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One weird thing that English does not have is tone--the use of pitch to distinguish meaning. In many Asian languages, changing the pitch you use on a certain phoneme changes the meaning of the word. So, "ma" in standard Mandarin has 5 distinct tones, and using any in place of the other will change the meaning of the word significantly. One can be a question particle, one can mean horse, while another can be part of the word for mother.
quite a lot... the "Đ" sound is considered quite usual along with "r". The word order isjust makes sense, rets of the more developed languages dont HAVE TO, since we can overcomplicate with pre--and suffixes.(saying this as a Hungarian)
The cambridge grammar of the english language argues that ·n't functions as a verbal suffix, that verbs negated this way are inflected for the negative (synthetic negation) and as such are not entirely equivalent to the "non-contracted" construction (analytic negation). They do acknowledge that ·n't was a contraction, that its etymology was of a reduced pronunciation of "not", but they argue that that's no longer the case. If you have access to the book, it's chapter 3, section 1.9
A conversation with my Italian friend... "How do you say your alarm wakes you up in the morning?" "My alarm goes off.." "NO! Your alarm goes ON!" Gave me pause for thought.
@@danytalksmusic Technically you turn it on when you set the timer (or activate the smoke detector), and the alarm is the last thing it does before it gets turned off.
Perhaps the phrase "goes off" is like a rocket "goes/going off" its launchpad. Something IS happening within the mechanism of the alarm clock to keep it from ringing (launching) UNTIL its proper set time. The alarm sounds when the silencing mechanism "goes off".
As a Frenchman (so not really objective on this one) I really loved that video. I even learnt some things about my "home words" which happens quite often with your videos Rob. There's obviously so much work behind all this !! Kudos for your accent !!
As a Swede, I'm so jealous of your access to single words to describe certain bodily movements like "shrug", "squat", "frown", "nudge" and "poke". In Swedish, you often have to describe it with a whole sentence, like "sitting down in a crouched position" or "push someone gently with your elbow". A terrible waste of time for us..
But we can say "closing your eyes" and "opening your mouth" with just one word . And moving away from bodily movements, what about bädda=making the bed, diska=doing the dishes, cykla=ridning a bike?
@@katam6471 Well, we do have cycling, but not usually used in the same context. And the Brits have washing up (unless they've americanized that one, too). As for the first one, young men just don't bother, either with the words or the thing.
As a native Spanish speaker I can tell you that learning all the vowels sounds in English can be a nightmare for us. I think I intuitively picked them up over the years, but nobody explains it like you do in the beginning of this video. Thanks for that.
Yeah, learning Spanish made me realize how complicated and inconsistent some aspects of English are. Even when you make sentences that seem correct, you're often not making word choices that a native speaker would use.
Just know that, as native English speakers, we understand how this could be difficult. We admit that it makes absolutely no sense. For instance, I think there are four ways the "oo" sound is made in various English words (like "cook", "blood", "floor", "boot"). Even if you mispronounce those, our ears will understand the context you are attempting to say the word, and we will understand. Don't be afraid to mess up!
@@HereForTheBeer1987 Well, if you mispronounce "cook" like the other three would be pronounced, you get, in order, the following meanings: "[something vulgar]", "cork", and "kook", all which have wildly different meanings than "to prepare food with heat." I think I would do a double-take if I heard someone refer to a person used for sexual denial fetishes OR a wine stopper OR a crazy person used to mean that my food is being prepared. Edit: My linguistic perspective is Eastern U.S., both South-Atlantic and Mid-Atlantic (with some Colorado mixed in), so your mispronunciation results may vary. 😉
@bryede You are absolutely correct. I am a native English speaker. I learned Spanish many years ago. English is a nightmare, especially it's vowels. Spelling does not match pronunciation, mostly due to vowel shifts that occurred over a period of several centuries in England. I will tell you however that Spanish, while very logical and phonetic, loses it with all the dipthongs in verb changes. Unlike Portuguese or Italian, the verbs are much messier in Spanish.
Loved the "medieval UA-cam" screen 😂 The little details like "brethren", "subscribeth", the video with the boar. That's quality: taking time to produce a result, even if that product is there for a few seconds.
20:26 We should bring back overmorrow and ereyesterday into common usage, they could be pretty useful (although maybe change "ereyesterday" to sound better since it doesn't sound as nice as "overmorrow" to me).
I'm already using "overmorrow" and explaining to people what it is when they are confused. But "ereyesterday" indeed sounds too odd, I wish there would be some better alternative.
I use these, sometimes. Confuses the hell out of people. In fact, they were my choice to post as needed words. I tend to pronounce ereyesterday as just eresterday, I guess it seems more like a single word, rather than two words, ere and yesterday, mashed together.
@@hankjeffries2596 A large amount of English is basically just borrowed/derived words, but that doesn't mean that those words aren't English. All it means is that those words didn't originate in English
Indefinite article in Dutch created the word 'Decoy'. It came from 'Eendekooi', duck cage (Eend = Duck), which was used to catch wild ducks by putting tame ducks in a cage. Wild ducks would flock with the tame ones making it easier to catch them. Anyway, it was wrongly assumed the 'Een' at the beginning was the indefinite article, thus 'Een dekooi' which turned into 'a decoy'.
@@SteveLFBO Yep. Also "a nadder" to "an adder", "a napron" to "an apron", "accord" to "a chord", and "alone (all one)" to "a lone" among several others.
That is a bit doubted, you had Eendekooi (modern spelling "eendenkooi"), but you had "de kooi" (the cage) too as a possible source of confusion, it may be that both misunderstandings played a role.
The part about phrasal verbs reminds me of a joke that Victor Borge used to tell about how, in English, it is odd that you have to cut down a tree before you can cut it up.
Once I have came across a restaurant in Seoul, advertising it's services - "BREAKFAST, COFFEE JUICE". My Slavic-parsing mind (i.e. one used to proper grammar, as in "Romanes eunt domus", but I digress here) never noticed it, but my pal, a native English speaker, started to laugh the moment he saw it. And this, my children, is what happens to languages when they don't upkeep their grammar and let it disappear - a single coma becomes a life or death difference... ;-)
Fully acknowledging its weirdness and difficulty to learn, I quite like the chaotic nature of it. There’s beauty in the way English bears all of these clues and remnants of its convoluted journey through time and geography. It’s uniquely primed to accept new words all the time, too.
Most of the difficulty with English in relation to grammar is because of the fact that English took in Latin, and French without changing the spellings of words. You can adopt words, but you have to change the spelling. That is where English failed. German more often than not changed the spellings of the words to conform to their language or kept the spelling and changed the pronunciation. For example, the word "depot" should be spelled "depo" the word 'jalapeno" should either be spelled "halepenyo" or pronounced like it is written. The same is true of the word "marijuana" it should be spelled "marehuana." Etc, etc.... In German they use the word "balloons" which comes from French. In French you do not pronounce the "ns" in German you do. The French word for office "bureau" is used in German but it is written as "Büro" In English the word is also used but they kept the French spelling.......
@@leviturner3265yet English (and some Australian) people get quite annoyed by Americans changing the spelling of English words, such as colour (color) or programme (program). I am Australian but I have to admire the practical nature of the US spellings.
We, who managed to learn english as a second language, thank you from the bottom of our hearts, Rob! You just validated a lot of struggles people had to come to terms with.
@@hankjeffries2596 Because it just is not a "cardinal rule" in English as it is actually spoken or written. It is a piece of nonsense invented by some pedantic grammarian trying to the rules of Latin onto English. We have may phrasal verbs as Rob points out. Regard the so-called "preposition" in these cases are being like the German separable and inseparable verbs. " To take on" is a different verb from "To take over " , or "to take down " or "To take off" or "to take up" and so on and ought each be treated a distinct verbs where the prepositional part may be separated from the main part but is not to be seen as a totally independent preposition but as part of the verb . Though good style may play a part too. Why do I prefer to end this note here rather than to end it up? Because the "up" here is totally superfluous.
The missing word I've been asked about several times by learners of English is the question word asking for an ordinal number. "Whichth wierdness was the pronouns?" - "The seventh." "Whichth president was Obama?" - "The forty-fourth." Thanks for the video!
I've had exactly that problem before and it's stumped me as I searched my brain for a method to explain exactly what I'm trying to ask. And I'm a native speaker. "In a chronological list of presidents, where does Obama fall?" seems such a mouthfull. We really need a "whichth" type word.
It doesn't sound like it would be technically correct, but I usually ask this as "which/what number". As in "What number in the list was the pronouns?" or "Which number president was Obama?"
Ironically we have it available for monarchs but as soon as you try to put it into a sentence you find it's redundant: Which reginal number did Henry the Eighth have?
It should also be showed to every bigoted person who throws a fit when they see a person in the US speaking a language other than English in public. I grew up speaking English and I'm impressed anyone can learn it as a 2nd or 3rd language because of all the weird quirks. I still have trouble some days myself!
@@corvidsRcool The worst part of english is pronunciation tbh. I mean it's satisfying if you're able to read/speak something in your amalgamation of english accents (it's my case; I target mostly northern american; I know there's more to it but idk) but it's also frustrating if you stumble upon something you didn't really say in your entire life or its grammatical structure makes it tongue twister for you
i mean "give up" kinda makes sense, like you're giving something abstract (hence losing it) to something higher or more powerful than yourself (almost "fate" in a way?) i might just be justifying my intuition unfoundedly
Yes!!! It's at 10:23 for those who want to go have another look. I could not stop laughing! (well, actually I did, but I'm about to start again just thinking about it) 🤣🤣🤣
I love all your videos but I find this particularly meaningful since every non-English speaking friend has complained about English's "weirdness." This spells that out. Thanks!
Or do what we Irish do....never give a yes/no answer.. agree/disagree with the question with an "I didn't", or "I did", or if its obvious the action wasn't carried out just say say "I know"
“I before E, except after C, and in weird words like…WEIRD!” An aside: English speakers in Yorkshire are trying to eliminate definite articles: eg. “We went t’ut theater” where the the has been reduced to a single letter t (I guess it’s still there in the contraction!)
Native Afrikaans speaker here. I can attest to the fact that the "th" is *extremely* difficult to learn when learning English. This normally gets substituted by the "f" sound, but "At school I thought a lot" has somewhat of a different meaning than: "At school I fought a lot"
I thought it was only cockneys that said "f" when they meant "th." Some Brit in the UA-cam world does that, and to me it feels like fingernails on a blackboard, just intolerable to listen to. Hearing a non-native English speaker do it is probably a lot less aggravating.
I do find that particular accent easy to understand myself, and clarification is usually simple if there's ever miscommunication. Bostonian accents though, those are impossible.
Its surprising how many grammar features Bulgarian/Macedonian shares with English. We also have sort of a meaningless "DO" - its "DA" and Its not the same DA as YES it has different function. The verb infinitive is formed with it. So if you listen to people speaking those languages you will hear a lot of DA's but they don't mean YES. Example: Da Vidya, Da sedna : to see, to sit. The articles are post positioned but there are one for each gender and in some dialects there are 3 types of articles for close, medium close and distant objects.And also the structure of the tenses also uses operators as in English. Fo example the future tense is formed with shte, which is another verb for "want"...
When you talked about the present tense, I thought you were going to mention (you almost did but didn't quite), the fact that we don't use the "present tense" as our present tense: "What are you doing?" "I am reading a book." We never ever say: "I read a book." The so-called "present progressive" has completely supplanted the present tense in our language.
I suppose you use it to show habit, 'On my way to work, I read a book', 'On Mondays, I visit my parents'. Also to state facts: 'The moon is Earth's satellite'.
Some of these conventions are needed to distinguish between heteronyms (words spelled the same but pronounced differently). For past tense, we write “I read a book.” We understand the pronunciation /rɛd/. For the present tense, we must write “I am reading a book.” The root there is pronounced /riːd/. Vocally there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s in the weird English spellings and phonics. There’s no such difficulty writing the past tense “led” and the present tense “lead”.
Irish has two present tenses for the verb "to be" (immediate & continuous) and so two present progressives. This has shaped how we speak English. So we would say in English: I read books I am reading books (now) I do be reading books (generally)
It's more subtle than that Eric. We have different present tenses for different situations. What you call the present tense, 'I read', is for habitual actions, usually qualified with an expression such as 'on Mondays' or 'if I'm sad'. 'I am reading' is the present tense for just saying what I am doing right now. 'I do read' is a now old fashioned and dialect present form which is mainly used for emphasis now, especially when contradicting a negative.
Even the word "weird" is weird! Its etymology involves meanings such as "fate" and "to turn" and "to become". Not only that, I just found out that Shakespeare reintroduced the word into English! It had fallen out of use in Middle English, but came back through Macbeth's Weird Sisters. Your videos are so wonderfully jovial and witty, as well as deeply informative! Thanks so much 😊
another fun Shakespeare fact he used about 20 000 words in his writings meanwhile the great french playwrights used about 2 000 since the 16th century (the height of french theatre) there was a big push to "purify" the language removing all words that didn't have a distinct french, latin or greek origin as well as having a simplified language as the fad at the time was beauty in simplicity
I so appreciate your videos! I'm teaching English in SEAsia. My students are smart but struggle so much with our very different - and sometimes weird- language. Particularly, in pronunciation, the variety of vowel sounds, the mismatch of spoken with written forms and many particular consonants- sh/s, v/f, that/three. At least they don't have to struggle with tones or gendered nouns and other declensions!
I had thought the expression "Do tell" was a request for someone to tell more of the shocking or scandalous or interesting information but a number of sources indicate that it simply an expression of surprise and not necessarily a request for more information.
(I) Love your videos, and always find it amusing to compare with my native Danish. My (English) grandchildren call me “morfar” (mother’s father) but in English I can distinguish between granddaughters and grandsons. In Danish they are all børnebørn (childrens’ children). When I studied Bahasa Indonesia, I discovered that you can do very well without the verb “to be”. (“I Danish” in stead of “I am Danish”). My teacher explained that “to be or not to be” had to be rendered as “hidup atau tidak hidup “ (alive or not alive). Languages are such fun.
