I think English is taken for granted most of the times. It's a really beautiful and unique language but people don't give it enough credit just because it's common and heard everywhere
Wow, my love of Spanish and language learning has me learning about my own language English, and I'm fascinated by this thing I've always taken for granted
The massive amounts of accents is interesting. Many other languages don't have the hundreds if not thousands of accents that English does. I imagine it makes learn it a bit challenging as just because you might understand Americans, you might not understand British or Indian English speakers very well at all.
Excellent presentation, Olly! Some of this was covered, coincidentally, way back in high school German class. However, since it was designed to help students understand the history and development of the German language, the English portion was mostly skipped over while emphasizing the vowel shifts and changes in both.The migration of tribes, invasions and other influences makes for a fascinating study.
One English word with one of the most interesting etymology is the word "girl". The word girl first appeared in English around 1300 and it originally meant "child of either gender" or "young person". Meaning that both male children and female children were called "girls". It wasn't until the 1400s when the word boy came into English and only female children were called girls. In modern times we still use the word "girl" to refer to adult young women. So in a way the world girl still retains that original meaning of "young person".
Interesting note about girl being a gender-neutral word. I have been studying German, a language with noun genders, and the German word for girl, Mädchen, is a gender neutral word. I wonder if there is a connection.
@@sweiland75 Like the other person said, it comes from the -chen (diminutive). We have "der Hund" (masculine, "the dog"), but "das Hündchen" (neuter, "the small dog). An other such suffix is -lein. "Die Frau" (woman) - "Das Fräulein" (the young woman - similar to madame and mademoiselle). Also the word "Mädchen" is the diminutive of "die Magd", wich is related to English "maiden".
@@sweiland75 Language gender and human gender have nothing to do with each other. It's very unfortunate that the word gender is used to refer to the different groups of words. Class, group or whatever but gender would be more appropriate.
1400s, boy did not yet mean male child. It meant servant or novice. It was even used as a slur, by the 1600s, toward african American farmhands before it became a word for male children
Most entertaining. A pity there are so many facts that I find it difficult to remember. The beauty, however, is one can always rewind and also watch again later. Thanks for the info.
❤❤❤ Excellent. Anyone watching this gets the gist of the book I read recently, The Story of English. Great book, but took a lot more time than the video ☝🏽🫵🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 English...it has something for everyone! Wherever you're from, there will be a familiar word in English 🥰😎🤷🏽♀️ I intend to share this with ESL people I know. The list of vowel pronounciation with various spellings is GOLD!
One of the most contentious Americanisms that was originally British is "soccer" (it's actually North American, since it's the word used in Canada as well). At Oxford, students took the portmanteau “assoccer” (association football) and shortened it to "soccer." The term was adopted in the United States but forgotten in the UK.
May be forgotten in the UK but it's near neighbour and former colony Ireland, uses soccer a lot to distinguish from the national sport, Gaelic football
To summarize Name Explain's video about it: - Football and rugby were the same sport - they split the rules - some reeeeeeally smart person back in the day took the name of one sport (football) and the rules of the other (rugby - it should have been called American RUGBY - IN MY OPINION it should be called ARMORED RUGBY because there is nothing "FOOTBALL" about it
My cousin the Geneologist, found an ancestors will from 1599 in Reading, England before the family emigrated in 1635 to the Massachusetts Colony. Our name today and on the first American ancestor's gravestone was/is HERSEY. In the earlier will however, throughout the will, the name was spelled-Hersey, Hersi, Hearsie!!! We think the name may have come with Wm the Conquerer's French army with Guy D'Hercy. I found all of that so interesting and is one reason I found this video so interesting.
Around @13:40, he began speaking of the printed press. There's a story of a printer that used the word "egg" to describe what we know as egg. This printer was from the western part of London. However, if he would have been from an area that was east of London, we would have been using a different word. Just outside of London, probably an hour's horse ride east, people used the word "eyg" to describe egg.
This is a wonderful history of the English language! Thanks for doing all this research. I can't wait to share all this information with my EFL students.
Sun day is named for the sun Monday is named for the moon Tuesday is named for Tyre, the Norse god of war Wednesday is named for Oden, the all father Thursday is named for Thor, the protector of Asgard Friday is named for Frye, the Norse god of beauty fertility and cats Saturday is named for Saturn, the roman name for Zeus
As boring as English can be since we have very few cases and it’s a pretty simple language in general I still believe it’s one of the most magical languages because of how widespread it is. There’s a ton of different dialects, expressions and even many languages that are not English have a variety of English phrases. I also speak German and in German we have the word Handys for a cellphone which comes from English. It’s pretty cool!
The days of the week are celestial bodies and gods, sometimes the same thing. Monday - Moon, Sunday - Sun. Tuesday - Mars, Wednesday - Odin, Thursday - Thor, Friday - Freya, and Saturday - Saturn. Tuesday took a sideways route to get from Mars day to Tues day, but it was named for the god of the sky and war..
The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Ramies, and the Hemps. "Cleave" is two unrelated words. One is sometimes weak, sometimes strong (cleft palate, but cloven hoof) and is cognate with dialectal German "klieben". The other is always weak and is cognate with German "kleben".
2:33 the days of the week, in english, are named for 2 celestial bodies, the biggest two seen from earth, and 5 gods, though only 4 are actually germanic in origin whilst the last god is roman
Good video, Olly. However, it seems like a missed opportunity not to mention Frisian or, at the very least, Dutch. Its connection is closer than German which was the chosen cognate to demonstrate links with a modern language. The level of intelligibility between the two languages, even after all the grammatical shifts and additional romance vocabulary, is striking! Have a look at Eddie Izzard's attempt to chat with a Frisian dairy farmer for a laugh 😅
Tell me about it. It's so frustrating when a dictionary or other source makes a comparison with German when the Dutch is even closer. e.g.: door/deur/Tür, help/help/Hilfe, stop/stop/anhalten.
