Simon has by far the nicest comment section I've ever seen, everyone is always so sweet about providing their experiences and positive feedback and praise of various shirts and nail polish colors and sideburns. Thanks so much for these videos by the way, the phone audio sounds great and the locations and nature footage are always so relaxing.
The food related term sweet and the nature related term nice(st) / (n)ice etc only reflect me, and cannot be misused by hum’ns in comments about hum’ns, which are the exact opposite of such terms, and praise is also only meant for me The Goddess etc - it’s also beyond disrespectful to food to misuse any food / plant / flower / nature / other purity terms, and all unsuitable terms must be edited out, and the word ames also cannot be in someone’s name!
I don’t understand how can someone not realise how wrong it is to misuse the word sweet, which is a food term - it implies EDIBILITY aka purity, and such terms cannot be misused in any way by hum’ns in comments! Unless one is saying that he just had an ice cream / dessert and it was sweet or something like that!
if youre studying and passionate about zooarcheology and paleontology itd be great to incorporate them into your channel. im positive itd be well received
Seconding this. I was really impressed by Simon's recent video on animals, his understanding of Britain's natural history is astounding for someone outside the ecology/wildlife biology field.
I am a Scots speaker, and I totally agree with what you say here about the Scots Wikipedia - the kid was honestly trying to contribute in good faith to a resource that was obviously underdeveloped, yes he was bad at it but there was no ill will and I doubt very much there is any real lasting damage either.
Just imagine how much time he sank into translating so many articles, checking each word in the dictionary. That's a huge effort and he should be applauded just for that
@@jenwombatexcelsior Aye, exactly! When you edit Wikipedia in good faith you do so with the expectation that if you haven't got it quite right the community will improve on your work. It isn't *his* fault there weren't enough other people participating in Scots Wikipedia.
@@Istoria-Movy Well I think he now realises he probably can't because he doesn't know the language well enough, so that job probably has to be left to actual Scots speakers. But it's easier to edit something than to write something new so in the long run maybe he's done us a favour by giving us something to fix instead of just a blank page.
This is by far the most comforting channel on UA-cam... thank you Simon, I for one can say that you’ve been one of the better things to come out of 2020!
The nature related term wood and hel cannot be in someone’s name, so all unsuitable names must be changed - only I reflect nature / forest / plant / tree / flower related terms etc and big terms such as Heaven / HeII related terms and royalty / astral / respectability / gemstone / light related terms etc and special / big names, and my protector Chip reflects the HeII as he is the real-life Devil / Reaper and Zeus / Ra, so any term that is or included such terms cannot be in names, while the items that reflect those terms / names are also only meant for me!
I don't know why Simon's channel popped up in my recommendations the other week.. I didn't know I was so interested in anthropology and old language.. *but I simply can't stop watching!* Thankyou! This is truly fascinating stuff.
If these comments are where Simon gets his questions, I'll put one here--or maybe someone else can answer me. I'm referncing the Beatles song "Till There Was You." In the line "No, I never saw them at all," it sounds to me as if Paul McCartney is singing "No, I never sore them at all." This seems like a linking "r," except that the next word doesn't start with a vowel. Is this just the way Sir Paul always pronounced "saw" (at least in his younger years), or is something else going on here?
I would be interested in hearing more about your academic work! Zooarchaeology is a fascinating field, especially in regards to livestock (domestication and economy.)
The book "The Wake" made me think of something. Chapter 14 of James Joyce's Ulysses starts with Old English and then progresses through the evolution of the language up to, at that point in time, the modern dialect in Dublin. What are your general thoughts on that chapter, if you know it? And also, how accurate is it, from a linguistic point of view? After all, it is just an artists impression of this evolution of language.
That would be really interesting. I know Ulysess well but unfortunately not linguistics. I believe Joyce used a contemporary history of English prose of the time and followed it somewhat impressionistically. He wasn't a linguist and was as concerned with the rhythm of the chapter as anything else. I wish I could remember more but it's definitely been written on academically somewhere if you look in literary studies journals
in addition, I'm curious if you'll do a video on stress and accents, as I've noticed my own accent changes when stressed or upset, sometimes happy, just emotional state and accents.
Who needs Xanax when you can just listen to a bit of Simon? I get really anxious at times but this always manages to soothe my nerves and inform me at the same time.
My relatives in Missouri and Arkansas insert an “r” in the words water (“worter”) and wash (“worsh”), but this must be an unrelated development since the r does not precede a vowel...
A lot of my Appalachian / West Virginian relatives say drawl; I’m not immediately sure of that has more to do with an Appalachian dialect specifically or a more general southern dialect which has influenced Appalachian speech. They also tend to say warsh instead of wash, as well as other iconic Appalachian-isms, like not using any irregular past tense verbs (showed instead of shone, stoled or stolt instead of stolen, blowed instead of blew, or unusual pluralizing (theys, thems, or using is instead of are). Also worth noting: my Pittsburgh relatives also say warsh and drawl at least some of the time but they are directly related to my Appalachian relatives so I don’t know where those originate.
I've just started reading The Wake based on this video. I would say that anyone who watches Simon's videos should consider reading it, it really captures how foreign and alien the past is, better than any historical fiction I've read before.
Cool point about humans being anatomically able to produce any language sound (barring speech impediments). My graduation thesis was about the perception of some English allophones by Brazilians. During my research I came across James E. Flege's Speech Learning Model, which proposes that we cateɡorize language sounds in our minds - a slot for /s/, a slot for /v/, a slot for /i/, for example. When we try to learn an unfamiliar sound we'll place it in the closest sounding "sound slot" if we can't really perceive it as a different sound. We have to "create" a new slot for the new sound to be able to produce it. For example, /θ/ doesn't exist in Portuɡuese; many people perceive it as /f/, so Brazilians tend to say /f/ whenever we have to say /θ/ when learning English. This is not because we _can't_ say /θ/, but more because most of us just can't hear it as a distinct sound at first. I also used /f/ for /θ/ before I started noticing that they're different sounds. According to Flege's model, I could say, then, that I lumped /f/ and /θ/ together in the same category at first, then eventually developed a new category for /θ/. There are probably some flaws with Flege's model, but I think it's a nice way to think about why it can be so hard for us to produce unfamiliar sounds (as adults) - it's more about perceiving the sounds and becoming used to them. Love your content, Simon. Keep doing what you're doing... I can't stop binge-watching your channel!
Love your videos mate! Regarding your "rambling", it's always a nice path to follow the weft and warp of your thoughts while you explain the topic of that video to us. Thanks again 👍
Hi from Spain! I may be entirely wrong, but regarding sound change, I believe that now that we live in a globalized society, where we can watch tv in any language we want, stream programs, watch youtube videos and travel around the world, besides the fact that most of the first and even second world countries have easy access to the internet, language change, in terms of varieties, will slow down somewhat. Not stop, but definitely, slow down in time. In Britain you watch many American films and shows, in Hollywood we have many brilliant British, Australian actors (and from other parts of the English-speaking world, as well). The present day lingua franca is now English, so there is a huge crossover, and whereas when I was a child (I'm 58), British English was perceived by Americans as sounding too posh and over the top, present-day Americans now love *any* British accent, whether they understand it or not, ha! When my Spanish mother, as a 14-year-old, started to study English by choice, here in Seville, Spain, at the British Institute, which back then, belonged to the British government, by the time she met my American dad when she was 18, he would pull her leg, implying she sounded too posh. Of course, at that time, only posh RP was taught (this was in the late 50s-early 60s). In addition to that, despite being a teacher of English as a foreign language, I have never, ever in my life seen or heard (her 4 language skills were impeccable) anyone with such perfect English. It's not because she was my mother. It's because it was true. In fact, all the Americans who she came into contact with when she started working as a personal assistant to the American military Head of Education on base truly believed she was British (we have a Spanish-U.S. Air Force base close by where she worked when she was young, and that was where she met my father). Of course, after being married to him for about 36 years until his untimely death, in addition to travelling around the world, and always being in contact with Americans, her British English became more americanized, though you could always hear that hint of RP in it, and curiously with no trace of a Spanish accent. Her relationship with the English language was love at first sight (hearing????). Many Americans would joke around with her in her late years saying, "Ma'am, you speak much better English than we do." And back when she started, in Spain, people would study French, not English. However, now, with all these crossovers in the media, on social networks, on TV (she loved to watch movies in the original version based on Jane Austen's books, and read them. She adored Shakespeare). Basically, more and more people are communicating in English, and now you find Americans pronouncing "either" with the British diphthong, and you hear British people saying "gonna." So, my impression is that in the long run, even if there will always be regional variations and new things cropping up, little by little, while English is as widely spoken as it is today, many native national dialects or variations of English will slowly begin to merge into a less diverse variety of the language (that doesn't mean we won't borrow words from other languages, though). Politics, in addition to music, acting, etc., is always important. As long as all English-speaking nations are allies and for a very long time, I don't believe each national standard of the same language will differ as much as they used to. But that's just my opinion... Oh, and let's not forget the internet and technology. If for whatever reason, something massive and permanent happened to our modern day telecommunications systems, that would set us back by centuries, and then, perhaps, language evolution would speed up again.
