"Eke" is one of my favorites. "Nickname" used to be "an ekename", i.e. an additional name, but then people started hearing it as "a neekname" and then it turned into "a nickname".
@@typograf62 I would like to add that the word "øgenavn" often has negative connotations, i.e. it is often used to taunt or tease someone; on the other hand we also have the word "kælenavn" (pet name) which is a positive word, something we call people we love and/or care about.
3:45 - Spanish also uses 'e' in lieu of 'y' when the next word begins with an 'i' (e.g. Estoy sorprendido e incrédulo). Also, as a side note, Spanish also uses 'u' in lieu of 'o' ("or") when the next word begins with an 'o' (e.g. Tiene siete u ocho años). Great video! :)
@@FrozenMermaid666 "Siete u ocho" would be correct according to all my sources. Also correct would be "cosas fabulosas e increibles" (and not "y increibles)". I don't believe the norm is any different in Latin America than in Spain, but I can't say what the common usage is as I am not a native speaker myself.
This man's already so well known but give it more time like another decade or two and he's going to evolve into a legend. Nobody compares to this stuff than what he does and how he does it.
I was about to mention that. There's also "ooch" in Lower German and some dialects of Standard German, most prominently the Rhenish dialects which are closest to Dutch, I believe.
Like @Peterolen says, in swedish we use "Också" but in some dialects, it's often just "Å", which is an informal "Och". And in norwegian and maybe some danish dialects it's just "Og".
Not surprising as Afrikaans is a daughter language of dutch. I can easily understand a person speaking Afrikaans, be it that some words changed meaning over time. Afrikaans to me sounds like dutch by someone who didn't pay attention in grammar class
The old dutch word for "and" used to be "ende" pronounced with two syllables. I guess it was to long to say so a the past centuries the "de" part was dropped and now we say "en". So it used to be more similar to English "and" and German "und"
That's a very apparent influence in faroese especially, where we have the word "Tarvur" for bull, from gaelic "Tarbh" and then some other words and also some placenames like "Mykines" which comes from Myk + Iness, meaning Swine Island basically
@@SuperPrumpur Yea there are a bunch of loan words from Celtic languages in Icelandic. Most are names of animals (ex. Jaðrakan (type of bird), kapall meaning horse (but its mostly used as the name of solitaire, card game))or people like f.ex. Melkólfr meaning Malcolm and Kjartan (cant remember how that is in Gaelic). There are also a few nouns, used to be more of them but only a few survive into modern icelandic.
The Dutch cognate of “archaic” old Norse ‘auk’ (3:22) is ‘ook’, meaning ‘also’. In my south eastern Dutch dialect it is ‘ouk’ (sounds like ‘auk’)!. ‘Ouk’ is used in just one town and two villages in an area squeezed between a northern ‘ok/ook’-area and a southern ‘auch’-area. This ‘auch’ is a form which was imported from the German Rhineland a long time ago. So ‘ouk’ could be a remnant, but it could also just be a mixture of ‘(o)ok’ and ‘auch’.
Talking about the dropping of the "j" (yuh) sound in Norse languages is somewhat prevalent in modern swedish, where many Swedes will pronounce "ja" (yes) as "a" (aa, ah) Although this is just spoken Swedish, it's still an interesting phenomenon!
I never got the chance to have one of your classes at CU. However, my best-friend did and she insists that you’re awesome. Keep up the good work. Sko Buffs
This is great! English is my mother tongue, I learnt Dutch as a child, have studied German and of course followed Dr. Crawford’s Old Norse channel. I had noticed this dissimilarity between the words meaning “and” and wondered about the etymologies of the words. Such a common word is more likely to be cognate in closely related languages, or at least I thought so based on French (learnt as a 5 year old) and Spanish (studied in school). (Nowadays I can only speak English well, French passably, Spanish badly, and the others not at all.)
@@GPrinceps I learned Portuguese around 16 ,lived in Brazil for a while. I have now forgotten most of my Portuguese at age 27. If you don't practice a non native language for long enough you forget it.
@@brittakriep2938 Of course there is variation but "ond" is likely descended from the form "und", which makes this kind of variation irrelevant to my point. (It could also be from "and" but I very much doubt that in this case) What I mean is that in Old High German and earlier the word usually did not have a "u". Judging from the other Germanic languages and Old High German we should rather have something like "änd"/"end". By Middle High German "und" had spread in a very unlikely way.
@@brittakriep2938 Very interesting anecdote. I think the value and richness in accent variation and old aspects of German that are retained in dialects outweigh the difficulties in communication. But some people just want to be able to communicate. I think the main problem is the image that dialects have gotten in the later decades of the last century.
Fun fact: in Estonian, the word for "yes" is "jah". The etymology for this word is unclear. The word for "and", which is "ja" as mentioned in the video, has cognates in all the Finnic languages, but "jah" does not have any cognates. Finnish has similar "joo" which is a Swedish loan (the normal word for "yes" is "kyllä" - cognate to Estonian "küll", meaning "enough"). In addition to "jah", there's also "jaa", suspiciously similar to German "ja", and I suspect this is a loan from German. But the -h in "jah" is weird.
In my Norwegian dialect we say "og" (pronounced å) for and, but where english has also, german has auch, dutch has ook and standard norwegian has også, we have "au". Not sure if that means the older form "auk" has survived in my dialect or not, but it's really interesting!
Native Danish speaker here with some insight on how this works in modern Danish: - og /ouw/ or /å/ depending on dialect -- means “and" - også /ouwså/ or more commonly /osse/ -- also -- literally “and so” - ja /jæ/ -- means “yes” -- simple affirmative. - jo /yo/ -- also means yes, but when answering a question requiring a confirmation, i.e., “You did do your homework, right?” or “You said you wanted your coffee black, right?", response: Jo. In older writing you can find both “jo” and “ja” being used to mean “also” or “and even" especially when listing things. Nowadays only “jo” is used in the sense of “also/and even” in an emphatic or confirmative sense within a sentence. E.g: “Jeg har jo stået og ventet hele dagen.” --- I’ve (in fact, even) stood (here) and waited all day.
@@filipboucher9614 ‘Hel’ means whole in the singular sense, but in the definitive you add the extra -e at the end for balance.. ‘dagen’ means “the day”. in Danish, you add the article at the end of the word. I think in Dutch, you would say “de dag” i.e. “the day”. They do this in Jutland for instance, but in Standard Danish, you add it at the end.
Possible explanation: the use of enclitic *-hw or *-hwe was still productive when the Proto-Germanic continuum started to separate and each daughter language replaced its usage differently. Possibly PGmc had no set way of saying "and" in a single word or maybe there were semantic distinctions (like your example of contrasting usage of ON "enn") that were erased later on. On the other hand, Vulgar Latin maybe had eliminated the usage of the enclitic "-que" and "et" was already standardized as a suitable replacement, giving rise to all later descending Romance languages.
I thought of this explanation too and wondered if there was a reason why the suffix didn't survive. It may be connected to the initial stress in Germanic languages that the suffix was awkward to pronounce or couldn't get enough emphasis. I'm not content with my hypothesis, though.
I understand that from the few sources that exist for Iberian languages, (not Basque), that the Iberian word for 'and' was very similar to the word 'and'.
