I learned, a while back, that international students(the ones I talked to) hate reading English for the fact that there are no standard, one-to-one, letter pronunciations. It can be incredibly difficult. This was a great video. I really enjoyed it. I look forward to more explorations in to what made our alphabet what it is today.
Yes, it's true. When I read a new book or an article in Polish I can go to my friends and tell them about new fascinating things that I learned - but with English books I don't do it (in English). Checking how to pronounce each specialized word in English is very time-consuming (unnecessarily time-consuming). I don't like to feel embarrassed so I really rarely speak in English :(. And I feel that many no-natives do not feel comfortable when they have to speak in English. I think that the most comfortable are people from other Germanic languages, e.g. Sweden. In addition, talking to someone who speaks English in a bad way (because English is not his first language) and he has a strong accent too isn't easy. I remember my conversations with some Indian - it took me some time to understand him :)
I am happy to live in a country with regular spelling reform. I am always puzzled when a native English speaker needs to pronounce something from another language and claims "not to know how to pronounce it", even though they have the written word in front of them! It's clear to me that they have been taught that there is no relation between the written word and how it sounds. I think this makes it hard for native English speakers to learn other languages. I think English would be better with regular spelling reform and a script that matched it's sounds.
I am happy too :). As a Pole I know what a regular pronunciation is. We learn ortography because spelling isn't often regular. I am always a little angry when I read about phonology of other languages (yes, English Wikipedia is a lot better than Polish) and thay always need a word to describe sound in English (whether it's a vowel or a consonant). It is so unpleasantly funny. As someone above write English is like Chinese. And it is true. They have the same pictograph but different dialects or countries pronounce them differently. I think that this is the reason why there will be no real reform of English. First English is used in many countries that belong or belonged to the "crown". I do not believe that this people will reach a compromise together, for e.g. USA is stubborn and strangely conservative (look "no" for metric system). Canada, Australia, USA or UK have their own characteristic ways of pronunciation certain words - in te same country they pronounce them differently. So how could they have the compromise? Secondly, if people do not create a universal language or there will not be another phase of civilization development (e.g. by China) English WILL BE lingua franca. USA and UK need to have the same language because of globalization. South Korea and North Korea are separated for half a century and their languages already sound a bit different. How long US does not belong to the UK and how technological progress has changed both countries? Different groups that live in the concerned countries change language too. I see it when I compare various countries using Slavic languages. I partially agree with the sentence: "I think this makes it hard for native English speakers to learn other languages". Before the age of 20 (when Internet was just developing and it was very expensive) I thought that every language has complicated grammar like Polish so I didn't liked learning languages because I though that it is too time-consuming. Why should I learn languages when I hate traveling? Why should I learn languages when I will not be useing it? Why there always is so many exceptions? etc. So what thinks average English speaker? Probably the same. USA is so big (and traveling abroad isn't cheap). Briton can travel using English. They can use only English on the Internet and no one will fault them. Because of many exceptions they probably think that other languages are the same - so language learning is for them waste of time.
Hmm, maybe not so much that there is NO correlation between the written word and the spoken word, but more that there's absolutely no guarantee that you can guess the entire pronunciation on the first try. At most, we hope we can pronounce a portion of an unfamiliar word. When we're learning to read as children, we are taught the basic possible sounds that each letter can make, and we are instructed to "sound out" unfamiliar words. Even with words that don't seem to follow any known spelling rule, you can usually make a good guess based on other words you've seen before. Under a parent's or teacher's guidance--and classmates and friends and siblings correcting each other--any improper pronunciations eventually get weeded out and corrected. Exposure to the spoken and written word is enough for native speakers to be able to learn all the vocabulary they need to. Rather than having difficulty with pronunciaton of unknown words, native speakers have exponentially more trouble spelling known words correctly. We just learn to accept that sometimes we might have to look up a spelling or be wrong, lol. At this point, however, I don't think anything can reasonably be done to standardize English spelling. At all. The reason being, the number of native speakers globally that have extremely varying pronunciation, since English has had centuries to evolve and change in different countries. Even more, within each such country, there are a wide range of regional variations in pronunciation. There is no governing body that controls English. No country or region will want to give up its pronunciation and spelling in favor of a foreign one. It's sad but true. Even we native speakers get very frustrated at times. XD
Well Also Lots Of Languages Have Different Pronunciations For, 'J' Could Be Pronounced /d̠ʒ/, /ʒ/, /j/, Or /h/, Depending On The Language, So If You Don't Know What Language Something Is, Or How To Pronounce Said Language, It's Reasonable To Not Know How To Pronounce It.
And then when they do pronounce it they pronounce the vowels seemingly at random without even a baseline idea of what said of vowels they should be using for those letters. No /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ first pass through always something random like pronouncing every A in a Russian word like /æ/ and every I like /aɪ/. Just generally very poor intuition as to what the most common vowels might be to sus out the pronunciation of any unfamiliar word. Really love turning every vowel into a diphthong too.
Then it should be pronounced "poon". The Latin "v" and the Greek "ω" were both used as vowel or consonants, representing either "u" (as in the English "put") or "w" (as in English "swim"). BTW, "w" is called "double-u" (despite looking like a "double-v") because of the use of the written "v" as a spoken "u" in Latin.
Love this video! For some reason I absolutely love the spelling system of English. I know I'm privileged as a native speaker having grown up learning it, and that it might be difficult for adult L2 learners to grasp when compared to say, Spanish, but like you said it really shows you the history of the language.
Spelling was my favorite subject, probably because my 1950's teachers actually taught us the history of the words we learned. It gave me a lifelong love of languages that eventually lead me to software development. Those darned compilers are real sticklers for spelling, grammar, and syntax. Legit!
As you alluded to above, English has made a rather circuitous route through many different languages. To put a twist on something the '40s comedian Will Rogers said, English never met a word it didn't like. What I have below is just a small portion of several pages of goofy things about English spelling, and it's from one of my documents called "English is nuts": 1) The bandage was wound around the wound. 2) The farm was used to produce produce. 3) The dump was so full, it had to refuse more refuse. 4) He decided to desert his dessert in the desert. Lastly, one I think would drive a new learner nuts would be if they got all 3 of these in 1 day: rough adds 1 letter for trough, which does the same for through. So, common sense says they should rhyme, but they don't--not even close.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll, Usenet:rec.arts.sf-lovers 15 May 1990.
It's a legacy from german to make verbs look like nouns with a completely different meaning. Hence we capitalize nouns. Buchen = beech trees / buchen = to book
My favorite example of the absurdity of English spelling is George Bernard Shaw's example of spelling "fish" as "ghoti"- "gh" as pronounced in "enough", "o" as pronounced in "women", and "ti" as pronounced in "action".
Jacob Griffin That just shows Chinese spelling is a mess too. They should've stayed with Wade Giles or adopted Yale romanization, so foreigners wouldn't say "King Dynasty".
This is how you make a perfect language: Place latin letters in the Hangul arrangement, use Japanese grammar, and Esperanto vocabulary. Nobody would use it! A soon as people start using a language, it will evolve. And then you cannot keep it perfect, for whatever crazy definition of perfect you migh have.
latin letters with exact phoneme-grapheme correspondence, forming syllable blocks, SOV order, no grammatical number or gender, totally regular inflections... That sounds great to me! :D
The I before E except after C mnemonic that I learned as a child is totally usless, especially since English has imported so many words that break the "rule" that there are now more exceptions than words that fit. At least it's no longer being taught in public schools.
The rule is more accurate when it applies only to the "ee" sound (so forget "weigh"), but there are still plenty of "weird" exceptions to "seize" onto.
There are, in fact, MORE words that violate the "I before E except after C" rule than follow it, so truly it's not something that should be taught. ... In fact, the "I before E except after C" rule was NOT taught in my school. It never appeared in any of my spelling books or reader books. I learned it from my parents because they'd been taught it back in the past when nobody questioned these things. So, at least in the 1970s and 1980s someone had it right.
I went to a public elementary school in the sixties (in Philadelphia, PA) and I before E was definitely still being taught there. Even if it's ancient history in schools parents will probably keep passing its dubious wisdom down for a few more generations.
I before E except after C when IE or IE make the sound EE... Which still leaves a few exceptions. One of them being caffeine which happened because that originated by putting the suffix -ine on the word café giving something like kaffay-een which we quickly started to [mis]pronounce more simply. Good, isn't it? Sadly there are no such excuses for seize and weird. They're just bastards. :)
Very very well done video! There's much research behind it, 26 minutes well spent. The part that struck me the most was the alphabet one, and since I'm currently trying to design several ones for my conworld I absolutely loved that part! Fun fact, with current English spelling the word "fish" could be jokingly written as "ghoti" (GH as in "enough", O as in "women" and TI as in "nation")
Alliterative Woah! I know your channel is mostly anglocentric but...I'd be damned if I wouldn't love a video of yours about other alphabets (expecially the chinese ideograms)!!!
In the Czech language, there is actually a mix of strictly phonetic and etymological writing. Generally, each letter corresponds to one sound, and long vowels also have distinct letters (for example, there is the short a and long á). This can also be seen in the spelling of foreign words like muzeum (Museum) or džez (Jazz). But some letters have the same pronunciation, which is why some words have the same pronunciation, but a different spelling. For example, there are the words být and bít, which by the way each have a different etymology. Být is a verb, which means "to be", while bít is also a verb, but means "to beat". This is also important, because both verbs have a number of derived verbs, created by adding prefixes. For example, dobýt means "to conquer", while dobít means "to bash" or "to reload". Some slavic languages don't have this differenciation, in the Slovene language for example, the verbs meaning "to be" and "to beat" are both spelled "biti", although they both have a completely different etymology and conjugation. So in this case, it can actually be quite helpful to have two letters with the same pronunciation (this is a bit simplifying, because in some Czech words, i changes the sound of the consonant before it, while y does not).
Polish, related to Chech, didn't merge 'y' and 'i' sounds as Czech did, so those words are pronunced differently and spelled as well: 'bić' and 'być', but on the other hand Polish pronunciation of 'morze' (sea) and 'może' (maybe) is the same in most dialects but keeping this simple trait of etymology really helps. Polish uses archaic, mostly diagraph spelling while Czech adopted more modern diacritic spelling. It's very interesting to campare Czech and Polish spelling to see sound changes and similarities of both, like Polish 'rz' and Czech 'ř', 'y-i' like mentioned above, h-g shift and many more.
Actually, there's slight difference - in common Czech, ý changes to ej but í does not. (I understand some may view common Czech as low language but it's still different the letters are differentiated even though the pronunciation merged.)
I assumed that it's not that simple. I take into account only standard language - some southern and northern Polish dialects even have distinct ''ř'' sound - spelled 'rz' (compare: řeka - rzeka), other have vowel lenght and so on, while standard doesn't (it does have other features). And to be clear: I don't speak any Czech, while I have pretty good understanding of Czech writing, like 80%. How much do Czech understand Polish writing?
The common Czech is so common (especially in bohemian parts of the country) it should be mentioned, IMHO. Slovak lacks this, its dialects are simply local dialects. Personally, apart from -i used for palatalization I don't have many problems with Polish orthography and that may be because both Czech and Slovak do not palatalize except for d, t, n and l (l in Slovak only). (Polish in general seems to have more consonants such as the ć/cz difference which is not present in Czech and Slovak.) But a couple of people told me they found it difficult, take from that whatever you will.
This is the most information I've come across in one video. From what I can tell, this had more information than other videos I've watched. On top of that, not only was it easier to understand, it actually makes so much more sense to Me now why the Modern English is so convoluted. An interesting thing though is being able to use the recorded History of the writing to possibly learn other languages around the world that have a somewhat similar writing system.
My most hated English spellings are actually mostly place names, simply because they seem to have never changed spellings at all, despite the fact they've been worn down SO MUCH. Local offenders include: Gloucester Worcester Leicester Billerica Haverhill
I've lived in that area my whole life, and while I could pronounce them, it took me until I was practically an adult before I could reliably spell them. Though I also couldn't spell Massachusetts until I was a teen, and I remember the first time I spelled America correctly on my first try when I was 10. I've always been awful at spelling.
The French left a bunch of place names in midland USA. Some retained their French pronunciations like Des Moines, Iowa but others became anglicized like Detroit, Michigan.
