Language Birth; Language Death

[@goobs..]

Hi Connor! I’m a Copt, and wanted to share some information regarding your section on Coptic. First, there’s a large diaspora of Copts, with around 500,000 copts in the US (namely in New York, New Jersey, Texas, and California.) Second, there are (probably) over 9 million Copts today, not 4 million as you said. Lastly, we hold the Coptic language very dearly, and I would guess that ~5 or 6 million Copts can read or sing in Coptic. Thank you so much for mentioning Coptic, and this video is awesome!!

[@legchairhistorian5496]

Yeah I was thinking that. I’ve heard of numbers as great as 30 million Copts, so 4 million seemed rather low

[@justaduck1664]

I have heard that coptix may have efected the arabic of egypt Mainly in word order, putting question words like what why and when at the end of the sentence (same for words like this and that) Or have i been lied too

[@Joelle_gray]

Y’all should really revive ur language for everyday use, it could be so cool

[@ConnorQuimby]

Thanks for letting me know! And this is so cool. Guess my prediction was wrong. Still better than anything Whatifalthist has ever said

[@angamaitesangahyando685]

​@@ConnorQuimbyWow, cool to see a shoutout to WIAH! Love you both! (On the topic - I wonder how known the Coptic writing system is though. The Berber languages do without one, and they're also more alive, ironically enough.) - Adûnâi

[@bowaxer7952]

As a native Basque speaker, I formally apologize for giving you PTSD

[@генри1917]

*Formally

[@John-qd5of]

My university Spanish professor told me that Castilian Spanish is a romance language with Basque phonology.

[@генри1917]

@@John-qd5of I though Basque had Castilian Spanish phonology.

[@borisk201]

I am glad to witness this in about 10 hours

[@IoSaturnalia17]

CONNOR QUIMBY?? IN THIS ECONOMY???

[@roomcayz]

The sole fact I'm writing this in English (not my native language), which is the only language I'm using to communicate in my work without even leaving my country, says a lot

[@rebelli65]

What’s your native language

[@roomcayz]

@@rebelli65 Polish

[@cactuscreek5925]

it's like he never left

[@thetornadocrusader968]

Have faith in Jesus to be saved, turn from your old ways and live life for God who created you, God bless!

[@allisonguthrie8257]

I’ve been a Métis learner of Michif for the past two years (Southern Michif), which is generally categorized by linguists as a mixed language. It definitely falls at the high-contact low-time end of this spectrum, although it’s neither considered a creole nor a pidgin. It formed when many Cree-speaking First Nations women around Manitoba/North Dakota married French-speaking men, and their children were raised fluently bilingual. It is thought these children began to speak Michif quite rapidly between each other and within their own communities. Michif is made of almost all Cree-origin verbs and verb grammar with French-origin nouns and noun grammar, which sounds almost artificial, until you begin to speak the language and realize it makes perfect sense given the grammar of those two languages. It retains accurate and fully complex grammar from both languages, including animacy from Cree and grammatical gender from French. Mixed languages of this sort are very rare, and I have read tend to occur only in situations where children are raised fluently bilingual among communities with those two languages where neither is held as more prestigious than the other.

[@Zastrava]

Taanshi! I'm another Métis learner of Southern Michif! My family were Bungee speakers (I'm Scotch Metis) and that went extinct in the 70s after a long process that can be politely called decreolisation. It was from the marriage of the same groups of Indigenous women marrying primarily Scottish men. With the limited resources I can find including my Greay Nan's diaries, Scottish English was definitely considered more prestigious and there was some simplification of the Swampy Cree vocabulary.

[@allisonguthrie8257]

@@Zastravathat’s awesome! Nice to meet another one in the wild. Any chance I know you from languages classes/groups/facebook? Bungee is so cool, I wish we had more/better recordings of it.

