Not necessarily. RP speakers are not the only accent elitists. Plenty of SSB and near-RP speakers look down upon as RP as inferior to their own speech. Usually they call it pretentious or silly or old fashioned instead of stupid or lazy but that does not make their superiority complex any less prescriptivist. Some with pure regional accents believe that the best people speak with pure regional accents and anyone with any non-regional features is a less grounded, less honest, social climber. The "my own speech is the yardstick" attitude is found in every accent community, it just doesn't use the same post-hoc rationalisations within them all because sociological circumstances don't allow the same ones to work within them all. The character in question was disparaging newer developments, which can be used to elevate many different British accents, because by being selective with data and with which time period and location you choose as the baseline, you can make arguments for many different British accents being the "least changed". Including most accents with some T-dropping or glottal stopping.
The skit at the end was absolutely sublime. Although you could tell from the content of the conversation that it was a parody, the voices, the audio, just absolutely, absolutely felt like something out of an old recording. The oldtimey smug attitude too felt so real, with the diction, the word choices really selling it, making the parody all the more hilarious. Most people who would do such a thing, trying to parody an old recording, just don't know how to get the voice to sound real, and it ends up sounding cartoonish. Also, I'm not a video expert at all, but your film emulation there had be wondering if you actually shot that on film. The black & white filters people lazily use just don't look like actual film whatsoever, but your footage had me fooled.
Fascinating and charming as usual. I'll just add that in my dialect (Warshington State, fifties) an "oaf" was not only male and clumsy, but also probably overweight. cheers from rainy Vienna, Scott
I reckon I'm fifteen years or so older than Simon, but from a similar broad part of the world to him. To me "oaf" does have a sense of the unintelligent as Simon says, but it definitely also contains the sense of being brutish, inelegant, ogreish, unwieldy.
Fascinating as always. Loved the skit at the end - the Audio edit, the black and white, the naturalistic speech; I can see you had a very specific idea and it worked so well!
The change of the L sound to a vowel is interesting. A friend of mine from Essex used to exhibit this change in words like "milk" (miwk). It is also the basis of the plural of some words in French that end vowel +L in the singular (cheval - chevaux). In renaissance French and earlier you would see "chevals", but this changes as the pronunciation did.
I think we should ask Mr BlackAndWhite for his opinion on the displacement of the verb ‘lend’ by the noun ‘loan’ used as a verb, as evidenced by Simon in this video. I fear Mr B&W’s head might explode.
To be honest I’m so glad you’ve made the last couple videos about language. You briefly seemed like you were pivoting in a different direction that’s much more saturated on RUclips. Makes my day when one of these is released!
I know it's not the main point of the video, but like a lot of people are saying, the skit at the end was very well written and portrayed. I have worked with so many people like this who have very little understanding of the thing they are arguing about, and are so stuck in their own small circle that they cannot fathom why they are bias towards something.
God, the way politics is at the moment! There is no compromise any more. People are like: I am right, I don't need to hear any evidence or opposing views, I know my point of view/beliefs are correct. I don't need to question them. It's a closed book for many people.
As an Australian, I would say 'tour' and 'cure' with two syllables like a Scot, but many people (like my brother) would say them your way with only one syllable.
I'm looking forward to the video on lexical diffusion. I suppose a third important category of exceptions to sound change is paradigmatic levelling whereby the different grammatical forms (e.g. conjugations or declensions) of a word tend to become more alike than regular sound change would suggest because they are related in the speakers' minds. This is where phonology and morphology interact and mesh with each other.
I love how the skit is basically the "prescriptive vs descriptive" war in a nutshell. Sidenote: I'd love to see a video breakdown of JRR Tolkien's accent.
I really like your videos, but, as a linguist (MA, MRes) I would really like to see you adopt the word 'variety' across the board when referencing them - I know it's more of a sociolinguistics thing, and absolutely no hate or anything that you've not done so already, but I just feel like given the size of your channel it would be nice to spread 'variety' as a bit more to the public ! :)
There’s a lot of that going on in England too, I strongly suspect it’s due to Jamaican influence, they’ve long said ‘dr’ as ‘jr’ and ‘tr’ (and even ‘thr’) as ‘chr’. Sometimes they drop the ‘r’ altogether, so ‘drive through’ becomes ‘jive chew’ and ‘tree’ becomes ‘chee’.
It was very nice to see someone talk about dialectal borrowing! Now, I'm only a enthusiast, so I don't exactly have anything to back this up with, but regarding your second point (sound changes "diffusing" through the language itself) I suspect it is not entirely random which words will be affected by the sound change and not. So you could still have an "exception-free" change, just a more restricted one? Taking your example, it seems to me that the words with an earlier /ʊə/ diphthong which haven't merged with /oː/ yet are exactly those where the vowel is preceded by /j/ (like *cure* and *pure*). It sounds like the vowel is dragged forward by the /j/ towards [ɵ] as you notated it. Since English isn't my first language (nor do I live in Britain) I find it hard to hear the sound of these words in my head, but I guess that people who still pronounce *pure* and *cure* differently from *bore* and *score* may still pronounce *mature* and *endure* with /oː/ -- since the /tj/ and /dj/ clusters in those words have assimilated to /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, the vowel is not preceded by a /j/ and is free to merge. Or am I wrong there? I would like to know.
