Creating My Own Alphabet FROM SCRATCH

today we are surrounded everywhere by the written word from emails and texts to books and newspapers advertisements and road signs it's hard to imagine a world without text but for most of humanity's existence language was limited to just a spoken word and the only way records could be kept was through oral tradition the ability to record the spoken words onto written record was such a crucial development that occurred independently at least five times in the world and then spread to nearly every dominant culture some have argued that writing is a defining characteristic of state-level civilizations although there are many contradictory occurrences that disprove that belief like the Incas in this video I'm gonna attempt this invention myself for this scenario we'll be sticking to the spoken language of English but under the assumption the modern written English has been completely forgotten by everyone so it's up to me to reinvent a new system of the written English word and invented my new language I have the unique position of having some foresight and knowledge to know how this language will be used in the future as I continue to slowly rebuild myself back to modern day so starting from my blank slate I can make some improvements to it and make it a better language then the chicken scratches up today's English so let's invent our own written language that's better [Music] everything we use comes from 8,000 generations of collective innovation and discovery but could an average person figure it all out themselves and work their way from the Stone Age to today that's a question we're exploring each week I try to take that next step forward in human history my name is Andy and this is how to make everything be sure to subscribe and turn on notifications so you don't miss the next step in this journey the scenario of a society losing the writing system they seem like a fanciful hypothetical but is not without historical basis during the Late Bronze Age collapse the writing system in Greece now known as linear beef was completely forgotten as their society faced cultural collapse after which they faced several generations of dark ages with no written record until they invented or maybe more accurately borrowed a new writing system from which evolved into the letters of today's English and the dominant writing system on earth well let's dive in a little earlier to learn about some of the first systems of writing that were invented and see if there's any lessons I can learn from them when I make my own first linkie did they sponsor curiosity stream help do some initial research on the origins of written language how was Italy used curiosity stream to access several excellent documentaries that helped set the stage curiosity stream is a streaming service with thousands of documentaries and nonfiction titles on pretty much every subject spending science nature history technology society and lifestyle with new titles added weekly the best part is it's only $20 a year go to curiosity stream comm such each TV for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries nonfiction series and for our viewers use a promo code each tme when prompted during the signup process and your membership is completely free for the first 30 days using curiosity stream we were able to access Ron's age rise of civilization and curious minds the Bronze Age both featuring the expertise of dr. Klein we reached out to him for some additional info to start our own journey in he ports in contact with his colleague dr. Christopher Ralston okay hear me now very good what distinguishes like a written language from just drawings on a wall writing in essence can be described as a system in which the attempt is made to put language in some sort of written form images to really represent language they have to be decipherable in the first place and also there has to have been an attempt to convey some things but by about 3200 BCE we actually get full-blown real writings in Mesopotamia and then generation through to later in Egypt and so in that case the pictographs they would represent words Junia form started pretty graphically but as it evolved was reduced to a series of strokes over time to simplify and speed up the writing process around 2,800 BCE keenya form shifted from pictograms to syllables where symbols would represent portions of the spoken word and would be combined together to form a complete word this greatly decreased the numbers symbols needed it was the first step towards an alphabet developed soon after that was writing that can convey words the laga gram of writing that can also convey syllables we call those syllabic rams and then these early writing systems both in Mesopotamia Egypt had a third category of signs and those were determinative z' syllables can be further broken down into phonemes and a group of symbols or letters the represents phonemes is called an alphabet the first protoform of an alphabet is believed to have been developed within the egyptian hieroglyphics called uni literals these are believed to form the basis of a Phoenician alphabet around 1050 BCE the alphabet wasn't invented by the Phoenicians the alphabet was invented by Semites who speak a semitic language becoming familiar with the egyptian writing system but then basically modifying it simplifying it and using signs of the alphabet not to represent full words but each sign represents a single phoneme or a single sound most accurately we could refer to them as Canaanites the Phoenicians are basically people who standardized the Canaanite alphabet they were step two in the history of the alphabet what was the evolution from these early forms to phonetic alphabet like what we have today non alphabetic writing requires a large number of signs six eight hundred a thousand signs something such as that so it's a very difficult system alphabetic writing is a writing system in which each sign represents a single phoneme and so it's a dramatic development because basically alphabets consist of somewhere between 25 and 35 or 40 characters so it's a much more simplified system quite elegant in a number of ways and this alphabet that was in was entirely consonantal the Greeks adopted the alphabet around 800 BCE but unlike the Phoenician Semitic language vowels aren't as implicit and needed their own letters as well the system was fledgling in Aramaic and Hebrew in terms of representation of vowels so basically the Greeks expanded on that they were modifying an existing system of representing vowels rather than doing something de novo thus treating the alphabet they would form the basis for Latin Krulak runic and Coptic alphabets around the world thanks for taking the time you're most welcome take care now learning from these early developments of the first written language I can pull a few lessons from venti my own an alphabet isn't necessarily a crucial building block for civilizations written language as a Chinese and mine languages show but having fewer characters does have a distinct advantage and