Yea that is so annoying i have to google the word and sometimes that wont work too and then i write a disclaimer that i don't know how the spell the word and i have already wasted 10 minutes trying to figure it out and people still insult me because i did not spell it right.
I realized how crazy the English language is, when in high school, I took German (I’m an American). How simple it was to read, write and pronounce German once you knew the rules.
I speak four languages and german isn't even the easiest one to write in. Double letters, ä-e and the letter h occasionally not being read is a weird thing. And, as a language with latin script, it borrowed some english or french words, so for example you have to read skateboard like in english and as a person who knows zero french I struggle to understand how the french borrowings should behave. But the easiest language to read that I know is ukrainian. It's impossible to borrow some word from non-cyrilic language, without writing each sound from it down in accordance to the laws of the language. The only problems that can ever occur are laughable - double letters (often you can understand where they are by using logic) and that -ться (t's'a) at the end of the verb is always written this way (cause when someone speaks slowly, he can even pronounce all of the sounds, but usually sounds t's' make something similar to german z sound, but with a ' added to it.
@@Ciborium Those mile-long compound words are quite rare works of art in regular german. Most common german compound words consist of only two or three compounds. Finding one with four or five is already quite a challenge.
German has a lot of randomness too but its better than English or French the one thing i like about English that that unlike most languages it does not have accents and other weird symbols on the pc its annoying because you need to get another keyboard layout.
In Polish, spelling competitions are also common but for a different reason. There's only one way to pronounce the same letter combination but there are multiple letter combinations you can potentially use to write down the same sounds. So if you know how to write a word, you'll 100% know how to pronounce it, but if you only know how to pronounce a word, you'll not always be able to guess how to spell it. For example, "rz" and "ż" make identical sounds, "ó" and "u" make identical sounds, "ch" and "h" make identical sounds. These used to be different sounds in the past but they merged while spelling has remained the same.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 No, Russians don't need any major spelling reform. While there are some minor things that could be changed for the better (like always spelling the hard [e] sound through "э" after consonants or always spelling ё), overall modern Russian spelling is near perfect and as phonetic as it could possibly be Why? Because there's a very good reason why there are multiple ways to spell the same sound in Russian. For instance even through the Russian adjective "холодный" (kolodnyi) is pronounced [halodnyj] with the [a] sound in the first syllable it can't just be spelled as "халодный" (khalidnyi) because otherwise it would lose any connection to the noun "the cold" that is spelled as "холод" (kholod) and pronounced with the [o] sound in it. There are plenty of other examples like this in Russian
@@thedamntrain I didnt say major I just sayed writing reform. холодный = holodnij холод = holod Why write что (čto) and say што (što)? Why write Витебск (Vitebsk) and say Бицебск (Vicebsk)? The belarussijans have changed bough of these.
That was informative. I'm an American who speaks English natively and studied French in high school. Quite frankly, without knowing that spelling is much easier in almost all other languages, a native English speaker wouldn't realize that their language is difficult. However, the same history that gives English its quirky spelling also gives it a rich vocabulary which has been used to great extent in poetry and fiction. I don't think there is another language as richly endowed as English so I feel the trade-off is well worth it. While the rules are not simple like other languages, there are nonetheless rules to follow. I think most English speakers see the language as a bit fluid. We're able to create new words as needed which is very convenient. So don't judge English only in terms of its spelling.
@@MaoRatto Why don't we begin eliminating silent and unnecessary letters? For example: dou(b)t, lam(b), thr(o)u(gh), nativ(e), lov(e), (s)cience, a(t)ta(c)k, pe(a)ce, i(s)land, g(h)ost, rei(g)n, c(h)aos, stuf(f), wel(l), le(a)rn, etc. We also can change ph for f in telephone, y for i in symbol, and ch for k in chemistry.
You can have a rich vocabulary with a more straightforward script. Many languages already do. The actual benefits of the English spelling system for literature are the potency for puns.
Minor correction: the 'ch' spelling in English is actually from those french scribes. The sound represented by 'ch' deaffricated later, after which point we loaned the word 'chef'. EDIT: more corrections, you mentioned the word 'chattel', which specifically had to be a later loanword as well because Norman French pronounced and spelled this word with simplt . We did, however, loan the Norman equivalent, catel, into English as 'cattle'.
Goose isn't from Old Norse, it's from Old English. Knife could possibly be from Old Norse, but given that the word 'cnif' existed in Old English I think it's more likely that it simply changed spelling in the same way as the word 'cniht' became 'knight'.
Yes, I used to also be a retard that said: "why dont we zbell how we zay tings" until I saw the beautiful history in them, and then realised literally all the other European spellings are badly inferior to English's.
Brilliant - I really like your 'language' videos. I'm a Duolingo freak, currently doing about 8 modules, including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Russian. I love discovering and noticing all the links, patterns and similarities between the various languages, and finding the connections. A pity I wasn't this enthusiastic about languages when I was at school :)
well saying Dutch is spelled "exactly like it's pronounced" is a bit misleiding. If you know all the rules and all the regular exception, you'll be able to spell most of the words but there are plenty of words that are irregular, loan words can or can not be pronouced or spelled like the original language, but not always. And you just have to learn when its ei or ij or if it's ou or au. If learn Northern Dutch you might struggle with g and ch. Also spelling can change based on the gramar (the dreaded DT rules for instance),... Yeah it's more regular than English or French but spelling is not as regular as Italian or Finnish.
Yea i am a native Dutch speaker but i still mess it up as badly as English and foreigners wont even know about a lot of sounds like the oe so it will make no sense to them.
I am Australian and living in Den Haag and learning dutch spelling is still WAY WAY Waaaaaay easier than learning English as a kid at school. I have often wondered if that's why the kids are super relaxed and the teachers more "chill" here about learning to read. There doesn't seem to be any rush- they pick it up. You don't have to teach as intensively with memorisation, the rules are so simple in the beginning. (Of course you are very correct -it would get more tricky at a higher level 🙏) At school in English countries there is a HUGE problem with learning how to read and it is common for children to struggle for years or even get missed and in my parents day, not unusual to finish high school not being able to read. Anyway- i do find it amusing when dutch people tell me how hard dutch is (it's like- have you studied German or french!?). Love the Netherlands xxxx
Even as a native English speaker many times i have looked at words like chameleon and wondered why it was spelled like that. I find it quite interesting to learn a bit more about its origins thank you for another great video.
