstick" for "d" - I'm sure children around the world have been taught various pictorial mnemonics for our letters.... Maybe they could just stick with the real ones though it does seem A is for Ox is a harder sell.
Japanese kanji is also pretty interesting, with some Chinese characters still used today that China has since revised, and vice-versa with lots of Chinese characters that Japanese revised. Then there are the hiragana and katakana syllabaries based on kanji.
Europe had its own indigenous writing system from the Minoans, but it's such a shame they had to adopt from the Afro-Asiatics due to the Late Bronze Age collapse.
@@GL-iv4rw What did it look like? Any links?
@@alukuhito Linear B
As a graphic designer, I love type, letters, symbols, and their origins. This was fun to watch and now I need to go and buy a book.
Thanks for this. Loved it.
ua-cam.com/video/JEecFAJVRFU/v-deo.html
This brings me back to elementary school days when I was still getting more familiar with English, I ran into calligraphy books which is next to a bunch of language learning books. I didn't really read it just skimming enough to understand what it as about. It was interesting to see how some of the letters and characters are all so similar yet pronounced and used differently for each language.
i can say in all honesty if i had u as my English teacher way back in the dark ages i may have taken a lot more notice and interest, rather than the dull, dry and boring lessons i remember u bring things to life with stories and colour in subjects that are usually a drab grey, cheers for all the time and effort u put into these its much appreciated
Back around 1960 or so, I learned the Phoenician alphabet from the encyclopedia in order to write in a diary I had that wouldn't lock. I also taught the alphabet to some of my friends at school for note writing that couldn't be deciphered by teachers. Some of my friends ended up getting detentions for it, but they said they were well worth it. Years later, I went to Israel and learned Hebrew. By then, it was easy.
i read this wrong and thought you were saying some really goofy shit
but yeah that's definitely some mischief
why would you need a lock on your diary
@@VectorJW9260 Rather obvious: So that other people (usually gossipy females in the house / dormitory) do not read the writer's thoughts / secrets / ideas / dreams.
I did the same in high school, but with the runic/futhark alphabet with my best friend. :')
The Phoenician, Canaanite and ancient Hebrew alphabets were pretty much identical.
The descendants of the ancient Israelites('Samaritans' in English)from the northern kingdom of Israel who never left the land but became a tiny minority after the Byzantine Empire killed off many of them and they became a minority by the time the Arab Islamic conquest but till this day the Samaritans still use the ancient Hebrew alphabet for their own religious and cultural studies and literature.
They are the last living population to use the oldest alphabet in the world.
I would have never thought I would say something like this, but I was absolutely enthralled learning the history of Roman letters - exclusively due to your witty side notes and thoroughly-informed knowledge base.
First time seeing your channel. I am very impressed. Keep up the great work sir. Cheers from the other side of the pond!
He's so cute...makes it easy to tune in and pay attention lol
Regarding Zee/Zed. I'm an American, but I'd argue for Zed! Here's why...
I used to work in graphic design and database publishing. Sometimes the programmer would have to walk me through some procedure using DOS commands whenever he updated the process. He spoke English, but had an accent. (He was from an island in Finland where they only speak Swedish.) When he said Control-Z, it sounded just like Control-C. Those commands did VERY different things!
Just say Zulu
@ ... OH MY!
@ Precisely why the phonetic alphabet was invented, but we can't all agree on that one either, and it has changed considerably over the years.
@@greebo7857 You mean IPA ?
There is of course no right or wrong way for a culture to pronounce their letters, but I have to defend the use of "zee" in American English.
"Zee" follows the custom for several letters who's names mimic the sound that they make and ending with an "ee" sound: bee, cee, dee, eee, gee, pee, tee, vee. "Zed" on the other hand, isn't consistent with any other letter name in the English speaking alphabet.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with calling it zed. Just as double-u is unique, zed doesn't _have_ to fit any pattern. And if we are concerned about being misunderstood in speech then we are going to have to change a lot more than just the "Z."
In Spanish we kept the name for “Zete” pretty much unchanged as “Zeta”, also Y was called “I griega” (Greek “I”) but now is “Ye” since people started unnecessarily calling I “I Latina” (Latin “I”) so just to end the confusion we went with I (ee) and Y (yeh). Another odd decision was to eliminate “Ll” called “elle” from our alphabet since it’s a digraph for L but makes the same sound as “Y” but since no one spells a word with double L’s as “Ele, ele” now they say “doble L” (double “L”) instead making it more contrived than just saying “elle” in the first place. The digraph Rr (called Erre) for the rolled R sound also got removed but now people are always confused on wether a word is spelled with one or two R’s since we got rid of the Rr (erre) digraph but gave it’s name to the letter R (formerly known as “ere”). V and B are both called “beh” but people would distinguish them as “v de Vaca” or “b de Burro” (“bee” as in cow vs “bee” as in donkey) while others call them “bee” and “u bee” or “b grande o v chica” (tall B vs short V). W suffers from the same thing is called either “doble u” or “double v” and people get really heated on which name is the right one. Q’s official name is “coo” but since it’s used in short hand and texting for the word “que” younger generations now refer to the letter as “keh” instead.
