Noooo mom I'm not doing drugs, I'm just watching a thoroughly researched and well put together video that demonstrates obscure and interesting facts about linguistics, presented in a trendy fashion employing the action of going down the icebergs to uncover progressively more niche entries while darkening the tone of narration, for the next 2 hours and 7 minutes
LEVEL 1 0:34 Octopi 1:39 French silent letters 2:17 Dearest Creature in creation 3:12 Tower of Babel 3:51 Duolingo 5:08 Omelette du fromage 5:42 Pig Latin 6:57 Hardest and Easiest language 8:26 American Monolingualism 9:44 Faux cyrillic 10:18 Quick brown fox 11:10 German is angry 12:24 Very long german words LEVEL 2 15:20 Ampersand origin 16:17 "Untranslatable words" 18:39 Ghoti 19:15 Esperanto 21:19 100 words for snow 22:46 Aoccrding to rscheearch 23:35 Click consonants 24:21 Army and a navy 24:55 Newspeak 25:27 Rosetta Stone 26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi 27:07 Had had 28:12 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously 29:29 Buffalo buffalo 30:42 Gendered articles 31:46 Code-switching 33:39 Boustrophedon 34:10 Sapir-whorf 35:49 Descriptivism and Prescriptivism LEVEL 3 37:26 Great vowel shift 38:30 Bhutanese passport 41:23 Bear taboo 43:23 Tea and cha 43:57 Critical period 44:48 Voynich Manuscript 46:34 Toki Pona 47:48 This is a wug 49:12 cockney rhyming slang 50:43 Pirahã 52:37 Volapük 53:42 Lorem ipsum origin 54:26 Rødgrød med fløde 54:39 Mele Kalikimaka 55:00 Grzegorz brz- 55:07 Hopi time 56:20 Kiki Bouba 57:58 Ye olde 59:02 Loglan 59:42 Pidgins and creoles 1:00:33 Folk etymologies LEVEL 4 1:02:27 Silbo Gomero 1:03:09 Ceceo 1:04:15 Kurgan hypothesis 1:05:00 Wasei-Eigo 1:06:31 Schleicher's fable 1:06:57 Latin wolf taboo 1:08:21 Hreks deiuoskwe 1:08:52 Prisencolinensinainciusol 1:10:10 Migration theory 1:11:16 Russian blue 1:12:39 Dyeus Phter 1:13:30 Labov R LEVEL 5 1:14:33 Foreign accent syndrome 1:16:00 Etymology of OK is unknown 1:17:07 Generative grammar 1:18:26 Koko gorilla 1:20:29 Mbabaram dog 1:21:21 Biang 1:22:12 Solresol 1:23:12 Singapore stone 1:24:51 Hlewagastiz holtijaz 1:26:05 Anglish 1:28:44 Universal Mom and Dad 1:30:04 Glossolalia 1:31:02 Dord LEVEL 6 1:31:52 Ithkuil 1:34:45 Basque-Icelandic pidgin 1:36:21 Butterly refers to their poop 1:36:56 Seaphim glyph 1:37:38 Tsakonian 1:38:34 Proto World 1:39:47 Linear B 1:41:45 Innateness 1:44:13 English is a pidgin LEVEL 7 1:46:11 Stoned Ape Theory 1:48:18 Sun Language 1:49:49 Edo Nyland 1:52:02 Italian gestures from romans 1:53:03 Curse of 39 1:54:37 Codex seraphinianus 1:56:06 Nicaraguan sign language 1:57:15 Zzxjoanw 1:58:04 Phaistos disc 2:00:08 Swedish yes sound LEVEL 8 2:00:32 Indian welsh 2:02:56 Helicopter Hieroglyph 2:03:48 Katakana Hebrew 2:04:23 Proto-Indo-European 'Nine' and 'New' 2:04:48 Neanderthal Language 2:05:32 Learn languages while sleeping really works
As a native Russian speaker, my mind was kinda blown up when I watched the "Russian Blue" entry. It kinda explains the struggle when I was first learning colors in English and trying to translate them into Russian. When I see something described as blue in English, I almost never have the idea if that color is the light blue shade or the darker shade, because of my perception of colours and how I grew up with it. Other than that, that was a really interesting iceberg.
I have to laugh. I live thirty miles from Ontario and often land on French Canadian radio as I am flipping through the dial. My father was even fluent in French. He had lived in France for several years. But I just can't wrap my head around not pronouncing many of the letters in French. 😅
So 1:12:06, the "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz", refers to an old polish comedy movie titled "how i started the second world war". In one scene the main character named "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz" is asked to indentify himself to a german officer who, obviously, struggles to write it down. Then he is asked to state where he lives to which he replies "chrząszczyrzewoszyce (the city), powiat łękołody (administrative unit)". The entire thing sounds like if you threw 10kg of aluminum foil down a staircase and a plausible polish name at the same time. the reaction of the german officer is pretty entertaining too, especially for a movie made in 1969. It pokes fun at the ridiculous pronunciation and an abundance of difficult and uncommon sounds in polish. The movie and the scene are cult classics in poland to this day (source: im polish)
one error: his actual name isn't grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz, he just made that up on the spot so germans won't get his real personal information. It was a tactic to confuse him and probably he also wanted to just annoy him XD
Im not polish, but I watched this film 10 years ago with some friends, and to this day we sometimes will just randomly say his name to each other. Great film
"especially for a movie made in 1969" movies had already been an entertaining and established medium for many decades at that point. Are you a 14 year old
The funniest language story I heard is when an older German couple couldn't have a child, so they adopted an orphan baby from China. They would then proceed to buy Chinese dictionaries and Chinese and German schoolbooks. When asked why they did this, they replied that they wanted to be able to communicate with the baby, once it started speaking.
I am Slavic, but I am a native English speaker. Once I started learning about my people's languages, the more I realized how crippling a language English can be to other people's and their ability to communicate. I suspect there's a link between neurological trends in ethnicities and the development of language. Maybe a Chinese baby would not speak Chinese, but maybe that baby would be better served to learn it.
@@vrillionaire88 interesting theory. I know many ethnic Chinese people that grew up in Europe, they learn Chinese usually just as fast as anybody else.
@@coconuthead4923 I have an exceedingly high level grasp of my language. Languages are built on archetypes, not merely found in culture but seem to be environmental adaptations, components of which make their way into grammatical structure, etymology, and even letters themselves. There seems to be some cause for belief that the PIE derived languages have similar enough archetypes that translation isn't a burden, but not all languages come from PIE, and slavic languages diverged from the germanic languages so far back that slavs named Germans mute/unintelligible. The components that make slavic languages so different from other IE languages do not stop at the words, but leave remnants in the mind for many generations. It might interest you to know that the largely Germanic descended people of the US respond most to Germanic derived words, and is so validated through study and application to be a primary focus of politicians in their speeches.
About the Voynich manuscript my personal hypotesis is that it was one of the earliest exemples of a nerd doing worldbuilding. Created a entire new language with its own script and the manuscript is basically worldbuilding hence the non existing plants.
Biang is also a very unique Chinese character that is almost meme-worthy in my opinion. Biang is a made up character. Yes technically all words and characters are "made up" but Biang is especially so. It's not really even a real official Chinese character. It is not possible to type it out on many digital devices, and its not included in most modern dictionaries either. For most of the Chinese language, one singular pronunciation can correspond to dozens of characters (涯/牙/芽 are all pronounced "ya" and with the same tone), but there is only one word in the entire Chinese language that is pronounced Biang. Also, most Chinese characters also have multiple meanings depending on the context and what other characters they are paired with, but Biang has one and ONLY one meaning, that is Biang Biang Noodles. And and and, the structure of Biang as a Chinese character doesn't even make sense! If you know Chinese you would know that each character is made up of multiple components that hint towards either the meaning or pronunciation of the character. Biang has tons of components, none of which allude to its meaning as a type of noodle nor as an onomatopoeia. Food usually has the component 饣(飠), or 口 for a sound word. Biang has neither of those. There are explanations trying to reason the structure of the character as an allusion to a person selling goods out of a cart but I personally feel like that's a bit far fetched. What I am trying to say is that Biang is a highly artificial character that has absolutely no buisness being so complex. My headcanon is that Biang was created as a marketing strategy by noodle sellers back in the olden days, it was purposely made to look as complicated as it is to draw attention to it and be memorable. According to this Biang would have most likely been created by merchants rather than educated scholars hence why it does not make a lot of sense linguistically. But it achieved its goal and sure is an unforgettable symbol of good food! (If anyone was curious, the Biang Biang noodle is a very wide chewy type of noodle made from wheat with spicy seasoning on top, its pretty good!)
I'd say it was created to look like what a long noodle or even a pile of noodles would look like if you threw them at a wall and interpreted whatever stuck as a glyph (sorry, can't recall the Chinese word equivalent, and I'm on mobile).
Wildest thing i have read , i speak japanese so it always difficult to explain how some kanji have over 15 ways of reading both japanese and chinese (音読み、訓読み)yet there is some kanji with only one way of reading , and there is also unused kanji so everyone use the hiragana form instead , or that there are many ways to write a word like "mind" since plenty of kanji have reference to it , yet the use varies in the context , i do want to learn mandarin or standard chinese eventually
13:02 I hate to be the akshully 🤓👆guy, but actually German words can be infinitely long, because you can simply come up with new correct words by combining nouns as long as the new word makes sense. The same is true for Dutch, a language closely related to German. It’s just that “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz” is the longest word in German dictionaries.
A typical Dutch word is kattenbakkorreltjesfabrieksterreinverlichtingschakelbordenverkoperaktentasontwerpersopleidingsinstituutsdirecteursalarisonderhandelingsgesprekpartners.
@@Borimira I can't translate it, but it seems to be similar to how english allows word-creation-dash-using-multiword-words-with-no-end-in-sight-on-and-on-forever
11:10 Here in Turkey, German is often seen as seductive. The reason why is probably because while we barely learn about WWII in schools, especially before the internet, German adult movies were very popular in Turkey
German is so pretty its like French especially the r's and non umlaut vowel sounds but more cute and less sexy sounding. Media has totally corrupted peoples perception of German in the west. I think its conditioning because when I hear German I don't think of aggression. I think of like romantic poems, magical princess fairytales and medieval castles.
Most of you're examples at 1:05:15 are not actually wasei-eigo but are instead the more general gairaigo (or loanwords), which is why we can understand their meaning when translated or spoken. Things like alcohol [arukooru] are only different because Japanese phonetics doesn't have such equivalents for things that include [L] sounds or consonate clusters. Japanese is more of a syllabic type of language. The way it forms syllables, or mora, are also different from English; since all of them end in a vowel except for ん [n]. Thus, Japanese can only get close approximations for gairaigo for it to be physically and comfortably said in Japanese. Many Japanese people can't even hear the difference between [R] and [L] if asked about it. Collaboration [koraboreeshion], hamburger [hanbaagaa], hip-hop [hippuhoppu], keyboard [kiiboodoo], skateboard [sukeetoboodoo], Twitter [tsuittaa], and more that you mentioned are all said this way because of the reasons I mentioned previously, but regardless, are all still /understood/ to mean the same thing in BOTH languages when used. _________ Wasei-eigo however is when gairaigo is taken a step further - when a word from English is used to mean something different in Japanese from what it would originally be understood as in English. Quote "[They] are Japanese-language expressions based on English words, or parts of word combinations, that do not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived." and "Wasei-eigo words [are] compound words and portmanteaus are constructed by Japanese speakers on the basis of loanwords derived from English and embedded into the Japanese lexicon with refashioned, novel meanings diverging significantly from the originals." For example, if I were planning to go somewhere with a friend and I said "I'll be the handle keeper" to them in English, they wouldn't know what I meant. Why would I be keeping or watching over a handle? In Japanese ハンドルキーパー [handorukiipaa] is indeed the wasei-eigo that they use for what we would call a "designated driver" and a "handle" is a "steering wheel" but that isn't how we use those words in English. Another one would be スキンシップ [sukinshippu] "skinship" (portmanteau of "skin" and "kinship") - this is when you're physically affectionate with close friends and family like hugging one another or a parents holding their baby skin-to-skin after it's born. We just call this being affectionate but if someone asked for or talked about "skinship" to you in English it would normally sound weird. Although, this is the fun part about wasei-eigo, is that after this one caught on and became more popular online, it has actually been used in English now and then for the meaning of skin-to-skin contact with another. English has borrowed wasei-eigo words that look English but are entirely novel to Japanese.
@@seredachan thank you for reading 🙏🏽 I'm Japanese-American, so I know about nuance in both languages; though admittedly my Japanese could use more work in general 😅
My thoughts exactly, thanks for bringing this up. Most of examples given under this entry are indeed garaigo. Real wasei-eigo is way more interesting. It makes me wander if there are similar cases in other languages. I feel like there must be.
マンション for apartment buildings was the one I came across first. Confusing because it's in the same area, but not quite right. アルバイト is similar, confusing for an English speaker until you remember that load words can come from other languages, and also doesn't quite mean what it means in German.
The "taboo bear" thing is literally to avoid attracting the attention of bears. Apparently in Yellowstone the bears have learned the English word "bear" and tend to move towards the source of the sound since it usually means an easy source of food. Thus, we may soon need new euphemisms for both our safety and theirs.
Ohh, neat! While we can’t say for certain this is specifically why they did, I’d say it’s entirely reasonable and a probable component. I do know also that bears have religious/spiritual significance for some folks in the broader geographic area (like in Perm region iirc? I’m not sure distinction of Perm, Permian, and Perm-Krai without looking them up, apologies if ‘Perm region’ is incorrect/nonsensical). And there’s even archaeological evidence of (long extinct) cave bears having spiritual significance, too.
but especially informative! I was unsure at first, sometimes people don't explain the stuff on the iceberg very well. he doesn't seem to be someone who was exposed to too much culture and language from all over the world and mostly confined in USA (example: for me as someone speaking German I'm not sure if he can't pronounce the "r" in "Bär" or why he said it almost exactly like the English "bear") but he's doing a really good job (much better than if I did probably, anyway)
2 hour video with mistakes already in the first 5 minutes. Rather seems like the concepts talked about are not really thought through, just compiled in their most popular forms no matter how (in)correct they are.
@@hhoopplaa Hi, I stopped watching at the American monolingualism part, but some notes before that: French is definitely not the only language with silent letters, i.e. English has plenty of those as well. Omelette du fromage does not mean cheese omelette, instead omelette au fromage does. The hardest and easiest languages is heavily toward native English speakers, and setting an amount of weeks for learning them is sketchy at best, it takes years to master any language depending on study time, environment and learning capabilities. Sure, the video would probably be double the length if he discussed these items thoroughly but wouldn't that kind of be the point :)
Just a quick note on Ceceo. Ceceo doesn't refer to pronouncing the "z" and "c" as th sounds, as this is the standard pronunciation for these letters in Spain. There are two different phenomena occurring typically in the south of Spain. Ceceo is when the "s" is pronounced as the th sound in English and Seseo which is when "z" and "c" are pronounced as "s". Since in Andalusia most people have Seseo, that is the variety of Spanish that was brought to Latinamerica.
1:18:26 one of the most obvious criticisms of the koko gorilla experiment is that none of her handlers could actually speak ASL fluently. there's a really insightful article about a fluent ASL speaker who saw koko and it explains how koko's hand signs were often incorrect or vague but her handlers would interpret them as valid anyway. and it also talks about how koko never actually used ASL unprompted. she would use it when answering questions and interacting with trainers, but she wouldn't use it to communicate something she thought of the way a human would.
Literally screwed up their 'experiment', the funny thing is there are other experiments of apes actually successfully using ASL (though not to the extent of what koko was claimed to use obviously)
Koko's advocate/main handler also constantly dressed her achievements up. I'd call her Koko's enabler but Koko wasn't really doing anything wrong so it doesn't quite fit... Koko signing "water bird" was Koko making up a compound word for waterfowl, not Koko making two circumstantially relevant separate signs for water and a bird that happened to be in the water. Koko signing incorrectly in response to prompts was Koko lying or joking, or getting confused between signs whose spoken English equivalents happen to *sound* similar.
Rød grød med fløde is something danish people ask non natives to say, since it uses pretty much all of danishes effed up phonemes resulting in the danes laughing at their poor german friends.
@@mittenielsen8424that is like English mixed with German: “er” like “are” and “blød” like “blithe” in English, everything else is like German: “das (dat in dialect) ”, “Niedergang”, “andere”
I'm a German who dabbles in learning northern Germanic languages and I must say danish in general and the nasal swedish i in words like "bli" are really hard for me to learn.
The census also doesn't necessarily cover a circumstance like a Spanish professor I had. Her father was a first gen. Mexican immigrant who had met his wife while serving in West Germany. Their common language was English, so their children mostly spoke English at home and school, but learned German from their mother and Mexican Spanish from their father. Neither parent ever learned the others' native language with any fluency.
Your native language also dictates your aptitude to other languages. German, english, spanish are relatively similar, they share letters vocabulary words, and the way ideas are presented arent alien to one anorher, but if an english speaker were to learn chinese it would need a structured learning method. My mother is chinese and speaks 4 dialects, but i never picked up fluency until i studied it in school. Some languages are just plain harder to learn than others
Eh… in this case the census would cover it. “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” Yes. All of them do, but slightly different language sets, which is then indicated on the census.
I love how the comment section feels like additional content, like a bonus feature on a dvd. 😅 Thank you to all who have gone in depth on topics from the video, added info or given further insight or different perspectives. I am fascinated and have learned a lot!
I watched 10-20 min of this video every night before bed for a few weeks now, and it has been such a cozy journey. So interesting and also well edited with funny memes here and there, thank you!! On to the next one :)
41:24 (Bear-stuff) Well, this is quite interesting because we had a similar practice here in Finland in the not-so-distant past. For example there were beliefs that bears are related to humans or have been humans before or are half-human etc (because of some human-like mannerisms and stuff like that). Using the actual word for bear (karhu) was somewhat of a taboo so there was a bunch of different names and some of them are still sometimes used. I don't really know when this practice faded away but I have an ancestor who was the most accomplished bear hunter in Finland and the euphemisms were still used during his lifetime in the late 18th- early 19th century.
