As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o) It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
@Sophie McCook how are those related exactly? I don't know of any development in English changing y to th or vice versa, except when confusing the þorn glyph with y.
@@weirdlanguageguy it could in theory be related to spelling influencing pronunciation actually. But "thon" is actually related to yon (since it comes from the+yon)
It's amazing how similar they are to the declensions of der, die, das in German. I'd love to see one more about grammatical case specifically, maybe even leaving the Instrumental in place since it's just hypothesis.
Not really amazing at all, since Old English comes from Anglo-Frisian (Ingvaeonic) dialects of West Germanic. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic
Brilliant! Perhaps unexpectedly to the layman, some of your hypothetical derivations were actually present in official Dutch until 1951 and still are in German.
I picked up German as a child partly from hearing my grandparents, whose parents immigrated at the end of the 19th century. So, I often have used the old dative plural -e ending, and I have gotten some strange looks.
Well, German retains the same genitive case ending (for masculine and neuter "strong" nouns) that became the possessive form in English and... I can't remember any other similarities with German. The "weak" declension's ending -en in indirect cases has nothing to do with the theoretical English -en, the article forms are different as well (der, das, die, des, dem, den), there's also the ending -e in dative, but it's dated.
@@user-mb4ux7xv4j I haven’t lived in Germany for about 20 years. Are ppl in Europe not using it? What do they do instead, say “von ___,” like they’re French?!
I'd wish you good luck on your dissertation, Simon, but something tells me that you don't need luck. I have every reason to think that congratulations are in order!
I once did the same thing for Spanish, working out what the noun declension would look like if the Latin case had survived, but after applying the actual sound changes. Spoiler: you could really see why the case system was lost, the resulting paradigms were a mess
@@riversnake6548 Le palabre en lis frasios estíos lengüe castellane teórique serían extrañe y nosotri encontraríamos lo españolo muy dificiliore habladu, gramática algo similare li alemano.
@@riversnake6548 Podíamos mantener la tría génera también -masculino, femenino y neutro- y decir «unos homo, do hombres; una mujer, due mujeres; uno animal, do animaja». Se freiría uno huevo o do hueva. Se visitaría uno museo o do musea.
@@Correctrix oddly enough italian retained what sounds like a masculine / feminine alternance in eggs (uovo masc. sing - uova fem. plur) although it was really a neuter noun II declension in latin.
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well. I'm from the American Midwest.
It's an interesting thought experiment. I tried something similar a while back, though the vowels were much more reduced and it included final unstressed /m/ becoming /n/ and þ- being extended to the se/seo forms as happened in late Old English. I ended up with: ///// | Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Pl. Nom. | the - the - that - the Acc. | then - the - that - the Gen. | thess - ther - thess - ther Dat. | then - ther - then - then
@@2712animefreak Yep, it's actually a closer match to the old Dutch system used in the early 1900s, because of some similar changes between English and other West Germanic languages. If I wanted to be a bit less conservative on keeping all the cases, I could have realistically added how unstressed English -en was reduced even further. It leads it to collapsing into a system very similar to the modern Dutch or some Low Saxon ones.
I was thinking about all the extra homophones too, and I wonder if other words might have moved out of the way for the sake of clarity, maybe relying on synonyms or something. I mean, /ðər/ can only mean so many things before something breaks.
@@aronocThree years late, but…that feels like a very dialectal issue? For me, and most dialects of English, the /ðiːɹ/ of “thear” sounds very different from the /ðeɪɹ/ of “their,” they’re,” and “there.”
@@tfan2222 They may sound different in isolation, but since they occur in unstressed environments, they're likely to be levelled when reduced. Notice how this happens with "we're" and "were".
Don't keep second guessing yourself dude. This is great content! I grew up speaking English, but lived in Germany for a while in my late teens and it was such a headfuck suddenly having three different articles as well as dative and accusative. I got there in the end, but interestingly common German people don't seem to be too concerned about using the correct gender in normal everyday communication, it's far more important to write it correctly. Lots of people have adopted using just "d" with a shwar sound for "die, der, das" and "num" instead of "eine, einen, einer, einem" although the dative "eines" seems it be an exception. Could be different in other areas of the cournty this is just from the region I used to live in.