When I was learning English in my 9'th school year I very soon figured it out that I needed to learn every ****ing English word twice: How it is pronounced and how it is written. So I added the pronounciation to every word I had in my textbook, as I heard it spoken by my teacher. I wrote it down just like it was a word in Finnish. like "learning" - "löörning", "year" - "jier" and so on. Not perfect, but better than "Rally English"
Guess it's a common feature of any English-learning pupil in the world, once I bought a secondhand school book, and it was almost completely sound-dubbed in pencil handwriting 😄
Hello Hilbert. Are you saying that English spelling is double Dutch to Frisians? Imagine the confusion of growing up speaking Yorkshire dialect, then having to change pronunciation and whole words at school, in an inner city area with kids whose parents were mostly either refugees from WW2 Europe or immigrants from the Commonwealth. When we started learning French aged nine, it was like listening to a scene from Ripping Yarns, featuring Eric Olthwaite's dad, which I keep recommending in comments on other channels. Since you expressed an interest in football history recently, I recommend also watching Golden Gordon, that follows on from it, if you watch carefully. For anyone familiar with the latter, who cares how you spell shorts?! Eight one to English as it is (one against being New World adopted misspelling). No official rules is the way the UK tends to try to do things. It is very adaptable and the sight of officials who set everything in standard form is a big reason many UK folk feel at odds with centralised (centralized) ideas in some other European traditions. I think part of this is down to the UK not being one country and the fact that the English were one of the peoples that made up Scotland, seeking protection of the Scottish king from Danelaw Vikings, who settled my local area. Scots is a form of English not as influenced by Norman and not from what became England. Many Scots words came into British and American English, as you have previously said. Anyone fancy a Ye Olde Speling Kontest?
It feels like there are a lot of missing graphics from this video, usually you show everything you're describing in tables and we're able to cross reference the different terms and meanings in their respective languages.
For everyone advocating a change to English orthography. Remember English has 44 phonemes (24 consonants and 20 vowels) and the alphabet has 26 letters. You can't just add Thorn and Eth back and add a cedilla to S and C and call it a day.
Also what gets me, is that everyone pronounces English so so differently. Like, who is gonna choose which pronunciation becomes the 'right' one. Here in the UK you'd have different spelling in every town. Imagine someone learning to spell in a Yorkshire accent trying to read the English written in a new Zealand accent, or Indian English accent. Seems like it would actually be worse than what we have.
Having just the names for the periods of English on screen while talking it podcast style does make it seem like a not so great introduction to the concept. (Especially when the intro suggests that the potential viewer could still be learning English) I have a layman understanding of this topic, for example, for the Old English segment: I know what thorn, wynn, looked like, but if someone who's completely new to the topic, having these words just mentioned with no visual may seem confusing, and without enough context, it is then mentioned that these letters are gone in Middle English. Showing the subject on screen akin to the "Old English and Old Norse" segment as well as the "Germanic, Romance and Greek" segment would seem to be better? Of course, I'm probably misunderstanding the intention of the earlier segments.
was just 3 minutes into the video and this is exactly what i wanted to comment i may want to add that besides the educational aspect, it would be way more visually interesting listening is fun but on an audio-visual platform, i feel severely ripped from normal watching if there is nothing to look at, the same way i would be if a podcast may say i have to view a picture
I like it the way it is. As you say one can learn much of the complex history of the language from the spellings, also with names and place-names. It does take a little learning or looking up. 😊
Some parallels with Urdu, which is an Indo Aryan language with much Arabic and Persian influences used in a similar manner to French loans in English. Sometimes a local word and a loanword are used together to amplify the meaning, like "subah sawera" literally "morning morning" (so next time a western PoC makes fun of phrases like chai tea or naan bread, please remind them this lol) Also regarding spelling, similar stuff with Urdu. A lot of Arabic words we pronounce completely differently but keep the same original spelling. It makes it interesting as a historian of language and whatnot but annoying for new learners hahah.
Urdu comes from exactly the sort of history that English does: a local language hoarding words & grammatical forms from the language of foreign rulers. Their reasons for doing that are also similar: it sounds more high class within that social context. Plenty of English aristocrats in later periods were specifically against spelling reforms for precisely the reason that it was easier to distinguish between the low brow & the high brow by the way the pronounced words once literacy became more widespread & fashion became more accessible from factories & imports.
If you trace Worcestershire's etymology back to its beginning, it comes from the Anglo-Saxon "Weogoran ceaster", which translates literally to the Camp of the Weogoran. Ceaster is the (Old) Anglicized form of the Latin word "castra" (camp), and Weogoran refers to an ancient Breton tribe that lived in the region before the Romans invaded England in 43 AD.
I like how you go into the history of English, I’ve watched so many critiques of English that always boil down to “look at how weird this is, this is confusing and we should change it.” The problem with a featural alphabet like Korean Hangul or just an alphabet that matches phonemes is that 1) it’d be a much longer alphabet and 2) English is a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people all of whom have their own pronunciations. Sure, we could make a script to perfectly match the phonetics of someone in New York, but that alphabet will be just as confusing if not more for everyone else, same goes with everywhere else. English is a standard language that transcends small cultures, so it can’t perfectly match one populations phonetics, look at the differences between regional German dialects and standard German that’s spoken throughout Germany as a lingua franca.
Well said, Imagine we start spelling "what" as "wat" while there are still people pronouncing the H. or even worse all the mergers that would create, to wine, or some wine? or perhaps we start spelling them both as "wain" "wain" then how will we spell the original "wain" ? lmao, terrible ideas of people who totally did not think it over.
English kinda does have language regulatory bodies (or "language academies" as I prefer to call them) like French. Oxford for British English, Marian-Webster for American English and Macquarie for Australian English.
@@baneofbanes Yes or else we would have ended up with the same idiots in France who decided to drop half of the Ss out of words and leave markers on where you left them, geniuses. "estep = etep" "estate = etat" "Hospital = Hopital" and they only did all of this in the 18th century, insanity.
If spelling and prnonounciation distance themselves further, could it be argued that english spelling is becomping hieroglyphics like thing in some point, where only expert scribed can write it properly?
In the case of Czar, I’m very partial to the Cz spelling because it emphasizes the etymology as it more closely resemble Caesar than Tsar does, but does a better job of fitting into English phonetically than Csar
I wish English would reflect German or Dutch and other languages with special characters as English should have them to begin with. It would us learn from each other and strengthen Germanic roots. Honestly more Germanic the better for English imo, though the Anglish movement is a bit much sometimes.