The words for the early alphabet, ox house, hook, water snake, etc, are still the same in Hebrew, the words star, still today with the corresponding letters - water is maiym, head is rosh etc
Oy vey, I was about to say that. Bayit is house ב. Gamal is camel ג. Rob also mentioned that D might’ve been fish, or dag ד. Coincidence? My Israeli father mentioned that kaf כ looks like a hand. Ayin is eye ע. Qof is monkey, ape ק.
תודה רבה!
Except for the word he said was the source for the letter Het...
Where did he get that it meant "fence"!?
Yeah, where do you write it, in Thai they use exact this things (but hedge is hen) as visual symbols to learn the first letter for the alphabet. Thai have 44 consonants and around 10 vocals (many used for loan words). Interesting details.
@@adrianblake8876 they got it from the Netherlandish word hek, or fence. Just kidding, dunno whether that is a coincidence or not.
Zionist Hebrew is a reinvented language, which means that it is based on what we know today and not necessarily how it was in the past. The Israelite ("Samaritan") Hebrew is different.
I had a friend whose last name was Linda. She said her ancestors came to America from Germany and their name was Zinde. But the way they wrote their z’s looked more like L’s to Americans so their
name got changed (likely by census takers) to Linda.
It happened quite a lot with the first settlers in America, as well as displaced people (e.g. Jews fleeing Europe in the 20th century). When people were "processed" at the borders, or in censuses, their names were written by hand on long lists. Due to unclear writing, or poor recognition skills, the names ended up getting mangled on official documents, leading people's names being officially changed by accident. (It even happens on birth certificates sometimes. I've come across people whose official name is spelled wrong because of an error by a parent, or a typo by a registrar.)
Linda means cute
Linda means “pretty” or “cute” in Spanish, but not in German. The name her ancestors came to the US was “Zinde”. It hot changed to “Linda” by Americans who thought the Z was an L.
It's been historically proven that names were not changes at the census, but rather by immigrants due to pressure to adapt to American culture and nomenclature
@@barbm9580 it also means "pretty" or "beautiful" in portuguese, I wonder if the origins of the word and the name are related
In Latin, the K went before A: kalendas, kardo, Kartago, etc. most of these got replaced with C later on. Q was used before U only when the U was followed by a vowel: aqua, equester, loqui, quorum, antiquus, etc.
In older inscriptions (i.e. during the Republican period) the letter Q was used before all instances of U/V, e.g. the word for ‘money’ was commonly written as PEQVNIA, but by the Imperial period the rule you mention came into effect and so this began to be spelled PECVNIA
In the version of Latin I learned at school there was no K, the Latin alphabet had only 24 characters, I was taught (obviously the language evolved and changed throughout its lifetime). I'm not sure which one the other unused letter was, I think W.
The Q-before-U rule is the reason I don't understand why we have Q at all. It's completely redundant in all languages I learned that have it, German, Latin and English.
EDIT: coming to think of it, Z is also redundant in German, it could be perfectly replaced by TS in every instance...
@@LRM12o8 That was the same standard I was exposed to in High School and College, and it’s a standardization that developed in 1800’s Britain, not ancient Rome. Unfortunately the way that Latin is commonly taught often leaves students woefully unprepared to read ancient inscriptions, although part of the issue is due to the fact that ancient inscriptions tend to make heavy use of abbreviations, which requires the reader to have a very thorough knowledge of Latin in order to fill in those gaps.
I was gonna say the same thing. I remember kalebdas for calendar and it being ka ce/ci and qu/qo but it all evolved into c or qu plus a vowel
The queer quiet queen quickly queried and quartered the quota of quinces and quarrelled with the quartermaster about the questionable quality and quantity of kumquats and quail from Quebec.And quipped if I had a quid for every Q I’d be quids in then quit.
Original X is symbol for Thee Temple ov Psychick Youth called The Psychick Cross. I’m really blown away 4:09 wowwwwww
Rob never disappoints 🖤🏆⚡️
Just to add, P and Rho were written quite the same, as the sound /p/ in Greek was given by the letter Π pi, so Romans decided that the sound for trilled or alveolar tap /r/ should be a P with another leg: R. Another story: labiodental /f/ was a quite uncommon sound, Greek had bilabial letter phi, and i can't recall any Etruscan word with this phoneme until the emerging of the Roman Republic. Firstly, for /f/ Etruscans spelled with an H, since their letter F sounded like /w/ from Phoenician waw / Greek upsilon. So, The ancient city of felsna was pronounced uelsina, but written felsna/velsina. Neo Etruscan alphabet brought a letter shaped like an 8 for this F sound spoken by their neighbors. While U was already doing its job in Latin, no need to differ F with a digraph FH, and then this is how F emerged in latin from Y.
The Etruscan alphabet came from the Cumean alphabet, which was a western variant of Greek alphabet before it standardized using the Ionic (eastern) variant, and many letters looks more similar to the current Latin alphabet ones rather than standard Greek ones. The letter rho actually had another leg in that variant like the latin R if you look closely at older inscriptions.
chicken pho
Greek had an F, waw, also called digamma (as in ‘double gamma’, one transposed over the other) and was used in words like boFos, ‘ox’. When no longer used, it was spelled ‘bous’, using the upsilon form of the letter. In the generic case, ‘boos’… was pronounced as if the F was still there: bowos.
No, R is an ancient Greek letter and was used for Rho in different Greek languages/dialects.
