How Far Back in Time Could an English Speaker Go and Still Communicate Effectively?
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- Опубликовано: 26 июл 2019
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In this video:
Contrary to what many a Grammar Nazi the world over would have you believe, language is constantly evolving, occasionally extremely rapidly, and there is nothing wrong with that, despite such individuals lamenting that fact pretty much as long as we have documented reference of people discussing language.
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Sources:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geoffrey...
www.bbc.co.uk/guides/z8vmfrd
sites.fas.harvard.edu/~chaucer...
• Shakespeare: Original ...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_M...
www.bardweb.net/language.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_V...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_...
learningenglish.voanews.com/a...
www.bardweb.net/language.html
www.linguisticsociety.org/con...
theconversation.com/what-will-...
hbr.org/2012/05/global-busine...
www.thehistoryofenglish.com/h...
www.ted.com/talks/claire_bowe...
www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhor...
www.ling.upenn.edu/courses/Fa...
www.ted.com/talks/john_mcwhor...
public.oed.com/blog/nineteent...
the-toast.net/2014/03/19/a-lin...
www.quora.com/If-we-could-go-...
www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic...
• What Shakespeare's Eng...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mispron...
www.librarius.com/canttran/gpt...
archive.org/stream/cu31924013...
web.cn.edu/kwheeler/hist_celt...
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Do a video about the Alabama meth squirrel.
5:00 - nailed it! Actually, as a Norwegian, it was rather easy to read. I would guess the pronunciation is closer to Swedish than Norwegian, it seems more fitting anyways, for it to be so. It's not present day English, no. It's closer to old Norse. Might be closer to Danish? I mean, "lædin", has a heavy consonant sound, rather than emphasis on the vocals. That's why it's spelled with a D instead of a T ("lætin"). Interesting that it's called, "book-latin", ("boclædin") by the way.
Also, it's the Norman liberation of 1066, thankyouverymuch.
But how far into the Future could you travel and still understand English speakers, assuming there were any
What led engineers to figure out the first/ most common design of the Internal Combustion Engine?
When you tried to read that first old text about the size of english isles. you sounded like an english person trying to speak in an very spesific norwegian dialect.
You could go back as far as you like. I've seen movies in ancient egypt, the roman empire and many other older times and places where they spoke perfect english.
Corkas_ this is not a good joke but remember to r/whooosh if someone doesn’t get it
Not to mention outer space. Here in the US you can travel a few hundred miles and not understand a word people are saying but Captain Kirk traveled millions of light years and he conversed in English with the strangist aliens and everyone understood everyone else.
@@frank124c in Star trek that small badge on the left side is a universal translation
@@frank124c Forget Star Trek. What about the Stargate series which lacks any translation tech of any kind?
And then there's Doctor Who, where the TARDIS translates everything for everyone, no matter how far away from it they may wander.
Bold of you to assume I communicate effectively now
Lmao 🤣
🤣
I'm sorry, what did you just say?
For shizzy!
Everyone on earth feels that
Several years ago, King Felipe of Spain paid a visit to New Mexico. He later remarked that in his tour of the northern part of the state, he met people who spoke a dialect of Spanish which had last been spoken, in Spain, several centuries ago.
Funny, this is similar to what my French friends say about French Canadian(iens). They kept the original language as it was when most migration took place.
@@stevecarroll6760 In the case of those people in New Mexico, it was isolation which prevented their language from evolving. A similar situation exists in some remote villages in Switzerland. The people there speak "Romansh." It's the closest language, in the modern World, to the Latin spoken by the ancient Romans.
I watched a Spanish movie and could understand like 50% but I heard some Latin American workers talking and it was more like 10%
@@Pootycat8359Faroe Islanders read viking sagas like it's hello magazine. Their language is so old and isolated, they're still speaking in much the same way as King Harald did in 1066.
Pretty cool
Like the German spoken in Fredericksburg, TX.
An anecdote about accents and dialects: In the mid-2000s I was part of an event that brought the current world champion pipe band to Pittsburgh PA for a concert. The band was St Lawrence O'Toole, which drew great highland bagpipers from all over Ireland--yes, Ireland. During a reception before the concert, I joined a bunch of the band outside for a smoke. The group was buzzing away in conversation (English, not Gaelic), many of them excited to be State-side for the first time. One of them turned to me and said, "You don't understand a thing we're sayin' do ya?" I shook my head 'no,' and he said, "That's ok, some of us don't understand each other either."
You mentioned bagpipes, now there's gotta be a punchline.
@@Fetherko You'll just have to ask the octopus's mother for it
Mate I'm from Northern Ireland and can barely understand people from southern England. Thats a few hundred miles and zero years.
I was watching Derry girls and needed subtitles to understand it.
@@StukovM1g but they all speak like that there like so they do.
"Norn Iron" ;)
@@gerardmontgomery280 When I heard the slang in that show, I had to gogole them up. I didn't know what a 'wain; or 'Ra' was.
You see, they don't sing-talk. It's all clipped. Ours is better.
When my father was in college one of his professors read something in "old English" and asked if the class could tell what it was. Dad recognized it immediately. In fact, after the first few words he started saying it along with the prof. It was the Lord's Prayer. Dad grew up in a village in Eastern Europe where Saxon was still spoken.
Wow! My dad grew up in NE England and said Chaucer sounded like his dialect. NE English (ie Geordie and similar) hasn’t quite assimilated the great vowel shift. Northumbrian (rarely spoken these days) contains around 70% old English/Saxon words. Lowland Scots is similar iirc.
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook In a broad Derbyshire accent Meat is still pronounced as Mate and that pre vowel shift English is in fact very similar to broad Derbyshire .
