Writing doesn't always end in alphabets - the enigmatic Egyptian counterexample
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- Опубликовано: 1 июн 2024
- As hieroglyphic writing reached the end of its life, Egyptians didn't simplify it like the alphabets emerging all around. They made it even more complex. Meet what Egyptologists call "enigmatic" or "cryptographic" hieroglyphs.
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~ Briefly ~
I'm following up on my tale of Egyptian phonology with this intriguing hieroglyphic shift. We'll contrast Egypt's developments with the alphabets emerging around the Mediterranean, revisit the basics of how hieroglyphs work, learn some of the readings and substitutions that drive cryptographic writing, and encounter examples of how sign choices relate to mythic context and content. At the end, we'll briefly wonder about the roles of temple, creativity, hybridity, and attrition in favor of alternative alphabets in the long twilight of the hieroglyphs.
~ Credits ~
Art, narration, animation and much of the music by Josh from NativLang.
My sources doc for claims and full credits for music, sfx, fonts and images:
docs.google.com/document/d/1v...
Music not by me:
Peace on the Water, Unlimited Potential
by Darren Curtis (custom license: darrencurtismusic.com/)
Silver Flame by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license
Thinking Music by Kevin MacLeod
Link: incompetech.filmmusic.io/song...
License: filmmusic.io/standard-license
Elephant- “draw three characters, make one redundant, and then the heck with it, draw an elephant too”
LOL
"But can't we just draw the elephant?"
"No! We're not children!"
I am assuming the elephant can be used as (a) consonant(s) in the absence of determinatives and classifiers, hence all that redundancy
How to write "elephant":
1. write three phonetic signs
2. draw the rest of the effing elephant
Queue kinds looks like a lot of letter standing in a line
Egyptian: "What's your name, cute furry predator?"
Cat: "*mew*"
Egyptian: "Cool name, Mew."
*New cat variant appears*
Egyptian: "Right, hello Mewtwo."
Some languages have "nyam" as the word for "eat," that may be my favorite onomatopoeia.
@@pentelegomenon1175 nyummy?
@@pentelegomenon1175 in German it's an interjection that means tasty
Its the reason I named my cat Mew; she is a cute furry predator that introduced herself to the world with that sound.
Phoenician scribes: let's take these complicated symbols and make them easy for people to write and understand
Egyptian scribes: MEEEEEEMES
Haha you’re right! Those deeply derived symbols are like a nicely aged meme
Ancient Egypt: memeing before memeing was cool
It makes me wonder about the future of the latin alphabet. Will we one day have a successor? An easier and more efficient way of writing. I know we nowadays type a lot, but handwriting is not going away anytime soon
@@srpenguinbr I think once technology is sufficient enough, language will play a much smaller role in our lives.
@@gabor6259 but I think that will take a very long time to become possible
Herein we learn that Egyptian scribes had WAY too much time on their hands.
Both day to day and in absolute terms. This took thousands of years, after all
I was thinking: that's why it took years to train a scribe!
(in comparison to us learning the alphabet in less than a year)
Just like Microsoft Windows developers making changes for the hell of it.
In french we say it "putain de fonctionnaires" and I think it's beautiful.
Wait until you learn more about Maya glyphs
I'm proud of myself. I understood almost 10% of what you said.
Pff, I understand 11% 😎👌
Don't brag, I'm at 9% u.u
What do those "10%" symbols mean?
@@wonksliver ten percent
@@akbas58 By the way, the history of the symbol % would give an interesting video.
this reminds me of how memes develop online. if you're constantly online for a length of time, you will accumulate a history of memes that express certain fundamental ideas or emotions, and mashing several memes together will have a whole conversation of meaning imbued into them by their context
"Hieroglyphs were just memes?"
🌍👨🚀🔫👨🚀
If you look at the very big picture and boil thing down humans have done and are doing the same stuff they have been doing for over many millennia.
except that memes make sense
@@LowestofheDead always has been
@@btstwitterupdates3790 memes make sense to us because we know the context and the meaning of them, just like hieroglyphs would have made sense to the ancient Egyptians
I figured the reason for the locust standing for the "R" sound is from how its wings sound.. especially when there's a massive swarm of them... an Egyptian onomatopoeia....
K
Like the horned viper producing /ffff/?
@@andreamillar9172 originally it's /th/ sound.. but u know how the scots wud say "thank you"... "fank you"...
@@neilsumanda1538 that’s fascinating...I can’t find a source on that though. Everything I’m finding says it meant /f/ or /v/ . Can you give me a source?
The word for elephant also could be how an elephant sounds :)
As a linguist, I'm impressed and delighted by how accurate this is! There is so much misinformation about writing systems out there. It's such a breath of fresh air to see someone who knows what they're talking about and isn't just speculating wildly and pulling stuff out of thin air.
