IS ENGLISH A FRENCH CREOLE?

[@LetThemTalkTV]

ERRATA You know that I work on a tight schedule and sometimes the pressure to release a video by a certain time can mean that a few errors slip through: Here are the errata for this video: Old Norse is also a Germanic language. I should have said "Anglo-Saxon" not "Germanic". I wrote "Scotch" language instead of Scots - apologies to all Scots speakers (and scotch drinkers). I misspelt "pearles" as "perles" and "responsible" as "responible" I'm told that the German for "it's me" should be "ich bin's" and not "ich bin es"

[@astree214]

Scots speakers and scotch drinkers aren't the same ? 😋

[@theChaosKe]

Ich bin's is the shortened form of ich bin es (same dynamic as it's me vs it is me), so not really a mistake, just a bit uncommon to say it that way.

[@lupus.andron.exhaustus]

After having enough drinks, any Scots speaker will speak Scotch fluently! 🤣

[@Belaziraf]

Technically, only the saxon part, referring to Germanic roots is correct. The "anglo", originating from "Angles" and including "pict" is not accurate as it incorporated "roman" language / idiom / differences, already. Real ancient English doesn't even exist as it's always a mix of languages, like French never really existed. Angle and Pict, later mixed with Danish. "Prittan", "Brittan", are Nord's man territories. So UK, except for Pict territories were mainly under viking rules at that time. Vikings as the large trend of conquerors from the North.

[@theChaosKe]

@@Belaziraf Are you saying angles arent germanic?

[@ianmckenzie7255]

If the French want to claim the English language, go ahead but they also have to take responsibility for the cuisine!

[@micshaz]

Lmfao

[@SinarNila]

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂❤❤❤❤❤❤

[@SinarNila]

No worries french will conquer again english cuisine 😂😂😂😂😂 a matter of time....just see and taste the effect❤

[@jagolago-bob]

You can lead a horse to water...

[@SinarNila]

​@@jagolago-bob I'm not a cuisine chef this film belongs to Jacques Jaquin not to me... This mission belongs to him 😂, never to me and BTW he's the French of the story ❤🎉

[@RobWords]

I loved this from my heart's bottom.

[@LetThemTalkTV]

I'm tickled pink to receive your comment. Thank you for your inspirational work.

[@suueker169]

hi

[@scottthesmartape9151]

@@LetThemTalkTVwhy are you pink when tickled

[@thomasdevine867]

Does your heart have a nice bottom?

[@sukhjandu4251]

Love your videos.

[@PierreGillet-i1x]

George Clemenceau used to say that English is just a badly pronounced French. Oh, well, he also said that Britain is a French island that turned bad ….

[@chrisamies2141]

Now best known as the name of an aircraft-carrier? Him and Foch, who said "aircraft are interesting toys but of no military value." In fairness he might have meant 'no military value yet - we need to develop them.'

[@PierreGillet-i1x]

@@chrisamies2141 Clemenceau was one of the winners of WW1 when airplanes were used mainly to make photos of battle fields . Some dod fights though using Winchester carbines !

[@clemenceau412]

Clemenceau was right. 😀

[@EnglandVersus]

The French are OBSESSED with England because we ultimately won the historical rivalry and our language rules the world.

[@astree214]

@@EnglandVersus I think it' more the english that are obsessed with France. In France we don't really care about this little island in the north 😀

[@tomadams4343]

As an American who has lived in France for over 40 years, one thing comes to mind after listening to your fascinating video. I remember having less of a problem reading and understanding Molière as concerns certain vocabulary words than many of my French friends.

[@ISkandarash]

It should be noted that the level of French people regarding their own language has dropped drastically over the last 25 years...

[@piotr821]

@@ISkandarashThis statement is applicable across all developed nations worldwide. It doesn’t provide a counterpoint to the original poster’s statement.

[@bilp_bloup_bot]

@@ISkandarash it depends a lot on what populations we're talking about. But yes the school level is dropping overall

[@ISkandarash]

@@bilp_bloup_bot No, it doesn't depend on which population, I have been in contact with all populations in France since the 80s, I can tell you that it's global.

[@waeldra1548]

@@ISkandarash really depends on the situation , informal and formal speech . In an informal conversation we obviously won't use complex and well ajusted sentences as much as if we were in a formal conversation . It's not a question of education but etiquette !

[@adad-nerari4117]

Merci pour cette passionnante analyse des origines de la langue anglaise. Au lycée j'avais choisi l'allemand et le russe, je n'ai appris l'anglais que beaucoup plus tard en autodidacte : ce fut un vrai plaisir de découvrir le charme de cette langue dont le vocabulaire est facile à mémoriser pour un Français (merci,les Normands ! ) , malgré quelques faux amis. Pour moi, comme pour beaucoup de Français, le plus difficile reste la prononciation.

[@wombatkins]

I can still read French and I haven't stayed in Paris for 20 years. As an English speaker, French is quite facile.

[@AdaL0906]

Oui, moi aussi j'ai étudié l'allemand. C'est pourquoi j'ai trouvé que la langue Anglaise ressemblait énormément au Français dans sa structure et son vocabulaire. 50% de chance qu'un mot français était aussi usé de la sorte en anglais, et pour les conjonctions, ou certains verbes et nom commun je prenais des mots allemands.

[@jhoughjr1]

@@wombatkinsi used rosetta stone for six months maybe and read most of that well enoigh lol. Idk if the 14 verb tenses en français are easy lol.

[@nosuchthing8]

Beautiful

[@petretepner8027]

Il est rare tché tchitch'un remercie les nouormands. Y'a pon dé tché! À bétôt!

[@mellowasahorse]

Word order is much more similar to Northern Germanic languages than our supposedly closer West Germanic brothers, showing how much Old Norse influenced the grammar. But it’s blindingly clear there was an equally strong French influence. A beautiful bastard, indeed.

[@Valentin-oc5nh]

not in the grammar or logic of the language...

[@SinarNila]

Never bastard, English is Romanic, a Creole Romanic, loved idiom. ❤🍺🍺🍺🍺🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘⚘

[@marchauchler1622]

English is clearly not Romanic. You are misled

[@Valentin-oc5nh]

@@marchauchler1622 right? if you look at the grammar, expressions and generally how the language and even the thinking works, its all germanic. every language uses words of other languages- and english does that more than others. but that does not change the identity of the language. at no point did it take french grammar or "logic". Just like we don't say "I have 20 years old" in english.

[@Valentin-oc5nh]

@@marchauchler1622 its no coincidence that german speakers can learn english super easily but french speakers have a super hard time and more often than not never get it right...

[@scottgates6993]

Oh, good! Now I can go to my French language teacher and tell her, "Hey, I already speak French. I'm dropping your class!" No, seriously, thank you for this very enlightening piece. I love language and its origins. You made it very entertaining as well.

[@SinarNila]

❤❤❤❤

[@tamassinty]

I didn’t study English in school, but since I speak French and more than half of English vocabulary has roots in French, it was easy for me to pick up.

[@ajs41]

I guess that if you know French and English, it's then quite easy to learn German.

[@tamassinty]

​@@ajs41In my opinion, learning German becomes significantly easier if you already speak Dutch.

[@petretepner8027]

Easy to read, or to speak/hear? I speak Spanish and can easily read Portuguese, but cannot begin to understand it when spoken (in Portugal).

[@plumebrise4801]

@@tamassinty Lexical similarities ,French and Italian have a lexical similarity of 89% while French and Spanish/Portuguese/Romanian have a 75% ,Spanish and Portuguese are at 89% between each other ,Romanian is at 75% with the other 4 major Romance language ,Italian at 75% with Spanish and Portuguese too. A lexical similarity of 85% or more is enough for a language to be considered a dialect ,If Italy/Portugal wasn't it's own countries (And was united with France/Spain instead) ,Italian/Portuguese would be considered a dialect of French/Spanish. It's the same with Dutch ,close enough to be considered a dialect to German ,but isn't because it has it's own country ,had the German managed to absorb the Netherlands ,it would be considered a dialect of German . Do you know where the word "Germany" come from ? It came from the French "Germanie" itself coming from the Latin "Germania" ,but the changed what the word originally meant at the formation of the German Empire in 1870 ,instead of meaning "Land where the people speak German" ,Germany would now mean the Country . Germany in English mean the country of Germany Germany in French mean Germany + Austria + Alemannic Switzerland + Bolzano province in Italy ,and before WW2 ,it also included Silesia ,East Pomerania ,Sudetenland ,the Netherlands ,Flanders and Luxembourg ,the last 3 ,although still speaking a Germanic language after the war ,managed to dissociate themselves with the word "Germanie" (And the Austrian tried to do it too ,but it didn't work for them)

[@berndf0]

Scandinavians find it easy to learn English because they watch American TV programs without dubbing. The same is true is the Netherlands, and the Dutch also find it easier to learn English than, say, the Germans who get all their foreign programmes dubbed. Being exposed to a language at an early age is a huge factor in learning a foreign language, especially when it is a related language where you can guess a lot. My daughter, who has German and French as her first and second languages taught herself English as a young girl just by watching TV. To make things worse, modern Scandinavian languages have far more West Germanic loans than English has Norse loans, even if you exclude recent loans from English which you find in abundance in all European languages. Most of these earlier West Germanic loans into Scandinavian languages are from Low German. For Danish, about 25% of the modern vocabulary is estimated to be from Low or High German, mostly from Low German. Given all these factors, It is quite a weak argument that it should be due to Old Norse influence on Old English 1200-1000 years ago should be the main reason why Scandinavian find it easy to learn English.

