"A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet." I am a linguist (Master's degree) and I encountered this saying during my linguistic studies back at Uni. It nails down pretty much what makes a language a language: People. If we say it's a language and everyone can agree, then it is one. Otherwise, everything would be a dialect or a variety. And there ... it get's messy. Just look at Serbo-Croatian which is now officially three languages: Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. But like Swiss, Austrian and German German, it's not so much it's own language but rather a variety of a common tongue.
Being Swiss, I challenge any German not conceding us language status to a mutual intelligibility contest. If they are from sowewhat north of the Main and don't have previous exposure: No chance. Comparing Alemannic-Standard German to Serbian-Croatian does not even come close to an equivalency.
and then there are languages like Góralski (in South Poland) that are considered to be a dialect rather than their own language because of how small they are within their respective country and other factors
As someone that is not a linguist I would have said that it is impossible since language is a slow process of change interrupted by some jumps that never realy stops.
My idea of the age of a language would the ability of today's people to understand the old texts. While the Nibelungenlied from the 13th century can be partly understood by most Germans (albeit some words changed their meaning, like "hochgezîten", which was not "Hochzeit", but just "good times"), the mentioned Hildebrandslied from the 9th century poses quite a challenge for contemporary speakers. So my personal idea of the age of today's German would be somewhere around 900 years, halfway between Hildebrand and Siegfried.
I remember LangFocus, NativLang and Simon Roper talking about the same subject, and they were pretty much in the same direction. Especially if we consider that England might come from "Land of the Angles" - although there's no consensus about the origin, apparently. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's fair enough, but it's still pretty fuzzy - the amount of understanding is going to gradually drop off as the texts get older and older. The cutoff point is going to be subjective. Plus, relying on texts is tricky because they are not exact representations of language. Imagine reading Chaucer vs. listening to someone from his time speak - it's a lot more understandable when written, because the spoken language has changed a lot more than the written language. It's even worse for languages that are written in logographic scripts like Chinese. Plus, some languages aren't even written down, or haven't been written down until recently. So judging a language's age by how understandable it is not a bad idea, but keep in mind that it will always be approximate and not clearly defined.
I think that an important distinction to make here would also be between what Germans refer to as regional "dialects" and Hochdeutsch/Standard German. Most non-Germans think that when Germans refer to their dialects, they're referring to dialects derived from Standard German, but they aren't. They're referring to regional varieties of the pre-"Standard German" German, which are older than Standard German (though they are obviously also living languages that have changed since the introduction of Hochdeutsch). I think if we focused on Standard German, which was largely constructed by Martin Luther in the creation of the German Bible, then we see that modern Standard German is quite a bit younger than people think. That said, standardization is a slightly different process and if we look at the development of Standard English varieties we'd see how they are also rather young.
I was always interested in the Germanic languages, I speak Low German because I grew up in East Frisia, High German, English, and a bit Dutch, because the Netherlands is in biking distance to my home town and I find this video very interesting and entertaining! Greetings from the other side of the North Sea :)😊
Moin almost the same story over here :) I grew up in the province of Groningen (so near the German border) and ofcourse I speak a dialect which is pretty much the same as Low German (or should I say Platt). It is a kind of funny that we can understand eachother while people in Munich or Amsterdam have a single clue what we are talking about :)
I usually don't comment on your videos, even though I generally enjoy all of them. However, I just have to say that I especially enjoyed this one. A good overview of the history of the west Germanic languages, all in under 10 minutes - excellent!
After translating a document from French into English, I can appreciate how much of a Germanic language Engliah still is. Although there are many shared words between English and French, the underlying structures are markedly different and even many of these shared words are used differently. I almost felt like a bulldozer because I had to excavate the Romance foundation of the article and replace it with a Germanic one.
And remember that the name "French" derives from the "Franks" who spoke a Germanic language. As a result French has some gramatical features shared with the Germanic world but not languages like Spanish and Italian, and a fair number of words of Germanic origin. The two different silent h's (!!!) in French are in large part due to origins in different language families.
This is also a common mistake in popular accounts of evolutionary theory. Species are related via a common ancestor. But the current observable species are not precursor and successor species of each other. In crude popular accounts, however, it is sometimes suggested that Humans evolved from Chimpanzees. In reality there was a common ancestor, which was neither Chimpanzee nor Human.
Plus: You are always the same species as your parents, by definition. So were their parents. And their parents. And their parents… Once you're several hundred-thousand or even a million years separated however, the genetically-related individuals at either end of the timeline are completely different species. So when did _that_ happen? How could you even draw a line, since every individual is the same species as its parents and its children? Common mistake in pop-evolution indeed!
@@John_Weiss Which is why these days, evolutionary biologists talk about _clades_ - essentially, you never leave the clades your ancestors were in, but speciation creates new clades. So (simplifying here), homo sapiens is in the homo clade, which is in the great apes clade, which is in the monkey clade, which is in the mammals clade, which is in the chordates (approximately fish) clade, and so on.
@@KaiHenningsen Oooooh! So _that's_ where I'm getting that concept from! I also knew about the term, "clade," and how it's kinda-sorta replacing the old Linnean way of categorizing life-forms. Thanks for giving me the correct terminology to talk about these things!
@@KaiHenningsen Heh! You said "Fish". according to a popular British panel show (Yes, THAT one), there's no such thing as a fish in zoology. Apparently the various species that are called that don't really fit in one clade. (And that doesn't even include the weirder uses of the term, such as 'jellyfish' and 'crayfish'.)
The funny thing about using the first words of Beowulf as an OE example is that I've heard and seen it used in so many videos about Old English that it's getting to be understandable. haha
As someone with a language background, I can say this with confidence: _It is incorrect_ to think of Middle English" or "Middle German" as just fancy forms of Modern English and Modern German, respectively. It's more correct to say that "Old English" and "Old [Low] German" were dialects of the same language, a language for which we don't have a name because we've gone and named its dialects differently. Even early-Old Norse would've been a dialect of this unnamed language. There really is no way to draw a hard-line in a timescale and say, "Here! Before this line, we had Olde High Blahblarian, and after it, we had 'Middle High Blahblarian'." The best we can do is draw _two separate_ lines and say, "Before this point, we still had 'Old Standard Whateverish', but after this line 150 years later, we had fully-formed 'Middle Standard Whateverish'." Oh! One more thing: The "High" in, say, "Middle High German" and the "Low" in "Old Low German" _does not_ refer to _social status,_ but to _high and low altitude_ (respectively). So "Middle High German" was spoken near and in The Alps, while "Old Low German" was spoken in the flat, sea-level lands of the North Sea and Baltic coasts. "Middle Low German," incidentally, was so different from "Middle High German" that it's practically a different language, with low mutual-intelligibility between the two. - Consider this: At the same time that "Old English" and "Old German" were being spoken, "Old French," "Old Italian," "Old Spanish," "Old Portuguese," and "Old Romanian" were really more like regional dialects of late Vulgate Latin, and would still have all been fairly mutually-intelligible. [Well, except maybe the dialect in Romania, which has always been the strange cousin of the Latin family. 😆] - Here's another way of thinking about it: Scouse, Geordi, Scots, are all _spatially-separated_ dialects of English. Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern [RP] English are all _temporally-separated "dialects"_ of English.
@@witerabid I am a physicist by education, so that should explain why I managed to have that idea. [ Before grad-school, I double majored in Germanistik and Physics, which is why I have any linguistics knowledge.]
"Oh! One more thing: The "High" in, say, "Middle High German" and the "Low" in "Old Low German" does not refer to social status, but to high and low altitude (respectively)." That's why I refuse to use "Hochdeutsch" in the sense of Standard German. The cultural imperialism that implies brushes me the wrong way. I'm a dialect speaker; can you tell? ;-) I find it quite sad what that imperialism does to the German dialect landscape.
@HotelPapa100 OOOH! Welche Dialekt? I spent a semester studying an der Uni Mainz, in Fachbereich Germanistik. [When you major in a language in US universities, you sometimes can spend a semester or a year at a university in a country where that language is spoken.] I was there in 1989, September-January. The summer afterward, I was still speaking fluent German … „mit einer Määäääänzrischen Aussprache“. 😆 My husband, BTW, is half-Austrian. His mother came from Pinzgau, in Land Salzburg. He never became fluent in German, but likes to say that he "speaks German like a demented 4-year-old … with a Pinzgau accent."
@@John_Weiss Swiss German, north western variety, which is close to the Alemannic of south western Germany. Before populations became so mobile, you basically could pinpoint the village a person came from by their language. There's a website (a linguistics project) called "chuchichäschtli-orakel", which asks you about two dozen questions about your pronunciation, then pinpoints your location. Now I (was) moved around quite a bit in my formative years, but when I fed it the data of my older sister, it placed her right in a village where we lived when she was of kindergarten age. (Chuchichäschtli, BTW, is a word the Swiss tease the Germans with, because it is full of the throaty "ach-laute" the Germans find offensive in the Swiss dialect. (Swiss German does not have the softer "ich" ch.) It also is one of the signature Swiss -li diminiutives.) (if this posts multiple times: YT keeps throwing errors when I edit.)
Just a little personal history. I grew up in Paddington, London in the fifties. As a child I could recognise, various London accents. My local West London accent from that time seems to me to have practically died out. (My father's family spoke practically only cockney rhyming slang despite being from West London.) Once I started work, I had to speak entirely differently, partially because most of my colleagues had a entirely different background. I have now lived over 30 years in Germany, and even I notice that in England, I already speak an old fashioned English. Languages change continually. There is no start or end.
My parents' generation still prefers low german in informal conversation and I used to be able to understand it with little difficulty. Nevertheless I always found Dutch on TV entirely incomprehensible. Only lately I found out, that Dutch is actually in the "franconian" branch whereas low german is "saxon". Dutch Low Saxon exists and that is the language spoken just across the border. This is what mutual intellegibility with low german speakers is based on, not dutch. I have about A2/B1 proficiency in French and learned English, Latin and Russian in school. I can read and understand french wikipedia articles a little bit better than dutch ones.
My culture and heritage are complex and have many roots none of which I would want to miss. If I had a reason to speak low german I would. Alas, I have not and I'd rather invest that time to have a go at sign language, turkish, spanish, arab or chinese.
@@zam1am It makes me wonder how long it would actually take to start speaking Low German instead of High German because everyone around you speaks Low German. I know it's not too uncommon for people to slowly pick up a dialect over time and I'm wondering if the same is true for Low German.
I've kept saying the same thing about American English vs British English. The two diverged after America was settled, but neither is quite the same language as was spoken in England before the split.
You didn't mention the great vowel shift that made Scots unintelligible, and made meat rhyme with meet instead of sweat. Another example of a VERY fast linguistic shift is Aussie. They went from 54 dialects and languages, to one accent in about 2 generations. Amazingly fast.
But the original migrants to Australia came from every corner of the British Isles, so native born Australian children had to settle of hybrid of all these accents. Then add the gold rush of the 1850s where the population more than doubled with lots more accents arriving including people from every country in Europe and even some Americans. So its not surprising that children born in towns and cities with many different accents in the adult population came up with their own accent which was essentially a combination of them all.
Meat once rhymed with sweat? This makes me realize that the German word "Mett" (for a type of minced pork) is probably related to the word "meat". Should've noticed this earlier.
@@JakobFischer60 One of the Old English words for Cow was...Cu, pronounced "coo". So it might be reasonable to assume the Scots retained the "original" pronounciation?
We still got 'shippern' as a word for traveling by boat or ship. Sometimes some words don't have the consonant shift. But those are exeptions afterall.
I think that's mostly a Low German word that got reabsorbed. Initially, it was probably used somewhat ironically and over time slipped into regular use like "nichtsdestotrotz" or "googlen".
For those who don’t know: the terms “High German” and “Low German” refer to altitude. Low German comes from the coastal plain, High German from the Alps. It’s not a class marker or value judgment.
Not at all. Low German is often connected to the rural people of lower social state than the more posh High German speaking people of higher social status.
@@SD_Alias Don't confuse the German word "Hochdeutsch" used as "Standarddeutsch" with the "High German" languages. Even Swabian and all the other allemanic dialects are considered High German. Matthew is correct here.
@@magnaretonsor Ok, did not know. Our German teacher in school teached us the wrong explanation then… It was the time in the 70ies and early 80ies when it was forbidden to speak low German in school and when low german was connected with "stupid uneducated farmers"...
@@SD_Alias Ganz falsch ist das natürlich nicht. Auch heute noch werden Dialekte mit einem "niedrigeren" sozialen Status verbunden. Das ist allerdings ganz unabhängig von der Region, in der man lebt. Ich selbst bin mit schwäbischem Dialekt aufgewachsen und auch mir hat man versucht, den Dialekt abzutrainieren. Das Problem ist, dass mit "Hochdeutsch" umgangssprachlich das Standarddeutsch gemeint ist. Linguistisch meint man aber die hochdeutschen Dialekte im südlicheren Teil des deutschen Sprachgebiets, die sich nochmal in mittel- und oberdeutsche Dialekte unterteilen lassen.
Thank you for this video! As a German, this is actually a trope that I encounter surprisingly often - other people (Germans) saying that obviously, German is "the older language" and English "split off and changed" while German stayed more or less the same. I'm no linguist either, but that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever even to me. Languages keep evolving all the time, and we can see how vastly different German looked just two centuries ago.
Here's my guess (I studied one intensive year of German in my teens, in school in England, and Old English at the university). Linguistics as a science really began in German (late 18th and early 19th centuries). Linguists such as the brothers Grimm set the standard, you might say. Grimm's Law is the one of the consonantal shift that distinguished the Germanic language family from other branches of Indo-European such as Latin and Greek. And then Werner's Law shows the further consonantal shift that set apart Old English from the West Germanic languages (including the ancestor of modern German). That was how it was taught in the 1950s, as least in my school and university (Oxford). So what we absorbed was that the ancestor of English split off from the ancestor of German, or so it seemed. It was a junior branch. But of course if you think of it in terms of a river dividing into two channels, with one having a specific change in water chemistry due to a difference in the surrounding land, but both in time undergoing further, separate changes, you can see that neither is older or younger; they are both branches of the upstream river.
Well, there definitely are things that show a great connection and relation (for example that Saxons are really good at saying "ocean" and other words that evolved mainly from the Angl-Saxon influences) but a relation is just that. Even tho Slavic languages are very close and you can understand some things in Polish even tho you speak Russian, you wouldn't say all Slavic languages are the same - the same counts for Germanic languages.
I feel like it is just a cheap way of asserting some sort of ownership or seniority over English, which is something I don't think could happen the other way around, we simply don't feel the need... There's also that ill conceived conservatism at play, the idea that language needs to be kept 'clean' and 'preserved' from foreign influence, which I think is a total load of bollocks. I don't think English is anywhere near dirty enough for my liking, whose dictionary shall we steal next, let's keep this party going :)
One thing Ive noticed as someone who is learning German and likes to compare languages, is that German changed grammatically slower than English, maintaining many grammatical ideas from older forms of German that English did from their older forms, such as verb endings, cases, some moods, etc. Perhaps this was the reason that people feel like German is older than English, even though that isnt the case. This is also why Old English is easier to learn as a German native speaker than as a native English speaker
I think most (at least European) languages changed slower than English - I think English is pretty unique in having gotten rid of so many endings/cases/moods and so forth.
So, German _feels_ older? It's really interesting to hear/read this from a native English speaker learning German because I only know the opposite perspective and to me it felt the same way. 😅 English seemed like a more modern language but I always thought that was mostly because it was new to me. 🤔 Apparently it goes deeper than that.
@@witerabid actually funny enough, when I first started learning German, thinking of how I would speak english in a very old fashioned way and then directly translating that really helped me wrap my head around the grammar and especially the usage of some words and the more flexible verb positions. Though some grammatical ideas like the adjective and verb conjugations and inflections and cases, which no longer really exist in English other than some artifacts (e.g. the -s at the end of verbs for 2nd person pronouns which might be related to the -t conjugations for German verbs for 2nd person pronouns similar to the water and Wasser comparison, and the difference between I and me being artifacts of cases in English), took alot longer to grasp
I think the reason is simply the way languages are categorised. Both German and English belong to the "IndoGERMANIC language family", and both belong to the subcategory of the Westgermanic languages. So considering that English is categorized as a Germanic language, it is kind of logical to think that German came first. Plus, anyone who knows British history also knows that English itself was influenced by both the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons...emphasis on "Saxons", which hints to its German origin.
I'd point out here that in English, the name of the language family is "Indo-European". It includes a very large number of languages that are neither Indian nor Germanic, including all of the Slavic, Celtic and Romance languages.
