Was not expecting a face I knew to show up in my youtube recommendations! The class I took with him was a bit weird and unstructured but very fascinating.
I came here to say the exact same thing! wish he had a UA-cam channel, even if it was just shorts doing one or two words at a time, though I assume he's a busy guy. This stuff is fascinating.
As a language/linguistics nerd, I find it to be the one of the few fields that everybody is lowkey interested in since everybody is a participant in language. I'm very happy to see non-language nerds here as well!
Oh yes, by profession, I am a registered nurse. History is not my strong suit, but I found this very interesting. Thank y’all for what you do. My wife is an English teacher, so she would love this also.
@@amberhide04 You are the Official Gold Medalist Winner Of The Internet October 22, 2024. I don't have a medal for you, but you can print this out and tape it to your bathroom mirror for early-morning inspiration. Or to your rear-view mirror if you don't care what the cars behind you are doing.
Maybe it's just the Professor being extremely good at explaining, but everything he explains just seems so intuitive and sensible to me. I've always loved tracing words and comparing languages and this video was a delight.
Good etymology is like that 🙂 It feels like discovering your ancestry. You'd have never thought of that yourself, but now that you know, it makes so much sense!
As a native German speaker who is also fluent in English and conversational in Spanish, I always found the similarity between "embarrassed / embarazada" amusing. I didn't know they were actually related until seeing this video. Then I remembered that the German word for "maternity clothing" is "Umstandskleidung" which consists of the words "Kleidung", meaning "clothing" and "Umstand", meaning "circumstance". However, the word "Umstand" has the related adjective "umständlich" , which means "cumbersome". Now it all makes sense!
Ich finde es interessant, dass "Leer" in allen drei Sprachen ein echtes Wort ist. Aber es hat eine andere Bedeutung und Aussprache in jeder Sprache. Tut mir leid, ob mein Deutsch nicht perfekt ist 😅
15:53 It's refreshing to see a scientist so passionate about his craft that he keeps on top of even the most recent of trends in his field, while also acknowledging those trends with a spark of humor. Very mindful.
I tend to find specialists in their fields are far less offended by developing trends and offshoots than the general public. Vocal fry is another prime example of this.
@@ImMattFromAus If I had to guess, I'd say it's because the general public tends to respond to new things negatively, without taking the time and effort to understand it. A specialist, though, seems respond to something new by studying it, which if done right leads to understanding. And when you understand something, you are much less likely to hate it
I do as well because I can't stand not knowing. The etymology is particularly interesting to me. People sometimes don't believe some of the words I use are real words-I particularly recall obfuscate, solipsism and curmudgeon. What can I say? I read a lot and I am endlessly curious.
Finally a linguistics episode! So fascinating. My favourite linguistics fact is that the components of the word 'helicopter' are not 'heli' and 'copter' as you may assume. Rather they are 'helico' (similar to helix meaning spiral) and 'pter' (like in pterodactyl meaning wing)!
That actually answered another question I had. I can't remember the word, but it had another word in it & made zero sense when I tried to dissect them.
It if funny if we look into those words in different languages like German for example. Hubschrauber, Hub means stroke, Schrauber would be the helix motion. The fun part is when you look into Hub a bit closer, when you translate it into english, because it can mean different things. Like lift.
this comments section is fire because it’s mostly people who are interested in this type of thing and would be likely to click on this sort of video and so they did and so we altogether each try and offer our own little clever linguistical quip or historical factoid. Love you guys love love love you!
Fun fact! "Factoid" doesn't mean "small fact", it means "something that is untrue but gets said so often that people assume it's true". An example would be the factoid about people swallowing 7 spiders a year in their sleep.
@@aspol12 doesn't seem so. The -oid ending usually means sth that's like the thing represented by the root, in this case 'fact', but not quite; so it's not a stretch to think that 'sth that's like a fact, but not quite' would get the meaning mentioned by captobvious
4:10 - as a native Russian speaker, our word for bear is "miedvied'" which literally means "The one, who knows where honey is" which I find hilarious. Similar words (sometimes with "mied" and "vied" swapped, like in Ukrainian) are also used in most of the other Slavic languages. Notable exceptions being Bulgarian ("Mechka") and Bosnian (which iirc, for whatever reason also uses "Bear", but im not sure about that).
"Word" being a way to say "something has been spoken" is funny because I'm immediately thinking of rap and how im the 90s they'd say "word". Ironically that use was correct to its original meaning
@@CB-ke5xx "hai" just means yes though? They probably have a word that fits way better. Considering Asian languages are a lot more complex and flexible compared to Germanic ones.
4:10 my mother used to call her small dog "the brown creature", so the story about European peoples referring to bears as "brown ones" out of fear and awe is very funny.
So awesome to know what he is talking about because of a class I'm taking at university!!!! We have covered almost everything he talked about!! Etymology is so fascinating because once you learn about Grimm's Law and the Great Vowel Shift, you can recognize so many words in other Germanic languages and their proto-languages!! We need more linguists on this channel! Bring this guy back!
The only reason "unaliving" is used on social media is because the algorithms suppress the creators who say the more overt words in order to be more advertiser friendly.
I hate the fact that we have to use the term “unalive” here on this particular platform and other parts of social media. Frankly it’s a step backwards, back to the time when talking about mental health was taboo. We should be raising more awareness and not be afraid to talk about such things. Talking keeps people alive.
If anything, it disrespects any and everyone you know that have died. My grandparents aren't "unalive". They are dead. Buried, decomposing, and dead. When did "blunt" or "natural" become triggering.
What does creative writing have to do with being a language nerd? This video is about etymology, linguistics, phonology, historical linguistics. Not creative writing or English class.
My high school language arts honors teacher, Mr. Blair used to make us study prefix and word origins, and it really made understanding words i’m not familiar with very easy to understand or break down. Super thankful for him and he made me into a little word nerd
In Swedish there’s a great example of using words to avoid invoking the horror of something and that is for the wolf. In Swedish the word for wolf is “varg”, but in the older days you wouldn’t say varg precisely for the aforementioned reason. People would instead call the wolf Gråben (Grayleg), Den Grå (The Gray one) or Tasse (an old word for wasteland or wilderness).
"Varg" was a euphemism for the real old Swedish word for wolf, which was "ulv" (cognate with wolf).
3 місяці тому+26
A similar thing happened in Hungarian, and we actually don't even know the original word. The currently used noun “farkas” is actually an adjective meaning “with tail” or “having a tail”. It is thought to be a taboo, because it was a totemic animal, similarly to deer. Deer are called “szarvas”, which similarly means “with horns”.
Varg är ett gammalt ord för någon som brukar våld, och är därför själv ett "noaord". Björn har kallats för styggnacke i delar av landet för att undvika åkallans makt. Man har också undvikit att åkalla djur som förknippas med otur som skata, som kallats skjora tidigare men vad fågeln kallats innan det ska helt har förlorats till tidens tand om jag mins rätt.
I'm just as fascinated by how words DON'T change. Apl is the Babylonian word for apple and has changed little in pronounciation over thousands of years.
