Thanks for watching everyone, hope yous enjoyed the video! Be sure to check out my other videos on Old English and Old Norse if you found it interesting and give me a thumbs up or considering subscribbling if you're new!
The quality of your work is astounding! I look forward to that notification bell every time as you are one of a few channels that satisfies that historical thirst! Well done 👍🏻
Very interesting. My Y-DNA centers on NW Europe, the UK with Ireland/Scotland but the NW European focus is in Germany and Frisian. I have read that Old English is largely based on the Frisian language. I'm interested in your thoughts.
Walking through the woods pontificating on Old Norse and Anglo Saxon. I have a feeling that if Tolkien was a 21st Century RUclipsr, this is exactly the sort of video he would have made, when he wasn't talking about Elves and Hobbits.
Love your videos! On mutual intelligibility: I have read that during the «Dutch Age» in Norwegian history (1550-1750) Dutch merchants were able to do business in Norway speaking their own language. Our languages were supposedly much more similar then. Would love to know more about this!
The languages weren't much more similar. But I can think of multiple reasons why it was possible. 1. Everyone spoke in dialect, making everyone aware of sound shifts. Thus it would be easier to pick up words and phrases in a different Germanic language. Nowadays on Dutch TV if something just sound a little bit off we start using subs. 2. Dutch merchant fleets dominated the the Northern waters. Thus causing more exposure to Dutch than nowadays. Even prior to the Dutch golden age the Hansa would dominated the trade. Exposing people to Low Saxon a very close related language/dialect to Dutch. 3. A Dutch merchant visiting Norway would most likely have several business trips. So he would also get exposed to the Norse language more than once.
That was fantastic 👍. You covered every angle I can imagine. Even the wild garlic scored a mention. I've been constantly impressed with your channel from the first time I stumbled across you a few years ago. Just keep doing what you're doing. You are a brilliant teacher.👍👍👍
I’m Swedish, and I like to study Old Norse and Old English in my free time. I have to say that Old English is naturally easier to understand than modern English. The only reason why I understand modern English better is because I’ve been learning it for years. Old English on the other hand is rather easy to understand without any practice.
@@eemmiill201 During March of this year, my brother took a genealogy test (a Christmas present) and we are 16% Swedish /Danish. I won't bore you with the rest as this Scandinavian hereditary applies to most English people. Fascinating stuff!
I think it's his Dutch genes (or diet?). I was thinking the same...he sounds so convincingly English, and yet you rarely see someone with that clarity of skin in the UK. I live in The Netherlands, and it's much more common here.
@@Nea1wood 'Rarely' is pushing it a bit, Neal. Taking care of yourself is pretty universal. Look up Survive the Jive, another historian who takes care of himself who is of English descent.
It is quite ironic how the Angles ,the Jutes and the Saxons originated from modern day Denmark and 4 centuries later the danes would become the biggest pain in their ass.
Dane just means northmen for quite a time. Denmark and Dane are not synonymous. Just like Germany named itself after the Germanic people but not all Germanic people are German.
@Hernando Malinche Yea, but the Anglo Saxons and the Danish who raided England during the Viking age were not the same tribe. They spoke different languages and most importantly (speaking about whether they get along or not) they were totally different religiously. The Anglo Saxons were fully Christianised and the Danes were still pagan.
Saxons and Angles never lived in modern Denmark. The Saxons formed in todays Lower Saxony, Westphalia and southern Holstein and the western part of Saxony-Anhalt. While the Angles evolved in Northern Holstein, or rather the place called Angeln.
I was working as a dishwasher in a kitchen for 3 years and all of the chefs were Arabic with very little knowledge in English or spoke it very poorly. I found myself speaking their broken English back to them most of the time just so they could understand. Also no time to teach them English in a kitchen atmosphere. Anyway, somehow it kind of rubbed off onto me and I found myself struggling with my English. I had to mentally correct myself so often before I spoke because I got so used to speaking this strange Arab/English that I had been speaking in my workplace just to communicate and make work easier. So it makes me think as well that possibly this kind of thing could have happened over the world too. Makes sense if a large population of foreign people come into your country and are co-operative, that the native people would adapt to that culture in some way and incorporating it.
I think this is a useful thought experiment...to imagine in what contexts Norse and Old English speakers would have mixed. So for example, did they live and work closely together as you did with these Arabic speakers? Or did they live separately in isolated, Norse-speaking farms and villages, and only meet at market to trade?
I'm from Denmark. I lived in Norway for a year. I ended up speaking a funny mix. Like we have different words for kitchen towel and dirty. I said the Norwegian versions, but pronounced in Danish. I also found myself using some special Nowegian structures, while speaking Danish. My family were laughing hard!
@ Queefmuffins I have had to do exactly the same as you in regards to adjusting your language to make for easier communication by incorporating some of their words into the mix. I to believe this is exactly what happened back then as well.
It all boils down to how much the subjective portion of "I understand" vs. "I don't understand" coupled with the objective portion saying... "I can understand" yet "I can not understand" blend together. As a historical linguist in Scandinavian languages I remember having this discussion with my brother at numerous occasions. He never could care a rat's arse about this while still claiming he couldn't understand Norwegian even though he is Swedish (which is easier than understanding Danish given the pronunciation). I told him that as long as you put your ears to the task you will be able to understand so much as to be able to have a deep every day conversation with a Norwegian. You could talk about anything together. Grab a beer and get at it. And when ever you don't understand a word or expression you simply ask what this or that means. Yet he couldn't see this being a thing and he told me I were bullshitting. Then at one point he went to Norway on a business trip and lo and behold. He rang me absolutelly surprised at how easy it was to understand and talk to them... to the point where he compared it to a Swedish dialect where he could ask them what "this or that word" means when ever he didn't or thought he didn't understand. And they would simply answer "it means this or that". Before this he thought Norwegian sounded like Swedish blended with gibberish. When I myself was 18 years old I went to Iceland to attend a course in Icelandic for Scandinavians. I was housed together with a Danish woman. At that age and given what I had "learned" being Swedish my first thought was that "well now I'm f*****... how am I supposed to have a conversation with this woman over the coming month?". Well, me and the Danish woman had no trouble understanding eachother. We just spoke about anything. There were more occasions of "say what?" happening but I articulated more clearly as a habit given the situation and so did she and there you go. No trouble at the end of the day. We just weren't accustomed to how the other spoke but we quickly got used to it. You can not ask Scandinavians how much they understand of another Scandinavian language. You have to test them. Otherwise the statistics get all skewed. Two people speaking the exact same language and dialect where one of them claims that "I can not understand anything" while the other claims "I understand everything" only to make a statistical graph based off of that kind of information. The same thing might or might not apply to the Old English and Old Scandinavian linguistics scenes at the time.
It is so good to teach history in this way. When I went to a Monisory school we spent a lot of time outside teaching and we did reading outside the only lessons we never did outside was the maths. I love these kind of discussions. Tells us alot about our fourbarers. Thanks for doing this video how beautiful.
A couple of anecdotes about mutual intelligibility, and the bilingualism: Here in Canada, products are required to be labelled with both French, and English, which regionally dependant, could have an impact on a lot of visual, written, and vocal memory associations when it comes to vocabulary. -While listening to your reading of the Anglo-Saxon passages, I wouldn't say I 'understood' the words, but I could get a reasonable comprehension of what you were saying, just by a cursory listen. That being said, I didn't process the words themself, but the meaning of the words (Essentially, I could explain what you had said, but not recite the words you used). I am a native English speaker, a passable French speaker (CECR-B1) and I can use simple phrases in German (CECR-A1, barely). I find that by expanding my English vocabulary, a lot of the Germanic rooted synonyms that have fallen out of use are just consonant shifted. So, I would suggest that (in a situation where neither group had made any prior communucations) the Norse, and Anglo-Saxons may not have processed the exact words as used in the individual languages, but would have comprehended the meanings of the speech without significant difficulty, especially when supplemented with subconscious conversation contexts, like tone, facial expression, and body language.
The town names are so interesting to me. I see it here in Ireland, where there is a mix of anglicised phonetics, or direct translation. It tends to be literal translations closer to the Pale, and phonetic further away, but not always. So you'll see a little more __town in Dublin and a little more Bally_ elsewhere. Not a hard and fast rule. Some phonetics seem to be english words, but are coincidence. Knockboy is cnoc buí, yellow hill. Mooncoin is Móin Choinn, Coyne's bogland. Names were something I took for granted, but realised there was a whole new layer of meaning preserving history.
You get this in Welsh too. Cardiff is an anglicisation of Caerdydd and Bridend is the English translation of Pen-y-bont. Swansea however does not follow either rule, it’s Abertawe in Welsh, which literally translates as ‘the mouth of the river Tawe.’
There's a place I know of in Somerset, called Penhill (there was an Anglo Saxon battle, I forget whether it was against the Britons, themselves or the Vikings though)...Obviously hill is the English, but 'pen' is p-Celtic, Welsh for hill.
As a Norwegian, my written language is almost identical to Danish. But understanding their pronounciation can sometimes take up to one or two days, depending on how thick their accent is. I don't speak to Danes too often, so I often find that I have to re-train my ability to understand them when I do, lol. (Beklager, alle mine kjære danske venner, men jeg er fortsatt glad i dere!)
Really great and thought provoking content. Interesting how humans create words to make language and understand each other more efficient, but behind every word is sentence or a phrase.
When learning Danish 40 years ago I found that the vocabulary from the King James Bible and Shakespear very similar to modern Danish, and the grammar was similar.
When I have been working for weeks/months with mostly English-speaking colleagues I eventually start thinking in English. But that takes quite some time to happen. Going back to my native Finnish is much faster, naturally. But it happens both ways. But having both languages simultaneously - I can't do that. But that doesn't mean nobody can. I'm quite sure there are some ppl out there who can switch languages instantly.
My Grandmother and her three sisters were fluent in Spanish, French, Latin and English. When they go together it was totally amazing listening to them. They conversed primarily in English switching around between Spanish and/or French in mid-sentence. All of which left me totally baffled at times. Their explanation was that often words or phrases in one of those other languages conveyed meaning more clearly. They understood each other perfectly although I don't believe anyone from the follow on generations did. So I will postulate that having multiple languages simultaneously is possible, but one probably needs to be raised in a multi-lingual household to develop and maintain this ability.