That would be interesting. I've studied some Turkish and supposedly, it didn't originally have a word for "and"; instead you'd use "ile" (with). Modern Turkish has "ve" (and), borrowed from Persian.
Okay, I'm not an expert on proto-germanic, on fact I know nothing about it, so take what follows just as an educated guess. Having studied Latin for 5 years, one thing that stood out to me was the fact that that language had 3 ways to say "and" (et, ac, -que), maybe proto Germanic also had multiple ways to say "and", that could explain it
That probably varied, depending on time and place, but both "auk" and "andi" could be used to signify "furthermore/additionally," and these two words are the precursors to most of the and-words in the germanic languages.
I learned Old Norse for half a year towards the end of my rather eclectic degree but even I didn't learn it from a man in a ten gallon hat standing in front of a mountain. That would've been quite something.
I guess the "j" didn't drop in já, because it was such a commonly use word in speech, that it became one of those irregular words that don't really follow standard rules. Also, 'á' or 'å' doesn't roll that easilly off the tongue, does it?
And is often acquired quite late in languages, a language can do fine completely without the word and. Sumerian for example didn't have a word for and until they borrowed it from Akkadian. That might be why and is sometimes so "fleeting" in languages.
If I recall correctly the Swedish words for boy and girl are from the Romani language. Tjej as an example which means girl. Although I am Scandinavian (Swedish) I have no clue what the other Norse languages’ words for boy and girl are.
In some deep way, they still have the same meaning. They are just used differently nowadays. I think you can translate the Dutch "ook" in Swedish with "ocksa". I know there has to be a circle on the "a" but I have no idea how to put it there.
Like “ek” in (West ) Frisian, related to an older verb meaning “grow/append”, related to the root “aug-“ (as found in Greek ‘augment”). Ook = additionally, sort of.
In some Swedish dialects (north Sweden), the word "en" is used before a male name - something like "en Erik". Usually the e in en is almost silent i those dialects. It sounds a bit like "n' Erik". My father and basically everyone around where he lives use that. They aslo use the letter a as a prefix before a feminine name -like " a Anna". The word en is also a number - one.
I think that norwegian is a bit more "logical" with en and ett then swedish. So it denotes male/female while we in Sweden just said "f*ck it" to any kind of rules regarding en/ett and you need to know the word ...
Didnt expect you to meantion the finnic languages here. A quick add on - "jah" also means "yes" in estonian which I suspect is a direct borowing from germanic languages too. You can also say "yes" by droping the h and making the a vowel longer "Jaa"
Low German “ok”, Dutch “ook” German “auch” all meaning “also” are clearly cognate with the Scandanavian words for “and”. You can imagine someone relating a story “Bob also Jane also Tom are coming to the party”. Swedish resolves the confusion between “also” and “and” with the word “ochså” for also
As far as I can see, etymological dictionaries (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) trace the evolution of 'men' back to Low German 'men, man' as well as Old Norse 'meðan'. So 'en' is the more archaic form while 'men' is German influenced. Would you agree?
Interesting that you mentioned that the norse "Ja" didn't drop the "j" sound at the beginning of the word. The thing is, even though it's spelled with a j it is very often colloquially pronounced "a". the J is omitted in colloquial pronunciation.
I know I'm just a random guy on the internet, but the most logical reason the Old Norse "yes" word mystery is that way is because it is a very common word, therefore harder to change. No?
In modern Swedish there are some rare remains of this PGerm . For example “and then (what)?”. Also sometimes with two contrasting verbs, like “to laugh and cry”. There is also a popular compound; “and still now”. Which is often shortened to , causing to mean “yet”, “still”, “so far”, etc.
Jah or Ja both is derived from continuous act of Yailamak in Turkish language. Yailamak/Ayaklamak is continuous act of pressing grapes in order to make wine. It is continuous so people use it instead of And which in turn literally means next.
Just a small tip: I've noticed that when Americans try to avoid pronouncing the short "u" in foreign words (Like in German "und") as in "cut" ([ʌ] or more accurately [ɐ]), they choose a long "u" sound as in "mood" [uː]. Of course you should avoid the "cut"-sound because in practically every language you'll ever find that is an "a" sound not an "u" sound. However, "mood" has a long vowel and you should choose a short "u" like in "put" instead: "und", "Umlaut" etc. don't have a long vowel. The impractical English spelling system unfortunately has no unambiguous way to write this sound. It's [ʊ] in IPA.
'Putt' and 'put' are different. 'Foot' and 'fool' are different. But, 'put' and 'foot' have the same vowel sound. If American English is native, it all seems obvious. Just try learning another language, and it's easy to over correct.
@@gnuling296 I was actually trying to agree with you, just explaining the phenomenon from an American perspective. I've proofed audio books and know how to explain to a fellow American how not to get it wrong. You seem to think I was trying to correct you. No, I was just amplifying it for Americans.
A cool video. But "and" is a bit complicated. Off the top of my head I can think of 7 different "ands". 1. 2 and 2 is 4 (mathematical operator) 2. horse and carriage (2 things that "go together") 3. the basket contained a blueberry and a whistle (arbitrary set of 2 things) 5. he turned and looked away (temporal succession) 6. do that and you will regret it (consequential, equivalent to if you do that then you will regret it) 7. interrogative Where are you going with that? "old norse is boring" and...? Are the various "ands" you talked about equally multivalent? Are the various "ands" you talked about equally multivalent?
On the Old Norse já: It seems to me that languages evolve in a systematic manner, wherein most sound changes will effect every instance of that sound in the language, but I assume there are some exceptions for practicality's sake. In this case having á as a word for yes seems impractical, as it would be very difficult to distinguish from, say, quickly spoken words ending in a á or e, as an example. Other than that, it's also possible já was in fact a borrowing; if it was borrowed from the west germanic languages, or in fact a dialect of north germanic languages which didn't drop "J"s in that way, but it was borrowed after that sound change I don't think it would be hard to believe the word be kept as is.
A lot of dialects of Swedish use a longer "a" as a short for ja, or to show agreement. I don't know old this practice is however, but if I had to guess it's a rather modern dialectual thing.
There are "exceptions" to systematic sound changes but these exceptions are systematic too. It shouldn't be possible to stop a non-combinatoric sound change just because the word would get an unusual structure. The sound change probably meant that for some time there were no initial glides in the language. I find your other idea more convincing. It's very common for words to be adopted from other dialects that were not affected by a specific sound change or where more conditions applied to the sound change.
Things I didn't know I was gonna do today: learn about the various surprisingly unrelated words for "and" across the Germanic languages from a cowboy with a doctorate in nordic studies, but here we are. Huh. The more you know.
@3:12 The Icelandic "g" is often pronaunced like "ch", so "og" sounds pretty much like the German "auch" or more like the North-German dialect "och". i.e. a true Berliner would say "Ick och" instead of "Ich auch." And the Icelandic word for I is "eg" and sounds like "ech" ... quite similar to the German "ich"
Can you comment on the English "yo". As used very occasionally, say in a roll call, "Jones?!, Yo!." Yes, I am here! Seen it used in a John Wayne movie. We used in grade school during roll call, just to needle the up tight teachers!