Any of these misinformations you're willing to share so we can learn these truths from lies?
i want to know that too, what this other guy says
As a Chinese native speaker, I’m strangely familiar with hieroglyphical writing system.
there seem to be a lot of similarities with the chinese and egyptian systems, where parts of characters are used to dictate phonetics or meaning etc
@ملقرت ملك صور A considerable amount of Chinese characters are formed combining semantic and phonetic roots(which we still use till nowadays), which is almost a mirror reflection of ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. But Chinese characters never got this far to reach alphabetical system, maybe because of the oversimplification of phonological system from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese languages.
@@azogtheeternallyunskilled9704 My guess of the theory , ancient people actually were kinda overwhelmed by the amount of symbols they created to indicate things, a small group of well educated scribes cannot sustain the growing society and the knowledge it produced any longer, and the writing tools were not as handy as we can use today, thus this process might be inevitable.
Weird, I found having taught my self a bit of hieroglyphics really helped me understand how Chinese writing works, even if I can only read a few symbols atm.
Japanese is closer, where Egyptian phonetic complements work like Japanese okurigana
Your love for that last one took me by surprise - sooo here's more about Egyptian!
Just the fact that this chanel exists makes me a happier person
hey, we love everything you do, this is my favorite language channel in youtube by far! Keep them coming
Thanks for your hard work creating these videos!
What kind of fonts do you typically use in your videos? that one italic font, what is it called?
🧐 Figurative, enigmatic and cryptographic is no way to go through life, son...
Extra points for using reconstructed pronunciation for egyptian, where every documentary I've ever seen uses egyptological
/r/grssk
@@ornessarhithfaeron3576 this is amazing, I want to know if there's one like that for Russian/Cyrillic
@@devong1838 Cyrillic *alphabet* is used across many *languages*. So which one do you want to hear?
Educate yourself first what Cyrillic and Glagolitic are.
Нивото на невежеството на хората в този специализиран канал ме кара да се замисля...
@@stanbinary Hi! I know what Cyrillic is and this was a really unnecessary comment, not sure what you're really doing but anyway no I don't need to "educate myself" :) Anyway the comment i was replying to references a submission the catalogs the use of the Greek/Hellenic alphabet as if it were regular Latin script for stylistic reasons regardless of inaccuracies. I wanted to know if there was a similar catalog for Russian/Cyrillic (and I will use that slash-combo again~), as the same thing frequently happens.
Stan B. r/iamverysmart
I'm even more confused about ancient Egyptian writing now then when I was before I watched the video.
Personally I don't think dynastic Egyptian hieroglyphs were phonetic. phonetic pronunciation of symbols is definitely not a requirement to convey meaning.
The subtle key is spoken language is not required.
🤫🗝️👉😀💨🙅
it's kinda like chinese, symbols with meanings are combined for new ones, sometimes parts are used to tell how it's read while others tell the meaning.
@@Hideyoshi1991 one of my favorite evolutions of a symbol is diàn 電 which is simplified to 电. Literally the symbol for lightning 🌩️, It's become synonymous with electricity ⚡🔌. And then how that gets used with modern electronics like a telephone 电话
📱☎️ The huà (话) means speech, words. If you took it at its literal meaning it'd be like lightning words which sounds pretty cool lol. Well the English roots for the telephone puts more precedence on the locality of the speech tele-
Easy to de-confuse... Find: BritainsHiddenHistory Ross. Cymroglyphics 01 Overview... will show you the way in just half an hour.
@@megw7312 Haha, already love the guy! Thanks!
9:50
Oh my god, the "Buffaflo buffalo" sentence trick is literally thousands of years old, and also works with hieroglyphs.
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_Den
F in le chat for french egyptologists.
that is a great comment on so many levels.
𓃠
Bilingual pun haha. F to pay respect for you.
I was going to make a similar comment but you went and surpassed it.
This comment really made me think.
It sounds like to understand what hieroglyphs mean you had to understand a great deal about the culture around their writing.
it's like memes
I would have liked a little of social context. Obviously that was a writing system developed and used by a elite of scribes. How many people could actually read it? Literacy rate was low at all times in the past but this looks like it wasn’t something used for everyday communication, or was it?
The same could be said of any language in history or even today, right? Culture and language are inherently connected. To understand one, you need to understand at least some of the other. Of course, it does seem Egyptian hieroglyphics take it to the extreme, but that might be because we are so disconnected from them in time, culture, and spoken and written language.
@@pansepot1490 Hieroglyphs were never for everyday usage. Hieratic was a cursive form used on papyrus that required knowledge of hieroglyphs. Demotic was simplified from hieratic for everyday usage. The Coptic alphabet was derived from a combination of demotic and the Greek alphabet.
Note the word hieroglyph comes from Greek for sacred carving while demotic comes from Greek for people.
We still have something like that in the different kinds of English newspapers. The lowest sort, the Daily Star or Daily Sport, are comics for the barely literate to drool over. The Daily Express and Daily Mail were aimed at the "homme moyen sensuel" or his wife. The Times, Manchester Guardian and Daily Telegraph were for the mandarin class, and barely comprehensible to Sun readers.
