The Changing Face of English (with
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- Опубліковано 16 тра 2024
- @simonroper9218 answers questions about the English language through history from Patreon supporters of Jackson Crawford, in a Patreon-exclusive Crowdcast conversation recorded February 26, 2021.
Jackson Crawford, Ph.D.: Sharing real expertise in Norse language and myth with people hungry to learn, free of both ivory tower elitism and the agendas of self-appointed gurus. Visit jacksonwcrawford.com/ (includes bio and linked list of all videos).
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Jackson Crawford’s translation of Hávamál, with complete Old Norse text: www.hackettpublishing.com/the... or www.amazon.com/Wanderers-Hava...
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This Crowdcast with my generous Patreon community was recorded a couple months ago while Simon Roper and I were still planning our collaboration on "A Conversation in Old English and Old Norse" (now on his channel at ua-cam.com/video/DKzJEIUSWtc/v-deo.html and on my channel at ua-cam.com/video/eTqI6P6iwbE/v-deo.html ). That project is often referred to in this video, in the future tense. Check it out if you haven't yet--it also includes a great deal of commentary from him and me on the non-standard forms of Old English and Old Norse that would have actually been in contact in eastern England a thousand years ago.
@Jackson Crawford (21:19) If “creolization” isn’t the right term for a blending of closely related dialects, wouldn’t “koineization” be the right term for the phenomenon?
Have you heard, ( if I understand this correctly ) that recent DNA advances have shown that there likely was a much higher exchange between central Norway and Brittonic Britain ( central Norwegians have an unusually high Celtic mix )
A
A
It really feels like you two have formed a beautiful friendship over Old Norse and Old English. And given the intense interaction between the two tongues and their dialects, your conversations really help put pieces in the puzzle of that old meeting of the two
Thanks again for having me Jackson, it was a fantastic conversation!
Always a great time!
@@JacksonCrawford Any thoughts on you two teaming up on starting a historical linguistics podcast? It could raise interest in your generous Lecture Series of videos and Patreon?
Any interest in podcasting Simon?
@Simon, I watch all of your videos and most of Jacksons. Simon, you have a West Country accent??
More blessed collaborations between the Viking Cowboy and the English Wildlife Photographer pls
The nickname Scouse is thought to refer to labskaus, a stew introduced to Liverpool by Scandinavian sailors via the docks. The meal caught on in Liverpool, earning the city's residents the nickname of "Scousers". Hence Scouse is applied to the distinctive dialect/accent of Liverpool and wider county of Merseyside.
@@dracodistortion9447 With "house"
huh, labskaus sounds a lot like lapskojs, labskaus sounds like an anglification?
@@molnet999 "Lobscouse", or simply "scouse", is the anglicised version of the word. The German equivalent is "labskaus" is closest to the English pronunciation, which is seemingly the version that got adapted into English spelling. "Lapskojs" in Swedish or "lapskaus" in Norwegian.
The anime crossover we’ve all been waiting for.
Another Germanic language that has undergone much simplification in terms of the loss of inflection is Afrikaans from Dutch. Perhaps the development of that language might hold some clues as to why the case and gender system decayed in English. There are some at least superficial similarities; a migrant population, which became somewhat isolated in the midst of people who spoke unintelligible languages and a new landscape and environment. Just a thought.
This is a wonderful discussion. When teaching English in Japan, my students ask why does English have 'Give' & 'Get' but also 'Offer' & 'Receive'? It seems redundant and how do native speakers choose one over the other? So I have always explained it as that the short words were old Norse verbs and feel informal and the verbs that came from French feel more formal and we use them in more formal situations. For example with a friend on chat you more often would use 'I got your message.' but if you were responding in a business situation you would use the more formal verb 'I received your message.'
It seems like Japanese probably deals with these formalities even more than English does, I would assume that maybe after the initial confusion they would understand your point about "got" vs "receive" depending on casual vs business usage.
About the rural vs urban thing in the US. I have observed it myself but never heard anyone mention it. The accent which I would describe as something like western appalachia/ozark seems to be picked up in TV and movies as the rural accent or else a generic southern accent. I live in Nevada and hear it here, especially in northern nevada. ....like 50 years ago in movies and tv the southern accent was either Rhett Butler (a fancy Georgia accent) or Gomer Pyle (Carolinas) and now it is like someone from some small town in Arkansas or something.
i like that you say appalachian instead of broadly southern. that's what i have thought as well. if you hear a rural speaker from an unknown location, it can be hard to pinpoint where they're from, but if you hear a southern speaker, it is almost always obvious.
Ok the three most important questions, Where did Jackson get the shirt? What is Simon drinking? and if it's Tea milk first or second?
A current and growing change - use of "less" in place of "fewer".
Also "disinterested" instead of "uninterested". And seeming obsolescence of "whom".
That one is really irritating to me! How can you have less trees in your hedge? It's like having fewer flour in your crust
@@cathjj840 because you had more at one point, and now you have less.
@@cathjj840 get used to it because its here to stay. Language changes! Prescriptive grammar has limited power in the real world
On why we kept speaking Welsh and didn't adopt Latin - Britain was very sparsely populated by Latin colonists compared to Gaul, which had numerous colonies and a large settled legionary presence, particularly along the Rhine border, and Gaul had been receiving Latin influence and colonisation for far longer (starting ~250 BCE) than Britain (~50 BCE). For example, there are Latin texts from around 200 CE praising the Latin spoken in Gaul for its clarity in pronunciation. Additionally, during Boudicca's rebellion in western Britain, a large number of Latin colonists were killed and their settlements burned to the ground, which may have disincentivised further colonisation as Britain developed a reputation for being unruly and revolt-prone. Latin colonisation seems to have been mostly confined to the south-east, leaving certain areas semi-autonomous (the Dumnonii and Demetae tribal lands for example were more-or-less autonomous). The Brythonic languages do have extensive Vulgar Latin borrowing though, so there was definitely intensive contact.
agreed, i've noticed several words that seem to be related to Latin; Ffenestr, cant, ti, traws etc
@@bleddynwolf8463 Mae ffenestr yn dod o Ladin yn uniongyrchol, ond mae cant, traws, a ti yn geiriau Cymraeg sy'n edrych fel Lladin, oherwydd maen nhw'n dod o darddair unrhyw. I fi, mae caru yn edrych fel 'carus' yn Lladin hefyd, a cyd mae caru ddim yn dod o Ladin, maen nhw'n cyfathrachol.
