The Canterbury Tales, or, How Technology Changes The Way We Speak: The London History Show
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- Опубликовано: 2 июн 2024
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Sources and further reading:
British Library accents and dialects archive: tinyurl.com/3zz66jam
McGillivray, M. 2013. Canterbury Tales 1 - 541 read aloud: vimeo.com/56602418
Robson, D. 2016. Has The Queen Become Frightfully Common? tinyurl.com/2p8usbah
Strycharczuk, P. et al. 2020. General Northern English: Exploring Regional Variation in the North of England with Machine Learning
Stuart-Smith, J. 2017. Changing sounds in a changing city: An acoustic phonetic investigation of real-time change over a century of Glaswegian
Walker, A. 2020. Northern English accents becoming more similar, researchers find. tinyurl.com/mvwjbtfb
00:00 Intro
00:59 Chaucer's Canterbury Tales
07:32 Sponsor: Kids These Days
09:08 Caxton's Canterbury Tales
11:31 How Technology Changes The Way We Speak
15:44 Credits
Permission to make “if history had gone down another trouser leg” a well known phrase…
Sir Terry Pratchett coined it!
It's a reference to Terry Pratchett's Discworld books! They're a great read and full of this sort of phrase - you should try them out :)
Is it not already?
It was in Back to the Future.
Is that a reference to the ancient (and now sadly banned) sport of Ferret-legging?
I had the great good fortune to study Chaucer under a prof who actually spoke conversational Middle English. The class was conducted in that language, and we were each encouraged to complete one of Chaucer's unfinished Tales (in rhyming Iambic pentameter couplets, of course) in lieu of taking the final exam. Made an English major out of me.
That sounds insane, did yall have any experience or were you'll learning on the go?
This is so fuckin' based.
I learned Middle High German at the university of Gothenburg when I was young, or rather I learned the pronunciation, grammar and some poems. I doubt I could hold a conversation. It sounds similar to Middle English and Old Swedish. For instance: until around 1400 the german W sounded like the English, while the German W today sounds like the English V. In Swedish the W sound exists, but only in dialects, unless it's an English loan word or a loanword from another language with the [w] phoneme. Standard Swedish only has the [v] phoneme.
Huh? You beat Chaucer at his own game? Brilliant, you are!
Or did it just reveal the one already there lol
She looks so proud of her modern lingo she’s acquired, I love it.
I don't know how I was recommended this but this is an AWESOME video.
Funnily enough, in Dutch, you still call “eggs” “eiren,” and pronounced very similarly! In Dutch, egg (singular) is “ei,” and adding -en at the end of most nouns makes that noun plural (with the occasional word becoming plural with an -s, like in English).
We can see the Germanic root of the English word for “eggs” in this way!
Goodness I love languages. And as a person with a degree in English studying in the NL, I absolutely love this video. ❤️
Snap! 🤣
I grew up spending my summers at my Dutch grandma's. I stopped going as a teen and haven't spoken Durch in 30 years, but I still retain a lot.
Later, as an adult I learned that I spoke differently from everyone else in that area. Not because I was a Finnish kid, but because the kids next door were from Amsterdam, and I copied their slang without realising :)
I've been wanting to rekindle my skills and I'm looking for any easy to understand channels, so recommendations are welcome.
@@VikingTeddy if you want dutch channels, easy dutch are great! they interview people based on a subject (whats ur favourite subject, whats ur favourite place to travel) in dutch and you can follow along with dutch/english subtitles. i always find it funny bc theres one person who always wont agree with the topic xD
My mother's family lived in Essex and Suffolk. It was said that people there, particularly nearer the coast, could happily talk with the Dutch sailors because so much of their dialect was influenced by Dutch and vice versa.
Very cool! Thanks for sharing 👍
Honestly, the sociocultural impact of the printing press is one my favorite subjects of history. It's so rare that a historical event creates such a clean break between two periods. For anyone who's interested and needs your reading slot filled for the next six months, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" by Elizabeth Eisenstein is probably the most comprehensive history on the topic.
Six months?! Geeze how long is this book
@@hannahblurp9360 she’s probably a slow reader.
@@hannahblurp9360 800 pages in paperback. Two volumes hardcover.
This is actually the exact book I've been looking for!
@@shrub4248 Will it take you six months to read, do you think ?🤔
That 'Henry Higgins' skill (placing people by their accent) is a real thing. It was, and might still be, something 'security specialists' *cough cough MI5/6* learned for special positions - the one I met was mingling at a British embassy entrance engaging people in conversation.
He got my dad to within 2 miles and my mum 10 miles, which is reasonable since she moved several miles aged 14.
Not just secret agents, the general police have specialists to help ascertain exactly where people might be from too to help them trace their background if they're suspects.
Bus divers, too. I once met a man in Peterlee, outside Newcastle (UK), who had spent 30 years driving a local shuttle between Newcastle and several of the surrounding towns & villages. He told me he got so that he could tell which town or village someone was from with near 100% accuracy.
Nobody ever guesses where I'm from because they have a stereotype in their head
@@parkmannate4154 what stereotype? You mean your physical appearance?
@@user-et6pj4db9s No. People have a stereotype in their head for what someone from North Carolina should sound like but we moved out when I was relatively young and I was raised by Canadians so I sound way more like someone from Toronto than someone from Raliegh
As a native Texan i embraced my deep southern accent early in life. I still use words like Howdy and y'all to keep them alive. I love using old euphemisms and sayings my grandparents would use. My people were Slovakian German and French. I heard a lot of German growing up. That has created a unique Dutch Texas dialect that is almost gone now. Great video, not many could make me revisit Canterbury Tales. enriching though they were ild not make it through today.
I used "The good Lord willin' an' the crick don't rise" at work the other day, and exactly zero coworkers understood what I meant by it. It was absolutely glorious. I have to find a way to work "on it like a chicken on a junebug" into a very serious corporate setting.
@@MereMeerkatI say it “like ducks on a junebug”, one of my favorite phrases.
Last week I said that someone was “crooked as a barrel of snakes” and everyone looked at me like I had three eyeballs or something. I thought it was a fairly ordinary idiom.
But, I’m Texan and my family on both sides are Texan going way back. My husband’s family are mostly transplants from the northeast.
Most of the time my accent is fairly neutral generic American (aside from the country southern idioms) but when I’m very tired my central Texas accent starts coming out, and when it does, my in laws find it bizarre, lol.
Like, if I say something about those “really purdy flah’rz” or ask for a “diaaahhhyet coke” they act like I have some contagious disease, lol!
Plus, I live in south Texas and I was raised with a Latino stepdad so through him I had lots of Tios and Tias and primos. So, in the same sentence sometimes I’ll use a southern idiom or phrase, along with a Spanish word or phrase.
