When I say I want to study linguistics, people usually think that I am going to spend years learning multiple languages. When I tell them I want to do research on indigenous languages here in Taiwan in the future, they laugh at me and say "there are more than ten indigenous languages here, you can never master all of them!" Well, doing linguistic research is about using scientific methods to find out linguistic facts about a language or a group of languages. That means a linguist doesn't necessarily have to be a polyglot or study a language in order to do a research on it. Sometimes those people really get on my nerves...lol
Hi there, usually I just ignore when unacquainted people add me to their circles. But your showing an interest in linguistics and Formosan languages drew my attention. As a Ph.D. student in linguistics, I am curious which department you determine to attend (I found that you have at least four choices.) You can decide not to reply, of course.
@@glitchelectrode3313 It’s referring to the Niger and Congo Rivers of Africa. It’s where the countries Niger, Nigeria, and DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) get their names because they sit on these two rivers.
People in my class think learning English is difficult, then I always say that learning English as a German guy is much less difficult than learning it as a Chinese. It's true, the simmilarities are surprisingly big
as someone who is fluent in English and is learning German, I think it's safe to say they do share a lot of similarities, except for the whole grammatical gender thing and how adjectives and the pronouns should be inflated or declined depends on the case
chinese is actually surprisingly similar to germanic languages in grammar and syntax (fun coincidence!). chinese-speakers would have a lot more trouble with a romance language
The fun thing about Greece, is that, even though it's so tiny, and only home to 11.000.000 people, it is SO diverse, and people in regions of Greece speak so differently from one another! It's insane! As an Athenian-born, raised with standard Greek and nothing else, when I travel around, I quickly get baffled by all the dialects. Greek is a very well structured and enduring language, but more ofthen than not, when speaking to elders, I just have ask for clarification. And foreigners are baffled too... That one time I was speaking to a Cypriot in frond of some people, and they were amazed, because to them, it sounded like we were speaking completely different languages... Which I found amazing, given the fact that we mostly understand each other...
TheThOdOr1s The thing I like about Greek is that it is alone on it's branch of Indo-European. Other branches like Germanic have German, Scandinavian languages, English, etc but the Greek branch just has Greek.
Malos Kain That's the thing though, Greek is really a macro-language. The dialects are so different, that they could be easilly concidered different languages by linguistics, and yet because Ancient Greek texts and features are so enduring in our culture, these very different dialects have a lot of common ground, which makes Greek a very weird and facsinating language. Or maybe it's just because the history of the Greek language is very well documented, and people have access to it, unlike most languages...
Well, i've been wondering that myself for a long period now. And i think, it has to do with the children. First thing children learn is to call their mother and "Ma" or similar sound is (one of )the easiest sound to make. So, yeah.
+Bibek Gautam I agree. It's particularly prevalent in Mandarin Chinese that the sounds for family members come from the sounds of a baby, as (without accents added) Father is Baba, mother is Mama, older brother is Gege, etc.
There are at least 4 variation of each 2-4 words (character) in mandarin. Making sá, sä, sâ, sà etc, very different in meaning and sound. Not sure which accent correspond to which character but, "sa" may mean, retarded, to spill, three/third, etc. while chin may mean (to their pronunciations), to kiss, to invite, to celebrate, etc. So pronunciation between common human sounds can vary. Not mentioning someone from the USA find it hard to pronounce "rr" like "correr" (to run in spanish) while chinese find it hard to pronounce "r" and japanese "l"
Jet IceBane everyone has a mother so the word ''mother'' must be really old and thus spoken in a real old proto language. There was probably a small group of people thousands of years ago who had the sound ''M'' as a part of the word mother. This small group divided and migrated spreading the ''m'' sound for the word mother around the globe. The language changed as, but the ''m'' sound stayed.
Finnish is my first language and I'm studying Spanish; I was really surprised by the amount of similarities in grammar that they have for languages so far from each other.
@J.W. S.D that's because English borrowed 30% of its vocabulary from French, and French and Portuguese are both romance languages so they still have many similarities. The cognates make it much easier to learn!
I think the "Chinese language" is misinterpreted by English speakers. I am a Chinese and I find the words "language" and "dialect" differ between English and Chinese because *these meanings of words were matched like a jigsaw by early bi-dialects to form a translation, and they may not be totally accurate.* *- more below -* In Chinese, "語言" means spoken language, "語" means speech or language and "言" means words spoken. "語文" means written language. "英"(ying) is the name we gave Britain. Therefore, "英語" and "英文" are not totally equal, meaning spoken English and written English. "地方" means place, "方言" means dialect in English, or in literal Chinese, can be interpreted as "spoken language spoken by minorities or smaller places". Therefore, it's not the same system of the westerns as we have an universal written language and different spoken languages.
Patricius Joshua 漢語 doesn't means Mandarin. It means "Chinese language", both spoken and written. Mandarin is either (Taiwanese) 國語, or (PRC) 普通話. Why? That is because Chinese contains different recognized, **different grammatic** dialects. We don't really see dialects have different grammar in English. We have the most spoken: 普通話, 廣東話, 閩南語, 台山話, 上海話, etc (with "話" explicitly meaning spoken language) Dividing even smaller, we have 港式廣東話, Hong Kong styled Cantonese. Conclusion: Chinese contains ONE and only written language, many dialects that have different grammar, in which they contains different styles.
+TheCheungDan 汉语 is not both spoken and written Chinese, it means only spoken, 中文 means written Chinese, you can never say that you write 汉语，its grammatically wrong
Guanxi Chen Don't you think I don't agree. That's yet another translation problem. I guarantee "language" means both written text and spoken voice in English. 讀漢語，寫漢字。
Malay: Selamat pagi (Good morning) Indonesian: Selamat pagi (Good morning) Filipino: Salamat pagi (Thank you stingray) Salamat pogi (Thank you handsome)
Ok here goes. Russians cant understand a word in ukrainian or belarusian (russian is not like ukrainian at all), and they get really annoyed when you speak ukrainian to them, and even angry (they think that its disrespectfull to them, but they call us "brothers"... yeah), but we can understand russian (and speak freely) and belarusian (it is very very similar to ukrainian), polish, and a bit serbian, slovenian, slovakian, czech... We really dont agree here that russians are slavic as they love to say (dont ask me why, they just love to steal neighbours history, its pretty much what they are doing for centuries, now they say that there is no nation as ukrainians, and that Kievan Rus' was always russian, which is just a blind propaganda, shauvinism and bollocks, and is really disgraceful from them), in fact they are finno-ugric people. These days we are really sick of them to be honest (not all ofcourse but those who believe in kremlin propaganda and call us fascists), and remembering all what they did to us (and to belarussian and polish as well) throughout the history.... But we try to leave peacefully, because we are neighbours. It is hard to do that, though... imperialist mentality, you know. I cant see that in any of todays slavic nation, mentalities are completely different.
***** Как же бесят такие, ладно сами с вбитыми в голову стереотипами сидите и думать не хотите, так нет, вам этого мало, надо ведь еще и окружающим тем же голову забить, фу как это низко.
***** Don't take it personally. The only people left in Russia today are the dregs that were too stupid to get out years ago. Some of my ancestors were some of the ones smart enough to get out a long time ago too.
That's a beautifully made video, full of interesting image choices and details (and i watch quite a few of the animation videos already). I came back to pause and rewind a few times to see better some great imagery in action. Congrats to the animator
My theory is that there was no "first language." When humans spread out from Africa, they were already in different areas throughout the globe when language arose. Because of this, their linguistic "starting points" were different, depending on how close they lived to one another. For example, if group A lived in section 1 of an area of the inhabitable world, their original language would almost certainly have been different from group L who lived in section 204, thousands of miles away from group A, who may or may not have begun using their own language around the same time. I call this my "Many Mothers" theory. To assert that there was only one original language would, by extension, imply that the first humans started communicating linguistically before they ever fanned out from their point of origin.
gregory brian Yea with humans migrating all over the world from general areas, chances are they did communicate linguistically via grunting as Mariana stated, or with clicks. There may not have been constructed syntax or morphology but take for example the Piraha language. They can communicate full thoughts by whistling to each other. These are still forms of language. Just something to take into consideration with your theory.
Interesting theory. It’s certainly plausible. A few things I can say about your theory: It could indeed be true considering that humans developed the physical ability for language (as we know it today) far earlier than the mental capacity. Chimpanzees could theoretically speak like humans but you will never be able to teach language to one. Another thing is that apparently (perhaps this has been overridden by new evidence but it was correct when I read it) though humans had settled most of Europe, including Spain, tens of millennia ago, Portugal wasn’t inhabited until 6,000 BC, so perhaps those new people were the ones that escaped genocide (very common long ago), and later when they returned to their homelands centuries after anyone could remember anything, they still kept their language and became the Basque (but that’s completely speculation on my part, my own theory if you will). Plus, it would make much more sense if your theory were true for that reason as well; prehistoric genocide was based on race, and because humans were still hunter-gatherer tribes, most peoples of the same race would speak the same language or similar languages. This could mean that race and language would be related, so language trees we see today survived because other trees (races) were wiped out. It’s highly unlikely that different speakers would have committed genocide before the expansion out of Africa because there were too few humans alive for people to split into identities, so all conflict was restricted to the scale of the tribe and not anything larger (Ive seen estimates of post-Toba human populations from as high as 10,000 to as low as 500). Once humans became numerous and spread apart, only then could people see themselves as disconnected from each other. And plus, this would be when mutations occurred that developed into the races we see today; those we don’t see today are by definition extinct In fact I think your theory is probably true because it’s estimated that humans did not behave mentally the same as a modern human until about 70,000 years ago and Toba was 75,000 years ago, so it’s highly likely that that was the point where different proto-languages developed into actual languages (though we’d call these proto-languages)
I can relate. When i am having french classes in school i can understand most of the words simply because they sound so similar to english. What a wonderful world
The evolution of languages reminds me a bit of the evolution in biology. Kinda funny how these fundamentally different things are driven by the same factors (physical movements, isolation etc) to come to a similar result.
As a person who indulged in learning languages, to mention: German (I forgot how to speak!), Greek, and Hungarian, with ease, I'd like to say that: within a few months I can connect with more people than ever across the world.
Basically, Darwinian evolution of languages instead of gene pools. I admire the use of the "Tower of Babel" story in what is essentially a scientific examination of language. Language is a fascinating thing--so much of our modern knowledge and early survival depended on it. I've been planning for my next video about how language barriers and misunderstandings act as catalysts for world issues and inhibited social progress. I recently put up a video about our ever-changing perceptions of our ever-changing world and how the two are key to making human progress. Check it out if you're interested, I promise I won't let you down. Good day to you all:) May we always learn from one another and never stop progressing.
When considering two similar languages, you seem to ignore the possibility that they may have converged into their similarity as opposed to having once been the same language, diverged from each other.
I love how in my country(the Philippines), a word for something could mean two different things in the same island, some islands even have multiple languages and dialects in them.
