᚛ᚈᚑᚋ ᚄᚉᚑᚈᚈ᚜ and ᚛ᚑᚌᚐᚋ᚜

Ogham is an old Irish script made by carving notches into stones. It fell out of use more than a millennium ago - but it's an interesting exception to a linguistics and computer-science rule that I'd never even realised existed. Let's talk about the Ogham Space Mark.

(you can find contact details and social links there too)

[TomScottGo]

An alternate title for this video was "The Space That Isn't A Space", but that's a bit more difficult to translate into Ogham. Thanks again to all the team at the British Museum!

[Ignideus]

This video is gonna be hell to try and search for later

[rustyspurs]

Subtle genius of this that most people won't realize: Once you have started carving into something, continuing is really easy, most especially in the case of straight lines. Getting started is extremely difficult by comparison. That is, unless you start carving from the edge. When all you have to write on is stones, Ogham is quite literally the pinnacle of efficient communication.

[MrHatoi]

I love how Unicode, the most modern standard for how we represent characters, had a debate over how to represent an alphabet that hasn't even been used for thousands of years.

[scottd]

I had to fit some projectors at the British Museum one night about 15 years ago. After my work was done, I was looking for security to let me out of the building. I couldn't find anyone for about 30 minutes, so sat on my toolbox staring a the Rosetta Stone for a while. Being in the museum, with no one around with the greatest translation of ancient languages was a moment in life that I doubt I could have again.

[alexanderf]

Unicode really has to be considered one of the greatest accomplishments of the modern world. The fact that I can easily switch between English and 日本語 and expect virtually everyone who encounters those characters to see them rendered correctly is astounding. People under maybe 15 have probably never encountered a webpage full of broken unreadable encodings for an unsupported text standard.

[pugsareawsome]

Imagine being surrounded by ancient irishmen and one says "ᚁᚏᚔᚅᚌ ᚆᚔᚋ ᚈᚑ ᚈᚆᚓ ᚑᚏᚁ"

[GaviLazan]

Are you trying to crash our phones again?

[frac]

I love that the ᚛   ᚜ characters draw the corner of a box edge on. Very straight-to-the-point.

[clementpoon]

i can't believe that unicode actually can handle the title. probably the most underrated human achievement.

[toucaninterieur]

Yes Tom, tell me about rectangle-rectangle-rectangle and rectangle-rectangle rectangle

[MNalias]

Oh, i see. That's why they make all those "edge" phones. To properly display Ogham.

[klop]

Zero-width space is also nice to stop programs from turning your emoticons into emoji

[dkwgallery]

I've been carving Ogham for awhile now. It helps me learn more about Irish history.

[Alchemy.]

I’ve made many conlangs for books I’m writing and one of my favorites is written from top to bottom and is all connected through a line. The spaces have specific characters and this language is where I learned how to do that

[michaelkarnerfors]

03:25 "An exception to a rule I did not even realise was there"

Sometimes rules are defined (at least in part) by their exceptions. Because even if all you have is the exception, that exception could not exist if there is no rule to except from. So you can — in theory — define a rule by its exceptions alone.

[dagwoodland]

The title translates to “Tom Scott and Ogam”.

[aengberg]

My favourite space character is Buzz Lightyear,

[PhileasLiebmann]

This is one of the major inspirations for New Phyrexian, a conlang in the collectible card game Magic: The Gathering. There's actually a whole subcommunity in the MTG fan community dedicated to decoding and translating New Phyrexian, it's really cool.

[SomeBritishDud]

That "ŀl" ligature shown at 2:57 is used in Catalan to distinguish a long /lː/ from a palatal /ʎ/, which is spelt "ll" like in Spanish.