I really like the forms you arrived at, and the example sentences feel surprisingly familiar and natural. I wonder if some of these spellings would have been modeled after their reduced forms, especially see->se (like modern the). And I could see unstressed thome spelled as them, or thone as then. Cool idea!
Wow! Why did I find your channel at night? I need to sleep but I want to listen to this such perfect topic. I would listen to these stuff for hours. Thank you for the videos. Perfect!
Yes, please - more like this. Quite enjoyable. Imagining what could possibly be the state of the language now is fun, especially if one has had exposure to multiple languages. What that would mean given the befuddling inability of many to distinguish between their-there-they’re is an interesting idea to pursue, as well. Maybe one day you’ll address issues such as, “what causes the transmogrification of languages more: ineptitude among students, laziness, lack of effective teaching, etc.?” Thanks for all your efforts, Simon.
I am highly fascinated by what you do in these videos. I did all this in uni here in Germany some 25 years ago and I always have been really keen on historical language studies (and still I am) and I really like the way you're doing hands-on videos by playing around with linguistic theories. I wish I had had a chance to watch this when I was a student because reading about it in dusty libraries is the one thing but this is the other! You should become a teacher and do this with your students.
Great video Simon! You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to write a poem (or any kind of artist literature) and take your suggestions to hiw English would today if we kept all the features they had earlier on but lost, translating it into modern English. That would be so interesting to me. What do the others think about this idea?
I like the concept. It is also something that unless you upload it, there would probably be no equivalent video. Pretty much as with most of your videos, though. A very good thing. I'd love to see more videos on hipotheticals. By the way, I loved the twist of going for ' sorry for my new phone' instead of 'sorry for the background noise'. I guess the record Guiness remains intact
Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs? Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case. *) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
Surprisingly understandable, when you put together some examples. As with John Doe, I wouldn't mind seeing some more of these hypotheticals. Anyway, best of wishes for your dissertation.
I’d be interested to know why in English some adjectives and nouns which are spoken with the unvoiced end sound /s/ such as close, house advice etc, change to the sound ending /z/ when verbs. What is it about the voiced sound which makes a word feel more like an action? Where does this stem from? Maybe it’s a similar pattern with cloth/clothe too, although clothes would be an exception there.
It's an example of the fossilisation talked about in the video. The noun derives from the Old English hūs and the verb from hūsian. As Simon said in the video, fricatives were voiced in OE when they ocurred between voiced sounds (most often vowels). So the in hūsian would be pronounced as /z/. The vowels at the end of hūsian dropped off by Modern English, leaving us with house. If the OE phonological rules still applied, the fricative would be devoiced but /s/ and /z/ are both phonemes now so we don't bother devoicing it. The same thing happened with clothe, which derived from clāþian (vs cloth from clāþ).
Good luck on your dissertation! This is really fascinating :) Not sure if I'm the only one having this problem, but I find that sometimes the notes aren't on the screen long enough to read them. I personally find the slide heavy videos hard to follow sometimes, maybe it's just me lol. I still watch them, though. Still love the content haha
Good luck on your dissertation Simon! When it's done, will it be available anywhere for us to look at? (Forgive me if that's a dumb question, I have no clue how dissertations work :P)
Another gem! I'm not keen on the transcription system you're using for modern English, though. Why do they analyse diphthongs as vowel + consonant (semi-vowel). I curious as to what it is you prefer about that. Good luck with thier dissertation.
Dative singular survives fossilised in words like alive (OE on life), as suggested re how house (dat.) could have had a voiced z in pronunciation. One problem not mentioned is that the dat. pl. -um sometimes became -en in ME, and is preserved in names like Nokes (atten okes < at þæm acum), so case endings in -n and -m could well have fallen together in ME even if the overall system had been preserved (though words like seldom look like dat. pl. -um, I think they are re-formations from earlier -en).
Nice to see a new video of yours. Thank the Cosmos that gender and case have (almost completely) disappeared from English! Interesting experiment, though. Thanks!
