@Tvaikah welcome to the internet. There are whole stacks of methods to bring attention and boost engagement instead of, you know, communicate meaningful knowledge.
Only complaint would be the blurring of phonology and phonetics. Aka, why stime is a possible English word, while tsime is not as it breaks English’s phonotactic (soundtouching) rules. Phonetics would be more so, how are sounds produced and their wave forms + the auditory system They’re definitely similar to one another, and much of phonology is built upon phonetics, but this is sorta a result of the bottom up hierarchy of the the field as the higher level layers are affected by the more fundamental ones (though I’d say the opposite is true when we actually produce utterances in terms of how we conceptualize what we want to say, form it into something well-formed and turn it into sounds that are produced). One other thing to note is that phonetics and phonology are entirely separate from orthography. This isn’t to say that we can’t explain why certain things are intuitive with historical linguistics through phonological changes. Writing is just a way to encode language, with how it’s actually encoded being irrelevant (And usually more conservative. This is dependant on how conservative the language is phonologically, any orthographical reforms or how new the system is) Overall tho, well done! Excellent presentation in terms of condensing all of the fields of linguistics into a succinct video. Looking forwards to seeing more :)
As someone who is both autistic and dyslexic, I had to teach myself most of this stuff since it doesn't at all come naturally to me. I think you explained it really well! Brilliant video
Imagine also being autistic, dyslexic AND not a native English speaker. I was at complete loss with my first online interactions. What exactly I should reply on "what's up!". I mean, it sounds like a question. But it is really does not seem appropriate to tell some random dude you barely know what's going on in your life. Also, in my childhood, i heard a joke, that goes something like: How would you define a nerd? It's person, that when asked "how you are doing?" start to tell you how he is doing. And that puzzled me: why the hell you even ask then? Later, I found consolation in the idea that we have our weird quirks, and neurotypicals has their own. So, you just had to be patient with them like you patient with some quirks of our neurodivergent kin.
@@laierr if it's any consolation, I'm as far as I know what you call neurotypical, and it still doesn't make sense. Granted, I'm a foreigner and speak multiple languages so what is a rule in a language isn't really a thing in another. (Which makes it easier to dodge/not internalize guilt.) The way I've made peace with it is people are just lazy and consequently play loose with language. Want non subjective "proof"? Look at "legalese", court proceedings, Terms & Conditions, finance statements, philosophy, even marketing prays on it. You'll often find people end up in trouble because they ... (essentially assume) approach the subject with a careless/inertial disposition.
I find that these "question-greetings" are mostly used by Americans. That's how I deal with them. If the person is from the U.S. you're probably not supposed to answer them.
When I started studying Japanese a few years ago, I realized how little I even know about English even after all the grammar and writing classes. Learning another language really makes you reflect on all the thousands of tiny nuances in a language that convey meaning.
I’m more worried that what it gets wrong will make people keep spreading incorrect information. Adjectival order isn’t a definitive rule, and ghoti can *not* be pronounced as fish in English
@@snowfloofcathug While I get that, it's still broadly helpful. Adjectival order isn't identical across languages, but the basic idea is applicable, at minimum, to all languages I know of. Also, ghoti irks me too, but it's a prevalent enough misconception that I doubt one video will be more than a drop in the bucket
@@Copyright_InfringementMy trust is forever shaken. How is ghoti inaccurate? My Linguistic Anthropology professor used it as an example in class. Of course professionals get things wrong, too. . .but ouch.
@@azurekuzma3598 Basic idea: it matters _where_ in the word the letters are. TI: only makes a "sh" sound _before a vowel_ in native words (eg. action, potential, patient, etc.). The only instance I know of TI="sh" is "Kiribati" which is a borrowing from Gilbertese (what they speak in Kiribati) O: only makes an "ih" sound in "women" due to a mix of umlauting in the second syllable (man>men) and dissimilation from the W (two sounds getting less similar), and even then, some dialects (such as mine) don't say the word that way GH: Hoo boy, where to start? The fact every existing word starting with "gh" is always pronounced with a G sound (ghost, ghetto, etc)? The fact the F sound in tough and laugh is actually from _UGH,_ not just GH? The fact that the sound in Old English which became the UGH in laugh just became H at the beginning of a word (house, hat, hide, etc)? This is honestly the worst one; I'd believe ghoti as "gish" if I squinted real hard, but there's no way to square the GH/F circle. Whenever I've had a chance to ask any teachers using this, they've generally said they want to show that the likely simplified version of English pronunciation the students were taught isn't the end-all-be-all in saying every word known to man. Perhaps this was your professor's aim; after all, anthropology covers all of Earth, and you might run into Maori WH being pronounced like F, or multiple consecutive silent letters in Mikmaq. Personally, it's not how I'd do it, but your prof isn't necessarily an idiot or trying to mislead; they might just be trying to counter subpar language arts standards
@@Copyright_Infringement I appreciate the in depth explanation, thank you! This definitely makes sense, even to someone with limited linguistics experience such as myself. As for your answer to my professor, I think I'd agree. To his credit the class was a class on the connection of language to culture (because of the anthropology emphasis) then say pure linguistics. So it would make sense that a more fun example such as Ghoti would be used without trying to make students worry about the accuracy of it.
It sounds fine to me if you just say it out as is, but if you know the 'land' is supposed to be pronounced like the first syllable of 'London' it sounds wrong
Interviewer: what is your greatest weakness? Candidate: I often understand the semantics of questions, but not the pragmatics. I: interesting, can you give us an example? C: Yes 😂
Great content! I like the Minecraft metaphors and such. As someone who speaks English, some Spanish, and a bit of Esperanto, it's interesting seeing all the differences in meaning between other languages. For instance, it's kinda cool that "I didn't realize" in Spanish is "No me dí cuenta," literally meaning "I didn't give myself account." Esperanto seems to be pretty flexible with syntax and morphology as well, though admittedly it feels regular to the point of feeling unnatural to speak. So yeah, great stuff, I'd like to see what comes next from this!
Glad you liked it! I am definitely interested in learning more about Esperanto. I imagine the combination of being a constructed language but also having native speakers could give rise to some unique stuff.
one thing not mentioned here is phono_tactics_ - phonetics is what sounds are, and how they can be represented, but phonotactics are what sounds are allowed to be put together at all. /h/ in English can't be at the coda of a word, for example. That's why a fake word like "splih" sounds "unenglish" while "plumbob" sounds like a perfectly normal English word, even if it means literally nothing.
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology: it isn't a component of language (which is the main subject of this video), but rather a field of study that deals with the distribution of phonemes in a language, so it wouldn't make much sense if phonotactics was covered in this video.
Compounding is where some of the value of the adjective ordering comes in. Often you can refer to a specific thing and modify it. Old Big Red dog, is referring to Clifford who is now old. An big old red dog is some random big old red dog.