@2:29 Sunday from "sun". Monday from "moon". Tuesday from "Týr" (Germanic god of warriors and mythological heroes). Wednesday from "Wōden" (Old English for "Odin", Germanic god of war and of the dead and the Norse All-Father). Thursday from "Thor" (Germanic god of lightning, thunder, storms, sacred groves and trees, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility). Friday from "Freja" [Germanic goddess of love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (magic for seeing and influencing the future)]. Saturday from "Saturn" (Roman god of time, generation, dissolution, abundance, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation).
So, we can clearly see that English changed abruptly throughout the decades. The early English resembles more a completely foreign and unknown language than the modern English language we are used to
The days of the week don't come from the Norse spoken by Vikings, they come from Western Germanic, which is the ancestral language of German, Dutch and English. So Thursday/Donderdag/Donnerstag comes from Thunor's dag/Donar dag/Donar tag. Thunor/Donar was the god of thunder/donder/donner to the Western Germanic people. Thor was the equivalent God to the Northern Germanic people, so while they are very closely related, they still different.
hi Oliver. Amanda here. Actually, my TH-cam handle is flute player 86. By the way, my apologies for calling you by your actual name. Your nickname OLLY does not come out right and text for some reason. Anyway, my ancestry is welsh, Irish, French, and German. your content on your videos is really interesting. I especially like the ones having to do with Star Wars. Those are cool.
And the reason English spelling is so crazy is that it's derived from so many other languages. And we're still borrowing words from Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish...
For animal/food words (cow/beef etc.), serfs worked with animals, but seldom if ever ate the flesh of the animals, as (1) a cow is more more useful as a supplier of milk and a beast of burden than a one-time meal, and (2) the lord usually retained the right to use the serfs’s animals for their meat; serfs being forbidden from eating the lord’s property. So serfs used the English word for the animal, and the Francophone royalty had no use for the word for the animal, as their only exposure was to the flesh that they ate.
God Bless you Sir OllyRichards. Very detailed and full of knowledge explanation of the topic. You did really amazing and hard work to bring knowledge to people, globally. Appreciable and marvelous work. 🙏🔥✝️🔥🙏🌻💐🌺🌷⛪❤💒👍
It's about time to revamp the English writing system and standardize its spelling and making it more consistent and a bit closer to the IPA system. The Americans (that's yet another word that should change because in Brazil and many other countries "America" is just one continent so "American" is just like African, European, Asian, etc") did a good job with the great vowel shift by changing things like: - centRE -> centER - programme -> program - burnT -> burnED But they still didn't "fix" other French influences like: - taBLE BLE does NOT make that sound in English, "taBOL" or "taBEL" but if we were to spell it phonetically it would be "TEIBOL" Other necessary changes, standardizing spellings: - ch -> "tch" sound Chaos? no. spell it "caos" or "kaos" - ph -> f -No more elephant and flask, make it eleFant - the "OUGH" nightmare enough -> enoff though -> douh through -> thru thorough -> torow thought -> tot Dumb words that should have the spelling or the pronunciation changed: - colonel -> kernel, cornel, cornol, kernol, etc whichever fits - ewe -> pronounce it as it's written "eh-weh" - Arkansas -> "Kansas" is already there, it's AR-KANSAS, wanna pronounce it "Arkansaw" then spell it as such - bologna -> it's pronounced "bo-LO-nya", or change the spelling to "belonee" Also Robwords made a great video on revamping the alphabet itself, Q is a pointless letter and so on Also to quote Name Explain, English could benefit by having accents precisely for those multiple meanings "wind vs wind"
@@Gertyutz I know it's unlikely, and it's dumb if they're nott trying I'm also aware about the origin, and my point still stands. Change the spelling or change the pronunciation.
The vikings spoke Old Norse which is another germanic language, supposedly Old English and Old Norse were mutually understandable, so the language barrier wasn't too heavy and in fact made it easier for Danes to make a home in england
14:20 would u say that Jamaicans or any other Caribbean country that was colonized by the British actually speak old English? The way daughter was spoken by Elisabeth the 1st is exactly how a Jamaican would pronounce it
Whats with languages having 33 letters? Russian has 33 letters, but 2 ъ,ь are silent, аnd 10 are vowels уеёзэоаыяию. Georgian has 33, all make sound, and only 5 vowels, ე,ი,უ,ა,ო. Can do so a video on Georgian? I use Ling and ReadLang. Georgian alphabet is the most beautiful, compared to latin, cryllic, and hebrew.
The first of my English ancestors to end up in North America arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. William Shakespeare lived between 1564-1616. The King James Bible was written between 1604-1611. My Mayflower ancestor, Edward Doty, was an illiterate indentured servant. Allowing for education level, social class, and regional accent, he probably spoke something similar to the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. All of the Englishmen on the Mayflower probably spoke something similar. English speakers were still using the informal “thee” and “thou” at the time. We had not yet dropped that in favor of the formal “you”. Some of the vowel sounds in English were still changing. Those sounds did not always change in North America in the same way they did in Britain. The present day accent of the British upper class was still centuries in the future. The spellings of English words were not yet codified. To the extent that spellings were codified, those spellings were sometimes different than the spellings used today in the USA. Words that were common in Britain sometimes dropped out of use here. Some words that were retained here dropped out of use in Britain. The North American accent was not yet distinctively different than British accents. That changed over time as different British accents merged and mutated in North America. The American accent further changed as people speaking other languages arrived here and left their mark on the way we speak English. I am sometimes astonished that British and American English are still close enough that we are able to communicate with each other. I am sure that a continuous stream of British immigrants helped. Books and news papers surely helped slow the divergence. Television, radio, movies, and the Internet have moved British and American English closer today. It would be interesting to know how this shakes out over the coming centuries.
