Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing — Transcript

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1. 0:07Writing.
2. 0:09Reading.
3. 0:11Typing.
4. 0:13Texting.
5. 0:15Written language is just one of those things that’s
6. 0:18always been around. It’s a natural way for you to use words. It’s a given. But there’s
7. 0:23something you’ve forgotten. It’s understandable. After all, it’s been a very long time.
8. 0:32A long time since no one on the planet knew how to write.
9. 0:49Our story starts with a legend: the tale of Thoth and Thamus. No, that’s not a lisp
10. 0:55you’re hearing. Thoth and Thamus. Thoth and Thamus. After the Egyptian god Thoth invents
11. 1:01writing, he runs to King Thamus to share this discovery. But, to his chagrin, the king isn’t
12. 1:07impressed. At all. Looking down his nose, he starts pontificating on the destructive
13. 1:13power of this newfangled technology.
14. 1:15“Oh, clever Thoth! This invention will produce forgetfulness in the minds of learners, with
15. 1:21the neglect of their memory, because their trust in writing comes from strange external
16. 1:26marks and not their own internal recall. The drug you’ve discovered isn’t a memory-enhancer,
17. 1:32but a mentioning-enhancer, and you’re offering students pretend wisdom, not truth.”
18. 1:38This sounds strange. It’s easy for you - and your world full of writing - to dismiss Thamus.
19. 1:44But hear him out. He brings you back to the early days of writing, when it was the hot
20. 1:48new thing. And, like many other inventions, not everyone was on board. Ok, so, let’s
21. 1:54say, for the sake of argument, you don’t want writing. What are the alternative technologies?
22. 2:00You could bust out your abacuses. They’ll help with counting and doing complex calculations.
23. 2:05Or maybe you prefer icons, ritualized images that help you relate to culturally significant
24. 2:10figures, events and attitudes. The quipu is an amazing Incan information
25. 2:14storage system using cords, colors and knots. Oh, and don’t overlook rote memorization
26. 2:20- a basic option, sure, but it’s really useful in preliterate societies, where sentences
27. 2:25can be memorized and recited by the thousands. Your brain’s bigger than you think.
28. 2:31Perhaps you prefer petroglyphs, rock carvings with major cultural ties that may refer to
29. 2:36nearby places or animals. Ooh, watch out, writing - we’re getting uncomfortably close.
30. 2:42All of these inventions helped humans keep track of their thoughts. So what makes writing
31. 2:46different? What is Thamus afraid of?
32. 2:48Let’s talk some ‘ness. Embeddedness. These things are all embedded in minds, tasks, rituals,
33. 2:55events, cultures. Rip them from those contexts and you rip out their expressive heart.
34. 3:00Thoth’s drug doesn’t come with so many strings attached. It will de-embed you, letting
35. 3:05you record any specific thought and letting future generations read it in any context.
36. 3:10So, human. Was Thamus right? Is writing an unnatural intrusion? Or do you want to swallow
37. 3:16Thoth’s pill and see for yourself what we actually unleashed when we invented writing?
38. 3:22La France. 17,000 years ago. It’s cold out. And getting colder. Possibly dangerous, too.
39. 3:41This may be France, and this may be the history of writing, but there’s nothing for you
40. 3:46here.
41. 3:47Until you take shelter in a nearby cave, and see how creative some of your ancestors really
42. 3:53were. Drawing on their enlarging brains and a long prehistory of building ever more complex
43. 3:58tools, these early artists took to etching and painting beautiful visual representations
44. 4:03of the animals around them. These aren’t words, they’re not stories, they’re pictures.
45. 4:09Early pictures like these start to become very routine, not necessarily depicting the
46. 4:13world, but marking and standing for things: a place to hunt… a place to eat. These are
47. 4:22pictographs.
48. 4:22The story gets sketchy here, but it’s important to notice that pictographic symbols like these
49. 4:27petroglyphs - rock carvings - weren’t words, they weren’t language, but they became more
50. 4:33than personal and communal artistic expressions. They became regular and repeatable, possibly
51. 4:38mapping to specific things, and, for that, these pictographs earn themselves the fancy
52. 4:43label of Proto-Writing.
53. 4:46Many pictographs have an intuitive give-away quality: they look like drawings of the things
54. 4:50they represent. Draw me a human: easy. Draw me a horse: sure. A river: there it is. But
55. 4:58how do you clearly and simply draw less tangible ideas like “playing around” or “taking
56. 5:03it easy” or “don’t even think about it”?
57. 5:06Uh-oh. Watch out for this “Major Moments in the History of Writing”! Meet Metonymy.
58. 5:13This principled fellow lets you represent a general, nebulous idea with a related pictogram
59. 5:18or part of a pictogram or a pictogram combo that’s pretty specific and obvious. Ancient
60. 5:24stick-human is a regular old pictogram, but if you cut off stick’s legs, you can get
61. 5:29across the general idea of… what? Walking or moving. What about a man leaning against
62. 5:35a tree? What’s the idea here? Taking it easy. Resting. These are ideographs - symbols
63. 5:42for ideas and concepts.
64. 5:44In some sense, all of these drawings express ideas: the concept of a horse, the concept
65. 5:49of a human. So they’re all ideographic. But with a little imagination and a lot of
66. 5:54time, extended ideographs let you cut and combine basic pictographs to be far more expressive
67. 6:00and abstract.
68. 6:03Just when you’re ready to grab that chisel and get your pictographic and ideographic
69. 6:06carving on, someone more inventive than you comes along. Your pictures and ideas aren’t
70. 6:11enough for her.
