The 10 Greatest Achievements in Linguistic History

Added: 2026-06-04

[00:00:00]Today on Let them Talk TV, the 10 greatest achievements in linguistic history. And if you feel that I've left any out, then add your own in the comments. And if you like my content, then do read my groundbreaking book.

[00:00:14]It's all about the history of idioms told through stories. Get the first chapter free. Link in the description.

[00:00:21]And without further ado, let's go with number 10.

[00:00:25]Espiranto.

[00:00:31]What if the whole planet spoke the same second language? You could travel anywhere, speak to anyone, and you'd understand and be understood wherever you went. French could speak to English.

[00:00:43]Egyptians could speak to Indonesians in a neutral language that belonged to nobody and everybody. This language would be easy with a simple structure and no irregular verbs. This was a vision of Professor Zamanhof, a Polish eye doctor who invented the Espiranto language in 1887.

[00:01:06]Europe had been ravaged by war for centuries. And if we all spoke the same language, we could communicate face to face without the need for interpreters, phrase books, or exaggerated hand gestures. a small step in bringing the peoples of the world together. It was an admirable goal. It had followers particularly before the first world war and again in the 1920s and 30s. It had haters too. The ideals of goodwill and peace between mankind didn't sit well with the fascists and nationalists.

[00:01:48]Adolf Hitler mentions Espiranto in mine kmph. Espirantists were rounded up and killed in Nazi Germany and in the Soviet Union too. The language survived. Today it has about 2 million speakers. Did it become the international language? No.

[00:02:09]Twice as many people speak Lithuanian than Espiranto.

[00:02:14]But we should nonetheless celebrate its ideals and achievements.

[00:02:21]It's supposed to be everyone's second language, but it even has some native speakers including financia and philanthropist George Soros who's originally from Hungary. And side note here, I have a personal story about my encounter with Espiranto. When I was a student, I shared a flat with an Espirantist and he convinced me to start learning it. It was really the first language I studied apart from a basic French at school. And he lent me book one and book two of the Espiranto language course. Yenya Mondo, this is our world. Then during the summer holidays, our apartment was burgled and the thieves took everything, including books. But here's the thing, they stole the Espiranto course book volume two, but not volume one. So I reached the conclusion that they must already know some Espiranto. I told this to the police that they should focus their investigation on thieves that had attained an intermediate level of espiranto and that would significantly narrow the number of suspects. Sadly, the local constablary scorned the insight of this master sleuth and the bilingual burglars remain at large to this day. Number nine, hieroglyphics. Hieroglyphics or those squiggly symbols depicting birds, snakes, insects, eyes, and little people. Looking at them, it's hard to believe that our very own Latin alphabet, as well as the Greek and cerillic alphabets, are descended from these very squiggles. And they're at least 5,000 years old. And to cut a very long story short, the hieroglyphics evolved into the protoitic script in the southern Levant. Then they were borrowed by the Phoenicians. Then the Greeks applied them to their language and vows in the process. Then they were adapted by the Atruscans. Then the Romans adopted them for their Latin alphabet, which we're still using. But did you know that for 1,500 years, these wondrous words were unreadable? In late antiquity, as traditional temple culture declined under Roman rule, the Egyptian writing systems fell out of use and the language evolved into what became known as Coptic. Then in the late 18th and 19th centuries, attempts were made to decipher the glyphs. Some headway was made, but the breakthrough came when the Rosetta Stone was unearthed in 1799 by the French in Egypt soon after to be snatched by the Perfidious British. And it's a lamp of granite containing a royal proclamation from 196 BC made during the reign of Tommy V. Crucially, it's written in three scripts. ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, demotic script, and ancient Greek. Greek was already known, so all that was needed was to match it to the other two. Simple, huh?

[00:06:03]Well, not quite. It took more than 20 years. Thomas Young, an English scientist and philologist, worked on the stone and made important headway identifying some phonetic elements in royal names. But the breakthrough was made by French scholar Jean Francois Champolon in 1822.