Thank you for another really interesting and fun video, Simon. I have one loosely related question: Generally, the personal pronouns of the third person "they, them, their" are attributed to be of wholly Scandinavian origin. I just read a text by a guy who said that this isn't necessarily the case and that these forms are actually remnants of the old English plural forms of the articles, "they" corresponding to OE "tha" (sorry, can't do the thorn), "them" being the dative plural form "tham" and "their" being the modern form of "thara". He backs this up by proving that similar forms were in use as personal pronouns before the Norse invasions and can be traced back to OE times. He doesn't deny that the emergence of these forms as the dominant forms was probably strongly influenced by Old Norse and that the process was facilitated by the many confusing forms of the old personal pronouns system that still exist in German (like "sie" meaning either "she" or "they", depending on the context). Also (and this is "original research", or my personal observation), one could argue that German has a similar workaround to avoid the confusion by using the plural articles "die" instead of "sie", "denen" instead of "ihnen" and "deren" instead of "ihres" in colloquial speech. So even the process of actual article forms taking over personal pronoun forms can be seen in other languages. I find this theory very intriguing as it would mean that more forms of the Old English article have survived, albeit probably influenced in sound by Norse. What do you think?
Just one small correction: It's not she/they that's differentiated by context but you/they. "sie geht" (she goes) != "sie gehen" (they go) == "sie gehen" (you go).
@@HenryLoenwind No, "sie" in the singular means "she" and in the plural it means "they". So your example with "gehen" is actually correct, "sie gehen" means "they go". What you mean is the polite form "Sie" (with a capital S) which indeed means "you". So German "sie" actually has three equivalents in English.
Like it! Do you think it might be possible to construct English as it might sound five hundred years from now, by extending any changes we know are currently underway?
Fascinating. In Dutch singular word ending in s sometimes change to z. So 'huis'->'huizen', or 'vaas'->'vazen'. Something similar happens with f and v. So 'beef'->'beven'. This only happens when you have this stronger sounding vowel. In Dutch there is 'a' and 'aa', or 'e' and 'ee', or 'o' and 'oo', or 'i' and 'ie'. Only if the vowel before the s or f is pronounced with the longer vowel it changes from an s to a z or an f to a v
Simon. Every video I watch of yours is a contemplative joy. After your results, people might take your hypotheticals more seriously, so be careful... 😁
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all. I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
7:20 I was thinking they'd all end up with a schwa but you were faster 😀 The Great Vowel Shift seems to have mostly affected stressed vowels, while most unstressed service words tend to reduce to a mere [ə]. As for the [θ] to [ð] shift, I think this also resulted from "weakening". Unstressed syllables tend to cause lenition.
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
Man, do you have a website or something with all these thoughts and ideas written down? I think you should, as it would be an interesting collection to explore for many of us!
*1.* Why would you want a collection of interesting ideas _of a specific person,_ as opposed to a collection of interesting ideas? That's irrational. *2.* As someone whose possessions have been destroyed and thrown away by other people _many times,_ and who's been advised to throw them away on other occasions, and whose possessions have been naturally consumed by weather, worms and mold over the decades otherwise, and who's wasted a small fortune and a huge chunk of eternity trying to preserve them, I'm forced to ask you: weren't you told by everyone that hoarding is a mental disorder? If so, why are you encouraging it here? *3.* We're in the same boat. I absolutely love these ideas too. But that alone doesn't make them good, and I'm sure some professionals would dismiss them as worthless crap. And definitely such respected authorities as my mother, my cleaner, my social worker, and my psychiatrist would. So let me pass our society's wisdom to you and teach you what I was taught: *everything you value is actually rubbish.*
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
2 года назад
I speak german and friesian, so its very good to see that here, because i see how it works
@ It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
2 года назад+1
@@arkle519 very well said. thank you so much. it is a very rich cultural heritage.
You are so articulate and I really enjoy your teaching capabilities and background knowledge you have yourself acquired. You sure you aren't a linguist? I noticed you said "NEE ter" for neuter. Where Americans would say NOO ter. Interesting.
