Don't forget to watch the three part video called "Verner's Law", if you would like a hilarious, yet educational take on this fascinating topic and our deep mutual linguistic roots 😉 Hav en god dag [daygh], min frænd(e) 😊
Tho it pains me to say it modern latvian is different than the lavian of our folksongs. (I actually speak something closer to the older kind, when I say modern I mean the language of the capitol not my own very conservative dialect.) modern - old - written english akmens - akmenis - stone mēness - mēnesis - moon akmens - akmeņa - [on] stone halāts - rīta svārki - (I dont know) armija - pulks - army (By the gods! I just realized pulks is a cognate of folk! Pulks in its base meaning means many, does that mean folk also used to mean many? An army is made up of many men, a nation is made up of many people...) un - i - and bēbis - zīdainis - baby kara rati - kariete - chariot kariete - kungu rati - coach dēliņi - bāliņi - sons [deminutive] suns - sunis - dog Also folksongs have much grater variation since they where composed when people couldnt easily comunicate over long distrances and coulnt read or write so dialects where much more pronounced for example the song I just sifted trough for differences from modern capitol language uses the phraze "zobens grieza baltu smilti" which is incorrect according to the literary language as it should be "zobens grieza baltas smiltis" and here the literary language saying smiltis is always plural is more conservative where as my grandfather usually says smilts singular, but there is also a chance this isnt a dialect thing and the conjugation eludes to the fact that it is flesh not sand that is being cut by the sword. Anyways most of the language is still identical even in the capitol I just picked out differences for you.
In Modern Persian (An Iranian language): Pedar - Father Mâdar - Mother Dokhtar - Daughter Barâdar - Brother Bad - Bad Na - No Now - New Band - Band Berenj - Bronze Kimia - Chemistry Dandân - Tooth (Dental) Pardis - Paradise Dar - Door Abroo - Eyebrow Famil - Family Gerân - Great Gorouh - Group Narang - Orange ... and many more
You forget khuda, which is cognate with 'god'. Geran would rather be cognate with 'grand'? Band (music band) might rather be a modern import from English? (unless you mean band as in wristband, like Persian 'band' = closed).
@@hectorserna7950'daant' is tooth in Hindi (India) 'narinja' is orange in Telugu (India) True that similar sounds mean something in more than one language.
I'm not sure how youtube recommended this channel, but it's one of the best channels I've seen. I chose science over linguistics for a career path, but have never lost my fascination with languages. I love your matter of fact explanations and the many references provided. I just got your audible books of The Poetic Edda and the Saga of the Volsungs and am happily listening to them.
There's an interesting exception to what you were talking about with "mama" being the word for "mother" in so many languages. In Georgian "მამა" (mama) is father and "დედა" (deda) is mother.
The Indo-European language family and by extension the Germanic and/or Celtic language families are often talked about in relation to people's ancestry and although languages carry cultural heritage, it's interesting that you separate language from genetic ancestry. I feel like a lot of people often mix up these two. So thanks for sharing!
genetic lineage is highly superfluous, especially in the modern era with heavy immigration and globalization. language is determined by the environment and culture one grows up in, not genetic origin.
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST hi, while I agree that languages are dependant on your environment and can change rapidly for groups of people, I don't agree on genetics being superfluous because of modern migration. I'm from the north of Belgium and most of my ancestors that I can trace back have been born in the same river valley for at least the past five to ten generations and the majority of the people here have that kind of ancestry. It's not that we don't want to intermarry with different people, but it just rarely happens, even today. So our genetic ancestry is very much its own subgroup, but the differences with other people from Europe and from around the world are very subtle and in that sense superfluous. The point about language still stands though 😉👍
Hungarians are pretty much genetically identical to other Europeans. Their culture has pretty much nothing to do at all with the culture of Uralic people. Of course there's similarities and influences but their culture is closer to German's than to other Uralic people from Siberia. It's ironic how Germanic people tried for centuries to revive the Roman empire, despite not even being descended from them. Germanic invaders conquered lots of roman provinces and named themselves kings and queens and started dinasties, but they all adopted the local variety of latin as their language and all adopted their Roman culture instead of trying to germanise places like Spain, France and Italy. Originally the people speaking Romanian in current day Romania were, as the name implies, descended from roman legionaries, but as the Slavs moved into those lands from the north they all adopted the latin language, which is why Romanians all look like any other Slavs, yet they speak a romance language, but their romance language is said to sound pretty much like a russian trying to speak a romance language. In fact I'm a native Romanian speaked, and a LOT of times I was walking down the street when I heard people having a conversation in what I assumed was Romanian, yet I was dumbfounded to find out that I didn't know a word of what they were talking, only for them to actually be Bulgarians, or Serbians. In fact all languages in the Balkan region exhibit a weird common characteristic, that being that regardless of whether they are a romance or a Slavic language, they all share a lot of common characteristics in their grammar. Which means that they have different words that sound nothing like each other, that are NOT cognates but they use their words in the same order and in the same way, and in a way that's different from any other Slavic or romance language. Like Slavic languages from the Balkan region, and Romanian, share grammar with each other, that they don't share with Russian or French or Spanish or Polish, which has lead many to believe that when Romans and Slavs moved into the area, they assimilated the people that were living there previously into their respective languages, but when those people learned latin/Slavic they learned it by mixing it with their own native grammar which sounded more natural to them, essentially forming a pigeon language. That means that the languages in the Balkan all share a common origin for their grammar but not for their words. All of this goes to tell you that this is a whole lot more complicated than genetics and language. Two related languages can be spoken by people.very genetically different from each other. Like Spanish spoken in the Philippines and on south America. Two languages can share a common "ancestor" language in their vocabulary but not in their grammar, or share common grammar but not vocabulary. When a language group moves to a new land, they don't genetically replace the other language, because the people that were already there, with their own genetic makeup can just adopt the language and culture if they like. Or the opposite can happen, where a new genetical group can move to a new area and since they're immigrants they can adopt their language and culture, maybe twist the language and culture a bit by mixing it with their own language. And like this, a whole lot of other things could happen. I love this.
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST what a load of nonsense you wrote. by ''modern migration'' you mean managed replacement of Whites in the lands of their ancestors?
The amount of facts we can find out about the native speakers of Proto-Indo-European language just from words present in it is mind blowing! Thank you for the video.
This brings me back 30 years ago to my favorite subjects (History of the English Language, Univ of Seville, Spain; and Historical Linguistics, Indiana Univ, Bloomington). I'm an ABD (due to horrible family illnesses, and me being the caretaker) in English Philology. I completed all my courses, worked on my dissertation, but couldn't finish it. My dad's very premature Alzheimers took care of achieving my dream. So I specialized in English Linguistics, nd teaching English as a foreign language is my job in lovely Seville, Spain. However, I was really into Old English and its literature, so when I heard you talk about the P and the F, I immediately knew you were going to talk about Grimm's Law. Such good times!!! But unless you've got a Ph.D, forget about teaching historical stuff outside the University...
Obviously, credentials are important for academic and professional reasons, but you still "know what you know". Anyway, we should all attempt to keep expanding our knowledge and understanding throughout our lives. This channel provides such an opportunity.
Came here to say this - the mistakes make sense if you're coming mostly from familiarity with the Greek alphabet. I would transcribe it хамингбзрд to get the Cyrillic version even closer to pronunciation, though I guess it depends on your dialect of English.
Well if or when you get your PhD. Try not to fall into this guys absolutes. Knowledge grows and he states things as fact at a very high frequency. He may be right, but it’s not very scholarly, if I can use that word in that way, to state things as he does without support as often as he does.
I personally love your "sunburst" model; it manages to capture important distinctions between varieties while also showing how much the dialects influence each other in a family where the "tree" model breaks down.
Thank you, Professor Crawford! Many people, myself in the lead, have long been confused about the incredible distances in time, and proximity of relationships, between the various branches of Indo-European languages. To our good luck, you manage to give us an overview that, by nature, has to be sweeping, but that you also make engaging. Then you clarify and add color to the mist of that very large picture with discursive detail. I love this mode of learning! The relevant facts and connections stick with me more than with any other approach. So thank you, very sincerely. This video also left me wishing you might pair up sometime with an anthropologist from a mesolithic perspective, so we might follow other markers of advancement, as anatomically modern peoples emerged into a post-glacial but pre-settled world. Their diets, clothing, migration, ungulate domestication, pottery, patterns of engagement (ill-advised hand signals, hey-there winks?), etc-all these phenomena must have been permitted by-perhaps even helped propel-the evolution of language. I’m hoping to flesh out what I call our Mirumbilon-the world when wonder was the primary vehicle of efflorescence for human cerebration. Much as iron drives populations of marine plankton and nitrogen generates vigor in terrestrial flora, I’m intrigued by the idea that our impulse of wonder is a truly somatic, phenotypically evolved and alarmingly potent agent of cognitive/behavioral bootstrapping, the gear-train of sentience & volition that in our wee hours potentiated what we now (very generously) call civilization.
I really really love and enjoy learning about this! literally I sit here excited like a little kid learning something new and amazing :D Especially the part when you explain how you can deduce from the existence of words for "snow", "beaver" and so on that the language must have been spoken more in the north and not too far south, or how you can show from the lack of a word for "writing" that there was no writing. That is so unspoeakably fascinating to me ^-^ Kinda reminds me of how in archaeology you can tell a lot about the age of findings just by comparative stratification with other dating evidence. Or also how you can tell the comparative age of walls (or similar) by looking at joints and intersections. I love it! Thank you so much :)
The whole f and p correspondence that he used as an example coincidentally characterizes all loanwords that transfered from Persian to Georgian. Fantastic discussion in this video, big thanks
The relationships between languages has always been fascinating to me. You do a great job explaining these relationships and make for an interesting teacher. Glad yt recommended your channel.
