In fairness, baby-talk like this defies many of the standard rules of English grammar, and since it's specifically used when talking to a certain type of person (or animal), I think it can safely be considered a distinct linguistic register.
@@veezhang6988 As OP pointed out in the video, the old plural of book wasn't beek, it was beec, pronounced like baitch. In OE any /k/ sound after an /i/ or /e/ vowel got lenitioned to a 'CH' sound.
Maybe everyone just got confused that bhad actually meant good lol. Imagine pulling a prank on an English learner by telling them the pattern is "bad, better, best"
I remember my friend who didn't speak very good english at the time said 'badder' instead of 'worse' and to me it sounded as if he really said 'better' and it was super weird in that context 😅
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries!
English has the regularised paradigm "old, older, oldest" and the umlaut paradigm "old, elder, eldest", though the latter sounds archaic in some contexts (i am elder than you), old-fashioned or formal in other contexts (his eldest brother), or a normal part of a set phrase (elder statesman). elder can also be a noun meaning anyone older than someone else relatively (respect your elders, i am your elder), or meaning a respected senior-aged person, especially in traditional societies (the tribal elders). [compare German "alt, älter, ältst(en)", and the noun "Eltern" meaning "parents"] likewise "brother" retains its umlaut+en plural "brethren" in the context of a fellow member of a fraternal society, like a religious order or college fraternity; or as the regular plural of brother in archaic texts like old bible translations. [compare German "Bruder, Brüder"... for fun, German family plurals Väter, Mütter, Brüder, Söhne, Töchter would correspond to English feether, mither, brether, sen, deighter as plurals of father, mother, brother, son, daughter.. Haus\Häuser = house\hice, Hand\Hände =hand\hend, Buch\Bücher = book\beech, Schuh\Schühe = shoe\shee, Kuh\Kühn = cow\kye (actually kye or kine for cows is still used in some dialects of English)] on the other hand "bad, worse, worst" can be regularised as "bad, badder, baddest" in the slang sense of being "badass" (he's the baddest of them all) analogy can sometimes make a regular paradigm irregular too, like "dived" and "sneaked" changing to "dove" and "snuck" in America, and "dragged" to "drug" in the US South. while "strong" ablaut verbs usually regularise to "weak" -ed verbs (swoll vs swelled, slew vs slayed; or archaic holp vs helped, shew vs showed), "dove, snuck, drug" are examples of the reverse.
@@frankhooper7871 interesting, i wonder what other strong paradigms are retained in dialects. going in the reverse direction of making weak verbs strong, i had a coworker use "wung it" as the past tense of "wing it", which completely amazed me lol... this is in the Canadian Prairies for context. other examples of old verb forms being retained for specialised purposes are "ought" and "wrought". these are not strong/ablaut verbs, just irregular weak/-ed/-t verbs, but originally those were the past tense forms of "owe" and "work". now, "owed" has supplanted "ought" except in the expression "ought to" which is no longer seen as a past tense verb. the older meaning of "owe" was more like "own", which is probably related anyways. interesting that "ought to", "should", and "had better" all use originally past tense forms; i'm not sure why this is... maybe an originally subjunctive sense there, along the lines of German "würde, hätte"... "wrought" has been supplanted by "worked", except in set expressions like "wrought iron", or in archaicisms like "the fate that you have wrought"... this is reserved for "work" not as in "labour", but as in "effect, bring about": "to work change in the world, to have wrought change..."
just letting you know, youtube seems to have automatically translated your title (which generally makes no sense, like the automatic french translation "Bon, meilleur, meilleur"), and given it horrible automatic dubbing as a viewer i can disable the dubbing, but the title translations i can't, so disabling that is definitely worthwhile
Btw there is no viewer setting to disable title translation and dubbing on all videos, but for creators, it's under Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic Dubbing
How do I disable auto-dubbing? I have been looking for the option in settings for days and feel dumb. I can only disable it after clicking on a video and manually change to original audio each time.
2:52 Technically there is a thing called "Proto-Romance", Which is basically if you tried to reconstruct a proto-language from the modern Romance ones in the same way you'd reconstruct Proto-Germanic from the modern Germanic ones or Proto-Celtic from the modern Celtic ones, Which can give us some insights into what changes happened from Latin as it went into the romance languages and when. For example, If some feature is present in all Romance languages (And thus the reconstructed proto-romance as well), But not Latin, it likely evolved prior to the split of the romance languages.
But are there any? Romance languages are by definition the languages that developed specifically from Latin in the early Middle Ages. Latin is one of the Italic languages, all of which died out in Antiquity. The other Italic languages therefore didn't have any influence on the later development of Romance languages. And if they had, that would be a localised effect. Like you would find certain features coming from non-Latin Italic languages in local areas in Central Italy because remnants of them might have been spoken there still, or had suvived in the local Latin dialect. But those would not have any influence on the development on early Spanish, or French, or Romanian.
i don't think it's fair to say that "proto-romance" is a thing. i'm sure some linguist somewhere uses that term, but it's generally called "vulgar latin" (i.e. spoken everyday latin) and while we don't have an abundance of sources (as it is by definition a spoken form) we have enough of them (appendix probi, graffiti, comedic passages in certain plays) that i would hesitate to call it a theoretical reconstruction. in contrast to proto-germanic, we know where, when and for how long it existed, can attest certain lexical, morphosintactical and phonological changes with 100% certainty and have a fairly good idea about the timeline and geography of changes we can't actually prove with a written document from that time.
@@farleyharper1270 @timecrayon Proto-Romance is distinct from Vulgar Latin and has been reconstructed as a hypothetical language. It exhibits a good few changes not present in Vulgar Latin, like consonant palatalisation, the loss of certain cases, and various changes in vocabulary. It's hard to say if it represents a single synchronic language stage or not, but it's roughly a description of the state of the Romance language(s) around the 6th-8th centuries. "Vulgar Latin" is not a historical stage of Latin and not a particularly useful term in historical linguistics, since it's just a vague name for the entire history of Latin as a spoken language.
Irregularities are fun. For example Slavic used to have a dual form for nouns that was lost at some point in (my native) Bulgarian, but the form is still used only for inanimate masculine nouns when there is a precise amount, regardless of the number. Colloquially the numerical plural form can be used for all masculine nouns but this is considered ungrammatical
The h-ch change you mention for German is not really a consonant change, because they are allophones of the same phoneme. H is the pronunciation in the onset, Ich-sound is coda after front vowels, Ach-sound is coda after back vowels. So from "höher" to "höchsten", the phoneme is switching from the onset of the second syllable to the coda of the first.
an interesting follow up would be to ask why the suppletion happened for the comparatives of the word 'good' in other branches In Romance languages like French: bon -> meilleur; and Spanish: bueno -> mejor. In Slavic like Polish: dobry -> lepszy; or Russian: хороший -> лучший (which are both different roots from Polish, but also different between bas and comparative forms). In Celtic like Irish: maith -> fearr. Moreover, even outside of the Indo-European family, like in Finnish: hyvä -> parempi And I am sure there must be even more examples. These are what I remember from the top of my head. It looks as if the suppletion is innately programmed to happen for the words with this meaning!