'Ffenestr' comes directly from Latin, but 'cant', 'traws', and 'ti' are Welsh words that look like Latin, because they come from the same root word. To me, 'caru' looks like 'carus' in Latin too, and although 'caru' does not come from Latin, they are related words.
@@therat1117 beth amdano geiriau fel coron, pont a llyfr, mae nhw'n edrych fel gallwn nhw'n dod o Ladin, falle mae geiriau fel buwch, tywych a cranc yn dod or un darddair, ond dim dod o Ladin
@@bleddynwolf8463 Dych chi'n cywir, ydy.
@@therat1117 hwre!
the analogy regarding material culture and the linguistic element. it makes things much easier to explain to someone who says, quotation mark why do you want to study that stuff? You can’t talk to anybody!“
Interesting similarity: In Southern Limburg area, in the southeast corner of the Netherlands, bordering (French-speaking) Belgium and Germany, they also speak with pitch accent. A comedian once said that it sounds like every sentence is a question. A former coworker of mine came from the area, and people always jokingly said that it sounds like he's singing whenever he's speaking.
I'm pretty sure this Ripuarian/East Low Franconian dialect of Dutch has not been influenced by language contact with the Norse, which makes me wonder whether pitch accent used to exist at a much earlier point in late Proto Germanic.
Either that, or the languages developed them separately, and Germanic languages just tend to develop pitch accent because of it's stress accent simplification.
I wonder, is pitching up at the end of a sentence to make a question an Indo-European thing, or is this common across all languages?
@@Sindraug25 something I should look into. If you look at other languages with pitch accent, it's indeed quite rare for the pitch to rise at the end of the sentence. Though, with my limited knowledge, I might be mistaken...
@@Sindraug25 It certainly isn't I speak Mandarin fluently and in Mandarin pitch and tone both matter and no matter the tone whenever one frains a question, you raise of the pitch of the sentence.
Ripuarian Speaker here. I don’t exactly know why but we do it. I’ve heard that there’s a tendency here to merge words together and the pitch is a signal when a sentence ends.
For example the German 'Sollen wir?' (Shall we) is bound to nearly one word depending if u speak regiolect or Dialekt: Sulle-mer or Sollmer or something like that. Since there’s no standard Dialekt writing in German it’s difficult spellingwise but I hope I was able to give you the point.
@@Sindraug25 it’s common across many languages actually
I enjoy your conversations much. I had followed you both for a while before your first videos together, and I'm delighted by the collaboration.
These linguistic archaeology chats are so interesting. Thank you :)
I loved the last collaboration between you two and it was so fun to see you both geek out then and now!
What Simon raised around 36:30 is one of the theories surrounding the Celtic hypothesis: Celtic speakers possibly outnumbered Anglo-Saxon by quite a large margin. When OE became more prestigious, they learned it but might have calqued some Celtic grammar into OE, which native OE speakers might have picked up as well.
I've been following both of you for some time. I'm delighted to see/hear you two in conversation. It was enjoyable and insightful. Thank you both for producing quality content.
The question regarding Welsh influence on English makes me think of the Finnic influence on Swedish. It's virtually non existent, despite that Finnic and Scandinavian spheres have basically always overlapped for thousand of years. There's only a handful of loan words from Sami and Finnish into Swedish.
I really enjoyed the question about how your peers have responded to your youtube work. I do similar stuff on archaeology in the US, and all of my colleagues have been really supportive of it. I was really surprised by how positive everyone has been so far. It's still small scale, but other students and grad students keep asking me to keep making more. Haven't heard anything from my professors though.
You Two are just amazing
The Celtic influence on English would not have simply come from borrowing. Think about all the Celtic speakers who shifted their dominant language from Celtic to English. This is more the situation people are talking about. Basically, their original language influencing the new language in the transition phase. Similar to how Irish and Scottish get their characteristic pronunciations today.
Raised in Texas, too! Howdy!🤠 I became interested in languages and dialects because of odd things my parent and grandparents say, and the (I used to think) ridiculous articulation of an "r" sound on words with no "r" at the end, and the failure to pronounce the "r" when clearly the spelling indicates it. For example, my Pa called me Alder (Alda) except when addressing me directly: he called me "Shug", or Sugar, but without the r on the end. Here was something like "heah". My parents retained this speech that was somewhat foreign and never picked up East Texas hick living in Mena, Ark., DeKalb, and Conroe, TX. They also say "warsher" instead of washer.I was also embarrassed by my parents having dinner and supper rather than lunch and dinner. My siblings and I quickly adopted lunch and dinner as we began to socialize with other families, and to this day we often show up for the wrong meal at our parents house, forgetting the shift. Later on in a very international oil company-based community, I made many British friends speaking like my family, and suddenly I began to study my ancestry. Everybody was very English, in fact Gaulden Manor was the home of my ancestors. Suddenly it wasn't embarrassing anymore and I'd give anything to have spent more time with my grandparents, learning about their lives and families. I missed so much, now I realize. I love your videos, both of you, and living in the most boring spot in Texas, congratulations on living in beautiful and fascinating places. I must say, the odd combination of cowboy and Norse professor caused me to click on the first video, as I have been studying Norse mythology. I study every religion I can and I find so many references in the Bible (I have it totally memorized from being required to sit through boring church throughout my early life) to Norse mythology events and characters. I think someone just threw together a combination of everything and had Jesus say a mixture of it and called it New Testament. So your subscribers come from many directions and they stay because it's more interesting than anything else on the Tube . Please know you are loved and never stop. Your efforts are so appreciated and if you did a tour, I'm there. We could maybe find a few people in Texas with such an interest. 💚💛🤠⭐️ Maybe.
