I had a nightmare last night where I made a conlang of "Simplified English" and removed the letter "C" so Jan Misali showed up at the foot of my bed and recited this video at me
Do remember that text at the time was commonly written on wax tablets or carved in stone, both of which are inherently tactile media. A blind man couldn’t read papyrus scrolls, but those were expensive, so primarily saved for long form media.
Where did this kids rumour start I'm so curious, everyone I've ever talked to where this subject came up has encountered the "when in doubt, choose c" bias in regards to multiple choice tests 😂
I love Xhosa's repurposing of c, q, and x for its 3 primary click consonants - /ǀ/, /ǃ/, and /ǁ/. They have other click consonants too, but they all fall under these 3 primary groups.
Also, the sound “kyuh” is predominantly represented with the letters “cu”. Cumulative, accuse, cure, cute, cube, etc. Sure you could replace it with “Ky” but it would give words like “Kyumulative”, which may also seem like it’s saying “Chi-yumulative” or “chi-umalative”. If we’re doing purely phonetic spelling, you get Kyoomuhluhtihv. Which looks like a Russian town name.
Conlang review: C has an unusually limited orthography compared to most conlangs, which makes it relatively easy for new conlang enthusiasts to learn. The alphabet is as follows: "c, C." The phonemic inventory is more diverse, consisting of "s, ch, sh, and k," depending on context.
C has a very strange orthography, using not only the letters of the English alphabet but also additional symbols such as +-/*=, which are also pronounced and serve as one letter abbreviations for mathematical expressions. The language is descended from English and reused English words like if, for, while and abbreviations of English words like int(eger), float (ing point number), (char)acter. It removes a lot of ambiguity from the English language by giving very specific definitions to these so called keywords. Interestingly, text modifiers like ();, and many more are essential to correct C syntax and give structure to what can often seem like a random collection of words and letters. The most interesting feature of the C language has to be the possibility to define your own words, allowing you to express extremely complicated things with just a letter, if you want to. In fact, text written in the c language are usually just one word (a lot of speakers use "main"), that is then defined to mean everything you want to say. This is a strange concept that has so far only been observed in the programming language family.
Just a note, when you showed how Polish used C, there was a mistake: Polish is actually /tɕi/, and the palatal phonemes in Polish are handled very much like a Romance language would handle them
Theoretically there exist rare borrowed words with ⟨ci⟩ pronounced as /t͡si/ for example (probably the most common instance of it) „cis” as in „tłuszcze cis”, „cispłciowy” and as a name of a musical note
Now I really want to see a conlang review of the C programming language. "The C Language's insistence that all nouns should be placed at the beginning of the paragraph has lead to no end of confusion"
@@tech6hutch Well thats the what most people do atleast... Within a company I worked for a few years back, we had an internal libary which always took the struct operating on as its last argument... At some point we decided as a team to rewrite that goddamn thing to be usuable without it breaking your brain every time... Atleast it was internally consistant...
I have spent 30 minutes of my life watching the history of the letter C... And I regret NOTHING! Seriously, your voice is so soothing that I didn't even feel time passing. Best thing is, I have learned something! (And thank you for dark mode, my eyes appreciate you)
He pretty much already covered the histories of F, V, U, and Y in his "w" video, and in this one, he pretty much already covered G. And unfortunately, a lot of letters are not as interesting as far as their histories are concerned. He could honestly cover all the remaining vowels in one video and include the history of J in it, and it probably would be less than 15 minutes.
I don't think a video about every letter is the way to go here, but I'm sure there are several more interesting "history of writing" stories to be told (heck, they even made a playlist for it!)
@@fikatrouvaille3670 Agreed, I was just saying one video per letter wouldn't be as interesting as people might think. If he does all the letters, but group them together in just, like, 2-3 short videos, that would be cool.
We probably need part 3, covering X which sounds like either 'ks' or 'z' Edit: Nevermind, maybe the letter J would be a better choice because it's pronounced so differently in other languages (Somehow the letter sounds like a Y in languages like German and Swedish and also sounds somewhat like H in Spanish)
X has at least 3 pronunciations: KS in Fix, GZ in Example, and Z in Xylophone. And J was originally just a shape variation, an I with a hook, so it makes perfect sense that it eventually came to stand for the sound of non-syllabic I, like our Y. That is how it is used in many languages today, including Latin. But some languages changed the Y sound into different sounds but kept the same letter, like the French, which is where we get our pronunciation of J.
I used to be one of those people who thought we should be getting rid of letters like c, q, z and others now I'm one of those people who's like we should be adding letters to distinguish the voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives.
How about using Albanian _dh_ to represent dhe voiced variant so more often used dhan dhe Greek _th_ ? It looks a bit strange, but it's nothing one can't get familiar with (widh?).
24:07 I really appreciate how you pointed out that the /oʊ/ vs /aʊ/ problem is not only more important than "fixing" C, but also found it important enough to put it at the beginning of the list. The "bow" problem has been bugging me for years. signed, Brendan Bow
I wondered why french had such a long name for Y (ygreck) when everything else was very similar to english and in both languages the letter names are very short, never knew it was actually being called "Greek I", neat!
7:12 he didn't like the letter "z" because when someone pronounces it his tongue would resemble the tongue of dead people. (I studied it in school) Romans at the time were very superstitious. Love from Roma!
Also thank you VERY much for not falling for the "primitive vs advanced" or "Pure vs degenerate" Also side note, this feel like how Carl Sagan went over human evolution "however this path does not lead to us"
End Lyrics: Letter C has folks saying it should be removed, that without it the alphabet would be improved. It’s a common complaint, that’s misguided at best. No you can’t just replace C with K and with S. (~No you can’t just replace C with K and with S~) You know S becomes voiced intervocalically, and suffixes preserve etymology. If it’s so inconsistent why focus on C? When the quote unquote “problem” is much worse with G? If you were to cut C, then what you’d have in store, is you’re left with more problems than you had before. If you’ve learned nothing else, just remember this: English spelling reforms break more than they can fix. (~English spelling reforms break more than they can fix~)
End Lyriks: Letter C has folks saying it should be removed, that without it the alphabet would be improved. It’s a kommon komplaint, that’s misguided at best. No you kan’t just replase sie with K and with S. (~No you kan’t just replase C with K and with S~) You know S bekomes voised intervokalikally, and suffixes preserve etymology. If it’s so inkonsistent why fokus on C? When the quote on quote “problem” is much worse with G? If you were to kut C, then what you’d have in store, is you’re left with more problems than you had before. If you’ve learned nothing else, just remember this: English spelling reforms break more than they kan fix. (~English spelling reforms break more than they kan fix~)
Simple answer: Because the "Ch" sound can't be expressed by any other letter or pair of letters. I've heard some people say the same thing about how "X" could be replaced by "Z," "Ex," "Cs," or "Ks." However, I think the most useful placement of the letter X is at the end of words like "tax" without making it look like a plural (tacs, taks, or tacks). Edit: Oh lord what have I done.
