Story of the Alphabet, pt. 1
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- Опубліковано 20 лип 2021
- Drs. Luke Gorton and Jackson Crawford tell the fascinating story behind our ABC and how it came to be in this first of a three-part video series. Part 2 will be posted on @wordsafari4611.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawford.com/ (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
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This series of videos is intended mostly to explore the history of the specific alphabet we use and the ones directly related to it, so we are not going to get sidetracked for a long time with comments on other writing systems, especially if they're not closely related. That being said, it's easy to oversimplify how logographic the writing of Egyptian and Chinese is, as Egyptian writing makes quite a bit of use of the acrophonic principle and Chinese writing of the rebus principle. Getting into this in any detail would take us too far into the weeds, but a surprisingly comprehensive and readable introduction to traditional Chinese writing and how it works can be found in Bryan W. Van Norden's "Classical Chinese for Everyone," available from Hackett ( www.hackettpublishing.com/classical-chinese-for-everyone-4357 ).
I will from now until the end of eternity refer to the word help as Hat-Elephant-Lizard-Punch
Courtyard - guy going "hooray!" - cattle prod - mouth (since English uses Latin which is derived from Greek which is derived from Phoenician... it made sense in Phoenician!)
Wednesdays are good days, thanks to Jackson Crawford. Appreciate your work and your ability to present the info to us laymen.
There's a great book called Language Visible by David Sacks that traces the history of writing and tells the story of the Roman alphabet letter by letter. It's fascinating.
This was the fastest 25 minutes of my UA-cam life
We forget that ancient humans were more advanced than we suppose. They were trading, paying taxes, sharing profits, keeping records. And thus the need for writing things down so that others could also read it and understand it was great. Take for example, Tally sticks which kept a record of a debt for the person who gave the loan and one in the same size and shape for the borrower as well.
It's also interesting how one imagines 'ancient' as well. I hear ancient humans and think of the ones from 200,000 years ago and 5,000 year ago ones as just 'older.'
Some points. Consonant only writing is already occurring with Egyptian hieroglyphs - hieroglyphs don't represent syllables but consonant frames regardless of accompanying vowels. Also the acrophonic principle was already in use in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the most commonly used hieroglyphs were already single consonant signs with the consonant being the initial sound of the object depicted.
Yes exactly, also Sinaitic wasn't the only case of adaptation of this system to write an other language than Egyptian, it also occurred indepedently in Nubia with Meroitic.
So excited for this series. Thank you both!
This was really interesting, looking forward to the next parts.
The second thing to add about the fumbing down of the populace over and above power politics is the question of communicating meaning to large numbers of foreign speakers. Not only does it become necessary to ditch the subtleties and nuance of meaning amongst native speakers for the generalities of pointed, basic meaning, it becomes necessary to exchange visual meaning for aural meaning, so to speak. Thus pictures take the place of letters/words.
I love these longer videos. Please take more deep dives into linguistic topics such as this
Thank you. I like your point that "Writing follows Language not Language follows Writing".
Very interesting, can't wait for more episodes.
Unbezahlbar!
Another fine collaboration of two great minds, can't put into words how much I appreciate lessons like this one.
Addendums to the discussion on Chinese writing: 1- there are actually phonetic aspects to the system (ie radicals), and 2- the grammar has changed, too, not just pronunciation, so the classical Chinese is not necessarily readily understandable to modern Chinese readers; 3- classical Chinese has several descendants, not just Mandarin, eg Cantonese, Fujianese, etc., so even things written in modern Mandarin isn't necessarily super easy to read for Cantonese readers, for example.
Awesome collab, great guest. I appreciate the expansion into general linguistic concepts. I would love to hear you take about more languages.
I'm really loving this! I have always been interested in other languages, but never learned another than American West Coast English. I took a linguistics class years back when studying Anthropology and Oregon State U and found that very fascinating. That class was taught by a woman who was trying to reconstruct some of the NW Native languages, which have been lost.
Great work Dr. Crawford and thanks for having a prof from my old alma mater, UNM.
