4:57 You made a couple mistakes in that Latin sentence. First, 'dabat' is imperfect tense, not perfect. Also, the accusative form of 'lex' is 'legem', not legume (legume is not even a word in Latin). Just wondering, have you studied Latin before and those mistakes were just careless errors, or is this your first time trying to translate Latin?
I remember once reading an article called "Futurese" that made the observation that (roughly), "languages get simpler and simpler until they end up as complex as ever". As grammatical case wears down, word order becomes more critical. As some sounds merge, others start marking distinctions that previously didn't exist (like "writer" and "rider" being distinguished by their first vowel in dialects of Canada and the U.S. Great Lakes region).
@pyropulse Nope. If I went up to you Speaking French, you wouldn't understand me, but you wouldn't misunderstand what I was trying to say either. And then there's the whole concept of twisting peoples words, misunderstanding them on purpose. Supposedly, with carefully enough chosen words, it's impossible to be misunderstood, impossible to have your words twisted.
Listen I'm all in for Y'all to become a common term, maybe even drop the apostrophe yall. And adding 'd've ain't too bad either, I'd've started using it sooner myself.
The new inflectional morphology of adding "a" to the ends of words seems very interesting to me, as I had never noticed it before. Aside from 'ima' or 'ima' you can see it in a few other words: 'finna' as in "I'm finna bake a cake" or "I'm fixing to bake a cake" 'tryna' as in "I'm tryna bake a cake" or "I'm trying to bake a cake" 'woulda' as in "I woulda baked a cake" or "I would have baked the cake" 'coulda' as in "I coulda baked the cake" or "I could have baked the cake" 'shoulda' as in "I shoulda baked the cake" or "I should have baked the cake" 'gonna' as in "I'm gonna bake a cake" or "I'm going to bake a cake" 'gotta' as in "I gotta bake a cake" or "I have got to bake a cake" 'outta' as in "I outta bake a cake" or "I ought to bake a cake" This makes it seem that the word "to" or "have" are implied by adding the 'a' to the ends of verbs. Anyhow, great video! Keep it up!
We're also slurring "then" (or maybe "and" or "to") into a straight "n-" clitic "imma go n'get the food" from "imma go and get the food" or "imma go to get the food" alternatively, "imma go, n'get the food" from "imma go, then get the food" english is weird
Doesn't English have a regulatory entity for grammar, pronunciation and spelling, like Spanish does to avoid those abrupt changes? Like the real academia de la lengua española (Royal academy of the Spanish language)
@@jnbaker7422 I think you are overanalyzing this. “n” is nothing more than a shortened “and” and does not replace “to” or “then”. So in some low-status dialects when people say “Imma go n get the food” what they mean is “I am going to go and get the food”, but they could more easily and clearly say “I will go get the food.”
Xidnaf You should make a video about all the different languages spoken in France, How similar and dissimilar they are; there's Occitan, Britton, Niçois, Languedoc, Creole, Corsican and probably more
where do you have this from? Slavic languages didnt retain all 8 cases of PIE and also lost the subjunctive form ( Interesting fact: In many slavic languages the original subjunctive is used as the indicative... For example riekam instead of reku). Then the slavic languages lost the present perfect/past simple and the past perfect tense( Some slavic languages started using the participle of present perfect for past simple). Also the non-composite future tense is rather indicated by prepositional prefixes then suffixes. We dont really have dual numbers anymore. The vocative is dying out... The slavic languages got simpler...
One good example of how English has actually gotten more complicated is the obligatory distinction between simple and progressive aspect in verbs. English used to be more like most other European languages, in that marking the difference between, for instance, "I swim" and "I am swimming" was optional if it even existed at all. The simple form "I swim" could be used to mean either "I swim (habitually)" or "I am swimming (right now)." In this way, older forms of English resembled modern Spanish, where "Nado" can mean either "I swim" or "I am swimming." You do have the option of saying "Estoy nadando" to specify progressive meaning, but it's not a grammatical requirement. There are other Indo-European languages that don't even have an optional, more specific form. They're just stuck with a single form that, from an English speaker's perspective, would seem rather ambiguous. This is why many foreign learners of English wrestle with the question of when to use simple versus progressive verb forms. It's more complicated than a native English speaker might think.
TranslatorCarminum Portuguese (or, at least Brazilian Portuguese. Don’t know for sure about the other varieties) actually does distinguish between them! “Eu nado” is just “I swim” while “eu estou nadando” (alternatively “eu tô nadando” or just “tô nadando” in colloquial speech) is “I am swimming”
I speak British English and in my accent "do" and "Dew/due" are not pronounced the same. Also "new" is not the same as the start of "food" to me. To me the ending of "dew/due" is the same as the word "you". So do is "doo" but dew/due are "dyou" and "new" is "nyou".
Yeah, I understand it's from an American point of view and he points out it is for his dialect I just thought this might be of interest to some people. I feel like British English, at least the southern kind that I speak, uses the "you" a lot more than many other dialects.
He does specifically say "my dialect of English" at one point. He also pointed out that different dialects of the same language have different inventories. He has to pick one to talk about, and how confusing would it be if that weren't the one he was speaking?
I don't agree, the Czech is much more simple than it use to be. We don't use dual form, aorist, imperfectum or trangresives anymore. The reason, why the Czech is much more complicated than romance or germanic languages is, that in Czech National Revival, we adopted the original, medieval form of Czech, but since than it's simplifying again.
I thought I might add that the Chinese particle 了 (Pinyin: le) is actually pronounced liao3 when used for its original meaning of "to finish". liao3 started to became pronounced as le when used as a particle, which makes sense as le is much quicker to pronounce.
Correct. (liǎo) from Pinyin is [ljau̯], which can also be [ljaɜ] when spoken quickly. (le) from Pinyin, a tone-less syllable, is [lɤ] or [lə]. In the Beijing dialect (if you can call it that way), there is actually a third way of pronouncing it, typically at the end of the short expression "{some verb} 好了" (hǎo lei) to emphasize the finishing of an action, or to emphasize an instruction as being understood. It is (lei) (tone is a bit falling) in Pinyin and [lei̯] in IPA.
When you were talking about European languages losing inflections I had a strange feeling about Russian. Slavs are not that far from Europe, why then we did not lose our inflections? Maybe we have lost some but to this day it is just a mess. But I like it. It is nice not to rely on word order for grammar functions. Changing order of words is a stylistic element in Russian.
Russian has actually lost the vocative case (звательный падеж). It's present now only in some Church-Slavonic relics like "Боже" and "Отче" etc. On the other hand, it is now being recreated in new colloquial forms like "мам, пап, Саш, Вась". So the idea of cycles makes sense.
Данил Дорошин Russian lost its complex verbal system, but if you look at Bulgarian it’s the other way around. It lost its cases but kept its verbal system!
I'd hazard a guess and say it's because both were written *th*, and so over time they got confused. Any words where there would be confusion you can, as the video says, usually work it out from context.
Asmodean Underscore Yeah, this makes sense. Patrick Hodson This is strange to me, too. This phenomenon is called iotacism. I'm afraid Greek will end up with just one vowel. :p
I love your use of colored and shaped speech bubbles to indicate different languages. I think it's a surprisingly fitting show of how languages relate to each other and evolve over time.
Xidnaf Improve your audio quallity all you want, *DO NOT* change the animations!!! They're awesome, descriptive, make you think and smile and laugh and I love them. I love them.
Hente Hoo There's nothing particularly interesting about the Uralic languages to warrant a video. If they're going to make a video about a single language family it should be something like the Austronesian family which has a fascinating and quite intriguing history behind it.
I agree that Xidnaf should definitely take a look at the Austronesian language family. However, I disagree with your first statement. While Uralic studies may seem relatively placid on the surface, there are some surprisingly powerful currents below. Indeed, some researchers question whether Proto-Uralic was ever a "single" (as far as proto-languages go) entity, or whether it was rather a Sprachbund. Personally, I'm more inclined to treat it as a family, just with cross-influences between certain groups. Of course, on the other hand, there's the Altaic Sprachbund of Turkish, Mongolian, Tungusic and Korean (and possibly Japanese) which MAY be connected well over 10000 years back, but which have traded lexical elements so extensively that working out stymologies can be like untying knots made out of knots!