I was hoping you'd talk about what decides whether a certain word changes earlier or later on during the 'productive' period. For example, for the p > f change, how come 'happy' was last? Are there any factors besides word frequency? Could perceived 'formality' of a term be involved too? What else? that kind of thing. Great video overall though!
The last bit was amazing. The dialog sounds 100% natural. Do you write the pauses, stutter, mid-sentence rephrasing,etc. as part of the script or you just improvise?
If anyone's curious about a possible historical example of dialectal borrowing, the Indo Aryan languages (Punjabi, Hindi-Urdu, Bangla, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhala, Gujarati, Kashmiri etc.) may be an example of it, though going back quite far to before the far older attested Indo Aryan languages like Sanskrit or Pali. All the way back in Proto Indo Iranian, the shared ancestor of the aforementioned Indo Aryan languages and also the Iranian languages (Avestan, Old Persian, Farsi, Kurdish, Balochi, Ossetian, Pashtun, and more). During the changes from Proto Indo European to Proto Indo Iranian the reconstructed sound *r and *l merged into just *r. However Indo Aryan languages have an /l/ sound corresponding to *l only sometimes quite rarely. So it's believed that Proto Indo Aryan contains some words from a dialect of Proto Indo Iranian that didn't survive time but maintained the *l *r distinction.
I've noticed a kind of lexical diffusion in my own idiolect which might provide some insights into the factors that influence which words change first. I'm from South Australia where, unlike the eastern states, we pronounce words like 'dance', 'plant', 'answer', and 'example' with [äː] instead of [æː]. This is how I grew up speaking. But since about 8 years ago I've been in regular contact with the eastern states as a working musician/producer, and now I usually say [dæːns] because when I use that word I'm usually talking to other music people from the east coast. At first I think I only did it when talking to east coast people, I guess as a way of mirroring them and fitting in, but eventually it just became how I say it with anyone. It's been a gradual switch that I just let happen because I don't feel attached to [däːns]. But I haven't felt the same influence on how I say the other [äː] words, maybe because I still use them regularly with other SA English speakers. If I worked interstate as a gardener the change probably would've happened with 'plant' instead of 'dance' 🤔
In my Australian accent, I say sure the same as shore but always use the CURE vowel in pure. (I've heard cultivated speakers say sure the older way.) In chaff, I use the first vowel in father, as in BATH/PALM. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary agrees that chaff uses that vowel, identifying it as the (non-rhotic) vowel in part.
I have a (Sydney) Australian accent, and I definitely pronounce 'chaff' with the 'TRAP' vowel rather than the 'BATH' vowel... and I don't think I've even heard someone say it the other way. Would you use the 'BATH' vowel even in the phrase 'to sort the wheat from the chaff'? I'm also curious as to whether your accent comes from farther south than Sydney. I've noticed that more southern Aussie accents tend to more often opt for the 'BATH' vowel in words that I would pronounce with the 'TRAP' vowel.
@@jasofthehollowWhich BATH vowel do you use though? Does it match TRAP or PALM? In Adelaide, almost everyone uses the PALM vowel in "graph". Within NSW, my dad always said there was a speech divide around Newcastle. He grew up further north and found he had to learn to talk differently in Sydney. (Side note: Because the /l/ can change the quality of the vowel before it in some accents, speech therapists prefer to use the first vowel in FATHER instead of PALM.)
@@ARNervebagI'm originally from western Sydney but I lived in Qld for a decade and now I'm in WA. Yes, I would use the PALM/BATH vowel in "chaff", just as the Macquarie Dictionary says we do. If you want to understand what's going on here, go to Wikipedia & look up "Variation in Australian English", then the "Phonology" section down the bottom. It has a chart comparing these vowels in 7 words across 5 of the eastern capitals. While I have you, do you distinguish "hour" from "our"? I do but Macquarie says they're identical.
@@LearnRunes Oh yeah, right, of course... I was just assuming that the 'BATH' vowel was the one in 'PALM' and 'FATHER'... which in retrospect I shouldn't have! I've definitely noticed that friends from Newcastle pronounce a whole bunch of words differently compared to me! Obviously there's not a single Aussie accent, so the Macq Dictionary simply can't be reflecting Aussie pronunciation per se (apparently it also plays pretty loose with the IPA phonetics). Even so, I've never heard 'chaff' spoken your way 'in the wild'.
In AmE, "sure" can be pronounced either ʃəɹ or ʃɔɹ (I prefer the former) and "lure" can be pronounced either ləɹ or lʉwəɹ (I prefer the former when saying the verb, but the latter when talking about the noun "fishing lure"). I also pronounce "manure" as mʌnʉwəɹ. For "pure" I would pronounce pjəɹ, but for "poor" I would pronounce pɔr. Relatedly, this sound change is probably the same reason the "t" palatalizes in "manufacture" (ʧəɹ). For all(?) Latinate words (fracture, juncture, etc.), I would say əɹ. As you can see, it's all mixed up in my dialect. The ʉwəɹ ones might come from an attempt to say the ʊɹ of other dialects. I don't have that sound in my dialect, so perhaps that is why it becomes əɹ or ʉwəɹ. Or maybe ʉwəɹ begot ʊəɹ which begot ʊɹ əɹ and ɔɹ. I suspect the palatal sound that tends to be in front comes from a latent jʉw. Relatedly I say "wool" as wəl̩ instead of using (the more traditional) ʊ. I also say "dull" and "lull" as əl̩ instead of ʌl̩. I still say ʊ in other contexts such as "wood" "hood" or "could". For reference, I grew up in the Southeast US but moved to the Northeast when I was 12.