@@setheisenberg7150the name digamma shows actually that the Greeks who used it sometimes had forgotten the name and thought of it as looking like two gammas. And now you know why Y is called -psilon. Because it's the retracted version of F digamma, and Y was once closer to German ü than u or w.
This was AMAZING!! Seriously, Rob, I will watch this at least half a dozen more times to actually take in all of the facts and trivia that you just, almost literally, blew my mind with. Being both *very* intellectual and *highly* visual, this relatively tiny video is worth hours of contemplation. I wish I could hit the like button at least 26 times.
Ok we get it. 😂😂
Blow it some more by finding: Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
I'm so glad I ran across your channel a few months ago. Been catching up on some of the older material. I love linguistics channels and think yours is one of the best around. Thanks for doing what you do!
As an Hebrew speaker it's cool to see how sound of word remained in the letter, for example the letter R that come from head is making sense to me because the Hebrew word for head is "ROSH" which starts with the letter R .Also the letter M that came from water, and water in Hebrew is "MAYIM" yet again starts with the letter M. BTW the letters ALEF and BET are also the first 2 letters in Hebrew.
And in Hebrew Ba-eet is a house while bet is the letter. In the bible, the word Aleph and Alaphim many times mean ox and oxes. O which comes from Ain is the Hebrew word for Eye and also happens to be an hieroglyph of an Eye.
The hebrew didn't invent anything, they just took the existing Phoenician alphabet. ALEPH doesn't mean OX even though the symbol is a ox HEAD, it means all Pet animals, the ox was the king of pet animals because it was the most helpful for its agricultural work. And 3Ayn means originally SOURCE symbolized by an Eye in the egyptian hieroglyphs, 3Ayn is a source of water and a source of light (EYE).
@@Malik_Sylvus aleph doesn't mean ox, but aluph dose. Aluph in hebrew is a champion but in ancient hebrew it means the head of an ox, ancient hebrew is derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs, as Phoenician is. Phoenician is a Greek name, at the time the language was not called Phoenician, and both languages ancient hebrew and proto-hebrew (Phoenician) was rather similar
@@-Belshazzar- old hebrew is a creolic language made of different semetic egyptian and greek idioms, just like nowadays hebrew is a creolic language made of Arabic dialects and several others languages, so if you want to be accurate don't try to find the real meanning of a semetic word by referring to Hebrew. By the way tons of semetic words used in hebrew language are given false meannings.
@@Malik_Sylvus no, ancient hebrew was spoken before the Greek ever got to the area. ancient hebrew letters, (because we are talking about letters, the spoken language was different obviously) were mostly derived from Egyptian hieroglyphs and proto-hebrew (Phoenician) Greek came to the area later. The Greek took the Ancient Hebrew letters and maybe some Phoenician not the other way around. Ancient hebrew was chisled on stone and since most people are right handed it was chisled from right to left. The greek used paper and ink, and so when they took the hebrew alphabet they wrote it from left to write because otherwise the hand would smear the ink, you can see many Greek letters are actually ancient hebrew letters only flipped. Arabic is a semit language that was developed from hebrew and Aramaic, modern day hebrew uses hebrew and Arabic but the Arabic itself originated from hebrew. I as a hebrew speaker can read Aramaic and understand some (my grandfather was fluent in Aramaic) Arabic people can't read a word in aramic
Love this video. I teach Spanish and so much I see in pronunciation of their alphabet letters. Fun to see how things moved from one culture/language to subsequent ones, who in turn adopted and morphed the letters.
Thank you so much, Rob. I have only praise for this video. I come from Cyprus, and ever since I was a kid we were constantly told "the Greeks invented everything" and yet there is archeological evidence that shows there was civilizations with languages of their own dating back to the Canaanites and the Phoenicians before the Greeks set foot on the island. Again, good work, Rob. 👏👏👏👏👏👏
The Phoenicians were Canaanites also known as Philistines. The Greeks called them Phoenicians after the Phoenix or Chinese Golden Partridge. As they became a world wide seafaring nation other races joined them like the Hittites and they became quite an ethnic mix.
The Carthaginian Royalty boasted their Philistine ethnic connection.
i haven't heard anyone say that the Greeks invented everything (im greek). But we do take pride for how much we have contributed to the world.
The fact that the Greek alphabet is derived from the Phoenician alphabet is no secret and is taught in schools and most people who know some history know this.
Though its not like Greeks did not contribute anything to the alphabet. They made changes and improvements, and then the Etruscans adopted it and thats where Latin started. So Latin was based on the upgraded Greek "version" of the alphabet and not the Phoenician. For example, the phoenician alphabet did not have lowercase letters. The Greeks invented them.
Greeks have not invented everything, but they have created and contributed so many many things
@@dieselgeezer18 - if it wasn't for the Greeks most of the ancient knowledge would probably have vanished. Alexander's library was a repository for knowledge of plants, chemistry, mathematics, geography, and physics. The Bible says " the Greeks gave us Logic.
In which case no logic or Boolean algebra = NO MODERN COMPUTERS
I'm glad to hear you pronounce the H as eych, not as heych. To me, as a speaker of Italian and French, the modern prepend of the h sound feels like the trampling down of etymology.
i’m a spanish speaker and it was this video that made me make the connection of y being “greek i” literally blew my mind
Quentin, Portugal, just next door to Spain, calls “y” to “ipsilom”.
