As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o) It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well. I'm from the American Midwest.
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case. *) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
@@derdurstigstemann It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
One complicated idea I've had floating around is creating a Romlang (a Romance conlang based on Late Latin) based on a scenario where the Anglo-Saxons didn't displace the native Romano-British but assimilated with them instead, adopting Late Latin and some Brittonic words while still undergoing the same sound changes as English did in normal history. I wonder whether the resulting language would be any similar to French (as the Franks originally spoke a language somewhat similar to the Anglo-Saxons).
Though, the Romano British was a apparently small minority of people ? most people were Celtic speakers, the population is said to have been four million and had halved by the time or during significant influxes of Germanic people started The Romans were apparently, only an administrative class really, some retries from the military and some Celts who worked for them and became 'Romano British' So, maybe the scenario might work better if in an alternative time, Celtic persisted longer in what is now England ( and Scotland ) would we be looking at an English regional dialect using much more Celtic also ?
@@thumbstruck Ah yes, forgot about those, I think there are a few others of course, I think 'do' ( to do ) is from Celtic ? Where I grew up ( Norfolk ) there is an old slang for a wife or girl "mawther" ( nothing to do with Mother ! quite different pronunciation in the accent ) and it is debated about the origin of this but there is an almost same word in Irish There are theories it is even a Britannic leftover or somehow made its way into dialect a long long time ago, maybe even borrowed from the local Celtic by the Anglians, though this seems on the face of it unlikely, as surely the Brittonic Celtic then, in that area, would be closer to modern Welsh of course but not Irish, I do not know enough about it tbh I think it is plausible though, that Celts persisted for much longer and even side by side with Germanic incomers, maybe even until Norman times. Certainly the place names of the area can be connected to Celtic sometimes
Interesting. Gender and cases probably didn't disappear in one go, so it would be interesting to know how it happened - what disappeared first and what was the last to go. Looking at Scandinavian, the case system was in collapse around 1500(?), but the dative didn't die so easily and several dialects still has it, and the gender system is either intact or reduced to two genders (or all gone in some Danish dialects, I believe).
You can more or less make 4 categories for how much is preserved, not counting the leftover genitive clitic: -Category 1: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Only Icelandic. -Category 2: Nominative, accusative and dative. Genitive is mostly dead. Faroese, Dalmål such as Orsamål and early Elfdalian. -Category 3: Nominative and dative. Living accusative and genitive gone. Plenty of Norwegian and some Swedish dialects follow this. -Category 4: Case system dead, except some fixed phrases and the "genitive" clitic. We've seen changes live, as for example Elfdalian went from 2 to 3 in the early 20th century, and plenty of dialects are going from 3 to 4 currently.
@@vatterholm The history of languages seems to be going only in one direction. Makes one wonder what it took for it to go in the opposite direction once and give rise to a language with such a multidimensional grammar as Proto Indo European. Were those prehistoric people even more cultured than ancient Greeks? If so, where's their science, arts, cities and literature? Nothing left beyond a few graves and chariots. Quite a mystery.
@@brexitgreens New cases emerge all the time. The language became much more complex from Proto-Norse to Old Norse by merging the articles into the words. Then even as some cases went away while going from Old Norse to modern dialecs, some have developed new cases like vocative.
@@vatterholm Thanks for bringing up those cases, I didn't know about them. So Old Norwegian had suffix declension, like non Germanic Euro languages… that's fun. I would say that an advanced grammar must be a reflection on intellectual capacity of the speaker - for the simple reason that a dull man wouldn't be capable of it. Advanced grammar seems to imply some cultivation as well, therefore science, literature and poetry. Grammar is similar to algebra: if you can inflect words and build compound sentences, you probably also can perform symbolic calculus.
On this gender thing (and apologies if this has come up elsewhere) ... when, back in the 1970s my 80 year old great aunt’s, who spoke Craven Yorkshire, used to say at tea-time, for example ‘That’s Mrs Coxshott lettuce’ or ‘That’s yer grandma Ramsden recipe’ (rather than Mrs Coxshott’s, or Grandma Ramsden’s)
Deletion of possessive -s is recorded in a lot of older northern English dialects - I'm not sure how far back it goes, but there are written examples from the 1800s! Thanks for this personal account of it, it's great to know it was still in use recently :)
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch. I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all. I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
Comparison to Icelandic demonstrative pronouns: *Singular forms:* see - sá / sú (masc. / fem.) thone - þann thas - þess thome - þeim / því (masc. / neuter) see - sú tho - þá thier - þeirrar / þeirri (genitive / dative) that - það *Plural forms:* tho - þær / þeir / þau (neuter / masc. / fem.) thore - þeirra thome - þeim Note: Icelandic vowels can get a bit whacky, so , and are not quite pronounced the way one might expect.
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
Another gem! I'm not keen on the transcription system you're using for modern English, though. Why do they analyse diphthongs as vowel + consonant (semi-vowel). I curious as to what it is you prefer about that. Good luck with thier dissertation.
Fascinating. Do you have a video which explains how and why English lost its grammatical gender? Thanks
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Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs? Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
I like the concept. It is also something that unless you upload it, there would probably be no equivalent video. Pretty much as with most of your videos, though. A very good thing. I'd love to see more videos on hipotheticals. By the way, I loved the twist of going for ' sorry for my new phone' instead of 'sorry for the background noise'. I guess the record Guiness remains intact
Good luck on your dissertation Simon! When it's done, will it be available anywhere for us to look at? (Forgive me if that's a dumb question, I have no clue how dissertations work :P)
Hey Simon, I loved the video! It's a really cool topic and I hope you do more English evolution hypotheticals in the future. I was just wondering, though, should "thas" and "that" be transcribed as /ðas/ and /ðat/, though? Shouldn't it be /ðæs/ and /ðæt/?
