The prehistory of English

[@nuageceleste3554]

Martin, you are my favourite youtube linguist! Thanks so much for your helpful lectures. You are so clear and concise.

[@MartinHilpert]

+Salmon Dance Thank you, I'm happy to hear that!

[@CadaverSplatter]

Good stuff. I am a student of ancient near eastern Philology (Sumerian, AKkadian, Hebrew etc.) and I have found some of your stuff to be very useful, and has helped me grow as a linguist. Thanks for this.

[@MartinHilpert]

+CadaverSplatter I'm happy to hear that!

[@yoriex3577]

You're a hero. Thank you so much for providing this knowledge to the world.

[@perikaveera]

At 18:30 for example, teeth- dens or dental. In Sanskrit it is danth. Man in Sanskrit is manu or manush. Father is pitr, mother is matr, brother is brathr, mind is manh, heart is hrudh, new/neo is nau, young is yuvan, and hundreds more such examples. The numbers from two to nine are almost identical. Jackson, Mississippi.

[@hglundahl]

17:59 I can think of one situation in which 0 > h. Epenthetic for hiatus avoidance. Precisely as one can also have 0 > w, 0 > j if one vowel in hiatus is either back rounded or front high. But for this to be as plausible as h > 0, I would like to check if Tongan does avoid hiatus. If it doesn't, agreed.

[@Fagas83]

I enjoyed this video, but I have to disagree in one point. In 33:16 you say, that 'Bruder' is an exception to Grimm's Law. But it is a regular development: PIE **bʰréh₂ters > *bʰréh₂tēr > Proto-Germanic *brōþēr (Grimm's Law), cf. engl. brother. Germ. Bruder (< OHG bruoder) underlays the High German consonant shift, so it's pretty regular. ;)

[@jellosapiens7261]

Isn't the voiced "d" a Verner's law reflex?

[@Fagas83]

@@jellosapiens7261 Sure, but Verner's Law means that the voicening inures by the accent shift; with Verner's Law we had have to reconstruct *bʰreh₂tḗr

[@RobertKaucher]

Hi, Martin! At around 6:15 you say Kannada is a Native American language but it's a Dravidian language of India.

[@MartinHilpert]

You're right of course! Thanks for pointing that out.

[@RobertKaucher]

+Martin Hilpert no problem. I've just found your channel and it's very enjoyable!

[@m0eable]

very comprehensive! thanks for the video.

[@hglundahl]

Decay or not decay overall, the "sound laws" are the decaying factor, the replacement strategies are the repairing factor.

[@hglundahl]

For instance, using diminutives as such is neither decay, nor repair, but invention. How do you like - if you read Latin - this dialogue with the salsarii but also the "avicellus habet finum beccum" of Lugdunum? enfrancaissurantimodernism.blogspot.fr/2012/08/dialogus-temporibus-romanis.html Sound laws, as they are misnamed, i e sound changes that start out as voluntary vanity but end up as ignorance of older speech (and worse: of older spelling, in some cases, speech being less important from before tape recorders), as estrangement from those preserving it, sometimes also erode useful distinctions. Solem and solum remain reasonably distinct to this day in Italian and Spanish, but in Gaul there was a time when both were pronounced about as very slow pronunciation of sôle (hope you enjoy that fish!). Soliculum which had been as funny as "Brother Sun" became the standard word instead of "solem" - hence soleil. A repair strategy had decayed a fun word to an ordinary word and that had been necessary when a decay of final vowel distinctions had decayed a phonetic distinction to a context based distinction between oral homophones, if not homographs. So, whether language change is overall repair or decay, it is certainly a change that involves both - in various proportions. Repair is btw obviously conscious, depending on consciousness of meaning and consciousness of an arisen ambiguity.

[@alexrafe2590]

Brethren may have been the predecessor word of brothers, but brothers hasn’t replaced it, because it remains an English word with a different but similar meaning.