[00:06:29]Champolon's crucial insight was that hieroglyphs weren't just pictures or symbols. They were combined phonetic letters with idographic signs. His knowledge of Coptic proved essential to cracking the code. Now, can you imagine walking through Egypt's temples, being the first person to read the hieroglyphs for 2,000 years? That must have been an incredible sight.

[00:07:01]Number eight, Braille. Before Braille, most blind people didn't read at all.

[00:07:07]For most of history, they received little formal education and weren't taught to read or write. The first attempts to teach reading to the blind took place in the 18th century. These consisted of standard script but with the letters embossed on the page and the reader would trace their fingers along the text. It was better than nothing.

[00:07:31]But these systems were created by cited people and not well adapted to the blind. They were slow and cumbersome and there was no way for blind people to write for themselves. The breakthrough came in 1821 with the introduction of Charles Barbier Knight writing system. It was a system of 12 raised dots on a grid each representing a phonetic sound. It was presented to the Royal Institution for Blind Youth in Paris. It was a significant improvement and for the first time the blind could read with relative ease but it was flawed. It needed refining. Can you guess the name of the student in 1821 at the Royal Institute for the Blind who would later go on to develop Braille? Yes, I think you can. It was none other than Louie Bry or as we know him in English, Braille. and that's why I'll continue calling him Louis Braille had been blind since the age of three. Braille and his fellow students using the night writing system reported that it was a clear step forward but needed refinement. It was still far too complicated for fast reading and writing. Braille was 12 years old in 1821 and for the next three years he worked on adapting Charles Barbier's night writing and he presented his improved system in 1824.

[00:09:15]Braille system was based on letters of the alphabet rather than phonetic sounds. He also reduced the number of dots from 12 to six so that they could easily be traced under the indexed finger of the reader with the placement of the dots indicating the letter of the alphabet. His system also allowed for easy writing with a metal frame and a puncher. Moreover, the Braille system could be adapted for reading and writing music too. Now, Braille was 15 years old when he presented his reading and writing system. Yes, you heard that correctly. He was 15 years old. What a kid. Although, the sad thing is that his system wasn't adopted by the Institute for the Blind until 1854, 2 years after his death at the age of 45.

[00:10:15]The blind had been illiterate since the dawn of civilization. Well, having said that, so had most cited people too. But anyway, it would take a young man of vision to make the ideal design that we know as Braille. Yes, he was blind, but he sure did have insight. And he certainly earned his place amongst the pantheon of great inventors. Actually, that's where he's buried literally in the Pantheon in Paris.

[00:10:49]Seven, Turkish language reform. For roughly a thousand years, from the conversion of the Turkish peoples to Islam in the 10th to 11th centuries and throughout the time of the Ottoman Empire, the Turkish language had been written in PersoArabic script. The problem was that it was poorly suited to Turkish phenology, particularly its vowels. Short vowels are usually omitted in Arabic script, but Turkish is a vowelrich language. This meant that Turkish sounds could not be properly represented, making vowels ambiguous.

[00:11:32]Reading and writing were therefore difficult and prone to errors. In the 1920s, only about 10% of the Turkish population could read and write. So there was an urgent needs to improve literacy. The other consideration was that the Arabic script was associated with Islam and the Quran and Turkeykey's leader Mustafa Kiml Ataturk wanted a modern secular state and sought to reduce religious influence. So in 1928 he did what any great politician would do. He set up a commission, the language council dili to oversee the reform and what they came up with was a 29 letter alphabet.

[00:12:27]X, Q and W were emitted and these letters were added. So for example, the C with a sadilla represents the ch sound in English. So the Turkish word for T, chai, is spelled like this. Chai.

[00:12:43]Anyway, the council came back with their report and they said, "Well, this will take time. We need about a 5 to 15year transition period when both alphabets could be taught before switching over."

