Great video. As a Swiss German native speaker living in Vienna, I would add that if you look at German as a dialect continuum rather than a standardized language, you still find some archaic features in different dialects. The pronouns and verb forms in the second person plural in most Bavarian dialects derive from the Proto-Germanic dual forms. E.g. "eank" instead of "euch" in Tyrolean or "es hobts" instead of "ihr habt" in Viennese. The interesting thing is that while the dual pronouns ("es", "eank") are considered dialectal, the verb ending "ts" (instead of "t", e.g. "ihr machts" instead of "ihr macht") is omnipresent in spoken Austrian Standard German (even though it would be considered a mistake in writing). The dialects of the Swiss canton of Valais (in a lot of respects the most archaic dialects of German) on the other hand still have different verb conjugation classes (including different infinitive endings) as well as the declension of predicative adjectives. (It also kept the third person plural verb ending "-nt".) I find it fascinating how these dialects have, in some instances, features of Old German or even Proto-Germanic that the standard variety lost more than a millennium ago ...
1:00 Early Germanic, Early Ancient Greek, Tocharian, Anatolian, Hittite, all Indic, Avestan, Middle and modern Iranian are primarily S-O-V. Some languages were flexible (Latin, Sanskrit but primarily SOV), others like Greek and German changed to SVO as time went by. These are ancient languages, some going back to a split from Indo European as early as 6000 BCE (See Paul Hegarty et al , Science, 2023). Prevalence of SOV in ancient languages spoken in far away lands tells me PIE must have been SOV.
Great video and really interesting… but why speak so quickly and show those tables so fast we can’t even stop on time to look at each one? Because those coloured tables are fabulous - no, really they are. You’ve put in a lot of hard work into this! Þúsend þökk! Tusen takk! Det här är allt underbart! Du bist eine Legende.
I watch most educational videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. For this channel I never go above 1x and often find myself going back and listening to a section multiple times, since it goes so dang fast. Please pause a bit between sentences WYL!!
German "nicht" always goes before what is being negated, not "after the verb". However, when negating the V2 verb, "nicht" stays at the end of the clause as if the word order were verb-final. More generally, German word order is essentially this: lay out everything as if it were verb final, but in main clauses, after everything is positioned, move the topic and the finite verb to the beginning. Subordinate clauses simply stay verb final without any shifting around.
Actually not. It is used as an adverb, since nicht is actually a noun, and nichts is the genitive of nicht. Ich mache das nicht, Here the nicht is after the finite verb. In late Old High German or Early Middle German you see the double negation as in French standard, ich ni/ne mache das nicht.
I really appriciate that you transcribe Dutch words ending with 'en' as just [ə], for some reason a lot of people still insist that it should be transcribed as [ən], when this hasn't been the pronounciation for the majority of Dutch speakers for decades. Usually if I hear a person speaking Dutch (not a Low Saxon dialect, which have retained the final [n], like German just across the border) and they pronounce the final [n], I assume they're not native speakers, because it sounds very unnatural to me.
It may not be [ən], but many argue that it is at minimum /ən/, as the final vowel is nasalized for many speakers, necessitating some sort of nasal element
Ik spreek de n uit als er een klinker op volgt of als er bepaalde medeklinkers op volgen. Ik heb familie in het zuiden die dat ook doen, maar ook familie in het oosten die alleen de n uitspreekt en in het westen die alleen de e uitspreekt. De 'standaard' is een vorm van een Hollands dialect met wat compromissen zoals het voor het zuiden behouden van het verschil tussen g en ch en het voor het oosten behouden van de ei en ij en de ou en au.
In my accent, which is influenced a lot by gronings, the schwa is los. stops become glottal stops, with the nasal assimilation: lopen > lo'm [ɫɒʔm̩] laken > laˈng [ɫɑʔŋ̩] lassen > lass'n [ɫɑzn̩] lachen > lag'n [ɫɑꭓɴ̩]
Standard Dutch still retains a masculine-feminine distinction when using pronouns to refer to nouns (Eenzaamheid; zij is wreed). But in modern Dutch it's very rare for speakers to do this and if it is used it's mostly by southern Dutch speakers or with abstract nouns with clear feminine endings (like -heid). There are still Dutch dialects with a three gender distinction in the articles, because when the case system collapsed, they preferred the accusitive form of the articles (den, de, het) so the gender distinction got maintained. Cases are also not completely gone from Dutch, the genetive in particular is still in use, either in titles (Woordenboek der Nederlandse taal) or when trying to avoid using "van"(of) too much (de zoon van de leider der voetbalvereneging)
In het oosten maken ze nog het zelfde onderscheid tussen mannelijk en vrouwelijk wat je ook in oude teksten vindt. Ze hebben de naamvals n behouden. Het zuiden gebruikt voor mannelijk een n als het woord wat erop volgt begint met een klinker of bepaalde medeklinkers. (t,d,h en g geloof ik. Ik doe het als ik met bepaalde mensen spreek ook, maar dat is onbewust.)
I think the use of the words "strong" and "weak" when talking about verb and adjective inflection comes from whether or not certain forms of the words tend to end in a "strong" (stressed) syllable or a "weak" (unstressed) syllable. "Strong" verbs have past tense forms where the final syllable (for singulars at least) is stressed, while the corresponding forms of "weak" verbs end with an unstressed syllable. Indefinite adjectives (unless formed with suffixes) also end "strongly" (in the singular), while all definite adjectives end with a "weak" (unstressed) syllable. Well, at least this holds for Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
In Dutch, the masculine and feminine are not merged. Masculine and feminine words are still referred to with gendered pronouns in Standard Dutch and in many dialects there is inflection on the indefinite article, adjectives and possesive pronouns that differes between masculine and feminine.
"niet een" always becomes "geen" and "uitgang" doesn't mean "outro". It means specifically exit, as in the exit of a highway for example. Also it means suffix in language context. as in "de uitgang in genitief nominaties is -us"
9:55 the object pronoun also replace the subject in Dutch: Gij had u as an oblique form and this has become the new formal 2nd person subject pronoun, maintaining the T-V distinction as jij/je vs u
I think the consensus is that German is still mostly SOV, it just seems SVO in simple sentences because of V2. You can see this clearly in subordinate clauses (e.g. "I know not why *I this not understand can*.") I think I read somewhere that Dutch is too, but might be wrong.
It's the same in Dutch but it is much more common to say "I know not why I this not *can understand*" Ich weiß nicht, warum ich das nicht verstehen kann. vs Ik weet niet waarom ik dit niet kan verstaan. "... waarom ik dit niet verstaan kan" is possible but less common.
I would have said that »ekki/ikke« etc were from enkein formerly nihein < nihw ainaz, where the final n in Old Nord got omitted just like the nasal befor h > k e(n)kki(n), that would also explain Frisian negative particle ek and also Swabian chei. 🤔 And it would explain to some extend Swedish inte.
It comes from the Proto-Germanic prefix *ga-, to indicate completeness (which is why the past participles use it. Unfortunately I’m not sure beyond that point. At least according to Wiktionary it comes from PIE *ḱom “with”, which would make it cognate with the prefix co-, from Romance languages. But I’m not sure if I believe this bc it’s a violation of Grimm’s law, it should’ve become *ha-. Maybe it did that bc it’s a prefix?
