The Top 7 Craziest Writing Systems in the World

now you might think that Chinese writing looks intimidating but I found seven even crazier writing systems like the one invented by a man who couldn't even read or write so in no particular order here are the top seven most bizarre Unforgettable and beautiful scripts in the world [Music] Tibetan script is used to write certain languages of the Himalayas languages that I have no idea how to pronounce but there's no harm in looking the Tibetan script was invented by this guy in the 7th Century while staying in this particularly cool spot out in the mountains of Tibet this is part of a monastery where Kings used to meditate so why did he create this script well Tibetans say it was meant for writing Buddhist scripts but academics will just tell you no no that's all just a legend here's how it works there are 30 basic letters and they are all consonants but not to worry because each letter has something called an inherent vowel which means they don't write the vowel they just assume it's there and that vowel is a that's right every single letter has an invisible a so on their own the sounds are all like this so how do you manage that when you write it down then well that's what these little marks are for when you write them above or below a letter like this they change the vowel sound pretty cool right so to make words you stack letters around each other over under Poseidon the shape of a letter can even change to fit the shape of a word so good luck with that as for punctuation Tibetan has two things a DOT that separates syllables and a stripe that is a full stop but there are tons of decorative marks like these fascinating brackets and then just for good measure they throw in some extra letters that can only be used for writing one language Sanskrit yeah Mongolian looks like it is raining combat knives and they use this cool script to write all of these languages the vertical lines are the traditional way to write and they flow from left to right it was originally written horizontally but they wanted to copy the old top to bottom Chinese writing style so they rotated their script 90 degrees anti-clockwise but without changing the orientation of the letters see how that works now Mongolian is an alphabetic script with consonants and vowels but here's the catch there are seven vowels and only five vowel letters that's right and then there's this foreign the letters have different shapes depending on their position in a word so you don't always know what letters you're reading why be simple if you can be madly confusing right but that is not the end of it a number of letters are written exactly the same like d and T yeah I know it's going to need a whole new video to explain that all I know is that there aren't enough letters for all of the sounds so some of them have to pull double duty are you good at counting extremely fast well look at the Mongolian word for pig words like Pig are hard to make sense of there's just a bewildering sequence of little bumps they're called teeth and quite a few of the letters are like this but I'm going to make things real easy for you something that is a lot easier to decipher though are the like And subscribe buttons that you can click right here if you want to hear more videos about language learning and turn on the notification Bell as well if you want to get notified of the next video now are you ready for a top secret script that's making a comeback foreign [Applause] [Music] was created and used exclusively by women a long time ago in the Hunan Province of China now women were forbidden formal education for many centuries so they decided to make a secret script to write their secret thoughts to one another and when your feet have to fit in these I'm pretty sure there's a lot to complain about each symbol represents a syllable and they wrote it using sharpened bamboo sticks and ink from the burnt leftovers in a wok when they couldn't write they embroidered messages into cloth it has a funny nickname too mosquito writing I think it's a good one well here's how it works The Strokes are skinny slashes dots and arcs and you write them in vertical columns from top to bottom and right to left unlike Chinese characters the symbols don't represent any kind of meaning only pronunciation although there are six or seven hundred of them and many are based on Chinese characters but others are modeled on embroidery stitches and designs and the best part is that new shoe is sung rather than red and no you're not going to get a demonstration foreign decided to create an alphabet for his language some of his people thought the practice was Witchcraft and that it wasn't a good idea to fix words to paper The Story Goes that everyone laughed at him for trying to copy the white people's talking leaves besides Sequoia didn't know how to read or write at all but 12 years later he finished his Cherokee writing system just by being one hell of a smart guy each character represents a syllable not just one letter so for example this letter is a syllable that says Ma and this one says okay Cherokee it's kind of hard to pronounce there are 85 of these characters and they are usually arranged in chart form with a column for each vowel and a row for each consonant so if you wanted to write Lisa you would go down the chart to the L row and across the iro and there's the sound for Li and then you do the