@@Blackberry0Pie Erdapfelmoment. (Earthapple = Potato) There is also the apple of the eye and the Reichsapfel (globus cruciger). So things that are round and shiny can also be called apple. Grenades have a similar background💣
@@Blackberry0PieWhich is why people today think the biblical fruit is an apple. It is in fact just an unspecified fruit. The same way the tree is unspecified.
1:39 Interesting that "man" was generic and became gendered, but has started to become ungendered again in casual speech ("Man, I was hoping she would be the one!")
That is not the gender being generic. That is object of dream, a fantasy. Characterised by the notion of a single perfect being to match with. That could just as easily be a car
@@mortenfrosthansen84 I can't understand any of what you're saying. If you're focusing on the statement itself, you're missing the point. I was just giving one of 1000 examples of using the word. I would argue that just like "dude" and "bro" are starting to be generic again, "man" (in this usage) already is.
@@stephenj9470 Ahh in that sense. Guess what I thought, was that it the sentence in general. That it has to be used as an emphasis. Because, then you can put any word there. Bananas, that was close. Rubber, I don't like mondays. So it's more explaining, that you really mean it. That is then an object, and has nothing to do with gender as it can be anything, with the same meaning. If you then say... girl, my seatbelt is scratchy. Then it has a different ring to it
@@amazinggrapes3045 Right, and I probably went a little to far in calling it "degendered." More that it used to be non gender, and nowadays it has a use (an interjection) that doesn't mean gender. Thought it seemed curious.
look up Catherine Tate, Derek at the men's health clinic. I'm pretty sure CT came up with it. Certainly the first time I ever heard it and I lived very close to CT, I'd often see her in Waitrose.
I love listening to History of English Podcast. Last years' biggest "wow" for me was learning that a cyclonic Caribbean storm mentioned in one document during Columbus' lifetime was furrican. The host says the Spanish changed it to hurricane (or what it would become) in the same way Fernandez became Hernandez.
etymology and philology are the two most import reason i came to love languages and their studies. university really killed all of my passion. I'm really happy to see more people being interested and passionate about this topics
I think it's beautiful seeing a language evolve in your own lifetime, it proves that language is from and for the people, and reflects change and adaptability.
Prescriptivist grammar is terrible but hyper speed fluid and increasingly corporate-influenced constant linguistic chaos reflects total chaos entropy more than it reflects any kind of composure or resilience. Language shifts are a feature of language but they have to happen together instead of breaking apart communities
When he explained the word "wer" i knew exactly it came from "vir", which is the most common word for "man" in classical Latin. Etymology is so freaking interesting, wanting or not, learning a new language should never be strained to learning the technicallities of the language itself, but its culture and history as well, not saying everybody should be forced to learn a languages history, it will by all means make you a better speaker and definetly motivate you more
This also survived in some Norwegian dialects, as the prefix "ver-" meaning "in-law"; your "verbror" was your brother-in-law, or more literally "your man's brother".
He mentions "doubt" having a silent "b" inserted by lexicographers, but there are plenty more examples of that in English. "Debt" was originally pronounced and spelled "dette" but the "b" was added to invoke the Latin "debitum." "Island" never had an "s" (it was more like "igland" originally), but lexicographers inserted it to recall the Latin "insula." The problem? "Igland" didn't come from "insula" in the first place - it was Old English (which is to say, of Germanic origin). A completely bogus etymology was added to the word.
Fake or 'folk' etymologies for both words & idioms are such a hugely widespread thing, both historically & today - I don't think people even realise! And they seem to invade the internet like kudzu... Ditto for incorrect idiom - I swear the warped versions are way more common online than the correct ones! 😂😭 "If you think that, then you've got another thing coming", "sneaky like a rouge", "slight of hand", "free reign", "wearing a hijab", "baited breath"... and the list just goes on & on!
23:25 In Polish (I don't know about other Slavic languages) pregnancy is "ciąża", which is related to "ciężar" meaning "heavy weight". It seems pretty appropriate, especially in the later stage.
Regarding gender neutral terms changing over the years: I've always been fascinated by the word, 'fellow'. In America at least, it refers to a group of men (hey fellas). But that always confused me, as it doesn't imply gender. You could call a group of women 'fellows', as in 'fellow people'. Maybe it has something to do with the notion that fellows in the context of a university always meant men, as men were the only ones there?
Idk. I've never thought of referring to any number of women as "fellas". Like if I were to walk into a group of 4 men and 1 woman, fellas would never be the word I use. But I think for me "guys" is much more gender-neutral (hey whatsup guys?), and that's probably what I would say. I get what you're saying about the "fellows" part though. But even then, I still see that more as in a congregation/religious aspect, as in "fellow worshippers". The implied gender aspect is just a societal agreement. It sort of just assumes that gender. That's just me though.
Interesting, because while I definitely do know of the gendered connotation to "fellas", I also feel like it's used almost equally often as gender-neutral, like "hey, guys" but Southern.
There's just something about the way he speaks about linguistics that makes me interested! I had no idea I was going to be so invested in this video until I was like "wow, that's really something!"
Etymology is what got me into Linguistics. I'm nearly finished my BA in it and it still holds a special place in my heart. It may not be the deepest subsection of Linguistics, but it's one heck of a gateway drug
There are few things I love more than learning about language, especially etymology. My favorite is the history of place names. The world we live on literally means "dirt," because it was all we knew and everything else was above in the sky, just like the gods, which is why we named planets after gods.
I would love an episode about specifically all the ways the Normans changed Saxon English (Old English) into modern English. Short version is a lot of the words we consider "fancy" are either Norman or French. For example: "room" is Saxon but "chamber" is Norman.
In Russian the word "bear" consists of 2 words: "honey" and "knows". I always wondered why the most interesting part about the bear for my ancestors was its honey addiction and not like, I don't know, shredding everything in pieces...
Not 'knows' but 'eats' or rather 'eater', 'honey' was 'медоу' (medou), where "оu" из quite close to 'v' and the rest is 'едь' (yed - eater), not 'ведь' (ved - knower). And yes, that is because it was also an eupheuism not to pronounce a 'real' name of an animal not to attract it. So we have direct link to English in that matter wich is rather funny and interesting.
@@PUARockstar and in Hungarian there are tons of words for bear, the most formal one being "medve". so thanks for one of the many many loan words. (mackó, bocs, brummogó, dörmögi are all also very much in use. some of them refer to the latter one referring to the sound of sleeping bears)
Медведь (medved') is essentailly an euthemism for бер (ber) which is cognate of bear. In Russian, the original root remained in words like берлога (berloga) and бурый (buriy).
I once heard a linguist pointing out the characteristic of a fully fledged language which elevates it above other means of communication that it is able to talk about itself. I really like that notion.
I know it’s etymology-focused but it’s so healing to hear a linguist on a popular platform addressing so many common confusions about language in a descriptive (non-judgmental/non-competitive) manner
In Denmark we still say "knight" with a hard k, "knægt" or "gnaw" with a hard g "gnave". Also animals like hamsters, rabbits and rats are known as "gnavere"/"gnawers" in Danish, which I find amusing.