[@PaulG.x]

You can't learn English by watching American shows - they don't speak it

[@Daniel-tm9fg]

Subtitles is the way to go. A lector reading over the dialogues isn't that bad even though it masks a big chunk of the original language and it's insufficient to learn the language. As for dubbing, it's just a dumb idea that renders movies unwatchable. Even as a kid I had a strong dislike to dubbed movies. It just felt fake like. With a lector, at least a viewer can hear the sound of actor's voice.

[@lesfreresdelaquote1176]

As a Frenchman who lived in England and struggled to learn English, I think you are missing the point. I'm a linguist by trade, but don't take my word as any kind of authority. Despite what people think, the most difficult part of learning a language is not the vocabulary or the grammar, it is the sounds, and more specially frequencies. Languages live in different frequency ranges, which usually do not overlap that much. When you learn your mother tongue, you first learn the specific frequency range of your language as early as in your mother's womb. Your brain then develops a very efficient frequency filter to be able to understand your own language in the most noisy environment. This filter is very efficient, but it is so efficient that if your language lives in a different range, then you will simply not be able to hear some specific sounds that belong to a different language. I started to learn English when I was 9, I watched a lot of subtitled movies when I was a kid, and still I couldn't understand English at all. I couldn't reconciliate the sounds and the words. It took me years to be able to listen to a dialog in a movie and understand it whole. I also learn German and a bit of Italian, and I didn't have this problem at all. Scandinavian languages and English live in the same frequency space, which help you _hear_ the words. This is also true for Dutch. This is why some linguists thought for a time that English was a dialect of Norse, not just because of the loan words. You have no idea how difficult listening to English is for many romance language speakers. As a last example, I watched this strange movie by Bergman: The Seven Seal and I was amazed how similar it sounded to English, even though if I remember the actors in the movie spoke an old version of Swedish.

[@Sauvageonne]

I should have read your comment before writing mine.

[@MassimoAngotzi]

A man can perfectly hear any sound produced by the larynx of another man. What “frequencies” are you talking about? A tenor sings as a tenor in German and in Italian. Doesn’t change “frequency”. I advise you to check in the dictionary the meaning of “frequency”, and find another word for what are you trying to say. And , by the way, you understand a word in another language if you KNOW that word.

[@mclartychannel]

In terms of vocabulary, English is a West Germanic language for one big reason: You can hold an entire English conversation using only words that come from Old English, with no words from Old Norse, French, or Latin. You can't do that using only words of Old Norse, French, or Latin origin. Only a few words in the Lord's Prayer are of French origin (trespasses/debts, deliver, temptation, power, glory).

[@Phillipdumont]

i think you have a point

[@Phillipdumont]

i feel like the french influence of english is more superficial and at it's core it's still old/middle english which are germanic languages.

[@jhoughjr1]

That feels like a diatilation lol

[@MrBalrogos]

@@liam1561 rucksack/backpack :o, where rucksack is almost like in german.

[@irtnyc]

It's not about the vocabulary. It's about the syntax and grammar rules. French vocab just makes the English dictionary longer, and more complex (there are two or more words for all nouns) but it doesn't and never did and never will make English a romance language. End of story.

[@nikoforu]

As a native French speaker, the large amount of words of French origin was helpful to learn English. But the core vocabulary is Germanic ( irregular verbs, numbers, etc.) and so is the grammar, albeit simplified compared to other Germanic languages (virtually no declension, no gender, easy to conjugate, SVO syntax).

[@kateS72]

I am bilingual and a teacher of both languages; Thank you for bringing so many examples and explanations. Brilliant! C’est brillant!

[@j.A-d6g]

@LetThemTalkTV , it was a pleasure meeting you in person yesterday. You’ve helped me tremendously with my English skills and speaking confidence. I’m sure many more people will say this in the future, as I truly believe you’re one of the best online teachers out there. With appreciation, Jeferson

[@LetThemTalkTV]

That's very kind of you. It was a pleasure to meet you in person. No doubt I'll bump into you in our neighbourhood again soon. Best wishes.

[@Amelia.A.T.]

I just love your channel! I'm 63 (still can't believe it 😂), and I've been fascinated by the history of English since I was 11, then my interest grew to include other languages, then to human communication in various forms. The librarian found it quite amusing when little 11 year old me would check out books like Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales with the English on one side and the original on the facing page, then a year or two later, checking out books on linguistics. (I guess I was a strange little kid! 😅) I still always learn something new from your videos, or am reminded of something I'd forgotten, and I always enjoy the way you put it all together, especially with your sense of humor! (BTW, as an elementary school student in the US, I read so many British kids' books that I had a really hard time in our spelling tests, always getting points off for words like "neighbour" and "humour"! I remember bringing a book in to show my fourth grade teacher to show her some word she'd marked wrong on my test, and that was the first time that it clicked that I had to pay attention to whether a book was British or American!) Edited autocorrect typos! 😁

[@askadia]

Wonderful, thank you for sharing it

[@LetThemTalkTV]

Thank you for your kind words. I'm glad you like the videos.

[@petretepner8027]

I'm relieved to discover that I was not the only 11-year-old to find the Great Vowel Shift a source of greater fascination than the performance of football teams.

[@marvinmauldin4361]

If you can't believe you're 63, kid, wait till you hit 86. Ah, to be 63 again...

[@isabelatence7035]

My niece is in Montreal, immersing herself in English, to her surprise people speak French in the places, she is in trouble, to my surprise I knew Creole was spoken in the Caribbean, understanding the origins of the English language in your videos has been a fundamental experience in my studies, incredible video for me to deepen more. Thanks Gideon

[@LetThemTalkTV]

thanks for you comment. Montreal is a wonderful city, perhaps good for learning both English and French though I think most people speak French.

[@isabelatence7035]

@@LetThemTalkTV Fascinating City!🐿️🍁

[@Alex_Plante]

@@LetThemTalkTV For the metropolitan area of slightly more than 4 million, about 2/3 are of French mother tongue, 1/6 English, and the remaining 1/6 various other languages, the most spoken of which are Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic.

[@belis35]

Seriously? She went to Montreal to be immersed in English language ? 😂

[@Alex_Plante]

@@belis35 There is an English speaking belt that stretches from downtown Montreal and across the western part of the island of Montreal where English predominates.

[@paulpoitras3642]

I’m a french canadian from new-brunswick. We learned english in school. We don’t have the typical french accent when we speak english like in france, but i still struggle sometime with some words when i speak. The worst part its that those words are of french origin. I’m so use to say in french i guess and trying to say it in english it’s like a tongue twister

[@zoranorlic2423]

The BBC correspondent Lyse Doucet's accent is almost unplaceable. Is she from the same area as yourself?

[@paulpoitras3642]

Can’t say i don’t know her. But I know that there is a lot of Doucet in the french acadian community of new-brunswick

[@hentype]

Typical issue of learning a language with plenty of cognates, and when plenty of them have the same spelling. It's like when an Indonesian or Filipino is trying to learn the other language.

[@bobbolondz2701]

I thought the British kicked you out and you turned into Cajuns.

[@paulpoitras3642]

Yes cajuns are the descendant of the french speaker that were deported from the maritimes in canada. But not all were deported and some deported have returned back to their homeland. They are some good video that explain the history of acadians on youtube. Fun fact : the word “cajun” and acadian is the same thing. When the deported french speaker introduce themselves the english, the were saying “ i’m acadian” but back in the day the french accent to pronounced the “d” was like “dj”. So an english ear could have easily heard im a cajun instead of im acadian

[@SiqueScarface]

I just did the test, and I am at 70% Germanic words. There is a catch though: email. While 'mail' came into Modern English via Old French, it came into Old French via Frankish. It is a Germanic word in a Roman disguise.

[@tobuslieven]

17:03 It could be a creole of a creole, but if you allow that, then every language might be too.

[@Mercure250]

I personally don't buy the idea that English is a French creole, and I say that as a native French speaker. People say that just because English became more analytic and because it massively borrowed from French. I don't think that's sufficient to qualify as a creole. If you look at both phenomena individually, there isn't really anything special about them; the only special thing is the fact they happened around the same time. Massive borrowing: If that's enough to qualify as a creole, then is Japanese a Chinese creole? I don't think there's anything really special about borrowing, even if it's at a large scale. It's a normal process of language. I guess English and Japanese went extreme in that area, sure, but that's just a matter of degree, and beyond that, I don't think it's really that special. More analytic: Alright, riddle me this. If English got its grammar from French... Where did French get its grammar? French comes from Latin, a very much flexional/synthetic language. So why is French more analytic? Is it because of the Franks? Is French a Frankish creole? ...Yeah, no. Some people exaggerate how influential Old Frankish was for French. We got a lot of words from them, sure, but it's not even close to the cases of English and Japanese, for example. Grammar becoming more analytic is just a very strong tendency for Western Indo-European languages in general. The Romance languages from Portugal to Italy all underwent such changes. Continental Scandinavian languages too. There isn't a reason to try to find an explanation for the case of English in particular. It's just a normal process in general. And then, there's the evidence AGAINST creolisation. Mainly, the presence of many irregulars. English simplified its plurals, sure, but even French doesn't have strange exceptions like "man-men", "mouse-mice", "ox-oxen". We have the general rule with "-s", and a special rule for many words ending in "-al" and a couple with "-el", and that's it. (I don't count "-ous" vs "-oux", that's just a quirk of spelling) More damningly, English still has many, many irregular verbs. These are the kinds of irregularity that, I think, wouldn't survive a true process of creolisation. We can also add the fact that writing is more conservative than speech, so if we already observe more analytic grammar in texts before the Norman Conquest, that would mean that speech was probably already way more analytic than that. I'd say the timing doesn't quite work for the Normans to be a major reason for it. I much prefer the idea that Old Norse and the Danelaw are the reason for English becoming more analytical. I think it makes more sense with the evidence. But again, I also think we don't really *need* an explanation to begin with.

