Rodents and Small Mammals in Early Medieval England
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- Опубліковано 28 лис 2023
- In this video, I explore the semantic ranges of several Old English rodent words, and how they map onto different species of rodent (and non-rodent) in Britain.
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"A mouse that looks like a fox and is the size of a fox," feels like a very Douglas Adams/Terry Pratchett/Neil Gaiman way to describe a fox.
Indeed 😂 "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't"
Pidgeon with the head of a horse and the body of a horse.
Behold the mighty Esquilax!
I think I’ll call it a bowl of petunias.
Having a whale of a time I see
A mouse that looks like a fox kind of sounds like a mongoose, especially given the geographic context.
Was just about to comment the same.
My old UK house was small and the under the stairs served as a larder. I went into the kitchen and hearing a rustling spotted a mouse nibbling on a piece of spaghetti it had dragged out of the packet. It looked up, decided I wasnt a threat, and carried on nibbling. 😂
Mice ate my Scalextric set in our attic many years age when I was a child, I have held a bit of a grudge against them ever since!
These videos are really good - could you do one for tree names? They probably have some interesting origins.
Exactly. Rivers and lakes names could be also interesting imho
I second this
Ooh there’s a great story behind the name for yaupon holly, “ilex vomitoria,” The guy that named it played Jumping To Conclusions with a misunderstaning of the anecdotal evidence he had, the wiki says more if you’re interested. I should write it out here for anyone who might read this but maybe Simon will explore it in a future video if he likes
Some info is incorrect tho - technically, every single language has been written down by its creator, as there is no way to create a language without writing the words on something until they are all learnt to fluency and then taught to others, and, the sounds didn’t change on their own, the words ware modified on purpose by the dudes that created the newer languages by modifying a previous language or multiple previous languages, and most words aren’t loanwords, because Germanic languages come from Latin, so they have many words that were not modified or that were only modified a bit and still look like the Latin word that always existed in the Germanic languages, and this is very obvious in Old Norse, which has so many word endings and words and letter combinations that are also found in Latin and words that sounds just like a Latin word like mæra / inum / mar etc! Proto European which is the first proper language ever created (with thousands of properly constructed words and grammar) was the only language that was created from scratch by a dude a long time ago, and it came with the first proper writing system ever created, which inspired all other languages and writing systems, either directly or indirectly, and then other dudes created new languages by modifying it, and others created new languages by modifying the languages that were modified from it, and so on, and it was always the type of dude that decided what a group of ppl did that created languages, and he created the language as a way to control that group of ppl (also creating the language barrier) and to make sure that the ppl from that group would understand the orders and do what he said - every language creator normaIly wanted to make the new language as different as possible or at least slightly different or different enough to be another language with different spelling rules and different diphthongs and different word endings etc, which explains why there are languages that are very similar as well as many languages that are very different! Germanic languages are the prettiest and most refined languages ever, with the most organized aspect as the dudes that modified / created them had a lot of natural artistic talent - the Norse languages were created by raider / warrior dudes and inspired by nature, and one can immediately feel those battle vibes if one looks at Norse / Icelandic etc, as each language reflects the personality of its creator, and the other Germanic languages and the modern Celtic languages and Latin etc were also inspired by nature!
I am learning all Germanic languages and my current levels are...
- intermediate level in Old Norse / Icelandic / Welsh
- writer level in English + native speaker level in Spanish
- upper advanced level in Dutch + advanced level in Norwegian
- mid intermediate level in German / Swedish / Portuguese / French / Italian
- beginner level in Breton / Hungarian / Gothic / Latin / Faroese / Galician / Danish / Slovene
- total beginner in Cornish / Manx / Irish / Scottish Gaelic / Aranese / Elfdalian / Gallo / Limburgish / Occitan / Luxembourgish / Catalan / East Norse / Ripuarian / Swiss German / Alemanic / Austrian German / PlatDeitsch / Greenlandic Norse / Friulian / Pretarolo / Sardinian / Neapolitan / Sicilian / Venetian / Esperanto / Walloon / Ladin / Guernsey / Norn / Burgundian / West Frisian / North Frisian / East Frisian / Yiddish / Afrikaans / Finnish / Latvian / Estonian etc (and the other languages based on Dutch / German / Norwegian / Italian / French that are referred to as ‘dialects’ but are usually a different language with different spelling etc)
(I highly recommend learning Dutch / Icelandic + Norse + Faroese / Norwegian as they are so magical, as pretty / refined / poetic as English - all other Germanic and the other pretty languages on my list are also gorgeous, so they are all a great option!)