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch. I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
You mentioned the word thon at one point in the video, but said you hadn't come across it in any modern dialects, I have heard people from northern Ireland use the word thon, I don't kow if it's even the same word as you were talking about, nor do I know the origin of it, or the exact meaning, but I think it means the same as that or those, for example thon house, meaning that house, or thon boys, meaning those boys.
This was really interesting. I wonder if "that" would merge with the modern "that" and if "see" would adopt a "th-" based on all the other articles having "th-"
These 'what if' scenarios are a lot of fun. I have spent a lot of time looking at how lost Old and Middle English words would look if they'd lasted until today, so Old English fregen would be frayn = question; niðing would be nithing = villain, and many more. I also made quite a lot of sentences with these words, such as Have you forthborn anything fremeful = Have you produced anything useful?; Carbon smalling is an oughting = Carbon reduction is a duty; these are in the book How we'd talk if the English had won in 1066 (new edition 2020). I am sure some of the worked out updated words could be tweaked - it's sometimes hard to be sure quite how some of the Old English words would have been most likely to have turned out.
Simon can you tell a bit of high german cuz there were many the same changes as in english taking place such as: i - ei, sk - sh, an - en. in verbs endings and so forth.
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This is a fun idea. I’d be happy to see more videos entertaining alternate histories of English
me too!
Tonal English
Absolutely!
@@user-ou1ff6fg6c no please no the language is bad enough
@@yerdasellsavon9232 I think it's a good mix of utilitarian and romantic.
As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
Hello, Indo-European fossils 😄. It's always awesome to meet someone who does not be in the one true timeline (not hese one offenly).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o)
It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
@@brexitgreens Wtf is your about page.
In the NE of Scotland they still say thon cat.
Yes, doric language
@Sophie McCook how are those related exactly? I don't know of any development in English changing y to th or vice versa, except when confusing the þorn glyph with y.
@@weirdlanguageguy it could in theory be related to spelling influencing pronunciation actually.
But "thon" is actually related to yon (since it comes from the+yon)
@@noamto oh, interesting
Scots is still a Germanic language for the most part (with some Goidelic influences)- first time I read Beowulf a lot of it actually made sense lmao
It's amazing how similar they are to the declensions of der, die, das in German. I'd love to see one more about grammatical case specifically, maybe even leaving the Instrumental in place since it's just hypothesis.
I took a whole year of Old English when I was in grad school, and today is the first time I ever heard that there was an instrumental in Old English.
It was only distinguishable from the dative for masculine and neuter singular.of strong adjectives and demonstratives
@@bigscarysteve
By the time consistent, written, records of Old English were being made, it was already falling out of use.
Not really amazing at all, since Old English comes from Anglo-Frisian (Ingvaeonic) dialects of West Germanic. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic
Der Werwolf, den Wenwolf, dem Wemwolf, des Wesswolfes: old german joke.
Brilliant! Perhaps unexpectedly to the layman, some of your hypothetical derivations were actually present in official Dutch until 1951 and still are in German.
I picked up German as a child partly from hearing my grandparents, whose parents immigrated at the end of the 19th century. So, I often have used the old dative plural -e ending, and I have gotten some strange looks.
Well, German retains the same genitive case ending (for masculine and neuter "strong" nouns) that became the possessive form in English and... I can't remember any other similarities with German. The "weak" declension's ending -en in indirect cases has nothing to do with the theoretical English -en, the article forms are different as well (der, das, die, des, dem, den), there's also the ending -e in dative, but it's dated.
@@zoria2718 I saw it most strongly in those final sentence examples:
thome < dem
thone < den
thore < deren
thier < der (wbl dativ)
@@jasmadams Do use the genitive case when speaking German please, we need to preserve it
@@user-mb4ux7xv4j I haven’t lived in Germany for about 20 years. Are ppl in Europe not using it? What do they do instead, say “von ___,” like they’re French?!
I'd wish you good luck on your dissertation, Simon, but something tells me that you don't need luck. I have every reason to think that congratulations are in order!
I once did the same thing for Spanish, working out what the noun declension would look like if the Latin case had survived, but after applying the actual sound changes. Spoiler: you could really see why the case system was lost, the resulting paradigms were a mess
Do you have any examples?