English is almost logographic. You need to remember the spelling of every spoken word seperately and need to remember the pronunciation of every written word seperately. Really, anglophones, you should give us L2-learners some more credit and stop whining about your Spanish classes ;)
I like it the way it is. It's part of what makes English special. There are some changes I'd make.That would be to formalize contractions and phrasal Verbs and make them mandatory.
Afrikaans is easier to learn than Dutch. Afrikaans is the phonetic version of the Dutch language. It is also called the Dutch baby language, because it is written very simply, clearly, and phonetically. In the same case in Bahasa Indonesia, thousands of Dutch loanwords have undergone a spelling change and the 'Dutch' loanwords is spelled phonetically.
Great video Hilbert, but we would have appreciated that you showed some of those words at the screen, then it's easier to visualize! Great video nonetheless, thumbs up
It wouldn't be a big deal if people didn't insult people for making typos derailing conversations sometimes even sending threats or blocking and banning people over typos.
The way english words are spelled makes it easier for people from other languages to read and understand them but a lot harder to pronounce, if the spelling matched the pronounciation the opposite would be true
I like the way English is. It would feel incredibly artificial if a bunch of people all of a sudden dictated how English should be spelt universally, especially when you consider the sheer amount of English dialects and creoles spoken around the world so therefore would most likely get ignored.
If every dialect started writing the way the spoke it could have pretty big affects. Sure you have your standard English, but the language is global belongs to the countries that speak it as a main language. Who knows what would happen if every country ignored each other and wrote in their own English, maybe the language could even split apart given years and years and become like the new Latin, a father of many related tongues. Or maybe not, who knows
@@fizziz_1035 Dude my guy that is literally what happens to languages all around the world. the only people that do not end up as divided languages are: languages with educated people, with one main spelling system. so for example I speak Turkish right, if I say I talk in my Language I would say :Konushyom: yet others say konshyrm, and the correct is konshuyorum. everyone starts spelling on his own and yeah we are screwed, new languages will eventually spring up because there is nothing holding them together. What we can do is literally reverse this process by not giving legitimacy to dialects then eventually languages. Italian and Spanish should not be recognized on any state-level, and instead replaced with Latin.
let's just bring back all the old english letters plus a couple new ones, have dotted c for ch, perhaps a new dotted s and z for sh and zh or j and we bring back ash eth and thorn, and for vowel quality we could have single and double vowels for example; cheese > ċiiz, bite > bait, bait > beit, bit > bit, beat > biit. moon > muun, London > Lundun, Manchester > Mænċester, United states of America > Iuunaited steits uf Ameriica, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland > Iuunaited Kingdum uf Greit Britun ænd Norðern Airlænd. It has some problems but we could work it out.
For a language that's pronounced 1:1 as it's spelled, look no futher, its Finnish. We change our words as does any other culture, but we keep the spelling matching the pronounciation, every century. That's one reason it's a bit awkward to read a hunderd-year old book in Finnish. We don't have many older than that, thanks to our colonial masters in Sweden and Russia.
How would I reform English spelling? I think it would be better to reform the whole language along with the spelling, and I'd follow the Icelandic model for that: Late West Saxon spelling, Late West Saxon morphology, cut out the French and in its place resurrect perfectly fine Old English words that didn't make it.
Greetings--long time listener, first time caller. I was just wondering, given how educational your program is, why don't you write more names and unfamiliar terms on the screen? I'm sure many of your viewers are not fluent in the futharks and may be curious to know how one would draw a thorn or win. Thanks for all your hard work--I'm a big fan of the program. Call me! Cheers
Serbo-Croatian (or Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and Montenegrin, depending how you look at it) have quite a nice characteristic where every sound has it's own letter, and it is literally spelled the way it's written and the other way around.
I agree with you. It's a window into undeniable history. It's not that hard if you try. I think it's most expressive when used intelligently ... like the way Stephen Frye speaks. Shakespearean actors track the changes for realism and understanding of the text. I could go on. 😆
All I would change is bringing back eth and thorn because I like how they look. I wouldn't mind a couple symbols for Ch and Sh too. 30 is a nice round number of letters.
I like the idea of reintroducing thorn but I am still not accustomed to how it looks when used casually, so I usually use it in abbreviations only (e.g. wþt for without, mþs for months, ꝥ for that, and so on)
Not at all. It’s influence from various other Germanic languages as well as some Romance languages. As well as keeping the spelling for sounds that are no longer used. Example is the gh in Night.
@@someguy9293 I wouldn’t say it’s broken. Definitely not anywhere near some other languages. English is just not phonetically written like a lot of other languages today. But there is a reason why things are spelled the way they are. The “gh” in words like “Night” and “Light” used to make its own sound. When you study both old English and Middle English, modern English makes a lot more sense. But Shakespeare had very little to do with why English is the way it is now. You can thank the Scandinavians and Normans as to why it is the way it is now.
As a Spanish speaker, I think English should have its own regulatory body just like Spanish. It doesn't have to do dramatical changes, however, it should promote the current form for now and to unify english speaker.
One reason why English has never had a major spelling reform, aside from not having a central authority to do so, is that English (as far as I can tell) is the language with the highest number of accents and dialects of any language in the world. This leads to the problem: whose pronunciation becomes the standard spelling? Phonetically spelling London English would be very different from phonetically spelling Louisiana Cajun English or New York English or Boston English or Canadian English or Australian English or Scottish English etc.. No matter how you decide to change the spelling of a word there is almost certainly someone who says that word a very different way.
Hey Hilbert I noticed that around 1:43 you actually mispronounce one of these trickily spelled words. You say "Though it had already been there" but pronounce though as thou and not tho 😂. Though it was funny it happens while you explain this.
Hey Hilbert would you take a look at the assassin's creed trailers for the curse of the druids and the siege of Paris, I'd like to see you critique the accuracy
We could standardised spelling, or switch to phonetic alphabet, but some people say 'accents exist so it can't be perfect' so we don't, but it seems like a really stupid reason not to to me.
You could standardize consonants to a certain extent. However, what would you do with glottal stop "T" in some accents, or rhotic vs non-rhotic? butter-ba:a? Too late to change the spellings of vowel sounds; there are too many variations and there would be no consensus. Spelling is still going through changes, though. "Chat English" and common 'mistakes' like "I would of done it" may end up becoming the norm over time. Who knows? Languages almost have a life of their own and it is impossible to predict what the fyuchr houldz.
