Good, Better, Best

[@mint6027]

i think we do say gooder/goodest in like good girl/good boy talk

[@kklein]

pin of... shame? or linguistic brilliance? you decide for yourselves...

[@RichConnerGMN]

can someone think of a joke about puppygirls? i'm not smart enough

[@fariesz6786]

nu uh geese are the goodest of them all!

[@Hositrugun]

In fairness, baby-talk like this defies many of the standard rules of English grammar, and since it's specifically used when talking to a certain type of person (or animal), I think it can safely be considered a distinct linguistic register.

[@josephmarrow5598]

I know many who would say this is ungrammatical in their dialects

[@realGBx64]

The audio level is so low here for some reason that when an ad comes my brain explodes.

[@jesperkthomsen]

I had to activate subtexts to decipher what he was saying...

[@TommyBrown-j6o]

@@realGBx64 🤯🤯🤯

[@modalmixture]

Yeah, listening on a plane and I can barely hear. Some audio mastering issue probably.

[@fernandofagner1357]

So imagine for me that my listening in english is terrible, lol. Even I can't understand the video with the audio too bad, although that's a great subject.@@jesperkthomsen

[@aio8432]

@@modalmixture don't know why/how this happened though. on every single editor, except like, windows editor you can see the db level. anything below like -14db (-12db is what you should aim for) for talking in a video is wayyyyy too quiet. hope this gets fixed - either in youtubes own editor or a reupload.

[@PerMortensen]

I respect your commitment to avoid pronouncing any Danish words.

[@landsgevaer]

And to skipping dutch altogether...? (Although his pronunciation sounds pretty good for the languages for which I can judge it.)

[@Liggliluff]

@@Mindinvasion if I'm not mistaken, they're native Swedish moved to the UK. Because the English is Swedish-tinted and the Swedish is flawless. The German also sounds Swedish-tinted. They've learned German through relatives from there. So the German "ch" and "ö" would therefore be Swedish "sj" and "ö". Also they're not a "he" just to help out ^^

[@Mindinvasion]

​​@@LiggliluffWas not aware, sorry :) I feel like the English is way less tinted then the German, but I'm also a bit obsessive with pronunciation, overall a very informative and well put together video :)!

[@kavorkagames]

@@Liggliluff I agree, the Swedish is flawless and effortless. He is native.

[@TheBcoolGuy]

@@Liggliluff Oh. Sorry, not 'he'. 'Narcissist'.

[@jatgreen2995]

just letting you know, youtube seems to have automatically translated your title (which generally makes no sense, like the automatic french translation "Bon, meilleur, meilleur"), and given it horrible automatic dubbing as a viewer i can disable the dubbing, but the title translations i can't, so disabling that is definitely worthwhile

[@MaoRatto]

This is why I miss community captions.

[@duncanhw]

"Bueno, mejor, excelente" is how it did it in Spanish... what is the original?

[@diribigal]

​@@duncanhwGood, better, best

[@BryanLu0]

Btw there is no viewer setting to disable title translation and dubbing on all videos, but for creators, it's under Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic Dubbing

[@alecity4877]

How do I disable auto-dubbing? I have been looking for the option in settings for days and feel dumb. I can only disable it after clicking on a video and manually change to original audio each time.

[@kevinmbtbass]

Maybe everyone just got confused that bhad actually meant good lol. Imagine pulling a prank on an English learner by telling them the pattern is "bad, better, best"

[@anowarjibbali]

Well, following Grimm's Law, it would've become 'bat', though that's not really that different.

[@vladthemagnificent9052]

I remember my friend who didn't speak very good english at the time said 'badder' instead of 'worse' and to me it sounded as if he really said 'better' and it was super weird in that context 😅

[@aminadabbrulle8252]

@anowarjibbali Thus making the deistinction between a weapon and an animal even more confusing.

[@andreasbauer3890]

It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries!

[@oliviaaaaaah1002]

@anowarjibbali And then bat>bæt>bet through Old and Middle English.

[@ryla-ci7rn]

i love this channel sm it’s such a treat whenever i get a notification

[@kklein]

thank you kindly :D

[@moodle6500]

​@@kklein sorry to hijack this reply but could you please disable auto-dubbing on your videos, it's a shitty new youtube "feature" that can't be disabled by the viewer, I can't watch this video on mobile because it only plays an awful french tts instead of you

[@ryan5769]

English has the regularised paradigm "old, older, oldest" and the umlaut paradigm "old, elder, eldest", though the latter sounds archaic in some contexts (i am elder than you), old-fashioned or formal in other contexts (his eldest brother), or a normal part of a set phrase (elder statesman). elder can also be a noun meaning anyone older than someone else relatively (respect your elders, i am your elder), or meaning a respected senior-aged person, especially in traditional societies (the tribal elders). [compare German "alt, älter, ältst(en)", and the noun "Eltern" meaning "parents"] likewise "brother" retains its umlaut+en plural "brethren" in the context of a fellow member of a fraternal society, like a religious order or college fraternity; or as the regular plural of brother in archaic texts like old bible translations. [compare German "Bruder, Brüder"... for fun, German family plurals Väter, Mütter, Brüder, Söhne, Töchter would correspond to English feether, mither, brether, sen, deighter as plurals of father, mother, brother, son, daughter.. Haus\Häuser = house\hice, Hand\Hände =hand\hend, Buch\Bücher = book\beech, Schuh\Schühe = shoe\shee, Kuh\Kühn = cow\kye (actually kye or kine for cows is still used in some dialects of English)] on the other hand "bad, worse, worst" can be regularised as "bad, badder, baddest" in the slang sense of being "badass" (he's the baddest of them all) analogy can sometimes make a regular paradigm irregular too, like "dived" and "sneaked" changing to "dove" and "snuck" in America, and "dragged" to "drug" in the US South. while "strong" ablaut verbs usually regularise to "weak" -ed verbs (swoll vs swelled, slew vs slayed; or archaic holp vs helped, shew vs showed), "dove, snuck, drug" are examples of the reverse. [edit: thanks to @dj1st for correcting my German: it's "Kühe" not "Kühn", and "Schuhe" without umlaut. so no "shee" for us at least if we're copying German umlaut plurals :]

[@frankhooper7871]

Note that 'shew' and 'snew' are still alive in the Suffolk dialect for the past tense of 'show' and 'snow' - probably others in the same vein.

