History Summarized: Why Is English Such A Mess?

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Linguistics is fun because you wonder why LanguageTM is the way it is, then you research it, and then you realize human language is at once the Sturdiest and MOST FRAGILE thing humans have ever created.
SOURCES & Further Reading:
"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English" by John McWhorter
Samples of text from Shakespeare's Sonnets & Plays, Folger Shakespeare Library
Geoffrey Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales" prologue Middle English text, via Poetry Foundation www.poetryfoun...
MIT "Bilingual Beowulf" Old English text and modern English translation www.mit.edu/~j...
MUSIC:
"Scheming Weasel" by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 creativecommon...
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[@OverlySarcasticProductions]

✨ VIRGO TIME ♍ The Virgo pin is available in our merch shop - The stars glow in the dark because of course they do overlysarcastic.shop/

[@marcus4046]

can we form some kind of petition to change the word "What" to "H W E A T" again? I feel english needs that vibe again...

[@antonissa8345]

I hope you eventually make a video about the Mayan hero twins and their adventures. It would be a perfect first Mayan mythology video

[@SmudgedSketch]

My birthday was yesterday! I might get this one lol

[@sebastianevangelista4921]

@@SmudgedSketch Happy late birthday 🥳🎉!!!

[@KGTiberius]

English gender persists, only rarely. “She’s a good ship.” (One wouldn’t say “He’s a good ship.”)

[@elliotq5964]

"i invite you to join me as we blame france" truly an english video for the english

[@Anonyomus_commenter]

I advise everyone to blame the French for everything, it’s usually their fault.

[@matthewchandler7845]

Yeah I think the basis of dogging on the French is the short version of how you determine if you are in fact English or a descendant of the English culture period. (>.

[@emory7288]

I was born and raised in a former English colony. We have to blame them. It’s a rule all former and current properties of the crown follow

[@Anonyomus_commenter]

@@emory7288 And that includes Northern France as a former English territory

[@GigAnonymous]

I am French and I approve of this message. This is how things should be!

[@robbiegarber898]

Finally, a full OSP video on Linguistics!!!

[@MB-wq4fp]

Yes, Old English is technically not a foreign to English speakers but IS considered to be a foreign language in College. It’s how I doubled up on my foreign language credit by taking a year long course split into 2 classes: Old English and Beowulf. As a person who took a year long course consisting of Old English and Beowulf where we first learned to read and translate in Old English, then translated the entirety of Beowulf in a single semester, no small feat I assure you, English is a weird language from the start.

[@donnytonny730]

finally get the archer whom joke

[@warrenmiller7195]

I will say that case is actually fairly marginal in most Germanic languages (Standard German, Icelandic and Faroese are fairly cased up, but Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, and Dutch are all pretty on par with English in regards to de-casification). As for gender, English is the only Indo-European language in Europe (important caveat!) completely without grammatical gender (though Afrikaans in South Africa also lacks gender, and I believe a Danish dialect or two might lack it as well), no matter which branch of IE it's from, be it Germanic, Celtic, Romance, Slavic, Baltic, or Hellenic! Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian and Livonian are also ungendered, but they're Uralic languages so never had gender to begin with. Another fun fact is that English (along with Icelandic) is the only language to retain the "th" sound from Proto-Germanic, with it changing to "t" or "d" in the other languages. Same for the "w' sound (and "wh" in the dialects that still make the w/wh distinction). There's also a bunch of other oddities to English, probably due to the Norse conquests and Welsh influence, but I've already nerded out hard enough as is.

[@dstinnettmusic]

So…you are telling me that we are like 500 years from Lil John being translated into a fancy exclamation like “Lo” to be properly understood?

[@AlkronLoki]

"A Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it" My mother, as a canadian who knew trace bits of various romantic languages once went to France for a vacation, and one time when she needed to ask a local a question, she ended up mangling bits of Spanish, Italian and French together. The guy she was asking started to say he didn't understand her, stopped and thought for a moment, then was very grumpy that he did in fact understand. I don't know if because he now had to answer a tourist's question, or that he had never considered his lovely French to be so close to Italian and Spanish. Might have been a bit of a language lesson for him that day.

[@Jake007123]

Spanish here, who has learned a bit of French in the past, and has been to France multiple times. The French do NOT like being close to Italian or Spanish, they have a massive unwarranted superiority complex towards their neighbours. Specially if it was on Paris, even other French talk shit about of Parisians feeling superior to everybody. This doesn't happen on Portugal, where I have been many more times and never, not even in their capital, have seen this atitude. This is a generalization, of course.

[@Nazuiko]

Id guess he was mad that she had dared to speak any language that wasn't French, but he couldnt just pass it off because it didnt really matter. Definitely a world-view scratching (though not shattering) revelation for the man. The French worship their own language, its weird.

[@TiroDvD]

The French as so exclusive to the language of French than nobody can speak or understand it properly. Even the French don't understand or speak it properly. (This is a joke at Paris and Parisian French.)

[@23plaster]

As a french speaking Canadian I can actively say the French, especially those from Paris, are stuck up and a pain in the ass to deal with. They will 100% say they don't understand you even though they can just cause your saying the words in a different accent, not to mention if they do decide to listen then just laugh at the way your speaking and try and force you to speak "proper" french

[@minisarge2619]

As an Italian speaker who can get through some Spanish, no I can't understand the rest easily. I can get maybe half tops. I know people who can understand my hot mess of a hybrid situatuon

[@sechran]

Some cultures have a lingua franca. We have a lingua Frankenstein.

[@FowlManor]

How come all the good language jokes are already written?

[@samrevlej9331]

@@FowlManorBecause the ones who aren’t tend to become dead letters

[@HerrMackerel]

This one makes no sense

[@manaphy1007]

Wouldn't it be a lingua Frankenstein's monster?

[@rmsgrey]

Though, of course "lingua franca" itself is an Italian (or possibly Latin) phrase meaning "Frankish tongue", from an era when the "Franks" were basically the whole of Western Europe, and nowadays most prominently referring to English...

[@gwest3644]

2:16 Actually, his native name was Williame, not Guillaume, because it wasn't just Old French the Normans brought over, it was their Norman dialect with its own weird features, like retaining W where French replaced it with G (hence why we have William and Walter where French has Guillaume and Gauthier, and why we have both Norman warranty and French guarantee). It also didn't shift C to Ch like the rest of France did, which is part of why we say castle and candle instead of chastle and chandle.

[@EllieK_814]

Warden and guardian are also doublets from this.

[@tsdk107]

Okay, that was something I never knew before. Thank you!

[@iryanmadayana1904]

"Warranty" and "Guarantee" being two words that sprang from the same lineage in related languages which then rejoined makes so much sense, oh my god! Thank you for this information!

[@corsaircaruso471]

Realizing the castle - château connection in high school French was what got me into linguistics in the first place. Thanks for sharing all this!

[@5peciesunkn0wn]

oooh. That's interesting! :D

[@MatthewCSnow]

Oddly enough, the book Ivanhoe joked about this very topic: with how it’s the old English pig when the peasants would raise them but it’s named the French pork when the nobles ate them

[@simonmagid4205]

Ivanhoe was brilliant. I loved the name 'Front-de-Boeuf', a nobleman who was clearly... bullheaded O.O

[@mirjanbouma]

Same with cows and beef (from french boeuf)

[@101Mant]

​@@mirjanboumasheep and mutton too

[@VivaLaDnDLogs]

That answers a question I never thought to ask.

[@TomLuTon]

There's one meat that did not get borrowed from French, and that's Horse. We literally call it horse meat, because traditionally eating horses wasn't a thing in England. The French word for horse, cheval, has entered English in two ways, cavalry and chivalry. So if eating horses had been a thing back in the middle ages, the English word for Horse meat today would likely be something like 'Chaval'

[@kilotun8316]

On the subject of gender, as a benighted Anglo Canadian trying to learn French, I asked my Franco buddy from backwoods Quebec just how the bloody hell he knows what is feminine and what is masculine. He kinda shrugged his shoulders and said "If it ends in e, go ahead and call it feminine. It's what I do when I have no idea."