@@riversnake6548 Le palabre en lis frasios estíos lengüe castellane teórique serían extrañe y nosotri encontraríamos lo españolo muy dificiliore habladu, gramática algo similare li alemano.
@@Correctrix wow, estoy contento que dejamos caer terminaciones de casos 🤣
@@riversnake6548 Podíamos mantener la tría génera también -masculino, femenino y neutro- y decir «unos homo, do hombres; una mujer, due mujeres; uno animal, do animaja». Se freiría uno huevo o do hueva. Se visitaría uno museo o do musea.
@@Correctrix oddly enough italian retained what sounds like a masculine / feminine alternance in eggs (uovo masc. sing - uova fem. plur) although it was really a neuter noun II declension in latin.
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
I think, minus the Conquest, English would be much more like Dutch.
There's a book called "how we'd talk if the English won in 1066" it's a good start
People are working on such a hypothetical language - it's called Anglish. The project is detailed on the Anglish Moot wiki, if you're interested :)
@@stevekaczynski3793 ouch 😅
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well.
I'm from the American Midwest.
I've never noticed this before but I do, too.
It's an interesting thought experiment. I tried something similar a while back, though the vowels were much more reduced and it included final unstressed /m/ becoming /n/ and þ- being extended to the se/seo forms as happened in late Old English. I ended up with:
///// | Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Pl.
Nom. | the - the - that - the
Acc. | then - the - that - the
Gen. | thess - ther - thess - ther
Dat. | then - ther - then - then
This is almost identical to German.
@@2712animefreak Yep, it's actually a closer match to the old Dutch system used in the early 1900s, because of some similar changes between English and other West Germanic languages. If I wanted to be a bit less conservative on keeping all the cases, I could have realistically added how unstressed English -en was reduced even further. It leads it to collapsing into a system very similar to the modern Dutch or some Low Saxon ones.
A really interesting hypothetical, but also a helpful tutorial for Old English grammatical gender!
Interesting that we 'almost' ended up with There, They're, Their and Thier in English
I was thinking about all the extra homophones too, and I wonder if other words might have moved out of the way for the sake of clarity, maybe relying on synonyms or something. I mean, /ðər/ can only mean so many things before something breaks.
@@aronocThree years late, but…that feels like a very dialectal issue? For me, and most dialects of English, the /ðiːɹ/ of “thear” sounds very different from the /ðeɪɹ/ of “their,” they’re,” and “there.”
@@tfan2222 They may sound different in isolation, but since they occur in unstressed environments, they're likely to be levelled when reduced. Notice how this happens with "we're" and "were".
Don't keep second guessing yourself dude. This is great content! I grew up speaking English, but lived in Germany for a while in my late teens and it was such a headfuck suddenly having three different articles as well as dative and accusative. I got there in the end, but interestingly common German people don't seem to be too concerned about using the correct gender in normal everyday communication, it's far more important to write it correctly. Lots of people have adopted using just "d" with a shwar sound for "die, der, das" and "num" instead of "eine, einen, einer, einem" although the dative "eines" seems it be an exception. Could be different in other areas of the cournty this is just from the region I used to live in.
Interesting, I think this definitely differs by dialect.
I really like the forms you arrived at, and the example sentences feel surprisingly familiar and natural. I wonder if some of these spellings would have been modeled after their reduced forms, especially see->se (like modern the). And I could see unstressed thome spelled as them, or thone as then. Cool idea!
How you could you think this wouldn't be popular? More like this, please!
Whenever I watch your videos I feel like I've literally travelled back in time a thousand years
Really Fun watch! Hope to see more like this
Another fine job, Simon. This is very interesting work and you are to be encouraged in continuing. Best of luck with your dissertation!
Really enjoyed this one! Please do more hypotheticals.
Very interesting, I hope you do more like this!
I love this style of video: it applies your expertise in a way that's interesting, fun and more digestible for non-linguists. I'd love to see more!
I have never commented in here before Simon, but I do so enjoy your videos. This one, in particular was great fun. Thank you
Very entertaining, very interesting, and very educational. What a great video!
