Arabic is my mother tongue and when I started learning English 4 years ago I was surprised how easy English was. You mentioned the word "love" which is true in Arabic we have a lot of words describing each meaning of love. One day I was telling my roommate that I love him "as a friend" which is normal to say in Arabic. Sadly because of the lack of words in English he understood it not the way that I meant and he was scared as hell. Thanks man for the video and stay awesome.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across the word "Asatte" which means "The day after tomorrow". I mostly use English to translate Japanese, so I didn't really understand what why "The day after tomorrow". Until I looked at my own language, dutch, which also got 1 word for it: "Overmorgen". so it really surprised me that English was lacking this basic word.
jjesss064 I experienced exactly the same thing. I'm a German and Turkish native speaker and the day after tomorrow means in Germany übermorgen, but I realize now that Turkish also does not have a Word for asatte instead people say yarın dan sonra which means literally after Tomorrow.
It can be really troublesome to speak many languages, though, especially because of the lack of words in some. I mean, French and Spanish are pretty close, that's not an issue, but there are tons of German and Russian words I have massive trouble translating into English, even though.. English has the biggest vocabulary, doesn't it? Considering all the different dialects, etc. There's also the issue that there are a lot of very interesting words, but they're not being used very frequently, and if you do happen to use them, people give you that weird look like you're just trying to sound clever.
Mina Fed The Unicorns ♥ Actually it's not that hard , they say it's the second most complicated language, but it's really an easy language to learn you won't know until you start learning *_^
Mina Fed The Unicorns ♥ You mean words like "handiverliertalzheimermomente", I have been wanting to use that word for ages, just because you can almost never use it. "Handiverliertalzheimermoment" is a word for the moment you look at your sellphone and see you have a missed call. When you look up the number that called you, and you see the number. You instantly realise that the missed call was you calling your cellphone with a different phone when it was missing.
Is aoibheann liom an Teanga Gaeilge. I feel it is of great importance that many languages be kept around; I find it very enlightening when I learn something new in Irish, because I suddenly get a new viewpoint on the world that I didn't have before.
Practically speaking, preserving the diversity of language will help preserve different ways of thinking since speaking a different language changes how you think. The more ways of thinking , the more probable that someone will be able to invent warp drive someday.
The thing about Irish people not speaking Irish is that the State really forces it on us and the dissuades a lot of people from learning it. Only 4% of the country are fluent in it and I have no interest in learning it when I leave school because I was never given a choice in learning it.
actually there is 60 different words for love in arabic, one for each kind or intensity of that feeling.Classic Arabic poets made a good use of those .
***** check out the ethnologue site and the unesco site for info on endangered languages. check out wals.info for more info too. This site is a bit more complicated if you don't have a background in linguistics.
"I really love you, I sort of love you, I love you as a friend". One could say "I adore you, I like you, and we're friends". The love of missing someone could be said as "I miss you". Why do you need a word that is a variant of love, but means "to miss"???? So, an additional word in the vocabulary is by itself a virtue? You're using a single word either way. The Inuit have many words for snow, but unless you need to reference "snow in the mouth" on a daily basis, all the extra words can really just distract people from learning other things.
I am currently learning Ancient Greek (More specifically, the Attic dialect). People never really get why i'm taking a language that no one speaks anymore, but it's so cool to see how many of our current words stem and evolve from these languages. Plus, so many influential books in history (New Testament, histories of war) were originally written in ancient Greek. Sometimes it's best to be your own translator!
I studied Classical Latin and Classical Greek at school, and now I study Italian and German at university. So, I know my way around languages, yet I struggle to think of Latin and Greek as dead. If dead means there is no body of active native speakers, then Latin is still living in the Vatican State and Classical Greek lives on in some Southern dialects of Italy. However, these languages aren't truly dead when our modern words fall back on them. For example, our commonly used word today for television derives from the Greek Tele- = distance/far and the Latin past participle from the verb to see, video-> viso=>vision. Hence we have tele-vis-ion. Alternatively i-Phone derives presumably from i= intelligent or whatever Apple's logic was, and phone comes from the Greek 'phone` ' for sound/voice. Last example: Computer is a compound of the Classical Latin words, words used by Cicero and Caesar, 'cum' =with and 'putare' =think, consider, Rendering 'putare' as simple a stem form without conjugation we have 'put-'. If we add the Latin operator suffix of '-or' and put the words all together, we have cum+put+or. Vowels notoriously change in languages, so one quick adjustment of 'cum' and '-or'we have 'computer', literally meaning in Latin, < a together thinker >, which in essence is what a computer is. It's a device that does thinking altogether until the process is complete. So, if these languages remain active in a small group, and forever are relied upon for the creation of new words in our supposed quasi "living" languages, can they truly be dead or are they simply dormant? Even a dormant volcano will spew some proof of life now and again. Great series and great talks! I look forward to the next installment :)
I took Old English in university for fun, and it's a really cool language. It was funny because every time I told people about it they thought I was talking about Shakespearean English. Then I'd say, "No, that's modern English," and their minds would blow. Haha.
S'up Dawgs Its more the fault of parents. In Scotland the only language you *need* to know is English, so parents don't bother speaking Scots around their children or teaching it to their children.
Jaco Barnard Wat is het, voor jou, raarste Nederlandse woord dat je ooit tegen bent gekomen. Het raarste Afrikaanse woord voor mij is "touwtjesbroekie".
When you said that about the world becoming duller... I couldn't help but think of entropy and the tendency to thermal balance, about how the Universe is going to end up still, balanced and unchanging. I can't help but feel like it's all related. Like everything tends to that.
I'm falling in "love" with this series about languages. Language learning is my life. I can't speak any dead language nor endangered language yet, but I intend to study and help preserve Manchurian (this language has about 30 native speakers nowadays), Tibetan and Javanese.
I'm from Sardinia, an island in Italy. We speak 5 different dialects, plus normal Italian, but we can't understand each other depending by the area where they speak a different dialect from mine.
John Uit het Broek Knowledge can exist and be transferred to any language. We only become dumber when we decide we no longer care to learn about the Reality we live in. And why is culture important at all? Culture didn't bring us the airplane or modern medicine. An advancement in our collective knowledge and science did that. Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
@@tasheemhargrove9650 If you were fluent in more than one language you'd know that some things cannot be translated. Abolishing words or entire languages is not evolution, it's newspeak like in "1984". It would also deprive people of the intimacy and privacy of their own ethnicity
@@ronaldonmg I don't even remember this post or what this video was about. But all I'll say is that words, in any language, are made up. Words are slightly similar to trends, like the fashionable clothing brands of the day. The collective group of speakers of the language develop norms, and trends arise which lead to the creation of new words/phrases, or re-defining of already existing words/phrases. If there isn't a word or phrase in a language that represents a particular concept, it is most likely due to native speakers' lack of experience with that concept. But there is nothing inherent about the language that prevents certain concepts or ideas from being expressed. If a language goes extinct, that does not necessarily mean that some concepts expressed in that language will never be expressed in any other language, or cannot be expressed in every language.
One of my favorite Japanese-exclusive words is "isagiyoi," an adjective describing the noble act of casting off that which will only spoil if kept; some examples would be the cherry blossom trees losing their petals in the spring, or a samurai commiting seppuku after a dishonorable act.
I am Circassian and although our language isn't dead, it might as well be. We are an ethnicity in diaspora, removed from our homeland in the Caucasus mountains where many of my relatives still live and speak Russian. Many live in Turkey but my parents lived in Jordan where they spoke Arabic. I was born in the US where many in our community (including myself) obviously spoke English, Arabic because we are raised in Islam, and tried learning one of three dialects of Circassian, either Adyghe, Abzakh, or Kabarde. Needless to say, things are a little complicated and uncertain in our culture.
Matt G I am trying my best to learn some of it, but I agree. I love the culture and I am 28 and just rejoined the dance group in my community because I learn so much about our heritage through it. There is a saying among my people, "a warrior cannot know how to fight if he does not know how to dance!"