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook Somewhat ironically, we reckon Chaucer's Middle English represented the kind of English spoken in more southern regions, particularly London. Though Middle English dialects are poorly attested in a linguistic sense; we often have to infer a lot from the literature and it's not bullet-proof to assume everyone in the same region as the author spoke in a similar way.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos yeah that’s true. isn’t the Gawain dialect more typical of the midlands for instance? And as you say literature could be different, probably more deliberately formal and old fashioned if anything, depending on what it is.
@@JazzGuitarScrapbook This is our traditional narrative for Middle English midlands dialects, yes. If we look at the English in Gawain, and Orfeo (we reckon it was the same poet), there is a lot more clear influence of Old Norse on English as well as more persistent leftovers from Old English too.
Here's one theory which I quite like a lot. During the development of Middle English, especially after more Norman influence began to spread, it has been suggested that English had possibly began to creolise to an extent. Especially in areas where there was historically strong Norse influence. Hence the significant differences between Gawain's English and Chaucer's. It supports the idea that this was amplified by the growing linguistic diversity of the country.
Again though, Middle English was very poorly documented as far as grammarians were concerned; so we really don't know what "standard Middle English" may have sounded like or if there was actually even such a thing. It's somewhat ironic, we're much more informed about Old English compared to Middle English!
I will never forget my 13 week work trip to the UK. I was working with a Scott, an Irishman and a Londoner who stuttered. I ( the American ) ended up occasionally being the interpreter for the others, they occasionally were incomprehensible to one another, but I seemed to be able to understand all of them. To this day I have no idea why that was the case.
You realize that (with no insult intended) this could be the start of a really good joke:
An Irishman, a Scot and a Londoner walk into a bar. The American says ...
You could just have a really good ear for languages. I seem to, as well, and maybe that because I was exposed to lots of different accents as a kid? I did that once, too, with a south african, a kiwi and a Brit 😆
Usually the other way round, Americans always struggle with British isles accents that aren’t south England. Never met Scottish or Irish people that I didn’t understand; even when they’re speaking naturally to a friend. and many brits are well travelled enough to not be sheltered from a full range as it’s such a small set of islands.
@@piercecooke9649 Could be, it was weird.. Now Welsh I can just give up on, I have no idea what they are saying half the time.
I’m American and I was in a restaurant with a Jamaican in Canada. We were ordering and the Canadian waiter could not understand what the Jamaican was saying. She looked at me in exasperation. I said oh he wants a medium pizza with pepperoni and a coke. No, he wasn’t speaking patois he was definitely speaking English lol 😂
I was born in Glasgow, but grew up in Canada. In my opinion the most difficult English accent to follow is a working class Glasgow accent. The Liverpool, Newcastle and certain Irish accents are also hard. But an American, Australian or Canadian visiting Glasgow would struggle with a working class Glaswegian speaking at normal speed.
Also some English
Glaswegians sometimes speak a different language - Scottish. Try this comedy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rab_C._Nesbitt
Yes, I'm pretty good at understanding but it's harder if they are speaking at their regular speed. I definitely miss parts but I get the gist. Even if you don't know a word or it's a slang word you can usually infer what it means from the context in which they use it.
@@NoiseWithRules Yeah Scots is a really cool sibling language to English
When I was in Glasgow as an American, my friend from Edinburgh had to translate everything people were saying for me
I was kinda amazed that I actually understood the old English phrases. As a native German speaker, that is.
Same! I'm Danish btw! :)
Thats because Danish and German lack the Norman French influence.that modern English has.
Old high/low Yiddish ?
You have at least one advantage then :)
Same here, I found it quite easy to understand.
No wonder Yoda talks like he does. He's over 800 years old.
It's confirmed this was indeed the reason!
Even then that makes little sense. Its not like he is unintelligent, or lacks the time to learn to speak as is regarded properly. Nobody expects him to comp to dealing with spazzers as he fiddles with his choobies, but grammatic shift is something else entirely.
Also President Biden's excuse.
Old he is
@@ilikeyoutube836 Agree do i
When my great grandfather came back from the war, he said one thing that really surprised him was just how many different dialects there were from around England.
I saw a linguistic teacher once, and he said that the accent used in southwestern nc, because of its isolated location, was as close to the upper class British accent from the 1800s as a modern person could get.
Think it’s North Carolina. Sounds a bit like an Americanised Cornish or east Anglian. ruclips.net/video/x7MvtQp2-UA/видео.html
Boston Brahmin is another one worth listening to.
southwest or southeast? there is an isolated accent in the southeast known as the hoi toider accent...
Outer Banks. I grew up in Western WV and KY. So much of the Irish spoken (around Belfast) sounds very much like the older folks up yonder, just a ways up the road
I took Old English (West Saxon dialect) as a linguistic requirement for a Ph.D. degree in English about 30 years ago, & since I used German as my foreign language requirement, if I didn't know the meaning of the word, I substituted a German vocabulary word, & I was correct almost 95 percent of the time.
So what's the effin answer to the video's question?
@@AlexGarcia-ze4yg 1422 ad
@@Jasonairsoftguy 1997.
@@AlexGarcia-ze4yg 2005
@@AlexGarcia-ze4yg April 5 BCE
What do we want?!
TIME TRAVEL!
When do we want it?!
.... IRRELEVANT!
*clap* *clap* *clap*
Oh Christ that's great!! This is a joke I am sure the late great Mr. Hawking's would laugh at.
No:
What do we want?
TIME TRAVEL!
When do we want it?
TWENTY YEARS AGO!
@@marccolten9801 ARRRR!
I can teach you how to time travel if you want. I've got a time travel machine you can travel forward in time with very accurately. I'll sell you it for $300. Drop me a msg.
When it comes to pirates it's important (to a degree) to distinguish between pirates and privateers. Privateers were issued letters of marque during war time and were essentially privatised warships - they could legally "pirate" enemy ships.
Did they speak differently or are you just bringing in facts that most of us know?
