NativLang
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2019–2023
47:25 · 1.3M views · Nov 6, 2015
NativLang's 47-minute animated documentary traces the birth and evolution of writing, from early cave marks to modern scripts. It presents the history of the world's writing systems as a story.
HN recommends it as a fun, amazing overview of writing systems whenever the alphabet or cuneiform comes up.
3 comments from Hacker News
I also recommend Thoth's Pill, an amazing historical overview of writing systems that breaks new ground in animated video production... as they are describing alphabet systems and letter figures they are drawn in real time and presented on a clear crisp background. Where most documentaries we've seen over the years show glimpses of photographs of ancient writing samples, often dimly lit or weathered and faded, tending to make it more about documents than language -- these folk are writing script and glyphs on computer, presenting detailed traces or brushing the characters and building alphabets, explaining down to the character/sound. For children this is precious. If I had seen something like this when I was young, it would have sucked me in and maybe changed the course of my life. this video
Highly recommend Thoth’s Pill [1] for a fun video on the subject. Goes deep but keeps it relatively light. Has the added bonus of going into Mesoamerican writing systems which are often underrepresented in these analyses. [1] this video
If you like these topics, you will enjoy "Thoth's pill - an Animated history of writing" this video