Blame the French for English | OSP

OSP Why Is English a Mess Reaction
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History Summarized: Why Is English Such A Mess?
• History Summarized: Wh...
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[@LauchlinM.]

Uh, Airier, Afrikaans is a relative to _Dutch_ not Danish. Sorrynotsorry.

[@AHorrorFanatic]

Yes.

[@Archris17]

In short, no we did NOT just steal half our language, we did what EVERY language does, combined with successive waves of invasions until our now-thoroughly-hybridized culture finally threw off foreign shackles and was able to establish itself.

[@Mercure250]

Yeah it's kinda funny to me that people started saying English got its words from mugging other languages in a dark alley, when in reality, it's more like English got beat up by the Vikings and the Normans and was told "You're gonna use our words and you're gonna like it." Of course, that doesn't mean English doesn't have words that came from E M P I R E. But in reality, they are not that numerous, compared to the other stuff.

[@kiritotheabridgedgod4178]

@@Mercure250 The way I always describe the English language, is "Imagine that German, Norse, Celtic and Latin, had an unholy bastard child. This bastard child then proceeded to have dirty, unprotected, hate filled beach sex with the French language. The resultant hellspawn then grew up to mug other languages in dark alleyways for random parts of their vocabulary." It's ever so slightly more accurate.

[@TheArcSet]

You make accusations about the Vikings and their wives, but in general, once they'd trading raiding for settling, a lot of the complaints were from men who claimed it was impossible to keep up with their new neighbours, because _they bathed at least once week, cleaned their nails_ and they actually _combed their hair and beards._ Exaggerations aside, for both hygiene and Norse (married) women's legal rights, that is a written account.

[@Justic_]

tbf, "if you're wrong often enough it becomes right" isn't just a thing for english, that's how language works. Language is primarily defined by how people speak and write, so even if a word is made up, if people use and understand it it becomes slang, dialect then proper language as its uses become more defined. Also reason India has its own English dialect is definitely more so tied to it being a former part of the British Empire rather than any influence English may have as a business-language... otherwise every language on earth would have its own "dialect" of english...

[@Kayta-Linda]

Even better: ALL words are made up.

[@wyvern_wolf2821]

I mean, take Yeet for a example. We all know what yeet means, even if it was once a slang word for throwing something

[@FonVegen]

What's fun is, modern Low German and the English of the 8th century are at least partially mutually intelligible!

[@thejestor9378]

Some of the pronunciation rules are similar as well, just the letter placement tends to get English speakers when trying to learn German.

[@the0neBoio]

really? I'm German and can't understand either of those 2 😂

[@kiritotheabridgedgod4178]

The thing about Cow vs Beef, Sheep vs Muton and Pig vs Pork, is less about the upperclass being fancy, and more about, the aristocracy never really dealt with the animal and raising of it, only the consumption, whereas the peasantry would view them as the animal, and the majority of their time interacting with said animal, wouldn't be for eating. Thus, we get the split.

[@colt1903]

"That is paraphrased from a Spy Kids movie." You say that like it's supposed to be surprising.

[@Crazael]

5:54 Basically, the food word for the animal is french because that's what they called the food made from it, while the non-food name comes from the old English because that's what the people who interacted with the animals called them. 12:59 IIRC, it's actually a pronounced a bit like something halfway between "wheat" and "wait". 24:40 In the credits, Blue recommends a book by John McWorter about English and it's history.

[@jackphantom9604]

Did anyone tell him that epic the musical wisdom saga is out, but there is no animation because it just came out.

[@StrewthStoatPirate]

I think there being a dialect of English in India has less to do with the population of India and more to do with England ruling the place as conquering colonizers for most of a century, and exploiting it commercially with pirate capitalism for more than 200 years before that.

[@kiritotheabridgedgod4178]

They can complain all they want, we're not giving them their stuff back.

[@Mondy667]

There's Philippine and Singaporean Languages

[@TheArcSet]

I actually thought of reccomending this, even out of order, just because of your language interest. Also _"Hay! Never correct my pronanceiation, here, we invanted the langoowarge."_

[@Arynightrose0901]

New ep of hunter the parenting is out, and its 1hour and 39 minutes long :)

[@Rainears129]

As someone who has studied French, yeah, a lot of our names for fancy things comes from French. An example I like is mansion from the French mason, which just means house. As for a funny thing I learned when I studied English history: swivel (like swivel chair) comes from swive in Middle English, which means to have adult fun times.

