Had to play this at 0.75 speed to follow this as a non-native English speaker, and even then I sometimes couldn't distinguish the words you were saying, but thanks for the interesting vid!
Fun fact: The Swedish spoken in Finland does not have the velar fricative like the (standard?) Swedish spoken in Sweden e.g. for /sk/, which is instead pronounced [∫]. So "skön" (beautiful) is pronounced the same as German "schön".There are also other major phonological differences between Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish.
This is true also of most northern Swedish dialects (however there it's a retroflex fricative, not an alveolar) and older upper class Swedish. Another fun fact :) the Swedish sje-ljud differs in pronunciation depending on dialect - on the West Coast it's generally more of a labial fricative; in Stockholm/Svealand it's more of an alveolar; and in Southern Swedish dialects it's more of a velar.
And some dialects here still have the masculine and feminine gender instead of the non-neuter it is shown when you instead of saying it (den in standard Swedish) you use the pronouns ha or ho (shortenings of the pronouns han and hon in standard Swedish respectively). So instead of saying it is small to say something is small we say he or she is small depending on what object we are replacing with the pronoun. This also applies to words like that or this, so our "that" would as an example be "hande" implying that its masculine. Likewise "honde" for feminine and "hede" for neuter. I think it's so fascinating how just a regional dialect of the same language has so different grammar.
@@excancerpoikmy dialect has remnants of this. We've forgotten most of the feminine words, but it's very common to say han instead of den, and i remember my grandma still having a noticeable masculine/feminine distinction, if with a fairly small number of words she treated as grammatically feminine
English does actually have non-latinate /d͡ʒ/, also as a result of palatalization. Geminated *jj (< *jj, *gj) in OE (as well as *j when preceded by a nasal, if I remember correctly) fortified to /d͡ʒ/, spelled as ⟨cġ⟩. An example: PG *brugjǭ > OE brycġ > ME bridge
“Job” is somewhat similar, though its true origin is unclear. Personally, I believe /d͡ʒ/ in “job” naturally developed and voiced from an earlier form, from Middle English choppe (or less likely gobbe) which had /t͡ʃ/.
there is also one instance in English of PG "*brugjǭ" > ON "bryggja" > MiddleEng "Brigge" > ModernEng "Brigg", because quite a large Norse influence in some parts of England, starting from about 830AD, something to do with some kids of Ragnar Lodbrok being very angry or something, but it's ok they did give us some Kings with the House of Knýtlinga.
@@simontollin2004 Bothnian, Jamtish, and Dalecarlian/Dalian have it. These are not just Swedish dialects though, they're a mix between West Norse and East Norse. Most Norwegian dialects also have it, or had it.
A few remarks: -Belgian Dutch has a bilabial w (transcribed as [ β̞ ]) and a voiced v -Belgian Dutch distinguishes g and ch. -[ʋ] also occurs in Germany, Denmark and Sweden. I think it would be better to say that all Germanic languages have [v~ʋ] except for Dutch, Frisian and English.
@@micayahritchie7158 not from mu experience with it, my dutch tutor was from suriname and she was native Dutch and Sranan and English (cool), the way people speak there at least pronunciation is maybe influenced by Sranan which in of itself is influenced from a few African languages i think. I asked her if there were any distinctive suriname words and she said that their accent was different but they had the same vocabulary and sometimes used words for foods and surinamse markets and sometimes they will use Sranan words for Dutch words they don't know if they're native sranan only.
i love this channel so much, you and a few other similar channels that are also pretty small and new are really forming a new wave of youtube linguistics content and its really cool to see how willing you all are to assume people are smart enough to understand linguistics concepts as long as they're explained well. i am now most the way thru my degree (not linguistics but directly related and i got into it thru linguistics) and ppl like tom scott and xidnaf were my introduction to the whole thing years ago, but honestly these videos are better and more thorough and accurate than those were. its really cool to imagine the generation that will get into it thru these videos (and the similar ones also coming out recently) and hope to see u continue making videos and get more traction on here bc its baffling you only have as few subs as u do
@@watchyourlanguage3870 yeah man definitely i mean i really hope you and the other small creators ive seen blow up enough for it to truly be a wave but i rlly see it going that way and u fit right in w them, love the videos keep it up bro
@@kikeshi off the top of my head the only one i can name in this new generation i was talkin abt it linglizard but i know there are more and when i see or remember more ill try to remember to come back n tell u, but some of the older ones that i think are really solid are langfocus and nativlang as well, polymathy is cool too but more focused on a few specific languages than linguistics or languages as a whole topic (tho it is all intertwined ofc). hope u enjoy :) if u like podcasts, theres also a Really good one called lexicon valley by john mcwhorter that has a huge backcatelogue of good informative interesting funny episodes, only problem (for me, some pll would see it as a good side and even i admit it adds character) is he just plays songs a lot esp broadway like a weird dj but its kinda nice inspite of and even bc of that. it was on slate, and he made a ton of episodes there and theyre worfh listening to. since then, he left slate and went to booksmart studios and continued making a show called lexicon valley, but it got way worse imo. also, slate made a new linguistics podcast called spectacular vernacular which actually is in the same feed as lexicon valley was so u now gotta scroll past those to get to lexicon valley, bc its also not nearly as good. i mean both of the shows being made now may also be for you, and have their value, but rheyre both not close to what it used to be imo. hope u enjoy that one too its really interesting
12:09 To nitpick a bit: In the North Germanic languages the word for chicken has a diminutive suffix, so the Proto-Germanic form for them would be *keukilīngaz (or *kukkilīngaz) The the Icelandic /u/ is completely off here. It's hard to tell, but /kl/ sounds like it turned into a [ç]. And finally, the /ʏ/ should be reduced a bit so that it's more central and shorter.
Awesome video, but I felt like I had to watch it on 0.75 speed to process things. As someone who has a amateur interest (think non-academic) in linguistics, a decent chunk of this stuff was not new, but I still had trouble following along at your speaking speed, and I could not read the text without pausing constantly. Great, informative video, but I thought I'd drop my two cents about the pacing. I really did enjoy though.
Glad you said something and it wasn't just me 😅 Yes, this guy's content is really good and he seems fairly knowledgeable, but probably should lay off the coffee before doing the video 😂
I have the same trouble understanding German when people talk fast. But I don't think everybody in Germany should speak slow to cater to me. I sometimes get annoyed at videos in English when the person speak slow like they are high on Xanax.
As I am a native speaker of two of these Germanic languages and speak all the others (I speak German though, not Yiddish) I have to say that your pronunciation impresses, Icelandic and Swedish are very close to correct and your Danish is not bad though it is clearly the one you have the biggest problems with pronouncing correctly. Keep up the good work.
I'm a native Spanish speaker and after learning a lot of english and a reasonable amount of German I fucking live for this kind of stuff, my world vision had been somewhat limited through the glass of a romance lenguage and trying to tie everything to either a latin or greek word but learning more deeply about the germanic family is giving me a deeper understanding of some stuff that seemed ''random'' in english or german (also language evolution rocks in general)
"Ande" only barely mean "ghost" in Swedish. "Den helige ande" is the translation for the trinity's "the holy ghost", but "ande" most often mean "spirit" as in mind/soul as in "the spirit is willing..." or as in a supernatural being as in a disembodied soul or "genie" as in the bottled kind. We also have "anda", which is breath ("hålla andan" = "hold your breath") or spirit of the more zealy variety ("kämparanda" = "fighting spirit")
Ghost and spirit are synonymous. In English, "Heliga anden" is "The holy ghost" as well as "The Holy Spirit". Also, what's the actual difference between a spirit and a ghost?
@@_loss_ Swedes see it as ande = spirit, and spöke = ghost. Spöke (related to "spook") is strongly associated with malice, haunting, and the "floating white sheet" horror conceptualisation of a ghost. Ande on the other hand is more neutral and used in more serious contexts. An exorcist trying to scam you might prefer to say there's an "ande" in your house, to make it sound more legitimate.
Dude your pronunciation of the Swedish "fyra" at 6:42 was probably the most on-point I've ever heard by a non native speaker, because you kinda nail the the sound from the upper class Stockholm accent. Your pitch variation in two-syllable words sounds a bit off sometimes, but overall your Swedish is really good, keep it up!
I originally thought that it sounded quite weird but reading your comment I realised that he kinda genuinely sounds like stereotypical Lidingö. More impressively done than I originally thought, just a weird dialect
@@ArturoSubutex it's not tones, but pitch accent! There's a good video by Academia Cervena on the subject Edit: This video ruclips.net/video/lXp7_Sjgm34/видео.html
@@ArturoSubutex Most Norwegian dialects, some Danish dialects, Ripuarian, Moselle Franconion(excluding Luxembourgish), and Limburgish have pitch accent as well.
As someone who studies English, German and Swedish, I've found this video very intriguing. You did a great job at summarising all the information into a short and entertaining video. I'm just hoping that we get a similar video about Slavic languages soon.
