Meanwhile, in America, you'd probably immediately think of the ploughing instrument since it's a common metaphor among Evangelical Christians. (being yoked to Jesus or yoked to a virtuous partner or a bad influence)
@@GuyNamedSeanMatthew 11 28-30 "Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
@@GuyNamedSeanim american (non evangelical) and i've never heard either of those metaphors so i imagine those aren't as well known outside of evangelical circles
The 'hames' was a part of the horse's yoke that it was easy to attach incorrectly, giving rise to another Irish expression "he made a hames of it", meaning he messed it up. "He made a right hames of that yoke, and we were half the morning putting it right again" was the kind of expression my father often used.
Interesting similarity with Dutch where we use 'Zaak' or more formally 'Rechtzaak' for that too. Not to be confused with 'Zaak' meaning store or 'Zaken' meaning Business or 'Zaak' meaning matter 😅
@@bramklinkenberg9140 thank you for this! I'm learning Dutch now for fun and I definitely had not picked up on this yet. I really like how recht is applied to things like the law and things being formally straightforward or literally straight ahead. Dutch is full of amusing literal translations for me as a native English speaker
yoke has a long history in being used as a metaphor for a burden; that's an alternative route it may have been thingified through: thing that burdens you metaphorically > thing that's literally heavy to carry > thing you carry > thing
Yoke also related to Sanskrit YOGA, a practice to HARNESS your mental, emotional & energetic bodies through physical exercises. Ancient Indo-European roots.
Cicero once complained to a friend that people were using the Latin word "penis" wrong ("at hodie penis est in obscenis"), because of course it always meant "tail" and should never mean anything else. "Tail" was actually a secondary definition, but he'd surely have a few words to say about how it got adopted into English.
I love how languages evolve! Its one of my hyperfixations and it always urks me when people are language "purists" bc language has never been pure and is just a reflection of the society and time its spoken in!
It urks me when people act like words have no meaning and that errors are impossible. Teenage girls hate hearing that rules apply to them, doesn’t matter how many people stop fighting them. Wrong is wrong.
@@spelcheak A stuffier grammarian than I might take issue with your misspelling of "irks", your use of "like" in place of "as though", the gerund "hearing" in place of the infinitive "to hear", a comma instead of a semicolon between your independent clauses, and lack of an explicit subject "it" before "doesn't". Even an almost universally accepted contraction like "doesn't" was once widely eschewed and still is by some people in certain contexts. Any set of rules and regulations you can come up with simply won't apply to many other speakers of your language. I'm sure you'll agree that enforcing such rules is absurd, even though they might once have been or might still be meaningful for someone else.
in language wrong is mostly context dependent so whatever you feel is wrong is not necessarily wrong. Linguists will generally say that any speech that's comprehensible to the intended audience is "correct"@@spelcheak
@@spelcheak nah, I just grew up in Appalachia and our dialect is interesting and it led me down the rabbit hole. Language isn't wrong unless you can't understand what we're saying. You just might be classist, most people who are language purists are. Essentially you are saying "you are uneducated" when education HIGHLY depends on the income of your area
Where i'm from (Eastern Pennsylvania) our word for thing is "jawn". I was actually explaining it to a friend out of state yesterday, so the timing of this video is pretty perfect
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn"). A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father." I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
I think “bleaching” is a good word for it because it illustrates how the strong primary *color* of the original word fades away, becoming less distinctive
great video! in brazilian portuguese the word "negócio", that originally meant "business", is used as a word for "thing", I couldn't understand the paths it took to get to this meaning and I never found any explanation, but now I believe it was probably something close to the word "thing", so thank you very much for solving this mystery for me.
It comes from the latin negotium, wich meant work, the word itself literaly means absence of otium, a latin concept that ranged from actualy relaxing to humanitary studies
@@felixfire6583Portuguese actually has that word too in the form of Ócio, it's basically the same meaning as it's Latin root without the humanitary part.
gets weirder if you're here from Minas Gerais, how does "trem" (train) means "thing", no idea, but it means haha, along many other words like "bodega" that meant originally "bar" but is also used as "thing" and other nonsense words we make on the way
I was particularly interested by the mention of how teenage girls tend to be at the forefront of language change. I've seen one or two mentions of this before, but it seems like not enough people talk about it. If we want a glimpse into the future of our languages, we should be eavesdropping on teenagers!
Be careful with that train of thought, though, because it's not like teenage girls as a monolith are inventing new things and _all_ using them. You could listen to teenage girls speaking at some high school in Madison, WI and think "so this is the future development of English" and be totally wrong because it was the innovations that were made by teenage girls in a high school in San Francisco that became dominant. Or rather, it's more like bits and pieces from all of the teen girl sociolects all around the country are coagulated while others are discarded, entirely at random and with literally no rhyme or reason Unfortunately, it's literally impossible to predict any sort of language change with any level of confidence whatsoever
@@aloysiusdevadanderabercrombie8Just to clarify, I wasn't planning to go prowling around high schools to collect data. I was thinking of, like, family members on major holidays, that kind of thing.
@@thatotherted3555 Sure, and it absolutely would be interesting to see the innovations they make, I just don't want people to be disappointed if it's not mainsteam in 10 years lol
There is an additional usage of “yoke” here that I find intriguing. A “mad yoke” is a person you’re unsure of, or acting strangely. As in, “who’s that mad yoke standing in the middle of the road?”
That just means "mad thing". "Yon yoke in the corner" would be mildly derogatory. The most important use of "yoke" that she doesn't mention here is to very specifically refer to an ecstacy tablet.
@@mccluskeytom I've certainly heard people say things like " _That_ yoke in the corner", but never " _Yon_ yoke in the corner"... is that just me, or is that a typo? As for the other usage you mention, you're absolutely right - I'm glad you mentioned it! Anyone who grew up in Ireland since the late '80's who's even broadly familiar with drug and/or club/rave culture would be conversant with this meaning. Should someone in a group of young people getting ready to head out for a night's revelry say "So, who's sorting out 'the yokes'?" absolutely _no-one_ is going to think they're talking about TV remotes, can openers, bulldog clips, or _anything_ like that, although the 'MDMA tablet' usage is obviously derived from the 'thingamabob' meaning. Like sex and money, drugs have always been such a delightfully rich source of slang! It kind of reminds me of what happened with the word 'Crack' (or 'Craic'), although sort of the other way around. As many will know, in addition to its usual meaning of 'split' or 'seam', in Ireland the word 'crack' is often used to refer to 'sport' or 'fun', in the sense of 'good clean - or even, slightly disreputable - fun'. _Slightly_ disreputable, inasmuch as alcohol may - or may not - be involved; but certainly, no Class A drugs! There was even a popular song in the '70's that went "The crack was 90 in the Isle of Man", "90" here being the maximum reading on the 'intensity' scale, for example, "My blood pressure was 'up to 90' " - but that's probably best left for another day's work! Anyway, there are countless tales out there, possibly apocryphal, possibly not, of somewhat naïve Irish tourists or students on working holidays arriving at JFK, Logan, LAX etc at the time the scourge of Crack Cocaine was first starting to become an epidemic and announcing to customs or immigration that they were in America, "Ah, y'know yourself sure, for a bit of crack..!" and wondering how things turned so ugly so fast! In fact, even though this particular Irish usage of the word 'crack' seems to now be much more widely understood internationally than it was in the late '80's and '90's, confusion of the sort mentioned would become such a problem that at least when rendered in written form, the word has largely reverted to its Gaelic origin, 'Craic', the Hiberno~English transliteration of 'Crack' having more~or~less fallen by the wayside..!
@@richiehoyt8487 I have read somewhere that the Irish word craic is not Irish at all, but is a derivation of the English word crack. Its use today in Irish is recognisable in the very England phrase 'cracking'. As in, "That was a cracking dinner-party last night, Jeeves."