My boys!
It’s also quite interesting that these old English poems really feel like they’re foreshadowing the vast and unique literary language that English becomes. Especially when it went through hundreds of years of being the “lower class” language or whatever you might call that.
This was a great conversation to listen to. I would love to learn old Norse. I wish I could take part in some of your classes.
Icelandic is the closest relative!
Thanks for sharing a very interesting talk.
I'll be walking around for the rest of the day saying "again" and "agen" which way do I say it? lol! (positive it's like rain but now I'm not sure)
Cheers!
In Bristol UK, the accent is similar to when I was a teenager, but I don't know anyone now who speaks in the same manner as my mother and fathers older siblings and my grandparents. Bristolian has changed quite a lot in the last 50 years. Bristolian seems to be merging with the accents of the wider Somerset area.
On the part about changing aspects of the way one speaks throughout life,
4 years ago at the age of 15~16 I consciously introduced the WH voiceless labiovelar fricative into my speech,
after learning that such a distinction was still alive right after I got into linguistics
Has anyone noticed or commented on that change? I wonder if you have influenced others to unconsciously start that pronunciation.
@@AgathaVelvet i haven't made anyone else start it, but i've certainly heard people comment. especially in the beginning i it took me a minute to get a proper ʍ down pat and would do a kind of χʷ and it was very noticeable and people would be weirded out. now doing it properly i kinda cause even normal folks to start linguistic conversations simply just cause they hear me say a simple word like [ˈʍɪs.kɪ]
I love Irish English. We had an Irish priest who pronounced all TH sounds as T, so that "death" and "debt" were pronounced the same, but "murder" was "murther" and "burden" was "burthen". He had a strong American -er- sound, but all rhotacized vowels were this. -ar-, -ir- and so on didn't exist, they were all the same vowel in "learn". The name "Mary" was very funny to hear. "Secondary" was "secondery".
Hi Jackson, I listen to your Audiobooks and I find your accent the easiest American accent to listen to.
I find some horrible but was really happy you narrated your Audiobooks yourself!
Regarding survival of the wh sound in English, I've heard people from California using distinct w and wh sounds, but no longer corresponding to spelling, for example pronouncing "weapon" as "wheapon".
Great job from two of my favorite UA-camrs....
To be honest Jackson I would like videos covering the academic literature. It's necessarily and properly aimed at experts by experts, but if you could "translate" so to speak cutting edge research into more accessible terms I would love to hear what's going on in the bleeding edges of Old Norse research (and of course anything even remotely related to it)
Simon, you need to come to Colorado!
Simon is so smart. Does not give himself enough credit- just so smart.
My dad who grew up in southern Texas distinguishes witch and which, and he’s probably 10 or so years older than you, Jackson (though I think his sister doesn’t except maybe in careful speech).
Love both of y’all’s videos!
I'm a Texan. What you describe is common here in East Texas as well. I sort of know the etemological history there, but it's a sound in Old English that survives in the Texan dialect of English. Has to do with the high Scotts-Irish heritage of many Southerners. Ye all = y'all. I'm in my 20's and pronounce witch and which differently too.
I do love our magnificent bastard tongue, as “rude and rusty” as it is!
(Ref: The History of English podcast.)
At about 1:40, Dr Crawford, you mention the Heliad. I read that about 4-5 years ago. It was fascinating to think about the long-term consequences (not all of them good) of the simplifications the Saxon monk made in the Gospels.
The idea is a group being mocked for features of a dialect is a strong motivator for normalization. In the American South, certain pronunciations are referred to as "drawl" and have historically been mocked as lower educated or backwards features.
can confirm. i have definitely smoothed out my east texan accent over the years owing to unkind comments.
@The505Guys I imagine part of it has to do with politics even going back to the civil war as well. Since during the civil war we split the country in half and some of those north vs south mentalities still remain today. Today as well the southern states seem to be heavily republican and the northern ones seem to be heavily democratic, of course that's not meant to be a blanket statement but combining the history and current day biases it's no surprise that southerners are still portrayed as "less than" or "other" Especially when the people who make the movies don't seem to be sympathetic to their idea of the south.
@Simon Roper , I'm curious about how you think the Old English word 'os' (plural 'ese') would have developed if it has survived to the modern language? The likeness that stands out to me is the relationship between 'goose' and 'geese', but I wasn't sure if they would evolve differently since those begin with consonants. Do you think they would be pronounced and spelt similarly as 'oose' and 'eese'?
Celtic influence on English, if it exists, would most likely not be the result of active borrowing as of a Brythonic substrate persisting in the speech of the Wealas living in what was becoming England. It would presumably therefore be low-status.
In my father's time, the dialect of the south of Fyn in Denmark distinguished between three genders, masculine, feminine and neuter, but even then a thorough knowledge of which nouns were which was gradually being lost. This dialect also features nasalised final consonants that standard Danish doesn't have.
Proud owner of a very broad Suffolk accent, I live about 15 minutes from Sutton Hoo and I like to think King Rædwald would have sounded like a roight'ol carrot cruncher as well..😆
At the different versions of the song "Lyke Wake Dirge" the evolution of speach is very good visible. It starts at old german and goes over the netherlandish old english when it adds some frankophnicals, to not so old english, where it becomes it´s gaelic influences, till the modern english.
25:06 So you have not come across Beowulf rides again, the sequal by the vulnerable Bede, recently found at a car boot sale in Jarrow.