I love that you accidentally wrote “in stead” instead of “instead.” 😂 But “in stead” is also technically correct, but a native English speaker would use “instead” every time … unless they were at a Renaissance Faire
While texting on a phone, I want to eliminate words that make it take longer to say what I want to say and still be easily understood. It isn't difficult to shorten many sentences that would normally start with 'I am....." followed by a verb ending in 'ing', for example, 'going' 'eating' 'walking', 'reading' and so forth. I am walking... begins instead 'Walking'.
In context that works. If I were to receive a text out of the blue from someone that only read "walking" I'd be left to wonder exactly what they mean, as a response to a text from me asking "what's up?", however, it fully qualifies as a complete answer.
To be fair, saying "Walking" has an implied "I am", "We are", "They are" in front of it. English, in some ways, is very contextual. If you and your family are sitting down for dinner and someone asks what's for dinner, you say "Pizza". You don't say "We are having pizza" because the "we are" and the idea of "having" are all implied.
@@RoySATX English is a very high context language - as you pointed out. As was pointed out in the video we're commenting on, other languages are low context because their words already include context in them, like "Voy" means "I go" or "I am going". But it's one word. However, as has been pointed out by several other commenters, it's also possible that English has singular words for things that other languages require many words to say. For example, hailing a cab (taxi) only requires "TAXI!!", where as in Japanese, it requires 3 characters/words to do the same thing.
I would argue that the indefinite article serves an absolute purpose, in clarification. Such as, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "You got my note!" "Well, I got A note." It doesn't work the same without that indefinite article specifying that he doubts the note's authenticity.
Zactly. There are all sorts of aspects of language that are functionally redundant in _many_ cases as they can be inferred from context and probability, but there are still times when their correct usage provides a useful distinction or where their incorrect usage could create confusion.
I think it works. In Irish your example would be "Fuair tú mo nóta" - "Fuair mé nóta" (I got a note) instead of "Fuair me do nóta" (I got your note). If I leave out the "do" (your) intentionally it is the same statement as in the English example. Namely "don't know if it's YOUR note".
I can definitely understand where you're coming from with this in that it's good for emphasis of clarity, but in the case where there was no indefinite article then the very absence of the definite article is enough to provide that clarity. In your example, "You got my note!" "Well, I got note" would be understood to mean that the received note wouldn't necessarily (though still could) be the one indicated by the definitive article
@@CahiraOMalley Ah, yes, I had the video paused for a while before watching so your comments weren't there for me when I replied. My reply was for the original post, don't worry
Tom Scott's short video about language features that don't exist in English was neat. Of those, clusivity is easily the most useful and I wish we (all) had it.
I speak Tok Pisin and I'm learning Te Reo Māori, both of which have clusivity. In my experience, clusivity is not as useful as you'd think. Cos how often do we find ourselves saying "Do mean 'you and me' or 'you and them'? I don't understand." BUT Tok Pisin is kinda fun cos it has singular, dual, trial, and plural clusivity! It all looks super confusing until you see the English etymology - eg, 'Yumitripela' comes from You-me-three-fellows. SINGULAR: Mi = I/me Yu = you Em = she/her/he/him/it DUAL: Mitupela = The two of us (but not you) Yumitupela = The two of us (including you) Yutupela = the two of you Tupela = the two of them TRIAL: Mitripela = The three of us (but not you) Yumitripela = The three of us (including you) Yutripela = the three of you Tripela = the three of them PLURAL: Mipela = Us (4 or more, but not you) Yumi = Us (4 or more, including you) Yupela = You (4 or more) Ol = Them (4 or more) But in practice, a lot of people drop the dual and trial. Eg, if you're about to leave a place with someone, they'll often just say 'yumi go' instead of 'yumitupela go'
@@ahorrell Good on ya for learning Te Reo Māori. Personally, I do find the clusivity of Te Reo useful and bemoan its lack in English - and I'm a "pasty white boy", so it's not a "my language is the best" thing. As an autistic person, I find myself confused when someone says "we are going to..." *more often than I care to remember* if there's enough people to make a "we" that doesn't include me. I constantly find myself wondering if only they're going or they mean me as well. I don't get that with "mātou" and "tātou".
@@ahorrell I don't understand. Is "mitupela" used in situation where there are 2 people or 3 people? If the first is the case why don't use "mi" for instance? I'd understand if a person wants to make them clear that it's not you but other than that it seems somewhat useless. I think plural ones are really neat tho PS. Didn't notice the thing you typed on a bottom bottom of a comment. I see why they drop it
@@bopmaster404 "tupela" is used in the case of a grouping of 2 people. "mitupela" signifies that the 2-person group includes me. For 3 people (me, you & another) it would be "yumitripela". Tok Pisin is intriguing ... think of "tupela" as "two fellas". So "mitupela" (or me-two fellas) = "two fellas including me". This clearly excludes you - as to include you would be "mi-YU-tupela" (me-YOU-two fellas). Same concept applies to 3 people (tri-pela), and likewise Plural. Hope that helps :)
Yes! This exists in Mandarin, although usage is not entirely strict. 我们 (wo men) can mean 'we' in all contexts. 咱们 (zan men) can only mean 'we' as in the people included in the conversation. Unfortunately, I am so used to my native English that I never use 咱们, since 我们 works just fine, and as many native Chinese speakers often neglect to use 咱们, I can't see that changing anytime soon! I do believe (though I may be wrong) that 咱们 is more often used up north, whereas I live in Shanghai, which is in the east.
i don't get it. i see that there are a bunch of "ow"/"own"s that are pronounced differently (seems like mostly 2 pronunciations).. but it seems like there must be more to it than that?
The day after tomorrow used to be “overmorrow”, just like in German this is “übermorgen”, and the day before yesterday is “eresterday” (the German equivalent is “vorgestern”). These two words had vanished in between 1500 and 1600 but still these can be met in some modern books written by nowadays bizarre authors.
I was searching UA-cam for English history videos, and this channel popped up. So I clicked on it. This is now one of my top three favorite UA-cam channels. Thanks for not only being educational, but also amusing.
@@davidioanhedges you have the same thing in English when you talk about children; mother, father and parent. If you don't know the gender just say "ägare" (owner).
In English these are "master" and "mistress" but the words have so many other uncomfortable connotations that most prefer to pretend we are their parents instead.
I often see hudad and humom used in pet related social media posts... In Dutch we have 'baas' or 'baasje' (boss, little boss) as non gender option over 'eigenaar/eigenaresse' (owner).
Even that is different per language/culture. In know for example in Japanese they make a sound akin to BIPUUU, because game show "wrong" sounds are usually two tones there. But I do think it's pretty universal that this only happens among close friends, when the other person makes this sound with their mouth. Surely you wouldn't literally always do it, like at a job interview or when speaking with the king 😀
In Australia, we use a word to negate a negative statement and we use it all the time. For example “Rob, you didn’t take the bins out again.” “Bullshit!”
Gotta love, how as a Hungarian speaker learning English, a lot of these didn’t feel weird at all, like no genders, the clunky future tense and the definite/indefinite articles. Phrasal verbs too.
@@andrewcarson5850 It sure is an outlier in many more ways, I just find it strange and funny how, the first two languages I learned have some common elements that I assumed are the norm, when in fact they are pretty rare.
I like the use of definite articles. Sometimes when you are in a room with multiple things you are considering or not considering, you are better off being able to define just “the” or “that” one thing you desire.
It can sometimes be very useful: "I need the (specific) paper." "I need a (random) paper." "I need paper." (The material or sometimes the concept (subject or category) of something.)
@@Khorteka But you don't need it for specific examples, like "I need article 23" (aka referencing specific paper). "I need yesterday's paper". You don't need "the" or "a". Just like in this reply I took out all times I would have used "the" or "a" and it still sounds correct.
Native Chinese(Mandarin) speaker here. When we started to have English classes in 2nd grade, I noticed a whole lot of parallelism between Chinese and English, and it became ever more noticeable when I started to learn even more languages like French Japanese Hebrew and Spanish. I cannot explain the parallelism but it's fun to point out.
Both have SVO word order, lack of inflections of nouns and verbs, and Mandarin is in the process of developing the indefinite article as yige (一个). Chinese can drop pronouns but in practice uses them more often than, say, Japanese. The 3rd person singular (he/she/it) is pronounced identically (tā) but in the written form are different (他，她，它). They both have a sound that is like a retroflex r, especially in the Beijing dialect (zher 这儿).
@@kiga14 I found Japanese students would often miss a/the when speaking English, which since English is stressed-timed language ruins the sentence rhythm (and hurt my ears) - I got my revenge on the students by speaking Japanese and leaving out the "wa" 😊 after every subject noun.
6:08 - Mind you, the reason why the Celtic languages do something vaguely like this is because we have question particles! "Useless do" might've entered English as a grammatical calque of this, so in a way, English does have a question particle. For those interested in how it looks, if I wanted to say "You understand", I'd say "tuigeann tú" (verb first), whereas if I were asking "do you understand?", I'd say "an dtuigeann tu?"
I personally think it even comes specifically from Welsh (Old Welsh/Brythonic), because of the sound and obvious proximity, Welsh first person pronoun "I do" / "'dw i" (although it's a shortened form of "rydw i") the dw sounds exactly like the English "do".
@@LeReubzRic Indo-European pronouns are pretty conservative, which is one of the ways that shows it's a family (other language families are similar with their pronouns). And English does have its cognate for the "tu" in other languages - it's "thou" (which would have been pronounced more like "thu" before the Great Vowel Shift), which was our original 2nd person singular until it was dropped for the more formal "you" in the 1600s.
@@johnfisk811 They didn't have to borrow but they certainly influenced the syntax and grammatical structure of the prestige language of the time(Old English).
Very fascinating épisode! I'm from province de Québec, and I can assure you, they are not exclusivity from France! Some with the same meaning, other slightly differents. And funny thing the most "choking" Québec usage for a French, it's here, we tend to tutoyer everybody! It is not considered this much informal nowadays. "Familier", oui, but "franc", tutoyer is talking "d'égal à égal". Thank tou for your great work! Toujours un plaisir d'apprendre avec toi!
Congrats!! As a person studying English as a foreign language for many years (trying to improve more and more) I find your channel very useful and interesting 👏🏻👏🏻
One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen just happened. A mid-roll ad interrupted the embedded ad. 🤣 But also and as well, great video, mightily entertaining! 12:41 my first thought was "What is similar to chocolate?"
See how many meanings you can get by re-punctuating / capitalising this. "What is this thing called love" (For non-native speakers, remember 'Love' can be a familiar honorific for a partner or in some dialects, any female.) Reply with your version please
Thank-you for this video. On the subject of articles, I think they do serve a purpose: they prepare your mind for what is coming. Yes, you can figure out what a non-native is saying, after they finish and you think about it. This preparation occurs in military marching commands also. "Left, face!", or "To the left, march!" both contain what are called a 'preparatory command' and a 'command of execution'. Since synchronized marching is not natural, the first command (the preparatory command) informs your mind of what direction (in this case) you need to be prepared to go; and the command of execution tells you when (now!) to do it. The particles synchronize the listener's brain with that of the person speaking in preparation for what will be referred to. This might not be necessary if the word order in English wasn't sometimes (but not always) backwards.
20:41 I use Correct / Incorrect when (dis)agreeing with something just said would be ambiguous as yes/no. Less formal sounding I could say "Wrong" negate whatever someone just said. - Rob, you didn't take the bins out. - Correct / Incorrect
Excellent Rob, thank you. I am sorry if you have already done this but I have a weird fascination with the word "up". Why do we use it it in so many and often contradictory ways? We get up, wake up, start up, open up, close up, break up, shut up, rev up, pick up, mess up, wind up, and on and on.... Maybe a short video explaining would clear it erm up?
Rob - you just TOTALLY delight me. I really enjoy every one of your videos - and often refer them to folks. I've been teaching various forms of English in Germany for MANY years. In my university classes - one of my first statements to students is: "I'll be the first one to say: English sucks." or "English is stupid." HOWEVER - over the many years I've worked here, it's the pronunciations and the verb phrases and/or idioms that truly challenge non-native speakers. Once I give them tips on how to simplify and deal with such things - they are quite delighted with this "weird" language - as it can be quite quick to grasp because it DOESN'T have so many rules (I HATE der-die-das and all the tenses, for example). And my absolute favourite German word is "doch". I firmly believe it should be incorporated into English at all levels.
In Germany we "do the do" in some regions. In the restaurant, e.g. you can hear sentences like "Tun Sie essen?" = "Do your eat?". Or: "ich tu Fernsehen gucken" = "I do watch television". 🤣 German has some sort of "phrasal verbs", too. However, the infinitive is not split. "Go up" ist in German "hinaufgehen" (hinauf = up, gehen = go). But we say, as in English: ich gehe hinauf = I go up...German is full of these phrasal verbs, like English: "geh hinauf", "geh hinab", "geh herunter", "geh auf", "geh ein", "geh aus" etc.
Brilliant as always. Rob. You put so much into your videos in high production values, fun images, videos within your video, and so much research behind every episode. THANK YOU! 🙏
About grandparents our family traditionally call the father’s side ‘ grandpa and grandma’ and mother’s side ‘nanna and granddad’. Saves a lot of confusion. Love you show.
Does that get confusing between cross cousins? The grandchildren by your male children and the grandchildren by your female children would refer to you by different terms then
We used Mormor and Morfar for mother's mother and mother's father, as well as the inverse for the father's side of the family. But that originated from Danish after one sibling's exchange year in Denmark. It is vastly more clear as to who is being spoken about.
@@Aaron-hr5bbYeah, the Danish way works very well for danes, because our family-words are so short. Just stick ‘em all together to describe the relation: Mother’s brother? - Motherbrother (morbror) Father’s mother? - Fathermother (farmor) We even have brotherson/sisterdaughter to describe how we are related to our nephews and nieces, though it is quite outdated.
