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.
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!
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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"
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."
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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 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!
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!
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.
Thank you for this. I study language obsessively and this is quite concise for the amount of information that it contains. Great lesson, Thank You! P.S. I am buying that Davis book tomorrow. Thanks again!💯
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
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.
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.
Can I recommend Rob look at, and maybe video, Ross Broadstock's "Cymroglyphics", on the research implying Egyptian heiroglyphics actually stood for 'sounds' being a consonant AND a vowel, explaining both the excess of heiroglyphs over alphabet letters, and the apparent absence of vowels from the writing. Also explains some of the 'naked letters'.
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
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.
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.
In NZ, there's a "meme"/cultural event, where a celebrity on wheel of fortune asked for "O for Awesome" (some claim is was O for Orson or something). But clearly, he knew the history of the letter A and, reading between the lines, was asking for O for A which is for Ox.
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!
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
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."
Important to note is also that it wasn't the Egyptians themselves really that started using the hieroglyphs as an "alphabet". And that the same thing happened multiple times over the world: - First, a people start using pictograms to represent entire words and concepts - A second people with a different language comes along, and adopts the pictograms as a vowel writing system - And finally, a third people/language comes along, adopting the vowel system to now represent individual sounds.
Nonsense! The demotic script is there for all to see. What is it with you guys? We all know there’s only one great ancient civilisation but because it’s in Africa, someone always feels the need to post these caveats.
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
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.
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
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 ❤🙏🇪🇬
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.
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!
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.
Well done! Aleph and Be(i)t i knew but i thought some 20 others equally had their meaning in Phoenician. You might also wish to expand a bit on the Greek and their second son kyrillic in a sequel?
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 been saying the same for Latinamerican Spanish. We can drop 7 letters C, H, Q, V, W, X and Z; with the addition of Ç for the /tʃ/ sound (or using C for this sound), and using G only for the /g/ sound. Simplifying spelling and bringing our alphabet down to 21 letters.
Note: This is basically a short summerization. You could have shown - and explained - the tranformation for every one with much more detail. (Like: why/when did they get mirrored or turned?) Also there could be more info about the (conflicting) pronounciation of some of the letters, for example "X" has a rough "CH" sound in some languages. And let's not forget the age old question "Who decided the *order* of the letters and why?" But this all would quickly take up more than half an hour - or more - and there are many videos about _The full history of our alphabet_ already...
@@RobWords I have never been able to find any explanation for Irish names. Presumably the first people writing with the Latin alphabet in Ireland were largely writing Latin and then thinking they could write Irish. So how did they decide to spell certain names Niamh or Siobhan? And so forth?
The biggest reason from inconsistent pronunciation seems to be borrowing letters for different sounds than the originally represented, or borrowing sounds without actually including the letter that made them. English "gh" is a combination of both, though it was less "borrowed" and more just "evolved over time." "ph" and hard "ch" are Latin ways of writing φ and χ, which are the time did sound like that, but φ's pronunciation has since changed, which seems to have gotten back-ported to "ph" despite no longer sounding anything like [pʰ]. And then there's the Great Vowel Shift. That time when English rotated its vowels: A -> E -> I -> A, which wrecks hell on trying to spell things φonetically since this rotation only applied to the "long" diφθongs, but they could still become their old forms as monoφθongs depending on stress.
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! ❤❤
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.
This is so interesting. This shows me how little I know but also what an adventure it is to widen ones knowledge. Thank you, this is totally interesting
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
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.