IPA, while useful, is virtually insufferable because it's sooooo long and boring and then you've gotta study where all the sounds are articulated and that's even more boring and long. I've found that phonetics works much better just using the sounds of whatever language you're speaking and spelling it funny. As in foe-NET-icks. Ta dah!
I just realised I internally reclassified the phrase "whoopdiefriggidydoo" to be it's own word, cause I got mad and said to someone "whoopdiefriggidy-fuckin-doo"
This was such a well organized video. I loved your examples through each layer and how you transitioned from each layer. Plus the minecraft visuals were sick
Excellent video! I've been looking to learn more about language, and this helped me realize that I want to learn about phonetics, morphology, and syntax. Also, I was confused why the nether was under bedrock, until I realized, "Oh wait, that's where it's canonically supposed to be, isn't it?" So I learned about language and Minecraft lore today.
Note that "morphology" is NOT how sounds form meanings. Rather, is it how different components, usually abstract (morphemes), are used in the construction of a language. The thing you were talking about sounds more like morpho-phonology
Just a thought, I always thought the ghoti example was a bit dumb. Preemptive apologies for not using ipa. Because I never considered the 'i' to be part of the 'sh' sound. Only the T. And the 'i' as i see it is lumped with 'io' to make the 'in' sound in nation. Same way that io makes the same sound in "vision" or "mission". Or maybe a better example "ratio". The letter 'i' clearly has its own vowel sound. And isn't functioning as part of a Digraph to make the "sh" sound. That's how I see anyway.
I agree- I've also always seen the ghoti example as pretty dumb. If you've ever tried to read through the big list of English sound-to-spelling correspondences ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Sound-to-spelling_correspondences ), or God forbid the spelling-to-sound correspondences right above it, anything in it loses meaning real fast. The only general way I know to make sense of a spelling is to follow its progression from back when it did make sense, usually Old English or Latin, and acknowledge that people make changes along the way. Maybe these changes are systematic, maybe they are stupid one-offs. Also, grouping the 'ti' together is a helpful pattern for other words from French, like "martial" and "patient" and "lutetium".
No one person decides it per se, but I wouldn't call it arbitrary since there are patterns behind it. French lenites from /ti/ to /sj/ in general (but with some regular exceptions), then most English dialects coalesce /sj/ to /ʃ/. Of course, this only happens when it has another vowel to glide into, which is not present in .
@γνῶσῐς-6 I'm not completely sure I follow but yeah phonology can drift in pretty unexpected directions and if the orthography is left behind it ends up just seeming random btw i like ur username and im happy i knew enough greek to understand it
As a Polish person I already had to learn all of this (and some more) just to speak my own language. It's funny to hear English native speakers e surprised by linguistics.
They don't like it, linguistics is more of a psychology of language than understanding your language. I don't even need to take that course. That doesn't make it proper rather a Cognitive formation of a language ! A limitation. Asserting how you should use language ? Because your mind is expecting this formula? Well I had to learn French to bypass this formula into cognitive apprehension of arbitrary writings. Then I had to recredit it to remember to read it.
When I see 'Ancient Chinese Red Dragon', I'd say 'Ancient' describes 'Chinese', which is why it sounds right; 'Ancient Chinese' as a whole is an adjective.
@@JoshuaTsukayama-cz9hy Then that would make "ancient" a noun, and the proper form of the verb would be "Chineses" (with an extra S), since it's in the third person. Not sure would that would mean, though.
In German, all definite articles (der/die/das/des/dem/den) can be used as pronouns. All except the 2nd and 3rd case plural ones, which, instead of being "der" / "den", are "deren" / "denen"
@Nikola_M that's not a quirk, sis is art! Den Anweisungen des Personals ist unbedingt Folge zu leisten. Our beautiful language is constantly evolving, we even got rid of the famous "RkReÜAÜG". That was the "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", in short "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz". For ze non-Deutsch-schpeaking: "Law on the transfer of tasks for the monitoring of bovine identification and beef labelling". Now that was art at its finest!
Man it is really crazy you use that "be sure to like and subscribe" example. I've always had this scenario I play out in my head for giggles where some future civilization finds archived UA-cam videos, and when they come across that phrase they don't understand it because they don't have the internet. So they take it as some kind of religious mantra
I need to know where he is from now. My fiancée pronounces it the same way and she is from Minnesota, but all her family pronounces it either as bagel or as “beggle”. I’ve never heard anyone else but her say “baggle” until today.
I feel like the idea is that the person only exists on the screen you watch a recording of their past self with. So when you watch a later video by that person, they are literally seeing you later. The person is looking at you and everything It's also that they're ending a conversation with what's supposed to be you, from their perspective. So if they finish recording for the video and do something different, they are literally stopping looking at what they're talking to and going to do it later when it's time to record again
Great introduction to linguistics! I just wanna add that the 'layers' that come after semantics are actually all "part of semantics", in a way that you can study how meaning works through sounds and morphemes. That also happens with other linguistics areas, such as historical linguistics, which is a "deeper layer" that also contais semantics and pragmatics in it (just like semantics and pragmatics with syntax, phonology etc).
This is a perfect video for me. I’m currently working on a goofy text to speech program and I’m using IPA for it. It’s for games I make in the future, the characters will be able to say anything at all, including the player’s made up name. I really like the concept of adding adjective order to it somehow but it’s not for generating new sentences. Maybe in the future though
Interesting that you would consider a “red dragon” to be a particular type of dragon, rather than just a particular color. Actually a “Chinese dragon” is one particular species of dragon, which is completely different from Western dragons.
It seems to be a strangely common assumption that the semantics of a word derives from its definition, as if we all have definitions which we recall when using a word to make sure we are using it correctly. An alternative view which seems much more plausible to avoid unnecessary complexity and counterexamples is to view the use of a word like the use of a tool. I don’t use a screw driver according to a defined use, I can use it however I want depending on what response I get. For instance, I may use a screw driver as a weapon. So words are just given depending on the expected response, not according to a preset definition. This is somewhat later Wittgenstein’s view for anyone interested.
You forgot about phonotactics. For me that's where it gets real interesting. How languages decide what sound combinations "make sense" or not. It's basically what gives languages their personalities lol
My favorite demonstration of pragmatics has to do with Gricean maxims. Take for example the following conversation: Wife: “Did you vacuum and do the dishes?” Husband: “I did the dishes.” Did the husband vacuum? I’ll bet you know the answer even though the husband didn’t say anything about vacuuming. How did you know?
Great, im watching this while abroad on a job, juggling between my native Polish, local German and universal English translating for my team, and boy, do I appreciate when somebody makes an effort to be undestood
1:20 thats the thing that i see english speaking pople tend to forget when speaking about languages. Like yes a word in Polish can have 30 diffrent versions but it isnt like we were taught that or think about it. Its just pattern reckognition.
Estoy estudiando todo esto que explicaste y, la verdad, trataste contenido de una alta carga cognitiva de una manera muy sencilla y de fácil aprehensión. ¡Me encantó el video!