My British neighbor loves to correct my mispronunciation of all those places, and I love to learn them. I fondly remember my very American father pronouncing "Were-Chester-Shyer Sauce" when I was a kid. To think it's actually "Wushter Sauce". Who knew!?
I'm not a linguist, but every time I watch a video like this, and learn about the root of one of our words... I immediately think back to my notion of English being one of the oldest 'creole' languages. My reasoning is simple, just look at the history of this island. Learning Spanish has also highlighted the vast number of Latin root words we use. I now also find it easier to spot the Germanic, and Scandinavian influences on English. Knife (G), Yacht (S, Dutch), Island (S, same spelling for the country 'Iceland' with the acute(L) on the I), Hut (G), et cetera (L). No wonder it's so tricky. We've adopted many traits, and carry many exceptions.
The most complicated thing about Finnish spelling is the lack of some sound changes. For example "mene kotiin" actually has a geminated K. This because the second-person imperative used to end in K. Luckily, it's always the same forms that have this. The most volatile Finnish consonant is TS, the dental affricate. It's either TS, TT or HT (depending on dialect), with multiple gradation patterns for HT; TT has gradation like any other geminate T. The affricate also undergoes gradation, but this is not written; the standard language just uses TS.
AEon Tokusatsu Reviews I'd suggest you'd google, in a very safe environment, what yif(f) means. Trust me, you'd be grateful for zhaif. Also, I apologise for the images in advance.
Superb video. I can relate this to the series by Melvin Bragg. I like the fact that my language, "English" has historical routes [or is it roots?] and gives some charm and longevity. Yes, I also had spelling problems, but ... I would like to see a video on "what came first the language or the grammar?" as this would stop [people] being assessed purely [or soley] on their ability to spell, be grammatically correct etc., rather than their ability to communicate.
The thing that I find hard about English is that long words usually have several schwas in them and you don't know if they a spelled with an a, an e, an o or...
Yes & no-in his own time it would have been pronounced ‘Kaiser’, but medieval and Renaissance Latin went through its own sound changes in various areas of Europe, and there are conventional Anglicizations of all the major Roman names (eg Mark Antony (not Marcus Antonius) & Cicero (not Kikero) & Pompey (not Pompeius) etc.)
To this day I find it extremely strange that anyone named their child 'Cicero' pronounced 'Kikero.' It blew my mind the first time I heard about it. Just kinda sounds bad to my ear. Maybe that's just because I don't speak Latin though.
That's why I like the Spanish system which mostly has every letter for a single phonetic sound each, it still has some repetitions or some variations, but nothing to the extent of English. You could argue that's because Spanish didn't have much influence from external languages, but in reality it has words from Latin, from the Germanic Visigoth language, and from Arabic, yet it kept consistent. ~And I'm totally not being biased by the fact that I'm argentinian~
Linguist here from Jade's channel. I am impressed. I shall now nerd out over your videos and wish people would talk to me about linguistics issues even more than I already do.
This is again a brilliant episode, thanks a lot! Lots of information in good context, yet very entertaining, and i laughed out loud many times because many aspects were presented in a very funny way, too, without harming seriousness. I disagree with respect to one of your main points, though: While etymology is tremendously interesting (IMHO, and i could explain my reasons, but others might still disagree), it does not really simplify spelling. The classical way, you learn the pronunciation and spelling of each English word completely separately, so you have to learn two independent things per word. In your proposed way, you have to learn the pronunciation and the etymology of each word, and i dare say as a rule, the etymology is more complex than the spelling - your video provides ample proof for that -, and then you have to learn all the rules of etymology (including the spelling systems of half a dozen dead languages and their evolution over time) on top of that in order to get from the etymology to the spelling, and then you are still left with reams of exceptions. Only a person who specializes in etymology anyway, hence knows most of etymology inside out and by heart anyway, can get the weird idea that teaching etymology can simplify the learning of spelling. I do tell everybody that learning English is an absolute must for every person on earth today (simply because it is used so much that it is viable as a lingua franca), and i certainly encourage the teaching of etymology (just as history in general), but i still admire languages with a young, pristine spelling system like Slovak - having to tell somebody to learn English spelling even though languages like Slovak exist feels kind of offensive to me. Heck, even French spelling is almost perfectly regular, even though admittedly substantial parts of the phoneme -> grapheme association are seriously unusual, like [o] -> eau, [u] -> ou, [y] -> u and so on, but at least they are consistent. But German spelling is bad enough, and English is outright terrible.
As a french speaker that had to learn German, i can attest you that German has a quite easy spelling. It is easier for me than my native language. Of course it's a bit harder than Slovak, Spanish or Finish but it's quite ok. In my opinion English and French are on par but maybe the later is a bit better cause it's more easy to learn to read it.
The reason why English is such a hard language to learn for some people because of the variety of languages around the world. For example and Australia is speak with a heavy Australian accent and in England they have a variety of different types of accents around a 10 mile radius of each other. Case in point a person from Central London can speak a different variety of English then one from Lisbon Grove in the same area. This way people don't understand each other. And you're in South America English has a Spanish accent attached to it.
@@peterhiggins1872Of course, the same can be said for other languages. Spanish natives speak in a variety of regional dialects and accents, some of which might even be associated with a particular part of the city or economic status or education. And then you have to take into account the varieties of Spanish spoken by South American speakers. In Holland, a significantly smaller country, a city boy will have tremendous difficulty understanding a farmer who is just a twenty minute drive away.
Grammar N Word you just made my point clear; even the Japanese language has it's own dialects. Another example is in Okinawa they say Nangin for carrots, and in Tokyo they pronounce it Noingin. You can hear the difference.
Discovered your channel via Jade, and I am glad I did. This is one of my favorite subjects. And there are so many facets, and historical events and trends reflected in it. For only one example: the Great Vowel Shift is recognized every time we try to affect a 'pirate' accent. Pirates seemed to have maintained the pre-Shift pronunciation for a longer time, perhaps because they were somewhat isolated. In any case, their vowels were the old pronunciations and still commemorate them. There are different reasons we spell the way we do, and some of those reasons are arbitrary, some with an origin now forgotten over time. But only slightly off-topic: I have met others with the following ability(?), but I can glance at an entire page of text and the misspelled word will attract my eyes. So as much historical context as we have in English spelling, isn't there something about it that trains some of us subconsciously? If I glance at some text composed with British spelling, I see the 'labour' or 'colour" before I see the topic or even the first sentence. Misspellings are a poke in the eye.
Welcome! Pirates are an interesting case, since the 'pirate accent' we all know is and love is actually mostly a product of mid-20th-century media, specifically Disney's Treasure Island. But it's true that the West Country accent that it's based on does indeed maintain some pre-vowel-shift elements, as many local dialects do. slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/pirate-speech-origins-in-west-country-english-via-robert-newton-aka-long-john-silver.html
Amazing video, allow me to correct few things though: 5:55 the Alphabet you showed is the Arabic Alphabet in modern order which is 50 years old and it starts with Aliph Baa Taa While the Aliph Baa Jeem Dal (Abjad) order is 6,500 years old was invented in Syria (Ugarit) and it the semetic group you didn't name is the Syrians. Each letter was a stickish shape of an object that starts with the sound (extremely smart innovation and one of the most important im history) like ... Aliph means a bull and is the name of letter A. Beit means a house which is for B. Jeem means a camel which is for Gi (modern English C). Dal means a door and is for D. And so on. The oldest alphabet in history was found in Syria 4500BC in the form of small portable tablets that are a bit larger than a finger in size and they were given to Syrian children at ancient schools/teaching place to learn to write and read. ((I've seen the original one, i was shocked how small)) Pheonicians called themselves Syrians
Of course, since we got the Alphabet from the Greeks most of the sounds have changed in their language, like Delta to "thelta" (like in the word "the," but not like in the word "with"), among others.
I, despite being an American, tend to spell "Catalogue" rather than "Catalog" because the only time when i would see/use the word was in reference to a web document made by my Australian friend.
I just had to second guess myself a couple days ago, because my spell check told me "catalogue" was wrong. I yelled at it for being xenophobic. I'm American, too, but I can't really tell you why I got in the habit of spelling it that way. Almost every other word where there's a difference, I use the American spelling, just that one word for some reason stuck with me from somewhere.
English needs our german Umlauts for easier spelling: Ä,Ö - air =är / urgent = ördshent There's also "Ü" (French U) but I'm not sure if an english word with that sound exists(?). Otherwise we pronunce V as F and Z as TS and C as K, which might be confusing for native english speakers - but we use to keep loan words as they are. Die Band (music group - english loan word) is spoken the same, but Das Band (the ribbon - german word) is spoken "Bunt"
Alliterative , Basically Italian, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese (which, by the way, is my native language, so I beg your forgiveness for any mistake in my English) and some other indo-european languages, also Finish, Estonian and Hungarian which are not indo-european, all of them in order to simplify each of their respective spellings, adopted the solution, you and Sorin mentioned, of using diacritics for accent and quality of vowels, and of dispensing with almost all Greek etymological markings . For example, through successive and successful spelling reforms they got rid of the "ch" (=kh χ ), vowel "y" (= υ), "ph" (= f φ), double consonants not really doubled, as in "chlorophyll" (in Spanish and Portuguese: "clorofila") which are quite a nuisance and do not even represent much of a help if one intends to learn Greek (ancient or modern). French spelling has maintained much of the same fancy problems as English. The real problem, however, with English spelling, as succinctly and clearly explained in your excellent video above, was mainly caused by: a) employing a dual spelling system, neolatinized for words of french or directly latin origins and another quite different for the words that came from the proto-germanic (and, of course, the useless greek etymological markings which only French also maintained in its entirety); b) the Great Vowel Change occurring coincidentally just after and during standardization which by itself has a lot to do with the introducing by Caxton and others of the printing press in England; and, c) of course, the vested interest of printers, intellectual elite and, most surprisingly, of a reasonable percentage of the common people, because of a good thing, to wit, a relatively high proportional level of litteracy associated with the Protestant Reform (every faithful is theoretically entitled to his or her own reading and interpretation of the Bible), which all put together precluded any successful ample spelling reform of the English Language (globalization and many sovereign countries writing English only strengthened already hegemonical conservatism in matters of spelling and even more doomed to fail any proposal of reform).
Thank you -- it's definitely instructive to look at how other languages have handled these same challenges. I definitely agree that the current situation is such that no widespread reform of English spelling is possible, for reasons connected much more to history and geography and politics than to phonology or linguistics!
@@Alliterative - I agree with you. The variety of English pronunciations (Australian, New Zealand, South African, Glaswegian, etc) make it impossible for there to be one accepted form of phonetic spelling. It's much easier to have one spelling, however odd, and just let people pronounce it as they wish. So girl can be pronounced gerl , gurl, goyl, gal, gel and so on; but each person still spells it girl. Doesn't help the non-native English speaker but keeps academics in employment.
@@hobmoor2042 I don't think many proponents of English spelling reform are calling for phonetic spelling. Phonemic (with an 'm') spelling can be designed in such a way that phonemic distinctions still made in any subgroup of speakers remain in the orthography. That way "girl" can still be spelled , since some (probably only Scots, I believe?) distinguish "fir", "fur" and "fer(n)". But AFAIK absolutely no one has a phonemic distinction between and , it's pure homage to Greek. If you read what @Alliterative writes, he says that the reason that reform is hard is not really linguistic.
Back in the 90's when I was computer programing I got used to spellong 'color' it rubbed off and I never used that 'colour' spelling it just looks wrong.
Another great video, one spelling reform we can perhaps all agree to is putting the "u" back in "some", "monk", "come" and the "i" back in "busy", which have nothing to do with their etymology or their current pronunciation.
Thanks! Sadly I very much doubt (doute?) there's *any* aspect of spelling that *everyone* will agree on these days, but it's true there's little logic to those spellings -- though they're explicable by history!
With English, I appreciate that there are regional dialects of it and will never be a 100% phonetic language, but what I would propose are some reforms to make it consistent. E.g. words that start with C but a pronounced with a K sound. Replace PH with F. Make words with 'Ough' in them sound more consistent, cough=koff through=throo/froo drop a few silent letters, like the b in debt. Stuff that is always pronounced wrong in every dialect of English.