@@richiehoyt8487 "Yon" = yonder = what light through yonder window breaks = over there. "Yon yoke in the corner" = that thing over there in the corner = that person over there in the corner. This is a bit of rural Monaghanese, where I'm from. You'd probably hear it in South Armagh and throughout the border region. I enjoyed your study of the uses of the word crack / craic. One minor point - as much as it pains me to admit it, the word is an English import to the island and entered the gaeilge through settler English. The original spelling was "crack".
Okay, so in French, many words can be very generic. The french word for glasses is: "lunettes", always plural, because it would refer to the roundish frames of the glasse. Lunette can mean: a loophole, a toilet seat or a guillotine hole that holds the neck in place. The French word: "bouton" can mean a button like one uses for clothing, but also a flower bud and a zit. In modern French, the word: "bécane" means "the machine I use for work or hobby", and it can thus be incredibly generic. The french word "baiser" as a verb could mean: to fuck, in more old now "to kiss" and in old slang: "to be lynched or executed". Prior to the verb "lyncher" entiring the commonly spoken tongue, "baiser la lanterne" or "à la lanterne" meant being lynched, which now colloqually means to take a collective beating, or getting jumped. In modern French, the word: "déguster" means formally and also informally to consume something delectable, but in a slightly more old-fashioned slang now, it means "to suffer". Many french word to refer to violence are food related. The verb: "Harceler" etymologically comes from "herceler" which means to plow a field for growing crops and making it all nice and straight and equal, ideal for growing crops, most often wheat. "Crapaudine" mean to "cut off the spine of an animal to make the carcass lie flat" also came to refer to a torture method, which did not involve butchering the victim, on the contrairy. Both Russian and French have a history of using informally, until very recently, slang terms to refer someone being victimized would be spoken in active voice.
This sent me down a rabbithole of looking for the origins of all the German words for "thing" I could think of, some of them are very obvious, you already mentioned "Ding", "Teil" also means "part", "Zeug" comes from "ziehen" ("to pull"), "Gelöte" I guess comes from "löten" ("to solder"), though I couldn't find anything on it online. Then there's "Gedöns", "Kram", "Krempel", "Pipapo", "Kruscht" (which I've also found written as "Grusch", "Gruscht", "Grust", or "Gerust", and which probably comes from "Rüstzeug", meaning "armour/weapons/stuff for war"), and probably more that I'm not familiar with. Language is fascinating!
Also interesting how certain dialect words (like Kruscht) become part of the standard language. I would have no idea where Kruscht comes from while I totaly understand Gerust.
Gelöte doesn't come from löten but rather Lot (cognate to English lead) and originally referred to weights on a scale. Kram was originally referring to the tents of merchants. Further etymology unknown. Krempel, interestingly enough, isn't related to Kram or Gerümpel. Rather it's a variant of Upper German, especially Alemannic, Grempel 'retail' from grempeln 'to retail', iterative form of Late Middle High German grempen which is likely borrowed from a Romance language. Compare Italian comprare 'to buy', Old Provencial crompar 'to buy, pay' from Latin comparare 'to compare, match, place together' later also 'to pay with money'. So it's ultimately related to English compare. Gerümpel comes from rumpeln, rummeln, related to English rumble. There so many more. The standard dictionary for German etymology is Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch but it's not freely available. The dwds (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) has detailed etymologies for most lexemes but most valuable is the historical dictionary section (Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Grimm brothers) because some words used to be more common but have fallen out of fashion
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn"). A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father." I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
6:54 i see literally as very consistent meta hyperbole: you could say "everyone knows that" and be more accurate but weak with "virtually everyone knows that" and use hyperbole on that to get "literally everyone knows that"
Really weird that you uploaded this when you did. I rewatched this Irish comedy movie last night, and they kept using “yoke” in this way. I tried to figure out what the hell they meant, but had no luck. On a side note, my mom’s family is French-Canadian. They use “piton” the same way. The word _does_ have an actual meaning in French, but I don’t know if this is a result of semantic bleaching.
Oh, im gonna be chewin on this video for MONTHS. I think my maximum scope is generally a tidge smaller than yours, but this opens up SO many lineage trails! I can't wait to have fully processed it all! Thank you for all your effort posting your brain as often as you do!!!
In Macedonian the word for "thing" is "rabota" which primarily means "work" and "job". It comes from Proto-Slavic *orbota which also means "work" and in turn is derived from the word for "slave", *orbъ. That comes from Proto-Balto-Slavic *árbas which comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos, which meant "orphan".
@@NakariSpeardane Yes, the word "robot" comes from a Czech play in which artificial humans are made in factories for the purpose of certain jobs. Robot then came to mean any intelligent creature or machine made for the purpose of work, though nowadays we'd probably call the articifial people from the play "androids" rather than robots.
Another interesting part about the Swedish words sak (thing) and ting (assembly, court) is that there exist a common saying where we use both to say "things and such", in swedish "saker och ting"
The word for thing in Indonesian is interesting imo as a native myself, it's "Sesuatu" and it comes from se- (prefix meaning a/whole/one from *esa and cognate with Tagalog "isa") + suatu (a determiner close to the meaning with English indefinite article, can also mean "thing".), now what's interesting is that "suatu" comes from se- (the aforementioned numeral prefix) + batu (stone). So the change is like: se-batu (a + stone) > sewatu (one) > suatu (one in Classical Malay) > se-suatu (thing). Also cognate with the number one (satu) that loses its u.
More specifically it came from *sabatu. Malay underwent lenited (?) the sequence -aba- into -awa-, like in *kaban → kawan. sabatu → *sawatu → suatu → satu As a native Malay speaker that's also fluent in Indonesian though, calling "sesuatu" the word for 'thing' feels kinda weird to me. It just depends on the situation. You wouldn't say "Tolong ambilkan sesuatu itu."
The Lithuanian word for "thing", _daiktas,_ seems to have originally meant "sticky-outy bit". Thence "something that _metaphorically_ sticks out, stands out" and then "that thing I mean".
@@40watt53 Yep! It means "from there", and "thither" means "to there". There are also "hence", "hither", "whence", and "whither", which follow exactly the same pattern with "here" and "where"!
also in french 'cause' is still a reason e.g. à cause de ça- to (the) cause of that- because of that, which was borrowed directly from latin whereas 'chose' evolved from it
same in portuguese, we have causa/causo(cause) and coisa/cousa(thing), but it seems that the ones meaning "cause" are borrowed, not inherited, this means that they were learned from latin books by romance speakers, not passed down through their parents/community and so on.
During the development of Old Chinese, speakers of the language had significant contact with speakers of one or more Indo-European languages, and borrowed many words into Old Chinese. Aside from the obvious ones like *mit 蜜 meaning honey and is cognate of the English word mead, and *C.q(r)a 車 meaning and is cognate with the English word car, the word for yoke, *qˤ[i]k 軛, is also borrowed in its original meaning. However, yoke had bleached meaning in Old Chinese as well, *[q](r)ewk 約 meaning to connect, to attach, to constrain, and now usually meaning an agreement, a treaty, a meeting and more. Interestingly, yoke is also cognate with yoga, which once meant to join with the supreme spirit.
And nobody knows why 东西 in a lot of Sinitic languages means "thing." It's not like 南北 broadened, so it's curious why 东西 did. Also, for those who don't know Chinese, those are the four cardinal directions, with 东西 literally meaning east and west and was extended to mean nearby. Perhaps that's one way it eventually got to "thing."
@@weirdofromhalo 東西 is a rather late term to be thingy-fied. Languages closer to Early Middle Chinese all just use the original word for thing, 物 /but/, like the languages of Tsiang-tsiu, Tsuân-tsiu, Amoy, and even Japanese use 物. 東西 likely came from the belief in the 5 basic elements, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The cardinal directions are philosophically linked to the elements, and east represents wood and in association food, and west represents metal. Since wood and metal are the two basic elements that make up most physical things, 東西 became thingy-fied as a word play no sooner than Late Tang dynasty. Some other people claim it came from the fact that most Chinese cities back then had two major markets, referred to as East or West Market, shopping often involve visiting both. I'm not sure which one is more likely.