[@ryan5769]

@@frankhooper7871 interesting, i wonder what other strong paradigms are retained in dialects. going in the reverse direction of making weak verbs strong, i had a coworker use "wung it" as the past tense of "wing it", which completely amazed me lol... this is in the Canadian Prairies for context. other examples of old verb forms being retained for specialised purposes are "ought" and "wrought". these are not strong/ablaut verbs, just irregular weak/-ed/-t verbs, but originally those were the past tense forms of "owe" and "work". now, "owed" has supplanted "ought" except in the expression "ought to" which is no longer seen as a past tense verb. the older meaning of "owe" was more like "own", which is probably related anyways. interesting that "ought to", "should", and "had better" all use originally past tense forms; i'm not sure why this is... maybe an originally subjunctive sense there, along the lines of German "würde, hätte"... "wrought" has been supplanted by "worked", except in set expressions like "wrought iron", or in archaicisms like "the fate that you have wrought"... this is reserved for "work" not as in "labour", but as in "effect, bring about": "to work change in the world, to have wrought change..."

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

This well-informed comment deserves more appreciation.

[@dj1rst]

Real German is Schuh/Schuhe and Kuh/Kühe and not Schühe and Kühn. The word kühn translates to brave.

[@egbront1506]

@@frankhooper7871 Not sure that shew was the past tense of show. I have a map from the 1890s with the word shewing on it. Shew just seemed to be a now archaic variant of show and was conjugated similarly: shew-shewed-shewed/shewn.

[@rateeightx]

2:52 Technically there is a thing called "Proto-Romance", Which is basically if you tried to reconstruct a proto-language from the modern Romance ones in the same way you'd reconstruct Proto-Germanic from the modern Germanic ones or Proto-Celtic from the modern Celtic ones, Which can give us some insights into what changes happened from Latin as it went into the romance languages and when. For example, If some feature is present in all Romance languages (And thus the reconstructed proto-romance as well), But not Latin, it likely evolved prior to the split of the romance languages.

[@gunjfur8633]

I was thinking the same

[@varana]

But are there any? Romance languages are by definition the languages that developed specifically from Latin in the early Middle Ages. Latin is one of the Italic languages, all of which died out in Antiquity. The other Italic languages therefore didn't have any influence on the later development of Romance languages. And if they had, that would be a localised effect. Like you would find certain features coming from non-Latin Italic languages in local areas in Central Italy because remnants of them might have been spoken there still, or had suvived in the local Latin dialect. But those would not have any influence on the development on early Spanish, or French, or Romanian.

[@timecrayon]

i don't think it's fair to say that "proto-romance" is a thing. i'm sure some linguist somewhere uses that term, but it's generally called "vulgar latin" (i.e. spoken everyday latin) and while we don't have an abundance of sources (as it is by definition a spoken form) we have enough of them (appendix probi, graffiti, comedic passages in certain plays) that i would hesitate to call it a theoretical reconstruction. in contrast to proto-germanic, we know where, when and for how long it existed, can attest certain lexical, morphosintactical and phonological changes with 100% certainty and have a fairly good idea about the timeline and geography of changes we can't actually prove with a written document from that time.

[@farleyharper1270]

is Proto-Romance just Vulgar Latin? Since vulgar Latin is not written down a lot

[@charlesrogers347]

​@@farleyharper1270 @timecrayon Proto-Romance is distinct from Vulgar Latin and has been reconstructed as a hypothetical language. It exhibits a good few changes not present in Vulgar Latin, like consonant palatalisation, the loss of certain cases, and various changes in vocabulary. It's hard to say if it represents a single synchronic language stage or not, but it's roughly a description of the state of the Romance language(s) around the 6th-8th centuries. "Vulgar Latin" is not a historical stage of Latin and not a particularly useful term in historical linguistics, since it's just a vague name for the entire history of Latin as a spoken language.

[@portal6347]

So proportional analogy got rid of the bulk of English ablaut, yet we still have words like goose/geese, tooth/teeth, foot/feet. Neat

[@veezhang6988]

However book/beek got regulated. NGL "beek" sounds somewhat badass

[@MaoRatto]

They are perfectly normal though? Irregular nouns provide a role of easy to contrast nouns... It is easier to hear tooth vs teeth.

[@Hositrugun]

@@portal6347 Those aren't ablaut words, they're umlaut words. Ablaut words (in English) would be things like give/gave, sing/sang/sung, and eat/ate.

[@Hositrugun]

@@veezhang6988 As OP pointed out in the video, the old plural of book wasn't beek, it was beec, pronounced like baitch. In OE any /k/ sound after an /i/ or /e/ vowel got lenitioned to a 'CH' sound.

[@BryanLu0]

Irregular forms are more likely to remain the more common the word is. That is why "to be" is often the most irregular

[@matesafranka6110]

A recent example of proportional analogy is the formation of "badder/baddest" as comparatives of "bad" when it's used as a compliment in slang, e.g. "bad b*tch" -> "the baddest b*tch"

[@markg1075]

Hmmm, curious if this is some kind of unconscious reclamation of a forgotten word, but then realize it's just those darn kids on my lawn talking in opposite speak. "Yo bro dude, that Ollie was just sick" meaning it was good.