I’ve got to say that I’m loving these videos on the etymological history of animals, it’s really interesting to explore how people through history interacted with and viewed the none human world.
It also combines 3 of my favourite things: etymology, history and animals 😁
We had a friend from Lincolnshire. We would always laughed when she would tell the cat to go catch a "MUS"(with a line over the U). We being Canadian thought the metal image hysterical of a cat catching a Moose. Moose is a Cree name for the ungulate almost the same as the European Elk.
Interesting you mention the other Latin name for mouse "sorex". There is a river in Western Canada named the Souris River(which is obviously from the French). This river crosses the American border several times where in the past they called the river by the English translation that is Mouse River.
👍
Just as an aside about the “Fox-sized” mice - Gambian Pouched Rats can get up to around 3ft in size apparently. I’d consider a rat that large fox-sized, and since authors in the region have demonstrated some limited experience with African fauna it might not be a stretch to think they may have encountered a Gambian Pouched Rat.
It's just a little guy!
This guy can't just make me unreasonablely excited by putting x animal in early medieval england as the video title
Never thought I'd be clicking on a video with that title so quickly.
As a lover of language, history and nature, this is basically the trifecta for me.
Great content as always Simon.
This series of language and animal folklore from Early Medieval England is just magic, Simon.
Hedgehog is "igelkott" in Swedish, preserving the common "igil" origin. The "-kott" part could be a reference to "kotte", meaning a cone from a coniferous tree, or anything with a shape or appearance suggestive of such a cone, which is at least plausible for a hedgehog. But it could also mean something completely different.
Yeah I´ve wondered about that word learning swedish on duolingo. It is btw "broddgöltur" in icelandic: "Spikehog"
@@MrKorton Well, I can tell you that "brodd" is a Swedish word for "spike" (now almost exclusively used in the plural, "broddar", for spiked shoe covers to prevent slipping on ice), and "galt" is a Swedish word for an adult, male pig. "Broddgalt" could easily have been the Swedish word for "hedgehog".
Does the Swedish endfast “-kott” have anything (also) to do with the thirdeye/pineal? hedgehog/igelkott cud haps = ‘headoga’ (“oga” is seemingly the Swedish for “eye” therefore headoga/headeye/pineal). An ugly sundred of “-cott” (cottage) is “-cote”, therefore the NWO could cote one’s ‘headoga’(pineal) with anti-terrorist chalk.
@@mytube001 Broddgalt, that´s cool. Yeah spiked shoe covers are also called broddar/mannbroddar ;)
video about rodents = best video ever. thank you for the cute rodent footage!
Indian mice [7:25]: since Alexander got as far as India, sounds like a reference to Dhole. Also know today as Whistling Dogs, for communicating via ultra-sound, they could just as well be called Squeaking Dogs.
I have rarely seen Shrews [9:25], but I can hear some bats, and having heard similar, high frequencies from woodland undergrowth, I'm guessing these were not from bats.
Historical naturalism. You are incredible sir, thank you
Igel is still used in some Norwegian dialects to mean hedgehog! Mostly in the form *igelkott* (ie, hedgehog cat). Not commonly used any more, but it's recorded as late as the 20th century!
I have been wondering about the "cat" thing as well - also with the squirrel, being an ekekatten (oak cat in Norwegian) or Oachkatzl (little oak cat in bavarian dialects), though the oak part might just be (as discussed in the video) a "new" interpretation of the older root.