For those interested in learning more about this kind of stuff, I HIGHLY recommend the PBS show "Other Words". The history of some words/languages are WILD.
13:30 interestingly other cultures have different onomatopoeia, and knowing what things are "supposed" to sound can change your perception of the sound itself. For example, cats go "nyan" and dogs go "mung mung"
Ohh I’ve also heard of “ waoo waoo “ or “ wan wan “ for dogs and people usually do hear the specific sound in their language when listening to animal sounds really interesting indeed
In 9th grade my Spanish teacher was trying to explain to the class basically why adding an o to the end of a word, or assuming a similar sounding word means what you think it does in Spanish vs English, was a bad idea, and used the embarrassed/pregnant example. That has stuck with me for nearly 20 years where I occasionally wonder how those words ended up so similar. And today that mystery ended. Thanks!
While studying a database query language, I was surprised to see that the operators "but" and "and" were considered synonyms in that language. Either could be used to produce identical results. Turns out that they both refer to operations that produce the intersection (as in Venn diagrams) of two datasets. It makes perfect sense to me now but I'm still surprised that I was ever surprised by it!
Unalived is not used because of social taboos, but because algorithms on social platforms silence, deemphasize, or completely censor content with certain flagged words in them, like suicide. So these words are used to bypass a restriction, but it's not based on collective social norms, it's based on imposed restrictions by a few socially influential entities.
@@nekrataaliWouldn’t “taboo” mean it’s widely “unaccepted”? Versus “Facebook doesn’t like it because of their non-scientific beliefs about it, meanwhile Reddit, Discord, etc and the general populace still regularly use those words in normal, everyday conversation”?
@@whisper4379 exactly. Taboos are understood to be collective. Suicide is a sensitive topic but not one that any defined slice of society has ever attempted to avoid naming. Even now the word isn't taboo by any living person, we just use the word "unalive" as a loophole to bypass algorithms that suppress content that uses it.
Long before its current social media presence, Deadpool used 'unalived' when he guest starred in a Spider-Man cartoon. He knew he couldn't talk about killing in a child-friendly show, so he used various coy euphemisms when suggesting how to deal with the story's villain.
Sudying to become an Enlgish teacher in Sweden and we have a course called English Survey where linguistics is part of it and it is SOOO difficult to grasp! This made some of it a lot....maybe not easier but at least more interesting! Thank you!
The word "harvest" in reference to autumn unlocked a memory I forgot I had. We celebrated "harvest day" every year in primary school, people bringing in tinned food to be donated and being thankful for the food we have. Being grateful for something as simple and taken for granted in the first world as food is very good practice I still do in gratitude journaling. :)
I never gave language that much thought, but Gareth made it all so fascinating! I was enthralled the whole video and really enjoyed the bits of humor. 😄
❤❤❤ I am bursting with this video, i speak spanish, english, and swedish, and I just love how the languages intertwine and somehow resemble between them english/spanish swedish/spanish and english/swedish. What’s even more fascinating was that my boyfriend speaks spanish, english,l and german, and turns out soooo many words in german are just the same or too similar to swedish (yeah, i know they’re both germanic, but still so much fun), oh i love to share my emotion with all you nerds too watching this!! 😜
20:38 it's the same here in Tagalog/Filipino... We usually use the word 'mo' as second person singular but we can also use 'nyo/ninyo', which is second person plural, plus the "po" honorific when talking to a person much older than us. The sentence is "Just put your cup there" 'Ilagay mo na lang yung baso mo jan' turns into 'Ilagay niyo na lang po yung baso niyo jan'
3:02 your pronunciation of the word „knight“ exactly sounds like the german „knecht“. If you now think about the fact that there was an „Edelknecht“, basically a „noble“ knecht, which was the word used for a squire before they were called squire (which is „knappe“ in german)….wow, it‘s Just very interesting how entangled everything is (or at least seems) 😁👍
I think "knappe" is related to the English "knave", which came to have a negative meaning (a knave is an amoral young man, like a thief). "Edel" was "aethel" in Old English, which you can see in historical names like Ethelred, a Saxon king, or even the female names Ethel, Adeline.
ah yes a fellow nerd loner who has previously thought that despite owning a dictionary compiled by many scholars together and offered for sale on the open market for our educational benefit. been there man. or i am still that. haha.
When my parents got married, the first thing they bought together was the etymology dictionary. My father was so into etymology that at the age of 6, I barely knew how to read but I already knew that the Czech word "brouk" (beetle) was related to Latin "bruchus". Aaaaand before you ask: Yes, I´ve written a book on etymology... 😂
The important thing to remember about any vowel shift be it the Great Vowel Shift or the more modern Great Northern Vowel Shift is that when you shift a vowel the space in the mouth abhors a vacuum and so another sound seeks to fill that void, which is just as much a part of the shift as the initial vowel change.
So, ancient languages took the Pokémon approach to some animal names. Ancient Egyptian hears a cat say "meow" and so it's name is 'Miu' (meow). That's really cool!
Interesting, you taught me about the old spanish meaning for "embarazado", nowadays people still use the expression "embarazoso" to refer to a complicated situation that produces negative emotions, and now it makes even more sense given that the old meaning was "entangled" and it's interesting that "embarazoso" coexist with the term "enrevesado" which means exactly the same and is used interchangeably, althought the former tends to refer more to situations that produce shame while the latter is more simple and just means "complex situation". Also, I knew that Shakespeare invented a lot of words but yeah maybe it was not that many, however I still think it's impressive how much one person was able to influence so many throughout the centuries in such thing as language.
As a German this whole video is very interesting, as English is more or less a german language, but the part at 5:50 was striking me the most, because we not only have Ps and Fs as first letters, but sometimes there's Pf, like a middle point in etymological evolution
Can we PLEASE get another episode of this BUT with more broad linguistic questions? I want to see questions about experiments and weird cases like Cage(was it?) and Genie!!!! Are we really born with a blueprint for language in our brains? I read about an experiment done on babies where they sucked their pacifiers at different rates when they heard their own language vs rubbish HOW DOES A 6 MONTH OLD BABY KNOW THAT WHEN IT CAN EVEN SPEAKKK
I first became consciously interested in linguistics when I decided that I wanted to write a conlang, and the more I look into it, the more I find it endlessly fascinating, seeing how today’s words evolved and continue to do so, and finding patterns like ‘p’ to ‘f’, ‘c’ to ‘h’, and the tendency of vowels to shift towards schwa (ə). My (limited) understanding is that the latter is similar to the former because ə requires almost no effort and just flows out for unstressed vowels when speaking quickly (for example, the ‘e’ in “vowel” is not typically pronounced as a full “eh” sound).
I studied theoretical linguistics and you´re actually spot on 🙂 It´s simply easier to go to the "unspecified" schwa sound. Happens in a lot of languages when speaking fast, only in English it´s consistent and "official". Bit of trivia: there isn´t much of that in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian. They´re taught to, and proud to, pronounce vowels carefully, especially the long ones.
