Writing doesn't always end in alphabets - the enigmatic Egyptian counterexample

Elephant- “draw three characters, make one redundant, and then the heck with it, draw an elephant too”

Egyptian: "What's your name, cute furry predator?" Cat: "*mew*" Egyptian: "Cool name, Mew."

Herein we learn that Egyptian scribes had WAY too much time on their hands.

Phoenician scribes: let's take these complicated symbols and make them easy for people to write and understand Egyptian scribes: MEEEEEEMES

I'm proud of myself. I understood almost 10% of what you said.

this reminds me of how memes develop online. if you're constantly online for a length of time, you will accumulate a history of memes that express certain fundamental ideas or emotions, and mashing several memes together will have a whole conversation of meaning imbued into them by their context

I figured the reason for the locust standing for the "R" sound is from how its wings sound.. especially when there's a massive swarm of them... an Egyptian onomatopoeia....

Your love for that last one took me by surprise - sooo here's more about Egyptian!

As a Chinese native speaker, I’m strangely familiar with hieroglyphical writing system.

Extra points for using reconstructed pronunciation for egyptian, where every documentary I've ever seen uses egyptological

I'm even more confused about ancient Egyptian writing now then when I was before I watched the video.

It sounds like to understand what hieroglyphs mean you had to understand a great deal about the culture around their writing.

F in le chat for french egyptologists.

9:50 Oh my god, the "Buffaflo buffalo" sentence trick is literally thousands of years old, and also works with hieroglyphs.

As a linguist, I'm impressed and delighted by how accurate this is! There is so much misinformation about writing systems out there. It's such a breath of fresh air to see someone who knows what they're talking about and isn't just speculating wildly and pulling stuff out of thin air.

Egyptian: Oh look! A furry creature is eating the mice! 2nd Egyptian: Cool! we should keep it! Egyptian: yeaaaahhh 2nd Egyptian: ok so whats his name? Cat: mew Egyptian: alright! your name is miw!

If you know Japanese the similar kind of thing happens quite a bit, and so it wouldn't surprise me that someone familiar with the cultural context and fluent in the language could easily figure out this kind of "crypographic" writing. It's basically just poetry but with a visual twist, and a lot of Japanese authors will use similar literary techniques, even in pretty mainstream works. It's pretty common to write certain words or names with unusual kanji that make visual puns or add another layer of meaning. Often you'll see it in songs where some words might be written differently than they're sung which gives a second meaning when reading along with the lyrics, or in books where normally katakana words will be written with kanji instead, or kanji words will be given a different reading. An example of a famous author who uses these things extensively is NisiOishin, who you might know from Bakemonogatari which is also pretty popular overseas. That series, the anime and even more so the books, is one that if you watch/read without knowing Japanese well you will miss a TON of buried jokes or extra meaning. His dialogue and writing is really dense in kanji based wordplay that doesn't translate at all, from alternate readings to visual gags to even being plot relevant occasionally, and it's a pretty mainstream work directed at a high school - young adult audience rather than some educated snobs. If you know the culture you can read that stuff no problem and get what the author was going for. Another example from the internet world you might have seen, is that 草 is used online as basically the english "lol" but the kanji just means grass and it's read as kusa (grass). But it's actually just a visual pun from the previous slang for lol which was just a bunch of wwwwww which look like grass, and those themselves came from either the word "warau" which means laugh, or alternatively just being what you might end up typing accidentally if you were trying to type "hahahaha" in a hurry on a japanese cellphone using the kana input. From 草 people have even evolved it further into stuff like 大草原 (giant field of grass) which is pretty funny. If you were studying it 3000 years in the future you'd be like why are these people talking about grass so much, but with context it makes sense. And if that much evolution can happen in a few years it's no surprise that Egyptian hieroglyphics would have developed such a rich vocabulary of weird memes and puns over the course of millennia.

Imagine a chisel scribe making a mistake on a wall.

"The first three are sounds. Focus on that last one." Oh, you mean... the elephant in the room?

Not having an alphabet is a huge problem. From the internet: 'I was once at a luncheon with three Ph.D. students in the Chinese Department at Peking University, all native Chinese (one from Hong Kong). I happened to have a cold that day, and was trying to write a brief note to a friend canceling an appointment that day. I found that I couldn't remember how to write the character 嚔, as in da penti 打喷嚔 "to sneeze". I asked my three friends how to write the character, and to my surprise, all three of them simply shrugged in sheepish embarrassment. Not one of them could correctly produce the character. Now, Peking University is usually considered the "Harvard of China". Can you imagine three Ph.D. students in English at Harvard forgetting how to write the English word "sneeze"?? Yet this state of affairs is by no means uncommon in China.'