@@johanneswerner1140 I've never heard eikekatt before, where do they say that? Can't seem to find it in any dictionaries. Are you sure it's Norwegian and not Swedish? (or even danish, though i'd assume that'd be ege-)
I thoroughly enjoyed the video about spiders and this one is every bit as interesting and entertaining. I look forward to more guided tours through Old English, zoological and otherwise!
I had an amazing encounter with a pygmy shrew this year walking along a path at dusk on the edge of Oxford. It was so still and silent you could practically hear the shrew breathing. I tried to explain to other people how amazing it was but they didn’t get it. I have some footage including some exquisite shrew sounds if you are interested. The thing I didn’t realise until I saw one in the wild is how incredibly fast they are. Amazing creatures.
These videos on animal portrayals in old english texts are really fascinating, thank you. They are very good as concrete examples. Really makes you think of how semantics both progresses and retains things over time, as well as gives some insight into the particular shades of meaning things may have had in a time and place.
The "Algorithm" brought me to this youtube channel. The excellent content kept me here. The ASMR brings me back again and again.
Thank you for your videos, Simon
Something like 3 terabytes of data are uploaded to youtube daily, and its still incredibly difficult to find anything quite like this.
It amused me greatly, when I was living in Vlanderen, when I learned that the dutch for squirrel was eekhoorn, which I hread as something like acorn. Now this makes a lot more sense, but it makes me wonder where the name squirrel came from.
Borrowed from French
@@goombacraft Latin: Sciurus. French: Ecureuil. O.Eng: Acweorna. OHG: Eihhorn.
It is safe to say that by the French composition of the word, that Ecureuil takes after the Germanic term rather than an adaptation of the Latin otherwise why have ''Ec'' prefix? Dutch takes after the West Germanic ''Aikwaurna'' where nowadays it is Eekhorn.
"Eichhörnchen" in German - with "eich" referring to oak, so acorn is not that far off.
@@jedi5263 I knew this word, but didn't put eich and oak together. Seems obvious now.
Acorn just means Oak's Corn and Corn is just another Word for Fruit/Food. So yeah it checks out. @@jedi5263
Enjoyed watching this masterfully done video.
Thank you
I too have live catch-and-release traps laid out for mice.
my cat very much enjoyed your mus footage 😁
Honestly I love this so much because you take the time to ask questions I would never have thought to ask. “Do we perceive mice in similar ways to the Anglo-Saxons?” may seem obvious but subtle differences in the answer to questions like these can reveal a lot. Cheers!
Allways good to see another animal video. English incommers here who are learning Cymraeg / welsh are amused to learn that a rat is just Lygoden Fawr ie a big mouse. Afanc is the name both of a beaver but also larger water monsters whereas I suspect Old English would call those Worms
My eternal love of rodents meets my eternal love of Old English, what better crossover could there be 😭❤
Good topic. One idea that came to me is how similar the words "mouse" "mus" "Maus"(English, Latin, German) and also "rat" "rattus" "Ratte" are. It seems to me like if somewhere in Europe someone shouts "mouse" or "rat" most people will understand. Not even wolves have this status, but almost: "wolf" "lupus" "Wolf".
Note that while mūs is an indoeuropean word that was inherited by both Latin and proto-germanic, rattus was not a native Latin word; it was borrowed from Germanic languages into Medieval Latin. Classical Latin used the word mūs for both mice and rats.
@@tim1724 Ah thank you thats good to know. Btw even the Bengali word for mouse is "Mā'usa". Looks to me even "more germanic" than the latin or reconstructed ancestor "mūs". But in general it really seems like a well conserved term.