I think one of the things to consider with the "predictability" of sound movement is that historically we can often know or at least assume a starting point and an end point for a sound, based on that it becomes more obvious where the sound transitioned through in different periods of time inbetween. If we look at the future we can only know the starting point, but there is no endpoint for us to draw a line to.
Hi Simon, just wanted to say how much I truly enjoy your videos and to thank you for taking the time to make them, I always come away having learnt something new and exciting. Also, as a modern German learner, your videos on old English help me bridge a mental gap between German and English like no textbook could teach.
In fact, in response to talking about the difficulty in predicting language feature shift before it happens - in the past century and a bit, we've gained access to increasingly high-quality recordings of everyday speech, and it has highlighted another problem that I'm not certain people were fully sold on before they heard it. A feature of a language can move in one 'direction', as you put it - but because this doesn't happen in all speakers at all times in all contexts at once (yes, I needed to specify all of those things, because they all individually affect the language a person uses in different ways), it's completely possible (and I think now we have documentary evidence that it does - and has - happen-s-ed; I cannot remember where or when I read about it, though, and I can't afford journal subscriptions at the moment) that the same feature can then 'change course' and move in a different 'direction' - including right back the way it came, and in fact sometimes it's more likely to do so, because remnants of the older dominant realisation of that feature will remain in different contexts. If the earlier realisation remains in more contexts than any single new realisation develops in, it's got a decent chance of becoming the pattern for the next wave of feature drift. So what you _can_ get is a sort of wobbling, back-and-forth movement of language between these two featural loci, where the total _net_ movement between them is ultimately what drives long-term language change. I think. Again, I have no current access to journals, and may have remembered something completely different and just slapped it up here because it _sounds_ right. But I _think_ that holds some water. Sorry I can't be more accurate.
I like the sensitive way you dealt with the question about the person who penned much of Scots Wikipedia. I've been studying Scots recently and my teacher is one of the people who has galvanized editors to correct the content. My latest video is about Scots, and includes a TV interview that starts in Old English. Costume design for my Angle migrant is a nod to Baldrick.
Likewise. I hear more Scottish influence in South Australia compared to the East, even though Eastern States people & foreigners say we sound 'more English'.The Northern Territory & Nth Qld have a drawl, but very different to Southern US.
I have long been amazed at the cliff edge change of accent/ dialect when leaving the outskirts of Carlisle and reaching Annan. Crossing the river seems to be it! Klonk. The switch is thrown. From an unmistakable Scottish accent it instantly becomes English with a local accent. I first recognised that in the mid 60s. No gradual change.... just as I said before..Klonk! It's changed... I'm not familiar with the East so I have no idea. Maybe it does that there as well? Maybe half across is the same? But Carlisle ...no mistaking it at all! Simon ...Great series. How you manage to learn this subject, at this level and yet cope with your main subject of study is impressive nay, astounding. Thank you!
I want to hear more about your research! One guy in my cohort wrote his master’s thesis on something similar. It was about XRF analysis and the different artiodactyls represented in archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest, mainly pronghorn, mule deer, mountain goats, and elk (wapiti, I suppose you’d call them). It was, in my opinion, the coolest thesis topic in our cohort.
I'm going to add some nuance to the discussion of discriminating between sounds and learning to reproduce them. Various circuits in the brain don't "mature" at the same time (or, more accurately, there are windows in time where particular synaptic connections are highly plastic and they don't occur at the same time for all the neurons throughout the brain). There are critical periods during development during which certain auditory processing tasks are more easily learned. You can learn them as an adult but it's certainly more difficult. So while it's true that children have an incentive to learn language quickly as a matter of survival, there are deep biological mechanisms that gives children a huge advantage.
@@helenahandkart1857 There are still some regions of the brain that are quite plastic during adolescence. This sometimes surprises people, but circuits in the prefrontal cortex involved in attentiveness are a great example of this. So to better acquire a language in adolescence one could harness these other aspects of language learning. The synaptic pruning thing is interesting because it's thought to occur at most developmental stages (often during sleep). In fact, insufficient loss or pruning of synapses is maladaptive. Mice that genetically model conditions like autism or tuberous sclerosis often have more dendritic spines in certain types of neurons. These conditions notably result in difficulties in speech and communication in humans. Although there's still a lot left to be learned in this field. But in principle too little or too much plasticity can result in difficulties in auditory learning.
@@eigenvectornormalized8843 Thanks for all this info. It's such a fascinating area. Even the adult brain is far more adaptive that people at first thought. Over synaptic pruning in adolescence is implicated in Schizophreniform mental ilnesses, which are also statistically somewhat correlated (not enough to be causative) with childhood autism spectrum symptoms. In supportive environments both can often soften in impact over time as people assimilate more 'normalcy' behaviourally, just from exposure to other people.
One thing you said was that vowels change their sound slowly. Can you explain how this fits with the Great Vowel Shift? BTW, I like your shirt, too, like someone else mentioned. Make sure to buy lots so you can wear them when you're old and gray. 😝
Imo I think 'Estuary English' has happened relatively quickly because some people (within one generation of people) consciously tried to emulate it to sound more approachable or on trend etc. The exposure to its use in the media may also have expediated its use.
6:45 That makes sense. I'd visited the Scots wikipedia once or twice out of curiosity (more interested in Gaelic personally, since that's the side my family's from, but everyone's got their own attachments) Honestly - coming from someone who's studied Gaelic? And several other resource-poor minority languages? (Gaelic at least is better on that front nowadays) At least the non-representative and inaccurate language was a good-faith effort made by someone honestly trying to help, and distributed for free. Sometimes people throw a load of garbage in a book, take it to a publisher that doesn't know any better (and doesn't bother to check) and sell it. Sometimes internationally (in fact, _often_ internationally - that's where they're least likely to get their work discovered by native speakers and shitlisted for being useless). And even _that_ , as much as it pains me to say it, is better than nothing, because at least people usually make a _token_ effort to include real language, even if they have no idea what any of it actually means. So sometimes people seek out and buy the garbage anyway, because if there are only ten books published on a language, they are all top-ten resources by default.
I am American, and interested in the relationship between geographies, climate changes, demographic migration in word pronunciation. I once heard a BBC documentary speak about how living on the windy northern seacoast creates a tighter mouth shape, and what population movements happened in the UK during 1300 to 1600? Thanks for the regional videos.
This guy is one of the more interesting people on youtube. A lot of us English speakers have questions about where our language came from, how it developed. He gives us a taste of that.
Always enjoy your vids, Simon. I fully agree that it's exceedingly difficult to predict how words will be pronounced in the future, or indeed what those words and grammar might be. However, I do believe that spelling will become more like the word is spoken: team > teem; night > nite; laugh > laff; etc. while a lot of us look down at misspells like that, they are more simple and more correct phonetically. There's another thing: ph drifts to f. Why? Why not? It's easier to remember. So thing that I'm getting more and more aggressive about is the regularization of verbs. Simple and easy changes, and arguably way easier to remember. The past tense of swim goes from swam to swimmed; drawn becomes drawed; and so on. It looks stilted and awful, but, verb regularization has been going on for a long time and will continue to happen. We as humans have a lot of things to remember in our increasingly complex world. Maybe regularization and general simplification is the way to go.
