Why Don't King & Queen Sound Similar?
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he words for king and queen in your language?
król i królowa
Kralj i kraljica
kral, kraliçe. imported to turkish from serbian
Kuningas ja Kuningatar (Finnish) and Kung och Drottning (Swedish).
Kuningas ja Kuningatar (Finnish) and Kung och Drottning (Swedish).
Idk how people came up with "tzarina" when it has always been "tzaritza". I am from Russia and that one just baffles me every time.
The ending ‘-ина’ usually signifies that the noun is female, doesn’t it? That’s what I understood from studying Russian. I spoke Bulgarian before studying Russian.
We call it the same in Polish and I wondered why the heck it's different in English lol
@@Windgoddess540 We use -ица in many other cases and I am pretty certain Bulgarian has -ица as well. Царевица = corn?
comes (probably) from german "Zarin/Tsarin"
@@annafirnen4815 it's average Russian defaultism. Russian is often seen as the neutral one and the norm
King and queen sound pretty similar to me, honestly. Q is just K with a W and NG is just nasalized N.
Right? I was surprised to find out they had different origins. I figured it might be a vowel shift thing or something or latin influenced spelling.
For example: Spanish the u doesn't make a sound next to certain consonants, it changes the way the consonant is pronounced, so i thought maybe king and queen had a spelling influenced by latin, ie keeng & keen.
The real weird ones are "earl" vs. "countess" and "marquess" (which itself is a weird word) vs. "marchioness".
@@EnigmaticLucas But wouldn’t it be count and countess? Earl is just an old English word, while “count” and also “countess” are French. So the choice to use Earl over count is really just a matter of English culture.
@@NBrixHIn the British system, earls are the male counterpart of countesses
@@EnigmaticLucas that’s what I said
In Arabic the more direct translation of king and queen is Malik And Malika respectively Sultan and Sultana is a very specific title often for sultanate kingdoms (example the country of Oman) while in Jordan their king is called Malik
I thought Malik was more associated with non-muslim/secular rulers? At least historically.
@@M-tl4xt not necessarily the king of Saudi Arabia Jordan Morrocco are all called Malik or I guess molok since it's plural it's associated with any monarchy
מלך מלכה
@@joshyam4026 I don't speak noodles sorry
@@nziom He sort of addresses this in the video using Tsar =/= King, with the justification that Tsar and King are "fundamentally the same role"
Which is not really true, as Tsar is closer to Emperor than King (in an oversimplified way, an Emperor was a "King of Kings" who would rule over smaller kingdoms). I'm not sure if this is the distinction for Sultan and Malik.
Fun fact: Slavic "Tsar" and Germanic "Kaiser" are both derived from Caesar (originally of course the last name of a real person, Julius Caesar, and later one of the titles given to the Roman Emperor(s), whose original Latin pronunciation would have been most similar to "Kaiser" rather than "See-zur"). The word "Emperor" came from a different Latin word, "Imperator" which literally means "The one who gives orders." It is interesting that Romance nations tended not to use name of Caesar himself, instead using a word derived from Imperator (a title historically given to many people in the Roman Republic, including Caesar). Germanic and Slavic nations seemed eager to compare themselves to Caesar, likely to try and invoke legitimacy or give a sense of power.
And don't forget the distinction made between "queen consort" (like Camilla now), the wife of a king, and "queen regnant" (like the late Elizabeth II), who's the actual nominal (in the case of the UK) ruler
I was expecting Empress Matilda, "Lady of the English," to be brought up, but that would have opened a can worms, not to mention the diet of Worms and the Salic Law.
A common excuse not to consider Mathilda a queen is not having been coronated. But coronation is a formality, not a transition of power. Granted I heard this over a decade ago so I can't be certain it is even accurate.
Yes, but she had married the Holy Roman Emperor and that's how she got that title.
Agree, Edward V was never crowned, but he was ranked as a King to confirm that Elizabeth of York was legitimate.
Missed opportunity to show Freddy Mercury when you showed the “male queen”. 😂
Just wanted to mention, they changed the laws of succession in 2013, not 2023. Probably just a mistake somewhere along the way in making this. Love your videos like always. Keep up the good work.
I thought it was 2012
@alexiswelsh5821 Could be. Just going based on memory and a quick Google search.
2012. The English did it in case George was a girl. @@thewetzelsixx9009
IIRC, the British parliament passed it in 2013, but it didn't come into effect until all the commonwealth realms passed it. One of the Australian States dragged its feet.
I note that a few people commenting have mentioned the fact that the Nordic languages have much more markedly diverging names for 'King' and 'Queen'. The idea of 'Queen' coming from a catch-all term for a woman would seem to make sense also in a Nordic conext, given that Swedish for 'female' is 'kvinnlig' - I suppose, literally 'queen-like'.
Indeed. Any Dane that has learned English in school (which is basically everyone) has probably made the connection between 'queen' and 'kvinde', especially 'kvindfolk' (womenfolk). Of interest is our collective name for queen, 'dronning/drottning',which comes from the very aspect of being regal, 'drot'. A king would oftentimes be called 'drot' but as a descriptor rather than title. Basically he would always be announced as king, but could be described as 'drot'. In Danish this is often seen in old translations of the Illiad and Odyssey. I'm guessing it is a quite old word that fell out of use as the smaller kings were slowly collected under the big kings (take note how the big viking battles in England often had a huge number of 'kings' in the Norse side). But for the king's wife, maybe there wasn't really any need to change her title.