'How do you make a cat go "Woof"? Pour petrol over it and light it'. A bad playground joke - which do not change over generations, hence in the UK if we tire of playing chase games we say "Pax" and cross our fingers - it's Latin for 'peace', and our fingers simulate The Cross. Holy cow (if I can say that) :)
I love that at 20:00 the diagram kind of reads like the west germanic languages actually descended from a "west norwegian". that would be a super interesting migration
@@mrjones2721 yeah he's pretty high up there. well he's in Fort Collins, so pretty far north, but they had a random cold front blow through and it dumped snow on them. It worked out though, because it suppressed that Cameron peak fire a bit.
On the other side of the world in rural Victoria, Australia we were just getting into warmer spring weather and now we have a snow storm that has turned the hills white again. Winter is not quite finished here.
You know, for a few years now I've seen people say things like "oh yeah, dr crawford, a very good educator, great content, also god he's so cool" but I never actually happened to watch any of your videos. Having had this randomly recommended to me by youtube I would just like to say: wow what a good video, very educational. Also god you're so cool (some pun intended)
Not only is the topic fascinating, and the presentation and subsequent discussion at a satisfying intellectual level, but the presenter (Professor Crawford) is a hoot!! Kudos
Great intro into historical linguistics and the Indo-European languages! I have to give you extra credit for knowing all the languages of the IE family and the differences between them from half the world away - USA (I'm in SE Europe, native speaker of Serbo-Croatian). Also, great explainer at the end that genes and languages are different things. And finally, as a history (and language) buff, I love how you put it very simply: "the past is as complex as the present and the future". I envy you for being payed to do what I love. Keep it up!
There is no Serbo-Croatian language. They are two languages, similar, but different. Serbian and Croatian. Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian) is the product of Yugoslavian policy to form Yugoslav nation and it was a failure. The great and tragic failure.
I find it very appropriate that an expert on ancient Germanic languages happens to speak a particular dialect of American English in which the wine-whine merger has not occurred. Thus, when speaking Old English, Jackson would pronounce the very first word in Beowulf, “hwaet”, much the same way as he pronounces its modern English cognate, “what” in his own native dialect. Certainly the two are much closer than they are in my (Western Australian) case, where not only has the wine-whine merger occurred, but the “a” has drifted even further backwards from its original “ae” pronunciation than it has in American English.
Like Stewie saying “Cool HWhip?” JC does have a wonderful accent, voice, and vocabulary. I’ve spent hours with him on The Great Courses on Audible. His most interesting accent is how he pronounces “…ing” without the “g.” Walkin, talkin, pronouncin, etc. He has such a magisterial and sonorous voice yet his western American upbringing still peeks through in an endearing way. Yet I mainly appreciate his deep expertise, something lacking on these channels and in today’s universities. The latter is, I’m quite sure, the reason he left the university and took up this position where he’s free to be excellent, unencumbered by plotting, tenured mediocrities.
Very interesting. Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx are 'Q' Celtic languages because of the sound at the beginning of some words, e.g. Ceann (Irish for 'head') whereas Welsh, Cornish and Breton are 'P' Celtic languages, e.g. Pen (Welsh for 'head').
It's so easy to forget when talking about this subject the incredible number of generations of people and long distances between these different splits. Incomprehensible
20:53 "Harja" is the Finnish word for comb. It was probably something similar in the north germanic languages but over the years it has shortened down to just Hår. This is actually a common occurrence with germanic words in Finnish, Finnish is a very conservative language. Consider the word for "King" in Finnish, "Kuningas", in Swedish it is now "Kung". It was probably something like "Koningaz" in Proto-Germanic.
Tocharian is very important. Before its discovery, i.e. languages were split in the middle in two groups, "kentum" languages and "satem" languages (kentum, written centum is the word for "hundred" in latin and satem the corrisponding word in sanskrit). Some languages (like the indo-iranian) had [s] where the others (like latin, greek and germanic taking into account grimm's law) had [k], but it was not understood which of the two was the original. Tocharian languages, even though they are more eastward than indo-iranian, are kentum languages. Since tocharian speakers and proto-italic or greek speakers were unlikely to have come up with the same innovation at that distance, it is safe to assume [k] is the original realization and [s] an innovation.
Theres a lot of reasons why this can be refuted. It is likeleh the palatovelars were Palatl plosives, or at leasted palatalized velar stops. Secondly we can see different languages shift back(velar) and forward(palatl or postalveolar affricates) throughout history. Finally the most conservative languages Sanskrit Avestan and Lithuanian are all Satem. And /ķ/> [s] only occured in Persian, in Sanskrit it became /ś/, and in PIE /ķ/ was likley [c]
I don't understand the Old West thing this brilliant person is laying down, but I will say he is right on with the material, and that he is a gifted lecturer. If you look, you can find a Proto Indo-European vocabulary in the back or front of some dictionaries.
Regarding the table Grimm's Law, 'heart': It's quite amazing how close PIE ḱḗr is to French cœr. It's almost as if thousands of years haven't happened.
Can we talk about "six"? Like, hello? The word is written the same in English and French, and it's pronounced almost the same, despite the fact the word doesn't come from borrowing? Even crazier in Quebec French, because the "i" in this word is pronounced pretty much like in English. (also, cœur*, you missed a "u")
As a Finnish linguist, I do not think that Proto Indo-European and Proto-Uralic are relatedbasic the basics of grammar and how the language system works are utterly distinct. I find more linguist connections between Finnish with Turkic and Coreo-Japonic languages than with Indo-European ones.
When I went to Afghanistan, I studied Dari. I found that about 10 or 15% of the ordinary, daily use vocabulary was different from the same words in Farsi. So I wonder if linguists consider Dari a difference language from Farsi, or a dialect of Farsi.
Can you make your previous Q and As public with simply a note that they’re not the most up to date? A lot of them had good information to reference that is not outdated. Love the videos 👍
There’s a lot of similarity between Sanskrit and Russian... like Nabaha in Sanskrit is Nebo in Russian, Chushk is same for cup in both the languages, and words like Devan(kinda sofa with no arms and back board), Dvar/Dver, Dham/Dom, Agni(fire)/ Agon... have same meanings... and so on.
Hey there :D I have a great example for you from a Ugric language, it was fun Im Finnish and I was working as a student in Hungary and I saw many similarities: Hungarian: Finnish: English: Morsza Murusia Crumbs (as in Breadcrumbs hűtőkamra Hyytävä kamari Freezing cabinet Víz Vesi Water Méz Mesi Honey Szarv Sarvi Horn the word refrigerator literally meant a Freeze cabinet, thats normally called a 'jääkaappi' but there are many more :D
Doesn't English also have the word 'morsel' which means small pieces (like crumbs). Is that related to Morzsa/Murusia?
4 года назад
@@oilslick7010 In Hungarian it comes from the verb morzsol which means to grind something with your palms, and in the end it just a form of morzsalék morzsolék that means crumbs, shreddings. The verb itself might have originated form the verb mar (bite) mimicking the verb forms dörzsöl (rub) and horzsol (bruise) . The Hungarian verb mar might me related to vogul verb mor- (breaks), Ostyak mori (cracks), finnic muru (morsel), samoyedic morei (breaks up).
4 года назад+1
Morsel comes from Old French, diminutive of mors ‘a bite’, from Latin mors- ‘bitten’, from the verb mordere
Great content Mr. Crawford! Going to follow your channel. I have one curious question: Have you ever met personally prof. Jaan Puhvel? His works are one of greatest inspiration to me (including Dumezil, Eliade etc.). with regards PhD. candidate of etnology/history Stanislav
How many hours of study do you think it took him to give us that 37 minute summary? Secondarily... The snowy background is a funny and interesting background choice!
I thought about Latvian and Estonian being completely distinct despite their near proximity last week, when I was discussing similarities between Latvian and Russian (Baltic and Slavic branch of Balto-Slavic language family). My anti-linguist Russian speaking opponent really refused to believe that there is any relation between Latvian and Russian, and if there is, it is because Latvians have assimilated Slavic vocabulary because of our near proximity. However, Baltics are quite isolated from the rest of the world in terms of its geography - this is a part of the reason why modern day Latvian and Lithuanian are well preserved and share similarities with Sanskrit. And I mean, any considerable contact with Slavic language speaking population would have started around 1710 when Russia took over modern day Latvia-Estonia. Okay, but back to the point, eventhough Latvian and Estonian are right next to each other and a Finno-ugric tribe (Livonians) used to live in modern day Latvian territory, Estonian and Latvian or Lithuanian are completely distinct. For the past 800 years Latvia and Lithuania have gone quite different paths historically. But despite that, I can still recognize certain roots in Lithuanian. However, Estonian, with which we have shared a large part of the territory and been in the same entity (Livonia=parts of modern day Latvia+Estonia) for centruries, we have very, very little vocabulary in common. For comparison, I'd like to present counting in Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian: Latvian: viens 1, divi 2, trīs 3, četri 4, pieci 5, seši 6, septiņi 7, astoņi 8, deviņi 9, desmit 10 Lithuanian: vienas 1 , du 2, trys 3, keturi 4, penki 5, šeši 6, septyni 7, aštuoni 8, devyni 9, dešimt 10 Estonian: üks [1], kaks [2], kolm [3], neli [4], viis [5], kuus [6], seitse [7], kaheksa [8], üheksa [9], and kümme [10] Spanish: uno (ooh-no), dos (dohs), tres (trays), cuatro (kwah-troh), cinco (seen-koh), seis (says), siete (syay-tay), ocho (oh-choh), nueve (nway-vay), diez (dyays) English: 1 one, 2 two, 3 three, 4 four, 5 five, 6 six, 7 seven, 8 eight, 9 nine, 10 ten. As you see, it is quite evident that all of the languages presented above share similarities but Estonian. This is truly striking. Anyways, let all the languages be preserved and cultural diversity to be cherished!