@@paiwanhan Hokkien/ Fujian/ Minnan languages: 物件 [mikkiã][mekkiã] Wu (Eastern Chinese languages like Shanghainese/ Ningbo/ Suzhou/ Zhenjiang/Hangzhou): 物事 [mezzi] Yue (Cantonese languages) The classifier for any random object 個/个/ became [go][ge] > [ye] usually now written phonetically in informal Cantonese. Interestingly, the classical Chinese word for thing 物 [mAt6] (flat low tone) became 乜 [mAt1] (high falling tone) which is the modern Cantonese word for "what" possibly from "(what) thing?" This is similar to Italian cosa meaning "thing" & also "what?"
May I say that your combination of being an artist, worldbuilder, and linguistics nerd made me smash that subscribe button instantly. You did a great job talking about etymologies.
This was really cool and made me realize my own native lang urdu has this too- (also a hindi word) we have *baat*-- which i just realized is pretty far gone in this process of "thingification" too this root of *bat-/baat* has to do with "speech/telling/talking" like in the verb *bataanaa* (= to tell) and the word *baat*, which is like the simple noun of that root, evolved from meaning smth like "things that are said / speech" to "things talked about" to smth like "subject of speech" and then just "thing that happens" in general, kinda-- like it hasn't quite been 100% "thingified" yet-- you can only really use it for things where it makes sense to say "thing that is talked about", like- "don't smoke, it's a bad baat" ("bad thing" i.e "shouldn't be done") or "it's not that big of a baat" ("not that big of a deal") but not really "that's my favourite thing" (maybe if you were referring to a process/happening that you like?? but not just an object) for an example of the concurrently existing more literal meaning- or "what kind of baat do y'all do" = smth like "what do you people even talk about" (usually chastising, implying that it's distasteful) or "these *baat*s annoy me" = these things / happenings annoy me but it could also mean "these things (that they say) annoy me", if interpreted more literally-- it is 10000% concept dependent. like- if you already were discussing smth, say: "nowadays there's been a spike in cases of bullying at school. this baat really concerns me" then it kinda means both? "this (thing that is under discussion) annoys me" but also just- "this thing annoys me" so yeah! really cool to learn about the connection to how this is really common in all sorts of languages.
Thanks for that piece of knowledge! Many times, learning english as a swedish speaking child, I was annoyed and fascinated by words that sounded so similar in both languages yet meant so very different things. Now I kbow why a few of them are that way!
This is a wonderful video, as always! You probably have heard it already, but you displayed the word דבר backwards. Although your description was accurate.
Tiny nitpick: the Hebrew word for thing, דבר, is spelled backwards in the video (as רבד, meaning layer). Damn RTL. Really interesting video, anyway. Plus your drawing of your grandma is beautiful and the guinea pigs are adorable.
Yeah I checked all the rtl text cause my art program is fussy but I think I just didn't spot that they were different letters ;-; sorry!! And thank you :D
Loved this video! Irish linguisticsc nerd here: The word 'Yoke' comes from the Yola ;anguage of county Wexford in east Ireland. Yola was an anglic language, having roots in Middle English, and the same is to be said for a related language of Yola, Fingallian from the Fingal area of north Dublin. I got super into this stuff a while ago, so here you go.
That’s so fun! In Brazilian Portuguese, depending on the region, you might use “train” or “business” to refer to a “thing”. Like “what’s that train in your kitchen?”, or “can you handle me that business?”
cool stuff, great art! in indonesian/malay we have "benda" (object), borrowed from sanskrit भाण्ड (bhāṇḍa) which has uncertain etymology and plenty of meanings but the relevant one here seems to be "goods/valuables", cognate with tamil வண்டி (vaṇṭi) meaning "vehicle". and then there's "barang" (stuff) which came from a sort of austronesian indefinite marker and coexists alongside it! "barang siapa" could either mean "whose stuff" or "whoever"
Nakari upload day is always a good day, but also, etymology my beloved!!!! Great video, awesome topic- the art you used for the opening and the one for the patreon credits looks v v cool btw
So fascinating 😮 In Dutch there is the word „Lichaam“ and focuses more on the Body and Torso. So English, Dutch and German have the same origin but nowadays different meanings and usage.
4:05 Now you mention it it's very interesting. We still say in Polish "rzeczyć" in the meaning of "to speak" and this term is everywhere in official and legal context but in most other contexts it means a thing or item but also sometimes a cause. It has a lot of meanings. As an example of a word for a thing that got "narrowed" it would be "wihajster" which today means a contraption, lever, something metal, something poking out but originally it simply ment a thing and its origin is German phrase "wie heist er" meaning "what is it called".
oh my god this is an amazing video!! i have no idea how i've subscribed to you already but i LOVE IT! i love hearing about people's interests, and linguistics and how language evolves??? sign me UP! the pretty visuals help SO MUCH, too ... girls with short attention span... i love ur voice, too!!! it has that tone of excitement that keeps me engaged - and is clear you're enthusiastic about the topic!
patterns like these are very good to find out more about earlier languages that the specific meanings may still be unclear, we may be able to follow the string futher
The first thing I thought of watching this, being from Brazil, is how some people from the state of Minas Gerais refer to abstract concepts or concrete "things" as "trem", our word for "train". Pretty much everywhere else in the country the word carries only its literal definition related to the locomotives, except for that one state. This video made me really wonder, for the first time, how that actually came to be...
This makes me curious if there are other language equivalents of "thingamajig" or "thingamabob" where you take a bleached word and sort of "re-dye" it with nonsense ... And also got me wondering about how this thingification relates to taboo and euphemism... The curiosity stokage is high - always the sign of a good vid! Thank you!
In the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais the portuguese word for train (trem) has been thingified which is quite cool since trains are a very new concept so we know the thingification of the word must have started at the very latest in the mid 19th century
In my conlang, which is basically proto world with future technology, the word for thing comes from an emotocon for a computer processor. In my conculture, food is 3D printed with atoms, but to save energy, non edible things are made simply by morphing the computer itself. They are referred to as computers or hilch’lg.
The bit at the beginning about "item" coming from list entries reminds me of the etymology of the word "date." "Date" was Latin for "given," and when sending a letter, scribes would write "date" followed by the day, month and year it was given to the messenger. Eventually "date" came to mean the indication of day, month and year! And as for "data," that comes from the same word. In English, the set of underlying facts on which a theory, proof, or argument is based are called "data," or "givens."
Some notes about French : Chose (thing, object) effectively comes from Latin "Causa", but there is also "cause" which means the same thing it does in English. Machin (thingamajig, weird contraption) effectively comes from Latin "machina" but there's also machine, which means the same thing it does in English. It also used to mean "" ingenious play, imaginative plan or action" in ye olde times
In German you can also say "Scheißteil". Actually means "shit piece", but gets used to refer to anything that you view as awful. These types of insults are in a way a similar thing.
Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese to be specific, has a ton of funny words meaning not "thing" in particular (we have "coisa" for that) but generally "any object you don't remember the name of" - this includes "negócio" (business), "treco", "troço" (both likely come from the same root as "trunk" or piece of wood), "bagulho" (from Latin baculus, or cane, stick), and even my favourite, "trem" (literally TRAIN). We have even created the masculine-gendered version of "coisa" - "coiso", as my mum would often say - "cadê o coiso?" (where is it? / where's the thing?). Thanks for the awesome video :))
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar. A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father." I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
in Spanish the word 'vaina' means sheath, but in Venezuelan Spanish it went to being considered a swear word and now is a general word for thing like 'yoke' we Venezuelans also do that thing Australians do of calling people harsh insults as informal greetings, and it's also made those words lose the insulting character to them
I could also imagine yoke being thingified through the path of "that thing that does something but I couldn't tell you what." Kind of like how we use doohickey or widget. Yokes are really strange-looking objects, and their purpose may no be decipherable by an observer who is not already familiar with them. Yoke is an easy word to remember, though, so maybe people who were shown a yoke and were told its name but not its purpose repurposed the word to mean "doohickey," which could easily devolve further to refer to any thing and not just a doodad that obviously has purpose.