Good question! I'm using Geoff Lindsey's guidelines for phonemic transcription because they align better with my own accent - I have [a] for the 'trap' vowel. In General American and some UK accents, it would indeed be [æ] :)
@@simonroper9218 Ah, okay, I think I see. I think my issue was that I was thinking of it as the /æ/ vowel rather than the 'trap' vowel, but that just goes to show you we have lexical sets for a reason. I'll have to read a little more on Geoff Lindsey. Either way, thanks for explaining, and I look forward to the next video.
Your disclaimer at the beginning that this was all hypothetical and not actual history reminded me of Orson Welles' disclaimers during his 1938 radio reading of H.G. Wells' _War of the Worlds._ Although Welles repeatedly assured the audience that Martians had not actually invaded the Earth, that didn't prevent some mobs from taking to the streets. I only hope that your audience has a more nuanced reaction. I loves me a plausible counterfactual history. Cheers from sunny Vienna, Scott
Simon. Every video I watch of yours is a contemplative joy. After your results, people might take your hypotheticals more seriously, so be careful... 😁
Interesting video! It actually made me very glad that English lost grammatical gender and almost all its case forms-they've never been missed, as far as I can tell.
You are so articulate and I really enjoy your teaching capabilities and background knowledge you have yourself acquired. You sure you aren't a linguist? I noticed you said "NEE ter" for neuter. Where Americans would say NOO ter. Interesting.
Speaking of collapsing grammar: What are your ideas on the fate of the past participle? I notice more and more that the simple past is used in its stead ('I have went'), and it's not just linguistically challenged people doing this. Same about cases in pronouns. While "for me" is still pretty much standard, the same is not true for phrases like "for you and me"; you can expect "for you and I" more often than not.
You have some interesting examples. "For you and I" is simply a hypercorrection, but it might trigger a grammatical reorganization in the future. I have the opposite in my dialect. (I'm from the Pittsburgh area, and I'm in the third generation in my family to have gone to college, yet my lower registers [in sociolinguistic terms] seem to go a lot lower than those of the people who attended college with me.) In a sentence with a double subject, I would say "Me and John went to town." (I don't say this in standard, formal English.) I've alway hypothesized that this is French influence, e. g. "Jean et moi, nous sommes alles en ville." (Sorry, I don't know how to type accent marks here on TH-cam.) However, this was also used in stereotypical depictions of foreigners using bad English, e. g. in a movie from the 1950's, a Native American might say something like "Me no got no wampum," meaning "I don't have any money." I could see a future for English where it breaks up into two languages, one using only the nominative forms of pronouns, and the other using only the accusative forms. As for verbs in my lower registers, some have the past tense form and the past participle form reversed. I've never sat down and tried to figure out how many verbs this is true of and how many verbs don't do that. Another thing I've noticed is people putting noun modifiers which should follow the noun in front of the noun instead, e. g. what used to be "peanuts in the shell" are now "in-shell peanuts." This could really wreak havoc on English. Tnink of "animals that eat plants" becoming "plant-eating animals." This could really mess up the rule that the subject precedes the verb and the object follows the verb. Just compare that to what has been happening to German since they started insisting on putting the verb at the end of the sentence about 300 years ago, and all the repercussions that has had on the language.
@@bigscarysteve well, the 'plant-eating animals' thing is simply an attributive construction vs. a sub-clause. Neither violates the rules of the language; it just shifts preferences. When I first came in contact with English I certainly experienced the overuse of the objective pronoun more often. Especially in replies that featured a simple pronoun: "Who did this?" "Me!" But that may have been my limited exposure. Or, as you say, it may have lead to hypercorrection. Once I had the cases down, coming from German a quite natural concept, I noticed how many natives don't really grasp the concept of cases at all. Regarding German placing the verb at the end: Only in complex sentences; Rewboss has an interesting video on that. It can make for intricate sentences, especially if you have sub-clauses. I myself, being of German mother tongue, don't really experience these things; they happen subconsciously. As for the lower registers: I love it when an individual has enough grasp of the language to play with these things, can use them in the appropriate situations.
@@HotelPapa100 Actually, attributive modifiers are logically derived from subordinate clauses. For example, in the sentence, "The red house burned down," how many propositions are there? There are two: 1. "The house burned down." 2. "The house is red." These would be combined into a single sentence, "The house which is red burned down." Then you collapse the relative clause, producing "The house red burned down," and finally you apply a transformational rule which gives you "The red house burned down." Most Indo-European languages are head-initial. The fact that English puts adjectives ahead of their nouns is a bit weird. Compare the French "la maison rouge." This phrase simply doesn't undergo the transformational rule that English does. However, this particular rule has been in place for millenia and English hasn't collapsed. The "plant-eating animals" thing has also been around for a long time, and I think it's what's spurring people on to say things like "in-shell peanuts," which is utterly weird to me, but I've been seeing more and more of that sort of thing in the last two decades, and I find it jarring. If this trend keeps up, English COULD transform itself into a head-final language--I'm not saying it necessarily will. As for "Who did this?--Me!", that is a very old usage in English. I would describe it as a disjunctive usage. The hypercorrections caused by this usage are pretty old, too--at least a century, if not more, I'm sure. I myself had never heard of noun cases until I started studying German. The funny thing is, French has cases as well, but as in English, they're only apparent in the pronouns. My French teacher had me absolutely baffelled with her explanaiton of direct and indirect object pronouns. It was only after studying German that that aspect of French began to make sense to me. I'll have to disagree with you a little bit about German having verb-final placement only in subordinate clauses. German also is VF in sentence fragments. Consider "to go to Berlin," which in German is "nach Berlin fahren." In an independent clause, there are two empty slots at the beginning of the clause in the deep structure. The first is for the topic of the sentence, and the second is for the conjugated verb, so a deep structure of "ich nach Berlin gefahren bin" produces the surface structure of "Ich bin nach Berlin gefahren" or "Nach Berlin bin ich gefahren."