WarOfTheRing Veteran Well... I see your point, altough it's really a matter of wowels for what I am concerned. I mean, after many years of study, I still tangle my tongue very hard every time I have to speak english, some of those wowels are just too similar to each other to me...!
My Spanish girlfriend had real trouble distinguishing sounds like the diphthongs dairy and diary and she could not pronounce w and v at all. Wood she pronounced as bud. I actually tried to teach her one day to say wood correctly. She just couldn't get it.
Short Names my guess is yes, look at the number of cases in Proto-indo-european (8) where did they all go? or the duall? or the informal/formal 'you' or grammatical gender (especially neutr is lost for many languages) About non-indo-european languages; I wouldn't know for sure.
In German we still use most of the latin cases (Nominative , Accusative, Dative and Genitive) and we also have 3 genders for words. In latin class, only ablative and vocative were new.
I have made that observation. 2000 years ago german and Latin were similar languages. Big bombastic words, complex grammar. Latin simplified both words and grammar. German is one of the least changed and therefore one of the most complex modern European languages but also oddly more like Latin than most others. By this I mean the vocabulary is different. Yes modern Italian is closest to Latin in that way. I mean in the feel, the sound, the thinking of it.
@@garak55 In high educated regions it finds a lot more use, but I agree that it is slowly getting unpopular and rare. Instead of "Das Haus des Mannes", you can just say "Das Haus vom Mann"
I am German. One aspect about the German language I love are its unnumerous derivations, even for very "basic" things like wall (Wand, from "wenden"), sand (Sand, from "senden") and its combined words. The porters of the most basic meanings are mostly single syllables. What I don´t like about German is that you cannot speak undefined, whether it is plural / singular, gender or time, it is always defined. On top of that you have a four-case system for nouns and adjectives together, irregular verbs AND highly irregular plural. Combined words also happen to be pretty irregular, they do have "s" between, sometimes not, sometimes the first part is plural, sometimes not (in accents that varies). German spelling knows four ways to lengthen a vowel (double the vowel, put a silent "h" after it, do not double the folling consonant, have a silent "e" to follow (only after "i", but for local names also after "a", "o" or "u"). You have to learn how the word looks. This is very much unlike Vietnamese language of which I have very basic understanding. -- But another thing: In my meaning German will dramatically change throughout the next decades: The grammar will simplify due to the pressure of immigrants who as adult can never really learn it, the incessant introduction of English words and by constant pressure of the gender lobby. Already, we used to have many combined words in German that are not any more used, e.g. Lichtspielhaus => Kino (cinema), Weltmeer => Ozean (ocean), Lichtbild => Foto (photo), Fernsprechgerät => Telefon (telephone) and so on.
Johannes M Indeed. Night and knight. Speaking of all the silent k's, they weren't always. The k's in knight, know, knew, and knowledge used to be pronounced. I also find it very interesting that words like 'melodies' used to be pronounced in the 12th and 13th centuries exactly as we do in Afrikaans today: [mɛludiːjə].
The comparison with (for example) Dutch is rather interesting: our word for 'night' is 'nacht' [nɑxt], which is rather similar to [ˈniçt], and 'knight' comes from the Dutch word for servant, which is 'knecht' [knɛxt] (or the other way around, or they both got it from a different language). You can see similar things with German. It's part of why people think English is difficult to pronounce, cause often there's seemingly no correlation between the way you write a word and the way you pronounce it.
@BonDieu617 It's the same in Afrikaans (for obvious reasons). Night is 'nag' (the Dutch nacht with a dropped t and a simplified spelling for ch), though our word for knight is ridder (literally meaning rider). The main reason for the similarity between Dutch and English is due to the shared influence of Low German, as the Saxons that settled England, and eventually dominated over the native Angles, and even older, the Celts, also settled what is today the Netherlands and brought their language with them.
in finnish people are nowadays sortening the word "kanssa" (with) to (kaa) and adding it to the end of the genetive forms of other words. for example: mä (I+nominative) mun (I+genetive) mun+kaa (with me) if the suffix starts conforming with the vowel harmony rules, people will probably stop considering it as a word of its own, and instead it'll become a new case suffix.
That's how it works in Turkish. Sen (you singular) Senin (yours) + ile (with) Seninle (with you) O (he, she, it) Onun (his, her, its) Onunla (with him, with her, with it)
This is strange in a good way. Is this what languages do? My native language, Bengali, has a similar construction to what you guys are currently doing with Finnish & Turkish. āmi = I (nominative) āmār = My (genitive) śāthe = with āmār śāthe = with me
The progress you talk about is exactly what has happened to Mandarin Chinese over the last few centuries. Many people wonder who people of Northern China get by with so many homophones, but the truth is the context and the regular use of compound words made Mandarin understandable. This process is turning Mandarin from a highly analytic language to a somewhat synthetic one, with all those prefix, suffixes and irregular word order.
Great video! I tended to fall into the misleading idea of languages only dumbing down, but after watching this, I made a connection. Spanish "S" dropping in coda position is reaching a critical mass where you'd think there'd be mass confusion when the plural "las reglas" can't be distinguished from the singular "la regla" (or "les dé" from "le des," etc.); however, just as you noted, the comparatively very simple vowel Spanish system (basically 5 compared to at least a dozen in French or English) is increasing in complexity to compensate, in some regions splitting into pairs to make 10 vowel sounds so that the "A"s in "la regla" are distinct from those in "lah reglah" and so on. Since French underwent a similar "S" dropping centuries ago, I now wonder if that's why they have a relatively complicated vowel inventory for a Romance language.
French is complicated though, because it's also heavily influenced by a now-extinct Celtic language that was the language of the Gauls before they were conquered.
well I mean pat, part, pot, port, putt, put, poot, pit, pet, peat, and pout are all different words so if you say the wrong word then well people are going to hear the wrong word because well you said the wrong word.
Wow I’m glad this showed up in my feed because this video was BRILLIANT. I’m a communications major, and love this kind of content. It’s fascinating from linguistic and sociological perspective
I’m a non-native English speaker. I’ve seen many English texts that use singular they. And the whole idea of “singular they” is extremely simple and it makes so much sense. In my language we don’t have gendered pronouns. And the usage of plural pronouns for refering to a single person, is something we do ALL the time. It is a way to show respect. People who argue it’s “wrong” sounds extremely silly to me
The discourses on the gender-neutral third-person-plural pronoun among native European language speakers always make me laugh as I speak Korean which has neither gender pronoun nor gender articles. How meaninglessly sensitive those languages are.
Mushroom Cube They’re talking about the consonant sound, not the vowel. They’re saying “due/dew” sounds like “dyoo”, which is closer to “Jew” than to “do”
@PennyPlunderer In French you use different suffixes to indicate mood (subjunctive) and tenses (simple past, conditional, etc). Dutch and German use modal verbs to form compounds, mostly. You could make a case here, though, since the pronunciation of the verb forms have coalesced in French.
Though German is getting easier. The Konjunktiv I & II and the Präteritum (Past Tense) almost disappeared from spoken German. (Though this might differ between dialects)
I love how good ole' Xidnaf sites his sources at the end. It sorta gives the video that college presentation type feel. Also, it's really helpful to know the outdo and intro songs.
As usual an excellent video. Etymology and progression of languages in general are among my biggest interests. Even with a degree mostly in English language (it's a long story lol) I'm still learning a lot from you. Please keep going. I just wish I could afford to support you, along with the other excellent 'teachers' there are on youtube. I think the ad-ban is disgraceful and wish someone could set up an alternate site doing much the same thing (only leave out the lists, cats... that sort of thing. It could be a You Learn Tube!).
A constructive critic for a careless error: Actually there is a romance language which still uses cases, which is Romanian !!! Thank you a lot for the video, I love this channel !
I'm always fascinated by the youngters' slang in french. They're actually creating a new grammar, adding to the new vocab mostly derived from english and arabic, but also from various sources, as various as… french itself (there are many effort within the LGBT communities to revive the gender-neutral words prior to the neutral-masculine merging). But what I find the most fascinating is that they managed to create a new kind of non-inflecting verbs while keeping the old ones, and while creating french conjugations from english verbs, complicating a language that they're accused to ruin oversymplifying it.
Great video, this is by far my favorite of the one's you've done recently. The whole topic was very well-chosen, and I liked your little footnote/disclaimer about the cycle theory.
