OK so obviously now we need a video where Max makes something and he and J explain the time period and the language surrounding it and why it was written in that way
I had the great good fortune to study Chaucer under a prof who actually spoke conversational Middle English. The class was conducted in that language, and we were each encouraged to complete one of Chaucer's unfinished Tales (in rhyming Iambic pentameter couplets, of course) in lieu of taking the final exam. Made an English major out of me.
I learned Middle High German at the university of Gothenburg when I was young, or rather I learned the pronunciation, grammar and some poems. I doubt I could hold a conversation. It sounds similar to Middle English and Old Swedish. For instance: until around 1400 the german W sounded like the English, while the German W today sounds like the English V. In Swedish the W sound exists, but only in dialects, unless it's an English loan word or a loanword from another language with the [w] phoneme. Standard Swedish only has the [v] phoneme.
The way you said 'copypasta' was fantastic. Also, I remember my grandad grumbling about modern historical dramas that no one wears any headwear in them - there's clearly a growing demand for wimple representation!
Yes, when you look at photos from only a hundred years ago, everyone wears a hat. Not only that, but the women in historical dramas all stride across the countryside in long dresses as if they were wearing trousers. Try doing that for more than the few seconds it takes for a camera shot and you’ll end up on your arse.
@@16poetisa Very fair! Mostly I'm happy with how clothing has deformalised over the last few decades, and dropping compulsory headwear is part of that; it would be nice if period dramas didn't just do correct costuming from the eyes down, though
Funnily enough, in Dutch, you still call “eggs” “eiren,” and pronounced very similarly! In Dutch, egg (singular) is “ei,” and adding -en at the end of most nouns makes that noun plural (with the occasional word becoming plural with an -s, like in English). We can see the Germanic root of the English word for “eggs” in this way! Goodness I love languages. And as a person with a degree in English studying in the NL, I absolutely love this video. ❤️
I grew up spending my summers at my Dutch grandma's. I stopped going as a teen and haven't spoken Durch in 30 years, but I still retain a lot. Later, as an adult I learned that I spoke differently from everyone else in that area. Not because I was a Finnish kid, but because the kids next door were from Amsterdam, and I copied their slang without realising :) I've been wanting to rekindle my skills and I'm looking for any easy to understand channels, so recommendations are welcome.
@@VikingTeddy if you want dutch channels, easy dutch are great! they interview people based on a subject (whats ur favourite subject, whats ur favourite place to travel) in dutch and you can follow along with dutch/english subtitles. i always find it funny bc theres one person who always wont agree with the topic xD
My mother's family lived in Essex and Suffolk. It was said that people there, particularly nearer the coast, could happily talk with the Dutch sailors because so much of their dialect was influenced by Dutch and vice versa.
My first language (or, to be more accurate, my first words) were Dutch, although I was born and grew up in UK. The first decade of my life was in a mix of Dutch and English. When it came to O level we did the _Nonnes Preestes Tale of the Cok and Hen_ - one of the few clene tales. When it came to my turn to read out a section I did so using Dutch phonetic pronunciation. Teacher (Dorothy/Dot) was astonished, and made me do a longer section at a school assembly.
My first language was Dutch too. We emigrated to Scotland when I was 7. Now you'd think I was Scottish (mixed West Highland/Glasgow) but I can still speak Dutch and your right about it making Chaucer much easier to pronounce.
As a Dutch person, I can confirm this. The excerpt she read at the beginning almost sounds like a blend of English and Dutch. The pronunciation is mostly Dutch, while the vocabulary itself is closer to English.
Honestly, the sociocultural impact of the printing press is one my favorite subjects of history. It's so rare that a historical event creates such a clean break between two periods. For anyone who's interested and needs your reading slot filled for the next six months, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" by Elizabeth Eisenstein is probably the most comprehensive history on the topic.
I love how the egg joke still kinda works for a modern audience. If it had been the exact same joke but backward and the man had asked for eyren then it would be confusing due to the lost context, but “could I get some eggs?” “sorry, I don’t speak French” is absurd enough on its own that I could see it today in something along the lines of the Monty Python spam sketch
eyeren is actually the original Anglo-Saxon word for eggs. The word eggs entered English from the Vikings during the Danelaw and is actually cognates with the word eyeren. This also explains why some dialects still used eyeren and some had switched over to eggs, as the Norse influence wasnt evenly spread out throughout England in that era
We did Canterbury Tales in high school. You said these characters were all recognizable to 14th century Britain's. This book stuck with me, because I recognized each character as fitting someone I knew in my life then. Chaucer did a great job capturing human nature in this book.
An example of technology changing English and every other language for that matter, is a really annoying auto correct / spell checker ..... Chancery ?😂
I cannot handle the sheer delight with which you pronounced "copypasta", like sampling a fine delicacy. Very much invited to live in my head rent free hereinafter
I've had this experience, and I believe that it is a widely shared one, of school teachers showing an open disdain for colloquialism or slang, almost as if anything under 100 years old is inherently non-valid. In fact, as far as I recall, the newest literature we studied throughout all of high school was To Kill A Mockingbird, a book written in the 1960's set in the 1930's. I don't think we studied any other 20th century work, perish the thought of 21st century literature. If the crypt keepers that run the department of public schools didn't study it when they were in school, it's not "academic." I actually think this damaged me. I remember the summer after I graduated high school, my grandmother loaned me this novel called Utopia by Lincoln Child. It's a thriller set in a high tech theme park. And the protagonist has a teenage daughter with an mp3 player. I was a teenager with an mp3 player! I remember thinking "Oh yeah, books are allowed to be new. I forgot that was a thing that could happen. They can even have people like me in them." So seeing a scholar of English history enjoy and appreciate modern 2023 youth slang hits with an uncomfortably unfamiliar yet positive sensation. Young people don't often hear it's okay to be young.
Thank you for this; this was my very favorite video of yours of all time. For decades I have taught my students that Chaucer is *AN* example of Middle English, just as Beowulf is an example of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon). But though it seems obvious now (having seen your video) it never occurred to me that Chaucer's work is the reason why anything called "Middle English" is even identifiable today. Oh, and the story about the eggs is one of the most insightful anecdotes (about anything) that I have ever heard. I just really, really liked this video, thank you.
Linguistics is such an interesting subject. Like archeology of words and language. Being a Dutch native speaker, grammar across Germanic influenced languages are so interchangeable.
Was lucky indeed as a Brit to live in the Netherlands for a while. Had learned a little German at school. Found the connections between our three languages both fascinating and helpful. Vive la difference. But also the borrowed wealth of shared linguistic roots. Ik denk? Ich denke (ok - so not quite the same meaning...) ? I think?
Dutch always sounded like someone making fun of the English language to me. Almost like someone heard it, and just decided to wing it. I mean no offence in that, it's just my personal opinion.
I feel that if I had quality youtube during my college years I'd have actually understood most of it. Creators who explain things and cite them and give examples and use visuals have helped me to understand stuff I've already been taught but didn't retain bc it never took a foothold in my brain.
"Yeet" is definitely my favourite word to be added to the English language. It's the only one I know of which so many transformations are agreed upon; he/she/it yeets, he has yeeted, he yote.
I grew up in an industrial town in Victoria, Australia. Almost no one had moved in or out of there for over a century. So when I moved to Melbourne, people were amused by my rather archaic vocabulary. Sadly I rarely say the words I was mocked for using 30 years ago and if I use them now, it seems slightly false and affected.
That's fascinating! A great example of how those regional dialects can occur/survive even in the modern day. (Though perhaps less commonly so now, in the internet age...?) I've definitely noticed that not just vocabulary but our NZ accent as a whole is changing, too. To me people from Auckland sound an awful lot like Aussies? (Apparently there's more than twice as many ex-pat Australians in Akld than there are in Chch & Wgtn combined, so maybe they're having a sneaky effect on the locals...?! 😉)
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 The very distinct clipped Adelaide accent is dying out. Most people in that city aged under 60 now just speak generic educated Australian.
I guess I had a bit of that. Spent eight years in primary school as a completely ordinary person with no-one conceptualising my accent as exceptional. Go to secondary 3km almost literally up the same road and all these people who weren't from my primary school were so convinced I was British. By which they meant English. To be fair, if I heard myself on a recording at this time I did (a) sound totally different, which is normal and (b) rather more English than I would've expected, which is not. Possibly related I remember sitting in the car once amusing myself with stupid accents and then going "I've forgotten what I sound like".
@@harryeast95 😂 Starting to think too hard about other people's speech patterns, let alone one's own, can definitely turn into quite the head-trip! 🤪 Still very fun though if you have an ear for language & an interest in it...
My mother was "older" when I was born, and she was mistaken for menopause by her own mother - I've been told that when I'm really angry my accent goes rather old fashioned. I also grew up looking up dictionary definitions in my mother's grandfather's dictionary...
As a German-American, I grew up in a bi-lingual environment. I also learned basic French in high school. I always loved learning about languages and the origins of words :) In German, eggs is "Eier," so very close to "Eyren" I really like how sci-fi TV series like "The Expanse" portray a quite colorful (or "colourful") form of English
That’s because “eggs”-or rather the singular “egg”-was borrowed from Old Norse (where the plural was the same as the singular, as it’s a neuter noun), while “eyren” is natively West Germanic.
The Expanse has mixed languages on the Asteroid Belt (a concept actually nicked from a 1950's book, mind you) which form a creole called Belta. The books actually have the Martians speaking Chinglish with Texan accents, but the show didn't replicate that.
Love your videos! I'm a nurse recovering from cancer surgery and I'm feeling a bit useless being on the receiving end at the moment so it's refreshing to watch someone funny, charming and educational as you are. Thank you and keep it up! ❤
God bless you both. I went through that (stage 4 malignant thymoma) stuff in 2006, and here I am loving life and watching Chaucer videos. Best of luck to 'ye.' --Old Guy
Thanks ,I really enjoyed that .At 80 + I still have the remains of an identifiable Geordie accent in spite of living in London for 60+ years .Working at the BBC in the 1950s I tried to lose it,and obviously didn’t succeed.Perhaps every human behavior has regional variations .Being able to imitate is a skill that maybe we’re not fully aware of .Life is wonderful .Peace n love ,J.
That so funny. I’m from Canada. My grandma is in her 70s, left her hometown at 16 and never looked back. She never lost her accent. Yet i work with a woman in her 40s who grew up knowing only french. I don’t know when she started using english daily but nowadays she can hardly speak french anymore!
As a half Swede, half American. But raised in Heston Hounslow, as well as central Stockholm. Bilingual with a dash of Dutch. I find this extremely interesting and entertaining. The three have so much in common historically. A lot of old Swedish words exist both in Britain and the Netherlands. And speaking, not with a swedish accent, but still a little "off" you notice just how important accent's are to the Brits. In EVERY pub, I get that slightly confused look, followed by "Where you from mate?" Then "Oh, SWEDEN! Thought you were Irish!" Which I feel isn't that bad for someone who moved from the UK over 40 year's ago. 😅
We Brits take an interest in where people are from, no idea why but we do. When I worked in retail I always asked where people were from if they had a strong accent, and then asked about the town/city/country they're were from, whether it was nice or whatever.
@@RicardoD957 I'm Kiwi born and bred, from Pommie parents but spent the middle third of my life in Australia (mostly in remote rural). I adore accents and languages but haven't (yet) had the chance to travel further than Aus+NZ. When I meet people with accents, which tends to be at the supermarket checkout, I politely ask where they're from and comment how I am interested in accents and foreign lands. Kiwi Friends have told me that my accent switches back to Australian when I've been there a few weeks in a row, for the first few days or so of my return to NZ. (So even subtle shifts in accents, our brains can sorta turn on and off). Even before the internet, I noticed that on long distance phone calls, I would change certain vocabulary words when speaking on calls from Aus to NZ or NZ to Aussie.
Its notable how much north germanic /scandanavian speakers speaking english here often end up sounding irish or american. Must be a twinge of that (apart from likely learning american english first thru tv absorption). I guess the american accent is the mix of irish, scottish, german, scandanavian, dutch - not just english, as those groups actually often outnumbered english settlers in america. They don't admit but americans are majority German heritage, and they definately will admit when they are Irish though. Especially the Dublin and strangely, Danish accent to me sounds quite american yet only when speaking english- not in their other native languages 🤔
@@jorgepeterbarton I spent a month in Granada in 2004 trying to speak Spanish and failing miserably. I am American and lived in many places when young and they would all ask me if I was from France.Never been there.
Fantastic video! I'm American and hearing all the different regional accents was fascinating! We have a lot of regional ones that are coalescing in much the same way. I remember in college when my professor of Medieval Literature had us all memorize a small section of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and recite it. I loved how the words flowed together, it was really lyrical. And I enjoyed hearing it here too!
Hi there! You say you're "American". I'm also American. Where are you exactly from? Canada, USA, México, in North América? Or from any Central American country? Or from a nation un South America? Because all of those are AMERICA, you know? I'm from Chile, South America. And we are all sick and tired hearing you, folks from USA, that YOU ARE AMERICANS AND YOUR COUNTRY IS AMERICA. If we are talking about language, please start making a correction to this big mistake. You are NOT AMERICA OR AMERICANS. YOU ARE JUST A PART OF IT. Best regards, from another American, out and far from the USA. Best regards
3 місяці тому
@@andreasekler5313 "American" is vernacular for "from the USA" in many parts of the world, because there is no other descriptor to replace it. We have no equivalent to "Canadian" or "Mexican". Remember USA stands for United States of AMERICA.
My High School English teacher had us memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and recite it in front of the class for a grade. I took the offered extra credit, and memorized it in Middle English. I was pretty happy with myself and thought I was all set for the day we were supposed to perform. I show up to class, and our first direction from our teacher is to write down the prologue on paper to turn in so she can grade it. I had listened to a recording, and memorized it from that. I had no idea how to spell most of the words I could pronounce. Thankfully, she gave me some wide latitude on what I wrote down.
Since Middle English had a *wide* variety of acceptable spellings (as they were local and strewn around in time like seed), I would have accepted the spellings as long as the vowels were correct, and then I'd write a neat little comment on which dialect would be closest to the spellings. I myself would have used the spellings found in the Harley manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (British Library, Harley MS. 7334), along with the script - that prologue would look like a straight-up copy. Actually, I once *wrote* a short story in south-western Middle English exactly like that (minus the occasional modern interference in vocabulary). And I read from the Harley manuscript during the uni seminar on the Miller's Tale (oh, how fun: “Yeah, my manuscript doesn't agree with this edition - I have a thorn here!”).
