I'm from Nordfriesland (southern part and mainland) and just yesterday I read the entries of the 7th century in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - never learned old english and was only relying on my frisian influenced low german skills but understood pretty much all of it ....although those entries are quite short and confronted with a longer text I might struggle a bit more ......but I read longer swedish texts yesterday as well and this quite worked...
You Brits are family just like the rest of us, as a Dane I very much appreciate how you have made (a kind of) Danish become a dominant world language. :-)
@@lhpl Yes, I think we should recognise the English as honorary Spare Danes and adopt them - half of their basic words and many parts of their grammar are similar to ours in DK anyway, even though they typically can't hear it on the fly 😉
Thank you for the challenge. I definitely had to use both the written and spoken clues, but in the end I managed to get all of words right (with some shaky guesswork on the first one). Very entertaining.
How so? I mean, it's cool but most people don't even know what old English is, and it's a dead language anyway. Even more obscure and dare I say, "useless" than Latin.
Look at all the videos like this one where he's guessing the meaning of words and sentences. His knowledge of Old English gives him an edge with basically every west Germanic language@Johnnybomb1
@Johnnybomb1 Probably because if you understand old English you understand more of the connections. I speak Dutch and understand west-frisian, wich let's me understand old English better. The frisian that is spoken in this video is more german-frisian but I still understand it cause I understand 4 germanic language's
The language spoken here is Söl'ring, an Insular dialect of the North Frisian language. It was heavily influencend by Southern Danish dialects and has a lot of North Germanic loan vocabulary. Söl'ring has around 80 native speakers and 400 L2 speakers and is thereby the fourth biggest of the 10 remaining dialects of NF. It is extremly endangered and although it is still taught in some schools on the island of Söl (Sylt/Sild), its odds of survival are very low.
I studied North Frisian at Kiel University some years ago and wasn't aware that Söl'ring is that much endangered already. I find it to be way more exciting than Fering/Öömrang. Too bad I didn't learn as much Söl'ring as I learned Mooring. I really appreciate your mother tongue.
Danish is a North Germanic language. I guess you mean loan words from the low German dialects also spoken in Northern Germany which just like Frisian, Dutch, Luxembourgish and all other German dialects are part of the West Germanic branch.
I have a question... What exactly are Söl’ring and Fering and Mooring and Öömrang, are these the official names of the Frisian languages? I am trying to learn all Germanic languages, but I cannot find videos teaching some of them, such as the ancient languages and the Frisian languages and some of the German-based languages!
As a native West-Frisian speaker, the difference with North-Frisian spoken here was way bigger than I expected. Still mostly understandable but with some effort. Really cool to hear 😃
I'm a native speaker of Fering which is one of the closest related dialects of North Frisian to Sölring, and even I had quite some trouble with some parts (though other parts were quite similar to how I would have said it in Fering). North Frisian is very heterogeneous.
I am Dutch, understand West Frisian very well, because I was born there, and I am also learning Swedish and German, but this was difficult for me to understand.
This was very exciting. I’m Swedish, German speaker with danish cousins, so I understand and speak danish quite good. Some pronunciations sound very danish! It would be great to see this language getting a revival! Bravo Moritz!
As a Swedish speaker this was like a hand in a glove. All the sentences was easy to figure out. Some words where almost exactly the same as in Swedish.
Yes! First time on one of these that I am better than the panelists - though I did mess up on the last one (thought something like "shore meadow" instead of dune, but that is probably because I have no idea what the landscape looks like). BUT I am not sure I would have done as well if I hadn't had the written form along with the spoken one.
@@Asptuber It's closer to Scandinavian, because it is, I'd say it's the closest to my dialect of Scanian than any other Germanic dialect. Though most Swedes have a problem understanding me, so yeah... Scanian is weird, I mean we have the weirdos in southern Scania that can't do anything but roll their Rs, and then we have me an actual Scanian speaker. Dää aau sau maungen fejl moj dé anere i Skaune. It is Oh so many faults with the others in Scania.
Als Nederlandse zijn voor mij ook sommige woorden herkenbaar. Het woord "Diil" lijkt op het Nederlandse woord "Deel" een deel of een gedeelte van iets. Vooral de uitspraak helpt mij, om de vergelijking te maken. Ik ben ook bekend met verschillende Nederlandse dialecten en het Duits, daardoor leg je ook makkelijker een link.
I managed to guess sand dune, but somehow completely missed the Frisian diil was like English dale. I heard "north frisian landscape" and "bare in the sun" or something, so just guessed something you might see on the coast.
I love this quartet. It's my favorite one together with Jackson Crawford's appearance. Generally, I love the kindness and knowledgeability the people on this channel encounter each other with. Okay, that was grammatically very wrong, I beg your pardon, non-native speaker here. Love to y'all!
For those who love comparisons between sister languages and especially regional ones, this is a linguistic treat, thank you so much. I always give the due thumbs-up and share by the way:-)
As a Brit living in Switzerland I was surprised how much I understaood, but it was nevertheless quite difficult. Excellent content and very interesting! Well done all.
I understand Plattdeutsch, and thought this would be an easy challenge. I was wrong 😅. But interesting to me: When I stopped reading the script, and only listened to Moritz, it was easier, and I recognized more words/grammar.
@@PkPvre as a Scanian, I understood a lot of the words, because they sound a lot like Scanian, I mean it's more like a weird mix of Danish, Scanian and German, but still, I'd say it's not the easiest to comprehend what is being said, I'd say I'd have about a 65-70% understanding. But I mean, when I speak Scanian my friends don't understand me, whether they're Danish or Swedish, doesn't matter, so I'm used to faulty communication. Although I speak both Swedish and Danish, Swedish due to it being forced in school, and Danish because it's so close to go to Denmark to drink beer.
Sölring is the most difficult of the remaining North Frisian variants, at least in my opinion. Mooring/Bökinghiirder Frasch and Fering/Öömrang are somewhat easier to understand.
As a Czech who learns german and spend some time in Austria and Switzerland I was able to figure out the topic and got pretty close with my guesses. Love it! Want to see more!
those southern dialects are probably the furthest apart from a low german dialect or frisian. Good to see that even non-native speakers get some understanding from it. Next step, come to germany and exchange some beer.
Som amerikaner var det litt vanskelig å påpeike spesifikke ord at jeg definitivt kunne forstå, men med hjelpen av norsk og gammel engelsk kunnskap gikk det an å lese teksten uten problemer. Lurer på hvor mye fra videoen forsto du da
I like North Frisian, it sounds like broken Danish. I mean, I speak German, Danish, Swedish, Scanian and English, so it wasn't hard at all to understand. Truly interesting to hear, still, it's not as weird sounding as I'd think, it's a lot more like other Frisian dialects. The word for part, was the easiest word for me to hear and understand, as it's Dejl/Dojl in Scanian, and Del in Swedish/Danish. And of course Teil in German. And I wish the Scandinavian languages had kept the months... instead of adopting the Roman Calendar.
I agree, i'm swedish and i felt like it was definitely easier to follow the frisian in this video than to understand what the german guys were saying when giving their guesses Edit: and interestingly, i felt like the guy from northern germany was also much easier to follow than the guy from the south
Another Dane here. Being from South Jutland close to Flensburg, and even nearly trilingual (S. J. Dialect, German, Danish) since infancy, combined with the very effective way we learn English in the Nordic countries, I also would say I had the best possible conditions for understanding North Frisian, without being a "pro" linguist. Although I didn't get "sunshine".
