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Not to be too anal or anything (I'm a Virgo, I suppose it can't be helped), but I noticed a typo on the frame about you hating Shakespeare at the age of 14, where "year" is spelled "yera." I was thinking you might want a heads up on that because I would, but that's me; apologies if I've offended you.
yes, the word anal is used that way in many other languages and for the same reason; but its not universal; but highly used in european languages afaik.
The English language had alot of letters that have been forgotten since then. Y was still Y back in those Times. The Y replacing the TH sound thing was a printing press typesetting comprise because they didn't often have a type for Þ, þ which used to be the letter that symbolised the TH sound. So Þe>ye>the , Þou>you>thou>you and AÞrshire>ayershire. Let's not forget & which used to be for the sound 'and' that was dropped gradually as well. So before the printing press a thousand would have probably been spelled a Þous& if spelling was uniform in those days and not almost entirely phonetic.
NO, Y was not pronounced as th. That was a separate letter named thorn (Þ, þ). This was replaced by a Y when the English imported Dutch printing presses lacking that letter, but having the extra letter 'Y', that English did not have.
By the time Shakespeare was alive, the letter thorn wasn't used anymore. It had developed and Y like variant that ended up being replaced by Y and then by Th.
The letter thorn ( Þ, þ ) in Old English (Anglo Saxon) changed its written form to a Y-like shape in blackletter script. During that time, the real Y acquired a dot for a while so the two could be distinguished. But when the Normans conquered the Saxons and Middle English (Anglo-Norman) started, the Normans, who spoke Old/Middle French, respelled English words to fit their Norman ears, and we got TH along with OU and GH and a few other oddities. Occasionally, the Y for thorn lingered on, even into early Modern English in the days of Shakespeare and King James and Queen Elizabeth (a range of time, not all concurrent), and even into the 1700's. By the 1700's, the thorn had been forgotten, but the Y-for-thorn was kept by printers of the time without a letter thorn or separate dotted Y and undated Y in their metal printing fonts, which had to be made by hand and were expensive and often imported until England's own printers and typesetters superseded them. So the thorn to dotless Y and TH always got the two TH (and DH) sounds, and the dotted Y, which lost its dot again, was the Ü sound in Greek and Old English, then chawed to an I, ih sound, and then to modern long and short I. Y also had the Y- sound like in Yellow. So for a while, you had to know "which Y" you were dealing with from context, the thorn or the Y (upsilon / ypsilon / y-grec). It's too bad we didn't keep the old thorn, which was very handy, and a few countries still use today.
Daniel Edwards my mother (who is Angolan of Portuguese descent) told me abacaxi was a different smaller sweeter type of pineapple and ananás was the larger comercial pineapple.
I did look into/read about it in the book I used as the basis of this video. I believe his lineage may have ended rather abruptly, though I could be misremembering.
There is a football manager by the name of Craig Shakespeare who managed Leicester City in 2016. Don't know if he is a descendant of THE Shakespeare but the name nevertheless is alive still today.
Shakespeare is not an uncommon name around these parts to this day, however I believe that William had no descendents in the male line, I think there are still descendents of his sister however.
Wow... Ann Hathaway looks good for her age. Anyway, the inconsistent spelling thing is why some believe that he didn't exist and that the plays were written by a troup. I believe that the Bard was a real person myself.
There was an actor by the name of William Shakspear, however evidence points to more than one person writing the plays that are attributed to him. Everything dealing with the law and legalese points to a lawyer or attorney, other details point to a skilled leatherworker, and more evidence points to a collection of individuals working together. It's believed that the intention was to create a new 'distinct' and 'modern' English language, using the plays and prose to spread the modern English to the masses.
Yes, that's a popular trend these days. Moses never existed. Jesus never existed. Shakespeare was either gay or a woman. Abraham Lincoln was a vampire slayer. Hermione was black. People love to trash the past.
A man who signed, or had others sign his name, as “Willm Shakp”; “William Shaksper”; “Wm Shakspe”; “William Shakspeare”; “Willm Shakspear”; “(By me), William Shakspear” certainly existed and was a 1/8 owner of the Globe theater. The debate is over how a man who could barely sign his own name could have written 36+ plays. Experts now accept that many of the works printed under the name "William Shakespeare" and "Shake-speare" were serially composed. IOW written, edited and rewritten by a variety of very smart people. But these experts generally use the term "collaboration" although there is no evidence that the guy who could not figure out how spell his own name was one of the writers.
"Y didn't make the sound it used to make today" That's not entirely accurate... There was no letter Y in the English alphabet, but there was þ ("thorn") which is now obsolete. When the printing press was introduced by the Dutch around 1500, they didn't have the letter þ (just as we don't have it on our keyboards today), so they used the next best letter available to replace it. Y was free, so that replaced þ in printed texts (similar to how German umlauts ä,ö,ü are commonly replaced by a,o,u in English texts because the letter isn't available; that wouldn't be considered the correct spelling in German). That's how we got ye, which actually is a lazy way of writing þe. A similar thing happened to the Scottish letter yogh (ȝ), which sounded like a J, but was replaced by the more easily available z.
What you're recounting is the traditional explanation given for the loss of thorn. Historical evidence shows that the letter was already being phased out in the 1300s with the introduction of th as a replacement. The substitution of y for thorn already occured as early as the mid-15th century, so the printing press merely solidified the change. Either way, within the context of this video none of this matters. At the time Elizabeth I was reigning, y had replaced thorn. Where Patrick screwed up was in implying y was always pronounced as th. While it is true that the modern consonant sound of y was still often represented by j in Elizabethan times and the mordern vowel sound of y was still represented by i, this was precisely the point in time when y started replacing those two letters to represent the modern y sounds we know.