9:39 I think you just blew my mind with that one - I knew the English language had its quirks, especially since it's my second language and the alphabet isn't specifically made for it, but my God, the fact that Ghoti is like Fish is so unbelievable to me.
If you asked someone to read "ghoti" they would probably say "goatee" since pronouncing "ghoti" as "fish" breaks English spelling rules. However, you _could_ write it as "pfysche" and it would still have the same pronunciation!
@@katakana1 it's one of my major linguistic pet peeves cause there's so many actual different ways you could make the same point and be RIGHT but that's the one that somehow everyone repeats ad nauseam
As a dyslexic stuff like this essentially cause me to rage quit learning how to read and write and accept my dependence on screen readers and speech to text software.
I have a fun story about semantics in meaning! In a math class we had a basic lesson on set theory, the math of categorizing things. As an example we were given a list of 8 ice cream flavours and told to sort them into "fruit" and "not fruit." Chocolate, Vanilla and Cookie's&Cream are easily classed as not fruit. Strawberry and banana are obviously fruit. The issue is one of them was Coconut... I put it in "fruit" but most of my classmates and in fact the teacher counted it as "not fruit." I objected to that and effectively hijacked the rest of the class with an argument about what a fruit is and coming up with weird counter examples to any new definition that anyone came up with. Ultimately concluding that marshmallows are a fruit derived product.
Infixes are very common in Austronesian (Pacific Islander) languages. Adding infixes of -un-, -in-, or -um-, to name a few, can drastically change up word meanings. Also, reduplication is used to emphasize things or show that some action is still ongoing, so combined, you get words that often don't even resemble their roots. Like the Hawaiian state fish the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
I'm a linguist. I've been studying languages for over 25 years, and I clicked on this video so I could tell you you're wrong. But I did learn a few things, and for that, you have my respect. Good job turning "rage bait" into useful info. I would comment more, but I, too, enjoy a good Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I must now look further into the etymology of "component" and not just because it has my secret code word "put" as its main word. Cheers, mates!
6:30 I was going to write up an entire comment here about compound words and runescape/D&D, but figured I'd watch a little more before I made a fool of myself and I'm glad I did. Fun direct example: "Ancient Chinese Bearded Dragon" (and now it's not even a dragon!)
English was my second language that I had to learn in school as a child. I always feel like I was forced to memorize a bunch of rules that even the textbook itself doesn’t follow. I was disgusted by its inconsistency and always hated to learn it. This videos explains a lot for me. Being able to understand videos like this was the only motivation for me to learn English in the first place.
I think language is anything that happens between any point in time, from point a to point b. Body language is like one of the most fundamental languages most people can interpret subconsciously. You can tell if people are in pain or confused or angry, or sad, or anxious just by how they present themselves in the moment. There is classical conditioning, then there is operant conditioning
And then there is pretending or acting. That's how a narcissist or sociopath tricks you. Oh, their body language is sooooo meaningful and deep. No, it's not. But I do like considering your idea. Anything that happens between point A and point B? Anything? Ooh, I'm gonna go all linguist turned philosopher here and start talking about determinism or something....
I like that I saw the thumbnail and, as a fellow nerd, was instantly hooked. Though I didn't expect you to actually mention D&D or even be nerdy yourself. Kind of reminds me of the youtuber Gneiss Name, who uses minecraft in his explanation of different geological subjects - I hope you'll make more videos in the future
As someone who comes from Romania. Where in our language there are barely any fancy pronunciations. When I first learned english it confused me so much. I will never forget how you can write the word: Tony as Ptoughneigh and it's still gonna be pronounced the same
As fun as it is to find weird technicalities about alternate spellings, it really doesn't work that way. Yes, some people named Ashley have it spelled as Ashleigh, and that has history behind it. But history is exactly why you wouldn't spell "fish" like "ghoti." Modern English is only a few hundred years old but there was Middle English and Old English going back a thousand years, and a whole group of languages before that which combined together. Several sounds from Old English stopped being used in Middle English and Modern English. In Old English, some words ended with a sound kind of like a cough, which was written with a 'gh.' Over time, people changed how they said those words. Sometimes it became a /f/ sound like in "tough" and sometimes it became a /h/ sound or silent like "through." There are also a lot of words borrowed from Greek, which had sound combinations like /pt/ and /ps/ that don't show up in English. So we write "pterodactyl" and "psychology" with an initial 'p' like Greeks would, but we don't pronounce the /p/. "Tony" actually has gone through a spelling change from Greek. Most English speakers pronounce "Anthony" with a soft /th/ sound, but Greek had a lot of words with "breathy" T's. So "Anthony" was pronounced like "Antony," and eventually people started spelling "Antony" without the 'h' to avoid confusion. And then it got shortened to "Tony." And vowels have so many different pronunciations which can vary between dialects, like what was mentioned in the video.
As someone who learned English practically at the same time as Spanish I can tell you that while the English writing system may seem flawed, it is easier than Spanish's. English may have weird phonetics but Spanish required me to learn the accent in literally every word, for example if you emphasize the "dis" in "disparo", you refer to a noun, but if you emphasize the "ro", it is a verb. For this sake the verb version uses what is known as a tilde, becoming "disparó". Of course, adding the tilde means there's no confussion when writing it, but when you have to take this into consideration for every single verb and their adjective/noun/verb/etc variants it becomes very headache inducing. In comparison, for English what I just said is "shot" for both versions, it can be both the verb and the noun, but this is, personally, better. Why? Because words are rarely said by themselves but rather said in sentences which add context. Said context should be enough to understand which version is it, "I heard a shot" and "He shot me" are different, and it's the same for Spanish, "Oí un disparo" and "Él me disparó", yet tildes are a rather unnecessary thing only there for the sake of semantics, which makes the language much harder to write.
The adjective order was difficult for me to get when I was learning english in highshool. In polish we can swap most of the words in a sentence around, and the meaning stays the same. It may sound more archaic, but the meaning is preserved.
I didn't know about the adjective order in English. In Spanish, we have a lot more freedom with adjectives. For example, we could say "Ancient Dragon Chinese Red," and it would feel the same as "Chinese Dragon Ancient Red" (although it might sound odd). This opens up a whole topic about how different authors use adjective order with different meanings.
That is the most amazing thing about languages... They are like collective softwares we run and yet we are still finding and making new rules to be then aware of.
As for the phatic phrases there are many examples (pretty much in every modern language) of how phrases that were used centuries ago became phatic. For instance, goodbye used to be "God be with ye", Russian спасибо (thank you) literally means "May God save you" and quite a common greeting in some Slavic languages such as Russian(здравствуйте/zdravstvuyte), Serbo-Croatian(zdravo) and Czech(zdravím) has an approximate litreal meaing of "I wsih you healh". As for the mentioned "what's up?", Polish has an exact equivalent "siema" which is a short for "jak się masz?", meaning "how are you?"