Yeah as a Dutch I had the same feeling. Since it is either close to Dutch and close to Danish and Danish in itself is also close to Dutch all of this made a lot of sense to me. I had no problems with it. His pronounciation of words is really just like Dutch mostly. Much more so than or own Frisian.
For the next time it would be quite cool if you add a western frisian, it's similar in some extend but even for me it's difficult. I think a normal western frisian would even struggle with Northern frisian.
As a student of linguistics, native English speaker and second language German speaker, I absolutely love these videos! It’s fascinating to me to compare and contrast these language.
i enjoyed this and understood the bulk of it surprisingly well - but only because I was able to read what Moritz was saying. If I'd had to rely on the audio only, like the three participants, I don't think I'd have had much of a chance! Btw, I'd like to see a similar language challenge between all six Celtic languages - or possibly two separate challenges for the Goidelic and Brytonnic branches.
I never get anything right in these challenges and today I got all 4 correct! (I speak English natively and German as a second language. I also have some limited knowledge of Plattdeutsch, which may helped parse the phonology here)
It's crazy that as a native English speaker, I pretty much cannot understand a thing in German or North Frisian, yet as an ~intermediate Spanish speaker, I can understand enough of even Romanian or Latin to guess the right words when watching your videos!
That's because modern English is mostly loanwords and is only categorized as Germanic due to etymology since the Germanic words are actually a minority. Most of the loanwords are Romance, especially French and Latin. Another consequence of being full of loanwords from different sources is that the phonetics of the letters are completely inconsistent, which makes it hard to master for a lot of non-native speakers. It also probably plays a part in why there's so many English-derived creole languages. Some suggest standard English is a creole itself.
I think the Romance languages are generally a bit closer than the remaining Germanic languages, with English being a weird cousin. I’m a native English speaker who speaks German, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as a fair amount of French and a little Italian (and a really tiny bit of Romanian and Catalan), and listening to a bit of tv shows in and have scanned the North Germanic languages.
Technically, that language isn’t Latin and is incorrectly classified as a Latin language, even though it doesn’t look and doesn’t sound Latin at all as it has completely different word endings and letter combinations and intonations that none of the Latin languages have, which are the elements that make a language what it is, and the most accurate classification would be Thracian-Aslavic as it is isn’t truly Slavic either - however, Germanic languages come directly from Latin, so it’s normal for them to have tons of cognates, and English has more words modified from a Latin word than any other language, including most technical terms and medical terms and the 9 million scientific names of plants and animals, which are Latin-based, but most European languages also have mostly words that come from Latin, including the Slavic languages which also come from Latin, and the modern Celtic languages which come mostly from Latin and Norse and Gaulish, and even Gaulish comes mostly from Latin as well, and most words from most European languages are in fact modified from Latin words or created by combining different parts from different Latin words, including most words that aren’t obvious cognates, it’s just that English has more words that are obvious cognates, but English is a Germanic language 100% which has the typical Germanic word endings and letter combinations and sounds and sound patterns etc, and it comes mostly from Norse, so most English words that are used the most are closer to the Norse word than they are to the other Germanic languages!
I'd say North Frisian is actually closer to modern Scandinavian than it is to modern English. Especially if you speak Danish/Scanian but I'd guess you're Swedish and that would be why you had a harder time understanding.
Frisian has been heavily influenced by surrounding countries nowadays. West Frisian is influenced by Dutch and Northern Frisian is so different from West Frisian and at least from what I know West Frisian has different dialects across the province
I have absolutely no formal study, but I have done some reading of Beowulf in it's original text. Additionally, I have a smattering of German and Dutch vocabulary. Other than that, I pick up on cognates readily, most frequently in written form as I have limited access to Dutch or German speakers, however there are many words which the cognates are still better picked up in speech. I was surprised at finding I was able to guess all these samples correctly given my limited background, particularly compared to this group. I hesitate to think what a year or two of immersion in Germany and the Nederlands would do to my overall linguistic skills...
In the fourth example, 9:28 I definitely also heard a word similar to ‘Heide’- ‘heather grows on top of it’ the dune. Dune is of course also in English. Also I never thought about dale and German Tal both meaning valley. I grew up going to Sylt every summer so I love that North Frisian is featured! Love these videos!
I'm not sure how many of these Ecolinguist vids I could binge watch before I wanted to stop. I might go all day if there was enough Germanic content. Thank you.
As a native Dutch speaker it's wild how intelligible North Frisian is to me. I struggled a bit on the animal stealing from tourists, I thought it was a duck being fed by tourists xD. Only when someone mentioned the stialt part being to steal (stelen/steelt in Dutch) did it click for me.
the riin/rain words, lacking the middle g as in dutch or deutsch, is evidence that, wayyyy back in history, frisian and english have more ancestry in common with each other than with the other low-germanic dialects
Your right especially west frisian, the languages are so close to each other they are basically sister languages. It written different but the pronunciation is the same a lot of times. Words like cheese>tsiis it's spelled different but you literally pronounce it like cheese. The word for house is still the same as in old English hûs.
Im Dutch and I thought the first word was "clear sky" The second word was quite obviously Christmas tree. The word Slach translates to "slag" in Dutch which ankther word for the English word "kind", we also use the words "soort" or "type" for the same meaning The third word i had "seagull" as i understood everything The fourth word i had "Dunes". I got that it was a part if the landscape found in north frisia, found close to the sea, often has helmgrass and heathen on it
Awesome video! As a native West-Frisian speaker I could understand most things without a lot of effort, though I found that the spelling differs quite far from West-Frisian.
As an English speaker, I only really got that the seagull one was likely about a bird. So, that's something! Plus I picked up on the fact that Jöölmoon was December (ie. "Yule moon")
Jokes aside, the Frisian and North Frisian languages are absolutely fascinating languages. In many respects they represent the missing link between a whole host of Germanic languages languages over history. I'm particularly fascinated by the commonalities, and how that makes one theorize about how the peoples who spoke this language evolved, moved and traded over time.
I think that the original Old English name for December, was “Yule month” - and January was “After Yule month”. Similarly, September was “Havest month”. 6:46
@імхо Thank you! I had seen these in the not too distant past, but couldn’t really remember them well. It’s is ironic that you did a comparison with the Ukrainian names - I’ve always loved them and know them well! My surname is Latinised in a Polish style, but it’s actually Височанський. My grandfather was Ukrainian, and I have a lot of relatives and friends there.)) (Звідки ви?)
@імхо Зрозуміло! Мої родичів з Івано-Франківської області. Я народився і виростив в Уельсі. Тепер, тут багато Українців. Я радим знати, що ви в безпеці))
I'm a Native Dutch speaker, proficient in English, basic in German, have heard (Dutch) Frisian but nothing more then that. The first word I didn't get, I guess I didn't get you're after a single word thinking the question was to translate the sentences. The other 3 words I got. It would be great to see something on how North Frisian compares to Westerlauwers (Dutch) Frisian.
I know it is easy to say after seeing them written down, but I could see a lot of links between the Frisian and English and particularly Old Saxon English from what I have seen. The old Saxon months were very similar.
Alot of word are straight up the same, sometimes just spelled different cheese>tsiis but is the same pronunciation. Other times the words are even written the same, or the words are the same in old English.
I'm a native English speaker (American) and while I had trouble with the first and last words like I expected, I was surprised how easy the second and third were for me; I could understand like 80-90% of what he was saying by ear. It was pretty cool.
