citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/... CORRECTIONS - A few people have pointed out that the distinction between 'TRANSfer' and 'transFER' is levelled in many (all?) US dialects.
@@lao3710 Search Moomin - Swedish and you'll find it. Tho it's a bit exaggerated ua-cam.com/video/SZeg2b2Bu1k/v-deo.html this channel is a bit more realistic i guess
The North Eastern parts of Norway and Sweden seem to be affected by close relations to Sami and Finnish, where the accent is always on the first syllable.
I'm curious... At what point would someone generally be considered a linguist proper? I would personally say that Simon is a linguist, even if he doesn't have any sort of official academic qualification. I think it's all about credit. I like to ask myself the question whether a person is verifiably knowledged and/or specialized enough into a particular field to be warranted such title. I'd say Simon is if you look at his channel and the videos he's produces. You're free to disagree with that of course :)
@@thogameskanaal Whether someone would be considered a linguist 'proper' is about the same as it is with any other academic profession - it's a job title, given to someone who is actively working to advance their field of study through either the examination of new problems and ideas, the reexamination of old ones from a different angle, or the analysis, verification and collation of older established sources of information into newer formats. I'm not a linguist either - I don't claim to be, and usually if I make a comment about this stuff I'll be more clear about this; I studied it at university, ages ago now. I did meet a few people who were employed by the university to do that work and were thus linguists, so I've got some idea of the difference - apologies if it looked like I was saying otherwise. Thing about linguistics, of course, is that it's the study of language; almost everyone on earth produces language nearly all the time, so just being able to say things about language isn't enough. You need to be able to encapsulate your findings and theories in such a way that your source material, your interpretation thereof, your supporting references, and any other things that you might have done along the way are all clearly separable from one another, and can thus help serve as the basis for someone else's work in future if they should want to build off yours. A year ago when I made this comment, Roper's videos weren't that, and he was putting a disclaimer at the start of each saying 'I am not a linguist'. He's closer to it now, and at any rate a lot closer to what I'd call a linguist than I am; I assume that's why the disclaimers are beginning to dry up in the newer videos. It is a thing; if you could call yourself academic titles just by having read enough books then I'd have multiple doctorates by now, haha. But alas, I am only a nerd. Oof, this went on for far too long. Anyway - that's the general theoretical idea of how academia is supposed to work, apparently. I'm not sure that's what you were asking for, but this took me half an hour to write so it's what you've got. Enjoy!
@@LordJazzly no worries! I respect and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts. I'll take the time to read your entire comment and take it all in. Before I do that, I need to admit that I tend to ask biased questions only to later disagree with my own presumptions, so correcting me where I might be wrong or irrational is good for the both of us.
“Produce” is another good example in English. “PRO-duce” is a noun referring to fruits and vegetables. “pro-DUCE” is the verb referring the the making of things.
I think Latinate words in general follow this kind of rule: concert, affect, frequent, convert; nouns with penultimate stress and verbs with ultimate. Some exceptions though.
@@FeedsNoSliesMusic to my knowledge 'frequent' doesn't have alternative stress. I've only heard it one way for either part of speech, and thus I would do too.
Mitchell This may be attributed to UK vs US accents. As a Yank who travels to London a lot, I fre-QUENT [UK usage] bars in London’s West-End FRE-quently. #ivesaidtoomuchalready
Simon, you are a breath of fresh air! I wish that more people presenting things on UA-cam would qualify their expertise (or lack thereof) instead of pretending that they know everything and wandering into subjects that they clearly don’t fully understand. Seeing your disclaimer and hearing you say that you aren’t qualified to decide between two contested dates makes me like you even more, and that’s not easy given my (amateur) love of linguistics and history.
@@patrickpaganini Very good question, except that I am not passing myself of as an expert in anything. I enjoy studying history and languages, but I made sure to note my amateur status in these regards. But in seriousness, the more you know about something the more you realize your limitations. I have completed university courses in critical thinking and reasoning, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and English. I have had a long career as a programmer/analyst, and I have been a card carrying skeptic for 25 years. And yet, I am humbled when I see Simon and the insights that he presents in his channel. I am interested in a great many things, but I do not have a depth of knowledge (except maybe programming where I could hold my own) which is why I love to continue learning new things. I am happy to be in the presence of people who are far smarter and more knowledgeable than me. In social media, I will relate things that I generally know, but I won't pretend for a moment that I am an expert, and will defer to people with better knowledge.
One thing you might’ve forgotten about here is Limburgish, wich is a West-Germanic language (officially a dialect, closely related to Dutch and German) that also uses pitch accent. In the case of Limburgish it’s mainly to distinguish singular from plural. For example the word “sjtein” (stone(s)) with a flat pitch is singular, where the plural has a rising pitch. This shift is also noticable when adding certain suffixes. “Sjtein” has a flat pitch as said before, but “sjteinke” (little stone) has a rising one.
Holy crap, I never noticed before that I stress "transfer" differently depending on whether I use it as a noun or verb and I'm not a native English speaker, my first language's German. Wow, this creeps me out somehow...
There are a few examples of this in German, as well. überSEtzen (stress on the first E of setzen) = to translate Übersetzen (stress on the ü) = to ferry over (a river) They're quite rare, though, and I would guess that in English, this affects mostly Latinate words, not Germanic ones.
The level of knowledge you have, I thought you might be a linguist specialising in old English. Now I know you're an archaeologist I expect you to wear a hat and a whip and say "it belongs in a museum" a lot.
@@helenahandkart1857 Not sure if UA-cam allows me to paste a link here, but a real archeologist looks like this: img.luzernerzeitung.ch/2021/2/9/9fc5b3c6-42c8-4ab3-90b3-eced02a9981b.jpeg?width=654&height=484&fit=crop&quality=75&auto=webp
In Spanish, they write a tilde (an accent mark) over the stressed syllable. So the 3 different words, término, termino, and terminó are stressed on the 1st, 2nd (default, so no accent needed) and 3rd syllables, respectively. If anybody's interested!
@@andrewchojnicki3112 yep, the tilde is this diacritic mark ‹~›, representing the palatal nasal ‹ñ› in Spanish (and some Mandé languages) and nasalised vowels ‹ã, õ› in Portuguese. ‹é› is indeed the acute diacritic, and ‹è› is the grave accent
As a native speaker I never realised that the same word get different meanings when pitched differently. But it is obvious. I always did it intuitively. I'm currently learning japanese and it's the same there. One word can have different meanings depending on the pitch and stress. I was confused when I learned this and thought it was weird and overly complicated. But then I remembered, it's like that in German and English too.
Is it easy for you to distinguish the patterns? German is my native language and compared to stress, pitch is so subtle I have a real hard time hearing some pitch patterns in Japanese.
Just the start of this was interesting for me because I've been learning German, and my partner (a native German speaker) has said to me a few times that I stress the wrong syllables. Your explanation made me realize that part of it could be because I'm not used to the number of "productive" prefixes (as you call them) that German has compared to English.
Dutch has two verbs spelt _voorkomen_ (prevent and occur) with different stresses and grammar. I believe this can happen in German as well, with umfahren for example.
There often is one literal and one figurative version of a verb. With the literal one the prefix is stressed and seperable and with the figurative one it's the opposite. Umfahren or übersetzen are good examples.
@@GdotWdot and there is the old joke bommelding. It only has one meaning or reading, but due to being a compound word, the middle syllable is also stressed, contrary to intuition. When quickreading people often initially read it as bommel-ding and not bom-melding.
I wanted to say that you've got some really interesting content on your channel. Also, I enjoy the distinctive aesthetics of your videos. With you talking in a very calm way and with the shots of nature and your surroundings, it's also quite soothing.
To sum up the Swedish pitch accent: Pitch accent, stress and vowel length are mostly separate things in Swedish. 1. Stress falls mostly on the first syllable of the root of a word (except for in some borrowed words). 2. The stressed vowel can be either long or short. * An unstressed vowel is always short; a long vowel is never unstressed. 3. The stressed syllable can take on either pitch 1 (acute) or pitch 2 (grave). * If the stress falls on the last syllable (as in most French borrowed words) it always takes on pitch 1. Note that the pitch accent isn't wholly contained within the stressed syllable and also defines the sounds of surrounding syllables.
"sorry, got distracted by a spider" That made me laugh for some reason. I would've stopped recording to get rid of it since I'm kind of afraid of spiders.
Hi Simon - around 1:54 when you’re talking about variable stress in non-Germanic languages you say something about “four magpies” and that you “can’t remember what that is”. Perhaps you are thinking of Russian, where “СОРок соРОК” (transliterated “SORok soROK”) means “forty magpies”?
If you are Russian and have a magpie, how many sable pelts does it take to make a shirt? Also there is замок, which means "lock" or "castle" depending on stress. German "Schloss" is a monosyllable.
In my particular dialect of english , a pair of words that are distinguished by stress are COM-bine, a grain harvester, and com-BINE, to mix two things together.