Fantastic video as usual, I just have a couple nitpicks (also as usual): 1:54 it's not really true that the phonetic use of hieroglyphs (not "hieroglyphics" btw) was “informal,” but rather it was part of the standard way of writing ancient Egyptian (insofar as it was standardized at all, as the spellings of words varied a lot over time, from inscription to inscription, and even sometimes within the same inscription). There were basically three ways of using hieroglyphs: (a) logograms, where the ‘eye’ symbol simply stood for the word ‘eye’ and so on, (b) phonetic representation, where a symbol would stand for an individual sound (uniliteral), two sequential sounds (biliteral), or three sequential sounds (triliteral), and (c) determiners, which came at the end of most words and gave some indication as to what kind of word it was that was intended (e.g. maybe it’s a kind of bird, or some deity, or a person, etc.) as the writing system was quite complex and so determiners were needed to clear up any potential ambiguities that might crop up. All three ways of using hieroglyphs are found in virtually every single inscription, but of these three logograms were in fact the least common, at least by the time the written language was semi-standardized in its Middle Egyptian form. 4:55 I think in your discussion of the letter E you sort of missed an opportunity to talk about the broader point about the transition from “abjad” (consonantal alphabet, i.e. with no vowels) into a fully-fledged alphabet, which happened when the Greeks adapted it from the Phoenicians. Initially the Canaanite (and then its direct descendant Phoenician) alphabet was purely consonantal, with no graphic representation for vowels, which made sense for a Semitic language where the consonants do most of the heavy lifting in terms of differentiating words from each other (this is because Semitic languages have what is called "templatic" or "root-and-pattern" morphology, which is a bit too complex to go into here but the Wikipedia article explains it quite well). Moreover, Semitic languages usually have quite a lot of “guttural” sounds towards the back of the vocal tract, specifically glottal, pharyngeal and uvular sounds, which tend to be less common in other language families, including Indo-European of which Greek is a member. And so when the ancient Greeks encountered the Phoenician alphabet, they faced two problems-(a) vowels are much more important in Greek in terms of differentiating words from each other, and yet this fancy new alphabet didn’t have any vowels, and (b) the Greeks didn’t quite know what to do with all of these difficult guttural letters, which stood for sounds that they simply didn’t have in their language. And so they managed to solve both problems at once by simply taking those guttural letters and re-purposing them as vowels. So for example the letter O, which in Phoenician was called ‘ayin and stood for a voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ (which can be quite difficult for people who don’t speak Semitic languages), they took this letter and gave it a totally new value, unrelated to how it sounded in Phoenician, that is the vowel sound /o/. (But even this more detailed account is incomplete as it doesn’t account for what are called ‘matres lectionis,’ namely I and U, which even Semitic languages eventually started taking advantage of in order to sneak in a few vowels into their own writing system, but I shall refrain from going further into depth on that).
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?)
@@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.
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!
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)
Is it weird that I (a Syrian) am able to understand the shapes and the names of letters 5000 years old? Like H Heitt is actually a wall in modern Arabic (Syrian dialect also) not a fence. A is Ox, the male cow not the female one. B for Beit is still the word for a house. C for Gamal is the word for Camel M Meim is Yam in Syrian which means water (sea, or big river). Zeit is oil still used even got into Spanish. Y ... Yad means a hand Q is strong Qqaff, which means a basket made of swamp sawgrass
No, it's not weird. Ox is technically a neutered bull (="male cow"), a wall is just a stronger fence. (Also, when I think of fence, the first material I think of is 'wood', for wall it's clay/stone. I'd guess the latter is more abundant in the drier Syria/Middle East) Different word in the same language with similar meaning exist for a reason - to express that nuance. Gamal sounds similar to camel (g-k is one, d-t, s-z are other "soft-hard" consonant pairs), it's not exactly indigenous to Europe, so there's no pressure to change the word too much. I think the Arabic alphabet is closer to its roots than the Latin, so it'd be interesting to see a similar research on it (Maybe there is, I'm just too European to understand xD also I have no idea how much the usage of the Arabic alphabet differs between countries that are using it.)
Same as a Hebrew speaker: Alef = aluf (meaning a head of a unit, not sure how that came from ox) Bet= bayit, meaning house Gimel = Gamal, camel (the English word is just a borrowing from Semitic) Daleth = delet, meaning door Vav (the ancestor of V) is the same word for hook in modern Hebrew Zayin = penis in modern Hebrew Heth = mark/sin (because you’re missing the mark, at least that’s what I’ve been told) in modern Hebrew Yud, ancestor of Y; yad is hand in Hebrew and Arabic Khaf, like K; kaph is the palm of a hand in modern Hebrew Mem, ancestor of ‘M’ in English; ‘Mayim’ is water in Hebrew Lamed, ancestor of L; if it’s an ox-goad that makes sense, as it’s used in an instructional manner, and the word for ’to teach’ in Hebrew is le-lamed ‘Ayin, ancestor of O; Ayin literally means eye in Hebrew (and ‘ayn is Arabic) There are many more obvious ones like peh, ancestor of P; “peh” means mouth in Hebrew Etc.
Alef and Bet are the first two letters of the HEBREW language. Which is where most language comes from. The Aleph is and Ox and Bet is a house. The the AlephBet or alphabet means house of Ox
This video was so interesting. As a native Spanish speaker, I just realized why Y in Spanish is “I griega” I never knew how it was spelled or that they were saying Greece I. Wow.
Rob, thank you for teaching us linguistics here on RUclips. 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!
That was fascinating Rob. If you haven't done one, I would love you to produce a video about our use of the the word 'up'. We use it all the time without thinking. I mean, why do we 'open up' but also 'shut up'? Just to name two of its opposing uses.
The problem here is that in the examples you give, "up" isn't a word on its own. It's what linguists call a two-word verb (or a phrasal verb). Think of the sentence, "He threw up," which means "He vomited." That is an example of a two-word verb. It's completely different from, "He threw the ball up into the air," where "threw" and "up are two different words. Ask anyone who has learned English as a foreign language. Two-word verbs are the bane of every foreign student of English.
