What Even Is a Word?

[@nanba009]

"ness-ness" Hooray! we have the word of the year here!

[@amieekennedy2792]

Azuki Island I laughed at that too!Great.. lol!

[@natqevalhiindisguise141]

*Ness from the Mother series nods his head* OK!

[@MisterHunterRow]

Unopenupable

[@enricobianchi4499]

sans-sans

[@roxie6971]

a lack of lack

[@PowerGohan91]

Here's a quote translated from Yiddish about the arbitrary differences between language and dialect: "A language is a dialect with an army and navy" - Max Weinreich

[@xkmi5996]

I was about to comment that... XD

[@alwinpriven2400]

Hello someone from Palestine! Please explain how it gave you hope?

[@isabelledaher9011]

Henry Pike ii

[@obviativ123]

There is a real common sense about the difference! If two communication systems have more than 80 % of their words in common, they're dialects, if not, they are different languages. But of course, there is no reason why it is 80 % and not 70 % or 90 %, it's just the convention.

[@Jacob-yg7lz]

@@obviativ123 What about Chinese, where the words aren't in common, but the writing is? Or in languages with cognates? Languages which are intelligable to one speaker but not the other?

[@TomatoFriesLAN]

3:12 that Rubik's cube is nowhere near solvable. 8 colors 5 green edges wtf man

[@JULIUSCOOLX]

Tomatofries LAN oh too bad

[@Jivvi]

There are only 4 green edges, and 2 green corners. But yeah, way too many colours (9 actually).

[@A.K2.718]

Yes because details matter

[@xcreeperbombx61]

I mean the Rubik's cube might represent how hard the problem is to solve: impossible

[@jax6648]

Isn’t it just a 3x3x3

[@ithrangroenen1787]

the cat actually lives in a toy owned by a garage

[@lordman5497]

English is good

[@devonm3400]

I understood the "cat who lives in the garage" as a single subject being attached to the gentive clitic "-'s", then toy is after and the object of the initial phrase. 🤷

[@ellies_silly_zoo]

@@devonm3400 …

[@angeldude101]

This is why I want to use parentheses as in "(The cat who lives in the garage)'s toy," so that it's not "The cat who lives in (the garage's toy)." Ambiguous parse trees like this are exactly what parentheses are used for in contexts that demand absolute precision like math and programming.

[@user-em4rk4qo1f]

3:02 In german words are frequently combined because of our grammatical rules. We do it so often that you could randomly combine two german words and might have a great chance of getting an already existing word.

[@IndianaJones664]

+WIRES' Study Platform Geschwindigkeitsbeschränkung

[@N4voru]

Modernskits 2016 | Actually, it is written "Juweliergeschäft" or "Juweliergeschaeft"

[@nbksrbija1039]

English does that too sometimes, for example a flower pot is a flowerpot, but it's usually just two words next to each other like "hotel room" (I think German has Hotelzimmer, one word, for hotel room). But are these really two words? "Hotel room" only has one stressed syllable (hoTEL room instead of hoTEL ROOM) just like a single word, and you wouldn't say "hotel nice room" for a nice hotel room, meaning that "hotel" is a prefix, so maybe it should be "hotelroom" just like in German? "Potatochips"? "Chimneycleanerchimneybroombroomstickmaker"?

[@zyaicob]

Our English word kindergarten is a great example of this phenomenon in German.

[@Galenus1234]

​@Somiron Kundu generally speaking you can glue together any words in German, but they must make sense in their entirety. and Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaftendonaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft doesn't make sense. but nevertheless there's no grammatical rule that forbids summoning such a word demon in German. btw you could call someone who does that a word-demon-summoner in German, and his door bell button would be a word-demon-summoner-door-bell-button, which in turn was made by a ................... well, i think you got it.

[@0xhba]

I hated French when I started learning it because of the conjugation. And currently I feel even worse about Japanese. But now that you mentioned Arabic (My mother tongue) and its complexity,,, I feel kinda stupid XD I had never thought of other people learning Arabic. It must be painful.

[@zyaicob]

Learning German.

[@obviativ123]

@@zyaicob 😂 But the biggest problem with German is not conjugation but plural forms and gender, right?

[@charlesleninja]

Sorry to reply to a 5 years old comment, but same honestly. I was studying Latin on duolingo when suddenly I get a verb wrong and I wonder why. Just realised moments later the verb was conjugated with another person than a previous exemple, I felt pretty dumb considering my mother tongue is French.

[@hzrnvm]

Yeah, Arabic is something, that’s for sure. It’s lots of fun tho.

[@nafismubashir2479]

Al-Hamd-Ul-Lillah for example this is why it's written together

[@somewony]

It turns out that the deeper you delve into any topic, the less certain you become of your knowledge. Guess it ties in with the famous John Green quote "The truth resists simplicity". Good thing I'm a mathematician and don't have to deal with all that stuff. :)

[@omp199]

You must really hate Gödel. ;)

[@somewony]

omp199 You cannot possibly imagine.