Despite Latvian and Estonian being from different lang families, Latvian has clearly been influenced by Uralic. In that sense, they definitely are neighbors. The same thing can be said about other so-called unrelated languages. Clearly more is going on than the typical family tree concept.
A few years ago, NASA announced that they are using the ancient Serbian calendar because it is the most accurate, that it is completely harmonized with nature, that the beginning of the seasons according to that calendar coincides with the electromagnetic changes of the Sun, lake water is changing ph level to acidic or alkaline on exact date.
@@Shakazaramesh On April 4, 2024. Serbs celebrate the year 7532. A few years ago, NASA announced that they are using the ancient Serbian calendar because it is the most accurate, that it is completely harmonized with nature, that the beginning of the seasons according to that calendar coincides with the electromagnetic changes of the Sun, lake water is changing ph level to acidic or alkaline on exact date. The Serbian national calendar was the official calendar of the medieval Serbian states from 1119, when Saint Sava introduced it into the church codex, until the middle of the 19th century. Charters, laws, decisions, obligations were written according to him. Many monuments and monasteries are dated according to the Serbian calendar. According to this calendar, the Battle of Kosovo took place in 6897, and the Code of Tsar Dusan was passed in 6857. Smederevo Fortress preserves one of the rare pieces of evidence about the old Serbian calendar. The tower and the Small Town, the court of the despot Djurdj, as it is written there, were built in the summer of 6938. The oldest recorded and preserved calendars begin to count the time from the creation of the world, which is believed to have been in 5508 BC. In our area, the beginning of agricultural, Starčevo culture corresponds to that time.
17:10 Actually, the region of Dacia, inhabited by an Indo-European Thracian people, was annexed by the Roman Empire under Trajan in the 2nd century CE. The area largely corresponds to present-day Romania and Moldova. The Thracians of Dacia adopted Vulgar Latin and became Romanized, whereas Thracians in the Byzantine Empire became Hellenized. Thus, the gradual emergence of Romanian from Vulgar Latin in Dacia likely has its origins before the start of the Medieval period.
Dacia was under roman rule for much shorter than the rest of the empire. Especially Moldova is quite far out. There are (and were even more historically) peoples all over the Balkans, who speak dialects of Romanian or languages closely related to it. Some of them as far away as Greece, Montenegro and Croatia. Historically these peoples (usually called Vlachs by their neighbors) practiced seminomadic pastoralism and moved often, so it's not so inconceivable that some of them migrated east. This would also explain the strong influences of slavi c languages on Romanian, which suggest centuries of cohabitation.
Establishment of the current Romanian language from what I have read was more of a state program than a natural process, implemented by Greek Phanariotes by the rule of Ottoman Empire. There were Vlahs in the region of course, but the majority of the population spoke and wrote in Slavic. The Ottoman Sultan wanted to distance this population from Russia and the other awakening closer Slavic countries. Cheers!
@@luisromanlegionaire Romanian is based on vulgar latin spoke in northern part of Eastern Roman Empire, not a specific region like Dacia. The weight center of this language was south of Danube was more dense populated and romanised, then after slavs moved in translated to north of Danube (600-900), in the south romanians were pushed to the edges or assimilated by slavs
@@Bultras12-CA You talk nonsense. Romanian was very infuenced by slavic trough use in administration and church, but always remained latin in core. In larger vocabulary in medieval time were more slavic words used than today, but as slowly slavic was removed from administration as it was not known by lower and middle class and later (no link with ottoman empire) was relatinised by literature writtings giving priority to latin words over slavic words in larger vocabulary and later (after 1850) loans from french and italian, altough today most of loans are from english
Similarities between English and Persian Persian / English Pedar / father Tu / you Dochter / daughter Mader / mother Brader / brother Daar / dor Shamshir / sword
I favour the idea that Hittite was not descended from PIE, but that Hittite and the PIE branch have a common ancestor. The reason for this is that Hittite does not have the three genders in PIE, but an animate-inanimate distinction instead, which is unlikely that is a development from the three genders in PIE. It's rather the other way, that Hittite preserved a system which predates the PIE genders. That is, the PIE masculine was developed from a concept of animate things, and the PIE neuter comes from inanimate things. I think the PIE nominative -s was originally an agent marker, which only animate things could have. The feminine gender was a PIE innovation which Hittite did not have, and it could originally be the inanimate plural, first used as abstracts or as a way to generalise concepts, like the feminine word "opera" in Latin, meaning "work", which comes from the neuter plural of "opus" ("a piece of work").
Ehhhhh I would need some serious citations on that. The theoretical breakup time of Proto-Anatolian from PIE was 3500 BCE and Hittite is attested around 2000 years later. That's plenty of time to rework your gender system into common-neuter like modern Danish or Dutch. Additionally, PIE masculine and feminine were already animate and neuter inanimate in implication, or if PIE had a common-neuter system, for a masculine-feminine system to generate before further splitting after the Proto-Anatolian split. Proto-Anatolian also split before PIE developed thematisation as a noun and verb distinction in all other PIE languages, and you seem to be unaware of PIE declensional patterns in the -s comment. There's too much evidence Hittite is a descendant language of PIE and not a sister language if you look at Hittite's vocabulary. To the -s point: the ending for PIE thematic feminine nominative, for example, is -a, compared to athematic feminine -s. Compare Doric Greek (rendered in Latin alphabet, as I am familiar with Ancient Greek) feminine thematic noun 'woman': *guna* with feminine athematic noun 'beam': *aktis* but also masculine thematic noun 'youth': *neanias* with athematic noun 'leader' *hagemon* showing this can go both ways. Compare also Doric Greek neuters, with thematic neuter 'gift': *do'ron* but athematic neuter 'missile' *belos*
@@therat1117 The two gender system as in Danish is a straight-forward simplification, which is easy to explain, especially with the collapse of the case system as the main difference was -inn vs -in from old Norse. The neuter-masculine merge of Romance languages also came about in a similar fashion. What Hittite has makes much less sense as a development from a three gender system, since it's not really an idea of gender. It's easier to see the genders as a development from what Hittite has. That was my argument. As for the feminine -s, it could be an influence from masculine. Paradigms can spread to other classes. Like how many Norwegian dialects made masculine and feminine definite nouns more distinct, rather than identical as in Danish, by applying the -a ending of weak feminine nouns to strong feminine nouns. That said, I have no issues with classifying Hittite as essentially PIE, which seems obvious based on the vocabulary. I find it unlikely that we can reconstruct a PIE language spoken exactly like that at some point. Rather, the reconstruction would be a language that would be easily understood by the earliest PIE speakers, who would speak different, more or less mutually intelligible dialects. Some of these dialects would have preserved features which predates the typical PIE traits. The animate-inanimate distinction of Hittite might be just such a thing. If we classify Hittite as PIE, Hittite contains a hint what the ancestor of PIE was like.
@@ppn194 I know, and the change from neuter plural to singular feminine is precisely what could explain how Indo-European originally got three genders. Standard Italian mille - mila is an example that remnants of the old neuter still exists.
Pashto isn't just spoken in AFG, its also spoken in Pakistan. Actually much much more speakers in PK, and it's the 2nd largest language after Punjabi if you count native 1st language speakers.
Nice vid. The language diffusion seems to occur from Indic regions to north and northwest. Even the word Yamuna off the River Yamuna near the Black Sea area is exact copy of the River Yamuna in the north India Himalayan foothills area. This area is also continuing civilization hence the evidence would remain buried beneath the modern population for a long time.
Are there similar methods of establishing relationships among languages using grammatical structures as well as vocabulary? Specifically, are there grammatical features common to the Indo-European languages that aren't used in other families or that shift and descend in a way specific to the family?
31:48 just a quick note - hummingbird written in cyrillics would look like хаммингбёрд or something like this. your example would be pronounced as hoomingvnrd.
Well done sir! Aside from your mastery of linguistics itself, your knowledge of the context is impressive. Given how widespread the IE languages and civilizations were (and still are), the amount of ancient history you know must be a challenge - one which you rise to remarkably.
Very good material! Although at 17:10 you might be curious to find out that Romanians didn't came from South somewhere between middle-ages, they come from Dacian Getae tribes, those were their ancestors! With much love from România 🇷🇴 !! Sorry for bad English!
And at the University of Georgia, his doctoral thesis was in the conjugation of y'all. Present: y'all Future: y'all'll Conditional: y'all'd Perfect: y'all've Future perfect: y'all'll've Pluperfect Subjunctive: y'all'd've.
Romania was part of the Roman Empire from 106 to 275 CE. It was called the Province of Dacia back then and it was one of the largest and wealthiest provinces in the Roman Empire. It was rich in natural resources, the land was extremely fertile and the climate was ideal. This prompted many Romans to immigrate to Dacia en masse, bringing their language with them. When Dacia was taken over by the Goths and later Gepids, it only helped to spread Vulgar Latin further, as these rulers promoted the language and helped with its spread among the population even beyond the settlement areas of the Roman settlers. Genetic studies have revealed that Romanians in the lowlands share some of their genetic markers with people from North Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Austria and Hungary, which confirms speculations by previous historians that Roman settlers in Dacia came primarily from Gallia Cisalpina, Noricum, Pannonia and the northern Romanized parts of Illyricum. The highland Romanians are much older indigenous populations.
Before watching this video, it didn't occur to me that Proto-Indo-European might have been a real, single language spoken by an identifiable culture during a known period. AND I DID MASTER'S WORK IN ANTHROPOLOGY. Mind blown.
