actually I think you'll find that is the reconstructed pronunciation of a particularly obscure mountainous variety that drifted extremely eastwards soo
"TH-cam is to a classroom like what Pinesol is to waking up in a pine forest". As an educator, I will remember that forever! Jackson, you are a fascinating man with fascinating thoughts and a supernaturally uncanny way of explaining complex linguistic ideas and processes. Thank you for clarifying the word "umlaut". Sheer brilliance.
0:30 «…for reasons mysterious to everyone, including myself…» I find “because I can” to be a good reason… 😉 …because some people just want to watch the world learn.
We deeply appreciate you braving the rude people out there to bring us this information! It's not super easy to come by in an accessible format like this, even in a place as vast as the internet. So thanks!
I studied these things during my Germanic Philology course, I have tons of books to study from and honestly I'm still studying on your videos. That's how good they are, thank you!
Making my day with simple and easy to understand material makes my love for the Norse people and the language accessible love everything you do and it makes me happy to have this
Old Frisian had some breaking too. Sometimes attributed to Viking contacts, but that’s very speculative. Like “riucht” (from older “recht-u”), Modern West Frisian has “rjocht” (and also “sljocht”, mjuks and “sjonge” (very reminiscent of East Scandinavian); it applies to e/i in heavy syllables, with w or u influence in the following syllable. It’s like a tell-tale sign to tell if a variety is Frisian: West-Germanic, plus unfounded old Umlaut, fronted old long a are the first signs but breaking puts it over the line to being “proper” Frisian.
I've just revisited this video and only now it occured to me that the change jó, jú > ý is from a synchronic perspective. Proto-Germanic had already undergone a different kind of i-Umlaut turning *e followed by *i into *i. This created *iu from *eu which means *eu did not exist in an i-Umlaut environment. *iu then developed into ý.
Better and best are also i-umlauted from boot (meaning profit), right? All these little remnants of i-umlaut in English are neat and make learning about Old Norse and Old English much easier. Thank you for making these videos about Old Norse, Dr. Jackson! It really makes learning a lot more fun.
Hi Dr. Crawford. I really enjoy your videos. They are very informative and interesting. I was wondering if you were planning to make a video on Old Norwegian and its relation to the current Norwegian dialects. :) As a Norwegian speaker, I am very interested in this matter.
I found there to be some interesting differences between the old norse i-umlaut you showed and the modern icelandic i-umlaut that I learned in school. One is that o is also said to change into y, although this is only because there are a lot of words written with o now that were written with u in proto-norse because of what I believe is a totally separate sound change. Another was the fact that you showed that the o becomes ø, but in many icelandic words (including your example, søfr) this becomes e (sefur). This is of course because ø became both ö AND e in modern Icelandic (while ǫ became just ö), making the modern version of o > ø be o > ö/e. There is also a i-umlaut in our list that isn't in your, and one that I don't really know if qualifies as an i-umlaut even though I was taught that it was, and that is e turning into i. Don't really know enough about that to know if there was anything different in old norse or not. And lastly there is just the fact that, because œ/ǿ became æ, both á AND ó become æ through i-umlaut in modern icelandic. Also, considering that modern icelandic o has the same sound as the old norse ǫ, would it be correct to say that words that were written with vá before but are written vo today (one of the regular changes between modern and old icelandic) are cases where the á (then pronounced as ǫ́) kept the original sound, or did these vá change into vo BEFORE o had the same sound value as old norse ǫ?
Add-on to this: I didn't realize/notice this the first time around (mostly because ö isn't really covered as changing in any way when we learn about i-umlaut, so I just assumed that there was no difference like you did), but ǫ does NOT just become ø, aka stay as ö, in modern Icelandic. Rather, because of the fact that ø became ö AND e in modern Icelandic, sometimes ö changes into e through a i-umlaut. This is evident in the verb hǫggva/höggva, which was in your example (and I really should have noticed this before) høggr, but is heggur today. Looking around the net I found this also happen in the verb gera, which has a e in all cases in modern Icelandic but has a ø in the past plurals in old Icelandic, which is probably from the fact that the original Proto-Germanic root verb has an a and that a is still apparent when a u causes an u-umlaut. But because the whole verb is i-umlauted, that a turned ǫ becomes ø. However, this is not the case in Icelandic, where the old ø is now just e. I think all in all, a which turn into ǫ, which then turn into ø, DON'T remain as ö in at least some cases, maybe all. Rather than make ö > e in modern Icelandic i-umlaut charts we seem to just treat it like that if an a is u-umlauted, then being i-ulauted just overrides the original u-umlaut, making it just be a normal a > e change. This could be true for ALL cases of ø that were i-umlauted from ǫ in modern Icelandic, but as a verb where it isn't the case it would just have an ö regardless, I cannot actually easily verify and be sure about this. Regardless, it is very interesting.
