English is a Semitic Language (old video, please just watch something else)
Channel: Xidnaf
Date: 2013-01-19

A while back, Vsauce did a video with a bright yellow thumbnail titled "this is not yellow."  His point was that the pixels on a screen only ever actually produce red, green and blue light, and that there were no beams of light coming from that thumbnail that would have, alone, been perceived as "yellow."  He was wrong, of course, in saying that the thumbnail wasn't yellow, but only because he was defining "yellow" differently from how we normally use the word, and he was using that misuse of terminology to teach people about the nature of color.

This video was my attempt to do something similar.  Of course English isn't semitic.  I knew that when I made this video.  That was the point, I wanted to have a provocative title which was blatantly wrong.  For the sake of teaching people about the origin of different scripts, I decided to define a "language" as everything encompassed in the written form of a language including the script (which isn't how we normally use the word, nor should it be) and define language inheritance around the language's script (which REALLY isn't how we normally use those words, nor should it be).  At the end I get into why this isn't actually even a viable way to think about it for a number of reasons.

In hindsight, none of this was very clear at all in this video, so I apologize for that.  I was still pretty new at making videos when I made this, and a lot of stuff about it really embarrasses me, including how unclear I was about what I ment.  However, I've decided to keep it up on my channel for historical purposes.  I want people to be able to see all of my work, even the stuff that makes me cringe when I go back and watch it myself.