What's always fun about Icelandic is that we can read 1000 year old sagas and still understand the majority of it with relative ease. We're really damn good at preserving the language.
But phonologically your language has changed alot from that time. So spoken Old west Norse would have been more difficult for an Icelander to understand.
Also that Iceland had low population and great population stability, sure the phonology was influenced by middel Irish but it has been politucally stable and most people living in very specific areas, also Iceland avoided the plague, which caused instability, instability leads to more change in language, it was partly because of the plague that continental North Germanic variants more diverged and changed from Old Norse. Likse wise more contact with other people. many Low Germans settled in Scandinavia and influenced the speech there.
SolviKaaber well is something similar with spanish (once I downloaded a book from 1200 and I could understand it), English, at the other hand, has changed so much that no-one, without some kind of training of some sort, can even read nor pronounce and much less understand english 200 years older than Shakespeare. that's how MUCH it has evolved. (reading early-11th century spanish is somehow like reading Shakespeare for an english speaker)
a big reason why Norwegian is so separated from Old Norse today (unlike Icelandic) is mostly due to outside influence: tradings with Germany (there is a *lot* of German influence in Norwegian), being ruled by Denmark, various border shiftings with Sweden, etc etc. Iceland, by comparison, has remained fairly isolated.
There,s been very,very little immigration to Iceland since the end of the 11th Century.So,almost all of the native Icelanders are descendants of Norse,with just a tiny admixture of Irish.Being mostly isolated for the most part probably did help Icelander to stay very,very close to it,s Old Norse origin,friends.
@@derlinclaire1778 actually many settlers and slaves came or brought from the British and Irish islands. Therefore, the DNA of Icelanders is is a mix of those groups mixed with Norwegian settlers while the Norwegians have slightly more impact on Icelandic DNA.
Yes, I totally agree. Contact with other "peoples" increases the influence/change in a language. For example, I have noticed, the closest Scandinavian country(Denmark) to Rome, the GREATEST the change in the language compared to the country(Iceland) that is the farthest from Rome. P.S. I speak Icelandic( or 8th Century Norwegian) & I am "aquiring" Danish. Gleðileg jól !( Icelandic) glædelig jul !(Danish) Shame they're not mutually intelligible. Merry Christmas!🎄
I think that written media, movies and politics can also slow language change. Greek student are taught Ancient Greek and much of modern Greek was also injected with ancient words. During my time in school I had to read old texts and understand them. I watch old movies, listen to songs sang over 100 years ago. Sometimes we imitate old accent and vocabulary for an effect. Our language is also codified by law which is super resistive to change. So schools are basically teaching 200 years old version of our language. This must be slowing the process of change.
@PetrosB4 oh, no, I didn't mean that. I'm saying that standard Italian is basically the language spoken by the Tuscanian elite in 1300, and many Italians who spoke their own different languages (that were and are called dialects. And think about that, because even MALTESE (a Semitic language, like Arabic, by the way) was, or maybe is, I don't know, thought to be an "Italian dialect" by most) were forced to learn it and forget their native tongue. However, we also study Latin (and in some schools Greek too) and we have to translate things written millennia ago.
Writing doesn't necessarily entail a certain degree of standardisation; that generally only develops after you already have a thriving literary community. No, the main thing writing does is record the language of the past. As an English person, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens were common on my syllabus and it is expected of educated people to have read many "classic" novels, all of which are 200 or so years old. Writing allows us to be in regular communication with someone who speaks the language as it was 200 years ago and, as our language reflects that that we hear (or read), it acts as a constant force trying to bring language back to the state it was in in the past. This is something that is completely impossible without writing as even someone whose own speech has hardly changed since their birth will die after 100 years or so at most.
From what I've read of Chinese linguistics, Chinese has gone through ridiculous amounts of sound changes in the last 2000-3000 years, even more than Latin to French. The major changes all seem to coincide with foreign invasions and other social upheaval. The fact that Chinese has been written for at least 4000 years clearly didn't help.
I would give a counter example to that: American English And yes, I'm serious here. If you do something as simple as simply go back to films and *recordings* of speakers of the English language in the 1940's and 1930's, there are some pretty noticeable difference. Go back to the 1780's to look at stuff written by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, it is really quite difficult to even read. Yes, you can recognized the words for the most part, but key words have even substantially changed their meaning. If you actually heard the way it was spoken at the time, you might not even really understand without concentrating or spending considerable time getting use to the speech patterns. The infusion of technology and mixing of cultural ideas from around the world via the internet is actually making English something I would argue is one of the fastest changing languages right now and a fair bit different from even when I was a child (a few decades ago). Words and concepts that would be alien to speakers from the 1970's or 1980's are now in common usage. It isn't so cut and dried to make such a bold statement like this. I'm giving an example of a language that has a broad written library by a huge population. The truth is for at least English, the dictionary creators are struggling to keep up with the shifts of the language and to simply keep track of new words that have been coined and put into common usage and substantial changes in the meanings of the words. Simple words like "faggot", "gay", "thong", and I'm sure you could come up with a bunch more had a substantially different meaning a hundred years ago. I know this is also happening for other common European languages as well. Icelandic may not have changed much from Old Norse for centuries (noted in the video), but I bet it is changing a whole lot right now.
my native language will probably be undergoing an evolution in the near future. I am a first nations in BC and we are trying to bring our language back. it will obviously not sound the same compared to when our elders speak/spoke it. it will probably be considered "modernised". but whatever. as long as we bring back some sort of version of our language, it's a lot better than no language at all. we were pretty lucky that a Dutch linguist came and learned how our language worked and gave us a written form. I've read a good quote from somewhere. "I want to know my language, so I can communicate with my ancestors after I die." something along those lines anyways.
@@derrbarn14 i love the salish languages! im glad you're bringing it back, it honestly makes me cry sometimes thinking about thousands of years of history, people, stories, lives gone because the language is gone.
Or you just keep your language close (if not identical) to the one that your ancestors spoke, in just the same way, the Icelandic language did. By the way, would your language's modern version due to the change have actually more of those SAE features (both the 9 core and the less common features) ua-cam.com/video/iwCfFrskwpk/v-deo.html than the older/original version of it has/had? Máár hoezo ontwikkelt u geen eigen scriptie vóór uw talen? En hoe heet eigenlijk deze Nederlandse linguïst?
My native tongue, Tagalog, has changed so much in recent times. So much so that it had actually been hard work for me to read even a 1940s novel for school. The probable reason is colonization. Almost half of vulgar Tagalog vocabulary is Spanish in origin, while English loan words have come to replace many Tagalog nouns. In reaction to the influence of colonization, Tagalog was standardized in the 60s during which dated Old Tagalog diction was brought back to popularity to replace English and Spanish loan words. Globalization and media, however, has partially reversed the effects of these efforts with a new wave of rapid adaptation of English loan words.
Namamatay na nga talaga ang wikang Pilipino. (Oo, ibig sabihin lang nito na sinasabi kong hindi ebolusyon ang Taglish---kailanma'y hindi magiging angkop ang Taglish sa anumang literatura o pagpapaggawa muli ng pamantayan)
Dr. Zamenhof: invents Esperanto Speaker: Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton? *1 thousand years later* Speaker: Thu bhi faerulus Asburentan? Dr. Zamenhof: what language was that? *5 thousand years later* Speaker: Ghju vhai bejllaris Esbjelandho? Dr. Zamenhof: This is so aliening... *20 thousand years later* Speaker: Dsahu tjavhi veraureux Jexzelreno? Dr. Zamenhof: This sounds like a tongue from Alpha Centauri...
@@ValkyRiver This is VERY slow rate of language change, esp. between 2K and 20K. It's basically just sound changes along the whole timeline. Highly unrealistic. My proposals: **200 years later** - Esperanto quickly optimizes itself once it becomes the first language for a population: Speaker: Faerulus Asburentan? **2K years later** - Western civilization falls. Eritrean empire rises, then falls. Imperial Eritrean is a daughter language of Tigrinya, and there are numerous ImpEr-based creoles, including Šfereńńa: Speaker: Šfereńńa vërëždo? **20K years later** - [DATA EXPUNGED], but trust me that "Žnwi" comes from "-reńńa" via sound changes and it's the only morpheme that survives to any degree, but linguists don't know that, because Žnwi has been extinct for thousands of years, having been an isolate for thousands of years before that. Scholar: Rgats-gats Žnwi rüg wömp?
I think this prediction fails to account for standardization. Languages are changing more slowly now due to standardized grammar/spelling, and educational institutions that make sure everyone learns the same language. We can even see this in English, it's possible for us to read a 500 year old text like Shakespeare, but 1500s English speakers could not have read Beowulf in its original Old English, so I believe going forward it will take much longer for English to be unintelligible to us. Still an awesome video that gave me perspective.
English went through a period of very rapid change around the Norman Conquest (so much so that there is significant debate about the extent to which English is a simple daughter of Old English, or whether it was partially creolised by Old French and the previous Norse influence) so trying to draw comparisons across that isn't very helpful. Chaucer and Pepys are spaced roughly equally and Pepys' writing is about as similar to our own as his to Chaucer's. The standardisation you talk about is only very recent because it only works if everyone is formally educated in the standard you come up with, something that only took off in the late 19th century. It may be true that standardisation will slow the evolution of English in the future, but I'd wager that the vastly increased numbers of speakers, and the volume of communication allowed by the internet will more than cancel that out
Hard to say. Shakespeare was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, and there are definitely some portions of those plays which, if said in the original, would be almost incomprehensible to us. On the other hand, compare Shakespeare to Chaucer, only about 200 years earlier...Chaucer's pronunciations are drastically different.
There are still changes caused by language contact. Adstrates are nowadays more common than ever. Also just because orthography doesn't change doesn't mean semantics don't. Try to explain to someone from 100 years ago why we 'crank down' windows in our car. There's no cranking anymore. We just push a button.
ZorroVulpes on the contrary, I think the internet will have a huge effect on the language within the next century. New words and constructions are created almost constantly, some becoming codified into the official language.
I still say "steam shovel" and "steamroller" even though they obviously aren't steam-powered anymore. (Mainly because I read Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and watched a lot of '30s cartoons as a kid; also "steam shovel" just sounds better than "power shovel".)
In basque some tools' names are formed with the root "aitz" which means "stone, rock" like "aizkora" (axe), azkona (arrow), haitzurra (hoe), aiztoa (knife). So some say those words come from the stone age
Robert Andersson, Without us down here in Scania, you wouldn't have a language. Damn Thieves. You Goths and Swear are the worst kind of people, however we only stay because of our relatives in the Gut, and also we pretty much like the Dalecarlians, the people up north well they are kind so we won't conquer them later on, but one day Stockholm shall fall, mark my word, Swear shitblood. Mark my word. Super Fluffy Ninja Dog, I agree Danish is a mistake, at least modern Danish is, I mean I live next to them and they are still unintelligible, It almost feels like if I was a Czech and had to speak with a Magyar. And the Danes are my closest relatives, but we Scanians shall not give up, we need to usurp the usurper nation of Svitjod, and bring salvation to these lands, and one day in the future, we the first Scandinavians will rule once more. For fucks sake the whole area is named after us. Down with the tainted blood of Swear, down with the false tongued Goths(not the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths which are technically from Scandinavia but ruled Rome, but the people that is the split from the old Goths that everyone enjoyed and liked and which were our brothers, yeah those Goths the modern day Goths, the slaves of the Swear). Bring back the days of the Gutnish and Scanian people being above the simple fishermen of the Swear. That's all, thanks for reading my comment. And I don't really dislike the rest of the Swedish population, just like the rest of the Swedish population doesn't hate me, come on, they love foreigners. Sure they aren't very smart, but at least they make up for it in good looks. Oh and the Norse and Danes, are a lot more open and friendly than the Swedes. Just a good reminder for people who wish to come up here as tourists. Tip number 1. Unless a Swede is drunk, he's more than likely not willing to talk to you, stranger. Tip 2. If you are within 15 meters you are invading their personal space. No I didn't mean 1.5 meters, 15 meters, they are weird, they never look others in the eyes, they don't say hello, they are rude, unless they are your friend, in which case they are ruder. Danes on the other hand are open, kind, likes to go bicycling, drink a beer, only works 6 hours a day, sure they pay 50% in income tax, but they are still really happy and outgoing people. Compared to Swedes who are the inbred kind of Scandinavian. The Norwegians, first of all smell like Fish, and Brunost(a disgustingly revolting cheese). They are like the Swedes, but Better, They are like the knock-off Danes, but better looking. They are also filthy rich, but that's nothing new, everybody knows that, how else can they afford $15 for a 12 inch pizza. At least it's a lot easier to live in Norway where the salaries are decent compared to Sweden, with it's slowly crashing economy and no houses for sale. With an estimated 750'000 houses to little to support our current population. Plus if you are a Norwegian and live close to the Swedish Border, then you can shop for some Cheap (in comparison to Norwegian) food, across the Border. This comment is weird, it's like I never stop typing, I mean it was just gonna be a spiteful reply to Robert Andersson, but yeah you see, I'm not good at stopping... I mean it's hard to stop commenting once you've gotten into it, I mean some times you can just stop typing but other times I mean you can understand from just this horrible section of the whole comment that it's not really my forte to stop typing, however I do believe that the most optimal time to stop would be now.