Having enough time in an environment that forces you to use both languages helps a lot for using two languages simultaneously. I was born to a Turkish mother and a Zaza father, and since my mother could not speak any other language I could only speak Turkish at home but with my dad or in my grandpa's house I could have both Turkish and Zazaki. I have to stop for resetting my brain when switching the languages, but my grandpa can almost simultaneously switch to Turkish, Kurdish or Zazaki any time he wants.
I had a friend at uni who was half Italian half Chinese and speaking to here was always amazing. She would often send voice notes to her mum in a mixture of Italian and mandarin, and then would instantly flip back to talking to me in English! It always amazed me.
My friend was a seafarer for many years and, in addition to his mother tongue German, speaks perfect English, Spanish, Danish and Swedish. I think you have to be a little linguistically gifted, it is not given to everyone. Like all children in Germany, I learned English at school and can also speak perfect Low German, which I learned from my grandparents. I later learned Danish at the adult education center and later Swedish because we sailed a lot in the Baltic Sea. However, when I speak Swedish, because of my German/Danish accent and because I sometimes mix Danish and Swedish words (lol), the Swedes always think that I am from the island of Bornholm. Bornholmsk is an East Danish dialect that is only spoken on the Danish island of Bornholm and is closely related to Danish and Swedish. I'm not as perfect as my friend, who can instantly switch from one language to the other.
Walking and talking is a good idea I think, good for the scholarly mind🤔 This was packed with information and very enjoyable, it’s frustrating that we have gaps in knowledge about language And it’s changes but people like you Hilbert keep learning and curiosity alive More please🥰🙏
I think monolingualism is a modern concept. Like you, I grew up with more than one (3) and knew 11 yr olds who were starting their 7th language on beginning secondary school in a mobile society. Just yesterday here in Friesland, a mother told me her 11 yr old has Dutch, Friesian, German and English at school and will have French too later this year when he mives on to ‚big‘ school... In Switzerland (where I normally live), we have 4 official languages and most prople can manage 2-3 plus English. So I would think multilingualism was just as frequent/essential/common 1000 yrs ago as it is in the non-English-speaking world today!!
You look much more attractive than I imagined you looking lmfao Good video, I heard that Old English might have started losing its case system because of Old Norse having similar word stems but different endings, leading to the gradual loss of inflection
@@historywithhilbert Hahaha take it as a compliment and ride the high, marra ;) More seriously though keep it up mate, your videos are rather good, especially taking into account the amount of effort put in alongside your degree at Cambridge Stay safe and God bless :)
You mentioned blackbirds, which is interesting because European blackbirds and American blackbirds are not closely related. European blackbirds are a kind of thrush and closely related to the American Robin (the European robin BTW is related to American bluebirds which are on the other end of the thrush family from American Robins and European blackbirds) American blackbirds (of which there are many species) belong to a large diverse family called icterids, which are native to the Americas
History With Hilbert they are quite pretty, or at least the ones out my way are. The red winged blackbird. The males are Jet black with bright red and yellow epaulets, the females look like big sparrows. Closely related interims in southern New England include the common grackle, Baltimore orioles, orchard orioles, brown headed cowbird, bobolink, and eastern meadowlark. Google all of them. And According to ornithologists, the European blackbirds are the imposters, just a black thrush. True blackbirds live in the Americas ;)
I recommend the channel Ecolinguist to see how different languages and dialects can be more or less mutually intelligible. He gets people together who speak different languages that are related and has them play a sort of word-guessing game with each of them speaking their native language. It is super interesting and really fun.
I thoroughly enjoyed that format, well done! Some points: 1. Don't forget Scots Norn. Norn (normally associated with the Orkneys and Shetlands, but the first known language of Caithness and Sutherland also) is one version of Scottish "English", a language strongly influenced by Norwegian Vikings. This Norwegian (as opposed to Danish) influence extends down into Northumberland and is the basis for what you like in that dialect (Danish is well known in Scandinavia for being the "flat, unmusical" version of those tongues). 2. Already Tacitus differentiates between "East" (Scandinavian) and "West" (Saxon - my descriptions not his) Germanic, though my just-completed scan of his "Germania" didn't unearth the source for this. 3. One of the ugliest word-creations of recent times is "creolisation" for the agglutination, coalescence or conflation of two tongues, but no matter: well into the 12th century early middle English was a coalescence (let's take that one) solely of West Saxon (with dialects) and Danish (with dialects). Norman French only began to seep into the common language during the reign of Henry II (rather complicating the coalescence) after 1154. 3. I am thoroughly bilingual (English and German) and I find that it is "thought patterns" which determine the choice of words. German is my everyday language and I find that in England, I want to use German phrases and expressions which are untranslateable 1:1, so I just transliterate them and then explain them longwindedly.
Here is another aspect of language, modern nation states like to emphasise the uniqueness of there languages through orthography, but if you were to spell things phonetically it is the same vocabulary essentially. Likewise I am sure that I pronounce certain words very differently from how they are spelled in my accent. Vowels seem to exist on a scale and a lot of folk speak in dual registers according to who they are speaking to, that is to say fairly broad and exclusive in local communities, but with more standard pronunciation when speaking to a larger audience. Anyway, I guess you know what Senedd means in Welsh, it is cognate with Senate of course with a bit of the senile thrown in maybe. In English we have the term for an elder statesman councillor Alderman, Older man, Elder man, same difference essentially. I like to read Shakespeare in my Coventry accent because I am not a fan of David uppity Crystal. Here is also the fun in Shakespeare in that he parodies other accents in several of his plays, for instance the Elizabethan equivalent of "mummerset" in King Lear, and the Welsh accent with Fluellen in Henry the wotsit part thingy.
I find it harder to learn French words by reading them than by listening to them. The opposite with German. Maybe because French is so much more melodious.
I speak English and have a weak vocabulary in French and Spanish. A lot of the time I can read understand basic Italian, like common nouns being spoken because they're basically a remixed pronunciation of their Romance language cousins. Sure they might be spelled pretty different at times (especially French), but once you account for patterns in the differences, the distance between them shrinks rapidly.
I remember doing a presentation on this topic in my Old English class, it's a really fascinating question. If anyone is interested in scientific analysis of the language contact that happened between Old English and Old Norse, I recommend "The Nordic languages. an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages", edited by Oskar Bandle. I would give a lot of money to see the creoloid that was spoken in the danalǫg. The question of intercommunication between Germanic tribes in general is kind of interesting, since we have got some evidence for communication between even the Goths and Danes in the migration period. I don't know if I would go as far as my former professor Wilhelm Heizmann who suggests that there was extensive communication between Germanic elites for quite a long time, until christianization, but the spread of art styles and the runes would suggest at least extensive trade relations. Thanks for making this video, ASNC is a topic that deserves more attention!
Excellent! Lots of ground covered both on foot and on different topics. Reminds us of the fluidity of language when only a minority of people write a language. To his point of the lack of true bi-linguarism. As a teacher, one can not expect a two students each of whom speaks both Spanish and English to have the same number English and Spanish words in mind. Even in the same family one brother will have far more English or Spanish words than the other. One generally excels in one language and the other in the other. In a truly mixed Texas neighborhood, an Anglo with a quick ear can end up speaking better Spanish than his Tejano friend.
One aspect of mutual intelligibility is often being forgotten. The factor of exposure. I am Swiss and was growing up with Swiss German as my mother tongue. Because Swiss people watch a lot of German TV, we are exposed to standard German from a very young age, and I cannot recall that I ever struggled to understand it as a child. However, a German with no previous exposure to Swiss German (and not from the southwestern part of Germany where they speak similar dialects), will not understand Swiss German at all, at least at first. I heard similar things from Norwegians who grow up watching a lot of Swedish TV: the Norwegians seem to be able to understand Swedish much more easily than Swedes do Norwegian. This is most likely the reason why you as a Dutch guy find it relatively easy to understand German, whereas I, as a native German and Swiss German speaker struggle with understanding Dutch, at least when it's spoken at a regular pace.
I can understand some Dutch because I learned German. A very interesting concept of a language is Interlingua, which is a kind of version of what Latin might be like now if it had continued, I have seen an interlingua speaker converse with portuguese speakers and I could understand what he was saying too from my familiarity with French and the latin influences on English.
I didn't know that there were references to translators for Old Irish and Latin but for Old Norse when ANglo-Saxon folk met them. That's very telling. I also learnt that many children of Danes born on this island had ENglish mothers as very few Scandinavian women came here. What a fantastic video! Handsome guy; enthusiastic explainer; beautiful scenery; the encouragement to do some healthy walking; loads of fascinating facts about Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon that I didn't know; loads of facts about the general history of the time that I didn't know... what's not to like? Ic þancie þē!
The Angels, Saxon, Juts and Frisians first arrived in Britannia right after the roman occupation ended in fourth century AD (410). Those Germanic tries brought with them their language and runic alphabet knows as the Elder Futhark runes. This very same alphabet was also used in the Danish Norse territories at that time. Remember, that the runic alphabet is not about how to spell words correctly, but spell words how they sound instead. So, yes longer distanced had slight sound and dialect variations. Ones in Britannia the early Germanic kingdoms mingled with the remnants of Celtic languages (Welch, Cornish), Romano British languages, probably some pictish. That led to the Angle-Saxon or Northumbria runic alphabet with expanded from the previously Elder futhark of 24 runic letters to 29 - 33ish to incorporate all the new vowels and sounds needed. In the Norse kingdoms (Danish, Scandinavia, Rus (in parts) around the 9th century the Elder Futhark alphabet was adopted to the Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, which added many more vowels like the English runes but instead of adding new runes their dropped the alphabet to only 16 letters. The Danish Norse first invaded Britain in AD 793, that’s just under 400 years of separate language development and sound changes. Reading a Danish rune stone with a Northumbria rune understanding is manageable but there are changes. So, could the Norse invaders understand the Anglo-Saxons? I would think so, on a rough level anyway.
Maybe a kind of creole or lingua-franc. In Texas in the 19th Century, Germans from all over came to live in Texas, staking often different dialects. My grand father from, Trier married my grandmother whose family had come from Saxony, I think. They tended to communicate in the Texas German that developed. Of course there were newspapers and schools so they both knew “school” German as well, which bled into the Texas German. What German my father remembered years later was Texas German.