Great video. It took me a while to get to it. I appreciate the cards with the name of the sites and academic words. The specific interaction between the Semites and Egyptians is really interesting.
Hat-Elephant-Lizard-Punch! I need somebody! Hat-Elephant-Lizard-Punch! Not just anybody! Hat-Elephant-Lizard-Punch! Won't you please please Hat-Elephant-Lizard-Punch me!
Thank you. Looking forward to part 2.
The view is just breathtaking! Really incredible shot! The background is also nice.
I was like 1066, which made me chuckel.
I love this stuff. I can’t wait for the remaining entries to the series.
Very interesting! Thank you both.
*awesome* - really interested in this topic - thank you both - looking forward to this collaboration and subject
This is great! Thank you! I don't know where you are, but it's amazing!
GREAT VIDEO! Invested from the beginning. Arabic also works with consonants, and every verb has a three or four consonant 'root', with a certain meaning, which changes semantically when other consonants or vocalic sounds are added to it. Pretty cool.
Interesting learning this stuff from a cowboy in the middle of nowhere Colorado 😆🙌
A friend of mine who is a rabbi says that while vowels are usually fully omitted, the matres lectionis ("mothers of reading": aleph א, he ה, waw ו and yod י) are used to represent long vowels in a somewhat broad sense, but they also help you to better figure out a certain word form that might be misconstrued for another and to predict other vowels in a word because they are used in particular instances with certain other vowels that are expected to follow.
My favorite of your collaborators.
The acrophonic principle already occured in Egyptian itself which as a Afro-asiatic language, had a very similar structure to Semitic. Also I read somewhere that the acrophonic principle arose in Egyptian originally to memorise hieroglyphics by grouping them by their first sounds. Which is funny, it would mean that the alphabetical principle is older than the alphabet itself.
Sinaitic is not the only case where it was then adapted to another language than Egyptian, the Meroitic alphabet in Nubia seems to bear no strict correspondance with Sinaitic and thus was probably adapted from Egyptian independently.
In the 80's I took Falkner shorthand which left out the vowels.
Beautiful background scenery.
Now the lyrics for Bloodhoundgangs "Foxtrot Uniform Charlie Kilo" are beginning to sound smart 🤔 who would've guessed
Love this stuff! thanks
great video, thank you!
You should attach the little microphone to a plastic spoon. It's easier that way.
All the leading youtube channels does it.
Lol irl
Stefan Milo has entered the chat.
Ethan Becker does it with a knife.
really fascinating stuff!
Amazing video.
5:40 There is an additional problem with modern readers trying to read classical texts in that being a logographic script with a *very* long tradition, some usages had become established and therefore opaque over the centuries and it was widely seen as "elegant" to fill texts with classical allusions and the like - kinda like Latin and Greek and whatnot peppered into 19th century European texts. There was a movement to simplify the language which took off shortly after the Chinese Revolution and produced a much more accessible system of writing which is use today - however, most Chinese students are confronted with the Classics at some point during their school education and have to read some of the more accessible texts (similar to how we still read Shakespeare or even Chaucer despite those texts not being all that accessible without prior knowledge)
STUNNING VIEW!!!😍😍😍
Finally somebody speaking on it.
And, another thing to change in my World History curriculum!
Links for part 2 & 3 should've been in the description.
I hope there'll be more videos on writing systems, it's OK even if they're mostly Europe based.
These are the best videos on youtube
Thank you for doing this. If nothing else I know which Instructor to contact if I choose to attend UNM.
awesome
9:02 that’s kind of like how modern English speakers use u, r, 2, 4, etc. to represent the sounds of other words (you, are, to/too, for)
Very cool video!
Maybe we all ought to write in pictographs to not be exclusive.... Perhaps, that's what webdings(precursor to emoji's) were about.
On a serious note, I never realized it prior to watching this, but that was probably why my first languages were numbers and music.
Anxious for next part! or... nxs fr nxt prt!
Bradley Cooper knows his stuff.
Welcome back to CO.
I think the book of JOB is the oldest book of the Bible. Structurally m enjoying this presentation.