[@goncalo33]

That's how it goes. In Portuguese, words ending in "-a" are Feminine, and "-o" are Masculine.

[@magnusbane420]

*laughs in German where there are no rules for gender*

[@Limrasson]

@@magnusbane420 *laughs in Hungarian where there is no gender*

[@axelprino]

Same in Spanish, you can usually guess from how the words end but with some you just have to memorize it. Like how water is a weird mix of masculine and feminine depending on what you're trying to say, masculine articles but feminine adjectives, unless it's plural then it's all feminine.

[@Styphon]

Is that why eating poutine is such a mess?

[@cee_ves]

i once saw a video about french as the french speak it and it was totally different to how you learn it, and i was like “great, my french lessons were wasted” then i realised that’s what people learning english feel when i say “gurl, you ate it up, no crumbs”

[@magnusbane420]

Fr. My Spanish teacher has been living in Germany for more than 20 years, so her slang was very outdated, not to mention that Latin American Spanish sounds very different from her accent from Spain

[@Duiker36]

My Spanish teacher *tried* to correct for this by teaching us to sing pop songs in Spanish. It didn't work, but it was a valiant effort.

[@magnusbane420]

@@Duiker36 my Spanish teacher made us translate Despacito ... The less said about that the better

[@gvendurst]

Years of academy training WASTED!

[@Nazuiko]

@@magnusbane420 Im going to guess they didnt translate the song themselves first, then.

[@bielandreu929]

1:04 "A Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it" As a Spanish speaker who has spoken with some Italians, that is an extremely optimistic statement. You can *maybe* get away with understanding about 60% of what the other is saying and fill in the blanks, if both people are willing to talk slowly and ennunciate a lot. And that estimate would probably be noticeably lower if I didn't also speak Catalan to help catch a few latin words that diverged in Spanish.

[@magicball3201]

To be fair, compare that to English and German. Aside from a few shared words, like Computer, you have no idea what is being said.

[@Wraithfighter]

Aye. A Spanish speaker might be more likely to understand the answer in Italian than an English speaker would, but that's a pretty low bar >_>.

[@Cuddlebear6285]

Tbf that doesn't disprove their statement, they never said a Spanish speaker can ask *ANY* question, so it's still true more or less.

[@Crazael]

I don't speak either language and I have a hard time believing that they are as easily mutually intelligible as Blue implies.

[@bielandreu929]

@@Cuddlebear6285 Hence why I didn't say Blue's statement was "wrong", strictly speaking. Just very optimistic

[@rahlly4345]

My mom, who was a retired English teacher, loves to call our language a bastard she loves to see new people finding out how much of a mess our language is. So I'm going to show her this. The frustration in your voice was just perfect!😂

[@pentagonofpeople]

My favorite thing about english is that every single letter in our alphabet is silent in at least one word

[@JMM33RanMA]

My opinion as an ESL teacher is that English is a pidjin, a simplified trade language. This fits with comments in the video and responses.

[@possiblyalive4475]

@@pentagonofpeople except v. there's actually a children's book based on this.

[@19RC64]

How did your mom react? I kinda need to know! 😛

[@JMM33RanMA]

@@19RC64 Was this question directed to me, and if so what are you specifically interested in? I'm a retired professor and am usually willing to answer questions.

[@ungainlytitan1460]

I feel somewhat aggrieved that 16 minutes later no one has made the joke that: English is a language invented by Norman soldiers to chat up Saxon barmaids.

[@doctormo]

I'm sad no one said "English is three languages in a frenchcoat"

[@GuiSmith]

@@doctormoI love that 😂

[@shrimpisdelicious]

English is what you get when Roman Celts, Germanic settlers, Scandinavian Vikings, and French Vikings scream at each other for several hundred years.

[@xLoLRaven]

@@shrimpisdelicious Well, they had to find SOMEWAY to tell each other to get the F* off their island.

[@atomf9143]

@xLoLRaven Amazing.

[@zeyalderson]

Another reason English is weird is that we love our boat idioms: "Let's wrap this up" "Are we all on board" "All hands on deck" "They're a loose canon" and many more

[@goncalo33]

"Royal Britannia rules the waves", after all.

[@pretzelbomb6105]

And then American English kept a lot of those while adding their own from a love of trains and baseball.

[@FranciscoAreasGuimaraes]

There's a great NPR video about the Naval influence on english

[@jonathanbaker3307]

Fun fact: The Royal Navy has its own slang that’s so extensive you can get dictionaries for it. Some highlights include: - gash - rubbish - yomp - hike (mostly used by the Royal Marines, who are not a separate branch) - dit - a story - square away - make sure something is done/completed - bucket of sunshine - a nuclear weapon - scran - food

[@artofthepossible7329]

Tbf, trying to talk about English history without any mention of boats or the navy, would make for a very strange history book.

[@Crazael]

10:39 John McWorter also has a podcast called Lexicon Valley where he talks about all sorts of interesting stuff about language.

[@sydhenderson6753]

I'll need to check that out. His books on language are very good, particularly the one he references and "The Power of Babel."

[@daviddavis4885]

Honestly I think the whole “OMG English is sooo complicated!!” thing comes from the fact that everyone has to learn English, but native English speakers don’t often learn other languages. As someone who’s learned English, Spanish, Mandarin, and Japanese, I assure you, English is FAR from the hardest 😂 I actually think English is really easy to learn because there is such a wildly excessive amount of American media and resources for learning it

[@TheDrumstickEmpire]

In terms of difference to other languages, English is quite difficult. Yes, it has a myriad of stuff out there, but had those things not exist, or had it been level with, say, Spanish, depending on your native language, it would have been harder. Just my thoughts though. I only speak Germanic languages with any fluency lmao.

[@patatequiroule]

@@TheDrumstickEmpire I cannot speak for everyone and my example is purely anecdotal but Spanish was harder for me to learn than English and my home language is French. Etymologically speaking, it should be the other way around, but there is just something that feels inherently "streamlined" about English. It has its flaws, but it's undeniably intuitive and efficient. And yeah, the abundance of American media definitely helped.

[@tumach4796]

Well, since apparently English grammar is what happened when two or three languages sanded off the rough edges to make it easier to understand, yeah, streamlined is fairly accurate.

[@Alias_Anybody]

English is basically a triple creolized language, or, ironically, the most uga-buga language of the whole Indo-European family. Which makes it both super basic to construct without sounding like a caveman yet also pretty unpredictable and illogical when expanding it. Like, there's a reason why traditionally, new words in German or French were constructed from existing vocabulary (compound words or portmanteaus) while English would rather dig up Latin terms. Though, in the Internet age this isn't strictly the case any more. A lot of new English words originate from regio- or sociolects now.

[@maromania7]

@@patatequiroule I wonder if that's because it's too close. I know for me, a native English speaker, Spanish and (at least grammatically) Japanese were easier for me to grasp than German. It was just so similar I kept getting german words and rules mixed up with my ingrained english one. Forgetting that "gift" means poison, not a present, for example

[@elizaripper]

As an English and Creative Writing major, this video speaks to me. Deeply. 😭💙

[@ashleightompkins3200]

Same, it is PAINFUL.

[@Quilly-Sammy]

honestly same, it's weird

[@ashleightompkins3200]

@@Quilly-Sammy It doesn’t help that I’m trying to create my own languages. It’s not easy.

[@michael-olivercousins1574]

9:11 "Come with me as we blame the french" is just music to my English ears.

[@sinfulloccultist950]

Sibling behaviour

[@stevetheduck1425]

As a resident of the old kingdom of Kent in the south-eastern tip of Britain, I can say that the idea of English being a cosmopolitan trading vernacular is long-established. I mean, we can see the continent on a clear day, and several major ports have been there since the land-bridge sank. We casually use Nederlands 'bootle', to mean 'what I've got in this bag', use the Turkish 'kiosk' to describe a free-standing booth from which things are sold, while in the other direction, French words like 'ordinateur' are now 'computer', and the German 'hubschrauber' is usually replaced by the English word 'helicopter', itself a hybrid. It's been a blast.