later media inventions like the printing press in computer I'm gonna go this direction so now to start dissecting the phonemes of English to decide my letters for miles but the initial thought might be that there's just 26 phonemes to coordinate with the 26 letters but language is a little bit of a mess in spoken language since we've all faster than written language this is called a pretty messy situation with the pronunciation of letters that have complex rules for hard and soft fouls different letters can be pronounced the same depending on the situation combinations of letters can produce completely unique sounds and for some reason there are silent letters for example at one point the word night was pronounced how that spelled can it but as a fonzie ation evolved the spelling remain the same so let's just forget about this mess of an alphabet and base ours on the sounds of the English language for the phonemes so what does English sound like and how many different phonemes are there generally there's believed to be 44 unique phonemes in English but in many parts of North America this can be as low as 39 so let's start with that and develop our unique thirty-nine letter alphabet as placeholders let's use characters from the international phonetic alphabet to designate each phoneme until we can come up with our unique letter at this point we've really lost any direct 1:1 connection between our letters and then I lost English elf but for the majority of our new alphabet with the exception of some consonants so first up let's put them in order alphabetical order is actually kind of an arbitrary tradition let's base it on something a little bit more meaningful so I used a study of the popularity of different phonemes in American English let's sort them by commonly used to least like many languages the first symbols of the original Phoenician alphabet likely started as pictograms derived from Egyptian hieroglyphics back then the pictograms connected to the phoneme and represented the first two characters of ox and house all started with a phoneme it represented in the Phoenician language so we went through the 30:19 ohms of the alphabet and decided on the pictograph that would clearly represent something that began with the same phenome for some letters especially a few Vols we had to use fee gnomes that were in the middle of the word as it weren't any English words that fit that role once satisfied with our selection we went through an attempt to turn the pictographs into a simpler symbol that would be easier to write quickly so these are all letters ah for agave mmm for knife her for rest just for tree e your insect s for sandwich did for dubby booth for light e for Egret cup for corn for a for egg mmm for man for zigzag pup for pottery and for ax the village for water ooh but loon beat for Bill uh for Earth uh for onions for fire i4ii arm huh the house o for oats ah for all moons for tongs for sheep e for YouTube gold for jeans for cheese Oh for cow ooh book Oh for oil lamp he television I tried to combine any letters when it was possible but understanding your own language and the vowels is pretty difficult so I mostly decide to leave things alone so I don't end up with a strange Lisp I did however decide to combine the and sounds as they seem extremely similar just to help reduce my alphabet down to 38 this is actually a common speech impediment and a challenge for non-native speakers so we'll see what kind of consequences this has in the long run another major part of any written language is which direction you read or write it initially there wasn't really a standard in the early systems was something going left to right and others right to left and many switching every other line like you would plow a field most Western text today goes left to right while languages like Arabic and Hebrew go right to left traditional Chinese characters used to be written right to left and top to bottom but over time has changed from left to right due to Western influence the direction is fairly arbitrary but with the majority of people being right-handed myself included writing left to right has the advantage of smearing the fresh ink West with your palm there's also become the predominant format in modern history and technology has been formatted to match so let's stick with us left-to-right format most initial writing systems didn't have any form of punctuation or even spacing order they were slowly added as they developed to improve readability the first evidence starts around 800 BCE with points between words and a horizontal stroke two separate sentences Greek playwrights around 400 BCE started indicating pauses in speech to help their actors recite it a most punctuation was formally developed in the medieval age to assist in reciting the Bible with thoughts at various heights to indicate intonation of things like questions the minor question mark developed from these dots it was formalized in the early 13th century the exclamation point also developed in the Middle Ages possibly as a combination of the letters and Latin explanation of joy IO something that was often added at the end of sentences so for my writing system I needed some small dots to indicate spaces between words some straight lines indicate pauses like commas square brackets to indicate quotations and the triangular brackets to indicate sentences and with that I want to incorporate the use of initial markings that's used in modern Spanish writing first introduced into Spanish in 1754 the addition of inverted punctuation marks at the beginning of clauses helps give you an early clue of the correct intonation for the sentence so I want to incorporate that into my writing system it also adds a nice symmetrical balance to sentences for questions I'll add a little squiggle designator to try and replicate the rise in intonation that indicates a question when you're speaking and then a sharp diamond to indicate an exclamation lastly I want to incorporate some additional designators to even further improve our language and make up for some shortcomings in English the additional need for punctuation has been hotly debated for countless years and designators like irony punctuation has imposed many times in English sometimes early as 1580 but has never been formally adopted whoever in recent years new elements have become common addressed some of these potential shortcomings for most of history text was for more formal use well the proliferation of literacy and ease of text-based communication and more recent eras we need to express the emotions behind written language become more and more important this has given rise to the invention of emoticons and emojis designators an interesting return of ideograms in tomorrow and language so the future proof and codify emotional intent I went through and found the most commonly used emojis and try to dissect their general emotional intent if happy live excitement of thinking or questioning love joy or laughing crying and sadness anger sarcasm king of a thirst or a strong desire as apparently