I went right off Ben Johnson when he got full of steroids snd cheated in an Olympic Final. Didn't know that he was that old, or knew Shakespeare - what a small World.
While sometimes printers had used y for ð, the characters were considered distinct, and ðe is the, and “ye” is a variant using a glyph that looks similar but is not the same. Like in German spelling street as StraBe, rather than Straße.
There are very few people of that time we know more about than we do Shakespeare. There aren't really biographical writings for most Elizabethan figures, we only know of their noteworthy deeds, rather than their normal lives. As for Y, Y did exist, Thorn was written as Y because it looked similar when printing was invented, and so people would just print Ys instead of Thorns, and the use of Y to mean Thorn entered common usage in writing as well. We do know his name had Spear in it, since his father's coat of arms included a spear on it as a pun.
I met my old English teacher the other day in a service station - I hadn't seen her in 33 years (she's now 80 years old). She was one of two teachers who gave us Hamlet & Macbeth while at school. Cheers Mrs Brown - you're a legend!
2:34 you're thinking of the letter 'thorn' (þ), they substituted it with Y because they didn't have it in foreign typewriters. "Eth and thorn both represented /θ/ in Old English. Eth fell out of use during the 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century, and was replaced by ⟨th⟩. (Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation | en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EME_ye.svg | ("þe", i.e. "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨y⟩ in this context; see ye olde.[22])" *-Middle English's wikipedia*
The claim at the begining that we know very little about Shakespeare is wrong when you compare Shakespeare to many of his contemporaries. We actually A LOT more about Shakespeare than we know about tons of people from the Elizabethan era who weren't born into nobility. Why? Because for the past 400 years Shakespeare fanatics and scholars have been combing over every possible scrap of evidence surrounding Shakespeare's life. We know what his parents did, we know where he went to school, we know what properties he bought, we have enough info on him to write a proper detailed CV. Heck we know so much minutiae much about Shakey, you'd think we did a background web search on him and looked his property up on Zillow. We even have court documents where he was present. What other working-class stiff from the 1500s can you say that about? also, the letter "Y" did not make the "the" sound. You claim that English only had 24 letters at the time. That's not true. The alphabet consisted of more than 26. The letter Þ (called thorn) was used for a soft "th" sound as in "the" and "those" as opposed to the hard "th" sound of "think", "thermal" and "Thanksgiving". So it would be "Þe olde" not "ye olde". When thorn fell out of use, people in later times confused it for a "y" and started the "ye olde" craze, beginning later printers who have the symbol to print from and just replaced it with y which was the nearest equivalent (they could also have gone with p, maybe some of them did, I don't know)
I think with most records and documents they have found there is always the chance they could refer to someone else of the same, or similar, name, who happened to live at around the same time, and in the same part of the country, rather than referring to the famous one, so there is probably a lot we think we know, if the various records do in fact pertain to the correct man, but very little, if anything, that we can know for absolute certain. I think the latter point was what the video was getting at.
MrDannydoodah No, the details in many of the court cases, including place of residence, occupation, etc. match up well. How many other dramatists or stage directors named William Shakesper or Shakespere could have been living in London at the time and been petitioning for family coats of arms or involved in litigation, etc. We know more about Shakespeare than we do about any of his contemporaries, except Ben Jonson.
Jovan Weismiller yes because printing presses in France didn’t have the (thorn) symbol (because french didn’t have the symbol in its alphabet) and so replaced it with ‘y’ because ‘y’ didn’t exist in English at the time.
I also used to misspell my surname (I changed my name, so it wasn’t Goldstein; it was a Russian surname) ending it with -eff, rather than -ev, as a really small child. Yet, many Slavic people Romanised their surname like that, so I wasn’t really wrong! I wrote in a poem how ‘I don’t believe in Shakespeare,’ so that’s another reason why!
I learned that Ye was used because when type print came out they didn't have the symbol for TH as Scandinavian languages still do. The Y looked the most like it, so they used it.
To the best of my knowledge, the letter y never made the th sound, but this was another letter, named thorn (capital Þ, small þ). It later fell out of use for reasons I don't exactly remember (maybe because of french influence?) and was substituted by y because of their visual similarity.
I/J and U/V -- In Shakespeare's day, yes, I and J were the same letter, and the J with the tail was a special swash variant, used at the end of I, II, III in Roman numerals, and gaining ground in lowercase for the J in Latin and English, as it is used today. but in capital letters, I was used more often, and J was starting to appear. U and V were more complicated, and in Shakespeae's day, they could appear interchangeably, even in the same line of printing, and so it was odd to see the curved U for a ver sound, and the pointy V for an oo / u sound. Mostly in capitals, only the V was used and U was for script or italics, mostly, but U and V were just starting to be distinct letters. It was only in the late 1700's and into the 1800's that I and J and U and V settled down into how we use them today. Even then, formal inscriptions sometimes avoided J and U in favor of I and V, until later in the 1800's and into the 1900's, when they solidified into how we use them today. This is also why we have W as "double U." It was a ligature, two U's or V's tied together, overlapping. In English, we call it double U, but in most other European languages, it's called double V. Old English had a letter called wynn that looked very much like a P. It was so close, even in the later pinched form, that it was easily replaced by the W introduced by the Normans after the. Norman Conquest. So we have a "double U" instead of a "double V." And one important thing to note is that English has one of the oldest written histories of any Germanic language, dating back to around Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede and others in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) times in the 500's AD. That survived, even when hit with the Norman Conquest, and then thrived eventually. It's kind of a shame we didn't keep the Ð, ð (eth, edh) and Þ, þ (thorn) and Æ, æ (æsc, ash) versus A, a distinctions from Saxon times, which would have made things simpler and easier to spell. The Normans are also why we have GH instead of just H from Saxon English, and OU instead of U. Wacky, isn't it?