Except that only works in your context. It doesn't work if you try to explain to someone else who doesn't use "nanna". Like I have a Mima (often spelled Meemaw by others). But if I say that to someone else, they have no idea how that is.
@@Dyanosis That's all words though. If you speak english to someone who don't speak english, they don't know what you are talking about either. If you are with people who know what Mima means, then Mima is really useful to distinguish who you are talking about. If they don't know Mima, then don't use Mima.
Here are my entries for potential collective nouns for "aunts and uncles": 1. Eldrins - Combines "elders," indicating seniority or older generation, with a suffix "-ins," which adds the familiar touch. 2. Eldsiblings 3. Kinparents - family (or made family) that are in a parental role without directly being parents. 4. Elderkin 5. Eldrets - eld + rets, a creative contraction of relatives of how it may have shortened over time.
I like Elderkin as the collective noun. Furthermore in colloquial application it would likely be contracted as in this example: "Ah yes, let Eldkin Peter have that mug, he is Mum's Uncle after all".
my only weigh in would be to replace the eld with gran or grand so it fits in with general usage of grandparents that we already use. ive also heard "niblings" for collective nieces and nephews
20:20 "Separate words for our mother's/father's grandparents." I would still go with "maternal" & "paternal" grandparents. I like these words because rather than have two unique words for this one specific idea (of grandparents), maternal and paternal are more versatile, describing anything to do specifically about one's mother's or father's side.
I think the idea is more of a separate word for Grandparent depending on the side of the family. Paternal and Maternal is just a descriptor, not a separate word that I think Rob is getting at
"My maternal grandmother" or "grandmother on my mother's side" both sound clunky to me. In Swedish, for example, we just say "mormor" (lit means mother's mother). Also helps with more complex family lineage, like saying "my maternal grandfather's paternal uncle" simply is "morfars farbror".
We do, sorta have a word for "day after tomorrow", "overmorrow". At least, I've heard it used and I have used it. Mostly it confuses people, but it's a word for "day after tomorrow". "Eresterday" or "Ereyesterday" is one I've heard used, and have used for "day before yesterday." Again, it mostly just confuses people. Note: Another archaic word, "yestereve", rather than "last evening" Near as I can tell, they are basically obsolete words that are no longer used. But I like them.
@@minuteman4199 I'm an American, but mostly in older movies and TV shows. I remember a old fellow from my childhood, back in the 80s, lol, using ereyesterday and yestereve. Overmorrow I probably picked up years ago from reading various things. (I used to pick up dictionaries and encyclopedias, just to read them.) I'm certain I've seen them in the dictionary of archaic words that some of the "Classics" novels you can get cheap have in them.
It is also a direct translation to the word we Scandinavians use for this exact thing - övermorgon is how we write it in Swedish. It's just the words we use for "over" and "morning" combined into one word. To get to our word for two days ago you could pretty much get there by translating "ereyesterday" as well, as long as you know that "ere" means before. We say "förrgår" for this, which either combines "förra" which means last or "före" which means "before" with "igår" which is yesterday. Or it could be that we use the prefix "för-", our equivalent to English "fore-" as in forefather. I actually don't know which it is, and it doesn't really matter since either of them make sense.
Thank you, @jamesmccrea4871, I came here to post the same thing. I have a taste for older literature, and these words pop up from time to time in the books I read. They are good words that deserve a return to daily usage.
For me it's your weird vowels and diphtongs. Your written vowels often have a different sound than other language's written vowels. For example, when you say the letter E, you make the sound that other languages typically would express with the letter I. And you pronounce other vowels as diphtongs, which other languages would use two vowels to express, if they do it at all. (In my language we don't use diphtongs, except for a few loan words and in some specific dialects.) Of course, this works well for English speakers speaking English, but it becomes a bit of a problem when native English speakers try to pronounce other languages. It isn't unusual at all for English speakers to see an A in a foreign word, for example, and automatically pronounce it as "ey" even though it makes it really weird, since it's a typical English pronunciation. Also, the vovel E at the end of a foreign word seems to create some sort of overload or something. :D I have heard three different pronunciations of it. The Japanese beverage "sake" often gets, to my ears, pronounced as "saki". And then we have the word "anime", which you pronounce as "animay". And I recently watched some reaction videos of the German show "Dark", where there's a character named "Helge". To my ears it sounded like many of the reactors pronounced this name as "Helga", which is the feminine form of "Helge". It's weird since all of these words have the same sound at the end in their original languages. I'm not sure how to transcribe it, but "eh" I guess would be the closest.
To be honest, "sake" is used for any alcoholic drink in general in Japanese. So it's weird that everybody else uses it for a single specific Japanese drink.
@@ajs41Because English doesn't have any words ending in that sound. While native Italian speakers have a tendency to add a final -e to their pronunciation of English words that end in a consonant, because in Italian those consonants would be followed by an -e.
I see the "do" in English and "si" in french having a similar purpose. It feels to me that they both respond to a said or unsaid "no". "You don't like coffee" "I do like coffee!" / "Si, j'aime le café!"
That's because English is quick to adopt any such needed words; e.g. "schadenfreude" from recent German. Our history as a massive German/ French creole shows that this goes back centuries.
English is poor in so mAaaaany concepts ; homesickness ( NOSTALGIA for a person, nothing to do with HOME ) , kidnapping ( RAPIMENTO of a dog, nothing to do with KID ) , blackmailing ( RICATTO from a son to his mother ) nothing to do with MAIL etc. 😢😢 What annoys me most is BUTTERFLY 🦋🦋🦋 what the damn has BUTTER to do with this wonderful insect ??? 😅😊😅😊😊
@@mariapiazza-od8ibI can't attest for any English other than what I speak on the US east coast, but I don't use the words you describe in that way. Homesickness really is about one's home. It might be a physical house, but could also be about a hometown. If my parents moved away from my childhood home into an apartment, I'd never say I was homesick unless I meant the town I grew up in or my childhood home. Likewise, if I live alone and have been traveling for a month, I would say homesick to mean I miss my apartment, despite there being no one there. Kidnapping is most often used to describe the taking (napping?) of a child. Yes, it can be used for an adult, too, but it's usually a kid. I'd never use it for a dog. I'd probably just say someone stole the dog. Maybe I'd playfully say dognapped. Blackmail, to my knowledge, used to be done by mail, but yes, nowadays means any form of extortion. It means threatening someone with some action, often revealing a secret, if the victim doesn't pay money to the blackmailer. It doesn't really have to do with sons and mothers. Usually it's between non-family, and often enemies or work colleagues/adversaries. You got me with butterfly!
@@mariapiazza-od8ibI'm not really sure what you are saying in the first part. Are you trying to say the words are more restricted in their definitions than the Italian words you mention or that the etymology of them is strange. Blackmail for example comes from "mal" an old word for payment or rent. As to butterfly I quite like that each European language seems to have their own idiosyncratic word for butterflies: vlinder, schmetterling, mariposa, farfalla, papillon, sommerfugl, borboleta, leptir, motyl, fjäril. No two languages seem to have gone for the same origin
20:35 "We don't have a word to negate a negative statement." Well, it may be viewed as a bit rude, but some Americans just say *"wrong"* as a challenge, like Doch or Si.
@@stephanzielinski7922 True, however those would be perceived as being even more rude. Except for "Bologna", that's probably the nicest way of directly contradicting someone.
My comment to this was that I sometimes use *"not true"* as such a challenge, which is a bit less harsh than "wrong", but (as an American) I've probably said that as well. Granted, "not true" is two words but as I saw in another comment, _"untrue"_ also fits here.
Fascinating!!! Thanks Rob…. I’ve been learning Spanish and I’ve noticed some of the differences you further illuminate…. Language is fascinating and you bring this out so well…. You’re interesting and fun (:
Kul att du lär dig svenska Rob! Det svåraste måste vara att veta när man ska använda ”en” och ”ett”. Många gör fel på det. Och att höra skillnaden på ”anden”, the bird, och ”anden”, the spirit, till exempel, men kämpa på och lycka till!
På norsk har man "ei" i tillegg til "en" og "et", men "ei" har forsvunnet fra store deler av landet, og i bokmål, og blir erstattet an "en". På vestlandet og i nynorsk bruker vi "ei" enda, til hunkjønnsord som ei jente eller ei dør. På bokmål kan man skrive en jente, en dør, en bok osv, men intetkjønn, et hus f.eks. gjelder som på svensk.
I do enjoy these vids from you and I finish them. I'm a bugger for getting a tad bored and not seeing videos out to the end. You present brilliantly. That has a lot to do with it.
5:49 While english may be the only language to use the meaningless "do", danish uses the word "can" in the exact same meaningless way. "I do not like matcha" = "Jeg kan ikke lide matcha (da) / I can not like matcha (en)" "Do you like coffee?" = "Kan du lide kaffe? (da) / Can you like coffee? (en)" "Do you see how special it is?" = "Kan du se hvor specielt det er? (da) / Can you see how special it is? (en)"
Interesting. Points to a general desire in Germanic languages for a filler word. My personal assumption would be to simplify grammar by avoiding inflection for most verbs. And despite Rob's claims, German very much does have meaningless "do" ("tun") as well. It is simply considered "uneducated speech", but it has been resilient despite teachers railing against it for centuries and decades of mass media language standardization. Especially in the north, so there might be a Hanseatic aspect to its origin.
This confuses me as a Norwegian. Lide means suffering in Norwegian. I do not like matcha (En) Jeg kan ikke lide matcha (Da) Jeg liker ikke matcha" (No) The Danske way sounds like "I can't suffer matcha." Do you like coffee?" (En) Kan du lide kaffe? (Da) Liker du kaffe (No) The Dansk sounds like "Can you suffer coffee?"
We have a meaningless do in German as well. It's just that it's considered either dialect or childlike speaking and not considered proper Standard German. At least where I live a meaningless do is used very regularly in the local dialect.
One can just say to wash the dishes and to dry the dishes . Up defines the end task. To do something up = to renovate or make something look better . It adds finality. Like to grow and to grow up. A start up defines the finality of the “start”… geddit? 😅😂
A fun fact: in “Star Trek: Enterprise” they don’t use the definite article about the ship (eg. “We need to get back to Enterprise.”). In other Star Trek series, they do use it (eg. “We need to get back to the Enterprise.”).
I've always thought that there was a general difference between American and English on that topic - Nelson served on HMS Victory versus Kirk served on the USS Enterprise. It's not always like that - just usually.
In the film Titanic, they always referred to the vessel as simply Titanic. In my dialect, I say the Titanic - as I do for all large floating vessels. The Mayflower, the Golden Hind, the Flying Dutchman, the Bounty, etc, etc. Note that the 1960s British war film was "Sink the Bismark", not "Sink Bismark"
A frequent annoyance to me is how the word next has become ambiguous when referring to future days. If today is Saturday and I say "Meet me here next Friday", most people will think that will be in six days but some will think it's the Friday of the week after. The closer we get to the Friday, the same phrase spoken that day makes more people think it's not the upcoming Friday but the Friday after. There's no clear agreement amongst us as to which week we're talking about.
French has a way to clarify this ("vendredi en huit" means Friday next week) but it's barely ever used. I suspect the need for this type of clarification isn't strong enough for people to worry about keeping such expressions alive.
Yes. This does require a bit of extra attention in English to avoid ambiguity. If it's Tuesday, and one tell you to meet them "next Friday" are they referring to three days from now? Or ten days from now? It's better to use "on Friday" instead of "next Friday" as that will be understood to mean Friday of this week. I often hear myself saying "this coming Friday" (clunky, sure, but it's unambiguous) or "Friday of next week," respectively.
I have coined a new English word! This was achieved while solving a game of "Target" where many words have to be made from 9 letters given. My word fills all the requirements of a 'good word' i.e. - It will be instantly understood by a British person - It will confuse the Americans - It will annoy the French - It solves an instance of using one word for three very different meanings (possibly more) You know how we use 'Liquidate' to mean 'Make into a Liquid' and also 'Turn Assets into Cash' or even 'Eliminate a rival' Ladies and Gentlemen I give you ... QUIDILATE "I'm so skint I had to quidilate my Biggles book collection"
7 місяців тому+13
"Liquidate" doesn't mean "make[sic] into a liquid". You mean "liquefy" (which, fittingly for this video, isn't spelled "liquify")
I hate it. You didn't miss that part at least. It looks just like Latin but in a " I'm so quirky, look at me " kind of way, the exact same a ton of english already sounds like.
I would insist that phrasal verbs are much harder to grasp in Dutch (and German) because the preposition and the verb don't always come in the same order like in English. Like for instance the example you used of opgeven in the present tense resembles the English phrasing, "Ik geef op", and the preposition is further separated like in English with a single object like in "I give something up", "Ik geef iets op", but unlike English the preposition is pushed to the end when there's more words, for example "Ik geef het gisteren op", literally "I gave it yesterday up". But _then_ as a participle it's in the same order as an infinitive, but with the "ge" prefix thing inserted between it, so "I have given it up" is "Ik heb het opgegeven". So not only does one have to learn the implied meanings of two parts that don't necessarily make sense literally, one also has to keep track of the preposition as it wanders around the phrase. Not only that, but this only actually applies to _some_ but not _all_ verbs. Sometimes they stay attached no matter what. And sometimes there are two verbs with the exact same components but are different depending on whether they're separable, like "Het komt voor" (It happens) vs "Het voorkomt" (It prevents)
Norwegian has a word for a 24 hour day+night - døgn - 1 døgn means 1 24 hour period. 1 day is asort of mbiguous in that it can also mean a 24 hour period but it can also mean specifically a day period - while the sun is up which ends at night when the sun has set. This ambiguity is similar to English "day" but in norwegian you can be specific and say "døgn" when you mean a 24 hyour period. For example If I at 14_00 says this iwll take me one "døgn" it means I will be done by 14:00 the following day while if I say "it will take me 1 day"" it means that I will be done some time the day after, it could be early morning the next day or late evening the following day. As such a "day" is more imprecise than "døgn".
What are the chances you could put these videos out hourly? Your is the single channel I wait and watch for all the time! I love this channel. Seriously - hourly...challenge yourself. I believe in you.