same for sir you see what I mean now you can write your name in Cherokee now speaking of cool stories if there is a language that you are dying to learn you might enjoy reading about the way that I teach language which is through stories see I have learned languages all my career through stories and I created a way to learn a new language through stories which is called story learning it teaches you languages the same way that you learned your first language as a child was just through stories with your parents reading you books and listening to things that happen around you it's all very natural and it gets really great results for people there is a free story learning kit that I've put together that you can check out if you want to find out more about the story learning method it's completely free you get a bunch of cool stuff included check the link in the description for access to that [Music] Tire writing was created by a king and it's really really beautiful don't you think but reading it is another story it has 44 consonants 32 vowels and you have to remember which tone marker to write on each letter since there are four of them now to make matters worse many of the consonants have the exact same sound exactly the same sound so how the heck do you know what letter you are hearing not to worry there is a word that goes with each sound so remember learning A is for apple s is for sake remember that sort of thing well Tai does that but not just for five-year-olds take a look these three Thai consonants all sound like s so the word in Brackets tells you which s is being used to compare if English had three different s's we would have to do something like s snake s sugar s skeleton the very short explanation is that Thai used to have a lot more sounds back in the day and now they can't pronounce those subtle differences between them so they just don't Thai be the strangest scriptable well I'm not so sure there's a pretty otherworldly one coming right up [Music] the script known as bybain is like a day at the beach it's all waves and seashells there is one simple rule with this script you spell it the way that you say it it's a Filipino script that has many many forms and was once used a lot more in ancient times when the Spanish colonized the Philippines Filipino languages took a lot of Spanish words and babayan script didn't have letters for those new sounds so the Spaniards made a reformed way to write it there are 15 consonants and only three vowels in barbadin [Music] hear that I and E are the same and O and U are the same now I know you've been paying attention so by now you know how syllabic writing works ah sound to this ba this is Baba and this is yep the consonants and vowels are written as one unit so each character has a default a sound [Music] yeah and to change the ending to a different vowel sound you just add a little little Mark a mark above adds an e or S sound and a mark below adds an o or u sound now what's a bit tricky is that you don't use that exact Mark no it can be a DOT a circle a tick an apostrophe a line Arrow Head it could be I want to remove the a sound well you simply write a little cross underneath the letter to cancel it out you vowel killer you and punctuation well it's really easy one vertical line is a comma two lines is a full stop so you've got a question we'll just use the same two lines it's really quite straightforward who wrote it where was it made what do these bizarre words and vibrant drawings represent What secrets do its Pages contain if laid back is not your thing or what about a cult phenomenon the Voynich manuscript is 240 pages of mystery it's a beautiful 15th century manuscript full of looping handwriting in an unknown language or code and Illustrated with weird pictures of real and imaginary plants naked women bathing castles and dragons and astrology diagrams that's right but nobody knows what this alphabet means it's managed to go undeciphered for more than 100 years so what on Earth is it science is it magic and who even wrote it now there was one egyptologist who thought he had deciphered a few sentences like this one but it's still a completely maddening mystery because nothing actually adds up it has all the characteristics of a real language there are consistent patterns a few letters borrowed from medieval languages and even two different handwriting Styles it's alphabetic like Latin but some features are more like Chinese and yet others seem more like Greek but then it has this whole kind of ancient Hebrew Vibe too so what's going on bottom line nobody can read it maybe you'll be the one to decipher it who knows but if you want to get some practice with a slightly simpler alphabet then you can practice with one that's so easy that you can learn this alphabet in a few hours along with a language that's blowing up around the world and it's all in this video right here so go and check that out right now

Channel: Olly Richards

Views: 76,307

Keywords: language learning, how to learn a language, foreign languages, learn a language, learn languages, polyglot, learn a new language, languages, language, stories, storylearning, olly richards, writing system, difficult languages to learn, writing systems, writing systems of the world, writing systems of asia, writing systems history, most difficult languages to learn

Id: FJpBsCiRK7s

Length: 10min 39sec (639 seconds)

Published: Fri Oct 07 2022