Thanks for all of the amazing videos
Wow! Why did I find your channel at night? I need to sleep but I want to listen to this such perfect topic. I would listen to these stuff for hours. Thank you for the videos. Perfect!
I’ve been waiting for a while for someone to make a video on this
I loved thone video! I would love to see more of these.
this is a great idea. please do more of these
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, it’s fascinating 😊
Great stuff Simon and best of luck with the audition for the reboot of Catweazel!
Interesting idea. Would love to see more like this
An amazing hypothetical, super explanation. Love this content
I really enjoy your content a lot, and it’s probably my favourite videos to watch on youtube.
Yes, please - more like this. Quite enjoyable. Imagining what could possibly be the state of the language now is fun, especially if one has had exposure to multiple languages. What that would mean given the befuddling inability of many to distinguish between their-there-they’re is an interesting idea to pursue, as well. Maybe one day you’ll address issues such as, “what causes the transmogrification of languages more: ineptitude among students, laziness, lack of effective teaching, etc.?” Thanks for all your efforts, Simon.
Another great video, I love this!
I am highly fascinated by what you do in these videos. I did all this in uni here in Germany some 25 years ago and I always have been really keen on historical language studies (and still I am) and I really like the way you're doing hands-on videos by playing around with linguistic theories. I wish I had had a chance to watch this when I was a student because reading about it in dusty libraries is the one thing but this is the other! You should become a teacher and do this with your students.
This was great. More please.
Great video Simon! You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to write a poem (or any kind of artist literature) and take your suggestions to hiw English would today if we kept all the features they had earlier on but lost, translating it into modern English. That would be so interesting to me.
What do the others think about this idea?
Simon please do more of this! I, as a german, love this!
Great video. As others have been saying, it might be interesting to see you make a video on how you feel about Anglish.
I really liked this video. It seems like a really entertaining format so I think you should make more hypotheticals.
I'm really enjoying this channel.
Fantastic videos, by the way. As a fellow linguist, I think your assessment is quite accurate.
This is really cool. Be neat if this was expanded to all noun, verb and adjective classes. Really curious to see the result.
Really enjoyed . Thank you
this video answered a question I had since about 2008, thank you very much!
What was the question you had?
@@Leofwine ... The title of the video
@@xmvziron yeah, pretty much
Brilliant as always, man!
I saw that Jack Adams vid. Is was very illuminating.
I like the concept. It is also something that unless you upload it, there would probably be no equivalent video. Pretty much as with most of your videos, though. A very good thing. I'd love to see more videos on hipotheticals.
By the way, I loved the twist of going for ' sorry for my new phone' instead of 'sorry for the background noise'. I guess the record Guiness remains intact
Very interesting video! Thanks :)
Whoa ive been thinking about this very subject very recently. Pogie vid.
How fun! Thank you for this ☺️
Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs?
Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case.
*) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
Id really like if you did more videos like this in the future
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
Surprisingly understandable, when you put together some examples. As with John Doe, I wouldn't mind seeing some more of these hypotheticals. Anyway, best of wishes for your dissertation.
I love theoretical takes on language! Good stuff 👍
I’d be interested to know why in English some adjectives and nouns which are spoken with the unvoiced end sound /s/ such as close, house advice etc, change to the sound ending /z/ when verbs. What is it about the voiced sound which makes a word feel more like an action? Where does this stem from? Maybe it’s a similar pattern with cloth/clothe too, although clothes would be an exception there.
In Old English, the voiced versions only occurred between vowels. Many of those vowels have since disappeared but left the consonant voicing behind.
Those esses were largely intervocalic in verbs. Even now, we add -es and -ing. Previously, -est, -eth, -èd and -en.
It's an example of the fossilisation talked about in the video. The noun derives from the Old English hūs and the verb from hūsian. As Simon said in the video, fricatives were voiced in OE when they ocurred between voiced sounds (most often vowels). So the in hūsian would be pronounced as /z/. The vowels at the end of hūsian dropped off by Modern English, leaving us with house. If the OE phonological rules still applied, the fricative would be devoiced but /s/ and /z/ are both phonemes now so we don't bother devoicing it. The same thing happened with clothe, which derived from clāþian (vs cloth from clāþ).