I think that on another video Rob said that he has a "Day Job" somewhere else, so he probably needs to sleep and eat. Just read a page or two from an English language dictionary each day, and you will be refreshed until next week's video. 🙂
Just yesterday I used the word “weird” and I immediately thought of this channel and wondered about the history/etymology of the word “weird” and if it has ever been covered here.
proto-indo-european *wert, meaning turn/twist, made its way to proto-germanic as “wurdiz” and then old english "wyrd" with the meaning of fate/destiny or an event thereof (out of the sense of a “turn/twist” of fate), later yielding the modern english “weird”
17:30 in Persian we use the same thing for future. For example "I will cook" is "mæn khāhæm pokht" And "mæn khāhæm" is "I want" mæn : I khāhæm : want (but it's not continuous) Pokht : cook
What striked me is the expression "to give up" which can be translated in french as : "laisser tomber" (someone, voluntarly, or something unvilingly (as to drop)) ou "abandonner," that can be translated as "to let down" (someone) or "let go" (something). and let go means "leave behind" ou "lâcher prise". and when you let go on something, you drop it, it falls. down. I think you can almost can make an entire episode on the subject... @RobWords love your channel, I wish I had been taught english your way. Cheers !
Another detail about articles. When using "the", we use the long sound before a word starting with a vowel, and the short sound before a word starting with a consonant. We use "an" before a word starting with a vowel. But when we are emphasizing something, we use the long sound on the article, both "the" and "a".
'We use "an" before a word starting with a vowel' Before a vowel sound not before a word beginning with a vowel letter. An honour, a house, an umbrella a university etc.
@@zegrze Excellent point. The one that always nudges me is historic. "an historic occasion". I often say, "When I hear 'an historic', I need someone to drive me to an hospital in an hurry.
@@Threezi04 Hence why I'm fine with both "a herb" and "an herb", even if the silent H one looks and sounds wrong to me, as I don't think I've ever heard anybody jumble together the two. But I could count the number of times I've heard somebody say "historic(al)" with a silent H in their native dialect on one hand. Instead my ears get tortured on a semi-regular basis by ostensibly educated US hosts (late night, news, sports, UA-cam, anything) declaring something "an historic moment" with a distinctly pronounced H.
Meaningless Do made learning other languages in school very hard. I was always asking what's the word for Do in situations where the foreign language structure was different.
I find that I'm always searching for a substitute for "get/got" when using Spanish. I realize now how often English relies on that verb and in different contexts. In Spanish, there's no one verb to take its place.
Dear Rob, we do have a word in American English that negates a statement. It is 'bullshit'. We also use the sporting expression 'to cry foul'. And thanks to South Park there is 'shenanigans!' As well, 'Y'all' is a limited plural form. If I were sitting at a table with friends and talking to only a few of them and said, "Y'all should come and visit." And then expanded my invitation to the entire table, I would amend my statement by saying "All Y'all should come and visit." Thanks so much for your videos.
"Ye" is still used in much of Ireland. Its use is especially widespread in the hiberno-english dialects of the west and south of the country. We also pronounce the letter "r" as a hard "r". It may sound unusual to many anglophones, but it saves confusion when saying the words island and Ireland. 😊
The thing I think English really needs is an exclusive we/our. A simple way to indicate "[belonging to] the group of which I am a member, but you/they are not."
Te reo Maori has "maua" (s/he and I) and taua (you the listener and I) and also matou (3 or more people excluding the listener) and tatau (3 or more people including the listener)
12:00 One possible reason for the development of grammatical gender (also called noun classes) is a sort of redundancy system. Language is, at its core, a signal transfer problem, and you want to provide the possibility of some amount of error correction without spending too much "bandwidth" encoding for redundant information. If I start a noun phrase with "the...", the only information you, the listener, have acquired is that the following word will most likely be a singular noun (it could be an adjective, but that's not salient to the point). If the article were to agree in gender with the head of the noun phrase, it restricts the set of all possible nouns that could follow to a smaller set of possibilities. Many Southeast Asian languages, as just one example, have a very well developed system of noun classification, which allows for a much more restricted set of possibilities, and ideally a much greater degree of error correction. The hypothetical scenario that I like to consider is a busy market, with many people shouting. Neither person communicating wants to have to spend time repeating themselves because some minor part of the utterance was obscured by someone yelling at the next stall over, and some amount of redundancy helps achieve this.
Yes, I think historically they came out of arbitrary classifications, or maybe noun classifier words like "long stringy things" or "round things", or animate/inanimate distinctions. In some languages one category happened to have mostly male words and another mostly female words, so the entire categories became associated with a gender.
@@adfaklsdjf You might find the history of animate/inanimate interesting then. I vaguely recall some animals or plants or things being animate or inanimate in ways we wouldn't think of them now.
The standard historical explanation for why English lacks grammatical gender is that it increases communication when used by partial speakers. The origin of English is as a pidgeon or creole to enable communication and trade between people who spoke different languages.
@@Rocketsong The origin of English is Anglo-Saxon. There's debate about how Norse, Celtic, and Norman speakers integrated with it, and whether modern English has an English base and those others added to it, or a Norse base, but in any case I don't think we can definitevly say it doesn't have an English base. The loss of grammatical gender happened after those, didn't it?
I'm scottish, my wife mocks me for saying y'all. But it is an effective contraction that flows much more easily than "you all". I think it should be formally adopted as an acceptable word.
@@michelejones711 The problem is created by using "you" for both singular and plural subjects, so "you all" was, presumably, established organically as the plural version of "you," thus allowing for the bastardization into "y'all." However, in the southern US, "y'all" has come to be used for both singular and plural, and that has produced the relatively recent (at least in my experience) adoption of "all y'all" as the plural form of "y'all." Where does it end?
Great videos! I thought for sure you were going to talk about the modal auxiliaries: should, could, would... and I thought you would talk about our sound "r" with the curled tongue. Keep up the good work Sir.
Used to teach Hispanic Linguistics and only studied English as it was necessary to my Spanish studies... love the run down here (See that phrasal verb? Nailed it!). Always appreciate your work. Keep up the great work!
Both I and my wife are native speakers of Dravidian languages. I started speaking English at two years of age, whereas she started around eight. She still has trouble with English prepositions, and I don't.
For a Finnish native, learning English since age of 10 officially, but obviously a lot before it (got my first computer as 6 year old), the whole concept of a language having or needing to use prepositions all the time is disturbing.
What's missing from English? Let me know below. And start speaking a new languages in 3 weeks with Babbel 🎉. Get up to 60% OFF your subscription ➡ Here: go.babbel.com/t?bsc=usa-influ-promo&btp=default&UA-cam&Influencer..May-2024..USA-TATAM..promo-yt-robwords-may-2024
First! 🎉 Also, there should be a letter for "sh" "ch" and "kh". Stuff like that! Like, Turkish has the letter “Şş” which makes the “Sh” sound. Bye! 😊
One weird thing that English does not have is tone--the use of pitch to distinguish meaning. In many Asian languages, changing the pitch you use on a certain phoneme changes the meaning of the word. So, "ma" in standard Mandarin has 5 distinct tones, and using any in place of the other will change the meaning of the word significantly. One can be a question particle, one can mean horse, while another can be part of the word for mother.
quite a lot... the "Đ" sound is considered quite usual along with "r". The word order isjust makes sense, rets of the more developed languages dont HAVE TO, since we can overcomplicate with pre--and suffixes.(saying this as a Hungarian)
also in Hungarian w euse plenty of thos fixes (up, dodown, etc, and we literally say the same way to give up (felad , whereas fel= up ; give(s) = ad )
Rob likes him a proper brew. 👍
When only a contraction sounds "right" but the full words do not. Don't you dare! v. Do not you dare!
Interestingly, to my ear the first is a command and the second a question.
well, I think it would be rearranged... You do not dare!
The cambridge grammar of the english language argues that ·n't functions as a verbal suffix, that verbs negated this way are inflected for the negative (synthetic negation) and as such are not entirely equivalent to the "non-contracted" construction (analytic negation). They do acknowledge that ·n't was a contraction, that its etymology was of a reduced pronunciation of "not", but they argue that that's no longer the case.
If you have access to the book, it's chapter 3, section 1.9
'dare not' is better but no one would take you seriously
@@sidarthur8706 Do not dare!
English is weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought though.
Nicely done! I may plagiarize you very soon.
That's a thoroughgoing thought thoroughly thought throughout; through and through!
It's good to see you have thought it through.
The English world is connected and divided by one language.
are you trying to give me a stroke?!
A conversation with my Italian friend...
"How do you say your alarm wakes you up in the morning?"
"My alarm goes off.."
"NO! Your alarm goes ON!"
Gave me pause for thought.
Well if it's going off in the morning, then logically you should turn it on to stop it?
@@danytalksmusic Technically you turn it on when you set the timer (or activate the smoke detector), and the alarm is the last thing it does before it gets turned off.
@danytalksmusic If the alarm is on then it's making a sound, if it is off then it's doing nothing.
Perhaps the phrase "goes off" is like a rocket "goes/going off" its launchpad. Something IS happening within the mechanism of the alarm clock to keep it from ringing (launching) UNTIL its proper set time. The alarm sounds when the silencing mechanism "goes off".
@@danytalksmusic Well, you'd be "turning on" the stop mechanism to cease the audible alarm sound.
As a Frenchman (so not really objective on this one) I really loved that video. I even learnt some things about my "home words" which happens quite often with your videos Rob. There's obviously so much work behind all this !! Kudos for your accent !!
As a Swede, I'm so jealous of your access to single words to describe certain bodily movements like "shrug", "squat", "frown", "nudge" and "poke". In Swedish, you often have to describe it with a whole sentence, like "sitting down in a crouched position" or "push someone gently with your elbow". A terrible waste of time for us..
Feel free to borrow the English words 😊
@@NikiHolmes Yes we already borrowed our fair share of Scandinavian ones 😂
But we can say "closing your eyes" and "opening your mouth" with just one word . And moving away from bodily movements, what about bädda=making the bed, diska=doing the dishes, cykla=ridning a bike?
@@katam6471 Well, we do have cycling, but not usually used in the same context. And the Brits have washing up (unless they've americanized that one, too). As for the first one, young men just don't bother, either with the words or the thing.
Swedish is like most European languages then.
A: You didn't take the bins out again.
B: Rubbish!
Yes, the rubbish bins. You didn't take them out.
Preposterous!
B: Rubbish?
Wrong!
I like "nuh" for these situations ^^
A friend of mine started using "grandboss" for boss's boss and I love it.
That's excellent
I would probably go with Überboss (overboss).
The Big Boss!
@CheeseWyrm But Big Boss is the CEO, the person at the point of the org chart.
Well, at least in my dialect it is.
I seem to recall that Dr. Charles Mayo and his wife Alice were called GrandChuck and GrandAlice by their grandchildren - lovely.
As a native Spanish speaker I can tell you that learning all the vowels sounds in English can be a nightmare for us. I think I intuitively picked them up over the years, but nobody explains it like you do in the beginning of this video. Thanks for that.
Yeah, learning Spanish made me realize how complicated and inconsistent some aspects of English are. Even when you make sentences that seem correct, you're often not making word choices that a native speaker would use.
Spanish grammar is also a lot more complex than English @@bryede
Just know that, as native English speakers, we understand how this could be difficult. We admit that it makes absolutely no sense. For instance, I think there are four ways the "oo" sound is made in various English words (like "cook", "blood", "floor", "boot"). Even if you mispronounce those, our ears will understand the context you are attempting to say the word, and we will understand. Don't be afraid to mess up!
@@HereForTheBeer1987 Well, if you mispronounce "cook" like the other three would be pronounced, you get, in order, the following meanings: "[something vulgar]", "cork", and "kook", all which have wildly different meanings than "to prepare food with heat." I think I would do a double-take if I heard someone refer to a person used for sexual denial fetishes OR a wine stopper OR a crazy person used to mean that my food is being prepared.
Edit: My linguistic perspective is Eastern U.S., both South-Atlantic and Mid-Atlantic (with some Colorado mixed in), so your mispronunciation results may vary. 😉
@bryede You are absolutely correct. I am a native English speaker. I learned Spanish many years ago. English is a nightmare, especially it's vowels. Spelling does not match pronunciation, mostly due to vowel shifts that occurred over a period of several centuries in England.
I will tell you however that Spanish, while very logical and phonetic, loses it with all the dipthongs in verb changes. Unlike Portuguese or Italian, the verbs are much messier in Spanish.
“Rob, you didn’t take the bins out again.”
“False.”
I like to use “correct” and “incorrect” in these situations.
That is appropriating a nother word for the situation, he was referring to a dedicated word.
Bullocks!
"Lies!"
Often a sound is used but not a word. Like "bah" or a negative grunt-like sound, something that would be classified as a scoff.
Loved the "medieval UA-cam" screen 😂 The little details like "brethren", "subscribeth", the video with the boar. That's quality: taking time to produce a result, even if that product is there for a few seconds.
Yeah I had to go back and pause it to see all the little details. Top work!
@@respectedgentleman4322 I also had to and it's how one realizes, values, and appreciates the effort that goes into quality work.
10:24 if anyone's looking for it
That's a theme of this video: ua-cam.com/video/mUF4afxMpQk/v-deo.html
That was my favorite part. Like an Easter egg.
20:26 We should bring back overmorrow and ereyesterday into common usage, they could be pretty useful (although maybe change "ereyesterday" to sound better since it doesn't sound as nice as "overmorrow" to me).
Overmorrow sounds fantastic 😆 I think I'm gonna start using is for real. It's just... it's just too good!
I’m here to stick up for ereyesterday-it sounds poetic to me, and I think that, ere long, it could make a comeback! 😊
I'm already using "overmorrow" and explaining to people what it is when they are confused. But "ereyesterday" indeed sounds too odd, I wish there would be some better alternative.