[@Cancoillotteman]

Eh. We're used to it at some point. It's all thanks to us, we know. Je vous en prie, c'est notre plaisir.

[@AxelQC]

Where 45% of your words are of French origin.

[@wenterinfaer1656]

Usual suspect

[@JoannaPiancastelli]

Worth noting as well that English got a bunch of its vocabulary not just from people who travelled to England and kicked it in the head, but also from people that the English went and kicked in the head more recently, like bungalow and pyjamas

[@ArchmageIlmryn]

Plus English is really bad at changing the spelling of words to actually function in English.

[@xiphosura413]

So that explains the inexplicably phonetic spelling of "pyjamas", as a traditional English word that would totally have ended up something like "pigamas". I can't think of any other words off the top of my head that have the audacity to follow a y with a j.

[@TetsuShima]

Speaking of the evolution of English, I've found some people defending the Indiana Jones 3 plot hole in which the immortal crusader perfectly understands what Indy is saying, claiming that he surely learned English while fighting with English monks during the crusades. Considering how vastly different Old English is, the Crusader should have said while meeting Indy: "𝒲𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒻𝓊*𝓀 𝒶𝓇ℯ 𝓉𝒽ℴ𝓊 𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓀𝒾𝓃ℊ 𝒶𝒷ℴ𝓊𝓉, 𝓈𝒾𝓇𝓇𝒶𝒽?!"

[@alicia1463]

I like to think that, since Indy is an archaeologist, he learned Old English somewhere in his education, and the movie just had them all speak Modern English so the audience wouldn't be confused.

[@DISTurbedwaffle918]

I think the Crusader is blessed by God to be able to communicate with whomever approaches him.

[@travislyonsgary]

It wouldn't even be that intelligible several of the tones and words wouldn't be the same or in the same order. Like seriously even middle English wouldn't be intelligible like that

[@TechBearSeattle]

Depending on which Crusade, it would have been either late Middle English or early Modern. Either way, please keep in mind that Shakespeare -- who wrote in early Modern, about half way through the Great Vowel Shift -- is typically translated into current Modern for today's readers. And how it actually would have sounded is quite different from what we speak today.

[@marhawkman303]

@@DISTurbedwaffle918 This is my favored approach, since it's not just Indy.

[@PowerfullPC]

For a moment I thought 9:52 was going to start talking about the Great Vowel Shift, until I saw how little time was left in the video.

[@j_fenrir]

only real ones remember the great vowel shift

[@ecurewitz]

Maybe he’ll cover that in a future video

[@angeldude101]

GVS: Other languages: "a" English: "/ej/!" Other languages: "e" English: "/ɪj/!" Other languages: "i" English: "/aj/!" Other languages: "o" English: "/ow/!" Other languages: "(at least one of them is _mostly_ normal)" Other languages: "u" English: "/juw/!" Other languages: "Don't you mean /uw/?" English: "Nope!"

[@the0thersyde725]

To quote Jay Foreman: "To make an English language, you start out with a base of Germanic Anglo Saxon, mix in a healthy dash of Old Norse, a huge dollop of Norman French, and just a barely detectable hint of Celtic. Stir it up for hundreds of years until the vowels have really started to shift, and there you have it. English" Also for modern english don't forget the shortening and combining of various words that's slowly happened aswell.

[@shaunpauldocherty2416]

And then on a region by region basis you add a mix of region-specific spice such as in Scotland where normal English is peppered with a plethora of Scots words that while mostly mutually intelligible with standard english can trip up the unaware

[@thesquishedelf1301]

On further reflection, it’s more than “a barely detectable hint” of Celtic. The weird grammar structure is mostly from the Celtic influence, to be honest. The flow of a sentence is pretty similar between English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots, it’s just English borrowed the Germanic vocabulary/alphabet so it looks and sounds totally different.

[@evanp1225]

​@@thesquishedelf1301 There is very little Celtic influence on the English language. It's mostly in the form of place names and first names/surnames that have been Anglicized. Scots and Modern English are similar because they're both descendants of Middle English. English didn't borrow the Germanic grammar and alphabet, it started as a Germanic language and has been heavily influenced by French and Latin.

[@evanp1225]

Can't forget a major ingredient in this recipe: multiple spoonfuls of Latin.

[@Krahazik]

Lets not forget the new ways words get misused or new ones made up to try and disguise what 2 people are talking about or describe a thing.

[@TheAbstruseOne]

The way it was told to me, the reason English doesn't have linguistic gender is because Old Norse, Old English, and Old Norman all had grammatical gender but had different gender. And as the languages merged, people got confused because something would be masculine in one but feminine in another. So everybody collectively just went "Screw that, this is too hard!" and just got rid of it. It's why the only gendered words remaining came into the language after the 1700s, like blond(e) and fiancé(e).

[@angeldude101]

And half the time people even forget that those words are supposed to be gendered since they have 0 effect on pronunciation.

[@Alias_Anybody]

People have actually asked why other languages like French or German don't drop grammatical gender to make them easier to learn. Which is rather simple: 1. You can't force such a massive language shift by policy or fashion. 2. A socioeconomic+political+ethnic shift of those proportions (like the Danelaw or Norman takeover) just won't happen any more in modern states. 3. This will never organically happen just to benefit learners/immigrants. The fact that only a tiny minority of learners can ever master the language like a native speaker can be seen as a feature instead of a bug by the latter.

[@thomaswrightson2230]

On the plus side, it means our language is tailor made for being a gender-neutral language in these gender sensitive times.

[@psymar]

I had no idea fiancé was gendered

[@Nazuiko]

@@psymar Yes. Your fiancé is your future husband, and she's the fiancée; If she changes her name, she might be referred to as Missus New, née Old.

[@perogun]

there's one very common thing in languages if reading it is hard, then the grammar is easy but if reading it is easy, then the grammar is insane (there are exceptions to this)

[@KikoKay-Kay]

*Raises hand to argue* Wait... no, i agree ....

[@HaniiPuppy]

Greek: "Why not both?" ... I hate declensions and arbitrary grammatical gender so much.

[@Broomer52]

I remember years ago a Vtuber was playing the English version of Among Us (at the time their wasn’t a Japanese translation) she struggled with the card reader for a very specific reason even though she was learning English she was competent yet not particularly great at it. She saw “too slow, try again” she focused on the word Slow and assumed the rest of the sentence meant she needed to swipe it slower. Unsurprisingly it didn’t work.

[@Arcanua]

Nearly all languages break one those two rules...it's an exception to follow one of them rather than to not :x

[@ΣτελιοςΠεππας]

​@HaniiPuppy Those things ain't exclusive to Greek, though. As a matter of fact, Greek grammar isn't that different from Germanic grammar.

[@Kazuma11290]

My english teacher once told me "Dictionaries follow language, not the other way around." And that's been living rent free in my head ever since.

[@Ememem473]

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar -Terry Pratchett

[@Arcanua]

English's grammar is Germanic and Latin based in its entirety...not it looks for loose words.

[@ronjaj.addams-ramstedt1023]

This! Basically, English is the language equivalent of a pot-based dish (stew / chowder / soup): it can contain just half a dozen or up to an overwhelming variety of ingredients, depending on where the dish was cooked and by whom, yet still be recognizable by some community/ies as "pretty much like what we had at home when I was growing up."

[@bheowolfe]

Oh, that's a Pratchettism. I've always loved that quote but never knew who it was from

[@koathekid8255]

No it’s three languages in a trench coat that DRAG other languages into back alleys Batman’s them THEN takes there words

[@rahlly4345]

The delightful sir Terry (GNU) definitely borrow edthat but if I remember right it was first said by James D Nicoll. The full quote is: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a crib house w****. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle through their pockets for new vocabulary." Don't you just love our pure Chimera of a language? First time I heard that quote, I thought that was the perfect way to describe English.