In my variety of American English, "poor" is [pʰɔɹ] but all the other [ʊɹ] words have [ʊɹ]~[ɚ]. "Sure" is [ʃʊɹ]~[ʃɚ], "pure" is [pʰjʊɹ]~[pʰjɚ], "cure" is [kʰjʊɹ]~[kʰjɚ]. With certain words, like "lure", "manure", "tour", [ʊɹ] is required and it cannot be reduced to [ɚ].
@@AtomikNYit's interesting how we all have slightly different pronunciations here! 'Poor' and 'tour' rhyme with [ɔɹ] 'Sure' is either [ɚ] or [ɔɹ] in exaggerated speech 'Pure' is odd for me, it can be [pʰjɚ] but more often it's [pʰiɹ], sounding like 'peer' 'manure' always sounds like sewer 'sewer' [ʉwɚ] 'lure' can sound also like 'sewer', but in quick speech it's [ɚ] -Bay Area Californian
@@AtomikNY "tour" couldn't be regular [tjɹ] because of the phonotactic restrictions on Cj clusters in American English. Other examples are "endure" and "lure". These get [uɹ]. Sure, on the other hand, gets [ʃɹ]. But poor gets [pʰɔɹ] because regular [pjɹ] would cause it to merge with "pure". Poor is definitely FORCE set for USAns that have the NORTH/FORCE distinction. This seems to be true for both African-American and New York City versions of the split.
Thank you. I appreciate that. :) Hat-guy was fun too. Man, that strikes some memories up. I've been on both sides of that. Not the same script, but the meaning was the same. What I'm used to is good. What I'm not used to is wrong.
Oaf was a feature of my northern grandparents speech but not my southern ones, they were all born around 1910. My parents generation used it no matter where they came from so I think it was probably spread by radio shows.
Interestingly, in my diaclect, the -ure /jʊə/ sound has merged with -eer /iɚ/ so that 'pure' is homophonous with 'peer'/'pier', 'cure' sounds like "keer", 'fury' like "feery", etc However, if the yod coalesces, then the vowel just becomes /ɝ/, so that 'sure' is /ʃɝ/ and not /ʃiɚ/
Here in the south of the US we have a similar situation with the "price" vowel. For myself it depends on the word and context (register) whether or not I use the dipthong or monothong. In an informal situation in the word "I" I will almost always use the monothong, but in formal situtations it varies. And for the word "price" i will tend towards the dipthong in both formal and informal contexts. None of my usage is driven by a will to talk one way or another, it all happens subconsciously.
A good example of cross-dialect borrowing causing an exception to a rule is the word "one", from Old English "an" (/ɑːn/). Mercian Old English /ɑː/ regularly becomes the diphthong we hear in words like "bone" and "stone" (OE "ban", "stan"), so the inherited form should be a homophone of "own". But with this word specifically, the native form was replaced by a loan from a different dialect (I want to say it was a West Country Middle English dialect?) between late Middle English and early Modern English. Funny enough, we still have words that were derived from the pre-borrowing form that have the expected pronunciation though, like "alone" and "only".
Does such an analysis explain why some people, generally Southern, say ‘wun’ with the CUT vowel (typically the same as the COMMA vowel (schwa) these days though) and some, generally Northern, say ‘won’ with the LOT vowel? There are also some Northerners who use the PUT vowel and pronunciations can vary a lot from person to person in the West Midlands and East Anglia (I’m personally from the West Mids and I use the LOT vowel).
I find the trap/bath split so interesting. Especially considering it hasn't spread to the North of England, with everything being so interconnected now. If you add the American English pronunciation of the A in 'bath' into the mix, it makes me wonder if globalisation will lead to the southern English ɑː dying out? Saying that it will probably be a different sound completely by the time that would happen.
I like L vocalisation, and especially in non-Indo-European languages: in Veps L turned velar and vocalised in many places as well: Finnish jalka 'leg' correspondes in Standard Veps to jaug, and in Southern Veps it monophtongised much like in Scots, becoming jaag, which is I mean cool as hell
A cool example from Estonian is the loss of word-final -n, only happening in nouns and not verbs. So compare Estonian and Finnish: lapse - lapsen - "of the/a child", genitive of laps/lapsi "child" elän - elan - "I live", 1st person singular present indicative of elada/elää "to live" The likely reason for this is is that the loss in nouns did not cause any syncretism - the genitive is already distinguished by the weak grade. While in verbs it would cause many different forms to become the same.
is that a pair of giant field glasses on the shelf on the left of the screen (to your right)? we have a really old pair and they're great for looking at the night sky if you don't have a telescope. we call them 'bignoculars' 😅
What is the queen's sister, in relation to the workers? It could also happen that people refused to pronounce "dipper" as "differ", because there already is a word "differ", and the meanings differ. The inherited doublet of "pork" is "farrow".
The word 'sure' has the secondary meaning of "I can accept what you said." I think I tend to pronounce the word slightly differently. It is shorter, though that may be the context, because I am trying to move the conversation on.
Language does not always simplify phonetics. It may add complexity to avoiding ambiguity. I live how languages basically work as a collective social software, with implicit rules that many are not aware of consciously, and yet they respect.