Can I be pedantic about one of the things you stated? If I'm not mistaken, the archaeology suggests that there's no such thing as a physical Anglo-Saxon migration. In a physical migration, you'd expect there to be a large number of burials with skeletons of Germanic origin, separation between those and the burials of original English inhabitants and a slow integration between the two over time. That's what you see with the Norman invasion, but it's not what is generally found in the beginning of Anglo-Saxon times... it looks more like the English, possibly because of trade relations with the continent, adopted Anglo-Saxon habits. In graves, grave goods and architecture, there's a slow shift from the Roman styles and customs starting about a century before the Romans left, and going on for centuries into the dark ages. In a sense, there is a migration, yes. But it's more of a migration of culture, habits and ideas rather than of loads and loads of actual people, which fits quite nicely with the shift you described :)
The crazy thing about that Beowulf-text you showed is, that it sounds almost German in parts. The old letters are a hindrance though, but the thing is - we Germans can understand that text as little as English speakers :D
Since German does retain some feature that English had lost after that time, learning Old English tends to be easier for German people (particularly when they also know decent Modern English) than for native English Speakers. Of course, saying that German is older than English doesn't really make sense, but the truth behind it is that German has not changed as much as English has for several historic reasons, which makes it look older in some ways.
You actually can notice the language change during one generation when you speak to older people who grew up with your language, but then moved to another country forty or fifty years ago and "froze" their native language in its original state.
That is an interesting point, but is it really so simple? This only works because you assume that people adapt to the language spoken around them throughout their lifes, which is fair, but it means probably nobody really "freezes" their native language in its original state. There are two ways how this might go, depending on whether the person continues using their native language. If they do then they'll most likely adapt to changes happening in the dialect of their new community. This could actually make their language diverge from their native language faster than it normally would have, if that community speaks a different dialect. Or they don't continue to use their native language. But if you don't speak your language for 50 years, it won't stay frozen, it will degrade.
@@renerpho I seem to recall hearing that English changed faster in England than in the colonies. If that's true or not, it's definitely true that there are more different dialects in England - for the same reason that Africans have a far larger genetic diversity than the rest of us. (For example, the physically largest and smallest human groups both live in Africa - actually, they're neighbors.)
@@KaiHenningsen For the community as a whole, maybe, but I'm not sure it is true on the individual level. If someone moved to a colony, where their community consists of speakers of different dialects of their language, what is the "common dialect" they converge on? I think that, on average, this will be quite far from the dialect of any individual, and I would argue it will be farther than what little change happens to any individual's dialect over the course of their lifetime. So, in the end you'd have a new, common dialect in the colony that is about equally distant from any of the dialects in England (on average), and the colonist's dialects would be under more "pressure to adapt" then they would have been in England. This is probably no longer true in recent times, I guess, where many local dialects are under strong pressure, and at risk of dying out. More and more people switch to the English they hear on the radio/TV/internet, or that they speak at work.
I agree. In the 80's I was in Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, where a lot of Europeans live. In a town called Teutonia live nearly only people with German ancestors. Their grandparents or grand grandparents moved from Germany( Hunsrueck) to there. Most of the older people didn't even spoke Portuguese, only German. I barely could understand their German , also due to the fact that the Hunsrueck dialect is hard to understand. They said that they always spoke like that, because there was no influence in German that could change their way of speaking
This channel is very underrated, he should go more mainstream , All this Instagram chick and living in Berlin for one month try to explain how and what is German and German , Keep up the good work mate , your long term fan .
Every time someone mentions Chomsky I remember Nim Chimpsky and Herbert Terrace. It took a while to Terrace give credit to Chomsky and acknowledge that apes (at least until the 1980's) were unable to acquire language and make their own subset of new words, like humans do. In this specific case, B. F. Skinner tried to make apes vocalize (failing miserably while torturing the animals) and then other researchers tried to achieve communication by teaching American Sign Language to them. No subject from any research was able to make intelligible sentences following a strict structure with subbject-verb-object. Not even Koko the gorilla (the most famous case.)
There’s an argument Old English was never the popular tongue, but an elite language only (diglossia). That’s why when the Anglo-Saxon elite was rubbed out by the Normans, the English that reappeared some time later (Middle English) was radically different - it was derived from the popular tongue that had been there the whole time and reflected a pre-English and even pre-Celtic substrate that rejected inflection and grammatical gender.
I have heard something like that, although a little different, and I don't know how good the scholarship is. But the notion is that, when Danes started moving in to England during the 800s, you'd have native English speakers living next to that newcomer Olaf, and they'd inevitably have to communicate with him. It became necessary to dumb down English to communicate with Olaf -- no need to teach him all those extra cases and inflections, just strip that stuff out -- so in not too many generations, it became common for the common man to speak the stripped-down version of English. But those educated types who had to write the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, they took their grammar seriously, and so what was written down was different from what was spoken on the street.
@@kingbeauregard I doubt that. In the 800s both Old German, Old English and Old Norse were so similar that it shouldn't have been much of a trouble to understand it for Olaf anyway. It's more true about the Scandinavian languages vs German in the 1300s, though. The many German loan words and the Germans' unability/unwillingness to speak grammatically correct in the Scandinavian languages supposedly destroyed most of the grammar in Old Swedish etc.
@@francisdec1615 Having to master the inflections would have been a lot of work, though. And completely unhelpful work, since gender contributes nothing to understanding, and the Danish preference for prepositions drifted into Old English.
Andrew, that was interesting, thank you! I speak Lower Bavarian dialect, but imported something from the area around Munich, where the -ng- sound is often pronounced like a simple -n-, and my mother and family often critisise me for that. And please excuse that my spellchecker is set to American English.
@@konradmichels1362 Haven't ever heard of that either. Not even from some of my pupils at my school in Oberbayern who speak a crude dialect . No such thing in Swabia where I live either.
The table showing the effects of the vowel shift has been really insightful. It shows the relation between the languages and how they drifted apart. While I was aware that shifts in the pronunciation of languages do happen, I had not yet seen the connection to other languages that derived from the common ancestor. Thanks for clearing that up.
It's like saying people evolved from monkeys...just shows zero understanding of evolution...exact same problem...in fact these are very much the same class of questions asked in evolutionary biology...
I totally agree with you that the human does not evolved from primates but both evolved from another common ancestor. But I think it is not complete unrealistic that this ancestor was some type of monkey.
I like to say, "Humans didn't evolve from Apes - because humans _ARE Apes."_ Which, of course, is true, but really freaks out and pisses off the ones with zero understanding of biology. 😁
That very video you mentioned was recommended to me a few days ago. I didn't get far in, but the amount of half-truths and "eh" takes on topics like the fall of the roman empire is staggering. His whole approach to the topic is, like you said, rather strange. I expected a good essay exploring German history and various facettes of German culture that don't get noticed a lot. Instead he talks about... the diaspora? I just had expected something different, and combined with his ... odd takes I clicked off after a time
Nice video :) there's this linguist on Danny Bate, and he always shares fun linguistic stuff there. Recently he analysed a sentence, that is recognised as one of the oldest written records of "Italian" in contrast to "Latin", but of course that's just how linguists define that. Still very interesting
Cool! That Diagram of the Indo-Germanic languages makes sense, even on a perceptual level. Frisian and Dutch always sounded/felt to me like having a lot of similarities to English. That diagram tells the same story. And ... perfect choice of the Hildebrandslied.
I argue that Frisian is quite different from Dutch and German. Frisian is perhaps the closest relative to English, and enjoys in the Netherlands a kind of minority status, whereas Dutch and (in particular Low-) German have many common forms in grammar and vocabulary. The heaviest consonant shifts happened in the Upper-German (South) dialects, as shown in this video (which I enjoyed very much, also because of the slang of the speaker)
Interestingly, the Dutch language is a mix of "flat german, french and englisch". I love listening to Dutch. Being from the south of Germany, I do not understand it very well....but it sounds so cool.
7:29 Ehm I'm assuming you spoke English for all 3 languages because that is not the pronunciation of ship in Dutch. The Dutch word schip uses the sch sounds which is different from the English sch. (I'm not a linguist so I don't have any better words to describe it but it seems the google translate pronunciation in dutch for schip is quite accurate.)
I would argue that a strong French influence is decisive for the English language. That happened after 1066. German evolved as a distinctive language around 900, about 2 generations after Charlemagne, when the treaties of Straßburg were signed. That is a political approach to things rather than a linguistic one.
The influence of Norman French is not quite as profound as people are often led to believe. It basically marked the transition from Old English to Middle English, but the most important development then wasn't the addition of French words (that was significant, but didn't really change the language itself) but the fragmentation of English into a number of very distinct dialects.
@@rewboss they english neede the normanns to develop local dialects? We not-native speakers think, in england not the regions but the social classes have their dialects.
@@rewbossthat's quite a bit of an awkward statement to make while having maybe one third of your comments response vocabulary coming from "French"... If you take out all the "English" words from your response one might still have a vague idea/guess of what you are talking about but if you take out instead all the "French" words then it becomes even more vague. I guess it also depends on subject.
I mean you could argue that "England" the way we know it only started after the Danelaw and William while Germany and France (as nations/cultural spheres) already started with Charlemagne. Or that High Medieval German is more intelligible than High Medieval English to native speakers of their respective languages. But it's of course all a little bit arbitrary.
I studied English and had to take courses in Middle English and Early Modern English. The written texts seemed to have a lot more similarities to German than to modern English. where vocabulary and word order are concerned.I grew up bilingual German/English (RP).
in history class we start german history around 500 CE. It is a useful date cause around that time after the fall of the western roman empire the center of the poitical world shifted from the roman empire to the francs.
"England" as a concept can be thought of as starting then, but the English _language_ as a concept predates it. The various kingdoms recognised that they shared a common language, albeit with regional variations. There's no such thing as "Medieval High English": during that period, the language was what's now mostly referred to as "Old English", though if we'd better records of the spoken language while Norman French and Latin were the dominant written languages in England, we'd probably be able to push back the the start date of what's called "Middle English" further back. Aside: the "High" in "High German" refers to it being the language of upland Germans in the South, not to it having any prestige: that prestige came later, and is a complicated story. Double aside: you might find the "History of English" podcast of interest.
@@talideon I'm just saying that English speakers would most likely struggle way harder reading any English without the Norman French components than German speakers with Middle High German.
@@Alias_Anybody it's pretty fast theres also old norse and celtic/brythonic before anglo saxon which is a strate/stratum also for more evolved one vs extinct archaic hittite or living lithuanian is french start from gaul frank and then the romance lang rise and it goes until now theres a nativlang vid about the historic sound changes edit: alright for german sound changes theres a comment in polymathy about retracted s in german historic changes development, the vid is about latin retracted s, also mentioned the different r, etc
Well, one could argue that English was not English before 1066 because the Normanic (French) influence shaped the English very much and is, away from the permanent evolution, one of the reasons why English is quite different from German nowadays.
absolutely, the norman invasion would be a reasonable "starting point" for the english language too. but either way, absolutely any point we define will be somewhat arbitrary
Indeed English is even considered by some as a creole language. To me English has we know it now dates back to the late 14th century when French started to recede in England to leave place to a creole language. So saying that German is older in that sense is correct.
@@jurgnobs8178 It really, really isnt. English had long been established as a language before the invasion and the country unified under one king. Norman French added to the vocab but virtually nothing (arguably zero, actually) to the grammar, which remained resolutely Germanic.
Maybe you could try to let German Wikipedia articles on that topic translate in your browser. Many of the information is probably also available in English articles. Merging Wikipedia articles from different languages to more extensive information would be a nice job for artificial intelligence.
I strongly promote taking care of dialects and languages spoken by small communities. They're allowing us to get a glimpse of the evolution of languages.
Check out Simon Roper's channel, he does some nice work on it (mostly focused on the evolution of English, but also going into other Germanic languages). Here is a fun example: ua-cam.com/video/3lXv3Tt4x20/v-deo.html (you can switch on subtitles to understand the earlier dialects). For Latin, my favourite channel is polýMATHY. It's so nice hearing someone try to speak classical, rather than ecclesiastical, Latin. The connection to the Romance languages is so much clearer.
i was surprised to see the video's title and you affirmatively answered my doubts about in a very wonderful way :) when you said "schlaf", i heard your english origin. but when you said "dorn", you sounded a bit like where i am from: northern germany, and i had to grin :) i think you said "doahn" instead of "dorrn" which is just.. aaw.. so lovely northernly pronounced :')
Fascinatingly languages are a lot like biological species. The question of "when does a new species start" is also a matter of endless debate among biologists. It's a gradual process of adapting and specialising. "They slowly evolve", you can say the exact thing about biological evolution as well as languages. When did English begin influencing other languages much more than other languages are influencing English? (No doubt it has to do with certain worldwide activities of both British and Americans in recent centuries ...)
English today contains some 10.000 words from French and most of the rest is Germanic so English of today is certainly not older. And then there is that only the English get upset if something is not the "oldest" in England. For example the British Parliament is the oldest (then insert the silly word - sitting) because apparently the Icelandic Althing, dating to 930 and the Faroese Løgting, dating to a similar period, did not sit all the time. Next one could of course ask if perhaps there were people in England before in the rest of Europe, and I don't think so.
@@gunjfur8633 , First of absolutely nothing but the British have this rather inbuilt habit of claiming they are "the first" and "the oldest" and rather often when it's not true at all. But seriously how could a language containing lots of words from other languages be older than the languages those words came from. There is simply no way. Humanity and language did not start in Britain but came to Britain from Continental Europe, from the south and from the east. It's tough and for the Brit who "found" the "missing link" in England it was too hard so he created one out of chicken bones and what not. The "fraud of the century" and in Britain it was just accepted like - "but of course it has to be English and found here.". Start listening to your countrymen with more criticism. And don't feel offended there is a lot to laugh at also in Britain.
I disagree that Shakespeare is perfectly clear. But it sure made a lot more sense to me after I took German in high school. Especially prepositions in a format that still exists in modern German. I went on to get a linguistics degree. :) Great job on this video. I really enjoy your channel.
German native speaker of a Franconian dialect here. I want to point out that I understand Anglo-Saxon English better then a speaker of modern English does. well apparently. there is a video on youtube which i can't seem to find right now, where a linguist speaks Anglo-Saxon and a few modern speakers try to figure out what he said. all of them where clueless while I could make out the general topic of a phrase or even some specifics. this leads me to believe that at least my dialect is more conservative then modern English .
Dutch schip is not pronounced "ship" - it has some form of chi sound in it and does not have a "sh" sound at all! I have the feeling I've noticed you pronouncing Dutch words as if they were German ones in your videos before. Just a minor criticism but nevertheless the differences in pronunciation between Dutch and German are something you may wish to address if you're going to refer to Dutch words at all regularly.
Hij reed een scheve schaats in Scheveningen... Fully correct, he has no idea how Dutch sounds, that it is a totally different language from German and has it's own development. And it is not the first time he does this. Sad... Because in other aspects he seems serious and correct.
4:03 Are these Germanic letters which have been written in the text? They are still used in Iceland. 4:59 The Hildebrand-Lied has in my view enough recognizeable words so that I could learn the language by reading more and more texts (but with a lot of grammar mistakes). A lot of words seem still to start with the same letter or a letter similiar to it (p,b) to recognize the word in Althochdeutsch (e. g. fatar, Ih and Ik), the word her was confusing knowing English but with German pronounciation it becomes "er". iro seems to be some form of "ihre" like "Ihres" in todays German. "enti" = "and" = "und" etc. Still a dead language today, so I do not put more effort in it...
The letters were used in Old English, but under pressure from the Latin languages they disappeared (þ became th, etc). The final blow was the printing press, because the old letters were not available when that technology was imported. There were some consonants that aren't in modern Icelandic; gh and w had their own letters for example.
To me it feels like Sowell only mixed up "german" and "germanic", something that happens quite often to native english speakers. This may not realy happen, if you are german since we have different words for it.
This should not happen to English speakers as there are two seperate words in English just like in German as mentioned / seen above in your first part of you comment.
I find it hilarious that this man has take a sentence from a book (not an essay as he states) about American culture and makes an entire video about language. Sowell has written a trilogy, Conquests/Migrations/Race And Cultures, that exhaustively documents the history of global cultures. Sowell has literally THOUSANDS of published pages on subjects from economics to education to photography... and this erudite & smarmy man seems intent on denigrating him because he's 'technically' wrong about German being an older language than English. My guess is Sowell, whom is an intellectual giant towering over this person, wrote a title that insulted him. Sowell would dub this guy 'Anointed'.
Kudos for having watched this video. I ran accidentally in it and after some eight minutes I was so fed up, I couldn't focus any longer. The clip - intentionally or by accident - turned out as a honey pot for right-wing extremists, stating a lot of crap about Germany and its history. And thanks for the easily understandable introduction of linguistics.
I too watched that video recently (the algorithm seems to work), and it flattered my oppressed German pride, but as soon as I watched a few other videos of this channel I recognized that there is an agenda behind all of them. I'm not quite sure which one, but I felt repelled and excluded it off from further suggestions.
Same here... That video contains all kinds of vague and oversimplified statements. So much that i had to turn it off. The hallmarks of unsubstantiated populist drivel. It just goes against my German self to listen to shit like that. And the comments almost made me hurl.
