Fun fact: If you prospect for gold in a German speaking country, it makes sense to look for place names that contain "rot", such as "Rotbach" (literally "red creek"), because in Middle High German and in Old High German, gold was considered to be "rot" (red).
Could that be because gold often occurs near iron? So the soil coming down a river will have red iron in it, and therefore a good place to look for gold?
@@TheWildManEnkidu Gold itself was called "red". Here is a stanza from the "Nibelungenlied", a Middle High German epic poem: Dô die herren sâhen daz der helt was tôt, si leiten in ûf einen schilt, der was von golde rôt, und wurden des ze râte, wie daz solde ergân daz man ez verhæle, daz ez héte Hagene getân. "schilt, der was von golde rôt" -- shield that was red from (being covered in or consisting of) gold
Just this morning, I was thinking about how messed up my "misheard" words were. And you reminded me. I always thought Wagner wrote his opera based on the "Neblig League" Which was something like the Justice League". So, as an English speaking kid, I thought the Valkyeries must be the "bad guys" but eventually, I learned it was actually the "Nibelungen Leid" my entire paradigm shifted. Thanks for the entertaining memory! 😂
.... except when the rot refers to the old form of the modern German "roden", cutting trees. The rotaher marks was an area of clear cutting, for example.
Beavers too. Gotta have that red meat even on fish-only days. And it wasn't just monks. All medieval Christians were supposed to abide by the fish days.
In South Louisiana there is a well-known heirloom variety of cotton whose fibers can be described as tan/khaki/brown in color, and is in English referred to as "brown cotton" - but in French, it is "du coton jaune" ('yellow cotton'). Many things are indeed "brun" ('brown') in French, but what you could call "tan" belongs in French to the 'yellow' category instead of 'brown'. But - and, if I recall, you’ve touched on this in a previous video in English or Norse - specifically for horses' coats and human hair color, there are words like "barosse" or "baille" that narrow down the color to something like tan.
I heard something like that the word "apple" was the old word for fruit (or at least used intechangebly) and apple therefore could be used for all types of fruits.
My understanding is that "Fish" is kind of a tricky taxon for more reasons, too; Christianity had restrictions on eating meat that imposed a strong incentive to classify things as fish that might not intuitively fit the concept.
Yes. It's a weird case to examine, because of that confounding factor. It's a bit like Bill Clinton using an unconventional definition of "to have sex with" to further his agenda. Or people who try to silence criticism of religion with accusations of "racism". That's an agenda too.
An English speaker would say "orange rooftile" but in my language the same rooftile is "red". The word for orange color exists but it's not used as widely as in English.
In Swedish the word for orange is "orange", which is a loan word from French. Earlier, and also nowadays when referring to more specific shades of orange, the word "brandgul" was/is used. This translates to fire-yellow. Your example made me think of this
In modern polish we have pomarańczowy which comes from the fruit pomarańcza that is from naranja but when it comes to naming the orangish colour of hair, animals, soil etc. we say rudy/ruda/rude which is a cognate to english red, even though we have a different word for red: czerwony. I remember being very confused as a child: why the same colour when on a paper and crayons is pomarańczowy, when on someone's hair its "rudy" and when on a cow its "czerwony"
It's a little known fact that "orange" was originally the name of the fruit. Only later did people start to use it for other items that had the same colour as the fruit.
Regarding animal classification and Germanic languages there's an interesting case with the "deer", which can be specifically the antler-bearling ungulates (or even specifically the red deer, typically in modern English), and in other languages took the generic meaning of wild game, or even just animal (like modern Swedish "djur")
Interesting video especially regarding the colours. I am Danish and here it's a matter of dispute whether people consider turquoise green, blue or somewhere in between. I used to consider it blue earlier in life but now I consider it green, myself...
Same in Germany. I would consider some shades of turquoise to be green and others to be blue. To me, turquoise is an umbrella term for bluish green and greenish blue. But unlike green and blue, it isn't a basic colour.
@@fritzp9916 main reason I view turquoise green now is that I have started paint, and I prefer using turquoise to contrast against blue to using it to contrast against green hence conditioning me to view turquoise and blue as more distant from one another
Turquoise the stone varies in colour from very greenish to very blue depending on copper/iron contents. Turquoise the colour as used in paint or graphics usually has similar amounts of green and blue, tending towards slightly more green. It always has some red mixed in, which might make different people see it as more green/blue. Since there are so many variations of 'turquoise' it's very understandable that different people categorise it differently
Finnish has solved this turquoise problem by calling that color "sini-vihreä" (blå-green), so a combination of both, instead of either or. There's also a more direct translation, which almost a transliteration "turkoosi".
insofar as I care, "turkis" is either its own colour or a hybrid of "blå" and "grøn". If you show it to me on a computer screen (i.e. context), I'll likely think and maybe also say the English word "cyan".
Really interesting video! I think even the usage of words changes with times. Like you said handsome is almost exclusively used for men now, but even a few centuries ago, it was common to use it even for women. I first encountered it reading books like Pride and Prejudice, and found it interesting.