Obviously sound changes take time, years or decades or even longer, and also have to work their way through words but sometimes also through geography. A certain change may start in the east en work westward for example. Also changes may start in certain social circles, like upper or lower social classes and work their way through all classes. All this takes time and makes it more complex, its not like turning a switch. In this way, certain vowels became diphtongs in Dutch in the late middle ages.
Wouldn't one possible reason for exceptions be that if a sound change happened, the result would be too close of even identical to an already existing word?
@@francesconicoletti2547 I am not arguing either, not that strongly, no idea where you are pulling that from. I am arguing that in some cases the speakers might avoid, consciously or unconsciously, going for the sound changes because of the collisions.
13:34 Ha ha ha ha ha 14:13 “Those sound changes which have happened recently are bad. Those which happened a relatively long time ago are acceptable.” Ha ha ha ha ha
Do some words ever resist sound changes to avoid homophony? I find in my own speech if I'm misunderstood I'll catch myself saying something like "no, not pour, poor!" with an exaggerated pronunciation difference when often in my rapid speech they're pronounced almost the same, and I wonder if the only thing keeping me from completely merging them is an effort to keep them distinct words.
Simon - have you noticed a sound change taking place currently in which the "s" sound is being replaced, by some speakers, with a "sh" sound, albeit with a sort of stifled "sh". For example, shtudent, ashume.
In my dialect, I have noticed one word that seems to resist a regular sound change. In almost all varieties of North American English, the sequence /æn/ is regularly pronounced [ẽə̃n] as in "pan" [pʰẽə̃n], "land" [lẽə̃nd], "manner" [ˈmẽə̃nɚ], etc. However, I pronounce "piano" as [pʰiˈænoʊ]. I think I may have inherited this single word from the Long Island dialect of my dad's family, since they gave us a piano when I was a kid.
Simon I have a question that has been bugging me. First I would like to say I flogged the dog in the fog for chasing the hog through the bog knocking the frog off the log. With that said, why the hell does English have dog, frog, and hog and other Germanic languages do not? Is it from the Celtic languages? I also wonder if flog, fog, bog, and log have similar origins? I would love to see a video about this. Love your videos. My West Texas accent would probably drive you mad.
@@beckyholderbach6665 I just made up that stupid saying. Knock was just used to tie the stupid phrase together. In West Texas all those sounds are very similar. Oh and I remembered grog. Not sure though. 🤣 Now I'm trying to say those words in an upstate NY accent. 🤣🤣 I'm failing miserably.
Genius. Does the Mr. Right character have a name? Clearly deserves a spin-off series.
I demand more!
@@InRegardsToMetal I second.
@@InRegardsToMetal I theerd
@@hond654i forth
I propose Henry Higgins as a name
the little skit at the end was amazing
I literally had that conversation on orthography and language in general with my dad. Took him quite a while to realize new=\=bad
Ur dad has a wrinkly amygdala
I was kind of expecting the blue hat to pop back up there. 🙂
So good! About to share the video just for that!
Makes a perfect point too.
Lovely bit of comedy at the end there
I’m sure,it is😂😂😂
14:56 I reckon this fellow would be absolutely _livid_ at himself for the "dropped t" here. 😉
Not necessarily. RP speakers are not the only accent elitists.
Plenty of SSB and near-RP speakers look down upon as RP as inferior to their own speech. Usually they call it pretentious or silly or old fashioned instead of stupid or lazy but that does not make their superiority complex any less prescriptivist.
Some with pure regional accents believe that the best people speak with pure regional accents and anyone with any non-regional features is a less grounded, less honest, social climber.
The "my own speech is the yardstick" attitude is found in every accent community, it just doesn't use the same post-hoc rationalisations within them all because sociological circumstances don't allow the same ones to work within them all.
The character in question was disparaging newer developments, which can be used to elevate many different British accents, because by being selective with data and with which time period and location you choose as the baseline, you can make arguments for many different British accents being the "least changed". Including most accents with some T-dropping or glottal stopping.
The skit at the end was absolutely sublime. Although you could tell from the content of the conversation that it was a parody, the voices, the audio, just absolutely, absolutely felt like something out of an old recording. The oldtimey smug attitude too felt so real, with the diction, the word choices really selling it, making the parody all the more hilarious. Most people who would do such a thing, trying to parody an old recording, just don't know how to get the voice to sound real, and it ends up sounding cartoonish. Also, I'm not a video expert at all, but your film emulation there had be wondering if you actually shot that on film. The black & white filters people lazily use just don't look like actual film whatsoever, but your footage had me fooled.
Armchair flatcap man is my favourite Simon character, long may this curmudgeon reign
Fascinating and charming as usual. I'll just add that in my dialect (Warshington State, fifties) an "oaf" was not only male and clumsy, but also probably overweight.
cheers from rainy Vienna, Scott
I reckon I'm fifteen years or so older than Simon, but from a similar broad part of the world to him. To me "oaf" does have a sense of the unintelligent as Simon says, but it definitely also contains the sense of being brutish, inelegant, ogreish, unwieldy.
@@zak3744 South African here, and my understanding of the word is just as yours
@@zak3744 I'm mid-20s and from the American northwest coast, and my understanding is about the same as yours
That ending was quite funny.