@@653j521 I would conject that they may in many cases have different recruitment bases for crews. For example in some regions there may be many freed/runaway slaves and dispossessed natives joining pirate crews and affecting the language to the level of a pidgin, but only whites hired as privateers. Or Maybe privateers could actually be ordered to cross oceans to do their job for the King, thus being from a different region? I’m not sure if this is the case.
Edit: fixed spelling (connected->conjected).
I've noticed a curious phenomenon. My mother spent a little time in Northern England (Crewe). She told me that she had a heck of a time understanding people there. But when she as asked them whether they understood her, the answer was invariably "yes." Also the same thing happened with some Scottish folks.
I find it fascinating that I, as a native Swedish speaker, could read that first phrase in old english without much effort.
As a native English speaker who also speaks Spanish as well as some French and Ancient Greek (I have forgotten a lot since I took those classes), and as a Danish American who knows little Danish beyond basic phrases, I can usually read Old English with some effort. Old French is about the same, though more difficult; if I compare Old French to its translation it all makes perfect sense. But I am curious how reading Old Norse goes for you? I can identify some words and phrases, but even after reading a translation, it doesn't quite click for me. I think it has more to do with sentence structure than anything else, as Old English and even more so Old French have a similar sentence structure to modern English, while Old Norse is less familiar to me.
That's because vikings migrated.
@Bob Brock No, you ignorant! He's not a "liar". Germanic languages (like for example German, Swedish, and English) all become the same as you move backwards in time. This is why people speaking one or more OTHER Germanic languages in addition to English enjoy a big advantage in understanding Old English. Old English and Old Norse were relatively close to each other, and Old Norse is what all Scandinavian languages stem from. (It's what the vikings spoke.) The ONE language best to know other than English in order to understand Old English is probably Icelandic. The reason is that it's the best preserved of the Germanic languages (and is very similar to Old Norse). Because I'm Swedish, I know that "etha" probably means "one" ("ett" in Swedish), "twa" means "two" ("två" in Swedish), "brad" means "wide" ("bred" in Swedish), etc.. Since I also speak some German, I can guess that "synd" probably either means "sinn" ("synd" in Swedish) or "is" ("sind" in German). And so on. :-)
@@syntaxerror8955 Very close to Dutch and some of todays Dutch dialects. People are still not sure about some old texts if they are Old English or Old West-Flemish.
@@skald9 Yeah easily intelligible for a Dutch speaker. In the North their are still Lower Saxon dialects that are understandable to Saxon dialect speakers even in other countries.
So King Arthur and all the other kings under the mountain are gonna be totally lost when they wake up in modern times, cool.
*Ni!*
And unpleasantly surprised too. Historical king Arthur was a Briton who spoke a Celtic language and fought the Anglo-Saxons.
@@tariver1693 *safe to say, he was complicated*
@@scottmantooth8785 What's complicated about him?
@@tariver1693 *it's called hyperbole'...and the reason coconuts are cheaper than horses as seen in Monty Python's Holy Grail*
I'd like to see someone from a Southern state in the US with a hardcore southern accent OR someone with a Baltimore African American accent communicate with English people in the 15th and 16th centuries. I would pay to watch that.
As a southerner (Louisiana), no one can understand anyone from Baltimore. I, too, would pay to see someone from Baltimore communicate with a 15th or 16th century English person
People understand me everywhere except florida
@@Life_Hays Yea I think the Baltimore person would have a better chance of understanding the Englishperson from the 15th/16th century, than the other way around.
Me: "Hey yall how's ya mama and 'nem?"
All of Medieval England: ".....BURN THE WITCH!"
@@Life_Hays : I'm from Baltimore and had trouble with Mississippian, for sure.
One of my English professors had our class memorize and recite the first 50 lines to the general prologue to Canterbury Tales in Middle English. While I didn’t remember all of it, he gave me 100% bc of my effort towards rhythm and pronunciation.
Short answer: You could chat with Shakespeare, but he might have to play translator for you if you wanted to chat with his grandfather.
Some accents are like that. I can understand my grandmother fairly well but her parents are not intelligeble. I understand some foreign languages better than their accent.
Good point.
This has nothing to do with accents. It’s all about Medieval English vs English today. Not how it sounded. The actual words.
Even Shakespeare is not fully comprehensible. "An' for 'if' for example. He'll be lost soon.
@@Garbeaux. changes in how words sound is a huge part of how languages change.
"Sorry, i don't speak English"
- A present day English speaker going back to the middle-ages trying to talk to English speakers of that time.
They would tell each other “I don’t speak YOUR English”
i'm a native spanish speaker and i think it's interesting how i could understand the pronunciation of old english after the vowel shift because that's how people around me pronounce english words.. it's pretty interesting
The great vowel shift was the transition between Middle English and Modern English, not Old English.
I happened to go to a few churches lately that had graves as far back as the 1500s and saw the differences in how they wrote. Just standing there reading them was pretty crazy
If I had a DeLorean, I would probably only drive it from time to time.
rswingman Gold.
Witty
Fuck, take my thumbs up.
I literally only understood this the fifth time I found this comment while scrolling through the comments take your likes and add 5
You thirst trap! Lol You just saw this on instagram and placed it anywhere with no humour, context or sense.
Now I’m wondering if we would be able to communicate with someone hundreds of years in the future
"Someone"? "Hundreds of years in the future"?
He's a 'card', isn't he?
Probably yes, if a nuclear war (the only high modern isolationism event possible) doesn't happen because, the globalised world would like a more standardised english language.
Also translation software would be more advanced and would probably be able to translate old languages.
“Ay bruh its giving bricked up vibes on god. sheesh shi was bussin bussin fr fr i cant een cap muh boy” - English in 100 years
😂
With emojis probably 😂.
The "Pam" bit in the old english example would have been more "tham". That "P" was a thorn, a symbol used for the "th" sound.
It was often spelled with a Y when the symbol was not available in fonts...