[@ASpaceOstrich]

this implies that one day our slang will be formal writing and I'm here for it. On god, fr fr, no cap.

[@HistoricaHungarica]

Skibidi indeed! BUT given how english tends to change gen alpha's words will be included with gen beta, gamma, delta... by gen epsylon.

[@alireza2847]

​@@HistoricaHungarica imagine if they mixed them with older English like: thou shouldst no cap pay thy Fanum tax, lest he abduct you to Ohio.

[@ravenpotter3]

Last summer I did a study abroad in Belgium and wow Dutch was a fever dream. It felt like I was crazy reading anything. There was this sign in all the train stations that said “En, Hoe was jouw weekend” and every time I saw it I felt like I was in a fever dream because it sounded almost English but not. I mean how far into Dutch I got was like hello goodbye please and exit/ entrance. Thanks duolingo but I really didn’t study that much and I’ve since forgotten like the few words I learned.

[@dandrodandro1272]

you know, as a belgian who speaks french, dutch does also feel like a fever dream

[@ravenpotter3]

@@dandrodandro1272it was a study abroad mostly based in brussles Belgium. We also went to France and a few cities there and Caen, and also Amsterdam for like 2 days, and on our own a few of us did a mini trip to Italy to the amalfi coast for like 3 days. The main class was graphic novels and comics and the second class was a general generic business communications class. Also we did go to asterix park in France as a mini trip. We read like tintin, asterix, one I think called My Friend Alan or something like that (later I can double check the name. We met the author and artist if it), one on like resistance in Amsterdam, etc.

[@magnusbane420]

As a German, I agree that Dutch is a 40 °C fever dream on shrooms

[@mirjanbouma]

As a Dutch, this comment section amuses me, but i feel like i should feel insulted for some reason 😂.

[@DoubleU_Nld]

As a Dutch I also wish to add that we don't have explicit gender in Dutch. Now I'm trying to learn Serbian... God those genders and cases are complicated 😂

[@PeterMoxilin]

Oh, my little Linguist heart loves that this topic finally got a video. Also, I was making curry while listening so I may have missed it, but did we go an entire video about the weirdness of English without mentioning the Great English Vowel Shift?

[@artofthepossible7329]

Yes we indeed did.

[@TheRavenir]

As a linguist, I was quite surprised he didn't mention the Great Vowel Shift at all, but I suppose he was trying to focus more on English vocabulary and grammar being weird rather than on English pronunciation (particularly the vowels) being so unlike other Germanic languages.

[@lilemmyRA]

As a non-linguist (but former EFL teacher) I was also waiting for the Vowel Shift & a discussion of how the printing press messed up English spelling forever.

[@shamasmacshamas7135]

English also acquired a bunch of vocabulary from the colonial period, Hurricane and Canoe come from Cuban Indigenous peoples while Karma and Guru come from Indian peoples.

[@Mr.Patrick_Hung]

A bunch of words also came from China. Take a look at the Dictionary of Hong Kong English. (Free on ResearchGate)

[@samfolmer3111]

Rare frisian mention!!! Its a local language that has few speakers these days but knowing it (and dutch) made high school english lit a breeze with all the common vocab words. I got quite a bit of Canterbury tales there :)

[@MartinAdverb]

I have seen a video comparing Frisian to English and it sounded a lot like modern English, but without the great vowel shift. The spellings seemed a bit more Scando-Germanic.

[@ferretyluv]

That’s because Frisian is the closest relative to English.

[@samfolmer3111]

@@MartinAdverb yeah I honestly don't know a lot of Frisian spelling but because of the modern fracturing and language loss they're inconsistent. It does hold a lot of Scandinavian influence!

[@EleiyaUmei]

Plattdeutsch can also help a lot with English - at least in terms of vocabulary

[@bintimes]

An interesting thing I noticed specifically about blue's accent is that he doesn't pronounce the first R in forward saying FOEWARD instead and that's just really interesting to notice little details like that

[@horseenthusiast1250]

I always like hearing dialects that do that. I say "For-werd," so hearing "Foe-ward" makes me imagine a D&D spell or something, like "I cast Foe Ward to create a shield around myself" lol

[@danukil7703]

9:50 for anyone interested in an example (albeit with the word "straightforward" instead of simply "forward")

[@ferretyluv]

I say it like that too. It’s a common way of saying it in American English.

[@fede6811]

As an "English is my 2nd language" person, I never considered how the language itself could be a conversation, this is a whole new world Blue has pointed at me like I'm a blind man discovering THE SUN

[@ButWordsRemain]

I am an English teacher in Brazil and I love it when my students ask me why English is so weird, or even where it came from. It gives me an opportunity to nerd out a bit and tell them a bit of history. Also, many of them are surprised to hear that Rollo, whom they usually know from watching the Vikings tv show (despite all the historical inaccuracies in that show), was indirectly responsible for making English what it is today, since one of his descendants would eventually conquer England, bringing Old English and French together.

[@Pedro_Colicigno]

My english teacher used to joke that english isn't one language, but 4 stacked on top of eachother using a trenchcoat

[@ButWordsRemain]

@@Pedro_Colicigno I'll have to remember to tell that one to my students too!

[@tagAught]

Descendants, actually, but that's rather neat!

[@ButWordsRemain]

@@tagAught Ah yes. Thanks for the heads-up. I'll edit that.

[@JoustingJaguar]

'To my friend an alligator throw I' when heard sounds you are throwing yourself to your friend who is an alligator. Obviously the lack of a comma between friend and alligator makes it impossible, but it still made me laugh.

[@Syamfprch]

More like an alligator threw you to your friend.

[@hi-i-am-atan]

i wouldn't say the lack of comma is _necessary_ for it, as that type of whatsitsface comma is really more of a measure of disambiguation. hell, that's _why_ that sort of word order is so weird, as it parses into several valid yet very different statements, some of which _can_ be disambiguated through the use of commas but then you get to the "my friend an alligator," branches and now you're caught in a three-way mixup where i could be the subject, object, or both ... hell, i'm realizing that the comma doesn't even reliably disambiguate it, as while "my friend an alligator," and "my friend, an alligator," both _mostly_ lack ambiguity, "my friend, an alligator" can be parsed as separating the receiver from the thrown _or_ as separating the object from a descriptor that just leeches into the subject and predicate. really goes to show the actual purpose of word order in english, as you can get pretty damn _creative,_ let's say, with how you structure your sentence and it'll still parse ... it just might parse in far more ways than you intend

[@alireza2847]

Actually in Dutch it might make some sense and it's not that incomprehendible and 'cause I know Dutch it made sense to me, even though Dutch also doesn't have cases. So here it would be "naar mijn vriend een krokodil gooi ik". I do have to say it is unusual to put two, but basically you can put another part of a sentence in the beginning of it if you inverse your verb with its subject, which is the case here "throw I". English doesn't have that inversion so maybe you could say "to my friend an alligator do I throw" or something. Now usually you wouldn't do it with two different nouns of which neither is more likely to be the subject like "a stone throws an apple", but in cases where there isn't such confusion, you could do it. For example "a stone throws he" because he is a person, more likely to be the subject but also the nominative case, meaning it can only be the subject. You can also have a stone throw the men, (but in Dutch) and because the verb is in plural and 'men' also is, you could see that it is the subject.

[@JoustingJaguar]

@@SyamfprchI like this.

[@michaelcherry8952]

10:15 For your consideration, I give you Newfoundland English. The rest of us in Canada secretly believe that Newfoundlanders are actually from another planet and just didn't do enough research on the language before they landed on "The Rock".🤣

[@CartoonCastro]

Nah they just got there from Ireland and old England when the language wasn't as modern

[@atomf9143]

0:54 unless it’s Basque, apparently.

[@TheDrumstickEmpire]

Lolol. Even Basque has a family, they’re just all LOONG dead.

[@crazydinosaur8945]

well, Basques family just happens to be dead, dosent mean it dont have/had one

[@atomf9143]

@@crazydinosaur8945 Basque is the Batman of languages.