@@HotelPapa100 I'd never heard of Rewboss before, but I just checked out the video you referenced. He's basically saying the same thing I said in the last paragraph of my previous post. The Germanic languages are traditionally V2. When German writers started mimicking Latin authors in the 1700's by putting the verb at the end, the V2 rule was so strong that German ended up with the "verbal bracket," as Rewboss calls it. However, weird things started happening in other places. In SVO languages, the adverbial elements in the predicate go in the order place-manner-time. In SOV languages, the order is time-manner-place. Modern German has adopted the time-manner-place word order, indicating that it really, really wants to be an SOV language. German is turning itself inside out. It's my understanding that something similar happened in the IE languages of India under the influence of the Dravidian languages.
Could the form of the definite article "them" still be used in some older dialects? Some people in Appalachia in the US sometimes say "there's (fill in the blank) in "them" woods" The use "them" instead of "the" sometimes.
That might just be leftover trauma from my German primary school, but it feels very wrong to see the cases listed in any order other than 'nominative, genetive, dative accusative'. Even worse, it's been more than a decade and I still associate certain colours with the respective cases simply because I had to stare at a brightly coloured chart for four years straight
Seems an unusual way to do it, I've learnt German as an Adult and I've always seen the charts of: Nom Der Das Die Die(plural) Acc Den Das Die Die Dat Dem Der Den Gen Des Der That's how I remember this
@@ryanchristopher2369 Same here, i learned it in this order primary school. While i understand that it's difficult to switch once you learn things in a particular pattern, I wouldn't say that there's specifically a right or wrong way.
@@aeschda given how most sentences are Nom, Akk, Dat and Gen is rare, it seems unusual to learn it in any other way, particularly when Akk comes before Dat, sometimes a shortcut is necessary, having Akk last makes it seem like a difficult 4×4, when the way I learnt it makes it seem far less daunting
Nom-Gen-Dat-Acc is the standard order in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and probably a few others, but other countries use a different word order. Here in France the most common is Nom-Acc-Gen-Dat, which i think is more practical for learners of German as the Nominative and Accusative are often identical.
Would it not also be likely that Old English would have followed, if not the same, similar changes that Old Saxon underwent in the nominative? OS: se, siu, þat --> þe, þie, þat OE: se, seo, þat --> þe, þie‚ þat (?)
These 'what if' scenarios are a lot of fun. I have spent a lot of time looking at how lost Old and Middle English words would look if they'd lasted until today, so Old English fregen would be frayn = question; niðing would be nithing = villain, and many more. I also made quite a lot of sentences with these words, such as Have you forthborn anything fremeful = Have you produced anything useful?; Carbon smalling is an oughting = Carbon reduction is a duty; these are in the book How we'd talk if the English had won in 1066 (new edition 2020). I am sure some of the worked out updated words could be tweaked - it's sometimes hard to be sure quite how some of the Old English words would have been most likely to have turned out.
I suspect that the genders and cases had started to disappear in the late Old English period because of Viking invasion and settlement. To the extent that they lived on in writing until 1066, that may reflect the conservatism of writing. Compare Katharevousa. The m in “whom” is a vestige of the dative case.
in modern English the word "them" derived from old norse pronoun þeim, "those" is a plural form obsolete singular form "tho" which comes from old English plural "þa"
How do you write and do the words in Anglo Saxon, or Old English with computer word processor? I can't find a youtube search on this though there aren't that many people that would even look for this. So far no known guides on this. It would be interesting to together something on this. ...
Thanks, it's interesting to me to see how similar it would be to German. People will shoot me for saying this, but I almost wish English had kept the cases...... but, nah! I'm fine with the simplification of both the cases and gender.
Correct me if I'm mistaken but I think the genderneutral forms are definitely useful, as you can easily refer to all people alike instead of having to mention different genders separately á la "ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary people". Having the gendered forms on the side may still be nice, though.
@@xCorvus7x @δτ Well, I am talking about genders as a grammatical form for nouns in general. As far as addressing a group of people, in German, a group would be addressed using the masculine and feminine form, but not neutral..... In Spanish, it would just be the masculine form, which encompasses any gender. Yeah, but I'm talking about the gender of the words themselves, not the gender of the people. Also, how the gendered nouns change with the case. It's mostly lost in English.
@@simonebalkenhol1206 I am only referring to words that describe people. And isn't it odd that we speak of genders in language at all? In German, what makes a door feminine and a table masculine? Even if we insist on declensing them differently, why are these different groups of words named after genders in the first place?
@@xCorvus7x I'm wondering how gendered nouns and their declensions in German or the lack of these grammatical forms in English, have to do with non-binary people? What pronoun is preferred? Of course out of consideration, that should be used. But what does that have to do with declensions and cases?
Simon can you tell a bit of high german cuz there were many the same changes as in english taking place such as: i - ei, sk - sh, an - en. in verbs endings and so forth.
In some dialects of English, “don” is used instead of “that.” I also know that demonstratives often arise from articles. Does “that” come from the “thaet?” And did the ancestor of dialects that use “don” just appropriate “thone” as the singular second/third person demonstrative instead of “thaet?” Or are these articles not related to demonstratives?
@@Sprecherfuchs I’ve certainly heard it elsewhere because it was already familiar to me, but I don’t remember specifically from where. The older characters in Derry Girls use it though. And after a listening to it again, they use “thon” with a th sound.
Thank you for the kind comment :) It's Photoshop! It's good for automatically lining things up with each other, although sometimes I don't get things completely neat (through my own sloppiness).
This makes me wonder what modern English would sound like if our gendered pronouns were related to grammatical gender. I’m also reminded of Mark Twain’s essay “The Awful German Language” from his book _A Tramp Abroad_ where he translates German into English in the most literal way possible to include the grammatical gender. E.g.: Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?” Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.” Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?” Wilhelm. “It has gone to the opera.”
Enjoyable, and food for thought. Sound change in plural still exists in house / houses, for one. And what about 'irregular' plurals such as mouse / mice?