Dr. Roberts is my Professor and he genuinely is the kindest and most intelligent dude ever. It's awesome to see him on Wired.
Knowing his students think well of him only makes it better. Thanks!
Was not expecting a face I knew to show up in my youtube recommendations! The class I took with him was a bit weird and unstructured but very fascinating.
Which University is this?
lol I didn't know he's going to be on wired I saw his face on my recommendation page lol Truly the best teacher
This guy makes me want to take his class, for no credit whatsoever, just for the pleasure.
I wish this video never ended. I could listen to this man talk about etymology for hours.
And I've seen your Mario iceberg about a dozen of times at least. I've started getting nostalgic for the time when it dropped.
@@Smogshaik Thank you…! 😳
I came here to say the exact same thing! wish he had a UA-cam channel, even if it was just shorts doing one or two words at a time, though I assume he's a busy guy. This stuff is fascinating.
Just an etymology podcast hosted by him would be awesome.
You might like Simon Roper, he’s a great linguistic channel on UA-cam.
As a language/linguistics nerd, I find it to be the one of the few fields that everybody is lowkey interested in since everybody is a participant in language. I'm very happy to see non-language nerds here as well!
as a non-language speaker i'm feel like i should point out that i'm also very interested in linguistics even though i don't speak any language
@@amberhide04
I hate you /joke
@@amberhide04says the language speaker
Oh yes, by profession, I am a registered nurse. History is not my strong suit, but I found this very interesting. Thank y’all for what you do. My wife is an English teacher, so she would love this also.
@@amberhide04 You are the Official Gold Medalist Winner Of The Internet October 22, 2024. I don't have a medal for you, but you can print this out and tape it to your bathroom mirror for early-morning inspiration. Or to your rear-view mirror if you don't care what the cars behind you are doing.
Maybe it's just the Professor being extremely good at explaining, but everything he explains just seems so intuitive and sensible to me.
I've always loved tracing words and comparing languages and this video was a delight.
Good etymology is like that 🙂 It feels like discovering your ancestry. You'd have never thought of that yourself, but now that you know, it makes so much sense!
As a native German speaker who is also fluent in English and conversational in Spanish, I always found the similarity between "embarrassed / embarazada" amusing. I didn't know they were actually related until seeing this video.
Then I remembered that the German word for "maternity clothing" is "Umstandskleidung" which consists of the words "Kleidung", meaning "clothing" and "Umstand", meaning "circumstance". However, the word "Umstand" has the related adjective "umständlich" , which means "cumbersome". Now it all makes sense!
Ich finde es interessant, dass "Leer" in allen drei Sprachen ein echtes Wort ist. Aber es hat eine andere Bedeutung und Aussprache in jeder Sprache.
Tut mir leid, ob mein Deutsch nicht perfekt ist 😅
@onionbubs386 Stimmt, ist mir noch nie aufgefallen. 😄
Dein Deutsch ist bis auf ein Wort übrigens perfekt ("dass" statt "ob")! 👌🏻
This is like a university-level crash course here for everyone to watch for free
IKR I was a language/linguistic student as well and there are several topics here that I remember I have discussed with during the lectures in uni
i have a degree in english linguistics and i can confirm it is actually exactly the stuff we learned in uni. like, practically to a tee!!!
Wouldnt go that far but it is a great introduction.
University is free where I live.
@@Palma5025i wish it was the same for me :(
15:53 It's refreshing to see a scientist so passionate about his craft that he keeps on top of even the most recent of trends in his field, while also acknowledging those trends with a spark of humor. Very mindful.
Very demure ✨😌
I tend to find specialists in their fields are far less offended by developing trends and offshoots than the general public. Vocal fry is another prime example of this.
@@ImMattFromAus If I had to guess, I'd say it's because the general public tends to respond to new things negatively, without taking the time and effort to understand it. A specialist, though, seems respond to something new by studying it, which if done right leads to understanding. And when you understand something, you are much less likely to hate it
@@umpteenthreason9627Also, experts know that people have always complained about neologisms, until they become part of the furniture.
Fie on thou
As someone who randomly looks up etymologies of words all the time, I very much enjoyed this :D
I do as well because I can't stand not knowing. The etymology is particularly interesting to me.
People sometimes don't believe some of the words I use are real words-I particularly recall obfuscate, solipsism and curmudgeon. What can I say? I read a lot and I am endlessly curious.
One of the best functions of the internet.
Some words are similar: Mom in languages
Norway : Moor = female parent
Iceland: Mor = Mom
Dinka: Mor = your mom
Nuer: Mor = your mom
I'm one of them 😅
same omg i gotta know a thing's origin or else i'll explode
I took one linguistics course in college and it was the hardest class i’ve ever done. He’s so knowledgeable it’s very impressive.
As a linguist I would love to see more linguistics videos like this!
Fall is a perfect counterpart to Spring. They're both single-syllable verbs that describe what the plants are doing
Genius
Oh cool, I never thought about it that way
Dialects are just hilarious to me in general - "You've got a solid language going there, but you're doing it wrong" 🙃
They such musical words.
There's a lot of dialects in the southern United States that pronounces "-ing" sort of like "-ing-khh", so "spring" isn't always a one syllable word
Finally a linguistics episode! So fascinating. My favourite linguistics fact is that the components of the word 'helicopter' are not 'heli' and 'copter' as you may assume. Rather they are 'helico' (similar to helix meaning spiral) and 'pter' (like in pterodactyl meaning wing)!
Makes perfect sense now that you said it.
Interestingly it get's abbreviated for colloquial use to either "heli" or "copter" in several languages.
The abbreviation for helicopter is "hélico" in French
That actually answered another question I had. I can't remember the word, but it had another word in it & made zero sense when I tried to dissect them.
it's funny how words are created but we go back to shorthand like heli, full circle
It if funny if we look into those words in different languages like German for example. Hubschrauber, Hub means stroke, Schrauber would be the helix motion.
The fun part is when you look into Hub a bit closer, when you translate it into english, because it can mean different things. Like lift.
this comments section is fire because it’s mostly people who are interested in this type of thing and would be likely to click on this sort of video and so they did and so we altogether each try and offer our own little clever linguistical quip or historical factoid. Love you guys love love love you!
Fun fact! "Factoid" doesn't mean "small fact", it means "something that is untrue but gets said so often that people assume it's true". An example would be the factoid about people swallowing 7 spiders a year in their sleep.
@@captobvious360 spiders georg mentioned ‼️‼️🕷️🕷️🕷️
@@captobvious360is this factoid also a "factoid" (fake fact)
@@captobvious360I'm changing the meaning of the word then, I only drop certified facts 🤾🏽
@@aspol12 doesn't seem so. The -oid ending usually means sth that's like the thing represented by the root, in this case 'fact', but not quite; so it's not a stretch to think that 'sth that's like a fact, but not quite' would get the meaning mentioned by captobvious
4:10 - as a native Russian speaker, our word for bear is "miedvied'" which literally means "The one, who knows where honey is" which I find hilarious.