I kinda develop secret hatred towards people mixing up english & tagalog words with our own language. I just see it as a threat to our heritage and identity as a separate ethnic group of Filipino and people are unaware of it and it's getting worse. I use english words sometimes but not to the point of replacing native words that are still existing. I don't know, i just took pride of myself as a bisaya person after learning the korean language.
i was in Macedonia in the late 90s, and there was already talk of Croatians attempting to separate their language from Serbian. my friend saying this was a native and spoke Serbian too, and said that they were basically the same language. but even then the breakup of Yugoslavia had begun to have its impact on the division of cultures and languages. i found it fascinating that i was witnessing that at the time, and i'm not surprised there's been more change since. and i know my friends also spoke Bosnian and it was different in some ways from Serbian, tho i don't know specifics. i did get the feeling that all of those languages were very closely related and that it seemed that Macedonian was the least similar, having elements of Greek and other influences unique to its geography/history.
you can see the effect of separation in way more recent, more recorded languages, it's visible when it comes to colonization. though some languages change more in a certain period of time than others do, which is also interesting. there's obviously the differences between english in great britain, north america, australia, india, etc. but if you take portuguese (which i'm using as an example because it's a language i speak), brazilian portuguese and portuguese portuguese can be quite different, not just in pronunciation or spelling but in a lot of words you'd find very basic, like "breakfast", or even something as simple as "girl". i have no idea what portuguese is like in angola, moçambique, and other countries that speak it as well, but i imagine their specific influences must make it very interesting as well, though also maybe harder to understand (i remember reading a book from moçambique (i think?) a few years ago, and it had a small "dictionary" in the back to clarify some words (including "breakfast, since it's also not the same word used in portugal or in brazil). in the case of colonization or any kind of domination, new dialects or accents can also teach about the language that was taken over. for example, some accents in brazil result from natives who learnt it not having a certain sound in their language, and producing it in a way that's different from how it was "supposed to be said", and then you get a regional accent as a result. i also find it super interesting to see how quickly languages change. brazilian portuguese, once again as an example because it's a language i speak, has changed considerably in the past 100 years only, or even less. if you read an older book, you can understand it, of course, but there are lots of words that aren't used these days at all, along with other changes. it's very obvious when something is older. meanwhile, while german has changed a lot throughout the ages, it hasn't changed as much in such a short time recently. and if you take icelandic, it's extremely similar to old norse - some icelandic friends of mine tell me they can often read texts that are hundreds of years old in school without that much difficulty, the language just didn't change that much even though it's been a while! one interesting thing i remember learning about english is how you can see that different words for two versions of one thing have different origins. for example, the word for "cow" has germanic origins, while "beef" is closer to the french word for it. because when the normans conquered england, they were largely the noble, rich people, as opposed to the germanic farmers. so the word for the animal in the farm is germanic while the word for the animal on a plate has latin roots a lot of the time. languages can really show a lot about the history of a group of people, which is why i find linguistics extremely fascinating, and am leaving a few fun facts for others who might find it interesting as well here lol
The question I have is will we all go (back) into having one language in the future and by combine all current languages or having a complete new language?
Conlangs (*con*structed *lang*uages) have been attempted, such as Esperanto, but none have actually succeeded to the point of being a universal language.
RKH1502 >English is no more a universal language than Mandarin Chinese or Spanish What do you mean? Unlike English, no one speaks Chinese or Spanish outside of their countries
Well given the premise of the video, the opposite should be true. In other words, as the world becomes more interconnected (we won't be isolated like before), then it's possible that we develop a common language. So far, it seems that English is the most widespread language, mainly because it's the adopted language for business.
I've noticed only one thing that can be considered wrong XD: I'm a native speaker of Portuguese, and the Portuguese word for "yes" is not "sí", as in Spanish, but "sim". xD
+Pedro Furtado "i think they used the "si" to show how portuguese speakers can understand spanish speakers even if they don't speak the same language." Another comment (Moisés Duarte)
+Xesau "si" means 'yes' in the context of countering/contradicting a negative statement or question, like for example, "You don't have a smartphone, do you?" _"Yes I do!"_ (insert "Si!" here hah) I've used an English example but it' the same principle :)
*There has to be an outside influence*, because ideas can come to many people at about the same time. Example: *Language developed at about the same time everywhere on the planet*. Religions from different times and places have many things in common. Inventions and styles of music and art come to people at about the same time. It is not just a coincidence. Find out about this outside influence it has brought us the world we are living in now. Google *TruthContest read the Present*, it explains for the 1st time ever the big picture of life in every facet, it explains the nature of everything. It will set you free
You`re actually right. For example in the 60`s and 70`s was the time for the best music. What is that influence you were talking about? Im curious now, is it some kind of holy ghost or something? lol
this is beautiful I have intro to language so this helped with the class and my teacher was the one who assigned this video so thanks to my teacher I found this and it helped :)
I hear foreign languages all the time since my school is international having students from dozens of countries, speaking more than 20 different languages and dialects... Our common language is English, since the school is in New York, and I've always wondered how languages formed and came to be so different from one and other...
I'm in the middle of constructing a whole dictionary of a new branch of words to simply add to English. My latest word added is "zore" which came into being from a mistake in Science Class where the teacher was trying to write "core".
+SamThe RandomG1rl "Dump water on the zore!" "I'm sorry; what?" "There'll be a nuclear meltdown if we can't cool the zore!" "What the fuck are you talking about?" "The zore! The reactor zore!" "Have you been standing too close to the zore?"
I love these things because it's like language science, and these are two things I like. Also, some videos on conlangs made me understand a lot if things in language development
Spanish and Portuguese is spoken very differently. Spanish speakers hardly ever understand Portuguese aside from the cognates but Portuguese speakers can somewhat understand Spanish.
My native language is Spanish ("Latino" version) and I have visited Brazil and Portugal (completely different Portuguese accents), but it was easy for all my family and I to understand them.
+jay pad My native language is Spanish and I can understand 85% of written Portuguese (Brazilian or European) but I can't understand that well someone speaking in Portuguese.
+KEEP CALM and PLAY SOCCER IN YOUR PAJAMAS no, this is for real! And I've seen tons of different people whose native language is Spanish talking with someone who speaks Portuguese and vice-versa.
Fascinating! I am beyond obsessed with linguistics and I speak four languages (including multiple dialects in Arabic) and yet I feel like I still wanna learn more languages. But one day I will fulfill my dream of studying linguistics!..
Felds Liscia No, finnish is VERY different from those languages, finnish comes from a language family with slavic background meanwhile the three mentioned languages come from the same language family as english and german.
Coolit man Actually Finnish is derived from a separate language family, and is part of the Uralic language family. Finnish is similar to Estonian and Hungarian in an extent, to name a few.
Fuma Aoki Thanks for correcting! Now that you say it I remember one of my teachers mentioned that a Hungarian kid who she taught learned the finnish grammar astonishingly fast.
1:48 This video seems to display the current relationship between Russia and Ukraine, through subtlety. I only brought this up because the angry faces made me giggle.
It's really fascinated me to knowing about how languages evolve, as i'm currently studying human evolution and make me realize there are many things i should learn about our origins..
There are actually about 10 or twelve different languages that are all labeled "Chinese" because of their shared writing style. Cantonese and Mandarin are just the largest. Like the vid said, it depends who's counting :/
There's a whole lot of them. Linguists use the term "Sinitic", because "Chinese" is typically reserved for Mandarin. Cantonese is the only other well-known Sinitic language because it's spoken in Hong Kong, has a large population of speakers, and has been prevalent in Overseas Chinese communities until recently. Those two also happen to be the only two languages with a standardised writing system. Oh, you can use Chinese characters to write other varieties alright, but there is no regulating body, and no standard, so everyone writes how they please. What they do share, however, is their common ancestry, having descended from Old Chinese (actually Middle Chinese for all varieties excluding Min).
What these other guys say is accurate. To the ones you mentioned I can add Wu. There's a language called Wu. My understanding is it's spoken in Shanghai. There are 10-12 of the sinitic ones, and there non-sinitic languages in China as well, it's a very divers country. But I know only 3 by name and location.
Most Chinese people consider the 12 or so languages to be the same, because China doesn't like people suggesting that the country is divided in any way. Also, since the characters represent ancient chinese words and the words that evolved from them, and since until only recently most writing imitated the style and grammar of the original chinese language rather than what people were speaking in their everyday lives, people who lived miles apart and communicated by mail just assumed that they couldn't be all that different.
Imagine all the romance languages write and use Latin vocabulary and grammar. However, they speak Spanish, French, Italian, etc. For example, take the Latin word for apple is "malum." However, each language will write down the word malum, but speak/pronounce it as manzana(Spanish), pomme(French), mela(Italian). This is what happens in Chinese, it has a single unified written language, but very divergent spoken language(dialects). However, the romance languages are not Latin because they don't share the same written language(although they share a common ancestry).
One thing I've noticed is how many languages have the /n/ sound in initial position for words of negation (even the word 'negation'!). No Nein Non Ne Nee Nej Nem Ni Não Nu Niet Nie At least the languages in Europe, anyway. Maybe someone else can give insight on this, as I haven't studied comparative linguistics! :P
It's slightly different else. it is true that japanese negation is nai, but the word for no is iie. and mandarin is bu, and cantonese is m, so i suppose it's a european phenomenon and that most of those words are dirrectly related
***** Strangely, it deleted your comment as spam! I don't know why. But I restored it. It's strange how not all of the languages I listed are Indo-European though ("nem" is Hungarian - Uralic language family, non Indo-European). I just found it strange how a continent could show such uniformity in an aspect of language - but maybe that's because I haven't studied it! TheVisitorChannel1 My point wasn't the letter used, though, it was the sound /n/ - the phoneme, not grapheme (in linguistic terms). So, you mentioned Arabic, I take it that because you are using a romanised version of the word 'No', that 'La/Laa' is pronounced with the /l/ sound?
Yeah I've thought about that myself, but there are some exceptions. For ancient Greek (presumably modern Greek would be similar) its: ou/ouk. Another commonality between languages is the starting m in the word mother.
in Filipino, the word for no is 'hindi' which is pronounced as hin-deh, atleast in the tagalog dialect. Just as said in the video, speakers of the same language can't sometimes understand each other because of the different dialects and there are around 110 dialects here. Even the same word is pronounced differently and one can usually determine where the person comes from based on their accent.
I once wrote a comment in spanish and someone replied in portugese: "Oh wow at first I thought this comment was portugese but it wasn't" and I understood! So I said (in spanish): "Dude I can understand you" and He replied: "Same I can understand you too"
***** yeah, I know that, mate. For russians any of slavic language sounds gibberish. And yeah, I totaly agree ab stealing neighbor's history by russian. this is exactly what Peter the Great did by changing state name from Moskovia to Russia.
thealphazoid yeah...no i speak a little russian and i understand a lot of slavic laguages, and russian isent even my first language! So im sure russians understand a lot of slavic languages.
This is a great representation of different languages. For the most part, every language has it's own dialect, accent, and even alphabet. But it is so interesting to see how they evolved from similar places. Many root words in English come from Latin, as so many words in Spanish. Once the root word origin is known, it's pretty simple to learn the language. However, because of the different accents, writing, grammar, and the alphabet, many people feel put off by learning other languages.
Maybe, maybe not. Technology changes human evolution. It has been doing so in a ridiculously accelerated fashion since the Industrial Revolution. On an informational level, the internet has been part of this exponential change, itself having an exponential effect growth rate and impact over the past 25 years of its existence. In fact, it can be argued there is a chance (lovers of cultural diversity would say risk or danger) that the internet and ever growing connectivity will result in a single language in the distant future, although the concept of distant is very fluid in this context, it may be very soon. Arabs still understand each other and they broke apart way before the American Colonies. There may never be a chance for the Englishes of the world to become new languages.
More likely different Dialects. We can see this happening with slang which ultimately changes a language. With words like Bae. An example which would be comparable would be the word "Knife", in the early days of it's creation, It was pronounced with the K. But after time, people grew lazy and decided to pronounce it without the K. Like how the new word "Bae" is an abbreviated word for Babe.
Just a small correction Ted. At the 2:30 mark the Spanish and Portuguese guy say the word "yes". The Spanish word is in fact "sí" but the portuguese word is "sim", not "si". Anyways, nice video :)
If that's the case then the Portuguese should've said "sí" as well and he didn't. From what I interpret they are trying to show that both languages are similar (which they are) and they illustrate it by writing both the Spanish and the Portuguese words. What I was pointing out is that the Portuguese is written wrong (it's not si, it's sim). The m is what makes the difference in the sound. Yes it's not very different, although it is very noticeable for us natives. Again, it's not a major issue at all, I was just pointing it out. Ahaha, não. Gouveia (suponho que é esse o nome que te referes), é um nome Português (até temos uma cidade com esse nome). Sou português :)
I think top of the tree is Thamizh. Let us take 'Tholkaappiam' which is considered as the oldest literature available in Thamizh. This has been conservatively dated to around 300BC (wiki). What this book talks about is the interesting part. Unlike the oldest literatures in other languages, Tholkaappiam does not talk about God or King or War. It explains the grammar rules to be followed while speaking and writing in Thamizh. (Road rules only after the road has appeared, Not possible to before rules).
Wonderful video! I enjoy it very much and I agree with this video that geography and other human interactions contributed to the changes of languages. #miao #niamtxiv #hmong
Me llamó la atención lo de la TORRE DE BABEL !!! En realidad q pudo ocurrir para que el primer grupo de personas empezaran a cambiar su idioma básico, ¿ será q los idiomas se inventaron luego de la expansión de esas primeras personas...? Y por eso luego al encontrarse se empezaron a fusionar creando cada vez más nuevas lenguas ?