@@watchyourlanguage3870 AS far as I know ge-has three meanings in German, while one just being dialectal, ge- in present tense indicative shows duration of the action as in geleiten, gefrieren, gewinnen, gebären, the other dialectal one is to indicate the beginning of an action as having future aspect, ich will das gemachen, always with auxiliary verbs and the last is perfective as already finished actions. Also glauben, gleichen, where the vowel is lost because of l.
I love this video! There are lots of channels that talk about Indo-European sound changes, but this is the only video I've seen that summarize how GRAMMAR changed from a proto-language to its descendants. It's great to see how and why the structure, rather than just the sounds, of languages changed to get our modern forms. Do you plan to do videos like this for other families in the future?
The great vowel shift is much discussed, but there are two things about middle english that I can hardly get any info on. I'd like to know when these features disappeared. 1. The silent e being pronounced 2. Infinitive verbs ending in -en
Interesting note about 3. Person plural in modern german: dei and they to sie doesn't look like it makes much sense, and you learn "wir, ihr sie", but in reality it's very common to say "die" when referring to a multiple of people , rather than sie
The topic is interesting and I like the fact that there is no music in the background. :-) And the very fast speaking I can compensate by slowing down the speed.
I think Latin had a mostly SOV word order too. It's actually a very common word order worldwide. Also can you do your videos in segments and slow down? You do a good job explaining the subject but try to compress too much information in too little time.
German has three different types of word order depending on the function of the clause. Subordinate clauses always have SOV, main clauses have SVO(V) and question clause have VSO, it also has OVS(V) AS a variant of those. And it can also have VSO(V) when usesing dependant clauses, bin ich dich zu schüchtern, sie anzusprechen.
Swiss German seems to keep old tense traditions: One past form (perfect), one present form, no future, that's it. A form with the auxiliary "werde(n)" exists, but it's not future tense, but rather a mood that means "I think it is like this": "es wird rägne" does not mean "it will rain", but rather, "it must be raining". Unfortunately, Standard German influence makes some people switch to using the auxiliary for future instead, nowadays.
German still has strong and week verbs, which still means ablaut and suffix. I got embarased at a Linguistics camp once, when I assumed strong and week meant the same thing, but apparently they're switched.
14:30 There’s still an adverbial suffix used in Dutch in some cases, and in German too. Compare zachtjes (softly) with zacht (soft), foutievelijk (erroneously) with foutief (erroneous). Some can be hogelijk vereerd (highly honoured), but a *hogelijk gebouw (highly building) does not exist. German uses -lich for an adverbial suffix.
Fantastic video. I was curious as to why the Nordics used a negative word with K while English and German and dutch used one with N. My doubt was solved. Thanks.
Personally I totally buy the idea that English lost its grammatical fussiness so that Aethelwulf could say to Olaf, "HELLO OLAF, I HAVE PLOUGH, YOU CAN USE MY PLOUGH WITH YOUR BULL. MY SON ALFRED LIKE YOUR DAUGHTER HILDEGARD." The only question is why the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles maintain all the complex grammar, and my answer for that is, it was something like how there was the Latin of the churches and then there was the Latin of the people that became Romance languages like French. Speaking of French, one might wonder why German didn't get extra-simple out of contact with neighbors, and my speculation is, French served as the lingua franca (literally) that people spoke with visitors. Thus, German wasn't changed.
Definitely makes sense, I saw on Langfocus once that some ppl think written OE stayed complex out of prestige, even if the spoken language of the time had deflected a lot, just like you describe with Vulgar Latin
@@watchyourlanguage3870the German Standard stayed complex because of it's early written use, and while implementing it on the people in the different German lands, as their Lingua francs, while the dialects could have been as simply as Middle English.
Hi again. Probably not that much to say about Faroese in this video as we tend to be similar to the others. First off, the genitive is all but completely dead in Faroese, having merged with the accusative and dative. The exact rules for which is a bit complex but in general verbs and prepositions governing it switched to governing the accusative with a few using the dative instead. So the verb sakna which in ON takes the genitive now takes the accusative while the preposition til meaning also takes the accusative; although many constructions with the genitive still live on but these can be seen as frozen genitives. The loss of the genitive becomes especially clear when looking at adjectives and words that inflect like adjectives like pronouns and articles. Using eins (genitive of ein, a/one) would be so weird, so I would probably move Faroese over to the Yiddish column. You mention how in some forms of German wir becomes mir; well, as you mentioned it also happens in many dialects of Norwegian where me is the 1st person plural pronoun. Interestingly, in an early 15th century document in medieval Faroese, we can see this start to happen aswell but this must have died out quickly as in Faroese the 1st person plural pronoun is still vit. 13:29 In Icelandic AND Faroese. Those tables you see there? Yup, very similar story in Faroese. Again pardon for this not being in a table but here goes: 1st row: mjúkur [ˈmjʉu:kʊɹ], mjúk [ˈmjʉu:k], mjúkt [ˈmjʏʰkt], mjúkir [ˈmjʉu:tʃɪɹ], mjúkar [ˈmjʉu:kaɹ], mjúk; 2nd row: mjúkan [ˈmjʉu:kan], mjúka [ˈmjʉu:ka], mjúkt, mjúkar, mjúkar, mjúk; 3rd row: mjúkum [ˈmjʉu:kʊn], mjúkari [ˈmjʉu:kaɹɪ], mjúkum, mjúkum, mjúkum, mjúkum; 4th row (genitive so all are in brackets): (mjúks [ˈmjʏʰks]), (mjúkrar [ˈmjʉu:kraɹ]), (mjúks), (mjúkra [ˈmjʉu:kra]), (mjúkra), (mjúkra); 5th row: mjúki [ˈmjʉu:tʃɪ], mjúka, mjúka, mjúku [ˈmjʉu:kʊ], mjúku, mjúku; 6th row: mjúka, mjúku, mjúka, mjúku, mjúku, mjúku. You missed one adverb form; the cognate adverb form for English -ly is -liga in Faroese. It probably also exists as -lega in Icelandic. So the Faroese cognate to quickly is kvikliga. To indicate the future, in Faroese we know very often use the verb "at fara" which means to go. There is a tendency in Danish to use the word "komme" (to come) for future tense and it is spilling over into Faroese more and more. I am catching myself using it from time to time. Old Norse ekki becomes ikki in Faroese, and yes, with a preaspiration geminated affricate [ˈɪʰtʃ:ɪ].
14:30 I might add that low german distuingishes adverbs from adjectives by hanging an final -e on them, if possible. Infact many german speakers in north germany still do that, for example "Das ist lang" vs "Lang*e* nicht mehr gesehen"
We don't do that in Swiss German, however, "long" has two such distinct uses as an adjective or as an adverb that there are also two forms: "das isch läng" (size) vs. "lang nümm gseh" (temporal).
I use lange for temporal length specifically and lang for physical length (also temporal). When used temporally lange most certainly always is an adverb, however.
That is what I do in Hessian. Lange nicht gesehen, ich habe dich gerne, I sometimes do that with usually longer words such as freundliche, ich grüße dich freundliche. 😅 But I also use some of the feminine noun declension which is obsolete in Standard such as die Ebene, but der Ebenen, in Singular, Not Plural. Ich befand mich auf der Ebenen 4.
9:55 Dutch has a distinction between formal u and informal je/jij or Gij for certain dialects. That in belgium they chose u as a non nominative form of gij is slighly confusing, but in dialects it usualy is an other vowel like oe in the Dutch part of Brabant or ou in some regions of Belgium.