Egyptian: Oh look! A furry creature is eating the mice!
2nd Egyptian: Cool! we should keep it!
Egyptian: yeaaaahhh
2nd Egyptian: ok so whats his name?
Cat: *mew*
Egyptian: alright! your name is miw!
Fun fact: "cat" in Chinese is 猫, pronounced māo, just like a cat :)
cuckoo (thats obvious), crow, owl and goose also have onomatopoeic origins.
I'm now wondering in how many languages is the cat named for the sound it makes?
Underrated comment
The Pokémon school of naming
If you know Japanese the similar kind of thing happens quite a bit, and so it wouldn't surprise me that someone familiar with the cultural context and fluent in the language could easily figure out this kind of "crypographic" writing. It's basically just poetry but with a visual twist, and a lot of Japanese authors will use similar literary techniques, even in pretty mainstream works. It's pretty common to write certain words or names with unusual kanji that make visual puns or add another layer of meaning. Often you'll see it in songs where some words might be written differently than they're sung which gives a second meaning when reading along with the lyrics, or in books where normally katakana words will be written with kanji instead, or kanji words will be given a different reading. An example of a famous author who uses these things extensively is NisiOishin, who you might know from Bakemonogatari which is also pretty popular overseas. That series, the anime and even more so the books, is one that if you watch/read without knowing Japanese well you will miss a TON of buried jokes or extra meaning. His dialogue and writing is really dense in kanji based wordplay that doesn't translate at all, from alternate readings to visual gags to even being plot relevant occasionally, and it's a pretty mainstream work directed at a high school - young adult audience rather than some educated snobs. If you know the culture you can read that stuff no problem and get what the author was going for.
Another example from the internet world you might have seen, is that 草 is used online as basically the english "lol" but the kanji just means grass and it's read as kusa (grass). But it's actually just a visual pun from the previous slang for lol which was just a bunch of wwwwww which look like grass, and those themselves came from either the word "warau" which means laugh, or alternatively just being what you might end up typing accidentally if you were trying to type "hahahaha" in a hurry on a japanese cellphone using the kana input. From 草 people have even evolved it further into stuff like 大草原 (giant field of grass) which is pretty funny. If you were studying it 3000 years in the future you'd be like why are these people talking about grass so much, but with context it makes sense. And if that much evolution can happen in a few years it's no surprise that Egyptian hieroglyphics would have developed such a rich vocabulary of weird memes and puns over the course of millennia.
Meanwhile, in Chinese, 草 is used to swear, because it's phonetically similar to the banned swear word 肏. There are so many variants of the "cao" curse and homophones being used to get around filters. Puns and homophones abound. It gets pretty annoying, honestly XD
The way that the different readings of a sign are indicated, as shown at 3:13, feels reminiscent of furigana to me.
Thanks for this detailed information😇 very interesting!
Good comment, the only thing I'd add though is that everything moves so quickly today, whereas back in ye olden days there weren't so many people using the written language and society itself didn't change too quickly, so changes occurred more slowly than they do now. The swap from wwwww to giant field of grass would've taken hundreds of years.
very interesting
Imagine a chisel scribe making a mistake on a wall.
Just invent a new hieroglyph to incorporate it, seems to be the answer
@@konstantinopoulos33 yeah i can imagine a few of these were mistakes once made but they were understood enough to become more regularly used
I think they would just have to hope that their planning and sketching would help prevent mistakes
maybe that's what drives these games
oh well this could be made into an f, I'll draw a cat next to it.
they'll get it everybody loves that tale
@@konstantinopoulos33 maybe we should call them "bluffograms," a writing system based on the concept of plausible deniability
Not having an alphabet is a huge problem. From the internet: 'I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.'
Saw an HAI on how the keyboard broke chinese. Since the characters have nothing to do with the phonology its easy to forget how to write them. Like my grade school cursive, everyone types everything these days so how to properly write kanji is forgotten. They are good at using adaption to the keyboard though.
@@nomobobby when Chinese speak, I can visualize the pinyin in my head and can look up a words this way. Enter-pinyin-choose-correct-character is very a very efficient way to write Chinese. Works with bopomofo too.
Something like that is happening to English as a first language. Children in some countries (USA, Australia, perhaps others) write mainly on keyboards and read on screens. They no longer learn to produce or read "joined-up writing," which they call "cursive." They may lose one point in exams for writing only in capital letters.
"The first three are sounds. Focus on that last one."
Oh, you mean... the elephant in the room?
Here's Nativlang to remind me why I never want to become an Egyptologist!
I have a friend who is. I need to call her and go "WTF WHY"
Your statement made me laugh. I have conquered understanding of complex molecules and their interactions in the brain but this language thing is strange. Yet this is the humanities side of the human and for a psychiatrist it is just as important to me as the biological mechanisms. So much to learn.....