5:50 Are you sure that was due to Viking influence? The Angles could have very easily believed the same mythology as the Scandinavians and the rest of the Germanic peoples in general.
Yeah part of the video is definitely completely incorrect. The Western Germanic people (modern day Germans, Dutch and English) originally believed in a religion that was nearly identical to that of the Norse mythology. There were a few gods missing and a few extra (like the goddess Easter), but over all, it was the same but with a different pronunciation of the names (Odin was called Woden/Wotan).
One theory is that English sort of “originated” from the Scandinavian language spoken by the Jutes and as the Jutes came in to contact with the Anglo Saxons, the language spoken by the Jutes adopted the WORDS of the Anglo Saxons but the Syntax of the Jutes language still remained! This theory is based off of the fact that the syntax of English is so similar to modern Scandinavian languages, and the fact that although WORDS are very commonly borrowed, syntax is not! Which would suggest that this theory of Anglo Saxon words replacing the words in the Jute language is an, at the very least, very plausible theory! I think I got that right at least 🤔😅
@@willvangaal8412 I meant the I think I got the theory right that I had heard, not necessarily that the theory was right, even tho I did think it to be more plausible than I do now, which is basically not at all as I can't find the original source of this "theory" and all I can find is that the Jutes probably didn't influence English a whole lot
To really tackle the origin of days of the week, we need to look first to the Babylonians. The reason there are seven days in the first place is because they named the days after the seven most important celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Everything starts to get complicated when you try to keep track of which gods various cultures attached to the planets. For example, Wednesday in Spanish is Miércoles, based on Mercury. We use Wednesday, based on Odin, associated with the planet Mercury (not to be confused with the Greek god Hermes). German uses Mittwoch, for some reason, which just means "mid-week," but keeps with the formula, otherwise.
Slightly wrong, as we were in the Roman Warm period around 55BC and the climate of Britain was warmer than today. In fact, the Romans came because we were so rich and could grow wine in large amounts, even in Northern England. Sadly Europe and the world went cold around 400AD for 500 years, until we went into the medievil warm period around 900 ad, which was roughly the time the vikings went to Greenland, where they stayed and grew crops like oats, untill it went cold again from around 1350 AD.
The best thing English did was get rid of all the gender articles. It is the one thing that makes learning German an absolute Hell on Earth! Six different words for "the" that are used in sixteen different places in a sentence. It couldn't get more stupid than that!
Maybe someday they'll come up with a system of "international" English with an academy of its own... I never realized that Thomas Mallory looked so much like Henry VII!
Well I'll stick with my old goodie Greek language. My head got explode of how many changes English had for the past two millennia, while my language had only some very little phonetics changes.
@Gertyutz yes it is absolutely the same, with same vocabulary, grammar, and expressions. I our daily life we express ourselves with thousands of quotes coming directly from ancient texts, and we read any book of our ancient Greek writers without any translation, or explanations. So go play with your buckets to another beach.
The biggest irony is that the modern-day Americans speak closer to Shakespearian English than the modern-day British, due to the latter's shift towards non-rhoticity.
Actually there there are dialects in Britain that are much closer to Shakespearean English than American English - such as those from the West Country, and areas of East Anglia.
It seems there is new evidence to suggest no such invasion occurred. Many "origin of English" books mention this Germanic invasion event over and over again. However, it sounds good and makes the topic a bit more interesting.
Hi Noir. The invasions definitely happened -- there's plenty of evidence. They're not just in the tales of where English language came from, they're in detailed historical accounts recorded by people who lived at the time. The details of such invasions are very complicated (invitations, mercenaries, not one giant attack, etc.) -- but I'm sure a deep analysis would take a full-length docco to do it justice. ;)
I really can't tell if you are spewing the English racist conspiracy theory that the English originated in modern-day Britain and never migrated from the Anglia peninsula or if you are saying the migration by the Germanic tribes was peaceful and therefore not an invasion.
@@lisamarydew Then I would say to your argument that two camps have formed based on the interpretation of the available evidence concerning "invasions" of England by various Germanic tribes. The archaeological evidence based on analysis of ancient and modern DNA is inconsistent with models of large-scale invasion or conquest. Also, evidence derived from dental enamel of immigrants show a process of assimilation in "existing communities". And this camp also looks at a lot of agricultural evidence as well.
This guy,: championing the rich history of how language grows and evolves. Also this guy,: eye-rolling at Tiktok and, quoth the man "dictionaries - remember them." Dictionaries still exist and tiktok is fast-tracking the evolution of communication. Drop the pointless snark, you're not Dr Grande
In English, that definition only works for Saturday. The days of the week came from the Babylonians and what they deemed the seven most important celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Many cultures since then have either kept with those entities, used gods they directly associate with them, or some combination. Keep that origin in mind and the days of the week will make more sense in many languages!
Good luck with introducing an English Language Police. Is it going to be a British or an American institution? It'd be the same nonsense as the French, Spanish or German language polices.