Latin has "et" and "-que". Old English has "and" and "ġēa" (not in the Latin sense). Why would we assume that conjunctions and affirmatives necessarily coincide, or that languages originally employed a single term to convey a subtle range of meanings? That is, the belong-together-"and" in "fish and chips" or "Jack and Jill" has a stronger meaning than the list-of-similars-"and" in "Bob, Ted, and Jim" (hence the Oxford comma).
I have a theory about why Já didn't drop the "j" I think it's because then it would sound exactly like the word "Å" which means a tiny river. My guess is that people kept the "j" to keep the distinction.
In Old English, 'ge' also meant 'and', as in listing nouns, not clauses. E.g. Ǽgðer ge on spræce, ge on þeáwum, ge on eallum sidum = Both in speech, and in manners, and in all customs.
Although "yes" in the Swedish, and perhaps the other north Germanic languages, got to keep the J, it is very common to just shorten it to just "a". I do not know if this is just a modern change because we are to lazy to pronounce the J, or if it is same as with the case of year and young.
@4:40 another example where Old Norse didn't lose the Y/J is Jötun (the giants), wich is relatated to eating (engl.) / essen (ger.). (Also compare the english giants "Ettin"). In this case it seems that the Westgermanic lLanguages lost the Y/J.
As a person from Skåne (Scania), we pronunce "och" like the sound without the "ch-sound", so it basically sounds like "åh" or like you said the "já" but without pronuncing the "j". Could this be related to the old norse word; "já"?
No, this is probably just your form of the word "ok"/"og". It is not uncommon for this final sound to drop in Scandinavian and especially in Scanian this shouldn't surprise you. :) It is close to Denmark and Scanian belongs to the East Danish dialect group.
Aha, so Finnish "ja" meaning "and" is from the Gemanic branch! Fascinating. If so, then "ja" in Japanese, with the exact same pronounciation -- and, while not important, with the same spelling in "Romaji"/Latin characters, for that matter -- meaning the exact same thing ("and") possibly rules out some some things. Here's a bit of Japanese: "sakana ja naganegi o tabemasu" (something like that), meaning "fish and long leeks to eat" (something like that).
I’d love to know when this was filmed. As a flat land, sub tropic dweller, the last time I saw snow was on Christmas Eve in 1988 or 89 when we had snowflakes here. Anyone know?
I'm curious what you thought of Paul C. Bauschatz's The Well and the Tree. The lack of a future tense in Germanic languages would an interesting topic as well.
I second that. When I was a student of Arabic some students got upset and couldn't wrap their minds around how Arabic had no specific future tense. Then you remind them that English doesn't either. Minds blown.
Many swedish dialects does indeed drop the j in "ja". They pronounce it something like "aå". As a Norwegian I often use this in when I parody the swedes hehe
Ja in low Saxon Dutch/German dia,ects is also used in sentences like: "dat göt ja niet", "dass geht ja nicht", here ja does not mean yes... it more or less means "really", or "surely", well maybe it has connections to and...
The Gothic language also have "auk" which means "and", but this word is used only after verbs or names. Amusing, that the Latin word "et" is somehow reminds Ukranian "та" or Croatian "te" for the same meaning.
It's also pretty weird how different the words for "boy" and "girl" is in different germanic languages: English: boy / girl Norwegian: gutt / jente Danish: dreng / pige Swedish: pojke / flicka German: Junge / Mädchen In fact it seems almost no language I know use a related word for this, even the latin languages is completely different: French: garçon / fille Italian: ragazzo / ragazza Spanish: niño / niña Etc. Why is that!? Did we only figure out we had a need to refer to children in a gendered way just a few years ago and we all came up with random new words or something?
The german word "Junge" cames from "jung", which means "young". The english word came from the proto-indo-european word "bʰā", which means "brother". And "dreng" cames from the proto-germanic word "drangijaz" which means "man" or "stake". So, yes every language create her own word for boy.
@@anthemsofeurope2408 yeah I know that the reason is that these words are (almost?) all different words with a different meaning that were repurposed to mean boy or girl. I know quite a few of them meant servant or children or a diminutive of man/woman etc. But that doesn't explain why. Didn't proto Indo-European have a gendered word for a child of each sex, or was these words "lost" somehow? And since even very closely related languages have so different words for it, it seems to suggest that gendered words for children was added to most European languages really recently, like just a few generations ago. A few centuries max, otherwise we should have had the same words in Scandinavian languages.
The word for girl in Dutch (meisje) , similar to German(Mädchen), is the diminutive of what is Maid(en) in English. The diminutive form also makes the gender neuter (het/das) instead of female. Boy is "Jongen" in Dutch, analogous to German too. (and Jong is indeed the word for Young). In Dutch the diminutive form "jongetje" is used, but only for specific cases. (to stress somebody is younger or the gender of a baby). I don't think I ever heard that in German.
"Junge" is not the only German word for boy, there's also "Knabe" and "Bub"/"Bube" the later one is pronounced "Bua" or "Bou" in Bavarian dialect and that is quite similar to the English "boy" (and in Bavarian you don't use the word "Junge"). In German a nasty girl is a "Göre", which is quite similar to "girl" imo. "Mädchen" has the same root as the English "maid/maiden".
Pretty incredible how much languages change over the course of only 2000 years. Given the fact we’ve been speaking for a few hundred thousand years.... Or does language evolve more when migration occurs?
That's a very good question. Languages change no matter if there's migration or language contact, BUT: I'm very sure that those result in quickly occurring profound changes. There are concepts like Sprachbund and Koiné language. The Scandinavian languages are a dialect continuum that differs in similar ways from their ancestor language (the same is true for continental Germanic) and Low Saxon influence on Scandinavian has resulted in more changes to the languages than their vocabulary. Sound changes spread in a dialect continuum (or cause it) in waves. The European languages have created concepts such as articles and simple affirmative and negative particles after they've split into different languages. And they have simplified their case systems! It has been suggested that the unstressed vowels didn't aid communication between Norse and Old English speakers and language contact may have caused them to vanish earlier. The same may be true of Scandinavian under the influence of Low Saxon and other languages.
Spanish "y" turns to "e" in front of words beginning with "i". That comes pretty close to Latin "et". -- I have got another story of "and": In old Vietnamese proverbs or still-used compounds (like "hai vợ chồng" = "two wife husband" = couple) their "and" is always missing. In their modern language it is given as "và". This comes pretty close to Arabic "wa" (="and"). It might have entered the Vietnamese language by Muslim Malayans. That´s my theory. Like the Turks turned Arabic "wa" into "ve" in Turkish. "And" is no necessary word.
3:56 even in todays high german (not only old high german) "ja" still means yes and is still pronounced the same. In some dialects it sounds like the old norse one. (and this is not specific to a certain region. There are german dialects in the north of germany which pronounce it "jo" and if you go south to bavaria and austria this is also common.) Additionally i think the czech word for yes also sounds the same (jo with the o like int the english word bottle)
The Czech word for yes is “ano” often shortened to “no” (confusing for English speakers learning the language). “Jo” is often heard for yes as German was widely spoken pre-war and many German words have entered the Czech language.