[@xxXthekevXxx]

Reminds me of the Dunning-Kruger effect. The less you know, the more you feel like you know... and vice-versa.

[@zyaicob]

Yup. Totally.

[@zyaicob]

It's the more you know the more you know you don't know, you know?

[@SeadogDriftwood]

"Antipreness"… a reaction against something that comes/came before? Or just a very funny word? YOU MAKE THE CALL.

[@DAAI741]

antipreness

[@davidjoffe-hunter7016]

The opposite of [before the concept of ___]

[@ikschrijflangenamen]

Post

[@passerbypassinbi]

antipreness /an ,tai 'pri nes/ Noun the quality or property of that which comes does not come before

[@korayacar1444]

Günther Tuben *of things that do not come from anything

[@ikemoon127]

Gunther Tuben No, that's non-preness. /an ,tai 'pri nes/ Noun the quality of being opposed to things having come before

[@n0lain]

Icelandic is polysynthetic as well, we have words like "Vaðlaheiðarvegavinnuverkfærageymsluskúraútidyralyklakippuhringur" that nobody really uses, but grammatically they count as words.

[@n0lain]

Burhan the Somali But in Danish it's harder to do because it has to fit specific rules, unlike Icelandic

[@lisaleibfried5318]

Same with German. My favorite example is "Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft," which means "the Danube steamboat voyage's main electrical engine's construction sub-officials' society."

[@Ibuiltatower]

It's not actually polysynthetic, it's just a highly compounding agglutino-synthetic language. Most Germanic languages are, and you could even argue that English is, we just don't write them compressed like the others do. Notice that any of the long compound words only fit one word class. For instance, the Icelandic orðhlutafræðilegur ("morphological", if my Icelandic is up to snuff) is an adjective. It is easily classifiable as a adjective, despite consisting of two nouns, a nominalising suffix, and an adjectivising suffix. Because it is, despite being a complex compound word composed of many differing kinds of morphemes, fundamentally an easily defined single kind of morpheme, it is not polysynthetic. By way of contrast, the Blackfoot word nitsspommooka ("he-helped-me") isn't able to be classified as a single 'kind' of word. It's not a noun. I can't go to the store and buy a he-helped-me. It's not an adjective. I can't sell a he-helped-me bicycle. It's not even a verb, because I can't hope that in the future he will he-helped-me. Instead, the 'words' in polysynthetic languages tend to act as if they were amalgamations of many different word-types into one sort of clause-word. The key there is in the term polysynthetic. Not only is it mixing together words (synthesising them, as it were), it's mixing them together into words which act to fill multiple roles in the sentence. It's why in Icelandic or German or any compounding language which is not synthetic, you will have to say Es geht kalt. ("It goes cold" or less literally "It's cold") Noun, verb, noun. But in Blackfoot, a polysynthetic language, you simply say Íksstoyiiwa for the same thing. ("it-is-cold" ish. My Blackfoot grammar is really really fuzzy). Not only that, though, you can't break apart the pieces of a Blackfoot word without making it nonsense. You can break up orðhlutafræðilegur into pieces that make sense. Orð, hluta, fræði, and the suffix -legur. You can't do that with nitsspommooka or íksstoyiiwa without it being not a word. It'd be like saying that hlu or fræ are distinct parts of hluta and fræði. The ni- in nitsspommooka does have a first-person subject meaning, but on it's own it makes no sense. You never say ni to mean I or me. If you want it to be a pronoun, you have to add a suffix making it a noun, so nistowa, "you" shows up in these sentence words as ki- but referring to you as a pronoun, it's kistowa. The distinction is that the same is true of nouns and verbs. They have base forms that show up all the time within words, but never alone. Apisi has the meaning wolf or coyote, but if it's alone, it must be apisiw. It's as if EVERY major class of words, nouns, verbs, adverbs, whichever are incomplete without other bits added on. That's what a polysynthetic language is. Long story short: True polysynthetic languages are really weird and have truly ridiculous words. Not necessarily because of their length, but because they mean entire sentences for instance "Nitsíssapaapino'toaa." meaning "He poked me in the eye.".

[@n0lain]

Ancyent Marinere Wow, I never knew the difference until now. That was really informative, thanks! So Kalaallisut *is* polysynthetic because of words like "Nalunaarasuartaateeranngualioriasaallaqqissupilorujussuanngortitsisinnaasussarsiortuinnakuluunnguanngortinnialersaleraluallaraminngamiaasiinngooq" being an entire clause and having different parts of speech inside of it, and Icelandic isn't because the example I gave only functions as one part of speech. Gotcha.

[@lisaleibfried5318]

Rohan Zener Sorry, I've never played Starfox (please don't hate me). Is there a reason South Cerinian is written in the Cyrillic alphabet?

[@bauxsedai1495]

It might just be me because I am not a native English speaker but "The cast who lives in the garage's toy" sounds to me like their is a cat who's living in a toy owned by a garage.

[@LostieTrekieTechie]

+For The Evulz Even as a native English speaker it sounds awkward, it might be understood but it's a way of phrasing I would avoid if possible.