As a native Texan i embraced my deep southern accent early in life. I still use words like Howdy and y'all to keep them alive. I love using old euphemisms and sayings my grandparents would use. My people were Slovakian German and French. I heard a lot of German growing up. That has created a unique Dutch Texas dialect that is almost gone now. Great video, not many could make me revisit Canterbury Tales. enriching though they were ild not make it through today.
I used "The good Lord willin' an' the crick don't rise" at work the other day, and exactly zero coworkers understood what I meant by it. It was absolutely glorious. I have to find a way to work "on it like a chicken on a junebug" into a very serious corporate setting.
@@MereMeerkatI say it “like ducks on a junebug”, one of my favorite phrases. Last week I said that someone was “crooked as a barrel of snakes” and everyone looked at me like I had three eyeballs or something. I thought it was a fairly ordinary idiom. But, I’m Texan and my family on both sides are Texan going way back. My husband’s family are mostly transplants from the northeast. Most of the time my accent is fairly neutral generic American (aside from the country southern idioms) but when I’m very tired my central Texas accent starts coming out, and when it does, my in laws find it bizarre, lol. Like, if I say something about those “really purdy flah’rz” or ask for a “diaaahhhyet coke” they act like I have some contagious disease, lol! Plus, I live in south Texas and I was raised with a Latino stepdad so through him I had lots of Tios and Tias and primos. So, in the same sentence sometimes I’ll use a southern idiom or phrase, along with a Spanish word or phrase. Most people that are from this area don’t bat an eye at that, but people not from here (like my in-laws) find it very startling and incongruous. Especially since I look very white. But ‘round here, speaking Tex-Mex is pretty common and normal.
I think "y'all" is safe: it fills a grammatical need better than the alternatives. I come from the Midwest U.S. and have been using "y'all" regularly in high-tech and Spanish-friendly communities here in southern California for years, and never get puzzled looks. (It *is* informal: I doubt I'd use it when making a presentation.) "Howdy" (for "how do you do?") I use sometimes, but - unlike "y'all" - I don't hear others using it 'round these parts.... maybe away from the coast/cities.
@@MereMeerkat it's and the Creek don't rise. Origin is a ,letter to George Washington from one of his generals. The general was tasked with keeping the Creek Indians from attacking the colonists, and wouldn't be able to come to support Washington if the Creek rose up. Which is why 'dont" is grammatically correct.
People say I "don't have an accent" because I'm from Northern Arkansas. No friends, I do have an accent, it's just not the one you were expecting. Arkansas and Missouri (especially Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri) are border regions which means some people are going to talk with a southern accent and some people are going to talk with a Midwestern one. The amount of times I've caught myself saying "oop" when I drop something or reflexively saying "sorry" when I haven't actually inconvenienced anyone on a daily basis is more than I can count on two hands.
I never thought history could be so interesting! When I was at school (many years ago!) I hated history lessons - they were so dry and full of names and dates which seemed totally irrelevant. Thank you for bringing life back to a previously dead subject.
Ugh, it's always so frustrating when people try & teach history that way! 😭 It's the personal stories & the wacky facts that really engage us about the past? SO glad YT is finally bringing all of that amazing stuff to life in an accessible way for people who were choked by the dry-dust version!! In my experience school history classes have also tended to subscribe far too heavily to the "great man" theory of history...? In reality, although some individuals (like Chaucer or Caxton) definitely make a very significant impact, it's never in isolation. I'm always more fascinated by seeing how they're products of their socio-economic context, including changes in contemporary attitudes & new trade contacts with other cultures...?
Yep history is presented so poorly in schools, if you can find it . James Burke did a series called connections that tells the history of innovations and is highly entertaining
My history classes at school were all "if you'd have lived back then, you'd have toiled in the fields / factories / trenches and died a miserable death at a young age". And I finished in 2000, so imagine how bad it is now. Probably wall-to-wall "we enslaved the world and need to feel guilty forever". Give me the great men any day.
I was once told that the Glaswegian accent lends itself to the cadences & intonation of Chaucerian language & therefore made it sound more rhythmically poetic & more readily understandable. I tried it & it works like charm. Cheers.
That's assuming you can understand Glaswegian at all. I saw a vid of man-on-the-street interviews with people in Glasgow. Could hardly understand a word. And it's not like I never heard Scots before.
@@CAMacKenzie True. I am basing the pronunciation on the educated Glaswegian twang that I was familiar with when at College of Education. The speech patterns are slower & enunciation crisp & clear. Using that tip did however help me to read & the better to appreciate Chaucerian verse.
@@CAMacKenzie Glaswegian isn't too bad. Dundee however, I know people who grew up in the city and still can't always understand other locals. I was a student there for a bit, the accent just sounds like noise and there's a lot of local slang and dialect. I only grew up 30 miles away. The universities in Dundee have students from all over the world, many of whom don't have English as a first language. If I didn't understand Dundonian folks then I can't understand how a French or Chinese person would.
English is sometimes said to be almost "sung," compared to other languages. Poets probably "sang" to a greater extent then than they do now. Old recordings of self-professed bards like Eliot, Joyce and Yeats have them droning on in a sing-song manner.
Keep in mind that Chaucer's Middle English wasn’t the dialect that became Modern English. Thomas Mallory's Arthurian works (written just a few decades later) are considerably easier to read, because his dialect won out.
I love the introductory bits in Morte d'Arthur, where Mallory is begging his readers to put in a good word for him, so he can get out of prison. It makes the whole thing seem so much more real.
@@joanhuffman2166 Are you asking about British Dialects of today? Mostly they are influence by whoever invaded/immigrated whichever part of the island. So Scouse (from Liverpool) is influence by Irish, Yorkshire accents are influenced by the Scandinavians, etc.
This video was wild, out of the gate she hits us with middle English from under a wimple, she goes from Chaucer to a blink and you'll miss it Terry Pratchett reference, and then the rabidly unapologetic smile at the patronage hint. Can we have some more, please?
@@jeffreyshort4531 The reference was to the "trouserleg of time" which is a minor plotpoint in "Guards! Guards!". Incidentally "Guards! Guards!" is a great starting point for getting into Pratchett's work. [Also, for fellow Disc fans, it appears the Trousers of Time wasn't a Pratchett original. It was also mentioned on the radio show "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again" including this appropriate quote: "There's a library at the end of the left trouserleg!"]
An uncle used to brag that he could pin down an accident to almost anywhere. It did seem to me that the accents I heard when I visited as a kid shifted a lot when I visited again 30 years later. It felt like many pleasant accents had been replaced by regional stereotypes from TV.
Love it when I click on a video for linguistic content and accidentally get a sneaky Pratchett reference. As someone with a degree in linguistics who also did a thesis on Pratchett, I love when a video caters specifically to my interests. Thank you! 😆
I love historical linguistics soooo much. It’s fascinating to place the internet, as an invention, alongside other major inventions that have made huge ripples in language. It is always sad to see dialects fall out of use, but I’m glad to see you discuss emergent dialects as well. Great stuff!
It just sucks that the emergent internet-based dialects are all American because they dominate culture so much 😒 I hate seeing my Australian colloquial heritage die to crap Americanisms from Twitter.
My High School English class was told to pick a tale and do a presentation about it. I jumped on the Miller's tale and proceeded to tell it like a stand-up comedy routine!
I always laugh when people my age (boomers) say the world is going mad, it always was and no change means no progress. Another Great episode. I have shared with my grandchildren so they too can enjoy.
Yay for passing on cool historio-linguistic content! 🥳 Heheheh yeah, nostalgia in my observation tends to mostly consist of a highly selective vision of the past...? Mostly due to fallible human memory, and childhood self-absorption! Hence all the perennial moaners extolling a former era when everything was supposedly so much "simpler"... 🤦🏻♀️ It's quite startling to realise that sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years! 😆 Think of the Ancient Greeks, harking back to a mythical "Golden Age"... The completely ahistorical takes political extremists come out with are rather horrifying though 😳 Feels like a significant failure in educational systems, but maybe instead it's just more wishful thinking...?
As a grumpy oldish git myself I do have to stop myself tutting when the youth of today don't know the difference between less and fewer... I think Douglas Adams' quote about technology could also apply to language: 1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. 2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. 3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
@@worldcomicsreview354 Oof. Really, really hope that's a joke. And as a linguist, I don't mind emojis if appropriately used... Perhaps consider them an analogue of the modifiers & honorifics in Ancient Egypt's elegant & complex hieroglyphic system? Might make you feel better!
I love hearing about old and Middle English as a Dutch speaker. When you mentioned eggs also being called “eyren” it’s so clear how close the languages are related because we still say “eieren” pronounced slightly different but in some dialects it’s almost the same as what you said here. Language is such an amazing thing.
This video exemplifies why I love history. Bringing the strands of history together to show its mirror in the modern world. Really helps make such distant and alien worlds feel so much more real and relevant. Someone at the BBC, give J Draper a history series, now!
Why? The whole world gets her for free (albeit with an ad or two) on UA-cam and we can rewatch her stuff whenever we like. But if she was signed to a TV network it is likely that one series would be made and quickly forgotten, so it wouldn't even show up on a streaming service a decade later.
My favourite word used in The Canterbury Tales but lost in modern English is 'eek', meaning 'also'. The text is just littered with all these little mouse-squeaks. To get an idea of the linguistic diversity that existed in medieval England, compare The Canterbury Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written around the same time, but in a Staffordshire dialect. Thanks to Chaucer's influence on modern English, it's fairly easy to get the gist of what he's written most of the time if you read it with some explanatory notes, but Sir Gawain really could be written in a completely different language (or at least it seems that way to me).
That 'Henry Higgins' skill (placing people by their accent) is a real thing. It was, and might still be, something 'security specialists' *cough cough MI5/6* learned for special positions - the one I met was mingling at a British embassy entrance engaging people in conversation. He got my dad to within 2 miles and my mum 10 miles, which is reasonable since she moved several miles aged 14.
Not just secret agents, the general police have specialists to help ascertain exactly where people might be from too to help them trace their background if they're suspects.
Bus divers, too. I once met a man in Peterlee, outside Newcastle (UK), who had spent 30 years driving a local shuttle between Newcastle and several of the surrounding towns & villages. He told me he got so that he could tell which town or village someone was from with near 100% accuracy.
@@user-et6pj4db9s No. People have a stereotype in their head for what someone from North Carolina should sound like but we moved out when I was relatively young and I was raised by Canadians so I sound way more like someone from Toronto than someone from Raliegh
Costumes. History. Theater. Linguistics. Humor. A cute accent. I love what you’re bringing ahahaha.. i really appreciate your linguistic takes and you saying YEET with such gusto, dressed like a 14th century person 😂
A bloody good tale. It was also the day I realised why we ask 'Can I get a copy of that book' because originally you would be getting a copy of the book you wanted. I feel enlightened and dumb in equal measures. Thank you J.
I worked in a bookstore in Seattle (in the US) for a while, and a British woman came in asking for a mop. I let her know that we didn't have any, but she could go to a store up the street. She looked surprised and asked, "You haven't got any mops? Like, a mop of Seattle?" That's when I realized she meant "maps".
I met an Australian woman in Alburquerque, and when I told her my sister was living in Mackay, she said "oh, the austic city!" After a minute, I realised she said "artistic."
@@glen1555 I didn't ask, but based on the single reference I have of the Liverpool accent, I think not (that reference being the Beatles, of course). I thought it sounded more like RP.
@@Joanna-il2ur bear in mind that a standard US accent pronounces the "o" in mop as /ɑ/ (as opposed to contemporary RP /ɔ/), whilst the contemporary RP "a" in map has arguably shifted towards a more open vowel sound which could be perceived as nearer to that American "o" than to the American /æ/ in the US pronunciation of "map".
Language is a living thing that grows and changes. On one hand it is sad to lose some words and dialects, on the other hand it's really great and exciting to see new ones being created from more people and cultures connecting. Thank you chaucer for kicking off an era. I bet he didn't know at the time that it would matter so much.
according to terry jones, most medieval peasants could at least read their own name, and they sued each other like modern americans, so it would be very advantagous if they could also read what their lawyer was writing down, so probably slightly more literate than people think
In Michael Woods book/ tv series "Story of England" where he looks at the records of 3 villages in Leicestershire through the history, there are records of the villagers employing Priests and School teachers from the late Medieval period so presumably a significant number of the villagers could read and write
@@nealjroberts4050 It helps to remember that the judicial system of the day was much less formal and much more local than it is now. Villages could convene their own juries for local disputes and Justices of the Peace, who today are mostly just good for witnessing official documents, acted as impromptu arbitrators for even smaller disagreements.
It's not particularly difficult to recognise your name even if illiterate. Even my niece was able to identify her name written down long before she could read anything else.
At 14:17, you brought up what I’ve noticed in America. This phenomenon is even more pronounced here. Younger Americans sound almost exactly the same despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. This is especially true in bigger cities.
I ran into one of those people with linguistic superpowers. After listening to me talk he outlined my family history. He was bang on and I would have accused him of cold reading but I did not know the dark secret of the family history and that my paternal grandfather was secretly from...Kent!
I love how enthused you are with the evolution of language! It's because of people like you that many forgotten words will be remembered for history's sake!
My accent really confuses people. I was born in Newcastle. My pa is a Gordie but Mother is Scottish and I have lived in Scotland most of my life. Most people think I am Scottish until come out with something like "wor lass". I love how my parents accents are similar like lass/lassie and aye are used in both but they are also very different. Yet another amazing video. I love your content, so informative and entertaining.
Reminds me of when my parents moved to the Borders a few decades ago, drinking in Berwick you'd hear that the folk from Spittal were all Geordies, and drinking in Spittal, they'd say the Berwick folk all spoke with Scots accents- there was a subtle difference, but being born near Newcastle then living in County Durham from 5yo to 10yo, it seemed minimal compared to crossing the Tyne or the Wear tbh
I mean, you're half Scottish and you spent most of your life in Scottland, enough to develop a Scottish enough accent that people think you're Scottish, so what then makes you not Scottish?