Case and gender still persist in a reduced form in casual English. Them can be a plural article. Of of them girls. The,rhyming with he, can be a feminine article. Another important distinction retained by casual English is between gerunds in yng (not ing) and present participles in ind (pronounced in). The y of Old Anglo Saxon copied from Greek upsilon was not German ü or French u. It is still preserved in Swedish and more or less in English words in y such as Derby. The collapse of the Anglo Saxon didn’t result in its disappearance but in its freer use, but the English Academia which was too influenced by Norman ironed out everything that was too popular.
Your voice is very bassy and monotone. So it's very easy for someone to think your videos would be boring. Unless of course they pay attention to what you are talking about and how you are breaking them down. I find it a very intuitive process of explaining to people concepts that are not very easy to wrap your head around, without giving in to unnecessary gimmickry!
I stumbled upon the English word "fee". That means German "Gebühr" What I hear is the German word "Vieh". That means English "cattle". A farmer will pay selling the "Vieh" : fiː to pay the fee : fiː
So I could say "Thone Simon is quite good at these videos" but I would say "thon bike is just the right size for me", possibly because I'm talking about an object I have used. At least I think. Thon/thone/yon is really in use a lot in central Scotland.
Some people believe masculin and female were given to things according to what they believed is living / not living. However the meaning what lives and what doesnt live got lost or wasnt remembered well.
@@đœwæþ idk why but for some reason I just thought that because native speakers might not have a conscious understanding of grammatical gender, they might not be able to work out this kind of parallel between languages
It would have been much more hassling to learn English, good thing it's gender-neutral making it easier to learn vocabulary. As an Arab user, sure grammatical gender can be challenging but it's not too difficult to learn it in Arabic even if it's right to left.
What's your take on the Present Perfect in English? I've been teaching English (TEFL) for decades, and it's the most difficult tense to teach and concretise in usage. And thank you for talking about weak forms, it's given me new lesson ideas.
The present perfect is not allways what the name suggests. It is used about an action that was perfected before the present, but has created a situation with an important effect in the present. It is also used about an acrion that began at a specific point in the past and is still going on. It can also be used about an action that will begin some time in the future, and that will create a situation, or will still be going on at a later time in the future.
@@knutholt3486 Yes, I know - the multiple and subtle uses are quite a project to teach successfully. I have only really done it once, when the student was staying with me and the tense was embedded into spontaneous interaction. That student was Italian so the structure of the Present Perfect equated to the Past Simple in their native language. But they got it!
If Spanish still counted 11-20 like Latin: once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, sece, setence, dosdeveinte, undeveinte, veinte. Hence "El uno es diecinueve, el otro es undeveinte", which Hungarians will recognize. If 20,30...90 had all been preserved in Russian as they are in Greek and Latin: висти, треяста, четыряста, пяносто, шестосто, седьмосто, восьмосто, девяносто.
As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
Hello, Indo-European fossils 😄. It's always awesome to meet someone who does not be in the one true timeline (not hese one offenly).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o)
It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
@@brexitgreens Wtf is your about page.
This is a fun idea. I’d be happy to see more videos entertaining alternate histories of English
me too!
Tonal English
Absolutely!
@@vicious-w7m no please no the language is bad enough
@@yerdasellsavon9232 I think it's a good mix of utilitarian and romantic.
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
I think, minus the Conquest, English would be much more like Dutch.
There's a book called "how we'd talk if the English won in 1066" it's a good start
People are working on such a hypothetical language - it's called Anglish. The project is detailed on the Anglish Moot wiki, if you're interested :)
@@stevekaczynski3793 ouch 😅
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well.
I'm from the American Midwest.
I've never noticed this before but I do, too.
Whenever I watch your videos I feel like I've literally travelled back in time a thousand years
A really interesting hypothetical, but also a helpful tutorial for Old English grammatical gender!
Really enjoyed this one! Please do more hypotheticals.
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case.
*) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
I'd just like to briefly chime in on the prospect of more hypotheticals: Yes, please, that was extremely fun!
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
I speak german and friesian, so its very good to see that here, because i see how it works
@@derdurstigstemann are you north frisian?
@@arkle519 eastfrisian, see my channel
@@derdurstigstemann It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
@@arkle519 very well said. thank you so much. it is a very rich cultural heritage.
Simon please do more of this! I, as a german, love this!
I love this style of video: it applies your expertise in a way that's interesting, fun and more digestible for non-linguists. I'd love to see more!
*Video starts*
Michael Rosen: noice
One complicated idea I've had floating around is creating a Romlang (a Romance conlang based on Late Latin) based on a scenario where the Anglo-Saxons didn't displace the native Romano-British but assimilated with them instead, adopting Late Latin and some Brittonic words while still undergoing the same sound changes as English did in normal history. I wonder whether the resulting language would be any similar to French (as the Franks originally spoke a language somewhat similar to the Anglo-Saxons).
Though, the Romano British was a apparently small minority of people ? most people were Celtic speakers, the population is said to have been four million and had halved by the time or during significant influxes of Germanic people started
The Romans were apparently, only an administrative class really, some retries from the military and some Celts who worked for them and became 'Romano British'
So, maybe the scenario might work better if in an alternative time, Celtic persisted longer in what is now England ( and Scotland ) would we be looking at an English regional dialect using much more Celtic also ?
@@junctionfilms6348 Interesting. English adopted "mom" or "mum" and "dad" or "da" from Celtic.
@@thumbstruck Ah yes, forgot about those, I think there are a few others of course, I think 'do' ( to do ) is from Celtic ?
Where I grew up ( Norfolk ) there is an old slang for a wife or girl "mawther" ( nothing to do with Mother ! quite different pronunciation in the accent ) and it is debated about the origin of this but there is an almost same word in Irish
There are theories it is even a Britannic leftover or somehow made its way into dialect a long long time ago, maybe even borrowed from the local Celtic by the Anglians, though this seems on the face of it unlikely, as surely the Brittonic Celtic then, in that area, would be closer to modern Welsh of course but not Irish, I do not know enough about it tbh
I think it is plausible though, that Celts persisted for much longer and even side by side with Germanic incomers, maybe even until Norman times. Certainly the place names of the area can be connected to Celtic sometimes
There's already Il Bethisad which has a fantasy British Romance; though they just made it to feel like actual Welsh.