Weirdly, we have almost exactly the same thing in Persian. Our word for good (khoob/خوب) is of a completely different root than our words for better (behtar/بهتر) and best (behtarin/بهترین). We do have the base form _beh_ for good, but I don't think anyone in past 1000 years has used it in that sense (it's very archaic).
And I was curious if it happens in the Indo-Iranian branch too, thanks for the comment. Romance and Slavic languages have the same suppletivism for good/better/best/bad/worse/worst, just from different roots. It's a common Indo-European thing it seems.
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries! ... And thank You @lambert801 showing me the persian root ... pro-ba-bly it started already in your neighborhood in ancient Ba-byl-on ... 🙂
it is interesting that the word good has comparative and superlative that are completely different in a few other languages as well, for example Finnish hyvä - parempi - paras
Last time i tried to tell people the audio is too low (it was 10% too quiet), I had a swarm of people arguing it's just fine. Be careful when you say stuff like this
Romance words for "To Go" are fun, because I think there are like 4-5 different Latin roots, and most of them combined forms from various of the different words into conjugations of one new word. And then Romanian just took a completely unrelated word for the meaning, But at least they conjugate it fully regularly rather than with suppletion!
As far as I know Danish has a single phrase where we do say “goodest”, which is “du godeste” (“my goodness”)… I’d love to know how that one came to be.
A recent example of proportional analogy is the formation of "badder/baddest" as comparatives of "bad" when it's used as a compliment in slang, e.g. "bad b*tch" -> "the baddest b*tch"
Hmmm, curious if this is some kind of unconscious reclamation of a forgotten word, but then realize it's just those darn kids on my lawn talking in opposite speak. "Yo bro dude, that Ollie was just sick" meaning it was good.
As a Nynorsk-user, thank you for including both written norms of the Norwegian language! 99% of the time we are ignored in tables like this from international sources.
i think you're right, it came out weirdly quiet in the upload... the original file runs fine in terms of audio strength on my computer, I tried to delete and reupload it a couple times, but it kept being read as oddly quiet by TH-cam somehow. i'm not fixing it now lol, i think it's audible at the end of the day, but yeah it's quieter than usual
@@caramelldansen2204 Did they? The audio options in my TH-cam TV app still state that it is adjusted automatically (which, given the audio of this video, seems to be a lie).
@@caramelldansen2204 on mobile you can turn it on, haven't looked on desktop. In the video player settings in the menu additional settings you can turn on stable volume
Interestingly, Polish also has irregular forms for comparitive of good and bad. It adds the suffix szy to form the comparitive, and the prefix naj and the suffix -szy for the superlative, as is usual with Polish, but the roots seem to be completely different. Good - Dobry Better - Lepszy Best - Najlepszy Bad - Zły Worse - Gorszy Worst - Najgorszy I wonder if these forms are irregular in other languages too, and why.
1:54 German has the word 'brav' - meaning good in a childish sense, like Santa only binging presents to good children or whatever. I wonder if it's related to Swedish & Norwegian 'bra'...
There are some slight misrepresentations of Dutch here about the extra *e* ending. That's just dependent on the gender of the word the adjective is applying to. Like *Een snel paard* (a fast horse) but *Een snelle koe* (a fast cow) This is only in the indefinite form of the neuter form that the *e* is dropped. The *het* for the superlative is a bit weird and can be used in a few ways, like to turn an adjective into an adverb but in the context here it would be the same as in English *the fastest horse*
It’s the adverbial form he lists in the tables. This is unambiguous for German because we say “am schnellsten” with a preposition instead of just the article.
Interestingly something similar happens in Polish, despite not even being a germanic language. good - better - best dobry - lepszy - najlepszy bad - worse - worst zły - gorszy - najgorszy
I am not even one minute into the video, so I don't know if you address this, but I am fairly sure you make a mistake from 0:13 to 0:41: To my knowledge, disyllabic adjectives also use more/most. The exception being when they end in -y. I also remember being taught in one of my first three years of English (as a native German speaker) that the word "quiet" has two comparatives, namely "quieter" and "more quiet" since it can be seen as either a monosyllabic or a disyllabic adjective. And that "clever" also has two comparatives, namely "more clever" and "cleverer". I've looked up disyllabic English adjectives to check, and the "an adjective with two syllables requires more/most unless it ends in -y" thing seems to be factual: - more able - more active - more awkward - more basic - more British - more broken - more central - more certain - more compact - more crowded and so on
Sometimes the est is correct, but not the er. Awkwardest but not awkwarder. Stupidest but not stupider. Rules are nearly always partial. Any English speaker would understand in any case. So much language teaching wastes time aiming for perfection, when ´good enough’ would do.
Well that's not quite what I was hoping it might be, but good video! I'd thought perhaps it was more like "will" and "woll" and how they gradually changed to have more or less the same meaning. Even though eventually will won out as the standard for future situations and won't for negative future situations.
I've never noticed this before but my language, Czech, has the same thing: most adjectives have regular comparatives and superlatives, Fast, Faster, Fastest = Rychlý, Rychlejší, Nejrychlejší. however "Good" has the same merger as english: Dobrý, Lepší, Nejlepší. I cannot imagine how "ghedh" turned into "dobrý" or "bhad" into "lepší" lol, but atleast to me this suggests that the merger of ghedh and bhad happened even earlier than Proto-Germanic
The roots you mentioned aren't those which turned into the Czech words, dobrý comes from Proto-Indo-European *dʰh₂ebʰros, meaning "fitting, suitable, while lepší is from a Proto-Slavic word *lěpьjь, originally the comparative of *lěpъ, "beautiful" so yeah, the words for "good" and "better", like the words for "bad" and "worse", are very very unstable and will often be replaced by new ones in new language families (*dobrъ has evolved into Russian as добрый "morally good", but the word for "good (in quality)" is хороший, a whole different root)😊
Let's not forget that Scots [and yes, I consider Scots a sister-language to English, not a dialect, and another child of the West Germanic branch] has 'braw', as in 'a braw bricht moonlicht nicht'.