So on my gaming channel I promised to provide more detail on where my native language, Faroese, fits in with these sound changes... only to promptly forget about the video so with many apologies here several months later are my comments: Voiced plosives: Like everywhere else except German, the b becomes v intervocalically and finally so have is at hava at to give is at geva. Note that unlike Icelandic we actually spell this v as a v and not as f. However, we completely lost the other two voiced fricatives. In places where this would result in a hiatus we where applicable insert a glide, the exact glide depends first on the preceding vowel and if that is ambiguous (i.e. not being high) we look at the following vowel. So the word dagur: the nominative form dagur is pronounced ['tɛa:vʊɹ] glide because the preceding vowel is non-high and thus the following vowel determines the value; the accusative form dag has no such glide and is simply [tɛa:]; and finally the dative form degi is pronounced [te:jɪ] because the non-high [ɪ] is interpreted as an [i]. Nasals liquids and trills: all remain, except [w] > [v] (as mention) but also [r] > [ɹ] (also as mentioned). The Faroese version of "skarre-r" was around for a while but died out shortly there after. There used to be 'oss' in Faroese pronounced like the Swedish but it's archaic today; this is because Faroese and Icelandic got rid of the old plural and instead use the old dual for the new modern plural, which is why "us" is okkum and okkur respectively. As for mouth: It's actually a bad example for Faroese as it is influenced by the -nnr > -ðr soundchange in Old Norse, so the more common nominative form is muður but all the other forms have munn- as the root: muður - munn - munni - muns etc., however muður can also have munnur as its nominative form. Examples of other nouns with the same sound change and which may have both nominative forms: brunnur/bruður (well), drunnur/druður (Gaelic loan word(!)), maður (mannur is just wrong), grunnur/gruður, lunnur/luður, and runnur/ruður. Some are rare with the -ður form since as all the other forms have nn, analogy wants the ð forms to become nn forms too. Anyway, munnur and muður are pronounced ['mʊn:ʊɹ] and ['mu:ʊɹ] (generally no glide here). Water is vatn and is pronounced [vaʰtn]. Red is reyður: ['ɹɛi:jʊɹ] although it also kinda sounds like ['ɹɛj:ʊɹ] to me at times. Initial hl-, hr-, and hn- have all be lost in Faroese but hv- merged with kv- but still spelled as hv, white is hvítur and pronounced ['kvʊi:tʊɹ]. We still have voiceless nasals and liquids but I'll get back to these later. Your comment about Icelandic hn being a separate develop is kinda true and kinda not, it's just that Icelandic merged kn- and hn- in most cases (yet still kept it in words like knattspyrna (football)). Faroese: ringur ['ɹɪŋkʊɹ], lurta ['lʊɻ̊ʈa]. You didn't mention hj, in Faroese it either merges with j [j] or kj [tʃʰ], the exact rule for when each is used always escapes me however but it _may_ have to do with the voicedness of the following consonant. Icelandic f doesn't just become [p] before nasals like in höfn [hœpn] but also before [l] so the main airport in Iceland is in Ke[p]lavík, but OK this is (< *b) not /f/ (< *p). Four is fýra ['fʊi:ɹa]. To sing is at syngja ['sɪɲtʃa]. Why ? Because in Old West Norse -ingw- the w rounded the /i/ to /y/. Danish synge is a later development from older Danish sjunge where the ju simply merges into y. The cognate of choose is kjósa ['tʃʰɔu:sa]. The cognate of think is tekkja [tʰɛʰtʃ:a] while we also have teinkja ['tʰɔɲ̊tʃa]. Feather = fjøður [fjø:vʊɹ]. Thou in Faroese is tú [tʰʉu:], so no t > d weakening here. The Faroese word for night is nátt [nɔʰt:]. Tooth: tonn [tʰɔn:]. As mentioned before, Faroese loses voiced fricatives completely, so the adjectivial suffix -ig is simply pronounced [i], although in lemma form we'd of course use the masculine for which is -igur [i(:)jʊɹ]. However, before n it's kept but like in Icelandic becomes a stop, so -ing: [ɪŋk]. Which leads to that Icelandic and Danish chain shift and yes, it also happened in Faroese for stops and affricates, so initial b d g dj gj [p t k tʲ tʃ] contrast with initial p t k tj kj [pʰ tʰ kʰ tʲʰ tʃʰ] but do note that the vast majority of Faroese speakers merge dj and tj with gj and kj respectively. I'm only separating them for completion's sake. So goose: gás [kɔɑ:s] and cold: kaldur [kʰaltʊɹ]. Faroese has also palatalised *k and *g before short high and central front vowels. It happened later than in English and like in English only unrounded vowels trigger palatalisation, so only /e i/. Of course adjacent to a j they also palatalise so kjúklingur is pronounced [tʃʰʉu:klɪŋkʊɹ]. The Faroese word for knee is knæ [knɛa:], no disappearing initial k- here. So like k and g, sk is also palatalised before short high and central front unrounded vowels, so like in English and German, this is pronounced [ʃ] in these positions. Therefore, skína is a bad example for this as it's still just ['skʊi:na], however a good example is the word for ship which is skip: [ʃi:p], yes, Faroese skip is pronounced like English sheep, I know. Mouse in singuar and plural in Faroese is: mús [mʉu:s] and mýs [mʊi:s]. Green is grønur [krø:nʊɹ] (yes, /ɹ/ has many allophones). Like German, Dutch, and English, Faroese also had its Great Vowel Shift. In short, short vowels lengthened and long vowel diphthongised. You've already seen many of these examples in the examples I have mentioned here. The possessive pronoun my/mine is thus mín [mʊi:n] in Faroese. A sound change that developed in Faroese and Icelandic is preaspiration. Preaspiration also exists in some (if not all) Sami languages as well as in Scottish Gaelic. It's uncertain where this feature originated; it could've been borrowed from one family to the next or it could be an areal feature. It's possible that ScG got it from Old Norse, which itself may have gotten it from Sami but don't quote me on that. Anyway, I'll explain Faroese preaspiration. Notice how the "voiceless" stops and fricatives in Faroese have postaspiration word initially? Well, intervocalically they shift from being postaspirated to preaspirated: [ʰp ʰt ʰk ʰtʲ ʰtʃ]. They do however lose their preaspiration if the preceding vowel is a high vowel or the diphthong ends in a high vowel, so this applies to [i: u: ai: ɛi: ɔi: ʊi: ɔu:]. However, if the stop/affricate is geminated: [ʰp: ʰt: ʰk: ʰtʲ: ʰtʃ:] then the preaspiration is never lost but this is also another feature of Faroese where vowels have different pronunciations depending on the number of or the length/gemination of the consonants that follow. Note that especially for the ungeminated preaspirated stops there are dialectical differences in Faroese, the dialect of the capital Tórshavn (or Havn for short) does not have these ungeminated preaspirated stop and just pronounced them as regular stops. A final pretty unique feature of Faroese is the so-called skerping. I sometimes call it Holtzmann's Law 2.0 as it pertains to how after high vowels or high diphthongs (same meaning as above), the cluster -ggj- is added after front vowels/diphthongs and -gv- after back vowels/diphthongs. I compare it to Holtzmann's Law because where Holtzmann's Law describes the difference between Faroese egg and German Ei, skerping describes the difference between Old Norse ey and Faroese oyggj. There are many such words in Faroese so you will come across it almost immediately. It's not fully fleshed out, however, and there are archaicsms that existed but don't any more. For instance, the preposition in, the word for no, and the other word for yes (the positive reply to a negative question) are in modern Faroese í, nei, and jú. In older Faroese, we find íggj, neiggj, and júgv. I hope that was it. Sorry if it's not that well ordered but I was following your video.
Hi there, love the video. I grew up speaking Dutch, Frisian and Hylpers which is close to old Frisian. Its really interesting to see what's most similar to my mother tongue (Hylpers).
I am an German nativ speaker and I had to google the word kiesen which you mentioned at the time 7:08, because I never heard of this word. Nowadays we would never use this word to express the word choose. The modern word would be wählen. Kiesen was used in middle high german. I've learned something new. Thanks a lot ;)
Today, the only form of kiesen that is left is the past participle of erkiesen: "erkoren". No "normal" German speaker has ever heard about the infinitive of "erkoren". I found it in a dictionary and first thought it was an error.
I just discovered this channel today because of youtube suggestions and I really love your videos! I like the way you explain and your pronunciation of the words! Not gonna lie, I kinda hope you make a video about Slavic languages or the Indian languages one day
this channel is so good, as a person who studies biology but somehow ended up having interest in linguistics too (especially germanic and turkic) your videos are so useful learning something, as u could think i dont have much time to learn all of that stuff by reading, so watching you is a fun and nice shortcut to get the basic ideas. keep it up
I am 37 and my mother is 67. We have never used or heard of kiesen or anyone using it. I had to google several dictionaries to find it. It is not in the usual leo or langenscheidt that one would use. We would say wählen or auswählen. It is so interesting to learn etymology.
[β] did not become labiodental [v] until after the dialects of West Germanic had already formed. In German it is bilabial to this day, but now a plosive [b]. Old Saxon sometimes used the letter . There are also very early examples of Old English writing with the letter that would later be found with . This shows that PG /b/ was still bilabial in those positions.
I second the comment about slowing down the pace at which you speak. Very interesting stuff but presentation is important if you want your channel to grow. I’m glad I found you via the algorithm tho!
As an English and Spanish speaker, I love comparing how the Romance languages and Germanic languages have changed over time!! I had no idea how similar the German languages are!
Whilst the Germanic languages are similar in many regards, I'd still claim that sincs he used words specifically for comparison in this video, it made it so that the languages looked more alike in opposed to a normal sentence whereas the gramatical structure is completely different, and whereas there are suddenly words that are completely different (Hence is why they weren't used for linguistic comparison in a video discussing similarities)
I'm so happy you transscribe Dutch words without the final 'n', so many people still insist on transscribing words like 'denken' as ['deŋkən], when the 'n' at the end of Dutch words has been silent for many many decades.
I was confused why he was dropping the final ‘n’ so often throughout the video and your comment made me realise he just learned the Dutch Dutch. In Belgian Dutch that final n is still very much pronounced.
11:42 I'm with the Chinese on this one. I was way past school when I first heard that "d"/"t" or "b"/"p" are NOT just differenciated by the amount of aspiration. I'm sure that's not just an issue of my dialect. I speak native Swiss German and Standard German since first grade, and I can hardly tell the difference between voiced and unvoiced "s" sounds - English teacher had to show us how to make a "z" by making us hum.
6:41 For dutch this heavily depends on the dialect I'd say. For example, spoken with a typical Amsterdam accent you wouldn't hear the difference between "vier" and "fier" (proud), although in a lot (if not most) dialects you can actually hear a difference, although in the Netherlands often subtle (but in Belgium very clear).
Why do you have to rush through the video? This is not a simple topic about celebrities or else so when you put a slide and come up with amounts of informations give the audience some time to let these informations sink in. It’s a pain to watch
Possible inaccuracies aside, when you're eating breathing sleeping sweating linguistics, someone not explaining prerequisite topics every time they come up, and speaking at a "I have something else to do too" pace, isnt that bad of a thing. I sped the video up, you can slow it down, or look for (or even make yourself) one that's slower and more in depth.
Excellent content, I love stuff like this. Can I advise to take your time presenting the information, let the viewer absorbe what it is that you're saying. It felt full of passion and full of speed as a result!
He barely mentioned Norway in the video. Maybe because we basically use the same words as swedish some places, Danish some places and icelandic minus ur some places
@@croucha1r237 I only commented on the times he implied something wrong by saying only these languages have this or that or similar. If I remember correctly
@@croucha1r237 I think he mentioned initially that not all Germanic branches were equally familiar to him or investigated by him. Norwegian was not among the prime ones.
Because we lost t he wars....the propaganda was so intense. Until today..we lost look at hollywood the oscars. Bedt foreingn films? A nazi movie. It never stops.....i leved it...german is beautiful....rest on peace. I love also french and russian. So much to learn....now you know why.....you always hear. HARSH....and it came a lot from rhe dear cousins....they do this so.well
Your energy and enthusiasm are possibly the best favor you do to the subject matter in my view. If I knew nothing about this I'd be intrigued simply on account of your descriptiveness and tempo.
Really enjoyed this! As an English speaker who has been studying Swedish and Yiddish and a little bit of German, this was really helpful in understanding certain similarities and differences.
It makes me wonder why one would study Yiddish instead of just studying Standard German, which at least uses the Latin alphabet and thus has a much lower learning curve.