So, the vowel A comes from alef, which is not a vowel but a consonant and it's a symbol for ox. Yeah, makes sense
Yeah, Aleph was a glottal stop, which Greek didn't have, so they simply repurposed it since Greek is a more vowel-dependent language than the Semitic languages were (eg verb endings sometimes differed only by vowels such as -o vs -e vs -a).
Found a book called Excavating English and im wondering if you have any other book suggestions for school age children? I also have an english etymology book too. We love resources and history anything that might read more like a curriculum such as excavating english or read like a well organized chapter book would be appreciated.
Completely random question for anyone on the comments (because I can't seem to find any answers elsewhere online) : did the Sumerians and Egyptians have names for the writing systems we now call Cuneiform and Hieroglyphs, or would they have both used their respective words for, 'writing' or, 'the written word', or something to refer to their scripts?
If not, then I assume they just didn't need to name them because they were the only [widely used] scripts in their respective regions at the time.
Following that logic, less exact forms of communicating meaning come AFTER the more exact lettering system of communicating meaning through writing letters.
The evolution of written communication (like its fictional biological partner) doesn't go from less exsct to more exact, but the opposite, to wit, from more exact to less exact.
Dr Gorton needs a hat. Dr Crawford's western hat matches his careful, laconic delivery. I suggest a pork pie hat for Dr Gorton to match his high energy, Ska-compatible delivery. I subscribe to you both, and encourage everyone to also. I support Dr Crawford though patreon, and plan on adding Dr Gorton soon.
Go Lobos! (UNM for those versed in other sports programs associated with lesser forms of higher Ed.)
All terms are of course conventional yet serve the purpose to convey a certain meaning. While we cannot be sure in absolute terms and in many cases simply lack evidence about some features of a language, it is still correct to state that some languages are older/more ancient compared to others. Taking your example in this video, "something ancestral to English certainly WAS spoken when Sumerian was written, but it wasn't "English" though, so it is factual to state that what is known as "Sumerian" language IS more ancient/older than what is called the "English" language. Just as Vedic Sanskrit is more ancient/older than Old (Church) Slavonic or Classical Latin is more ancient/older than Old Norse.
What do you think of an ice age, prehistoric system of writing, one that maybe transformed into the Vinca Tablets, and was native in europe?
My 12yo this evening randomly comes out with "/C/ is such a pointless letter. You can do everything with a /k/ or an /s/. No one needs /c/."
Alllriiighty then kid. Maybe after this I can let her know
/c/ isn't quite so pointless...
You should have been able to point out 'ch' to her. I have not watched this video yet but know my phonetics.
@@joepike1972 didn't think of it at the time, I was too busy laughing
If I had it my way, c would be abandoned for K and S sounds, and would only be used to represent the sound in cello.
Our use of the letter 'c' has to do with the palatalization sound change that happened in going from Latin to the Romance languages iirc.
Encourage 12yo to look more deeply into it. Maybe they'll become a comparative linguist and go study with Jackson or Luke. Because linguistics pays so well.... Hmm, better get a minor in computers.
@@johnwilson1340 well she has just recently taken it upon herself to learn Scots Gaelic. Thus begins her journey into impoverishment. Or a lucrative UA-cam channel... 😂
Zero dislikes.
This is really fascinating. One question, I have is whether there was this fairly direct arc from Egyptian to more modern alphabets or whether there were many simultaneous and parallel false starts and dead ends? I'm sure I could do my own research, but sometimes it's great to directly ask two professors. I know literacy could not have been widespread, and I was wondering how historically these different attempts at writing systems were adopted by different societal castes (rulers, religious, traders, etc.) in order for them to become standardized and how that determined which system ultimately won out.
My curiosity is how there was such a whole sale shift in Hieroglyphic phonetics such as the Egyptian symbol for water being [n] despite the other languages having [m] be the phonetic of water. The cow head that most alphabets use as the basis of alef, Egyptian has a /k3/. The reed shelter often associated with bet, Egyptian gives an [h] sound. The mouth symbol giving rise to [p] in most other languages has an /r3/. The Shepard's cane that forms the basis of [L] in most languages is /'wt/.
