In German it is not even called "Grimms Law" rather "Erste Lautverschiebung" = "First Sound Shift" or "Germanische Lautverschiebung" = "Germanic Sound Shift". It was not only discovered by Grimm and Rask, but also by Friedrich Schlegel, a german philosoph, in 1806, 6 years prior to Rask and 16 years prior to Grimm. German had another loud shift which seperated it more clearly from other germanic languages. The Second Loud shift went in quiet the same direction as the first: p -> pf/f (sleep -> schlafen, apple -> Apfel, pan -> Pfanne); t -> s/tz (sweet - süß [alternative: suess], water -> Wasser, to tell er-zählen, timber -> Zimmer); d -> t (day -> Tag BUT th -> d (thorn -> Dorn, thunder -> Donner, brother -> Bruder). As examples i used english words but often denish or dutch words are closer and make it even closer. Simple spoken, dutch is german, which didn't made ist through the second loud change, like all lower german dialects but later became a written language. In some high german dialects the loud shift was a little bit different, some made "Berg" (mountain) to "perg" (alemannic) or like we in Thuringia say "Fanne" (pan) und "Ferd" (horse) instead of "Pfanne" and "Pferd".
In austria and south-tyrol the word for 'thunder' is 'dunder' in most southern dialects and the word for 'zimmer' ('timber') is sometimes 'zimber' (this is rare, but I already heard it a view times in south-tyrol). Also the word for 'lamb' is 'låmp' nearly everywhere in austria. This means bavarian preserved the some letters that are gone in german. Also 'berg' is 'perg' in bavarian too (except for the danube area, which got influenced by central german dialects, because of the danubes importance as a trade route).
@Jim lastname there are also a group called "the Landler" who live around Hungary and Ukraine. They speak a very old version of the dialect of Upper Austria (called "Landl" by the local population). Another cool Austrian dialects are the one of the Ötztal (Tyrol) and the Gottschea (it split from the carinthian dialect during the middle ages and didn't change very much since then. It used to be spoken in Slovenia, but it died out there, because the slovenians didn't recognize it as a minority languages after ww1).
@Jim lastname yes, it's sad that languages die out, but luckily they never fully disappear, because they leave some kind of trace in the new language. Are the Aborigine languages offical minority languages in Australia? Btw if you are interrested in the Bavarian and Swabian dialects of Ukraine and Romania: old.stifterhaus.at/sprachforschung/dom/sprachatlas.php You can hear the spoken dialects on this website.
I researched these etymologies a bit. You might find them interesting. Here is a chart for all of them: *English* *Anglo Saxon* *Spanish* *Latin* *PIE* house hus casa casa *(s)kew(s)/*ket (original for each language respectively) cat catt/catte gato catta/-us *katta or *tʃaute (I am not sure which one) According to wiktionary (and confirmation from a PIE dictionary), house came from *(s)kew(s), meaning cover/hide (form of *skeumo (v.)), while casa came from *ket. So 'casa' and 'house' aren't related; at least not related in the last ~6500 years. English cat comes from catta (very related to cattus in Latin); Spanish also gets gato from cattus, so they seem very related. They are cognates, genetic sisters in fact. However, the Romans got 'cattus' from the most serious cat-lovers, the Egyptians, from 'c̆aute' (possibly; I'm not sure since there seems to be multiple etymologies). This comes from Afroasiatic family, NOT PIE (only if that is true though), meaning that English and *Spanish* words for 'cat' are related, but not related to PIE which is very strange. This etymology was one of the weirdest I've seen...
Edvard Are you saying that all the Indo-European languages originiate from Sanskrit? No way. Edit after 5 years: I meant to say that this is not the case. I didn't account for how my phrasing might be perceived in colloquial speech.
Just from memory, I know that german 'hund' is related to English 'hound'. The origin of 'dog' however is pretty much a mystery. Look it up on the Online Etymology Dictionary. I use that all the time. www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dog
Whoah, I did not know fellow Serbs (or any Balkan people) watch this kind of videos, there's just 1 mistake in your comment - the ancestor was PIE and not Sanskrit, and it did have k'm°tom, but Sanskrit is a satem language so Sanskrit probably had sm°tom or šmtom or something like that, not km°tom
When I was a child (what I like to call my “baby linguist stage”)I used to think that a lot of english words (cat, for, name, brother, house, wasp, eye...) came from Latin, because I knew that my mother tongue had eveolved from latin, and they were too similar to portuguese cognates not to be related (gato, por, nome, frater(nidade), casa, vespa, olho...) When I discovered PIE as a teenager I was very excited to find out that yes, they were related, but that relation went back to thousands of years ago, and Russian, Gaelic, Persian and Sanskrit were part of the family too.
Serbian kćer/kćerka (archaic) ćerka (modern). It's related to Czech, as both are Slavic, and I guess Czech is a bit more conservative because it kept the d on the beginning *IT'S ALL CONNECTED*
I know German ... but these books neither seem like I could borrow them from a library nor like I would be able to convince myself to read them. But this be said: 'Grimms Law# in German would be 'Grimms Gesetz' ... ALLITERATION!!!
@@TheMallaclllypse Es ist wahr. Auf Französisch findet man das sechsbändig Le Comte de Monte-Cristo von Alexander Dumas völlig kostenlos. Und auf Deutsch für meinen Handy habe ich Der Tod in Venedig von Thomas Mann, Das Parfum von Patrick Süskind und selbst Die Verwandlung von Franz Kafka heruntergeladen.
I never even considered linguistics before i saw you, but i saw you video on Thai and spent like 2 and 1/2 hours last night watching you, then Artifexian's videos on linguistics... This is my life...
I'm currently living in Girona, in Catalonia and I'm learning both Spanish and Catalan. I've noticed that lots of words in Catalan and Spanish do a similar thing to what you were talking about in this video. For example h in spanish is often an f in Catalan, and suffixes like "idad" become "itat". Just thought you might like to know :)
Spanish is responsible for that change since a lot of words that started with f started being pronounced kind of like an h sound, until eventually the sound disappeared, and you will notice that learning other Romance languages because most will have f words that correspond with h words in Spanish. Actually that's still a relevant phenomenon in Spanish to this day, in some varieties you will notice people pronouncing f sounds as if they were a j, saying things like "juego" in instead of "fuego", "cajé" in instead of "café".
when i started learning spanish one year ago out of pure interest i was amazed to notice how much of the two languages' vocabulary is either absolutely the same or slightly different. i knew about the romance influence on english but i didnt really realise it because i never had any experience with a romance language. sometimes when i dont know the word in spanish i simply pick up the english word and modify it according to what it would sound in spanish. it works pretty well.
Am from saudi Arabia. I studied linguistic , now am studying history of English. Your video MashaAllah helped me a lot ! Thank you so much for the explanation and for the fun way of learning Grimm's law. Now I can finally love this subject. Am so excited to learn more!
The Germanic consonant described as [xh] at 5:15 is voiced like Stewie from Family Guy episodes "Cool Whip." Additionally, the puff of air sound at 3:00 is found in many western Native American languages, such as Paiute and Shoshone.
Man, you're a grade-A genius. Now, thanks to you, I'm starting to understand something that's puzzled me for years: how exactly do sounds change over time? What causes _this_ sound to turn into _that_ sound and not _that_ other sound? You know that feeling of sudden enlightenment, when you feel like you've just understood something that had been puzzling you for ages? That's what I got from listening to your explanation and looking at your sketches. So, kudos.
"If you watch my channel odds are you are pretty into linguistics" Me whos just here to have something neat to watch while i eat my spaghetti: "hm yes i am something of a linguist myself"
French is pretty similar to Spanish on the question words: Who - Qui What - Quoi When - Quand Where - Oú - um... Why - Pourquoi (For what) How much - Combien French and Spanish are REALLY close!
+John Kegelmeyer Which Makes sense cause both Spanish and French derives from Latin, The difference is that the french insist to keep the spelling as close to latin while Spanish have their own thing Latin: Qui, Quid, Cum, Ubi, Para que, Quanto French: Qui, Quoi, Quan, Où, Pourquoi, Combien Spanish: Quien, Qué, Quando, Dónde, Para Qué, Cuánto Meanwhile the Germanic are very different German: Wer, Was, Wann, Woher, Wofür, Wie viel Dutch: Wie, Wat, Waneer, waar, waarvoor, Hoe veel English: Who, What, When, Where, (for) What, How (much) Which is why I am infuriated every time someone compares German with the Romance Languages. Da hell you might as well compare Arabic with Russian.
The Grimm brothers didn't WRITE those fairy tales except in writing them DOWN. They put a collection of folk tales they collected from various sources to paper to preserve them, as part of their research interests.