Rewboss' short summary sounded like it was exactly that. "German history is way more than the 2nd WW" - I might be priviliged of having had great history teachers, but that onr is kind of obvious and when that statement makes you feel understood, you probably have an issue ("wounded national pride" is a great way to put it) and easily dragged into whatever glorious / supreme Image the dude paints.
Thomas Sowell is black, raised in Harlem (the one in USA) and a Harvard professor of economics. Hardly a right wing extremist. His key message is that culture can sometimes affect individual outcomes more than external discrimination.
I took a class when I was learning Advanced to Proficient C2 and my teacher, not a Foreigner Course teacher, but a English to native English speakers teacher, she showed us the history of the English Language, and the material showed very consistently that German as we have contemporaneously with the earliest documents in what could be called Proto-English and that denotes a point in which English derived from that. However German did had a long time of being similar to its roots. And while "semantically" you seem right, in practice, what Sowell says is more accurate.
The German language to me seems to have changed very little since the middle ages grammatically, but a lot phonetically. Mediæval English texts are difficult to understand today because the syntax is unfamiliar. Mediæval German texts, on the other hand, are hard to read because the spellings are all different. 9:40 is called a scholar's cradle (see Lindybeige).
That is not entirely true. First, all texts from older German variants we have today are written(!) examples of regional variants. This sounds obvious and unproblematic until you realise that dialects and variants were much more volatile when there was no standardised (written) language. But even disregarding that, it is not only the spelling that changed; even Middle High German, which is still relatively easy to relate to, has a plethora of lexemes, phonemes and diphthongs modern German doesn't recognise anymore -- not to mention that the pronunciation was fundamentally different, quantitatively and qualitatively. There *were* grammatical changes, too: have a look at partitive genitive, for example. Or negations. Or counting words. Or articles. Middle High German doesn't sound *at all* like modern German.
@@mkb_de I've never read anything by Wallenstein, but considering his unusual, ambitious, and decidedly sinister character, I'm not at all surprised that literary endeavours didn't come easy to him. He's not exactly a gentleman of the time. Now, Madame Palatine, on the other hand, was born a princess of the Wittelsbacher; it doesn't get any more high-bred than that in Europe. But her personality was such, that she prided herself on not conforming to the rules, conventions, and expectations directed at someone of her station. Ironically, letters also might, not be the best medium for analysis in comparison to modern German, because it had yet to be standardised. Either way, Wallenstein sits firmly in the Frühneuhochdeutsch phase of German (and Madame Palatine close to it) -- which is still not quite modern High German. Comparing the former to the latter as an 'old-fashioned precursor' doesn't do it justice. There *still* are several grammatical changes occurring at the time.
French and German in their older versions got issued their official birth certificates on February 14th 842 in the so called Oaths of Strasbourg, which doesn't neccesarily makes them twins but siblings growing up with the same parents...
With regards to the Great Consonant Shift, how do you think the Latin "quando" morphed into "when"? [In which order did the following happen - the dropping of the "o", the change in the main vowel sound, or the shift in the initial consonant sound from /k/ to /x/ to /hw/ to /w/?] As a Scot, I aspirate the "wh" in "what" - which is a little bit "old-fashioned".
The split happened before latin. The both come from the proto indo european something like kwam. In proto german the k became an aspriated consonant. And in latin they added the particle do
I speak german as a native and I'm fluid in english. This combination helps to understand old texts. Also knowing about the vowel shift. Beowulf is to far into the past for me to read easily. Maybe I should dive into this language. To unlock even more beautiful old texts. 🤗
Old English is a beautiful language, but to learn it means as much study and dedication as learning any modern European language. It had three genders of nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter), with four cases, two types of verbs (strong and weak) with more conjugations, a number of irregular verbs, and the myriad endings you find in modern German or Latin. If you know German, that gives you a head start over a speaker of modern English! But it still means a lot of memorizing of noun and pronoun forms, verbs, and so on. If you want to get an idea of it without devoting the time to actually learning it (hard to do if one has a job and a life to live!), there are sites on the Web where you can access some texts in bilingual editions (Old English with modern English translation). For example, try Aelfric's homilies in the Skeat edition, where you can find the Old English line by line with translation immediately below. And you can see how many words are so close that you can figure out quite a bit. First, access a site online that teaches basic OE grammar--and particularly the alphabet and spelling/pronunciation rules--and get used to the runic letters that OE had in common with North Germanic languages (Old Norse and descendants).And then dive in! Try Aelfric's Life of St. Edmund--it's actually quite interesting, with a miraculous wulf (wolf), "graedig and hungrig" ( greedy and hungry--the final "g" is like a consonantal "y"), It's a sermon written to appeal to a mixed congregation, many or most of whom were illiterate peasants, so the style is fairly straightforward, just the colloquial language of the time, not a high-flown literary style. It does use a prose version of the alliterative poetry style--possibly to make it easier for the congregation to remember. From the first words: Sum swithe gelaerned munuc com suthan ofer sae ... A certain very learned monk came from the south over the sea ... you can begin to recognize that this is indeed English, but with the grammatical forms modern English has lost, and far fewer articles and the prepositions that we now use to substitute for grammatical suffixes. If you do a little reading this way, I think you'll enjoy it. Hope so, anyway!
9:40 It is a hand tent. Languages and dialects are still "shifting" nowadays. A small example: The village my grandmother lived in was south of the gsi/gwä-border while she was a child, but northeast of it since my mother's childhood. Gsi? Gwä? The first is the Alemannic past participle of "to be" ("sein" in German / "sei" in Alemannic) which is formed regularly, while 'gwä' is the Swabian form of German "gewesen" - the past participle of "sein", which is an irregular verb in German. Swabian is an Alemannic dialect, however - which is spreading to the South since about 200 years (accelerated since about 100 years by railway lines) and supplanting other Alemannic dialects. ;)
Ah, the old confusion between the terms 'German' and 'germanic'. Similarly, I have seen people arguing that Charlemange was German, not French, since the Franks were a germanic tribe, so how could it be otherwise? (Ignoring of course the fact the neither 'Germany' nor 'France' existed back then, and wouldn't for a few centuries to come). Maybe this confusion wouldn't exist if there were entirely seperate terms, like for 'Italian' and 'latin'. After all, both Italians and latin people inhabited the same area and spoke a related language, but no one would jump to the conclusion that they are somehow identical or claim that Italian is much older than French.
Also, the word "German" only was a substitute for the word "Dutch". "Dutch" comes from "Deutsch" and if everything would have went right we would say "Dutchland" instead of "Germany". At some point though Englishman began to call people from the Netherlands the "Dutch". Later they needed a new term for the people next to the "Dutch".
Germany DID exist back then. The mistake you seem to make is you confuse the cultural region Germany with the national state Germany. Yes, Charlemagne was a Frank. People who call themselves "Franken" still exist in Germany, even though these are not the Franks that Charlemagne belonged to, just as the people in the German state Saxony have very little to do with the tribe of the Saxons. The "Franks" were originally from the rhinelands. The people that lived there when the tribe of the franks was first mentioned still have descendents there. It's not like they were genocided or all emigrated. And the Franks that conquered today's France were very ethnocentic people. At least in the early middle ages, they did not mix with the gallo-romanic people, they even considered it a crime, and they did see other germanic tribes as their brethren; which did not stop them from fighting wars between one another, since war was just something between "politics by other means" and a traditional annual sporting event. I'm exaggerating, but the main point is that the "Hate War" is a modern phenomenon. Before the 20th century, people fought wars without hating one another. But in the early middle ages frankish aristocrats usually married aristocrats from other germanic tribes. So why not see the Germanic people who lived on lands that later became German as Germans?
@@FantadiRienzo 100 % agree. Since "Karl der Große" (aka Carolus magnus, Charlemagne) was of Germanic culture and descent he must be considered a German. We would count him among the French if he had been of Gallo-Roman descent (like Saint Martin, for example), which he wasn't.
@@GrandTheftChris And because of that fact, a couple years ago I was kinda surprised to find out the so-called "Pennsylvania Dutch" is in fact... German.
Ok, where should I start... First, I did not confuse the nation state Germany, which exists since 1871, with Germany in general. Yes, you could call e.g. the German Confederation "Germany", which predates the German Empire, and you could go even further back. However, the first entity that one could very, very broadly call "Germany" is the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE in turn evolved out of the Frankish Empire, with its first emperor Charlemagne (surprise!). As you asked: "So why not see the Germanic people who lived on lands that later became German as Germans?". But the Franks like Charlemange did not live on lands that laber became Germany! It is nonsense to claim that Charlemagne was either French or German, because none of these labels existed back then. Maybe think about the distionction between "German" and "germanic" this way: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch are germanic languages. The respective countries were settled by germanic tribes during the Migration Period. Yet you wouldn't call any of them German! The only reason one would think germanic tribes living in modern day Germany are German is because the words similar. If you state the phrase in another language ("Des peuples germaniques qui habitaient en Allemagne moderne" or "Germanische Stämme, die im heutigen Deutschland lebten"), this becomes evident.
I saw the mentioned video and to me as a German it looked like pure and utter bullshit beginning with the first "fact" that is nonsense. After that the creator of the video says that many Germans left their homeland and created "colonies" in other countries (so what? Many people from many countries did the same. That is nothing special) and that they kept speaking German (well, that is nothing special too. If you create a settlement with all your neighbors speaking German then you have no reason to learn another language. Look at Chinatown in New York, most people there still speak the Chinese language for the same reason). Yes, the "facts" in that video are not taught in school, because nobody would dare to waste the time of the students with such meaningless crap.
"German" remains closer to it's ancestral languages (yes plural) than English did mostly because local varieties remain even though faded. English gets the L mostly because the Normans transformed Anglish beyond recognition and as such English as we know it was born. Langfocus made a nice video about it. French has a similarly definite beginning imo though they have managed to celebrate their first 1000 years already. In a way fun to think that had it not been for the dislike between the peasants and nobles we would all be speaking French nowadays.
The Normans didn't transform English "beyond recognition". They added a significant amount of vocabulary relating to things like the arts, the military, government and jurisprudence, but apart from that they quickly started speaking English -- not the other way around. They'd done it before. They were originally from Scandinavia, but when they settled in France, instead of imposing their language on the locals, they adopted the local language and started speaking French.
@@rewboss hmm to be fair some of the fundamental changes such as th --> y came later. Beyond recognition is a strong word I admit - key turning point no less. I do wonder however if the Normans ultimately pushed the adoption of French when they fell into modern day Normandy - at that point I assume either some Gaelic or Latin would have persisted in parts of the countryside and slowly faded away.
@@aniinnrchoque1861 the Normans that invaded England were no longer the ones who had settled in France two centuries before. William's army was made up of Normans (1/3) but also of Bretons, Manceaux, Picards, Flemish, etc. Very little was left of the Scandinavian origins, only remained the dynasty and the glorified legend/history. Had they been collectively named differently in 1066, like "Seinois" or "Manchots" then less people (English mainly) would nowadays insist (for dubious reasons) on their (partial and remote) Scandinavian origins. Also let's not forget the Plantagenet dynasty that later on ruled over England for quite some time had even less in common with Scandinavians... Another fact is in that time "France" was much more populated than Britain. In that sense England was only considered as some sorts of colony by the Normans after the conquest. They eradicated the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and did not want to hear anything of the local language and culture. Nothing much was to be preserved. Those were hard times by our actual standards.
@@jandron94 this would be the first time I've heard of people that are conflating the Normans with Scandinavians. I mean that's like calling Dublin or Waterford Scandinavian. With the Normans came the then already established French lingo from the mainland and the rest is history.
I always thought of languages driffting apart and becoming their own thing when a member of one group can no longer understand a member of the other group. That being said, imagine a bavarian in berlin :) I mean the written language is still the same in both places, but when high german is not used as a means to communicate, than communication defaults to gestures and calling each other "Saupreiss" and "Kuhumschubser" xD
Oh, so much prejudice! Except for in some rural regions, people in Bavaria speak standard German to communicate! There may be a Bavarian accent but that's just about it. Noone ever uses the expression "Saupreiß" anymore - that's history as well as satire. And what is "Kuhumschubser" supposed to mean? Never heard of that. I spent a few years in Berlin studying at the FU and must say, that people were far more intolerant than here in Bavaria. I don't speak a special Bavarian dialect, only my intonation is southern German. That was enough for some Berliners to make rude remaks.
Does that make Dutch German than, though, since I can almost perfectly understand Dutch people when they speak, though I can't speak Dutch myself. But I can speak German and Afrikaans. I think even the idea of a language can be difficult as there are many languages with so many similarities that it is something difficult to tell them apart. Then there is Swiss German which is theoretically German, but I don't understand much of it. I found this video very interesting, will definitely watch more.
it's difficult to say, as you need perfect monolingual speakers to test this theory, with no outside influence, which can sometimes be difficult to get a hold of monolingual speakers we understand shakespeare, don't we? well we constantly study him, and maybe the first time you read shakespeare was when you were small. let's say shakespeare's impact on modern english is an immutable part of modern english. still, does someone with 0 *direct* knowledge of shakespeare understand shakespeare? it's difficult to find other examples for english since many native english speakers seem to be monolingual, but it isn't difficult to see how teching a population more variety can expand what may be called their language there exist such a thing as one-way intelligibility, such as with quebec french and paris-french, or lisbon-portugues and brasilia-portuguese where one population is exposed to the other's way of talking, and to the first population, the language(s) is/are relatively similar, but to the second group, it's unintelligible
I'm from Austria and basically everyone here speaks a dialect that's more or less similar to the dialects spoken in Bavaria. It's pretty easy for an Austrian to understand Northern Germans, but they really struggle to understand us.
Good video! It would be good to specify that "High German" in this video is NOT the "Standard High German" students typically learn and that German news presenters use.
But I am always amazed when I notice English words with a Germanic origin and understand without looking up: maiden name = Mädchen-Name pay a fee = ein (Stück) Vieh bezahlen ? gift = Gift ? I must only beware of the false friends ;-)
@@Leofwine There are still bars called "Giftbuden" at North German beaches. You can't buy poisen there despite the name. They are called like this because the barmaid will "give" you a drink. Or to say it in Low German: "Da gift et wat" (You'll get something there). The German word Gift (poison) is actually closely related to the English word gift and still had the same meaning in the 1700s. You can see it in the German word "Mitgift" (dowry). The modern translation for gift is actually "Gabe" and not "Geschenk" (present).
Very interesting video, well researched and explained. I'm not a linguist or really interested in the evolution of a language, never heard or remember hearing of the great wovel change at all. Once again something learned - thank you! I especially liked your explanation of this change on the word "ship" in German "Schiff", which made me think about it. Being a German I know that most of the verbs are written and pronounced as the noun. But for "Schiff" it is different. So in German we say "Ich fahre mit dem Schiff..." which literally translate to "I drive with the ship", but never say "Ich schiffe....". On the other hand I remember my grandparents sometimes say "Ich schipperte..." which is an old version of driving a ship and contains "Schip" instead of "Schiff" . "Ich schiffe..." is instead a slang for "I pee..." in sentences like "Ich schiffte in den Schnee" -> "I peed into the snow".
;) na ja, nur die Bayern und die Schwaben "schiffen" in den Schnee LOL. Mein Urugroßvater war Schiffssteuermann in Böhmen und "schipperte" die Elbe entlang bis Hamburg, so erzählte es mein Vater.
Reminds me to my father, who made this joke by wrongly translating the following latin sentence: "Cum portus plenus erat, Caesar juxta navigavit" to "Kaum war der Hafen voll, schiffte Cäsar daneben" Notice: Hafen translates into German pot or port.
Come on, if a mere shift in consonants is enough for you to call it a new language (fair enough), then English is originated after 1066, when half of your original vocabulary has been exchanged with French words. That is definitely a bigger change than some consonants shifting, which itself could very well seen as just a shift in dialect.
@@torspedia No, that is when it became a totally new language. No one on earth would consider a swap of half the vocabulary something else than becoming a completely new language. The village next to my home village in Bavaria is called Wessobrunn. There has been found a prayer from around 800, called the "Wessobrunner Gebet", one of the oldest written texts in German. I have very little problems to translate it with a bit of fantasy, as it has all the words we still use. Now try the same with an "English" text from around 800 - you'll find it impossible because the words are *German* , but half of them have disappeared from your vocabulary without any trace since then. The other half you may be able to recognize, just like me, but it's just 50% of them, and your fantasy won't help you to grasp the meaning of the whole text. English is easy to learn for Germans as well as for French people, because both of us find half of your vocabulary to be quite similar to ours. It should be the other way round, too, that French and German are easy for you as well, but we all know that English speakers are very bad in learning new languages …
@@hape3862 Be careful … the meanings of words drift with time. So you may _think_ you are reading that text from 800, but you are almost certainly misinterpreting words because of that meaning-drift. [Okay, the "Wessobrunner Gebet" won't have any meaning-drift, but that's because _it's a prayer_ and prayers don't change. So it's not a good example.] When I was studying for a semester an der Uni Mainz, my Mittelhochdeutsch Professorin told me that she loved having American students in her class, because we treated Mittelhochdeutsch as Yet Another Foreign Language, rather than "just some olde-fashionede version of Neuhochdeutsch." We [Ausländische Studierende] assumed nothing about the definition of the Mittlehochdeutsche words, she told us, giving us an advantage on learning the older meanings.