55:00 While it's true that Grzegorz Brz(ęczyszczykiewicz) is a meme about how difficult it is to pronounce polish names the story behind it's origin is much more interesting. It originates from a cult classic polish movie "How I Unleashed World War II" where the main character is captured and interrogated by german officers. The movie is more than 50 years old but it legacy continues, and that scene along with many others became part of polish culture.
@@Annathroy The real and hard to speak (for foreginers) and write (also for native poles) is last name "Gżegżółka". It is because is has two "ż" and "ó" letters, which occur sometimes as "rz" and "u". We have some spelling rules about these letters, but more often we write intuitively. "Gżegżółka" is funny because in polish web-culture we have story about teenager who was arrested for laughing at a cop who didn't know how to spell it.
@@SinfulKaptur Idk, I'm also a croat and our writing-saying is 99.9% the same. I think when u learn how to read polish it's izi but, I'm not PL idk. Those names would be very izi to write when u hear them and to read if u know cro alphabet (Ečišćikijević - following ije rule and čć rule, and Gžegžolka- not south slavic but its a nice sounding)
Polish spelling might look confusing and intimidating for English speakers but is actually much more consistent than English spelling. Here's a video in which an Australian guy explains basically everything about both Czech and Polish spelling in just 10 minutes: th-cam.com/video/roh14dzDm6E/w-d-xo.html Fun fact: that Voynich fellow, after whom the Voynich Manuscript is named, was Polish and his surname was originally spelt Wojnicz. He changed the spelling after moving to Britain. Fun fact 2: the whole Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz scene was inspired by a novel that was later adapted into another cult classic Polish comedy - "C.K. Dezerterzy."
What gets me is that he didn't even bother to explain the origin of the word "pidgin" in a video about linguistics! "Pidgin" probably originated from a Chinese attempt at a shortened pronunciation of the phrase "business-language" ("bizin").Instead he keeps showing a picture of a pigeon. Oh well.
What you're describing in the "English is a pidgin" is actually English as a "lingua Franca", trade language, or "Common" from roleplaying contexts - the language that everyone in a diverse population speaks when speaking to people outside their community, while keeping their mother language only for their own people.
A lot of the words you used as examples of 和製英語 (wasei eigo) at around 1:05:00 are actually just 外来語 (gairaigo) or loan words. Wasei-eigo, or "Japan-derived English" refers specifically to words and phrases specific to Japan that use English as a base. アメリカンドッグ (Amerikan doggu) is Wasei eigo because no one calls a corn dog an American dog outside of Japan スケートボード (Sukeetoboodo) is not because it's just a Japanese transliteration of the word Skateboard. パワハラ (pawa hara) is a good one. "Power-harassment" is when you abuse your authority over someone as their boss/parent, etc.
We want Sociology, Economics, Psychology & Art-history icebergs too. You're the only one on TH-cam who gives me hope on these. Please do them. Would be immensely appreciated by me and certainly by the rest on TH-cam, like the Philosophy & Linguistics icebergs were ♥
Duncan good job on your videos man, the amount of work you put on them is crazy this are lectures my friend, I can firmly say that you are about to take off!!
Three incredible things about Piraha you didn't mention: -They don't have connectives. They connect different phrases. Phrases are connected by context. Everything I said is a rough emulation of how Piraha speak. -They use the same words to describe relevance, distance or time. A distant place can be somewhere that no longer exists, that doesn't matter or is far away. -They have a whole vocabulary that allows them to speak while eating and another to communicate with whistles, so they can communicate while hunting.
You forgot to mention this is important because it flies in the face of Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis. I think this is the reason why pirahã is in this iceberg.
This video is staggeringly fascinating. I've been watching, pausing to make lengthy cross references and investigate topics more deeply, then returning here and watching more. I had no idea when I started that I would be immersed in these things for 5.5 hours.
I don't know if someone has already written it or not, but actually there are some sentences that have meaning in two languages but it is completly different depending on the language you read the sentence with. In Italian for example the sentence "I vitelli dei Romani sono belli" means "Romans' calves are beautiful", but the same sentence in Latin means "Go, o Vitellius, at the war signal of the Roman god". I find it pretty interesting and also a bit strange considering how similar Italian and Latin should be. I don't know if there are similar sentences in other languages though.
The thing with Latin as we know and teach it now is that it was slightly changed from the "original" Latin. So actually, if we were to compare Italian and the "original" Latin, there would be less similarities. And we also don't really know what it sounded like, but it is believed it sounded more like a "crude" Romanian.
The meaning of words often change over time. The linguistic term for this phenomena is 'semantic drift'. Italian has had a long time to drift away from Latin. For example the word we know as 'silly' meant 'Holy' in 14th century English. It was related to the to the Germán word selig, which meant 'blessed ' or 'holy' back in the time, but now usually means happy in 21st century German.
I think your Italian/Roman exampole is bogus. Somebody's having you on. Doesn't the sentence have both meanings in both languages depending on how you punctuate it vocally?
just graduated with a BA in Linguistics and Anthropology, and i’m starting a MA in Applied Ling in the fall. this video was SO interesting, i’d heard of some of these in class but i have so many more rabbit holes and research ideas now!
the section of untranslatable words was really eye opening about how we accidentally make other parts of the world way more exotic than they actually are through their language only. Super super reflective, thank you Duncan edit - sept 1, 2023: i appreciate yall and the discussion in the replies, i’m not much of a linguist but cultural priorities and values DO shine through in language, sorry to give this page too much credit for a concept i didn’t fully understand :)
It's simply wrong, though. It wildly mischaracterises Pullum's response. Pullum's response only addressed the idea that untranslatable words inherently say something about our priorities. He does not contest that untranslatable words exist in this response, nor that they _can_ reflect our priorities. For example, "seppuku" in Japanese comes with connotations that equivalents in other languages don't have. The priorities it indicates are no longer relevant, but it is still a word that exists in the way it does by virtue of Japanese culture of the past. And often, loan words reflect someone else's priorities. Take "Siesta". In English, it describes a foreign cultural phenomenon. To suggest that the existence of the word "siesta" in English says nothing about Mediterranean culture is patently absurd. But in Spanish, it mostly just means "nap". This way of borrowing words is incredibly common cross-linguistically. However, what we should be careful with is characteristing words/phrases like "fernweh", "umami" or "l'appel du vide" as saying something about the culture from which they originate. They very much do not. They're just fairly lyrical descriptions of the ideas they communicate, and/or just exotic by virtue of being foreign. Whatever the reason might be that we use them, it is certainly not because they describe a cultural phenomenon. How do you tell the difference? That's straight-forward: by actually looking at the culture in question. The words themselves however, are just words; which is all that Pullum's response really means. We should characterise words by the culture that uses them, not the other way around.
You can certainly always translate but sometimes it is particularly difficult to get all the meanings and tones into a compact package without having the whole context included.
Try translating "wea" from Chilean. I don't think it has a correct translation (you can use synonyms for specific contexts, but this word changes its meaning depending on the context)
So the real insight you can find in the "untranslatable" words is that words in different language rarely one on one translate; but that there's usually some slight nuance in meaning. Sure you can make it sound profound by overdiscribing the differences, but what you really need to know is that translating a sentence is a lot more an art than a mathematical function.
Pidgin. In college I had an Arab boyfriend and picked up conversational Arabic. His cousin was struggling to learn English, so my boyfriend asked me to help him. This guy just couldn't get it. But after a couple months spending so much time trying, we developed our own pidgin. No one could understand us! One example I remember was 'manager'. He didn't like his apartment manager, so that is what he said when he didn't like something. A woman he found unattractive was a manager. And so our conversations went. Mansour asked what the hell did I do to his cousin? The Arabs found it funny. The cousin went home, never to learn English.
''colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' 28:25 for some reason i was able to instantly extract meaning from this entrance, hearing it for the first time now. i assumed it meant, environmentally conscious ideas without substance or forethought are fantasized greatly but will never come to fruition, which frustrate people like hippies.
A note on "English is a pidgin," there's actually a third option: Before the Norman conquest, there was the Danelaw. During this time older Anglo-Saxons lived next to Danish newcomers, and their languages were a lot more similar than modern Danish and English. Although we have very little writing evidence of common speech at the time, the hypothesis goes that the two peoples, who shared a lot of vocabulary but slightly different inflections and grammar, simply dropped a lot of inflections to make communication easier, and that this is the reason why English remains a language that is incredibly light on inflection, even compared to its Germanic relatives. English would thus be a creole descended from this Dane-Anglo pidgin.
it's probably a pidgin in all ways it can be lol. On that same segment, Duncan says that "Against all odds, English with its wealth of exceptions, bizarre characteristics and frankly weird sound it has become the great equalizer". Well, I'd say it is precisely because of those characteristics. It is an amalgamation of multiple languages, resulting in various exceptions and weirdness, but it is also *very similar* to other languages (well, mostly European). Like in the "easy to learn" chart, there are languages like Portuguese, French, Spanish... as well as Dutch in tier 1. I'm Brazilian, and I think that starting from a strictly Portuguese baseline, Spanish and Italian would probably be a tier 0.3 compared to that chart, French 0.6 perhaps, while Dutch a tier 3. In other words, English brings it all together. You can also see it in the way English is much more respectful of word origins than Portuguese is (and probably other languages are). Loan words in Portuguese tend to be deformed to conform with our language, while English doesn't do that as much (well, modern br portuguese is more like English in this aspect, and words such as "layout" are generally used as-is, but sometimes I find it being deformed into "leiaute" in formal texts). The plural thing is an example, here we just use -s for everything, while in at least some cases English keeps the original way. Brazilians also conjugate imported verbs as a first conjugation Portuguese verb (-ar) (to hit becomes hitar), applying our grammar to foreign words. Meanwhile, English seems to have gotten rid of much of its original grammar, since it doesn't have much of the grammar Dutch or German present...When you think of the "pidgin" section of the video that describes how "pidgins" use words from both original languages while disregarding both languages grammar, it all fits.
Personally I found the most iconic example with regards to Japanese borrowing words from other language is the word karaoke. It is an English word adapted from Japanese, which itself is a combination of Japanese and borrowed English word abbriviated. The Japanese word is actually two words combined. Kara, a Japanese word meaning empty, and oke, an abbriviated form of ochestra. Put together, it means an empty ochestra, which is conceptually what karaoke is, someone singing along with an empty band playing music for them.
As a language sciences and linguistics master student who speaks four languages I'm familiar with most of these concepts, but I enjoyed watching this. Great job putting all that together. I hope you will make another video that encompasses all linguistics theories.
Another iceberg can be formed from the Chinese sentence "shi shi shi shi shi施氏食石狮". This sentence is written in Chinese characters and read in Mandarin Chinese. However, when read in Cantonese, it is sounds like "see sea sek sek see"; when read in Hokkien, it sounds like "see see jiak sik sai". when read in Hakka it sounds like “she shi sit sak su“. Cantonese, Hokkien (called Southern Min in the video, the part on "tea/chai"), Hakka and Mandarin are all varieties of Chinese. However, there's been a debate on what to call all those different types of Chinese varieties: are they "dialects" of Chinese or "language"? When we speak of "dialects" of a language, for example "dialects of English", it is understood that they are regional speech patterns of English (i.e. accents and pronunciations), however the differences do not impede the understanding between the speakers. Here's a further example: London Cockney, General London, Northern English, Scottish English, New York English, Philly English, Southern Appalachian, West Coast English, Standard Canadian English, General Australian English, NZ English are all dialects of English. An Aussie can understand a Californian, or a West Virginian's speech can be understood by a Scot with little to no problem etc. If we apply the same definition to regional speech across China, a problem soon becomes obvious. If you have a Mandarin speaker, Cantonese speaker, Hokkien speaker and Hakka speaker talk to each other using only their regional speech, they can't understand each other. Suppose all of them are well literate in written Chinese, there's a high change that they are able to exchange ideas using written words. Meaning that if they all write in Chinese, they can understand each other. Yet, this situation can only be possible if all of them write in Standard Chinese. If they write in their written regional varieties, i.e. a Cantonese speaker writes in written Cantonese; Hokkien speaker writes in written Hokkien; Hakka speaker writes in written Hakka, they may find exchanging ideas through text a bit difficult. That brings us to diglossia. The phenomenon where a language has a "high" and "low" type, that "high" is the standardised language which is mostly reserved for formal situations, which is generally understood by every speaker of that language. However, outside of the formal situations, a speaker of that language uses the "low" type to communicate with "low type" speakers of the same. Like all thing linguistics, not all "low types" are the same. "Low type" A speakers may not understand "low type" B speakers; if there's "low type" C speakers they may not understand "low type" A or "B". Besides Chinese, diglossia is also found in Arabic and Malay to name a few.
It's not that complicated, if we remove the political narrative then Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, and Hokkien are actually seperate languages within the Sinitic branch of Sino-Tibetan linguistically, in fact Hokkien is speculated to have split from Old Chinese whereas the rest such as Cantonese and Mandarin diverged after Middle Chinese, but Politics always skew things up to promote a united centralised state and try to undermine the spoken variaties of Chinese as a mere "dialects", it's sad but it's true.
And to add up to certain things, even certain Mandarin dialects aren't intelligible to each other, we're not talking about Hokkien vs Mandarin here, but ""Dialects"" within the Mandarin branch, some even classify Mandarin not as a unified language but seperate languages within the "Mandarin group", yeah it's confusing.
You don't have to go to Chinese for that. English is actually an exception, for having their dialects being so similar. In Germany we obviously all speak High German. But if someone who only speaks High German speaks to someone who only speaks Lower German (Plattdeutsch) He won't understand a thing. Same with people speaking Bavarian dialects. Its not just Accent and Pronounciation, its entirely different words, but still kinda the same language and same script. Kinda like you described with Chinese...
@@gtc239it’s not that simple either. even if you’re attempting to remove the political narrative (and i’d argue you can’t, given that language is inherently political), there’s still the question of how you’re defining dialect and language. regarding dialect alone, there seems to exist multiple meanings, eg. dialect as a pejorative, similarly to how you seem to be using it vs. dialect simply describing a particular form of spoken language
@@alwjpgI'd definitely argue against language being inherently political, but it would be useful to know your definition of political. Also the evaluative dimension of dialect i.e. dialect as a pejorative, is more connected to the broader speech act the word is embedded in rather than the word itself.
He made a bit of a bias pronunciation and I say this because if he were looking at a French phonemic chart, none of this would be out of the ordinary. It's only strange for him because he's pronouncing it from an English perspective. In French Oi = wa = s=z = eaux = o wazo. Des oiseaux. Des Wazo.
@@Ashley24306 French is mostly consistant with it's own rules of pronunciation - whereas english is a bit of a mishmash of rules and you kind of just need to brute force learn the individual words.
My high school Spanish teacher helped me understand masc/fem nouns by presenting them as arbitrary categories rather than logically consistent “boy and girl” nouns. So instead of “La barba” being a “girl noun” it was a “la” noun, in a catergory that “niña” and “mujer” also fell into
It doesn't help that English uses the same word for both grammatical gender and gender gender, because Victorians wanted a nicer way of talking about the sexes. Originally, "gender" just meant "type," as "species" did. Maybe there's an alternate universe where Romance languages separate genders roughly by species, and we talk about grammatical species.
In Norwegian there are three genders: masc/fem/neutral. (So also in German, Russian etc.) The Norwegian word "utepils" (pronounced "oo-teh-pils") was mentioned but wrongly written and pronounced. (Beer you drink outside, mostly in the summertime)
The last idea, sleep learning, was in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as "hypnopaedia". And the Welsh Native Americans figure tangentially in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Swiftly Tilting Planet". What a lovely trip down a literary and linguistic memory lane.
If you lucid dream, you can in fact learn in your sleep. There was a study done with a professional basketball player who would practice shooting while lucid dreaming and he actually got better due to that.
@@Nous520 I think Huxley meant it to be derived from the Greek "paideia", which is still rooted in "pais" or "paidos" (child), and pertains to child education.
@@JovanDacic yes it conjured the image of zombie citizens -having the freedoms and access to knowledge of a child. Big brother being the watchful eye of the Father State.
*Level 1* 0:34 Octopi 🐙 🐙 1:39 French Silent Letters 🇫🇷 2:20 Dearest Creature poem ✍🏻 3:11 Tower of Babel ☦️ 3:50 Duolingo 🦉🟩 5:07 Omlette Du Formage 🤓 5:41 Pig Latin 🐷 6:56 Hardest and Easiest Languages. 😫☺️ 8:25 American Monolingualism 🇺🇸 9:43 Cyrillic 🇷🇺 10:16 Quick Brown Fox 🦊 11:09 German Language 🇩🇪 12:23 Very Long German Words 🇩🇪 14:45 Wales gogogoch🏴 15:25 Ampersand “et” = & 16:17 Untranslatable words. 🇩🇪, 🇮🇪 18:38 Ghoti 19:14 Esperanto “one who hopes.” 21:18 Snow ❄️ 22:48 According to research.” 23:35 Click Consonants 24:23 Army & A Navy 24:53 Newspeak 📰🗞️🙈🙊 25:27 Rosetta Stone _Weird Sentences_ 26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi shi 28:16 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 29:27 Buffalo 8x 🦬 30:35 Gendered Articles 31:50 Code Switching 33:40 Boustrophedon 34:12 Saphir-Whorf 35:49 Perscriptivist/Descriptivist *Level 3* 37:28 The Great Vowel Shift 38:33 Bbutanese Passport 🇧🇹 41:27 Bear Taboo 43:59 Critical Period 👶 46:35 Toki Pona, breaking down complexity into simplicity. 47:49 This is a Wug. 49:11 Cockney Accent. 50:45 Piraha 52:37 Volapük 54:25 Red Porridge with Cream 54:44 Mele Kalikimaka 🎄⛪️ 55:44 Kiki and Bouba 57:58 Ye Old 59:04 Logland 59:44 Pidgens & Creoles *Level 4* 1:02:23 Silbo-Gomero 🇪🇸
It's funny how people tend to think other languages are more mystical than theirs because they don't have the outside perspective on their own language. I'm slightly bilingual with Japanese and there are some thoughts and ideas that are conveyed entirely differently depending on the language. Sometimes you need a whole long phrase in English to say something small in Japanese or vice versa.