*venerable, I should think? :P
@@Ithirahad Armour of God notwithstanding, when he goes to bed and wakes up with the Vikings on the plunder, he is pretty vulnerable.
When did the west, north and east Germanic come to be after breaking away from Proto-Germanic?
my favs are collabing!!!!!
Would the similarity of Old English to Old Norse be comparable to that of Spanish and Portuguese? As a speaker of Spanish as a second language I can understand a great deal of Portuguese and I imagine that the degree of mutual intelligibility is very high for native speakers of both languages.
'give' from Saxon ?
I am with Simon on the sort of 'mirroring' of a second language speakers way of speaking. Having lived in European mainland areas for a long time, having colleagues who use English but calque their mother tongue constructions, I sometimes found myself using those out of habit for common phrases and situations eg: ENG: Let's have lunch CLQ: We go have the lunch :-) Just a rough example. Though, this might occur only in a few people prone to mirror more than others ? Though if it became habitual among a small group with prolonged contact, it might spread ?
I tend to do that, but my fellow native speakers keep telling me I talk funny (with reason I suppose). Or they just smirk
Give is from Norse. The Saxon form would be "yive" today. Give replaced the Saxon form.
Re prestige contacts with the British, the Lowbury burial is a saxon burial but with British decoration on the grave goods. Does suggest if a prince (?) is into British stuff there is some prestige in some contact with the British
Ha ha ha, I clicked on this cause I thought the title said " changing faces with English" and you two look so much alike that I wondered what face swapping would yield. Alas, I was mistaken, but it would have been so funny, so I'm going to laugh, anyhow. Ha ha ha
I just had to stop and say that yes, you can get grammatical features borrowed into a dominant language, and I think precisely the gender distinction in Spanish and languages such as Tagalog are good examples. You will find speakers of English who will make the Latino/Latina, Filippino/Filippina distinction because they hear the speakers of those languages do it consistently and because it is important when you communicate with speakers of those languages. As a fun little extra, my Arabic speaking ex happily adopted the term "guys" for people in general, but insisted on gendering it in Arabic and so addressed mixed groups as "Guy-een and Guy-aat" as would be proper in Arabic. :)
I was taught the creolization hypothesis specifically as a possible explanation for the loss of grammatical gender and case system in old => middle English -- because that sort of grammatical simplification and resultant reliance on word order is exactly what happens in pidgins. It was an argument of the following sort: Where else do we see this kind of grammatical shift? A: Pidgins and resultant Creoles. Anywhere else? A: Not to the extent that it happened in English; you can get 3 cases going to 2: M+N vs F in Romance, M+F vs N in Dutch etc, but not going to 1 except in pidgins/creoles (like Afrikaans or Papiamentu).
The thing people forget is that Dutch, which is at least somewhat related to English, also developed a progressive tense and no 'Celtic influence' can be seen in Dutch. When talking about 'Celtic influence' on grammar, people often make the mistake of using more modern Celtic language constructions compared to modern or historical English rather than comparing how Old Welsh or Old Cornish or Old Irish would affect Old English, and as far as I can tell, none of these older languages had progressive tenses, for example. This is from lack of knowledge because, for example, Old Welsh is poorly attested and Middle Welsh is rather unknown outside Wales.
Progressive tenses are much less frequently used in Dutch compared to English, and quite different in construction. Not sure I'd consider it a strong counter to the idea that progressive tense in English could have roots in some kind of Celtic influence.
@@digitalbrentable Right, but progressive tenses in Celtic languages are a late phenomenon (Literary Welsh/Old Irish/Modern Irish do not use them frequently or at all) which weakens the point significantly. The point about Dutch is that they can occur as a local innovation in West Germanic languages, specifically ones close in space to English. If they also occurred in Frisian that would be the best evidence, but I don't know much about Frisian.
@@therat1117 Also not very familiar with Frisian, but the couple of folk songs I know do feature it (first line of 'twa roeken' attests two crows 'oan de praat' - equivalent to Dutch 'aan het praat'). I think you're probably right that progressive tenses coming into English via celtic languages is shaky at best. I think the speculation is understandable, as the dearth of celtic influence on English is one of the linguistic mysteries of history.
@@digitalbrentable there's practically no celtic infuence on French, either, except for place names. And that is the case in Britain, as well. I think the question about the Y chromosome they didn't know how to answer may hold a good clue. The Y (male) chromosomes from the indigenous males tend to disappear after conquests, whereas the femle indigenous lines persist and there isn't invader female.genetic input. I have been wondering what this could mean for language and rapid adoption of the new and abandonment of the old. i believe English common law is largely based off of Saxon law and not Roman codified law which had probably trumped celtic tradition among the local population.
The Romans were in Gaul a lot longer than they were in Britain, in greater numbers. That’s probably why Brythonic wasn’t purged.
Responding to Jackson at 5:10: written language is usually much more formal than spoken language (and the recorded spoken language such as the Iliad or the Eddas is also formal), so the fact all direct evidence from the past is written skews our perceptions.
Given that all the Saxons called the people they were invading 'Walha' or by their Celtic endonyms (Cornish, Cumbrian, etc.) rather than 'Romans' or 'Latins' given the Saxons had extensive contact with the Romans, it's most likely that Latin was very sparsely spoken in sub-Roman Britain.
However, the word 'Walhas' was used to describe Romance speakers too. In various German dialects Welsch or something like that used to mean 'Italian'. The word was also borrowed into Slavic languages where it mostly refers to Romance speakers or people who spoke a Romance dialect historically. There are Latin inscriptions dating from sub-Roman Britain, but the most thoroughly Romanised area was in the south-east, so perhaps a part of the population spoke British Latin in that area until they switched to English.