Me too! I have always wondered why. I can't wait to tell everyone it's a Greek i (hey I don't get out much lol)
Every one of those letters except for X has relatives in modern Semitic, some are used in Arabic or Hebrew in a very similar way to how it was used in ancient dialects. The letters U, V and W are represented with the same letter in Hebrew, also in Arabic although it doesn't have the sound of V at all, some native Arabic speakers tend to pronounce it like F which might explain something. also the letter Q looks about the same in modern Semitic as in ancient dialects, in Arabic and Yemenite Hebrew it's easy to notice the difference between Quf and Kaf.
I'm hoping to watch more videos on the subject, especially if you can make the same review on Russian alphabet. Thank you very much.
Actually x is based on the letter that became the Hebrew Samech. ס
love this comment, i was noticing the same things too
X is kind of an oddball letter in the languages I'm familiar with, English being primary. In most cases in North AM English it's spoken as KS. I know there must be a story on the internet about why that is, but I haven't taken the time to hunt it down.
Xavier in spanich is Ha-bi-er, and in RP it's ZAY-vyer. But I hate, absolutely hate when my countrymen call Xavier, "ex-AY-vyer." "Where did you go to Uni? " "Francis ex-AY-vyer."
Fun fact: the first letter of the Arabic alphabet is "أ" which is pronounced as "Aleph" , and it's a direct equivalent to the letter A when paired with other letters to make a word
And in Hebrew it's 'Eleph'.
@@frogsnack7072 sorry but it's the same: aleph
@@salvia506 I've seen it spelled with an 'E'. Same pronunciation, I bet.
El is the God Saturn that many worship to this day
Another fun fact, the letter "s" in Arabic is similar to the number 3 in Arabic.
Why is the alphabet arranged A though Z?
It's easier to use alphabetical order....
😂no not to make it easy ots to fool us
As someone who speaks both English and Hebrew, it's interesting to see the transition. Most of the symbol make sense to me because the word in Hebrew is still the same.
After all, many words in Hebrew didn't really change since ancient times.
The head in "R" for example, probably refers to the word "Rosh" which is.... well... head in hebrew. Same for the D in "Dag" (fish) and many others.
Search for a channel called Original Hebrew 🤓😉
I think d in Hebrew is for door, delet sounds a lot like daled
So do that go the same way if you have a letter 💌 R in your name 📛 Rosh right and so on I have the Hebrew alphabet 🔤 written down
England was invaded by so many different folk (Saxons, Picts, Vandals, Vikings, Normans etc) that its weird it retained any from its Celtic roots (afaik that's the most ancient part there), not to mention the conscious (forced) changes the language had.
On the other hand, people native in Hebrew (=jews) did a great effort to preserve the language as part of the cultural identity.
Not true , alpha beta ….. is arabic like any other words you can not understand , exempt history, logo .
5:38 In Hebrew, the letter that makes the "R" sound is called "Reish", which derives from the word "Rosh" meaning head. My correct prediction was therefore not unexpected. And at 6:42, that letter looks like the Hebrew "Shin", which makes the "S/Sh" sound. Besides A and B, the English letters D, I/J, and M, correspond to the Hebrew letters "Dalet", "Yud", and "Mem", which come from the words Delet (door), Yad (hand), and Mayim (water). It's really amazing to see traces of older languages especially ones that I can speak or have knowledge about in the English language / Latin alphabet!
I wholeheartedly believe the Hebrews of old gave us our modern writing systems and took cues from the Egyptians hieroglyphics because they had just escaped slavery from them just as the Bible says.
@@UncleUncleRj you are not mistaken. Hebrew is a Canaanite language, so everything discussed in this video derived from the ancient Hebrew/Phoenician alphabet.
@ravinmarokef That's because Hebrew is the language of the letters that can be referred to as Phoenician or ancient Hebrew (or ancient Aramaic, etc). Literally, every letter's make you heard as Phoenician is the Hebrew name of the letter. The thing about D possibly coming from door or fish? Definitely door, as Dalet is literally coming from delet, Hebrew for door.
I'm learning a bit of Arabic and I spotted some similarities as well. My initial impression is Semitic languages stuck more closely to older versions of the characters whereas the European languages needed to adapt them more.
@@matan4ilit's way more complicated than that. Hebrew is a Canaanite dialect related to but distinct from Phoenician. Other Canaanite dialects in early inscriptions used a clear fish with fins for the D sound. Aramaic is somewhat mutually intelligible but an entirely different language spoken by a different culture, the Aramaeans and Chaldeans (founders of the Neo-Babylonian empire after migrating from Syria to southern Mesopotamia). Hebrew did not give us writing, Egyptian did via Phoenician and other early Canaanite dialects of polytheistic peoples in Sinai and the Levant.
A content writer who is currently learning Old English here.. Just want to say that I would like to give a round of applause for your script writer! The presentation of the content is just fascinating!