Another interesting aspect of English is that stress on words (rather than syllables) has semantic significance - compare "WE will do it" (not you lot) to "we WILL do it" (just have some faith). It doesn't work the same way in in French, for instance, where you often have to restructure sentences to add equivalent emphasis.
Stress on words is inflection. It is usually pitch based and it’s what allows us to change the same phrase from a simple statement into a question or an imperative. You - will - go. You - will / go? You. \ will __ go.
Just this years I discovered that such a thing like pitch accent even exists after studying Japanese for 6 years already. Interesting to know that there are European languages with this feature as well. In Japanese the Pitch accent also helps to distinguish some otherwise cognate words and is integral to sounding "normal", but it is rarely even mentioned to Japanese learners. I am now trying to learn it but there is huge dialectal variation and materials exist almost only for Standard Japanese (Tokyo Dialect) while I live on the southern Island of Kyushu.
Ancient Greek also had a pitch accent. Pitch accent mostly seems to be a limited version of tonal accent, otherwise no difference. It's not unreasonable that this would arise as much as stress accent would. Stress is basically a dumping ground for features that make a syllable subjectively 'stand out' to a speaker (which can mean almost anything depending on language and dialect). Pitch accent is similar but addresses a very specific device. Also, there's a difference between non-phonemic accent and phonemic accent. English has a phonemic stress accent but many languages, while having identifiable stress, do not use it to distinguish words and therefore it is non-phonemic. Another example is that length of vowels is also a common feature but most dialects of English do not use it phonemically (even if it is not uniform but consistently varies), mine does though. It's kind of like what the listener pays attention to to distinguish a sound or syllable.
@@Schwarzorn Check out Dogen here on UA-cam. He has some interesting materials about Japanese phonetics especially on Pitch accent. I decided to join his patreon for a couple of months to make some progress in that front.
I am so pumped to watch many more videos of many other topics. Very entertaining. Don't overwhelm yourself tho. I remember hearing a video of the reading of one accounts of the first Japanese men to learn and teach English, and one of the first on the officially sanctioned voyage to America by the tokugawa shogunate. He said that Dutch language knowledge could be applied to English. What do you think he meant by that? Alphabet? Sounds? Sentence structure? I know nothing about Dutch. What would be the most striking similarities coming from someone with no knowledge of any indo European languages?
I saw the same video! Voices of the Past :) Dutch and German are very intimately related, both being Germanic. So, other than alphabet, they also share a similar catalog of words with a lot of cognates -- "The big dog eats apples" is "De grote (great) hond (hound) eet appels". I'm not sure how good the analogy is but I would think it's like learning Italian after Spanish, there's a lot of crossover. Especially for someone from Japan who has no other exposure to any European language.
I'm eager for Simon's answer too, but I'll leave my own for now. I saw the video you're talking about too, I think (Voices of the Past's one, right?), and I find it telling that Fukuzawa Yukichi says the relevant quote right after mentioning that they were strange, alien languages 'which were written sideways' and 'with a common origin' (I forget what exact wording he used). Given the context, he might have meant all three - he mentioned writing immediately prior, he elsewhere talks about him and the Dutch-speaking translator asking a third man for help with pronunciation, and one of the most obvious differences between his language and Germanic ones would probably be sentence structure (Japanese uses post-positions instead of prepositions, is topic-prominent rather than subject-prominent, etc.). However, given the history of and relationship between English and Dutch, I think the last one would probably give the most mileage to a non-native Dutch speaker who's then trying to learn English. Knowing the Latin alphabet and how to write in Dutch would probably make it a lot easier for a native Japanese speaker to gain English literacy, but of course, iinglish ruitiing iz netoriiesli naanfeneetik (and of course, Dutch isn't perfectly phonetic either - most languages aren't - but it's more consistent than English, and more importantly, we use different orthographic tactics to get past the challenge of mapping a script from an Italic language onto our Germanic tongues - it might be difficult getting used to "book" after learning "boek," for instance). The sounds of Dutch are certainly closer to English than those of Japanese, but there are still major discrepancies like the English sounds and affricates being largely missing in Dutch, the Dutch velar fricatives being largely missing in English, our fairly different sounds, etc. Sentence structure might play a stronger rule, since both English and Dutch are subject-prominent, are predominantly S-V-O, use articles and prepositions before nouns, commonly use adjectives separately from other parts of speech, and so on - all rather different from Japanese, which is topic-prominent, is S-O-V, uses postpositions and has no articles, and has noun-like and verb-like adjectives which are so much like the original parts of speech that some linguists debate whether Japanese has syntactic adjectives at all. Oh, aside from sentence structure, one of the most striking features might be those adjectives. As an English speaker, one of the first things that stuck out to me about Japanese was its use of particles to carry meaning, as a class of words we just don't really have in any Indo-European languages. If that seems so novel to me, I think adjectives as a new part of speech would probably seem really weird to a speaker whose native language covers those meanings using secondary nouns and verbals. Phonotactics in English in general would probably be a headspin too, coming from a language with fewer consonants, far fewer vowels, and comparatively very limited consonant clusters - the longest clusters Japanese allows are two, as in "Honshu," while English has monstrosities like the phrase "our angsts strengthen us" (which technically features 8 consonants without a break, depending on your dialect).
@@chisps_ thank you both for the replies! Since we all saw the video, it is quite likely that the UA-cam algorithm linked up this channel and that ones video. How interesting! But thanks for the super useful info. I'm not an academic or anything. But learning this stuff as a hobby is great. I really love the communities that sprout up out of these channels! Great video and great community!
Several things from a Japanese speaker's perspective - One, common alphabet if speaking of writing. Two, sentence structure: Japanese emphasises SOV word order whereas both English and Dutch have mobile sentence structure with an emphasis on SVO. Japanese is also strongly head-final and left-branching (meaning that Japanese tends to put linguistically prominent information at the end of phrases) whereas English and Dutch are both the reverse. Accordingly, Japanese also post-positions, whereas English and Dutch are largely pre-positioning. Third, in nouns Japanese lacks number, grammatical gender, and articles, but has a highly conjugated noun system, all of which are very foreign to Dutch and English but very similar in Dutch and English compared to Japanese. Lastly, from an Indo-European perspective, Japanese verbs are conjugated very strangely, and adjectives are often conjugated, and function atimes akin to stative verbs. Verbs focus more on aspect and voice, as in, on verb function, and only conjugate for tense (and only past and non-past for tenses) in the imperfect and perfect, and do not conjugate for person or number. This is entirely divorced from the majority of common Indo-European verbal grammar, and auxiliary verbs as commonly used in Dutch and English, as well as participles, are completely foreign to Japanese grammar. Generally speaking, English and Dutch are closely related languages, and compared to the wide gulf between either and Japanese, from the Japanese speaker's perspective, they look very similar.
Are you sure about that? According to Pokorny's etymological dictionary, 'Ufer' derives from PIE 'āpero' (1st syllable is stressed). archive.org/stream/indogermanisches01pokouoft/indogermanisches01pokouoft#page/53/mode/1up It would be very unsual for a word, which has its root in PIE, to keep the /u/ all the way into modern High German, without any sound change.
I beg to disagree here: the German word Ufer is a loan word from Low German branch (otherwise it would have been something like *Uber if it came straight from the High German branch). The Low German word comes itself from Proto-Germanic *ōferaz, itself coming from IE *h₂peros, not *upér. Those two roots remain unrelated so far.
I'm a native Swedish speaker. We have word pairs that are homographs but have different pitch accents. Notable examples are: "tomten" which either means "the yard/the plot of land" (acute accent) or "the gnome/Father Christmas" (grave accent), and "anden" which either means "the duck" (acute accent) or "the spirit/the soul" (grave accent). Good job on the pronunciation of the Swedish words, BTW!
Hi Simon. In Spanish or Catalan it's easy to know the stressed syllabes because of the accentuation rules, but when I was learning English I had to learn the stressed syllabes by practice and intuition. It's very interesting knowing how it really works
Interesting hearing about stress and pitch accents in an another language family. In Lithuania, for grammar lessons we study about the pitch accent and stress in Lithuanian and it's one of the most difficult subjects to get a hang of. In Lithuanian, both stress and accents are fully variable and their position changes the meaning of words. For stress, there are four classes, one fixed (that is, stress stays always in the same place) and three movable, that move also depending on declination in nouns and adjec. For accents, usually it has the most noticable effect in diphthongs, for example: áukštas (tall) and aũkštas (a storey). 'Áu' has a more rounded quality to the a letter, like the a in armor (british accent). 'Aũ' has the u very firmly pronounced
I think you mentioned it with transfer, but nouns when used as verbs have stress changed. Not sure exactly how stress changes, but I know is /ˈprɛzn̩t/ as a noun, but /prəˈzɛnt/ as a verb.