That's so cool to know that Y was originally called "I Grecca" (Greek I), because this is how is still called in my languages, Catalan and Spanish. I always wondered why the name
As an English speaker in Canada who had to learn French in grade school, I was always extremely confused about why 'Y' had an insane name like "eegrek." It sounded like some Star Trek species or something. "Greek I" makes so much sense.
Interesting side-note: the Cyrillic letter С looks exactly like the Latin letter C and also makes a /s/ sound (and it's even on the same place on the keyboard! infuriating Russians who accidentally use the wrong one) but it has its own very interesting history (the so-called "lunate sigma") and isn't even descended from gaml
I feel like this further informs my feeling that we should stop caring about when s and c are used in sertain words. Because as long as one kan understand what they're reading, it's fine.
I just recently started learning the C programming language. So I'm at the very very very beginner levels of learning. I've been watching a lot of videos about it. This video shows up in my recommendations. I click on it expecting it to be some breakdown of the history of the C language or something. I have to say that I'm happy I was wrong and found this video.
That was very very well done! The music throughout was amazing, both Patricia Taxxon's instrumental and when accompanied with Jules' vocals. I think I forgot that the video was about c and not proto-sinaitic and ancient egyptian, but very good. Found it to be well-structured, as more of a story than a lecture.
For Welsh, I've heard that the consistent spelling of /k/ as < c > was not so much a reflection of pre-palatalization Roman usage but a more recent convention as printing press types crafted for English or French didn't have enough K's to write "Kymru" in the way that seemed most logical at the time (that'd be, with a K) but they did have plenty of C's which would otherwise have been unused. If this story is indeed true (as Wikipedia seems to suggest), then Welsh would have likely used K's like Cornish (Kernewek) had they not ran into trouble with mobile types designed for a different language. Conversely, if Cornish had done better at the time printing was introduced, it's likely that Cornish printers would have run into the same problem, possibly coming up with the same solution Welsh printers did, giving us Cernewec instead of Kernewek.
Tbh, it is better if the Celtic languages influence all the Romance languages to use C exclusively for /k/ and get rid of both K and Q entirely from those languages.
I love that this video is well researched, concise, and provides necessary context for each given situation. A beautiful exploration of history; a beautiful perspective of modern language. I wish that every RUclipsr on the platform made videos like you
8:11 Actually, sometimes in the same text! They had some early texts written like: say you began left- to-right, then you followed the text to its right end, down to the next line and read this one right-to-left, the next left-to-right, etc. kind of just following the page in a flow. I think that went archaic very early on but very interesting!
That sounds like and amazing piece of worldbuilding for any fantasy/ancient culture. And also could be used as such a mind bending tactic in the modern world, especially for puzzles or just to troll people. (Once in english class i rotated my book upsidedown and read like normal to see how long it took the teacher to notice, it was fun, i think it took 5min)
I love these letter lore videos! It would be cool to make this a series. Not necessarily for all letters, but for the ones with an interesting origin or that are used in many different ways across different languages. I guess the “w” video already covered five different letters but there are still more to pick from. Best, love jan Misali videos
@@goonchefstur in the video game MOTHER 3 (the sequel to the game known as Earthbound in the west), the... a "chimera" is... one of the more memorable enemies. :)
really enjoying this comment, and makes me realize I somewhat unconscioulsly followed that pattern for my proto-conlang inventory... thing has a /ts/ affricate but no /t/, a /k/ but no ... Just clicks how these orthographies and phones were jammed around through history.
Haven't watched this through yet but holy shit I mean this in the best way possible, I'm SO going to listen to this as I fall asleep, the vibe of this video is exactly what I need and your voice is so nice and calming
I saw this video with no context in my recommendations and was like, man I hope this answers/resolves the exact question I've had about the letter c since I was in first grade. It did, thank you very much!
Paying more attention to this, I just noticed the weird part about Z looking like the mouth of a corpse. I kinda love the idea that, pre-standardisation, you could banish a whole letter from a language because it gave you the Jibblies.
english needs more letters, not less. bring back yogh and add a letter for χ to encourage its use in spelling loanwords purely because it's such a fun sound to make
thumbnail and title are perfect. I expected it to be a silly 3 second meme video, so I glanced at the time and to my surprise I see almost a 30 minute video, and immediately hooked. Thumbnail, C. Title, C. what in the hell can this be? click. perfect execution my guy
I think if we had to have a spelling reform around the letter c, instead of removing it we should change it to represent "ch", so cello would be consistent, cat would change (cange, looks weird, and reinforces the fact that a spelling reform isn't needed) to kat, and cell would be sell (also reinforcing the fact that a spelling reform would break a lot more than it fixes). This obviously isn't to say I think a spelling reform should happen, I've already covered that in parentheses, but if it _did_ happen, this is how it should be done
finally, someone else thought of this. i feel like sell/cell situations dont really matter as plenty of words are homophones or whatever the word for same word different meaning is already exist and sort themselves out through context, if i said out loud "i will put you in a sell/cell" you probably know what i mean, as you already cant hear the difference when speaking. using c as the ch sound and replacing any instance of c going "s" with an s and "k" with a k, as well as replace and "qu" with kw and any x with ks or z depending on the sound, would make it so much easier to learn and spell english
"Why do we have the letter C?" Simple. On an 88-key piano, the first two white keys are reserved for floppy drives, so 61-key keyboards start on C instead. (This is a joke that makes sense if you understand music and Windows.)