As a Danish speaker I think perhaps that the "j" in "jo" remains to distinguish it in the midst af all these diphtongs we have. The pronouncation of "jo" differs quite a lot - depending 🤨 it kan be with a short o, long o, it can have "stød" (a sort of "pressure" like in "æg" {egg}, and sometimes we even add a "t" in front of it to indicate we are thinking it over or are rather indifferent. I probably should have started out by telling that "ja" and "jo" both means yes, but "jo" is used when answering a question with a "not" in it, "Don't you like it?" - "Jo, I do!" "Do you like it?" - "Ja, I do!" Besides - English and Danish are quite similar, but when you get to the nitty-gritty parts of it can be super tricky to translate unambiguously, hence the "Danglish" which it super clear when Danes speak English with each other, but actually makes no sence in real English 😄
Probably it's due to separate it from general screaming. AAAAAAAAAAA is a very very angry yes... How about keeping that J in the beginning so that we can understand each other better...
Icelandic: á. Norwegian og. The norwegian "og" is pronounced like å (english ~"aw"). In some western dialects, the western coast being really close to Iceland, å is pronounced "ao". Do you know what else is pronounced "ao"? Icelandic á. Coincidence? I think not
In Slavic languages end can be the same as yes. Also og can be related to slavic ak which is affix for "as" or "like". EG: Me as you are so ans so... Me (ak, og, aug, eke=as) you... for and or und we can also compare it to slavic ond which is suffix for place. So I theorise that one groupe of Germanic languages used descriptive way like"og"= as to say and but other may hawe used place and/end und for saying and. :D
Another oddity: the Swedish word for 'and' is 'och' (pronounced witk a hard short k, like 'ok' without the last y-sound) - and it's the only Swedish word spelled -ch... I personally think it's because of old handwriting styles, where a messily written k became an h, but I'm not sure.
Peterolen Maybe. There is also the curiosity of the word 'också' (also, direct translation 'and so'), which retain the hard k and from a pronounciation point of view, the correct spelling.
For some reason 'enn' in the meaning and, is used in modern norwegian in a special context which is the beginning of a sentence. "Enn du da?" meaning "How about you" when asked how you are doing or something like that. Maybe it is a dutch loan word.
I don't think we have an equivalent to enn in Danish. We have 'end' (silent d) but I can't think of a situation where it would be used like this. Maybe in a dialect. But we have 'endog' (end + og) meaning something like also.
Knightonagreyhorse Could be from Dutch influence, in the Dutch language we say En (met) jij(/jou)? Literally meaning And (with) you?) for How about you? Literally word for word How about you? is translated as Hoe over jij? Or Hoe met jou? But that’s not a comprehensible sentence/question. I find the word About difficult to translate in dutch. I don’t think we have one single equivalent in dutch, but many. Not any of those substitutes has a similarity to the word About. Maybe there was in Old Dutch, but to my knowledge not in Modern Dutch.
"Eke" is one of my favorites. "Nickname" used to be "an ekename", i.e. an additional name, but then people started hearing it as "a neekname" and then it turned into "a nickname".
And in Danish we still have "et øgenavn", "øge" meaning increase, add, extend etc.
Similar thing happened with the word 'apron,' but in the opposite fashion. "A napron" was eventually heard as "an apron", and so the spelling shifted.
@@typograf62 I would like to add that the word "øgenavn" often has negative connotations, i.e. it is often used to taunt or tease someone; on the other hand we also have the word "kælenavn" (pet name) which is a positive word, something we call people we love and/or care about.
a norange
an orange
proof: spanish still uses the word "naranja"
@widhbnw efDwdwDW How does that detract from the point? If anything it reïnforces what I was saying: that the version with an "n" is older
Being taught about my own language (Norwegian) by a cowboy is not how I thought my day was going, men I'm not complaining :D
Dr. Jackson Crawford makes the snow come back.
"and pretentious later poets" sick burn.
I do enjoy the manner in which Doc delivers his burns. It's like he's blowing bugs off of his sleeve.
3:45 - Spanish also uses 'e' in lieu of 'y' when the next word begins with an 'i' (e.g. Estoy sorprendido e incrédulo). Also, as a side note, Spanish also uses 'u' in lieu of 'o' ("or") when the next word begins with an 'o' (e.g. Tiene siete u ocho años).
Great video! :)
@@FrozenMermaid666 How would you say "7 or 8" in Spanish?
@@FrozenMermaid666 "Siete u ocho" would be correct according to all my sources. Also correct would be "cosas fabulosas e increibles" (and not "y increibles)". I don't believe the norm is any different in Latin America than in Spain, but I can't say what the common usage is as I am not a native speaker myself.
This man's already so well known but give it more time like another decade or two and he's going to evolve into a legend. Nobody compares to this stuff than what he does and how he does it.
And he looks cool doing it. A Wyoming Cowboy who happens to be a linguist!
@@iberius9937 he's not from Wyoming he's from Texas though
3:27 and Dutch "ook" meaning "too" or "as well"
I was about to mention that. There's also "ooch" in Lower German and some dialects of Standard German, most prominently the Rhenish dialects which are closest to Dutch, I believe.
Reminds me of auch in German also meaning too
We use "ook" in Afrikaans, too. Means exactly the same as the German "auch" and Dutch "ook".
Like @Peterolen says, in swedish we use "Också" but in some dialects, it's often just "Å", which is an informal "Och". And in norwegian and maybe some danish dialects it's just "Og".
Not surprising as Afrikaans is a daughter language of dutch. I can easily understand a person speaking Afrikaans, be it that some words changed meaning over time.
Afrikaans to me sounds like dutch by someone who didn't pay attention in grammar class
I just read your translation of the poetic edda, you make it really accessible to modern readers and I like it quite a bit
The old dutch word for "and" used to be "ende" pronounced with two syllables. I guess it was to long to say so a the past centuries the "de" part was dropped and now we say "en". So it used to be more similar to English "and" and German "und"
It was also Enda or even Ind.
Please make a video about Irish Gaelic and the norse interaction and impact on them
That's a very apparent influence in faroese especially, where we have the word "Tarvur" for bull, from gaelic "Tarbh" and then some other words and also some placenames like "Mykines" which comes from Myk + Iness, meaning Swine Island basically
Anything between Gaelic agus and Danish og?
@@gearoiddom - Unlikely: agus is from Proto-Celtic *onkus (near); og from Old Norse auk (also).
@@SuperPrumpur Yea there are a bunch of loan words from Celtic languages in Icelandic. Most are names of animals (ex. Jaðrakan (type of bird), kapall meaning horse (but its mostly used as the name of solitaire, card game))or people like f.ex. Melkólfr meaning Malcolm and Kjartan (cant remember how that is in Gaelic). There are also a few nouns, used to be more of them but only a few survive into modern icelandic.
2:40 medan (while) is still a word in swedish but the 'ð' sound turned into a 'd' sound, I did not know how old it was thank you!!
I like your relaxed highly professional explanation of our languages development.
As far as I know, the word for "and" in Romanian is "și", pronounced *shee*. "E" is the shortened form of "este", meaning "is".
David Vanau I thought so too, but could be wrong...
That's interesting, as "este" means "this" in Spanish. But I suppose Romanian "este" is equivalent and related to Spanish "está".