[@Wraithfighter]

I honestly think that English's massive messiness is actually a secret benefit. Sure, English is the modern common trade language at least partially because Britain went and Empired all over everyone, but because speaking 100% proper English is a damn mess, native and fluent English speakers are just kinda used to crap not making sense sometimes. It might be a very hard language to learn how to speak fluently, but its actually kinda easy to just speak well enough to be understood. Then again, might just be my English-consumed mind. And... well, yeah, I just kinda like the notion that English is such a chaotic mess that its become comparatively easy just by virtue of everyone kinda agreeing that the rules are mostly optional, just try to get close enough and you'll be fine.

[@FerretPirate]

English is the AK-47 of languages: Its biggest strength is that it can take a lot of abuse and still be used. 😁

[@undercovercrazy8455]

Sorry to say but that's like every language (with a few exceptions) as long as you get the main topic words of your sentence you can be understood in most countries and they'll even praise you sometimes for just trying which is awesome. But it's kinda built into our brains to get the meaning of something without proper language, I mean just through gesture or expression you can tell what somebody is asking for most of the time. It's really only higher level and technical concepts that you have to be fluentish in a language to express yourself. Take Japanese for instance (I work in Japan sometimes) despite it being a pretty rigid language (I wouldn't say speaking or listening is really complicated, just the writing) If you try to speak with a Japanese person and you only know the basic words of what your trying to say even without knowing the language rules they will understand you and help you out. When I first started speaking Japanese I was speaking my sentences backwards but the people still understood me without batting an eye and some even helped me out by telling me what the correct way was. When traveling to other countries it's the same, just learn a few basic sentences and a lot of words you may or may not need and just mash em together if something happens. I guarantee in most places people will understand you without batting an eye. So what I'm really saying is, languages are cool

[@intergalactic92]

I think this is true, there’s so much local slang that you don’t have to travel very far to come across strong accent and dialect differences, yet there are rarely instances where people are genuinely incapable of conversing. I think the ability to just not use any of the grammar rules helps a lot here.

[@marhawkman303]

Also.. English is interesting int hat... yoda-speak... is technically actually grammatically correct... despite being atypical... as English... modern that is... actually supports multiple grammars.

[@marhawkman303]

@@undercovercrazy8455 You want really hard? try talking to a Korean who doesn't speak English... when you don't speak Korean. I once attempted to do that..... trying to talk to Germans is way easier.

[@janisport23]

The thing about Old Norse being the reason for English's loss of morphology is a myth that needs to die, and I really don't understand the idea that it is what differentiates English from other Germanic languages. It doesn't help that this video is trying to explain linguistic history but doesn't actually want to touch "complicated" linguistics and instead has to essentially assume that the most important changes to the language came from the outside. Which is tempting to language geeks who are also interested in history, but very often it is better to look for internal rather than external causes for linguistic change. Consider that, just like English, the vast majority of Germanic languages have undergone the same loss of morphology. That's a very important detail that you might not be aware of if you're not knowledgable on the topic and encounter this video. All you get to hear is that Anglophones have no knowledge of case and gender because their language mysteriously lacks them, even though most Western Europeans struggle, at least with case, just as much and for the exact same reason. Another important thing to note is that written Old English was already being kept artificially conservative by Benedictine monks *before* the arrival of Norse settlers. English, like practically all Germanic languages, was losing its morphology due to sound changes. Mainly Germanic's shift of stress to the first syllable and various forms of vowel weakening and loss. It's difficult to maintain something like a case system in a language that mainly uses endings, if all the endings sound the same.

[@EleiyaUmei]

As someone studying English and German Language and Literature, I really don't get why a historian felt the need to do a video explaining language history. It's as if I made a video about history - I would not be equipped with enough knowledge and of course I would have the feeling that "history is complicated" because I don't know enough about it. But then again, this whole channel is half about explaining stuff the creators have read about without ever studying it (esp. when it comes to mythology), so I shouldn't be surprised.

[@LadyDarkHatter]

I was very lucky to have a professor in university that could spoke and understood old english perfectly and recited the lines of Beowulf to us so we could better appreciate the nuance of the language rather than just crying over trying to translate and understand the story's themes

[@slwrabbits]

Very lucky indeed! Old English is super interesting, spent a lot of time comparing it to modern German.

[@keolas6916]

Was his name Michael Drout by chance?

[@boringturtle]

As a writer, the messiness of english is what makes it so nice for telling stories. For any given concept I have *so many* synonyms to pull from (even without committing thesaurus heresy) because of all the disparate sources of the language. These words are all different lengths with different connotations and syllabic emphasis. This really opens the door for fun and creative meter for whatever you might want to say.

[@adude20]

Yes, I agree with this completely. I am learning Portuguese, and I'm sure I don't know all their vocabulary yet... but so often they have 1 word that we have 2 or 3 or 4 for... like their word for boring is the same as for annoying... so I have to make sure they understand which way I am meaning it.

[@dvillines26]

our thick thesauri are a testament to our language's beautiful excess of words.

[@leightonolsson4846]

It has an astonishing amount of precision. It lacks single words and phrases that sum up abstract moods and feelings like the other European languages, but every synonym has... A slightly different flavour?

[@Windona]

@@leightonolsson4846 "kingly' 'royal' and 'regal' for example? All mean roughly the same thing, but 'regal' sounds far more elegant while 'kingly' sounds like something ye olde peasant would say. The more latin the word is the classier it sounds.

[@leightonolsson4846]

@@Windona good observation

[@Namburiadityasairam2605]

You know, let me tell this to you as an Indian (so a non native speaker, but in India your entire education is done in English if you pick an English medium school, which are dominant) you only know how good English is when you start learning another language (in my case German). I'm sorry English, I'll never insult you again.

[@slwrabbits]

I speak English natively, but learned all my grammar from French and German classes. I was saying and writing English correctly, but never knew WHY until I got taught real grammar in foreign language classes.

[@psymar]

Having begun studying Swedish and having previously studied Japanese... nah, I hate English more now!

[@salgen1319]

A fun thing about grammatical gender in Swedish: We used to have three categories of grammatical gender: masculine, feminine and neutral. Over time (long ago but there are still remnants of it - clocks are sometimes referred to as "she") the masculine and feminine categories merged, which left us with two categories, general and neutral. Now words are seemingly arbitrarily divided into these two, with the only real difference being the article in front of the noun ("en" or "ett") and whether they have a different plural form ("ett hus, flera hus" = one house, several houses or "en hund, flera hundar" = one dog, several dogs)

[@kirstenpaff8946]

In German we still have male, female, and neutral grammatical cases. Due to a weird grammatical quirk, the word for girl is gender neutral in German, while the word for boy is masculine. It has to do with how the gender becomes neutral if you use a diminutive suffix, but it also means that, especially in dialect, girls are referred to as it.

[@magnusengeseth5060]

There are quite a few more differences than that between words of the two grammatical genders in Swedish. In a short sentence like "A large blue boat" you need to replace every single word if you decide to use "ship" instead of "boat" just because the two words have different grammatical genders: En stor blå båt Ett stort blått skepp And if you want to talk about this boat/ship, you would use different words for things like "it" "this" and "that" for a boat and a ship as well. For people who grew up with the language, 99% of this is done on autopilot and requires no conscious knowledge of what the rules are and when to apply them.

[@salgen1319]

@@magnusengeseth5060 true adjectives and pronouns do differ a bit too! It's a mess when you do have to learn it though but yeah you're right

[@marsmadness9630]

Dutch has gone through the same change in grammatical gender. We used to have the same system as German, but now we have "de" (your "en") and "het" (your "ett"). Though we don't make a distinction if we the Dutch word for (the English) "a(n)".

[@WynnofThule]

0:10 Actually, there is a pretty consistent rule about stress in two-syllable words. Nouns and adjectives are stressed on the first syllable, verbs and prepositions are on the second.

[@quinn0517]

You and I have very different definitions "pretty consistent".