I was watching a documentary once; surprisingly, I heard many Arabic word similar to those commonly spoken in Hindi. Similarly, I come across many Hindi and Sanskrit words in English too. Btw, my native language is Hindi. I know Sanskrit too. So I guess, they were once the *same...?
Khushwant Singh Sanskrit and English are actually cousins. They're both members of the Indo-European language family, so that's probably why you noticed that. :)
Khushwant Singh Can you give us any examples? If the words were instantly recognisable, then you are almost certainly talking about borrowings. If a word referring to a modern invention, such as "television", is similar in different languages, then you can be certain that you are not looking at evidence that the languages are related but are just looking at what happens when a new concept is discovered or invented and every language suddenly needs a word for it. Most language communities won't just make up a new word out of the blue but will borrow the word for that new concept from a language that already has one. Words that genuinely derive from a common ancestral language will pertain to concepts commonly discussed during the era in which the ancestral language was spoken: words for ancient concepts involving, for example, numbers, the natural world, and family relationships. For English and Hindi, the common ancestral language was Proto-Indo-European, and it was spoken roughly five thousand years ago. There are related words in English and Hindi - such as English "know" and Hindi "jānanā" - but ten thousand years of separation will make it difficult, if not impossible, to recognise the relationships. You have to study historical linguistics to properly appreciate the connection between English and Hindi. As for Arabic and Hindi - no chance! They are likely related, but much more distantly than English and Hindi. There is no chance at all of recognising cognate words between those two languages without extensive study of the histories of the two languages, and perhaps not even then.
+Khushwant Singh Hindi, English and Sanskrit were all originally the same. Arabic wasn't. Those Arabic words were added into Hindi, probably through either a) Persian or b) imperialism and conquest.
+BernieSandersenEspañol Hey, your conclusion seems quite appropriate. Since, Indian subcontinent was once ruled by Persian-speakers for quite a long time, the words from Persian gradually would've seeped into the language that of the locals. I guess it's the place from where those similarities must have come from.
पेशवा JAY Thank you. I know that there are many English words that come either directly or indirectly from Sanskrit. "Jungle" and "juggernaut" come from Sanskrit via Hindi. "Karma", "Aryan", "mantra", and "yoga" come directly from Sanskrit. ("Umbrella" comes from Italian!) The examples that you give are recent borrowings into English, so they are nothing to do with the common Indo-European origins of Sanskrit and English. I was only asking Khushwant Singh for examples of the words that he was talking about in the hope that I could explain to him why they sounded similar.
Yeah. Like Hindi and Bengali are SO similar. I am Bangladeshi and know Bengali. But when I was a kid all cartoons were in Hindi. So I had no choice but to watch them in Hindi. I learned Hindi just by watching a few cartoons. No one ever taught me anything. Now I can speak Hindi pretty fluently and its very helpful as I am came to India for 5 months
this is a video, not a slide show, dont just look at the picture, hear what the narrator is saying ffs, she said that most portuguese and spanish speakers understand each other, they depicted the portuguese guy saying "si" because he understood what the spanish guy was saying! was that soo hard to understand? lets say you start speaking to some random guy who understands very little english, he will most probably end up saying "ok" or "good" meaning that he acknowledges what you are saying, it doesnt mean his native language has words "ok" or "good"
I speak Spanish and even though Portuguese is different I could understand someone from Brazil or Portugal who is asking for directions. My mother has a good ear she can even understand someone from Italy! French may be a little harder but if you take your time and use hand gestures to fill in the language gaps you can understand French.
It isn't about what people know, it's the similarities between languages, I know Portuguese and I could decently communicate with someone Spanish through similarities of the languages.
"If you hear a foreign language, pay attention. It may not be as foreign as you think." I do believe that languages are just a accent of the tongue, as what a buddha have said. I am currently mastering the English Language right now and your videos really helps. Thanks.
One time I was at a bookstore in my country (Guatemala; I speak Spanish) and there was this girl and her mother talking a foreign language I did not recognize. They were European, tall, white and blonde, and the only word I could figure out was one that sounded like "book". Since we were in a bookstore, I knew it mean "libro" (book in Spanish), because the girl was holding one in her hands, convincing the mother to buy it. I did some research and I think it was either Swedish, Norwegian or Dutch, but I still don't know. ._.
On the topic of dialects, English has a lot of accents and dialects and some are completely incomprehensible to others. Canadian, American, British, and Australian peoples all speak mostly the same language that being English. But the different words, pronunciations, dialects, and accents make them extremely different and recongnizable.
The reseblence of "name" could suggest there being common language, look how many n's and m's: Abkhaz: ахьʒ (āx’ʒ) Afrikaans: naam (af) m Aghul: тур Albanian: emër (sq) m American Sign Language: H@RadialFinger-H@CenterChesthigh Contact Contact Amharic: ስም (səm) Arabic: اِسْم (ar) m (ism), أسْمَاء m pl (ʾasmāʾ) Cypriot Arabic: ism m Egyptian Arabic: اسم m (esm) Tunisian Arabic: اِسْمْ m (ʾism) Aragonese: nombre m Aramaic: Syriac: ܫܡܐ m (šmā’) Hebrew: שמא m (šmā’) Armenian: անուն (hy) (anun) Aromanian: numã Asturian: nome m, ñome m Avar: цӏар (c̣ar) Azeri: ad (az) Baluchi: نام (nám) Bashkir: исем (isem), ат (at) Basque: izen Belarusian: і́мя n (ímja), (of a place, class, etc.) назо́ў m (nazóŭ), на́зва f (názva) Bengali: নাম (nam) Breton: ano m, anv (br) m Bulgarian: и́ме (bg) n (íme) Burmese: အမည် (my) (a.many), နာမည် (my) (namany) Catalan: nom (ca) m Chechen: цӏе (c̣ie) Chinese: Cantonese: 名 (ming4), 名字 (ming4 zi6), 名稱, 名称 (ming4 cing1) Mandarin: 名 (zh) (míng), 名字 (zh) (míngzì), 名稱 (zh), 名称 (zh) (míngchēng) (thing or organisation) Min Nan: 名 (zh-min-nan) (miâ), 名字 (zh-min-nan) (miâ-jī, miâ-lī), 名稱 (zh-min-nan), 名称 (miâ-chheng) (thing or organisation) Chiricahua: -́zhii Chuvash: ят (jat) Coptic: ⲣⲁⲛ (ran) Cornish: hanow m Crimean Tatar: ad, isim Czech: jméno (cs) n, název (cs) m Dalmatian: naun m, naum m Danish: navn (da) Dhivehi: ނަން (nan) Dutch: naam (nl) m Egyptian: rn r n Eshtehardi: نومَ (nōma) Esperanto: nomo (eo) Estonian: nimi Extremaduran: nombri Faroese: navn (fo) n Finnish: nimi (fi) (especially a person), nimitys (fi) (object) French: nom (fr) m Old French: nom m Middle French: nom m Friulian: non Georgian: სახელი (saxeli), სახელწოდება (saxelcodeba) German: Name (de) m Greek: όνομα (el) n (ónoma) Ancient: ὄνομα n (ónoma) Gujarati: નામ (gu) m (nām) Hausa: suna Hawaiian: inoa Hebrew: שם (he) m (shem) Hindi: नाम (hi) m (nām) Hungarian: név (hu) Icelandic: nafn (is) n Ido: nomo (io) Indonesian: nama (id) Ingrian: nimi Interlingua: nomine Irish: ainm (ga) m Old Irish: ainmm n Primitive Irish: ᚐᚅᚋ n (anm) Istriot: non, nom Istro-Romanian: nome Italian: nome (it) m Japanese: 名前 (ja) (なまえ, namae), 名 (ja) (な, na), (honorific) お名前 (ja) (おなまえ, o-namae), (honorific) ご芳名 (ごほうめい, go-hōmei), 名称 (ja) (めいしょう, meishō) (thing or organisation) Kannada: ಹೆಸರು (kn) (hesaru) Karachay-Balkar: ат (at) Karelian: nimi Kashubian: miono n Kazakh: есім (esim), ат (kk) (at) Khmer: ឈ្មោះ (km) (cmʊəh) Korean: 이름 (ko) (ireum), 성함 (ko) (seongham) (honorific), 명칭 (ko) (myeongching) (名稱 (ko)) (thing or organisation) Kurdish: nav (ku) Sorani: ناو (ku) Kyrgyz: ат (ky) (at) Ladin: inom, inuem Lao: ຊື່ (sư̄), ນາມ (nām) Latgalian: vuords m Latin: (please verify) nōmen (la) n, (please verify) nōmen nōminis n Latvian: vārds (lv) m Lithuanian: vardas (lt) m Lojban: cmene (jbo) Luhya: lisina Luxembourgish: Numm Macedonian: име n (ime), назив m (naziv) Malay: nama (ms) n Malayalam: പേര് (ml) (pēr), നാമം (ml) (nāmaṃ) Maltese: isem m Manx: ainm m Maori: ingoa Marathi: नाव (nāv) Mongolian: нэр (ner) Navajo: -́zhiʼ, yízhí Nepali: नाम (ne) (nām) Ngarrindjeri: mitji North Frisian: (Mooring) noome m; (Föhr-Amrum) nööm m Northern Sami: namma Norwegian: navn (no) Novial: nome Occitan: nom (oc) m Old English: nama m Old French: num m Old Persian: nāman Ossetian: ном (nom) Pashto: نوم (ps) (nūm) Persian: نام (fa) (nâm), اسم (fa) (esm) Pipil: -tukay, -tucay Pitjantjatjara: ini Plains Apache: -zhííh Polish: imię (pl) n Portuguese: nome (pt) m Quechua: suti (qu) Rohingya: nam Romani: anav m Romanian: nume (ro) n Romansch: num m, nom m Russian: и́мя (ru) n (ímja), (of a place, class, etc.) назва́ние (ru) n (nazvánije) Sanskrit: नामन् n (nā́man) Sardinian: nomene, nomini, numen, numene Saterland Frisian: Noome Scottish Gaelic: ainm m Serbo-Croatian: Cyrillic: име n Roman: ime (sh) n Sicilian: nomu (scn) m Sindhi: نالو (nālō) Sinhalese: නම (nama) Skolt Sami: nõmm Slovak: meno (sk) n Slovene: ime (sl) n Slovincian: mjuono n Somali: magac Sorbian: Lower Sorbian: mě n Upper Sorbian: mjeno n Sotho: lebitso (st) Southern Sami: nomme Spanish: nombre (es) m Sundanese: jenengan, nami Swahili: jina (sw) sg, majina (sw) pl Swedish: namn (sv) n Tagalog: ngalan (tl), pangalan (tl) Tahitian: iʻoa Tajik: ном (nom), исм (tg) (ism) Tamil: பெயர் (ta) (peyar) Tatar: исем (tt) (isem), ат (tt) (at) Telugu: పేరు (te) (pēru) Thai: ชื่อ (th) (chùu), นาม (th) (naam) Tigrinya: ስም (səm) Tocharian A: ñom Tocharian B: ñem Tok Pisin: nem (tpi) Turkish: ad (tr), isim (tr) Turkmen: at (tk) Ukrainian: і́м'я (uk) n (ímʺja), (of a place, class, etc.) на́зва (uk) f (názva) Umbrian: 𐌍𐌖𐌌𐌄𐌌 (numem), 𐌍𐌏𐌌𐌄 (nome) Urdu: نام m (nām), اسم (ur) m (ism) Uyghur: ئات (ug) (at), ئىسىم (ug) (isim) Uzbek: ism (uz), nom (uz), ot (uz) Venetian: nome Vietnamese: tên (vi) Volapük: nem (vo) Votic: nimi Welsh: enw (cy) West Frisian: namme c Western Apache: -̨́-̨́zhi’, -́zhi’ White Hmong: lub npe Xhosa: ifani Yiddish: נאָמען m (nomen) Yucatec Maya: k’aaba’ Zulu: igama class 5/6, ibizo (zu) class 5/6
HURME Well "name" is part of the English branch of Indo-European which is one of the larger language families so any European language (except Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish) on this list or heavily influenced by Europeans (like Afrikaans) are naturally going to be related in addition to many languages between Europe and India. So all of those peppered into this list would definitely make it seem like you might be right, but what you should do is look at the proto languages to see similarities. If you find cognates between Proto Indo-European and say Proto Altaic or something, I think that would be huge. I will say though that you have to look at more than just the word has a sound or two that match. For instance, yes the Xhosa word is "ifani" with an n but it's pretty far from "name". Cool list, it is fun to see comparisons like this.