I believe the earlier sense of 'handsome' is slightly more distant; more of a 'technically correct, well-proportioned, appropriate' and maybe also 'authoritative' than the 'someone I am attracted to' of a word like 'beautiful'
I would use beauty as a generic term describing an attractive person who's appearance is strikingly attractive and usually feminine. Pretty describes someone who is attractive but isn't particularly outstanding in their appearance(feminine). Handsome in a historical sense probably meant something like a beautiful person who's body and facial features were attractive but were not dainty they were strong in appearance and attractive. Think a man with a narrow waist broad shoulders, muscular but a bit more than lean. Think a woman with what could be referred to as Birthing hips, slimmer midsection, shoulders narrower than hips, not frail or weak, with strong jawline cheekbones etc. but not overly masculine that's my opinion anyways
I have read your dissertation and it was very interesting. I've never read a dissertation before and it was a bit of a slog in places, but I think that's because they aren't typically written for the general public to read. A lot of references and references to references. 😁 Once I learned to read around those, it was a good read.
When you hit a reference you must always follow and read it, until you reach the first reference in the reference, and then you follow that. And so on down the rabbit hole. They say that after only six or seven references you will invariably reach the study "Colonic gas explosion during therapeutic colonoscopy with electrocautery" by Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, and Emmanuel Ben-Soussan.
it does seem odd that my grandpa would hunt for fish, but he called it bowfishing. also, I think the difference between beautiful and handsome lies mostly in the jawline, at least when referring to people.
In most modern Celtic languages, the blue/green meaning for "glas" is lost. I think it can still mean both in Breton, but for the most part the modern Celtic languages just have one meaning (green in Irish, blue in Welsh etc.) although both languages still occasionally use them more broadly. Greyish animals can be "glas" in Irish, for example, and I think Welsh still describes plants as "glas" even though it generally means blue in modern Welsh. Irish still doesn't distinguish red and pink though. Pink is just considered light red in Modern Irish
@@matthewbarry376 Yup, but worth noting that that's also just how Irish talks about light and dark shades of colour in general. Light blue is "bánghorm" for example.
This is a really fascinating subject. Would love to see more vids on this, and maybe some more collaborations with Simon? Also, really like the hat you're wearing in this vid :D
@@BetterMonsters One somewhat arbitrary solution would be to taxonomically classify only _actinopterygians_ as fish. This would exclude _agnathans_ (e.g., lampreys), _chondrichthyans_ (e.g., sharks), and _sarcopterygians_ - from which, among others, tetrapods, including humans, are descended. Implementing this would require some renaming since the superclass _Osteichthyes_ (which includes both actinopterygians and sarcopterygians) and the class _Chondrichthyes_ both contain the Ancient Greek word for fish (ἰχθύς) in their names. In common language, 'fish' could still be used to refer to all these animals except for tetrapods.
I think we should define fish scientifically as meaning actinopterygii, but even more than that I think scientists should stop taking old words that are in common use and redefining them. "Sorry, that's not actually a bug because it isn't in hemiptera." "Sorry, that raspberry isn't technically a berry but you know what is? Zucchini."
The combination "væne mø" - pretty maid, appears frequently in Danish mediaeval ballads, almost a fossilized expression, a cliche, if I remember right called a "kending"
Interesting segues to investigate from this fascinating material: Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, Lacan's psychoanalytic views on the Symbolic register which anchors human subjectivity in terms of signifiers and and the discrepancies between representations and reality, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from linguistics.
I've often interpreted the term "handsome" (especially when used to describe a woman) as a kind of beauty resulting less from elegance and grace (as is associated with femininity), and instead more from regal bearing or venerable character. "Badass beauty" i like to call it.
"Handsome" for a woman means "non-desirable beauty". I might really enjoy looking at a tiger or a cat, but I have no instinctive desire to get intimate.
Very nice video as always, the varying categorization is a neat indicator that a lot of this stuff is pretty subjective. You almost nailed the Russian pronunciation! sinij was perfect, but goluboj is stressed on the last syllable, so the first 'o' turns into more of a schwa kinda 'a' sound.
someone once asked me whether a particular object was blue or green... they were very unhappy when i said it was aqua... they were trying to gather support for an argument with their spouse!
Joseph Addison in the Spectator way back in 1711 or so agrees with you that something very small cannot be beautiful: it is pretty. Nor does one say of the most striking large mountains that they are pretty: they are beautiful.
It's interesting how in Anglo-Saxon language or rather culture I should say, words like "good" or "pretty" are much closer to "average" than something more positive. I feel like calling someone or something pretty is like 5-6/10 but calling it the same in polish- "ładny" is 7-8/10. I used to watch interviews with swedish group Abba when they were talking with english or americans about how they felt about their recent tour and most of the time when they responded "It was good", the interviewers laughed because they considered the response to be somewhat held back. Its the same with a recent trend to rate someone's looks on the scale of 10 and people consider giving 6 as calling someone "ugly", while tye average is 5.5 so 6 is literally above average=prettier than most
That's not an English-speaking thing, it's specifically an American thing. Overly enthusiastic expressions are the standard in American society, hence why so many Europeans perceive Americans as fake.