There are people arguing the Uralic ("Finno-Ugric") language family is 9000 years old...and the proposed Dené-Yeniseian family would have a vintage of 13,000 years or more!
I don't think there's any foundation for that estimate for the Uralic family, especially considering the Indo-European loanwords, although of course we can't know for sure how conservative proto-Uralic itself was
The evidence for the age is that when we have the earliest evidence of daughter languages, they are already fully developed and separated from each other over 6,000 years ago. So the proto language has to be 6,000 years old at least, plus however long it took the daughters to separate which, considering how different they are, must have been many thousands before that.
Speaking of language changing, I as a Chinese, found Chinese pronunciation in 800AD very close to morden days, but pronunciation before 400AD is very hard to understand, if go earlier than 200BC it's not understandable. (grama and writing remained same so do not affect understanding) But strangely the poems and literatures highly depending on phonology back to 800BC still rhyme well today.
I find Middle Chinese very interesting, and I sometimes try to reconstruct obscure characters and figure out their pronunciation. It’s honestly amazing how similar it is to standard Beijing mandarin today
I wonder how technology factors into the rate of language change. I have lived abroad for 13 years and I find that American English is not what is was when I left. For example, grammar choices that would be considered mistakes by traditional English teachers are made so often now that they seem to have been accepted. A few examples: - ignoring plural pronoun/noun+verb agreement when using "to be", more spoken than written - using "fewer" and "less" interchangeably, something I see printed VERY often - using comparatives, particularly "more", with single syllable adjectives, instead of adding "er", such as this is "more clear" During my years abroad, the smart phone put an internet connection (and a keyboard) into everyone's hands, and I'm curious if linguists are exploring how this might contribute speeding up the rate of language change.
Thank you. I too have noted shifts in the language. I am in my late 60's and have noted words acquiring different connotations or even meanings from when I learned. People have taken insult when I request a definition of how they mean a word, an explanation of what is meant. So yes, the American vernacular language has shifted within a lifetime. Perhaps this may be partially a result of fewer common platforms of edited and composed language platforms acting as homogenizers available today along with the rapidity of transmission of acquired meanings among subsets of the language users.
My obervations are a little less particular but: I do notice the German influence in American English eg. lets go swim or, lets go ride, whearas native English would be lets have a swim or lets and have a ride etc, also I notice the word "at" as in where is he at? ... in England sufficient would be where is he?
@@terner1234 They can mean the same thing, but they are used differently. Less is used with nouns you can't count, such as water, paper, sand, etc. (There is less water in this cup than that one.) Fewer is used with things you can count, such as apples, men and women, telephones, etc. (There were fewer apples on the table this morning. Did you take some to work?)
Icelandic feels like reading an old ass script fit for the Viking age, because of the complex grammar and fewer words in common with Norwegian it's harder to learn but still relatively easy to understand simple sentences if you've been exposed to it as a Norwegian speaker :)
I remember in high school English Literature Class reading the same sentence in Old English (Anglo-Saxon), 2 dialects of Middle English (the more French version of Chaucer and the Northern version of "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight"), Shakespeare's English, Jane Austen's English, and modern American English, and it was startling how much vocabulary and pronunciation had changed
What is interesting, though, is how dialects can preserve archaic vocabulary or even phonetic features. I'm from a small region in Bavaria (approximately the size of delaware) that has an unusual ammount of archaic words in its vocabulary. Even more fascinating is, that we still use diphthongs that died out with Middle High German at the end of the 14th century (For example we still say brouda instead of bruder like all other German variations).
althouhgh filipino is not a spanish dialect, it was able to retain archaic spanish words and pronunciations that no other spanish speaking countries use today. It's quite interesting!
I'm curious to know why the breathy-voiced (murmured) consonants of Proto-Indo-European have been preserved in all Indo-Aryan languages, but not in ANY other branch of Indo-European.
That's true, sad fact is that local dialects are dying; I'm from the border of silesian and lesserpoland voivodeships in Poland; thanks to the fact I've spent much time with my grandparents (born 1929 and 1931) during my childhood, my mother language is Polish lesserpoland-silesian dialect (mixed in ratio around 3:1), some of it's elements disappeared in main Polish hunderds years ago (for example moveability of sufixes, regularly used multiple/frequent form of verb ("czasownik wielokrotny/częstotliwy/frekwentatywny", idk what's it's correct translation into english), simply some words, and more stuff)... ofc there's also some strictly dialectic things, mainly very frequent vowel changes (and bigger number of it of it, 12, that's 4 more than in main form of Polish language). But ppl I meet everyday don't use much dialect; sometimes it's truly surprising for me, how easily ppl (that lived in the same place as I for so many years!) gets mindfuck when I'm moving single sufix in the sentence, or using single dialect basic word. Btw we have germanisms here, I'm using your words, such as "luft" or "fest" (as adverb) nearly as often as polish words that means the same... they're understood by everybody :P.
What i found interesting living in Germany, is how often English words are used when there are actually perfectly good German words with the same meaning. To a lesser extent, i also noticed unnecessary borrowings from French.
This topic truly is fascinating. I was reading 'Y Gododdin' and 'Diffaith Aelwyd Rheged' [Two 8th century Welsh poems] the other day and understood them almost entirely (There were only a few words that required looking up and the orthography was only a slight annoyance, apart from that, the aforementioned poems would, most probably, be easy for any Welsh speaker to read.) Being that I'm also an English speaker, I tried to read an Old English text, and understood next to naught [That being said, Old English was basically forced to adapt to the Norman-French speaking invaders... ]. anyway
Yo, I would LOVE to read the myths and poems about Yr Hen Ogledd! Sadly I don't speak Welsh though. Do you know of any good translations of these poems?
No one suspects that the original observations of Dyirbal were simply in error? I keep expecting to hear that possibility raised. The reports of old-timey anthropologists abound in half-truths and misinterpretations.
Dyirbal-speakers were in contact with Europeans since Captain Hook in late 18th century, but it was Queensland government 100 yrs later who conducted more thorough studies. Within a generation afterwords native life - as the natural environment - had been completely transformed if not destroyed. About 100 yrs later DMW Dixon compiled by direct contact and through the writings of earlier linguists and anthropologist-types probably the most definitive works on the Dyirbal-speakers. One of his publications, "Words of My Country," is available online
this makes me think of time traveling. the main problem i see now about going to the future or the past could be not understanding any language spoken on earth
Old English is almost unrecognizable to modern English speakers. That's about 1000 years ago maybe. About 500 years ago was Shakespeare, which modern people have trouble with. I think it's not changed a great deal in the last 200 years.
I would argue that the last 200 years have likely experienced a greater need/flow for new vocabulary. The underlying grammar and/or pronunciation may not have changed much, but there has been a rather large burst in vocabulary both from technological changes and changes in societal norms. (i.e. "all men created equal" meaning white men vs "all persons regardless of race, gender, health"). One should also take into account the variety between European English vs American English post-revolution.
Sum monn him plantode wingeard. Some man him planted vineyard. Not very comprehensible, once you get into "betynde" and "seaþ", but certainly recognizable.
Well, Finnish people can still easily read Finnish from the 1500's, the only things that have changed are basically some letters being changed in words, like "c" being replaced by "k" or "z" with "s". Not only that but Finnish has also preserved many proto-german words with little to no change in the words themselves. for example "King" in proto-german was "Kuningaz", in modern Finnish "king" is "Kuningas"
If languages change drastically when they’re near death, that would explain why Gaulish appeared to have changed drastically the last 200 years or so of its existence
I think that language contact is the main factor, frankly. The thing about the younger Dyirbal speakers was, they weren't even speaking Dyirbal as their main language. That's what leads to language attrition and language death: when you use another language more frequently than your native language. It's easy to observe this in emigrants, for example, Germans who emigrate to the US or Australia. Languages widely used as a second language are also notoriously prone to changing fast (if not as fast as languages like Dyirbal that are on their way out). It's probably because quirks introduced by second-language speakers gradually seep even into the language of first-language speakers. Icelandic was never spoken widely by anyone outside Iceland, immigrants came almost exclusively from Norway, and the language was largely isolated from other Scandinavian languages for a long time, especially in the crucial period when Norwegian, along with Swedish and Danish, came to radically simplify its grammar (along very similar lines as English, in fact). And this period was also the time when Low German was widely spoken as a second language in Scandinavia. It turns out that Low German has simplified its grammar in similar ways as English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. (The same is also true for Dutch.) This is unlikely to be coincidental, given how deeply Low German has influenced the vocabularies of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, too. By about 1200, even 1300, all Scandinavian languages had a complex morphology comparable with Modern Icelandic (and to some extent, Modern German). By 1800, spoken Danish, Swedish and Norwegian had a grammar more like English, while Icelandic and Faroese preserved the older state.
A standardized language will change very slowly. And keep in mind that we have modern means of communication like TV and internet that keep us in touch with the standard language.
@@rohandahiya7822 no. Internet is a mean of information transfer. This contributes to interconnection. Languages have always developed faster in rural areas where people communicate with less people and tend to interact with locals, also people in rural areas used to be far less literate than people in urban areas, so nothing restrained the natural and "wild" language evolution and divergence at a faster rate. With modern means of information transfer, mass education and literacy people are far more stuck to prescribed norms and thus language will evolve at a much slower rate. I actually think that in 1000 years future generations (if humans not die out) will still be able to understand today's videos on UA-cam.
@@mihanich But pronunciation could end up changing and so in 1000 years, people might not understand. Also slang is a thing & meanings change. The word ‘gay’ has changed its meaning a lot & it’s only been like 100 years.
A lot of people act like Middle English is completely or mostly unintelligible to speakers of Modern English. To me, written Chaucerian English, at least, is about 90 percent comprehensible. I haven't really studied the language at all. All I've done is read the Miller's Tale in different modern translations, interlinear translations, and the original Middle English. Even my family members who have never seen Middle English in their lives report it as being mostly understandable when I present it to them.
Your language is a mistake, stop speaking it at once. We will be there in the coming weeks with a real language for you. Sorry about this minor setback, Iceland.
English isn't really the iOS of languages. iOS, like most Apple products, is almost defined by how closely it has to stick to the Apple party line. English has the opposite problem-it mixes Germanic patterns with vocabulary from all sorts of languages, including much from French and other Romance languages, with many of these words dragging their grammatical oddities along with them. So it's more like the Linux of languages, if we're talking about the version your buddy cobbled together out of semi-compatible alpha-version kernels.
Oh excuse me for living on an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where, up until around a 100-200 years ago got almost no exposition to any languages other then ones similar to ours, therefore evolving slower than it's supposed. Yeah, because that's totally our mistake.
A story our host surely will recognize…In 19th Century Hawaiian seaports and plantations adults of various cultures working together - Hawaii, Guangdong & Guangxi, Japan, Okinawa, Philippine Tagalog & Ilokano, Korea, Portugal, US and England - worked out a practical *pidgin Hawaiian* with enough words to do the transactions of their labors and exchanges. Meanwhile their children, playing together, attending missionary schools, and exploring developed their own much more sophisticated and extensive CREOLE mingling the vocabulary of their parents with new words and grammar of their own creation. This is a wonderful reminder of the plasticity and pre-wired circuitry of the young human brain. But by the time Excited Linguists had learned of this phenomenon and came to Hawaii to study it, the children had matured past and begun their lives in the working world, and the memory of that unique language was already fading. Sorry, it's been decades since I chanced on that, so I don't have a link handy.
I'd love it. Eastern Sudanic (aka Nubian) alone would be wonderful. Also a great opportunity to rant about how I suspect Basque is partly Nubian (what is extremely odd but that's what I stumbled upon making random mass lexical comparisons - thanks to Starostin Jr., who seems to be about the only linguist interested in Nubian languages).
Partly Sudanic? Probably not, at least not directly, as the grammar doesn't line up well. I have, however compared its structure with various Amazigh languages, which appear to be the closest to Basque in native vocabulary and grammar, so Euskara is probably descended from a proto-Berber language from the North African coastline. Which would also make sense from a proximity standpoint, no?
+Luis Aldamiz You did not get the joke. The Joke is that he said in rather than on. As if the video was to be presented with him speaking in the aforementioned language.