English did have words of Old Norse origin like knife, skill, from many others since the Vikings dwelled in England in the region called the Danelaw, some of Old Norse Words got into English
The case situation with Yiddish is also reflected in many dialects of High German, to add some extra info. Pennsylvania Dutch is much the same, losing the genitive entirely, but also merges the nominative and accusative everywhere but pronouns. Within the language some varieties specifically those used by the sectarian speakers i.e. the Amish have lost the dative case as well and only have a nominative/accusative split in pronouns, and no other case distinctions outside that. (dative pronouns replaced by accusative pronouns, dative adjective endings no longer used, resulting in adjectives only being inflected for grammatical gender and number, of which they've 3 rather than 4 categories as other Pa Dutch varieties don't merge the feminine singular and plural like Standard German or these dative-less forms of Pa Dutch)
-weise is an adverbial suffix in Standard German, but not mandatory and only applied to certain words. When applied however, the word cannot act as an adjective anymore.
Examples are: normal - usual/normal normalerweise - usually verständlich - understandable verständlicherweise - understandably bekannt - known/famous bekannterweise - as is widely known/understood This is cognate to the -wise found in "likewise" but interestingly not found in the German equivalent "gleichfalls"/"gleichermaßen".
In fact it's actually a nominal phrase as in an absolute case, here Genitive absolute. Normaler Weise, unaufhörlicher Weise actually. It is a coincidence that we write some of them as one word.
@@SchmulKrieger Interesting. Thank you for the insight. I guess it is a potential candidate for a future suffix then, should it ever undergo grammaticalization.
@@EnnocbThese are exactly my thoughts, too, yeah!! 👍 👍 😃 😃 I'm pretty sure "-weise" is the "Nachfolger" auf "-lich" which is - according to my experiences and my understanding so far - not only a suffix for adjectives but also for adverbs!! E. g. where I come from (northern Austria extremely close to the Czech Republic) we say "elendigLICH krepieren" instead of "elendig krepieren!! 😉 And in the Middle Ages, our most famous poet from that times, Walther von der Vogelweide, wrote" Es wart noch gelachet innigLICHE" instead of "Es wart noch gelachet innig" in his work "Under der linden"!! 😉 😃 😃 But this poem, I guess, is written in MIDDLE High German and not new in New High German, of course!! 😁 😁 😁
at 13:58 you said your not a fan of the order of the cases but I just wondered why that was? since when talking about Polish we order N.G.D.A.I.L.V. and it works just fine.
It’s mostly that the accusative belongs second, in my mind at least. For one, the direct object is a very important role and seems like it should naturally come right after the subject, especially considering that they often look the same. Speaking of this and Polish, the fact that Slavic languages sometimes have the accusative look like the nominative, and sometimes like the genitive, makes it very logical to make the order N.A.G. I’m not too picky about whether the genitive or dative should go first in the Germanic languages, but they should both definitely go after the accusative
17:55 The imperative in Icelandic is also ‘ver’, as in ‘Ver þú góður’ ((literally) Be thou good), and ‘Ver góður’ when the personal pronoun is omitted . The form ‘vertu’ is enclitic and the suffix being ‘-tu’. Every Icelandic verb has at least two imperative singular forms. The enclitic suffixes are: ‘-du’, ‘-tu’ and ‘-ðu’ such as in: ‘hvíldu’, ‘gettu’ and ‘freistaðu’, while their non-enclitic forms being: ‘hvíl’, ‘get’ and ‘freista’.
There’s some Dutch dialects that have 3 genders although since Dutch is debatably just a Low Germanic dialect and the what counts as Dutch vs Low German can be very unclear it’s why it could be said to have the 3 genders remaining. Standard Low German and Limburgish however keep Der/Die/Dat. Same can be said about the case system which exists in Limburgish and the Groningen accent.
I have a question ab english. Would English be considered to have a "nominative" and "objective" case since there are distinctions between pronouns like they and them, who and whom, I and me, etc.?
@@davidlins5689 Not really, a language is considered to have cases just based on what its nouns can do. The pronouns, which are far more common, follow their own rules, often following a more historical pattern than the nouns
Danish does use skal/skulle as an auxiliary verb though, for future tense and should. "Jeg vil spise is" is different from "jeg skal spise is" are both future tenses but vil has more of the sense that its a thing you want to do, but skal is more you have to or its set in stone
9:21 Icelandic also has the plural pronouns nom. 'vér', acc. 'oss' dat. 'oss' gen. 'vor', which were sometimes used in the 19th century, especially in patriotic speech. The plural pronouns are rarely use nowadays.
19:17 "inte" is not an alteration for "icke", it's a replacement for it, a sloppy prounciation of "intet" which is an old fashioned word for "ingenting" ... Replacing "not" with "nothing" is sth English did too, since "not" = "naught" ... Replacing "nothing" with "not a thing" is also a thing, like "intet" replaced by "ingenting" and "naught" replaced by "nothing" ... the forms that are similar to and etymologies of the negation are in both languages considered archaic and solemn.
And "icke" is a separate word. It's not usually used as a prefix. In Lewis Carroll, you can find "non-birthday" (I suppose) translated as "icke-födelsedag" but the usual prefix of negation is "o-" corresponding to "un-" ...
What this means is that your sources may have been biased towards that. I didn’t read directly that PIE was SVO, what I read (on Wikipedia) is that there’s a big debate about PIE’s syntax. What I did, was I analyzed the relevant modern IE languages, looked at which features were likely given to them by other languages in the area (allowing me to isolate the features that were likely native), and made my own decision based on that data.
But since Hittite and Tocharian are both predominantly SOV and adjective-noun...? Both split off very early, and the Tocharian languages seem to have had very little influence from any other language.
@@danielbriggs991 I’m not really convinced that those languages are exemplary of PIE syntax. Both of them were influenced by surrounding SOV languages, namely Tocharian being around Turkic languages and Hittite being around Kartvelian languages (especially if you believe in the Kurgan hypothesis, like I do), both of which are famously head-final
Subjunctive mood is "archaic" in English??? Do you say "if I was," cause that sounds like nails on a chalkboard to my ears. Not trying to be a prescriptivist, maybe it's just surviving to a greater extent in Northern US dialects
@@watchyourlanguage3870 That's strange, "If I were" sounds quite grammatically mandatory to my ears, I would never conjugate it any other way and I'm 24 years old lol.
I've noticed that the subjunctive is surviving more in the North as well. As a young new yorker I'm likely to use either but would probably opt toward "If I were"
@@watchyourlanguage3870 still use the subjunctive. While it is archaic in some dialects, in others it is still a mandatory part of verb conjugation, even clearly contrasting with the indicative. An example would be how “it’s important that he’s here” and “it’s important that he be here” mean two completely different things. I speak a form of Midlands American English just for reference.
I have a pretty interesting anecdote about English subjunctive from my high school Spanish class. When we were learning about subjunctive in Spanish, it became really clear who used subjunctive in English as they understood the Spanish subjunctive with minimal instruction. It didn’t help that our teacher also used the subjunctive in English so when trying to explain how to use the subjunctive in Spanish she kept giving English subjunctive examples which confused the students more.