Very enjoyable challenge! I'm a native Afrikaans speaker, L2 is South African English. I understand Dutch/Flemish, and a bit of German, but can't speak these. My knowledge of French didn't help at all. I have never heard North Frisian before, but I could follow a fair bit with the subtitles on. I got "sun" (not sunshine, which in Afrikaans is "sonskyn") and "denneboom/Kersboom" (pine tree/Christmas tree). For the third word I got that this was a bird, but my African frame of reference sent me to ostrich, haha! (white and grey, tourists ... - Afrikaans word for seagull is "seemeeu"). My guess for the last word was "heuwel" (hill).
I'm an English speaking South African and also speak and understand Afrikaans. I understood a fair bit of North Frisian by using these two languages. I found it much easier than Old English.
I'm an English speaker who knows very little German, and has never studied any other North European languages, and my only knowledge of Friesland would be 'black and white cows' and 'pretty flat landscape'. So I was amazed that I came close with three of the four words - I guessed holly or ivy, a pigeon and beach. I couldn't have done it without the subtitles though, as I didn't get long enough to tune in to the language. I think it was probably the smattering of German that did it, not being an English speaker.
As an English speaker with German relatives, 3 years of learning German in school a long time ago, but no fluency in German, the 2nd and 3rd words were easy. The 2nd was the easiest, but I suspect if I didn't have any knowledge of German/Dutch vocab and cognate words, it would have been harder and perhaps the 3rd would be the only one I could have got correct with nothing but English knowledge. Even with knowing Dutch and German words/cognates, I was only able to get in the ballpark of the meanings of the 1st and 4th. Spoilers for the 4th: I didn't take the false path Simon took. Having understood "North Frisian landscape", I chose not to fixate on Deel. Part of this was because the meaning of 'Slach' turned out to be unimportant to correctly guessing the 2nd word with confidence. Seeing Deel as possibly cognate with Dale never occurred to me. Secondly, I chose to understand See as sharing meaning with Zee/Sea, rather than German Zee - because geographically and culturally, I've always associated the Frisians with the North Sea, and linguistically I expected the deviation in meaning between West Germanic languages to have been a unique Irminonic/High German deviation from the others. The word I clung to was Sön - I thought that's either sun or sand. Sun, sand, sea, I guessed beach. I was trying to figure out what Bärig was. I thought maybe barrier. Honestly I almost thought that meant barrier from the Sun, and if I'd over thought it I might have thought "techbi See finj" meant you could find tech by the sea, and I would have guessed parasol which would have been worse than guessing beach.
Holy friggen SHEIT, I am a West Frisian who only understands Frisian but doesn't speak it and I blind clicked this video - without captions the first guy just started introducing himself and I was loosely paying attention and literally understood everything he said. That is just wild. I know it is Frisian but it sounded super different, I thought I was listening to Danish for a second, Interesting.
Wow I've never heard North Frisian before, you can definitely hear the Danish influence on it. On a separate note, Simon is looking damn fine these days 😊
Seems to me this variety of Frisian is the link between North and West Germanic languages and more specifically between Danish and Dutch. With some German influence I guess here and there.
Native English speaker here who knows a reasonable amount of German and Dutch (and my tiny bit of Icelandic helped me with "ek" meaning "not"). I got about 30% or so and found it easier to understand when I didn't look at the transcript. The spelling put me off a bit!
It's more difficult than I thought but I got a few cognate words here and there. I think I might have heard a different dialect or variation perhaps. I remember hearing it as more "Dutch" sounding than German. I like the references to nature in the Frisian calendar, like Dùbhlachd for December in Gaelic the Darkness month.
Would you be able to do Old English vs Icelandic/Dutch/English? Also maybe Icelandic (or Norwegian) vs German/Dutch/Frisian? Or maybe Native Norwegian vs Non-native learners (like you did with Danish)! If doing that one, I volunteer to be on 😁😁😁
Not overly difficult as a dutchman (with knowledge of english, and some basics of german, west-frisian and swedish) purely by ear, although for the first word I guessed "trocken" because I thought it /could/ happen at night, and I am still puzzled what grows on the dunes. 10k speakers or even less surprised me though, that is not a lot...! 😮
In North Frisia the dunes are covered in heath and gras, to protect them from erosion. The North Frisian language has around 10.000 speaker. The dialect presented in this video has 80 native speaker and around 400 L2 speaker. Because of their relative isolation from each other, the dialects are only partialy mutual intelligeable and could be considered their own languages by certain metrics. There are 10 dialects, all with their own spoken and written standards.
As an English speaker with a smattering of Flemish and reasonable Dutch, I got them all. Surprised myself with this one, although I did need the written clues. I doubt I would have got more than seagull and Christmas tree from spoken language alone.
God I love this. It's so weird when you get one right when you don't speak any Germanic language except English. I'm listening to it without reading, then going back and listening while reading. Managed to get the second one, and got a couple words of the others (knew the third was a bird, but not what kind, because ba-ba-ba bird is the word bird is the word hehe. Wasn't sure if gre was green or grey, and guul I assumed was yellow for no reason other than the L, and it didn't occur to me to think of gold). Also, this guessing game is great, because it's not just vocabulary testing, it's comprehension testing.
As a native English speaker who studied Hochdeutsch and spent a few weeks in and around Hamburg, I thought this dialect of Frisian was much closer to Platt than either Hoch or English. I guessed Holly instead of Christmas tree. I missed sunshine but got seagull and dune.
About schlagbaum, I recalled a certain small time American writer by the name of Mark Twain who wrote a piece about the German language, and he mentioned how Schlag is used for just about every _thing_ in German.
I am a native English speaker and only understand Spanish as a second language. I really didn't get any of these. Only could make out a couple of words in each clue.
I don't think so. It sounds very much like Dutch. And Danish sounds really different but I have the same with Danish: Danish is a language I think I should be able to understand with ease. But that is far from the truth. However written Danish is actually very easy to understand at least to me.
For the last clue I am reminded on how even in different dialects of English we have varying terms of geography. For example in the part of Canada I am from we use the word "slough" (pronounced slew) to refer to a natural fresh water body that is too small to be a lake. Other dialects might say "pond" but in my mind a pond is a shallow artificial freshwater body (as opposed to a dugout that is a deep artifical freshwater body). We also use the work "bluff" to refer to a small stand of trees... and a local bit if cruel humor is to giggle in anticipation when workers from other regions discover muskeg, a kind of semi swampland that appears solid until you attempt to cross it. Another term that is espesially prominent in the oil and gas sector is "breakup" which is similar to the Russian work "raspusitsa". It refers to the time when outdoor temperatures rise but the ground hasn't completely thawed. So any roads that are not specifically built for these conditions will collapse under loads and swallow cars and even people and animals. What happens is you get layers of frozen ground and liquid water and the pressure of driving or walking can melt the frozen layers turning the ground into a death trap. A common site around here in late winter are oil and gas companies rushing to move heavy equipment before the ground thaws to escape breakup.
Wow! As a Dane it is so understandable. 😮 Imean, it still sounds like when my Dutch brother-in-law mixes Dutch and Danish. 😂 But so many words, more than in Dutch and German, are like Danish. Which really shouldn't be surprising, since the Southern Jutland/Sleswig/Holstein and the regions just below are really a dialect continuum from Danish to German/Dutch. But I was still surprised.
This is so weird, I understood that "the first word is a weather, it happens when there is no rain or clouds and it is not likely at night, the sky is blue and light." Then got the second and third ones too but from both the listening and subtitles. I speak English and a smattering of German - I was really quite surprised by how this went.