Voice is genetic and each nation has a different voice, and the voice of a nation impacts how a language is spooken even by foreigners for they not only mimic the langauge they mimic the voice.
Simon, I would answer that in the US (at least outside New England) we don’t insert the r in words like drawing, firstly because our formation of “draw” is less rounded than the southern UK pronunciation you have. The other part seems to be a bit of a slide into the “ing” (rather than a glottal stop).
I still think it would be fun to have a pint or two and discuss things as diverse as French influence on English culture, to thatched roofs, to accents in England that denote a person's income and area of origin.
yes! linking r's is a big thing in the boston accent, which is pretty famous for dropping r's, but I always tell people that's not true, we drop the r's that should be there and add them where they shouldn't be. So, Drawring, and "i sawr it." It's one of the accent features that people without a strong regional accent generally still have. I don't do it, because I had a speech impediment and couldn't say my R's til I was older and so I'm more aware of them, but everybody else around here does. Also I lived in philly the last two years and they seem to do the same thing with the L sound, a lot of people say "I saul it."
Personally I like any video of yours in which you discuss something you’re passionate about. So a video on Zoology would be very interesting to me if thats what you’re doing your dissertation on
Thank you for your channel, most interesting, slowly working my way through your broadcasts. I grew up in Portsmouth, it wasn't until I was about ten ten that my father explained that I could not pronounce pint but would always say point. Oh, and there is definitely no letter t pronounced in Pompey speak, just a minor pause. Later in life when I started working in Winchester, only 25 miles away, colleagues asked me if I came from London as my accent was unknown to them.
Simon, what’s your opinion about the phenomenon of dialects in general? What do you think about the ‘Chinese case’ where the dialects turn into separate languages that are not mutually intelligible anymore?
In Spanish it's fairly common for children to not acquire the alveolar trill /r/ until 4 or 5 years old. My sibling in particular had trouble with it (to some extent) until around 7 or 8.
3:00 ff - there's another thing to be considered nowadays: writing. languages don't change any more in the same way since writing is really common - which is merely some 100 years
With the Scottish/northern English accent similarities. I’m 30 and from County Durham, I did a distance learning degree from a London university, with my study group being in Scotland. Anyway, my first trip to the London site for the interview, without being assigned to the Scotland group yet, several people assumed I was Scottish based on my accent, and once on the course, every time my study group met with the southern England group (in Derbyshire), I was assumed to be Scottish based on linguistically being far closer than it was to middle and southern English. I often had to work as a translator in the pub on those meetings for the Scots from Glasgow and above. As for where the North starts, there’s a city called Middlesbrough, I always joke (kinda) that it’s the Middle of Britain and anything below is southern
Yes, some videos, or a lot of videos, concerning your studies would be great. The details of daily life are crucial to understanding the past and to understanding the present. Otherwise, we are all the same and differences are unacceptable, as a particular political party and current 'movement' would have us believe. A very enjoyable video. Having grown well into adulthood before social media, I have to admit group curiosity while listening to Led Zeppelin as to why Robert Plant kept putting an 'r' at the end of words clearly without one, like "draw"..."drawr", at the time, seemed strange. Though, I can't recall the song at the moment.
The linking R shows up in some US non-rhotic accents. My aunt had a very coastal Southern accent, she said “drawing” more like y’all do than like most USGE or even SVA speakers do. However, outside the coastal south (and even there, probably concentrated among older speakers), even non-rhotic SVA speakers tend not to show linking Rs for whatever reason.
Another question. Is there evidence that the put-putt merger in Northern England is linked to the Viking invasions? Or is that just a legend? I believe most of the Viking incursions on the island of Great Britain were in Northern England? (apologies if you have already covered this, I haven't seen all your videos yet.)
Excellent question! The situation with 'put' and 'putt' is actually down to a split in southern English, not a merger in northern English. Words like 'run', 'gun' and 'duck' were pronounced with the same vowel as 'put' in most dialects of English until the early modern period. As for what caused the split, it's not completely clear - it's often very hard to isolate causes of sound changes :)
Future Q&A: What do you think about how Game of Thrones deals with languages, if you have watched or read it? Are there any conlangs you find especially interesting?
It is quite unrelistic that a huge continent like Westeros would have one main language with little difference in dialects, especially as (from what I've read on the worldbuilding, I haven't actually read the books) it was settled over a period of millennia
Sir Jaojao well it’s based off of Early Modern England, and it represents what happened there, if rather more dramatically on Westeros. You had various groups coming in at various times each with their own very much distinct languages, but after several centuries they developed a common vernacular with regional dialects (as Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Norman French came together to form English). I have many other disagreements with GOT world building but the Common Tongue is plausible. What is much less plausible is that the Targaryen rulers wouldn’t have made Valyrian the court language in the way the Normans did with Norman French, and that the Wildings don’t have a different language like the contrast between Early Modern English and Scots, which is what would make more genealogical or at least ethnographical sense. But then, it’s a TV show, I don’t know if that’s represented in the books or not.
@@rmcewan10 I can see the England argument, but Martin portrays Westeros as a much larger country than England (I think he mentioned once that it is about the size of South America!), and has also been settled for much longer (supposedly the Andals came over several thousand years ago) which would mean dialects would have diverged
Sir Jaojao oh right then in that case definitely. I still don’t think it’s inconceivable that there would be a lingua franca across the whole continent, but it’s unlikely they would all be speaking the same native language
13:30 minutes in you mention Leicester. I was born, raised, and currently live in Leicester. My father was a strong accented Geordie, my mother and most of the other relatives I encountered most were from around Leicestershire. I have travelled quite a lot with various work and met people from all over the country, talking with all sorts of accents. I have been fascinated by accents for years and have managed to avoid speaking with a Leicester accent. I often say that there is no such thing as a Leicester accent, it is in fact a speech defect. My accent has been somewhat flexible when I have worked in one place for a few months or more, often to avoid rather than mimic certain aspects of the accent(s) to which I was exposed. I remember been shocked by my own accent when I once asked for a bacon 'saahhndwidge' one day when working in Essex, ever since then I've paid a lot closer notice to what I allow myself to pick up. I lived in Glasgow for six months without picking up much at all, but a month of sharing a house with two Glaswegians while working seven days a week with many more saw me become fluent in Glaswegian. Twenty-five years later I still sometimes come out with bits of Glaswegian. The accents around the area where Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Nottingham meet up are among the most incomprehensible accents in the country, on a par with those of Barrow-in-Furness, and other parts of Cumbria. In the city areas strong local accents seem to be in decline due to high numbers of outside influences, but from the suburbs out accents seem to survive better, perhaps that goes for many places?
I’ve noticed anecdotally that historically recent Gaelic speaking areas in North Western Scotland seem to have a Scottish accent that is ‘lighter’ than more Southern historically Doric (or other Scots dialect) speaking areas for example. Their Scottish accent appears to be less influenced by Scots and better described as Scottish English. My understanding is that this is because a lot of the traders into these remote areas, as well as teachers and missionaries trying to steer the locals away from Gaelic and away from Catholicism, were English, and so many locals learnt ‘English English’ as a second language rather than Scots, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I know there are certainly some Gaelic speaking areas where Doric was a heavy influence too.
Id say the North starts at the Humber, its a natural barrier to the yellow bellies in Lincolnshire haha, but the language that runs up the east coast is unique as no one wanted to go there and no one there wanted to leave. Ill leave Simon a little bit of dialect which i really like from where i am. Skeg means look where im from, "giz a skeg" "Give us a look" Steggi in Old Norse is a male goose which is called a (gander) "Steggi, Steg" and also "gander" is give us a look which makes me smile when a plan comes together...
Thanks for this Simon. And please do more. And longer. I frequent another YT channel where the guy does Q&As every week that sometimes run 3 hours! Those of us interested in this stuff can tolerate a LOT of blather. :-D
An alternative to the linking 'r', and which is heard in older speakers of RP, is to pronounce the otherwise silent consonant at the end of the first syllable, such as the 'w' in draw-ing, which does not then require an 'r' sound to connect the two syllables.