I had a feeling from the outset (partly because I've recently been diving into old Norse) that it might just seem like languages were more complicated before simply because no one speaks like that anymore and it tends to feel like your own language is simple and easy to grasp (though I would never use those terms to describe English, no matter how much of a grasp I have on it). Also my immediate reaction was basically what you said about new words. There are probably millions of things both concrete and abstract that we now have words for that, say, the ancient Greeks didn't. All of which is saying I'm talking out my ass and I thoroughly enjoyed the video. Thank you.
Yeah, the L2 vs L1 effect definitely makes sense. I keep finding myself thinking that the way Japanese grammar works is so complicated and English grammar is much easier, and then I stumble upon an L2 English learner asking about some aspect of English that I've taken for granted that really confuses them.
This whole "gaining new things" reminded me of how Finnish may be getting definitive articles. It doesn't really have articles right now, but I've noticed how "se" is often used as if it was the equivalent of English's "the". I don't know how widespread that is, but everyone I've met seems to be using that in speech.
I had thought about ths subject myself for quite a while now, but only sporadically and had never bothered to do some research on it. This as been of my favorite of your videos so far! I am really glad you're managing to pull through after everything that has happened reagarding your future professional life, but I can only say, if you do decide to continue making RUclips videos, I'll be here to watch them! Take care Xidnaf, and keep'em coming ;)
Hey, Xidnaf. Great video! There's something I've been wondering about. Languages evolve according to how they're actually used. The Romance languages, for example, came from how most people (who were uneducated at that time) spoke Latin, contrary to how the nobility spoke it. Nowadays, however, we could say education rates are as high as they have ever been. There are language institutions, academies and whatnot, regulating languages. Do you think this may slow down the evolution of languages? I think it's something nearly impossible to avoid, but consider, for example, that a book won't get published unless it's written "correctly", that is, taking into consideration what these institutions dictate is the correct way to speak. One would avoid imitating a person's way to speak if that person lacks education. So what do you think will happen to languages in the future?
Maybe that would result in there being a separate way to write vs speak normally? That already exists in a few languages. With the internet, though, it’s also possible that there will just be more of a distinction between formal/informal speech and writing
Those who regulate languages add or remove some rules of writing, grammar, etc according to how people actually speak. However I agree this regulations will make language evolution get slower. I think it's a good thing. People from 200 years in the future will not have a hard time understanding what someone from 200 years ago wrote/said.
I love this video. You break down the evolution of language in a way no-one else does. There are countless lectures that end up being unable to explain it clearly and simply. Thank you.
I dunno, I was trying to do more of a /nəɪxt/, which I kind of thought was a plausible pronunciation for someone from the 1500s. But yeah, probably should have gone with /niːxt/.
@@Xidnaf /əɪ/ for the vowel is probably correct for most speakers in the 1500s. But the /x/ (or /ç/) had long gone by that point - possibly by Chaucer's time. /aɪ/ developed later, the 1600s. However all bets are off WRT Scottish speakers, on both the vowel and /x/.
4:36 ''Holy crap verbs used to be comlicated'' -Sigh it isn't complicated tbh, pretty much the same like in Dutch or German (in the way we have more different forms)
I must say I'm very impressed by the recent spike in quality of your videos. To be brutally honest with you, I have been watching your videos every time they show up in my recommendations ever since you had around 5 released, but I never really subscribed because I thought your content was somewhat shallow and lacking in research. Now, however, I've seen an upgrade in quality, accuracy and novelty of information. Please keep it up! You've got yourself a "new" subscriber from among your long time viewers.
Wow! This is a question I've been having for a long time, so thanks for clearing it up! By the way, you should make a video on the effects of the arrival of dictionaries on language.
wow this is my first video of yours that i've watched and i never thought of linguistics as that interesting before.. just wanted to say that this opened my mind a lot, thank you
i actually do get the 'new addition of inflections in Chinese' and its very true. words are getting grouped into sets more often and are less so seperate. seems unusual to not add addional somewhat useless words at the end of some particular words; evwn if it would make complete sense and have the same meaning.
In the beginning of the video, I was thinking like: "Dude, Swedish has gotten _a lot simpler_ in the past 80 years. Why are you talking about thousands of years, Xidnaf?". After the video, I have gotten some hope that Swedish is going to have 4 different cases in the future and a whole lot of verb conjugations. :D
Maybe it's just my current perspective as an American living in Hungary and learning Hungarian, but he cycle between Agglutinative, Fusional, and Analytic makes so much sense to me.
imo, it's not an evolution that discards the previous grammar, but rather tends towards these phonological systems. Your example for Ennglish is perfect, and I wanted to give an example for Hungarian, I would cite the language's consonant assimilation via suffixes. it occurs for most suffixes, but the val suffix and the first person singular definite verb conjugations earn especial note. This, of course, takes vowel harmony as an obviously given feature of the language. Yes, the rigid categorization of thee types does more damage to the theory than it helps it, but I still think it has some useful insights.
Little fan-fact. In Poland we still have all the things you said about latin. Different plurals, forms dependent on usage or even gender. For exammple: Word "house" in Polish: Dom M. Dom, Domy D. Domu, Domów C. Domowi, Domom B. Dom, Domy N. Domem, Domami Msc. Domu, Domach W. Domie, Domy
Have you ever considered studying German? Because it's actually one of the best languages to see the development of e.g. the English language in. Just saying, that table you brought up with the old forms of "to live" is actually quite precisely how it still works in German
From what I've heard from linguists the whole fusional/agglutinative/isolating thing is viewed more as a sliding scale, where fusional vs. agglutinative represents the number of functions morphemes typically take (e.g. noun endings in latin encode case, number and gender at the same time, whereas in a agglutinative language those might each have their own morphemes), and synthetic vs. isolating represent how many morphemes a word typically has
3:34 this point is really solid and I can see it back in Albanian. For example, l and ll are different letters, because the ll makes a 'thicker' sound than the singular l, so it's just percieved as a new letter in the alphabet. And that's how Albanian manages to make the 26 word Latin alphabet into 36 letters
Actually, the "gh" in some of the words like night used to be a voiceless palatal fricative, not a velar one. This is because they are preceded by a front vowel, and Englishspeakers found it easier to make a palatal fricative after front vowels, so that's just what they did, I guess, until they decided that whole business was too much hassle and just threw it all away. (Excuse my overly simplified explanation; I am not a professional) You will notice palatalization is a huge theme in English. Whereby I mean that velar fricatives turn into palatal fricatives, which eventually turn into approximates, which is why Dutch still has the suffix -ig (the g being pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative and the i as a centralized mid-open unrounded vowel), whereas English has -y. Yes, they are cognates. You probably knew this. I just find it interesting. Also notice how velar plosives become silenced before the letter n, especially at the beginning of a word, as in the words "know" and "knight", whereas the other Germanic languages don't do this. Does anyone know why English pronunciation went so soft and why Englishspeakers hated the velum? Another example of English being soft is how the letter R has completely become an approximate now (or silenced before other consonants in British dialects), whereas in other Germanic languages, it stays as a trill or fricative of some sort? The same thing happens in Dutch. It must just be easier to speak that way, which leads us to the general trend of language in general. It tends to get simpler! That's just common sense.
This leads into something I've been wondering. Are modern languages fundamentally different than ancient ones? Like are there any language changes that are universal across language families?
Yes. European languages seemed to evolve in a similar direction. Most likely because they influenced each other. By this I mean one could argue that modern French is more like modern English than it is to Latin. Or modern German more like French than ancient German. They have all moved towards dropping in flexion, relying on word order and certain word markers. But like the video said it isn't true of all language families.
I think most historical languages had small vocabularies with words that could mean many things (vague meaning). World languages seem to have towards larger vocabularies and more precise meaning. This is a result of more people speaking it and literacy. Since usually the same trend occurs when more people speak a given language.
I am so glad to see your work man. Every time you upload, may day gets brighter! Also, may I suggest an interesting use for your Patreon supporters? What if you released your videos early to them, and used their input to help fix errors and typos before your youtube release? With the amount of language lovers that offer corrections in the comments, it seems to me like it might help, and be a fun way to interact with Patreon supporters. If you already do something like that... sorry I am not a Patron x_x
I think that a language can become unnecessary complicated by culture. For example if people stick to historical spelling (like in English) or if people demand complicated language to see you as educated.