[@Moley1Moleo]

+Maester Marwyn - The amazing thing is that the way you understood the sentence (the garage owns a toy) is entirely valid. It is just not considered by a native English speaker because we don't think of garages as being capable of ownership. However, let us imagine that in the future my garage is a not just a room, but is a large sentient robot. It stores and sorts my cars for me, and decides when to clean or service them. Furthermore, it happens to consider the cars its toys. If I had a cat that (somehow) lived in one of my cars, I could validly refer to it as "the cat who lives in the garage's toy". ----- More realistically, if I say "My sister who went to the city's beach" it is genuinely ambiguous if I mean: * "my sister owns a beach and I'm specifying I mean the sister who went to the city", or * "my sister went to the beach and that beach is part of (or belongs to) the city".

[@snowwonder9814]

"That toy belongs to the cat that lives in the garage" is what that means. People tend to speak that way more frequently than they write that way in English, though, as it is a bit confusing/ambiguous.

[@zyrohnmng]

If said out loud, I would immediately understand it and give no second thought. When I saw it written down, I was like o.O is that even correct? It's something done when spoken, but rarely done written out.

[@MichaelHowell]

The man who owns the garage's door.

[@jeromydoerksen2603]

It's official. I'm binging this entire channel.

[@User-xh5zu]

Relatable

[@allthe1]

7:00 The cat who lived in the toy which belonged to the garage? XD

[@Fummy007]

I'm looking forward to "What even is a language" already. I hope you mention the Scots "language." The whole language/dialect problem is always brought up around Scots. Another example, Norwegian is basically the same as Danish since the original Norsk died out under Danish rule. leading to a very confused situation called the Norwegian language conflict. They use both "Bokmål" (Book tongue) a Norwegianized variety of Danish and "Nynorsk" (new-Norsk) based on Norwegian dialects in opposition to Danish.

[@xkmi5996]

Speakers of “Rikssvenska” (Standard Swedish) can most of the time understand standard Norwegian pretty well. The same can't be said about some extreme variants of dialects of Swedish (Extrem(-t)/Extreme Skånska/Scanish, Norrländska/northern Swedish, Dalmål/the dialect in Dalarna, a region in central Sweden och/and Gotländska/Gotlandic)

[@fugl_fugl]

+Fummy Also, the dialects. The Setedalsdialect is so different it has it's own grammatical rules. They even have cases, gender conjugation of adjectives and numbers! But the whole thing about Norwegian and Danish being very similar is also because they started as the same language, Norse. And then the Danes colonized the Norwegians, and then they said "Fuck Norwegian!" and made Danish the main language. And then the rich people started talking Danish because that was nice, posh and cool if you were the upper class. They also, hired southerners as nannies so that the children would get a christian-r. Apart from the upper class, everyone else went on and spoke normal Norwegian. Gøttære enn prim ;p

[@digilici951]

Fummy your comment made it into the actual video!

[@aaronvxblu215]

3:12 That Rubik's cube has 9 colors on it BTW...

[@arnouth5260]

Aaron it’s Rubik’s cubeception

[@Anonymous-df8it]

wtf?

[@falnica]

In spanish you can put the object in the verb too sometimes, for example "sembrándolas" means "seeding them", although it doesn't tell you who "them" are, and in old spanish they did it even more, people used to say things like "conózcolo" which means "I know him", today people prefer to say "lo conozco" instead. My favorite is "úntesela" which is a single word but means "rub it all around your body"

[@jwolternova1051]

empezarán a pensar (por el ejemplo del vídeo): me corro te corres se corre nos corremos os corréis se corren maemia xDDD

[@brunnomenxa]

"Úntesela" looks like the expression "grease it" in English. In Portuguese you can say "unte-a" which is pretty similar to the Spanish construction and means "grease it" as well. The "la" in Spanish and the "a" in Portuguese, are oblique pronouns that refer to something previously inserted in the conversation. Then say something like "take this tray and grease it" would be translated to "pegue essa bandeja e unte-a" and I think this works for Spanish in an expression such as "toma esa bandeja y úntesela". In other words, "úntesela" would not necessarily translate into a complete sentence in English. (Tell me if I messed up something, although I'm probably correct)

[@nameguy101]

Minor error: When describing morphemes the first time, you show 's' meaning < 1 instead of > 1.

[@Xidnaf]

Nameguy crap, thanks

[@ummjoe]

@Xidnaf crap, thanks

[@TheVurnPL]

I was hoping you'd mention that the "Eskimo has 100000 or whatever words for snow" is wrong on multiple levels as Eskimo is a rather politically incorrect name for people usually described properly as Inuit, and that there isn't just some single, one Inuit language like ones may thing, but a whole Eskimo-Aleut language family, in all of the languages of which there are about as many root words for snow as 4, and that in one specific language of that family you wouldn't find a speaker that uses more than two of those in their language (source: The Book of General Ignorance by John Mitchinson and John Lloyd). And what's funnier, it is Finnish that actually has, comparatively, a considerably big vocabulary for all specific kinds of snow, sleet, rain etc.