An interesting thing of note is that Shrews in Portuguese are still called Musaranhos, with a very similar pronounciation as Latin, but our word for Mouse is Rato
6:16 Aelfric himself in his homily on the Maccabees, when he recounts the enemy army having elephants says "Some men will think it strange to hear this, because elephants have never come to England..." and gives a brief description of its great size and long gestation period (and some slightly less biologically accurate statements). It's in his collection on saints lives rather than Catholic homilies so may have been for private reading of the laity.
Been loving these videos on animals
What an absolute joy to stumble upon!
This is becoming my favorite series on UA-cam
Congratulations on 200,000 subscribers!
Excellent videos
Cheers!
Mouse is still "mus" in Norwegian. With a retracted rounded long u. The olde english pronounciation might be more similar to that.
According to what I could find, the Proto-Germanic word *aikwernô seems to have become *ēkorno and ēkworna in Old Dutch and Old Frisian respectively. *bebruz became *bevar and *bever. And *igilaz became *igil in Old Dutch.
Interesting little factiod is that the current common Frisian word for hedgehog is 'stikelbaarch', which translates to something like 'spike pig'. This same composite is used in Dutch (stekelvarken) to mean porcupine; where the Dutch word for hedgehog is egel. Porcupines are called 'kjifstikelbaarch' in Frisian.
Congrats on 200k! 🎉
Fascinating as always.
In German, shrews are called "Spitzmäuse", pointy mice.
Unspittlewise, a “spit” is a pointy outspiking bit of sand in English. German “Spitzmause” minds me of ‘spikemouse’.
Sounds like your family needs to adopt some cats. Nice work again!
"Elephants are afraid of mice" is more than an old idiom! The Mythbusters(if you're unaware, an American tv program that use experiments to test old myths and wives tales) tested it.
Elephants are indeed terrified by mice.
I didn't know it was such an old idea.
I remember that too! But I didn't remember the source so I was suspicious of my memory lol
They released a mouse from a cage they'd rigged to open from under some elephant poop. The elephant was very surprised by this - I'd wager it was more surprised by the mouse leaping out of a piece of poop very close to it.
I love rodents and I love medieval England. Thank you for covering this topic! ♥
Fantastic video...🤝
Hazel dormouse mad cute.
Onions next! I have a theory that crow garlic (Allium vineale) was the one used in the famous antibiotic poultice from Bald's Leechbook, called cropleac in the recipe.
A (nearly) fox-sized, fox-like "mouse" that lives in India? Mongoose 100% for me
I'm placing this here because it's your newest video and there's a better chance of you seeing it.
I have a video idea for you. Assume that a person could converse with both their grandchild and grandparent because that person would know both vocabularies, slang, accents, and such. That's a chain of three people.
So here's the idea. Play as long a chain of grandparents as you can so that somebody from today can converse back and forth with an ancestor from as far back as possible. All the way from Modern English to Biblical English to Old English to Latin to whatever. I hope what I said was clear.
How many ancestors would be needed? It may be fun to listen to the conversations.
Another great video. One of your best. Can I suggest that you stick with this format and perhaps to medieval musical instruments, food, clothing etc? Again, if you ever considered doing a live talk, I'd put serious money on the table for a ticket. More than a tenner even.
As a rodent fan this video was a pleasant surprise to see!
Never in my life have I noticed that wood pigeons and city pigeons are different
Didn't know that about the diet of mice!!
I've only seen a couple of shrews when my cat has caught them.
To me they look just like mice, just with longer snouts 🐭
Another brilliant video 🤠💜
(I think I've watched all of them 🙂)
Fascinating. Thank you.
I wonder if muus was a bit broader in meaning than modern mouse.
Thank you.
Small Creatures and Critters in Early Medieval England
21:27 Middle Dutch has ee(n)coren, which in modern Dutch has become Eekhoorn as it had been reconstructed as if formed from eik (oak) and horen (horn), maybe influenced by the Dutch word for unicorn (eenhoorn = one-horn). Not to be confused with Neushoorn (nose-horn): the rhinoceros. No maiden will get the better of the latter :)
The exact same thing happened in German. Except that since the 19th century or so, it has become increasingly common to use Eichhorn in the diminutive, so Eichhörnchen.