But I must say that I don’t like blank beige screens as much as footage of bugs and leaves.
that skit at the end, fantastic acting and writing. bravo
The little skit really cracked me up! Love that you found a way to inject a bit of cheek without really disrupting your normal cool, low-energy style.
Fascinating as always. Loved the skit at the end - the Audio edit, the black and white, the naturalistic speech; I can see you had a very specific idea and it worked so well!
The little skit at the end strongly reminds me of the kind of thing that the pianist Glenn Gould did.
I like how smoking make the scene more authentic.
10:53 caught me off guard, amazing stuff.
The change of the L sound to a vowel is interesting. A friend of mine from Essex used to exhibit this change in words like "milk" (miwk). It is also the basis of the plural of some words in French that end vowel +L in the singular (cheval - chevaux). In renaissance French and earlier you would see "chevals", but this changes as the pronunciation did.
In brazilian portuguese is also the norm, the "normal" is the "normau"
The end bit reminded me of humorous mockumentaries like "This is Spinal Tap" and "A Mighty Wind". 🤣
honestly i can't wait for english to become grunts and hoots. i welcome this supposedly inevitable future
This has already happened to Danish
could be argued that it is even now.
Aren't all languages basically just an ape yelling nonsense?
I wonder what English would look like if people had kept the Late West Saxon standard and gone the Icelandic route.
I, for one, welcome our new grunt and hoot overlords.
i never thought abt the etymology of "oaf". i think we should start using the word to mean 'changeling' again
I think we should ask Mr BlackAndWhite for his opinion on the displacement of the verb ‘lend’ by the noun ‘loan’ used as a verb, as evidenced by Simon in this video. I fear Mr B&W’s head might explode.
Love the ending - You need to do a video on diachronicity of cigarette-holding
To be honest I’m so glad you’ve made the last couple videos about language. You briefly seemed like you were pivoting in a different direction that’s much more saturated on RUclips. Makes my day when one of these is released!
That last bit was amazing
Oh, bravo! The 60's man skit is genius. I shall say shewer instead of sure from now on
I know it's not the main point of the video, but like a lot of people are saying, the skit at the end was very well written and portrayed.
I have worked with so many people like this who have very little understanding of the thing they are arguing about, and are so stuck in their own small circle that they cannot fathom why they are bias towards something.
God, the way politics is at the moment! There is no compromise any more. People are like: I am right, I don't need to hear any evidence or opposing views, I know my point of view/beliefs are correct. I don't need to question them. It's a closed book for many people.
I love the skit at the end, brilliantly done! 👍⭐️
As an Australian, I would say 'tour' and 'cure' with two syllables like a Scot, but many people (like my brother) would say them your way with only one syllable.
I'm looking forward to the video on lexical diffusion.
I suppose a third important category of exceptions to sound change is paradigmatic levelling whereby the different grammatical forms (e.g. conjugations or declensions) of a word tend to become more alike than regular sound change would suggest because they are related in the speakers' minds. This is where phonology and morphology interact and mesh with each other.
Elegant use of an alternative personality. I can see myself slipping into such moods, though the experience seems psychologically risky.
the sketch at the end elevates this already good video to an excellent once
We need more of "chronicle Simon"!
I love how the skit is basically the "prescriptive vs descriptive" war in a nutshell.
Sidenote: I'd love to see a video breakdown of JRR Tolkien's accent.
Old Simon's own feeling is clearly a finest piece of scientific discovery.
Very interesting and well written. The sketch at the end Nadeem laugh, brilliant.
I really like your videos, but, as a linguist (MA, MRes) I would really like to see you adopt the word 'variety' across the board when referencing them - I know it's more of a sociolinguistics thing, and absolutely no hate or anything that you've not done so already, but I just feel like given the size of your channel it would be nice to spread 'variety' as a bit more to the public ! :)
Yes variety is such a useful term, I wish it was more widespread amongst non socio linguists.
Guy at the end is my mother insisting she (American) is the only person in the country whose tr- sounds aren't trending towards chr-
There’s a lot of that going on in England too, I strongly suspect it’s due to Jamaican influence, they’ve long said ‘dr’ as ‘jr’ and ‘tr’ (and even ‘thr’) as ‘chr’. Sometimes they drop the ‘r’ altogether, so ‘drive through’ becomes ‘jive chew’ and ‘tree’ becomes ‘chee’.
Please more on why sound changes happen🙏❤️
I loved that skit at the end acmeszkf
you got the black and white vintage effect pretty good
Convincing explanation, and such a fun character! Thanks.
It was very nice to see someone talk about dialectal borrowing! Now, I'm only a enthusiast, so I don't exactly have anything to back this up with, but regarding your second point (sound changes "diffusing" through the language itself) I suspect it is not entirely random which words will be affected by the sound change and not. So you could still have an "exception-free" change, just a more restricted one?
Taking your example, it seems to me that the words with an earlier /ʊə/ diphthong which haven't merged with /oː/ yet are exactly those where the vowel is preceded by /j/ (like *cure* and *pure*). It sounds like the vowel is dragged forward by the /j/ towards [ɵ] as you notated it.
Since English isn't my first language (nor do I live in Britain) I find it hard to hear the sound of these words in my head, but I guess that people who still pronounce *pure* and *cure* differently from *bore* and *score* may still pronounce *mature* and *endure* with /oː/ -- since the /tj/ and /dj/ clusters in those words have assimilated to /tʃ/ and /dʒ/, the vowel is not preceded by a /j/ and is free to merge. Or am I wrong there? I would like to know.