@@UnintentionalSubmarine Thank you for the illustration that Swedish is not the only Nordic language where the cognates of the English word 'queen' describe anything generally female/feminine. Maybe those 'kings' were a little like the Three Kings of the New Testament - maybe not quite literally kings in the usually accepted form of the word.
@@christopherbentley7289 No, they were smaller warband leaders. If you go back in history to Rome you will find much the same story with the Germanians. Their warbands, when noted, were led by what the Romans called kings. Same applies to Vercingetorix, though he was the leader of a coalition. And once more you can look at Iberia, where it is clear that the tribes there elected kings to go to war. In fact Scipio (the later Africanus) ran into some problems there as his men proclaimed him Imperator after some victories, which the locals then interpreted as king and they then proclaimed him king, and he had to walk it back for fear of Rome's reaction.
«Kvinnlig» is more accurately translated to «feminine»
In Elizabethan English they had the word Quean, meaning a disreputable woman, found in one of Shakespeare's history plays. It also derives from the same source as Queen. a woman.
In 14th century Poland we were ruled by queen Jadwiga (królowa), as she is commonly known today, however she was officially crowned as the king of Poland (król). We have gender-specific titles in general, but similar as in English, 'królowa' means a wife of a king and 'król' means a male ruler. We did't really have a specific title for a female monarch, but these days we just refer to all queens as 'królowa', so same as in English.
Queen was originally exclusively reserved for the wife of the monarch, which is a King, and on that note, King is also exclusively reserved for a male monarch, and not "the husband of the Queen". Also, the other titles, like Tsar, Emperor, Sultan, etc, they have female forms because the female title does not exclusively refer to the "wife of the monarch", but can also refer to the monarch herself. in this case, this is where the extra gender-neutral titles of Regent/Regnant and Consort come in. the Regent is the ruling monarch, while the consort is the spouse of the monarch. Prince Phillip chose to have the title of Prince Consort, as the title of King is strictly reserved for the monarch, which in his case was his wife Queen Elizabeth II.
Note that Lord Darnley was titled a King Consort when married to Mary Queen of Scots.
'Regent' implies ruling on behalf of another. A queen regent rules on behalf of an underage son or disabled husband; a queen regnant is a queem in her own right.
In Poland we had female king - King Jadwiga.
Regent ≠ regnant
Exactly. Note, currently, it is King Charles III and Queen Camilla.
In romance languages they do, in fact, sound similar.
Latin -> Rex vs Regina
Portuguese -> Rei vs Rainha
Spanish -> Rey vs Reina
French -> Roi vs Reine
Italian -> Re vs Regina
how about Romanian?
@@xolang They are that kid from Home Alone lol, everyone forgets them
The French ones aren't pronounced alike, are they? Something like Wah and Ren?
@@xolang in Romanian: Rege vs Regină
@@EdKolis no in french Roi is pronaunced Ro-ah
The channel Rob Words has some more discussions of gendered English from earlier eras, and ones specifically about gendered job titles that are no longer used.
If I remember correctly "brewer"/"brewster" and "spinner"/"spinster" are examples.
In my D&D game, my players deposed the lich queen of the gith and installed one of their friends (a friendly cleric named Khazar) as the new ruler. The lich queen had been in charge for so long that the gith language didn’t have a word for king. That fun fact led to the immortal line of "All hail the man-queen!"
I think it is interesting how some of the gendered Job titles in English are still around as surnames. Such as Baxter which is the feminine form of Baker.
Didn't know baxter was the female baker!! Know of some others?
In Polish we have the word "król" for a king, similar to Russian. But the curious thing is that the word which we generally use for a queen nowadays (królowa) doesn't really mean "a female ruler". It follows the rules naming for wives of men of different professions. Hence why "królowa" rather means "the wife of a king" like it used to be with a queen. Because of it the one time we actually had a female ruler in our history she was called the King (król), kind of like with the pharaohs in Egipt.
Ale dalej w współczesnej polszczyźnie "królowa" nie jest już "żona króla" a żeńska forma tytułowu król i jest dziwne że kiedyś było inaczej.
Queen Elizabeth po polsku była nazwywana "Królową Elżbietą" a nie "Królem Elżbietą".
What was the woman king's husband then called?
This was similar in German. A woman was refered to by the job of her husband, because not only defined it her social status compared to other women (and lower-class men), she also sometimes helped out her husband in their workshop or in sales negotiations.
So what title does Queen Jadwiga actually use?
@@danshakuimoKing Jadwiga. Because there was no rule that kings must be male.
I just got to thinking about the fact that in English there is giantess, but dwarfess is so rare I had never heard of it before I went looking for it. In German the word for giant is Riese, fem is Riesin, dwarf is Zwerg (this is related to dwarf) and fem Zwergin. In Spanish they have masc and fem for both as well, gigante/giganta, and enano/enana. By the way, the Russian empress was the tsaritsa (царица). Tsarina came from German Zarin by way of Italian.
Side note: In Swedish, we have some gendered job titles, and they don't always change to reflect the actual gender of the person.
Most notably "Sjuksköterska" (nurse). The suffix -erska is feminine. The masculine form would be "sjukskötare", but that is the title for another job altogether. So a nurse in Sweden will use a feminine job title even if male.
OK, I'll bite: what is the other job? Google Translate provides "nurse" for sjukskötare.
Yeah it is a kind of nurse, so to speak.
Not so sure about the specifics, but I think that a "Skötare" is less educated. My mental image is a male nurse working at like a psych ward where patients might need restraining.
However, as I said, not sure about the specifics.
@@mattisvov Thank you!