@@davidmandic3417 Right, after all, 'Wallachia', but I was speaking of the Saxons, who raided the Roman Empire extensively before its collapse. We know that a section of the population were native Latinate speakers (St. Patrick, for example), but there are simply a dearth of Latinate names in Britain after the 400s, indicating a lack of Latinate spoken-language presence after the withdrawal.
@@therat1117 But nobody withdrew. Much of the army left Britain during the revolts by Magnus Maximus etc. But civilians remained, members of the administration etc. They didn't expect Britain would stop being part of the Empire, or that the western part of the R. Empire would be lost to Goths, Franks, etc. People like St Patrick (mid-5th c.), and even Gildas (early 6th c.) seem to have had classical education. Some kings mentioned by Gildas (De conquestu & excidio Britanniae) have Latin names, there are various inscriptions from sub-Roman Britain with such names (Latinus stone, the Cat stane - these are even in Scotland). Of course, names can be borrowed, but these inscriptions aren't written completely in Classical Latin, they show mistakes done by speakers of Vulgar Latin. So there must have remained some who spoke Latin in the next 100-150 years after 410.
I found there was some crossover between linguistics and archaeology when I studied Classics at Université de Montréal. I focused more on Roman archaeology, but I still learned Latin on the side and even had some linguistics and ethnolinguistics courses as electives.
I wish I could have found the same thing but for the Iron Age Celts, but I think I have learned the methods that allow me to research such topic on my own, and make UA-cam videos about them.
Thank you, Dr. Crawford and Simon Roper for this video, you two are, along with ScorpioMartianus, my favorite UA-camrs for historical linguistics!
Concerning borrowing grammatical structures - some Slavic languages borrowed some from Germanic, eg. to express ‘I hear the wolf howl’ in Old Church Slavonic or in modern Polish you need to say something like ‘I hear the wolf as he howls’ or ‘I hear how the wolf howls’ with a finite present-tense verb for expressing the howling (in Polish ‘słyszę wilka jak wyje, słyszę jak wyje wilk’) but in Czech and in some Polish dialects you can literally say ‘I hear the wolf (to) howl’ using infinitive (Czech ‘slyším vlka výt’, Polish Masurian dialect ‘słichám zilkä wicz’ or the like) directly mirroring the English or German ‘ich höre den Wolf heulen’ - while something like ‘*słyszę wilka wyć’ would be completely ungrammatical in standard Polish and would make no meaningful sense to most Polish speakers. This is a foreign construction borrowed to Slavic dialects that had a lot of contact with Germanic.
So it’s not that surprising to me that English might have borrowed Celtic grammatical structures, especially if there was some longer period of general biblingualism in parts of the population (and if intermarriage happened - I believe I’ve read about some genetic evidence of early Welsh-English intermarriage; trade between the two peoples happened etc. - there must have been some significant bilingual population), then people forcing structure of one language upon the other doesn’t surprise me too much (although it is interesting that it took so long for those features to surface in writing so late).
Also what struck me recently: as a native Polish speaker, I sometimes borrow English structures into my native speech. If there is some semantic area I’m used to thinking about in English, then when speaking Polish I might just literally translate my English thought to Polish when speaking if I know the other person will understand me and I don’t want to put too much effort into phrasing it more natural way. At the same time, I *think* I don’t borrow Polish structures to English too much - because that’s a foreign language and I do my best to try to imitate ‘proper’ native speech, I won’t use the same wording as I would in Polish if I’m not convinced it actually makes natural English.
So I myself kinda do consciously borrow foreign structures into my own language rather than forcing my language’s structures onto the foreign one (so I do the reverse of what’s often postulated, not the foreign adstrate adding structures to the second language by making mistakes, but native speaker consciously ‘breaking’ the rules because it’s sometimes easier to translate directly even if you know it sounds off - after a few generations of children listening to that, it would stop to sound off and become completely natural way of expressing yourself).
I think the DNA evidence shows that the “English “ population has a very large Brythonic component. I’m sure the British population took up speaking old English because the new strangers seemed to be “cool” compared to the Romans.
It did not seem so at the time, that there was anything unusual with the BBC English accent in the media as it was standard newsreader, presenter and normal, but when I see old broadcasts now it sounds just as stilted as a Pathe commentator, media presenters have got more colloquial and regionalised. Here in Coventry I don't feel there is anything unusual in my speech, but when I go outside of Coventry I feel really self conscious about it.
I think w / wh distinction is still present in many Scots accents.
I'd agree. I grew up in rural Perthshire and have just experimented with trying to spot the difference between me saying whether and weather. Now I don't know the technical terms for language sounds but I start whether with lips pursed almost like I'm going to whistle while I don't when I say weather and in saying weather the sides of my lips pull out in the same direction as a smile would (just very slightly though, just using smile as a general indication of direction but not magnitude). It also feels like something very slightly different is happening with my tongue for the "th" bit between whether and weather. It's difficult to objectively describe but I think it's that the tongue touches the teeth for a tiniest bit longer when I say weather as opposed to whether.
@@ISutherland1967 thanks for that. I suspect it’s something in addition. W as in weather is pronounced as a voiced bilabial semivowel. That is it is produced by placing both lips together in a kind of pout and at the same time using your voice box and mouth to make a kind of uh sound. Wh as in whether is made the same way but without the voice - just a brief expulsion of breath. That's called an unvoiced bilabial semivowel, with aspiration. So it’s full name is an unvoiced aspirated bilabial semivowel! Ho on earth christened it that, I cannot imagine. But there,S the unnecessary technical explanation.
"When I was in school I ran with a kid down the street,
And I watched him burn himself up on bourbon and speed,
But I was smarter than most, and I could choose.
Learned to talk like the man on the six o'clock news.
Yeah, what do you do with good ol' boys like me?
Don Williams,
"Good Ol' Boys Like Me"
I can't believe you posted these lyrics!! I have often thought it should make the short list of best C&W songs ever. "When I was a kid Uncle Remus would put me to bed..."