71. 6:13Gone are the days of Lascaux. The world outside this cave is changing, she says. Crops, cities,
72. 6:18rulers, markets, and she needs a way to keep track of it all. She likes your icons. She
73. 6:23can use them for goats and pots, fields and even long walks through the desert. But she
74. 6:28has an incredible practical streak. She takes those goats and those pots, and starts to
75. 6:32tally the items she’s recording. One goat, she says. Then two goats, three goats, four
76. 6:39goats. Notice what she’s done. These aren’t simple depictions anymore. They’re not just
77. 6:44ideas. She’s reading one word for each symbol. She’s encoding language.
78. 6:50Let’s slow down here, because it’s hard to overstate the importance of this “Major
79. 6:55Moments in the History of Writing”. These goat counts are word-symbols now - logographs.
80. 7:03Pictographs can be visualized. Ideographs can be imagined. But logographs can be directly
81. 7:08and consistently read.
82. 7:11Logographic systems emerge and flourish in the early civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt,
83. 7:15China, and Mexico. Characters for people, animals, land, crops, hundreds - even thousands
84. 7:22- of logographs for everything under the sun and moon, including the sun and the moon.
85. 7:27Even after all these millennia, if you squint hard enough you can still pick out the symbols
86. 7:32scratched into weathered artifacts bearing the world’s early scripts: a Chinese turtle,
87. 7:37an Egyptian house, a Sumerian head, a Sumerian head eating bread, a Mayan jaguar. And, in
88. 7:43each of these places, in all of these languages, these were read as words. We know what these
89. 7:48logographs mean, and we can put that meaning into words.
90. 7:52The world is now in a race to fill itself with logographs. But which humans started
91. 7:56this craze? Well, the Mesoamericans started writing more
92. 8:00than 2900 years ago. Some Chinese characters are at least 3200 years old. Writing popped
93. 8:06up in Crete 4000 years ago. But the two clear contenders are Egyptian Hieroglyphs and Sumerian
94. 8:12Cuneiform, both a whopping 5000 years old! Minimum. It’s common to say that the Egyptians
95. 8:19stole the idea of writing from Mesopotamia and just came up with their own glyphs - common,
96. 8:24but not demonstrated.
97. 8:25For a while, monogenesis made sense. This is idea that one civilization was king of
98. 8:31all the writing, that writing started once in Mesopotamia, where people pressed a stylus
99. 8:36into wet clay to make these wedge (cuneus) shapes (forms): Cuneiform. So the monogenesis
100. 8:43story goes, everyone else steals Cuneiform and reskins it to fit their needs. It’s
101. 8:48not a popular story these days, given what we know about Chinese and especially Mesoamerican
102. 8:54writing, along with some very early Egyptian finds.
103. 8:57Whoever’s first, in these early days of writing, all the civilizations start manufacturing
104. 9:02hordes of logographs, so many in fact that they unwittingly unleash an epic memory burden
105. 9:08on budding logographers, from would-be ancient scribes to beginning students of Mandarin
106. 9:12Chinese.
107. 9:13Do they really need this many characters to write? Surely there’s an easier way!
108. 9:28Say hello to this smart rogue, who’s about to solve your problem with an innocent mistake.
109. 9:34His father has been counting sheep. Literally. And he just asked his son to record a measly
110. 9:39line in his budget: “10 sheep for uncle”. The son writes the 10, and the logograph for
111. 9:45sheep, but uncle? He pauses and scratches his head. Eager to play with his friends,
112. 9:51he writes the character for “ankle”. “10 sheep - ankle”. He hurries away without
113. 9:56a second thought, but don’t take his invention lightly.
114. 10:00If you’ve ever played fill-in-the-blank or guessing games where you have to sound
115. 10:03out picture-words, you’ve seen and used this principle for yourself. But it’s not
116. 10:07just for quirky puzzles with funny solutions.
117. 10:10The name for this is another “Major Moments in the History of Writing”. Ahem, the name
118. 10:16for this is rebus. This familiar language game lets you look beyond the meaning of a
119. 10:21character and use it simply for its sound. Sun sounds like son, and, by extension, perhaps
120. 10:27soon and sown. Logographs, like the symbol for “sun”, could already be read as words.
121. 10:32Now, with the rebus principle in your pocket, logographs can also be read as sounds.
122. 10:38This isn’t just useful for getting ancient uncle his ancient sheep. Once Aztec city planners
123. 10:43finished building their stunning capital in the middle of a lake, the Venice of the New
124. 10:47World, Tenochtitlán, their scribes needed a way to write its name. They’ve been using
125. 10:52what amounts to basic picture writing. Since Tenochtitlán has a stone, “te”, and a
126. 10:58cactus, “nochtli”, it’s natural to write it with two fairly obvious glyphs. Then these
127. 11:03become not just symbols meaning cactus and stone, but symbols for the noises “Tenochtitlán”,
128. 11:09making them just as much rebus fun as those puzzles you solved as a kid. And now you know
129. 11:14the name for those. You also know why there’s a cactus on top of a stone in Mexico’s flag.
130. 11:19It’s not just for show!
131. 11:22How alike does the sound-alike pronunciation have to be? Which sounds can we chop off?
132. 11:27Pit the Egyptians against the Sumerians one more time. Egyptian hieroglyphs cut off the
133. 11:32initial consonant, or, less often, two or three consonants from the original word. Sumerians,
134. 11:38on the other hand, with their cuneiform, take whole syllables. These two paths don’t just
135. 11:44add some local flavor. Rebusing out consonants doesn’t just impact ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs.