[@seanrowshandel1680]

Japanese people say that their language is basically a Chinese creole, though. Before China introduced Japan to feudalism, Japanese people had a completely different appearance. Yes, it seems like their entire feudal history began when China brought feudalism to them, against their will. Of course, our perspective of the situation might be influenced by a "blind spot" obscuring ancient Japan, which we are responsible for acknowledging when we cover the subject.

[@jandron94]

If you read Chaucer (the Tales of Canterbury) you might get a second thought on this issue. If we add Chaucer's pronunciation and spelling into the equation then the creolisation idea is even less questionable.

[@seanrowshandel1680]

@@jandron94 Well, he might have been part of a French subcommunity....

[@davidmandic3417]

@@seanrowshandel1680 Japanese has a huge number of Chinese loanwords, but it's structure is totally different from that of Chinese. And it's grammar is fairly complex. That's not what a creole would look like.

[@davidmandic3417]

@@jandron94 The best way to solve this mystery is having a look at Haitian Creole and comparing that to post-1066 English. English definitely isn't a French Creole. Or if we look at Tok Pisin (which is an English-based creole) it's immediatelly obvious that even its most basic vocabulary (including pronouns and similar) comes from English, with some exceptions. You don't see anything like that in English.

[@producedbypodcast]

That's when I want to enjoy some entertaining content and Gideon tricks me into learning at the same time by making it fun! 🔥Great video idea as always. 🤓

[@LetThemTalkTV]

Glad you like it. It's always a pleasure.

[@wombatkins]

I am a Japanese learner, and a language learner in general and English itself is such an interesting language that i often forget its complexities and heritage

[@ReiKakariki]

💚🍀🌱🦎🐉🍾🥂🍸 Welcome to Romanic English and nice learning here 👍 👌 🍹🍺🥗

[@gaufrid1956]

Creoles are interesting. In the Zamboanga Peninsula in Mindanao Philippines, people speak the only Spanish creole in Southeast Asia. It's called Chavacano, and it's largely Seventeenth Century Castellan Spanish mixed with Cebuano words. I live in Cagayan de Oro City in Northern Mindanao, understand a lot of Spanish and Cebuano, and can understand Chavacano well. English of course is a very different story. I'd go along with the Old Norse being the main influence on English idea, but French without a doubt was also a major influence on both vocabulary and grammar. We speak Cebuano here, but the Mindanao dialect which is more Spanish influenced. Yes, not a creole but having a lot of loan words from Spanish. Cebuano is a synthetic language, so word order can vary, and particles indicate the actor and recipient of the action. There are no genders (apart from Spanish gender words) and no adjective agreement at all. Looking at the words for kitchen utensils, I've worked out that before the Spanish Colonial Period, the Filipinos cooked in pots and barbecued as well, and ate and drank from bowls. They ate with their hands. All the other words for kitchen and eating utensils are Spanish loan words. Another great video, Gideon!

[@ReiKakariki]

@@gaufrid1956 🍺🍻🥂🍹🍸🍦🍨🍧🍷🥃🥃🥤🧋🧃 Thanks for did the swords and arrows points on english and show the austronesian analogy. Touchdown for you to reveals the Romanicity of English.

[@joebombero1]

When I lived in Texas I loved showing TV Patrol in Chavacano to my Mexican friends. They understood the programs without effort. They were always fascinated. I am always trying to find single Chavacana women as a matchmaker for my male hispanic Texan friends, but alas, I have never been able to find any here. I retired to Cavite in 2018.

[@hoangkimviet8545]

Hmmm... This question is like "Was England a French colony?"

[@KamBar2020]

Make BAGUETTE Great Again 🥖

[@phillipc3286]

It was a Norman one

[@machi3353]

In some way it was, at least about the language, England had few Kings that only speak French and others that only German

[@BritishBeachcomber]

​@@phillipc3286But the Normans were Vikings who settled in Normandy before invading England. They were not French.

[@MrBeiragua]

​@@BritishBeachcomber The original Normans were Viking invaders, but by the time of William I they spoke a dialect of french and were just french people with a cool lore.

[@ajstube54]

Such a balanced video. So well put together to say many things in a short time! Truly, English and French could not sound more dissimilar. People from nordic countries feel at home with English.

[@jonebjrheim3148]

We do the same thing in Scandinavian and in English when a sentence short circuits (you don't know what is the subject and the object). In Norwegian we throw in an "it is" section, thus: "Det (S) er katten (S) som biter hunden" (O) and "Det (S) er hunden (S) som biter katten (O)". In English: "It is the cat that is biting the dog" and vice versa. This arrangement usually clarifies which nouns are the subject and object.

[@ajs41]

Interesting how in Norwegian you put the "the" at the end of the word. I haven't discovered any other languages that do that, but perhaps other Nordic languages also do it.

[@jrault7589]

I am a Frenchman and what I found difficult to learn in English was the pronunciation, once I got it, everything changed.

[@brawndothethirstmutilator9848]

I believe that street runs both ways 😂. As a Spanish speaker I can muddle my way through written French, but can barely grasp more than a word when it’s spoken (and when I try to read French aloud I end up sounding like an extremely drunken Brazilian). Your phonetics are wild.

[@ReiKakariki]

🤭🤭🤭🍧🍷🥃🥤🧋🧃🍸🍹🍹🍺🍻🍻🥂🍦🍨🍾🍿🧈🍾🥗🥘

[@NormanF62]

True with modern English but if you learn Medieval English the pronunciation will feel oddly familiar.

[@ReiKakariki]

@@jrault7589 If you learn middle english, you learn after modern english, middle english use french phonetics, modern english is simple is the phonetics of middle english plus ancient english, without mistification.

[@nosuchthing8]

Same applies to me in reverse. If I watch a French movie with subtitles it's a LOT easier to understand. The French pronunciation seems wild and extremely beautiful at the same time. Does English seem boring, ugly, without emotion to you when spoken?

[@serenissimarespublicavenet3945]

“About 5%” is from old Norse” And since when is old Norse not Germanic?

[@SinarNila]

😂 true😂

[@minutemansam1214]

While true, it's important to know the words English which were passed down from our Proto-Germanic roots vs the words we got specifically from the Norse. For example, the English word heaven comes from our Proto-Germanic root, and is a cognate to the German Himmel, which just means the sky. Sky, however, was borrowed from the Old Norse sky, which means, well, sky. So while sky is a Germanic word, it wasn't passed down to English from it's proto-Germanic roots, but is a loanword from Old Norse.

[@PasteurizedLettuce]

West Germanic vs old Norse

[@Sauvageonne]

In Nigerian English, it's not uncommon to hear "Me I know..." which sounds even more French.

[@erichamilton3373]

That's regular English emphasis: me, I know...

[@erichamilton3373]

That's American English emphasis: Me, I know...

[@SinarNila]

In french: Moi, je sebere...

[@davidh4374]

never heard this in any American dialect Can you give an example of how this phrase is used in English?

[@erichamilton3373]

@@davidh4374 A: I don't care for kale. B: Me, I love kale. Or Me and mom, we stay in touch by email.

[@greendsnow]

As a language lover who happens to speak Turkish as the native tongue, the ease of learning those languages goes like this for me: * Swedish > English > Dutch > Italian = Spanish > Portuguese > French = German * French is by far the most perplexing European language for a Turkish native speaker, if we don't count Caucasian and Slavic languages and Greek. And Swedish is the easiest... It should have been the world language instead, sounds so melodic and full of joy.