Thus "thou" became "you"
@MrBenwaan
According to my son who has studied these things:
"You" came from eoƿ (ƿ is the letter wynn)
"Thou" came from þu."
@@geoh7777 that's awesome I'd always wondered and so had gone off on my own tangent and put two and two together after seeing the thorn so heavily substituted by the letter Y in ye olde spelling.
I love how he put in that earth would be in a different point in the universe if you traveled back in time, most movies don't cover that.
All this makes me wonder now, how far in the future could somebody for today go and still be able to understand and talk with a future human being.
Hard to know, but standardization might slow the change. Of course, there’s texting and other abbreviations. Hmmm
Seeing how heavily standardized language has become, worst case scenario is there are just new words for things that don't exist yet today.
It would be harder going forward than back. Most people are aware of some of the archaic words which have died out (e.g. from Shakespeare) and you can study up to know even more. But you would have no frame of reference for new words. Just think about someone who’d been in a coma for the last 15 - 20 years and woke up to conversations about googling, tweeting and COVID!
mahenonz Some people living now are having problems with those ideas!
I'd say a hundred years or so
"the great vowel shift" missed opportunity to call it "the great vowel movement"
Lol. But "shift" is pretty close for that purpose too!
Mathew McGuire
Exactly! I have vowel movements daily. Feels good. Doh! Sorry. That should have been, “I heva vewol mevoments dialy.”
LOL
I just had a great vowel movement this morning. I became E, and I was about to Shet my pants.
@@CorbCorbin You can always just put an E at the end instead of replacing the I and British it!
It might have everything to do with where you were hearing the English being spoken. For instance right now in 2023 as a regular American, I can listen to people speaking to each other in rural Ireland or Scotland somewhere and truly not understand more than a few words. It's amazing and beautiful the variety of how English can sound.
I appreciate you pointing out that going back in time one needs to also go back in space, only few people think about this!
So, "Leet", "Yeet", "Waifu", "K" and "LOL" on business-letters is a future thing??
Ye boi
LOL seems possible. Give it about 10 or so more years.
It's ya boi
@@TwiztidFam412 nah bra, it can be either. I use it to differentiate between
ye boi (ex: yes boy).
Ya boi (ex: it's your boy)
I'm already using smileys with my professors in emails :')
Okay so I know this wasn't the main focus, BUT I'M SO GLAD SOMEONE ACKNOWLEDGED THAT GOING BACK IN TIME MEANS FINDING YOUR WAY BACK TO EARTH
*claps* (yeah, that's right. the thumbs up was not enough).
I know it ruins the illusion of a good book or movie and I'm not one of those people that needs a specific explanation for everything. But this is one that just sticks with me.
I believe many of us thought of this, even when we were very young... It just makes dumb sense.
I remember when I used to read or watch fictional time travel stories, I kept trying to repair the logic in my mind, somehow... "well, maybe the time bubble is tethered to Earth movement... or the trajectory of Earth movement is calculated...?" no satisfaction
@@luceatlux7087 time travel is already fiction itself, is it not so hard to imagine the technology could also correct you to your current position? Or also, you're already traveling time, would time itself not pause? Of all the things to get stuck upon time travel, this is a silly one.
@@Million900 Wait a minute... it's fiction?
OF COURSE, such is the case.
Simple implication of my last post being: I would've had fun hearing some mention of the fantasy logic surrounding of the issue (at least an acknowledgement).
You disagree, huh? Not salient enough? Maybe some have more fun with more detailed musing, I guess.
There was a sci fi TV show where a guy would get sent back in time like 7 days in a pod to solve some problem that happened in the previous seven days. He always showed up above Earth and would be recovered by the team. Problem: not zipping along in orbit, just hanging out up there, which seems problematic.
@@googiegress7459 didn't he become a different person? I cant remember the name now..ahhhhh
my two cents...I recently listened to Swedish on language tapes. I was amazed. Some entire phrases sound almost identical to English. Examples: "Kan ni hjalpe meg?.." = "Can you help me?", "Vilken weg skal vi gå?" = "Which way shall we go?". Norwegian example "flyet kommer inn for landing..." = "plane coming in for a landing..."...
I really appreciated the part explaining that if you go back in time to the 'same' relative place, you'd be in space
so basically language is one big game of telephone and humans suck at it lol
As someone who takes great care to make sure they're spelling things correctly, this fact really drives me nuts. Because many of the words we consider to be correct, are actually misused words that have replaced what were once considered the correct terms. . . Mistakes just become more commonplace, and the original words forgotten because nobody remembers the rules of their own languages.
broken** telephone
Less that nobody remembers the rules and more that the rules change
What? I'm sorry, I don't understand.
Yep
The short answer is: sometime after the beginning of the 17th century. You’re welcome. 😉👍
That leaves a very large amount of time where all languages overall were just a bubbling mess of nonsense that were continuously shifting from one thing to the next. Even those who study Latin in schools may not find any resemblance to the actual spoken Latin during Rome's prime. Yeet!
It was the 16th. Your welcome. (11.30)
RipoffGuy “you’re “. You’re welcome.
Omg thank you. I can't listen to him for more than a few minutes. The way he speaks is exhausting to listen to. So. Many. Un. Necessary. Pauses. Andthenrunonsentenceswithsomanywords.
I want to like this but i dont want to be that persom
Love your videos! I'm very fond of learning everything I can about history, and you make my lunch breaks at work entertaining as well as informative 👍 kudos
Linguistics aside, you raise a point I don't think I've seen before about time travel. Any story plot or thought experiment about going back in time, needs to space travel, too, for as you point out, the earth rotates and revolves, the Solar System moves through the galaxy, and the Milky Way is in motion.
I used to have a Norwegian girlfriend...I once read her the introduction to The Canterbury Tales by Chaucer in Middle English...She said to my amazement that she understood most of it...which is more than I did when I first came upon it!
Nice move. Reading her Chaucer. Very...saucy.