As a Swede, I'm unable to hear the melody of Swedish, although I've heard that non-natives may find it quite distinct. Maybe the pitch accent is a contributor to this melody?
Lithuanian also supposedly has a pitch accent but as a native speaker I can't hear it for the life of me. I definitely notice the pitch accent in Swedish though.
Same, though non-native speakers tend to sound very flat/robotic when they speak Swedish no matter where they're from so maybe that's a way you can tell.
@@hodgeyhodge8414 Sorry for the delay, I was busy in preparation of the pagan summer solstice tradition. The specific use of "socker", when speaking about foot garments is dialectal. I don't use it myself, hence I haven't really thought about how it resembles sugar. So I can't unfortunately answer for it. However, speaking in general about words with pitch accent, I almost never mix them together. I just automatically pronounce according to which word is currently in mind. That would happen in the case of sugar too, if I spoke that dialect. I would simply use the right stress to show what I wanted. Same when hearing someone saying such a word, it automatically paints the right picture.
I've been taught that Verner's law happened at the same time as Grimm's law. It's not a later change, but an alternative development of the same chain-development. We treat them as two separate laws because there were two different scholars involved but it should actually be one, called Grimm-Verner's law. That said, I find this video interesting, I like your quiet way of explaining things and I'm happy UA-cam proposed it in my board. P.S. may I ask you what software you use to edit the video and to prepare the shot with the examples?
Very interesting. The stress of the words is pretty much fixed in Spanish, we learn how to count syllables and how to use accents at school, as we have rules that tell us when to use an accent and when not to. We have what we call "palabras agudas" which are the words whose last syllable is stressed and they have an accent in most cases (e.g.: caMIÓN=truck, aDIÓS=bye, veRÉ=I will see). We also have "palabras llanas", which are the most common ones in Spanish, these have the stress on the second syllable starting to count from the right, basically the next syllable if we take into account what I just said about palabras agudas, and they don't have an accent most of the times. (e.g.: RAna=frog, herMAno=brother, aCENto=accent). Finally we have "palabras esdrújulas" which are the ones which are stressed on the third syllable from the right and always have an accent. (e.g.: PLÁtano=banana, eFÍmero=ephemeral, MÁScara=mask). There's no such thing as changing the stress to change the meaning, at least that I recall right now, and there are indeed exceptions in terms of accent usage depending on the last letter of the word (e.g.: words ending with R are agudas if there's no accent: canTAR=to sing//CÁNcer=cancer, here the accent breaks the rule and tells me that CÁN- is the stressed one). These are the main rules we learn to stress words and know when to write the accent, so the Germanic ways strike me as something genuinely different. Hope this was at least informative and worth reading. I love the channel. Cheers.
Really interesting video as usual man. About pitch accent, I don't think it's taught at all, atleast not intentionally. But regardless of what language you choose to learn and however subtle the pitch accent may be it's the key ingredient to sounding fluent and having that natural pronounciation only natives seem to have. Studying pitch accent for me is just as important as any else language related :)
The channel Academia Cervena has two great videos explaining the Swedish pitch accent A) overall and B) how it varies depending on what dialect of Swedish you speak (and I would highly recommend the other videos on the channel as well if you're interested in Swedish and/or the other languages featured on the channel).
Just noticed how important stress is in German. This is probably why I can immediately distinguish between a native speaker and non native speaker of German, even if the non native speaker is fluent and doesn't make mistakes. Vorkommen, umfahren, abmachen...
Some continental West Germanic dialects like Limburgian and adjacent Ripuarian also have some vestigial pitch accent. The most common example is by/bee which is the same sound (sounds like "bee" in English, but in the case an actual bee is meant, the vowel is dragged on. If English "by" is meant, it kept short) and daag (basic noun "day" but alternate meaning as a short greet as in "good day", the latter is also dragged) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburgish#Tone
For other words like "transfer", check the Wikipedia page on " Initial-stress-derived noun". Right near the top, it gives "perMIT" and "PERmit", which is a perfect example for me.
About "transfer": This accentual difference occurs frequently in two-syllable words in English. Typically the word accented on the first syllable is a noun and the one accented on the second syllable is a verb. Another post here mentions "produce"; further examples are "contrast", "record" and "rebel".
in american english we always stress the first syllable of transfer, whether it's a verb or a noun. we do change the stress on other words do differentiate noun and verb, such as combat, and in that case the first syllable is stressed on the noun and the second is stressed on the verb.
I never quite figured out whether it was a deliberate awkwardness to pay me back for mangling the language or something about the language but I found when I mis-pronounced a word in Czech- including using the wrong stress- that the Czech person listening would seem to have no idea what I was saying. Every other word was correct, the context was unmistakable and no other meaning other than the one I intended might be possible but putting the stress in the wrong place in a single word would lead the the listener to to mockingly say 'nerozumím' followed by a couple of fast spoken sentences filled with the most obscure Czech idioms.
I have no idea what actually happened and no knowledge of Czech, but it would be interesting to hear your version of the sentence, a native speaker's version and their explanation of the difference. There could be multiple factors at play. I have some experience learning and interacting with native speakers of multiple languages. It does seem that people in different countries may react very differently towards foreign speakers or learners of their language. Their reaction also seems to be very different when we're at different stages in our language-learning journey. It seems very related to comprehensibility but other socio-linguistic factors seem to be very important as well. Native speakers of some languages may come across as being much more accepting of learners or non-native speakers than the native speakers of others...
When I was doing my postgrad research in Iceland (in arch as well) the only thing I found that made Icelandic easier was that the first syllable is always stressed in Iceland.
This might be unrelated to this particular video, but in topic of stress systems, you might be interested. Academician Zaliznyak formalized Russian stress systems, which is being used now in speech synthesizers, like, for example, in Google Translate. In addition, Zaliznyak was the most famous researches of Novgorod birch bark scrolls, which are really interesting to read and read about.
I think a Vollbart would fit you very well. I have not that beard grow. I envy you. And thank you for your content. You let my curiosity for linguistic grow again.
I would say that pitch in stressed syllables is a change in pitch relative to the surrounding syllables, not necessarily higher. The change can go either way.
I'd love to get in a call with you some time and try to learn Old-English. I'm a Native Frisian speaker myself so I already felt like I have basic understand of Old-English. But it would be interesting to be taught by you :)
Very interesting. Simon, would you say that the languages/dialects grouped as/descended from North Sea West Germanic share a kindred accent(s) unique to the group, including the variations found across the UK? Or is it just my imagination? For example, the first time I ever heard a sound bite of Frisian, without knowing it was Frisian, my impression was that of an unintelligible form of Scots, but it certainly seemed to have the essence of that accent. I have since heard distinct similarities between other languages, like Southwest Jutlandic and, for example, a London accent. Can an accent survive across time and even language barriers that have since arisen?
I am a native speaker of Norwegian. The two variations in tone exist in every Norwegian dialect I am aware of, but they are not identical in every dialect. (In fact, this can be a distinguishing feature of dialects in Norwegian, Swedish and even some Jutland varieties of Danish.) The terms "acute" and "grave" are not really used to refer to the two variations in tone, although these diacritics may occasionally be used to to transcribe pitch accent.. The accents themselves are referred to as "tonemes" - that is, a phoneme distinguished solely by pitch accent. You did not touch on pitch accent in Icelandic or Faroese. I believe these languages would have it, but I don't actually know for certain. They do seem to have the same "sing-songy" quality to them that pitch accent lends to Norwegian and Swedish, however.
Does the way of pitch inside a word change its meaning? And simons examples were just syllables, does norwegian has pitch accents on stressed tones eg long vowels? Thank you :)
Thanks Simon. In thinking about the Mandarin language, which I do not speak, it has the 5 tones, to give different meanings to a singular sound like 'fan' (rice). Your comments on the word "transfer', makes me think that English does have a comparable system using stress, instead of tones, to change the meaning of a word. My understanding of the use of tones in English is to impart emotions, or to create a question. It would be interesting to know if there was any influence of Proto-Indo-European on the early Chinese language family, thousands of years ago. I am aware that the Thai language is influenced by Buddhist Pali. Pali is a descendent of Sanskrit. With an English word that has multiple meanings (ie. 'view' as noun or verb), each meaning acquired by the words in the rest of the sentence, I can see how non-English speakers struggle to learn our strange, mongrel language.