In Dutch, "secretary" is either "secretaris" (masculine) and "secretaresse" (feminine), but "secretaris" is a position of leadership like "secretary-general" while "secretarese" is a (personal) assistant. Generally women in secretary leadership positions are called "secretaris" while men working as secretary assistants are called "secretariaatsmedewerker" or "coworker/employee from the central office" (AFAIK women are formally called that as well, it's just that "secretaresse" is still an informal term only for women in that position).
@@jasmijnwellner6226 Appears to be a similar linguistic mechanism here.
Thank you for mentioning Mary I. She actually had to fight for her throne thanks to her brother betraying her on his deathbed. Even though Mary I had serious disagreements with her sister Elizabeth, Mary named her as heir.
I think Mary realised what a disaster for Lady Jane Grey had been Edward naming her as his heir. Mary's prefered choice of succesor would have been her Catholic cousin, Lady Margaret Douglas, mother of Lord Darnley [ not Mary Queen of Scots who was half French and married to the Dauphin, therefore an enemy to England and Spain]. Mary realised naming her could lead her to a similar fate as Lady Jane Grey as it was clear the people prefered Elizabeth [ as they had prefered Mary over Jane Grey] and poor Margaret could end up loosing her head.
In Poland the equivelant of queen (królowa) is also just the wife of the king (król) but unlike in England in the few occasions when a woman was a ruler she would be called a king, and would only become a queen after marrying
In modern Hungarian we have 3 words for this exact reason. "Király" means king, "királyné" means queen (kingwife), and "királynő" means queen regnant (kingwoman). We had queens regnant in history, but they were officially known as "király" because the alternative didn't yet exist.
Wdym only english has this??? Danish has the same: ''Konge'' (King) and ''Dronning'' (Queen).
Swedish too, "kung" and "drottning".
And there was a change from Danish Queen to King just this past weekend so that reference would've been topical had Patrick thought to mention it.
@@FoggyD (I’m Danish, so I’m very much aware), but yeah, that would’ve been very topical, seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Same in Norway
What is the etymology of the two words? Like how Patrick mentioned that King came from kin/family and queen came from an old word for wife.
皇帝, and despite there were multiple females who held the power as mothers of succeeding emperors. The only one who actually ascended to the throne herself also claimed herself as 皇帝.
Chinese didn't even have "she" as "她" until 20th century (btw I actually stopped use "she" and "她" in my daily life, "he" and "他" only).
I have been wondering this, thank you.
Honestly, your theory on why are the words King and Queen different is really good
The thing I like the most about english is the non gendered grammar. It's just easier to write anything and there aren't any discussions about gendering.
I don't know if you've already done this, but as a german speaker, I'd be very interested in a video about it. I think it's a very interesting topic
We really need to stop calling it gender. While yes there are gendering suffixes (-ess, -rix, the occasional -ter, or the Spanish-o -a) you have a lot b that have a hierarchy based on animacy, animacy-inanimacy itself, or even common-other.
Then how come English-spekaing countries are the global capital of "discussions about gendering"? Also, even though English doesn't have grammatical gender to a large extent, the language itself is very much gendered. English, like all Germanic languages (and French), is not a pro-drop language, meaning that you always have to specify the subject pronoun. In most Romance languages you don't have to (e.g., you don't have to say "she goes" or "he is going", you can just say "goes" and "is going"). Secondly, Romance languages inflect possessive pronouns according to the grammatical gender of the thing owned, not the owner. So, for example, instead of saying "that's his car" one would say something like "that's her car" not because the owner is female, but because "car" is feminine. This means that you can avoid acknowledging somebody's sex, most of the times. Spoken Italian also makes no difference between "him" and "her" when they are direct or indirect objects. Although "give her" should be "dalle" in standard Italian, everybody simply sais "dagli", which is identical to the masculine form. It's not that different of a phenomenon as compared to how the Dutch use "hij" and "hem" to refer to any noun, regardless of its grammatical gender (even for cows!!). The only real thing that you can't avoid gendering, in Romance languages, are adjectives and past participles (these last ones with many exceptions, still). However, let's not forget that speakers of gendered languages are used to seeing the grammatical gender not match up with the sex of the person that is being talked about. "You're a good person" in (all?) Romance languages is always inflected in the feminine gender, regardless of whether "you" is male or female, becuase "person" is a feminine noun. Honestly, I find it much harder to avoid using gendered language in English than in Italian.
@@camiblack1 Thing is, "gender" was being used in grammar waaaaay before it was in studies on sexuality. The term "gender" comes from latin "genus" and it just meant "type", until the 20th century. In fact, "genus" is the same word that originated the term "genre". That's really all it means. It is in the 20th century that some thinkers started using it to refer to phenomena related to sexuality. Hence, perhaps we should stop using it to refer to that and find a better word for it. I'll give you an example: in Italian (descendent of Latin) the word for "gender" is "genere", but it's still used as it was in Latin, when you would use "kind, type" in English. E.g. "Che genere di problemi ci sono?", "What kind of problems are there?"
Old English (Anglo-Saxon) originally had three genders - masculine, feminine and neuter - like German. However, the Viking settlement and then the Normans, speaking old Norse and Norman French respectively, made simplifying spoken English a necessity in order that people understood each other. Gender was one of the things to go, also English changed its grammar in other ways, going from being highly inflected (word endings changing for subject, object etc.) to being highly reliant on word order.
We did used to have the term Baxter, which was a female baker.
11:56 I approve of this message.
Great content, as always Patrick.
Keep up the great work.