@@bubbletea695 Ok, wise guy. I didn't take the time to copy and paste the phonetic script. But I was talking about the glottal stop used by many British people. And it isn't /u/ btw, it's /ˈbʌtə/. I used "a" because it's closer in sound to /ʌ/ than /u/. No one says "booter" except people who are learning English as a foreign language. So, stick that in your paip n smoukit.
You're slightly wrong about the ch in words derived from Greek. Cholesterol in Greek is χοληστερόλη. Now, modern pronunciation of Χχ (Chi) is similar to the Scots word loch, but the ancient one would be an aspirated k. The thing is that all of the Greek words that ended up in a western language had to do so through Latin, even if the loan word was borrowed directly from Greek, it had to be Latinised first. The Latin language does not uses the letter Kk so Greek words like κυκλῶν would be transcribed as cyclone and words like χοληστερόλη as cholesterol.
If ever there was a spelling reform it would probably end up like Norwegian where there are two official ways of writing. Or the half-hearted attempts to convert to metric. Might as well keep it the way it is🤪
Arabic is spelled exactly how it is to be read, except for the ending of a past plural masculine conjugated verb that they add an extra alef that is not pronounced. From my own experience French is also out of place concerning the mater of silent consonants, there are useless combinations of vowels that are pronounced as a single one, otherwise french vowels are constant.
I like to let people read "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité. First part: "Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer."
Great video, but would be way better if you SHOWED symbols and text examples that you're talking about more instead of using lazy static "Old English" text.
I have a video idea for you: hadjememaar, the homeless man from Amsterdam who was elected to the munincipality for an anarchist anti-establishment party in the 1920s. Important policy plans of the Rapaille party were cheap jenever and opening the Vondelpark to hunting and fishing.
I don't think that not having a governing body has anything to do with English being spoken in many countries. In fact, Spanish is spoken in a lot more countries than English and it has a governing body, not that I think one is needed... I like English the way it's spelt tbh. There's something called orthoepic which is the ability to associate the sounds of words to their spellings. I've always been good at that. 😊
I would change: Spell the words one, two, four and eight like they sound. So new English language learners won't get scared off by the first words they learn.
8:20 "The ch in cholesterol is a kh like it was written in Greek" since when? The original word is "χοληστερόλη" written with a "χ" and it's pronounced as if the h in "Hadrian". Bro I love your videos but how can you screw up when it comes to Greek but do fine in every other language, that's a gift XD.
I'd be a bit more humble when talking about stuff I don't know. There is a millenia long history of Greek language evolution and pronunciation. English changed a lot in just a thousand years, right? Greek was not stagnant either.
Sometimes I spell a word so badly to the point where autocorrect doesn’t even know what I’m trying to say, and that just makes me feel empty inside.
I’ve done that too, makes me feel stupid.
That’s me anytime I try to spell words like “Entrepreneur”
EXACTLY.
#relateable
Yea that is so annoying i have to google the word and sometimes that wont work too and then i write a disclaimer that i don't know how the spell the word and i have already wasted 10 minutes trying to figure it out and people still insult me because i did not spell it right.
I realized how crazy the English language is, when in high school, I took German (I’m an American). How simple it was to read, write and pronounce German once you knew the rules.
I speak four languages and german isn't even the easiest one to write in. Double letters, ä-e and the letter h occasionally not being read is a weird thing. And, as a language with latin script, it borrowed some english or french words, so for example you have to read skateboard like in english and as a person who knows zero french I struggle to understand how the french borrowings should behave. But the easiest language to read that I know is ukrainian. It's impossible to borrow some word from non-cyrilic language, without writing each sound from it down in accordance to the laws of the language. The only problems that can ever occur are laughable - double letters (often you can understand where they are by using logic) and that -ться (t's'a) at the end of the verb is always written this way (cause when someone speaks slowly, he can even pronounce all of the sounds, but usually sounds t's' make something similar to german z sound, but with a ' added to it.
Compound German words are a work of art. A single mile-long word having a sentence worth of meaning. Beautiful.
@@Ciborium Those mile-long compound words are quite rare works of art in regular german.
Most common german compound words consist of only two or three compounds. Finding one with four or five is already quite a challenge.
@@Ciborium What's your favorite? I have a few, eg:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
German has a lot of randomness too but its better than English or French the one thing i like about English that that unlike most languages it does not have accents and other weird symbols on the pc its annoying because you need to get another keyboard layout.
I realized that English spelling was quite weird when I found out about spelling bees.
There are literal competitions on who can spells words better
I know right. Do one latviešu language and everyone will get 100% right.
In Polish, spelling competitions are also common but for a different reason. There's only one way to pronounce the same letter combination but there are multiple letter combinations you can potentially use to write down the same sounds. So if you know how to write a word, you'll 100% know how to pronounce it, but if you only know how to pronounce a word, you'll not always be able to guess how to spell it.
For example, "rz" and "ż" make identical sounds, "ó" and "u" make identical sounds, "ch" and "h" make identical sounds. These used to be different sounds in the past but they merged while spelling has remained the same.
@@And-lj5gb The polish and the russijans are the only 2 eastern europians who need writing reform. (Or speaking reform if thats what you prefer)
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 No, Russians don't need any major spelling reform. While there are some minor things that could be changed for the better (like always spelling the hard [e] sound through "э" after consonants or always spelling ё), overall modern Russian spelling is near perfect and as phonetic as it could possibly be
Why? Because there's a very good reason why there are multiple ways to spell the same sound in Russian. For instance even through the Russian adjective "холодный" (kolodnyi) is pronounced [halodnyj] with the [a] sound in the first syllable it can't just be spelled as "халодный" (khalidnyi) because otherwise it would lose any connection to the noun "the cold" that is spelled as "холод" (kholod) and pronounced with the [o] sound in it.
There are plenty of other examples like this in Russian
@@thedamntrain I didnt say major I just sayed writing reform.
холодный = holodnij
холод = holod
Why write что (čto) and say што (što)? Why write Витебск (Vitebsk) and say Бицебск (Vicebsk)? The belarussijans have changed bough of these.
English is my first language but it took some time to learn spelling as a child, i lived in spain and spanish spelling made more sense.