@@ronaldonmg No, irregularity is a separate thing. Irregular verbs generally occur when two or more distinct verbs become synonymous, and people start using one verb only in one tense and switching to its synonym for another tense. Irregular plurals, at least in English, resulted from the loss of grammatical gender and the fact that many nouns have kept their gendered plurals despite losing their gender. Neither of those are exclusive to spelling (you don't say "childs" while writing "children" for example) and they're not related to education, in fact highly educated people often insist on preserving distinctions in meaning in words that are in the process of becoming synonyms.
Love your videos Xidnaf! Im not a linguist in any sense, but since watching one or two videos on the topic, the youtube algorithm started pushing more one me and I got very interested in the topic. One thing I've been wondering is how the rise of literacy and government issued spelling standards changed the way in which languages evolve. Intuitively it seems to me that having a nationwide official version of a language would make dialects in a region less pronounced because the media will mostly work with the standard language. The city I live in (eindhoven, the Netherlands) used to have a different dialect for all of it's 'burroughs', however over time, this faded, and no only people of old age still use one of these hyper-local dialects. There are also other obvious reasons for this, like the major movement of workers from all over the country to Eindhoven to work in the Phillips factories. But I was wondering if there is a visible slowing down of the evolution within languages in language areas where literacy in a nationally agreed upon standard is high. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
I remember getting into highschool before realizing that the words "to separate" and "to be separate" were the same word. I don't know when I noticed it, but people in my area (Houston Texas as at time) would say "seperATE it" or "it is sep'rate." To me, they were always two sep'rate words that were related, but were anyways seperATEd. This was even when I enjoyed reading. I just guess I glazed over it in books. It was when I wrote a note to a friend and realized that I said "It's seperate," then wrote later "it'll be separated." When called out, I made my case that they were separate words... and was completely made fun of. Honestly, I still think of them as sep'rate words. I write this down as an example of how the rules can change on the smallest of scales. If I was an influencer, I could quickly get others to write in my way. Really, if I lived in small area and had a few kids, that could easily infect the area in a couple generations. We'd be adding a new, small rule to the language that separATEs the adjective from the verb without any contextual additions needed.
you're clearly right though, one is an adjective and one is a verb and that pronunciation distinction is common in most English dialects, pronouncing them differently is clunky and ambiguous
Yea, I pronounce 'do' /du/, and 'due' and 'dew' as /dju/. I come from America. Although, I actually have a lot of archaisms in my dialect, like the distinction between 'which' and 'witch'. Anyway, a lot of people pronounce 'due' that way. It's most common in England, I think. The Welsh accent certainly doesn't have it.
damn xidnaf I've been here since some of your first language videos and you have really improved since then. congrats on all the growth your channel has had recently. keep up the good work!
![Yeat & Summrs - GO2WORK [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/NEFEwfPcXRA/mqdefault.jpg)
4:57
You made a couple mistakes in that Latin sentence. First, 'dabat' is imperfect tense, not perfect. Also, the accusative form of 'lex' is 'legem', not legume (legume is not even a word in Latin). Just wondering, have you studied Latin before and those mistakes were just careless errors, or is this your first time trying to translate Latin?
King Keegster what a savage
I've never really studied Latin. I thought I could do a decent translation anyway, but apparently not.
I'm pretty sure it was his first time.
Xidnaf Don't worry, we Latin speakers appreciate the effort :) No one really mentions Latin that often.
Excuse my horribly broken Latin but...
Ego Sum Est, Verbum Anglicus at "Latin Vulgarus" est "Best".
I did it for the rhyme.
I remember once reading an article called "Futurese" that made the observation that (roughly), "languages get simpler and simpler until they end up as complex as ever". As grammatical case wears down, word order becomes more critical. As some sounds merge, others start marking distinctions that previously didn't exist (like "writer" and "rider" being distinguished by their first vowel in dialects of Canada and the U.S. Great Lakes region).
I'm curious, what is the exact vowel difference that those speakers in Canada and the Midwest make?
@@maxim5156 as a Canadian I’m actually now having trouble imagining pronouncing those words the same
@@maxim5156 wrider and rider
@@maxim5156 As a Canadian, I find that I pronounce them as r-ite-er and r-eye-der.
That's actually really cool, I hadn't thought of that before.
@@notveryobservant1056 could you maybe just give the IPA for that? (Or someone else)
My dad says that the purpose of language is not so much to be understood as it is to be impossible to be misunderstood.
Lol
Wise man indeed
Thats so profound
@F.W. Lol
@pyropulse Nope. If I went up to you Speaking French, you wouldn't understand me, but you wouldn't misunderstand what I was trying to say either.
And then there's the whole concept of twisting peoples words, misunderstanding them on purpose. Supposedly, with carefully enough chosen words, it's impossible to be misunderstood, impossible to have your words twisted.
2007: english is simplifying at an alarming rate
2017: yall'd've whomst'd'soever wants a [B]o[B]a [B]ola
Listen I'm all in for Y'all to become a common term, maybe even drop the apostrophe yall.
And adding 'd've ain't too bad either, I'd've started using it sooner myself.
+
I think it just became more complex.
Goff Roff I just had an aneurism trying to read that
yall would be a great addition to the language, it'd make things clearer
The new inflectional morphology of adding "a" to the ends of words seems very interesting to me, as I had never noticed it before.
Aside from 'ima' or 'ima' you can see it in a few other words:
'finna' as in "I'm finna bake a cake" or "I'm fixing to bake a cake"
'tryna' as in "I'm tryna bake a cake" or "I'm trying to bake a cake"
'woulda' as in "I woulda baked a cake" or "I would have baked the cake"
'coulda' as in "I coulda baked the cake" or "I could have baked the cake"
'shoulda' as in "I shoulda baked the cake" or "I should have baked the cake"
'gonna' as in "I'm gonna bake a cake" or "I'm going to bake a cake"
'gotta' as in "I gotta bake a cake" or "I have got to bake a cake"
'outta' as in "I outta bake a cake" or "I ought to bake a cake"
This makes it seem that the word "to" or "have" are implied by adding the 'a' to the ends of verbs.
Anyhow, great video! Keep it up!
We're also slurring "then" (or maybe "and" or "to") into a straight "n-" clitic
"imma go n'get the food" from
"imma go and get the food" or
"imma go to get the food"
alternatively,
"imma go, n'get the food" from
"imma go, then get the food"
english is weird
JN Baker It’s definitely the “and” we’ve been doing it for a long time. Hence ‘n’ as a conjunction. DnD is an example.
@@jnbaker7422 and people dont say the ful th sound in the,its more d'ua than thhe
Doesn't English have a regulatory entity for grammar, pronunciation and spelling, like Spanish does to avoid those abrupt changes? Like the real academia de la lengua española (Royal academy of the Spanish language)
@@jnbaker7422 I think you are overanalyzing this. “n” is nothing more than a shortened “and” and does not replace “to” or “then”. So in some low-status dialects when people say “Imma go n get the food” what they mean is “I am going to go and get the food”, but they could more easily and clearly say “I will go get the food.”
5:33 - what's even going on with Dravidian languages there?
wish I knew.
Xidnaf Heyyy😃😃 collaborate with NativLang
Clearly, they went back in time 2 times.
Xidnaf You should make a video about all the different languages spoken in France, How similar and dissimilar they are; there's Occitan, Britton, Niçois, Languedoc, Creole, Corsican and probably more
And also Italian. Same thing going on there... In fact, he can talk about both of them, and maybe Spanish, in one video, as a recurring phenomenon...
two Xidnaf videos that close!?! Am I dreaming?
This is the power of Patreon.
To quote CGP Grey, "don't get used to it".
Unfortunately :(
I'm assuming because it's summer so no school
How do xidnaf videos close? How do they open, for that matter?
4:25 Romanian (a Romance language) still has a full case system. Also all Slavic languages ave gotten more complex in their morphology.
Romanian however is very readable for someone who can read Latin. The language are really close
where do you have this from? Slavic languages didnt retain all 8 cases of PIE and also lost the subjunctive form ( Interesting fact: In many slavic languages the original subjunctive is used as the indicative... For example riekam instead of reku). Then the slavic languages lost the present perfect/past simple and the past perfect tense( Some slavic languages started using the participle of present perfect for past simple). Also the non-composite future tense is rather indicated by prepositional prefixes then suffixes. We dont really have dual numbers anymore. The vocative is dying out... The slavic languages got simpler...