He makes the South seem familiar to the listener, probably even if it's not. My son has a beautiful, deep voice and I taught him to read myself, because I know too many people with decent educations that can't. Don Williams truly made an impression on me, as I always told my son that if all else failed, as long as he could read a prompter he could easily get a job doing the news. As it turned out, he hasn't needed it yet, but he did become a poet and professional musician.
Hi there! In my dialect of Scots, early and earth would be akin to air. So air-ly and air-th, though with the typical 'swallowed' r sound. If anyone knows the IPA for it, that'd be great cheers!
Sounds like linguistics and history/archaeology could learn from Physics regarding the Ivory Tower approach: I doubt many would dare to suggest that Richard Feynman or Karl Sagan weren't "real scientists" because they worked to bring their knowledge to the public. These the likes of Sabine Hossenfelder, Ethan Siegel, Becky Smedhurst, follow in their footsteps today.
I’m not sure how I picked it up, but I’m from the northeast and I say y’all for second person plural pronoun. 🤷🏻♂️ not always, in formal situations I try to use the standard you.
jackson, simon; Many words and placenames in cornwall and devon are brythonic celt. Have a look.
Would love to see a comprehensive theoretical analysis of what English might have evolved like, with next to nothing Norman influence.
Eg, A layman theory is that we might be have a situation similar to Scandinavia, where there are more divergent dialects of the same 'language' then some, retaining more west Germanic features ?
Articles, grammar, might not have been so simplified ?
MGE as I frame it - thou besspaken forbinded toungues ?
The use of "ou" for ME /u/ is also a Norman influence - a lot of our spelling conventions are thanks to Normans, we will probably use a more Germanic-style spelling too. Like a far stronger use of doubled letters for short vowels.
@@Smitology Although, the majority of French vocab surely came along in the 1700s . . . so perhaps, I should have written : " with no French influence" 🙂
I KNEW YOU SOUNDED TEXAN!!!! Every time you reference how idiosyncratic your speech patterns are I think to myself that you just sound Texan. I grew up south of Dallas and while you have a few differences on specific words, your overarching accent always sounds like home to me.
Also, thank you for this wonderful video! You guys are absolutely my two favorite youtubers!
Regarding suprasegmentals:
As a native to Scania, I've _never_ found the melody of Jackson's speech strange. Neither in English nor in Norse.
The Norse words and their endings are as they are, somewhat of a hurdle so to say, but the suprasegmentals just sound ...as could be expected, from a distantly related dialect.
I wonder if there was more population replacement In the south east of France by the Romans. Or was it just longer Roman influence. Would be interesting to know more about Frankish. Was it mutually intelligible with Anglo-Saxon? And its influence of French
39:35 Did AS replace Brythonic or Latin?
There will undoubtedly have been Latin speakers in sub-Roman Britain, even if most will have been bilingual with Brythonic. Simon says Latin survived as an ecclesiastical language and that's clearly true but in the earlier decades it would have survived for a while as a general upper class language of administration and culture.
However one factor that needs to be understood is that different sections of the country were Romanised to different degrees. The south-east, which also happens to be where AS settlement and takeover began, was much more Romanised, with all that meant not only in terms of language and high culture but how dependent on the continent they were and how 'pacified' (demilitarised and domesticated). By contrast the south-west, west (i.e. Wales), centre and north were not so Romanised, so will have been a bit more independently-spirited and much more retaining of Brythonic.
Those people came to call themselves the 'Cymry' and the south-easterners 'Lloegyr'. The etymology of the latter word is unknown and disputed, but it is the origin of the 'Logres' of later Arthurian legend. And it is also the origin of the modern Welsh for England, 'Lloegr'. So the Cymry simply expanded their sense of what 'Lloegyr' referred to as the AS kingdoms expanded out of the south-east into the rest of what is now England. In effect the Cymry saw the Lloegyr people as a kind of foreigner; first as Romanised people who spoke more Latin and were weaker and more effete, and then as pagan Anglo-Saxons who'd conquered the former.
Following on from this:
42:20 Why did Latin replace the native Celtic language in France (Gaul) but not in Britain?
The above could be part of the answer - parts of Britain weren't Romanised as heavily as all of Gaul, so there was less pressure from Latin. Gaulish actually held out in a few places right into the period of Frankish rule but it was already moribund. A related point is that the period of Roman rule was longer in Gaul than in Britain, and this issue has been focused on with regard to other parts of the former empire that were Latin-using officially (as opposed to the Greek-using eastern parts). A good example is Dacia and Romanian. Those opposed to the idea that Romanian is descended from Dacian Latin point to the rather short time period of Roman rule, claiming Latin could not have taken root as a vernacular and survived after the empire.
42:30 DNA evidence and the replacement question
There's very little DNA evidence that clearly points to Germanic ancestry, even in YDNA. The areas in Britain with the highest percentages are East Anglia, north-east England and the Northern Isles. In the latter it's very high (and due to the Norse), in the other two around 30%. West of those areas it drops off to single digits. When you think about it, that's remarkably low for a supposedly invading people, who modern English people still identify with and whose language and ethnic identity completely took over. How is this possible?
I think of it like this. A few coastal Ingvaeonic people migrate to an island they or their fathers and grandfathers once helped guard on the 'Litus Saxonicum', Britain's south coast. They may have been hired as mercenaries as Bede's account suggests, and which would have been a continuation of their role as foederati under Roman rule. They may have been unpaid, as Bede again suggests, because the local British rulers were becoming impoverished and chancing their arms. In lieu of payment they demand farmland, and eventually just take over because it was easier than faffing around trying to negotiate with weak, untrustworthy Britons. They also call more of their kin over from the continent and start commandeering local women. One little bit of conquest leads to another as they come up against weaker British rulers and as more of their own people migrate in and eventually they've taken over what would later become complete counties in the south-east.