Former English major here, and I'm very much enjoying this channel. I can feel my brain waves getting perked in all kinds of directions. 😊
The ox morphing into a mark for the a sound like in call and so on makes total sense, so I'm not surprised that it worked out like this. The R coming from a head isnt that odd, either, with the top curved area being the head and the straight line & angled line being indicators for the torso. But some of these are pretty fascinating, for sure! Thanks for all you do - here's a well-deserved like and comment for the care & feeding of the Almighty Algorithm! ❤❤
Rob, you always amaze me with your research and explanations. Are you a professor ? You should be if not. You are a great teacher. You are where you're supposed to be. Great work, as always!
Your love of languages shines through, always learn something fascinating on this channel.
in German, a lot of old heads write an I like a J in handwriting when it comes at the beginning of a sentence. Like "Jsland" .. always wondered why that is
love this. The F in the Welsh alphabet is sounded as a v , and y and w are vowels along with u, so being related makes sense
Are you the same Helen who Ali G featured on his show, when he visited Wales?
@@carultch nope, just another helen - lots of us in my peer group
Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
I love this channel! I studied linguistics but so rarely get the chance anymore to talk about these things with other language nerds! My language students are definitely not as excited about the alphabet and linguistics as I am
Not mentioned here is the reason why letters keep getting reversed and rotated. When right-left reading order languages were appropriated by cultures who preferred left-right, it was easier to reverse the character with the direction than it was to keep the character. So from Egyptian (RL) to Greek (LR) to Etruscan (RL) to Roman (LR) we basically have a story of each culture reversing and simplifying the characters.
Thank you, that is most insightful!
You are absolutely brilliant. Then you add the excellent graphics, your amazing and entertaining delivery, the unique and fascinating subject,the well-done editing, and your channel is certainly unmatched. Thank you!! Also, your accent is very appealing❤
Fascinating video, Rob. I can’t believe I taught French for years and never wondered about igrec! ☺️ The lost letters video is my favourite too.
I think it is interesting how some letters that came from Ancient Egypt, not only mutated in shape, but also changed sounds. For example: the B from Egyptian reed hut has more of a modern "h" sound. The wavy line of M, is almost exactly the Egyptian shape, but theirs usually had 4 peaks and had the sound of our modern letter "n". There are several others.
Because the Canaanites didn't care for Egyptian sounds. They had their own language with their own sounds. The point was just to use a system of symbols to represent it in writing.
This is now one of my favorite videos on UA-cam. Thank you for your work and humor! 😊
11:22 That “Oui, Si.” Is a genius joke
Ikr, I just clocked it then decided to check the comment section 😂
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a German, and a Spaniard were all watching a street performer. The street performer asks his audience if everyone can see well enough. To which they reply:
Yes
Oui
Si
Ja
This whole clip sounds like bullshit
What a great teacher. Thankyou for this .
Very interesting as always... it is very nice to see the actual similarity between letters which are entirely different nowadays. Some of these letters have the same names in modern Hebrew by the way... A is still 'Alef' and B is 'Beyt', which is very similar to the word 'Ba'it' that means home. We kept the G sound in the third letter and most of the order is practically the same. But the shapes took a very different turn and bare almost no similarities.... some looks identical to Cananites letters... with similar pronunciations
Zee/zed is like aks/ask both are historically correct pronunciations it just depends on what neighborhood you were raised in. Language is a fascinating dynamic thing. Anyone that thinks it's static is a fool.
For R, the Hebrew equivalent ‘rosh’ (ר) spelled out in Hebrew means head. The language is pictographic which is pretty neat
This was my absolute favorite episode yet. Whenever I see that little red notification icon for your videos it becomes something of a mini celebration in my mind. Keep up the astoundingly great work, Mr Rob
Edit- I wonder if Veritasium knows he should pronounce his channel name as ‘Weritasium’…? 🤔
About the last part, I got some fun info for you.
There are two latin pronunciations today. One called Classical, and one called Ecclesiastical. Ecclesiastical is basically reading Latin as if it was medieval Italian, and is the official of the Catholic Church. The most widely used pronunciation by far as you may guess, is that one. Most Latin learners and speakers use that one and songs are sung and Vatican comms are written with it everyday.
So Veritasium with the labiodental is also kind of correct, even if the old Romans wouldn't have pronounced it that way...
@@crusaderACR that's really interesting, especially since my teachers used to give me texts with u and not v and i and not j (or the other way round)! We were also taught to pronounce v as u and j and i!
@@camillechauve1352 Then your teachers preferred Classical pronunciation.
Except Classical has more differences than that. And that the U shouldn't have been used at all.
Main one is the so called long and short vowels. 5 short and 5 long, for each written vowel. In texts you will often not see them marked differently (if it does it looks like this: Veritāsium) which is endlessly confusing, and makes Ecclesiastical MUCH simpler. Ecclesiastical, like Italian and most other major Romanic languages, has only short 5 vowels, the long versions being dead.
Like this: Gāius Ivlivs Caesar vs. Gaius Julius Caesar.
Pronunciation-wise, Caesar in Classical is pronounced Kaisar, and in Ecc it's Chesar (ch like in cheese)
Hmm maybe your teacher writes it with U to make sure you don't mistake the pronunciation? Because both the U and the J are medieval inventions.
@Alonso B In the world of choral music, we study [at least] two variants of Latin's pronunciations: Italian style and German style. We use one or the other depending on who the composer was, or whe they were living when the music was composed, or what period/style the piece belongs to... sometimes the choice is rather subjective, to be honest.