Similar words (sometimes with "mied" and "vied" swapped, like in Ukrainian) are also used in most of the other Slavic languages. Notable exceptions being Bulgarian ("Mechka") and Bosnian (which iirc, for whatever reason also uses "Bear", but im not sure about that).
of course the russian word for bear isnt scary... I wonder what the bears call russians tho... the white two-legged scary beast?
Miedvied the Pooh! Oh bother!😄
interestingly, the Spanish word for honey is miel
@@thevuittonet777do the Spanish refer to their partner as "Honey"? i have always been curious about words/phrases like these in other languages.
In Slovak, bear is medveď.
I taught English as a foreign language for years. My heart goes out to them for all the difficulties with the English language.
What a cunning linguist. He’s so intelligent and enthusiastic, please bring him back!
I see what you did there.
Miss Moneypenny!🤣🤣🤣
You did not.
But he doesn't know anything about Colonel Angus.
One might say that he's a Master Debator
"Word" being a way to say "something has been spoken" is funny because I'm immediately thinking of rap and how im the 90s they'd say "word". Ironically that use was correct to its original meaning
Word is a great acknowledgement that you heard and understood someone. Similar to HAI in Japanese.
@@CB-ke5xx "hai" just means yes though? They probably have a word that fits way better. Considering Asian languages are a lot more complex and flexible compared to Germanic ones.
in farsi we have ver zadan or ver ver which means like blah blah refers to someone who talks alot
That’s not irony, that’s aave. ‘Word’ is also used as a term to gain confirmation.
@@Mithrounzer too
4:10 my mother used to call her small dog "the brown creature", so the story about European peoples referring to bears as "brown ones" out of fear and awe is very funny.
There's also the old word "bruin" for bear in English which also means brown.
that's not a nice name for a dog. sounds more like a code word for flatulence
@@Psycandy no it doesn't
Chihuahua?
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.
So awesome to know what he is talking about because of a class I'm taking at university!!!! We have covered almost everything he talked about!! Etymology is so fascinating because once you learn about Grimm's Law and the Great Vowel Shift, you can recognize so many words in other Germanic languages and their proto-languages!! We need more linguists on this channel! Bring this guy back!
Shoutout to the men who didnt confuse "a nipple" for "an ipple".
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.
Funny
Good one Peter!
😂😂
Good one!
😂
Man deserves an entire channel
word to your mother, bromeo
If Michael from Vsauce and Babish from Binging with Babish had a kid.
I can't unsee it now
ohhhhhhh good one dude
I see it
🩻
Bro looks like shaved headed Matt Walsh
The only reason "unaliving" is used on social media is because the algorithms suppress the creators who say the more overt words in order to be more advertiser friendly.
I hate the fact that we have to use the term “unalive” here on this particular platform and other parts of social media. Frankly it’s a step backwards, back to the time when talking about mental health was taboo. We should be raising more awareness and not be afraid to talk about such things. Talking keeps people alive.
If anything, it disrespects any and everyone you know that have died.
My grandparents aren't "unalive". They are dead. Buried, decomposing, and dead. When did "blunt" or "natural" become triggering.
Wait, we can’t say “kill” or “dead” on YT?
@@severianthefool7233no like you can’t say suicide you say self unalive absolutely stupid
@@severianthefool7233 Unalive refers to suicide. UA-cam algorithm doesn't like it and will bury a video, as do many other social media platforms.
Euphemisms for death are nothing new. See the entire Monty python parrot skit…
Where are my language nerds at? I'm a technical/creative writer by trade and I never clicked on a video so fast.
Reporting - English teacher here 👩🏫
Same, clicked excitedly as soon as I saw it, but it was mostly introductory stuff I already knew. Still fun to go over.
What does creative writing have to do with being a language nerd? This video is about etymology, linguistics, phonology, historical linguistics. Not creative writing or English class.
I have no formal linguistic training, but the English language fascinates me.
right here
My high school language arts honors teacher, Mr. Blair used to make us study prefix and word origins, and it really made understanding words i’m not familiar with very easy to understand or break down. Super thankful for him and he made me into a little word nerd
In Swedish there’s a great example of using words to avoid invoking the horror of something and that is for the wolf.
In Swedish the word for wolf is “varg”, but in the older days you wouldn’t say varg precisely for the aforementioned reason. People would instead call the wolf Gråben (Grayleg), Den Grå (The Gray one) or Tasse (an old word for wasteland or wilderness).
Joel lore
"Varg" was a euphemism for the real old Swedish word for wolf, which was "ulv" (cognate with wolf).
A similar thing happened in Hungarian, and we actually don't even know the original word. The currently used noun “farkas” is actually an adjective meaning “with tail” or “having a tail”.
It is thought to be a taboo, because it was a totemic animal, similarly to deer. Deer are called “szarvas”, which similarly means “with horns”.
Varg är ett gammalt ord för någon som brukar våld, och är därför själv ett "noaord". Björn har kallats för styggnacke i delar av landet för att undvika åkallans makt. Man har också undvikit att åkalla djur som förknippas med otur som skata, som kallats skjora tidigare men vad fågeln kallats innan det ska helt har förlorats till tidens tand om jag mins rätt.
I i grew up in ulvvik, the wolfs bay
whenever i’ve seen a linguist they all seem like people who are so passionate and knowledgable 😭❤ i love the energy
Yes!!! As someone who studied language in school and university, I am loving this representation of linguistics. Please bring more linguists on!!
If he starts speaking about pragmatics, syntax, semantics etc those so-called lovers of linguistics will run away very quickly
I'm just as fascinated by how words DON'T change. Apl is the Babylonian word for apple and has changed little in pronounciation over thousands of years.
I seem to recall that older uses of "apple" refer to fruits in general instead of specifically the modern apple fruit
Hey, if it works
@@Blackberry0Pie Erdapfelmoment. (Earthapple = Potato)
There is also the apple of the eye and the Reichsapfel (globus cruciger). So things that are round and shiny can also be called apple. Grenades have a similar background💣
@@DeutschlandDenDeutschen1848 Same with the French "pomme de terre"!
@@Blackberry0PieWhich is why people today think the biblical fruit is an apple. It is in fact just an unspecified fruit. The same way the tree is unspecified.
All the linguistics are going CRAZY rn, the minute we see people talking about linguistics, we are hooked in
*linguists :)
Edit: I want to clarify that I responded to this with love. Most people interested in linguistics are also avid language learners.
Ironic
Shoutout to all the linguists around the world ✨
“good question, very mindful” 😂😂😂💯
1:39 Interesting that "man" was generic and became gendered, but has started to become ungendered again in casual speech ("Man, I was hoping she would be the one!")
That is not the gender being generic.
That is object of dream, a fantasy. Characterised by the notion of a single perfect being to match with.
That could just as easily be a car
@@mortenfrosthansen84 I can't understand any of what you're saying. If you're focusing on the statement itself, you're missing the point. I was just giving one of 1000 examples of using the word.
I would argue that just like "dude" and "bro" are starting to be generic again, "man" (in this usage) already is.