My choice would be the rather simplistic and rudimentary pronoun "I". It just looks awkward standing there all by itself as a single letter. Breaks the -e ending rule as well. Would much prefer "aye", "ai", etc. Also, I recommend the video Langfocus did featuring the concept of "Anglish".
I don't understand. You have "-A- single letter" - [a] :) There is many languages where one letter means a word, eg. Korean 이 /i/ - a tooth; 아 /a/ - oneself. In Polish we have: a ("disjoint" and), i (and), k (to - in archaic; but in Czech too), o (about), u (at), w (in; or Czech "v"), z (with/from). Czech use "z" (from) and "s" (with). In Russian they have this "two letters in one letter" letters :) я /ya/ (I) ё /yo/ (argh - expression of annoyance) Here is a list of some languages that have one letter words: jalu.ch/languages/one_letter_words.php www.wordnik.com/lists/single-letter-words Look how others Germanic languages uses their vowels as single letter words. :) I, island, ice, Ireland etc. - do you want to change all this "i" to "aye" or "ai"? English language needs standardization of spelling, not the next emotions of the scribe o_O (21:30 "ghost" was a good example in this video).
The way I learnt the origin of j was not 'a fancy way of spelling i', but as a means to differentiate between a single i and a double i(ii), because in older languages and a few modern ones it makes a difference in pronunciation and meaning. Examples of modern languages are Finnish and Dutch, the latter of which changed it to ij and later on changed the pronunciation to /eɪ/.
Not my most hated word in English but a favorite of mine is cwm, a Welsh loan word meaning valley. However, in English it specifically refers to a valley head created through glacial erosion and with a shape similar to an amphitheater (Source: Wiktionary). The only other Welsh loanwords I could find with a vocalic W were bwthyn, crwth, and cwtch. Archaic? Sure. Niche? Probably. Unusual? Very much, yes. Please include a mention of the vocalic W when you get into the history of English vowels.
Jade's video on Information Entropy is up now! Check out the fascinating explanation of why English words have more information than coin flips... with a cameo from me! ruclips.net/video/_PG-jJKB_do/видео.html
Well, I started learning English at the 7th grade and I wondered about the nonsensical spelling, too. My solution was to simply memorize each word twice, how it is spelled and how it is pronounced. That worked. I took the vocabulary in the back of my English language book and added "phonetic" versions of words to it. Like: house /haus/, phonetically /fonetikli/ and so on. If I'd known the real phonetical alphabet I would've used it. But not at the 7th grade, no.
Small nitpick here, but when you described the difference between C and G you said "hard," when really you probably should have just said "voiced," as that's really the only distinction. Great video, though! I love your stuff; keep making videos!
I love all English spelling -- such a fine game -- but my favourite is diarrhoea. Now that's a challenge! Great video -- I look forward to more spelling arcana.
Unfortunately I got here late so no one will see this, but there is no standard-setting body for English, so if we want to have a better spelling system, we have to do it ourselves and start spelling things more correctly when we write to our frends, colleauges or when leaving internet comments. Ther ar a number of changes which ar fairly uncontroversial and don't require new letters or learning a new system. I suggest we start with Spelling Reform 1 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1). Even these fairly minor changes would greatly improve English spelling, we can try to tackle the other inconsistencies later.
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
_Dehr wuld be resistins tu dat kind of spelling do', espesili in Amerika and Ostralia and Nu-Sealend and Kanada tu and mabi efen Grate-Briten aswel beakus Brexit._
honestly the best way to describe english spelling is we have several different glyphs mainly based on word history (germanic, latinate/greek, trends of transcription, trends of aesthetic) and they all share the same entry-keys. basically english is like japanese in which we use different spelling rules/glyphs/words for different things, but japanese actually has distinct scripts for each of those while english uses the same for everybody.
The Danish written language is just as hopeless since the words very often have silent letters and isn't pronounced the way they're written, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard for foreigners to learn the language - The complete written language should just be completely rewritten, which actually means that we could completely remove the letters CQWXZ from our alphabet since these aren't really used in the danish language and is pronounced the same way as more used letters like SKV. And i think it's interesting to compare the language to Norwegian where the written and spoken language is very similar and even when they adobt foreign words, they're often rewritten as they're pronounced in Norway, fx the word "Cool" is written "Kul" because that's actually how you prononuce it in norwegian and because C isn't a common letter in the scandinavian languages..
poertjt2 Danish speakers sound like they are swallowing their vowels. Or it sounds like speaking Norwegian while you're trying to gargle a teaspoon of water at the same time.
Yes, Danish and English are the only two languages that I know of, where you can never be sure about the pronunciation by looking at the spelling or vice versa. In some other languages there ara a few spoken sounds that have more than one potential spelling, but very rarely the other way around. If you know how to spell, you can pronounce. But not so in Danish or English.
And aswell, in Danish, the already much used s, k and v makes q, w, z, x and c almost entirely redundant. But on the other hand, there should be letters for a whole host of other sounds that currently don't have their own letters, aswell as symbols for vowel length, extra syllable (a schwa letter), glottal stop and syllable stress. All of these have huge impact on the meaning of spoken words, and yet they have no written counterpart. Among the vowels, and besides from vowel length, there are 3 kinds of a, 3 kinds of ø and 3 kinds of å, and two of each don't have their own letter. Together with the schwa sound this is 7 vowels missing their own letter. Among the consonants, the "soft" versions of d, v, and r miss having their own letters, as does the sound currently denoted by "ng". So that is a further 4 letters missing. These 11 missing letters would represent sounds which are not automatic variations of other sounds, only dependent on the surrounding sounds. Rather they are true independent sounds in Danish, with no current letter of their own. There is of course 20 or 30 other sounds which are merely automatic variations of the primary sounds, and they shouldn't count as independent letters. But then there is vowel length, glottal stop and syllable stress, all 3 of which should have their own marker. So this gives a total of 11 letters and 3 markers that should be added to written Danish. Subtracting the 5 before mentioned redundant letters from the current 29 letter of the Danish alphabet gives 24 letters, and adding 11 new ones and 3 markers, gives an alphabet of 35 letters and 3 markers.
Hi! Did you know that there's a theory suggesting that Korean Hangul (some letters) derives from Egyptian hieroglyphs as well? This is because of the Phagspa script (or ʼPhags-pa). It's really fascinating 🤩
It all has to do with the different word-stress patterns of the influences on English. Romance languages tend to have word stress towards the middle or end of their words, whilst English-native words are almost always stressed on the first syllable. If there is an exception, such as 'behest' or 'among', that exception is due to the fact that the first syllable is a prefix; the first syllable of the root is still stressed. Another thing to note is that Greek has a nearly unpredictable stress, which is why they always mark the stressed vowel on their words. I don't know the history of the stress for 'photograph' and 'photography', but it is possible that those are the stresses left over from Greek. Then again, of course, those words have gone through several languages to get to English, so I could definitely be wrong and they are from Latin or French. Point being, different patterns of where stress lies on a word create the confusion in modern English, where so many words are derived from different sources.
Not that I'm judging but I wish you had an ad on my feed with this video specifically on the k c and g sounds wonderful stuff newly subbed can't wait to binge 😅
Great video! Wow! However, wish it had been split up into about 3 separate videos and more examples had been given. Thanks so much for putting it together though! Wow! Such a great amount of information. Have you heard about the amusing attempt to use only Germanically derived words rather than Latin ones? It results in some interesting English usage.
I have two native languages, since both were spoken in my household I never felt like English was too difficult to understand, also, my parents made me read a ton (expression) of books when I was a kid, that helped a lot. Later on when I was 20-21 I decided to learn another language and started with Japanese, which I found quite lengthy to learn but not too difficult. At 25 I decided to learn French, it's taking far longer than I thought, partly because I'm not as consistent as the other languages, and partly because my mind has a fog issue, possibly because of fibromyalgia, or maybe a autoimmune disease, the doctor is still trying to figure that one out. But I still feel French is not too difficult. Korean thou... that's a "bxtch"... >M> I started TRYING to learn it last year because my little sister is learning it, and I'm half the time frying my brain and the other half crying my frustration out. I can't differentiate the sounds, can't memorize the letters or their orders, and the explanations don't make any sense. T______T Maybe is it because all the languages I have learned follow the same idea of structure? Maybe I'm too old (not really), I don't know... but Korean might be a bit too much for my poor brain.
From your pronunciation of gif, to some of the art you used in the reindeer video. I think I'm noting a pattern. Do the terms FA, SF, IB, and E621 mean anything to you?
It is especially interesting, when a ligature becomes a letter. In german, whe have four: ä, ö, ü, ß. To encode it, it would be ae, oe, ue, sz/ss. (Yes, the ß is so special, it has two roots.)
Definitely a regional difference; that initial 'f' for "th" is widespread in a number of places, but completely unknown in others. A clear example of the problems with phonetic spelling!
I've tried pronouncing through with the 'th' instead of the 'f' sound and I have to say it sounded unlike any word I've ever heard. Just transferring smoothly from a 'th' to a 'r' was extremely difficult. May be the rest of my dialect influencing it though.
What I don't get is that, if English is actually so hard because of its irregularity in appearence and spelling confusions, how on earth this language managed to become the most spoken language? One thinks that in theory, in order to make almost everybody speak the same language, that language has to be much more simpler, no? I am Turkish, fortunately I learned English starting from a very young age, maybe by memorizing the spellings over time. But when my adult newly english learner friends ask me how a written word is read, and why so, I just don't have any response :) I really enjoy your videos, this one too. I would like to watch more videos about this topic, but maybe more concentrated on some specific sounds on each one :):):) By the way, one word I can never remember how to write: teather. or theater ????
I think the dominance of English is actually a perfect example of the overwhelming importance of politics, society, geography etc in the development of a language. English isn’t widespread because of anything inherent to it as a language, but because of historical circumstances that resulted in English-speaking people having military/political/social/economic power in many areas of the world. For better or (often) for worse. And thanks, glad you enjoyed the video! Some of the Spelling Bee Endnotes have more specific info on some sounds, & I’ll be doing more of them over time.
This reminds me of a book I read once called "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough" by Theodore Giessel (not sure if I spelled that correctly) also known as Dr. Seuss.
Interesting, you've answered plenty of my questions about our modern spelling system that I didn't even know! I'll be searching through your videos to see if you have one on modern grammar. (If that's not a train wreck, I don't know what is!)
I'd like to make a correction here. You said 'The short 'a' as in swan has basically remained the same from Old English to Modern English'. But that's not true. Swan changed, but changed back in some North American dialects when short o sounds (got, sod) merged with long a sounds (father, dhal). In dialects without this father/bother merger, the sound in swan is more similar to that of a short o sound, and rhymes with Ron, which does not, in these dialects, rhyme with Khan.
In Hindi the pronunciation is quite in pair with the writing. Devnagari is a system of consonants to which vowels are added, although they can stand alone as well, with diacritics to nasalise, make a "n" sound (matching with the following consonant), etc. I can't think of any redundancy, however the "w" and "v" are somehow interchangeable and written with the same glyph. People have different accents throughout India, most noticeably, some don't make the distinction of all sounds (the Persian "z" sound could become "j" in Bihar, for example, etc). Would you say it's not old enough yet, or is there something else to it? I feel the entropy is quite high also, as they have a tendency to have shorter words with many more sounds/phonems, quite the opposite of romance languages, maybe that's what is keeping it an almost one-to-one correspondence.
16:20 "Dear Granny. Today we went on an excursion to the fruit fly circus. It was very good. We had to wait a little while for it to start. It was very good. My favorite was when they slid across the table and did a somersault. Thank you for the ms (?) money."
As I learned English as a second language when I moved to the US, I had to learn two versions of it: the spoken/listening one and the one for writing. When I used to write in English a couple of years ago, I used the phonetic rules of my native language to remember how to correctly spell, like if I wanted to write "I am speaking and writing" I went in my head like, "Ee am sp-eh-ah-k-ee-ng ah-nth wr-ee-t-ee-ng." Now I don't relay on that as much... just with words like, "wealth" or "head." The funny thing is that when I'm reading, in my head, I think in the correct sound of each word, it's only when I write I, some times, need to use my messed up method.