7:57 I just wanted to say that the Dutch phrase you use here isn't really correct. I've never seen or heard "want" get used the same way as "omdat" or "gezien" as it is here. You probably either meant "gezien/omdat het als 't woord *het* klinkt, moeten we ze hetzelfde schrijven!" ("seen as it sounds like the word *het*, we should write them the same way!") or "want als het als 't woord *het* klinkt, moeten we ze hetzelfde schrijven!" ("because if it sounds like the word *het*, we should write them the same way!") I actually hadn't noticed this facet of the want-omdat distinction before myself!
Hey i have some questions. You've probably stated this before, but you are studying linguistics right?. What literature would you recomend to me in order to deepen my knowledge about the topic? I really like your videos but sometimes the concepts and definitions of certain gramatical elements go way over my head. Thanks in advanced.
I unfortunately don’t read much in terms of like “literature”, I find it hard to grasp. I normally just use Wikipedia and Wiktionary, as well as other TH-cam channels. For Wikipedia pages, I especially like Indo-European sound laws, that’s probably my favorite. Also Phonological History of English, which is slightly more relevant for this video in particular. Sorry if you were looking for like books, but hopefully this helps!
To borrow a word construction from other Germanic languages, "forlongsume" - slow down! This is very interesting but it is difficult to absorb both what you are reading and the beautiful charts you make.
What Polish has is still a type of T-V distinction, but it uses other means to express non-familiarity/formality. Among the major Romance languages, only French uses its 2ndPl pronoun and verb forms to express formality, yet all have a T-V distinction
2:44 That sentence does not make sense. uitgang means exit as in a door to exit or ending in the context of conjugation.😂 Also niet een has to be geen, but I would suggest something slightly different. "Ik kan het einde niet in deze taal doen." (I can not do the end in this language) Would not have the exact same meaning, but would be a way better translasion and actually be understood.
5:16 strictly seen dutch does not have a common gender. Although in the very dominant randstad area and some parts of the north there is no distinction, in standard dutch words of that so called common gender still have to be called by he or she and a very large part if not the majority of the dialects makes the distinction in conjugasions, although the ways they do are different. It has to do with the murging of the nominative and accusative case. The north and west started usung only the nominative, the south only the accusative and the east kept the old distinction.
The advantage of recording a video so fast is that you can be hard to understand at 1x speed for being too fast, while also being hard to understand at 0.75x speed due to slowing artifacts. Congrats. But interesting video otherwise.
There are dialects of english with thou and thee, there are dialects of mainland scandinavian that still have cases and gender (in fact it is the norm outside of standard languages). Wish you'd be more nuanced. Also utgång is not an outro, it's an exit in a building
Way too fast! I switched to 0.75 speed, but there are no pauses in your script reading, so still almost impossible to learn anything. I think you have been told this before? You know so much, and have made so much visual content, but unfortunately you keep throwing it all at us, and then instantly remove again, instead of presenting it. Why? Please slow down, present the visual content, explain things, don't just rush through a script! And put in breathing pauses!
about adverbial suffixes. German does have one -lich. i mean i am no linguist so might just not getting it, but i feel like all german word ending in -lich are adverbs. or at least are used in sentences in combination with "sein" (to be) and its various versions. "Ich bin glücklich" (i am luck/happyness-ly) for example. also another thing i found intereisting a friends daughter during her early life often made constructions with "-lich" to discribe how she did things, which suggests to me that her brain somehow associated a adverbial feeling to -lich. again maybe this is just my lack of linguistics knowledge speaking.
@@watchyourlanguage3870 Now as Proto Germanic is a theoretically constructed language (I understand a few inscriptions have been found, but mostly it is extrapolated from descendent languages) what methods are used to assert “there was no dual number in Proto Germanic”. Is it not possible that descendant languages inherited and lost it? For example in modern Indic languages dual is not used, but in Sanskrit literature dual is adhered to without exception. What are the theories about how this kind of change happened in almost all Indo European languages in far away areas detached from each other.
@@williamliamsmith4923 to my understanding it is still possible that PG had the dual number in nouns, but very unlikely because not even Gothic had it. As for the theories about how most IE languages lost the dual in far-off places, it just has to do with the broad concept that either languages merged the dual with something else through natural sound shifts, or just found it hard to remember to use overtime, or a bit of both
Great video. As a Swiss German native speaker living in Vienna, I would add that if you look at German as a dialect continuum rather than a standardized language, you still find some archaic features in different dialects.
The pronouns and verb forms in the second person plural in most Bavarian dialects derive from the Proto-Germanic dual forms. E.g. "eank" instead of "euch" in Tyrolean or "es hobts" instead of "ihr habt" in Viennese. The interesting thing is that while the dual pronouns ("es", "eank") are considered dialectal, the verb ending "ts" (instead of "t", e.g. "ihr machts" instead of "ihr macht") is omnipresent in spoken Austrian Standard German (even though it would be considered a mistake in writing).
The dialects of the Swiss canton of Valais (in a lot of respects the most archaic dialects of German) on the other hand still have different verb conjugation classes (including different infinitive endings) as well as the declension of predicative adjectives. (It also kept the third person plural verb ending "-nt".)
I find it fascinating how these dialects have, in some instances, features of Old German or even Proto-Germanic that the standard variety lost more than a millennium ago ...
Was just about to jump into the comments to "add a note about swiss german", and here you are about 20 steps ahead of me...
They also have a full vowel noun declension as zunga, zungo, zungon etc.
1:00 Early Germanic, Early Ancient Greek, Tocharian, Anatolian, Hittite, all Indic, Avestan, Middle and modern Iranian are primarily S-O-V. Some languages were flexible (Latin, Sanskrit but primarily SOV), others like Greek and German changed to SVO as time went by.
These are ancient languages, some going back to a split from Indo European as early as 6000 BCE (See Paul Hegarty et al , Science, 2023).
Prevalence of SOV in ancient languages spoken in far away lands tells me PIE must have been SOV.
Great video and really interesting… but why speak so quickly and show those tables so fast we can’t even stop on time to look at each one?
Because those coloured tables are fabulous - no, really they are. You’ve put in a lot of hard work into this! Þúsend þökk! Tusen takk! Det här är allt underbart! Du bist eine Legende.
Yeah, you could make five separate, very interesting videos out of this one by slowing down and going through the material that you've assembled.
I watch most educational videos at 1.25x or 1.5x speed. For this channel I never go above 1x and often find myself going back and listening to a section multiple times, since it goes so dang fast. Please pause a bit between sentences WYL!!
German "nicht" always goes before what is being negated, not "after the verb". However, when negating the V2 verb, "nicht" stays at the end of the clause as if the word order were verb-final. More generally, German word order is essentially this: lay out everything as if it were verb final, but in main clauses, after everything is positioned, move the topic and the finite verb to the beginning. Subordinate clauses simply stay verb final without any shifting around.
Actually not. It is used as an adverb, since nicht is actually a noun, and nichts is the genitive of nicht. Ich mache das nicht, Here the nicht is after the finite verb. In late Old High German or Early Middle German you see the double negation as in French standard, ich ni/ne mache das nicht.
I really appriciate that you transcribe Dutch words ending with 'en' as just [ə], for some reason a lot of people still insist that it should be transcribed as [ən], when this hasn't been the pronounciation for the majority of Dutch speakers for decades. Usually if I hear a person speaking Dutch (not a Low Saxon dialect, which have retained the final [n], like German just across the border) and they pronounce the final [n], I assume they're not native speakers, because it sounds very unnatural to me.
i mean there are millions of speakers that do still pronounce it that way, especially in belgium
@@purple_purpur7379 counterpoint: belgium doesn't exist
It may not be [ən], but many argue that it is at minimum /ən/, as the final vowel is nasalized for many speakers, necessitating some sort of nasal element
Ik spreek de n uit als er een klinker op volgt of als er bepaalde medeklinkers op volgen. Ik heb familie in het zuiden die dat ook doen, maar ook familie in het oosten die alleen de n uitspreekt en in het westen die alleen de e uitspreekt.