I know for people who live on islands, geography affects language. In the islands of Chuuk for example, they all speak Chuukese but every island has there way of speaking it. I hear 3 main dialects but like i said each island in the 3 dialects has there way of speaking the language. For example, to say “please”, I’ve heard: Kose mochen Ose moshen Ohe morhen (Can also mean “you don’t want”)
Well, if I am not gravely mistaken, Icelandic had developed relatively alongside with other scandinavian languages till the middle of the XVIII century when the government started to pursue the purist policy. So, its notable permanence / stiffness is at least partially an artificial feature. Still looks and sounds pretty cool, though.
in the philippines... we have 100+ dialects and only a small fraction uses the national language as their main, they usually speak it to understand people from other region. the problem is, each region is severely revising the national language at an alarming rate. the national language(tagalog) is already made up of 11+ languages to begin with and the land separation doesn't help too. 75% of the population also code switches because its easier to say it in english than the national language. i myself need to exert effort to read the national language, and some words i have never heard of, and most are just feels disgusting to use.
Greek must be one of the slowest changing languages. you can sometimes pick a word or two out of each sentence from something like Homer, its used the same alphabet for at least 2400 years. but in english for the same degree of intelligibility you can't go much further back than the Tudors.
What about some languages like Hebrew? Many scholars say that say that someone fluent in hebrew today could hold a conversation with someone speaking Hebrew 3,000 years ago.
It would be cool to see a video about Afro-Asiatic languages :D I never thought a family of languages could be as old as 9000+ years and still he recognized as that family in particular.
2:25 not necessarily. In France, English words for IT terms common, whereas in Quebec they invent French words for those terms. Maybe they become overprotective. Also in Islandic there are only a few foreign words, I think they try to protect their language
One look at Tsakonika proves that languages can "gain distance" on each other very slowly. It split off from Greek a LONG time ago but still shares so much in common with it that it's almost still a dialect.
Perhaps you can help. My friend and I were discussing a similar subject and were trying to figure out just when did American English become distinct from European English. At what point did it become verbally obvious that someone was from the United States?
By the Revolutionary War from what I know (apparently standard American had retained pronunciation features from the late 1600s British English had dropped by that point). I can't find anything previous to that due to, well, not a large amount of British-English to American-English contact previously. American English also changed a lot afterwards, in many ways seemingly adopting German vowel pronunciation in many dialects (presumably due to the en masse German immigration), whereas a lot of New England English retains very Scots to Irish traits. Essentially which immigrants lived where contributed a bucketload to dialectal differences. The Western States' dialect have the most mutual intellegibility with other US regions, due to them being an agglomeration of previous American accents in close proximity due to their settlement pattern. The Southern dialect, ironically, has changed the least of all dialects, since with minor variations added to vowel stress and length it sounds recognisably like a rural British accent. These differences are, however, much less than the dialectal differences within Britain itself (we sometimes can't understand people who live barely 200 miles from our house if we haven't been exposed to their dialect before)
If you want an example of what early American accents sounded something like, Ocracoke and the Carolina outer islands are probably the best still-existing example, or the Gullah dialect for contemporary black Americans, although many black Americans would adopt similar dialect to their local white communities due to necessity. Modern differentiation of a 'black' and 'white' accent in some areas has more to do with the legacy of internal migrations of black American populations from south to north and the legacy of segregation and white flight, particularly in metropolitan areas.
Spoken English seems to be changing, in many places differently. (That's not supposed to happen, languages change at their "centres"; at least English did for a long time.) My children, who speak the "general" New Zealand accent, have some difficulty understanding US English on television shows and movies; they will turn on subtitles if they can. That accent, which is somewhat different to my own, has had several mergers and other changes in my lifetime which I've noticed as they've become widespread.
English is definitely de-centralising and fracturing into separate "cutlures"! Americans don't watch or even know anything from New Zealand; though, here in Canada, we occasionally get TV shows from Australia and the UK. French, on the other hand, is homogenising more and more in terms of pop culture and speech.
Yes, that happens, hence you have dialects. Some dialects in the UK preserve more of the Middle English vowels, a few dialects preserve the distinction between wine and whine.
Nothing from New Zealand? What about Lord of the Rings? :p On a more serious note, there actually are a number of Australian films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Strictly Ballroom, etc. that are pretty well-regarded in the US, and District 9 (a South African film) did quite well, so there's still a lot of cultural cross-pollination in the Anglophone world. That said, I'd be very interested in a report on what's happening with English in places where it's a foreign lingua franca -- former British colonies like India and Nigeria, former American colonies like the Philippines, etc. Or places like Jamaica, where Jamaican Creole is gaining ground as a literary language, but there's also the effect the globalization of entertainment (Hollywood films, etc) will have on the region.
Hollywood is Americanizing Australian, UK, NZ etc. As a kid I only heard the word cookie on US TV shows. Now young even young adults in Australia use it. I blame Sesame Street and McDonald's for this.
@@binaway NZ used to have a lot of British television but now it's mostly American and you can see the difference in the way younger people speak. Likewise there is an internationalising effect through computer games where people are picking up cultural cues through games rather than traditional stories.
7th century BC Hellenic are still recognizeable and quite understandable by modern Hellenes. Words even from Myceanean times are recognizable like "γυναικα" (=woman) , "αετος" (=year), "αρμα" (=chariot) and many others are still used !
You should've allowed for the presence of writing. Because of higher rates of literacy, I think English and most other widely spoken languages will retain quite a bit of intelligibility far into the future. Thair mite be sum speling reformz over the yeerz tu maik spling akchuli line up with pronunsiayshun, but Inglish wil stil be recognizabul tu most peepul. Unforchunitli meni mynoriti langwijez laik Dyirbul wil dye aut under presher frum larjer wunz (including Frisian, Inglish's closest relativ).
Hahaha wow, I understood that! Makes sense! I guess we can see a lot of that now, especially with American English changing words from English Centre to Center etc.
Oh one that language that might be a little different there is French.... because of their spelling/grammar moderator Academie Francaise. Where basically they have final ruling on how words are spelt, even if they don't pronounce the entire word anymore! Which is annoying when you're trying to learn to read/write in french and all their words have these extra letters at the end that they don't pronounce anymore!!
andyjay729 "Speling reformz"? If we ever stoop so low as to enact such "reformz", woes are us. (Not sure how to write "woe is me" in plural) Perish the thought!
Nixycat As a French citizen, my personal explanation is that these silent letters are traces of the origins of the words. Traces of the origins of our language. Of our nation. And such traces are not to be erased, even if it makes the language tricky to master. I dreaded those tests with all the fancy-sounding tenses, back in elementary school. But I grew into acknowledging this what allowed our writers to have produced so many works that are still revered today; what allows our language to be so rich in different ways to speak and designate one thing or another. And I think this goes for pretty much every language. So even today, if I had the occasion to go back in time and "start over" school with a "simplified" - or, as I put it, impoverished - version of the French tenses, I would still choose to go with the same version I was taught in, through and through.
We hav uh fraze fur that (woe betide us). If u prefr to uze thuh "reformz," mayb itz wo betyd us. U cud ulso go with "woe upon us" dpendyng on pruhnunseashun. Mayhapz tho, n defens uf propryete, u mite put the cama _n_ the kwotayshin marks.
I don't know if anyone watches THE 100 series here, but it has always bothered me, how english could change into grounder language in only 97 years. And also, why warriors kept english? And also, how could they COMPLETELY forget technology: I mean it was only 97 years. Someone, whose parents have seen pramfaya (when everything went boom) is surely alive. And also, how the hell could people who survived atom bombs (!) believe that Becca Pramheda is some goddess? Any ideas? Maybe NativLang should make a video of grounder language, I would LOVE that!
To me, it is not at all obvious that Old English is related to my native tongue. I know there are cognates, but a casual listener can't pick them out of a conversation. I'd call that "unrecognizeable". And that's only 1000 years.
There's an uncanny similarity between the factors affecting the evolution of language and the evolution of living things... (ie. the conditions of the hardy weinberg principle)
The real question is whether language-wide internet connections will speed up or slow down language progression. In one sense, the forever-frozen media of the past will be a reference for future learners. Yet since the rise of Google we have a large amount of new terms: to Google, meme, troll, etc
Languages change the fastest when they cross cultural borders (like the Roman invading all Europe) and then come back hitting you in the face, like a boomerang. When I visited England, driving west from Brighton to Plymouth then east, from Bristol to London, I was shocked to discover such a diversity of accents, and probably vocabulary. It is like if the radio/tv never influenced these people. Or maybe it did, since we could at least be understood using a mix of french and fake london/queen of England accent.
Ive come to notice that my language, german, is a pretty consistent language; With a little thinking, a modern german speaker could understand middle high erman from c.a. 1000 years ago just fine. The word order changed a little, for example, back then, it was more like the english order of words, but most words sentences would have such a similar pronounciation that understanding them would be no problem. Compare that to english which changed drastically. Just LOOK at old and middle english! I mean woah.
Middle high german is a bit unfair though because they had an insane way of spelling, as you see. That's just a matter of being used to it. The average German is able to perfectly unterstand everything since Luther, that was around 1500. Further back the meanings of some words are different. You may be able to recognize the words in a middle or old high german text, but you will be missinterpreting it for sure.
"You may get the general sense of it but good luck with the details. :)" Exactly, that's what I mean |'D. The details would take more time, sure, and the spelling is cray cray, and the rhiming makes it kinda hard to make sense of it too, but with a little time, and talking that whole thing outloud, amd thinking about the entire thing, one think one could decipher that... With a bit of time. And a dictionary because old words. Thats what i meant with "a little thinking" :P I just ment, in comparison to the english language at the time, the changes were ~~relatively~~ minor, like, I have seen old english and modern english. I don't even think the general gist would even be understood by anyone :'D
Artur M. I mean why wouldn't it be. In my opinion it should just be in every video. Especially with simple to pronounce words like Vaðlaheiðavegavinnuverkamannaskúrslyklakippuhringur. See, it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
What about creolization or pidginization or even adstrate influences? There's some strong evidence that this is the most important accelerator of language change: that expansive, interactive, "cosmopolitan" languages change a lot faster than isolated ones like Icelandic. For instace Latin evolved fast in the period between Roman Italian expansion and the Middle Ages but then Romances sorta froze (if you speak Spanish you can perfectly read La Celestina, which was written 518 years ago and understand everything, except maybe some cultural clues, but no problem with the language at all, but it becomes harder when you try the Cantar del Mio Cid, from the 12th century). What about the influence of print (never mind radio and TV and the Internet) on this process of language evolutionary freeze? Even in those languages where pronunciation has continued evolving (English, French) it has managed to freeze the written language, so Shakespeare probably pronounced things quite differently than modern English speakers but he certainly wrote them the same way (or almost so).
@@EriniusT - Not significantly. You can read 16th century stories and have no major differences re. what is spoken today, stuff like "x" turning "j", some vocabulary that sounds dated, little more. Now if you go back into the Middle Ages, then that's another story, but from 1492 to now the changes are all very minor.
1. State that Iceland (less than 400k people) changes their language slower than Norway (10 times the population). 2. Explains this by stating that smaller populations changes their language faster. They don't teach math in linguistic school now do they?
he quoted one hypothesis from a research paper, then went into other hypothesises. also iceland is in the middle of the atlantic; and norway is on a peninsula.
The two even sometimes have analogous concepts: Example: Living fossil: a species that has physically changed very little, if at all from specimens in the fossil record. Lingustic conservativism: where a word changes very little compared to other words derived from the same source.
The 5000 thing pricked my ears. I seem to hear that number a lot not just langauges but when hearing of ages of civilisations. It actually seems to correspond with a world wide flood, then soon all languages splitting from the tower or babel a short while after.
*Would someone from the 1500s understand me if i said:"que pasa pato? Yo soy de bario cabron!"? Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of shit like that*
English is a good example of the "social upheaval" catalyst. It changed after the invasion of the The Great Heathen Army, though not as starkly due to the similarity of Old Norse and Old English. It changed much more dramatically and quickly after the Norman conquest.
so basically your'e saying, it will take a very long time? recently i saw a picture of a greek plaque about 3-4000 years old ... i could actually recognise some of the words! but i wonder what it sounded like?
I speak several languages, and so does one of my brothers. When we chat, our languages intermingle to impart a point of view in the more exacting words.. As you'd suspect, there are words to which there are no accurate translations in any particular language. Thus, we must borrow from other languages. There are other factors which also influence these changes. Scientific and technical terms, for instance, will also slither their way into our common vocabulary. In perhaps a couple of hundred years, maybe less, what is written here may be difficult to understand, unless one's an expert in "old English", circa 2017.