This happens in other Indo-European languages, too. In Serbo-Croatian, for example, the comparative form is formed by adding a suffix to the base word, to get things like visok->viši, and for the superlative you add naj- to the comparative, to get visok->viši->najviši. However, the comparative form (and by proxy, the superlative, as well) of the adjective ‘dobar’ (good) do not stem from the same root, giving a situation where dobar->bolji->najbolji (I also find the similarity that both in S-C and in Germanic languages these weird forms begin with the letter b amusing), but also, similar to English where bad does not result in badder, but in worse, so does loš (bad) in Serbo-Croatian become ‘gori’. (Also, I’m not 100% sure but I think the superlative for ‘good’ in Slovene is najboljši, so that could mean this is widespread among other Slavic languages as well?)
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the best / biest (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ...
I love how every time you're about to give the Danish examples, you just, by chance, happen to be distracted by something else 😂 Also I hoped you'd go a bit into other IE branches. I saw someone in the comments say Farsi has the same thing with different roots for good vs better, best, and I personally didn't even what the paradigm looked like in other branches
Now I'm wondering if a similar thing happened for Spanish bueno, mejor, and el/la mejor, or that's a completely different, equally interesting linguistic rabbit hole
Looking it up, It seems it was indeed the case that in Latin the word "Bonus" (good) was rather irregular, having the comparative and superlative forms both derived from suppletion of other separate verbs, Hence for example the Italian forms "Buono", "Migliore", and "Ottimo", Which are all forms of the same word, Yet completely etymologically unrelated.
Good and bad are general definitions like dead and alive, which need no comparison. Comparative and superlative are needed when these words are used as substitutes for more precise expressions. The "best medicine" is the "most effective medicine" and the "best friend" is the "most favored friend".
Being a persian speaker and having studied Avestan for a while made me already know the answer. In persian we have two words for good: 1) Khub 2) Beh But the second one hasn’t been in use for centuries and we only know it because of our literature courses. The comparative and Superlative in persian are the suffixes “tar” and “tarin” respectively. So it would be sth like this : Persian: Beh Behtar Beh-tarin English: Good Better Best Avestan: Beh Behtr Behšt (I don’t remember much about Avestan) But eventually the word Khu:b replaced beh
Interestingly, there is a region in the Netherlands called "de Betuwe" in which - at Roman times - lived a tribe "Batavi". To my understanding the name of the region comes from "bat" + "ouwe"; meaning "good" and "soil" respectively. So to me the "goed -> beter -> best" paradigm has always made a lot of sense, since adding an umlaut to "bat" turns the "a" into an "e".
The base of "besser" still exist in Germane but in a "frozen" state in idioms like "bas erstaunt" = "very suprised". In dialekts like in Upper Saxonian you can form "gut = guter = am gutsten".
Finally someone talked about this! I noticed this when learning Swedish. I thought Swedish was the "OG" Germanic language. Can you now make a similar video explaining why there is dålig - sämre - sämst but also dålig - värre - värst (?)?
TH-cam decided to add a fun extra twist to this video for me via trying to translate the title to spanish. :D It couldn't handle better and best next to each other in a list like this, so decided best = excelente.
Commenting before I watch the video because I want to guess. I’ll edit after watching: I think this is because good is a noun with a strange and “unchanged” adjective form. So…saying someone is doing good, you are saying their actions align with some abstract “form” of good. So, much like you cannot be “more perfect”, you cannot be “more good”. If you are compare two things, better is a different word that is obviously unrelated with the word good, but because of history, good has been lumped in with these comparison adjectives.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned yet but Lowlands Scots also use Bra (or Braw) not as often used in Doric Scots though Bonnie is more common but used the same
Better hasn't quite lost it's base form, it's just mostly passed into a substantive and is archaic, at least in English boot (advantage, profit), and the older legal term bote and wite (compensation and penalty, other offshoots are booty and freebooter), and a partly comparative adverb such as German bass "greatly". The root bat- had senses of both well/good and better, from which comparatives and superlatives were formed. Something similar happened to more and most, from mo (now only dialectal). The development of comparative forms of words which at their root may have been comparative can be understood from modern paradigms such as "mo better", "more bigger" ...
This seems to be a common pattern in Indo-European languages, I wonder why? I immediately noted that as a native speaker of Russian but couldn't find the answer anywhere Also, as a fun fact, this -ghodh- PIE root is found in a LOT of Russian words. You mentioned "profit" (выгода/vygoda), but there's also "to be fit" (годится/godytsa), "attractive" (пригожий/prigozhyi), "to hold on, to wait" (погодить/pogidit'), "a year" (год/god), "the weather" (погода/pogoda), maybe more. I didn't know that it goes down that deep! It's fun to think about how the word "good" and the Russian "year" have the same roots.
I think an interesting example of suppletion is word for film in russian there is kino [same latin roots as in cimema] and fil'm [same as english film] word film can be both plural and singular but plural kino sounds weird, it still makes sense, but people don't really say it. I feel like we're somewhat in this stage of change, except for one thing word kino also means cinematography in general, and in this case it's more of an uncountable noun it's like if in english you could call a film a cinema, while word cinema could still have its real meanin.
At 2:55 is there any reason you used the ablative after ‘vellem’? I would assume if you want to say ‘I want human rights’ it should be in the accusative ‘ius humanum vellem’ or ‘iura humana vellem’ in the plural
A great example from Latin: fero, tuli, latum. Tuli and latum turn out to be from the same root, but still, you end up de facto with three different stems for the “same” verb. PS: even more fitting example: bonus, melior, optimus. Literally good/better/best, but Latin decided it needs three stems instead of 2.
Why do we say gooder? Scandinavian grammar, a logical extrapolation. The Scandinavian influence on the language perhaps. You can do it with a lot more words than you can in English. Like "north" for example.
well vulgar latin is attested (ie. we know it existed as a descendant of latin) so it's still not a proto-language, but yes it's still largely a reconstructed language.
Conclusion: dutch is the easiest and most regular. No more or most, no vowel changes (umlaut). The only thing is a D after an R for pronunciation (dont know why they found it difficult to say duurer (= more expensive) , but they did…)
youtube, despite this video defaulting to the english (original) voice track and not having any subtitles, auto translated this videos title and description, which translated two of the title’s words into the same word, so I don’t even know what it’s trying to say (probably “good, better and best” but either way) I hate youtube auto translating titles, why cant you set more than one language so it doesnt try to translate stuff out of your native language or out of the language youre trying to learn? anyone know if there’s a solution to this?