Around the 29 minute mark / the discussion re “á” - in Faroese the letter “á” is still pronounced as a long “a” and not a round “a”. Really enjoy these videos 👍🏻
Giant actually originally refered to the Greek mythological Gigantes, a group of supernatural beings that opposed the gods who also weren’t particularly big.
Have you ever considered a live stream? It would help those who wish to interact with you similar to a classroom. Also have you considered writing a norse language book? Something I would be interested in! ❤
Takk fyrir, Jackson! Þegar ég sá sögnina "geldan" úr frumnorrænu, þá áttaði ég mig á því að þýska orðið "Geld" (peningar) er, líklegast, komið af sama stofni og íslenska/norræna orðið "gjald". English: Thanks, Dr. Crawford! When I saw the verb "geldan" from Proto-Norse, then I realized that the german word "Geld" (money) is, most likely, come of the same root (cognate) as the Icelandic/norse word "gjald".
I am not one of your patreon supporters, but if I may make a suggestion for a future video that I would be particularly interested in I would like one on the building blocks of Old Norse words, the various derivational suffixes to form nouns, adjectives, adverbs or verbs and what kind of compounds were common and which words were often used to form them. Another thing you could maybe discuss is the degree to which modern Icelandic speakers can be confused due to change of meaning from Old Norse to modern Icelandic. I know I can not expect a lot without supporting you via patreon. But maybe I was able to inspire you for more videos.
Have you read Helge Dyvik's 1978 paper 'Breaking in Old Norse and Related Languages', in Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi? It's a very good discussion of the topic which makes the compelling case that breaking in heavy stems has nothing to do with the following vowels, but is conditioned entirely by the following consonants (hence why words like _segl_ don't show breaking). It doesn't seem to have had much uptake, as far as I can tell, but it strikes me as a much more convincing explanation of the whole process than the traditional views. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Thanks again for these videos. They are perfect for learning languages since I can rewind and listen carefully with headphones. I probably won't get that in a classroom.
Actually, the VlC > V:lC is not unique to Icelandic as it's quite apparent in Faroese, too, so wolf, help, and half are úlvur, hjálpa, and hálvur in Faroese. Granted Old Faroese is not as readily attested as Old Icelandic but there are some mediæval texts available like Seyðabrævið (which iirc has elements of itakism/delabialisation), Hundabrævið, Húsavíkarbrøvini and some other texts.
Fantastic as always Sir! Its amazing to see/hear the many similarities between Old Norse and Scots, words I use daily, is this something you have noticed yourself?
I have a question regarding umlauts that perhaps you or another can answer. I have an Old Icelandic dictionary (1910 Cambridge publication free online) from which I am learning stems to help me learn ON, and it frequently uses the ö character - I wasn't aware that umlauts exist in general ON (not making distinctions between Old Icelandic or Norwegian). Did the editors of the dictionary use the umlaut in place of an older character? Just wondering for pronunciation purposes. Thank you.
I like your channel and the language and grammar lessons. I'm wondering: since your expertese is in Scandinavian languages, what kind of info/material would you be interested in from faroese? Are you familiar with the linguistic work of Dr. Jacobsen in Shetland?
You characterized this as a feature spreading from an unstressed vowel to a stressed one, but is it the stress that really influences the spread? Is it just a matter of the vowel location spreading in an anticipatory way -- from second syllable to first, and the first syllable just happens to be stressed in Old Norse? It just seems like chalking it up to the stress or lack thereof of a syllable is attributing it to the wrong thing ... unless the stress DOES cause the spread somehow.
