All over India and Southeast Asia they write with these squiggly, loopy, hangy, sprouty scripts. But perhaps the only thing cooler
than the way they look is the way they work! A spice market in India. The hooded figure
in front of you apologizes for the kidnapping. He needs your help. He explains that his land
has taken part in history’s most elaborate and rigorous memorization exercises. Instead
of scribes, they had recitations. These weren’t retellings of campfire stories, these were
whole libraries of knowledge handed down for generations. He says his name is Ashoka. This
is his land, and he’s king. After a bloody and violent war, he had a change of heart,
and now has but one singular focus: to spread his message - a law of tolerance and compassion
- throughout the land. But he doesn’t want to use the mouth-to-ear
memorization ways of the oral tradition. That’s for old texts and old ideas! No, his vision
is to install massive pillars around his empire, each one engraved with his list of edicts.
This, he explains, is where you come in. See, he’s been keeping tabs on you as you roamed
the land of the Semitic abjads, and he really likes this crazy consonant alphabet idea.
He’ll take it. But he also appreciates the whimsical simplicity
of accenting consonants with vowel marks. Oh, and he doesn’t want to have to write
the vowel if it’s just a short “uh”. His language is full of those. So he’ll
write “funnel” something like this, with these built in syllables. But wait, it’s
not “funnel-uh”. That final “l” isn’t a separate syllable. He needs a way to write
just bare consonants, to tell his past apart from his pasta. How? With a simple “hush”
stroke below the letter. Now, he brags to you, his system is complete. Make sure you don’t miss the step he’s
taking here. It’s a “Major Moments in the History of Writing”! Each of the character
units fundamentally represents a syllable. It just so happens that, unless the vowel
in that syllable is a short “a”, the vowel gets added onto (or below or beside) the consonant
character. On their own, the base characters contain that dummy vowel “uh”, like “puh”,
but you can take that “puh” and modify it with any vowel you like. Certain vowels
go in certain places - like “ee” to the side or “oo” below. So in India, characters
are syllables, but, unlike a full syllabary, you don’t need a completely separate character
for each separate syllable. And all characters give consonant plus vowel information, but,
unlike a full alphabet, you don’t line up sequences of consonants plus vowels, consonants
plus vowels. The hybrid combination nature of this system earns it the name “alphasyllabary”. Combos are built into this system, paving
the way for over a thousand ligatures - commonly linked characters - in the alphasyllabary.
Sure, other writing systems develop ligatures in their calligraphy. But the Indic alphasyllabary
welcomes them naturally. As it’s passed all around this entire slice
of the world, up to Nepal and Tibet, down the coast to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia
and beyond, this script keeps updating its look but continues to capture consonants and
vowels accurately, like an alphabet, and to write those voweled consonants in syllable
units, like a syllabary. Even completely unrelated alphasyllabaries
seize on this same idea. This is the Ethiopic symbol for “ma”. This one reads “me”.
And this is “mu”. This is “la”, “le” and “lu”. Now that you understand alphasyllabaries,
you must answer this next question: if this symbol sounds like “ba”, how do you write
“be” and “bu” in Ethiopia? This is your Ge’ez abcd’s, the abugida - looks
different, but works much the same way. Your characters have never looked so different,
even after the Greeks and Romans took them over. Maybe it’s this dizzying variety of
writing systems. Or maybe Thoth’s pill is starting to wear off.
I enjoyed this. Thanks for sharing.
I recommend this youtube channel to anyone who is interested. Found it recently after looking for fun youtube channels about languages, their history, evolution, alphabets, abugidas and logograms etc. They use animation to convey history, stories and facts about languages and writing systems.
Great video! Subscribed.