[@blu3260]

@@markg1075 I always thought it just came from "so bad(ly)" meaning "so much/intensely" as in "I've been wanting this _so bad"_ or "I need medical attention _badly"_

[@usernametaken017]

I mean in this sende it's being used to replace "badass" so it hss a different meaning that "worse" simply doesn't see also: good boy / goodest boy

[@TommyBrown-j6o]

"Bra" being a french loanword was the biggest plot twist

[@nullFoo]

I wasn't expecting to have to worry about spoilers on a linguistics video

[@yerkishisi]

for real

[@dandupaysdegex]

@@nullFoo that's why I never read or answer to comments.

[@SpoikeTube]

As a Swede I didn’t know nor reflect much about it as ”bra” is such a commonly used word. ”God” is almost exclusively used in context of food and taste except for some holidays ”God Jul och Gott nytt år”. It would make sense if it was introduced by French influence through Napoleon or Bernadotte. Learned something new most def!

[@jeper3460]

Swedish has a ton of French loan words, similar to English, but they came a lot later in the 1700s

[@jessezeller-davis7699]

Interestingly the non-comparative form of better/best does survive in English with the fossil phrase 'to boot' meaning additionally

[@WyattGoslingIsCool]

Happy to see a new video from you. The audio level is quite low.

[@m.s.5370]

By far the most good video I have seen on this topic!

[@hakonsoreide]

This was bet, but surely there might be a gooder one out there?

[@Bacopa68]

@@hakonsoreide We were talking about this in my 7th grade English class. This was in Houston, but our teacher recently arrived from Boston. Needless to say there were some communication quirks. So we were talking about comparatives and my teacher said "For instance, 'gooder' is not a word." I raised my had and my teacher called on me and I said, "I understand that in Boston, gooder is a cheese."

[@lambert801]

Weirdly, we have almost exactly the same thing in Persian. Our word for good (khoob/خوب) is of a completely different root than our words for better (behtar/بهتر) and best (behtarin/بهترین). We do have the base form _beh_ for good, but I don't think anyone in past 1000 years has used it in that sense (it's very archaic).

[@MooImABunny]

I was hoping he'd go a little into other Indo European languages, I don't even know the er est paradigm in other branches

[@kirillomelchenko5803]

And I was curious if it happens in the Indo-Iranian branch too, thanks for the comment. Romance and Slavic languages have the same suppletivism for good/better/best/bad/worse/worst, just from different roots. It's a common Indo-European thing it seems.

[@andreasbauer3890]

It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries! ... And thank You @lambert801 showing me the persian root ... pro-ba-bly it started already in your neighborhood in ancient Ba-byl-on ... 🙂

[@MooImABunny]

@@andreasbauer3890 Latin does the same thing even though it sounds nothing like the word for God. bonus → meliorious → optimus malus → peiorior → pressimus while word for God is Deus

[@andreasbauer3890]

Thank You @@MooImABunny for reminding me to latin! Yes, You are right! It doesen't matter the name/word for God, but the connection that (s)he is good, and a comparative is demonic ... by the way demon related with Deus ... Bonus for good from the B-family, but the comparative is meliiorious you would expect for malus (bad) ... and that one for malus is peiorior ... sanskrit "pei" to love ... to prefer प्रिय (Priya) / Freyja ... priyatel / friend ... prior/prince/prime ... ... ...

[@oravlaful]

the audio is REALLY low on this one

[@ZoofyZoof]

Last time i tried to tell people the audio is too low (it was 10% too quiet), I had a swarm of people arguing it's just fine. Be careful when you say stuff like this

[@oravlaful]

@ZoofyZoof the masses wont silence me (like the video)

[@cirodeandrade]

I had this problem when I tried watching. I closed the video and tried again, and it worked better. Just a suggestion that might work.

[@ZoofyZoof]

@@cirodeandrade That probably happened because you increased the volume on a different video and when you reloaded the page it updated the volume on this video

[@cirodeandrade]

@@ZoofyZoof on mobile. Literally just closed and clicked the thumbnail again.

[@Nighthunter006]

As a Nynorsk-user, thank you for including both written norms of the Norwegian language! 99% of the time we are ignored in tables like this from international sources.

[@markg1075]

Oh man, wondered that for years as a student of the Nordic languages. Bravo! Ha det bra og hyggelig.

[@marcelthoma8890]

The base of "besser" still exist in Germane but in a "frozen" state in idioms like "bas erstaunt" = "very suprised". In dialekts like in Upper Saxonian you can form "gut = guter = am gutsten".

[@kbityy]

it is interesting that the word good has comparative and superlative that are completely different in a few other languages as well, for example Finnish hyvä - parempi - paras

[@BryanLu0]

It's possibly because of Sprachbund

[@maurozanchetta648]

In Italian too

[@BryanLu0]

@@maurozanchetta648 Italian - Latin - Pie Not surprising that PIE languages follow PIE pattern

[@maurozanchetta648]

@@BryanLu0 Right!

[@empty2757]

in arabic too its jayyid-afthal-al'afthal(جيد-افضل-الافضل)

[@ezequielgerstelbodoha9492]

I wouldn't dare to say I know it now, rather that I might remember where I found this piece of info to check it later when I'm talking with someone about the topic

[@MalcolmCooks]

In Scotland, we still use "braw" to mean good, the pronounciation being strikingly similar to "bra"

[@tovarishchfeixiao]

Honestly whenever he said "bra" i always thought about the underwear meaning.

[@sharonminsuk]

Wait, so... "bhad" means "good"? That deserves a follow-up video all its own!

[@gavinrolls1054]

different root than what you're thinking of

[@sharonminsuk]

@@gavinrolls1054 No doubt, but it's still funny. 😄

[@ratajs]

Thanks!