Hi Prof. Crawford, I really enjoyed this video the other day, but I was just thinking about it as I read the name of a professor "Gruenwald" in an unrelated book. That sparked me to think that, of course, that surname means something like "Green Forest," and the diaresis/umlaut is represented in English with the addition of the "e". But that got me thinking, how/why do monosyllabic Germanic words have umlaut? Grün shouldn't be incorporating any second vowel into the first vowel in an umlaut phenomenon, should it? Is this just something about the "n" and its unique sometimes vowel-like characteristics? I notice that the words that come to mind as monosyllabic examples off the top of my head all contain an "n". "Grün," " schön," "Köln," "fünf". But then what about a word like "Früh"? Would love to hear any of your thoughts or clarification on my confusion here. Thanks again for the great video! I had always thought that umlaut basically meant diaresis, and didn't realize it was also a phenomenon in English!
> how/why do monosyllabic Germanic words have umlaut? Because they weren't monosyllabic back when the umlaut was happening. "foot" is monosyllabic, yet it's changing to "feet" in the plural, because of an ancient umlaut that happened in the Proto-West Germanic plural *fōti (and the second vowel disappeared afterwards).
Sorry, Jackson. Is there a list or a consistent way to know which Old Norse words feature nasal vowels? I have not been able to find such a list anywhere, I would really appreciate it. Looking forward to your answer. Keep up the good work!
![SAFEPLANET - ดาวเคราะห์ [ THE PLANET ]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/4X1XL3I_k3c/mqdefault.jpg)
Crawford with the casual Smeagol impression/pronunciation. Classic.
I don't know how you can have a straight face whilst imitating Sméagol's voice.
actually I think you'll find that is the reconstructed pronunciation of a particularly obscure mountainous variety that drifted extremely eastwards soo
"TH-cam is to a classroom like what Pinesol is to waking up in a pine forest". As an educator, I will remember that forever! Jackson, you are a fascinating man with fascinating thoughts and a supernaturally uncanny way of explaining complex linguistic ideas and processes. Thank you for clarifying the word "umlaut". Sheer brilliance.
0:30
«…for reasons mysterious to everyone, including myself…»
I find “because I can” to be a good reason… 😉
…because some people just want to watch the world learn.
We deeply appreciate you braving the rude people out there to bring us this information! It's not super easy to come by in an accessible format like this, even in a place as vast as the internet. So thanks!
Afternoon doctor, I thank you for all you've shared. 3 cheers for cheaper education. Skol, Skol, Skol.
Really glad to see you're still using the mug!
I studied these things during my Germanic Philology course, I have tons of books to study from and honestly I'm still studying on your videos. That's how good they are, thank you!
thank you for the information you put forth, extremely helpful. can't wait to get the translations in your works 🖤
Really useful, I'm studying for my English language history exam, about Old English
Jackson, - Being Danish... I'm really impressed by your work and knowledge. ... and your pronunciation.
I need to watch this several times.
Thanks again, Dr. Crawford.
Making my day with simple and easy to understand material makes my love for the Norse people and the language accessible love everything you do and it makes me happy to have this
Old Frisian had some breaking too. Sometimes attributed to Viking contacts, but that’s very speculative. Like “riucht” (from older “recht-u”), Modern West Frisian has “rjocht” (and also “sljocht”, mjuks and “sjonge” (very reminiscent of East Scandinavian); it applies to e/i in heavy syllables, with w or u influence in the following syllable. It’s like a tell-tale sign to tell if a variety is Frisian: West-Germanic, plus unfounded old Umlaut, fronted old long a are the first signs but breaking puts it over the line to being “proper” Frisian.
Thank you for such a thorough and accessible explanation of this phenomenon.
Ans that Smeagol impersonation really caught me off guard
I've just revisited this video and only now it occured to me that the change jó, jú > ý is from a synchronic perspective. Proto-Germanic had already undergone a different kind of i-Umlaut turning *e followed by *i into *i. This created *iu from *eu which means *eu did not exist in an i-Umlaut environment. *iu then developed into ý.
How many languages can you fluently speak? How many do you have enough working knowledge in that you could survive if you were just dropped there?
Another well done video. Thanks for taking the time to do these!
Today has clearly been a rough day for our favorite Old Norse expert. Tip'o the hat.
Better and best are also i-umlauted from boot (meaning profit), right? All these little remnants of i-umlaut in English are neat and make learning about Old Norse and Old English much easier. Thank you for making these videos about Old Norse, Dr. Jackson! It really makes learning a lot more fun.
Hi Dr. Crawford. I really enjoy your videos. They are very informative and interesting. I was wondering if you were planning to make a video on Old Norwegian and its relation to the current Norwegian dialects. :) As a Norwegian speaker, I am very interested in this matter.