De 'standaard' is een vorm van een Hollands dialect met wat compromissen zoals het voor het zuiden behouden van het verschil tussen g en ch en het voor het oosten behouden van de ei en ij en de ou en au.
In my accent, which is influenced a lot by gronings, the schwa is los. stops become glottal stops, with the nasal assimilation:
lopen > lo'm [ɫɒʔm̩]
laken > laˈng [ɫɑʔŋ̩]
lassen > lass'n [ɫɑzn̩]
lachen > lag'n [ɫɑꭓɴ̩]
So much good info in this video (as in previous videos). But its sooooooo hard to follow when its goes so fast.
Standard Dutch still retains a masculine-feminine distinction when using pronouns to refer to nouns (Eenzaamheid; zij is wreed). But in modern Dutch it's very rare for speakers to do this and if it is used it's mostly by southern Dutch speakers or with abstract nouns with clear feminine endings (like -heid). There are still Dutch dialects with a three gender distinction in the articles, because when the case system collapsed, they preferred the accusitive form of the articles (den, de, het) so the gender distinction got maintained.
Cases are also not completely gone from Dutch, the genetive in particular is still in use, either in titles (Woordenboek der Nederlandse taal) or when trying to avoid using "van"(of) too much (de zoon van de leider der voetbalvereneging)
In het oosten maken ze nog het zelfde onderscheid tussen mannelijk en vrouwelijk wat je ook in oude teksten vindt. Ze hebben de naamvals n behouden.
Het zuiden gebruikt voor mannelijk een n als het woord wat erop volgt begint met een klinker of bepaalde medeklinkers. (t,d,h en g geloof ik. Ik doe het als ik met bepaalde mensen spreek ook, maar dat is onbewust.)
I think the use of the words "strong" and "weak" when talking about verb and adjective inflection comes from whether or not certain forms of the words tend to end in a "strong" (stressed) syllable or a "weak" (unstressed) syllable. "Strong" verbs have past tense forms where the final syllable (for singulars at least) is stressed, while the corresponding forms of "weak" verbs end with an unstressed syllable. Indefinite adjectives (unless formed with suffixes) also end "strongly" (in the singular), while all definite adjectives end with a "weak" (unstressed) syllable. Well, at least this holds for Swedish, Danish and Norwegian.
In Dutch, the masculine and feminine are not merged. Masculine and feminine words are still referred to with gendered pronouns in Standard Dutch and in many dialects there is inflection on the indefinite article, adjectives and possesive pronouns that differes between masculine and feminine.
"niet een" always becomes "geen" and "uitgang" doesn't mean "outro". It means specifically exit, as in the exit of a highway for example. Also it means suffix in language context. as in "de uitgang in genitief nominaties is -us"
geen is a version of German kein, which comes from Germanic nihw(e) ainaz, the hw(e) means and as in Latin -que.
@@SchmulKrieger It's not a "version of German kein".
@@YourCreepyUncle. How do they differ then?
@@SilenceOase how are they thet same?
9:55 the object pronoun also replace the subject in Dutch: Gij had u as an oblique form and this has become the new formal 2nd person subject pronoun, maintaining the T-V distinction as jij/je vs u
I think the consensus is that German is still mostly SOV, it just seems SVO in simple sentences because of V2. You can see this clearly in subordinate clauses (e.g. "I know not why *I this not understand can*.") I think I read somewhere that Dutch is too, but might be wrong.
It's the same in Dutch but it is much more common to say "I know not why I this not *can understand*"
Ich weiß nicht, warum ich das nicht verstehen kann.
vs
Ik weet niet waarom ik dit niet kan verstaan.
"... waarom ik dit niet verstaan kan" is possible but less common.
omg FINALLY! Ive been waiting whole week for it. I believe in Watch your Language supremacy 🙏
I would have said that »ekki/ikke« etc were from enkein formerly nihein < nihw ainaz, where the final n in Old Nord got omitted just like the nasal befor h > k e(n)kki(n), that would also explain Frisian negative particle ek and also Swabian chei. 🤔 And it would explain to some extend Swedish inte.
1:35 Interesting seeing your recommendations recommend the TH-camrs that I and other linguistics fans watch
Thank you, great video! I was wondering how the "ge-" verb prefix came about for the past participles (e.g. in German "gemacht", "gegangen")
It comes from the Proto-Germanic prefix *ga-, to indicate completeness (which is why the past participles use it. Unfortunately I’m not sure beyond that point. At least according to Wiktionary it comes from PIE *ḱom “with”, which would make it cognate with the prefix co-, from Romance languages. But I’m not sure if I believe this bc it’s a violation of Grimm’s law, it should’ve become *ha-. Maybe it did that bc it’s a prefix?
It used to mark when verbs referred to complete actions, regardless of tense.
@@watchyourlanguage3870 AS far as I know ge-has three meanings in German, while one just being dialectal, ge- in present tense indicative shows duration of the action as in geleiten, gefrieren, gewinnen, gebären, the other dialectal one is to indicate the beginning of an action as having future aspect, ich will das gemachen, always with auxiliary verbs and the last is perfective as already finished actions.
Also glauben, gleichen, where the vowel is lost because of l.
I love this video! There are lots of channels that talk about Indo-European sound changes, but this is the only video I've seen that summarize how GRAMMAR changed from a proto-language to its descendants. It's great to see how and why the structure, rather than just the sounds, of languages changed to get our modern forms. Do you plan to do videos like this for other families in the future?
Yes!
1:36 you mentioned the k -> /x/ shift, and now it's really happening.
edit. He said 'it seems most li/x/ely'
The great vowel shift is much discussed, but there are two things about middle english that I can hardly get any info on. I'd like to know when these features disappeared.
1. The silent e being pronounced
2. Infinitive verbs ending in -en
Thank you!!! I am trying to make a germanic conlang and this is very helpful!
Interesting note about 3. Person plural in modern german: dei and they to sie doesn't look like it makes much sense, and you learn "wir, ihr sie", but in reality it's very common to say "die" when referring to a multiple of people , rather than sie
The topic is interesting and I like the fact that there is no music in the background. :-)
And the very fast speaking I can compensate by slowing down the speed.
I think Latin had a mostly SOV word order too. It's actually a very common word order worldwide. Also can you do your videos in segments and slow down? You do a good job explaining the subject but try to compress too much information in too little time.
German has three different types of word order depending on the function of the clause. Subordinate clauses always have SOV, main clauses have SVO(V) and question clause have VSO, it also has OVS(V) AS a variant of those. And it can also have VSO(V) when usesing dependant clauses, bin ich dich zu schüchtern, sie anzusprechen.
Swiss German seems to keep old tense traditions: One past form (perfect), one present form, no future, that's it. A form with the auxiliary "werde(n)" exists, but it's not future tense, but rather a mood that means "I think it is like this": "es wird rägne" does not mean "it will rain", but rather, "it must be raining".
Unfortunately, Standard German influence makes some people switch to using the auxiliary for future instead, nowadays.