Ah, you have missed ETYMOLOGY. It's an important feature of any language, but especially so in English where we have an unusually large vocabulary drawn from many parent languages. That means we often have a very rich choice among several words which superficially mean more or less the same thing but which carry useful or playful associations beyond the literal meaning. And that in turn means drawing not only on the "front" meaning of a word - as if we were picking at random from a list of synonyms - but also its more subtle metaphoric associations with the cognate from its parent language, what that originally meant, and even how it may have changed through intermediate forms over time. Even loosely, if I use "syllabus" in a sentence, I'm more apt to choose other words like "forum" or "seminar" with a Latin cognate - rather than, say, "meeting" or "classroom" - because I'm thereby entering into a way of thinking, setting a tone, giving local color to my story. When I'm using English really sharply, I might want to compare an option that I favor with one I don't by choosing to call one "splendid" and the other "sordid" not merely because these both have Latin cognates but even more because those cognates (respectively: shining, dirty) produce such a delightfully clear visual contrast. And it doesn't hurt for emphasis that they have the same suffixes. The use of this kind of symmetry, when you can get it, allows listeners to feel confident that they're tracking the deeper meaning. Or I might prefer to contrast "splendid" with "wretched" even though the latter doesn't come from Latin at all, but from West Germanic. But both words came into popular use in English literature at about the same time - you can almost hear the English accent - and if I'm trying for a histrionic rather than visual effect, this may be just the thing. In short, I think that a decent grasp of etymology does wonders for bringing a language to life. And English, all of its mongrel peculiarities notwithstanding, is one of the very best for the purpose.
I actually did know about infixes because of the book The know It All but I think part of the reason for the locations not working is because an absolutely AB and ly are prefixes and suffixes so if it were directly next to them it would also be a prefix or a suffix
"Ghoti" cannot spell fish, english has syntactic rules for when certain letters can and cannot represent certain sounds. It's the same as the example of saying "Cartoon red giant dog" you instinctively know it's wrong because of obscure rules behind the enlish langue most people don't know about, yet follow anyways.
Right - it’s that each of the individual phonemes of fish can, in other contexts, be represented by gh, o, and ti. ‘Ghoti’ spelling fish is just a classical example of how English spelling is unintuitive. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it and it dates back to a poet in the 1850s I believe
With all respect from a spanish native speaker, the english scripture is a shit and don't have any fucking sense, the Spanish have problems like "hierro" "pingüino" "guerra" "gil" but the English is just a lot
There's two spaces in the description between „the“ and „hidden“. Do you have opinions on the letter system of the German language? Most words do follow rules but you have to look at the letters around a given letter to understand its exact meaning. German also has that grammar infixes as „zu“ but it’s not for adjectives and more for verbs which can be equivalent to the gerund.
Language teacher here, I always tell my students that learning a language is like getting a horse to drink some water. When you relax and look away, the horse will naturally gravitate to the water. But if you're constantly looking at the horse, waiting for it, pulling it, etc. Then the horse will dig in and avoid taking a sip of water. A language naturally grows on the user when the user is relaxed. Up to the point where others will say "You're really fluent, congrats.'
I like the use of Minecraft instead of an iceberg
I prefer OSI model instead
cobbleberg
@@TomatOgorodow all the homies on the physical layer
Why not just scrap the whole metaphor though? It serves no purpose. Just teach.
@Tvaikah welcome to the internet. There are whole stacks of methods to bring attention and boost engagement instead of, you know, communicate meaningful knowledge.
What's funnier is there is a Yu-Gi-Oh archetype called Ghoti and all the monsters are fish type.
Ok
Ah! That’s interesting
@@Yehor-v7y ok👌
Uhhhh are you in the wrong vid
@@rayray5878did you watch the video 💀
A channel dedicated to anime, minecraft and linguistics? Man youtube algorythms know me well, don't they
real
Hear hear!
Only complaint would be the blurring of phonology and phonetics.
Aka, why stime is a possible English word, while tsime is not as it breaks English’s phonotactic (soundtouching) rules.
Phonetics would be more so, how are sounds produced and their wave forms + the auditory system
They’re definitely similar to one another, and much of phonology is built upon phonetics, but this is sorta a result of the bottom up hierarchy of the the field as the higher level layers are affected by the more fundamental ones (though I’d say the opposite is true when we actually produce utterances in terms of how we conceptualize what we want to say, form it into something well-formed and turn it into sounds that are produced).
One other thing to note is that phonetics and phonology are entirely separate from orthography. This isn’t to say that we can’t explain why certain things are intuitive with historical linguistics through phonological changes. Writing is just a way to encode language, with how it’s actually encoded being irrelevant (And usually more conservative. This is dependant on how conservative the language is phonologically, any orthographical reforms or how new the system is)
Overall tho, well done! Excellent presentation in terms of condensing all of the fields of linguistics into a succinct video. Looking forwards to seeing more :)
It could do without the japanese cartoons
same
As someone who is both autistic and dyslexic, I had to teach myself most of this stuff since it doesn't at all come naturally to me. I think you explained it really well! Brilliant video
Imagine also being autistic, dyslexic AND not a native English speaker.
I was at complete loss with my first online interactions. What exactly I should reply on "what's up!". I mean, it sounds like a question. But it is really does not seem appropriate to tell some random dude you barely know what's going on in your life.
Also, in my childhood, i heard a joke, that goes something like: How would you define a nerd? It's person, that when asked "how you are doing?" start to tell you how he is doing.
And that puzzled me: why the hell you even ask then?
Later, I found consolation in the idea that we have our weird quirks, and neurotypicals has their own. So, you just had to be patient with them like you patient with some quirks of our neurodivergent kin.
Yeah, I never knew that "How ya doin'?" was a greeting and not a question until just now, surprised me
Same reaction, it was jarring to me and I disagreed when he said it felt natural
@@ThatGuyThatHasSpaghetiiCode Same! I always tried to respond with something to that "question"
@@laierr if it's any consolation, I'm as far as I know what you call neurotypical, and it still doesn't make sense. Granted, I'm a foreigner and speak multiple languages so what is a rule in a language isn't really a thing in another. (Which makes it easier to dodge/not internalize guilt.)
The way I've made peace with it is people are just lazy and consequently play loose with language. Want non subjective "proof"? Look at "legalese", court proceedings, Terms & Conditions, finance statements, philosophy, even marketing prays on it.
You'll often find people end up in trouble because they ... (essentially assume) approach the subject with a careless/inertial disposition.
"Be sure to like and subscribe" goes hard as a goodbye
Playing outro music after is even better
Xenogenesis starts playing
Kinda feels like a threat irl.
Like and subscribe... or else.
2:33 Some of us can't tell when "What's up" is a question. Over the decades, I've figured out a lot but this one still stumps me.
Don’t tell your friends about your indigestion / “how are you” is a greeting, not a question.