Good luck on your dissertation! This is really fascinating :)
Not sure if I'm the only one having this problem, but I find that sometimes the notes aren't on the screen long enough to read them. I personally find the slide heavy videos hard to follow sometimes, maybe it's just me lol. I still watch them, though. Still love the content haha
This was delightful, like the language in an old tale.
Good luck on your dissertation Simon! When it's done, will it be available anywhere for us to look at? (Forgive me if that's a dumb question, I have no clue how dissertations work :P)
I'd just like to briefly chime in on the prospect of more hypotheticals: Yes, please, that was extremely fun!
I found that fascinating, thanks.
Could you do a video about how romance languages like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French would look like if they had preserved Latin cases?
Nice
Another gem! I'm not keen on the transcription system you're using for modern English, though. Why do they analyse diphthongs as vowel + consonant (semi-vowel). I curious as to what it is you prefer about that.
Good luck with thier dissertation.
Dative singular survives fossilised in words like alive (OE on life), as suggested re how house (dat.) could have had a voiced z in pronunciation.
One problem not mentioned is that the dat. pl. -um sometimes became -en in ME, and is preserved in names like Nokes (atten okes < at þæm acum), so case endings in -n and -m could well have fallen together in ME even if the overall system had been preserved (though words like seldom look like dat. pl. -um, I think they are re-formations from earlier -en).
Very interesting video! Should have more views!
I loved that, thank you!
Really interesting video!
You need to do a video about extinct letters and phonetic symbols. Thorn and eth were so cool. The crossed d is awesome too
Thanks Simon. Those are a lot of fun for me as a German to follow.
Great Video!
Nice to see a new video of yours. Thank the Cosmos that gender and case have (almost completely) disappeared from English! Interesting experiment, though. Thanks!
Extremely interesting video. I like the hypotheticals.
Thank you for another really interesting and fun video, Simon. I have one loosely related question: Generally, the personal pronouns of the third person "they, them, their" are attributed to be of wholly Scandinavian origin. I just read a text by a guy who said that this isn't necessarily the case and that these forms are actually remnants of the old English plural forms of the articles, "they" corresponding to OE "tha" (sorry, can't do the thorn), "them" being the dative plural form "tham" and "their" being the modern form of "thara". He backs this up by proving that similar forms were in use as personal pronouns before the Norse invasions and can be traced back to OE times.
He doesn't deny that the emergence of these forms as the dominant forms was probably strongly influenced by Old Norse and that the process was facilitated by the many confusing forms of the old personal pronouns system that still exist in German (like "sie" meaning either "she" or "they", depending on the context). Also (and this is "original research", or my personal observation), one could argue that German has a similar workaround to avoid the confusion by using the plural articles "die" instead of "sie", "denen" instead of "ihnen" and "deren" instead of "ihres" in colloquial speech. So even the process of actual article forms taking over personal pronoun forms can be seen in other languages.
I find this theory very intriguing as it would mean that more forms of the Old English article have survived, albeit probably influenced in sound by Norse. What do you think?
Just one small correction: It's not she/they that's differentiated by context but you/they. "sie geht" (she goes) != "sie gehen" (they go) == "sie gehen" (you go).
@@HenryLoenwind No, "sie" in the singular means "she" and in the plural it means "they". So your example with "gehen" is actually correct, "sie gehen" means "they go".
What you mean is the polite form "Sie" (with a capital S) which indeed means "you". So German "sie" actually has three equivalents in English.
@@thomaseck3210 But only the you/they pair needs to be distinguished by context, the she/they pair uses grammar for it.
I find Simon's talks on historical linguistics fascinating.
Very interesting video!
I want MORE videos that are linguistics filled!
Like it! Do you think it might be possible to construct English as it might sound five hundred years from now, by extending any changes we know are currently underway?
Fascinating. In Dutch singular word ending in s sometimes change to z. So 'huis'->'huizen', or 'vaas'->'vazen'. Something similar happens with f and v. So 'beef'->'beven'.