In Slovene we still have dual.
Romanian has lost a LOT of morphology. Latin had way more case endings.
@@Mato42
Based bro, what else slav languages have this?
One good example of how English has actually gotten more complicated is the obligatory distinction between simple and progressive aspect in verbs. English used to be more like most other European languages, in that marking the difference between, for instance, "I swim" and "I am swimming" was optional if it even existed at all. The simple form "I swim" could be used to mean either "I swim (habitually)" or "I am swimming (right now)."
In this way, older forms of English resembled modern Spanish, where "Nado" can mean either "I swim" or "I am swimming." You do have the option of saying "Estoy nadando" to specify progressive meaning, but it's not a grammatical requirement. There are other Indo-European languages that don't even have an optional, more specific form. They're just stuck with a single form that, from an English speaker's perspective, would seem rather ambiguous. This is why many foreign learners of English wrestle with the question of when to use simple versus progressive verb forms. It's more complicated than a native English speaker might think.
TranslatorCarminum Yeah, in Latin American Spanish, the word “swim” is the same as the word “bathe/bath”
I’m learning French and it can be quite confusing to not have a progressive tense. I feel like I can’t express myself.
Sujay R
Well actually French kinda has progressive, you can use "être en train de" but it's nowhere near as frequent as in English.
TranslatorCarminum Portuguese (or, at least Brazilian Portuguese. Don’t know for sure about the other varieties) actually does distinguish between them! “Eu nado” is just “I swim” while “eu estou nadando” (alternatively “eu tô nadando” or just “tô nadando” in colloquial speech) is “I am swimming”
African American English has a distinction betwen "he working" and "he be working".
very insightful upbringing ending
Sounds are merging !!!!! WERE BECOMING /le gasp/ ... French!
cadr003 French has like 17 nouns
PennyPlunderer ????
LE GASP
Draco de Anglicus
True.
They wouldn't have you.
French has 19 vowel sounds btw, and my dialect of English has 13
I speak British English and in my accent "do" and "Dew/due" are not pronounced the same. Also "new" is not the same as the start of "food" to me. To me the ending of "dew/due" is the same as the word "you". So do is "doo" but dew/due are "dyou" and "new" is "nyou".
Yes, the video was rather Americocentric. Good to see it's not just me who noticed those inconsistencies.
Yeah, I understand it's from an American point of view and he points out it is for his dialect I just thought this might be of interest to some people. I feel like British English, at least the southern kind that I speak, uses the "you" a lot more than many other dialects.
The merging of /du/ and /dʲu/ is only really an American thing.
Ah, interesting
He does specifically say "my dialect of English" at one point. He also pointed out that different dialects of the same language have different inventories.
He has to pick one to talk about, and how confusing would it be if that weren't the one he was speaking?
Loving these regular videos!
GamerGeek clearly i dont care or else i would have commented about it
Late by a few days is better than not making one for 6 fucking months.
I don't agree, the Czech is much more simple than it use to be. We don't use dual form, aorist, imperfectum or trangresives anymore. The reason, why the Czech is much more complicated than romance or germanic languages is, that in Czech National Revival, we adopted the original, medieval form of Czech, but since than it's simplifying again.
I thought I might add that the Chinese particle 了 (Pinyin: le) is actually pronounced liao3 when used for its original meaning of "to finish".
liao3 started to became pronounced as le when used as a particle, which makes sense as le is much quicker to pronounce.
Correct. (liǎo) from Pinyin is [ljau̯], which can also be [ljaɜ] when spoken quickly. (le) from Pinyin, a tone-less syllable, is [lɤ] or [lə]. In the Beijing dialect (if you can call it that way), there is actually a third way of pronouncing it, typically at the end of the short expression "{some verb} 好了" (hǎo lei) to emphasize the finishing of an action, or to emphasize an instruction as being understood. It is (lei) (tone is a bit falling) in Pinyin and [lei̯] in IPA.
Do you happen to know when it started to be used as an aspect marker?
Gentlemen. Whomst'd've.
Whomst'd've's
Enthused Norseman Thiswould be great if "whomst'd've" was actually usable in a sentence and meant something
What the hell is that?!
Memes.
Connor Shea
Whomst'd've
Whomst would have
Whomst'd've done this?
Moral of the story: AHHHH CHANGE IS SCARY TALK NORMAL
¿WAT BE NARMIL!
I DUN NOW WAT NUMIL IZ
Arno Online why did I read this in Xidnaf's voice
Froma future. Language's changes
When you were talking about European languages losing inflections I had a strange feeling about Russian. Slavs are not that far from Europe, why then we did not lose our inflections? Maybe we have lost some but to this day it is just a mess.
But I like it. It is nice not to rely on word order for grammar functions. Changing order of words is a stylistic element in Russian.
Russian has actually lost the vocative case (звательный падеж).
It's present now only in some Church-Slavonic relics like "Боже" and "Отче" etc.
On the other hand, it is now being recreated in new colloquial forms like "мам, пап, Саш, Вась". So the idea of cycles makes sense.
Данил Дорошин Russian lost its complex verbal system, but if you look at Bulgarian it’s the other way around. It lost its cases but kept its verbal system!
meanwhile in bulgarian we have that free word order but lack cases... still have the vocative though
Ты уверен? А двойственное число? А глагол быть в настоящем времени? А перфект? А настоящее длительное? Все это было в праславянском языке!
In german we have four cases, though one of them gets slowly replaced by another
The ether/either part blew my mind. Never really felt the difference between /θ/ and /ð/ before
As a Greek it's always surprised me how English speakers sometimes confuse /θ/ and /ð/. In Greek these two phonemes are totally independent.
Tom Raptile it's interesting because I'm surprised by how many vowels have merged in Greek. υ, ει, ι, η, υι, οι all pronounced "ee"
I'd hazard a guess and say it's because both were written *th*, and so over time they got confused. Any words where there would be confusion you can, as the video says, usually work it out from context.
Asmodean Underscore Yeah, this makes sense.
Patrick Hodson This is strange to me, too. This phenomenon is called iotacism. I'm afraid Greek will end up with just one vowel. :p
There are already letters for th and dh in the Latin alphabet: þorn (Þ, þ) and eð (Ð, ð).
I love your use of colored and shaped speech bubbles to indicate different languages. I think it's a surprisingly fitting show of how languages relate to each other and evolve over time.
Tbh this channel wouldn't be the same if you had good audio quality
It's just not xidnafey
I am at once flattered, comforted and insulted.
Those 3 words might eventually merge into "comflatled" as the English language get simplier. j/k
Xidnaf
You should look up Shoe0nHead, 480p masterrace.
Xidnaf Improve your audio quallity all you want, *DO NOT* change the animations!!!
They're awesome, descriptive, make you think and smile and laugh and I love them. I love them.
I'd love to see a video about the *Uralic languages*!
Why?
Johannes M why not?
kato perkele!
Hente Hoo There's nothing particularly interesting about the Uralic languages to warrant a video. If they're going to make a video about a single language family it should be something like the Austronesian family which has a fascinating and quite intriguing history behind it.
I agree that Xidnaf should definitely take a look at the Austronesian language family.
However, I disagree with your first statement. While Uralic studies may seem relatively placid on the surface, there are some surprisingly powerful currents below. Indeed, some researchers question whether Proto-Uralic was ever a "single" (as far as proto-languages go) entity, or whether it was rather a Sprachbund. Personally, I'm more inclined to treat it as a family, just with cross-influences between certain groups.
Of course, on the other hand, there's the Altaic Sprachbund of Turkish, Mongolian, Tungusic and Korean (and possibly Japanese) which MAY be connected well over 10000 years back, but which have traded lexical elements so extensively that working out stymologies can be like untying knots made out of knots!
TIL speakers of Dravidian languages are time travelers.
I’m pretty sure the Dravidian line was a joke.
Nah, their time is just cursive
Stewie Griffin
@@allisond.46 r/whoooosh
How? Please explain
I don't think english speaking people need to worry about losing sounds, really, let's be honest, you have way too many :)
AquilaIrreale my dialect of American English seems to be merging a lot of its vowels while gaining consonants like /x/ and the glottal stop.
WarOfTheRing Veteran Well... I see your point, altough it's really a matter of wowels for what I am concerned. I mean, after many years of study, I still tangle my tongue very hard every time I have to speak english, some of those wowels are just too similar to each other to me...!
