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Just what we need, Americans coming over to tell us how to fix our spelling! I think this is an interesting video, and an interesting thought exercise, but while the languages have a common root, they have diverged and their orthographies have changed accordingly. I'm the case of Manx, they lost their writing system and had to invent one from scratch after several hundred years as an oral language only. While trying to come up with a united orthography is interesting academically, I'm not sure it's useful to speakers of them. Also, I personally find keeping the original leading letter on eclipsed words really helpful.

As a Scottish Gaelic speaker, the eclipses thing isn't going to work. The reason we would write the equivalent of "a mbád" as "am bàta" is because most of our dialects *don't* eclipse, merely assimilate, so there is still an audible b there. So this would not be suitable for an orthography meant to cover both varieties; "a mád" would bear no relation to how most Scottish dialects pronounce this.

Why did you add Bulgarian to the Northern Orthography? The first slavonic Cyrillic writing system was developed in Bulgaria, after all.

Waste of time. Spelling unification will never happen.

Oh! I thinks that at the end of the day, all said and done, these Gaelics don’t knows what’s occurin’.

generally good system except baltic should not have been included and gatekeeping the h letter for only latin loanwords is counterproductive, it should just be used instead of ch like in serbian

Some interesting suggestions though I disagree with replacing the eclipsed letter entirely. I (an Irish speaker) think that the eclipse is quite a good system, when written you can see how the word as it is came to be, i.e. "bád" and "i mbád". "Mád" just looks like another word entirely. As a concept, it isn't a hard one to get to grips with, although it can at first seem strange or foreign to someone who's language is English, gdor example

your reform just made everything longer. welsh spelling is already good and established and there's no need to change it. for breton at the very least i would like to see x instead of the ridiculous c'h trigraph and i would be satisfied with this, but it will be better if they go further and replace the french-based eu and u with ö and ü, ou with plain u, ch with š and so on. the reflexes of the historical θ and ð, however they are pronounced, can be replaced with c and z, no need for zh or dh digraphs. also replace gn with nh for consistency

You know when i saw this video i thought it was going to be enjoyable but no it's just arrogant American thinking he knows us and our culture and languages, if this was done by someone more qualified it would maybe be a good video but no you had to ruin it

I've always thought that Irish should be written in the Cyrillic alphabet because it can accommodate slender/broad consonants neatly. I'd love to see how you would create a Cyrillic orthography for Irish!

Next up: a unified orthography for all Indo-European languages😈

I think you should use 'cw' instead of 'qw' and 'cs' instead of 'x'

I see the reason for a needed reform for the “Gaelic” languages…. I see no reason for a reform of the “Brythonic” languages…. Welsh is totally phonetic if you know the Welsh Alphabet….and that has only a few variations from English….. Kernewek already has had a spelling reform and Breton is just spoken with a French accent…no big deal

Ok, you glossed over orthographic vowel combinations faaaar too quickly.

Lose the extremely irritating 'jokes' like 'that's it then'. just an irritation and freaking waste of time.

I very rarely comment on videos and don’t know much about linguistics (and got a bit lost at times), but I thought this was super interesting as an Irish speaker, even to see the comparison Irish to Scottish Gaelic and Manx! I don’t agree with many of the changes (some seem to be objectively more confusing as suggested by other commenters) but nevertheless it was super interesting and cool to see the ideas, especially from the perspective of someone who doesn’t speak these languages! Fantastically made video. Nár lagaí Dia thú!

How is the Baltic group apply here? “but they sound simi..” Finnic. Finnic languages. Shared vocabulary and exclusively Finnic-Baltic grammar cases. Unified Finnish-Baltic group when? People who have nothing to do with Northern Europe are amusing..

I am all for it, it would boost enormously the prestige of this language, unite a greater number of speakers in a broader geographic area and link it better to its historic poetry!

It is awesome😮

unified finno-ugric/uralic orthography when? 🥺👉👈

I don't speak Latvian, but the orthography in this video would be stupid to use for Lithuanian, we took the letters we needed and the spelling of words always make sense. Also I didn't see an Ėė anywhere

37:55 lol thanks for the clarification

Cool video! I liked some changes more and some less but something that really doesn't make any sense to me is why would you delete the [h] sound at the start of Greek loanwords? 59:13 You didn't give any reason against it and I can see a few reasons that make it worth keeping. 1. It's loyal to the original word 2. Other languages like english kept their [h]'s in words like "history" 3. Keeping the [h] makes the word stand out more/be less ambigious ("imn" doesn't look like "hymn" at all) 4. Words that start with [h] are relatively rare in my language (Polish) and when they do start with this sound it often indicates that it's a loanword which I personally just find neat and more objectively it can be useful information for grammar declensions The following part of the vid with "ocean" turning into "okean" is less blatant but I feel like ts/c pronunciation is widely used in Slavic languages? If you want to change this sound, making it a similar-sounding "s" would make more sense I think. That would make it go hand in hand with english and Romance languages as you stated. But I would just keep it as it is tbh

This is certainly interesting. You should do one for just English considering how fucked up the spelling is.