That was informative. I'm an American who speaks English natively and studied French in high school. Quite frankly, without knowing that spelling is much easier in almost all other languages, a native English speaker wouldn't realize that their language is difficult. However, the same history that gives English its quirky spelling also gives it a rich vocabulary which has been used to great extent in poetry and fiction. I don't think there is another language as richly endowed as English so I feel the trade-off is well worth it. While the rules are not simple like other languages, there are nonetheless rules to follow. I think most English speakers see the language as a bit fluid. We're able to create new words as needed which is very convenient. So don't judge English only in terms of its spelling.
English should be judged on the spelling due to how badly written it is.
@@MaoRatto Why don't we begin eliminating silent and unnecessary letters? For example: dou(b)t, lam(b), thr(o)u(gh), nativ(e), lov(e), (s)cience, a(t)ta(c)k, pe(a)ce, i(s)land, g(h)ost, rei(g)n, c(h)aos, stuf(f), wel(l), le(a)rn, etc. We also can change ph for f in telephone, y for i in symbol, and ch for k in chemistry.
You can have a rich vocabulary with a more straightforward script. Many languages already do. The actual benefits of the English spelling system for literature are the potency for puns.
Minor correction: the 'ch' spelling in English is actually from those french scribes. The sound represented by 'ch' deaffricated later, after which point we loaned the word 'chef'.
EDIT: more corrections, you mentioned the word 'chattel', which specifically had to be a later loanword as well because Norman French pronounced and spelled this word with simplt . We did, however, loan the Norman equivalent, catel, into English as 'cattle'.
I love how much old norse influenced english, and how easy it is to see in english and danish. 'Knife' - 'kniv'. 'Goose' - 'gås', etc.
Goose isn't from Old Norse, it's from Old English. Knife could possibly be from Old Norse, but given that the word 'cnif' existed in Old English I think it's more likely that it simply changed spelling in the same way as the word 'cniht' became 'knight'.
Yes, I used to also be a retard that said: "why dont we zbell how we zay tings" until I saw the beautiful history in them, and then realised literally all the other European spellings are badly inferior to English's.
Brilliant - I really like your 'language' videos. I'm a Duolingo freak, currently doing about 8 modules, including Norwegian, Danish, Swedish, Ukrainian and Russian. I love discovering and noticing all the links, patterns and similarities between the various languages, and finding the connections. A pity I wasn't this enthusiastic about languages when I was at school :)
Ah yes, Duolingo. At least that app helped me out sometimes aside from the memes.
@@deplatformedcrowprinceluna6339 Thank you for commenting - in the words of Private Crawford in Platoon, "Think positive, dude..."
@@neilcook4686
**nods** noted.
English: look how strange some spelling in my language
French: hold my wine
French isn't that dreadful!!!
well saying Dutch is spelled "exactly like it's pronounced" is a bit misleiding. If you know all the rules and all the regular exception, you'll be able to spell most of the words but there are plenty of words that are irregular, loan words can or can not be pronouced or spelled like the original language, but not always. And you just have to learn when its ei or ij or if it's ou or au. If learn Northern Dutch you might struggle with g and ch. Also spelling can change based on the gramar (the dreaded DT rules for instance),...
Yeah it's more regular than English or French but spelling is not as regular as Italian or Finnish.
Exactly
Yea i am a native Dutch speaker but i still mess it up as badly as English and foreigners wont even know about a lot of sounds like the oe so it will make no sense to them.
I am Australian and living in Den Haag and learning dutch spelling is still WAY WAY Waaaaaay easier than learning English as a kid at school. I have often wondered if that's why the kids are super relaxed and the teachers more "chill" here about learning to read. There doesn't seem to be any rush- they pick it up. You don't have to teach as intensively with memorisation, the rules are so simple in the beginning. (Of course you are very correct -it would get more tricky at a higher level 🙏) At school in English countries there is a HUGE problem with learning how to read and it is common for children to struggle for years or even get missed and in my parents day, not unusual to finish high school not being able to read. Anyway- i do find it amusing when dutch people tell me how hard dutch is (it's like- have you studied German or french!?). Love the Netherlands xxxx
Try saying: 'koeieuier'
kinderstraatfeestvoorbereidingswerkzaamhedenadministratiekantoormeubelmakersvakbondvoorzitter
Spanish, Italian, Old Norse:
Why can't you be normal?
English:
*authistic screech*
Because it’s a hybrid of a bunch of different languages. Also why it’s rules are inconsistent and don’t make sense.
English is my first language and even I find it confusing at times.
"introduced by Irish & continental monks"
*Welsh monks*
Are we a joke to you?
yes xD
Even as a native English speaker many times i have looked at words like chameleon and wondered why it was spelled like that. I find it quite interesting to learn a bit more about its origins thank you for another great video.
We had an old sign here in Topeka Kansas that it was a sign for the expo center but was spelt centre so I guess that’s kinda the same!
This is the EXACT question my brain was thinking today itself just like a few hours ago 😂
Another excellent lesson. Much of it I know, some new. I'm very interested in language development, written and pronunciation. Subscribed. Thank you!
When I was learning English in my 9'th school year I very soon figured it out that I needed to learn every ****ing English word twice: How it is pronounced and how it is written. So I added the pronounciation to every word I had in my textbook, as I heard it spoken by my teacher. I wrote it down just like it was a word in Finnish. like "learning" - "löörning", "year" - "jier" and so on. Not perfect, but better than "Rally English"
Guess it's a common feature of any English-learning pupil in the world, once I bought a secondhand school book, and it was almost completely sound-dubbed in pencil handwriting 😄
Hello Hilbert. Are you saying that English spelling is double Dutch to Frisians?
Imagine the confusion of growing up speaking Yorkshire dialect, then having to change pronunciation and whole words at school, in an inner city area with kids whose parents were mostly either refugees from WW2 Europe or immigrants from the Commonwealth.
When we started learning French aged nine, it was like listening to a scene from Ripping Yarns, featuring Eric Olthwaite's dad, which I keep recommending in comments on other channels. Since you expressed an interest in football history recently, I recommend also watching Golden Gordon, that follows on from it, if you watch carefully. For anyone familiar with the latter, who cares how you spell shorts?! Eight one to English as it is (one against being New World adopted misspelling).
No official rules is the way the UK tends to try to do things. It is very adaptable and the sight of officials who set everything in standard form is a big reason many UK folk feel at odds with centralised (centralized) ideas in some other European traditions.