This is a very interesting topic! I am not a linguist but I do speak Spanish and French fluently as well as a fair amount of German and some Italian. As a classical/opera type vocalist, I have also learned ecclesiastic Latin. I earned a B.A. degree in French after having lived for a year in France. I was very interested in continuing to speak French but France is across the ocean. I found Quebec to be far more accessible but of course, I immediately became aware of the great difference in dialect.Then, I had heard that some people in Louisiana still speak French, so I decided to explore that. It was difficult to find at first but when I did, I was amazed! There were people in the smaller communities who still actively spoke French. It does have a very distinct accent with many vowel shifts but the more I explore it, the more that I find it is about 95% the same as French spoken in France today.That is despite the US government's effort to basically eradicate it beginning in the 1920's. French was no longer taught in schools and school children were punished for speaking French at school. Nevertheless, speakers of Louisiana French performed a valuable service in World War II. The language was still spoken at home. They could speak it to the people in France and be understood but most importantly, they could deceive the enemy. The fact that French was discouraged however, meant that in many families, the parents did not speak it to their children. Radio and Television also contributed to the idea that English was the key to French heritage people becoming an integral part of modern American society. Yet, some people continued to speak it.They had no foundation in education. They learned to read and write in English and had no idea how to spell the words they used in French nor could they read much of anything written in French and understand it. Yet, they know words that date back to 15th and 16th Century France in some cases.So, the topic of this video becomes very interesting when all of these elements are considered. Basic words being preserved entirely aurally for as much as 500 years, for example. The people who brought the French language to Louisiana are a mix, to be sure from the Creoles who came directly from France, to the Acadians (popularly known as the Cajuns) who went through great turmoil to be resettled in Louisiana after having been exiled from Canada.Almost none of the people who settled in Louisiana had much, if any educational support for their language. It was taught in schools in the 19th Century and early 20th Century but these were rural people for the most part, not university scholars. Yet, the kind of vocabulary that still persists among some speakers is vast and truly amazing to identify! French in Louisiana was predicted to totally die out long before the turn of the 21st Century. Yet, nearly 20 years into the 21st Century, there are estimated to be about 100,000 speakers still left. In the late 1960's there was a movement in Louisiana to reverse the trend of eradication of French spoken in Louisiana, called The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). It has made little progress. The damage has already been done. It was frankly, a rather clumsy effort. That being said, there are French immersion schools in Louisiana where children learn modern, Standard French. The students can sometimes speak to grand parents and great grand parents and still be mutually understood. They can sometimes learn the typical Louisiana French pronunciation and unique words from the elders. Some young children are actually quite enthusiastic about being able to speak the old dialect.Some have even grown up, learning Louisiana French as a second language but are proud speakers and promoters of it. Those who are musicians have had the greatest influence. They interpret the old Folk songs, sometimes in a very traditional way but often in a modern way. They sometimes also create new songs and melodies, borrowing from the old traditions but making their new presentations be appealing to a contemporary audience.There are now many websites devoted to the preservation and encouragement of Louisiana French. One of the most popular now on Facebook has 28,342 members! facebook.com/groups/cajunfrench/They discuss all types of issues but there are daily vocabulary offerings. What I very consistently noted from the time when I joined was that almost all of them were the very same as standard French spoken today in France. The members of the group from France concur. Only very rarely, is there a word or expression that is unique to Louisiana French.Some of the native speakers express dismay when they see how words are actually spelled in French and insist upon spelling words, "like they sound" (based upon their own experience of knowing only English phonology). But, we work it out and try to encourage them to accept the proper French spelling, for sooner or later, they will get it.It is an interesting group, to be sure and I would think that all of the pure linguists would be interested in the phenomenon: French is still French as spoken by at least 100,000 people in Louisiana as only a spoken dialect but one that with some patience, is still mutually comprehensible from people who live in France today.
Did you know that if a current English speaker were to show him the original texts of Shakespeare, it would be difficult for him to understand it more than if a current Spanish speaker were shown the original texts of Cervantes?
over the 70+ years of separation, the Korean language spoken in South and North Korea have diverged so much that 45% of North Korean defectors have trouble understanding South Koreans and 1% can't understand South Koreans at all
I'm native Faroese, and Faroese is the closest relative to Icelandic. It's interesting because our vocabulary is very similar to Icelandic, but our pronounciation is very different - so different that we don't understand each other very much at all when it's spoken. We (Faroese) have lost the "th" sound and changed it to either a hard "t" or a regular "h". For example, the capital on the Faroe Islands is Tórshavn (means Thor's Harbour) - we use a hard "t" sound while Icelandic uses a "th" sound (spelled þ in Icelandic), which it was originally in Faroese too. When I read Icelandic I can understand most of it, if it isn't too technical, and from my understanding, written Faroese is similarly understood by Icelandic people, but to a lesser degree because of our loan words from (mostly) Danish.
I love all of your videos! They’ve made me really interested in linguistics. If you feel comfortable can you do a video explaining your journey with linguistics, and maybe some book recommendations?
Maybe unintelligible would be a better word than unrecognisable. Old English is very hard for speakers of modern English to understand, but it's instantly recognisable as some kind of English. A french speaker can't understand classical Latin very well but they can still see that it's related
What about technology? What stabilizing or destabilizing effects did the printing press (increases of literacy rates, and spelling and pronunciation standardization) or even today's internet have on the rate of language change?
Odd, the Aborigines have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years. The pictographs are meaningless without oral communication. So the Aborigines must have had a series of languages rise and fall.
When a language becomes unrecognizable, how is it not then a different language? For example if someone only understands English they will need a translation to understand something in Old English.
From what I understand, language changes faster than the written word. In other words, I would have a better chance reading the words 1000 years in the future than I would listening to them spoken.
The presence of and rigidity of a writing system and its spelling could effect how fast a language changes, although modern English orthography retains the spellings of sounds from Elizabethan literature that are no longer pronounced in contemporary English
This is so sad. This is why I think we need more language education, because just letting languages devolve, as is their typical natural process, is just so, so sad.
education may help document a language, which I think is very important, but it won't stop changing. At least, there's no guarantee of it. A language with no writing system may change very little, for instance. You can explain the rate of change in language in hindsight, but it's hard to predict it, so it's very difficult to prevent it.
How would teaching more "big" languages stop the "little" ones from devolving? They only devolve because they are pushed out of spheres of use and are replaced by the "big" language there. As far as we know now, the smartest policy would be to teach children Esperanto for one year ( see wikipedia Propaedeutic_value_of_esperanto), followed by several years of classes in at least one language of their choice. You need serious knowledge of at least two ethnic languages to fully appreciate their uniquenesses
@@taududeblobber221 Are you talking about the extent to which it was designed or the way in which it was? Either way it's a matter of opinion. The fact is that it's easier to learn than any ethnic/national language, and that it has about a thousand times as many users as any other full-fledged conlang. Teaching children Ido, Modern(ised) Latin or Interlingua for a year could have almost the same propaedeutic effect, but in the shorter term they would provide fewer opportunities to use the language.
Isolation has to be a strong considerate in evolution of language. Iceland is relatively isolated (or was pre flight). Just as there are some Italian island regions that speak closer to the original Latin than mainland Italian etc.
Nice work. As a native Mandarin speaker our language didn't change much in over 1000 years(except for tones, since they decay/transform quickly). Thanks to the continuous and large-complex-structural Chinese Characters and literatures, an inscription from Han Dynasty(1st Century BCE) is still familliar to us. That's 2,000 years ago, amazing, isn't it? When back to the Oracle bone script, yeah they are intellegible to modern Chinese but still recognizable. 4,000 years ago, wow. So to make a language stable, the best way probably is to build an empire that has the ultimate power (institution for grammar standardization, grammar school, etc.) to unite words and languages.(probably hundreds of language died in the process of Great Expansion to the Southern part of ancient China and we just simply had no clue about them.)
But this didn't happen in the latin world. Although the Empire was strong at trying to keep latin a uniform language, it rapidly created dialects of ''vulgar latin'' or day to day latin... By the end of the Empire, people from different regions would have a hard time speaking to one an other.
but norwegian is basically the way it is today due to 300 years of danish influence had it evolved naturally, it might very well have been more similar to icelandic
Niko L Yes, but keep in mind that Danish is a closely related language, also descended from the Old Norse. Beside almost all languages are influenced by others to some extent, so it is natural. I think that the point is that the intensity of this influence is one of the major factors deciding how fast language changes.
Norwegian was however closer related to Icelandic than Danish, coming from the west-norse dialect, while Danish and Swedish were east-norse. But because Norway is continentally connected, influence from the neighbours is inevitable, even if it hadn't been under danish rule. The changes might have been less though. We'll never know for sure.
What's always fun about Icelandic is that we can read 1000 year old sagas and still understand the majority of it with relative ease. We're really damn good at preserving the language.
Same thing with the Greeks, who tell me they can read ancient Greek perfectly; only difference is that it sounds stilted and "unnatural".
and spoken unintelligible to untrained modern ears
But phonologically your language has changed alot from that time.
So spoken Old west Norse would have been more difficult for an Icelander to understand.
Also that Iceland had low population and great population stability, sure the phonology was influenced by middel Irish but it has been politucally stable and most people living in very specific areas, also Iceland avoided the plague, which caused instability, instability leads to more change in language, it was partly because of the plague that continental North Germanic variants more diverged and changed from Old Norse.
Likse wise more contact with other people. many Low Germans settled in Scandinavia and influenced the speech there.
SolviKaaber well is something similar with spanish (once I downloaded a book from 1200 and I could understand it), English, at the other hand, has changed so much that no-one, without some kind of training of some sort, can even read nor pronounce and much less understand english 200 years older than Shakespeare. that's how MUCH it has evolved. (reading early-11th century spanish is somehow like reading Shakespeare for an english speaker)
a big reason why Norwegian is so separated from Old Norse today (unlike Icelandic) is mostly due to outside influence: tradings with Germany (there is a *lot* of German influence in Norwegian), being ruled by Denmark, various border shiftings with Sweden, etc etc. Iceland, by comparison, has remained fairly isolated.
Iceland is still ruled by Vikings, whilst every other Germanic peoples changed
Azrily Rhul they aren’t Vikings anymore. The term Viking is a pirate
There,s been very,very little immigration to Iceland since the end of the 11th Century.So,almost all of the native Icelanders are descendants of Norse,with just a tiny admixture of Irish.Being mostly isolated for the most part probably did help Icelander to stay very,very close to it,s Old Norse origin,friends.
@@derlinclaire1778 actually many settlers and slaves came or brought from the British and Irish islands. Therefore, the DNA of Icelanders is is a mix of those groups mixed with Norwegian settlers while the Norwegians have slightly more impact on Icelandic DNA.
Yes, I totally agree. Contact with other "peoples" increases the influence/change in a language. For example, I have noticed, the closest Scandinavian country(Denmark) to Rome, the GREATEST the change in the language compared to the country(Iceland) that is the farthest from Rome. P.S. I speak Icelandic( or 8th Century Norwegian) & I am "aquiring" Danish. Gleðileg jól !( Icelandic) glædelig jul !(Danish) Shame they're not mutually intelligible.
Merry Christmas!🎄
I think that written media, movies and politics can also slow language change. Greek student are taught Ancient Greek and much of modern Greek was also injected with ancient words. During my time in school I had to read old texts and understand them. I watch old movies, listen to songs sang over 100 years ago. Sometimes we imitate old accent and vocabulary for an effect. Our language is also codified by law which is super resistive to change. So schools are basically teaching 200 years old version of our language. This must be slowing the process of change.
What is the old Greek accent you are refering to?
2000 year old pronunciation rules, perhaps.
I would imagine he may be referring to Doric Greek...but very few Greeks still actually speak it, mainly only in Morea.
Same with Italian. We are forced to read and understand things written in 1300...
@PetrosB4 oh, no, I didn't mean that. I'm saying that standard Italian is basically the language spoken by the Tuscanian elite in 1300, and many Italians who spoke their own different languages (that were and are called dialects. And think about that, because even MALTESE (a Semitic language, like Arabic, by the way) was, or maybe is, I don't know, thought to be an "Italian dialect" by most) were forced to learn it and forget their native tongue. However, we also study Latin (and in some schools Greek too) and we have to translate things written millennia ago.
I think written languages evolve much slower than no written ones due to the fact that they retain a certain degree of standardization.
Especially in modern times, after they invented dictionaries and for some languages a standardising authority.
Writing doesn't necessarily entail a certain degree of standardisation; that generally only develops after you already have a thriving literary community. No, the main thing writing does is record the language of the past. As an English person, Shakespeare, Austen and Dickens were common on my syllabus and it is expected of educated people to have read many "classic" novels, all of which are 200 or so years old.
Writing allows us to be in regular communication with someone who speaks the language as it was 200 years ago and, as our language reflects that that we hear (or read), it acts as a constant force trying to bring language back to the state it was in in the past. This is something that is completely impossible without writing as even someone whose own speech has hardly changed since their birth will die after 100 years or so at most.
From what I've read of Chinese linguistics, Chinese has gone through ridiculous amounts of sound changes in the last 2000-3000 years, even more than Latin to French. The major changes all seem to coincide with foreign invasions and other social upheaval. The fact that Chinese has been written for at least 4000 years clearly didn't help.
Also the level of literacy and reach of mass media have a lot of influence in my opinion.