[@murderofcrows5089]

I wrote this in a short’s comment section, I believe it was a short anyway, but English is essentially the Frankenstein’s monster of languages

[@Airier]

The only thing I would change to that statement is that Frankenstein himself would have to get stitched into the rest of the monster to equate what the English language has done to itself. 😁

[@JonStormr]

23:28 *cough* British Empire *cough* Yeah, gee. Wonder how a regional dialect of English got established in India. Definitely because English is one of the global trade languages and definitely not because of any other reasons relating to a certain island nation taking over a sub-continent via a company...

[@RealityInk]

The Norse were very attractive to the English women. THEY BATHED AND BRUSHED THEIR HAIR AND BEARDS.

[@eruantien9932]

On the topic of split infinitives: the line that it is grammatically incorrect to split the infinitive was written by a man who was both from Southern England and not a grammarian. The fact he was from Southern England is important, because it introduces certain biases borne of the fact that Southern and Midlands Middle English have an (edit: almost) solely West Germanic grammatical framework; Northern Middle English picked up various North Germanic traits from the Scandinavians. Whilst Standard Modern English is primarily based on Midlands Middle English, many Scottish English and Northern English dialects have retained certain Northern Middle English features, including split infinitives. You can see this divide in the rest of the modern Germanic languages too, with German having no split infinitives, and Danish using split infinitives even more than Scottish/Northern English, for example. Yeah, so it was basically one guy unwittingly raging against historical Norse influence on the language and using Latin as the excuse.

[@yoch5383]

And funny enough when you go to a trial or parlement chamber (parlement chamber come from french btw both words) When they agreed on smth they say "La reine le veut" meaning "the will of the queen"

[@CommissarMitch]

So here is a fun fact. It is speculated that the Vikings were super clean because they bathed a lot (which as a Swede I can attest that bathing and keeping clean is important) so it is fully possible a lot of the English Wives were actually voluntary wives. Scandinavians in general also think of women in a different way, some of us venerate women above men due to long lasting traditions.

[@kiritotheabridgedgod4178]

I mean, "Bathed a lot" is very much subjective there and context sensitive. Once a week isn't a lot, but it is when compared to once every other month.

[@CommissarMitch]

@@kiritotheabridgedgod4178 Yes. Bathed a lot compared to many others of the time.

[@NaBa.O3O]

"Yin" is not a new word added to the english dictionary by US regional speech. It's a word imported from Asia. Yin is the opposite of Yang, and relates to cold/dark/feminine properties while yang refers to hot/light/masculine properties instead. That said.... Whatever US regional speech is using yin for (that I'm assuming is completely unrelated to the original meaning) *is* probably new, so whatever meanings associated with that specific usage of the word would also be new by consequence.

[@MySerpentine]

He said yinz, not yin :D

[@cobraglatiator]

like the other reply said, not "yin" as in "yin and yang" but "yinz" a regional combo similar to "y'all."

[@autobotskyflame6287]

I'm all for making fun of the English, but this is a case where it's not what you're making it out to be.

[@lessonslearned2569]

Most of the "Scientific" Greek words are actually madeup, more like naming things to sound Greek or Latin but not words that either the Romans or the Classical Greeks would speak. Arabic, because they transcribed and preserved the classical works and expanded upon them.

[@spilleraaron4748]

Speaking of English, Airier new hunter audio log, you gotta get on that :)

[@HBHaga]

Right with you on Beowulf. There's a reason many copies come with translation pages. You should definitely check out Red's take on Beowulf, it's a lot of fun.

[@LarsisLP]

I've been speaking english as a second language for well over 10 years now. Up until I watched this video it never clicked to me, that english just doesn't have cases. To me it's such a fundamental part of grammar, I guess I kinda just assumed it does and just accepted that most words with the exceptions of pronouns just don't change depending on their case.

[@viktormadzov5286]

5:42. Well no. Pig and Pork have the exact same deal. Its less a case of one being fancy (although it is that too). Its more that English pessents would eat there pig/cow/sheep,chicken... meat in whatever way they can afford, while the nobilety would have there meat properly cooked, garnished and served to them on a plate. Moreover in most cases pesents would not eat cow and pig as stakes or make a entire meal out of it (they would not have had enough meat for that) but would instead cook it in a stew, mixing peaces of meat with other, cheeper, more abundend engediants. Not so case for nobles who could afford a plate of pork, mutten,beaf ..on a more regular basis. Thus, the MEAL version of inportant food animal inhereted the french name of said animal

[@viktormadzov5286]

7:30 No no no, it IS borrow, not just steal or apropriate. And yes, that IS a fact of linguistics. A lot of comman words in many languages around the world have there roots in other ( usually neighbiring) languages. Wether its just cultural meiosis, adopting the foughren word since there is no native one for it, or being strongly influanced (or temporerally ocupied) by another culture. That English has a lot of other bagage and crap atacked to it doesnt mean we should be cynical all the time😅

[@slavicandroid1999]

i dont know if youll see it, but slavic is an indoeuropean language group like germanic, but otherwise unrealted except for instances where slavs were forced into a germanic empire like polish, czecho-slovak and slovenian

[@kiritotheabridgedgod4178]

Don't forget the introduction of Latin context by the Kievan Russ, or however you spell it.