@@robby319 there is a very good video by Dr. Jackson Crawford ruclips.net/video/BaWgJq9OVGM/видео.html as well as ruclips.net/video/UsjSAFbBSFc/видео.html and as a great overview to the Germanic languages in general ruclips.net/video/g6UbGLC7YWk/видео.html
I remember a point made in the PBS series The Story of English, that the root words in old English and old Norse were mutually intellible, but the inflections were different. The result was that in English almost all inflections were dropped, and replaced by word order to understand who did what.
As a Finnish/English bilingual person I found your comment about bilingualism interesting because I process information in neither language and think of things like blackbirds conceptually only translating them to 'rastas' or 'blackbird' when I need to communicate about the bird to another person.
weren't the Northumbrians Angles? who originate from an area right next to Denmark, and have more linguistic similarities to each than the Saxons and Danes?
Yes, quite right. He came very close to mentioning that but not quite getting there - 9th century Northumbrian Anglish and Danish Norse are going to be a lot closer to each other than 9th century West Saxon and Norwegian Norse.
@@davidjames4915 I mean, given the Angles spoke Old English, it's sort of a logical fallacy to affirm that that's why it's closer. Frisian and Proto-Norse had split off before the tribes even did.
I enjoy your videos. Recently you've shot them while out walking. I enjoy seeing the woods you walk through, but I do get distracted by the beauty of nature and then have to bring my attention back to your thoughts.
My friend from Muenster Germany, near the Dutch Border never understood the original local dialect until she learned Dutch. Then her father and his friends conversations were no longer secret.
Interesting. Talking about Old English, pre-Norman English, made me think, again, about the "Anglish" movement, and, a reminder of just how latinized our modern language is.
How different it would be if Harold hadn't headed north to face the Norse and had just stayed put to defeat William on the beaches of Pevensey... given how close-run the eventual battle was with an exhausted, weakened English army, a decisive victory by William had Harold stayed put seems unlikely. Even if Harold had lost the realm to the Norse, the language would not have undergone heavy latinization.
Its funny how you like the sound of the old Northumbrian blokes, as when I listen to your voice that is what I pick up, a slight Geordie lilt, I don't notice any Dutch Accent. I'm an East Anglian with a bit of Estuary English (Essex Cockney).
But don't forget Hilbert is Frisian, and Frisian sounds a lot more like English than does Dutch. He has a segment of him and his father speaking Frisian on his Facebook page: facebook.com/1448562625153968/videos/277376793284799 And you can go watch this rather awkward encounter between a modern day Englishman speaking Old English badly and a Frisian farmer: ruclips.net/video/OeC1yAaWG34/видео.html
Another great vid fella. Nice to see you flying the flag For Northumberland, I am Northumbrian born and bred. loads of that lovely wild garlic down Holywell Dene :-)
May I suggest that you consider the Vicking settlements in Normandy where you can find a lot of places called with Old Norse names, or at least roots. The North Men, as they were called, started to speak Old French in 3 generations and more, depending on their condition. Benoît de Sainte-Maure states that "Danish" was still spoken in villages in the 12th century, well after 1066 when William the Conqueror invaded England. In fact, this has been a Vicking invasion from the south, with a mix of people speaking French or Old Norse or both. Some people from Normandy must have felt "at home" in England at that time.
One thing to consider is shared words (or root words). Danes, Jutes, Anglos, Saxons and Frisians were all Germanic tribes so bound to share a lot of vocabulary in their languages. Also, there is passive vocabulary to consider. Being Danish I maintain a passive vocabulary of Norwegian and Swedish words that differ from their Danish counterpart, which helps me understand Norwegians and Swedes. Add to this the lack of hard borders and relative easy of travel by sea and perhaps by land over flat coastal plains, and you could end up with a language "continuum" where for instance neighboring Jutes and Anglos would have an easier time understanding each other. Further trade could have resulted in a type of "Lingua Franca" in the same way as in the Mediterranean, where a kind of "trade speak" evolved. But then, these are mostly speculations on my part. I am not a linguist nor a historian :P
This idea is really close to what I was talking about in my last video on Old English/Old Norse language contacts. These two languages sure were mutually intelligible, perhaps comparable to modern-day Czech/Slovak, Slovenian/Croatian etc.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest. I thought you were a two-dimensional cartoon with an immobile mouth and disembodied voice. Maybe floating over some maps. This is earth-shattering.
Hey Hilbert, Could you make a video that focuses on the relation between the german tribes (i dont mean germanic but like modern day germany) and their relations to the anglo saxons? For example Saxon and Anglo Saxon relations during the migration times and after it? I know Otto the great and Æthelstan had relations but i would be interested in earlier relations and if they still saw each other as related etc. cus i struggle to find info on that topic and you study anzac so ill give it a shot with this comment. Big fan of you channel btw, keep it up.
Bokmaal (old Norwegian) was very similar to Danish with different spelling. Ibsen is easy for Danes to read. Nynorsk, which was created from a range of regional dialects, is much more difficult for Danes. Denmark, Norway and Sweden were one country under Margrete 1 in 14th/15th century. Then Norway and Denmark were joined for some time.
Having looked into this fairly deeply over the years and read on the topic I lean towards saying intelligibility was minimal; differentiated morphology, different syntax and word order and at times very different pronunciation. Then you can look at modern analogues; Spanish and Italian are not really mutually intelligible nor are Dutch and German and those are languages where case exists minimally to not at all. Did they understand some of what they were saying? Sure, but not enough without significant confusion at times.
Scotts has all of those, and people argue if it’s a different language or just a very distinctive dialect. With more conservative dialects, I can see a high degree of intelligibility.
I'm an intermediate Dutch speaker and it takes me about a week in Germany to be able speak and understand basic German (poorly). I make mistakes and miss sentences, but it works. There's a fairly predictable intuitive pattern of vowel and consonantal shifts, and German words that aren't straight cognates of the equivalent Dutch terms are often cognates with archaic terms, or are descriptive/literal enough to understand in context. Interestingly, a week out of Germany and it all goes away again. It feels like bending my Dutch into an awkward shape, or tuning a radio between channels.
@@digitalbrentable Think that is an exaggeration. Beyond very, very basic stuff, German/Dutch intelligibility is minimal. False friends abound, syntax is different and phonology, whilst predictable will not help you much on the fly in rapid conversation. The intelligibility you speak of would be of the same sort that may have been present in medieval England but if so it would not be that extensive.
It should be pointed out that ME (and consequently later English) seems to share some rather basic grammatical structure that is otherwise unique to Scandinavian languages. Not the grammar of the other Germanic languages that you would expect if its roots were from the Anglo-Saxon. Which is harder to explain, as while it is easy for loan words to slip in, especially between two very similar languages which are mutually intelligible, basic grammatical structure is far less likely to change. It would seem to indicate that ME is rather more Scandinavian based with a great deal of OE words.
To me, mutual intelligibility is only how mutually intelligible "everyday" language is; if there is enough intelligibility of the, say, 1000 most common words, that serves well enough to communicate and explain the meaning of any complex words that come up. This applies to dialects too; if someone mentions "bairns", if I don't know what that means, the other person can resort to common words, "young human". This is the same thing that happens if I say "molecular physics", and a child doesn't understand, I can explain "study of how the smallest bits of stuff that's in everything bonds together" and that gives a good enough definition to build on. If you can do that between two languages, then to me those languages are mutually intelligible. Based on that, I imagine that there was quite a bit of intelligibility between Old Norse and Old English. Grammar is probably the biggest hurdle. That said, even back then our languages probably had many synonyms. If you meet someone who can clearly understand some words but not others, you can just throw synonyms at them when they look like they don't get something. "His majesty... okay, um... sovereign, monarch, king, leader, ruler, bigman, country-father, landman", until they get it.
I know some Swedish and I have conversated with a German fellow who spoke only German with pretty good success. But then, he was from northern Germany. Then I tried the same in southern Germany it failed spectacularly. I couldn't make myself understood and I didn't understand them. So, are Hochdeutch and Plattdeutch different languages? To me they are. On this basis I believe that the English speaking a language somewhat close to Anglo-Saxon and Danes could understand each other reasonably well, if they both wanted to understand each other.
To me, a Norwegian, too. Sadly Plattdeutsch seems to be on the brink of extinction. Germans who know Plattdeutsch (Low German) pick up Scandinavian remarkably fast.
The North West is closest to Dutch and less derived accents (in older, more rural people) would be the most accessible. Hochdeutsch is the standard "language" thought throughout, uses in media and promoted along with unity... "platt"/lower german refers to the northern third of accents, while the southern most third is commonly lumped in the with Bavarian/Swiss German for being equally divergent. There have been Sociology/cultural anthropology studies made to trace language diversity in some states (around universitys that could secure funding), who found trade routs kept dialects close over surprising distances, while small inconveniences like creeks or mountains could drastically reduce commonalitys.
He was probably speaking Plattdeutsch rather than Hochdeutsch. Plattdeutsch hasn’t had the same sound changes. Even after three years of German in high school, I find Plattdeutsch easier to understand.
@@hannem9799 none of these accents had big populations when they were first recorded, the political and economic power that established one over the others hasn't been backed by any population numbers... But yes, I have a hard time shifting my vouls back towards my grandparents and usually take 3 days.
@@kokofan50, well, this happened in Lübeck and I am pretty certain he was local... What I meant with that anecdote was that there is a huge difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch. And the closer you get to Denmark the more it resembles Scandinavian languages.
I think that danes and anglo-saxons were able to communicate. They just had to speak more simple sentences backing them up with gestures. I am a native Finnish speaker and even though Estonian is closely related to Finnish, I can't understand almost anything if an Estonian speaks naturally like he would to another Estonian. If we sit down to discuss then we can understand each other. We just have to keep things simple and slow our speech.
In my mind I have a lot of stuff that I think of as both Dutch and English (and sometimes Frisian, but that one I mostly just use for sentences and not actually identifying objects).
I grew up in Jutland in an area where many old people still spoke old jutish dialect,complet different to danish even in grammar. That area is just north of the area where the anglo came from. To my knowledge the anglo lived up in Northumbria where the danes (jutes) settled so they have maybe been able to understand each other. There has only been 200-300 years gap between their arrivals in England or should I say Meadowland( meadow in danish is eng)
This is an important point I think. The old dialects of West Jutland are strikingly more similar to English in a number of ways compared to standard Danish.