Brah, no make li' dat. Why you no include us guyz from da kine? Only mainlandaz cuzz!? We stay pahd ada US, too!! I get one cousin from Waipahu... akamai him... but when da kine stay buss up, ho... no can unnastan nut'teeng. Knowwudahmeen?
any chance he can get to plug his story telling merchandise, he'll take. It gets annoying. I bought his story telling for beginners book too. Haven't used it yet. But it's annoying to shamelessly advertise it on EVERY video.
You might know languages but your history is really out of date. The Anglo Saxon invasion and ethnic replacement stuff you talk about is pretty much discredited and isn’t reflected in the archaeological record. AS influx is nowadays considered to be a lot more gradual over a longer period amounting to only around 10% of Britain’s genetic inheritance. Language change to English is a lot more top down driven by elite emulation interacting with a fairly static native population. Similar language change happened in Scotland at a similar era, changing from largely Brythonic to Goidelic Celtic, again driven by identity orientation in Aristocracy and Church
@@jmwild22 No, because the archaeological record says so, because our genetic inheritance says so, because more nuanced interpretations of how changes to language and material culture happen are available. ‘Old stories’ are not history. I suggest you think about your own political motivation for commenting without any specifically reasoned points or evidence.
@@reducer774 I have no political motivation, since I'm not British, neither am I descended from the British. The 'old story' I referred to was the old story of people trying desperately to rewrite history. It happens all over the world -- including in my country. Honestly, I'm always looking for new information about the past, since I adore history, but I'm not easily swayed by "astonishing new evidence" and will ALWAYS dissect every new interpretation thoroughly before just gulping it down. Hopefully we can agree, at least, that it's good to be among the minority who have enquiring minds?
@@jmwild22 Ok no problem dude. I was merely summarising the current historical thinking that has been increasingly downplaying simplistic ‘invasion theory’ as an explanation for change in early medieval British history, not spinning a political viewpoint. If you’re truly historically inquisitive you’ll appreciate the way that modern history writing on the period incorporates archaeology and genetics to challenge old myths and dogmas.
As a native english speaker/ American. It's become really annoying to see the entire world try to learn my native language but for selfish reasons. They don't care about the culture, the history, they don't even like the language. They only learn it because of globalization. It's become superfluous to learn any language that isn't English. This is making the world a boring place. I'm learning other languages and finding it pointless as nobody wants to speak in these languages with me. They only want to practice English , so they can improve their career and life. Very sad and annoying.
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What about Scots?
Not exactly accurate. You made a few mistakes, over simplified and glossed over some other points. Nice overview though.
I think English is taken for granted most of the times. It's a really beautiful and unique language but people don't give it enough credit just because it's common and heard everywhere
Agreed. Also, many people learn it because they have to, not because they want to.
Interesting thought!
Yes people generally look down on English and English is becoming more like a pidgin again
English is, in my opinion, the ugliest language i learnt, it's subjective really
@@elmotarealIt is subjective but there are many external factors that could influence one's perception of the language
As a Brazilian, I would say I'm impressed by the way that English was developing all through the years. ❤
Wow,
my love of Spanish and language learning has me learning about my own language English, and I'm fascinated by this thing I've always taken for granted
The massive amounts of accents is interesting. Many other languages don't have the hundreds if not thousands of accents that English does. I imagine it makes learn it a bit challenging as just because you might understand Americans, you might not understand British or Indian English speakers very well at all.
and regional dialects and national dialects. Try understanding Jamaican English.
Excellent presentation, Olly!
Some of this was covered, coincidentally, way back in high school German class. However, since it was designed to help students understand the history and development of the German language, the English portion was mostly skipped over while emphasizing the vowel shifts and changes in both.The migration of tribes, invasions and other influences makes for a fascinating study.
One English word with one of the most interesting etymology is the word "girl". The word girl first appeared in English around 1300 and it originally meant "child of either gender" or "young person". Meaning that both male children and female children were called "girls". It wasn't until the 1400s when the word boy came into English and only female children were called girls. In modern times we still use the word "girl" to refer to adult young women. So in a way the world girl still retains that original meaning of "young person".
Interesting note about girl being a gender-neutral word. I have been studying German, a language with noun genders, and the German word for girl, Mädchen, is a gender neutral word. I wonder if there is a connection.
@@sweiland75 No, the neuter gender comes from the -chen suffix.
@@sweiland75 Like the other person said, it comes from the -chen (diminutive). We have "der Hund" (masculine, "the dog"), but "das Hündchen" (neuter, "the small dog). An other such suffix is -lein. "Die Frau" (woman) - "Das Fräulein" (the young woman - similar to madame and mademoiselle).
Also the word "Mädchen" is the diminutive of "die Magd", wich is related to English "maiden".
@@sweiland75 Language gender and human gender have nothing to do with each other. It's very unfortunate that the word gender is used to refer to the different groups of words. Class, group or whatever but gender would be more appropriate.
1400s, boy did not yet mean male child. It meant servant or novice. It was even used as a slur, by the 1600s, toward african American farmhands before it became a word for male children
Fantastic video! Helpful for my "history of the English Language" class!
Most entertaining. A pity there are so many facts that I find it difficult to remember. The beauty, however, is one can always rewind and also watch again later. Thanks for the info.
And use that pause button a lot, haha ;)
❤❤❤ Excellent. Anyone watching this gets the gist of the book I read recently, The Story of English. Great book, but took a lot more time than the video ☝🏽🫵🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 English...it has something for everyone! Wherever you're from, there will be a familiar word in English 🥰😎🤷🏽♀️ I intend to share this with ESL people I know. The list of vowel pronounciation with various spellings is GOLD!