[@swedishfish3555]

I cannot believe that ‘bra’ is a loan word

[@oliverknagg5109]

What a bet video. The goodest I’ve seen today

[@LanceAbrams]

It's kinda similar to how children will draw upon the word "good" to develop the incorrect forms "gooder" and "goodest" under the assumption that that's the natural morphological progression.

[@YaakovA-k4n]

1:54 German has the word 'brav' - meaning good in a childish sense, like Santa only binging presents to good children or whatever. I wonder if it's related to Swedish & Norwegian 'bra'...

[@talideon]

Yes, because they all borrowed it from French "brave".

[@heikozysk233]

Actually, the meaning of "brav" has lost 50% of its meaning in current German. 100+ years ago, a "braver Soldat" was not necessarily just an obedient soldier (which somehow goes with the job) but also courageous or fearless when following orders without much regard of his own well-being. Nowadays, as you described, "brav" in German is falling out of fashion -- more an expression that grandmas or aunties or the education system of the 1950s would use, IMO. Since the whole concept of being quiet and obedient as a child is not really considered an educational achievement any longer.

[@YaakovA-k4n]

@@heikozysk233 I didn’t know that! Really interesting

[@frankhooper7871]

Let's not forget that Scots [and yes, I consider Scots a sister-language to English, not a dialect, and another child of the West Germanic branch] has 'braw', as in 'a braw bricht moonlicht nicht'.

[@nikolay4101-s7r]

Irregularities are fun. For example Slavic used to have a dual form for nouns that was lost at some point in (my native) Bulgarian, but the form is still used only for inanimate masculine nouns when there is a precise amount, regardless of the number. Colloquially the numerical plural form can be used for all masculine nouns but this is considered ungrammatical

[@novedad4468]

I might be too nitpicky but am I the only one mad that he didn't use the opportunity to tell us whether bad worse worst got to us the same way?

[@umbreonstop-motion5780]

As a Swedish-Norwegian: «Bra» is from WHAT NOW??? Never been so betrayed by my languages ever 😢

[@elzabethtatcher9570]

And here I thought bra is what women wear under their cloth...

[@vsmash2]

i am blown away, i always wondered in the back of my head and never had the motivation to figure it out. great video!

[@059metafrast]

For some strange reason in Estonian and Finnish the words with same meaning (good-better-best) have irregular comparatives/superlatives too: hyvä-parempi-paras (FI) and hea-parem-parim (ET). They are non-indoeuropean languages, although in contact with Germanic languages.

[@johansvideor]

Parempi/paras comes from an old word para. Both hyvä and paras are very old loan words from Aryan or Iranian (according to Koivulehto 2009) and also exist in some form in Sámi, Mari and Mordvinic.

[@askadia]

One of the most frequent suppletion in English nouns is person/people.

[@addeenen7684]

In Dutch: Boek-boeken. In Limburgs: Book-böök.

[@user-rm2qj2jh4l]

These videos are so great! Thank you for exploring such interesting topics!

[@believeinpeace]

That was very interesting and educational! Thank you!

[@DustinLaGriza]

1:40 Scots also has "braw"

[@gary.h.turner]

As in "It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht taenicht".

[@iCucer]

​@@gary.h.turner It's a good bright moonlight night tonight?

[@gary.h.turner]

@iCucer Exactly! 👍

[@redcuillin]

Yes and it's exactly the same, as you can say "braw, better, best" or "guid, better, best". The distinction between the words is that "braw" still also has the sense of "brave" or "admirable". In the cliché "braw, bricht, moonlicht nicht" braw is being used more in the sense of admirable or outstanding. You wish a "guid new year" not a "braw" one.

[@joshadams8761]

Two commonly used French verbs, être and aller, are also suppletive.

[@rateeightx]

Romance words for "To Go" are fun, because I think there are like 4-5 different Latin roots, and most of them combined forms from various of the different words into conjugations of one new word. And then Romanian just took a completely unrelated word for the meaning, But at least they conjugate it fully regularly rather than with suppletion!

[@josiahbills1273]

Man, I just read about the Comparative-Superlative Generalisation for the first time today as well.

[@gryrabild]

As far as I know Danish has a single phrase where we do say “goodest”, which is “du godeste” (“my goodness”)… I’d love to know how that one came to be.

[@odenetheus]

From us, your cannibal cousins across the pond

[@camelopardalis84]

I am not even one minute into the video, so I don't know if you address this, but I am fairly sure you make a mistake from 0:13 to 0:41: To my knowledge, disyllabic adjectives also use more/most. The exception being when they end in -y. I also remember being taught in one of my first three years of English (as a native German speaker) that the word "quiet" has two comparatives, namely "quieter" and "more quiet" since it can be seen as either a monosyllabic or a disyllabic adjective. And that "clever" also has two comparatives, namely "more clever" and "cleverer". I've looked up disyllabic English adjectives to check, and the "an adjective with two syllables requires more/most unless it ends in -y" thing seems to be factual: - more able - more active - more awkward - more basic - more British - more broken - more central - more certain - more compact - more crowded and so on

[@petermaling943]

Sometimes the est is correct, but not the er. Awkwardest but not awkwarder. Stupidest but not stupider. Rules are nearly always partial. Any English speaker would understand in any case. So much language teaching wastes time aiming for perfection, when ´good enough’ would do.

[@bud-yo]

8:21 bet is an old form for an adverb of better

[@vsl5455]

So that would be the comparative to "well" then? Like "he did it well, but she did it bet"?