I respect the art being in basically dark mode and his calming voice because I know damn well I wouldn’t be watching this at any other time then at least 3:42 am
As a Korean, I'm thrilled to C, in the next few thousands years, the Korean alphabets getting changed through history and hopefully, many other people using them for their own languages. Oh, wait. I can't.
Doubt it. Most major languages already have a well established writing system and most languages that don't are small indigenous languages that aren't really that close to Korea, like Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Cia-Cia seems to have adopted Hangul, but that's about it. Most of the time they go for whatever nearby written languages are using, or go the boring route of just using the Latin alphabet. Unless Korea grows a huge empire or manages to become Asia's top power (and also manages to keep this status for many years), I mostly expect for Hangul to just keep being used and evolve in Korea for the purpose of writing Koreanic languages, which probably just means Korean, because things sure aren't looking good for Jeju.
jan Misali, I laughed when you said "negative 300 years ago," but then you said "negative 75 (about 2100 years ago)," and now I'm wondering if you're trying to avoid choosing between BC or BCE. Could we get a video on your thoughts about that?
the most interesting thing about just using negative years is that you get an off-by-one error because the concept of zero hadn't been discovered by Western Europe by the time the BC/AD system was used. e.g. Alexander the Great died in the year -322 (323 BC)
@@Cloiss_ Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think the off-by-one correction goes the other way. Counting back 2 AD, 1 AD, 1 BC, 2 BC, 3 BC without zero, corresponding to the years 2, 1, 0, -1, -2, respectively, using negative numbers and zero. So 323 BC would be -322, not -324.
My thoughts are that while it’s nice to try and remove the religious basis for the date to better accommodate those who don’t share that religion and feel uncomfortable acknowledging it every time they use their calendar, it doesn’t actually remove the fact that the date is based on an old approximation of the date of Jesus’s birth, it just hastily sweeps the connection under the rug. IMO if people want a different dating system that isn’t fundamentally tied to a Christocentric worldview, they should use an actually different dating system instead of just using more vague names for the same thing. Like Ab Urbe Condita, the (rarely actually used b/c the Romans preferred to discuss the year in terms of the Consuls for the year not refer to them by number) original Roman year numbering system which counts from the founding of the city of Rome. Or use the Unix epoch as year 0. Or use the astronomical Julian Date Year or something. also easier to confuse CE & BCE since they share the “CE” than BC & AD and an extra syllable to use the abbreviation for BCE, but those are more minor gripes.
@@IONATVS I feel like it should stay the way it is, because while yes, it is tied to a random dude who some people believe had god powers, it's the most accepted and used method of counting years (afaik, it might not be, making this whole comment useless, idk im dumb) and changing it would just make things a lot messier and complicated than they need to be
"It fits the Romance languages that naturally descend from Latin" - it doesn't. Latin was phonetically very poor and all modern Romance languages need dipgraphs (ch, ll, gli, gn, ill, lh, nh, on, ou, gu, qu, rr...) and diacritics (é, è, ñ, ã, ô, ç, ț, ü...) to express their phonemic inventory. It's a complete mess, but at least you can (almost always) predict the pronunciation from the orthograph (even in French).
Though the Romance languages manage to be phonetic while English completely fails to. Have characters to represent all 14 vowels so we don't have the "cough, through, enough" fiasco. Also C is redundant. Ch is treated as its own letter in Spanish, we can do that too, just drop the standalone c.
@@hypotheticaltapeworm Spanish and Italian are close to phonetic, but have you seen French? European Portuguese is kinda messy as well. But God forbid you try to learn written Lombard or Sicilian - there are too many sounds, huge local variations, and no tradition unifies orthograph.
@@lucaslourenco8918 Still much closer than English. If you hear spoken Italian or Spanish and know their alphabets, you can spell what was spoken, the converse is also true. If you've heard spoken Italian or Spanish, you'd be able to read it. English isn't like that, like at all. Most words have zero harmony between their written and spoken versions. There's nothing that indicates how things are supposed to be pronounced, each letter can be pronounced several ways, it's largely a case-by-case basis. Color and Octopus. Four uses of the letter "o", all of which are pronounced entirely differently, yet there is nothing written that indicates this.
surprisingly it's been three hours since the video release and nobody has added a [citation needed] tag on this statement in 17:21 (oh and before you check, i've already added it)
I had a nightmare last night where I made a conlang of "Simplified English" and removed the letter "C" so Jan Misali showed up at the foot of my bed and recited this video at me
I can't believe Jan Misali is your sleep paralysis demon.
@@halyoalex8942 Can't you?
i relate to your username
@@taududeblobber221 dude, me also.
But... He totally would
As a Courtney with a sister named Cierra and another named Cheyenne I can pretty securely say I like and understand the versatility of C.
i can c why
Kourtney, Sierra, and Xeyenne (x being ch because x can be replaced with ks)
As a non native english speaker I have no idea how any of those names are pronounced lmao
@@milic5068 my man
Core-tenny, see-era, chain-ee (I think)
Also am non native speaker.
@@milic5068 pretty sure it’s “Court-knee,” “See-era,” and “Shy-anne.”
Judging by your calm voice, I’m surprised you didn’t ask me to try squarespace
Lol
yeah why is this such a common sponsor for soft voiced youtubers
NO I MISS SAM MAN WHY YOU GOTTA REMIND ME BRO 😭
*c*alm
RUclipsr: Don’t worry this isn’t a sponsorship for Squarespace!
Viewer: whew
RUclipsr: *slowly pulls out NORDVPN*
The fact that a blind man had so much influence on our writing system is hilarious, absurd, and awesome.
you mean appius claudius caecus ?
Do remember that text at the time was commonly written on wax tablets or carved in stone, both of which are inherently tactile media. A blind man couldn’t read papyrus scrolls, but those were expensive, so primarily saved for long form media.
your use of dark mode for your complicated visuals is much appreciated by my drunk, night owl eyes.
A drunk person wouldn’t type this.
@@quesokid4959 👆a drunk person would type this
@@diamondking169 i can confirm
I thing I shit myself I can't tell
@@dhrextinction983 now drucjb
Not gonna lie, I thought this was going to be a 30-minute shitpost consisting of a single C note.