One of the most contentious Americanisms that was originally British is "soccer" (it's actually North American, since it's the word used in Canada as well). At Oxford, students took the portmanteau “assoccer” (association football) and shortened it to "soccer." The term was adopted in the United States but forgotten in the UK.
May be forgotten in the UK but it's near neighbour and former colony Ireland, uses soccer a lot to distinguish from the national sport, Gaelic football
To summarize Name Explain's video about it:
- Football and rugby were the same sport
- they split the rules
- some reeeeeeally smart person back in the day took the name of one sport (football) and the rules of the other (rugby
- it should have been called American RUGBY
- IN MY OPINION it should be called ARMORED RUGBY because there is nothing "FOOTBALL" about it
@@n1hondude It is what it is. 370 million Americans and Canadians call it football, and it isn't going to change.
@@javiermoretti1825 Yup, it is what it is and it is wrong. lol
Very fascinating topic. I loved the presentation
3:46 Beowulf obviously
My cousin the Geneologist, found an ancestors will from 1599 in Reading, England before the family emigrated in 1635 to the Massachusetts Colony. Our name today and on the first American ancestor's gravestone was/is HERSEY. In the earlier will however, throughout the will, the name was spelled-Hersey, Hersi, Hearsie!!! We think the name may have come with Wm the Conquerer's French army with Guy D'Hercy. I found all of that so interesting and is one reason I found this video so interesting.
Around @13:40, he began speaking of the printed press. There's a story of a printer that used the word "egg" to describe what we know as egg. This printer was from the western part of London. However, if he would have been from an area that was east of London, we would have been using a different word. Just outside of London, probably an hour's horse ride east, people used the word "eyg" to describe egg.
This is a wonderful history of the English language! Thanks for doing all this research.
I can't wait to share all this information with my EFL students.
Sun day is named for the sun
Monday is named for the moon
Tuesday is named for Tyre, the Norse god of war
Wednesday is named for Oden, the all father
Thursday is named for Thor, the protector of Asgard
Friday is named for Frye, the Norse god of beauty fertility and cats
Saturday is named for Saturn, the roman name for Zeus
I speak English and Spanish. Two world languages with fascinating histories.
Me too I speak both only missing Chinese to speak the 3 most widely spoken
As boring as English can be since we have very few cases and it’s a pretty simple language in general I still believe it’s one of the most magical languages because of how widespread it is. There’s a ton of different dialects, expressions and even many languages that are not English have a variety of English phrases. I also speak German and in German we have the word Handys for a cellphone which comes from English. It’s pretty cool!
This is so interesting and I have really enjoyed this one💜
Great video, I learned a lot from it.
In Australia, “garn” and “carn” mean “go on” and “come on”.
The days of the week are celestial bodies and gods, sometimes the same thing. Monday - Moon, Sunday - Sun. Tuesday - Mars, Wednesday - Odin, Thursday - Thor, Friday - Freya, and Saturday - Saturn. Tuesday took a sideways route to get from Mars day to Tues day, but it was named for the god of the sky and war..
The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Ramies, and the Hemps.
"Cleave" is two unrelated words. One is sometimes weak, sometimes strong (cleft palate, but cloven hoof) and is cognate with dialectal German "klieben". The other is always weak and is cognate with German "kleben".
Nice.
The Dutch name for the country still has that extra syllable: Engeland.
Yep, and in Afrikaans, too. :)
@@lisamarydew In 't Limburgs as well: Ingelandj
2:33 the days of the week, in english, are named for 2 celestial bodies, the biggest two seen from earth, and 5 gods, though only 4 are actually germanic in origin whilst the last god is roman
Good video, Olly. However, it seems like a missed opportunity not to mention Frisian or, at the very least, Dutch. Its connection is closer than German which was the chosen cognate to demonstrate links with a modern language. The level of intelligibility between the two languages, even after all the grammatical shifts and additional romance vocabulary, is striking! Have a look at Eddie Izzard's attempt to chat with a Frisian dairy farmer for a laugh 😅
Tell me about it. It's so frustrating when a dictionary or other source makes a comparison with German when the Dutch is even closer. e.g.: door/deur/Tür, help/help/Hilfe, stop/stop/anhalten.
I just started watching this and was wondering if Frisian would come up. Trying to teach myself Frisian actually.
Yes, I have heard that Frisian was very close to English in the past.
This is an awesome channel! And are you serious? The story language learning thing is free?!?
The kit to learn how to use the story learning is free. The actual story learning courses are not.
@2:29
Sunday from "sun".
Monday from "moon".
Tuesday from "Týr" (Germanic god of warriors and mythological heroes).
Wednesday from "Wōden" (Old English for "Odin", Germanic god of war and of the dead and the Norse All-Father).
Thursday from "Thor" (Germanic god of lightning, thunder, storms, sacred groves and trees, strength, the protection of humankind, hallowing, and fertility).
Friday from "Freja" [Germanic goddess of love, beauty, fertility, sex, war, gold, and seiðr (magic for seeing and influencing the future)].
Saturday from "Saturn" (Roman god of time, generation, dissolution, abundance, wealth, agriculture, periodic renewal and liberation).
Basically a dialect of Scandinavian Dutch with a lot of French words.
Also German and Latin.
@@Gertyutzno
Pretty the same thing French is latin while dutch is germanic@@Gertyutz
@@Gertyutzthe German is Dutch, and the Latin is French
So, we can clearly see that English changed abruptly throughout the decades. The early English resembles more a completely foreign and unknown language than the modern English language we are used to
I have just watched an 18 mins of video about my native language. Brilliant.