This is what blew my mind. The grammar of PIE is bonkers, it's got eight or nine cases and two or three genders, to say nothing of singular, dual, and plural. Who would even set up a language like that? Now, here's the part that blew my mind: PIE is only the most recent version of that language we are aware of. There were presumably forerunners to PIE (as we know it), and there's a reasonable chance that PIE (as we know it) is the result of grammatical features being grafted on through contact with speakers of other languages. That means that PIE itself has a history that explains why it has features that seem so needlessly complicated. I have to wonder what the core language behind PIE was like: was it more reasonable? I realize I'm not being objective when I describe PIE as a mess, but I'm still going to stand by it.
@@thorr18BEM Sure, fully agreed. It's just that PIE is so often talked about like the root of everything else that it's easy to forget that even PIE is a child language, with more mothers than Heimdallr.
@@kingbeauregard The morphology of PIE is actually not so complex compared to a lot of living world languages. Bantu languages often have upwards of a dozen grammatical genders, and there are languages like basque, hungarian, and various caucasian languages with 13, 15, 18 or more cases. It's important to keep in mind that morphological complexity can increase or decrease naturally over time, and that it corresponds with increases or decreases in complexity in other areas. For instance, English has much more complex rules governing syntax than Latin does, because English communicates with word order what Latin communicates with word endings. It's common to put certain ancient languages up on a pedestal and think of modern languages as 'less complex', but complexity seems to largely be a zero sum game, with some caveats that I could go into.
@@Philoglossos Agreed. Spend just a few days on an English language learning help forum and take in the awesomeness of endless, endless questions about the correct use of "the". For many learners of languages without an explicit definite article it seems to be like hocus pocus. And yet we as English speakers consider that absolutely basic. You can also be charmed by the endless questions about the word "as". "What does it mean?" Sometimes it's so obvious, it's impossible to explain. "It means 'as'."😂 When complex things need to be said, complex ways, in whatever form, have to be available. And human communication is complex.
Are you Sir a supporter of the Graeco-Armenian common linguistic origin hypothesis (maybe even a Balkan Indo-European subgroup of IE) or maybe you find it less likely?
Dr. thank you so much for the video. Great content and presentation. You just answered what I was going to ask about the Mittani - Vedic connection, thanks! Keep up the great work.
Proto-Indo-European is so interesting. Not just because of what it informs linguistically, but what it also tells us about the evolution of culture and religion.
An example of genes not going with language: the Garinagu are about 3/4 sub-Saharan African, but the Garifuna language is Arawakan with a heavy admixture of Cariban (AFAIK it is the only language which not only shows gender in the first-person singular pronoun, but has two words for "I" from two different language families).
A quick note here - the Insular Celtic languages are *not* extremely different from the Continental Celtic languages. There is an attestation gap from about 100 CE when Gaulish and Celtiberian stop being attested for the most part to 600 CE when we start seeing Old Welsh, Old Breton, and Old Irish that makes the difference exaggerated. That 500 year gap is also the difference between late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish, which would show about the same innovation changes. There is major debate on whether Brittonic languages are more related to the Gaelic languages or to Gaulish, and the truth is probably closer to the sunburst model shown for the Germanic languages than to strict descent, as attested Primitive Irish (ca. ~ 200 BCE - 400 CE) already shows extensive phonological deviations from what contemporaneous evidence of Brittonic Celtic we have. There is even some speculation that Primitive Irish is more related to Celtiberian, but that is mostly spurious. Generally most scholars consider 'Insular' and 'Continental' to be areal rather than relational groupings. Here's a good sample word for comparison, twenty (nominative singular where applicable): Proto-Celtic: *wikanti Celtiberian (~200 BCE): *uicanta Gaulish (~200 BCE): *uiconts Old Welsh (~600 CE): uceint -> Modern Welsh: ugain Old Breton (~600 CE): ucent -> Modern Breton: ugent Old Irish (~850 CE): fiche -> Irish: fiche Aside from the common Insular transition of a/o to e/ei/i by umlaut and loss of terminal syllables (which seems to have been an ongoing pan-Celtic process even in the continental languages), Old Welsh and Breton make few innovations whereas Old Irish has turned initial u -> f, likely nasalised the -nt ending completely, and aspirated the medial c -> ch. This is a somewhat extreme example, but there are very few common sound innovations between Old Welsh and Old Irish, and Old Welsh (and particularly Old Breton) are conservative in ways Old Irish is not, and vice versa. Each language family developed initial consonant mutation more or less independently, for example (although they both developed this feature). For further comparison, twentieth: Proto-Celtic: *wikantmetos Gaulish: *uicontmetos Old Welsh: *uceintved (m -> v medially is a Common Brittonic innovation) Old Irish: fichetmad (the t is restored here as it isn't part of the terminal syllable, but the n is still nasalised, and we see the common Primitive/Old Irish terminal e -> a reduction)
Consider Munster Irish vs Scottish Gaelic. They are separated from a common ancestor by at least 1500 years. They have both been largely spoken by illiterates. Yet they still have a remarkable similarity in core vocabulary and pronunciation.
A great video. You have covered the topic before, but it cannot be repeated often enough when we talk about languages from Europe. I especially like the end of the video where you emphasize that languages in most cases must not be confused with ethnicity. This is important and especially here in Europe where different groups of people live close together. Europe is a patchwork of people with different backgrounds and in a modern globalized world it is important that we do not make the differences between us greater than they actually are.
What about the Basque culture and languages, which do not appear to be Indo-European, IIRC. And why are British scholars so hostile towards conclusions based upon IE mythic/ cultural/ folkloric comparisons, which they seem to dismiss as coincidental (and this is being kind as I've seen them be much more hostile, such as Ronald Hutton).
Cowboy linguist ASMR.
... with the old fashioned soothing "wh".
@@dariuszb.9778 cowboy linguist says 'hwæt!'
@@andrewgould6689 Yeah, that old fashioned English (learnt from his grandma AFAIR) sounds really cool, doesn't it?
MrJones innit though!?!
Definitely Henglish!
I feel better knowing there are 4000 other people out there that find this information fascinating enough to watch the whole thing through.
84,000 as of the time I’m watching it
A lot more I believe, the online community of linguistics is huuuge.
Don't forget to watch the three part video called "Verner's Law", if you would like a hilarious, yet educational take on this fascinating topic and our deep mutual linguistic roots 😉
Hav en god dag [daygh], min frænd(e) 😊
Make that 180 000
200,000 as of 8/22 haha
“The past is as complex as the present or the future.”
- Jackson Crawford
Tho it pains me to say it modern latvian is different than the lavian of our folksongs.
(I actually speak something closer to the older kind, when I say modern I mean the language of the capitol not my own very conservative dialect.)
modern - old - written english
akmens - akmenis - stone
mēness - mēnesis - moon
akmens - akmeņa - [on] stone
halāts - rīta svārki - (I dont know)
armija - pulks - army
(By the gods! I just realized pulks is a cognate of folk! Pulks in its base meaning means many, does that mean folk also used to mean many? An army is made up of many men, a nation is made up of many people...)
un - i - and
bēbis - zīdainis - baby
kara rati - kariete - chariot
kariete - kungu rati - coach
dēliņi - bāliņi - sons [deminutive]
suns - sunis - dog
Also folksongs have much grater variation since they where composed when people couldnt easily comunicate over long distrances and coulnt read or write so dialects where much more pronounced for example the song I just sifted trough for differences from modern capitol language uses the phraze "zobens grieza baltu smilti" which is incorrect according to the literary language as it should be "zobens grieza baltas smiltis" and here the literary language saying smiltis is always plural is more conservative where as my grandfather usually says smilts singular, but there is also a chance this isnt a dialect thing and the conjugation eludes to the fact that it is flesh not sand that is being cut by the sword.
Anyways most of the language is still identical even in the capitol I just picked out differences for you.
In Modern Persian (An Iranian language):
Pedar - Father
Mâdar - Mother
Dokhtar - Daughter
Barâdar - Brother
Bad - Bad
Na - No
Now - New
Band - Band
Berenj - Bronze
Kimia - Chemistry
Dandân - Tooth (Dental)
Pardis - Paradise
Dar - Door
Abroo - Eyebrow
Famil - Family
Gerân - Great
Gorouh - Group
Narang - Orange
...
and many more
You forget khuda, which is cognate with 'god'. Geran would rather be cognate with 'grand'? Band (music band) might rather be a modern import from English? (unless you mean band as in wristband, like Persian 'band' = closed).
pardis and paradise are not cognates from pie directly tho,paradise was borrowed from old irsnian or avestan (or something)pardayjah
@@aryyancarman705 Actually 'pairi daeza' = enclosed / fenced area
Naranja - orange in spanish
Diente- tooth
Interesting similarities
@@hectorserna7950'daant' is tooth in Hindi (India)
'narinja' is orange in Telugu (India)
True that similar sounds mean something in more than one language.
I'm not sure how youtube recommended this channel, but it's one of the best channels I've seen. I chose science over linguistics for a career path, but have never lost my fascination with languages. I love your matter of fact explanations and the many references provided. I just got your audible books of The Poetic Edda and the Saga of the Volsungs and am happily listening to them.
Im learning electrical engineering, but I really like linguistics, its always an amazing subject
Last time I was this early the horse was not yet domesticated
Good one!
Wow, you were very early!
big brain yamnaya joke
There's an interesting exception to what you were talking about with "mama" being the word for "mother" in so many languages. In Georgian "მამა" (mama) is father and "დედა" (deda) is mother.
I mean it's a fifty fifty chance what ancient Georgians assigned to the sounds their babies babbled, quite amusing actually lol
Ah, btw i just now realised in Kurdish mother is "dê" lol
How very modern 😂
Yes, might be, but we must not exclude the Influence of neighbouring languages like armenian or other neighbouring indo-european languages
Deda, OK, Deeda is used in India for grannie in Bengali; it's a variation of Dadi (Hindi), and Dada (Hindi - Gramps).