@@John_Weiss I find this lady's approach questionable. What should prevent me from considering Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, the Song of the Nibelungs or the Wessobrunn Prayer as the language of my ancestors, which has changed a lot, but whose root words are still the same and whose meaning has not changed as much as this lady would have you believe? I just remembered the word "gafregin", which translates as "erfuhr" - well, when you don't even have a decent current vocabulary at your disposal, it seems like a completely different language! But if you know your mother tongue (here: German), you will of course hear our "erfragte" in "gafregin" - and not "erfuhr" - which is an even better - because closer - translation. I did not study linguistics, but Ancient Greek and Latin, and if these two languages taught me anything, then to recognize word stems! There is a UA-cam channel where people from different countries try to understand foreign languages that are somewhat related. And one is amazed how much is still intelligible. PS: The Wessobrunner Gebet isn't a standardized prayer like The Lord's Prayer! It's text has been completely unknown until its discovery. So, it's as good an example for meaning shift (or lack thereof!) as any other text from that time period.
@@hape3862 On the "Wessobrunner Gebet" - ah, I read, "Gebet" and my brain translated it to "Prayer". As for the professor who taught, "Einfuhrung in das Übersetzen des Mittelhochdeutschens und der Arbeitsweise des Mediavistiks," - okay, not the course's exact name, and probably full of grammar mistakes, but it's been over 30 years and I only vaguely remember it. But I distinctly remember that it was _long._ The professor's point was that the Germans taking the course came in already thinking they knew what everything meant, but didn't. As a saying in English goes, "The Past is a foreign country." That applies to _our own_ past. Language encodes culture, and the culture that _you_ live in here in the early 21st Century is already slightly different from the culture of 1980s West-Germany … which is when I was taking that class. The culture of the 12th-14th Centuries was very, very different from our own. That means Mittelhochdeutsch encoded a very different culture. But since we Ausländische Studierende didn't see the 12th-14th Century culture of the Holy Roman Empire as, "our past," we didn't fall into the trap of thinking, "…and therefore, the same as us." Mind you, when learning US history, _YOU_ are the one who will have that identical advantage over _us._ It's a very human thing to do.
Though i get your point regarding the fact that English and German are essentially the same age - I think what that essay ment to explain is the fact German culture persists in the diaspora (and as you stated evolves, and the german surenames are just an easy way to follow culture), and this has been happening since Roman times (I'm not sure about that specific video, but theres a video where Sowell talks about the beer industry)
I do agree - to some degree. But - fun fact: Most modern Krauts might understand Old English better than modern Brits. Also, I'd call modern English a Creole Language, because of its simple grammar and other reduced complexity.
although (as was explained in the video) one word became "ship" in english and "Schiff" in german, we still today say eg "wir schippern übers Meer". thus even nowadays, we have some remnants from the old times ...
@@rewboss Well, the problem is of course the sound and the pronunciation, and second the meaning of the words - and quite a bunch of today unknown words. But, and I do not only speak for me, if you have a trained person reading such a text (a linguist eg., people like Daniel Scholten), I do understand quite a lot of those old texts. This is true for Beowulf and true for texts like the "Merseburger Zaubersprüche" or Otfrid von Weißenburg. If you try to read it yourself, you will likely don't understand much, yes. But, the sound of the modern English language is even further away from Old English, so for many Germans Old English sound a bit like a very strange old dialect but for many modern English people it sounds like a complete different language. In German, many consonants in the words were changed - but not the pronunciation of the consonants. But that's exactly what happened in English: The sound of all vowels and consonants have changed.
@@d.b.2215 It is. Weird questions with do, strange infinitive constructions with -ing, total loss of grammatical genders, no verb suffixes (but same at least in Swedish), one or you instead of a generic man (One/you should know.), V2 word order, words come from many languages (Latin, Celtic, West and Nordic Germanic languages, French, ...) etc. pp...
Even for conlangs it's not always that easy to say. Sometimes you can maybe use a certain date when the creator first published or presented the language or I guess you could use the first day they started working on it but often times it's just a very gradual thing starting out as just random thoughts and notes that gets refined and fixed step by step and can certainly stretch over decades. Though I guess you can at least be precise to the century and most likely the decade, maybe even the year.
Sehr schönes Thema. Ich nehme an, es war von dem, den du kritisierst, nicht gemeint, dass sich Englisch von Hochdeutsch abgespalten hätte. Briten nennen uns doch heute noch Germans. Gemeint sollte sein, dass Germanisch älter ist als Englisch. Und der Zweig Germanisch zu Westgermanisch zu Deutsch soll der Hauptzweig sein - davon hat sich Anglofriesisch (später Englisch) abgespalten.
Die nennen uns "Germans" weil sie das englische Wort für "Deutsch" - "Dutch" aus Gewohnheit über eine sehr lange Zeit für die Niederländer benutzt haben. Das ist wirklich der einzige Grund. Es ist ein Ersatz, mehr nicht. Normalerweise wären wir heute aus "Dutchland" und würden "Dutch" sprechen.
Aber warum sollte das "der Hauptzweig" sein? Germanisch und German sind zwei unterschiedliche Dinge - das eine ist die übergeordnete Kategorie, das andere ein Teil davon. Deutsch und Englisch haben sich beide aus früheren germanischen Sprachen entwickelt. Diese Darstellung als Baum ist, äh, sehr vereinfachend, freundlich ausgedrückt. "Germanisch ist älter als Englisch" - ja klar. Es ist auch älter als Deutsch. Weil es die allgemeine Kategorie aller Sprachen bezeichnet, zu denen Englisch und Deutsch gehören, inklusive ihrer Vorläufer.
@@varana Es gibt eben sehr viele Menschen, die Germanen und Deutsche, Germanisch und Deutsch miteinander identifizieren, es gleichsetzen. So ist der Satz gemeint, dass Deutsch älter als Englisch ist.
So may I ask to what the Bavaric and schwäbisch dialects belong? Higher or lower German? From what I remember the Higher German developed as a merchant tounge to communicate between the various German kingdoms
To me, born in the North of Germany, High German was the language of the posh people - or like you say the merchants. In no way are the South German dialects like Bavarian or Swabian HIGH German. The theory that you name the language after the topography of the country does not make sense to me.
Nice to see someone who knows what they are talking about amongst the usual sea of linguistic disinformation that I encounter daily on my travels through youtube :-) - subscribed. If you want to see some crazy assertions about a language, do a video on Tamil and then stand back.
The shift of T to Z in High German is probably the most salient one that lets us relate many modern German to English words (while the actually meaning may have shifted as well). By the way, Z is always pronounced /ts/ in German, never like Z in English. zehn ten Zeh toe zu to Hitze heat Zoll toll zählen tell (actually, count), also Zahl tale (actually, number). This is better reflected in "erzählen/tell" and "Erzählung/tale". Zeit tide (actually, time, which comes from another root)
Great video. While I’m not a linguist, I do have my doubts regarding the separation between West Germanic languages and East Germanic languages. In your language tree, the East Germanic languages are missing, probably because they died out. Though I’m not so sure they did. There is very little evidence of the two language families outside the Wulfila Bible. Much of it is based on educated guesses. I wouldn’t be surprised if West Germanic and East Germanic have a more complex relationship than previously thought. Particularly regarding Old High German and it’s origins. Be that as it may, I’m currently working my way through the „Nibelungenlied“ which is of course the most famous Middle High German Text. At first it looks really foreign but one quickly realised how similar it actually still is to modern High German. There were some notable vowel-shifts since, but at some point I realised that particularly Swiss-German still sounds a lot like it. Also, me being from Swabia, I can often easily deduce things as in my native dialect there are also still different diphthongs compared to High German which relate to some of the Middle High German sounds. Old High German on the other hand is a different matter. I have looked at the „Hilfebrandlied“ and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A few words here or there maybe, but for more you really need to dig in and learn about all the sound shifts. Of course I also can’t read Old Anglo-Saxon, but I feel like it slightly helps to speak both German and English. Often the meanings of some of the more archaic words can be deduced if one speaks German. But of course it’s not enough to actually read such a text. For that you once again have to dig in deep.
Norman French didn't have such a profound effect on the language as some people seem to think. The map shows the approximate extent of the West Germanic language varieties in the early 10th century. Anglia is believed to be in present-day Schleswig-Holstein, but the languages spoken in that region were North Germanic -- specifically, Anglian Danish.
Really liked your video, which is so clear and reasonable. I am always drawn to explanations that don't leap to assumptions but acknowledge that there are limits to what we can figure out in the absence of hard evidence! In the absence of a time machine that could send us back to hear ancestral languages spoken, we are actually fairly sure about some things, but others are mysteries. Part of the appeal of the period that used to be called the Dark Ages, for me, at any rate.
I won't say more about it than the following: Between 600 and 800 the so-called second or "High German sound shift" took place. It divided the regional languages in the German-speaking area into High German and Low German speaker groups. Modern High German has been spoken since around 1350. Modern English did not become established until the 1700s. Early Modern English 1500-1700. Middle English 1100-1500. If you ask yourself what was English or German before, do you mean the modern language. Thus, modern High German prevailed 350 years before modern English. Because Anglo Frisian is not English. Just as little as Low or High German is West Germanic. That is, even if you go back to the roots. And the year 600-800 puts it as the root of modern german, anglo-frisian is not english! So the German language definitely came into existence before that. no matter how you twist and turn it!
@varalderfreyr8438 Certainly! And also understand it 100%! For example, "Hausbuch des Michael Leone." The expression is not used today, but it is understood 100%. Because the syntax is also almost identical to modern High German. An even better example: "Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung." Unfortunately, I don't know the author of this book. The spelling was different, and not uniform throughout the German-speaking region. Nevertheless, it is 100% understandable for everyone! The house book clearly shows tendencies towards older expressions because the author was born around 1300. However, with "Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung," it's almost modern German. As mentioned, only the expression wouldn't be used today.
@varalderfreyr8438 Example: Frühneuhochdeutsch: Sô begunden sî, diu sunne ir lioht ûf die hûsmauer schînete. Hochdeutsch: So begannen sie, die Sonne ihr Licht auf die Hausmauer scheinen ließ. Frühneuhochdeutsch: Min hêrz verlangte nâch der minne, diu als ein süezer bluomen gart in minem gemoete erblüete. Hochdeutsch: Mein Herz verlangte nach der Liebe, die wie ein süßer Blumengarten in meinem Gemüt erblühte. Frühneuhochdeutsch: Diu vogele sangen ir melodiâ in dem wâlde, und die lüfte brâchten den süezen duft von den bluomen. Hochdeutsch: Die Vögel sangen ihre Melodie im Wald, und die Lüfte brachten den süßen Duft von den Blumen. Frühneuhochdeutsch: Ich gedenke an die sternen, die bî nachte am himel schînen, als lüchten gotes klâre ougen. Hochdeutsch: Ich denke an die Sterne, die bei Nacht am Himmel scheinen, als würden Gottes klare Augen leuchten. Frühneuhochdeutsch: Daz flûsse rûsche laut in der nâhe, und diu welle tanzete im morgenwind. Hochdeutsch: Der Fluss rauschte laut in der Nähe, und die Welle tanzte im Morgenwind. The spelling is different, including the orthography, but the syntax is the same.
German is much closer to its common ancestor with English. Languages do not always slowly evolve. Perhaps we could even consider English after the Norman invasion to be a new language, distinct from what's usually referred as Old English. The same criteria of intercomprehensibility between two languages should be applied across time.
You see... no, there wasn't a sudden change in 1066 that created a completely new language. This is a myth, and I wish people wouldn't keep repeating it. The Normans introduced a few new words into the language, but it took a _very_ long time for them to become accepted, and most of them related to things that the Normans took charge of -- government, the courts, the military, and so on. It's worth pointing out that German also has a lot of French words, some of them going back a very long way: English isn't unusual in this respect. What did happen to English during this period is that it fragmented into a number of very different dialects that were only partially mutually comprehensible, and which didn't merge back together again until the end of the Middle English period when the introduction of the printing press standardized the language. That was the most profound change, but it took a couple hundred years and wasn't the result of the Norman invasion.
@@rewboss It didn't really merge back until the BBC began broadcasting across the UK, unless you pretend the London standard was spoken across Britain. The Middle English period saw a very profound change that was the loss of the case system and the extreme simplification of its syntax. Either way, the question remains of whether English has departed suddenly and drastically to the point that it's something essentially different or not after a particular period. I am afraid that you come up with a recollection of facts, but facts, even if accurate, even if a comprehensive and balance collection is made of them, do not provide, by themselves, a criteria on age and identity of a given speak.
I would say that William the conqueror made such an impact onto the English language that maybe it can be seen as as a big divider between a situation where the languages spoken in England and those that were spoken in the area of north Germany are kind of dialects of the same language or members of a very closely related family of languages to a situation where there is a very distinct line between them.
@@rewboss When I look at the vocabulary of modern English it looks to me a bit like half and half Plattdütsch and French. I always credited this to the Anglosaxons being ruled by the French speaking Normans. Probably a too simplistic vies Am I missing something important here, or was that process just slower than one might imagine.
"A language is a dialect with an army and a fleet."
I am a linguist (Master's degree) and I encountered this saying during my linguistic studies back at Uni. It nails down pretty much what makes a language a language: People. If we say it's a language and everyone can agree, then it is one. Otherwise, everything would be a dialect or a variety. And there ... it get's messy. Just look at Serbo-Croatian which is now officially three languages: Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian. But like Swiss, Austrian and German German, it's not so much it's own language but rather a variety of a common tongue.
Guess one could also add Macedonian to the mix [and even Bulgarian?]
Being Swiss, I challenge any German not conceding us language status to a mutual intelligibility contest. If they are from sowewhat north of the Main and don't have previous exposure: No chance.
Comparing Alemannic-Standard German to Serbian-Croatian does not even come close to an equivalency.
and then there are languages like Góralski (in South Poland) that are considered to be a dialect rather than their own language because of how small they are within their respective country and other factors
Then what about one with an AIR FORCE?
For a linguist you have a very confused notion of the use of the apostrophe.
I _am_ a linguist and I can say that you absolutely nailed it. It really is hard to pinpoint how "old" any particular language is.
Also the Dutch word is /sxɪp/, not /ʃɪp/, but no big deal. It's still a good example.
As someone that is not a linguist I would have said that it is impossible since language is a slow process of change interrupted by some jumps that never realy stops.
My idea of the age of a language would the ability of today's people to understand the old texts. While the Nibelungenlied from the 13th century can be partly understood by most Germans (albeit some words changed their meaning, like "hochgezîten", which was not "Hochzeit", but just "good times"), the mentioned Hildebrandslied from the 9th century poses quite a challenge for contemporary speakers. So my personal idea of the age of today's German would be somewhere around 900 years, halfway between Hildebrand and Siegfried.
I remember LangFocus, NativLang and Simon Roper talking about the same subject, and they were pretty much in the same direction. Especially if we consider that England might come from "Land of the Angles" - although there's no consensus about the origin, apparently.
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
That's fair enough, but it's still pretty fuzzy - the amount of understanding is going to gradually drop off as the texts get older and older. The cutoff point is going to be subjective.
Plus, relying on texts is tricky because they are not exact representations of language. Imagine reading Chaucer vs. listening to someone from his time speak - it's a lot more understandable when written, because the spoken language has changed a lot more than the written language. It's even worse for languages that are written in logographic scripts like Chinese. Plus, some languages aren't even written down, or haven't been written down until recently.
So judging a language's age by how understandable it is not a bad idea, but keep in mind that it will always be approximate and not clearly defined.
I think that an important distinction to make here would also be between what Germans refer to as regional "dialects" and Hochdeutsch/Standard German. Most non-Germans think that when Germans refer to their dialects, they're referring to dialects derived from Standard German, but they aren't. They're referring to regional varieties of the pre-"Standard German" German, which are older than Standard German (though they are obviously also living languages that have changed since the introduction of Hochdeutsch).
I think if we focused on Standard German, which was largely constructed by Martin Luther in the creation of the German Bible, then we see that modern Standard German is quite a bit younger than people think. That said, standardization is a slightly different process and if we look at the development of Standard English varieties we'd see how they are also rather young.
I was always interested in the Germanic languages, I speak Low German because I grew up in East Frisia, High German, English, and a bit Dutch, because the Netherlands is in biking distance to my home town and I find this video very interesting and entertaining! Greetings from the other side of the North Sea :)😊
Ostfriesenwitze incoming ._.
Living in Northern Frisia I grew up with low german.
Moin almost the same story over here :) I grew up in the province of Groningen (so near the German border) and ofcourse I speak a dialect which is pretty much the same as Low German (or should I say Platt). It is a kind of funny that we can understand eachother while people in Munich or Amsterdam have a single clue what we are talking about :)
@@xXTheoLinuxXx ick glöv wi schnack een Beeten anders, aver nich veel.