I'm fond of the hard TH, Ð, (eth) turning into D. Oðin becoming Odin, in colloquial American English "them folks over there" to "dem folks over der!" It's just cool to think about.
the urban dublin hiberno English dialect does that with the start of TH words and any t endings are dropped so "that" becomes "da" "this" becomes "dis" etc etc
In spanish the opposite happened (or is happenning, I don't know how spread the shift is) : our /d/ intervocalically has turned into a /ð/ (as in THat), and then an approximant. I think it's gonna diappear soon in informal speech
Horny Aleks Hiberno English can have a weird way around the sound of "th". Irish doesn't have a "th" sound (anymore) so whilst today Irish people can pronounce both "th" sounds, they have a tendency to almost merge them with "t" for the soft "th" sound and "d" for the hard "th" sound
Great video, I love how you pronounced the sounds from each table. I really enjoy your videos and was amazed to find out you are (were) still in high school. Very impressive!
this was such a huge relief like honestly this was a huge worry i didn’t even know i had but when it was explained i felt a HUGE weight lifted off my shoulders
How fascinating! It's always bothered me that Western human history rarely ever goes past classical antiquity. Hopefully we can learn more through PIE culture/language.
Just discovered your channel yesterday and I gotta say I'm impressed you did this kinda videos around the time graduating from high school. Props and greetings from Germany!
Hey man, just a little while ago it was hard for me to believe that there can be so damn cool videos with such simplistic graphics, with no animation and no real human face in them... But somehow you manage to do it every time! Awesome job, mate! You present important and complicated things in a way so relaxed and easy to understand) Keep making more cool stuff, and all the best!
The word cat in English actually comes indirectly from Latin ("cattus"). The "g" in Spanish "gato" is an example of lenition that happened to the romance languages, and therefore is not an example of Grimm's law.
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） - Like Bolino said, many dialects of English, both American and British, pronounce the h in wh and contrast it with w. Wh- is really [hw-], and was spelled that way in Old English / Anglo-Saxon: hwæt = modern what, for instance. It may have been [xw-] in Old English times. So people who say [hw-] keep the old form and people who say wh- as [w-] have dropped the h to simplify it. That's also why German has only W and not Wh or Hw for its old hw- words. Similar processes happen in other languages. Similarly, a special consonant, phi, became either f or h or dropped entirely, in Spanish (hierro instead of *fierro, from ferrus). When I looked a little at Japanese, I was surprised to see the same thing: phi became h or f or dropped entirely, which is why Japanese has h/f instead of p, contrasted with voiced b.
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） Watch the "Family Guy" episodes where Stewie and Brian argue over the word "whip." It's hysterical, to me, because I went to Catholic grade schools, and the Franciscan brothers ALWAYS forced us to use the "hw" sound for all words starting with "wh." So, even today, I sound pedantic and elitist to a lot of people because I have been so ingrained with the usage that I just haven't merged.
I have a friend who speaks Spanish because she and her family are from Mexico, but has lived in America since she was young. Her name is Laticia but everyone calls her Leti. I mentioned her to someone who learned to speak in Mexico. He called me out for saying her name like "Leddy" and said it was pronounced like Lay'Tea, with a hard T sound. That was one of the first times I became aware of the way English speakers don't make consonants very distinct. I've only watch a couple so far but I love your videos. Thanks!
Played the video and in the first 2-3 seconds I was like 'this music is cancer and the video is probably gonna suck' but I was SO WRONG, I loved everything about it (except how fast-paced it was tbh) and I liked it and subscribed. Great stuff! Greetings from a fellow language nerd! ❤
Funny thing is that the same thing happened in Japanese, where P became F which then became H. You can tell because the many words imported from Chinese 2000 years ago which are pronouned with an H consonant are replaced with a K. For example, "ocean" hai in Chinese, kai in Japanese.
This is a great example of Stigler's Law of Eponymy (i.e. laws being named after people who didn't discover them). I would describe it, but the wikipedia article is probably much more entertaining. Sowieso, I have 0 background in linguistics, so please continue describing everything in excruciating detail.
Took linguistics in High school (sadly gave up on that dream for STEM haha) and I'm a native speaker of two IE languages (English and Czech) and I love these videos. The end with English -> Spanish with Grimm's Law blew my mind. Amazing observation/tool!
That's a process called lenition or sound weakening. It is when a language changes sounds in a word or multiple words when they follow one another to make it easier to pronounce. Like want to becoming wanna or going to becoming gonna in English. A lot of the time in languages you will see this with words that have consonants that are pronounced in different areas of the mouth next to one another, where one of the consonants will move to be pronounced using the same parts of the mouth as the other consonant or it may just be dropped. In Sandwich you have an alveolar nasal followed by an alveolar stop followed by a bilabial approximate. This is difficult to pronounce quickly and so English speakers will drop the stop consonant that really slows down the pronunciation (You can see this process in other Germanic languages like English Thunder and Dutch Donder but German Donner, or English Timber but Dutch and Swedish Timmer, German Zimmer, and Norwegian and Danish Tømmer). Then the bilabial approximate will draw the alveolar nasal to become a bilabial nasal M and will assimilate, leaving us with sammich.
In Germany, almost noone calls this Grimm's Law/ Grimm'sches Gesetz (btw, I kinda hate the apostrophy, it interrupts the words so badly^^), we prefer to say 'Erste Lautverschiebung'/'first sound shift'; so I don't know where the name's coming from...
English is my second language, and watching your videos makes me want to see these things about my native language, portuguese. Since it's very similar to spanish, this video was really interesting because of this ending. I mean, it's not as if your other videos are not interesting, but I had a hard time trying to understand the whole "cot-caught" thing since my pronunciation is weird :P
Sir William Jones was a welshman not an englishman. Studying Welsh and comparing it to Greek and Latin is actually what gave him the idea to try it with Sanskrit.
Hey man, keep up these videos, they're great. I'm finishing my MA in Spanish linguistics, so any of these topics are interesting to me, even though I do theoretical stuff. By one of your comments below, it looks like you may be into computational linguistics. Keep up the good work!
Cromm Cruach Well no... I know that: Italian - padre German - Vater English - father Grimms's Law explains this stuff, but then we have Polish - ojciec But in polish we have the word 'daddy" and it's "tata" which seems morel logical. So Padre, Father, Vater and Tata are related, so in Polish the word switched meanings and a new word randomly emerged? Where could the "ojciec" be comming from? That's what interests me, where did the random new word come from that pushed the old one into a lower category?
According to Wikidictionary , it is believed to have been took as a loanword from Proto-Turkic that itself modified it from a borrowing from an ancient Mesopotamian language , possibly even Sumerian. Through trade with the ancient Inuits , it also spread to the Proto-Inuit Atta
@@Anonymous-df8it Oh, gotcha. I knew that, but didn't know that's what you were getting at. In English, voiceless plosives (p, t, k) are basically always unaspirated when followed by an S.
could you do a video about how some eastern languages don't differentiate between r and l? I have a very hard time wrapping my head around that, and would like to know more
Nikolaj Lepka Every language has sounds that they can differentiate and sounds they cannot. We can differentiate R and L but Japanese and Korean really can't. They see them as different "shades" of the same sound. For example, in Korean, they use the same letter for R and L in their alphabet. But it is pronounced R at the beginning of a syllable or L at the end of the syllable. So we have words like "Seoul" or "Ramyeon" (ramen). On the other hand, English cannot different aspirated and unaspirated consonants, although we do use them in different situations, we consider them to be the same sound. For example, the P sound in Pit is aspirated -> There's a puff of air you can feel if you place your hand in front of you mouth as you pronounce it. But if you say "Spit", there is no air puff anymore, the P is unaspirated. You can feel the difference but most English native speakers cannot hear it. To a Korean speaker though, the P in Spit and Pit would likely sound like completely different letters, and wonder why the heck we can't differentiate unaspirated and aspirated consonants....
***** So this is why ㄲ, ㅋ, ㄱ/ ㅃ, ㅂ, ㅍ/ ㄸ, ㄷ, ㅌ/ and ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ all sound the same to me but native Korean speakers swear up and down that they sound so different. I have also noticed when native Korean speakers use english they pronounce r with a kind of Spanish sounding rolling L sound.
Brianab3ar my only problem with Korean pronunciation is between 시 and 씨, which sound exactly the same, i cant hear the tensing (I can hear the tenseness following ㅉ ㄸ ㄲ and ㅃ and between ㅅ and ㅆ followed by other vowels), but my korean teacher will say "no theyre different" while pronouncing them exactly the same like whaaat
***** same. I have learned the differences in the others from watch countless kdramas to learn pronunciation, but 시 and 씨 still catch me up. At first I thought that 시 was pronounced like see and 씨 was like she. But it got more difficult when I heard people pronounce 씨 like see and 시 like she.
I think it could maybe be important to note that the relations between english and spanish also apply to a lot more latin languages as I can say with a lot of certainty that at least the question words similarities (6:50) applies exactly the same in french as in spanish: "who"→"qui";"what"→"quoi";"when"→"quand" and "why"→"pour *qu* oi" wich litteraly translates into "for what".
Hold up. You got that into linguistics in HIGH SCHOOL?! That's awesome. Also you uploaded this video on my birthday this past summer! What an awesome present :-) Too bad I didn't find it until now!
oh my god you just got out of highschool!!!! (well, 2 yrs ago) I figured you were much older... just because these videos are so great, i wrongly assumed someone needed to be older to have made them! Thanks for teaching me so much about linguistics and now about myself as well.
Nice video and how you pronounce each letter word stuff. Im impressed. Haha. May I ask what are you studying in college? With all this videos I feel like you want to be some linguistic professor researcher teacher. But thats just me guessing. Very interesting indeed
Gerardo Sim Hi, I'm glad you like my videos! To answer your question, I'm studying linguistics right now, although I want to switch to this computer-science-linguistics-combined-major-thingy they have.