Good vid,man. I wish I had followed my interests as you have-but no,I decided to work myself into burnout. You,Langfocus,Jackson Crawford,and others keep my intrest in linguistics alive. Good luck to you and all that you do.
Hi Simon, a question for you if you do another one of these or have time: I’m from Suffolk. When people try to mimic a “broad suffolk” accent they often end up doing West Country instead. Although to me they sound poles apart - are they somehow related even though geographically speaking they are opposite sides of the country? Do you have any insights into the history of the suffolk accent? Thanks in advance if you manage to reply to this.
The linking "r" phenomenon fascinates me and I'm glad you mentioned it. I must confess that my instinctual response to hearing it is as if it is a speech impediment. I had a cousin who at a very young age had some speech difficulties and had therapy to help him. Part of his issue was a linking "r". I know a family whose mother inserts it and her two children do and the children had lots of therapy in their early years to help them with this and other issues. I live in central Missouri in the US. There are a couple other interesting consonant shifts that I pick up from English speakers in the UK that come across to me as impediments rather than a linguistic feature.
Try saying "The India Office" without a linking "r" (and without a linking "y", come to that). You'd have to make a conscious effort not to elide three words into one - in most of the dialects I am familiar with, anyway.
I love your videos ... and how down to earth you are .. honestly goof on ya mate .. keep her goin for us Edit:also me personally finds (and excuse my horrible spelling) paleo anthropology really interesting and it’s partly how I found your channel..
Someone asked when you got interested in linguistics. As soon as I found out that there are other languages in the world it really interested me. I liken this to some people take an interest in music. Language is like music for me. This is why I really like your channel.
I'm from the U.S. in northern Ohio. Most people in my area have a Great Lakes accent. Basically a chicago accent. It's definitely a Rhotic accent. I think I might have heard some linking Rs before from family and neighbors, but it's not a regular feature of our accent. I do however hear plenty of people who will add Ls to the end of some words, like saying "drawl" instead of "draw." Not a regular feature of the accent but it a thing many people do.
That sounds can change in the long term to other places of articulation cleared up a question I had of how the Japanese for mother could have changed from papa to haha.
A few videos on zooarchelogy sound interesting from my point of view as being more chemistry minded. What's your view on how spoken media (TV/film/youtube etc) has changed people's accents and language? Also re: North/South debate, the midlands also exists...
The linking r happens in some but not all non-rhotic accents here in the northeastern US, and seems to be regional. There's a related thing where some folks warsh their dishes, which doesn't correspond to your description of the linking r, but it seems that the people who do one, also do the other.
Howdy Simon! Do you think because we now live in a world that is interconnected digitally it’s possible there won’t be any vowel shifts, or a dramatic change in English over the next few centuries?
Personally, I think the north starts in the northernmost counties of the Midlands. I've always thought there's a perceptible linguistic north / south line between the Brummified accents of south Staffordshire and the more nothern-ised accents of north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. The same applies for the difference between the definitely midlands accents of Leicestershire through into Cambridgeshire, versus the more northernised accents of Derbyshire and the Peak District through to Lincolnshire. I guess that's all subjective though.
Can confirm the alveolar-trill thing. Being a Russian speaker, I've come across a fairly large number of people who substitute the sound with something else, most commonly with /ʁ/ or /ʀ/. According to the statistics, up to 15% of native speakers have trouble producing the correct sound, which seems too much for an impediment, doesn't it?
There's evidence that during native language acquisition, young children actively forget how to produce sounds that are confusingly intermediate between two phonemes of their native language. (ie as well as learning what sounds they should make they learn what sounds they should not make in order to communicate).
Hi Simon, just a quick question. Wulfnoth Cild, the supposed father of Earl Godwin - does the Cild have the usual meaning of "child"? And if so, would this cognomen perhaps indicate that he was young-looking (Like Tolkien's Eorl the Young)?
Some sounds simply differ so greatly from what a speaker has been exposed to in their native language, that they even struggle to hear the difference, let alone make that sound. A great example it th in English for most none English speakers.
Interesting comment about southern Scottish and northern English. I'm a Geordie who has lived in western Canada for over 50 years but remember well an experience I had in Hampshire visiting my Aunty as a child. My younger cousins and I entered a greengrocers to buy an apple. I asked for a threepenny apple, please, which was the usual price in Newcastle for one childish snack. The chap behind the counter looked nonplussed and after a rummage handed me two rather small and shrivelled apples, then took my threepenny bit. As we left the shop I heard two ladies mutter to each other about Scottish. I then realised that my accent must gave mislead the shopkeeper, but I didn't bother to correct anyone there as that would have been deemed cheeky in those days. One threepenny apple in my Geordie accent must have sounded like three hapenny/halfpenny to him. We pronounced the 3d thruppeny then. Coins no longer in circulation of course. Neither hapennies not thrupennies, more's the pity. 😉
Hi... My sister in law comes from Whitley Bay and is happy to be called a Geordie. I asked her what actually does that mean being a Geordie? Is it simply being born in the North East or Newcastle? Or has it something to do with living close to the River Tyne when born? She said it's just being able to say Way aye man?
I'll say I'm definitely here for the linguistics stuff but I think your brand benefits from the fact that people like listening to others speak on things they're knowledgeable and interested in, so I'm willing to bet some zooarchaeology stuff would be well received, I'm definitely interested at least
![Method Writing: The First Four Concepts - Jack Grapes [FULL INTERVIEW]](/img/n.gif)
Simon dear, don’t worry about whether a topic would be interesting. I would watch you reading the York phone book (if there is still one).
same, very chill and informative voice its nice content
Simon has by far the nicest comment section I've ever seen, everyone is always so sweet about providing their experiences and positive feedback and praise of various shirts and nail polish colors and sideburns. Thanks so much for these videos by the way, the phone audio sounds great and the locations and nature footage are always so relaxing.
thats what i was thinking its so wholesome i love it
@Ken H. You should ask yourself what makes you think that
@Ken H. that's a pretty godless outlook
The food related term sweet and the nature related term nice(st) / (n)ice etc only reflect me, and cannot be misused by hum’ns in comments about hum’ns, which are the exact opposite of such terms, and praise is also only meant for me The Goddess etc - it’s also beyond disrespectful to food to misuse any food / plant / flower / nature / other purity terms, and all unsuitable terms must be edited out, and the word ames also cannot be in someone’s name!
I don’t understand how can someone not realise how wrong it is to misuse the word sweet, which is a food term - it implies EDIBILITY aka purity, and such terms cannot be misused in any way by hum’ns in comments! Unless one is saying that he just had an ice cream / dessert and it was sweet or something like that!
if youre studying and passionate about zooarcheology and paleontology itd be great to incorporate them into your channel. im positive itd be well received
Seconding this. I was really impressed by Simon's recent video on animals, his understanding of Britain's natural history is astounding for someone outside the ecology/wildlife biology field.
Im personally very interested in archeology, and would love some more about that~
fourth?-ing this!
Nick Powell Yep yep yep. Simon’s quiet passion makes almost anything interesting.
Dinosaurs are boring. Unless you're a kid, then they're cool.
I am a Scots speaker, and I totally agree with what you say here about the Scots Wikipedia - the kid was honestly trying to contribute in good faith to a resource that was obviously underdeveloped, yes he was bad at it but there was no ill will and I doubt very much there is any real lasting damage either.
Just imagine how much time he sank into translating so many articles, checking each word in the dictionary. That's a huge effort and he should be applauded just for that
Also, it's the nature of the wikipedia beast.
@@jenwombatexcelsior Aye, exactly! When you edit Wikipedia in good faith you do so with the expectation that if you haven't got it quite right the community will improve on your work. It isn't *his* fault there weren't enough other people participating in Scots Wikipedia.
Does he at least consider correcting it now?
@@Istoria-Movy Well I think he now realises he probably can't because he doesn't know the language well enough, so that job probably has to be left to actual Scots speakers. But it's easier to edit something than to write something new so in the long run maybe he's done us a favour by giving us something to fix instead of just a blank page.
This is by far the most comforting channel on UA-cam... thank you Simon, I for one can say that you’ve been one of the better things to come out of 2020!