I feel all languages have the same ideas. I can use "ser" and "estar" in English just fine using expressions like "looks like", but having those ideas baked into the grammar and used as a foundation rather than a byproduct confuses people.
Some language are short, some are long. My native language is polish and correct version of Polish mostly is much longer in giving the same information (correct as in not contaminated with English words and Abbreviations). Of course sometimes you can say more in one word, thanks to declination, but damn, it's hard to speak anything resembling polish in small number of short words in messages between people.
As a native swedish speaker I'm laughing so hard about the inclusion of the inhaling "yes" because it caught me completely off guard 😂 I can also confirm that it is 100% accurate and I'd literally never even thought of it as something interesting until you mentioned it. Now that I think of it there actually also is a "correct" way to do it, it's not just a random gasp for air. You use the word "jo" or "juu" (depending on where you're from) and not the word "ja". Also, as you make that "u" shape with your lips and inhale briefly, you tilt your head back. An important thing to remember is that you only tilt your head back for the same duration of time as when you inhale. If, however, you wanna respond with a long "yes", you can also nod as you're inhaling but again, this is only for as long as you're actually inhaling. I would also make it a slow nod that starts with tilting your head back, as opposed to the standard type of nodding where you start by tilting your head forward. There you go, master this and you're basically a native swedish speaker 😂😂
I was recently in rural Ireland (I'm Irish btw) and heard an Irish person doing this. I thought he had a health problem. Then I met another. So it's a thing here too but only with some people. I've heard maybe the Vikings brought it but not sure if proven
It's also a thing in french ! mostly used by parisians tho. there also is a "correct way" to use it, rather than saying "oui" youd do an inhaled "ouais" which is the french equivalent of "yep"
I’m native polish speaker and my boyfriend is swedish theres not a single diner without them trying to teach me correct way to inhale air to say yes haha
Wierdly enough this exists with yes in certain midwest states including upper peninsula michigan nortgern illinois and minnesota. You say yes softly while inhaling and nodding
I think the shades of blue thing applies to me. When I was a kid, I had the light blue ikea cup, and my brother had the blue one. That way, we wouldn’t drink from each other’s cups. I thought “lightblue” was its own color for a LONG time. Even now, I catch myself forgetting that blue includes light blue when people are talking about blue things.
The funny thing is that the word “blue” actually does mean what we call light blue. The word “indigo” means what we call dark blue, but most of us have forgotten seventh grade science class that explained the color spectrum… ROYGBIV! ; )
@@freneticness6927 His brother probably had an indigo-colored cup, but most English speakers wouldn’t know that. Let’s just use one word for two colors, instead!
@@jayhache5609 Well if you mix white with blue you get light blue. And indigo is more purple. Like how the seven colours of the rainbow were purple and indigo due to 6 being the devils number. And the ikea cap is actually light blue. But every shade and mixture has their own name but there are certain main ones. The 6 ones aswell as brown and black with brown being a kind of black. Which is why people with black hair are often described as having brown hair. But the light blonde is really just very light brown which becomes like yellow the pigment in the hair. Caritin in hair turns it red.
"Octopodes" actually sounds more 'correct' in my brain even in English, we should start using this. One use of Anglish is it's good for medieval English fantasy - similar to LotR, where use of Latin words feel more modern or American, while the use of Anglish words make it more " English countryside cozy/homey". Eg: Saying Headtown instead of Capital, or Forsitter instead of President.
As someone who speaks Finnish and English fluently, Swedish somewhat decently, and is learning Korean and just so happens to find languages absolutely fascinating, this is exactly the kind of stuff for me to be geeking over. Thank you!
@@FriendlyALB lol förlåt, jag är finsk så min svenska grammatik är väldigt dåligt 😅 Men du skrev 522, är det rätt? Och ja, jag minns inte vad jag gjorde den dagen, mest på grund av covid heh
@@FriendlyALB mhmm, vad sa jag 😅 No but seriously, I say I know Swedish somewhat decently because I understand perfectly fine, I just can't really produce it that fluently. I do apologize for any grammatical atrocities here lol
Hamburgers were not invented in Hamburg, but the practice of using ground beef as a meal center was known as "Hamburg steak" (changed to "Salisbury Steak" I think around WWI because, you know, Germany were the bad guys) and that's the dish that was imported from Hamburg (though it's unlikely that this was the first time a culture used ground beef). The "Hamburger" was a sandwich made with this "Hamburg Steak" and was created first in Wisconsin.
Just a comment about marmelada for the record. In portuguese we usualy put "ada" in the end of a fruit name to represent a jam or conserved fruit in sugar. So we have "Goiabada" from "Goiaba" (Guava in english), Bananada for bananas or "Marmelada" for "Marmelo" (Quince in english). The ending "ada" also have the meaning of an action executed, or a hit that was blown. So maybe it was refering to the act of smashing those fruits to make the jams. Also, mildly infuriated by adding Brasil in the lisp/no lisp map of spanish speaking countries.
not sure what map you're talking about. I've watched the ceceo portion 5 times tryna find it and I can't. are you talking about the last map shown? in which case algeria and other African countries were shown too, and they don't speak spanish. 1:04:09 Brazil was just shown because that's where it's located geographically.
Now we know how Canada got its name - smashing those fruits! 🤣 But more seriously, did you know that Canada used to be spelt with only three letters? C, eh? N, eh? D, eh? 🤣 I’m here all week, folks. Try the veal! 😀
@@jayhache5609 the funny thing is... Veals gather in a MANADA (the Spanish word for pack/herd). Wolfs do as well. It's a more flexible word than English ones. We would use REBAÑO for herds of cattle, but wild herbivores gather in MANADAS :P 🦌
@@fL0p Thanks! Not sure if that makes it more or less flexible, though! 😁 FYI, veal is the food word for sheep, and the plural of wolf is wolves. Cheers!
A few years back I got hung up on the thought on what the plural of "Wombat" was (German) and i was too stubborn to just google it. So over the years I've asked people what they thought the correct plural was and I would throw in that it could be "Wombaten" and people would be second-guessing themselves, that it may be plausible that it, in fact, could be "Wombaten" or "Wombatten". When I felt cheeky, I would suggest "Wombatanten" or with English speakers "Wombatants". This video reminded me of the funny and extended discussions I had with people from all walks of life, friends and family to random strangers to job interviews. I now know that "Wombats" is correct in both English and German, though I still like to dabble in this topic from time to time, these friend-shaped creatures are just too adorable to pass up some funny 5 minutes. The small things in life :)
Actually I think the right form is "Womabte". "-s" is often wrongly used in German because people are used to the English plural. For example, the correct plural of "Park" in German is "Parke", not "Parks" as many people think. The same goes for "Test". The German plural is "Teste". But many people are used to the English plural "tests" and erroneously think "Tests" would also be the correct German form.
I find meme culture very interestingly different in Mandarin and English. English memes are generally very literal, such as "Everything is fine", "bombastic side eye" or it is just a new made up word such as "rizz". In stark comparison are the metaphorical chinese memes such as "Melon eating audience" (people watching a show or fight from the sidelines), "diving" (lurking in a chat", "big pig trotters" (men who are unreliable romatically). Even though I am a more fluent English speaker, I find myself funnier when I'm speaking Mandarin, whipping out all the internet meme metaphors.
@@m.ceniza4688 there’s a term referring big liars as big asshole coz the sound resembles each other: big liar is da-piàn-zi and big asshole in northeastern dialect is da-pì-yǎn-zi. And a video of a girl from northeastern China was complaining abt her cheating boyfriend using the dialect went viral, in the video she use big pig trotters (da-zhu-tí-zi) to rhyme with big asshole/big liar (da-pi-yǎn-zi). And soon the nations knows what to call a cheating guy.
This also touches on the philosophy of language. Language itself is a man made tool that we use to communicate, so of course it will be imperfect and have flaws. The butterfly I think of when reading or hearing the word will be different from the butterfly you think of. As long we’re thinking of all the essential qualities that constitute a butterfly, language has done it’s job.
Reminds of something I heard once, What if we all see different colors, but we labelled them in particular ways, hence we never realise? You see the green color, you say let's name it "blue". I see the color you called "blue", to me it looks red. Neither of us, so far, have named this color as green or red or anything yet. We both think, then agree with the name you mentioned, that it shall be called "blue" from now on. So, the color called "blue" will always look green to you, it will always look red to me. Yet we both named it as "blue". Hence whenever you say, hey pass me that "blue" paint, I will pass you the reddish looking paint. You will use it on the tree, as trees looked green to you. But to me, trees always looked red, so it's natural for me to paint it red. But remember, my red and your green is the one same color we named "blue". So even though we see and name it a certain way, this is the normality for us. We'll never know the truth.
facts. it doesnt happen that often to me anymore but one word that i always refer to as she is "praying mantis". in german its "die Gottesanbeterin" which translates to "god-worshipper" but the suffix "in" at the end makes it female
@@dinimueter9878 I remember, when I watched Kung Fu Panda for the first time, I initially thought Mantis was female ngl. Gottesanbeterin ist halt durch das -in einfach ein komplett weiblicher Tiername fsr
As a native Portuguese speaker I was always intrigued with color perspective through the languages. Apparently, "roxo" = purple, but we had the word "púrpura" too, but don't actually seems like the exactly same color. Also, "roxo" is kinda similar to "rojo", "rosso", "rouge" or "rosu" which means red in Spanish, Italian, French and Romanian respectively. Portuguese is the only Romantic Language that has "Vermelho" as a word for red, which is intriguing. Edit: yep, I understand that vermilion is red, I just accentuate the rojo/roxo thing
it's definitely a false friend for a language learner in the beginning. But it also makes sense that roxo became purple in portuguese to me. There are so many purple fruits and vegetables that are described as red, but they are obviously purple. There is red cabbage (which is purple) vs white cabbage (which is green). That always messed with my mind. Why don't we say purple cabbage and green cabbage. Sometimes they describe the red one as blue, too, here in my country. So they pick only on part of the real colour, because red and blue combined equals purple. It's just an assumption, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is part of the reason why roxo became purple in portuguese. Red cabbage is repolho roxo in portuguese, too if I remember correctly :)
Portuguese is not the only one, in catalan red is called "vermell". Also in Spanish there is the word "bermejo" which also means red and shares the same linguistic root of verme/berme/erme, which "vermell", "bermejo" and "vermelho" share
It is absolutely wild to have seen emoticon/emoji form and mix as it happened. I was in college learning Japanese, and Japanese had emoji before emoticons were commonly used in the US (emotes were primarily ASCII when Japanese already had emoji). I remember in the earlier years of emoji in Japan there also being a bit of a play on words joke of 絵文字 ("emoji") picture letters and エモ字 ("emoji") "emo" characters, like emoting characters. Granted, this joke may have primarily been in multilingual, Japanese as as second language circles. Edit: also curious how the Italian somatic expression for "eff you" ended up in Wisconsin. I totally have used and seen it used growing up, and have been confused since when folks didn't understand it elsewhere.
If you're referring to vaffanculo, that's a 100% italo-american expression. It would travel back to the Old World and end up being adopted by the Italy of "today", but it's as Italian as deep dish Chicago-style pizza. Just a 'cimarrón' (a Mustang horse, becoming wild again after being introduced in America) expression.
french has what i would like to call "loaded letters". those silent letters at the end of words are meant to be pronounced at the BEGINNING of the next word, so long as the next word starts with a vowel. moreover, to an american speaker, these letters SEEM useless, but to a french speaker, they DO impact how letters sound. some words may have a lot of "silent letters", but they are inadvertently impacting how the rest of the word is said. also "omelette du fromage" is also funny because it's grammatically incorrect. if you want to say "cheese omelette", you say "omelette au fromage"
I am learning to speak mandarin. I am not fluent, but I know quite a bit. I’ve actually heard and personally experienced that it gets easier as you know more. In a language like English or French you learn the basics than there are so many addition grammar rules or exceptions to rules. Mandarin is pretty consistent once you know many words you can begin to understand and learn words faster and the grammar is simple in my opinion.
Wasei eigo specifically refer to only the pseudo-anglicisms, not just any loanword taken from English to Japanese. The term translates as "Japanese-made English". "Amerikan doggu", "kanningu", "handoru kiipaa", and "rabuho" are such examples, but "koraboreeshon", "hanbaagaa", "hippu hoppu", and "kiiboodo" are not wasei eigo. Rule of thumb is that if the word originates from English but native English speakers can't derive the meaning even from knowing its etymon, then it's wasei eigo. Many Japanese people are surprised to know that a lot of the wasei eigo aren't used as such in English and won't recognize the actual English translations for them. One other note is that it's not just English that Japanese has pseudo-loans for. It also has wasei kango, for words taken from historical Chinese. These ones are basically compound words that look like they were regularly borrowed, but were actually first used in the Japanese language. In some cases, these compound words already existed in historical Chinese but now gained additional meanings in Japanese to represent modern concepts. And a lot of those wasei kango actually get adopted (loaned) into modern Chinese languages, Vietnamese, and Korean. CJKV words such as 世界 'world', 電話 'telephone', and 自然 'nature' owe their modern meanings to Japanese.
For those fellow vietnamese who don’t know hanzi/kanji, the examples are ‘thế giới’, ‘điện thoại’ and ‘tự nhiên’ respectively. Quite interesting how the sounds changed: diānhuà - denwa - denhwa - điện thoại. I think we Vietnamese are missing out a lot of the cultural connections to our East Asian folks due to not being taught hanzi (at least to a superficial reading level, the Korean are at least taught to recognize a few hundreds to thousands of hanja if memory serves me right)
Thank you, I was annoyed by this haha. Other examples of wasei eigo are things like ペーパードライバー ‘paper driver’ (a person who has a driver’s license but doesn’t in practice drive at all) and バイキング ‘Viking’ (buffet) Things like alcohol and hip hop and keyboard are just loanwords.
Actually, pseudo-Anglicisms are a bit different for the Japanese language. These are words that are mistaken to be from English since the vast majority of loanwords in the language come from English. For instance, アンケート (originating from French) for questionnaire and カルテ (originating from German) for medical chart. The overarching term that should be used to describe what this TH-camr is talking about is 外来語 (literally "words from abroad" but basically means "loanwords"). But you did accurately point out specific wasei-eigo (English made in Japan) and the others are merely 外来語. My favorite is パイプカット (pipe cut) which is actually a term used for vasectomy! Lol. I wrote a short piece in Japan Today about this very topic just last week: From English to Japanese: A word’s journey into another language.
I don't know how to explain it, but as a french speaker, it always seemed logical for me that OK or okay was a recent word. I never thought it was a mystery as its sounds really made it sound modern.
It comes for casualties count sign hanging at barracks from American Civil War. 0 K (0 kills) would be 0 casualties which would announce nobody had died that day or since deployment at where troops would be stationed.
5:45 in Finnish there was a "language" called "i-kieli" very popular among kids when I went to school. However it was not as complex as the one shown in the video: children just replaced every vowel in a word with the vowel "i".
26:36 To add context, at that time Chinese newspaper was still publishing in Classical Chinese. If you read aloud with modern Mandarin pronnciation, it become incomprehensible. But if you read the poem with Classical pronunciation, the words are recognizable. Some historians believe the poet wrote the words in opposition of using Classical Chinese in documents.
Fun fact about Volapük. The Danish saying for nonsense or "That is greek to me" is also "Volapyk". And it is not just a novelty example. Most Danes wouldn't know Volapük is/was a language, it is simply THE word for gibberish. Speaking of Rød grød med fløde as well, it is there for another reason as well. It is also THE one thing you will hear every Dane try to make a non-danish speaker say, since it's notoriously difficult.
Volapyk being an actual language is like a fun fact you tell people in Denmark. The word just somehow entered common language and stuck around, presumably because it sounds really silly in Danish so it's a perfect word for nonsense.
Greek is my second language and I've noticed some words evoke different imagery. For example the word Sky. When I hear that in English I imagine a clear blue sky but in Greek (ouranos) I get a more cloudy almost biblical image of the sky. Oh and how did you generate those Chomsky intros?. It's amazing how one can instantly recognise his voice just from a few words, even though it's not him actually speaking
Omg… I never realized this but sky often comes in my mind as dark blue-ish with stars but ‘céu/cielo’ I think about clouds sun and light blue. So cool!
Perhaps is duo to when we learn the language. I’m just thinking about more words and so far all the images in my mother tongues are more cheerful, but in English (that I started learning after 16) is more serious, mature, gloomy, realistic
I can relate to this and upon thinking about it - I can see my Greek school textbooks in my minds eye and learning the word ilios (sun) on a very bright colourful page of the day and the word ouranos being related to or closely related to uranus the planet and In Greek music the word ouranos as related to a love sick mood of loss and pain.
Also in addition to the pidgin languages, it is also spoken in a lot of West African countries, especially Pidgin-English with each country having definitive variations. I am Cameroonian and our version of pidgin is different from the pidgin commonly spoken in Nigeria. We can understand Nigerian pidgin, but they can't necessarily understand Cameroonian pidgin, although we are neighbours and it basically originates from the same language. A good number of our pidgin (Cameroon Pidgin-English) words and sentence structures can be dated back to the English phrases used by English colonisers which may not be heavily used today. With of course the influence of pronunciation alteration of these words. And because of this most of the English speaking Cameroonians were prohibited as kids from speaking pidgin especially at school, and sometimes at home. And for many people who do speak both Pidgin-English and English efficiently, I have noticed there is a significant change of tone in that while speaking pidgin, we become much more flippant, extroverted and playful which constrasts the formal structure of English usually learned. It has been an interesting way for me to analyse language patterns besides the more conventional ones spoken in our country such as English and French. Also as a linguistic nerd, I am deeply appreciative of videos like this and have been following your content for a while. Thank for doing the relevant research as I imagine it must take a long time to create these videos.