Gerardo Sim Heh, it's basically just a normal computer science degree, but with some added classes about linguistics. The main thing people tend to do with it is program computers to use human language, like designing Siri or Google Translate.
Xidnaf That's really awesome. And it kind of makes me wonder if one day you'll develop something, some sort of program that has to do with languages... :D
Xidnaf do u know the channel "the thinking ape" he sort of did 2 videos about language and different things like dialect and origin of language i think. it would be cool if u have to time to check it out. what would help your channel growth would be to do a podcast with the dude. i dont know, just ideas and stuff.
You raped that Pronounciation you said Deutsch' Gramatique Grammatik is pronounced quite slowly and with you could say a glottal stop at the end. A sharp K sound.as in sharK. And you actually pronounce the E in Deutsche. In german we like to pronounce everything, which is why some germans struggle with english. Theyre not used to not pronouncing letters Just wanna help :)
+HoneyDane French is what ruined English spelling with lots of silent letters and makes no sense spelling rules. German spelling is so easy because of what you said... it always follows the rules... sometimes to too strong a degree... :( But at least spelling in German is easier than English. And French words, forget about it.
+jmitterii2 German can be ambiguous. Why say Vogel as Fogel but Revier as Rewier ? The v letter should disappear from German. Even worse : How do you say Wachsstube ? Either you say it Vax-toobe (Wachs-tube, tube of wax), or you say Vakh-shtoobe (Wach-stube, room for guards (?)). The way German wird written is sometimes misleading and confusing. French on the other hand doesn't pretend it isn't confusing, it is honest with you. When you learn a French word, the three aspects of the word (meanings, pronunciation, spelling) have to be learnt independently. C'est pour cette raison que la langue française est et restera une langue élégante, de par l'origine étymologique et non-phonétique de son orthographe, et ne cèdera pas à la tentation d'enlaidir son écriture pour la rendre plus cohérente :)
+jmitterii2 I thought I was supposed to say "thorkt", not "thort" (with non-rhotic r, as "or" is the closest English equivalent to a reason to have a dark round vowel). Now I know that English is wrong about itself.
Thank you so much for this video. I wanna add something about the argument of "Why Grimms law" and not anything else, which is impossible to know, without the socio-linguistic and cultural backround of being German I believe. The brothers Grimm wrote a lot of fairytale stories (like Red Riding Hood), which are highly influential and popular all over the world and which were also responsible on people learning how to read in the first place. The Deutsche Grammatik is a book of German Grammar altogether, where it also explains the entire organization of the German language. I´m assuming these factors together made people rather acknowledge his work, than other peoples. The typical rule of "More famous, therefore more influental."
Hi! I love your videos, but you've got a couple of things wrong on this one: house comes from *(s)keu- (to hide), whereas casa probably comes from *kat (to braid/fold), according to some sources (others say its root is just unknown), but in any case they are not related. The second point is a bit more nitpicky: your pronunciation of certain Spanish sounds. There are no aspirated consonants in Spanish (/pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/), so words like "que", "quien" and "casa" should not sound like in English, unless you are happy to have a very strong foreign (and weird) accent, of course. Also, the "t" and "d" should be dental, not alveolar, and the "b" in "labio" (/β/) and "g" in "gato" (/ɣ/) should be softer. Finally, you pronounce the "e" as /ɛ/ or /æ/ instead of /e/.
My former Spanish teacher, who was a native speaker from south america, pronounced the e sometimes as æ and sometimes as e, depending on the word. I'm unsure whether she adopted a German accent in her Spanish speech or if it is actually a South American thing, developed because of non Spanish speaking settlers there who introduced this to Spanish
Peters Zeug I'm from Argentina and, yes, there's a whole range of differences in pronunciation, not only in vowels. Sounds like she is from the North of South America, near the Caribbean, but I'm just guessing, even in the same country you find regional differences.
Another related topic you could talk about would be the High German Consonant Shift, where Ds became Ts, Ts became Ss, Ps became Fs, etc. I noticed this myself when I studied German in high school, and it's one reason why modern German differs as much as it does from English and Dutch.
+TopCuber Languages tend to borrow from other languages. Given that the domestic pussycat has its origins in the Middle East, a place where ancient Indo-European languages were not common, and quickly became very popular because of its mouse-catching abilities, is it any surprise that the word's origins are from a different language family and perhaps entered those languages semi-independently?
+Bob Sutton Woah, woah. I think you're both slightly off the point here. g from k in catus->gato is a sound change that occurred in transition from Proto-Romance to Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. French, for example has chat, so it's not a common romance development. If we take that many IE languages have cognates for "cat" (for example Russian кот or Welsh cath) we can assume the word cat was not subject to Grimm's law, as, due to k->x and t->th it would be pronounced something like HATH today in English.
+TopCuber I don't know about that. In both Hebrew and Phoenician (based on the word for cat as used in Tunisia, which is likely a leftover from now dead Phoenician) cat is a word that sounds like khatus. I wrote kh to sort of imitate a k sort of sound made at the low back of the mouth by the throat. How do you know it came from Berber or Nubian originally? I am not sure anybody can say with confidence that it came from there rather than Mesopotamia or Sumeria or who knows maybe some much earlier language that split off into Hebrew/Phoenician and so on. By the way, if anybody is interested in more sound changes, words that are said with a 'th' sound in Phoenician (based on Tunisian pronunciations of Hebrew cognates) are said as 'sh' in Hebrew. So if I write some words as they sound to me (sorry but I don't know the real spellings as I don't speak these languages but based on what I have heard and picked up traveling and watching movies): The number two in Tunisia is ithnayn but in Hebrew it is ishnee. The number three in Tunisia is thalatha but in Hebrew it is shalosh. Clearly these words are cognates. It is even more obvious that they are cognates when you hear all the numbers in sequence (1-9 follows first the Tunisian and then the Hebrew). Wahed, ithnayn, thalath, arba, khamsa, sitta, sabbah, thamanya, tissa. Versus ehad, ishnee, shalosh, hamash, shesh, sheva, shmone, tesha. But then the Tunisian pronunciation might just be from Arabic and not a residual of Phoenician pronunciation. I do know that the Tunisian accent is not the same in Arabic and the accent of gulf Arabs because of the Phoenician influence. Since Phoenician is a dead language, it is hard to know what it exactly sounded like but it is supposed to have been very close to Hebrew. It might not be far off to think that modern Tunisian pronunciation is heavily influence by Phoenician still since it would have been spoken until at least about a thousand years ago. Now I have a goal to find out what the sound differences are between gulf Arabic and Tunisian. Whether the comparison is Arabic or Phoenician, either way it seems modern Hebrew has a tendency to turn both 'th' and 's' into 'sh'. I quite hate it. It is annoying for me to listen to Hebrew because I don't like all the sh noises. It sounds vulgar to me compared to a softer 'th' sound. I don't speak either language. I just noticed this on my travels. If I were trapped in a jail cell for eternity with somebody who constantly lisped 'sh' when speaking, one of us would die pretty quick because I would try to kill them. There would only be one of us left in there one way or the other because I just could not listen to that for long. I also hate the way Donald Trump says the word "China". Oh, and that nasal voiced lady who played a nanny, Fran Drescher, yep, I would kill her inside of one hour if you stuck me in a room with her and told her to babble nonstop. I think I have a problem with annoying voices. It makes me seriously homicidal. Babies don't bother me. I can listen to babies cry all day--no problem. But annoying speech, nope, can't take it.
+Xidnaf Question words in other Germanic Languages tend to start with a W. English - Dutch - German Who - Wie - Wie What - Wat - Was Where - Waar - Wo When - Wanneer - Wann Why - Waarom - Warum How - Hoe - Wie
+Xidnaf I've also noticed a pattern in West Germanic Languages. 1. English "OU" = Dutch "UI" = German "AU" English - Dutch - German House - Huis - Haus Mouse - Muis - Maus Loud - Luid - Laut 2. Word that starts with an F in English and German usually starts with a V in Dutch. English - Dutch - German Flight - Vlucht - Flug Find - Vinden - Finden Foot - Voet - Fuß 3. Word that starts with an S in English and German usually starts with a Z in Dutch. English - Dutch - German Sun - Zon - Sonne Search - Zoek - Suche 4. Other patterns. T-D, T-S. English - Dutch - German Thunder - Donder - Donner Water - Water - Wasser Better - Beter - Besser Dance - Dans - Tanz That - Dat - Dass
Jackson S Nothing's really wrong with using it, it's just I'm being very nit picky, and England is the place where English came from. The U.K. is broader than England.
6:53 That Spanish accent. I myself call this the English - Spanish tongue. It's when someone who comes from a different native language tries to pronounce something and says it different to how it's actually pronounced. Not trying to pour dirt on you, I do it too with German. Hope your channel grows!
+Zardo Dhieldor It's a little odd that a self-described linguist wouldn't speak German. It seems that most linguistic terms come from German: Umlaut, Sprachbund, Urheimat, etc.