[@hglundahl]

By 24 approx, Grimm's law ... When did it happen? One could also ask: why and to what sequence of speakers did it happen? Were Fenno-Ugrians (or other language of soundtype close to Finnish) adopting a language close to Q-Celtic and Latin (and to P-Celtic as for "peduar"/"fidwor") but turning stops from b, p to p, pp, etc? Even Verner might have some such reason, confer "fitta"/"vittu" (sorry for example, if you know what it means, but it shows Finnish lacks f and replaces it with v in loans, and in this case even word initially). Had Grimm happened lots earlier in Anatolia and are Germanic langs de-satemised Phrygian (or was it Lydian)? Both Finnish and Hittite (I recall) share with Germanic the trait of a simple past which has no aspectual morphology attached. Slavonic also has such pasts, roughly analysable as "active aorist participles" and with aspect tied to lexical choice between verb pairs. While Greek has the Imperfect Aorist contrast, Latin the Imperfect Perfect contrast and probably Sanskrit something similar, as well as Celtic. We have seen no pre-Germanic stage of Germanic, we do not know.

[@hglundahl]

7:11 determining similarities between languages is not necessarily proving a genetic relationship, as the known one between Latin and French/Occitan/Spanish/Italian. On Balkan you have vocabulary and grammatical similarities crossing over independently of genetic supposed distant and obvious non-relationship between Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, Albanian, formerlyTurkish. Genitive/Dative merger "I gave his a book=I gave him a book" of Greek/Romanian originating probably from Latin feminines. Post-posed articles in Romanian and Bulgarian, possibly Albanian which I know very little about. Lexical items all over Balkan. Etc.

[@hglundahl]

4:34 Common source. Very philosophically stated. Mother language, like Archaic and Popular Latin to Romance? Mutual adstrate/Sprachbund, like Balkanic similarities? Common superstrate language like banalised Classic Latin = Medieval Latin to West European (Romance, Germanic or Celtic) languages? Common adstrate language of lingua franca nature? Like Romani on diverse slang (both Swedish and Spanish have the gipsy words chey and choor- (-ing/-o) on a certain social level) or Occitan (on a higher social level) on Middle Age court languages? ALL of above qualify as "common source", precisely as in another field both "common ancestor" and "common Creator" are a "common source" for undeniable similarities.

[@stevenwilliams24]

Clearly and well explained.

[@MartinHilpert]

+Steven Williams Thanks for watching!

[@hglundahl]

22:24 The four Polynesian languages are not subject to doubt. They are perhaps as close as Nordic with Tongan in Icelandic position or Westic, with Tongan in German position (excepting the Second sound shift). At least if the thirteen words are representative of vocabulary. But there are certainly Balkanic (or a little further East partially inthis example) similarities too. Think of Romanian î, Turkish i with no dot, Polish y (and a similar sound in Russian) ... can these arise through conditioned sound change? Probably yes. Same condition? Perhaps as probable (not true of î before nasal and y wordfinally) Sometimes even in same words shared between them? Why not, though I know of no example. So how do we know that Indo-European sound correspondences are Polynesian rather than Balkanic? If Swedish has pojke and pjexa from Finnish, and if Finnish has Joulu and Pukku from Swedish, can we totally exclude situations in which the sound correspondences are not similar whichever way the loan goes? In this case it is not so, or we would have **bojke and **bjexa but ... Especially if a superstrate was a written language, like Nesili, which can have had different pronunciations. Abstract ending syllable -tion(em) has systematic sound law like correspondences in diverse West European languages. And Nesili writing systems was probably syllabic. Right?

[@alienglish7868]

very nice lecture it is useful i like it

[@cheyennehall1984]

Excellent video! A little tip, in Tongan, the word 'tapu' is pronounced 'dapu' :-)

[@Lalzovi]

Thanks for the interesting video. Considering it purports to be about the prehistory of English, I was curious that the exceptions to Grimm's Law in German are not exceptions in English with respect to "seven" and "brother". How do linguists understand this distinction?

[@shadialomari9067]

Is there an indefinite article in Old English?

[@hglundahl]

_shoures soote_ = _pluie douce_? Doux can be used first (douce France), but general tendency might have beenn especially in Aquitaine rather than Normandy, N-A rather than A-N. In other words, foreign language influence is not _limited_ to lexical items. Whatever the Jung Grammarians used to say.

[@anamargic2702]

Thanks for this helpful video! 😊

[@hglundahl]

No one is denying internal genetic relationships as to Germanic, etc. But are relationships between "branches" looser or tighter than between Balkanic ones?