@@sennaka I was thinking of studying Ancient Egyptian culture, but I never really got around it. Seeing this video made me think twice before doing it.
@@barbarahouk1983 We have so little time and so much to learn though. It's depressing how the opportunity cost of knowledge is more knowledge and the more we specialize in one thing, the less time we have to learn the others.
Funny, this is exactly the sort of thing that would make me want to become an Egyptologist. I find this to be absolutely fascinating!
I love the idea of being able to express language with art, like using crocodiles to compose a poem to a god associated with crocodiles!! It's Egyptian hieroglyphs are complicated, but so is Japanese writing...
I would love a video about cuneiform writing and how it was deciphered
+
Concuerdo con esto
I think he may have done a segment in one of his videos on this subject but the story deserves its own video.
Leaving my customary comment-for-the-algorithm. So glad a shitty year ends with a NativLang upload. ☺️🥰
Amen
Yup
The crocodile hymn has Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den energy.
Also Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo
@@JovanKo314 that's not a poem...
@@neilsumanda1538 Define poem, I suppose. It means "Bison from Buffalo, New York who are intimidated by other bison in their community also happen to intimidate other bison in their community."
"You can't just substitute a locust for the letter 'R' it doesn't even have an 'R' in the Egyptian word!"
Egyptian scribe: "LOL Locust go Rrrrrrrrrrr"
This reminds me of the British gang slang that used rhyming words. It sounds like gibberish to any normal person not in the know.
Which is kind of the point of it?
9:49 So basically like the Chinese Shi Shi Poem, where you make a hymn composed only of crocodiles.
In a way, isn’t the development of hieroglyphs similar to that of Chinese symbols?
I always thought Seal Script was so interesting and comparing the original symbol of Qin to sumerian symbolic representation of Ashur especially when tethered.
@@mykulpierce I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about but it sure does sound interesting!
@@jddbrr4144 When you look at reliefs of what's called the "Sumerian tree of Life" It's depicted with a tree flanked by two figures often with lines running up to a depiction of Ashur, or a winged disk. The sealed script symbol for Qin closely resembles the motif, could just be an interesting coincidence.
No, Chinese characters eventually became phonetic-ish
After the Qin Dynasty, new characters are created largely based on existing "phonetic parts" （聲旁）.
For example, when the Sanskrit word "Buddha" was introduced to China, Chinese created the new character "佛" （*bjut，reconstructed pronunciation） using the "phonetic part" 弗 （*bjut） which sounded the closest to "Bud-" . The "人" (human) part denotes that the character's meaning is related to human, as Buddha was a type of human.
Yes, it is similar. But the way how Hieroglyphs works seems to be way more complicated than Chinese characters.
"Writing always end in alphabets"
Chinese: 哈哈哈哈
Japanese copying the homework desperately
@@theparrot6516 Not gonna lie they didn't do it well.
the little smile on the statue and blinking eyes was a really nice touch. thank you for helping elucidate a fascinating subject.
The hieroglyphs reminds me of that Star Trek episode "Darmok". Except that instead of trying to talk to the aliens, you have to pass notes back and forth to each other.
Sekhmet and Ptah at Hurghada
It's a wonderful episode, but what seems frustrating about the Egyptian system is that the symbols have no stability...Picard never would have figured anything out!
“Sutekh, when the walls fell.”
I saw those 3d pillars in the beginning and thought this going to be a sequel to Major Moments in the History of Writing
I would call it "Hieroglyphic Poetry" more than Cryptography.... And had to be really fun to do.
Only in hindsight
Reminds me of 通假, but hieroglyphic seems way more complex.
@Hernando Malinche It means using a character to represent another because they sound the same. It is known also as rebus in English. A good example is 來 where it meant "wheat" but now means "come".
@Hernando Malinche Another example is "萬" which was a logogram for scorpions but now means "ten thousand". Also a fun fact: it is the first syllable of "ban" in the Japanese war cry "banzai".
通假 is essentially rebus, but the determinative part is absorbed into a new character and used to strengthen the ideographic / pleremic system, rather than the rebus principle making the system alphabetic / cenemic
@@windywendi
Then what the hell is 蠍
@@windywendi Yep, the full phrase actually says something like "May the Emperor live ten thousand years", with banzai being a shortened as "ten thousand years" or "a long time". I believe this was derived from the Chinese emperor where the characters would be pronounced "wan sui" in Mandarin.
If they wanted to write "elephant, why couldn't they just draw the frickin elephant instead of drawing 3 signs before it?
The word "elephant" wasn't a good illustration of how determiners work. In general they can stand for a whole class of things. It would be like writing "p-r-k-t-(bird)" in English to mean "parakeet". Nearly every word ends in a determiner, and sometimes they get so specific (like in the case of elephant) that they're redundant, but notice that they also function as useful separators between words.
In japanese they have something called furigana (phonetic spelling above the kanji) for kids who don't know all the chinese characters yet, maybe there was something similar in egypt.