@@freneticness6927not necessarily, it has its own rules. In Nigerian Pidgin you would say “make we dey go” to say “let’s go”, if you said “make US dey go” that would be grammatically incorrect. Plus, like AAVE, we also use ‘the habitual be’: “E be like say….” which would mean “it’s like…”
A note about the Swedish “yes”. Ja is generally pronounced as “ya” with the “a” sound like the one from the English word “far”. In the dialect of Skåne, “ja” can sound identical to the English “yeah”. I sometimes use “yeah” when I’m speaking Swedish and some people have asked me if I am from Skåne because of it. You can find some people using the “hhhp” type of “yes” in other parts of Sweden if they come from the northern parts or as a joke. It seems pretty famous in Sweden and people generally understand what it means even if they don’t use it.
In skåne the ja sounds more like the German or Danish ja. In other parts it sounds like 'A' from the Swedish alphabet or just a more fuller rounder sound of the English 'O' as in 'yo' mama and at other times we drop the j completely and just say A (O).
Just to add to this. In the part where he discussed the word "Wolf" and used the Icelandic word "ulfur" he pronounced the "f" as "f" but the "f" should be pronounced like Swedish or Danish word for "Wolf", with a "v". This is almost always the case when "f" is included in a Icelandic word when the "f" is not in the beginning or end
The concept is wrong too. I think what it’s supposed to be referring to is inhalation when used in the context of “yes, continue, I am listening” (used in Icelandic too)
I love linguistics in terms of word play. Trying to make panagrams or a sentence or group of sentences that are as confusing as possible or have multiple meanings is always a fun exercise in creativity
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" could make sense. Colorless can be used (perhaps using a little poetic license) to mean indistinguishable, uninteresting, or generic. Green over the last 20 years has come to mean enviromental or eco-friendly. Sleep is frequently used to mean inactive or unused when applied to non-animate nouns. So the sentence could mean 'a bland environmental idea will be ignored for flashier ones, even if it's a potent one'
I was thinking something similar. Semantic flexibility of language is funny, and ironically, "colorful" language seems to further that. Pairing nouns with verbs that don't mix is a good way of evoking readers' imaginations. Using the phrase "singing hands" in a piece of poetry could call to mind many things, like jazz-hands, or that numb, buzzing feeling you get from being out in the cold for too long. I don't know much about the technical terms in linguistics, so I couldn't put a name to this phenomenon, but I quite like it and think about it often while writing.
@@iamnothale chill bro it's just a video about linguistics from a guy who idolizes noam chomsky, umberto eco, and the likes... Watches TED talks and calls what he does "tomfoolery" but only when Joe Rogan does it. He clearly comes from philosophy, having no clue about linguistics.This video is bad taste joke, and a waste of time for a lot of viewers. Clickbait and a lot of deception. Moral of the story: keep the ball in your court, bro. And stay there, being an old-dick forever. And stop pretending.
As someone who lived in Germany for a long time, I don't believe that the "Antibabypillen" from Google translate is actually used very much. "Empfangnisverhütung" is a lot more common, at least in the region where I live. It means something like "protection against catching something", so it is admittedly funny too. Also, in Germany, "Sonntagsleere" takes on a completely different meaning, because almost everything is closed, and most people don't go to church anymore. It's a level of boredom that is difficult to comprehend.
Empfangnisverhütung literally means conception prevention. It is a much broader term, which also includes condoms and the like. And as the other native speaker said: It's usually "die Pille" or "Verhütung", if the general context is clear.
I have been living in Germany for four years now (having studied the language for twelve years prior), and never in my life have I heard the word "Empfängnisverhütung" 😂 As mentioned by Tom, "die Pille" is what I've heard most people refer to it.
4:22 : "Generally, when you teach people a second languages, you actually show them the grammatical structure first, before jumping into examples and tests so that the learner does not have to magically figure it out through trial and error". I COULD NOT DISAGREE MORE! AND I AM NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE APP DUOLINGO! I understand where this video is coming from, it is the classical way of teaching languages that believed to be true for centuries. However, if you follow the more recent studies, those all insist on "Acquiring" the language rather than "Leaning" it. Even if someone chooses to disagree, we all met or heard about that guy who just "mingled" and "acquired" the language without any academic studies!
I think it really depends on the country and even where you're learning within that country. Some countries have a very 'learn through acquisition at all costs' ethos and others still follow the 'amass all grammatical knowledge before you even attempt a sentence' approach. (Schools in Ireland are notorious for teaching Irish as a second language this way and it is... not good.) Best modern practice seems to be a combination of teaching grammar and other aspects of practical language use and immediately getting students to use it while also encouraging immersion in material you don't understand all of yet because it'll help you solidify what you know and pick up new stuff.
16:45 It should be “utepils” not “utepsils”. It directly translates to “outside pilsner”. In Norway, instead of asking people if they wanna grab a beer/pint, it is more common to ask if they wanna grab a pilsner. “Utepils” refers to drinking pilsner outside on a sunny summer day, often outside a bar/café. I think what makes it such a special moment for us is a mixture of the fact that we don’t get that many nice summer days a year, and that buying alcohol at bars/cafés is extremely expensive here, so we usually only drink at home. These two factors makes the experience of an “utepils” an idyllic moment for us.
I’m Finland we have something similar called “pussikalja” which literally translates to “bag-beer”. That is, the process of buying beer, putting it in a plastic bag, and subsequently enjoying the outdoors while periodically taking drinks from out of the plastic bag and enjoying them. :) It should be mentioned that in the case of pussikalja, the connotations can oftentimes be negative due to this activity being a popular pastime of rowdy teenagers and unemployed adults with alcohol problems.
In German you have "Wegbier" (way beer), the beer you drink on the walk to your destination, often a party or similiar event. Maybe it was shortly a pussikalja and as you walk outside it's definitly a utepils too :D
I feel like one could ascribe meaning to "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" quite easily. Colorless - for all people green ideas - ideas about climate change sleep furiously - lie dormant but with high tension or alternatively, the green ideas are not being implemented and are causing frustration and anger. If I would write an article about climate activists being frustrated about broken promises from politicians I would title it that! Great video!
as a non-native English speaker (I'm from Poland) 1st tier was more obscure since it's so heavily English based. It just showed me how context based language and linguistics are... It's really odd to know more from 2nd tier 😅
I feel personally attacked... In polish "bear" is NIEDŹWIEDŹ and Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz is exclusively polish. It comes from awesome movie series "How I unleashed World war II"
seeing that this video is so well done and seems to be well researched, i did not expect the pronunciation of “saudade” to be so off, i almost didn’t recognize it as portuguese even though its my native language
The fear of bears in slavic languages reminds me of another similarity: slavic languages use the same type of "voldemort" descriptive names for mushrooms, and it is hypothesized that people believed that calling mushrooms by their proper name would make them poisonous (or something in that vein). So the theory is very plausible that there was some fear of naming dangerous things in old slavic tribes.
When I first started learning English, as a brazilian portuguese speaker, I felt horrified that there's no literal translation to "saudade". Bcause for us is such a common word for such a basic and essential feeling
Homesick is a broad term, it doesn't have to be specifically tied to a place. One can be homesick for a person, a time, a feeling they no longer feel or an object I can feel homesick for my couch, it is a "place" but if that couch were moved to a different place, I could feel as much relief from the feeling of homesickness, by sitting on it. It's more about a feeling of absence that is relieved by presence
I always thought this was a silly non-question/myth because to me the words "longing" and "miss" (as in "i miss the holidays!") conveyed perfectly well what saudade means/invokes... unless we're talking about class-exclusive words as both of those english words are verbs whilst saudades is a noun...
Cyrillic fonts that are in latin are a bit weird because the letters that look like latin ones sound completely different. For example you showed Borat, but that "A" looking letter is actually a D, so it's Bordt 😅
As a Russian speaker, I heard about the bear thing from school. The most interesting thing was that we call a bear "med-ved" (honey-knower or something like that), but the place where the bear lives is called "ber-lo-ga" which resembles other languages' ber-sounding names
@@alenunya Я тоже скептически относилась, но если автор здесь упоминает, что что-то похожее происходит в целой группе языков, то, наверное, что-то в этом есть
@@vivi_vivi69 по фасмеру -ведь в медведе это тот кто ест, а не ведаед. а берлога риал прям и напрашивается "там где лежит бер", но по фасмеру это просто топкое\грязное место. может с бер есть зависимость грязь-кал-коричневый, но точно не использование табуистического "the brown one". прямая характеристика места короче, а не через того, кто в этом месте обитает. обожаю впрочем народную этимологию, сам грешу и это всегда кайфово!
@vivi_vivi69 ...I am Czech and the word bear in Czech is "medvěd" and the place they sleep or hibernate is called "brloha" ..... The word water is "voda" and I can go on and on. 😃 🥰We can understand each other when we speak❤
An interesting fact about Esperanto, is that even though it started as a conlang, this many years later there are now first generation native speakers of it that consider it their first language. So Esperanto is still going strong even if it's not /as/ wildly known or used today. It could still grow and become more well known in the future if we wanted to take that route linguistically. With there only being about 12 grammatical rules, most of the work is in memorizing vocab and then applying the 12 rules. It doesn't have grammatical structure such as like word order so that makes it a little easier to learn!
English doesnt really have word order either. I can say I walked to the beach or to the beach I walked. Or to the beach walked I. English has easier grammar but harder pronunciation than Spanish but easier pronunciation and harder grammar than mandarin.
@@freneticness6927 English does though, the general standard word order of English is Subject-Verb-Object with 4 levels of complexity of sentence structure: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. English is going to follow this word order just about every time barring some dialects that could have different rules. While you /can/ say things out of that order in English on purpose and get the point across, it isn't how people actually speak the language or how it's properly written in daily usage. Esperanto literally has no word order rules; it can be SOV, SVO, OSV, VOS, etc. It only has 16 total rules to learn its grammar and that's it. None of which mentions sentence structure. As a conlang, it's purpose was to bring all kinds of speakers together so the rules had to be very simple and conform at least a little to the speakers native language. They removed the word order to help make it easier to learn. All information that you need about the sentence is tacked on to the end or beginning of a root word. Everyone can use the word order of their native language but Esperanto vocab and its other grammar rules and you're still completely intelligible to another Esperanto speaker without breaking standards of grammar to do so. And while what you say about Spanish and Mandarin comparing to English may be true (idk those languages so I couldn't say for certain) even those have standard word orders; SVO for Spanish and Mandarin which then modify differently depending on their own grammar rules.
@@Koutouhara The fact remains that you can say words in english in most types of grammatical structure and still be understood. Because of the lack of spoken pronouns in latin languages it isnt really possibly because you could be talking about the object of the sentence and not the subject. Like I walked the dog changing to dog walked. In mandarin it seems possible to rearrange grammar fairly easily and they essentially dont bother learning grammar anyways as the pronunciation is way more important. But they still hae a common sentence structure because obviously you would. You can understand other sentence structures in english extremely easily without even thinking. But it is standardized so you know how to expect whats coming. Esperanto would have the same problem as english and the sentence structure would be standardized if anyone anywhere spoke the language with any frequency. Esperanto is just italian/ spanish with different grammar. It is less useful in daily life than elvish. Nothing of any value is written in it. It is barely a more simple language than english but also doesnt have the vocabulary, the literary heritage or global reach and history. In the uk grammar schools were made to teach you vocabulary and standardize grammar aswell for people who used random types of grammar which english allows in order to follow latin style sentence structure alot of the time. Thats why its pretty easy to learn english because you can say words with most types of grammar and most types of pronounciation and still be understood unlike in spanish and mandarin.
note on french people choosing english in school @ 1:45:42 - most don't really have a choice basically, in ~6th grade, you have an "Alive Language A" class, where you study a foreign language that you _technically_ chose, but it's more often than not english, because schools rarely have teachers capable of teaching other languages at an acceptable level for this class. also, when given the choice, parents tend to chose english, because it's seen as more useful than the other languages, especially professionally. though you also have the "Alive Language B" class, starting ~2 years later, where you have to chose another foreign language to study, the 2 you'd hear the most about being spanish and italian, sometimes german - though it's often seen as an elitist choice. you can also study local/regional languages, like provençal, and private schools sometimes offer options such as russian or japanese.
At 16:42 it should be "utepils", "psils" is not a Norwegian word. But you are otherwise correct in both the meaning of the word and that it is simply compound noun. Also @ 1:28:56 "papa" should be "pappa". Just some minor corrections, for a two hour long video I am impressed by the amount of research and how clearly you are able to explain the different topics.
Noooo mom I'm not doing drugs, I'm just watching a thoroughly researched and well put together video that demonstrates obscure and interesting facts about linguistics, presented in a trendy fashion employing the action of going down the icebergs to uncover progressively more niche entries while darkening the tone of narration, for the next 2 hours and 7 minutes
COCAINE COCAINE COCAINE MMMMMMMMM
but for real though i love watching shit like this while high
this but also doing drugs
I’m literally high rn
@@hello-rq8kf me high watching rn 😂
LEVEL 1
0:34 Octopi
1:39 French silent letters
2:17 Dearest Creature in creation
3:12 Tower of Babel
3:51 Duolingo
5:08 Omelette du fromage
5:42 Pig Latin
6:57 Hardest and Easiest language
8:26 American Monolingualism
9:44 Faux cyrillic
10:18 Quick brown fox
11:10 German is angry
12:24 Very long german words
LEVEL 2
15:20 Ampersand origin
16:17 "Untranslatable words"
18:39 Ghoti
19:15 Esperanto
21:19 100 words for snow
22:46 Aoccrding to rscheearch
23:35 Click consonants
24:21 Army and a navy
24:55 Newspeak
25:27 Rosetta Stone
26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi
27:07 Had had
28:12 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously
29:29 Buffalo buffalo
30:42 Gendered articles
31:46 Code-switching
33:39 Boustrophedon
34:10 Sapir-whorf
35:49 Descriptivism and Prescriptivism
LEVEL 3
37:26 Great vowel shift
38:30 Bhutanese passport
41:23 Bear taboo
43:23 Tea and cha
43:57 Critical period
44:48 Voynich Manuscript
46:34 Toki Pona
47:48 This is a wug
49:12 cockney rhyming slang
50:43 Pirahã
52:37 Volapük
53:42 Lorem ipsum origin
54:26 Rødgrød med fløde
54:39 Mele Kalikimaka
55:00 Grzegorz brz-
55:07 Hopi time
56:20 Kiki Bouba
57:58 Ye olde
59:02 Loglan
59:42 Pidgins and creoles
1:00:33 Folk etymologies
LEVEL 4
1:02:27 Silbo Gomero
1:03:09 Ceceo
1:04:15 Kurgan hypothesis
1:05:00 Wasei-Eigo
1:06:31 Schleicher's fable
1:06:57 Latin wolf taboo
1:08:21 Hreks deiuoskwe
1:08:52 Prisencolinensinainciusol
1:10:10 Migration theory
1:11:16 Russian blue
1:12:39 Dyeus Phter
1:13:30 Labov R
LEVEL 5
1:14:33 Foreign accent syndrome
1:16:00 Etymology of OK is unknown
1:17:07 Generative grammar
1:18:26 Koko gorilla
1:20:29 Mbabaram dog
1:21:21 Biang
1:22:12 Solresol
1:23:12 Singapore stone
1:24:51 Hlewagastiz holtijaz
1:26:05 Anglish
1:28:44 Universal Mom and Dad
1:30:04 Glossolalia
1:31:02 Dord
LEVEL 6
1:31:52 Ithkuil
1:34:45 Basque-Icelandic pidgin
1:36:21 Butterly refers to their poop
1:36:56 Seaphim glyph
1:37:38 Tsakonian
1:38:34 Proto World
1:39:47 Linear B
1:41:45 Innateness
1:44:13 English is a pidgin
LEVEL 7
1:46:11 Stoned Ape Theory
1:48:18 Sun Language
1:49:49 Edo Nyland
1:52:02 Italian gestures from romans
1:53:03 Curse of 39
1:54:37 Codex seraphinianus
1:56:06 Nicaraguan sign language
1:57:15 Zzxjoanw
1:58:04 Phaistos disc
2:00:08 Swedish yes sound
LEVEL 8
2:00:32 Indian welsh
2:02:56 Helicopter Hieroglyph
2:03:48 Katakana Hebrew
2:04:23 Proto-Indo-European 'Nine' and 'New'
2:04:48 Neanderthal Language
2:05:32 Learn languages while sleeping really works
bumping, veryy important
Thanks a lot
Very nice
Thanks for this list!!! ❤❤❤
bump
As a native Russian speaker, my mind was kinda blown up when I watched the "Russian Blue" entry. It kinda explains the struggle when I was first learning colors in English and trying to translate them into Russian. When I see something described as blue in English, I almost never have the idea if that color is the light blue shade or the darker shade, because of my perception of colours and how I grew up with it. Other than that, that was a really interesting iceberg.
This is legit in my top 10 most interesting video of all time. Great to see someone who learnt french in Canada! Cheers
what is the top 1-9?
I have to laugh. I live thirty miles from Ontario and often land on French Canadian radio as I am flipping through the dial. My father was even fluent in French. He had lived in France for several years. But I just can't wrap my head around not pronouncing many of the letters in French. 😅
So 1:12:06, the "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz", refers to an old polish comedy movie titled "how i started the second world war". In one scene the main character named "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz" is asked to indentify himself to a german officer who, obviously, struggles to write it down. Then he is asked to state where he lives to which he replies "chrząszczyrzewoszyce (the city), powiat łękołody (administrative unit)". The entire thing sounds like if you threw 10kg of aluminum foil down a staircase and a plausible polish name at the same time. the reaction of the german officer is pretty entertaining too, especially for a movie made in 1969. It pokes fun at the ridiculous pronunciation and an abundance of difficult and uncommon sounds in polish. The movie and the scene are cult classics in poland to this day (source: im polish)
one error: his actual name isn't grzegorz brzęczyszczykiewicz, he just made that up on the spot so germans won't get his real personal information. It was a tactic to confuse him and probably he also wanted to just annoy him XD
Im not polish, but I watched this film 10 years ago with some friends, and to this day we sometimes will just randomly say his name to each other.
Great film
I thought you were keysmashing that
This should be pinned!!
"especially for a movie made in 1969" movies had already been an entertaining and established medium for many decades at that point. Are you a 14 year old
The funniest language story I heard is when an older German couple couldn't have a child, so they adopted an orphan baby from China. They would then proceed to buy Chinese dictionaries and Chinese and German schoolbooks. When asked why they did this, they replied that they wanted to be able to communicate with the baby, once it started speaking.