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

The main reason English isn't a French creole, or even a Norse creole, is that it has not gone through the process of becoming a creole. That is where first a new simplified 'pidgin' language is created as a second language through the contact between two different native languages which are unknown to each other's speaker communities. And second that pidgin becomes a mother tongue by being transmitted to children, perhaps if the pidgin is the only common language between parents and so is used in the home around the children. That hasn't happened to English because... English is a native language that has persisted all the way through the processes of influence from Old Norse and mediaeval French. The fact that it's been heavily influenced by these incomer languages is not the same as being born anew by the pidginisation/creolisation process. The idea that the mediaeval influences on English are creolisation has been made by people who are not familiar enough with either the details of pidginisation and creolisation, or those of the changes English went through. If Later Middle English were a creole, we would expect the following to be true: * The majority of vocabulary, including all the more basic words, would be from French * The grammar would follow neither that of Old English or Old French, but the typical ultra-simple grammar that pidgins have * Where grammar deviated from that and became more complex it would do so more on the French model than the English * The phonology would also have been levelled and simplified rather than carrying on from the phonology of Old English in a series of regular sound changes * There would have been quite a few mixed English-Norman couples for whom a pidgin English-French would have been the domestic language, picked up as a first language by their children, somehow spreading to other people None of these things were true, instead other things happened: * While there was a big vocabulary influx from French, there is a high survival rate of Old English words, especially in the most basic roles * The grammar changed, and some elements seemed to change towards a French model, but many other grammar points continued modified Old English trends, while some changes are due to internal mechanisms * The phonology also changed according to gradual shifts from Old English patterns, with notable additions due to borrowing of French vocab * There was no general pattern of English-Norman households, and most people kept to their own ethnic group, learning the other's language if at all as a second one rather than generating a mixed, simplified contact language The notion that post-Conquest English is a creole needs to die.

[@urvanhroboatos8044]

Basically, Anglo Saxon and Norman French fused into a new language.

[@SinarNila]

Nope 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 🙅🏻 and never. The notion about english as germanic should have to die 😑 forever by all ways. It's a Romanic Creole and Romanic today, simple as that.

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

@@urvanhroboatos8044 No that didn't happen either. It's less of an illusion than the creole one, but it's still an illusion. English continued all the way through, French just had a powerful effect on it, especially in its vocabulary. English is no more a mixed or hybrid language than a creole.

[@rowdyriemer]

I saw a good example of a Scandinavian person having an easy time learning English. I moved to a small town during the middle of my 2nd year of high school. At the end of the year, everyone was saying their goodbyes to a Swedish foreign exchange student in my Spanish class - I had absolutely no idea she was a foreign exchange student up to that point. Not only did she speak perfect English, but she had the same small-town Texas accent as everyone else - something everyone joked about when saying their goodbyes.

[@petretepner8027]

When I worked for the EU Council translation department, we spoke to everybody from other language divisions in French -- except the Danes (Sweden had not yet joined), whom we addressed in English. For some reason, this was regarded as a courtesy to them, rather than to us, the English.

[@tommyvictorbuch6960]

It makes sense, in multiple ways, that English has become the lingua franca.

[@samuelmelton8353]

lol

[@iamdigory]

I think I see what you did there

[@tommyvictorbuch6960]

@@iamdigory 😉

[@johnyoung1601]

It's actually damned unfortunate.

[@wild8074]

It's Fascinating 👍

[@brettevill9055]

Q: What do you get when you teach Germans to speak Latin? A: French. Q: What do you get when you teach Germans to speak French? A: English. Q. What do you get when you teach Germans to speak English? A: American.

[@lupus.andron.exhaustus]

Q. What do you get when you teach Germans to speak English? A: American. Wrong! You will get headache and bleeding ears from all those words like "zee", "zet", "zings",... 😁

[@markaxworthy2508]

Q. What do you get when you teach the English to speak any foreign language? A. A miracle!

[@luboripel4581]

The very 1st question should be: Q: What do you get when you teach Celts to speak Latin? A: French. Nonetheless, the original question and answer made me laugh.

[@ludoviciusmagnus5125]

French is Celt + Latin + Greek

[@brettevill9055]

@@luboripel4581 I was referring to Gauls teaching Latin to Franks, Goths, Burgundians etc., but it’s a joke, and a laugh is all I was hoping for.

[@barbaragemin5117]

Interesting, Gideon, thanks . I was always convinced , having taught EFL in Italy until a few years ago, that the majority of influence in English was Latin. The Romans. You could argue that Norman French has roots in Latin. I always enjoy your videos about the history of English. Thanks again

[@Bayerwaldler]

Word order in German: 1. „Der Mann sah die Frau“. „Wen sah der Mann?“ „Die Frau sah der Mann!“. 2. „Die Frau sah den Mann“. „Wen sah die Frau?“ „Den Mann sah die Frau!“

[@BudoReflex]

Wow. So, the missing piece of this video is German is analytic? Now I have to look that up😅

[@ReiKakariki]

I like German, German is fully loyal to Germanic no matters the time or space, German protects the memory and energy of Germanic not matters if it's peace or war. 🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂🥂 Epic idiom. 🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚

[@cleliac.2470]

Ja 👍und zumindest theoretisch geht auch noch - wenngleich aus der modernen Umgangssprache verschwunden - "Es sah die Frau den Mann / Es sah den Mann die Frau", siehe etwa "Sah ein Knab ein Röslein steh'n".

[@Jonassoe]

​​@@BudoReflexGerman is far more synthetic than analytic. It just happens that the masculine gender can decline in the accusative case, so you can use that to play around with word order a bit.

[@minutemansam1214]

@@ReiKakariki Icelandic is more Germanic than even German. It's isolation helps preserve it.

[@ogunsiron2]

I like to think of english as a germanic tree with french leaves, while the other germanic languages are germanic from the root to the leaves, for the most part.

[@JamieR2077]

Great way to put it

[@jeanvaljean7266]

Well, German does have a fair share of words of Latin (Italian/French) origin, too. In some cases, there are German words of Latin origin whereas in English, there are Germanic words. F.ex: 1) window (lit. eye to the wind) in German: window = Fenster (it: fenestra, fr: fenêtre) 2) the sea = das Meer (fr: la mer) 3) the shower = die Dusche (fr: la douche)

[@ogunsiron2]

@jeanvaljean7266 they also use "see" for the sea. as part of the proper name for a particiular sea.

[@jeanvaljean7266]

@@ogunsiron2 I know because I'm German myself ;) the lake = der See the sea = das Meer / die See The use of "die See" (with feminine article) is more used in a poetic/romantic way. Sailors used to prefer to speak of "die See" rather than of "das Meer". And then of course you have Nordsee (North Sea) and Ostsee (Baltic Sea). But my point was that there a few words where in German there's a word of Latin origin wheras in English there's a word of Germanic origin.

[@petretepner8027]

I think "a Germanic tree with French leaves" better describes Dutch, may be even German itself, than English. For us (English), French penetrates much deeper into the branches and the trunk of our tree, though, I will concede, not into our "deepest roots".

[@MarkDDG]

I think it’s important to note that other Germanic languages, particularly German and Dutch, also contain a significant number of French loanwords. For example, Dutch words like bureau and etage (floor) are of French origin, while English uses different terms such as ‘desk’ instead of bureau. This variation reflects the historical context of language borrowing; English was heavily influenced by French after the Norman Conquest, whereas Dutch absorbed a lot of French vocabulary through cultural exchanges and French rule as well. Interestingly, even when both languages borrow the same word, they often adapt it differently. English may change pronunciation or meaning, while Dutch tends to retain more of the original structure. Additionally, many French loanwords in both languages appear in formal contexts, illustrating how they can shape tone and style. For instance, English pairs like ‘help’ (Germanic) and ‘assist’ (French) showcase this distinction, as do Dutch terms like beginnen (to begin) and commenceren (to commence).

[@mrkjsmooth16]

Also German uses the subjective and sein for the past tense like French and Italian uses to be. English has modal verbs like German too. I know because I took both French and German in school.

[@wasstl2153]

Interesting, but there is no possible comparison. German and Dutch simply borrowed French words, rather recently, while French played a major role in the making of the English language, with some kind of hybridation in the end, as seen not only in vocabulary and spelling, or speech patterns, but also in "grammar" at large, especially with the use of French prefixes and suffixes to shape new words. "Believable" or "beautyful" or "embodyment" are hybrid words, for instance. Fun fact : In English, "Bureau de change" is called a... "bureau de change".

[@petretepner8027]

_Desk_ is from Medieval Latin _desca._

[@lev_rzld_]

Isn't bureau in dutch is dienst ?

[@petretepner8027]

@@lev_rzld_ It depends on the context. _Bureau_ can refer either to a physical item of furniture _(=schrijftafel)_ or to [a room in] a building _(=kantoor),_ or to an agency. It can also be used in all three senses in English, though as a piece of furniture, it in that language suggests a rather fancy, possibly antique writing desk.

[@bonbahoue]

Here is an excerpt from a poem written in the 11th century, "La vie de Saint Alexis (The Life of Saint Alexis)", corresponding to the French that William the Conqueror must have spoken at the time: De la dolor que demenat li pedre Grant fut la noise, si l’entendit la medre : La vint corant com feme forsenede, Batant ses palmes, cridant, eschavelede ; Veit mort son fil, a terre chiet pasmede. In modern French this would be: De la douleur que témoigna le père Grand fut le bruit; la mère l'entendit. Elle accourut comme femme forcenée, Battant ses paumes, criant, échevelée : Voit mort son fils, à terre choit pâmée. translation : Of the pain that the father showed Great was the noise; the mother heard it. She ran like a frenzied woman, Clapping her palms, screaming, disheveled: Sees her son dead, falls fainting to the ground.

[@ogunsiron2]

i would not have guessed that "noise" was a very old french word. There is no trace of it in modern french that I can think of. The old french to modern french changes are the expected ones : the accent circonflexe "^" was always an "s" and "au" was "al" etc. Cool stuff. (I am a native french speaker)

[@danielbriggs991]

@@ogunsiron2 I was going to say it's all over the Chronicles of Jean Froissart, until I realized it's the writing of a 14th-century chronicler translated into modern French in 2024 leaving some Middle French words untouched.