I use these, sometimes. Confuses the hell out of people. In fact, they were my choice to post as needed words. I tend to pronounce ereyesterday as just eresterday, I guess it seems more like a single word, rather than two words, ere and yesterday, mashed together.
I was going to bring up overmorrow - a nice sounding word. We could have yesterdayeve instead of ereyesterday?
When I started learning English, the weirdest and the most frustrating thing for me was how different the way words written compared to how pronounced
My favorite is rendezvous. Not only is its spelling and pronunciation wild, it's one of the few words with a silent "z".
@@nyandayo24 Rendevouz is French
I have the same problem with French
@@nyandayo24 rendezvous is French, not English.
@@hankjeffries2596 A large amount of English is basically just borrowed/derived words, but that doesn't mean that those words aren't English. All it means is that those words didn't originate in English
Indefinite article in Dutch created the word 'Decoy'. It came from 'Eendekooi', duck cage (Eend = Duck), which was used to catch wild ducks by putting tame ducks in a cage. Wild ducks would flock with the tame ones making it easier to catch them. Anyway, it was wrongly assumed the 'Een' at the beginning was the indefinite article, thus 'Een dekooi' which turned into 'a decoy'.
Same kind of change as "an ewt" becoming "a newt" in English (so I've been told)
@@SteveLFBO Yep. Also "a nadder" to "an adder", "a napron" to "an apron", "accord" to "a chord", and "alone (all one)" to "a lone" among several others.
That's a nice random fact that I'm going to remember 😅
@@twincast2005 And the funny thing about the nadder-to-adder thing, is that that one happened both in Dutch and English.
That is a bit doubted, you had Eendekooi (modern spelling "eendenkooi"), but you had "de kooi" (the cage) too as a possible source of confusion, it may be that both misunderstandings played a role.
The part about phrasal verbs reminds me of a joke that Victor Borge used to tell about how, in English, it is odd that you have to cut down a tree before you can cut it up.
Non native speakers of a language are always aware of its idiosyncrasies.
In hungarian we cut the tree out then cut it up.
I have always giggled at this sort of phrase ‘The burnt house was razed to the ground’ what would you call it? Oxymoronic phrase?
@@mariannewhyte8310?
That is interesting
3:16 RIP, Rob. Eaten by his Kitten. Another tragic instance in which a comma could've saved a life.
Great catch! I missed that and went back to look. I sincerely hope the feline's request will not be met!
I dedicate this comment to my parents, Ayn Rand and God.
Once I have came across a restaurant in Seoul, advertising it's services - "BREAKFAST, COFFEE JUICE". My Slavic-parsing mind (i.e. one used to proper grammar, as in "Romanes eunt domus", but I digress here) never noticed it, but my pal, a native English speaker, started to laugh the moment he saw it.
And this, my children, is what happens to languages when they don't upkeep their grammar and let it disappear - a single coma becomes a life or death difference... ;-)
@@MrKotBonifacy Yes, a coma is a serious medical situation.
@@MrKotBonifacy The famous: "Let's eat Grandma.", as opposed to: "Let's eat, Grandma."
Fully acknowledging its weirdness and difficulty to learn, I quite like the chaotic nature of it. There’s beauty in the way English bears all of these clues and remnants of its convoluted journey through time and geography. It’s uniquely primed to accept new words all the time, too.
I agree.
Most of the difficulty with English in relation to grammar is because of the fact that English took in Latin, and French without changing the spellings of words.
You can adopt words, but you have to change the spelling. That is where English failed. German more often than not changed the spellings of the words to conform to their language or kept the spelling and changed the pronunciation.
For example, the word "depot" should be spelled "depo" the word 'jalapeno" should either be spelled "halepenyo" or pronounced like it is written. The same is true of the word "marijuana" it should be spelled "marehuana." Etc, etc....
In German they use the word "balloons" which comes from French. In French you do not pronounce the "ns" in German you do. The French word for office "bureau" is used in German but it is written as "Büro" In English the word is also used but they kept the French spelling.......
@@leviturner3265yet English (and some Australian) people get quite annoyed by Americans changing the spelling of English words, such as colour (color) or programme (program). I am Australian but I have to admire the practical nature of the US spellings.
We, who managed to learn english as a second language, thank you from the bottom of our hearts, Rob! You just validated a lot of struggles people had to come to terms with.
But, you ignore the cardinal rule of "never end a sentence with a preposition"
@@hankjeffries2596 Because it just is not a "cardinal rule" in English as it is actually spoken or written. It is a piece of nonsense invented by some pedantic grammarian trying to the rules of Latin onto English. We have may phrasal verbs as Rob points out. Regard the so-called "preposition" in these cases are being like the German separable and inseparable verbs. " To take on" is a different verb from "To take over " , or "to take down " or "To take off" or "to take up" and so on and ought each be treated a distinct verbs where the prepositional part may be separated from the main part but is not to be seen as a totally independent preposition but as part of the verb . Though good style may play a part too. Why do I prefer to end this note here rather than to end it up? Because the "up" here is totally superfluous.
@@hankjeffries2596 Which is pedantry up with which we will not put.
The missing word I've been asked about several times by learners of English is the question word asking for an ordinal number.
"Whichth wierdness was the pronouns?" - "The seventh."
"Whichth president was Obama?" - "The forty-fourth."
Thanks for the video!
I've had exactly that problem before and it's stumped me as I searched my brain for a method to explain exactly what I'm trying to ask. And I'm a native speaker. "In a chronological list of presidents, where does Obama fall?" seems such a mouthfull. We really need a "whichth" type word.
And thus we have another candidate for a crazy spelling...
It doesn't sound like it would be technically correct, but I usually ask this as "which/what number". As in "What number in the list was the pronouns?" or "Which number president was Obama?"
which works fine in both
Ironically we have it available for monarchs but as soon as you try to put it into a sentence you find it's redundant:
Which reginal number did Henry the Eighth have?
The episode should be shown at the beginning of every B1 ESL course - the best one so far. Thanks Rob!
It should also be showed to every bigoted person who throws a fit when they see a person in the US speaking a language other than English in public. I grew up speaking English and I'm impressed anyone can learn it as a 2nd or 3rd language because of all the weird quirks. I still have trouble some days myself!
@@corvidsRcool The worst part of english is pronunciation tbh. I mean it's satisfying if you're able to read/speak something in your amalgamation of english accents (it's my case; I target mostly northern american; I know there's more to it but idk) but it's also frustrating if you stumble upon something you didn't really say in your entire life or its grammatical structure makes it tongue twister for you
i mean "give up" kinda makes sense, like you're giving something abstract (hence losing it) to something higher or more powerful than yourself (almost "fate" in a way?)
i might just be justifying my intuition unfoundedly
Your old-timey UA-cam page was brilliant. I went back and paused the video so I could read everything and appreciate the clever humour.
Yes!!! It's at 10:23 for those who want to go have another look. I could not stop laughing! (well, actually I did, but I'm about to start again just thinking about it) 🤣🤣🤣
ThouTube 😂😂
yes i was wondering how much time it took to put this little easter egg in the episode
I love all your videos but I find this particularly meaningful since every non-English speaking friend has complained about English's "weirdness." This spells that out. Thanks!
Or do what we Irish do....never give a yes/no answer.. agree/disagree with the question with an "I didn't", or "I did", or if its obvious the action wasn't carried out just say say "I know"
“I before E, except after C, and in weird words like…WEIRD!” An aside: English speakers in Yorkshire are trying to eliminate definite articles: eg. “We went t’ut theater” where the the has been reduced to a single letter t (I guess it’s still there in the contraction!)
Native Afrikaans speaker here. I can attest to the fact that the "th" is *extremely* difficult to learn when learning English.
This normally gets substituted by the "f" sound, but "At school I thought a lot" has somewhat of a different meaning than:
"At school I fought a lot"
12:07 - Just went past that bit in the video. Went instantly from "yeah, your English is weird" to a very proud: *"Ah yes! We're also weird!" *
I thought it was only cockneys that said "f" when they meant "th." Some Brit in the UA-cam world does that, and to me it feels like fingernails on a blackboard, just intolerable to listen to. Hearing a non-native English speaker do it is probably a lot less aggravating.
Somehow I never struggled with the "th" Vs "f". I had more trouble with "r"s. I'm so glad Afrikaans doesn't have gendered forms of words though!
But doesn't the other "th" as in "the" use a "z" sound, as well as "th" as in thought when it is in the middle of a word (not beginning or end)?
I do find that particular accent easy to understand myself, and clarification is usually simple if there's ever miscommunication. Bostonian accents though, those are impossible.
Its surprising how many grammar features Bulgarian/Macedonian shares with English. We also have sort of a meaningless "DO" - its "DA" and Its not the same DA as YES it has different function. The verb infinitive is formed with it. So if you listen to people speaking those languages you will hear a lot of DA's but they don't mean YES. Example: Da Vidya, Da sedna : to see, to sit. The articles are post positioned but there are one for each gender and in some dialects there are 3 types of articles for close, medium close and distant objects.And also the structure of the tenses also uses operators as in English. Fo example the future tense is formed with shte, which is another verb for "want"...
When you talked about the present tense, I thought you were going to mention (you almost did but didn't quite), the fact that we don't use the "present tense" as our present tense: "What are you doing?" "I am reading a book." We never ever say: "I read a book." The so-called "present progressive" has completely supplanted the present tense in our language.
I suppose you use it to show habit, 'On my way to work, I read a book', 'On Mondays, I visit my parents'. Also to state facts: 'The moon is Earth's satellite'.
That.. that is the present tense though.... Or else what tense would you class "I am reading" as?
Some of these conventions are needed to distinguish between heteronyms (words spelled the same but pronounced differently). For past tense, we write “I read a book.” We understand the pronunciation /rɛd/. For the present tense, we must write “I am reading a book.” The root there is pronounced /riːd/. Vocally there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s in the weird English spellings and phonics. There’s no such difficulty writing the past tense “led” and the present tense “lead”.
Irish has two present tenses for the verb "to be" (immediate & continuous) and so two present progressives.
This has shaped how we speak English. So we would say in English:
I read books
I am reading books (now)
I do be reading books (generally)
It's more subtle than that Eric. We have different present tenses for different situations. What you call the present tense, 'I read', is for habitual actions, usually qualified with an expression such as 'on Mondays' or 'if I'm sad'. 'I am reading' is the present tense for just saying what I am doing right now. 'I do read' is a now old fashioned and dialect present form which is mainly used for emphasis now, especially when contradicting a negative.
Even the word "weird" is weird! Its etymology involves meanings such as "fate" and "to turn" and "to become". Not only that, I just found out that Shakespeare reintroduced the word into English! It had fallen out of use in Middle English, but came back through Macbeth's Weird Sisters.
Your videos are so wonderfully jovial and witty, as well as deeply informative! Thanks so much 😊
Guess Shakespeare was the original weirdo then!😂
i before e except after c. And also except "weird" ...
another fun Shakespeare fact he used about 20 000 words in his writings meanwhile the great french playwrights used about 2 000 since the 16th century (the height of french theatre) there was a big push to "purify" the language removing all words that didn't have a distinct french, latin or greek origin as well as having a simplified language as the fad at the time was beauty in simplicity
The disagreeing word in response to you didn’t take the trash out would be “bullshit”
Better in that context would be "Rubbish!"
Said the same thing hahaha
Nuh-uh!
@@nigelsimpson3547 Not in the USA.
How about, "Untrue!"
I so appreciate your videos! I'm teaching English in SEAsia. My students are smart but struggle so much with our very different - and sometimes weird- language. Particularly, in pronunciation, the variety of vowel sounds, the mismatch of spoken with written forms and many particular consonants- sh/s, v/f, that/three. At least they don't have to struggle with tones or gendered nouns and other declensions!
5:26 - My mother who was raised in England would END a sentence with "do" for emphasis!, as in "Stop it, DO!" (very British!)
Like in the song, "Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer, do!"
@@pablovivant9089 Yes, another use of "do" as a generic verb like in the standard response to "May i (verb)?" = "Please do"
I had thought the expression
"Do tell" was a request for someone to tell more of the shocking or scandalous or interesting information
but a number of sources indicate that it simply an expression of surprise and not necessarily a request for more information.
“Love Me, Do” by the Beatles.
"English does not a word for disagreeing"
OBJECTION YOUR HONOUR
I disagree works very well. Or " I don't happen to agree with you!"
No
My first thought was:
*in Trump voice* "Wrong."
“Cap”
That's one of the many examples of when a word taken from French comes to save the day :D
(I) Love your videos, and always find it amusing to compare with my native Danish. My (English) grandchildren call me “morfar” (mother’s father) but in English I can distinguish between granddaughters and grandsons. In Danish they are all børnebørn (childrens’ children). When I studied Bahasa Indonesia, I discovered that you can do very well without the verb “to be”. (“I Danish” in stead of “I am Danish”). My teacher explained that “to be or not to be” had to be rendered as “hidup atau tidak hidup “ (alive or not alive). Languages are such fun.
I love that you accidentally wrote “in stead” instead of “instead.” 😂 But “in stead” is also technically correct, but a native English speaker would use “instead” every time … unless they were at a Renaissance Faire
While texting on a phone, I want to eliminate words that make it take longer to say what I want to say and still be easily understood. It isn't difficult to shorten many sentences that would normally start with 'I am....." followed by a verb ending in 'ing', for example, 'going' 'eating' 'walking', 'reading' and so forth. I am walking... begins instead 'Walking'.
In context that works. If I were to receive a text out of the blue from someone that only read "walking" I'd be left to wonder exactly what they mean, as a response to a text from me asking "what's up?", however, it fully qualifies as a complete answer.
To be fair, saying "Walking" has an implied "I am", "We are", "They are" in front of it. English, in some ways, is very contextual. If you and your family are sitting down for dinner and someone asks what's for dinner, you say "Pizza". You don't say "We are having pizza" because the "we are" and the idea of "having" are all implied.
@@RoySATX English is a very high context language - as you pointed out. As was pointed out in the video we're commenting on, other languages are low context because their words already include context in them, like "Voy" means "I go" or "I am going". But it's one word. However, as has been pointed out by several other commenters, it's also possible that English has singular words for things that other languages require many words to say.