Native Chinese speaker here. Actually Old Chinese spoken before Han Dynasty (200 BC) did not have tones. You can look up some videos on youtube with reconstructions. Tones were definitely around by the Middle Chinese period, 500 AD around Tang Dynasty (pronunciation guide back then mentioned 4 tones, which split into 5-9 tones in modern dialects). The 4 original tones were 1 flat, 2 rising, 3 falling, all very easily imaginable in any spoken language, and 4 "entering", which is not really a tone, it's akin to the modern light tone, but with syllables ending in p, t, k sound (Mandarin can no longer end with these sounds, most southern dialects still can). Tones arise from the reduction of more complicated syllable endings in Old Chinese, and I'd imagine it happened in a similar manner as you and Simon mentioned here. There are Indo-European languages with tones too, the most famous being Punjabi. The Middle Chinese tone numbering system is obviously influenced by contact with ancient India (via Buddhism). Most East Asian(esp. SE Asian) languages nowadays have tones, regardless of linguistic family. This likely means tones as a feature was passed from one language to another in the last 2000 years. Also words that mean a verb or a noun depending on context is not rare among languages in general, even Chinese with tones still have words in the same tone meaning both a verb/noun nucleus or adverb/adjective modifier depending on context. An example is 飞 fēi, which means fly/flying/flight/really fast and many more, look it up in google translate.
@@OscarLiu24 wow! I was just fascinated by all this. I've checked out some lessons in Mandarin on youtube, but found it a bit daunting, with no one to practise with.
@@OscarLiu24 Wow! Thanks Oscar. That was a comprehensive explanation. I should have realized that Chinese languages would have definitely been affected by the introduction of Buddhism from India. Not only Sanskrit, but other Indian dialects as well. My understanding of the Thai language is that the Thai-Kadai people originated in southern China, migrating south to what is now Thailand. I believe the Thai language has 5 tones. I find the history of languages very interesting. Simon does an excellent job with English. Thanks again for the clarification on historical Chinese languages.
Simon. Have you considered studying linguistics? I’m considering studying that major at college. I’m not sure if it’s worth the payment though. It’s kind of expensive.
Simon, my information might be out-dated.... but is held that the Indo-Germanic proto-language had pitch accent (a song-like accent). Not only do Swedish, Norwegian and some Danish dialects have pitch accent, but also the two most archaic LIVING indo-germanic tongues - the Baltic Lithuanian and Latvian tongues (neighbours of the North Germanic tongues), also have pitch accent. So does Slovenian. Ancient Greek also had pitch accent, but modern greek has lost it. The tongues which still have it - i learnt - had kept the pitch accent inherited from Proto-Indogermanic, and thus, their pitch accent systems are not innovations. I speak lithuanian from my childhood, and thus know well how important pitch accent is in LIthuanian in order to distinguish words which otherwise would be alike.
I'm so glad to learn the North Germanic languages and my native language happen to share an important feature that is so often either sorely glossed over or dismissed altogether by learners and teachers alike for some unfathomable reasons: the pitch accent. It's really a thing folks.
The pitch(es) of a word (noun) can be different if it is used as a question ('fånen?', 'bilen?'), affirmative or even exclamative (if that's even a word) in standard Swedish. Don't even get me started on Elfdalian (Älvdalsmål) and its siblings (Moramål & Orsamål).
And then there's the curious case of Limburgish, a collection of mutually intelligible dialects that sit in the Dutch/German language continuum, and which do have a pitch accent. For example, "bein" can mean both "leg" and "legs", and it's the pitch accent that determines which is meant. With pitch accents and all, one such dialect can have up to 24 vowels and an additional 6 diphthongs.
The variable stress thing shows up in American English for sure, but transfer is a word where that distinction has been lost. Both the verb and the noun are stressed on the first syllable. I think I've noticed that this has happened to a few words in American English, but I can't think of any right now...
Just so happened that I was wondering again about how and when French could have started putting emphasis on the last syllable. As Latin shares the same emphasis pattern with modern Italian and Spanish, Gaullic languages sound rather Greek-ish, and Germanic languages... well you saw this video, it must've come from a popular local dialect or an outside influence that may be lost in time.
I don t know if this video was a reply on previous comments of mine or just a great video i wished for, in both cases thank you alot! Great video!!! Btw. Pitch accents exist in limburgian and ripuarian francish too but the pitch can be even on single tones, especially long vowels not just syllables and compleatly change the words meaning. I am suprised nordic germanic languages have one too, the literature i read so far refers to ripuarian beeing the only european pitch accent language... Does the pitch change the words meaning in nordic languages???
In Scandinavian languages, pitch accent or intonation can change the meaning of a word. In Swedish, "anden" can mean either "the duck" or "the spirit" depending on whether your voice goes up or down on the end. Most dialects of Basque (which I'm trying to learn) also have pitch accent. In both Basque and Scandinavian languages, there's a lot of dialectical variation, and it only makes a difference in meaning in a few words. Pitch accent isn't indicated in writing. A couple Basque examples: The word "baso", pronounced low-high, means "uninhabited area" or "deep forest", but "baso", pronounced high-low, means "vase" or "drinking glass". (The second one is a loan-word from Spanish.) The word "gozo", meaning "delicious", is pronounced low-high in some regions of Basque Country, but high-low in other regions.
@@craigfaber4777 thank you so much!!! Do you know examples of vowel pitches? My dialect doesn t have real diphtongs like the standard german ei, au or english ou etc. For example (my favorite ;)) Leeve (lee-ve, e is a long e not two seperate tones, an e like the first e in Example something in between german e and ä) with voice going down means love, with voice going up means life, with constant intonation it would mean lovely. Btw. english to mean "ea" is a good example for one vowel tone going down, i think as i hear it (i am not a native speaker) with vowel tone up is the pronounciation of beeing mean to someone, do i hear this right@native speakers? Other example of my dialect broit-che "oi", : intonation within oi going down means bride (dimnutive), with intonation up means bread(dimnutive), so a wrong pronounced proposal (wanna be my bride) could be funny. Standard german speakers can t even hear the difference i gave up to explain to them. I have a spanish friend who studies chinese, she can hear the difference, i don t even have to think and conciously exaggerate it. Thanks for reading to everyone 🙂👍 even more for replys 😉
I'm a native swedish speaker from Finland and part of what makes our version of swedish distinct is that it has no pitch accent.
@@lao3710 Search Moomin - Swedish and you'll find it. Tho it's a bit exaggerated
ua-cam.com/video/SZeg2b2Bu1k/v-deo.html this channel is a bit more realistic i guess
The North Eastern parts of Norway and Sweden seem to be affected by close relations to Sami and Finnish, where the accent is always on the first syllable.
Hey hey! Fint att se en annan findlandssvenska! Jag kommer från Korpo, och du då?
Wait, you're not a linguist?
Holy crap, you could have fooled me! A+ for dedication and effort in your personal studies.
he is a genius
I'm curious... At what point would someone generally be considered a linguist proper? I would personally say that Simon is a linguist, even if he doesn't have any sort of official academic qualification.
I think it's all about credit. I like to ask myself the question whether a person is verifiably knowledged and/or specialized enough into a particular field to be warranted such title.
I'd say Simon is if you look at his channel and the videos he's produces.
You're free to disagree with that of course :)
@@thogameskanaal Whether someone would be considered a linguist 'proper' is about the same as it is with any other academic profession - it's a job title, given to someone who is actively working to advance their field of study through either the examination of new problems and ideas, the reexamination of old ones from a different angle, or the analysis, verification and collation of older established sources of information into newer formats.
I'm not a linguist either - I don't claim to be, and usually if I make a comment about this stuff I'll be more clear about this; I studied it at university, ages ago now. I did meet a few people who were employed by the university to do that work and were thus linguists, so I've got some idea of the difference - apologies if it looked like I was saying otherwise.
Thing about linguistics, of course, is that it's the study of language; almost everyone on earth produces language nearly all the time, so just being able to say things about language isn't enough. You need to be able to encapsulate your findings and theories in such a way that your source material, your interpretation thereof, your supporting references, and any other things that you might have done along the way are all clearly separable from one another, and can thus help serve as the basis for someone else's work in future if they should want to build off yours. A year ago when I made this comment, Roper's videos weren't that, and he was putting a disclaimer at the start of each saying 'I am not a linguist'. He's closer to it now, and at any rate a lot closer to what I'd call a linguist than I am; I assume that's why the disclaimers are beginning to dry up in the newer videos. It is a thing; if you could call yourself academic titles just by having read enough books then I'd have multiple doctorates by now, haha. But alas, I am only a nerd.
Oof, this went on for far too long. Anyway - that's the general theoretical idea of how academia is supposed to work, apparently. I'm not sure that's what you were asking for, but this took me half an hour to write so it's what you've got. Enjoy!
@@LordJazzly no worries! I respect and appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts.
I'll take the time to read your entire comment and take it all in.
Before I do that, I need to admit that I tend to ask biased questions only to later disagree with my own presumptions, so correcting me where I might be wrong or irrational is good for the both of us.
There is an art to this man's artlessness.
“Produce” is another good example in English.
“PRO-duce” is a noun referring to fruits and vegetables.
“pro-DUCE” is the verb referring the the making of things.
I think Latinate words in general follow this kind of rule: concert, affect, frequent, convert; nouns with penultimate stress and verbs with ultimate. Some exceptions though.
@@FeedsNoSliesMusic to my knowledge 'frequent' doesn't have alternative stress. I've only heard it one way for either part of speech, and thus I would do too.