[@alexmood6407]

@@bonbahoue easy for modern French speakers to understand. Now try this with comparing Old English and modern English 😂

[@alexmood6407]

@@ogunsiron2 now try Old English: Hyse cwom gangan, þær he hie wisse stondan in wincsele, stop feorran to, hror hægstealdmon, hof his agen hrægl hondum up, hrand under gyrdels hyre stondendre stiþes nathwæt, worhte his willan; wagedan buta. Þegn onnette, wæs þragum nyt tillic esne, teorode hwæþre æt stunda gehwam strong ær þon hio, werig þæs weorces. Hyre weaxan ongon under gyrdelse þæt oft gode men ferðþum freogað ond mid feo bicgað.

[@bonbahoue]

@@alexmood6407 Oh no, it's not easy! We can read and guess some words of course. First time i read it, i didn't understant the text. I needed translation. It's like reading some italian, spanish or portuguese. Old english is another language. Words with letters that no longer exist. The demonstration, with this poem, proves that when we say that English (part of english) comes from French, we just have to understand that our current French also comes from this period. 1066, one starting point, two different directions. Today, if we spoke with a person from this period, it would be like speaking to a foreigner. We would not understand any more than if an Italian spoke to us but certainly more than with an English person speaking old english..

[@AdaL0906]

Thanks the franco-norman conquest, there is a pretty simple trick when we get lost in a French Speaking country. You pronounce an english word with French accent, then you have 50% chance it functions. And even read french is quite easy (especially the "yard's french"). Furthermore, when I visited Canada, I could understand every French written signs. It is a reality that English is a French creole.

[@petretepner8027]

Québec has really gone overboard with francizing road signs, insisting on _Arrêt_ while every other French-speaking country in the world, including France itself, is content with _Stop._

[@jameshepburn4631]

Part of what made English the international language is it’s openness to adopting foreign words and expressing concepts in an easily understood way. It’s given English the largest vocabulary by far and approaching a near monopoly as the common language at conferences, scientific conclaves, entertainment venues, academic seminars, and the like. It’s by far the most learned second language world wide and essentially a must for educated people. Contrast this with a bunch of other languages such as French where official & political efforts are continuously made to prevent and forbid adoption of foreign words. They go into contortions to express a substitute for a word like lumberjack. English is blessed with it’s two main roots, the original Anglo-Saxon Germanic overlaid with its Latin via the Norman French. You can either sweat or perspire, either talk to each other or converse, and either end or terminate a comment.

[@petretepner8027]

The French word _bûcheron_ dates from the mid-16th century, whereas _lumberjack_ was not coined until the early 1830s.

[@jameshepburn4631]

@ Here in America we’re most familiar with Quebec Canadian French. On the syndicated lumber sports show sponsored by Stihl Saws, the Quebecois are called an ‘ouvrier de le bois’ while the Anglophones are ‘lumberjacks’. The literal English would be something like skilled tradesman of the woods. Never heard the word ‘bucheron’ in at least three seasons of the show. The invention of the word ‘lumberjack’ so relatively recently shows how adaptable English is to simplifying concepts by adding new vocabulary.

[@petretepner8027]

@@jameshepburn4631 _Bûcheron_ is the usual word in European French, and I have found it in texts published in Canada too. _Ouvrier du bois_ would seem very vague here, and could potentially cover carpenters, joiners and all sorts of other tradespeople as well as forestry workers. An earlier (18th century) North American version of _lumberjack_ is _lumberman_ , while in England _timberman_ is attested in this sense from the early 15th century, and _feller_ from around 1400. It doesn't really strike me that the North American terms are in any sense "simplifications", relative to the European ones. P.S. _Je suis bûcheron_ is a country'n'western-style song written and performed by the Québécois duo Chantal and Réjean Massé.

[@diegoflores9237]

No. It became the world language because the USA (English speakers) is the holder of the world's reserve currency, the dollar. The USA's military has over 800 bases all over the world. So English is the world language because of imperialism. Just like Spanish is spoken in many parts of the American continent from Mexico to Argentina because Spain back then was the world's most powerful country.

[@petretepner8027]

@@diegoflores9237 The extent of the British Empire must also have played a role. But as you point out, it is political power that determines what becomes a regional or global language, not some inherent "superiority" of the language itself. Curious though (just as a side note) that Greek, not Latin, was the lingua franca of the Roman Empire.

[@Trappist4us]

I heard before, the comparative forms of "long" adjectives, i.e. adjectives with more than 3 syllables, are of French origin. I mean, the use of "more", in "more beautiful", "more difficult", etc., those "more + adjectives" form is from French "plus + adjectives" form.

[@petretepner8027]

Curioser and curioser!

[@topquark22]

The NeXT/NeXTStep had a wonderfully easy way to type accented letters on a standard US keyboard. For example, to type a letter with an acute accent such as in "café," you would type ALT-e and then the letter. For the dieresis in "naïve," you would type "ALT-u i". And similarly, ALT-a before a grave accent, ALT-c for a cedilla, etc. What a beautiful, intuitive interface, and I still wish we could have this system today!

[@Azar-etboul]

One funny fact: There is a proverb in French that says: Pierre qui roule n’amasse pas mousse. The same English proverb says: A rolling stone gathers no moss. In French, it means it’s better not to move (mousse/moss is seing as positive) while in English it means it’s better to move (mousse/moss is negative). Very similar translation (roule / rolling, mousse / moss), but they have the exact opposite meaning! Don’t know if it comes from creolisation (or creolation)?

[@SinarNila]

@@Azar-etboul This creolisation we call in linguistics, cultural creolisation, when differents idioms shares the same dictates, slangs,tales and myths, creeds. Your example it's a example of creolisation of dictates in specific case, in general case, creolisation of wisdom and experience of life.

[@SinarNila]

In this case the dictates are differents not equal ,by the context of meaning and saying.

[@chrisamies2141]

That's odd, I thought the saying was negative, that it's better not to move - including in English.

[@David-ru8xf]

mousse is a germanic loanword from Frankish or Old Dutch mosa (moss), French have a lot of germanic loanword which were later passed in English: wait, from Norman French waiter, from Frankish wahtu (guard, watch, wait), warranty, heron, hamlet, sturgeon, forest, abandon, arrange, and many many others, so Norman French borrowed to English a lot of germanic words of Frankish origin, not only latin words.

[@SinarNila]

Yes, but in his report there was a difference in the meaning of the sayings, as they deny each other in meaning, so you can't be too careful, they are different sayings using similar vocabulary. When working with translation, you are obliged to be accurate and detailed, there is no way around it, the job's bones.

[@Sauvageonne]

It would be easier to learn English in France if foreign TV content was not dubbed into French. Scandinavia and the Netherlands don't have this level of dubbing, if at all. So for a French toddler who watches Peppa Pig in English, picking up the language would presumably be much easier. Spanish and Italian should be easier to learn for a French person, but being exposed just 4 hours per week in school make the French no better at Spanish than they are at English....

[@Wazkaty]

Yes ! As we say in French "Je plussoie !"

[@jandron94]

Is learning English such a good thing ? I prefer French toddlers to be exposed to good quality French-speaking programs and have a very good command of French as they grow up. Let's margenalize a bit English in our lives.

[@SinarNila]

🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻

[@petretepner8027]

En Belgique, on y met des sous-titres. Tu sais pas capter les chaînes belges, là où tu te trouves ?

[@chestnutters9504]

0:13 last time I checked old Norse was a Germanic language

[@LetThemTalkTV]

I know, please see my pinned comment.

[@Leviwosc]

English is in all comparisons usually the odd one out. But that doesn't mean it's a lesser language, on the contrary, it makes English to be linguistically one of the more interesting languages. I say this as a native Dutch speaker. What about French. I'm learning French right now and knowing English is really an advantage in this process.

[@SiqueScarface]

12:25 The same exists in German with 'von' and in Dutch with 'van'. While in Dutch, this is considered normal, in German, it is frowned upon and called 'dialectal use', not 'High German'. Nonetheless, it is widespread. So using 'of' instead of the Genitive might not be a Romanism at all.

[@jorgereyes3465]

Very interesting. I'm an English teacher, I also speak French and I know some German and Italian. My native language is Spanish, so I am somehow aware of this contributions from other languages to the English language. There are a few words coming from the Aztec language as well, such as: chocolate, tomato, mocassin, just to name a few. I believe all of this makes English a "unique" language regarding it's vocabulary, structure and simplification. I also think that's the reason why it's become a very popular language around the world.