I think part of this is down to the UK not being one country and the fact that the English were one of the peoples that made up Scotland, seeking protection of the Scottish king from Danelaw Vikings, who settled my local area. Scots is a form of English not as influenced by Norman and not from what became England. Many Scots words came into British and American English, as you have previously said.
Anyone fancy a Ye Olde Speling Kontest?
It feels like there are a lot of missing graphics from this video, usually you show everything you're describing in tables and we're able to cross reference the different terms and meanings in their respective languages.
same
French might even be a worse nightmare
For everyone advocating a change to English orthography. Remember English has 44 phonemes (24 consonants and 20 vowels) and the alphabet has 26 letters. You can't just add Thorn and Eth back and add a cedilla to S and C and call it a day.
Also what gets me, is that everyone pronounces English so so differently. Like, who is gonna choose which pronunciation becomes the 'right' one. Here in the UK you'd have different spelling in every town. Imagine someone learning to spell in a Yorkshire accent trying to read the English written in a new Zealand accent, or Indian English accent. Seems like it would actually be worse than what we have.
@@orangew3988 doesn't have to be perfect. Just coherent.
Well we can
In French, we have many way of spelling for the same sound, in english, they have the same spelling used for many sound.
In English, we have both: Homophones and homographs
We also have homonyms: The same word used for many different concepts (e.g. 'set')
Having just the names for the periods of English on screen while talking it podcast style does make it seem like a not so great introduction to the concept. (Especially when the intro suggests that the potential viewer could still be learning English)
I have a layman understanding of this topic, for example, for the Old English segment:
I know what thorn, wynn, looked like, but if someone who's completely new to the topic, having these words just mentioned with no visual may seem confusing, and without enough context, it is then mentioned that these letters are gone in Middle English.
Showing the subject on screen akin to the "Old English and Old Norse" segment as well as the "Germanic, Romance and Greek" segment would seem to be better?
Of course, I'm probably misunderstanding the intention of the earlier segments.
was just 3 minutes into the video and this is exactly what i wanted to comment
i may want to add that besides the educational aspect, it would be way more visually interesting
listening is fun but on an audio-visual platform, i feel severely ripped from normal watching if there is nothing to look at, the same way i would be if a podcast may say i have to view a picture
Couldn’t agree more, a rather disappointing video.
I like it the way it is. As you say one can learn much of the complex history of the language from the spellings, also with names and place-names. It does take a little learning or looking up. 😊
Some parallels with Urdu, which is an Indo Aryan language with much Arabic and Persian influences used in a similar manner to French loans in English. Sometimes a local word and a loanword are used together to amplify the meaning, like "subah sawera" literally "morning morning" (so next time a western PoC makes fun of phrases like chai tea or naan bread, please remind them this lol)
Also regarding spelling, similar stuff with Urdu. A lot of Arabic words we pronounce completely differently but keep the same original spelling. It makes it interesting as a historian of language and whatnot but annoying for new learners hahah.
Urdu comes from exactly the sort of history that English does: a local language hoarding words & grammatical forms from the language of foreign rulers. Their reasons for doing that are also similar: it sounds more high class within that social context. Plenty of English aristocrats in later periods were specifically against spelling reforms for precisely the reason that it was easier to distinguish between the low brow & the high brow by the way the pronounced words once literacy became more widespread & fashion became more accessible from factories & imports.
Because of one man. William the Conqueror. His norman ass fucked it up
I have an unrelenting personal grievance against whoever named Worcestershire.
@The Philosoraptor or Leicester
It used to be pronounced that way, but over time people simplified it until we got to the way it's said today
Sounds more like polish.
If you trace Worcestershire's etymology back to its beginning, it comes from the Anglo-Saxon "Weogoran ceaster", which translates literally to the Camp of the Weogoran. Ceaster is the (Old) Anglicized form of the Latin word "castra" (camp), and Weogoran refers to an ancient Breton tribe that lived in the region before the Romans invaded England in 43 AD.
I’m Brazilian, but I love the English language 🏴 and its unique spelling system
To you does it sound like a Germanic or a Romance language?
@@camulodunon English sounds rather Germanic to my ears specially because it’s a time stressed language
I like how you go into the history of English, I’ve watched so many critiques of English that always boil down to “look at how weird this is, this is confusing and we should change it.” The problem with a featural alphabet like Korean Hangul or just an alphabet that matches phonemes is that 1) it’d be a much longer alphabet and 2) English is a language spoken by hundreds of millions of people all of whom have their own pronunciations. Sure, we could make a script to perfectly match the phonetics of someone in New York, but that alphabet will be just as confusing if not more for everyone else, same goes with everywhere else. English is a standard language that transcends small cultures, so it can’t perfectly match one populations phonetics, look at the differences between regional German dialects and standard German that’s spoken throughout Germany as a lingua franca.
Exactly! One cannot devise a system of truly phonetic spelling for a language with such huge variations in pronunciation.
Well said, Imagine we start spelling "what" as "wat" while there are still people pronouncing the H.
or even worse all the mergers that would create, to wine, or some wine? or perhaps we start spelling them both as "wain" "wain" then how will we spell the original "wain" ?
lmao, terrible ideas of people who totally did not think it over.
I really like the phonetic turn this channel has done - really interesting!
I feel like English needs to add districts, bring back þ,ð,æ. We need accent marks. I also believe that we need to bring back more Germanic words.
Faegen, du bring it baec den, Ic would luf to see hwaet of dis becomest.
Because Normans. That’s how I always learned it.
As a Spanish speaker, I like how English is spelled because of the similarities with my language, which makes it easier to learn.
Mexico man
I always saw them as very different, as Spanish has a more phonetic type of spelling, though the vocabulary is very similar
English kinda does have language regulatory bodies (or "language academies" as I prefer to call them) like French.
Oxford for British English, Marian-Webster for American English and Macquarie for Australian English.
No, there is no regulatory body for English.
@@keiths81ca except there is, it’s just on the national level and varies between the Anglophone nations.
@@baneofbanes Yes or else we would have ended up with the same idiots in France who decided to drop half of the Ss out of words and leave markers on where you left them, geniuses.
"estep = etep"
"estate = etat"
"Hospital = Hopital"
and they only did all of this in the 18th century, insanity.
I love English for this reason, Germanic+Romance make a wonderful language
If spelling and prnonounciation distance themselves further, could it be argued that english spelling is becomping hieroglyphics like thing in some point, where only expert scribed can write it properly?