TaiFerret Even Nepal uses word: 'Nām'; in Bengali it's 'nam' - where on earth does the word originate from? Must be one of the most loaned words thru ages.
HURME Well, Nepali and Bengali are part of the Indo-European language family, so no surprise there. I think it's more interesting that even some non-IE languages like Finnish and Japanese have a similar word.
Patterns of language creation are actually very similar to patterns of speciation. The only real difference is time scale. Two populations of one species get split apart by geography, diet, or other, and drift apart genetically. When they come back together they're too different to be called the same species anymore. This is how one species can split into more over time. The evolutionary pattern is very similar to what was described here with language.
Interessante. Sempre tive vontade de estudar linguística, aprender a falar várias línguas diferentes e descobrir suas origens, variações, conexões, etc.
I feel like it's so hard for foreigner to learn my language - Georgian, because only verb can have about two thousand form (11series x 12 subjective and objective signs x 15 verb prefics =1980 forms) and we don't even think while using one :D
@@Gamer-uf1kl Yes, subjective and objective sings, also verb prefics are just affixes, but series aren't. There is no exact rule to conjucate a verb from series to series.
A clear mistake in the visuals: when the narrator comments about Portuguese and Spanish being mutually intelligible (not that much, since only by resorting to a slow-paced intermediary dialect, which we call Portuñol, mutual intelligibility between the 2 languages is guaranteed), the Portuguese "person" answers back "si". There is no "si" in Portuguese, but "sim", and in real spoken language most Portuguese speakers don't reply "sim", but actually they simply repeat the verb used in the question ("Você fez seu trabalho?" - "Did you do your work?" - R: "Fiz", lit. "I did".).
KEEP CALM and PLAY SOCCER IN YOUR PAJAMAS I don't know any specific case, but I'd say acquiring the other partner's language is very easy so it'll mostly depend on where the couple lives: if they're in a Spanish-speaking environment, Spanish will prevail between them; if in a Portuguese-speaking environment, Portuguese will prevail. And for a while Portuñol (a sort of pidgin which at least in South America is mostly a "spanish-flavored" Portuguese) is enough to guarantee mutual understanding.
Antes eu pensava que Português e Castelhano fossem iguais, mas depois de ouvir percebi que não entendia porra nenhuma. Talvez numa conversa cara-a-cara, com a pessoa tentando ajudar eu entenda, mas dois hispânicos conversando é impossível de entender
Spanish and portuguese are Not mutual integible. Spanish people understand the italian even best than understand the portuguese. But is a truth that portugueses understand better spanish than viceversa.
This is a syndrome of dissociation... Spanish is not even a language! Is castillano! Portuguese and Gallego (from Galicia actual Spain) are 98% de same language with slightly different accent! Castillano is about 80-90% de same as Portuguese... Actually in Spain there are languages more diverse and far from castillano then then current portuguese!
qTions you dont gonna teach me about spanish languages. I am galician. And galician is not portuguese with other accent, there are two separate languages, like ucranian and russian.
Enhorabuena, yo también entiendo bien el portugués. Pero no son mutuamente inteligibles. El italiano se entiende mejor, o el catalán, o el gallego. Y es un hecho que los hablantes de portugués entienden mejor el español que al revés. Así que la percepción de un hablante a otro puede cambiar. A ver, son lenguas parecidas, pero verlas como casi la misma lengua no es más que el resultado de la típica ignorancia estadounidense de encasillar dentro de lo mismo a cosas que son diferentes. Es como si yo ahora digo que el inglés y el holandés son lo mismo sólo porque se parecen muchísimo.
Piedrijo É verdade, o Português e o Castelhano são virtualmente inteligíveis entre si, mas tudo depende dos dialetos dos dois diferentes idiomas e do nível linguístico a que cada um é falado, bem como o meio em que cada um está a ser pronunciado. Neste momento, pelo meio escrito, parto do princípio que tanto o Piedrijo como o + My Two Cents consigam entender o que estou a querer dizer, mas se estivesse a falar oralmente, a história já seria outra. Mesmo dentro da mesma língua os diferentes dialetos podem não ser mutuamente inteligíveis, como entre os Brasileiros e os Portugueses há um certa dificuldade devido às diferenças tanto ao nível da pronúncia como ao nível do vocabulário. Penso que entre Argentinos e Espanhóis a mesma dificuldade também se encontra presente, por exemplo.Depois há a trocadilha em que Espanhóis podem perceber melhor o que um Brasileiro diz mais propriamente do que um Português, quando tanto um como outro supostamente estão a falar na mesma língua, tal como um Português terá mais facilidade a perceber um Venezuelano do que um Espanhol.E se estivermos a falar do nível linguístico, ou da complexidade que cada língua é capaz de ter, é capaz de cada língua se tornar completamente inteligível para outros falantes. Como, por exemplo, "poderá de algum modo subsistir um meio no qual dois estilos pronunciais poderão converter-se em intercâmbios não decifráveis, quebrando a simbiose entre dois modos de falar completamente distintos?"
Yo creo que las diferencias entre el poretugués europeo y americano son más grandes que las diferencias en el español europeo y americano. Yo entiendo perfectamente a todos los países hispanos. Es cierto que el español de Argentina es quizás el más diferente de todos, porque cambia la segunda persona de los verbos. Pero se sigue entendiendo. Lo que puede ser difícil de entender son aquellos hablantes que tienen un acento cerrado, pero por lo general eso no ocurre.
Spanish influenced Filipino (Tagalog) the way French did Old English. We have quite a lot of words that are of Spanish origin but we retained Tagalog's basic grammatical rules.
Also, Spanish and Romanian, along with Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. belong to a branch of the Indo-European language family called 'Romance languages'. These are all descended from the language of the Romans -- Latin.
Also worth mentioning that languages are imposed upon civilizations through wars of conquest, where the conquered combine their original language with that of the conquering party (e.g. Rome and the tribes of Gaul developed what we now know as French).
Very good and useful video. As I would like to show this to my classes I teach, I wish the narration was a bit slower. It feels a bit rushed. Still, the content was very good and useful intro to the topic.
Did you know TED-Ed now publishes animations in 5 other languages? Subscribe via our channels tab or learn more here: bit.ly/3D5Xf9Z
2 days ago on a video 8 years ago?
come on where is the Turkish??
@@user-yt2ku3ht5pikr ?
When I say I want to study linguistics, people usually think that I am going to spend years learning multiple languages. When I tell them I want to do research on indigenous languages here in Taiwan in the future, they laugh at me and say "there are more than ten indigenous languages here, you can never master all of them!" Well, doing linguistic research is about using scientific methods to find out linguistic facts about a language or a group of languages. That means a linguist doesn't necessarily have to be a polyglot or study a language in order to do a research on it. Sometimes those people really get on my nerves...lol
Hi there, usually I just ignore when unacquainted people add me to their circles. But your showing an interest in linguistics and Formosan languages drew my attention. As a Ph.D. student in linguistics, I am curious which department you determine to attend (I found that you have at least four choices.) You can decide not to reply, of course.
劉先生你好！多謝你共我加入你ê circle。這幾工我teh看大支kap閃靈ê影片ê時，攏有看著你用台語寫ê評論，所以就共你加入矣。我對語言學kap漢語文字學攏誠有興趣，大學ê時我想欲讀中文系kap英文系雙主科（其實我猶閣真少年leh）。月頭「指定科目考試」拄考煞，我按算登記師大、政大、清大，koh有東華大學（民族語言kap傳播學系）。
你若對單純語言學khah有興趣，hit四間學校內底除了東華以外攏袂bái，若東華，就khah毋是單純語言學--ah。另外，清大無英語所，kan-tann外語所。
中文系讀--ê，毋是語言學，是漢語古典文學 (文言文) 佮漢語聲韻學為主，佮一般語言學差大碼，愛考慮予清楚oo！
我佇清大語言所博士班，有問題會當koh討論。^__^
I'm starting to studie linguistics, and I'm only 14, but my classmate asked if I knew Hebrew.
This thread went from 0 to 100 real quick
I love the illustration! they make interesting analogies. that red dragon with the multiple tongues is a cool one
3:05 one of the languages is calles the n word
@@glitchelectrode3313 It’s referring to the Niger and Congo Rivers of Africa. It’s where the countries Niger, Nigeria, and DRC (Democratic Republic of the Congo) get their names because they sit on these two rivers.
@@mrmangoberry8394 Big brain, but yes. I googled it, you are ABSOLUTELY right.
I liked the wires and the plugs
People in my class think learning English is difficult, then I always say that learning English as a German guy is much less difficult than learning it as a Chinese.
It's true, the simmilarities are surprisingly big
I learn German as sub-native English and i'm amazed too the commonness they have (English is low Germanic language while German is high Germanic)
Even chinese has very different grammar from korean and japanese lol
I think almost everything in English can be traced directly back to either Germanic or Latin roots
as someone who is fluent in English and is learning German, I think it's safe to say they do share a lot of similarities, except for the whole grammatical gender thing and how adjectives and the pronouns should be inflated or declined depends on the case
chinese is actually surprisingly similar to germanic languages in grammar and syntax (fun coincidence!). chinese-speakers would have a lot more trouble with a romance language
The fun thing about Greece, is that, even though it's so tiny, and only home to 11.000.000 people, it is SO diverse, and people in regions of Greece speak so differently from one another! It's insane! As an Athenian-born, raised with standard Greek and nothing else, when I travel around, I quickly get baffled by all the dialects. Greek is a very well structured and enduring language, but more ofthen than not, when speaking to elders, I just have ask for clarification. And foreigners are baffled too... That one time I was speaking to a Cypriot in frond of some people, and they were amazed, because to them, it sounded like we were speaking completely different languages... Which I found amazing, given the fact that we mostly understand each other...
TheThOdOr1s The thing I like about Greek is that it is alone on it's branch of Indo-European. Other branches like Germanic have German, Scandinavian languages, English, etc but the Greek branch just has Greek.
Malos Kain That's the thing though, Greek is really a macro-language. The dialects are so different, that they could be easilly concidered different languages by linguistics, and yet because Ancient Greek texts and features are so enduring in our culture, these very different dialects have a lot of common ground, which makes Greek a very weird and facsinating language. Or maybe it's just because the history of the Greek language is very well documented, and people have access to it, unlike most languages...
Malos Kain There was other before.
If you want a language ALONE on it’s branch, take albanic.
***** Yep Albanian is the other IE language alone on it's branch. :)
cuz of one fucking phonetic rule…
like korean........north and south korea are experiencing a language separation from being apart for two long
how bad is it? is it to the point where its incomprehensible or just small things here and there?
Le Doge
just small things but it shows it can happen
But we understand each other very well.... It's really tiny difference.
@@ahg126 Except that North Koreans can't understand 50% of what the text says in a South Korean textbook?
@@jinyoungmysteria193 they just can't understand the loan words
The old joke is that the difference between a language and a dialect is that a language has a flag and an army.
+Rick Jones And it's true.
+Rick Jones A joke ? A flag? I think you're wrong.
I chuckled
Sad.
Does Esperanto not count as a language then?
can anyone explain why the word for "mother" starts with an "M" sound in so many totally different languages?
Well, i've been wondering that myself for a long period now. And i think, it has to do with the children. First thing children learn is to call their mother and "Ma" or similar sound is (one of )the easiest sound to make. So, yeah.
+Bibek Gautam
I agree. It's particularly prevalent in Mandarin Chinese that the sounds for family members come from the sounds of a baby, as (without accents added) Father is Baba, mother is Mama, older brother is Gege, etc.
Jet IceBane Because the mother-child relationship is sponsored by McDonald's.
There are at least 4 variation of each 2-4 words (character) in mandarin. Making sá, sä, sâ, sà etc, very different in meaning and sound. Not sure which accent correspond to which character but, "sa" may mean, retarded, to spill, three/third, etc. while chin may mean (to their pronunciations), to kiss, to invite, to celebrate, etc. So pronunciation between common human sounds can vary. Not mentioning someone from the USA find it hard to pronounce "rr" like "correr" (to run in spanish) while chinese find it hard to pronounce "r" and japanese "l"
Jet IceBane everyone has a mother so the word ''mother'' must be really old and thus spoken in a real old proto language. There was probably a small group of people thousands of years ago who had the sound ''M'' as a part of the word mother. This small group divided and migrated spreading the ''m'' sound for the word mother around the globe. The language changed as, but the ''m'' sound stayed.