[@neeneko]

This reminds me of the debate in astronomy regarding 'what is a planet'. Seems simple till you try to really spec it out.

[@Xidnaf]

neeneko "Big space rock?" No, that rules out gas giants. "Big space thing smaller than a star?" But then would that count clouds of gas? . . . I give up. Back to grammar for me.

[@Xidnaf]

TheByzantineDragon So am I a dwarf planet, then, since I orbit the sun and have neither achieved nuclear fusion or cleared my orbit? Also, to the best of my knowledge I have not been annihilated by the earth, even though we share the same stable orbit.

[@CosmicDoom47]

TheByzantineDragon But how perfect does a body need to be to be a "near perfect" sphere? Remember, we need an all-encompassing definition.

[@neeneko]

TheByzantineDragon One thing to keep in mind is that while there is a particular definition right now, the lines have changed multiple times over the decades as new examples are found. That is why I feel it is similiar to what was described in this video, in both fields you encounter simple initial definitions which require greater refinement and complexity as more edge cases are examined. Within the study of language one can always point to 'when a majority of linguists say so', but every few years you run into a 'crap, that does not fit, now what?' example as other languages are studied.

[@soupy4099]

Or Geography's "what is a continent"

[@luiscarlosqg]

What's up with this word: Notwithstanding?

[@zyaicob]

It's one of those words I could use in a sentence perfectly, but defining it is... challenging. Like peradventure.

[@Jivvi]

Nevertheless Nonetheless Insofaras Inasmuchas

[@Tranxhead]

I never really understood why the possessive 's was a clitic before, and that cleared it up. Thanks!

[@PintoRagazzo]

I gonna watch this video and then the first suggested video and so on. Let's see where I end up.

[@PintoRagazzo]

Ok, so I ended up here again in just one video. New Rule: If the first suggested video has been seen, the video to be seen next will be the second suggested, and so on.

[@gingganggoolie]

+PintoRagazzo I like to believe you've fallen so far down into the dark depths of KZbin you've become stuck

[@Xx_BoogieBomber_xX]

+Iona Cloran He probably died down there.

[@somespeciesofpenguin]

@@Xx_BoogieBomber_xX Definitely dead now. He still hasn't come back.

[@ummjoe]

@@somespeciesofpenguin definitely.

[@Ggdivhjkjl]

The possessive apostrophe means "his". This becomes more obvious if you read older historical works where the actual word "his" is used more often instead. It's even more obvious in the feminine, e.g. "the Queen her crown" even though most people today would just say "the Queen's crown".

[@chekhovsgun4554]

This is the most interesting channel I have ever seen. I love your videos and you have inspired me to move on to linguistics instead of just learning a bunch of languages.

[@xkmi5996]

A funny thing, to me, is that we have the inuit/eskimo snow myth in Sweden too, despite the fact that we, in the same manner, have a very large amount of words for snow because of our language often having two small words becoming one big, instead of two separate small ones like in English. (Some examples include “Snö” (snow), “Kramsnö” (Snow that one can make good snowballs from), “Pudersnö” (Snow that is powder-y and can't be formed into snowballs), “Nysnö” (newly fallen snow), Blötsnö (Wet snow, almost slush), “Slask” (Slush), “Skarsnö” (Snow with a frozen, hard upper layer), etc.)

[@augris42]

"pluralness" = "plurality"

[@chronophagocytosis]

Finnish is one of those tricky languages where a single "word" usually contain a whole bunch of content. I don't know if it's at the same level with the Inuit language, but I certainly get the same vibe from it. This has some significant real life implications in the era of mobile phones. Typing or swiping a message in English is pretty straightforward, because the number of "words" a swiping dictionary has to have is quite moderate. However, in a Finnish spell checking dictionary you need to include the main word itself and all the countless forms you can derive from it. Here are some examples: avain = key, avaimesta = from_a_key, avaimeen = to_a_key, avaimissakaan = not_even_in_keys, and so on. The list is really long, so if I say that the size of your dictionary has to be around 30 times the number of base words, that might not be far off. Anyway, since the English dictionary on my phone is more than adequate, I can easily communicate just about any thought through it. However, the Finnish dictionary sucks so bad it's not even funny. In every sentence of a text message, I find at least one word that's not in the dictionary. Typing Finnish on this system is just a nightmare. Might as well bring a full size bluetooth keyboard and type it with that.

[@TaberIV]

4:45 This animation xD

[@juliadonati8245]

When I heard the outro music I looked around because I thought it had to have come from somewhere else. Nice to see another Lenich and Kirya fan. Their cover of Hey Cheerilee is one of my favorites. Great video overall!

[@General12th]

I AM THE THE-NESS FEAR ME

[@14MsDesiree]

It's great to have you back!