There's something deeply strange about looking at a reference to a blue raven and thinking that the speaker must've meant black. Like... go look at a raven.
Regarding dogs: "Get along little doggies..." the word is referring to a cow. Now, I understand this, but if I was saying that to, let's say, my kids they would probably be imagining someone wrangling a large group of dogs 🐕. Like the default emoji.
What luck, I had a semantics lecture on categorization today! We covered lexical relations like different types of antonymy, hyponymy and meronymy, but the kind of coded synonyms like pretty/handsome wasn't mentioned! What's the term for that relation? Is it simply "coded"?
I bet many English speakers would quibble about how and when beautiful, handsome, or pretty should be used; which continues to prove Dr. Jackson’s point here. Even subcultural idiosyncrasies will change how one believes a word should be used, and so culture dictates language, and also vice versa. In some (all?) Anishanabe languages, there is no nonpersonal pronoun. So, you can’t call a tree “it.” That word doesn’t exist, because all things have personhood culturally, so all things are seen as having womanhood or manhood.
Whales 🐋 🐳 and otters *are* 🐟, since ðey're descended from 🐟. Mammals, including humans, otters, and 🐋, are more closely related to lungfish ðan to coelocanþs, who are closer to mammals ðan to guppies, who are closer to mammals ðan to 🦈, who are closer to mammals ðan to Chunky Dunk, who is closer to mammals ðan to Cephalaspis. Mammals are very deeply rooted in ðe 🐟 🐠 family 🌳 and ðerefore can't be excluded from it. By contrast, lampreys and hagfish aren't descended from forebears wið fins oðer ðan ðe tail fin and mineralized scales, so ðey're no fish.
How do you make those associations of meaning with the words? Is this data based solely on comparative studies and a lot of reading and text research? Doesn't every language speaker develop their own (similar but slightly different) interpretations of words? Same with color? I don't want to get too political but it seems nowadays people that speak the same language have different definitions of the same word. I also noticed differences in color identification across generational lines. That's probably a completely different topic but I noticed that your definitions of the English words you talked about seemed to be based on a hunch and not on a scientific study.
Interesting. I have occasionally seen claims that language shapes everything about ones conception of the world. It strikes me that this goes too far. I am skeptical of the claim that all thought is language based.. I have a math degree, co I believe that some kinds of deep abstract thought are more geometric than linguistic. A musical likely "thinks" internally in pitches and rhythms, etc. Whether these share deep brain processing functions with language processing, I don't know. However, I think of language as primarily semiotic, and involving referents. When I hear a tune in my head, it doesn't refer to anything external. Calling music, art or mathematics "languages" is, I believe , more figurative than literal. So I wonder hew deep semantic taxonomy goes in respect of one's conception of the world.
Even in music though, how we divide the universe of possible sounds up into different scales, modes, and time signatures is totally up to culture. Other cultures have very different music theories with their own idea about how many notes belong in a scale and what makes music sound pleasant or sound like it matches a certain mood. Farya Faraji is a very interesting TH-camr who covers the topic if you find that stuff interesting.
@@allisonguthrie8257 oh, I entirely agree. And that is an interesting point, certainly. But those cultural differences in music do not make music a form of language (except in the figurative sense).
I often think about certain subjects in terms of abstract forces that work against each other, which makes sense from a physics perspective. Where I think something saphir/worf-like does make sense is when it comes to categorization, discrimonation, and even recognition. If you know more words then you know to distinguish more precisely between different phenomena. If you don't then you're going to smurf around in a blue mist. For an Inuit, awareness of the different types of snow is useful. And then there's recognizing phenomena in the first place. If you're not familiar with the phenomenon of "chronic illness" then you're taking for granted that all diseases are temporary. The first time another person says to you "no, this is what my life is and will be until I die" you're going to be shocked, and it's very possible that you'll react in a way that is rude.
Ðe Arabic word "9ayd" (nameword) means ðe same as "Hunt". Ðe Arabic equivalent of "Fishing" is "9ayd sámak", literally "fish hunting". "9ayyáad" can be translated as "fisher" or "hunter" depending on ðe context.
7:30 i don't quite understand it here. if a word encompasses all bright colors, why refer to this word as "red" rather than, say, "bright"? or am i missing something
@@klausolekristiansen2960 This in itself is an interesting one too! The association between colours and temperatures. Red is considered warm, probably because fire and embers are red. In fact, the way Old Norse uses red, sounds a lot like it just means fire-coloured. But, when you start looking at it scientifically, it turns out to be backwards. Red is cool and blue is hot.
@@xr33tk Some pinks. Here we have another difference of catagories between languages, in this case English and Danish. When I first learned English, one of the things that surprised me was this: For most colors, the light version just has the word "light" plus the color name. Lyseblå is light blue, lysegrøn is light green, lysegul is light yellow and so on. But there is one exception. Lyserød is not, as you would expect, light red, but pink. I did not think much about it. It was only much, much later that I learned that to an English speaker, pink is a basic color, not a shade of red. I still do not really understand it. To me it is obvious that light red is a shade of red.