And you've doubtless heard the stories of how, when they went to Narvik during WWII, men from your part of England were able, with a little trouble, to talk to the Norwegians. If that was true in 1940, it must have been a good deal easier a thousand years earlier.
An urban legend I'm afraid... Sure, English speakers will be able to identify loads of Norwegian words. Typically: body parts, leaf trees, basic food... And yes, Northumbrian pronounciation (particularly vowels/diphtongs) is very Norwegian-like. I hope these four examples are correct: "Blind" is pronounced like Norwegian "Blind" (corresponding to English "Wind"). "House" is pronounced like Norwegian "Hus" (like "Hoose"). "Book" is pronounced like Norwegian "Bok" (long vowel). "Ball" is pronounced like Norwegian "Ball" (A like in "Fast", not like in "Wall"). And there's some dialect words shared with Norwegian. But all in all, I'm afraid the German occupant got more out of spoken Norwegian than the Northumbrian liberator...
lmao during a late night scouring for old english/old norse language material this video came up as recommended, but the videos I was watching were years old, so I assumed this was too ... only to see it now and realise it was brand new! :P
There is also the possibility of speakers of one language understand another language more easily than speakers of the other language. Famously, the Portuguese understand Spanish better than Spaniards understand Portuguese. Similarly, I think that both the Norwegians and the Swedes would agree that the Norwegians understand Swedish than the other way around which makes perfect sense when one considers all the dialects of Norwegian that existed until recently, fewer today, requiring the ability to move between accents facilely. The facility for Danish by the Norwegians may have more to do with the long political union between the two countries. Oddly, my Norwegian grandfather could understand the Danes who lived next door on the left but found he could understand little of the Icelandic spoken by the Icelanders who lived next door on the right. My Mother and hers were born in Arendal which had been a Danish administrative town, has its own peculiar accent and some people from other parts of the country say they speak Danish there, though I can plainly hear the difference though I have only a limited understanding of the language. Similarly, my ancestors who were born north of the Arctic Circle found the accent spoken in Oslo odd as peculiar and a source for mirth. (of course, they had come to the US before the language reform. I do though know a few useful prefixes and suffixes. The suffix for town or city is -by, hence Derby. Vik- means cove or by extension a synonym for fjord. (vowel with no English equivalent)y- is island, hence Jersey, Guernsey, and Orkney among others. And -ing means people or people of. Thus Viking may have originally used to make a distinction from the Danes and Swedes.
That’s a good point you make about being bilingual. Being a multi lingual person I totally understand that a blackbird might be a black bird or “svarttrast”, “svarttrost”, “solsort” or “koltrast” depending who I am speaking to or where I am.
I do find this interesting, sorry to bang on. In the book The Story of English by Robert MacNeil, Robert McCrum, and William Cran, published in 1986 they authors do assert that English is a hybrid of Norse and Anglo-Saxon.
Being a fan of the Finnish band Nightwish I watched lead singer Floor Jansen on the Dutch TV show Beste Zangers. Listening to the conversations in Dutch .. it struck me that I kept feeling that I could ** almost ** understand .. or .. more correctly .. felt I SHOULD understand .. but it was .. just .. out of reach of my English speaking mind.
I know old English used the word Horse, and Old Norse used Hros for horse Old English and Old Fris is very close together. there is an old poem: Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fris.
If it helps, "horse" isn't from the Latin side of English. That's "equus", but we have the word "equestrian" because of it... But that in itself was a type of noble in the Roman Republic. But then there were also "Equites", a rank in the manipular legions. English just took both apparently! 😅 It's logical, but it can be a bit of a rabbit hole!
The existence of a tradition of alliterative verse in Germanic languages is important. What is known about this verse suggests that it was a formal register of language and thus was linguistically conservative overall. In late antiquity, a speaker of a Germanic language who was raised as a noble would have been familiar with such verse, and it wouldn't be surprising if such a person had learned to perform alliterative verse as part of the education process. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Old English term scop, which signifies a poet of alliterative verse, is cognate with the early modern German Schof, which signifies a lawyer of the Vehmic courts. If it is the case that a traditional upbringing of a Germanic gentleman of late antiquity included training in alliterative verse, then it may be that this form of language was used to communicate with tribes that spoke different dialects (as well as being used as the language of formal occasions). An analogy would be standard Modern English as opposed to casual Modern English(es), which is (are) more location-specific. Thus, a person from rural Alabama who is casually speaking the local dialect might not be mutually intelligible to a person from rural Scotland who is casually speaking the local dialect. But a person from rural Alabama and a person from rural Scotland can readily communicate with each other if both are sufficiently educated to be fluent in standard English.
It's interesting that you associate different things in the different languages. The blackbird being primarily dutch example makes sense in the context you explained but as bi-lingual English/Spanish for me the object is essentially English or Spanish dependent on situation. I was brought up in England and spoke Spanish at home so learnt both simultaneously from TV/school and family. Me and my sister would speak in English and turn mid sentence to our dad and continue in Spanish as if the same language So to me a bat in England is a bat. But when in Spain or even speaking to a Spaniard in England it's just 'murcielago' with no real thought or translation. The only exception is things like 'chorizo', 'paella', 'japelenos', 'fajita'which even in England to English people I say in Spanish 'choreetho' and 'paeya' 'halepeños' 'faheeta'
Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old English had some traits in common with the North Germanic languages, espcially the Anglian dialects of Old English, I'd say speakers of Old east Norse whom settled in eastern England would have had little to no issue communicating with speakers of Old Northumbrian or Mercian after some time together, the languages had a great level of similarity vocabulary wise and the common form of to be being rendered as 'eāron' in Old English and 'erum' in old East Norse, many words would be paralleled in both languages, everyday words like 'shirt' 'day' 'cow' 'horse' 'milk' etc are found in similar forms in both languages. Part of the reason for the erosion of the Old English inflections could be due to the influence of the Norse living in the Danelaw who found the Old English inflections too complicated as they tried to learn the language. Ingvaeonic the purported language family of the north-sea Germanic tongues was situated such that they had some features in common with north Germanic.
Informative video during a very lovely walk. Loved the forest setting, btw. As far as what you discuss goes, I have some questions and I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter. It has often been said that QEI was a voracious reader and very capable writer in her own right. In addition it is documented that she knew several languages such as French, Spanish (??) and Italian just to name a few. That being said if you could go back in time and analyze part of her upbringing and education how far back would you guess SHE could go in life and still be able to understand others that came before her? Would you say perhaps the 12th or 13th century or is that too far back? Similarly, between us and her time (the 16th century) how far back can modern man go and understand written and spoken language? I'd like to hear your thoughts. Thanks for considering my questions.
Thanks for watching everyone, hope yous enjoyed the video! Be sure to check out my other videos on Old English and Old Norse if you found it interesting and give me a thumbs up or considering subscribbling if you're new!
The quality of your work is astounding! I look forward to that notification bell every time as you are one of a few channels that satisfies that historical thirst! Well done 👍🏻
Very interesting. My Y-DNA centers on NW Europe, the UK with Ireland/Scotland but the NW European focus is in Germany and Frisian. I have read that Old English is largely based on the Frisian language. I'm interested in your thoughts.
*If you've got to travel, by the Nine Divines, stay on the roads! The wilderness just isn't safe anymore. We've had sightings, you see.*
''yous'' you don't have a connection with the Greater Glasgow area...do you?...haha
@@ChristophersMum He has a geordie twang. yous is common though out the North East.
Walking through the woods pontificating on Old Norse and Anglo Saxon. I have a feeling that if Tolkien was a 21st Century RUclipsr, this is exactly the sort of video he would have made, when he wasn't talking about Elves and Hobbits.
He'd probably be stopping next to more trees and talking about them in detail, though
High praise indeed
Another person who has no dialect talking about dialect.
@@edmundsveikutis1698 easy sport, you kids be nice
As an Australian, it's quite nice to see random views of a more or less natural landscape from where my ancestors came.
The best part was obviously that about the wild garlic.
*Fresh-smelling breath has left the chat*
@@historywithhilbert LOLOL
Daslook?
@@cvb6089 Jep. De afrikaanse wilde knoflook is roze/paarsig, daslook is wit.
Beware of those trees, they speak a certain language
What are you still doing alive? Your sister will make a better dictator.
They speak dari and pashto
(languages of Afghanistan) .
Brythonic
how you ioing man hope recovered from your heart opperation
Tiếng Việt
I'm so glad you've kept up on this channel for so long. Please keep it up. I'm just a fan in a small town in Ohio.
Thanks so much Mike really glad you're still watching and enjoying the content!
Another Ohioan here. Cincinnati.
*Not from Ohio, but I think the same. Thanks for your brilliant works!*
*PS: Actually a Chinese fan who’s using a VPN to peek into the world, 😂 😆 .*
Bro Hillbert looks like a giga chad version of Alex the rambler
I think there are a lot of people who look like more of a chad Alex the Rambler.
That's why one makes videos on history and the other yells at a map
Thank you..? xD
@@historywithhilbert Keep lifting and honoring the land and your gods. You're doing good work
I wonder if hilbert honks?
Love your videos! On mutual intelligibility: I have read that during the «Dutch Age» in Norwegian history (1550-1750) Dutch merchants were able to do business in Norway speaking their own language. Our languages were supposedly much more similar then.
Would love to know more about this!
The languages weren't much more similar. But I can think of multiple reasons why it was possible.
1. Everyone spoke in dialect, making everyone aware of sound shifts. Thus it would be easier to pick up words and phrases in a different Germanic language. Nowadays on Dutch TV if something just sound a little bit off we start using subs.
2. Dutch merchant fleets dominated the the Northern waters. Thus causing more exposure to Dutch than nowadays. Even prior to the Dutch golden age the Hansa would dominated the trade. Exposing people to Low Saxon a very close related language/dialect to Dutch.
3. A Dutch merchant visiting Norway would most likely have several business trips. So he would also get exposed to the Norse language more than once.
That was fantastic 👍. You covered every angle I can imagine. Even the wild garlic scored a mention. I've been constantly impressed with your channel from the first time I stumbled across you a few years ago. Just keep doing what you're doing. You are a brilliant teacher.👍👍👍
I’m Swedish, and I like to study Old Norse and Old English in my free time. I have to say that Old English is naturally easier to understand than modern English. The only reason why I understand modern English better is because I’ve been learning it for years. Old English on the other hand is rather easy to understand without any practice.