[@theanonymousmrgrape5911]

Also, in American English (I don't profess to speak for all dialects) "the" changes pronunciation based on the first letter of the word it comes before. When it comes before a consonant it is pronounced thuh eg (the street), but when it comes before a vowel, it is pronounced thee (the apple)

[@Randomalistic]

I'm not even interested in languages whatsoever yet these videos are still interesting and enjoyable to watch. Well done.

[@ShrasRJ1987]

Can't wait for your next video! Keep it up. I have alerts for when your videos come out so that I can watch them the same day.

[@ossi_2429]

Spanish: Voy a hacer un video (5 words) English: Imma make a video (4 words) REKT

[@YindiOfficial]

That was a really good pronunciation for someone who has just learned (I'm talking about arabic), although you didn't have to try so much with the "h" sound, it's much softer and more natural than the way you've pronounced it. Great video as always.

[@bobmerkley3959]

Man, your stuff is so cool. I'm hooked. I'm so glad I found you.

[@gamermapper]

6:11 It's literally called "Yupik". If you think that "Eskimo" is offensive, fine, just don't replace it with "Inuit", because those terms are not interchangeable. The Eskimo term includes the Inuit AND Yupik.

[@Nikhil-P-R]

Xidnaf? Another thing to add to the Inuit thing- they also compound adjectives in. So they say " don't eat yellowslush" (I think it's adjective before noun???).

[@jackabug2475]

Your linguistics videos are so great! And I really like what you did with matching the animation to the music in the intro to this one. Hoping to see more from you soon!

[@JoshuaHillerup]

So, can we argue that the word "a" is a clitic? After all, we say "a banana" but "an apple".

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

One Two No, the -n dropped off before a vowel.

[@keithplayzstuff2424]

Try pronouncing "topz" or "garage - s"

[@keithplayzstuff2424]

On the other hand "ass" is an exception to xidnaf's rule

[@keegster7167]

or... you could say that there is an underlying /n/ that disappears next to consonants. :/ It just depends how you analyse it. Linguistics can get almost philosophical at times.

[@Chubbchubbzza007]

King Keegster Yes, but in German, which English is related to, it's ein or eine.

[@jeffirwin7862]

I love your videos dude. I don't care even if it's just the basic stuff that you're learning in Linguistics 101; as a mechanical engineer I find it completely foreign and interesting.

[@katiekawaii]

Soooo good having you back ^_^

[@JustLooking]

I happen to speak Swedish, which usually treats the definite article (three forms, at least) as a clitic: _hatten_ 'the hat', _bordet_ 'the table', _böckerna_ 'the books'. None of these examples include modifiers because I didn't want to go off on another grammatical tangent... :-) In addition, some Swedish dialects turn the equivalents of 'him', 'her', and 'it' into clitics: _sätta dit'en_ 'put him there [slang implying: in prison]'; _jag ville klapp'na och kyss'na_ 'I wanted to pat her and kiss her'.

[@Tasermaxx]

Couldn't help but giggle when the word clitics popped up. Linguistics truly is fascinating, isn't it.

[@skamiikaze]

you did a pretty good job with arabic! usally i see people choking on their tounges when trying to speak it . so a gold star for you xidnaf!

[@pauleugenio5914]

Maybe the concept of a word is an invented way to understand the nuanced reality of human communication. In the same way that all such categorizations (of anything) are always arbitrary but useful yet incomplete. The concept of a word probably came long after people were already speaking. Sorta an early linguistic concept

[@willowFFMPEG]

When you say "The cat who lives in the garage's toy", I don't automatically think of a toy belonging to a cat who lives in the garage; I think of a cat living in a toy which belongs in the garage. I might interpret it the first way in a different context, though.

[@user-mh8to9bc4s]

I'm glad to see so much interest in language, but I hardly see much worthy of scholarly note, including the upload and attendant comments, but as is (nearly) always the case, people have their obstinate opinions and (almost) always think they're right, when in fact they're unqualified to really determine much.

[@LetsFeet]

In German, you can, infact, move around suffixes and prefixes

[@pentelegomenon1175]

I think that definition of a word being something that has demonstrable freedom from the things next to it (like you could put an adjunct in the middle) is a winner, and clitics are somehow a function of the word next to them (possibly marking a new and strange case that points to the subject indirectly?).

[@toldeneye007]

Another big problem with defining a word as the smallest unit where someone knows what you'll mean is that it some things that have only one meaningful unit of speech can also be distinct words where people will know what you mean. The difference between 'hat' and '-s' isnt the difference between words and not words, more just bound and unbound morphemes. NativeLangs series on the grammar of words has some pretty interesting stuff about that.

[@linhkien5199]

In Vietnamese, my mother tounge, we don't write space between words, instead we write space between syllables, so it's really hard to actually khow what group of syllables are word or phraes, Ex: Con hổ mang bò lên núi. if there is no situation, there is 2 meaning for this 1st: con hổ = tiger mang= take bò=bull, ox, cow lên=up núi=mountian so the sentence would means "The tiger takes the bull up the mountain" 2nd: con hổ mang=cobra bò= crawl lên=up núi=mountain so the sentence would means "the cobra crawl up the mountain" That's the epitome of what i'm talking about.