"It may not be as foreign as you think." I love this quote.
This sentence means what? I couldn't get it. Can you just explain to me a little bit about this ?
Lasagna Balls@@hoctienganhcungsinhvien3888
Here is an easy example:
English: Thanks
Swedish/Norwegian: Tack
German: Danke.
Or
Catalonian: Gracies
Italian: Gratzie
Spanish: Gracias
***** Thanks; FYI: Swedish is "tack" while Norwegian is "takk".
And also:
Catalonian: gràcies (grave accent "a")
Italian: grazie (no "t")
And french : Merci ... Nothing in common xd
juste kevin
And it's a latin-based language.
DANKE MEMES
Grazie*
Finnish is my first language and I'm studying Spanish; I was really surprised by the amount of similarities in grammar that they have for languages so far from each other.
@J.W. S.D that's because English borrowed 30% of its vocabulary from French, and French and Portuguese are both romance languages so they still have many similarities. The cognates make it much easier to learn!
@J.W. S.D Same with Spanish:
English: Probably
French: Probablement
Spanish: Probablemente
Portuguese: Provavelmente
Lol
Which is interesting because they are from different language families. Finnish is Finno-Urgic, while Spanish is Indo-European.
3:24 there's a mistake. Balto-Slavic is NOT a superfamily, but a language group of the Indo-European language family!
No, they’re not.
Did you see the russian and ukrainian matroshkas frowning at each other?? 1:50
Yes
coincidence? I don't think so
So?
@@TaigiTWeseFormosanDiplomat They don't get along.
Coppier: unkarian
I think the "Chinese language" is misinterpreted by English speakers. I am a Chinese and I find the words "language" and "dialect" differ between English and Chinese because *these meanings of words were matched like a jigsaw by early bi-dialects to form a translation, and they may not be totally accurate.*
*- more below -*
In Chinese, "語言" means spoken language, "語" means speech or language and "言" means words spoken. "語文" means written language. "英"(ying) is the name we gave Britain. Therefore, "英語" and "英文" are not totally equal, meaning spoken English and written English.
"地方" means place, "方言" means dialect in English, or in literal Chinese, can be interpreted as "spoken language spoken by minorities or smaller places". Therefore, it's not the same system of the westerns as we have an universal written language and different spoken languages.
My mandarin teacher told me that 'han yu'(汉语/漢語) means mandarin, but never told me that 语/語 represents the spoken from.
Patricius Joshua 漢語 doesn't means Mandarin. It means "Chinese language", both spoken and written. Mandarin is either (Taiwanese) 國語, or (PRC) 普通話.
Why? That is because Chinese contains different recognized, **different grammatic** dialects. We don't really see dialects have different grammar in English. We have the most spoken: 普通話, 廣東話, 閩南語, 台山話, 上海話, etc (with "話" explicitly meaning spoken language)
Dividing even smaller, we have 港式廣東話, Hong Kong styled Cantonese.
Conclusion: Chinese contains ONE and only written language, many dialects that have different grammar, in which they contains different styles.
+TheCheungDan 汉语 is not both spoken and written Chinese, it means only spoken, 中文 means written Chinese, you can never say that you write 汉语，its grammatically wrong
Guanxi Chen
Don't you think I don't agree. That's yet another translation problem. I guarantee "language" means both written text and spoken voice in English.
讀漢語，寫漢字。
TheCheungDan no its not translation problem, how can you say " write 汉语"？ 写汉语？ once again, its grammatically wrong to say that
Kudos to the ones who thought of and drew the analogies in this video. Amazed!
Malay: Selamat pagi (Good morning)
Indonesian: Selamat pagi (Good morning)
Filipino: Salamat pagi (Thank you stingray)
Salamat pogi (Thank you handsome)
All all of those Salamat probably came from the Arabic Salam meaning peace and used in greetings
Swahili : salama . Definitely Arabic influenced
When i first heard what Selamat in Malay means i can't stop auto translating it into thank you when it means good morning or smth 😂😂😂
Nice touch with the Russian and Ukrainian matroskas
Ok here goes. Russians cant understand a word in ukrainian or belarusian (russian is not like ukrainian at all), and they get really annoyed when you speak ukrainian to them, and even angry (they think that its disrespectfull to them, but they call us "brothers"... yeah), but we can understand russian (and speak freely) and belarusian (it is very very similar to ukrainian), polish, and a bit serbian, slovenian, slovakian, czech... We really dont agree here that russians are slavic as they love to say (dont ask me why, they just love to steal neighbours history, its pretty much what they are doing for centuries, now they say that there is no nation as ukrainians, and that Kievan Rus' was always russian, which is just a blind propaganda, shauvinism and bollocks, and is really disgraceful from them), in fact they are finno-ugric people. These days we are really sick of them to be honest (not all ofcourse but those who believe in kremlin propaganda and call us fascists), and remembering all what they did to us (and to belarussian and polish as well) throughout the history.... But we try to leave peacefully, because we are neighbours. It is hard to do that, though... imperialist mentality, you know. I cant see that in any of todays slavic nation, mentalities are completely different.
***** Как же бесят такие, ладно сами с вбитыми в голову стереотипами сидите и думать не хотите, так нет, вам этого мало, надо ведь еще и окружающим тем же голову забить, фу как это низко.
***** Don't take it personally. The only people left in Russia today are the dregs that were too stupid to get out years ago. Some of my ancestors were some of the ones smart enough to get out a long time ago too.
@@lladeratAbsolutely true. Just what I was going to say.
@@lladerat ❌⭕️❌🎵🅰️ забыли спросить.🐷🇺🇦
That's a beautifully made video, full of interesting image choices and details (and i watch quite a few of the animation videos already). I came back to pause and rewind a few times to see better some great imagery in action. Congrats to the animator
My theory is that there was no "first language." When humans spread out from Africa, they were already in different areas throughout the globe when language arose. Because of this, their linguistic "starting points" were different, depending on how close they lived to one another. For example, if group A lived in section 1 of an area of the inhabitable world, their original language would almost certainly have been different from group L who lived in section 204, thousands of miles away from group A, who may or may not have begun using their own language around the same time. I call this my "Many Mothers" theory. To assert that there was only one original language would, by extension, imply that the first humans started communicating linguistically before they ever fanned out from their point of origin.
gregory brian Yea with humans migrating all over the world from general areas, chances are they did communicate linguistically via grunting as Mariana stated, or with clicks. There may not have been constructed syntax or morphology but take for example the Piraha language. They can communicate full thoughts by whistling to each other. These are still forms of language. Just something to take into consideration with your theory.
Interesting theory. It’s certainly plausible. A few things I can say about your theory:
It could indeed be true considering that humans developed the physical ability for language (as we know it today) far earlier than the mental capacity. Chimpanzees could theoretically speak like humans but you will never be able to teach language to one.
Another thing is that apparently (perhaps this has been overridden by new evidence but it was correct when I read it) though humans had settled most of Europe, including Spain, tens of millennia ago, Portugal wasn’t inhabited until 6,000 BC, so perhaps those new people were the ones that escaped genocide (very common long ago), and later when they returned to their homelands centuries after anyone could remember anything, they still kept their language and became the Basque (but that’s completely speculation on my part, my own theory if you will).
Plus, it would make much more sense if your theory were true for that reason as well; prehistoric genocide was based on race, and because humans were still hunter-gatherer tribes, most peoples of the same race would speak the same language or similar languages. This could mean that race and language would be related, so language trees we see today survived because other trees (races) were wiped out. It’s highly unlikely that different speakers would have committed genocide before the expansion out of Africa because there were too few humans alive for people to split into identities, so all conflict was restricted to the scale of the tribe and not anything larger (Ive seen estimates of post-Toba human populations from as high as 10,000 to as low as 500). Once humans became numerous and spread apart, only then could people see themselves as disconnected from each other. And plus, this would be when mutations occurred that developed into the races we see today; those we don’t see today are by definition extinct
In fact I think your theory is probably true because it’s estimated that humans did not behave mentally the same as a modern human until about 70,000 years ago and Toba was 75,000 years ago, so it’s highly likely that that was the point where different proto-languages developed into actual languages (though we’d call these proto-languages)
Exactly what I was thinking, humans started speaking when they were already split into different areas
Lies
Exactly. The original language theory is not very realistic.
1:50 You made Russian and Ukrainian mathryoshkas hate each other? Haha
that's literally what west want
What west want? Maybe don’t steal parts of eastern ukraine
Oh no...
foreshadowing level 1000
1:50 see what you did there ted ed...
+TheChosenOne Haha, took me a while to notice:D
+TheChosenOne HAHAHAHA
+Troy Chávez took my a while hahaha
+lol lel same
Aged like fine vodka
I can relate. When i am having french classes in school i can understand most of the words simply because they sound so similar to english. What a wonderful world
AWESOME metaphorical visuals throughout the video.
The evolution of languages reminds me a bit of the evolution in biology. Kinda funny how these fundamentally different things are driven by the same factors (physical movements, isolation etc) to come to a similar result.
Yeah, it's pretty cool
Yeah, it's pretty cool
Yeah, it's pretty cool
All I know is that in any language/country "eh?" means "what?".
Lol
no. At least in Russian it is "a?" not "eh"
Malay kumai dialec : "ha?" Sometimes "Eh"
@Kavya Murthy in my local lang, "ha ah" is "Yes"
In Egyptian Arabic, "eh" is an actual word that means "what?".
I'm currently taking language related course in college. This video is a mind opener. Thank you❤
As a person who indulged in learning languages, to mention: German (I forgot how to speak!), Greek, and Hungarian, with ease, I'd like to say that: within a few months I can connect with more people than ever across the world.
This video is giving an easy and comprehensive overview of what languages really are or come from.
Basically, Darwinian evolution of languages instead of gene pools. I admire the use of the "Tower of Babel" story in what is essentially a scientific examination of language. Language is a fascinating thing--so much of our modern knowledge and early survival depended on it. I've been planning for my next video about how language barriers and misunderstandings act as catalysts for world issues and inhibited social progress.
I recently put up a video about our ever-changing perceptions of our ever-changing world and how the two are key to making human progress. Check it out if you're interested, I promise I won't let you down. Good day to you all:)
May we always learn from one another and never stop progressing.
When considering two similar languages, you seem to ignore the possibility that they may have converged into their similarity as opposed to having once been the same language, diverged from each other.
Interesting, ive never thought of it that way, even though i still think the latter is more likely to have happened
The matter of the origin of languages, briefly and beautifully presented.
I love how in my country(the Philippines), a word for something could mean two different things in the same island, some islands even have multiple languages and dialects in them.
I kinda develop secret hatred towards people mixing up english & tagalog words with our own language. I just see it as a threat to our heritage and identity as a separate ethnic group of Filipino and people are unaware of it and it's getting worse. I use english words sometimes but not to the point of replacing native words that are still existing. I don't know, i just took pride of myself as a bisaya person after learning the korean language.
I'm so honored and glad to be speaking an Austronesian language which is Tagalog.... Mabuhay!