Thank you! That's a lovely thing to read :)
The nature related term wood and hel cannot be in someone’s name, so all unsuitable names must be changed - only I reflect nature / forest / plant / tree / flower related terms etc and big terms such as Heaven / HeII related terms and royalty / astral / respectability / gemstone / light related terms etc and special / big names, and my protector Chip reflects the HeII as he is the real-life Devil / Reaper and Zeus / Ra, so any term that is or included such terms cannot be in names, while the items that reflect those terms / names are also only meant for me!
I don't know why Simon's channel popped up in my recommendations the other week.. I didn't know I was so interested in anthropology and old language.. *but I simply can't stop watching!* Thankyou! This is truly fascinating stuff.
I knew I was, but still it was a lucky draw (drawr?) that I noticed it among the MSM/Cable/aliens garbage they dump on me.
Yes, the linking "r" shows up in the U.S. in the non-rhotic Boston accent.
Occasionally in Texas we will use drawrer usually older people as opposed to droor which I think most people use
Pahk the cah down by Hahvahd yahd
If these comments are where Simon gets his questions, I'll put one here--or maybe someone else can answer me. I'm referncing the Beatles song "Till There Was You." In the line "No, I never saw them at all," it sounds to me as if Paul McCartney is singing "No, I never sore them at all." This seems like a linking "r," except that the next word doesn't start with a vowel. Is this just the way Sir Paul always pronounced "saw" (at least in his younger years), or is something else going on here?
@@bigscarysteve I always took that lyric to be a cheeky double entendre of 'saw' and 'soar' (it being about birds soaring in the sky, and all)
@@darraghchapman Okay. I suppose that could be it.
Does foot only become fit at the Scottish border? Also as a retired farmer I would watch a video about livestock from a historical point of view!
Until the early 20th century, that and similar pronunciations of 'foot' existed in the north of England, as well :)
Simon, I think you could make any topic interesting to your viewers. Your enthusiasm is infectious.
I would be interested in hearing more about your academic work! Zooarchaeology is a fascinating field, especially in regards to livestock (domestication and economy.)
Where's the shirt from??
Also rip to Simon for working so hard on this amazingly informative video and noo most o' the comments are aboot his shirt 😭😭
I have got to the stage where all my UA-cam suggestions are for Simon Roper :) and I listen to them all, keep up the good Simon :)
Hopefully you still manage to get some variety! Thank you for the kind comment :)
The book "The Wake" made me think of something. Chapter 14 of James Joyce's Ulysses starts with Old English and then progresses through the evolution of the language up to, at that point in time, the modern dialect in Dublin.
What are your general thoughts on that chapter, if you know it? And also, how accurate is it, from a linguistic point of view? After all, it is just an artists impression of this evolution of language.
That would be really interesting. I know Ulysess well but unfortunately not linguistics. I believe Joyce used a contemporary history of English prose of the time and followed it somewhat impressionistically. He wasn't a linguist and was as concerned with the rhythm of the chapter as anything else.
I wish I could remember more but it's definitely been written on academically somewhere if you look in literary studies journals
in addition, I'm curious if you'll do a video on stress and accents, as I've noticed my own accent changes when stressed or upset, sometimes happy, just emotional state and accents.
Who needs Xanax when you can just listen to a bit of Simon? I get really anxious at times but this always manages to soothe my nerves and inform me at the same time.
My relatives in Missouri and Arkansas insert an “r” in the words water (“worter”) and wash (“worsh”), but this must be an unrelated development since the r does not precede a vowel...
Isn't it an intrusive R?
Western Pennsylvania relatives do this.
Hey everyone and welcome to gāæmer meld
This makes me want to watch Sling Blade again
yeah my family in Nebraska says "warshington dc" lol
This dude would go viral if he made gameplays in old english
Ðat would be peak gæmer moment
@@jannes3290 *gæmer
@@jaojao1768 yeah true I'll fix that up
He unfortunately seems to spend all his time reading books
þat whould be peake gæmer momente
In the US, I heard "drawling" a lot as a kid. Not sure if that's related to the linking "r" though, but it IS a liquid in the same spot.
I distinctly remember a girl at my school who said "sawl it" instead of "saw it".
@@alisonjane7068 Yes! "sawl it" is another one I recall too!
A lot of my Appalachian / West Virginian relatives say drawl; I’m not immediately sure of that has more to do with an Appalachian dialect specifically or a more general southern dialect which has influenced Appalachian speech. They also tend to say warsh instead of wash, as well as other iconic Appalachian-isms, like not using any irregular past tense verbs (showed instead of shone, stoled or stolt instead of stolen, blowed instead of blew, or unusual pluralizing (theys, thems, or using is instead of are).
Also worth noting: my Pittsburgh relatives also say warsh and drawl at least some of the time but they are directly related to my Appalachian relatives so I don’t know where those originate.
I hear Drawring and Drawling sometimes too.
I've just started reading The Wake based on this video. I would say that anyone who watches Simon's videos should consider reading it, it really captures how foreign and alien the past is, better than any historical fiction I've read before.
Cool point about humans being anatomically able to produce any language sound (barring speech impediments).
My graduation thesis was about the perception of some English allophones by Brazilians. During my research I came across James E. Flege's Speech Learning Model, which proposes that we cateɡorize language sounds in our minds - a slot for /s/, a slot for /v/, a slot for /i/, for example. When we try to learn an unfamiliar sound we'll place it in the closest sounding "sound slot" if we can't really perceive it as a different sound. We have to "create" a new slot for the new sound to be able to produce it.
For example, /θ/ doesn't exist in Portuɡuese; many people perceive it as /f/, so Brazilians tend to say /f/ whenever we have to say /θ/ when learning English. This is not because we _can't_ say /θ/, but more because most of us just can't hear it as a distinct sound at first. I also used /f/ for /θ/ before I started noticing that they're different sounds. According to Flege's model, I could say, then, that I lumped /f/ and /θ/ together in the same category at first, then eventually developed a new category for /θ/.
There are probably some flaws with Flege's model, but I think it's a nice way to think about why it can be so hard for us to produce unfamiliar sounds (as adults) - it's more about perceiving the sounds and becoming used to them.
Love your content, Simon. Keep doing what you're doing... I can't stop binge-watching your channel!
Love your videos mate! Regarding your "rambling", it's always a nice path to follow the weft and warp of your thoughts while you explain the topic of that video to us. Thanks again 👍
I would definitely be interested in videos on anthropology and your research
Hi from Spain! I may be entirely wrong, but regarding sound change, I believe that now that we live in a globalized society, where we can watch tv in any language we want, stream programs, watch youtube videos and travel around the world, besides the fact that most of the first and even second world countries have easy access to the internet, language change, in terms of varieties, will slow down somewhat. Not stop, but definitely, slow down in time.
In Britain you watch many American films and shows, in Hollywood we have many brilliant British, Australian actors (and from other parts of the English-speaking world, as well). The present day lingua franca is now English, so there is a huge crossover, and whereas when I was a child (I'm 58), British English was perceived by Americans as sounding too posh and over the top, present-day Americans now love *any* British accent, whether they understand it or not, ha! When my Spanish mother, as a 14-year-old, started to study English by choice, here in Seville, Spain, at the British Institute, which back then, belonged to the British government, by the time she met my American dad when she was 18, he would pull her leg, implying she sounded too posh. Of course, at that time, only posh RP was taught (this was in the late 50s-early 60s). In addition to that, despite being a teacher of English as a foreign language, I have never, ever in my life seen or heard (her 4 language skills were impeccable) anyone with such perfect English. It's not because she was my mother. It's because it was true. In fact, all the Americans who she came into contact with when she started working as a personal assistant to the American military Head of Education on base truly believed she was British (we have a Spanish-U.S. Air Force base close by where she worked when she was young, and that was where she met my father). Of course, after being married to him for about 36 years until his untimely death, in addition to travelling around the world, and always being in contact with Americans, her British English became more americanized, though you could always hear that hint of RP in it, and curiously with no trace of a Spanish accent. Her relationship with the English language was love at first sight (hearing????). Many Americans would joke around with her in her late years saying, "Ma'am, you speak much better English than we do." And back when she started, in Spain, people would study French, not English.