The Indian monarchic terms, Raja and Rani is similar too. I couldn't easily find etymological roots of these words too. But it is easy to see that King is derives from Dutch or Germanic Konig/koning and Queen if the hypothesis is correct, comes from Saxonic roots. It could denote how the Viking raids and Norman influence had brought chiefly men, who were warring against England, so the men stuck with their work for king, Konig and Saxon queens stuck with their kingship terms queen?
King doesn't derive from Dutch Koning or from German König; rather all three derive from a common germanic root.
The word for "king" was a native English word, it wasn't borrowed from any other language. There is a hypothesis that "queen" came from the Nordic languages as it's similar to their words for "woman".
But Old English had not yet been greatly influenced by the vikings and normans. Though they had by the romans, and had some contact with the northern tribes.
@@WGGplantMore like from a common root meaning cow. In Nordic languages it became the default, but in other Germanic languages it was a reductive way to refer to women
It comes from Sanskrit rājah, it's closely related to Latin rēx
@@JosePineda-cy6om that's an excellent answer but sadly it is also the obvious one. Because other than Rex there is no other cognate to Raja. Indo Aryan Persians used Shah instead to indicate kingship. Which again is quite peculiar as one would assume these linguistic and geographic neighbours would have cognates for such an important word. And we know Proto Indo Europeans definitely had kingship of some sort back then.
There's also Prince and Princess.
But they are almost identical
Patrick took the topic I suggested and went at it from a very different perspective. Again. Good, makes it more interesting for me :)
In Finnish, the word for king is _kuningas_ and the word for queen is _kuningatar._
5:28 no. It is based on the gender of the word itself, which is *sometimes* related to the gender of person it could be referring to. The gender of the word "girl" in Spanish (niña) is feminine and so are girls themselves, and the word for "table" in Spanish (mesa) has a feminine gender, but tables themselves obviously aren't. In German, the word for girl (mädchen) is neuter, which reflects the rule that all diminutive forms of words are neuter. Synonyms in many languages with gendered nouns are quite often in separate genders, and similar words that are in different genders often have different but tangentially related meanings. All of this goes to show that it is a reflection of the *noun* itself not what the noun represents, although what the noun represents does sometimes have an influence on it.
Yeah I’m not sure why he didn’t mention that, but there is grammatical gender like he mentioned too. Which is more related to the topic, which is I guess why that was the one he mentioned.
in Old English, it was the same as in German. The modern English word "maiden" which is a cognate of Mädchen was also neutral in old eng. 😊
@toomanyopinions8353 well like I explained, sometimes the nouns match up with the gender they are referring to, which coupled with the fact that it's called gender makes it seem like it's supposed to be based on the gender of what it's referring to
It's not just in the english language actually, here in the philippines, the filipino word for "King" and "Queen" is "Hari" at "Reyna" respectively.
In most contexts and languages, the term queen still refers to the king's wife.
If you want to clarify which kind of queen a queen is, you can say queen regnant (ruling by birthright), consort (the wife of the ruling king) or dowager (ruling on behalf of a minor son).
Funnily enough, in some contexts a queen regnant is referred to as female king.
So... This video was quite UK-centric.
I mean, he literally said he was focusing on the UK.
Dowager queens don’t rule. That would be a queen regent. Dowager just means previous generation. So a dowager queen would be the widow of the dead king.
A little correction, dowager queen isn't one ruling on behalf of a minor son, it's just the widow of a deceased king. The widow of a king who rules for a minor child is a Queen Regent. If Camilla outlives Charles, she will become Queen Dowager or Dowager Queen upon William's accession. The widows of George V and VI became "Queen Mother" as they were the mother of the next monarch, but Camilla's not William's mother.
amazing video. thanks.
The English word 'Queen' comes from the same root (kwoeniz) as the word 'kvinde/kvinna' in the Scandinavian languages. 'Kvinde/kvinna' means 'woman'.
Interestingly, the Scandinavian word for 'Queen' is 'dronning/drotning', which is also different from 'konge/konung' (King). However 'konge/konung' is a relatively new word. In older Scandinavian it would be 'drot' (which is still used poetically), so that is actually a gendered term (drot + drotning), where the male version has since been superceded.
See also Greek gyne
And also Russian ‘zhena’ is from that same root, meaning ‘wife’
It would have been worth adding that in formal or legal contexts the word 'queen' in English is usually given that rara avis - an English postnominal adjective - to distinguish between the types of queen described. To wit: Queen Regnant and Queen Consort.
Its not that jobs were only worked by men. The wife of the man working that job often helped work those jobs, but women's work was not worthy of pay. The men were seen as working and the wives helped their husbands with that work.
Women's contribution was mostly with housework and rearing the kids, which is more than enough work to keep any person busy most of the time, most of the day. Women were not expected nor *required* to do a significant part of the tradeable work, anything more than an ocassional helping hand in the workshop would've caused their husband's reputation to plummet, he'd be seen as a lesser men who needs his wife to help as he cannot provide by himself. Of course, such a man would have trouble galore getting a wife - no self respecting woman would've warried a man that *required* his future wife to be working constantly. A womat having to work was seen as a disgrace, hence typically only widows or the spinsters did it - and they typically stopped working when they (re)married
Judging by these comments, i think there are enough other situations with names for leaders to fill several videos. I'd like to see more!
Interestingly, Lord and Lady fit into this job title theory, and perhaps stayed that way longer. The Queen of England does not become the Lady of Man but is the Lord of Man.
hey good job / hypothesis. carry on!
Well, you do have Old English: cyning (from which king does come from) and cyninge/cyningen.
And, no, queen, does not come from Old Saxon quan but from Old English cwēn. And the root of cwēn is from IE: gʷḗn (a woman), a cognate to archaic greek γυνή (gunḗ) and irish bean.