Dude, imagine being so old that the way you speak to your family gave rise to other languages! This is very epic
The fact that there are at least 3000 languages is mind blowing!
i was in Macedonia in the late 90s, and there was already talk of Croatians attempting to separate their language from Serbian. my friend saying this was a native and spoke Serbian too, and said that they were basically the same language. but even then the breakup of Yugoslavia had begun to have its impact on the division of cultures and languages. i found it fascinating that i was witnessing that at the time, and i'm not surprised there's been more change since. and i know my friends also spoke Bosnian and it was different in some ways from Serbian, tho i don't know specifics. i did get the feeling that all of those languages were very closely related and that it seemed that Macedonian was the least similar, having elements of Greek and other influences unique to its geography/history.
you can see the effect of separation in way more recent, more recorded languages, it's visible when it comes to colonization. though some languages change more in a certain period of time than others do, which is also interesting. there's obviously the differences between english in great britain, north america, australia, india, etc. but if you take portuguese (which i'm using as an example because it's a language i speak), brazilian portuguese and portuguese portuguese can be quite different, not just in pronunciation or spelling but in a lot of words you'd find very basic, like "breakfast", or even something as simple as "girl". i have no idea what portuguese is like in angola, moçambique, and other countries that speak it as well, but i imagine their specific influences must make it very interesting as well, though also maybe harder to understand (i remember reading a book from moçambique (i think?) a few years ago, and it had a small "dictionary" in the back to clarify some words (including "breakfast, since it's also not the same word used in portugal or in brazil). in the case of colonization or any kind of domination, new dialects or accents can also teach about the language that was taken over. for example, some accents in brazil result from natives who learnt it not having a certain sound in their language, and producing it in a way that's different from how it was "supposed to be said", and then you get a regional accent as a result.
i also find it super interesting to see how quickly languages change. brazilian portuguese, once again as an example because it's a language i speak, has changed considerably in the past 100 years only, or even less. if you read an older book, you can understand it, of course, but there are lots of words that aren't used these days at all, along with other changes. it's very obvious when something is older. meanwhile, while german has changed a lot throughout the ages, it hasn't changed as much in such a short time recently. and if you take icelandic, it's extremely similar to old norse - some icelandic friends of mine tell me they can often read texts that are hundreds of years old in school without that much difficulty, the language just didn't change that much even though it's been a while!
one interesting thing i remember learning about english is how you can see that different words for two versions of one thing have different origins. for example, the word for "cow" has germanic origins, while "beef" is closer to the french word for it. because when the normans conquered england, they were largely the noble, rich people, as opposed to the germanic farmers. so the word for the animal in the farm is germanic while the word for the animal on a plate has latin roots a lot of the time. languages can really show a lot about the history of a group of people, which is why i find linguistics extremely fascinating, and am leaving a few fun facts for others who might find it interesting as well here lol
The question I have is will we all go (back) into having one language in the future and by combine all current languages or having a complete new language?
Well, we kinda have a common language already - English
MrFreakman0 ...is an example of an understatement. No, English is no more a universal language than Mandarin Chinese or Spanish.
Conlangs (*con*structed *lang*uages) have been attempted, such as Esperanto, but none have actually succeeded to the point of being a universal language.
RKH1502
>English is no more a universal language than Mandarin Chinese or Spanish
What do you mean? Unlike English, no one speaks Chinese or Spanish outside of their countries
Well given the premise of the video, the opposite should be true. In other words, as the world becomes more interconnected (we won't be isolated like before), then it's possible that we develop a common language. So far, it seems that English is the most widespread language, mainly because it's the adopted language for business.
I've noticed only one thing that can be considered wrong XD: I'm a native speaker of Portuguese, and the Portuguese word for "yes" is not "sí", as in Spanish, but "sim". xD
+Pedro Furtado You're not the only one who saw that! *shame*
+Pedro Furtado "i think they used the "si" to show how portuguese speakers can understand spanish speakers even if they don't speak the same language." Another comment (Moisés Duarte)
+Pedro Furtado In French "si" can mean either "if" or "yeh", so they should have used either French or perhaps italien as better examples.
+Jordan Benjamin In french, isn't it 'Oui' (or 'Oc' in the south, sometimes)
+Xesau "si" means 'yes' in the context of countering/contradicting a negative statement or question, like for example,
"You don't have a smartphone, do you?" _"Yes I do!"_ (insert "Si!" here hah)
I've used an English example but it' the same principle :)
*There has to be an outside influence*, because ideas can come to many people at about the same time. Example: *Language developed at about the same time everywhere on the planet*. Religions from different times and places have many things in common. Inventions and styles of music and art come to people at about the same time. It is not just a coincidence. Find out about this outside influence it has brought us the world we are living in now. Google *TruthContest read the Present*, it explains for the 1st time ever the big picture of life in every facet, it explains the nature of everything. It will set you free
You`re actually right. For example in the 60`s and 70`s was the time for the best music. What is that influence you were talking about? Im curious now, is it some kind of holy ghost or something? lol
this is beautiful I have intro to language so this helped with the class and my teacher was the one who assigned this video so thanks to my teacher I found this and it helped :)
I find it interesting that almost all austronesian languages always call number 5 as "lima".
Also for the word eye which is "mata" in almost all austronesian languages.
The conclusion was the best part, not denying all the video content.
I hear foreign languages all the time since my school is international having students from dozens of countries, speaking more than 20 different languages and dialects... Our common language is English, since the school is in New York, and I've always wondered how languages formed and came to be so different from one and other...
As an Indian it made me so proud to see the Sanskrit word "pada", as Indian languages and India itself is rarely spoken about in Ted
In tamil we say it as padham. We use it often.
I'm in the middle of constructing a whole dictionary of a new branch of words to simply add to English. My latest word added is "zore" which came into being from a mistake in Science Class where the teacher was trying to write "core".
+SamThe RandomG1rl
"Dump water on the zore!"
"I'm sorry; what?"
"There'll be a nuclear meltdown if we can't cool the zore!"
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"The zore! The reactor zore!"
"Have you been standing too close to the zore?"
Hello, its me. Zore Odinson, prince of asgard
I love these things because it's like language science, and these are two things I like. Also, some videos on conlangs made me understand a lot if things in language development
Spanish and Portuguese is spoken very differently. Spanish speakers hardly ever understand Portuguese aside from the cognates but Portuguese speakers can somewhat understand Spanish.
My native language is Spanish ("Latino" version) and I have visited Brazil and Portugal (completely different Portuguese accents), but it was easy for all my family and I to understand them.
+jay pad My native language is Spanish and I can understand 85% of written Portuguese (Brazilian or European) but I can't understand that well someone speaking in Portuguese.
+Maria Taboada ¿Qué de qué?
+Paula Echeverría Suárez
Are you some kind of a genius?
+KEEP CALM and PLAY SOCCER IN YOUR PAJAMAS no, this is for real! And I've seen tons of different people whose native language is Spanish talking with someone who speaks Portuguese and vice-versa.
It's easy to understand, but hard to explain, but you did an amazing job
Thank you for making this video, I love languages and this was interesting.
Fascinating! I am beyond obsessed with linguistics and I speak four languages (including multiple dialects in Arabic) and yet I feel like I still wanna learn more languages. But one day I will fulfill my dream of studying linguistics!..
People speaking Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic can all have a conversation like the Spanish and Portuguese.
what about Finnish?
Felds Liscia No, finnish is VERY different from those languages, finnish comes from a language family with slavic background meanwhile the three mentioned languages come from the same language family as english and german.
Coolit man Actually Finnish is derived from a separate language family, and is part of the Uralic language family. Finnish is similar to Estonian and Hungarian in an extent, to name a few.
Fuma Aoki Thanks for correcting! Now that you say it I remember one of my teachers mentioned that a Hungarian kid who she taught learned the finnish grammar astonishingly fast.
No, as a Swede I can't understand a word Danish. :D
Using this for my English essay I have due tomorrow 😻
1:48 This video seems to display the current relationship between Russia and Ukraine, through subtlety.
I only brought this up because the angry faces made me giggle.
Thanks for opening my ears & eyes about the origin of languages.
It's really fascinated me to knowing about how languages evolve, as i'm currently studying human evolution and make me realize there are many things i should learn about our origins..
This topic is so interesting! The video made me want to learn more about it.
Is 'Chinese' a language? I thought there was Cantonese & Mandarin?
There are actually about 10 or twelve different languages that are all labeled "Chinese" because of their shared writing style. Cantonese and Mandarin are just the largest. Like the vid said, it depends who's counting :/
There's a whole lot of them. Linguists use the term "Sinitic", because "Chinese" is typically reserved for Mandarin. Cantonese is the only other well-known Sinitic language because it's spoken in Hong Kong, has a large population of speakers, and has been prevalent in Overseas Chinese communities until recently.
Those two also happen to be the only two languages with a standardised writing system. Oh, you can use Chinese characters to write other varieties alright, but there is no regulating body, and no standard, so everyone writes how they please. What they do share, however, is their common ancestry, having descended from Old Chinese (actually Middle Chinese for all varieties excluding Min).
What these other guys say is accurate. To the ones you mentioned I can add Wu. There's a language called Wu. My understanding is it's spoken in Shanghai. There are 10-12 of the sinitic ones, and there non-sinitic languages in China as well, it's a very divers country. But I know only 3 by name and location.
Most Chinese people consider the 12 or so languages to be the same, because China doesn't like people suggesting that the country is divided in any way. Also, since the characters represent ancient chinese words and the words that evolved from them, and since until only recently most writing imitated the style and grammar of the original chinese language rather than what people were speaking in their everyday lives, people who lived miles apart and communicated by mail just assumed that they couldn't be all that different.
Imagine all the romance languages write and use Latin vocabulary and grammar. However, they speak Spanish, French, Italian, etc. For example, take the Latin word for apple is "malum." However, each language will write down the word malum, but speak/pronounce it as manzana(Spanish), pomme(French), mela(Italian). This is what happens in Chinese, it has a single unified written language, but very divergent spoken language(dialects). However, the romance languages are not Latin because they don't share the same written language(although they share a common ancestry).
The origin of languages is still debatable, no one determined the source of it. It is interesting how language evolves! Enjoyable Ted-ED
One thing I've noticed is how many languages have the /n/ sound in initial position for words of negation (even the word 'negation'!).
No
Nein
Non
Ne
Nee
Nej
Nem
Ni
Não
Nu
Niet
Nie
At least the languages in Europe, anyway. Maybe someone else can give insight on this, as I haven't studied comparative linguistics! :P
It's slightly different else. it is true that japanese negation is nai, but the word for no is iie. and mandarin is bu, and cantonese is m, so i suppose it's a european phenomenon and that most of those words are dirrectly related
***** Strangely, it deleted your comment as spam! I don't know why. But I restored it.
It's strange how not all of the languages I listed are Indo-European though ("nem" is Hungarian - Uralic language family, non Indo-European). I just found it strange how a continent could show such uniformity in an aspect of language - but maybe that's because I haven't studied it!
TheVisitorChannel1 My point wasn't the letter used, though, it was the sound /n/ - the phoneme, not grapheme (in linguistic terms).
So, you mentioned Arabic, I take it that because you are using a romanised version of the word 'No', that 'La/Laa' is pronounced with the /l/ sound?
Yeah I've thought about that myself, but there are some exceptions. For ancient Greek (presumably modern Greek would be similar) its: ou/ouk. Another commonality between languages is the starting m in the word mother.
maybe this universality has something to do with phono-semantic?
in Filipino, the word for no is 'hindi' which is pronounced as hin-deh, atleast in the tagalog dialect. Just as said in the video, speakers of the same language can't sometimes understand each other because of the different dialects and there are around 110 dialects here. Even the same word is pronounced differently and one can usually determine where the person comes from based on their accent.
I once wrote a comment in spanish and someone replied in portugese: "Oh wow at first I thought this comment was portugese but it wasn't" and I understood! So I said (in spanish): "Dude I can understand you" and He replied: "Same I can understand you too"
"Foda-se, seu hispânico pedaço de bosta" -
1:49 Russia and Ukraine, this look
***** yeah, I know that, mate. For russians any of slavic language sounds gibberish.
And yeah, I totaly agree ab stealing neighbor's history by russian. this is exactly what Peter the Great did by changing state name from Moskovia to Russia.
thealphazoid Thats exactly what Peter the Great did, great to meet someone who remebers history today.
thealphazoid
yeah...no i speak a little russian and i understand a lot of slavic laguages, and russian isent even my first language! So im sure russians understand a lot of slavic languages.
I didn't notice until you pointed it out! Hilarious. haha
armenac92 so, you are russian and you understand most of the slavic languages? I doubt it. really :)
This is a great representation of different languages. For the most part, every language has it's own dialect, accent, and even alphabet. But it is so interesting to see how they evolved from similar places. Many root words in English come from Latin, as so many words in Spanish.
Once the root word origin is known, it's pretty simple to learn the language. However, because of the different accents, writing, grammar, and the alphabet, many people feel put off by learning other languages.
The last sentence was really great- Foreign languages may not be as following as we think; the key is to listen carefully.
So 2000 years from now, American English and British English will evolve and become different languages, right?