Thomas Malory, 18:13, has a striking resemblance to Henry VII !
This is a very nice short summary of the wonderful hundreds of hours long History of English Podcast.
So how did Monday and Sunday not originate from German (Montag, Sonntag), where Mon(d) = moon, Sonn = sun and Tag = day?
The days of the week don't come from the Norse spoken by Vikings, they come from Western Germanic, which is the ancestral language of German, Dutch and English.
So Thursday/Donderdag/Donnerstag comes from Thunor's dag/Donar dag/Donar tag.
Thunor/Donar was the god of thunder/donder/donner to the Western Germanic people. Thor was the equivalent God to the Northern Germanic people, so while they are very closely related, they still different.
hi Oliver. Amanda here. Actually, my TH-cam handle is flute player 86. By the way, my apologies for calling you by your actual name. Your nickname OLLY does not come out right and text for some reason. Anyway, my ancestry is welsh, Irish, French, and German. your content on your videos is really interesting. I especially like the ones having to do with Star Wars. Those are cool.
And the reason English spelling is so crazy is that it's derived from so many other languages. And we're still borrowing words from Farsi, Arabic, French, Spanish...
For animal/food words (cow/beef etc.), serfs worked with animals, but seldom if ever ate the flesh of the animals, as (1) a cow is more more useful as a supplier of milk and a beast of burden than a one-time meal, and (2) the lord usually retained the right to use the serfs’s animals for their meat; serfs being forbidden from eating the lord’s property. So serfs used the English word for the animal, and the Francophone royalty had no use for the word for the animal, as their only exposure was to the flesh that they ate.
Good stuff
Also, most grammatical errors that are common among American speakers have their roots in England.
It is so good
😮
3:18 "Boring" omg lmaoo
Yep i think english needs an english academy. Nice video
God Bless you Sir OllyRichards. Very detailed and full of knowledge explanation of the topic. You did really amazing and hard work to bring knowledge to people, globally. Appreciable and marvelous work. 🙏🔥✝️🔥🙏🌻💐🌺🌷⛪❤💒👍
16:11 bruhhh this shit had me on my neckkk 😭😭😭
I would love to hear about the Tironian Notes.
It's about time to revamp the English writing system and standardize its spelling and making it more consistent and a bit closer to the IPA system.
The Americans (that's yet another word that should change because in Brazil and many other countries "America" is just one continent so "American" is just like African, European, Asian, etc") did a good job with the great vowel shift by changing things like:
- centRE -> centER
- programme -> program
- burnT -> burnED
But they still didn't "fix" other French influences like:
- taBLE
BLE does NOT make that sound in English, "taBOL" or "taBEL" but if we were to spell it phonetically it would be "TEIBOL"
Other necessary changes, standardizing spellings:
- ch -> "tch" sound
Chaos? no. spell it "caos" or "kaos"
- ph -> f
-No more elephant and flask, make it eleFant
- the "OUGH" nightmare
enough -> enoff
though -> douh
through -> thru
thorough -> torow
thought -> tot
Dumb words that should have the spelling or the pronunciation changed:
- colonel -> kernel, cornel, cornol, kernol, etc whichever fits
- ewe -> pronounce it as it's written "eh-weh"
- Arkansas -> "Kansas" is already there, it's AR-KANSAS, wanna pronounce it "Arkansaw" then spell it as such
- bologna -> it's pronounced "bo-LO-nya", or change the spelling to "belonee"
Also Robwords made a great video on revamping the alphabet itself, Q is a pointless letter and so on
Also to quote Name Explain, English could benefit by having accents precisely for those multiple meanings "wind vs wind"
Nice idea, but unlikely. Actually, Arkansas is a Native American name.
@@Gertyutz I know it's unlikely, and it's dumb if they're nott trying
I'm also aware about the origin, and my point still stands.
Change the spelling or change the pronunciation.
The vikings spoke Old Norse which is another germanic language, supposedly Old English and Old Norse were mutually understandable, so the language barrier wasn't too heavy and in fact made it easier for Danes to make a home in england
Among contranyms, you omitted "sanction."
Isn't the english language STILL coming from all over the world? It adds new words constantly.
"...Dinner party material for years." That is so me
Thanks
14:20 would u say that Jamaicans or any other Caribbean country that was colonized by the British actually speak old English? The way daughter was spoken by Elisabeth the 1st is exactly how a Jamaican would pronounce it
In Icelandic, egg is egg, pronounced /ehhk/! Now, I know why! Thanks!
Whats with languages having 33 letters? Russian has 33 letters, but 2 ъ,ь are silent, аnd 10 are vowels уеёзэоаыяию. Georgian has 33, all make sound, and only 5 vowels, ე,ი,უ,ა,ო.
Can do so a video on Georgian?
I use Ling and ReadLang. Georgian alphabet is the most beautiful, compared to latin, cryllic, and hebrew.
Homophones are the thrill of the English language
The first of my English ancestors to end up in North America arrived on the Mayflower in 1620. William Shakespeare lived between 1564-1616. The King James Bible was written between 1604-1611. My Mayflower ancestor, Edward Doty, was an illiterate indentured servant. Allowing for education level, social class, and regional accent, he probably spoke something similar to the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible. All of the Englishmen on the Mayflower probably spoke something similar.
English speakers were still using the informal “thee” and “thou” at the time. We had not yet dropped that in favor of the formal “you”. Some of the vowel sounds in English were still changing. Those sounds did not always change in North America in the same way they did in Britain. The present day accent of the British upper class was still centuries in the future.