The reason we translate it as "red" is because the 'focal point'/'prototype'/'best example' of the colour is the colour of strawberries, fresh blood and crimson rosellas, just like the English word "red".
This is all over the place. German goes nuts breaking movement down into categories of walk / ride (a conveyance) / ride (an animal) / fly . To my Germanicized ears it sounds laughably wrong when someone uses the wrong one. And other such examples abound everywhere. On the other end are languages - a suprising number - which have no gender pronouns. My Iranian friend randomly says "er" (he) or "sie" (she) regardless of whom she's talking about and I have to figure it out, or wait until context clears it up. But, Dr. Crawford, it is as you say - naturally she knows the difference, she just doesn't code for it.
@@oneukum Oh absolutely, nor does it distinguish between "safety" and "security" (it's all just Sicherheit); we could come up with any number of other examples. Multiply this by the languages of the world and you get ... many ... different ways to cut any given cake.
@@FERDINANDVSLVCIVSFor all I know, "brun" might have denoted a much lighter shade. In 2024 Danish, "brun" does not, nor in the 80s when I was a child. But it might have back in the viking age.
@@peterknutsen3070 But that doesn't explain why they took "blue". Like, for ravens, according to Crawford, it was cuz their feathers reflect a blue hue under direct light. But black people don't.
This only applies to watching displays that are only capable of producing RGB. Basically any other object you're looking at has a wider spectrum than three narrow channels for RGB.
There are some fascinating science videos about this. I want to say one of them, about orange and brown, is by Vsauce. They also include ones about the infamous blue/gold dress.
Technically all colours have a specific wavelength that excite our S, M, and L type cone cells. The degree of excitation of each of those types helps us situate the colour in a perceptual spectrum that has some correspondence with the physical spectrum of light's wavelength. This correspondence is dependent on the particular idiosyncracies of an individual's retinal biology. Linguistically, the terms red, green, and blue (and their semantic equivalents in other languages) have been developed to describe areas in this perceptual spectrum. In modernity, these terms have been retrofitted to the description of S, M, and L type cone cells for useful convenient description. As the science has progressed to more precisely describe the biological mechanisms of sight, those terms have fallen out of favour for their inaccuracies. L-type cones are the cones that excite the most on longer wavelengths that we call red, but the peak excitation is actually around what in English we'd call a greenish yellow. RGB is very useful technology for mixing the excitation of these three cones at extremes of that spectrum, but to say all colour is RGB is inaccurate.
I think of pretty - beautiful - handsome as having a component indicating strength. A woman or animal that's pretty might be beautiful but somehow trivial. Like an Irish Setter, male or female, is a very pretty dog but hard to take seriously. I might describe a woman as handsome, meaning she has a look of strength about her. She might also be beautiful, but not pretty. She might not take it as a compliment, so I'll just shut up. ETA - Thanks for the Steller's Jay. Very cool, and handsome, bird.
Fun fact: If you prospect for gold in a German speaking country, it makes sense to look for place names that contain "rot", such as "Rotbach" (literally "red creek"), because in Middle High German and in Old High German, gold was considered to be "rot" (red).
Could that be because gold often occurs near iron? So the soil coming down a river will have red iron in it, and therefore a good place to look for gold?
@@TheWildManEnkidu Gold itself was called "red". Here is a stanza from the "Nibelungenlied", a Middle High German epic poem:
Dô die herren sâhen daz der helt was tôt,
si leiten in ûf einen schilt, der was von golde rôt,
und wurden des ze râte, wie daz solde ergân
daz man ez verhæle, daz ez héte Hagene getân.
"schilt, der was von golde rôt" -- shield that was red from (being covered in or consisting of) gold
Just this morning, I was thinking about how messed up my "misheard" words were.
And you reminded me. I always thought Wagner wrote his opera based on the "Neblig League" Which was something like the Justice League".
So, as an English speaking kid, I thought the Valkyeries must be the "bad guys" but eventually, I learned it was actually the "Nibelungen Leid" my entire paradigm shifted.
Thanks for the entertaining memory! 😂
Same in Norwegian. Gold can be said to be red
.... except when the rot refers to the old form of the modern German "roden", cutting trees. The rotaher marks was an area of clear cutting, for example.
Medieval monks took full advantage of the fish definition, eating everything from puffins to seal to eels on Friday & justifying it all as “fish”.
Beavers too. Gotta have that red meat even on fish-only days.
And it wasn't just monks. All medieval Christians were supposed to abide by the fish days.
fun fact: monks got out of the food rules all the time by eating in the sick booth, or by hunting their cattle, becaues hunted food was fine, lol
A lot of people don't realise that eels are actually fish though. That's kind of besides the point, but I'm an angler
@@louismarlow53 I never realised that some people don't realise eels are fish. I mean, what the hell else would they be?
In South Louisiana there is a well-known heirloom variety of cotton whose fibers can be described as tan/khaki/brown in color, and is in English referred to as "brown cotton" - but in French, it is "du coton jaune" ('yellow cotton'). Many things are indeed "brun" ('brown') in French, but what you could call "tan" belongs in French to the 'yellow' category instead of 'brown'. But - and, if I recall, you’ve touched on this in a previous video in English or Norse - specifically for horses' coats and human hair color, there are words like "barosse" or "baille" that narrow down the color to something like tan.