@@bigscarysteve That doesn't Anat the question asked, but does make it more precise. Now we can instead ask "Why does English have these two-word verbs?" With do-support, it's commonly believed to come from the Celtic languages, but "_ up" is much less widely talked about from what I can tell.
It is also worth showing for every letter that the name of each letter was originally a Canaanite word and the first sound of the word the sound of the letter. A= Aleph, B = Bayt house, D = Dalet door, K = Kaph hand palm, M = Maym water, N = Nun snake, P = Peh mouth, Q = Quph needle head, T = tav sign. There are more but they are less clear in Latin letters.
I love how you bring in the French, German and Spanish evolutions of the letters. Can you do something that shows how the Welsh alphabet (as we currently know it) also evolved, complete with its DD, CH and NG (each of which is considered a single letter)?
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 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.
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 😁
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!
3:37 Phoenicians are canaanites so pretty much the same people, its just that Phoenicians in particular used to a lot of trade (they are the first people to do colonisation), so all of the other alphabets (Aramaic, Greek,...) come from Phoenician
Just a note, the 26 letters you show are not "the" alphabet, but the English alphabet. Latin for example was written with less letters, Italian has only 21 letters (missing XYWJK, used only for foreign words, except J that was used in the past with meaning of consonantic I). Other languages based on Latin alphabet have other letters not present in English, like double S in German ß - so German has both doubleS and doubleV (ß,W). Polish has ŻŁ... and so on. Regards
Awesome topic! thank you for posting... funny you are talking 'outside' but it makes it so much better for some reason lol... Perhaps you can add another video for those special characters in some languages like Spanish for Ñ, á, and European ones...æ, ƒ, ¥, Ü, etc? Gracias!
My understanding of the early Semitic Aleph was chosen specifically because it's a head, so it makes sense to have it at the "head" of the aleph-bet. The earliest Bet I am aware of is a horizontal line with a triangle, so resembling a tent on the ground, perhaps more resembling an actual house at the time than a square. The great thing about this system was that when you combine letters phonetically, you also connect their meaning. Connecting A and B yields "ab," which means "head of the house," and this is the word "father" in early Hebrew. The 5th letter of this early aleph-bet was He, which looked like a window lattice and could mean breath or wind, but when placed in the middle of a word, it meant "the heart of ..." whatever that word was, so when you place it between the Aleph and the Bet, the resulting word is AHB, pronounced aw-hab, and means "love." This is an beautifully poetic way to construct words, and I think it's possible "paleo-hebrew" / aramaic may have been the first functional alphabet. See the work of Doug Petrovich for a more extensive discussion on how a Hebrew (literally, descendant of someone named Eber) named Joseph, who was schooled in the court / palace of Egypt may have co-opted select hieroglyphs to form 22 letters of what we know as paleo-Hebrew, or that early Semetic language in Canaan you keep speaking of. A stele was found some years ago in the Sinai peninsula with hieroglyphs that don't make sense if read has hieroglyphs, but if each glyph is changed to the paleo-Hebrew letter it most-closely resembles, it DOES make sense in Hebrew! So in it's earliest form, actual hieroglyphs were used, but you can see the similarities of those specific glyphs to the paleo-Hebrew letters. Paleo-Hebrew was how the Hebrews wrote before Jerusalem was destroyed and the people exiled to Babylon. After that point, the letters changed into a form very similar to the Hebrew letters of today. The idea that it may have been formed from hieroglyphs is backed up by your point that the early Semitic letters Aleph & Bet resemble a couple hieroglyphic concepts.
Love the video!! it's really fascinating how many of the hyroglyphs are still pronounced and mean the same in modern day levantene arabic. For example Bet=بيت=house Y=يا=hey (calling article) M=يم=sea R=رأس=head I=يد=hand Het=حيط=wall Do you know any more letters?
Yep both Levantine Arabic and Hebrew share many similarities with Phoenician, so knowing either provides many insights into the construction of the Latin alphabet.
Excellent thank you ! I did same kind of work with the names of the musical notes, starting in early renaissance (modal music with solmization, hexachords), through the baroque period and up to 19e cent. and it"s also full of surprises and fascinating. It's always good to recall that the knowledge we use today, like metric system, has not been granted to us like that but is the result of considerable evolution, changes, and so many dogmatic fights !
Your videos are always interesting and educational. Would you do a video on the days of the week? I'm curious to know if the order or names have changed throughout history.
(14:50) "zed" is better than "zee" because it helps those who don't have an S/Z distinction, like me. When people say "zee", I can't tell if it's C or Z, because both sounds like "see" to me. But if you say "zed", then even if I hear it as "sed", there's no question of what letter you're talking about. This is quite annoying on spoken American computer tutorials because I don't know if they said the shortcut was "Alt+C" or "Alt+Z", they sound the same to me.