@@stephenj9470
Ahh in that sense.
Guess what I thought, was that it the sentence in general. That it has to be used as an emphasis.
Because, then you can put any word there.
Bananas, that was close.
Rubber, I don't like mondays.
So it's more explaining, that you really mean it.
That is then an object, and has nothing to do with gender as it can be anything, with the same meaning.
If you then say... girl, my seatbelt is scratchy. Then it has a different ring to it
@@stephenj9470it's because in that example you gave the word "man" isn't used to refer to a person but as an interjection
@@amazinggrapes3045 Right, and I probably went a little to far in calling it "degendered." More that it used to be non gender, and nowadays it has a use (an interjection) that doesn't mean gender. Thought it seemed curious.
i was surprised to see so many other appreciators of linguistics and etymology here -- hello my people!
You’d love Words Unravelled, it’s an etymology YT channel and podcast. An English and an American etymologist word-nerd out once a week. FYI
“How very dare you”
I am 100% commandeering this phrase
me too i love that
Me too , and wondering if God Smack is a female relation who whops you on the head when you misbehave.
Is this a reference to Gigi Goode’s robot in Rupaul’s Drag Race? 😂
look up Catherine Tate, Derek at the men's health clinic. I'm pretty sure CT came up with it. Certainly the first time I ever heard it and I lived very close to CT, I'd often see her in Waitrose.
@@cori2356 No, it's Catherine Tate. Derek. Look it up it's sooo funny.
As a language lover, this was a real treat! 😊
Would love to see one on proverbs and their origins…
4realz
Absolutely fascinating. Crazy you guys consistently get people who are so personable and easy to understand.
I love listening to History of English Podcast. Last years' biggest "wow" for me was learning that a cyclonic Caribbean storm mentioned in one document during Columbus' lifetime was furrican. The host says the Spanish changed it to hurricane (or what it would become) in the same way Fernandez became Hernandez.
etymology and philology are the two most import reason i came to love languages and their studies. university really killed all of my passion. I'm really happy to see more people being interested and passionate about this topics
Oh, that´s so sad to hear. You must have had horrible teachers.
Another banger of an episode. You guys seriously get some great folks for these.
I think it's beautiful seeing a language evolve in your own lifetime, it proves that language is from and for the people, and reflects change and adaptability.
Yes, language is dynamic.
Love that approach. Language is alive. Never static.
@@tangerinetangerine4400 Which is why we would all benefit from the absence of prescriptivist grammar pedants.
Seeing Dog maybe return to it's 'cuter' roots with Doggo is funny.
Prescriptivist grammar is terrible but hyper speed fluid and increasingly corporate-influenced constant linguistic chaos reflects total chaos entropy more than it reflects any kind of composure or resilience. Language shifts are a feature of language but they have to happen together instead of breaking apart communities
finally, Tech Support in my field. I love lingustics, philology, etymology... I'm just a language nerd.
for a sec I thought philology was a typo, but after a google turns out it's not! a new word for me :D thanks for introducing me to it!
me too!!
Al praat jy net een taal. 'n 'nerd' is heeltemal iets anders in elk geval
I could listen to a few hours of this, so interesting, please bring this man back!
I hope you bring him back again! This episode was so fun!
When he explained the word "wer" i knew exactly it came from "vir", which is the most common word for "man" in classical Latin. Etymology is so freaking interesting, wanting or not, learning a new language should never be strained to learning the technicallities of the language itself, but its culture and history as well, not saying everybody should be forced to learn a languages history, it will by all means make you a better speaker and definetly motivate you more
"Vir" itself still lives in the English language through "virile"!
This also survived in some Norwegian dialects, as the prefix "ver-" meaning "in-law"; your "verbror" was your brother-in-law, or more literally "your man's brother".
@@TasteOfButterflies
And “virtue”.
I had five years of Latin in high school and in the first two years we also learned bout culture and history. I really loved it
Couldn't agree more
He mentions "doubt" having a silent "b" inserted by lexicographers, but there are plenty more examples of that in English. "Debt" was originally pronounced and spelled "dette" but the "b" was added to invoke the Latin "debitum." "Island" never had an "s" (it was more like "igland" originally), but lexicographers inserted it to recall the Latin "insula."
The problem? "Igland" didn't come from "insula" in the first place - it was Old English (which is to say, of Germanic origin). A completely bogus etymology was added to the word.
Those lexicographers have a lot to answer for...
German word for Island is Insel.
Fake or 'folk' etymologies for both words & idioms are such a hugely widespread thing, both historically & today - I don't think people even realise! And they seem to invade the internet like kudzu...
Ditto for incorrect idiom - I swear the warped versions are way more common online than the correct ones! 😂😭 "If you think that, then you've got another thing coming", "sneaky like a rouge", "slight of hand", "free reign", "wearing a hijab", "baited breath"... and the list just goes on & on!
@@herbertbloch4167 thanks, now I'm island-pilled
I was waiting for him to mention "island/insula."
23:25 In Polish (I don't know about other Slavic languages) pregnancy is "ciąża", which is related to "ciężar" meaning "heavy weight". It seems pretty appropriate, especially in the later stage.
I never realised that; in czech it's "těhotenství".
Hungarian too! We have "terhes." Means weighed down.
In persian we have two words "bārdāri" and "hāmelegi". Both kinda mean carrying or holding a load or something
@@mahatmaniggandhi2898 The "bâr" in "bârdâri" has the same root as the English verb "bear", which is also related to "birth".
8:05 when he was describing how "but" describes physical separation, I definitely thought he was talking about butt cheeks 😂
This is fascinating! Kindly bring him back for another hour 🙏🏽
Regarding gender neutral terms changing over the years: I've always been fascinated by the word, 'fellow'. In America at least, it refers to a group of men (hey fellas). But that always confused me, as it doesn't imply gender. You could call a group of women 'fellows', as in 'fellow people'. Maybe it has something to do with the notion that fellows in the context of a university always meant men, as men were the only ones there?
Idk. I've never thought of referring to any number of women as "fellas". Like if I were to walk into a group of 4 men and 1 woman, fellas would never be the word I use. But I think for me "guys" is much more gender-neutral (hey whatsup guys?), and that's probably what I would say. I get what you're saying about the "fellows" part though. But even then, I still see that more as in a congregation/religious aspect, as in "fellow worshippers". The implied gender aspect is just a societal agreement. It sort of just assumes that gender. That's just me though.
Interesting, because while I definitely do know of the gendered connotation to "fellas", I also feel like it's used almost equally often as gender-neutral, like "hey, guys" but Southern.
I'm American, and tbh I never hear anyone say fellow or fellas anymore
I actually only ever hear the use of fellows in a gender neutral, academic sense. “Fellas” seems so West Side Story!
Throwing it out there to add to the discussion - "My fellow Americans"
Please make a part 2!! My mind was blown like five times during this video
lmao what he’s doing at 7:40 is literally the sign for ‘milk’ in Auslan (Australian sign language)
And pretty similar for "milk" in ASL (american sign language) too!
And in Japanese Sign Language as well!