How different is North Frisian from the Frisian still spoken in the Netherlands? Is it kind of the same or are they very different? I'm very interested in how the Germanic languages evolved and I know Old English and even Middle English and the transitional period between both were very similar to Frisian and Dutch in medieval times and those were similar to Saxon (from Saxony) and other languages and dialects now absorbed by German. Also Old English was close enough with Old Norse to be mutually understandable (kind of), but High German land the languages closest to it may have been a little harder.
As a Dane it was pretty easy to get the meaning of most sentences - I feel there must be a lot of influence from Danish in the North Frisian dialect's.
@@Glossologia in this case, it is more direct language contact to Danish that had the bigger impact. Due to proximity NF had a strong jutlandic (southern danish) influence over the centuries. My dialect Söl‘ring is an insular dialect, which made it pretty isolated from the Low German spoken on the mainland. The mainland dialects of NF have a lot stronger Low German influence. So although you‘re right about the Low German impact on Danish, it isn‘t really the reason for similarities here :)
Yes. I managed to guess all the sentences, but with some uncertainty. Like in the first sentence, I was guessing sunshine, but when they both said rainbow, I thought I must be wrong then, but then I wasn't 😄
@@MoLauer I'm not sure I got this right. Are you saying that NF has been influenced by SJ centuries ago? (As in, long before various natonalist tendencies resulted in the reduction of dialects in favour of "national" languages - typically based on the dialect spoken in the capital city.) "Modern" SJ - to my best assessment - is heavily influenced both by std Danish and std German, which means its connection to an earlier version has weakened a lot. I often wonder how it may have sound just 50-100 years before I was born in 1968. I remember our neighbours from my childhood, they had an extremely musical lilt, especially the mother, and I've always wondered where that came from. (Given the location, just on the northern bank across from Flensburg, I have speculated if there might be some relation to - or remaining fraction of - Angeldansk. When I read the WP entry, I can see some similarity in the examples.)
Kindergarten and elementary education should get you close to native level, depending on the intensity of exposure and embedding of the language in daily life.
Native UK English speaker, studied Old and Middle English at university but only know very little German/Dutch. Tried listening to it without reading any of the subtitles: First three mostly understandable, like Simon I thought "the sun". Guessed "holly" for the second (picked up all the words just got the wrong tree, maybe holly/Christmas is an English thing) Seagull- yes Fourth one was so much harder; got the bits about the sea and landscape but I did exactly the same thing as Fernando! Thought he said "deer" (animal) again so thought something like seal or whale. (Like deer/deel, in the third I also misheard "stialt" as "tail"- "steort" in OE, but still got it. Is it me or does he have a very "dark" L sound, except after the ü?) Another interesting thing is his accent in English sounds to me much more Scandinavian than German
Well done and really fascinating observations :) I never thought about having a "darker" l-sound. But I think I'll look into it, I had a lot of contact with other german dialects, so maybe I picked it up there. I speak a lot of Danish in my university life, so maybe I adopted a more scandinavian pronounciation there, but northern german english prounciation sounds very different to the stereotypical "german" accent, that is largely based on Bavarian and Austrian prounciation
Ein Schlagbaum steht doch an einer Landesgrenze. Auf jeden Fall ein sehr interessantes Video, da sieht man mal wieder wie unterschiedlich selbst innerhalb der Grenzen der BRD unsere Dialekte sein können. :) Vielen Dank, für das Video! :)
Yes in Dutch too. "Slagboom" but that is when you wrte it as one word. "Een slag bomen" is first of all not something we would usually say but it is perfectly fine in Dutch. Now it means "a kind of trees". Much like North Frisian. This version of Frisian is much closer to Dutch than the Frisian that is actually spoken in The Netherlands. I can understand most of that language too since it is also close to Dutch, but this one in pronounciation is much closer and I think the words are also more similar.
@@jaysimoes3705 In German, we also use it for groups with a specific feature, but only for animals and humans, not "ein Schlag Bäume". Though with trees it probably wouldn’t be understood, because in forestry it means an area where trees will be chopped down.
Can Germans understand Old English? → ua-cam.com/video/Ve7JLIYnuD0/v-deo.html
I'd be quite interested in an episode hosted by Fernando in his Allgäu dialect, maybe with Eric, Moritz and Simon as the guessers.
You should do a video about West-Frisian, it's vastly different from North frisian.
Norbert, when are you going to compare Scots Gealic to Irish and Manx Speakers?
I'm from Nordfriesland (southern part and mainland) and just yesterday I read the entries of the 7th century in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle - never learned old english and was only relying on my frisian influenced low german skills but understood pretty much all of it ....although those entries are quite short and confronted with a longer text I might struggle a bit more ......but I read longer swedish texts yesterday as well and this quite worked...
Thank you Simon Roper for making us Brits look a bit more worldly with every appearance. Big fan!
Agree 100%.
I'm not British but as an anglophone you get a thumbs up from me too.
Me too
You Brits are family just like the rest of us, as a Dane I very much appreciate how you have made (a kind of) Danish become a dominant world language. :-)
@@lhpl Yes, I think we should recognise the English as honorary Spare Danes and adopt them - half of their basic words and many parts of their grammar are similar to ours in DK anyway, even though they typically can't hear it on the fly 😉
Thank you Norbert for the opportunity to present my small endangered language on your channel :)
*Moritz!* Ic wylle būgan se brūne cū! Hæfst þū ānne? Oh and Eddie says hello!
Thank you for the challenge. I definitely had to use both the written and spoken clues, but in the end I managed to get all of words right (with some shaky guesswork on the first one). Very entertaining.
Entre eles, quem fala a língua frísia?
@@manoeldejesus2864 the frisians
Obrigado por responder, sou brasileiro, queria que você me desse mais detalhes sobre quais são os frísios por ordem.
Simon is a very dangerous man with the power of old english.
Fr
How so? I mean, it's cool but most people don't even know what old English is, and it's a dead language anyway. Even more obscure and dare I say, "useless" than Latin.
Look at all the videos like this one where he's guessing the meaning of words and sentences. His knowledge of Old English gives him an edge with basically every west Germanic language@Johnnybomb1
@Johnnybomb1 Probably because if you understand old English you understand more of the connections. I speak Dutch and understand west-frisian, wich let's me understand old English better. The frisian that is spoken in this video is more german-frisian but I still understand it cause I understand 4 germanic language's
@@Johnnybomb1 it's very revelant for this video and for linguistics.
The language spoken here is Söl'ring, an Insular dialect of the North Frisian language. It was heavily influencend by Southern Danish dialects and has a lot of North Germanic loan vocabulary. Söl'ring has around 80 native speakers and 400 L2 speakers and is thereby the fourth biggest of the 10 remaining dialects of NF. It is extremly endangered and although it is still taught in some schools on the island of Söl (Sylt/Sild), its odds of survival are very low.
I studied North Frisian at Kiel University some years ago and wasn't aware that Söl'ring is that much endangered already. I find it to be way more exciting than Fering/Öömrang. Too bad I didn't learn as much Söl'ring as I learned Mooring. I really appreciate your mother tongue.
Danish is a North Germanic language. I guess you mean loan words from the low German dialects also spoken in Northern Germany which just like Frisian, Dutch, Luxembourgish and all other German dialects are part of the West Germanic branch.