The Indo-European language family and by extension the Germanic and/or Celtic language families are often talked about in relation to people's ancestry and although languages carry cultural heritage, it's interesting that you separate language from genetic ancestry. I feel like a lot of people often mix up these two. So thanks for sharing!
genetic lineage is highly superfluous, especially in the modern era with heavy immigration and globalization. language is determined by the environment and culture one grows up in, not genetic origin.
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST hi, while I agree that languages are dependant on your environment and can change rapidly for groups of people, I don't agree on genetics being superfluous because of modern migration.
I'm from the north of Belgium and most of my ancestors that I can trace back have been born in the same river valley for at least the past five to ten generations and the majority of the people here have that kind of ancestry. It's not that we don't want to intermarry with different people, but it just rarely happens, even today. So our genetic ancestry is very much its own subgroup, but the differences with other people from Europe and from around the world are very subtle and in that sense superfluous.
The point about language still stands though 😉👍
Hungarians are pretty much genetically identical to other Europeans. Their culture has pretty much nothing to do at all with the culture of Uralic people. Of course there's similarities and influences but their culture is closer to German's than to other Uralic people from Siberia.
It's ironic how Germanic people tried for centuries to revive the Roman empire, despite not even being descended from them.
Germanic invaders conquered lots of roman provinces and named themselves kings and queens and started dinasties, but they all adopted the local variety of latin as their language and all adopted their Roman culture instead of trying to germanise places like Spain, France and Italy.
Originally the people speaking Romanian in current day Romania were, as the name implies, descended from roman legionaries, but as the Slavs moved into those lands from the north they all adopted the latin language, which is why Romanians all look like any other Slavs, yet they speak a romance language, but their romance language is said to sound pretty much like a russian trying to speak a romance language.
In fact I'm a native Romanian speaked, and a LOT of times I was walking down the street when I heard people having a conversation in what I assumed was Romanian, yet I was dumbfounded to find out that I didn't know a word of what they were talking, only for them to actually be Bulgarians, or Serbians.
In fact all languages in the Balkan region exhibit a weird common characteristic, that being that regardless of whether they are a romance or a Slavic language, they all share a lot of common characteristics in their grammar.
Which means that they have different words that sound nothing like each other, that are NOT cognates but they use their words in the same order and in the same way, and in a way that's different from any other Slavic or romance language.
Like Slavic languages from the Balkan region, and Romanian, share grammar with each other, that they don't share with Russian or French or Spanish or Polish, which has lead many to believe that when Romans and Slavs moved into the area, they assimilated the people that were living there previously into their respective languages, but when those people learned latin/Slavic they learned it by mixing it with their own native grammar which sounded more natural to them, essentially forming a pigeon language.
That means that the languages in the Balkan all share a common origin for their grammar but not for their words.
All of this goes to tell you that this is a whole lot more complicated than genetics and language.
Two related languages can be spoken by people.very genetically different from each other. Like Spanish spoken in the Philippines and on south America.
Two languages can share a common "ancestor" language in their vocabulary but not in their grammar, or share common grammar but not vocabulary.
When a language group moves to a new land, they don't genetically replace the other language, because the people that were already there, with their own genetic makeup can just adopt the language and culture if they like.
Or the opposite can happen, where a new genetical group can move to a new area and since they're immigrants they can adopt their language and culture, maybe twist the language and culture a bit by mixing it with their own language. And like this, a whole lot of other things could happen.
I love this.
@@MuddafukhingdisKUST what a load of nonsense you wrote. by ''modern migration'' you mean managed replacement of Whites in the lands of their ancestors?
@@norielgames4765 Insightful comment. Romanians are chill. I met one guy from Moldova but idk if they count as Romanians lol.
The amount of facts we can find out about the native speakers of Proto-Indo-European language just from words present in it is mind blowing! Thank you for the video.
You have the best classroom, Dr. Crawford!
This brings me back 30 years ago to my favorite subjects (History of the English Language, Univ of Seville, Spain; and Historical Linguistics, Indiana Univ, Bloomington). I'm an ABD (due to horrible family illnesses, and me being the caretaker) in English Philology. I completed all my courses, worked on my dissertation, but couldn't finish it. My dad's very premature Alzheimers took care of achieving my dream. So I specialized in English Linguistics, nd teaching English as a foreign language is my job in lovely Seville, Spain. However, I was really into Old English and its literature, so when I heard you talk about the P and the F, I immediately knew you were going to talk about Grimm's Law. Such good times!!! But unless you've got a Ph.D, forget about teaching historical stuff outside the University...
Obviously, credentials are important for academic and professional reasons, but you still "know what you know". Anyway, we should all attempt to keep expanding our knowledge and understanding throughout our lives. This channel provides such an opportunity.
That was strong of you to do what you did for your dad.
I came for the attractive man and stayed for the education.
Hahaha 💙
@Himanshu Bhatt or because he's clearly above average looking. Why are you so insecure about not being "white"?
@Himanshu Bhatt I think you and Jackson Crawford are both very attractive if that helps.
he's fine as hell
Mood
I can't imagine how anybody would react upon opening this video I sent them and seeing a viking cowboy linguist
Why would you say he is a "viking cowboy"?
@@Lagolop dresses like a Cowboy, is a old norse speaker and expert
@@Cyprian96 Oh, he wears cowboy dresses? LOL.
Nope that’s a Nimrud
31:45 “Хуммингвнрд” would be “hummunvnrd”; maybe you meant “хуммингбирд” 🤓 Good point in that segment, though. @Jackson Crawford
Came here to say this - the mistakes make sense if you're coming mostly from familiarity with the Greek alphabet. I would transcribe it хамингбзрд to get the Cyrillic version even closer to pronunciation, though I guess it depends on your dialect of English.
Im currently in school for Linguistics and Anthropology and this man is living my dream
I am not in school, Linguistics or Anthropology and this man is also my living dream.
Its every kids dream to be a cowboy!
@@Deckdisz you either wanna be a cowboy or a viking and this guy is basically a cowboy-viking soothsayer.
Well if or when you get your PhD. Try not to fall into this guys absolutes. Knowledge grows and he states things as fact at a very high frequency. He may be right, but it’s not very scholarly, if I can use that word in that way, to state things as he does without support as often as he does.
I personally love your "sunburst" model; it manages to capture important distinctions between varieties while also showing how much the dialects influence each other in a family where the "tree" model breaks down.
Thank you, Professor Crawford! Many people, myself in the lead, have long been confused about the incredible distances in time, and proximity of relationships, between the various branches of Indo-European languages.
To our good luck, you manage to give us an overview that, by nature, has to be sweeping, but that you also make engaging. Then you clarify and add color to the mist of that very large picture with discursive detail. I love this mode of learning! The relevant facts and connections stick with me more than with any other approach. So thank you, very sincerely.
This video also left me wishing you might pair up sometime with an anthropologist from a mesolithic perspective, so we might follow other markers of advancement, as anatomically modern peoples emerged into a post-glacial but pre-settled world. Their diets, clothing, migration, ungulate domestication, pottery, patterns of engagement (ill-advised hand signals, hey-there winks?), etc-all these phenomena must have been permitted by-perhaps even helped propel-the evolution of language.
I’m hoping to flesh out what I call our Mirumbilon-the world when wonder was the primary vehicle of efflorescence for human cerebration. Much as iron drives populations of marine plankton and nitrogen generates vigor in terrestrial flora, I’m intrigued by the idea that our impulse of wonder is a truly somatic, phenotypically evolved and alarmingly potent agent of cognitive/behavioral bootstrapping, the gear-train of sentience & volition that in our wee hours potentiated what we now (very generously) call civilization.
I really really love and enjoy learning about this! literally I sit here excited like a little kid learning something new and amazing :D
Especially the part when you explain how you can deduce from the existence of words for "snow", "beaver" and so on that the language must have been spoken more in the north and not too far south, or how you can show from the lack of a word for "writing" that there was no writing.
That is so unspoeakably fascinating to me ^-^
Kinda reminds me of how in archaeology you can tell a lot about the age of findings just by comparative stratification with other dating evidence.
Or also how you can tell the comparative age of walls (or similar) by looking at joints and intersections.
I love it!
Thank you so much :)
The intro, badass. The knowledge, fascinating. The channel, indispensable
Will be referring back to that. Great overview.
This is an endlessly fascinating subject.
Boring!
@@StompingRabbits ok
@@StompingRabbits like your comment
The whole f and p correspondence that he used as an example coincidentally characterizes all loanwords that transfered from Persian to Georgian. Fantastic discussion in this video, big thanks
The relationships between languages has always been fascinating to me. You do a great job explaining these relationships and make for an interesting teacher. Glad yt recommended your channel.
I believe the word “woof” is onomatopoeic.
😆
'How do you make a cat go "Woof"? Pour petrol over it and light it'. A bad playground joke - which do not change over generations, hence in the UK if we tire of playing chase games we say "Pax" and cross our fingers - it's Latin for 'peace', and our fingers simulate The Cross. Holy cow (if I can say that) :)
Informative title, listing qualifications, and straight to the point. I'm already excited to watch!!
The video we've all been waiting for..
I love that at 20:00 the diagram kind of reads like the west germanic languages actually descended from a "west norwegian". that would be a super interesting migration
Is it already snowing there damn
It was snowing two weeks ago when I was there.
My brother said they had like a 60 degree drop or something like that a couple weeks ago.
Is he in the mountains? It snows earlier there than anywhere else.
@@mrjones2721 yeah he's pretty high up there. well he's in Fort Collins, so pretty far north, but they had a random cold front blow through and it dumped snow on them. It worked out though, because it suppressed that Cameron peak fire a bit.