I did also and I got this story of C
Fr
^
same
Same
the next letter episode should be about "r" so we could have a trill-ogy
That’d actually be an interesting one, considering the many different pronunciations of it in various romance languages!
x
@@icancu9680 no u
teollogy
@@vari1535 Romance languages? Lovish?
As someone who is only mildly interested in studying language, this series does often devolve into word salad but I love it
Imagine my pain as someone who doesn’t really care but somehow got sucked down this rabbit hole
@@jmurray1110 I'm not sure if I'm enjoying this or in pain
people: lets remove all Cs!
programmers: *starts sweating*
Can’t wait to design my website front end in sss
is it k++ or s++
@@DarkPortall S seems to be a better option.
@@yeahuh4128 S#
@@theninjamaster67 SEE#
"But that's Z", the thrilling sequel to "So that's Y"
I love it when he makes us wait for the sentence to end to no avail
Tell me Y,
_Ain't nothing but a heaaaaaart ache_ ;v
can't wait for the next instalment
it's actually "So that's Y" not "And that's Y"
And the third part, "you'll C"
When i don't know what to answer in a multiple choice questions, C is the way to go. C is my comfort letter
c for cunt, that’s why we love it
Where did this kids rumour start I'm so curious, everyone I've ever talked to where this subject came up has encountered the "when in doubt, choose c" bias in regards to multiple choice tests 😂
Because from experience it’s actually mostly c for some reason
I answered C on a test today that wasn’t even multiple choice
@@bigchungus894 correct choice
I love Xhosa's repurposing of c, q, and x for its 3 primary click consonants - /ǀ/, /ǃ/, and /ǁ/. They have other click consonants too, but they all fall under these 3 primary groups.
We're ignoring the key argument:
We can't call it the YMCA anymore, and that song by the Village People is now obsolete.
it would b called ymka
YMSA
@@modmaker7617 ☹️
YMSA*
@@renaigh doesn't have the same ring to it.
xQc really named himself after the three English letters closest to being redundant.
That's some symbolism, alright.
petition to start calling him "cuh cuh cuh" (which in hindsight i realise could be reformed to be spelt kkk,,, hmmmmmm)
Ah a fellow juicer
@@zephr8786 no, call him /xqc/
@@gamerrfm9478 that sounds pretty awesome ngl
man pulled off 1.3 million views with just a “c” as his thumbnail and the title, and managed to get the vid to be of almost half an hour. legend
i thought that it was about the c programming language.
I thought that it was about the speed of light
@@adrian_chr843 I thought it was gonna be some rando shilling for rust ngl
vague title and thumbnail. could mean anything
i thought it was gonna be 29 minutes of middle C for people to use for tuning instruments
Also, the sound “kyuh” is predominantly represented with the letters “cu”.
Cumulative, accuse, cure, cute, cube, etc.
Sure you could replace it with “Ky” but it would give words like “Kyumulative”, which may also seem like it’s saying “Chi-yumulative” or “chi-umalative”.
If we’re doing purely phonetic spelling, you get Kyoomuhluhtihv. Which looks like a Russian town name.
KYOOOOOO
I'm brazilian and this made me LOL
I know what I'm naming my next fictional Russian town. Kyoomuhluhtihv.
As a Russian, that doesn't really look like a Russian town name, more like a weird mix of Finnish and Korean lol
@@meowcat7124 isn’t that what russian is
Man, I should have known you’d do the “that’s y” joke again. Still got me though.
I regret scrolling down to read this comment.
Whe wha? How did i miss that!?
an advertisement kicked in at just the right time so I was left with "was that 'so, that said', or 'so that's zed'????" for a full five seconds
Here’s tree.
Only on jan misali: "rad as heck" qualifying as a valid formal argument in a linguistic debate
27:19
Pinyin q is absolutely rad as heck
@@yanxishan6575 shi la
Conlang review: C has an unusually limited orthography compared to most conlangs, which makes it relatively easy for new conlang enthusiasts to learn. The alphabet is as follows: "c, C." The phonemic inventory is more diverse, consisting of "s, ch, sh, and k," depending on context.
C has a very strange orthography, using not only the letters of the English alphabet but also additional symbols such as +-/*=, which are also pronounced and serve as one letter abbreviations for mathematical expressions.
The language is descended from English and reused English words like if, for, while and abbreviations of English words like int(eger), float (ing point number), (char)acter. It removes a lot of ambiguity from the English language by giving very specific definitions to these so called keywords.
Interestingly, text modifiers like ();, and many more are essential to correct C syntax and give structure to what can often seem like a random collection of words and letters.
The most interesting feature of the C language has to be the possibility to define your own words, allowing you to express extremely complicated things with just a letter, if you want to.
In fact, text written in the c language are usually just one word (a lot of speakers use "main"), that is then defined to mean everything you want to say. This is a strange concept that has so far only been observed in the programming language family.
lang*
Don’t forget č, ç, ć, Č, Ç and Ć
@@xyldkefyi ah yes, the well known types int, float and acter
@@globalincident694 yea... well spotted xD
Just a note, when you showed how Polish used C, there was a mistake: Polish is actually /tɕi/, and the palatal phonemes in Polish are handled very much like a Romance language would handle them
Theoretically there exist rare borrowed words with ⟨ci⟩ pronounced as /t͡si/ for example (probably the most common instance of it) „cis” as in „tłuszcze cis”, „cispłciowy” and as a name of a musical note
@@jobda1211 Yes but that's marginal
"what are we eating tonight honey"
"kicken"
"tshikken"
it would have been kicen
@@alexanderjoseph5380 The double consonant is important. Maybe kiccen.
Tzikin
Tsiken
The real play is to redefine "c" to represent the "ch" sound
Based. That's what I do with a lot of my characters' names lmao.
or something like „ts” sound
Actually in Turkish, c is like the g sound in the word "german" and the G in Turkish is like the g sound in great. We also have ç fo ch and ş for sh.
@@miray3596 Turkish is a superior language and I will die on that hill
or ch becomes tsh
I thought this was gonna be a meme, not a whole backstory of the letter c 😭
bruh same
Fr
omg same 😭💀
c lore
I respect the grind, tho. I think that he knows that most think his vids are shit posts, but throws us off intentionally.
I used to think C was pointless, but you have completely changed my mind and opened my eyes to the beautiful letter. Thank you sooo much!