[00:13:01]Ataturk, however, was adamant either in 3 months or not at all. And so it was and literacy rose to 20 to 25% in the 1930s and it continued to increase.

[00:13:14]Next, the Turkish language went through its second phase of transformation. And it is estimated that in the early 20th century, 58% of Turkish vocabulary had been derived from Persian and Arabic.

[00:13:28]And between 1932 and 1938, a great many Arabic and Persian words and grammatical rules were from those languages. and they were either replaced by native Turkish words that had fallen out of use or they would seek alternatives from languages related to Turkish such as Usuzbck or Tajik. So um give you some examples. Excuse my pronunciation.

[00:14:00]Orun cop or product replaced the Persian masul. Kural rule replaced the Arabic whole or entire replaced k. And although the most intense period of change happened in the 1930s, the process continued until the 1970s.

[00:14:22]So what we have now is a language quite different to the one used by the greatgrandparents of this generation.

[00:14:32]And I'm not a Turkish speaker, but if you are, I'd like to get your insight into the changes. But one problem it has caused is that Turkish people know a very different form of Turkish from their forefathers. This means that they are disconnected from the literature and manuscripts of the past. In fact, the old Turkish language goes by a different name, Ottoman Turkish. Number six, the IPA. Imagine you're reading a book in, say, English, and you encounter a word you're not familiar with. This one, for example, hyperbo.

[00:15:14]Hyper bowl. And I'm using this word, by the way, because I remember when I was at school. I read it in a book and I learned the meaning and I thought I was being clever by using it in school the next day, but I got it wrong and the teacher made fun of me and the whole class laughed at me. Anyway, say you don't know how to pronounce it. So, you could look it up in a book of words.

[00:15:44]Let's call it a dictionary. And there would be symbols next to the word. And each symbol would represent a sound which would convey to you exactly how it should be said. Was that? Ah, yes. That already exists. It's called the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. Wow. I wish I'd known that when I was 15. It would have saved me from the mockery and ridicule of Mr. Suckliffe in form 4C and the embarrassment with my classmates.

[00:16:23]So, number six on our list, life is a million times better for language lovers if you know the IPA. And I say that without a hint of hyperbole. Whether you're a linguist, a teacher, a student of languages, or a voice actor, I'm sure you've come across the IPA. And as of 2020, here it is. The first version of the IPA came out in 1886.

[00:16:52]Before that, there were attempts using the Latin alphabet to represent sounds.

[00:16:57]So, for example, the C represented the sh sound in shu in English. But for the French language, they used an X for the sh sound. In 1886, there was a meeting of the phonetic teachers association.

[00:17:17]I'm not making it up. They were a group of European language teachers and linguists, including its founder, Paul Paci, a Frenchman who had spent many years teaching English and German in French schools. He was also fluent in Italian and had taught himself Sanskrit.

[00:17:35]The group met in Paris with the objective of improving the teaching of modern languages by creating con a consistent way to write pronunciation and they devised a standard script for all languages. It's not only based on Latin scripts. There is some Greek and other symbols. With that, all sounds from all languages can be represented from Cantonese to Zulu. The script has evolved since its inception in 1886.

[00:18:08]I've been a teacher of English as a foreign language for many years, and I do encourage my students to learn the IPA.

[00:18:18]Those that do tend to have much better pronunciation. Let me just give you a couple of examples. This word, how do you pronounce it? Now, if you rely on the Latin alphabet, you'd say something like lo. This is my lo. But my students who know the phonetic script will read this and say lava correctly. By the way, why is the O pronounced as an a sound?

[00:18:51]That's because in the Middle Ages when the script was written by hand, a U next to a V was problematic because they looked the same. So, they changed the U to an O, but for the spelling only. And I talk more about that in my brilliant video on the history of English spelling. Check it out here. And what about this word? Now, there are two pronunciations, but you'd know that already if you knew the IPA. The verb is to close. Close the door. The adjective is close. I live close to the station.