Great stuff Rob as always. Love your videos. I've been speaking English, as a native, for 70 years and I'm still learning. 😃
greeting from Egypt, wonderful effort .. well done .
Des explications claires pour un sujet vraiment étonnant. Thank you.
Great video, I really liked how I never noticed that "Y" is "i grec", I'm a french speaker and never would have made the connection!
Spanish used to be i-griega (same thing), but literally towards the end of last year decided to change it to Ye lol
@@epuerta5967 That was the hardest letter to learn in the Spanish Alphabet, and probably exacerbated by the fact that it was at the end and we didn't have nearly as much practice with it. If only our teacher told us that "ee ga dee egg a" was spelled "ygriega" and meant "Greek i", it would've been a lot easier to remember its name and know why it has such a complicated name compared to all the other letters.
@@carultch I see why that would be the case lol (I've known most teachers to just present rather than instruct and thereby turn people off certain subjects). Having come from Spanish background in a English/French country, the French helped essentially take the concept for granted (I didn't realize until much later that the "grec/griega" meant "Greek" lol). Well, at least it's Ye now, as it should be (or at least similar- not sure if Ye does it justice)
@@epuerta5967 I'm guessing she probably didn't know herself, about the etymology of ygriega, and had bigger tasks to complete when teaching the class to us.
Hi Rob
First, thank you for referring to them as HIEROGLYPHS and not "hieroglyphics"!! Second, I think you and I are kindred spirits. Growing up, we had a set of World Book Encyclopedias. I used to spend hours looking through them. I memorized the characters behind each letter and would write in my diary using Egyptian, Semitic, and Phonecian characters. It was fun having this language that noone else understood.
I've always been fascinated with the origins of our alphabets ever since, as a student, I read Robert Graves' "The White Goddess". It seems clear that the Greeks took their iota from the Canaanite and Phoenician yod (י) which was pronounced like "yah", "yoh", or "yoo" depending on the vowel markings underneath the consonant. In ancient Greek the iota looked like an apostrophe. In Canaanite and Phoenician there is a letter "shin" (ש) the Greeks skipped over but when the Russian monks took their Cyrillic alphabet from the Greek alphabet, the Russians added the shin (ш) pronouncing it as "sh..." just like in Hebrew, Phoenician, and Canaanite. I enjoy your videos!
One of your most enjoyable videos! So many details and stories but also really light hearted 😄Do please cover the lower case letters, or even other scripts! (Arabic, Hebrew, Syriac maybe?)
Thank you for the hours you must spend crafting a script that sounds so conversational, but is thoroughly delightful. “P: A vaguely bendy line that gained confidence over time”….Love it!
Another reason why alphabets with a limited number of symbols became so popular was that it was easier to learn to read, which was really handy if you're a traveling merchant. Cuneiform writing was immensely popular for so long because you could use it to write in any language, if it was still around, you could easily use it for either English or Chinese. But it was a pain to learn and keep accurate which was not so fun for merchants making out bills of sale in the hopes of getting paid properly. But with written language that only had 26 or 30 symbols, you could be a lot more accurate about how much was being transported and how much you expected to get paid.
I've been told that there are as many as 19 separate languages in China but that they all use the same characters in their written languages. So two people from different Chinese cultures may not understand each other verbally, but they can read each other's writing. I think that's cool!
I am Egyptian ,yes from Egypt 🇪🇬where it all begins 😸..Great video but I would like to point out something about the letter M ,water is called in Arabic مياه Meiah and in Egyptian baby talk مو مو Mo Mo ,still used till today when we talk to babies to refer to water .
Speaking of Egypt and Egyptian dialect Arabs and Egyptians call Egypt 'Mother of the World ' أم الدنيا , because every thing begins here ❤🙏🇪🇬
Ancient Egyptian and Arabic are two different languages.
Foolish talk. Arabs invaded Kemet in the 7th Century. What do you or they have to do with the African culture of Kemet?
When I was in high school, I researched the same subject myself from encyclopedias for a long time. I took notes, tried to find out where each letter came from and why it was written like that. Of course, there was no youtube back then 😁
See: Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
Wow!🤩
I didn't think we humans knew how the letters came to be. To watch this and finally learn after living on this rock for over 40 years that Egyptians used symbols to represent sounds to instruct foreign workers is just fantastic
I'm so glad i picked this video to watch,. thank you Rob!
Your name is so contradictory lol
The two F sounds is actually very common and can be found for almost every sound in the IPA (international phonetic alphabet). Examples of this are D and T, P and B, and S and Z. Each pair of sounds is made the exact way with the only difference being one is voiced and one isn't voiced. You can actually feel the difference with the S and Z example. If you put your hand over your throat like you would if you were choking yourself, of course don't choke yourself. Just place your have there and make a continuous s sound and then a continuous z sound. You should notice that your mouth is doing the same thing in both instances but when you make the z sound you should feel your throat vibrating. And that's the only difference in each of those pairs of sounds.
I love that Japanese takes a voiceless character and adds 〃 to the end to show that it's voiced
What you feel when saying "z" is the vibration of the glottal folds. It's also really easy to hear the vibration in your voice when comparing "f" to "v" or "s" to "z".
I started thinking about this after learning to mix and produce music. If you cut too much low frequencies out of a vocal track, G's will start to sound like C's, etc.