@@wandilismus8726 nee, 't is bienoa hetzulfde. Wie schriefen 't een beetje aans moar mit proaten liekt het heul veul op elkoar :)
I usually don't comment on your videos, even though I generally enjoy all of them. However, I just have to say that I especially enjoyed this one. A good overview of the history of the west Germanic languages, all in under 10 minutes - excellent!
The route that the Frisian language took is somewhat amazing.
The pose you are doing actually is resembling something closer to “Mr. Burns hands“.
To add to what you said: It's the "hand steeple" or "steepling".
"EXCELLENT!"
And now you've mentioned it, there is far more that resembles Mr. Burns!
@@hape3862 Yes e.g. the nerd neck. I know because I have one.
@@GrandTheftChris #metoo
After translating a document from French into English, I can appreciate how much of a Germanic language Engliah still is.
Although there are many shared words between English and French, the underlying structures are markedly different and even many of these shared words are used differently.
I almost felt like a bulldozer because I had to excavate the Romance foundation of the article and replace it with a Germanic one.
And remember that the name "French" derives from the "Franks" who spoke a Germanic language. As a result French has some gramatical features shared with the Germanic world but not languages like Spanish and Italian, and a fair number of words of Germanic origin. The two different silent h's (!!!) in French are in large part due to origins in different language families.
This is also a common mistake in popular accounts of evolutionary theory. Species are related via a common ancestor. But the current observable species are not precursor and successor species of each other. In crude popular accounts, however, it is sometimes suggested that Humans evolved from Chimpanzees. In reality there was a common ancestor, which was neither Chimpanzee nor Human.
Plus: You are always the same species as your parents, by definition.
So were their parents. And their parents. And their parents…
Once you're several hundred-thousand or even a million years separated however, the genetically-related individuals at either end of the timeline are completely different species. So when did _that_ happen? How could you even draw a line, since every individual is the same species as its parents and its children?
Common mistake in pop-evolution indeed!
@@John_Weiss Which is why these days, evolutionary biologists talk about _clades_ - essentially, you never leave the clades your ancestors were in, but speciation creates new clades. So (simplifying here), homo sapiens is in the homo clade, which is in the great apes clade, which is in the monkey clade, which is in the mammals clade, which is in the chordates (approximately fish) clade, and so on.
@@KaiHenningsen Oooooh! So _that's_ where I'm getting that concept from!
I also knew about the term, "clade," and how it's kinda-sorta replacing the old Linnean way of categorizing life-forms.
Thanks for giving me the correct terminology to talk about these things!
@@KaiHenningsen Heh! You said "Fish". according to a popular British panel show (Yes, THAT one), there's no such thing as a fish in zoology. Apparently the various species that are called that don't really fit in one clade. (And that doesn't even include the weirder uses of the term, such as 'jellyfish' and 'crayfish'.)
"it is sometimes suggested that Humans evolved from Chimpanzees"
No wonder, Chimpanzees are the most aggressive and cruel apes.
The funny thing about using the first words of Beowulf as an OE example is that I've heard and seen it used in so many videos about Old English that it's getting to be understandable. haha
I think that's what most people know because they get to the end of the first or second page and say "nope" CLOSE
nice vid man, greets from Alzenau
As someone with a language background, I can say this with confidence: _It is incorrect_ to think of Middle English" or "Middle German" as just fancy forms of Modern English and Modern German, respectively. It's more correct to say that "Old English" and "Old [Low] German" were dialects of the same language, a language for which we don't have a name because we've gone and named its dialects differently.
Even early-Old Norse would've been a dialect of this unnamed language.
There really is no way to draw a hard-line in a timescale and say, "Here! Before this line, we had Olde High Blahblarian, and after it, we had 'Middle High Blahblarian'." The best we can do is draw _two separate_ lines and say, "Before this point, we still had 'Old Standard Whateverish', but after this line 150 years later, we had fully-formed 'Middle Standard Whateverish'."
Oh! One more thing: The "High" in, say, "Middle High German" and the "Low" in "Old Low German" _does not_ refer to _social status,_ but to _high and low altitude_ (respectively). So "Middle High German" was spoken near and in The Alps, while "Old Low German" was spoken in the flat, sea-level lands of the North Sea and Baltic coasts. "Middle Low German," incidentally, was so different from "Middle High German" that it's practically a different language, with low mutual-intelligibility between the two.
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Consider this: At the same time that "Old English" and "Old German" were being spoken, "Old French," "Old Italian," "Old Spanish," "Old Portuguese," and "Old Romanian" were really more like regional dialects of late Vulgate Latin, and would still have all been fairly mutually-intelligible. [Well, except maybe the dialect in Romania, which has always been the strange cousin of the Latin family. 😆]
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Here's another way of thinking about it: Scouse, Geordi, Scots, are all _spatially-separated_ dialects of English. Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern [RP] English are all _temporally-separated "dialects"_ of English.
That last paragraph is a beautiful analogy to my math and physics-infested brain. 😊
@@witerabid I am a physicist by education, so that should explain why I managed to have that idea.
[ Before grad-school, I double majored in Germanistik and Physics, which is why I have any linguistics knowledge.]
"Oh! One more thing: The "High" in, say, "Middle High German" and the "Low" in "Old Low German" does not refer to social status, but to high and low altitude (respectively)." That's why I refuse to use "Hochdeutsch" in the sense of Standard German. The cultural imperialism that implies brushes me the wrong way. I'm a dialect speaker; can you tell? ;-)
I find it quite sad what that imperialism does to the German dialect landscape.
@HotelPapa100 OOOH! Welche Dialekt?
I spent a semester studying an der Uni Mainz, in Fachbereich Germanistik. [When you major in a language in US universities, you sometimes can spend a semester or a year at a university in a country where that language is spoken.] I was there in 1989, September-January. The summer afterward, I was still speaking fluent German … „mit einer Määäääänzrischen Aussprache“. 😆
My husband, BTW, is half-Austrian. His mother came from Pinzgau, in Land Salzburg. He never became fluent in German, but likes to say that he "speaks German like a demented 4-year-old … with a Pinzgau accent."
@@John_Weiss Swiss German, north western variety, which is close to the Alemannic of south western Germany.
Before populations became so mobile, you basically could pinpoint the village a person came from by their language.
There's a website (a linguistics project) called "chuchichäschtli-orakel", which asks you about two dozen questions about your pronunciation, then pinpoints your location. Now I (was) moved around quite a bit in my formative years, but when I fed it the data of my older sister, it placed her right in a village where we lived when she was of kindergarten age.
(Chuchichäschtli, BTW, is a word the Swiss tease the Germans with, because it is full of the throaty "ach-laute" the Germans find offensive in the Swiss dialect. (Swiss German does not have the softer "ich" ch.) It also is one of the signature Swiss -li diminiutives.)
(if this posts multiple times: YT keeps throwing errors when I edit.)
Just a little personal history. I grew up in Paddington, London in the fifties. As a child I could recognise, various London accents. My local West London accent from that time seems to me to have practically died out. (My father's family spoke practically only cockney rhyming slang despite being from West London.) Once I started work, I had to speak entirely differently, partially because most of my colleagues had a entirely different background. I have now lived over 30 years in Germany, and even I notice that in England, I already speak an old fashioned English. Languages change continually. There is no start or end.
"At the time when the Roman Empire Collapsed"
The Basilius Romanaoi in Constantinopolis would like to have a little word with you.
Are there really folks left with whom we could argue today?
@@lotharschepers2240 Modern Hellenes?
well, it collapsed at least half way :)
My parents' generation still prefers low german in informal conversation and I used to be able to understand it with little difficulty. Nevertheless I always found Dutch on TV entirely incomprehensible. Only lately I found out, that Dutch is actually in the "franconian" branch whereas low german is "saxon". Dutch Low Saxon exists and that is the language spoken just across the border. This is what mutual intellegibility with low german speakers is based on, not dutch. I have about A2/B1 proficiency in French and learned English, Latin and Russian in school. I can read and understand french wikipedia articles a little bit better than dutch ones.
Likewise, for me (an "Amsterdam Dutch" speaker), the Dutch spoken in the eastern part of The Netherlands is barely comprehensible.
You and your generation should definitely use Low German. It's your heritage and culture.
My culture and heritage are complex and have many roots none of which I would want to miss. If I had a reason to speak low german I would. Alas, I have not and I'd rather invest that time to have a go at sign language, turkish, spanish, arab or chinese.
@@zam1am It makes me wonder how long it would actually take to start speaking Low German instead of High German because everyone around you speaks Low German. I know it's not too uncommon for people to slowly pick up a dialect over time and I'm wondering if the same is true for Low German.
I've kept saying the same thing about American English vs British English. The two diverged after America was settled, but neither is quite the same language as was spoken in England before the split.
You didn't mention the great vowel shift that made Scots unintelligible, and made meat rhyme with meet instead of sweat. Another example of a VERY fast linguistic shift is Aussie. They went from 54 dialects and languages, to one accent in about 2 generations. Amazingly fast.
But the original migrants to Australia came from every corner of the British Isles, so native born Australian children had to settle of hybrid of all these accents. Then add the gold rush of the 1850s where the population more than doubled with lots more accents arriving including people from every country in Europe and even some Americans. So its not surprising that children born in towns and cities with many different accents in the adult population came up with their own accent which was essentially a combination of them all.
Meat once rhymed with sweat? This makes me realize that the German word "Mett" (for a type of minced pork) is probably related to the word "meat". Should've noticed this earlier.
@@bernhardkrickl3567 Yes, and have you heard a scot say "cow"? It is pronouced "coo" or "Kuh".
@@JakobFischer60 One of the Old English words for Cow was...Cu, pronounced "coo". So it might be reasonable to assume the Scots retained the "original" pronounciation?
This leida of the opposition
We still got 'shippern' as a word for traveling by boat or ship. Sometimes some words don't have the consonant shift. But those are exeptions afterall.
I think that's mostly a Low German word that got reabsorbed. Initially, it was probably used somewhat ironically and over time slipped into regular use like "nichtsdestotrotz" or "googlen".
For those who don’t know: the terms “High German” and “Low German” refer to altitude. Low German comes from the coastal plain, High German from the Alps. It’s not a class marker or value judgment.
Not at all. Low German is often connected to the rural people of lower social state than the more posh High German speaking people of higher social status.
@@SD_Alias Don't confuse the German word "Hochdeutsch" used as "Standarddeutsch" with the "High German" languages. Even Swabian and all the other allemanic dialects are considered High German. Matthew is correct here.
@@magnaretonsor Ok, did not know. Our German teacher in school teached us the wrong explanation then… It was the time in the 70ies and early 80ies when it was forbidden to speak low German in school and when low german was connected with "stupid uneducated farmers"...
@@SD_Alias Ganz falsch ist das natürlich nicht. Auch heute noch werden Dialekte mit einem "niedrigeren" sozialen Status verbunden. Das ist allerdings ganz unabhängig von der Region, in der man lebt. Ich selbst bin mit schwäbischem Dialekt aufgewachsen und auch mir hat man versucht, den Dialekt abzutrainieren. Das Problem ist, dass mit "Hochdeutsch" umgangssprachlich das Standarddeutsch gemeint ist. Linguistisch meint man aber die hochdeutschen Dialekte im südlicheren Teil des deutschen Sprachgebiets, die sich nochmal in mittel- und oberdeutsche Dialekte unterteilen lassen.
@@magnaretonsor Wieder was gelernt… ;)
Thank you for this video! As a German, this is actually a trope that I encounter surprisingly often - other people (Germans) saying that obviously, German is "the older language" and English "split off and changed" while German stayed more or less the same. I'm no linguist either, but that just doesn't make any sense whatsoever even to me. Languages keep evolving all the time, and we can see how vastly different German looked just two centuries ago.
I noticed people often confuse German with Germanic.
@@marchauchler1622 Yep, I think that is the point
Here's my guess (I studied one intensive year of German in my teens, in school in England, and Old English at the university). Linguistics as a science really began in German (late 18th and early 19th centuries). Linguists such as the brothers Grimm set the standard, you might say. Grimm's Law is the one of the consonantal shift that distinguished the Germanic language family from other branches of Indo-European such as Latin and Greek. And then Werner's Law shows the further consonantal shift that set apart Old English from the West Germanic languages (including the ancestor of modern German). That was how it was taught in the 1950s, as least in my school and university (Oxford). So what we absorbed was that the ancestor of English split off from the ancestor of German, or so it seemed. It was a junior branch. But of course if you think of it in terms of a river dividing into two channels, with one having a specific change in water chemistry due to a difference in the surrounding land, but both in time undergoing further, separate changes, you can see that neither is older or younger; they are both branches of the upstream river.
Well, there definitely are things that show a great connection and relation (for example that Saxons are really good at saying "ocean" and other words that evolved mainly from the Angl-Saxon influences) but a relation is just that. Even tho Slavic languages are very close and you can understand some things in Polish even tho you speak Russian, you wouldn't say all Slavic languages are the same - the same counts for Germanic languages.
I feel like it is just a cheap way of asserting some sort of ownership or seniority over English, which is something I don't think could happen the other way around, we simply don't feel the need...
There's also that ill conceived conservatism at play, the idea that language needs to be kept 'clean' and 'preserved' from foreign influence, which I think is a total load of bollocks.
I don't think English is anywhere near dirty enough for my liking, whose dictionary shall we steal next, let's keep this party going :)
One thing Ive noticed as someone who is learning German and likes to compare languages, is that German changed grammatically slower than English, maintaining many grammatical ideas from older forms of German that English did from their older forms, such as verb endings, cases, some moods, etc. Perhaps this was the reason that people feel like German is older than English, even though that isnt the case. This is also why Old English is easier to learn as a German native speaker than as a native English speaker
I think most (at least European) languages changed slower than English - I think English is pretty unique in having gotten rid of so many endings/cases/moods and so forth.
So, German _feels_ older? It's really interesting to hear/read this from a native English speaker learning German because I only know the opposite perspective and to me it felt the same way. 😅 English seemed like a more modern language but I always thought that was mostly because it was new to me. 🤔 Apparently it goes deeper than that.
@@witerabid actually funny enough, when I first started learning German, thinking of how I would speak english in a very old fashioned way and then directly translating that really helped me wrap my head around the grammar and especially the usage of some words and the more flexible verb positions. Though some grammatical ideas like the adjective and verb conjugations and inflections and cases, which no longer really exist in English other than some artifacts (e.g. the -s at the end of verbs for 2nd person pronouns which might be related to the -t conjugations for German verbs for 2nd person pronouns similar to the water and Wasser comparison, and the difference between I and me being artifacts of cases in English), took alot longer to grasp
I think the reason is simply the way languages are categorised. Both German and English belong to the "IndoGERMANIC language family", and both belong to the subcategory of the Westgermanic languages. So considering that English is categorized as a Germanic language, it is kind of logical to think that German came first. Plus, anyone who knows British history also knows that English itself was influenced by both the Normans and the Anglo-Saxons...emphasis on "Saxons", which hints to its German origin.
I'd point out here that in English, the name of the language family is "Indo-European". It includes a very large number of languages that are neither Indian nor Germanic, including all of the Slavic, Celtic and Romance languages.
08:37 In Old Bavaria we still say "brug" to "Brücke".
Can I be pedantic about one of the things you stated?
If I'm not mistaken, the archaeology suggests that there's no such thing as a physical Anglo-Saxon migration. In a physical migration, you'd expect there to be a large number of burials with skeletons of Germanic origin, separation between those and the burials of original English inhabitants and a slow integration between the two over time.
That's what you see with the Norman invasion, but it's not what is generally found in the beginning of Anglo-Saxon times... it looks more like the English, possibly because of trade relations with the continent, adopted Anglo-Saxon habits. In graves, grave goods and architecture, there's a slow shift from the Roman styles and customs starting about a century before the Romans left, and going on for centuries into the dark ages.
In a sense, there is a migration, yes. But it's more of a migration of culture, habits and ideas rather than of loads and loads of actual people, which fits quite nicely with the shift you described :)
Would that not also imply that the Angles, Saxons, Jutes and Frisians continued to inhabit their originsl regions?
The crazy thing about that Beowulf-text you showed is, that it sounds almost German in parts. The old letters are a hindrance though, but the thing is - we Germans can understand that text as little as English speakers :D
Since German does retain some feature that English had lost after that time, learning Old English tends to be easier for German people (particularly when they also know decent Modern English) than for native English Speakers. Of course, saying that German is older than English doesn't really make sense, but the truth behind it is that German has not changed as much as English has for several historic reasons, which makes it look older in some ways.
I think it is kind of similar to "norse" i.e. Old Swedish/Danish/Norwegian.
@@Tybold63 Angles, Lowland Saxons, and Jutes who were ancestors of what is now called British Anglo-Saxons came from what is now Southern Denmark.
You actually can notice the language change during one generation when you speak to older people who grew up with your language, but then moved to another country forty or fifty years ago and "froze" their native language in its original state.
That is an interesting point, but is it really so simple?