2:07 anatolian, tocharian and daco-thracian are related. you heard it here first

Support from a somewhat "Anglo/Germanic-Centric"(regarded as such by some fellow "otakus" in online keyboard politician communities) person. Gaelic people are equal people after all, and just like the unified Turkic orthography this movement will definitely help make the world (esp. Scotland) a better place. Good luck.

Love it!!! ❤ You should make a video with pronunciation too!

Tá na Mheiriceánaigh ana aisteach afách, tá siad cliste.... uaireanta yeah very irish here and no not american irish from the island plays hurling has funny accent -_- Id love for the language to be reused and for hurling to be in one american movie in hollywood and everyone starts playing it 😎 3:31 also Smidiríní to smithereens

Doing something in the same style for the Romance family would be awesome, I'd love to see what you'd come up with

Some of your proposals are placed in *Interslavic language.* Especially about alphabets. They have different sets from less to more advanced users. They used a lot of solutions from Serbo-Croatian which uses two alphabets. So content could be easily transcribed from one alphabet to another.

Belarusian, Serbo-Croatian, Macedonian use two alphabets (Latin and Cyrillic). Ukrainian language has multiple proposals for Ukrainian Latinka. You missed letters: *ć, ś, ź* -- all or some of them are in Polish, Lower Sorbian, Belarusian Latinka. *Ć* is present in Upper Serbian and Serbo-Croatian Latinka. There are series of letters/sounds for these letters (softer to harder): *ć, č, c* + *ś, š, s* + *ź, ž, z* *Some letters in Polish language* could be changed to improve ability of Slavs with Latin alphabets (Czech, Slovak, and other) to read Polish and vice versa; this change would be neutral to current Polish orthographical rules: *ż* => *ž* *rz* => *ř* *cz* => *č* *sz* => *š* *w* => *v*

I'm loving this series of unified orthographies! Any chance you'll explore outside European languages, like maybe Semitic or Hmong-Mien?

Ъ in Bulgarian is very very far from a rare sound, and there is absolutely no rule allowing you to predict when a proposed "a" would be pronounced as ъ or a...

I think that Baltic languages shouldn't've been added to this "unified orthography", as there's a clear bias in both explaining the system and the system itself to Slavic languages, and Baltic ones are left unaccounted or poorly accounted for in most of the cases. Main points (mainly about Baltic languages): 1. At 13:53, ł is said to be North Slavic only, despite the fact that it is used in Lithuanian as well to represent a hard l before a front vowel (this only occurs in some south-eastern dialects, but it should not be ignored, e.g. "saulałė" is a very common word in folk songs, meaning "Dear Sun") 2. The choices of spelling initial wo-/wu- as o-/u- (which also occurs to a degree in Samogitian, though this is mentioned nowhere), initial je- as e- (which, by the way, tends to be unrelated to iotation in Baltic languages, e.g. the dialectal "jeknos", related to, for example, Latin iecur, and had a beginning j- since PIE) , and of ґ as г in this same section contradict the earlier laid out principle of "one sound per grapheme" (i.e. of phonetic spelling). If etymological spelling is intended to be at least somewhat kept, it should be specified as such in the principles. 3. At 22:16, in Lithuanian; both -ia and -ija are regular endings of both nouns and verbs; how are we now supposed to differentiate between, for example, "valia" (will) and "valija" (he/she/it is useful; see LKŽ, valyti 3), or "ponia" (lady) and "ponija" (noblemen as a whole)? How are we supposed to know that vyšnia has two syllables, but policia is four? 4. At 30:12, Same problem as above with the -i-, but now that it can apply to any -i- between vowels, it's even worse: -ijo and -io, -iu and -iju, ect. are all simultaneously present and pronounced differently in the language. 5. At 31:23, short o in native words, though very rare, DOES exist (lokys as an an example). The majority of international/foreign words like "atomas" will have a short o as well (except a few like fortepijonas) 6. At 31:43, ę and ė literally make different sounds, there's no reason to make them into one letter. If anything, ę should be merged long e (e can be both long and short, same with a) into é, same applies to a/ą, and ė would simply be kept. Additionally, Samogitian actually differentiates between a short ė and a long ė̄ (also written as õ), which isn't accounted for anywhere. Also, "e/ē" in Latvian can have a different pronunciation depending on the syllables after it, though this is not accounted for nor in the old orthography, nor in the "new" one. Also also, separating y and í because of a few "similar words", but not ų and ú makes little sense: take, for example, siūs (he/she/it/they will sew) and siųs (he/she/it/they will send). You either keep both of them intact or merge both with í/ú. 7. At multiple points, Belarusian is written as Belarussian, probably by analogy with Russian. This is incorrect, though a common mistake. 8. The proposal for stress and pitch-accent does not account for the broken tone of Latvian and the secondary stress of Samogitian. Using acutes for high pitch also doesn't really work well with the pre-established choice to use them for vowel lengths (in my personal opinion, macrons, i.e. āēīōū, are both fairly universal and just look nicer). 9. At 1:02:24, you've forgotten that a/e can be both long and short in Lithuanian; for example, savo has a long a in its stem. Minor points: 1. At 2:38, Church Slavonic is shown as a living language, despite being a liturgical one, having no native speakers and not used outside of the Church. Later, Latin is depicted as dead, despite having a similar status. 2. At 6:35, it is said that Baltic languages have a "very similar system", but since this is speaking about proto-Slavic (and thus, proto-Baltic), it fails to account for palatalization not being present in proto-Baltic, as well as a very clear distinction between long/short vowels (different from the Slavic one). The sound /x/ isn't native to Baltic either. 3. At 6:51, it may serve to mention that Belarusian was also written (by the Tatars) in the Arabic script. 4. At 7:04, only 4 colours are in the legend, but 5 are on the map. 5. At 7:33, Czajkówski would be pronounced as Czajkuwski (ó is pronounced as u) 6. At 16:55, Lithuanian is not accounted for in the explanation, as dž is a very common diagraph, and dz is incredibly common in the Dzūkijan dialect (it's even in the name) 7. At 20:31, Weird to use the third singular person of "to be" for Slavic, but the second person singular for Baltic languages, especially when Lithuanian still has a form "esti" still occasionally used in place of "yra", especially in scientific literature. 8. I'd say better maps could've been chosen, though they're not really the point of the video, so oh well. Probably other points of contention that I missed in the video as well.