The swedish "god" thing reminds me that in Italian we use the word "good" to mean tasty too (Also unlike germanic languages we just put "more" for comparatives in all but irregular cases)
"God" can pretty much always be used instead of "bra" in Swedish. Danish used to use "brav" with the same meaning. This word got to Scandinavian because of Middle Low Saxon.
You should do a video on the verb "to go" in romance languages. It's basically a more insane version of good, better, best. Think of "aller" in french. The indicative present is: Je vais, tu vais, il va. But wasn't the verb aller? This looks more like "vare"? But then, nous allons, vous allez. Surprisingly normal. And then, of course, ils vont. And the indicative future is... J'irai, tu iras et cetera. But that's essentially the same root as ghe future from latin "to go", eo. And it's not just french. The other romance languages (admittedly, i dont know about Romanian) have many irregularities when it comes to this verb. What is going on here? (It's suppletion, but i'd love to see a video on it anyway)
Danish does have a cognate of 'bra', but it is just archaic and with a different meaning than 'good'. They all stem from French "brave" and they are all loan words from MLG (Brav). In Danish we have "brav" meaning 'brave, very, steadfast' and so on with a lot of different meanings. (Depends on the context and its usage)
Ok, but did this phenomenon happen independantly in a bunch of European languages? Every Indo-European language I speak/studied has this feature, especially with good/better. Latin, Russian/Belarusian, German, Ancient (Attic) Greek (this one has a lot of such words). So did this happen independantly in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Slavic/Proto-Baltoslavic and Proto-Greek? Or was such a phenomenon already present in Proto-Indo-European and the respective proto-languages put changed the words they use for the comparative? If it were random words it'd be easy to assume random chance, but since good/better is mostly affected I'd imagine a deeper explanation. good/better: in German: gut, besser in Russian: хорошо, лучше in Latin: bonus, melior/melius in Attic: ἀγαθός, and like five words that all mean "better" with different connotations
Suppletive forms for good and better tend to evolve in every language family with adjectival inflection in some way, for a non-Indo-European example we have Finnish hyvä (good) - parempi (better)
Chinese always uses more/most + adj The hardest part of learning Chinese is characters but once you master them the rest is soooooooo much simpler than nearly every other languages
as a suggestion, since this video is very quiet, in your editing program check your audio db and aim for hovering around -15 db in the future, in case you haven’t been already
Even in Serbian(and Montenegrin, Bosnian and Croatian), a Slavic language, the adjective for good is an irregular adjective. The word for good is 'dobar'. The world for better is 'bolji', and the word for the best is 'najbolji'. Also in Russian, Polsih, Ukranian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian and I think Belarusian, so all Slavic languages.
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries!
So is the Fast Faster Fix / New Newer Next structure a regular irregularity? What's the rule that determines whether a the final form is the fullform or truncated -est? Also, what's the rule that determines the method of pluralization? Is it just words with that oo sound become ees? Or is there a class of objects it applies to that includes teeth, feet, and books?
i think we do say gooder/goodest in like good girl/good boy talk
pin of... shame? or linguistic brilliance?
you decide for yourselves...
can someone think of a joke about puppygirls? i'm not smart enough
nu uh
geese are the goodest of them all!
In fairness, baby-talk like this defies many of the standard rules of English grammar, and since it's specifically used when talking to a certain type of person (or animal), I think it can safely be considered a distinct linguistic register.
I know many who would say this is ungrammatical in their dialects
"Bra" being a french loanword was the biggest plot twist
I wasn't expecting to have to worry about spoilers on a linguistics video
The audio level is so low here for some reason that when an ad comes my brain explodes.
I had to activate subtexts to decipher what he was saying...
I respect your commitment to avoid pronouncing any Danish words.
i love this channel sm it’s such a treat whenever i get a notification
thank you kindly :D
So proportional analogy got rid of the bulk of English ablaut, yet we still have words like goose/geese, tooth/teeth, foot/feet. Neat
However book/beek got regulated. NGL "beek" sounds somewhat badass
They are perfectly normal though? Irregular nouns provide a role of easy to contrast nouns... It is easier to hear tooth vs teeth.
@@portal6347 Those aren't ablaut words, they're umlaut words. Ablaut words (in English) would be things like give/gave, sing/sang/sung, and eat/ate.
@@veezhang6988 As OP pointed out in the video, the old plural of book wasn't beek, it was beec, pronounced like baitch. In OE any /k/ sound after an /i/ or /e/ vowel got lenitioned to a 'CH' sound.
Irregular forms are more likely to remain the more common the word is. That is why "to be" is often the most irregular
Maybe everyone just got confused that bhad actually meant good lol. Imagine pulling a prank on an English learner by telling them the pattern is "bad, better, best"
Well, following Grimm's Law, it would've become 'bat', though that's not really that different.
I remember my friend who didn't speak very good english at the time said 'badder' instead of 'worse' and to me it sounded as if he really said 'better' and it was super weird in that context 😅
@anowarjibbali Thus making the deistinction between a weapon and an animal even more confusing.
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries!
English has the regularised paradigm "old, older, oldest" and the umlaut paradigm "old, elder, eldest", though the latter sounds archaic in some contexts (i am elder than you), old-fashioned or formal in other contexts (his eldest brother), or a normal part of a set phrase (elder statesman). elder can also be a noun meaning anyone older than someone else relatively (respect your elders, i am your elder), or meaning a respected senior-aged person, especially in traditional societies (the tribal elders). [compare German "alt, älter, ältst(en)", and the noun "Eltern" meaning "parents"]
likewise "brother" retains its umlaut+en plural "brethren" in the context of a fellow member of a fraternal society, like a religious order or college fraternity; or as the regular plural of brother in archaic texts like old bible translations. [compare German "Bruder, Brüder"... for fun, German family plurals Väter, Mütter, Brüder, Söhne, Töchter would correspond to English feether, mither, brether, sen, deighter as plurals of father, mother, brother, son, daughter.. Haus\Häuser = house\hice, Hand\Hände =hand\hend, Buch\Bücher = book\beech, Schuh\Schühe = shoe\shee, Kuh\Kühn = cow\kye (actually kye or kine for cows is still used in some dialects of English)]
on the other hand "bad, worse, worst" can be regularised as "bad, badder, baddest" in the slang sense of being "badass" (he's the baddest of them all)
analogy can sometimes make a regular paradigm irregular too, like "dived" and "sneaked" changing to "dove" and "snuck" in America, and "dragged" to "drug" in the US South. while "strong" ablaut verbs usually regularise to "weak" -ed verbs (swoll vs swelled, slew vs slayed; or archaic holp vs helped, shew vs showed), "dove, snuck, drug" are examples of the reverse.