This only happens when you have this stronger sounding vowel. In Dutch there is 'a' and 'aa', or 'e' and 'ee', or 'o' and 'oo', or 'i' and 'ie'. Only if the vowel before the s or f is pronounced with the longer vowel it changes from an s to a z or an f to a v
Simon. Every video I watch of yours is a contemplative joy.
After your results, people might take your hypotheticals more seriously, so be careful... 😁
id like seeing more similar content.
This is a lot of fun! Very happy to see Geoff Lindsey's SSBE transcription here, I'm a proponent of using it more widely
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all.
I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
I had to comment because your username is my real life actual name and it was very jarring to see
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
More of this please
7:20
I was thinking they'd all end up with a schwa but you were faster 😀
The Great Vowel Shift seems to have mostly affected stressed vowels, while most unstressed service words tend to reduce to a mere [ə].
As for the [θ] to [ð] shift, I think this also resulted from "weakening". Unstressed syllables tend to cause lenition.
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
Thanks for having me on! And it certainly wouldn't help the poor L2 learners!
Man, do you have a website or something with all these thoughts and ideas written down? I think you should, as it would be an interesting collection to explore for many of us!
*1.* Why would you want a collection of interesting ideas _of a specific person,_ as opposed to a collection of interesting ideas? That's irrational.
*2.* As someone whose possessions have been destroyed and thrown away by other people _many times,_ and who's been advised to throw them away on other occasions, and whose possessions have been naturally consumed by weather, worms and mold over the decades otherwise, and who's wasted a small fortune and a huge chunk of eternity trying to preserve them, I'm forced to ask you: weren't you told by everyone that hoarding is a mental disorder? If so, why are you encouraging it here?
*3.* We're in the same boat. I absolutely love these ideas too. But that alone doesn't make them good, and I'm sure some professionals would dismiss them as worthless crap. And definitely such respected authorities as my mother, my cleaner, my social worker, and my psychiatrist would. So let me pass our society's wisdom to you and teach you what I was taught: *everything you value is actually rubbish.*
@@brexitgreens just stop
@@brexitgreens ...
@@MohammedAli-hl4mr I'm glad somebody still reads it. That RUclips comment is my only legacy.
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
I speak german and friesian, so its very good to see that here, because i see how it works
@ are you north frisian?
@@arkle519 eastfrisian, see my channel
@ It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
@@arkle519 very well said. thank you so much. it is a very rich cultural heritage.
This is awsome🤗🎢🎶🎺💡
thanks man
You are so articulate and I really enjoy your teaching capabilities and background knowledge you have yourself acquired. You sure you aren't a linguist? I noticed you said "NEE ter" for neuter. Where Americans would say NOO ter. Interesting.
My brother. Love this content
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
Fascinating. Do you have a video which explains how and why English lost its grammatical gender? Thanks
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch.
I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
You mentioned the word thon at one point in the video, but said you hadn't come across it in any modern dialects, I have heard people from northern Ireland use the word thon, I don't kow if it's even the same word as you were talking about, nor do I know the origin of it, or the exact meaning, but I think it means the same as that or those, for example thon house, meaning that house, or thon boys, meaning those boys.
This was really interesting. I wonder if "that" would merge with the modern "that" and if "see" would adopt a "th-" based on all the other articles having "th-"
These 'what if' scenarios are a lot of fun. I have spent a lot of time looking at how lost Old and Middle English words would look if they'd lasted until today, so Old English fregen would be frayn = question; niðing would be nithing = villain, and many more. I also made quite a lot of sentences with these words, such as Have you forthborn anything fremeful = Have you produced anything useful?; Carbon smalling is an oughting = Carbon reduction is a duty; these are in the book How we'd talk if the English had won in 1066 (new edition 2020). I am sure some of the worked out updated words could be tweaked - it's sometimes hard to be sure quite how some of the Old English words would have been most likely to have turned out.
Simon can you tell a bit of high german cuz there were many the same changes as in english taking place such as: i - ei, sk - sh, an - en. in verbs endings and so forth.