For example, hailing a cab (taxi) only requires "TAXI!!", where as in Japanese, it requires 3 characters/words to do the same thing.
I would argue that the indefinite article serves an absolute purpose, in clarification. Such as, from Monty Python and the Holy Grail: "You got my note!" "Well, I got A note." It doesn't work the same without that indefinite article specifying that he doubts the note's authenticity.
Zactly. There are all sorts of aspects of language that are functionally redundant in _many_ cases as they can be inferred from context and probability, but there are still times when their correct usage provides a useful distinction or where their incorrect usage could create confusion.
I think it works. In Irish your example would be "Fuair tú mo nóta" - "Fuair mé nóta" (I got a note) instead of "Fuair me do nóta" (I got your note). If I leave out the "do" (your) intentionally it is the same statement as in the English example. Namely "don't know if it's YOUR note".
I can definitely understand where you're coming from with this in that it's good for emphasis of clarity, but in the case where there was no indefinite article then the very absence of the definite article is enough to provide that clarity. In your example, "You got my note!" "Well, I got note" would be understood to mean that the received note wouldn't necessarily (though still could) be the one indicated by the definitive article
@@Shna_na That's what I intended to say. Reading over my own comment again I think it might be a bit confusing?! 🤔😬
@@CahiraOMalley Ah, yes, I had the video paused for a while before watching so your comments weren't there for me when I replied. My reply was for the original post, don't worry
Tom Scott's short video about language features that don't exist in English was neat. Of those, clusivity is easily the most useful and I wish we (all) had it.
I speak Tok Pisin and I'm learning Te Reo Māori, both of which have clusivity. In my experience, clusivity is not as useful as you'd think. Cos how often do we find ourselves saying "Do mean 'you and me' or 'you and them'? I don't understand."
BUT Tok Pisin is kinda fun cos it has singular, dual, trial, and plural clusivity! It all looks super confusing until you see the English etymology - eg, 'Yumitripela' comes from You-me-three-fellows.
SINGULAR:
Mi = I/me
Yu = you
Em = she/her/he/him/it
DUAL:
Mitupela = The two of us (but not you)
Yumitupela = The two of us (including you)
Yutupela = the two of you
Tupela = the two of them
TRIAL:
Mitripela = The three of us (but not you)
Yumitripela = The three of us (including you)
Yutripela = the three of you
Tripela = the three of them
PLURAL:
Mipela = Us (4 or more, but not you)
Yumi = Us (4 or more, including you)
Yupela = You (4 or more)
Ol = Them (4 or more)
But in practice, a lot of people drop the dual and trial. Eg, if you're about to leave a place with someone, they'll often just say 'yumi go' instead of 'yumitupela go'
@@ahorrell Good on ya for learning Te Reo Māori. Personally, I do find the clusivity of Te Reo useful and bemoan its lack in English - and I'm a "pasty white boy", so it's not a "my language is the best" thing. As an autistic person, I find myself confused when someone says "we are going to..." *more often than I care to remember* if there's enough people to make a "we" that doesn't include me. I constantly find myself wondering if only they're going or they mean me as well. I don't get that with "mātou" and "tātou".
@@ahorrell I don't understand. Is "mitupela" used in situation where there are 2 people or 3 people? If the first is the case why don't use "mi" for instance? I'd understand if a person wants to make them clear that it's not you but other than that it seems somewhat useless. I think plural ones are really neat tho
PS. Didn't notice the thing you typed on a bottom bottom of a comment. I see why they drop it
@@bopmaster404 "tupela" is used in the case of a grouping of 2 people. "mitupela" signifies that the 2-person group includes me. For 3 people (me, you & another) it would be "yumitripela".
Tok Pisin is intriguing ... think of "tupela" as "two fellas". So "mitupela" (or me-two fellas) = "two fellas including me". This clearly excludes you - as to include you would be "mi-YU-tupela" (me-YOU-two fellas). Same concept applies to 3 people (tri-pela), and likewise Plural. Hope that helps :)
Yes! This exists in Mandarin, although usage is not entirely strict.
我们 (wo men) can mean 'we' in all contexts.
咱们 (zan men) can only mean 'we' as in the people included in the conversation.
Unfortunately, I am so used to my native English that I never use 咱们, since 我们 works just fine, and as many native Chinese speakers often neglect to use 咱们, I can't see that changing anytime soon! I do believe (though I may be wrong) that 咱们 is more often used up north, whereas I live in Shanghai, which is in the east.
Mine own owl, grown and gowned, owned a crow's crown, mined by the slow plow, flown down, never scowling, yet unknown.
🤣👍🏻👍🏻
Nice.
i don't get it. i see that there are a bunch of "ow"/"own"s that are pronounced differently (seems like mostly 2 pronunciations).. but it seems like there must be more to it than that?
Me trying to read this: ow.
That's... just two pronunciations repeatedly?
The day after tomorrow used to be “overmorrow”, just like in German this is “übermorgen”, and the day before yesterday is “eresterday” (the German equivalent is “vorgestern”). These two words had vanished in between 1500 and 1600 but still these can be met in some modern books written by nowadays bizarre authors.
'Overmorgen' en 'eergisteren' in Dutch; 'euvermorge' en 'ieergister' in Limburgisch
I believe that "this morrow" technically means today, especially when spoken in the morning.
Ever since discovering the world overmorrow, I’ve made it my mission to use it more often.
Ever since discovering the world overmorrow, I’ve made it my mission to use it more often.
Ever since discovering the world overmorrow, I’ve made it my mission to use it more often.
I was searching UA-cam for English history videos, and this channel popped up.
So I clicked on it.
This is now one of my top three favorite UA-cam channels.
Thanks for not only being educational, but also amusing.
Swedish has male and female names for pet owners.
Husse - male owner of pet
Matte - female owner of pet
...and it's useful exactly how ? ..and how to you refer to an owner of a pet you don't know the gender of?
@@davidioanhedges you have the same thing in English when you talk about children; mother, father and parent. If you don't know the gender just say "ägare" (owner).
In English these are "master" and "mistress" but the words have so many other uncomfortable connotations that most prefer to pretend we are their parents instead.
Ok we definitely need this added to English
I often see hudad and humom used in pet related social media posts... In Dutch we have 'baas' or 'baasje' (boss, little boss) as non gender option over 'eigenaar/eigenaresse' (owner).
round of applause for the medieval UA-cam recreation, Rob. I had a good chuckle at that.
That was well done :)
I particularly loved the video titled "Should I learn to read?". Rather ironic title.
When I disagree with a statement I just make a loud "ERRRR" like it's a buzzer from a game show when a contestant answers incorrectly
Even that is different per language/culture. In know for example in Japanese they make a sound akin to BIPUUU, because game show "wrong" sounds are usually two tones there. But I do think it's pretty universal that this only happens among close friends, when the other person makes this sound with their mouth. Surely you wouldn't literally always do it, like at a job interview or when speaking with the king 😀
Agreed let's adopt the word er. For this! People may pronounce as they wish. Our new equivalent of si, doch. Is er.
In Australia, we use a word to negate a negative statement and we use it all the time. For example
“Rob, you didn’t take the bins out again.”
“Bullshit!”
🤣🤣🤣
Bullshit! I'm living here hahahah
Can confirm!
As an australian I have no idea what your talking about. 😢
@@Wreniffer Bullshit! 🤣
Hi Rob! Swedish speaker here! It should be "Tycker du om ost?" not um (um is it not word :D) Great video nonetheless!
Gotta love, how as a Hungarian speaker learning English, a lot of these didn’t feel weird at all, like no genders, the clunky future tense and the definite/indefinite articles. Phrasal verbs too.
Yes, phrasal verbs are a very difficult part of learning Hungarian. I have had to create flashcards to drill them in.
uszername checks out
Yeah, but Hungarian is even weirder, or so I've heard.
@@andrewcarson5850 It sure is an outlier in many more ways, I just find it strange and funny how, the first two languages I learned have some common elements that I assumed are the norm, when in fact they are pretty rare.
@@19Szabolcs91 Out of the frying pan and into the fire, one might say.
I like the use of definite articles. Sometimes when you are in a room with multiple things you are considering or not considering, you are better off being able to define just “the” or “that” one thing you desire.
It can sometimes be very useful: "I need the (specific) paper." "I need a (random) paper." "I need paper." (The material or sometimes the concept (subject or category) of something.)
@@Khorteka But you don't need it for specific examples, like "I need article 23" (aka referencing specific paper). "I need yesterday's paper". You don't need "the" or "a". Just like in this reply I took out all times I would have used "the" or "a" and it still sounds correct.
In this case, articles act a lot like pronouns by taking the place of the exact name of the paper or "yesterday's."
Native Chinese(Mandarin) speaker here. When we started to have English classes in 2nd grade, I noticed a whole lot of parallelism between Chinese and English, and it became ever more noticeable when I started to learn even more languages like French Japanese Hebrew and Spanish. I cannot explain the parallelism but it's fun to point out.
Both have SVO word order, lack of inflections of nouns and verbs, and Mandarin is in the process of developing the indefinite article as yige (一个). Chinese can drop pronouns but in practice uses them more often than, say, Japanese. The 3rd person singular (he/she/it) is pronounced identically (tā) but in the written form are different (他，她，它). They both have a sound that is like a retroflex r, especially in the Beijing dialect (zher 这儿).
Yes, you can very often say the same sentence in English or Chinese using the exact same word order.
@@kiga14 I found Japanese students would often miss a/the when speaking English, which since English is stressed-timed language ruins the sentence rhythm (and hurt my ears) - I got my revenge on the students by speaking Japanese and leaving out the "wa" 😊 after every subject noun.
@@jumpingjohnflash
Leaving out the は isn't *as* bad as leaving out the article in English though
. True. Still made them wince though.
6:08 - Mind you, the reason why the Celtic languages do something vaguely like this is because we have question particles! "Useless do" might've entered English as a grammatical calque of this, so in a way, English does have a question particle.
For those interested in how it looks, if I wanted to say "You understand", I'd say "tuigeann tú" (verb first), whereas if I were asking "do you understand?", I'd say "an dtuigeann tu?"
I personally think it even comes specifically from Welsh (Old Welsh/Brythonic), because of the sound and obvious proximity, Welsh first person pronoun "I do" / "'dw i" (although it's a shortened form of "rydw i") the dw sounds exactly like the English "do".
Huh, the word for "you" is the same in Irish (That is irish right?), Spanish, and Hindi. I guess it's an Indo-European thing
Whilst very few Celtic words entered English Celtic grammar and numerics have done.
@@LeReubzRic Indo-European pronouns are pretty conservative, which is one of the ways that shows it's a family (other language families are similar with their pronouns). And English does have its cognate for the "tu" in other languages - it's "thou" (which would have been pronounced more like "thu" before the Great Vowel Shift), which was our original 2nd person singular until it was dropped for the more formal "you" in the 1600s.
@@johnfisk811 They didn't have to borrow but they certainly influenced the syntax and grammatical structure of the prestige language of the time(Old English).
Very fascinating épisode! I'm from province de Québec, and I can assure you, they are not exclusivity from France! Some with the same meaning, other slightly differents. And funny thing the most "choking" Québec usage for a French, it's here, we tend to tutoyer everybody! It is not considered this much informal nowadays. "Familier", oui, but "franc", tutoyer is talking "d'égal à égal".
Thank tou for your great work!
Toujours un plaisir d'apprendre avec toi!
Congrats!! As a person studying English as a foreign language for many years (trying to improve more and more) I find your channel very useful and interesting 👏🏻👏🏻
One of the most hilarious things I've ever seen just happened. A mid-roll ad interrupted the embedded ad. 🤣
But also and as well, great video, mightily entertaining!
12:41 my first thought was "What is similar to chocolate?"
See how many meanings you can get by re-punctuating / capitalising this.
"What is this thing called love"
(For non-native speakers, remember 'Love' can be a familiar honorific for a partner or in some dialects, any female.)
Reply with your version please
@@derekmills5394 "What is this thing called, love?"
Yep, that's what my thought too: “like chocolate” = “similar to chocolate.”
@@YvonneWilson312 What! Is this thing called 'Love'?
Thank-you for this video.
On the subject of articles, I think they do serve a purpose: they prepare your mind for what is coming. Yes, you can figure out what a non-native is saying, after they finish and you think about it.
This preparation occurs in military marching commands also. "Left, face!", or "To the left, march!" both contain what are called a 'preparatory command' and a 'command of execution'. Since synchronized marching is not natural, the first command (the preparatory command) informs your mind of what direction (in this case) you need to be prepared to go; and the command of execution tells you when (now!) to do it.
The particles synchronize the listener's brain with that of the person speaking in preparation for what will be referred to. This might not be necessary if the word order in English wasn't sometimes (but not always) backwards.
And by insisting upon a symmetrical construction, it acts as a check-sum to show that a word wasn't omitted.
20:41 I use Correct / Incorrect when (dis)agreeing with something just said would be ambiguous as yes/no. Less formal sounding I could say "Wrong" negate whatever someone just said.
- Rob, you didn't take the bins out.
- Correct / Incorrect
Excellent Rob, thank you. I am sorry if you have already done this but I have a weird fascination with the word "up". Why do we use it it in so many and often contradictory ways? We get up, wake up, start up, open up, close up, break up, shut up, rev up, pick up, mess up, wind up, and on and on.... Maybe a short video explaining would clear it erm up?
The kitchen got burned up but the house got burned down.
@@Ron_Rhodes razed to the ground
And we park on a driveway, yet drive on a parkway! ??? I really miss George Carlin!
How do non native speakers put up with it all?
@@Ron_Rhodes that's American English? Never heard of kitchens being burned up .....