Most people that are from this area don’t bat an eye at that, but people not from here (like my in-laws) find it very startling and incongruous. Especially since I look very white. But ‘round here, speaking Tex-Mex is pretty common and normal.
I think "y'all" is safe: it fills a grammatical need better than the alternatives.
I come from the Midwest U.S. and have been using "y'all" regularly in high-tech and Spanish-friendly communities here in southern California for years, and never get puzzled looks.
(It *is* informal: I doubt I'd use it when making a presentation.)
"Howdy" (for "how do you do?") I use sometimes, but - unlike "y'all" - I don't hear others using it 'round these parts.... maybe away from the coast/cities.
@@MereMeerkat it's and the Creek don't rise. Origin is a ,letter to George Washington from one of his generals. The general was tasked with keeping the Creek Indians from attacking the colonists, and wouldn't be able to come to support Washington if the Creek rose up. Which is why 'dont" is grammatically correct.
People say I "don't have an accent" because I'm from Northern Arkansas. No friends, I do have an accent, it's just not the one you were expecting. Arkansas and Missouri (especially Northern Arkansas and Southern Missouri) are border regions which means some people are going to talk with a southern accent and some people are going to talk with a Midwestern one. The amount of times I've caught myself saying "oop" when I drop something or reflexively saying "sorry" when I haven't actually inconvenienced anyone on a daily basis is more than I can count on two hands.
I love how the egg joke still kinda works for a modern audience. If it had been the exact same joke but backward and the man had asked for eyren then it would be confusing due to the lost context, but “could I get some eggs?” “sorry, I don’t speak French” is absurd enough on its own that I could see it today in something along the lines of the Monty Python spam sketch
Eyren is almost the same as Dutch/Flemish eieren. And at that time there were lots of people from Flanders in the southeast of England.
Almost exactly as eggs in German, eier (pronounced eyer) :)
eyeren is actually the original Anglo-Saxon word for eggs. The word eggs entered English from the Vikings during the Danelaw and is actually cognates with the word eyeren. This also explains why some dialects still used eyeren and some had switched over to eggs, as the Norse influence wasnt evenly spread out throughout England in that era
That's how you say 'eggs' in Dutch.
The way you said 'copypasta' was fantastic. Also, I remember my grandad grumbling about modern historical dramas that no one wears any headwear in them - there's clearly a growing demand for wimple representation!
Yes, when you look at photos from only a hundred years ago, everyone wears a hat. Not only that, but the women in historical dramas all stride across the countryside in long dresses as if they were wearing trousers. Try doing that for more than the few seconds it takes for a camera shot and you’ll end up on your arse.
Wimples, veils, bonnets, hoods... give me headwear!
I'm trying to bring hats back in fashion by wearing my own small collection of vintage hats.
I'm quite grateful I don't have to wear anything on my head just to look presentable in public because I hate the feeling, ugh
@@16poetisa Very fair! Mostly I'm happy with how clothing has deformalised over the last few decades, and dropping compulsory headwear is part of that; it would be nice if period dramas didn't just do correct costuming from the eyes down, though
Your grandad should have blamed the car for that change.
Thank you for this; this was my very favorite video of yours of all time. For decades I have taught my students that Chaucer is *AN* example of Middle English, just as Beowulf is an example of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon). But though it seems obvious now (having seen your video) it never occurred to me that Chaucer's work is the reason why anything called "Middle English" is even identifiable today. Oh, and the story about the eggs is one of the most insightful anecdotes (about anything) that I have ever heard. I just really, really liked this video, thank you.
That's really kind of you to say, thank you!
My first language (or, to be more accurate, my first words) were Dutch, although I was born and grew up in UK. The first decade of my life was in a mix of Dutch and English. When it came to O level we did the _Nonnes Preestes Tale of the Cok and Hen_ - one of the few clene tales. When it came to my turn to read out a section I did so using Dutch phonetic pronunciation. Teacher (Dorothy/Dot) was astonished, and made me do a longer section at a school assembly.
My first language was Dutch too. We emigrated to Scotland when I was 7. Now you'd think I was Scottish (mixed West Highland/Glasgow) but I can still speak Dutch and your right about it making Chaucer much easier to pronounce.
I cannot handle the sheer delight with which you pronounced "copypasta", like sampling a fine delicacy. Very much invited to live in my head rent free hereinafter
And I've never heard "yeet" spoken so thoroughly.
me with copium
meaTSpace
I've had this experience, and I believe that it is a widely shared one, of school teachers showing an open disdain for colloquialism or slang, almost as if anything under 100 years old is inherently non-valid. In fact, as far as I recall, the newest literature we studied throughout all of high school was To Kill A Mockingbird, a book written in the 1960's set in the 1930's. I don't think we studied any other 20th century work, perish the thought of 21st century literature. If the crypt keepers that run the department of public schools didn't study it when they were in school, it's not "academic."
I actually think this damaged me. I remember the summer after I graduated high school, my grandmother loaned me this novel called Utopia by Lincoln Child. It's a thriller set in a high tech theme park. And the protagonist has a teenage daughter with an mp3 player. I was a teenager with an mp3 player! I remember thinking "Oh yeah, books are allowed to be new. I forgot that was a thing that could happen. They can even have people like me in them."
So seeing a scholar of English history enjoy and appreciate modern 2023 youth slang hits with an uncomfortably unfamiliar yet positive sensation. Young people don't often hear it's okay to be young.
I grew up in an industrial town in Victoria, Australia. Almost no one had moved in or out of there for over a century. So when I moved to Melbourne, people were amused by my rather archaic vocabulary. Sadly I rarely say the words I was mocked for using 30 years ago and if I use them now, it seems slightly false and affected.
That's fascinating! A great example of how those regional dialects can occur/survive even in the modern day. (Though perhaps less commonly so now, in the internet age...?)
I've definitely noticed that not just vocabulary but our NZ accent as a whole is changing, too. To me people from Auckland sound an awful lot like Aussies? (Apparently there's more than twice as many ex-pat Australians in Akld than there are in Chch & Wgtn combined, so maybe they're having a sneaky effect on the locals...?! 😉)
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166 The very distinct clipped Adelaide accent is dying out. Most people in that city aged under 60 now just speak generic educated Australian.
I guess I had a bit of that. Spent eight years in primary school as a completely ordinary person with no-one conceptualising my accent as exceptional. Go to secondary 3km almost literally up the same road and all these people who weren't from my primary school were so convinced I was British. By which they meant English.
To be fair, if I heard myself on a recording at this time I did (a) sound totally different, which is normal and (b) rather more English than I would've expected, which is not. Possibly related I remember sitting in the car once amusing myself with stupid accents and then going "I've forgotten what I sound like".
@@harryeast95 😂 Starting to think too hard about other people's speech patterns, let alone one's own, can definitely turn into quite the head-trip! 🤪 Still very fun though if you have an ear for language & an interest in it...