@@DY142 Though, Welsh is a Brittonic Celtic language, not Latin
Interesting. Gender and cases probably didn't disappear in one go, so it would be interesting to know how it happened - what disappeared first and what was the last to go.
Looking at Scandinavian, the case system was in collapse around 1500(?), but the dative didn't die so easily and several dialects still has it, and the gender system is either intact or reduced to two genders (or all gone in some Danish dialects, I believe).
You can more or less make 4 categories for how much is preserved, not counting the leftover genitive clitic:
-Category 1: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Only Icelandic.
-Category 2: Nominative, accusative and dative. Genitive is mostly dead. Faroese, Dalmål such as Orsamål and early Elfdalian.
-Category 3: Nominative and dative. Living accusative and genitive gone. Plenty of Norwegian and some Swedish dialects follow this.
-Category 4: Case system dead, except some fixed phrases and the "genitive" clitic.
We've seen changes live, as for example Elfdalian went from 2 to 3 in the early 20th century, and plenty of dialects are going from 3 to 4 currently.
@@vatterholm The history of languages seems to be going only in one direction. Makes one wonder what it took for it to go in the opposite direction once and give rise to a language with such a multidimensional grammar as Proto Indo European. Were those prehistoric people even more cultured than ancient Greeks? If so, where's their science, arts, cities and literature? Nothing left beyond a few graves and chariots. Quite a mystery.
@@brexitgreens New cases emerge all the time. The language became much more complex from Proto-Norse to Old Norse by merging the articles into the words. Then even as some cases went away while going from Old Norse to modern dialecs, some have developed new cases like vocative.
@@brexitgreens Doesn't have anything to do with how "cultured" a people is.
@@vatterholm Thanks for bringing up those cases, I didn't know about them. So Old Norwegian had suffix declension, like non Germanic Euro languages… that's fun. I would say that an advanced grammar must be a reflection on intellectual capacity of the speaker - for the simple reason that a dull man wouldn't be capable of it. Advanced grammar seems to imply some cultivation as well, therefore science, literature and poetry. Grammar is similar to algebra: if you can inflect words and build compound sentences, you probably also can perform symbolic calculus.
'In thome house' mirrors perfectly German 'in dem Haus' :)
On this gender thing (and apologies if this has come up elsewhere) ... when, back in the 1970s my 80 year old great aunt’s, who spoke Craven Yorkshire, used to say at tea-time, for example ‘That’s Mrs Coxshott lettuce’ or ‘That’s yer grandma Ramsden recipe’ (rather than Mrs Coxshott’s, or Grandma Ramsden’s)
was that a relic of a different feminine possessive compared with a masculine ‘’s’ which has survived in standard English?
Deletion of possessive -s is recorded in a lot of older northern English dialects - I'm not sure how far back it goes, but there are written examples from the 1800s! Thanks for this personal account of it, it's great to know it was still in use recently :)
This is really cool. Be neat if this was expanded to all noun, verb and adjective classes. Really curious to see the result.
You need to do a video about extinct letters and phonetic symbols. Thorn and eth were so cool. The crossed d is awesome too
Anglish speakers:
WRITE THAT DOWN!
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch.
I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
This is a lot of fun! Very happy to see Geoff Lindsey's SSBE transcription here, I'm a proponent of using it more widely
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all.
I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
I had to comment because your username is my real life actual name and it was very jarring to see
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
Comparison to Icelandic demonstrative pronouns:
*Singular forms:*
see - sá / sú (masc. / fem.)
thone - þann
thas - þess
thome - þeim / því (masc. / neuter)
see - sú
tho - þá
thier - þeirrar / þeirri (genitive / dative)
that - það
*Plural forms:*
tho - þær / þeir / þau (neuter / masc. / fem.)
thore - þeirra
thome - þeim
Note: Icelandic vowels can get a bit whacky, so , and are not quite pronounced the way one might expect.
"Tho folk are in thome housem" sounds like something you'd see in one of those surreal memes
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
Thanks for having me on! And it certainly wouldn't help the poor L2 learners!
Another gem! I'm not keen on the transcription system you're using for modern English, though. Why do they analyse diphthongs as vowel + consonant (semi-vowel). I curious as to what it is you prefer about that.
Good luck with thier dissertation.
Fascinating. Do you have a video which explains how and why English lost its grammatical gender? Thanks
Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs?
Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
The shortening of 'that' to 'tha' must be an England thing; here in the States that is always that, it is never shortened.
This was great. More please.
Very interesting, I hope you do more like this!
I like the concept. It is also something that unless you upload it, there would probably be no equivalent video. Pretty much as with most of your videos, though. A very good thing. I'd love to see more videos on hipotheticals.
By the way, I loved the twist of going for ' sorry for my new phone' instead of 'sorry for the background noise'. I guess the record Guiness remains intact
Good luck on your dissertation Simon! When it's done, will it be available anywhere for us to look at? (Forgive me if that's a dumb question, I have no clue how dissertations work :P)
Great video. As others have been saying, it might be interesting to see you make a video on how you feel about Anglish.
Fantastic videos, by the way. As a fellow linguist, I think your assessment is quite accurate.
I have never commented in here before Simon, but I do so enjoy your videos. This one, in particular was great fun. Thank you
Hey Simon, I loved the video! It's a really cool topic and I hope you do more English evolution hypotheticals in the future. I was just wondering, though, should "thas" and "that" be transcribed as /ðas/ and /ðat/, though? Shouldn't it be /ðæs/ and /ðæt/?