Treis is Masculine and Feminine, Tria is neuter. Ancient Greek had different declensions for the first four numbers depending on the word's gender. Heis Masc, Mia Fem, Hen Neut for One; Dyo Masc/Fem/Neut; Treis Masc/Fem, Tria Neut; Tettares Masc/Fem, Tettara Neut.
Even if it was Ancient Greek, B is pointing to the right and since it was written from R to L it should've been written as Δ Γ Β Α not A B Γ Δ (sry i couldnt find the mirror Γ αηδ Β)
Good video, as always. For the difference between an aspirated and non-aspirated stop, think of the English stop allophones. For example, in English when a stop is at the beginning of a word, it is aspirated. When it is in the middle of a word, it is not aspirated. Thanks for showing the application of Grimm's Law on question words. I never made that connection before, even though I'm learning French, Spanish, and Portuguese!
I also made the house-casa observation a while back, but after some quick research it turns out that casa likely came into Spanish through Hebrew, not a PIE root. They seem like cognates, but probably aren't. Also, the word Kattuz (cat) was borrowed into Proto-Germanic from Latin Cattus, and so should not be used as an example of this law. Both gato and cat essentially evolved from the same Latin source word. Very well done video, thanks for sharing!
Holy... I've casually studied linguistics off-and-on for the sake of making my own conlang. This video just completely blew my mind. O.O Also, you have a very humorous presentation style!
Sorry for breaking this, but in Greek you're supposed to accent the vowel that has the little stress marking, not whichever you like. Sooo you kinda killed every single word 😂. Also, 4:46 perí means around, not far. apó means far. You can even see evidence of this in Greek words in English, like periphrasis or perimeter.
Aww... Saw TheLydeOctave and thought you had a link to their work... Still, every time I come around to your videos (and by extension the other linguistics channels around youtube), I am always highly entertained and enlightened.
One thing about the very end: "Cat" comes from an Old English borrowing of the Latin word "cattus" (which, according to wiktionary, is ultimately from an Ancient Egyptian word, which was something I didn't know til now). The Spanish has "gato" because the Iberian dialects of Latin weakened /k/ to /g/ in that position. Thus, the difference between cat and gato is more evident of the development of Latin into Spanish, rather than a result of differential development of Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic and Proto-Italic. Unfortunately, I can't think of an alternative example for this kind of k/g difference that goes back to the respective proto-languages.
/b/ and /bh/ are two different phonemes in my language so I can differentiate them. For the speakers of language that [b] and [bh] are allophones, you can learn it as well. It's not that difficult!
There are lots of examples, but another example of consistent phonetic shifts from a parent language would be the Vulgar Latin /kt/ shift in the daughter Romance languages. Ex: "lact-" (milk) -> It. latte, Fr. lait, Sp. leche "noct-" (night) -> It. notte, Fr. nuit, Sp. noche "oct-" (eight) -> It. otto, Fr. huit, Sp. ocho Thus, given a Latin root and a known pattern in the descendant language, it becomes possible to predict vocabulary without actually having heard it. Ex: Romanian turned /kt/ into /pt/ (among other changes). Knowing this, I would guess lapte, nopte, and opte for milk, night, eight. Lo and behold, milk = lapte, night = noapte, eight = opt. Not bad, for one who doesn't speak any Romanian! English "milk" comes from a different root, but we can see similar consistency in night and eight.
There are many possible sound changes for the "ndw" and "ch" segments in "sandwich" "ndw" could be /ndʷ/, /nʷ/, /mʷ/, /ŋʷ/, /m/, /w/, /ŋ/, /ʍ/, /n/ "ch" could be /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ts/, /t/, /ʃ/ I say /sænʷɪtʃ/.
I suppose that it goes sændwɪtʃ > sanwɪtʃ (perhaps d>ɾ then adjacent velars (nɾ) just become n) > sanʷɪtʃ > samɪtʃ. -but I don’t think I can imagine that intermediate “sanʷitsh” (IPA takes too long) actually existing, so my line of reasoning must be flawed. Also, I think it is a fool’s errand to apply sound shifts too rigorously to what is literally baby pronunciation.
In German it is not even called "Grimms Law" rather "Erste Lautverschiebung" = "First Sound Shift" or "Germanische Lautverschiebung" = "Germanic Sound Shift". It was not only discovered by Grimm and Rask, but also by Friedrich Schlegel, a german philosoph, in 1806, 6 years prior to Rask and 16 years prior to Grimm. German had another loud shift which seperated it more clearly from other germanic languages. The Second Loud shift went in quiet the same direction as the first: p -> pf/f (sleep -> schlafen, apple -> Apfel, pan -> Pfanne); t -> s/tz (sweet - süß [alternative: suess], water -> Wasser, to tell er-zählen, timber -> Zimmer); d -> t (day -> Tag BUT th -> d (thorn -> Dorn, thunder -> Donner, brother -> Bruder). As examples i used english words but often denish or dutch words are closer and make it even closer. Simple spoken, dutch is german, which didn't made ist through the second loud change, like all lower german dialects but later became a written language. In some high german dialects the loud shift was a little bit different, some made "Berg" (mountain) to "perg" (alemannic) or like we in Thuringia say "Fanne" (pan) und "Ferd" (horse) instead of "Pfanne" and "Pferd".
In austria and south-tyrol the word for 'thunder' is 'dunder' in most southern dialects and the word for 'zimmer' ('timber') is sometimes 'zimber' (this is rare, but I already heard it a view times in south-tyrol). Also the word for 'lamb' is 'låmp' nearly everywhere in austria. This means bavarian preserved the some letters that are gone in german. Also 'berg' is 'perg' in bavarian too (except for the danube area, which got influenced by central german dialects, because of the danubes importance as a trade route).
@Jim lastname there are also a group called "the Landler" who live around Hungary and Ukraine. They speak a very old version of the dialect of Upper Austria (called "Landl" by the local population).
Another cool Austrian dialects are the one of the Ötztal (Tyrol) and the Gottschea (it split from the carinthian dialect during the middle ages and didn't change very much since then. It used to be spoken in Slovenia, but it died out there, because the slovenians didn't recognize it as a minority languages after ww1).
@Jim lastname yes, it's sad that languages die out, but luckily they never fully disappear, because they leave some kind of trace in the new language. Are the Aborigine languages offical minority languages in Australia?
Btw if you are interrested in the Bavarian and Swabian dialects of Ukraine and Romania: old.stifterhaus.at/sprachforschung/dom/sprachatlas.php
You can hear the spoken dialects on this website.
Haha, grüße aus Erfurt.
is this where "first germanic sound shift" comes from?
Correction: two of the five examples at 7:10 don't actually come from Grimm's law: House/casa and cat/gato.
I researched these etymologies a bit. You might find them interesting.
Here is a chart for all of them:
*English* *Anglo Saxon* *Spanish* *Latin* *PIE*
house hus casa casa *(s)kew(s)/*ket (original for each language respectively)
cat catt/catte gato catta/-us *katta or *tʃaute (I am not sure which one)
According to wiktionary (and confirmation from a PIE dictionary), house came from *(s)kew(s), meaning cover/hide (form of *skeumo (v.)), while casa came from *ket. So 'casa' and 'house' aren't related; at least not related in the last ~6500 years.
English cat comes from catta (very related to cattus in Latin); Spanish also gets gato from cattus, so they seem very related. They are cognates, genetic sisters in fact. However, the Romans got 'cattus' from the most serious cat-lovers, the Egyptians, from 'c̆aute' (possibly; I'm not sure since there seems to be multiple etymologies). This comes from Afroasiatic family, NOT PIE (only if that is true though), meaning that English and *Spanish* words for 'cat' are related, but not related to PIE which is very strange. This etymology was one of the weirdest I've seen...
Edvard Are you saying that all the Indo-European languages originiate from Sanskrit? No way.
Edit after 5 years: I meant to say that this is not the case. I didn't account for how my phrasing might be perceived in colloquial speech.
Just from memory, I know that german 'hund' is related to English 'hound'. The origin of 'dog' however is pretty much a mystery.
Look it up on the Online Etymology Dictionary. I use that all the time. www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=dog
//\\//\\//\\ film "Japanese: shiba"
nononono
It's "inu". Shiba is just the word for the breed of the fluffy bastards.
Whoah, I did not know fellow Serbs (or any Balkan people) watch this kind of videos, there's just 1 mistake in your comment - the ancestor was PIE and not Sanskrit, and it did have k'm°tom, but Sanskrit is a satem language so Sanskrit probably had sm°tom or šmtom or something like that, not km°tom
.... My god.... 6 years of technically learning French and I finally learn why their questions start with "Q"'s.... EVERYTHING MAKES SENSE NOW!
its just like w in english
who what where when why
whow?
Oui oui baguette, croissant..?
@@equaius893 😂
In German they start with w which is pronounced like the English v
Turkish, it's "5N1K" like English "5W1H".
When I was a child (what I like to call my “baby linguist stage”)I used to think that a lot of english words (cat, for, name, brother, house, wasp, eye...) came from Latin, because I knew that my mother tongue had eveolved from latin, and they were too similar to portuguese cognates not to be related (gato, por, nome, frater(nidade), casa, vespa, olho...) When I discovered PIE as a teenager I was very excited to find out that yes, they were related, but that relation went back to thousands of years ago, and Russian, Gaelic, Persian and Sanskrit were part of the family too.