I found there to be some interesting differences between the old norse i-umlaut you showed and the modern icelandic i-umlaut that I learned in school.
One is that o is also said to change into y, although this is only because there are a lot of words written with o now that were written with u in proto-norse because of what I believe is a totally separate sound change.
Another was the fact that you showed that the o becomes ø, but in many icelandic words (including your example, søfr) this becomes e (sefur). This is of course because ø became both ö AND e in modern Icelandic (while ǫ became just ö), making the modern version of o > ø be o > ö/e.
There is also a i-umlaut in our list that isn't in your, and one that I don't really know if qualifies as an i-umlaut even though I was taught that it was, and that is e turning into i. Don't really know enough about that to know if there was anything different in old norse or not.
And lastly there is just the fact that, because œ/ǿ became æ, both á AND ó become æ through i-umlaut in modern icelandic.
Also, considering that modern icelandic o has the same sound as the old norse ǫ, would it be correct to say that words that were written with vá before but are written vo today (one of the regular changes between modern and old icelandic) are cases where the á (then pronounced as ǫ́) kept the original sound, or did these vá change into vo BEFORE o had the same sound value as old norse ǫ?
Add-on to this: I didn't realize/notice this the first time around (mostly because ö isn't really covered as changing in any way when we learn about i-umlaut, so I just assumed that there was no difference like you did), but ǫ does NOT just become ø, aka stay as ö, in modern Icelandic. Rather, because of the fact that ø became ö AND e in modern Icelandic, sometimes ö changes into e through a i-umlaut. This is evident in the verb hǫggva/höggva, which was
in your example (and I really should have noticed this before) høggr, but is heggur today.
Looking around the net I found this also happen in the verb gera, which has a e in all cases in modern Icelandic but has a ø in the past plurals in old Icelandic, which is probably from the fact that the original Proto-Germanic root verb has an a and that a is still apparent when a u causes an u-umlaut. But because the whole verb is i-umlauted, that a turned ǫ becomes ø. However, this is not the case in Icelandic, where the old ø is now just e.
I think all in all, a which turn into ǫ, which then turn into ø, DON'T remain as ö in at least some cases, maybe all. Rather than make ö > e in modern Icelandic i-umlaut charts we seem to just treat it like that if an a is u-umlauted, then being i-ulauted just overrides the original u-umlaut, making it just be a normal a > e change.
This could be true for ALL cases of ø that were i-umlauted from ǫ in modern Icelandic, but as a verb where it isn't the case it would just have an ö regardless, I cannot actually easily verify and be sure about this.
Regardless, it is very interesting.
Around the 29 minute mark / the discussion re “á” - in Faroese the letter “á” is still pronounced as a long “a” and not a round “a”.
Really enjoy these videos 👍🏻
Giant actually originally refered to the Greek mythological Gigantes, a group of supernatural beings that opposed the gods who also weren’t particularly big.
Have you ever considered a live stream? It would help those who wish to interact with you similar to a classroom.
Also have you considered writing a norse language book? Something I would be interested in! ❤
Roxxi J he’s written several
Takk fyrir, Jackson!
Þegar ég sá sögnina "geldan" úr frumnorrænu, þá áttaði ég mig á því að þýska orðið "Geld" (peningar) er, líklegast, komið af sama stofni og íslenska/norræna orðið "gjald".
English:
Thanks, Dr. Crawford!
When I saw the verb "geldan" from Proto-Norse, then I realized that the german word "Geld" (money) is, most likely, come of the same root (cognate) as the Icelandic/norse word "gjald".
I am not one of your patreon supporters, but if I may make a suggestion for a future video that I would be particularly interested in I would like one on the building blocks of Old Norse words, the various derivational suffixes to form nouns, adjectives, adverbs or verbs and what kind of compounds were common and which words were often used to form them. Another thing you could maybe discuss is the degree to which modern Icelandic speakers can be confused due to change of meaning from Old Norse to modern Icelandic. I know I can not expect a lot without supporting you via patreon. But maybe I was able to inspire you for more videos.
Have you read Helge Dyvik's 1978 paper 'Breaking in Old Norse and Related Languages', in Arkiv för Nordisk Filologi? It's a very good discussion of the topic which makes the compelling case that breaking in heavy stems has nothing to do with the following vowels, but is conditioned entirely by the following consonants (hence why words like _segl_ don't show breaking). It doesn't seem to have had much uptake, as far as I can tell, but it strikes me as a much more convincing explanation of the whole process than the traditional views. I'd be curious to hear your thoughts.