I was hoping you'd talk about what decides whether a certain word changes earlier or later on during the 'productive' period. For example, for the p > f change, how come 'happy' was last? Are there any factors besides word frequency? Could perceived 'formality' of a term be involved too? What else?
that kind of thing. Great video overall though!
The last bit was amazing. The dialog sounds 100% natural. Do you write the pauses, stutter, mid-sentence rephrasing,etc. as part of the script or you just improvise?
I never realized how American baseball caps look to me until Simon caught me off guard in one
If anyone's curious about a possible historical example of dialectal borrowing, the Indo Aryan languages (Punjabi, Hindi-Urdu, Bangla, Marathi, Nepali, Sinhala, Gujarati, Kashmiri etc.) may be an example of it, though going back quite far to before the far older attested Indo Aryan languages like Sanskrit or Pali. All the way back in Proto Indo Iranian, the shared ancestor of the aforementioned Indo Aryan languages and also the Iranian languages (Avestan, Old Persian, Farsi, Kurdish, Balochi, Ossetian, Pashtun, and more).
During the changes from Proto Indo European to Proto Indo Iranian the reconstructed sound *r and *l merged into just *r. However Indo Aryan languages have an /l/ sound corresponding to *l only sometimes quite rarely. So it's believed that Proto Indo Aryan contains some words from a dialect of Proto Indo Iranian that didn't survive time but maintained the *l *r distinction.
OMG the ending is especially amazing :D lovin it!
I've noticed a kind of lexical diffusion in my own idiolect which might provide some insights into the factors that influence which words change first. I'm from South Australia where, unlike the eastern states, we pronounce words like 'dance', 'plant', 'answer', and 'example' with [äː] instead of [æː]. This is how I grew up speaking. But since about 8 years ago I've been in regular contact with the eastern states as a working musician/producer, and now I usually say [dæːns] because when I use that word I'm usually talking to other music people from the east coast. At first I think I only did it when talking to east coast people, I guess as a way of mirroring them and fitting in, but eventually it just became how I say it with anyone. It's been a gradual switch that I just let happen because I don't feel attached to [däːns]. But I haven't felt the same influence on how I say the other [äː] words, maybe because I still use them regularly with other SA English speakers. If I worked interstate as a gardener the change probably would've happened with 'plant' instead of 'dance' 🤔
I very much enjoyed the skit at the end.
In my Australian accent, I say sure the same as shore but always use the CURE vowel in pure. (I've heard cultivated speakers say sure the older way.) In chaff, I use the first vowel in father, as in BATH/PALM. Australia's Macquarie Dictionary agrees that chaff uses that vowel, identifying it as the (non-rhotic) vowel in part.
I have a (Sydney) Australian accent, and I definitely pronounce 'chaff' with the 'TRAP' vowel rather than the 'BATH' vowel... and I don't think I've even heard someone say it the other way. Would you use the 'BATH' vowel even in the phrase 'to sort the wheat from the chaff'? I'm also curious as to whether your accent comes from farther south than Sydney. I've noticed that more southern Aussie accents tend to more often opt for the 'BATH' vowel in words that I would pronounce with the 'TRAP' vowel.
@@ARNervebag as a Tasmanian, I've always pronounced chaff with the 'BATH' vowel, so you might just be onto something with the more southern accents.
@@jasofthehollowWhich BATH vowel do you use though? Does it match TRAP or PALM? In Adelaide, almost everyone uses the PALM vowel in "graph". Within NSW, my dad always said there was a speech divide around Newcastle. He grew up further north and found he had to learn to talk differently in Sydney.
(Side note: Because the /l/ can change the quality of the vowel before it in some accents, speech therapists prefer to use the first vowel in FATHER instead of PALM.)
@@ARNervebagI'm originally from western Sydney but I lived in Qld for a decade and now I'm in WA. Yes, I would use the PALM/BATH vowel in "chaff", just as the Macquarie Dictionary says we do.
If you want to understand what's going on here, go to Wikipedia & look up "Variation in Australian English", then the "Phonology" section down the bottom. It has a chart comparing these vowels in 7 words across 5 of the eastern capitals.
While I have you, do you distinguish "hour" from "our"? I do but Macquarie says they're identical.
@@LearnRunes Oh yeah, right, of course... I was just assuming that the 'BATH' vowel was the one in 'PALM' and 'FATHER'... which in retrospect I shouldn't have! I've definitely noticed that friends from Newcastle pronounce a whole bunch of words differently compared to me!
Obviously there's not a single Aussie accent, so the Macq Dictionary simply can't be reflecting Aussie pronunciation per se (apparently it also plays pretty loose with the IPA phonetics). Even so, I've never heard 'chaff' spoken your way 'in the wild'.
In AmE, "sure" can be pronounced either ʃəɹ or ʃɔɹ (I prefer the former) and "lure" can be pronounced either ləɹ or lʉwəɹ (I prefer the former when saying the verb, but the latter when talking about the noun "fishing lure"). I also pronounce "manure" as mʌnʉwəɹ. For "pure" I would pronounce pjəɹ, but for "poor" I would pronounce pɔr. Relatedly, this sound change is probably the same reason the "t" palatalizes in "manufacture" (ʧəɹ). For all(?) Latinate words (fracture, juncture, etc.), I would say əɹ. As you can see, it's all mixed up in my dialect.