[@LeahSunKyu]

"The cat that lives in the garage's toy", can't it be also be interpreted as if the garage had a toy? Someone plz

[@rafaelarevalo8047]

these videos were part of my inspiration to study Linguistics years ago. i'm now in my 7th semester and i revisit your channel from time to time. i hope you're reading the comments still. thanks for the videos and i hope you consider returning to content creation again.

[@agfd5659]

5:20 In the Czech language we have prepositions (which are words on their own) that change their voicing in relevance to what sound comes after them, so this is not a 100% general indicator of a word. For example "v rákosí" - the 'v' is pronounced just like the English 'v', but "v pytli" - the 'v' (which is the same preposition with the same meaning) is pronounced like the english 'f' sound. Plus in both of these cases the two words are pronounced as one word. I think similar things appear in other slavic languages.

[@ibbi30]

Btw, I believe my native language, Icelandic, has many more actual words for snow than both English and the Inuit lanuages. Some of them are obscure, but the common ones are likely snjór, the general one, as well as, mjöll, lausamjöll and krap. In my eyes the last one isn't even snjór, but I believe English uses the word snow for that. In addition to those we apperantly got nýsnævi, hjarn, skari, áferða, ísskel, fastalæsing, kafsnjór, kafald, kafaldi, kafaldshjastur, bleytuslag and blotasnjó for just stationary snow (the last one referrers to halfmolten snow just like krap). For frozen precipitation we got snjókomma, él, moldél, éljagangur, snjógangur, snjóhraglandi, sjóbörlingur, hundslappadrífa, skæðadrífa, logndrífa, kafaldsmyglingur, hjaldur, lognkafald, ryk, hríð, kaskahríð, lenjuhríð, blotahríð, (ofankoma), ofanhríð and fukt. When the snow that falls is closer to rain than snjór we call it slydda, bleytukafald, klessing or slytting. Then we got names snow that is carried by wind just over the surface, skafrenningur, neðanbylur, skafkafald, snjófok, snjódrif, kóf, fjúk, snjódríf, drift, fjúkburður, fýlingur, skafbylur, skafhríð, skafmold, skafningur and svirðinsbylur. Not to mention the words for a blizzard, bylur, kafaldsbylur, kafaldshríð and moldbylur. P.S. Sorrý til allra Íslendinga sem lásu þetta :D (svona "útlendingamont" fer oft í taugarnar á mér sjálfum).

[@Arctagon]

+Olvirki As a Norwegian, I could actually understand the postscript without any knowledge of Icelandic (I could understand only a few words between the parentheses, though). I know Icelandic and Norwegian (or any other Scandinavian language for that matter) have a bit in common, but it's so much fun when I understand something in another language without any knowledge in it, just because they are similar in some respects.

[@kiwifruitkl]

Chinese has a very fluid concept of a word. It has no spaces between the characters, so for people of European languages, it may be difficult to tell where a word begins or ends. Also, two characters can generally make a word, but this word can be split up and understood individually.

[@F_Karnstein]

Great topic! But I'm afraid there's even (kind of) an example of detachable affixes: German. E.g. the verbs "verstehen" and "aufstehen" form their tenses differently (1.sg.): - verstehen: ich verstehe - aufstehen: ich stehe auf (not "ich aufstehe") This is because "ver-" is a genuine prefix, while "auf" is also a seperate adverbial element, as you can see in the (pretty much straighforward) English counterparts "understand" vs. "stand up". Nevertheless they are usually considered one word that is split up in conjugation.

[@dannicron]

Lothenon Interestingly, the words with the detachable prefixes have their stress on the prefix, while the non-detachable versions are stressed on the word root. I.e. it's verSTEHen but AUFstehen and "ich verSTEHe" but "ich stehe AUF".

[@McRaylie]

Same in Danish, it might be a germanic thing

[@Ibuiltatower]

Kasper Kamstrup It's a thoroughly Germanic thing. English does something similar with phrasal verbs like "to turn off". "He TURNED the lights OFF", but "the lights were TURNED OFF". As the subordinate verb, the two pieces (preposition & verb) stay together, but as the main verb, they split apart to bracket the rest of the predicate. Hungarian also has similar things, although it's possibly under influence from German, as the other Finno-Ugric languages don't.

[@wolflahti412]

What even is language? "A shprakh iz a diyalekt mit an armey un a flot." ―Max Weinreich (1894-1969)

[@jamesyu1093]

+Xidnaf Most syllables in the English language have a vowel

[@ikariim]

+FierceDeity YuJam (James) I was thinking the same thing.

[@Mutantcy1992]

I actually use ness as a word in informal contexts to mean the essence of

[@jax6648]

This guy questions life every video give him an Oscar

[@Aksuloid]

Yeah actually here in Finland only a few think that Inuit's have many words for snow, because Finnish has over 100 suffixes for every single word. Not in a way that Inuit's have, more like Spanish, but just...more of them.