[00:19:30]Of course, in the English language alone, there are thousands of such examples. Number five, the Indo-European connection. Imagine you're living in Europe in the Middle Ages. There's no Google, no chat, GPT. Actually, no printed books at all. The only people who could read and write were clergy, some nobles, and maybe some merchants.

[00:19:55]How did you make sense of the world? How could you explain the multiplicity of languages in the world? Well, there was one book which had all the answers, and that was the Holy Bible. The consensus at that time was that Hebrew was the original language as it was the language spoken by God in the Bible. Greek and Latin were holy languages too as God's truth was revealed through them. The New Testament was written in ancient Greek and the early church adopted Latin as its language. And according to the Bible, we all did speak one language.

[00:20:40]But let me explain unto you what happened. In the town of Shina, they built a great city, the centerpiece of which was a tower that would reach the heavens. God, in his infinite wisdom, was displeased with this act of hubris.

[00:21:00]They're getting too big for their boots, he exclaimed. though he didn't actually say that. But what he did say was, "Come, let us go down and confuse their language so they will not understand each other." From then on, all the nations on earth spoke a different language or so it is written. Side note here, Freddy II, the Holy Roman Emperor in the 13th century, reasoned with remarkable scientific perspacity that if Hebrew was God's language, then children not taught any language from birth might end up speaking the language of Adam and Eve, Hebrew, or perhaps Greek or Latin.

[00:21:44]There was only one way to find out. He took some infants and kept them in isolation for several years to see what would happen. Side note of the side note, the quest to identify the language spoken by Adam and Eve constitute a whole branch of early linguistics known as the study of the Adamic language. And beyond the usual suspects that I already mentioned, other candidates included Celtic and Dutch, later proposed unsurprisingly by a Dutchman. Anyway, you can draw your own conclusions about the results of Frederick's experiment. I would summize that he was disappointed by the outcome. However, it was a step forward in that he conducted a scientific experiment, albeit one grounded in religious superstition and what could be proved scientifically can also be disproved scientifically. And over the centuries, linguists began taking a more logical approach based on observation of real languages rather than taking their cue from the scriptures.

[00:23:03]So look at this. You see how similar brother is in so many languages. broader in German, frater in Greek and also you'll see the words for three in different languages and the word for new. Franciscus Rafael a professor at Leighten University fluent in Hebrew, Latin, Arabic. He produced an Arabic Latin dictionary. his native Dutch.

[00:23:31]Persian amongst others was the first to recognize the connection between Persian and Germanic languages in the 1590s.

[00:23:43]Marcus Fan Boxhorn, another Dutchman writing in the mid- 17th century, proposed a common ancestor of Greek, Latin, Persian, the Slavic languages, Baltic, Celtic, and Germanic. and which he called Skyion which was an empire by the way in central Asia from the 9th to the 6th century BC. And then there was Sir William Jones 1746 to 1794 a British judge and philologist who rather unfairly gets most of the credit for recognizing the affinity between Indo-Uropean languages. His work was nevertheless extremely influential.

[00:24:33]Jones was a judge at the court in Kolkata.

[00:24:37]He loved Indian culture and languages and he wrote extensively on a wide range of subjects and was the first to translate some classic works of Indian literature into English. He also founded the Asiatic Society in Kolkata. In 1786, he gave a talk at the society about the linguistic relationships between languages. And this is the famous quote from that discourse. The Sanskrit language is of a wonderful structure, more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitly refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity both in the roots of verbs and the forms of grammar than could possibly have been produced by accident. So strong indeed that no philologist could examine them all three without believing them to have sprung from some common source which perhaps no longer exists.