My mother was "older" when I was born, and she was mistaken for menopause by her own mother - I've been told that when I'm really angry my accent goes rather old fashioned.
I also grew up looking up dictionary definitions in my mother's grandfather's dictionary...
We did Canterbury Tales in high school. You said these characters were all recognizable to 14th century Britain's. This book stuck with me, because I recognized each character as fitting someone I knew in my life then.
Chaucer did a great job capturing human nature in this book.
An example of technology changing English and every other language for that matter, is a really annoying auto correct / spell checker ..... Chancery ?😂
@@georgerobartes2008 I use swipe, so swipe sometimes assumes letters should be in a word that shouldn't.
@@zengrenouille You should have left it , pretty obvious who you were referring to and why. I thought it was funny and entirely appropriate.
Dear J. Draper. I've just discovered you, 15 minutes ago and I'd say I'm delighted. I'm Chilean, 65, attended a local Brittish school where I learned my English from great Brittish and Scottish teachers. Without formal training, I became an English/Spanish translator. I love languages so much, I learned French as well. English has let me open a door to a whole different culture, which I have enjoyed since childhood, being able to discover great literature and history, and to watch movies in it's original sound. Spanish is also a great language, so rich and ample. To be able to navigate in both languages made me recognise similarities, differences, many common roots, everything so fascinating! Tks for this wonderful presentation. I read Chaucer for the first time at school, when I was twelve, and simply loved him. Cheers from a new subscriber, from the other end of the planet and congratulations for your beatifull work❤
I adore this video! Can’t get enough Chaucer. Thank you.
Hey it´s the Tasting History guy, love your show!😀
Hey man, I got here from seeing your community post. I gotta thank you for the introduction because this is awesome! She is awesome!
@@damedesuka77 right? Next time I’m in London, I’m definitely taking her tour.
@@Adam-nc6qg thank you!
OK so obviously now we need a video where Max makes something and he and J explain the time period and the language surrounding it and why it was written in that way
You have summarized my 6 years of university in 17 minutes. Thank you, this is a wonderful, delightful video.
I feel that if I had quality youtube during my college years I'd have actually understood most of it. Creators who explain things and cite them and give examples and use visuals have helped me to understand stuff I've already been taught but didn't retain bc it never took a foothold in my brain.
Hoo noo broon coow
@@drewgoin8849 ja meine brun cuu
What did you study? I’m genuinely curious
@@prapanthebachelorette6803Probably linguistics or English.
Costumes. History. Theater. Linguistics. Humor. A cute accent. I love what you’re bringing ahahaha.. i really appreciate your linguistic takes and you saying YEET with such gusto, dressed like a 14th century person 😂
Wow! I wish you had been my English teacher when I was at school. I laboured through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue with a teacher who couldn’t pronounce it like you do. I understood far more of it with your pronunciation. I have always been fascinated with regional speech. As a boy of about 6 years old, I could barely understand a word from the two farm workers on my uncles farm in Devon during the early fifties. It was not just their accent, but also their vocabulary. As an adult I married a lass from Lancashire and her accent has moderated considerably over the forty plus years we have been married. Interestingly her accent returns when we visit her sister who still resides in Lancashire. I have lived in many parts of England and pick up accents quite easily. So I’m not sure which region I sound like. It may depend on who I am speaking to. Please can you do more videos like this one. Thank you.
That's what happens with accents. I had an American friend staying with me in Vancouver Canada. A bloke who had grown😢 up just eight miles away from me in South East London stopped by for a visit. When he left, my American friend remarked that he hadn't understood a word either of us had said for the previous twenty minutes.
Try talking to someone from Newfoundland, @@davidbouvier8895 , I had an ex-gf who sounded "normal" until she phoned the folks back home, then all of a sudden I needed Closed Captions to figure out WTH is going on.
I'm an American, and we don't have quite the accent diversity as the UK, but my parents are originally from Wisconsin in the Midwest, and my mom had a pretty thick Midwestern accent that lightened over decades of living in California. My relatives who stayed in Wisconsin, though, still have it. I've never lived there, but a Midwestern O sound sometimes slips out from being exposed to that accent as a kid.
Can you make a whole video of you joyously reciting modern slang one by one? That was wonderful
YEET YEET
@@rapchee what is yeet? Yes?
@@vonn2221 YEET
ruclips.net/video/3sxRAeh8f7w/видео.html
I too am requesting this now
@@vonn2221 Yeet means to throw something suddenly, usually with much emotion.
Linguistics is such an interesting subject. Like archeology of words and language. Being a Dutch native speaker, grammar across Germanic influenced languages are so interchangeable.
Living in CH, Dutch sounds familiar :)
Was lucky indeed as a Brit to live in the Netherlands for a while. Had learned a little German at school. Found the connections between our three languages both fascinating and helpful. Vive la difference. But also the borrowed wealth of shared linguistic roots. Ik denk? Ich denke (ok - so not quite the same meaning...) ? I think?
@@LathropLdST
As a dutch native speaker i'm not sure what CH is
@@forregom CH means Switzerland, I think
Dutch always sounded like someone making fun of the English language to me. Almost like someone heard it, and just decided to wing it. I mean no offence in that, it's just my personal opinion.
Fantastic video! I'm American and hearing all the different regional accents was fascinating! We have a lot of regional ones that are coalescing in much the same way.
I remember in college when my professor of Medieval Literature had us all memorize a small section of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and recite it. I loved how the words flowed together, it was really lyrical. And I enjoyed hearing it here too!
Hi there! You say you're "American". I'm also American. Where are you exactly from? Canada, USA, México, in North América? Or from any Central American country? Or from a nation un South America?
Because all of those are AMERICA, you know?
I'm from Chile, South America. And we are all sick and tired hearing you, folks from USA, that YOU ARE AMERICANS AND YOUR COUNTRY IS AMERICA. If we are talking about language, please start making a correction to this big mistake. You are NOT AMERICA OR AMERICANS. YOU ARE JUST A PART OF IT. Best regards, from another American, out and far from the USA. Best regards
I remember using "Yeet" for the first time in 2007. My new favorite phrase when I was throwing things.
This video was wild, out of the gate she hits us with middle English from under a wimple, she goes from Chaucer to a blink and you'll miss it Terry Pratchett reference, and then the rabidly unapologetic smile at the patronage hint. Can we have some more, please?
Yes! The Terry Pratchett reference! Made me grin ear to ear☺️💜. Such a great job she does!
I definitely don't know enough about Pratchett (but know of him)... where/what is reference ?
@@jeffreyshort4531 The reference was to the "trouserleg of time" which is a minor plotpoint in "Guards! Guards!". Incidentally "Guards! Guards!" is a great starting point for getting into Pratchett's work.