I would give a counter example to that: American English
And yes, I'm serious here. If you do something as simple as simply go back to films and *recordings* of speakers of the English language in the 1940's and 1930's, there are some pretty noticeable difference. Go back to the 1780's to look at stuff written by Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, it is really quite difficult to even read. Yes, you can recognized the words for the most part, but key words have even substantially changed their meaning. If you actually heard the way it was spoken at the time, you might not even really understand without concentrating or spending considerable time getting use to the speech patterns.
The infusion of technology and mixing of cultural ideas from around the world via the internet is actually making English something I would argue is one of the fastest changing languages right now and a fair bit different from even when I was a child (a few decades ago). Words and concepts that would be alien to speakers from the 1970's or 1980's are now in common usage.
It isn't so cut and dried to make such a bold statement like this. I'm giving an example of a language that has a broad written library by a huge population. The truth is for at least English, the dictionary creators are struggling to keep up with the shifts of the language and to simply keep track of new words that have been coined and put into common usage and substantial changes in the meanings of the words. Simple words like "faggot", "gay", "thong", and I'm sure you could come up with a bunch more had a substantially different meaning a hundred years ago.
I know this is also happening for other common European languages as well. Icelandic may not have changed much from Old Norse for centuries (noted in the video), but I bet it is changing a whole lot right now.
my native language will probably be undergoing an evolution in the near future. I am a first nations in BC and we are trying to bring our language back. it will obviously not sound the same compared to when our elders speak/spoke it. it will probably be considered "modernised". but whatever. as long as we bring back some sort of version of our language, it's a lot better than no language at all. we were pretty lucky that a Dutch linguist came and learned how our language worked and gave us a written form.
I've read a good quote from somewhere. "I want to know my language, so I can communicate with my ancestors after I die." something along those lines anyways.
Which language of which people in which country are you trying to bring back then?
@@cakeisyummy5755 an Interior Salish dialect in BC Canada
@@derrbarn14 i love the salish languages! im glad you're bringing it back, it honestly makes me cry sometimes thinking about thousands of years of history, people, stories, lives gone because the language is gone.
That's so amazing! I wish you would write some publications about the process
Or you just keep your language close (if not identical) to the one that your ancestors spoke, in just the same way, the Icelandic language did. By the way, would your language's modern version due to the change have actually more of those SAE features (both the 9 core and the less common features) ua-cam.com/video/iwCfFrskwpk/v-deo.html than the older/original version of it has/had?
Máár hoezo ontwikkelt u geen eigen scriptie vóór uw talen?
En hoe heet eigenlijk deze Nederlandse linguïst?
My native tongue, Tagalog, has changed so much in recent times. So much so that it had actually been hard work for me to read even a 1940s novel for school. The probable reason is colonization. Almost half of vulgar Tagalog vocabulary is Spanish in origin, while English loan words have come to replace many Tagalog nouns. In reaction to the influence of colonization, Tagalog was standardized in the 60s during which dated Old Tagalog diction was brought back to popularity to replace English and Spanish loan words. Globalization and media, however, has partially reversed the effects of these efforts with a new wave of rapid adaptation of English loan words.
Elijah Mikhail tama ka!! 😊
mahirap nga magbasa ng malalalim na tagalog
Namamatay na nga talaga ang wikang Pilipino. (Oo, ibig sabihin lang nito na sinasabi kong hindi ebolusyon ang Taglish---kailanma'y hindi magiging angkop ang Taglish sa anumang literatura o pagpapaggawa muli ng pamantayan)
Even other dialects, I speak Sinugbuanong Bisaya, and even that is mixed with other languages like Tagalog, English and Spanish.
Elijah Mikhail we did you a favor kid...
this really reminds me of a dumb meme I saw once.
Doctor: "Sir you've been in a coma for two years"
Me: "Are memes still funny?"
Doctor: "Yesn't"
Dr. Zamenhof: invents Esperanto
Speaker: Ĉu vi parolas Esperanton?
*1 thousand years later*
Speaker: Thu bhi faerulus Asburentan?
Dr. Zamenhof: what language was that?
*5 thousand years later*
Speaker: Ghju vhai bejllaris Esbjelandho?
Dr. Zamenhof: This is so aliening...
*20 thousand years later*
Speaker: Dsahu tjavhi veraureux Jexzelreno?
Dr. Zamenhof: This sounds like a tongue from Alpha Centauri...
@ValkyRiver Nice one 👍🏻. Also, the Esperanto 200 years later (Asburentan) seems very Irish/Celtic ☘️🇮🇪🍀.
@@ValkyRiver This is VERY slow rate of language change, esp. between 2K and 20K. It's basically just sound changes along the whole timeline. Highly unrealistic.
My proposals:
**200 years later** - Esperanto quickly optimizes itself once it becomes the first language for a population:
Speaker: Faerulus Asburentan?
**2K years later** - Western civilization falls. Eritrean empire rises, then falls. Imperial Eritrean is a daughter language of Tigrinya, and there are numerous ImpEr-based creoles, including Šfereńńa:
Speaker: Šfereńńa vërëždo?
**20K years later** - [DATA EXPUNGED], but trust me that "Žnwi" comes from "-reńńa" via sound changes and it's the only morpheme that survives to any degree, but linguists don't know that, because Žnwi has been extinct for thousands of years, having been an isolate for thousands of years before that.
Scholar: Rgats-gats Žnwi rüg wömp?
I think this prediction fails to account for standardization. Languages are changing more slowly now due to standardized grammar/spelling, and educational institutions that make sure everyone learns the same language. We can even see this in English, it's possible for us to read a 500 year old text like Shakespeare, but 1500s English speakers could not have read Beowulf in its original Old English, so I believe going forward it will take much longer for English to be unintelligible to us. Still an awesome video that gave me perspective.
English went through a period of very rapid change around the Norman Conquest (so much so that there is significant debate about the extent to which English is a simple daughter of Old English, or whether it was partially creolised by Old French and the previous Norse influence) so trying to draw comparisons across that isn't very helpful. Chaucer and Pepys are spaced roughly equally and Pepys' writing is about as similar to our own as his to Chaucer's. The standardisation you talk about is only very recent because it only works if everyone is formally educated in the standard you come up with, something that only took off in the late 19th century. It may be true that standardisation will slow the evolution of English in the future, but I'd wager that the vastly increased numbers of speakers, and the volume of communication allowed by the internet will more than cancel that out
Hard to say. Shakespeare was in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, and there are definitely some portions of those plays which, if said in the original, would be almost incomprehensible to us. On the other hand, compare Shakespeare to Chaucer, only about 200 years earlier...Chaucer's pronunciations are drastically different.
There are still changes caused by language contact. Adstrates are nowadays more common than ever.
Also just because orthography doesn't change doesn't mean semantics don't. Try to explain to someone from 100 years ago why we 'crank down' windows in our car. There's no cranking anymore. We just push a button.
ZorroVulpes on the contrary, I think the internet will have a huge effect on the language within the next century. New words and constructions are created almost constantly, some becoming codified into the official language.
I still say "steam shovel" and "steamroller" even though they obviously aren't steam-powered anymore. (Mainly because I read Mike Mulligan and the Steam Shovel and watched a lot of '30s cartoons as a kid; also "steam shovel" just sounds better than "power shovel".)
In basque some tools' names are formed with the root "aitz" which means "stone, rock" like "aizkora" (axe), azkona (arrow), haitzurra (hoe), aiztoa (knife). So some say those words come from the stone age
I was in Yemen "where Arabic was invented" then I went to Malta.
Its like a 1000 year travel in a language age
@NurturingTalents Maltese has arabic & Italian influence.
@@cakeisyummy5755 Maltese is actually a semitic language with heavy italian influence
Yemeni Arabic to us Arabic speakers is like listening to old tribesmen from a thousand years ago speaking
As a icelander I don't think icelandic is a mistake Danish is
As Swede, I agree with you. Scanian (skånska) is too...
EDIT: No offence, dansker! ;)
Robert Andersson, Without us down here in Scania, you wouldn't have a language. Damn Thieves. You Goths and Swear are the worst kind of people, however we only stay because of our relatives in the Gut, and also we pretty much like the Dalecarlians, the people up north well they are kind so we won't conquer them later on, but one day Stockholm shall fall, mark my word, Swear shitblood. Mark my word.
Super Fluffy Ninja Dog, I agree Danish is a mistake, at least modern Danish is, I mean I live next to them and they are still unintelligible, It almost feels like if I was a Czech and had to speak with a Magyar. And the Danes are my closest relatives, but we Scanians shall not give up, we need to usurp the usurper nation of Svitjod, and bring salvation to these lands, and one day in the future, we the first Scandinavians will rule once more. For fucks sake the whole area is named after us.
Down with the tainted blood of Swear, down with the false tongued Goths(not the Visigoths or the Ostrogoths which are technically from Scandinavia but ruled Rome, but the people that is the split from the old Goths that everyone enjoyed and liked and which were our brothers, yeah those Goths the modern day Goths, the slaves of the Swear).
Bring back the days of the Gutnish and Scanian people being above the simple fishermen of the Swear.
That's all, thanks for reading my comment. And I don't really dislike the rest of the Swedish population, just like the rest of the Swedish population doesn't hate me, come on, they love foreigners. Sure they aren't very smart, but at least they make up for it in good looks.
Oh and the Norse and Danes, are a lot more open and friendly than the Swedes. Just a good reminder for people who wish to come up here as tourists. Tip number 1. Unless a Swede is drunk, he's more than likely not willing to talk to you, stranger. Tip 2. If you are within 15 meters you are invading their personal space. No I didn't mean 1.5 meters, 15 meters, they are weird, they never look others in the eyes, they don't say hello, they are rude, unless they are your friend, in which case they are ruder.
Danes on the other hand are open, kind, likes to go bicycling, drink a beer, only works 6 hours a day, sure they pay 50% in income tax, but they are still really happy and outgoing people. Compared to Swedes who are the inbred kind of Scandinavian.
The Norwegians, first of all smell like Fish, and Brunost(a disgustingly revolting cheese).
They are like the Swedes, but Better, They are like the knock-off Danes, but better looking.
They are also filthy rich, but that's nothing new, everybody knows that, how else can they afford $15 for a 12 inch pizza. At least it's a lot easier to live in Norway where the salaries are decent compared to Sweden, with it's slowly crashing economy and no houses for sale. With an estimated 750'000 houses to little to support our current population.
Plus if you are a Norwegian and live close to the Swedish Border, then you can shop for some Cheap (in comparison to Norwegian) food, across the Border.
This comment is weird, it's like I never stop typing, I mean it was just gonna be a spiteful reply to Robert Andersson, but yeah you see, I'm not good at stopping... I mean it's hard to stop commenting once you've gotten into it, I mean some times you can just stop typing but other times I mean you can understand from just this horrible section of the whole comment that it's not really my forte to stop typing, however I do believe that the most optimal time to stop would be now.
läste hela kommentaren av någon anledning
+The Major This is long, and interesting.
Gustavo Silva Yea, hopefully they can save it, or at least parts of it. I'm counting on it.
There are people arguing the Uralic ("Finno-Ugric") language family is 9000 years old...and the proposed Dené-Yeniseian family would have a vintage of 13,000 years or more!
I don't think there's any foundation for that estimate for the Uralic family, especially considering the Indo-European loanwords, although of course we can't know for sure how conservative proto-Uralic itself was
you better explain that proto-afro-asiatic ultra in depth! :D
It's probably because the oldest written down languages are majoridly Afro-Asiatic. Because of this, we can go back further.
i knew that it was arround 5000yo, but 9000+ was unheard of!
The evidence for the age is that when we have the earliest evidence of daughter languages, they are already fully developed and separated from each other over 6,000 years ago. So the proto language has to be 6,000 years old at least, plus however long it took the daughters to separate which, considering how different they are, must have been many thousands before that.
The first Egyptian writings are apparently over 5000 years old, so obviously the language family must be much older than that.
Yeah proto Afro-Asiatic is way too underrated nobody talks about it
Speaking of language changing, I as a Chinese, found Chinese pronunciation in 800AD very close to morden days, but pronunciation before 400AD is very hard to understand, if go earlier than 200BC it's not understandable. (grama and writing remained same so do not affect understanding)
But strangely the poems and literatures highly depending on phonology back to 800BC still rhyme well today.
I find Middle Chinese very interesting, and I sometimes try to reconstruct obscure characters and figure out their pronunciation. It’s honestly amazing how similar it is to standard Beijing mandarin today
I wonder how technology factors into the rate of language change. I have lived abroad for 13 years and I find that American English is not what is was when I left. For example, grammar choices that would be considered mistakes by traditional English teachers are made so often now that they seem to have been accepted. A few examples:
- ignoring plural pronoun/noun+verb agreement when using "to be", more spoken than written
- using "fewer" and "less" interchangeably, something I see printed VERY often
- using comparatives, particularly "more", with single syllable adjectives, instead of adding "er", such as this is "more clear"
During my years abroad, the smart phone put an internet connection (and a keyboard) into everyone's hands, and I'm curious if linguists are exploring how this might contribute speeding up the rate of language change.