The points to notice here are
1. They didn't necessarily intend to conquer the whole country, it just kind of happened, gradually
2. It's a lot harder to conquer large areas quickly as the Franks and others did on the continent. They could move a lot of people by land, the Ingvaeonics had to move by boat. It could only begin by toeholds, and continue due to the military and cultural weakness of the Britons and the AS' greater preparedness to fight.
3. If you take over an area and take the local women as wives and have children with them, you can then impose your culture on the new generation, which is only half AS ancestrally and genetically but fully AS culturally and linguistically. Except that your kids might pick up some Celticisms from their mother. After a couple of generations of this with increased expansion and capture of Britons as slaves and more imposed marriages, 'Anglo-Saxons' in Britain are still just as much Germanic in culture and language but only a fraction of it in ancestry.
Ironically, if it had been easier to conquer Britain and had taken much less time, English and the Anglo-Saxon ethnic identity might have died out like the Visigoths in Spain. It was very easy for them to conquer the Iberian peninsula, and then they remained aloof and failed to impose their culture. As a result of which the population never felt themselves to be of their ethnicity, and had no resistance when the Moors overthrew them.
The Germanicness of England is not due to mass invasion by hundreds of thousands and extermination and replacement of the Britons. It's due to slow imposition of culture through gradually expanding and interbreeding from a dominant position.
When I think of the (potential)Celtic influence on English and the grammatical structure. In a thought experiment, I would imagine it being something when an anglophone learns french and wants to say je suis 25 rather than j'ai 25 ans. Just a theoretical situation of what an adult learner might do.
Y'all should just start a linguistics podcast already. Man, I wish English had a "you two/both" duel Pronoun like in ON.
Maybe a focus on historical linguistics, occasionally with guests? What do y'all think?
Maybe we English speakers could start saying yit (like ON: þit) or co-opt youse as a duel pronoun.
"Yit" or "yout" sounds like a shortened "you-two," chopping off a final syllable of course.
@@owenwoellert6989 I've probably heard people pronounce "you two" like [jɨʉɾɨʉ] before in my dialect.
@@owenwoellert6989 I think it contracts like y'all and becomes y'both. When I'm saying it really fast, the b seems to be the strongest and not want to disappear. Next might be an e'both where that y diphthong disappears, then it becomes e'boh. The th vanishes pretty easily depending on next word, like "you both should" which becomes y'bo'should. It doesn't want to disappear in this phrase "you both need to" which wants to stay y'both need'a
There also seem to be some grammatical differences.
Listen up, you two! GOOD
Listen up, you both! BAD
Both of you, Listen up! Good
Listen up, both of you! Bad [especially bad. Seems like this form is for "Listen up! Both of you need to..."
You both, Listen up! Bad
You two, Listen up! Good
Also becomes "both of yours" in genitive. That both does not want to contract but easily becomes both'e'ya or both'yer as in "both your father and mother" or both'e'yer "both of your sisters"
Anyways, my point is that the "both" core of these phrases seems strongest and the other words want to contract around them, and only way to make both contract is to place it in front of a word beginning with a sound the th wants to merge with like you both should, or you both think where it can become ya'bo'should or ya'bo'think
English DID have dual pronouns in Old English and early Middle English. Second person was in nominative “ᵹit”, accusative/dative “inc”, and genitive “incer” (pronounced roughly “yit” /jɪt/ “ink” /ɪŋk/ and “inker” /ɪŋkəɾ/ respectively).
So yeah, your suggestion of “yit” would be perfect!
Someone might already have said this, but a lot of Scots distinguish the vowels in, e.g. firm, turn and learn. And the difference wh vs. w is still widespread there as well.
Growing up in the U.S. I always thought the "wh" sound was just a goofy Texas thing - had no idea that "h" wasn't always silent in older English dialects
Not an expert here, but as a potential answer as to why Latin didn’t replace Brythonic (or whatever was spoken in the British Isles), my sense of things is that Gaulish was similar enough to Latin that after so long a time of being subject to Rome, having Romans living among them, and the Romans never really leaving that the Gaulish just adopted Latin. Similar to how Native American languages have decreased over the years as English has become (and been) the predominate language in America.
That would contrast to the British situation where the Roman population would be incredibly sparse and only concentrated around trade routes and a few cities. Watching the archeology show Time Team where they do tons of archeological digs in England around Roman occupied areas, they find that these “Roman” centers were only occasionally occupied by actual Romans and the people garrisoning the roads, forts, and administrative centers were actually Britons, not Romans, who only adopted the Roman way of life. So you could see a situation where a Roman legionnaire in Britain is actually a Briton who lives around Brythonic speakers in a village or area his ancestors lived in for centuries and only really adopts Roman habits in the way he dresses and his job. Otherwise he’s speaking Brythonic, lives in a Brythonic village/area, works a Roman job, and maybe only speaks some Latin at work. And he may not speak Latin at all. If all his commanders were also native Brythonic speakers then they’d probably be speaking Brythonic when he’s doing legionnaire stuff.
Also the time Rome dominated British trade is far shorter than how long Rome dominated the continent and never left. After Rome pulled out of the British Isles, Time Team makes it evident in some episodes that while warlords and some limited claims to Roman culture lasted for a generation or two, the population reverted back to its typical non-Roman Brythonic patterns within a generation or two, really quickly. Basically, it’s like a multinational corporation (Rome) set up business in Britain for a while but then left. Like today, setting up Microsoft in Sweden business isn’t going to alter its culture so much. Sweden will still be Sweden after Microsoft left, similarly to how (it seems) Brythonic Britain was still Brythonic Britain when Rome took its business (trade) out of the country.
It’s kind of weird to go back and watch videos with short-beard Jackson
Scotts pronouncing head as “hīd”, would probably pronounce Earth as something like “ārth”.
What a shirt!