Despite the other derivations of these symbols being remarkably consistent between the languages, the hieroglyphics are distinctly and wildly different.
@@joepike1972 I don't know if you are still there or if you have researched the question yourself, but Egyptian is not a Semitic language. It is related, but distinct. The Egyptian word for water was _nun,_ so 𓈖 represented /n/. The Semites took some Hieroglyphic symbols but used them for their own language, assigning completely different sounds to them. The Semitic word for water was _mem,_ so the glyph was given the sound /m/. Imagine the example of using a hat to represent /h/. The French might take inspiration from English and do the same, but their word for hat is _chapeau_ so they would use the symbol to represent /ʃ/. The difference is not because of a phonetic change in the languages, such as β changing from /b/ to /v/ in Greek.
But there are long vowels and vowel markings in modern Semitic alphabets, and both aren't a recent development, with long vowels having their genesis in the Phoenician alphabet!
Anyone got a link for part 2? Don't think Word Safari has released it yet but if he has I can't find it.
I’ve been waiting for it too but it still doesn’t seem to have been uploaded.
Bro I'm going crazy waiting for part 2
Does the military Alpha-Bravo-Charlie alphabet also kind of work like an acrophonic device? Like "Foxtrot" means F but it is only taken to mean F because it starts with an F. Like a reverse acrophonic principle maybe?
The NATO radioalphabet is acrophobic, and designed to have words that remove ambiguity over poor radio reception.
Distinguishing between one syllable letters over the static of radio is difficult. B, D, C, E, G, T, all sound identical if a pop of static overlaps the short sounding of the leading consonant.
Where did alphabetic order come from? The Ugaritic alphabet is attested in both abgad and helḥam orders.
דבר can also mean "plague", which has nothing to do with "word", and מדבר means both "speaking" and "wilderness", with different vowels.
Part 2?
If an acrophonic principle uses the first sound of a word (sound!), how can 🤠 signify 'aytch'? (As that clearly is not the first sound of "hat")
you guys didn't mention the alphabetic script from the turquoise mines in Egypt's Sinai that date to from 1800 BC to 1400s BC
little correction, one is actually eins in German and один in Russian
Damn I've never been this early
ሀለሐረሠበሰሸቀአመወዐፀቸተኀነከኸዘዠፈየደጀገጠጨጰጸፐ
This is the original alphabet, please refer to the king james bile in its first page, Genesis chapter 2 verse 13. It is created in the region of Tigray by its language called ge'ez , which was the language of Adam and Eve. Aram is their grandson who created the language af ARAMIYIK.
8:55 we do that in english too. the kids think it's gr8!
Dr. Gorton mentioned that a Semitic language was not spoken in Egypt. What was spoken there then? ( I always thought it was a Semitic - or at least Afro-Asiatic- language)
Ancient Egyptian is an Afro-Asiatic language in the Egyptian family. The Semitic family is a subgroup of Afro-Asiatic, but are not the same thing in the way Germanic and Italic aren't.
I sort of understood that Ancient Egyptian was an ancestor of Coptic, which is still used within the Coptic Orthodox Church, although it is so longer spoken by Egyptian Christians in everyday life. But if that's wrong, I'd be interested in knowing what it is most closely related to.
@@Dave_Sisson that is correct i believe
Oh hey, I had Dr. Gorton before. I didn't know he had a UA-cam channel! polyMATHY brought me here.
i think Joseph for Jacob and family developed hieroglyphics for super dummies: or the consonant alphabet. The Egyptians probably (if they knew about it) probably looked down on it with distain as something developed and used by illiterate "nothings"/nobodies.
So the greatest invention of humankind was used by a small family group in Egypt for centuries until it appeared in Canaan and was eventually discovered/used by the Phoenicians and spread throughout the Mediterranean
[April 2022: curse tablet found on Mt Ebal with YHW - name of God written on it].
Well true, Arabic doesn't have words starting with vowels, but technically English doesn't have words starting with vowels either.