Rob - you just TOTALLY delight me. I really enjoy every one of your videos - and often refer them to folks. I've been teaching various forms of English in Germany for MANY years. In my university classes - one of my first statements to students is: "I'll be the first one to say: English sucks." or "English is stupid." HOWEVER - over the many years I've worked here, it's the pronunciations and the verb phrases and/or idioms that truly challenge non-native speakers. Once I give them tips on how to simplify and deal with such things - they are quite delighted with this "weird" language - as it can be quite quick to grasp because it DOESN'T have so many rules (I HATE der-die-das and all the tenses, for example).
And my absolute favourite German word is "doch". I firmly believe it should be incorporated into English at all levels.
Splendid! Certainly among the best Rob's videos. Great analysis, great UA-cam -1.5ky page, nice humor. Just love it, what a brilliant work!
In Germany we "do the do" in some regions. In the restaurant, e.g. you can hear sentences like "Tun Sie essen?" = "Do your eat?". Or: "ich tu Fernsehen gucken" = "I do watch television". 🤣
German has some sort of "phrasal verbs", too. However, the infinitive is not split. "Go up" ist in German "hinaufgehen" (hinauf = up, gehen = go). But we say, as in English: ich gehe hinauf = I go up...German is full of these phrasal verbs, like English: "geh hinauf", "geh hinab", "geh herunter", "geh auf", "geh ein", "geh aus" etc.
Brilliant as always. Rob. You put so much into your videos in high production values, fun images, videos within your video, and so much research behind every episode.
THANK YOU! 🙏
10:25 I had to pause the video at the 1500's version of UA-cam. Very creative!
HrodelbertWords
400k brethren
😄
When it comes to family trees, I love the obscure word niblings for nieces and nephews.
Good one!
Also “piblings” as a gender-inclusive term for aunts and uncles (parent’s sibling) 🙂
and piblings for aunts and uncles! (parents siblings)
Sounds like two kinds of Halloween candy...
Thanks Seth 😉👍 and I thought I knew it all 😆😅
We're never done learning are we pal 🍻 Like punctuation Patrick? 😆😅
Another interesting alternative to “Give up” is … “ Pack it in”…😂- What the hell??.. 🤣🤣
About grandparents our family traditionally call the father’s side ‘ grandpa and grandma’ and mother’s side ‘nanna and granddad’.
Saves a lot of confusion.
Love you show.
Does that get confusing between cross cousins? The grandchildren by your male children and the grandchildren by your female children would refer to you by different terms then
We used Mormor and Morfar for mother's mother and mother's father, as well as the inverse for the father's side of the family. But that originated from Danish after one sibling's exchange year in Denmark. It is vastly more clear as to who is being spoken about.
@@Aaron-hr5bbYeah, the Danish way works very well for danes, because our family-words are so short. Just stick ‘em all together to describe the relation:
Mother’s brother? - Motherbrother (morbror)
Father’s mother? - Fathermother (farmor)
We even have brotherson/sisterdaughter to describe how we are related to our nephews and nieces, though it is quite outdated.
Except that only works in your context. It doesn't work if you try to explain to someone else who doesn't use "nanna". Like I have a Mima (often spelled Meemaw by others). But if I say that to someone else, they have no idea how that is.
@@Dyanosis That's all words though. If you speak english to someone who don't speak english, they don't know what you are talking about either. If you are with people who know what Mima means, then Mima is really useful to distinguish who you are talking about. If they don't know Mima, then don't use Mima.
Here are my entries for potential collective nouns for "aunts and uncles":
1. Eldrins - Combines "elders," indicating seniority or older generation, with a suffix "-ins," which adds the familiar touch.
2. Eldsiblings
3. Kinparents - family (or made family) that are in a parental role without directly being parents.
4. Elderkin
5. Eldrets - eld + rets, a creative contraction of relatives of how it may have shortened over time.
I like Elderkin as the collective noun.
Furthermore in colloquial application it would likely be contracted as in this example: "Ah yes, let Eldkin Peter have that mug, he is Mum's Uncle after all".
my only weigh in would be to replace the eld with gran or grand so it fits in with general usage of grandparents that we already use. ive also heard "niblings" for collective nieces and nephews
I like this! Riffing off kinparents, what about "parblings"? (Pronounced like "pairblings")
@@erinm9445 maybe "parsibs" pair-sibs
Unclings? Auntles?
I think this is your best effort yet, Rob. Very thought-provoking... and a lot of fun!
one of the many reasons I like to rewatch RobWords videos I've already seen is it makes my algorithm better and I get great recommendations.
20:20 "Separate words for our mother's/father's grandparents."
I would still go with "maternal" & "paternal" grandparents.
I like these words because rather than have two unique words for this one specific idea (of grandparents), maternal and paternal are more versatile, describing anything to do specifically about one's mother's or father's side.
I think the idea is more of a separate word for Grandparent depending on the side of the family. Paternal and Maternal is just a descriptor, not a separate word that I think Rob is getting at
@@yumyumsunkie true, but I would argue that a simple yet versatile descriptor is more useful than a unique word for a unique situation.
"My maternal grandmother" or "grandmother on my mother's side" both sound clunky to me. In Swedish, for example, we just say "mormor" (lit means mother's mother). Also helps with more complex family lineage, like saying "my maternal grandfather's paternal uncle" simply is "morfars farbror".
Gets real confusing when a kid only has 2 mothers tho lol
@@LordZeebee No kid has that.
(At least not yet, although DNA technology may produce something like that in the future.)
We do, sorta have a word for "day after tomorrow", "overmorrow". At least, I've heard it used and I have used it. Mostly it confuses people, but it's a word for "day after tomorrow". "Eresterday" or "Ereyesterday" is one I've heard used, and have used for "day before yesterday." Again, it mostly just confuses people.
Note: Another archaic word, "yestereve", rather than "last evening"
Near as I can tell, they are basically obsolete words that are no longer used. But I like them.
Where in the world have you seen these words used? Is it in an old regional dialect word?
@@minuteman4199 I'm an American, but mostly in older movies and TV shows. I remember a old fellow from my childhood, back in the 80s, lol, using ereyesterday and yestereve. Overmorrow I probably picked up years ago from reading various things. (I used to pick up dictionaries and encyclopedias, just to read them.)
I'm certain I've seen them in the dictionary of archaic words that some of the "Classics" novels you can get cheap have in them.
It is also a direct translation to the word we Scandinavians use for this exact thing - övermorgon is how we write it in Swedish. It's just the words we use for "over" and "morning" combined into one word.
To get to our word for two days ago you could pretty much get there by translating "ereyesterday" as well, as long as you know that "ere" means before. We say "förrgår" for this, which either combines "förra" which means last or "före" which means "before" with "igår" which is yesterday. Or it could be that we use the prefix "för-", our equivalent to English "fore-" as in forefather. I actually don't know which it is, and it doesn't really matter since either of them make sense.
Hey, that disaster movie from a decade or two ago could have been called "Overmorrow"...cool title...
Thank you, @jamesmccrea4871, I came here to post the same thing. I have a taste for older literature, and these words pop up from time to time in the books I read. They are good words that deserve a return to daily usage.
For me it's your weird vowels and diphtongs. Your written vowels often have a different sound than other language's written vowels. For example, when you say the letter E, you make the sound that other languages typically would express with the letter I. And you pronounce other vowels as diphtongs, which other languages would use two vowels to express, if they do it at all. (In my language we don't use diphtongs, except for a few loan words and in some specific dialects.)
Of course, this works well for English speakers speaking English, but it becomes a bit of a problem when native English speakers try to pronounce other languages. It isn't unusual at all for English speakers to see an A in a foreign word, for example, and automatically pronounce it as "ey" even though it makes it really weird, since it's a typical English pronunciation.
Also, the vovel E at the end of a foreign word seems to create some sort of overload or something. :D I have heard three different pronunciations of it. The Japanese beverage "sake" often gets, to my ears, pronounced as "saki". And then we have the word "anime", which you pronounce as "animay". And I recently watched some reaction videos of the German show "Dark", where there's a character named "Helge". To my ears it sounded like many of the reactors pronounced this name as "Helga", which is the feminine form of "Helge". It's weird since all of these words have the same sound at the end in their original languages. I'm not sure how to transcribe it, but "eh" I guess would be the closest.
Putting a short "eh" sound at the end of a word is difficult for English speakers. Not sure why, but it is.
The short e at the end of German words do sound a lot like an "uh" sound, e.g. Porsche, meine, liebe, etc
To be honest, "sake" is used for any alcoholic drink in general in Japanese. So it's weird that everybody else uses it for a single specific Japanese drink.
@@ajs41Because English doesn't have any words ending in that sound.
While native Italian speakers have a tendency to add a final -e to their pronunciation of English words that end in a consonant, because in Italian those consonants would be followed by an -e.
Hmmm. Attempt at phonetic spelling for how I pronounce the three example words
Saw kay
Anim ay
Helg eh.
I see the "do" in English and "si" in french having a similar purpose. It feels to me that they both respond to a said or unsaid "no".
"You don't like coffee"
"I do like coffee!" / "Si, j'aime le café!"
I want to tell you about a concept that we don't have a word for, in English, but I just can't put it into words!
That's because English is quick to adopt any such needed words; e.g. "schadenfreude" from recent German. Our history as a massive German/ French creole shows that this goes back centuries.
English is poor in so mAaaaany concepts ; homesickness ( NOSTALGIA for a person, nothing to do with HOME ) , kidnapping ( RAPIMENTO of a dog, nothing to do with KID ) , blackmailing ( RICATTO from a son to his mother ) nothing to do with MAIL etc. 😢😢 What annoys me most is BUTTERFLY 🦋🦋🦋 what the damn has BUTTER to do with this wonderful insect ??? 😅😊😅😊😊
@@mariapiazza-od8ibI can't attest for any English other than what I speak on the US east coast, but I don't use the words you describe in that way.
Homesickness really is about one's home. It might be a physical house, but could also be about a hometown. If my parents moved away from my childhood home into an apartment, I'd never say I was homesick unless I meant the town I grew up in or my childhood home. Likewise, if I live alone and have been traveling for a month, I would say homesick to mean I miss my apartment, despite there being no one there.
Kidnapping is most often used to describe the taking (napping?) of a child. Yes, it can be used for an adult, too, but it's usually a kid. I'd never use it for a dog. I'd probably just say someone stole the dog. Maybe I'd playfully say dognapped.
Blackmail, to my knowledge, used to be done by mail, but yes, nowadays means any form of extortion. It means threatening someone with some action, often revealing a secret, if the victim doesn't pay money to the blackmailer. It doesn't really have to do with sons and mothers. Usually it's between non-family, and often enemies or work colleagues/adversaries.
You got me with butterfly!
@@mariapiazza-od8ibI'm not really sure what you are saying in the first part. Are you trying to say the words are more restricted in their definitions than the Italian words you mention or that the etymology of them is strange. Blackmail for example comes from "mal" an old word for payment or rent. As to butterfly I quite like that each European language seems to have their own idiosyncratic word for butterflies: vlinder, schmetterling, mariposa, farfalla, papillon, sommerfugl, borboleta, leptir, motyl, fjäril. No two languages seem to have gone for the same origin
@@mariapiazza-od8ib well butterfly, is a hiccup of flutterby which was the original, surely!
20:35 "We don't have a word to negate a negative statement."
Well, it may be viewed as a bit rude, but some Americans just say *"wrong"* as a challenge, like Doch or Si.
Or, for that matter, "Bull!", "Bullsh*t!", or the corresponding euphemism "Baloney!"
@@stephanzielinski7922 True, however those would be perceived as being even more rude.
Except for "Bologna", that's probably the nicest way of directly contradicting someone.
In Scots you can say Aye , Naw ! for an emphatic no !
My comment to this was that I sometimes use *"not true"* as such a challenge, which is a bit less harsh than "wrong", but (as an American) I've probably said that as well. Granted, "not true" is two words but as I saw in another comment, _"untrue"_ also fits here.
@@johnnydarling8021 In certain parts of the States, we use "Hogwash!"
Just can’t get enough of this. Stunningly brilliant
Fascinating!!!
Thanks Rob….
I’ve been learning Spanish and I’ve noticed some of the differences you further illuminate….
Language is fascinating and you bring this out so well…. You’re interesting and fun (:
Kul att du lär dig svenska Rob! Det svåraste måste vara att veta när man ska använda ”en” och ”ett”. Många gör fel på det. Och att höra skillnaden på ”anden”, the bird, och ”anden”, the spirit, till exempel, men kämpa på och lycka till!
På norsk har man "ei" i tillegg til "en" og "et", men "ei" har forsvunnet fra store deler av landet, og i bokmål, og blir erstattet an "en". På vestlandet og i nynorsk bruker vi "ei" enda, til hunkjønnsord som ei jente eller ei dør. På bokmål kan man skrive en jente, en dør, en bok osv, men intetkjønn, et hus f.eks. gjelder som på svensk.
20:07 Meanwhile in the dictionary...
Ereyesterday: **Am I a joke to you?**
Overmorrow: **Am I a joke to you?**
Aside from that, great content :D
Those are archaic words.
@@razerx100 they're only archaic if people don't use them. I also want "fromwards" to be brought back.
They’re archaic and weren’t ever really used. They’re mostly attested in translations from German, where it’s a calque of the German equivalent.
Well I use them.
@@mjb7015 Also froward (like backward, as in to and fro)
I do enjoy these vids from you and I finish them. I'm a bugger for getting a tad bored and not seeing videos out to the end.
You present brilliantly. That has a lot to do with it.
I love this channel Rob.I learn something new everyday here. TY mate.
5:49
While english may be the only language to use the meaningless "do", danish uses the word "can" in the exact same meaningless way.
"I do not like matcha" =
"Jeg kan ikke lide matcha (da) / I can not like matcha (en)"
"Do you like coffee?" =
"Kan du lide kaffe? (da) / Can you like coffee? (en)"
"Do you see how special it is?" =
"Kan du se hvor specielt det er? (da) / Can you see how special it is? (en)"
Interesting. Points to a general desire in Germanic languages for a filler word. My personal assumption would be to simplify grammar by avoiding inflection for most verbs. And despite Rob's claims, German very much does have meaningless "do" ("tun") as well. It is simply considered "uneducated speech", but it has been resilient despite teachers railing against it for centuries and decades of mass media language standardization. Especially in the north, so there might be a Hanseatic aspect to its origin.