***** That's awesome man! I would like to visit one day, if I have the money, I have seen some dance of the Caucasus I think its called Lezginka? It looks so cool, I especially like the costumes! That kind of culture should be preserved. :)
Matt G Nothing makes me more proud and hopeful than to hear an outsider sharing their love for my culture. Thank you for reinstilling hope that we might survive. Lezingka is one my personal tribes close cousins, but yes, very much the same thing! I am a Adyghe tribe but I was born in the US. I haven't been to the homeland but I have been to Jordan and Syria where much of our Diaspora live. Take care, brother!
I remember a lesson in high school where the teacher was saying that Tagalog has no word for snow (because obviously we don't have snow in the Philippines). Our word for snow is borrowed from Spanish (nieve), which becomes niyebe. But that we have separate words for every kind of rice because it's part of our everyday life. Rice that's unmilled - palay Rice (milled) - bigas Cooked rice - kanin Burnt rice - tutong Leftover rice - bahaw Rice porridge - lugaw Fried rice - sinangag Rice that fall out of your plate - mumo Sweetened rice - biko
English also has some ways of describing or categorizing things that some other languages don't have. For example, in Chinese, all fungi are categorized as vegetables. There is no word for fungus in Chinese. There is a word for mushroom, but since they have no word for the fungus family, it's considered a vegetable.
About that love example: I actually prefer having fewer words, but the ability to combine them to create an infinite variety of meanings. In my opinion, this way of expression is far superior to having thousands of niche words that many people (especially foreigners) don't even know, thus can't understand. That is the only thing I really like about German. If I don't know the right word to describe a situation, I can just take 3 or 4 simple nouns, melt them together and create exactly the word I need. Only disadvantage is that words get really long and Google fails horribly trying to translate them^^.
The thing about "love" is that we (culturally) don't even have a good idea what that emotion is, and we have a habit of attaching it to other feelings like friendship or eroticism or novelty or simple enjoyment. This gives us unproductive and sometimes destructive reactions to certain events, and we end up having a hard time understanding why. It's not so much that we need language to describe each combination of love+otherFeeling, but that we need to establish language for-- and awareness of what is actually going on there.
I really love this channel. I speak English (Brooklyn), Haitian Creole (My mom), Spanish (My father), and now I can say I've mastered Portuguese (Do Brasil) I want to pick your brain.
I studied Latin in high school solely o be able to pick up the Romance Languages easier and it vastly helped to improve my English grammar too. One of my best friends studied Ancient Greek (I know it's not technically dead) and that was a massive pain.
I learned Latin my freshman and sophomore year of high school, i took it as elective but it has really helped me learn other Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian!
India have 23 official languages. More than 100 recognizable languages and over 5000 dialects. So it's a language soup. Most of Indians understand at least 2(English and their mother tongue). I, for example, understand English, Bengali, French, Hindi and Sanskrit
I was taught ASL along with English when I was young. I also lived in Germany at the time but am only now learning German to go back. I also am learning Latin kinda, because I am a medical student and just knowing what the terms that Form most of the basis of medical terminology is helpful. I'm very very into etymology so learning what words are connected (like lactation and galaxy) is really helpful in me actually learning what a word means or how it formed and is used or was before. (the word "galacto" means "milk" and is the basis of both lactation, the process of creating milk, and galaxy, resembling milk. unsurprisingly it's because we are in the "milky way" galaxy which is said to resemble milk but I don't see it myself. there are few medical terms that aren't from Latin. like anorexia is Greek for without appetite. but the vast majority of terms I'll need are Latin based. I got a bit of help with my medical Terminology class, but right now I'm informally teaching myself as I start to wonder. and later when I can I'll more formally teach myself. )
I actually forgot ASL though so I need to relearn it. only a few commonly used signs are still with me on a level that I can understand. the difficulty is I have a very hard time seeing subtleties so actually seeing what someone else is saying is really hard. only the big overt gestures like in "thank you" can be easily read. I think that's part of why I mostly forgot it.
I wanted to learn Japanese back in highschool, but the teacher who did it stopped it the year I entered highschool.. Apparently they weren't doing a very good job at it either from what others have said in retrospect. The biggest problem I've had when it comes to learning a new language, is the cost barrier. Sure there are resources out there that you could use to learn to speak a language. But the problem with that is, they are effectively just literature. You need more than a 'book' to learn to speak a language, you need a coach that knows how to speak. There are very nuanced qualities that you just don't learn from a book, but from actively speaking with someone who knows the language. I still would love to learn Japanese, their culture as a whole is a big fascination for me, from pop culture, to mythology, to even the ins and outs of day to day life. But from what free resources I've seen out there, they either don't cover eastern languages (or they cover only Chinese of them), or the resources aren't that good. =\
In context to the series, it's a pity you have not mentioned phonetics. Many thanks for the Afrikaans references, I am a native speaker of it and proud of my language. Currently I am learning seTswana, an offical language here in South Africa... Polyglot, here I come =]
08:29 I got news for you the word for the colors of the sunset is sunset. You can picture the colors, because you know the concept and the word sunset.
I had to learn HEbrew, which is one of the only effectively dead languages to be revived in a major way. (Even if Moern HEbrew differs from Classical in many ways, including basic word order.)
in arabic we have many words to describe how deep in love you are. mawada\wed, taim, heyam, hub, eshq, shaghaf and much more but in english they are all translated to love. for example gharam means love accompained with obsession and torture. heyam means being so in love that you lose your mind and go wandering looking for your beloved till you potentially die.
I also do believe Turkish is like that too. It too has many words for love but the only word for to love is sevmek. I'm taking about the nouns. As in Arabic, the word that sounds very familiar to Turkish speakers will be عشق because it sounds like aşk. I also spoke some Turkish most of the time and more than Japanese between January 2015 and January 2016, but I still barely learned any of it. I was just watching some cartoons from Turkey including Leliko where they can actually teach vocabulary words to children and help make their brain grow and get smarter as well. In Japanese, sometimes in anime they use a synonym so now I'm sure for certain I have to learn all the words. By this point, I'm watching Dragon Ball and I hadn't seen the results yet, probably because I'm also used to fast speech and had been learning a lot before then, but they speak more slowly and clearer and I love the narrator's good sense of Japanese vocabulary. If I do say so myself!
in my oppinion a language has to be an efficient way of cummunication. it sould be easy to learn as well as precise in describing things. with those two requirements in mind, there is no need for 20 different forms of "love" when you just can combine an adjective with the word "love" and say the same thing.
Trace very nice to hear you interest in Irish (Gaeilge) language. Most people are ignorant to the fact we even have a language. Also Gaeilge is an extremely oild language, old of the oldest in Europe if not the world. Go raibh míle mhaith agat a chara. (Thank you my friend)
Multilingual person. Not easy because sometimes one of the language is not enough. I feel inadequate and end up saying "that's it, I don't get the point, my ability to understand the language ended" and i get a reaction of "you don't focus enough, you don't even try to understand" damn it, i say that sentence because i literally don't get your point, find a synonym or definition because I don't get the material. Also i translate some stuff from one language to another and sometimes some words don't have exact meaning at that point i dig whatever the material is. Also if the material is faulty the translation is faulty too. The ending product after the process of translating is mine but if the material is faulty so the translation is too. Also mixing the words daily, not even getting into that...
i know this has nothing to do with the topic but i was hoping that you could do a series on the immune system. how it works its evolution and auto immune disorders. I'm currently reading on book on this and i think i brief over view would help me understand it better.
I've studied Latin and a bit of the revitalised Hebrew. I'm Swedish and thus a native speaker of Swedish as well as I've studied English and French. My experience is that I've been able to split up a Swedish word in to something that I can understand better due to my studies in Latin, French and English.
Although Arabic has a lot of different words for love, in practice the most common word is even more generic than ours, and it's used to describe loving or liking depending on context.