These evolutions suggest, strangely, that either our ancestors used different terms for 'thing' that have not survived, or that they did not feel the need a word for a vague unspecified referent.
Interesting! In Hawaii, the local dialect (Hawai'i Creole English) has the term "da kine" with a similar function as a placeholder for something familiar that you can't think of the word for at the moment: "Pass me da kine, you know da kine, on da kine, in front of da kine!"
In Danish we are actually currently using the same word for 'corpse' = 'lig' and 'equal' = 'lig(e)'. However, I think context and grammar makes it quite easy to distinguish which meaning is used.
in romanian another word for thing is "lucru" which also means work or something you're working on, so that fits the rule too. fellow etymology enthusiast here enjoying your artstyle and presentation. happily subscribed
Cool video. I love looking into etymologies of words & semantic drift words take over time. I say all the time my favorite website is wiktionary lol. Language evolution is one of the things that I love to ponder abt most in worldbuilding
The word for thing in chinese is 東西, meaning literally east west. This is due to during the Tang Dynasty there were two large markets in the capital Chang'an, the East Market and the West Market, so when you went shopping you would buy east, buy west, buy east west (買東買西買東西).
In the place where i live, "train" means "thing", because in 19th there are a lot of gold mines here and they built a lot of railroads, and everything becomes a "train".
In the Portuguese Miner Dialect from Southeastern Brazil we use the word "Trem" which literally means train as placeholder for things. So over here everything is a train 🚂 or should I say everytrain?
In Arabic, the word شيء (sha-y-') that means “a thing” is linked to the verb شاء (sha-a-'a) that means “to want”. An interesting thing in the Holy Quran is that the word شيء is written as it is all over the Quran, except in one place (18:23) where it is written differently (شايء), with the second letter being silent. That verse says: And don't say to “something” I am doing that tomorrow. (End of verse.) with the “don't” being insisted. They explained it by saying this “something/thing” here is not yet a “thing”, it is just an intension in the head of a human, and so it can happen to be a real thing and it can not do. (The next verse says: Except if God wants… and so it is not prohibiting planning, it is just saying don't tell what will happen in the future as if you know it for sure, but always say “if God wants [it will happen]”, and that's why Muslims always say “inshallah”, like “I will do that inshallah”.) Here are a few examples of referring to things in a negative way in nowadays dialects: In nowadays dialects, we refer to “things” in funny ways, especially when we are expressing anger. Those may be away from the video's subject, and closer to some English speakers saying the s/c/f/mf words instead of “thing”, like in “Give me that ****!”. In Levant, we would say “watermelon” to mean anything we're angry at, like “Give me that watermelon!!!”. It is a sarcastic expression, and the reason is the pronunciation of the word “watermelon” in Arabic (in those dialects specifically), which is بطيخ (batteekh, with the t being emphatic, and the kh being a German ch sound like in Nacht or doch). We also say شسمه (shi-s-mu) meaning “what [is] its name”. In North Jordan and South Syrian (حوران/Horan region) they say ماخوذ (ma-a-khu-u-th), and with emphaticing the last letter, ماخوظ, which means literally “taken”, and it is actually a curse, because it means “taken by God”, which indicates losing something (because God is the one who gives and takes). This expression is mostly used by elderly people. Thanks for the interesting video.
I wonder: were there words for 'thing' before these bleached ones took over? Were they bleached variants of even more ancient words? Something to look into. By the way, it isn't specifically complaining about the changing of meanings, but if you want to see Latin Grammarians being annoyed by the language changing, check out the 'Appendix Probi', a seventh century list of common latin mistakes that reveal the changing of latin into vulgar latin into (eventually) the Italian dialects.
The “quite nice” example reminds me of an ad for coffee that used to be on tv. A wife brings her husband a cup of coffee and tells him it’s a new brand. He takes a sip and says, “it’s quite nice.” The ad must have been written by an american … it did not convey what they meant it to, to a New Zealand audience. We’re a little wee bit british here. That coffee brand was not successful.
This reminds me of when I went off to college in Pennsylvania; in the stretch between Philly and DC, the word "jawn" has been thingified in the same way as yoke. Went from "joint" (meeting, criminal) to "joint" (meeting) to "joint" (place) to "joint" (thing) to jawn (thing)
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn"). A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father." I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
Finally somewhere where the Hiberno-English meaning of “yoke” is brought to the public attention! Here’s an even challenge for you - why is “grand” in Hiberno-English used to describe things that are simply “fine”, “adequate” or “mediocre” as opposed to its usual use in the Anglophone world of “immense”, “spectacular” or “impressive”?
I’m Irish and I can’t lie I had completely forgotten that a yoke was an actual ploughing instrument in the first place💀💀
Meanwhile, in America, you'd probably immediately think of the ploughing instrument since it's a common metaphor among Evangelical Christians. (being yoked to Jesus or yoked to a virtuous partner or a bad influence)
@@GuyNamedSeanMatthew 11 28-30
"Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light."
I was thinking of an egg yolk😬
@@GuyNamedSeanim american (non evangelical) and i've never heard either of those metaphors so i imagine those aren't as well known outside of evangelical circles
Sure, you're an awful yokeen altogether...
"delirium? stroke? dementia? no, just linguistics. you see, my grandmother is irish" is the BEST hook to a video ive seen
The 'hames' was a part of the horse's yoke that it was easy to attach incorrectly, giving rise to another Irish expression "he made a hames of it", meaning he messed it up. "He made a right hames of that yoke, and we were half the morning putting it right again" was the kind of expression my father often used.
"A wyrd guy? How flattering you'd call me a fated guide."
As a German lawyer I'll add that "Sache" is still used to mean a legal dispute, but I wasn't aware that that's actually the older meaning.
Interesting similarity with Dutch where we use 'Zaak' or more formally 'Rechtzaak' for that too.
Not to be confused with 'Zaak' meaning store or 'Zaken' meaning Business or 'Zaak' meaning matter 😅
Spanish "lid", which is from Latin "lis" (lawsuit), often means "fight/struggle".
@@bramklinkenberg9140 thank you for this! I'm learning Dutch now for fun and I definitely had not picked up on this yet. I really like how recht is applied to things like the law and things being formally straightforward or literally straight ahead. Dutch is full of amusing literal translations for me as a native English speaker
Sak, Rettsak, Søksmål 🇳🇴
In Swedish, when you are presenting your case in a court it's called Sakframställan. Literally "legal case-forward-putting"
yoke has a long history in being used as a metaphor for a burden; that's an alternative route it may have been thingified through: thing that burdens you metaphorically > thing that's literally heavy to carry > thing you carry > thing
Yoke also related to Sanskrit YOGA, a practice to HARNESS your mental, emotional & energetic bodies through physical exercises. Ancient Indo-European roots.
I am absolutely convinced someone a thousand years ago would have gone "uhm, acktchuallee" regarding the 'misappropriation' of Latin words.
Cicero once complained to a friend that people were using the Latin word "penis" wrong ("at hodie penis est in obscenis"), because of course it always meant "tail" and should never mean anything else. "Tail" was actually a secondary definition, but he'd surely have a few words to say about how it got adopted into English.
I'm sure I read somewhere that a Roman writer complained of people dropping the h in hic.
I love how languages evolve! Its one of my hyperfixations and it always urks me when people are language "purists" bc language has never been pure and is just a reflection of the society and time its spoken in!
It urks me when people act like words have no meaning and that errors are impossible. Teenage girls hate hearing that rules apply to them, doesn’t matter how many people stop fighting them. Wrong is wrong.
irks*
@@spelcheak A stuffier grammarian than I might take issue with your misspelling of "irks", your use of "like" in place of "as though", the gerund "hearing" in place of the infinitive "to hear", a comma instead of a semicolon between your independent clauses, and lack of an explicit subject "it" before "doesn't". Even an almost universally accepted contraction like "doesn't" was once widely eschewed and still is by some people in certain contexts.