@@mikemustmurder just for more discussion other OP said pleremic rebus eg 通假 unanswered 蠍 so check it out this is good becuz im in Jpstudies just like theonion relevantly real instead of satirical surrealism!
@@turtlellamacow to add to this, it would be like writing “w-t (plant)” to mean “wheat” and “w-t (water)” to mean “wet”
I think like its been mentioned they are describing the elephant or what happened to the elephant. You have to remember in ancient times people have the capacity to learn and learn to talk but had no one to teach them so when they wanted to say lets go hunt an animal theyd make a killing gesture and then make the sound of the animal they wanted to kill, later someone came up with the idea for the sound for killing gesture. Same way with hieroglyphs, they first used all the images from nature, like the stars, clouds, animals and plants things they all knew ok so now with what you know tell a story. So you use animals to describe a person or what they did. You use the sky to describe what is misterious and unknown or godly. Thats how herioglyphs start and with time they get more complicated but the system is the same. People knew what they saw so they talked that basic way. Some people understood and some probably didnt or got confused youd probably had to know what the other person was thinking in order to completely understand because the language had that many gaps back then... they were doing the best they could with what little understanding they had. But they did have a very good concept of the great scheme of things. Like you know the result but not the formula to get there...
The egyptian Word for elephant sounds like the german one for an unfinished building: Rohbau
The only difference is that the German word doesn't end with the thought, "Oh, they might not know what we mean, so we'd better draw a picture of an unfinished building."
It's interesting how the fact that hieroglyphs kept their original pictographic shape allowed for many of these cryptographic strategies and cultural associations. They probably wouldn't be possible with cuneiform signs, which simplified and largely lost the connection to their pictographic origins.
I’m studying the Akkadian language to study ancient Mesopotamia, and I’m telling you now I could never be an Egyptologist.
Biblaridion and Nativlang on one day, McJesus this is amazing.
BROOO ikrrr Bib just posted a vid the same time NativLang did!! 🤩
Son of Jesus in Gaelic ☺
@@creely123 Mác Jhaisus or something... I dunno... I don't speak Irish
Would you like a side of frankincense with that McJesus?
I think a good rule of thumb would be that accessible writing systems, like alphabets, develop when writing is democratized (or at least developed by common people for common purpose, regardless of its dispersal). When writing is ritualized it is almost always made more complicated. Look at how unchanged Chinese writing has been for a millennia, but, in the modern era, pinyin and simplified scripts are becoming the norm no the literacy is much more common in China.
By the time of the Song Dynasty writing was somewhat common in that there was usually at least one person in a household who was literate, and also pinyin isn’t used far too often amongst Chinese people living in China.
Huitzilopochtli which is why I said simplified mandarin script. I didn’t know that about the Song Dynasty, very interesting.
Not sure how much Simplified Characters have done for literacy, they are still Hanzi. For example, is there a difference in literacy between Mainland China and Taiwan, favoring Mainland China?
Alexander Armfelt it really depends on how much you put into CCP statistics. Even in the most honest countries those sorts of stats are used as propaganda, but considering the lengths they are willing to go to reincorporate Hong Kong and Taiwan, I find it hard to believe that they would risk publishing numbers that didn’t make Taiwan look backward.
@@viracocha6093 what are you talking about? Computers are pretty common in China, and you type on them with Pinyin
Egyptians: Hey guys let's make ourselves immortal by writing all the cool stuff we did on that building over there so everyone can know how glorious we were.
Also Egyptians: Let's make it as unreadable as possible.
Hieroglyphs were the main reason I went into Egyptology. Just when you think you understand how it works, the Egyptians throw another surprise at you from 3000 years ago. Sometimes I can hear them laugh...
NativLang posting always makes my day!
It makes my head spin, my mind disoriented.
Reminded me from the beginning of the Chinese writing system, where one character may have a phonetic part and a semantic classifier part. Add in complex sound changes throughout the history of the Chinese languages and the introduction of this writing system into other languages such as Japanese (with their own sound changes) and you end up with a very complex and beautiful way of writing.
I'm actually creating my own language and pictographic writing system to match it for world-building of a story I've been working on for about 4/5 years now. This video was quite helpful! Thanks
Do more videos on ancient Egyptian Scripts plz! Heirogyphics, sianic script, hieratic, demotic and Phoenician scripts. As well as the decoding of the Rosetta Stone
I really, really hope that 90% of this is just a result of them genuinely having a pun-off with each other.
When I was much younger I had a copy of Horapolllo’s “Hieroglyphics “ and I was mystified as to why he got so many hieroglyphs wrong but in light of this, and that fact that he was writing hundreds of years after the enigmatic era when the process may have been even more involved , its time for a reappraisal of his book.
Hopefully there are actual scholars of Egyptian hieroglyphics who have already considered this.
0:52 OF COURSE IT DID, I EVEN USED IT AS A SOURCE FOR AN ESSAY.
OKAY.