The ʉwəɹ ones might come from an attempt to say the ʊɹ of other dialects. I don't have that sound in my dialect, so perhaps that is why it becomes əɹ or ʉwəɹ. Or maybe ʉwəɹ begot ʊəɹ which begot ʊɹ əɹ and ɔɹ. I suspect the palatal sound that tends to be in front comes from a latent jʉw.
Relatedly I say "wool" as wəl̩ instead of using (the more traditional) ʊ. I also say "dull" and "lull" as əl̩ instead of ʌl̩. I still say ʊ in other contexts such as "wood" "hood" or "could".
For reference, I grew up in the Southeast US but moved to the Northeast when I was 12.
In my variety of American English, "poor" is [pʰɔɹ] but all the other [ʊɹ] words have [ʊɹ]~[ɚ]. "Sure" is [ʃʊɹ]~[ʃɚ], "pure" is [pʰjʊɹ]~[pʰjɚ], "cure" is [kʰjʊɹ]~[kʰjɚ]. With certain words, like "lure", "manure", "tour", [ʊɹ] is required and it cannot be reduced to [ɚ].
@@AtomikNYit's interesting how we all have slightly different pronunciations here!
'Poor' and 'tour' rhyme with [ɔɹ]
'Sure' is either [ɚ] or [ɔɹ] in exaggerated speech
'Pure' is odd for me, it can be [pʰjɚ] but more often it's [pʰiɹ], sounding like 'peer'
'manure' always sounds like sewer 'sewer' [ʉwɚ]
'lure' can sound also like 'sewer', but in quick speech it's [ɚ]
-Bay Area Californian
@@AtomikNY "tour" couldn't be regular [tjɹ] because of the phonotactic restrictions on Cj clusters in American English. Other examples are "endure" and "lure". These get [uɹ]. Sure, on the other hand, gets [ʃɹ]. But poor gets [pʰɔɹ] because regular [pjɹ] would cause it to merge with "pure".
Poor is definitely FORCE set for USAns that have the NORTH/FORCE distinction. This seems to be true for both African-American and New York City versions of the split.
Thank you. I appreciate that. :)
Hat-guy was fun too. Man, that strikes some memories up. I've been on both sides of that. Not the same script, but the meaning was the same. What I'm used to is good. What I'm not used to is wrong.
Oaf was a feature of my northern grandparents speech but not my southern ones, they were all born around 1910. My parents generation used it no matter where they came from so I think it was probably spread by radio shows.
Awesome skit at the end!!!!!!!😂
Interestingly, in my diaclect, the -ure /jʊə/ sound has merged with -eer /iɚ/ so that 'pure' is homophonous with 'peer'/'pier', 'cure' sounds like "keer", 'fury' like "feery", etc
However, if the yod coalesces, then the vowel just becomes /ɝ/, so that 'sure' is /ʃɝ/ and not /ʃiɚ/
Interesting video and also LOL at the end
Great video, loved the skit!
Here in the south of the US we have a similar situation with the "price" vowel. For myself it depends on the word and context (register) whether or not I use the dipthong or monothong. In an informal situation in the word "I" I will almost always use the monothong, but in formal situtations it varies. And for the word "price" i will tend towards the dipthong in both formal and informal contexts. None of my usage is driven by a will to talk one way or another, it all happens subconsciously.
I always refer to my aunt as "you miserable insolent worm". Then I put on my armor and attack the Fantastic Four.
Haven't even watched it yet but this sounds like exactly what I need for my conlang rn
simon roper the goat
Loved the skits~
The guy at the end - totally me, in my native language. MY accent is fine, things some people say - horrible mistakes. :)
A good example of cross-dialect borrowing causing an exception to a rule is the word "one", from Old English "an" (/ɑːn/). Mercian Old English /ɑː/ regularly becomes the diphthong we hear in words like "bone" and "stone" (OE "ban", "stan"), so the inherited form should be a homophone of "own". But with this word specifically, the native form was replaced by a loan from a different dialect (I want to say it was a West Country Middle English dialect?) between late Middle English and early Modern English.
Funny enough, we still have words that were derived from the pre-borrowing form that have the expected pronunciation though, like "alone" and "only".
Does such an analysis explain why some people, generally Southern, say ‘wun’ with the CUT vowel (typically the same as the COMMA vowel (schwa) these days though) and some, generally Northern, say ‘won’ with the LOT vowel? There are also some Northerners who use the PUT vowel and pronunciations can vary a lot from person to person in the West Midlands and East Anglia (I’m personally from the West Mids and I use the LOT vowel).
"Pray tell me, how many syllables in the number after threy?" "'Threy'?" "No." "What?" "What?"
I find the trap/bath split so interesting. Especially considering it hasn't spread to the North of England, with everything being so interconnected now. If you add the American English pronunciation of the A in 'bath' into the mix, it makes me wonder if globalisation will lead to the southern English ɑː dying out? Saying that it will probably be a different sound completely by the time that would happen.
ahahahah A+ bit. love it. needs to be a regular bit
I find it funny that u say the word oaf is a rare one, im from london and i personally use it probably atleast once a day
I like L vocalisation, and especially in non-Indo-European languages: in Veps L turned velar and vocalised in many places as well: Finnish jalka 'leg' correspondes in Standard Veps to jaug, and in Southern Veps it monophtongised much like in Scots, becoming jaag, which is I mean cool as hell
i thought you were gonna say that "upper" wouldn't become "uffer" because it comes from "up" and "up" isn't affected. is this a thing?