[@WynnofThule]

@@quinn0517 *by English standards. It certainly works better than "i before e, except after c"

[@Amanda-C.]

You can consistently derive new words with it, especially if they've got latin roots. In fact, one might call such deRIVEd nouns... DErives.

[@quinn0517]

@@WynnofThule 🤣 So true.

[@legateelizabeth]

This is the thing about English. It usually has pretty set rules, ones that are applicable almost all the time in normal speech. But for some reason everyone acts like this is an insane exception filled nonsense language.

[@Brinara13]

I'd gotten this explanation three times already through college professors, but you fighting back linguistic prejudice by standing up for other dialects related to English was the cherry on top. I salute you, sir.

[@nikolakovacevic1369]

4:56 has to end up in OSP Out Of Context compliations

[@aspihen8815]

9:09 is also a good Quote

[@janmelantu7490]

A lot of English exceptionalism is overstated, but one thing that our language does have over other languages is that it doesn’t have a central regulatory body. Nobody has any authority to say how to “properly” spell or pronounce words or how to grammar “correctly”. There are conventions, sure, but these are all ad hoc, limited to specific publications or regions. And many of the are purely descriptive of how people are doing them, not a prescription of how things ought to be done.

[@Duiker36]

I guarantee you that *most* languages don't have a regulatory body. There are thousands of languages spoken today. There are maybe a dozen language regulatory bodies.

[@patatequiroule]

It's pretty much the case with every language. For French, France has the Académie Française and Québec has the Office National de la Langue Française, but they function with a basic understanding of how linguistics work (in essence, a language always end up being defined by those who use it, regardless of institutions). Don't get me wrong, they did try to pretend they had some sort of linguistic authority through various attempt at reforming French, but they were mostly unsuccessful.

[@dvillines26]

English is definitely a Wild West language, absolute anarchy. no gods, no masters, we take the words we want, when we want them, and we can and will coin words and phrases at an alarming rate and make up entirely niche jargons consisting of nesting arrays of in-jokes. also call things different, other things just to be different. one of my favorite books in elementary school was 'Frindle', a book about a kid deciding to make up a word so hard that it'd ultimately get into dictionaries. The thing I valued about the book was how it taught me about how malleable English is, and how even just one stubborn, dedicated person can change the lexicon.

[@janmelantu7490]

@@Duiker36 there are thousands of languages, yes, but you would be surprised how many regulatory bodies exist (it’s in the hundreds). Even for small languages, tho they tend to be more on the “promote the language” side. Checking the list of languages by total number of speakers, the only other widely-spoken ones without a regulatory body are Hausa (not entirely sure why, other languages in Nigeria have regulators), Wu Chinese (the PRC is pro-Mandarin), and creoles

[@Alias_Anybody]

@@Duiker36 While there isn't that one authority who can just change things with some kind of executive order, there's actually some kind of regulation in place for German specifically. Basically, you can get some changes done if you lock a hundred experts from all over the German speaking world in a room for a decade, lol.

[@TheJH1015]

5:30 slight correction, Dutch ditched the case system officially in the late 1940s, after barely having been used in practice for decades as well as to look and feel less German (for obvious reasons). In other words, English is NOT an outlier, merely one of two languages that have evolved to ditch cases because 'why bother when word order works fine'. Which is saying a lot for the most conservative West-Germanic language in existence. Modern Dutch from 1500 AD can still be read perfectly fine by a native Dutchman today.

[@100beep5]

5:37 Almost! English *does* have grammatical gender for exactly one noun... boats. All boats are female. Don't ask me why.

[@wolfgangsilverfang8642]

That explains AzurLane

[@VivaLaDnDLogs]

Cars, too?

[@bespokeenglish389]

And aeroplanes, and buildings.. We also have a rule that says something like "if you don't know the gender of something/someone, assume masculine" which is used by most native speakers but almost never recognised

[@magnusengeseth5060]

Not really, you just use female pronouns for boats. Grammatical gender changes a bit more than that. For example, the two Swedish cognates to boat and ship have different grammatical genders - "båt" is common and "skepp" is neuter. If I want to say "A large blue boat/ship" I can't just change the noun and nothing else, as you can see here: En stor blå båt. Ett stort blått skepp.

[@100beep5]

@@VivaLaDnDLogs It's not nearly as ingrained, at least. Could be.

[@JonoSSD]

I like english because it's an extremely easy language to learn, especially nowadays. As a native portuguese speaker, a language that has verb tenses in the double digits with genders in everything, having to worry only about past, present and future (most of them extremely regular) is a blessing. (Technically english also has like 12 verb tenses but most are just remixes of others like anything perfect continuous just putting "been" after "have" and it's done. In latin languages every tense morphs the words, sometimes by a lot, and you have to memorize it. There's also a lot more of irregular verbs and special cases. And I do mean A LOT.)

[@JBG1968]

I’ve been told Portuguese is simply Spanish spoken in French . Lol

[@ThinWhiteAxe]

7:09 Blue is a time traveller or immortal

[@aroma13]

The do thing in english is also done in colloquial german for german, with the related verb tun, so for exemple:Tust du englisch sprechen? /Do you speak english?;Ja, tue ich/Yes, I do. There are more exemples of this, but I couldn't find any that also have english cognates in them, the cooler thing is when you throw middle english into the mix, it's sounds like a mix of the two languages: Tust du englisch sprechen?(ge.)/Dost thou speken englisch(m.e)/do you speak english?

[@vathek5958]

The way he spoke about the ‘ending a sentence with a preposition’ and ‘splitting an infinitive’ ‘rules’ makes it sound like they were naturally occurring additions that arose in the Middle Ages. Instead, they were much later (18th-19th century) inventions by prescriptivist reformers that have never been part of how the language is actually used by the vast majority of its speakers.

[@tagAught]

The thing is, that the rules were *taken* from Latin by those reformers, rather than - as you said - developing naturally.

[@catomajorcensor]

Excellent quality, as always. One small nitpick: Most Germanic languages don't have case (other than a vestigial genitive in -s which English also has) - English is in the majority here. Standard German has case, but it's quite archaic among western European languages to preserve it (off the top of my head, Romanian and Greek also have it, as well as more fully-preserved systems in the Slavic and Baltic languages). I don't know how the continuous aspect (not just in the present) in -ing came about, so you could be right about Celtic influence, but some Romance languages also have a similar construction (sto guardando, estoy leyendo). Might have an interesting history there.

[@Zealus_24]

English is the monsterous hybrid of multiple languages and it really shows.

[@rahthrees]

A common misconception. English has a lot of loanwords from different languages, and in terms of number a lot of its words are from different languages. However, the most common words are almost all native english words, and the grammer and syntax of the language is very English. But it is not a hybrid or creole of any sorts.

[@Arcanua]

@@rahthrees English itself is a hybrid however not in the way a Hybrid language itself is define. It doesn't have many native words either...they're nearly all Germanic originally...half the grammar is also Germanic the other half being Latin...Syntax is mostly French and Latin....you fill the gaps in either with the other two in some amount. Yeah it is a hybrid language, just again not how something like Creole exists and those hybrids are defined.

[@connorleonard4047]

@@Arcanua it literally isnt a hybrid.