Note that 'shew' and 'snew' are still alive in the Suffolk dialect for the past tense of 'show' and 'snow' - probably others in the same vein.
@@frankhooper7871 interesting, i wonder what other strong paradigms are retained in dialects. going in the reverse direction of making weak verbs strong, i had a coworker use "wung it" as the past tense of "wing it", which completely amazed me lol... this is in the Canadian Prairies for context.
other examples of old verb forms being retained for specialised purposes are "ought" and "wrought". these are not strong/ablaut verbs, just irregular weak/-ed/-t verbs, but originally those were the past tense forms of "owe" and "work".
now, "owed" has supplanted "ought" except in the expression "ought to" which is no longer seen as a past tense verb. the older meaning of "owe" was more like "own", which is probably related anyways. interesting that "ought to", "should", and "had better" all use originally past tense forms; i'm not sure why this is... maybe an originally subjunctive sense there, along the lines of German "würde, hätte"...
"wrought" has been supplanted by "worked", except in set expressions like "wrought iron", or in archaicisms like "the fate that you have wrought"... this is reserved for "work" not as in "labour", but as in "effect, bring about": "to work change in the world, to have wrought change..."
This well-informed comment deserves more appreciation.
Real German is Schuh/Schuhe and Kuh/Kühe and not Schühe and Kühn. The word kühn translates to brave.
just letting you know, youtube seems to have automatically translated your title (which generally makes no sense, like the automatic french translation "Bon, meilleur, meilleur"), and given it horrible automatic dubbing
as a viewer i can disable the dubbing, but the title translations i can't, so disabling that is definitely worthwhile
This is why I miss community captions.
"Bueno, mejor, excelente" is how it did it in Spanish... what is the original?
@@duncanhwGood, better, best
Btw there is no viewer setting to disable title translation and dubbing on all videos, but for creators, it's under Upload defaults > Advanced settings > Automatic Dubbing
How do I disable auto-dubbing? I have been looking for the option in settings for days and feel dumb. I can only disable it after clicking on a video and manually change to original audio each time.
Interestingly the non-comparative form of better/best does survive in English with the fossil phrase 'to boot' meaning additionally
2:52 Technically there is a thing called "Proto-Romance", Which is basically if you tried to reconstruct a proto-language from the modern Romance ones in the same way you'd reconstruct Proto-Germanic from the modern Germanic ones or Proto-Celtic from the modern Celtic ones, Which can give us some insights into what changes happened from Latin as it went into the romance languages and when. For example, If some feature is present in all Romance languages (And thus the reconstructed proto-romance as well), But not Latin, it likely evolved prior to the split of the romance languages.
I was thinking the same
But are there any?
Romance languages are by definition the languages that developed specifically from Latin in the early Middle Ages. Latin is one of the Italic languages, all of which died out in Antiquity. The other Italic languages therefore didn't have any influence on the later development of Romance languages.
And if they had, that would be a localised effect. Like you would find certain features coming from non-Latin Italic languages in local areas in Central Italy because remnants of them might have been spoken there still, or had suvived in the local Latin dialect. But those would not have any influence on the development on early Spanish, or French, or Romanian.
i don't think it's fair to say that "proto-romance" is a thing. i'm sure some linguist somewhere uses that term, but it's generally called "vulgar latin" (i.e. spoken everyday latin) and while we don't have an abundance of sources (as it is by definition a spoken form) we have enough of them (appendix probi, graffiti, comedic passages in certain plays) that i would hesitate to call it a theoretical reconstruction. in contrast to proto-germanic, we know where, when and for how long it existed, can attest certain lexical, morphosintactical and phonological changes with 100% certainty and have a fairly good idea about the timeline and geography of changes we can't actually prove with a written document from that time.
is Proto-Romance just Vulgar Latin? Since vulgar Latin is not written down a lot
@@farleyharper1270 @timecrayon
Proto-Romance is distinct from Vulgar Latin and has been reconstructed as a hypothetical language. It exhibits a good few changes not present in Vulgar Latin, like consonant palatalisation, the loss of certain cases, and various changes in vocabulary. It's hard to say if it represents a single synchronic language stage or not, but it's roughly a description of the state of the Romance language(s) around the 6th-8th centuries. "Vulgar Latin" is not a historical stage of Latin and not a particularly useful term in historical linguistics, since it's just a vague name for the entire history of Latin as a spoken language.
Happy to see a new video from you. The audio level is quite low.
By far the most good video I have seen on this topic!
Irregularities are fun. For example Slavic used to have a dual form for nouns that was lost at some point in (my native) Bulgarian, but the form is still used only for inanimate masculine nouns when there is a precise amount, regardless of the number. Colloquially the numerical plural form can be used for all masculine nouns but this is considered ungrammatical
The h-ch change you mention for German is not really a consonant change, because they are allophones of the same phoneme.
H is the pronunciation in the onset, Ich-sound is coda after front vowels, Ach-sound is coda after back vowels. So from "höher" to "höchsten", the phoneme is switching from the onset of the second syllable to the coda of the first.
an interesting follow up would be to ask why the suppletion happened for the comparatives of the word 'good' in other branches
In Romance languages like French: bon -> meilleur; and Spanish: bueno -> mejor.
In Slavic like Polish: dobry -> lepszy; or Russian: хороший -> лучший (which are both different roots from Polish, but also different between bas and comparative forms).
In Celtic like Irish: maith -> fearr.
Moreover, even outside of the Indo-European family, like in Finnish: hyvä -> parempi
And I am sure there must be even more examples. These are what I remember from the top of my head. It looks as if the suppletion is innately programmed to happen for the words with this meaning!
Macedonian doesn't supplete it's dobar->podobar->najdobar. I think Bulgarian also doesn't.
Weirdly, we have almost exactly the same thing in Persian. Our word for good (khoob/خوب) is of a completely different root than our words for better (behtar/بهتر) and best (behtarin/بهترین). We do have the base form _beh_ for good, but I don't think anyone in past 1000 years has used it in that sense (it's very archaic).
I was hoping he'd go a little into other Indo European languages, I don't even know the er est paradigm in other branches
And I was curious if it happens in the Indo-Iranian branch too, thanks for the comment. Romance and Slavic languages have the same suppletivism for good/better/best/bad/worse/worst, just from different roots. It's a common Indo-European thing it seems.