Maybe, maybe not. Technology changes human evolution. It has been doing so in a ridiculously accelerated fashion since the Industrial Revolution. On an informational level, the internet has been part of this exponential change, itself having an exponential effect growth rate and impact over the past 25 years of its existence. In fact, it can be argued there is a chance (lovers of cultural diversity would say risk or danger) that the internet and ever growing connectivity will result in a single language in the distant future, although the concept of distant is very fluid in this context, it may be very soon. Arabs still understand each other and they broke apart way before the American Colonies. There may never be a chance for the Englishes of the world to become new languages.
They basically are already.
Wrong, the only reason language diversified is because of isolation, but as globalization speeds up, more languages will disappear than be created.
More likely different Dialects. We can see this happening with slang which ultimately changes a language. With words like Bae. An example which would be comparable would be the word "Knife", in the early days of it's creation, It was pronounced with the K. But after time, people grew lazy and decided to pronounce it without the K. Like how the new word "Bae" is an abbreviated word for Babe.
the Internet kinda makes it harder to be isolated.
I liked the closing statement, that was a good way to put language learning
Just a small correction Ted. At the 2:30 mark the Spanish and Portuguese guy say the word "yes". The Spanish word is in fact "sí" but the portuguese word is "sim", not "si". Anyways, nice video :)
When I taught Spanish, I had to tell my students that culo is not the Spanish word for cool!
Ahaha. A very important difference. :P
txvoltaire Cooloh!
If that's the case then the Portuguese should've said "sí" as well and he didn't. From what I interpret they are trying to show that both languages are similar (which they are) and they illustrate it by writing both the Spanish and the Portuguese words. What I was pointing out is that the Portuguese is written wrong (it's not si, it's sim). The m is what makes the difference in the sound. Yes it's not very different, although it is very noticeable for us natives. Again, it's not a major issue at all, I was just pointing it out.
Ahaha, não. Gouveia (suponho que é esse o nome que te referes), é um nome Português (até temos uma cidade com esse nome). Sou português :)
It says sim?
I think top of the tree is Thamizh. Let us take 'Tholkaappiam' which is considered as the oldest literature available in Thamizh. This has been conservatively dated to around 300BC (wiki). What this book talks about is the interesting part. Unlike the oldest literatures in other languages, Tholkaappiam does not talk about God or King or War. It explains the grammar rules to be followed while speaking and writing in Thamizh.
(Road rules only after the road has appeared, Not possible to before rules).
Wonderful video! I enjoy it very much and I agree with this video that geography and other human interactions contributed to the changes of languages. #miao #niamtxiv #hmong
Me llamó la atención lo de la TORRE DE BABEL !!!
En realidad q pudo ocurrir para que el primer grupo de personas empezaran a cambiar su idioma básico, ¿ será q los idiomas se inventaron luego de la expansión de esas primeras personas...? Y por eso luego al encontrarse se empezaron a fusionar creando cada vez más nuevas lenguas ?
I was watching a documentary once; surprisingly, I heard many Arabic word similar to those commonly spoken in Hindi. Similarly, I come across many Hindi and Sanskrit words in English too. Btw, my native language is Hindi. I know Sanskrit too. So I guess, they were once the *same...?
Khushwant Singh Sanskrit and English are actually cousins. They're both members of the Indo-European language family, so that's probably why you noticed that. :)
Khushwant Singh Can you give us any examples?
If the words were instantly recognisable, then you are almost certainly talking about borrowings. If a word referring to a modern invention, such as "television", is similar in different languages, then you can be certain that you are not looking at evidence that the languages are related but are just looking at what happens when a new concept is discovered or invented and every language suddenly needs a word for it. Most language communities won't just make up a new word out of the blue but will borrow the word for that new concept from a language that already has one.
Words that genuinely derive from a common ancestral language will pertain to concepts commonly discussed during the era in which the ancestral language was spoken: words for ancient concepts involving, for example, numbers, the natural world, and family relationships.
For English and Hindi, the common ancestral language was Proto-Indo-European, and it was spoken roughly five thousand years ago. There are related words in English and Hindi - such as English "know" and Hindi "jānanā" - but ten thousand years of separation will make it difficult, if not impossible, to recognise the relationships. You have to study historical linguistics to properly appreciate the connection between English and Hindi.
As for Arabic and Hindi - no chance! They are likely related, but much more distantly than English and Hindi. There is no chance at all of recognising cognate words between those two languages without extensive study of the histories of the two languages, and perhaps not even then.
+Khushwant Singh Hindi, English and Sanskrit were all originally the same. Arabic wasn't. Those Arabic words were added into Hindi, probably through either a) Persian or b) imperialism and conquest.
+BernieSandersenEspañol Hey, your conclusion seems quite appropriate. Since, Indian subcontinent was once ruled by Persian-speakers for quite a long time, the words from Persian gradually would've seeped into the language that of the locals. I guess it's the place from where those similarities must have come from.
पेशवा JAY Thank you. I know that there are many English words that come either directly or indirectly from Sanskrit. "Jungle" and "juggernaut" come from Sanskrit via Hindi. "Karma", "Aryan", "mantra", and "yoga" come directly from Sanskrit. ("Umbrella" comes from Italian!) The examples that you give are recent borrowings into English, so they are nothing to do with the common Indo-European origins of Sanskrit and English.
I was only asking Khushwant Singh for examples of the words that he was talking about in the hope that I could explain to him why they sounded similar.
Yeah. Like Hindi and Bengali are SO similar. I am Bangladeshi and know Bengali. But when I was a kid all cartoons were in Hindi. So I had no choice but to watch them in Hindi. I learned Hindi just by watching a few cartoons. No one ever taught me anything. Now I can speak Hindi pretty fluently and its very helpful as I am came to India for 5 months
this is a video, not a slide show, dont just look at the picture, hear what the narrator is saying ffs, she said that most portuguese and spanish speakers understand each other, they depicted the portuguese guy saying "si" because he understood what the spanish guy was saying! was that soo hard to understand?
lets say you start speaking to some random guy who understands very little english, he will most probably end up saying "ok" or "good" meaning that he acknowledges what you are saying, it doesnt mean his native language has words "ok" or "good"
I speak Spanish and even though Portuguese is different I could understand someone from Brazil or Portugal who is asking for directions. My mother has a good ear she can even understand someone from Italy! French may be a little harder but if you take your time and use hand gestures to fill in the language gaps you can understand French.
It isn't about what people know, it's the similarities between languages, I know Portuguese and I could decently communicate with someone Spanish through similarities of the languages.
"If you hear a foreign language, pay attention. It may not be as foreign as you think." I do believe that languages are just a accent of the tongue, as what a buddha have said. I am currently mastering the English Language right now and your videos really helps. Thanks.
One time I was at a bookstore in my country (Guatemala; I speak Spanish) and there was this girl and her mother talking a foreign language I did not recognize. They were European, tall, white and blonde, and the only word I could figure out was one that sounded like "book". Since we were in a bookstore, I knew it mean "libro" (book in Spanish), because the girl was holding one in her hands, convincing the mother to buy it. I did some research and I think it was either Swedish, Norwegian or Dutch, but I still don't know. ._.
+Ana Aguilar El Alemán se puede diferenciar mas fácilmente del Sueco y del Noruego, probablemente haya sido alguno de los dos últimos :P
+Danielodiazo O del Holandés.
+Danielodiazo El alemán y el holandés se pueden diferenciar, así como el ruso. Puede que haya sido noruego o sueco... aunque no tengo ni idea.
Y creo que no la tendrás jamas porque el Sueco y el Noruego son muy parecidos, incluso fonéticamente. :)
+Danielodiazo Lo sé. Al menos pude reducir la cantidad de posibles idiomas a dos en vez de pensar "puede ser cualquier idioma europeo".
On the topic of dialects, English has a lot of accents and dialects and some are completely incomprehensible to others. Canadian, American, British, and Australian peoples all speak mostly the same language that being English. But the different words, pronunciations, dialects, and accents make them extremely different and recongnizable.
The reseblence of "name" could suggest there being common language, look how many n's and m's:
Abkhaz: ахьʒ (āx’ʒ)
Afrikaans: naam (af) m
Aghul: тур
Albanian: emër (sq) m
American Sign Language: H@RadialFinger-H@CenterChesthigh Contact Contact
Amharic: ስም (səm)
Arabic: اِسْم (ar) m (ism), أسْمَاء m pl (ʾasmāʾ)
Cypriot Arabic: ism m
Egyptian Arabic: اسم m (esm)
Tunisian Arabic: اِسْمْ m (ʾism)
Aragonese: nombre m
Aramaic:
Syriac: ܫܡܐ m (šmā’)
Hebrew: שמא m (šmā’)
Armenian: անուն (hy) (anun)
Aromanian: numã
Asturian: nome m, ñome m
Avar: цӏар (c̣ar)
Azeri: ad (az)
Baluchi: نام (nám)
Bashkir: исем (isem), ат (at)
Basque: izen
Belarusian: і́мя n (ímja), (of a place, class, etc.) назо́ў m (nazóŭ), на́зва f (názva)
Bengali: নাম (nam)
Breton: ano m, anv (br) m
Bulgarian: и́ме (bg) n (íme)
Burmese: အမည် (my) (a.many), နာမည် (my) (namany)
Catalan: nom (ca) m
Chechen: цӏе (c̣ie)
Chinese:
Cantonese: 名 (ming4), 名字 (ming4 zi6), 名稱, 名称 (ming4 cing1)
Mandarin: 名 (zh) (míng), 名字 (zh) (míngzì), 名稱 (zh), 名称 (zh) (míngchēng) (thing or organisation)
Min Nan: 名 (zh-min-nan) (miâ), 名字 (zh-min-nan) (miâ-jī, miâ-lī), 名稱 (zh-min-nan), 名称 (miâ-chheng) (thing or organisation)
Chiricahua: -́zhii
Chuvash: ят (jat)
Coptic: ⲣⲁⲛ (ran)
Cornish: hanow m
Crimean Tatar: ad, isim
Czech: jméno (cs) n, název (cs) m
Dalmatian: naun m, naum m
Danish: navn (da)
Dhivehi: ނަން (nan)
Dutch: naam (nl) m
Egyptian: rn
r
n
Eshtehardi: نومَ (nōma)
Esperanto: nomo (eo)
Estonian: nimi
Extremaduran: nombri
Faroese: navn (fo) n
Finnish: nimi (fi) (especially a person), nimitys (fi) (object)
French: nom (fr) m
Old French: nom m
Middle French: nom m
Friulian: non
Georgian: სახელი (saxeli), სახელწოდება (saxelcodeba)
German: Name (de) m
Greek: όνομα (el) n (ónoma)
Ancient: ὄνομα n (ónoma)
Gujarati: નામ (gu) m (nām)
Hausa: suna
Hawaiian: inoa
Hebrew: שם (he) m (shem)
Hindi: नाम (hi) m (nām)
Hungarian: név (hu)
Icelandic: nafn (is) n
Ido: nomo (io)
Indonesian: nama (id)
Ingrian: nimi
Interlingua: nomine
Irish: ainm (ga) m
Old Irish: ainmm n
Primitive Irish: ᚐᚅᚋ n (anm)
Istriot: non, nom
Istro-Romanian: nome
Italian: nome (it) m
Japanese: 名前 (ja) (なまえ, namae), 名 (ja) (な, na), (honorific) お名前 (ja) (おなまえ, o-namae), (honorific) ご芳名 (ごほうめい, go-hōmei), 名称 (ja) (めいしょう, meishō) (thing or organisation)
Kannada: ಹೆಸರು (kn) (hesaru)
Karachay-Balkar: ат (at)
Karelian: nimi
Kashubian: miono n
Kazakh: есім (esim), ат (kk) (at)
Khmer: ឈ្មោះ (km) (cmʊəh)
Korean: 이름 (ko) (ireum), 성함 (ko) (seongham) (honorific), 명칭 (ko) (myeongching) (名稱 (ko)) (thing or organisation)