136. 11:50It leaves a legacy for later spinoffs: the mentality that these are either read as logographs
137. 11:55or they stand for consonants. Cuneiform leaves a different legacy. Completely unrelated languages
138. 12:01will spend thousands of years borrowing and reborrowing cuneiform to write their own words,
139. 12:05but, each time, the symbols are read as logographs or as syllables.
140. 12:11Flexibility is key here. Look at this Egyptian hieroglyph. It can be read as a logograph
141. 12:16for “mouth” (“re”), or as the consonant “r”. This character could be read as the
142. 12:21logograph meaning “house”, or it could stand for the consonants pr, the two consonants
143. 12:26in the Egyptian word. Conveniently, in Egyptian, the little slashy below lets you know when
144. 12:31it’s a pure logograph.
145. 12:33The rebus discovery brings up a tension between meaning and sound. Is writing phonetic or
146. 12:38semantic? Is it about encoding the meaning of words or encoding speech sounds? The old
147. 12:44logographs were fundamentally a meaning-writing system. Sure, this sounds like “re” in
148. 12:49Egyptian, but what’s crucial is that this is the logograph for the word meaning “mouth”.
149. 12:54Rebus writing takes a big step towards sound-writing: this will come to stand for the consonant
150. 12:59“r”, regardless of meaning.
151. 13:01It may come as a surprise, but, once discovered, sound writing doesn’t oust meaning writing.
152. 13:07Not at all!
153. 13:08Indeed, early writers notice that phonetic writing brings up a problem, a problem you
154. 13:13probably missed because of your comfort with sound-writing, a problem that meaning-writing
155. 13:18can solve. Brace yourself, history, because logographs are about to make a comeback!
156. 13:33Like all of the world’s earliest writing systems, Chinese characters start out as symbols
157. 13:37that stand for words. A rice paddy. A person. A tree. These are logographs, and they let
158. 13:45you depict specific language pieces - to write what you mean. But instead of requiring different
159. 13:50characters for every word, the handy rebus principle lets you write other things that
160. 13:55sound like the logograph - to write what you say.
161. 13:58Sure, you could use the rebus “sounds like” principle to write any sound in your language.
162. 14:03But please consider this symbol and answer the question that follows. Does it mean ‘son’,
163. 14:08‘soon’, ’sun’ or ‘sown’? Oh my, did rebus writing get you into a bit of trouble
164. 14:14here?
165. 14:15When we see this character, we could read it as a plain old logograph, according to
166. 14:20its meaning, or any of these rebus ways, following its pronunciation. Which one should you choose?
167. 14:25Think a bit outside of the jade box here, and take the lead of this Han scribe. His
168. 14:31solution is elegant: don’t choose one. Use both systems together!
169. 14:36What’s that behind is back? Is that a… oh, yeah! “Major Moments in the History
170. 14:44of Writing”! So, here’s the logograph for “horse”.
171. 14:47But it also sounds the same as the word for “ant”, so the rebus principle lets us
172. 14:51write them both with the same glyph. Confusing? Not if you add the logograph for “insect”
173. 14:56next to the sound-alike character! This says it’s pronounced like “horse”, which
174. 15:01it is, but that its meaning has something to do with “insect”. You don’t read
175. 15:05the extra character - it’s a meaning hint, determining how to read the sound character,
176. 15:10so it’s called a determinative.
177. 15:12One more Mandarin example. This logograph means “moon”, which happens to be pronounced
178. 15:17“yuè”. Using rebus writing, “yuè” also means “amputate your feet”. Incidentally,
179. 15:22the word “key” is pronounced the same way. Same problem. But nothing a couple determinatives
180. 15:29can’t fix! Add the determinative for “metal” to this character. Add “knife” to that
181. 15:34one. And let’s leave the moon be, because that’s already what it means.
182. 15:38Here again, the “sounds like” reading of a character gives you its phonetic component.
183. 15:43This extra logograph clues you into its meaning - its semantic component. Together, they form
184. 15:48a unit - a whole character with a clear meaning and a clear pronunciation. Determinatives
185. 15:53are very common in Chinese characters, natively called Han characters. In fact, since they
186. 15:59hint at the character’s root meaning - its radix - Han determinatives get called radicals.
187. 16:05Bring back the character “sun”. It can be pronounced many ways, true. But add a determinative,
188. 16:11a silent helper character, and you can quickly narrow down its meaning. These extra determinatives
189. 16:16avoid ambiguous readings. Which one is the “sun” in the sky? Which is a father’s
190. 16:21“son”? Which one means “soon”? Too easy.
191. 16:25There’s something else to learn from this quiet scribe. He’s using radicals to clean
192. 16:29up some ambiguity, but even he knows that context matters. He won’t spell everything
193. 16:34out for you every time. Sometimes this character means “for”, as in “this is for you”,
194. 16:41other times it’s the verb “supply”. He’s balancing this tension in the history
195. 16:45of writing between what’s easy on the reader, who needs more information to interpret the
196. 16:50words, versus what’s easy on the writer, who typically knows what he means when he’s
197. 16:54writing it. Plus, hand cramps.
198. 16:57The choice of leaving in or leaving out helpful information isn’t simply about clarity and
199. 17:02laziness. It’s aesthetic. Throughout the history of Chinese calligraphy, from oracle
200. 17:07bones to the rough cursive script, stylistic choices are made, not just semantic and phonetic
201. 17:12choices. Seeing through the calligrapher’s eyes, you can find in the history of writing
202. 17:17not only a vision of what words and sounds look like, but where words and sounds go and
203. 17:22where they stop.