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries! ... And thank You @lambert801 showing me the persian root ... pro-ba-bly it started already in your neighborhood in ancient Ba-byl-on ... 🙂
What a bet video. The goodest I’ve seen today
it is interesting that the word good has comparative and superlative that are completely different in a few other languages as well, for example Finnish
hyvä - parempi - paras
It's possibly because of Sprachbund
In Italian too
@@maurozanchetta648 Italian - Latin - Pie
Not surprising that PIE languages follow PIE pattern
@@BryanLu0 Right!
in arabic too its jayyid-afthal-al'afthal(جيد-افضل-الافضل)
the audio is REALLY low on this one
Last time i tried to tell people the audio is too low (it was 10% too quiet), I had a swarm of people arguing it's just fine.
Be careful when you say stuff like this
@ZoofyZoof the masses wont silence me (like the video)
Wait, so... "bhad" means "good"? That deserves a follow-up video all its own!
Two commonly used French verbs, être and aller, are also suppletive.
Romance words for "To Go" are fun, because I think there are like 4-5 different Latin roots, and most of them combined forms from various of the different words into conjugations of one new word.
And then Romanian just took a completely unrelated word for the meaning, But at least they conjugate it fully regularly rather than with suppletion!
As far as I know Danish has a single phrase where we do say “goodest”, which is “du godeste” (“my goodness”)… I’d love to know how that one came to be.
From us, your cannibal cousins across the pond
A recent example of proportional analogy is the formation of "badder/baddest" as comparatives of "bad" when it's used as a compliment in slang, e.g. "bad b*tch" -> "the baddest b*tch"
Hmmm, curious if this is some kind of unconscious reclamation of a forgotten word, but then realize it's just those darn kids on my lawn talking in opposite speak. "Yo bro dude, that Ollie was just sick" meaning it was good.
In Scotland, we still use "braw" to mean good, the pronounciation being strikingly similar to "bra"
Reminds me of how "bad" (meaning "attractive") becomes badder and baddest
As a Nynorsk-user, thank you for including both written norms of the Norwegian language! 99% of the time we are ignored in tables like this from international sources.
Is it just me or the volume of this video is too low?
i think you're right, it came out weirdly quiet in the upload... the original file runs fine in terms of audio strength on my computer, I tried to delete and reupload it a couple times, but it kept being read as oddly quiet by TH-cam somehow. i'm not fixing it now lol, i think it's audible at the end of the day, but yeah it's quieter than usual
It is. I usually watch videos at 50% master volume(?) and 5% TH-cam volume but here I had to go to 15% TH-cam volume.
TH-cam used to compensate for this to normalise volume between videos but have recently stopped doing that without telling anyone. HeII site.
@@caramelldansen2204 Did they? The audio options in my TH-cam TV app still state that it is adjusted automatically (which, given the audio of this video, seems to be a lie).
@@caramelldansen2204 on mobile you can turn it on, haven't looked on desktop. In the video player settings in the menu additional settings you can turn on stable volume
Interestingly, Polish also has irregular forms for comparitive of good and bad. It adds the suffix szy to form the comparitive, and the prefix naj and the suffix -szy for the superlative, as is usual with Polish, but the roots seem to be completely different.
Good - Dobry
Better - Lepszy
Best - Najlepszy
Bad - Zły
Worse - Gorszy
Worst - Najgorszy
I wonder if these forms are irregular in other languages too, and why.
1:54 German has the word 'brav' - meaning good in a childish sense, like Santa only binging presents to good children or whatever. I wonder if it's related to Swedish & Norwegian 'bra'...
Yes, because they all borrowed it from French "brave".
1:40 Scots also has "braw"
As in "It's a braw bricht moonlicht nicht taenicht".
@@gary.h.turner It's a good bright moonlight night tonight?
@iCucer Exactly! 👍
Man, I just read about the Comparative-Superlative Generalisation for the first time today as well.
If enough people start using "gooder", it would become accepted and win a place in the dictionary.
Yes, this is literally how words work.
Badder and baddest have certainly made a mark.
There are some slight misrepresentations of Dutch here about the extra *e* ending. That's just dependent on the gender of the word the adjective is applying to.
Like *Een snel paard* (a fast horse)
but *Een snelle koe* (a fast cow)
This is only in the indefinite form of the neuter form that the *e* is dropped.
The *het* for the superlative is a bit weird and can be used in a few ways, like to turn an adjective into an adverb but in the context here it would be the same as in English *the fastest horse*
It’s the adverbial form he lists in the tables. This is unambiguous for German because we say “am schnellsten” with a preposition instead of just the article.
@@eypandabear7483 Ahh thanks, my German is seriously out of date as a Belgian.
Interestingly something similar happens in Polish, despite not even being a germanic language.
good - better - best
dobry - lepszy - najlepszy
bad - worse - worst
zły - gorszy - najgorszy
i am blown away, i always wondered in the back of my head and never had the motivation to figure it out. great video!
I am not even one minute into the video, so I don't know if you address this, but I am fairly sure you make a mistake from 0:13 to 0:41: To my knowledge, disyllabic adjectives also use more/most. The exception being when they end in -y. I also remember being taught in one of my first three years of English (as a native German speaker) that the word "quiet" has two comparatives, namely "quieter" and "more quiet" since it can be seen as either a monosyllabic or a disyllabic adjective. And that "clever" also has two comparatives, namely "more clever" and "cleverer".
I've looked up disyllabic English adjectives to check, and the "an adjective with two syllables requires more/most unless it ends in -y" thing seems to be factual:
- more able
- more active
- more awkward
- more basic
- more British
- more broken
- more central
- more certain
- more compact
- more crowded
and so on
Sometimes the est is correct, but not the er. Awkwardest but not awkwarder. Stupidest but not stupider. Rules are nearly always partial. Any English speaker would understand in any case. So much language teaching wastes time aiming for perfection, when ´good enough’ would do.
Oh man, wondered that for years as a student of the Nordic languages. Bravo! Ha det bra og hyggelig.
In Dutch: Boek-boeken. In Limburgs: Book-böök.
Well that's not quite what I was hoping it might be, but good video! I'd thought perhaps it was more like "will" and "woll" and how they gradually changed to have more or less the same meaning. Even though eventually will won out as the standard for future situations and won't for negative future situations.
One of the most frequent suppletion in English nouns is person/people.
I've never noticed this before but my language, Czech, has the same thing: most adjectives have regular comparatives and superlatives, Fast, Faster, Fastest = Rychlý, Rychlejší, Nejrychlejší. however "Good" has the same merger as english: Dobrý, Lepší, Nejlepší.