Yeah. Și descends from Latin "sic," while "este" doesn't come from "et" but rather Latin "essere."
@@karmakanic It's "esse", not "essere". Essere is the Italian word for it
@@GPrinceps in Italian the pronounciation of "è" (is) is a larger "e" (idk the ipa) while "e" (and) is pronounced [e]
3:42 the Romanian word for "and" is "și", not "e". "E" is the shortened form of "este" which means he/she is.
Yes, but i think it comes from latin sic - other romance languages have sí / si which means 'yes' or 'if'. So everything is closely related. :)
The Dutch cognate of “archaic” old Norse ‘auk’ (3:22) is ‘ook’, meaning ‘also’. In my south eastern Dutch dialect it is ‘ouk’ (sounds like ‘auk’)!. ‘Ouk’ is used in just one town and two villages in an area squeezed between a northern ‘ok/ook’-area and a southern ‘auch’-area. This ‘auch’ is a form which was imported from the German Rhineland a long time ago. So ‘ouk’ could be a remnant, but it could also just be a mixture of ‘(o)ok’ and ‘auch’.
I love evolution of language video's, maybe you can make more of those?
Talking about the dropping of the "j" (yuh) sound in Norse languages is somewhat prevalent in modern swedish, where many Swedes will pronounce "ja" (yes) as "a" (aa, ah)
Although this is just spoken Swedish, it's still an interesting phenomenon!
dane her e - i've actually noticed the same thing with spoken danish
That's just because we Danes are lazy and don't pronounce half the letters 🤣
more comparitive etymology, please! I love that subject.
I never got the chance to have one of your classes at CU. However, my best-friend did and she insists that you’re awesome. Keep up the good work. Sko Buffs
This is great! English is my mother tongue, I learnt Dutch as a child, have studied German and of course followed Dr. Crawford’s Old Norse channel. I had noticed this dissimilarity between the words meaning “and” and wondered about the etymologies of the words. Such a common word is more likely to be cognate in closely related languages, or at least I thought so based on French (learnt as a 5 year old) and Spanish (studied in school).
(Nowadays I can only speak English well, French passably, Spanish badly, and the others not at all.)
(I just put in all those disclaimers because I don’t want to pretend I am an actual linguist or truly polylingual, because I am not.)
@@GPrinceps I learned Portuguese around 16 ,lived in Brazil for a while. I have now forgotten most of my Portuguese at age 27. If you don't practice a non native language for long enough you forget it.
Oh, I like that you've learnt several Germanic languages.
Something that I've found odd is the "u" in German "und".
@@brittakriep2938 Of course there is variation but "ond" is likely descended from the form "und", which makes this kind of variation irrelevant to my point. (It could also be from "and" but I very much doubt that in this case)
What I mean is that in Old High German and earlier the word usually did not have a "u". Judging from the other Germanic languages and Old High German we should rather have something like "änd"/"end".
By Middle High German "und" had spread in a very unlikely way.
@@brittakriep2938 Very interesting anecdote. I think the value and richness in accent variation and old aspects of German that are retained in dialects outweigh the difficulties in communication. But some people just want to be able to communicate.
I think the main problem is the image that dialects have gotten in the later decades of the last century.
Thanks for this. I enjoy the linguistics videos and particularly ones that deal with etymologies and cognates.
It's the little details like this that I appreciate the most.
Keep up the good work.
This might be a bit irrelevant, but was the TV series that you said a while ago that you were part of "Fremvandrerne"?
Fun fact: in Estonian, the word for "yes" is "jah". The etymology for this word is unclear. The word for "and", which is "ja" as mentioned in the video, has cognates in all the Finnic languages, but "jah" does not have any cognates. Finnish has similar "joo" which is a Swedish loan (the normal word for "yes" is "kyllä" - cognate to Estonian "küll", meaning "enough").
In addition to "jah", there's also "jaa", suspiciously similar to German "ja", and I suspect this is a loan from German. But the -h in "jah" is weird.
In my Norwegian dialect we say "og" (pronounced å) for and, but where english has also, german has auch, dutch has ook and standard norwegian has også, we have "au". Not sure if that means the older form "auk" has survived in my dialect or not, but it's really interesting!
Great video, very informative, but have your sound guy get a wind sock for the microphone! The wind noise is very distracting!
i was actually JUST thinking about this problem and this video showed up in my recommendations. thank you!
Native Danish speaker here with some insight on how this works in modern Danish:
- og /ouw/ or /å/ depending on dialect -- means “and"
- også /ouwså/ or more commonly /osse/ -- also -- literally “and so”
- ja /jæ/ -- means “yes” -- simple affirmative.
- jo /yo/ -- also means yes, but when answering a question requiring a confirmation, i.e., “You did do your homework, right?” or “You said you wanted your coffee black, right?", response: Jo.
In older writing you can find both “jo” and “ja” being used to mean “also” or “and even" especially when listing things. Nowadays only “jo” is used in the sense of “also/and even” in an emphatic or confirmative sense within a sentence. E.g: “Jeg har jo stået og ventet hele dagen.” --- I’ve (in fact, even) stood (here) and waited all day.
Wow, Danish is sick... I was reading this like Danish, Danish, Danish, Dutch wtf? "Hele dagen" means "whole days" in Dutch
@@filipboucher9614 ‘Hel’ means whole in the singular sense, but in the definitive you add the extra -e at the end for balance.. ‘dagen’ means “the day”. in Danish, you add the article at the end of the word. I think in Dutch, you would say “de dag” i.e. “the day”. They do this in Jutland for instance, but in Standard Danish, you add it at the end.
Possible explanation: the use of enclitic *-hw or *-hwe was still productive when the Proto-Germanic continuum started to separate and each daughter language replaced its usage differently. Possibly PGmc had no set way of saying "and" in a single word or maybe there were semantic distinctions (like your example of contrasting usage of ON "enn") that were erased later on.
On the other hand, Vulgar Latin maybe had eliminated the usage of the enclitic "-que" and "et" was already standardized as a suitable replacement, giving rise to all later descending Romance languages.
I thought of this explanation too and wondered if there was a reason why the suffix didn't survive. It may be connected to the initial stress in Germanic languages that the suffix was awkward to pronounce or couldn't get enough emphasis. I'm not content with my hypothesis, though.
@LegoGuy87 doesnt "que" means what? Cuz in spanish "what" is que, in portuguese que, in italian che
I understand that from the few sources that exist for Iberian languages, (not Basque), that the Iberian word for 'and' was very similar to the word 'and'.
Did proto-germanic not have a proper "and" word? Or did they only use the "-hw" suffix and not have a separate word?
That would be interesting. I've studied some Turkish and supposedly, it didn't originally have a word for "and"; instead you'd use "ile" (with). Modern Turkish has "ve" (and), borrowed from Persian.
Okay, I'm not an expert on proto-germanic, on fact I know nothing about it, so take what follows just as an educated guess. Having studied Latin for 5 years, one thing that stood out to me was the fact that that language had 3 ways to say "and" (et, ac, -que), maybe proto Germanic also had multiple ways to say "and", that could explain it
That probably varied, depending on time and place, but both "auk" and "andi" could be used to signify "furthermore/additionally," and these two words are the precursors to most of the and-words in the germanic languages.