I'm amazed how close you came to pronouncing Koning and Koningin. It wasn't perfect but it was very good!
Yes, but... In practice, the wife of the King was often left in charge when the King went off campaigning abroad (or in Scotland or Ireland), so even in the late mediaeval period the queen consort could be the effective queen regent, if not queen regnant.
I know in Irish, the same word is pronounced differently for male (hard g ending) and female (softened). What came through was the phonetic vs the olde English (maybe).
I believe 'Pharaoh' in ancient Egyptian referred to the house of the ruling family, and was not a specific name for the 'job' of the ruler at the time, hence it being gender neutral. Also, I believe until relatively recently in historical terms (1800s?) nurses were males, primarily. Also, Titles like 'Tsar,' 'Emperor,' 'Shah,' 'Khan,' all have meaning differing from 'King' historically. As you touched on,
'King' likely meant something like 'ruler of a clan or tribe,' a group linked by family connections. Whereas 'Caesar' (the etymological root of Tsar, Shah, Kaiser, etc.) has a culturally/historical meaning much more akin to what we refer to in English as 'Emperor,' ie: a military ruler holding sway over many different cultural/kinship groups, tribes or nations. The usage of these terms seems to have become confused when western European societies became technologically advanced enough to become imperial powers during the early industrial revolution. Hence Queen Victoria being accurately titled: 'Empress of India,' or Napoleon the 1st being called 'Emperor.'
Pharaoh/Per Aah just means big house. Any town has a big house where someone (like a mayor) give orders
6:14 That's exactly why we have a lot of words which have no equivalent although we have for farmer (boer/boerin) and nurse (verpleger/verpleegster or broeder/zuster)
We have not for words like: minister, burgemeester (town major), parlementariër (member of parlement) usualy jobs only man coumd do in the past. The 'female equivalent' of those words is just referring to it with our version of she.
Germans are more consistant by adding male and female equivalents for every job. I think it sounds nice.
Although Queen Consort and Queen Regnant are different roles, they never exist at the same time (unless in the future we have a Queen who is in a same-sex marriage - but that would require the Church to change their position on the subject), so the vast majority of the time they're just called The Queen. Although in the time after the Accession of Charles III, the royal family and the media used "Queen Consort" to refer to Her Majesty to emphasise the difference in role to the late Queen Elizabeth II.
In England/UK, the Husband of a Queen Regnant has never been given an automatic style in the way that the wife of a King automatically becomes Queen Consort. In each case of a Queen Regnant their Husband's title has been dealt with specifically.
Queen Mary I's husband Philip was called King because he was the King of Spain in his own right.
Queen Elizabeth I never married.
Queen Mary II's husband William was King, but they were Joint Monarchs as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution.
Queen Anne's husband George was HRH Prince of Denmark/Norway before their marriage and on their marriage he was created as Duke of Cumberland in the English Peerage. After Anne became Queen, George got no change.
Queen Victoria's husband Albert was a Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before their marriage. On their marriage, his style was promoted from "His Serene Highness" to "His Royal Highness". 17 years after their marriage (and only 4 years before his death), he was specifically granted the title of "The Prince Consort". This specific title is unique to him, but is a description of the others. Reportedly Victoria wanted him to be called King Consort, but the Government wouldn't allow it.
Queen Elizabeth II's husband Philip was born a Prince of Greece and Denmark but gave up those titles. On his marriage to Elizabeth he was created Duke of Edinburgh in the British Peerage and was given the style of "His Royal Highness". (Interestingly those orders happened on separate days so there was a short time where he had the strange title and style of "Lieutenant His Royal Highness Sir Philip"). On their 10th wedding anniversary (which happened after Elizabeth had become Queen), Philip was granted "the titular dignity" of a Prince of the UK, the same as sons of a monarch - but not the same "Prince Consort" Title as Prince Albert had had.
King and Queen aren't all that dissimilar phonetically. K is very close to Q, a long "i" is very close to ee, and they both have the "n" at the end. Queen has the "u" sound at the start and king has the "g" at the end, but other than that they are very close to being the same word. And Gs at the ends of words get lost in language drift frequently.
So hypothetically, if there were two nations with very closely related languages and one called their ruler their "Keeng" and the other calked theirs "Kweeng" just because of language drift and spotty literacy, then there's a union between the two monarchies and suddenly there's a keeng and a kweeng and a millennia or two later the words diverged further as the spelling got locked in and the languages muddled together.
There names used to be simular in in Scandinavia too. Being called "Drott" and "Drottning". Now "Drott" is replaced with something like "Konge" in all the nordic languages, wile "Drottning" has changed little or nothing.
Here in the Philippines, the tagalog for King is "Hari" and for Queen is "Reyna" (Which is obviously Spanish in origin). So they are very different as well.
There is Baker and Baxter, Weber and Webster, spinner and spinster as examples of gendered words for various trades.
In Danish we use two very different words.
We use a cognate of king for the male.
We use a cognate of Drighten with a feminine suffix for female.
Then there's the king and queen in england adding an R at the end of their names when signing anything official. the R for a king means Rex and for a queen means Regina which are the titles of king and queen in latin.
I'd just kind of assumed "king" and "queen" came from the same root. Without looking into it, I assumed something like "keen" being some sort of original root, morphing into what we have today, maybe by coming in through a language which doesn't gender words by suffixes but instead through a different sort of transformation. But hey, interesting to know otherwise.
Have a look at the Scandinavian words for King and Queen, they are also different: Kung and Drottning (Swedish)
To job titles with genders:
An example from the past: The female variant of a baker was a baxter.