[Also, for fellow Disc fans, it appears the Trousers of Time wasn't a Pratchett original. It was also mentioned on the radio show "I'm Sorry I'll Read That Again" including this appropriate quote: "There's a library at the end of the left trouserleg!"]
I recognized it from "Johnny and the Bomb". "We're in the wrong trousers of time!"
@@lordcirth For me… it would have been Wallace & Gromit ;)
Keep in mind that Chaucer's Middle English wasn’t the dialect that became Modern English. Thomas Mallory's Arthurian works (written just a few decades later) are considerably easier to read, because his dialect won out.
I love the introductory bits in Morte d'Arthur, where Mallory is begging his readers to put in a good word for him, so he can get out of prison. It makes the whole thing seem so much more real.
Standard English, maybe, but all the dialects of today descend from whatever English was spoken back then all around the British Isles.
What were the names/origin of these dialects?
@@joanhuffman2166 Are you asking about British Dialects of today? Mostly they are influence by whoever invaded/immigrated whichever part of the island. So Scouse (from Liverpool) is influence by Irish, Yorkshire accents are influenced by the Scandinavians, etc.
@euansmith3699 No, I'm asking what dialect Chaucer used, and which dialect became the source of modern English, the one that was printed?
Knowing some German was SO invaluable the first time I came across The Canterbury Tales in high school!
As a history and English teacher, I love your videos. You make my life so much easier. So clear, fun, engaging, and friendly. Legend, legend, legend
As a German-American, I grew up in a bi-lingual environment. I also learned basic French in high school. I always loved learning about languages and the origins of words :)
In German, eggs is "Eier," so very close to "Eyren"
I really like how sci-fi TV series like "The Expanse" portray a quite colorful (or "colourful") form of English
That’s because “eggs”-or rather the singular “egg”-was borrowed from Old Norse (where the plural was the same as the singular, as it’s a neuter noun), while “eyren” is natively West Germanic.
The Expanse has mixed languages on the Asteroid Belt (a concept actually nicked from a 1950's book, mind you) which form a creole called Belta.
The books actually have the Martians speaking Chinglish with Texan accents, but the show didn't replicate that.
@@worldcomicsreview354
Good luck getting “Chinglish” out of a Texan!
@@worldcomicsreview354 ITYM "form of patois" rather than "form of creole". (Although there is some creole in Belta.)
BELTALOWDA
Love your videos! I'm a nurse recovering from cancer surgery and I'm feeling a bit useless being on the receiving end at the moment so it's refreshing to watch someone funny, charming and educational as you are. Thank you and keep it up! ❤
Also a cancer patients looking for interesting ways to spend my time. I love languages and medieval history so this is the best it gets.
God bless you both. I went through that (stage 4 malignant thymoma) stuff in 2006, and here I am loving life and watching Chaucer videos. Best of luck to 'ye.' --Old Guy
Thank you for this! It's real "the universe provides" episode. I've been reading a modern English version of The Canterbury Tales, as one does, and it hit me just yesterday to wonder how it could have lasted so long given it was written before Herr Guggenheim's printing press. I'll sleep better tonight.
Also, I was in Glasgow and wanted to know of a restaurant that was open late while I waited for my night train to London. I asked the young barman if he could help. Three times he tried to tell me about a place and three times I didn't understand what he was saying. Luckily someone walked by and I asked for a translation. I was truly embarrassed; the young man couldn't understand what my problem was.
I love the way she says the word “yeet”
I never thought history could be so interesting! When I was at school (many years ago!) I hated history lessons - they were so dry and full of names and dates which seemed totally irrelevant. Thank you for bringing life back to a previously dead subject.
Ugh, it's always so frustrating when people try & teach history that way! 😭 It's the personal stories & the wacky facts that really engage us about the past? SO glad YT is finally bringing all of that amazing stuff to life in an accessible way for people who were choked by the dry-dust version!!
In my experience school history classes have also tended to subscribe far too heavily to the "great man" theory of history...? In reality, although some individuals (like Chaucer or Caxton) definitely make a very significant impact, it's never in isolation. I'm always more fascinated by seeing how they're products of their socio-economic context, including changes in contemporary attitudes & new trade contacts with other cultures...?
History is not dull, but some teachers make it so.
Yep history is presented so poorly in schools, if you can find it . James Burke did a series called connections that tells the history of innovations and is highly entertaining
History is in the telling. I find a lil humor helps you hold on to it
My history classes at school were all "if you'd have lived back then, you'd have toiled in the fields / factories / trenches and died a miserable death at a young age". And I finished in 2000, so imagine how bad it is now. Probably wall-to-wall "we enslaved the world and need to feel guilty forever". Give me the great men any day.
I always laugh when people my age (boomers) say the world is going mad, it always was and no change means no progress. Another Great episode. I have shared with my grandchildren so they too can enjoy.
Yay for passing on cool historio-linguistic content! 🥳 Heheheh yeah, nostalgia in my observation tends to mostly consist of a highly selective vision of the past...? Mostly due to fallible human memory, and childhood self-absorption! Hence all the perennial moaners extolling a former era when everything was supposedly so much "simpler"... 🤦🏻♀️
It's quite startling to realise that sort of thing has been going on for thousands of years! 😆 Think of the Ancient Greeks, harking back to a mythical "Golden Age"...
The completely ahistorical takes political extremists come out with are rather horrifying though 😳 Feels like a significant failure in educational systems, but maybe instead it's just more wishful thinking...?
As a grumpy oldish git myself I do have to stop myself tutting when the youth of today don't know the difference between less and fewer...
I think Douglas Adams' quote about technology could also apply to language:
1. Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
2. Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
3. Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
Kids there days... give me hope for the future.
@@anna_in_aotearoa3166Political extremism or neanderthal pictograms interspersed in perfectly good language? Give me the extremism any time.
@@worldcomicsreview354 Oof. Really, really hope that's a joke. And as a linguist, I don't mind emojis if appropriately used... Perhaps consider them an analogue of the modifiers & honorifics in Ancient Egypt's elegant & complex hieroglyphic system? Might make you feel better!
Wow, this is a great primer for how language never merely is, but always is becoming!
"Yeet" is definitely my favourite word to be added to the English language. It's the only one I know of which so many transformations are agreed upon; he/she/it yeets, he has yeeted, he yote.
I like that we threw in an irregular past tense purely because it's funnier.
GNU Terry Pratchett
Lovely to hear the trouser legs of time metaphor.
Oh this note, I think we need to bring back “boffo” as a term in regular use tbh.