Strongly doubt that really happened, but would be very funny if it did
@@Sir_TophamHatt Yeah I'm not sure either, I just heard about it. But some people are more than capable to do something stupid I'm sure.
I am Slavic, but I am a native English speaker. Once I started learning about my people's languages, the more I realized how crippling a language English can be to other people's and their ability to communicate. I suspect there's a link between neurological trends in ethnicities and the development of language. Maybe a Chinese baby would not speak Chinese, but maybe that baby would be better served to learn it.
@@vrillionaire88 interesting theory. I know many ethnic Chinese people that grew up in Europe, they learn Chinese usually just as fast as anybody else.
@@coconuthead4923 I have an exceedingly high level grasp of my language. Languages are built on archetypes, not merely found in culture but seem to be environmental adaptations, components of which make their way into grammatical structure, etymology, and even letters themselves. There seems to be some cause for belief that the PIE derived languages have similar enough archetypes that translation isn't a burden, but not all languages come from PIE, and slavic languages diverged from the germanic languages so far back that slavs named Germans mute/unintelligible. The components that make slavic languages so different from other IE languages do not stop at the words, but leave remnants in the mind for many generations.
It might interest you to know that the largely Germanic descended people of the US respond most to Germanic derived words, and is so validated through study and application to be a primary focus of politicians in their speeches.
About the Voynich manuscript my personal hypotesis is that it was one of the earliest exemples of a nerd doing worldbuilding. Created a entire new language with its own script and the manuscript is basically worldbuilding hence the non existing plants.
I agree
Yeah definitely
Yeah
That actually makes a lot of sense.
Brilliant, original and insightful conclusion.
"Octopussies" is also acceptable
why
Pussy3s
Eightpussies?
Lmao you're a simp
@@pavelborisov515 yes
Biang is also a very unique Chinese character that is almost meme-worthy in my opinion. Biang is a made up character. Yes technically all words and characters are "made up" but Biang is especially so. It's not really even a real official Chinese character. It is not possible to type it out on many digital devices, and its not included in most modern dictionaries either.
For most of the Chinese language, one singular pronunciation can correspond to dozens of characters (涯/牙/芽 are all pronounced "ya" and with the same tone), but there is only one word in the entire Chinese language that is pronounced Biang. Also, most Chinese characters also have multiple meanings depending on the context and what other characters they are paired with, but Biang has one and ONLY one meaning, that is Biang Biang Noodles.
And and and, the structure of Biang as a Chinese character doesn't even make sense! If you know Chinese you would know that each character is made up of multiple components that hint towards either the meaning or pronunciation of the character. Biang has tons of components, none of which allude to its meaning as a type of noodle nor as an onomatopoeia. Food usually has the component 饣(飠), or 口 for a sound word. Biang has neither of those. There are explanations trying to reason the structure of the character as an allusion to a person selling goods out of a cart but I personally feel like that's a bit far fetched.
What I am trying to say is that Biang is a highly artificial character that has absolutely no buisness being so complex. My headcanon is that Biang was created as a marketing strategy by noodle sellers back in the olden days, it was purposely made to look as complicated as it is to draw attention to it and be memorable. According to this Biang would have most likely been created by merchants rather than educated scholars hence why it does not make a lot of sense linguistically. But it achieved its goal and sure is an unforgettable symbol of good food!
(If anyone was curious, the Biang Biang noodle is a very wide chewy type of noodle made from wheat with spicy seasoning on top, its pretty good!)
Big Biang theory
I'd say it was created to look like what a long noodle or even a pile of noodles would look like if you threw them at a wall and interpreted whatever stuck as a glyph (sorry, can't recall the Chinese word equivalent, and I'm on mobile).
@@kingarthurthethirdthst3804 Big Brain comment
Wildest thing i have read , i speak japanese so it always difficult to explain how some kanji have over 15 ways of reading both japanese and chinese (音読み、訓読み)yet there is some kanji with only one way of reading , and there is also unused kanji so everyone use the hiragana form instead , or that there are many ways to write a word like "mind" since plenty of kanji have reference to it , yet the use varies in the context , i do want to learn mandarin or standard chinese eventually
How do you type Chinese characters on digital devices? Surely there are to many characters to fit on a keyboard or phone
13:02 I hate to be the akshully 🤓👆guy, but actually German words can be infinitely long, because you can simply come up with new correct words by combining nouns as long as the new word makes sense. The same is true for Dutch, a language closely related to German. It’s just that “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz” is the longest word in German dictionaries.
A typical Dutch word is kattenbakkorreltjesfabrieksterreinverlichtingschakelbordenverkoperaktentasontwerpersopleidingsinstituutsdirecteursalarisonderhandelingsgesprekpartners.
@@ronald3836what
@@ronald3836 😧😬🤣 English translation, please? ))
@@Borimira I can't translate it, but it seems to be similar to how english allows word-creation-dash-using-multiword-words-with-no-end-in-sight-on-and-on-forever
@@Borimira It's a job description.
Idk why, but calling a bear “the brown one,” seems infinitely more terrifying then just having an actual word for it
you can think of it more as "Brownie" instead
@@paulkanjaThe horror. The horror
@@paulkanjahell om earth
"Fear of a name increases fear of a thing itself."
racist
11:10
Here in Turkey, German is often seen as seductive. The reason why is probably because while we barely learn about WWII in schools, especially before the internet, German adult movies were very popular in Turkey
What a terrible fate.
@@venga3Banished to the German dirty talk porn realm for eternity
German is so pretty its like French especially the r's and non umlaut vowel sounds but more cute and less sexy sounding. Media has totally corrupted peoples perception of German in the west. I think its conditioning because when I hear German I don't think of aggression. I think of like romantic poems, magical princess fairytales and medieval castles.
Most of you're examples at 1:05:15 are not actually wasei-eigo but are instead the more general gairaigo (or loanwords), which is why we can understand their meaning when translated or spoken. Things like alcohol [arukooru] are only different because Japanese phonetics doesn't have such equivalents for things that include [L] sounds or consonate clusters. Japanese is more of a syllabic type of language. The way it forms syllables, or mora, are also different from English; since all of them end in a vowel except for ん [n]. Thus, Japanese can only get close approximations for gairaigo for it to be physically and comfortably said in Japanese. Many Japanese people can't even hear the difference between [R] and [L] if asked about it.
Collaboration [koraboreeshion], hamburger [hanbaagaa], hip-hop [hippuhoppu], keyboard [kiiboodoo], skateboard [sukeetoboodoo], Twitter [tsuittaa], and more that you mentioned are all said this way because of the reasons I mentioned previously, but regardless, are all still /understood/ to mean the same thing in BOTH languages when used.
_________
Wasei-eigo however is when gairaigo is taken a step further - when a word from English is used to mean something different in Japanese from what it would originally be understood as in English. Quote "[They] are Japanese-language expressions based on English words, or parts of word combinations, that do not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived." and "Wasei-eigo words [are] compound words and portmanteaus are constructed by Japanese speakers on the basis of loanwords derived from English and embedded into the Japanese lexicon with refashioned, novel meanings diverging significantly from the originals."
For example, if I were planning to go somewhere with a friend and I said "I'll be the handle keeper" to them in English, they wouldn't know what I meant. Why would I be keeping or watching over a handle? In Japanese ハンドルキーパー [handorukiipaa] is indeed the wasei-eigo that they use for what we would call a "designated driver" and a "handle" is a "steering wheel" but that isn't how we use those words in English.
Another one would be スキンシップ [sukinshippu] "skinship" (portmanteau of "skin" and "kinship") - this is when you're physically affectionate with close friends and family like hugging one another or a parents holding their baby skin-to-skin after it's born. We just call this being affectionate but if someone asked for or talked about "skinship" to you in English it would normally sound weird. Although, this is the fun part about wasei-eigo, is that after this one caught on and became more popular online, it has actually been used in English now and then for the meaning of skin-to-skin contact with another. English has borrowed wasei-eigo words that look English but are entirely novel to Japanese.
oof, awesome comment, thank you for the effort you've put in
@@seredachan thank you for reading 🙏🏽
I'm Japanese-American, so I know about nuance in both languages; though admittedly my Japanese could use more work in general 😅
My thoughts exactly, thanks for bringing this up. Most of examples given under this entry are indeed garaigo. Real wasei-eigo is way more interesting. It makes me wander if there are similar cases in other languages. I feel like there must be.
マンション for apartment buildings was the one I came across first. Confusing because it's in the same area, but not quite right. アルバイト is similar, confusing for an English speaker until you remember that load words can come from other languages, and also doesn't quite mean what it means in German.
I wonder if "Viking Lunch" (buffet-style meal) is wasei-eigo too? It always tickled me to see it advertised in Tokyo.
The "taboo bear" thing is literally to avoid attracting the attention of bears. Apparently in Yellowstone the bears have learned the English word "bear" and tend to move towards the source of the sound since it usually means an easy source of food. Thus, we may soon need new euphemisms for both our safety and theirs.
That was an oval; it has to be a circle!
Ohh, neat! While we can’t say for certain this is specifically why they did, I’d say it’s entirely reasonable and a probable component. I do know also that bears have religious/spiritual significance for some folks in the broader geographic area (like in Perm region iirc? I’m not sure distinction of Perm, Permian, and Perm-Krai without looking them up, apologies if ‘Perm region’ is incorrect/nonsensical). And there’s even archaeological evidence of (long extinct) cave bears having spiritual significance, too.
"Furry Tank"
I'll take my noble prize in a pastel funko pop shape 😉
time to reinvent the word bear
give me a source for that brother
Props in making a 2 hour video not only informative, but also entertaining. Keep up the good stuff!
but especially informative! I was unsure at first, sometimes people don't explain the stuff on the iceberg very well. he doesn't seem to be someone who was exposed to too much culture and language from all over the world and mostly confined in USA (example: for me as someone speaking German I'm not sure if he can't pronounce the "r" in "Bär" or why he said it almost exactly like the English "bear") but he's doing a really good job (much better than if I did probably, anyway)
honestly it’s kinda of misinformation considering all words/languages he gives examples of aren’t pronounced correctly😭
2 hour video with mistakes already in the first 5 minutes. Rather seems like the concepts talked about are not really thought through, just compiled in their most popular forms no matter how (in)correct they are.
@@kekekessa Can I ask what exactly is wrong? Whether it be at the beginning or anywhere else, genuinely curious
@@hhoopplaa Hi, I stopped watching at the American monolingualism part, but some notes before that: French is definitely not the only language with silent letters, i.e. English has plenty of those as well. Omelette du fromage does not mean cheese omelette, instead omelette au fromage does. The hardest and easiest languages is heavily toward native English speakers, and setting an amount of weeks for learning them is sketchy at best, it takes years to master any language depending on study time, environment and learning capabilities. Sure, the video would probably be double the length if he discussed these items thoroughly but wouldn't that kind of be the point :)
Just a quick note on Ceceo. Ceceo doesn't refer to pronouncing the "z" and "c" as th sounds, as this is the standard pronunciation for these letters in Spain. There are two different phenomena occurring typically in the south of Spain. Ceceo is when the "s" is pronounced as the th sound in English and Seseo which is when "z" and "c" are pronounced as "s". Since in Andalusia most people have Seseo, that is the variety of Spanish that was brought to Latinamerica.
1:18:26 one of the most obvious criticisms of the koko gorilla experiment is that none of her handlers could actually speak ASL fluently. there's a really insightful article about a fluent ASL speaker who saw koko and it explains how koko's hand signs were often incorrect or vague but her handlers would interpret them as valid anyway. and it also talks about how koko never actually used ASL unprompted. she would use it when answering questions and interacting with trainers, but she wouldn't use it to communicate something she thought of the way a human would.
Literally screwed up their 'experiment', the funny thing is there are other experiments of apes actually successfully using ASL (though not to the extent of what koko was claimed to use obviously)
Koko's advocate/main handler also constantly dressed her achievements up. I'd call her Koko's enabler but Koko wasn't really doing anything wrong so it doesn't quite fit...
Koko signing "water bird" was Koko making up a compound word for waterfowl, not Koko making two circumstantially relevant separate signs for water and a bird that happened to be in the water.
Koko signing incorrectly in response to prompts was Koko lying or joking, or getting confused between signs whose spoken English equivalents happen to *sound* similar.
@accelerationquanta5816What are you adding to the conversation, here?
@accelerationquanta5816🤔
@@LordMarcus Demonstrating why breakfast cereals can't keep a job
Rød grød med fløde is something danish people ask non natives to say, since it uses pretty much all of danishes effed up phonemes resulting in the danes laughing at their poor german friends.
Ahh... a Shibboleth it is
Det bløde D er alle andres nedgang xD
@@mittenielsen8424that is like English mixed with German: “er” like “are” and “blød” like “blithe” in English, everything else is like German: “das (dat in dialect) ”, “Niedergang”, “andere”
Röd grode med flode? 😂
I'm a German who dabbles in learning northern Germanic languages and I must say danish in general and the nasal swedish i in words like "bli" are really hard for me to learn.
The census also doesn't necessarily cover a circumstance like a Spanish professor I had. Her father was a first gen. Mexican immigrant who had met his wife while serving in West Germany. Their common language was English, so their children mostly spoke English at home and school, but learned German from their mother and Mexican Spanish from their father. Neither parent ever learned the others' native language with any fluency.
Your native language also dictates your aptitude to other languages. German, english, spanish are relatively similar, they share letters vocabulary words, and the way ideas are presented arent alien to one anorher, but if an english speaker were to learn chinese it would need a structured learning method. My mother is chinese and speaks 4 dialects, but i never picked up fluency until i studied it in school. Some languages are just plain harder to learn than others
Eh… in this case the census would cover it. “Does this person speak a language other than English at home?” Yes. All of them do, but slightly different language sets, which is then indicated on the census.
Your meme selection and jokes are S tier! Can't wait for another long format video from you!
I love how the comment section feels like additional content, like a bonus feature on a dvd. 😅 Thank you to all who have gone in depth on topics from the video, added info or given further insight or different perspectives. I am fascinated and have learned a lot!
Haha... It for sure is like further documentation
I watched 10-20 min of this video every night before bed for a few weeks now, and it has been such a cozy journey. So interesting and also well edited with funny memes here and there, thank you!! On to the next one :)
BHUTANESE PASSPORT
You missed the absolutely best (and most metal) pangram, "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!"
Sounds like something Kratos would yell angrily in Egypt.
I was thinking the same thing! I love that one. It's smaller, right?
This sounds like some yugi oh shit
@@burst1323probably reminds you of Solemn vow and Yu-Gi-Oh general Egyptian theming
Theres no y hows it a pangram
41:24 (Bear-stuff)
Well, this is quite interesting because we had a similar practice here in Finland in the not-so-distant past. For example there were beliefs that bears are related to humans or have been humans before or are half-human etc (because of some human-like mannerisms and stuff like that). Using the actual word for bear (karhu) was somewhat of a taboo so there was a bunch of different names and some of them are still sometimes used. I don't really know when this practice faded away but I have an ancestor who was the most accomplished bear hunter in Finland and the euphemisms were still used during his lifetime in the late 18th- early 19th century.
I’m gratified to find that fifty years after I majored in Linguistics, the principles I learned have withstood the test of time.
oyce lingwidge!
1:53:09 is this Loss??
@@tiyenin yes
@@tiyenin yes D:
Except that that’s not how languages are learned anymore.
55:00
While it's true that Grzegorz Brz(ęczyszczykiewicz) is a meme about how difficult it is to pronounce polish names the story behind it's origin is much more interesting. It originates from a cult classic polish movie "How I Unleashed World War II" where the main character is captured and interrogated by german officers. The movie is more than 50 years old but it legacy continues, and that scene along with many others became part of polish culture.
i heard of something that sounds like jabilski's star but it's spelled prz...etc. mind blown!
For native slavic speakers like myself, a Croat, it is super easy to pronounce but almost impossible to write down. I always thought that was the joke
@@Annathroy The real and hard to speak (for foreginers) and write (also for native poles) is last name "Gżegżółka". It is because is has two "ż" and "ó" letters, which occur sometimes as "rz" and "u". We have some spelling rules about these letters, but more often we write intuitively.
"Gżegżółka" is funny because in polish web-culture we have story about teenager who was arrested for laughing at a cop who didn't know how to spell it.
@@SinfulKaptur Idk, I'm also a croat and our writing-saying is 99.9% the same. I think when u learn how to read polish it's izi but, I'm not PL idk. Those names would be very izi to write when u hear them and to read if u know cro alphabet (Ečišćikijević - following ije rule and čć rule, and Gžegžolka- not south slavic but its a nice sounding)
Polish spelling might look confusing and intimidating for English speakers but is actually much more consistent than English spelling. Here's a video in which an Australian guy explains basically everything about both Czech and Polish spelling in just 10 minutes:
th-cam.com/video/roh14dzDm6E/w-d-xo.html
Fun fact: that Voynich fellow, after whom the Voynich Manuscript is named, was Polish and his surname was originally spelt Wojnicz. He changed the spelling after moving to Britain.
Fun fact 2: the whole Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz scene was inspired by a novel that was later adapted into another cult classic Polish comedy - "C.K. Dezerterzy."
Him using actual pigeons when saying pidgin, and transforming said pigeon into a different pigeon when pidgin is evolving always gets me.
What gets me is that he didn't even bother to explain the origin of the word "pidgin" in a video about linguistics! "Pidgin" probably originated from a Chinese attempt at a shortened pronunciation of the phrase "business-language" ("bizin").Instead he keeps showing a picture of a pigeon. Oh well.
What you're describing in the "English is a pidgin" is actually English as a "lingua Franca", trade language, or "Common" from roleplaying contexts - the language that everyone in a diverse population speaks when speaking to people outside their community, while keeping their mother language only for their own people.
A lot of the words you used as examples of 和製英語 (wasei eigo) at around 1:05:00 are actually just 外来語 (gairaigo) or loan words. Wasei-eigo, or "Japan-derived English" refers specifically to words and phrases specific to Japan that use English as a base.