Now you like C right?
@@jamburga321 Yep. I suppose I do
@@gcbreptile4571 c is a very important letter in English
And it also looks cool like a crescent moon, doesn't it, cool crescent shape right?
@@jamburga321 Yes, it does have a nice shape :)
The punchline “that’s [Letter]” remains god-tier
it's complete S
as it should B
that’s E
Now I really want to see a conlang review of the C programming language. "The C Language's insistence that all nouns should be placed at the beginning of the paragraph has lead to no end of confusion"
His next video should simply be titled "C++" with 0 explanation
“That’s how Middle C looked like. However, in Early Modern C, the word order has been significantly relaxed.”
Unlike more object-oriented languages, C follows a strict verb-subject-object word order.
@@tech6hutch Well thats the what most people do atleast... Within a company I worked for a few years back, we had an internal libary which always took the struct operating on as its last argument... At some point we decided as a team to rewrite that goddamn thing to be usuable without it breaking your brain every time... Atleast it was internally consistant...
am I sleep deprived or is "tooc off his cloac" (26:34) the funniest fucking thing I've seen in my life
you're sleep deprived.
both
Sleep deprived, and somewhat funny
Not sleep deprived, still hilarious
I thinc it loocs pretty good. Tkange my mind.
I have spent 30 minutes of my life watching the history of the letter C... And I regret NOTHING! Seriously, your voice is so soothing that I didn't even feel time passing. Best thing is, I have learned something! (And thank you for dark mode, my eyes appreciate you)
Now you like C right?
I hope we get twenty-six of these videos eventually. These are fun.
don't forget about old ampersand, & thorn now
He pretty much already covered the histories of F, V, U, and Y in his "w" video, and in this one, he pretty much already covered G. And unfortunately, a lot of letters are not as interesting as far as their histories are concerned. He could honestly cover all the remaining vowels in one video and include the history of J in it, and it probably would be less than 15 minutes.
I don't think a video about every letter is the way to go here, but I'm sure there are several more interesting "history of writing" stories to be told (heck, they even made a playlist for it!)
@@Mercure250 then he shoULD DO THAT
@@fikatrouvaille3670 Agreed, I was just saying one video per letter wouldn't be as interesting as people might think. If he does all the letters, but group them together in just, like, 2-3 short videos, that would be cool.
The sequel we have all been waiting for
Beat me to it
the c-quel
@@quarts_i_guess kquel
Every single person who uses night mode appreciate your time and effort into this.
You're respected among the community.
What makes it even better is that this design choice is because their PC literally cannot handle anything more, made me respect them even more lmao
@@abyssosque “You’re respected *among* the community.”
We probably need part 3, covering X which sounds like either 'ks' or 'z'
Edit: Nevermind, maybe the letter J would be a better choice because it's pronounced so differently in other languages (Somehow the letter sounds like a Y in languages like German and Swedish and also sounds somewhat like H in Spanish)
I don't think there is going to be one!
The Y is the original pronunciation
X has at least 3 pronunciations: KS in Fix, GZ in Example, and Z in Xylophone. And J was originally just a shape variation, an I with a hook, so it makes perfect sense that it eventually came to stand for the sound of non-syllabic I, like our Y. That is how it is used in many languages today, including Latin. But some languages changed the Y sound into different sounds but kept the same letter, like the French, which is where we get our pronunciation of J.
@@tkfandbfbfan Perhaps for you it has a KS sound, but for me and millions of others, the X in example is pronounced like the GS in eggs.
it has a k+jh sound in the word “luxury”
I used to be one of those people who thought we should be getting rid of letters like c, q, z and others now I'm one of those people who's like we should be adding letters to distinguish the voiced and unvoiced dental fricatives.
How about using Albanian _dh_ to represent dhe voiced variant so more often used dhan dhe Greek _th_ ? It looks a bit strange, but it's nothing one can't get familiar with (widh?).
@@GlaceonStudios Chambers dictionary (1983) says (widh, with).
Why not both?
The real issue with English spelling are the "vowels".
bring back þorn and eð
24:07 I really appreciate how you pointed out that the /oʊ/ vs /aʊ/ problem is not only more important than "fixing" C, but also found it important enough to put it at the beginning of the list. The "bow" problem has been bugging me for years.
signed, Brendan Bow
My guy signed his RUclips comment. That's class you can't teach
@@ericmatevossian1962 He also ended his comment with a bow. ;)
boe or b ow
Do you spell that bow like bow the weapon, or bow the front part of a shit
Edit: *I meant ship not shit
ç
I respekt how perfektly krafted this video was. It's Exsellent!
Eksellent
I have a problem with the spelling here....
Your name has an 0 instead of an o
@@tripppleccc54 you're right, how blasphemous. I must khange my name to "Exotik Lettuse". This kursed c is everywhere!
@@berrycade the kursed " "
Can someone translate please
I wondered why french had such a long name for Y (ygreck) when everything else was very similar to english and in both languages the letter names are very short, never knew it was actually being called "Greek I", neat!
Did you know? jan Misali is currently in the hospital for back pain due to the fact that he's been carrying the entire conlanging community
Not completely fair, there’s also biblaridion and artifexian
you mean "the entire conglang community"?
P Schlösser lol
I think you meant David J. Peterson*
@@philipschloesser what a cute fraud
7:12 he didn't like the letter "z" because when someone pronounces it his tongue would resemble the tongue of dead people. (I studied it in school) Romans at the time were very superstitious.
Love from Roma!
But the position of the tongue is the same with [s]
It says so on screen around 15:30 "Z was abhorrent to Appius Claudius, because it resembles in its expression the teeth of a corpse"
And I always thought the internet was the thing that made people go insane.
Ciao
@@Ondohir in Italian not quite
Also thank you VERY much for not falling for the "primitive vs advanced" or "Pure vs degenerate"
Also side note, this feel like how Carl Sagan went over human evolution "however this path does not lead to us"
"ch" is quite important to me, for it is one of the only instances where "c" has its own sound! also, your videos are so fun and interesting to watch!
End Lyrics:
Letter C has folks saying it should be removed, that without it the alphabet would be improved.
It’s a common complaint, that’s misguided at best. No you can’t just replace C with K and with S.