[@alphacentauri3162]

I am from Sardinia, i am witnessing the disappeareance of the Sardinian language in my Island. When i was born although not taught in school (only Italian) everyone at home especially in the rural areas spoke it including myself. Now i grow and here almost none speaks it and the new generation they don't even know or just some words. 99% they speak Italian. So probably it will die in a couple of generations. It's one of the romance languages most close to Latin. Now there is some effort to preserve it, but the truth is in Europe all of the small languages will die soon, replacesd by few others and English especially. (Me i support the use of Latin as a common language in Europe)

[@vladimirskala]

As a native speaker of a dying language, this was quite informative.

[@Siamunpatonute]

🤣🫵

[@Mathematica_EtHistoria]

Precarious situation I, myself am also in. And, yeah, informative and scary

[@Siamunpatonute]

@@Mathematica_EtHistoria 🤣🫵

[@d.c.8828]

Please elaborate.

[@vladimirskala]

@@d.c.8828 Rusyn. The last pre-WW2 census identified 2 million Rusyns in their homeland in and around the Carpathians. Today it's around 100k, though rate of language transmission is down to 10% or less in some cases. It's become the norm for parents not to speak Rusyn with their kids.

[@amadeus3165]

Hi Conor. Really nice video! But I want to ask wether there will be a Part 3 to extinct languages we should bring back. I really liked these videos

[@RainBrain26]

This is so nice to listen to while working. Thank you also for using lesser known (in the west) examples. You could have used anatolian Greek post Seljuk Invasion or the Slavic migrations. But you didn't and used examples from all around the world. Especially happy about the inclusion of South Sentinelese, I never thought about that they, of course, are linguistically isolated

[@inept_]

Your best work yet

[@al3xa723]

HWTATATTtt what what WHATTT UES YE SY RSY EYS YES LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE SO EXCITED AGHHH

[@matiasmendes8528]

peak content

[@AiC_124]

Amazing thank you so much

[@LFITZY1745]

Holy xnopyt, he's back

[@Pascal-1]

I subbed when you stopped upload, didn't know it would turn out to be a good move lol Im really happy you uploaded again

[@tu7765]

I can't imagine how crazy it would be to study the sentinelise language

[@pakhyeoncheol]

I’m frustrated that this isn’t currently out

[@ConnorQuimby]

it is 4 am here i will get killed by the algorithm

[@brunnomenxa]

​​@@ConnorQuimby, Good news, I just received a recommendation for your video and probably many non-subscribers received too. Very informative, thank you.

[@ConnorQuimby]

@@brunnomenxa Thanks for letting me know! From another channel or like from a server?

[@brunnomenxa]

@@ConnorQuimby, This video appeared on my KZbin homepage, so the algorithm hit the nail on the head with this one. I imagine it reached more people who like the subject as well, because it is very common for me at least to get this kind of recommendation.

[@DavidCowie2022]

It showed up in my recommendations on Saturday evening (UK time). Im not a subscriber, but I do subscribe to a few other linguistics channels.

[@legchairhistorian5496]

Great video. I’m incredibly happy to have stumbled on this channel.

[@HappyFlowerDE]

Hey Connor! At around 25:00 for the death of vulgar latin: Fun thing is that speakers of romance languages can still understand latin. Luke Ranieri, Satura Lanx et al. made some videos!

[@sosotik]

im curious as to whether the french view latin as how we do when we see middle english

[@brunnomenxa]

This is true. Most of the words are still quite intelligible. To a Portuguese speaker, Latin sounds like Italian, it's just not as intelligible like Italian because of the grammatical cases in Latin that didn't survive the birth of the Portuguese language. But you can get the overall meaning of Latin texts just by speaking Portuguese, for example.

[@HappyFlowerDE]

@@sosotik As french is one of my native tongues, I would say that Latin sound very ancient and skewed. Written latin, seems semantically very understandable but the pragmatics, as french got rid of most of the flexions seems to me pretty nebulus. How do you experience middle english?

[@HappyFlowerDE]

​@@brunnomenxa Yes, after learning italian, the similarities seem astounding. Yet the cases can make it considerably more flexible. The word order sometimes seems sooo from another time ;) (I wonder why hihi.) Are you a native speaker of portuguese?