As a German and English speaker, you did pretty good on German pronunciation for someone who doesn't speak the language, although a couple things (like äu) could definitely be improved
I know this is an old video, but I feel it's important to note that Norwegian also palatalises sk to [ʂ]. Norwegian also palatalises k to [ç] or [tʃ] depending on the dialect, while in Swedish it became [ʃ]. Interestingly, there is an ongoing vowel shift in some dialects of Norwegian, where [ç] turns into [ʂ] among young people
Wow, this is amazing, thanks! You do cover so much, so quickly that, to be honest, not only do I pause your videos a lot; I also slow them to 50-75% to avoid BMS (Blown Mind Syndrome). Brilliant stuff, cheers!
Nice, the only slip I noticed was in 'kuiken' (at about 12:10) that came out sounding more like 'keuken'. As the f>v>f, I tend to do that myself, but it is a problem as there is a difference in meaning between 'vel' and 'fel' or 'vier' and 'fier'. s>z>s seems to be pressent in the way it's pronounced in Amsterdam (if it ever passed through the 'v' phase).
1:40 Small correction, as a Low-German Native Speaker, this language is Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic). It derived from Old-Saxon, and western dialects are still called Low-Saxon to this day.
I'm sitting here eating this video up at 1x speed, and then I realized how fast you were talking, haha. When nerd minds meet... If you know the IPA and anything about historical linguistics, this is super easy to digest, but I can't send it to a friend for fear of their eyes glazing over. Love the video.
As for 4:26, a common alternative in Dutch (also used in standard language) is the bilabial consonant [β]. This sound can fully replace the [ʋ] in standard pronunciation and will generally be used after certain vowels (at least "u"). In certain dialects, I could hear the [w] being used (e.g. along the Hollandic coast). It's clearly noticeable in speech and I think it has mostly died out through standardization (so unlike [β], it did not enter the standard).
Ik vond het grappig dat de helft van de veranderingen die hij voor Nederlands gaf, niet voor Vlaams (zelfs de standaardtaal, niet enkel bij tussentaal en dialecten), en ook niet voor sommige Zuid-Nederlandse dialecten gelden... Of gewoon anders zijn. De zachte g is een goed voorbeeld, maar ook de w in water en nog vele anderen. Echt bijna een andere taal eigenlijk.
it would be raelly cool if you could make a similar video about germanic languages but this time regarding grammar. How much of the grammar remained in the modern germanic languages. You could mention languages like Icelandic, Faroese, Elfdalian which retain a lot of old germanic grammatical forms like the consonant cluster hl-. Or the cases, or subjunctive mood etc. You're really great at explaining! :D
8:12 The German word is Haupt (which also fits the rule). 8:28 The German word is lachen, like in Dutch 12:14 The same happens in Southwest German dialects, especially in Alemannic dialects, as they are spoken in Switzerland.
As a German, regarding the changes alluded to with the examples of *-igaz and *-ingo, I would like to add that there is actually a fair bit of variation in how these are now being pronounced. While the shift you described is generally pretty common, some speakers, especially in Bavarian dialects, do pronounce final /ig/ as written with /g/, while others say it with a final devoicing to /k/. Yet others, at least in my impression, tend to say it with something closer to /ʝ/ at the end, and it's pretty frequent in some dialects to pronounce /ig/ somewhere between /ʝ/ and /j/ between vowels. Interestingly, there's also a hypercorrection, semi-common in varieties in the general area of the lower Rhineland and Ruhr region, to pronounce some words with a suffix descended from earlier -lîch (the one that became -ly or -like in English), like hässlich (hateable/ugly), as if ending in /ik/. This is further complicated by some speakers pronouncing a written -ich like /iʝ/ between vowels. While /ing/ is indeed pronounced with a simple [ŋ] at the end by many, there are also speakers who pronounce it closer to /ŋk/, with some even aspirating it pretty heavily, similar to Icelandic.
Very interesting subject (my major in university). You do seem to be in hurry to catch a train though. I wouldn’t mind watching a 30 min video instead of a 20 min video and feel less stressed after watching it ;-)
Fantastic, super well explained and comprehensive! Would you consider doing something expanding on North Germanic tonogenesis in the future, or perhaps just tonogenesis in general? For instance potential phonological parallels between the development of pitch accent/stød in Scandinavian and the tones of actual tonal languages like Mandarin?
I would speculate that pitch accent is an ancestral trait in all indo european languages that only a few have preserved into modern times, its present in swedish, norwigian, serbian, punjabi and sanskrit for example
Yeah I think treating English as an "oops jk" language for velar frication is a mischaracterisation, because a very large chunk of would-be /g/ turns into /j/ like you say (hence OE gear, dæg > PDE year, day) or zero (burg > borough, ge- > Ø). Though calling giefan >> give a Norse _loan_ feels a bit weird in the terminology, when it's more like influence or interference from Norsified post-Danelaw Northern English dialects than a proper lexical borrowing. /g/ isn't properly established (at least based on orthographic evidence) until a good two centuries after Old Norse stops being spoken in England, while Midland/Southern writers like Chaucer still maintain ⟨y⟩ spellings into the 1400s.
The sk shift to sh happened in Norwegian too! Not like the swedish one, but like the West-Germanic languages. Alot of sk- words in Norwegian is pronounced with an sh- sound like in English. Even tho they are still written with sk- For example your word "shine" is in Norwegian: Skinne, pronounced shinne I know you didn't study it, but thought I would mention it as it DID actually change in Norwegian.
Thanks for this great video! One error I noticed: Low German dialects are North Sea Germanic (not Weser-Rhine Germanic) and also underwent the nasal-spirant law e.g. Goos (goose), fief (five). Also, Low German verbs have a dental suffix in the plural of verbs in present, just like Old English (in most dialects except those with more High German influence).
another error was that he said /z/ was the only voiced fricative in proto germanic when there was also /ð/. Also he said /z/ was fronted then retracted but that's incorrect. Proto Germanic /z/ was always retracted since it developed from Indo-European /s/ which was definitely retracted.
I'm Norwegian, but quite fluent in Danish and Swedish as well, in addition to knowing a wee bit of German and Iceland and this was interesting. You forgot Faeroese, though ;)
One peculiarity of Faroese is that initial *þ- becomes h- instead of t- in some circumstances, usually in short unstressed words. That's how you end up with hósdagur (see ON þórsdagr, "Thursday"), hóast (< *þo at, "although"), hetta (ON þetta, "this"), har (ON þar, "there"), hesin (ON þessi, "this"), Hósvík (ON Þórsvík, placename).
How many languages do you speak? I count at least 11 (six mentioned here, plus Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and French). That's wild. How many hours a day do you spend studying?
The number now is 17, but I don’t by any means consider myself “fluent” in all of those- only like 4 of them. I don’t know “hours” necessarily- I just memorize stuff and do translation practice between other tasks in my life (like on the bus, for example). It varies day to day
Haha, my first reaction to hearing "...but I wanted to wait until I knew a few more languages of the group before making the video..." was "well, that's different!". Most Americans I'm familiar with will (either proudly or apologetically) tell you they only speak English. Of course, here in the Netherlands we only have a 2-3 hour trip to get to a place where the locals speak English, German or French, so I guess we have more if an incentive to learn foreign languages than, say, someone born in Nebraska.... :-). Anyway, nice if very speedy video, and your Dutch pronunciation is definitely not too bad!
@@watchyourlanguage3870 11:32 a little note here about aspiration, in Northern traditional English dialects and Scots there's no aspiration either like in Dutch. I also heard that Swiss German often doesn't have aspiration natively but does borrow aspiration over in loanwords from standard German
The German verb "kiesen" for "to choose" is old fashioned / out dated and not understood by many Germans nowadays. However, speaking Dutch and German I could recognize the word "kiezen". Great video. Subscribed your channel and look forward to watching more of your videos.
5:39 It didn't happen in Faroese, most Norwegian dialects or most Jutlandic dialects either. There are even some dialects in Sweden that didn't merge them.
I am a native swedish speaker. This is so interesting. There are a lot of similar words and even words that are spelled the same but often pronounced different between Swedish and English.
Old Saxon was also part of the Ingvaeonic group. For example, the example you gave in the video applies to modern Low German as well, giving us [u:s] [us] [ʊs], depending on which low german youre talking about. The palatalisation of /k/ did indeed only happen in Anglo-Frisian, though. Low German also preserved [w], at least regionally. edit: ive just noticed that another commenter has already pointed this out
@@throwaway1270 oh, certainly but to a much, much lesser degree. most common example being church, which is Kirk in low german, but anytthing from tsjerke to schörk in frisian
I have but one piece of criticism I humbly tell you WyL. Could you slow down the pacing on your videos a little. Personally I like to read and assimilate everything you have on the screen, but it changes too quickly. I keep having to rewind to finish reading. Muchas gracias por tus videos de muy buena calidad bro
yotambie'n! el video va muy rapido, lo fastidio (lo siento para mi Espan~a I am too lazy and I don't have a spanish keyboard :/ I was also just excited to practice my spanish jaja)
I agree, I was barely able to really even perceive what was being said, much less digest anything before you were on to the next things. I’d love to hear more examples and maybe even repeated sound clips.
Great presentation! Around 12:35 you start digging into the palatalization effect before (high) front vowels. However, among the North Germanic languages, Swedish is not alone in doing that, and in most modern Norwegian dialects it happened too. It must have happened, as you mentioned, later than in West Germanic, but it did happen! One interesting observation related to this is that English did borrow a few words from Norse or Norwegian which start with sk+front vowel, for example "sky" and "ski". Both of those are spelled the same but now pronounced with an /sh/ sound in Norwegian, like in their cognate inherited words in English. Norwegian "ski" = the English word "shide"; a stick of wood, besides the now more commonly used meaning of something useful on top of snow. (The bonus in English is that it gets two words to keep the two meanings apart.) From their pronunciation in English we can assume that they must have been borrowed at a time _after_ the /sk/ > /sh/ rule had done its work, because the rule didn't affect these words. Presumably they reflect the source language's pronunciation at the time of borrowing as well, which means that a similar transition rule had not (yet) had its effect in that language. It therefore must have happened later than at least in English. One can also compare the word "shin" (as in shinbone) which has the same meaning and same pronunciation as the modern Norwegian word "skinn". In Norwegian, however, the word also means "skin" or "hide", which thus reveals the origin of the word "skin" in English.
Obviously, "ski" is a very recent loan in English, based on written Norwegian rather than spoken (would give "shee" or something similar). This is what I found: "It was first used in 1921 in English by British writer and mountaineer Sir Arnold Lunn (1888-1974) in a hyphenated form “ski-ing.” With time, the hyphen disappeared, which is why “skiing” in English first principally connoted the alpine variety." (From "Skiing, an English word of Norwegian heritage" by M. Michael Brady.)
