There are nearly 300 writing systems out there
in the world. Some work like building blocks while others
are the words themselves, some have vowels and others do not, some are squiggly some
are boxy, and some are long extinct while others are everywhere in the modern world. But writing systems, much like the languages
they encode, don’t always spring up out of nowhere, but descend from another similar
script, maybe adding and changing a few letters here and there. Writing arose independently multiple times,
but what if I told you that most of the scripts used today and in the past all descend from
one script? on the merch store! These shirts have guides on how to read different
scripts, and printed upside-down so you, the wearer can easily use them on your travels. We’re starting this off with Cyrillic and
Arabic, but if enough people buy these, we’ll be launching even more designs with more scripts!] Sumerian1: So, what do you think of my invention? Sumerian2: Oh my gods that is an amazing idea,
write that down! Sumerian1: Wait what is “write”? Sumerian2: That… is a good question. Let’s start in Ancient Egypt, where you
may almost certainly recognize ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs. And if you don’t… well here they are. These symbols were mostly used as what is
called a logography. What is a logography? Chinese characters are a logography, a type
of script where the different characters represent not sounds but concepts, like house or water
or person. However, if you look at the 700+ hieroglyphs
there were and are thinking “ain’t nobody got time for that”, congratulations, you
are in sync with the ancient Egyptians, as a sort of cursive form called hieratic would
also come into use shortly after. You might also be in sync with the Phoenicians. By the mid-2nd millennium BC, Egypt version
3.0 started to expand, conquering their neighbors in Nubia to the south and the land of Canaan
to the northeast. While the Phoenicians in the area started
out using cuneiform, they would adopt a sort of simplified version of Egyptian hieroglyphs,
evolving from Proto-Sinaitic, also a common ancestor of the Ge’ez script used across
East Africa in languages like Amharic. You see, while each symbol was supposed to
represent a thing not a sound, that thing still had a particular set of sounds attached
to it (or in linguistics terminology: a word), so you could also use hieroglyphs as an abjad
(basically an alphabet without the vowels). For instance this was the symbol for house,
for which the word in Phoenician (and other Semitic languages like Arabic and Hebrew)
would’ve been ‘bet’, and thus this symbol adopted the name ‘bet’, and represented
the sound ‘B’ instead of the concept of a house. String a few together and oh baby you can
spell words for all the brand new foreign concepts you want! A lot of the time, a script might be adopted
by a language that it was not designed for, like say Greek, which is an Indo-European
Hellenic language whereas Phoenician was an Afro-Asiatic Semitic language. If that just sounded like a bunch of nerd
jargon to you, that just means Greek and Phoenician are extremely different from one-another. Case in point, vowels matter a lot more in
Greek than Phoenician, but no two languages share the same sounds either, so they could
just repurpose letters for sounds they didn’t need as the vowels they did need. [AD] It was their Old Italic script that begat
the Latin script used by the Romans, and later the kingdoms of Europe, and later the empires
of Europe, and later Vietnam. However it was likely also from the Etruscans
that Northern Europe got their system of runes. There was also another script that branched
off from Greek in the 9th century AD, invented by Saints Cyril and Methodius to write Slavic
languages. Can you guess which one? That’s right, Glagolitic! Glagolitic was developed by the two brothers
to transcribe the language of Old Church Slavonic. However some of their disciples would make
their way to Bulgaria, where Glagolitic would be turned into the Cyrillic we all know and
love today. Greek also branched off in the Caucasus, creating
Armenian and the Georgian scripts. What this means is that Turkey, surrounded
by 8 countries, is surrounded by 6 different scripts, all of which are actually related
to one another. Getting back out of Europe now, the Phoenicians
also did plenty of that colonization stuff, but also plenty of that trading stuff with
their neighbors. The Berbers saw that neat little script the
Phoenicians had and yoinked it for themselves, as did the Arameans, the next link in our
journey. You see Aramaic was used for the Aramaic language
(shocker, I know) which became the lingua franca of the Neo-Babylonian and later the
Persian Achaemenid Empire. From this seat of prominence, Aramaic would
inspire the writing systems used in Hebrew, Arabic, and a script called Syriac, which
in turn gave rise to Sogdian, Old Turkic, Old Hungarian, Uyghur, and Mongolian. And that brings us to China, and by extension
Japan and Korea, and it’s important we mention China here because… there’s literally
no relation here whatsoever, let’s go somewhere else. But there’s another branch that might also
descend from Phoenician. In India, the script known as Kharosthi descended
from Aramaic, but there is also another, more influential script that might belong within
this family as well. You see, many linguists think that the Aramaic
script might also be the ancestor of the Brahmi script (not that kind of Brummie, this kind
of Brahmi), which was used in Northern India for several hundred years. However many does not mean *all*, as there
are two camps, those who believe Brahmi developed on its own with no non-Indian influences (or
perhaps from the script used by the Indus River Valley civilization), and those who
believe there were at least some non-Indian influences, perhaps from a Semitic script
like Aramaic? So that leaves me sort of between a rock and
a hard place. Either I can talk about a linguistic theory
that could be completely wrong, or I can have a shorter and arguably more boring video. But hey, when you’re between a rock and
a hard place, why not just walk around them? So *if* there is a connection between Brahmi
and Aramaic, then that expands the Phoenician phonetic family throughout all these places
east of the Middle East. As I mentioned in a previous video, Brahmi
was used to write Sanskrit for several centuries, but slowly split into several different regional
varieties, largely divided into a northern and southern family. In the north we get scripts like Devanagari
(that’s what this script you see all over India is called), Bengali, Odia, Tibetan,
and several others (India has a lot of writing systems, you might want to watch that video
after this one). In the south meanwhile we get Tamil, Telugu,
Kannada, and Sinhala, but also many indigenous scripts used across Southeast Asia, like Thai,
Khmer, Burmese, Balinese, and Baybayin. So the next time you look at a writing system
you’re not familiar with, look more closely, because it might just be more familiar than
you think… or something like that, pfft I don’t know, I just like talking about
writing systems and wanted to sell shirts.