Can you do a video on the word potato? Thx (edit: as in the word potato in different languages because I find each language has its own unique way of communicating “potato”. Thx again
In French it is called "earth apple", where "apple" actually means "fruit", not the real apple. (Pineapple is similar, everyone calls it Ananas or something like this, except the English and some other languages) Maybe the "apple" Adam ate wasn't actually an apple, but any other fruit.
I like the theory that Shakespeare was actually a writing group of many writers who all worked collectively on the various plays. Perhaps edited and compiled by one man at the end to have a similar voice, but probably written in draft form by half a dozen people or more. The name Shakespeare might have just been a cover name for everyone in the writing group and not anyone's actual name. And I wouldn't put it past these people to go around all signing their name as this same person, just to confuse others. Creative eccentrics like to do that kind of thing. And people today would be more open to Shakespeare's work if they performed them with less of the "old English" pronunciation. We're learning all the time that a lot of the pronunciations we've been using for a couple hundred years are totally wrong. Not just the "th" sound but many others. So why should we keep focusing on the old pronunciations? About the only people that would be mad are the actors and professors who have made a career out of memorizing his plays the old way. But is it smart to cater to a few professionals and have the vast majority of the public dislike something? I saw a couple of his plays (Loves Labors Lost and Macbeth) using a modern English translation and they were great. And they weren't horribly mutilated, like translating from a foreign language to English.
Ironically, you have hit upon a verifiable fact. Besides A Midsummer Night's Dream and (I think) The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare borrowed the stories of every one of his plays from other authors. He rewrote nearly all the words, of course, and did it almost entirely by himself, and it's for that that he is famous today. His plots, though, are largely purloined from a dozen different authors.
The second best bed is the one you'd actually use, while the best one would sit next to the window adjacent to the street fully made and never used with the rare exception of a special guest. It was a prestige and posturing sort of thing, just showing off to passerby's lol... "Keeping Up Appearances" is not some new phenomenon invented in England for a TV show :D So yeah, that wasn't exactly an insult, that's the bed they would have used.
Lazarus Long, the long lifer from “Time Enough For Love” thought the Bard was a long lifer, he left his second best bed when he faked his death to move on to a new personality and wanted his best bed for his new life.
You’re dead wrong about the letter Y. It was pronounced as it is today. Yes, it was also used as a substitute for an older character for “th”, but Y was still used all the time the way we do now. Would you assert that it was pronounced “Ladth Macbeth”? “... all our thesterdaths have lighted fools the way to dusth death”? “the sound and furth”? Change all the ys in any Shakespeare play to ths, and see what you get.
Actually the alphabet had two more letters- ð and þ, which acted as the two “th” sounds we know today, ð being /ð/, as in “this,” and þ being /θ/, as in “thin.” Y made the sound of /y/, which is like an “ee” or /i/ but with rounded lips. As more printing presses were created, the other countries didn’t have space for those letters (ð and þ) and used “y” instead because it kind of looked like it. Later on we can still see that in names like “Ye Olde Shoppe,” which should be pronounced as /ði oʊld ʃɑp/, not /ji oʊld ʃɑp/ as people often pronounce it today. Sorry I felt like I had to correct that my bad.
Shakespeare also created my name. Imogen came about because one of his characters was going to me called Innogen but some guy wrote the N’s too close together and since then it’s been Imogen.
Shakespeare could be converted into all of the ways he spelt his name depending on how you pronounce it like Shakespea sounds like a quick and British or Shakespeare like Shake Spay-uh
Words I like from Shakespeare: moonbeam, summit, tranquil, bedroom, blanket, blush. Words I like from Lewis Carroll: Galumph, chortle, mimsy, snark. Words I like from me: Eudimesa (an emotion when you’re happy on the inside but restrain from showing it). Intravitom (a moment when something triggers a memory that sums up how you feel about a period of your life). Snogis (a person who’ll kiss up to you when they need you and doesn’t admit they have ulterior motives despite it being painfully obvious). I mean. There’s no chortles or moonbeams, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. SNOGIS LIVES!!!
1:48 I have to admit, "Shackspear" sounds more like a traditional English surname; when I hear the modern pronunciation "Shakespeare", I just picture a spearmint milkshake.
So given the subject of the video, I'm going to assume that "14 yera old me" was a subtle litmus test put in there on purpose to see if people would flip out about it in the comments. Clever, Name Explain.
Why not? They are only 'extra' by our fairly arbitrary agreed spellings today. There are plenty of words in English today that end with a silent e. Often an ending with a consonant (or consonantal sound) followed by a silent e causes the vowel before that consonant to change slightly, e.g. FIN becomes FINE, or BAR becomes BARE, but there are other words where the e does not SERVE that function, and is just an 'extra' letter silently sitting on the end. In some instances the e on the end gives the final consonant the COURAGE to CHANGE its sound (with the previous vowel often changing slightly too, as with those examples). grammar.yourdictionary.com/word-lists/english-words-end-with-silent-e.html Bear in mind too that until the last 100-150 most people were at best semi-literate and spelt words how they saw fit, so there were many different spellings of words out there in documents over the previous centuries, so shoppe may have been one of many variant spellings of shop available before we settled on shop as the universally correct English spelling. Such variation in the past is why many surnames have an 'extra' e on the end when compared with the English word(s) they seem to derive from. Shakespeare being one such example (shake spear, someone who was some form of soldier or guard (or always played that part in the annual village play), i.e. they shook a spear).