@@robinrehlinghaus1944 It certainly is, but as it appears names of body parts also tend to "move around" as time passes. (Compare Latin "boccum" = cheek with Spanish "boca" = mouth.) It is interesting to read the etymology of Schenkel on Wiktionary! As it appears the modern English equivalent is "shank", described as the lower part of the leg. Incidentally that lower part is now what we call "legg" in Norwegian! The shin I suppose is more referring to the _front_ section of the shank, where it really hurts if you hit something hard!
The lack of mentions of Afrikaans hurts my Afrikaner heart, spoken like old Dutch and written with the English alphabet, (zuid - suid) with some khoisan thrown in like abba.
This is the first video I'm seeing of your channel, so idk if you covered it before, but it would be interesting to examine East Germanic languages & West Germanic dialects (or languages) that used to exist in the east before the ethnic cleansings during & after WW2 (and some which maybe survived despite the odds).
Honestly when you're explaining how mouse and mice came to be and said moose and meese I started cracking up because people joke about meese being the plural of moose
'Kyse' in Danish today is mostly used to mean a certain type of hood, historically worn by women and today mostly worn by babies. I know Danish is super difficult for non-natives to pronounce, even for natives to be fair, but 'kyse' would be pronounced with a long first vowel sound as there is only one s. How you pronounced it sounded more similar to 'kysse' which means 'kissing'. I must say it's impressive that you do speak 6 germanic languages, and I applaud you for having learnt Danish as a non-native! Great video
@@someopinion2846 I wouldn't say kyse is obsolete, we use it occasionally. Usually as an adjective 'kyst'*, you can say it means something like frightened into submission, usually by a person, but could also be someone who has become apathetic due to life traumas. Example "hun virker lidt kyst" , "she seams a bit ----" *not to be confused with Kyst (Seashore) which is pronounced differently.
Your Dutch seems to be heavily biased towards the Northern Netherlands. 'w' is probably one of these phonemes that is pronounced differently in every national regiolect of Dutch: labiodental [ʋ] in the Netherlands, bilabial [β̞] in Belgium and [w], as in English, in Suriname. 'v' remains voiced in most Dutch dialects, only the North of the Netherlands and Suriname devoice them The official standard pronunciation of 'g' is [γ] in Dutch, while 'ch' (as well as 'g' at the end of a word) is [x]. The pronunciation [χ] is a Northern Dutch phenomenon, which, although spreading in the Netherlands, is resented in Belgian and Southern Dutch. Suriname also devoices [γ] to [x] 'r' has a great variety of realisation depending on where you are [r] and [R] are the most common ones Also [u] had shifted to [y] in most Dutch dialects (and even some low german dialects) before the great vowel shift took place, with [y] then shifting to [oey], admittedly this might just have been a simplifaction on your part
The Dutch vowel shifts are simplified because the English ones are also simplified and it would make the video incredibly long. The trilled r [r] is very uncommon in Dutch. The most common ones are the tap, the uvular fricatives and the retroflex r. Otherwise I completely agree.
@@Kikkerv11 Also NL biased. Nobody uses the retroflex ever or even tap down south, but only a trill (alveolar or uvular) or uvular fricative in word endings.
Your content is good, but I would slow down your videos and put more emphasis in mastering the pronunciation of the living languages you cite or cutting in native speakers' pronunciations. Practice slowing down, clarifying your diction, and giving faithful representations of the phonologies of the examples from living languages that you cite. Suffering from phonological interference from your native language happens to all of us, but if you make a science-based video, it's best to use a separate source from a native speaker if that interference is strong.
my parents pronounce it quite clearly but mine is relatively soft but still present. And I hear many people around me say the enlgish r and it kinda makes me cringe when they overdo it.
3:53 made me giggle - we still have the word "mampfen" in german which seems to not be too far off and (while a bit old) we say "has it mouth-ed"-"hat es gemundet" to ask if the food was good.
I should point out that while in north germanic *Vnþ became *Vnn and *Vmf/Vnf became *Vmm (though it might've become V:f in some words), *Vns ALWAYS became *V:s, just as in north sea (ingvaeonic). The reason *uns doesn't show that, with old norse "oss", is because the PG word that gives us "oss" was actually "unsiz" (compare "okkr" from *unkiz, and "yðr" from *izwiz, with irregular z>ð). This resulted in *ósR and then *óss, and then shortened to "oss". Other examples, like how *gans (goose) became "gás" and *ansuz became "áss" (ss from sR) shows us however that the loss of *n lengthened the vowel, not the *s The cluster *Vht also didn't just lengthen the consonant, but ALSO the vowel, so *V:t: (hence icelandic "dóttir" and "nátt/nótt") Also, Icelandic hn DOES come from proto germanic hn, such as in "hneta/hnot" (nut), proto germanic *hnuts, or "hníga" from pg *hnīganą. It just also turned a lot of old norse kn into hn, but that was probably possible because old norse already HAD hn The voiceless fricatives *f and *þ didn't just stay unchanged either in north germanic, rather they stayed voiceless at the start of words and when by another voiceless sound or doubled, but otherwised voiced inside words (same happened in old english, but there it also happened with *s, and the new voiced *þ was distinct from old *ð cuz it had already changed into *d, hence death vs dead). Later the now voiced /v/, written "f" both in old norse and old english (whether from *f or from *b) changed into /b/ before /n/ and /l/ in Icelandic (so danish "havn", but icealndic "höfn" being pronounced "höbn"). Of course, with icelandic /b/ actually being voiceless, it lookes like "f" being pronounced as "p", but there were more steps between those sounds than the orthography might make you think
4:10 the symbol represents a Velar lateral approximant and thats not dark l, dark l is represented with so is not dark l. But despite that great video! I also find historical linguistics really interesting and its kinda sad that this community is so small so these types of videos are really great!
Great video I wish Scots had been mentioned, as it bridges some of the distance between English and the continental languages. Also, in Primary School in Scotland in the 90s I was taught to make a distinction between wh and w, I'm not sure if that's still the case Thanks for the enjoyable video
In the recent past, about 40 or 50 years ago, it was considered proper in the US also to make this distinction. I was often corrected when saying "what".
I think this is what is missing from this video. Perhaps he's just unaware of the Scots language and pronunciation. I hate that other English speakers don't differentiate between Wales and whales, witch and which , wile and while , Wye and why. Also he might be interested to know that gh is still a fricative in Scots with bocht for bought and dochter for daughter.
9:05 some other examples of verners law alterations include lost/forlorn (german verloren), kiesen/auserkoren (archaic German verb meaning choose), as well in some place names - for example, the Weser River in germany which is called the Werre upstream.
6:40 The way you pronounced fyra (Swedish for "four") sounds exactly like when swedes make fun of the accent of people who come from Stockholm lmao. It comes off as very pretentious.
Oh, boy... I will need to rewatch this entire video to comment on what happened in Faroese, my native language. I might do that with my IRL profile though instead of my gaming profile. We'll see. Great job on this video.
As a Northern German native speaker it is pretty interesting seeing that, many PG words are extremely similar to low German but also to German in general (compared to English)
Rhoticization is epic. One day you say sat the next you say rat and no one could've traced the etymology if it wasn't for you meddling linguists figuring morphology out.
Had to play this at 0.75 speed to follow this as a non-native English speaker, and even then I sometimes couldn't distinguish the words you were saying, but thanks for the interesting vid!
I had the same problem and I am a native English speaker ! Sounds like a racehorse!
Same here..... But native speaker
Glad to know it wasn’t just me!
Y’all are slow 😂😂😂😂😂😂
I’m joking bruh calm down chief it ain’t that serious
Fun fact: The Swedish spoken in Finland does not have the velar fricative like the (standard?) Swedish spoken in Sweden e.g. for /sk/, which is instead pronounced [∫]. So "skön" (beautiful) is pronounced the same as German "schön".There are also other major phonological differences between Sweden-Swedish and Finland-Swedish.
This is true also of most northern Swedish dialects (however there it's a retroflex fricative, not an alveolar) and older upper class Swedish. Another fun fact :) the Swedish sje-ljud differs in pronunciation depending on dialect - on the West Coast it's generally more of a labial fricative; in Stockholm/Svealand it's more of an alveolar; and in Southern Swedish dialects it's more of a velar.
And some dialects here still have the masculine and feminine gender instead of the non-neuter it is shown when you instead of saying it (den in standard Swedish) you use the pronouns ha or ho (shortenings of the pronouns han and hon in standard Swedish respectively). So instead of saying it is small to say something is small we say he or she is small depending on what object we are replacing with the pronoun. This also applies to words like that or this, so our "that" would as an example be "hande" implying that its masculine. Likewise "honde" for feminine and "hede" for neuter. I think it's so fascinating how just a regional dialect of the same language has so different grammar.
@@excancerpoikmy dialect has remnants of this. We've forgotten most of the feminine words, but it's very common to say han instead of den, and i remember my grandma still having a noticeable masculine/feminine distinction, if with a fairly small number of words she treated as grammatically feminine
As a northern Norwegian I love Finland Swedish, and Skåne too btw 😂
also in southern Finland the trill R is very often pronounced as the English r
English does actually have non-latinate /d͡ʒ/, also as a result of palatalization. Geminated *jj (< *jj, *gj) in OE (as well as *j when preceded by a nasal, if I remember correctly) fortified to /d͡ʒ/, spelled as ⟨cġ⟩. An example: PG *brugjǭ > OE brycġ > ME bridge
Some swedish dialects also have it as palatalization of dj
“Job” is somewhat similar, though its true origin is unclear. Personally, I believe /d͡ʒ/ in “job” naturally developed and voiced from an earlier form, from Middle English choppe (or less likely gobbe) which had /t͡ʃ/.
there is also one instance in English of PG "*brugjǭ" > ON "bryggja" > MiddleEng "Brigge" > ModernEng "Brigg", because quite a large Norse influence in some parts of England, starting from about 830AD, something to do with some kids of Ragnar Lodbrok being very angry or something, but it's ok they did give us some Kings with the House of Knýtlinga.
@@simontollin2004 Kan du ge exemel? nyfiken
@@simontollin2004 Bothnian, Jamtish, and Dalecarlian/Dalian have it. These are not just Swedish dialects though, they're a mix between West Norse and East Norse. Most Norwegian dialects also have it, or had it.
A few remarks:
-Belgian Dutch has a bilabial w (transcribed as [ β̞ ]) and a voiced v
-Belgian Dutch distinguishes g and ch.
-[ʋ] also occurs in Germany, Denmark and Sweden. I think it would be better to say that all Germanic languages have [v~ʋ] except for Dutch, Frisian and English.
also, surinamese dutch straight up uses [w]
Where does [ʋ] occur in Swedish?
Cockney English has /ʋ/ as an allophone of
@@uriurw8630 Surinamese dutch is heavily Sranan influenced no?