204. 17:25When it comes to aesthetic choices and Han characters, none is more fundamental than
205. 17:29the decision to arrange character components in blocks. Bonus note: this is definitely
206. 17:34not the only time in history that writing gets organized in blocks.
207. 17:39So this radical sits on top of this phonetic component in a block, making up one whole
208. 17:44character - the character for “flower”. The ideograph man plus tree, a man leaning
209. 17:49against a tree, has two components sitting side by side in a block, and they’re the
210. 17:53character for “rest”. And here’s one tree in its own block, two trees meaning “woods”
211. 17:58and three trees for “forest”.
212. 18:01Aesthetics aside, what would happen if we took this “sounds like“ principle a step
213. 18:04further and make writing about the sounds? Isn’t that a better solution to our “soon”,
214. 18:09“son”, “sown”, “sun” problem, and one that doesn’t make us memorize tons
215. 18:13of characters?
216. 18:23A Maya stoneworker etches elaborate rows of characters onto a stela, a tall stone brought
217. 18:28in from far away that’s now standing straight up in the middle of the city. The characters
218. 18:33he’s carving look more like detailed pictures than writing, but don’t let that fool you!
219. 18:38Take a look at this block. It means mountain, but it’s not a logograph standing for “mountain”.
220. 18:43It’s not a rebus symbol for “think of a word that rhymes with shmountain”. It’s
221. 18:48actually a block of two sound symbols that spell the word “witz”, the Maya word for
222. 18:52mountain. That’s great for climbers, but chocolate lovers may instead prefer to sample
223. 18:57these three symbols that together spell the word “kakaw”, cocoa! There’s a nifty
224. 19:02shortcut here - this bit doesn’t even mean “ka”, it’s actually a syllable multiplier!
225. 19:08Or “iteration mark”, if you want the fancy name.
226. 19:11Shhh. I think you’re being watched. Over there in the jungle. Maybe not. Hmmm, “Major
227. 19:25moments in the history of writing”!
228. 19:27Both of these Maya glyphs combine syllable characters into blocks to write words. This
229. 19:32is full-fledged sound writing. These aren’t logographs that happen to be read as sounds.
230. 19:37They are sounds. Sounds capable of writing any syllable in the language. In a full syllabary,
231. 19:44like the Classical Maya script, there are separate characters for just about every possible
232. 19:48syllable in the language. No longer must you invent new word characters. You can make do
233. 19:53with a much smaller set of syllable characters.
234. 19:56Nice! But syllable writing comes with its own set of problems. Here’s a glyph that’s
235. 20:02quite useful around these parts: “jaguar”. The word is actually “balam”. But, have
236. 20:08you noticed something about the Mayan syllabary? Consonant plus vowel, consonant plus vowel,
237. 20:14more consonants plus more vowels - all of these syllables end in vowels! How in the
238. 20:20world are you supposed to write the -lam in “balam”? Shifty, scripty syllabaries have
239. 20:25grappled with this problem and settled on two solutions. One: leave out the final letter.
240. 20:32Just ignore it. The term for this is underspelling…. because…. you’re not fully spelling the
241. 20:37word. And it’s a good solution, because, you know, ignoring your problems makes them
242. 20:42go away, right? Option two: spell the last letter with an extra syllable, but use a syllable
243. 20:48that just repeats the last vowel so that we know we can just ignore the final vowel. This
244. 20:52gets called the “echo vowel”. Mayan likes number 2. A lot. So “kakaw” is ka-ka-wa
245. 21:00- well, ka-times two-wa. “Witz”, the mountain, is actually wi-tzi. And your new pet “balam”
246. 21:09is spelled ba-la-ma. Cross out the echo vowels and the words practically read themselves!
247. 21:16Your new friend pulls you along to show you another project he’s working on - an amate
248. 21:20codex. That’s a paper book. Yes, he has paper and yes, books! But that’s not what’s
249. 21:27got him excited. He folds open the book he’s working on… maybe to share new ideas? No.
250. 21:33To brag how inventive and potentially efficient his writing system is? No!
251. 21:38For his people, the invention of the new wasn’t about ditching the old. He shows you how creative
252. 21:44he’s been with the characters you learned. He shows you a mountain and calls it “witz”.
253. 21:49And then a jaguar and calls it “balam”. Logographs? Wait a second. You stop and ask
254. 21:55him, which is the correct way to write “balam”? He writes ba-la-ma. You ask him to write it
255. 22:02again. And he writes the logograph, but with a syllable. And again, but he writes the logograph
256. 22:08plus two syllables. He smiles mischievously. They’re all “balam”. This is what he’s
257. 22:15proud of. He can write the same word - even the same syllable - in different ways and
258. 22:20combinations without repeating himself. Creative!
259. 22:23But his use of logographs plus syllables recalls the tension between sound writing and meaning
260. 22:29writing. Meaningful determinatives helped us choose the right pronunciation for our
261. 22:33rebus character, and Mayan logographs can still do that. But the helping hand goes both
262. 22:38ways: the syllabary can also clarify the sounds you should make when you read a logograph.
263. 22:43Here’s the character “jaguar”, but add a couple extra syllable hints and you make
264. 22:47it clear that we’re meant to read this glyph as “balama”, minus the echo vowel, so
265. 22:52“balam”. These are phonetic complements, pronunciation clues sitting comfortably alongside
266. 22:58logographs.