[@brian0902]

There are around 891,800 Welsh speakers in Wales as of September 30, 2023 and there are many more outside of Wales

[@nelhuiliztli2926]

He forgot to mention the Great Vowel Shift

[@Mercure250]

While Celtic and Slavic do not come from Germanic, they do share a common ancestor (along with the Romance languages, Greek, and languages from the North of the Indian subcontinent, Iran, Armenian, Albanian...), and we call it Proto-Indo-European. Basically, it's a very ancient language (we're talking more than 4000 years old) with no written trace that we were able to reconstruct by comparing its daughter languages. We are very confident it existed because of the similarities between the languages in question (like the existence of masculine, feminine, and neuter grammatical genders, similarities in grammatical cases, verb conjugations, similarities in word roots, etc.). I'm simplifying a bit, comparing languages to determine whether or not they share a common ancestor is a complex and rigorous process.

[@jackpeacock986]

The New Helluva Short is Out

[@ghostginger2545]

Hey imma huge fan of your videos I just wanted to let you know the wisdom saga is out for epic the musical if you didn’t know

[@Airier]

Recorded my reaction during a livestream last Friday. It'll go live for everyone on Thursday. 😁

[@alexeysimushov4971]

@@Airier When on KZbin?

[@SSecularScholar]

India was also a British colony for a while. Remember what Gandhi United India behind? Getting rid of the British. But there was none the less British influence left behind.

[@CGomm-le7gv]

8:29 on the Beowulf book it the skyrim symbol ironic as in the 2007 cgi Beowulf film with ray winstone he not the dragon born but had a had in making it,yo Airier a old Teamfourstar video you may like puddin rap honestly trying to get people aware of puddin as she a old Teamfourstar oc who had links to cooler so hoping by reminding people of her she have a nod in next hfil

[@matthewdougherty1159]

8:18 yeah Grammar and English my two worse subjects....next to spelling thank god for spell check funny side note my reading comprehension is high but when i try to put it in to words......well i can understand it lol my brain is wired weird.

[@Airier]

What you're describing is the main reason English majors actually have any paying job options. Technical Writing is pretty much the only job you can get from this that doesn't rely on blind luck selling novels. 😁

[@colossalslayer3616]

Some advice don't try to give rules to english it's just chaos

[@ralphsexton8531]

Airier trying to read old English sounds like a recording backwards... was an extra-planer summoned?

[@arvidfrykman9850]

If you want to listen to funny people roast British place names, I heartily recommend "Why are British place names so hard to pronounce?" by the Map Men, available on Jay Foreman's KZbin channel.

[@trevorcornell6729]

Hi Arier! Are you gonna watch the new Hellava Boss short? No spoilers but it's even more hilarious than the last!

[@annekeener4119]

Many Pittsburghese terms are either phonetic renderings of the accent or are straight up borrowed from other languages, primarily Scots. Yinz, nebby, redd up, jag off and even that weird habit of dropping the words “to be” from imperatives, are all thanks to the Scots-Irish. So it is English, but from its own unique dialect.

[@ARandomKey]

You should try reacting to "The Undertale Musical"

[@PhantomObserver]

I am so looking forward to when you react to Blue's mapmaking video.

[@Jacen32272]

That "b-p combo" is called Thorn, and was replaced by th in modern spelling. So, your pronunciation was notably off...

[@ghassenmraihi-kf8pf]

Helluva boss Just dropped 3rd Short and trust me its most unhinged short you'll ever see can you watch it

[@BrittanyArtPoetry]

I had a theory you might react to this video. Glad to see I was right.

[@dragontamer7897]

New hunter the parenting out

[@yoch5383]

Almost 50% vocabulary come from french (latin in a extent too but mostly french) so yeah

[@Zahri8Alang]

Im mostly peeved that the Americans(and some/most Canadians use the Imperial system And the other two country

[@matthewdougherty1159]

lol 10:00 read it yeah spicy just to say the least

[@hugocastillo5612]

Jujitsu’s kaisen abridged

[@oddengi]

Please react to a new Hunter the parenting audioblog .

[@HornAndHaloWrestling]

Day 16 of asking you to react to BHultra's retrospective on Bray Wyatt (if it turns out he doesn't allow reactions I'll stop doing this)

[@PlayerUnknow01]

i wish you can reaction MMD V.I.P., its a good animation, the channel named "zen". thank you for read my comment :)