[@brunnomenxa]

@@HappyFlowerDE, > Are you a native speaker of portuguese? Yes, I am. Specifically Brazilian Portuguese. Brazilian Portuguese was heavily affected by Tupi and Guarani, two large indigenous languages at the time of colonization of Americas. The modern Portuguese would probably be near the creolization in the chart if it weren't any kind of standardization among the lusophone (Portuguese speaking) countries since the colonization in the 1500's. We got a lot of new words from these local languages that now are extinct, probably by Unforced Shift. In the far future, if Portuguese were to be extinct, it would probably suffer a Non-Isolated Fission With Non-Related Neighbors, because all of the derived countries of the Portuguese Empire are at this moment gradually diverging since they're isolated in various parts of the world surrounded by languages of distant or completely unrelated language families. Even with an standardization, the differences are gradually arising even today.

[@Kick0a0cat]

I know it's not meant to be academic, but I'd be very interested in reading about this some more, do you have some sources for us? No pressure :)

[@WhiteCamry]

"What the sigma?" - the Last Words of Queen Elizabeth II (allegedly)

[@d.c.8828]

Fascinating video! Glad to have just discovered your channel! Subscribed!

[@MCKevin289]

I know a speaker if Sumerian, tbf he’s a college professor.

[@Loveolin]

YOOOOOOOOOO im so excited🥳🥳🥳

[@kamodo2299]

Gary's a pretty chill dude

[@tomasje]

Algonquin Basque was so unexpected lmfao

[@the.lemon.linguist]

this video is amazing! konor kuvimbi

[@takashi.mizuiro]

where can i double like a video

[@beacebrocess]

Oogq booga!!!

[@utqiagvik1991]

Great video, nice to hear you mentioning Orokh, Nivkh and Ainu. Dziękuję!

[@AntoninHamstra]

I love Etruscan too. I hope against hope that some group somewhere is speaking a language descended from Etruscan at home, but that isn't very likely.

[@Patriciaball-rp1jz]

Language A chilling through every aspect of language change

[@The2bcooper]

quick lil 15 month side stop

[@EllieMcEla]

Norwegian here, this video gave me a new perspective on our language. Substration (from the danish colonizers) has really influnced norwegian, and becoming more familiar with Norwegian's history, I'd say it's almost a problem. Using proper (as in old and authentic) grammatical gender is a very common feature to be dropped into "common" gender like in Swedish and Danish, especially in formal settings. Sometimes bootlicking changes languages...

[@bosniencommie1202]

14:16 Medival milišević🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 good one hi from bosnia 🇧🇦

[@tijuanajoe8445]

Great video as always, bro!

[@zvidanyatvetski8081]

Great video as always!

[@limsowka]

You have an absolutely gorgeous cat 😻😻😻

[@ashenen2278]

It's sad that forced deportation is often disregared not to be a part or form of a genocide... That's very great that you mentioned the Circassians/Adyghe!

[@MCKevin289]

That’s where we have disagreement amongst historians and the legal world. Historians of genocide studies absolutely consider forced deportations a form of genocide. Unless if you’re that piece of shit Guenther Lewey, who thinks genocide is a uniquely Jewish experience. He is inadvertently a Holocaust denier as he denies that LGBTQ people were targeted, Romany people, Slavs, and Jehovah’s witnesses were deliberately targeted in the Holocaust.

I agree. What the Russians did to Circassia was horrendous.

[@alsatusmd1A13]

In my world with human lives of musical instruments, the existence of these lives births a second series of languages with the same words but phonetic and inflection systems that die more slowly: For example, their Indo-European family systematically continues the full Proto-Indo-European paradigm for at least the generations until its proto-history including more learned Vulgar Latin, which thus never really loses th sounds

[@Hwelhos]

Another good example of an unforced shift going on is the Low German dialects in the Netherlands. They are distinct of the Dutch language, being part of a Low German dialect continuum. Yet, it is dying out due to Dutch being the standardized language spoken in schools and such, making more and more parents teach their children Dutch instead of their own tongue.