The title of Tsar and many other, like the german title "Kaiser" ("emperor") came from the name Caesar.
Does this “job title” relate to how some people have king or Queen as a last name similar to how old job titles became family names?
Like “Smith” for example…
It beares mentioning that man is gender neutral where woman is the female gendered version. Wereman would have been the male gendered versions but that was dropped at some point in the past
When it comes to the actress/waitress thing, that comes from Latin. The feminine ending in Latin was -ix, which would give us actrix/waitrix, which were corrupted to actress/waitress
The Swedish word for "woman" is "kvinna" which is very similar to the English "queen". A cognate perhaps?
Yes, definitely a cognate.
What about all the other royal titles, like prince and princess?
Dutch also has had this de-gendering of language, albeit not to the same extent as English. For example, masculine/feminine nouns use "de" as definite article while neuter nouns use "het" but masculine and feminine are generally only distinguished when it comes to pronouns and a select few job titles like in English.
I'm not familiar with how it works in other languages so I don't know how common it is, but both Dutch and English use prins/prince for the spouse of a koningin/queen regnant. Dutch may very well have taken that from other languages like English though, as we didn't have a monarchy until 1815.
They do sound similar, the both have ee sounds and use hard C or K sounds as well as an ‘n’ sounds They are spelled differently but they aren’t that different in my POV, still enjoyed your take a lot! Very detailed
That's why Matilda called herself "Domina Anglorum" Mistress of the English, rather than Queen---queen means 'king's wife.' Middle English didn't HAVE a word for "female ruler." ruler".
idk if anyones already said this but in Poland once we actually had a King that was a woman, like her title was actually King. (In Polish tho obviously)
If I recall correctly, because there was lack of agreement on who the next (male) king should be, so in order to avoid putting any male king on the throne at all, which would cause undue trouble given the disagreements, they gave the title to a woman to keep the peace, at least for a little while. Pretty clever way of avoiding a civil war...
@@sststr yeah tbh I don't remember much about the specifics of it, learned about her a long time ago now
I missed the fact that in the British monarchy there is a titel divide between king/queen (ruler) and king consort/queen consort (partner of the ruler). So the UK has no queen right now, but a king and his queen consort.
The Scandinavian Languages follow the same system as English when it comes to mostly ungendered job titles but a special word for queen.
I don't think anyone in Britain has ever been called King consort. King has always meant someone that ruled. Of Husbands of reigning queens Phillip II of Spain, husband to Mary I, was given the title King of England, but only for as long as Mary lived (which wasn't very long). William III was awarded the throne in his own right and ruled jointly with his wife, Mary II. I'm not sure what royal title Anne's husband got, if any, but I don't think he was a king of any sort. Then the husbands of Victoria and Elizabeth II both got to be Prince Consort, but no more.
Although Queen Consort and Queen Regnant are different roles, they never exist at the same time (unless in the future we have a Queen who is in a same-sex marriage - but that would require the Church to change their position on the subject), so the vast majority of the time they're just called The Queen. Although in the time after the Accession of Charles III, the royal family and the media used "Queen Consort" to refer to Her Majesty to emphasise the difference in role to the late Queen Elizabeth II.
In England/UK, the Husband of a Queen Regnant has never been given an automatic style in the way that the wife of a King automatically becomes Queen Consort. In each case of a Queen Regnant their Husband's title has been dealt with specifically.
Queen Mary I's husband Philip was called King because he was the King of Spain in his own right.
Queen Elizabeth I never married.
Queen Mary II's husband William was King, but they were Joint Monarchs as a consequence of the Glorious Revolution.
Queen Anne's husband George was HRH Prince of Denmark/Norway from birth. A few years after their their marriage (but before Anne became Queen) he was created as Duke of Cumberland in the English Peerage. After Anne became Queen, George got no change.
Queen Victoria's husband Albert was a Prince of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha before their marriage. On their marriage, his style was promoted from "His Serene Highness" to "His Royal Highness". 17 years after their marriage (and only 4 years before his death), he was specifically granted the title of "The Prince Consort". This specific title is unique to him. Reportedly Victoria wanted him to be called King Consort, but the Government wouldn't allow it.
Queen Elizabeth II's husband Philip was born a Prince of Greece and Denmark but gave up those titles. On his marriage to Elizabeth he was created Duke of Edinburgh in the British Peerage and was given the style of "His Royal Highness". (Interestingly those orders happened on separate days so there was a short time where he had the strange title and style of "Lieutenant His Royal Highness Sir Philip"). On their 10th wedding anniversary (which happened after Elizabeth had become Queen), Philip was granted "the titular dignity" of a Prince of the UK, the same as sons of a monarch - but not the same "Prince Consort" Title as Prince Albert had had.
@@donaldb1 Lord Darnley was titled a King Consort when he was married to Mary Queen of Scots.
It's quiet strange indeed that each gendered titles for the monarch are derived from separate origins while most other royal or high-class titles are like any other titles where the genders sounds similar like prince and princess, duke and duchess.
King and queen sound pretty similar to me. Were it not for the “g” at the end of “king,” they would even rhyme. They’re both monosyllabic words with the long E sound and an N towards the end.
king is pronounced with a short i, not long e so its not keeng
In Chinese (grammatically gender neutral) it was specific for the job. 王 = king ， 王后 =wife of the king -literally (the woman following in the) back of the king. For a ruling female, we call her 女王 (female king). For example, we call QE2 英國女王 - the female king of England.