I heard something like that the word "apple" was the old word for fruit (or at least used intechangebly) and apple therefore could be used for all types of fruits.
Yeah, like a potato was a ground apple or something! Good call!
German "Liebesapfel" was a tomato. In a region in Germany I spent some time the etymology of potato was "ground berry", so not an apple.
Aardappel, pijnappel, sinaasappel, granaatappel, dennenappel, paradijsappel, sterappel, appel.
@@waterdrager93 hvilket språk er dette?
@@sisseeboy thats dutch
My understanding is that "Fish" is kind of a tricky taxon for more reasons, too; Christianity had restrictions on eating meat that imposed a strong incentive to classify things as fish that might not intuitively fit the concept.
Yes. It's a weird case to examine, because of that confounding factor.
It's a bit like Bill Clinton using an unconventional definition of "to have sex with" to further his agenda. Or people who try to silence criticism of religion with accusations of "racism". That's an agenda too.
in some languages you eat your soup, in others you drink it :)
An English speaker would say "orange rooftile" but in my language the same rooftile is "red". The word for orange color exists but it's not used as widely as in English.
In Swedish the word for orange is "orange", which is a loan word from French. Earlier, and also nowadays when referring to more specific shades of orange, the word "brandgul" was/is used. This translates to fire-yellow. Your example made me think of this
On the other hand English speakers would say that someone has red hair, when the colour of that person's hair might be closer to orange.
"Orange" in English originally connoted "The shade of red that oranges are"
In modern polish we have pomarańczowy which comes from the fruit pomarańcza that is from naranja but when it comes to naming the orangish colour of hair, animals, soil etc. we say rudy/ruda/rude which is a cognate to english red, even though we have a different word for red: czerwony.
I remember being very confused as a child: why the same colour when on a paper and crayons is pomarańczowy, when on someone's hair its "rudy" and when on a cow its "czerwony"
It's a little known fact that "orange" was originally the name of the fruit. Only later did people start to use it for other items that had the same colour as the fruit.
Regarding animal classification and Germanic languages there's an interesting case with the "deer", which can be specifically the antler-bearling ungulates (or even specifically the red deer, typically in modern English), and in other languages took the generic meaning of wild game, or even just animal (like modern Swedish "djur")
Rådyr в Норвегии, так смешно если перевести на русский "дикий зверь", такой маленький милый олененок.
Dius in Gothic, meaning beast.
I remember when I started playing Minecraft and "Magenta" and "Purple" was diffrent colors. I thought it was so wierd.
This is a fascinating subject matter!
Interesting video especially regarding the colours. I am Danish and here it's a matter of dispute whether people consider turquoise green, blue or somewhere in between. I used to consider it blue earlier in life but now I consider it green, myself...
Same in Germany. I would consider some shades of turquoise to be green and others to be blue. To me, turquoise is an umbrella term for bluish green and greenish blue. But unlike green and blue, it isn't a basic colour.
@@fritzp9916 main reason I view turquoise green now is that I have started paint, and I prefer using turquoise to contrast against blue to using it to contrast against green hence conditioning me to view turquoise and blue as more distant from one another
Turquoise the stone varies in colour from very greenish to very blue depending on copper/iron contents.
Turquoise the colour as used in paint or graphics usually has similar amounts of green and blue, tending towards slightly more green. It always has some red mixed in, which might make different people see it as more green/blue.
Since there are so many variations of 'turquoise' it's very understandable that different people categorise it differently
Finnish has solved this turquoise problem by calling that color "sini-vihreä" (blå-green), so a combination of both, instead of either or.
There's also a more direct translation, which almost a transliteration "turkoosi".
insofar as I care, "turkis" is either its own colour or a hybrid of "blå" and "grøn".
If you show it to me on a computer screen (i.e. context), I'll likely think and maybe also say the English word "cyan".
Really interesting video! I think even the usage of words changes with times. Like you said handsome is almost exclusively used for men now, but even a few centuries ago, it was common to use it even for women. I first encountered it reading books like Pride and Prejudice, and found it interesting.
I presume an older visually pleasing woman can be described as ‘handsome’, but as a young more or less she would be referred as ‘beautiful’
I believe the earlier sense of 'handsome' is slightly more distant; more of a 'technically correct, well-proportioned, appropriate' and maybe also 'authoritative' than the 'someone I am attracted to' of a word like 'beautiful'
I would use beauty as a generic term describing an attractive person who's appearance is strikingly attractive and usually feminine. Pretty describes someone who is attractive but isn't particularly outstanding in their appearance(feminine). Handsome in a historical sense probably meant something like a beautiful person who's body and facial features were attractive but were not dainty they were strong in appearance and attractive. Think a man with a narrow waist broad shoulders, muscular but a bit more than lean. Think a woman with what could be referred to as Birthing hips, slimmer midsection, shoulders narrower than hips, not frail or weak, with strong jawline cheekbones etc. but not overly masculine that's my opinion anyways
These are my favorite kinds of videos.