アメリカンドッグ (Amerikan doggu) is Wasei eigo because no one calls a corn dog an American dog outside of Japan
スケートボード (Sukeetoboodo) is not because it's just a Japanese transliteration of the word Skateboard.
パワハラ (pawa hara) is a good one. "Power-harassment" is when you abuse your authority over someone as their boss/parent, etc.
someone needs to bring this up
@@benginaldclocker2891he technically did
and alcohol is an arabic word not english
@@aevstiel And of course the Japanese borrowed it directly from the Arabs, right? You twit.
@@aevstielnot really, we took the inspiration from it for sure but it’s not spelled the same nor does it have the same meaning
The Bhutanese passport one had me in stitches, and the way people responded to it was even funnier than the original sound recording.
Here is huge china mass. I love her
Changing it would be racist, but so would not changing it lol
@@Sir_TophamHatt The woke paradox.
BOUTANESE PASSPOOOooooo⁰⁰⁰°°rt
Honestly I think they should've asked a Bhutanese person or their king whether to keep it or not , lol .
We want Sociology, Economics, Psychology & Art-history icebergs too. You're the only one on TH-cam who gives me hope on these. Please do them. Would be immensely appreciated by me and certainly by the rest on TH-cam, like the Philosophy & Linguistics icebergs were ♥
But seems to be much work.
Yeah!
you just assigned this man enough work for his entire life
If you want the psychology iceberg, read Nietzsche and Carl Jung
You should watch wndigoon! The man is awesome and puts so much work into his content
Duncan good job on your videos man, the amount of work you put on them is crazy this are lectures my friend, I can firmly say that you are about to take off!!
Three incredible things about Piraha you didn't mention:
-They don't have connectives. They connect different phrases. Phrases are connected by context. Everything I said is a rough emulation of how Piraha speak.
-They use the same words to describe relevance, distance or time. A distant place can be somewhere that no longer exists, that doesn't matter or is far away.
-They have a whole vocabulary that allows them to speak while eating and another to communicate with whistles, so they can communicate while hunting.
pirahã
@@mito88grammar nazi
That's so cool. Thanks for sharing
You forgot to mention this is important because it flies in the face of Chomsky's universal grammar hypothesis.
I think this is the reason why pirahã is in this iceberg.
This video is staggeringly fascinating. I've been watching, pausing to make lengthy cross references and investigate topics more deeply, then returning here and watching more. I had no idea when I started that I would be immersed in these things for 5.5 hours.
I feel ya. I've had to poop for hours, but "I'll just watch one more".
😆👍@@dylanmeacham1043
ok
@@dylanmeacham1043 so based
Yeah for real
I don't know if someone has already written it or not, but actually there are some sentences that have meaning in two languages but it is completly different depending on the language you read the sentence with. In Italian for example the sentence "I vitelli dei Romani sono belli" means "Romans' calves are beautiful", but the same sentence in Latin means "Go, o Vitellius, at the war signal of the Roman god". I find it pretty interesting and also a bit strange considering how similar Italian and Latin should be. I don't know if there are similar sentences in other languages though.
ooh thats a great one
wow that's a fantastic example. thank you for sharing
The thing with Latin as we know and teach it now is that it was slightly changed from the "original" Latin. So actually, if we were to compare Italian and the "original" Latin, there would be less similarities. And we also don't really know what it sounded like, but it is believed it sounded more like a "crude" Romanian.
The meaning of words often change over time. The linguistic term for this phenomena is 'semantic drift'. Italian has had a long time to drift away from Latin.
For example the word we know as 'silly' meant 'Holy' in 14th century English. It was related to the to the Germán word selig, which meant 'blessed ' or 'holy' back in the time, but now usually means happy in 21st century German.
I think your Italian/Roman exampole is bogus. Somebody's having you on.
Doesn't the sentence have both meanings in both languages depending on how you punctuate it vocally?
just graduated with a BA in Linguistics and Anthropology, and i’m starting a MA in Applied Ling in the fall. this video was SO interesting, i’d heard of some of these in class but i have so many more rabbit holes and research ideas now!
the section of untranslatable words was really eye opening about how we accidentally make other parts of the world way more exotic than they actually are through their language only. Super super reflective, thank you Duncan
edit - sept 1, 2023: i appreciate yall and the discussion in the replies, i’m not much of a linguist but cultural priorities and values DO shine through in language, sorry to give this page too much credit for a concept i didn’t fully understand :)
It's simply wrong, though. It wildly mischaracterises Pullum's response.
Pullum's response only addressed the idea that untranslatable words inherently say something about our priorities. He does not contest that untranslatable words exist in this response, nor that they _can_ reflect our priorities.
For example, "seppuku" in Japanese comes with connotations that equivalents in other languages don't have. The priorities it indicates are no longer relevant, but it is still a word that exists in the way it does by virtue of Japanese culture of the past.
And often, loan words reflect someone else's priorities. Take "Siesta". In English, it describes a foreign cultural phenomenon. To suggest that the existence of the word "siesta" in English says nothing about Mediterranean culture is patently absurd. But in Spanish, it mostly just means "nap". This way of borrowing words is incredibly common cross-linguistically.
However, what we should be careful with is characteristing words/phrases like "fernweh", "umami" or "l'appel du vide" as saying something about the culture from which they originate. They very much do not. They're just fairly lyrical descriptions of the ideas they communicate, and/or just exotic by virtue of being foreign. Whatever the reason might be that we use them, it is certainly not because they describe a cultural phenomenon.
How do you tell the difference? That's straight-forward: by actually looking at the culture in question. The words themselves however, are just words; which is all that Pullum's response really means. We should characterise words by the culture that uses them, not the other way around.
You can certainly always translate but sometimes it is particularly difficult to get all the meanings and tones into a compact package without having the whole context included.
I'll bet the speakers of Piraha must have been blown away by the concept of counting things.
Try translating "wea" from Chilean. I don't think it has a correct translation (you can use synonyms for specific contexts, but this word changes its meaning depending on the context)
@@matiascorrea2545what do you mean man, Chilean isn’t even a language. If you mean you can’t translate slang, that’s another argument altogether.
So the real insight you can find in the "untranslatable" words is that words in different language rarely one on one translate; but that there's usually some slight nuance in meaning. Sure you can make it sound profound by overdiscribing the differences, but what you really need to know is that translating a sentence is a lot more an art than a mathematical function.
Doch
Pidgin. In college I had an Arab boyfriend and picked up conversational Arabic. His cousin was struggling to learn English, so my boyfriend asked me to help him. This guy just couldn't get it. But after a couple months spending so much time trying, we developed our own pidgin. No one could understand us! One example I remember was 'manager'. He didn't like his apartment manager, so that is what he said when he didn't like something. A woman he found unattractive was a manager. And so our conversations went. Mansour asked what the hell did I do to his cousin? The Arabs found it funny. The cousin went home, never to learn English.
Great story!🧑🎓
This is beautiful 😂
you fucked him up lol
You also accidentally developed your own inside jokes
What the hell 😭😭that is quite the experience dude
''colorless green ideas sleep furiously'' 28:25
for some reason i was able to instantly extract meaning from this entrance, hearing it for the first time now.
i assumed it meant, environmentally conscious ideas without substance or forethought are fantasized greatly but will never come to fruition, which frustrate people like hippies.
I guess no sentence can be semantically meaningless
I think that the idea of semantic meaninglessnes excludes metaphores or allegories, which otherwise give meaning to non existant words like xnopyt.
Good job - I got a bit of the same
whats your native language?
1:15:34 the phrase "brain damage" in the context of acquiring a "french" accent from an accident is hilarious for some reason
A note on "English is a pidgin," there's actually a third option:
Before the Norman conquest, there was the Danelaw. During this time older Anglo-Saxons lived next to Danish newcomers, and their languages were a lot more similar than modern Danish and English. Although we have very little writing evidence of common speech at the time, the hypothesis goes that the two peoples, who shared a lot of vocabulary but slightly different inflections and grammar, simply dropped a lot of inflections to make communication easier, and that this is the reason why English remains a language that is incredibly light on inflection, even compared to its Germanic relatives. English would thus be a creole descended from this Dane-Anglo pidgin.
Inglés es una lengua barbara de los salvajes
it's probably a pidgin in all ways it can be lol. On that same segment, Duncan says that "Against all odds, English with its wealth of exceptions, bizarre characteristics and frankly weird sound it has become the great equalizer". Well, I'd say it is precisely because of those characteristics. It is an amalgamation of multiple languages, resulting in various exceptions and weirdness, but it is also *very similar* to other languages (well, mostly European). Like in the "easy to learn" chart, there are languages like Portuguese, French, Spanish... as well as Dutch in tier 1. I'm Brazilian, and I think that starting from a strictly Portuguese baseline, Spanish and Italian would probably be a tier 0.3 compared to that chart, French 0.6 perhaps, while Dutch a tier 3. In other words, English brings it all together.
You can also see it in the way English is much more respectful of word origins than Portuguese is (and probably other languages are). Loan words in Portuguese tend to be deformed to conform with our language, while English doesn't do that as much (well, modern br portuguese is more like English in this aspect, and words such as "layout" are generally used as-is, but sometimes I find it being deformed into "leiaute" in formal texts). The plural thing is an example, here we just use -s for everything, while in at least some cases English keeps the original way. Brazilians also conjugate imported verbs as a first conjugation Portuguese verb (-ar) (to hit becomes hitar), applying our grammar to foreign words. Meanwhile, English seems to have gotten rid of much of its original grammar, since it doesn't have much of the grammar Dutch or German present...When you think of the "pidgin" section of the video that describes how "pidgins" use words from both original languages while disregarding both languages grammar, it all fits.
Personally I found the most iconic example with regards to Japanese borrowing words from other language is the word karaoke. It is an English word adapted from Japanese, which itself is a combination of Japanese and borrowed English word abbriviated. The Japanese word is actually two words combined. Kara, a Japanese word meaning empty, and oke, an abbriviated form of ochestra. Put together, it means an empty ochestra, which is conceptually what karaoke is, someone singing along with an empty band playing music for them.
do you live in boston
@@nenonone791do you live in Boston?
空 can also mean sky, as in 空色, meaning sky blue (lit. sky color)
As a language sciences and linguistics master student who speaks four languages I'm familiar with most of these concepts, but I enjoyed watching this. Great job putting all that together. I hope you will make another video that encompasses all linguistics theories.
Dang this was such a niche yet in depth iceberg video. This is probably one of the most interesting ones I've seen and I thoroughly enjoyed the watch!
Another iceberg can be formed from the Chinese sentence "shi shi shi shi shi施氏食石狮". This sentence is written in Chinese characters and read in Mandarin Chinese. However, when read in Cantonese, it is sounds like "see sea sek sek see"; when read in Hokkien, it sounds like "see see jiak sik sai". when read in Hakka it sounds like “she shi sit sak su“. Cantonese, Hokkien (called Southern Min in the video, the part on "tea/chai"), Hakka and Mandarin are all varieties of Chinese.
However, there's been a debate on what to call all those different types of Chinese varieties: are they "dialects" of Chinese or "language"? When we speak of "dialects" of a language, for example "dialects of English", it is understood that they are regional speech patterns of English (i.e. accents and pronunciations), however the differences do not impede the understanding between the speakers. Here's a further example: London Cockney, General London, Northern English, Scottish English, New York English, Philly English, Southern Appalachian, West Coast English, Standard Canadian English, General Australian English, NZ English are all dialects of English. An Aussie can understand a Californian, or a West Virginian's speech can be understood by a Scot with little to no problem etc.
If we apply the same definition to regional speech across China, a problem soon becomes obvious. If you have a Mandarin speaker, Cantonese speaker, Hokkien speaker and Hakka speaker talk to each other using only their regional speech, they can't understand each other. Suppose all of them are well literate in written Chinese, there's a high change that they are able to exchange ideas using written words. Meaning that if they all write in Chinese, they can understand each other. Yet, this situation can only be possible if all of them write in Standard Chinese. If they write in their written regional varieties, i.e. a Cantonese speaker writes in written Cantonese; Hokkien speaker writes in written Hokkien; Hakka speaker writes in written Hakka, they may find exchanging ideas through text a bit difficult.
That brings us to diglossia. The phenomenon where a language has a "high" and "low" type, that "high" is the standardised language which is mostly reserved for formal situations, which is generally understood by every speaker of that language. However, outside of the formal situations, a speaker of that language uses the "low" type to communicate with "low type" speakers of the same. Like all thing linguistics, not all "low types" are the same. "Low type" A speakers may not understand "low type" B speakers; if there's "low type" C speakers they may not understand "low type" A or "B". Besides Chinese, diglossia is also found in Arabic and Malay to name a few.
It's not that complicated, if we remove the political narrative then Mandarin, Hakka, Cantonese, and Hokkien are actually seperate languages within the Sinitic branch of Sino-Tibetan linguistically, in fact Hokkien is speculated to have split from Old Chinese whereas the rest such as Cantonese and Mandarin diverged after Middle Chinese, but Politics always skew things up to promote a united centralised state and try to undermine the spoken variaties of Chinese as a mere "dialects", it's sad but it's true.
And to add up to certain things, even certain Mandarin dialects aren't intelligible to each other, we're not talking about Hokkien vs Mandarin here, but ""Dialects"" within the Mandarin branch, some even classify Mandarin not as a unified language but seperate languages within the "Mandarin group", yeah it's confusing.
You don't have to go to Chinese for that. English is actually an exception, for having their dialects being so similar.
In Germany we obviously all speak High German. But if someone who only speaks High German speaks to someone who only speaks Lower German (Plattdeutsch) He won't understand a thing. Same with people speaking Bavarian dialects.
Its not just Accent and Pronounciation, its entirely different words, but still kinda the same language and same script. Kinda like you described with Chinese...
@@gtc239it’s not that simple either. even if you’re attempting to remove the political narrative (and i’d argue you can’t, given that language is inherently political), there’s still the question of how you’re defining dialect and language. regarding dialect alone, there seems to exist multiple meanings, eg. dialect as a pejorative, similarly to how you seem to be using it vs. dialect simply describing a particular form of spoken language
@@alwjpgI'd definitely argue against language being inherently political, but it would be useful to know your definition of political.
Also the evaluative dimension of dialect i.e. dialect as a pejorative, is more connected to the broader speech act the word is embedded in rather than the word itself.
As someone who did French for a few years at high school, oiseaux honestly looks to be spelt exactly how it sounds.
Exactly
I was thinking the same haha
Ikr
He made a bit of a bias pronunciation and I say this because if he were looking at a French phonemic chart, none of this would be out of the ordinary. It's only strange for him because he's pronouncing it from an English perspective. In French Oi = wa = s=z = eaux = o wazo. Des oiseaux. Des Wazo.
@@Ashley24306 French is mostly consistant with it's own rules of pronunciation - whereas english is a bit of a mishmash of rules and you kind of just need to brute force learn the individual words.
Thank yꙮu for this video. It’s so well-written, and it basically summarised what would have taken 2 years to learn into 2 hours
My high school Spanish teacher helped me understand masc/fem nouns by presenting them as arbitrary categories rather than logically consistent “boy and girl” nouns. So instead of “La barba” being a “girl noun” it was a “la” noun, in a catergory that “niña” and “mujer” also fell into
It doesn't help that English uses the same word for both grammatical gender and gender gender, because Victorians wanted a nicer way of talking about the sexes. Originally, "gender" just meant "type," as "species" did. Maybe there's an alternate universe where Romance languages separate genders roughly by species, and we talk about grammatical species.
and 'polla'
this kind of thinking has been essential for me in understanding turkish conjugations, especially since its not a gendered language
In Norwegian there are three genders: masc/fem/neutral. (So also in German, Russian etc.)
The Norwegian word "utepils" (pronounced "oo-teh-pils") was mentioned but wrongly written and pronounced. (Beer you drink outside, mostly in the summertime)
Yeah this is way better, it would help a lot be called "gramatical genre/kind" insted of "gramatical gender"
The last idea, sleep learning, was in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as "hypnopaedia". And the Welsh Native Americans figure tangentially in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Swiftly Tilting Planet". What a lovely trip down a literary and linguistic memory lane.
“Hypnopaedia” would translate to sleeping children - it’s interesting he would name it that…
If you lucid dream, you can in fact learn in your sleep. There was a study done with a professional basketball player who would practice shooting while lucid dreaming and he actually got better due to that.
@@Nous520 I think Huxley meant it to be derived from the Greek "paideia", which is still rooted in "pais" or "paidos" (child), and pertains to child education.
@@JovanDacic yes it conjured the image of zombie citizens -having the freedoms and access to knowledge of a child.
Big brother being the watchful eye of the Father State.
Theres so many L's in your comment
*Level 1*
0:34 Octopi 🐙 🐙
1:39 French Silent Letters 🇫🇷
2:20 Dearest Creature poem ✍🏻
3:11 Tower of Babel ☦️
3:50 Duolingo 🦉🟩
5:07 Omlette Du Formage 🤓
5:41 Pig Latin 🐷
6:56 Hardest and Easiest Languages. 😫☺️
8:25 American Monolingualism 🇺🇸
9:43 Cyrillic 🇷🇺
10:16 Quick Brown Fox 🦊
11:09 German Language 🇩🇪
12:23 Very Long German Words 🇩🇪
14:45 Wales gogogoch🏴
15:25 Ampersand “et” = &
16:17 Untranslatable words. 🇩🇪, 🇮🇪
18:38 Ghoti
19:14 Esperanto “one who hopes.”
21:18 Snow ❄️
22:48 According to research.”
23:35 Click Consonants
24:23 Army & A Navy
24:53 Newspeak 📰🗞️🙈🙊
25:27 Rosetta Stone
_Weird Sentences_
26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi shi
28:16 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
29:27 Buffalo 8x 🦬
30:35 Gendered Articles
31:50 Code Switching
33:40 Boustrophedon
34:12 Saphir-Whorf
35:49 Perscriptivist/Descriptivist
*Level 3*
37:28 The Great Vowel Shift
38:33 Bbutanese Passport 🇧🇹
41:27 Bear Taboo
43:59 Critical Period 👶
46:35 Toki Pona, breaking down complexity into simplicity.