Any set of rules and regulations you can come up with simply won't apply to many other speakers of your language. I'm sure you'll agree that enforcing such rules is absurd, even though they might once have been or might still be meaningful for someone else.
in language wrong is mostly context dependent so whatever you feel is wrong is not necessarily wrong. Linguists will generally say that any speech that's comprehensible to the intended audience is "correct"@@spelcheak
@@spelcheak nah, I just grew up in Appalachia and our dialect is interesting and it led me down the rabbit hole.
Language isn't wrong unless you can't understand what we're saying.
You just might be classist, most people who are language purists are. Essentially you are saying "you are uneducated" when education HIGHLY depends on the income of your area
Where i'm from (Eastern Pennsylvania) our word for thing is "jawn". I was actually explaining it to a friend out of state yesterday, so the timing of this video is pretty perfect
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn").
A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father."
I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
I think “bleaching” is a good word for it because it illustrates how the strong primary *color* of the original word fades away, becoming less distinctive
great video! in brazilian portuguese the word "negócio", that originally meant "business", is used as a word for "thing", I couldn't understand the paths it took to get to this meaning and I never found any explanation, but now I believe it was probably something close to the word "thing", so thank you very much for solving this mystery for me.
It comes from the latin negotium, wich meant work, the word itself literaly means absence of otium, a latin concept that ranged from actualy relaxing to humanitary studies
Coisa, negócio, troço, treco, bagulho, trem, breguete... there's so many 'things' in br-portuguese.
@@felixfire6583Portuguese actually has that word too in the form of Ócio, it's basically the same meaning as it's Latin root without the humanitary part.
@@drake9634 same for the italian word "ozio"
gets weirder if you're here from Minas Gerais, how does "trem" (train) means "thing", no idea, but it means haha, along many other words like "bodega" that meant originally "bar" but is also used as "thing" and other nonsense words we make on the way
I was particularly interested by the mention of how teenage girls tend to be at the forefront of language change. I've seen one or two mentions of this before, but it seems like not enough people talk about it. If we want a glimpse into the future of our languages, we should be eavesdropping on teenagers!
based
Be careful with that train of thought, though, because it's not like teenage girls as a monolith are inventing new things and _all_ using them. You could listen to teenage girls speaking at some high school in Madison, WI and think "so this is the future development of English" and be totally wrong because it was the innovations that were made by teenage girls in a high school in San Francisco that became dominant. Or rather, it's more like bits and pieces from all of the teen girl sociolects all around the country are coagulated while others are discarded, entirely at random and with literally no rhyme or reason
Unfortunately, it's literally impossible to predict any sort of language change with any level of confidence whatsoever
@@aloysiusdevadanderabercrombie8Just to clarify, I wasn't planning to go prowling around high schools to collect data. I was thinking of, like, family members on major holidays, that kind of thing.
@@thatotherted3555 Sure, and it absolutely would be interesting to see the innovations they make, I just don't want people to be disappointed if it's not mainsteam in 10 years lol
it's not teen girls, most modern innovation of English comes from ebonics so it's the black community that's on the cutting edge of English
There is an additional usage of “yoke” here that I find intriguing. A “mad yoke” is a person you’re unsure of, or acting strangely. As in, “who’s that mad yoke standing in the middle of the road?”
That just means "mad thing". "Yon yoke in the corner" would be mildly derogatory. The most important use of "yoke" that she doesn't mention here is to very specifically refer to an ecstacy tablet.
@@mccluskeytom I've certainly heard people say things like " _That_ yoke in the corner", but never " _Yon_ yoke in the corner"... is that just me, or is that a typo?
As for the other usage you mention, you're absolutely right - I'm glad you mentioned it! Anyone who grew up in Ireland since the late '80's who's even broadly familiar with drug and/or club/rave culture would be conversant with this meaning. Should someone in a group of young people getting ready to head out for a night's revelry say "So, who's sorting out 'the yokes'?" absolutely _no-one_ is going to think they're talking about TV remotes, can openers, bulldog clips, or _anything_ like that, although the 'MDMA tablet' usage is obviously derived from the 'thingamabob' meaning. Like sex and money, drugs have always been such a delightfully rich source of slang!
It kind of reminds me of what happened with the word 'Crack' (or 'Craic'), although sort of the other way around. As many will know, in addition to its usual meaning of 'split' or 'seam', in Ireland the word 'crack' is often used to refer to 'sport' or 'fun', in the sense of 'good clean - or even, slightly disreputable - fun'. _Slightly_ disreputable, inasmuch as alcohol may - or may not - be involved; but certainly, no Class A drugs! There was even a popular song in the '70's that went "The crack was 90 in the Isle of Man", "90" here being the maximum reading on the 'intensity' scale, for example, "My blood pressure was 'up to 90' " - but that's probably best left for another day's work! Anyway, there are countless tales out there, possibly apocryphal, possibly not, of somewhat naïve Irish tourists or students on working holidays arriving at JFK, Logan, LAX etc at the time the scourge of Crack Cocaine was first starting to become an epidemic and announcing to customs or immigration that they were in America, "Ah, y'know yourself sure, for a bit of crack..!" and wondering how things turned so ugly so fast! In fact, even though this particular Irish usage of the word 'crack' seems to now be much more widely understood internationally than it was in the late '80's and '90's, confusion of the sort mentioned would become such a problem that at least when rendered in written form, the word has largely reverted to its Gaelic origin, 'Craic', the Hiberno~English transliteration of 'Crack' having more~or~less fallen by the wayside..!
@@richiehoyt8487 I have read somewhere that the Irish word craic is not Irish at all, but is a derivation of the English word crack. Its use today in Irish is recognisable in the very England phrase 'cracking'. As in, "That was a cracking dinner-party last night, Jeeves."
Cracking good time was used in England ages ago. Another use of crack in USA is cracker for a red neck type. Anyone know where that came from?
@@richiehoyt8487 "Yon" = yonder = what light through yonder window breaks = over there.
"Yon yoke in the corner" = that thing over there in the corner = that person over there in the corner.
This is a bit of rural Monaghanese, where I'm from. You'd probably hear it in South Armagh and throughout the border region.
I enjoyed your study of the uses of the word crack / craic. One minor point - as much as it pains me to admit it, the word is an English import to the island and entered the gaeilge through settler English. The original spelling was "crack".
I love how saying, "We get together and do our thing," is more accurate to the etymology of the word "thing" than referring to objects as "thing".
Okay, so in French, many words can be very generic. The french word for glasses is: "lunettes", always plural, because it would refer to the roundish frames of the glasse.
Lunette can mean: a loophole, a toilet seat or a guillotine hole that holds the neck in place. The French word: "bouton" can mean a button like one uses for clothing, but also a flower bud and a zit. In modern French, the word: "bécane" means "the machine I use for work or hobby", and it can thus be incredibly generic. The french word "baiser" as a verb could mean: to fuck, in more old now "to kiss" and in old slang: "to be lynched or executed". Prior to the verb "lyncher" entiring the commonly spoken tongue, "baiser la lanterne" or "à la lanterne" meant being lynched, which now colloqually means to take a collective beating, or getting jumped. In modern French, the word: "déguster" means formally and also informally to consume something delectable, but in a slightly more old-fashioned slang now, it means "to suffer".
Many french word to refer to violence are food related. The verb: "Harceler" etymologically comes from "herceler" which means to plow a field for growing crops and making it all nice and straight and equal, ideal for growing crops, most often wheat. "Crapaudine" mean to "cut off the spine of an animal to make the carcass lie flat" also came to refer to a torture method, which did not involve butchering the victim, on the contrairy.
Both Russian and French have a history of using informally, until very recently, slang terms to refer someone being victimized would be spoken in active voice.
This sent me down a rabbithole of looking for the origins of all the German words for "thing" I could think of, some of them are very obvious, you already mentioned "Ding", "Teil" also means "part", "Zeug" comes from "ziehen" ("to pull"), "Gelöte" I guess comes from "löten" ("to solder"), though I couldn't find anything on it online. Then there's "Gedöns", "Kram", "Krempel", "Pipapo", "Kruscht" (which I've also found written as "Grusch", "Gruscht", "Grust", or "Gerust", and which probably comes from "Rüstzeug", meaning "armour/weapons/stuff for war"), and probably more that I'm not familiar with. Language is fascinating!