I believe crag and hog are of Celtic origin?
As far as grammar transmitting I think Simon gets it right. It makes sense if someone kept much of the grammar of their first language (celtic) while speaking their second language (english). It would also help if they were someone influential such as a great warrior, influential church man, aid or educator of nobles or important author.
@1:04 mins, so Simon has a "West Country" dialect?
To the point about an "English-Scots creole", the Russian-Ukrainian surjik or the Russian-Belarussian trasyanka are pretty much examples of what that might look like.
When it comes to the grammatical influence of pre-existing languages on an incoming language, what about the example of India? English is the official common language of India, and there are many people there who speak it natively. But when I, as an English person, hear them speak, a lot of the grammar sounds quite strange (though I can’t give any example of the top of my head). Where does those grammatical differences arise?
I actually know German dialects (namely from Carinthia's Mölltal) who realise virtually every word starting with "r" as "hr". They don't do it with any other sounds.
Well in english pop you tend to fudge the vowels.
What about all the Irish slaves that the Norse took to Iceland? Or the Romano-Celts absorbed by the Anglosaxons? Is it not possibly those people, e.g. Irish mothers, calqued their native construction while speaking Norse or Old English?
On the question of whether the future development of English will be more towards leveling or more towards dialecticization, I suspect that, on one hand, the most formal registers of English will be increasingly aligned across the English-speaking world. That will likely prevent dialects from diverging into separate languages. But, on the other hand, local and social class dialects may become increasingly distinct as a result of various factors, including identity issues of the type discussed in this video. For example, the so-called Northern Cities version of American English (heard primarily in cities on the US side of the Great Lakes, such as Chicago and Detroit) was not identified as distinct until the 1970s and accelerated in its distinctiveness during the 1980s. This time frame coincides with the beginning of migration out of that region, the American "rust belt," to the American "sun belt" and has been interpreted as an example of how people who feel themselves to be socially besieged may adopt linguistic signals to define themselves as members of a group. The Northern Cities accent involves a vowel shift that results in a vowel system that is difficult for non-Northern Cities speakers to reproduce.
On the search for "ea" words that do not end in "-d," I believe "deaf" may be pronounced "deef" by some speakers in the North of England.
We are subject to graphemic interference...when spelling affects us
The Tudors were Welsh, is that too late to be the origin of any celtic influences?
I suppose you could call what you are doing, experimental linguistics on a par with experimental archaeology. You two make a great team. I like the idea of trying to make it sound natural. My biggest bugbear with people when they read Chaucer or Beowulf is the voice they put on to do it, it sounds so fake to me. I particularly dislike David Crystal's interpretation of how Shakespeare spoke, I don't reckon he spoke the standard English of the day but Warwickshire dialect which I am sure was not anything like it has been reconstructed. It's just a hunch, but it does not feel roight for me.
@@davidweihe6052 Good point, I believe he did introduce dialect words though.
@@davidweihe6052 I strongly suspect this is where I picked up the idea. s://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/009568190 I would guess that I read that back when I was studying Shakespeare for myA level in 1972 :)
Alright, silly question... does the set of letters ᛗᛟᚲᚺᛁᚢ make any sense whatsoever?
54:20 I think the justification for treating /ɑː/ in car as underlying /ar/ in southern British English is phonological. Contemporary /ɑː/ has two diachronic sources, one from /ar/ and the other from /æ/ + specific fricatives or fricative clusters (like dance). Only the former can generate a contemporary open syllable /-ɑː/. So an open /Cɑː/-type syllable like car can be unambiguously identified as historically rhotic just from its contemporary pronunciation, which isn't the case for the latter (for example, a hypothetical word "parth" would have merged with path). If you want to rhyme anything with car, there are no such words other than those that also end in ar that you can find.
What will be English in 2500 ?
May alla guide us to an answer
In terms of the Spanish influence on American English, could the use of the Spanish word 'ya', which is usually translated as 'already ' be responsible for phrases like 'Enough already!' ¡Basta ya! in Spanish? This phrase isn't used in the UK, where it would be just 'Enough!' or 'Enough now!'. There are other examples in American usage, such as 'What's going on already? etc. Could this phenomenon be the result of Hispanic migration to the US?
I can say that "Enough already!" is used in the UK, what I don't know is if it's an "Americanism" or how common it is
@@MrTrilbe Thanks for the reply. I'm English and I have to admit I've never heard it here, but perhaps it some people do use that phrase.
@@MrTrilbe You must be very young if “enough already” doesn't sound American to you. It's gibberish in standard English and is as American as “y'all folks don't got any alooominum pails to fill at the faucet” and cops shooting black people.
Isn’t it more likely to come from German / Yiddish influence - schon gut, or schon genug - and whatever the equivalent is in Yiddish? In cities like New York such a phrase could easily become useful and could have propagated from there. In British English I would certainly think it an Americanism. It’s not something I’ve heard this side of the Atlantic.
@@johnfenn3188 Yes, your German/Yiddish theory sounds plausible, but I'm no expert.
Top ten anime crossovers
Wasn't "sister" much more likely introduced by Old English speakers? Anglosaxons? Seems like a very basic word
The Anglo Saxon word had a W in it, the Norse form without the W caught on. Same with give, which was originally yive, but the Norse form with the -g- replaced it.
Guid tae hear ye gie a shout oot tae the Scots leid. And ye are richt that the leid has mony features frae Norse. Faur mair than English has.
You make a common mistake. Native Swedish speakers in Finland speak with pitch accent. If someone speaks Swedish without a pitch accent, it's a native Finnish speaker, speaking the mandatory Swedish.
Old Norse words with only one syllable that has become a two syllable word in Standard Swedish still has a one syllable accent. This is an indication that they were spoken with pitch accent in Old Norse.
Did the Norsemens Celtic wifes on Iceland spoke with pitch accent? If not, they did not taught their children.