[@vladimirskala]

12:18 Props on the Rusyn flag.

[@ΧΑΡΗΣΚΟΥΡΗΣ-ψ3ν]

A good example of language death is the several more divergent modern greek dialects. One such example is Pontic, which could be considered a language of its own. It developed on the horizon of Medieval Greek, on a continuum with more standard-passing varieties. However, turkish domination, and later resettlement to Macedonia and greek Thrace, took a heavy toll on it, such as that my paternal grandmother, born in 1942, belongs to the last generation of Pontic Greeks to have this variety as a first language (while her parents also spoke Turkish for reasons of privacy). Lessons at school, her marriage to someone from the island of Kefalloniá, and her migration to Athens meant that there was no particular material reason to substantially teach her three children, two sons and a daughter, her own mother tongue, beyond a few expressions. On the other side of the family, my maternal grandfather's local speech was Epirotan, a group of subdialects that, for example, cut unstressed vowels and turn /ɛ/ and /ɔ/ into /i/ and /u/ respectively. However, at 12 years of age, he migrated to Athens, and constant contact with Standard Greek eroded his possible original accent. His cousin and the cousin's wife, later migrants to Attica, still retain some elements of the original accent.

[@RobespierreThePoof]

Art historian here with a side interest in languages. (Most of us have them.) Just a friendly tip from a professor with lots of classroom time at all kind of universities. I'm not sure what your goal for your channel is but if you want to grow an audience and do the public service doing some linguistics education, I think there's some things you could implement with relative ease. The video is very dense and conceptual. If you're only aiming for an audience of graduate students and advanced undergraduates in languages and linguistics (or maybe cultural geography), then that's fine. But I'm not neophyte to linguistics and even I had to pause and think for a moment what you meant by some of the terminology you use. If you wanted to speak to others this video could be broken down into at least ten or so shorter bite-size videos which slow down to define your terms and give examples. Also the wider public doesn't know that the vast majority of the languages you mention even exist. The maps are great. But it you want to draw people in, you could try a "Hey at this cool language that does this one cool thing." These are fairly common teaching techniques which you could easily implement ... Again, if you want to and depending on your goals for your channel.

[@StFrancisEnjoyer]

An interesting example of a forced shift for me is the Paulista General Language, which was spoken in southern Brazil during its colonial era. It was a indigenous language that was adopted by the settlers, as it was the language spoken by the tribes here that evolved and gained more popularity than Portuguese at a point. But at the end of the 18th century it was prohibited by Portuguese authorities, and now it's an extinct language. It would be nice to see a video about it!

[@liamgarcia9408]

Bro really said :3 24:36

[@creamofthecrop4339]

His stick figure is wearing Spongebob's outfit lmao

[@Great_Olaf5]

20:47 What do you have against the Basques?

[@patronsaintoflostcauses4029]

WE'RE SO BARACK

[@eyeless_person]

4:02 BERBER MENTIONED 🦅🦅🦅

[@carterwood4197]

It was like you took great care to try pronouncing every language with their own names for themselves, until you got to Vedic Sanskrit where you just used the English name for it but with a pseudo-Indian accent lol. Sanskrit's name for itself is Saṁskṛtam (the short a's are schwas). As for Vedic (Vaidika), the Vedic people didn't really call their own language "Vedic" but instead Āryabhāṣā.

[@Joseph-pz5bo]

When did he use the native names? (Apart from Inglish)

[@DouglasTheMagicBean]