I was fascinated by Turkish spelling when I went there and was explained how to read the words. It's written exactly how it's pronounced, since they changed from the arabic to the latin alphabet in 1928. So I can take a book and start reading out loud and people who speak Turkish understand what I say, even if I have no idea. But after this video it occurred to me that they might have problems with words that sound the same but have different meaning or sound different but have the same origin. I know that they use a sign on top of the vowels to make the difference sometimes, for example kar and kâr sound the same but mean different things. But I don't know if it solves all the problems and I don't know if this phonetic writing works well for all the accents of Turkish speaking people. I heard that Portuguese had a reform quite recently and they changed words to better fit the modern pronunciation, but since Brazilian sounds so different it created a lot of problems. I heard this from a Brazilian.
I would love to hear more about how other languages have handled / are handling these issues, since all languages have sound changes (though not all of them have had as many drastic changes as English since writing was introduced). Thanks for these tidbits!
The thing that I liked the most of Turkish spelling is how they write words borrowed from other languages, especially French. For example: hairdresser in Turkish is kuaför (coiffeur) and museum is müze (musée).
Well, for norwegian, since we were writing danish, and speaking various dialects of early modern norwegian, we ended up splitting our written languages into two separate ones. One that norwegianified the existing danish language used by those of higher social status, and one that was based on a collection of regional dialects, turned into a writing system by Ivar Aasen. Today they enjoy equal legal status, and you have a right to receive and fill in any official documents in either form, and each primary school will choose one as the main one, and secondary schools might end up with a mix of students of both. Personally, in secondary school, any class not strictly about spelling was taught in Bokmål (norwegianified danish), while i was required to write in the one my primary school taught, Nynorsk (which is based on a selection of regional dialects) For administration, each county chooses one as the main one for use internally, so you have to make a specific request to get documents and forms in your language of choice. Spelling reforms have tried to move them closer to eachother, hoping to unify them into a common norwegian set of spellings, but it never was successful, and the notion is now mostly abandoned. Nynorsk (the one based on rural dialects) however, is generally adding some spellings that are absorbed from Bokmål-like speech. It's important to distinguish that they don't have separate languages connected to them, nor are they simply spelling systems for different dialects. They are simply two different attempts at spelling reform after we gained independence from denmark, and both of them stuck. I've been told that it's a fairly unique set-up.
I used to be quite critical about the crazy spellings in English before I started learning Japanese, where (in one of their scripts) you have to memorize a character or two for each and every different word. After that I realized that just with enough practice, looking at the "shape" of the word is how you should read the language, as opposed to looking at each letter.
so in modern swedish they pronouce the g like a y too, like in "ger/giv" and "göra/gör". and in low germanic languages g pronounced as a gh sound, which shows that saxon and frisian played a part in development of english, like "groot" and "goed"
The British word ending -our pronounced or (like in 'colour' and 'honour') really is totally annoying since it creates words with the same endings that don't rhyme, and it make words that do rhyme have a multitude of spellings. All of which is eliminated if that stupid U goes away. The only reason to keep it, is if it disambiguates different words (like 'for' and 'four'), but in most cases there are no ambiguous words. So, Noah Webster got this one right. Whenever I see the words like 'harbour' my mind wants to rhyme them with 'our' and 'hour' and 'sour'. ("The ships are sailing through the ."
As a foreign speaker of English, spelling send not to be a major problem, simply because you need to learn things that are new, and you have to assume it, even though it may not seem logical. As a native Spanish speaker, we consider almost a miracle the homogeneous and fairly simple spelling we have. We premium the homogeneity of the language, rather than keeping a historiography of the words.
I have always considered myself to be a good speller, but when I make a mistake it is nearly always because I use a single consonant when there should be a double consonant or because I use a double consonant where there should be a single one. It drives me nuts.
Yes, there are lots of other writing systems, but cuneiform isn't linked directly to the English alphabet; I only went back to the roots of our alphabet for this video.
The problems related to the English word spelling "system" is that large percentages of that language's words have been borrowed from Danish, Norman French, Church Latin, while the base vocabulary also comes from multiple dialectical sources (Low Saxon, Frisian, Aenglesk (language of The Angles) and Juttish (language of The Jutes). The spellings that were fixed as official, had come from many different sources and spelling systems. That shouldn't be a problem, IF the spellings were changed, periodically, to match the way the word is spoken, after its sounds have been changed. This has happened in Spanish, and Dutch, both of which have few spelling rules, with very few irregularities and exceptions to the hard-and-fast rules. The Dutch spellings were changed again just after World War II, to reflect current speech. There should NOT be 3 different ways to spell the sound "uff" (ough, uff, uf). or 6 different ways "ough" can be pronounced (ooh, oww, off, oh, uff, awf). The origin of the word, "enough", in English is clear that it comes from the Frisian "genöch", which sounds very close to Dutch "genoeg". Clearly, the Old English "enough" sounded almost identical to the Old Frisian "genoch" and Old Dutch "genoeg", as the Frisian gutteral, "ch" sound is very similar to the Dutch gutteral "g" word ending, and both of them differ from the English spelling, mainly because the beginning gutteral "g" sound has been first softened, and finally dropped, altogether, in English. One of the major problems with English is that the original Middle Ages chosen conventional spellings have not changed for hundreds of years since they were standardised, despite their sounds having changed many times, over that long period. If one learns the spelling rules in Spanish and Dutch (and several other languages), the language learner can spell almost every word, and know the sound of nearly every word he or she encounters, based on simple, logical rules, that never, or almost never, have exceptions. I would like English to do the same (change the official spellings to match the new spoken words, every 100 years, or so).
Corey Cook it used to be pronounced like "own", think about it you say only not "wonly", stone, alone, or atone. It actually brings it a lot closer to other Indo-European languages as in Spanish un or una One of the many peculiarities of Abraham Lincoln was that he was so backwoods that he pronounced it as "own" and most high-minded easterners thought he was parochial for it, but he was actually right, lol
Place names in Norfolk, England. "Wymondham", for example, is pronounced "win-dum". "Happisburgh" is "hayz-bruh", "Garboldisham" is "garble-shum", "Snetterton" is apparently "snettun" (even though I never once heard it pronounced as such in my 23 years of living literally 4 miles from there), "Costessy" is "cossy", "Attlebourgh" is "attle-burruh" (I can only assume that at some point it was spelled with a 'borough' at the end which eventually became just 'bourgh' for reasons that elude me). The Broad Norfolk dialect in general is pretty wacky even among other regional English dialects. There's a great deal of Scandinavian influence. For example, in Broad Norfolk there's this word, 'dwile' (pronounced roughly "dwoil") meaning a cloth or rag used to clean the floor, which still has cognates in some Scandinavian languages, specifically Danish, if I recall correctly. The dialiect is dying out these days though, now it's little more than just an accent, which rather saddens me if I'm honest.
I work with dyslexic students, I sometimes tell them the etymology behind words to help them. For me, being a native Spanish speaker, I struggle with short vowels, especially the /i/ (saying /e/ instead) and the /u/ (saying /o/ instead). I also struggle listening to ch as it does not exists in my dialect of Spanish I can make the sound, but I can't hear it when others pronounce it. And my most hated words will have to be words where ch sounds like sh (Michelle, machine, etc.)
Interesting... seems like the Brits really want to seperate themselves from everyone else even more, trying to get their own identity, since everyone speaks English nowadays. o_O
Tnk you brother , but this was quite a lot for me to understand all just at one, i'm defintely going the do a do several replays before understanding it all. thank you again ever so mush kp blessed i do appreciate your work so mush,💖👊...
I used to think that English and French spelling was bad. And then I came across Irish ☘️ spelling 🇮🇪 - apparently it comes directly from the deepest orthographic pits of hell.
It seems that the main reason of the spelling complexity is the change of pronunciation. At the same time, German can make a writing system which reflects its pronunciation quite well. I'm not quite sure that it works in German because the standard German itself is kind of artificially created or it has been pronounced and spelt that way for the long time by the majority through out history.
I'm a native Spanish speaker, although I've understand and communicated in written english for a long time, it's been only less than 5 years that I speak it on a regular basis. A couple of years ago, I was in california for a visit, a bunch of friends and I went into a restaurant, where after finishing our meals, and since I was being reimbursed for my expense I asked the waiter for the receiPt, the waiter couldn't understand me until one of the guys in my party told him I wanted the "receit".
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Learning English can be rough though not if thoroughly thought through. ;)
It can be managed through tough thorough thought, though.
i understood both of these things
I love that story about Bernard Shaw, where he wrote "fish" as "ghoti" ("gh" as in "enough", "o" as in "women" and "ti" as in "nation")
I learned, a while back, that international students(the ones I talked to) hate reading English for the fact that there are no standard, one-to-one, letter pronunciations. It can be incredibly difficult. This was a great video. I really enjoyed it. I look forward to more explorations in to what made our alphabet what it is today.
Yes, it's true. When I read a new book or an article in Polish I can go to my friends and tell them about new fascinating things that I learned - but with English books I don't do it (in English). Checking how to pronounce each specialized word in English is very time-consuming (unnecessarily time-consuming).
I don't like to feel embarrassed so I really rarely speak in English :(. And I feel that many no-natives do not feel comfortable when they have to speak in English. I think that the most comfortable are people from other Germanic languages, e.g. Sweden.
In addition, talking to someone who speaks English in a bad way (because English is not his first language) and he has a strong accent too isn't easy. I remember my conversations with some Indian - it took me some time to understand him :)
I am happy to live in a country with regular spelling reform.
I am always puzzled when a native English speaker needs to pronounce something from another language and claims "not to know how to pronounce it", even though they have the written word in front of them!
It's clear to me that they have been taught that there is no relation between the written word and how it sounds. I think this makes it hard for native English speakers to learn other languages. I think English would be better with regular spelling reform and a script that matched it's sounds.
I am happy too :). As a Pole I know what a regular pronunciation is. We learn ortography because spelling isn't often regular. I am always a little angry when I read about phonology of other languages (yes, English Wikipedia is a lot better than Polish) and thay always need a word to describe sound in English (whether it's a vowel or a consonant). It is so unpleasantly funny.
As someone above write English is like Chinese. And it is true. They have the same pictograph but different dialects or countries pronounce them differently. I think that this is the reason why there will be no real reform of English. First English is used in many countries that belong or belonged to the "crown". I do not believe that this people will reach a compromise together, for e.g. USA is stubborn and strangely conservative (look "no" for metric system). Canada, Australia, USA or UK have their own characteristic ways of pronunciation certain words - in te same country they pronounce them differently. So how could they have the compromise?
Secondly, if people do not create a universal language or there will not be another phase of civilization development (e.g. by China) English WILL BE lingua franca. USA and UK need to have the same language because of globalization. South Korea and North Korea are separated for half a century and their languages already sound a bit different. How long US does not belong to the UK and how technological progress has changed both countries?
Different groups that live in the concerned countries change language too. I see it when I compare various countries using Slavic languages.
I partially agree with the sentence: "I think this makes it hard for native English speakers to learn other languages". Before the age of 20 (when Internet was just developing and it was very expensive) I thought that every language has complicated grammar like Polish so I didn't liked learning languages because I though that it is too time-consuming. Why should I learn languages when I hate traveling? Why should I learn languages when I will not be useing it? Why there always is so many exceptions? etc. So what thinks average English speaker? Probably the same. USA is so big (and traveling abroad isn't cheap). Briton can travel using English. They can use only English on the Internet and no one will fault them. Because of many exceptions they probably think that other languages are the same - so language learning is for them waste of time.
yeah sadly here as a child I was always told by my teachers words arent pronounced the way they look
Hmm, maybe not so much that there is NO correlation between the written word and the spoken word, but more that there's absolutely no guarantee that you can guess the entire pronunciation on the first try. At most, we hope we can pronounce a portion of an unfamiliar word.
When we're learning to read as children, we are taught the basic possible sounds that each letter can make, and we are instructed to "sound out" unfamiliar words. Even with words that don't seem to follow any known spelling rule, you can usually make a good guess based on other words you've seen before. Under a parent's or teacher's guidance--and classmates and friends and siblings correcting each other--any improper pronunciations eventually get weeded out and corrected. Exposure to the spoken and written word is enough for native speakers to be able to learn all the vocabulary they need to.
Rather than having difficulty with pronunciaton of unknown words, native speakers have exponentially more trouble spelling known words correctly. We just learn to accept that sometimes we might have to look up a spelling or be wrong, lol.