The spellings of English words were not yet codified. To the extent that spellings were codified, those spellings were sometimes different than the spellings used today in the USA.
Words that were common in Britain sometimes dropped out of use here. Some words that were retained here dropped out of use in Britain.
The North American accent was not yet distinctively different than British accents. That changed over time as different British accents merged and mutated in North America. The American accent further changed as people speaking other languages arrived here and left their mark on the way we speak English.
I am sometimes astonished that British and American English are still close enough that we are able to communicate with each other. I am sure that a continuous stream of British immigrants helped. Books and news papers surely helped slow the divergence. Television, radio, movies, and the Internet have moved British and American English closer today.
It would be interesting to know how this shakes out over the coming centuries.
Should have adopted the language of New Amsterdam: wharf; sleigh, buoy, sluice; skipper, iceberg!
Sounds like a fun alternative
@@storylearning All weird words for spelling bees....
Lolll... The spellings of "school" 😂😂
Ancient Roman pidgin?
5:50 Are you sure that was due to Viking influence? The Angles could have very easily believed the same mythology as the Scandinavians and the rest of the Germanic peoples in general.
Yeah part of the video is definitely completely incorrect.
The Western Germanic people (modern day Germans, Dutch and English) originally believed in a religion that was nearly identical to that of the Norse mythology. There were a few gods missing and a few extra (like the goddess Easter), but over all, it was the same but with a different pronunciation of the names (Odin was called Woden/Wotan).
One theory is that English sort of “originated” from the Scandinavian language spoken by the Jutes and as the Jutes came in to contact with the Anglo Saxons, the language spoken by the Jutes adopted the WORDS of the Anglo Saxons but the Syntax of the Jutes language still remained! This theory is based off of the fact that the syntax of English is so similar to modern Scandinavian languages, and the fact that although WORDS are very commonly borrowed, syntax is not! Which would suggest that this theory of Anglo Saxon words replacing the words in the Jute language is an, at the very least, very plausible theory!
I think I got that right at least 🤔😅
NO your not right .
@@willvangaal8412 I meant the I think I got the theory right that I had heard, not necessarily that the theory was right, even tho I did think it to be more plausible than I do now, which is basically not at all as I can't find the original source of this "theory" and all I can find is that the Jutes probably didn't influence English a whole lot
@@cannonballbob6949 the Frisians they are the ancestors of your language , find out the origins of the english language on youtube .
I love Samuel Johnson's definition of a cat 🐈 - 'a pygmy lion that patronises its owner'. (He was a cat lover.)
A dog says, "He feeds me and cares for me. He must be God."
A cat says, "He feeds me and cares for me. I must be God."
Aren’t days of the week based on norse culture? Thursday… Thor’s day
Thursday comes from Thunor's Day. Thunor was a pagan god of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes, although Thunor was thought to be pretty similar to Thor.
To really tackle the origin of days of the week, we need to look first to the Babylonians. The reason there are seven days in the first place is because they named the days after the seven most important celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Everything starts to get complicated when you try to keep track of which gods various cultures attached to the planets. For example, Wednesday in Spanish is Miércoles, based on Mercury. We use Wednesday, based on Odin, associated with the planet Mercury (not to be confused with the Greek god Hermes). German uses Mittwoch, for some reason, which just means "mid-week," but keeps with the formula, otherwise.
Slightly wrong, as we were in the Roman Warm period around 55BC and the climate of Britain was warmer than today. In fact, the Romans came because we were so rich and could grow wine in large amounts, even in Northern England. Sadly Europe and the world went cold around 400AD for 500 years, until we went into the medievil warm period around 900 ad, which was roughly the time the vikings went to Greenland, where they stayed and grew crops like oats, untill it went cold again from around 1350 AD.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after Norse gods, with the most obvious one being "Thor's Day."
Ninth
The best thing English did was get rid of all the gender articles. It is the one thing that makes learning German an absolute Hell on Earth! Six different words for "the" that are used in sixteen different places in a sentence. It couldn't get more stupid than that!
Maybe someday they'll come up with a system of "international" English with an academy of its own...
I never realized that Thomas Mallory looked so much like Henry VII!
We don't know what he looked like.
Why did you use an image of Henry VII for Thomas Malory?
So why did English change word order?
I want the english language to be the first language of every country on the planet.
Well I'll stick with my old goodie Greek language. My head got explode of how many changes English had for the past two millennia, while my language had only some very little phonetics changes.
Ancient Greek isn't like modern Greek.
@Gertyutz yes it is absolutely the same, with same vocabulary, grammar, and expressions. I our daily life we express ourselves with thousands of quotes coming directly from ancient texts, and we read any book of our ancient Greek writers without any translation, or explanations. So go play with your buckets to another beach.
@@iggo45 I stand corrected. Sorry.
@@Gertyutz Είσαι συγχωρεμένος.
Are homonyms that have opposite meanings contronyms? EX: raise & raze.
That doesn't qualify because they're spelled differently. One of the best examples of a contronym is "sanction."
@@SoiledWig TY
Shakespeare cold not read and write. He had help to this.
from Russia
Normans may have spoken the language of the Franks but they were still a viking up and down the coasts of Europe.
How did the Celtic and Anglo saxons communicate with each other ?
Google Translate.
The Anglophone nations are separated by a common language.
Normal person came up with that Title illustration.......?
From Germany it comes
Denmark, Western Germany and The Netherlands, Those areas. It certainly isn’t British! Brythonic is what we have come to know as Welsh.