[@bud-yo]

@@vsl5455 better and bet were the comparative. So it would be like "he did it well, but she did it bet" but thing is bet and better were both used as comparatives but one was treated more like a comparative adverb and the other a comparative adjective, so when you look back into the statement of "he did it well but she did it..." You would need to think whether you were using an adverb or an adjective. Basically you can see why over time we chose one over the other because the average person is too lazy to differentiate it so less and less people know about the rules and get used to the merging even if they find it weird at first. Also what doesn't help is that best is both an adjective and an adverb in the superlative

[@iparipaitegianiparipaitegi4643]

Same in french: bon, meilleur (good, better). And bien, mieux (well, better)

[@slyasleep]

Wow, that was more fascinating than I anticipated. [ _suppletive deleted_ ]

[@Ariana_y004]

Being a persian speaker and having studied Avestan for a while made me already know the answer. In persian we have two words for good: 1) Khub 2) Beh But the second one hasn’t been in use for centuries and we only know it because of our literature courses. The comparative and Superlative in persian are the suffixes “tar” and “tarin” respectively. So it would be sth like this : Persian: Beh Behtar Beh-tarin English: Good Better Best Avestan: Beh Behtr Behšt (I don’t remember much about Avestan) But eventually the word Khu:b replaced beh

[@Ani-13-w8d]

I aint sure about the comparative but for superlative: بھشت /beɦeʃt̪/ in Iranian Persian, comes from vahištah which inturn comes either from the Avestan 𐬬𐬀𐬵𐬌𐬱𐬙𐬀(vahišta) or the Old Median *vahišta both from the Proto-Indo-Iranian *Hwásištʰas, a superlative of *Hwásuš which is vohu in Avestan (as in the angel Vohumanu (Bahman)). The comparative in in Proto-Iranian is different and is *yās and there is the Old Avestan 𐬬𐬀𐬵𐬌𐬌𐬀𐬵(vahiiah) from that. So the morpheme -tarin cannot be applied here I think. It's cognate with Sanskrit वसु (vásu), which also comes from the previously mentioned proto-indo-iranian word.

[@barihong5629]

But, this very good video gave me next way how to make my conlangs more believable, thanks you!

[@RunstarHomer]

Really weird that both "good" and "bad" have this kind of structure. Good/better/best, Bad/worse/worst.

[@AnthemsOfEurope]

Interestingly something similar happens in Polish, despite not even being a germanic language. good - better - best dobry - lepszy - najlepszy bad - worse - worst zły - gorszy - najgorszy

[@Diriector_Doc]

If the plural of "book" is "beek" then I take that to mean "shoop" is the singular of "sheep"

[@NicFiinx]

Another banger, god jul! 🇧🇻

[@dionysus6081]

to use an inside joke i have with my dad, this video is the gooderest bestest

[@LucaioSuper]

Is it just me or the volume of this video is too low?

[@kklein]

i think you're right, it came out weirdly quiet in the upload... the original file runs fine in terms of audio strength on my computer, I tried to delete and reupload it a couple times, but it kept being read as oddly quiet by KZbin somehow. i'm not fixing it now lol, i think it's audible at the end of the day, but yeah it's quieter than usual

[@kakahass8845]

It is. I usually watch videos at 50% master volume(?) and 5% KZbin volume but here I had to go to 15% KZbin volume.

[@caramelldansen2204]

KZbin used to compensate for this to normalise volume between videos but have recently stopped doing that without telling anyone. HeII site.

[@lonestarr1490]

​@@caramelldansen2204 Did they? The audio options in my KZbin TV app still state that it is adjusted automatically (which, given the audio of this video, seems to be a lie).

[@bruhspenning]

@@caramelldansen2204 on mobile you can turn it on, haven't looked on desktop. In the video player settings in the menu additional settings you can turn on stable volume

[@brassen]

The first time I heard "den godaste" I thought my co-workers were mocking my swedish.

[@plowe6751]

If enough people start using "gooder", it would become accepted and win a place in the dictionary.

[@eypandabear7483]

Yes, this is literally how words work.

[@petermaling943]

Badder and baddest have certainly made a mark.

[@crito3534]

Let's make it happen. The World will be a gooder place.

[@Muhammed_English314]

For better or worse !

[@strugen_eth]

This is such a good video. Thanks!

[@okaro6595]

It is also irregular in Finnish: hyvä, parempi, paras/parhain, which is a completely unrelated language.

[@joelproko]

hoch-höher is possibly a case of syllable-final h becoming ch. Old songs and the fixed expression "vom hohen Ross runterkommen" (to come down from the/ones high horse) use "hoh" rather than "hoch". Meanwhile the Alemannic dialects use hoch->höcher. Either they regularized it or it's a case of Standard German taking hoch from the Southern Dialects and höher from the Northern ones. Or maybe it's a mix of these two explanations.

[@RyumaXtheXKing]

Oh yeah, interesting. „Das Haus ist hoch“ the House is high versus das hohe Haus/the high House. Never noticed that before

[@MarieFüchschen]

Standard German is mostly based upon and middle and north German dialects, and here there can´t be Schwa-Laut after a ch. Thus, either the ch sound was abolished (like in modern standard German), or the Schwa-Laut was solved into "a", see Plautdietsch: Huach - Hecha - Hechsten

[@Chizypuff]

I love that the old words good and better came from look like "good" and "bad" And now we're bringing back bad to mean something really good

[@HaydenTheEeeeeeeeevilEukaryote]

youtube, despite this video defaulting to the english (original) voice track and not having any subtitles, auto translated this videos title and description, which translated two of the title’s words into the same word, so I don’t even know what it’s trying to say (probably “good, better and best” but either way) I hate youtube auto translating titles, why cant you set more than one language so it doesnt try to translate stuff out of your native language or out of the language youre trying to learn? anyone know if there’s a solution to this?

[@elzabethtatcher9570]

The channel owner can disable this, the viewers can't to jack shit. KZbin ignores language setting you have in your account for some reason.