267. 22:58If that’s all too complex, just remember that you can write everything in syllables.
268. 23:04But before you have time to settle into this land of balam and kakaw to practice those
269. 23:09syllables, a sandy wind starts blowing in from the East, a familiar reminder from a
270. 23:14faraway land where even more dramatic changes are about to shape the future of writing.
271. 23:31Even in these ancient times, Egyptian monuments have been sitting and weathering for thousands
272. 23:36of years. On their great murals and pillars, you find rows of little pictures. Sorry, not
273. 23:42pictures. Hieroglyphs. Sacred symbols. But, despite appearances, this isn’t some mysterious
274. 23:49Pharaonic picture writing.
275. 23:50It’s consonants. One consonant signs! Two consonant signs! Three consonant signs! A
276. 23:57wall of consonants!! Plus a sprinkle of logographs for determinatives. It’s not that Egyptian
277. 24:03was a harsh, vowelless desert of a tongue. It simply did not write its vowels. Imagine
278. 24:08if you wrote this way. Would that work? And then imagine if you could add in logographs
279. 24:13to make sure you really got your point across?
280. 24:16Imagine you wrote like that, and you’re thinking with hieroglyphs.
281. 24:20Too difficult? Fine, off to the caves with you, where you toil away with with ancient
282. 24:25miners on the Sinai peninsula. You and your fellow miners would find it handy to leave
283. 24:33messages for one another. But there’s no time for deep studies of rows of fancy hieroglyphs
284. 24:38in here. You need to keep it simple if you want another “Major Moments in the History
285. 24:44of Writing”!
286. 24:45Your characters look like scratchy, rushed versions of those glamorous Egyptian symbols,
287. 24:50but their meaning doesn’t matter anymore. Nothing but consonants. And the same symbol
288. 24:54for the same consonant every time. Take this character. In Egyptian, it means “house”.
289. 25:01These Semitic miners are calling a house a “beth”. Acrophony, or “top sounds”,
290. 25:07suggests that you can just take the first letter of a word, like the Egyptians had already
291. 25:11been doing with much of their consonant writing. You end up with a letter for your sound “b”.
292. 25:16Do the same thing with “water”, which the Semitic speakers are calling “mem”,
293. 25:20and you now have an “m” sound. With a couple dozen elegant simplifications, you
294. 25:25create a simple, reliable list of consonants. An alphabet! And you’ve given generations
295. 25:30of future children the joy of reciting their ABC’s. Actually, at this point in history,
296. 25:36their a-b-g-d’s, sometimes called an abjad or an abgad, because who needs that wishy-washy
297. 25:43C when you can just use an S or a K!
298. 25:46After a long hard day of mining and etching, you turn to find that someone’s been watching
299. 25:51you this whole time. She’s a trader. A Phoenician merchant who knows a good thing when she sees
300. 25:57it. She’s already made major cash in the paper business, where they turn tufty, stalky,
301. 26:02swampy Egyptian papyrus into flat, inkable sheets of paper. She rushes back home to Phoenicia
302. 26:17and smirks. Think of the advantage she has - keeping track of whatever anyone else tells
303. 26:24her just by remembering about as many characters as she has fingers and toes. Old kings can
304. 26:30keep their obtuse hieroglyphs and their stone monuments. The future of the Mediterranean
305. 26:34will belong to alphabets and paper. Writing is going portable.
306. 26:40She uses this newfound alphabetic leverage to turn a huge profit across the entire Eastern
307. 26:44Mediterranean, leaving people inspired to adopt and adapt her alphabet wherever she
308. 26:49goes. All this and she doesn’t even write you a thank you card! How hard could it be?
309. 26:55Writing is easier than ever!
310. 26:57It feels universal, like writing’s here to stay, for everyone. But there’s a peculiar
311. 27:02quirk that’s easier to spot in hindsight. You and your mining crew were communicating
312. 27:07in a Semitic language. Phoenician’s a Semitic language. All of these friendly shades of
313. 27:12the Phoenician alphabet were being used for languages that sounded similar and worked
314. 27:16much the same way. Even Egyptian, though no Semitic language itself, is at least a distant
315. 27:22relative of the Semitic languages, with a similar personality. This consonant alphabet
316. 27:27is being tested in easy waters. But history’s shaking things up. Your merchant friend comes
317. 27:33back for your help. She needs you to deliver your alphabet to a very different people living
318. 27:37along her trade route. What will happen when the alphabet gets leaked outside of the family?
319. 27:47Greece. No, not that Greece. Greece before there was a Parthenon. A stern old man in
320. 27:57a trademark sporty toga seems a bit on edge as he glares at the papyrus sheet clutched
321. 28:02in his hand. Aakh, you see!? You try to shrug off his outburst, but he can’t let this
322. 28:08go. My friend, my friend, he recounts how five hundred years before he was even born,
323. 28:15when the walls of Troy still stood, the Greeks had a writing system of their own. It was
324. 28:20one of those more elaborate syllabary-plus-logograph types. But that script had come and it had
325. 28:26gone. The new Greeks were a people on the rise, but an illiterate people on the rise.
326. 28:31A people looking for something new, something great. And this alphabet thing seems great.
327. 28:38Almost. He calls over his close friends.
328. 28:41The Phoenician consonants are useful, he concedes, but why these extra characters for huffing,
329. 28:47coughing and clearing your throat? These are Barbarian sounds. Greeks have no need for
330. 28:54them! And what about the voicy noises like aaah and oooh? How to write them, huh? So
331. 29:01much extra yet so much missing. What a mess. You try to explain, but they laugh it off.