Noice.
The biggest irony is that the modern-day Americans speak closer to Shakespearian English than the modern-day British, due to the latter's shift towards non-rhoticity.
and rhoticity is not the only American English's conservative feature, there are far more
Actually there there are dialects in Britain that are much closer to Shakespearean English than American English - such as those from the West Country, and areas of East Anglia.
The reconstructions of the Shakespearean accent by experts that I have heard, sounds like a Cornish accent and nothing like an American accent.
@@richienyhusWhich American accent? There are quite a few.
@@richienyhusFalse. The fact is that American English has NOT changed much since the 17th century!
It seems there is new evidence to suggest no such invasion occurred. Many "origin of English" books mention this Germanic invasion event over and over again. However, it sounds good and makes the topic a bit more interesting.
Hi Noir. The invasions definitely happened -- there's plenty of evidence. They're not just in the tales of where English language came from, they're in detailed historical accounts recorded by people who lived at the time. The details of such invasions are very complicated (invitations, mercenaries, not one giant attack, etc.) -- but I'm sure a deep analysis would take a full-length docco to do it justice. ;)
I really can't tell if you are spewing the English racist conspiracy theory that the English originated in modern-day Britain and never migrated from the Anglia peninsula or if you are saying the migration by the Germanic tribes was peaceful and therefore not an invasion.
@@lisamarydew Then I would say to your argument that two camps have formed based on the interpretation of the available evidence concerning "invasions" of England by various Germanic tribes.
The archaeological evidence based on analysis of ancient and modern DNA is inconsistent with models of large-scale invasion or conquest. Also, evidence derived from dental enamel of immigrants show a process of assimilation in "existing communities". And this camp also looks at a lot of agricultural evidence as well.
This guy,: championing the rich history of how language grows and evolves.
Also this guy,: eye-rolling at Tiktok and, quoth the man "dictionaries - remember them." Dictionaries still exist and tiktok is fast-tracking the evolution of communication.
Drop the pointless snark, you're not Dr Grande
TiktoK is owned by a Chinese company that has nefarious motives.
No mention of american influence 😊
Days of the week came from Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
In English, that definition only works for Saturday. The days of the week came from the Babylonians and what they deemed the seven most important celestial bodies: Sun, Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn. Many cultures since then have either kept with those entities, used gods they directly associate with them, or some combination. Keep that origin in mind and the days of the week will make more sense in many languages!
Good luck with introducing an English Language Police. Is it going to be a British or an American institution? It'd be the same nonsense as the French, Spanish or German language polices.
I'M NOT NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER. DON'T DISCRIMINATE
Did you want him to tell the history of every language in 15 minutes?
colonialism is what made English popular, one day it used to be Italian, before that it was Arabic, one day it will be... Russian? maybe?
Before English, the international language was French.
Brah, no make li' dat. Why you no include us guyz from da kine? Only mainlandaz cuzz!? We stay pahd ada US, too!! I get one cousin from Waipahu... akamai him... but when da kine stay buss up, ho... no can unnastan nut'teeng. Knowwudahmeen?
any chance he can get to plug his story telling merchandise, he'll take. It gets annoying. I bought his story telling for beginners book too. Haven't used it yet. But it's annoying to shamelessly advertise it on EVERY video.
You might know languages but your history is really out of date. The Anglo Saxon invasion and ethnic replacement stuff you talk about is pretty much discredited and isn’t reflected in the archaeological record. AS influx is nowadays considered to be a lot more gradual over a longer period amounting to only around 10% of Britain’s genetic inheritance. Language change to English is a lot more top down driven by elite emulation interacting with a fairly static native population. Similar language change happened in Scotland at a similar era, changing from largely Brythonic to Goidelic Celtic, again driven by identity orientation in Aristocracy and Church
Because some university students said so? This is an old story -- discrediting history for political reasons.
@@jmwild22 No, because the archaeological record says so, because our genetic inheritance says so, because more nuanced interpretations of how changes to language and material culture happen are available. ‘Old stories’ are not history. I suggest you think about your own political motivation for commenting without any specifically reasoned points or evidence.
@@reducer774 I have no political motivation, since I'm not British, neither am I descended from the British. The 'old story' I referred to was the old story of people trying desperately to rewrite history. It happens all over the world -- including in my country. Honestly, I'm always looking for new information about the past, since I adore history, but I'm not easily swayed by "astonishing new evidence" and will ALWAYS dissect every new interpretation thoroughly before just gulping it down. Hopefully we can agree, at least, that it's good to be among the minority who have enquiring minds?
@@jmwild22 Ok no problem dude. I was merely summarising the current historical thinking that has been increasingly downplaying simplistic ‘invasion theory’ as an explanation for change in early medieval British history, not spinning a political viewpoint. If you’re truly historically inquisitive you’ll appreciate the way that modern history writing on the period incorporates archaeology and genetics to challenge old myths and dogmas.
I'd love to some good citations.
As a native english speaker/ American. It's become really annoying to see the entire world try to learn my native language but for selfish reasons. They don't care about the culture, the history, they don't even like the language. They only learn it because of globalization. It's become superfluous to learn any language that isn't English. This is making the world a boring place. I'm learning other languages and finding it pointless as nobody wants to speak in these languages with me. They only want to practice English , so they can improve their career and life. Very sad and annoying.
You're in the wrong community! Come and join us... :)
Improving their career and life is sad?
Dislike and block for clickbait and the worst mic I've ever heard. Listen to what you made. Hurts anyone's ears.