(~No you can’t just replace C with K and with S~)
You know S becomes voiced intervocalically, and suffixes preserve etymology.
If it’s so inconsistent why focus on C?
When the quote unquote “problem” is much worse with G?
If you were to cut C, then what you’d have in store, is you’re left with more problems than you had before.
If you’ve learned nothing else, just remember this: English spelling reforms break more than they can fix.
(~English spelling reforms break more than they can fix~)
End Lyriks:
Letter C has folks saying it should be removed, that without it the alphabet would be improved.
It’s a kommon komplaint, that’s misguided at best. No you kan’t just replase sie with K and with S.
(~No you kan’t just replase C with K and with S~)
You know S bekomes voised intervokalikally, and suffixes preserve etymology.
If it’s so inkonsistent why fokus on C?
When the quote on quote “problem” is much worse with G?
If you were to kut C, then what you’d have in store, is you’re left with more problems than you had before.
If you’ve learned nothing else, just remember this: English spelling reforms break more than they kan fix.
(~English spelling reforms break more than they kan fix~)
Or just turn on captions
@@DanksterPaws Seems to work just fine :P
@@kylekafka6636 Yeah it does.
@@DanksterPaws The fact that you kept "q" makes it look so weird.
this showed up on my recommended and i actually fell asleep. not because it was boring, but because of your soothing af voice.
Simple answer: Because the "Ch" sound can't be expressed by any other letter or pair of letters.
I've heard some people say the same thing about how "X" could be replaced by "Z," "Ex," "Cs," or "Ks." However, I think the most useful placement of the letter X is at the end of words like "tax" without making it look like a plural (tacs, taks, or tacks).
Edit: Oh lord what have I done.
Then just keep C, but have it mean "ch" capter, scool, ets
@@rafasilva1265 The sounds of "ch" in those two words are different, so that wouldn't work
HUH?????
@@rafasilva1265 should be "skool"
The "Ch" in Chips and Chandelier couldn't be replaced by anything
The letter C is present in that most beautiful of English phrases, 'cellar door'. Aesthetics is enough for me to justify C's presence. Great vid!
That's why C is the best letter
Agreed :)
Thank you for putting the first track of music in C-Major. I cannot thank you enough
That's so cool to know that Y was originally called "I Grecca" (Greek I), because this is how is still called in my languages, Catalan and Spanish. I always wondered why the name
The Russian word for Y is игрек (igrek), presumably taken from the French
yeah i thought the same
In Polish "Y" is also called "igrek"
@@voland6846 can confirm y is still i grecque meaning greek i in France
Edit: didn't know how to spell greek
As an English speaker in Canada who had to learn French in grade school, I was always extremely confused about why 'Y' had an insane name like "eegrek." It sounded like some Star Trek species or something. "Greek I" makes so much sense.
"I'd take redundancy over ambiguity any day". mi sona e ni: ala.
a a a!
I got my and gave up
i can't believe i didn't realize there was anything weird about _jan Misali_ making this statement until i saw this comment
@Mia yun Ruse because of ambiguity it could also be "we know that's not true" :)
my son and I: ???
Interesting side-note: the Cyrillic letter С looks exactly like the Latin letter C and also makes a /s/ sound (and it's even on the same place on the keyboard! infuriating Russians who accidentally use the wrong one) but it has its own very interesting history (the so-called "lunate sigma") and isn't even descended from gaml
I feel like this further informs my feeling that we should stop caring about when s and c are used in sertain words. Because as long as one kan understand what they're reading, it's fine.
@@tangentfox4677sure you can understand even if it's spelled wrong, but it also takes significantly longer to parse
I just recently started learning the C programming language. So I'm at the very very very beginner levels of learning. I've been watching a lot of videos about it. This video shows up in my recommendations. I click on it expecting it to be some breakdown of the history of the C language or something. I have to say that I'm happy I was wrong and found this video.
Good luck in your studies! Hope you'll be a cool C programmer soon
ah, but that's the Truttle1 video, not the jan Misali video
That was very very well done! The music throughout was amazing, both Patricia Taxxon's instrumental and when accompanied with Jules' vocals. I think I forgot that the video was about c and not proto-sinaitic and ancient egyptian, but very good. Found it to be well-structured, as more of a story than a lecture.
This scares me. Your so calm. And made a 20 some minutes long video called “c”, you have earned my respect good sir.
30*
more please! this is my favourite series of yours
you did the tangent on "zed" just to make the "but that said" joke. kudos
Swear to god, if he makes a joke about this being a “Cquel”....
*sigh* I’m not mad... just disappointed...
You’ll C
Honestly, I C it as an absolute win. Puns are fun.
28:17
@@purpleisdebeste You'll
Look, just be glad he didn’t attempt a Sonic-fandom joke at 5:19 .
For Welsh, I've heard that the consistent spelling of /k/ as < c > was not so much a reflection of pre-palatalization Roman usage but a more recent convention as printing press types crafted for English or French didn't have enough K's to write "Kymru" in the way that seemed most logical at the time (that'd be, with a K) but they did have plenty of C's which would otherwise have been unused.
If this story is indeed true (as Wikipedia seems to suggest), then Welsh would have likely used K's like Cornish (Kernewek) had they not ran into trouble with mobile types designed for a different language. Conversely, if Cornish had done better at the time printing was introduced, it's likely that Cornish printers would have run into the same problem, possibly coming up with the same solution Welsh printers did, giving us Cernewec instead of Kernewek.
Tbh, it is better if the Celtic languages influence all the Romance languages to use C exclusively for /k/ and get rid of both K and Q entirely from those languages.
I love that this video is well researched, concise, and provides necessary context for each given situation. A beautiful exploration of history; a beautiful perspective of modern language. I wish that every RUclipsr on the platform made videos like you
Let’s go c!!! You’ve got your own video now, I’m proud of you!
8:11 Actually, sometimes in the same text! They had some early texts written like: say you began left- to-right, then you followed the text to its right end, down to the next line and read this one right-to-left, the next left-to-right, etc. kind of just following the page in a flow.
I think that went archaic very early on but very interesting!
That was called boustrophedon
That sounds like and amazing piece of worldbuilding for any fantasy/ancient culture.
