Thoth's Pill - an Animated History of Writing

My animation takes you through the birth and evolution of writing. Watch the story of the world's scripts unfold, from the early cave days to modern writing systems. But only if you choose to take Thoth's Pill...

This animated documentary is my vision of the history of writing if you could've seen it evolve with your own eyes. It was a time-consuming labor of love in honor of written language, a topic I've been passionate about for years.

** CORRECTIONS **
(Hugs to the commenters who took time to point all of these out on specific videos in the series.)

CHINESE #1
The two bottom "yue" examples use simplified characters, one of which ("key") has the more common reading "yao". This means that the characters didn't evolve in ancient times according to the traditional pattern presented here, but were made to look similar later in history. To find accurate examples, rewind to our character "ma" ("horse"). Better yet, use an online Hànzì dictionary to see each component of a specific character:

CHINESE #2
The character for "ant" is cited as a prefix with the more general meaning "insect".

ETHIOPIAN (GE'EZ)
In standard transliteration, mä, bä and lä rather than ma, ba and la.

KOREAN
I swapped the shape keys for 'p' and 'm'. Annotations should pop up to correct this unless you're watching on mobile.

쓰기 instead of 쯔기 on the capsule at 3:20, mentioned by FredRick010 on reddit and also by multiple commenters.

Meet these scripts:
- Egyptian hieroglyphs
- Sumerian cuneiform
- Aztec glyphs
- Chinese characters (Hanzi)
- Maya glyphs
- Phoenician abjad (consonant alphabet)
- Greek alphabet
- Roman alphabet
- Arabic, Syriac and Hebrew consonant alphabets
- Brahmic scripts, including Devanagari
- Ge'ez abugida
- Korean hangul and hanja
- Japanese kana and kanji

See these developments in the history of writing:
- pictographs (pictograms)
- ideographs
- metonymy
- logographs (logograms)
- rebus writing
- determinatives and radicals
- syllabaries
- phonetic complements
- acrophony
- abjads
- alphabets
- matres lectionis
- vowel pointing
- alphasyllabaries
- abugidas
- featural alphabets

~ Who's to thank or blame? ~
Mostly me, plus some CC-BY and public domain stuff.

CREDITS:

Also, Thamus' opening speech is my translation of Plato's Phaedrus 274e-275a.

[muskyoxes]

Thamus: "Your invention of writing will erode people's ability to memorize."
Thoth: "Don't worry, my system will use 600 symbols with 10 readings each. It'll take tons of memory to use it."

[suneenough]

"The name for Moon sounds the same as 'amputate your feet'" Something I never thought I'd hear.

[Longhunter]

This is a “major moments in knowledge history” icon.

When your average person is able to access, via the internet, a 46 minute video that gives them the same knowledge of a concept as a semester of college… but for free.

[ruddfoxerjay]

This was the best 47 minutes of my life!
*proceeds to create a fictional language using every concept used in this video*

[JuiceBoxWizard]

24:08
Writing without vowels, and adding pictures for extra meaning? That's how people text one another! :0

[emiko]

Almost 5 years later and this is still one of the most interesting and informative videos I've ever seen.

[MultiSciGeek]

*MAJOR MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING!*

[kaleine]

This video is a MAJOR MOMENT IN THE HISTORY OF YOUTUBE!

[guxinim]

I must congratulate you, this video is incredibly well made and engaging. I can't remember when a 40+ minutes video kept me so interested.

[trenza]

Major moments in the history of writing stamps:
5:08
6:54
10:12
14:41
19:24
24:41
29:42
32:13
37:19
42:16

[Brakvash]

MAJOR MOMENTS IN THE HISTORY OF WRITING! *cuteness overload!*
This narrator has a great voice.

[gingerale]

20:37
"And it's a good solution because, y'know, ignoring your problems makes them go away."
*nods in agreement*

[MsJavaWolf]

History can be very interresting. Unfortunatelly in schools it's usually war after war, king after king and date after date. This video is great.

[Alex-dnjq]

Us Greek be like:
No vowels?
*Absolutely Barbaric*

[mykimikimiky]

if this isn't one of the very best videos on YT then ...
this comes like the most valuable gift to every poliglot

[SOUNDSNOISESCO]

I’ve watched this so many times. It’s such a classic of the youtube languages genre

[SFGJP]

This has to be one of the best things ever posted to YouTube, on par with the greatest Vsauce videos. As a budding linguist, I'm going to shout this video from the rooftops. Major, major kudos.

[Alkis]

This video should win some kind of award!
I wish we all could just understand one another. If we could all understand one another I think it would make the world a really better place. I remember how learning english opened up a huge section of the internet to me. I've learned a lot since then. Imagene whole sections and communities in the world and in the internet that is totally unavailable to us just because of language.
How much longer until everyone can speak a common language or communicate telepathically?

[CBusschaert]

Why doesn't this have more than a million views yet?? START SHARING, PEOPLE!

[David_Lloyd-Jones]

A Hangul note, for around 42:00 : I once took a class in Korean at the Asahi Culture Center in Shinjuku, where I was the only white face. The instructor was showing off the power of Hangul by showing everybody how to write their names, all Japanese until he got around to me. Then he wrote up the equivalent for loid joans, and read it. I said it was not bad, but in Welsh Ll is a single letter of the alphabet, pronounced, more or less, "HL." He made just the slightest adjustment to the Hangul and had Lloyd-Jones in perfect Welsh.

I think it is likely that the Koreans are so good, so much better than the Japanese, at learning new languages because their writing system is so good: a syllabary written in Hangul can be almost perfect, whereas one that tries to do it with Katakana for the pronunciation guides will be hopeless.