332. 29:09Here, I fix for you, he says. See, he was going to ditch the… ahem… “barbarian”
333. 29:16letters, but he had second thoughts, and it struck him: why not use these un-Greek sounds
334. 29:21for vowels? The one you call ‘aleph, ignore the throaty catch at the beginning: it’s
335. 29:27“a”. Take that “he” but ditch that hhh, and we’re left with a vowely “e”.
336. 29:33Loosen up that tight “w” in “waw”, and it’s the vowel “u”.
337. 29:39This isn’t just a small correction. This is a powerful “Major Moments in the History
338. 29:45of Writing”! He’s fundamentally shifted the way the alphabet functions. It used to
339. 29:49be just the consonants suggesting the pronunciation of a word. Once you recognize the word, the
340. 29:54job’s done. But Greek spelling isn’t merely about writing recognizable words. It’s about
341. 29:59matching letters to sounds. A new principle has just emerged, perhaps even a new goal:
342. 30:05one sound, one character.
343. 30:08You suspect that he’s not aware of the impact of his discovery, as he tells you to drop
344. 30:12everything and come enjoy some dinner and dancing. The party goes on and on, so long
345. 30:20that your new friends don’t even see what’s happening beyond the walls of their city state.
346. 30:24This consonant-vowel alphabet, this pronunciation writing, is spreading, inspiring new alphabets
347. 30:29to the East, with flavors like Armenian and Cyrillic popping up. Out West, in Italy, the
348. 30:35Tuscans - the Etruscans - borrow it, and they pass it on to the Romans. The Romans burst
349. 30:40out and splatter it among Celts and Germanic peoples. And, eventually, the world. Such
350. 30:45a visual rainbow of variations, and yet they’ll all stick with the basic principle of writing
351. 30:50a character for each sound, consonants and vowels.
352. 30:54Finally, you see your writing system in this story. Your alphabet! All because a handful
353. 31:00of Semitic symbols got mistaken for Greek vowels.
354. 31:04But before you get overconfident, know that the history of writing doesn’t stop here.
355. 31:09This isn’t the be-all-end-all. Not even close.
356. 31:16You’re back in old Phoenicia, where it turns out the Greeks aren’t the only ones looking
357. 31:23to buy a vowel. Your contact in town is still your merchant frenemy, who reminds you of
358. 31:28how she traded your consonant alphabet across the ancient world. That abjad spread to every
359. 31:33language with even a passing resemblance to Phoenician. Every town from here to Carthage
360. 31:38has some version of her abjad, spot the Egyptians - those stuck-in-their-ways traditionalists.
361. 31:43Initially, these Semitic speakers loved it. They were proud of it. But the days are turning
362. 31:48to years, and that love grows cold.
363. 31:51They grumble that they’re stuck with these consonants. Just consonants! Clamoring for
364. 31:56vowels, they get desperate and grab a few characters to stand in for a long sound. Take
365. 32:01a look. This symbol is originally the stop between a’-a’-a. This one’s a “y”,
366. 32:06a /j/ sound. And this is a /w/.
367. 32:10But they’re about to become not these things thanks to “Major Moments in the History
368. 32:14of Writing”!
369. 32:16This moment hits you twice, because it brings up both an innovation specific to Semitic
370. 32:20scripts and a more general principle that kind of bends the rules of the alphabet game.
371. 32:25First, it’s worth reiterating that abjad writing systems are viable ways to write and
372. 32:29read a language. They work. But with one obvious shortcoming: those missing vowels can create
373. 32:35ambiguous situations. But what if, instead of writing every vowel, we just had a few
374. 32:41helpful hinters that suggested the presence of certain kinds of vowels? Take this letter
375. 32:46/w/ - well, actually, they called it “waw”. Wow! Now imagine that we keep using it in
376. 32:51words that have the sound “w”, but we also extend its use, placing it between consonants
377. 32:56for the similar enough vowel sound /u/. In the old abjad, you’d have to write “soon”
378. 33:01and “son” with the same characters: s plus n. Everything else is vowels, and we
379. 33:06don’t have those. But suddenly our extended “w” comes in handy: “son” doesn’t
380. 33:11have that “oo” sound, so it’s still s+n. But “soon” does, so we add in the
381. 33:16“w”. Do the same thing with /j/, which can double as a long “i”, and this quirky
382. 33:21catch-in-your-throat pause between uh-oh, ’aleph, which can double as a long /a:/,
383. 33:26and you end up with three handy vowel suggesters: the matres lectionis, these helpful “mothers
384. 33:32of reading”, that show up in Aramaic, Hebrew, Arabic and Syriac.
385. 33:36But these “mothers” don’t leave their consonant-ness behind. They still double as
386. 33:41consonants. The abjad traded the ambiguity of a vowelless existence for a new kind of
387. 33:46ambiguity: depending on context, each of these “matres” may be a consonant or it might
388. 33:51be a vowel. One character, multiple sounds. This is a huge trend in alphabets - why invent
389. 33:57new characters when you can reuse an old one?
390. 34:01Repurposing consonants for vowels here and there won’t satisfy everyone. These bickering
391. 34:05scribes aren’t content with matres lectionis. You see, they’re not just trying to tell
392. 34:10son apart from soon. The bickering scribes are bickering over how to read of one of their
393. 34:14most treasured sayings. One says that it’s such a fine point, you wouldn’t understand
394. 34:19unless you were incredibly well versed in his language. But he makes an analogy for
395. 34:23you: write the word “news” in a consonant-only alphabet. It’s “n-w-s”. Fine. Now imagine
396. 34:30that someone comes along with their fancy consonant/vowel hybrids and spells the word
397. 34:34“noose”: “n-w-s”. Hmmm, wait a second.