[@chenoaholdstock3507]

Regarding point 2: several languages, (French is one of them, I believe) change how the new word starts based upon how the last one ended.

[@noThankyou-g5c]

"this is the noise that refers to these things" /language

[@bljhvatterskyllconlangcour5248]

443 likes, no dislikes. You are a really good KZbinr!

[@inTIMMYdator44]

One thing to add, you say prefixes cannot be seperated from the word they're associated with, but in german there are a whole set of words in german called seperable prefix verbs. When they are used in sentences, the main verb is in the second position in the sentence, while its prefix goes to the end. Here's an example. Ich rufe ihn an. (I call him) The verb isnt just ruhen, its anrufen.

[@luiscarlosqg]

All those s and z having different sounds is so difficult, at least in Spanish they all sound the same. (portuguese has the same "s ≠ z" problem).

[@tomatenmagnet]

I have so much respect for you right now! Really, I love watching your videos and learning about all those things I never even thought of before. It must take soooo long to research all of that and make a structured video out of what you've got. I'd be way to lazy to look stuff like that up myself, despite finding it very interesting. Could you tell me your secret to motivation, please? Thanks! :)

[@Xidnaf]

Li Na Wow, thank you so much! And yeah, it does take a lot of work but . . . I am not qualified at all to be giving advise about how to get motivated and get lots of work done. I have a tendency to get interested in something and drop everything around me to go off and research it, and then I'll do nothing for a few days but look into that one thing until I get bored and go do something else. Doesn't really lend itself to keeping up with school work. Knowing that there's multiple thousands of people waiting on me for new videos is a pretty big motivater, though, so I guess . . . maybe I should get everyone to subscribe to "me getting straight As" :P

[@tomatenmagnet]

Xidnaf Well actually that sounds like pretty good advice. I think I'm generally worried about getting too invested in something and forgetting about everything else. I could see myself getting into a work flow and not being able to stop, it's just that I'm scared of it. Unfortunately I waste my time binge watching KZbin videos instead, which certainly isn't productive in any way. But your comment genuinely inspired me to try and really start working on something. Thank you! Also, I would happily subscribe to you getting straight As. You deserve it :)

[@talideon]

There are two other examples that break the sound-change rule of thumb for telling affixes from separate words: French with liason, &c., which you've mentioned before, and the various Celtic languages and their initial mutations (which also come into effect when you're creating compounds) where even the distant presence of a word can cause sound changes, e.g. 'an bord' = 'the table' vs 'ar an mbord' = 'on the table' in Irish. To quote Morphophonology Barbie: Finding word boundaries is hard! Let's go shopping! :-)

[@talideon]

***** Irish, and Ireland.

[@MacheteEnima]

I'm addicted to morpheme

[@Double-Negative]

Japanese likes combining descriptors into nouns. The longest one I'm aware of is 国際研究型大学連合, which you could argue is 1 word, or 5, or 9. Of course, they have inflections which combine with the word キャンピングする except when they don't キャンピング を する

[@TheGeorgiosK]

The whole combining words to get new words as in the softsnow part (3.01), swedish has alot of this, guess you could say it is built on this. as in the words: Sjukgymnast - Physiotherapist Sjuk gymnast - Sick gymnast

[@daniellbondad6670]

English also used to differentiate verbs by subject. I run,you runest and he runeth.

[@datrumate7375]

When I hear someone say the word "ness", I think of the the character Ness form Earthbound.

[@epicboxx3838]

I mean, I feel like this question could easily be solved by looking at patterns of what words are. For example, in english Xorks isn’t a word that indicates any meaning, making it more of a sound than a word, however car or boat is a word since it indicates meaning.

[@pqlamzowjsnxiejdbcurfhcbvg]

In languages like German, some prefixes for verbs are separable and, in some some sentences, are sent to the end of the sentence or clause. It is separated by a space, but not considered its own word.

[@jayasuryangoral-maanyan3901]

I tend to say s and never z, even after voiced consonants. In some cases I might do zs but that doesn't even seem to apply after every voiced consonant, just a few specific ones.

[@letmewatchcoolvids]

I wonder if Japanese grammar particles are words or not. Based on your criteria, they aren't because they can't move around--they attach directly to the word they're describing. But the Japanese count them as words anyway. の is the most frequent word.

[@gamermapper]

Fun fact : the Eskimo peoples and languages don't only include the Inuit people but also the Yupik people, a cousin Arctic ethnic group which unlike the Inuit don't exist in Greenland but do in Siberia. Also the Aleuts are also related but idk why they weren't classified as Eskimos.

[@swfreak258]

I'm not sure, if anyone told you before, but you're wrong: In German the prefixes of verbs do move around, so if you have the infinitive, there's one word (anfassen = to touch), but another form will contain two words. (ich fasse an = I touch)

[@43615]

_clicks video_ [Flight of the Breezies] _happiness noise_

[@lewischristopheroneill7971]

This has made me realise that English is more complicated than I thought.