And also in German Sign Language (DGS)!
There's just something about the way he speaks about linguistics that makes me interested! I had no idea I was going to be so invested in this video until I was like "wow, that's really something!"
Etymology is what got me into Linguistics. I'm nearly finished my BA in it and it still holds a special place in my heart. It may not be the deepest subsection of Linguistics, but it's one heck of a gateway drug
There are few things I love more than learning about language, especially etymology. My favorite is the history of place names. The world we live on literally means "dirt," because it was all we knew and everything else was above in the sky, just like the gods, which is why we named planets after gods.
We definitely need more place-name content
in polish and many other slavic languages Ziemia means planet earth or dirt/ground
also in Italian we say Terra, wich means both dirt and Earth, aswell as land
@@patrickgheser6615same in hungarian "föld"
woah thats me 1:07
Hii :3
Twitter?!
Nice question dude
Dude! Hope you're doing well bro! 😂
Woah it is you
etymology is so cool, WIRED give me fifteen of these please
I would love an episode about specifically all the ways the Normans changed Saxon English (Old English) into modern English. Short version is a lot of the words we consider "fancy" are either Norman or French. For example: "room" is Saxon but "chamber" is Norman.
@@ericbrown1101 I would check out RobWords and videos on Middle English, French words became used to differentiate animal and meat, for example
“My apologies, I am entangled in a inconvenience” 😂
Etymology has so much to tell us about our past! Could watch a hundred of these vids 😍
In Russian the word "bear" consists of 2 words: "honey" and "knows". I always wondered why the most interesting part about the bear for my ancestors was its honey addiction and not like, I don't know, shredding everything in pieces...
Not 'knows' but 'eats' or rather 'eater', 'honey' was 'медоу' (medou), where "оu" из quite close to 'v' and the rest is 'едь' (yed - eater), not 'ведь' (ved - knower).
And yes, that is because it was also an eupheuism not to pronounce a 'real' name of an animal not to attract it. So we have direct link to English in that matter wich is rather funny and interesting.
@@AVlad-eg3dsfunnily enough, in Ukrainian it became vedmid' (ведмідь) after all, changing the original meaning to exactly "knower".
@@PUARockstar and in Hungarian there are tons of words for bear, the most formal one being "medve". so thanks for one of the many many loan words. (mackó, bocs, brummogó, dörmögi are all also very much in use. some of them refer to the latter one referring to the sound of sleeping bears)
@@PUARockstar Now I see how in Polish it's 'niedźwiedź' - the 'niedź-' part being similar to 'med' and then the obvious '-wiedź' = 'ved' = 'knows'.
Медведь (medved') is essentailly an euthemism for бер (ber) which is cognate of bear. In Russian, the original root remained in words like берлога (berloga) and бурый (buriy).
12:37 my guy cracked the whole Pokemon naming convention.
Sup, Sergio 😂
it's just type + animal like squirtle is squirt and turtle
I once heard a linguist pointing out the characteristic of a fully fledged language which elevates it above other means of communication that it is able to talk about itself. I really like that notion.
I know it’s etymology-focused but it’s so healing to hear a linguist on a popular platform addressing so many common confusions about language in a descriptive (non-judgmental/non-competitive) manner
I love that he uses every question to go off on a tangent about a bunch of etymologies
In Denmark we still say "knight" with a hard k, "knægt" or "gnaw" with a hard g "gnave". Also animals like hamsters, rabbits and rats are known as "gnavere"/"gnawers" in Danish, which I find amusing.
Just like Dutch! Knecht en knaag en knaagdieren
But we dropped the hard H in hvad, hvor, hval etc. In Icelandic and Faroese it's still pronounced with a k.
In German we say Knecht. But we also dropped the g in gnaw = nagen, gnavere = Nager/ Nagetier
For those interested in learning more about this kind of stuff, I HIGHLY recommend the PBS show "Other Words". The history of some words/languages are WILD.
+1 for Other Words!!!
YES a really great show and presenter!
I like otherwords, but sometimes they oversimplify things.
The moment I read your comment, the Other Words theme started playing in my head.
May I also recommend YT channel called RobWords
13:30 interestingly other cultures have different onomatopoeia, and knowing what things are "supposed" to sound can change your perception of the sound itself. For example, cats go "nyan" and dogs go "mung mung"
¡Guau, guau!
Ohh I’ve also heard of “ waoo waoo “ or “ wan wan “ for dogs and people usually do hear the specific sound in their language when listening to animal sounds really interesting indeed
So the nyan cat is basically just a meow cat.
@@rfvtgbzhn yup nyā is the sound cats make in Japanese and nyan is a cute way of saying cat so people usually say “ nyanko” for like kitty
@@rfvtgbzhn Miau cat.
In 9th grade my Spanish teacher was trying to explain to the class basically why adding an o to the end of a word, or assuming a similar sounding word means what you think it does in Spanish vs English, was a bad idea, and used the embarrassed/pregnant example. That has stuck with me for nearly 20 years where I occasionally wonder how those words ended up so similar. And today that mystery ended. Thanks!
Lexicology was one of my first classes in undergrad. I've been hooked on language ever since!
While studying a database query language, I was surprised to see that the operators "but" and "and" were considered synonyms in that language. Either could be used to produce identical results. Turns out that they both refer to operations that produce the intersection (as in Venn diagrams) of two datasets. It makes perfect sense to me now but I'm still surprised that I was ever surprised by it!
I liked this video a lot. Please invite this guy back. I want to learn more origins of words
Who knew word origins could be this captivating? Love to watch these types of videos!
Can you give this man his own show? I could watch this every day!
Unalived is not used because of social taboos, but because algorithms on social platforms silence, deemphasize, or completely censor content with certain flagged words in them, like suicide. So these words are used to bypass a restriction, but it's not based on collective social norms, it's based on imposed restrictions by a few socially influential entities.
....the restriction is the taboo.
totally not taboo.
@@nekrataaliWouldn’t “taboo” mean it’s widely “unaccepted”? Versus “Facebook doesn’t like it because of their non-scientific beliefs about it, meanwhile Reddit, Discord, etc and the general populace still regularly use those words in normal, everyday conversation”?
@@whisper4379 exactly. Taboos are understood to be collective. Suicide is a sensitive topic but not one that any defined slice of society has ever attempted to avoid naming. Even now the word isn't taboo by any living person, we just use the word "unalive" as a loophole to bypass algorithms that suppress content that uses it.
Long before its current social media presence, Deadpool used 'unalived' when he guest starred in a Spider-Man cartoon. He knew he couldn't talk about killing in a child-friendly show, so he used various coy euphemisms when suggesting how to deal with the story's villain.
Mono = One
Rail = Rail
Profile pic checks out.
And that concludes our intensive three-week course.
Mono... Doh!
@@paulahillier1390is there a chance the tracks could bend?
I call the big one Bitey
Re: pregnancy in Spanish being related to the word for rope. I think of the umbilical cord.