I have read your dissertation and it was very interesting. I've never read a dissertation before and it was a bit of a slog in places, but I think that's because they aren't typically written for the general public to read. A lot of references and references to references. 😁 Once I learned to read around those, it was a good read.
When you hit a reference you must always follow and read it, until you reach the first reference in the reference, and then you follow that. And so on down the rabbit hole. They say that after only six or seven references you will invariably reach the study "Colonic gas explosion during therapeutic colonoscopy with electrocautery" by Spiros D Ladas, George Karamanolis, and Emmanuel Ben-Soussan.
it does seem odd that my grandpa would hunt for fish, but he called it bowfishing.
also, I think the difference between beautiful and handsome lies mostly in the jawline, at least when referring to people.
In Finnish the word pyytää can mean to ask, to request, to hunt or to fish.
In most modern Celtic languages, the blue/green meaning for "glas" is lost. I think it can still mean both in Breton, but for the most part the modern Celtic languages just have one meaning (green in Irish, blue in Welsh etc.) although both languages still occasionally use them more broadly. Greyish animals can be "glas" in Irish, for example, and I think Welsh still describes plants as "glas" even though it generally means blue in modern Welsh. Irish still doesn't distinguish red and pink though. Pink is just considered light red in Modern Irish
Bándearg - literally white red for anyone who sees this. If you mix red and white paint you usually end up with a shade of pink.
@@matthewbarry376 Yup, but worth noting that that's also just how Irish talks about light and dark shades of colour in general. Light blue is "bánghorm" for example.
This is a really fascinating subject. Would love to see more vids on this, and maybe some more collaborations with Simon? Also, really like the hat you're wearing in this vid :D
The great fish lie is my favorite scientific piece of trivia that no one ever believes is true. Either fish doesn't exist or we're all fish.
ghoti exist
@@jacobpast5437 We all know there's No Such Thing As A Fish.
Well, there's the third option that fish are real but most fish aren't fish
@@BetterMonsters One somewhat arbitrary solution would be to taxonomically classify only _actinopterygians_ as fish. This would exclude _agnathans_ (e.g., lampreys), _chondrichthyans_ (e.g., sharks), and _sarcopterygians_ - from which, among others, tetrapods, including humans, are descended. Implementing this would require some renaming since the superclass _Osteichthyes_ (which includes both actinopterygians and sarcopterygians) and the class _Chondrichthyes_ both contain the Ancient Greek word for fish (ἰχθύς) in their names. In common language, 'fish' could still be used to refer to all these animals except for tetrapods.
I think we should define fish scientifically as meaning actinopterygii, but even more than that I think scientists should stop taking old words that are in common use and redefining them. "Sorry, that's not actually a bug because it isn't in hemiptera." "Sorry, that raspberry isn't technically a berry but you know what is? Zucchini."
The combination "væne mø" - pretty maid, appears frequently in Danish mediaeval ballads, almost a fossilized expression, a cliche, if I remember right called a "kending"
I don't think that really qualifies as a kenning.
Love the topic! I work a lot with semantic classifications and taxonomy, so this is especially interesting.
Interesting segues to investigate from this fascinating material: Wittgenstein's philosophy of language, Lacan's psychoanalytic views on the Symbolic register which anchors human subjectivity in terms of signifiers and and the discrepancies between representations and reality, and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from linguistics.
i am currently builidng the lexicon of my conlang and this shows up hhaah
Me too! Are you going more fusional or agglutinative for your basic morphology?
I've often interpreted the term "handsome" (especially when used to describe a woman) as a kind of beauty resulting less from elegance and grace (as is associated with femininity), and instead more from regal bearing or venerable character.
"Badass beauty" i like to call it.
"Handsome" for a woman means "non-desirable beauty".
I might really enjoy looking at a tiger or a cat, but I have no instinctive desire to get intimate.
Very nice video as always, the varying categorization is a neat indicator that a lot of this stuff is pretty subjective.
You almost nailed the Russian pronunciation! sinij was perfect, but goluboj is stressed on the last syllable, so the first 'o' turns into more of a schwa kinda 'a' sound.
Came here to learn about colors, but now I just kinda want trout.
Rainbow trout, right?
If we've seen her in your shorts... Is this some new level of Patreon?
i like your blue jay shirt! :)
someone once asked me whether a particular object was blue or green... they were very unhappy when i said it was aqua... they were trying to gather support for an argument with their spouse!
"Handsome" used to be used for women all the time!
When and where was that used?
But not these days. If you say a woman is handsome, then you're insinuating that she's not conventionally attractive.
Joseph Addison in the Spectator way back in 1711 or so agrees with you that something very small cannot be beautiful: it is pretty. Nor does one say of the most striking large mountains that they are pretty: they are beautiful.
It's interesting how in Anglo-Saxon language or rather culture I should say, words like "good" or "pretty" are much closer to "average" than something more positive. I feel like calling someone or something pretty is like 5-6/10 but calling it the same in polish- "ładny" is 7-8/10.