When I was in 11th grade (the year before graduation in America), we had to memorize the introduction to the Canterbury Tales in Middle English! We had to know that ish inside out & backwards, and most of the people I was in that class with can still recite the majority of it today (about 13 years later haha). I remember that, as a French student, I had a much easier time pronouncing parts of it than my classmates who took Spanish, but I don’t think any of us had much more than a vague idea what it actually SAID until it was explained
Also worth noting that the passage from Canterbury Tales that he chose was MUCH easier to understand than the introduction, which was much more lyrical and contained many references and metaphors haha
@@Fabala827 I recall having to write a short story from the point of view of a character from the Canterbury Tales, I had to write one that the knight would tell, so me being the weeb that I was just retold the ending to Tenchi Muyo first season just changed the names a bit, easy A for me teacher was really impressed 2002 was great time to be alive
We were taught Canterbury tales in grade 7 in Canada in its original writing. Apparently they’ve banned all English books because it promotes English tribalism in Canada for genZ
Started a conversation at the North Pole, I was on top of the world. Unfortunately the locals couldn't understand me so it all went south from there.
Kindly leave the stage ,Agent 47. hiih
@@normanpearson8753 The stage leaves from in front of the Shurf's office at two this afternoon, mister.
Be under it!
Awesomeness! The first person I have heard reference time travel and taking into account that the Earth, solar system and galaxy are moving. I have tried and failed to introject this over the years and no one seems to get it. Thank you!
Thank you so much for the space analysis that's part of any time travel concept. I've never fully enjoyed time travel movies for this exact reason!
you heard it here first, "af" and "yeet" in 2060's business letters.
Hahaha, I was thinking that.
vox please no
To Whom It May Concern:
I am writing this letter because I am interested in being hired for the position listed online, as I believe that I am qualified af. You will not need to yeet me from the company due to incompetence. I will definitely not be taking that L.
Thanks, fam.
@Anthony Swiss Its a slag term. Meaning to throw out, toss aside or generally get rid of. Example: I'm going to yeet this apple because it is gross af.
You don't think Gen Z will be writing business letters until they're 60?
Imagine going back in time and introducing the word “bruh”
Bruh
😆😆
Lol
"Bruh" is only new to white people. I know that Black people have been saying it since the 70's when I personally heard it as a child.
@@cappyjones No.
05:00 As a Norwegian, English and partly German speaker I actually understood about 3/4 of what was written there. It just looks like a bunch of languages smashed together from modern perspective.
Correction: "ġeþēode" in the OE text actually means language, since it has a "ġe" prefix, which make a lot more sense considering "bōclǣden" (book Latin) doesn't really make sense as a nation. Also, the þ is the letter thorn, making a "th" sound, not a p. "Þēodisċ" (meaning "of the people" or "vernacular") is actually related to the words Dutch and Deutsch, surviving into Middle English as "theedish", but dying out afterwards (where English retains "th", the continental languages have usually replaced it with "d").
He look's like a mix between Binging with babish and Michael from V sauce 😂
But he sounds much more qualified to speak on any subject because of that beautiful English accent.
Hey, simon from binging sauce here
Fuck both of them
He looks nothing like either of them. Being bald and having a beard doesn’t mean you automatically look like someone. Their facial structure and features are all completely different.
Bald bearded bespectacled - defacto internet information guy.
So roughly about 600 years is the cutoff to where you wouldn’t recognize the language as English. Got it. 👍.
@@MichaelTheophilus906 Just going by what he said my man.
Thank you, he just keeps going on and on with no answer so far... lol thanks!!!!!!
Thankyou for this comment, I can’t be bothered to listen to this guy waffle anymore
Its all very interesting, and I'd love to learn about it later, but it's 12:20 PM and I just wanna know right now. Thanks.
Saved me 15 mins bless you brother
As an evangelical protestant who grew up with the KJV bible i was able to read Shakespear in high school quite easily. In my college years several professors said i had an easier time with shakewpear than most students. I can read the 1520s Tyndale Bible though it is a bit more difficult. I can read middle english to a degree and have read the Wycliffe 1380 translation but it is work.
All that and yet you can’t spell “Shakespeare.”
That was completely and utterly fascinating!
I can’t believe I’ve never thought about how earth wouldn’t be in the same place if you travelled back in time...
Same
Depends on how it's done.
If time travel involved quantum entanglement, you could theoretically create a snap point wormhole that wouldn't throw you into space.
Have you seen the show Outlander, or read the books? I've only seen the show, it already has four seasons and the fifth season will come out in February 2020. If you haven't seen it yet, I definitely recommend it!
Makes me think of how powerful gravity actually is. Even if we were to actually stop moving in space, we would still be moving relative to the galaxy. If we were to negate or zero out gravity somehow, would the universe pass us by in an instant?
@@zeroumashi2947 all that quantum entanglement complexity and stepping on a prehistoric butterfly is what caused all those problems in the 2005 movie a sound of thunder...
From New Zealand, I was way up in the north of Scotland talking to a guy at a gas station neither of us understood what the other was saying though we were both speaking English. Literally had an easier time communicating in Japan.
Agree heavy Scottish is incomprehensible! I need subtitles to watch Scottish crime drama. Once heard a Scot yelling into a public telephone. He was saying what sounded like "Ah hairt muh neigh" complete with rolling r and spoken very fast. Turns out he was saying he hurt his knee.
@@marye813 I'm not a native english speaker but I feel like I would've understood ðat.
@@danielantony1882absolutely no chance. I can just about understand people from Iverness and Aberdeeen (both places the original comment could be describing) a mmy entire family on my mothers side are Scottish (Glaswegian specifically, which is the accent you mostly hear on tv).The Scots from really far north sound like they're mumbling and grunting unless you know what you're listening out for.
@@tickledeggz Sure.
You’re kiwi and said “gas station”. Doesn’t add up.