47:49 This is a Wug.
49:11 Cockney Accent.
50:45 Piraha
52:37 Volapük
54:25 Red Porridge with Cream
54:44 Mele Kalikimaka 🎄⛪️
55:44 Kiki and Bouba
57:58 Ye Old
59:04 Logland
59:44 Pidgens & Creoles
*Level 4*
1:02:23 Silbo-Gomero 🇪🇸
Wow! I like you. OC-like. 🤓
Just woke up to this video.
4 minutes in now. 📚
I like the emojis 😁💗
Dang...that was incredibly interesting. Awesome video!
It's funny how people tend to think other languages are more mystical than theirs because they don't have the outside perspective on their own language. I'm slightly bilingual with Japanese and there are some thoughts and ideas that are conveyed entirely differently depending on the language. Sometimes you need a whole long phrase in English to say something small in Japanese or vice versa.
I feel all languages have the same ideas. I can use "ser" and "estar" in English just fine using expressions like "looks like", but having those ideas baked into the grammar and used as a foundation rather than a byproduct confuses people.
As a translation student I face these problems constantly 😂
Some language are short, some are long. My native language is polish and correct version of Polish mostly is much longer in giving the same information (correct as in not contaminated with English words and Abbreviations). Of course sometimes you can say more in one word, thanks to declination, but damn, it's hard to speak anything resembling polish in small number of short words in messages between people.
My favorites are natsukashi and shoganai
Saganaki=greek/japanese cheese?
As a native swedish speaker I'm laughing so hard about the inclusion of the inhaling "yes" because it caught me completely off guard 😂 I can also confirm that it is 100% accurate and I'd literally never even thought of it as something interesting until you mentioned it. Now that I think of it there actually also is a "correct" way to do it, it's not just a random gasp for air. You use the word "jo" or "juu" (depending on where you're from) and not the word "ja". Also, as you make that "u" shape with your lips and inhale briefly, you tilt your head back. An important thing to remember is that you only tilt your head back for the same duration of time as when you inhale. If, however, you wanna respond with a long "yes", you can also nod as you're inhaling but again, this is only for as long as you're actually inhaling. I would also make it a slow nod that starts with tilting your head back, as opposed to the standard type of nodding where you start by tilting your head forward.
There you go, master this and you're basically a native swedish speaker 😂😂
I was recently in rural Ireland (I'm Irish btw) and heard an Irish person doing this. I thought he had a health problem. Then I met another. So it's a thing here too but only with some people. I've heard maybe the Vikings brought it but not sure if proven
It's also a thing in french ! mostly used by parisians tho. there also is a "correct way" to use it, rather than saying "oui" youd do an inhaled "ouais" which is the french equivalent of "yep"
I’m native polish speaker and my boyfriend is swedish theres not a single diner without them trying to teach me correct way to inhale air to say yes haha
About 12-15 years ago, when blogs were still a thing, there were several blogs by people trying to learn Norwegian named something with "hja"
Wierdly enough this exists with yes in certain midwest states including upper peninsula michigan nortgern illinois and minnesota. You say yes softly while inhaling and nodding
I think the shades of blue thing applies to me. When I was a kid, I had the light blue ikea cup, and my brother had the blue one. That way, we wouldn’t drink from each other’s cups. I thought “lightblue” was its own color for a LONG time. Even now, I catch myself forgetting that blue includes light blue when people are talking about blue things.
The funny thing is that the word “blue” actually does mean what we call light blue. The word “indigo” means what we call dark blue, but most of us have forgotten seventh grade science class that explained the color spectrum… ROYGBIV! ; )
@@jayhache5609 Colour theorists are going to jump in and tell you that Indigo isn't a real colour.
Well if it has the word blue in it that would indicate it is in fact blue.
@@freneticness6927 His brother probably had an indigo-colored cup, but most English speakers wouldn’t know that. Let’s just use one word for two colors, instead!
@@jayhache5609 Well if you mix white with blue you get light blue. And indigo is more purple. Like how the seven colours of the rainbow were purple and indigo due to 6 being the devils number. And the ikea cap is actually light blue. But every shade and mixture has their own name but there are certain main ones. The 6 ones aswell as brown and black with brown being a kind of black. Which is why people with black hair are often described as having brown hair. But the light blonde is really just very light brown which becomes like yellow the pigment in the hair. Caritin in hair turns it red.
"Octopodes" actually sounds more 'correct' in my brain even in English, we should start using this.
One use of Anglish is it's good for medieval English fantasy - similar to LotR, where use of Latin words feel more modern or American, while the use of Anglish words make it more " English countryside cozy/homey". Eg: Saying Headtown instead of Capital, or Forsitter instead of President.
As someone who speaks Finnish and English fluently, Swedish somewhat decently, and is learning Korean and just so happens to find languages absolutely fascinating, this is exactly the kind of stuff for me to be geeking over. Thank you!
Vad gjorde du den 24 februari 2020? Om du inte minns, skriv talet femhundratjugotvå med siffror.
@@FriendlyALB lol förlåt, jag är finsk så min svenska grammatik är väldigt dåligt 😅 Men du skrev 522, är det rätt? Och ja, jag minns inte vad jag gjorde den dagen, mest på grund av covid heh
@@sofff225 😅🤣 rätt
@@FriendlyALB mhmm, vad sa jag 😅 No but seriously, I say I know Swedish somewhat decently because I understand perfectly fine, I just can't really produce it that fluently. I do apologize for any grammatical atrocities here lol
Can someone who speaks French please point out that "omelette du/de fromage" is grammatically incorrect?
Hamburgers were not invented in Hamburg, but the practice of using ground beef as a meal center was known as "Hamburg steak" (changed to "Salisbury Steak" I think around WWI because, you know, Germany were the bad guys) and that's the dish that was imported from Hamburg (though it's unlikely that this was the first time a culture used ground beef). The "Hamburger" was a sandwich made with this "Hamburg Steak" and was created first in Wisconsin.
you just made me hungry
Everyone knows it was actually invented millennia ago by the great Serb empire, named pljeskavica
@@owenswabiserbs are cringe
@@owenswabi Serbians of course also created gunpowder, the Internet, and so on
the hamburger patty is a derivation of a meatball, which was invented in persia
Just a comment about marmelada for the record. In portuguese we usualy put "ada" in the end of a fruit name to represent a jam or conserved fruit in sugar. So we have "Goiabada" from "Goiaba" (Guava in english), Bananada for bananas or "Marmelada" for "Marmelo" (Quince in english).
The ending "ada" also have the meaning of an action executed, or a hit that was blown. So maybe it was refering to the act of smashing those fruits to make the jams.
Also, mildly infuriated by adding Brasil in the lisp/no lisp map of spanish speaking countries.
Nossa, duas horas de vídeo sobre fatos linguísticos pra classificar o Brasil como hispanohablante. Triste.
not sure what map you're talking about. I've watched the ceceo portion 5 times tryna find it and I can't. are you talking about the last map shown? in which case algeria and other African countries were shown too, and they don't speak spanish. 1:04:09 Brazil was just shown because that's where it's located geographically.
Now we know how Canada got its name - smashing those fruits! 🤣
But more seriously, did you know that Canada used to be spelt with only three letters? C, eh? N, eh? D, eh? 🤣
I’m here all week, folks. Try the veal! 😀
@@jayhache5609 the funny thing is... Veals gather in a MANADA (the Spanish word for pack/herd). Wolfs do as well. It's a more flexible word than English ones. We would use REBAÑO for herds of cattle, but wild herbivores gather in MANADAS :P 🦌
@@fL0p Thanks! Not sure if that makes it more or less flexible, though! 😁
FYI, veal is the food word for sheep, and the plural of wolf is wolves. Cheers!
Octopussies
octopodie
A few years back I got hung up on the thought on what the plural of "Wombat" was (German) and i was too stubborn to just google it. So over the years I've asked people what they thought the correct plural was and I would throw in that it could be "Wombaten" and people would be second-guessing themselves, that it may be plausible that it, in fact, could be "Wombaten" or "Wombatten". When I felt cheeky, I would suggest "Wombatanten" or with English speakers "Wombatants". This video reminded me of the funny and extended discussions I had with people from all walks of life, friends and family to random strangers to job interviews.
I now know that "Wombats" is correct in both English and German, though I still like to dabble in this topic from time to time, these friend-shaped creatures are just too adorable to pass up some funny 5 minutes. The small things in life :)
Actually I think the right form is "Womabte". "-s" is often wrongly used in German because people are used to the English plural. For example, the correct plural of "Park" in German is "Parke", not "Parks" as many people think. The same goes for "Test". The German plural is "Teste". But many people are used to the English plural "tests" and erroneously think "Tests" would also be the correct German form.
@@Alternatives_Universum Did not know that, thanks
@@Alternatives_UniversumDude stop trolling literally all those words are pluralised with an s in German.
@@Alternatives_Universumwhat a completely confident absolutely clueless person, holy shit lmfaooo
I find meme culture very interestingly different in Mandarin and English. English memes are generally very literal, such as "Everything is fine", "bombastic side eye" or it is just a new made up word such as "rizz". In stark comparison are the metaphorical chinese memes such as "Melon eating audience" (people watching a show or fight from the sidelines), "diving" (lurking in a chat", "big pig trotters" (men who are unreliable romatically). Even though I am a more fluent English speaker, I find myself funnier when I'm speaking Mandarin, whipping out all the internet meme metaphors.
ok
Lol big pig trotters where does that come from?
rizz is thought to be a shortening of the word 'charisma'.
... thank novelty for that... and may want to avoid killing it with a nuanced understanding of individualistic vs collective cultures.
@@m.ceniza4688 there’s a term referring big liars as big asshole coz the sound resembles each other: big liar is da-piàn-zi and big asshole in northeastern dialect is da-pì-yǎn-zi. And a video of a girl from northeastern China was complaining abt her cheating boyfriend using the dialect went viral, in the video she use big pig trotters (da-zhu-tí-zi) to rhyme with big asshole/big liar (da-pi-yǎn-zi). And soon the nations knows what to call a cheating guy.
This also touches on the philosophy of language. Language itself is a man made tool that we use to communicate, so of course it will be imperfect and have flaws. The butterfly I think of when reading or hearing the word will be different from the butterfly you think of. As long we’re thinking of all the essential qualities that constitute a butterfly, language has done it’s job.
lol, i wrote a short story called the butterfly. mine is kinda different
I think you're describing Saussure's sign
Reminds of something I heard once,
What if we all see different colors, but we labelled them in particular ways, hence we never realise?
You see the green color, you say let's name it "blue".
I see the color you called "blue", to me it looks red.
Neither of us, so far, have named this color as green or red or anything yet.
We both think, then agree with the name you mentioned, that it shall be called "blue" from now on.
So, the color called "blue" will always look green to you, it will always look red to me. Yet we both named it as "blue".
Hence whenever you say, hey pass me that "blue" paint, I will pass you the reddish looking paint.
You will use it on the tree, as trees looked green to you. But to me, trees always looked red, so it's natural for me to paint it red. But remember, my red and your green is the one same color we named "blue".
So even though we see and name it a certain way, this is the normality for us.
We'll never know the truth.
The gendered nouns are also the reason why you sometimes hear someone who started learning english refer to some objects as "he" or "she".
facts. it doesnt happen that often to me anymore but one word that i always refer to as she is "praying mantis". in german its "die Gottesanbeterin" which translates to "god-worshipper" but the suffix "in" at the end makes it female
@@dinimueter9878 I remember, when I watched Kung Fu Panda for the first time, I initially thought Mantis was female ngl. Gottesanbeterin ist halt durch das -in einfach ein komplett weiblicher Tiername fsr
@@oberlurch-handimations8628 ist so. schlangen und spinnen bleiben bei mir manchmal auch ausversehen weiblich wenn ich englisch spreche
As a native Portuguese speaker I was always intrigued with color perspective through the languages.
Apparently, "roxo" = purple, but we had the word "púrpura" too, but don't actually seems like the exactly same color.
Also, "roxo" is kinda similar to "rojo", "rosso", "rouge" or "rosu" which means red in Spanish, Italian, French and Romanian respectively.
Portuguese is the only Romantic Language that has "Vermelho" as a word for red, which is intriguing.
Edit: yep, I understand that vermilion is red, I just accentuate the rojo/roxo thing
it's definitely a false friend for a language learner in the beginning. But it also makes sense that roxo became purple in portuguese to me. There are so many purple fruits and vegetables that are described as red, but they are obviously purple. There is red cabbage (which is purple) vs white cabbage (which is green). That always messed with my mind. Why don't we say purple cabbage and green cabbage. Sometimes they describe the red one as blue, too, here in my country. So they pick only on part of the real colour, because red and blue combined equals purple. It's just an assumption, but it wouldn't surprise me if this is part of the reason why roxo became purple in portuguese. Red cabbage is repolho roxo in portuguese, too if I remember correctly :)
@@pikapi6993 Yep, it is "repolho roxo" here, and actually what you said makes so much sense.
Portuguese is not the only one, in catalan red is called "vermell". Also in Spanish there is the word "bermejo" which also means red and shares the same linguistic root of verme/berme/erme, which "vermell", "bermejo" and "vermelho" share
@@alexgamez7085 uh, ok.
This explain.
Acho que o equivalente à "rojo" em português seria "rubro"
It is absolutely wild to have seen emoticon/emoji form and mix as it happened. I was in college learning Japanese, and Japanese had emoji before emoticons were commonly used in the US (emotes were primarily ASCII when Japanese already had emoji). I remember in the earlier years of emoji in Japan there also being a bit of a play on words joke of 絵文字 ("emoji") picture letters and エモ字 ("emoji") "emo" characters, like emoting characters. Granted, this joke may have primarily been in multilingual, Japanese as as second language circles.
Edit: also curious how the Italian somatic expression for "eff you" ended up in Wisconsin. I totally have used and seen it used growing up, and have been confused since when folks didn't understand it elsewhere.
If you're referring to vaffanculo, that's a 100% italo-american expression. It would travel back to the Old World and end up being adopted by the Italy of "today", but it's as Italian as deep dish Chicago-style pizza.
Just a 'cimarrón' (a Mustang horse, becoming wild again after being introduced in America) expression.
french has what i would like to call "loaded letters". those silent letters at the end of words are meant to be pronounced at the BEGINNING of the next word, so long as the next word starts with a vowel. moreover, to an american speaker, these letters SEEM useless, but to a french speaker, they DO impact how letters sound. some words may have a lot of "silent letters", but they are inadvertently impacting how the rest of the word is said.
also "omelette du fromage" is also funny because it's grammatically incorrect. if you want to say "cheese omelette", you say "omelette au fromage"
I am learning to speak mandarin. I am not fluent, but I know quite a bit. I’ve actually heard and personally experienced that it gets easier as you know more. In a language like English or French you learn the basics than there are so many addition grammar rules or exceptions to rules. Mandarin is pretty consistent once you know many words you can begin to understand and learn words faster and the grammar is simple in my opinion.
Wasei eigo specifically refer to only the pseudo-anglicisms, not just any loanword taken from English to Japanese. The term translates as "Japanese-made English". "Amerikan doggu", "kanningu", "handoru kiipaa", and "rabuho" are such examples, but "koraboreeshon", "hanbaagaa", "hippu hoppu", and "kiiboodo" are not wasei eigo. Rule of thumb is that if the word originates from English but native English speakers can't derive the meaning even from knowing its etymon, then it's wasei eigo. Many Japanese people are surprised to know that a lot of the wasei eigo aren't used as such in English and won't recognize the actual English translations for them.
One other note is that it's not just English that Japanese has pseudo-loans for. It also has wasei kango, for words taken from historical Chinese. These ones are basically compound words that look like they were regularly borrowed, but were actually first used in the Japanese language. In some cases, these compound words already existed in historical Chinese but now gained additional meanings in Japanese to represent modern concepts. And a lot of those wasei kango actually get adopted (loaned) into modern Chinese languages, Vietnamese, and Korean. CJKV words such as 世界 'world', 電話 'telephone', and 自然 'nature' owe their modern meanings to Japanese.
For those fellow vietnamese who don’t know hanzi/kanji, the examples are ‘thế giới’, ‘điện thoại’ and ‘tự nhiên’ respectively. Quite interesting how the sounds changed: diānhuà - denwa - denhwa - điện thoại. I think we Vietnamese are missing out a lot of the cultural connections to our East Asian folks due to not being taught hanzi (at least to a superficial reading level, the Korean are at least taught to recognize a few hundreds to thousands of hanja if memory serves me right)
Thank you, I was annoyed by this haha. Other examples of wasei eigo are things like ペーパードライバー ‘paper driver’ (a person who has a driver’s license but doesn’t in practice drive at all) and バイキング ‘Viking’ (buffet)
Things like alcohol and hip hop and keyboard are just loanwords.
Yah the part about wasei-eigo was quite misleading. テンション下がるー！
Actually, pseudo-Anglicisms are a bit different for the Japanese language. These are words that are mistaken to be from English since the vast majority of loanwords in the language come from English. For instance, アンケート (originating from French) for questionnaire and カルテ (originating from German) for medical chart. The overarching term that should be used to describe what this TH-camr is talking about is 外来語 (literally "words from abroad" but basically means "loanwords"). But you did accurately point out specific wasei-eigo (English made in Japan) and the others are merely 外来語. My favorite is パイプカット (pipe cut) which is actually a term used for vasectomy! Lol. I wrote a short piece in Japan Today about this very topic just last week: From English to Japanese: A word’s journey into another language.
@@DrJamesRogers finally an expert on the topic!
I don't know how to explain it, but as a french speaker, it always seemed logical for me that OK or okay was a recent word. I never thought it was a mystery as its sounds really made it sound modern.
It comes for casualties count sign hanging at barracks from American Civil War. 0 K (0 kills) would be 0 casualties which would announce nobody had died that day or since deployment at where troops would be stationed.
@fL0p no it doesn't. That's not even a convincing fake etymology
@@rickpgriffin look it up
5:45 in Finnish there was a "language" called "i-kieli" very popular among kids when I went to school. However it was not as complex as the one shown in the video: children just replaced every vowel in a word with the vowel "i".