Good question! I'm using Geoff Lindsey's guidelines for phonemic transcription because they align better with my own accent - I have [a] for the 'trap' vowel. In General American and some UK accents, it would indeed be [æ] :)
@@simonroper9218 Ah, okay, I think I see. I think my issue was that I was thinking of it as the /æ/ vowel rather than the 'trap' vowel, but that just goes to show you we have lexical sets for a reason. I'll have to read a little more on Geoff Lindsey. Either way, thanks for explaining, and I look forward to the next video.
Your disclaimer at the beginning that this was all hypothetical and not actual history reminded me of Orson Welles' disclaimers during his 1938 radio reading of H.G. Wells' _War of the Worlds._ Although Welles repeatedly assured the audience that Martians had not actually invaded the Earth, that didn't prevent some mobs from taking to the streets. I only hope that your audience has a more nuanced reaction.
I loves me a plausible counterfactual history. Cheers from sunny Vienna, Scott
Simon. Every video I watch of yours is a contemplative joy.
After your results, people might take your hypotheticals more seriously, so be careful... 😁
I really enjoy your content a lot, and it’s probably my favourite videos to watch on youtube.
Interesting video! It actually made me very glad that English lost grammatical gender and almost all its case forms-they've never been missed, as far as I can tell.
I miss them!
@@thinking-ape6483 Haha, that's one!
You are so articulate and I really enjoy your teaching capabilities and background knowledge you have yourself acquired. You sure you aren't a linguist? I noticed you said "NEE ter" for neuter. Where Americans would say NOO ter. Interesting.
This is so fun!!! Could this also be done for the indefinite particles? I am very interested...
And also personal pronouns!!! that would be most exciting!!!!!!
Could make the argument for there for the masculine article. In Old High German it was þer before þ changed to d.
Speaking of collapsing grammar: What are your ideas on the fate of the past participle? I notice more and more that the simple past is used in its stead ('I have went'), and it's not just linguistically challenged people doing this.
Same about cases in pronouns. While "for me" is still pretty much standard, the same is not true for phrases like "for you and me"; you can expect "for you and I" more often than not.
You have some interesting examples. "For you and I" is simply a hypercorrection, but it might trigger a grammatical reorganization in the future. I have the opposite in my dialect. (I'm from the Pittsburgh area, and I'm in the third generation in my family to have gone to college, yet my lower registers [in sociolinguistic terms] seem to go a lot lower than those of the people who attended college with me.) In a sentence with a double subject, I would say "Me and John went to town." (I don't say this in standard, formal English.) I've alway hypothesized that this is French influence, e. g. "Jean et moi, nous sommes alles en ville." (Sorry, I don't know how to type accent marks here on TH-cam.) However, this was also used in stereotypical depictions of foreigners using bad English, e. g. in a movie from the 1950's, a Native American might say something like "Me no got no wampum," meaning "I don't have any money." I could see a future for English where it breaks up into two languages, one using only the nominative forms of pronouns, and the other using only the accusative forms.
As for verbs in my lower registers, some have the past tense form and the past participle form reversed. I've never sat down and tried to figure out how many verbs this is true of and how many verbs don't do that.
Another thing I've noticed is people putting noun modifiers which should follow the noun in front of the noun instead, e. g. what used to be "peanuts in the shell" are now "in-shell peanuts." This could really wreak havoc on English. Tnink of "animals that eat plants" becoming "plant-eating animals." This could really mess up the rule that the subject precedes the verb and the object follows the verb. Just compare that to what has been happening to German since they started insisting on putting the verb at the end of the sentence about 300 years ago, and all the repercussions that has had on the language.
@@bigscarysteve well, the 'plant-eating animals' thing is simply an attributive construction vs. a sub-clause. Neither violates the rules of the language; it just shifts preferences. When I first came in contact with English I certainly experienced the overuse of the objective pronoun more often. Especially in replies that featured a simple pronoun: "Who did this?" "Me!" But that may have been my limited exposure. Or, as you say, it may have lead to hypercorrection.
Once I had the cases down, coming from German a quite natural concept, I noticed how many natives don't really grasp the concept of cases at all.
Regarding German placing the verb at the end: Only in complex sentences; Rewboss has an interesting video on that. It can make for intricate sentences, especially if you have sub-clauses. I myself, being of German mother tongue, don't really experience these things; they happen subconsciously.
As for the lower registers: I love it when an individual has enough grasp of the language to play with these things, can use them in the appropriate situations.
@@HotelPapa100 Actually, attributive modifiers are logically derived from subordinate clauses. For example, in the sentence, "The red house burned down," how many propositions are there? There are two: 1. "The house burned down." 2. "The house is red." These would be combined into a single sentence, "The house which is red burned down." Then you collapse the relative clause, producing "The house red burned down," and finally you apply a transformational rule which gives you "The red house burned down." Most Indo-European languages are head-initial. The fact that English puts adjectives ahead of their nouns is a bit weird. Compare the French "la maison rouge." This phrase simply doesn't undergo the transformational rule that English does. However, this particular rule has been in place for millenia and English hasn't collapsed. The "plant-eating animals" thing has also been around for a long time, and I think it's what's spurring people on to say things like "in-shell peanuts," which is utterly weird to me, but I've been seeing more and more of that sort of thing in the last two decades, and I find it jarring. If this trend keeps up, English COULD transform itself into a head-final language--I'm not saying it necessarily will.
As for "Who did this?--Me!", that is a very old usage in English. I would describe it as a disjunctive usage. The hypercorrections caused by this usage are pretty old, too--at least a century, if not more, I'm sure. I myself had never heard of noun cases until I started studying German. The funny thing is, French has cases as well, but as in English, they're only apparent in the pronouns. My French teacher had me absolutely baffelled with her explanaiton of direct and indirect object pronouns. It was only after studying German that that aspect of French began to make sense to me.