To me it's easier to pronounce that modern English 😅 I'm a Spanish speaker
I do think that a Scandinavian would understand someone speaking
Anglo Saxon, better than an English person today. Ironic in a way.
🇸🇪 🏴
@@gazza2933 Very true. The grammar and vocabulary is much more similar.
@@eemmiill201
During March of this year, my brother took a genealogy test (a Christmas present) and we are
16% Swedish /Danish.
I won't bore you with the rest as this Scandinavian hereditary applies to most English people.
Fascinating stuff!
@@gazza2933 Oh, interesting! Perhaps a remnant of the Danelaw?
The style of this video reminds me of the ones Simon Roper does.
Simon Roper is a treasure
Hilberts doing some vlogging? Oh boy I can't wait for him to finally release his skincare /morning beauty rutine
Maybe some unboxings.
@@oiawoo9168 Well here's a snapshot of leg day.. ;)
I think it's his Dutch genes (or diet?). I was thinking the same...he sounds so convincingly English, and yet you rarely see someone with that clarity of skin in the UK. I live in The Netherlands, and it's much more common here.
@@Nea1wood 'Rarely' is pushing it a bit, Neal. Taking care of yourself is pretty universal. Look up Survive the Jive, another historian who takes care of himself who is of English descent.
@@historywithhilbert singing "Wilhelmus while walking in the woods.
this cannot have been shot in Holland... there are hills.
There's a shot of a highway in which the car is driving on the wrong side, so England
Also not raining.
@@andersaxmark5871 You mean right side.
Yeah he lives in england
@@Matt_The_Hugenot yes but also no
It is quite ironic how the Angles ,the Jutes and the Saxons originated from modern day Denmark and 4 centuries later the danes would become the biggest pain in their ass.
@plentyness I was just joking around. Everybody knows that Denmark does not exist.
not to mention a lot of those pesky Normans would have also been Danes.
Dane just means northmen for quite a time. Denmark and Dane are not synonymous. Just like Germany named itself after the Germanic people but not all Germanic people are German.
@Hernando Malinche Yea, but the Anglo Saxons and the Danish who raided England during the Viking age were not the same tribe. They spoke different languages and most importantly (speaking about whether they get along or not) they were totally different religiously. The Anglo Saxons were fully Christianised and the Danes were still pagan.
Saxons and Angles never lived in modern Denmark. The Saxons formed in todays Lower Saxony, Westphalia and southern Holstein and the western part of Saxony-Anhalt. While the Angles evolved in Northern Holstein, or rather the place called Angeln.
I was working as a dishwasher in a kitchen for 3 years and all of the chefs were Arabic with very little knowledge in English or spoke it very poorly. I found myself speaking their broken English back to them most of the time just so they could understand. Also no time to teach them English in a kitchen atmosphere. Anyway, somehow it kind of rubbed off onto me and I found myself struggling with my English. I had to mentally correct myself so often before I spoke because I got so used to speaking this strange Arab/English that I had been speaking in my workplace just to communicate and make work easier. So it makes me think as well that possibly this kind of thing could have happened over the world too. Makes sense if a large population of foreign people come into your country and are co-operative, that the native people would adapt to that culture in some way and incorporating it.
@@stardust86x Didn't get the "six, seven" thing... You mean your mind went white and you couldn't remember the words?
I think this is a useful thought experiment...to imagine in what contexts Norse and Old English speakers would have mixed. So for example, did they live and work closely together as you did with these Arabic speakers? Or did they live separately in isolated, Norse-speaking farms and villages, and only meet at market to trade?
I'm from Denmark. I lived in Norway for a year. I ended up speaking a funny mix. Like we have different words for kitchen towel and dirty. I said the Norwegian versions, but pronounced in Danish. I also found myself using some special Nowegian structures, while speaking Danish. My family were laughing hard!
@ Queefmuffins
I have had to do exactly the same as you in regards to adjusting your language to make for easier communication by incorporating some of their words into the mix. I to believe this is exactly what happened back then as well.
I love this vlogging format! And as I'm sure you know, Hilbert, "garlic" has a fun etymology: OE gār + lēac, 'spear leek'
I too enjoy garlic. I feel your pain my friend. Still hilarious though.
Taking the Jackson Crawford angle? I like it.
So for the last month I've been watching a lot of your videos and I'm grateful I have found your channel. You do a amazing job keep it up
It all boils down to how much the subjective portion of "I understand" vs. "I don't understand" coupled with the objective portion saying... "I can understand" yet "I can not understand" blend together.
As a historical linguist in Scandinavian languages I remember having this discussion with my brother at numerous occasions. He never could care a rat's arse about this while still claiming he couldn't understand Norwegian even though he is Swedish (which is easier than understanding Danish given the pronunciation). I told him that as long as you put your ears to the task you will be able to understand so much as to be able to have a deep every day conversation with a Norwegian. You could talk about anything together. Grab a beer and get at it. And when ever you don't understand a word or expression you simply ask what this or that means. Yet he couldn't see this being a thing and he told me I were bullshitting. Then at one point he went to Norway on a business trip and lo and behold. He rang me absolutelly surprised at how easy it was to understand and talk to them... to the point where he compared it to a Swedish dialect where he could ask them what "this or that word" means when ever he didn't or thought he didn't understand. And they would simply answer "it means this or that". Before this he thought Norwegian sounded like Swedish blended with gibberish.
When I myself was 18 years old I went to Iceland to attend a course in Icelandic for Scandinavians. I was housed together with a Danish woman. At that age and given what I had "learned" being Swedish my first thought was that "well now I'm f*****... how am I supposed to have a conversation with this woman over the coming month?". Well, me and the Danish woman had no trouble understanding eachother. We just spoke about anything. There were more occasions of "say what?" happening but I articulated more clearly as a habit given the situation and so did she and there you go. No trouble at the end of the day. We just weren't accustomed to how the other spoke but we quickly got used to it.
You can not ask Scandinavians how much they understand of another Scandinavian language. You have to test them. Otherwise the statistics get all skewed. Two people speaking the exact same language and dialect where one of them claims that "I can not understand anything" while the other claims "I understand everything" only to make a statistical graph based off of that kind of information. The same thing might or might not apply to the Old English and Old Scandinavian linguistics scenes at the time.
Thank you so much for sharing your walk! The beauty of nature coupled with thought provoking ideas was a breath of fresh air mid-week ☺
It is so good to teach history in this way. When I went to a Monisory school we spent a lot of time outside teaching and we did reading outside the only lessons we never did outside was the maths. I love these kind of discussions. Tells us alot about our fourbarers. Thanks for doing this video how beautiful.
A couple of anecdotes about mutual intelligibility, and the bilingualism:
Here in Canada, products are required to be labelled with both French, and English, which regionally dependant, could have an impact on a lot of visual, written, and vocal memory associations when it comes to vocabulary.
-While listening to your reading of the Anglo-Saxon passages, I wouldn't say I 'understood' the words, but I could get a reasonable comprehension of what you were saying, just by a cursory listen. That being said, I didn't process the words themself, but the meaning of the words (Essentially, I could explain what you had said, but not recite the words you used).
I am a native English speaker, a passable French speaker (CECR-B1) and I can use simple phrases in German (CECR-A1, barely).
I find that by expanding my English vocabulary, a lot of the Germanic rooted synonyms that have fallen out of use are just consonant shifted.
So, I would suggest that (in a situation where neither group had made any prior communucations) the Norse, and Anglo-Saxons may not have processed the exact words as used in the individual languages, but would have comprehended the meanings of the speech without significant difficulty, especially when supplemented with subconscious conversation contexts, like tone, facial expression, and body language.
Nice video. An excellent idea for those of us in lock down. So soothing to seen a nature walk when all we've got is four walls.
The town names are so interesting to me. I see it here in Ireland, where there is a mix of anglicised phonetics, or direct translation.
It tends to be literal translations closer to the Pale, and phonetic further away, but not always.
So you'll see a little more __town in Dublin and a little more Bally_ elsewhere. Not a hard and fast rule.
Some phonetics seem to be english words, but are coincidence. Knockboy is cnoc buí, yellow hill. Mooncoin is Móin Choinn, Coyne's bogland.
Names were something I took for granted, but realised there was a whole new layer of meaning preserving history.
You get this in Welsh too. Cardiff is an anglicisation of Caerdydd and Bridend is the English translation of Pen-y-bont. Swansea however does not follow either rule, it’s Abertawe in Welsh, which literally translates as ‘the mouth of the river Tawe.’
There's a place I know of in Somerset, called Penhill (there was an Anglo Saxon battle, I forget whether it was against the Britons, themselves or the Vikings though)...Obviously hill is the English, but 'pen' is p-Celtic, Welsh for hill.
@@mikeycraig8970 Doesn't it mean "head"? Cognate with Gaelic "ceann"?
As a Norwegian, my written language is almost identical to Danish. But understanding their pronounciation can sometimes take up to one or two days, depending on how thick their accent is. I don't speak to Danes too often, so I often find that I have to re-train my ability to understand them when I do, lol. (Beklager, alle mine kjære danske venner, men jeg er fortsatt glad i dere!)
Really great and thought provoking content. Interesting how humans create words to make language and understand each other more efficient, but behind every word is sentence or a phrase.
Best video to date. I like you talking about interesting subjects without all the frills and production budget.
Man I'm so jealous of your course, but I know just how freaking high the requirements to get on it and learn all this stuff is: kudos!
When learning Danish 40 years ago I found that the vocabulary from the King James Bible and Shakespear very similar to modern Danish, and the grammar was similar.
When I have been working for weeks/months with mostly English-speaking colleagues I eventually start thinking in English. But that takes quite some time to happen. Going back to my native Finnish is much faster, naturally. But it happens both ways. But having both languages simultaneously - I can't do that. But that doesn't mean nobody can. I'm quite sure there are some ppl out there who can switch languages instantly.
My Grandmother and her three sisters were fluent in Spanish, French, Latin and English. When they go together it was totally amazing listening to them. They conversed primarily in English switching around between Spanish and/or French in mid-sentence. All of which left me totally baffled at times. Their explanation was that often words or phrases in one of those other languages conveyed meaning more clearly.
They understood each other perfectly although I don't believe anyone from the follow on generations did. So I will postulate that having multiple languages simultaneously is possible, but one probably needs to be raised in a multi-lingual household to develop and maintain this ability.