This is incredible. Thank you.❤
I studied Old English as part of my honours degree in university and I’m shocked I actually understood that bit cause it has been 30 years since I studied that! Yay, me; something stuck!
8:30 _"We still have 'many' English words whose spellings don't really match the way that we pronounce them"_
That is an understatement, to say the least. The humble opinion of a native Spanish language speaker.
We all agree they say "sound it out" it's a lie never works
And then there are words like "bow" and "minute" which have different meanings and those meanings are pronounced differently. English is just a mess.
That is knot the case.
Because English is written in an alphabet that wasnt created for it (the latin alphabet),it was only ADAPTED. I would say the only language that perfectly match the latin alphabet is Latin, Spanish and Italian match it pretty well but not 100 % ,specially the varieties that are not standard. Portuguese , and specially French etc have a different phonology.
And Germanic languages and all the rest,well ,same thing ....totally different phonology
@@rndm7528 Not really, no. For example in German one letter (or sometimes two letters in combination) have one pronunciation and only one. If you read a German word you can say out out loud with pretty much 100% accuracy. From what I understand only French and English have these weird phonetical inconsistencies.
- walks into an 18th century bar -
"what up fam, this place is lit"
😂 x2
You joke, but considering that you can barely go back four hundred years and have a conversation, the English language four hundred years from now is going to be heavily influenced by current slang and ways of communicating.
Someday yeet is going to be a silly anachronism that only grandparents use.
Excuse me good sir, my name is not “Fam”, it is John. And yes, my establishment is well lit thanks to our lanterns, thank you for noticing!
@@northernsun6003 Best comment ever, seriously made me laugh for the first time today.
Lit by kerosene lanterns
I often wondered about this topic! Thank you very much for the share! 😊
Aside from the main thrust of your video, thank you for pointing out the various directions Earth travels in the universe...
Today I found out that well educated people in the 16th century talked like pirates, nice 😎👍
Pirates were just classier than we imagine them.
@EnglishXnXproud u should vlog it and get them to read out lines of script... sounds interesting
@EnglishXnXproud So they sound like pirates to you also?
@EnglishXnXproud And now I know where I'm moving.
EnglishXnXproud that's because the West Country accent is the stereotypical pirate accent, that's because of Disneys treasure island but some pirates were also from the area however most pirates came from London.
I had a friend in university who said that modern English is the end result of Norman nobles trying to pick up Saxon bar maids.
Sounds like a joke. French speaking Normans will interact Old English speaking Saxons.
I had a friend in university who said that Surfer Dude sleeps with his sister...
I had a friend in university
I had a friend
@@sheadoherty7434 Yes, it was a joke. But the fellow was studying old English at the time. Also, if one examines the origins of the words we use in modern English, it is apparent that most of our vocabulary comes from French or German.qpparent
I'm from the USA and had a client from Scotland who placed a lot of orders over the phone. I could barely understand him but I loved talking to him. 😂
I have always wondered this - thank you!
I'm from Tennessee. I thought that I was a fluent speaker of English, since it is supposedly my native tongue. The last time I went to London, I literally could not understand anything that anyone said to me. Its not just time that can mess you up, it's geography too.
England and the United States, two countries separated by a common language.
And for London, demographics. The British natives are now a minority in London.
Some Scottis accents are simply incomprehensible to me in the US. I turn on the subtitles if it’s on tv
I'm from Austria and think that Americans are easier to understand than the British except of course maybe the queen talking vs a mumbling hillbilly
@Jack Oh
Separate languages?
I can't wait for your explanation backing that up.
Just sitting here waiting for "yeet" to get added to the dictionary.
...Aaaany day now.
it is.. and so is LOL and many other words and slang from the internet... 1000's of them have been.. though maybe not in a text book dictionary.. butt the internet dictionaries.. they are there..
internet is not excluded from it... example "urban dictionary" is nor more or no less credible then any other internet dictionary including text book ones..
english try hards/grammar nazi's gave up on trying to control it..
the internet was a prefect reminder for those people that would seek to control language that u cant control it.. it goes with the flow...
@@InanisNihil Urban Dictionary is indeed less credible than, say, a Merriam-Webster dictionary.
@@cwheels01 With the Oxford, being several times that of the latter 🧐
Yeet
From Middle English yeten, ȝeten, from Middle English ye, ȝe (“ye”). Compare Middle English thouten.
Verb
yeet (third-person singular simple present yeets, present participle yeeting, simple past and past participle yeeted)
(obsolete) To ye (address with the pronoun "ye").
(Wikitionary)
Yeet is just the antonym brother of yoink.
Good report as always sir
Great video! Thanks!
The reason you can go back that far and at least recognize the language is due to primarily three factors: William Shakespeare, The Bible, and The Book of Common Prayer. They have, for centuries, acted as a stabilizing force within the English language but as people place less emphasis on these, expect changes to English to accelerate.
However, I dispute that you could converse with anyone. The farther back you go, the more the culture of the day changes. Key to linguistic communication are cultural references. In many cases, these allow us to pack a large amount of description into a single familiar idea and are a great aid to efficiency within communication. However, that makes it important that we understand that idea. It's akin to your parents trying to talk to your teenaged children. Then there's the problem of the references YOU are bound to use in conversation that the person you're speaking with would have no comprehension of.
However, even if you go back to just 1776, while you'll recognize the words, you'll be confused a great deal of the time because you're missing the references. Notice that SPELLING was not yet standardized in this period since literacy rates were not high enough previously to warrant development of such formalities. That process was still under way. Where do you think "The King's English" came from? That was the formal standardization of spelling and pronunciation. Efforts to create a standard dictionary (ala Noah Webster who did his work not long after the year mentioned) also helped in this regard because it solidified the spelling and pronunciation of words in addition to clarifying their common meaning.