As a non-native, I even thought it was an app
Nothing but the sky or ceiling. How about you? 😂
My default answer is always "nothing much"
Because I have no freaking clue (heh) how to respond otherwise
I find that these "question-greetings" are mostly used by Americans. That's how I deal with them. If the person is from the U.S. you're probably not supposed to answer them.
When I started studying Japanese a few years ago, I realized how little I even know about English even after all the grammar and writing classes. Learning another language really makes you reflect on all the thousands of tiny nuances in a language that convey meaning.
Linguist here
Great beginner-level introductions on this stuff. Good job!
I’m more worried that what it gets wrong will make people keep spreading incorrect information. Adjectival order isn’t a definitive rule, and ghoti can *not* be pronounced as fish in English
@@snowfloofcathug While I get that, it's still broadly helpful. Adjectival order isn't identical across languages, but the basic idea is applicable, at minimum, to all languages I know of. Also, ghoti irks me too, but it's a prevalent enough misconception that I doubt one video will be more than a drop in the bucket
@@Copyright_InfringementMy trust is forever shaken. How is ghoti inaccurate? My Linguistic Anthropology professor used it as an example in class. Of course professionals get things wrong, too. . .but ouch.
@@azurekuzma3598 Basic idea: it matters _where_ in the word the letters are.
TI: only makes a "sh" sound _before a vowel_ in native words (eg. action, potential, patient, etc.). The only instance I know of TI="sh" is "Kiribati" which is a borrowing from Gilbertese (what they speak in Kiribati)
O: only makes an "ih" sound in "women" due to a mix of umlauting in the second syllable (man>men) and dissimilation from the W (two sounds getting less similar), and even then, some dialects (such as mine) don't say the word that way
GH: Hoo boy, where to start? The fact every existing word starting with "gh" is always pronounced with a G sound (ghost, ghetto, etc)? The fact the F sound in tough and laugh is actually from _UGH,_ not just GH? The fact that the sound in Old English which became the UGH in laugh just became H at the beginning of a word (house, hat, hide, etc)? This is honestly the worst one; I'd believe ghoti as "gish" if I squinted real hard, but there's no way to square the GH/F circle.
Whenever I've had a chance to ask any teachers using this, they've generally said they want to show that the likely simplified version of English pronunciation the students were taught isn't the end-all-be-all in saying every word known to man. Perhaps this was your professor's aim; after all, anthropology covers all of Earth, and you might run into Maori WH being pronounced like F, or multiple consecutive silent letters in Mikmaq. Personally, it's not how I'd do it, but your prof isn't necessarily an idiot or trying to mislead; they might just be trying to counter subpar language arts standards
@@Copyright_Infringement I appreciate the in depth explanation, thank you! This definitely makes sense, even to someone with limited linguistics experience such as myself.
As for your answer to my professor, I think I'd agree. To his credit the class was a class on the connection of language to culture (because of the anthropology emphasis) then say pure linguistics. So it would make sense that a more fun example such as Ghoti would be used without trying to make students worry about the accuracy of it.
scott-fucking-land sounds perfectly fine to me
Not to me, this stuff is regional.
It sounds fine to me if you just say it out as is, but if you know the 'land' is supposed to be pronounced like the first syllable of 'London' it sounds wrong
@@N____er still sounds fine
scott has a very particular interest in the hills 😏
I guess those seeds will make it very fertile land 😂
Interviewer: what is your greatest weakness?
Candidate: I often understand the semantics of questions, but not the pragmatics.
I: interesting, can you give us an example?
C: Yes
😂
Good one
Haven't watched the video yet and I'm already amused 😮💨👍🏿
i absolutely LOVE how the different chapters are placed physically in the world, really helps to have them laid out spatially!
Great content! I like the Minecraft metaphors and such.
As someone who speaks English, some Spanish, and a bit of Esperanto, it's interesting seeing all the differences in meaning between other languages. For instance, it's kinda cool that "I didn't realize" in Spanish is "No me dí cuenta," literally meaning "I didn't give myself account." Esperanto seems to be pretty flexible with syntax and morphology as well, though admittedly it feels regular to the point of feeling unnatural to speak.
So yeah, great stuff, I'd like to see what comes next from this!
Glad you liked it!
I am definitely interested in learning more about Esperanto. I imagine the combination of being a constructed language but also having native speakers could give rise to some unique stuff.
“Be sure to like and subscribe”is such a nice goodbye-phrase i gotta say it to my friends
Genuinely gonna start saying it hope it catches on
The minecraft diorama and animations are tight and your little examples and scenarios are perfect. Really nice video
one thing not mentioned here is phono_tactics_ - phonetics is what sounds are, and how they can be represented, but phonotactics are what sounds are allowed to be put together at all. /h/ in English can't be at the coda of a word, for example. That's why a fake word like "splih" sounds "unenglish" while "plumbob" sounds like a perfectly normal English word, even if it means literally nothing.
Phonotactics is a branch of phonology: it isn't a component of language (which is the main subject of this video), but rather a field of study that deals with the distribution of phonemes in a language, so it wouldn't make much sense if phonotactics was covered in this video.
@@hxt0109 both a good explanation of why phonotactics shouldn't be included and of why phonology should
helps that plumb bobs exist
Phonotactis are gr8, I think Rick and Morty mastered them "plumbus"
3:00 That joke alone has earned you another subscriber. Keep up the good work
Compounding is where some of the value of the adjective ordering comes in. Often you can refer to a specific thing and modify it. Old Big Red dog, is referring to Clifford who is now old. An big old red dog is some random big old red dog.
That “i before e” followed by the accelerating exceptions was super fun.
Ngl i wish the IPA and phonetics was taught in schools as it is useful for learning languages.
IPA, while useful, is virtually insufferable because it's sooooo long and boring and then you've gotta study where all the sounds are articulated and that's even more boring and long. I've found that phonetics works much better just using the sounds of whatever language you're speaking and spelling it funny. As in foe-NET-icks. Ta dah!
@@SunnyAquamarine2 just imagine if english and french hadn't existed...
@@mmclxxii bien. ¿Yahora?
I just realised I internally reclassified the phrase "whoopdiefriggidydoo" to be it's own word, cause I got mad and said to someone "whoopdiefriggidy-fuckin-doo"
Rad
Lol
I gotta start using that ngl
This was such a well organized video. I loved your examples through each layer and how you transitioned from each layer. Plus the minecraft visuals were sick
Been looking for a video like this- absolutely brilliant stuff
Excellent video! I've been looking to learn more about language, and this helped me realize that I want to learn about phonetics, morphology, and syntax.
Also, I was confused why the nether was under bedrock, until I realized, "Oh wait, that's where it's canonically supposed to be, isn't it?" So I learned about language and Minecraft lore today.
Thank you for making a video that perfectly conveys my love for linguistics and related areas of study.
2:52 Thought for sure it would be "Thank you for watching" but then it was...
