 6,000 years ago, there was a language called Proto-Indo-European. Over the past 6,000 years, it evolved into Proto-Germanic, and from there it evolved into English. This makes English a member of the Germanic family of languages, which itself is part of the larger Indo-European family of languages, right? Well, maybe not. We say that a language is the descendant of another when we mean that most parts of the Dada language were originally an equivalent part of the mother language that got changed a bit, like how the English word bitter was originally just a funny way of pronouncing the Proto-Germanic word bitrasse. Hot was originally the Proto-Germanic hytas, etc., but did the word hot really come from hytas? Yes, the sounds are equivalent, the glottal frictive state of glottal frictive, the diphthong turned into a single vowel, etc., but I'm not just talking about English the spoken language. I'm talking about English the written language. These symbols in the word hot, this circle, and this thing with the two vertical lines and a horizontal line through them, these didn't come from Proto-Germanic. In fact, the Proto-Germanic people didn't even write. These symbols came from the Romans when they invaded England, and the Romans got it from the Greeks, and the Greeks got it from the Phoenicians, from the Phoenician language, a Semitic language. So perhaps that makes English a Semitic language as well as a Germanic one. Now I know it's generally only the spoken language that's used to decide genetic relationships, but why? Reading and writing are as important in our culture as speaking. Society would crumble without either, and English wouldn't really be English without its written version. And since the symbols that make up the alphabet that English uses comes from a Semitic language, that seems to me to make English just as Semitic as it is Germanic. So maybe we should start talking about languages being genetically related based on their scripts as much as based on the lexicon. If we do this, then we find it's kind of like the entire Western Hemisphere plus Western Europe and Africa speak the same language if writing systems are now equivalent to languages since they all use the Latin alphabet. And if we start grouping them into language families, then the Latin language I guess you would call it now, the Cyrillic language and the Greek language would all be grouped into a family, let's call it the Hellenic language family since they all come from ancient Greek. South and Southeast Asia have a huge number of writing systems, but they are almost all descended from a 2,000 year old script called Brahmi, so we could call them the Brahmic language... oh, linguists already sort of do. Huh. Well don't get the wrong idea, everything else I'm saying right now I'm making up as I go along. Brahmi is descended from Aramaic along with Arabic and Hebrew, so we could group them all together into the Aramaic languages. And since Aramaic came from Phoenician along with ancient Greek, we could call all of these the Phoenician languages. So we've now grouped almost all of the world's languages into one big happy family, except East Asia has just off doing its own thing like the loner it is. But doing things this way raises all kinds of questions. For instance, what about languages like Turkmen where they're commonly written with different writing systems? Or what about languages like Japanese where half the writing system are symbols they made up and the other half are essentially adapted Chinese characters? I suppose in the case of Turkmen you could say that the language has two different registers or versions of the same language used in different circumstances. With Japanese I guess you could say it's kind of like a cradle of native Japanese and Chinese, except even the native Japanese was already very very vaguely based on Chinese in the first place. So does that make the whole thing Chinese, or is it now a mix between Chinese and a mix between Chinese and native Japanese? Okay, the problem with Japanese brings up another good point, and that's that it's really really hard to apply traditional concepts of language descendants like this because with spoken language people feel like they're speaking the same language as their immediate ancestors each step of the way. There's no sudden break where one day they're speaking Latin and the next day they're speaking Spanish. The change is gradual and has no clear borders and people aren't aware they're doing it. With written language though people will deliberately and consciously make up writing systems based on old ones in order to write an inner language, like how Saint Cyril and Saint Methodius created the Cyrillic alphabet, or how Sejong the Great created the Korean alphabet, syllable, writing thing. Because of that they can have very large changes, very suddenly, and as exemplified perfectly by Japanese it can become very difficult to say whether or not something is descended from another. So I get why linguists don't classify languages genetically based on orthography. Besides the fact that they don't evolve the same way spoken language does, it works so differently from the other features of a language and it's just so easy to put in the back of your mind and separate from the rest of a language that it's really talked about in the same way. But I just thought I'd use this video to remind us English speakers that there is a fundamental deeply ingrained facet of the English language that isn't Indo-European at all.