Try reading "Of Plymouth Plantation" (or any of the "relations", which are collections, summarizations, and distillations of reports from various ministers/monks/etc). We are all familiar with it but without careful footnotes, a lot of it will go right by you. That's just 400 years ago and that's a more formal structure than a conversation would be. This is one of the things that makes Shakespeare so hard for us to grasp. That's what makes the Old Testament so hard for us to process, the missing or misunderstood cultural references. There is much more to language than just the dictionary.
Well said. What you are alluding to are called "idioms" , turns of phrase that do not have a clear literal meaning. Unless your language (and region/vernacular) already possesses that idiom, or one very similar, you aren't likely to understand it the first time you hear it. Also what you say about those three texts is very interesting and undoubtedly true. Several of the Romance languages have academic institutions dedicated to their preservation, English has no such institution and is now spoken globally. It is unavoidable that many new languages will be formed from components of English, much as Latin still persists within many of the languages of Western Europe. Honestly English is such a muddle of words thrown together at random anyways that I'm not sure you would be "preserving" it by making it static.
All Excellent points.
I doubt you would communicate for long. You would come across as so weird that you would be burned as a witch.
Fine essay 🙂
@@billgreen576 Drowned or hanged, not burned.
Just so you know, that letter þ is not a p. The letter is called thorn and made a th sound.
Exactly. I noticed that, too. IIt would have been more instructive to make the effort to read the passage correctly or play a tape of someone who can, which, as he mentions himself, we entirely know how to do.
The letter looks like what my tongue does to make that sound.
I wonder is that where a silent P comes from
@@thesupremepizzaking funny, in my courses in Old English (Anglo-Saxon) in graduate school, we called it a "thorn" and it made the th sound like the one in the word "the" rather than the hissy one in the word "with." You are right that there was no "th" at that time because that sound was represented by the thorn. Too bad we missed out on studying any magick books!
@@shantalynn I thought thorn made the soft 'th' sound like in 'thing' and 'path' at least from what I remember learning about Old Norse & Icelandic
Thank you very much, Sir.
Finally! I’ve often wondered this
As a Dane I understood about 75% of that old English text
Same as a Swede actually.
Another Dane, that's about how much I understood also.
as a German i understood most of the old english text too.
I'm Scottish and I also quite successfully deciphered the old english text. This guy in the video totally hammed up how difficult it was for a native modern day english speaker.
I understood it all but am a native English speaker who majored in German and took a fair amount of linguistic and middle high German classes. What isn't English falls into squarely Germanic if nit German per se.
Me: *Goes to Britain*
Welshman: *Speaks*
Me: What kind of devil language are you speaking?
Shhhhhhh.... Those guys don't count... I'm not even sure if the Welsh really understand Welsh.
Have you tried Yorkshire? *evil grin*
Me, who lives less than 30 miles from Wales and has been there dozens of times: "WHY ARE THERE 4 L's IN THIS WORD! INSANE DEVIL TONGUE!"
Everyone who speaks it is some kind of cryptid. No normal human voicebox could wrap itself around that nonsense garble of too few vowels and too many consonants.
@@Pro_Butcher_Amateur_Human Well, take a look at the Welsh alphabet and you'll realize it contains quite a couple of letters made up of two characters (in Spanish there are the "ch" (che) and the "ll" (elye), to give an example of a different language with the same thing). "dd", "ff", "ll" are each only one letter, therefore "llll" is just a double consonant, and not four. Considering that, the amount of consonants to vowels is probably pretty average. Try some eastern European Slavic languages and you truly stumble upon several consonant-only words and so few vowels your mouth breaks apart trying to read them.
@@littlerave86 I know, right? Russian is an absolute mess. Tried learning it, gave up after a week.
Although, I'm learning Danish at the moment, and let me tell you, some Scandinavian languages are also bonkers. Finnish? Urgh.
Although, to be fair, most languages are a hodgepodge garbage fire. Modern English certainly is. It's a bizarre mix of French, German, Flemish, Middle English, Old English and a bit of Danish. For a laugh, I once went through a chapter of Lord of the Rings and wrote everything out phonetically. It was insane. Our language is nuts.
Wow I never thought of this, this is a great subject that everyone over looks. Please keep making awesome videos
English was the first language I learned and just learning about it's history is amazing
I took British literature in college. The dialects around when Beowulf was popular were almost unrecognizable.
That was not British...it was Anglo-Saxon. British was essentially Welsh
The dialects were popular, the daleks were less so, as they tended to exterminate.
I'm taking that class this semester and for real it sounds like a whole different language lol
@@HepCatJack Who???
What's"british" literature?
Dude's quote against punctuation was punctuated. And that makes me happy
Suck on it, Cicero
I learned English in the US, this is super interesting.
I'm from Chile so a Spanish one of thess would be awesome as well.
Cheers!
This vid is bussin no cap
"Make sure your time machine is also a space ship"
So...a TARDIS
Have to avoid copyright strikes in any fashion, y'know. But yeah, first thing I thought of when he was going through the science of it all.
If that were the case you can choose any time. As the TARDIS translates you and them automatically.
Who
IKR?
daer devvyl EXTARDIS, NEXTARDIS
Great video. Really interesting.
I always loved the Red Dwarf episode when they went back in time only to forget that, yes, they did go back in time but were still in the same location in space. Empty space doesn’t change much over time.
Since you are here watching this video, a fun fact might be that the word "Window" is from old norse.
It's derived from the word "vindauga" meaning "wind eye". Back then there were no glass windows, so opening the wooden blinds let the wind in ^^
Yeah, I'm Norsky. But I had no idea there was wood in old Norway. I assumed blinds must have beeen made of lichens and mud from the semi-frozen tundra. Jolly time we used to have in Old Norway.
@@mitchellhawkes22 You could always have used greased parchment (ie v thin scraped animal hide) like many others of the era :) Papyrus was obviously not available due to expense (Old Norse were major traders), but linen (from flax) could have been another option..