At this point, however, I don't think anything can reasonably be done to standardize English spelling. At all.
The reason being, the number of native speakers globally that have extremely varying pronunciation, since English has had centuries to evolve and change in different countries. Even more, within each such country, there are a wide range of regional variations in pronunciation.
There is no governing body that controls English. No country or region will want to give up its pronunciation and spelling in favor of a foreign one.
It's sad but true. Even we native speakers get very frustrated at times. XD
Well Also Lots Of Languages Have Different Pronunciations For, 'J' Could Be Pronounced /d̠ʒ/, /ʒ/, /j/, Or /h/, Depending On The Language, So If You Don't Know What Language Something Is, Or How To Pronounce Said Language, It's Reasonable To Not Know How To Pronounce It.
And then when they do pronounce it they pronounce the vowels seemingly at random without even a baseline idea of what said of vowels they should be using for those letters. No /a/ /i/ /u/ /e/ /o/ first pass through always something random like pronouncing every A in a Russian word like /æ/ and every I like /aɪ/. Just generally very poor intuition as to what the most common vowels might be to sus out the pronunciation of any unfamiliar word. Really love turning every vowel into a diphthong too.
I've usually heard "pwn" pronounced like "pone". I kind of like the idea of using w as a vowel, as they do in Welsh
Then it should be pronounced "poon". The Latin "v" and the Greek "ω" were both used as vowel or consonants, representing either "u" (as in the English "put") or "w" (as in English "swim"). BTW, "w" is called "double-u" (despite looking like a "double-v") because of the use of the written "v" as a spoken "u" in Latin.
I thought it was "pee-owned". That comes from having teenagers to teach me about the internet. I told them, darlings, I invented the internet.
I always thought it was similar to “pawn”, like the chess piece, except without the a.
As in, pwn, which can be made of p as in pal, and wn as in own.
'Pwn' is a typo of 'own' which means 'to dominate or conquer a rival in a humiliating way.'
I always pronounced it like pvvvvvn
Love this video! For some reason I absolutely love the spelling system of English. I know I'm privileged as a native speaker having grown up learning it, and that it might be difficult for adult L2 learners to grasp when compared to say, Spanish, but like you said it really shows you the history of the language.
Spelling was my favorite subject, probably because my 1950's teachers actually taught us the history of the words we learned. It gave me a lifelong love of languages that eventually lead me to software development. Those darned compilers are real sticklers for spelling, grammar, and syntax. Legit!
As you alluded to above, English has made a rather circuitous route through many different languages. To put a twist on something the '40s comedian Will Rogers said, English never met a word it didn't like. What I have below is just a small portion of several pages of goofy things about English spelling, and it's from one of my documents called "English is nuts":
1) The bandage was wound around the wound. 2) The farm was used to produce produce. 3) The dump was so full, it had to refuse more refuse. 4) He decided to desert his dessert in the desert.
Lastly, one I think would drive a new learner nuts would be if they got all 3 of these in 1 day: rough adds 1 letter for trough, which does the same for through. So, common sense says they should rhyme, but they don't--not even close.
"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and riffle their pockets for new vocabulary." - James Nicoll, Usenet:rec.arts.sf-lovers 15 May 1990.
😂😂😂😂😂😂
It's a legacy from german to make verbs look like nouns with a completely different meaning. Hence we capitalize nouns. Buchen = beech trees / buchen = to book
My favorite example of the absurdity of English spelling is George Bernard Shaw's example of spelling "fish" as "ghoti"- "gh" as pronounced in "enough", "o" as pronounced in "women", and "ti" as pronounced in "action".
No one ever spells Cheshire as "qaixolo" even though Xi Jinping might be colonel of the Qing Dynasty again.
Jacob Griffin That just shows Chinese spelling is a mess too. They should've stayed with Wade Giles or adopted Yale romanization, so foreigners wouldn't say "King Dynasty".
But those sounds depends on where they are placed in the word, then no, fish cannot be written ghoti. That's the dumbest example in the world.
*cough* Ugh, that's roughly enough. It takes ploughing through tough thorough thought though.
@@TAKEmeTOtheMORGUE 👏
This is how you make a perfect language: Place latin letters in the Hangul arrangement, use Japanese grammar, and Esperanto vocabulary.
Nobody would use it!
A soon as people start using a language, it will evolve. And then you cannot keep it perfect, for whatever crazy definition of perfect you migh have.
Exactly!
Kinda like how the original Pona Toki language had only 20 words, but speakers of Pona Toki today recognize 23.
Cuzican Aerospace 🤣
latin letters with exact phoneme-grapheme correspondence, forming syllable blocks, SOV order, no grammatical number or gender, totally regular inflections... That sounds great to me! :D
Cuzican Aerospace you mean toki pona?? It started with 118 words and now it numbers 125-ish
The I before E except after C mnemonic that I learned as a child is totally usless, especially since English has imported so many words that break the "rule" that there are now more exceptions than words that fit. At least it's no longer being taught in public schools.
yeah, this came to mind for me too when he asked for "most hated spellings" :D
The rule is more accurate when it applies only to the "ee" sound (so forget "weigh"), but there are still plenty of "weird" exceptions to "seize" onto.
There are, in fact, MORE words that violate the "I before E except after C" rule than follow it, so truly it's not something that should be taught.
...
In fact, the "I before E except after C" rule was NOT taught in my school. It never appeared in any of my spelling books or reader books. I learned it from my parents because they'd been taught it back in the past when nobody questioned these things. So, at least in the 1970s and 1980s someone had it right.
I went to a public elementary school in the sixties (in Philadelphia, PA) and I before E was definitely still being taught there. Even if it's ancient history in schools parents will probably keep passing its dubious wisdom down for a few more generations.
I before E except after C when IE or IE make the sound EE...
Which still leaves a few exceptions. One of them being caffeine which happened because that originated by putting the suffix -ine on the word café giving something like kaffay-een which we quickly started to [mis]pronounce more simply. Good, isn't it?
Sadly there are no such excuses for seize and weird. They're just bastards. :)
Very very well done video! There's much research behind it, 26 minutes well spent. The part that struck me the most was the alphabet one, and since I'm currently trying to design several ones for my conworld I absolutely loved that part! Fun fact, with current English spelling the word "fish" could be jokingly written as "ghoti" (GH as in "enough", O as in "women" and TI as in "nation")
Thanks! My initial script was double the length (!) and most of it was on the development of the alphabet! It's such a fascinating story.
Alliterative Woah! I know your channel is mostly anglocentric but...I'd be damned if I wouldn't love a video of yours about other alphabets (expecially the chinese ideograms)!!!
That would be interesting but definitely not my expertise--I heartily recommend NativLang's channel for explorations of such things!
Have you ever heard of the Qaixolo Cat?
Here's a hint: _Colonel Xi Jinping will make the Qing Dynasty great again!_
In the Czech language, there is actually a mix of strictly phonetic and etymological writing. Generally, each letter corresponds to one sound, and long vowels also have distinct letters (for example, there is the short a and long á). This can also be seen in the spelling of foreign words like muzeum (Museum) or džez (Jazz). But some letters have the same pronunciation, which is why some words have the same pronunciation, but a different spelling. For example, there are the words být and bít, which by the way each have a different etymology. Být is a verb, which means "to be", while bít is also a verb, but means "to beat". This is also important, because both verbs have a number of derived verbs, created by adding prefixes. For example, dobýt means "to conquer", while dobít means "to bash" or "to reload". Some slavic languages don't have this differenciation, in the Slovene language for example, the verbs meaning "to be" and "to beat" are both spelled "biti", although they both have a completely different etymology and conjugation. So in this case, it can actually be quite helpful to have two letters with the same pronunciation (this is a bit simplifying, because in some Czech words, i changes the sound of the consonant before it, while y does not).
Thank you! This is really interesting, and a good demonstration of how 'simplification' doesn't always make things easier.
Polish, related to Chech, didn't merge 'y' and 'i' sounds as Czech did, so those words are pronunced differently and spelled as well: 'bić' and 'być', but on the other hand Polish pronunciation of 'morze' (sea) and 'może' (maybe) is the same in most dialects but keeping this simple trait of etymology really helps.
Polish uses archaic, mostly diagraph spelling while Czech adopted more modern diacritic spelling. It's very interesting to campare Czech and Polish spelling to see sound changes and similarities of both, like Polish 'rz' and Czech 'ř', 'y-i' like mentioned above, h-g shift and many more.
Actually, there's slight difference - in common Czech, ý changes to ej but í does not. (I understand some may view common Czech as low language but it's still different the letters are differentiated even though the pronunciation merged.)
I assumed that it's not that simple. I take into account only standard language - some southern and northern Polish dialects even have distinct ''ř'' sound - spelled 'rz' (compare: řeka - rzeka), other have vowel lenght and so on, while standard doesn't (it does have other features).
And to be clear: I don't speak any Czech, while I have pretty good understanding of Czech writing, like 80%. How much do Czech understand Polish writing?
The common Czech is so common (especially in bohemian parts of the country) it should be mentioned, IMHO. Slovak lacks this, its dialects are simply local dialects.
Personally, apart from -i used for palatalization I don't have many problems with Polish orthography and that may be because both Czech and Slovak do not palatalize except for d, t, n and l (l in Slovak only). (Polish in general seems to have more consonants such as the ć/cz difference which is not present in Czech and Slovak.) But a couple of people told me they found it difficult, take from that whatever you will.
This is the most information I've come across in one video. From what I can tell, this had more information than other videos I've watched. On top of that, not only was it easier to understand, it actually makes so much more sense to Me now why the Modern English is so convoluted. An interesting thing though is being able to use the recorded History of the writing to possibly learn other languages around the world that have a somewhat similar writing system.
My most hated English spellings are actually mostly place names, simply because they seem to have never changed spellings at all, despite the fact they've been worn down SO MUCH. Local offenders include:
Gloucester
Worcester
Leicester
Billerica
Haverhill
I've lived in that area my whole life, and while I could pronounce them, it took me until I was practically an adult before I could reliably spell them.
Though I also couldn't spell Massachusetts until I was a teen, and I remember the first time I spelled America correctly on my first try when I was 10. I've always been awful at spelling.
The French left a bunch of place names in midland USA. Some retained their French pronunciations like Des Moines, Iowa but others became anglicized like Detroit, Michigan.
The cities in the above comment are all cities in Massachusetts, which is a different geographical region from what you're mentioning.
My British neighbor loves to correct my mispronunciation of all those places, and I love to learn them. I fondly remember my very American father pronouncing "Were-Chester-Shyer Sauce" when I was a kid. To think it's actually "Wushter Sauce". Who knew!?
I'll one-up you
Gloucestershire /ɡlɒstɚʃɚ/ not /glaʊ.sestɚ.ʃaɪɚ/
Worcestershire /wʊs.tɚ.ʃɚ/ not /wor.sestɚ.ʃaɪɚ/
I have to hand it to you, this video has completely changed my opinion on English spelling.
I'm not a linguist, but every time I watch a video like this, and learn about the root of one of our words... I immediately think back to my notion of English being one of the oldest 'creole' languages.
My reasoning is simple, just look at the history of this island.
Learning Spanish has also highlighted the vast number of Latin root words we use. I now also find it easier to spot the Germanic, and Scandinavian influences on English. Knife (G), Yacht (S, Dutch), Island (S, same spelling for the country 'Iceland' with the acute(L) on the I), Hut (G), et cetera (L).
No wonder it's so tricky. We've adopted many traits, and carry many exceptions.
The most complicated thing about Finnish spelling is the lack of some sound changes. For example "mene kotiin" actually has a geminated K. This because the second-person imperative used to end in K. Luckily, it's always the same forms that have this. The most volatile Finnish consonant is TS, the dental affricate. It's either TS, TT or HT (depending on dialect), with multiple gradation patterns for HT; TT has gradation like any other geminate T. The affricate also undergoes gradation, but this is not written; the standard language just uses TS.
Please don't pronounce it yif. That has connotations that wouldn't be accepted at work.
Or even flipping Zhaif... that is sooo grating on the ears and speech processing centres.
AEon Tokusatsu Reviews I'd suggest you'd google, in a very safe environment, what yif(f) means. Trust me, you'd be grateful for zhaif. Also, I apologise for the images in advance.