[@connorleonard4047]

@@Arcanua all the grammar is germanic

[@polishmapper5968]

7:30 ahhhhhhh no. While the Celtic languages do have a similar usage of "do" in their languages as English does, we cannot confirm that there is any link between the two. English was nearly fully standardized by the time the "do" came into our language in the way we use it today, and earlier written forms of English do not possess it. There is debate over whether or not this was a Celtic trait, but many linguists have offered the counter-explanation that it just happened to evolve in several English dialects independent of the Celts and was thus incorporated into the standardized form. Basically we don't know if this trait came from Celtic or if it evolved convergently, and to present it as coming from the Celtic languages is a bit misleading

[@connorleonard4047]

@@polishmapper5968 also german has it with tun

[@TAHOEkaleidonaut]

We can all thank the patron saint of Linguistics & Fantasy Literature, J.R.R.Tolkien, for the contemporary English translation of Beowulf.✨ What sucks about English though is the fact that you need about 150K words to be fluent in spoken alone. We’re not even talking about the the mess that is English Syntax or Grammar. Especially to those learning or teaching the language.👀 As a contrasting example: Conversationally, Japanese, Korean, & Mandarin are fairly easy to pick up. With Mandarin having several nuances that makes it a few levels harder to learn. What makes Japanese difficult to pick up for the West is when it’s written; IE: having 2 different alphabets PLUS 10K Kanji/Chinese Pictographic Characters needed to be fluent. At least it’s not 150K… You just have basic written Hangeul for Korean, & you’re set. Hanja/Chinese Pictographic Characters exist, but it’s very much not the norm in South Korea. BUT, then we get to Mandarin, & we have to wrap our heads around 2 additional Intonations asides Questions & Statements… And with it being a root language equivalent to Latin birthing the Romantic Languages - you mess up, & basically you have Mushu from Mulan breathing “Dishonor” down your throat…😅 The only other 2 languages that would likely make a Westerner’s head spin even more are Thai, & contemporary Hebrew. They have EIGHT Intonations.👀💧

[@artofthepossible7329]

There are some people in the world whose "lessar" achievements would be the kinds of things most people could only wish of accomplishing.

[@leanansidhe6332]

You don't really need 10K characters to read japanese, you only need about 2K to 3K. I'd say learning japanese is also difficult because the grammar is completely different.

[@akl2k7]

TBH, I think the number of words required to know English is grossly overstated and a lot of those are probably for specific situations that aren't used by the average person, or are words that were used centuries ago but fell out of use. I'm also pretty sure modern Hebrew is NOT a tonal language. Thai is also analytic, like Chinese and Vietnemese, which can make up for the tones. It also has an alphabet as well.

[@dvillines26]

you don't need that many words to be functionally fluent, many native speakers go through life completely ignorant of most of the common SAT words, and only know any of those words if they come up in a specific, memorable context where their meaning becomes clear. how many of you out here know what 'indolent' or 'stringent' mean? 'Juxtapose'? 'Abrogate'? People need verbs, common nouns and adjectives, prepositions, PRONOUNS, and articles. when it comes to anything more than the basic adjectives and adverbs, and less common nouns, that's case-by-case.

[@augustrnning7823]

Fun fact at 5:50 you talk about Case; I’m Norwegian and fun fact, we don’t use case-words either… but we do use genitive (like english) For those if you that do not know what genitive is: it’s used to refer to the “property” of something: its/hers/his like in english: John’s or Alex’s… or in non-gendered words like: tree, the tree’s branches Mind that we do have gendered nouns in Norwegian, otherwise, we’re pretty similar

[@Alias_Anybody]

Is this actually unique to Norwegian or just a shared feature with Swedish and Danish?

[@augustrnning7823]

@@Alias_Anybody honestly, I do not know, but considering Norwegian is basically modified danish im guessing at least Danish has some similar grammar rules

[@psymar]

​@@Alias_AnybodySwedish doesn't use genitive, but does have a case for definite articles. "a cat" is "en katt" but "the katt" is just "katten"

[@kaia-di4pq]

​@@psymar swedish does have a genitive case (indef. gen. sg. katts/indef. gen. pl. katters/def. gen. sg. kattens/def. gen. pl. katternas) which functions similarly to how the english genitive works simply being the -s suffix most of the time. to be more precise, the genitive case is not about possession but attributive aspects. the swedish definite article is also not a case but simply a different way of forming the definite compared to many other languages, icelandic for instance similarly forms definite nouns as a suffix and that suffix itself conjugates according to case in its fully preserved 4-case system rather than being a case on its own. additionally, i havent read enough about danish so i cant attest but in both swedish and norwegian a large body of dialects maintain more advanced case distinctions, sometimes preserving accusative and dative (this is the reason you hear some people say "han" where youd expect "honom" because "han" was the accusative form, and some places also use the old accusative of "hon" which is "hana", often suffixed to the previous word as -'na (standard swedish "känner du henne" vs dialectal "känner du'na") and in the case of swedish dialects also preserving 3 genders. modern swedish nominative case nouns largely derive from the accusatives and datives of old swedish, and even in standard swedish some remains such as dem, honom, lagom, and henne all being old dative forms (this is also the reason many people mix up de and dem, because the otherwise almost complete lack of dative gives people a poor intuition for its use).

[@echtblikbonen]

We don't have case in Dutch or Frisian either, I feel like only German has case but all Germanic languages have gender lol

[@mr.boomguy]

10:24 - And that's why puns exist

[@michaeltalksanime]

I'm so glad you brought up how much english changes with culture at the end. The amount of frustrating arguments I have with people explaining how african american and african canadian dialect are it's own dialects based on cultural differences, only to be met with laughs by supposed academics is insane.

[@metrux321]

"I remember it blissfully" wait, Blue's an immortal???

[@emberandfriendsanimations2454]

Or a time traveler

[@Duiker36]

Nah, just super-old. He'll die eventually.

[@BoliVic96]

loved the conclusion because I always say my native language is spanglish, that's the language I speak in my mind, with the internet being so focused in the english speaking world the way we see english gobally is changing as well so at least now I have a 10 minute comeback when my classmates complain that english is hard lol

[@I_exist_I_guess]

short answer : the romans and the french longer answer : the romans and the french but not how you'd think

[@pjlusk7774]

This strikes me as quite similar to a Langfocus video I saw a while back that argued English might be what's called a Creole language. Creoles are a particular type of hybrid language that frequently emerge in situations like this, where two groups of people who don't speak the same language have to interact with each other. Most often this is in a colonial context, where one group has substantial power over the other. When that happens, they develop what's called a pidgin language. These generally take the vocabulary of the dominant groups language and the grammar rules of the dominated groups language (which might be why people in the dominant group tend to think their counterparts are stupid!). These languages are generally hyperfocused on the economic interactions between the two groups, as well. As these interactions continue over decades and centuries, the former pidgin becomes useful for a wider array of topics and eventually picks up native speakers. That's when it becomes a Creole.

[@vainiwanowski]

The more I learn about english language, the less respect I have for it. This actually helps me to speak the damn thing, as I'm not embarrassed by my mistakes, and sometimes do it on purpose when I decide that the proper english in some cases is dumb.

[@msvoxacious]

Agreed! Language is meant to be played with and personalized

[@xanderwardwell-gaw7472]

As soon as I saw the title of this video, I said out loud "Oh, this is gonna be a good one."

[@jessephillips1233]

The best way to get Chaucer is to read it aloud with a very heavy scottish accent. Suddenly all the rhymes make sense and word order and pacing are much smoother.

[@Nasser851000]

*Reads Title* Because of Weather and Politics XD

[@Rose-yx6jq]

You're not wrong.

[@beardedgeek973]

Ah, English. The language we all are forced to learn in school, but it is easiest to learn by simply read a lot of books in English instead of trying to understand the damned grammar. Fighting my way thru LOTR in English at 12 and then the entirety of Discworld did me more good than 10 years of school.

[@arbknight12]

I once heard the English language is the “Bastard child of all other languages”. Lol

[@shubhamjoshi1843]

9:05 ooh hidden Mickey

[@poenpotzu2865]

Ah a video catering to my personal tastes, thanks!

[@artsrandomstuff436]

This just legitimately made me feel like I understand English better, and I'm a writer who's been speaking it my whole life-

[@TheGreyPie]

Another example of case still being used in English are pronouns Him is the accusative (object case) of He. So the reason we can even figure out that I is throwing the alligator in the example and not the other way around is because I is in the nominative (subject case). Say "... an alligator throw my colleague" (a noun which consequently doesn't show its case) and one can only infer that the alligator is doing the throwing

[@Duiker36]

Case *and* gender. The only reason why we have to tell people our pronouns today is because they're the only part of English with gender.