11:10 Ancient Roman soldier facing off the greatest threat of Egypt: a fish-footed minotaur entirely made of words!
9:56 That ”Crocodile Hymn” kind of reminds me of the Classical Chinese ”Shi Shi” -poem, which is entirely composed of repetition of the syllable ”shi”, with different tones; and yet, it forms a completely coherent story. 😅
Somehow this makes me think of memes: using references, puns, and purposeful misspelling for clever effects. The internet is basically turning into ancient Egyptian linguists
NativLang and Artifexian uploading at around the same time? What a lovely Christmas present!
And they seem like the type of channels to have the same fanbase too!
I'm wondering how many of these glyphs started as slang and eventually became incorporated into the everyday written language. I'm learning Finnish for 8 years now and there's a lot more word borrowing and slang being incorporated in the past 5 years than I remember from years ago
Am I the only one who feels that quantum mechanics is more straight forward to understand?? This concept demands rewatching several times over... THANK YOU for the fascinating insight; I am sure enlightenment will develop once I eventually digest all this knowledge🤯
Thanks, NativLang! Another wonderfully informative video!
For everyone here in the comments who are baffled by this system, I'd like to say that, as a professional Biologist, hobbyist artist, and amateur Egyptologist, I attest that learning Middle Egyptian and hieroglyphic writing can definitely be done in less than a year with only an hour of studying every day. Buy James P. Allen's "Middle Egyptian: An Introduction to the Language and Culture of Hieroglyphs", "Ancient Egyptian Phonology" and "Middle Egyptian Literature" and you have everything you need to begin!
Please do a dive into my wife's native language Kokborok/Tripuri! It's a bodo-baro, sino-tibetan language in north east India and part of Bangladesh!
I had no idea hieroglyphics were that convoluted
They’re not... Try Cymroglyphics at BritainsHiddenHistory Ross
I started with a "learn hieroglyphs" book, I got so intrigued I got a few more. I forgot pretty much everything, but images representing letters and actual images, and you can put them together to make boxes... it blew my mind
Thanks for this video! I think that reveling in clever wordplay is the sign of an advanced civilization and love that you can show how it happens across the world.
I also like that you are speaking pretty slowly in this video - it really helped me digest what you were saying.
It's almost as if 4000 years of language evolution being taken in by someone who grew up on another system altogether 2 thousand years after this system was supplanted by their own would seem complicated.
So I guess this means that there was once a language with a writing system that was harder to learn than Japanese.
You should mean Chinese characters (a.k.a. kanji, hanja, CJK Unified Ideographs, CJKV Unified Ideographs, etc.)
@@justinshamch2547 Yeah, except the way Japanese uses them, as well as the fact that they use them alongside their own syllabaries, make writing Japanese more difficult than writing Chinese languages. As for other languages that formerly used the characters, like Korean, I honestly don't know.
@@FairyCRat Not to mention the numerous pronunciations each kanji has based on native Japanese words, borrowed Chinese words, or just for fun, borrowed words from other languages
I mean, there's Tibetan
I mean interestingly enough if you know Japanese the similar kind of thing happens quite a bit, and so it wouldn't surprise me that someone familiar with the cultural context and fluent in the language could easily figure out this kind of "crypographic" writing. It's basically just poetry but with a visual twist, and a lot of Japanese authors will use similar literary techniques, even in pretty mainstream works. It's pretty common to write certain words or names with unusual kanji that make visual puns or add another layer of meaning. Often you'll see it in songs where some words might be written differently than they're sung which gives a second meaning when reading along with the lyrics, or in books where normally katakana words will be written with kanji instead, or kanji words will be given a different reading. An example of a famous author who uses these things extensively is NisiOishin, who you might know from Bakemonogatari which is also pretty popular overseas. That series, the anime and even more so the books, is one that if you watch/read without knowing Japanese well you will miss a TON of buried jokes or extra meaning. His dialogue and writing is really dense in kanji based wordplay that doesn't translate at all, from alternate readings to visual gags to even being plot relevant occasionally, and it's a pretty mainstream work directed at a high school - young adult audience rather than some educated snobs. If you know the culture you can read that stuff no problem and get what the author was going for, it's just hard for us trying to look back into the past and reconstruct it without context.
Another example from the internet world you might have seen, is that 草 is used online as basically the english "lol" but the kanji just means grass and it's read as kusa (grass). But it's actually just a visual pun from the previous slang for lol which was just a bunch of wwwwww which look like grass, and those themselves came from either the word "warau" which means laugh, or alternatively just being what you might end up typing accidentally if you were trying to type "hahahaha" in a hurry on a japanese cellphone using the kana input. From 草 people have even evolved it further into stuff like 大草原 (giant field of grass) which is pretty funny. If you were studying it 3000 years in the future you'd be like why are these people talking about grass so much, but with context it makes sense. And if that much evolution can happen in a few years it's no surprise that Egyptian hieroglyphics would have developed such a rich vocabulary of weird memes and puns over the course of millennia.