398. 34:39He shows you a cheat sheet he’s been keeping. “It’s so easy!”, he says, pointing out
399. 34:43the little dots and dashes above and below letters to keep his vowels straight. Put them
400. 34:48here for an “a”, there for an “e”, you can even add them below one of the long
401. 34:52vowel things if you need to distinguish, say, an “i”. Nobody’s confused! That’s
402. 34:56it, he won’t tolerate the vagueness any longer! Effective immediately, in all important
403. 35:02texts where clear reading matters, everyone’s to use this method. And so for generations,
404. 35:07scribes would mark vowels above and below the consonants, writing vowels in what was
405. 35:11once a consonant-only alphabet.
406. 35:13But, as much as the pious and students swear by their dotty vowels, modern Arabic and Hebrew
407. 35:18speakers stick with the simple consonants plus the extended consonant/vowel mothers.
408. 35:23The optional helper dots get thrown in like a life preserver for struggling learners or
409. 35:26careful texts. But grown ups don’t need them anymore.
410. 35:36A spice market in India. The hooded figure in front of you apologizes for the kidnapping.
411. 35:45He needs your help. He explains that his land has taken part in history’s most elaborate
412. 35:49and rigorous memorization exercises. Instead of scribes, they had recitations. These weren’t
413. 35:55retellings of campfire stories, these were whole libraries of knowledge handed down for
414. 36:00generations. He says his name is Ashoka. This is his land, and he’s king. After a bloody
415. 36:07and violent war, he had a change of heart, and now has but one singular focus: to spread
416. 36:12his message - a law of tolerance and compassion - throughout the land.
417. 36:17But he doesn’t want to use the mouth-to-ear memorization ways of the oral tradition. That’s
418. 36:22for old texts and old ideas! No, his vision is to install massive pillars around his empire,
419. 36:28each one engraved with his list of edicts. This, he explains, is where you come in. See,
420. 36:34he’s been keeping tabs on you as you roamed the land of the Semitic abjads, and he really
421. 36:38likes this crazy consonant alphabet idea. He’ll take it.
422. 36:42But he also appreciates the whimsical simplicity of accenting consonants with vowel marks.
423. 36:47Oh, and he doesn’t want to have to write the vowel if it’s just a short “uh”.
424. 36:51His language is full of those. So he’ll write “funnel” something like this, with
425. 36:55these built in syllables. But wait, it’s not “funnel-uh”. That final “l” isn’t
426. 37:01a separate syllable. He needs a way to write just bare consonants, to tell his past apart
427. 37:06from his pasta. How? With a simple “hush” stroke below the letter. Now, he brags to
428. 37:13you, his system is complete.
429. 37:16Make sure you don’t miss the step he’s taking here. It’s a “Major Moments in
430. 37:20the History of Writing”! Each of the character units fundamentally represents a syllable.
431. 37:26It just so happens that, unless the vowel in that syllable is a short “a”, the vowel
432. 37:31gets added onto (or below or beside) the consonant character. On their own, the base characters
433. 37:36contain that dummy vowel “uh”, like “puh”, but you can take that “puh” and modify
434. 37:41it with any vowel you like. Certain vowels go in certain places - like “ee” to the
435. 37:46side or “oo” below. So in India, characters are syllables, but, unlike a full syllabary,
436. 37:52you don’t need a completely separate character for each separate syllable. And all characters
437. 37:57give consonant plus vowel information, but, unlike a full alphabet, you don’t line up
438. 38:02sequences of consonants plus vowels, consonants plus vowels. The hybrid combination nature
439. 38:07of this system earns it the name “alphasyllabary”.
440. 38:09Combos are built into this system, paving the way for over a thousand ligatures - commonly
441. 38:15linked characters - in the alphasyllabary. Sure, other writing systems develop ligatures
442. 38:20in their calligraphy. But the Indic alphasyllabary welcomes them naturally.
443. 38:26As it’s passed all around this entire slice of the world, up to Nepal and Tibet, down
444. 38:30the coast to Burma, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and beyond, this script keeps updating its
445. 38:35look but continues to capture consonants and vowels accurately, like an alphabet, and to
446. 38:40write those voweled consonants in syllable units, like a syllabary.
447. 38:44Even completely unrelated alphasyllabaries seize on this same idea. This is the Ethiopic
448. 38:49symbol for “ma”. This one reads “me”. And this is “mu”. This is “la”, “le”
449. 38:55and “lu”. Now that you understand alphasyllabaries, you must answer this next question: if this
450. 39:00symbol sounds like “ba”, how do you write “be” and “bu” in Ethiopia? This is
451. 39:06your Ge’ez abcd’s, the abugida - looks different, but works much the same way.
452. 39:12Your characters have never looked so different, even after the Greeks and Romans took them
453. 39:16over. Maybe it’s this dizzying variety of writing systems. Or maybe Thoth’s pill is
454. 39:22starting to wear off.
455. 39:32Another time, another king. This time in a Korean palace. He presents himself as King
456. 39:37Sejong. As you get a grip on your surroundings, you begin to tell him of your journeys. Yet,
457. 39:42with a sweeping gaze, the king looks right past you.