3:22 Don’t be so sure
Uh oh
Note that "morphology" is NOT how sounds form meanings. Rather, is it how different components, usually abstract (morphemes), are used in the construction of a language. The thing you were talking about sounds more like morpho-phonology
Congratulations you have taught me more about the English language than 11 years of English classes
Just a thought, I always thought the ghoti example was a bit dumb. Preemptive apologies for not using ipa.
Because I never considered the 'i' to be part of the 'sh' sound. Only the T. And the 'i' as i see it is lumped with 'io' to make the 'in' sound in nation. Same way that io makes the same sound in "vision" or "mission". Or maybe a better example "ratio". The letter 'i' clearly has its own vowel sound. And isn't functioning as part of a Digraph to make the "sh" sound. That's how I see anyway.
I agree- I've also always seen the ghoti example as pretty dumb. If you've ever tried to read through the big list of English sound-to-spelling correspondences ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_orthography#Sound-to-spelling_correspondences ), or God forbid the spelling-to-sound correspondences right above it, anything in it loses meaning real fast. The only general way I know to make sense of a spelling is to follow its progression from back when it did make sense, usually Old English or Latin, and acknowledge that people make changes along the way. Maybe these changes are systematic, maybe they are stupid one-offs.
Also, grouping the 'ti' together is a helpful pattern for other words from French, like "martial" and "patient" and "lutetium".
No one person decides it per se, but I wouldn't call it arbitrary since there are patterns behind it. French lenites from /ti/ to /sj/ in general (but with some regular exceptions), then most English dialects coalesce /sj/ to /ʃ/.
Of course, this only happens when it has another vowel to glide into, which is not present in .
@γνῶσῐς-6 I'm not completely sure I follow
but yeah phonology can drift in pretty unexpected directions and if the orthography is left behind it ends up just seeming random
btw i like ur username and im happy i knew enough greek to understand it
So.... Ghot?
@@AnnXYZ666 pretty much.
So facinating! I loved the new way to spell Fish!
As a Polish person I already had to learn all of this (and some more) just to speak my own language. It's funny to hear English native speakers e surprised by linguistics.
Zapytaj Polaka z ulicy czy też się tego uczył. Podpowiem: nie xd
you didn't require that, you already could speak your native language before you learned basic linguistics at school
But… these things exist in English?
They don't like it, linguistics is more of a psychology of language than understanding your language. I don't even need to take that course. That doesn't make it proper rather a Cognitive formation of a language ! A limitation. Asserting how you should use language ? Because your mind is expecting this formula? Well I had to learn French to bypass this formula into cognitive apprehension of arbitrary writings. Then I had to recredit it to remember to read it.
When I see 'Ancient Chinese Red Dragon', I'd say 'Ancient' describes 'Chinese', which is why it sounds right; 'Ancient Chinese' as a whole is an adjective.
In that case, ancient would be an adverb, so the order of adjectives rule would not apply to it.
@@artugert til that "chinese" is a verb
@@JoshuaTsukayama-cz9hy Then that would make "ancient" a noun, and the proper form of the verb would be "Chineses" (with an extra S), since it's in the third person. Not sure would that would mean, though.
@@JoshuaTsukayama-cz9hy an adverb is a word that describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb.
No, German doesn't have any quirks and isn't weird at all. Shut it, Mark Twain, I cannot hear you .
In German, all definite articles (der/die/das/des/dem/den) can be used as pronouns. All except the 2nd and 3rd case plural ones, which, instead of being "der" / "den", are "deren" / "denen"
@Nikola_M that's not a quirk, sis is art!
Den Anweisungen des Personals ist unbedingt Folge zu leisten.
Our beautiful language is constantly evolving, we even got rid of the famous "RkReÜAÜG".
That was the "Gesetz zur Übertragung der Aufgaben für die Überwachung der Rinderkennzeichnung und Rindfleischetikettierung", in short "Rinderkennzeichnungs- und Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz".
For ze non-Deutsch-schpeaking: "Law on the transfer of tasks for the monitoring of bovine identification and beef labelling".
Now that was art at its finest!
@Nikola_M kinda expected cus definite articles come from these pronouns, like with the word for "one" being identical to the indefinite article
this was unnecessarily funny. great video :P
Man it is really crazy you use that "be sure to like and subscribe" example. I've always had this scenario I play out in my head for giggles where some future civilization finds archived UA-cam videos, and when they come across that phrase they don't understand it because they don't have the internet. So they take it as some kind of religious mantra
i like how the speech bubbles cast shadows as if they were physical objects
Are speech bubbles parachutes. These days the more the better
8:56 A BAGGLE???
I need to know where he is from now. My fiancée pronounces it the same way and she is from Minnesota, but all her family pronounces it either as bagel or as “beggle”. I’ve never heard anyone else but her say “baggle” until today.
There's a whole running gag on the show Community about Britta pronouncing it like that 😂😂
Et tu, Brute? 😂 (Baggle)
I really liked this video. Subscribed!
You won't see me later?! Why would anyone lie, on the internet of all things?!
I feel like the idea is that the person only exists on the screen you watch a recording of their past self with. So when you watch a later video by that person, they are literally seeing you later. The person is looking at you and everything
It's also that they're ending a conversation with what's supposed to be you, from their perspective. So if they finish recording for the video and do something different, they are literally stopping looking at what they're talking to and going to do it later when it's time to record again
Great introduction to linguistics! I just wanna add that the 'layers' that come after semantics are actually all "part of semantics", in a way that you can study how meaning works through sounds and morphemes. That also happens with other linguistics areas, such as historical linguistics, which is a "deeper layer" that also contais semantics and pragmatics in it (just like semantics and pragmatics with syntax, phonology etc).
I love this kind of visuals with minecraft while talking seriously
Absolutely bangers video!!! Please don't stop making these kind of video!!
Came because Minecraft thumbnail and cool title, stayed for Minecraft and interesting explanation of language!
i think this is the first time my wife and nine year old son have thoroughly enjoyed a video on language with me. thank you!
Legen-waitforit-dary
This is a perfect video for me. I’m currently working on a goofy text to speech program and I’m using IPA for it. It’s for games I make in the future, the characters will be able to say anything at all, including the player’s made up name. I really like the concept of adding adjective order to it somehow but it’s not for generating new sentences. Maybe in the future though
Interesting that you would consider a “red dragon” to be a particular type of dragon, rather than just a particular color. Actually a “Chinese dragon” is one particular species of dragon, which is completely different from Western dragons.
and chinese red could be a kind of red
You can't really say it's a species when it's a type of supernatural being that controls weather
@ why not?
@@MastaBaitaAmbatukamwhat else would you call it? its completely different from european dragons
@@danielsmokesmidsa god
It seems to be a strangely common assumption that the semantics of a word derives from its definition, as if we all have definitions which we recall when using a word to make sure we are using it correctly. An alternative view which seems much more plausible to avoid unnecessary complexity and counterexamples is to view the use of a word like the use of a tool. I don’t use a screw driver according to a defined use, I can use it however I want depending on what response I get. For instance, I may use a screw driver as a weapon. So words are just given depending on the expected response, not according to a preset definition. This is somewhat later Wittgenstein’s view for anyone interested.