Having enough time in an environment that forces you to use both languages helps a lot for using two languages simultaneously. I was born to a Turkish mother and a Zaza father, and since my mother could not speak any other language I could only speak Turkish at home but with my dad or in my grandpa's house I could have both Turkish and Zazaki. I have to stop for resetting my brain when switching the languages, but my grandpa can almost simultaneously switch to Turkish, Kurdish or Zazaki any time he wants.
I had a friend at uni who was half Italian half Chinese and speaking to here was always amazing. She would often send voice notes to her mum in a mixture of Italian and mandarin, and then would instantly flip back to talking to me in English! It always amazed me.
@@whiskeytangosierra6 How did they become fluent in so many languages?
My friend was a seafarer for many years and, in addition to his mother tongue German, speaks perfect English, Spanish, Danish and Swedish. I think you have to be a little linguistically gifted, it is not given to everyone. Like all children in Germany, I learned English at school and can also speak perfect Low German, which I learned from my grandparents. I later learned Danish at the adult education center and later Swedish because we sailed a lot in the Baltic Sea. However, when I speak Swedish, because of my German/Danish accent and because I sometimes mix Danish and Swedish words (lol), the Swedes always think that I am from the island of Bornholm. Bornholmsk is an East Danish dialect that is only spoken on the Danish island of Bornholm and is closely related to Danish and Swedish. I'm not as perfect as my friend, who can instantly switch from one language to the other.
Oh my god, Hilbert's a real person. Thought this was going to be Simon Roper tbh ;)
I need a more RP-based Cumbrian twang for that ;)
@@historywithhilbert I think he'd be happy with your production. A little too mobile perhaps :)
@@MrGalpino He reminds me of Simon Roper too. Would love to see them in the same room together
Walking and talking is a good idea I think, good for the scholarly mind🤔
This was packed with information and very enjoyable, it’s frustrating that we have gaps in knowledge about language
And it’s changes but people like you Hilbert keep learning and curiosity alive
More please🥰🙏
I think monolingualism is a modern concept. Like you, I grew up with more than one (3) and knew 11 yr olds who were starting their 7th language on beginning secondary school in a mobile society. Just yesterday here in Friesland, a mother told me her 11 yr old has Dutch, Friesian, German and English at school and will have French too later this year when he mives on to ‚big‘ school... In Switzerland (where I normally live), we have 4 official languages and most prople can manage 2-3 plus English. So I would think multilingualism was just as frequent/essential/common 1000 yrs ago as it is in the non-English-speaking world today!!
You look much more attractive than I imagined you looking lmfao
Good video, I heard that Old English might have started losing its case system because of Old Norse having similar word stems but different endings, leading to the gradual loss of inflection
Don't know whether to be grateful or insulted that you imagined me so ugly ;)
@@historywithhilbert Hahaha take it as a compliment and ride the high, marra ;)
More seriously though keep it up mate, your videos are rather good, especially taking into account the amount of effort put in alongside your degree at Cambridge
Stay safe and God bless :)
You mentioned blackbirds, which is interesting because European blackbirds and American blackbirds are not closely related. European blackbirds are a kind of thrush and closely related to the American Robin (the European robin BTW is related to American bluebirds which are on the other end of the thrush family from American Robins and European blackbirds) American blackbirds (of which there are many species) belong to a large diverse family called icterids, which are native to the Americas
I didn't know that! I shall have to google what the American variant (or imposter to the blackbird name as your comment suggests) actually looks like!
History With Hilbert they are quite pretty, or at least the ones out my way are. The red winged blackbird. The males are Jet black with bright red and yellow epaulets, the females look like big sparrows. Closely related interims in southern New England include the common grackle, Baltimore orioles, orchard orioles, brown headed cowbird, bobolink, and eastern meadowlark. Google all of them. And According to ornithologists, the European blackbirds are the imposters, just a black thrush. True blackbirds live in the Americas ;)
@@ecurewitz Ornithologists must have forgotten where the English language comes from :p
Thank you. Very educational.
Very nice Video Hilbert! Well researched too. Well narrated. Especially for a Frysian. (:)) Greetings from Groningen.
I recommend the channel Ecolinguist to see how different languages and dialects can be more or less mutually intelligible. He gets people together who speak different languages that are related and has them play a sort of word-guessing game with each of them speaking their native language. It is super interesting and really fun.
I thoroughly enjoyed that format, well done! Some points: 1. Don't forget Scots Norn. Norn (normally associated with the Orkneys and Shetlands, but the first known language of Caithness and Sutherland also) is one version of Scottish "English", a language strongly influenced by Norwegian Vikings. This Norwegian (as opposed to Danish) influence extends down into Northumberland and is the basis for what you like in that dialect (Danish is well known in Scandinavia for being the "flat, unmusical" version of those tongues). 2. Already Tacitus differentiates between "East" (Scandinavian) and "West" (Saxon - my descriptions not his) Germanic, though my just-completed scan of his "Germania" didn't unearth the source for this. 3. One of the ugliest word-creations of recent times is "creolisation" for the agglutination, coalescence or conflation of two tongues, but no matter: well into the 12th century early middle English was a coalescence (let's take that one) solely of West Saxon (with dialects) and Danish (with dialects). Norman French only began to seep into the common language during the reign of Henry II (rather complicating the coalescence) after 1154. 3. I am thoroughly bilingual (English and German) and I find that it is "thought patterns" which determine the choice of words. German is my everyday language and I find that in England, I want to use German phrases and expressions which are untranslateable 1:1, so I just transliterate them and then explain them longwindedly.
Here is another aspect of language, modern nation states like to emphasise the uniqueness of there languages through orthography, but if you were to spell things phonetically it is the same vocabulary essentially. Likewise I am sure that I pronounce certain words very differently from how they are spelled in my accent. Vowels seem to exist on a scale and a lot of folk speak in dual registers according to who they are speaking to, that is to say fairly broad and exclusive in local communities, but with more standard pronunciation when speaking to a larger audience. Anyway, I guess you know what Senedd means in Welsh, it is cognate with Senate of course with a bit of the senile thrown in maybe. In English we have the term for an elder statesman councillor Alderman, Older man, Elder man, same difference essentially. I like to read Shakespeare in my Coventry accent because I am not a fan of David uppity Crystal. Here is also the fun in Shakespeare in that he parodies other accents in several of his plays, for instance the Elizabethan equivalent of "mummerset" in King Lear, and the Welsh accent with Fluellen in Henry the wotsit part thingy.
I love this approach on things. I dare say if RP and Northumbrian English were spelled phonetically they'd look very different indeed.
I find it harder to learn French words by reading them than by listening to them. The opposite with German. Maybe because French is so much more melodious.
Robby Or maybe because French spelling is full of attempts to be more like Latin (which weren’t written like that in Old French) and hypercorrections.
I speak English and have a weak vocabulary in French and Spanish. A lot of the time I can read understand basic Italian, like common nouns being spoken because they're basically a remixed pronunciation of their Romance language cousins. Sure they might be spelled pretty different at times (especially French), but once you account for patterns in the differences, the distance between them shrinks rapidly.
Thanks for the lovely nature walk and sharing this info with us. 😊
I remember doing a presentation on this topic in my Old English class, it's a really fascinating question. If anyone is interested in scientific analysis of the language contact that happened between Old English and Old Norse, I recommend "The Nordic languages. an international handbook of the history of the North Germanic languages", edited by Oskar Bandle. I would give a lot of money to see the creoloid that was spoken in the danalǫg.
The question of intercommunication between Germanic tribes in general is kind of interesting, since we have got some evidence for communication between even the Goths and Danes in the migration period. I don't know if I would go as far as my former professor Wilhelm Heizmann who suggests that there was extensive communication between Germanic elites for quite a long time, until christianization, but the spread of art styles and the runes would suggest at least extensive trade relations.
Thanks for making this video, ASNC is a topic that deserves more attention!
Excellent! Lots of ground covered both on foot and on different topics. Reminds us of the fluidity of language when only a minority of people write a language. To his point of the lack of true bi-linguarism. As a teacher, one can not expect a two students each of whom speaks both Spanish and English to have the same number English and Spanish words in mind. Even in the same family one brother will have far more English or Spanish words than the other. One generally excels in one language and the other in the other. In a truly mixed Texas neighborhood, an Anglo with a quick ear can end up speaking better Spanish than his Tejano friend.
Strangely enjoyable video; thanks for making it!
One aspect of mutual intelligibility is often being forgotten. The factor of exposure. I am Swiss and was growing up with Swiss German as my mother tongue. Because Swiss people watch a lot of German TV, we are exposed to standard German from a very young age, and I cannot recall that I ever struggled to understand it as a child. However, a German with no previous exposure to Swiss German (and not from the southwestern part of Germany where they speak similar dialects), will not understand Swiss German at all, at least at first. I heard similar things from Norwegians who grow up watching a lot of Swedish TV: the Norwegians seem to be able to understand Swedish much more easily than Swedes do Norwegian. This is most likely the reason why you as a Dutch guy find it relatively easy to understand German, whereas I, as a native German and Swiss German speaker struggle with understanding Dutch, at least when it's spoken at a regular pace.
I can understand some Dutch because I learned German. A very interesting concept of a language is Interlingua, which is a kind of version of what Latin might be like now if it had continued, I have seen an interlingua speaker converse with portuguese speakers and I could understand what he was saying too from my familiarity with French and the latin influences on English.
In other words what an Italian speaker would be.
inregionecaecorum What do you mean by “if it had continued”? It has, it’s the Romance languages.
Fantastic! Thank you Hilbert
Been waiting for this video forever! Thank you!
Been watching your videos for a while now and love them mate, realised early in the video you were walking around Prudhoe. Grew up here all my life.
I didn't know that there were references to translators for Old Irish and Latin but for Old Norse when ANglo-Saxon folk met them. That's very telling. I also learnt that many children of Danes born on this island had ENglish mothers as very few Scandinavian women came here.
What a fantastic video! Handsome guy; enthusiastic explainer; beautiful scenery; the encouragement to do some healthy walking; loads of fascinating facts about Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon that I didn't know; loads of facts about the general history of the time that I didn't know... what's not to like?
Ic þancie þē!
How similar was Old English (West Saxon) to Old German (Saxon)?
Depends on what time period you’re talking about.
*Old Low German
@Nicholas Negosian Sadly not.