Arabic is actually such a wonderful language. Very comprehensive. Tough, but simple on its own way. I'm not religious person at before, and then this language taught me how possible about supernatural existence like god and immaterial things in very logic way when it's hard to understood in english or japanese. Philosophically, It presents to comprehend spiritual world in the way english or other language can never imagine. This language can catch every single meanings in mind by words that you may just silent because words limits in other language. I plan to comprehend iran language after this language. Middle east is not like what anchors on tv or modernization told us.
I had to learn Latin and Ancient Greek side by side with regional Greek, mainstream Greek, English and French. All this in just 3 years. They really were expecting too much from high schoolers.
Afrikaans is my first language - I'd love for you to do a whole episode on the civil issues in South Africa (and other countries) with relation to Afrikaans, and also other languages... It would be interesting to see what your research comes up with.
Well when Webster wrote the first American dictionary, he wrote out a different pronunciation for Americans...but before that Americans had British/English accent
The Irish Language functionally died out after the famine. Before the famine, the Irish language was spoken amongst the tenant farmers and labours as well as musicians and poets (who were the poorest members of Irish society at the time). However the Irish language was on great decline with the general population, people who lived in cities and large villages mainly spoke English. English was also spoken by land owners and the richer side of the population. After the famine the poorest either left Ireland or died. It is shame that the language is gone. but like many great things it died along time ago. I'm Irish, lived my whole life in this country I love and have never met anyone who only speaks Irish. So to conclude it isn't just young people as the video my suggest.
James Mccloskey The Irish lanhuage isn't dead and is still the second most spoken language in Ireland. I even met a Dutch woman who learned Irish in the Netherlands and came over to Ireland to hear Irish people speak it. I admit that the language isn't in a great place at the moment but the amount of people who take higher level Irish for the Leaving Cert is growing, and slowly the amount of young people that listen to music in Irish or speak Irish is growing however older people in the country don't show the same interest and enthusiasm in the language. Hopefully more work will be done to grow the language again. Tír gan teanga, Tír gan ainm.
I'm afraid ,having spent most of my time in Cork, Dublin and Kenmare, I haven't seen much sign of a resurgence or resurrection of the Irish language. However I do know that Irish is actually now the third most spoken language after English and Polish with native french and Spanish speakers in hot pursuit. Here is a link for reference: www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-now-the-third-most-spoken-language-in-ireland-after-english-and-polish-145200025-237438651.html As for young people and interest in the Irish Language, I would say (Having done my Leaving Cert in 2010) that Irish was not a particular popular subject. Perhaps, depressingly, quite the opposite. Maybe there has been a big change since then and people in there teens are different now. but at 23 I can't say.
James Mccloskey I don't have a link to a website but you'll find it on RTÉ or another newspaper. There was a survey done last week that show about 40% of the population can understand Irish and that young people speak it more than older people. In my Irish class there was a mixture of people who loved Irish, hated Irish, those who wanted to get better, and those who just didn't care.
NEXUSELITE97 That's very interesting! maybe times have changed. Although I wonder how much Irish the 40 percent of the population know. What is really interesting is the young-old divide is opposite way around to what I would expect.
even though im not native american, i always felt bad for them so i decided to learn Ho-Chunck, which only has 60 native speakers, and all of them are old, so sadly i dont know how much longer this language can hold on
Very cool stuff. Can't wait until tomorrow's Web cast. I have an unrelated question for you Trace, what does the bottom half of your shirt say? lol. It's got me wondering. 😊
I remember in high school some 10+ years ago people kept saying that Afrikaans was a dying language. I see now that this was just people expressing their fears of change after apartheid and probably frustration at not doing well at it as a school subject too (this was me btw :P ) , but every few years this "rumour" and discuss still keeps popping up. I doubt it will happen. There is too much boer pride and it really is the cross over language between cultures here. Its hard to not find someone that doesn't speak/understand it even in the family with an African language as their home language
I think the reason we don't have more words for love isn't because we have a limited language, it's because western culture reserves love for very specific relationships. If we felt actual love for friends as opposed to just a deep attachment, we would have come up with words for those feelings.
Yess more on Afrikaans please! In the UK each nation's language is pretty much dying out. Welsh, Scottish, and Irish young people learn their languages in school but after that they never really have to use it. I once voluntarily took Latin, it's fascinating to see how similar it is to all the romance languages
in South Africa, unless you live in a 100% Afrikaans community, you don't choose to do Afrikaans but the state forces about 60% of the population to learn it in school as a preservation of culture. In other words, if you are a South Africa citizens you are forced to do English and Afrikaans or Zulu, you are not allowed to do a non-South African language in school.
Those are not the only dead/dying out languages in the UK(and crown dependencies),there's Manx(Spoken on The Isle of Man),Cornish(Spoken in Cornwall),Jèrriais(Spoken in the Baliwick of Jersey),Guernèsiais(Spoken in the Baliwick of Guernsey),Sercquiais(Spoken on an island named Sark in the Baliwick of Guernsey),and the now the extinct Auregnais(Formerly spoken on an island named Alderney in the Baliwick of Guernsey)
The one thing i like about spanish, my mother language, is that we have the exact right ammount of words for love: 2. Te Quiero and Te Amo. Quiero, querer, it's kinda more than appreciation but less than love. It's what you say to a friend, a cousin your father or a pet. Amor, te amo it's what you say to your girlfriend/boyfriend.
It's nteresting to consider how digital translation technologies might affect language evolution in the long term. Will it accelerate or decelerate the loss of language diversity?
Hi! How's it going? I'm studying English with your amazing show. I love it very much and I appreciate your work sincerely. Thank you very much and hello from Russia.
I live in Wales, in the UK. Pretty much everyone you will meet speaks English here but we were forced, by law, to learn Welsh in our teen years. It sucked
Arc Kocsog A language is hard to be exciting to learn if it isn't even used by it's supposed native speakers and enforcement just ads to the demotivation.
Yeah John is right. Hardly anyone can speak it, and most that can also speak English so it's unnecessary. It's not the nicest sounding language either (but don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to be able to speak it)..
I want the language preserved but when it comes to the practicality of it, it's genuinely worthless. I'm of Irish and Serbian descent and would love to be multilingual but us British and Americans are notoriously bad for learning other languages because English is useful anywhere on the planet. I'm thinking of learning another language though. What would you recommend? Don't say Welsh ;)
The only dead language i have tried to learn is Old Norse, on my own, but the grammar is so complicated that beyond a few words, and memorizing a few lines of ancient poetry, I have had no real success.
I had to learn sanskrit as a 2nd language in high school. It is right now classified as dead but it is the root of most current Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu and Bengali and has links to many old European languages. Many texts of science and philosophy in India were written in it in the ancient times. Even though there are currently no native speakers of sanskrit, it is relatively easier for Indians to understand it to an extent as the current languages were derived from it.
In english though, you have to describe with effort. If you make multiple words for different things, that's lazy. You aren't trying, you're just saying a word as empty as the word love is alone. But using description, something as small as "I really love you," shows effort, be it small, or large, like in Romeo and Juliet. "But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she: Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were! She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? Her eye discourses; I will answer it. I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks: Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes. To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven. Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!"
Joseph Stassup I'd disagree. Compare these three sentences: "I love you" he said. "I love you" he muttered. "I love you" he howled. Each of these words are referring to the same thing - speech. You get a lot more richness in writing if you have a more specific word rather than a general one. I'm a writer so I'm always by my thesaurus looking up more interesting ways to say things.
simply.s Or you describe it, and take up more writing space, creating a longer book. If Tolkien just used different words rather than describe what's going on, the LoTR trilogy would be one book.