We’re so back

[@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410]

gives me some thoughts on Pennsylvania Dutch to be honest I'm going to call it Deitsch for the sake of ease in writing, but note it's normally just called Pa Dutch in English (this did not in fact occur, as I am very used to saying Pa Dutch in English) Deitsch is in a weird place right now Look up info about the language and it'll all say the language is not endangered at all, it's doing great! Except that's not exactly true See there are two different kinds of Pa Dutch There's the plain Dutch and the fancy Dutch, or the church dutch (but that term gets confusing what with Mennonites who also have churches) The Fancy are people like me who are not members of certain anabaptist sects, who make up the plain, so called due to certain religious tenets. For the most part the different plain groups operate like ethnoreligious communities, and it's within these groups that Pa Dutch has mainly survived. Pa Dutch has around 3 to 4 hundred thousand speakers. It was more around 1.5 to 2 in the year 2000 but is around 4 nowadays, reason being is that the plain groups, most notably the old order Amish have been doubling in population roughly ever 20 years ever since the beginning of the 20th century, making them one of the fasted growing minority groups in the United States. in the year 1900 there were around 700,000 speakers of Pa Dutch and only around 6000 were Amish, I don't know how many would be Mennonites nor do I know what proportion of the plain folk would be Amish/Mennonite (the two largest groups therein) though regardless the Amish will certainly _become_ the dominant group if they weren't already by that date, and nowadays that current 3~400,000 speakers is maybe around 98 or so percent plain Dutch, the vast majority of which is old order Amish. The current number of nonsectarian, that is to say 'fancy,' speakers is believed to be below 40000 and probably hovering anywhere between 10 and 20000 speakers, including the couple thousand second language learners, so that's not even all native speakers like it is with the plain Dutch. And most of those speakers, almost all the native ones, are older, above maybe the age of 50 or 60 at minimum. And the sectarians don't even speak the same sorta dialects as the nonsectarians. They speak a much more innovative and English influenced dialect, somewhat surprisingly (some theories link this to their status an ethnoreligious group, i.e. that being Amish is enough for their identity to be safe that English influence isn't a danger to said identity and in fact just a natural consequence of being taught extensively in English from a very early age as a public language, even if Pa Dutch remains their in-group language, with a religious philosophy that seeks to prevent overly caring about such 'worldly' things as linguistic purity or survival. There's a lot of reasons why Pa Dutch is not spoken by most of the Pa Dutch themselves and instead by these anabaptist sects. There're social reasons; American nationalism has always been predicated on the assimilation into anglophone British-American culture, the no-adjective "American" culture, thus putting many people's ideas of being American at odds with most of the Pa Dutch. This being further exasperated by of course the world wars, where being at war with a German speaking power really ramped up anti-german sentiments, themselves building off a long history of anti-palatine/Pa Dutch sentiments that've existed before the USA was even born, only dying out now because quite simply put there aren't enough of us left that people remember. There're economic reasons; most of the urban City Dutch were assimilated into anglophone culture faster than any other group, most of the early 20th century fighting over the use of Pa Dutch happened in City Dutch groups while the rural Country Dutch were more isolated and thus protected. Part of this is because cities are of course always cosmopolitan and as well there were people pushing internal to the culture for the Dutch to abandon the language, those particular people often being in the cities where superstrate influence of English and German was strongest. The reason I'm grouping all that into economic is because of urbanization. While there were City Dutch groups, where pa Dutch was the main street language, a lot of Dutch moved into the cities, both Dutch and English speaking cities, due to economic changes in the late 19th and early 20th century, which would be compounded by effects made by the World Wars. Lot of people moving into the cities and Pa Dutch just couldn't compete against English and thus most people would assimilate within a generation or two, while those staying in the country side preserved the language, though in smaller numbers. And of course there are actual overt political reasons. The USA made interment camps for "people of enemy nations" including Italian-, German-, and most famously and to the largest degree Japanese-Americans. The German camps mostly detained people of recent immigration history, but it put a lot of fear in Pa Dutch people at the time There were tar and featherings, which is a lot worse in reality than history classes often make it up to be, there were murders and lynchings. Not a great time The worst was in the 60's abouts where the worst hit to the number of speakers happened. That was when changes to the education system occurred that closed down the highly local single room schools that were a mainstay in the Pa Dutch country (remember most pa Dutch speakers were rural at this point and these single room schools were still common in less developed areas) This resulted in a great dilution of Pa Dutch speaking children into larger and more diverse schools, which normally is a good thing but wasn't healthy for a language in such a risky position. All of this combined to a result where Pa Dutch wasn't being actively taught to children and by the 80's and 90's you could still hear Pa Dutch in public but it was mostly older people speaking to other older people. Younger native speakers today are usually older millennials raised by their grandparents or otherwise around people of that age range enough to learn the language by overhearing it, though usually with significant influence from English in the way of phonology and increasingly and most worryingly in the way of lexicon. There are none I know of who are my own age. That's probably how the language is going to actually die. For the most part Fancy Dutch is already nearly dead and is not going to survive the next 2 to 3 decades. By the time I die of old age, I'll likely see the death of my form of the language, and might see the end of the plain Dutch A lot of the economic reasons pa Dutch began dying out among the Fancy Dutch is beginning to appear in the Plain Dutch. So together with their nonchalance towards their own language and the increased number of loans by their use, things aren't looking too good even if they _are_ having a lot of children. side note: i'd not say Yiddish is really in the creolization section properly. There are a lot of loans for sure, but most of their lexicon, especially their basic lexicon, is Germanic as is their grammar and syntax. Yiddish is largely within the bounds of what one might expect for a German dialect, and is considered a different language namely because the loan pattern is so different and of course social and cultural reasons. Jewish people who speak Yiddish think of it as a different language, and so it is as it's their right to determine that. But linguistically speaking, they're not that different all things considered when you look at other German dialects. Personally I'd put it more into the substratum section There's also koine-ization to think of, or dialectal leveling. That's how Pa Dutch was born for example. Many German dialects came together and while there's a clear Palatine bias, it can't be traced to any particular Palatine dialect. And of course there's the being isolated and surrounded by English bit, which is clearly fission with less-related neighbors (where does one draw a cut off when a language's neighbor is distant enough to count as 'unrelated?') Dialectal leveling is still ongoing, with the nonsectarian dialects dying out, the sectarian dialects live on and as they mostly come from particular regions originally, it's a sort of leveling by way of elimination And English is just close enough to Pa Dutch that as the lexicon is increasingly replaced, it really becomes only syntax that distinguishes them, and once that fades the linguistic variety will well and truly be dead (this one reminds me of Elfdalian)