@@micayahritchie7158 not from mu experience with it, my dutch tutor was from suriname and she was native Dutch and Sranan and English (cool), the way people speak there at least pronunciation is maybe influenced by Sranan which in of itself is influenced from a few African languages i think. I asked her if there were any distinctive suriname words and she said that their accent was different but they had the same vocabulary and sometimes used words for foods and surinamse markets and sometimes they will use Sranan words for Dutch words they don't know if they're native sranan only.
i love this channel so much, you and a few other similar channels that are also pretty small and new are really forming a new wave of youtube linguistics content and its really cool to see how willing you all are to assume people are smart enough to understand linguistics concepts as long as they're explained well. i am now most the way thru my degree (not linguistics but directly related and i got into it thru linguistics) and ppl like tom scott and xidnaf were my introduction to the whole thing years ago, but honestly these videos are better and more thorough and accurate than those were. its really cool to imagine the generation that will get into it thru these videos (and the similar ones also coming out recently) and hope to see u continue making videos and get more traction on here bc its baffling you only have as few subs as u do
Thanks! I think you pretty much nailed my philosophy about teaching stuff as well, and I’m glad you see me as part of the “new wave”
@@watchyourlanguage3870 yeah man definitely i mean i really hope you and the other small creators ive seen blow up enough for it to truly be a wave but i rlly see it going that way and u fit right in w them, love the videos keep it up bro
could you name a few others? I'm just discovering this nieche of youtube :)
@@kikeshi off the top of my head the only one i can name in this new generation i was talkin abt it linglizard but i know there are more and when i see or remember more ill try to remember to come back n tell u, but some of the older ones that i think are really solid are langfocus and nativlang as well, polymathy is cool too but more focused on a few specific languages than linguistics or languages as a whole topic (tho it is all intertwined ofc). hope u enjoy :) if u like podcasts, theres also a Really good one called lexicon valley by john mcwhorter that has a huge backcatelogue of good informative interesting funny episodes, only problem (for me, some pll would see it as a good side and even i admit it adds character) is he just plays songs a lot esp broadway like a weird dj but its kinda nice inspite of and even bc of that. it was on slate, and he made a ton of episodes there and theyre worfh listening to. since then, he left slate and went to booksmart studios and continued making a show called lexicon valley, but it got way worse imo. also, slate made a new linguistics podcast called spectacular vernacular which actually is in the same feed as lexicon valley was so u now gotta scroll past those to get to lexicon valley, bc its also not nearly as good. i mean both of the shows being made now may also be for you, and have their value, but rheyre both not close to what it used to be imo. hope u enjoy that one too its really interesting
@@user-ze7sj4qy6q thanks so much!
12:09 To nitpick a bit:
In the North Germanic languages the word for chicken has a diminutive suffix, so the Proto-Germanic form for them would be *keukilīngaz (or *kukkilīngaz)
The the Icelandic /u/ is completely off here. It's hard to tell, but /kl/ sounds like it turned into a [ç]. And finally, the /ʏ/ should be reduced a bit so that it's more central and shorter.
Awesome video, but I felt like I had to watch it on 0.75 speed to process things.
As someone who has a amateur interest (think non-academic) in linguistics, a decent chunk of this stuff was not new, but I still had trouble following along at your speaking speed, and I could not read the text without pausing constantly.
Great, informative video, but I thought I'd drop my two cents about the pacing. I really did enjoy though.
Agreed. Fantastic content but too quick to digest properly.
Speed was fine. Watch it again if you have to
Glad you said something and it wasn't just me 😅
Yes, this guy's content is really good and he seems fairly knowledgeable, but probably should lay off the coffee before doing the video 😂
I have the same trouble understanding German when people talk fast. But I don't think everybody in Germany should speak slow to cater to me. I sometimes get annoyed at videos in English when the person speak slow like they are high on Xanax.
I’m a native english speaker and I had to watch this on 0.75x speed 😅
As I am a native speaker of two of these Germanic languages and speak all the others (I speak German though, not Yiddish) I have to say that your pronunciation impresses, Icelandic and Swedish are very close to correct and your Danish is not bad though it is clearly the one you have the biggest problems with pronouncing correctly. Keep up the good work.
His swedish sounds a bit too nasally but the actual sounds are still right even if exaggerated which is definitely very impressive
@@deadsnooker7565 yes, the Swedish is not very close to correct and would sound funny to any Swede especially someone not from the Stockholm region...
@@walterwalters5443 specifically Lidingö hahaha
his swedish somehow has the same accent as zlatan ibrahimowic which i found pretty funny
Absolutely correct.
your icelandic pronunciation was pretty good. one thing to note is that even though u and ö are transcribed with œ and ʏ they are central vowels
I'm a native Spanish speaker and after learning a lot of english and a reasonable amount of German I fucking live for this kind of stuff, my world vision had been somewhat limited through the glass of a romance lenguage and trying to tie everything to either a latin or greek word but learning more deeply about the germanic family is giving me a deeper understanding of some stuff that seemed ''random'' in english or german (also language evolution rocks in general)
Im gonna start sharing all of these videos with people, I find your channel so fun and interesting
"Ande" only barely mean "ghost" in Swedish. "Den helige ande" is the translation for the trinity's "the holy ghost", but "ande" most often mean "spirit" as in mind/soul as in "the spirit is willing..." or as in a supernatural being as in a disembodied soul or "genie" as in the bottled kind.
We also have "anda", which is breath ("hålla andan" = "hold your breath") or spirit of the more zealy variety ("kämparanda" = "fighting spirit")
Ghost and spirit are synonymous. In English, "Heliga anden" is "The holy ghost" as well as "The Holy Spirit".
Also, what's the actual difference between a spirit and a ghost?
@@_loss_
Swedes see it as ande = spirit, and spöke = ghost.
Spöke (related to "spook") is strongly associated with malice, haunting, and the "floating white sheet" horror conceptualisation of a ghost.
Ande on the other hand is more neutral and used in more serious contexts. An exorcist trying to scam you might prefer to say there's an "ande" in your house, to make it sound more legitimate.
@@_loss_connotation. It's gonna depend on each person and how they use it. Definition wise they are very similar.
@@_loss_ not in every sense. The phrase "in the spirit of the law" is conveyed with anden. Using ghost means something completely different.
Dude your pronunciation of the Swedish "fyra" at 6:42 was probably the most on-point I've ever heard by a non native speaker, because you kinda nail the the sound from the upper class Stockholm accent. Your pitch variation in two-syllable words sounds a bit off sometimes, but overall your Swedish is really good, keep it up!
I originally thought that it sounded quite weird but reading your comment I realised that he kinda genuinely sounds like stereotypical Lidingö. More impressively done than I originally thought, just a weird dialect
Wow. It sounded kinda Chinese to me. I didn't know Swedish had tones (kind of)
@@ArturoSubutex it's not tones, but pitch accent! There's a good video by Academia Cervena on the subject
Edit: This video ruclips.net/video/lXp7_Sjgm34/видео.html
Det i-ljodet er veldugt merkelegt. Det finst i Meldal i Trøndelag og.
@@ArturoSubutex Most Norwegian dialects, some Danish dialects, Ripuarian, Moselle Franconion(excluding Luxembourgish), and Limburgish have pitch accent as well.
My man just summarized a playlist-worth of Simon Roper videos in 17 minutes. Respect.
(No shade at Simon. Love his videos. )
Me too
As someone who studies English, German and Swedish, I've found this video very intriguing. You did a great job at summarising all the information into a short and entertaining video. I'm just hoping that we get a similar video about Slavic languages soon.
Please, slow down! it's not a speed race, or is it?
So on my gaming channel I promised to provide more detail on where my native language, Faroese, fits in with these sound changes... only to promptly forget about the video so with many apologies here several months later are my comments:
Voiced plosives: Like everywhere else except German, the b becomes v intervocalically and finally so have is at hava at to give is at geva. Note that unlike Icelandic we actually spell this v as a v and not as f. However, we completely lost the other two voiced fricatives. In places where this would result in a hiatus we where applicable insert a glide, the exact glide depends first on the preceding vowel and if that is ambiguous (i.e. not being high) we look at the following vowel. So the word dagur: the nominative form dagur is pronounced ['tɛa:vʊɹ] glide because the preceding vowel is non-high and thus the following vowel determines the value; the accusative form dag has no such glide and is simply [tɛa:]; and finally the dative form degi is pronounced [te:jɪ] because the non-high [ɪ] is interpreted as an [i].
Nasals liquids and trills: all remain, except [w] > [v] (as mention) but also [r] > [ɹ] (also as mentioned). The Faroese version of "skarre-r" was around for a while but died out shortly there after. There used to be 'oss' in Faroese pronounced like the Swedish but it's archaic today; this is because Faroese and Icelandic got rid of the old plural and instead use the old dual for the new modern plural, which is why "us" is okkum and okkur respectively. As for mouth: It's actually a bad example for Faroese as it is influenced by the -nnr > -ðr soundchange in Old Norse, so the more common nominative form is muður but all the other forms have munn- as the root: muður - munn - munni - muns etc., however muður can also have munnur as its nominative form. Examples of other nouns with the same sound change and which may have both nominative forms: brunnur/bruður (well), drunnur/druður (Gaelic loan word(!)), maður (mannur is just wrong), grunnur/gruður, lunnur/luður, and runnur/ruður. Some are rare with the -ður form since as all the other forms have nn, analogy wants the ð forms to become nn forms too. Anyway, munnur and muður are pronounced ['mʊn:ʊɹ] and ['mu:ʊɹ] (generally no glide here). Water is vatn and is pronounced [vaʰtn]. Red is reyður: ['ɹɛi:jʊɹ] although it also kinda sounds like ['ɹɛj:ʊɹ] to me at times. Initial hl-, hr-, and hn- have all be lost in Faroese but hv- merged with kv- but still spelled as hv, white is hvítur and pronounced ['kvʊi:tʊɹ]. We still have voiceless nasals and liquids but I'll get back to these later. Your comment about Icelandic hn being a separate develop is kinda true and kinda not, it's just that Icelandic merged kn- and hn- in most cases (yet still kept it in words like knattspyrna (football)). Faroese: ringur ['ɹɪŋkʊɹ], lurta ['lʊɻ̊ʈa]. You didn't mention hj, in Faroese it either merges with j [j] or kj [tʃʰ], the exact rule for when each is used always escapes me however but it _may_ have to do with the voicedness of the following consonant.
Icelandic f doesn't just become [p] before nasals like in höfn [hœpn] but also before [l] so the main airport in Iceland is in Ke[p]lavík, but OK this is (< *b) not /f/ (< *p).