Same rules apply to the emperor 皇帝. However, since there's no grammatical gender, the only empress in Chinese history was originally officially posthumously emperor - 則天大聖皇帝. Yet perhaps like in English, some historian/emperos referred her as 王后/聖后 , effectively used 'queen' as her job title (to diminish her significance). But those titles didn't stick. She is still known as 女皇 - (the only) female emperor.
Because Japan imported writing from China, the Emperor is 天皇 and his wife is 皇后、which follows the same logic as 王→王后。(Sometimes the title 中宮 is used instead, but that's because 一条天皇 had two empresses at the same time, so they used the name of the empress's palace for the second empress).
Interestingly, the only ruling Empress that's called 皇后 is 神功皇后、every other ruling Empress in Japanese history is called 天皇。I have no idea why.
I thought it was partly down or due to sounds. Keh Queh I eh ee .
So keh i (ee) neh (king)
Qeh ee neh (Queen)
In Swedish, king is "kung" and queen is "drottning". Drottning derived as the female form of the older title for a chief or leader which was "drott" in old norse. I don't know if the Danish and Norwegian word "dronning" came from the same origin but dropped the double tts for some reason.
I think kung and "konung" and the Danish/Norwegian "konge" have similar origin as the English king but I have no idea why it replaced the previous word drott.
The Swedish unmarried female monarch Kristina was notorious for wanting to be referred as kung rather than drottning even if modern times refers her as drottning Kristina. It seems like in her and many perspectives
was that drottning only means the wife of the king rather than just a female ruler just like the English queen but it seems like many people already back then seems to understand drottning as the female form for kung like today even if there wasn't any (I think) known female monarchs in Sweden other than queen Margareta of Denmark who formed the Kalmar union.
Thia bends some of the logic presented here, since Scandinavian languages have kept genders, so they could have come up with "konunginna", "kongesse" or something similarly silly.
@@geirmyrvagnes8718 Danish has two grammatical genders: No-gender (similar to the neuter in other languages) and common-gender (containing the feminine and masculine gender). I think the same applies to Swedish and at least some common Norwegian dialects. I'm not sure about Icelandic, Faroese or Finnish.
I think that the feminine and masculine grammatical genders still existed in Danish when 'konge' had become the dominant title for the ruler, but 'dronning' lingered. It would be interesting to know how this happened, why and when. Assuming that 'drot' was an actual title, and not just a description like ruler in English.
@@Zumbs Swedish and Danish lost the feminine gender around 1500, and kings and queens had been around for a while back then. Standard variants of Norwegian, Icelandic and Faroese is all about all the genders. Dialects have variations and Finnish is it's own thing. 😁
In Icelandic the terms for King and Queen are Kóngur and Drottning
Well not only english that sound diffrent for thier king and queen, in malay there are Raja for the king and a Permaisuri for the queen. Other word are Ratu for the queen that sound simillar with Raja but we never use it often as we do with the Pemaisuri. But our monarchs would like too use other title like sultan and sultanah for the kings and queens except for the state of perlis which thier monarch use Raja (king) and Raja Perempuan (woman king) for thier royal title. Some state use uniqe title like Negeri Sembilan use Yamtuan Besar (Big Lord) for thier king and Tunku Ampuan Besar (her majesty big madam) for thier queen. In Malaysia we practice a faderal monarch which our supreme king and queen will be elected by the Majlis Raja-Raja (council of kings). Each king and queen form diffrent state member are rotate bettwen them self to be elected as the Yang Di Pertuan Agong (his majesty the king) and a Raja Permaisuri Agong (her majesty the queen) as a supreme king/emperor of Malaysia
@@momytik yup it mean queen in malay
1:50 "Tsar" does mean "king", it means "emperor" and comes from the name Cesar. It's often forgotten today but a king and an emperor are not the same. A king rules over a kingdom, an emperor over an empire that includes several kingdoms each with their own king subservient to the emperor.
Since English has Prince/Princess, Duke/Duchess, and Count/Countess, are those all words borrowed from languages with gendered spelling? And is the reason there's no female equivalent for Earl that it's an older word?
Exactly! Earl's an anglo-saxon word and the other 3 words originate from French, therefore they employ gendered spelling while the former doesn't.
There are English titles that have similar sounding male and female forms like prince/princess, duke/duchess, and elector/electress. Also there's the German example kaiser/kaiserin.
Another case of curious gendered titles comes in form of Earls and Countesses.
Long story short, Earl comes from Old English "Eorl" (Cognate to the Nordic "Jarl") before the Norman period. In that time a feminine form never developed.
The Normans implementing feudalism took the rank of Earl and made it equivalent to the title of count on the continent (beforehand, Earls were more akin to Dukes).
So when a feminine form was needed, rather than use a variation of Earl, they decided just to import the feminine version of Count from the continent instead, Countess.
8:12 kings were generals until the 16th century in Europe, so they were fearful of women in charge because she could not realistically lead an army in a situation were it became needed. So much so, that in many cases they would make the husband of the queen the king, and not just prince-consort, because that man could lead a army.
Do you know how many queens in history have led armies?
8:51 It was changed in the year 2013, not 2023. Also, later in the video you forgot to mention Queen Mary II & Queen Anne.
Is CYNN related to CONNOR, both meaning family and head family?k
Gender tends to be primarily significant in Indo-Europeans and Afro-Asiatic languages. Query as to titles from other language families. (Japan had some Empresses early in its history, before a scandal was blamed on the Empress' alleged susceptibility to an alleged lover. I don't know what title was used in Japanese.)
something similar I think is the counterpart of "Earl", the Earls wife is referred to as a "countess".