[@SoWhat89]

As a Linguist, I must say that English being a Germanic language is about as debatable as whether the Earth is round. The main argument is vocabulary. Yes, there is more Latin/French vocab in the English language than in other Germanic languages. Still, many of the Latin/French words in English that are pointed out in videos like this are also used in other Germanic languages. That's really not an indicator. And now look at your own example here, the excerpt from Harry Potter: 1. Your excerpt consists of 46 words, 16 of which are French/Latin and "Mr." and "Mrs." are just a male and female verison of the same word. That's around 30%, not 50%. 2. Out of these 16 words "number", "perfect" and "normal" are totally common in German as well, "mysterious" and "involved" are also used but a little less frequently. Even "just" is sometimes used in German and words like "except" have derivatives like "exceptional"="exzeptionell". That leaves us with about 7-9 words that are somehow unique to English. You mentioned the suffixes like -tion but they are not unique to English. Situation, Emotion etc. exist in every German language. It's just normal that English was also influenced by Latin and in its case by French in particular. And there also is something to the argument that "basic" words are Germanic. Grammar: The of-genitive? Guys, some Germans envy you for still having the s-genitive as it is dying out in German. There's even a funny saying that goes kind of like "The dative is the death of the genitive", using the dative (here: of-genitive) in the saying itself. Just look at: Pronouns, verb-subject inversion in various types of question, adjective before the noun (and sorry, the handful of fancy examples you presented there, such as "president elect", are outlandish exceptions). Even the tenses of countless verbs completely resemble German: see, saw, seen= sehe, sah, gesehen; hear, heard, heard= höre, hörte, gehört, drink, drank, drunk = trink, trank, getrunken; sing, sang, sung = singe, sang, gesungen and even with the same exceptions, e.g.: there is no bring, brang, brung, neither is there bring, brang, gebrungen in German but bringen, brachte, gebracht = bring, brought, brought I could go on like this for ages. What's really interesting, and I think it deserves some sociological research being conducted on it, is why some people, often Brits I get the feeling, desperately defend the idea of English being a Romance language and overly emphasize the misleading percentages of the origin of English vocabulary. Like, why... Is it a wish for otherness from the Germanics just like they always underline that they're not European?

[@quantumweirdness1710]

Well except can function like a preposition in English. There are others like sans, via, across, ergo etc.

[@quantumweirdness1710]

Also, English has something like 12-17 tenses. Where do you think we got that from?

[@SoWhat89]

@@quantumweirdness1710 These tenses consist of Germanic words. Have and to be, the most important auxiliaries in the different tenses are Germanic.

[@SoWhat89]

@@quantumweirdness1710 And? How do a few Latin derived prepositions, many of which also exist in other Germanic languages, make it less of a Germanic language?

[@quantumweirdness1710]

@@SoWhat89 The word "have" is heavily influenced by French. Similarly, other prepositions like "of." English, because of its heavy lexical borrowing, suffixes and prefixes, modal words from French (very and just), prepositions etc. is not a normal Germanic language. You could even argue words like "a/an," "is" and "or" come from French, words the English language cannot do without. Even other things. This video does not argue for it but a case could be made that the pluralization in English comes from French, primarily because of how we say it.

[@jerzyzajaczkowski8537]

I don't know French, but because I know English, I can understand scientific mathematical works written in French without any problems

[@JJLemire]

Exemple, soit (let) f une fonction derivable sur le segment [0,1], il existe un point m …

[@SinarNila]

@@jerzyzajaczkowski8537 The French maths follows english maths, both uses the same Micenic, Greek , Phrigians maths symbols and concepts of maths. Both uses the same words too on calculation area til today.

[@lostinthesupermarket]

English is one of the most flexible languages there is. Its both good and bad. Bad because its a complete mess but good because anyone can speak it almost however they want and they would still be able to communicate .

[@ReiKakariki]

💚💚💚💚💚

[@thefunbuns1]

Despite the inconsistency and anachronisms, I love English spelling. These unique differences carry so much history and so many stories. I love the feeling of learning why something is spelled differently and what development in the language created that difference

[@frost1183]

The problem with saying “this big percentage of English words are from such and such origin” is that you have to understand that there are THOUSANDS of terms scientific and technical or medical that are NEVER used day to day. It’s something like 90% of English’s daily words are Germanic so obviously English is Germanic. I took time a Spanish class and learning some German and I understand wayyy more German than I ever did Spanish because almost none of our day to day words are Latin.

[@andrewfletcher1341]

Hello from Paris France ,original lessons and original teacher!,for me you ARE the best teacher in youtube with Liz from UK and Rachel from USA .By the way Sir do you speak french ?

[@RJSmith-jo7oe]

Many years ago, there was this writing how ask for 2 species of mongoose. Is it mongooses or mongeese? The solution stated as follows: "Send me a mongoose. P.S. And please send me an other one as well".

[@kipwatson]

One of the things I learnt at uni was that SVO sentence order is 'primitive' (in the Syntactic sense of being closer to Universal Grammar, requiring a less complex Transformational Grammar to produce). The process of Creolisation is also a process of simplification; pidgens and creoles tend to be SVO, because when the complexities of a language are stripped back you get a more Syntactically Primitive grammar, even without the influence of the other language. The same thing seems to have happened to Spanish and French when they diverged from Latin, even though there was no German linguistic influence during the process. Anyway - great video, thanks heaps!

[@boptillyouflop]

I think SVO being considered "primitive" is a little much, though it's certainly a common order... generally order comes with grammar type: - Isolative or Analytic: Almost always SVO - Case-marking: Usually SOV or variable order - Verb-subject-and-object-person-marking: That kind of language can have any word order

[@kipwatson]

@@boptillyouflop : yes, I was trying to be succinct, but I wasn't very clear. The theory (which I found persuasive) is that the natural or default word order is SVO (hence Primitive in the sense of primal); that other word orders are a result of movement of sentence constituents (mainly Noun Phrases); and that at a certain threshold, inflection requires such movement. Sentence re-ordering is part of what Chomsky called a Transformation Grammar (all the processes that cause a given language to be distinct from Universal Grammar, the innate language potential in any human mind). Anyway, the theory is that SVO is the innate, natural word-order (which uninflected languages all have; and lightly inflected languages have to some degree); and that when languages lose some or all of their inflection, they will revert to SVO word order, irrespective of influences from other languages. It was a fascinating theory with a lot of evidence to support it.

[@petretepner8027]

@@kipwatson I'm not entirely convinced by this. British Sign Language order is OSV, for example.

[@Inglesemente]

Very interesting video! One observation: in Italian people say "sono io", but for the third person singular they use the object pronoun "e' lui" (masculine), "e' lei" (feminine), even though grammar would require that they use the subject.

[@resilientcomposer]

Dutch feels really familiar for an English speaker like me, more than what you describe, in particular. So, my guess is that it would have done what dutch would have done , since there seems to be a lot of convergent development between both languages since the french took over.

[@HarryHaller1963]

Comment on the pronunciation of "house" and "mouse"...it never occurred to me that the Scottish accent might be a retention of the French pronunciation. My father's family had a traditional grace they would say before important meals: "God is great; God is good; and we thank him for this food." I was more than 50 years old before I realized that "good" and "food" originally did rhyme, because my father's father's grandparents were from Scotland. One more, related, point: someone with a strong Canadian accent (English-speakers, that is) would say "house" and "mouse" with the "ou" sort of halfway between the French "ou" and the English--which, I suppose is because so many Canadians are descendants of Scottish settlers during the colonial era?

[@JoaoMariaNunes]

The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic.

[@iainmc9859]

All languages are a creole, they change and adapt over time, the longer time goes on the more 'loan' words, phrases and grammatical phrasing occurs due to contact with other parts of the world ... is there a root language of all, probably not as language developed in multiple settlements in east Africa before we started blindly following the primaeval Sat Nav. Who wrote your Germanic language family tree at 0:46 and was it done in 1896. Bottom row from right to left - Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Faroese, Icelandic, German, Dutch, Frisian, Alcohol and English 🤷‍♂

[@tao2bruno259]

I love your videos and I'm French. :-) I only learnt a few years ago (... is "ten years ago" a few years ago?...) that the English language was greatly influenced by French. I was not told that when I was learning English. Quite the opposite. Always appreciate your way to approach a subject, not cliché at all. ;-)

[@generaldodger940]

I really enjoyed this!

[@pablooscarfernandez6077]

From 🇦🇷. Mi hijo mayor fue a un secundario muy selecto, algo como Eton pero público y ahí hacían hincapié en la similitud del frances e ingles. Los profesores de ambas asignaturas les hacian notar las similitudes permanentemente.

[@SinarNila]

✌✌✌✌✌✌✌✌ 🌈🍹🍹🍹🍹🍹🌈🌈🌈

[@lorenzoderobertis8116]

I appreciate this video very very much. Sorry for my english. When I was about 14 (lot a time ago) I was fighting with my school camarades about english is more similar to german rather than italian, that is why for them I had an advantage, knowing already german. I was not able to convince them there was so much vocabulary similar to italian words.

[@JayTemple]

1:10 Is that when we stopped putting our verbs at the end of subordinate clauses?

[@christopherneil8265]

I dunno about your last points about the ease of learning a language. I have never taken French, but don’t have trouble speaking it when I’ve been there. It’s also much easier to understand on the face of it as a fellow stress-timed language. However, I’ve heard people speak West African English, which is entirely incomprehensible.

[@ReiKakariki]

🍺🍸💚🥗🍹🥂🍾🐉🦎🌱🍀🍻🎉 Great testimony.

[@RJSmith-jo7oe]

"That doesn't sound very sophisticated, innit?" Haha

[@teveve31]

It is I, Leclerc!

[@johnmc67]

As a mostly obscure intellectual exercise, sure, the case can be made. However the reality is that english is a polyglot language, that can both absorb foreign influences, but more than any other language, creates its own words. Computer, High School, telephone, T-shirt…

[@ReiKakariki]

Youre right english is a polyglot idiom cos English is a global creole of our days. 💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚 English is victorious global creole.