The worst part is people who want to be more "international", by using the American name "zee". Which means they're less international because now they're using a letter name that is more ambiguous internationally. It's the equivalent of a French person deciding to use Imperial units to be more international over using metric units.
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
R in hebrew, ר - pronounced: reish. Head in hebrew is pronounced: rosh. In general, if you want to more easily understand the origin of the letters, it is recommended to also look at the Hebrew language
@@byatch_ Actually he didn't even mention Anciet Hebrew. Lots of language names were thrown around, but the word Hebrew seems to have been specifically avoided, considering the outsized influence of Ancient Hebrew texts on European cultures and languages.
@@byatch_Hebrew itself is a daughter language from Aramaic. Also Phoenician the one mentioned. It makes sense to mention historically existing civilisations rather than religiously imagined ones:)
Very interesting to observe is that modern hebrew uses almost the same alphabet (named alef bet) as the proto canaanite, even to the name of the letters and so kept the connection to the original shapes or glyphs, but were morphed in different ways which resulted in different characters. For example, the eights letter in the Hebrew alphabet is het ח that looks somewhat similar to h, both came from an earlier het that looked like a fence. UsefulCharts have a great video (and chart) about it over in his channel.
the modern Hebrew alpha bet changed to the Chaldian/Babylonian alpha bet after the Babylonian exile of about 590 BC. Then names stayed the same but the shapes changed. Today it is called square Hebrew since most of the letters are square shaped א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ך ל מ ם נ ן ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת consonants 22
@@gkaplan443 I know it's called the square script. But when I look at it only 6 letters seem square to me: בדהחת And of course: ם That is simply a square.
Very informative, thank you. Kindly allow me to add the following comments: The Epsilon doesn’t mean “naked” E, but “tall” E. Also Q seems to come not just from that O with the unreasonable line in the middle. It comes from Φ, the Greek letter “Fi”. B, common between the Greek and Latin alphabet hence English, is not pronounced as Beta, but “Vita”. What I want to say is that pronunciation has also changed as a matter of selectivity for linguistic purposes, no matter the original sounds.
I like how alphabets around the world are differently shaped, compare the detailed mandarin symbols to the more flowing Arabic, some of my favourite looking are Amharic, Burmese, Hebrew, Khmer
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.
We should also take into account that the Phoenician alfabet was made for their language, which had sounds we don't have anymore, but the Arabic languages still have. One letter is called Ayin, which became our letter O, but is a glottal sound. The letter is also in the Hebrew alphabet, but in Hebrew they simply pronounce it as A. So Canaan should either be Cana'an (with a glottal stop) or the glottal sound. If you want to know how that sounds look for Ayin and look for people who speak an Arabic language. There are also a few phoenician letters who didn't make it into the Latin Alphabet. One of them still exists in Greek and another one in Russian. ruclips.net/video/Y0ro6b50-Lk/видео.html
Some people actually assume that the name "zee" was just made so that it rhymes in the alphabet song, even though they actually had the Futhorc/Fuþorc. It's actually talked about in the video of the lost letters of the alphabet. Instead of A, B, C, D, E, F it's F, U, Þ, O, R, C.
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?
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.
ruclips.net/video/JEecFAJVRFU/видео.html
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?
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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."
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!
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) 🤨
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."
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.
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.
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
ruclips.net/video/Vud0sD7X4jA/видео.html
Apparently good enough to get him a job as a host in the German news channel DW.
He's fantastic!
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
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!
What a great teacher. Thankyou for this .
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.
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 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!
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!
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.
ruclips.net/video/JEecFAJVRFU/видео.html
Thank you for this. I study language obsessively and this is quite concise for the amount of information that it contains. Great lesson, Thank You! P.S. I am buying that Davis book tomorrow. Thanks again!💯
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.
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.
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
Can I recommend Rob look at, and maybe video, Ross Broadstock's "Cymroglyphics", on the research implying Egyptian heiroglyphics actually stood for 'sounds' being a consonant AND a vowel, explaining both the excess of heiroglyphs over alphabet letters, and the apparent absence of vowels from the writing. Also explains some of the 'naked letters'.
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
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.
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.
In NZ, there's a "meme"/cultural event, where a celebrity on wheel of fortune asked for "O for Awesome" (some claim is was O for Orson or something). But clearly, he knew the history of the letter A and, reading between the lines, was asking for O for A which is for Ox.
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!
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
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."
Important to note is also that it wasn't the Egyptians themselves really that started using the hieroglyphs as an "alphabet". And that the same thing happened multiple times over the world:
- First, a people start using pictograms to represent entire words and concepts
- A second people with a different language comes along, and adopts the pictograms as a vowel writing system
- And finally, a third people/language comes along, adopting the vowel system to now represent individual sounds.