One funny coincidence is that Eichhörnchen is an extremely difficult word for English native speakers to pronounce, while at the same time, German native speakers have a hard time pronouncing the English word squirrel.
@@fritzp9916 Eekhoorntje.
Let them try to figure that one out ;)
Excellent video!
If anyone wants to see some more mūs footage, I recommend the Natural History Society of Northumbria's channel - they uploaded some just a few days ago, with several species in the same location (23rd Nov).
The mouse-fox concept makes me think of the jerboa and bandicoot.
"They often forget caches" is this necessarily true? It's not like squirrels are immortal- a hawk or other bird of prey, or some other predator could eat or kill the squirrel and any caches that squirrel had would be left untouched to grow into new trees.
OK, I never heard of an animal called vole, had to look that up. In German, that too is a "Maus" or mouse.
8:23 lol heckin’ big jump
Hedgehog - Igil -, in Slavic languages (at least mine(croatian)and (russian) sounds like igla=needle,describing the hedgehog nicely i think
10:25 so that's where "mussaranho" in portuguese comes from
21:45 Old Dutch seems to have had bevor. Very similar to ODu ever and OEn eofor for wild boar.
why are mice so cute 😩
Apologizing specifically to Luke Ranieri before pronouncing latin made me laugh
I live in an American (meaning its made of wood) house built in 1914 its super drafty and holes are everywhere. I have absolutely zero pests whatsoever. Because i have 2 cats. I know they had cats in medieval europe...
I think you missed that igel survives as the word for hedgehog in North Germanic today too! "Igelkott" in Swedish. I'm not sure where the -kott comes from, though, and would be very interested to hear if anyone knows.
I did som googling around it, and found it came from old Norse ígulkǫttr. ígul is a sea urchin, and kǫttr means cat. So sea-urchin-cat . Again, I'm not a linguist, I just found some random info online.
@@knaperstekt7953 this would make sense. It hadn't clicked for me that -kott might be from köttr - thanks!
That also makes me wonder if there was a period where ígul (or some proto-Norse form) could be applied to both hedgehogs and sea urchins, as if they were seen as sea and land "urchins". -köttr perhaps being added to clarify it to be the land animal.
I wonder what the origin of the Welsh word for mouse, 'llygoden' is?
Same for beaver, 'afanc', shrew, 'llyg', draenog 'hedgehog'. Llygoden bengron for vole, probably just means round-headed mouse
Love these videos- just try not to get roped into travelling through a Stargate any time soon. You might not come back!
In Dutch, hedgehog is still 'egel'. I don't know if in the quote from B-T 'cliewene' was a word you weren't sure of, but it seems to be the same as modern Dutch 'kluwen': a ball of yarn or wool.
English has the modern English word clue from cliewene, which originally also meant a ball of yarn. It changed meaning to modern clue by the idea of pulling a thread to get to the origin..I think that is how its meaning changed. Threads and mysticism occur a lot in old mythology like in Greek.
8:00 thatd be a mongoose, no?
0:04 I just spent several seconds wondering why you were referring to a video about Covid. Must get better ears.
20:36 yep, modern Dutch words are muis/eekhoorn/bever/egel
couldn't the old forms be reconstructed? of course mark them with an asterisk, but i would have been interested in seeing what these forms in all these languages _could_ have looked like (not just Old Dutch, all of them)
Cool😊
Life will find a way . . . To gnaw, nibble, and pop out babies.
I remember in the Canterbury Tales, the nun said is said to be so softhearted she would shed a tear at the sight of a dead mouse.
But for to speken of hire conscience,
She was so charitable and so pitous
She wolde wepe, if that she saugh a mous
Kenterburgh.
@@josephyearwood1179 I'm afraid I don't follow the allusion. Expatiate?
Cute little guys
i know it's not the point of the video but that's a very interesting pronunciation of frequent at 13:20ish. is this a popular pronunciation in england?