Look interesting, but I’m afraid I had to give up after two minutes. I just can’t follow somebody speaking at that speed about such a complex topic.
9:27 Old Norse still had ið - the famous edda quote "deyja sjálfr ið sama" in modern Icelandic would be "deyja sjálfur þið sama"
German still has strong and week verbs, which still means ablaut and suffix. I got embarased at a Linguistics camp once, when I assumed strong and week meant the same thing, but apparently they're switched.
German also have the mixed declension from strong and weak.
14:30
There’s still an adverbial suffix used in Dutch in some cases, and in German too. Compare zachtjes (softly) with zacht (soft), foutievelijk (erroneously) with foutief (erroneous). Some can be hogelijk vereerd (highly honoured), but a *hogelijk gebouw (highly building) does not exist. German uses -lich for an adverbial suffix.
Didn’t know German had any grammatical evolution 😅😂 seems to have kept all possible features intact. As opposed to Scandinavian, Dutch or English.
18:48 It went from 'naught' and then to 'not'.
Fantastic video. I was curious as to why the Nordics used a negative word with K while English and German and dutch used one with N. My doubt was solved. Thanks.
German does have a negative with k, it is keine- used to negate nouns and stands before those negated nouns.
Personally I totally buy the idea that English lost its grammatical fussiness so that Aethelwulf could say to Olaf, "HELLO OLAF, I HAVE PLOUGH, YOU CAN USE MY PLOUGH WITH YOUR BULL. MY SON ALFRED LIKE YOUR DAUGHTER HILDEGARD." The only question is why the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles maintain all the complex grammar, and my answer for that is, it was something like how there was the Latin of the churches and then there was the Latin of the people that became Romance languages like French.
Speaking of French, one might wonder why German didn't get extra-simple out of contact with neighbors, and my speculation is, French served as the lingua franca (literally) that people spoke with visitors. Thus, German wasn't changed.
Definitely makes sense, I saw on Langfocus once that some ppl think written OE stayed complex out of prestige, even if the spoken language of the time had deflected a lot, just like you describe with Vulgar Latin
@@watchyourlanguage3870the German Standard stayed complex because of it's early written use, and while implementing it on the people in the different German lands, as their Lingua francs, while the dialects could have been as simply as Middle English.
The sequel we've all been waiting for
Hi again. Probably not that much to say about Faroese in this video as we tend to be similar to the others.
First off, the genitive is all but completely dead in Faroese, having merged with the accusative and dative. The exact rules for which is a bit complex but in general verbs and prepositions governing it switched to governing the accusative with a few using the dative instead. So the verb sakna which in ON takes the genitive now takes the accusative while the preposition til meaning also takes the accusative; although many constructions with the genitive still live on but these can be seen as frozen genitives.
The loss of the genitive becomes especially clear when looking at adjectives and words that inflect like adjectives like pronouns and articles. Using eins (genitive of ein, a/one) would be so weird, so I would probably move Faroese over to the Yiddish column.
You mention how in some forms of German wir becomes mir; well, as you mentioned it also happens in many dialects of Norwegian where me is the 1st person plural pronoun. Interestingly, in an early 15th century document in medieval Faroese, we can see this start to happen aswell but this must have died out quickly as in Faroese the 1st person plural pronoun is still vit.
13:29 In Icelandic AND Faroese. Those tables you see there? Yup, very similar story in Faroese. Again pardon for this not being in a table but here goes: 1st row: mjúkur [ˈmjʉu:kʊɹ], mjúk [ˈmjʉu:k], mjúkt [ˈmjʏʰkt], mjúkir [ˈmjʉu:tʃɪɹ], mjúkar [ˈmjʉu:kaɹ], mjúk; 2nd row: mjúkan [ˈmjʉu:kan], mjúka [ˈmjʉu:ka], mjúkt, mjúkar, mjúkar, mjúk; 3rd row: mjúkum [ˈmjʉu:kʊn], mjúkari [ˈmjʉu:kaɹɪ], mjúkum, mjúkum, mjúkum, mjúkum; 4th row (genitive so all are in brackets): (mjúks [ˈmjʏʰks]), (mjúkrar [ˈmjʉu:kraɹ]), (mjúks), (mjúkra [ˈmjʉu:kra]), (mjúkra), (mjúkra); 5th row: mjúki [ˈmjʉu:tʃɪ], mjúka, mjúka, mjúku [ˈmjʉu:kʊ], mjúku, mjúku; 6th row: mjúka, mjúku, mjúka, mjúku, mjúku, mjúku.
You missed one adverb form; the cognate adverb form for English -ly is -liga in Faroese. It probably also exists as -lega in Icelandic. So the Faroese cognate to quickly is kvikliga.
To indicate the future, in Faroese we know very often use the verb "at fara" which means to go. There is a tendency in Danish to use the word "komme" (to come) for future tense and it is spilling over into Faroese more and more. I am catching myself using it from time to time.
Old Norse ekki becomes ikki in Faroese, and yes, with a preaspiration geminated affricate [ˈɪʰtʃ:ɪ].
Great video, but please don't switch slide all the time. Is really hard to watch it at full speed.
14:30 I might add that low german distuingishes adverbs from adjectives by hanging an final -e on them, if possible. Infact many german speakers in north germany still do that, for example "Das ist lang" vs "Lang*e* nicht mehr gesehen"
We don't do that in Swiss German, however, "long" has two such distinct uses as an adjective or as an adverb that there are also two forms: "das isch läng" (size) vs. "lang nümm gseh" (temporal).
I use lange for temporal length specifically and lang for physical length (also temporal). When used temporally lange most certainly always is an adverb, however.
That is what I do in Hessian. Lange nicht gesehen, ich habe dich gerne, I sometimes do that with usually longer words such as freundliche, ich grüße dich freundliche. 😅 But I also use some of the feminine noun declension which is obsolete in Standard such as die Ebene, but der Ebenen, in Singular, Not Plural. Ich befand mich auf der Ebenen 4.
I didn't know of je lieden. We basically say 'yall' then
9:55 Dutch has a distinction between formal u and informal je/jij or Gij for certain dialects. That in belgium they chose u as a non nominative form of gij is slighly confusing, but in dialects it usualy is an other vowel like oe in the Dutch part of Brabant or ou in some regions of Belgium.
Your videos just bring me so much joy. 😊
Excellent video
Wow this video is packed with information. If don't have prior knowledge about cases, and gender, you'll completely be lost 😂😂😂
English did have words of Old Norse origin like knife, skill, from many others since the Vikings dwelled in England in the region called the Danelaw, some of Old Norse Words got into English
The case situation with Yiddish is also reflected in many dialects of High German, to add some extra info. Pennsylvania Dutch is much the same, losing the genitive entirely, but also merges the nominative and accusative everywhere but pronouns.
Within the language some varieties specifically those used by the sectarian speakers i.e. the Amish have lost the dative case as well and only have a nominative/accusative split in pronouns, and no other case distinctions outside that. (dative pronouns replaced by accusative pronouns, dative adjective endings no longer used, resulting in adjectives only being inflected for grammatical gender and number, of which they've 3 rather than 4 categories as other Pa Dutch varieties don't merge the feminine singular and plural like Standard German or these dative-less forms of Pa Dutch)
-weise is an adverbial suffix in Standard German, but not mandatory and only applied to certain words. When applied however, the word cannot act as an adjective anymore.