Nonsense! The demotic script is there for all to see. What is it with you guys?
We all know there’s only one great ancient civilisation but because it’s in Africa, someone always feels the need to post these caveats.
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
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 .
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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Well done!
Aleph and Be(i)t i knew but i thought some 20 others equally had their meaning in Phoenician.
You might also wish to expand a bit on the Greek and their second son kyrillic in a sequel?
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
Your love of languages shines through, always learn something fascinating on this channel.
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 been saying the same for Latinamerican Spanish. We can drop 7 letters C, H, Q, V, W, X and Z; with the addition of Ç for the /tʃ/ sound (or using C for this sound), and using G only for the /g/ sound. Simplifying spelling and bringing our alphabet down to 21 letters.
C: caña = kaña, cena = sena
CH: cuchara = kuçara
G: enjuague = enjuage, energía = enerjía
H: huerto = uerto
Ll: llave = yabe
Q: queso = keso
V: vivir = bibir
We don't have words with W.
X: experimento = esperimento
Z: zapato = sapato
Note: This is basically a short summerization. You could have shown - and explained - the tranformation for every one with much more detail. (Like: why/when did they get mirrored or turned?) Also there could be more info about the (conflicting) pronounciation of some of the letters, for example "X" has a rough "CH" sound in some languages.
And let's not forget the age old question "Who decided the *order* of the letters and why?"
But this all would quickly take up more than half an hour - or more - and there are many videos about _The full history of our alphabet_ already...
Indeed, there is so much more say on the subject.
That's where jan Misali will eventually come in! :p
@@RobWords I have never been able to find any explanation for Irish names. Presumably the first people writing with the Latin alphabet in Ireland were largely writing Latin and then thinking they could write Irish. So how did they decide to spell certain names Niamh or Siobhan? And so forth?
Try Useful Charts' video explanation.
The biggest reason from inconsistent pronunciation seems to be borrowing letters for different sounds than the originally represented, or borrowing sounds without actually including the letter that made them. English "gh" is a combination of both, though it was less "borrowed" and more just "evolved over time." "ph" and hard "ch" are Latin ways of writing φ and χ, which are the time did sound like that, but φ's pronunciation has since changed, which seems to have gotten back-ported to "ph" despite no longer sounding anything like [pʰ].
And then there's the Great Vowel Shift. That time when English rotated its vowels: A -> E -> I -> A, which wrecks hell on trying to spell things φonetically since this rotation only applied to the "long" diφθongs, but they could still become their old forms as monoφθongs depending on stress.
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! ❤❤
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!
This is so interesting. This shows me how little I know but also what an adventure it is to widen ones knowledge. Thank you, this is totally interesting
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
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.
For R, the Hebrew equivalent ‘rosh’ (ר) spelled out in Hebrew means head. The language is pictographic which is pretty neat
There is something cognitively comforting about this... the apparent chaos of the years brought to making sense. Love this video.
Fantastic video as usual, I just have a couple nitpicks (also as usual):
1:54 it's not really true that the phonetic use of hieroglyphs (not "hieroglyphics" btw) was “informal,” but rather it was part of the standard way of writing ancient Egyptian (insofar as it was standardized at all, as the spellings of words varied a lot over time, from inscription to inscription, and even sometimes within the same inscription). There were basically three ways of using hieroglyphs: (a) logograms, where the ‘eye’ symbol simply stood for the word ‘eye’ and so on, (b) phonetic representation, where a symbol would stand for an individual sound (uniliteral), two sequential sounds (biliteral), or three sequential sounds (triliteral), and (c) determiners, which came at the end of most words and gave some indication as to what kind of word it was that was intended (e.g. maybe it’s a kind of bird, or some deity, or a person, etc.) as the writing system was quite complex and so determiners were needed to clear up any potential ambiguities that might crop up. All three ways of using hieroglyphs are found in virtually every single inscription, but of these three logograms were in fact the least common, at least by the time the written language was semi-standardized in its Middle Egyptian form.