[00:25:46]There was a similar reason for supposing that both the Gothic and the Celtic had the same origin with the Sanskrit and the old Persian might be added to the same family. As you've seen, Jones wasn't the first to suggest such a relationship, but his timing was impeccable. He was speaking in an era of great scientific, cultural, and intellectual advancement. And in the parliament of our time, his speech went viral. The language he referred to became known as Indo-Uropean, which linguists have since attempted to reconstruct. And here's a handy map of the Indo-Uropean languages of Europe and Asia.

[00:26:38]Number four, the revival of the Hebrew language. Shalom. Shalom.

[00:26:49]Amen. Aar Ben Yehuda's only friend as a boy was his dog. His parents forbade any contact with other children of the community in his hometown of Jerusalem in the 1880s. It was the subject, some would say the victim of a language experiment. It ben Yehuda was the first native speaker of Hebrew for at least 1,500 years. His father Elza Ben Yehuda was an immigrant from Russia. He played a leading role in the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language.

[00:27:29]The Hebrew language of ancient times had thrived in Cananan in modernday Israel, West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and parts of southern Syria and Lebanon from the 10th century BC and for the centuries that followed. And it was the language of the Bible, but it ceased to be a vernacular language between 200 and 400 AD when it was gradually replaced by Greek and Aramaic. Hebrew continued as a language of prayer and Jewish scholars continued to speak it and write it, but not as a native tongue. In the late 19th century in Jerusalem and other towns with mixed Jewish populations, Hebrew was sometimes used as a pigeon for trade and everyday communication between communities. Ben Yehuda must have witnessed this for himself as a young immigrant to Jerusalem in Ottoman Palestine in 1881.

[00:28:25]He was a key actor in the revival of Hebrew, producing a Hebrew dictionary in 1908 and publishing several Hebrew language newspapers and raising his son and daughter entirely in Hebrew.

[00:28:41]At the turn of the 20th century, there were a number of Jewish languages. The Dino based on Spanish had spoken across the Ottoman Empire, including Turkey, Greece, and the Bulans and North Africa.

[00:28:53]And of course, Yiddish spoken by 11 to 13 million people before the Holocaust.

[00:29:12]Hebrew is a kind of espiranto, an international language for all Jews of the diaspora. But it went one stage further in that it was devised as a native language too. Many in the Orthodox Jewish community were vehemently opposed, arguing that Hebrew was a holy language and should therefore not be used outside of the religion. But through the efforts of Ben Yehuda and other champions of modern Hebrew, it was successful. In 1948, it became an official language of the state of Israel. And today, it has around 7 million native speakers in Israel and about 10 million worldwide.

[00:29:59]Meanwhile, Itamama Ben Yehuda moved to New York where he learned and promoted Espiranto for a time and was influenced by the Turkish language reforms, arguing that Hebrew should be written using Latin script. He even published a newspaper with Hebrew in Latin script, which he believed would encourage more European Jews to learn Hebrew. And you see how these tales of linguistic achievements are related. Number three, Dr. Johnson's dictionary. Is this the greatest Englishman who ever lived? He wasn't a king or a politician. He didn't build bridges or played football. No, he wrote a dictionary. Not just any dictionary, but a dictionary that would change dictionaries forever. This is Dr. Samuel Johnson. To be clear, it wasn't the first dictionary. There were Spanish, French, Latin, Italian, and Greek dictionaries of great scholarship.

[00:31:05]The first dictionary of a modern European language was in Spanish in 1611. It wasn't even the first English dictionary. There had been more than 20 before his.

[00:31:17]First Italian dictionary came out in 1612, taking 30 years to complete with around a dozen to 20 active contributors. It focused on explaining the correct usage of the Tuscan dialect.

[00:31:30]The French dictionary de academy frances was written by 40 of the most eminent men of letters in France. It took 60 years to complete. It seems a lot but lunch breaks are long in France often involving several courses and many glasses of wine and it's a struggle to go back to work after that. Dictionary finally saw the light of day in 1694. It was a highly prescriptive tone and it explained to on respectable people how to use the best French. The Brits were impressed by both the Italians and the French. The English dictionaries that had been published up to that point had severe shortcomings. In typical British style, instead of setting up a committee to write a dictionary, they asked one extremely brilliant bloke to write it all himself. And he was Dr. Samuel Johnson. and he did. It took him only seven years. Dr. Johnson's dictionary was published on the 15th of April 1755.