@@marchauchler1622 No, I mean that due to it being spoken at the Danish border, there was a lot of Danish influence on the North Frisian language
@@MoLauer that's true regarding the influence
I have a question... What exactly are Söl’ring and Fering and Mooring and Öömrang, are these the official names of the Frisian languages? I am trying to learn all Germanic languages, but I cannot find videos teaching some of them, such as the ancient languages and the Frisian languages and some of the German-based languages!
As a native West-Frisian speaker, the difference with North-Frisian spoken here was way bigger than I expected. Still mostly understandable but with some effort. Really cool to hear 😃
That's a pretty interesting comment
I feel like I understand Dutch more than North Frisian
I'm a native speaker of Fering which is one of the closest related dialects of North Frisian to Sölring, and even I had quite some trouble with some parts (though other parts were quite similar to how I would have said it in Fering). North Frisian is very heterogeneous.
I am Dutch, understand West Frisian very well, because I was born there, and I am also learning Swedish and German, but this was difficult for me to understand.
As a non frisian speaker who lives in the north west it was still quite understandable.
First time, I heard Simon speaking german in a whole sentence. Well done @Simon
This was very exciting. I’m Swedish, German speaker with danish cousins, so I understand and speak danish quite good. Some pronunciations sound very danish! It would be great to see this language getting a revival! Bravo Moritz!
As a Swedish speaker this was like a hand in a glove. All the sentences was easy to figure out. Some words where almost exactly the same as in Swedish.
Lönskep = landskap
Wuksi = växa
... väldigt likt
Yes! First time on one of these that I am better than the panelists - though I did mess up on the last one (thought something like "shore meadow" instead of dune, but that is probably because I have no idea what the landscape looks like).
BUT I am not sure I would have done as well if I hadn't had the written form along with the spoken one.
Das ist interessant
@@Asptuber It's closer to Scandinavian, because it is, I'd say it's the closest to my dialect of Scanian than any other Germanic dialect. Though most Swedes have a problem understanding me, so yeah... Scanian is weird, I mean we have the weirdos in southern Scania that can't do anything but roll their Rs, and then we have me an actual Scanian speaker. Dää aau sau maungen fejl moj dé anere i Skaune. It is Oh so many faults with the others in Scania.
The Scandinavian languages have a ton of Low German loanwords, most of which being from Low Saxon, but a few are from Frisian and Dutch.
As a Bristolian who lives near Hamburg and speaks Dutch and German, and is interested in frisian and Platt, this video's a dream! 😊
Als Nederlandse zijn voor mij ook sommige woorden herkenbaar.
Het woord "Diil" lijkt op het Nederlandse woord "Deel" een deel of een gedeelte van iets.
Vooral de uitspraak helpt mij, om de vergelijking te maken.
Ik ben ook bekend met verschillende Nederlandse dialecten en het Duits, daardoor leg je ook makkelijker een link.
I managed to guess sand dune, but somehow completely missed the Frisian diil was like English dale. I heard "north frisian landscape" and "bare in the sun" or something, so just guessed something you might see on the coast.
I love this quartet. It's my favorite one together with Jackson Crawford's appearance. Generally, I love the kindness and knowledgeability the people on this channel encounter each other with. Okay, that was grammatically very wrong, I beg your pardon, non-native speaker here. Love to y'all!
The legend that is Simon Roper. 😊
For those who love comparisons between sister languages and especially regional ones, this is a linguistic treat, thank you so much. I always give the due thumbs-up and share by the way:-)
As a Brit living in Switzerland I was surprised how much I understaood, but it was nevertheless quite difficult. Excellent content and very interesting! Well done all.
Thanks Norbert for making these vids and showing those small languages which are most of time forgotten in every day's life
I understood Christmas tree and now I'm hella proud of myself :D fun video idea!
I understand Plattdeutsch, and thought this would be an easy challenge. I was wrong 😅. But interesting to me: When I stopped reading the script, and only listened to Moritz, it was easier, and I recognized more words/grammar.
It sounded a lot like Danish with a pronunciation much easier to understand for a German… and with some words taken from Lower Saxon.
As a Dutchman it was the opposite. I got a lot from the script and not so much from listening.
@@PkPvre as a Scanian, I understood a lot of the words, because they sound a lot like Scanian, I mean it's more like a weird mix of Danish, Scanian and German, but still, I'd say it's not the easiest to comprehend what is being said, I'd say I'd have about a 65-70% understanding. But I mean, when I speak Scanian my friends don't understand me, whether they're Danish or Swedish, doesn't matter, so I'm used to faulty communication. Although I speak both Swedish and Danish, Swedish due to it being forced in school, and Danish because it's so close to go to Denmark to drink beer.
@@livedandletdie A lot cheaper too I believe ^^
Sölring is the most difficult of the remaining North Frisian variants, at least in my opinion. Mooring/Bökinghiirder Frasch and Fering/Öömrang are somewhat easier to understand.
6:35 "Slach" is also used in Dutch (slag) to mean kind or type. "Een bepaald slag boom" in this case.
What a sweet treat for my ears. Thanks for this video and Merry Christmas/ Yuletide to everyone.
As a Czech who learns german and spend some time in Austria and Switzerland I was able to figure out the topic and got pretty close with my guesses.
Love it! Want to see more!
those southern dialects are probably the furthest apart from a low german dialect or frisian. Good to see that even non-native speakers get some understanding from it. Next step, come to germany and exchange some beer.
Veldig interessant og morsomt for en nordmann å prøve å forstå! 😊
Tusen takk og god jul! 🎉
Heve du høyrt saksisk?
@@dan74695 Takk for at du lurer meg ned i det kaninhullet på lille julaften! 😅
Som amerikaner var det litt vanskelig å påpeike spesifikke ord at jeg definitivt kunne forstå, men med hjelpen av norsk og gammel engelsk kunnskap gikk det an å lese teksten uten problemer. Lurer på hvor mye fra videoen forsto du da
I like North Frisian, it sounds like broken Danish. I mean, I speak German, Danish, Swedish, Scanian and English, so it wasn't hard at all to understand.
Truly interesting to hear, still, it's not as weird sounding as I'd think, it's a lot more like other Frisian dialects.
The word for part, was the easiest word for me to hear and understand, as it's Dejl/Dojl in Scanian, and Del in Swedish/Danish. And of course Teil in German.
And I wish the Scandinavian languages had kept the months... instead of adopting the Roman Calendar.
"Deel" in Dutch btw.
Very interesting to hear this as a danish speaker.
Some things sounded very danish. Other things sounded almost dutch.
I agree, i'm swedish and i felt like it was definitely easier to follow the frisian in this video than to understand what the german guys were saying when giving their guesses
Edit: and interestingly, i felt like the guy from northern germany was also much easier to follow than the guy from the south
Another Dane here. Being from South Jutland close to Flensburg, and even nearly trilingual (S. J. Dialect, German, Danish) since infancy, combined with the very effective way we learn English in the Nordic countries, I also would say I had the best possible conditions for understanding North Frisian, without being a "pro" linguist. Although I didn't get "sunshine".
@@lhpl interesting. I was also in doubt about sunshine.
Yeah as a Dutch I had the same feeling. Since it is either close to Dutch and close to Danish and Danish in itself is also close to Dutch all of this made a lot of sense to me. I had no problems with it. His pronounciation of words is really just like Dutch mostly. Much more so than or own Frisian.
For the next time it would be quite cool if you add a western frisian, it's similar in some extend but even for me it's difficult.
I think a normal western frisian would even struggle with Northern frisian.