You forgot about phonotactics. For me that's where it gets real interesting. How languages decide what sound combinations "make sense" or not. It's basically what gives languages their personalities lol
My favorite demonstration of pragmatics has to do with Gricean maxims. Take for example the following conversation:
Wife: “Did you vacuum and do the dishes?”
Husband: “I did the dishes.”
Did the husband vacuum? I’ll bet you know the answer even though the husband didn’t say anything about vacuuming. How did you know?
Great, im watching this while abroad on a job, juggling between my native Polish, local German and universal English translating for my team, and boy, do I appreciate when somebody makes an effort to be undestood
1:20 thats the thing that i see english speaking pople tend to forget when speaking about languages. Like yes a word in Polish can have 30 diffrent versions but it isnt like we were taught that or think about it. Its just pattern reckognition.
3:03 UA-cam highlighted your subscribe button when you said that, lol
Estoy estudiando todo esto que explicaste y, la verdad, trataste contenido de una alta carga cognitiva de una manera muy sencilla y de fácil aprehensión.
¡Me encantó el video!
Apparently I did know how language works, but it’s nice how everything is explained concisely here.
9:39 I think you just blew my mind with that one - I knew the English language had its quirks, especially since it's my second language and the alphabet isn't specifically made for it, but my God, the fact that Ghoti is like Fish is so unbelievable to me.
If you asked someone to read "ghoti" they would probably say "goatee" since pronouncing "ghoti" as "fish" breaks English spelling rules. However, you _could_ write it as "pfysche" and it would still have the same pronunciation!
@@katakana1 it's one of my major linguistic pet peeves cause there's so many actual different ways you could make the same point and be RIGHT but that's the one that somehow everyone repeats ad nauseam
Phoutheathoughe spells potato also with similar logic
that's the thing, it isn't actually true. is only /f/ at the end of a syllable, and is only /ʃ/ in .
@@raposaarvorelua4099 and usually "tion" is at the end of a word, right? just a random question I've got while watching
As a dyslexic stuff like this essentially cause me to rage quit learning how to read and write and accept my dependence on screen readers and speech to text software.
I have a fun story about semantics in meaning!
In a math class we had a basic lesson on set theory, the math of categorizing things. As an example we were given a list of 8 ice cream flavours and told to sort them into "fruit" and "not fruit." Chocolate, Vanilla and Cookie's&Cream are easily classed as not fruit. Strawberry and banana are obviously fruit.
The issue is one of them was Coconut...
I put it in "fruit" but most of my classmates and in fact the teacher counted it as "not fruit." I objected to that and effectively hijacked the rest of the class with an argument about what a fruit is and coming up with weird counter examples to any new definition that anyone came up with. Ultimately concluding that marshmallows are a fruit derived product.
This is kind of just a list of weird things that everybody who studies linguistics already knows without any thesis
Infixes are very common in Austronesian (Pacific Islander) languages. Adding infixes of -un-, -in-, or -um-, to name a few, can drastically change up word meanings. Also, reduplication is used to emphasize things or show that some action is still ongoing, so combined, you get words that often don't even resemble their roots. Like the Hawaiian state fish the Humuhumunukunukuapua'a.
really nice video, a lot of useful information explained with a well-structured format, i really enjoyed it
I'm a linguist. I've been studying languages for over 25 years, and I clicked on this video so I could tell you you're wrong. But I did learn a few things, and for that, you have my respect. Good job turning "rage bait" into useful info. I would comment more, but I, too, enjoy a good Wikipedia rabbit hole. And I must now look further into the etymology of "component" and not just because it has my secret code word "put" as its main word. Cheers, mates!
You just praised clickbait. Enjoy when you get more of it 👍
@@venga3 I did call it rage bait for a reason. I can take it, and I can dish it out.
Really cool to see the adjective list laid out, I did not know
6:19 you can’t say that, but i think you could reasonably say "young tall german man" instead of "tall young german man" and it still sounds fine
I think that sounds wired. All these things are highly regional.
1:10 I think Samuel L Jackson taught us all how cuss grammatically and poetically correct. 😂
This is a good iceberg format.
6:30 I was going to write up an entire comment here about compound words and runescape/D&D, but figured I'd watch a little more before I made a fool of myself and I'm glad I did. Fun direct example: "Ancient Chinese Bearded Dragon" (and now it's not even a dragon!)
English was my second language that I had to learn in school as a child. I always feel like I was forced to memorize a bunch of rules that even the textbook itself doesn’t follow. I was disgusted by its inconsistency and always hated to learn it. This videos explains a lot for me. Being able to understand videos like this was the only motivation for me to learn English in the first place.
I think language is anything that happens between any point in time, from point a to point b. Body language is like one of the most fundamental languages most people can interpret subconsciously. You can tell if people are in pain or confused or angry, or sad, or anxious just by how they present themselves in the moment.
There is classical conditioning, then there is operant conditioning
And then there is pretending or acting. That's how a narcissist or sociopath tricks you. Oh, their body language is sooooo meaningful and deep. No, it's not.
But I do like considering your idea. Anything that happens between point A and point B? Anything? Ooh, I'm gonna go all linguist turned philosopher here and start talking about determinism or something....
Underrated video quality, subscribed
Well explained!! Love the minecraft
Pragmatics... you casually just told me how to hold natural conversations... and I'm amazed by how it doesn't make any sense
@3:04 now I’ma always be like “bye mom, be sure to like and subscribe”
You might be my new favorite UA-camr…
Ngl this is how I wanna be when I grow up
I like that I saw the thumbnail and, as a fellow nerd, was instantly hooked. Though I didn't expect you to actually mention D&D or even be nerdy yourself. Kind of reminds me of the youtuber Gneiss Name, who uses minecraft in his explanation of different geological subjects - I hope you'll make more videos in the future
I want more of these visual language classes
As someone who comes from Romania. Where in our language there are barely any fancy pronunciations. When I first learned english it confused me so much. I will never forget how you can write the word: Tony as Ptoughneigh and it's still gonna be pronounced the same
As fun as it is to find weird technicalities about alternate spellings, it really doesn't work that way. Yes, some people named Ashley have it spelled as Ashleigh, and that has history behind it. But history is exactly why you wouldn't spell "fish" like "ghoti." Modern English is only a few hundred years old but there was Middle English and Old English going back a thousand years, and a whole group of languages before that which combined together.
Several sounds from Old English stopped being used in Middle English and Modern English. In Old English, some words ended with a sound kind of like a cough, which was written with a 'gh.' Over time, people changed how they said those words. Sometimes it became a /f/ sound like in "tough" and sometimes it became a /h/ sound or silent like "through."
There are also a lot of words borrowed from Greek, which had sound combinations like /pt/ and /ps/ that don't show up in English. So we write "pterodactyl" and "psychology" with an initial 'p' like Greeks would, but we don't pronounce the /p/.