Kurdish: nav (ku)
Sorani: ناو (ku)
Kyrgyz: ат (ky) (at)
Ladin: inom, inuem
Lao: ຊື່ (sư̄), ນາມ (nām)
Latgalian: vuords m
Latin: (please verify) nōmen (la) n, (please verify) nōmen nōminis n
Latvian: vārds (lv) m
Lithuanian: vardas (lt) m
Lojban: cmene (jbo)
Luhya: lisina
Luxembourgish: Numm
Macedonian: име n (ime), назив m (naziv)
Malay: nama (ms) n
Malayalam: പേര് (ml) (pēr), നാമം (ml) (nāmaṃ)
Maltese: isem m
Manx: ainm m
Maori: ingoa
Marathi: नाव (nāv)
Mongolian: нэр (ner)
Navajo: -́zhiʼ, yízhí
Nepali: नाम (ne) (nām)
Ngarrindjeri: mitji
North Frisian: (Mooring) noome m; (Föhr-Amrum) nööm m
Northern Sami: namma
Norwegian: navn (no)
Novial: nome
Occitan: nom (oc) m
Old English: nama m
Old French: num m
Old Persian: nāman
Ossetian: ном (nom)
Pashto: نوم (ps) (nūm)
Persian: نام (fa) (nâm), اسم (fa) (esm)
Pipil: -tukay, -tucay
Pitjantjatjara: ini
Plains Apache: -zhííh
Polish: imię (pl) n
Portuguese: nome (pt) m
Quechua: suti (qu)
Rohingya: nam
Romani: anav m
Romanian: nume (ro) n
Romansch: num m, nom m
Russian: и́мя (ru) n (ímja), (of a place, class, etc.) назва́ние (ru) n (nazvánije)
Sanskrit: नामन् n (nā́man)
Sardinian: nomene, nomini, numen, numene
Saterland Frisian: Noome
Scottish Gaelic: ainm m
Serbo-Croatian:
Cyrillic: име n
Roman: ime (sh) n
Sicilian: nomu (scn) m
Sindhi: نالو (nālō)
Sinhalese: නම (nama)
Skolt Sami: nõmm
Slovak: meno (sk) n
Slovene: ime (sl) n
Slovincian: mjuono n
Somali: magac
Sorbian:
Lower Sorbian: mě n
Upper Sorbian: mjeno n
Sotho: lebitso (st)
Southern Sami: nomme
Spanish: nombre (es) m
Sundanese: jenengan, nami
Swahili: jina (sw) sg, majina (sw) pl
Swedish: namn (sv) n
Tagalog: ngalan (tl), pangalan (tl)
Tahitian: iʻoa
Tajik: ном (nom), исм (tg) (ism)
Tamil: பெயர் (ta) (peyar)
Tatar: исем (tt) (isem), ат (tt) (at)
Telugu: పేరు (te) (pēru)
Thai: ชื่อ (th) (chùu), นาม (th) (naam)
Tigrinya: ስም (səm)
Tocharian A: ñom
Tocharian B: ñem
Tok Pisin: nem (tpi)
Turkish: ad (tr), isim (tr)
Turkmen: at (tk)
Ukrainian: і́м'я (uk) n (ímʺja), (of a place, class, etc.) на́зва (uk) f (názva)
Umbrian: 𐌍𐌖𐌌𐌄𐌌 (numem), 𐌍𐌏𐌌𐌄 (nome)
Urdu: نام m (nām), اسم (ur) m (ism)
Uyghur: ئات (ug) (at), ئىسىم (ug) (isim)
Uzbek: ism (uz), nom (uz), ot (uz)
Venetian: nome
Vietnamese: tên (vi)
Volapük: nem (vo)
Votic: nimi
Welsh: enw (cy)
West Frisian: namme c
Western Apache: -̨́-̨́zhi’, -́zhi’
White Hmong: lub npe
Xhosa: ifani
Yiddish: נאָמען m (nomen)
Yucatec Maya: k’aaba’
Zulu: igama class 5/6, ibizo (zu) class 5/6
HURME Well "name" is part of the English branch of Indo-European which is one of the larger language families so any European language (except Basque, Hungarian, and Finnish) on this list or heavily influenced by Europeans (like Afrikaans) are naturally going to be related in addition to many languages between Europe and India. So all of those peppered into this list would definitely make it seem like you might be right, but what you should do is look at the proto languages to see similarities. If you find cognates between Proto Indo-European and say Proto Altaic or something, I think that would be huge.
I will say though that you have to look at more than just the word has a sound or two that match. For instance, yes the Xhosa word is "ifani" with an n but it's pretty far from "name".
Cool list, it is fun to see comparisons like this.
Malos Kain I think it's quite interesting that Finnish "nimi" and Japanese "namae" are so similar to the Indo-European word.
TaiFerret Even Nepal uses word: 'Nām'; in Bengali it's 'nam' - where on earth does the word originate from? Must be one of the most loaned words thru ages.
HURME Well, Nepali and Bengali are part of the Indo-European language family, so no surprise there. I think it's more interesting that even some non-IE languages like Finnish and Japanese have a similar word.
TaiFerret Yeah, that definitely is.
Patterns of language creation are actually very similar to patterns of speciation. The only real difference is time scale. Two populations of one species get split apart by geography, diet, or other, and drift apart genetically. When they come back together they're too different to be called the same species anymore. This is how one species can split into more over time. The evolutionary pattern is very similar to what was described here with language.
Interessante. Sempre tive vontade de estudar linguística, aprender a falar várias línguas diferentes e descobrir suas origens, variações, conexões, etc.
hablas portugués? es divertido porque estoy aprendiendo espanol y es muy facíl entender portugués también jaja
Me encanta que gracias a que hablo español puedo entender todo lo que dice tu comentario
I ❤ learning and this YT channel is PRICELESS! 💎
I feel like it's so hard for foreigner to learn my language - Georgian, because only verb can have about two thousand form (11series x 12 subjective and objective signs x 15 verb prefics =1980 forms) and we don't even think while using one :D
It's your mother language so yeah
But it would be like prefixes and suffixes so you would just have to learn some affixes, right?
@@Gamer-uf1kl Yes, subjective and objective sings, also verb prefics are just affixes, but series aren't. There is no exact rule to conjucate a verb from series to series.
There's certainly a common ancestor for human languages, as we all share a common ancestor.
why did the Portuguese said si ?
research laziness
typo, similiar words
A clear mistake in the visuals: when the narrator comments about Portuguese and Spanish being mutually intelligible (not that much, since only by resorting to a slow-paced intermediary dialect, which we call Portuñol, mutual intelligibility between the 2 languages is guaranteed), the Portuguese "person" answers back "si". There is no "si" in Portuguese, but "sim", and in real spoken language most Portuguese speakers don't reply "sim", but actually they simply repeat the verb used in the question ("Você fez seu trabalho?" - "Did you do your work?" - R: "Fiz", lit. "I did".).
+Homoclassicus
What happens when Portuguese and Spanish people mate, or has that ever occurred?
Si se entiende el portugués
KEEP CALM and PLAY SOCCER IN YOUR PAJAMAS I don't know any specific case, but I'd say acquiring the other partner's language is very easy so it'll mostly depend on where the couple lives: if they're in a Spanish-speaking environment, Spanish will prevail between them; if in a Portuguese-speaking environment, Portuguese will prevail. And for a while Portuñol (a sort of pidgin which at least in South America is mostly a "spanish-flavored" Portuguese) is enough to guarantee mutual understanding.
Antes eu pensava que Português e Castelhano fossem iguais, mas depois de ouvir percebi que não entendia porra nenhuma. Talvez numa conversa cara-a-cara, com a pessoa tentando ajudar eu entenda, mas dois hispânicos conversando é impossível de entender
Spanish and portuguese are Not mutual integible. Spanish people understand the italian even best than understand the portuguese. But is a truth that portugueses understand better spanish than viceversa.
This is a syndrome of dissociation... Spanish is not even a language! Is castillano! Portuguese and Gallego (from Galicia actual Spain) are 98% de same language with slightly different accent! Castillano is about 80-90% de same as Portuguese... Actually in Spain there are languages more diverse and far from castillano then then current portuguese!
qTions you dont gonna teach me about spanish languages. I am galician. And galician is not portuguese with other accent, there are two separate languages, like ucranian and russian.
Enhorabuena, yo también entiendo bien el portugués. Pero no son mutuamente inteligibles. El italiano se entiende mejor, o el catalán, o el gallego. Y es un hecho que los hablantes de portugués entienden mejor el español que al revés. Así que la percepción de un hablante a otro puede cambiar. A ver, son lenguas parecidas, pero verlas como casi la misma lengua no es más que el resultado de la típica ignorancia estadounidense de encasillar dentro de lo mismo a cosas que son diferentes. Es como si yo ahora digo que el inglés y el holandés son lo mismo sólo porque se parecen muchísimo.
Piedrijo É verdade, o Português e o Castelhano são virtualmente inteligíveis entre si, mas tudo depende dos dialetos dos dois diferentes idiomas e do nível linguístico a que cada um é falado, bem como o meio em que cada um está a ser pronunciado. Neste momento, pelo meio escrito, parto do princípio que tanto o Piedrijo como o + My Two Cents consigam entender o que estou a querer dizer, mas se estivesse a falar oralmente, a história já seria outra.
Mesmo dentro da mesma língua os diferentes dialetos podem não ser mutuamente inteligíveis, como entre os Brasileiros e os Portugueses há um certa dificuldade devido às diferenças tanto ao nível da pronúncia como ao nível do vocabulário. Penso que entre Argentinos e Espanhóis a mesma dificuldade também se encontra presente, por exemplo.Depois há a trocadilha em que Espanhóis podem perceber melhor o que um Brasileiro diz mais propriamente do que um Português, quando tanto um como outro supostamente estão a falar na mesma língua, tal como um Português terá mais facilidade a perceber um Venezuelano do que um Espanhol.E se estivermos a falar do nível linguístico, ou da complexidade que cada língua é capaz de ter, é capaz de cada língua se tornar completamente inteligível para outros falantes. Como, por exemplo, "poderá de algum modo subsistir um meio no qual dois estilos pronunciais poderão converter-se em intercâmbios não decifráveis, quebrando a simbiose entre dois modos de falar completamente distintos?"
Yo creo que las diferencias entre el poretugués europeo y americano son más grandes que las diferencias en el español europeo y americano. Yo entiendo perfectamente a todos los países hispanos. Es cierto que el español de Argentina es quizás el más diferente de todos, porque cambia la segunda persona de los verbos. Pero se sigue entendiendo. Lo que puede ser difícil de entender son aquellos hablantes que tienen un acento cerrado, pero por lo general eso no ocurre.
언어가 진화하는 법에 대하여 배우는 시간이 되었습니다. 언어가족이 무었인지 알게 되었고요. 모든 언어의 공통적인 조상을 가지고 있는지 알아내기 정말 어려울것 같습니다. 좋은 시간 감사합니다.
2:43 brother, may I have some oats?
جزاك الله خيرا على توفير الترجمة 😊
I am currently developing a story of a gradually evolving language, set in a fictional world.
Cool! Do you know Artifexian? He has some good videos on this topic!
that's nice!
Beautiful lesson.
2:05 this is so goddamn clever
That's so complicated and interesting!
I've noticed similarities between Spanish, Romanian and Filipino, how far related are they?
Spanish influenced Filipino (Tagalog) the way French did Old English. We have quite a lot of words that are of Spanish origin but we retained Tagalog's basic grammatical rules.
Also, Spanish and Romanian, along with Portuguese, French, Italian, etc. belong to a branch of the Indo-European language family called 'Romance languages'. These are all descended from the language of the Romans -- Latin.
Wow, I had no idea, that's so cool!!
I knew about portuguese, french and italian but I didn't know Romanian is also a romance langage!
+Tayloraurrekoetxea It's an odd one as we don't know if it's descended from Romanized Dacians or not
Philippines before was colonized from Spain over 300 years that's why some other words is very similar 🙃
Also worth mentioning that languages are imposed upon civilizations through wars of conquest, where the conquered combine their original language with that of the conquering party (e.g. Rome and the tribes of Gaul developed what we now know as French).
1:48
I like how the Russian and Ukrainian dolls looked at each other in disgust.
Very good and useful video. As I would like to show this to my classes I teach, I wish the narration was a bit slower. It feels a bit rushed. Still, the content was very good and useful intro to the topic.
At 1:22 I was kinda proud because I am from Romania :-)
Toți românii care văd sa răspundă ;)))
:)
Pretty cool video!
Love the voice, love the animation, love everything!
If it bothers you that much simply don't watch.
This is why holy book translataion need to be revised from time to time, although the words change, but we will understand the idea easily.