My brother went to University in Scotland and had his kids there, which officially makes them Scots. They moved to southern England - which leaves my English brother speaking Scots with a English accent and the Scottish children having no trace of Scots at all, apart from when they're in the mood. My accent confuses people. Born in Manchester my family moved abroad when I was 11 and I went to an international school, which played havoc with my accent. I returned to Manchester in my late teens and had to re-learn the accent, which isn't 100% even 40 years later. I've lost the mid -Atlantic accent, from the international school, completely but, even when I try hard, I don't sound authentically local - it's more generic 'BBC north' - lovely flat vowels and a deliberate preservation of archaic phrases. My next door neighbour (from Blackpool) said 'No, where are you REALLY from?' when I told him I was born three miles away.
@@pd4165 that reminds me of a woman I knew decades ago. I think she was born here in Australia, but her parents were USian and she spent most of her childhood in India and attended an English school there. Her accent was a glorious mish-mash.
Wow! I wish you had been my English teacher when I was at school. I laboured through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue with a teacher who couldn’t pronounce it like you do. I understood far more of it with your pronunciation. I have always been fascinated with regional speech. As a boy of about 6 years old, I could barely understand a word from the two farm workers on my uncles farm in Devon during the early fifties. It was not just their accent, but also their vocabulary. As an adult I married a lass from Lancashire and her accent has moderated considerably over the forty plus years we have been married. Interestingly her accent returns when we visit her sister who still resides in Lancashire. I have lived in many parts of England and pick up accents quite easily. So I’m not sure which region I sound like. It may depend on who I am speaking to. Please can you do more videos like this one. Thank you.
That's what happens with accents. I had an American friend staying with me in Vancouver Canada. A bloke who had grown😢 up just eight miles away from me in South East London stopped by for a visit. When he left, my American friend remarked that he hadn't understood a word either of us had said for the previous twenty minutes.
Try talking to someone from Newfoundland, @@davidbouvier8895 , I had an ex-gf who sounded "normal" until she phoned the folks back home, then all of a sudden I needed Closed Captions to figure out WTH is going on.
I'm an American, and we don't have quite the accent diversity as the UK, but my parents are originally from Wisconsin in the Midwest, and my mom had a pretty thick Midwestern accent that lightened over decades of living in California. My relatives who stayed in Wisconsin, though, still have it. I've never lived there, but a Midwestern O sound sometimes slips out from being exposed to that accent as a kid.
It's interesting that I dropped out of high school and still Chaucer is my favorite writer. I've read the Canterbury tales over and over. One thing that's always fascinated me is language. This was an excellent video.
Ah, J. Draper!! SOO WELL DONE!! The writing, the performance, the spooky 2-second shots, the passion, the credibly-sourced history & research, the wimple rant at the end...!!!! I LOVE YOUR WORK!!!!!!
Love the video, I only speak English and have struggled with learning other languages in the past, but etymology like this is FASCINATING to me. I did personally have an egg/eren situation as a kid when I visited the north of Scotland and had to dash into a corner stop and ask where their bread was, the lady was very confused until I said for making sandwiches, when she exclaimed "Oh, y' mean breed?" - it's so fascinating that the regional difference in pronunciation of a word in our shared language is enough to impede communication.
A good job you only wanted bread, which is accented. Try asking for a bread roll, whichever variant you say locally. In my local chippies they are barms but in the shops they're baps, which should give scholars a fair clue to my location.
I found this very interesting to watch, as an American I knew that this was something that happened here, we have many accents and some regional dialects but it seems they're slowly vanishing. Where one use to be able to identify someone's accent to the state, now it's more the region, someone doesn't have a "Florida accent" or "Texas accent" they have a southern accent. Or they may have a New England accent, or Midwestern, or pacific northwest. Knowing that many European countries including the UK are so much smaller (speaking only of land mass) it never occurred to me that there were once so distinctive accents and dialects there and that the same phenomenon, the disappearance of those and emergance of new accents and dialect, was a world wide phenomenon. It's nice for me to learn about other places in the world, it helps expand my world view even just a little bit. I thank you for sharing your history and your culture.
I had heard the story of the eggs or eyren before, but it's still a very dramatic indicator of the state of the language at that time. As someone born and raised in Oklahoma, it's interesting to consider how much watching Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate when I was a teen influenced me and my language, even my accent.
My family's Swiss German, and I lived there as a kid. It might be different now but the accents were still super localized (you could tell who was from the next village over because they used a different word for swimming pool). I reckon it's because TV in Switzerland is almost all high German, so the regional dialects are still sort of separate, and able to survive.
Dear J. Draper. I've just discovered you, 15 minutes ago and I'd say I'm delighted. I'm Chilean, 65, attended a local Brittish school where I learned my English from great Brittish and Scottish teachers. Without formal training, I became an English/Spanish translator. I love languages so much, I learned French as well. English has let me open a door to a whole different culture, which I have enjoyed since childhood, being able to discover great literature and history, and to watch movies in it's original sound. Spanish is also a great language, so rich and ample. To be able to navigate in both languages made me recognise similarities, differences, many common roots, everything so fascinating! Tks for this wonderful presentation. I read Chaucer for the first time at school, when I was twelve, and simply loved him. Cheers from a new subscriber, from the other end of the planet and congratulations for your beatifull work❤
We had a bit of a repeat of this play out with those of us who went in the Queue last September. The only thing we had in common was that we all decided to go & see the Queen at the exact same time, & now we share anecdotes with each-other over Whatsapp.
I remember asking my Dad (a South Londoner like myself) why he said graph with a short a like maths rather than a long one like laugh and he said it was because his teacher at school was from Birmingham.
Seriously! All her videos are good, but this one was especially well done. It's rare that a 15 minute video on UA-cam is well done enough to be interesting all the way through.
As an American who grew up through primary school in East Anglia, has relatives from Middlesex, lived in France and Sicily, and now lives in the southern US, I'm no stranger to dialect melding. I loved your explanation snd comparisons to how technology can shift language permanently - modern meme culture is definitely interesting to watch evolve!
I'm American, grew up in America, and I still use English words because I read so many British authors as a kid! My personal favorite is "falling like ninepins," because it's so much more fun to say than "bowling pins."
@@angelabecker9611 i always insist on using the english spelling of words like favourite and recognise for this reason, at this point it's a reflex i can't break out of. i still remember getting into an argument in 2nd grade because there was a word search and i was looking for a synonym for "colour" that was only 5 letters long.
Sophisticated people who are "involved" with your wife's sister. With all credit to John of Gaunt though the fact that Chaucer's granddaughter ascended to the rank of duchess is a testament to the enormous value his support bore for the family.
Linen headwear is so underappreciated. I have found that wearing a linen coif on a hot, sunny day actually keeps me cooler than being bareheaded, because linen is a breathable material which protects my head from solar heat gain.
I often spent sunmers in Poland as a child and quite a few women wore head dresses or babushkas in the summer covering their hair. Part of the reason was to keep it cool the other was to keep their hair clean as they walked quite a bit and were exposed to more dirt than we might be accustomed to.
I speak danish, german and english, and i find that Middle English, is quite understandable once I just mix the languages together in my head. I don’t know if this has any actual backing, but I just found it fascinating
I speak English, and learnt French (well enough to read ok) and German (atrocious) at school. With that combination I can largely read Middle English and not have to think about it too hard.
I grew up in the Peak District, and was relentlessly bullied for being ‘posh’ because I had a much softer northern accent that doesn’t really sound like anything specific. Just using hard vowels so bath sounds like math etc. We weren’t posh - I was one of 4 with a single Mum and we were pretty poor for my youngest years. But Mum and my older sisters grew up in the South so my accent was a bit generic.
My mum's family were Northerners in the South so we all have odd "Northern" expressions. I use "tad" and "owt" a lot. And we have this mixed meal description system: dinner is always the main cooked meal at whatever time but the smaller usually uncooked one is lunch if at midday or tea if in the evening.
Had it the other way around growing up in the south with northern parents. I still get people thinking I am much posher than I actually am. I also use dinner for the main meal of the day whatever the time and lunch, tea, or supper for a small meal.
@@davidwright7193 I'm an American, and in my family we typically used "supper" for the evening meal and "lunch" for the noon meal regardless of size. We would occasionally say "dinner" for the evening meal (and never the noon meal) - normally in a context that implied it was special, like, "Let's go out for dinner tonight." For holidays, like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, we always called the main (and huge!) meal "dinner" even though it was served around 2 PM. Of course, we have no meal called "tea." Tea to us is just the (category of) drink. Also, no one has ever accused me of sounding posh. ;)
It’s crazy to think that in England you can tell what COUNTY someone came from. In the US, if they have a very strong accent and you have an ear for it, you can identify which five state area they’re from. I wonder if that’s because the US has always had more migration? Very, very few people can say their families have lived in an area for more than a couple of generations, there’s been constant movement for work and land and greener pastures, so there’s less chance for areas to develop a specific identity?
My family has lived in and around Atlanta since the 1700s. My grandmother and her generation all sounded like Gone with the Wind, but my generation has no discernible accent at all. I even heard my son pronounce the second 't' in Atlanta the other day! Shockhorror! I love how multicultural Atlanta is now, and I love my non-accent accent.😊
Same! I have a Bawlmer (Baltimore) accent (not quite THAT heavy) but my daughter does not. You can hear the older generations and distinguish which county they are from, but the younger people's accents are indistinguishable.
@slake9727 I'd be so curious to know what people from other regions hear! I'm sure you're right...I'm no Rhett or Scarlett, but surely there's some kind of regional dialect still lurking.😄
Love this, I find accent and dialect and the development of language FASCINATING! I live in S Yorkshire, my dad's a Manc and my mum's a Sheffield/Welsh mix, with her mum being Welsh/Irish, and just from that I've grown up around a real mix. In particular I love idioms - I think it's partially because my parents are a bit older than most of the parents of people my age, but I've grown up around a lot of idioms that just aren't used much any more (although it's also been revealed to me in recent years that some of them are what we now call "nan-isms", turns out nobody outside of my family says "the pot calling the kettle greasy-arse") and take great delight in keeping them alive, and I love learning new ones from other areas, cultures and languages! And maybe I'm biased because it's where I'm from, but I do think Yorkshire has some really interesting history in the local dialect; the fact that a lot of people here still use thee/thou or that we use a lot more words of Scandinavian origin than the south because of the Vikings having more influence up here. A few years ago a Swedish artist I followed on tumblr mentioned the phrase "hej hopp" and to me it seems obvious that the standard greeting here, "ey up", would probably have come from that (though I've only been able to find one other discussion of this and I'm nowhere near enough an actual linguist to state it as fact) and the mental image of Vikings saying "ey up" is wonderful to me.
I grew up on the Lancashire/ Cumbria border. Some of the old folks in the village when I was a kid spoke a dialect so deep that I doubt anyone not from those parts would understand them.
I'm originally from West Yorkshire. One set of grandparents came from Bingley and the other from Bradford, which are only about 3 miles apart, but their accents were discernibly different. Now, we all just speak with a kind of generic Yorkshire accent which is not even as far removed from the Lancastrian accent as it used to be.
Fun Fact: Jeffery Chaucer was also a footballer for a team that would eventually become Bury FC, a 10th-tier side. He was not a player of any note, as back in that era football was played more in a scrum-style, not the intricate open space and passing style of today. And in Pennsylvania eggs are called "cackleberrys"...
When I was in elementary school, teachers STILL believed that writing things out by hand built character. One of my teacher's favorite punishments was making us copy dictionary pages. Another just liked us to copy the same sentence over and over (in my case, it was usually something like, "I will do my homework on time.")
Even in the early 2000's, when I was in high school, my teachers put a huge emphasis on writing things by hand. We were allowed to type research papers on a computer, but everything else had to be hand-written. And this was in the early 2000's, when it should have been obvious that computers were taking over the world. And I had, still have, terrible handwriting, and my teachers were always complaining to me about it. Hm, maybe that problem would have easily been solved by, oh, I don't know, maybe letting me type out my homework on one of those new-fangled things called a computer? And don't get me started on all the years in school we spent learning to write in proper cursive. A completely useless skill.
@@hamsterama I think they eventually figured out this was torture for the teachers who had to read everything too, and it ended. I hear you though, I have a similar problem with handwriting. I remember teaching myself to use a spreadsheet in college (late 90s) just to avoid all that adding in a course where we had to do some statistical analysis. I wasn't a business major, so I never took the Excel class. But once I learned to use a spreadsheet, lo and behold, I was suddenly able to do math! I always though I was horrible at math. Turns out I just had bad handwriting--I didn't line my numbers up very well, mixed up the letters and numbers in algebra (2s and Zs look very similar), etc. I had no trouble with the concepts at all, and once the numbers were typed out, and I could plug them into formulas error-free, math was easy! If I did make a mistake, it was easy to work out where the problem was.
@@rileybanks1191 Was it older teachers who made you write stuff by hand? If so, that wouldn't surprise me. When I was in school, some teachers made us do silly, pointless assignments because "you'll need to do that in the real world." It turns out, in the "real world," your employer doesn't make you do silly assignments. In retrospect, many of my teachers lived in their own academic bubble. They had no clue what people in actual, productive jobs do. Teachers living in their little bubbles think that knowing how to handwrite stuff is an important skill. Well, it is definitely not.
The Maths correction. The author himself was one of the pilgrims in the story too, so it's 29 pilgrims plus 1. So it was supposed to be 120 stories not 116. Love it that you showed how old and middle English sounded.
This is such a brilliant video. I am a German-as-a-second-language teacher in Germany and so tired of my fellow "native" Germans blaming newcomers or young people for destroying the language. Languages change! It's always been the case and often to the benefit of communication, like giving up regional dialects to be more understandable to a greater group of people. I'm also personally interested and invested in German minority language/dialects, and sometimes I think about how we could preserve them...but that doesn't mean I have to stop language change, because that never ever worked throughout history.
Clearer communication is why every German writes Hochdeutsch and not just their local dialect, and why every Norwegian writes either Bokmål or Nynorsk despite the wealth of dialects we could be writing. It’s also why you don’t use all dialect words when teaching, or when talking to someone who speaks a different dialect than you, and when you *do* use a dialect word while teaching, you also tell the learners that it’s specific to a particular area.
@@ragnkja teaching some dialect words always makes me happy but it's not exactly enjoyed my students. For the sake of simplicity, I stick to Standard words when possible, but just reading your comment here makes me excited about the possibilities languages have.
@@ragnkja - likewise, as an Instructional Designer writing training for an international audience at Ford Motor Co, we were required to use "International English" - no contractions & simpler words over a more varied vocabulary. It hurt my poetic heart to do that, but I powered through.