4:40
Sanskrit _ananas_
Greek _ananas_
Latin _ananas_
English _pineapple_
Russian _ананас._ [ana'nas]
Tamil(Dravidian language): anasi
portuguese: abacaxi
@@farseer5726 indigenous reason
Spanish: piña
English -> daughter
German-> toechter
Persian-> dokhtar
My favorite example for Grimm's law, euhh... excuse me Rask's Rule ;)
+Mohamed Hamza *Tochter :) Töchter (or as you wrote it "toechter") meant daughters.
snakelemon Thanks for the information
+Mohamed Hamza Czech -> dcera
Serbian kćer/kćerka (archaic) ćerka (modern). It's related to Czech, as both are Slavic, and I guess Czech is a bit more conservative because it kept the d on the beginning *IT'S ALL CONNECTED*
Mohamed Hamza Sanskrit - duhitr
I know German ... but these books neither seem like I could borrow them from a library nor like I would be able to convince myself to read them. But this be said: 'Grimms Law# in German would be 'Grimms Gesetz' ... ALLITERATION!!!
So ziemlich alle Bücher die kein Copyright mehr haben gibts kostenlos als Kindle ebook. Den Kindle reader gibts auch als app.
@@TheMallaclllypse Es ist wahr. Auf Französisch findet man das sechsbändig Le Comte de Monte-Cristo von Alexander Dumas völlig kostenlos. Und auf Deutsch für meinen Handy habe ich Der Tod in Venedig von Thomas Mann, Das Parfum von Patrick Süskind und selbst Die Verwandlung von Franz Kafka heruntergeladen.
Before subscribing to your channel, I didn't even know I was _that_ interested in linguistics.
Holy shit, you're just now out of highschool. By your knowledge of linguistics, I thought you were an adult. You're so smart.
+Ethan M If he were an adult, wouldn't his voice have changed?
I never even considered linguistics before i saw you, but i saw you video on Thai and spent like 2 and 1/2 hours last night watching you, then Artifexian's videos on linguistics... This is my life...
I'm currently living in Girona, in Catalonia and I'm learning both Spanish and Catalan. I've noticed that lots of words in Catalan and Spanish do a similar thing to what you were talking about in this video. For example h in spanish is often an f in Catalan, and suffixes like "idad" become "itat". Just thought you might like to know :)
+Craig Ford Good job noticing the shift :)
Spanish is responsible for that change since a lot of words that started with f started being pronounced kind of like an h sound, until eventually the sound disappeared, and you will notice that learning other Romance languages because most will have f words that correspond with h words in Spanish. Actually that's still a relevant phenomenon in Spanish to this day, in some varieties you will notice people pronouncing f sounds as if they were a j, saying things like "juego" in instead of "fuego", "cajé" in instead of "café".
@@baykkus maybe that's what happened to the names Fernandez and Hernandez?
@@baykkus spanish is even more complicated for the heavy arab influence in the language
when I briefly lived in Spain I noticed that idad in Spanish is ity in English
4:00 technically Latin only mergered the voiced aspirated stops in medium and final position, initially, it became “f”, “f”, “h” , “f” respectively
when i started learning spanish one year ago out of pure interest i was amazed to notice how much of the two languages' vocabulary is either absolutely the same or slightly different. i knew about the romance influence on english but i didnt really realise it because i never had any experience with a romance language. sometimes when i dont know the word in spanish i simply pick up the english word and modify it according to what it would sound in spanish. it works pretty well.
When the words are really similar, like the ción words, it's probably just an English borrowing from Latin, not a relation through PIE
Am from saudi Arabia. I studied linguistic , now am studying history of English. Your video MashaAllah helped me a lot ! Thank you so much for the explanation and for the fun way of learning Grimm's law. Now I can finally love this subject. Am so excited to learn more!
The Germanic consonant described as [xh] at 5:15 is voiced like Stewie from Family Guy episodes "Cool Whip." Additionally, the puff of air sound at 3:00 is found in many western Native American languages, such as Paiute and Shoshone.
The native American language is English
@@Aaron-vk3mbbased
Man, you're a grade-A genius.
Now, thanks to you, I'm starting to understand something that's puzzled me for years: how exactly do sounds change over time? What causes _this_ sound to turn into _that_ sound and not _that_ other sound?
You know that feeling of sudden enlightenment, when you feel like you've just understood something that had been puzzling you for ages?
That's what I got from listening to your explanation and looking at your sketches.
So, kudos.
Did he say high school?! Kids these days :P
For real tho... i came to his channel to prepare for my indo european finals. Like this highschooler knows more then me, a linguistics student...
I thought he was joking lol
was he not right?
@@shikkithefirst5393 He just does a lot of research
"If you watch my channel odds are you are pretty into linguistics"
Me whos just here to have something neat to watch while i eat my spaghetti: "hm yes i am something of a linguist myself"
God, the start of this video hits different after the break and the return.
French is pretty similar to Spanish on the question words:
Who - Qui
What - Quoi
When - Quand
Where - Oú - um...
Why - Pourquoi (For what)
How much - Combien
French and Spanish are REALLY close!
+John Kegelmeyer Where is donde in Spanish.
I said similar, not the same.
It seems that where is weird, I'm not sure if it's of the same origin.
+John Kegelmeyer oú comes from ubi and dónde from unde ... both are latin words to say where but they have differents syntax meanings ...
+John Kegelmeyer
Which Makes sense cause both Spanish and French derives from Latin,
The difference is that the french insist to keep the spelling as close to latin while Spanish have their own thing
Latin: Qui, Quid, Cum, Ubi, Para que, Quanto
French: Qui, Quoi, Quan, Où, Pourquoi, Combien
Spanish: Quien, Qué, Quando, Dónde, Para Qué, Cuánto
Meanwhile the Germanic are very different
German: Wer, Was, Wann, Woher, Wofür, Wie viel
Dutch: Wie, Wat, Waneer, waar, waarvoor, Hoe veel
English: Who, What, When, Where, (for) What, How (much)
Which is why I am infuriated every time someone compares German with the Romance Languages. Da hell you might as well compare Arabic with Russian.
AHH YOU'RE GOING TO UI!! THAT'S WHERE _I_...
was rejected
+Andrew Sang heh, not anymore. they kicked me out after a year because my grades were too low :P
+Andrew Sang Become the master of the field
Xidnaf better than me having never got in eh?
+Xidnaf aww. are you still planning on going to a different college?
TheGamerOfTheAwesome yep, I'll be going to Denver Metro this fall.
I used to think linguistics was a bit of a boring topic to me, but you really got me interested in it. Thanks :D
The Grimm brothers didn't WRITE those fairy tales except in writing them DOWN. They put a collection of folk tales they collected from various sources to paper to preserve them, as part of their research interests.
I'm fond of the hard TH, Ð, (eth) turning into D. Oðin becoming Odin, in colloquial American English "them folks over there" to "dem folks over der!" It's just cool to think about.
the urban dublin hiberno English dialect does that with the start of TH words and any t endings are dropped so "that" becomes "da" "this" becomes "dis" etc etc
In spanish the opposite happened (or is happenning, I don't know how spread the shift is) : our /d/ intervocalically has turned into a /ð/ (as in THat), and then an approximant. I think it's gonna diappear soon in informal speech
Horny Aleks Hiberno English can have a weird way around the sound of "th". Irish doesn't have a "th" sound (anymore) so whilst today Irish people can pronounce both "th" sounds, they have a tendency to almost merge them with "t" for the soft "th" sound and "d" for the hard "th" sound
Dew you know *de* wey? (Obligatory meme reference)
Danzinora Switch Odin is still Óðin in Faroese
You've "cot" up on your schoolwork.
Cot-caught merger: **exists**
Me: I'll just do it for half of the words
Great video, I love how you pronounced the sounds from each table. I really enjoy your videos and was amazed to find out you are (were) still in high school. Very impressive!
Ik this was made a decade ago, but as a Latin speaker I feel obligated to mention that Latin has aspirated consonants like classical Greek.
0:15 Did Xidnaf wear his helmet/hat/coconut shell underneath his graduation hat?
this was such a huge relief like honestly this was a huge worry i didn’t even know i had but when it was explained i felt a HUGE weight lifted off my shoulders
How fascinating! It's always bothered me that Western human history rarely ever goes past classical antiquity. Hopefully we can learn more through PIE culture/language.
Just discovered your channel yesterday and I gotta say I'm impressed you did this kinda videos around the time graduating from high school. Props and greetings from Germany!
6:32
You misspelled alliteration.
He alliterated alliteration!
@Jim lastname Exactly, in fact some schoolars form Hoo'carez-century have said it's Mutha'fuckin'
6:57 OOOOOH THAT EXPLAINS WHY ALL THE IRISH QUESTIONS WORDS START WITH C!!! cén fath, cathain, cad, cá bhfuil, etc
yes.
5:39 Answere
Thy answere
L'ansere
Hey man, just a little while ago it was hard for me to believe that there can be so damn cool videos with such simplistic graphics, with no animation and no real human face in them... But somehow you manage to do it every time! Awesome job, mate! You present important and complicated things in a way so relaxed and easy to understand) Keep making more cool stuff, and all the best!