“You down with OPP?!”
“yae, eueth knahhen mai!”
Most underappreciated comment, right here
Translation please?? Lol
Tu es domine ingenio!
"Yeah, you know me!"😂😂..music..the universal language😂
Yesssss
Well done (as always)
Thank you!
I love the detail about the Earth moving through space over time. That's never talked about when considering the possibility of time travel.
Easy peasy, we can already travel through space. The spacial adjustments would be taken care of by the navigation system if/when time travel ever becomes a thing. Certainly is a consideration, just not something that really matters when the other difficulties are considered. Or maybe we all ready have time travel and they all died in space never to return so the experiments were considered failures, something to ponder while inebriated.
That’s easy, all you have to do is design your machine to maintain relativistic position and velocity with your starting position or a defined positional target marker.
I can't recall the title, but Isaac Asimov had a delightful short story where displacement of the Earth was the twist at the end of an ill fated time travelers trip.
Piers Anthony wrote a book called "Ghost" where this was the central theme. The characters traveled through time in a space ship but didn't actually find Earth. I read it about 30 years ago and could never watch time travel movies the same way. I mean what's the point of time travel in space?
Don't forget to take account of the expansion of the universe, too.
Language video takes unexpected astronomy turn.
One that no one ever really considers in the time travel duscussion.
It's kind of what we do here. ;-) -Daven
I thought that the earth was flat 🤣🤣🤣
A well-meaning but slightly mis-leading astronomy turn though really - you wouldn't really need a star chart to figure out where your time travelling space ship ended up, as even if you take those high-speeds quoted in the video and you multiply them out to give the distance travelled in a thousand years, that's still less than 1 light year, and thereby only one quarter of the distance to our nearest star, so you would literally not have made it next door yet, galactically speaking. (Insert Douglas Adams "space is big" quote here!)
Of course you WOULD have to figure out how to travel a greater distance than we've ever travelled before to get back to Earth, and in a reasonable amount of time, but if you've cracked time travel then distance travel should be cake! ;o)
@@beth8775 I've considered it.
Absolutely fascinating.
This really made me laugh! I'm a fair bit older than you and American. I found your channel a few years ago and after sampling some, backed off a bit because you speak so rapidly it is an onslaught to my ears. Recently I discovered that I can alter the playback speed and so I do. There are few options, and although 75% is a bit slurred, I have recovered my enjoyment of the content of your presentation. I've always enjoyed your style of humor and the topics you choose are quite interesting. Thanks for all your hard work to put these videos together. It's ironic and funny that even with only the half generation or so that separates us the rapid fire speaking that seems to becoming more common now makes such a difference.
I'm a native Dutch speaker and Old English is remarkably recognisable to me.
As a swede I agree
@@user-dk1lh7et1m If I recall correctly the first viking invaders whilst not able to converse with Anglosaxons were not so very far away from understanding each other. It was the Norman (French) influence that created English.
Since Dutch and English are both Germanic languages, they share a lot of the same root words. Actually, Old English and Old Frisian are the closest to each other.
That's very interesting.
@@bbbf09 or maybe it was the viking kings and nobles that settled in Britain ?
My guess: the Elizabethan era. It’s when Shakespeare and his contemporaries were publishing their works, and that’s one of the first examples of Early Modern English
Not really. lol
Shakespeare is a bit after that. He started publishing in the reign of king James the Ist & VIth. So perhaps a generation later.
*it has always been my understanding that authentic Shakespeare would closely approximate the verbal inflections and cadence as found the the early natives of the Appalachian Mountains regions of the Southern states of America*
I don't think Shakespeare published any of his works, it was done by his colleagues after his death as they realised the works could not be lost. Another reason why Shakespeare is not meant to be read, but to be performed or watched performed (if only schools did this, rather than making us all disseminate Macbeth). The comments about accents I agree with completely, they were so vastly different it would have been hard for contemporaries to understand each other.
@@gregnew1 As far as I know, he published a long poem "The rape of... what's her face?", the sonnets and four plays referred to as "The Good Quartos". He published the plays only to counter 'copy right infringements'. So your assumption is insofar right, that he never wanted to publish a play.
The cool thing is if you learned latin and went back, you would be able to speak to most nobility and clergy as far back as maybe the Roman's (since it is a "dead language" it stopped changing and remains relatively unchanged for almost 2000 years)
Thank you
Pfft, there's certain places I can go to in 2019 where I don't understand english.
You mean Manchester? ;)
@@toto197 Didn't even watch the video and came here to say this. Damn Gen Z
Wales?
Scotland
Yeah, like the Hood.
"..is etha hund mila lang and twa hund mila brad" hahaha as a swede, this is how my grandmother would speak english.
that sentence is bascilly swedish tho: "är åtta hundra mil lång och två hundra mil bred"
Supposedly old english is understandable by a frisian.
It's not, it comes from the Saxons wich all british people actually come from and were an invading Germanic tribe that took over the UK and murdered basically everybody out who used to live there. It ancestry lies being an old Germanic language that yeah eventually evolved in to what you call Frisian wich also is a germanic old language
@@psaxxon and the language the saxons spoke was even there ealier while frisian is an even newer branch of what the saxons originally spoke wich wasn't frisian at all. It has more in common with dutch wich is a language that comes from the francs wich the saxons integrated with actually
@@psaxxon frisian integrated itself with dutch. You even have a region in the netherlands called friesland
Lending to the idea that English is more Scandanavian than German.
I can relate my own personal time travel event on this very topic. I traveled from my Native USA to the U.K. in 1975. Once there, I found it difficult to communicate because of the dialect differences between U.K. English and Americanize English. I grew tired of asking over and over again, "What?". Then when I spoke, they couldn't understand me. English is a strange language. A friend of mine from Germany told me it's the same way in his country with different regional speech patterns that outsiders from that region can't understand that form of German.
That's a very good question!