Yes, but that "change"/"destruction" isn't usually actively supported by the Native inhabitants "leaders". Herein lies the difference. Organic change from within, is perfectly natural. Mechanized mass displacement of indigenous People in the name of "Mult-Culturalism" is not. Herein lies the difference. What was it called when the roles were reversed ;)
@@KarlKarsnark Nobody supports destruction... Which is, as I said, not even the case here. Migration is soooo normal if you look at the big picture. What can be supported is peaceful integration.
What you say about accents is interesting. In the US it's _always_ been common to have people who are, as you say, from a place but without the accent. However in the 1990s there was some evidence that local accents were getting _stronger,_ and in 2012 I did a survey of local accents in Southern California and discovered that not only were there many more of them than previously recorded but that a new, _non-rhotic_ accent was taking shape among younger speakers in some parts of Los Angeles. And even within a metro area there's very strong distinctions. You say people Americans speak in the accent of their local media market, but Pasadenans still sound _very_ different from Angelenos, more similar to Illinois than to the rest of California. To the north, people from the San Francisco Peninsula or the coastal East Bay sound much more similar to east coasters than the northern and southern reaches of the Bay Area, which became major urban centers much later in history. My own accent switches depending where I am between the Midwestern-influenced Pasadenan where I grew up and the quasi-posh, mid-Atlantic American accent of someone who has now spent many years living in a non-Anglophone country (coincidentally I now sound kinda like Bill Bryson, whom I idolized in high school).
Even so, the basic phenomenon being described here is definitely happening, as regional accents get flattened out to a sort of vague Ohio accent. It's usually ascribed to the influence of TV newscasters.
@SamAronow As a New Yorker I’ve definitely noticed some of the patterns you mentioned before. The accents of Downstate NY, NYC, Central NY, Buffalo, etc all vary pretty drastically. I just have to say how much of a fan I am of your channel. Your videos are incredibly informative and entertaining. I think they are important for people who, like me, come from Jewish families but do not know much about their history. Thank you for creating such amazing content.
Fascinating. In Dutch we still say “eieren”. And your pronunciation of “night” sounded very much like our “nacht”: you called it pronouncing the “h”, but seems to me that it is pronouncing the “g”. All of which is a perfect illustration of how Germanic Old and Early Middle English were.
That was interesting, Draper. I thought the closest to a generic American accent was your West Country dialect. Almost New Yorkish but without the overlay of Dutch, Irish and Yiddish that comprise that general dialect. Full disclosure, I'm a Boomer. I was born in a Suburb of NYC. My Dad had been an announcer for NBC during WWII. He and my Mom were from Chicago, originally. We moved ''back'' to Chicago when I was 3. [Each of the NY burroughs had once a distinctive accent.] Chicago accents depended on class and location: North Side/South Side,/West Side. There were ethnic inflections. Near North Side Chicago-ese was very close to Manhattan's dialect. When I lived there, locals all said Sh- CAW - go. Out of towners said Shi-kah -go. That pronunciation has now morphed into the locals sounding like out-of-towners to me. But we moved west when I was 16. I turned 17 in LA. Locals there sometimes asked me if I was from England when I was new in town. I learned from new friends that the town name had once been said as Loss Angh' less [with a hard G]. You can listen for it in vintage film noir flix. After 1950, the broadcast networks pushed Talent to use the Network Pronounciation of Los Ann-jell-ess, until even the locals said it that way, or avoided the issue by using the two initials. At 21 I moved to Tucson AZ. Fifty-something years ago, locals had something of a South West twang, but that has become homogenized by the TV accent, plus the old timers mostly moving out of a town they considered ruined by the influx of Snowbirds, Yankees and Californians. Go figure?
That was enlightening. In around 15 minutes you conveyed more useful information than a typical hour long documentary, piecing together gaps in my own knowledge. Thank you. I love your presentation style too. The sponsor section was inspired. I was reminded of some of the Horrible Histories ad sketches, but with extra dry wit 😂 I half hope you get "discovered" by the BBC to make short form education videos, but at the same I fervently hope you are not so you remain independent to produce excellent content like this.
UA-cam seems to do a far better job of this sort of thing than mainstream media; as UA-camrs don't need to pad out every episode to make up for high production costs.
@@euansmith3699 Let us not forget special topic interests. What TV documentary would get away with a 90 second reference to the dawn of the printing press without at least a 20 minute exploration it's development, timeline of the spread across Europe, mandatory visit to some museum and select sound-bites from the curator. Meanwhile, the viewer has forgotten why the printing press was important. Yet fail to do so and someone somewhere will put pen to paper over the disservice done to history. I wish I could write that purely in jest 😅
Love this video. I’m an American and majored in speech therapy and this is why! it’s just fascinating how languages grow and evolve and words die. Dialects can change so quickly.
I do enjoy the sound of Middle English as well as Celtic and Gaelic. I worked at a call center in the US for a while in a sales position and I memorized most of our area codes so I would know the location of the caller. I paid careful attention to the various dialects and learned to mimic them because a person feels more secure when talking to a person who sounds like them. To this day, I can listen to a person a guess what region they are from and I automatically emulate their dialect when I hear them speak.
My mom used to work at a call center and she took me to work one day and the thing that fascinated me the most was the accents coming from all over the US and how clearly different they were. Which is really saying something because normally I am _so bad_ at picking up on accents that one time I was watching a British UA-camr, and when he mentioned he was British I was really confused because I didn't notice XD
I completely understand what you mean when you say the person over the phone feels more comfortable talking to someone who sounds like them. I grew up in a melting pot neighbourhood outside of Toronto, so I heard so many pronunciations of words and dialects that I actually got used to automatically doing the “translation” in my brain 😂 Fast forward to adulthood, taking phone calls at my work, people would say very rude and micro-aggressive things in confession to me about how glad they were that I didn’t have an accent or from a specific place they don’t like 🙄 While they often harped on Indian and Filipino accents, under the false assumption that they’re not located in Canada locally (Canada has HUGE Indian and Filipino communities), they would often get more upset if they were transferred to someone who worked in the US. A lot of the customers openly admitted their disdain for hearing Southern US accents, and making assumptions about their level of education, mental ability and what not. It’s crazy that while my experience with a multitude of accents made it easier for me to understand people’s English almost regardless of where they came from around the world, the same exposure amps up xenophobia in older populations in the most culturally diverse area of the country. I never want to be that closed minded when I age. Their inability to voice their frustration with respect just reeks of senility.
We covered Chaucer in my English (and German) linguistics & literature studies at university 😄 always amazing to see someone being as fascinated by language history as I am!
A fascinating and skillfully executed presentation! You’ve made the Canterbury Tales both present in the Middle English whilst also making modern English all the more understood and unique. I quite like the way you connected Chaucer to communication technology, seeing as how critical he was in the development and proliferation of the written word as a new form of communication.
I'm Canadian, was born in northern Ontario with a bit of a bush accent, moved to Nova Scotia and got immersed in the Atlantic English Accent. While an overwhelmingly amount of Newfie accents in the area had also changed the way I speak. It's subconscious but it's a real thing.
I’m in my 60’s, American and used to Sing. This was riveting. I had noticed years ago that Broadly speaking anyone who sings tends to sing in a rather generic American style English. Not Everyone, I’m only generalizing. But I also went with a student from each State to a singing Tour. In 1980 a Boston, v New York v Alabama v Texas v California accents were Very strong speaking in casual chit chat tone. 40 years later it is Rare I speak with (or hear in some way) those drastic obvious accents. We seem to be unconsciously doing exactly what Londoners are doing! Also, while there is much to criticize in our US Education the kids today are allowed to write an essay “in their voice” rather than to strict grammar constraints I had in the 1960’s. I think that is marvelous! I am Not claiming you can not find thick incomprehensible accents in the US, but they are smoothing or dying out and you really have to go to small hamlets to find it. City & Internet life require that others can understand you so local slang gets dropped, accents fade. Way to go Chaucer! If we had had a History teacher like you Everyone would have clamored to be in your class!
Wonderful video, just a wonderful perspective on things. Your talk about regional accents and the subtleties of how people speak from place to place (even if that's lessening over time) struck a particular chord. While taking some remedial French lessons, my teacher absolutely nailed EXACTLY where I was from within the province, by both how I spoke French and how I spoke English. Before then it hadn't even clicked with me that the difference existed, but we spent an entire class going over how so many communities here do language just that little bit differently. I've mostly lost my accent, living in the city and existing online, but it comes rolling on back every time I visit my hometown for a week or two. I'm happy to see such clear examples from elsewhere! Lots to think about. Thank you so much.
Happens to me too. Went to my Mother’s home town and dropped from my standard moved a lot plus TV English into Deep South. She accused me of making fun of our relatives. I call it the result of musical training, as a lot of accent seems to be related to pitch and intonation.
When you say "write it out word by word," it's worth mentioning that in those days you didn't just pop out to the stationery store to select your paper and choose from a variety of ball point pens or gel pens.
Oh my goodness, I remember this from secondary school, and then finally got the hard fact stories from Baba Brinkman, the poet/rapper who translated it into modern english. I adore your work, J. Draper. That Yorkshire, my friend from there was easily understandable until they got excited or upset. Then Yorkshire was a totally different language. In the US we are seeing the same thing regionally. The south and the north east have always been vastly difference. Words, not so much. We have regional idioms that my own travels around the US have made truly obvious. And I adore your wimple.
Permission to make “if history had gone down another trouser leg” a well known phrase…
Sir Terry Pratchett coined it!
It's a reference to Terry Pratchett's Discworld books! They're a great read and full of this sort of phrase - you should try them out :)
Is it not already?
It was in Back to the Future.
Is that a reference to the ancient (and now sadly banned) sport of Ferret-legging?
I adore this video! Can’t get enough Chaucer. Thank you.
Hey it´s the Tasting History guy, love your show!😀
Hey man, I got here from seeing your community post. I gotta thank you for the introduction because this is awesome! She is awesome!
@@damedesuka77 right? Next time I’m in London, I’m definitely taking her tour.
@@Adam-nc6qg thank you!
OK so obviously now we need a video where Max makes something and he and J explain the time period and the language surrounding it and why it was written in that way
I had the great good fortune to study Chaucer under a prof who actually spoke conversational Middle English. The class was conducted in that language, and we were each encouraged to complete one of Chaucer's unfinished Tales (in rhyming Iambic pentameter couplets, of course) in lieu of taking the final exam. Made an English major out of me.
That sounds insane, did yall have any experience or were you'll learning on the go?
This is so fuckin' based.
I learned Middle High German at the university of Gothenburg when I was young, or rather I learned the pronunciation, grammar and some poems. I doubt I could hold a conversation. It sounds similar to Middle English and Old Swedish. For instance: until around 1400 the german W sounded like the English, while the German W today sounds like the English V. In Swedish the W sound exists, but only in dialects, unless it's an English loan word or a loanword from another language with the [w] phoneme. Standard Swedish only has the [v] phoneme.
Huh? You beat Chaucer at his own game? Brilliant, you are!
Or did it just reveal the one already there lol
The way you said 'copypasta' was fantastic. Also, I remember my grandad grumbling about modern historical dramas that no one wears any headwear in them - there's clearly a growing demand for wimple representation!
Yes, when you look at photos from only a hundred years ago, everyone wears a hat. Not only that, but the women in historical dramas all stride across the countryside in long dresses as if they were wearing trousers. Try doing that for more than the few seconds it takes for a camera shot and you’ll end up on your arse.
Wimples, veils, bonnets, hoods... give me headwear!
I'm trying to bring hats back in fashion by wearing my own small collection of vintage hats.
I'm quite grateful I don't have to wear anything on my head just to look presentable in public because I hate the feeling, ugh
@@16poetisa Very fair! Mostly I'm happy with how clothing has deformalised over the last few decades, and dropping compulsory headwear is part of that; it would be nice if period dramas didn't just do correct costuming from the eyes down, though
Your grandad should have blamed the car for that change.
Funnily enough, in Dutch, you still call “eggs” “eiren,” and pronounced very similarly! In Dutch, egg (singular) is “ei,” and adding -en at the end of most nouns makes that noun plural (with the occasional word becoming plural with an -s, like in English).
We can see the Germanic root of the English word for “eggs” in this way!
Goodness I love languages. And as a person with a degree in English studying in the NL, I absolutely love this video. ❤️
Snap! 🤣
I grew up spending my summers at my Dutch grandma's. I stopped going as a teen and haven't spoken Durch in 30 years, but I still retain a lot.
Later, as an adult I learned that I spoke differently from everyone else in that area. Not because I was a Finnish kid, but because the kids next door were from Amsterdam, and I copied their slang without realising :)
I've been wanting to rekindle my skills and I'm looking for any easy to understand channels, so recommendations are welcome.
@@VikingTeddy if you want dutch channels, easy dutch are great! they interview people based on a subject (whats ur favourite subject, whats ur favourite place to travel) in dutch and you can follow along with dutch/english subtitles. i always find it funny bc theres one person who always wont agree with the topic xD
My mother's family lived in Essex and Suffolk. It was said that people there, particularly nearer the coast, could happily talk with the Dutch sailors because so much of their dialect was influenced by Dutch and vice versa.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing 👍
My first language (or, to be more accurate, my first words) were Dutch, although I was born and grew up in UK. The first decade of my life was in a mix of Dutch and English. When it came to O level we did the _Nonnes Preestes Tale of the Cok and Hen_ - one of the few clene tales. When it came to my turn to read out a section I did so using Dutch phonetic pronunciation. Teacher (Dorothy/Dot) was astonished, and made me do a longer section at a school assembly.
My first language was Dutch too. We emigrated to Scotland when I was 7. Now you'd think I was Scottish (mixed West Highland/Glasgow) but I can still speak Dutch and your right about it making Chaucer much easier to pronounce.
As a Dutch person, I can confirm this. The excerpt she read at the beginning almost sounds like a blend of English and Dutch. The pronunciation is mostly Dutch, while the vocabulary itself is closer to English.
Honestly, the sociocultural impact of the printing press is one my favorite subjects of history. It's so rare that a historical event creates such a clean break between two periods. For anyone who's interested and needs your reading slot filled for the next six months, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" by Elizabeth Eisenstein is probably the most comprehensive history on the topic.
Six months?! Geeze how long is this book
@@hannahblurp9360 she’s probably a slow reader.