I'll have to disagree with you a little bit about German having verb-final placement only in subordinate clauses. German also is VF in sentence fragments. Consider "to go to Berlin," which in German is "nach Berlin fahren." In an independent clause, there are two empty slots at the beginning of the clause in the deep structure. The first is for the topic of the sentence, and the second is for the conjugated verb, so a deep structure of "ich nach Berlin gefahren bin" produces the surface structure of "Ich bin nach Berlin gefahren" or "Nach Berlin bin ich gefahren."
@@HotelPapa100 I'd never heard of Rewboss before, but I just checked out the video you referenced. He's basically saying the same thing I said in the last paragraph of my previous post. The Germanic languages are traditionally V2. When German writers started mimicking Latin authors in the 1700's by putting the verb at the end, the V2 rule was so strong that German ended up with the "verbal bracket," as Rewboss calls it. However, weird things started happening in other places. In SVO languages, the adverbial elements in the predicate go in the order place-manner-time. In SOV languages, the order is time-manner-place. Modern German has adopted the time-manner-place word order, indicating that it really, really wants to be an SOV language. German is turning itself inside out. It's my understanding that something similar happened in the IE languages of India under the influence of the Dravidian languages.
Could the form of the definite article "them" still be used in some older dialects? Some people in Appalachia in the US sometimes say "there's (fill in the blank) in "them" woods" The use "them" instead of "the" sometimes.
I feel like that's unrelated
@@mmmmmmmmmmmmm Yes, it's just the pronoun 'them'
I love theoretical takes on language! Good stuff 👍
That might just be leftover trauma from my German primary school, but it feels very wrong to see the cases listed in any order other than 'nominative, genetive, dative accusative'. Even worse, it's been more than a decade and I still associate certain colours with the respective cases simply because I had to stare at a brightly coloured chart for four years straight
I agree completely. Same here in the Netherlands
Seems an unusual way to do it, I've learnt German as an Adult and I've always seen the charts of:
Nom Der Das Die Die(plural)
Acc Den Das Die Die
Dat Dem Der Den
Gen Des Der
That's how I remember this
@@ryanchristopher2369 Same here, i learned it in this order primary school. While i understand that it's difficult to switch once you learn things in a particular pattern, I wouldn't say that there's specifically a right or wrong way.
@@aeschda given how most sentences are Nom, Akk, Dat and Gen is rare, it seems unusual to learn it in any other way, particularly when Akk comes before Dat, sometimes a shortcut is necessary, having Akk last makes it seem like a difficult 4×4, when the way I learnt it makes it seem far less daunting
Nom-Gen-Dat-Acc is the standard order in Germany, the Netherlands, Russia and probably a few others, but other countries use a different word order. Here in France the most common is Nom-Acc-Gen-Dat, which i think is more practical for learners of German as the Nominative and Accusative are often identical.
Thanks Simon. Those are a lot of fun for me as a German to follow.
Would it not also be likely that Old English would have followed, if not the same, similar changes that Old Saxon underwent in the nominative?
OS: se, siu, þat --> þe, þie, þat
OE: se, seo, þat --> þe, þie‚ þat (?)
I wonder if /s/ wouldn't have voiced to /z/ in analogy to /θ/ > /ð/.
These 'what if' scenarios are a lot of fun. I have spent a lot of time looking at how lost Old and Middle English words would look if they'd lasted until today, so Old English fregen would be frayn = question; niðing would be nithing = villain, and many more. I also made quite a lot of sentences with these words, such as Have you forthborn anything fremeful = Have you produced anything useful?; Carbon smalling is an oughting = Carbon reduction is a duty; these are in the book How we'd talk if the English had won in 1066 (new edition 2020). I am sure some of the worked out updated words could be tweaked - it's sometimes hard to be sure quite how some of the Old English words would have been most likely to have turned out.
"How'd you like thone apples?"
Extremely interesting video. I like the hypotheticals.
Can you make a video for indefinite articles?
I suspect that the genders and cases had started to disappear in the late Old English period because of Viking invasion and settlement. To the extent that they lived on in writing until 1066, that may reflect the conservatism of writing. Compare Katharevousa. The m in “whom” is a vestige of the dative case.
So cool! But boy am I glad English dropped the different gendered articles. That part of learning German in college nearly killed me.
well if english had kept it, learning german would have been much easier since then you would grow up using the cases.
@VFM #7634 Same way as you cannot tell which letter a noun starts with unless you learn that together with the rest oft he word...
I have to wonder: did the words “those” and “them” arise from the original inflections for “the”?
in modern English the word "them" derived from old norse pronoun þeim, "those" is a plural form obsolete singular form "tho" which comes from old English plural "þa"
@@unraed thank you stranger!
Interesting idea. Would love to see more like this
How do you write and do the words in Anglo Saxon, or Old English with computer word processor? I can't find a youtube search on this though there aren't that many people that would even look for this. So far no known guides on this. It would be interesting to together something on this.
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Thanks, it's interesting to me to see how similar it would be to German. People will shoot me for saying this, but I almost wish English had kept the cases...... but, nah! I'm fine with the simplification of both the cases and gender.
Correct me if I'm mistaken but I think the genderneutral forms are definitely useful, as you can easily refer to all people alike instead of having to mention different genders separately á la "ladies, gentlemen, and non-binary people".
Having the gendered forms on the side may still be nice, though.
@@xCorvus7x @δτ Well, I am talking about genders as a grammatical form for nouns in general. As far as addressing a group of people, in German, a group would be addressed using the masculine and feminine form, but not neutral..... In Spanish, it would just be the masculine form, which encompasses any gender. Yeah, but I'm talking about the gender of the words themselves, not the gender of the people. Also, how the gendered nouns change with the case. It's mostly lost in English.
@@xCorvus7x Icelandic solves that problem by using the neuter, but that wouldn’t work in English because it (no pun intended) would sound dehumanizing
@@simonebalkenhol1206 I am only referring to words that describe people.
And isn't it odd that we speak of genders in language at all?
In German, what makes a door feminine and a table masculine?
Even if we insist on declensing them differently, why are these different groups of words named after genders in the first place?