unified proto indoeuropean orthography

I understand this is.. older italian than I actually speak, but I always interpreted it as "che la stima"? why is that not correct? (it would be more common in modern italian). Also, "oh ciel" would mean "oh heavens!", and that's not... accompanied by any adjectives? I sincerely do not understand why you have translated it like this.

I think this video, and potentially whatever series it is a part of, is really quite arrogant. As you say yourself, you do not speak any of these languages and therefore are not part of these vibrant communities. Not to be blunt but you are an outsider to these groups and until you learn one of these languages and engage with the community, an outsider you will remain. It's not based on ethnicity or nationality or anything like that. If you had just said 'this is an experiment to see can I create a spelling that works for all three!', it would be a different scenario. You say in your video description 'these languages are closely related, they're spellings are not--*let's fix it!*' and 'this is my best attempt at making something that will be *good for their peoples and cultures*'. What you are doing here is not 'fixing' anything and is certainly not 'good for our peoples and cultures', what an arrogant attitude. You seem to think that our orthographies are broken and that you are in a position to 'fix' them. Please consider that they are not broken and understand that you are definitively not in any position to be 'fixing them'. Lots of people like to approach Gaelics from the outside with their own ideas of how things should be without even understanding properly how they are in the first place. This proposal is interesting! but don't get ahead of yourself, it is a spelling proposal. Whether it would be 'good for our peoples and cultures' is not really an appropriate judgement for you to make. Please avail yourself more thoroughly of the wealth of resources about us and engage properly with these communities before you go around declaring what you think is good for us.