AquilaIrreale we hecking do
My Spanish girlfriend had real trouble distinguishing sounds like the diphthongs dairy and diary and she could not pronounce w and v at all. Wood she pronounced as bud. I actually tried to teach her one day to say wood correctly. She just couldn't get it.
No we need more sounds
My guess is No before watching.
Short Names my guess is yes, look at the number of cases in Proto-indo-european (8) where did they all go? or the duall? or the informal/formal 'you' or grammatical gender (especially neutr is lost for many languages)
About non-indo-european languages; I wouldn't know for sure.
Betterridge's law of headlines XD
And that's not even including the possibility of an allative case that's only marginally attested outside of Anatolian!
I can't wait to someday see the word "Yeet" in the merriam webster dictionary
In German we still use most of the latin cases (Nominative
, Accusative, Dative and Genitive) and we also have 3 genders for words. In latin class, only ablative and vocative were new.
I have made that observation. 2000 years ago german and Latin were similar languages. Big bombastic words, complex grammar. Latin simplified both words and grammar. German is one of the least changed and therefore one of the most complex modern European languages but also oddly more like Latin than most others. By this I mean the vocabulary is different. Yes modern Italian is closest to Latin in that way. I mean in the feel, the sound, the thinking of it.
lol last time I used the genitiv in a sentence the guy I was talking to laughed and said "don't do that, it makes me want to punch you"
@@garak55 In high educated regions it finds a lot more use, but I agree that it is slowly getting unpopular and rare.
Instead of "Das Haus des Mannes", you can just say "Das Haus vom Mann"
I am German. One aspect about the German language I love are its unnumerous derivations, even for very "basic" things like wall (Wand, from "wenden"), sand (Sand, from "senden") and its combined words. The porters of the most basic meanings are mostly single syllables. What I don´t like about German is that you cannot speak undefined, whether it is plural / singular, gender or time, it is always defined. On top of that you have a four-case system for nouns and adjectives together, irregular verbs AND highly irregular plural. Combined words also happen to be pretty irregular, they do have "s" between, sometimes not, sometimes the first part is plural, sometimes not (in accents that varies). German spelling knows four ways to lengthen a vowel (double the vowel, put a silent "h" after it, do not double the folling consonant, have a silent "e" to follow (only after "i", but for local names also after "a", "o" or "u"). You have to learn how the word looks. This is very much unlike Vietnamese language of which I have very basic understanding. -- But another thing: In my meaning German will dramatically change throughout the next decades: The grammar will simplify due to the pressure of immigrants who as adult can never really learn it, the incessant introduction of English words and by constant pressure of the gender lobby. Already, we used to have many combined words in German that are not any more used, e.g. Lichtspielhaus => Kino (cinema), Weltmeer => Ozean (ocean), Lichtbild => Foto (photo), Fernsprechgerät => Telefon (telephone) and so on.
1:43 I think 'night' was pronounced [ˈniçt] rather than [ˈnaɪxt] when they came up with the spelling for the word.
Was looking to see if anyone else had mentioned this to save me the trouble. And one or two other mistakes I'd mention such as with 'taught'.
Likely before the Great Vowel Shift, yes.
Johannes M Indeed. Night and knight. Speaking of all the silent k's, they weren't always. The k's in knight, know, knew, and knowledge used to be pronounced. I also find it very interesting that words like 'melodies' used to be pronounced in the 12th and 13th centuries exactly as we do in Afrikaans today: [mɛludiːjə].
The comparison with (for example) Dutch is rather interesting: our word for 'night' is 'nacht' [nɑxt], which is rather similar to [ˈniçt], and 'knight' comes from the Dutch word for servant, which is 'knecht' [knɛxt] (or the other way around, or they both got it from a different language). You can see similar things with German. It's part of why people think English is difficult to pronounce, cause often there's seemingly no correlation between the way you write a word and the way you pronounce it.
@BonDieu617 It's the same in Afrikaans (for obvious reasons). Night is 'nag' (the Dutch nacht with a dropped t and a simplified spelling for ch), though our word for knight is ridder (literally meaning rider).
The main reason for the similarity between Dutch and English is due to the shared influence of Low German, as the Saxons that settled England, and eventually dominated over the native Angles, and even older, the Celts, also settled what is today the Netherlands and brought their language with them.
Loved it. Just one question: Is this thing on your head a hat or a rough estimate of your real hair?
No it's a hard hat from all that dangerous linguistics work
Christian Schreiner I say he had a hat on his head.
Andres Villagra Probably that one.
Thinking about the comments on the AAVE video a hard hat might be appropriate.
lol. I always assumed it was a bowl cut.
in finnish people are nowadays sortening the word "kanssa" (with) to (kaa) and adding it to the end of the genetive forms of other words. for example:
mä (I+nominative)
mun (I+genetive)
mun+kaa (with me)
if the suffix starts conforming with the vowel harmony rules, people will probably stop considering it as a word of its own, and instead it'll become a new case suffix.
just like spanish conmigo or contigo
That's how it works in Turkish.
Sen (you singular)
Senin (yours) + ile (with)
Seninle (with you)
O (he, she, it)
Onun (his, her, its)
Onunla (with him, with her, with it)
This is strange in a good way. Is this what languages do?
My native language, Bengali, has a similar construction to what you guys are currently doing with Finnish & Turkish.
āmi = I (nominative)
āmār = My (genitive)
śāthe = with
āmār śāthe = with me
I love the illustration of words as little blobs. Brilliant!
The progress you talk about is exactly what has happened to Mandarin Chinese over the last few centuries. Many people wonder who people of Northern China get by with so many homophones, but the truth is the context and the regular use of compound words made Mandarin understandable. This process is turning Mandarin from a highly analytic language to a somewhat synthetic one, with all those prefix, suffixes and irregular word order.
You're on the ball with these uploads, good man yourself. Your channel is better than ever!
Great video! I tended to fall into the misleading idea of languages only dumbing down, but after watching this, I made a connection.
Spanish "S" dropping in coda position is reaching a critical mass where you'd think there'd be mass confusion when the plural "las reglas" can't be distinguished from the singular "la regla" (or "les dé" from "le des," etc.); however, just as you noted, the comparatively very simple vowel Spanish system (basically 5 compared to at least a dozen in French or English) is increasing in complexity to compensate, in some regions splitting into pairs to make 10 vowel sounds so that the "A"s in "la regla" are distinct from those in "lah reglah" and so on.
Since French underwent a similar "S" dropping centuries ago, I now wonder if that's why they have a relatively complicated vowel inventory for a Romance language.
French is complicated though, because it's also heavily influenced by a now-extinct Celtic language that was the language of the Gauls before they were conquered.
Phonology of English is pretty damn complex. And if I butcher one of these vowel's variant, y'all acting as if you didn't understand me.
If you butcher them in the unstressed syllables you'll be fine. In the stressed syllables, we really won't understand you. So sorry.
well I mean pat, part, pot, port, putt, put, poot, pit, pet, peat, and pout are all different words so if you say the wrong word then well people are going to hear the wrong word because well you said the wrong word.
Wow I’m glad this showed up in my feed because this video was BRILLIANT. I’m a communications major, and love this kind of content. It’s fascinating from linguistic and sociological perspective
I love when people argue "singular they" isn't grammatically correct even though we made "Google" a verb, and "Rickroll" a word
@@goodiesfeats2252 they has also been used singular for a long time, and it's the only word that sounds right
@@goodiesfeats2252 < Ignore this singular commenter. They are wrong.
I’m a non-native English speaker. I’ve seen many English texts that use singular they. And the whole idea of “singular they” is extremely simple and it makes so much sense.
In my language we don’t have gendered pronouns. And the usage of plural pronouns for refering to a single person, is something we do ALL the time. It is a way to show respect.
People who argue it’s “wrong” sounds extremely silly to me
The discourses on the gender-neutral third-person-plural pronoun among native European language speakers always make me laugh as I speak Korean which has neither gender pronoun nor gender articles. How meaninglessly sensitive those languages are.
@@ldalexandrite Well, in my language it doesn't make sense, so you are the silly one
In my accent (British, south east of England) do is not pronounced the same as due and dew. In fact, due and dew are pronounced more like Jew.
Adam C Dialects often keep old sounds (archaisms) and make up new ones (novations)
In my accent Jew is pronounced the same as do..