Joseph Stassup That's really not how literature works. It's never a race to write a longer book, probably quite the opposite considering it has to go through editing. Quality is paramount to quantity. No one wants to read a lengthy and convoluted paragraph. Especially because we tend to have short attention spans. It is completely possible, and quite a skill, to be concise and descriptive. It also holds more effect: "he shouted loudly" and "he yelled" mean the exact same thing, but the latter is more clean, crisp and precise. Particularly because there isn't just one way to shout loudly (he could be roaring, screaming, wailing.) Being succinct also allows the writer to use the rest of his sentence to describe other things. If you've ever written an essay or read an article for example, you'll notice the aim is to say exactly what you mean in as little words a possible. Unnecessary words just make for convoluted reading.
***** You can write a full a novel without over-lengthy descriptions :) but agreed, it's all about skillful use of language. It has to be purposeful, not just for the sake of writing a longer book like Joseph Stassup suggests
I've been learning Irish for ten years, and I can say without a doubt that the French and Spanish I've been learning for only two years now, are almost stronger. If it weren't for my love of languages I would long have given up on trying to learn Irish, as with many of my fellow classmates. There is no real effort made by most teachers or schools to get students to actually speak it, which is the only way you're going to really learn a language. We are just taught to learn a few phrases and regurgitate it onto a paper during a test, nothing about the culture, nothing about why we should learn it, just remember these phrases and you'll be fine. I've heard my classmates say many times "why should we even bother, we can speak English" or "Irish is a dead language" or "nobody even uses it" even the Gaeltachts are going into decline as more and more young people prefer English. Irish is dying, and it's because few Irish teachers bother to try and give their students a love of the language.
when he said in Arabic there are many ways to describe love I paused the video and tried to think of the "many ways to describe love" I came out with NOTHING and I'm a native Arabic speaker .. so if anyone knows about the different ways to describe love .. please tell me
Lauren Stam Engels volgt Nederlands. English comes after Dutch. NL: Bedankt dat je me daar aan helpt herineren... "Lol" is trouwens Nederlands voor "fun", om iets positievers te noemen. EN: Thanks for reminding me... by the way"lol" is Dutch for fun, to take a more positive example.
But perhaps the idea of having only one word for something, like you were saying in the case of love, is possibly a situation of Homonym, where the word love has multiple meanings which do have to be gleaned from the situation. Perhaps the word love does in fact have the meaning of familial love, and the meaning of romantic love, and the meaning of the love of inanimate idea. I might be wrong, but its a valid thought which should be considered.
I'm originally from the Czech Republic, and the Czech language is definitely dying, slowly but surely. Almost everyone in the Czech Republic is multilingual and speaks at least English or German or other languages in addition to Czech. So few outsiders study Czech as a second language because native Czech speakers learn other, more dominant languages to fit in with the more dominant countries. And not very many people are interested in learning Czech because why learn Czech when they can learn English, German, French, or other Western European languages? Also Czech is a difficult language for non-native speakers who don't speak a Slavic language to learn. And the people of Czech Republic are having few children; the population of the Czech Republic is decreasing as a result of decreasing birth rates, so the number of native Czech speakers is also decreasing.
I've learned some Latin and old Greek because I had a course about science languages and we use so many words from Latin and Greek in ordinary science!
I had to learn latin at my old school and I hated it 😅 back then i also sucked at english now i am quite good in english and determined to learn an additional language when i finish school :)
**Afrikaans was a creole which evolved from dutch when natives and settlers in inland South Africa and Namibia needed to communicate; it was not artificially created by the dutch as you suggest
English is good at certain verbs, such as hitch, punt, grate. Latin is good for non-verbal nouns. Chinese is good at the addressing of relatives. Addressing mother's sisters is a complete different word from addressing father's sisters.
im from Ireland and I am fluent in Irish .. there are many people who speak it and its great but the majority of people dont even care/dont have an interest in learning it :( kind of the same as welsh and Scottish which is a Shane because they are beautiful languages
just a tiny example. In Hungarian there are 2 different words for "red" depending on what red thing you want to talk about. And that's just the beginning.
I've always seen english as a "technical" language. You don't quite have a whole new word to describe something, you just add a bunch of adjectives in front of it or write a long sentence like this to describe something. I'm all down for creating a database of spoken languages, except for lojban, it can die lol. I wonder what a truly global language will sound like. Will it just be 1 language that dominates with just a few loan words or will it actually integrate the characteristics of different languages together along with vocabulary and be indiscernible from anything before?
I can speak/read/write 3 languages fluently and one of them (my native one) has only 80,000 speakers at most. I use all of them almost on a daily basis, so they all have their uses. :P I use my native language with my family, live in another country with a different language and use English in education and computer all the time. :)
I learned Latin in school. At first I thought it was useless but now I can read and understand French oder Spanish words even though I don't speak those languages.
I'm not really sure how you think Irish is coming back. It's declining in the Gaeltacht regions. The only way you can say it's coming back is the Gaelscoil movement which means that around 7% of schools in Ireland are in Irish.
My old German teacher could speak German, Norwegian, English and Latin (well, he insisted you couldn't *speak* Latin, but he could read and write it at least) fluently.
Arabic is my mother tongue and when I started learning English 4 years ago I was surprised how easy English was.
You mentioned the word "love" which is true in Arabic we have a lot of words describing each meaning of love. One day I was telling my roommate that I love him "as a friend" which is normal to say in Arabic. Sadly because of the lack of words in English he understood it not the way that I meant and he was scared as hell.
Thanks man for the video and stay awesome.
When I was learning Japanese, I came across the word "Asatte" which means "The day after tomorrow". I mostly use English to translate Japanese, so I didn't really understand what why "The day after tomorrow". Until I looked at my own language, dutch, which also got 1 word for it: "Overmorgen".
so it really surprised me that English was lacking this basic word.
jjesss064 I experienced exactly the same thing. I'm a German and Turkish native speaker and the day after tomorrow means in Germany übermorgen, but I realize now that Turkish also does not have a Word for asatte instead people say yarın dan sonra which means literally after Tomorrow.
In Malay we also have the word 'two days after tomorrow' 😊
In Malay :
Tomorrow - Esok
The day after tomorrow - Lusa
Two days after tomorrow - Tulat
It can be really troublesome to speak many languages, though, especially because of the lack of words in some. I mean, French and Spanish are pretty close, that's not an issue, but there are tons of German and Russian words I have massive trouble translating into English, even though.. English has the biggest vocabulary, doesn't it? Considering all the different dialects, etc.
There's also the issue that there are a lot of very interesting words, but they're not being used very frequently, and if you do happen to use them, people give you that weird look like you're just trying to sound clever.
Mina Fed The Unicorns ♥ from what i know
Arabic has 12 million
English has 600,000
Muhammed L4M Woah, really? That's.. oh dear.. I'd love to learn Arabic one day, but that's kind of terrifying.
Mina Fed The Unicorns ♥ Actually it's not that hard , they say it's the second most complicated language, but it's really an easy language to learn
you won't know until you start learning *_^
Chinese would be difficult as it doesn't have many as many words but has several thousand characters.
Mina Fed The Unicorns ♥ You mean words like "handiverliertalzheimermomente", I have been wanting to use that word for ages, just because you can almost never use it.
"Handiverliertalzheimermoment" is a word for the moment you look at your sellphone and see you have a missed call. When you look up the number that called you, and you see the number. You instantly realise that the missed call was you calling your cellphone with a different phone when it was missing.
Is aoibheann liom an Teanga Gaeilge.
I feel it is of great importance that many languages be kept around; I find it very enlightening when I learn something new in Irish, because I suddenly get a new viewpoint on the world that I didn't have before.
I live in Cyprus so in high school we all had learn Ancient Greek alongside the modern.
Another better question would be how many languages did the English Language kill???
Thousands.
Where can I get those science shirts? Each week I can't wait to see the next shirt.