Mø Nälayé you and me, buddy, you and me.
Mø Nälayé go for it
Just don't Google the e number for MSG
The most confusing spelling?
English can be weird. It can be understood through tough thorough thought, though.
Superb video. I can relate this to the series by Melvin Bragg. I like the fact that my language, "English" has historical routes [or is it roots?] and gives some charm and longevity. Yes, I also had spelling problems, but ...
I would like to see a video on "what came first the language or the grammar?" as this would stop [people] being assessed purely [or soley] on their ability to spell, be grammatically correct etc., rather than their ability to communicate.
The thing that I find hard about English is that long words usually have several schwas in them and you don't know if they a spelled with an a, an e, an o or...
So wait, if Latin always uses a hard C, have I been mispronouncing Caesar my whole life?
Yes & no-in his own time it would have been pronounced ‘Kaiser’, but medieval and Renaissance Latin went through its own sound changes in various areas of Europe, and there are conventional Anglicizations of all the major Roman names (eg Mark Antony (not Marcus Antonius) & Cicero (not Kikero) & Pompey (not Pompeius) etc.)
That's wild, I had no idea. Great video, by the way!
Thanks!
xidnaf has a good video on it, though it's more about kings vs emperor.
To this day I find it extremely strange that anyone named their child 'Cicero' pronounced 'Kikero.' It blew my mind the first time I heard about it. Just kinda sounds bad to my ear. Maybe that's just because I don't speak Latin though.
That's why I like the Spanish system which mostly has every letter for a single phonetic sound each, it still has some repetitions or some variations, but nothing to the extent of English. You could argue that's because Spanish didn't have much influence from external languages, but in reality it has words from Latin, from the Germanic Visigoth language, and from Arabic, yet it kept consistent. ~And I'm totally not being biased by the fact that I'm argentinian~
Linguist here from Jade's channel. I am impressed. I shall now nerd out over your videos and wish people would talk to me about linguistics issues even more than I already do.
Welcome! And thanks! :)
This is again a brilliant episode, thanks a lot! Lots of information in good context, yet very entertaining, and i laughed out loud many times because many aspects were presented in a very funny way, too, without harming seriousness.
I disagree with respect to one of your main points, though: While etymology is tremendously interesting (IMHO, and i could explain my reasons, but others might still disagree), it does not really simplify spelling. The classical way, you learn the pronunciation and spelling of each English word completely separately, so you have to learn two independent things per word. In your proposed way, you have to learn the pronunciation and the etymology of each word, and i dare say as a rule, the etymology is more complex than the spelling - your video provides ample proof for that -, and then you have to learn all the rules of etymology (including the spelling systems of half a dozen dead languages and their evolution over time) on top of that in order to get from the etymology to the spelling, and then you are still left with reams of exceptions. Only a person who specializes in etymology anyway, hence knows most of etymology inside out and by heart anyway, can get the weird idea that teaching etymology can simplify the learning of spelling.
I do tell everybody that learning English is an absolute must for every person on earth today (simply because it is used so much that it is viable as a lingua franca), and i certainly encourage the teaching of etymology (just as history in general), but i still admire languages with a young, pristine spelling system like Slovak - having to tell somebody to learn English spelling even though languages like Slovak exist feels kind of offensive to me. Heck, even French spelling is almost perfectly regular, even though admittedly substantial parts of the phoneme -> grapheme association are seriously unusual, like [o] -> eau, [u] -> ou, [y] -> u and so on, but at least they are consistent. But German spelling is bad enough, and English is outright terrible.
As a french speaker that had to learn German, i can attest you that German has a quite easy spelling. It is easier for me than my native language. Of course it's a bit harder than Slovak, Spanish or Finish but it's quite ok.
In my opinion English and French are on par but maybe the later is a bit better cause it's more easy to learn to read it.
The reason why English is such a hard language to learn for some people because of the variety of languages around the world. For example and Australia is speak with a heavy Australian accent and in England they have a variety of different types of accents around a 10 mile radius of each other. Case in point a person from Central London can speak a different variety of English then one from Lisbon Grove in the same area. This way people don't understand each other. And you're in South America English has a Spanish accent attached to it.
@@peterhiggins1872Of course, the same can be said for other languages. Spanish natives speak in a variety of regional dialects and accents, some of which might even be associated with a particular part of the city or economic status or education. And then you have to take into account the varieties of Spanish spoken by South American speakers. In Holland, a significantly smaller country, a city boy will have tremendous difficulty understanding a farmer who is just a twenty minute drive away.
Grammar N Word you just made my point clear; even the Japanese language has it's own dialects. Another example is in Okinawa they say Nangin for carrots, and in Tokyo they pronounce it Noingin. You can hear the difference.
Discovered your channel via Jade, and I am glad I did. This is one of my favorite subjects. And there are so many facets, and historical events and trends reflected in it. For only one example: the Great Vowel Shift is recognized every time we try to affect a 'pirate' accent. Pirates seemed to have maintained the pre-Shift pronunciation for a longer time, perhaps because they were somewhat isolated. In any case, their vowels were the old pronunciations and still commemorate them.
There are different reasons we spell the way we do, and some of those reasons are arbitrary, some with an origin now forgotten over time.
But only slightly off-topic: I have met others with the following ability(?), but I can glance at an entire page of text and the misspelled word will attract my eyes. So as much historical context as we have in English spelling, isn't there something about it that trains some of us subconsciously? If I glance at some text composed with British spelling, I see the 'labour' or 'colour" before I see the topic or even the first sentence. Misspellings are a poke in the eye.
Welcome! Pirates are an interesting case, since the 'pirate accent' we all know is and love is actually mostly a product of mid-20th-century media, specifically Disney's Treasure Island. But it's true that the West Country accent that it's based on does indeed maintain some pre-vowel-shift elements, as many local dialects do. slate.com/human-interest/2014/09/pirate-speech-origins-in-west-country-english-via-robert-newton-aka-long-john-silver.html
This is a really amazing and informative video! You deserve so many more subscribers and views! Keep it up!
Amazing video, allow me to correct few things though:
5:55 the Alphabet you showed is the Arabic Alphabet in modern order which is 50 years old and it starts with Aliph Baa Taa
While the Aliph Baa Jeem Dal (Abjad) order is 6,500 years old was invented in Syria (Ugarit) and it the semetic group you didn't name is the Syrians. Each letter was a stickish shape of an object that starts with the sound (extremely smart innovation and one of the most important im history) like ... Aliph means a bull and is the name of letter A. Beit means a house which is for B. Jeem means a camel which is for Gi (modern English C). Dal means a door and is for D. And so on.
The oldest alphabet in history was found in Syria 4500BC in the form of small portable tablets that are a bit larger than a finger in size and they were given to Syrian children at ancient schools/teaching place to learn to write and read. ((I've seen the original one, i was shocked how small))
Pheonicians called themselves Syrians
Thank you-as you can tell, I can’t read Arabic, and so had to rely on the labelling of images to be accurate. I appreciate your correction.
Absolutely brilliant video - awesome explanation, thank you!!
Of course, since we got the Alphabet from the Greeks most of the sounds have changed in their language, like Delta to "thelta" (like in the word "the," but not like in the word "with"), among others.
Very true -- another whole level of complication.
You might not have noticed that many people pronounce "with" with a /ð/, even utterance-finally.
You go on so many tangents
Like distinguishing between German, Latinate, and other is basically so helpful in figuring out spelling how-tos
I, despite being an American, tend to spell "Catalogue" rather than "Catalog" because the only time when i would see/use the word was in reference to a web document made by my Australian friend.
I just had to second guess myself a couple days ago, because my spell check told me "catalogue" was wrong. I yelled at it for being xenophobic. I'm American, too, but I can't really tell you why I got in the habit of spelling it that way. Almost every other word where there's a difference, I use the American spelling, just that one word for some reason stuck with me from somewhere.
I definitely always use the -logue spellings as well. Just ending on an -og looks bad!
I spell it 'catalog.' The extra '-ue' is superfluous. You get the same pronunciation.
Correct: dialog, catalog, analog, monolog
Incorrect: rog, leag, tong (language)
Jacob Griffin No.
English needs our german Umlauts for easier spelling: Ä,Ö - air =är / urgent = ördshent
There's also "Ü" (French U) but I'm not sure if an english word with that sound exists(?).
Otherwise we pronunce V as F and Z as TS and C as K, which might be confusing for native english speakers - but we use to keep loan words as they are.
Die Band (music group - english loan word) is spoken the same, but Das Band (the ribbon - german word) is spoken "Bunt"
Alliterative , Basically Italian, Spanish, German, Danish, Swedish, Portuguese (which, by the way, is my native language, so I beg your forgiveness for any mistake in my English) and some other indo-european languages, also Finish, Estonian and Hungarian which are not indo-european, all of them in order to simplify each of their respective spellings, adopted the solution, you and Sorin mentioned, of using diacritics for accent and quality of vowels, and of dispensing with almost all Greek etymological markings . For example, through successive and successful spelling reforms they got rid of the "ch" (=kh χ ), vowel "y" (= υ), "ph" (= f φ), double consonants not really doubled, as in "chlorophyll" (in Spanish and Portuguese: "clorofila") which are quite a nuisance and do not even represent much of a help if one intends to learn Greek (ancient or modern). French spelling has maintained much of the same fancy problems as English. The real problem, however, with English spelling, as succinctly and clearly explained in your excellent video above, was mainly caused by: a) employing a dual spelling system, neolatinized for words of french or directly latin origins and another quite different for the words that came from the proto-germanic (and, of course, the useless greek etymological markings which only French also maintained in its entirety); b) the Great Vowel Change occurring coincidentally just after and during standardization which by itself has a lot to do with the introducing by Caxton and others of the printing press in England; and, c) of course, the vested interest of printers, intellectual elite and, most surprisingly, of a reasonable percentage of the common people, because of a good thing, to wit, a relatively high proportional level of litteracy associated with the Protestant Reform (every faithful is theoretically entitled to his or her own reading and interpretation of the Bible), which all put together precluded any successful ample spelling reform of the English Language (globalization and many sovereign countries writing English only strengthened already hegemonical conservatism in matters of spelling and even more doomed to fail any proposal of reform).
Thank you -- it's definitely instructive to look at how other languages have handled these same challenges. I definitely agree that the current situation is such that no widespread reform of English spelling is possible, for reasons connected much more to history and geography and politics than to phonology or linguistics!
@@Alliterative - I agree with you. The variety of English pronunciations (Australian, New Zealand, South African, Glaswegian, etc) make it impossible for there to be one accepted form of phonetic spelling. It's much easier to have one spelling, however odd, and just let people pronounce it as they wish. So girl can be pronounced gerl , gurl, goyl, gal, gel and so on; but each person still spells it girl. Doesn't help the non-native English speaker but keeps academics in employment.
@@hobmoor2042 I don't think many proponents of English spelling reform are calling for phonetic spelling. Phonemic (with an 'm') spelling can be designed in such a way that phonemic distinctions still made in any subgroup of speakers remain in the orthography. That way "girl" can still be spelled , since some (probably only Scots, I believe?) distinguish "fir", "fur" and "fer(n)". But AFAIK absolutely no one has a phonemic distinction between and , it's pure homage to Greek. If you read what @Alliterative writes, he says that the reason that reform is hard is not really linguistic.
Back in the 90's when I was computer programing I got used to spellong 'color' it rubbed off and I never used that 'colour' spelling it just looks wrong.
Coloure
Another great video, one spelling reform we can perhaps all agree to is putting the "u" back in "some", "monk", "come" and the "i" back in "busy", which have nothing to do with their etymology or their current pronunciation.
Thanks! Sadly I very much doubt (doute?) there's *any* aspect of spelling that *everyone* will agree on these days, but it's true there's little logic to those spellings -- though they're explicable by history!
With English, I appreciate that there are regional dialects of it and will never be a 100% phonetic language, but what I would propose are some reforms to make it consistent. E.g. words that start with C but a pronounced with a K sound. Replace PH with F. Make words with 'Ough' in them sound more consistent, cough=koff through=throo/froo drop a few silent letters, like the b in debt. Stuff that is always pronounced wrong in every dialect of English.