A cool example from Estonian is the loss of word-final -n, only happening in nouns and not verbs. So compare Estonian and Finnish:
lapse - lapsen - "of the/a child", genitive of laps/lapsi "child"
elän - elan - "I live", 1st person singular present indicative of elada/elää "to live"
The likely reason for this is is that the loss in nouns did not cause any syncretism - the genitive is already distinguished by the weak grade. While in verbs it would cause many different forms to become the same.
is that a pair of giant field glasses on the shelf on the left of the screen (to your right)? we have a really old pair and they're great for looking at the night sky if you don't have a telescope. we call them 'bignoculars' 😅
What is the queen's sister, in relation to the workers?
It could also happen that people refused to pronounce "dipper" as "differ", because there already is a word "differ", and the meanings differ.
The inherited doublet of "pork" is "farrow".
The word 'sure' has the secondary meaning of "I can accept what you said." I think I tend to pronounce the word slightly differently. It is shorter, though that may be the context, because I am trying to move the conversation on.
Language does not always simplify phonetics. It may add complexity to avoiding ambiguity. I live how languages basically work as a collective social software, with implicit rules that many are not aware of consciously, and yet they respect.
0:01 I like the hat Simon!
@simomroper9218 did you watch the recent Matt Smith film starve acre? It looks right up your alley subject wise
Obviously sound changes take time, years or decades or even longer, and also have to work their way through words but sometimes also through geography. A certain change may start in the east en work westward for example. Also changes may start in certain social circles, like upper or lower social classes and work their way through all classes. All this takes time and makes it more complex, its not like turning a switch. In this way, certain vowels became diphtongs in Dutch in the late middle ages.
Thank you.
amazing bro
Grunts & hoots gang rise up ❤
Please release the skit as a separate video
When I was this damn early, the Proto-Indo-European was still being spoken!
I heard you've been "premature" a lot more recently and a lot more frequently than that.
Historical Yorkshire dialect would be interesting
I live in the US, and here a lot of people pronounce sure like shoah especially if they say "for sure" - foah shoa
coda /l/ also vocalised in brazilian portuguese, so = /aw/
Wouldn't one possible reason for exceptions be that if a sound change happened, the result would be too close of even identical to an already existing word?
Are you arguing that homonyms do not happen or that speakers prevent more from happening then there already are ?
@@francesconicoletti2547 I am not arguing either, not that strongly, no idea where you are pulling that from. I am arguing that in some cases the speakers might avoid, consciously or unconsciously, going for the sound changes because of the collisions.
I’m not sure!
13:34 Ha ha ha ha ha
14:13 “Those sound changes which have happened recently are bad. Those which happened a relatively long time ago are acceptable.” Ha ha ha ha ha
Do sounds such as vocal fry also count as sound changes?
Do some words ever resist sound changes to avoid homophony? I find in my own speech if I'm misunderstood I'll catch myself saying something like "no, not pour, poor!" with an exaggerated pronunciation difference when often in my rapid speech they're pronounced almost the same, and I wonder if the only thing keeping me from completely merging them is an effort to keep them distinct words.
cant lie I'm a big fan of the hat
Simon - have you noticed a sound change taking place currently in which the "s" sound is being replaced, by some speakers, with a "sh" sound, albeit with a sort of stifled "sh". For example, shtudent, ashume.
Do you say the vowel in those words /juw/ or just /uw/? Sounds like the /s/ could be shifting closer to the yod if so
In my dialect, I have noticed one word that seems to resist a regular sound change. In almost all varieties of North American English, the sequence /æn/ is regularly pronounced [ẽə̃n] as in "pan" [pʰẽə̃n], "land" [lẽə̃nd], "manner" [ˈmẽə̃nɚ], etc. However, I pronounce "piano" as [pʰiˈænoʊ]. I think I may have inherited this single word from the Long Island dialect of my dad's family, since they gave us a piano when I was a kid.
Simon I have a question that has been bugging me. First I would like to say I flogged the dog in the fog for chasing the hog through the bog knocking the frog off the log. With that said, why the hell does English have dog, frog, and hog and other Germanic languages do not? Is it from the Celtic languages? I also wonder if flog, fog, bog, and log have similar origins? I would love to see a video about this. Love your videos. My West Texas accent would probably drive you mad.
Oddly, for me, growing up in upstate NY, and living in VA, dog, log, and fog have the same vowel sound, but not hog, flog, frog, and knock.
@@beckyholderbach6665 I just made up that stupid saying. Knock was just used to tie the stupid phrase together. In West Texas all those sounds are very similar. Oh and I remembered grog. Not sure though. 🤣 Now I'm trying to say those words in an upstate NY accent. 🤣🤣 I'm failing miserably.
Honestly prefer this hat
I always assumed it was simply because of dialects, sociolects, etc.
Hi Simon
I was afraid you were going to reference something else while contrasting "aw"~"uah"
we're not ready for the hawk tuah merger
this is Cinema
Grunts and hoots
I like the hat