In the case of Czar, I’m very partial to the Cz spelling because it emphasizes the etymology as it more closely resemble Caesar than Tsar does, but does a better job of fitting into English phonetically than Csar
+it looks better
Problem is, in Polish, cz represents a ch sound, so they might pronounce it as 'char'
@@KabalFromMK9 mhmm that’s true but I meant within English it would be better, not as some international standard spelling.
I wish English would reflect German or Dutch and other languages with special characters as English should have them to begin with. It would us learn from each other and strengthen Germanic roots. Honestly more Germanic the better for English imo, though the Anglish movement is a bit much sometimes.
English is almost logographic. You need to remember the spelling of every spoken word seperately and need to remember the pronunciation of every written word seperately. Really, anglophones, you should give us L2-learners some more credit and stop whining about your Spanish classes ;)
Id create new letters specifically for "th" "sh" and "ch"
Bring back þ
I like it the way it is. It's part of what makes English special. There are some changes I'd make.That would be to formalize contractions and phrasal Verbs and make them mandatory.
We use some of these "lost letters" in Scandinavia and Iceland
As someone with dyslexia I of the opinion that reforms to English spelling are badly needed.
Afrikaans is easier to learn than Dutch. Afrikaans is the phonetic version of the Dutch language. It is also called the Dutch baby language, because it is written very simply, clearly, and phonetically. In the same case in Bahasa Indonesia, thousands of Dutch loanwords have undergone a spelling change and the 'Dutch' loanwords is spelled phonetically.
Pidgeon language basically, Haitian is also easier to learn than French, or Jamaican to English...
Great video Hilbert, but we would have appreciated that you showed some of those words at the screen, then it's easier to visualize!
Great video nonetheless, thumbs up
Showers (rain) or showers (multiple people showing)
Fascinating look at the languages origins, the great vowel shift was crazy 🤪✌️
It wouldn't be a big deal if people didn't insult people for making typos derailing conversations sometimes even sending threats or blocking and banning people over typos.
There's a mouse loose about this house.
Because Norse! .. and then because Norse again, but they’ve become French in disguise.
Normans were Norse+Gaul+Frank+Roman.
to anyone who thinks English spelling is weird, don't try learning Danish.
The way english words are spelled makes it easier for people from other languages to read and understand them but a lot harder to pronounce, if the spelling matched the pronounciation the opposite would be true
Different video style from usual, but Hilbert never fails to make videos with good content.
I like the way English is. It would feel incredibly artificial if a bunch of people all of a sudden dictated how English should be spelt universally, especially when you consider the sheer amount of English dialects and creoles spoken around the world so therefore would most likely get ignored.
If every dialect started writing the way the spoke it could have pretty big affects.
Sure you have your standard English, but the language is global belongs to the countries that speak it as a main language.
Who knows what would happen if every country ignored each other and wrote in their own English, maybe the language could even split apart given years and years and become like the new Latin, a father of many related tongues.
Or maybe not, who knows
@@fizziz_1035 Dude my guy that is literally what happens to languages all around the world.
the only people that do not end up as divided languages are:
languages with educated people, with one main spelling system.
so for example I speak Turkish right, if I say I talk in my Language I would say :Konushyom:
yet others say konshyrm, and the correct is konshuyorum. everyone starts spelling on his own and yeah we are screwed, new languages will eventually spring up because there is nothing holding them together.
What we can do is literally reverse this process by not giving legitimacy to dialects then eventually languages. Italian and Spanish should not be recognized on any state-level, and instead replaced with Latin.
let's just bring back all the old english letters plus a couple new ones, have dotted c for ch, perhaps a new dotted s and z for sh and zh or j and we bring back ash eth and thorn, and for vowel quality we could have single and double vowels
for example; cheese > ċiiz, bite > bait, bait > beit, bit > bit, beat > biit.
moon > muun, London > Lundun, Manchester > Mænċester, United states of America > Iuunaited steits uf Ameriica, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland > Iuunaited Kingdum uf Greit Britun ænd Norðern Airlænd.
It has some problems but we could work it out.
For a language that's pronounced 1:1 as it's spelled, look no futher, its Finnish. We change our words as does any other culture, but we keep the spelling matching the pronounciation, every century. That's one reason it's a bit awkward to read a hunderd-year old book in Finnish. We don't have many older than that, thanks to our colonial masters in Sweden and Russia.
Suomi perkele!
How would I reform English spelling?
I think it would be better to reform the whole language along with the spelling, and I'd follow the Icelandic model for that: Late West Saxon spelling, Late West Saxon morphology, cut out the French and in its place resurrect perfectly fine Old English words that didn't make it.
Yah no that’s a bad idea, especially the cutting out the French part.
@@baneofbanes couldn't manage that even in a hundred years 😏
Greetings--long time listener, first time caller. I was just wondering, given how educational your program is, why don't you write more names and unfamiliar terms on the screen? I'm sure many of your viewers are not fluent in the futharks and may be curious to know how one would draw a thorn or win. Thanks for all your hard work--I'm a big fan of the program. Call me! Cheers
Serbo-Croatian (or Serbian, Croatian, Bosniak and Montenegrin, depending how you look at it) have quite a nice characteristic where every sound has it's own letter, and it is literally spelled the way it's written and the other way around.
I agree with you. It's a window into undeniable history.
It's not that hard if you try.
I think it's most expressive when used intelligently ... like the way Stephen Frye speaks.
Shakespearean actors track the changes for realism and understanding of the text. I could go on. 😆
All I would change is bringing back eth and thorn because I like how they look. I wouldn't mind a couple symbols for Ch and Sh too. 30 is a nice round number of letters.
I like the idea of reintroducing thorn but I am still not accustomed to how it looks when used casually, so I usually use it in abbreviations only (e.g. wþt for without, mþs for months, ꝥ for that, and so on)
Can you make a video discussing english letters that fell out of use. Our alphabet was once larger than 26 lol.
More videos on English language history please
Very interesting. Confirmed basically what I suspected about history and the language.
I want thorn þ (th) to be brought back , I just þink it's neat
The current title is: Why is English broken?
The answer is William Shakespeare.
Not at all. It’s influence from various other Germanic languages as well as some Romance languages. As well as keeping the spelling for sounds that are no longer used. Example is the gh in Night.