I LOVE your enthusiasm and joy you have for language! It is SO wholesome to watch your videos seeing your excitement! Thank you so much!
And I didn't even know, that Part of my Internet Name was once a letter ❤🤩
I’m an language enthusiast, been interested in languages for years; and I’ve never known why the letter Q is used.
I knew there was a reason.
And I’ve been asked so many times why the letter Q exists, and now thanks to this very interesting and informative video - I can tell them.
As for epsilon, the name is not because it lost it's /h/ sound. The letters E and Y were called originally "ei" and "hy" or "y", but later changes in Greek caused AI and OI to be pronounced the same and that's why they renamed the letters "e psilon" "simple E - not AI" and "y psilon" "simple Y - not OI". For the same reason letters H, U and Ż are sometimes called in Polish "samo H", "U otwarte" and "Ż z kropką" - "only H - not CH", "open U - not Ó", "Ż with a dot - not RZ".
Also, it wasn't Romans who moved Y to the back of alphabet first, it was the Greeks - the original spot was occupied by F, so Greeks put the extra letter after T, which was the last letter for the Pheonicians. That's why Latin V is also after T.
Arabic not Hebrew/cananite/phoneician/etc. Hebrew is too mumbled. (lost b for p, v and no h just kh, no s just sh) as opposed to Arabic which retained all the original consonants, infact julius caesar's Arabic pronunciation is identical to the one presented.
5:01 About that Greek letter Ε ε. Its original Ancient name was just εἶ _eî_ (/eː/ or /ei/). From my understanding, its current name ἒ ψιλόν _è psīlón_ (i.e. “simple e”) came about not because the Greeks stripped the letter from its /h/ but because in Middle Ages a need arose to distinguish it from the diphtong ΑΙ αι _ai_ which came to be pronounced as /e/. Thus: *Ε ε* (e), i.e. “simple e” vs *ΑΙ αι* (ai), i.e. “diphthong e”.
As an aside, the analogous naming process was applied to the following Greek letters as well due to pronunciation changes:
1. *Υ υ* ὖ _ŷ_ (/yː/) → ὖ ψιλόν _ŷ psīlón_ (i.e. “simple y”) vs *ΟΙ οι* _oi_ (i.e. “diphthong y”), because the latter came to be pronounced as the former (/y/),
2. *Ω ω* ὦ _ô_ (/ɔː/) → ὦ μέγα _ô méga_ (i.e. “big o”) vs *Ο ο* οὖ _oû_ (/oː/ or /ou/) → ὂ μικρόν _ò mikrón_ (i.e. “small o”), because the long vowel /ɔː/ that the letter Ω ω represented became shortened to /o/ &, thus, indistinguishable from the sound that was represented by the letter Ο ο.
This is my understanding too. These vowel names are Byzantine.
Came here to write this. Very well said 👌
Also, "psilon" literally means fine, small, tenuous, so it distinguishes ε and υ from the chonkier diphthongs αι and οι.
@@pazelpazel1926 Interesting. Also, according to the Liddell-Scott-Jones Dictionary, ψιλός _psīlós_ was an adjective that was used to describe the unaspirated voiceless stop consonants (litterae tenues) π /p/, κ /k/, & τ /t/ as opposed to the aspirated ones: φ /pʰ/, χ /kʰ/, & θ /tʰ/. It is also in the name ψιλὸν πνεῦμα _psīlòn pneûma_ (the smooth breathing, i.e. the absence of aspiration).
@@MattakiUtsuro that was my initial thought but what are the "aspired counterparts" of epsilon and ypsilon? Also ypsilon is always aspired at the beginning of the word while epsilon can be either aspired on unaspired. It's a bit confusing.
I would love a video from you about the phonetic alphabet 😊 I'm not a native English speaker and never learned/ ever been taught about phonetic alphabet. Can you imagine my confusion when I saw new words, looked up their pronunciation and the letters are utter gibberish. Almost 14 years of living in England and I still baffle and amuse the native speakers with my interpretation of words I only read and not heard (at least didn't recognise them as such) 😂 Your humour and delivery would be so fun to watch 😂
Welsh is a phonetic language. The hieroglyphs are a phonetic ‘say what you see’ system. See:
Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
Well, I am not a native English speaker either, but I found an excellent way to look up the pronunciation of words: just type in for example "cucumber pronunciation" into the googly eyed search engine, and there you can listen to the sounds of most words, in British and in American pronunciation, and in slow version too.
''A is for ox''! BRILLIANT!
I absolutely love how you present your features Rob. A very simple, humble, clear talk with personal character only supporting rather than getting in the way of the message. Very beautiful.
Interestingly, it is said quite cleverly, that what is denoted by the Tower of Babylon story is that the original alphabet as we know it was semetic and at it's most classic form, in my opinion, Hebrew and it is after Babylon a schism happened in language. It is said by some Rabbis and Tzadikim that that original language was the Hebrew form of the alphabet. It's a really lovely way to view that story whether as a believer or sheer interest.
The idea of alphabetical order always puzzles me. I'd love to know the story of how the letters of the alphabet came to be arranged in their current order.
Well, the Canaanites created the alphabet because they were intrepid merchants. They needed to sort through their lists of clientele and quickly look through their inventory to see how much of a certain product they were carrying in their ships.