The word cat in English actually comes indirectly from Latin ("cattus"). The "g" in Spanish "gato" is an example of lenition that happened to the romance languages, and therefore is not an example of Grimm's law.
It is also possible that cattus comes from proto-germanic *kattuz
Cat comes from Proto-Germanic, not Latin.
@@alternateperson6600
*possibly
Grimm’s law: the theory of evolution for linguistics.
I just realised that you pronounce the wh... words as wh, rather than w. O_o
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） That's normal. Quite a few dialects of English don't have the w/wh-merger.
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） - Like Bolino said, many dialects of English, both American and British, pronounce the h in wh and contrast it with w. Wh- is really [hw-], and was spelled that way in Old English / Anglo-Saxon: hwæt = modern what, for instance. It may have been [xw-] in Old English times. So people who say [hw-] keep the old form and people who say wh- as [w-] have dropped the h to simplify it. That's also why German has only W and not Wh or Hw for its old hw- words. Similar processes happen in other languages. Similarly, a special consonant, phi, became either f or h or dropped entirely, in Spanish (hierro instead of *fierro, from ferrus). When I looked a little at Japanese, I was surprised to see the same thing: phi became h or f or dropped entirely, which is why Japanese has h/f instead of p, contrasted with voiced b.
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） Watch the "Family Guy" episodes where Stewie and Brian argue over the word "whip." It's hysterical, to me, because I went to Catholic grade schools, and the Franciscan brothers ALWAYS forced us to use the "hw" sound for all words starting with "wh." So, even today, I sound pedantic and elitist to a lot of people because I have been so ingrained with the usage that I just haven't merged.
+周 むてん（Lel On'Yomi Readings） It was originally hw, before it became an allophone of w.
I personally say them as w but read them as wh
I have a friend who speaks Spanish because she and her family are from Mexico, but has lived in America since she was young. Her name is Laticia but everyone calls her Leti. I mentioned her to someone who learned to speak in Mexico. He called me out for saying her name like "Leddy" and said it was pronounced like Lay'Tea, with a hard T sound. That was one of the first times I became aware of the way English speakers don't make consonants very distinct. I've only watch a couple so far but I love your videos. Thanks!
Lol @ "fuckwad" scrambled 0:40
+Igor Soares lol
@@heccshoot lmk🧣🧣
Played the video and in the first 2-3 seconds I was like 'this music is cancer and the video is probably gonna suck' but I was SO WRONG, I loved everything about it (except how fast-paced it was tbh) and I liked it and subscribed. Great stuff! Greetings from a fellow language nerd! ❤
Funny thing is that the same thing happened in Japanese, where P became F which then became H. You can tell because the many words imported from Chinese 2000 years ago which are pronouned with an H consonant are replaced with a K. For example, "ocean" hai in Chinese, kai in Japanese.
But Japanese is as good as a language isolate
although the japanese f never fully h-ified, it's more of a "ph sound"; i don't have the IPA on my phone but it's a bilabial something-or-other
@@KineticManiac "f" in Japanese ONLY occurs when followed by the vowel u, /h/ mutates to /ɸ/ before /ɯ/
Great channel, I very much enjoy watching all of your content despite the somewhat raw illustrations. Good work!
This is a great example of Stigler's Law of Eponymy (i.e. laws being named after people who didn't discover them). I would describe it, but the wikipedia article is probably much more entertaining.
Sowieso, I have 0 background in linguistics, so please continue describing everything in excruciating detail.
I must tell you I enjoy linguistics a lot and your videos are so funny! I love what you do with so limited resources. Cheers from Chile :)
5:37 Longer Answere. SRSLY?!?!?!
To be fair, answere is longer than answer
Took linguistics in High school (sadly gave up on that dream for STEM haha) and I'm a native speaker of two IE languages (English and Czech) and I love these videos. The end with English -> Spanish with Grimm's Law blew my mind. Amazing observation/tool!
That-one-law-where-"sandwich"-becomes-"sammich"
That's a process called lenition or sound weakening. It is when a language changes sounds in a word or multiple words when they follow one another to make it easier to pronounce. Like want to becoming wanna or going to becoming gonna in English. A lot of the time in languages you will see this with words that have consonants that are pronounced in different areas of the mouth next to one another, where one of the consonants will move to be pronounced using the same parts of the mouth as the other consonant or it may just be dropped. In Sandwich you have an alveolar nasal followed by an alveolar stop followed by a bilabial approximate. This is difficult to pronounce quickly and so English speakers will drop the stop consonant that really slows down the pronunciation (You can see this process in other Germanic languages like English Thunder and Dutch Donder but German Donner, or English Timber but Dutch and Swedish Timmer, German Zimmer, and Norwegian and Danish Tømmer). Then the bilabial approximate will draw the alveolar nasal to become a bilabial nasal M and will assimilate, leaving us with sammich.
In Germany, almost noone calls this Grimm's Law/ Grimm'sches Gesetz (btw, I kinda hate the apostrophy, it interrupts the words so badly^^), we prefer to say 'Erste Lautverschiebung'/'first sound shift'; so I don't know where the name's coming from...
Max DM Cool!
because in German there was a second sound shift. hence tochter and zeit instead of daughter and tide.
Ah yes, but have you ever heard of Cole's Law
English is my second language, and watching your videos makes me want to see these things about my native language, portuguese. Since it's very similar to spanish, this video was really interesting because of this ending. I mean, it's not as if your other videos are not interesting, but I had a hard time trying to understand the whole "cot-caught" thing since my pronunciation is weird :P
His pronunciation of "pie" killed me
Sir William Jones was a welshman not an englishman. Studying Welsh and comparing it to Greek and Latin is actually what gave him the idea to try it with Sanskrit.
Hey man, keep up these videos, they're great. I'm finishing my MA in Spanish linguistics, so any of these topics are interesting to me, even though I do theoretical stuff. By one of your comments below, it looks like you may be into computational linguistics. Keep up the good work!
Now, what happened to the slavic ones?
Like polish has "ojciec"
from my knowledge the balto-slavic group is rather conservative and has preserved a lot from PIE. dunno if this is helpful
Cromm Cruach
Well no... I know that:
Italian - padre
German - Vater
English - father
Grimms's Law explains this stuff, but then we have Polish - ojciec
But in polish we have the word 'daddy" and it's "tata" which seems morel logical.
So Padre, Father, Vater and Tata are related, so in Polish the word switched meanings and a new word randomly emerged?
Where could the "ojciec" be comming from?
That's what interests me, where did the random new word come from that pushed the old one into a lower category?
Vjorp That is interesting
According to Wikidictionary , it is believed to have been took as a loanword from Proto-Turkic that itself modified it from a borrowing from an ancient Mesopotamian language , possibly even Sumerian. Through trade with the ancient Inuits , it also spread to the Proto-Inuit Atta
Maybe even from Dravidian
2:53 In English, voiceless plosives are aspirated. While whispering, no consonants are voiced, so this becomes the primary distinction between them.
"stop" would like to have a word with you
@@Anonymous-df8it?
@@artugert The 't' in 'stop' is voiceless and unaspirated
@@Anonymous-df8it Oh, gotcha. I knew that, but didn't know that's what you were getting at. In English, voiceless plosives (p, t, k) are basically always unaspirated when followed by an S.
@@artugert a) it's 'preceded', and b) it was a counterexample to the commenter's statement
could you do a video about how some eastern languages don't differentiate between r and l?
I have a very hard time wrapping my head around that, and would like to know more
Nikolaj Lepka
Every language has sounds that they can differentiate and sounds they cannot. We can differentiate R and L but Japanese and Korean really can't. They see them as different "shades" of the same sound. For example, in Korean, they use the same letter for R and L in their alphabet. But it is pronounced R at the beginning of a syllable or L at the end of the syllable. So we have words like "Seoul" or "Ramyeon" (ramen).
On the other hand, English cannot different aspirated and unaspirated consonants, although we do use them in different situations, we consider them to be the same sound.
For example, the P sound in Pit is aspirated -> There's a puff of air you can feel if you place your hand in front of you mouth as you pronounce it. But if you say "Spit", there is no air puff anymore, the P is unaspirated. You can feel the difference but most English native speakers cannot hear it. To a Korean speaker though, the P in Spit and Pit would likely sound like completely different letters, and wonder why the heck we can't differentiate unaspirated and aspirated consonants....
***** Wow. Just wow. I'm just amazed that I'm able to say two different P sounds. Like whaaaaat... haha, thank you. :D
***** So this is why ㄲ, ㅋ, ㄱ/ ㅃ, ㅂ, ㅍ/ ㄸ, ㄷ, ㅌ/ and ㅈ, ㅊ, ㅉ all sound the same to me but native Korean speakers swear up and down that they sound so different. I have also noticed when native Korean speakers use english they pronounce r with a kind of Spanish sounding rolling L sound.
Brianab3ar my only problem with Korean pronunciation is between 시 and 씨, which sound exactly the same, i cant hear the tensing (I can hear the tenseness following ㅉ ㄸ ㄲ and ㅃ and between ㅅ and ㅆ followed by other vowels), but my korean teacher will say "no theyre different" while pronouncing them exactly the same like whaaat
***** same. I have learned the differences in the others from watch countless kdramas to learn pronunciation, but 시 and 씨 still catch me up. At first I thought that 시 was pronounced like see and 씨 was like she. But it got more difficult when I heard people pronounce 씨 like see and 시 like she.