@@andeve3 "auk" is more similar to the Swedish word 'och" pronounced auck and "Andi" is similar to "and"
I learned Old Norse for half a year towards the end of my rather eclectic degree but even I didn't learn it from a man in a ten gallon hat standing in front of a mountain. That would've been quite something.
I am so sorry for sending you there for fishing. It isn't supposed to be frozen over this late in the year!
2:43 medan is still a word in swedish that means while.
I guess the "j" didn't drop in já, because it was such a commonly use word in speech, that it became one of those irregular words that don't really follow standard rules.
Also, 'á' or 'å' doesn't roll that easilly off the tongue, does it?
Great video Dr. Crawford!!!
And is often acquired quite late in languages, a language can do fine completely without the word and. Sumerian for example didn't have a word for and until they borrowed it from Akkadian. That might be why and is sometimes so "fleeting" in languages.
And in Old Irish 'ocus' > modern Irish 'agus'; in Welsh 'ac'
That's an unusual Viking helmet you've got there, padner.
I love how the Old English word for "yes" sounds almost identical to the modern American slang of "yeah".
By the way, Estonian for "and" is "ja", while "yes" is either "jah" or "jaa".
Well, what I think is surprising are the different words for boy and girl in the different germanic languages
If I recall correctly the Swedish words for boy and girl are from the Romani language.
Tjej as an example which means girl. Although I am Scandinavian (Swedish) I have no clue what the other Norse languages’ words for boy and girl are.
@@EmmaWithoutOrgans That's interesting. Hungarian has a slang word for girl, csaj, which comes from Romani. cs = English ch
I'm still surprised that German borrowed from English to get ,,das Baby''.
Interestingly, Low Saxon (Low Getman) also uses "man" for "but". It’s very similar to Scandinavian "men", but is it from Old Norse?
Huh, had no idea that "ook" in Dutch and "og" were related.
In some deep way, they still have the same meaning. They are just used differently nowadays. I think you can translate the Dutch "ook" in Swedish with "ocksa". I know there has to be a circle on the "a" but I have no idea how to put it there.
Like “ek” in (West ) Frisian, related to an older verb meaning “grow/append”, related to the root “aug-“ (as found in Greek ‘augment”). Ook = additionally, sort of.
ik auch nicht.
@@hennobrandsma4755 Dat is ook interessant!😉
Inderdaad een ander gebruik " ook zo" 😁 almoast också ?
In some Swedish dialects (north Sweden), the word "en" is used before a male name - something like "en Erik". Usually the e in en is almost silent i those dialects. It sounds a bit like "n' Erik". My father and basically everyone around where he lives use that. They aslo use the letter a as a prefix before a feminine name -like " a Anna". The word en is also a number - one.
I think that norwegian is a bit more "logical" with en and ett then swedish. So it denotes male/female while we in Sweden just said "f*ck it" to any kind of rules regarding en/ett and you need to know the word ...
Jamtlandic is a Norwegian dialect though..
In Swedish we often drop the j in ja /jɑ:/ (yes) in speech and just say a /ɑ:/
Didnt expect you to meantion the finnic languages here. A quick add on - "jah" also means "yes" in estonian which I suspect is a direct borowing from germanic languages too. You can also say "yes" by droping the h and making the a vowel longer "Jaa"
In Finnish "jaa" is only on voting on the parliament. In the spoken language one says "joo", in the written language it is "kyllä".
If I'm not mistaken it has been suggested that the Celtiberian word for 'and' was 'endi' or something similar. I'm happy to be corrected if wrong.
Cool sponsor! Kinda came outta nowhere, but that’s a good way to do it I guess!
Low German “ok”, Dutch “ook” German “auch” all meaning “also” are clearly cognate with the Scandanavian words for “and”. You can imagine someone relating a story “Bob also Jane also Tom are coming to the party”. Swedish resolves the confusion between “also” and “and” with the word “ochså” for also
As far as I can see, etymological dictionaries (Swedish, Danish, Norwegian) trace the evolution of 'men' back to Low German 'men, man' as well as Old Norse 'meðan'. So 'en' is the more archaic form while 'men' is German influenced. Would you agree?
Interesting that you mentioned that the norse "Ja" didn't drop the "j" sound at the beginning of the word. The thing is, even though it's spelled with a j it is very often colloquially pronounced "a". the J is omitted in colloquial pronunciation.
Add to that that in german dialects, the j sound can (if rarely) be dropped as well.
maybe it was originally not there but spelt that way to conform to someone's dialect, then hypercorrected into 'correct' form.
I know I'm just a random guy on the internet, but the most logical reason the Old Norse "yes" word mystery is that way is because it is a very common word, therefore harder to change. No?
Could be true. A number of very common everyday words have retained the "j" letter in front, such as "járn" or "jarl".
Man this is fascinating. (Colorado represent)
This a fascinating little point here. Thank you.
What's an enclidic word? I maybe misheard but even if I didn't hear correctly, I'm not sure what it means...
In modern Swedish there are some rare remains of this PGerm . For example “and then (what)?”. Also sometimes with two contrasting verbs, like “to laugh and cry”. There is also a popular compound; “and still now”. Which is often shortened to , causing to mean “yet”, “still”, “so far”, etc.
Could “jo” be the derivation of the colloquial Swedish “o”, however?
Interesting , now I go try to give these variants a nice place in my germanic conlang. 😁 Thank you.
Jah or Ja both is derived from continuous act of Yailamak in Turkish language. Yailamak/Ayaklamak is continuous act of pressing grapes in order to make wine. It is continuous so people use it instead of And which in turn literally means next.
Just a small tip:
I've noticed that when Americans try to avoid pronouncing the short "u" in foreign words (Like in German "und") as in "cut" ([ʌ] or more accurately [ɐ]), they choose a long "u" sound as in "mood" [uː].
Of course you should avoid the "cut"-sound because in practically every language you'll ever find that is an "a" sound not an "u" sound.
However, "mood" has a long vowel and you should choose a short "u" like in "put" instead: "und", "Umlaut" etc. don't have a long vowel.
The impractical English spelling system unfortunately has no unambiguous way to write this sound. It's [ʊ] in IPA.
'Putt' and 'put' are different. 'Foot' and 'fool' are different. But, 'put' and 'foot' have the same vowel sound. If American English is native, it all seems obvious. Just try learning another language, and it's easy to over correct.
@@joeampolo42 Sorry, I'm not entirely sure if you understood my post.
I know how to pronounce these words and I have learned many foreign languages.
@@gnuling296 I was actually trying to agree with you, just explaining the phenomenon from an American perspective. I've proofed audio books and know how to explain to a fellow American how not to get it wrong. You seem to think I was trying to correct you. No, I was just amplifying it for Americans.
@@joeampolo42 Okay, :)
Then thank you. I wasn't sure how to understand your post because it didn't seem clear to me who you were addressing.
@@gnuling296 You're welcome.
A cool video.
But "and" is a bit complicated.
Off the top of my head I can think of 7 different "ands".