Practically speaking, preserving the diversity of language will help preserve different ways of thinking since speaking a different language changes how you think. The more ways of thinking , the more probable that someone will be able to invent warp drive someday.
loving this series about language! i cannot believe i only just found out about this channel
The thing about Irish people not speaking Irish is that the State really forces it on us and the dissuades a lot of people from learning it. Only 4% of the country are fluent in it and I have no interest in learning it when I leave school because I was never given a choice in learning it.
actually there is 60 different words for love in arabic, one for each kind or intensity of that feeling.Classic Arabic poets made a good use of those .
This is my favourite week of TestTube Plus yet!
love this channel, but I wish it went more into depth. I wanna know more
***** check out the ethnologue site and the unesco site for info on endangered languages. check out wals.info for more info too. This site is a bit more complicated if you don't have a background in linguistics.
"I really love you, I sort of love you, I love you as a friend". One could say "I adore you, I like you, and we're friends". The love of missing someone could be said as "I miss you". Why do you need a word that is a variant of love, but means "to miss"???? So, an additional word in the vocabulary is by itself a virtue? You're using a single word either way. The Inuit have many words for snow, but unless you need to reference "snow in the mouth" on a daily basis, all the extra words can really just distract people from learning other things.
I am currently learning Ancient Greek (More specifically, the Attic dialect). People never really get why i'm taking a language that no one speaks anymore, but it's so cool to see how many of our current words stem and evolve from these languages. Plus, so many influential books in history (New Testament, histories of war) were originally written in ancient Greek. Sometimes it's best to be your own translator!
I studied Classical Latin and Classical Greek at school, and now I study Italian and German at university. So, I know my way around languages, yet I struggle to think of Latin and Greek as dead.
If dead means there is no body of active native speakers, then Latin is still living in the Vatican State and Classical Greek lives on in some Southern dialects of Italy.
However, these languages aren't truly dead when our modern words fall back on them. For example, our commonly used word today for television derives from the Greek Tele- = distance/far and the Latin past participle from the verb to see, video-> viso=>vision. Hence we have tele-vis-ion.
Alternatively i-Phone derives presumably from i= intelligent or whatever Apple's logic was, and phone comes from the Greek 'phone` ' for sound/voice.
Last example: Computer is a compound of the Classical Latin words, words used by Cicero and Caesar, 'cum' =with and 'putare' =think, consider, Rendering 'putare' as simple a stem form without conjugation we have 'put-'. If we add the Latin operator suffix of '-or' and put the words all together, we have cum+put+or. Vowels notoriously change in languages, so one quick adjustment of 'cum' and '-or'we have 'computer', literally meaning in Latin, < a together thinker >, which in essence is what a computer is. It's a device that does thinking altogether until the process is complete.
So, if these languages remain active in a small group, and forever are relied upon for the creation of new words in our supposed quasi "living" languages, can they truly be dead or are they simply dormant? Even a dormant volcano will spew some proof of life now and again.
Great series and great talks! I look forward to the next installment :)
I took Old English in university for fun, and it's a really cool language. It was funny because every time I told people about it they thought I was talking about Shakespearean English. Then I'd say, "No, that's modern English," and their minds would blow. Haha.
Do a history on Mercenaries/Private Military
Ann Lee Great Idea
dope
Ann Lee Modern or ancient?
I assume modern because of PMC
history as in all of their history
past, present and future
Ann Lee To include the Prussians.
"Imagine if we had one word to describe all the colors in a sunset, and you knew what I meant."
*drum roll* Sunset. *mic drop*
I was raised speaking Scots, which is definitely dying. Give it three more generations and it sadly will probably be gone.
My parents spoke scots but failed to pass it on because they felt it would be usless skill in later life
Matthew Skilling Yeah thats really common and is why it's dying. I don't think I know any children who know Scots beyond the obvious few words.
then y don't u teach ppl how to speak Scots
S'up Dawgs Its more the fault of parents. In Scotland the only language you *need* to know is English, so parents don't bother speaking Scots around their children or teaching it to their children.
as a dutch person i find afrikaans surprisingly easy to understand...
infrieser as a afrikaans speaking person i find dutch surprisingly easy to understand... ; )
Jaco Barnard Wat is het, voor jou, raarste Nederlandse woord dat je ooit tegen bent gekomen. Het raarste Afrikaanse woord voor mij is "touwtjesbroekie".
When you said that about the world becoming duller... I couldn't help but think of entropy and the tendency to thermal balance, about how the Universe is going to end up still, balanced and unchanging. I can't help but feel like it's all related. Like everything tends to that.
I'm falling in "love" with this series about languages. Language learning is my life.
I can't speak any dead language nor endangered language yet, but I intend to study and help preserve Manchurian (this language has about 30 native speakers nowadays), Tibetan and Javanese.
I'm from Sardinia, an island in Italy. We speak 5 different dialects, plus normal Italian, but we can't understand each other depending by the area where they speak a different dialect from mine.
It's kinda sad how many unique language families are dying. Especially in North and South America.
Also in parts of Asia and Africa.
Why is that sad? That's a sign of Evolution. Let the past die and bring us the future.
John Uit het Broek Knowledge can exist and be transferred to any language. We only become dumber when we decide we no longer care to learn about the Reality we live in. And why is culture important at all? Culture didn't bring us the airplane or modern medicine. An advancement in our collective knowledge and science did that.
Sprechen Sie Deutsch?
John Uit het Broek Not today. Today, we are much better at translating languages. Is it wrong to change who you are?
@@tasheemhargrove9650 If you were fluent in more than one language you'd know that some things cannot be translated. Abolishing words or entire languages is not evolution, it's newspeak like in "1984". It would also deprive people of the intimacy and privacy of their own ethnicity
@@ronaldonmg I don't even remember this post or what this video was about. But all I'll say is that words, in any language, are made up. Words are slightly similar to trends, like the fashionable clothing brands of the day. The collective group of speakers of the language develop norms, and trends arise which lead to the creation of new words/phrases, or re-defining of already existing words/phrases.
If there isn't a word or phrase in a language that represents a particular concept, it is most likely due to native speakers' lack of experience with that concept. But there is nothing inherent about the language that prevents certain concepts or ideas from being expressed. If a language goes extinct, that does not necessarily mean that some concepts expressed in that language will never be expressed in any other language, or cannot be expressed in every language.
I am surprised you didn't talk about the Aboriginal languages in Australia and the amount there are
One of my favorite Japanese-exclusive words is "isagiyoi," an adjective describing the noble act of casting off that which will only spoil if kept; some examples would be the cherry blossom trees losing their petals in the spring, or a samurai commiting seppuku after a dishonorable act.
I am Circassian and although our language isn't dead, it might as well be. We are an ethnicity in diaspora, removed from our homeland in the Caucasus mountains where many of my relatives still live and speak Russian. Many live in Turkey but my parents lived in Jordan where they spoke Arabic. I was born in the US where many in our community (including myself) obviously spoke English, Arabic because we are raised in Islam, and tried learning one of three dialects of Circassian, either Adyghe, Abzakh, or Kabarde. Needless to say, things are a little complicated and uncertain in our culture.
I think the Caucasus is so interesting, especially from a linguistic viewpoint! It's a pity that those languages are slowly dying out...
Matt G
I am trying my best to learn some of it, but I agree. I love the culture and I am 28 and just rejoined the dance group in my community because I learn so much about our heritage through it. There is a saying among my people, "a warrior cannot know how to fight if he does not know how to dance!"
*****
That's awesome man!
I would like to visit one day, if I have the money, I have seen some dance of the Caucasus I think its called Lezginka? It looks so cool, I especially like the costumes! That kind of culture should be preserved. :)
Matt G Nothing makes me more proud and hopeful than to hear an outsider sharing their love for my culture. Thank you for reinstilling hope that we might survive. Lezingka is one my personal tribes close cousins, but yes, very much the same thing! I am a Adyghe tribe but I was born in the US. I haven't been to the homeland but I have been to Jordan and Syria where much of our Diaspora live.
Take care, brother!
*****
You are very much welcome!