What? "Y" made the same sound it makes now... but it got confused with the character "thorn" which made a "th" sound. Printing presses didn't have a "thorn" character and began to use the "Y" tile in its place because it looked similar, especially in some fonts/scripts. If "Y" didn't sound like it currently does, words like "play" and "eyeball" and, for that matter, "Hathaway," would be a tad different... and what would "deny thy father and refuse thy name" sound like? Or names like Lysander, Cymbeline, Henry, Shylock? NativLang talks about something similar that gave us "Z" in the name MacKenzie where it was originally a more Y-like sound. ruclips.net/video/4CtWyh49Mms/видео.html Generally an interesting channel, but please check your research... and think about whether a statement like that makes any sense at all?
Names are legalized dyslexia. Take the name Meier in Germany: Meier, Meyer,Meyr,Maier, Mayr are the most common derivatives of a name which is essentially the same. In Shakespeare’s time that was just common practice.
Is it true that term "Bard" was not applied until after 1769? Bard is a Welsh word so it seems odd that the English would associate it with their mythical hero.
I once told my high school English Literature teacher that Shakespeare spelt his name many different ways. She replied that while that was true in his time, it didn't excuse the typo in my essay 😁. Maybe I should have used the original Klingon 😉.
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Not to be too anal or anything (I'm a Virgo, I suppose it can't be helped), but I noticed a typo on the frame about you hating Shakespeare at the age of 14, where "year" is spelled "yera." I was thinking you might want a heads up on that because I would, but that's me; apologies if I've offended you.
yes, the word anal is used that way in many other languages and for the same reason; but its not universal; but highly used in european languages afaik.
Maybe his lest name was Shaxpir
"Ye second best bed is to go to my wife" William Shakeshack.
The English language had alot of letters that have been forgotten since then. Y was still Y back in those Times. The Y replacing the TH sound thing was a printing press typesetting comprise because they didn't often have a type for Þ, þ which used to be the letter that symbolised the TH sound. So Þe>ye>the , Þou>you>thou>you and AÞrshire>ayershire. Let's not forget & which used to be for the sound 'and' that was dropped gradually as well. So before the printing press a thousand would have probably been spelled a Þous& if spelling was uniform in those days and not almost entirely phonetic.
Shakespeare was married to Anne Hathaway.
She looks great for her age.
#Catwoman
She's called Catwoman because she can lick her own arse.
That was william shakspere. Not Shakespere A.K.A Edward de Vere
WHAT do y'all have against Anny Haths
NO, Y was not pronounced as th. That was a separate letter named thorn (Þ, þ). This was replaced by a Y when the English imported Dutch printing presses lacking that letter, but having the extra letter 'Y', that English did not have.
Hans so yes, when seeing y, it was pronounced th
@@jeannebouwman1970 When it made sense in context. There were still the other words with y where y was pronounced y.
löwenzahn It is not like the pronunciation of Y changed to (modern) Y, it are two totally different things.
By the time Shakespeare was alive, the letter thorn wasn't used anymore. It had developed and Y like variant that ended up being replaced by Y and then by Th.
The letter thorn ( Þ, þ ) in Old English (Anglo Saxon) changed its written form to a Y-like shape in blackletter script. During that time, the real Y acquired a dot for a while so the two could be distinguished. But when the Normans conquered the Saxons and Middle English (Anglo-Norman) started, the Normans, who spoke Old/Middle French, respelled English words to fit their Norman ears, and we got TH along with OU and GH and a few other oddities. Occasionally, the Y for thorn lingered on, even into early Modern English in the days of Shakespeare and King James and Queen Elizabeth (a range of time, not all concurrent), and even into the 1700's. By the 1700's, the thorn had been forgotten, but the Y-for-thorn was kept by printers of the time without a letter thorn or separate dotted Y and undated Y in their metal printing fonts, which had to be made by hand and were expensive and often imported until England's own printers and typesetters superseded them. So the thorn to dotless Y and TH always got the two TH (and DH) sounds, and the dotted Y, which lost its dot again, was the Ü sound in Greek and Old English, then chawed to an I, ih sound, and then to modern long and short I. Y also had the Y- sound like in Yellow. So for a while, you had to know "which Y" you were dealing with from context, the thorn or the Y (upsilon / ypsilon / y-grec). It's too bad we didn't keep the old thorn, which was very handy, and a few countries still use today.
Hey Patrick, just a friendly suggestion: Make a video about the word "pineapple" and how it is the same in almost every major language except English.
Agreed
It's neither a pine nor an apple
Interestingly, in Afrikaans pineapple is "pynappel" but in Dutch (like almost all languages) it is "ananas"
in Brazilian portuguese, It is called abacaxi. It doesn't have anything to do with ananas either
Daniel Edwards my mother (who is Angolan of Portuguese descent) told me abacaxi was a different smaller sweeter type of pineapple and ananás was the larger comercial pineapple.
Can you do a video on the last living Shakespeare
I did look into/read about it in the book I used as the basis of this video. I believe his lineage may have ended rather abruptly, though I could be misremembering.
AKA Marshal Mathers
There is a football manager by the name of Craig Shakespeare who managed Leicester City in 2016. Don't know if he is a descendant of THE Shakespeare but the name nevertheless is alive still today.
Shakespeare is not an uncommon name around these parts to this day, however I believe that William had no descendents in the male line, I think there are still descendents of his sister however.
that probably would end up to my family cause on my mom’s side her dad’s name is Shakespear
What's in a name?