Thank you. I too have noted shifts in the language. I am in my late 60's and have noted words acquiring different connotations or even meanings from when I learned. People have taken insult when I request a definition of how they mean a word, an explanation of what is meant.
So yes, the American vernacular language has shifted within a lifetime.
Perhaps this may be partially a result of fewer common platforms of edited and composed language platforms acting as homogenizers available today along with the rapidity of transmission of acquired meanings among subsets of the language
users.
My obervations are a little less particular but: I do notice the German influence in American English eg. lets go swim or, lets go ride, whearas native English would be lets have a swim or lets and have a ride etc, also I notice the word "at" as in where is he at? ... in England sufficient would be where is he?
there's a difference between "less" and "fewer"?
I'm not a native english speaker.
@@terner1234 They can mean the same thing, but they are used differently. Less is used with nouns you can't count, such as water, paper, sand, etc. (There is less water in this cup than that one.) Fewer is used with things you can count, such as apples, men and women, telephones, etc. (There were fewer apples on the table this morning. Did you take some to work?)
@@mailepointfive thanks for replying to a reply on your two year old comment.
Icelandic feels like reading an old ass script fit for the Viking age, because of the complex grammar and fewer words in common with Norwegian it's harder to learn but still relatively easy to understand simple sentences if you've been exposed to it as a Norwegian speaker :)
yess
It's so similar to Old Norse that many scholars of Norse literature use modern Icelandic pronunciation rather than the reconstructed Old Norse ones.
Alice In Salt Land yeah we can read old Norse kinda well
I can also kinda read norwegan but not know completely what it's about
That's what makes Icelandic so interesting.
I remember in high school English Literature Class reading the same sentence in Old English (Anglo-Saxon), 2 dialects of Middle English (the more French version of Chaucer and the Northern version of "Sir Gawaine and the Green Knight"), Shakespeare's English, Jane Austen's English, and modern American English, and it was startling how much vocabulary and pronunciation had changed
What is interesting, though, is how dialects can preserve archaic vocabulary or even phonetic features. I'm from a small region in Bavaria (approximately the size of delaware) that has an unusual ammount of archaic words in its vocabulary. Even more fascinating is, that we still use diphthongs that died out with Middle High German at the end of the 14th century (For example we still say brouda instead of bruder like all other German variations).
althouhgh filipino is not a spanish dialect, it was able to retain archaic spanish words and pronunciations that no other spanish speaking countries use today. It's quite interesting!
I'm curious to know why the breathy-voiced (murmured) consonants of Proto-Indo-European have been preserved in all Indo-Aryan languages, but not in ANY other branch of Indo-European.
That's true, sad fact is that local dialects are dying; I'm from the border of silesian and lesserpoland voivodeships in Poland; thanks to the fact I've spent much time with my grandparents (born 1929 and 1931) during my childhood, my mother language is Polish lesserpoland-silesian dialect (mixed in ratio around 3:1), some of it's elements disappeared in main Polish hunderds years ago (for example moveability of sufixes, regularly used multiple/frequent form of verb ("czasownik wielokrotny/częstotliwy/frekwentatywny", idk what's it's correct translation into english), simply some words, and more stuff)... ofc there's also some strictly dialectic things, mainly very frequent vowel changes (and bigger number of it of it, 12, that's 4 more than in main form of Polish language).
But ppl I meet everyday don't use much dialect; sometimes it's truly surprising for me, how easily ppl (that lived in the same place as I for so many years!) gets mindfuck when I'm moving single sufix in the sentence, or using single dialect basic word.
Btw we have germanisms here, I'm using your words, such as "luft" or "fest" (as adverb) nearly as often as polish words that means the same... they're understood by everybody :P.
Marco van Panter Where is this, you have me super interested?
What i found interesting living in Germany, is how often English words are used when there are actually perfectly good German words with the same meaning. To a lesser extent, i also noticed unnecessary borrowings from French.
Finished! I have lots of coursework these days, but I'll make time to start on the next one: a tale about an old tongue...
NativLang Nice!
Ooh are we finally getting a video on þe ald tunge, Ænglisc?
Old ones - still in uploads and playlists. New ones - even as I do my coding duties, my digital pen sits beside the keyboard, calling me to animate.
A good guess - but not this time!
I love your videos, some of the most interesting content on youtube
Swadish: languages all change at the same rate!
Icelandic: I'm about to end this mans whole career
This topic truly is fascinating. I was reading 'Y Gododdin' and 'Diffaith Aelwyd Rheged' [Two 8th century Welsh poems] the other day and understood them almost entirely (There were only a few words that required looking up and the orthography was only a slight annoyance, apart from that, the aforementioned poems would, most probably, be easy for any Welsh speaker to read.) Being that I'm also an English speaker, I tried to read an Old English text, and understood next to naught [That being said, Old English was basically forced to adapt to the Norman-French speaking invaders... ]. anyway
Jacob Parry it’s the same with Icelandic and old Norse
Yo, I would LOVE to read the myths and poems about Yr Hen Ogledd! Sadly I don't speak Welsh though. Do you know of any good translations of these poems?
As strange as it may sound, but old english is actually closer to modern swedish, then it is to modern english
In conclusion:
*Languages are memes.*
In both meaning of the word
I WILL BE REMEMBERED AS AN EXON OF HISTORY
VOCAL CHORD PARASITES
PlayTheMind If it's English sure.
English is the best language for memes.
No one suspects that the original observations of Dyirbal were simply in error? I keep expecting to hear that possibility raised. The reports of old-timey anthropologists abound in half-truths and misinterpretations.
I thought that too. Especially the no vagueness part and the incredibly free word order left me suspicious
Dyirbal-speakers were in contact with Europeans since Captain Hook in late 18th century, but it was Queensland government 100 yrs later who conducted more thorough studies. Within a generation afterwords native life - as the natural environment - had been completely transformed if not destroyed. About 100 yrs later DMW Dixon compiled by direct contact and through the writings of earlier linguists and anthropologist-types probably the most definitive works on the Dyirbal-speakers. One of his publications, "Words of My Country," is available online
Captain Hook? I sure hope he got rid of that annoying ticking crocodile.
I think you meant Captain Cook ;)
@@johannesschutz780 It's easy to have a free word order, if it is not used to grammatical means.
0:31 I'm gonna name my next Gerbil Dyirbal- but no one will know how to spell it.
English Writing in a nutshell
I T
this makes me think of time traveling. the main problem i see now about going to the future or the past could be not understanding any language spoken on earth
Old English is almost unrecognizable to modern English speakers. That's about 1000 years ago maybe. About 500 years ago was Shakespeare, which modern people have trouble with. I think it's not changed a great deal in the last 200 years.
Even middle English is mostly unrecognizable.
Well you can read it, because we still spell it as if we're living in the 17th century
I would argue that the last 200 years have likely experienced a greater need/flow for new vocabulary. The underlying grammar and/or pronunciation may not have changed much, but there has been a rather large burst in vocabulary both from technological changes and changes in societal norms. (i.e. "all men created equal" meaning white men vs "all persons regardless of race, gender, health"). One should also take into account the variety between European English vs American English post-revolution.
Middle English gradually adopted more and more French/Latin words, and changed Germanic ones. So late Middle English can be very vaguely understood.
Sum monn him plantode wingeard.
Some man him planted vineyard.
Not very comprehensible, once you get into "betynde" and "seaþ", but certainly recognizable.
'Language time time languaged time language linguist time.'- this video in a nutshell
this channel in a nutshell *
historical linguistics in a nutshell. *
You forgot about the blowing wind sound
Language + time = a new different language
Well, Finnish people can still easily read Finnish from the 1500's, the only things that have changed are basically some letters being changed in words, like "c" being replaced by "k" or "z" with "s". Not only that but Finnish has also preserved many proto-german words with little to no change in the words themselves. for example "King" in proto-german was "Kuningaz", in modern Finnish "king" is "Kuningas"
If languages change drastically when they’re near death, that would explain why Gaulish appeared to have changed drastically the last 200 years or so of its existence
I think English itself a great example of how a language can change so much
I think that language contact is the main factor, frankly. The thing about the younger Dyirbal speakers was, they weren't even speaking Dyirbal as their main language. That's what leads to language attrition and language death: when you use another language more frequently than your native language. It's easy to observe this in emigrants, for example, Germans who emigrate to the US or Australia.
Languages widely used as a second language are also notoriously prone to changing fast (if not as fast as languages like Dyirbal that are on their way out). It's probably because quirks introduced by second-language speakers gradually seep even into the language of first-language speakers.
Icelandic was never spoken widely by anyone outside Iceland, immigrants came almost exclusively from Norway, and the language was largely isolated from other Scandinavian languages for a long time, especially in the crucial period when Norwegian, along with Swedish and Danish, came to radically simplify its grammar (along very similar lines as English, in fact). And this period was also the time when Low German was widely spoken as a second language in Scandinavia. It turns out that Low German has simplified its grammar in similar ways as English, Danish, Swedish and Norwegian. (The same is also true for Dutch.) This is unlikely to be coincidental, given how deeply Low German has influenced the vocabularies of Danish, Swedish and Norwegian, too.
By about 1200, even 1300, all Scandinavian languages had a complex morphology comparable with Modern Icelandic (and to some extent, Modern German). By 1800, spoken Danish, Swedish and Norwegian had a grammar more like English, while Icelandic and Faroese preserved the older state.
its so interesting to hear about languages from all over the world instead of just English, i love this channel good work
A standardized language will change very slowly. And keep in mind that we have modern means of communication like TV and internet that keep us in touch with the standard language.
The internet not so much. Actually, the internet will increase the rate of language change.
@@rohandahiya7822 no. Internet is a mean of information transfer. This contributes to interconnection. Languages have always developed faster in rural areas where people communicate with less people and tend to interact with locals, also people in rural areas used to be far less literate than people in urban areas, so nothing restrained the natural and "wild" language evolution and divergence at a faster rate. With modern means of information transfer, mass education and literacy people are far more stuck to prescribed norms and thus language will evolve at a much slower rate. I actually think that in 1000 years future generations (if humans not die out) will still be able to understand today's videos on UA-cam.
@@mihanich I meant to say, that the internet won't be the same force which slows down change as earlier previous media was.
@@mihanich But pronunciation could end up changing and so in 1000 years, people might not understand. Also slang is a thing & meanings change. The word ‘gay’ has changed its meaning a lot & it’s only been like 100 years.
A lot of people act like Middle English is completely or mostly unintelligible to speakers of Modern English. To me, written Chaucerian English, at least, is about 90 percent comprehensible. I haven't really studied the language at all. All I've done is read the Miller's Tale in different modern translations, interlinear translations, and the original Middle English. Even my family members who have never seen Middle English in their lives report it as being mostly understandable when I present it to them.
Yes, but your pronounciation would be incrompehensible to anyone from that time. Historical spelling helps in this case
Your language is a mistake, stop speaking it at once. We will be there in the coming weeks with a real language for you. Sorry about this minor setback, Iceland.
English isn't really the iOS of languages. iOS, like most Apple products, is almost defined by how closely it has to stick to the Apple party line. English has the opposite problem-it mixes Germanic patterns with vocabulary from all sorts of languages, including much from French and other Romance languages, with many of these words dragging their grammatical oddities along with them. So it's more like the Linux of languages, if we're talking about the version your buddy cobbled together out of semi-compatible alpha-version kernels.
Oh excuse me for living on an isolated island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean where, up until around a 100-200 years ago got almost no exposition to any languages other then ones similar to ours, therefore evolving slower than it's supposed. Yeah, because that's totally our mistake.
Lewis Johnson guys it was a joke from the video... no one is dissing Icelandic
Maddy Martin exactly
Icelandic is actually fucking awesome
can it replace English please
The way you explain things is so concise and accurate, keep up the good work!
I have got alerts on for your channel, and just yours.
(consider this me professing my love for you)
Intense! I'd better make those alerts count.
wait a minute, i got alerts for his channel alone too.
A story our host surely will recognize…In 19th Century Hawaiian seaports and plantations adults of various cultures working together - Hawaii, Guangdong & Guangxi, Japan, Okinawa, Philippine Tagalog & Ilokano, Korea, Portugal, US and England - worked out a practical *pidgin Hawaiian* with enough words to do the transactions of their labors and exchanges.
Meanwhile their children, playing together, attending missionary schools, and exploring developed their own much more sophisticated and extensive CREOLE mingling the vocabulary of their parents with new words and grammar of their own creation.
This is a wonderful reminder of the plasticity and pre-wired circuitry of the young human brain. But by the time Excited Linguists had learned of this phenomenon and came to Hawaii to study it, the children had matured past and begun their lives in the working world, and the memory of that unique language was already fading.
Sorry, it's been decades since I chanced on that, so I don't have a link handy.
Maybe a future video in Nilo-Saharan languages?