1. 2 and 2 is 4 (mathematical operator)
2. horse and carriage (2 things that "go together")
3. the basket contained a blueberry and a whistle (arbitrary set of 2 things)
5. he turned and looked away (temporal succession)
6. do that and you will regret it (consequential, equivalent to if you do that then you will regret it)
7. interrogative
Where are you going with that?
"old norse is boring"
and...?
Are the various "ands" you talked about equally multivalent?
Are the various "ands" you talked about equally multivalent?
On the Old Norse já: It seems to me that languages evolve in a systematic manner, wherein most sound changes will effect every instance of that sound in the language, but I assume there are some exceptions for practicality's sake. In this case having á as a word for yes seems impractical, as it would be very difficult to distinguish from, say, quickly spoken words ending in a á or e, as an example.
Other than that, it's also possible já was in fact a borrowing; if it was borrowed from the west germanic languages, or in fact a dialect of north germanic languages which didn't drop "J"s in that way, but it was borrowed after that sound change I don't think it would be hard to believe the word be kept as is.
A lot of dialects of Swedish use a longer "a" as a short for ja, or to show agreement. I don't know old this practice is however, but if I had to guess it's a rather modern dialectual thing.
In Swedish the J in 'Ja' is often dropped in speech so it becomes aa/ah instead. Pronounced kind of like: awh
There are "exceptions" to systematic sound changes but these exceptions are systematic too. It shouldn't be possible to stop a non-combinatoric sound change just because the word would get an unusual structure. The sound change probably meant that for some time there were no initial glides in the language.
I find your other idea more convincing. It's very common for words to be adopted from other dialects that were not affected by a specific sound change or where more conditions applied to the sound change.
Always like your linguistic vids. Vielen dank/mange takk/ta muchly.
Slovenian ja for yes is also a borrowing from the Germanic languages, I assume.
It's in a lot of languages
Things I didn't know I was gonna do today: learn about the various surprisingly unrelated words for "and" across the Germanic languages from a cowboy with a doctorate in nordic studies, but here we are. Huh. The more you know.
@3:12 The Icelandic "g" is often pronaunced like "ch", so "og" sounds pretty much like the German "auch" or more like the North-German dialect "och". i.e. a true Berliner would say "Ick och" instead of "Ich auch." And the Icelandic word for I is "eg" and sounds like "ech" ... quite similar to the German "ich"
Berlin has that from Plattdeutsch, where it is said "ick ouck/ohk"
Can you comment on the English "yo". As used very occasionally, say in a roll call, "Jones?!, Yo!." Yes, I am here! Seen it used in a John Wayne movie. We used in grade school during roll call, just to needle the up tight teachers!
Latin has "et" and "-que". Old English has "and" and "ġēa" (not in the Latin sense). Why would we assume that conjunctions and affirmatives necessarily coincide, or that languages originally employed a single term to convey a subtle range of meanings? That is, the belong-together-"and" in "fish and chips" or "Jack and Jill" has a stronger meaning than the list-of-similars-"and" in "Bob, Ted, and Jim" (hence the Oxford comma).
I have a theory about why Já didn't drop the "j"
I think it's because then it would sound exactly like the word "Å" which means a tiny river. My guess is that people kept the "j" to keep the distinction.
They would be used in different contexts so it would not be confusing
In Old English, 'ge' also meant 'and', as in listing nouns, not clauses. E.g. Ǽgðer ge on spræce, ge on þeáwum, ge on eallum sidum = Both in speech, and in manners, and in all customs.
True, though It can also be used with clauses:
www.bosworthtoller.com/046975
Although "yes" in the Swedish, and perhaps the other north Germanic languages, got to keep the J, it is very common to just shorten it to just "a". I do not know if this is just a modern change because we are to lazy to pronounce the J, or if it is same as with the case of year and young.
In Danish, we often say "å" instead of "og" for the word and. This is basically a long AA, which seems related to "Já".
så også på svensk (så säger vi å)
@4:40 another example where Old Norse didn't lose the Y/J is Jötun (the giants), wich is relatated to eating (engl.) / essen (ger.). (Also compare the english giants "Ettin"). In this case it seems that the Westgermanic lLanguages lost the Y/J.
As a person from Skåne (Scania), we pronunce "och" like the sound without the "ch-sound", so it basically sounds like "åh" or like you said the "já" but without pronuncing the "j".
Could this be related to the old norse word; "já"?
No, this is probably just your form of the word "ok"/"og".
It is not uncommon for this final sound to drop in Scandinavian and especially in Scanian this shouldn't surprise you. :) It is close to Denmark and Scanian belongs to the East Danish dialect group.
Aha, so Finnish "ja" meaning "and" is from the Gemanic branch! Fascinating. If so, then "ja" in Japanese, with the exact same pronounciation -- and, while not important, with the same spelling in "Romaji"/Latin characters, for that matter -- meaning the exact same thing ("and") possibly rules out some some things. Here's a bit of Japanese: "sakana ja naganegi o tabemasu" (something like that), meaning "fish and long leeks to eat" (something like that).
So you think the Gothic "jah" was borrowed from Asiatic languages?
@@westelaudio943 I leave that to the experts to figure out. Coincidences are a fact of nature.
I’d love to know when this was filmed. As a flat land, sub tropic dweller, the last time I saw snow was on Christmas Eve in 1988 or 89 when we had snowflakes here. Anyone know?
Netherlands, Zealand
I think that the Lithuanian word: ant (unt in my dialect) which means on as in on top of is a cognate to and.
My first thought regarding "já" is that it might be adopted from another Germanic language like the names of the week days were supposedly.
I'm curious what you thought of Paul C. Bauschatz's The Well and the Tree. The lack of a future tense in Germanic languages would an interesting topic as well.
I second that. When I was a student of Arabic some students got upset and couldn't wrap their minds around how Arabic had no specific future tense. Then you remind them that English doesn't either. Minds blown.
@@baaler3953 English has no specific future tense? Will you please explain? (See what I did there?)
Great video, thank you
Many swedish dialects does indeed drop the j in "ja". They pronounce it something like "aå". As a Norwegian I often use this in when I parody the swedes hehe
Maybe the dropping of the J in Ja is ongoing? In swedish, at least, the informal everyday way of saying it is very often just "Aa".
Ja in low Saxon Dutch/German dia,ects is also used in sentences like: "dat göt ja niet", "dass geht ja nicht", here ja does not mean yes... it more or less means "really", or "surely", well maybe it has connections to and...
The Gothic language also have "auk" which means "and", but this word is used only after verbs or names. Amusing, that the Latin word "et" is somehow reminds Ukranian "та" or Croatian "te" for the same meaning.
It's also pretty weird how different the words for "boy" and "girl" is in different germanic languages:
English: boy / girl
Norwegian: gutt / jente
Danish: dreng / pige
Swedish: pojke / flicka
German: Junge / Mädchen
In fact it seems almost no language I know use a related word for this, even the latin languages is completely different:
French: garçon / fille
Italian: ragazzo / ragazza
Spanish: niño / niña
Etc.
Why is that!? Did we only figure out we had a need to refer to children in a gendered way just a few years ago and we all came up with random new words or something?
The german word "Junge" cames from "jung", which means "young". The english word came from the proto-indo-european word "bʰā", which means "brother". And "dreng" cames from the proto-germanic word "drangijaz" which means "man" or "stake". So, yes every language create her own word for boy.