I can definitely see all the hard work put into this video. The animations look so nice. The content is very complex and well researched. Great job and Happy New Year!
This is the first time I’ve listened to one of your videos through earphones. Man your voice is so comforting
When rhyming slang goes on a 3000 year bender.
Would you consider elaborating on why Egyptian got so complex? Was it a desire to keep writing mystical, free options for artistic expression or something else entirely?
seems like artistic license and meme culture to me
Fascinating! I'm starting the new year learning, which is as it should be. Especially loved the piece about Mjw. Thanks.
it's beautiful in a way, it's like an art, like writing poetry but with the symbols themselves
Please, a video on the writing of Vinča culture in Eastern Europe!
Egyptian Hieroglyphic Cryptography: Basically, ancient Cockney Rhyming Slang.
new video!! yusss
was just binging nativlang videos the other day, wondering when you would upload again. a fine way to end out the year haha
Your videos are absolute Gems!
Me encantan tus videos!!!!!
I imagine this is how future scholars will look at languages such as French, Portugese and English and wonder why the hell doesn't the spelling add up, thinking we were all fools that complicated things too much
To be fair they wouldn't be wrong in thinking that 😂
Not only the rebus writing and substituting, also the way the hieroglyphs were written in cursive reminds one of the way they're shortened in Chinese cursive scripts. It's really fascinating how much of what we consider specific to one culture is based on universal principles of how language and writing works
That was magnificent. Thank you for that. And happy
New year to ya
Just here to say I love your videos cause I'm actually early enough to be seen
oh my gosh, this absolutely rules
Decent video! Thanks for uploading!
Great video. Loved this
Question: Was this incredibly complex writing system confined to a small, learned elite? How could it possibly be learned by the masses? Does the expansion of literacy necessarily lead to alphabets, even if time alone does not?
Yes, it was confined to a small body of scribes. Yes it could and no, it doesn't (respectively), as seen by, say, Chinese script.
@@melanoc3tusii205 Or Japanese, which has Chinese characters all having at least two and possibly many more potential readings, plus two other writing systems - one of which is commonly used to disambiguate the pronunciation of Chinese characters the same way that foot in elephant is disambiguating the dagger's pronunciation.
It’s actually kind of the same with the grammar, everybody says that languages lose inflection over time while coptic gained a lot and became polysynthetic lol
Cause of Arabic probably
@@ranro7371 what? Arabic isn’t polysynthetic.
@@rubbedibubb5017 : أوأعطيناكموه عبثًا؟ awaʼāʻṭaynākumūhu ʻabathan (a-wa-aʻṭay-nā-kum-ūh-u ʻabath-an) means "And did we give it (masc.) to you futilely?" in Arabic, each word consists of one root that has a basic meaning (aʻṭī 'give' and ʻabath 'futility'). Prefixes and suffixes are added to make the word incorporate subject, direct and indirect objects, their plurality, etc.
It has the most complex and complete verb conjunctions and morphology of any language, don't know if that's synthetic or not.
@@ranro7371 well there are plenty of languages that have more complex morphology than that. For example in Yup’ik, a langugage spoken in Alaska in the US, tuntussuqatarniksaitengqiggtuq means ”he had not yet said again that he was going to hunt reindeer”. I love arabic morphology and it is very complex, but it is probably not the MOST complex of all languages ever.
@@rubbedibubb5017 The complex part is in i'rab, which is without a doubt the most complex aspect of any language. It was not present in my example.
- What's your name?
+ Xrhobauwelephant.
...
+ The elephant is 'silent'.
- Oh, alright.
Your videos really are so interesting
I know it's "The Mummy,'" but something that always bugged me about it, especially since in was a running gag in TWO of them, was the verbal ascription to the Stork symbol, here written as "Amenaphus." Is it even possible that THIS could have been a word from a SINGLE hieroglyph?
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%F0%93%85%A1 No reference to Amenophus, so I think it was just made up for the movie. His name would almost certainly have atleast the character for the God's name "Amen"
Would you do a video on the history of the cyrillic alphabet ,I found it so interesting that Cyrill found a way to adopt the greek alphabet to language groups that sounded nothing like greek
The Cyrillic Alphabet we know today was developed in Bulgaria roughly during the reign of Simeon I, i.e. not by Cyril and Methodius.
@@charlesfu3726 right !!!Cyril made the old slavonic alphabet ,but didnt the bulgarians base the cyrillic on the slavonic alphabet?
@@aroma13 nah the Bulgarians took a handful of Glagolitic letters and added them to the existing Greek model. The majority of Cyrillic is Greek uncial, with some Latin and Glagolitic components, and some letters of unidentified provenance.
@@aroma13 The older system even have Theta and Omega and many ligatures which modern spelling reforms of Russian, Bulgarian and other Slavic languages completely got rid of. You can still see them on proper ecclesiastical texts today. I think most liturgical books are still in the old script.