I'm sure you will survive, if there are people like you that preserve the beautiful culture!
Take care bro!
I remember a lesson in high school where the teacher was saying that Tagalog has no word for snow (because obviously we don't have snow in the Philippines). Our word for snow is borrowed from Spanish (nieve), which becomes niyebe.
But that we have separate words for every kind of rice because it's part of our everyday life.
Rice that's unmilled - palay
Rice (milled) - bigas
Cooked rice - kanin
Burnt rice - tutong
Leftover rice - bahaw
Rice porridge - lugaw
Fried rice - sinangag
Rice that fall out of your plate - mumo
Sweetened rice - biko
English also has some ways of describing or categorizing things that some other languages don't have. For example, in Chinese, all fungi are categorized as vegetables. There is no word for fungus in Chinese. There is a word for mushroom, but since they have no word for the fungus family, it's considered a vegetable.
I would TOTALLY be interested in you doing a separate mini-series on languages like Afrikaans that have an oppressive/unique history
About that love example: I actually prefer having fewer words, but the ability to combine them to create an infinite variety of meanings. In my opinion, this way of expression is far superior to having thousands of niche words that many people (especially foreigners) don't even know, thus can't understand.
That is the only thing I really like about German. If I don't know the right word to describe a situation, I can just take 3 or 4 simple nouns, melt them together and create exactly the word I need. Only disadvantage is that words get really long and Google fails horribly trying to translate them^^.
The thing about "love" is that we (culturally) don't even have a good idea what that emotion is, and we have a habit of attaching it to other feelings like friendship or eroticism or novelty or simple enjoyment. This gives us unproductive and sometimes destructive reactions to certain events, and we end up having a hard time understanding why. It's not so much that we need language to describe each combination of love+otherFeeling, but that we need to establish language for-- and awareness of what is actually going on there.
Still watch it in August 2017 :)) so informaive, LOVE this channel (I have to say that cause I don't have any word meaning more or less)
Killer channel Trace!
I hope you are gonna have a bit on Esperanto.
I really love this channel. I speak English (Brooklyn), Haitian Creole (My mom), Spanish (My father), and now I can say I've mastered Portuguese (Do Brasil) I want to pick your brain.
I studied Latin in high school solely o be able to pick up the Romance Languages easier and it vastly helped to improve my English grammar too. One of my best friends studied Ancient Greek (I know it's not technically dead) and that was a massive pain.
I learned Latin my freshman and sophomore year of high school, i took it as elective but it has really helped me learn other Romance languages like Spanish, French, and Italian!
India have 23 official languages. More than 100 recognizable languages and over 5000 dialects. So it's a language soup. Most of Indians understand at least 2(English and their mother tongue). I, for example, understand English, Bengali, French, Hindi and Sanskrit
I was taught ASL along with English when I was young. I also lived in Germany at the time but am only now learning German to go back.
I also am learning Latin kinda, because I am a medical student and just knowing what the terms that Form most of the basis of medical terminology is helpful.
I'm very very into etymology so learning what words are connected (like lactation and galaxy) is really helpful in me actually learning what a word means or how it formed and is used or was before.
(the word "galacto" means "milk" and is the basis of both lactation, the process of creating milk, and galaxy, resembling milk. unsurprisingly it's because we are in the "milky way" galaxy which is said to resemble milk but I don't see it myself.
there are few medical terms that aren't from Latin. like anorexia is Greek for without appetite. but the vast majority of terms I'll need are Latin based. I got a bit of help with my medical Terminology class, but right now I'm informally teaching myself as I start to wonder. and later when I can I'll more formally teach myself. )
I actually forgot ASL though so I need to relearn it. only a few commonly used signs are still with me on a level that I can understand. the difficulty is I have a very hard time seeing subtleties so actually seeing what someone else is saying is really hard. only the big overt gestures like in "thank you" can be easily read. I think that's part of why I mostly forgot it.
I wanted to learn Japanese back in highschool, but the teacher who did it stopped it the year I entered highschool.. Apparently they weren't doing a very good job at it either from what others have said in retrospect.
The biggest problem I've had when it comes to learning a new language, is the cost barrier. Sure there are resources out there that you could use to learn to speak a language. But the problem with that is, they are effectively just literature. You need more than a 'book' to learn to speak a language, you need a coach that knows how to speak. There are very nuanced qualities that you just don't learn from a book, but from actively speaking with someone who knows the language.
I still would love to learn Japanese, their culture as a whole is a big fascination for me, from pop culture, to mythology, to even the ins and outs of day to day life. But from what free resources I've seen out there, they either don't cover eastern languages (or they cover only Chinese of them), or the resources aren't that good. =\
Today we learned that Trace has both a girlfriend and a wife to love. =D 7:35
polyamory \m/
Or are they one and the same? :O
3somes 👸👸🤴
In context to the series, it's a pity you have not mentioned phonetics. Many thanks for the Afrikaans references, I am a native speaker of it and proud of my language. Currently I am learning seTswana, an offical language here in South Africa... Polyglot, here I come =]
08:29 I got news for you the word for the colors of the sunset is sunset. You can picture the colors, because you know the concept and the word sunset.
I had to learn HEbrew, which is one of the only effectively dead languages to be revived in a major way. (Even if Moern HEbrew differs from Classical in many ways, including basic word order.)
I learned Latin but not spoken, only written. It helped with my SAT's and helps in every day life understanding language.
in arabic we have many words to describe how deep in love you are. mawada\wed, taim, heyam, hub, eshq, shaghaf and much more but in english they are all translated to love. for example gharam means love accompained with obsession and torture. heyam means being so in love that you lose your mind and go wandering looking for your beloved till you potentially die.
I also do believe Turkish is like that too. It too has many words for love but the only word for to love is sevmek. I'm taking about the nouns. As in Arabic, the word that sounds very familiar to Turkish speakers will be عشق because it sounds like aşk. I also spoke some Turkish most of the time and more than Japanese between January 2015 and January 2016, but I still barely learned any of it. I was just watching some cartoons from Turkey including Leliko where they can actually teach vocabulary words to children and help make their brain grow and get smarter as well. In Japanese, sometimes in anime they use a synonym so now I'm sure for certain I have to learn all the words. By this point, I'm watching Dragon Ball and I hadn't seen the results yet, probably because I'm also used to fast speech and had been learning a lot before then, but they speak more slowly and clearer and I love the narrator's good sense of Japanese vocabulary. If I do say so myself!
"I love beer. I love bowling. I don't want to cheapen the meaning of the word." - Al Bundy
i live in wales and i know about 3 people who speak welsh :P they try to teach the basics in schools but nobody really picks it up
in my oppinion a language has to be an efficient way of cummunication. it sould be easy to learn as well as precise in describing things.
with those two requirements in mind, there is no need for 20 different forms of "love" when you just can combine an adjective with the word "love" and say the same thing.
Trace very nice to hear you interest in Irish (Gaeilge) language. Most people are ignorant to the fact we even have a language. Also Gaeilge is an extremely oild language, old of the oldest in Europe if not the world. Go raibh míle mhaith agat a chara. (Thank you my friend)
Multilingual person. Not easy because sometimes one of the language is not enough. I feel inadequate and end up saying "that's it, I don't get the point, my ability to understand the language ended" and i get a reaction of "you don't focus enough, you don't even try to understand" damn it, i say that sentence because i literally don't get your point, find a synonym or definition because I don't get the material. Also i translate some stuff from one language to another and sometimes some words don't have exact meaning at that point i dig whatever the material is. Also if the material is faulty the translation is faulty too. The ending product after the process of translating is mine but if the material is faulty so the translation is too. Also mixing the words daily, not even getting into that...
i know this has nothing to do with the topic but i was hoping that you could do a series on the immune system. how it works its evolution and auto immune disorders. I'm currently reading on book on this and i think i brief over view would help me understand it better.