458. 39:45You’ve been out for a very long time, over 1000 years. The world has come so far, and
459. 39:52the scripts you once knew have, too. He reminds you of the old Chinese logographs and sound-meaning
460. 39:57combinations. Those are still useful to his court, to a point. You see, Chinese has these
461. 40:03nice word units, one after another. But Korean, he boasts, has these elegantly complex words
462. 40:09with different pieces and endings. Fitting Chinese writing to Korean grammar hasn’t
463. 40:14been easy.
464. 40:15He tells you of a people across the sea who’ve gone through a similar struggle. The Japanese
465. 40:20simplified Chinese characters by turning them into a fixed syllabary, which they now use
466. 40:25alongside the Chinese characters. So they have these syllable characters and these thousands
467. 40:30of Han characters. They use the Han characters for the meaning-heavy components, the vocabulary
468. 40:35terms. Then they use the syllabary to write little grammatical words and word pieces or
469. 40:39new vocabulary words that don’t historically have their own Chinese logograph. (Such a
470. 40:45complicated system, gentlemen!)
471. 40:47The king has an almost puzzled look, like he’s holding back a punchline. He recounts
472. 40:52how, in Old Japan, women wrote entire books using only the syllable characters, because
473. 40:57writing with the traditional Han characters was seen as the masculine thing to do.
474. 41:02But he knows of another land. He’s heard exotic tales of the West, where people write
475. 41:06out all of their sounds logically. He pauses. He can’t quite grasp this himself. You snicker
476. 41:13as you think back on how you saw the alphabet develop with your own eyes in your journeys.
477. 41:17You would know. So you sit down and show him how to write every vowel and consonant with
478. 41:22the alphabet. A couple dozen shapes and you can write any sound! You smile and think,
479. 41:27so simple! But he lets out an unimpressed sigh.
480. 41:31Why do all the characters look so different, so haphazard? I mean, you make “f” and
481. 41:37“v” by putting your bottom lip against your top teeth, the only difference is that
482. 41:41your throat vibrates when you say “v”. He quizzes you - why do you write “f”
483. 41:46and “v”? And he goes on interrogating you - what about “b”? Why does it look
484. 41:51that way, when it’s just taking the “v” sound and saying it through smacked lips?
485. 41:55Seems you underestimated the king. He doesn’t want any old alphabet. He wants a writing
486. 42:00system that shows the various features of sounds - that the sound is made in your throat,
487. 42:04against your teeth, made with your lips, and so on. He puts his brightest scholars to work,
488. 42:10giving them the humble name of the Hall of Worthies. In go the experts, and out comes
489. 42:15another “Major Moments in the History of Writing”!
490. 42:19They develop Korean Hangul, a featural alphabet. Every syllable gets separated out into its
491. 42:25own block. The syllable’s consonants and vowels will be written side-by-side within
492. 42:29that block. Each consonant and vowel letter inside that block will be shaped according
493. 42:33to its features. So here are the consonants that get pronounced with the lips. See the
494. 42:38similar lip shape? Here’s /g/, and here’s /k/. Again, similar sounds, similar shape.
495. 42:45The featural alphabet was so simple and straightforward that one of the king’s historians almost
496. 42:50dared people to learn it: “if you’re smart, you can learn it in one morning. If you’re
497. 42:55a fool, it’ll take you ten days.”
498. 42:58Not everyone’s jumping on the Hangul easytrain. Community-accessible writing bothers traditionalists,
499. 43:04who skip out on the innovation and keep using Chinese characters fitted to Korean, Hanja
500. 43:09or Han characters, even into the 1900s. Still, for the rest, writing is easier than ever.
501. 43:15It has its first rockstar. It even gets its own holiday!
502. 43:19Oh, writing! You’ve come a long, long way from pictographs in a cave.
503. 44:05The day that Thoth invented writing, Thamus warned him that he’d discovered a drug that
504. 44:09would make people lose touch with themselves. If you’re still watching, you took Thoth’s
505. 44:14pill and saw for yourself the effects it really had.
506. 44:17It started with visual depictions of the world (pictographs), signs for ideas and thoughts
507. 44:22(ideographs), then a transformation from picture writing to true writing with symbols that
508. 44:27stand for words (logographs), using those word-symbols to stand for similar-sounding
509. 44:32words (rebus), then those sound-alikes became syllable characters (syllabaries), consonant
510. 44:38characters (abjads), and then consonant and vowel characters (alphabets), or even consonant
511. 44:44and vowel syllables (alphasyllabaries), and if things get really linguistic, savvy alphabets
512. 44:50become all featural, characters grouped by their phonetic properties.
513. 44:54Along the way, writing had to deal with tensions and take sides. Should it represent meaning
514. 44:58or sounds? Should it benefit the reader or the writer? Contain maximum information about
515. 45:04every sound or just enough to recognize the shape of a word? Should it be flexible and
516. 45:09creative or rigid and consistent? How do physical techniques shape it? Oh, and who did it first?
517. 45:15Who did it best?
518. 45:17Maybe you’ve learned to make some sense out of the chaotic noise of world writing
519. 45:20systems. Maybe you can appreciate some of the problems each one solves, the traditions
520. 45:25it captures, the ambiguities it creates. Or perhaps it’s more comfortable just to close
521. 45:30your eyes and wake up back at home, looking at your familiar characters of your familiar
522. 45:35writing system plastered across your favorite websites. Still, somehow you can’t even
523. 45:40look at that the same way. It’s just one invention among many in the long history of
524. 45:45this language technology we call writing.