This only works because you assume that people adapt to the language spoken around them throughout their lifes, which is fair, but it means probably nobody really "freezes" their native language in its original state.
There are two ways how this might go, depending on whether the person continues using their native language. If they do then they'll most likely adapt to changes happening in the dialect of their new community. This could actually make their language diverge from their native language faster than it normally would have, if that community speaks a different dialect. Or they don't continue to use their native language. But if you don't speak your language for 50 years, it won't stay frozen, it will degrade.
@@renerpho I seem to recall hearing that English changed faster in England than in the colonies. If that's true or not, it's definitely true that there are more different dialects in England - for the same reason that Africans have a far larger genetic diversity than the rest of us. (For example, the physically largest and smallest human groups both live in Africa - actually, they're neighbors.)
@@KaiHenningsen For the community as a whole, maybe, but I'm not sure it is true on the individual level. If someone moved to a colony, where their community consists of speakers of different dialects of their language, what is the "common dialect" they converge on? I think that, on average, this will be quite far from the dialect of any individual, and I would argue it will be farther than what little change happens to any individual's dialect over the course of their lifetime. So, in the end you'd have a new, common dialect in the colony that is about equally distant from any of the dialects in England (on average), and the colonist's dialects would be under more "pressure to adapt" then they would have been in England.
This is probably no longer true in recent times, I guess, where many local dialects are under strong pressure, and at risk of dying out. More and more people switch to the English they hear on the radio/TV/internet, or that they speak at work.
I agree. In the 80's I was in Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, where a lot of Europeans live. In a town called Teutonia live nearly only people with German ancestors. Their grandparents or grand grandparents moved from Germany( Hunsrueck) to there. Most of the older people didn't even spoke Portuguese, only German. I barely could understand their German , also due to the fact that the Hunsrueck dialect is hard to understand. They said that they always spoke like that, because there was no influence in German that could change their way of speaking
Or how English and American English are diverging.
This channel is very underrated, he should go more mainstream ,
All this Instagram chick and living in Berlin for one month try to explain how and what is German and German ,
Keep up the good work mate , your long term fan .
I like -Noam Chomsky's- Max Weinrich's definition: A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.
Every time someone mentions Chomsky I remember Nim Chimpsky and Herbert Terrace. It took a while to Terrace give credit to Chomsky and acknowledge that apes (at least until the 1980's) were unable to acquire language and make their own subset of new words, like humans do. In this specific case, B. F. Skinner tried to make apes vocalize (failing miserably while torturing the animals) and then other researchers tried to achieve communication by teaching American Sign Language to them.
No subject from any research was able to make intelligible sentences following a strict structure with subbject-verb-object. Not even Koko the gorilla (the most famous case.)
That isn't Chomsky's definition, the quote comes from Max Weinreich, a jiddish linguist.
@@gerdforster883 You're right. I'm gonna correct it immediately.
7:42 Could you say it schiffted?
There’s an argument Old English was never the popular tongue, but an elite language only (diglossia). That’s why when the Anglo-Saxon elite was rubbed out by the Normans, the English that reappeared some time later (Middle English) was radically different - it was derived from the popular tongue that had been there the whole time and reflected a pre-English and even pre-Celtic substrate that rejected inflection and grammatical gender.
I have heard something like that, although a little different, and I don't know how good the scholarship is. But the notion is that, when Danes started moving in to England during the 800s, you'd have native English speakers living next to that newcomer Olaf, and they'd inevitably have to communicate with him. It became necessary to dumb down English to communicate with Olaf -- no need to teach him all those extra cases and inflections, just strip that stuff out -- so in not too many generations, it became common for the common man to speak the stripped-down version of English. But those educated types who had to write the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles, they took their grammar seriously, and so what was written down was different from what was spoken on the street.
@@kingbeauregard I doubt that. In the 800s both Old German, Old English and Old Norse were so similar that it shouldn't have been much of a trouble to understand it for Olaf anyway. It's more true about the Scandinavian languages vs German in the 1300s, though. The many German loan words and the Germans' unability/unwillingness to speak grammatically correct in the Scandinavian languages supposedly destroyed most of the grammar in Old Swedish etc.
@@francisdec1615 Having to master the inflections would have been a lot of work, though. And completely unhelpful work, since gender contributes nothing to understanding, and the Danish preference for prepositions drifted into Old English.
This was one of your best ones, Andrew. Can you do more on this topic? Very amazing
Andrew, that was interesting, thank you! I speak Lower Bavarian dialect, but imported something from the area around Munich, where the -ng- sound is often pronounced like a simple -n-, and my mother and family often critisise me for that. And please excuse that my spellchecker is set to American English.
What is the correct way to pronounce it then? How do pronounce for instance the word "Ausbildung" in german?
@@emiroviloria7368 As in English "singer", not "finger". Never heard "ng" as "n", not in Upper Bavaria (e.g., Munich), not elsewhere.
@@konradmichels1362 Haven't ever heard of that either. Not even from some of my pupils at my school in Oberbayern who speak a crude dialect . No such thing in Swabia where I live either.
The table showing the effects of the vowel shift has been really insightful. It shows the relation between the languages and how they drifted apart. While I was aware that shifts in the pronunciation of languages do happen, I had not yet seen the connection to other languages that derived from the common ancestor. Thanks for clearing that up.
It's like saying people evolved from monkeys...just shows zero understanding of evolution...exact same problem...in fact these are very much the same class of questions asked in evolutionary biology...
I was thinking the exact same thing
I totally agree with you that the human does not evolved from primates but both evolved from another common ancestor. But I think it is not complete unrealistic that this ancestor was some type of monkey.
I like to say, "Humans didn't evolve from Apes - because humans _ARE Apes."_
Which, of course, is true, but really freaks out and pisses off the ones with zero understanding of biology. 😁
@@diverlady5860 Humans are primates.
Knuckle walking is a relatively recent evolutionary development in our clade; chimps and gorillas are better at it than we are, thus more evolved!
That was thoroughly thoroughly fascinating, thank you.
That very video you mentioned was recommended to me a few days ago.
I didn't get far in, but the amount of half-truths and "eh" takes on topics like the fall of the roman empire is staggering.
His whole approach to the topic is, like you said, rather strange. I expected a good essay exploring German history and various facettes of German culture that don't get noticed a lot. Instead he talks about... the diaspora?
I just had expected something different, and combined with his ... odd takes I clicked off after a time
Oh well, that's "UA-cam University" ;).
Really interesting video - thank you
Great! You just brought it to the point.
As a german-speaking linguist I can only say thank you.
New viewer here. As a French-ca, I really appreciate your vision and the way you explain the unknown (mine). You gained a new sub :)
Nice video :) there's this linguist on Danny Bate, and he always shares fun linguistic stuff there. Recently he analysed a sentence, that is recognised as one of the oldest written records of "Italian" in contrast to "Latin", but of course that's just how linguists define that. Still very interesting
About your point in the outro: That gesture is called an apex scholars cradle. But you mostly use the front cage in your video.
Cool! That Diagram of the Indo-Germanic languages makes sense, even on a perceptual level. Frisian and Dutch always sounded/felt to me like having a lot of similarities to English. That diagram tells the same story.
And ... perfect choice of the Hildebrandslied.
I argue that Frisian is quite different from Dutch and German. Frisian is perhaps the closest relative to English, and enjoys in the Netherlands a kind of minority status, whereas Dutch and (in particular Low-) German have many common forms in grammar and vocabulary. The heaviest consonant shifts happened in the Upper-German (South) dialects, as shown in this video (which I enjoyed very much, also because of the slang of the speaker)
Interestingly, the Dutch language is a mix of "flat german, french and englisch". I love listening to Dutch. Being from the south of Germany, I do not understand it very well....but it sounds so cool.
7:29 Ehm I'm assuming you spoke English for all 3 languages because that is not the pronunciation of ship in Dutch. The Dutch word schip uses the sch sounds which is different from the English sch. (I'm not a linguist so I don't have any better words to describe it but it seems the google translate pronunciation in dutch for schip is quite accurate.)
I would argue that a strong French influence is decisive for the English language. That happened after 1066. German evolved as a distinctive language around 900, about 2 generations after Charlemagne, when the treaties of Straßburg were signed. That is a political approach to things rather than a linguistic one.
The influence of Norman French is not quite as profound as people are often led to believe. It basically marked the transition from Old English to Middle English, but the most important development then wasn't the addition of French words (that was significant, but didn't really change the language itself) but the fragmentation of English into a number of very distinct dialects.
@@rewboss they english neede the normanns to develop local dialects?
We not-native speakers think, in england not the regions but the social classes have their dialects.
@@rewbossthat's quite a bit of an awkward statement to make while having maybe one third of your comments response vocabulary coming from "French"...
If you take out all the "English" words from your response one might still have a vague idea/guess of what you are talking about but if you take out instead all the "French" words then it becomes even more vague.
I guess it also depends on subject.
I really enjoyed this video. Thank you.
I mean you could argue that "England" the way we know it only started after the Danelaw and William while Germany and France (as nations/cultural spheres) already started with Charlemagne. Or that High Medieval German is more intelligible than High Medieval English to native speakers of their respective languages. But it's of course all a little bit arbitrary.
I studied English and had to take courses in Middle English and Early Modern English. The written texts seemed to have a lot more similarities to German than to modern English. where vocabulary and word order are concerned.I grew up bilingual German/English (RP).
in history class we start german history around 500 CE. It is a useful date cause around that time after the fall of the western roman empire the center of the poitical world shifted from the roman empire to the francs.
"England" as a concept can be thought of as starting then, but the English _language_ as a concept predates it. The various kingdoms recognised that they shared a common language, albeit with regional variations. There's no such thing as "Medieval High English": during that period, the language was what's now mostly referred to as "Old English", though if we'd better records of the spoken language while Norman French and Latin were the dominant written languages in England, we'd probably be able to push back the the start date of what's called "Middle English" further back.
Aside: the "High" in "High German" refers to it being the language of upland Germans in the South, not to it having any prestige: that prestige came later, and is a complicated story.
Double aside: you might find the "History of English" podcast of interest.
@@talideon
I'm just saying that English speakers would most likely struggle way harder reading any English without the Norman French components than German speakers with Middle High German.
@@Alias_Anybody it's pretty fast theres also old norse and celtic/brythonic before anglo saxon which is a strate/stratum also for more evolved one vs extinct archaic hittite or living lithuanian is french start from gaul frank and then the romance lang rise and it goes until now theres a nativlang vid about the historic sound changes
edit: alright for german sound changes theres a comment in polymathy about retracted s in german historic changes development, the vid is about latin retracted s, also mentioned the different r, etc
Excellent, excellent, excellent! THX for this extremely informative video!
Greetings from Germany 🧡🧡🧡
Well, one could argue that English was not English before 1066 because the Normanic (French) influence shaped the English very much and is, away from the permanent evolution, one of the reasons why English is quite different from German nowadays.
well, it is still pretty close
absolutely, the norman invasion would be a reasonable "starting point" for the english language too. but either way, absolutely any point we define will be somewhat arbitrary
Indeed English is even considered by some as a creole language. To me English has we know it now dates back to the late 14th century when French started to recede in England to leave place to a creole language. So saying that German is older in that sense is correct.
@@jurgnobs8178 It really, really isnt. English had long been established as a language before the invasion and the country unified under one king. Norman French added to the vocab but virtually nothing (arguably zero, actually) to the grammar, which remained resolutely Germanic.
It would be nice to see a video on west low german, or the languages of Germany (other than German) in general
Maybe you could try to let German Wikipedia articles on that topic translate in your browser. Many of the information is probably also available in English articles.
Merging Wikipedia articles from different languages to more extensive information would be a nice job for artificial intelligence.
I strongly promote taking care of dialects and languages spoken by small communities. They're allowing us to get a glimpse of the evolution of languages.
I’d love to learn more about that Lautverschiebung thing 🤓 I study Roman Philology and it’s just sooo interesting!!!
Check out Simon Roper's channel, he does some nice work on it (mostly focused on the evolution of English, but also going into other Germanic languages). Here is a fun example: ua-cam.com/video/3lXv3Tt4x20/v-deo.html (you can switch on subtitles to understand the earlier dialects).
For Latin, my favourite channel is polýMATHY. It's so nice hearing someone try to speak classical, rather than ecclesiastical, Latin. The connection to the Romance languages is so much clearer.
Yes i'd say Simon Ropers Videos are the best you can find on this topic.
i was surprised to see the video's title and you affirmatively answered my doubts about in a very wonderful way :) when you said "schlaf", i heard your english origin. but when you said "dorn", you sounded a bit like where i am from: northern germany, and i had to grin :) i think you said "doahn" instead of "dorrn" which is just.. aaw.. so lovely northernly pronounced :')
Fascinatingly languages are a lot like biological species. The question of "when does a new species start" is also a matter of endless debate among biologists. It's a gradual process of adapting and specialising. "They slowly evolve", you can say the exact thing about biological evolution as well as languages.
When did English begin influencing other languages much more than other languages are influencing English? (No doubt it has to do with certain worldwide activities of both British and Americans in recent centuries ...)
Thanks a lot; very interesting! Best wishes from Germany :)
English today contains some 10.000 words from French and most of the rest is Germanic so English of today is certainly not older. And then there is that only the English get upset if something is not the "oldest" in England.
For example the British Parliament is the oldest (then insert the silly word - sitting) because apparently the Icelandic Althing, dating to 930 and the Faroese Løgting, dating to a similar period, did not sit all the time.
Next one could of course ask if perhaps there were people in England before in the rest of Europe, and I don't think so.
What do loan word have anything to do with oldness?
@@gunjfur8633 , First of absolutely nothing but the British have this rather inbuilt habit of claiming they are "the first" and "the oldest" and rather often when it's not true at all. But seriously how could a language containing lots of words from other languages be older than the languages those words came from. There is simply no way.
Humanity and language did not start in Britain but came to Britain from Continental Europe, from the south and from the east.
It's tough and for the Brit who "found" the "missing link" in England it was too hard so he created one out of chicken bones and what not. The "fraud of the century" and in Britain it was just accepted like - "but of course it has to be English and found here.".
Start listening to your countrymen with more criticism.
And don't feel offended there is a lot to laugh at also in Britain.
@@hurri7720
(you didnt really answer my question)
Loan words dont make a language older or younger, most if not all languages have them
I disagree that Shakespeare is perfectly clear. But it sure made a lot more sense to me after I took German in high school. Especially prepositions in a format that still exists in modern German.
I went on to get a linguistics degree. :)
Great job on this video. I really enjoy your channel.
I call the "i don´t knowwhat it is" rhombus the "Mister Burns Rhombus" :P
German native speaker of a Franconian dialect here. I want to point out that I understand Anglo-Saxon English better then a speaker of modern English does. well apparently. there is a video on youtube which i can't seem to find right now, where a linguist speaks Anglo-Saxon and a few modern speakers try to figure out what he said. all of them where clueless while I could make out the general topic of a phrase or even some specifics. this leads me to believe that at least my dialect is more conservative then modern English .
Dutch schip is not pronounced "ship" - it has some form of chi sound in it and does not have a "sh" sound at all! I have the feeling I've noticed you pronouncing Dutch words as if they were German ones in your videos before. Just a minor criticism but nevertheless the differences in pronunciation between Dutch and German are something you may wish to address if you're going to refer to Dutch words at all regularly.
Hij reed een scheve schaats in Scheveningen...
Fully correct, he has no idea how Dutch sounds, that it is a totally different language from German and has it's own development.
And it is not the first time he does this. Sad... Because in other aspects he seems serious and correct.
4:03 Are these Germanic letters which have been written in the text? They are still used in Iceland.
4:59 The Hildebrand-Lied has in my view enough recognizeable words so that I could learn the language by reading more and more texts (but with a lot of grammar mistakes).
A lot of words seem still to start with the same letter or a letter similiar to it (p,b) to recognize the word in Althochdeutsch (e. g. fatar, Ih and Ik), the word her was confusing knowing English but with German pronounciation it becomes "er". iro seems to be some form of "ihre" like "Ihres" in todays German. "enti" = "and" = "und" etc. Still a dead language today, so I do not put more effort in it...
The letters were used in Old English, but under pressure from the Latin languages they disappeared (þ became th, etc). The final blow was the printing press, because the old letters were not available when that technology was imported. There were some consonants that aren't in modern Icelandic; gh and w had their own letters for example.
To me it feels like Sowell only mixed up "german" and "germanic", something that happens quite often to native english speakers. This may not realy happen, if you are german since we have different words for it.
This should not happen to English speakers as there are two seperate words in English just like in German as mentioned / seen above in your first part of you comment.
I find it hilarious that this man has take a sentence from a book (not an essay as he states) about American culture and makes an entire video about language. Sowell has written a trilogy, Conquests/Migrations/Race And Cultures, that exhaustively documents the history of global cultures. Sowell has literally THOUSANDS of published pages on subjects from economics to education to photography... and this erudite & smarmy man seems intent on denigrating him because he's 'technically' wrong about German being an older language than English.