[@Pining_for_the_fjords]

Interestingly, Polish also has irregular forms for comparitive of good and bad. It adds the suffix szy to form the comparitive, and the prefix naj and the suffix -szy for the superlative, as is usual with Polish, but the roots seem to be completely different. Good - Dobry Better - Lepszy Best - Najlepszy Bad - Zły Worse - Gorszy Worst - Najgorszy I wonder if these forms are irregular in other languages too, and why.

[@magpie_girl3741]

The same happens in Slavic (exception Bulgarian and Macedonian) and Romance languages. The difference here between Slavic is that we have different words for comparative suppletion: Belarusian / Czech / Polish/ Slovak *dobrŭ --> *lěpĭšij Ukrainian *dobrŭ --> kraščyj / *lěpĭšij / *dobrĭšij Serbo-Croatian / Slovene *dobrŭ --> boljši Bulgarian / Macedonian / (Russian) *dobrŭ --> po-*dobrŭ Russian chorošij --> po-lučše / lučšij And Romance languages took them from Latin: GOOD: Latin bonus (CAT bo, FRE bon, GAL bo, ITA buono, OCC bon, POR bom, ROM bun, SAR bonu, SPA bueno) --> Latin melior (CAT millor, FRE meilleur, GAL mellor, ITA migliore, OCC melhor, POR melhor, SAR mègiu, SPA mejor) Exception: Romanian (also part of Balkan Sprachbund, togther with BUL/MAC) --> mai (LAT magis) 'more'. And when you look at Germanic/Slavic/Romance languages, they have a concept of something "worse" in them and added different words for "bad". Celtic languages are the least uniform. Baltic languages don't have the distinction good/bad --> better/worse (they treat them as other adjectives).

[@valmarsiglia]

I think it's like that across Indo-European languages: in Spanish it's bueno, mejor, mejor, French has bon, mieux, meilleur, Ancient Greek is the craziest, with agathos/meizon/aristos.

[@Asiago9]

Now I'm wondering if a similar thing happened for Spanish bueno, mejor, and el/la mejor, or that's a completely different, equally interesting linguistic rabbit hole

[@liyin9194]

Latin bonus, melior, optimus. No idea where the other two forms came from though.

[@rateeightx]

Looking it up, It seems it was indeed the case that in Latin the word "Bonus" (good) was rather irregular, having the comparative and superlative forms both derived from suppletion of other separate verbs, Hence for example the Italian forms "Buono", "Migliore", and "Ottimo", Which are all forms of the same word, Yet completely etymologically unrelated.

[@lambert801]

We have the same thing in Persian with khoob (good), behtar (better), and behtarin (best).

[@geertarys4927]

Dutch has also a variant of good akin to 'bra", namely the word "braaf" (in the meaning of good behavior, typically for animals and children). It is variable: "een brave hond", meaning "a well behaved dog"/"a good dog" or "het braafste kind" meaning "the best behaved child".

[@vitia7507]

Great video keep going !

[@MiguelArcanjo-s2j]

Ironically good,better,best in my lang, portuguese is respectly "bom,ótimo,melhor"

[@NeichoKijimura]

There are some slight misrepresentations of Dutch here about the extra *e* ending. That's just dependent on the gender of the word the adjective is applying to. Like *Een snel paard* (a fast horse) but *Een snelle koe* (a fast cow) This is only in the indefinite form of the neuter form that the *e* is dropped. The *het* for the superlative is a bit weird and can be used in a few ways, like to turn an adjective into an adverb but in the context here it would be the same as in English *the fastest horse*

[@eypandabear7483]

It’s the adverbial form he lists in the tables. This is unambiguous for German because we say “am schnellsten” with a preposition instead of just the article.

[@NeichoKijimura]

@@eypandabear7483 Ahh thanks, my German is seriously out of date as a Belgian.

[@notwithouttext]

2:59 but then there's VULGAR latin, which is reconstructed i think

[@kklein]

well vulgar latin is attested (ie. we know it existed as a descendant of latin) so it's still not a proto-language, but yes it's still largely a reconstructed language.

[@notwithouttext]

@@kklein yeah it's interesting

[@andrescortina1323]

Double plus good !

[@Moses_Caesar_Augustus]

3:00 There are also some words written down in runes which are thought to be from a late stage of Proto-Germanic or Proto-Norse.

[@geheimemartha]

Reminds me of how "bad" (meaning "attractive") becomes badder and baddest

[@pxolqopt3597]

When was "bad" meaning attractive first used? I've only noticed around 2020

[@ProdavackaDivu]

Persian has khoob>behtar>behtareen (good, better, best) bad>badtar>badtareen (bad, worse, worst)

[@huntergalaxy]

It’s also a hypothesis that these patterns changing for conjugating is because children learn the more common way to conjugate and then apply the same logic to other words until it becomes engrained in a language.

[@secretsundersiege2]

From the screen, to the ring, to the pen, to the king.

[@vladthemagnificent9052]

an interesting follow up would be to ask why the suppletion happened for the comparatives of the word 'good' in other branches In Romance languages like French: bon -> meilleur; and Spanish: bueno -> mejor. In Slavic like Polish: dobry -> lepszy; or Russian: хороший -> лучший (which are both different roots from Polish, but also different between bas and comparative forms). In Celtic like Irish: maith -> fearr. Moreover, even outside of the Indo-European family, like in Finnish: hyvä -> parempi And I am sure there must be even more examples. These are what I remember from the top of my head. It looks as if the suppletion is innately programmed to happen for the words with this meaning!

[@2712animefreak]

Macedonian doesn't supplete it's dobar->podobar->najdobar. I think Bulgarian also doesn't.

