Animated History of Writing Systems

[Gharial]

Came across this on YouTube the other day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PdO3IP0Pro8 . While there may be a few points to quibble about in the Chinese segment ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QvGPeezXDIg ), overall it seems pretty solid, informative, and well-made.

[Shelley]

Watched the first quarter or so, love the animation style, nice and clean and clear.

 

When I get time I will definitely watch the whole thing.

 

Nice find, thanks for sharing.

[Demonic_Duck]

Very little to quibble about in the Chinese one, actually. Only real quibble would be 给 = "for" or "supply", which seems like more of a grammar issue than truly different meanings.

I didn't know that 钥 had the pronunciation yue4, but turns out that checks out (I guess yao4 is a colloquial reading).

[Gharial]

Well, there are a number of comments there on YT that question why the video maker didn't (given the quite ancient historical context) use certainly more traditional- than simplified-form examples, and he himself admitted (down near the start of the comments) in reply to a Ragnarok EX that 'Dictionaries give both pronunciations. Yes, I wish I had selected clearer examples - these ones are definitely "manufactured"'.

 

Personally I'd've also tried to avoid presenting phonetic components with potentially too-dissimilar readings (even though perfect homophony may be rare compared to the apparent heterophonicity across any particular range of phonetically-related characters). But it probably would've been too complicated and spoilt the neat left-right simplicity to have opted for a more consistent phonetic like 相 eh. Yeah the unbound yue4 reading (cf. 钥匙的钥) seems more literary or something than colloquial spoken.

 

I do agree with him however when he then goes on to say 'Fortunately, most viewers don't seem to be missing the forest for the trees here, which is the point of the video'.

 

So, yes, it's a good video, which is why I posted the link to it!

[Demonic_Duck]

Ah yeah, that's a good point about simp/trad. But the forest/trees argument is legit. Most introductions might get the trees right but they get the forest completely wrong by perpetrating the ideographic myth, only giving examples of 象形 and 会意 characters, and completely ignoring pronunciation.

[Shelley]

This is one in the same series that was a bit fun and may be interesting to some, its about stroke order.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TD7Lc4QBh5w

[Hofmann]

Well, that's a simple way to put it. But you'd be mistaken if you think following the recommended stroke orders complicates things. Stroke orders are recommended because somebody thinks they're the easiest way to write a character (correctly), which naturally coincides with how the character evolved, most of the time.

[Shelley]

I have found that if you don't use the correct stroke order, amongst other things, they don't look right. There needs to be an order to write characters , so it might as well be the order that has been found to give the best results.

 

It also help with memorising characters.