4:55 I think in your discussion of the letter E you sort of missed an opportunity to talk about the broader point about the transition from “abjad” (consonantal alphabet, i.e. with no vowels) into a fully-fledged alphabet, which happened when the Greeks adapted it from the Phoenicians. Initially the Canaanite (and then its direct descendant Phoenician) alphabet was purely consonantal, with no graphic representation for vowels, which made sense for a Semitic language where the consonants do most of the heavy lifting in terms of differentiating words from each other (this is because Semitic languages have what is called "templatic" or "root-and-pattern" morphology, which is a bit too complex to go into here but the Wikipedia article explains it quite well). Moreover, Semitic languages usually have quite a lot of “guttural” sounds towards the back of the vocal tract, specifically glottal, pharyngeal and uvular sounds, which tend to be less common in other language families, including Indo-European of which Greek is a member. And so when the ancient Greeks encountered the Phoenician alphabet, they faced two problems-(a) vowels are much more important in Greek in terms of differentiating words from each other, and yet this fancy new alphabet didn’t have any vowels, and (b) the Greeks didn’t quite know what to do with all of these difficult guttural letters, which stood for sounds that they simply didn’t have in their language. And so they managed to solve both problems at once by simply taking those guttural letters and re-purposing them as vowels. So for example the letter O, which in Phoenician was called ‘ayin and stood for a voiced pharyngeal fricative /ʕ/ (which can be quite difficult for people who don’t speak Semitic languages), they took this letter and gave it a totally new value, unrelated to how it sounded in Phoenician, that is the vowel sound /o/. (But even this more detailed account is incomplete as it doesn’t account for what are called ‘matres lectionis,’ namely I and U, which even Semitic languages eventually started taking advantage of in order to sneak in a few vowels into their own writing system, but I shall refrain from going further into depth on that).
This is now one of my favorite videos on RUclips. Thank you for your work and humor! 😊
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?)
absolutely not needed knowledge in my life but man loved it
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.
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!
greeting from Egypt, wonderful effort .. well done .
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.
Is it weird that I (a Syrian) am able to understand the shapes and the names of letters 5000 years old?
Like H Heitt is actually a wall in modern Arabic (Syrian dialect also) not a fence.
A is Ox, the male cow not the female one.
B for Beit is still the word for a house.
C for Gamal is the word for Camel
M Meim is Yam in Syrian which means water (sea, or big river).
Zeit is oil still used even got into Spanish.
Y ... Yad means a hand
Q is strong Qqaff, which means a basket made of swamp sawgrass
And the Portuguese word for oil is “azeite”. Not much change there.
awesome comment thank you
No, it is not weird.
No, it's not weird.
Ox is technically a neutered bull (="male cow"), a wall is just a stronger fence. (Also, when I think of fence, the first material I think of is 'wood', for wall it's clay/stone. I'd guess the latter is more abundant in the drier Syria/Middle East) Different word in the same language with similar meaning exist for a reason - to express that nuance.
Gamal sounds similar to camel (g-k is one, d-t, s-z are other "soft-hard" consonant pairs), it's not exactly indigenous to Europe, so there's no pressure to change the word too much.
I think the Arabic alphabet is closer to its roots than the Latin, so it'd be interesting to see a similar research on it (Maybe there is, I'm just too European to understand xD also I have no idea how much the usage of the Arabic alphabet differs between countries that are using it.)
Same as a Hebrew speaker:
Alef = aluf (meaning a head of a unit, not sure how that came from ox)
Bet= bayit, meaning house
Gimel = Gamal, camel (the English word is just a borrowing from Semitic)
Daleth = delet, meaning door
Vav (the ancestor of V) is the same word for hook in modern Hebrew
Zayin = penis in modern Hebrew
Heth = mark/sin (because you’re missing the mark, at least that’s what I’ve been told) in modern Hebrew
Yud, ancestor of Y; yad is hand in Hebrew and Arabic
Khaf, like K; kaph is the palm of a hand in modern Hebrew
Mem, ancestor of ‘M’ in English; ‘Mayim’ is water in Hebrew
Lamed, ancestor of L; if it’s an ox-goad that makes sense, as it’s used in an instructional manner, and the word for ’to teach’ in Hebrew is le-lamed
‘Ayin, ancestor of O; Ayin literally means eye in Hebrew (and ‘ayn is Arabic)
There are many more obvious ones like peh, ancestor of P; “peh” means mouth in Hebrew
Etc.
Alef and Bet are the first two letters of the HEBREW language.
Which is where most language comes from.
The Aleph is and Ox and Bet is a house.
The the AlephBet or alphabet means house of Ox
This video was so interesting. As a native Spanish speaker, I just realized why Y in Spanish is “I griega” I never knew how it was spelled or that they were saying Greece I. Wow.
Rob, thank you for teaching us linguistics here on RUclips. 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!
9:10 Man... I was always puzzled, why in Polish we call letter 'y" as "igrek" 😆
Same
Same in Romanian 🙂 "y" is "igrec"
Also Spanish 'i griega', different from i.
@@GillianMStarlight Greek I. Lol
That was fascinating Rob. If you haven't done one, I would love you to produce a video about our use of the the word 'up'. We use it all the time without thinking. I mean, why do we 'open up' but also 'shut up'? Just to name two of its opposing uses.
He tried to record that exact video but fucked it up.
That’s a good question, might have to look it up
Yeah, what's uo with that?