Favorite video so far, fantastic choice of language!
As a student of linguistics, native English speaker and second language German speaker, I absolutely love these videos! It’s fascinating to me to compare and contrast these language.
Would be nice if you had a north germanic speaking person there as well for comparison.
i enjoyed this and understood the bulk of it surprisingly well - but only because I was able to read what Moritz was saying. If I'd had to rely on the audio only, like the three participants, I don't think I'd have had much of a chance!
Btw, I'd like to see a similar language challenge between all six Celtic languages - or possibly two separate challenges for the Goidelic and Brytonnic branches.
It's eary how easy this north frysian is to understand for a native Dutch speaker (who also speaks German and English).
It's so interesting that Frisian has something in common with the Finnish language where December translates as well as "Joulukuu" aka Christmas moon.
I never get anything right in these challenges and today I got all 4 correct! (I speak English natively and German as a second language. I also have some limited knowledge of Plattdeutsch, which may helped parse the phonology here)
This was so much fun to listen to :D
It's crazy that as a native English speaker, I pretty much cannot understand a thing in German or North Frisian, yet as an ~intermediate Spanish speaker, I can understand enough of even Romanian or Latin to guess the right words when watching your videos!
Yes, English is so weird this way. 😁
That's because modern English is mostly loanwords and is only categorized as Germanic due to etymology since the Germanic words are actually a minority. Most of the loanwords are Romance, especially French and Latin. Another consequence of being full of loanwords from different sources is that the phonetics of the letters are completely inconsistent, which makes it hard to master for a lot of non-native speakers. It also probably plays a part in why there's so many English-derived creole languages. Some suggest standard English is a creole itself.
@@poppinc8145 do you think that an Anglish speaker would better understand other Germanics tongues ?
I think the Romance languages are generally a bit closer than the remaining Germanic languages, with English being a weird cousin. I’m a native English speaker who speaks German, Spanish and Portuguese, as well as a fair amount of French and a little Italian (and a really tiny bit of Romanian and Catalan), and listening to a bit of tv shows in and have scanned the North Germanic languages.
Technically, that language isn’t Latin and is incorrectly classified as a Latin language, even though it doesn’t look and doesn’t sound Latin at all as it has completely different word endings and letter combinations and intonations that none of the Latin languages have, which are the elements that make a language what it is, and the most accurate classification would be Thracian-Aslavic as it is isn’t truly Slavic either - however, Germanic languages come directly from Latin, so it’s normal for them to have tons of cognates, and English has more words modified from a Latin word than any other language, including most technical terms and medical terms and the 9 million scientific names of plants and animals, which are Latin-based, but most European languages also have mostly words that come from Latin, including the Slavic languages which also come from Latin, and the modern Celtic languages which come mostly from Latin and Norse and Gaulish, and even Gaulish comes mostly from Latin as well, and most words from most European languages are in fact modified from Latin words or created by combining different parts from different Latin words, including most words that aren’t obvious cognates, it’s just that English has more words that are obvious cognates, but English is a Germanic language 100% which has the typical Germanic word endings and letter combinations and sounds and sound patterns etc, and it comes mostly from Norse, so most English words that are used the most are closer to the Norse word than they are to the other Germanic languages!
Nordfrysish is very different to Westlauwers-frysish.
Lot of saksish/danish in its pronouncing.
Probably because of a lot of trading in that region.
For me as a Scandinavian I found old English "easier" than Frisian, but I definitely hear that the languages are closely related
I'd say North Frisian is actually closer to modern Scandinavian than it is to modern English. Especially if you speak Danish/Scanian but I'd guess you're Swedish and that would be why you had a harder time understanding.
@@livedandletdie Old English and Old Frisian were closer.
Frisian has been heavily influenced by surrounding countries nowadays. West Frisian is influenced by Dutch and Northern Frisian is so different from West Frisian and at least from what I know West Frisian has different dialects across the province
I have absolutely no formal study, but I have done some reading of Beowulf in it's original text. Additionally, I have a smattering of German and Dutch vocabulary. Other than that, I pick up on cognates readily, most frequently in written form as I have limited access to Dutch or German speakers, however there are many words which the cognates are still better picked up in speech. I was surprised at finding I was able to guess all these samples correctly given my limited background, particularly compared to this group. I hesitate to think what a year or two of immersion in Germany and the Nederlands would do to my overall linguistic skills...
Your mission, should you choose to accept it...
In Dutch we also say: "Een ander slag volk" ("A different type/kind of people")
In the fourth example, 9:28 I definitely also heard a word similar to ‘Heide’- ‘heather grows on top of it’ the dune. Dune is of course also in English. Also I never thought about dale and German Tal both meaning valley. I grew up going to Sylt every summer so I love that North Frisian is featured! Love these videos!
I'm not sure how many of these Ecolinguist vids I could binge watch before I wanted to stop. I might go all day if there was enough Germanic content. Thank you.
Wish I could have participated in this video. Frissian sounds so much like a combination of Danish German and Dutch. I from Denmark btw 😂
As a native Dutch speaker it's wild how intelligible North Frisian is to me. I struggled a bit on the animal stealing from tourists, I thought it was a duck being fed by tourists xD. Only when someone mentioned the stialt part being to steal (stelen/steelt in Dutch) did it click for me.
The thing I most noticed with North Frisian is that it was like German with English vowels and Dutch like words added.
the riin/rain words, lacking the middle g as in dutch or deutsch, is evidence that, wayyyy back in history, frisian and english have more ancestry in common with each other than with the other low-germanic dialects
Your right especially west frisian, the languages are so close to each other they are basically sister languages. It written different but the pronunciation is the same a lot of times. Words like cheese>tsiis it's spelled different but you literally pronounce it like cheese. The word for house is still the same as in old English hûs.
Very enjoyable :)
I could understand some of it, but (being dutch) once I read it it was all clear, very close to modern day dutch
Im Dutch and I thought the first word was "clear sky"
The second word was quite obviously Christmas tree. The word Slach translates to "slag" in Dutch which ankther word for the English word "kind", we also use the words "soort" or "type" for the same meaning
The third word i had "seagull" as i understood everything
The fourth word i had "Dunes". I got that it was a part if the landscape found in north frisia, found close to the sea, often has helmgrass and heathen on it
Awesome video! As a native West-Frisian speaker I could understand most things without a lot of effort, though I found that the spelling differs quite far from West-Frisian.
As an English speaker, I only really got that the seagull one was likely about a bird. So, that's something! Plus I picked up on the fact that Jöölmoon was December (ie. "Yule moon")
Jokes aside, the Frisian and North Frisian languages are absolutely fascinating languages. In many respects they represent the missing link between a whole host of Germanic languages languages over history. I'm particularly fascinated by the commonalities, and how that makes one theorize about how the peoples who spoke this language evolved, moved and traded over time.
I think that the original Old English name for December, was “Yule month” - and January was “After Yule month”. Similarly, September was “Havest month”. 6:46
Jul-månad in Swedish
@@ustit-vuohta6695 That’s very similar! I had to look up the orthography, but the Anglo Saxon name was “Ġēolamōnaþ”.
@імхо Thank you! I had seen these in the not too distant past, but couldn’t really remember them well. It’s is ironic that you did a comparison with the Ukrainian names - I’ve always loved them and know them well! My surname is Latinised in a Polish style, but it’s actually Височанський. My grandfather was Ukrainian, and I have a lot of relatives and friends there.)) (Звідки ви?)