But then very few of his subscribers would be able to understand it. . . Da dum ts
I'd love it. Eastern Sudanic (aka Nubian) alone would be wonderful. Also a great opportunity to rant about how I suspect Basque is partly Nubian (what is extremely odd but that's what I stumbled upon making random mass lexical comparisons - thanks to Starostin Jr., who seems to be about the only linguist interested in Nubian languages).
@Oleg Olenev: Do you think we understand anything about his Australian Aboriginal language example?
Partly Sudanic? Probably not, at least not directly, as the grammar doesn't line up well. I have, however compared its structure with various Amazigh languages, which appear to be the closest to Basque in native vocabulary and grammar, so Euskara is probably descended from a proto-Berber language from the North African coastline. Which would also make sense from a proximity standpoint, no?
+Luis Aldamiz You did not get the joke. The Joke is that he said in rather than on. As if the video was to be presented with him speaking in the aforementioned language.
I know for people who live on islands, geography affects language. In the islands of Chuuk for example, they all speak Chuukese but every island has there way of speaking it. I hear 3 main dialects but like i said each island in the 3 dialects has there way of speaking the language. For example, to say “please”, I’ve heard:
Kose mochen
Ose moshen
Ohe morhen
(Can also mean “you don’t want”)
I accidently ended my post. I grew up reading the king James bible. Like many protestants in their 60s. I can read Shakespeare quite easily.
I'll watch it in the morning. I've been waiting for this. By the way, I _love_ how you say all your sources in one google document. So useful!
Icelandic Is so young that we can read the old Norse and understanding most of it.
You guys got frozen in time. Sorta... XD
Or literally, the volcanoes thaw them from time to time tho.
Though the vocabulary changed very little and the grammar barely at all, the pronunciation changed quite a bit. ^^
It's not young, it's old.
Well, if I am not gravely mistaken, Icelandic had developed relatively alongside with other scandinavian languages till the middle of the XVIII century when the government started to pursue the purist policy. So, its notable permanence / stiffness is at least partially an artificial feature. Still looks and sounds pretty cool, though.
in the philippines... we have 100+ dialects and only a small fraction uses the national language as their main, they usually speak it to understand people from other region. the problem is, each region is severely revising the national language at an alarming rate. the national language(tagalog) is already made up of 11+ languages to begin with and the land separation doesn't help too. 75% of the population also code switches because its easier to say it in english than the national language. i myself need to exert effort to read the national language, and some words i have never heard of, and most are just feels disgusting to use.
Greek must be one of the slowest changing languages. you can sometimes pick a word or two out of each sentence from something like Homer, its used the same alphabet for at least 2400 years. but in english for the same degree of intelligibility you can't go much further back than the Tudors.
If I had seen the word Dyirbal written down, I'd have not pronounced it Gerbil.
What about some languages like Hebrew? Many scholars say that say that someone fluent in hebrew today could hold a conversation with someone speaking Hebrew 3,000 years ago.
It would be cool to see a video about Afro-Asiatic languages :D I never thought a family of languages could be as old as 9000+ years and still he recognized as that family in particular.
2:25 not necessarily. In France, English words for IT terms common, whereas in Quebec they invent French words for those terms. Maybe they become overprotective. Also in Islandic there are only a few foreign words, I think they try to protect their language
I looooooove native Australian art
I love the rest of Australian aboriginal culture.
doing the aboriginal dot paintings for year 7 art class was so fun.
One look at Tsakonika proves that languages can "gain distance" on each other very slowly. It split off from Greek a LONG time ago but still shares so much in common with it that it's almost still a dialect.
Perhaps you can help. My friend and I were discussing a similar subject and were trying to figure out just when did American English become distinct from European English. At what point did it become verbally obvious that someone was from the United States?
By the Revolutionary War from what I know (apparently standard American had retained pronunciation features from the late 1600s British English had dropped by that point). I can't find anything previous to that due to, well, not a large amount of British-English to American-English contact previously.
American English also changed a lot afterwards, in many ways seemingly adopting German vowel pronunciation in many dialects (presumably due to the en masse German immigration), whereas a lot of New England English retains very Scots to Irish traits. Essentially which immigrants lived where contributed a bucketload to dialectal differences. The Western States' dialect have the most mutual intellegibility with other US regions, due to them being an agglomeration of previous American accents in close proximity due to their settlement pattern. The Southern dialect, ironically, has changed the least of all dialects, since with minor variations added to vowel stress and length it sounds recognisably like a rural British accent.
These differences are, however, much less than the dialectal differences within Britain itself (we sometimes can't understand people who live barely 200 miles from our house if we haven't been exposed to their dialect before)
If you want an example of what early American accents sounded something like, Ocracoke and the Carolina outer islands are probably the best still-existing example, or the Gullah dialect for contemporary black Americans, although many black Americans would adopt similar dialect to their local white communities due to necessity. Modern differentiation of a 'black' and 'white' accent in some areas has more to do with the legacy of internal migrations of black American populations from south to north and the legacy of segregation and white flight, particularly in metropolitan areas.
When British speech started dropping unstressed "r" sounds, in the early 19th century See e.g. dialectblog.com/2011/06/13/americans-talking-britis/
Stay on topic, this isn't a political channel.
you were derailing the discussion. why not ask them in a private message if it's so important for you to know?
The mellifluous melody that enters as our linguistic adventure nears it's end; I for one really enjoy.
Spoken English seems to be changing, in many places differently. (That's not supposed to happen, languages change at their "centres"; at least English did for a long time.) My children, who speak the "general" New Zealand accent, have some difficulty understanding US English on television shows and movies; they will turn on subtitles if they can. That accent, which is somewhat different to my own, has had several mergers and other changes in my lifetime which I've noticed as they've become widespread.
English is definitely de-centralising and fracturing into separate "cutlures"! Americans don't watch or even know anything from New Zealand; though, here in Canada, we occasionally get TV shows from Australia and the UK.
French, on the other hand, is homogenising more and more in terms of pop culture and speech.
Yes, that happens, hence you have dialects.
Some dialects in the UK preserve more of the Middle English vowels, a few dialects preserve the distinction between wine and whine.
Nothing from New Zealand? What about Lord of the Rings? :p
On a more serious note, there actually are a number of Australian films like Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, Strictly Ballroom, etc. that are pretty well-regarded in the US, and District 9 (a South African film) did quite well, so there's still a lot of cultural cross-pollination in the Anglophone world.
That said, I'd be very interested in a report on what's happening with English in places where it's a foreign lingua franca -- former British colonies like India and Nigeria, former American colonies like the Philippines, etc. Or places like Jamaica, where Jamaican Creole is gaining ground as a literary language, but there's also the effect the globalization of entertainment (Hollywood films, etc) will have on the region.
Hollywood is Americanizing Australian, UK, NZ etc. As a kid I only heard the word cookie on US TV shows. Now young even young adults in Australia use it. I blame Sesame Street and McDonald's for this.
@@binaway
NZ used to have a lot of British television but now it's mostly American and you can see the difference in the way younger people speak. Likewise there is an internationalising effect through computer games where people are picking up cultural cues through games rather than traditional stories.
This is by far one of my favourite channels on UA-cam!! Love It!!
7th century BC Hellenic are still recognizeable and quite understandable by modern Hellenes. Words even from Myceanean times are recognizable like "γυναικα" (=woman) , "αετος" (=year), "αρμα" (=chariot) and many others are still used !
You should've allowed for the presence of writing. Because of higher rates of literacy, I think English and most other widely spoken languages will retain quite a bit of intelligibility far into the future. Thair mite be sum speling reformz over the yeerz tu maik spling akchuli line up with pronunsiayshun, but Inglish wil stil be recognizabul tu most peepul. Unforchunitli meni mynoriti langwijez laik Dyirbul wil dye aut under presher frum larjer wunz (including Frisian, Inglish's closest relativ).
Hahaha wow, I understood that! Makes sense! I guess we can see a lot of that now, especially with American English changing words from English Centre to Center etc.
Oh one that language that might be a little different there is French.... because of their spelling/grammar moderator Academie Francaise. Where basically they have final ruling on how words are spelt, even if they don't pronounce the entire word anymore! Which is annoying when you're trying to learn to read/write in french and all their words have these extra letters at the end that they don't pronounce anymore!!
andyjay729
"Speling reformz"?
If we ever stoop so low as to enact such "reformz", woes are us. (Not sure how to write "woe is me" in plural)
Perish the thought!
Nixycat
As a French citizen, my personal explanation is that these silent letters are traces of the origins of the words. Traces of the origins of our language. Of our nation. And such traces are not to be erased, even if it makes the language tricky to master.
I dreaded those tests with all the fancy-sounding tenses, back in elementary school.
But I grew into acknowledging this what allowed our writers to have produced so many works that are still revered today; what allows our language to be so rich in different ways to speak and designate one thing or another. And I think this goes for pretty much every language.
So even today, if I had the occasion to go back in time and "start over" school with a "simplified" - or, as I put it, impoverished - version of the French tenses, I would still choose to go with the same version I was taught in, through and through.
We hav uh fraze fur that (woe betide us). If u prefr to uze thuh "reformz," mayb itz wo betyd us. U cud ulso go with "woe upon us" dpendyng on pruhnunseashun.
Mayhapz tho, n defens uf propryete, u mite put the cama _n_ the kwotayshin marks.
I don't know if anyone watches THE 100 series here, but it has always bothered me, how english could change into grounder language in only 97 years. And also, why warriors kept english? And also, how could they COMPLETELY forget technology: I mean it was only 97 years. Someone, whose parents have seen pramfaya (when everything went boom) is surely alive. And also, how the hell could people who survived atom bombs (!) believe that Becca Pramheda is some goddess? Any ideas? Maybe NativLang should make a video of grounder language, I would LOVE that!
Eperke you're not the only one, believe me. It made much more sense when I found out that in the books the time frame was actually 300years!
To me, it is not at all obvious that Old English is related to my native tongue. I know there are cognates, but a casual listener can't pick them out of a conversation. I'd call that "unrecognizeable". And that's only 1000 years.
There's an uncanny similarity between the factors affecting the evolution of language and the evolution of living things... (ie. the conditions of the hardy weinberg principle)
omg
The real question is whether language-wide internet connections will speed up or slow down language progression. In one sense, the forever-frozen media of the past will be a reference for future learners. Yet since the rise of Google we have a large amount of new terms: to Google, meme, troll, etc
Dutch from a thousand years ago (and more) is still very recognisable to me anno 2017.
Languages change the fastest when they cross cultural borders (like the Roman invading all Europe) and then come back hitting you in the face, like a boomerang.
When I visited England, driving west from Brighton to Plymouth then east, from Bristol to London, I was shocked to discover such a diversity of accents, and probably vocabulary. It is like if the radio/tv never influenced these people. Or maybe it did, since we could at least be understood using a mix of french and fake london/queen of England accent.
Ive come to notice that my language, german, is a pretty consistent language; With a little thinking, a modern german speaker could understand middle high erman from c.a. 1000 years ago just fine. The word order changed a little, for example, back then, it was more like the english order of words, but most words sentences would have such a similar pronounciation that understanding them would be no problem.
Compare that to english which changed drastically. Just LOOK at old and middle english! I mean woah.
Middle high german is a bit unfair though because they had an insane way of spelling, as you see. That's just a matter of being used to it. The average German is able to perfectly unterstand everything since Luther, that was around 1500. Further back the meanings of some words are different. You may be able to recognize the words in a middle or old high german text, but you will be missinterpreting it for sure.
And that's partly _because of_ Luther.
But the original poster explicitly mentioned "MHG from a 1000 years ago", so...
"You may get the general sense of it but good luck with the details. :)"
Exactly, that's what I mean |'D. The details would take more time, sure, and the spelling is cray cray, and the rhiming makes it kinda hard to make sense of it too, but with a little time, and talking that whole thing outloud, amd thinking about the entire thing, one think one could decipher that... With a bit of time. And a dictionary because old words. Thats what i meant with "a little thinking" :P
I just ment, in comparison to the english language at the time, the changes were ~~relatively~~ minor, like, I have seen old english and modern english. I don't even think the general gist would even be understood by anyone :'D
Adjective precedes the noun as in all Germanic speech.
Another fab vid. Love your animations on this one. Cooee from Wadu Wurrung country (south eastern Australia).
I knew that Icelandic would be mentioned.
Artur M. I mean why wouldn't it be. In my opinion it should just be in every video. Especially with simple to pronounce words like Vaðlaheiðavegavinnuverkamannaskúrslyklakippuhringur. See, it just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?