"Kram" and "Krempel" come from "Gerümpel", which comes from "rumpel" meaning noise or rumbling
Also interesting how certain dialect words (like Kruscht) become part of the standard language. I would have no idea where Kruscht comes from while I totaly understand Gerust.
Gelöte doesn't come from löten but rather Lot (cognate to English lead) and originally referred to weights on a scale.
Kram was originally referring to the tents of merchants. Further etymology unknown.
Krempel, interestingly enough, isn't related to Kram or Gerümpel. Rather it's a variant of Upper German, especially Alemannic, Grempel 'retail' from grempeln 'to retail', iterative form of Late Middle High German grempen which is likely borrowed from a Romance language. Compare Italian comprare 'to buy', Old Provencial crompar 'to buy, pay' from Latin comparare 'to compare, match, place together' later also 'to pay with money'. So it's ultimately related to English compare.
Gerümpel comes from rumpeln, rummeln, related to English rumble.
There so many more.
The standard dictionary for German etymology is Kluge's Etymologisches Wörterbuch but it's not freely available. The dwds (Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache) has detailed etymologies for most lexemes but most valuable is the historical dictionary section (Deutsches Wörterbuch by the Grimm brothers) because some words used to be more common but have fallen out of fashion
dont forget "der Teil" and "das Teil" have different meanings too 😭
I've never heard Gelöte and Kruscht tbh.
in philadelphia slang 'jawn' is the same!! it's so neat to see someone explain it like this, thank you!
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn").
A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father."
I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
6:54 i see literally as very consistent meta hyperbole: you could say "everyone knows that" and be more accurate but weak with "virtually everyone knows that" and use hyperbole on that to get "literally everyone knows that"
Really weird that you uploaded this when you did. I rewatched this Irish comedy movie last night, and they kept using “yoke” in this way. I tried to figure out what the hell they meant, but had no luck.
On a side note, my mom’s family is French-Canadian. They use “piton” the same way. The word _does_ have an actual meaning in French, but I don’t know if this is a result of semantic bleaching.
Oh, im gonna be chewin on this video for MONTHS. I think my maximum scope is generally a tidge smaller than yours, but this opens up SO many lineage trails! I can't wait to have fully processed it all! Thank you for all your effort posting your brain as often as you do!!!
Hate to be an “um actually” sorta person, but you wrote דבר backwards, which is kinda funny since this is a linguistics video. Keep up the great work
NOOOOOOOO I SWORE I CHECKED IT ;-; Sorry!!! My art program has an issue with right to left text v_v
@@NakariSpeardanetechnical issues get us all one day
In Macedonian the word for "thing" is "rabota" which primarily means "work" and "job". It comes from Proto-Slavic *orbota which also means "work" and in turn is derived from the word for "slave", *orbъ. That comes from Proto-Balto-Slavic *árbas which comes from Proto-Indo-European *h₃órbʰos, which meant "orphan".
Oh!! Related to robot?! That's a really good one!
@@NakariSpeardane Yes, the word "robot" comes from a Czech play in which artificial humans are made in factories for the purpose of certain jobs. Robot then came to mean any intelligent creature or machine made for the purpose of work, though nowadays we'd probably call the articifial people from the play "androids" rather than robots.
It's also related to the Latin word "opera" and the Irish word "obair", both of which mean "work, exertion, labour".
Oh, and "arbeit" in German.
That is genuinely awesome
Not opera. That comes from *Hep-, not *Herbh-. The r in opera is originally *s, which became r between vowels in Latin. opus, operis…
that is an opening
Another interesting part about the Swedish words sak (thing) and ting (assembly, court) is that there exist a common saying where we use both to say "things and such", in swedish "saker och ting"
The word for thing in Indonesian is interesting imo as a native myself, it's "Sesuatu" and it comes from se- (prefix meaning a/whole/one from *esa and cognate with Tagalog "isa") + suatu (a determiner close to the meaning with English indefinite article, can also mean "thing".), now what's interesting is that "suatu" comes from se- (the aforementioned numeral prefix) + batu (stone).
So the change is like:
se-batu (a + stone) > sewatu (one) > suatu (one in Classical Malay) > se-suatu (thing).
Also cognate with the number one (satu) that loses its u.
More specifically it came from *sabatu. Malay underwent lenited (?) the sequence -aba- into -awa-, like in *kaban → kawan.
sabatu → *sawatu → suatu → satu
As a native Malay speaker that's also fluent in Indonesian though, calling "sesuatu" the word for 'thing' feels kinda weird to me. It just depends on the situation. You wouldn't say "Tolong ambilkan sesuatu itu."
The Lithuanian word for "thing", _daiktas,_ seems to have originally meant "sticky-outy bit". Thence "something that _metaphorically_ sticks out, stands out" and then "that thing I mean".
Oh that's a really good one!!!
"Thence"? that's a word?? that's a good word.
@@40watt53 Yep! It means "from there", and "thither" means "to there". There are also "hence", "hither", "whence", and "whither", which follow exactly the same pattern with "here" and "where"!
@@jeremydavis3631 Incredible. All going into my daily vocabulary.
@@jeremydavis3631 That's so interesting. Are there words like that derived from 'yonder'?
To be fair causa became 2 words in italian, we still have a word, "causa", meaning motive or reason
also in french 'cause' is still a reason e.g. à cause de ça- to (the) cause of that- because of that, which was borrowed directly from latin whereas 'chose' evolved from it
same in portuguese, we have causa/causo(cause) and coisa/cousa(thing), but it seems that the ones meaning "cause" are borrowed, not inherited, this means that they were learned from latin books by romance speakers, not passed down through their parents/community and so on.
Causa is a Latin borrowing, so removes part of the cool semantic stuff
Same in spanish, "causa" and "cosa"
During the development of Old Chinese, speakers of the language had significant contact with speakers of one or more Indo-European languages, and borrowed many words into Old Chinese. Aside from the obvious ones like *mit 蜜 meaning honey and is cognate of the English word mead, and *C.q(r)a 車 meaning and is cognate with the English word car, the word for yoke, *qˤ[i]k 軛, is also borrowed in its original meaning. However, yoke had bleached meaning in Old Chinese as well, *[q](r)ewk 約 meaning to connect, to attach, to constrain, and now usually meaning an agreement, a treaty, a meeting and more. Interestingly, yoke is also cognate with yoga, which once meant to join with the supreme spirit.
And nobody knows why 东西 in a lot of Sinitic languages means "thing." It's not like 南北 broadened, so it's curious why 东西 did. Also, for those who don't know Chinese, those are the four cardinal directions, with 东西 literally meaning east and west and was extended to mean nearby. Perhaps that's one way it eventually got to "thing."
@@weirdofromhalo 東西 is a rather late term to be thingy-fied. Languages closer to Early Middle Chinese all just use the original word for thing, 物 /but/, like the languages of Tsiang-tsiu, Tsuân-tsiu, Amoy, and even Japanese use 物. 東西 likely came from the belief in the 5 basic elements, metal, wood, water, fire, and earth. The cardinal directions are philosophically linked to the elements, and east represents wood and in association food, and west represents metal. Since wood and metal are the two basic elements that make up most physical things, 東西 became thingy-fied as a word play no sooner than Late Tang dynasty. Some other people claim it came from the fact that most Chinese cities back then had two major markets, referred to as East or West Market, shopping often involve visiting both. I'm not sure which one is more likely.
@@paiwanhan Hokkien/ Fujian/ Minnan languages: 物件 [mikkiã][mekkiã]
Wu (Eastern Chinese languages like Shanghainese/ Ningbo/ Suzhou/ Zhenjiang/Hangzhou): 物事 [mezzi]
Yue (Cantonese languages) The classifier for any random object 個/个/ became [go][ge] > [ye] usually now written phonetically in informal Cantonese.