The problem here is that in the examples you give, "up" isn't a word on its own. It's what linguists call a two-word verb (or a phrasal verb). Think of the sentence, "He threw up," which means "He vomited." That is an example of a two-word verb. It's completely different from, "He threw the ball up into the air," where "threw" and "up are two different words. Ask anyone who has learned English as a foreign language. Two-word verbs are the bane of every foreign student of English.
@@bigscarysteve That doesn't Anat the question asked, but does make it more precise. Now we can instead ask "Why does English have these two-word verbs?" With do-support, it's commonly believed to come from the Celtic languages, but "_ up" is much less widely talked about from what I can tell.
It is also worth showing for every letter that the name of each letter was originally a Canaanite word and the first sound of the word the sound of the letter. A= Aleph, B = Bayt house, D = Dalet door, K = Kaph hand palm, M = Maym water, N = Nun snake, P = Peh mouth, Q = Quph needle head, T = tav sign. There are more but they are less clear in Latin letters.
I love how you bring in the French, German and Spanish evolutions of the letters.
Can you do something that shows how the Welsh alphabet (as we currently know it) also evolved, complete with its DD, CH and NG (each of which is considered a single letter)?
Don't forget FF and best of all the LL!
@@gagatube That's fforget, bach ;-)
BritainsHiddenHistory Ross Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
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 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.
As an Egyptian I had no idea that some Arabic and English alphabet were originated from hieroglyphics that’s dope
That's because you're an Arab lol
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
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? 🤔
@@Heavy-metaaal 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 ^_^
3:37 Phoenicians are canaanites so pretty much the same people, its just that Phoenicians in particular used to a lot of trade (they are the first people to do colonisation), so all of the other alphabets (Aramaic, Greek,...) come from Phoenician
Just a note, the 26 letters you show are not "the" alphabet, but the English alphabet. Latin for example was written with less letters, Italian has only 21 letters (missing XYWJK, used only for foreign words, except J that was used in the past with meaning of consonantic I). Other languages based on Latin alphabet have other letters not present in English, like double S in German ß - so German has both doubleS and doubleV (ß,W). Polish has ŻŁ... and so on.
Regards
Awesome topic! thank you for posting... funny you are talking 'outside' but it makes it so much better for some reason lol... Perhaps you can add another video for those special characters in some languages like Spanish for Ñ, á, and European ones...æ, ƒ, ¥, Ü, etc? Gracias!
My understanding of the early Semitic Aleph was chosen specifically because it's a head, so it makes sense to have it at the "head" of the aleph-bet. The earliest Bet I am aware of is a horizontal line with a triangle, so resembling a tent on the ground, perhaps more resembling an actual house at the time than a square. The great thing about this system was that when you combine letters phonetically, you also connect their meaning. Connecting A and B yields "ab," which means "head of the house," and this is the word "father" in early Hebrew. The 5th letter of this early aleph-bet was He, which looked like a window lattice and could mean breath or wind, but when placed in the middle of a word, it meant "the heart of ..." whatever that word was, so when you place it between the Aleph and the Bet, the resulting word is AHB, pronounced aw-hab, and means "love." This is an beautifully poetic way to construct words, and I think it's possible "paleo-hebrew" / aramaic may have been the first functional alphabet.
See the work of Doug Petrovich for a more extensive discussion on how a Hebrew (literally, descendant of someone named Eber) named Joseph, who was schooled in the court / palace of Egypt may have co-opted select hieroglyphs to form 22 letters of what we know as paleo-Hebrew, or that early Semetic language in Canaan you keep speaking of. A stele was found some years ago in the Sinai peninsula with hieroglyphs that don't make sense if read has hieroglyphs, but if each glyph is changed to the paleo-Hebrew letter it most-closely resembles, it DOES make sense in Hebrew! So in it's earliest form, actual hieroglyphs were used, but you can see the similarities of those specific glyphs to the paleo-Hebrew letters. Paleo-Hebrew was how the Hebrews wrote before Jerusalem was destroyed and the people exiled to Babylon. After that point, the letters changed into a form very similar to the Hebrew letters of today. The idea that it may have been formed from hieroglyphs is backed up by your point that the early Semitic letters Aleph & Bet resemble a couple hieroglyphic concepts.
Love the video!!
it's really fascinating how many of the hyroglyphs are still pronounced and mean the same in modern day levantene arabic. For example
Bet=بيت=house
Y=يا=hey (calling article)
M=يم=sea
R=رأس=head
I=يد=hand
Het=حيط=wall
Do you know any more letters?
Yep both Levantine Arabic and Hebrew share many similarities with Phoenician, so knowing either provides many insights into the construction of the Latin alphabet.
Des explications claires pour un sujet vraiment étonnant. Thank you.