What about creolization or pidginization or even adstrate influences? There's some strong evidence that this is the most important accelerator of language change: that expansive, interactive, "cosmopolitan" languages change a lot faster than isolated ones like Icelandic. For instace Latin evolved fast in the period between Roman Italian expansion and the Middle Ages but then Romances sorta froze (if you speak Spanish you can perfectly read La Celestina, which was written 518 years ago and understand everything, except maybe some cultural clues, but no problem with the language at all, but it becomes harder when you try the Cantar del Mio Cid, from the 12th century). What about the influence of print (never mind radio and TV and the Internet) on this process of language evolutionary freeze? Even in those languages where pronunciation has continued evolving (English, French) it has managed to freeze the written language, so Shakespeare probably pronounced things quite differently than modern English speakers but he certainly wrote them the same way (or almost so).
Spanish is atypical, since it was standardized in 1492 with its first grammar, that is way, way earlier than english, for instance.
Euclides Ribeiro but Spanish has still changed quite a bit since, especially in orthography and pronunciation
@@EriniusT - Not significantly. You can read 16th century stories and have no major differences re. what is spoken today, stuff like "x" turning "j", some vocabulary that sounds dated, little more. Now if you go back into the Middle Ages, then that's another story, but from 1492 to now the changes are all very minor.
@@duckdialectics8810 - It was my "Selectividad" text commentary, I'm aware.
Nice conclusion to great series!
x2 speed with a bit of skipping
1. State that Iceland (less than 400k people) changes their language slower than Norway (10 times the population).
2. Explains this by stating that smaller populations changes their language faster.
They don't teach math in linguistic school now do they?
he quoted one hypothesis from a research paper, then went into other hypothesises.
also iceland is in the middle of the atlantic; and norway is on a peninsula.
Indignant Wellington What hypothesis did he quote?
It boggles my mind how simliar this process is to evolution.
The two even sometimes have analogous concepts:
Example:
Living fossil: a species that has physically changed very little, if at all from specimens in the fossil record.
Lingustic conservativism: where a word changes very little compared to other words derived from the same source.
Good work NativLang! An important topic, and you've covered it well.
Can you please do a video on "how different English evolved through time"? I'm curious about it
The 5000 thing pricked my ears. I seem to hear that number a lot not just langauges but when hearing of ages of civilisations. It actually seems to correspond with a world wide flood, then soon all languages splitting from the tower or babel a short while after.
*Would someone from the 1500s understand me if i said:"que pasa pato? Yo soy de bario cabron!"? Sometimes I lie awake at night and think of shit like that*
English is a good example of the "social upheaval" catalyst. It changed after the invasion of the The Great Heathen Army, though not as starkly due to the similarity of Old Norse and Old English. It changed much more dramatically and quickly after the Norman conquest.
so basically your'e saying, it will take a very long time?
recently i saw a picture of a greek plaque about 3-4000 years old ... i could actually recognise some of the words! but i wonder what it sounded like?
just look up the letter to phonetic correspondence. it is written very phonetically.
you saw a plaque in linear b and recognized what it said?
I speak several languages, and so does one of my brothers. When we chat, our languages intermingle to impart a point of view in the more exacting words.. As you'd suspect, there are words to which there are no accurate translations in any particular language. Thus, we must borrow from other languages. There are other factors which also influence these changes. Scientific and technical terms, for instance, will also slither their way into our common vocabulary. In perhaps a couple of hundred years, maybe less, what is written here may be difficult to understand, unless one's an expert in "old English", circa 2017.
This is a very interesting topic! I am not a linguist but I do speak Spanish and French fluently as well as a fair amount of German and some Italian. As a classical/opera type vocalist, I have also learned ecclesiastic Latin.
I earned a B.A. degree in French after having lived for a year in France. I was very interested in continuing to speak French but France is across the ocean. I found Quebec to be far more accessible but of course, I immediately became aware of the great difference in dialect.Then, I had heard that some people in Louisiana still speak French, so I decided to explore that. It was difficult to find at first but when I did, I was amazed! There were people in the smaller communities who still actively spoke French. It does have a very distinct accent with many vowel shifts but the more I explore it, the more that I find it is about 95% the same as French spoken in France today.That is despite the US government's effort to basically eradicate it beginning in the 1920's. French was no longer taught in schools and school children were punished for speaking French at school. Nevertheless, speakers of Louisiana French performed a valuable service in World War II. The language was still spoken at home. They could speak it to the people in France and be understood but most importantly, they could deceive the enemy.
The fact that French was discouraged however, meant that in many families, the parents did not speak it to their children. Radio and Television also contributed to the idea that English was the key to French heritage people becoming an integral part of modern American society. Yet, some people continued to speak it.They had no foundation in education. They learned to read and write in English and had no idea how to spell the words they used in French nor could they read much of anything written in French and understand it. Yet, they know words that date back to 15th and 16th Century France in some cases.So, the topic of this video becomes very interesting when all of these elements are considered. Basic words being preserved entirely aurally for as much as 500 years, for example. The people who brought the French language to Louisiana are a mix, to be sure from the Creoles who came directly from France, to the Acadians (popularly known as the Cajuns) who went through great turmoil to be resettled in Louisiana after having been exiled from Canada.Almost none of the people who settled in Louisiana had much, if any educational support for their language. It was taught in schools in the 19th Century and early 20th Century but these were rural people for the most part, not university scholars. Yet, the kind of vocabulary that still persists among some speakers is vast and truly amazing to identify!
French in Louisiana was predicted to totally die out long before the turn of the 21st Century. Yet, nearly 20 years into the 21st Century, there are estimated to be about 100,000 speakers still left.
In the late 1960's there was a movement in Louisiana to reverse the trend of eradication of French spoken in Louisiana, called The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL). It has made little progress. The damage has already been done. It was frankly, a rather clumsy effort. That being said, there are French immersion schools in Louisiana where children learn modern, Standard French.
The students can sometimes speak to grand parents and great grand parents and still be mutually understood. They can sometimes learn the typical Louisiana French pronunciation and unique words from the elders. Some young children are actually quite enthusiastic about being able to speak the old dialect.Some have even grown up, learning Louisiana French as a second language but are proud speakers and promoters of it. Those who are musicians have had the greatest influence. They interpret the old Folk songs, sometimes in a very traditional way but often in a modern way. They sometimes also create new songs and melodies, borrowing from the old traditions but making their new presentations be appealing to a contemporary audience.There are now many websites devoted to the preservation and encouragement of Louisiana French. One of the most popular now on Facebook has 28,342 members!
facebook.com/groups/cajunfrench/They discuss all types of issues but there are daily vocabulary offerings. What I very consistently noted from the time when I joined was that almost all of them were the very same as standard French spoken today in France. The members of the group from France concur. Only very rarely, is there a word or expression that is unique to Louisiana French.Some of the native speakers express dismay when they see how words are actually spelled in French and insist upon spelling words, "like they sound" (based upon their own experience of knowing only English phonology). But, we work it out and try to encourage them to accept the proper French spelling, for sooner or later, they will get it.It is an interesting group, to be sure and I would think that all of the pure linguists would be interested in the phenomenon: French is still French as spoken by at least 100,000 people in Louisiana as only a spoken dialect but one that with some patience, is still mutually comprehensible from people who live in France today.
Did you know that if a current English speaker were to show him the original texts of Shakespeare, it would be difficult for him to understand it more than if a current Spanish speaker were shown the original texts of Cervantes?
over the 70+ years of separation, the Korean language spoken in South and North Korea have diverged so much that 45% of North Korean defectors have trouble understanding South Koreans and 1% can't understand South Koreans at all
Japanese changes so fast, you wouldn't understand 100 years old Japanese.
poor guy, he's stuck in a state of suspended animation until such times that this question can be answered.
I'm native Faroese, and Faroese is the closest relative to Icelandic. It's interesting because our vocabulary is very similar to Icelandic, but our pronounciation is very different - so different that we don't understand each other very much at all when it's spoken. We (Faroese) have lost the "th" sound and changed it to either a hard "t" or a regular "h". For example, the capital on the Faroe Islands is Tórshavn (means Thor's Harbour) - we use a hard "t" sound while Icelandic uses a "th" sound (spelled þ in Icelandic), which it was originally in Faroese too.
When I read Icelandic I can understand most of it, if it isn't too technical, and from my understanding, written Faroese is similarly understood by Icelandic people, but to a lesser degree because of our loan words from (mostly) Danish.
I love all of your videos! They’ve made me really interested in linguistics. If you feel comfortable can you do a video explaining your journey with linguistics, and maybe some book recommendations?
Video about Quechua? or Andean Languages general? please NativLang guy
Carrot Slice yes pls
I wanna see this dude focus on some Native American languages. Like Athabascan
Maybe unintelligible would be a better word than unrecognisable. Old English is very hard for speakers of modern English to understand, but it's instantly recognisable as some kind of English. A french speaker can't understand classical Latin very well but they can still see that it's related
I still don't understand why people dislike this?
maybe people who accidentally clicked on the video?
because not everyone is you
A word of thanks for your videos, they’re so interesting and clear. A pleasure to watch!
Ur so sexy
What about technology? What stabilizing or destabilizing effects did the printing press (increases of literacy rates, and spelling and pronunciation standardization) or even today's internet have on the rate of language change?
Odd, the Aborigines have been in Australia for at least 40,000 years. The pictographs are meaningless without oral communication. So the Aborigines must have had a series of languages rise and fall.
As far as I know, there were at least 500 different australian aboriginal languages at the time the first european colonists came
When a language becomes unrecognizable, how is it not then a different language? For example if someone only understands English they will need a translation to understand something in Old English.
2:59 The biggest reason why language change so fast?
Colonialism.
People always forget forced assimilarion
From what I understand, language changes faster than the written word. In other words, I would have a better chance reading the words 1000 years in the future than I would listening to them spoken.
It's easier to change pronounciation than changing writing
I can still understand 13th century Hungarian.
Take that, Anglophones who have difficult comprehending Shakespearian English
Shakespeare is nothing. Chaucer is difficult.
The presence of and rigidity of a writing system and its spelling could effect how fast a language changes, although modern English orthography retains the spellings of sounds from Elizabethan literature that are no longer pronounced in contemporary English
This is so sad. This is why I think we need more language education, because just letting languages devolve, as is their typical natural process, is just so, so sad.
education may help document a language, which I think is very important, but it won't stop changing. At least, there's no guarantee of it. A language with no writing system may change very little, for instance. You can explain the rate of change in language in hindsight, but it's hard to predict it, so it's very difficult to prevent it.
Dont Fuck With Me UA-cam Language evolution is natural, it's language death that's tragic.
How would teaching more "big" languages stop the "little" ones from devolving? They only devolve because they are pushed out of spheres of use and are replaced by the "big" language there. As far as we know now, the smartest policy would be to teach children Esperanto for one year ( see wikipedia Propaedeutic_value_of_esperanto), followed by several years of classes in at least one language of their choice. You need serious knowledge of at least two ethnic languages to fully appreciate their uniquenesses
@@ronaldonmg esperanto is a horrably designed language.
@@taududeblobber221 Are you talking about the extent to which it was designed or the way in which it was? Either way it's a matter of opinion. The fact is that it's easier to learn than any ethnic/national language, and that it has about a thousand times as many users as any other full-fledged conlang. Teaching children Ido, Modern(ised) Latin or Interlingua for a year could have almost the same propaedeutic effect, but in the shorter term they would provide fewer opportunities to use the language.
Isolation has to be a strong considerate in evolution of language. Iceland is relatively isolated (or was pre flight). Just as there are some Italian island regions that speak closer to the original Latin than mainland Italian etc.
"The one aberration here is Proto-Afro-Asiatic, story for another time".
Did that time come?
Nice work. As a native Mandarin speaker our language didn't change much in over 1000 years(except for tones, since they decay/transform quickly). Thanks to the continuous and large-complex-structural Chinese Characters and literatures, an inscription from Han Dynasty(1st Century BCE) is still familliar to us. That's 2,000 years ago, amazing, isn't it? When back to the Oracle bone script, yeah they are intellegible to modern Chinese but still recognizable. 4,000 years ago, wow. So to make a language stable, the best way probably is to build an empire that has the ultimate power (institution for grammar standardization, grammar school, etc.) to unite words and languages.(probably hundreds of language died in the process of Great Expansion to the Southern part of ancient China and we just simply had no clue about them.)
But this didn't happen in the latin world. Although the Empire was strong at trying to keep latin a uniform language, it rapidly created dialects of ''vulgar latin'' or day to day latin... By the end of the Empire, people from different regions would have a hard time speaking to one an other.
but norwegian is basically the way it is today due to 300 years of danish influence
had it evolved naturally, it might very well have been more similar to icelandic
Niko L Yes, but keep in mind that Danish is a closely related language, also descended from the Old Norse. Beside almost all languages are influenced by others to some extent, so it is natural. I think that the point is that the intensity of this influence is one of the major factors deciding how fast language changes.
Norwegian was however closer related to Icelandic than Danish, coming from the west-norse dialect, while Danish and Swedish were east-norse.
But because Norway is continentally connected, influence from the neighbours is inevitable, even if it hadn't been under danish rule. The changes might have been less though. We'll never know for sure.
Artur M Danish is related but has changed extremely much from how it was in the Viking age