My guess is Sowell, whom is an intellectual giant towering over this person, wrote a title that insulted him.
Sowell would dub this guy 'Anointed'.
Thanks a lot for this video with so much educational content and its very understandable explanation! Please do more of this!
Kudos for having watched this video. I ran accidentally in it and after some eight minutes I was so fed up, I couldn't focus any longer. The clip - intentionally or by accident - turned out as a honey pot for right-wing extremists, stating a lot of crap about Germany and its history. And thanks for the easily understandable introduction of linguistics.
At least not entirely unintentionally. Sowell is a ... controversial figure, and the extreme right are just up his alley.
I too watched that video recently (the algorithm seems to work), and it flattered my oppressed German pride, but as soon as I watched a few other videos of this channel I recognized that there is an agenda behind all of them. I'm not quite sure which one, but I felt repelled and excluded it off from further suggestions.
Same here... That video contains all kinds of vague and oversimplified statements. So much that i had to turn it off. The hallmarks of unsubstantiated populist drivel. It just goes against my German self to listen to shit like that. And the comments almost made me hurl.
Rewboss' short summary sounded like it was exactly that.
"German history is way more than the 2nd WW" - I might be priviliged of having had great history teachers, but that onr is kind of obvious and when that statement makes you feel understood, you probably have an issue ("wounded national pride" is a great way to put it) and easily dragged into whatever glorious / supreme Image the dude paints.
Thomas Sowell is black, raised in Harlem (the one in USA) and a Harvard professor of economics. Hardly a right wing extremist. His key message is that culture can sometimes affect individual outcomes more than external discrimination.
Also, I would point out that that hand pose you do is characteristic of Gendo Ikari.
I took a class when I was learning Advanced to Proficient C2 and my teacher, not a Foreigner Course teacher, but a English to native English speakers teacher, she showed us the history of the English Language, and the material showed very consistently that German as we have contemporaneously with the earliest documents in what could be called Proto-English and that denotes a point in which English derived from that.
However German did had a long time of being similar to its roots. And while "semantically" you seem right, in practice, what Sowell says is more accurate.
“a long time similar to its roots” No, at all. You have totally failed to grasp the information contained in this video.
but is it more cold outside or at night?
The German language to me seems to have changed very little since the middle ages grammatically, but a lot phonetically. Mediæval English texts are difficult to understand today because the syntax is unfamiliar. Mediæval German texts, on the other hand, are hard to read because the spellings are all different.
9:40 is called a scholar's cradle (see Lindybeige).
That is not entirely true.
First, all texts from older German variants we have today are written(!) examples of regional variants. This sounds obvious and unproblematic until you realise that dialects and variants were much more volatile when there was no standardised (written) language.
But even disregarding that, it is not only the spelling that changed; even Middle High German, which is still relatively easy to relate to, has a plethora of lexemes, phonemes and diphthongs modern German doesn't recognise anymore -- not to mention that the pronunciation was fundamentally different, quantitatively and qualitatively.
There *were* grammatical changes, too: have a look at partitive genitive, for example. Or negations. Or counting words. Or articles.
Middle High German doesn't sound *at all* like modern German.
@@mkb_de I've never read anything by Wallenstein, but considering his unusual, ambitious, and decidedly sinister character, I'm not at all surprised that literary endeavours didn't come easy to him. He's not exactly a gentleman of the time.
Now, Madame Palatine, on the other hand, was born a princess of the Wittelsbacher; it doesn't get any more high-bred than that in Europe. But her personality was such, that she prided herself on not conforming to the rules, conventions, and expectations directed at someone of her station. Ironically, letters also might, not be the best medium for analysis in comparison to modern German, because it had yet to be standardised.
Either way, Wallenstein sits firmly in the Frühneuhochdeutsch phase of German (and Madame Palatine close to it) -- which is still not quite modern High German. Comparing the former to the latter as an 'old-fashioned precursor' doesn't do it justice. There *still* are several grammatical changes occurring at the time.
Sehr gut zusammengefasst. Bravo! Gern mehr davon. Vielleicht mit noch mehr Kontext aus den Völkerwanderungen?
French and German in their older versions got issued their official birth certificates on February 14th 842 in the so called Oaths of Strasbourg, which doesn't neccesarily makes them twins but siblings growing up with the same parents...
With regards to the Great Consonant Shift, how do you think the Latin "quando" morphed into "when"? [In which order did the following happen - the dropping of the "o", the change in the main vowel sound, or the shift in the initial consonant sound from /k/ to /x/ to /hw/ to /w/?] As a Scot, I aspirate the "wh" in "what" - which is a little bit "old-fashioned".
The split happened before latin. The both come from the proto indo european something like kwam. In proto german the k became an aspriated consonant. And in latin they added the particle do
I speak german as a native and I'm fluid in english. This combination helps to understand old texts. Also knowing about the vowel shift. Beowulf is to far into the past for me to read easily. Maybe I should dive into this language. To unlock even more beautiful old texts. 🤗
Old English is a beautiful language, but to learn it means as much study and dedication as learning any modern European language. It had three genders of nouns (masculine, feminine, neuter), with four cases, two types of verbs (strong and weak) with more conjugations, a number of irregular verbs, and the myriad endings you find in modern German or Latin. If you know German, that gives you a head start over a speaker of modern English! But it still means a lot of memorizing of noun and pronoun forms, verbs, and so on. If you want to get an idea of it without devoting the time to actually learning it (hard to do if one has a job and a life to live!), there are sites on the Web where you can access some texts in bilingual editions (Old English with modern English translation). For example, try Aelfric's homilies in the Skeat edition, where you can find the Old English line by line with translation immediately below. And you can see how many words are so close that you can figure out quite a bit. First, access a site online that teaches basic OE grammar--and particularly the alphabet and spelling/pronunciation rules--and get used to the runic letters that OE had in common with North Germanic languages (Old Norse and descendants).And then dive in!
Try Aelfric's Life of St. Edmund--it's actually quite interesting, with a miraculous wulf (wolf), "graedig and hungrig" ( greedy and hungry--the final "g" is like a consonantal "y"), It's a sermon written to appeal to a mixed congregation, many or most of whom were illiterate peasants, so the style is fairly straightforward, just the colloquial language of the time, not a high-flown literary style. It does use a prose version of the alliterative poetry style--possibly to make it easier for the congregation to remember. From the first words:
Sum swithe gelaerned munuc com suthan ofer sae ...
A certain very learned monk came from the south over the sea ...
you can begin to recognize that this is indeed English, but with the grammatical forms modern English has lost, and far fewer articles and the prepositions that we now use to substitute for grammatical suffixes.
If you do a little reading this way, I think you'll enjoy it. Hope so, anyway!
9:40 It is a hand tent.
Languages and dialects are still "shifting" nowadays. A small example: The village my grandmother lived in was south of the gsi/gwä-border while she was a child, but northeast of it since my mother's childhood. Gsi? Gwä? The first is the Alemannic past participle of "to be" ("sein" in German / "sei" in Alemannic) which is formed regularly, while 'gwä' is the Swabian form of German "gewesen" - the past participle of "sein", which is an irregular verb in German. Swabian is an Alemannic dialect, however - which is spreading to the South since about 200 years (accelerated since about 100 years by railway lines) and supplanting other Alemannic dialects. ;)
Ah, the old confusion between the terms 'German' and 'germanic'. Similarly, I have seen people arguing that Charlemange was German, not French, since the Franks were a germanic tribe, so how could it be otherwise? (Ignoring of course the fact the neither 'Germany' nor 'France' existed back then, and wouldn't for a few centuries to come). Maybe this confusion wouldn't exist if there were entirely seperate terms, like for 'Italian' and 'latin'. After all, both Italians and latin people inhabited the same area and spoke a related language, but no one would jump to the conclusion that they are somehow identical or claim that Italian is much older than French.
Also, the word "German" only was a substitute for the word "Dutch". "Dutch" comes from "Deutsch" and if everything would have went right we would say "Dutchland" instead of "Germany". At some point though Englishman began to call people from the Netherlands the "Dutch". Later they needed a new term for the people next to the "Dutch".
Germany DID exist back then. The mistake you seem to make is you confuse the cultural region Germany with the national state Germany. Yes, Charlemagne was a Frank. People who call themselves "Franken" still exist in Germany, even though these are not the Franks that Charlemagne belonged to, just as the people in the German state Saxony have very little to do with the tribe of the Saxons. The "Franks" were originally from the rhinelands. The people that lived there when the tribe of the franks was first mentioned still have descendents there. It's not like they were genocided or all emigrated. And the Franks that conquered today's France were very ethnocentic people. At least in the early middle ages, they did not mix with the gallo-romanic people, they even considered it a crime, and they did see other germanic tribes as their brethren; which did not stop them from fighting wars between one another, since war was just something between "politics by other means" and a traditional annual sporting event. I'm exaggerating, but the main point is that the "Hate War" is a modern phenomenon. Before the 20th century, people fought wars without hating one another. But in the early middle ages frankish aristocrats usually married aristocrats from other germanic tribes. So why not see the Germanic people who lived on lands that later became German as Germans?
@@FantadiRienzo 100 % agree. Since "Karl der Große" (aka Carolus magnus, Charlemagne) was of Germanic culture and descent he must be considered a German. We would count him among the French if he had been of Gallo-Roman descent (like Saint Martin, for example), which he wasn't.
@@GrandTheftChris And because of that fact, a couple years ago I was kinda surprised to find out the so-called "Pennsylvania Dutch" is in fact... German.
Ok, where should I start... First, I did not confuse the nation state Germany, which exists since 1871, with Germany in general. Yes, you could call e.g. the German Confederation "Germany", which predates the German Empire, and you could go even further back. However, the first entity that one could very, very broadly call "Germany" is the Holy Roman Empire. The HRE in turn evolved out of the Frankish Empire, with its first emperor Charlemagne (surprise!).
As you asked: "So why not see the Germanic people who lived on lands that later became German as Germans?". But the Franks like Charlemange did not live on lands that laber became Germany! It is nonsense to claim that Charlemagne was either French or German, because none of these labels existed back then.
Maybe think about the distionction between "German" and "germanic" this way: Swedish, Norwegian, Danish and Dutch are germanic languages. The respective countries were settled by germanic tribes during the Migration Period. Yet you wouldn't call any of them German! The only reason one would think germanic tribes living in modern day Germany are German is because the words similar. If you state the phrase in another language ("Des peuples germaniques qui habitaient en Allemagne moderne" or "Germanische Stämme, die im heutigen Deutschland lebten"), this becomes evident.
i enjoyed your videos quite some time, this made me hit the subscribe button :D
I saw the mentioned video and to me as a German it looked like pure and utter bullshit beginning with the first "fact" that is nonsense. After that the creator of the video says that many Germans left their homeland and created "colonies" in other countries (so what? Many people from many countries did the same. That is nothing special) and that they kept speaking German (well, that is nothing special too. If you create a settlement with all your neighbors speaking German then you have no reason to learn another language. Look at Chinatown in New York, most people there still speak the Chinese language for the same reason). Yes, the "facts" in that video are not taught in school, because nobody would dare to waste the time of the students with such meaningless crap.
Would have been nice to include a lint to the referenced Tom Scott video, wouldn't it?
It should be there in a card. Is it not showing for you?
@@rewboss A 'card'? Not sure what a card in this context is. I was looking for a look in the video description.
"German" remains closer to it's ancestral languages (yes plural) than English did mostly because local varieties remain even though faded.
English gets the L mostly because the Normans transformed Anglish beyond recognition and as such English as we know it was born.
Langfocus made a nice video about it.
French has a similarly definite beginning imo though they have managed to celebrate their first 1000 years already.
In a way fun to think that had it not been for the dislike between the peasants and nobles we would all be speaking French nowadays.
The Normans didn't transform English "beyond recognition". They added a significant amount of vocabulary relating to things like the arts, the military, government and jurisprudence, but apart from that they quickly started speaking English -- not the other way around.
They'd done it before. They were originally from Scandinavia, but when they settled in France, instead of imposing their language on the locals, they adopted the local language and started speaking French.
@@rewboss hmm to be fair some of the fundamental changes such as th --> y came later.
Beyond recognition is a strong word I admit - key turning point no less.
I do wonder however if the Normans ultimately pushed the adoption of French when they fell into modern day Normandy - at that point I assume either some Gaelic or Latin would have persisted in parts of the countryside and slowly faded away.
@@aniinnrchoque1861 the Normans that invaded England were no longer the ones who had settled in France two centuries before. William's army was made up of Normans (1/3) but also of Bretons, Manceaux, Picards, Flemish, etc. Very little was left of the Scandinavian origins, only remained the dynasty and the glorified legend/history. Had they been collectively named differently in 1066, like "Seinois" or "Manchots" then less people (English mainly) would nowadays insist (for dubious reasons) on their (partial and remote) Scandinavian origins.
Also let's not forget the Plantagenet dynasty that later on ruled over England for quite some time had even less in common with Scandinavians...
Another fact is in that time "France" was much more populated than Britain. In that sense England was only considered as some sorts of colony by the Normans after the conquest. They eradicated the Anglo-Saxon aristocracy and did not want to hear anything of the local language and culture. Nothing much was to be preserved. Those were hard times by our actual standards.
@@jandron94 this would be the first time I've heard of people that are conflating the Normans with Scandinavians. I mean that's like calling Dublin or Waterford Scandinavian.
With the Normans came the then already established French lingo from the mainland and the rest is history.
Your hands at the end were steepling. It's a natural body language expression that typically communicates to others confidence.
I always thought of languages driffting apart and becoming their own thing when a member of one group can no longer understand a member of the other group.
That being said, imagine a bavarian in berlin :)
I mean the written language is still the same in both places, but when high german is not used as a means to communicate, than communication defaults to gestures and calling each other "Saupreiss" and "Kuhumschubser" xD
Oh, so much prejudice! Except for in some rural regions, people in Bavaria speak standard German to communicate! There may be a Bavarian accent but that's just about it. Noone ever uses the expression "Saupreiß" anymore - that's history as well as satire. And what is "Kuhumschubser" supposed to mean? Never heard of that.
I spent a few years in Berlin studying at the FU and must say, that people were far more intolerant than here in Bavaria. I don't speak a special Bavarian dialect, only my intonation is southern German. That was enough for some Berliners to make rude remaks.
Does that make Dutch German than, though, since I can almost perfectly understand Dutch people when they speak, though I can't speak Dutch myself. But I can speak German and Afrikaans. I think even the idea of a language can be difficult as there are many languages with so many similarities that it is something difficult to tell them apart. Then there is Swiss German which is theoretically German, but I don't understand much of it.
I found this video very interesting, will definitely watch more.
it's difficult to say, as you need perfect monolingual speakers to test this theory, with no outside influence, which can sometimes be difficult to get a hold of monolingual speakers
we understand shakespeare, don't we? well we constantly study him, and maybe the first time you read shakespeare was when you were small. let's say shakespeare's impact on modern english is an immutable part of modern english. still, does someone with 0 *direct* knowledge of shakespeare understand shakespeare?
it's difficult to find other examples for english since many native english speakers seem to be monolingual, but it isn't difficult to see how teching a population more variety can expand what may be called their language
there exist such a thing as one-way intelligibility, such as with quebec french and paris-french, or lisbon-portugues and brasilia-portuguese where one population is exposed to the other's way of talking, and to the first population, the language(s) is/are relatively similar, but to the second group, it's unintelligible
I'm from Austria and basically everyone here speaks a dialect that's more or less similar to the dialects spoken in Bavaria. It's pretty easy for an Austrian to understand Northern Germans, but they really struggle to understand us.
Good video! It would be good to specify that "High German" in this video is NOT the "Standard High German" students typically learn and that German news presenters use.
But I am always amazed when I notice English words with a Germanic origin and understand without looking up: maiden name = Mädchen-Name
pay a fee = ein (Stück) Vieh bezahlen ?
gift = Gift ?
I must only beware of the false friends ;-)
The German cognate changed its meaning.
You still give Gift to someone, it's just that you want that person dead, not happy.
@@Leofwine There are still bars called "Giftbuden" at North German beaches. You can't buy poisen there despite the name. They are called like this because the barmaid will "give" you a drink. Or to say it in Low German: "Da gift et wat" (You'll get something there). The German word Gift (poison) is actually closely related to the English word gift and still had the same meaning in the 1700s. You can see it in the German word "Mitgift" (dowry). The modern translation for gift is actually "Gabe" and not "Geschenk" (present).
Very interesting video, well researched and explained. I'm not a linguist or really interested in the evolution of a language, never heard or remember hearing of the great wovel change at all. Once again something learned - thank you!
I especially liked your explanation of this change on the word "ship" in German "Schiff", which made me think about it. Being a German I know that most of the verbs are written and pronounced as the noun. But for "Schiff" it is different. So in German we say "Ich fahre mit dem Schiff..." which literally translate to "I drive with the ship", but never say "Ich schiffe....". On the other hand I remember my grandparents sometimes say "Ich schipperte..." which is an old version of driving a ship and contains "Schip" instead of "Schiff" . "Ich schiffe..." is instead a slang for "I pee..." in sentences like "Ich schiffte in den Schnee" -> "I peed into the snow".