However, now, with all these crossovers in the media, on social networks, on TV (she loved to watch movies in the original version based on Jane Austen's books, and read them. She adored Shakespeare). Basically, more and more people are communicating in English, and now you find Americans pronouncing "either" with the British diphthong, and you hear British people saying "gonna." So, my impression is that in the long run, even if there will always be regional variations and new things cropping up, little by little, while English is as widely spoken as it is today, many native national dialects or variations of English will slowly begin to merge into a less diverse variety of the language (that doesn't mean we won't borrow words from other languages, though).
Politics, in addition to music, acting, etc., is always important. As long as all English-speaking nations are allies and for a very long time, I don't believe each national standard of the same language will differ as much as they used to. But that's just my opinion...
Oh, and let's not forget the internet and technology. If for whatever reason, something massive and permanent happened to our modern day telecommunications systems, that would set us back by centuries, and then, perhaps, language evolution would speed up again.
I think one of the things to consider with the "predictability" of sound movement is that historically we can often know or at least assume a starting point and an end point for a sound, based on that it becomes more obvious where the sound transitioned through in different periods of time inbetween. If we look at the future we can only know the starting point, but there is no endpoint for us to draw a line to.
Hi Simon, just wanted to say how much I truly enjoy your videos and to thank you for taking the time to make them, I always come away having learnt something new and exciting. Also, as a modern German learner, your videos on old English help me bridge a mental gap between German and English like no textbook could teach.
In fact, in response to talking about the difficulty in predicting language feature shift before it happens - in the past century and a bit, we've gained access to increasingly high-quality recordings of everyday speech, and it has highlighted another problem that I'm not certain people were fully sold on before they heard it.
A feature of a language can move in one 'direction', as you put it - but because this doesn't happen in all speakers at all times in all contexts at once (yes, I needed to specify all of those things, because they all individually affect the language a person uses in different ways), it's completely possible (and I think now we have documentary evidence that it does - and has - happen-s-ed; I cannot remember where or when I read about it, though, and I can't afford journal subscriptions at the moment) that the same feature can then 'change course' and move in a different 'direction' - including right back the way it came, and in fact sometimes it's more likely to do so, because remnants of the older dominant realisation of that feature will remain in different contexts. If the earlier realisation remains in more contexts than any single new realisation develops in, it's got a decent chance of becoming the pattern for the next wave of feature drift. So what you _can_ get is a sort of wobbling, back-and-forth movement of language between these two featural loci, where the total _net_ movement between them is ultimately what drives long-term language change.
I think.
Again, I have no current access to journals, and may have remembered something completely different and just slapped it up here because it _sounds_ right. But I _think_ that holds some water. Sorry I can't be more accurate.
I like the sensitive way you dealt with the question about the person who penned much of Scots Wikipedia. I've been studying Scots recently and my teacher is one of the people who has galvanized editors to correct the content. My latest video is about Scots, and includes a TV interview that starts in Old English. Costume design for my Angle migrant is a nod to Baldrick.
I would love to know your thoughts on Australian English Simon...
Likewise. I hear more Scottish influence in South Australia compared to the East, even though Eastern States people & foreigners say we sound 'more English'.The Northern Territory & Nth Qld have a drawl, but very different to Southern US.
@@helenahandkart1857 exactly... not only is the accent different the nomenclature is different between states...
English... but what happens to it when the population is perpetually pissed for 2 centuries
@@MrLeemo176 I'm Australian, but this cracked me up! 🍻
@@MrLeemo176 Whereas English-English is what it sounds like when a population is pissed for about 1500 years. :)
Where do I go to sign the petition for Simon to narrate "The Wake" audiobook? Surely this needs to happen?
impeccable sideburns today simon, id give it a 9.6/10
in linguistics "predictable" usually refers to a change governed by a well established rule
I have long been amazed at the cliff edge change of accent/ dialect when leaving the outskirts of Carlisle and reaching Annan.
Crossing the river seems to be it! Klonk. The switch is thrown. From an unmistakable Scottish accent it instantly becomes English with a local accent.
I first recognised that in the mid 60s. No gradual change.... just as I said before..Klonk! It's changed... I'm not familiar with the East so I have no idea. Maybe it does that there as well?
Maybe half across is the same? But Carlisle ...no mistaking it at all!
Simon ...Great series. How you manage to learn this subject, at this level and yet cope with
your main subject of study is impressive nay, astounding.
Thank you!
When you do what you love it's no bother at all, I think.
I want to hear more about your research! One guy in my cohort wrote his master’s thesis on something similar. It was about XRF analysis and the different artiodactyls represented in archaeological sites in the Pacific Northwest, mainly pronghorn, mule deer, mountain goats, and elk (wapiti, I suppose you’d call them). It was, in my opinion, the coolest thesis topic in our cohort.
As someone studying anthropology and history I love your videos, thanks Simon!
I'm going to add some nuance to the discussion of discriminating between sounds and learning to reproduce them. Various circuits in the brain don't "mature" at the same time (or, more accurately, there are windows in time where particular synaptic connections are highly plastic and they don't occur at the same time for all the neurons throughout the brain). There are critical periods during development during which certain auditory processing tasks are more easily learned. You can learn them as an adult but it's certainly more difficult. So while it's true that children have an incentive to learn language quickly as a matter of survival, there are deep biological mechanisms that gives children a huge advantage.
Neuroplasticity & then synaptic pruning. I'm guessing the late adolescent pruning process has a part in making it trickier at later stages.
@@helenahandkart1857 There are still some regions of the brain that are quite plastic during adolescence. This sometimes surprises people, but circuits in the prefrontal cortex involved in attentiveness are a great example of this. So to better acquire a language in adolescence one could harness these other aspects of language learning.
The synaptic pruning thing is interesting because it's thought to occur at most developmental stages (often during sleep). In fact, insufficient loss or pruning of synapses is maladaptive. Mice that genetically model conditions like autism or tuberous sclerosis often have more dendritic spines in certain types of neurons. These conditions notably result in difficulties in speech and communication in humans. Although there's still a lot left to be learned in this field. But in principle too little or too much plasticity can result in difficulties in auditory learning.
@@eigenvectornormalized8843 Thanks for all this info. It's such a fascinating area. Even the adult brain is far more adaptive that people at first thought. Over synaptic pruning in adolescence is implicated in Schizophreniform mental ilnesses, which are also statistically somewhat correlated (not enough to be causative) with childhood autism spectrum symptoms. In supportive environments both can often soften in impact over time as people assimilate more 'normalcy' behaviourally, just from exposure to other people.
I would listen to you ramble anytime Simon! And I’d be very interested to hear about stable isotope analysis.
Yes. The shirt is especially quality. Agreed.
One thing you said was that vowels change their sound slowly. Can you explain how this fits with the Great Vowel Shift? BTW, I like your shirt, too, like someone else mentioned. Make sure to buy lots so you can wear them when you're old and gray. 😝
Imo I think 'Estuary English' has happened relatively quickly because some people (within one generation of people) consciously tried to emulate it to sound more approachable or on trend etc. The exposure to its use in the media may also have expediated its use.
6:45 That makes sense. I'd visited the Scots wikipedia once or twice out of curiosity (more interested in Gaelic personally, since that's the side my family's from, but everyone's got their own attachments)
Honestly - coming from someone who's studied Gaelic? And several other resource-poor minority languages? (Gaelic at least is better on that front nowadays)
At least the non-representative and inaccurate language was a good-faith effort made by someone honestly trying to help, and distributed for free. Sometimes people throw a load of garbage in a book, take it to a publisher that doesn't know any better (and doesn't bother to check) and sell it. Sometimes internationally (in fact, _often_ internationally - that's where they're least likely to get their work discovered by native speakers and shitlisted for being useless).
And even _that_ , as much as it pains me to say it, is better than nothing, because at least people usually make a _token_ effort to include real language, even if they have no idea what any of it actually means. So sometimes people seek out and buy the garbage anyway, because if there are only ten books published on a language, they are all top-ten resources by default.
I would absolutely be interested in a video on stable isotope analysis. I'm up for anything that uses a mass spectrometer.
I am American, and interested in the relationship between geographies, climate changes, demographic migration in word pronunciation. I once heard a BBC documentary speak about how living on the windy northern seacoast creates a tighter mouth shape, and what population movements happened in the UK during 1300 to 1600? Thanks for the regional videos.