Your section on Manx is quite inaccurate. -At 5:44 you say 'English's influence on tiny Manx was early enough and strong enough that an English style orthography successfully supplanted the traditional Gaelic script on the island effectively isolating the language from its siblings'. This is not quite accurate as there is not much evidence of 'a Gaelic learned elite' in Manx prior to the 17th century - a Gaelic style orthography would theoretically have been just as alien to Manx speakers as an English one as neither had ever been used to write Manx before. It isn't exactly English conventions mapped onto Manx but that's another point. -It wasn't English linguistic or cultural influence that necessarily cut off Manx from the rest of the Gaelic world. The Isle of Man had already been isolated politically and socially for hundreds of years by the 17th century. As far as I know, English/British political influence of the Isle of Man came after any common Gaelic literary tradition would have disappeared and the IoM has always had a degree of self-governing (it's not in the United Kingdom for example and never has been). -You then say that Manx spelling is not 'phonemic', 'traditional' or 'recognisable by any account'... - Whilst it's not phonemic like an IPA transcription is, does it need to be? Why? The fact of the matter is that it was Manx speakers who were the ones that devised this spelling to suit their own needs - namely delivering preprepared sermons, reading religious texts etc. I agree the spelling can obscure etymology and specific details of the pronunciation but these factors were irrelevant to those who practised the orthography. The idea that Manx spelling is totally unsystematic and inconsistent is generally blown out of proportion in my opinion, and addressed by Christopher Lewin in the article '‘An English monstrosity’? Evolution and reception of Manx orthography' (2020) which is available online. - I don't think the word 'traditional' makes sense here at all, though I think I know what you are trying to say. As I mentioned earlier, the orthographic conventions of Gaelic in Ireland and Scotland never really applied to Manx and the existing literary canon from C17th onwards is the only one there is. Manx speakers are proud of their island's unique heritage. This orthography is the only one Manx has ever used and has been using it exclusively for hundreds of years - in what way is that not traditional? If Manx orthography as it is now is not 'traditional', then what do you suggest is? Manx speakers - the people actually using the language - seem to be fairly content with their orthography as it is. - 'recognisable by any account', I'm not really sure what you mean here. If you mean to say that it is not easily readable for an Irish/SG speaker then that's just not really true. It's not *familiar*, no, but with a bit of practice it is not difficult for a speaker of either other variety to learn to read Manx to a decent level. On another note, it is worth mentioning that non-Gaelic orthographies (that is, spellings and writing not directly derived from the Old Gaelic literary tradition) have been used across the Gaelic world for many centuries. For example, a lot of Gaelic writing in Ireland from the 18th and 19th centuries is instructional religious material such as collections of sermons or catechisms which employ 'a non-Gaelic orthography'. Examples are the 1722 'Rathlin Catechism' or the sermons of John Heely (1759-1831). By this point, Gaelic literacy in Ireland at least was dwindling/restricted to a literary elite and this material was being written to educate and evangelise people so creating a new and more accessible orthography made sense to those writing. Further, I believe that *all* of the written material in Gaelic from a large part of Scotland (roughly the eastern half?) is written in a non-Gaelic orthography and the Gaelic orthography was never prominent in this area until I would guess late 19th century with the revival. This large body of literature constitutes a great part of the linguistic, cultural and religious heritage (of all sects) of the Gaelic world and should not be forgotten or dismissed because it is not 'satisfactorily Gaelic'. (if I were to be pedantic, I could even argue that actually a Gaelic orthography is untraditional in much of Scotland and the Isle of Man as it was never historically used there :P )

What's the basilisk for Western slavic? Cannot associate it with anything, a griffon could stand for pomeranians.

Totally change three language systems actively used but three populations forcing them to relearn what works perfectly well for them. Why? So it looks "neat" to some colonial? Yeah, hard pass.

So this spelling is very similar to what Scottish Gaelic already uses

As a native Gael of Ireland, we should all just go back to speaking Old Gaelic. A note, also, Ogam was used to write Primitive Gaelic, not Old Gaelic.

Germanic next? Afrikaans is slowly turning tonal so it'd be interesting how that turns out

I appreciate your efforts (and first video was about Gaelic languages proposal, which was kind of useful to understand spelling and phonological phenomenon there), but thanks, no thanks. We Belarusians already struggled a lot with attempt of intrusion in our spelling (narkomaŭka vs taraškievica) with attempt to make our spelling closing to Russian (and etymologicalization will lead to similar results) that not so many existing carriers starting to lose sibilation assimilation (e.g. it is spelt "lodačcy" in narkamaŭka, but should be pronounces "lodaccy", or "kupaješsia" -> "kupajeśsia"), so please no. And don't you think being involved in topic of languages which you don't know, but which have very difficult and traumatized relations between each other because of precursor (and current) imperialism and linguacid, as at very best naive or even more like cultural mentoring??? We ourselves decide how to write and pronounce our languages, thanks. If you interested in liguistics better adopt just simple descriptive approach of "rozum/razum" channel where he just describes internal reality of individual Slavic languages and show case the different history of evolution from common source.

Rus' 🇺🇦🔱

07:49 Isn't what's really being assumed here -English- pronunciation, not "basic"?

MAKE ENGLAND AND BRITAIN WELSH AND CORNISH AGAIN!! 👏🏼🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿

"South" Slavic group doesn't exist. it's "more or less" geographical definiton. Slovenes (Caranthanians) are West Slavs by it's origins. Today definiton of Slavs is not the same as in 6. century. Bulgarians are Slavicized Bulgars. I am "South" Slav.

The fact that you developed glagolotic is impressive. Not many slavs know much about it.

Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) languages when?