My choice would be the rather simplistic and rudimentary pronoun "I". It just looks awkward standing there all by itself as a single letter. Breaks the -e ending rule as well. Would much prefer "aye", "ai", etc. Also, I recommend the video Langfocus did featuring the concept of "Anglish".
I don't understand. You have "-A- single letter" - [a] :)
There is many languages where one letter means a word, eg. Korean 이 /i/ - a tooth; 아 /a/ - oneself.
In Polish we have: a ("disjoint" and), i (and), k (to - in archaic; but in Czech too), o (about), u (at), w (in; or Czech "v"), z (with/from). Czech use "z" (from) and "s" (with).
In Russian they have this "two letters in one letter" letters :)
я /ya/ (I)
ё /yo/ (argh - expression of annoyance)
Here is a list of some languages that have one letter words:
jalu.ch/languages/one_letter_words.php
www.wordnik.com/lists/single-letter-words
Look how others Germanic languages uses their vowels as single letter words. :)
I, island, ice, Ireland etc. - do you want to change all this "i" to "aye" or "ai"? English language needs standardization of spelling, not the next emotions of the scribe o_O (21:30 "ghost" was a good example in this video).
English, the language in which irregular words are regularly used.
This is absolutely fascinating. Great video!
The way I learnt the origin of j was not 'a fancy way of spelling i', but as a means to differentiate between a single i and a double i(ii), because in older languages and a few modern ones it makes a difference in pronunciation and meaning. Examples of modern languages are Finnish and Dutch, the latter of which changed it to ij and later on changed the pronunciation to /eɪ/.
Not my most hated word in English but a favorite of mine is cwm, a Welsh loan word meaning valley. However, in English it specifically refers to a valley head created through glacial erosion and with a shape similar to an amphitheater (Source: Wiktionary). The only other Welsh loanwords I could find with a vocalic W were bwthyn, crwth, and cwtch. Archaic? Sure. Niche? Probably. Unusual? Very much, yes. Please include a mention of the vocalic W when you get into the history of English vowels.
We use the word cwtch in English all the time when talking to babies. We just never realized because no one bothered to write it
What a great video! My most difficult word to spell was "necessary". Don't know why.
I love how different spellings and pronunciations of words with the same meaning but have different flavors. siesta verses nap. Banquet verse feast.
Jade's video on Information Entropy is up now! Check out the fascinating explanation of why English words have more information than coin flips... with a cameo from me! ruclips.net/video/_PG-jJKB_do/видео.html
That links to this video, not to Jade's...
Oops! Thanks -- cut & paste error. Fixed now!
Fantastic research and presentation, thank you so much.
Thank you!
Well, I started learning English at the 7th grade and I wondered about the nonsensical spelling, too. My solution was to simply memorize each word twice, how it is spelled and how it is pronounced. That worked.
I took the vocabulary in the back of my English language book and added "phonetic" versions of words to it. Like:
house /haus/, phonetically /fonetikli/ and so on. If I'd known the real phonetical alphabet I would've used it. But not at the 7th grade, no.
Great stuff! Best history of the complicated history of spelling.
Thanks!
Small nitpick here, but when you described the difference between C and G you said "hard," when really you probably should have just said "voiced," as that's really the only distinction. Great video, though! I love your stuff; keep making videos!
I love all English spelling -- such a fine game -- but my favourite is diarrhoea. Now that's a challenge! Great video -- I look forward to more spelling arcana.
Unfortunately I got here late so no one will see this, but there is no standard-setting body for English, so if we want to have a better spelling system, we have to do it ourselves and start spelling things more correctly when we write to our frends, colleauges or when leaving internet comments. Ther ar a number of changes which ar fairly uncontroversial and don't require new letters or learning a new system. I suggest we start with Spelling Reform 1 (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SR1). Even these fairly minor changes would greatly improve English spelling, we can try to tackle the other inconsistencies later.
*friends, not frends
*colleagues, not colleauges
*are, not ar
I think they where trying to spell it “right”
as they mentioned they are trying to spell things more correctly when they leave internet comments .^.
*+Deadpyro1130* So "friend", "league", "again" and "are" weren't correct spelling all along?
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer people wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas.
_Dehr wuld be resistins tu dat kind of spelling do', espesili in Amerika and Ostralia and Nu-Sealend and Kanada tu and mabi efen Grate-Briten aswel beakus Brexit._
honestly the best way to describe english spelling is we have several different glyphs mainly based on word history (germanic, latinate/greek, trends of transcription, trends of aesthetic) and they all share the same entry-keys. basically english is like japanese in which we use different spelling rules/glyphs/words for different things, but japanese actually has distinct scripts for each of those while english uses the same for everybody.
This was AMAZING! Thank you so much! 🤯🤠😮
The Danish written language is just as hopeless since the words very often have silent letters and isn't pronounced the way they're written, which is one of the reasons why it's so hard for foreigners to learn the language - The complete written language should just be completely rewritten, which actually means that we could completely remove the letters CQWXZ from our alphabet since these aren't really used in the danish language and is pronounced the same way as more used letters like SKV. And i think it's interesting to compare the language to Norwegian where the written and spoken language is very similar and even when they adobt foreign words, they're often rewritten as they're pronounced in Norway, fx the word "Cool" is written "Kul" because that's actually how you prononuce it in norwegian and because C isn't a common letter in the scandinavian languages..
poertjt2
Danish speakers sound like they are swallowing their vowels. Or it sounds like speaking Norwegian while you're trying to gargle a teaspoon of water at the same time.
Yes, Danish and English are the only two languages that I know of, where you can never be sure about the pronunciation by looking at the spelling or vice versa. In some other languages there ara a few spoken sounds that have more than one potential spelling, but very rarely the other way around. If you know how to spell, you can pronounce. But not so in Danish or English.
And aswell, in Danish, the already much used s, k and v makes q, w, z, x and c almost entirely redundant. But on the other hand, there should be letters for a whole host of other sounds that currently don't have their own letters, aswell as symbols for vowel length, extra syllable (a schwa letter), glottal stop and syllable stress. All of these have huge impact on the meaning of spoken words, and yet they have no written counterpart. Among the vowels, and besides from vowel length, there are 3 kinds of a, 3 kinds of ø and 3 kinds of å, and two of each don't have their own letter. Together with the schwa sound this is 7 vowels missing their own letter. Among the consonants, the "soft" versions of d, v, and r miss having their own letters, as does the sound currently denoted by "ng". So that is a further 4 letters missing. These 11 missing letters would represent sounds which are not automatic variations of other sounds, only dependent on the surrounding sounds. Rather they are true independent sounds in Danish, with no current letter of their own. There is of course 20 or 30 other sounds which are merely automatic variations of the primary sounds, and they shouldn't count as independent letters. But then there is vowel length, glottal stop and syllable stress, all 3 of which should have their own marker. So this gives a total of 11 letters and 3 markers that should be added to written Danish. Subtracting the 5 before mentioned redundant letters from the current 29 letter of the Danish alphabet gives 24 letters, and adding 11 new ones and 3 markers, gives an alphabet of 35 letters and 3 markers.
Nice video, excellent communication skills. And you are correct English spelling sure is tricky.
Hi! Did you know that there's a theory suggesting that Korean Hangul (some letters) derives from Egyptian hieroglyphs as well? This is because of the Phagspa script (or ʼPhags-pa). It's really fascinating 🤩
I would love to know why different forms of the same root word stress on different syllables. Like PHOtograph, but phoTOgraphy.
It all has to do with the different word-stress patterns of the influences on English. Romance languages tend to have word stress towards the middle or end of their words, whilst English-native words are almost always stressed on the first syllable. If there is an exception, such as 'behest' or 'among', that exception is due to the fact that the first syllable is a prefix; the first syllable of the root is still stressed. Another thing to note is that Greek has a nearly unpredictable stress, which is why they always mark the stressed vowel on their words. I don't know the history of the stress for 'photograph' and 'photography', but it is possible that those are the stresses left over from Greek. Then again, of course, those words have gone through several languages to get to English, so I could definitely be wrong and they are from Latin or French.
Point being, different patterns of where stress lies on a word create the confusion in modern English, where so many words are derived from different sources.
Not that I'm judging but I wish you had an ad on my feed with this video specifically on the k c and g sounds wonderful stuff newly subbed can't wait to binge 😅
Thank you! I wish I had the budget for ads! 😆
Great video! Wow! However, wish it had been split up into about 3 separate videos and more examples had been given. Thanks so much for putting it together though! Wow! Such a great amount of information. Have you heard about the amusing attempt to use only Germanically derived words rather than Latin ones? It results in some interesting English usage.
I have two native languages, since both were spoken in my household I never felt like English was too difficult to understand, also, my parents made me read a ton (expression) of books when I was a kid, that helped a lot. Later on when I was 20-21 I decided to learn another language and started with Japanese, which I found quite lengthy to learn but not too difficult. At 25 I decided to learn French, it's taking far longer than I thought, partly because I'm not as consistent as the other languages, and partly because my mind has a fog issue, possibly because of fibromyalgia, or maybe a autoimmune disease, the doctor is still trying to figure that one out. But I still feel French is not too difficult. Korean thou... that's a "bxtch"... >M> I started TRYING to learn it last year because my little sister is learning it, and I'm half the time frying my brain and the other half crying my frustration out. I can't differentiate the sounds, can't memorize the letters or their orders, and the explanations don't make any sense. T______T Maybe is it because all the languages I have learned follow the same idea of structure? Maybe I'm too old (not really), I don't know... but Korean might be a bit too much for my poor brain.
From your pronunciation of gif, to some of the art you used in the reindeer video. I think I'm noting a pattern. Do the terms FA, SF, IB, and E621 mean anything to you?
It is especially interesting, when a ligature becomes a letter. In german, whe have four: ä, ö, ü, ß. To encode it, it would be ae, oe, ue, sz/ss. (Yes, the ß is so special, it has two roots.)
Rough = ruff
Cough = coff
Through = throo
Plough = plow
+
Through and threw = throo!?
Seems legit!
Did you misspell 'plao' ? Also, what's that 'w' character?
Pretty certain through is actually pronounced 'froo'. Pronouncing it with the 'th' sound is quite difficult and sounds weird.
Definitely a regional difference; that initial 'f' for "th" is widespread in a number of places, but completely unknown in others. A clear example of the problems with phonetic spelling!
I've tried pronouncing through with the 'th' instead of the 'f' sound and I have to say it sounded unlike any word I've ever heard.
Just transferring smoothly from a 'th' to a 'r' was extremely difficult.
May be the rest of my dialect influencing it though.
There is a Gough Street in San Francisco. If you mispronounce it, people will instantly know you are not from around here.
What I don't get is that, if English is actually so hard because of its irregularity in appearence and spelling confusions, how on earth this language managed to become the most spoken language? One thinks that in theory, in order to make almost everybody speak the same language, that language has to be much more simpler, no? I am Turkish, fortunately I learned English starting from a very young age, maybe by memorizing the spellings over time. But when my adult newly english learner friends ask me how a written word is read, and why so, I just don't have any response :)
I really enjoy your videos, this one too. I would like to watch more videos about this topic, but maybe more concentrated on some specific sounds on each one :):):)
By the way, one word I can never remember how to write: teather. or theater ????
I think the dominance of English is actually a perfect example of the overwhelming importance of politics, society, geography etc in the development of a language. English isn’t widespread because of anything inherent to it as a language, but because of historical circumstances that resulted in English-speaking people having military/political/social/economic power in many areas of the world. For better or (often) for worse.
And thanks, glad you enjoyed the video! Some of the Spelling Bee Endnotes have more specific info on some sounds, & I’ll be doing more of them over time.
This reminds me of a book I read once called "The Tough Coughs as he Ploughs the Dough" by Theodore Giessel (not sure if I spelled that correctly) also known as Dr. Seuss.
Interesting, you've answered plenty of my questions about our modern spelling system that I didn't even know! I'll be searching through your videos to see if you have one on modern grammar. (If that's not a train wreck, I don't know what is!)
I'd like to make a correction here. You said 'The short 'a' as in swan has basically remained the same from Old English to Modern English'. But that's not true. Swan changed, but changed back in some North American dialects when short o sounds (got, sod) merged with long a sounds (father, dhal). In dialects without this father/bother merger, the sound in swan is more similar to that of a short o sound, and rhymes with Ron, which does not, in these dialects, rhyme with Khan.