Four is fýra ['fʊi:ɹa]. To sing is at syngja ['sɪɲtʃa]. Why ? Because in Old West Norse -ingw- the w rounded the /i/ to /y/. Danish synge is a later development from older Danish sjunge where the ju simply merges into y. The cognate of choose is kjósa ['tʃʰɔu:sa]. The cognate of think is tekkja [tʰɛʰtʃ:a] while we also have teinkja ['tʰɔɲ̊tʃa]. Feather = fjøður [fjø:vʊɹ]. Thou in Faroese is tú [tʰʉu:], so no t > d weakening here. The Faroese word for night is nátt [nɔʰt:]. Tooth: tonn [tʰɔn:].
As mentioned before, Faroese loses voiced fricatives completely, so the adjectivial suffix -ig is simply pronounced [i], although in lemma form we'd of course use the masculine for which is -igur [i(:)jʊɹ]. However, before n it's kept but like in Icelandic becomes a stop, so -ing: [ɪŋk].
Which leads to that Icelandic and Danish chain shift and yes, it also happened in Faroese for stops and affricates, so initial b d g dj gj [p t k tʲ tʃ] contrast with initial p t k tj kj [pʰ tʰ kʰ tʲʰ tʃʰ] but do note that the vast majority of Faroese speakers merge dj and tj with gj and kj respectively. I'm only separating them for completion's sake. So goose: gás [kɔɑ:s] and cold: kaldur [kʰaltʊɹ].
Faroese has also palatalised *k and *g before short high and central front vowels. It happened later than in English and like in English only unrounded vowels trigger palatalisation, so only /e i/. Of course adjacent to a j they also palatalise so kjúklingur is pronounced [tʃʰʉu:klɪŋkʊɹ]. The Faroese word for knee is knæ [knɛa:], no disappearing initial k- here.
So like k and g, sk is also palatalised before short high and central front unrounded vowels, so like in English and German, this is pronounced [ʃ] in these positions. Therefore, skína is a bad example for this as it's still just ['skʊi:na], however a good example is the word for ship which is skip: [ʃi:p], yes, Faroese skip is pronounced like English sheep, I know.
Mouse in singuar and plural in Faroese is: mús [mʉu:s] and mýs [mʊi:s]. Green is grønur [krø:nʊɹ] (yes, /ɹ/ has many allophones).
Like German, Dutch, and English, Faroese also had its Great Vowel Shift. In short, short vowels lengthened and long vowel diphthongised. You've already seen many of these examples in the examples I have mentioned here. The possessive pronoun my/mine is thus mín [mʊi:n] in Faroese.
A sound change that developed in Faroese and Icelandic is preaspiration. Preaspiration also exists in some (if not all) Sami languages as well as in Scottish Gaelic. It's uncertain where this feature originated; it could've been borrowed from one family to the next or it could be an areal feature. It's possible that ScG got it from Old Norse, which itself may have gotten it from Sami but don't quote me on that. Anyway, I'll explain Faroese preaspiration. Notice how the "voiceless" stops and fricatives in Faroese have postaspiration word initially? Well, intervocalically they shift from being postaspirated to preaspirated: [ʰp ʰt ʰk ʰtʲ ʰtʃ]. They do however lose their preaspiration if the preceding vowel is a high vowel or the diphthong ends in a high vowel, so this applies to [i: u: ai: ɛi: ɔi: ʊi: ɔu:]. However, if the stop/affricate is geminated: [ʰp: ʰt: ʰk: ʰtʲ: ʰtʃ:] then the preaspiration is never lost but this is also another feature of Faroese where vowels have different pronunciations depending on the number of or the length/gemination of the consonants that follow. Note that especially for the ungeminated preaspirated stops there are dialectical differences in Faroese, the dialect of the capital Tórshavn (or Havn for short) does not have these ungeminated preaspirated stop and just pronounced them as regular stops.
A final pretty unique feature of Faroese is the so-called skerping. I sometimes call it Holtzmann's Law 2.0 as it pertains to how after high vowels or high diphthongs (same meaning as above), the cluster -ggj- is added after front vowels/diphthongs and -gv- after back vowels/diphthongs. I compare it to Holtzmann's Law because where Holtzmann's Law describes the difference between Faroese egg and German Ei, skerping describes the difference between Old Norse ey and Faroese oyggj. There are many such words in Faroese so you will come across it almost immediately. It's not fully fleshed out, however, and there are archaicsms that existed but don't any more. For instance, the preposition in, the word for no, and the other word for yes (the positive reply to a negative question) are in modern Faroese í, nei, and jú. In older Faroese, we find íggj, neiggj, and júgv.
I hope that was it. Sorry if it's not that well ordered but I was following your video.
Great job!
Clicked on this video hoping I would learn something... but I feel like I'll have to watch it like 5 more times for anything to stick xD
Great work! A complete seminar hour at the university level in 17 minutes and free of charge. Thank you very much! 🎉
I am blown away by the fact how many different R sounds you can make :D
Hi there, love the video. I grew up speaking Dutch, Frisian and Hylpers which is close to old Frisian. Its really interesting to see what's most similar to my mother tongue (Hylpers).
dude how don't you have more subs?? your future american video got recommended to me yesterday and i was instantly hooked, these videos are great
Very nice video! I always enjoy seeing historical linguistics stuff and this is quite comprehensive, if a little fast! :D
Just came across your channel. As someone mildy interested in languages you have my sub.
Germanic sound shift speed run!
I am an German nativ speaker and I had to google the word kiesen which you mentioned at the time 7:08, because I never heard of this word. Nowadays we would never use this word to express the word choose. The modern word would be wählen. Kiesen was used in middle high german. I've learned something new. Thanks a lot ;)
Today, the only form of kiesen that is left is the past participle of erkiesen: "erkoren". No "normal" German speaker has ever heard about the infinitive of "erkoren". I found it in a dictionary and first thought it was an error.
Great resource to show people who don’t know anything about linguistics and ask what I do as a grad student
I just discovered this channel today because of youtube suggestions and I really love your videos! I like the way you explain and your pronunciation of the words!
Not gonna lie, I kinda hope you make a video about Slavic languages or the Indian languages one day
this channel is so good, as a person who studies biology but somehow ended up having interest in linguistics too (especially germanic and turkic) your videos are so useful learning something, as u could think i dont have much time to learn all of that stuff by reading, so watching you is a fun and nice shortcut to get the basic ideas. keep it up
I am 37 and my mother is 67. We have never used or heard of kiesen or anyone using it. I had to google several dictionaries to find it. It is not in the usual leo or langenscheidt that one would use. We would say wählen or auswählen. It is so interesting to learn etymology.
[β] did not become labiodental [v] until after the dialects of West Germanic had already formed. In German it is bilabial to this day, but now a plosive [b]. Old Saxon sometimes used the letter . There are also very early examples of Old English writing with the letter that would later be found with . This shows that PG /b/ was still bilabial in those positions.
I second the comment about slowing down the pace at which you speak. Very interesting stuff but presentation is important if you want your channel to grow. I’m glad I found you via the algorithm tho!
He's obviously an academic but not an intuitive teacher. Doesn't seem able to empathise with the viewer/learner at all.
I love how accurate these IPA transcriptions are for the modern languages!
Very detailed and informed video. And cool to see Yiddish included in a video like this!
As an English and Spanish speaker, I love comparing how the Romance languages and Germanic languages have changed over time!! I had no idea how similar the German languages are!
Whilst the Germanic languages are similar in many regards, I'd still claim that sincs he used words specifically for comparison in this video, it made it so that the languages looked more alike in opposed to a normal sentence whereas the gramatical structure is completely different, and whereas there are suddenly words that are completely different (Hence is why they weren't used for linguistic comparison in a video discussing similarities)
I'm so happy you transscribe Dutch words without the final 'n', so many people still insist on transscribing words like 'denken' as ['deŋkən], when the 'n' at the end of Dutch words has been silent for many many decades.
I was confused why he was dropping the final ‘n’ so often throughout the video and your comment made me realise he just learned the Dutch Dutch. In Belgian Dutch that final n is still very much pronounced.
@@iljaack I feel like this is happening in Flanders as well, maybe on a lesser scale, though I've heard plenty of Flemish speakers who also drop the n
@@buurmeisje Doesn't it depend on the dialect? We definitely drop it in North-Brabant.
11:42 I'm with the Chinese on this one. I was way past school when I first heard that "d"/"t" or "b"/"p" are NOT just differenciated by the amount of aspiration. I'm sure that's not just an issue of my dialect.
I speak native Swiss German and Standard German since first grade, and I can hardly tell the difference between voiced and unvoiced "s" sounds - English teacher had to show us how to make a "z" by making us hum.
6:41 For dutch this heavily depends on the dialect I'd say. For example, spoken with a typical Amsterdam accent you wouldn't hear the difference between "vier" and "fier" (proud), although in a lot (if not most) dialects you can actually hear a difference, although in the Netherlands often subtle (but in Belgium very clear).
in amsterdam gebruiken we fier niet, we gebruiken wel trots. we gebruiken echter wel vieren in de zin van verjaardag vieren
Why do you have to rush through the video? This is not a simple topic about celebrities or else so when you put a slide and come up with amounts of informations give the audience some time to let these informations sink in. It’s a pain to watch
plus not all the information is accurate..
Possible inaccuracies aside, when you're eating breathing sleeping sweating linguistics, someone not explaining prerequisite topics every time they come up, and speaking at a "I have something else to do too" pace, isnt that bad of a thing.
I sped the video up, you can slow it down, or look for (or even make yourself) one that's slower and more in depth.
Excellent content, I love stuff like this. Can I advise to take your time presenting the information, let the viewer absorbe what it is that you're saying. It felt full of passion and full of speed as a result!
Well said. It was hard to digest what he was saying before he was on to the next thing.
Many Norwegian dialects also differentiate words coming from w- and hw-
And Norwegian has changed sk- in front of for example i into (usually) sh
He barely mentioned Norway in the video. Maybe because we basically use the same words as swedish some places, Danish some places and icelandic minus ur some places
@@croucha1r237 I only commented on the times he implied something wrong by saying only these languages have this or that or similar. If I remember correctly
@@croucha1r237 I think he mentioned initially that not all Germanic branches were equally familiar to him or investigated by him. Norwegian was not among the prime ones.
People stereotype German as the harsh language. Meanwhile Dutch Gs, which appear at least twice in every word:
CHHRRRRRRRR
Normal Dutch G is just as hard as ch in German "ach", I think he exaggerates to ridicule Dutch a bit :\
@@ikbintom
That would actually be a soft Ch. German has multiple different ones.
Because we lost t he wars....the propaganda was so intense. Until today..we lost look at hollywood the oscars. Bedt foreingn films? A nazi movie. It never stops.....i leved it...german is beautiful....rest on peace. I love also french and russian. So much to learn....now you know why.....you always hear. HARSH....and it came a lot from rhe dear cousins....they do this so.well
German to me is the soft one.
Your energy and enthusiasm are possibly the best favor you do to the subject matter in my view. If I knew nothing about this I'd be intrigued simply on account of your descriptiveness and tempo.