@@hannahblurp9360 800 pages in paperback. Two volumes hardcover.
This is actually the exact book I've been looking for!
@@shrub4248 Will it take you six months to read, do you think ?🤔
I love how the egg joke still kinda works for a modern audience. If it had been the exact same joke but backward and the man had asked for eyren then it would be confusing due to the lost context, but “could I get some eggs?” “sorry, I don’t speak French” is absurd enough on its own that I could see it today in something along the lines of the Monty Python spam sketch
Eyren is almost the same as Dutch/Flemish eieren. And at that time there were lots of people from Flanders in the southeast of England.
Almost exactly as eggs in German, eier (pronounced eyer) :)
eyeren is actually the original Anglo-Saxon word for eggs. The word eggs entered English from the Vikings during the Danelaw and is actually cognates with the word eyeren. This also explains why some dialects still used eyeren and some had switched over to eggs, as the Norse influence wasnt evenly spread out throughout England in that era
That's how you say 'eggs' in Dutch.
We did Canterbury Tales in high school. You said these characters were all recognizable to 14th century Britain's. This book stuck with me, because I recognized each character as fitting someone I knew in my life then.
Chaucer did a great job capturing human nature in this book.
An example of technology changing English and every other language for that matter, is a really annoying auto correct / spell checker ..... Chancery ?😂
@@georgerobartes2008 I use swipe, so swipe sometimes assumes letters should be in a word that shouldn't.
@@zengrenouille You should have left it , pretty obvious who you were referring to and why. I thought it was funny and entirely appropriate.
I cannot handle the sheer delight with which you pronounced "copypasta", like sampling a fine delicacy. Very much invited to live in my head rent free hereinafter
And I've never heard "yeet" spoken so thoroughly.
me with copium
meaTSpace
I've had this experience, and I believe that it is a widely shared one, of school teachers showing an open disdain for colloquialism or slang, almost as if anything under 100 years old is inherently non-valid. In fact, as far as I recall, the newest literature we studied throughout all of high school was To Kill A Mockingbird, a book written in the 1960's set in the 1930's. I don't think we studied any other 20th century work, perish the thought of 21st century literature. If the crypt keepers that run the department of public schools didn't study it when they were in school, it's not "academic."
I actually think this damaged me. I remember the summer after I graduated high school, my grandmother loaned me this novel called Utopia by Lincoln Child. It's a thriller set in a high tech theme park. And the protagonist has a teenage daughter with an mp3 player. I was a teenager with an mp3 player! I remember thinking "Oh yeah, books are allowed to be new. I forgot that was a thing that could happen. They can even have people like me in them."
So seeing a scholar of English history enjoy and appreciate modern 2023 youth slang hits with an uncomfortably unfamiliar yet positive sensation. Young people don't often hear it's okay to be young.
She looks so proud of her modern lingo she’s acquired, I love it.
Thank you for this; this was my very favorite video of yours of all time. For decades I have taught my students that Chaucer is *AN* example of Middle English, just as Beowulf is an example of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon). But though it seems obvious now (having seen your video) it never occurred to me that Chaucer's work is the reason why anything called "Middle English" is even identifiable today. Oh, and the story about the eggs is one of the most insightful anecdotes (about anything) that I have ever heard. I just really, really liked this video, thank you.
That's really kind of you to say, thank you!
Linguistics is such an interesting subject. Like archeology of words and language. Being a Dutch native speaker, grammar across Germanic influenced languages are so interchangeable.
Living in CH, Dutch sounds familiar :)
Was lucky indeed as a Brit to live in the Netherlands for a while. Had learned a little German at school. Found the connections between our three languages both fascinating and helpful. Vive la difference. But also the borrowed wealth of shared linguistic roots. Ik denk? Ich denke (ok - so not quite the same meaning...) ? I think?
@@LathropLdST
As a dutch native speaker i'm not sure what CH is
@@forregom CH means Switzerland, I think
Dutch always sounded like someone making fun of the English language to me. Almost like someone heard it, and just decided to wing it. I mean no offence in that, it's just my personal opinion.
You have summarized my 6 years of university in 17 minutes. Thank you, this is a wonderful, delightful video.
I feel that if I had quality youtube during my college years I'd have actually understood most of it. Creators who explain things and cite them and give examples and use visuals have helped me to understand stuff I've already been taught but didn't retain bc it never took a foothold in my brain.
Hoo noo broon coow
@@drewgoin8849 ja meine brun cuu
What did you study? I’m genuinely curious
@@prapanthebachelorette6803Probably linguistics or English.
"Yeet" is definitely my favourite word to be added to the English language. It's the only one I know of which so many transformations are agreed upon; he/she/it yeets, he has yeeted, he yote.
I like that we threw in an irregular past tense purely because it's funnier.
Can you make a whole video of you joyously reciting modern slang one by one? That was wonderful
YEET YEET
@@rapchee what is yeet? Yes?
@@vonn2221 YEET
ua-cam.com/video/3sxRAeh8f7w/v-deo.html
I too am requesting this now
@@vonn2221 Yeet means to throw something suddenly, usually with much emotion.
I grew up in an industrial town in Victoria, Australia. Almost no one had moved in or out of there for over a century. So when I moved to Melbourne, people were amused by my rather archaic vocabulary. Sadly I rarely say the words I was mocked for using 30 years ago and if I use them now, it seems slightly false and affected.
That's fascinating! A great example of how those regional dialects can occur/survive even in the modern day. (Though perhaps less commonly so now, in the internet age...?)
I've definitely noticed that not just vocabulary but our NZ accent as a whole is changing, too. To me people from Auckland sound an awful lot like Aussies? (Apparently there's more than twice as many ex-pat Australians in Akld than there are in Chch & Wgtn combined, so maybe they're having a sneaky effect on the locals...?! 😉)
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 The very distinct clipped Adelaide accent is dying out. Most people in that city aged under 60 now just speak generic educated Australian.
I guess I had a bit of that. Spent eight years in primary school as a completely ordinary person with no-one conceptualising my accent as exceptional. Go to secondary 3km almost literally up the same road and all these people who weren't from my primary school were so convinced I was British. By which they meant English.
To be fair, if I heard myself on a recording at this time I did (a) sound totally different, which is normal and (b) rather more English than I would've expected, which is not. Possibly related I remember sitting in the car once amusing myself with stupid accents and then going "I've forgotten what I sound like".
@@harryeast95 😂 Starting to think too hard about other people's speech patterns, let alone one's own, can definitely turn into quite the head-trip! 🤪 Still very fun though if you have an ear for language & an interest in it...
My mother was "older" when I was born, and she was mistaken for menopause by her own mother - I've been told that when I'm really angry my accent goes rather old fashioned.
I also grew up looking up dictionary definitions in my mother's grandfather's dictionary...
Knowing some German was SO invaluable the first time I came across The Canterbury Tales in high school!
As a German-American, I grew up in a bi-lingual environment. I also learned basic French in high school. I always loved learning about languages and the origins of words :)
In German, eggs is "Eier," so very close to "Eyren"
I really like how sci-fi TV series like "The Expanse" portray a quite colorful (or "colourful") form of English
That’s because “eggs”-or rather the singular “egg”-was borrowed from Old Norse (where the plural was the same as the singular, as it’s a neuter noun), while “eyren” is natively West Germanic.
The Expanse has mixed languages on the Asteroid Belt (a concept actually nicked from a 1950's book, mind you) which form a creole called Belta.
The books actually have the Martians speaking Chinglish with Texan accents, but the show didn't replicate that.
@@worldcomicsreview354
Good luck getting “Chinglish” out of a Texan!
@@worldcomicsreview354 ITYM "form of patois" rather than "form of creole". (Although there is some creole in Belta.)
BELTALOWDA
Love your videos! I'm a nurse recovering from cancer surgery and I'm feeling a bit useless being on the receiving end at the moment so it's refreshing to watch someone funny, charming and educational as you are. Thank you and keep it up! ❤
Also a cancer patients looking for interesting ways to spend my time. I love languages and medieval history so this is the best it gets.
God bless you both. I went through that (stage 4 malignant thymoma) stuff in 2006, and here I am loving life and watching Chaucer videos. Best of luck to 'ye.' --Old Guy
I don't know how I was recommended this but this is an AWESOME video.
Thanks ,I really enjoyed that .At 80 + I still have the remains of an identifiable Geordie accent in spite of living in London for 60+ years .Working at the BBC in the 1950s I tried to lose it,and obviously didn’t succeed.Perhaps every human behavior has regional variations .Being able to imitate is a skill that maybe we’re not fully aware of .Life is wonderful .Peace n love ,J.
Love the Geordie accent, I'm glad you didn't lose it! 😊💜
That so funny. I’m from Canada. My grandma is in her 70s, left her hometown at 16 and never looked back. She never lost her accent. Yet i work with a woman in her 40s who grew up knowing only french. I don’t know when she started using english daily but nowadays she can hardly speak french anymore!
Don't lose the accent. It's one of my favorite British accents. It's so pleasant and interesting.
As a half Swede, half American. But raised in Heston Hounslow, as well as central Stockholm. Bilingual with a dash of Dutch. I find this extremely interesting and entertaining. The three have so much in common historically. A lot of old Swedish words exist both in Britain and the Netherlands. And speaking, not with a swedish accent, but still a little "off" you notice just how important accent's are to the Brits. In EVERY pub, I get that slightly confused look, followed by "Where you from mate?" Then "Oh, SWEDEN! Thought you were Irish!" Which I feel isn't that bad for someone who moved from the UK over 40 year's ago. 😅
We Brits take an interest in where people are from, no idea why but we do. When I worked in retail I always asked where people were from if they had a strong accent, and then asked about the town/city/country they're were from, whether it was nice or whatever.
@@RicardoD957 I'm Kiwi born and bred, from Pommie parents but spent the middle third of my life in Australia (mostly in remote rural). I adore accents and languages but haven't (yet) had the chance to travel further than Aus+NZ. When I meet people with accents, which tends to be at the supermarket checkout, I politely ask where they're from and comment how I am interested in accents and foreign lands. Kiwi Friends have told me that my accent switches back to Australian when I've been there a few weeks in a row, for the first few days or so of my return to NZ. (So even subtle shifts in accents, our brains can sorta turn on and off). Even before the internet, I noticed that on long distance phone calls, I would change certain vocabulary words when speaking on calls from Aus to NZ or NZ to Aussie.
Its notable how much north germanic /scandanavian speakers speaking english here often end up sounding irish or american. Must be a twinge of that (apart from likely learning american english first thru tv absorption). I guess the american accent is the mix of irish, scottish, german, scandanavian, dutch - not just english, as those groups actually often outnumbered english settlers in america. They don't admit but americans are majority German heritage, and they definately will admit when they are Irish though. Especially the Dublin and strangely, Danish accent to me sounds quite american yet only when speaking english- not in their other native languages 🤔
@@jorgepeterbarton I spent a month in Granada in 2004 trying to speak Spanish and failing miserably. I am American and lived in many places when young and they would all ask me if I was from France.Never been there.
Vikings settled in both Britain and North America 😊
Fantastic video! I'm American and hearing all the different regional accents was fascinating! We have a lot of regional ones that are coalescing in much the same way.
I remember in college when my professor of Medieval Literature had us all memorize a small section of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and recite it. I loved how the words flowed together, it was really lyrical. And I enjoyed hearing it here too!
Hi there! You say you're "American". I'm also American. Where are you exactly from? Canada, USA, México, in North América? Or from any Central American country? Or from a nation un South America?
Because all of those are AMERICA, you know?
I'm from Chile, South America. And we are all sick and tired hearing you, folks from USA, that YOU ARE AMERICANS AND YOUR COUNTRY IS AMERICA. If we are talking about language, please start making a correction to this big mistake. You are NOT AMERICA OR AMERICANS. YOU ARE JUST A PART OF IT. Best regards, from another American, out and far from the USA. Best regards
@@andreasekler5313 "American" is vernacular for "from the USA" in many parts of the world, because there is no other descriptor to replace it. We have no equivalent to "Canadian" or "Mexican". Remember USA stands for United States of AMERICA.
In Spanish we call you ESTADOUNIDENSES, just to be clear, since we are all AMERICANS. But your country is used to swallow everything around.
My High School English teacher had us memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and recite it in front of the class for a grade. I took the offered extra credit, and memorized it in Middle English. I was pretty happy with myself and thought I was all set for the day we were supposed to perform. I show up to class, and our first direction from our teacher is to write down the prologue on paper to turn in so she can grade it. I had listened to a recording, and memorized it from that. I had no idea how to spell most of the words I could pronounce. Thankfully, she gave me some wide latitude on what I wrote down.
I feel for you...
Since Middle English had a *wide* variety of acceptable spellings (as they were local and strewn around in time like seed), I would have accepted the spellings as long as the vowels were correct, and then I'd write a neat little comment on which dialect would be closest to the spellings.
I myself would have used the spellings found in the Harley manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (British Library, Harley MS. 7334), along with the script - that prologue would look like a straight-up copy.
Actually, I once *wrote* a short story in south-western Middle English exactly like that (minus the occasional modern interference in vocabulary).
And I read from the Harley manuscript during the uni seminar on the Miller's Tale (oh, how fun: “Yeah, my manuscript doesn't agree with this edition - I have a thorn here!”).
I also had to memorize it luckily I didn't have to write it as well 😊
@@Leofwinethere were 500 different spellings of “through” alone during that period
Just remind the teacher that English spelling was not standardized at the time and you were writing in your own dialect.
As a native Texan i embraced my deep southern accent early in life. I still use words like Howdy and y'all to keep them alive. I love using old euphemisms and sayings my grandparents would use. My people were Slovakian German and French. I heard a lot of German growing up. That has created a unique Dutch Texas dialect that is almost gone now. Great video, not many could make me revisit Canterbury Tales. enriching though they were ild not make it through today.
I used "The good Lord willin' an' the crick don't rise" at work the other day, and exactly zero coworkers understood what I meant by it. It was absolutely glorious. I have to find a way to work "on it like a chicken on a junebug" into a very serious corporate setting.
@@MereMeerkatI say it “like ducks on a junebug”, one of my favorite phrases.
Last week I said that someone was “crooked as a barrel of snakes” and everyone looked at me like I had three eyeballs or something. I thought it was a fairly ordinary idiom.