some people like eggplants unamused and neutral firm ative and negative well these emoji seem to be effective at expressing an emotional intent if they suffer from not being part of the formal writing system and it becomes a bit of a faux pas if you try to use it in any context outside of super informal I thought the use of emojis will be well-received and a doctoral thesis legal statutes or diplomatic treaties so I'm going to incorporate them in a few ways formally so I can better express tone and emotional context so gonna have little designators reminiscent of human mouth for things like happy laughing sad then symbols for a thumbs up or down to show agreement or disagreement a flat line to show neutral or enemy's tone a heart to show love and affection sharp daggers to show anger squiggly lines to show playful humor joking or sarcasm and a tongue to show a strong desire or thirst yeah I think that's a tongue the punctuation is then offer the option to be used independently from the complete sentence for expressing an emotional intent without the use of words so they'll go draw text small paragraph in clay here then of being a lot more difficult than I expected and the characters I have chosen are still pretty complex it's very easy to see why Kuni form eventually took the form that it did pressing in with a read to make very simple characters if this was the only medium I was going to use that's definitely a direction I'd want ahead however I have the foresight of knowing that papyrus is gonna be event to pre soon and we'll be doing a video on that and that allow us to write with ink on a paper and something is easy to transport even further along eventually the point of having a printing press into computer where the complexity of the characters isn't as important but until then it's still useful to be able to write it out but in this stage my language is still pretty complex so you look at the different evolutions of characters I'd say it's about a middle point two generations it should hopefully get to something that's pretty efficient I think getting at that point is really impossible without just a lot of trial in there it's hard to tell what little details need to be there to keep characters distinct and which ones can be removed to simplify them I found trying to read it as actually kind of fun it kinda reminds me of like a rebus puzzle where I figure it out based on different images so there's a lot more straightforward and it's all phonetic and once you remember what each letter represents you just kind of have to sound it out it's like you're learning how to read all over again which you kind of are probably gonna be in the same process when you first learn to read where you sound out every word until you get used to it and then you start to recognize blocks of words instantly and then it's super quick that really kind of illustrates why all these improvements I made aren't really that important it's all about just distinct characters they're together form cohesive units that are both easy to write and read really all you need at this stage it's still a pretty underdeveloped language there's a lot of fun 'national aspects but it's missing things you use today like grammatical punctuation to depict ownership variety of different pauses like colons semicolons and such and parentheses there's no capital case or lowercase I still don't have a numbering system which will probably important to invent as the rubato month we'll be getting to inventing my own units of measurement so probably I need some sort of numbers to go with that one issue with the phonetic alphabet is that hominins are all gonna be spelled the same whether you're eating meat or meeting someone it's the same word so then it's entirely up to context feel it figure it out combination of all these things is really needed to keep it to an efficient easy to read language at this point it's a bit clunky it has a little bit of evolving to do it but considering that this is a first draft and we're roughly at the Year 3200 BCE we millennia head of contemporary written languages at the time the best way to really improve it is through real-world usage figure out what does and doesn't work in use and tweak it as you go so check out our discord where I just added a new channel experimenting and helping a flesh out this writing system and evolving it into the next step we're currently working on trying to make a translator to make it really easy to transition from written English to this new language and I already put together a font so you can start using it on your computer and you can start communicating with this new language which it might be better than English let's try it out and see what happens lastly thank you to all of our patrons we normally have a wall of our patrons names on our to give you the process of rewriting them our new secondary language that will be continuing to be used throughout the series so with that with our $75 patrons you know send you a personalized little note with your name written and this new language for you to enjoy so thanks again for everybody support there and thanks for watching ah mmm eat deep boo pika Ashley be uh and uh oh and oh and he now I know my inter next time won't you sing with me [Music] if you enjoyed this video be sure to subscribe and check out other content we have covering a wide variety of topics also if you enjoy these series consider supporting us on patreon we are largely a fan funded channel and depend on the support of our viewers in order to keep our series going thanks for watching

Channel: How To Make Everything

Views: 199,950

Rating: 4.9060225 out of 5

Keywords: HTME, Smart, Learn, History, Innovator, Education, Educational, School, Invention, how to make everything, brow tidy ox, create your own language, make your own alphabet, english language, language, english, game of thrones language, english alphabet, diy, maker, ancient languages, primitive language, first written language, linguistics, got language, con lang, create a language, got, dothraki, make a language, diy language, conlang, constructed language, hieroglyphics, egyptian, ancient, primitive

Id: 1M4AReJV3ys

Length: 17min 58sec (1078 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 22 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Qwerto227]

Context: An episode in a series about rebuilding human civilisation from scratch which discusses the origins of written language and builds a new phonetic alphabet by looking at how ancient alphabets were formed and applying the same ideas to modern spoken English.

Arguably not worldbuilding, given the idea of the series is to reconstruct our civilization again, but I've still found it, and this episode in particular, to be extremely interesting for exploring how civilizations and cultures can grow organically and progress technologically in ways that I can apply to my own fictional worlds.

[u/Available-Football]

I've watched all of their reset earth videos, they're great for seeing how things developed in a fun and educational way.