I used to watch interviews with swedish group Abba when they were talking with english or americans about how they felt about their recent tour and most of the time when they responded "It was good", the interviewers laughed because they considered the response to be somewhat held back.
Its the same with a recent trend to rate someone's looks on the scale of 10 and people consider giving 6 as calling someone "ugly", while tye average is 5.5 so 6 is literally above average=prettier than most
That's not an English-speaking thing, it's specifically an American thing. Overly enthusiastic expressions are the standard in American society, hence why so many Europeans perceive Americans as fake.
There's something deeply strange about looking at a reference to a blue raven and thinking that the speaker must've meant black. Like... go look at a raven.
I associate hunting with actively pursuing, whereas "catching" a fish implies waiting for it to be caught.
Holt moly, ever since Lauren showed up, DJC is putting out videos left and right.
Always a pleasure, Jackson. Isn't pretty derived from m.French and means small aka petite? Maybe the meaning has lingered? 🐸💚
Wiktionary suggests "pretty" is from Old English "prættig" meaning "astute, sly, cunning". It apparently has cognates in other Germanic languages.
9:32 *Diogenes has entered the chat*
Regarding dogs:
"Get along little doggies..." the word is referring to a cow. Now, I understand this, but if I was saying that to, let's say, my kids they would probably be imagining someone wrangling a large group of dogs 🐕. Like the default emoji.
What luck, I had a semantics lecture on categorization today! We covered lexical relations like different types of antonymy, hyponymy and meronymy, but the kind of coded synonyms like pretty/handsome wasn't mentioned! What's the term for that relation? Is it simply "coded"?
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I bet many English speakers would quibble about how and when beautiful, handsome, or pretty should be used; which continues to prove Dr. Jackson’s point here. Even subcultural idiosyncrasies will change how one believes a word should be used, and so culture dictates language, and also vice versa.
In some (all?) Anishanabe languages, there is no nonpersonal pronoun. So, you can’t call a tree “it.” That word doesn’t exist, because all things have personhood culturally, so all things are seen as having womanhood or manhood.
Whales 🐋 🐳 and otters *are* 🐟, since ðey're descended from 🐟. Mammals, including humans, otters, and 🐋, are more closely related to lungfish ðan to coelocanþs, who are closer to mammals ðan to guppies, who are closer to mammals ðan to 🦈, who are closer to mammals ðan to Chunky Dunk, who is closer to mammals ðan to Cephalaspis. Mammals are very deeply rooted in ðe 🐟 🐠 family 🌳 and ðerefore can't be excluded from it. By contrast, lampreys and hagfish aren't descended from forebears wið fins oðer ðan ðe tail fin and mineralized scales, so ðey're no fish.
Is 'goluboj', Russian for light blue any way related to 'yellow' in English and 'gelb' in German? Linguistically it looks similar.
yellow and gelb are related, but голубой comes from Latin columbus 'pigeon'
9:20 the biological taxonomy has to resort to special pleading to exclude the great apes and humans from the classification of monkey
How do you make those associations of meaning with the words? Is this data based solely on comparative studies and a lot of reading and text research? Doesn't every language speaker develop their own (similar but slightly different) interpretations of words? Same with color? I don't want to get too political but it seems nowadays people that speak the same language have different definitions of the same word. I also noticed differences in color identification across generational lines. That's probably a completely different topic but I noticed that your definitions of the English words you talked about seemed to be based on a hunch and not on a scientific study.
Interesting. I have occasionally seen claims that language shapes everything about ones conception of the world. It strikes me that this goes too far. I am skeptical of the claim that all thought is language based.. I have a math degree, co I believe that some kinds of deep abstract thought are more geometric than linguistic. A musical likely "thinks" internally in pitches and rhythms, etc. Whether these share deep brain processing functions with language processing, I don't know. However, I think of language as primarily semiotic, and involving referents. When I hear a tune in my head, it doesn't refer to anything external. Calling music, art or mathematics "languages" is, I believe , more figurative than literal. So I wonder hew deep semantic taxonomy goes in respect of one's conception of the world.
Even in music though, how we divide the universe of possible sounds up into different scales, modes, and time signatures is totally up to culture. Other cultures have very different music theories with their own idea about how many notes belong in a scale and what makes music sound pleasant or sound like it matches a certain mood. Farya Faraji is a very interesting TH-camr who covers the topic if you find that stuff interesting.
@@allisonguthrie8257 oh, I entirely agree. And that is an interesting point, certainly. But those cultural differences in music do not make music a form of language (except in the figurative sense).
I often think about certain subjects in terms of abstract forces that work against each other, which makes sense from a physics perspective.
Where I think something saphir/worf-like does make sense is when it comes to categorization, discrimonation, and even recognition.
If you know more words then you know to distinguish more precisely between different phenomena. If you don't then you're going to smurf around in a blue mist.
For an Inuit, awareness of the different types of snow is useful.
And then there's recognizing phenomena in the first place. If you're not familiar with the phenomenon of "chronic illness" then you're taking for granted that all diseases are temporary. The first time another person says to you "no, this is what my life is and will be until I die" you're going to be shocked, and it's very possible that you'll react in a way that is rude.