[@parthiancapitalist2733]

Relative tone languages can edit words. If there is a tone in a word that cannot exist like High, Low, High, it gets interesting. Kárà is HL. Add a bé suffix and it would be HLH- this can't happen so it become káràbè. But if there is a word after that that has a low tone at the beginning syllable, then it will actually have a higher low tone. Káràbè kùnét the kù is like a middle tone. This is in effect that carries from word to word. What IS a word?

[@daniellbondad6670]

English is in the Proto-Indo-European family tree. Ang Tagalog ay nasa pagka-angkan ng Proto-Austronesian.

[@happyghost8311]

In german you can seperate prefixes from verbs. For example: "aufstehen" means "to wake up" but "ich stehe auf" means "I wake up" Does that mean that the "auf-" is a word rather than a prefix?

[@marcusknutsson2714]

Oooo good question, same thing happens in the closely related Swedish language and surely the other scandinavian languages too

[@linuxman777]

In the Korean language they have something really strange that really blurs the concept for me. They have a system of linking syllables together but a sound from the previous word carries into another. A good example of this is the word 맛있어요 which means "is delicious". It is pronounced in IPA maɕisɔjo yet each syllable is 맛 "mat" which means taste. 있 "it" which is the base form of the verb to have. 어"eo" which is use in present tense informal endings. And 요 "yo" which make the phrase a bit more formal. You can se that the t sound in the beginning becomes an sh sound when it links to another syllable and the other t becomes an s when the second syllable links to the third

[@kassange]

In dutch we also mash words together. For example: 'langeafstandloper' is the Dutch word for someone who walks long distances. It's 3 words mashed together as one: "lang(e)" meaning long, "afstand" meaning distance, "loper" meaning walker. But in dutch you have to mash them together when writing the word otherwise it would be a spelling mistake. Does that mean that Dutch is Polysynthetic too or is this something different?

[@AndrewHokanson]

I like the idea of the what even is a language video, cuz like ya, I speak Spanish but I can understand Portuguese, Leonese, Aragonese, Gallego, Extremenu, Corsu.. (etc) I feel like they are different languages though, because it's more than just a dialect, because Honduran Spanish and Mexican Spanish are obviously the same language, but these ones I can clearly tell are different. Idk this comment is too long. Farewell.

[@connorhalleck2895]

4:50 is the best drawing ever

[@NordicPerfection]

Did you know that Northern Saami (and probably also other Saami languages) actually does have hundreds of different words for snow? They are even using Northern Saami words for scientific research of snow, because you can precisely with one word name the properties of the kind of snow :D

[@joshuahadams]

A tiny bit on (Rigolet) Inuktitut: Adjective(?): "tanna", that Noun: "IKaluk", Arctic char/trout Suffix: "-ngi", negative Suffix: "-ga", personal possesive Phrase: "Tanna iKalungiga",(Tan-na ih-ha-loo-ngi-ga) or "That is not my char/trout" When modifying a noun, you drop the final "k", and attach the suffixes. In my dialect, a capital "K"is read as an "h", it's different in different areas.

[@darrend.4835]

If you really think about it, words like "a" and "the" actually can change pronunciation based on what comes after them, similarly to what you described with the -s suffix. "The animal," for example, would be pronounced differently from "the cat." In words that start with a vowel sound, "the" is pronounced "thee," whereas in words that start with a consonant it is pronounced "thuh." Just a thought.

[@Abby-h7j]

How doesn't this guy have ALL the subs?

[@riley.b.o]

a combination of syllables that relays an idea,

[@Hold7heMayo]

What even is a language? Ooh, I can see Low German vs. German, English vs Scots or even Yola being brought up there.

[@42mateos]

I have been wondering about this for a while. Thank you for this video.

[@eclipses1003]

It’s easier in Mandarin… probably 🤔 We call a Chinese character 字, and each of them takes a block. But I came across this seminar years ago where they translate 字 into a word. Now that’s causing some problem, since we have another character, 詞, referring to the minimal unit that presents a meaning. Not all Chinese characters have a meaning. Take 蝴蝶 as an example, the second character means butterfly (butterflies), it has a meaning on its own, and could be separated from the term, or phrase, 蝴蝶. But the first character itself has no meaning, and would only be used with 蝶 to form the term butterfly. Another example is 葡萄, grape(s). Both characters have to be put together to have a meaning. Now if you say 字 to a Mandarin speaker, they would think of a character, like 葡 or 萄, which might have no meaning, but if you say word to an English speaker, they would think of one or more alphabets that sticks together without a space and also possess a meaning (probably, for as far as I know…), which is more like a 詞, in this case, 葡萄 in Mandarin. But they told me the translation has been asserted decades ago and people just keep using it anyways 🙄

[@keegster7167]

I encourage everyone to learn just a little bit of a polysynthetic language, because it's not as difficult nor as different as people think. In fact, polysynthetic languages often are similar to analytic ones. That being said, there are three major types of polysynthesis and so many question why polsynthetic languages are even lumped together. but I digress...