[00:32:39]He had six clerical assistants, but the work was all his own. It is still considered as perhaps the greatest work of scholarship in English by a single individual. Johnson's dictionary was a general dictionary with entries with deep analytical definitions. But the backbone of the dictionary was the use of literary quotations which he used on a massive scale. 114,000 quotations taken from the cannon of literary authors such as Shakespeare and Milton. Dr. Johnson's work was the go-to dictionary in English for 173 years until the appearance of the Oxford English dictionary in 1928 which owes much to Johnson and his work served as a model for lexographers abroad. Johnson had his prejudices. This is his famous jbe of the Scots in the entry for oats.

[00:33:42]oats, a grain which in England is generally given to horses but in Scotland supports the people. By the way, if you're in London, I highly recommend a visit to Dr. Johnson's home in Goff Square, which has become a museum. This is where he lived and worked while writing the dictionary and for the rest of his life. And you can also indulge your passion for 18th century cosplay as you can try on a wide selection of garments of the era. And in the square outside is a statue of Dr. Johnson's cat Hodgej who was very fond of oysters which the great lexographer used to acquire for him from the market in London. And side note here, Johnson's manservant was Francis Barber, a freed slave. Johnson was a vehement critic of slavery. And when Johnson died, he bequeethed most of his belongings and fortune to barber. Number two, remarkable rise of English as the international language. If you were around in 1600 and somebody told you that English would become the international language, they would probably have laughed in your face.

[00:35:02]About 4 million people spoke English at that time, which is about the population of Lithuania today. Using Lithuania again as an example, by comparison, France had a population of around 20 million, the largest in Europe. and more than double the population of the whole of Russia in law, science, philosophy, and theology. If you publish something and you wanted it to be widely read in London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome, you'd write in Latin. And if we go back to 1300, it would be even more ridiculous.

[00:35:45]English wasn't even the primary language in England, let alone the world. It was the third after Anglo Norman French and Latin. All laws, administration and proclamations were in French or Latin.

[00:36:02]English was spoken mainly by peasants.

[00:36:05]It had almost died out as a written language. that this Germanic peasant language spoken by a relatively small and low status population on a craggy island in a farflung corner of northern Europe could become the world language is truly a remarkable story.

[00:36:33]First of all, English needed to gain ascendancy in its own country, which at the time was by no means certain.

[00:36:43]Fortunately, I've covered most of that in another video. Check it out here. And of course, the latter part of the story is well documented. British Empire spread across many parts of the globe.

[00:36:57]The US became an economic powerhouse, yada yada yada. But there is one other factor that's often overlooked and certainly contributes to its success. If English were an isolated language like I know Basque for example, yes, it would still be important.

[00:37:21]But do you think so many people would learn it? At least part of the reason for the success of English in addition to the sheer number of native speakers, it's ideal for the international language more so than Espiranto or any other language. The reason is that the English language bridges the Germanic and Latin worlds. It has a largely Latinbased vocabulary with about 40% of words coming to us via French and English is a Germanic language and its grammar and a large proportion of its core vocabulary is Germanic. Uh what that means is that anyone who speaks a Latinbased language roughly a billion people and anyone who speaks a Germanic language that's about 200 million people excluding English itself of course and what this all means is that 1.2 2 billion people already know a considerable amount of what constitutes English before they even step into uh classroom. No other language straddles different language groups like English.

[00:38:38]In addition, English is an Indo-Uropean language. This means shares deep structural similarities with an even wider array of languages. Furthermore, for learners of English, it is relatively easy to reach an intermediate level. Yes, it gets more difficult as you progress, but for everyday communication, for travel and for business, intermediate English goes a long way. So, well done English, the language that went from obscure peasant tongue to the global language.