But, I’m Texan and my family on both sides are Texan going way back. My husband’s family are mostly transplants from the northeast.
Most of the time my accent is fairly neutral generic American (aside from the country southern idioms) but when I’m very tired my central Texas accent starts coming out, and when it does, my in laws find it bizarre, lol.
Like, if I say something about those “really purdy flah’rz” or ask for a “diaaahhhyet coke” they act like I have some contagious disease, lol!
Plus, I live in south Texas and I was raised with a Latino stepdad so through him I had lots of Tios and Tias and primos. So, in the same sentence sometimes I’ll use a southern idiom or phrase, along with a Spanish word or phrase.
Most people that are from this area don’t bat an eye at that, but people not from here (like my in-laws) find it very startling and incongruous. Especially since I look very white. But ‘round here, speaking Tex-Mex is pretty common and normal.
I think "y'all" is safe: it fills a grammatical need better than the alternatives.
I come from the Midwest U.S. and have been using "y'all" regularly in high-tech and Spanish-friendly communities here in southern California for years, and never get puzzled looks.
(It *is* informal: I doubt I'd use it when making a presentation.)
"Howdy" (for "how do you do?") I use sometimes, but - unlike "y'all" - I don't hear others using it 'round these parts.... maybe away from the coast/cities.
@@MereMeerkat it's and the Creek don't rise. Origin is a ,letter to George Washington from one of his generals. The general was tasked with keeping the Creek Indians from attacking the colonists, and wouldn't be able to come to support Washington if the Creek rose up. Which is why 'dont" is grammatically correct.
People say I "don't have an accent" because I'm from Northern Arkansas. No friends, I do have an accent, it's just not the one you were expecting. Arkansas and Missouri (especially Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri) are border regions which means some people are going to talk with a southern accent and some people are going to talk with a Midwestern one. The amount of times I've caught myself saying "oop" when I drop something or reflexively saying "sorry" when I haven't actually inconvenienced anyone on a daily basis is more than I can count on two hands.
As a history and English teacher, I love your videos. You make my life so much easier. So clear, fun, engaging, and friendly. Legend, legend, legend
I never thought history could be so interesting! When I was at school (many years ago!) I hated history lessons - they were so dry and full of names and dates which seemed totally irrelevant. Thank you for bringing life back to a previously dead subject.
Ugh, it's always so frustrating when people try & teach history that way! 😭 It's the personal stories & the wacky facts that really engage us about the past? SO glad YT is finally bringing all of that amazing stuff to life in an accessible way for people who were choked by the dry-dust version!!
In my experience school history classes have also tended to subscribe far too heavily to the "great man" theory of history...? In reality, although some individuals (like Chaucer or Caxton) definitely make a very significant impact, it's never in isolation. I'm always more fascinated by seeing how they're products of their socio-economic context, including changes in contemporary attitudes & new trade contacts with other cultures...?
History is not dull, but some teachers make it so.
Yep history is presented so poorly in schools, if you can find it . James Burke did a series called connections that tells the history of innovations and is highly entertaining
History is in the telling. I find a lil humor helps you hold on to it
My history classes at school were all "if you'd have lived back then, you'd have toiled in the fields / factories / trenches and died a miserable death at a young age". And I finished in 2000, so imagine how bad it is now. Probably wall-to-wall "we enslaved the world and need to feel guilty forever". Give me the great men any day.
I was once told that the Glaswegian accent lends itself to the cadences & intonation of Chaucerian language & therefore made it sound more rhythmically poetic & more readily understandable. I tried it & it works like charm. Cheers.
Vowel shifts, innit 😉 Southern English accents have been through ar least one
That's assuming you can understand Glaswegian at all. I saw a vid of man-on-the-street interviews with people in Glasgow. Could hardly understand a word. And it's not like I never heard Scots before.
@@CAMacKenzie True. I am basing the pronunciation on the educated Glaswegian twang that I was familiar with when at College of Education. The speech patterns are slower & enunciation crisp & clear. Using that tip did however help me to read & the better to appreciate Chaucerian verse.
@@CAMacKenzie Glaswegian isn't too bad. Dundee however, I know people who grew up in the city and still can't always understand other locals. I was a student there for a bit, the accent just sounds like noise and there's a lot of local slang and dialect.
I only grew up 30 miles away. The universities in Dundee have students from all over the world, many of whom don't have English as a first language. If I didn't understand Dundonian folks then I can't understand how a French or Chinese person would.
English is sometimes said to be almost "sung," compared to other languages. Poets probably "sang" to a greater extent then than they do now. Old recordings of self-professed bards like Eliot, Joyce and Yeats have them droning on in a sing-song manner.
I remember using "Yeet" for the first time in 2007. My new favorite phrase when I was throwing things.
Keep in mind that Chaucer's Middle English wasn’t the dialect that became Modern English. Thomas Mallory's Arthurian works (written just a few decades later) are considerably easier to read, because his dialect won out.
I love the introductory bits in Morte d'Arthur, where Mallory is begging his readers to put in a good word for him, so he can get out of prison. It makes the whole thing seem so much more real.
Standard English, maybe, but all the dialects of today descend from whatever English was spoken back then all around the British Isles.
What were the names/origin of these dialects?
@@joanhuffman2166 Are you asking about British Dialects of today? Mostly they are influence by whoever invaded/immigrated whichever part of the island. So Scouse (from Liverpool) is influence by Irish, Yorkshire accents are influenced by the Scandinavians, etc.
@euansmith3699 No, I'm asking what dialect Chaucer used, and which dialect became the source of modern English, the one that was printed?
This video was wild, out of the gate she hits us with middle English from under a wimple, she goes from Chaucer to a blink and you'll miss it Terry Pratchett reference, and then the rabidly unapologetic smile at the patronage hint. Can we have some more, please?
Yes! The Terry Pratchett reference! Made me grin ear to ear☺️💜. Such a great job she does!
I definitely don't know enough about Pratchett (but know of him)... where/what is reference ?
@@jeffreyshort4531 The reference was to the "trouserleg of time" which is a minor plotpoint in "Guards! Guards!". Incidentally "Guards! Guards!" is a great starting point for getting into Pratchett's work.
[Also, for fellow Disc fans, it appears the Trousers of Time wasn't a Pratchett original. It was also mentioned on the radio show "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again" including this appropriate quote: "There's a library at the end of the left trouserleg!"]
I recognized it from "Johnny and the Bomb". "We're in the wrong trousers of time!"
@@lordcirth For me… it would have been Wallace & Gromit ;)
An uncle used to brag that he could pin down an accident to almost anywhere. It did seem to me that the accents I heard when I visited as a kid shifted a lot when I visited again 30 years later. It felt like many pleasant accents had been replaced by regional stereotypes from TV.
Love it when I click on a video for linguistic content and accidentally get a sneaky Pratchett reference. As someone with a degree in linguistics who also did a thesis on Pratchett, I love when a video caters specifically to my interests. Thank you! 😆
I love historical linguistics soooo much. It’s fascinating to place the internet, as an invention, alongside other major inventions that have made huge ripples in language. It is always sad to see dialects fall out of use, but I’m glad to see you discuss emergent dialects as well. Great stuff!
It just sucks that the emergent internet-based dialects are all American because they dominate culture so much 😒 I hate seeing my Australian colloquial heritage die to crap Americanisms from Twitter.
@@rhythmandblues_alibi It's time we chucked a U-ey, mate, but we'll be flat out like a lizard drinking.
@@personaljesus4278 wow that's so interesting!
Middle English sounds like a dutch tourist trying to strike a bargain in english....while on vacation in France.
The ending of the Miller's Tale almost made me burst out in laughter the first time I read it in school.
Hence “a Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harem
My High School English class was told to pick a tale and do a presentation about it. I jumped on the Miller's tale and proceeded to tell it like a stand-up comedy routine!
Almost? If you get through that one without at least a chuckle there's something wrong with your funny bone.
Some comedy is timeless.
Yeah me too. I was shocked at the ending and that my high school English teacher let me read it!
@@ferretyluv
And recited by Amy Farrah Fowler on the Big Bang Theory show!
I always laugh when people my age (boomers) say the world is going mad, it always was and no change means no progress. Another Great episode. I have shared with my grandchildren so they too can enjoy.
Yay for passing on cool historio-linguistic content! 🥳 Heheheh yeah, nostalgia in my observation tends to mostly consist of a highly selective vision of the past...? Mostly due to fallible human memory, and childhood self-absorption! Hence all the perennial moaners extolling a former era when everything was supposedly so much "simpler"... 🤦🏻♀️
It's quite startling to realise that sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years! 😆 Think of the Ancient Greeks, harking back to a mythical "Golden Age"...
The completely ahistorical takes political extremists come out with are rather horrifying though 😳 Feels like a significant failure in educational systems, but maybe instead it's just more wishful thinking...?
As a grumpy oldish git myself I do have to stop myself tutting when the youth of today don't know the difference between less and fewer...
I think Douglas Adams' quote about technology could also apply to language:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Kids there days... give me hope for the future.
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166Political extremism or neanderthal pictograms interspersed in perfectly good language? Give me the extremism any time.
@@worldcomicsreview354 Oof. Really, really hope that's a joke. And as a linguist, I don't mind emojis if appropriately used... Perhaps consider them an analogue of the modifiers & honorifics in Ancient Egypt's elegant & complex hieroglyphic system? Might make you feel better!
I love hearing about old and Middle English as a Dutch speaker. When you mentioned eggs also being called “eyren” it’s so clear how close the languages are related because we still say “eieren” pronounced slightly different but in some dialects it’s almost the same as what you said here.
Language is such an amazing thing.
This video exemplifies why I love history. Bringing the strands of history together to show its mirror in the modern world. Really helps make such distant and alien worlds feel so much more real and relevant. Someone at the BBC, give J Draper a history series, now!
Why? The whole world gets her for free (albeit with an ad or two) on UA-cam and we can rewatch her stuff whenever we like. But if she was signed to a TV network it is likely that one series would be made and quickly forgotten, so it wouldn't even show up on a streaming service a decade later.
My favourite word used in The Canterbury Tales but lost in modern English is 'eek', meaning 'also'. The text is just littered with all these little mouse-squeaks. To get an idea of the linguistic diversity that existed in medieval England, compare The Canterbury Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written around the same time, but in a Staffordshire dialect. Thanks to Chaucer's influence on modern English, it's fairly easy to get the gist of what he's written most of the time if you read it with some explanatory notes, but Sir Gawain really could be written in a completely different language (or at least it seems that way to me).
related to german auch, icelandic auk, norwegian au
Dutch again. Ook means also.
That's awesome 😆 I've only ever seen it reproduced as "eke", and that definitely doesn't convey nearly as much rodential interjection power! 😂
It's where "nickname" comes from. Min eek namn spoken as a sentence became my neekname i.e. nickname
@@geoffwoodgate7450 I thought that "Ook" means, "Who are you calling a "Monkey"?"
As a linguistics major who never used my degree, your videos are such brain food that reignite those synapses. Love this!
That 'Henry Higgins' skill (placing people by their accent) is a real thing. It was, and might still be, something 'security specialists' *cough cough MI5/6* learned for special positions - the one I met was mingling at a British embassy entrance engaging people in conversation.
He got my dad to within 2 miles and my mum 10 miles, which is reasonable since she moved several miles aged 14.
Not just secret agents, the general police have specialists to help ascertain exactly where people might be from too to help them trace their background if they're suspects.
Bus divers, too. I once met a man in Peterlee, outside Newcastle (UK), who had spent 30 years driving a local shuttle between Newcastle and several of the surrounding towns & villages. He told me he got so that he could tell which town or village someone was from with near 100% accuracy.
Nobody ever guesses where I'm from because they have a stereotype in their head
@@parkmannate4154 what stereotype? You mean your physical appearance?
@@user-et6pj4db9s No. People have a stereotype in their head for what someone from North Carolina should sound like but we moved out when I was relatively young and I was raised by Canadians so I sound way more like someone from Toronto than someone from Raliegh
Costumes. History. Theater. Linguistics. Humor. A cute accent. I love what you’re bringing ahahaha.. i really appreciate your linguistic takes and you saying YEET with such gusto, dressed like a 14th century person 😂
Your passion is so infectious! And that sponsor, mwah, chef's kiss, wonderful sketch and so openly critical, I love it!
A bloody good tale. It was also the day I realised why we ask 'Can I get a copy of that book' because originally you would be getting a copy of the book you wanted. I feel enlightened and dumb in equal measures.
Thank you J.
I worked in a bookstore in Seattle (in the US) for a while, and a British woman came in asking for a mop. I let her know that we didn't have any, but she could go to a store up the street. She looked surprised and asked, "You haven't got any mops? Like, a mop of Seattle?"
That's when I realized she meant "maps".
I met an Australian woman in Alburquerque, and when I told her my sister was living in Mackay, she said "oh, the austic city!" After a minute, I realised she said "artistic."
As a Brit, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce map as mop.
Was she from Liverpool?
@@glen1555 I didn't ask, but based on the single reference I have of the Liverpool accent, I think not (that reference being the Beatles, of course). I thought it sounded more like RP.
@@Joanna-il2ur bear in mind that a standard US accent pronounces the "o" in mop as /ɑ/ (as opposed to contemporary RP /ɔ/), whilst the contemporary RP "a" in map has arguably shifted towards a more open vowel sound which could be perceived as nearer to that American "o" than to the American /æ/ in the US pronunciation of "map".
Language is a living thing that grows and changes. On one hand it is sad to lose some words and dialects, on the other hand it's really great and exciting to see new ones being created from more people and cultures connecting. Thank you chaucer for kicking off an era. I bet he didn't know at the time that it would matter so much.
JD, your passion for history is both wonderful and infectious.
That impish glint in the eye when reciting new slang was absolutely hilarious.
Laggy😛
JD from Heathers who lmfao
according to terry jones, most medieval peasants could at least read their own name, and they sued each other like modern americans, so it would be very advantagous if they could also read what their lawyer was writing down, so probably slightly more literate than people think
In Michael Woods book/ tv series "Story of England" where he looks at the records of 3 villages in Leicestershire through the history, there are records of the villagers employing Priests and School teachers from the late Medieval period so presumably a significant number of the villagers could read and write
It surprised the heck out of me to realise how litigious the Angles and Saxons were!