The words that start with a vowel in English aren't phonetically vowels, they are glottal stops, which are consonantal sounds. As one says "apple" or "open" your restricting air flow first then transitioning to a vowel. It's them same sound as the "T-ies" in saying "butter" in a stereotypical British accent. If these are going to start with a phonetic vowel, there has to be no air restriction, then the are going to start like one is screaming or out of breath.
The letter "أ" in Arabic represents the glottal stop in the start of words and a long-vowel in the middle and end of words with out the "همزة" (the apostrophe looking thing on top). So words like "أمة" would be written something like "ummeh" in the English Roman alphabet, "أدم"-"Adam", "إمارة"-"imarah" (emirate/principality) would sound the same in English. And to my point i have never seen an Arabic speaker struggle with pronouncing English words that start with "vowels".
I am a native Arabic speaker, and hope you correct this in future videos if I am right (someone maybe can say what was wrong with my assessment).
I am a follower of both your channels and enjoy your videos, but can Dr. Luke Gorton make some videos about etymologies of words of Semitic origin, as I thought he had a PhD in studies of Mediterranean cultures (I have requested that before on his channel, but maybe there aren't that many people that have requested or interested in it)?
Sorry if my comment isn't readable!
I don't think that's true about English vowels. We do not start them with a glottal stop. That may be the case in some languages, German is a very glottal language and puts glottals before vowels, but you will never see a glottal placed before a vowel in English IPA transcriptions, and native English speakers usually have a hard time learning how to do this when they learn German, they probably have a very hard time when they learn Arabic as well. And people pronouncing English words with a glottal at the beginning is definitely a give away sign that the person has an accent. Words like apple or open have no restriction of the air before the vowel.
As for whether or not they sound out of breath, maybe, it's possible. When I began to study Sanskrit, I found that I had to hold my mouth in a certain position in order to pronounce the aspirated consonants correctly, and I realized that it was actually much easier to breathe while speaking if I talked like that. In comparison, I realized that in English I am more often than not letting out my breath than holding it in or conserving it. There probably is something to that, where English vowels are exhaled in comparison to vowels that start with glottals.
@@sameash3153 I'm not saying that English words starting with vowels are full or hard glottal stops, like those that occur in the middle or end of words in languages that have it!
It's what I have observed, that there's no phonetic difference between the words that start with vowels in English and those that start with the letter "أ" in Arabic or It's equivalence in other Semitic languages.
My objection was just to what they said in the video, that Semitic languages can't start with vowels!
Either both languages can start with phonetic vowels or both can only start with consonantal sounds!
@@aa-zz6328 I'm not saying that English vowels are glottal stops either, but I'm saying that vowels in English are not articulated with glottals in their onset, which is what your original post said, I'm sorry if I misunderstood. English is a null-onset language. From what I understand, Arabic is not a null-onset language and requires glottals to be onset before vowel-initial syllables. So there is a difference between two words starting with vowels in English and Biblical Hebrew (I believe this was the example used in the video). The vowel in Hebrew would be onset with a glottal.
English doesn't exactly have words with a true vowel onset, since most speakers in most contexts will put a glottal stop in front of a vowel at the beginning of a word (it gets elided in quick speech and doesn't change the meaning if you leave it out, but if you _never_ put it in, you sound foreign). Those old semitic languages, as I understand it, had two sounds that sound kind of like a glottal stop to me but are written with different letters: aleph and ayin. I guess that helped them know that their language(s) didn't have vowel onsets either.
This is not to say English could be written without vowels after all; we have too many words that would look exactly the same but are entirely unrelated. The letter combination 'mn' could stand for 'man', 'men', 'mean', 'moan', 'moon', 'mane', 'mine', 'many', 'omen', and even, if one speaks a non-rhotic dialect, 'mourn'.
The vowel less system doesn't work well, it's incredibly frustrating and impractical which is why they then forced to invent niqquds. The tri literal roots make the vowels even more important. It'd make more sense (were the spelling better and more consistent) for English to be vowel less than Hebrew.
Black Africans gave the whole world a system of writing.