Excellent thank you ! I did same kind of work with the names of the musical notes, starting in early renaissance (modal music with solmization, hexachords), through the baroque period and up to 19e cent. and it"s also full of surprises and fascinating. It's always good to recall that the knowledge we use today, like metric system, has not been granted to us like that but is the result of considerable evolution, changes, and so many dogmatic fights !
Your videos are always interesting and educational. Would you do a video on the days of the week? I'm curious to know if the order or names have changed throughout history.
I can give you a hint. October means 8th month. And December means 10th month
(14:50) "zed" is better than "zee" because it helps those who don't have an S/Z distinction, like me. When people say "zee", I can't tell if it's C or Z, because both sounds like "see" to me. But if you say "zed", then even if I hear it as "sed", there's no question of what letter you're talking about. This is quite annoying on spoken American computer tutorials because I don't know if they said the shortcut was "Alt+C" or "Alt+Z", they sound the same to me.
The worst part is people who want to be more "international", by using the American name "zee". Which means they're less international because now they're using a letter name that is more ambiguous internationally. It's the equivalent of a French person deciding to use Imperial units to be more international over using metric units.
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
R in hebrew, ר - pronounced: reish. Head in hebrew is pronounced: rosh.
In general, if you want to more easily understand the origin of the letters, it is recommended to also look at the Hebrew language
ikr, I was kinda surprised he didnt even mention modern Hebrew which still indicates the connection between the letter and its origin
@@byatch_ Actually he didn't even mention Anciet Hebrew. Lots of language names were thrown around, but the word Hebrew seems to have been specifically avoided, considering the outsized influence of Ancient Hebrew texts on European cultures and languages.
@@byatch_Hebrew itself is a daughter language from Aramaic. Also Phoenician the one mentioned. It makes sense to mention historically existing civilisations rather than religiously imagined ones:)
Very interesting to observe is that modern hebrew uses almost the same alphabet (named alef bet) as the proto canaanite, even to the name of the letters and so kept the connection to the original shapes or glyphs, but were morphed in different ways which resulted in different characters.
For example, the eights letter in the Hebrew alphabet is het ח that looks somewhat similar to h, both came from an earlier het that looked like a fence.
UsefulCharts have a great video (and chart) about it over in his channel.
the modern Hebrew alpha bet changed to the Chaldian/Babylonian alpha bet after the Babylonian exile of about 590 BC. Then names stayed the same but the shapes changed. Today it is called square Hebrew since most of the letters are square shaped א ב ג ד ה ו ז ח ט י כ ך ל מ ם נ ן ס ע פ צ ק ר ש ת consonants 22
@@gkaplan443 I know it's called the square script. But when I look at it only 6 letters seem square to me:
בדהחת
And of course:
ם
That is simply a square.
Cymroglyphics 01 Overview
Very informative, thank you. Kindly allow me to add the following comments:
The Epsilon doesn’t mean “naked” E, but “tall” E.
Also Q seems to come not just from that O with the unreasonable line in the middle. It comes from Φ, the Greek letter “Fi”.
B, common between the Greek and Latin alphabet hence English, is not pronounced as Beta, but “Vita”.
What I want to say is that pronunciation has also changed as a matter of selectivity for linguistic purposes, no matter the original sounds.
I like how alphabets around the world are differently shaped, compare the detailed mandarin symbols to the more flowing Arabic, some of my favourite looking are Amharic, Burmese, Hebrew, Khmer
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.
Cool!
Cool indeed
Yes
This is indescribably fascinating, thank you so much for making this
Интересно и познавательно. Благодарю вас.
We should also take into account that the Phoenician alfabet was made for their language, which had sounds we don't have anymore, but the Arabic languages still have. One letter is called Ayin, which became our letter O, but is a glottal sound. The letter is also in the Hebrew alphabet, but in Hebrew they simply pronounce it as A. So Canaan should either be Cana'an (with a glottal stop) or the glottal sound. If you want to know how that sounds look for Ayin and look for people who speak an Arabic language.
There are also a few phoenician letters who didn't make it into the Latin Alphabet. One of them still exists in Greek and another one in Russian.
ruclips.net/video/Y0ro6b50-Lk/видео.html
cna'an is prnounced with a glottal sound. the second "a" is actually an "ayn" which is infact the first letter in my name "Oded". first latter is Ayn
@@odedbasis4423 not the second a, but the a'a is the glottal sound, so KNON or to show that the O is a Ayin, you can write KN3N.
In hebrew it written כנען
Some people actually assume that the name "zee" was just made so that it rhymes in the alphabet song, even though they actually had the Futhorc/Fuþorc. It's actually talked about in the video of the lost letters of the alphabet. Instead of A, B, C, D, E, F it's F, U, Þ, O, R, C.