I think it could maybe be important to note that the relations between english and spanish also apply to a lot more latin languages as I can say with a lot of certainty that at least the question words similarities (6:50) applies exactly the same in french as in spanish: "who"→"qui";"what"→"quoi";"when"→"quand" and "why"→"pour *qu* oi" wich litteraly translates into "for what".
I'd also like to see something that's not European like the Austronesian languages and what similarities and differences they've got.
I know a lot of Austronesian languages have a clusivity thing going on.
Hold up. You got that into linguistics in HIGH SCHOOL?! That's awesome. Also you uploaded this video on my birthday this past summer! What an awesome present :-) Too bad I didn't find it until now!
Still mus in Scandinavian :)
French : we have souris but also MUSaraigne (shrew)
Same in Swiss German, Muus.
German has Maus
Icelandic has mús
+GroovingPict Become the master of the field
oh my god you just got out of highschool!!!! (well, 2 yrs ago) I figured you were much older... just because these videos are so great, i wrongly assumed someone needed to be older to have made them! Thanks for teaching me so much about linguistics and now about myself as well.
Nice video and how you pronounce each letter word stuff. Im impressed. Haha. May I ask what are you studying in college? With all this videos I feel like you want to be some linguistic professor researcher teacher. But thats just me guessing. Very interesting indeed
Gerardo Sim Hi, I'm glad you like my videos! To answer your question, I'm studying linguistics right now, although I want to switch to this computer-science-linguistics-combined-major-thingy they have.
Xidnaf
wow what a long class/major name, whats that all about, just communication that goes on over the Web/internet. sounds interesting.
Gerardo Sim Heh, it's basically just a normal computer science degree, but with some added classes about linguistics. The main thing people tend to do with it is program computers to use human language, like designing Siri or Google Translate.
Xidnaf That's really awesome.
And it kind of makes me wonder if one day you'll develop something, some sort of program that has to do with languages... :D
Xidnaf do u know the channel "the thinking ape" he sort of did 2 videos about language and different things like dialect and origin of language i think. it would be cool if u have to time to check it out. what would help your channel growth would be to do a podcast with the dude. i dont know, just ideas and stuff.
I love your videos, they're so entertaining and well made too :) keep it up :)
You raped that Pronounciation
you said
Deutsch' Gramatique
Grammatik is pronounced quite slowly and with you could say a glottal stop at the end. A sharp K sound.as in sharK.
And you actually pronounce the E in Deutsche. In german we like to pronounce everything, which is why some germans struggle with english. Theyre not used to not pronouncing letters
Just wanna help :)
Yeahe, we like toe gete reallye Frenche sometimes.
+HoneyDane French is what ruined English spelling with lots of silent letters and makes no sense spelling rules. German spelling is so easy because of what you said... it always follows the rules... sometimes to too strong a degree... :(
But at least spelling in German is easier than English. And French words, forget about it.
+jmitterii2 German can be ambiguous. Why say Vogel as Fogel but Revier as Rewier ? The v letter should disappear from German.
Even worse : How do you say Wachsstube ? Either you say it Vax-toobe (Wachs-tube, tube of wax), or you say Vakh-shtoobe (Wach-stube, room for guards (?)). The way German wird written is sometimes misleading and confusing.
French on the other hand doesn't pretend it isn't confusing, it is honest with you. When you learn a French word, the three aspects of the word (meanings, pronunciation, spelling) have to be learnt independently. C'est pour cette raison que la langue française est et restera une langue élégante, de par l'origine étymologique et non-phonétique de son orthographe, et ne cèdera pas à la tentation d'enlaidir son écriture pour la rendre plus cohérente :)
+HoneyDane So I, an Anglo, would say s.th. like Doicha Gra"mmmmmmmmmmm"atik
+jmitterii2 I thought I was supposed to say "thorkt", not "thort" (with non-rhotic r, as "or" is the closest English equivalent to a reason to have a dark round vowel). Now I know that English is wrong about itself.
Thank you so much for this video. I wanna add something about the argument of "Why Grimms law" and not anything else, which is impossible to know, without the socio-linguistic and cultural backround of being German I believe. The brothers Grimm wrote a lot of fairytale stories (like Red Riding Hood), which are highly influential and popular all over the world and which were also responsible on people learning how to read in the first place. The Deutsche Grammatik is a book of German Grammar altogether, where it also explains the entire organization of the German language. I´m assuming these factors together made people rather acknowledge his work, than other peoples. The typical rule of "More famous, therefore more influental."
How does "t" turn into "ø"?
It doesn't. He's using that symbol for nothing.
Chubbchubbzza 007 Oh
SparkySywer no I think he meant to write theta
ro ben I don't think so, m8
[∅] means silence in IPA.
3:33 where did you get the characters from for the 3rd column?
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
Hi! I love your videos, but you've got a couple of things wrong on this one: house comes from *(s)keu- (to hide), whereas casa probably comes from *kat (to braid/fold), according to some sources (others say its root is just unknown), but in any case they are not related.
The second point is a bit more nitpicky: your pronunciation of certain Spanish sounds. There are no aspirated consonants in Spanish (/pʰ/, /tʰ/, /kʰ/), so words like "que", "quien" and "casa" should not sound like in English, unless you are happy to have a very strong foreign (and weird) accent, of course. Also, the "t" and "d" should be dental, not alveolar, and the "b" in "labio" (/β/) and "g" in "gato" (/ɣ/) should be softer. Finally, you pronounce the "e" as /ɛ/ or /æ/ instead of /e/.
My former Spanish teacher, who was a native speaker from south america, pronounced the e sometimes as æ and sometimes as e, depending on the word. I'm unsure whether she adopted a German accent in her Spanish speech or if it is actually a South American thing, developed because of non Spanish speaking settlers there who introduced this to Spanish
Peters Zeug I'm from Argentina and, yes, there's a whole range of differences in pronunciation, not only in vowels. Sounds like she is from the North of South America, near the Caribbean, but I'm just guessing, even in the same country you find regional differences.
Another related topic you could talk about would be the High German Consonant Shift, where Ds became Ts, Ts became Ss, Ps became Fs, etc. I noticed this myself when I studied German in high school, and it's one reason why modern German differs as much as it does from English and Dutch.
thaaank you for this video, I've got an English History test tomorrow and I missed that class, also the teacher did not answer my emai :( so thanksss
Well crap 0_0 I hope I covered everything you'll need to know!!!
yeees, thanks :D awesome channel btw
Got me to subscribe. I've always been interested in language, mainly because its a very powerful tool that many people seem to overlook.
Hold on! Gato comes from Latin catus, which in turn coms from either Nubian or Berber. It's not even of IE origin
+TopCuber Languages tend to borrow from other languages. Given that the domestic pussycat has its origins in the Middle East, a place where ancient Indo-European languages were not common, and quickly became very popular because of its mouse-catching abilities, is it any surprise that the word's origins are from a different language family and perhaps entered those languages semi-independently?
+Bob Sutton Woah, woah. I think you're both slightly off the point here.
g from k in catus->gato is a sound change that occurred in transition from Proto-Romance to Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. French, for example has chat, so it's not a common romance development.
If we take that many IE languages have cognates for "cat" (for example Russian кот or Welsh cath) we can assume the word cat was not subject to Grimm's law, as, due to k->x and t->th it would be pronounced something like HATH today in English.
+TopCuber I don't know about that. In both Hebrew and Phoenician (based on the word for cat as used in Tunisia, which is likely a leftover from now dead Phoenician) cat is a word that sounds like khatus. I wrote kh to sort of imitate a k sort of sound made at the low back of the mouth by the throat.
How do you know it came from Berber or Nubian originally? I am not sure anybody can say with confidence that it came from there rather than Mesopotamia or Sumeria or who knows maybe some much earlier language that split off into Hebrew/Phoenician and so on.
By the way, if anybody is interested in more sound changes, words that are said with a 'th' sound in Phoenician (based on Tunisian pronunciations of Hebrew cognates) are said as 'sh' in Hebrew. So if I write some words as they sound to me (sorry but I don't know the real spellings as I don't speak these languages but based on what I have heard and picked up traveling and watching movies):
The number two in Tunisia is ithnayn but in Hebrew it is ishnee.
The number three in Tunisia is thalatha but in Hebrew it is shalosh.
Clearly these words are cognates. It is even more obvious that they are cognates when you hear all the numbers in sequence (1-9 follows first the Tunisian and then the Hebrew). Wahed, ithnayn, thalath, arba, khamsa, sitta, sabbah, thamanya, tissa. Versus ehad, ishnee, shalosh, hamash, shesh, sheva, shmone, tesha.
But then the Tunisian pronunciation might just be from Arabic and not a residual of Phoenician pronunciation. I do know that the Tunisian accent is not the same in Arabic and the accent of gulf Arabs because of the Phoenician influence. Since Phoenician is a dead language, it is hard to know what it exactly sounded like but it is supposed to have been very close to Hebrew. It might not be far off to think that modern Tunisian pronunciation is heavily influence by Phoenician still since it would have been spoken until at least about a thousand years ago. Now I have a goal to find out what the sound differences are between gulf Arabic and Tunisian.