As this channel has shown me, quite a lot :D
ZULU COP (❤️ U-BETTA)
Donut 🍩 go 2 Shaka 🇿🇦
Axe🌳“How a’grow U pear?”🍐
So Khan Acad Pro 📺 ‘fessah
Hasn’t cashew🥜 unaware 🧚🏾♀️
👁Feel4U-
ruclips.net/video/QwhDpXnfiQw/видео.html
Love U Better-
#Bella’ll 🕊#Win
Just so people know, the dental fricative (th) sound was represented by the letter thorn before being replaced by y.
Why did you have to remove thorn?! It was so cool! :( At least Iceland gets it.
Because of Dutch prints didn’t have a letter for a sound their language lost hundreds of years before.
Ðat’s a very interesting fact; þank You for telling us!
Wow... Ann Hathaway looks good for her age.
Anyway, the inconsistent spelling thing is why some believe that he didn't exist and that the plays were written by a troup. I believe that the Bard was a real person myself.
There was an actor by the name of William Shakspear, however evidence points to more than one person writing the plays that are attributed to him. Everything dealing with the law and legalese points to a lawyer or attorney, other details point to a skilled leatherworker, and more evidence points to a collection of individuals working together. It's believed that the intention was to create a new 'distinct' and 'modern' English language, using the plays and prose to spread the modern English to the masses.
Didn’t he also spell it “Shaxpur” once? I remember reading that somewhere
He's now Would-I-Was ShookSpeared
Wouldiwas actually sounds like a cool name.
That's pretty clever.
That is so sad,choristers play the fifth symphony of beethovem
etymology of his surname: shake-spear, an occupational surname for someone who shakes spear.
Alejandar-Ickenatio Qi, you are now predisent.
Ignatius Qi
it could also and was most likely a pun on someone who uses a pen ie a writer
Wan-ker then?
This “Will” be kinda confusing I guess...
I am shaken
William Shaqner
Shakespeare in 16th century: My name is Shakspar
Shakespears after watching this video: What the Hell is Shakespeare?
:-0
Shakespeare is Shakspar, but with three extra e!
And there are people who don’t believe Shakespeare even really existed.
Yes, that's a popular trend these days. Moses never existed. Jesus never existed. Shakespeare was either gay or a woman. Abraham Lincoln was a vampire slayer. Hermione was black. People love to trash the past.
A man who signed, or had others sign his name, as “Willm Shakp”; “William Shaksper”; “Wm Shakspe”; “William Shakspeare”; “Willm Shakspear”; “(By me), William Shakspear” certainly existed and was a 1/8 owner of the Globe theater.
The debate is over how a man who could barely sign his own name could have written 36+ plays. Experts now accept that many of the works printed under the name "William Shakespeare" and "Shake-speare" were serially composed. IOW written, edited and rewritten by a variety of very smart people. But these experts generally use the term "collaboration" although there is no evidence that the guy who could not figure out how spell his own name was one of the writers.
"Y didn't make the sound it used to make today"
That's not entirely accurate... There was no letter Y in the English alphabet, but there was þ ("thorn") which is now obsolete. When the printing press was introduced by the Dutch around 1500, they didn't have the letter þ (just as we don't have it on our keyboards today), so they used the next best letter available to replace it. Y was free, so that replaced þ in printed texts (similar to how German umlauts ä,ö,ü are commonly replaced by a,o,u in English texts because the letter isn't available; that wouldn't be considered the correct spelling in German). That's how we got ye, which actually is a lazy way of writing þe.
A similar thing happened to the Scottish letter yogh (ȝ), which sounded like a J, but was replaced by the more easily available z.
What you're recounting is the traditional explanation given for the loss of thorn. Historical evidence shows that the letter was already being phased out in the 1300s with the introduction of th as a replacement. The substitution of y for thorn already occured as early as the mid-15th century, so the printing press merely solidified the change. Either way, within the context of this video none of this matters. At the time Elizabeth I was reigning, y had replaced thorn.
Where Patrick screwed up was in implying y was always pronounced as th. While it is true that the modern consonant sound of y was still often represented by j in Elizabethan times and the mordern vowel sound of y was still represented by i, this was precisely the point in time when y started replacing those two letters to represent the modern y sounds we know.
Thanks for the clarification, Andrew!
I went right off Ben Johnson when he got full of steroids snd cheated in an Olympic Final.
Didn't know that he was that old, or knew Shakespeare - what a small World.
Glad to know I wasn't the only one watching this video who's mind drifted in that direction.
His handwriting was terrible
It was in a script called "Secretary Hand" which fell out of use in the early 17th Century. If you can read that script, it's actually quite legible.
While sometimes printers had used y for ð, the characters were considered distinct, and ðe is the, and “ye” is a variant using a glyph that looks similar but is not the same. Like in German spelling street as StraBe, rather than Straße.
There are very few people of that time we know more about than we do Shakespeare. There aren't really biographical writings for most Elizabethan figures, we only know of their noteworthy deeds, rather than their normal lives. As for Y, Y did exist, Thorn was written as Y because it looked similar when printing was invented, and so people would just print Ys instead of Thorns, and the use of Y to mean Thorn entered common usage in writing as well.
We do know his name had Spear in it, since his father's coat of arms included a spear on it as a pun.
I met my old English teacher the other day in a service station - I hadn't seen her in 33 years (she's now 80 years old).
She was one of two teachers who gave us Hamlet & Macbeth while at school.
Cheers Mrs Brown - you're a legend!
Billy ShakeGuy has some weird spellings for his name.