Also would be good to be able to write down stock and exchanges as well
@@nealjroberts4050 It helps to remember that the judicial system of the day was much less formal and much more local than it is now. Villages could convene their own juries for local disputes and Justices of the Peace, who today are mostly just good for witnessing official documents, acted as impromptu arbitrators for even smaller disagreements.
It's not particularly difficult to recognise your name even if illiterate. Even my niece was able to identify her name written down long before she could read anything else.
At 14:17, you brought up what I’ve noticed in America. This phenomenon is even more pronounced here. Younger Americans sound almost exactly the same despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. This is especially true in bigger cities.
I ran into one of those people with linguistic superpowers. After listening to me talk he outlined my family history. He was bang on and I would have accused him of cold reading but I did not know the dark secret of the family history and that my paternal grandfather was secretly from...Kent!
GNU Terry Pratchett
Lovely to hear the trouser legs of time metaphor.
Oh this note, I think we need to bring back “boffo” as a term in regular use tbh.
I love how enthused you are with the evolution of language! It's because of people like you that many forgotten words will be remembered for history's sake!
My accent really confuses people. I was born in Newcastle. My pa is a Gordie but Mother is Scottish and I have lived in Scotland most of my life. Most people think I am Scottish until come out with something like "wor lass". I love how my parents accents are similar like lass/lassie and aye are used in both but they are also very different. Yet another amazing video. I love your content, so informative and entertaining.
You say: _Most people think I am Scottish_ , in a way you are half Scot. It's not for nothing that there's something called *mother tongue* .
Reminds me of when my parents moved to the Borders a few decades ago, drinking in Berwick you'd hear that the folk from Spittal were all Geordies, and drinking in Spittal, they'd say the Berwick folk all spoke with Scots accents- there was a subtle difference, but being born near Newcastle then living in County Durham from 5yo to 10yo, it seemed minimal compared to crossing the Tyne or the Wear tbh
I mean, you're half Scottish and you spent most of your life in Scottland, enough to develop a Scottish enough accent that people think you're Scottish, so what then makes you not Scottish?
My brother went to University in Scotland and had his kids there, which officially makes them Scots.
They moved to southern England - which leaves my English brother speaking Scots with a English accent and the Scottish children having no trace of Scots at all, apart from when they're in the mood.
My accent confuses people.
Born in Manchester my family moved abroad when I was 11 and I went to an international school, which played havoc with my accent.
I returned to Manchester in my late teens and had to re-learn the accent, which isn't 100% even 40 years later.
I've lost the mid -Atlantic accent, from the international school, completely but, even when I try hard, I don't sound authentically local - it's more generic 'BBC north' - lovely flat vowels and a deliberate preservation of archaic phrases.
My next door neighbour (from Blackpool) said 'No, where are you REALLY from?' when I told him I was born three miles away.
@@pd4165 that reminds me of a woman I knew decades ago. I think she was born here in Australia, but her parents were USian and she spent most of her childhood in India and attended an English school there. Her accent was a glorious mish-mash.
Wow! I wish you had been my English teacher when I was at school. I laboured through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue with a teacher who couldn’t pronounce it like you do. I understood far more of it with your pronunciation. I have always been fascinated with regional speech. As a boy of about 6 years old, I could barely understand a word from the two farm workers on my uncles farm in Devon during the early fifties. It was not just their accent, but also their vocabulary. As an adult I married a lass from Lancashire and her accent has moderated considerably over the forty plus years we have been married. Interestingly her accent returns when we visit her sister who still resides in Lancashire. I have lived in many parts of England and pick up accents quite easily. So I’m not sure which region I sound like. It may depend on who I am speaking to. Please can you do more videos like this one. Thank you.
That's what happens with accents. I had an American friend staying with me in Vancouver Canada. A bloke who had grown😢 up just eight miles away from me in South East London stopped by for a visit. When he left, my American friend remarked that he hadn't understood a word either of us had said for the previous twenty minutes.
Try talking to someone from Newfoundland, @@davidbouvier8895 , I had an ex-gf who sounded "normal" until she phoned the folks back home, then all of a sudden I needed Closed Captions to figure out WTH is going on.
I'm an American, and we don't have quite the accent diversity as the UK, but my parents are originally from Wisconsin in the Midwest, and my mom had a pretty thick Midwestern accent that lightened over decades of living in California. My relatives who stayed in Wisconsin, though, still have it. I've never lived there, but a Midwestern O sound sometimes slips out from being exposed to that accent as a kid.
It's interesting that I dropped out of high school and still Chaucer is my favorite writer. I've read the Canterbury tales over and over. One thing that's always fascinated me is language. This was an excellent video.
Ah, J. Draper!! SOO WELL DONE!! The writing, the performance, the spooky 2-second shots, the passion, the credibly-sourced history & research, the wimple rant at the end...!!!! I LOVE YOUR WORK!!!!!!
Love the video, I only speak English and have struggled with learning other languages in the past, but etymology like this is FASCINATING to me.
I did personally have an egg/eren situation as a kid when I visited the north of Scotland and had to dash into a corner stop and ask where their bread was, the lady was very confused until I said for making sandwiches, when she exclaimed "Oh, y' mean breed?" - it's so fascinating that the regional difference in pronunciation of a word in our shared language is enough to impede communication.
A good job you only wanted bread, which is accented.
Try asking for a bread roll, whichever variant you say locally.
In my local chippies they are barms but in the shops they're baps, which should give scholars a fair clue to my location.
I found this very interesting to watch, as an American I knew that this was something that happened here, we have many accents and some regional dialects but it seems they're slowly vanishing. Where one use to be able to identify someone's accent to the state, now it's more the region, someone doesn't have a "Florida accent" or "Texas accent" they have a southern accent. Or they may have a New England accent, or Midwestern, or pacific northwest. Knowing that many European countries including the UK are so much smaller (speaking only of land mass) it never occurred to me that there were once so distinctive accents and dialects there and that the same phenomenon, the disappearance of those and emergance of new accents and dialect, was a world wide phenomenon. It's nice for me to learn about other places in the world, it helps expand my world view even just a little bit. I thank you for sharing your history and your culture.
I had heard the story of the eggs or eyren before, but it's still a very dramatic indicator of the state of the language at that time.
As someone born and raised in Oklahoma, it's interesting to consider how much watching Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate when I was a teen influenced me and my language, even my accent.
My family's Swiss German, and I lived there as a kid. It might be different now but the accents were still super localized (you could tell who was from the next village over because they used a different word for swimming pool). I reckon it's because TV in Switzerland is almost all high German, so the regional dialects are still sort of separate, and able to survive.
Dear J. Draper. I've just discovered you, 15 minutes ago and I'd say I'm delighted. I'm Chilean, 65, attended a local Brittish school where I learned my English from great Brittish and Scottish teachers. Without formal training, I became an English/Spanish translator. I love languages so much, I learned French as well. English has let me open a door to a whole different culture, which I have enjoyed since childhood, being able to discover great literature and history, and to watch movies in it's original sound. Spanish is also a great language, so rich and ample. To be able to navigate in both languages made me recognise similarities, differences, many common roots, everything so fascinating! Tks for this wonderful presentation. I read Chaucer for the first time at school, when I was twelve, and simply loved him. Cheers from a new subscriber, from the other end of the planet and congratulations for your beatifull work❤
We had a bit of a repeat of this play out with those of us who went in the Queue last September. The only thing we had in common was that we all decided to go & see the Queen at the exact same time, & now we share anecdotes with each-other over Whatsapp.
I remember asking my Dad (a South Londoner like myself) why he said graph with a short a like maths rather than a long one like laugh and he said it was because his teacher at school was from Birmingham.
I am Western Canadian and those three vowel centers of the words I pronounce all the same.
@@westzed23- Midwest US (Michigan) and same.
Brummie Joke Alert!
Q: What is the difference between a Buffalo and a Bison?
A: You can't wash your hands in Buffalo.
Eastern Canada and they are all the same for me.
@@westzed23 Oh that's common almost everywhere where the English language is spoken,except the Southern Hemisphere and Southern England
i love the expression "gone down another trouser leg"
Honestly, how do you manage to make such consistently high quality content??? Keep up the great work!❤
Seriously! All her videos are good, but this one was especially well done. It's rare that a 15 minute video on UA-cam is well done enough to be interesting all the way through.
She’s phenomenal! Loved this video!
As an American who grew up through primary school in East Anglia, has relatives from Middlesex, lived in France and Sicily, and now lives in the southern US, I'm no stranger to dialect melding.
I loved your explanation snd comparisons to how technology can shift language permanently - modern meme culture is definitely interesting to watch evolve!
-heh, Middlesex- yo that’s cool, did you get an accent from it? anyone start borrowing words from you?
I'm American, grew up in America, and I still use English words because I read so many British authors as a kid! My personal favorite is "falling like ninepins," because it's so much more fun to say than "bowling pins."
@@angelabecker9611
i always insist on using the english spelling of words like favourite and recognise for this reason, at this point it's a reflex i can't break out of. i still remember getting into an argument in 2nd grade because there was a word search and i was looking for a synonym for "colour" that was only 5 letters long.
Your ability to make history come alive is amazing.
Sophisticated people who are "involved" with your wife's sister. With all credit to John of Gaunt though the fact that Chaucer's granddaughter ascended to the rank of duchess is a testament to the enormous value his support bore for the family.
Linen headwear is so underappreciated. I have found that wearing a linen coif on a hot, sunny day actually keeps me cooler than being bareheaded, because linen is a breathable material which protects my head from solar heat gain.
I often spent sunmers in Poland as a child and quite a few women wore head dresses or babushkas in the summer covering their hair. Part of the reason was to keep it cool the other was to keep their hair clean as they walked quite a bit and were exposed to more dirt than we might be accustomed to.
This is one of the most fascinating videos I have ever seen and the narration is to die for. Great job and I cannot believe how much i have learned.
I speak danish, german and english, and i find that Middle English, is quite understandable once I just mix the languages together in my head. I don’t know if this has any actual backing, but I just found it fascinating
That sounds perfectly reasonable, the German/Nordic influence being strong. If you spoke French too it would make it a complete doddle.
Reading my post back to myself - that 'too' is a proper tell about my age. No youngsters say too/do.
I speak English, and learnt French (well enough to read ok) and German (atrocious) at school. With that combination I can largely read Middle English and not have to think about it too hard.
@@pd4165 I want to learn French, at least for reading, since there are so many sources in French
I grew up in the Peak District, and was relentlessly bullied for being ‘posh’ because I had a much softer northern accent that doesn’t really sound like anything specific. Just using hard vowels so bath sounds like math etc. We weren’t posh - I was one of 4 with a single Mum and we were pretty poor for my youngest years. But Mum and my older sisters grew up in the South so my accent was a bit generic.
My mum's family were Northerners in the South so we all have odd "Northern" expressions.
I use "tad" and "owt" a lot. And we have this mixed meal description system: dinner is always the main cooked meal at whatever time but the smaller usually uncooked one is lunch if at midday or tea if in the evening.
Had it the other way around growing up in the south with northern parents. I still get people thinking I am much posher than I actually am. I also use dinner for the main meal of the day whatever the time and lunch, tea, or supper for a small meal.
Who's that then?'
'I dunno, must be posh'
'Why?'
'He hasn't got sh*t all over him'
Feel proud. Most of us try to beat the disgusting ebonics of of children
@@davidwright7193 I'm an American, and in my family we typically used "supper" for the evening meal and "lunch" for the noon meal regardless of size. We would occasionally say "dinner" for the evening meal (and never the noon meal) - normally in a context that implied it was special, like, "Let's go out for dinner tonight." For holidays, like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, we always called the main (and huge!) meal "dinner" even though it was served around 2 PM. Of course, we have no meal called "tea." Tea to us is just the (category of) drink.
Also, no one has ever accused me of sounding posh. ;)
It’s crazy to think that in England you can tell what COUNTY someone came from. In the US, if they have a very strong accent and you have an ear for it, you can identify which five state area they’re from.
I wonder if that’s because the US has always had more migration? Very, very few people can say their families have lived in an area for more than a couple of generations, there’s been constant movement for work and land and greener pastures, so there’s less chance for areas to develop a specific identity?
My family has lived in and around Atlanta since the 1700s. My grandmother and her generation all sounded like Gone with the Wind, but my generation has no discernible accent at all. I even heard my son pronounce the second 't' in Atlanta the other day! Shockhorror! I love how multicultural Atlanta is now, and I love my non-accent accent.😊
Same! I have a Bawlmer (Baltimore) accent (not quite THAT heavy) but my daughter does not. You can hear the older generations and distinguish which county they are from, but the younger people's accents are indistinguishable.
I'm rather certain your generation has a discernible accent. Everyone does.
@slake9727 I'd be so curious to know what people from other regions hear! I'm sure you're right...I'm no Rhett or Scarlett, but surely there's some kind of regional dialect still lurking.😄
Love this, I find accent and dialect and the development of language FASCINATING! I live in S Yorkshire, my dad's a Manc and my mum's a Sheffield/Welsh mix, with her mum being Welsh/Irish, and just from that I've grown up around a real mix.
In particular I love idioms - I think it's partially because my parents are a bit older than most of the parents of people my age, but I've grown up around a lot of idioms that just aren't used much any more (although it's also been revealed to me in recent years that some of them are what we now call "nan-isms", turns out nobody outside of my family says "the pot calling the kettle greasy-arse") and take great delight in keeping them alive, and I love learning new ones from other areas, cultures and languages!
And maybe I'm biased because it's where I'm from, but I do think Yorkshire has some really interesting history in the local dialect; the fact that a lot of people here still use thee/thou or that we use a lot more words of Scandinavian origin than the south because of the Vikings having more influence up here. A few years ago a Swedish artist I followed on tumblr mentioned the phrase "hej hopp" and to me it seems obvious that the standard greeting here, "ey up", would probably have come from that (though I've only been able to find one other discussion of this and I'm nowhere near enough an actual linguist to state it as fact) and the mental image of Vikings saying "ey up" is wonderful to me.
Your stuff is such a great mix of travel, history, wholsomeness and just fun. Thank you.
I grew up on the Lancashire/ Cumbria border. Some of the old folks in the village when I was a kid spoke a dialect so deep that I doubt anyone not from those parts would understand them.
Was just thinking of yan-tan-tethera.. Or whatever the local variant for you is :)
I'm originally from West Yorkshire. One set of grandparents came from Bingley and the other from Bradford, which are only about 3 miles apart, but their accents were discernibly different. Now, we all just speak with a kind of generic Yorkshire accent which is not even as far removed from the Lancastrian accent as it used to be.