On the other side of the world in rural Victoria, Australia we were just getting into warmer spring weather and now we have a snow storm that has turned the hills white again. Winter is not quite finished here.
You know, for a few years now I've seen people say things like "oh yeah, dr crawford, a very good educator, great content, also god he's so cool" but I never actually happened to watch any of your videos. Having had this randomly recommended to me by youtube I would just like to say: wow what a good video, very educational. Also god you're so cool (some pun intended)
I like that I grew up speaking several languages.
Not only is the topic fascinating, and the presentation and subsequent discussion at a satisfying intellectual level, but the presenter (Professor Crawford) is a hoot!!
Kudos
Great intro into historical linguistics and the Indo-European languages! I have to give you extra credit for knowing all the languages of the IE family and the differences between them from half the world away - USA (I'm in SE Europe, native speaker of Serbo-Croatian).
Also, great explainer at the end that genes and languages are different things.
And finally, as a history (and language) buff, I love how you put it very simply: "the past is as complex as the present and the future".
I envy you for being payed to do what I love. Keep it up!
There is no Serbo-Croatian language. They are two languages, similar, but different. Serbian and Croatian. Serbo-Croatian (or Croato-Serbian) is the product of Yugoslavian policy to form Yugoslav nation and it was a failure. The great and tragic failure.
Wow, this is a really good summary of this topic. Includes all of the main interesting points, but still concise!
Agree absolutely 💙
I find it very appropriate that an expert on ancient Germanic languages happens to speak a particular dialect of American English in which the wine-whine merger has not occurred. Thus, when speaking Old English, Jackson would pronounce the very first word in Beowulf, “hwaet”, much the same way as he pronounces its modern English cognate, “what” in his own native dialect. Certainly the two are much closer than they are in my (Western Australian) case, where not only has the wine-whine merger occurred, but the “a” has drifted even further backwards from its original “ae” pronunciation than it has in American English.
Like Stewie saying “Cool HWhip?” JC does have a wonderful accent, voice, and vocabulary. I’ve spent hours with him on The Great Courses on Audible. His most interesting accent is how he pronounces “…ing” without the “g.” Walkin, talkin, pronouncin, etc. He has such a magisterial and sonorous voice yet his western American upbringing still peeks through in an endearing way. Yet I mainly appreciate his deep expertise, something lacking on these channels and in today’s universities. The latter is, I’m quite sure, the reason he left the university and took up this position where he’s free to be excellent, unencumbered by plotting, tenured mediocrities.
I thank RUclips for recommending this to me. Great video, professor.
Very interesting. Irish, Scots Gaelic and Manx are 'Q' Celtic languages because of the sound at the beginning of some words, e.g. Ceann (Irish for 'head') whereas Welsh, Cornish and Breton are 'P' Celtic languages, e.g. Pen (Welsh for 'head').
Aka Goidelic and Brittonic languages (based on their geography).
It's so easy to forget when talking about this subject the incredible number of generations of people and long distances between these different splits. Incomprehensible
20:53 "Harja" is the Finnish word for comb. It was probably something similar in the north germanic languages but over the years it has shortened down to just Hår. This is actually a common occurrence with germanic words in Finnish, Finnish is a very conservative language. Consider the word for "King" in Finnish, "Kuningas", in Swedish it is now "Kung". It was probably something like "Koningaz" in Proto-Germanic.
@@servantofaeie1569 both seem to work for the Dutch descendent of "koning".
Tocharian is very important. Before its discovery, i.e. languages were split in the middle in two groups, "kentum" languages and "satem" languages (kentum, written centum is the word for "hundred" in latin and satem the corrisponding word in sanskrit). Some languages (like the indo-iranian) had [s] where the others (like latin, greek and germanic taking into account grimm's law) had [k], but it was not understood which of the two was the original. Tocharian languages, even though they are more eastward than indo-iranian, are kentum languages. Since tocharian speakers and proto-italic or greek speakers were unlikely to have come up with the same innovation at that distance, it is safe to assume [k] is the original realization and [s] an innovation.
Theres a lot of reasons why this can be refuted. It is likeleh the palatovelars were Palatl plosives, or at leasted palatalized velar stops. Secondly we can see different languages shift back(velar) and forward(palatl or postalveolar affricates) throughout history. Finally the most conservative languages Sanskrit Avestan and Lithuanian are all Satem. And /ķ/> [s] only occured in Persian, in Sanskrit it became /ś/, and in PIE /ķ/ was likley [c]
Your content is infinitely valuable. Thanks Doc.
I don't know how I got to a cowboy teaching me about the history of language but I'm here now and I'm not leaving.
Спасибо, доктор. Очень интересно и информативно
I don't understand the Old West thing this brilliant person is laying down, but I will say he is right on with the material, and that he is a gifted lecturer. If you look, you can find a Proto Indo-European vocabulary in the back or front of some dictionaries.
Regarding the table Grimm's Law, 'heart': It's quite amazing how close PIE ḱḗr is to French cœr. It's almost as if thousands of years haven't happened.
Can we talk about "six"? Like, hello? The word is written the same in English and French, and it's pronounced almost the same, despite the fact the word doesn't come from borrowing? Even crazier in Quebec French, because the "i" in this word is pronounced pretty much like in English.
(also, cœur*, you missed a "u")
I wonder how they reconstructed it as ker and not kerd/kert.
English: Heart
Latin: Cardis (C is a K sound)
Greek: Kardio/Kardia
Lithuanian: Širdis
@@pilenai The final consonant appears in other ide. cases, but not in nominative.
@@550077 oh ok
It is Hrdaya in Sanskrit.
Putting (37 min.) in the title is such a dad move 😂 (I love you)
As a Finnish linguist, I do not think that Proto Indo-European and Proto-Uralic are relatedbasic the basics of grammar and how the language system works are utterly distinct. I find more linguist connections between Finnish with Turkic and Coreo-Japonic languages than with Indo-European ones.
...which you cunning people got HIM Akihito to say out loud during a visit to Hungary.
17:04 Much of modern Romania was a part of the Roman Empire, it was known as the province of Dacia.
When I went to Afghanistan, I studied Dari. I found that about 10 or 15% of the ordinary, daily use vocabulary was different from the same words in Farsi. So I wonder if linguists consider Dari a difference language from Farsi, or a dialect of Farsi.
?
I would like to wait for someone knowledgeable to answer you. AFAIK, Dari is a dialect of Farsi.
Dari is a dialect of farsi,without arabic word like tajiki
It's a dialect of Persian.
Can you make your previous Q and As public with simply a note that they’re not the most up to date? A lot of them had good information to reference that is not outdated. Love the videos 👍
Just got here. I'm very happy to see this kind of content.
8:57 beawer - in Russian we have "bobior", "bobr".
There’s a lot of similarity between Sanskrit and Russian... like Nabaha in Sanskrit is Nebo in Russian, Chushk is same for cup in both the languages, and words like Devan(kinda sofa with no arms and back board), Dvar/Dver, Dham/Dom, Agni(fire)/ Agon... have same meanings... and so on.
This man is brilliant and I love his content
Hey there :D I have a great example for you from a Ugric language, it was fun
Im Finnish and I was working as a student in Hungary and I saw many similarities:
Hungarian: Finnish: English:
Morsza Murusia Crumbs (as in Breadcrumbs
hűtőkamra Hyytävä kamari Freezing cabinet
Víz Vesi Water
Méz Mesi Honey
Szarv Sarvi Horn
the word refrigerator literally meant a Freeze cabinet, thats normally called a 'jääkaappi'
but there are many more :D
that's morzsa not morsza
@ woops
Doesn't English also have the word 'morsel' which means small pieces (like crumbs). Is that related to Morzsa/Murusia?
@@oilslick7010 In Hungarian it comes from the verb morzsol which means to grind something with your palms, and in the end it just a form of morzsalék morzsolék that means crumbs, shreddings. The verb itself might have originated form the verb mar (bite) mimicking the verb forms dörzsöl (rub) and horzsol (bruise) . The Hungarian verb mar might me related to
vogul verb mor- (breaks), Ostyak mori (cracks), finnic muru (morsel), samoyedic morei (breaks up).
Morsel comes from Old French, diminutive of mors ‘a bite’, from Latin mors- ‘bitten’, from the verb mordere
Really good coverage of the branches of PIE languages and all without notes or bullet points 👍
Well done. I found this really informative. Thank you
Great content Mr. Crawford! Going to follow your channel. I have one curious question: Have you ever met personally prof. Jaan Puhvel? His works are one of greatest inspiration to me (including Dumezil, Eliade etc.).
with regards PhD. candidate of etnology/history
Stanislav
How many hours of study do you think it took him to give us that 37 minute summary?
Secondarily... The snowy background is a funny and interesting background choice!
I saw a bigfoot peeking in the background
At which time Stamp?
Thank you! cowboy ,nature, snow, this is wonderful, thank you professor.
I thought about Latvian and Estonian being completely distinct despite their near proximity last week, when I was discussing similarities between Latvian and Russian (Baltic and Slavic branch of Balto-Slavic language family). My anti-linguist Russian speaking opponent really refused to believe that there is any relation between Latvian and Russian, and if there is, it is because Latvians have assimilated Slavic vocabulary because of our near proximity.
However, Baltics are quite isolated from the rest of the world in terms of its geography - this is a part of the reason why modern day Latvian and Lithuanian are well preserved and share similarities with Sanskrit. And I mean, any considerable contact with Slavic language speaking population would have started around 1710 when Russia took over modern day Latvia-Estonia.