2:34 you're thinking of the letter 'thorn' (þ), they substituted it with Y because they didn't have it in foreign typewriters.
"Eth and thorn both represented /θ/ in Old English. Eth fell out of use during the 13th century and was replaced by thorn. Thorn mostly fell out of use during the 14th century, and was replaced by ⟨th⟩. (Anachronistic usage of the scribal abbreviation | en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:EME_ye.svg | ("þe", i.e. "the") has led to the modern mispronunciation of thorn as ⟨y⟩ in this context; see ye olde.[22])"
*-Middle English's wikipedia*
1:20 "comes into play" nice pun mate
The claim at the begining that we know very little about Shakespeare is wrong when you compare Shakespeare to many of his contemporaries. We actually A LOT more about Shakespeare than we know about tons of people from the Elizabethan era who weren't born into nobility. Why? Because for the past 400 years Shakespeare fanatics and scholars have been combing over every possible scrap of evidence surrounding Shakespeare's life. We know what his parents did, we know where he went to school, we know what properties he bought, we have enough info on him to write a proper detailed CV. Heck we know so much minutiae much about Shakey, you'd think we did a background web search on him and looked his property up on Zillow. We even have court documents where he was present. What other working-class stiff from the 1500s can you say that about?
also, the letter "Y" did not make the "the" sound. You claim that English only had 24 letters at the time. That's not true. The alphabet consisted of more than 26. The letter Þ (called thorn) was used for a soft "th" sound as in "the" and "those" as opposed to the hard "th" sound of "think", "thermal" and "Thanksgiving". So it would be "Þe olde" not "ye olde". When thorn fell out of use, people in later times confused it for a "y" and started the "ye olde" craze, beginning later printers who have the symbol to print from and just replaced it with y which was the nearest equivalent (they could also have gone with p, maybe some of them did, I don't know)
I think with most records and documents they have found there is always the chance they could refer to someone else of the same, or similar, name, who happened to live at around the same time, and in the same part of the country, rather than referring to the famous one, so there is probably a lot we think we know, if the various records do in fact pertain to the correct man, but very little, if anything, that we can know for absolute certain. I think the latter point was what the video was getting at.
MrDannydoodah No, the details in many of the court cases, including place of residence, occupation, etc. match up well. How many other dramatists or stage directors named William Shakesper or Shakespere could have been living in London at the time and been petitioning for family coats of arms or involved in litigation, etc. We know more about Shakespeare than we do about any of his contemporaries, except Ben Jonson.
you just hate him go away
'Y' never had a 'th' sound. 'Þ' (thorn) did, and was often printed as 'y' for lack of a Þ in a printer's case.
Jovan Weismiller yes because printing presses in France didn’t have the (thorn) symbol (because french didn’t have the symbol in its alphabet) and so replaced it with ‘y’ because ‘y’ didn’t exist in English at the time.
Thank you for this informative and witty video ♥️
I also used to misspell my surname (I changed my name, so it wasn’t Goldstein; it was a Russian surname) ending it with -eff, rather than -ev, as a really small child. Yet, many Slavic people Romanised their surname like that, so I wasn’t really wrong!
I wrote in a poem how ‘I don’t believe in Shakespeare,’ so that’s another reason why!
This is all on the assumption that William wasn't lying about his last name. So innocent.
I learned that Ye was used because when type print came out they didn't have the symbol for TH as Scandinavian languages still do. The Y looked the most like it, so they used it.
Y was used as a replacement for a letter called thorn. Thorn (like a y with the bottom line going through the cross part) represented TH
To the best of my knowledge, the letter y never made the th sound, but this was another letter, named thorn (capital Þ, small þ). It later fell out of use for reasons I don't exactly remember (maybe because of french influence?) and was substituted by y because of their visual similarity.
@EyeZackZin Thanks for elaborating on that!
I/J and U/V -- In Shakespeare's day, yes, I and J were the same letter, and the J with the tail was a special swash variant, used at the end of I, II, III in Roman numerals, and gaining ground in lowercase for the J in Latin and English, as it is used today. but in capital letters, I was used more often, and J was starting to appear. U and V were more complicated, and in Shakespeae's day, they could appear interchangeably, even in the same line of printing, and so it was odd to see the curved U for a ver sound, and the pointy V for an oo / u sound. Mostly in capitals, only the V was used and U was for script or italics, mostly, but U and V were just starting to be distinct letters. It was only in the late 1700's and into the 1800's that I and J and U and V settled down into how we use them today. Even then, formal inscriptions sometimes avoided J and U in favor of I and V, until later in the 1800's and into the 1900's, when they solidified into how we use them today. This is also why we have W as "double U." It was a ligature, two U's or V's tied together, overlapping. In English, we call it double U, but in most other European languages, it's called double V. Old English had a letter called wynn that looked very much like a P. It was so close, even in the later pinched form, that it was easily replaced by the W introduced by the Normans after the. Norman Conquest. So we have a "double U" instead of a "double V." And one important thing to note is that English has one of the oldest written histories of any Germanic language, dating back to around Alfred the Great and the Venerable Bede and others in Anglo-Saxon (Old English) times in the 500's AD. That survived, even when hit with the Norman Conquest, and then thrived eventually. It's kind of a shame we didn't keep the Ð, ð (eth, edh) and Þ, þ (thorn) and Æ, æ (æsc, ash) versus A, a distinctions from Saxon times, which would have made things simpler and easier to spell. The Normans are also why we have GH instead of just H from Saxon English, and OU instead of U. Wacky, isn't it?