Interestingly, the classical Chinese word for thing 物 [mAt6] (flat low tone) became 乜 [mAt1] (high falling tone) which is the modern Cantonese word for "what" possibly from "(what) thing?"
This is similar to Italian cosa meaning "thing" & also "what?"
@@paiwanhan or from the fact that all things are produced in 東西南北中, and they took 東西 as a shortening of this fact
May I say that your combination of being an artist, worldbuilder, and linguistics nerd made me smash that subscribe button instantly. You did a great job talking about etymologies.
This was really cool and made me realize my own native lang urdu has this too- (also a hindi word)
we have *baat*-- which i just realized is pretty far gone in this process of "thingification" too
this root of *bat-/baat* has to do with "speech/telling/talking"
like in the verb *bataanaa* (= to tell)
and the word *baat*, which is like the simple noun of that root, evolved from meaning smth like "things that are said / speech" to "things talked about" to smth like "subject of speech" and then just "thing that happens" in general, kinda--
like it hasn't quite been 100% "thingified" yet-- you can only really use it for things where it makes sense to say "thing that is talked about", like- "don't smoke, it's a bad baat" ("bad thing" i.e "shouldn't be done") or "it's not that big of a baat" ("not that big of a deal")
but not really "that's my favourite thing" (maybe if you were referring to a process/happening that you like?? but not just an object)
for an example of the concurrently existing more literal meaning-
or "what kind of baat do y'all do" = smth like "what do you people even talk about" (usually chastising, implying that it's distasteful)
or "these *baat*s annoy me" = these things / happenings annoy me
but it could also mean "these things (that they say) annoy me", if interpreted more literally-- it is 10000% concept dependent. like- if you already were discussing smth, say: "nowadays there's been a spike in cases of bullying at school. this baat really concerns me" then it kinda means both?
"this (thing that is under discussion) annoys me"
but also just- "this thing annoys me"
so yeah! really cool to learn about the connection to how this is really common in all sorts of languages.
Thanks for that piece of knowledge! Many times, learning english as a swedish speaking child, I was annoyed and fascinated by words that sounded so similar in both languages yet meant so very different things. Now I kbow why a few of them are that way!
I found the first bit hilarious, because growing up with an Irish mother, yoke almost always translates directly to tv remote!
gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "I _like_ like you" 😰
What meaning
this is fascinating. I had no idea "like" and "Leiche" were cognates
Lovely video as always
Thank you :D
Never reflected on that “sak” Swedish is both a thing, an action and a legal term. Brilliant video
This is a wonderful video, as always!
You probably have heard it already, but you displayed the word דבר backwards. Although your description was accurate.
Tiny nitpick: the Hebrew word for thing, דבר, is spelled backwards in the video (as רבד, meaning layer). Damn RTL.
Really interesting video, anyway. Plus your drawing of your grandma is beautiful and the guinea pigs are adorable.
Yeah I checked all the rtl text cause my art program is fussy but I think I just didn't spot that they were different letters ;-; sorry!! And thank you :D
this channel Is an hidden gem, I'm so happy to have found it!
Loved this video! Irish linguisticsc nerd here:
The word 'Yoke' comes from the Yola ;anguage of county Wexford in east Ireland.
Yola was an anglic language, having roots in Middle English, and the same is to be said for a related language of Yola, Fingallian from the Fingal area of north Dublin.
I got super into this stuff a while ago, so here you go.
That’s so fun! In Brazilian Portuguese, depending on the region, you might use “train” or “business” to refer to a “thing”. Like “what’s that train in your kitchen?”, or “can you handle me that business?”
finally a word that caters to my way of speaking..
this video's amazing and i love your art!! the effort you put into this shows and has paid off for sure
cool stuff, great art!
in indonesian/malay we have "benda" (object), borrowed from sanskrit भाण्ड (bhāṇḍa) which has uncertain etymology and plenty of meanings but the relevant one here seems to be "goods/valuables", cognate with tamil வண்டி (vaṇṭi) meaning "vehicle".
and then there's "barang" (stuff) which came from a sort of austronesian indefinite marker and coexists alongside it!
"barang siapa" could either mean "whose stuff" or "whoever"
Alternate title: The origin of all "thing"s
I loved the whole video but I just want to say I absolutely adore the little cows you drew 😂
Nakari upload day is always a good day, but also, etymology my beloved!!!!
Great video, awesome topic- the art you used for the opening and the one for the patreon credits looks v v cool btw
The art and pacing and content of this video was stellar automatic sub !!!!!!
So fascinating 😮 In Dutch there is the word „Lichaam“ and focuses more on the Body and Torso. So English, Dutch and German have the same origin but nowadays different meanings and usage.
Fascinating stuff and very well put together. More etymology videos please!
4:05 Now you mention it it's very interesting. We still say in Polish "rzeczyć" in the meaning of "to speak" and this term is everywhere in official and legal context but in most other contexts it means a thing or item but also sometimes a cause. It has a lot of meanings.
As an example of a word for a thing that got "narrowed" it would be "wihajster" which today means a contraption, lever, something metal, something poking out but originally it simply ment a thing and its origin is German phrase "wie heist er" meaning "what is it called".
oh my god this is an amazing video!! i have no idea how i've subscribed to you already but i LOVE IT! i love hearing about people's interests, and linguistics and how language evolves??? sign me UP! the pretty visuals help SO MUCH, too ... girls with short attention span... i love ur voice, too!!! it has that tone of excitement that keeps me engaged - and is clear you're enthusiastic about the topic!
Thank you so much!!
This is a very underrated channel, the quality and interest of these videos are amazing! Please continue to make videos
Southern Irish US , “ The Thingy-ma-bob is kept on the whos-e-not”, in the kitchen.
The item is on the “catch all” shelf in the kitchen.
patterns like these are very good to find out more about earlier languages that the specific meanings may still be unclear, we may be able to follow the string futher
The visuals in this video are amazing 😍❤️ Love your style and colour choices!
The first thing I thought of watching this, being from Brazil, is how some people from the state of Minas Gerais refer to abstract concepts or concrete "things" as "trem", our word for "train". Pretty much everywhere else in the country the word carries only its literal definition related to the locomotives, except for that one state. This video made me really wonder, for the first time, how that actually came to be...
Like how the word for "train" means "thing" in Minas Gerais' Brazilian Portuguese
woah i just randomly got recommended this video, and it's great, loved it. this channel is super underrated 👍
really well put together video! the illustration is beautiful & you're very engaging; looking forward to checking out the rest of your channel :D
This makes me curious if there are other language equivalents of "thingamajig" or "thingamabob" where you take a bleached word and sort of "re-dye" it with nonsense ...
And also got me wondering about how this thingification relates to taboo and euphemism...
The curiosity stokage is high - always the sign of a good vid! Thank you!
When in Ireland we wish to be less than precise, we sometimes say yokimabob!
In the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais the portuguese word for train (trem) has been thingified which is quite cool since trains are a very new concept so we know the thingification of the word must have started at the very latest in the mid 19th century
Yoke in Hiberno-Irish is usually a bit more specific than thing. It would usually be used to refer to a gadget or tool of some kind.
In my conlang, which is basically proto world with future technology, the word for thing comes from an emotocon for a computer processor. In my conculture, food is 3D printed with atoms, but to save energy, non edible things are made simply by morphing the computer itself. They are referred to as computers or hilch’lg.
The bit at the beginning about "item" coming from list entries reminds me of the etymology of the word "date." "Date" was Latin for "given," and when sending a letter, scribes would write "date" followed by the day, month and year it was given to the messenger. Eventually "date" came to mean the indication of day, month and year!
And as for "data," that comes from the same word. In English, the set of underlying facts on which a theory, proof, or argument is based are called "data," or "givens."
Oh I never knew that! I think that's going to be one of my new favourite etymologies.
really lovely art on this one
Some notes about French :
Chose (thing, object) effectively comes from Latin "Causa", but there is also "cause" which means the same thing it does in English.