@імхо Зрозуміло! Мої родичів з Івано-Франківської області. Я народився і виростив в Уельсі. Тепер, тут багато Українців. Я радим знати, що ви в безпеці))
I'm a Native Dutch speaker, proficient in English, basic in German, have heard (Dutch) Frisian but nothing more then that. The first word I didn't get, I guess I didn't get you're after a single word thinking the question was to translate the sentences. The other 3 words I got.
It would be great to see something on how North Frisian compares to Westerlauwers (Dutch) Frisian.
I know it is easy to say after seeing them written down, but I could see a lot of links between the Frisian and English and particularly Old Saxon English from what I have seen. The old Saxon months were very similar.
Alot of word are straight up the same, sometimes just spelled different cheese>tsiis but is the same pronunciation. Other times the words are even written the same, or the words are the same in old English.
I'm a native English speaker (American) and while I had trouble with the first and last words like I expected, I was surprised how easy the second and third were for me; I could understand like 80-90% of what he was saying by ear. It was pretty cool.
Very enjoyable challenge! I'm a native Afrikaans speaker, L2 is South African English. I understand Dutch/Flemish, and a bit of German, but can't speak these. My knowledge of French didn't help at all. I have never heard North Frisian before, but I could follow a fair bit with the subtitles on. I got "sun" (not sunshine, which in Afrikaans is "sonskyn") and "denneboom/Kersboom" (pine tree/Christmas tree). For the third word I got that this was a bird, but my African frame of reference sent me to ostrich, haha! (white and grey, tourists ... - Afrikaans word for seagull is "seemeeu"). My guess for the last word was "heuwel" (hill).
I'm an English speaking South African and also speak and understand Afrikaans. I understood a fair bit of North Frisian by using these two languages. I found it much easier than Old English.
I'm an English speaker who knows very little German, and has never studied any other North European languages, and my only knowledge of Friesland would be 'black and white cows' and 'pretty flat landscape'. So I was amazed that I came close with three of the four words - I guessed holly or ivy, a pigeon and beach. I couldn't have done it without the subtitles though, as I didn't get long enough to tune in to the language. I think it was probably the smattering of German that did it, not being an English speaker.
As an English speaker with German relatives, 3 years of learning German in school a long time ago, but no fluency in German, the 2nd and 3rd words were easy. The 2nd was the easiest, but I suspect if I didn't have any knowledge of German/Dutch vocab and cognate words, it would have been harder and perhaps the 3rd would be the only one I could have got correct with nothing but English knowledge.
Even with knowing Dutch and German words/cognates, I was only able to get in the ballpark of the meanings of the 1st and 4th.
Spoilers for the 4th:
I didn't take the false path Simon took. Having understood "North Frisian landscape", I chose not to fixate on Deel. Part of this was because the meaning of 'Slach' turned out to be unimportant to correctly guessing the 2nd word with confidence. Seeing Deel as possibly cognate with Dale never occurred to me. Secondly, I chose to understand See as sharing meaning with Zee/Sea, rather than German Zee - because geographically and culturally, I've always associated the Frisians with the North Sea, and linguistically I expected the deviation in meaning between West Germanic languages to have been a unique Irminonic/High German deviation from the others.
The word I clung to was Sön - I thought that's either sun or sand. Sun, sand, sea, I guessed beach. I was trying to figure out what Bärig was. I thought maybe barrier. Honestly I almost thought that meant barrier from the Sun, and if I'd over thought it I might have thought "techbi See finj" meant you could find tech by the sea, and I would have guessed parasol which would have been worse than guessing beach.
*See not Zee. Typed too quickly and can't find option to edit comment.
Holy friggen SHEIT, I am a West Frisian who only understands Frisian but doesn't speak it and I blind clicked this video - without captions the first guy just started introducing himself and I was loosely paying attention and literally understood everything he said. That is just wild. I know it is Frisian but it sounded super different, I thought I was listening to Danish for a second, Interesting.
I am SO fascinated by the fact that you still use the old (North) Germanic names for the moon-months. We don't even do that in the Nordics anymore.
Wow I've never heard North Frisian before, you can definitely hear the Danish influence on it. On a separate note, Simon is looking damn fine these days 😊
Dit es en apārti Programm! Fuul Dank :)
Seems to me this variety of Frisian is the link between North and West Germanic languages and more specifically between Danish and Dutch. With some German influence I guess here and there.
Native English speaker here who knows a reasonable amount of German and Dutch (and my tiny bit of Icelandic helped me with "ek" meaning "not"). I got about 30% or so and found it easier to understand when I didn't look at the transcript. The spelling put me off a bit!
It's more difficult than I thought but I got a few cognate words here and there. I think I might have heard a different dialect or variation perhaps. I remember hearing it as more "Dutch" sounding than German.
I like the references to nature in the Frisian calendar, like Dùbhlachd for December in Gaelic the Darkness month.
Would you be able to do Old English vs Icelandic/Dutch/English?
Also maybe Icelandic (or Norwegian) vs German/Dutch/Frisian?
Or maybe Native Norwegian vs Non-native learners (like you did with Danish)! If doing that one, I volunteer to be on 😁😁😁
West Frisian sounds like Dutch from Groningen and North Frisian sounds like a Mix of South Jutlandic Danish and German from North of Hamburg😂
Not overly difficult as a dutchman (with knowledge of english, and some basics of german, west-frisian and swedish) purely by ear, although for the first word I guessed "trocken" because I thought it /could/ happen at night, and I am still puzzled what grows on the dunes.
10k speakers or even less surprised me though, that is not a lot...! 😮
In North Frisia the dunes are covered in heath and gras, to protect them from erosion.
The North Frisian language has around 10.000 speaker. The dialect presented in this video has 80 native speaker and around 400 L2 speaker. Because of their relative isolation from each other, the dialects are only partialy mutual intelligeable and could be considered their own languages by certain metrics. There are 10 dialects, all with their own spoken and written standards.
Halem = Helmgras :)
It would be interesting to hear the frisian sentences in regular talking speed as well.
I like your challenges!
As a speaker of Low-saxon-dutch I understood most of it, and could guess all the words :)
Good challenge. I'm interested in the Frisian languages!
Love Simon
As an English speaker with a smattering of Flemish and reasonable Dutch, I got them all. Surprised myself with this one, although I did need the written clues. I doubt I would have got more than seagull and Christmas tree from spoken language alone.
God I love this. It's so weird when you get one right when you don't speak any Germanic language except English. I'm listening to it without reading, then going back and listening while reading. Managed to get the second one, and got a couple words of the others (knew the third was a bird, but not what kind, because ba-ba-ba bird is the word bird is the word hehe. Wasn't sure if gre was green or grey, and guul I assumed was yellow for no reason other than the L, and it didn't occur to me to think of gold).
Also, this guessing game is great, because it's not just vocabulary testing, it's comprehension testing.
As a native English speaker who studied Hochdeutsch and spent a few weeks in and around Hamburg, I thought this dialect of Frisian was much closer to Platt than either Hoch or English.
I guessed Holly instead of Christmas tree. I missed sunshine but got seagull and dune.
@7:00 Simon, einen Baum schlagen is to cut down a tree. While ein Schlagbaum is a barrier that blocks a border and can be lifted to open rhe road.
About schlagbaum, I recalled a certain small time American writer by the name of Mark Twain who wrote a piece about the German language, and he mentioned how Schlag is used for just about every _thing_ in German.
Being from Middle Frisia I had also some struggle with the understanding of number 4, great vid
Middle Frisia?