I cannot imagine how "ghedh" turned into "dobrý" or "bhad" into "lepší" lol, but atleast to me this suggests that the merger of ghedh and bhad happened even earlier than Proto-Germanic
The roots you mentioned aren't those which turned into the Czech words, dobrý comes from Proto-Indo-European *dʰh₂ebʰros, meaning "fitting, suitable, while lepší is from a Proto-Slavic word *lěpьjь, originally the comparative of *lěpъ, "beautiful"
so yeah, the words for "good" and "better", like the words for "bad" and "worse", are very very unstable and will often be replaced by new ones in new language families (*dobrъ has evolved into Russian as добрый "morally good", but the word for "good (in quality)" is хороший, a whole different root)😊
Let's not forget that Scots [and yes, I consider Scots a sister-language to English, not a dialect, and another child of the West Germanic branch] has 'braw', as in 'a braw bricht moonlicht nicht'.
This happens in other Indo-European languages, too. In Serbo-Croatian, for example, the comparative form is formed by adding a suffix to the base word, to get things like visok->viši, and for the superlative you add naj- to the comparative, to get visok->viši->najviši. However, the comparative form (and by proxy, the superlative, as well) of the adjective ‘dobar’ (good) do not stem from the same root, giving a situation where dobar->bolji->najbolji (I also find the similarity that both in S-C and in Germanic languages these weird forms begin with the letter b amusing), but also, similar to English where bad does not result in badder, but in worse, so does loš (bad) in Serbo-Croatian become ‘gori’.
(Also, I’m not 100% sure but I think the superlative for ‘good’ in Slovene is najboljši, so that could mean this is widespread among other Slavic languages as well?)
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the best / biest (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ...
I love how every time you're about to give the Danish examples, you just, by chance, happen to be distracted by something else 😂
Also I hoped you'd go a bit into other IE branches.
I saw someone in the comments say Farsi has the same thing with different roots for good vs better, best, and I personally didn't even what the paradigm looked like in other branches
great work
Now I'm wondering if a similar thing happened for Spanish bueno, mejor, and el/la mejor, or that's a completely different, equally interesting linguistic rabbit hole
Latin bonus, melior, optimus.
No idea where the other two forms came from though.
Looking it up, It seems it was indeed the case that in Latin the word "Bonus" (good) was rather irregular, having the comparative and superlative forms both derived from suppletion of other separate verbs, Hence for example the Italian forms "Buono", "Migliore", and "Ottimo", Which are all forms of the same word, Yet completely etymologically unrelated.
We have the same thing in Persian with khoob (good), behtar (better), and behtarin (best).
The first time I heard "den godaste" I thought my co-workers were mocking my swedish.
Amazing video actually
If the plural of "book" is "beek" then I take that to mean "shoop" is the singular of "sheep"
Good and bad are general definitions like dead and alive, which need no comparison. Comparative and superlative are needed when these words are used as substitutes for more precise expressions. The "best medicine" is the "most effective medicine" and the "best friend" is the "most favored friend".
Wow, that was more fascinating than I anticipated. [ _suppletive deleted_ ]
Being a persian speaker and having studied Avestan for a while made me already know the answer.
In persian we have two words for good:
1) Khub
2) Beh
But the second one hasn’t been in use for centuries and we only know it because of our literature courses.
The comparative and Superlative in persian are the suffixes “tar” and “tarin” respectively.
So it would be sth like this :
Persian: Beh Behtar Beh-tarin
English: Good Better Best
Avestan: Beh Behtr Behšt
(I don’t remember much about Avestan)
But eventually the word Khu:b replaced beh
Interestingly, there is a region in the Netherlands called "de Betuwe" in which - at Roman times - lived a tribe "Batavi". To my understanding the name of the region comes from "bat" + "ouwe"; meaning "good" and "soil" respectively. So to me the "goed -> beter -> best" paradigm has always made a lot of sense, since adding an umlaut to "bat" turns the "a" into an "e".
The base of "besser" still exist in Germane but in a "frozen" state in idioms like "bas erstaunt" = "very suprised". In dialekts like in Upper Saxonian you can form "gut = guter = am gutsten".
8:21 bet is an old form for an adverb of better
rly cool video again :)
to use an inside joke i have with my dad, this video is the gooderest bestest
Finally someone talked about this! I noticed this when learning Swedish. I thought Swedish was the "OG" Germanic language. Can you now make a similar video explaining why there is dålig - sämre - sämst but also dålig - värre - värst (?)?
Good. Gooder. Goodest.
Double plus good !
TH-cam decided to add a fun extra twist to this video for me via trying to translate the title to spanish. :D It couldn't handle better and best next to each other in a list like this, so decided best = excelente.
I would love a video on Icelandic
Good, gooder, goodest.
Best, better, Bestest.
cool I was never tought the rule for when not to use -er, but more 😅
Commenting before I watch the video because I want to guess. I’ll edit after watching:
I think this is because good is a noun with a strange and “unchanged” adjective form. So…saying someone is doing good, you are saying their actions align with some abstract “form” of good.
So, much like you cannot be “more perfect”, you cannot be “more good”. If you are compare two things, better is a different word that is obviously unrelated with the word good, but because of history, good has been lumped in with these comparison adjectives.
Not sure if anyone has mentioned yet but Lowlands Scots also use Bra (or Braw) not as often used in Doric Scots though Bonnie is more common but used the same
Better hasn't quite lost it's base form, it's just mostly passed into a substantive and is archaic, at least in English boot (advantage, profit), and the older legal term bote and wite (compensation and penalty, other offshoots are booty and freebooter), and a partly comparative adverb such as German bass "greatly". The root bat- had senses of both well/good and better, from which comparatives and superlatives were formed. Something similar happened to more and most, from mo (now only dialectal). The development of comparative forms of words which at their root may have been comparative can be understood from modern paradigms such as "mo better", "more bigger" ...
Same in french: bon, meilleur (good, better). And bien, mieux (well, better)
mein gutster
This seems to be a common pattern in Indo-European languages, I wonder why? I immediately noted that as a native speaker of Russian but couldn't find the answer anywhere
Also, as a fun fact, this -ghodh- PIE root is found in a LOT of Russian words. You mentioned "profit" (выгода/vygoda), but there's also "to be fit" (годится/godytsa), "attractive" (пригожий/prigozhyi), "to hold on, to wait" (погодить/pogidit'), "a year" (год/god), "the weather" (погода/pogoda), maybe more. I didn't know that it goes down that deep! It's fun to think about how the word "good" and the Russian "year" have the same roots.
I think an interesting example of suppletion is word for film in russian
there is kino [same latin roots as in cimema] and fil'm [same as english film]
word film can be both plural and singular
but plural kino sounds weird, it still makes sense, but people don't really say it.
I feel like we're somewhat in this stage of change, except for one thing
word kino also means cinematography in general, and in this case it's more of an uncountable noun
it's like if in english you could call a film a cinema, while word cinema could still have its real meanin.