Can you do a video on the word potato? Thx (edit: as in the word potato in different languages because I find each language has its own unique way of communicating “potato”. Thx again
As in like different languages the word potato because I know in some languages it’s called a type of apple or something
In French it is called "earth apple", where "apple" actually means "fruit", not the real apple. (Pineapple is similar, everyone calls it Ananas or something like this, except the English and some other languages)
Maybe the "apple" Adam ate wasn't actually an apple, but any other fruit.
In Arabic potato is batata
Andrew Vasirov interesting in Dutch it’s called “aardapple” which also means earth apple.
Oh, cool! I didn't know that.
In German it is Kartoffel.
I once corrected a RUclips commenter who wrote "at least" as one word and they replied, "OK Shakespeare."
Yanks, eh?
Well, goethe also always changed the spelling of his surname... because he was a dislexic... So it might also just be that.
I like the theory that Shakespeare was actually a writing group of many writers who all worked collectively on the various plays. Perhaps edited and compiled by one man at the end to have a similar voice, but probably written in draft form by half a dozen people or more. The name Shakespeare might have just been a cover name for everyone in the writing group and not anyone's actual name. And I wouldn't put it past these people to go around all signing their name as this same person, just to confuse others. Creative eccentrics like to do that kind of thing.
And people today would be more open to Shakespeare's work if they performed them with less of the "old English" pronunciation. We're learning all the time that a lot of the pronunciations we've been using for a couple hundred years are totally wrong. Not just the "th" sound but many others. So why should we keep focusing on the old pronunciations? About the only people that would be mad are the actors and professors who have made a career out of memorizing his plays the old way. But is it smart to cater to a few professionals and have the vast majority of the public dislike something? I saw a couple of his plays (Loves Labors Lost and Macbeth) using a modern English translation and they were great. And they weren't horribly mutilated, like translating from a foreign language to English.
Ironically, you have hit upon a verifiable fact. Besides A Midsummer Night's Dream and (I think) The Merry Wives of Windsor, Shakespeare borrowed the stories of every one of his plays from other authors. He rewrote nearly all the words, of course, and did it almost entirely by himself, and it's for that that he is famous today. His plots, though, are largely purloined from a dozen different authors.
The second best bed is the one you'd actually use, while the best one would sit next to the window adjacent to the street fully made and never used with the rare exception of a special guest.
It was a prestige and posturing sort of thing, just showing off to passerby's lol... "Keeping Up Appearances" is not some new phenomenon invented in England for a TV show :D
So yeah, that wasn't exactly an insult, that's the bed they would have used.
Lazarus Long, the long lifer from “Time Enough For Love” thought the Bard was a long lifer, he left his second best bed when he faked his death to move on to a new personality and wanted his best bed for his new life.
3:30
You *spelled* that wrong.
Actually, he spelled it correct, according to British English Grammar rules. This is just a difference between American English and British English.
Fascinating! Thanks Patrick
Come on you're thinking of doctor who William don't lie
You’re dead wrong about the letter Y. It was pronounced as it is today. Yes, it was also used as a substitute for an older character for “th”, but Y was still used all the time the way we do now. Would you assert that it was pronounced “Ladth Macbeth”? “... all our thesterdaths have lighted fools the way to dusth death”? “the sound and furth”? Change all the ys in any Shakespeare play to ths, and see what you get.
Jessica is a biblical name Genesis 11:29
The names that appear in Gen 11:29 are: Abram, Nahor , Sarai, Milcah, Haran, and Iscah. Jessica does not appear there.
Big Green Truck Jessica comes from Iscah.
The thing about how people didn't care about spelling explains a lot about the etymology of all the words.
Actually the alphabet had two more letters- ð and þ, which acted as the two “th” sounds we know today, ð being /ð/, as in “this,” and þ being /θ/, as in “thin.” Y made the sound of /y/, which is like an “ee” or /i/ but with rounded lips. As more printing presses were created, the other countries didn’t have space for those letters (ð and þ) and used “y” instead because it kind of looked like it. Later on we can still see that in names like “Ye Olde Shoppe,” which should be pronounced as /ði oʊld ʃɑp/, not /ji oʊld ʃɑp/ as people often pronounce it today. Sorry I felt like I had to correct that my bad.
Shakespeare also created my name. Imogen came about because one of his characters was going to me called Innogen but some guy wrote the N’s too close together and since then it’s been Imogen.
Not my favorite Shakespeare play, but Imogen/Fidele is a great character.
Finally, I have an excuse to spell stuff wrong
He was born seven years after his death? Colour me intrigued...
Search ouroboros red dwarf and all will become clear.
That or it was simple poor phrasing.
Are there any Caesars left?
*_Shakspear_*
Are we even sure it was somewhat like Shakespeare? Maybe his name was just Smith and he liked to spell it funny but pronounce it Smith.
You made a typo at 2:11 you spelled year as yera
Shakespeare could be converted into all of the ways he spelt his name depending on how you pronounce it like Shakespea sounds like a quick and British or Shakespeare like Shake Spay-uh
Where do you base your claim that Shakespeare created all those words and names?
Why the hell did English change from Þ, þ, Y to "th" ?
Was it meant to my the pronunciation of words starting with "th" counter intuitive?
Words I like from Shakespeare:
moonbeam, summit, tranquil, bedroom, blanket, blush.
Words I like from Lewis Carroll:
Galumph, chortle, mimsy, snark.
Words I like from me:
Eudimesa (an emotion when you’re happy on the inside but restrain from showing it).
Intravitom (a moment when something triggers a memory that sums up how you feel about a period of your life).
Snogis (a person who’ll kiss up to you when they need you and doesn’t admit they have ulterior motives despite it being painfully obvious).