[@elpaya7775]

Fun fact, in the small island Menorca the local catalan dialect is full of modern English words because the British occupation of the island for 100 hundred years

[@burghleyimeanberdly6513]

it's fun how the lands of the Weogora tribe now bear the name that American's just can't pronounce (Worcestershire) because they built a castle and that's how regions got named. E.g. Gloucestershire, Dorchester, Cheshire. Because Cester/Chester just means castle so they were "The lands of X castle"

[@smaza2]

As a linguist, I was a bit worried seeing this video pop up, especially given how popular the "three languages in a trenchcoat in a dark alley" mentality is. Bluntly, English is not particularly special or messy, all languages are like this, we are far from the only language with lots of loan words and complicated spellings and loss of inflection and gender - not even the only Germanic language, as Afrikaans has the same. Certain pop linguists write books on how unique and mutt-like English is, because it sells and gets book tours. Aside from a few common misconceptions (split infinitives / dangling prepositions are fine - native speakers doing these is proof they are grammatical), and seemingly having started research with the conclusion "English is such a crazy language!" decided, it does seem like you've done your homework & avoided a lot of common pitfalls. Overall 6.5 / 10 grade, welcome to linguistics, watch out for all the rabbit holes

[@Skellybeans]

Yay! A linguistics video

[@Dominic-Noble]

I approve of the blame the french message.

[@SpaghettiNachos]

Heck yeah, I love languages

[@michelleignatowski8393]

I have a cousin who is starting her first year of teaching this school year and a while back, we somehow got onto the topic of how difficult it can be to teach children about spelling and grammer rules in school. I remember around that time, I listened to a video by the KZbin channel, Answer in Progress, where they talked about why is spelling in the English language so convoluted. The take away I mainly got from the video and later explained to my cousin was that English is a conglomeration of 3 different languages that all follow different grammer rules and this is why spelling for certain words can be a real hot mess. Kinda nice to have a refresher and another angle on why English as a language can be a difficult language to learn and teach.

[@keegandecker4080]

Short answer: the romans, the Irish, the welsh, some norsemen, and a Frenchman walk into the pub Real answer: England was Europe’s doormat before the advent of gunpowder

[@connorleonard4047]

@@keegandecker4080 nope the romans nor celts had zero influence on english

[@keegandecker4080]

@@connorleonard4047 Cambrian Chronicles, amigo

[@connorleonard4047]

@@keegandecker4080 some welsh nationalist youtuber?

[@keegandecker4080]

@@connorleonard4047 yeah

[@connorleonard4047]

@@keegandecker4080 sheep huggers

[@lilemmyRA]

The history of English spelling is also interesting, especially once you into the mind-blowing & rapid change "The Great Vowel Shift". Plus, looking at how spelling continues to evolve as English spreads across the globe (ex: grey vs. gray).

[@Nirlo]

English is the child of most of Europe holding a thousand year long absolute rager of a party in the Celts house after their roommate Romans moved out due to bankruptcy.

[@zoyo8903]

This video kind of helps confirm for me the thought that I've had for a long time, which is the idea that English is just one giant creole language that has developed into a recognizably official language, that is, if you don't count creole languages as "official", And the reason it is so inconsistent on grammar is not only because there were active meaningful changes and how it was written overtime, but because so many different languages and so many different cultures jammed themselves onto the British isles and everyone there could only speak about 70% of English, and the other 30% they just filled in with their own stuff until it caught on or they learned. 😂

[@grungekitty77]

Fun fact! Why is English the business language? Not because the English are conquer happy (although that HELPED) it's actually America's fault. It's because of airplanes. America started making commercial flights and the companies did the math involved. They realized it would never be profitable if they made their own private infrastructure. The only way it worked was if the government built and regulated the infrastructure for all of them to use. So Air Traffic Control become a federal department with laws attached. When any other country wanted to trade flights with the US (or 90% of all the airports in the early days) they legally HAD to talk to ATC. And ATC spoke English. So you HAD to speak English to make any money in the aeronautics industry. And when everyone speaks English to talk to the USA, then you know you can rely on English to be a common language. People eventually just standardized it. You HAVE to speak fluent English to work with international flights. From there, it trickled into other international industries.

[@daviddaugherty2816]

I noticed something was weird there when I was on a flight from Florence to Amsterdam. All the safety announcements and stuff were in Italian and English. Even me, a native English speaker, was thinking, "Where’s the Dutch?"

[@blacksage2375]

If THAT were all that true the USA would be on the metric system from the number of elite fields it is required for. Likewise the modern FAA unifying American airspace under one authority was established in 1958 after several high-profile accidents, so the usual ink for safety regulations. More importantly nobody would have had to do business with USA were it not for being the economic hyperpower after the traditional empires destroyed themselves.

[@grungekitty77]

@@blacksage2375 So....metric is also the standard for international projects. I don't know what you're trying to say? American companies do require employees to understand metric measurements (Edit. Forgot the end of this sentence.) if they are working internationally. And I never implied being an economic super power had nothing to do with it. How do you think America was in a position to almost single handedly start an international industry?

[@dvillines26]

I think the rise of the internet also compounded this, as the fundamentals of internet architecture and protocol were largely done by English speakers. also the way Wall Street became globally central post WWII.

[@blacksage2375]

@@grungekitty77 Because there's no wash over effect. It's only particular fields demostrating your basic effect is fake. Only pilots, controllers, and a few others need to know English for the job. It's the passengers doing business when they arrive that made English everyone's second language.

[@karpi470]

I just wrote a term paper about the Great Vowel Shift, and I love how hating the French is one of the factors that initiated it.

[@tux_duh]

As someone from the Appalachias, even within different Hollers you could have differing pronunciations or words for things, usually its just seen as a mispronunciation of "standard English" Example: my friend grew up a few towns over, and eventually moved to my town in middle school. I didn't know for the longest time that she pronounced sink like 'zinc' and when I questioned it one day she didn't know what I was talking about, everyone from her town said it that way and that's how she was taught to

[@jessebridgeman767]

MORE LINGUISTIC DEEP DIVES! History has SOOOO many interesting instances of language making all the difference in diplomatic situations, such as the Spanish translator for the Aztecs twisting what was said due to parallels between the two languages

[@judeleewrites]

4:44 can't blame you for not trying, but I could have sworn I read somewhere that JRR Tolkien would open his Oxford class on Beowulf by reciting that intro from memory. Unfortunately I can't find the source for this, so it might be cap, but just imagine.

[@Duiker36]

It's probably true. The thing is, Tolkien would have been aware that immersion is an important part of language acquisition, so priming his students to hear Old English is a reasonably smart professor thing to do. And as a bonus, if it makes you panic, you might not be cut out for that class.

[@Xalerdane]

It also doesn’t help that we have roughly twenty-five vowel sounds and only five vowel letters in our alphabet.

[@maromania7]

My favorite English trend is that most words people in the UK think others "say wrong" are actually cases of them changing the word like 10 times and thier former colonies not. Then forgetting they were the ones who changed and claiming we did. Hence why, for perhaps the biggest example, Australia and the USA say "soccer." Originally it was Association Football and Rugby Football. AsSOCationers were shortened to SOC-ers, hence soccer and rugby football. eventually that switched to Football and Rugby, but others didn't care. Same with many other words, like trash or period. Americanisms are mostly just "Others changed, but for better and worse, America refused."

[@FatherDraven]

At first glance I thought this said "ENGLAND IS A MESS" and I was just like "yea"

[@Getsugaru]

There's a description for English that has stuck with me for years that I feel sums it up quite nicely: "English is a language that follows other languages into dark alleys, beats them up, then rummages through their pockets for spare grammar and loose vocabulary."

[@alphaundpinsel2431]

I was always taught English is a creole language that just occured in Europe

[@mafeel105]

Congrats on the 700th video 🎉🎉🎉

[@Maxisamo1]

So basically: - The Norse married in with other Germanic people - France came in and added Latin spice to the aristocracy - France is kicked out, English is then based on the only writing available, which was a mixture of French and English, which influenced the English speakers - The rest is history