Really enjoyed this! As an English speaker who has been studying Swedish and Yiddish and a little bit of German, this was really helpful in understanding certain similarities and differences.
It makes me wonder why one would study Yiddish instead of just studying Standard German, which at least uses the Latin alphabet and thus has a much lower learning curve.
@@ghenuloNot if you're Jewish and can already read Hebrew/Aramaic 😉
As a German and English speaker, you did pretty good on German pronunciation for someone who doesn't speak the language, although a couple things (like äu) could definitely be improved
I know this is an old video, but I feel it's important to note that Norwegian also palatalises sk to [ʂ]. Norwegian also palatalises k to [ç] or [tʃ] depending on the dialect, while in Swedish it became [ʃ]. Interestingly, there is an ongoing vowel shift in some dialects of Norwegian, where [ç] turns into [ʂ] among young people
Wow, this is amazing, thanks! You do cover so much, so quickly that, to be honest, not only do I pause your videos a lot; I also slow them to 50-75% to avoid BMS (Blown Mind Syndrome). Brilliant stuff, cheers!
Nice, the only slip I noticed was in 'kuiken' (at about 12:10) that came out sounding more like 'keuken'.
As the f>v>f, I tend to do that myself, but it is a problem as there is a difference in meaning between 'vel' and 'fel' or 'vier' and 'fier'. s>z>s seems to be pressent in the way it's pronounced in Amsterdam (if it ever passed through the 'v' phase).
1:40
Small correction, as a Low-German Native Speaker, this language is Ingvaeonic (North Sea Germanic). It derived from Old-Saxon, and western dialects are still called Low-Saxon to this day.
I'm sitting here eating this video up at 1x speed, and then I realized how fast you were talking, haha. When nerd minds meet... If you know the IPA and anything about historical linguistics, this is super easy to digest, but I can't send it to a friend for fear of their eyes glazing over. Love the video.
As for 4:26, a common alternative in Dutch (also used in standard language) is the bilabial consonant [β]. This sound can fully replace the [ʋ] in standard pronunciation and will generally be used after certain vowels (at least "u"). In certain dialects, I could hear the [w] being used (e.g. along the Hollandic coast). It's clearly noticeable in speech and I think it has mostly died out through standardization (so unlike [β], it did not enter the standard).
Yeyeye my grandma has the [β] in her accent
Ik vond het grappig dat de helft van de veranderingen die hij voor Nederlands gaf, niet voor Vlaams (zelfs de standaardtaal, niet enkel bij tussentaal en dialecten), en ook niet voor sommige Zuid-Nederlandse dialecten gelden... Of gewoon anders zijn. De zachte g is een goed voorbeeld, maar ook de w in water en nog vele anderen. Echt bijna een andere taal eigenlijk.
@@CouldBeMathijs Yeah this man has probably only seen people from Amsterdam talk Dutch.
it would be raelly cool if you could make a similar video about germanic languages but this time regarding grammar. How much of the grammar remained in the modern germanic languages. You could mention languages like Icelandic, Faroese, Elfdalian which retain a lot of old germanic grammatical forms like the consonant cluster hl-. Or the cases, or subjunctive mood etc. You're really great at explaining! :D
Lmao wait about one more week 😉 thanks!
8:12 The German word is Haupt (which also fits the rule).
8:28 The German word is lachen, like in Dutch
12:14 The same happens in Southwest German dialects, especially in Alemannic dialects, as they are spoken in Switzerland.
As a German, regarding the changes alluded to with the examples of *-igaz and *-ingo, I would like to add that there is actually a fair bit of variation in how these are now being pronounced.
While the shift you described is generally pretty common, some speakers, especially in Bavarian dialects, do pronounce final /ig/ as written with /g/, while others say it with a final devoicing to /k/. Yet others, at least in my impression, tend to say it with something closer to /ʝ/ at the end, and it's pretty frequent in some dialects to pronounce /ig/ somewhere between /ʝ/ and /j/ between vowels.
Interestingly, there's also a hypercorrection, semi-common in varieties in the general area of the lower Rhineland and Ruhr region, to pronounce some words with a suffix descended from earlier -lîch (the one that became -ly or -like in English), like hässlich (hateable/ugly), as if ending in /ik/. This is further complicated by some speakers pronouncing a written -ich like /iʝ/ between vowels.
While /ing/ is indeed pronounced with a simple [ŋ] at the end by many, there are also speakers who pronounce it closer to /ŋk/, with some even aspirating it pretty heavily, similar to Icelandic.
Very interesting subject (my major in university). You do seem to be in hurry to catch a train though. I wouldn’t mind watching a 30 min video instead of a 20 min video and feel less stressed after watching it ;-)
Fantastic, super well explained and comprehensive! Would you consider doing something expanding on North Germanic tonogenesis in the future, or perhaps just tonogenesis in general? For instance potential phonological parallels between the development of pitch accent/stød in Scandinavian and the tones of actual tonal languages like Mandarin?
I would speculate that pitch accent is an ancestral trait in all indo european languages that only a few have preserved into modern times, its present in swedish, norwigian, serbian, punjabi and sanskrit for example
@@simontollin2004 I think Punjabi got its tones from losing the breathy voiced consonants, it didn't evolve directly from Sanskrit tones.
I could hear creaky voice before but didn’t know it was phonemic and thought it emotive.
9:41 English give is actually a North Germanic loan, *g stayed a fricative word-initially in Old English and turned into /j/ before front vowels
Yeah I think treating English as an "oops jk" language for velar frication is a mischaracterisation, because a very large chunk of would-be /g/ turns into /j/ like you say (hence OE gear, dæg > PDE year, day) or zero (burg > borough, ge- > Ø).
Though calling giefan >> give a Norse _loan_ feels a bit weird in the terminology, when it's more like influence or interference from Norsified post-Danelaw Northern English dialects than a proper lexical borrowing. /g/ isn't properly established (at least based on orthographic evidence) until a good two centuries after Old Norse stops being spoken in England, while Midland/Southern writers like Chaucer still maintain ⟨y⟩ spellings into the 1400s.
The sk shift to sh happened in Norwegian too! Not like the swedish one, but like the West-Germanic languages.
Alot of sk- words in Norwegian is pronounced with an sh- sound like in English. Even tho they are still written with sk-
For example your word "shine" is in Norwegian:
Skinne, pronounced shinne
I know you didn't study it, but thought I would mention it as it DID actually change in Norwegian.
Thanks for this great video! One error I noticed: Low German dialects are North Sea Germanic (not Weser-Rhine Germanic) and also underwent the nasal-spirant law e.g. Goos (goose), fief (five). Also, Low German verbs have a dental suffix in the plural of verbs in present, just like Old English (in most dialects except those with more High German influence).
another error was that he said /z/ was the only voiced fricative in proto germanic when there was also /ð/. Also he said /z/ was fronted then retracted but that's incorrect. Proto Germanic /z/ was always retracted since it developed from Indo-European /s/ which was definitely retracted.
I'm Norwegian, but quite fluent in Danish and Swedish as well, in addition to knowing a wee bit of German and Iceland and this was interesting. You forgot Faeroese, though ;)
Amazing video. Thanks for the extensive information as I have been interested in how English and other west germanic languages have changed over time.
Why the hurry?
✨now that I’ve learned 6 Germanic languages✨💁🏻♂️
really great video, hope to see more👍
One peculiarity of Faroese is that initial *þ- becomes h- instead of t- in some circumstances, usually in short unstressed words. That's how you end up with hósdagur (see ON þórsdagr, "Thursday"), hóast (< *þo at, "although"), hetta (ON þetta, "this"), har (ON þar, "there"), hesin (ON þessi, "this"), Hósvík (ON Þórsvík, placename).
How many languages do you speak? I count at least 11 (six mentioned here, plus Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Spanish, and French). That's wild. How many hours a day do you spend studying?
The number now is 17, but I don’t by any means consider myself “fluent” in all of those- only like 4 of them.
I don’t know “hours” necessarily- I just memorize stuff and do translation practice between other tasks in my life (like on the bus, for example). It varies day to day
@@watchyourlanguage3870 you ever thought about learning Mandarin
@@watchyourlanguage3870 how do alow youself to fall onto language learning
Haha, my first reaction to hearing "...but I wanted to wait until I knew a few more languages of the group before making the video..." was "well, that's different!". Most Americans I'm familiar with will (either proudly or apologetically) tell you they only speak English. Of course, here in the Netherlands we only have a 2-3 hour trip to get to a place where the locals speak English, German or French, so I guess we have more if an incentive to learn foreign languages than, say, someone born in Nebraska.... :-). Anyway, nice if very speedy video, and your Dutch pronunciation is definitely not too bad!
@@watchyourlanguage3870 11:32 a little note here about aspiration, in Northern traditional English dialects and Scots there's no aspiration either like in Dutch. I also heard that Swiss German often doesn't have aspiration natively but does borrow aspiration over in loanwords from standard German
The German verb "kiesen" for "to choose" is old fashioned / out dated and not understood by many Germans nowadays. However, speaking Dutch and German I could recognize the word "kiezen". Great video. Subscribed your channel and look forward to watching more of your videos.
i know kiesen from the consturction industry as a term to coverstuff in gravel
@@Schwainermitai but its easier for us dutchies because we say kiezen
5:39 It didn't happen in Faroese, most Norwegian dialects or most Jutlandic dialects either. There are even some dialects in Sweden that didn't merge them.
I am a native swedish speaker.
This is so interesting. There are a lot of similar words and even words that are spelled the same but often pronounced different between Swedish and English.
Old Saxon was also part of the Ingvaeonic group.
For example, the example you gave in the video applies to modern Low German as well, giving us [u:s] [us] [ʊs], depending on which low german youre talking about.
The palatalisation of /k/ did indeed only happen in Anglo-Frisian, though.
Low German also preserved [w], at least regionally.
edit: ive just noticed that another commenter has already pointed this out
Low Saxon does slightly palatalize /k/ in words
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic
@@throwaway1270 oh, certainly but to a much, much lesser degree. most common example being church, which is Kirk in low german, but anytthing from tsjerke to schörk in frisian
I (German) know a dude who says /kʋ/ for the old lavio-velar. It blew my mind
@@johannesschutz780 so Quelle and Welle are homophonous?
@@Zeutomehr Oh excuse me, I should have specified that I meant pie. *gw. So he sais /kʋɛlə/ but /vɛlə/
Great and comprehensive work! Almost makes me want to finish my last semester I need to graduate at uni, *almost*.
I have but one piece of criticism I humbly tell you WyL. Could you slow down the pacing on your videos a little. Personally I like to read and assimilate everything you have on the screen, but it changes too quickly. I keep having to rewind to finish reading.
