 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 these spoken words onto a 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 going to attempt this invention myself. For this scenario, we'll be sticking to the spoken language of English, but under the assumption that 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. In inventing my new language, I have the unique position of having some foresight and knowledge into how this language will be used in the future, as I continue to slowly rebuild myself back to modern day. So starting from a blank slate, I can make some improvements to it, and make it a better language than the chicken scratches of today's English. So let's invent our own written language that's better. 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 the 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 their writing system may seem like a fanciful hypothetical, but is now without historical basis. During the late Bronze Age collapse, the writing system in Greece, now known as Linear B, 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. But 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. But first, thank you to today's sponsor, CuriosityStream, helped do some initial research on the origins of written language. I was able to use CuriosityStream to access several excellent documentaries that helped set the stage. CuriosityStream is a streaming service with thousands of documentaries and non-fiction titles on pretty much every subject, spanning science, nature, history, technology, society, and lifestyle, with new titles added weekly. The best part is it's only $20 a year. Go to curiositystream.com slash htme for unlimited access to the world's top documentaries and non-fiction series. And for our viewers, use the promo code htme when prompted during the signup process and your membership is completely free for the first 30 days. Using CuriosityStream, we were able to access Bronze 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 and he was in contact with his colleague, Dr. Christopher Ralstein. Okay, can you hear me now? Ah, very good. I can hear you now. 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 be an attempt to convey some things. But by about 3200 BCE, we actually get full-blown, real writing. First in Mesopotamia and then a generation or two later in Egypt. And so in that case, the pictographs that would represent words. Cuneiform started pictographically, but as it evolved, was reduced to a series of strokes over time to simplify and speed up the writing process. Around 2800 BCE, Cuneiform 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 number of symbols needed and was the first step towards an alphabet. What developed soon after that was writing that can convey words, a logogram, of writing that can also convey syllables, we call those syllabograms. And then these early writing systems, both in Mesopotamia and Egypt, had a third category of signs and those were determinatives. Syllables can be further broken down into phonemes. In 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 uniliterals. These are believed to have formed the basis of the 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 whole 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 a 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 invented was entirely continental. 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, that they were modifying an existing system of representing vowels rather than doing something de novo. Thus creating the alphabet, they would form the basis for Latin, Krillic, 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 venting my own. An alphabet isn't necessarily a crucial building block for our civilization's written language as the Chinese and Mayan languages show, but having fewer characters does have a distinct advantage in later media inventions like the printing press and computer. I'm going to go this direction. So now to start dissecting the phonemes of English to decide my letters for my alphabet. 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 and spoken language tends to evolve faster than written language. This is called a pretty messy situation with the pronunciation of letters that have complex rules for hard and soft vowels. Different letters can be pronounced the same depending on the situation. Combinations of letters can produce completely unique sounds and for some reason they're silent letters. For example, at one point the word night was pronounced out of the spell, konit. But as the pronunciation evolved, the spelling remained the same. So let's just forget about this mess of an alphabet and base ours on the sounds of the English language or 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 39 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 one-to-one connection between our letters and the now lost English alphabet 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 most 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 it represented. The first two characters of ox and house both started with the phoneme it represented in the Phoenician language. So we went through the 39 phenomes of the alphabet and decided on a pictograph that would clearly represent something that began with the same phenome. For some letters, especially a few vowels, we had to use phenomes that were in the middle of the word, as there weren't any English words that fit that role. Once satisfied with our selection, we went through and attempted to turn the pictographs into a simpler symbol that would be easier to write quickly. So these are our letters. A for agave, n for knife, r for rest, t for tree, n for insect, s for sandwich, d for dubby, l for light, e for egret, k for corn, for thor, e for egg, n for man, z for zigzag, p for pottery, a for axe, v for village, for water, w with loon, b for bill, r for earth, u for onion, f for fire, a for eye, a for arm, for house, o for oats, a for all, m for tongs, sh for sheep, y for youtube, g for gold, z for jeans, for cheese, o for cow, u for book, o for oil lamp, g for 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 decided to leave things alone so I don't end up with a strange lisp. I did however decide to combine the th and th sounds as they seemed 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 with some going left to right and others right to left, and many switching every other line like you would plow a field. Most western texts 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 spearing the fresh ink less with your poem. It has also become a predominant format in modern history and technology has been formatted to match, so let's stick with this left to right format. Most initial writing systems didn't have any form of punctuation or even spacing, however 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 to separate sentences. Greek playwrights around 400 BCE started indicating pauses in speech to help their actors recite it, and most punctuation was formally developed in the medieval age to assist in reciting the bible, with dots at various heights to indicate intonation of things like questions. The minor question mark developed from these dots and 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, something that was often added at the end of sentences. So for my writing system, I used some small dots to indicate spaces between words, some straight lines to 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. And 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 been proposed many times in English, sometimes early as 1580, but has never been formally adopted. However, in recent years new elements have become common that address some of these potential shortcomings. For most of history, text was for more formal use. With the proliferation of literacy and ease of text-based communication in more recent eras, the need to express the emotions behind written language have become more and more important. This has given rise to the invention of emoticons and emojis at designators, an interesting return of ideograms into modern language. So to future-proof and codify emotional intent, I went through and found the most commonly used emojis and tried to dissect their general emotional intent. We have happy, we have excitement, we have thinking or questioning, love, joy or laughing, crying and sadness, anger, sarcasm or joking, we have a thirst or strong desire as apparently some people like eggplants, unamused and neutral, affirmative and negative. While these emojis seem to be effective at expressing the emotional intent, they suffer from not being part of the formal writing system, and it becomes a bit of a full paw if you try to use it in any context outside of super informal. I doubt the use of emojis would be well received in a doctorate 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 I'm going to add little designators reminiscent of human mouth for things like happy, laughing, sad and then symbols for a thumbs up or down to show agreement or disagreement, a flat line to show neutral or unamused 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 punctuations then offer the option to be used independently from the complete sentence for expressing emotional intent without the use of words. So I was able to draw, put the text, small paragraph in clay here and it ended up being a lot more difficult than I expected and the characters I have chosen are still pretty complex and it's very easy to see why cuneiform 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 going to be invented pretty soon and we'll be doing a video on that and that'll allow us to write with ink on a paper and something that's easy to transport. Even further along will eventually be the point of having a printing press and a 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 at 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 that point is really impossible without just a lot of trial and error. 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 is actually kind of fun, it kind of reminds me of like a Remus puzzle where you have to figure it out based on different images except it'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 end up being 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 that together form cohesive units that are both easy to write and read. It's really all you need. At this stage it's still a pretty underdeveloped language because a lot of the foundational aspects but it's missing things we 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 lower case. I still don't have a numbering system which will probably be important to invent as in about a month we'll be getting to inventing my own units of measurement. So we're probably gonna need some sort of numbers to go with that. One issue with the phonetic alphabet is that homonyms are all going to be spelled the same. So whether you're eating meat or meeting someone it's the same word so then it's entirely up to context to be able to 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 but considering that this is a first draft and we're roughly at the year 3200 BCE we are millennia ahead 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 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 that 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 it so it's really going to be 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 I'm going to send you a personalized little note with your name written in this new language for you to enjoy. So thanks again for everybody's support there and thanks for watching. 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've enjoyed 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!