I studied linguistics in college, and I’m a teacher now, I’ve always been fascinated with languages and their origins. Loved the video
HIM UNDERSTANDING THE TWEET ABOUT DEMURE ENDED MEE
Sudying to become an Enlgish teacher in Sweden and we have a course called English Survey where linguistics is part of it and it is SOOO difficult to grasp! This made some of it a lot....maybe not easier but at least more interesting! Thank you!
The word "harvest" in reference to autumn unlocked a memory I forgot I had. We celebrated "harvest day" every year in primary school, people bringing in tinned food to be donated and being thankful for the food we have. Being grateful for something as simple and taken for granted in the first world as food is very good practice I still do in gratitude journaling. :)
I teach English as a second language in Japan. I wish this video had been published years ago... This is a way lot more fun than it should be.
I never gave language that much thought, but Gareth made it all so fascinating! I was enthralled the whole video and really enjoyed the bits of humor. 😄
❤❤❤ I am bursting with this video, i speak spanish, english, and swedish, and I just love how the languages intertwine and somehow resemble between them english/spanish swedish/spanish and english/swedish. What’s even more fascinating was that my boyfriend speaks spanish, english,l and german, and turns out soooo many words in german are just the same or too similar to swedish (yeah, i know they’re both germanic, but still so much fun), oh i love to share my emotion with all you nerds too watching this!! 😜
20:38 it's the same here in Tagalog/Filipino... We usually use the word 'mo' as second person singular but we can also use 'nyo/ninyo', which is second person plural, plus the "po" honorific when talking to a person much older than us. The sentence is "Just put your cup there"
'Ilagay mo na lang yung baso mo jan'
turns into
'Ilagay niyo na lang po yung baso niyo jan'
3:02 your pronunciation of the word „knight“ exactly sounds like the german „knecht“. If you now think about the fact that there was an „Edelknecht“, basically a „noble“ knecht, which was the word used for a squire before they were called squire (which is „knappe“ in german)….wow, it‘s Just very interesting how entangled everything is (or at least seems) 😁👍
Fr, French, Norse and German words are better at identifying old English better than current/new English itself.
english is a germanic language, after all.
I think "knappe" is related to the English "knave", which came to have a negative meaning (a knave is an amoral young man, like a thief). "Edel" was "aethel" in Old English, which you can see in historical names like Ethelred, a Saxon king, or even the female names Ethel, Adeline.
It’s still pronounced that way in Scots.
@@c.jishnu378 "Knight" isn't Old English, it's Middle English
Modern Englishman: "May I please have an orange?"
Old Frenchman: "no-renge lmao got em"
I thought I was the only weird person that thought it necessary to own a etymology dictionary. Great video!
ah yes a fellow nerd loner who has previously thought that despite owning a dictionary compiled by many scholars together and offered for sale on the open market for our educational benefit. been there man. or i am still that. haha.
Ah, but do you have a thesaurus?
Even my family thinks I'm weird.
When my parents got married, the first thing they bought together was the etymology dictionary. My father was so into etymology that at the age of 6, I barely knew how to read but I already knew that the Czech word "brouk" (beetle) was related to Latin "bruchus". Aaaaand before you ask: Yes, I´ve written a book on etymology... 😂
The important thing to remember about any vowel shift be it the Great Vowel Shift or the more modern Great Northern Vowel Shift is that when you shift a vowel the space in the mouth abhors a vacuum and so another sound seeks to fill that void, which is just as much a part of the shift as the initial vowel change.
The type of person that gets you enthusiastic of things they are enthusiastic about themselves. Awesome guy
I need a part 2. Please and thank you WIRED!
"If you look at the modern Romance languages, you don't find the word CAPUT meaning HEAD" ( 17:40) - unless you're looking at Romanian, where CAP (
exactly, same in Spanish and Portuguese (cabeza and cabeça)
More directly "capăt" which also means head or end
Caput sounds a lot like Swedish kaputt, which is slang for "broken".
in Italian too! "head" can be both "testa" or "capo"..the latter is a slightly fancier word that also means "boss"/"chief"
in Catalan, cap is also the word to mean head
So, ancient languages took the Pokémon approach to some animal names. Ancient Egyptian hears a cat say "meow" and so it's name is 'Miu' (meow). That's really cool!
SOFT PLAY CASUALLY BEING HERE IS WILD 😭 love them 💕 Recommend giving them a listen!
Interesting, you taught me about the old spanish meaning for "embarazado", nowadays people still use the expression "embarazoso" to refer to a complicated situation that produces negative emotions, and now it makes even more sense given that the old meaning was "entangled" and it's interesting that "embarazoso" coexist with the term "enrevesado" which means exactly the same and is used interchangeably, althought the former tends to refer more to situations that produce shame while the latter is more simple and just means "complex situation".
Also, I knew that Shakespeare invented a lot of words but yeah maybe it was not that many, however I still think it's impressive how much one person was able to influence so many throughout the centuries in such thing as language.
As a German this whole video is very interesting, as English is more or less a german language, but the part at 5:50 was striking me the most, because we not only have Ps and Fs as first letters, but sometimes there's Pf, like a middle point in etymological evolution
Grimm’s law repeated itself in high German.
*GermanIC language. But yeah, good point!
Germanic*
🗣️ Pferd
(I took German in college for a couple of years and don’t remember much, but I love being able to connect what I do remember)
@@ajp7968 Or Pfeffer!
Can we PLEASE get another episode of this BUT with more broad linguistic questions? I want to see questions about experiments and weird cases like Cage(was it?) and Genie!!!! Are we really born with a blueprint for language in our brains? I read about an experiment done on babies where they sucked their pacifiers at different rates when they heard their own language vs rubbish HOW DOES A 6 MONTH OLD BABY KNOW THAT WHEN IT CAN EVEN SPEAKKK
Because their parents are talking to them since birth and it's a sound they recognize. It's not that hard.
Reading is easier than writing. It's especially true when your tongue dexterity hasn't formed yet. Have you ever tried learning a second language?
@@Wendifur_Before, even.
Fascinating! Please bring Dr. Roberts back for more!
I thoroughly enjoyed this feature. I could listen and learn for hours to this professor! So awesome! Thanks, Wired! 😊
I first became consciously interested in linguistics when I decided that I wanted to write a conlang, and the more I look into it, the more I find it endlessly fascinating, seeing how today’s words evolved and continue to do so, and finding patterns like ‘p’ to ‘f’, ‘c’ to ‘h’, and the tendency of vowels to shift towards schwa (ə). My (limited) understanding is that the latter is similar to the former because ə requires almost no effort and just flows out for unstressed vowels when speaking quickly (for example, the ‘e’ in “vowel” is not typically pronounced as a full “eh” sound).
I studied theoretical linguistics and you´re actually spot on 🙂 It´s simply easier to go to the "unspecified" schwa sound. Happens in a lot of languages when speaking fast, only in English it´s consistent and "official". Bit of trivia: there isn´t much of that in Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian. They´re taught to, and proud to, pronounce vowels carefully, especially the long ones.
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Huh, I hadn’t come across that! I like how different cultures have different attitudes towards this phenomenon.