And also could be used as such a mind bending tactic in the modern world, especially for puzzles or just to troll people. (Once in english class i rotated my book upsidedown and read like normal to see how long it took the teacher to notice, it was fun, i think it took 5min)
At this point if we want a completely consistent language we'd have to build a new one with a new alphabet from the ground up
and then jan Misali could do a review on it and put it in his show Conlang Critic!
Yes
@@XDtoMeOld no, you just interpret the letters with different, more consistent rules. that's what pretty much all conlangs do. same alphabet.
Give it a couple hundred years and it will be as messy as any other language--'cause that's how the peoples do.
yes please
I love these letter lore videos! It would be cool to make this a series. Not necessarily for all letters, but for the ones with an interesting origin or that are used in many different ways across different languages. I guess the “w” video already covered five different letters but there are still more to pick from.
Best, love jan Misali videos
"one of the least productive conversations in online discourse."
Wow, that's saying a lot.
I was waiting all video for the equivalent of the "That's Y" joke, and was not disappointed.
24:25 24:57
come on, you can't put the word examples "chimera", "mother", and "three" one after the other like that, you just can't do that
FMA...... cant believe I didn't understand at first
@@mihaelandnate1 plz explain I beg
@@goonchefstur in the video game MOTHER 3 (the sequel to the game known as Earthbound in the west), the... a "chimera" is... one of the more memorable enemies. :)
@@shledzguohn thank u!
no
really enjoying this comment, and makes me realize I somewhat unconscioulsly followed that pattern for my proto-conlang inventory... thing has a /ts/ affricate but no /t/, a /k/ but no ... Just clicks how these orthographies and phones were jammed around through history.
Haven't watched this through yet but holy shit I mean this in the best way possible, I'm SO going to listen to this as I fall asleep, the vibe of this video is exactly what I need and your voice is so nice and calming
Finally a video about the c: drive
*C programming language
@@ecranfortessa *An expansion on the Seven Cs units of measurement
This is very well made and well presented. The use of ipa had me crying tears of joy- I love the attention to detail!
I hate when linguists write "the ee sound in reed" or whatever. Just use IPA, damn.
Be like me.
I have 3 due assignments, 2 quizes tommorow and midterm next week.
I decided to watch a video about the letter c.
"Hey guys, it's Appius. Today I'm gonna be doing another makeup tutorial, so let's talk about why the letter Z is useless"
I'd watch a blind guy's makeup tutorial
Þ
"Did you die?"
Z"sadly yes ..."
Z"but i lived!"
"But I got better."
K: My death was... greatly exagerated
It's the Zombie letter! o.O
I did have a stroke reading this
Zed's dead
I saw this video with no context in my recommendations and was like, man I hope this answers/resolves the exact question I've had about the letter c since I was in first grade. It did, thank you very much!
Good for you then!!! :)
1:44 i love that artist's music
Jan misali made it himself
Paying more attention to this, I just noticed the weird part about Z looking like the mouth of a corpse. I kinda love the idea that, pre-standardisation, you could banish a whole letter from a language because it gave you the Jibblies.
Always nice to wake up hungover on 4 hours of sleep to see a new full-length Jan Misali video
english needs more letters, not less. bring back yogh and add a letter for χ to encourage its use in spelling loanwords purely because it's such a fun sound to make
Nah, English need more vowels. Make Æ great again!
how do you pronounce that long x thingy
I'm a proponent of accents!
@@jamesjohnXII if it's the Greek one I think it's pronounced like "key"
Don't forget about thorn and eth that got replaced by th even though they have distinct sounds from each other.
All this fulfilling info from a video that's titled with just a single letter. Fascinating.
Honestly, you should convert these to podcasts and toss them on spotify cus I would listen the shit out of this
Jan Misali's name was gonna be spelt Jan Micali, but his parents didn't want people to mispronounce it as Jan Mikali
Except Toki pona don’t have a C
jan miçali
"Jan Misali's name was gonna be spelt Jan Micali"
Then I wonder how did it become spelled Mitch Halley.
But everyone pronounced it John instead of Jan
@@sojourner_303 C and a lot of other letters, they have 14 letters
I love how the song in the end was in c major
This is one of the best videos I've ever watched.
thumbnail and title are perfect. I expected it to be a silly 3 second meme video, so I glanced at the time and to my surprise I see almost a 30 minute video, and immediately hooked. Thumbnail, C. Title, C. what in the hell can this be? click. perfect execution my guy
"Languages being poorly designed is a good thing, actually"
- Jan Misali
I think if we had to have a spelling reform around the letter c, instead of removing it we should change it to represent "ch", so cello would be consistent, cat would change (cange, looks weird, and reinforces the fact that a spelling reform isn't needed) to kat, and cell would be sell (also reinforcing the fact that a spelling reform would break a lot more than it fixes). This obviously isn't to say I think a spelling reform should happen, I've already covered that in parentheses, but if it _did_ happen, this is how it should be done
finally, someone else thought of this. i feel like sell/cell situations dont really matter as plenty of words are homophones or whatever the word for same word different meaning is already exist and sort themselves out through context, if i said out loud "i will put you in a sell/cell" you probably know what i mean, as you already cant hear the difference when speaking. using c as the ch sound and replacing any instance of c going "s" with an s and "k" with a k, as well as replace and "qu" with kw and any x with ks or z depending on the sound, would make it so much easier to learn and spell english
Was expeking a video on the speed of light. Pleasantly surprised.
23:16 "Cnidarian" might just be the only time c is truly silent in English
I'd count indict and its derivatives too
There is plenty of discourse around the pronounciation of "g". Its just hidden in the even more unproductive debate ariund the pronounciation of GIF.
Hard g. Get the fuck over it 😂
@@eesr I prefer the worst option, as proposed by the creator of the format: GIF is pronounced as Yiff
King Solomon has nothing on him
@@WaluigisBulge Yraphics Interchange Format
comments in here proving Adam's point
@@WaluigisBulge Like the Old English, I see.
"Why do we have the letter C?"
Simple. On an 88-key piano, the first two white keys are reserved for floppy drives, so 61-key keyboards start on C instead.
(This is a joke that makes sense if you understand music and Windows.)
Yes
Makes perfect sense to me
I wish i was nerdy enough to get this joke
I understand the music half at least 😂😅
This joke is so dumb, I love it!