Danish: Kong and Dronning. Not similar, much like English. But the Norse language had a major impact on the development of the English language pre-Norman invasion. In 1135 when Henry I died, he only had one daughter, Matilda. He had coerced the barons to accept her as the ruler to succeed him after he died. But once he was actually dead, the barons had a hard time wrapping their heads around the notion of a female king. They didn't know what to call it. Just go with king? So when Matilda's cousin Stephen landed on the English shore and knocked on the door, beating Matilda to the punch, as she was still back in France, having just given birth, the barons were all to eager to accept Stephen, because they didn't have to deal with the thorny issue of a female king. So the issue lay dormant for 400 more years until it was forced up on the nobility again in 1547 when Edward VI died at age 15, and all that was left was his sisters Mary and Elizabeth. So as you noted, they just took the title that had traditionally been solely the wife of a king, and applied it to a regnant. Thus Queen as the term of a regnant was born. In your list of queens regnant, you skipped Mary II and Anne.
In the Scandinavian languages, the term for 'Queen' is also etymologcally unrelated to the term for 'King' - (NO/DK: Dronning, SV: Drotning). But unlike in English, the words are the female variants of a term for a ruler, stemming from the Old Norse drótt (originally used for a warlord, or leader of the hird).
Farmer's wife is an established archetype so it's a job title as much as queen. Also homesteader's wife and inn keeper's wife. What a man was back then could have a big effect on his family.
If king can come from cynn/kung/kong, i suggest that the qu may actually be the feminized form of cy/ku/ko and that what really has changed is vowel form and its related gendered spelling. Its also curious that u start to see the use of King/Queen be the prevailing option at around the time of Ghengis Kong, cultural asimulations perhaps!?
Just maybe... You bring up the Old English word "cynn" meaning family; more specifically, the 'royal' family. This one word does bear strong resemblance to both king and queen.
It could well be that, like many English words, the pronunciation shifted differently among different more-isolated communities/circles. Perhaps the 'k' shifting towards 'kw' in a region which favored female rulers, while the 'nn' shifted towards 'ng' in other regions which favored male rulers. This last is not so dissimilar from how certain English dialects, even today, tend to 'over-emphasize' the terminal 'g' in words which end with "ing".
If they had to make a female kingdom monarch's title sound similar to "king" (with a feminine touch indeed), then it could've been called "kingess" (to me when I hear this, it now sounds quite weird).
I would like to suggest a more Germanic origin for king since König is more similar to the English word, king, and English is considered a Germanic language. Cynn seems more similar to Queen. Cynn is an old English word for kin denoting a family relationship or tribe.
I agree that King is more likely from the Germanic word.
Yes, both are probably Germanic words. If you look queen up on Wiktionary, it compares it to other Germanic languages and you can see that they all have congates of "queen", though most of them use it to refer to "a woman". Specifically, Dutch uses kween as "A woman past child-bearing age". I suspect it was just a formal way to refer to a noble woman. Sure, the words for "woman" and "wife" often mixed up (wijf in dutch means woman, while being a cognate to English wife; mujer in Spanish comes from Latin mulier, which meant "married woman", compare Italian "moglie" meaning "wife"). However, I think it's more a domina-donna type of semantical change. The Italian word for woman "donna" comes form Latin "domina" that referred to a noble often elderly woman that was the boss of a household or a familial hierarchy. "Queen" probably had the same meaning, but got restricted to be used only to the wife of the king. My assumption is that, just like Latin "domina", it meant something like "wise (old) female boss".
the "qu-" in queen is a little confusing in this case because it makes it look less germanic. But a long time ago it was spelled like "cwen". Same with other words like "quick" which used to be "cwic".
They were changed to match the Norman spelling norms.
cyning was the Old English word for king.
Cynn" is pronounced the same as the "Kon" in Konig. Both King and Konig have the same derivation, just different spellings in Old English and in German.
Denmark has, like the other Scandinavian languages? Konge (king) and dronning (queen). Wheras king is very similar to English, dronning is actually the female form of "drot" (master, prince, king, lord). That is "drotning" changed into "dronning".
And a Danish nurse is "en sygeplejerske", a distinct female term, even if he is male. The reason might be, that the male term, "sygeplejer", is an entirely different job.
I trust your research.
In the Netherlands both male and female monarchs are referred to as "King", though we don't actually call the female King as a King.
The Philippines has a similar thing to where King and Queen sound different with Hari and Rayna being their words for king and queen
another comperision you could have put in the thumbnail is Kaiser and Kaiserin
Similar to the other Nordic languages. We have Kóngur and Drottning (we have two words for king, Kónungur aswell. It's more formal.)
I always hated how English is non gendered. Some think that a gendered language is somehow more sexist because you acknowledge the sex of the person in question... But i find English to be more sexist.
Take the example between Slavic language and English.
In English Queen ans Kind are distinct and seoaratee. Their riles are separate too. A queen doesn't do, not had the same power as a kind.
You then get words like Warrior or President, or the default Postman.
They have a male form, vut no famile variaty....
So the language basically states that women are not to be called these words because these words are masculine. As such... It creates society where women are seen as unsuitable for these roles.
Meanwhile in slavic languages every word has both male and female option. You have a feminine word for a warior, leader or what not. Equality you have a masculine word for typical feminine roles - Cook, cleaner, carer, teacher or what not.
What nore, if you call a woman a warrior in English, it takes away frkm ger femininity. It as if she could not be both. You don't get that in skavic languages.
Kung and Drottning in Scandinavian.
isn’t king and konig related as germanic terms?
And was there a difference between the older word queen and wife semanticly?