I've studied Latin and a bit of the revitalised Hebrew. I'm Swedish and thus a native speaker of Swedish as well as I've studied English and French. My experience is that I've been able to split up a Swedish word in to something that I can understand better due to my studies in Latin, French and English.
Sucks that there are not many fluent speakers of my native language. Darn residential schools.
Although Arabic has a lot of different words for love, in practice the most common word is even more generic than ours, and it's used to describe loving or liking depending on context.
Arabic is actually such a wonderful language. Very comprehensive. Tough, but simple on its own way. I'm not religious person at before, and then this language taught me how possible about supernatural existence like god and immaterial things in very logic way when it's hard to understood in english or japanese. Philosophically, It presents to comprehend spiritual world in the way english or other language can never imagine. This language can catch every single meanings in mind by words that you may just silent because words limits in other language. I plan to comprehend iran language after this language. Middle east is not like what anchors on tv or modernization told us.
I had to learn Latin and Ancient Greek side by side with regional Greek, mainstream Greek, English and French. All this in just 3 years. They really were expecting too much from high schoolers.
Afrikaans is my first language - I'd love for you to do a whole episode on the civil issues in South Africa (and other countries) with relation to Afrikaans, and also other languages... It would be interesting to see what your research comes up with.
I want to see a video on why Britons sound so different from the U.S. when it was the Britons that colonized the first 13 colonies.
Thoughty2 did a video on that semi-recently if you're interested
Well when Webster wrote the first American dictionary, he wrote out a different pronunciation for Americans...but before that Americans had British/English accent
MangekyoItachi625 I am interested, is "Thoughty2" the name of the channel?
+nappybiscuit Yes
+nappybiscuit The video is called "Why Do We Have Accents?" with a thumbnail picture of a stereotypical French guy
The Irish Language functionally died out after the famine.
Before the famine, the Irish language was spoken amongst the tenant farmers and labours as well as musicians and poets (who were the poorest members of Irish society at the time). However the Irish language was on great decline with the general population, people who lived in cities and large villages mainly spoke English.
English was also spoken by land owners and the richer side of the population.
After the famine the poorest either left Ireland or died.
It is shame that the language is gone. but like many great things it died along time ago.
I'm Irish, lived my whole life in this country I love and have never met anyone who only speaks Irish. So to conclude it isn't just young people as the video my suggest.
James Mccloskey The Irish lanhuage isn't dead and is still the second most spoken language in Ireland. I even met a Dutch woman who learned Irish in the Netherlands and came over to Ireland to hear Irish people speak it. I admit that the language isn't in a great place at the moment but the amount of people who take higher level Irish for the Leaving Cert is growing, and slowly the amount of young people that listen to music in Irish or speak Irish is growing however older people in the country don't show the same interest and enthusiasm in the language. Hopefully more work will be done to grow the language again. Tír gan teanga, Tír gan ainm.
I'm afraid ,having spent most of my time in Cork, Dublin and Kenmare, I haven't seen much sign of a resurgence or resurrection of the Irish language.
However I do know that Irish is actually now the third most spoken language after English and Polish with native french and Spanish speakers in hot pursuit. Here is a link for reference:
www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-now-the-third-most-spoken-language-in-ireland-after-english-and-polish-145200025-237438651.html
As for young people and interest in the Irish Language, I would say (Having done my Leaving Cert in 2010) that Irish was not a particular popular subject. Perhaps, depressingly, quite the opposite.
Maybe there has been a big change since then and people in there teens are different now. but at 23 I can't say.
James Mccloskey I don't have a link to a website but you'll find it on RTÉ or another newspaper. There was a survey done last week that show about 40% of the population can understand Irish and that young people speak it more than older people.
In my Irish class there was a mixture of people who loved Irish, hated Irish, those who wanted to get better, and those who just didn't care.
NEXUSELITE97 That's very interesting! maybe times have changed. Although I wonder how much Irish the 40 percent of the population know. What is really interesting is the young-old divide is opposite way around to what I would expect.
Im in my last year of school in Ireland and Irish is very unpopular though my class has a good ability to speak the language
even though im not native american, i always felt bad for them so i decided to learn Ho-Chunck, which only has 60 native speakers, and all of them are old, so sadly i dont know how much longer this language can hold on
Very cool stuff. Can't wait until tomorrow's Web cast. I have an unrelated question for you Trace, what does the bottom half of your shirt say? lol. It's got me wondering. 😊
I remember in high school some 10+ years ago people kept saying that Afrikaans was a dying language. I see now that this was just people expressing their fears of change after apartheid and probably frustration at not doing well at it as a school subject too (this was me btw :P ) , but every few years this "rumour" and discuss still keeps popping up. I doubt it will happen. There is too much boer pride and it really is the cross over language between cultures here. Its hard to not find someone that doesn't speak/understand it even in the family with an African language as their home language
I think the reason we don't have more words for love isn't because we have a limited language, it's because western culture reserves love for very specific relationships. If we felt actual love for friends as opposed to just a deep attachment, we would have come up with words for those feelings.
Yess more on Afrikaans please! In the UK each nation's language is pretty much dying out. Welsh, Scottish, and Irish young people learn their languages in school but after that they never really have to use it. I once voluntarily took Latin, it's fascinating to see how similar it is to all the romance languages
in South Africa, unless you live in a 100% Afrikaans community, you don't choose to do Afrikaans but the state forces about 60% of the population to learn it in school as a preservation of culture. In other words, if you are a South Africa citizens you are forced to do English and Afrikaans or Zulu, you are not allowed to do a non-South African language in school.
Garth Wormington true
ryan g I know where I live, unless you have a foreign passport, you have to chose two out of Afrikaans, English, or Zulu to learn.
simply.s I eros you.
Those are not the only dead/dying out languages in the UK(and crown dependencies),there's Manx(Spoken on The Isle of Man),Cornish(Spoken in Cornwall),Jèrriais(Spoken in the Baliwick of Jersey),Guernèsiais(Spoken in the Baliwick of Guernsey),Sercquiais(Spoken on an island named Sark in the Baliwick of Guernsey),and the now the extinct Auregnais(Formerly spoken on an island named Alderney in the Baliwick of Guernsey)
The one thing i like about spanish, my mother language, is that we have the exact right ammount of words for love: 2. Te Quiero and Te Amo. Quiero, querer, it's kinda more than appreciation but less than love. It's what you say to a friend, a cousin your father or a pet. Amor, te amo it's what you say to your girlfriend/boyfriend.
It's nteresting to consider how digital translation technologies might affect language evolution in the long term.
Will it accelerate or decelerate the loss of language diversity?
the totally unjustified faith in translation-technology will serve as an excuse to not learn an additional language
A video about Conlangs would be great.
Hi! How's it going? I'm studying English with your amazing show. I love it very much and I appreciate your work sincerely. Thank you very much and hello from Russia.
I live in Wales, in the UK. Pretty much everyone you will meet speaks English here but we were forced, by law, to learn Welsh in our teen years. It sucked
Why did it suck? Why don't you want to speak Welsh if you are Welsh?
Arc Kocsog A language is hard to be exciting to learn if it isn't even used by it's supposed native speakers and enforcement just ads to the demotivation.
Yeah John is right. Hardly anyone can speak it, and most that can also speak English so it's unnecessary. It's not the nicest sounding language either (but don't get me wrong, it'd be nice to be able to speak it)..
But this is part of your heritage. I believe one must be proud of that and make the effort to preserve this unique language.
I want the language preserved but when it comes to the practicality of it, it's genuinely worthless. I'm of Irish and Serbian descent and would love to be multilingual but us British and Americans are notoriously bad for learning other languages because English is useful anywhere on the planet. I'm thinking of learning another language though. What would you recommend? Don't say Welsh ;)
The only dead language i have tried to learn is Old Norse, on my own, but the grammar is so complicated that beyond a few words, and memorizing a few lines of ancient poetry, I have had no real success.