Machin (thingamajig, weird contraption) effectively comes from Latin "machina" but there's also machine, which means the same thing it does in English. It also used to mean "" ingenious play, imaginative plan or action" in ye olde times
In German you can also say "Scheißteil". Actually means "shit piece", but gets used to refer to anything that you view as awful. These types of insults are in a way a similar thing.
In Maryland (and I think in other parts of the US), people sometimes use "joint" as a word for thing. It's also used to mean a place.
Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese to be specific, has a ton of funny words meaning not "thing" in particular (we have "coisa" for that) but generally "any object you don't remember the name of" - this includes "negócio" (business), "treco", "troço" (both likely come from the same root as "trunk" or piece of wood), "bagulho" (from Latin baculus, or cane, stick), and even my favourite, "trem" (literally TRAIN). We have even created the masculine-gendered version of "coisa" - "coiso", as my mum would often say - "cadê o coiso?" (where is it? / where's the thing?).
Thanks for the awesome video :))
Philadelphia has a very particular thingified word, jawn, which most likely comes from the word joint
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar.
A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father."
I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
in Spanish the word 'vaina' means sheath, but in Venezuelan Spanish it went to being considered a swear word and now is a general word for thing like 'yoke'
we Venezuelans also do that thing Australians do of calling people harsh insults as informal greetings, and it's also made those words lose the insulting character to them
I could also imagine yoke being thingified through the path of "that thing that does something but I couldn't tell you what." Kind of like how we use doohickey or widget. Yokes are really strange-looking objects, and their purpose may no be decipherable by an observer who is not already familiar with them. Yoke is an easy word to remember, though, so maybe people who were shown a yoke and were told its name but not its purpose repurposed the word to mean "doohickey," which could easily devolve further to refer to any thing and not just a doodad that obviously has purpose.
These evolutions suggest, strangely, that either our ancestors used different terms for 'thing' that have not survived, or that they did not feel the need a word for a vague unspecified referent.
Ive heard it used to describe drugs, specifically ecstasy
Interesting! In Hawaii, the local dialect (Hawai'i Creole English) has the term "da kine" with a similar function as a placeholder for something familiar that you can't think of the word for at the moment: "Pass me da kine, you know da kine, on da kine, in front of da kine!"
An extremely common word for "thing" in certain parts of Brazil is "trem", which is literally train/locomotive :3
In Danish we are actually currently using the same word for 'corpse' = 'lig' and 'equal' = 'lig(e)'. However, I think context and grammar makes it quite easy to distinguish which meaning is used.
several latin american dialects of spanish use cuestión, from quaestio, like romanian, to refer to things too!
interrestingly there are rare german expression where Sache is still used to mean sake
in romanian another word for thing is "lucru" which also means work or something you're working on, so that fits the rule too.
fellow etymology enthusiast here enjoying your artstyle and presentation. happily subscribed
Cool video. I love looking into etymologies of words & semantic drift words take over time. I say all the time my favorite website is wiktionary lol. Language evolution is one of the things that I love to ponder abt most in worldbuilding
One common version in north east of the, mostly Philadelphia is the use of the word “jawn” Which can mean a person, place, thing, or an idea
It may be yoke, but my brain keeps thinking yolk 🐌
The word for thing in chinese is 東西, meaning literally east west. This is due to during the Tang Dynasty there were two large markets in the capital Chang'an, the East Market and the West Market, so when you went shopping you would buy east, buy west, buy east west (買東買西買東西).
In the place where i live, "train" means "thing", because in 19th there are a lot of gold mines here and they built a lot of railroads, and everything becomes a "train".
In the Portuguese Miner Dialect from Southeastern Brazil we use the word "Trem" which literally means train as placeholder for things. So over here everything is a train 🚂 or should I say everytrain?
The etymology of the German word "Zeug" (=stuff) is also interesting, where there's bleaching and pejorisation involved.
“Lich” also means “corpse” in English, not just German. For instance, “lich-yard” means “cemetery”.
Spanish has bleached “cosa” (“thing”) and unbleached “causa” (“case”). “Causa” also has the bleached meaning “cause”.
In Arabic, the word شيء (sha-y-') that means “a thing” is linked to the verb شاء (sha-a-'a) that means “to want”. An interesting thing in the Holy Quran is that the word شيء is written as it is all over the Quran, except in one place (18:23) where it is written differently (شايء), with the second letter being silent. That verse says: And don't say to “something” I am doing that tomorrow. (End of verse.) with the “don't” being insisted. They explained it by saying this “something/thing” here is not yet a “thing”, it is just an intension in the head of a human, and so it can happen to be a real thing and it can not do.
(The next verse says: Except if God wants…
and so it is not prohibiting planning, it is just saying don't tell what will happen in the future as if you know it for sure, but always say “if God wants [it will happen]”, and that's why Muslims always say “inshallah”, like “I will do that inshallah”.)
Here are a few examples of referring to things in a negative way in nowadays dialects:
In nowadays dialects, we refer to “things” in funny ways, especially when we are expressing anger. Those may be away from the video's subject, and closer to some English speakers saying the s/c/f/mf words instead of “thing”, like in “Give me that ****!”.
In Levant, we would say “watermelon” to mean anything we're angry at, like “Give me that watermelon!!!”. It is a sarcastic expression, and the reason is the pronunciation of the word “watermelon” in Arabic (in those dialects specifically), which is بطيخ (batteekh, with the t being emphatic, and the kh being a German ch sound like in Nacht or doch).
We also say شسمه (shi-s-mu) meaning “what [is] its name”. In North Jordan and South Syrian (حوران/Horan region) they say ماخوذ (ma-a-khu-u-th), and with emphaticing the last letter, ماخوظ, which means literally “taken”, and it is actually a curse, because it means “taken by God”, which indicates losing something (because God is the one who gives and takes). This expression is mostly used by elderly people.
Thanks for the interesting video.
the beige tones in this video are very pleasant. makes me want coffee
I wonder: were there words for 'thing' before these bleached ones took over? Were they bleached variants of even more ancient words? Something to look into.
By the way, it isn't specifically complaining about the changing of meanings, but if you want to see Latin Grammarians being annoyed by the language changing, check out the 'Appendix Probi', a seventh century list of common latin mistakes that reveal the changing of latin into vulgar latin into (eventually) the Italian dialects.
If I had to posit a guess I'd imagine that 'yoke' is important because of the history of Ireland as a cattle culture. Great vid, thanks for sharing!
The “quite nice” example reminds me of an ad for coffee that used to be on tv. A wife brings her husband a cup of coffee and tells him it’s a new brand. He takes a sip and says, “it’s quite nice.”
The ad must have been written by an american … it did not convey what they meant it to, to a New Zealand audience. We’re a little wee bit british here. That coffee brand was not successful.
This reminds me of when I went off to college in Pennsylvania; in the stretch between Philly and DC, the word "jawn" has been thingified in the same way as yoke. Went from "joint" (meeting, criminal) to "joint" (meeting) to "joint" (place) to "joint" (thing) to jawn (thing)
I've never heard that--but I have heard something a bit similar (depending on how you pronounce "jawn").
A friend of mine who had been in the navy complained about the blacks whom he met there using a word, "jonque," whenever they didn't know what something was called. I'm guessing "jonque" might be derived from "junk." (I invented my own spelling for it.) The difference in pronunciation between "junk" and "jonque" is not the sound at the end of the word. Rather, it is the vowel. The vowel in "jonque" is pronounced like the "a" in "father."
I found my friend's comment a bit ignorant, as "jonque" is used in exactly the same way as "thing."
Finally somewhere where the Hiberno-English meaning of “yoke” is brought to the public attention! Here’s an even challenge for you - why is “grand” in Hiberno-English used to describe things that are simply “fine”, “adequate” or “mediocre” as opposed to its usual use in the Anglophone world of “immense”, “spectacular” or “impressive”?
@@Eet_Mia Oh no, not sarcasm I assure you. You could easily make that mistake, but sure, you're grand!
The same thing happens here in Brazil: people from the state of Minas Gerais call anything a train. Except a train, which they call a thing.
my vote for next word to undergo thingification based on what this video suggests : "topic"
this is a fantastic video