As a half Swede, half American. But raised in Heston Hounslow, as well as central Stockholm. Bilingual with a dash of Dutch. I find this extremely interesting and entertaining. The three have so much in common historically. A lot of old Swedish words exist both in Britain and the Netherlands. And speaking, not with a swedish accent, but still a little "off" you notice just how important accent's are to the Brits. In EVERY pub, I get that slightly confused look, followed by "Where you from mate?" Then "Oh, SWEDEN! Thought you were Irish!" Which I feel isn't that bad for someone who moved from the UK over 40 year's ago. 😅
We Brits take an interest in where people are from, no idea why but we do. When I worked in retail I always asked where people were from if they had a strong accent, and then asked about the town/city/country they're were from, whether it was nice or whatever.
@@RicardoD957 I'm Kiwi born and bred, from Pommie parents but spent the middle third of my life in Australia (mostly in remote rural). I adore accents and languages but haven't (yet) had the chance to travel further than Aus+NZ. When I meet people with accents, which tends to be at the supermarket checkout, I politely ask where they're from and comment how I am interested in accents and foreign lands. Kiwi Friends have told me that my accent switches back to Australian when I've been there a few weeks in a row, for the first few days or so of my return to NZ. (So even subtle shifts in accents, our brains can sorta turn on and off). Even before the internet, I noticed that on long distance phone calls, I would change certain vocabulary words when speaking on calls from Aus to NZ or NZ to Aussie.
Its notable how much north germanic /scandanavian speakers speaking english here often end up sounding irish or american. Must be a twinge of that (apart from likely learning american english first thru tv absorption). I guess the american accent is the mix of irish, scottish, german, scandanavian, dutch - not just english, as those groups actually often outnumbered english settlers in america. They don't admit but americans are majority German heritage, and they definately will admit when they are Irish though. Especially the Dublin and strangely, Danish accent to me sounds quite american yet only when speaking english- not in their other native languages 🤔
@@jorgepeterbarton I spent a month in Granada in 2004 trying to speak Spanish and failing miserably. I am American and lived in many places when young and they would all ask me if I was from France.Never been there.
Vikings settled in both Britain and North America 😊
So enlightening! I learned to speak
German and on more than one occasion I was told I spoke television German!
As a linguistics major who never used my degree, your videos are such brain food that reignite those synapses. Love this!
The ending of the Miller's Tale almost made me burst out in laughter the first time I read it in school.
Hence “a Whiter Shade of Pale” by Procul Harem
My High School English class was told to pick a tale and do a presentation about it. I jumped on the Miller's tale and proceeded to tell it like a stand-up comedy routine!
Almost? If you get through that one without at least a chuckle there's something wrong with your funny bone.
Some comedy is timeless.
Yeah me too. I was shocked at the ending and that my high school English teacher let me read it!
@@ferretyluv
And recited by Amy Farrah Fowler on the Big Bang Theory show!
Love it when I click on a video for linguistic content and accidentally get a sneaky Pratchett reference. As someone with a degree in linguistics who also did a thesis on Pratchett, I love when a video caters specifically to my interests. Thank you! 😆
The ad section was hilarious! I love these videos.
Excellent presentation, I particularly like your hand movements accompanying the narrative. It brings the words alive. 😊
My favourite word used in The Canterbury Tales but lost in modern English is 'eek', meaning 'also'. The text is just littered with all these little mouse-squeaks. To get an idea of the linguistic diversity that existed in medieval England, compare The Canterbury Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written around the same time, but in a Staffordshire dialect. Thanks to Chaucer's influence on modern English, it's fairly easy to get the gist of what he's written most of the time if you read it with some explanatory notes, but Sir Gawain really could be written in a completely different language (or at least it seems that way to me).
related to german auch, icelandic auk, norwegian au
Dutch again. Ook means also.
That's awesome 😆 I've only ever seen it reproduced as "eke", and that definitely doesn't convey nearly as much rodential interjection power! 😂
It's where "nickname" comes from. Min eek namn spoken as a sentence became my neekname i.e. nickname
@@geoffwoodgate7450 I thought that "Ook" means, "Who are you calling a "Monkey"?"
My High School English teacher had us memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and recite it in front of the class for a grade. I took the offered extra credit, and memorized it in Middle English. I was pretty happy with myself and thought I was all set for the day we were supposed to perform. I show up to class, and our first direction from our teacher is to write down the prologue on paper to turn in so she can grade it. I had listened to a recording, and memorized it from that. I had no idea how to spell most of the words I could pronounce. Thankfully, she gave me some wide latitude on what I wrote down.
I feel for you...
Since Middle English had a *wide* variety of acceptable spellings (as they were local and strewn around in time like seed), I would have accepted the spellings as long as the vowels were correct, and then I'd write a neat little comment on which dialect would be closest to the spellings.
I myself would have used the spellings found in the Harley manuscript of the Canterbury Tales (British Library, Harley MS. 7334), along with the script - that prologue would look like a straight-up copy.
Actually, I once *wrote* a short story in south-western Middle English exactly like that (minus the occasional modern interference in vocabulary).
And I read from the Harley manuscript during the uni seminar on the Miller's Tale (oh, how fun: “Yeah, my manuscript doesn't agree with this edition - I have a thorn here!”).
I also had to memorize it luckily I didn't have to write it as well 😊
@@Leofwinethere were 500 different spellings of “through” alone during that period
as an american Im not going to lie you're excitement and innocent joy at saying Copium etc was just *chefs kiss* the Serotonin I needed today.
A good one. I had a professor from the Midlands who claimed that when he was young if you want 15 or more miles into the adjacent county that the accents (dialects, actually) were so different that one couldn't understand them. (He also said that as a student he could not get into Oxford or Cambridge despite good marks because of his accent. But that's another story and might have been apocryphal.)
according to terry jones, most medieval peasants could at least read their own name, and they sued each other like modern americans, so it would be very advantagous if they could also read what their lawyer was writing down, so probably slightly more literate than people think
In Michael Woods book/ tv series "Story of England" where he looks at the records of 3 villages in Leicestershire through the history, there are records of the villagers employing Priests and School teachers from the late Medieval period so presumably a significant number of the villagers could read and write
It surprised the heck out of me to realise how litigious the Angles and Saxons were!
Also would be good to be able to write down stock and exchanges as well
@@nealjroberts4050 It helps to remember that the judicial system of the day was much less formal and much more local than it is now. Villages could convene their own juries for local disputes and Justices of the Peace, who today are mostly just good for witnessing official documents, acted as impromptu arbitrators for even smaller disagreements.
It's not particularly difficult to recognise your name even if illiterate. Even my niece was able to identify her name written down long before she could read anything else.
Thanks ,I really enjoyed that .At 80 + I still have the remains of an identifiable Geordie accent in spite of living in London for 60+ years .Working at the BBC in the 1950s I tried to lose it,and obviously didn’t succeed.Perhaps every human behavior has regional variations .Being able to imitate is a skill that maybe we’re not fully aware of .Life is wonderful .Peace n love ,J.
Love the Geordie accent, I'm glad you didn't lose it! 😊💜
That so funny. I’m from Canada. My grandma is in her 70s, left her hometown at 16 and never looked back. She never lost her accent. Yet i work with a woman in her 40s who grew up knowing only french. I don’t know when she started using english daily but nowadays she can hardly speak french anymore!
Don't lose the accent. It's one of my favorite British accents. It's so pleasant and interesting.
At 14:17, you brought up what I’ve noticed in America. This phenomenon is even more pronounced here. Younger Americans sound almost exactly the same despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. This is especially true in bigger cities.
I noticed the blending of accents myself. I thought maybe I was just watching too much British television, as an American. I find it fascinating how many accents are in the British Isles, even in one neighborhood. Compared to American's land mass size, there's a lot of accents here, but there's easily MORE in the British Isles and they are 40 times smaller!
Anyway, great video!
I ran into one of those people with linguistic superpowers. After listening to me talk he outlined my family history. He was bang on and I would have accused him of cold reading but I did not know the dark secret of the family history and that my paternal grandfather was secretly from...Kent!
I was once told that the Glaswegian accent lends itself to the cadences & intonation of Chaucerian language & therefore made it sound more rhythmically poetic & more readily understandable. I tried it & it works like charm. Cheers.
Vowel shifts, innit 😉 Southern English accents have been through ar least one
That's assuming you can understand Glaswegian at all. I saw a vid of man-on-the-street interviews with people in Glasgow. Could hardly understand a word. And it's not like I never heard Scots before.
@@CAMacKenzie True. I am basing the pronunciation on the educated Glaswegian twang that I was familiar with when at College of Education. The speech patterns are slower & enunciation crisp & clear. Using that tip did however help me to read & the better to appreciate Chaucerian verse.
@@CAMacKenzie Glaswegian isn't too bad. Dundee however, I know people who grew up in the city and still can't always understand other locals. I was a student there for a bit, the accent just sounds like noise and there's a lot of local slang and dialect.
I only grew up 30 miles away. The universities in Dundee have students from all over the world, many of whom don't have English as a first language. If I didn't understand Dundonian folks then I can't understand how a French or Chinese person would.
English is sometimes said to be almost "sung," compared to other languages. Poets probably "sang" to a greater extent then than they do now. Old recordings of self-professed bards like Eliot, Joyce and Yeats have them droning on in a sing-song manner.
About 20 years ago, there was a journalist in Norfolk who could tell which town in the county anyone had come from simply by the variation in their accent. 😊
I loved this as I adore learning different languages ( or at least trying to). I also have a lot of fun with my own accent- when people ask where Im from i always say “me or my accent? “ as i was born a Geordie but grew up in Northern Ireland!
I worked in a bookstore in Seattle (in the US) for a while, and a British woman came in asking for a mop. I let her know that we didn't have any, but she could go to a store up the street. She looked surprised and asked, "You haven't got any mops? Like, a mop of Seattle?"
That's when I realized she meant "maps".
I met an Australian woman in Alburquerque, and when I told her my sister was living in Mackay, she said "oh, the austic city!" After a minute, I realised she said "artistic."
As a Brit, I’ve never heard anyone pronounce map as mop.
Was she from Liverpool?
@@glen1555 I didn't ask, but based on the single reference I have of the Liverpool accent, I think not (that reference being the Beatles, of course). I thought it sounded more like RP.
@@Joanna-il2ur bear in mind that a standard US accent pronounces the "o" in mop as /ɑ/ (as opposed to contemporary RP /ɔ/), whilst the contemporary RP "a" in map has arguably shifted towards a more open vowel sound which could be perceived as nearer to that American "o" than to the American /æ/ in the US pronunciation of "map".
I remember asking my Dad (a South Londoner like myself) why he said graph with a short a like maths rather than a long one like laugh and he said it was because his teacher at school was from Birmingham.
I am Western Canadian and those three vowel centers of the words I pronounce all the same.
@@westzed23- Midwest US (Michigan) and same.
Brummie Joke Alert!
Q: What is the difference between a Buffalo and a Bison?
A: You can't wash your hands in Buffalo.
Eastern Canada and they are all the same for me.
@@westzed23 Oh that's common almost everywhere where the English language is spoken,except the Southern Hemisphere and Southern England
I found this very interesting to watch, as an American I knew that this was something that happened here, we have many accents and some regional dialects but it seems they're slowly vanishing. Where one use to be able to identify someone's accent to the state, now it's more the region, someone doesn't have a "Florida accent" or "Texas accent" they have a southern accent. Or they may have a New England accent, or Midwestern, or pacific northwest. Knowing that many European countries including the UK are so much smaller (speaking only of land mass) it never occurred to me that there were once so distinctive accents and dialects there and that the same phenomenon, the disappearance of those and emergance of new accents and dialect, was a world wide phenomenon. It's nice for me to learn about other places in the world, it helps expand my world view even just a little bit. I thank you for sharing your history and your culture.
I’m a 71 y/o American. I love your channel. I love British history. I love the cockney accent and can see its danish origins. I love marriage and am very close to my own wife of decades. I love that you’re accomplished, and have become so learned over decades. I love that you so proudly sport a wedding ring and dress with conservative elegance. I love your channel, your art and you yourself.
As a Londoner I am surprised you believe the cockney accent has Danish origins. The Danes invaded and took over the north of England, not the south, and that was over a thousand years ago so there is unlikely to be any trace left of a Danish accent anyway.
This video exemplifies why I love history. Bringing the strands of history together to show its mirror in the modern world. Really helps make such distant and alien worlds feel so much more real and relevant. Someone at the BBC, give J Draper a history series, now!
Why? The whole world gets her for free (albeit with an ad or two) on RUclips and we can rewatch her stuff whenever we like. But if she was signed to a TV network it is likely that one series would be made and quickly forgotten, so it wouldn't even show up on a streaming service a decade later.
I had heard the story of the eggs or eyren before, but it's still a very dramatic indicator of the state of the language at that time.
As someone born and raised in Oklahoma, it's interesting to consider how much watching Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate when I was a teen influenced me and my language, even my accent.
As a German, I hear the word ‘eyren’, and immediately think of ‘Eier’, so I guess eyren is likely Anglo-Saxon origin? I come from a part of Germany, where they used to speak ‘Plattdeutsch’ Flat/Nether-German, quite related to Dutch. But by the time I grew up (55 soon), it was only the old folks speaking it, holding on a bit longer in the countryside. Now we have more ‘regional’ dialects, like probably most countries, as you’ve said…
Language is a living thing that grows and changes. On one hand it is sad to lose some words and dialects, on the other hand it's really great and exciting to see new ones being created from more people and cultures connecting. Thank you chaucer for kicking off an era. I bet he didn't know at the time that it would matter so much.