Fun Fact: Jeffery Chaucer was also a footballer for a team that would eventually become Bury FC, a 10th-tier side. He was not a player of any note, as back in that era football was played more in a scrum-style, not the intricate open space and passing style of today.
And in Pennsylvania eggs are called "cackleberrys"...
When I was in elementary school, teachers STILL believed that writing things out by hand built character. One of my teacher's favorite punishments was making us copy dictionary pages. Another just liked us to copy the same sentence over and over (in my case, it was usually something like, "I will do my homework on time.")
Even in the early 2000's, when I was in high school, my teachers put a huge emphasis on writing things by hand. We were allowed to type research papers on a computer, but everything else had to be hand-written. And this was in the early 2000's, when it should have been obvious that computers were taking over the world. And I had, still have, terrible handwriting, and my teachers were always complaining to me about it. Hm, maybe that problem would have easily been solved by, oh, I don't know, maybe letting me type out my homework on one of those new-fangled things called a computer? And don't get me started on all the years in school we spent learning to write in proper cursive. A completely useless skill.
@@hamsterama I think they eventually figured out this was torture for the teachers who had to read everything too, and it ended. I hear you though, I have a similar problem with handwriting. I remember teaching myself to use a spreadsheet in college (late 90s) just to avoid all that adding in a course where we had to do some statistical analysis. I wasn't a business major, so I never took the Excel class. But once I learned to use a spreadsheet, lo and behold, I was suddenly able to do math! I always though I was horrible at math. Turns out I just had bad handwriting--I didn't line my numbers up very well, mixed up the letters and numbers in algebra (2s and Zs look very similar), etc. I had no trouble with the concepts at all, and once the numbers were typed out, and I could plug them into formulas error-free, math was easy! If I did make a mistake, it was easy to work out where the problem was.
@@tamoramuir2089 I actually had to take Excel as part of my accounting degree in college. It definitely makes math easier!
@@hamsterama i had people do this in the mid-2010s, it absolutely still happens
@@rileybanks1191 Was it older teachers who made you write stuff by hand? If so, that wouldn't surprise me. When I was in school, some teachers made us do silly, pointless assignments because "you'll need to do that in the real world." It turns out, in the "real world," your employer doesn't make you do silly assignments. In retrospect, many of my teachers lived in their own academic bubble. They had no clue what people in actual, productive jobs do. Teachers living in their little bubbles think that knowing how to handwrite stuff is an important skill. Well, it is definitely not.
This is absolutely brilliant! Every British Lit professor needs to share this with students!
The Maths correction. The author himself was one of the pilgrims in the story too, so it's 29 pilgrims plus 1. So it was supposed to be 120 stories not 116.
Love it that you showed how old and middle English sounded.
This is such a brilliant video. I am a German-as-a-second-language teacher in Germany and so tired of my fellow "native" Germans blaming newcomers or young people for destroying the language. Languages change! It's always been the case and often to the benefit of communication, like giving up regional dialects to be more understandable to a greater group of people. I'm also personally interested and invested in German minority language/dialects, and sometimes I think about how we could preserve them...but that doesn't mean I have to stop language change, because that never ever worked throughout history.
Clearer communication is why every German writes Hochdeutsch and not just their local dialect, and why every Norwegian writes either Bokmål or Nynorsk despite the wealth of dialects we could be writing. It’s also why you don’t use all dialect words when teaching, or when talking to someone who speaks a different dialect than you, and when you *do* use a dialect word while teaching, you also tell the learners that it’s specific to a particular area.
@@ragnkja teaching some dialect words always makes me happy but it's not exactly enjoyed my students. For the sake of simplicity, I stick to Standard words when possible, but just reading your comment here makes me excited about the possibilities languages have.
@@ragnkja - likewise, as an Instructional Designer writing training for an international audience at Ford Motor Co, we were required to use "International English" - no contractions & simpler words over a more varied vocabulary. It hurt my poetic heart to do that, but I powered through.
Yes, but that "change"/"destruction" isn't usually actively supported by the Native inhabitants "leaders". Herein lies the difference. Organic change from within, is perfectly natural. Mechanized mass displacement of indigenous People in the name of "Mult-Culturalism" is not. Herein lies the difference. What was it called when the roles were reversed ;)
@@KarlKarsnark Nobody supports destruction... Which is, as I said, not even the case here. Migration is soooo normal if you look at the big picture. What can be supported is peaceful integration.
What you say about accents is interesting. In the US it's _always_ been common to have people who are, as you say, from a place but without the accent. However in the 1990s there was some evidence that local accents were getting _stronger,_ and in 2012 I did a survey of local accents in Southern California and discovered that not only were there many more of them than previously recorded but that a new, _non-rhotic_ accent was taking shape among younger speakers in some parts of Los Angeles.
And even within a metro area there's very strong distinctions. You say people Americans speak in the accent of their local media market, but Pasadenans still sound _very_ different from Angelenos, more similar to Illinois than to the rest of California. To the north, people from the San Francisco Peninsula or the coastal East Bay sound much more similar to east coasters than the northern and southern reaches of the Bay Area, which became major urban centers much later in history.
My own accent switches depending where I am between the Midwestern-influenced Pasadenan where I grew up and the quasi-posh, mid-Atlantic American accent of someone who has now spent many years living in a non-Anglophone country (coincidentally I now sound kinda like Bill Bryson, whom I idolized in high school).
Even so, the basic phenomenon being described here is definitely happening, as regional accents get flattened out to a sort of vague Ohio accent. It's usually ascribed to the influence of TV newscasters.
Is your Mid-Atlantic accent non-rhotic, like that of Cary Grant?
@@pjlusk7774 It's true that regional accents haven't been de-stigmatized in the US the way they have been in the UK.
@@SamAronow As someone who grew up in the South (but mostly lost the accent), I’m aware :P
@SamAronow As a New Yorker I’ve definitely noticed some of the patterns you mentioned before. The accents of Downstate NY, NYC, Central NY, Buffalo, etc all vary pretty drastically.
I just have to say how much of a fan I am of your channel. Your videos are incredibly informative and entertaining. I think they are important for people who, like me, come from Jewish families but do not know much about their history. Thank you for creating such amazing content.
Fascinating. In Dutch we still say “eieren”. And your pronunciation of “night” sounded very much like our “nacht”: you called it pronouncing the “h”, but seems to me that it is pronouncing the “g”. All of which is a perfect illustration of how Germanic Old and Early Middle English were.
That was interesting, Draper. I thought the closest to a generic American accent was your West Country dialect. Almost New Yorkish but without the overlay of Dutch, Irish and Yiddish that comprise that general dialect. Full disclosure, I'm a Boomer. I was born in a Suburb of NYC. My Dad had been an announcer for NBC during WWII. He and my Mom were from Chicago, originally. We moved ''back'' to Chicago when I was 3. [Each of the NY burroughs had once a distinctive accent.] Chicago accents depended on class and location: North Side/South Side,/West Side. There were ethnic inflections. Near North Side Chicago-ese was very close to Manhattan's dialect. When I lived there, locals all said Sh- CAW - go. Out of towners said Shi-kah -go. That pronunciation has now morphed into the locals sounding like out-of-towners to me. But we moved west when I was 16. I turned 17 in LA. Locals there sometimes asked me if I was from England when I was new in town. I learned from new friends that the town name had once been said as Loss Angh' less [with a hard G]. You can listen for it in vintage film noir flix. After 1950, the broadcast networks pushed Talent to use the Network Pronounciation of Los Ann-jell-ess, until even the locals said it that way, or avoided the issue by using the two initials. At 21 I moved to Tucson AZ. Fifty-something years ago, locals had something of a South West twang, but that has become homogenized by the TV accent, plus the old timers mostly moving out of a town they considered ruined by the influx of Snowbirds, Yankees and Californians. Go figure?
Geographically it does make sense that the “foundation” of American English is from the west of England.
That was enlightening. In around 15 minutes you conveyed more useful information than a typical hour long documentary, piecing together gaps in my own knowledge. Thank you.
I love your presentation style too.
The sponsor section was inspired. I was reminded of some of the Horrible Histories ad sketches, but with extra dry wit 😂
I half hope you get "discovered" by the BBC to make short form education videos, but at the same I fervently hope you are not so you remain independent to produce excellent content like this.
My thoughts exactly. How some TV production company hasn’t swooped her up is beyond me, but I am selfishly glad that, so far, no one has!
UA-cam seems to do a far better job of this sort of thing than mainstream media; as UA-camrs don't need to pad out every episode to make up for high production costs.
@@euansmith3699 Let us not forget special topic interests. What TV documentary would get away with a 90 second reference to the dawn of the printing press without at least a 20 minute exploration it's development, timeline of the spread across Europe, mandatory visit to some museum and select sound-bites from the curator. Meanwhile, the viewer has forgotten why the printing press was important.
Yet fail to do so and someone somewhere will put pen to paper over the disservice done to history. I wish I could write that purely in jest 😅
@@euansmith3699UA-camrs can pad out videos for ad time, especially to reach the 10 min mark. They aren't immune.
@@euansmith3699 yeh way too much timewasting padding and pointless landscape shots or actors or reconstructions in most tv.
Love this video. I’m an American and majored in speech therapy and this is why!
it’s just fascinating how languages grow and evolve and words die. Dialects can change so quickly.
I do enjoy the sound of Middle English as well as Celtic and Gaelic.
I worked at a call center in the US for a while in a sales position and I memorized most of our area codes so I would know the location of the caller. I paid careful attention to the various dialects and learned to mimic them because a person feels more secure when talking to a person who sounds like them. To this day, I can listen to a person a guess what region they are from and I automatically emulate their dialect when I hear them speak.
My mom used to work at a call center and she took me to work one day and the thing that fascinated me the most was the accents coming from all over the US and how clearly different they were. Which is really saying something because normally I am _so bad_ at picking up on accents that one time I was watching a British UA-camr, and when he mentioned he was British I was really confused because I didn't notice XD
What do you mean by "Celtic"? There isn't one language called Celtic. It's a descriptor that can be used for a number of different languages.
I completely understand what you mean when you say the person over the phone feels more comfortable talking to someone who sounds like them. I grew up in a melting pot neighbourhood outside of Toronto, so I heard so many pronunciations of words and dialects that I actually got used to automatically doing the “translation” in my brain 😂
Fast forward to adulthood, taking phone calls at my work, people would say very rude and micro-aggressive things in confession to me about how glad they were that I didn’t have an accent or from a specific place they don’t like 🙄 While they often harped on Indian and Filipino accents, under the false assumption that they’re not located in Canada locally (Canada has HUGE Indian and Filipino communities), they would often get more upset if they were transferred to someone who worked in the US. A lot of the customers openly admitted their disdain for hearing Southern US accents, and making assumptions about their level of education, mental ability and what not. It’s crazy that while my experience with a multitude of accents made it easier for me to understand people’s English almost regardless of where they came from around the world, the same exposure amps up xenophobia in older populations in the most culturally diverse area of the country. I never want to be that closed minded when I age. Their inability to voice their frustration with respect just reeks of senility.
We covered Chaucer in my English (and German) linguistics & literature studies at university 😄 always amazing to see someone being as fascinated by language history as I am!
A fascinating and skillfully executed presentation! You’ve made the Canterbury Tales both present in the Middle English whilst also making modern English all the more understood and unique. I quite like the way you connected Chaucer to communication technology, seeing as how critical he was in the development and proliferation of the written word as a new form of communication.
This was excellent. I humbly request more etymology/ linguistic videos in your lovely style.
Second that!! 🤩🙏 For us language nuts & addicts of The Allusionist podcast & similar, this sort of content is cognitive catnip... 😜
I'm Canadian, was born in northern Ontario with a bit of a bush accent, moved to Nova Scotia and got immersed in the Atlantic English Accent. While an overwhelmingly amount of Newfie accents in the area had also changed the way I speak. It's subconscious but it's a real thing.
I’m in my 60’s, American and used to Sing. This was riveting. I had noticed years ago that Broadly speaking anyone who sings tends to sing in a rather generic American style English. Not Everyone, I’m only generalizing.
But I also went with a student from each State to a singing Tour. In 1980 a Boston, v New York v Alabama v Texas v California accents were Very strong speaking in casual chit chat tone. 40 years later it is Rare I speak with (or hear in some way) those drastic obvious accents. We seem to be unconsciously doing exactly what Londoners are doing! Also, while there is much to criticize in our US Education the kids today are allowed to write an essay “in their voice” rather than to strict grammar constraints I had in the 1960’s. I think that is marvelous!
I am Not claiming you can not find thick incomprehensible accents in the US, but they are smoothing or dying out and you really have to go to small hamlets to find it. City & Internet life require that others can understand you so local slang gets dropped, accents fade. Way to go Chaucer! If we had had a History teacher like you Everyone would have clamored to be in your class!
I love you. If you want to bring back old traditions, become a patron! You’ve officially taught me more than four years of high school history
Wonderful video, just a wonderful perspective on things. Your talk about regional accents and the subtleties of how people speak from place to place (even if that's lessening over time) struck a particular chord. While taking some remedial French lessons, my teacher absolutely nailed EXACTLY where I was from within the province, by both how I spoke French and how I spoke English. Before then it hadn't even clicked with me that the difference existed, but we spent an entire class going over how so many communities here do language just that little bit differently. I've mostly lost my accent, living in the city and existing online, but it comes rolling on back every time I visit my hometown for a week or two. I'm happy to see such clear examples from elsewhere! Lots to think about. Thank you so much.
Happens to me too. Went to my
Mother’s home town and dropped from my standard moved a lot plus TV English into Deep South. She accused me of making fun of our relatives. I call it the result of musical training, as a lot of accent seems to be related to pitch and intonation.
When you say "write it out word by word," it's worth mentioning that in those days you didn't just pop out to the stationery store to select your paper and choose from a variety of ball point pens or gel pens.
Oh my goodness, I remember this from secondary school, and then finally got the hard fact stories from Baba Brinkman, the poet/rapper who translated it into modern english. I adore your work, J. Draper. That Yorkshire, my friend from there was easily understandable until they got excited or upset. Then Yorkshire was a totally different language. In the US we are seeing the same thing regionally. The south and the north east have always been vastly difference. Words, not so much. We have regional idioms that my own travels around the US have made truly obvious. And I adore your wimple.