Okay, but back to the point, eventhough Latvian and Estonian are right next to each other and a Finno-ugric tribe (Livonians) used to live in modern day Latvian territory, Estonian and Latvian or Lithuanian are completely distinct. For the past 800 years Latvia and Lithuania have gone quite different paths historically. But despite that, I can still recognize certain roots in Lithuanian. However, Estonian, with which we have shared a large part of the territory and been in the same entity (Livonia=parts of modern day Latvia+Estonia) for centruries, we have very, very little vocabulary in common. For comparison, I'd like to present counting in Latvian, Lithuanian and Estonian:
Latvian: viens 1, divi 2, trīs 3, četri 4, pieci 5, seši 6, septiņi 7, astoņi 8, deviņi 9, desmit 10
Lithuanian: vienas 1
, du 2, trys 3, keturi 4, penki 5, šeši 6, septyni 7, aštuoni 8, devyni 9, dešimt 10
Estonian: üks [1], kaks [2], kolm [3], neli [4], viis [5], kuus [6], seitse [7], kaheksa [8], üheksa [9], and kümme [10]
Spanish: uno (ooh-no), dos (dohs), tres (trays), cuatro (kwah-troh), cinco (seen-koh), seis (says), siete (syay-tay), ocho (oh-choh), nueve (nway-vay), diez (dyays)
English: 1 one, 2 two, 3 three, 4 four, 5 five, 6 six, 7 seven, 8 eight, 9 nine, 10 ten.
As you see, it is quite evident that all of the languages presented above share similarities but Estonian. This is truly striking.
Anyways, let all the languages be preserved and cultural diversity to be cherished!
Serbian: 1 jedan,2dva,3 tri, 4 četri, 5 pet, 6 šest, 7 sedam, 8 osam , 9 sever 10 deset
You can see Serbian language ( slavic family) have big similarities
Thank you for your comments 🙏 Really appreciated and informative!
Despite Latvian and Estonian being from different lang families, Latvian has clearly been influenced by Uralic. In that sense, they definitely are neighbors. The same thing can be said about other so-called unrelated languages. Clearly more is going on than the typical family tree concept.
A few years ago, NASA announced that they are using the ancient Serbian calendar because it is the most accurate, that it is completely harmonized with nature, that the beginning of the seasons according to that calendar coincides with the electromagnetic changes of the Sun, lake water is changing ph level to acidic or alkaline on exact date.
@@Shakazaramesh On April 4, 2024. Serbs celebrate the year 7532.
A few years ago, NASA announced that they are using the ancient Serbian calendar because it is the most accurate, that it is completely harmonized with nature, that the beginning of the seasons according to that calendar coincides with the electromagnetic changes of the Sun, lake water is changing ph level to acidic or alkaline on exact date.
The Serbian national calendar was the official calendar of the medieval Serbian states from 1119, when Saint Sava introduced it into the church codex, until the middle of the 19th century. Charters, laws, decisions, obligations were written according to him. Many monuments and monasteries are dated according to the Serbian calendar. According to this calendar, the Battle of Kosovo took place in 6897, and the Code of Tsar Dusan was passed in 6857.
Smederevo Fortress preserves one of the rare pieces of evidence about the old Serbian calendar. The tower and the Small Town, the court of the despot Djurdj, as it is written there, were built in the summer of 6938.
The oldest recorded and preserved calendars begin to count the time from the creation of the world, which is believed to have been in 5508 BC. In our area, the beginning of agricultural, Starčevo culture corresponds to that time.
Thanks, a great introduction, very clear, and a very pleasant narrating voice and pace to listen to!
17:10 Actually, the region of Dacia, inhabited by an Indo-European Thracian people, was annexed by the Roman Empire under Trajan in the 2nd century CE.
The area largely corresponds to present-day Romania and Moldova. The Thracians of Dacia adopted Vulgar Latin and became Romanized, whereas Thracians in the Byzantine Empire became Hellenized. Thus, the gradual emergence of Romanian from Vulgar Latin in Dacia likely has its origins before the start of the Medieval period.
Quite correct he is not a historian, to suggest Romanians came into Romania during the middle ages is rather poor form on his part.
Dacia was under roman rule for much shorter than the rest of the empire. Especially Moldova is quite far out. There are (and were even more historically) peoples all over the Balkans, who speak dialects of Romanian or languages closely related to it. Some of them as far away as Greece, Montenegro and Croatia. Historically these peoples (usually called Vlachs by their neighbors) practiced seminomadic pastoralism and moved often, so it's not so inconceivable that some of them migrated east. This would also explain the strong influences of slavi c languages on Romanian, which suggest centuries of cohabitation.
Establishment of the current Romanian language from what I have read was more of a state program than a natural process, implemented by Greek Phanariotes by the rule of Ottoman Empire. There were Vlahs in the region of course, but the majority of the population spoke and wrote in Slavic. The Ottoman Sultan wanted to distance this population from Russia and the other awakening closer Slavic countries. Cheers!
@@luisromanlegionaire Romanian is based on vulgar latin spoke in northern part of Eastern Roman Empire, not a specific region like Dacia. The weight center of this language was south of Danube was more dense populated and romanised, then after slavs moved in translated to north of Danube (600-900), in the south romanians were pushed to the edges or assimilated by slavs
@@Bultras12-CA You talk nonsense. Romanian was very infuenced by slavic trough use in administration and church, but always remained latin in core.
In larger vocabulary in medieval time were more slavic words used than today, but as slowly slavic was removed from administration as it was not known by lower and middle class and later (no link with ottoman empire) was relatinised by literature writtings giving priority to latin words over slavic words in larger vocabulary and later (after 1850) loans from french and italian, altough today most of loans are from english
Similarities between English and Persian
Persian / English
Pedar / father
Tu / you
Dochter / daughter
Mader / mother
Brader / brother
Daar / dor
Shamshir / sword
Also please make more videos about PIE and the possible relationships with other language families like Uralic.
Finnish definitely has contact with Baltic and Slavic
Never thought I'd have a cowboy teach me linguistics, but here we are.
I've no choice but to subscribe.
I favour the idea that Hittite was not descended from PIE, but that Hittite and the PIE branch have a common ancestor. The reason for this is that Hittite does not have the three genders in PIE, but an animate-inanimate distinction instead, which is unlikely that is a development from the three genders in PIE. It's rather the other way, that Hittite preserved a system which predates the PIE genders. That is, the PIE masculine was developed from a concept of animate things, and the PIE neuter comes from inanimate things. I think the PIE nominative -s was originally an agent marker, which only animate things could have. The feminine gender was a PIE innovation which Hittite did not have, and it could originally be the inanimate plural, first used as abstracts or as a way to generalise concepts, like the feminine word "opera" in Latin, meaning "work", which comes from the neuter plural of "opus" ("a piece of work").
Ehhhhh I would need some serious citations on that. The theoretical breakup time of Proto-Anatolian from PIE was 3500 BCE and Hittite is attested around 2000 years later. That's plenty of time to rework your gender system into common-neuter like modern Danish or Dutch. Additionally, PIE masculine and feminine were already animate and neuter inanimate in implication, or if PIE had a common-neuter system, for a masculine-feminine system to generate before further splitting after the Proto-Anatolian split. Proto-Anatolian also split before PIE developed thematisation as a noun and verb distinction in all other PIE languages, and you seem to be unaware of PIE declensional patterns in the -s comment. There's too much evidence Hittite is a descendant language of PIE and not a sister language if you look at Hittite's vocabulary.
To the -s point: the ending for PIE thematic feminine nominative, for example, is -a, compared to athematic feminine -s. Compare Doric Greek (rendered in Latin alphabet, as I am familiar with Ancient Greek) feminine thematic noun 'woman': *guna* with feminine athematic noun 'beam': *aktis* but also masculine thematic noun 'youth': *neanias* with athematic noun 'leader' *hagemon* showing this can go both ways. Compare also Doric Greek neuters, with thematic neuter 'gift': *do'ron* but athematic neuter 'missile' *belos*
@@therat1117 The two gender system as in Danish is a straight-forward simplification, which is easy to explain, especially with the collapse of the case system as the main difference was -inn vs -in from old Norse. The neuter-masculine merge of Romance languages also came about in a similar fashion.
What Hittite has makes much less sense as a development from a three gender system, since it's not really an idea of gender. It's easier to see the genders as a development from what Hittite has. That was my argument.
As for the feminine -s, it could be an influence from masculine. Paradigms can spread to other classes. Like how many Norwegian dialects made masculine and feminine definite nouns more distinct, rather than identical as in Danish, by applying the -a ending of weak feminine nouns to strong feminine nouns.
That said, I have no issues with classifying Hittite as essentially PIE, which seems obvious based on the vocabulary. I find it unlikely that we can reconstruct a PIE language spoken exactly like that at some point. Rather, the reconstruction would be a language that would be easily understood by the earliest PIE speakers, who would speak different, more or less mutually intelligible dialects. Some of these dialects would have preserved features which predates the typical PIE traits. The animate-inanimate distinction of Hittite might be just such a thing. If we classify Hittite as PIE, Hittite contains a hint what the ancestor of PIE was like.
@@midtskogen also Hittie could have absorb the aforementioned feature from the culture they took over in the highland the Hatti if I'm not mistaken.
@@ppn194 I know, and the change from neuter plural to singular feminine is precisely what could explain how Indo-European originally got three genders.
Standard Italian mille - mila is an example
that remnants of the old neuter still exists.
Thanks for the video. I visited Roamnia a few years ago and was surprised when I recognized a few of the words.
Pashto isn't just spoken in AFG, its also spoken in Pakistan. Actually much much more speakers in PK, and it's the 2nd largest language after Punjabi if you count native 1st language speakers.
Isn’t the language of Afghanistan Dari Pashto? Pardon my ignorance.
@@AlexKS1992 dari n pashto are separate languages.
@@AlexKS1992 In fact, Dari is a variant of Persian, or Farsi.