Man, did I need this.
Thanks again for these videos. They are perfect for learning languages since I can rewind and listen carefully with headphones. I probably won't get that in a classroom.
Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge and didactic expertise! Greatly appreciated.
Hehe, I was once compared to a Nazi due to writing in a "samnorsk" syle of Norwegian.
Actually, the VlC > V:lC is not unique to Icelandic as it's quite apparent in Faroese, too, so wolf, help, and half are úlvur, hjálpa, and hálvur in Faroese. Granted Old Faroese is not as readily attested as Old Icelandic but there are some mediæval texts available like Seyðabrævið (which iirc has elements of itakism/delabialisation), Hundabrævið, Húsavíkarbrøvini and some other texts.
Fantastic as always Sir! Its amazing to see/hear the many similarities between Old Norse and Scots, words I use daily, is this something you have noticed yourself?
Great content as always! Which languages do you speak?
Many of the predictable umlauts you mention (notably comparatives, superlatives, and plurals) are still present in Modern German
I have a question regarding umlauts that perhaps you or another can answer. I have an Old Icelandic dictionary (1910 Cambridge publication free online) from which I am learning stems to help me learn ON, and it frequently uses the ö character - I wasn't aware that umlauts exist in general ON (not making distinctions between Old Icelandic or Norwegian). Did the editors of the dictionary use the umlaut in place of an older character? Just wondering for pronunciation purposes. Thank you.
Nevermind, I just found the answer to my question (ö = ø). Anyway, the videos are very helpful. Thank you.
I like your channel and the language and grammar lessons.
I'm wondering: since your expertese is in Scandinavian languages, what kind of info/material would you be interested in from faroese?
Are you familiar with the linguistic work of Dr. Jacobsen in Shetland?
Frálíkt hugskot.
You characterized this as a feature spreading from an unstressed vowel to a stressed one, but is it the stress that really influences the spread? Is it just a matter of the vowel location spreading in an anticipatory way -- from second syllable to first, and the first syllable just happens to be stressed in Old Norse? It just seems like chalking it up to the stress or lack thereof of a syllable is attributing it to the wrong thing ... unless the stress DOES cause the spread somehow.
Hi Prof. Crawford, I really enjoyed this video the other day, but I was just thinking about it as I read the name of a professor "Gruenwald" in an unrelated book. That sparked me to think that, of course, that surname means something like "Green Forest," and the diaresis/umlaut is represented in English with the addition of the "e". But that got me thinking, how/why do monosyllabic Germanic words have umlaut? Grün shouldn't be incorporating any second vowel into the first vowel in an umlaut phenomenon, should it? Is this just something about the "n" and its unique sometimes vowel-like characteristics? I notice that the words that come to mind as monosyllabic examples off the top of my head all contain an "n". "Grün," "
schön," "Köln," "fünf". But then what about a word like "Früh"? Would love to hear any of your thoughts or clarification on my confusion here.
Thanks again for the great video! I had always thought that umlaut basically meant diaresis, and didn't realize it was also a phenomenon in English!
> how/why do monosyllabic Germanic words have umlaut?
Because they weren't monosyllabic back when the umlaut was happening. "foot" is monosyllabic, yet it's changing to "feet" in the plural, because of an ancient umlaut that happened in the Proto-West Germanic plural *fōti (and the second vowel disappeared afterwards).
If the only source of /æ/ is long /á/, why do linguists reconstruct both short and long /æ/ for Old Norse? Shouldn't it only be able to occur long?
The real reason to watch this video 20:50
Whatever the background noise is at 7:26, it is not a nice thing to half hear alone in the woods at night.
Sorry, Jackson.
Is there a list or a consistent way to know which Old Norse words feature nasal vowels? I have not been able to find such a list anywhere, I would really appreciate it.
Looking forward to your answer. Keep up the good work!
Is there any umlaut-like phenomenon in romance languages?
French
"For reasons mysterious including to myself" xd
2:00😮. Wow.
Three genders? Two was a shock in highschool french. This may be too hard.
Who disliked this?
People on youtube will literally dislike anything
Old norse brought to you by Kevin Spacey
Here’s my attempt:
fjǫrðr
blǿtr
hendr
sǫk
gjálda
eldiri
minn systir fömk bit með mýss