We do that in spanish too, to mock people
@@juankgonzalez6230 como funciona eso, todos hablablan asi pero nunca entendi , solo escuhaba pipi prapa prarapa
Easily the greatest iceberg out there, very well done and thank you!
It's very relevant that 1984 had an epilogue that talks about how Newspeak _didn't end up working;_ this is often left out of mentions of it
Didn't know that. Thank you !!!
26:36 To add context, at that time Chinese newspaper was still publishing in Classical Chinese. If you read aloud with modern Mandarin pronnciation, it become incomprehensible. But if you read the poem with Classical pronunciation, the words are recognizable. Some historians believe the poet wrote the words in opposition of using Classical Chinese in documents.
Fun fact about Volapük. The Danish saying for nonsense or "That is greek to me" is also "Volapyk". And it is not just a novelty example. Most Danes wouldn't know Volapük is/was a language, it is simply THE word for gibberish.
Speaking of Rød grød med fløde as well, it is there for another reason as well. It is also THE one thing you will hear every Dane try to make a non-danish speaker say, since it's notoriously difficult.
Its pronounced "rote Grütze mit Creme"
@@onurbschrednei4569no
Redundant "as well".
Volapyk being an actual language is like a fun fact you tell people in Denmark. The word just somehow entered common language and stuck around, presumably because it sounds really silly in Danish so it's a perfect word for nonsense.
I never thought I’d see jerma an hour into a linguistics video
Greek is my second language and I've noticed some words evoke different imagery. For example the word Sky.
When I hear that in English I imagine a clear blue sky but in Greek (ouranos) I get a more cloudy almost biblical image of the sky.
Oh and how did you generate those Chomsky intros?.
It's amazing how one can instantly recognise his voice just from a few words, even though it's not him actually speaking
I don't know anybody in real life whose first language was English and later learnt greek
@@goatgamer001maybe English is his third language or fourth. He might be speaking other languages as a first language.
Omg… I never realized this but sky often comes in my mind as dark blue-ish with stars but ‘céu/cielo’ I think about clouds sun and light blue. So cool!
Perhaps is duo to when we learn the language. I’m just thinking about more words and so far all the images in my mother tongues are more cheerful, but in English (that I started learning after 16) is more serious, mature, gloomy, realistic
I can relate to this and upon thinking about it - I can see my Greek school textbooks in my minds eye and learning the word ilios (sun) on a very bright colourful page of the day
and
the word ouranos being related to or closely related to uranus the planet
and
In Greek music the word ouranos as related to a love sick mood of loss and pain.
Also in addition to the pidgin languages, it is also spoken in a lot of West African countries, especially Pidgin-English with each country having definitive variations. I am Cameroonian and our version of pidgin is different from the pidgin commonly spoken in Nigeria. We can understand Nigerian pidgin, but they can't necessarily understand Cameroonian pidgin, although we are neighbours and it basically originates from the same language.
A good number of our pidgin (Cameroon Pidgin-English) words and sentence structures can be dated back to the English phrases used by English colonisers which may not be heavily used today. With of course the influence of pronunciation alteration of these words. And because of this most of the English speaking Cameroonians were prohibited as kids from speaking pidgin especially at school, and sometimes at home.
And for many people who do speak both Pidgin-English and English efficiently, I have noticed there is a significant change of tone in that while speaking pidgin, we become much more flippant, extroverted and playful which constrasts the formal structure of English usually learned. It has been an interesting way for me to analyse language patterns besides the more conventional ones spoken in our country such as English and French. Also as a linguistic nerd, I am deeply appreciative of videos like this and have been following your content for a while. Thank for doing the relevant research as I imagine it must take a long time to create these videos.
THAT IS SO COOL! Congrats on grasping into your culture so deeply! It's people like you that are keeping those hundreds of years alive and through
Pidgin english is just badly spoken english or at best just an accent of english.
@@freneticness6927not necessarily, it has its own rules. In Nigerian Pidgin you would say “make we dey go” to say “let’s go”, if you said “make US dey go” that would be grammatically incorrect. Plus, like AAVE, we also use ‘the habitual be’: “E be like say….” which would mean “it’s like…”
A note about the Swedish “yes”. Ja is generally pronounced as “ya” with the “a” sound like the one from the English word “far”. In the dialect of Skåne, “ja” can sound identical to the English “yeah”. I sometimes use “yeah” when I’m speaking Swedish and some people have asked me if I am from Skåne because of it.
You can find some people using the “hhhp” type of “yes” in other parts of Sweden if they come from the northern parts or as a joke. It seems pretty famous in Sweden and people generally understand what it means even if they don’t use it.
In skåne the ja sounds more like the German or Danish ja. In other parts it sounds like 'A' from the Swedish alphabet or just a more fuller rounder sound of the English 'O' as in 'yo' mama and at other times we drop the j completely and just say A (O).
Just to add to this. In the part where he discussed the word "Wolf" and used the Icelandic word "ulfur" he pronounced the "f" as "f" but the "f" should be pronounced like Swedish or Danish word for "Wolf", with a "v". This is almost always the case when "f" is included in a Icelandic word when the "f" is not in the beginning or end
Skåning here, you are so right 😁
The in breathing yes is also prevalent in finland with 'juu' or 'joo'
The concept is wrong too. I think what it’s supposed to be referring to is inhalation when used in the context of “yes, continue, I am listening” (used in Icelandic too)
masterpiece of a video, hats off to you
I love linguistics in terms of word play. Trying to make panagrams or a sentence or group of sentences that are as confusing as possible or have multiple meanings is always a fun exercise in creativity
"Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" could make sense. Colorless can be used (perhaps using a little poetic license) to mean indistinguishable, uninteresting, or generic. Green over the last 20 years has come to mean enviromental or eco-friendly. Sleep is frequently used to mean inactive or unused when applied to non-animate nouns. So the sentence could mean 'a bland environmental idea will be ignored for flashier ones, even if it's a potent one'
I was thinking something similar. Semantic flexibility of language is funny, and ironically, "colorful" language seems to further that. Pairing nouns with verbs that don't mix is a good way of evoking readers' imaginations. Using the phrase "singing hands" in a piece of poetry could call to mind many things, like jazz-hands, or that numb, buzzing feeling you get from being out in the cold for too long.
I don't know much about the technical terms in linguistics, so I couldn't put a name to this phenomenon, but I quite like it and think about it often while writing.
Chill bro it's just a dumb old sentence
It could mean "Boring ideas from the trees sleep with rage." or just some trollish Gnomeski stuff.
@@iamnothale chill bro it's just a video about linguistics from a guy who idolizes noam chomsky, umberto eco, and the likes... Watches TED talks and calls what he does "tomfoolery" but only when Joe Rogan does it. He clearly comes from philosophy, having no clue about linguistics.This video is bad taste joke, and a waste of time for a lot of viewers. Clickbait and a lot of deception.
Moral of the story: keep the ball in your court, bro. And stay there, being an old-dick forever. And stop pretending.
babe wake up, Duncan posted
90% of people who post like this are virgins.
this is genuinely the most interesting linguistics video that I've ever watched. PLEASE MAKE MORE ICEBERG EXPLAINED VIDS!!!
As someone who lived in Germany for a long time, I don't believe that the "Antibabypillen" from Google translate is actually used very much. "Empfangnisverhütung" is a lot more common, at least in the region where I live. It means something like "protection against catching something", so it is admittedly funny too.
Also, in Germany, "Sonntagsleere" takes on a completely different meaning, because almost everything is closed, and most people don't go to church anymore. It's a level of boredom that is difficult to comprehend.
As a German I hear Antibabypille more often then Empfängnisverhütung, but it could be a reginal thing. Edit: Often it also just "die Pille"
Empfangnisverhütung literally means conception prevention. It is a much broader term, which also includes condoms and the like. And as the other native speaker said: It's usually "die Pille" or "Verhütung", if the general context is clear.
I have been living in Germany for four years now (having studied the language for twelve years prior), and never in my life have I heard the word "Empfängnisverhütung" 😂 As mentioned by Tom, "die Pille" is what I've heard most people refer to it.
4:22 : "Generally, when you teach people a second languages, you actually show them the grammatical structure first, before jumping into examples and tests so that the learner does not have to magically figure it out through trial and error". I COULD NOT DISAGREE MORE! AND I AM NOT EVEN TALKING ABOUT THE APP DUOLINGO! I understand where this video is coming from, it is the classical way of teaching languages that believed to be true for centuries. However, if you follow the more recent studies, those all insist on "Acquiring" the language rather than "Leaning" it. Even if someone chooses to disagree, we all met or heard about that guy who just "mingled" and "acquired" the language without any academic studies!
I think it really depends on the country and even where you're learning within that country. Some countries have a very 'learn through acquisition at all costs' ethos and others still follow the 'amass all grammatical knowledge before you even attempt a sentence' approach. (Schools in Ireland are notorious for teaching Irish as a second language this way and it is... not good.) Best modern practice seems to be a combination of teaching grammar and other aspects of practical language use and immediately getting students to use it while also encouraging immersion in material you don't understand all of yet because it'll help you solidify what you know and pick up new stuff.
i love that Chomsky's universal grammar theory is on level 5, but it was the first thing i learned in my linguistics lecture lol
16:45 It should be “utepils” not “utepsils”. It directly translates to “outside pilsner”.
In Norway, instead of asking people if they wanna grab a beer/pint, it is more common to ask if they wanna grab a pilsner. “Utepils” refers to drinking pilsner outside on a sunny summer day, often outside a bar/café.
I think what makes it such a special moment for us is a mixture of the fact that we don’t get that many nice summer days a year, and that buying alcohol at bars/cafés is extremely expensive here, so we usually only drink at home. These two factors makes the experience of an “utepils” an idyllic moment for us.
I’m Finland we have something similar called “pussikalja” which literally translates to “bag-beer”.
That is, the process of buying beer, putting it in a plastic bag, and subsequently enjoying the outdoors while periodically taking drinks from out of the plastic bag and enjoying them. :)
It should be mentioned that in the case of pussikalja, the connotations can oftentimes be negative due to this activity being a popular pastime of rowdy teenagers and unemployed adults with alcohol problems.
Exactly. You don’t experience a word from another culture just because someone can spell it out to you like a medical term.
Jesus, you need to embrace beer garden culture more
Juuuteppsils 😂😂😂
In German you have "Wegbier" (way beer), the beer you drink on the walk to your destination, often a party or similiar event. Maybe it was shortly a pussikalja and as you walk outside it's definitly a utepils too :D
I feel like one could ascribe meaning to "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" quite easily.
Colorless - for all people
green ideas - ideas about climate change
sleep furiously - lie dormant but with high tension or alternatively, the green ideas are not being implemented and are causing frustration and anger.
If I would write an article about climate activists being frustrated about broken promises from politicians I would title it that! Great video!
I think it sounds nice for a poem
as a non-native English speaker (I'm from Poland) 1st tier was more obscure since it's so heavily English based. It just showed me how context based language and linguistics are... It's really odd to know more from 2nd tier 😅
I feel personally attacked...
In polish "bear" is NIEDŹWIEDŹ
and Grzegorz Brzęczyszczykiewicz is exclusively polish. It comes from awesome movie series "How I unleashed World war II"
seeing that this video is so well done and seems to be well researched, i did not expect the pronunciation of “saudade” to be so off, i almost didn’t recognize it as portuguese even though its my native language
The fear of bears in slavic languages reminds me of another similarity: slavic languages use the same type of "voldemort" descriptive names for mushrooms, and it is hypothesized that people believed that calling mushrooms by their proper name would make them poisonous (or something in that vein). So the theory is very plausible that there was some fear of naming dangerous things in old slavic tribes.
I speak Polish natively but I've never heard of this
@@doktorhabilitowanystanczykI speak Ukrainian natively and have also never heard of this.
When I first started learning English, as a brazilian portuguese speaker, I felt horrified that there's no literal translation to "saudade". Bcause for us is such a common word for such a basic and essential feeling
o cara meio que traduzindo a palavra saudade com "homesick" kkk nada a ver, o cara meteu um google translate na cara dura
"Saudade" actually seems to be a great match with "toska" (тоска) in Russian, kind of a melancholic longing with nostalgia for something unidentified.
Homesick is a broad term, it doesn't have to be specifically tied to a place. One can be homesick for a person, a time, a feeling they no longer feel or an object
I can feel homesick for my couch, it is a "place" but if that couch were moved to a different place, I could feel as much relief from the feeling of homesickness, by sitting on it.
It's more about a feeling of absence that is relieved by presence
I always thought this was a silly non-question/myth because to me the words "longing" and "miss" (as in "i miss the holidays!") conveyed perfectly well what saudade means/invokes... unless we're talking about class-exclusive words as both of those english words are verbs whilst saudades is a noun...
Cyrillic fonts that are in latin are a bit weird because the letters that look like latin ones sound completely different. For example you showed Borat, but that "A" looking letter is actually a D, so it's Bordt 😅
ВОЯДТ all of those letters are in the Cyrillic alphabet. For example, in Russian, that would be pronouced VOYADT
@@G3NK5T42 true xD
genuinely one of the best and most interesting videos i’ve watched in a long time, bravo 👏
As a Russian speaker, I heard about the bear thing from school. The most interesting thing was that we call a bear "med-ved" (honey-knower or something like that), but the place where the bear lives is called "ber-lo-ga" which resembles other languages' ber-sounding names
Звучит как байка Задорнова, но любопытно
@@alenunya Я тоже скептически относилась, но если автор здесь упоминает, что что-то похожее происходит в целой группе языков, то, наверное, что-то в этом есть
@@vivi_vivi69 по фасмеру -ведь в медведе это тот кто ест, а не ведаед. а берлога риал прям и напрашивается "там где лежит бер", но по фасмеру это просто топкое\грязное место. может с бер есть зависимость грязь-кал-коричневый, но точно не использование табуистического "the brown one". прямая характеристика места короче, а не через того, кто в этом месте обитает. обожаю впрочем народную этимологию, сам грешу и это всегда кайфово!
@vivi_vivi69 ...I am Czech and the word bear in Czech is "medvěd" and the place they sleep or hibernate is called "brloha" ..... The word water is "voda" and I can go on and on. 😃 🥰We can understand each other when we speak❤
In bosnian we say medvjed and jed sounds similar to jesti/jedi in a diffrent time/form so honey eater idk bout the v tho
An interesting fact about Esperanto, is that even though it started as a conlang, this many years later there are now first generation native speakers of it that consider it their first language. So Esperanto is still going strong even if it's not /as/ wildly known or used today. It could still grow and become more well known in the future if we wanted to take that route linguistically.
With there only being about 12 grammatical rules, most of the work is in memorizing vocab and then applying the 12 rules. It doesn't have grammatical structure such as like word order so that makes it a little easier to learn!
English doesnt really have word order either. I can say I walked to the beach or to the beach I walked. Or to the beach walked I. English has easier grammar but harder pronunciation than Spanish but easier pronunciation and harder grammar than mandarin.
@@freneticness6927 English does though, the general standard word order of English is Subject-Verb-Object with 4 levels of complexity of sentence structure: simple, compound, complex, and compound-complex. English is going to follow this word order just about every time barring some dialects that could have different rules.
While you /can/ say things out of that order in English on purpose and get the point across, it isn't how people actually speak the language or how it's properly written in daily usage.
Esperanto literally has no word order rules; it can be SOV, SVO, OSV, VOS, etc. It only has 16 total rules to learn its grammar and that's it. None of which mentions sentence structure.
As a conlang, it's purpose was to bring all kinds of speakers together so the rules had to be very simple and conform at least a little to the speakers native language. They removed the word order to help make it easier to learn. All information that you need about the sentence is tacked on to the end or beginning of a root word.
Everyone can use the word order of their native language but Esperanto vocab and its other grammar rules and you're still completely intelligible to another Esperanto speaker without breaking standards of grammar to do so.
And while what you say about Spanish and Mandarin comparing to English may be true (idk those languages so I couldn't say for certain) even those have standard word orders; SVO for Spanish and Mandarin which then modify differently depending on their own grammar rules.
@@Koutouhara The fact remains that you can say words in english in most types of grammatical structure and still be understood. Because of the lack of spoken pronouns in latin languages it isnt really possibly because you could be talking about the object of the sentence and not the subject. Like I walked the dog changing to dog walked. In mandarin it seems possible to rearrange grammar fairly easily and they essentially dont bother learning grammar anyways as the pronunciation is way more important. But they still hae a common sentence structure because obviously you would. You can understand other sentence structures in english extremely easily without even thinking. But it is standardized so you know how to expect whats coming. Esperanto would have the same problem as english and the sentence structure would be standardized if anyone anywhere spoke the language with any frequency. Esperanto is just italian/ spanish with different grammar. It is less useful in daily life than elvish. Nothing of any value is written in it. It is barely a more simple language than english but also doesnt have the vocabulary, the literary heritage or global reach and history. In the uk grammar schools were made to teach you vocabulary and standardize grammar aswell for people who used random types of grammar which english allows in order to follow latin style sentence structure alot of the time. Thats why its pretty easy to learn english because you can say words with most types of grammar and most types of pronounciation and still be understood unlike in spanish and mandarin.
32:35, so "They don't think it be like it is, but it do" actually means, "They don't think this is how things are, but it really is how things are."
note on french people choosing english in school @ 1:45:42 - most don't really have a choice
basically, in ~6th grade, you have an "Alive Language A" class, where you study a foreign language that you _technically_ chose, but it's more often than not english, because schools rarely have teachers capable of teaching other languages at an acceptable level for this class. also, when given the choice, parents tend to chose english, because it's seen as more useful than the other languages, especially professionally.
though you also have the "Alive Language B" class, starting ~2 years later, where you have to chose another foreign language to study, the 2 you'd hear the most about being spanish and italian, sometimes german - though it's often seen as an elitist choice. you can also study local/regional languages, like provençal, and private schools sometimes offer options such as russian or japanese.
At 16:42 it should be "utepils", "psils" is not a Norwegian word. But you are otherwise correct in both the meaning of the word and that it is simply compound noun.
Also @ 1:28:56 "papa" should be "pappa".
Just some minor corrections, for a two hour long video I am impressed by the amount of research and how clearly you are able to explain the different topics.