"this is the story of c" and that style of music following it made me fondly remember an old flash game i loved as a kid called The I of It. Nostalgia
I respect the art being in basically dark mode and his calming voice because I know damn well I wouldn’t be watching this at any other time then at least 3:42 am
Glad Misali is spending time emphasising that we shouldn't follow progressivist (nor dual progressivist? regressivist?) views of historic development
Oh so it's not about using progamming languages in order to measure English orthography in preposterous units?
#include
int main() {
printf("I thought in was about C aswell :d
");
return 0;
}
I wrote that on a Phone with German spellcheck, it was awful but i Had to make that Joke...
@@paulfragemann3333 Hahahaha your dedication is appreciated
@@paulfragemann3333 where are the heckin semicolons now it wont compile
@@dihydrogen Was able to find them on my phone I'll edit the message to add them, now that I'm on a PC....
Milions of videos with fire ass thumbnails, full of random capitalization titles and i of all things this title and thumbnail peaked my curiocity
I’m so mad I haven’t seen this until now!! I loved the w video, and I’m sure this’ll be another masterpiece. :)
As a Korean, I'm thrilled to C, in the next few thousands years, the Korean alphabets getting changed through history and hopefully, many other people using them for their own languages. Oh, wait. I can't.
Yeah, I wish we just used Hangeul.
Honestly english is a language that doesnt particularly have too many letters, but too many words in my opinion
Doubt it. Most major languages already have a well established writing system and most languages that don't are small indigenous languages that aren't really that close to Korea, like Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Cia-Cia seems to have adopted Hangul, but that's about it. Most of the time they go for whatever nearby written languages are using, or go the boring route of just using the Latin alphabet. Unless Korea grows a huge empire or manages to become Asia's top power (and also manages to keep this status for many years), I mostly expect for Hangul to just keep being used and evolve in Korea for the purpose of writing Koreanic languages, which probably just means Korean, because things sure aren't looking good for Jeju.
@@poudink5791 What's about Jeju?
jan Misali, I laughed when you said "negative 300 years ago," but then you said "negative 75 (about 2100 years ago)," and now I'm wondering if you're trying to avoid choosing between BC or BCE. Could we get a video on your thoughts about that?
the most interesting thing about just using negative years is that you get an off-by-one error because the concept of zero hadn't been discovered by Western Europe by the time the BC/AD system was used. e.g. Alexander the Great died in the year -322 (323 BC)
@@Cloiss_ Correct me if I'm wrong, but I would think the off-by-one correction goes the other way. Counting back 2 AD, 1 AD, 1 BC, 2 BC, 3 BC without zero, corresponding to the years 2, 1, 0, -1, -2, respectively, using negative numbers and zero. So 323 BC would be -322, not -324.
@@steffahn yeah i did it wrong, just edited the comment
My thoughts are that while it’s nice to try and remove the religious basis for the date to better accommodate those who don’t share that religion and feel uncomfortable acknowledging it every time they use their calendar, it doesn’t actually remove the fact that the date is based on an old approximation of the date of Jesus’s birth, it just hastily sweeps the connection under the rug. IMO if people want a different dating system that isn’t fundamentally tied to a Christocentric worldview, they should use an actually different dating system instead of just using more vague names for the same thing. Like Ab Urbe Condita, the (rarely actually used b/c the Romans preferred to discuss the year in terms of the Consuls for the year not refer to them by number) original Roman year numbering system which counts from the founding of the city of Rome. Or use the Unix epoch as year 0. Or use the astronomical Julian Date Year or something. also easier to confuse CE & BCE since they share the “CE” than BC & AD and an extra syllable to use the abbreviation for BCE, but those are more minor gripes.
@@IONATVS I feel like it should stay the way it is, because while yes, it is tied to a random dude who some people believe had god powers, it's the most accepted and used method of counting years (afaik, it might not be, making this whole comment useless, idk im dumb) and changing it would just make things a lot messier and complicated than they need to be
"It fits the Romance languages that naturally descend from Latin" - it doesn't. Latin was phonetically very poor and all modern Romance languages need dipgraphs (ch, ll, gli, gn, ill, lh, nh, on, ou, gu, qu, rr...) and diacritics (é, è, ñ, ã, ô, ç, ț, ü...) to express their phonemic inventory. It's a complete mess, but at least you can (almost always) predict the pronunciation from the orthograph (even in French).
Though the Romance languages manage to be phonetic while English completely fails to. Have characters to represent all 14 vowels so we don't have the "cough, through, enough" fiasco. Also C is redundant. Ch is treated as its own letter in Spanish, we can do that too, just drop the standalone c.
@@hypotheticaltapeworm the problem with English having orthographical vowels is that every English dialect has completely different vowels
@@doorhanger9317 Then it should've been standardized long ago so as to prevent divergence in dialect.
@@hypotheticaltapeworm Spanish and Italian are close to phonetic, but have you seen French? European Portuguese is kinda messy as well. But God forbid you try to learn written Lombard or Sicilian - there are too many sounds, huge local variations, and no tradition unifies orthograph.
@@lucaslourenco8918 Still much closer than English. If you hear spoken Italian or Spanish and know their alphabets, you can spell what was spoken, the converse is also true. If you've heard spoken Italian or Spanish, you'd be able to read it. English isn't like that, like at all. Most words have zero harmony between their written and spoken versions. There's nothing that indicates how things are supposed to be pronounced, each letter can be pronounced several ways, it's largely a case-by-case basis. Color and Octopus. Four uses of the letter "o", all of which are pronounced entirely differently, yet there is nothing written that indicates this.
“But, that’s Z”
Should’ve known you’d do something like that again lol
You'd
he said "But, that’s Zed" not “But, that’s Z”
@@wildstarfish3786 I’m a Canadian, that’s how Z is pronounced
@@NStripleseven no it's not
My humor is so broken that I clicked on the video titled “c” and proceeded to laugh at a very unfunny ad thinking it was the video
...
surprisingly it's been three hours since the video release and nobody has added a [citation needed] tag on this statement in 17:21
(oh and before you check, i've already added it)
Facade is actually a huge pet peeve of mine. C and ç aren't (exactly) the same letter, and façade is such a beautiful word...