Me tew!
Same with Australian accent
Mushroom Cube
They’re talking about the consonant sound, not the vowel. They’re saying “due/dew” sounds like “dyoo”, which is closer to “Jew” than to “do”
people do what they feel sounds better when communicating and linguists try to figure out which new rules people have invented
"...and holy crap, our verbs used to be complicated."
Your French, German and Dutch viewers beg to differ. :P
Leon de Rozan eh, French verbs are simpler than Old English verbs, though you're right about Dutch and German.
Leon de Rozan complicated compared to modern English at least, haha
@PennyPlunderer
In French you use different suffixes to indicate mood (subjunctive) and tenses (simple past, conditional, etc).
Dutch and German use modal verbs to form compounds, mostly.
You could make a case here, though, since the pronunciation of the verb forms have coalesced in French.
Though German is getting easier. The Konjunktiv I & II and the Präteritum (Past Tense) almost disappeared from spoken German. (Though this might differ between dialects)
Bia Zarr and the Genetiv, too, as an example for nouns
I love how good ole' Xidnaf sites his sources at the end. It sorta gives the video that college presentation type feel.
Also, it's really helpful to know the outdo and intro songs.
As usual an excellent video. Etymology and progression of languages in general are among my biggest interests. Even with a degree mostly in English language (it's a long story lol) I'm still learning a lot from you. Please keep going. I just wish I could afford to support you, along with the other excellent 'teachers' there are on youtube. I think the ad-ban is disgraceful and wish someone could set up an alternate site doing much the same thing (only leave out the lists, cats... that sort of thing. It could be a You Learn Tube!).
A constructive critic for a careless error: Actually there is a romance language which still uses cases, which is Romanian !!! Thank you a lot for the video, I love this channel !
I'm always fascinated by the youngters' slang in french. They're actually creating a new grammar, adding to the new vocab mostly derived from english and arabic, but also from various sources, as various as… french itself (there are many effort within the LGBT communities to revive the gender-neutral words prior to the neutral-masculine merging).
But what I find the most fascinating is that they managed to create a new kind of non-inflecting verbs while keeping the old ones, and while creating french conjugations from english verbs, complicating a language that they're accused to ruin oversymplifying it.
Ksidnaf is actually uploading videos! wow
Great video, this is by far my favorite of the one's you've done recently.
The whole topic was very well-chosen, and I liked your little footnote/disclaimer about the cycle theory.
This video is great! It's noticeable the extra amount of time you're putting to make this videos
Cantonese are reducing their tones and eliminating the ng and o phomemes slowly.
I can't even tell between n and l, ng and no consonant, tone 5 and tone 2, even as a native speaker
You Know Who same here
I had a feeling from the outset (partly because I've recently been diving into old Norse) that it might just seem like languages were more complicated before simply because no one speaks like that anymore and it tends to feel like your own language is simple and easy to grasp (though I would never use those terms to describe English, no matter how much of a grasp I have on it). Also my immediate reaction was basically what you said about new words. There are probably millions of things both concrete and abstract that we now have words for that, say, the ancient Greeks didn't.
All of which is saying I'm talking out my ass and I thoroughly enjoyed the video. Thank you.
Yeah, the L2 vs L1 effect definitely makes sense. I keep finding myself thinking that the way Japanese grammar works is so complicated and English grammar is much easier, and then I stumble upon an L2 English learner asking about some aspect of English that I've taken for granted that really confuses them.
This whole "gaining new things" reminded me of how Finnish may be getting definitive articles. It doesn't really have articles right now, but I've noticed how "se" is often used as if it was the equivalent of English's "the". I don't know how widespread that is, but everyone I've met seems to be using that in speech.
I had thought about ths subject myself for quite a while now, but only sporadically and had never bothered to do some research on it. This as been of my favorite of your videos so far! I am really glad you're managing to pull through after everything that has happened reagarding your future professional life, but I can only say, if you do decide to continue making RUclips videos, I'll be here to watch them! Take care Xidnaf, and keep'em coming ;)
You're diagrams and pictures are so simple but spot on and informative.
Hey, Xidnaf. Great video!
There's something I've been wondering about. Languages evolve according to how they're actually used. The Romance languages, for example, came from how most people (who were uneducated at that time) spoke Latin, contrary to how the nobility spoke it. Nowadays, however, we could say education rates are as high as they have ever been. There are language institutions, academies and whatnot, regulating languages. Do you think this may slow down the evolution of languages? I think it's something nearly impossible to avoid, but consider, for example, that a book won't get published unless it's written "correctly", that is, taking into consideration what these institutions dictate is the correct way to speak. One would avoid imitating a person's way to speak if that person lacks education. So what do you think will happen to languages in the future?
Maybe that would result in there being a separate way to write vs speak normally? That already exists in a few languages. With the internet, though, it’s also possible that there will just be more of a distinction between formal/informal speech and writing
Those who regulate languages add or remove some rules of writing, grammar, etc according to how people actually speak. However I agree this regulations will make language evolution get slower. I think it's a good thing. People from 200 years in the future will not have a hard time understanding what someone from 200 years ago wrote/said.
Thanks I was super bored in class this a great gift
I love this video. You break down the evolution of language in a way no-one else does. There are countless lectures that end up being unable to explain it clearly and simply. Thank you.
i love when you point out stuff that's happening to language right now. I do the Ima and the o' thing all the time and didn't even realize it.
In Slovenian we have 18 different forms. 6 on how its used in the sentence and for each of them we gave singular, dual and plural. Latin has only 12
Slight correction on your pronunciation of "night": The process was /nixt/ > /niːt/ > /naɪt/, so your pronunciation /naɪxt/ never existed.
I dunno, I was trying to do more of a /nəɪxt/, which I kind of thought was a plausible pronunciation for someone from the 1500s. But yeah, probably should have gone with /niːxt/.
@@Xidnaf /əɪ/ for the vowel is probably correct for most speakers in the 1500s. But the /x/ (or /ç/) had long gone by that point - possibly by Chaucer's time. /aɪ/ developed later, the 1600s.
However all bets are off WRT Scottish speakers, on both the vowel and /x/.
4:36 ''Holy crap verbs used to be comlicated''
-Sigh it isn't complicated tbh, pretty much the same like in Dutch or German (in the way we have more different forms)
Yeah even the past version of the verb is pretty much the same, still though in comparison to modern english it's incredibly complicated.
That is true, but still, it's not complicated.
I must say I'm very impressed by the recent spike in quality of your videos.
To be brutally honest with you, I have been watching your videos every time they show up in my recommendations ever since you had around 5 released, but I never really subscribed because I thought your content was somewhat shallow and lacking in research.
Now, however, I've seen an upgrade in quality, accuracy and novelty of information. Please keep it up! You've got yourself a "new" subscriber from among your long time viewers.
Wow! This is a question I've been having for a long time, so thanks for clearing it up! By the way, you should make a video on the effects of the arrival of dictionaries on language.
5:33 WTH are Dravidan Launguages doing ?
4:34 we also have stone used as a verb... which has an innapropriate meaning.
There's always fanny, which means cVnt in British 😘
"I'm going to have to do a lot of work to collect enough dew by the time it's due." BEST. SENTENCE. EVER.
NORMIE.
wow this is my first video of yours that i've watched and i never thought of linguistics as that interesting before.. just wanted to say that this opened my mind a lot, thank you
I'm so glad videos came out after such long time !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I pronounce do and dew very differently.
Do, dew and due are pronounced the same in an American accent. Other accents pronounce the d in dew and due as a 'j'
i actually do get the 'new addition of inflections in Chinese' and its very true. words are getting grouped into sets more often and are less so seperate. seems unusual to not add addional somewhat useless words at the end of some particular words; evwn if it would make complete sense and have the same meaning.
What kinds of "useless" words, for example?
I'm loving these linguistics videos. You've earned yourself a sub!
Actually these eight minutes have given me so much insight about things I always wondered about. Thank you :)
In the beginning of the video, I was thinking like: "Dude, Swedish has gotten _a lot simpler_ in the past 80 years. Why are you talking about thousands of years, Xidnaf?". After the video, I have gotten some hope that Swedish is going to have 4 different cases in the future and a whole lot of verb conjugations. :D
Maybe it's just my current perspective as an American living in Hungary and learning Hungarian, but he cycle between Agglutinative, Fusional, and Analytic makes so much sense to me.
imo, it's not an evolution that discards the previous grammar, but rather tends towards these phonological systems. Your example for Ennglish is perfect, and I wanted to give an example for Hungarian, I would cite the language's consonant assimilation via suffixes. it occurs for most suffixes, but the val suffix and the first person singular definite verb conjugations earn especial note. This, of course, takes vowel harmony as an obviously given feature of the language.