[@wasstl2153]

Telephone is a learned word, based on Greek. But maybe it first appeared in the USA ? That would make sense. What about "television" ?

[@mahnas92]

14:50 is interesting, especially "house" and "mouse", because in Scandinavian it is "hus" and "mus", just like you said they were pronounced in Old English.

[@petretepner8027]

And are to this day in parts of Scotland and (I think) Northern England: "There's a moose loose in the hoose!"

[@joshadams8761]

I enjoy signaling my erudition by using the French words “frisson” and “rapprochement”. On a more-serious note, the comparative and superlative forms “more X” and “most X” likely reflect French influence. Other Germanic languages mostly use the “X-er” and “X-est” forms.

[@BubuMarimba]

English is changing with the ruling dynasties. So what is it now? Oldenburg?

[@SinarNila]

English became the global mundialect creole and never follows the house of Oldenburg, in others words, don't follow and don't obey Danish in any case....as you prefer...

[@petretepner8027]

I lost track after Saxe-Coburg.

[@SinarNila]

English follows Normand, Neustrian since middle ages

[@jdlg185]

As a Frenchman I think that learning english is very difficult because french and english gradually drifted apart with the great vowel shift. Nowadays a new phenomenon is emerging, as the English hardly pronounce their own language, which makes them so hard to understand. I fink I ave a bo’le ev wa’er...

[@jagolago-bob]

You are associating with the wrong English people. 😁

[@calincucuietu8220]

A' fink A' 'ev a bo'' o' wa'a.

[@MattMcIrvin]

The French I learned in school in the US bears little resemblance to what people actually speak in France, which to me seems to have about half of the syllables missing. I think it's just a characteristic of conversational informal language the world over, as compared with the very formal and regularized version one learns from textbooks.

[@jagolago-bob]

@@MattMcIrvin That's funny because the French I learned in school in the UK is exactly how they speak in France (I only noticed slightly different pronunciation in Paris). Maybe your teacher wasn't very good?

[@jamesMartinelli-x2t]

As an American most of the time an Englishman is hard to understand unless I pay rapt attention.

[@angeljimenez3362]

I'd like to add another comment, from the perspective of a native Spanish speaker. Even though French is supposed to be the furthest roman language from Spanish (except Romanian), the reality is that in a relatively short period of three, four years, one can reach a quite good level of French, whereas one might have been studying English for decades and still be kind of stuk at intermediate level. And that considering that English grammar is relatively simple. There are aspects, probably related with phonetics, weak forms of words, intonation patterns, and so on, that makes English quite a distant language for roman speakers. I'm not saying that the French influence on English is not huge, but it's still a Germanic language after all...

[@MattMcIrvin]

It's kind of true the other way around, too, as an English speaker--I spent many years studying French and even though much of the vocabulary is familiar (sometimes deceptively so), there are aspects of the language that will never be 100% natural to me, that are common features of Romance languages.

[@SinarNila]

This is what makes English a super-Creole, for a Romance speaker, English still sounds Celtic and Germanic, for a Germanic speaker, English sounds Celtic, Italic and Romance, for a Phrygian and Greek speaker and Ibero and Anatolian, English already sounds like a mixture of many languages, which is why it is called a global super-creole Anglian language and because it has so many grammatical, symbolic and linguistic mixtures and fusions, English is this global super-creole of now. The linguistic mathematics of English is simple, take away its grammar, grammar, Celtic, Iberian, Anatolian, Mycenaean, Greek, Phrygian and Italic linguistics. English is a mere Germanic creole. Remove the semantics, grammar and Germanic linguistics of English, and it remains a Romanesque, Greek, Celtic, Mycenaean, Iberian and Anatolian creole mixed today with Amerindian, African, Asian and Austronesian languages. The essence of English has always been to be a European Creole and because of this European Creole essence, English has become the global Creole of now. Pure English never existed and nor will it exist, because the term English itself, in practice is and has always been the purest linguistic mixture. And in the current state that English is in now, it is in a Romanesque stage now. Tomorrow could be another internship, what doesn't change about English is that it is essentially a Creole language, no matter the side.

[@petretepner8027]

When people say "English grammar is relatively simple", they mean the morphology (endings, to you and me) is little, and easy. But precisely for that reason, English *syntax* is very complicated, and everything can hinge on the order of words or even the intonation pattern in a sentence.

[@noprosthesisforyoursoul]

I speak English and German and I’ve been learning Norwegian for some time now and I absolutely agree with that conclusion. When I started learning Norwegian I was dumbfounded by how easy it came to me. I actually said it felt like it was already somehow in my brain and joked that it must be my genetic memories. The link between Norwegian and English is just too short to not consciously notice it while learning.

[@JoanPeiroton]

Another romance language the study of which should be relevant for English studies is Gascon. Some words supposedly of French orign could be rather gascon. This is the case with friar (gascon fray = brother), possibly judge (gascon judge), gadget, (to) jump (a word of cantabre origin, etym. lat. plumbare) , caddie (gascon caddet), and note that the gascon lexic does include the norse word "hap" which, in gascon, mean good luck, good fortune, good chance and the english word perhaps looks like gascon as, in Gascon and not in French, "per" means" by" and the gascon language is fond of the adverbial "s".

[@SinarNila]

Nice observations, Guillaume de Poitou from old Gascony wrote and created middle English as we know, he was an occitan translator on old England. The influence of Occitan with all occitanics dialects inside of english is visible til today.❤

[@tibsky1396]

Probably because of Troubadours in Middle-Ages. They were quite popular in European courts.

[@David-ru8xf]

Jump is from Middle Low German (c.f. Low Saxon jumpen) from Proto Germanic gumpona (to hop, skip, jump). In Italy the dialectal word zompare (jump) came from Gothic or Langobardic

[@SinarNila]

​@@David-ru8xf Yes mate Italy 🇮🇹 is the reverse of England 🇬🇧 👍 in movement of idioms. In Italy Gothic and Langobardic were assimilated by popular Latin to became Lombard and futurely Emilian and Italian. In England Celt, Hellenic, Italic, Latin, regional frenches idioms entered inside on all germanics of England to became the romanic English of today, the super creole of the globe 🌎

[@bikesfrench8524]

Ceci est exacte tu as le Gacon béarnais qui se trouve dans l'Aquitaine tu es resté très longtemps sous l'emprise anglaise dans la ville de Bayonne tu as les cimetières anglais où tu es une ville qui s'appelle Anglet et on prononce en vieux français angloy

[@alternateperson6600]

The analytic-synthetic distinction is not a useful indication of French influence because most Germanic languages are analytic; in fact, German and Icelandic are outliers, and German is only the way it is because it's an artificial language -- case markers have been absent from regional languages in Germany for ages. I wouldn't even say French is particularly analytic, but I digress. The loss of morphemes and simplification of English grammar might well just be a side effect of phonetic changes in the language; in particular, vowel reduction in word-final positions, which is common place among Germanic languages due to word-initial stress. English's rigid syntax was developed to cope with the ambiguity caused by such changes, rather than as an import from imperfect acquisition by French speakers. The plural s was inherited from OE o-stem nouns; French had nothing to do with it. The reason it "won out" over other plurals again boils down to phonetic change: other stems marked the plural with vowel endings, so it's not hard to imagine how most distinctions would get blurred once they all reduced to a schwa. O-stem plurals didn't have that problem because they ended in a consonant. The only thing that could even be argued as an example of borrowed grammatical structures from French is disjunctive pronouns i.e. using oblique pronouns as subjects for emphasis; the problem for adherents of the creole hypothesis is that this structure is absent from Middle English -- the period in which English had supposedly undergone creolization -- and it's use was repudiated by English grammarians from as late as the 18th century, meaning it was a recent trend. The rise of disjunctive pronouns in English could be an independent innovation, esp. with how late it's developed. The bottom line however is that English is too complicated for a creole, no matter how much the grammar has been simplified. The preservation of strong verbs points to this. If English doesn't sound "germanicky" to you, that's because it's not a continental language and underwent development not akin to those of continental languages merely by virtue of geographic isolation. English would have sounded different even if 1066 had never come... and Frisian wouldn't sound so much like Dutch if they weren't neighbors. The important thing is that English syntax and root vocabulary is Germanic, hence it's a Germanic language. The latter is of particular note as it concerns creolization; for in creole languages the substrate language borrows many root words e.g. pronouns from the target language, something we don't see in English.

[@petretepner8027]

DER DATIV IST DEM GENETIV SEIN TOD!

[@Ice_Karma]

No, it's not. Nor is it a Romance language. It's a Germanic language that's been heavily influenced by Old Norman French and Old Norse.

[@romcr3630]

Cool story bro.

[@mydogisbailey]

10:08 fyi this is not the object pronoun in French. It is actually the emphatic pronoun. It just happens that in your example moi/moi are identical in both forms. But for third person plural, they are different ils/eux.