The Angels, Saxon, Juts and Frisians first arrived in Britannia right after the roman occupation ended in fourth century AD (410). Those Germanic tries brought with them their language and runic alphabet knows as the Elder Futhark runes. This very same alphabet was also used in the Danish Norse territories at that time. Remember, that the runic alphabet is not about how to spell words correctly, but spell words how they sound instead. So, yes longer distanced had slight sound and dialect variations.
Ones in Britannia the early Germanic kingdoms mingled with the remnants of Celtic languages (Welch, Cornish), Romano British languages, probably some pictish. That led to the Angle-Saxon or Northumbria runic alphabet with expanded from the previously Elder futhark of 24 runic letters to 29 - 33ish to incorporate all the new vowels and sounds needed.
In the Norse kingdoms (Danish, Scandinavia, Rus (in parts) around the 9th century the Elder Futhark alphabet was adopted to the Younger Futhark, also called Scandinavian runes, which added many more vowels like the English runes but instead of adding new runes their dropped the alphabet to only 16 letters.
The Danish Norse first invaded Britain in AD 793, that’s just under 400 years of separate language development and sound changes. Reading a Danish rune stone with a Northumbria rune understanding is manageable but there are changes.
So, could the Norse invaders understand the Anglo-Saxons? I would think so, on a rough level anyway.
Maybe a kind of creole or lingua-franc. In Texas in the 19th Century, Germans from all over came to live in Texas, staking often different dialects. My grand father from, Trier married my grandmother whose family had come from Saxony, I think. They tended to communicate in the Texas German that developed. Of course there were newspapers and schools so they both knew “school” German as well, which bled into the Texas German. What German my father remembered years later was Texas German.
@@robby319 there is a very good video by Dr. Jackson Crawford
ruclips.net/video/BaWgJq9OVGM/видео.html
as well as
ruclips.net/video/UsjSAFbBSFc/видео.html
and as a great overview to the Germanic languages in general
ruclips.net/video/g6UbGLC7YWk/видео.html
I remember a point made in the PBS series The Story of English, that the root words in old English and old Norse were mutually intellible, but the inflections were different. The result was that in English almost all inflections were dropped, and replaced by word order to understand who did what.
Excellent videos on intriguing topics.
Mother Nature, it's nice to go out for a walk and explore
You again
I swear your everywhere
I like this style of video. Seeing your face and walking around. Do more of this
As a Finnish/English bilingual person I found your comment about bilingualism interesting because I process information in neither language and think of things like blackbirds conceptually only translating them to 'rastas' or 'blackbird' when I need to communicate about the bird to another person.
I’d love for you and Simon Roper to collab on something... Anything at all!
@Basil II isn't Hilbert in Northumberland?
weren't the Northumbrians Angles? who originate from an area right next to Denmark, and have more linguistic similarities to each than the Saxons and Danes?
Yes, quite right. He came very close to mentioning that but not quite getting there - 9th century Northumbrian Anglish and Danish Norse are going to be a lot closer to each other than 9th century West Saxon and Norwegian Norse.
@@davidjames4915 I mean, given the Angles spoke Old English, it's sort of a logical fallacy to affirm that that's why it's closer. Frisian and Proto-Norse had split off before the tribes even did.
@Marcelo Henrique Soares da Silva well, yes, the Jutes came from an area right next to where the Angles came from
I enjoy your videos. Recently you've shot them while out walking. I enjoy seeing the woods you walk through, but I do get distracted by the beauty of nature and then have to bring my attention back to your thoughts.
My friend from Muenster Germany, near the Dutch Border never understood the original local dialect until she learned Dutch. Then her father and his friends conversations were no longer secret.
the dude had no script. let that sink in. his pure love of language, history, geography is infectious. he fackin lavs etttt
When you read from the book it reminded me so much of Tolkien's Elvish and the Rohirric song of Eowyn in the LotR movies. So cool.
i like your video, great topics with peaceful surrounding!support you
Excellent...thank you 👏👏👏
Love the hybrid of the vlog with your usual content
I love this video. It reminds me of Jabzy’s legendary Nagashino to Newcastle travel series!
Interesting.
Talking about Old English, pre-Norman English, made me think, again, about the "Anglish" movement, and, a reminder of just how latinized our modern language is.
How different it would be if Harold hadn't headed north to face the Norse and had just stayed put to defeat William on the beaches of Pevensey... given how close-run the eventual battle was with an exhausted, weakened English army, a decisive victory by William had Harold stayed put seems unlikely. Even if Harold had lost the realm to the Norse, the language would not have undergone heavy latinization.
Its funny how you like the sound of the old Northumbrian blokes, as when I listen to your voice that is what I pick up, a slight Geordie lilt, I don't notice any Dutch Accent. I'm an East Anglian with a bit of Estuary English (Essex Cockney).
I agree about Hilbert's accent. I had no idea he was of Dutch parentage until this video.
But don't forget Hilbert is Frisian, and Frisian sounds a lot more like English than does Dutch.
He has a segment of him and his father speaking Frisian on his Facebook page:
facebook.com/1448562625153968/videos/277376793284799
And you can go watch this rather awkward encounter between a modern day Englishman speaking Old English badly and a Frisian farmer:
ruclips.net/video/OeC1yAaWG34/видео.html
Another great vid fella. Nice to see you flying the flag For Northumberland, I am Northumbrian born and bred. loads of that lovely wild garlic down Holywell Dene :-)
May I suggest that you consider the Vicking settlements in Normandy where you can find a lot of places called with Old Norse names, or at least roots. The North Men, as they were called, started to speak Old French in 3 generations and more, depending on their condition.
Benoît de Sainte-Maure states that "Danish" was still spoken in villages in the 12th century, well after 1066 when William the Conqueror invaded England. In fact, this has been a Vicking invasion from the south, with a mix of people speaking French or Old Norse or both. Some people from Normandy must have felt "at home" in England at that time.
One thing to consider is shared words (or root words). Danes, Jutes, Anglos, Saxons and Frisians were all Germanic tribes so bound to share a lot of vocabulary in their languages. Also, there is passive vocabulary to consider. Being Danish I maintain a passive vocabulary of Norwegian and Swedish words that differ from their Danish counterpart, which helps me understand Norwegians and Swedes. Add to this the lack of hard borders and relative easy of travel by sea and perhaps by land over flat coastal plains, and you could end up with a language "continuum" where for instance neighboring Jutes and Anglos would have an easier time understanding each other. Further trade could have resulted in a type of "Lingua Franca" in the same way as in the Mediterranean, where a kind of "trade speak" evolved. But then, these are mostly speculations on my part. I am not a linguist nor a historian :P
This idea is really close to what I was talking about in my last video on Old English/Old Norse language contacts. These two languages sure were mutually intelligible, perhaps comparable to modern-day Czech/Slovak, Slovenian/Croatian etc.
I'm gonna be perfectly honest. I thought you were a two-dimensional cartoon with an immobile mouth and disembodied voice. Maybe floating over some maps. This is earth-shattering.
Hey Hilbert,
Could you make a video that focuses on the relation between the german tribes (i dont mean germanic but like modern day germany) and their relations to the anglo saxons? For example Saxon and Anglo Saxon relations during the migration times and after it?
I know Otto the great and Æthelstan had relations but i would be interested in earlier relations and if they still saw each other as related etc. cus i struggle to find info on that topic and you study anzac so ill give it a shot with this comment.
Big fan of you channel btw, keep it up.
The return of Hilbert the Hunk to the screen :D.
Always great content, skol.
Bokmaal (old Norwegian) was very similar to Danish with different spelling. Ibsen is easy for Danes to read. Nynorsk, which was created from a range of regional dialects, is much more difficult for Danes. Denmark, Norway and Sweden were one country under Margrete 1 in 14th/15th century. Then Norway and Denmark were joined for some time.
I can read nynorsk :) But I did also live in Norway for a year once.
This video reminded me of Simon Romper's channel. Maybe it's the woods and the old english
Having looked into this fairly deeply over the years and read on the topic I lean towards saying intelligibility was minimal; differentiated morphology, different syntax and word order and at times very different pronunciation. Then you can look at modern analogues; Spanish and Italian are not really mutually intelligible nor are Dutch and German and those are languages where case exists minimally to not at all. Did they understand some of what they were saying? Sure, but not enough without significant confusion at times.
I would say that they understood close to nothing at all until they adjusted to the other language.
@@meginna8354 That's an interesting observation. It is possible to "tune in" to an unknown or part-learned language in my experience.
Scotts has all of those, and people argue if it’s a different language or just a very distinctive dialect. With more conservative dialects, I can see a high degree of intelligibility.
I'm an intermediate Dutch speaker and it takes me about a week in Germany to be able speak and understand basic German (poorly). I make mistakes and miss sentences, but it works. There's a fairly predictable intuitive pattern of vowel and consonantal shifts, and German words that aren't straight cognates of the equivalent Dutch terms are often cognates with archaic terms, or are descriptive/literal enough to understand in context. Interestingly, a week out of Germany and it all goes away again. It feels like bending my Dutch into an awkward shape, or tuning a radio between channels.
@@digitalbrentable Think that is an exaggeration. Beyond very, very basic stuff, German/Dutch intelligibility is minimal. False friends abound, syntax is different and phonology, whilst predictable will not help you much on the fly in rapid conversation. The intelligibility you speak of would be of the same sort that may have been present in medieval England but if so it would not be that extensive.
It should be pointed out that ME (and consequently later English) seems to share some rather basic grammatical structure that is otherwise unique to Scandinavian languages. Not the grammar of the other Germanic languages that you would expect if its roots were from the Anglo-Saxon. Which is harder to explain, as while it is easy for loan words to slip in, especially between two very similar languages which are mutually intelligible, basic grammatical structure is far less likely to change. It would seem to indicate that ME is rather more Scandinavian based with a great deal of OE words.
To me, mutual intelligibility is only how mutually intelligible "everyday" language is; if there is enough intelligibility of the, say, 1000 most common words, that serves well enough to communicate and explain the meaning of any complex words that come up. This applies to dialects too; if someone mentions "bairns", if I don't know what that means, the other person can resort to common words, "young human". This is the same thing that happens if I say "molecular physics", and a child doesn't understand, I can explain "study of how the smallest bits of stuff that's in everything bonds together" and that gives a good enough definition to build on.