And “I reCALL seeing the product REcall.”.
Yes it does :en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/frequent
Albeit the verb is not used commonly
Mitchell This may be attributed to UK vs US accents. As a Yank who travels to London a lot, I fre-QUENT [UK usage] bars in London’s West-End FRE-quently.
#ivesaidtoomuchalready
Simon, you are a breath of fresh air!
I wish that more people presenting things on UA-cam would qualify their expertise (or lack thereof) instead of pretending that they know everything and wandering into subjects that they clearly don’t fully understand.
Seeing your disclaimer and hearing you say that you aren’t qualified to decide between two contested dates makes me like you even more, and that’s not easy given my (amateur) love of linguistics and history.
Oh dear - where is your own qualification? I'll qualify my statement by admitting a lack of expertise, but merely following your own logic.
@@patrickpaganini Very good question, except that I am not passing myself of as an expert in anything. I enjoy studying history and languages, but I made sure to note my amateur status in these regards. But in seriousness, the more you know about something the more you realize your limitations.
I have completed university courses in critical thinking and reasoning, Latin, Ancient Greek, French, and English. I have had a long career as a programmer/analyst, and I have been a card carrying skeptic for 25 years. And yet, I am humbled when I see Simon and the insights that he presents in his channel. I am interested in a great many things, but I do not have a depth of knowledge (except maybe programming where I could hold my own) which is why I love to continue learning new things. I am happy to be in the presence of people who are far smarter and more knowledgeable than me. In social media, I will relate things that I generally know, but I won't pretend for a moment that I am an expert, and will defer to people with better knowledge.
if you were my teacher of history class, i would never skip school.
The singer decided to re-CORD an album. It went to number one in the RE-cord charts.
I can’t get enough of this guys face and brain.
I’d love to have his face on my pillowcase.
One thing you might’ve forgotten about here is Limburgish, wich is a West-Germanic language (officially a dialect, closely related to Dutch and German) that also uses pitch accent. In the case of Limburgish it’s mainly to distinguish singular from plural. For example the word “sjtein” (stone(s)) with a flat pitch is singular, where the plural has a rising pitch. This shift is also noticable when adding certain suffixes. “Sjtein” has a flat pitch as said before, but “sjteinke” (little stone) has a rising one.
Simon, be a teacher. You’re a gifted gentleman. Bright, inspired and inspiring. Your videos are quite well-executed.
Holy crap, I never noticed before that I stress "transfer" differently depending on whether I use it as a noun or verb and I'm not a native English speaker, my first language's German.
Wow, this creeps me out somehow...
Native English speaker and the way I stress transfer is totally arbitrary. Almost always put stress on the first syllable no matter the situation.
Myrm Ants There are tons of words that change meaning when stressed differently in English. RECord vs reCORD. OBject vs obJECT. INsult vs inSULT.
There are a few examples of this in German, as well.
überSEtzen (stress on the first E of setzen) = to translate
Übersetzen (stress on the ü) = to ferry over (a river)
They're quite rare, though, and I would guess that in English, this affects mostly Latinate words, not Germanic ones.
Usually you dont rely on the stress alone to differentiate these nouns and verbs, so it's easy to overlook.
@@treyb.194 Also FREquent and freQUENT. It pisses me off when people don't make the distinction.
These rules are a bit different when you're being attacked by geese.
Hahaha I would love to see a video on this
All rules are different when one is attacked by geese
ahahaha!
Haven't even watched the video yet just wanted to say I'm a fan. Keep making quality content.
it's quarter to one in the morning where i am. what's this? a video about germanic prosody? let's do it
0108 AM and here we all are...
@@beaudwayful Wait how are you a half hour off? Are you guys from Australia or something? XD
@@zozzy4630 its actually the afternoon in australia at the moment
@@zozzy4630 i'm in EST which is GMT (london) minus 4 hours
The level of knowledge you have, I thought you might be a linguist specialising in old English. Now I know you're an archaeologist I expect you to wear a hat and a whip and say "it belongs in a museum" a lot.
I'm possibly the last bastion of ignorance, but why does an archeologist need a whip?
@@helenahandkart1857 for the kinky archaeologist sex
@John Broadhurst I will sleep better tonight knowing this, thank you
@@helenahandkart1857 Not sure if UA-cam allows me to paste a link here, but a real archeologist looks like this: img.luzernerzeitung.ch/2021/2/9/9fc5b3c6-42c8-4ab3-90b3-eced02a9981b.jpeg?width=654&height=484&fit=crop&quality=75&auto=webp
My uncle was the Curator of Mammals at the Museum of Natural History NY for decades.. Who knew he was doing it all wrong all those years..
I wish I had this last year, when I was studying this for lingustics.
In Spanish, they write a tilde (an accent mark) over the stressed syllable. So the 3 different words, término, termino, and terminó are stressed on the 1st, 2nd (default, so no accent needed) and 3rd syllables, respectively.
If anybody's interested!
@Aurora Peace Cool! Cheers.
I believe a tilde is a wiggly accent over the letter (can't find it at the moment on my keyboard). I would call yours an acute accent.
@@andrewchojnicki3112 yep, the tilde is this diacritic mark ‹~›, representing the palatal nasal ‹ñ› in Spanish (and some Mandé languages) and nasalised vowels ‹ã, õ› in Portuguese. ‹é› is indeed the acute diacritic, and ‹è› is the grave accent
término: done
termino: I terminate
terminó: He/she/it terminated
término means "term".
You also have pitch accent in Limburgish, which is either a Dutch dialect or a West Germanic language, depending on how you draw the line.
Upper Swamp Franconian
As a native speaker I never realised that the same word get different meanings when pitched differently. But it is obvious. I always did it intuitively.
I'm currently learning japanese and it's the same there. One word can have different meanings depending on the pitch and stress. I was confused when I learned this and thought it was weird and overly complicated. But then I remembered, it's like that in German and English too.
Is it easy for you to distinguish the patterns? German is my native language and compared to stress, pitch is so subtle I have a real hard time hearing some pitch patterns in Japanese.
Just the start of this was interesting for me because I've been learning German, and my partner (a native German speaker) has said to me a few times that I stress the wrong syllables. Your explanation made me realize that part of it could be because I'm not used to the number of "productive" prefixes (as you call them) that German has compared to English.
Dutch has two verbs spelt _voorkomen_ (prevent and occur) with different stresses and grammar. I believe this can happen in German as well, with umfahren for example.
There often is one literal and one figurative version of a verb. With the literal one the prefix is stressed and seperable and with the figurative one it's the opposite. Umfahren or übersetzen are good examples.
@@GdotWdot and there is the old joke bommelding. It only has one meaning or reading, but due to being a compound word, the middle syllable is also stressed, contrary to intuition. When quickreading people often initially read it as bommel-ding and not bom-melding.
I wanted to say that you've got some really interesting content on your channel. Also, I enjoy the distinctive aesthetics of your videos. With you talking in a very calm way and with the shots of nature and your surroundings, it's also quite soothing.
To sum up the Swedish pitch accent:
Pitch accent, stress and vowel length are mostly separate things in Swedish.
1. Stress falls mostly on the first syllable of the root of a word (except for in some borrowed words).
2. The stressed vowel can be either long or short.
* An unstressed vowel is always short; a long vowel is never unstressed.
3. The stressed syllable can take on either pitch 1 (acute) or pitch 2 (grave).
* If the stress falls on the last syllable (as in most French borrowed words) it always takes on pitch 1.
Note that the pitch accent isn't wholly contained within the stressed syllable and also defines the sounds of surrounding syllables.
"invite" is an excellent example of noun-verb stress distinction that's preserved in American. "Did you get the INvite?" vs "I'll inVITE him"
This dude is very intelligent on this subject, he can even speak English as people from the 1500's or 1600's...thats real art love.
Your explanation of Grimm's law might the best I've seen yet! Very good.
What happened to "American Influence On British English"?
That was quite fascinating, thanks for uploading!
"sorry, got distracted by a spider"
That made me laugh for some reason. I would've stopped recording to get rid of it since I'm kind of afraid of spiders.
@Myrm Ants I'd probably say "oh sh*t!" and go ask someone to kill it for me.
Pesky attercops
Hi Simon - around 1:54 when you’re talking about variable stress in non-Germanic languages you say something about “four magpies” and that you “can’t remember what that is”. Perhaps you are thinking of Russian, where “СОРок соРОК” (transliterated “SORok soROK”) means “forty magpies”?
If you are Russian and have a magpie, how many sable pelts does it take to make a shirt?
Also there is замок, which means "lock" or "castle" depending on stress. German "Schloss" is a monosyllable.
In my particular dialect of english , a pair of words that are distinguished by stress are COM-bine, a grain harvester, and com-BINE, to mix two things together.
Another interesting aspect of English is that stress on words (rather than syllables) has semantic significance - compare "WE will do it" (not you lot) to "we WILL do it" (just have some faith).