[@speedwagon1824]

Good video

[@deathtocringe2464]

In the case of the death of Coptic I didn't know people call Islam "demographic shift and climate change". Funny how language changes over time.

[@adriennequimby3983]

oh he cooked with this

[@генри1917]

English is practically a creole language.

[@eliavrad2845]

What the Feynman are these diagrams?

[@sert87]

29:45 over what time? it's all 2019.

[@thetornadocrusader968]

Hungarian supposedly has 18. Maybe you added thr plural too

[@ayu-fq4xm]

lets goooo

[@angamaitesangahyando685]

What I do dislike about language channels on KZbin is treating non-Eurasian languages as equal to Eurasian. Like Oceania? Just why? - Adûnâi

[@Artur_M.]

Turkic montage goes hard! 😄

[@diocore2816]

Awesome :3

[@tygical]

this is not an africate

[@adriennequimby3983]

HES BACCCKKKK

[@kornsuwin]

holy hell

[@thetornadocrusader968]

Have faith in Jesus to be saved, turn from your old ways and live life for God who created you, God bless!

[@klaus120]

28:30 monty python reference????

[@user-j4dywwh456]

What about dialect death? Could Palestinian Arabic eventually enter the list for that?

[@Pherron]

WHAT WAS THAT ITALIAN TEXT AHAHAHA

[@ConnorQuimby]

my magnum opus. that’s what it was

[@vladthemagnificent9052]

29:35 the sign is in russian though

[@humanfingers]

YAYAYAYA CONNOR!!!!

[@Great_Olaf5]

38:34 What about rebirth? There is at least one example of a language that did and is now alive. Hebrew was dying a slow death as a liturgical language, and had no native speakers for a few hundred years. Now it is a living language with millions of native speakers. How could you talk about the processes of language birth and death without bringing this up?

[@fariesz6786]

10:45 how dare you lump my waterfowlian brethren in with food items? 🦢

[@real-csc]

You use windows 7. nice