;) na ja, nur die Bayern und die Schwaben "schiffen" in den Schnee LOL. Mein Urugroßvater war Schiffssteuermann in Böhmen und "schipperte" die Elbe entlang bis Hamburg, so erzählte es mein Vater.
man schifft vielleicht nicht, aber man verschifft ;)
Reminds me to my father, who made this joke by wrongly translating the following latin sentence:
"Cum portus plenus erat, Caesar juxta navigavit" to
"Kaum war der Hafen voll, schiffte Cäsar daneben"
Notice: Hafen translates into German pot or port.
Come on, if a mere shift in consonants is enough for you to call it a new language (fair enough), then English is originated after 1066, when half of your original vocabulary has been exchanged with French words. That is definitely a bigger change than some consonants shifting, which itself could very well seen as just a shift in dialect.
That is when it became Middle English.
@@torspedia No, that is when it became a totally new language. No one on earth would consider a swap of half the vocabulary something else than becoming a completely new language. The village next to my home village in Bavaria is called Wessobrunn. There has been found a prayer from around 800, called the "Wessobrunner Gebet", one of the oldest written texts in German. I have very little problems to translate it with a bit of fantasy, as it has all the words we still use. Now try the same with an "English" text from around 800 - you'll find it impossible because the words are *German* , but half of them have disappeared from your vocabulary without any trace since then. The other half you may be able to recognize, just like me, but it's just 50% of them, and your fantasy won't help you to grasp the meaning of the whole text.
English is easy to learn for Germans as well as for French people, because both of us find half of your vocabulary to be quite similar to ours. It should be the other way round, too, that French and German are easy for you as well, but we all know that English speakers are very bad in learning new languages …
@@hape3862 Be careful … the meanings of words drift with time. So you may _think_ you are reading that text from 800, but you are almost certainly misinterpreting words because of that meaning-drift.
[Okay, the "Wessobrunner Gebet" won't have any meaning-drift, but that's because _it's a prayer_ and prayers don't change. So it's not a good example.]
When I was studying for a semester an der Uni Mainz, my Mittelhochdeutsch Professorin told me that she loved having American students in her class, because we treated Mittelhochdeutsch as Yet Another Foreign Language, rather than "just some olde-fashionede version of Neuhochdeutsch." We [Ausländische Studierende] assumed nothing about the definition of the Mittlehochdeutsche words, she told us, giving us an advantage on learning the older meanings.
@@John_Weiss I find this lady's approach questionable. What should prevent me from considering Martin Luther's translation of the Bible, the Song of the Nibelungs or the Wessobrunn Prayer as the language of my ancestors, which has changed a lot, but whose root words are still the same and whose meaning has not changed as much as this lady would have you believe? I just remembered the word "gafregin", which translates as "erfuhr" - well, when you don't even have a decent current vocabulary at your disposal, it seems like a completely different language! But if you know your mother tongue (here: German), you will of course hear our "erfragte" in "gafregin" - and not "erfuhr" - which is an even better - because closer - translation.
I did not study linguistics, but Ancient Greek and Latin, and if these two languages taught me anything, then to recognize word stems!
There is a UA-cam channel where people from different countries try to understand foreign languages that are somewhat related. And one is amazed how much is still intelligible.
PS: The Wessobrunner Gebet isn't a standardized prayer like The Lord's Prayer! It's text has been completely unknown until its discovery. So, it's as good an example for meaning shift (or lack thereof!) as any other text from that time period.
@@hape3862 On the "Wessobrunner Gebet" - ah, I read, "Gebet" and my brain translated it to "Prayer".
As for the professor who taught, "Einfuhrung in das Übersetzen des Mittelhochdeutschens und der Arbeitsweise des Mediavistiks," - okay, not the course's exact name, and probably full of grammar mistakes, but it's been over 30 years and I only vaguely remember it. But I distinctly remember that it was _long._
The professor's point was that the Germans taking the course came in already thinking they knew what everything meant, but didn't. As a saying in English goes, "The Past is a foreign country." That applies to _our own_ past. Language encodes culture, and the culture that _you_ live in here in the early 21st Century is already slightly different from the culture of 1980s West-Germany … which is when I was taking that class. The culture of the 12th-14th Centuries was very, very different from our own. That means Mittelhochdeutsch encoded a very different culture.
But since we Ausländische Studierende didn't see the 12th-14th Century culture of the Holy Roman Empire as, "our past," we didn't fall into the trap of thinking, "…and therefore, the same as us." Mind you, when learning US history, _YOU_ are the one who will have that identical advantage over _us._ It's a very human thing to do.
Though i get your point regarding the fact that English and German are essentially the same age - I think what that essay ment to explain is the fact German culture persists in the diaspora (and as you stated evolves, and the german surenames are just an easy way to follow culture), and this has been happening since Roman times (I'm not sure about that specific video, but theres a video where Sowell talks about the beer industry)
I do agree - to some degree. But - fun fact: Most modern Krauts might understand Old English better than modern Brits. Also, I'd call modern English a Creole Language, because of its simple grammar and other reduced complexity.
although (as was explained in the video) one word became "ship" in english and "Schiff" in german, we still today say eg "wir schippern übers Meer". thus even nowadays, we have some remnants from the old times ...
I'd be interested to see what would happen if you gave an average German the text of Beowulf and asked them to summarize it for you.
@@rewboss Well, the problem is of course the sound and the pronunciation, and second the meaning of the words - and quite a bunch of today unknown words. But, and I do not only speak for me, if you have a trained person reading such a text (a linguist eg., people like Daniel Scholten), I do understand quite a lot of those old texts. This is true for Beowulf and true for texts like the "Merseburger Zaubersprüche" or Otfrid von Weißenburg. If you try to read it yourself, you will likely don't understand much, yes.
But, the sound of the modern English language is even further away from Old English, so for many Germans Old English sound a bit like a very strange old dialect but for many modern English people it sounds like a complete different language. In German, many consonants in the words were changed - but not the pronunciation of the consonants. But that's exactly what happened in English: The sound of all vowels and consonants have changed.
That's not enough to call a language a creole. Scandinavian languages went through great simplifications from Old Norse as well. English is not alone.
@@d.b.2215 It is. Weird questions with do, strange infinitive constructions with -ing, total loss of grammatical genders, no verb suffixes (but same at least in Swedish), one or you instead of a generic man (One/you should know.), V2 word order, words come from many languages (Latin, Celtic, West and Nordic Germanic languages, French, ...) etc. pp...
Even for conlangs it's not always that easy to say. Sometimes you can maybe use a certain date when the creator first published or presented the language or I guess you could use the first day they started working on it but often times it's just a very gradual thing starting out as just random thoughts and notes that gets refined and fixed step by step and can certainly stretch over decades. Though I guess you can at least be precise to the century and most likely the decade, maybe even the year.
Yeah for sure. Tolkien's conlangs evolved throughout his lifetime, so there isnt a definite date for when Sindarin and Quenya came into being
Sehr schönes Thema. Ich nehme an, es war von dem, den du kritisierst, nicht gemeint, dass sich Englisch von Hochdeutsch abgespalten hätte. Briten nennen uns doch heute noch Germans. Gemeint sollte sein, dass Germanisch älter ist als Englisch. Und der Zweig Germanisch zu Westgermanisch zu Deutsch soll der Hauptzweig sein - davon hat sich Anglofriesisch (später Englisch) abgespalten.
Die nennen uns "Germans" weil sie das englische Wort für "Deutsch" - "Dutch" aus Gewohnheit über eine sehr lange Zeit für die Niederländer benutzt haben. Das ist wirklich der einzige Grund. Es ist ein Ersatz, mehr nicht. Normalerweise wären wir heute aus "Dutchland" und würden "Dutch" sprechen.
Aber warum sollte das "der Hauptzweig" sein? Germanisch und German sind zwei unterschiedliche Dinge - das eine ist die übergeordnete Kategorie, das andere ein Teil davon. Deutsch und Englisch haben sich beide aus früheren germanischen Sprachen entwickelt. Diese Darstellung als Baum ist, äh, sehr vereinfachend, freundlich ausgedrückt.
"Germanisch ist älter als Englisch" - ja klar. Es ist auch älter als Deutsch. Weil es die allgemeine Kategorie aller Sprachen bezeichnet, zu denen Englisch und Deutsch gehören, inklusive ihrer Vorläufer.
@@varana Es gibt eben sehr viele Menschen, die Germanen und Deutsche, Germanisch und Deutsch miteinander identifizieren, es gleichsetzen. So ist der Satz gemeint, dass Deutsch älter als Englisch ist.
@@janschlumpf Da liegen diese sehr vielen Menschen halt falsch. ;) Und deswegen stimmt der Satz aus dem Video auch nicht.
I love learning with you!
That was quite interesting. Learned a lot, thx.
Great info. Thoroughly interesting.
Thank you, it always bothered me when people speak of ages of languages, now I can point them to your video. Also that's the rewboss pyramid.
So may I ask to what the Bavaric and schwäbisch dialects belong? Higher or lower German? From what I remember the Higher German developed as a merchant tounge to communicate between the various German kingdoms
To me, born in the North of Germany, High German was the language of the posh people
- or like you say the merchants. In no way are the South German dialects like Bavarian or Swabian HIGH German.
The theory that you name the language after the topography of the country does not make sense to me.
Nice to see someone who knows what they are talking about amongst the usual sea of linguistic disinformation that I encounter daily on my travels through youtube :-) - subscribed. If you want to see some crazy assertions about a language, do a video on Tamil and then stand back.
Dankeschön. Das war sehr interessant.
The shift of T to Z in High German is probably the most salient one that lets us relate many modern German to English words (while the actually meaning may have shifted as well). By the way, Z is always pronounced /ts/ in German, never like Z in English.
zehn ten
Zeh toe
zu to
Hitze heat
Zoll toll
zählen tell (actually, count), also Zahl tale (actually, number). This is better reflected in "erzählen/tell" and "Erzählung/tale".
Zeit tide (actually, time, which comes from another root)
@Martin Cregan tty means "teletype" to me. :-) I mean, they started to ban "master" out of any contexts, so be prepared for the worst.
Great video. While I’m not a linguist, I do have my doubts regarding the separation between West Germanic languages and East Germanic languages. In your language tree, the East Germanic languages are missing, probably because they died out. Though I’m not so sure they did. There is very little evidence of the two language families outside the Wulfila Bible. Much of it is based on educated guesses.
I wouldn’t be surprised if West Germanic and East Germanic have a more complex relationship than previously thought. Particularly regarding Old High German and it’s origins.
Be that as it may, I’m currently working my way through the „Nibelungenlied“ which is of course the most famous Middle High German Text. At first it looks really foreign but one quickly realised how similar it actually still is to modern High German. There were some notable vowel-shifts since, but at some point I realised that particularly Swiss-German still sounds a lot like it. Also, me being from Swabia, I can often easily deduce things as in my native dialect there are also still different diphthongs compared to High German which relate to some of the Middle High German sounds.
Old High German on the other hand is a different matter. I have looked at the „Hilfebrandlied“ and couldn’t make heads or tails of it. A few words here or there maybe, but for more you really need to dig in and learn about all the sound shifts.
Of course I also can’t read Old Anglo-Saxon, but I feel like it slightly helps to speak both German and English. Often the meanings of some of the more archaic words can be deduced if one speaks German. But of course it’s not enough to actually read such a text. For that you once again have to dig in deep.
5:18 I am missing the anglos on this map. Just a few saxons and mostly friesians. And what about the influence of the normans and the french?
Norman French didn't have such a profound effect on the language as some people seem to think.
The map shows the approximate extent of the West Germanic language varieties in the early 10th century. Anglia is believed to be in present-day Schleswig-Holstein, but the languages spoken in that region were North Germanic -- specifically, Anglian Danish.
Really liked your video, which is so clear and reasonable. I am always drawn to explanations that don't leap to assumptions but acknowledge that there are limits to what we can figure out in the absence of hard evidence! In the absence of a time machine that could send us back to hear ancestral languages spoken, we are actually fairly sure about some things, but others are mysteries. Part of the appeal of the period that used to be called the Dark Ages, for me, at any rate.
I won't say more about it than the following: Between 600 and 800 the so-called second or "High German sound shift" took place. It divided the regional languages in the German-speaking area into High German and Low German speaker groups. Modern High German has been spoken since around 1350. Modern English did not become established until the 1700s. Early Modern English 1500-1700. Middle English 1100-1500. If you ask yourself what was English or German before, do you mean the modern language. Thus, modern High German prevailed 350 years before modern English. Because Anglo Frisian is not English. Just as little as Low or High German is West Germanic.
That is, even if you go back to the roots. And the year 600-800 puts it as the root of modern german, anglo-frisian is not english! So the German language definitely came into existence before that. no matter how you twist and turn it!
@varalderfreyr8438
Certainly! And also understand it 100%! For example, "Hausbuch des Michael Leone." The expression is not used today, but it is understood 100%. Because the syntax is also almost identical to modern High German.
An even better example: "Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung." Unfortunately, I don't know the author of this book. The spelling was different, and not uniform throughout the German-speaking region. Nevertheless, it is 100% understandable for everyone! The house book clearly shows tendencies towards older expressions because the author was born around 1300. However, with "Angriff ist die beste Verteidigung," it's almost modern German. As mentioned, only the expression wouldn't be used today.
@varalderfreyr8438 Example: Frühneuhochdeutsch: Sô begunden sî, diu sunne ir lioht ûf die hûsmauer schînete.
Hochdeutsch: So begannen sie, die Sonne ihr Licht auf die Hausmauer scheinen ließ.
Frühneuhochdeutsch: Min hêrz verlangte nâch der minne, diu als ein süezer bluomen gart in minem gemoete erblüete.
Hochdeutsch: Mein Herz verlangte nach der Liebe, die wie ein süßer Blumengarten in meinem Gemüt erblühte.
Frühneuhochdeutsch: Diu vogele sangen ir melodiâ in dem wâlde, und die lüfte brâchten den süezen duft von den bluomen.
Hochdeutsch: Die Vögel sangen ihre Melodie im Wald, und die Lüfte brachten den süßen Duft von den Blumen.
Frühneuhochdeutsch: Ich gedenke an die sternen, die bî nachte am himel schînen, als lüchten gotes klâre ougen.
Hochdeutsch: Ich denke an die Sterne, die bei Nacht am Himmel scheinen, als würden Gottes klare Augen leuchten.
Frühneuhochdeutsch: Daz flûsse rûsche laut in der nâhe, und diu welle tanzete im morgenwind.
Hochdeutsch: Der Fluss rauschte laut in der Nähe, und die Welle tanzte im Morgenwind.
The spelling is different, including the orthography, but the syntax is the same.
@varalderfreyr8438 You're Welcome
German is much closer to its common ancestor with English. Languages do not always slowly evolve. Perhaps we could even consider English after the Norman invasion to be a new language, distinct from what's usually referred as Old English. The same criteria of intercomprehensibility between two languages should be applied across time.
You see... no, there wasn't a sudden change in 1066 that created a completely new language. This is a myth, and I wish people wouldn't keep repeating it.
The Normans introduced a few new words into the language, but it took a _very_ long time for them to become accepted, and most of them related to things that the Normans took charge of -- government, the courts, the military, and so on. It's worth pointing out that German also has a lot of French words, some of them going back a very long way: English isn't unusual in this respect.
What did happen to English during this period is that it fragmented into a number of very different dialects that were only partially mutually comprehensible, and which didn't merge back together again until the end of the Middle English period when the introduction of the printing press standardized the language. That was the most profound change, but it took a couple hundred years and wasn't the result of the Norman invasion.
@@rewboss It didn't really merge back until the BBC began broadcasting across the UK, unless you pretend the London standard was spoken across Britain. The Middle English period saw a very profound change that was the loss of the case system and the extreme simplification of its syntax. Either way, the question remains of whether English has departed suddenly and drastically to the point that it's something essentially different or not after a particular period. I am afraid that you come up with a recollection of facts, but facts, even if accurate, even if a comprehensive and balance collection is made of them, do not provide, by themselves, a criteria on age and identity of a given speak.
Great Video! Danke.
I would say that William the conqueror made such an impact onto the English language that maybe it can be seen as as a big divider between a situation where the languages spoken in England and those that were spoken in the area of north Germany are kind of dialects of the same language or members of a very closely related family of languages to a situation where there is a very distinct line between them.
The Norman invasion marked the transition from Old English to Middle English, but its impact wasn't as huge as some people imagine.
@@rewboss
When I look at the vocabulary of modern English it looks to me a bit like half and half Plattdütsch and French. I always credited
this to the Anglosaxons being ruled by the French speaking Normans. Probably a too simplistic vies
Am I missing something important here, or was that process just slower than one might imagine.
@@MusikCassette Also what you need to bear in mind is that this French decisive influence is hard to stomach for some Brits...