It doesn't work the same way in in French, for instance, where you often have to restructure sentences to add equivalent emphasis.
Stress on words is inflection. It is usually pitch based and it’s what allows us to change the same phrase from a simple statement into a question or an imperative.
You - will - go.
You - will / go?
You. \ will __ go.
The Default Inflection can vary between accent too. A lot if northern US accents have a different Inflection pattern than Southern ones.
Anglish will be the rethe why Old English will come back to life since it has many Old English words. 👏👏👏💪💪💪
Just ask Jackson Crawford about the North Germanic pitch accent
I seriously thought for sure you had to be a.) a linguist and b.) an expert on Old English philology. *Love* these videos
That's definitely the impression he makes. I love the videos too.
Just this years I discovered that such a thing like pitch accent even exists after studying Japanese for 6 years already. Interesting to know that there are European languages with this feature as well.
In Japanese the Pitch accent also helps to distinguish some otherwise cognate words and is integral to sounding "normal", but it is rarely even mentioned to Japanese learners. I am now trying to learn it but there is huge dialectal variation and materials exist almost only for Standard Japanese (Tokyo Dialect) while I live on the southern Island of Kyushu.
Ancient Greek also had a pitch accent. Pitch accent mostly seems to be a limited version of tonal accent, otherwise no difference. It's not unreasonable that this would arise as much as stress accent would. Stress is basically a dumping ground for features that make a syllable subjectively 'stand out' to a speaker (which can mean almost anything depending on language and dialect). Pitch accent is similar but addresses a very specific device.
Also, there's a difference between non-phonemic accent and phonemic accent. English has a phonemic stress accent but many languages, while having identifiable stress, do not use it to distinguish words and therefore it is non-phonemic. Another example is that length of vowels is also a common feature but most dialects of English do not use it phonemically (even if it is not uniform but consistently varies), mine does though. It's kind of like what the listener pays attention to to distinguish a sound or syllable.
Any idea where I can learn Japanese syllable emphasis online? My textbook teaches SOME words, but it really sucks that dictionaries don’t do this.
@@Schwarzorn Check out Dogen here on UA-cam. He has some interesting materials about Japanese phonetics especially on Pitch accent. I decided to join his patreon for a couple of months to make some progress in that front.
I am so pumped to watch many more videos of many other topics. Very entertaining. Don't overwhelm yourself tho.
I remember hearing a video of the reading of one accounts of the first Japanese men to learn and teach English, and one of the first on the officially sanctioned voyage to America by the tokugawa shogunate.
He said that Dutch language knowledge could be applied to English. What do you think he meant by that? Alphabet? Sounds? Sentence structure? I know nothing about Dutch. What would be the most striking similarities coming from someone with no knowledge of any indo European languages?
I saw the same video! Voices of the Past :) Dutch and German are very intimately related, both being Germanic. So, other than alphabet, they also share a similar catalog of words with a lot of cognates -- "The big dog eats apples" is "De grote (great) hond (hound) eet appels". I'm not sure how good the analogy is but I would think it's like learning Italian after Spanish, there's a lot of crossover. Especially for someone from Japan who has no other exposure to any European language.
I'm eager for Simon's answer too, but I'll leave my own for now.
I saw the video you're talking about too, I think (Voices of the Past's one, right?), and I find it telling that Fukuzawa Yukichi says the relevant quote right after mentioning that they were strange, alien languages 'which were written sideways' and 'with a common origin' (I forget what exact wording he used). Given the context, he might have meant all three - he mentioned writing immediately prior, he elsewhere talks about him and the Dutch-speaking translator asking a third man for help with pronunciation, and one of the most obvious differences between his language and Germanic ones would probably be sentence structure (Japanese uses post-positions instead of prepositions, is topic-prominent rather than subject-prominent, etc.). However, given the history of and relationship between English and Dutch, I think the last one would probably give the most mileage to a non-native Dutch speaker who's then trying to learn English. Knowing the Latin alphabet and how to write in Dutch would probably make it a lot easier for a native Japanese speaker to gain English literacy, but of course, iinglish ruitiing iz netoriiesli naanfeneetik (and of course, Dutch isn't perfectly phonetic either - most languages aren't - but it's more consistent than English, and more importantly, we use different orthographic tactics to get past the challenge of mapping a script from an Italic language onto our Germanic tongues - it might be difficult getting used to "book" after learning "boek," for instance). The sounds of Dutch are certainly closer to English than those of Japanese, but there are still major discrepancies like the English sounds and affricates being largely missing in Dutch, the Dutch velar fricatives being largely missing in English, our fairly different sounds, etc. Sentence structure might play a stronger rule, since both English and Dutch are subject-prominent, are predominantly S-V-O, use articles and prepositions before nouns, commonly use adjectives separately from other parts of speech, and so on - all rather different from Japanese, which is topic-prominent, is S-O-V, uses postpositions and has no articles, and has noun-like and verb-like adjectives which are so much like the original parts of speech that some linguists debate whether Japanese has syntactic adjectives at all.
Oh, aside from sentence structure, one of the most striking features might be those adjectives. As an English speaker, one of the first things that stuck out to me about Japanese was its use of particles to carry meaning, as a class of words we just don't really have in any Indo-European languages. If that seems so novel to me, I think adjectives as a new part of speech would probably seem really weird to a speaker whose native language covers those meanings using secondary nouns and verbals. Phonotactics in English in general would probably be a headspin too, coming from a language with fewer consonants, far fewer vowels, and comparatively very limited consonant clusters - the longest clusters Japanese allows are two, as in "Honshu," while English has monstrosities like the phrase "our angsts strengthen us" (which technically features 8 consonants without a break, depending on your dialect).
@@zozzy4630 thank you for the reply!
@@chisps_ thank you both for the replies! Since we all saw the video, it is quite likely that the UA-cam algorithm linked up this channel and that ones video. How interesting!
But thanks for the super useful info. I'm not an academic or anything. But learning this stuff as a hobby is great. I really love the communities that sprout up out of these channels!
Great video and great community!
Several things from a Japanese speaker's perspective -
One, common alphabet if speaking of writing.
Two, sentence structure: Japanese emphasises SOV word order whereas both English and Dutch have mobile sentence structure with an emphasis on SVO. Japanese is also strongly head-final and left-branching (meaning that Japanese tends to put linguistically prominent information at the end of phrases) whereas English and Dutch are both the reverse. Accordingly, Japanese also post-positions, whereas English and Dutch are largely pre-positioning.
Third, in nouns Japanese lacks number, grammatical gender, and articles, but has a highly conjugated noun system, all of which are very foreign to Dutch and English but very similar in Dutch and English compared to Japanese.
Lastly, from an Indo-European perspective, Japanese verbs are conjugated very strangely, and adjectives are often conjugated, and function atimes akin to stative verbs. Verbs focus more on aspect and voice, as in, on verb function, and only conjugate for tense (and only past and non-past for tenses) in the imperfect and perfect, and do not conjugate for person or number. This is entirely divorced from the majority of common Indo-European verbal grammar, and auxiliary verbs as commonly used in Dutch and English, as well as participles, are completely foreign to Japanese grammar.
Generally speaking, English and Dutch are closely related languages, and compared to the wide gulf between either and Japanese, from the Japanese speaker's perspective, they look very similar.
The German word "Ufer" (shore/riverbank) is also derived from your example at 4:28.
Are you sure about that?
According to Pokorny's etymological dictionary, 'Ufer' derives from PIE 'āpero' (1st syllable is stressed).
archive.org/stream/indogermanisches01pokouoft/indogermanisches01pokouoft#page/53/mode/1up
It would be very unsual for a word, which has its root in PIE, to keep the /u/ all the way into modern High German, without any sound change.
I beg to disagree here: the German word Ufer is a loan word from Low German branch (otherwise it would have been something like *Uber if it came straight from the High German branch).
The Low German word comes itself from Proto-Germanic *ōferaz, itself coming from IE *h₂peros, not *upér. Those two roots remain unrelated so far.
I'm a native Swedish speaker. We have word pairs that are homographs but have different pitch accents. Notable examples are: "tomten" which either means "the yard/the plot of land" (acute accent) or "the gnome/Father Christmas" (grave accent), and "anden" which either means "the duck" (acute accent) or "the spirit/the soul" (grave accent).
Good job on the pronunciation of the Swedish words, BTW!
Duck Music
Anyway, I'm wondering. Does that make Swedish a tonal language?
Hi Simon. In Spanish or Catalan it's easy to know the stressed syllabes because of the accentuation rules, but when I was learning English I had to learn the stressed syllabes by practice and intuition. It's very interesting knowing how it really works
As an English speaker learning Spanish, the accent marks help a lot.
Interesting hearing about stress and pitch accents in an another language family. In Lithuania, for grammar lessons we study about the pitch accent and stress in Lithuanian and it's one of the most difficult subjects to get a hang of. In Lithuanian, both stress and accents are fully variable and their position changes the meaning of words. For stress, there are four classes, one fixed (that is, stress stays always in the same place) and three movable, that move also depending on declination in nouns and adjec.