In fergelyk mei in oare Fryske taal. Ik kin dy goed ferstean, hear!
As someone learning Dutch I got all of them right! I didn't expect that.😮
As the speaker of Dutch I am able to understand about 60% of Frisian (probably even more).
I am a native English speaker and only understand Spanish as a second language. I really didn't get any of these. Only could make out a couple of words in each clue.
Me, too.
Honestly, you should have had a Dane or Norwegian here. I understood most of what he said.
Since this is really really close to Dutch, especially the pronounciation, can you also understand standard Dutch?
I'm used to West Frisian as an L1 English + L1.5 German speaker myself this sounds a lot different, but still rather understandable
Cool and interesting challenge. Norbert, could you organize the same but with West Frisian?
Listening to Northern Frisian is like listening to Danish but I don't understand a word 😂
I don't think so. It sounds very much like Dutch. And Danish sounds really different but I have the same with Danish: Danish is a language I think I should be able to understand with ease. But that is far from the truth. However written Danish is actually very easy to understand at least to me.
For the last clue I am reminded on how even in different dialects of English we have varying terms of geography.
For example in the part of Canada I am from we use the word "slough" (pronounced slew) to refer to a natural fresh water body that is too small to be a lake. Other dialects might say "pond" but in my mind a pond is a shallow artificial freshwater body (as opposed to a dugout that is a deep artifical freshwater body).
We also use the work "bluff" to refer to a small stand of trees... and a local bit if cruel humor is to giggle in anticipation when workers from other regions discover muskeg, a kind of semi swampland that appears solid until you attempt to cross it.
Another term that is espesially prominent in the oil and gas sector is "breakup" which is similar to the Russian work "raspusitsa". It refers to the time when outdoor temperatures rise but the ground hasn't completely thawed. So any roads that are not specifically built for these conditions will collapse under loads and swallow cars and even people and animals. What happens is you get layers of frozen ground and liquid water and the pressure of driving or walking can melt the frozen layers turning the ground into a death trap. A common site around here in late winter are oil and gas companies rushing to move heavy equipment before the ground thaws to escape breakup.
I'd like to give this five thumbs up. Thank you
Schlagbaum is a barrier on a road. I'm surprised no one said that.
For Norbert...Schlagbaum = Polish "szlaban"
Try this with a Dutch speaker! They will understand 90%
i come from west frisia and i understand north frisian like 75% mostly because i also speak a bit of german but west frisian has less german in it
Wow! As a Dane it is so understandable. 😮
Imean, it still sounds like when my Dutch brother-in-law mixes Dutch and Danish. 😂 But so many words, more than in Dutch and German, are like Danish. Which really shouldn't be surprising, since the Southern Jutland/Sleswig/Holstein and the regions just below are really a dialect continuum from Danish to German/Dutch. But I was still surprised.
This is so weird, I understood that "the first word is a weather, it happens when there is no rain or clouds and it is not likely at night, the sky is blue and light." Then got the second and third ones too but from both the listening and subtitles. I speak English and a smattering of German - I was really quite surprised by how this went.
How different is North Frisian from the Frisian still spoken in the Netherlands? Is it kind of the same or are they very different? I'm very interested in how the Germanic languages evolved and I know Old English and even Middle English and the transitional period between both were very similar to Frisian and Dutch in medieval times and those were similar to Saxon (from Saxony) and other languages and dialects now absorbed by German. Also Old English was close enough with Old Norse to be mutually understandable (kind of), but High German land the languages closest to it may have been a little harder.
As a Dane it was pretty easy to get the meaning of most sentences - I feel there must be a lot of influence from Danish in the North Frisian dialect's.
It's more that Danish has a lot of Low German/Saxon influence, and Low German is fairly close to Frisian.
@@Glossologia in this case, it is more direct language contact to Danish that had the bigger impact. Due to proximity NF had a strong jutlandic (southern danish) influence over the centuries. My dialect Söl‘ring is an insular dialect, which made it pretty isolated from the Low German spoken on the mainland. The mainland dialects of NF have a lot stronger Low German influence. So although you‘re right about the Low German impact on Danish, it isn‘t really the reason for similarities here :)
@@MoLauer Interesting! Thanks for the correction! :-)
Yes. I managed to guess all the sentences, but with some uncertainty.
Like in the first sentence, I was guessing sunshine, but when they both said rainbow, I thought I must be wrong then, but then I wasn't 😄
@@MoLauer I'm not sure I got this right. Are you saying that NF has been influenced by SJ centuries ago? (As in, long before various natonalist tendencies resulted in the reduction of dialects in favour of "national" languages - typically based on the dialect spoken in the capital city.)
"Modern" SJ - to my best assessment - is heavily influenced both by std Danish and std German, which means its connection to an earlier version has weakened a lot.
I often wonder how it may have sound just 50-100 years before I was born in 1968. I remember our neighbours from my childhood, they had an extremely musical lilt, especially the mother, and I've always wondered where that came from. (Given the location, just on the northern bank across from Flensburg, I have speculated if there might be some relation to - or remaining fraction of - Angeldansk. When I read the WP entry, I can see some similarity in the examples.)
Would be fun to see with ducth Frisian speaker, too.
well in a sense month/maand/monate is derived from Moon/maan , i never really thought of that before.
Very fun!!!
I guessed the first three but didn't have a clue on the last.
Kindergarten and elementary education should get you close to native level, depending on the intensity of exposure and embedding of the language in daily life.
Native UK English speaker, studied Old and Middle English at university but only know very little German/Dutch. Tried listening to it without reading any of the subtitles:
First three mostly understandable, like Simon I thought "the sun". Guessed "holly" for the second (picked up all the words just got the wrong tree, maybe holly/Christmas is an English thing)
Seagull- yes
Fourth one was so much harder; got the bits about the sea and landscape but I did exactly the same thing as Fernando! Thought he said "deer" (animal) again so thought something like seal or whale. (Like deer/deel, in the third I also misheard "stialt" as "tail"- "steort" in OE, but still got it. Is it me or does he have a very "dark" L sound, except after the ü?)
Another interesting thing is his accent in English sounds to me much more Scandinavian than German
Well done and really fascinating observations :)
I never thought about having a "darker" l-sound. But I think I'll look into it, I had a lot of contact with other german dialects, so maybe I picked it up there.
I speak a lot of Danish in my university life, so maybe I adopted a more scandinavian pronounciation there, but northern german english prounciation sounds very different to the stereotypical "german" accent, that is largely based on Bavarian and Austrian prounciation
Ein Schlagbaum steht doch an einer Landesgrenze.
Auf jeden Fall ein sehr interessantes Video, da sieht man mal wieder wie unterschiedlich selbst innerhalb der Grenzen der BRD unsere Dialekte sein können. :)
Vielen Dank, für das Video! :)
Yes in Dutch too. "Slagboom" but that is when you wrte it as one word. "Een slag bomen" is first of all not something we would usually say but it is perfectly fine in Dutch. Now it means "a kind of trees". Much like North Frisian. This version of Frisian is much closer to Dutch than the Frisian that is actually spoken in The Netherlands. I can understand most of that language too since it is also close to Dutch, but this one in pronounciation is much closer and I think the words are also more similar.
@@jaysimoes3705 In German, we also use it for groups with a specific feature, but only for animals and humans, not "ein Schlag Bäume". Though with trees it probably wouldn’t be understood, because in forestry it means an area where trees will be chopped down.