[@andreasbauer3890]

It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries! ... And thank You @lambert801 showing me the persian root ... pro-ba-bly it started already in your neighborhood in ancient Ba-byl-on ... @MooImABunny 4 hours ago @andreasbauer3890 Latin does the same thing even though it sounds nothing like the word for God. bonus → meliorious → optimus malus → peiorior → pressimus while word for God is Deus ... Thank You @MooImABunny for reminding me to latin! Yes, You are right! It doesen't matter the name/word for God, but the connection that (s)he is good, and a comparative is demonic ... by the way demon related with Deus ... Bonus for good from the B-family, but the comparative is meliiorious you would expect for malus (bad) ... and that one for malus is peiorior ... sanskrit "pei" to love ... to prefer प्रिय (Priya) / Freyja ... priyatel / friend ... prior/prince/prime ... ... ...

[@vladthemagnificent9052]

@@andreasbauer3890 no

[@andreasbauer3890]

@@vladthemagnificent9052 In russian it's like in german/english: лучший should be the comparative of zły / loš and not for the opposite word! ... Bhad / Bösi-bösser-böst had once the meaning of good-gooder-goodest, and than bhad was replaced by good, but comparative and superlative remain ...

[@vladthemagnificent9052]

@@andreasbauer3890 it is really not

[@pasoska_kontrola]

This happens in other Indo-European languages, too. In Serbo-Croatian, for example, the comparative form is formed by adding a suffix to the base word, to get things like visok->viši, and for the superlative you add naj- to the comparative, to get visok->viši->najviši. However, the comparative form (and by proxy, the superlative, as well) of the adjective ‘dobar’ (good) do not stem from the same root, giving a situation where dobar->bolji->najbolji (I also find the similarity that both in S-C and in Germanic languages these weird forms begin with the letter b amusing), but also, similar to English where bad does not result in badder, but in worse, so does loš (bad) in Serbo-Croatian become ‘gori’. (Also, I’m not 100% sure but I think the superlative for ‘good’ in Slovene is najboljši, so that could mean this is widespread among other Slavic languages as well?)

[@andreasbauer3890]

It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the best / biest (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ...

[@urinstein1864]

The h-ch change you mention for German is not really a consonant change, because they are allophones of the same phoneme. H is the pronunciation in the onset, Ich-sound is coda after front vowels, Ach-sound is coda after back vowels. So from "höher" to "höchsten", the phoneme is switching from the onset of the second syllable to the coda of the first.

[@jeremy16473]

Can't the ich-laut produce syllable onsets? Thinking of -chen suffix and Chemie. To me, Loch/Löcher implies a regular comparative form of hoch could exist.

[@PaulBenares]

It's also often pronounced "hösten"

[@elzabethtatcher9570]

I wish I knew what that means

[@devin6272]

great work

[@__gadonk__]

4:54... say that again?

[@mbberry135]

This is the Goodest video I have to watch later.

[@whataboutthings]

I mean, as a Swedish speaker, I am pretty sure we use "Godare" and "Godast" for moral character "God" as well. But it means something else than when we use "Bättre" and "Bäst". Like, for example. If I describe my father as "En God Man", he'd be a man of good moral character, generally. If I then call my uncle, by comparison, "En Bättre Man" that could mean many things, among them that he was of even better moral character but also that despite not being of higher more character he had other strengths like agility or intellect which combined to make him a better man all things considered. But if I call my uncle by comparison "En Godare Man" I am specifically noting that he was of better moral character than my father. Not that he tasted better. So yea, this video is great. And maybe that nuance is just not able to be fit into a youtube video, but thought it was worth pointing out.

[@kklein]

det har jag aldrig hört lol, för mig låter det som att mannen smakar bättre när man säger "den godare mannen"!! edit: men intressant ändå, bara nåt jag själv aldrig skulle säga (tror jag)

[@whataboutthings]

@kklein rätt säker att jag även skulle använda uttrycket "den godaste av oss all" om jag till exempel skrev dialog där en ledare av ett flertal moraliska figurer beskrev vem den ansåg som deras främsta. Kommer inte på exempel att dela, men rätt säker att jag sett det i olika mediaverk över åren.

[@whataboutthings]

Jag tror mitt frekventa spelande av D&D är en influence här. Där vi ofta hanterar text om "Good and Evil" i en fantasi-värld där dessa aspekter går att definiera mer än i verkligheten. Tror Engelskans "good" kan översättas till två olika ord på Svenska. Den ena moralisk och den andra kvalitativ. A good tool = Ett bra redskap A good god = En god gud Och jag skulle säga att om du använder [God] på svenska som en översättning av den nedre varianten av [Good] så böjer du Godare/Godast generellt. Att använda Bättre/Bäst istället låter mer som att du dömer någonting kvalitativt, därav att "en bättre man" inkluderar fler kvaliteter som styrka, humorsinne eller kunskap.

[@kklein]

jag håller inte med helt o hållet, men just exemplet "den godaste av oss all" var faktiskt mycket bra, det stämmer ju! det kanske är så att god-bättre-bäst-paradigmet dör ut och att vi kommer få två distinkta ord: bra, bättre, bäst och god, godare, godast.

[@whataboutthings]

@@kklein jag skulle säga att det nog är fallet. Jag tror det kommer av engelsk influens. Jag själv t.ex. spelar väldigt mycket D&D och där är behovet av att uttrycka godhet som separat koncept från "brahet" viktigt inom reglerna. Där får vi situationer där Engelskans "Good" måste översättas och då blir t.ex. saker så här... A better axe = en bättre yxa A gooder god = en godare gud (i enlighet med att den är närmare tangerande definitionen av "good' i regelboken.) Att kalla det "en bättre gud" skulle vara väldigt förvirrande och låta som att guden var en starkare källa av helig magi... vilken även en mäktig ond gud kan vara i spelet. Så det blir fel. Tror min bakgrund i D&D är varför jag är lite extra känslig för det här och plockar upp ändringen enkelt.