This guy is one of the more interesting people on youtube. A lot of us English speakers have questions about where our language came from, how it developed. He gives us a taste of that.
Always enjoy your vids, Simon.
I fully agree that it's exceedingly difficult to predict how words will be pronounced in the future, or indeed what those words and grammar might be. However, I do believe that spelling will become more like the word is spoken: team > teem; night > nite; laugh > laff; etc. while a lot of us look down at misspells like that, they are more simple and more correct phonetically. There's another thing: ph drifts to f. Why? Why not? It's easier to remember.
So thing that I'm getting more and more aggressive about is the regularization of verbs. Simple and easy changes, and arguably way easier to remember. The past tense of swim goes from swam to swimmed; drawn becomes drawed; and so on. It looks stilted and awful, but, verb regularization has been going on for a long time and will continue to happen.
We as humans have a lot of things to remember in our increasingly complex world. Maybe regularization and general simplification is the way to go.
Voice is genetic and each nation has a different voice, and the voice of a nation impacts how a language is spooken even by foreigners for they not only mimic the langauge they mimic the voice.
You make these complex, interesting topics so much easier to understand, thank you!
Simon, I would answer that in the US (at least outside New England) we don’t insert the r in words like drawing, firstly because our formation of “draw” is less rounded than the southern UK pronunciation you have. The other part seems to be a bit of a slide into the “ing” (rather than a glottal stop).
I still think it would be fun to have a pint or two and discuss things as diverse as French influence on English culture, to thatched roofs, to accents in England that denote a person's income and area of origin.
A go-fund-me for Simon's beer fund'd be a noble thing!
Helena Handkart we could yet prove there is such a thing as free beer..
For Simon at least.
yes! linking r's is a big thing in the boston accent, which is pretty famous for dropping r's, but I always tell people that's not true, we drop the r's that should be there and add them where they shouldn't be. So, Drawring, and "i sawr it." It's one of the accent features that people without a strong regional accent generally still have. I don't do it, because I had a speech impediment and couldn't say my R's til I was older and so I'm more aware of them, but everybody else around here does. Also I lived in philly the last two years and they seem to do the same thing with the L sound, a lot of people say "I saul it."
Personally I like any video of yours in which you discuss something you’re passionate about. So a video on Zoology would be very interesting to me if thats what you’re doing your dissertation on
Thank you for your channel, most interesting, slowly working my way through your broadcasts. I grew up in Portsmouth, it wasn't until I was about ten ten that my father explained that I could not pronounce pint but would always say point. Oh, and there is definitely no letter t pronounced in Pompey speak, just a minor pause. Later in life when I started working in Winchester, only 25 miles away, colleagues asked me if I came from London as my accent was unknown to them.
Simon, what’s your opinion about the phenomenon of dialects in general? What do you think about the ‘Chinese case’ where the dialects turn into separate languages that are not mutually intelligible anymore?
Archeological info is really cool, too! Bring on the archeology videos!
I would love to see videos about the minute details of ancient life.
I have no idea how I’ve ended up watching this but I’m not complaining! Very interesting and you have a lovely way of explaining things, thank you 😊
In Spanish it's fairly common for children to not acquire the alveolar trill /r/ until 4 or 5 years old. My sibling in particular had trouble with it (to some extent) until around 7 or 8.
3:00 ff - there's another thing to be considered nowadays: writing. languages don't change any more in the same way since writing is really common - which is merely some 100 years
With the Scottish/northern English accent similarities. I’m 30 and from County Durham, I did a distance learning degree from a London university, with my study group being in Scotland. Anyway, my first trip to the London site for the interview, without being assigned to the Scotland group yet, several people assumed I was Scottish based on my accent, and once on the course, every time my study group met with the southern England group (in Derbyshire), I was assumed to be Scottish based on linguistically being far closer than it was to middle and southern English. I often had to work as a translator in the pub on those meetings for the Scots from Glasgow and above.
As for where the North starts, there’s a city called Middlesbrough, I always joke (kinda) that it’s the Middle of Britain and anything below is southern
Yes, some videos, or a lot of videos, concerning your studies would be great. The details of daily life are crucial to understanding the past and to understanding the present. Otherwise, we are all the same and differences are unacceptable, as a particular political party and current 'movement' would have us believe. A very enjoyable video. Having grown well into adulthood before social media, I have to admit group curiosity while listening to Led Zeppelin as to why Robert Plant kept putting an 'r' at the end of words clearly without one, like "draw"..."drawr", at the time, seemed strange. Though, I can't recall the song at the moment.
The linking R shows up in some US non-rhotic accents. My aunt had a very coastal Southern accent, she said “drawing” more like y’all do than like most USGE or even SVA speakers do. However, outside the coastal south (and even there, probably concentrated among older speakers), even non-rhotic SVA speakers tend not to show linking Rs for whatever reason.
Another question. Is there evidence that the put-putt merger in Northern England is linked to the Viking invasions? Or is that just a legend? I believe most of the Viking incursions on the island of Great Britain were in Northern England? (apologies if you have already covered this, I haven't seen all your videos yet.)
Excellent question! The situation with 'put' and 'putt' is actually down to a split in southern English, not a merger in northern English. Words like 'run', 'gun' and 'duck' were pronounced with the same vowel as 'put' in most dialects of English until the early modern period.
As for what caused the split, it's not completely clear - it's often very hard to isolate causes of sound changes :)
Future Q&A: What do you think about how Game of Thrones deals with languages, if you have watched or read it?
Are there any conlangs you find especially interesting?
It is quite unrelistic that a huge continent like Westeros would have one main language with little difference in dialects, especially as (from what I've read on the worldbuilding, I haven't actually read the books) it was settled over a period of millennia
Sir Jaojao well it’s based off of Early Modern England, and it represents what happened there, if rather more dramatically on Westeros. You had various groups coming in at various times each with their own very much distinct languages, but after several centuries they developed a common vernacular with regional dialects (as Celtic, Latin, Anglo-Saxon, Norse, and Norman French came together to form English). I have many other disagreements with GOT world building but the Common Tongue is plausible.
What is much less plausible is that the Targaryen rulers wouldn’t have made Valyrian the court language in the way the Normans did with Norman French, and that the Wildings don’t have a different language like the contrast between Early Modern English and Scots, which is what would make more genealogical or at least ethnographical sense. But then, it’s a TV show, I don’t know if that’s represented in the books or not.
@@rmcewan10 I can see the England argument, but Martin portrays Westeros as a much larger country than England (I think he mentioned once that it is about the size of South America!), and has also been settled for much longer (supposedly the Andals came over several thousand years ago) which would mean dialects would have diverged
Sir Jaojao oh right then in that case definitely. I still don’t think it’s inconceivable that there would be a lingua franca across the whole continent, but it’s unlikely they would all be speaking the same native language
Love the 70’s Haircut
thanks for posting! Love your videos.
13:30 minutes in you mention Leicester. I was born, raised, and currently live in Leicester. My father was a strong accented Geordie, my mother and most of the other relatives I encountered most were from around Leicestershire. I have travelled quite a lot with various work and met people from all over the country, talking with all sorts of accents. I have been fascinated by accents for years and have managed to avoid speaking with a Leicester accent. I often say that there is no such thing as a Leicester accent, it is in fact a speech defect. My accent has been somewhat flexible when I have worked in one place for a few months or more, often to avoid rather than mimic certain aspects of the accent(s) to which I was exposed. I remember been shocked by my own accent when I once asked for a bacon 'saahhndwidge' one day when working in Essex, ever since then I've paid a lot closer notice to what I allow myself to pick up. I lived in Glasgow for six months without picking up much at all, but a month of sharing a house with two Glaswegians while working seven days a week with many more saw me become fluent in Glaswegian. Twenty-five years later I still sometimes come out with bits of Glaswegian.
The accents around the area where Leicestershire, Derbyshire, and Nottingham meet up are among the most incomprehensible accents in the country, on a par with those of Barrow-in-Furness, and other parts of Cumbria. In the city areas strong local accents seem to be in decline due to high numbers of outside influences, but from the suburbs out accents seem to survive better, perhaps that goes for many places?
don't you mean Lestaaah. I used to work in Hinkleh, it was weird!