Both are so handsome xoxo
The north western Semitic languages that "didn't use vowels", because their syllables "did not start with vowels", such as Hebrew, actually do have vowels and their syllables can start or independently be a vowel. The three vowels /i,a,u/ would be written with the consonants for /y,-,w/ (- being the glottal stop as in uh-oh), also /e,o/ would be written with /h,gh/ (gh being the voiced deep throat frictive of ayan in Hebrew that corresponds to omincron in Greek and the symbol for eye).
Syllabaries are not only used by some ancient languages in transition to alphabet. It is how Devanagari of Sanskrit works (and most South Eastern Asian scripts in that language family work), how Hongul of Korean (that was invented in the 1600s) works, and how Japanese works. Once you learn a syllabarie you can appreciate how it keeps words organized and reveals phonotactics of the language.
Also for the most part in Hebrew/Arabic and Sanskrit the default vowel is the 'ah' sound, if the vowel were a high front 'i' or high back 'u' that would be shown by the addition of symbols like yod for /i/ and vav for /u/, in Sanskrit vowel diacritics are added to the main consonant symbol.
Would achad (one) or el (god) be considered starting with a vowel in hebrew?
Does ac mean after Christ and bc, before Christ?
From what I know yes. What can also be found is ace meaning after common era and bce before common era
@@sophiasroad Thank you!
14:08 Only some of the stories collected in Genesis are old. The book itself is one of the youngest books of the hebrew bible. 😏
1:37 That's wrong, lol. It should've been "Зис из стил Инглиш", at least that's how Russians use to write that or similar sentences.
Now kiss
an alphabet should have vowels.
The alphabet was invented for 19 cents?
Of course there was contact and migration between Egypt and what we call the Middle East but there is a good consesus amid historians, archaelogists and biblical scholars that there was no Moses or Exodus where a large group of Hebrews fled Egypt.
This is pure legend. Fortunately, the story of the alphabet(s) works without it.
Just because there aren’t other historical records of an event, it doesn’t mean that that event didn’t occur. Not everything gets recorded and some events may even be purposefully omitted from records by some people because it damages their national pride. I actually remember once reading about a king (if I’m not mistaken) who had only been known to be mentioned in the Bible but whose existence was discovered to also be evidenced by a later archaeological discovery. I can’t remember the name of that king though, unfortunately.
@@sikoyakoy2376 The people who claim a positive (that something happened) have the burden of proof.
Isreali archaelogogists have been diigging to "find Moses" for years, found nothing and have conluded accordingly.
there's an act by Louis CK where he describes the "dudes" that hang in a group with their unstoppable nodding heads. i though the guy with the hat was bad, bad the "dude" waving his head was distracting. you know that all the world hates your guts, don't you? couldn't make to the end of the video. was to north-Mexico to me.
This guy needs a spoon for his mike.
Was it really impossible to find an Assyriologist or Historical Semiticist? That would *really* have helped with the quality of this video.
Always enjoy these presentations., But please gentley suggest to the good visiting professor that he say "UM" a little bit less. Very distracting.
So just because the Bible was written long after other sources were written that were similar. Oral tradition means Judeo-Christian thought could be older that written records. Just because English speakers were the first to write down Native American or aboriginal Australian myth doesn’t mean they invented it. This is a major fallacy used against Christians all the time to try and disprove it.
Duh. Never met anyone saying that the one writing something down equals 'inventing' it. Where do people find these people who say that?
@@demi3115 Religious videos often Or Bible debunking video. You can’t prove or disprove anything so it’s just put downs and insults. This argument is used to say pagan roots are older ( because older records.)
We evolved, and if I hear one more peep out of you, you trouble maker, you'll get fewer marks on your paper!
We evolved, do your hear? We evolved! You were just getting around in skins in Europe five thousand years ago, and you can't speculate otherwise because you have no physical evidence. You evolved, do you hear me? You never had civilization before yhe end of the ice age! The surge of water for ten thousand years didn't wash away your civilizations because you never had any civilizations before! And there were no alphabets before, either. There was no writing - nothing, do you hear?!