"Tony" actually has gone through a spelling change from Greek. Most English speakers pronounce "Anthony" with a soft /th/ sound, but Greek had a lot of words with "breathy" T's. So "Anthony" was pronounced like "Antony," and eventually people started spelling "Antony" without the 'h' to avoid confusion. And then it got shortened to "Tony."
And vowels have so many different pronunciations which can vary between dialects, like what was mentioned in the video.
As someone who learned English practically at the same time as Spanish I can tell you that while the English writing system may seem flawed, it is easier than Spanish's. English may have weird phonetics but Spanish required me to learn the accent in literally every word, for example if you emphasize the "dis" in "disparo", you refer to a noun, but if you emphasize the "ro", it is a verb. For this sake the verb version uses what is known as a tilde, becoming "disparó". Of course, adding the tilde means there's no confussion when writing it, but when you have to take this into consideration for every single verb and their adjective/noun/verb/etc variants it becomes very headache inducing.
In comparison, for English what I just said is "shot" for both versions, it can be both the verb and the noun, but this is, personally, better. Why? Because words are rarely said by themselves but rather said in sentences which add context. Said context should be enough to understand which version is it, "I heard a shot" and "He shot me" are different, and it's the same for Spanish, "Oí un disparo" and "Él me disparó", yet tildes are a rather unnecessary thing only there for the sake of semantics, which makes the language much harder to write.
Interesting, I think it’s like when you say, 'Can you pass the salt?' - it’s really a request, not just a question.
The adjective order was difficult for me to get when I was learning english in highshool. In polish we can swap most of the words in a sentence around, and the meaning stays the same. It may sound more archaic, but the meaning is preserved.
Great video to explain these fundamental concepts!
As someone taking an AP language and composition class, I definitely do know how language works
I didn't know about the adjective order in English. In Spanish, we have a lot more freedom with adjectives. For example, we could say "Ancient Dragon Chinese Red," and it would feel the same as "Chinese Dragon Ancient Red" (although it might sound odd). This opens up a whole topic about how different authors use adjective order with different meanings.
Autism Vs Phatic.
😭
I need more Minecraft linguistics content please
That is the most amazing thing about languages... They are like collective softwares we run and yet we are still finding and making new rules to be then aware of.
I actually geniuenly knew this already but it's nice to see someone talk about it, finally
Iceberg❌Minecraft Chunck✅
As for the phatic phrases there are many examples (pretty much in every modern language) of how phrases that were used centuries ago became phatic. For instance, goodbye used to be "God be with ye", Russian спасибо (thank you) literally means "May God save you" and quite a common greeting in some Slavic languages such as Russian(здравствуйте/zdravstvuyte), Serbo-Croatian(zdravo) and Czech(zdravím) has an approximate litreal meaing of "I wsih you healh".
As for the mentioned "what's up?", Polish has an exact equivalent "siema" which is a short for "jak się masz?", meaning "how are you?"
Ah, you have missed ETYMOLOGY.
It's an important feature of any language, but especially so in English where we have an unusually large vocabulary drawn from many parent languages. That means we often have a very rich choice among several words which superficially mean more or less the same thing but which carry useful or playful associations beyond the literal meaning.
And that in turn means drawing not only on the "front" meaning of a word - as if we were picking at random from a list of synonyms - but also its more subtle metaphoric associations with the cognate from its parent language, what that originally meant, and even how it may have changed through intermediate forms over time.
Even loosely, if I use "syllabus" in a sentence, I'm more apt to choose other words like "forum" or "seminar" with a Latin cognate - rather than, say, "meeting" or "classroom" - because I'm thereby entering into a way of thinking, setting a tone, giving local color to my story.
When I'm using English really sharply, I might want to compare an option that I favor with one I don't by choosing to call one "splendid" and the other "sordid" not merely because these both have Latin cognates but even more because those cognates (respectively: shining, dirty) produce such a delightfully clear visual contrast. And it doesn't hurt for emphasis that they have the same suffixes. The use of this kind of symmetry, when you can get it, allows listeners to feel confident that they're tracking the deeper meaning.
Or I might prefer to contrast "splendid" with "wretched" even though the latter doesn't come from Latin at all, but from West Germanic. But both words came into popular use in English literature at about the same time - you can almost hear the English accent - and if I'm trying for a histrionic rather than visual effect, this may be just the thing.
In short, I think that a decent grasp of etymology does wonders for bringing a language to life. And English, all of its mongrel peculiarities notwithstanding, is one of the very best for the purpose.
I actually did know about infixes because of the book The know It All but I think part of the reason for the locations not working is because an absolutely AB and ly are prefixes and suffixes so if it were directly next to them it would also be a prefix or a suffix
9:08 I before E, except after C always makes me laugh when there are hundreds of words that break the rule and iirc less than a hundred that follow it
My stupid ass clicked this video thinking it's about programming languages 😭
...it's not?
Bro same😂
@@Ratstail91it is, but without the maths.
Same, but stayed interested 😀
the thumbnail literally says "phonetics" tho 🤣
"Ghoti" cannot spell fish, english has syntactic rules for when certain letters can and cannot represent certain sounds. It's the same as the example of saying "Cartoon red giant dog" you instinctively know it's wrong because of obscure rules behind the enlish langue most people don't know about, yet follow anyways.
Right - it’s that each of the individual phonemes of fish can, in other contexts, be represented by gh, o, and ti.
‘Ghoti’ spelling fish is just a classical example of how English spelling is unintuitive. There’s a whole Wikipedia article on it and it dates back to a poet in the 1850s I believe
@@FractalPhilosophyit's because we use lame latin letters instead of chad runes
@@CloutmasterPhluphyy ᛥᚺᚣᛠ
Latin words in Latin do not change the sounds. It's an English problem. Probably would have been the same if it used runes.
With all respect from a spanish native speaker, the english scripture is a shit and don't have any fucking sense, the Spanish have problems like "hierro" "pingüino" "guerra" "gil" but the English is just a lot
There's two spaces in the description between „the“ and „hidden“.
Do you have opinions on the letter system of the German language? Most words do follow rules but you have to look at the letters around a given letter to understand its exact meaning.
German also has that grammar infixes as „zu“ but it’s not for adjectives and more for verbs which can be equivalent to the gerund.
i was waiting for the be sure to like and subscribe , and wheezed out when you said out
How does OP know what I do and don't understand?
I found this video very interesting, and it is presented in a very entertaining manner!
Great breakdown!
Language teacher here,
I always tell my students that learning a language is like getting a horse to drink some water. When you relax and look away, the horse will naturally gravitate to the water. But if you're constantly looking at the horse, waiting for it, pulling it, etc. Then the horse will dig in and avoid taking a sip of water.
A language naturally grows on the user when the user is relaxed. Up to the point where others will say "You're really fluent, congrats.'