@@anthemsofeurope2408 yeah I know that the reason is that these words are (almost?) all different words with a different meaning that were repurposed to mean boy or girl. I know quite a few of them meant servant or children or a diminutive of man/woman etc.
But that doesn't explain why. Didn't proto Indo-European have a gendered word for a child of each sex, or was these words "lost" somehow? And since even very closely related languages have so different words for it, it seems to suggest that gendered words for children was added to most European languages really recently, like just a few generations ago. A few centuries max, otherwise we should have had the same words in Scandinavian languages.
The word for girl in Dutch (meisje) , similar to German(Mädchen), is the diminutive of what is Maid(en) in English. The diminutive form also makes the gender neuter (het/das) instead of female. Boy is "Jongen" in Dutch, analogous to German too. (and Jong is indeed the word for Young). In Dutch the diminutive form "jongetje" is used, but only for specific cases. (to stress somebody is younger or the gender of a baby). I don't think I ever heard that in German.
"Junge" is not the only German word for boy, there's also "Knabe" and "Bub"/"Bube" the later one is pronounced "Bua" or "Bou" in Bavarian dialect and that is quite similar to the English "boy" (and in Bavarian you don't use the word "Junge").
In German a nasty girl is a "Göre", which is quite similar to "girl" imo. "Mädchen" has the same root as the English "maid/maiden".
Pojke is a loan from Finnish: poika (son, boy). Junge clearly means young. Mädchen is related to the English word maiden.
You forgot the dutch word, ook which means as well in dutch!
Dat ook ja xD
Is it possible that the Old Norse word for yes (ja) didn't lose it's y-sound because the word "yes" is used so commonly?
You have an awesome voice. It's like Sam Elliott with a nice beard.
Pretty incredible how much languages change over the course of only 2000 years.
Given the fact we’ve been speaking for a few hundred thousand years....
Or does language evolve more when migration occurs?
That's a very good question. Languages change no matter if there's migration or language contact, BUT: I'm very sure that those result in quickly occurring profound changes.
There are concepts like Sprachbund and Koiné language.
The Scandinavian languages are a dialect continuum that differs in similar ways from their ancestor language (the same is true for continental Germanic) and Low Saxon influence on Scandinavian has resulted in more changes to the languages than their vocabulary.
Sound changes spread in a dialect continuum (or cause it) in waves.
The European languages have created concepts such as articles and simple affirmative and negative particles after they've split into different languages. And they have simplified their case systems!
It has been suggested that the unstressed vowels didn't aid communication between Norse and Old English speakers and language contact may have caused them to vanish earlier. The same may be true of Scandinavian under the influence of Low Saxon and other languages.
@@gnuling296 Very interesting! I'm going to read up on Sprachbund
But now, grammar and spelling teachers keep the evolution at a manageable pace.
3:17 ook in Dutch
Spanish "y" turns to "e" in front of words beginning with "i". That comes pretty close to Latin "et". -- I have got another story of "and": In old Vietnamese proverbs or still-used compounds (like "hai vợ chồng" = "two wife husband" = couple) their "and" is always missing. In their modern language it is given as "và". This comes pretty close to Arabic "wa" (="and"). It might have entered the Vietnamese language by Muslim Malayans. That´s my theory. Like the Turks turned Arabic "wa" into "ve" in Turkish. "And" is no necessary word.
3:56 even in todays high german (not only old high german) "ja" still means yes and is still pronounced the same.
In some dialects it sounds like the old norse one. (and this is not specific to a certain region. There are german dialects in the north of germany which pronounce it "jo" and if you go south to bavaria and austria this is also common.) Additionally i think the czech word for yes also sounds the same (jo with the o like int the english word bottle)
nirfz you can hear that “ja” all the way to the Adriatic and the Dinaric hinterland...
The Czech word for yes is “ano” often shortened to “no” (confusing for English speakers learning the language). “Jo” is often heard for yes as German was widely spoken pre-war and many German words have entered the Czech language.
@@janetnarodetsky5405 Thanks for the explanation!
As a Danish speaker I think perhaps that the "j" in "jo" remains to distinguish it in the midst af all these diphtongs we have. The pronouncation of "jo" differs quite a lot - depending 🤨 it kan be with a short o, long o, it can have "stød" (a sort of "pressure" like in "æg" {egg}, and sometimes we even add a "t" in front of it to indicate we are thinking it over or are rather indifferent.
I probably should have started out by telling that "ja" and "jo" both means yes, but "jo" is used when answering a question with a "not" in it,
"Don't you like it?" - "Jo, I do!"
"Do you like it?" - "Ja, I do!"
Besides - English and Danish are quite similar, but when you get to the nitty-gritty parts of it can be super tricky to translate unambiguously, hence the "Danglish" which it super clear when Danes speak English with each other, but actually makes no sence in real English 😄
Probably it's due to separate it from general screaming. AAAAAAAAAAA is a very very angry yes... How about keeping that J in the beginning so that we can understand each other better...
Icelandic: á. Norwegian og. The norwegian "og" is pronounced like å (english ~"aw"). In some western dialects, the western coast being really close to Iceland, å is pronounced "ao". Do you know what else is pronounced "ao"? Icelandic á. Coincidence? I think not
I do think it is coincidence
In Slavic languages end can be the same as yes. Also og can be related to slavic ak which is affix for "as" or "like". EG: Me as you are so ans so... Me (ak, og, aug, eke=as) you... for and or und we can also compare it to slavic ond which is suffix for place. So I theorise that one groupe of Germanic languages used descriptive way like"og"= as to say and but other may hawe used place and/end und for saying and. :D
Another oddity: the Swedish word for 'and' is 'och' (pronounced witk a hard short k, like 'ok' without the last y-sound) - and it's the only Swedish word spelled -ch... I personally think it's because of old handwriting styles, where a messily written k became an h, but I'm not sure.
Peterolen Maybe. There is also the curiosity of the word 'också' (also, direct translation 'and so'), which retain the hard k and from a pronounciation point of view, the correct spelling.
In middle Dutch it's ende, sometimes shortened to end'
And when are you coming to Europe??? Or have you already been to Europe???
I'm a Dutch man and i hope you can reed this was een leuke video 😄.
Ja, me reed
For some reason 'enn' in the meaning and, is used in modern norwegian in a special context which is the beginning of a sentence. "Enn du da?" meaning "How about you" when asked how you are doing or something like that. Maybe it is a dutch loan word.
I don't think we have an equivalent to enn in Danish. We have 'end' (silent d) but I can't think of a situation where it would be used like this. Maybe in a dialect. But we have 'endog' (end + og) meaning something like also.
Knightonagreyhorse Could be from Dutch influence, in the Dutch language we say En (met) jij(/jou)? Literally meaning And (with) you?) for How about you? Literally word for word How about you? is translated as Hoe over jij? Or Hoe met jou? But that’s not a comprehensible sentence/question. I find the word About difficult to translate in dutch. I don’t think we have one single equivalent in dutch, but many. Not any of those substitutes has a similarity to the word About. Maybe there was in Old Dutch, but to my knowledge not in Modern Dutch.