[@PIANOPHUNGUY]

car comes from lLtin word "carrus" meaning wagon or waggon (British spelling)

[@tstsullivan]

Excellent presentation, but one query? Isn't Kannada actually a South Indian language, not one from Native america?

[@MartinHilpert]

Yes, absolutely! Thanks for catching that!

[@Kleinerfloter]

Great job! congrats :D

[@sinecure45]

I'm afraid you missed the boat with your definition of "reflex". Here is what Merriam-Webster says: a linguistic element (such as a word or sound) or system (such as writing) that is derived from a prior and especially an older element or system: boat is the reflex of Old English bāt. [Piscis is not derived from fish.]

[@dlwatib]

Misleading title. Very little of the information was specifically about English.

[@Ghada24]

thank u so much sir

[@hglundahl]

34:55 "All living languages change" You mean, all living spoken languages change. The written language can stay the same, leading at best to just a new correspondence set between one to one grapheme/phoneme pairs, at worst to a real diglossia. But if the written language does change it can either be towards or against speech change. Or it can be suddenly exchanged; most famously perhaps when hyll was respelled hull, geard yard etc. after French spelling system, or earlier when feid replaces fidem after the correspondence in the Alcuinic pronunciation of fidem. Swedish spelling reform 1906 was useless - and so was Hitler abolishing of Deutsche Schrift and of Schwabach print.

[@tarasrybin8410]

Dr. Hilpert, may I ask you whether you have ever tried listening to History of English Podcast by Kevin Stroud, and if you have, what is your professional opinion on that? Here is the link to the mentioned resource: historyofenglishpodcast.com/episodes/

[@reemsuliman5619]

Thank you

[@kphilj]

Kannada is a southern Indian language (Dravidian), not a Canadian language.

[@richardbennett4365]

None of these claims IS, not none of these claims ARE. . . .

[@MartinHilpert]

+Richard BENNETT Huddleston and Pullum (2005: 90) discuss the alternation of singular and plural 'none' and 'neither'.

[@SRoyCanvasAndCrayons]

Kannada is not Native American. Its a Dravidian language which is spoken in Southern India.

[@hglundahl]

And the word _gay_ retained a certain decent meaning to the days when CSL let Puddleglum till Jill and Eustace to be "gay and frolic" ... (Silver Chair). Its new meaning is definitely a reason for cultural pessimism!

[@janeadelaidelennox7193]

Also the acronym additions. English speakers (and other languages too now more and more) use lol to denote mild amusement. But it abbreviates LAUGH OUT LOUD. Which means that this acronym is REMOVING US from the deeper meaning of what we're saying and eventually rendering it obsolete. If you want "lol" to actually stand for "Laugh out loud" anymore, you have to make a point of calling it out. "I actually lol'd!" which is concerning to me. I call this new emergence @nglish and I don't mind it for the most part. But there seems to be a creation of new vocabulary whose purpose is to save time while texting. But the result has been quite insidious. "lol" now means smile. ROTFL isn't the belly laugh it started out to be. It's now chuckling. These things don't sound like a big deal, but i think their implication is bigger than just how we express humor on the internet.

[@janeadelaidelennox7193]

Of course, I'm ambiguous about the word "gay". nobody in my social sphere would use this in an insulting way. It simply means homosexuality. Even if somebody feels uncomfortable about homosexuality, they don't use the word "gay" in an uncomfortable way.

[@yurismir1]

This guy's funny

[@hglundahl]

24:18 Combining Grimm/Werner into one scenario: filolohika.blogspot.fr/2013/01/coniectura-linguistica-pro-casu.html

[@hglundahl]

Sed ponitur tunc quaestio de γ quod est laryngalis tertius theoriae laryngalium. H3 recunstructed as North German intervocalic G witn labialisation - why in that last extra scenario it did not turn same way as PIE (my reconstruction) γw.

[@rogerdubarry8505]

None of these claims IS scientifically sound. :)

[@MartinHilpert]

Team singular!

[@rogerdubarry8505]

@@MartinHilpert Great talk btw. Very interesting. Waes Hal.