Old English: *Exists*
William Shakespeare: I'm about to end this man's whole career.
@@someguy9293 Shakespeare spoke Early Modern English. Old English hadn’t been spoken in 500 plus years by the time Shakespeare was around
@@Lingist081 And yet 500 years later and English is still broken.
@@someguy9293 I wouldn’t say it’s broken. Definitely not anywhere near some other languages. English is just not phonetically written like a lot of other languages today. But there is a reason why things are spelled the way they are. The “gh” in words like “Night” and “Light” used to make its own sound. When you study both old English and Middle English, modern English makes a lot more sense. But Shakespeare had very little to do with why English is the way it is now. You can thank the Scandinavians and Normans as to why it is the way it is now.
As a Spanish speaker, I think English should have its own regulatory body just like Spanish. It doesn't have to do dramatical changes, however, it should promote the current form for now and to unify english speaker.
Thing is that’s not going to work because there is standardized English, it just varies by nation.
Bring back þ and I'll be happy
One reason why English has never had a major spelling reform, aside from not having a central authority to do so, is that English (as far as I can tell) is the language with the highest number of accents and dialects of any language in the world. This leads to the problem: whose pronunciation becomes the standard spelling? Phonetically spelling London English would be very different from phonetically spelling Louisiana Cajun English or New York English or Boston English or Canadian English or Australian English or Scottish English etc.. No matter how you decide to change the spelling of a word there is almost certainly someone who says that word a very different way.
I have an easier time writing my second language, Spanish, than I have writing English. Learning another language is like a breath of fresh air.
Did you know that for 50 years ther was a despute for the spelling of ketchup should it be writen with k or c. This is mad.
Chef is French.
I don't know why I know how to spell or when I learned to read.
Really brilliant thank you ! (Can you please turn the music down a bit in your video- hard to concentrate on the words) 🙏
Hey Hilbert I noticed that around 1:43 you actually mispronounce one of these trickily spelled words. You say "Though it had already been there" but pronounce though as thou and not tho 😂. Though it was funny it happens while you explain this.
Hey Hilbert would you take a look at the assassin's creed trailers for the curse of the druids and the siege of Paris, I'd like to see you critique the accuracy
We could standardised spelling, or switch to phonetic alphabet, but some people say 'accents exist so it can't be perfect' so we don't, but it seems like a really stupid reason not to to me.
Suddenly several channels focus on language. Mostly (old) English. Inspired by each other?
My hypothesis of why the English lanquage have some weird spelling is that the Black Death killed off all the educated people who knew how to spell.
You could standardize consonants to a certain extent. However, what would you do with glottal stop "T" in some accents, or rhotic vs non-rhotic? butter-ba:a? Too late to change the spellings of vowel sounds; there are too many variations and there would be no consensus. Spelling is still going through changes, though. "Chat English" and common 'mistakes' like "I would of done it" may end up becoming the norm over time. Who knows? Languages almost have a life of their own and it is impossible to predict what the fyuchr houldz.
/butə/ not /ba:a/
@@bubbletea695 Ok, wise guy. I didn't take the time to copy and paste the phonetic script. But I was talking about the glottal stop used by many British people. And it isn't /u/ btw, it's /ˈbʌtə/. I used "a" because it's closer in sound to /ʌ/ than /u/. No one says "booter" except people who are learning English as a foreign language. So, stick that in your paip n smoukit.
@@gregoryriley9946 ok
Eth was not part of Futhorc
You're slightly wrong about the ch in words derived from Greek.
Cholesterol in Greek is χοληστερόλη.
Now, modern pronunciation of Χχ (Chi) is similar to the Scots word loch, but the ancient one would be an aspirated k.
The thing is that all of the Greek words that ended up in a western language had to do so through Latin, even if the loan word was borrowed directly from Greek, it had to be Latinised first.
The Latin language does not uses the letter Kk so Greek words like κυκλῶν would be transcribed as cyclone and words like χοληστερόλη as cholesterol.
If ever there was a spelling reform it would probably end up like Norwegian where there are two official ways of writing. Or the half-hearted attempts to convert to metric. Might as well keep it the way it is🤪
Arabic is spelled exactly how it is to be read, except for the ending of a past plural masculine conjugated verb that they add an extra alef that is not pronounced.
From my own experience French is also out of place concerning the mater of silent consonants, there are useless combinations of vowels that are pronounced as a single one, otherwise french vowels are constant.
I like it as it is, because I really don't feel like relearning my own language when it seems to work just fine for me. ;D
I like to let people read "The Chaos" by Gerard Nolst Trenité.
First part:
"Dearest creature in creation,
Study English pronunciation.
I will teach you in my verse
Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.
I will keep you, Suzy, busy,
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer."
Great video, but would be way better if you SHOWED symbols and text examples that you're talking about more instead of using lazy static "Old English" text.
I have a video idea for you: hadjememaar, the homeless man from Amsterdam who was elected to the munincipality for an anarchist anti-establishment party in the 1920s. Important policy plans of the Rapaille party were cheap jenever and opening the Vondelpark to hunting and fishing.
Excellent video
Bro I’ve always spelled phonetically I just gave up. I just use speech to text.
Are you from Sweden? Jag såg att du gjorde en video med koi fish
I don't think that not having a governing body has anything to do with English being spoken in many countries. In fact, Spanish is spoken in a lot more countries than English and it has a governing body, not that I think one is needed...
I like English the way it's spelt tbh. There's something called orthoepic which is the ability to associate the sounds of words to their spellings. I've always been good at that. 😊
Why no animations on the screen? Just audio? Why change your goood format to this
Çîs (Ç=Ch, Î= double i).
I would change: Spell the words one, two, four and eight like they sound. So new English language learners won't get scared off by the first words they learn.
4:04 both came from Latin tho
8:20 "The ch in cholesterol is a kh like it was written in Greek" since when? The original word is "χοληστερόλη" written with a "χ" and it's pronounced as if the h in "Hadrian". Bro I love your videos but how can you screw up when it comes to Greek but do fine in every other language, that's a gift XD.
I'd be a bit more humble when talking about stuff I don't know. There is a millenia long history of Greek language evolution and pronunciation. English changed a lot in just a thousand years, right? Greek was not stagnant either.
And that letter was *actually pronounced* like ch, as in, a literal c+h sound, an aspirated /k/, but then there's a sound shift that turns it into /x/
I'm happy as long as the sign of Ð is rising in the air.