Nice vid. The language diffusion seems to occur from Indic regions to north and northwest. Even the word Yamuna off the River Yamuna near the Black Sea area is exact copy of the River Yamuna in the north India Himalayan foothills area. This area is also continuing civilization hence the evidence would remain buried beneath the modern population for a long time.
Are there similar methods of establishing relationships among languages using grammatical structures as well as vocabulary? Specifically, are there grammatical features common to the Indo-European languages that aren't used in other families or that shift and descend in a way specific to the family?
the use of the subjective in indo-european languages tend to be very similar to each other but not so compared to others
Wow, amazing video! Beautiful setting, too. Thank you for posting.
31:48 just a quick note - hummingbird written in cyrillics would look like хаммингбёрд or something like this. your example would be pronounced as hoomingvnrd.
I would say it should have been written like хуммингбирд, because it’s not phonetic transcription (as shown with Greek, for example hymmiggbird)
Well done sir! Aside from your mastery of linguistics itself, your knowledge of the context is impressive. Given how widespread the IE languages and civilizations were (and still are), the amount of ancient history you know must be a challenge - one which you rise to remarkably.
Very good material! Although at 17:10 you might be curious to find out that Romanians didn't came from South somewhere between middle-ages, they come from Dacian Getae tribes, those were their ancestors! With much love from România 🇷🇴 !! Sorry for bad English!
Sorbic / Sorbisch is still spoken (also street signage) in Bautzen (Sachsen, Germany) as a protected culture
And at the University of Georgia, his doctoral thesis was in the conjugation of y'all.
Present: y'all
Future: y'all'll
Conditional: y'all'd
Perfect: y'all've
Future perfect: y'all'll've
Pluperfect Subjunctive: y'all'd've.
Romania was part of the Roman Empire from 106 to 275 CE. It was called the Province of Dacia back then and it was one of the largest and wealthiest provinces in the Roman Empire. It was rich in natural resources, the land was extremely fertile and the climate was ideal. This prompted many Romans to immigrate to Dacia en masse, bringing their language with them. When Dacia was taken over by the Goths and later Gepids, it only helped to spread Vulgar Latin further, as these rulers promoted the language and helped with its spread among the population even beyond the settlement areas of the Roman settlers.
Genetic studies have revealed that Romanians in the lowlands share some of their genetic markers with people from North Italy, Croatia, Serbia, Austria and Hungary, which confirms speculations by previous historians that Roman settlers in Dacia came primarily from Gallia Cisalpina, Noricum, Pannonia and the northern Romanized parts of Illyricum. The highland Romanians are much older indigenous populations.
Really well researched and logically presented. Top man. Great hat.
Before watching this video, it didn't occur to me that Proto-Indo-European might have been a real, single language spoken by an identifiable culture during a known period. AND I DID MASTER'S WORK IN ANTHROPOLOGY.
Mind blown.
This is what blew my mind. The grammar of PIE is bonkers, it's got eight or nine cases and two or three genders, to say nothing of singular, dual, and plural. Who would even set up a language like that? Now, here's the part that blew my mind: PIE is only the most recent version of that language we are aware of. There were presumably forerunners to PIE (as we know it), and there's a reasonable chance that PIE (as we know it) is the result of grammatical features being grafted on through contact with speakers of other languages. That means that PIE itself has a history that explains why it has features that seem so needlessly complicated. I have to wonder what the core language behind PIE was like: was it more reasonable?
I realize I'm not being objective when I describe PIE as a mess, but I'm still going to stand by it.
kingbeauregard , no one set it up. It evolved naturally. Every language on the planet is a mess for this reason.
@@thorr18BEM Sure, fully agreed. It's just that PIE is so often talked about like the root of everything else that it's easy to forget that even PIE is a child language, with more mothers than Heimdallr.
@@kingbeauregard The morphology of PIE is actually not so complex compared to a lot of living world languages. Bantu languages often have upwards of a dozen grammatical genders, and there are languages like basque, hungarian, and various caucasian languages with 13, 15, 18 or more cases. It's important to keep in mind that morphological complexity can increase or decrease naturally over time, and that it corresponds with increases or decreases in complexity in other areas. For instance, English has much more complex rules governing syntax than Latin does, because English communicates with word order what Latin communicates with word endings. It's common to put certain ancient languages up on a pedestal and think of modern languages as 'less complex', but complexity seems to largely be a zero sum game, with some caveats that I could go into.
@@Philoglossos Agreed. Spend just a few days on an English language learning help forum and take in the awesomeness of endless, endless questions about the correct use of "the". For many learners of languages without an explicit definite article it seems to be like hocus pocus. And yet we as English speakers consider that absolutely basic. You can also be charmed by the endless questions about the word "as". "What does it mean?" Sometimes it's so obvious, it's impossible to explain. "It means 'as'."😂 When complex things need to be said, complex ways, in whatever form, have to be available. And human communication is complex.
This is the best video on this topic ever! Finally I understand something🎉
Thank you!!! (cool hat btw😂)
Are you Sir a supporter of the Graeco-Armenian common linguistic origin hypothesis (maybe even a Balkan Indo-European subgroup of IE) or maybe you find it less likely?
Dr. thank you so much for the video. Great content and presentation. You just answered what I was going to ask about the Mittani - Vedic connection, thanks! Keep up the great work.
Romania was part of the Roman empire, as the province of Dacia, which was not ruled by Rome for very long, but military veterans were settled there.
This should be what everyone learns before learning any of these languages. Fantastic
Proto-Indo-European is so interesting. Not just because of what it informs linguistically, but what it also tells us about the evolution of culture and religion.
Good stuff, I'm glad that you keep this information up to date.
337:0
Like - dislike ratio. Wonderful
Many thanks for sharing your knowledge. It’s much appreciated. A few fascinating nuggets there too!
Harja in Finnish means brush, but also it means mane...
It's a germanic loanword harja = hair
@@honkytonk4465 in finnish it also means a horse's hair aka the mane 🙂
I love your "h" emphasis in what and where and wheel
Best video on youtube ever, thank you
Denne mannen har evnen til å få språkhistorie til å bli like spennende som StarWars. 👍
Bara om man är intresserad, så därför håller jag med dig :)
An example of genes not going with language: the Garinagu are about 3/4 sub-Saharan African, but the Garifuna language is Arawakan with a heavy admixture of Cariban (AFAIK it is the only language which not only shows gender in the first-person singular pronoun, but has two words for "I" from two different language families).
A quick note here - the Insular Celtic languages are *not* extremely different from the Continental Celtic languages. There is an attestation gap from about 100 CE when Gaulish and Celtiberian stop being attested for the most part to 600 CE when we start seeing Old Welsh, Old Breton, and Old Irish that makes the difference exaggerated. That 500 year gap is also the difference between late Old Swedish and Early Modern Swedish, which would show about the same innovation changes. There is major debate on whether Brittonic languages are more related to the Gaelic languages or to Gaulish, and the truth is probably closer to the sunburst model shown for the Germanic languages than to strict descent, as attested Primitive Irish (ca. ~ 200 BCE - 400 CE) already shows extensive phonological deviations from what contemporaneous evidence of Brittonic Celtic we have. There is even some speculation that Primitive Irish is more related to Celtiberian, but that is mostly spurious. Generally most scholars consider 'Insular' and 'Continental' to be areal rather than relational groupings. Here's a good sample word for comparison, twenty (nominative singular where applicable):
Proto-Celtic: *wikanti
Celtiberian (~200 BCE): *uicanta
Gaulish (~200 BCE): *uiconts
Old Welsh (~600 CE): uceint -> Modern Welsh: ugain
Old Breton (~600 CE): ucent -> Modern Breton: ugent
Old Irish (~850 CE): fiche -> Irish: fiche
Aside from the common Insular transition of a/o to e/ei/i by umlaut and loss of terminal syllables (which seems to have been an ongoing pan-Celtic process even in the continental languages), Old Welsh and Breton make few innovations whereas Old Irish has turned initial u -> f, likely nasalised the -nt ending completely, and aspirated the medial c -> ch. This is a somewhat extreme example, but there are very few common sound innovations between Old Welsh and Old Irish, and Old Welsh (and particularly Old Breton) are conservative in ways Old Irish is not, and vice versa. Each language family developed initial consonant mutation more or less independently, for example (although they both developed this feature).
For further comparison, twentieth:
Proto-Celtic: *wikantmetos
Gaulish: *uicontmetos
Old Welsh: *uceintved (m -> v medially is a Common Brittonic innovation)
Old Irish: fichetmad (the t is restored here as it isn't part of the terminal syllable, but the n is still nasalised, and we see the common Primitive/Old Irish terminal e -> a reduction)
Consider Munster Irish vs Scottish Gaelic. They are separated from a common ancestor by at least 1500 years. They have both been largely spoken by illiterates. Yet they still have a remarkable similarity in core vocabulary and pronunciation.
Jacob Grimm one of brothers who wrote german tales was also linguist. I havent known it before
A great video. You have covered the topic before, but it cannot be repeated often enough when we talk about languages from Europe. I especially like the end of the video where you emphasize that languages in most cases must not be confused with ethnicity. This is important and especially here in Europe where different groups of people live close together. Europe is a patchwork of people with different backgrounds and in a modern globalized world it is important that we do not make the differences between us greater than they actually are.
Fascinating! I want to see more of this series.
What about the Basque culture and languages, which do not appear to be Indo-European, IIRC. And why are British scholars so hostile towards conclusions based upon IE mythic/ cultural/ folkloric comparisons, which they seem to dismiss as coincidental (and this is being kind as I've seen them be much more hostile, such as Ronald Hutton).
Thanks a lot for the decent overview and explanatory examples!
i love the /ʍ/ in his pronunciation