Examples are:
normal - usual/normal
normalerweise - usually
verständlich - understandable
verständlicherweise - understandably
bekannt - known/famous
bekannterweise - as is widely known/understood
This is cognate to the -wise found in "likewise" but interestingly not found in the German equivalent "gleichfalls"/"gleichermaßen".
In fact it's actually a nominal phrase as in an absolute case, here Genitive absolute. Normaler Weise, unaufhörlicher Weise actually. It is a coincidence that we write some of them as one word.
@@SchmulKrieger Interesting. Thank you for the insight. I guess it is a potential candidate for a future suffix then, should it ever undergo grammaticalization.
@@EnnocbThese are exactly my thoughts, too, yeah!! 👍 👍 😃 😃
I'm pretty sure "-weise" is the "Nachfolger" auf "-lich" which is - according to my experiences and my understanding so far - not only a suffix for adjectives but also for adverbs!! E. g. where I come from (northern Austria extremely close to the Czech Republic) we say "elendigLICH krepieren" instead of "elendig krepieren!! 😉
And in the Middle Ages, our most famous poet from that times, Walther von der Vogelweide, wrote" Es wart noch gelachet innigLICHE" instead of "Es wart noch gelachet innig" in his work "Under der linden"!! 😉 😃 😃 But this poem, I guess, is written in MIDDLE High German and not new in New High German, of course!! 😁 😁 😁
the legend is back
I wish there were videos like these about the Romance languages
My dialect of North Frisian "Sölring" actually still has dual pronouns.
SG: ik, dü, hi/jü/hat
DU: wat, at, jat
PL: wü, i, ja
17:35 The conditional auxiliary is also 'mundi'. The form 'myndi' derives from 'mundi'.
at 13:58 you said your not a fan of the order of the cases but I just wondered why that was? since when talking about Polish we order N.G.D.A.I.L.V. and it works just fine.
It’s mostly that the accusative belongs second, in my mind at least. For one, the direct object is a very important role and seems like it should naturally come right after the subject, especially considering that they often look the same. Speaking of this and Polish, the fact that Slavic languages sometimes have the accusative look like the nominative, and sometimes like the genitive, makes it very logical to make the order N.A.G. I’m not too picky about whether the genitive or dative should go first in the Germanic languages, but they should both definitely go after the accusative
@@watchyourlanguage3870 What you've said makes a lot of sense, thanks for replying.
@@cyganskadywizjapiechoty no problem, I enjoy ranting about this kinda stuff lol
17:55 The imperative in Icelandic is also ‘ver’, as in ‘Ver þú góður’ ((literally) Be thou good), and ‘Ver góður’ when the personal pronoun is omitted . The form ‘vertu’ is enclitic and the suffix being ‘-tu’. Every Icelandic verb has at least two imperative singular forms. The enclitic suffixes are: ‘-du’, ‘-tu’ and ‘-ðu’ such as in: ‘hvíldu’, ‘gettu’ and ‘freistaðu’, while their non-enclitic forms being: ‘hvíl’, ‘get’ and ‘freista’.
The enclitic phenomenon is also a thing in German, that's why second singular person has -st, instead of -s. gehste for gehst du.
what i never understand is how a word can be ended with its gendered form (-iz, -az and ô) and sometimes a noun is just "Spreki" instead of Sprekiz.
There’s some Dutch dialects that have 3 genders although since Dutch is debatably just a Low Germanic dialect and the what counts as Dutch vs Low German can be very unclear it’s why it could be said to have the 3 genders remaining. Standard Low German and Limburgish however keep Der/Die/Dat. Same can be said about the case system which exists in Limburgish and the Groningen accent.
I have a question ab english. Would English be considered to have a "nominative" and "objective" case since there are distinctions between pronouns like they and them, who and whom, I and me, etc.?
@@davidlins5689 Not really, a language is considered to have cases just based on what its nouns can do. The pronouns, which are far more common, follow their own rules, often following a more historical pattern than the nouns
9:32 The 'þ-' in 'þér' and 'þit' might have come from '-ð' such as in hafið. This is a pervasive sandhi effect.
That's how "ér" and "it" became "de" and "did" in Norwegian.
I guess from a Graeco-Latin comparative perspective, Germanic strong verbs are more regular than weak verbs.
Luxembourgish uses “Mir” instead of “wir”
So does Swiss German!
Danish does use skal/skulle as an auxiliary verb though, for future tense and should. "Jeg vil spise is" is different from "jeg skal spise is" are both future tenses but vil has more of the sense that its a thing you want to do, but skal is more you have to or its set in stone
I want vs I shall basically (will in English become more and more synonymous with shall over time)
At 10:18 you say: "Je is still used casually for all second-person pronouns," but I can't imagine not using 'jullie'. Did I misunderstand?
Oh my God Dutch then why did you contract it in the first place??!?!
the only way to really understand every sentence, is to slow down the speed of the video. Too bad, otherwise interesting.
Oh good I thought I was the only one lol
İn my father tongue we often use OSV and the adjective genrally comes after the noun
9:21 Icelandic also has the plural pronouns nom. 'vér', acc. 'oss' dat. 'oss' gen. 'vor', which were sometimes used in the 19th century, especially in patriotic speech. The plural pronouns are rarely use nowadays.
19:17 "inte" is not an alteration for "icke", it's a replacement for it, a sloppy prounciation of "intet" which is an old fashioned word for "ingenting" ...
Replacing "not" with "nothing" is sth English did too, since "not" = "naught" ...
Replacing "nothing" with "not a thing" is also a thing, like "intet" replaced by "ingenting" and "naught" replaced by "nothing" ... the forms that are similar to and etymologies of the negation are in both languages considered archaic and solemn.
And "icke" is a separate word. It's not usually used as a prefix.
In Lewis Carroll, you can find "non-birthday" (I suppose) translated as "icke-födelsedag" but the usual prefix of negation is "o-" corresponding to "un-" ...
2:22 Yes, speak personally I this way.
Didn't proto germanic have 3 numbers? Anglo Saxon and Gothic both have the dual number. So it had to have a dual in proto germanic for that to happen.
I thought Proto Indo European was believed to have an SOV word order. Where did you read it was SVO? I'm really curious.
What this means is that your sources may have been biased towards that. I didn’t read directly that PIE was SVO, what I read (on Wikipedia) is that there’s a big debate about PIE’s syntax. What I did, was I analyzed the relevant modern IE languages, looked at which features were likely given to them by other languages in the area (allowing me to isolate the features that were likely native), and made my own decision based on that data.
I honestly could’ve included this in my previous video about contentious topics in linguistics
But since Hittite and Tocharian are both predominantly SOV and adjective-noun...? Both split off very early, and the Tocharian languages seem to have had very little influence from any other language.
@@danielbriggs991 I’m not really convinced that those languages are exemplary of PIE syntax. Both of them were influenced by surrounding SOV languages, namely Tocharian being around Turkic languages and Hittite being around Kartvelian languages (especially if you believe in the Kurgan hypothesis, like I do), both of which are famously head-final
@@watchyourlanguage3870what about Latin?
English still has a subjunctive, but it is rarely used.
This is soooo good but really hard to follow at this speed 😭
I wonder how Afrikaans would fit in here? Would it be redundant as an example of 'simplification' considering that English is far more well known?
At 4:15 we see pair of lorries from Scania leaving the inflected Italian pronoun behind at a merger. Brilliant.