I’ve noticed anecdotally that historically recent Gaelic speaking areas in North Western Scotland seem to have a Scottish accent that is ‘lighter’ than more Southern historically Doric (or other Scots dialect) speaking areas for example. Their Scottish accent appears to be less influenced by Scots and better described as Scottish English. My understanding is that this is because a lot of the traders into these remote areas, as well as teachers and missionaries trying to steer the locals away from Gaelic and away from Catholicism, were English, and so many locals learnt ‘English English’ as a second language rather than Scots, but I don’t know how accurate that is. I know there are certainly some Gaelic speaking areas where Doric was a heavy influence too.
In the U.S. Southeast, we don't usually stick an r in between syllables, but we do pronounce a w that is at the end of a syllable, as in "drahw-ing".
Id say the North starts at the Humber, its a natural barrier to the yellow bellies in Lincolnshire haha, but the language that runs up the east coast is unique as no one wanted to go there and no one there wanted to leave. Ill leave Simon a little bit of dialect which i really like from where i am. Skeg means look where im from, "giz a skeg" "Give us a look" Steggi in Old Norse is a male goose which is called a (gander) "Steggi, Steg" and also "gander" is give us a look which makes me smile when a plan comes together...
Thanks for this Simon. And please do more. And longer. I frequent another YT channel where the guy does Q&As every week that sometimes run 3 hours! Those of us interested in this stuff can tolerate a LOT of blather. :-D
An alternative to the linking 'r', and which is heard in older speakers of RP, is to pronounce the otherwise silent consonant at the end of the first syllable, such as the 'w' in draw-ing, which does not then require an 'r' sound to connect the two syllables.
Good vid,man. I wish I had followed my interests as you have-but no,I decided to work myself into burnout. You,Langfocus,Jackson Crawford,and others keep my intrest in linguistics alive. Good luck to you and all that you do.
Your voice is very soft & relaxing, makes me sleepy 😊
Hi Simon, a question for you if you do another one of these or have time:
I’m from Suffolk. When people try to mimic a “broad suffolk” accent they often end up doing West Country instead. Although to me they sound poles apart - are they somehow related even though geographically speaking they are opposite sides of the country?
Do you have any insights into the history of the suffolk accent?
Thanks in advance if you manage to reply to this.
+1 vote for more paleoanthropology on the channel please!
Also, 'North' is anything above the M4 😂
The linking "r" phenomenon fascinates me and I'm glad you mentioned it. I must confess that my instinctual response to hearing it is as if it is a speech impediment. I had a cousin who at a very young age had some speech difficulties and had therapy to help him. Part of his issue was a linking "r". I know a family whose mother inserts it and her two children do and the children had lots of therapy in their early years to help them with this and other issues. I live in central Missouri in the US. There are a couple other interesting consonant shifts that I pick up from English speakers in the UK that come across to me as impediments rather than a linguistic feature.
Try saying "The India Office" without a linking "r" (and without a linking "y", come to that). You'd have to make a conscious effort not to elide three words into one - in most of the dialects I am familiar with, anyway.
I love your videos ... and how down to earth you are .. honestly goof on ya mate .. keep her goin for us
Edit:also me personally finds (and excuse my horrible spelling) paleo anthropology really interesting and it’s partly how I found your channel..
What do you think about JRR Tolkien's impact on the perception of Old English?
Someone asked when you got interested in linguistics. As soon as I found out that there are other languages in the world it really interested me. I liken this to some people take an interest in music. Language is like music for me. This is why I really like your channel.
I'm from the U.S. in northern Ohio. Most people in my area have a Great Lakes accent. Basically a chicago accent. It's definitely a Rhotic accent. I think I might have heard some linking Rs before from family and neighbors, but it's not a regular feature of our accent. I do however hear plenty of people who will add Ls to the end of some words, like saying "drawl" instead of "draw." Not a regular feature of the accent but it a thing many people do.
That sounds can change in the long term to other places of articulation cleared up a question I had of how the Japanese for mother could have changed from papa to haha.
A few videos on zooarchelogy sound interesting from my point of view as being more chemistry minded.
What's your view on how spoken media (TV/film/youtube etc) has changed people's accents and language?
Also re: North/South debate, the midlands also exists...
The linking r happens in some but not all non-rhotic accents here in the northeastern US, and seems to be regional. There's a related thing where some folks warsh their dishes, which doesn't correspond to your description of the linking r, but it seems that the people who do one, also do the other.
Howdy Simon! Do you think because we now live in a world that is interconnected digitally it’s possible there won’t be any vowel shifts, or a dramatic change in English over the next few centuries?
Personally, I think the north starts in the northernmost counties of the Midlands. I've always thought there's a perceptible linguistic north / south line between the Brummified accents of south Staffordshire and the more nothern-ised accents of north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. The same applies for the difference between the definitely midlands accents of Leicestershire through into Cambridgeshire, versus the more northernised accents of Derbyshire and the Peak District through to Lincolnshire. I guess that's all subjective though.
I notice that President Trump (NY, Queens) says "law and order", not "law rand orde(r)" as do most southern English people.
Thanks for posting this for us today! Also, I do not know why your sudden looking up and saying "Train, hold on" made me laugh, but it did.
Can confirm the alveolar-trill thing. Being a Russian speaker, I've come across a fairly large number of people who substitute the sound with something else, most commonly with /ʁ/ or /ʀ/. According to the statistics, up to 15% of native speakers have trouble producing the correct sound, which seems too much for an impediment, doesn't it?
There's evidence that during native language acquisition, young children actively forget how to produce sounds that are confusingly intermediate between two phonemes of their native language. (ie as well as learning what sounds they should make they learn what sounds they should not make in order to communicate).
Have you read Riddley Walker? It's a book written using some approximation of future-english.
I'm from Massachusetts, USA, and our Eastern New England/Boston accent has the linking r as well.
Hi Simon, just a quick question. Wulfnoth Cild, the supposed father of Earl Godwin - does the Cild have the usual meaning of "child"? And if so, would this cognomen perhaps indicate that he was young-looking (Like Tolkien's Eorl the Young)?
Love this! I'd love to hear you talk about archaeology too!
I enjoy your videos. This is the second shirt of yours I have found extremely stylish to the point that I want one myself!
I have heard people from Bewick on. Tweed, who possess both Scottish and English sounds in their dialect.
Some sounds simply differ so greatly from what a speaker has been exposed to in their native language, that they even struggle to hear the difference, let alone make that sound. A great example it th in English for most none English speakers.
I'd be interested in more Paleo anthropology. I liked your livestock video
Interesting comment about southern Scottish and northern English. I'm a Geordie who has lived in western Canada for over 50 years but remember well an experience I had in Hampshire visiting my Aunty as a child. My younger cousins and I entered a greengrocers to buy an apple. I asked for a threepenny apple, please, which was the usual price in Newcastle for one childish snack. The chap behind the counter looked nonplussed and after a rummage handed me two rather small and shrivelled apples, then took my threepenny bit. As we left the shop I heard two ladies mutter to each other about Scottish. I then realised that my accent must gave mislead the shopkeeper, but I didn't bother to correct anyone there as that would have been deemed cheeky in those days. One threepenny apple in my Geordie accent must have sounded like three hapenny/halfpenny to him. We pronounced the 3d thruppeny then. Coins no longer in circulation of course. Neither hapennies not thrupennies, more's the pity. 😉
Hi... My sister in law comes from Whitley Bay and is happy to be called a Geordie. I asked her what actually does that mean being a Geordie? Is it simply being born in the North East or Newcastle? Or has it something to do with living close to the River Tyne when born? She said it's just being able to say Way aye man?
I'll say I'm definitely here for the linguistics stuff but I think your brand benefits from the fact that people like listening to others speak on things they're knowledgeable and interested in, so I'm willing to bet some zooarchaeology stuff would be well received, I'm definitely interested at least
Thanks for putting this together Simon, very interesting
I would love to see the video about Louisiana accents. I’m from Louisiana.
Can you speak Louisiana French?
@@GullibleTarget yes
I would be very interested in you discussing your discretion topics on here or maybe linking to a pdf!