[@kantoros]

I've never noticed this before but my language, Czech, has the same thing: most adjectives have regular comparatives and superlatives, Fast, Faster, Fastest = Rychlý, Rychlejší, Nejrychlejší. however "Good" has the same merger as english: Dobrý, Lepší, Nejlepší. I cannot imagine how "ghedh" turned into "dobrý" or "bhad" into "lepší" lol, but atleast to me this suggests that the merger of ghedh and bhad happened even earlier than Proto-Germanic

[@CommonCommiestudios]

The roots you mentioned aren't those which turned into the Czech words, dobrý comes from Proto-Indo-European *dʰh₂ebʰros, meaning "fitting, suitable, while lepší is from a Proto-Slavic word *lěpьjь, originally the comparative of *lěpъ, "beautiful" so yeah, the words for "good" and "better", like the words for "bad" and "worse", are very very unstable and will often be replaced by new ones in new language families (*dobrъ has evolved into Russian as добрый "morally good", but the word for "good (in quality)" is хороший, a whole different root)

[@iamspencerx]

The regularisation of irregular plurals is happening right now, I see mouses instead of mice very often

[@adrianblake8876]

5:32 Arabic still has the proto-semitic "regular" singular for woman, being "untha"... Now, you'd say "untha" and "nisaa" aren't etymologically related, and well, you'll be right. In fact, the famous biblical verses "she'll be called a woman for she was made from man" is misleading. The Hebrew QUARTET of "ish" (man), "isha" (woman, related to "untha"), "anashim" (men, related to "insaan") and "nashim" (women, related to "nisaa") are ALL in complimentary distribution, NEITHER ONE sharing it's root with ANY of the others....

[@bertilow]

Congrats for the excellent Swedish pronunciation, like perfect

[@kklein]

ja svenska är inget svårt språk, särskilt inte när man har det som modersmål ;)

[@Zippy_Zolton]

extremely quiet video, at 500% volume right now :(

[@pwn3dname]

I thought this video was going to be (and this still might be an idea for a sequel, mind you) how good-better-best is suppletive throughout most Indoeuropean languages, even as those languages use entirely different base words for their "better", "best" forms. Spanish here (which I'm seeing as the translated title of this video) uses "Bueno, Mejor, Excelente" -three different roots altogether (although I'd argue "Excelente" is not a good translation, since Spanish also uses "el mejor" as its superlative), and Russian uses хороший / лучше / лучши (but also keeps "добрий" around with a different meaning). Notably, this suppletion also shows up a lot in "bad-better-worse" (malo/peor in Spanish) and the verb "go", which features a really neat table of the many complex ways in which it's suppletive across Romance languages on Wikipedia.

[@jojohehe3251]

Bad badder/better Baddest/bast/best Seems simple that "bad" simply changed from originally being positive.

[@MrEst97]

I believe the Scots word "braw" shares an origin with Swedish "bra". In fact a lot of Scots words that are not obviously present in English are seen in the Scandinavian languages. I'm not certain that I've ever heard brawer or brawest however. I'm not a speaker but I'd assume they say mair braw and maist braw

[@dirk-janvw6387]

Interestingly, there is a region in the Netherlands called "de Betuwe" in which - at Roman times - lived a tribe "Batavi". To my understanding the name of the region comes from "bat" + "ouwe"; meaning "good" and "soil" respectively. So to me the "goed -> beter -> best" paradigm has always made a lot of sense, since adding an umlaut to "bat" turns the "a" into an "e".

[@MooImABunny]

I love how every time you're about to give the Danish examples, you just, by chance, happen to be distracted by something else 😂 Also I hoped you'd go a bit into other IE branches. I saw someone in the comments say Farsi has the same thing with different roots for good vs better, best, and I personally didn't even what the paradigm looked like in other branches

[@tijuanajoe8445]

In German there also exists the archaic "bass" meaning good which is derived from the bhad-root afaik

[@RNS_Aurelius]

This rule also exists in Romance languages. Another weird phenomenon I've found is the verb to be is often an irregular verb, at least in every language I've ever studied. (Romance languages, English, German and Japanese)

[@deithlan]

Amazing video actually

[@johnbolton292]

Well that's not quite what I was hoping it might be, but good video! I'd thought perhaps it was more like "will" and "woll" and how they gradually changed to have more or less the same meaning. Even though eventually will won out as the standard for future situations and won't for negative future situations.

[@AutoReport1]

Better hasn't quite lost it's base form, it's just mostly passed into a substantive and is archaic, at least in English boot (advantage, profit), and the older legal term bote and wite (compensation and penalty, other offshoots are booty and freebooter), and a partly comparative adverb such as German bass "greatly". The root bat- had senses of both well/good and better, from which comparatives and superlatives were formed. Something similar happened to more and most, from mo (now only dialectal). The development of comparative forms of words which at their root may have been comparative can be understood from modern paradigms such as "mo better", "more bigger" ...

[@bennykakerautodidact]

Curiouser and curiouser.

[@thereddeveloper]

0:49 We say "Er ist der schnellste"/"Er ist am schnellsten" (or if we're in a hurry "Er ist schnellster") and "Sie ist die interessanteste"/"Sie ist am interessantesten". "Er ist schnellst" and "Sie ist interessantest" are completely wrong.

[@scmtuk3662]

"Went" was originally the past tense of the verb "to wend", meaning "to pursue one's way". Due to suppletion, "went" became a past tense form of "to go", while the current past tense of "to wend", is simply "wended". And also, "wander" is derived from "wend". But what is the _original_ base word, for which "better" and "best" were the literal comparative and superlative words? Well, surprisingly, the word still exists. It is the word "boot". Not the kind you wear on your foot, but instead, a word that means "profit" or "remedy". While the word "boot" is virtually obsolete in its own right, it _is_ still used, in the derived term "to boot", meaning "in addition".