[00:39:18]Number one.

[00:39:20]And now number one in our list of the greatest achievements in linguistic history. Drum roll. It's Hungul. The Korean alphabet.

[00:39:38]>> In order to understand how truly extraordinary Hangle is, we need to look at its history. In ancient times, the Korean language was written using Chinese characters >> known as hanja.

[00:39:55]>> Chinese fits very naturally with Chinese characters. Each character is a separate morphine.

[00:40:04]Words are mostly one syllable and there are few grammatical endings. But in Korean and Japanese, but that's another story, you have grammatical endings, root words, tenses, politeness levels, and much much more. In short, it's wholly unsuited to the Korean language.

[00:40:28]And given the complexity of writing Korean with Chinese characters, it was not surprising that the vast majority of people were illiterate. One day, King Sjun the Great, who ruled between 1418 to 1450, thought to himself, h, you know what? Hanja is wholly unsuited to the Korean language. At this stage, King Sedon could have done what all great politicians do and set up a committee to look into creating a new script. And they would have no doubt taken long lunches with many glasses of sodu and end up reporting back 67 years later with something mediocre while he went off hunting and attending banquetss. But instead, King Sjun wrote the script himself or at the very least played a major role in its creation. Scholars disagree on the extent of his involvement. Anyway, it took two years to complete and what he or they came up with is truly a masterpiece.

[00:41:49]More about the script in a moment.

[00:41:51]However, the script was not adopted all at once. In fact, there was a lot of push back from the elite who scorned it.

[00:41:58]Some of the early adopters were women.

[00:42:01]And this is a famous letter written by a widow in 1536 to her dead husband.

[00:42:09]However, it wasn't until the 19th century that the script was widely adopted and it was only fully embraced by the Korean government in 1894.

[00:42:22]During those 500 years it took for acceptance by the wider Korean society.

[00:42:30]Hangul had its detractors including King Yun Sangun. P reign from 1495 to 1506 who ordered all hangle books to be burnt. They say that hangle is so intuitive and so easy that you can learn it in 15 minutes. Now I can't in all honesty make a video claiming that hangle is the greatest achievement in linguistic history without knowing something about it myself. Can I? So, you know what I did? I went to Korea to find out more.

[00:43:11]>> Welcome to Seoul.

[00:43:13]>> Here he is, right in the heart of Seoul, King Sajjun the Great. While I was in Soul, I wanted to go to the Hangle Museum, but unfortunately it was closed because of a fire. But I did go to the National Museum. And a Korean friend of mine kindly got me this uh book introducing the Hungle Writing System and written by Sedun the Great. Now Hangle has 14 consonants and 10 vowels.

[00:43:46]Letters represent sounds like English, but are grouped into square syllable blocks. Each block equals one syllable built from consonant plus vowel. And basic consonants and vowels have consistent sounds with a few positioned based changes. You learn the letters first and then you practice combining the letters into blocks and then you can read most Korean words phonetically. So can you learn Hangle in 15 minutes?

[00:44:22]No, you can't. Though you can understand the concept in that time. Now, I spent the weekend trying to learn Hangle, and I certainly cannot read fast, but but by the end of my trip, I could stop at a sign in Hangle and gradually make out the letters. And I'm sure that others more talented than me could learn it quicker, but 15 minutes. know this stream and park running through the center of soul used to be Chiong Yachion Elevated Expressway from 1976 to 2003 when it got pulled down to make way for this linear park. If anyone makes a video about the greatest achievements in urban renewal, this should be in it. Do you agree with my choice? What would be in your 10 greatest achievements in linguistic history? Let us know in the comments. If you like this video, then do subscribe. And if you want more, then do sign up for my free newsletter, The Rambler, where I talk about all things language. And to support the channel and get even more content, then become a Patreon. Links to all in the description. That's all for now. Bye.