[@Tybold63]

I must say I agree on most if not all your arguments as a Swede. Love the "magnificent bastard tongue" reference as it sums it all up neatly.😆

[@poopoosplatter99]

King - cyning Queen - cwēn (ē = ee) Yes - gea/giese No - nese/ne/na Excuse me - forgiefe mec Sorry - sārig Welcome - welcumen 1 - ān 2 - tþeġen (þ = th , ġ = y) 3 - þrēo (þ = th) 4 - fēoƿer 5 - fif 6 - seox 7 - seofon 8 - eahta 9 - nigon 10 - tīen Day - dæg Night - niht Good morning - Gōdne mergen Good evening - Gōdne ǣfen Good night - Gōde nihte Year - ġear (ġ = y) He - hē Here - hēr There - þǣr (þ = th, ǣ = soft "eh") We - wē Who - hwā What - hwæt When - hwænne Where - hwær How - hū Many - maniġ Some - sum Few - fēaw Not - ne Heavy - hefiġ (ġ = y) Small - lȳtel Child - ċild, bearn Mother - mōder Father - fæder Fish - fisċ Thin - þynne (þ = th) Wide - wīd Long - lang Other - ōþer Short - sċort (ċ = sh) Person - mann Tree - trēow Stick - sticca Seed - sǣd Blood - blōd Ear - ēare Nose - nosu Tongue - tunge Foot - fōt Hand - hand Feather - feþer Fingernail - fingernæġl (ġ = y) Mouth - mūþ (þ = th) Breast - brēost Heart - heorte Drink - drincan To eat - etan To spit - spǣtan To bite - bitan To suck - sūcan To sleep - slǣpan To live - libban To hunt - huntian To sit - sittan To stand - standan To dig - delfan (delve) To float - flēotan To flow - flōwan To play - plegian To freeze - frēosan To wipe - wīpian To push - sċiufan (cognate shoving) To sing - singan Sun - sunne Lake - lacu Salt - sealt Stone - stân Sand - sand Snow - snāw Sea - sǣ Fog - mist Earth - eorþe (þ = th) Sky, heaven - heofon Wind - wind Ice - is Fire - fȳr Star - steorra Moon - mōna Water - wæter Rain - reġn (ġ = y) Smoke - smīeċ Dust - dust Ash - æsċe (ċ = sh) Burn - birnan, bærnan Red - rēad Green - grēne Yellow - ġeolu White - hwit Black - sweart, blæc Full - full And - and If - ġif (ġ = y) At = æt Name - nama Wet - wæt Dry - drȳġe (ġ = y) Hmmmmmmmmm just a few days learning and I see a very Germanic core.

[@petretepner8027]

Middle and Modern English _lake_ does not come from Old English _lacu_ , but from French _lac._

[@albertoluciano2169]

Everytime I represent myself a sort of puppet show 😅with germanic languages ...german, dutch, danish, swedish etc. saying "English is very strange...he does'nt even seem our brother...🤔" ...on the other part the latin languages ...spanish, french, italian etc that are saying "English looks like dad Latin...look!! same eyes...same nose...same walking..."🤣😅

[@EdwardM-t8p]

Same imperial characteristics too.

[@SinarNila]

😂😂😂💚💚💚🍺🍺🍺🌈🌈🌈soooo English is Romanic 🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻🍻in this view ❤❤❤❤❤Thanks.

[@jackjack1683]

English doesn't look or sound like Latin at all, even less so in basic use with more Germanic words. "Fæder ūre, þū þē eart on heofonum" the first two lines of the Lord's Prayer in Anglo Saxon, a tongue that is undeniably unlike Latin. Literally father our, thou the art on heaven. Seems pretty English to me. the continuation with Old English is obvious when you look at any religious writings of the Anglo Saxons.

[@maurcd]

If English is a French creole, then french is a Latin creole. And then English is just a romance language. But that's quite short sighed. Languages are a fluid thing, as such it is quite dump to pick an arbitrary point in their evolution, and call everything up river by that point. There is problably not even a single starting point for languages. I think the French just need to deal with the fact that their language is not the world's lingua franca.

[@GrosPointRouge]

The difference in language proficiency can be attributed to exposure to English. French is a global language, and French speakers generally have less exposure to English compared to Scandinavian speakers. I've also observed that while Scandinavians often have better pronunciation, their spelling tends to be less accurate than that of the French. For instance, the French consistently know where to place double consonants in words like "accommodate" and "embarrass," whereas the Nordics struggle with this aspect.

[@chillin5703]

French consistently know where to place them because these words tend to literally be French. Like the two examples you provided.

[@SinarNila]

✌✌✌✌✌🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷🍷

[@petretepner8027]

@@chillin5703 They are not reflected in the pronunciation, either in English or in French. If only English-speakers themselves knew how to spell those words! I've trained myself to get "accommodate" right (double everything that's doublable), but have no shame in admitting that I, well-educated, with a degree in linguistics, and a professional translator, still hesitate over "embarrass", and have often looked it up. Mais si on fait une erreur, c'est pas vraiment quelque chose pour s'embraser, ni pour s'embarrasser.

[@Gisele.Lisboa]

Very nice vídeo, I shared it with my Scottish boyfriend to see if it could demystify his annoyance with the beautiful French language.

[@jeffdavies2824]

I had never heard of a synthetic language before. It explains why I struggle with Spanish as much as I do (as does Google Translate). This is an eye opener that will help me learn a bit better!

[@metacosmos]

in spanish you can find overall Latin with a lot of words coming from Iberian, greek, german, arabian, french, jewish , italian....

[@someopinion922]

Correction - English is a Norman French - relexified Germanic creole.

[@pablojlascano8322]

Kudos for this channel, it is always informative and entertaining at the same time.

[@Jefff72]

Did we get anything from Celtic or where the Celts completely driven off that they had no impact on English?

[@ReiKakariki]

The use of verbs in tag simple questions and complex questions and the verbal answers. And silent or mutant vowels and consonants letters.

[@voiceofreason2674]

The way we use the words "Do, Did, Done" is entirely Celtic from what I've heard. French is the only other major language to have that cornerstone but it's not as pure I don't think

[@bernardnarber4595]

Unfortunately the romans managed to erase this beautiful culture almost completely.

[@isabelatence7035]

Valeu!

[@LetThemTalkTV]

That's so very kind of you Isabel. Thank you so much. I'm glad you enjoyed the video.

[@isabelatence7035]

@@LetThemTalkTV my pleasure

[@SiqueScarface]

10:45 While usually, German just uses "ich" for both "I" and "me", it also has versions of "me", namely "mich" or "mein", the later often playfully doubled up as "meinereiner" (the me one). The use of "mein" in places where French would place a "moi" has fallen out of use though. It has remained in the meaning of "my".

[@simont.b.2660]

Excellent! (Up to you to find out if it was said in French or English) 😄

[@robertstevenson8728]

A minority of english words are of german origin, however the words we use most are of german origin.

[@cipaisone]

To me the most awkward thing of English…perhaps the only one…is the use of the verb “do” to make questions and negatives.

[@JacobSnow-ie3re]

Some say that is influenced by Celtic (as in Gaelic) grammar. Source: if I recall correctly, I heard it on John McWhorter’s podcast.

[@SinarNila]

English dialects and French dialects have influence of celts, breton and gaelic grammar. Coloquial english: ya read the book today? Celtic coloquial english: read ya the book today? C.e: please,ya sing this song for me? C. C. E: please, sing ya this song for me? The padron english of the books, copies the celtics dialects of english on dialogues til today.

[@ronanbakker]

I note from my own experience as a native, monolingual Dutch/Frisian speaker, because English is made to be a world's tongue, just wielding it in everyday settings feels very natural, whereas I still struggle to even follow French television and multimedia. Even though we share the long ú and r sounds (muurvast, huurovereenkomst, rumoerig, verzuurd, naturen, ..). I feel like I could cozily live in England at least tongue-wise, but not in France, where I only would be able to read short words and would certainly need a travelguide. The Netherlands is slowly Anglicizing but we speak another form of English without French and Latin instreamings

[@petretepner8027]

Als je zowel Nederlands als Fries spreekt, dan ben je per definitie niet “eentalig”. As jo ​​sawol Nederlânsk as Frysk prate, dan binne jo per definysje net "ientalich" ("monolingual"). Apart from the word "instreamings" (which would mean little to most English people -- I suppose you mean _toevloed_ or _influx_ ), you write good English, just as full of French-derived terms as our own.

[@ChristopheDefelice94]

As a French person, it's easy for me to spot all the words of French origin in the English language (and there are really a lot of them). The hardest part is distinguishing the old French words, and I'm often surprised to discover that a word I thought was typically English actually comes from Old French, like attorney or tennis.

[@SinarNila]

💚💚💚💚💚🌈🌈🌈🌈🌈

[@petretepner8027]

Did you know that _bucket_ (seau) comes from Norman _boutchet/bouquet_ , Old French _buquet_ ?

[@ChristopheDefelice94]

@@petretepner8027 no, thank you, i think there are many more

[@dom0201]

Errata erratum: the plural is pearls - is it not thus? (as they say in Greek). Also it's £ sterling, not the placename...

[@SinarNila]

🥂🍹🍾👍✌🍸🍺🍻🍀🦎🌱🍀

[@Gingq]

I would love for a video on Nigerian English.....Love from Nigeria😁😁

[@SinarNila]

😂😂😂😂😂 Yeah yas. Great, English is African too Nice idea. 😂😂😂😂😂 🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺🍺