In Brazilian Portuguese there's this weird thing where formally we would say "O que é isso?" ("What is this?"), but informally we actually say "O que é que é isso?", pronounced something like /kekjɛ isu/ (I'm not sure if I got the IPA right). Fun stuff
When I took a prepare course for the Law School in 1957, in São Paulo, Brazil, Professor Castellões called "é que" a "expletivo", that means: it has no meaning, it just reinforces . Anyone remembers professor Castellões from the "Cursinho Castellões"?
Great video! One thing I think you left out is that those who consider French questions "strange" should realize that, by the same logic, English questions are even stranger: if you go on to translate them literally, for example to French they would be something like this: What do you want = Que fais-tu vouloir? What do you do? = Que fais-tu faire? And such weird way of speaking also holds for negations. I do not want this = Je ne fais pas vouloir ceci. By the way, where in the parameters/principles scheme does English "do-questions" fit in? I suppose it is a question marker, but it seems to be rather peculiar. I know that some Celtic languages use a similar construction
In older Englishes, the verb was conjugated properly. It's only later on that this emphatic way of speaking (using "to do" was emphatic, like in modern day "I do know!" Is emphatic) became the norm for negative and interrogative sentences
@J Boss This seems like an overcomplicated discussion. Germanic languages and French, which is a romance outlier with Germanic grammatical traits, all do pretty much exactly the same thing when asking questions. All using modal verbs, which actually do still need conjugation. So the view that they were just simple unlettered farmers simplifying their language is not quite the case. In some cases the language of then is somewhat more complicated than simplifications which have subsequently developed among 'lettered' users.
@J Boss No, the point you made was that it was simplified by not being conjugated, but it wasn't. You don't need to be the appointed expert on this. 'Boss' is only in your username, not your function.
The point about Russian speakers coming across as rude because of comparative question intonation is fascinating. Sort of the intersection of prosody and pragmatics. Nice mug. So, I kept hearing "David is afraid of mogs." I'm like, "What's a mog???" 😄
@@archeofutura_4606 What he said was even closer to "marthes", if that were an English word. What makes it incomprehensible is a combo of voicing the "th" in "moths", as you said, and saying "ah" instead of "o", which makes it obscure that "moths" was the word he was saying.
En français québécois, et ailleurs en Amérique, on emploi la particule -tu pour former des questions (où la réponse est oui ou non), dans le langage familier. Par exemple, "Je sais-tu?" , "Ça se peut-tu?"... Vive la diversité linguistique!
@@philippegauvin-vallee9371 En fait, le vieux français avait la particule de question "ti" à la fin de la phrase. Le Québec s'est retrouvé isolé de la France pendant longtemps, quand le Québec à eu de nouveau contacte avec la France, la province s'est fait dire que c'était mal parlé d'utiliser cette particule puisque la France l'a éliminé. Dans un effort de sur-correction, le "ti" s'est transformé en "tu" Il n'y a pas de formulation de phrase vulgaire en linguistique, si ça parait comme tel, c'est uniquement votre ignorance de l'origine de cette formulation.
@@myriam8091 Hélas ce n'est pas la bonne explication. En fait, le «tu» provient d'une transformation des sons «d et t» devant «i et u», un phénomène que l'on appelle «affrication». En fait, ces sons en québécois se prononcent «dzi, dzu et tsi, tsu». Le «tu-viens-tu» est le résultat de cette affricatiion. A l'origine, l'expression était semblable au français normand ou picard: «tu viens-ti» que Molière d'ailleurs parodie dans une scène de Don Juan. Du fait de l'affrication, le deuxième ti est devenu «tsu». La France n'a rien à voir avec cette transformation. Au passage, mais évidemment, la carte de la position d'autorité est insupportable, donc j'évite généralement, j'ai fait un doctorat de linguistique à l'Université de Montréal....
I won’t attempt to answer the question of whether you left anything out; I will say that it pleases me greatly that you included the eyebrow markings of ASL. I loved when I first learned about that, and how the exact same sequence of hand signs can have (at least) three distinct (and easily distinguished) meanings, based on eyebrow position.
As a student of French and English as foreign languages, the French way of forming questions (est-ce que xxx) never struck me as more bizarre than the English way (do you xxx). In Italian we simply change the intonation and put a question mark at the end of the sentence
You find nearly the same structure in some varieties of Spanish, e.g. "¿Qué comiste?" 'What did you eat?' is phrased instead as "¿Qué _es lo que_ comiste?" 'What is that that you ate?'. Colonialist prescriptivists like to deride this construction as an "unnecessary gallicism", but it's not -- the form without "...es lo que..." is perceived as expressing disbelief or disapproval, which the form with "...es lo que..." avoids.
@@poissonpuerile8897 I use both but I can't explain what the difference is, I don't perceive any disbelief or disapproval in any of the forms. I'm a native speaker of Spanish and English, and I feel these are equivalent 1 to 1 with English: "Que comiste?" -> "What did you eat?"; "Que es lo que comiste?" -> "What is it you ate?" or even "Que fue lo que comiste?" -> "What was it you ate?".
I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic and and find the VSO order rather charming and very neat where you generally know right at the beginning of a sentence whether the verb form indicates a positive or negative statement or a positive or negative question.
I've been learning Irish Gaelic and I've wondered if "Do" questions in english came from contract with the Celts since its closer to "An" questions forms than what is found in Germanic and Latin languages.
@@j.obrien4990 That is a hypothesis, but there's no real evidence for it, especially as "do support" is actually also found in Dutch and in many German dialects. Also, the use of "do" in questions in English began to appear very late, in the Middle English period. If it had come from Celtic languages, it would surely have appeared earlier than that. The more Gaelic I learn the more I realise how its grammar and syntax have moulded Scots and Scottish English, but "do support" isn't one of those features.
@@alicemilne1444 Well I'd say you've stopped me from advancing my hypothesis to a theory. ;-) Thanks for the explanation, and even though I'm not very familiar with Hiberno English I have noticed some of their twists of phase probably came from Irish similar to your observation about Scottish English.
@@j.obrien4990 You reminded me that I have a linguistics book called "Celtic and English in Contact". I decided to consult that about this again. It seems the discussion on "do-periphrastic" (in other words, forming more wordy forms in speech) is not over, but it's still regarded as a hypothesis. From my observation of Scottish Gaelic verbs (I have a book with 500 verbs fully conjugated), "do" is only a particle in the dependent past tense. It is not a verb itself. And it has many other meanings and functions as a preposition, pronoun, etc. But since my knowledge of Gaelic is intermediate I'll leave it up to the experts to battle this out.
To translate "chocolate croissant" with "chocolatine" is to ask for controversy! Anyway, I'd say in modern French, for yes/no questions, you can fit them in three different categories. For example if you want to ask **Are you coming?** Questions where you take an affirmation and just add a question mark: **Tu viens?** Questions where you invert subject and verb: **Viens-tu?**, they sound more formal Questions where you add "est-ce que": **Est-ce que tu viens?**, they can feel cluttered in some situations, but as a single question you ask to a friend before leaving it is still short enough, while raising any ambiguity with it being a question, an order or a simple statement. This last form is a progressive deformation: "Ceci est X" (this is X) -> "Est ceci X?" (Is this X?). In English that would look like: "Cats are mortal." -> "Cats do be mortal" -> "Do cats be mortal?"
Wow. That tangent on Russians explains so much. Every single person I've spoken to with a mild to heavy Russian accent always came across as a bit... blunt when asking questions. I always assumed this was a Russian culture thing. I never realized that it was a Russian linguistics thing.
I learned French at school decades ago and all the inversions and qu- words etc. I am now re-immersing myself via télé policiers (particularly 'Engrenages'/'Spiral'. I realise that all this has virtually disappeared (along with 'nous') and questions are now almost entirely based on verbal inflexion. Tu est allé? Avec qui?
This is especially true in France, and, I think, European French in general (I never paid much attention to it, so I might be wrong, but I didn't notice any difference on that front when speaking to Belgian or Swiss people, and they haven't pointed out anything, and they do mock me relentlessly for "soixante-dix" et "quatre-vingt-dix"), but it is, as far as I know, not particularly common in Québec, they have their own preferred ways of asking questions.
I found surprising that the inverted question mark in Spanish sentence are not at the beginning but where the actual question part starts. Logical but hard for me to remember to write. (Total beginner here.)
well, this isn't necessarily an aspect of grammar either, it's just a spelling quirk (I also think most native speakers wouldn't even bother with it precisely because it's not even particularly necessary haha)
In Quebec French we also have "tu" to indicate a question which is separate from the pronoun "tu" ex: "on vas-tu à la plage", gets a bit weird when used with the 2nd person pronoun "tu" like "tu vas-tu à la plage?".
It gets weird because of the "tu" indicating a question being now pronounced in Quebec in the same way as the pronoun "tu". But in the Normand (Cauchois) variety of French, for example, where this weird "tu" question marker is still used, it's still pronounced "ti" (tee), as you may know. "Tu vas-ti à la plage?" Which is closet to its origin, the "-t-il" used in standard French (As in: "Va-t-il à la plage?") So, less weirdness there. Or maybe still as much for people only used to a standard type of French!
Well, the phonics is easy enough to explain... two languages from two different families had their own phonics/spelling systems. They had a head-on collision almost a thousand years ago and the clean-up process still isn't done.... So we stiill have a bit of a mess on our hands. "Do" as a modal for questions and negation is a bit tougher for me, though. I feel like I'm missing something here. From my perspective hast thou? -> have you? -> do you have? in an extremely short amount of time compared to how quickly most other changes occur. IMO the rise of 'do' as a modal is a much bigger change than the secod person pronouns collapsing into 'you', yet there seems to be much more research on the latter. Maybe worth its own video?
My father and his family are all from Hungary, but my insight into English comes from how my grandmother would say things in English. So, although she would ask me (correctly), "What are you doing?", she would preserve the same word order in the command, "Tell me what are you doing."
I think of "est-ce que" as "is it that" for y/n questions. Is it that you're hungry? "Qu'est-ce que" is for "what is it that". What is it that you want to eat?
And the "Keske" in "Qu'est-ce que tu manges" is often even more simplified into "kess", as in, "kess tu mange"? It's fun to think it's becoming a proper word in its own right :)
Okay, no one’s asking the really important question: why do you use “chocolatine” instead of “pain au chocolat?” 😂 (I learned “chocolatine” because I primarily learned French in La Rochelle, and - as I understand it - it’s very much a Charentais and Bordelais term. Which makes me curious where in France you may have studied!)
I looked in the comments expecting a war about "chocolatine", and I am surprised to find none. Languagejones, did you learn French in Toulose or somewhere else in the South-West?
I don't think its strange at all. Of course I've been reading it for about 30 years. Previously I had studied both Latin and German. Which was a big help. But my attitude was always to accept it as is. It only seems strange if you translate it literally. Which is always a mistake.
Exactly, I run into similar issues when I explain/teach languages, you have some people that have either the mental plasticity or willingness to accept it as is, while others question some rules or expressions to no end, constantly comparing them to their native language (which also has a lot of rules that make no logical sense regardless of which language it is)
Absolutely! It's not forbidden to question how a language (or anything) works, but first, you have to learn the basics before you can start to take the language appart and criticize. When you're new to a language, you can't really make the difference between what might sound weird but is as it is with no way around it vs what's not logical and can / could be changed or improved. For example, many English speaker love to add superfluous "pre" in front of many words, one of the most common being the silly "pre-plan(ned)" (see George Carlin who did a whole sketch about it). Well, you need to have reached a certain level of English to be able to notice such examples and be able to correct / not use them in your own speech. But as a beginner, you can't go around finding things silly and questioning it all; you have to move on. @@mats1975
What I've learnt from this video, and having checked to verify, is that Americans seem to pronounce plural 'moths' differently to us Brits, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders. You seem to say 'moθ' in the singular and 'moðz' in the plural whereas we also say 'moθ' in the singular but say 'moθs' in the plural. Yeah, I know we say the vowel differently too but that's not what I'm looking at.
That's an ongoing change in progress, and my speech is somewhat conservative. I have eth in deaths, booths, myths, etc. But it's definitely on its way out in English.
@@MrNyathi1 I'd guess American. Where I grew up the majority of people had English as a first language and everybody folnowed the 'rule' of final '-s' being voiced or not depending on the preceding sound, not the other way around. Where I live now the majority don't and I can't mind much of a pattern to any changes of any kind. What my brain seems to be stuck on is why people omit the auxiliary in the continuous aspect when doing so in their native languages is the exact same kind of error and introduces the same ambiguities as doing so does in English.
Nice how you “snuck in" the blason with the croix occitaine after the example use of chocolatine, although the use of that term for the viennoiserie is both wider than that, and is patchy in its use in the South as well. By the way, another driving force for how miserable French orthography is, beyond a tendency toward written language being generally more conservative (McWhorter uses “frozen”) than spoken language, is how freakin’ complex the language’s roots are with regards to the region’s ethnic history. Several independent strains of Germanic influence, from Gothic tribes and Rhineland peoples, to the much later Vikings, as well as Celtic languages, Basque influence, and the whole history of Parisian power and dominance over the much more purely Romance languages of the South, like Occitan’s many dialects, and Catalán. Season with Italian, Corsican, Savoyard, and the imported vocabulary from an extensive global colonial history. There’s a wonderfully complicated daube bubbling away on the stove.
Thanks for this material, it's very helpful. I hope your channel grows and brings you revenue so that you could invest it in some good quality microphone ;)
Wh-movement? Yo, dude! I bring that up with my wife & she has a conniption fit. But the concept, I'm sorry, is sooooo simple. Carry on, amigo! Nice mug, by the way.
Something more "big picture" I like to emphasize to my students is that language is more about whether a given phrase functions for its intended purpose than whether you're able to make immediate sense of the grammar.
So, you are the whole of France all by yourself, then? Or you asked all the 60 plus millions of your fellow countrymen how they call this particular piece of French pastry? Sure. Give me a break, will you!
Hahaha! Non, non, non. On dirait plutôt, «Que sék t'as mangé, toé?» (que c’est que tu as...) Belle vidéo! J’sais pas si ça va aider à ma classe, mais on verra. 😊 (T’as très raison; on parle pas comme on écrit. J’imagine que c’est vrai pour toutes les langues.)
French has this "qu'est-ce que", in Brazilian portuguese we have "kikse": kikse wanna eat, kikse did yesterday, kikse do for a living... oh! and there's also "kiktu" in Rio, the South, the Northeast
Props for including ASL as an example. French spelling: It's bizarre but it works. I took French in middle school and the weekly quiz always had dictation and/or read aloud with no comprehension required. I nearly always got max points for that part of the quiz. We won't talk about the other parts of the quiz.... I switched to Russian for HS and it was so much easier....
In Finnish we have question marker -ko or -kö. Tämä on auto. This is a car. Onko tämä auto? Is this a car? Autoko tämä on? Is this a car? but intonation on the car. Tämäkö on auto? Is this a car? but intonation on this. We also have the Wh-question which in Finnish are K- or M-questions: Kuka (who singular), ketkä (who plural), kelle (to whom), keltä (from whom), kellä (who has), koska (when or because) , kuinka (how), mikä (what singular), mitkä (what plural), missä (where), mistä (from where), minne (towards where), millä (with what), miltä (from what), mille (to what) milloin (when), miksi (why).
6:26 just curious, but wouldn’t this graph only hold for VSO and SVO languages? (Though I’m aware this type of strict categorization of languages is somewhat of a simplification) What I mean is, it seems like it assumes that the Object (or whatever noun is being replaced by the wh-word) is always at the end of declarative sentences
I only have notions of Turkish, but I find the Turkish way of forming questions probably the cleverest in the six languages I know. You have a question word (mı, mi, mu, mü, it's actually the same word with variants for phonetic harmonization) which you can place anywhere in a sentence to indicate what it is that you are questioning. Here's how it works : let's take the affirmative sentence : Yesterday Chris went to the movies with a friend. You can question any part of this by adding mu : Yesterday mu Chris went to the movies with a friend ? means : is it yesterday that he went ? Yesterday Chris mu went to the movies with a friend ? means was it Chris who went ? Yesterday Chris went to the movies mu with a friend ? means Did he go TO THE MOVIES with a friend ? Etc.
The "qu'est-ce que" fixed expression did start out as a roundabout way of asking a question without flipping the subject and verb, but it's almost its own question-word now, reduced down to [kEsk] or [kEsk(ë)] in nearly all settings. It could nearly be shortened in spelling to quesq without losing too much of the etymology. And yes, literally, it's "what is it that?" but it has reduced in basic meaning down to more like a special form of "what" or just a general question marker, specifically so you can follow with a subject and verb without flipping them to verb-subject like in the shorter way of asking questions in French. And yes, learning it as a non-native speaker, it does seem odd and overly roundabout, but that's just how it is. (Quesq would at least be shorter, and could be explained, taught, fairly simply, with the history given as context or trivia to pique students' interest.)
Yes, est-ce qui would similarly reduce to esq. Whether you wanted to explicitly add a schwa E, e-muet, for esqe, kesqe versus esq, quesq might fit as if it were like the a/an, or archaic my/mine, thy/thine in English, similar to how French adds the -t- out of thin air as a holdover from an older stage of French. (Such as, Comment t'appelle-t-il?)
English also has its own complicated system of question markers, where you repeat a statement as its interrogative opposite: You don't want that, do you? He likes bacon, doesn't he? And so on.
As a French person, when I was a kid and first learned how to say "Do you speak English?", it made no sense to me that it translated word-for-word as "fais-tu parler anglais".
It's the standard term in English-language linguistics when talking about such words in _any_ language. It serves as a technical shorthand that allows linguists to communicate an idea quickly and precisely. Since it's done by English speakers, they get to call it whatever the hell they want. If you do linguistics in another language, you can feel free to invent a more diverse, inclusive and equitable term, and try and get it adopted. If, on the other hand, you aren't a linguist at all, you need to find a better hobby than performing indignant outrage in RUclips comments.
Bruh...... chocolatine? T'aimes bien toulouse? Sorry I woukd have made a joke about the questions but my french is only passable. Just found the channel thiugh and I'm enjoying it thank you.
c'est quoi? ** quoi c'est? -> ** quoi "est-ce que" c'est? -> qu'est-ce que c'est? And "est-ce que" ceased to literally mean "is it that" and became corresponding to polish "czy" ...
I like the analysis, but it only works for native speakers in english/Anglican family of languages. I speak 5 languages from 5 different languages and if i switch my brain to arabic or russian i will start using different rules that will make english look weird in my prespective and then explain that weirdness in a different prespective. Linguistics explained to different speakers will be explained differently
@@languagejones6784 C'était une petite taquinerie pour les Français du sud. Par chez moi, au nord de la Loire, on ne trouve que des pains au chocolat. 😉
C'est ce qu'il y a au Québec en tous cas, où les pains au chocolats ont le seul sens d'être un pain, en forme de pain, au chocolat, c'est-à-dire avec des morceaux de chocolat à l'intérieur!
First I thought you did not answer the question. Then I realized you did - sort of: Why of all WH-words only "quoi" should be used alongside the question marker "est-ce que" stays unexplained. After all, you should expect sentences like *"Quand est-ce que tu reviendras?" (Which is, by the way, the Portuguese way of posing questions.) Furthermore, you fail to explain how a construction like "qu’est-ce qui c’est passé?" would arise, since *"est-ce qui" as a question marker does not exist, while "qui" alone is a perfectly good WH-word. So, I’m not convinced.
Argh!!! I knew it... I could feel it from the beginning... Chomsky is still alive... It is quite funny, I did my PhD in the 90s at the Université de Montréal in linguistics and my supervisor had a specific hatred against Chomsky theories, the Universal Grammar in particular. We studied GPSG and HPSG, which were trying to replace Chomsky GB theory back then. 30 years later, it makes laugh... I used to be a computational linguist, I implemented a parsing environment partially based on GPSG, which was used for 17 yeas in my laboratory: XIP (Xerox Incremental Parser), up to 2016. With the advent of Deep Learning, most of it is now garbage. But I still have some feelings when I see a Syntactic Tree... 🥲
My master's at NYU back in the 90's required a half dozen or so linguistics courses. My memories are a bit murky but I recall the 'black box' and 'LAD' not impressing us much.
French has strange questions? Nonsense! English does. I've been working as an English tutor for 16 years and my students always (I repeat: always) struggle with questions. No matter how many exercises we do, they don't seem to understand how English questions work. I remember it took me years to understand it back at school as well. Neither English nor French is my native language, mind you.
@@F_A_F123 I'm using question as shorthand for an interrogative sentence, and sentence as shorthand for declarative sentence. Most languages have different syntax for both.
You were either reading or typing too fast. Yes, eau and eux are pronounced differently, but not eau and eaux. And let's mention "os": it's pronounced /o/ when it is the plural: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/os#French No need to snipe at my doctorate when also making false claims in the comments on an old video. But please feel free to continue to comment.
@@languagejones6784 My bad. I was watching too fast. You didn't mention "eux" in the example. That's true. And as for "bones", the clarification you did , settled it (the articles would help as I saw a single form of the word). Now it's clear, Doc.
I think you spoke a lot about linguistic principles and other languages and hardly about French and the title of the video. You barely mentioned it at one point in the video.
![Cody Johnson - I'm Gonna Love You (with Carrie Underwood) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/yy9PuYMU29g/mqdefault.jpg)
![DDG & G Herbo - Nosey [Official Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/I9Ra0Zc2NlQ/mqdefault.jpg)
I'm just here to watch the francophones lose their minds over "chocolatine".
South of France will defend it in the fight against “pain au chocolat” 😂🥐🍫
i am more offended by calling it a chocolate croissant
@@mikolajlisAnd all of french-canada! ⚔️
It's "pain au chocolat" and nothing else !
😂
In Brazilian Portuguese there's this weird thing where formally we would say "O que é isso?" ("What is this?"), but informally we actually say "O que é que é isso?", pronounced something like /kekjɛ isu/ (I'm not sure if I got the IPA right). Fun stuff
oh cool .. first time I heard this expression in portuguese I thought it's korean 😅
kek
@@MutohMech RUclips should have a "translate to alliance/horde" option
When I took a prepare course for the Law School in 1957, in São Paulo, Brazil, Professor Castellões called "é que" a "expletivo", that means: it has no meaning, it just reinforces . Anyone remembers professor Castellões from the "Cursinho Castellões"?
Great video! One thing I think you left out is that those who consider French questions "strange" should realize that, by the same logic, English questions are even stranger: if you go on to translate them literally, for example to French they would be something like this: What do you want = Que fais-tu vouloir? What do you do? = Que fais-tu faire? And such weird way of speaking also holds for negations. I do not want this = Je ne fais pas vouloir ceci. By the way, where in the parameters/principles scheme does English "do-questions" fit in? I suppose it is a question marker, but it seems to be rather peculiar. I know that some Celtic languages use a similar construction
😅😅😅 exactement hhh 👌
In older Englishes, the verb was conjugated properly. It's only later on that this emphatic way of speaking (using "to do" was emphatic, like in modern day "I do know!" Is emphatic) became the norm for negative and interrogative sentences
@J Boss This seems like an overcomplicated discussion. Germanic languages and French, which is a romance outlier with Germanic grammatical traits, all do pretty much exactly the same thing when asking questions. All using modal verbs, which actually do still need conjugation. So the view that they were just simple unlettered farmers simplifying their language is not quite the case. In some cases the language of then is somewhat more complicated than simplifications which have subsequently developed among 'lettered' users.
@J Boss No, the point you made was that it was simplified by not being conjugated, but it wasn't. You don't need to be the appointed expert on this. 'Boss' is only in your username, not your function.
@J Boss They are conjugating though. And it's not like every single verb in a sentence was conjugated previously.
To me French questions seem so weird because I constantly compare Frech to other romance languages that I have already learned
As a french speaking person i found this video very interesting bc it’s something i say every day so i never really thought about it
The point about Russian speakers coming across as rude because of comparative question intonation is fascinating. Sort of the intersection of prosody and pragmatics.
Nice mug. So, I kept hearing "David is afraid of mogs." I'm like, "What's a mog???" 😄
A "mog" is a "cat", althought not many people use that word anymore :p
@@spaghettiking653 Did not know that!
I thought he said moths
He said moths, but he voiced the ‘th’, which I’ve honestly never heard before as a native English speaker. I always say moths with a voiceless th
@@archeofutura_4606 What he said was even closer to "marthes", if that were an English word. What makes it incomprehensible is a combo of voicing the "th" in "moths", as you said, and saying "ah" instead of "o", which makes it obscure that "moths" was the word he was saying.
En français québécois, et ailleurs en Amérique, on emploi la particule -tu pour former des questions (où la réponse est oui ou non), dans le langage familier. Par exemple, "Je sais-tu?" , "Ça se peut-tu?"...
Vive la diversité linguistique!
Ça fait partie du registre familier, voire vulgaire.
@@philippegauvin-vallee9371 En fait, le vieux français avait la particule de question "ti" à la fin de la phrase. Le Québec s'est retrouvé isolé de la France pendant longtemps, quand le Québec à eu de nouveau contacte avec la France, la province s'est fait dire que c'était mal parlé d'utiliser cette particule puisque la France l'a éliminé. Dans un effort de sur-correction, le "ti" s'est transformé en "tu"
Il n'y a pas de formulation de phrase vulgaire en linguistique, si ça parait comme tel, c'est uniquement votre ignorance de l'origine de cette formulation.
@@myriam8091 Hélas ce n'est pas la bonne explication. En fait, le «tu» provient d'une transformation des sons «d et t» devant «i et u», un phénomène que l'on appelle «affrication». En fait, ces sons en québécois se prononcent «dzi, dzu et tsi, tsu». Le «tu-viens-tu» est le résultat de cette affricatiion. A l'origine, l'expression était semblable au français normand ou picard: «tu viens-ti» que Molière d'ailleurs parodie dans une scène de Don Juan. Du fait de l'affrication, le deuxième ti est devenu «tsu».
La France n'a rien à voir avec cette transformation.
Au passage, mais évidemment, la carte de la position d'autorité est insupportable, donc j'évite généralement, j'ai fait un doctorat de linguistique à l'Université de Montréal....
@@lesfreresdelaquote1176 C'est à l'Université que tu as appris à faire des prétéritions?
I noticed this when in Quebec some years ago and found it deeply confusing!
How does this channel have less than 1k subscribers. It deserves many more.
I won’t attempt to answer the question of whether you left anything out; I will say that it pleases me greatly that you included the eyebrow markings of ASL. I loved when I first learned about that, and how the exact same sequence of hand signs can have (at least) three distinct (and easily distinguished) meanings, based on eyebrow position.
As a student of French and English as foreign languages, the French way of forming questions (est-ce que xxx) never struck me as more bizarre than the English way (do you xxx). In Italian we simply change the intonation and put a question mark at the end of the sentence
You find nearly the same structure in some varieties of Spanish, e.g. "¿Qué comiste?" 'What did you eat?' is phrased instead as "¿Qué _es lo que_ comiste?" 'What is that that you ate?'. Colonialist prescriptivists like to deride this construction as an "unnecessary gallicism", but it's not -- the form without "...es lo que..." is perceived as expressing disbelief or disapproval, which the form with "...es lo que..." avoids.
@@poissonpuerile8897 I use both but I can't explain what the difference is, I don't perceive any disbelief or disapproval in any of the forms. I'm a native speaker of Spanish and English, and I feel these are equivalent 1 to 1 with English: "Que comiste?" -> "What did you eat?"; "Que es lo que comiste?" -> "What is it you ate?" or even "Que fue lo que comiste?" -> "What was it you ate?".
I'm currently learning Scottish Gaelic and and find the VSO order rather charming and very neat where you generally know right at the beginning of a sentence whether the verb form indicates a positive or negative statement or a positive or negative question.
I've been learning Irish Gaelic and I've wondered if "Do" questions in english came from contract with the Celts since its closer to "An" questions forms than what is found in Germanic and Latin languages.
@@j.obrien4990 That is a hypothesis, but there's no real evidence for it, especially as "do support" is actually also found in Dutch and in many German dialects. Also, the use of "do" in questions in English began to appear very late, in the Middle English period. If it had come from Celtic languages, it would surely have appeared earlier than that.
The more Gaelic I learn the more I realise how its grammar and syntax have moulded Scots and Scottish English, but "do support" isn't one of those features.
@@alicemilne1444 Well I'd say you've stopped me from advancing my hypothesis to a theory. ;-) Thanks for the explanation, and even though I'm not very familiar with Hiberno English I have noticed some of their twists of phase probably came from Irish similar to your observation about Scottish English.
@@j.obrien4990 You reminded me that I have a linguistics book called "Celtic and English in Contact". I decided to consult that about this again. It seems the discussion on "do-periphrastic" (in other words, forming more wordy forms in speech) is not over, but it's still regarded as a hypothesis.
From my observation of Scottish Gaelic verbs (I have a book with 500 verbs fully conjugated), "do" is only a particle in the dependent past tense. It is not a verb itself. And it has many other meanings and functions as a preposition, pronoun, etc.
But since my knowledge of Gaelic is intermediate I'll leave it up to the experts to battle this out.
To translate "chocolate croissant" with "chocolatine" is to ask for controversy!
Anyway, I'd say in modern French, for yes/no questions, you can fit them in three different categories. For example if you want to ask **Are you coming?**
Questions where you take an affirmation and just add a question mark: **Tu viens?**
Questions where you invert subject and verb: **Viens-tu?**, they sound more formal
Questions where you add "est-ce que": **Est-ce que tu viens?**, they can feel cluttered in some situations, but as a single question you ask to a friend before leaving it is still short enough, while raising any ambiguity with it being a question, an order or a simple statement.
This last form is a progressive deformation: "Ceci est X" (this is X) -> "Est ceci X?" (Is this X?). In English that would look like: "Cats are mortal." -> "Cats do be mortal" -> "Do cats be mortal?"
the "chocolatine" bit hurt so much my little french heart
Wow. That tangent on Russians explains so much. Every single person I've spoken to with a mild to heavy Russian accent always came across as a bit... blunt when asking questions. I always assumed this was a Russian culture thing. I never realized that it was a Russian linguistics thing.
Did you forget “why” and “which” as wh- question words?
I learned French at school decades ago and all the inversions and qu- words etc. I am now re-immersing myself via télé policiers (particularly 'Engrenages'/'Spiral'. I realise that all this has virtually disappeared (along with 'nous') and questions are now almost entirely based on verbal inflexion. Tu est allé? Avec qui?
This is especially true in France, and, I think, European French in general (I never paid much attention to it, so I might be wrong, but I didn't notice any difference on that front when speaking to Belgian or Swiss people, and they haven't pointed out anything, and they do mock me relentlessly for "soixante-dix" et "quatre-vingt-dix"), but it is, as far as I know, not particularly common in Québec, they have their own preferred ways of asking questions.
I found surprising that the inverted question mark in Spanish sentence are not at the beginning but where the actual question part starts. Logical but hard for me to remember to write. (Total beginner here.)
well, this isn't necessarily an aspect of grammar either, it's just a spelling quirk (I also think most native speakers wouldn't even bother with it precisely because it's not even particularly necessary haha)
In Quebec French we also have "tu" to indicate a question which is separate from the pronoun "tu" ex: "on vas-tu à la plage", gets a bit weird when used with the 2nd person pronoun "tu" like "tu vas-tu à la plage?".
sorry to be that guy, but shouldn't it be "on va-tu" and not "on vas-tu"?
Surely because in Québec they find it to difficult to simply inverse verb and subject as "Vas-tu à la plage ?"
I mean most French people don't do inversions in casual speech, not just the Québécois.
@@impossiblynice yes in casual no inversion.
It gets weird because of the "tu" indicating a question being now pronounced in Quebec in the same way as the pronoun "tu".
But in the Normand (Cauchois) variety of French, for example, where this weird "tu" question marker is still used, it's still pronounced "ti" (tee), as you may know.
"Tu vas-ti à la plage?"
Which is closet to its origin, the "-t-il" used in standard French (As in: "Va-t-il à la plage?")
So, less weirdness there. Or maybe still as much for people only used to a standard type of French!
5:26
Half of france just disliked the video right about here
The wrong half lol
You blew my mind with the ASL eyebrows thing, it was something I just did automatically, wow!
So basically "qu'est-ce que" is a historical construction, that remains till this day...
Thanks for using the cute word ‘chocolatine’!
French: I am the king of strange questions and strange spelling
English: Hold my dummy do and my phonics
Well, the phonics is easy enough to explain... two languages from two different families had their own phonics/spelling systems. They had a head-on collision almost a thousand years ago and the clean-up process still isn't done.... So we stiill have a bit of a mess on our hands.
"Do" as a modal for questions and negation is a bit tougher for me, though. I feel like I'm missing something here. From my perspective hast thou? -> have you? -> do you have? in an extremely short amount of time compared to how quickly most other changes occur.
IMO the rise of 'do' as a modal is a much bigger change than the secod person pronouns collapsing into 'you', yet there seems to be much more research on the latter.
Maybe worth its own video?
My father and his family are all from Hungary, but my insight into English comes from how my grandmother would say things in English. So, although she would ask me (correctly), "What are you doing?", she would preserve the same word order in the command, "Tell me what are you doing."
Linguists - “These parameters have a very high explanatory power.”
chocolatine? I see you have chosen death
When he talked about sign language 😍
It is nice when sign languages are brought up too, since their grammar are fascinating
I think of "est-ce que" as "is it that" for y/n questions. Is it that you're hungry? "Qu'est-ce que" is for "what is it that". What is it that you want to eat?
Whoa....just found your channel...mind blown...speechless!! 🙊
And the "Keske" in "Qu'est-ce que tu manges" is often even more simplified into "kess", as in, "kess tu mange"?
It's fun to think it's becoming a proper word in its own right :)
People who say that are making noise because a simple "C'est quoi ?" is all you need for "What's this?" or "What's that?"
Okay, no one’s asking the really important question: why do you use “chocolatine” instead of “pain au chocolat?” 😂
(I learned “chocolatine” because I primarily learned French in La Rochelle, and - as I understand it - it’s very much a Charentais and Bordelais term. Which makes me curious where in France you may have studied!)
He might be aware of the “debate”. That would explain the Toulouse cross just after.
@@AllanLimosinoh… I was wondering what that cross was about 😂
Just a dumb English-speaker here, who was not aware of the debate lol
@@AllanLimosin Huh, I didn't notice that! I'll have to go back and look.
I looked in the comments expecting a war about "chocolatine", and I am surprised to find none.
Languagejones, did you learn French in Toulose or somewhere else in the South-West?
I've never heard of 'chocolatine'.. In our house we debate whether the standard patisserie French is pronounced pain-chocolat or pain-au-chocolat.
I don't think its strange at all. Of course I've been reading it for about 30 years. Previously I had studied both Latin and German. Which was a big help. But my attitude was always to accept it as is. It only seems strange if you translate it literally. Which is always a mistake.
Exactly, I run into similar issues when I explain/teach languages, you have some people that have either the mental plasticity or willingness to accept it as is, while others question some rules or expressions to no end, constantly comparing them to their native language (which also has a lot of rules that make no logical sense regardless of which language it is)
Very well said!
Absolutely!
It's not forbidden to question how a language (or anything) works, but first, you have to learn the basics before you can start to take the language appart and criticize.
When you're new to a language, you can't really make the difference between what might sound weird but is as it is with no way around it vs what's not logical and can / could be changed or improved.
For example, many English speaker love to add superfluous "pre" in front of many words, one of the most common being the silly "pre-plan(ned)" (see George Carlin who did a whole sketch about it). Well, you need to have reached a certain level of English to be able to notice such examples and be able to correct / not use them in your own speech. But as a beginner, you can't go around finding things silly and questioning it all; you have to move on.
@@mats1975
I guess this video explains why Chomsky would deliver his lectures at mathematics conferences.
in portuguese "what is this' is 'o que que é isso?', but you can drop the second 'que' if you want.
6:10 Chomsky still refers to them as principles and parameters.
What I've learnt from this video, and having checked to verify, is that Americans seem to pronounce plural 'moths' differently to us Brits, Irish, Australians and New Zealanders.
You seem to say 'moθ' in the singular and 'moðz' in the plural whereas we also say 'moθ' in the singular but say 'moθs' in the plural.
Yeah, I know we say the vowel differently too but that's not what I'm looking at.
That's an ongoing change in progress, and my speech is somewhat conservative. I have eth in deaths, booths, myths, etc. But it's definitely on its way out in English.
@@MrNyathi1 I'd guess American. Where I grew up the majority of people had English as a first language and everybody folnowed the 'rule' of final '-s' being voiced or not depending on the preceding sound, not the other way around.
Where I live now the majority don't and I can't mind much of a pattern to any changes of any kind.
What my brain seems to be stuck on is why people omit the auxiliary in the continuous aspect when doing so in their native languages is the exact same kind of error and introduces the same ambiguities as doing so does in English.
5:28 wtf how DARE you call a "chocolatine"!!! It's "pain au chocolat" 😤
Jk, great video!
Nice how you “snuck in" the blason with the croix occitaine after the example use of chocolatine, although the use of that term for the viennoiserie is both wider than that, and is patchy in its use in the South as well. By the way, another driving force for how miserable French orthography is, beyond a tendency toward written language being generally more conservative (McWhorter uses “frozen”) than spoken language, is how freakin’ complex the language’s roots are with regards to the region’s ethnic history. Several independent strains of Germanic influence, from Gothic tribes and Rhineland peoples, to the much later Vikings, as well as Celtic languages, Basque influence, and the whole history of Parisian power and dominance over the much more purely Romance languages of the South, like Occitan’s many dialects, and Catalán. Season with Italian, Corsican, Savoyard, and the imported vocabulary from an extensive global colonial history. There’s a wonderfully complicated daube bubbling away on the stove.
Thanks for this material, it's very helpful. I hope your channel grows and brings you revenue so that you could invest it in some good quality microphone ;)
It's a pain au chocolat, not a chocolatine!!
Otherwise: brilliant.
Wh-movement? Yo, dude! I bring that up with my wife & she has a conniption fit. But the concept, I'm sorry, is sooooo simple. Carry on, amigo! Nice mug, by the way.
English speakers: Why do French questions look so weird?
French speakers: Why do English questions look so weird?
Something more "big picture" I like to emphasize to my students is that language is more about whether a given phrase functions for its intended purpose than whether you're able to make immediate sense of the grammar.
3:20 WH words are Who What When Where and... How?
The look on your face made me laugh😂
Replace Wh with Th for the answer:
What When Where Who How?
That Then There Tho Hot!
I don't know where you picked up this "chocolatine" word, but nobody speaks like that in France. We say "pain au chocolat" instead.
So, you are the whole of France all by yourself, then? Or you asked all the 60 plus millions of your fellow countrymen how they call this particular piece of French pastry?
Sure.
Give me a break, will you!
"How" has a w and an h in it, it's just that they're not next to each other. :-)
Hahaha! Non, non, non. On dirait plutôt, «Que sék t'as mangé, toé?» (que c’est que tu as...) Belle vidéo! J’sais pas si ça va aider à ma classe, mais on verra. 😊 (T’as très raison; on parle pas comme on écrit. J’imagine que c’est vrai pour toutes les langues.)
French has this "qu'est-ce que", in Brazilian portuguese we have "kikse": kikse wanna eat, kikse did yesterday, kikse do for a living...
oh! and there's also "kiktu" in Rio, the South, the Northeast
Props for including ASL as an example.
French spelling: It's bizarre but it works. I took French in middle school and the weekly quiz always had dictation and/or read aloud with no comprehension required. I nearly always got max points for that part of the quiz. We won't talk about the other parts of the quiz....
I switched to Russian for HS and it was so much easier....
In Finnish we have question marker -ko or -kö. Tämä on auto. This is a car. Onko tämä auto? Is this a car? Autoko tämä on? Is this a car? but intonation on the car. Tämäkö on auto? Is this a car? but intonation on this.
We also have the Wh-question which in Finnish are K- or M-questions: Kuka (who singular), ketkä (who plural), kelle (to whom), keltä (from whom), kellä (who has), koska (when or because) , kuinka (how), mikä (what singular), mitkä (what plural), missä (where), mistä (from where), minne (towards where), millä (with what), miltä (from what), mille (to what) milloin (when), miksi (why).
That was very informative, thank you
I would love to know how AAE varies across the country is it does at all.
6:26 just curious, but wouldn’t this graph only hold for VSO and SVO languages? (Though I’m aware this type of strict categorization of languages is somewhat of a simplification)
What I mean is, it seems like it assumes that the Object (or whatever noun is being replaced by the wh-word) is always at the end of declarative sentences
In Finnish they also have a question marker (-ko) and their intonation doesn't change in questions. That's weird for us Germans.
It's an agglutinative language, they have a suffix for everything, and solve everything by adding a suffix
@@hastaelcielo8690 not even close to everything
I only have notions of Turkish, but I find the Turkish way of forming questions probably the cleverest in the six languages I know. You have a question word (mı, mi, mu, mü, it's actually the same word with variants for phonetic harmonization) which you can place anywhere in a sentence to indicate what it is that you are questioning. Here's how it works :
let's take the affirmative sentence :
Yesterday Chris went to the movies with a friend.
You can question any part of this by adding mu :
Yesterday mu Chris went to the movies with a friend ? means : is it yesterday that he went ?
Yesterday Chris mu went to the movies with a friend ? means was it Chris who went ?
Yesterday Chris went to the movies mu with a friend ? means Did he go TO THE MOVIES with a friend ?
Etc.
You do realize you didn't at all explain why French is the way it is, and only pointed out that other languages also follow... rules?
Your video was already excellent but when you used the word "chocolatine" at 5:23, you convinced me to suscribe.
WHy
"That's why they're called W-H-words; there's who what where when and..."
Not that "whow" is not functionally another W-H-word.
Great video !!!
The "qu'est-ce que" fixed expression did start out as a roundabout way of asking a question without flipping the subject and verb, but it's almost its own question-word now, reduced down to [kEsk] or [kEsk(ë)] in nearly all settings. It could nearly be shortened in spelling to quesq without losing too much of the etymology. And yes, literally, it's "what is it that?" but it has reduced in basic meaning down to more like a special form of "what" or just a general question marker, specifically so you can follow with a subject and verb without flipping them to verb-subject like in the shorter way of asking questions in French. And yes, learning it as a non-native speaker, it does seem odd and overly roundabout, but that's just how it is. (Quesq would at least be shorter, and could be explained, taught, fairly simply, with the history given as context or trivia to pique students' interest.)
Yes, est-ce qui would similarly reduce to esq. Whether you wanted to explicitly add a schwa E, e-muet, for esqe, kesqe versus esq, quesq might fit as if it were like the a/an, or archaic my/mine, thy/thine in English, similar to how French adds the -t- out of thin air as a holdover from an older stage of French. (Such as, Comment t'appelle-t-il?)
English also has its own complicated system of question markers, where you repeat a statement as its interrogative opposite:
You don't want that, do you?
He likes bacon, doesn't he?
And so on.
Because you cannot deal with subtlety. When its gross, vulgar and rude, you are the best!
As a French person, when I was a kid and first learned how to say "Do you speak English?", it made no sense to me that it translated word-for-word as "fais-tu parler anglais".
In English we have the double truth searching question or legalese of 'is it or is it not the case that'. Linguistic term for that?
The term "wh-words" is terribly anglo-centric. Speakers of many other Indo-European languages have to mind their Ps and Qs
But it is also an english word. i see no problem.
@@chri-k It's not really a problem as such, I'd prefer to call them Interrogative Words in a linguistic context
It's the standard term in English-language linguistics when talking about such words in _any_ language. It serves as a technical shorthand that allows linguists to communicate an idea quickly and precisely. Since it's done by English speakers, they get to call it whatever the hell they want. If you do linguistics in another language, you can feel free to invent a more diverse, inclusive and equitable term, and try and get it adopted. If, on the other hand, you aren't a linguist at all, you need to find a better hobby than performing indignant outrage in RUclips comments.
@@poissonpuerile8897 thanks for rising to the bait, sorry I hurt your feelings 🤣
@@timflatus man go to worl
You go through this like you have to run and catch a bus. What’s your hurry?
Thank you
5:24 pain au chocolat
Interesting if a bit too rapid-fire and not sufficiently focused on French.
French questions are ok. French numbers are…not.
Fifty, sixty, sixty ten, 4 twenty, 4 twenty ten, hundred.
Mental
Bruh...... chocolatine? T'aimes bien toulouse?
Sorry I woukd have made a joke about the questions but my french is only passable. Just found the channel thiugh and I'm enjoying it thank you.
You forgot "aulx" which is the plural for "ail" - garlic :D
better mic?
0:36 Qu’est-ce à dire que ceci?
i somehow came up with the exact same question in arabic for hal
I think French questions look weird because they always put a space before the question mark. N'est-ce pas ?
c'est quoi?
** quoi c'est? ->
** quoi "est-ce que" c'est? ->
qu'est-ce que c'est?
And "est-ce que" ceased to literally mean "is it that" and became corresponding to polish "czy" ...
If this form isn't weird, why do French people skip it?
i was expecting a fight in the comments section abt chocolatine and pain au chocolat
Cool but I think a missed the punchline. Can you do one of these where you illustrate the basic claim a bit more fully.
I like the analysis, but it only works for native speakers in english/Anglican family of languages. I speak 5 languages from 5 different languages and if i switch my brain to arabic or russian i will start using different rules that will make english look weird in my prespective and then explain that weirdness in a different prespective. Linguistics explained to different speakers will be explained differently
What is it that it is?🤔
Qu'est-ce que c'est, une chocolatine ?
😉
c'est ce qu'on appelle un à Toulouse et ses environs !
@@languagejones6784 C'était une petite taquinerie pour les Français du sud. Par chez moi, au nord de la Loire, on ne trouve que des pains au chocolat. 😉
@@languagejones6784 Also in Bordeaux I think. In the South, definitely.
C'est ce qu'il y a au Québec en tous cas, où les pains au chocolats ont le seul sens d'être un pain, en forme de pain, au chocolat, c'est-à-dire avec des morceaux de chocolat à l'intérieur!
@@Jeanmigus Oui, je m'en souviens bien. Quand j'y vivais, il y avait plein de bonnes choses dans les boulangeries de Montréal. :-a
and nope..... "chocolatine" is not the correct French word....it must be "Pain au Chocolat".... 😈
Because they’re written in French.
Qu'est-ce que c'est que ça?
this is all fine but what's up with that mug?
First I thought you did not answer the question. Then I realized you did - sort of:
Why of all WH-words only "quoi" should be used alongside the question marker "est-ce que" stays unexplained. After all, you should expect sentences like *"Quand est-ce que tu reviendras?" (Which is, by the way, the Portuguese way of posing questions.) Furthermore, you fail to explain how a construction like "qu’est-ce qui c’est passé?" would arise, since *"est-ce qui" as a question marker does not exist, while "qui" alone is a perfectly good WH-word. So, I’m not convinced.
"Quand est-ce que tu reviens?" is a pretty standard French question (in familiar French)... Are you saying it's not used in French?
Not to mention: Qu'estamangé? 😂
Thats kinda cool
Argh!!! I knew it... I could feel it from the beginning... Chomsky is still alive... It is quite funny, I did my PhD in the 90s at the Université de Montréal in linguistics and my supervisor had a specific hatred against Chomsky theories, the Universal Grammar in particular. We studied GPSG and HPSG, which were trying to replace Chomsky GB theory back then. 30 years later, it makes laugh... I used to be a computational linguist, I implemented a parsing environment partially based on GPSG, which was used for 17 yeas in my laboratory: XIP (Xerox Incremental Parser), up to 2016. With the advent of Deep Learning, most of it is now garbage. But I still have some feelings when I see a Syntactic Tree... 🥲
My master's at NYU back in the 90's required a half dozen or so linguistics courses. My memories are a bit murky but I recall the 'black box' and 'LAD' not impressing us much.
Very light for a PhD. French questions are simple: raise you voice at the end of an otherwise normal sentence. Il aime le fromage ?
They aren't.
Chocolatine rpz
French has strange questions? Nonsense! English does. I've been working as an English tutor for 16 years and my students always (I repeat: always) struggle with questions. No matter how many exercises we do, they don't seem to understand how English questions work. I remember it took me years to understand it back at school as well. Neither English nor French is my native language, mind you.
That's because questions have more possibilities than sentences, in most languages. Confused students exist in every language.
@@sameash3153 ? but questions are sentences
@@F_A_F123 I'm using question as shorthand for an interrogative sentence, and sentence as shorthand for declarative sentence. Most languages have different syntax for both.
1:24 I don't know what your "PhD" is, but the information you provided is incorrect. "eau" and "eux" are pronounced differently. Not to mention "os"
You were either reading or typing too fast. Yes, eau and eux are pronounced differently, but not eau and eaux. And let's mention "os": it's pronounced /o/ when it is the plural: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/os#French
No need to snipe at my doctorate when also making false claims in the comments on an old video. But please feel free to continue to comment.
@@languagejones6784 My bad. I was watching too fast. You didn't mention "eux" in the example. That's true. And as for "bones", the clarification you did , settled it (the articles would help as I saw a single form of the word). Now it's clear, Doc.
I think you spoke a lot about linguistic principles and other languages and hardly about French and the title of the video. You barely mentioned it at one point in the video.