Whether the comparison is Arabic or Phoenician, either way it seems modern Hebrew has a tendency to turn both 'th' and 's' into 'sh'. I quite hate it. It is annoying for me to listen to Hebrew because I don't like all the sh noises. It sounds vulgar to me compared to a softer 'th' sound. I don't speak either language. I just noticed this on my travels. If I were trapped in a jail cell for eternity with somebody who constantly lisped 'sh' when speaking, one of us would die pretty quick because I would try to kill them. There would only be one of us left in there one way or the other because I just could not listen to that for long. I also hate the way Donald Trump says the word "China". Oh, and that nasal voiced lady who played a nanny, Fran Drescher, yep, I would kill her inside of one hour if you stuck me in a room with her and told her to babble nonstop. I think I have a problem with annoying voices. It makes me seriously homicidal. Babies don't bother me. I can listen to babies cry all day--no problem. But annoying speech, nope, can't take it.
As an actual Grimm, I approve this video.
777 likes, 7 dislikes! ^^
JayFolipurba Woh, cool!
+Xidnaf Question words in other Germanic Languages tend to start with a W.
English - Dutch - German
Who - Wie - Wie
What - Wat - Was
Where - Waar - Wo
When - Wanneer - Wann
Why - Waarom - Warum
How - Hoe - Wie
+Xidnaf I've also noticed a pattern in West Germanic Languages.
1. English "OU" = Dutch "UI" = German "AU"
English - Dutch - German
House - Huis - Haus
Mouse - Muis - Maus
Loud - Luid - Laut
2. Word that starts with an F in English and German usually starts with a V in Dutch.
English - Dutch - German
Flight - Vlucht - Flug
Find - Vinden - Finden
Foot - Voet - Fuß
3. Word that starts with an S in English and German usually starts with a Z in Dutch.
English - Dutch - German
Sun - Zon - Sonne
Search - Zoek - Suche
4. Other patterns. T-D, T-S.
English - Dutch - German
Thunder - Donder - Donner
Water - Water - Wasser
Better - Beter - Besser
Dance - Dans - Tanz
That - Dat - Dass
+POOP! HEAD! In German Who is "Wer", not "Wie" (I assume that was a typo, since you correctly say that "Wie" is "How")
+JayFolipurba Ha - while these numbers aren't true anymore, the comment as of now have...7 likes!
7:10 's correction is correct, considering the fact that a whole spoonful, mabye very many, of the English dictionary come from Latin.
If you're going to use a flag to represent a language, use the English flag please. My nit picking is at the max right now.
To represent English that is. Didn't mention that in my earlier comment.
in general, its poor practice to use flags to represent languages, especially for multi country languages. Use the ISO code or something.
What's wrong with using the flag of the U.K.?
Jackson S Nothing's really wrong with using it, it's just I'm being very nit picky, and England is the place where English came from. The U.K. is broader than England.
I'm just happy he didn't use the American flag like many do surprisingly, like what is this language? American? so at least it isn't that I guess.
6:53 That Spanish accent. I myself call this the English - Spanish tongue. It's when someone who comes from a different native language tries to pronounce something and says it different to how it's actually pronounced. Not trying to pour dirt on you, I do it too with German. Hope your channel grows!
Hey, cooler Kanal! Mach weiter so! :D
_Hey, awesome channel! Keep it up! :D_
+Zardo Dhieldor It's a little odd that a self-described linguist wouldn't speak German. It seems that most linguistic terms come from German: Umlaut, Sprachbund, Urheimat, etc.
ghenulo
Really? I didn't know that. I should have noticed as a native speaker!
1:11 that Gamma (Γ) is backwards, before anybody say “but Ancient Greek…” nope, nope NOPE! Also Treis? It’s tria in Greek!
Treis is Masculine and Feminine, Tria is neuter. Ancient Greek had different declensions for the first four numbers depending on the word's gender. Heis Masc, Mia Fem, Hen Neut for One; Dyo Masc/Fem/Neut; Treis Masc/Fem, Tria Neut; Tettares Masc/Fem, Tettara Neut.
Even if it was Ancient Greek, B is pointing to the right and since it was written from R to L it should've been written as Δ Γ Β Α not A B Γ Δ (sry i couldnt find the mirror Γ αηδ Β)
Gratz on the graduation belatedly
Good video, as always. For the difference between an aspirated and non-aspirated stop, think of the English stop allophones. For example, in English when a stop is at the beginning of a word, it is aspirated. When it is in the middle of a word, it is not aspirated.
Thanks for showing the application of Grimm's Law on question words. I never made that connection before, even though I'm learning French, Spanish, and Portuguese!
Why have I never seen your videos before????? They are really good! I am hooked! (On my 4th or 5th on)! Thanks!
I also made the house-casa observation a while back, but after some quick research it turns out that casa likely came into Spanish through Hebrew, not a PIE root. They seem like cognates, but probably aren't.
Also, the word Kattuz (cat) was borrowed into Proto-Germanic from Latin Cattus, and so should not be used as an example of this law. Both gato and cat essentially evolved from the same Latin source word.
Very well done video, thanks for sharing!
Holy... I've casually studied linguistics off-and-on for the sake of making my own conlang. This video just completely blew my mind. O.O
Also, you have a very humorous presentation style!
I think for Latin, the voiced aspirated consonants become fricatives. For example frater cognates with brother, bhratar etc.
Sorry for breaking this, but in Greek you're supposed to accent the vowel that has the little stress marking, not whichever you like. Sooo you kinda killed every single word 😂.
Also, 4:46 perí means around, not far. apó means far. You can even see evidence of this in Greek words in English, like periphrasis or perimeter.
90% cat was borrowed long after Grimm's law. Also it is a loanword, so it was never a cognate in the first place.
I love you for making this video and doing a better job at teaching this than my univ. professor with a doctorate in linguistics
Aww... Saw TheLydeOctave and thought you had a link to their work...
Still, every time I come around to your videos (and by extension the other linguistics channels around youtube), I am always highly entertained and enlightened.
5:20 You can't have pie without cool whip.
One thing about the very end: "Cat" comes from an Old English borrowing of the Latin word "cattus" (which, according to wiktionary, is ultimately from an Ancient Egyptian word, which was something I didn't know til now). The Spanish has "gato" because the Iberian dialects of Latin weakened /k/ to /g/ in that position. Thus, the difference between cat and gato is more evident of the development of Latin into Spanish, rather than a result of differential development of Proto-Indo-European into Proto-Germanic and Proto-Italic.
Unfortunately, I can't think of an alternative example for this kind of k/g difference that goes back to the respective proto-languages.
I don't know if this helps but in Armenian cat is gadu pronounced like god ooh and that seems pretty similar to Spanish Gato.. no ?
/b/ and /bh/ are two different phonemes in my language so I can differentiate them. For the speakers of language that [b] and [bh] are allophones, you can learn it as well. It's not that difficult!
You mean "my conlang" or "my native language" by saying "my language"?
Never thought that a voiceless alveolar plosive would change to a front close-mid rounded vowel.
There are lots of examples, but another example of consistent phonetic shifts from a parent language would be the Vulgar Latin /kt/ shift in the daughter Romance languages.
Ex: "lact-" (milk) -> It. latte, Fr. lait, Sp. leche
"noct-" (night) -> It. notte, Fr. nuit, Sp. noche
"oct-" (eight) -> It. otto, Fr. huit, Sp. ocho
Thus, given a Latin root and a known pattern in the descendant language, it becomes possible to predict vocabulary without actually having heard it.
Ex: Romanian turned /kt/ into /pt/ (among other changes). Knowing this, I would guess lapte, nopte, and opte for milk, night, eight. Lo and behold, milk = lapte, night = noapte, eight = opt. Not bad, for one who doesn't speak any Romanian!
English "milk" comes from a different root, but we can see similar consistency in night and eight.
Archaic Doric preserved the "Kw" sound at the beginning of "Why" for a long time, being spelt as "Quhoy"
My man you are genius to know all this at your age, more so to be interested in it! Congrats!
Yay you're back! :D Why don't you make a video about Nostratic?
"That sound change that changes sandwich to sammich"
Or in Australian English samwidj
There are many possible sound changes for the "ndw" and "ch" segments in "sandwich"
"ndw" could be /ndʷ/, /nʷ/, /mʷ/, /ŋʷ/, /m/, /w/, /ŋ/, /ʍ/, /n/
"ch" could be /tʃ/, /dʒ/, /ts/, /t/, /ʃ/
I say /sænʷɪtʃ/.
I suppose that it goes
sændwɪtʃ > sanwɪtʃ (perhaps d>ɾ then adjacent velars (nɾ) just become n) > sanʷɪtʃ > samɪtʃ.
-but I don’t think I can imagine that intermediate “sanʷitsh” (IPA takes too long) actually existing, so my line of reasoning must be flawed. Also, I think it is a fool’s errand to apply sound shifts too rigorously to what is literally baby pronunciation.
@@willzimmermann2511 most sound changes are motivated by simplification, so don't discount the value of baby talk!
@@xhesil8848 somebody took their adderall