For accents, usually it has the most noticable effect in diphthongs, for example:
áukštas (tall) and aũkštas (a storey). 'Áu' has a more rounded quality to the a letter, like the a in armor (british accent). 'Aũ' has the u very firmly pronounced
Very interesting indeed. Thank you for uploading.
keep up the great work mate... this Aussie loves it..
I think you mentioned it with transfer, but nouns when used as verbs have stress changed. Not sure exactly how stress changes, but I know is /ˈprɛzn̩t/ as a noun, but /prəˈzɛnt/ as a verb.
As a Swede, I'm unable to hear the melody of Swedish, although I've heard that non-natives may find it quite distinct. Maybe the pitch accent is a contributor to this melody?
Lithuanian also supposedly has a pitch accent but as a native speaker I can't hear it for the life of me. I definitely notice the pitch accent in Swedish though.
Same, though non-native speakers tend to sound very flat/robotic when they speak Swedish no matter where they're from so maybe that's a way you can tell.
It's because Swedish has a distinction between long and short vowels. To me, Swedish sounds chewy and needs more mouth movements than English.
@@hodgeyhodge8414
Sorry for the delay, I was busy in preparation of the pagan summer solstice tradition.
The specific use of "socker", when speaking about foot garments is dialectal. I don't use it myself, hence I haven't really thought about how it resembles sugar. So I can't unfortunately answer for it.
However, speaking in general about words with pitch accent, I almost never mix them together. I just automatically pronounce according to which word is currently in mind. That would happen in the case of sugar too, if I spoke that dialect. I would simply use the right stress to show what I wanted.
Same when hearing someone saying such a word, it automatically paints the right picture.
Swedish pitch accent is explained in this video really well: ua-cam.com/video/lXp7_Sjgm34/v-deo.html
I've been taught that Verner's law happened at the same time as Grimm's law. It's not a later change, but an alternative development of the same chain-development.
We treat them as two separate laws because there were two different scholars involved but it should actually be one, called Grimm-Verner's law.
That said, I find this video interesting, I like your quiet way of explaining things and I'm happy UA-cam proposed it in my board.
P.S. may I ask you what software you use to edit the video and to prepare the shot with the examples?
Very interesting. The stress of the words is pretty much fixed in Spanish, we learn how to count syllables and how to use accents at school, as we have rules that tell us when to use an accent and when not to. We have what we call "palabras agudas" which are the words whose last syllable is stressed and they have an accent in most cases (e.g.: caMIÓN=truck, aDIÓS=bye, veRÉ=I will see). We also have "palabras llanas", which are the most common ones in Spanish, these have the stress on the second syllable starting to count from the right, basically the next syllable if we take into account what I just said about palabras agudas, and they don't have an accent most of the times. (e.g.: RAna=frog, herMAno=brother, aCENto=accent). Finally we have "palabras esdrújulas" which are the ones which are stressed on the third syllable from the right and always have an accent. (e.g.: PLÁtano=banana, eFÍmero=ephemeral, MÁScara=mask). There's no such thing as changing the stress to change the meaning, at least that I recall right now, and there are indeed exceptions in terms of accent usage depending on the last letter of the word (e.g.: words ending with R are agudas if there's no accent: canTAR=to sing//CÁNcer=cancer, here the accent breaks the rule and tells me that CÁN- is the stressed one). These are the main rules we learn to stress words and know when to write the accent, so the Germanic ways strike me as something genuinely different. Hope this was at least informative and worth reading. I love the channel. Cheers.
Interesting content, thanks for the upload.
Thank you, Simon. Again.
Was watching Hawk the Slayer and saw your 80s doppelganger. Took me a while to realise where I'd seen the actor before :p
Nice morning for a walk in the rain
love your videos :) keep it up !
Really interesting video as usual man.
About pitch accent, I don't think it's taught at all, atleast not intentionally. But regardless of what language you choose to learn and however subtle the pitch accent may be it's the key ingredient to sounding fluent and having that natural pronounciation only natives seem to have. Studying pitch accent for me is just as important as any else language related :)
Great video as always.
The channel Academia Cervena has two great videos explaining the Swedish pitch accent A) overall and B) how it varies depending on what dialect of Swedish you speak (and I would highly recommend the other videos on the channel as well if you're interested in Swedish and/or the other languages featured on the channel).
Thanks Simon, take care
Just noticed how important stress is in German. This is probably why I can immediately distinguish between a native speaker and non native speaker of German, even if the non native speaker is fluent and doesn't make mistakes.
Vorkommen, umfahren, abmachen...
I enjoy your informative videos
Would you consider making a video where you try to read in all germanic languages as a challenge?
Some continental West Germanic dialects like Limburgian and adjacent Ripuarian also have some vestigial pitch accent. The most common example is by/bee which is the same sound (sounds like "bee" in English, but in the case an actual bee is meant, the vowel is dragged on. If English "by" is meant, it kept short) and daag (basic noun "day" but alternate meaning as a short greet as in "good day", the latter is also dragged) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limburgish#Tone
No need for the disclaimer! People sprout all kinds of bollocks about language but your insights are always fascinating.
For other words like "transfer", check the Wikipedia page on " Initial-stress-derived noun". Right near the top, it gives "perMIT" and "PERmit", which is a perfect example for me.
About "transfer": This accentual difference occurs frequently in two-syllable words in English. Typically the word accented on the first syllable is a noun and the one accented on the second syllable is a verb. Another post here mentions "produce"; further examples are "contrast", "record" and "rebel".
in american english we always stress the first syllable of transfer, whether it's a verb or a noun. we do change the stress on other words do differentiate noun and verb, such as combat, and in that case the first syllable is stressed on the noun and the second is stressed on the verb.
This is true. I wonder why...
@@Schwarzorn Just to annoy the British.
I never quite figured out whether it was a deliberate awkwardness to pay me back for mangling the language or something about the language but I found when I mis-pronounced a word in Czech- including using the wrong stress- that the Czech person listening would seem to have no idea what I was saying.
Every other word was correct, the context was unmistakable and no other meaning other than the one I intended might be possible but putting the stress in the wrong place in a single word would lead the the listener to to mockingly say 'nerozumím' followed by a couple of fast spoken sentences filled with the most obscure Czech idioms.
To be fair, I did manage to make their language sound horrible, so it wasn't unjustified.
I have no idea what actually happened and no knowledge of Czech, but it would be interesting to hear your version of the sentence, a native speaker's version and their explanation of the difference. There could be multiple factors at play.
I have some experience learning and interacting with native speakers of multiple languages. It does seem that people in different countries may react very differently towards foreign speakers or learners of their language. Their reaction also seems to be very different when we're at different stages in our language-learning journey. It seems very related to comprehensibility but other socio-linguistic factors seem to be very important as well. Native speakers of some languages may come across as being much more accepting of learners or non-native speakers than the native speakers of others...
That face at the end is the best thing I've ever seen
When I was doing my postgrad research in Iceland (in arch as well) the only thing I found that made Icelandic easier was that the first syllable is always stressed in Iceland.
This might be unrelated to this particular video, but in topic of stress systems, you might be interested. Academician Zaliznyak formalized Russian stress systems, which is being used now in speech synthesizers, like, for example, in Google Translate.
In addition, Zaliznyak was the most famous researches of Novgorod birch bark scrolls, which are really interesting to read and read about.
You do amazing work for the European people.
What do you mean?
Wow. You just boosted my swedish a lot
I think a Vollbart would fit you very well. I have not that beard grow. I envy you.
And thank you for your content. You let my curiosity for linguistic grow again.
very very interesting video!!
I would say that pitch in stressed syllables is a change in pitch relative to the surrounding syllables, not necessarily higher. The change can go either way.
I'd love to get in a call with you some time and try to learn Old-English. I'm a Native Frisian speaker myself so I already felt like I have basic understand of Old-English. But it would be interesting to be taught by you :)
you guys need to collab
Very interesting. Simon, would you say that the languages/dialects grouped as/descended from North Sea West Germanic share a kindred accent(s) unique to the group, including the variations found across the UK? Or is it just my imagination? For example, the first time I ever heard a sound bite of Frisian, without knowing it was Frisian, my impression was that of an unintelligible form of Scots, but it certainly seemed to have the essence of that accent. I have since heard distinct similarities between other languages, like Southwest Jutlandic and, for example, a London accent. Can an accent survive across time and even language barriers that have since arisen?
"Transfer" has also leveled in Canadian English, we only stress the first syllable regardless of whether it's a verb or noun.
Agreed. I've never even heard the second syllable stressed.
7:58 if stress was a face
if you're more curious about pitch accent, i recommend checking out Academia Cervana's videos on the Swedish pitch accent
"Professor River Song.... Archaeologist" Love ya' Simon.