I mean. There’s no chortles or moonbeams, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
SNOGIS LIVES!!!
Why can't we go with the simple answer that he suffered from dyslexia?
i also didn't know how to spell my middle name "Styliano". I spelled "Stiliano" "Stilyano" or "Stylyano" but now I pronounce it well
I begeth thee to answ'r this questioneth. At which hour shall Name Explain maketh a video about shakespeare again?
You didn't mention a little thing called "The Great Vowel Shift" which was happening during Shakespeare's lifetime.
Boy, that's a can of worms.
3:30 Is that a callback to you Colombia fiasco earlier this week?
The “Y” is actually a derivative of thorn, which made the “th” sound.
holy crap, wendover productions is a patron
1:48 I have to admit, "Shackspear" sounds more like a traditional English surname; when I hear the modern pronunciation "Shakespeare", I just picture a spearmint milkshake.
Some say Shakespeare was actually italian, search about it, it's really interesting
Please do a video on Uruguay and Paraguay. Guay do they have the same suffix?
So given the subject of the video, I'm going to assume that "14 yera old me" was a subtle litmus test put in there on purpose to see if people would flip out about it in the comments. Clever, Name Explain.
Wait you did not tell us why he is called the Bard.
Oh boy that was sooo interesting 😍😍😍😍
My old headmaster would always say Shacksper.
Heard a rumor the Shakespeare and Francis Bacon were the same person or that Bacon was the true author.
Willem Jacques-Pierre?
Are there any Shakespeares left?
Illumisepoolist not of the same genealogy at least.
Name explain I have a one question why are some old things like this
“Ye olde shoppe”
I mean why extra e’s
Why not? They are only 'extra' by our fairly arbitrary agreed spellings today. There are plenty of words in English today that end with a silent e. Often an ending with a consonant (or consonantal sound) followed by a silent e causes the vowel before that consonant to change slightly, e.g. FIN becomes FINE, or BAR becomes BARE, but there are other words where the e does not SERVE that function, and is just an 'extra' letter silently sitting on the end. In some instances the e on the end gives the final consonant the COURAGE to CHANGE its sound (with the previous vowel often changing slightly too, as with those examples).
grammar.yourdictionary.com/word-lists/english-words-end-with-silent-e.html
Bear in mind too that until the last 100-150 most people were at best semi-literate and spelt words how they saw fit, so there were many different spellings of words out there in documents over the previous centuries, so shoppe may have been one of many variant spellings of shop available before we settled on shop as the universally correct English spelling. Such variation in the past is why many surnames have an 'extra' e on the end when compared with the English word(s) they seem to derive from. Shakespeare being one such example (shake spear, someone who was some form of soldier or guard (or always played that part in the annual village play), i.e. they shook a spear).
The extra vowels weren't silent. A "shoppe" was pronounced "shop-uh"
What? "Y" made the same sound it makes now... but it got confused with the character "thorn" which made a "th" sound. Printing presses didn't have a "thorn" character and began to use the "Y" tile in its place because it looked similar, especially in some fonts/scripts.
If "Y" didn't sound like it currently does, words like "play" and "eyeball" and, for that matter, "Hathaway," would be a tad different... and what would "deny thy father and refuse thy name" sound like? Or names like Lysander, Cymbeline, Henry, Shylock?
NativLang talks about something similar that gave us "Z" in the name MacKenzie where it was originally a more Y-like sound. ruclips.net/video/4CtWyh49Mms/видео.html
Generally an interesting channel, but please check your research... and think about whether a statement like that makes any sense at all?
Do a video
If the Ottoman family line is still alive
Headline
“RUclips CHANNEL SAYS THAT THE THINK HIS CHANNEL RELIES ON DOESN’T MATTER.”
You’re not stopping me from watching.
Mista.
thanks for not talking about the great letter thorn or Þorn
At 1:42 spellings 2 and 6 are identical.
I’m i the only one that would rather travel to the past than the future?
MakaveliThaSavage no I’d rather travel to the past too
But what is past but memories - stories written and unwritten. What is future but wishes and dreams.
Clearly, you care more about names that Shakespeare himself. But that is a good thing. I love your videos.
He was called " Would I was Shookedpeared."
That is so sad, choristers play the fifth symphony of beethoven
Names are legalized dyslexia.
Take the name Meier in Germany:
Meier, Meyer,Meyr,Maier, Mayr are the most common derivatives of a name which is essentially the same.
In Shakespeare’s time that was just common practice.
Is it me or are the top and bottom right spellings the same?
The spellings are all basically the same. They are all abbreviated slightly differently.
Is it true that term "Bard" was not applied until after 1769?
Bard is a Welsh word so it seems odd that the English would associate it with their mythical hero.
I'm a fellow alumnus of the man who created the theory that Shakespeare was in actuality was the Earl of Oxford
I once told my high school English Literature teacher that Shakespeare spelt his name many different ways. She replied that while that was true in his time, it didn't excuse the typo in my essay 😁.
Maybe I should have used the original Klingon 😉.
We do have the word mierenneuken in Dutch (ant-fucking), which means caring too much about the details.
Excellent
What about S and F making the same sound?
They didn't. A variant of the S just looked a lot like an F.
Such complexities.
To shake or not to spear--that is the question.
Don't forget the other spellings like Shksp
Can we go back to spelling things however we feel like?
If y was used as th, then what about the word “yes” at this time? 🤔
Misleading title
I thought Shakespeare was klingon 🤔
2:30 I see an arrow pointing down
24 letter alphabet??
Didn't Shakespeare also spell his name "Shagsper?