I’ll let you keep thinking I put that much thought into that image 😅
Guys is there other channels similar to this?
Subjunctive mood is "archaic" in English??? Do you say "if I was," cause that sounds like nails on a chalkboard to my ears. Not trying to be a prescriptivist, maybe it's just surviving to a greater extent in Northern US dialects
I do say “if I was”, yes
@@watchyourlanguage3870 That's strange, "If I were" sounds quite grammatically mandatory to my ears, I would never conjugate it any other way and I'm 24 years old lol.
I've noticed that the subjunctive is surviving more in the North as well. As a young new yorker I'm likely to use either but would probably opt toward "If I were"
@@watchyourlanguage3870 still use the subjunctive. While it is archaic in some dialects, in others it is still a mandatory part of verb conjugation, even clearly contrasting with the indicative. An example would be how “it’s important that he’s here” and “it’s important that he be here” mean two completely different things. I speak a form of Midlands American English just for reference.
I have a pretty interesting anecdote about English subjunctive from my high school Spanish class. When we were learning about subjunctive in Spanish, it became really clear who used subjunctive in English as they understood the Spanish subjunctive with minimal instruction. It didn’t help that our teacher also used the subjunctive in English so when trying to explain how to use the subjunctive in Spanish she kept giving English subjunctive examples which confused the students more.
7:57 I just wanted to say that the Dutch phrase you use here isn't really correct. I've never seen or heard "want" get used the same way as "omdat" or "gezien" as it is here. You probably either meant "gezien/omdat het als 't woord *het* klinkt, moeten we ze hetzelfde schrijven!" ("seen as it sounds like the word *het*, we should write them the same way!") or "want als het als 't woord *het* klinkt, moeten we ze hetzelfde schrijven!" ("because if it sounds like the word *het*, we should write them the same way!") I actually hadn't noticed this facet of the want-omdat distinction before myself!
Nice video, but I don't think your long and short vowels in the final sample were very distinct.
Meen Kopp deit weh😅
9:25 In early Old Norse the second person dual pronoun was 'it' and the second person plural pronoun was 'ér'.
As Early Old High German dual 2nd person git and er for 2nd person plural.
can u do the same thing you have done with the sound and grammar shifts for slavic languages?
I will one day
Hey i have some questions. You've probably stated this before, but you are studying linguistics right?.
What literature would you recomend to me in order to deepen my knowledge about the topic?
I really like your videos but sometimes the concepts and definitions of certain gramatical elements go way over my head. Thanks in advanced.
I unfortunately don’t read much in terms of like “literature”, I find it hard to grasp. I normally just use Wikipedia and Wiktionary, as well as other TH-cam channels. For Wikipedia pages, I especially like Indo-European sound laws, that’s probably my favorite. Also Phonological History of English, which is slightly more relevant for this video in particular. Sorry if you were looking for like books, but hopefully this helps!
To borrow a word construction from other Germanic languages, "forlongsume" - slow down! This is very interesting but it is difficult to absorb both what you are reading and the beautiful charts you make.
9:45 Polish doesn't use the T-V distinction, it's actually a russicism that commies had imposed on our language after WW2
What Polish has is still a type of T-V distinction, but it uses other means to express non-familiarity/formality. Among the major Romance languages, only French uses its 2ndPl pronoun and verb forms to express formality, yet all have a T-V distinction
That distinction of formality/informality using 2Pl pronouns for 1 person came in Russian from French
P3?
In Norwegian, 'utgang' means exit, when you walk out from a building or similar. If you drive out, it would be ' utkjørsel'. Not outro.
im pretty sure some english dialects still have thou pronouns
2:44 That sentence does not make sense. uitgang means exit as in a door to exit or ending in the context of conjugation.😂
Also niet een has to be geen, but I would suggest something slightly different.
"Ik kan het einde niet in deze taal doen." (I can not do the end in this language) Would not have the exact same meaning, but would be a way better translasion and actually be understood.
5:16 strictly seen dutch does not have a common gender. Although in the very dominant randstad area and some parts of the north there is no distinction, in standard dutch words of that so called common gender still have to be called by he or she and a very large part if not the majority of the dialects makes the distinction in conjugasions, although the ways they do are different. It has to do with the murging of the nominative and accusative case. The north and west started usung only the nominative, the south only the accusative and the east kept the old distinction.
The advantage of recording a video so fast is that you can be hard to understand at 1x speed for being too fast, while also being hard to understand at 0.75x speed due to slowing artifacts. Congrats.
But interesting video otherwise.
Who is Sanchez?
There are dialects of english with thou and thee, there are dialects of mainland scandinavian that still have cases and gender (in fact it is the norm outside of standard languages). Wish you'd be more nuanced. Also utgång is not an outro, it's an exit in a building
Out of curiosity how would you say outro
@@watchyourlanguage3870 just outro, i GUESS you could say avslut but it's not a perfect match
Same with dutch, uitgang means exit. We'd mostly just use outro as well.
What dialects of English have thou and thee?!?!
@@Aerostarm Northumbrian ones
I'd consider myself a prescriptivist but i think 'y'all' is actually a natural and good development
Th German future auxiliary is wird, not wirt.
This video would be good if it was 10 times slower.
Way too fast! I switched to 0.75 speed, but there are no pauses in your script reading, so still almost impossible to learn anything. I think you have been told this before? You know so much, and have made so much visual content, but unfortunately you keep throwing it all at us, and then instantly remove again, instead of presenting it. Why?
Please slow down, present the visual content, explain things, don't just rush through a script! And put in breathing pauses!
Slow down!
about adverbial suffixes. German does have one -lich. i mean i am no linguist so might just not getting it, but i feel like all german word ending in -lich are adverbs. or at least are used in sentences in combination with "sein" (to be) and its various versions. "Ich bin glücklich" (i am luck/happyness-ly) for example. also another thing i found intereisting a friends daughter during her early life often made constructions with "-lich" to discribe how she did things, which suggests to me that her brain somehow associated a adverbial feeling to -lich.
again maybe this is just my lack of linguistics knowledge speaking.
-lich is a derivational suffix, making adjectives from nouns and verbs
If it's used in combination with "sein", that's a good hint that it's an adjective rather than an adverb.
🙂
Really good video, very informative!
Slow down! I heard an American medicine advert.
3:30 no dual? Both Ancient Greek and Sanskrit as well as older Vedic have dual. Avestan as well.
I talk about the dual like five minutes later…
@@watchyourlanguage3870 I see.
@@watchyourlanguage3870
Now as Proto Germanic is a theoretically constructed language (I understand a few inscriptions have been found, but mostly it is extrapolated from descendent languages) what methods are used to assert “there was no dual number in Proto Germanic”. Is it not possible that descendant languages inherited and lost it?
For example in modern Indic languages dual is not used, but in Sanskrit literature dual is adhered to without exception.
What are the theories about how this kind of change happened in almost all Indo European languages in far away areas detached from each other.
@@williamliamsmith4923 to my understanding it is still possible that PG had the dual number in nouns, but very unlikely because not even Gothic had it. As for the theories about how most IE languages lost the dual in far-off places, it just has to do with the broad concept that either languages merged the dual with something else through natural sound shifts, or just found it hard to remember to use overtime, or a bit of both
BABE WAKE UP WATCH YOUR LANGUAGE IS TALKING ABOUT PROTO-GERMANIC AGAIN
Hello