At 2:55 is there any reason you used the ablative after ‘vellem’? I would assume if you want to say ‘I want human rights’ it should be in the accusative ‘ius humanum vellem’ or ‘iura humana vellem’ in the plural
A great example from Latin: fero, tuli, latum. Tuli and latum turn out to be from the same root, but still, you end up de facto with three different stems for the “same” verb.
PS: even more fitting example: bonus, melior, optimus. Literally good/better/best, but Latin decided it needs three stems instead of 2.
Swedish is so funny!
I'll learn it next lol
Why do we say gooder? Scandinavian grammar, a logical extrapolation. The Scandinavian influence on the language perhaps. You can do it with a lot more words than you can in English. Like "north" for example.
Выгода is more like benefit, profit, not advantage. For advantage there is преимущество.
In Germany, we don’t say “schnellst”. We say “am schnellsten” e.g. “er ist am schnellsten” meaning “he is the fastest”.
2:59 but then there's VULGAR latin, which is reconstructed i think
well vulgar latin is attested (ie. we know it existed as a descendant of latin) so it's still not a proto-language, but yes it's still largely a reconstructed language.
@@kklein yeah it's interesting
It felt like you already made this video.
Also, wow you're quiet.
Conclusion: dutch is the easiest and most regular. No more or most, no vowel changes (umlaut). The only thing is a D after an R for pronunciation (dont know why they found it difficult to say duurer (= more expensive) , but they did…)
Good video. I was just happy no notification came in. Please don't make the next video as quiet.
youtube, despite this video defaulting to the english (original) voice track and not having any subtitles, auto translated this videos title and description, which translated two of the title’s words into the same word, so I don’t even know what it’s trying to say (probably “good, better and best” but either way) I hate youtube auto translating titles,
why cant you set more than one language so it doesnt try to translate stuff out of your native language or out of the language youre trying to learn? anyone know if there’s a solution to this?
The swedish "god" thing reminds me that in Italian we use the word "good" to mean tasty too (Also unlike germanic languages we just put "more" for comparatives in all but irregular cases)
"God" can pretty much always be used instead of "bra" in Swedish. Danish used to use "brav" with the same meaning. This word got to Scandinavian because of Middle Low Saxon.
As mentioned in the video? Except for Danish also having bra I suppose.
@ He didn't say that "god" can pretty much always be used instead of "bra" though.
Petition to normalize/regularize good, gooder, and goodest.
You should do a video on the verb "to go" in romance languages. It's basically a more insane version of good, better, best.
Think of "aller" in french. The indicative present is:
Je vais, tu vais, il va. But wasn't the verb aller? This looks more like "vare"? But then, nous allons, vous allez. Surprisingly normal. And then, of course, ils vont. And the indicative future is... J'irai, tu iras et cetera. But that's essentially the same root as ghe future from latin "to go", eo. And it's not just french. The other romance languages (admittedly, i dont know about Romanian) have many irregularities when it comes to this verb.
What is going on here? (It's suppletion, but i'd love to see a video on it anyway)
Danish does have a cognate of 'bra', but it is just archaic and with a different meaning than 'good'. They all stem from French "brave" and they are all loan words from MLG (Brav). In Danish we have "brav" meaning 'brave, very, steadfast' and so on with a lot of different meanings. (Depends on the context and its usage)
Poor East Germanic 😔
2:50 Metatron enters the chat
Ok, but did this phenomenon happen independantly in a bunch of European languages? Every Indo-European language I speak/studied has this feature, especially with good/better. Latin, Russian/Belarusian, German, Ancient (Attic) Greek (this one has a lot of such words). So did this happen independantly in Proto-Germanic, Proto-Italic, Proto-Slavic/Proto-Baltoslavic and Proto-Greek? Or was such a phenomenon already present in Proto-Indo-European and the respective proto-languages put changed the words they use for the comparative? If it were random words it'd be easy to assume random chance, but since good/better is mostly affected I'd imagine a deeper explanation.
good/better:
in German: gut, besser
in Russian: хорошо, лучше
in Latin: bonus, melior/melius
in Attic: ἀγαθός, and like five words that all mean "better" with different connotations
Suppletive forms for good and better tend to evolve in every language family with adjectival inflection in some way, for a non-Indo-European example we have Finnish hyvä (good) - parempi (better)
bet better best
extremely quiet video, at 500% volume right now :(
Chinese always uses more/most + adj
The hardest part of learning Chinese is characters but once you master them the rest is soooooooo much simpler than nearly every other languages
as a suggestion, since this video is very quiet, in your editing program check your audio db and aim for hovering around -15 db in the future, in case you haven’t been already
I might be too nitpicky but am I the only one mad that he didn't use the opportunity to tell us whether bad worse worst got to us the same way?
it's like in czech for dobrý (good) we have lepší and nejlepší (better and best) and for špatný (bad) we have horší and nejhorší (worse and worst)
Persian has khoob>behtar>behtareen (good, better, best)
bad>badtar>badtareen (bad, worse, worst)
Even in Serbian(and Montenegrin, Bosnian and Croatian), a Slavic language, the adjective for good is an irregular adjective. The word for good is 'dobar'. The world for better is 'bolji', and the word for the best is 'najbolji'. Also in Russian, Polsih, Ukranian, Czech, Slovak, Slovenian and I think Belarusian, so all Slavic languages.
It's because of the power of the church in last centuries ... God is good, and nothing can be gooder than God, so better (bad-der) is from the beast / best (bad-est) = the devil ... in german: gut - besser (böser) - am besten (bösesten) ... in south-slavic: dobro - bolje (bol = sick) - najbolje ... other slavic languages use the comparative of beautiful = lepa/lijepa/lipa = the linden tree = linda = beautiful in latin/romanic languages: dobry - lepsy - najlepsy ... too beautiful is also from the devil. Origin of "b" is very positive, but fearful! "Ba" a kind of "Wow" of our stoneage ancestors, and even monkeys/apes in sight of fire and good morning "prayer" welcoming the sun ... Ba / Be (Bel = white) for everything bon/bella/beautiful/brilliant/beacon/.../.../... To be like slavic biti and sanskrit bhati from bha = the shine of the sun/son of God (Jesus/Deus/Dies/Diyevs = daylight), but ancient Gods like Ba-Al and Belzebub became demonized by christian church ... church was monopol for written languages for centuries!
So is the Fast Faster Fix / New Newer Next structure a regular irregularity? What's the rule that determines whether a the final form is the fullform or truncated -est? Also, what's the rule that determines the method of pluralization? Is it just words with that oo sound become ees? Or is there a class of objects it applies to that includes teeth, feet, and books?