Linen headwear is so underappreciated. I have found that wearing a linen coif on a hot, sunny day actually keeps me cooler than being bareheaded, because linen is a breathable material which protects my head from solar heat gain.
I often spent sunmers in Poland as a child and quite a few women wore head dresses or babushkas in the summer covering their hair. Part of the reason was to keep it cool the other was to keep their hair clean as they walked quite a bit and were exposed to more dirt than we might be accustomed to.
My accent really confuses people. I was born in Newcastle. My pa is a Gordie but Mother is Scottish and I have lived in Scotland most of my life. Most people think I am Scottish until come out with something like "wor lass". I love how my parents accents are similar like lass/lassie and aye are used in both but they are also very different. Yet another amazing video. I love your content, so informative and entertaining.
You say: _Most people think I am Scottish_ , in a way you are half Scot. It's not for nothing that there's something called *mother tongue* .
Reminds me of when my parents moved to the Borders a few decades ago, drinking in Berwick you'd hear that the folk from Spittal were all Geordies, and drinking in Spittal, they'd say the Berwick folk all spoke with Scots accents- there was a subtle difference, but being born near Newcastle then living in County Durham from 5yo to 10yo, it seemed minimal compared to crossing the Tyne or the Wear tbh
I mean, you're half Scottish and you spent most of your life in Scottland, enough to develop a Scottish enough accent that people think you're Scottish, so what then makes you not Scottish?
My brother went to University in Scotland and had his kids there, which officially makes them Scots.
They moved to southern England - which leaves my English brother speaking Scots with a English accent and the Scottish children having no trace of Scots at all, apart from when they're in the mood.
My accent confuses people.
Born in Manchester my family moved abroad when I was 11 and I went to an international school, which played havoc with my accent.
I returned to Manchester in my late teens and had to re-learn the accent, which isn't 100% even 40 years later.
I've lost the mid -Atlantic accent, from the international school, completely but, even when I try hard, I don't sound authentically local - it's more generic 'BBC north' - lovely flat vowels and a deliberate preservation of archaic phrases.
My next door neighbour (from Blackpool) said 'No, where are you REALLY from?' when I told him I was born three miles away.
@@pd4165 that reminds me of a woman I knew decades ago. I think she was born here in Australia, but her parents were USian and she spent most of her childhood in India and attended an English school there. Her accent was a glorious mish-mash.
When you say "write it out word by word," it's worth mentioning that in those days you didn't just pop out to the stationery store to select your paper and choose from a variety of ball point pens or gel pens.
A bloody good tale. It was also the day I realised why we ask 'Can I get a copy of that book' because originally you would be getting a copy of the book you wanted. I feel enlightened and dumb in equal measures.
Thank you J.
I love historical linguistics soooo much. It’s fascinating to place the internet, as an invention, alongside other major inventions that have made huge ripples in language. It is always sad to see dialects fall out of use, but I’m glad to see you discuss emergent dialects as well. Great stuff!
It just sucks that the emergent internet-based dialects are all American because they dominate culture so much 😒 I hate seeing my Australian colloquial heritage die to crap Americanisms from Twitter.
@@rhythmandblues_alibi It's time we chucked a U-ey, mate, but we'll be flat out like a lizard drinking.
@@personaljesus4278 wow that's so interesting!
Wow... WOW!! WOOOOW!!!! This video just randomly played on my TV. I was cooking breakfast when it started playing. I was so hooked by the time my eggs were done I had to restart it. Thank you so much for this wonderful video I learned so much. I knew just how powerful the printing press was, but really didn't understand how much Modern English was shaped by it. And I never really appreciated how the internet is the new printing press... "...yeet...copypasta..." LMAO! Subscribed.
That's a very interesting take on Chaucer and his tales. Guess we'll never know how much was lost.
On my way out of a restaurant with my take-out, one of the other customers said, "You're not from here are you? I can tell by your accent.".
Most people can't tell the difference between a Canadian and an American accent but this person noticed the difference between an urban Toronto accent and my rural Ontario accent.
JD, your passion for history is both wonderful and infectious.
That impish glint in the eye when reciting new slang was absolutely hilarious.
Laggy😛
JD from Heathers who lmfao
I enjoyed this very much. I absoulely love Middle English.
I’ve got access to my family’s wills from around this time which are in Middle English… it’s surprisingly easy to read once you get over the odd spelling
My family's Swiss German, and I lived there as a kid. It might be different now but the accents were still super localized (you could tell who was from the next village over because they used a different word for swimming pool). I reckon it's because TV in Switzerland is almost all high German, so the regional dialects are still sort of separate, and able to survive.
My family has lived in and around Atlanta since the 1700s. My grandmother and her generation all sounded like Gone with the Wind, but my generation has no discernible accent at all. I even heard my son pronounce the second 't' in Atlanta the other day! Shockhorror! I love how multicultural Atlanta is now, and I love my non-accent accent.😊
Same! I have a Bawlmer (Baltimore) accent (not quite THAT heavy) but my daughter does not. You can hear the older generations and distinguish which county they are from, but the younger people's accents are indistinguishable.
I'm rather certain your generation has a discernible accent. Everyone does.
@slake9727 I'd be so curious to know what people from other regions hear! I'm sure you're right...I'm no Rhett or Scarlett, but surely there's some kind of regional dialect still lurking.😄
I'm American with a New York City midtown Manhattan accent. I get not being able to fully understand your own countryman. Love you videos. Keep 'em coming!!😊
Incredible teller of history 😊☮️🫶☮️
Ah, J. Draper!! SOO WELL DONE!! The writing, the performance, the spooky 2-second shots, the passion, the credibly-sourced history & research, the wimple rant at the end...!!!! I LOVE YOUR WORK!!!!!!
I grew up in the Peak District, and was relentlessly bullied for being ‘posh’ because I had a much softer northern accent that doesn’t really sound like anything specific. Just using hard vowels so bath sounds like math etc. We weren’t posh - I was one of 4 with a single Mum and we were pretty poor for my youngest years. But Mum and my older sisters grew up in the South so my accent was a bit generic.
My mum's family were Northerners in the South so we all have odd "Northern" expressions.
I use "tad" and "owt" a lot. And we have this mixed meal description system: dinner is always the main cooked meal at whatever time but the smaller usually uncooked one is lunch if at midday or tea if in the evening.
Had it the other way around growing up in the south with northern parents. I still get people thinking I am much posher than I actually am. I also use dinner for the main meal of the day whatever the time and lunch, tea, or supper for a small meal.
Who's that then?'
'I dunno, must be posh'
'Why?'