I love this video so much! And it has made me appreciate the complexities and innovation of hieroglyphics even more than your last video!
10:45 - all through the video I’m thinking “that’s just like Chinese!” (and consequently so with the use of Chinese characters in Japanese too). There are so many similarities with how the Egyptians used hieroglyphs to how the Chinese and Japanese use Hanzi/Kanji, but it seems there are also differences especially with how flexible the hieroglyphs could be used (but then again my understanding of the history of all 3 cultures is limited to a point so there may be even more similarities than I am aware of) - like even the poem using all characters of crocodiles with the Chinese poem consisting entirely of characters of Hanzi with the sound of ‘shi’ (but with different tones)!
And then there’s also the comparison of the flaw in human logic where people have thought of the term ‘evolution’ equating to improvement, where as in reality (in biology, language pronunciation, language grammar, language writing etc) evolution simply means ‘change’ which could be towards something simple or something complex, something ‘better’ or something ‘worse’ (from a subjective view).
Have I mentioned how much I love this video? 😍🤣
Edit: And not to mention the similarity of the Egyptian and Chinese word for cat developing from the sound it makes!
Thank you so much for this video. The complexity of the writing system allowed the author ways to input subtle meaning that we don't have. They had words AND visual imagery that together conveyed more feeling, more meaning, and seemed to be a brilliant, rich way of sharing thoughts and ideas.
Nativlang in 5029: How pinyin destroyed the 4 millennia year old Chinese writing system
If he does a video on Pinyin, he should compare it to Zhuyin
Honestly it's already in the way, quite a lot of young chinese only type in pinyin and don't remember how to write the character, only read them
@@Grityom even if u type in cangjie, u will forget how to write the characters. Cangjie breaks down characters weirdly. Stroke order typing might require more knowledge of the whole character🤔
@@user-rr3ux6tb1w what if they romanise their scripts too though🤔
@@carolhomanhei9497 for Korean no, for Japanese maybe?
Am I crazy, or does it seem like this would still be exhausting to always be trying to parse what you're reading? I know that it's a very different cultural mindset, and I know that a lot of it is context dependent, but still, it seems just reading even a little bit as an Egyptian would be like trying to solve multiple word puzzles at once
you get used to it, and eventually you just recognize a word. It’s no different than reading japanese for the most part
It's great how you narrate history through the story of various languages. Waiting for your next video. It would be great if you could also make a video regarding Harappan script. Just telling.
Hello, I am a new subscriber. Keep it up, Nativlang! 🖒
Nooooooo! Impossible! Efficient writing systems always led to alphabets!
"Haha, hieroglyphs go brrrrrr"
It's not efficient though
Was this kind of cryptography used in everyday texts, or for specific purposes, like the crocodile hymn?
Seems specific; one quote I included in my sources doc says their creation was "the monopoly of a very restricted intellectual community". Some signs did get popular enough to flow out into regular hieroglyphic texts.
@@NativLang So to an extent, these were word games. Cool.
Was there even such a thing as everyday texts? Writing was exclusively used by priests and scribes.
@@kekeke8988 Well as I understand, Egypt had quite a few scribes, with varying degrees of respect and status. there plenty need of accountants and administrative work or government work.
Being a scribe was definitely high status and a respected work, but there still was quite a few of them and they weren’t not really part of the elite as I understand.
I remember seeing quite a few preserved texts from accountants from ancient Egypt with hieroglyphs,
In every harbour, big project, army or trading post, in a big empire with large areas, there arises a need of people to keep records. And they add up.
I don’t know if most scribes could be considered the intellectual elite, but they certainly worked for them.
They were the sort of middle class to higher middle class that handled the administrative work for the real important people all around Egypt and all that they worked on.
So I’m guessing it talks about, hieroglyphs spreading from religious hieroglyph text to becoming common among your normal boring scribes working at a harbour, in their book keeping and report.
@@kekeke8988 Yes there was. It was called Demotic.
Knowledge... delicious knowledge. I love this stuff
Another great video! -- had a potential video / idea the other day: Cypriot Arabic, or Sanna, the language of the tiny Maronite population in Cyprus. Very hard to find lots of information about it, and the language itself is on its last legs.
This is the most overly complicated and inefficient writing system I have ever seen. The guy who came up with it was probably a mazochist or something
They basically made a writing system that people could be somewhat successful at reading without having ever learned it before, using phonetic and meaning hints.
It makes sense if you have absolutely nothing to base yourself before that. It only makes more sense other systems would base themselves on this one, then simplify it, which is exactly what happened.
It was meant to be complicated. That’s the point of cryptography, it’s like puzzles
@@masterspark9880 Which confirms my point that the creator was a mazochist
on contrary the egyptians' thought, "it's beautiful"...
Most likely an every increasing bureaucracy creating more and more reasons for them to have a job
3:39 "Of course Egyptians would have need hundreds of symbols"
Me, a native Mandarin speaker: why not?
Thousands actually
Great work!
This was a lovely video!