I had to learn sanskrit as a 2nd language in high school. It is right now classified as dead but it is the root of most current Indian languages like Hindi, Urdu and Bengali and has links to many old European languages. Many texts of science and philosophy in India were written in it in the ancient times. Even though there are currently no native speakers of sanskrit, it is relatively easier for Indians to understand it to an extent as the current languages were derived from it.
In english though, you have to describe with effort. If you make multiple words for different things, that's lazy. You aren't trying, you're just saying a word as empty as the word love is alone. But using description, something as small as "I really love you," shows effort, be it small, or large, like in Romeo and Juliet.
"But, soft! what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun. Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon, Who is already sick and pale with grief, That thou her maid art far more fair than she: Be not her maid, since she is envious; Her vestal livery is but sick and green And none but fools do wear it; cast it off. It is my lady, O, it is my love! O, that she knew she were! She speaks yet she says nothing: what of that? Her eye discourses; I will answer it. I am too bold, 'tis not to me she speaks: Two of the fairest stars in all the heaven, having some business, do entreat her eyes. To twinkle in their spheres till they return. What if her eyes were there, they in her head? The brightness of her cheek would shame those stars, as daylight doth a lamp; her eyes in heaven. Would through the airy region stream so bright That birds would sing and think it were not night. See, how she leans her cheek upon her hand! O, that I were a glove upon that hand, That I might touch that cheek!"
Joseph Stassup I'd disagree. Compare these three sentences: "I love you" he said. "I love you" he muttered. "I love you" he howled. Each of these words are referring to the same thing - speech. You get a lot more richness in writing if you have a more specific word rather than a general one. I'm a writer so I'm always by my thesaurus looking up more interesting ways to say things.
simply.s Or you describe it, and take up more writing space, creating a longer book. If Tolkien just used different words rather than describe what's going on, the LoTR trilogy would be one book.
Joseph Stassup That's really not how literature works. It's never a race to write a longer book, probably quite the opposite considering it has to go through editing. Quality is paramount to quantity. No one wants to read a lengthy and convoluted paragraph. Especially because we tend to have short attention spans. It is completely possible, and quite a skill, to be concise and descriptive. It also holds more effect: "he shouted loudly" and "he yelled" mean the exact same thing, but the latter is more clean, crisp and precise. Particularly because there isn't just one way to shout loudly (he could be roaring, screaming, wailing.)
Being succinct also allows the writer to use the rest of his sentence to describe other things. If you've ever written an essay or read an article for example, you'll notice the aim is to say exactly what you mean in as little words a possible. Unnecessary words just make for convoluted reading.
***** You can write a full a novel without over-lengthy descriptions :) but agreed, it's all about skillful use of language. It has to be purposeful, not just for the sake of writing a longer book like Joseph Stassup suggests
I've been learning Irish for ten years, and I can say without a doubt that the French and Spanish I've been learning for only two years now, are almost stronger. If it weren't for my love of languages I would long have given up on trying to learn Irish, as with many of my fellow classmates. There is no real effort made by most teachers or schools to get students to actually speak it, which is the only way you're going to really learn a language. We are just taught to learn a few phrases and regurgitate it onto a paper during a test, nothing about the culture, nothing about why we should learn it, just remember these phrases and you'll be fine. I've heard my classmates say many times "why should we even bother, we can speak English" or "Irish is a dead language" or "nobody even uses it" even the Gaeltachts are going into decline as more and more young people prefer English. Irish is dying, and it's because few Irish teachers bother to try and give their students a love of the language.
when he said in Arabic there are many ways to describe love
I paused the video and tried to think of the "many ways to describe love"
I came out with NOTHING
and I'm a native Arabic speaker .. so if anyone knows about the different ways to describe love .. please tell me
can you do a series on civil issue that effect languages?
afrikaans is a dutch word and its funny to hear you say it in english
+ryan g voor mij klinkt afrikaans een beetje als een vorm van Nederlands zonder echte vervoegingen.
It souds like Ehfrikhans to me :,)
apartheid is Dutch too 😃
it's a Dutch word the same as the word English is an English word. but english evolved from dutch so....
Lauren Stam Engels volgt Nederlands. English comes after Dutch.
NL: Bedankt dat je me daar aan helpt herineren... "Lol" is trouwens Nederlands voor "fun", om iets positievers te noemen.
EN: Thanks for reminding me... by the way"lol" is Dutch for fun, to take a more positive example.
But perhaps the idea of having only one word for something, like you were saying in the case of love, is possibly a situation of Homonym, where the word love has multiple meanings which do have to be gleaned from the situation. Perhaps the word love does in fact have the meaning of familial love, and the meaning of romantic love, and the meaning of the love of inanimate idea. I might be wrong, but its a valid thought which should be considered.
I'm originally from the Czech Republic, and the Czech language is definitely dying, slowly but surely. Almost everyone in the Czech Republic is multilingual and speaks at least English or German or other languages in addition to Czech. So few outsiders study Czech as a second language because native Czech speakers learn other, more dominant languages to fit in with the more dominant countries. And not very many people are interested in learning Czech because why learn Czech when they can learn English, German, French, or other Western European languages? Also Czech is a difficult language for non-native speakers who don't speak a Slavic language to learn. And the people of Czech Republic are having few children; the population of the Czech Republic is decreasing as a result of decreasing birth rates, so the number of native Czech speakers is also decreasing.
I've learned some Latin and old Greek because I had a course about science languages and we use so many words from Latin and Greek in ordinary science!
I had to learn latin at my old school and I hated it 😅
back then i also sucked at english
now i am quite good in english and determined to learn an additional language when i finish school :)
**Afrikaans was a creole which evolved from dutch when natives and settlers in inland South Africa and Namibia needed to communicate; it was not artificially created by the dutch as you suggest
6:47
Could you guys talk about language attrition?
English is good at certain verbs, such as hitch, punt, grate. Latin is good for non-verbal nouns. Chinese is good at the addressing of relatives. Addressing mother's sisters is a complete different word from addressing father's sisters.
im from Ireland and I am fluent in Irish .. there are many people who speak it and its great but the majority of people dont even care/dont have an interest in learning it :( kind of the same as welsh and Scottish which is a Shane because they are beautiful languages
just a tiny example. In Hungarian there are 2 different words for "red" depending on what red thing you want to talk about. And that's just the beginning.
I find languages and how they develope interesting, but I'm also very happy that I mainly have to learn english to speak to most people ;)
I've always seen english as a "technical" language. You don't quite have a whole new word to describe something, you just add a bunch of adjectives in front of it or write a long sentence like this to describe something.
I'm all down for creating a database of spoken languages, except for lojban, it can die lol. I wonder what a truly global language will sound like. Will it just be 1 language that dominates with just a few loan words or will it actually integrate the characteristics of different languages together along with vocabulary and be indiscernible from anything before?
I can speak/read/write 3 languages fluently and one of them (my native one) has only 80,000 speakers at most. I use all of them almost on a daily basis, so they all have their uses. :P
I use my native language with my family, live in another country with a different language and use English in education and computer all the time. :)
Language will continue to evolve just as it always has and we will most likely streamline down to just a couple of languages.
Hey i have question does human memory limited ?
I have had one year of Latin... forgot everything... :-/
+Willem van de Beek I had 6 years of it. That in combination with my polylingual family gives me huge advantages in language learning.
I learned Latin in school. At first I thought it was useless but now I can read and understand French oder Spanish words even though I don't speak those languages.
I'm not really sure how you think Irish is coming back. It's declining in the Gaeltacht regions. The only way you can say it's coming back is the Gaelscoil movement which means that around 7% of schools in Ireland are in Irish.
Komorebi - The light that filters through the leaves of trees.
My old German teacher could speak German, Norwegian, English and Latin (well, he insisted you couldn't *speak* Latin, but he could read and write it at least) fluently.
I am learning Ancient Greek and Latin for 2 years and I have still 4 years to go. I don't really like it but I need to because my school forces me...