In Hindi the pronunciation is quite in pair with the writing. Devnagari is a system of consonants to which vowels are added, although they can stand alone as well, with diacritics to nasalise, make a "n" sound (matching with the following consonant), etc. I can't think of any redundancy, however the "w" and "v" are somehow interchangeable and written with the same glyph. People have different accents throughout India, most noticeably, some don't make the distinction of all sounds (the Persian "z" sound could become "j" in Bihar, for example, etc). Would you say it's not old enough yet, or is there something else to it? I feel the entropy is quite high also, as they have a tendency to have shorter words with many more sounds/phonems, quite the opposite of romance languages, maybe that's what is keeping it an almost one-to-one correspondence.
Dravidian languages like Malayalam also a letter based (alphabetic-?) language not a phonemic (sound based) like English.
16:20 "Dear Granny. Today we went on an excursion to the fruit fly circus. It was very good. We had to wait a little while for it to start. It was very good. My favorite was when they slid across the table and did a somersault. Thank you for the ms (?) money."
thank you! I couldnt figure out that it meant 'excursion' for the life of me.
But what is _ms money_ ?
A BIG Thank You!
As I learned English as a second language when I moved to the US, I had to learn two versions of it: the spoken/listening one and the one for writing. When I used to write in English a couple of years ago, I used the phonetic rules of my native language to remember how to correctly spell, like if I wanted to write "I am speaking and writing" I went in my head like, "Ee am sp-eh-ah-k-ee-ng ah-nth wr-ee-t-ee-ng." Now I don't relay on that as much... just with words like, "wealth" or "head." The funny thing is that when I'm reading, in my head, I think in the correct sound of each word, it's only when I write I, some times, need to use my messed up method.
Albanian has a one to one, sound to letter correspondence.
I see TikToks asking questions this channel loves to answer ❤you should reply to some if you see any❤I saw one yesterday asking why it’s not “sheeps”
I was fascinated by Turkish spelling when I went there and was explained how to read the words. It's written exactly how it's pronounced, since they changed from the arabic to the latin alphabet in 1928. So I can take a book and start reading out loud and people who speak Turkish understand what I say, even if I have no idea. But after this video it occurred to me that they might have problems with words that sound the same but have different meaning or sound different but have the same origin. I know that they use a sign on top of the vowels to make the difference sometimes, for example kar and kâr sound the same but mean different things. But I don't know if it solves all the problems and I don't know if this phonetic writing works well for all the accents of Turkish speaking people.
I heard that Portuguese had a reform quite recently and they changed words to better fit the modern pronunciation, but since Brazilian sounds so different it created a lot of problems. I heard this from a Brazilian.
I would love to hear more about how other languages have handled / are handling these issues, since all languages have sound changes (though not all of them have had as many drastic changes as English since writing was introduced). Thanks for these tidbits!
The thing that I liked the most of Turkish spelling is how they write words borrowed from other languages, especially French. For example: hairdresser in Turkish is kuaför (coiffeur) and museum is müze (musée).
Well, for norwegian, since we were writing danish, and speaking various dialects of early modern norwegian, we ended up splitting our written languages into two separate ones. One that norwegianified the existing danish language used by those of higher social status, and one that was based on a collection of regional dialects, turned into a writing system by Ivar Aasen. Today they enjoy equal legal status, and you have a right to receive and fill in any official documents in either form, and each primary school will choose one as the main one, and secondary schools might end up with a mix of students of both. Personally, in secondary school, any class not strictly about spelling was taught in Bokmål (norwegianified danish), while i was required to write in the one my primary school taught, Nynorsk (which is based on a selection of regional dialects)
For administration, each county chooses one as the main one for use internally, so you have to make a specific request to get documents and forms in your language of choice.
Spelling reforms have tried to move them closer to eachother, hoping to unify them into a common norwegian set of spellings, but it never was successful, and the notion is now mostly abandoned. Nynorsk (the one based on rural dialects) however, is generally adding some spellings that are absorbed from Bokmål-like speech.
It's important to distinguish that they don't have separate languages connected to them, nor are they simply spelling systems for different dialects. They are simply two different attempts at spelling reform after we gained independence from denmark, and both of them stuck. I've been told that it's a fairly unique set-up.
Wow. And people say English spelling is complicated! That's fascinating, thank you!
But when you put a caret on a Turkish "g" it goes silent, that doesn't sound very phonetic!
I used to be quite critical about the crazy spellings in English before I started learning Japanese, where (in one of their scripts) you have to memorize a character or two for each and every different word.
After that I realized that just with enough practice, looking at the "shape" of the word is how you should read the language, as opposed to looking at each letter.
so in modern swedish they pronouce the g like a y too, like in "ger/giv" and "göra/gör". and in low germanic languages g pronounced as a gh sound, which shows that saxon and frisian played a part in development of english, like "groot" and "goed"
The British word ending -our pronounced or (like in 'colour' and 'honour') really is totally annoying since it creates words with the same endings that don't rhyme, and it make words that do rhyme have a multitude of spellings. All of which is eliminated if that stupid U goes away. The only reason to keep it, is if it disambiguates different words (like 'for' and 'four'), but in most cases there are no ambiguous words. So, Noah Webster got this one right.
Whenever I see the words like 'harbour' my mind wants to rhyme them with 'our' and 'hour' and 'sour'. ("The ships are sailing through the ."
I love the history preserved in the English language. But i think it's the only language where spelling is a competitive sport.
Really interesting! Much pwnage, well done.
As a foreign speaker of English, spelling send not to be a major problem, simply because you need to learn things that are new, and you have to assume it, even though it may not seem logical.
As a native Spanish speaker, we consider almost a miracle the homogeneous and fairly simple spelling we have. We premium the homogeneity of the language, rather than keeping a historiography of the words.
I have always considered myself to be a good speller, but when I make a mistake it is nearly always because I use a single consonant when there should be a double consonant or because I use a double consonant where there should be a single one. It drives me nuts.
Hey, just wondering why you didn't touch on cuneiform, as far as I know it is the oldest written language?
Stuart Smiles :D it doesn’t really affect our modern spelling
Yes, there are lots of other writing systems, but cuneiform isn't linked directly to the English alphabet; I only went back to the roots of our alphabet for this video.
U
The problems related to the English word spelling "system" is that large percentages of that language's words have been borrowed from Danish, Norman French, Church Latin, while the base vocabulary also comes from multiple dialectical sources (Low Saxon, Frisian, Aenglesk (language of The Angles) and Juttish (language of The Jutes). The spellings that were fixed as official, had come from many different sources and spelling systems. That shouldn't be a problem, IF the spellings were changed, periodically, to match the way the word is spoken, after its sounds have been changed. This has happened in Spanish, and Dutch, both of which have few spelling rules, with very few irregularities and exceptions to the hard-and-fast rules. The Dutch spellings were changed again just after World War II, to reflect current speech.
There should NOT be 3 different ways to spell the sound "uff" (ough, uff, uf). or 6 different ways "ough" can be pronounced (ooh, oww, off, oh, uff, awf). The origin of the word, "enough", in English is clear that it comes from the Frisian "genöch", which sounds very close to Dutch "genoeg". Clearly, the Old English "enough" sounded almost identical to the Old Frisian "genoch" and Old Dutch "genoeg", as the Frisian gutteral, "ch" sound is very similar to the Dutch gutteral "g" word ending, and both of them differ from the English spelling, mainly because the beginning gutteral "g" sound has been first softened, and finally dropped, altogether, in English. One of the major problems with English is that the original Middle Ages chosen conventional spellings have not changed for hundreds of years since they were standardised, despite their sounds having changed many times, over that long period.
If one learns the spelling rules in Spanish and Dutch (and several other languages), the language learner can spell almost every word, and know the sound of nearly every word he or she encounters, based on simple, logical rules, that never, or almost never, have exceptions. I would like English to do the same (change the official spellings to match the new spoken words, every 100 years, or so).
Who thought to spell “one” like that how does that turn out to make “won”
Corey Cook it used to be pronounced like "own", think about it you say only not "wonly", stone, alone, or atone. It actually brings it a lot closer to other Indo-European languages as in Spanish un or una
One of the many peculiarities of Abraham Lincoln was that he was so backwoods that he pronounced it as "own" and most high-minded easterners thought he was parochial for it, but he was actually right, lol
I Believe I Heard That When English Spelling Was Standardised, The Spelling Of One Came From One Dialect, While The Pronounciation From An Other.
‘rhythm’… seriously this one bends all logic!
Shud bee spelt az rithum
How about a video on the various digraphs for consonants (especially-those using a trailing -H)?!?!
Place names in Norfolk, England. "Wymondham", for example, is pronounced "win-dum". "Happisburgh" is "hayz-bruh", "Garboldisham" is "garble-shum", "Snetterton" is apparently "snettun" (even though I never once heard it pronounced as such in my 23 years of living literally 4 miles from there), "Costessy" is "cossy", "Attlebourgh" is "attle-burruh" (I can only assume that at some point it was spelled with a 'borough' at the end which eventually became just 'bourgh' for reasons that elude me). The Broad Norfolk dialect in general is pretty wacky even among other regional English dialects. There's a great deal of Scandinavian influence. For example, in Broad Norfolk there's this word, 'dwile' (pronounced roughly "dwoil") meaning a cloth or rag used to clean the floor, which still has cognates in some Scandinavian languages, specifically Danish, if I recall correctly. The dialiect is dying out these days though, now it's little more than just an accent, which rather saddens me if I'm honest.
I work with dyslexic students, I sometimes tell them the etymology behind words to help them. For me, being a native Spanish speaker, I struggle with short vowels, especially the /i/ (saying /e/ instead) and the /u/ (saying /o/ instead). I also struggle listening to ch as it does not exists in my dialect of Spanish I can make the sound, but I can't hear it when others pronounce it.
And my most hated words will have to be words where ch sounds like sh (Michelle, machine, etc.)
I have been saying "Green Witch" to Greenwich instead of "grenn-itch" for a long time...
That's one of those (many) English place names that's *completely* opaque... I'll put it on the list! :)
In Italy, when we talk about the Greenwich Meridian, we pronounce that as "Green Witch" too
Lol in Brazil people say Greh-noo-itch
So are the British just messing with the tourists then? o_O
Interesting... seems like the Brits really want to seperate themselves from everyone else even more, trying to get their own identity, since everyone speaks English nowadays. o_O
Tnk you brother , but this was quite a lot for me to understand all just at one, i'm defintely going the do a do several replays before understanding it all. thank you again ever so mush kp blessed i do appreciate your work so mush,💖👊...
I used to think that English and French spelling was bad. And then I came across Irish ☘️ spelling 🇮🇪 - apparently it comes directly from the deepest orthographic pits of hell.
still irish spelling is better than the english one.
David Pusnik 😱😮
Haha 😁
Have you seen Welch?
@@krcmaine - I speak Welsh (Cymraeg) and it is easier to read than English.
It seems that the main reason of the spelling complexity is the change of pronunciation. At the same time, German can make a writing system which reflects its pronunciation quite well. I'm not quite sure that it works in German because the standard German itself is kind of artificially created or it has been pronounced and spelt that way for the long time by the majority through out history.
I'm a native Spanish speaker, although I've understand and communicated in written english for a long time, it's been only less than 5 years that I speak it on a regular basis. A couple of years ago, I was in california for a visit, a bunch of friends and I went into a restaurant, where after finishing our meals, and since I was being reimbursed for my expense I asked the waiter for the receiPt, the waiter couldn't understand me until one of the guys in my party told him I wanted the "receit".
Ah, that’s a good one! I covered some of the reasons that when I did a video on “Recipe” a while back.
Hey there , Where could find the map of Western Europe that appears in bottom left corner at beginning of window, and such similar quality maps?
The one on the wall? I'm afraid I got it in a museum in Paris almost 20 years ago, so I don't know where to get it now.
I would love to support your channel but what's painttreeon?
Thanks! Patreon is a crowd-funding platform: www.patreon.com/TheEndlessKnot but we also appreciate comments and subscribers and word of mouth promotion.
Great video!
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Interesting!
Seriously great video.
I like how he says, "Confused yet?"
If you suspect it might be confusing...SLOW DOWN!