Muchas gracias por tus videos de muy buena calidad bro
yotambie'n! el video va muy rapido, lo fastidio (lo siento para mi Espan~a I am too lazy and I don't have a spanish keyboard :/ I was also just excited to practice my spanish jaja)
wait *me fastidia
I agree, I was barely able to really even perceive what was being said, much less digest anything before you were on to the next things. I’d love to hear more examples and maybe even repeated sound clips.
just watch in 0.75x
Couldn't agree more! It is so interesting, but so hard to follow because of the speed at which he is talking.
Something I feel is worth mentioning is that Yiddish split off more during middle high german than old high german.
Great presentation!
Around 12:35 you start digging into the palatalization effect before (high) front vowels. However, among the North Germanic languages, Swedish is not alone in doing that, and in most modern Norwegian dialects it happened too. It must have happened, as you mentioned, later than in West Germanic, but it did happen! One interesting observation related to this is that English did borrow a few words from Norse or Norwegian which start with sk+front vowel, for example "sky" and "ski". Both of those are spelled the same but now pronounced with an /sh/ sound in Norwegian, like in their cognate inherited words in English. Norwegian "ski" = the English word "shide"; a stick of wood, besides the now more commonly used meaning of something useful on top of snow. (The bonus in English is that it gets two words to keep the two meanings apart.) From their pronunciation in English we can assume that they must have been borrowed at a time _after_ the /sk/ > /sh/ rule had done its work, because the rule didn't affect these words. Presumably they reflect the source language's pronunciation at the time of borrowing as well, which means that a similar transition rule had not (yet) had its effect in that language. It therefore must have happened later than at least in English.
One can also compare the word "shin" (as in shinbone) which has the same meaning and same pronunciation as the modern Norwegian word "skinn". In Norwegian, however, the word also means "skin" or "hide", which thus reveals the origin of the word "skin" in English.
Obviously, "ski" is a very recent loan in English, based on written Norwegian rather than spoken (would give "shee" or something similar). This is what I found: "It was first used in 1921 in English by British writer and mountaineer Sir Arnold Lunn (1888-1974) in a hyphenated form “ski-ing.” With time, the hyphen disappeared, which is why “skiing” in English first principally connoted the alpine variety." (From "Skiing, an English word of Norwegian heritage" by M. Michael Brady.)
Isn't shin realted to German Schenkel?
@@robinrehlinghaus1944 It certainly is, but as it appears names of body parts also tend to "move around" as time passes. (Compare Latin "boccum" = cheek with Spanish "boca" = mouth.) It is interesting to read the etymology of Schenkel on Wiktionary! As it appears the modern English equivalent is "shank", described as the lower part of the leg. Incidentally that lower part is now what we call "legg" in Norwegian! The shin I suppose is more referring to the _front_ section of the shank, where it really hurts if you hit something hard!
@@benhetland576I love the feeling of how palpably all is related when one studies these things
The lack of mentions of Afrikaans hurts my Afrikaner heart, spoken like old Dutch and written with the English alphabet, (zuid - suid) with some khoisan thrown in like abba.
this channel is so good
This is the first video I'm seeing of your channel, so idk if you covered it before, but it would be interesting to examine East Germanic languages & West Germanic dialects (or languages) that used to exist in the east before the ethnic cleansings during & after WW2 (and some which maybe survived despite the odds).
Honestly when you're explaining how mouse and mice came to be and said moose and meese I started cracking up because people joke about meese being the plural of moose
'Kyse' in Danish today is mostly used to mean a certain type of hood, historically worn by women and today mostly worn by babies. I know Danish is super difficult for non-natives to pronounce, even for natives to be fair, but 'kyse' would be pronounced with a long first vowel sound as there is only one s. How you pronounced it sounded more similar to 'kysse' which means 'kissing'.
I must say it's impressive that you do speak 6 germanic languages, and I applaud you for having learnt Danish as a non-native! Great video
Da. 'kyse' "bonnet", but 'kyse' (obsolete) "frighten', org. "influence with magic", and it is actually (says Wiktionary) related to 'choose'.
@@someopinion2846 I wouldn't say kyse is obsolete, we use it occasionally. Usually as an adjective 'kyst'*, you can say it means something like frightened into submission, usually by a person, but could also be someone who has become apathetic due to life traumas.
Example "hun virker lidt kyst" , "she seams a bit ----"
*not to be confused with Kyst (Seashore) which is pronounced differently.
@@Aoderic We live in Jutland, don't we?
@@someopinion2846 Southern Zealand actually, it's not only Jutland that have dialects.
You should make a video explaining modern sound shifts in different English Accents
Fantastic video! The Germanic languages certain do have complex and interesting history.
@@andrejuha164 Nothing about your reply makes any sense.
Your Dutch seems to be heavily biased towards the Northern Netherlands.
'w' is probably one of these phonemes that is pronounced differently in every national regiolect of Dutch: labiodental [ʋ] in the Netherlands, bilabial [β̞] in Belgium and [w], as in English, in Suriname.
'v' remains voiced in most Dutch dialects, only the North of the Netherlands and Suriname devoice them
The official standard pronunciation of 'g' is [γ] in Dutch, while 'ch' (as well as 'g' at the end of a word) is [x]. The pronunciation [χ] is a Northern Dutch phenomenon, which, although spreading in the Netherlands, is resented in Belgian and Southern Dutch. Suriname also devoices [γ] to [x]
'r' has a great variety of realisation depending on where you are [r] and [R] are the most common ones
Also [u] had shifted to [y] in most Dutch dialects (and even some low german dialects) before the great vowel shift took place, with [y] then shifting to [oey], admittedly this might just have been a simplifaction on your part
The Dutch vowel shifts are simplified because the English ones are also simplified and it would make the video incredibly long. The trilled r [r] is very uncommon in Dutch. The most common ones are the tap, the uvular fricatives and the retroflex r. Otherwise I completely agree.
@@Kikkerv11 Also NL biased. Nobody uses the retroflex ever or even tap down south, but only a trill (alveolar or uvular) or uvular fricative in word endings.
That uvular sound jumpscared me XD
9:39
The fact that in proto-germanic Ą sound existed
This letter and sound is present in polish language up until this day.
Your content is good, but I would slow down your videos and put more emphasis in mastering the pronunciation of the living languages you cite or cutting in native speakers' pronunciations. Practice slowing down, clarifying your diction, and giving faithful representations of the phonologies of the examples from living languages that you cite. Suffering from phonological interference from your native language happens to all of us, but if you make a science-based video, it's best to use a separate source from a native speaker if that interference is strong.
just so you know, coda r in dutch has only recently been shifting to this english sounding r and in many dialects it's not present
my parents pronounce it quite clearly but mine is relatively soft but still present. And I hear many people around me say the enlgish r and it kinda makes me cringe when they overdo it.
As well with the v->f. from my experience that's not thát present in the Netherlands, only in like city accents.
@@titaan814 the final-syllable "r" is an upper class thing, the f is the original pronunciation of the v.
This channel is gonna blow up!! Great, consistent content
I'd hate to see it explode. Every channel has the right to exist, without terrorism.
@@ghenulo Hahahahah peak sense of humor ;)
3:53 made me giggle - we still have the word "mampfen" in german which seems to not be too far off and (while a bit old) we say "has it mouth-ed"-"hat es gemundet" to ask if the food was good.
I should point out that while in north germanic *Vnþ became *Vnn and *Vmf/Vnf became *Vmm (though it might've become V:f in some words), *Vns ALWAYS became *V:s, just as in north sea (ingvaeonic).
The reason *uns doesn't show that, with old norse "oss", is because the PG word that gives us "oss" was actually "unsiz" (compare "okkr" from *unkiz, and "yðr" from *izwiz, with irregular z>ð). This resulted in *ósR and then *óss, and then shortened to "oss". Other examples, like how *gans (goose) became "gás" and *ansuz became "áss" (ss from sR) shows us however that the loss of *n lengthened the vowel, not the *s
The cluster *Vht also didn't just lengthen the consonant, but ALSO the vowel, so *V:t: (hence icelandic "dóttir" and "nátt/nótt")
Also, Icelandic hn DOES come from proto germanic hn, such as in "hneta/hnot" (nut), proto germanic *hnuts, or "hníga" from pg *hnīganą. It just also turned a lot of old norse kn into hn, but that was probably possible because old norse already HAD hn
The voiceless fricatives *f and *þ didn't just stay unchanged either in north germanic, rather they stayed voiceless at the start of words and when by another voiceless sound or doubled, but otherwised voiced inside words (same happened in old english, but there it also happened with *s, and the new voiced *þ was distinct from old *ð cuz it had already changed into *d, hence death vs dead).
Later the now voiced /v/, written "f" both in old norse and old english (whether from *f or from *b) changed into /b/ before /n/ and /l/ in Icelandic (so danish "havn", but icealndic "höfn" being pronounced "höbn").
Of course, with icelandic /b/ actually being voiceless, it lookes like "f" being pronounced as "p", but there were more steps between those sounds than the orthography might make you think
4:10 the symbol represents a Velar lateral approximant and thats not dark l, dark l is represented with so is not dark l. But despite that great video! I also find historical linguistics really interesting and its kinda sad that this community is so small so these types of videos are really great!
Great video
I wish Scots had been mentioned, as it bridges some of the distance between English and the continental languages.
Also, in Primary School in Scotland in the 90s I was taught to make a distinction between wh and w, I'm not sure if that's still the case
Thanks for the enjoyable video
In the recent past, about 40 or 50 years ago, it was considered proper in the US also to make this distinction. I was often corrected when saying "what".
I think this is what is missing from this video. Perhaps he's just unaware of the Scots language and pronunciation. I hate that other English speakers don't differentiate between Wales and whales, witch and which , wile and while , Wye and why. Also he might be interested to know that gh is still a fricative in Scots with bocht for bought and dochter for daughter.
9:05 some other examples of verners law alterations include lost/forlorn (german verloren), kiesen/auserkoren (archaic German verb meaning choose), as well in some place names - for example, the Weser River in germany which is called the Werre upstream.
6:40 The way you pronounced fyra (Swedish for "four") sounds exactly like when swedes make fun of the accent of people who come from Stockholm lmao. It comes off as very pretentious.
14:09 "Mäuse" in German is pronouced like "moize" and not "möüze". The way you pronounced it could be mistaken by a German for a very sexual word.
Oh, boy... I will need to rewatch this entire video to comment on what happened in Faroese, my native language. I might do that with my IRL profile though instead of my gaming profile. We'll see. Great job on this video.
i would love to read that
Insanely good! Will be nagging my friends to watch your videos.
As a Northern German native speaker it is pretty interesting seeing that, many PG words are extremely similar to low German but also to German in general (compared to English)
Low German is actually part of the North Sea Germanic languages which was still very obvious in its oldest attested form, Old Saxon.
Rhoticization is epic. One day you say sat the next you say rat and no one could've traced the etymology if it wasn't for you meddling linguists figuring morphology out.