If you can do that between two languages, then to me those languages are mutually intelligible. Based on that, I imagine that there was quite a bit of intelligibility between Old Norse and Old English. Grammar is probably the biggest hurdle.
That said, even back then our languages probably had many synonyms. If you meet someone who can clearly understand some words but not others, you can just throw synonyms at them when they look like they don't get something. "His majesty... okay, um... sovereign, monarch, king, leader, ruler, bigman, country-father, landman", until they get it.
I know some Swedish and I have conversated with a German fellow who spoke only German with pretty good success. But then, he was from northern Germany. Then I tried the same in southern Germany it failed spectacularly. I couldn't make myself understood and I didn't understand them. So, are Hochdeutch and Plattdeutch different languages? To me they are.
On this basis I believe that the English speaking a language somewhat close to Anglo-Saxon and Danes could understand each other reasonably well, if they both wanted to understand each other.
To me, a Norwegian, too. Sadly Plattdeutsch seems to be on the brink of extinction. Germans who know Plattdeutsch (Low German) pick up Scandinavian remarkably fast.
The North West is closest to Dutch and less derived accents (in older, more rural people) would be the most accessible.
Hochdeutsch is the standard "language" thought throughout, uses in media and promoted along with unity... "platt"/lower german refers to the northern third of accents, while the southern most third is commonly lumped in the with Bavarian/Swiss German for being equally divergent.
There have been Sociology/cultural anthropology studies made to trace language diversity in some states (around universitys that could secure funding), who found trade routs kept dialects close over surprising distances, while small inconveniences like creeks or mountains could drastically reduce commonalitys.
He was probably speaking Plattdeutsch rather than Hochdeutsch. Plattdeutsch hasn’t had the same sound changes. Even after three years of German in high school, I find Plattdeutsch easier to understand.
@@hannem9799 none of these accents had big populations when they were first recorded, the political and economic power that established one over the others hasn't been backed by any population numbers... But yes, I have a hard time shifting my vouls back towards my grandparents and usually take 3 days.
@@kokofan50, well, this happened in Lübeck and I am pretty certain he was local...
What I meant with that anecdote was that there is a huge difference between Hoch- and Plattdeutsch. And the closer you get to Denmark the more it resembles Scandinavian languages.
I think that danes and anglo-saxons were able to communicate. They just had to speak more simple sentences backing them up with gestures.
I am a native Finnish speaker and even though Estonian is closely related to Finnish, I can't understand almost anything if an Estonian speaks naturally like he would to another Estonian. If we sit down to discuss then we can understand each other. We just have to keep things simple and slow our speech.
In my mind I have a lot of stuff that I think of as both Dutch and English (and sometimes Frisian, but that one I mostly just use for sentences and not actually identifying objects).
I grew up in Jutland in an area where many old people still spoke old jutish dialect,complet different to danish even in grammar. That area is just north of the area where the anglo came from. To my knowledge the anglo lived up in Northumbria where the danes (jutes) settled so they have maybe been able to understand each other. There has only been 200-300 years gap between their arrivals in England or should I say Meadowland( meadow in danish is eng)
This is an important point I think. The old dialects of West Jutland are strikingly more similar to English in a number of ways compared to standard Danish.
And you've doubtless heard the stories of how, when they went to Narvik during WWII, men from your part of England were able, with a little trouble, to talk to the Norwegians. If that was true in 1940, it must have been a good deal easier a thousand years earlier.
That is incredible; I did not know this!
That's an amazing story!!
Do you have any source for this? Would love to read more about it
An urban legend I'm afraid...
Sure, English speakers will be able to identify loads of Norwegian words. Typically: body parts, leaf trees, basic food...
And yes, Northumbrian pronounciation (particularly vowels/diphtongs) is very Norwegian-like. I hope these four examples are correct:
"Blind" is pronounced like Norwegian "Blind" (corresponding to English "Wind").
"House" is pronounced like Norwegian "Hus" (like "Hoose").
"Book" is pronounced like Norwegian "Bok" (long vowel).
"Ball" is pronounced like Norwegian "Ball" (A like in "Fast", not like in "Wall").
And there's some dialect words shared with Norwegian.
But all in all, I'm afraid the German occupant got more out of spoken Norwegian than the Northumbrian liberator...
I have headed that fishermen from west cost of Sweden could speech to scotch fishermen
in the 19th century, without learn English in school
lmao during a late night scouring for old english/old norse language material this video came up as recommended, but the videos I was watching were years old, so I assumed this was too ... only to see it now and realise it was brand new! :P
There is also the possibility of speakers of one language understand another language more easily than speakers of the other language. Famously, the Portuguese understand Spanish better than Spaniards understand Portuguese.
Similarly, I think that both the Norwegians and the Swedes would agree that the Norwegians understand Swedish than the other way around which makes perfect sense when one considers all the dialects of Norwegian that existed until recently, fewer today, requiring the ability to move between accents facilely. The facility for Danish by the Norwegians may have more to do with the long political union between the two countries. Oddly, my Norwegian grandfather could understand the Danes who lived next door on the left but found he could understand little of the Icelandic spoken by the Icelanders who lived next door on the right.
My Mother and hers were born in Arendal which had been a Danish administrative town, has its own peculiar accent and some people from other parts of the country say they speak Danish there, though I can plainly hear the difference though I have only a limited understanding of the language. Similarly, my ancestors who were born north of the Arctic Circle found the accent spoken in Oslo odd as peculiar and a source for mirth. (of course, they had come to the US before the language reform.
I do though know a few useful prefixes and suffixes. The suffix for town or city is -by, hence Derby. Vik- means cove or by extension a synonym for fjord. (vowel with no English equivalent)y- is island, hence Jersey, Guernsey, and Orkney among others. And -ing means people or people of. Thus Viking may have originally used to make a distinction from the Danes and Swedes.
That’s a good point you make about being bilingual. Being a multi lingual person I totally understand that a blackbird might be a black bird or “svarttrast”, “svarttrost”, “solsort” or “koltrast” depending who I am speaking to or where I am.
I do find this interesting, sorry to bang on. In the book The Story of English by Robert MacNeil, Robert McCrum, and William Cran, published in 1986 they authors do assert that English is a hybrid of Norse and Anglo-Saxon.
Being a fan of the Finnish band Nightwish I watched lead singer Floor Jansen on the Dutch TV show Beste Zangers. Listening to the conversations in Dutch .. it struck me that I kept feeling that I could ** almost ** understand .. or .. more correctly .. felt I SHOULD understand .. but it was .. just .. out of reach of my English speaking mind.
Amazing! Cheers.
knowing both english and deutsch made visiting the NL much much easier
I know old English used the word Horse, and Old Norse used Hros for horse Old English and Old Fris is very close together. there is an old poem: Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fris.
If it helps, "horse" isn't from the Latin side of English. That's "equus", but we have the word "equestrian" because of it... But that in itself was a type of noble in the Roman Republic. But then there were also "Equites", a rank in the manipular legions. English just took both apparently! 😅
It's logical, but it can be a bit of a rabbit hole!
The existence of a tradition of alliterative verse in Germanic languages is important. What is known about this verse suggests that it was a formal register of language and thus was linguistically conservative overall. In late antiquity, a speaker of a Germanic language who was raised as a noble would have been familiar with such verse, and it wouldn't be surprising if such a person had learned to perform alliterative verse as part of the education process. In this regard, it is noteworthy that the Old English term scop, which signifies a poet of alliterative verse, is cognate with the early modern German Schof, which signifies a lawyer of the Vehmic courts. If it is the case that a traditional upbringing of a Germanic gentleman of late antiquity included training in alliterative verse, then it may be that this form of language was used to communicate with tribes that spoke different dialects (as well as being used as the language of formal occasions). An analogy would be standard Modern English as opposed to casual Modern English(es), which is (are) more location-specific. Thus, a person from rural Alabama who is casually speaking the local dialect might not be mutually intelligible to a person from rural Scotland who is casually speaking the local dialect. But a person from rural Alabama and a person from rural Scotland can readily communicate with each other if both are sufficiently educated to be fluent in standard English.
It's interesting that you associate different things in the different languages. The blackbird being primarily dutch example makes sense in the context you explained but as bi-lingual English/Spanish for me the object is essentially English or Spanish dependent on situation.
I was brought up in England and spoke Spanish at home so learnt both simultaneously from TV/school and family. Me and my sister would speak in English and turn mid sentence to our dad and continue in Spanish as if the same language
So to me a bat in England is a bat. But when in Spain or even speaking to a Spaniard in England it's just 'murcielago' with no real thought or translation.
The only exception is things like 'chorizo', 'paella', 'japelenos', 'fajita'which even in England to English people I say in Spanish
'choreetho' and 'paeya' 'halepeños' 'faheeta'
Old Frisian, Old Saxon and Old English had some traits in common with the North Germanic languages, espcially the Anglian dialects of Old English, I'd say speakers of Old east Norse whom settled in eastern England would have had little to no issue communicating with speakers of Old Northumbrian or Mercian after some time together, the languages had a great level of similarity vocabulary wise and the common form of to be being rendered as 'eāron' in Old English and 'erum' in old East Norse, many words would be paralleled in both languages, everyday words like 'shirt' 'day' 'cow' 'horse' 'milk' etc are found in similar forms in both languages. Part of the reason for the erosion of the Old English inflections could be due to the influence of the Norse living in the Danelaw who found the Old English inflections too complicated as they tried to learn the language. Ingvaeonic the purported language family of the north-sea Germanic tongues was situated such that they had some features in common with north Germanic.
Informative video during a very lovely walk. Loved the forest setting, btw.
As far as what you discuss goes, I have some questions and I'd appreciate hearing your thoughts on the matter. It has often been said that QEI was a voracious reader and very capable writer in her own right. In addition it is documented that she knew several languages such as French, Spanish (??) and Italian just to name a few.
That being said if you could go back in time and analyze part of her upbringing and education how far back would you guess SHE could go in life and still be able to understand others that came before her? Would you say perhaps the 12th or 13th century or is that too far back?
Similarly, between us and her time (the 16th century) how far back can modern man go and understand written and spoken language? I'd like to hear your thoughts.
Thanks for considering my questions.
Hi from Finlnd🇫🇮 I was little surpriest I understood old english but maybe Its cause I have learnt swedish and german too.
Hello from the Kingdom of East Anglia (Thetford , Norfolk)