This confuses me as a Norwegian. Lide means suffering in Norwegian.
I do not like matcha (En)
Jeg kan ikke lide matcha (Da)
Jeg liker ikke matcha" (No)
The Danske way sounds like
"I can't suffer matcha."
Do you like coffee?" (En)
Kan du lide kaffe? (Da)
Liker du kaffe (No)
The Dansk sounds like
"Can you suffer coffee?"
We have a meaningless do in German as well. It's just that it's considered either dialect or childlike speaking and not considered proper Standard German. At least where I live a meaningless do is used very regularly in the local dialect.
I knew a French man who asked me why do you say washing 'up' and drying 'up' , I didn't have an answer for him.
When we do the washing up we're cleaning dishes and cutlery. When we do the washing we're cleaning clothes.
Heheh try explaining the difference between a lay up and lay down.
And what's a "lay-by"? In England it's a turnout/siding at the side of a highway where you can stop if your car's not working right or you're tired.
A puddle can dry up. But if you've washed up, you then dry off.
One can just say to wash the dishes and to dry the dishes . Up defines the end task. To do something up = to renovate or make something look better . It adds finality. Like to grow and to grow up. A start up defines the finality of the “start”… geddit? 😅😂
A fun fact: in “Star Trek: Enterprise” they don’t use the definite article about the ship (eg. “We need to get back to Enterprise.”). In other Star Trek series, they do use it (eg. “We need to get back to the Enterprise.”).
I've always thought that there was a general difference between American and English on that topic - Nelson served on HMS Victory versus Kirk served on the USS Enterprise. It's not always like that - just usually.
In the film Titanic, they always referred to the vessel as simply Titanic.
In my dialect, I say the Titanic - as I do for all large floating vessels.
The Mayflower, the Golden Hind, the Flying Dutchman, the Bounty, etc, etc.
Note that the 1960s British war film was "Sink the Bismark", not "Sink Bismark"
Enterprise would be more accurate since military vessels tend to be gendered.
So you would "Go to Rob" not "Got to the Rob"
But what if he's the only one? ;)
The difference between humanizing a ship (Enterprise) versus treating it like an object (the Enterprise)
I love these videos, they’re so informative and interesting. Great work Rob, please keep it up.
A frequent annoyance to me is how the word next has become ambiguous when referring to future days. If today is Saturday and I say "Meet me here next Friday", most people will think that will be in six days but some will think it's the Friday of the week after. The closer we get to the Friday, the same phrase spoken that day makes more people think it's not the upcoming Friday but the Friday after. There's no clear agreement amongst us as to which week we're talking about.
North South Divide .. but not exclusively ... Next Saturday is not well defined ...
"This Friday" and "Friday next."
@@drs-xj3pb Check with your Northern and Southern friends and they won't agree on these either ...
French has a way to clarify this ("vendredi en huit" means Friday next week) but it's barely ever used. I suspect the need for this type of clarification isn't strong enough for people to worry about keeping such expressions alive.
Yes. This does require a bit of extra attention in English to avoid ambiguity. If it's Tuesday, and one tell you to meet them "next Friday" are they referring to three days from now? Or ten days from now? It's better to use "on Friday" instead of "next Friday" as that will be understood to mean Friday of this week. I often hear myself saying "this coming Friday" (clunky, sure, but it's unambiguous) or "Friday of next week," respectively.
I have coined a new English word!
This was achieved while solving a game of "Target" where many words have to be made from 9 letters given.
My word fills all the requirements of a 'good word' i.e.
- It will be instantly understood by a British person
- It will confuse the Americans
- It will annoy the French
- It solves an instance of using one word for three very different meanings (possibly more)
You know how we use 'Liquidate' to mean 'Make into a Liquid' and also 'Turn Assets into Cash' or even 'Eliminate a rival'
Ladies and Gentlemen I give you ...
QUIDILATE
"I'm so skint I had to quidilate my Biggles book collection"
"Liquidate" doesn't mean "make[sic] into a liquid". You mean "liquefy" (which, fittingly for this video, isn't spelled "liquify")
You could reach this meaning with "cashilate" in America. Cashify would work equally well.
I hate it. You didn't miss that part at least.
It looks just like Latin but in a " I'm so quirky, look at me " kind of way, the exact same a ton of english already sounds like.
I found "skint" more confusing.
@@SigEpBlue it means impecunious
I would insist that phrasal verbs are much harder to grasp in Dutch (and German) because the preposition and the verb don't always come in the same order like in English. Like for instance the example you used of opgeven in the present tense resembles the English phrasing, "Ik geef op", and the preposition is further separated like in English with a single object like in "I give something up", "Ik geef iets op", but unlike English the preposition is pushed to the end when there's more words, for example "Ik geef het gisteren op", literally "I gave it yesterday up". But _then_ as a participle it's in the same order as an infinitive, but with the "ge" prefix thing inserted between it, so "I have given it up" is "Ik heb het opgegeven". So not only does one have to learn the implied meanings of two parts that don't necessarily make sense literally, one also has to keep track of the preposition as it wanders around the phrase. Not only that, but this only actually applies to _some_ but not _all_ verbs. Sometimes they stay attached no matter what. And sometimes there are two verbs with the exact same components but are different depending on whether they're separable, like "Het komt voor" (It happens) vs "Het voorkomt" (It prevents)
Norwegian has a word for a 24 hour day+night - døgn - 1 døgn means 1 24 hour period. 1 day is asort of mbiguous in that it can also mean a 24 hour period but it can also mean specifically a day period - while the sun is up which ends at night when the sun has set. This ambiguity is similar to English "day" but in norwegian you can be specific and say "døgn" when you mean a 24 hyour period. For example If I at 14_00 says this iwll take me one "døgn" it means I will be done by 14:00 the following day while if I say "it will take me 1 day"" it means that I will be done some time the day after, it could be early morning the next day or late evening the following day. As such a "day" is more imprecise than "døgn".
What are the chances you could put these videos out hourly? Your is the single channel I wait and watch for all the time! I love this channel. Seriously - hourly...challenge yourself. I believe in you.
I think that on another video Rob said that he has a "Day Job" somewhere else, so he probably needs to sleep and eat. Just read a page or two from an English language dictionary each day, and you will be refreshed until next week's video. 🙂
@@gusloader123His 'day job' is a news presenter on DW (Deutsche Welle). Tons of videos of him there.
Came here to say I love the old UA-cam interface thing and the titles you put with them! 😂😂 “Should I Learn to Read?”
Didn't use an obligatory pronoun!
Just yesterday I used the word “weird” and I immediately thought of this channel and wondered about the history/etymology of the word “weird” and if it has ever been covered here.
weird..
@@miralupa8841weird..
It would have been weird if he did a quick bonus fact about the history of the word weird at the end. 😁
@@amandaburnham8626 Indeed!
proto-indo-european *wert, meaning turn/twist, made its way to proto-germanic as “wurdiz” and then old english "wyrd" with the meaning of fate/destiny or an event thereof (out of the sense of a “turn/twist” of fate), later yielding the modern english “weird”
17:30 in Persian we use the same thing for future. For example
"I will cook" is "mæn khāhæm pokht"
And "mæn khāhæm" is "I want"
mæn : I
khāhæm : want (but it's not continuous)
Pokht : cook
What striked me is the expression "to give up" which can be translated in french as : "laisser tomber" (someone, voluntarly, or something unvilingly (as to drop)) ou "abandonner," that can be translated as "to let down" (someone) or "let go" (something). and let go means "leave behind" ou "lâcher prise". and when you let go on something, you drop it, it falls. down. I think you can almost can make an entire episode on the subject... @RobWords love your channel, I wish I had been taught english your way. Cheers !
Another detail about articles. When using "the", we use the long sound before a word starting with a vowel, and the short sound before a word starting with a consonant. We use "an" before a word starting with a vowel.
But when we are emphasizing something, we use the long sound on the article, both "the" and "a".
'We use "an" before a word starting with a vowel' Before a vowel sound not before a word beginning with a vowel letter. An honour, a house, an umbrella a university etc.
@@zegrze Excellent point. The one that always nudges me is historic. "an historic occasion".
I often say, "When I hear 'an historic', I need someone to drive me to an hospital in an hurry.
@@dands1144 only acceptable if their accent doesn't pronounce their Hs
@@Threezi04 Hence why I'm fine with both "a herb" and "an herb", even if the silent H one looks and sounds wrong to me, as I don't think I've ever heard anybody jumble together the two. But I could count the number of times I've heard somebody say "historic(al)" with a silent H in their native dialect on one hand. Instead my ears get tortured on a semi-regular basis by ostensibly educated US hosts (late night, news, sports, UA-cam, anything) declaring something "an historic moment" with a distinctly pronounced H.
Something to do with the phoneme not being a stop.
Meaningless Do made learning other languages in school very hard. I was always asking what's the word for Do in situations where the foreign language structure was different.
I find that I'm always searching for a substitute for "get/got" when using Spanish. I realize now how often English relies on that verb and in different contexts. In Spanish, there's no one verb to take its place.
Dear Rob, we do have a word in American English that negates a statement. It is 'bullshit'. We also use the sporting expression 'to cry foul'. And thanks to South Park there is 'shenanigans!' As well, 'Y'all' is a limited plural form. If I were sitting at a table with friends and talking to only a few of them and said, "Y'all should come and visit." And then expanded my invitation to the entire table, I would amend my statement by saying "All Y'all should come and visit." Thanks so much for your videos.
BS is a slang word though. I think he was talking about non-slang words.
@@ajs41 Bollocks! 🤣 On the contrary! I refute that! Negatory!!
"Ye" is still used in much of Ireland. Its use is especially widespread in the hiberno-english dialects of the west and south of the country. We also pronounce the letter "r" as a hard "r". It may sound unusual to many anglophones, but it saves confusion when saying the words island and Ireland. 😊
The thing I think English really needs is an exclusive we/our. A simple way to indicate "[belonging to] the group of which I am a member, but you/they are not."
Them.
Us. Ourselves.
Edit: "Our group" (as stated by @gregorymorse8423) is even better. Not perfect but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
but we don't say "Us are going" or "Ourselves are going" - and neither distinguish between including or excluding the listener in any case.
Te reo Maori has "maua" (s/he and I) and taua (you the listener and I) and also matou (3 or more people excluding the listener) and tatau (3 or more people including the listener)
"Our group"... done. You are welcome
12:00 One possible reason for the development of grammatical gender (also called noun classes) is a sort of redundancy system. Language is, at its core, a signal transfer problem, and you want to provide the possibility of some amount of error correction without spending too much "bandwidth" encoding for redundant information. If I start a noun phrase with "the...", the only information you, the listener, have acquired is that the following word will most likely be a singular noun (it could be an adjective, but that's not salient to the point).
If the article were to agree in gender with the head of the noun phrase, it restricts the set of all possible nouns that could follow to a smaller set of possibilities. Many Southeast Asian languages, as just one example, have a very well developed system of noun classification, which allows for a much more restricted set of possibilities, and ideally a much greater degree of error correction. The hypothetical scenario that I like to consider is a busy market, with many people shouting. Neither person communicating wants to have to spend time repeating themselves because some minor part of the utterance was obscured by someone yelling at the next stall over, and some amount of redundancy helps achieve this.
Yes, I think historically they came out of arbitrary classifications, or maybe noun classifier words like "long stringy things" or "round things", or animate/inanimate distinctions. In some languages one category happened to have mostly male words and another mostly female words, so the entire categories became associated with a gender.
@@sluggo206 I've often thought distinguishing animate from inanimate would be useful language markup
@@adfaklsdjf You might find the history of animate/inanimate interesting then. I vaguely recall some animals or plants or things being animate or inanimate in ways we wouldn't think of them now.
The standard historical explanation for why English lacks grammatical gender is that it increases communication when used by partial speakers. The origin of English is as a pidgeon or creole to enable communication and trade between people who spoke different languages.
@@Rocketsong The origin of English is Anglo-Saxon. There's debate about how Norse, Celtic, and Norman speakers integrated with it, and whether modern English has an English base and those others added to it, or a Norse base, but in any case I don't think we can definitevly say it doesn't have an English base. The loss of grammatical gender happened after those, didn't it?
I'm scottish, my wife mocks me for saying y'all.
But it is an effective contraction that flows much more easily than "you all".
I think it should be formally adopted as an acceptable word.
I didn't even know that was Scottish until now 😂
I was born and raised in South Texas and agree 100% that y'all should be adopted as an official word.
@@michelejones711 The problem is created by using "you" for both singular and plural subjects, so "you all" was, presumably, established organically as the plural version of "you," thus allowing for the bastardization into "y'all." However, in the southern US, "y'all" has come to be used for both singular and plural, and that has produced the relatively recent (at least in my experience) adoption of "all y'all" as the plural form of "y'all." Where does it end?
I'm a New Zealander, and I too use y'all
I’m Scottish and I have never said y’all 😂 more like “ yees “ for more than one person 😂
Great videos! I thought for sure you were going to talk about the modal auxiliaries: should, could, would... and I thought you would talk about our sound "r" with the curled tongue. Keep up the good work Sir.
Used to teach Hispanic Linguistics and only studied English as it was necessary to my Spanish studies... love the run down here (See that phrasal verb? Nailed it!). Always appreciate your work. Keep up the great work!
Both I and my wife are native speakers of Dravidian languages. I started speaking English at two years of age, whereas she started around eight. She still has trouble with English prepositions, and I don't.
If you have problems with English propositions try Cymraeg(Welsh)😁
For a Finnish native, learning English since age of 10 officially, but obviously a lot before it (got my first computer as 6 year old), the whole concept of a language having or needing to use prepositions all the time is disturbing.
Rob: “We don’t have a single word to negate a statement.”
Me: “False.”
Wrong
“Not” or “N’t” 😜
SMH
Nuh-uh! Yuh-huh!
Me - Rubbish!