Ðe Arabic word "9ayd" (nameword) means ðe same as "Hunt". Ðe Arabic equivalent of "Fishing" is "9ayd sámak", literally "fish hunting". "9ayyáad" can be translated as "fisher" or "hunter" depending on ðe context.
Nameword? Navneord in Danish?
If so, the English term is "noun". I'm not sure I remember what the Latin term is.
@peterknutsen3070 Ðe Latin word is "nomen" if I'm not mistaken, whence English "noun". However, ðe truly English term is "nameword".
7:30 i don't quite understand it here. if a word encompasses all bright colors, why refer to this word as "red" rather than, say, "bright"? or am i missing something
Not bright. Warm. Red, orange and yellow.
@@klausolekristiansen2960 This in itself is an interesting one too! The association between colours and temperatures. Red is considered warm, probably because fire and embers are red. In fact, the way Old Norse uses red, sounds a lot like it just means fire-coloured.
But, when you start looking at it scientifically, it turns out to be backwards. Red is cool and blue is hot.
In modern english red can mean red but it can also cover red-brown, dark orange some pinks etc. So red means both a color and a category of colors.
@@xr33tk Some pinks. Here we have another difference of catagories between languages, in this case English and Danish. When I first learned English, one of the things that surprised me was this: For most colors, the light version just has the word "light" plus the color name. Lyseblå is light blue, lysegrøn is light green, lysegul is light yellow and so on. But there is one exception. Lyserød is not, as you would expect, light red, but pink. I did not think much about it. It was only much, much later that I learned that to an English speaker, pink is a basic color, not a shade of red. I still do not really understand it. To me it is obvious that light red is a shade of red.
The reason we translate it as "red" is because the 'focal point'/'prototype'/'best example' of the colour is the colour of strawberries, fresh blood and crimson rosellas, just like the English word "red".
This is all over the place. German goes nuts breaking movement down into categories of walk / ride (a conveyance) / ride (an animal) / fly . To my Germanicized ears it sounds laughably wrong when someone uses the wrong one. And other such examples abound everywhere. On the other end are languages - a suprising number - which have no gender pronouns. My Iranian friend randomly says "er" (he) or "sie" (she) regardless of whom she's talking about and I have to figure it out, or wait until context clears it up. But, Dr. Crawford, it is as you say - naturally she knows the difference, she just doesn't code for it.
Other fields are less divided on the other hand. Have you ever noticed that German does not distinguish between "bag" and "pocket"?
@@oneukum Oh absolutely, nor does it distinguish between "safety" and "security" (it's all just Sicherheit); we could come up with any number of other examples. Multiply this by the languages of the world and you get ... many ... different ways to cut any given cake.
But why did the old Norse call black people "blámaðr" then? Was it just poetic as well?
Because they are physically dark brown, not really black as soot or the night sky, at least not people from West Africa.
@@oneukum Then why not brunmaðr? Why blue?
@@FERDINANDVSLVCIVSFor all I know, "brun" might have denoted a much lighter shade.
In 2024 Danish, "brun" does not, nor in the 80s when I was a child. But it might have back in the viking age.
@@peterknutsen3070 But that doesn't explain why they took "blue". Like, for ravens, according to Crawford, it was cuz their feathers reflect a blue hue under direct light. But black people don't.
Sinople
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Get you flirting with historical socio-linguistics!
Technically all colors we see are RGB while the rest is interpreted from RGB in the brain
This only applies to watching displays that are only capable of producing RGB. Basically any other object you're looking at has a wider spectrum than three narrow channels for RGB.
There are some fascinating science videos about this. I want to say one of them, about orange and brown, is by Vsauce. They also include ones about the infamous blue/gold dress.
Technically all colours have a specific wavelength that excite our S, M, and L type cone cells. The degree of excitation of each of those types helps us situate the colour in a perceptual spectrum that has some correspondence with the physical spectrum of light's wavelength. This correspondence is dependent on the particular idiosyncracies of an individual's retinal biology.
Linguistically, the terms red, green, and blue (and their semantic equivalents in other languages) have been developed to describe areas in this perceptual spectrum. In modernity, these terms have been retrofitted to the description of S, M, and L type cone cells for useful convenient description. As the science has progressed to more precisely describe the biological mechanisms of sight, those terms have fallen out of favour for their inaccuracies.
L-type cones are the cones that excite the most on longer wavelengths that we call red, but the peak excitation is actually around what in English we'd call a greenish yellow.
RGB is very useful technology for mixing the excitation of these three cones at extremes of that spectrum, but to say all colour is RGB is inaccurate.
I think of pretty - beautiful - handsome as having a component indicating strength. A woman or animal that's pretty might be beautiful but somehow trivial. Like an Irish Setter, male or female, is a very pretty dog but hard to take seriously. I might describe a woman as handsome, meaning she has a look of strength about her. She might also be beautiful, but not pretty. She might not take it as a compliment, so I'll just shut up.
ETA - Thanks for the Steller's Jay. Very cool, and handsome, bird.
Doctor ran out of old norse stuff seems like😂😂😂
Instant linguistic clickbait!
💙🩵 that is синий & голубой