What happened to the video on American influence on British English?
I am a native speaker of Norwegian. The two variations in tone exist in every Norwegian dialect I am aware of, but they are not identical in every dialect. (In fact, this can be a distinguishing feature of dialects in Norwegian, Swedish and even some Jutland varieties of Danish.)
The terms "acute" and "grave" are not really used to refer to the two variations in tone, although these diacritics may occasionally be used to to transcribe pitch accent.. The accents themselves are referred to as "tonemes" - that is, a phoneme distinguished solely by pitch accent.
You did not touch on pitch accent in Icelandic or Faroese. I believe these languages would have it, but I don't actually know for certain. They do seem to have the same "sing-songy" quality to them that pitch accent lends to Norwegian and Swedish, however.
Does the way of pitch inside a word change its meaning? And simons examples were just syllables, does norwegian has pitch accents on stressed tones eg long vowels? Thank you :)
Limburgs (spoken in the Dutch province Limburg) also has a pitch accent that is contrastive).
I looked quite worried at the end when you struggled to reach the 'off' button.
Thanks Simon. In thinking about the Mandarin language, which I do not speak, it has the 5 tones, to give different meanings to a singular sound like 'fan' (rice). Your comments on the word "transfer', makes me think that English does have a comparable system using stress, instead of tones, to change the meaning of a word. My understanding of the use of tones in English is to impart emotions, or to create a question. It would be interesting to know if there was any influence of Proto-Indo-European on the early Chinese language family, thousands of years ago. I am aware that the Thai language is influenced by Buddhist Pali. Pali is a descendent of Sanskrit. With an English word that has multiple meanings (ie. 'view' as noun or verb), each meaning acquired by the words in the rest of the sentence, I can see how non-English speakers struggle to learn our strange, mongrel language.
Native Chinese speaker here. Actually Old Chinese spoken before Han Dynasty (200 BC) did not have tones. You can look up some videos on youtube with reconstructions. Tones were definitely around by the Middle Chinese period, 500 AD around Tang Dynasty (pronunciation guide back then mentioned 4 tones, which split into 5-9 tones in modern dialects). The 4 original tones were 1 flat, 2 rising, 3 falling, all very easily imaginable in any spoken language, and 4 "entering", which is not really a tone, it's akin to the modern light tone, but with syllables ending in p, t, k sound (Mandarin can no longer end with these sounds, most southern dialects still can). Tones arise from the reduction of more complicated syllable endings in Old Chinese, and I'd imagine it happened in a similar manner as you and Simon mentioned here. There are Indo-European languages with tones too, the most famous being Punjabi. The Middle Chinese tone numbering system is obviously influenced by contact with ancient India (via Buddhism). Most East Asian(esp. SE Asian) languages nowadays have tones, regardless of linguistic family. This likely means tones as a feature was passed from one language to another in the last 2000 years.
Also words that mean a verb or a noun depending on context is not rare among languages in general, even Chinese with tones still have words in the same tone meaning both a verb/noun nucleus or adverb/adjective modifier depending on context. An example is 飞 fēi, which means fly/flying/flight/really fast and many more, look it up in google translate.
@@OscarLiu24 wow! I was just fascinated by all this. I've checked out some lessons in Mandarin on youtube, but found it a bit daunting, with no one to practise with.
@@OscarLiu24 Wow! Thanks Oscar. That was a comprehensive explanation. I should have realized that Chinese languages would have definitely been affected by the introduction of Buddhism from India. Not only Sanskrit, but other Indian dialects as well. My understanding of the Thai language is that the Thai-Kadai people originated in southern China, migrating south to what is now Thailand. I believe the Thai language has 5 tones. I find the history of languages very interesting. Simon does an excellent job with English. Thanks again for the clarification on historical Chinese languages.
Awesome face at the end Roper
anden and anden is a good word. It either means the duck or the spirit (like in "the holy spirit") depending on which pitch accent you use :)
Simon. Have you considered studying linguistics? I’m considering studying that major at college. I’m not sure if it’s worth the payment though. It’s kind of expensive.
You’re an archaeology student? That’s exciting, nice to know you’re enthusiastic about linguistics though.
Simon, my information might be out-dated.... but is held that the Indo-Germanic proto-language had pitch accent (a song-like accent). Not only do Swedish, Norwegian and some Danish dialects have pitch accent, but also the two most archaic LIVING indo-germanic tongues - the Baltic Lithuanian and Latvian tongues (neighbours of the North Germanic tongues), also have pitch accent. So does Slovenian. Ancient Greek also had pitch accent, but modern greek has lost it. The tongues which still have it - i learnt - had kept the pitch accent inherited from Proto-Indogermanic, and thus, their pitch accent systems are not innovations. I speak lithuanian from my childhood, and thus know well how important pitch accent is in LIthuanian in order to distinguish words which otherwise would be alike.
I'm so glad to learn the North Germanic languages and my native language happen to share an important feature that is so often either sorely glossed over or dismissed altogether by learners and teachers alike for some unfathomable reasons: the pitch accent. It's really a thing folks.
What language do you speak?
The stress is on the first syllable in both pitch accents, though.
The pitch(es) of a word (noun) can be different if it is used as a question ('fånen?', 'bilen?'), affirmative or even exclamative (if that's even a word) in standard Swedish. Don't even get me started on Elfdalian (Älvdalsmål) and its siblings (Moramål & Orsamål).
Elfdalian is very "singsongy" when spoken; the tone goes up & down over a whole sentence.
You can just speak Finland Swedish, where you dont have to bother with pitch accent :D
German is my favourite language :). I love that we have for like everything a word and it sounds so competent :)
Simon, you look exactly the way I would imagine and Anglo/Saxon/Jute fellow
And then there's the curious case of Limburgish, a collection of mutually intelligible dialects that sit in the Dutch/German language continuum, and which do have a pitch accent. For example, "bein" can mean both "leg" and "legs", and it's the pitch accent that determines which is meant. With pitch accents and all, one such dialect can have up to 24 vowels and an additional 6 diphthongs.
Man you're so friggin cool
Could you recommend a good linguistic book or scientific papers about the developement of Germanic?
The variable stress thing shows up in American English for sure, but transfer is a word where that distinction has been lost. Both the verb and the noun are stressed on the first syllable. I think I've noticed that this has happened to a few words in American English, but I can't think of any right now...
It's so fun that I have moved from tanks and punk rock songs to old aenglish.
Just so happened that I was wondering again about how and when French could have started putting emphasis on the last syllable. As Latin shares the same emphasis pattern with modern Italian and Spanish, Gaullic languages sound rather Greek-ish, and Germanic languages... well you saw this video, it must've come from a popular local dialect or an outside influence that may be lost in time.
One is for sorrow, two for joy. Three for a girl and four for a boy. Five for silver, six for gold. Seven is for a secret never told.
I don t know if this video was a reply on previous comments of mine or just a great video i wished for, in both cases thank you alot! Great video!!! Btw. Pitch accents exist in limburgian and ripuarian francish too but the pitch can be even on single tones, especially long vowels not just syllables and compleatly change the words meaning. I am suprised nordic germanic languages have one too, the literature i read so far refers to ripuarian beeing the only european pitch accent language... Does the pitch change the words meaning in nordic languages???
In Scandinavian languages, pitch accent or intonation can change the meaning of a word. In Swedish, "anden" can mean either "the duck" or "the spirit" depending on whether your voice goes up or down on the end. Most dialects of Basque (which I'm trying to learn) also have pitch accent. In both Basque and Scandinavian languages, there's a lot of dialectical variation, and it only makes a difference in meaning in a few words. Pitch accent isn't indicated in writing.
A couple Basque examples: The word "baso", pronounced low-high, means "uninhabited area" or "deep forest", but "baso", pronounced high-low, means "vase" or "drinking glass". (The second one is a loan-word from Spanish.) The word "gozo", meaning "delicious", is pronounced low-high in some regions of Basque Country, but high-low in other regions.
@@craigfaber4777 thank you so much!!! Do you know examples of vowel pitches? My dialect doesn t have real diphtongs like the standard german ei, au or english ou etc. For example (my favorite ;)) Leeve (lee-ve, e is a long e not two seperate tones, an e like the first e in Example something in between german e and ä) with voice going down means love, with voice going up means life, with constant intonation it would mean lovely. Btw. english to mean "ea" is a good example for one vowel tone going down, i think as i hear it (i am not a native speaker) with vowel tone up is the pronounciation of beeing mean to someone, do i hear this right@native speakers? Other example of my dialect broit-che "oi", : intonation within oi going down means bride (dimnutive), with intonation up means bread(dimnutive), so a wrong pronounced proposal (wanna be my bride) could be funny. Standard german speakers can t even hear the difference i gave up to explain to them. I have a spanish friend who studies chinese, she can hear the difference, i don t even have to think and conciously exaggerate it. Thanks for reading to everyone 🙂👍 even more for replys 😉