'He hasn't got sh*t all over him'
Feel proud. Most of us try to beat the disgusting ebonics of of children
@@davidwright7193 I'm an American, and in my family we typically used "supper" for the evening meal and "lunch" for the noon meal regardless of size. We would occasionally say "dinner" for the evening meal (and never the noon meal) - normally in a context that implied it was special, like, "Let's go out for dinner tonight." For holidays, like Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving, we always called the main (and huge!) meal "dinner" even though it was served around 2 PM. Of course, we have no meal called "tea." Tea to us is just the (category of) drink.
Also, no one has ever accused me of sounding posh. ;)
As a Dutchman, I vote for revitalising the word 'eyren', it makes me think of its Dutch cognate 'eieren'.
Sophisticated people who are "involved" with your wife's sister. With all credit to John of Gaunt though the fact that Chaucer's granddaughter ascended to the rank of duchess is a testament to the enormous value his support bore for the family.
Love this, I find accent and dialect and the development of language FASCINATING! I live in S Yorkshire, my dad's a Manc and my mum's a Sheffield/Welsh mix, with her mum being Welsh/Irish, and just from that I've grown up around a real mix.
In particular I love idioms - I think it's partially because my parents are a bit older than most of the parents of people my age, but I've grown up around a lot of idioms that just aren't used much any more (although it's also been revealed to me in recent years that some of them are what we now call "nan-isms", turns out nobody outside of my family says "the pot calling the kettle greasy-arse") and take great delight in keeping them alive, and I love learning new ones from other areas, cultures and languages!
And maybe I'm biased because it's where I'm from, but I do think Yorkshire has some really interesting history in the local dialect; the fact that a lot of people here still use thee/thou or that we use a lot more words of Scandinavian origin than the south because of the Vikings having more influence up here. A few years ago a Swedish artist I followed on tumblr mentioned the phrase "hej hopp" and to me it seems obvious that the standard greeting here, "ey up", would probably have come from that (though I've only been able to find one other discussion of this and I'm nowhere near enough an actual linguist to state it as fact) and the mental image of Vikings saying "ey up" is wonderful to me.
I studied Old English in college. The way you speak Middle English, you can hear Old English with a French overlay. Thank you
Thank you very much ❤
As an American who grew up through primary school in East Anglia, has relatives from Middlesex, lived in France and Sicily, and now lives in the southern US, I'm no stranger to dialect melding.
I loved your explanation snd comparisons to how technology can shift language permanently - modern meme culture is definitely interesting to watch evolve!
-heh, Middlesex- yo that’s cool, did you get an accent from it? anyone start borrowing words from you?
I'm American, grew up in America, and I still use English words because I read so many British authors as a kid! My personal favorite is "falling like ninepins," because it's so much more fun to say than "bowling pins."
@@angelabecker9611
i always insist on using the english spelling of words like favourite and recognise for this reason, at this point it's a reflex i can't break out of. i still remember getting into an argument in 2nd grade because there was a word search and i was looking for a synonym for "colour" that was only 5 letters long.
We had a bit of a repeat of this play out with those of us who went in the Queue last September. The only thing we had in common was that we all decided to go & see the Queen at the exact same time, & now we share anecdotes with each-other over Whatsapp.
Well done for bringing back the wimple, and making it look so stylish.
An uncle used to brag that he could pin down an accident to almost anywhere. It did seem to me that the accents I heard when I visited as a kid shifted a lot when I visited again 30 years later. It felt like many pleasant accents had been replaced by regional stereotypes from TV.
I'm originally from West Yorkshire. One set of grandparents came from Bingley and the other from Bradford, which are only about 3 miles apart, but their accents were discernibly different. Now, we all just speak with a kind of generic Yorkshire accent which is not even as far removed from the Lancastrian accent as it used to be.
'Always a fun way to spend a Friday night'.
Hell, it's better than the occasional student riot on Castle Street in Dunedin during semester 😄
Jeez, the notorious couch burnings & rooftop binges (& collapses!!)
I honestly sometimes wonder why the non-student locals haven't gotten sick of it all and rioted Town-vs-Gown style, or forced the uni to move further out of town! 🙈
Your stuff is such a great mix of travel, history, wholsomeness and just fun. Thank you.
Your ability to make history come alive is amazing.
That was interesting, Draper. I thought the closest to a generic American accent was your West Country dialect. Almost New Yorkish but without the overlay of Dutch, Irish and Yiddish that comprise that general dialect. Full disclosure, I'm a Boomer. I was born in a Suburb of NYC. My Dad had been an announcer for NBC during WWII. He and my Mom were from Chicago, originally. We moved ''back'' to Chicago when I was 3. [Each of the NY burroughs had once a distinctive accent.] Chicago accents depended on class and location: North Side/South Side,/West Side. There were ethnic inflections. Near North Side Chicago-ese was very close to Manhattan's dialect. When I lived there, locals all said Sh- CAW - go. Out of towners said Shi-kah -go. That pronunciation has now morphed into the locals sounding like out-of-towners to me. But we moved west when I was 16. I turned 17 in LA. Locals there sometimes asked me if I was from England when I was new in town. I learned from new friends that the town name had once been said as Loss Angh' less [with a hard G]. You can listen for it in vintage film noir flix. After 1950, the broadcast networks pushed Talent to use the Network Pronounciation of Los Ann-jell-ess, until even the locals said it that way, or avoided the issue by using the two initials. At 21 I moved to Tucson AZ. Fifty-something years ago, locals had something of a South West twang, but that has become homogenized by the TV accent, plus the old timers mostly moving out of a town they considered ruined by the influx of Snowbirds, Yankees and Californians. Go figure?
Geographically it does make sense that the “foundation” of American English is from the west of England.
Love the video, I only speak English and have struggled with learning other languages in the past, but etymology like this is FASCINATING to me.
I did personally have an egg/eren situation as a kid when I visited the north of Scotland and had to dash into a corner stop and ask where their bread was, the lady was very confused until I said for making sandwiches, when she exclaimed "Oh, y' mean breed?" - it's so fascinating that the regional difference in pronunciation of a word in our shared language is enough to impede communication.
A good job you only wanted bread, which is accented.
Try asking for a bread roll, whichever variant you say locally.
In my local chippies they are barms but in the shops they're baps, which should give scholars a fair clue to my location.
Thank you, gods of the algorithm, for presenting me this channel
Referencing the Trouser Leg of Time, I like it. Also, you have not only great content but also the most amazing outfits.
Honestly, how do you manage to make such consistently high quality content??? Keep up the great work!❤
Seriously! All her videos are good, but this one was especially well done. It's rare that a 15 minute video on RUclips is well done enough to be interesting all the way through.
She’s phenomenal! Loved this video!
Eyren (Middle English dialect) = eieren (modern dutch). It is pronounced almost the same in modern dutch, but has the additional vowel 'uh' between the 'Ey' and 'ren'.
Ei/Eier in high German - but then, Dutch and German do have many similarities! : )
They’re all from the same West Germanic origin, whereas “egg” is borrowed from Old Norse.