@@xCorvus7x I'm wondering how gendered nouns and their declensions in German or the lack of these grammatical forms in English, have to do with non-binary people? What pronoun is preferred? Of course out of consideration, that should be used. But what does that have to do with declensions and cases?
Great! As a German, I now know how to write my next English essay.
hell yeah more hypotheticals!
Simon can you tell a bit of high german cuz there were many the same changes as in english taking place such as: i - ei, sk - sh, an - en. in verbs endings and so forth.
Whoa ive been thinking about this very subject very recently. Pogie vid.
id like seeing more similar content.
mate the beard looks so good
In some dialects of English, “don” is used instead of “that.” I also know that demonstratives often arise from articles. Does “that” come from the “thaet?” And did the ancestor of dialects that use “don” just appropriate “thone” as the singular second/third person demonstrative instead of “thaet?” Or are these articles not related to demonstratives?
Are you sure you don't mean "yon"? Never heard of "don", what dialects do you mean?
@@Sprecherfuchs I’ve certainly heard it elsewhere because it was already familiar to me, but I don’t remember specifically from where. The older characters in Derry Girls use it though. And after a listening to it again, they use “thon” with a th sound.
I follow your content passionately. Thanks!
Just curious. What template/tool do you use to create your slides?
Thank you for the kind comment :) It's Photoshop! It's good for automatically lining things up with each other, although sometimes I don't get things completely neat (through my own sloppiness).
Now we need a video about English with hieroglyphs )
This makes me wonder what modern English would sound like if our gendered pronouns were related to grammatical gender.
I’m also reminded of Mark Twain’s essay “The Awful German Language” from his book _A Tramp Abroad_ where he translates German into English in the most literal way possible to include the grammatical gender. E.g.:
Gretchen: “Wilhelm, where is the turnip?”
Wilhelm: “She has gone to the kitchen.”
Gretchen: “Where is the accomplished and beautiful English maiden?”
Wilhelm. “It has gone to the opera.”
Enjoyable, and food for thought.
Sound change in plural still exists in house / houses, for one. And what about 'irregular' plurals such as mouse / mice?
The i-umlaut plural mutation in west-germanic. Yes, Simon already did a video about that.
Case and gender still persist in a reduced form in casual English. Them can be a plural article. Of of them girls. The,rhyming with he, can be a feminine article. Another important distinction retained by casual English is between gerunds in yng (not ing) and present participles in ind (pronounced in). The y of Old Anglo Saxon copied from Greek upsilon was not German ü or French u. It is still preserved in Swedish and more or less in English words in y such as Derby. The collapse of the Anglo Saxon didn’t result in its disappearance but in its freer use, but the English Academia which was too influenced by Norman ironed out everything that was too popular.
Your voice is very bassy and monotone. So it's very easy for someone to think your videos would be boring. Unless of course they pay attention to what you are talking about and how you are breaking them down. I find it a very intuitive process of explaining to people concepts that are not very easy to wrap your head around, without giving in to unnecessary gimmickry!
Another great video, I love this!
Very interesting. It would be good to hear a complete modern English passage including old forms of "the". Just me?
This needs to be government mandated to bring this"back"!
I stumbled upon the English word "fee". That means German "Gebühr"
What I hear is the German word "Vieh". That means English "cattle".
A farmer will pay selling the "Vieh" : fiː to pay the fee : fiː
Just noticed that the "th" in the and thistle, are different.
How fun! Thank you for this ☺️
Thon/thone or yon/yone are still in use in Scotland...
So I could say "Thone Simon is quite good at these videos" but I would say "thon bike is just the right size for me", possibly because I'm talking about an object I have used. At least I think. Thon/thone/yon is really in use a lot in central Scotland.
Some people believe masculin and female were given to things according to what they believed is living / not living. However the meaning what lives and what doesnt live got lost or wasnt remembered well.
Gender of words does often describe if a think is womanly or manly or neither. Often it doesnt but often it does.
Audio fine! No worries!
Love counterfactual linguistics! Keep up the good work.
Wouldn’t vowel endings lead to open syllable lengthening?
I found that fascinating, thanks.
Well that was interesting.
How would romance vocabulary have been incorporated in this case?
Maybe by copying the French gender.
@@đœwæþ idk why but for some reason I just thought that because native speakers might not have a conscious understanding of grammatical gender, they might not be able to work out this kind of parallel between languages
This would have been a nightmare for English language learners today. LOL
Wow, the old definite articles look like today's German
It would have been much more hassling to learn English, good thing it's gender-neutral making it easier to learn vocabulary. As an Arab user, sure grammatical gender can be challenging but it's not too difficult to learn it in Arabic even if it's right to left.
I loved that, thank you!
What's your take on the Present Perfect in English? I've been teaching English (TEFL) for decades, and it's the most difficult tense to teach and concretise in usage. And thank you for talking about weak forms, it's given me new lesson ideas.
The present perfect is not allways what the name suggests. It is used about an action that was perfected before the present, but has created a situation with an important effect in the present. It is also used about an acrion that began at a specific point in the past and is still going on. It can also be used about an action that will begin some time in the future, and that will create a situation, or will still be going on at a later time in the future.
@@knutholt3486 Yes, I know - the multiple and subtle uses are quite a project to teach successfully. I have only really done it once, when the student was staying with me and the tense was embedded into spontaneous interaction. That student was Italian so the structure of the Present Perfect equated to the Past Simple in their native language. But they got it!
If Spanish still counted 11-20 like Latin: once, doce, trece, catorce, quince, sece, setence, dosdeveinte, undeveinte, veinte. Hence "El uno es diecinueve, el otro es undeveinte", which Hungarians will recognize.
If 20,30...90 had all been preserved in Russian as they are in Greek and Latin: висти, треяста, четыряста, пяносто, шестосто, седьмосто, восьмосто, девяносто.
so by internet rule now this is the absolute true fact of what would happened
More example sentences!!