When used as a verb, yes. The adjective has first syllable stress.
(Edit: Originally I said noun instead of adjective, now corrected)
The adjective has first syllable stress. As does the noun " 'fre/quency". But not the verb, as noted. Is the American stress pattern different?@@dingo137
7:55 The size of a fox... says someone in India... Maybe they meant Fennec foxes. At a distance, a wharf rat could probably seem about the same size, if a fox has pinnae flattened back.
In Swedish hedgehog is called "igelkott" whereas just igel means leech.
Bit confusing with the just happen to be the same, when they are structurally related (and happen not to have diverged)
Excellent mouse footage, I took a rodent for a drive to the woods. I swear he liked us but he had to go.At least freeing him meant he had a crack at survivng.
You captured a rodent and dropped it off in the woods? What kind of rodent was it?
@@wedding2710 don’t worry, I outfitted him with a Swiss army knife, a mini Bergen, and a half-sovereign in case he needed to buy anything from the natives. He texted me recently to let me know he was well.
Most Germanic languages call shrews "spiky mice", Most West Germanic languages call voles "burrowing mice".
Seeigel means sea urchin in German.
Interesting enough, mouse is мышь in Russian, sounding like 'mysh'. Not exactly same as mus but close enough. Beaver is бобёр, bobyor, which sounds closer to that Proto-Germanic bebruz.
Sadly, that's where similarities end. Shrew is землеройка which means 'soil digger' and sounds nothing like a 'shrew'. Rat is крыса, nowhere close again. Squirrel - acweorna - белка, three words seemingly having nothing in common with each other.
Igil/Il is ёж in Russian, interesting that both words are short while 'hedgehog' is much longer and harder to pronounce or remember.
Is it this kind of dormouse that said "feed your head?"
I’m betting they had a lot more cats and dogs running around than we do. To kill mus I mean. I think stouts or martins would not have been common because those guys can easily kill cats, chickens, heck probably even sheep and cows.
Danish:
mus [moos], husmus, mark(field)-mus, hasselmus
due / S duva = dove / pigeon
rotte
egern / S ekore / G Eichorn = squirrel
bæver
hare [hAr-e]
i like mouses, meese, mooses.
With all due respect to your knowledge of rodents, there are various species as large as a fox. Nutria are invasive in the US and are easily as large as a fox. Your queen was infamously served a large rat on one of her travels in Central America. The Gambian rat rivals the size of an average fox. The porcupine is a rodent and they are much larger than foxen.
Nutria, now a household word around the world! Considering their obscure beginnings, it’s a wonder. I see them frequently here in Louisiana, and foxes are larger than they are, in terms of leg length and body length, but I’ll give you this, they are very large rats.
*due
@@dubfox1691 Duly noted. Thanks!
@@tim31415 lol!
2:49 Undoubtedly, the medieval serf didnt care or if they did they were disuaded from their interests with harsh labour. Its the monks and priests who would have noticed. They had the time, wealth and interest in god's creation to make an observation.
In ancient Greek it's μυς which is where we get muscle, because a bicep looks like a little mouse under the skin 🤣
Also the word mystery derives from μυς and the modern greek word for mouse, ποντικι is also used for a cut of beef (muscle).
I did not know mother mice ate their babies🙄
A lot of small rodents do. IIRC a study of hamsters found that mothers only ate their babies if she had more babies than she had teats, the explanation being that one baby per teat means all of them can drink enough milk to grow up, but two or more babies having to share one teat would cause both of them to starve.
"A mouse that looks like a fox and is the size of a fox," this is gonna sound stupid because I'm extremely uneducated in this regard, but could they have been talking about rats? Would the medieval layman know that rats and mice were different animals? Here in New York City, mostly Brooklyn, there's rats the size of cats. Maybe it was talking about one of those big super-rats.
Rats were my first thought
I know how they kept mice out of their homes... cats
Did they have the corvids in medieval?
Check out his video on it (but yes)