Yes, the rigid categorization of thee types does more damage to the theory than it helps it, but I still think it has some useful insights.
The concept of endings in latin and anciant greek are surprisingly similar to the japanese particles
You make linguistics fun. I hope you get back to it someday. :)
Holy shit, that video was so awesome and needed. Adding to favorites now.
Now you can tell haughty people, "It ain't slang it's inflectional morphology"
Little fan-fact. In Poland we still have all the things you said about latin. Different plurals, forms dependent on usage or even gender. For exammple:
Word "house" in Polish: Dom
M. Dom, Domy
D. Domu, Domów
C. Domowi, Domom
B. Dom, Domy
N. Domem, Domami
Msc. Domu, Domach
W. Domie, Domy
Have you ever considered studying German? Because it's actually one of the best languages to see the development of e.g. the English language in. Just saying, that table you brought up with the old forms of "to live" is actually quite precisely how it still works in German
From what I've heard from linguists the whole fusional/agglutinative/isolating thing is viewed more as a sliding scale, where fusional vs. agglutinative represents the number of functions morphemes typically take (e.g. noun endings in latin encode case, number and gender at the same time, whereas in a agglutinative language those might each have their own morphemes), and synthetic vs. isolating represent how many morphemes a word typically has
3:34 this point is really solid and I can see it back in Albanian. For example, l and ll are different letters, because the ll makes a 'thicker' sound than the singular l, so it's just percieved as a new letter in the alphabet. And that's how Albanian manages to make the 26 word Latin alphabet into 36 letters
lol a person learning english might not even know what "aight imma head out" means
I beg to differ,it's still intelligible,because it's still possible to slurr it even more
Actually, the "gh" in some of the words like night used to be a voiceless palatal fricative, not a velar one. This is because they are preceded by a front vowel, and Englishspeakers found it easier to make a palatal fricative after front vowels, so that's just what they did, I guess, until they decided that whole business was too much hassle and just threw it all away. (Excuse my overly simplified explanation; I am not a professional) You will notice palatalization is a huge theme in English. Whereby I mean that velar fricatives turn into palatal fricatives, which eventually turn into approximates, which is why Dutch still has the suffix -ig (the g being pronounced as a voiceless velar fricative and the i as a centralized mid-open unrounded vowel), whereas English has -y. Yes, they are cognates. You probably knew this. I just find it interesting. Also notice how velar plosives become silenced before the letter n, especially at the beginning of a word, as in the words "know" and "knight", whereas the other Germanic languages don't do this. Does anyone know why English pronunciation went so soft and why Englishspeakers hated the velum? Another example of English being soft is how the letter R has completely become an approximate now (or silenced before other consonants in British dialects), whereas in other Germanic languages, it stays as a trill or fricative of some sort? The same thing happens in Dutch. It must just be easier to speak that way, which leads us to the general trend of language in general. It tends to get simpler! That's just common sense.
This leads into something I've been wondering. Are modern languages fundamentally different than ancient ones? Like are there any language changes that are universal across language families?
Yes. European languages seemed to evolve in a similar direction. Most likely because they influenced each other. By this I mean one could argue that modern French is more like modern English than it is to Latin. Or modern German more like French than ancient German. They have all moved towards dropping in flexion, relying on word order and certain word markers. But like the video said it isn't true of all language families.
I think most historical languages had small vocabularies with words that could mean many things (vague meaning). World languages seem to have towards larger vocabularies and more precise meaning. This is a result of more people speaking it and literacy. Since usually the same trend occurs when more people speak a given language.
Well, one thing that's definitely different is vocabulary, because modern languages need words for things ancient people never saw.
I really liked that last point about how framing language changes is important.
I am so glad to see your work man. Every time you upload, may day gets brighter!
Also, may I suggest an interesting use for your Patreon supporters? What if you released your videos early to them, and used their input to help fix errors and typos before your youtube release? With the amount of language lovers that offer corrections in the comments, it seems to me like it might help, and be a fun way to interact with Patreon supporters.
If you already do something like that... sorry I am not a Patron x_x
'Do you know that Newspeak is the only language in the world whose vocabulary gets smaller every year?’
4:36 "present subjective"
uhhhh that's not the mood my friend
I think that a language can become unnecessary complicated by culture. For example if people stick to historical spelling (like in English) or if people demand complicated language to see you as educated.
yes, that's why you have irregular verbs and irregular plurals (and Esperanto doesn't )
@@ronaldonmg No, irregularity is a separate thing. Irregular verbs generally occur when two or more distinct verbs become synonymous, and people start using one verb only in one tense and switching to its synonym for another tense. Irregular plurals, at least in English, resulted from the loss of grammatical gender and the fact that many nouns have kept their gendered plurals despite losing their gender. Neither of those are exclusive to spelling (you don't say "childs" while writing "children" for example) and they're not related to education, in fact highly educated people often insist on preserving distinctions in meaning in words that are in the process of becoming synonyms.
the into song never fails to get me pumped for linguistics
Love your videos Xidnaf! Im not a linguist in any sense, but since watching one or two videos on the topic, the youtube algorithm started pushing more one me and I got very interested in the topic.
One thing I've been wondering is how the rise of literacy and government issued spelling standards changed the way in which languages evolve. Intuitively it seems to me that having a nationwide official version of a language would make dialects in a region less pronounced because the media will mostly work with the standard language. The city I live in (eindhoven, the Netherlands) used to have a different dialect for all of it's 'burroughs', however over time, this faded, and no only people of old age still use one of these hyper-local dialects. There are also other obvious reasons for this, like the major movement of workers from all over the country to Eindhoven to work in the Phillips factories. But I was wondering if there is a visible slowing down of the evolution within languages in language areas where literacy in a nationally agreed upon standard is high. Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
I remember getting into highschool before realizing that the words "to separate" and "to be separate" were the same word.
I don't know when I noticed it, but people in my area (Houston Texas as at time) would say "seperATE it" or "it is sep'rate." To me, they were always two sep'rate words that were related, but were anyways seperATEd. This was even when I enjoyed reading. I just guess I glazed over it in books.
It was when I wrote a note to a friend and realized that I said "It's seperate," then wrote later "it'll be separated." When called out, I made my case that they were separate words... and was completely made fun of. Honestly, I still think of them as sep'rate words.
I write this down as an example of how the rules can change on the smallest of scales. If I was an influencer, I could quickly get others to write in my way. Really, if I lived in small area and had a few kids, that could easily infect the area in a couple generations. We'd be adding a new, small rule to the language that separATEs the adjective from the verb without any contextual additions needed.
you're clearly right though, one is an adjective and one is a verb and that pronunciation distinction is common in most English dialects, pronouncing them differently is clunky and ambiguous
I say them differently as well. Not just a Texas thing
Oh no, language is changing! I won't be able to understand it in a few hundred years!
I can't see much difference between the a's in rake and table. Aren't they just both /eɪ/?
Dan's Channel yeah I think you're right.
Dan's Channel depends on your dialect
More like [ei]
Xidnaf, I love your videos man. I really appreciate it that you create them. I clicked an add for you. 💕 Keep it up!
Man; I love this. Good work my friend.
Please add links ie url in description not just normal text so we can easily open it.
woops
didn't mean to do that, thanks for pointing it out
Welcome Xidnaf 😊
And thanks for changing so quickly.
When the internet is making up phrases like "whom'st've'd" for the sake of irony, I think language is in for one hell of a ride.
The Internet is becoming too "normie"!
I say "due" as "dyoo."
Yea, I pronounce 'do' /du/, and 'due' and 'dew' as /dju/. I come from America. Although, I actually have a lot of archaisms in my dialect, like the distinction between 'which' and 'witch'. Anyway, a lot of people pronounce 'due' that way. It's most common in England, I think. The Welsh accent certainly doesn't have it.
keep being awesome. you keep my love for linguistics alive.
damn xidnaf I've been here since some of your first language videos and you have really improved since then. congrats on all the growth your channel has had recently. keep up the good work!