@@MrLeemurman Sure, but why did we end up with A followed by B then C then DEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ. Why that particular order?
@@hexagod1313 Because thats how the song goes🤣
There were (and are) different sequences used by different cultures in different languages. For example, in Hebrew (I’m not sure about Arabic) and Phoenician, G (Gimel) came after B/V (Beit, with or without a central dot), and in Greek, Gamma also came after Alpha and Beta, as all physicists know. And Zeta comes after Epsilon, but the Romans added it to the end.
I can confirm that J and I where inseparable at that time, because in Greek, such words as "Julius" and "Japan" are carried from the Romans and are still written with a Greek I (Makes an E sound), being pronounced as "ee-ooh-lee-os" (Ιούλιος) and "ee-ah-po-ni-ah" (Ιαπωνία)
Great video overall!
Japan sounds like iaponia? 🤔
@@flavio-viana-gomide yessir! Firstly because the J is translated to I, and secondly cuz Greek words end with a vowel, so it was added at the end :o
I love that λ is L for Lambda ^_^
Very interesting video ! I'd like to add that for the letter D , the two symbols of a door an fish as shown in the video, are borrowed from the Hebrew words Delet = Door , and Dag -=Fish. The letter D in Hebrew is pronounced Dalet , similar to Delet (Door)
Dagon also has fish relativity
@@igitha..._Dagon might be related to fish. But might also be related to Dagan.. which is crops.
There is something cognitively comforting about this... the apparent chaos of the years brought to making sense. Love this video.
Rob, thank you for teaching us linguistics here on UA-cam. Every video you've made is incredibly interesting, educational, but also very entertaining. Same as with every video you've made, this one was highly enjoyable to watch. I am very happy to have found your channel and I look forward to sticking around and seeing what videos you'll produce in the future!
I think F was related to P due to the P being sounded as F. Also at 13:44 we can see the figure 8 which of course sounds like Aitch. Also H is the 8th letter of the Aphabet.
So numbers also relate to the alphabet.
A is 1 as in ‘A pig’ one pig
B is 2 as in ‘Bi’
C is 3 (C and G same letter) 3 is a stylised old handwritten small g.
D is 4 and we can see the ‘Delta’ shape in the number. 👍
wait... so the shapes of the numbers are related to the shapes of the letters in that position??
Yeah, some languages do not have numbers and use letter instead with a "code word" - or both. The thai folk use numbers (copy from Indian Sanskrit) but write 1st hour, 2nd hour, 3rd hour, 4th hour for time; then start again till 24 hours (a day) is around - all with writing letters and a special code word for "early morning" (1-4), "morning" (5-8) aso. Meetings at "three morning" mean 7th hour at 24 hour clock. 🤣🙄 For not confusing Buddhist rules most Buddhist temples use 24 hour clock at talking (in European and Asia room exists 24h mechanics clocks or digital clocks).
Do you see it in English and German with "a/ein" for representing "1" - one point where many foreigner struggles if they are older - kids just accept it easily. Then "too/two/zwei" for the second count "2". As kid I ask my teacher for this simple same between writing - but they not known it. These days we know that many folks count her/his own hands "1,2,3,4,many" - sure do you see the point.
In Germany we talk it "Arabische Ziffern" (Arab numbers) - now we known that the Arab steal them self from India. But Sanskrit as "writing documents" came over the "Zigeuner/traveler's" on-the-landway into our European room too. For Arab or Aramaic it is crazy too - they use near same writing but different meaning. Same in German with "Millionen/Milliarden/Billionen" but English "millions/billions/trillions" so are 1/a billion not 1/eine Billion. 😉 Todays are many information are in English language and many German *educated professors* translated it wrong. 🤮
A is used to represent 1 but so is I and both are diphthongs. i is derived from the lower case e the dot above being the top circle of the e. ‘Mutation’ by scribes writing quickly. A, E and I are closely related. B is the consonant version of O.
At one point B was more circular like a spiral representing a house (Beth) from which we get - bed and berth in English.
Also represents 2.
Also F, P, U, V, W are closely related so get used interchangeably in languages. Welsh is a great example where the same word can have different letters even if repeated in the same sentence.
The alphabet probably started with only a few letters, the rest being added as languages changed and fed back to each other.
i and j are a good example. Both the same letter but j being the mirror image of i in hand writing. Due to direction of writing.
I am from Pakistan, and I can see the letters of Urdu/Arabic in all of these. Which is perhaps the eastern most language using this system of writing.
I'm no expert, but I believe they are are all classed together as the Indo-European language family, and all derive from a common linguistic ancestor. This group comprises almost all of the European languages (including Russian), Iranian languages and those of the northern part of the Indian sub-continent.
@@artifax1407 The alphabet originated in the Semitic language group, then migrated to the IE languages through Greek. I believe Arabic letters evolved from these early Semitic scripts, then was adopted by Urdu speakers through Islam. Same for Persian (also IE). Devanagari is used to write Hindi, which is essentially the same language as Urdu.
@@mikedaniel1771 Afro-Asiatic.
Phoenicians...totally genius approach they had
I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I am interested in the origin of words, letters and languages and this was illuminating, and funny in parts. I'm going to check out your recommended video now. Thank you so much! Whilst I think of it, have you done a video on the origins of punctuation marks? That would be great. Best wishes to you from Australia.