To help some confused commenters - the map isn't showing language relatedness, only the number of shared features. Perhaps I should've taken a minute to explain isopleths and isoglosses? Are "language families" just an easier concept for us than "areal" linguistics? Thanks for thinking about this and commenting!
I was wondering why English came up with the Slavic languages, but then noticed that you had actually included a key. I don't think you needed to explicitly mention it - the information was there and it became clear what you were doing once you reached 'Baltic'. It was a bit odd naming language families like 'Germanic', only for French to pop up, and then saying 'Romance' and including Dutch. I think most people are familiar with the main language families (at least people who watch your channel!), but wouldn't necessarily have been familiar with isopleths (I hadn't actually thought of isopleths being related to linguistics before - interesting!). Six minutes is a nice length for a video, so rather than explaining it perhaps you could have included the isopleths and/or arrows on the map showing (rather than telling) the feature count contours? Anyway, excellent video as always. Do you dare venture further into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis realm?
I was able to follow that. The only thing I'd be curious about is how these features compare to non-European Indo-European languages. Would they have been red on the map?
So explain Belgium. The north speaks Dutch and the South speaks French. I think you have to make a new version of this video. I 'm a native speaker of Dutch, and Dutch and Italian are very different while Dutch and German are very Similar. This video is very confusing.
language families are the superior method of categorization because it includes origins and is more based around the "tradition" areal linguistics will be less and less pertinent as communication between languages increases we will share more and more concepts an example: I'd say most "Hispanic" romance speakers (so Português, Gallego, Castellano, Catalano, etc.), and even a lot of Western Germanic speakers, most of them would know the concept of a "taifa", and would've conceptualized it similarly to how Arabs, Bedouins, Libyanites, Vandals, etc would have in Umayyadi Iberia but this is disparate from the concept of taifa in the middle east, where in Iberia it's conceptualized to be like a regnum, a petty kingdom, a dutchy or even county in most of the middle east taifa tends to be conceptually more like a "group". both are similar to the word "res", and both mean thing, but how they are conceptualized are different and while this might seem like it's a point in favor of areal linguistics initially, that is only true temporarily. the internet is going to bring both concepts ot both area, one will either erase the other or people will just know the two different concept stogether, and then breaking it up by area will be irrelevant
Language families vs areal contact isn't an either-or choice though. Areal features/Sprachbünde aren't even a method of categorisation as such but simply refer to a phenomenon of languages in close contaxt adopting not just vocabulary but similar syntactical, morphological (suffixed definite articles in the Balkans) and phonological (e.g. retroflexes in the Indosphere, tonal languages in Southeast Asia) features. You find something similar in the study of language families as well, neither the tree nor the wave model is wholly satisfactory on its own but they work really well when used to complement each other. How the internet does and will influence language evolution is kind of a different subject that doesn't invalidate the areal model on a historical basis.
Well you're very proficient nevertheless. Would you like to join our Celtic language Discord server? We've got all the Celtic people's on there (Even revived Gaulish I'm pretty sure). Link: discord.gg/SvAfTfU
Reflexive pronouns are like Sig in Swedish or Sin in Esperanto right? I don't speak Spanish and my German is still in progress so, I didn't quite grasp the oneself≠oneself at 4:15 .
I find this interesting because I think of the European/Asian divide as being a purely social construct. Yet, according to this video, linguists still class languages as being "European". But don't European languages have similarities with languages in Asia? Is the European/Asian divide useful in the study of linguistics?
Sisi Love He said slavic but look at what the map is meant to represent.Also if you went by what he said then greek and english would be slavic too since those showed up at the same time when he said slavic.
I would posit that the idiom was actually borrowed from others, and not natively developed. Sort of like how pineapple is "ananas" or some variant of in almost the entire rest of the world - but some of these places have never had pineapples. So, the crocodile tear idiom likely came from Latin, and was spread throughout Europe until Mongolians used the phrase too - although many have never even seen a crocodile before.
Pretty sure the animal was well known across Europe all the way back to ancient times. It is one of the most ferocious beasts of the earth. I wouldn't be surprised if the phrase 'crocodile tears' to label a faker developed independently, even though knowledge of the beast itself was shared knowledge. It is just an effective description.
i can confidently say the haystack one (direct word for word translation with the same meaning) is limited to neither europe, nor european languages. and was used by my grand grandparents.
And if you had watched the video you'd seen that French ticks just as many boxes and that the area is called Charlemagne area - aka the area where the Franks (a Germanic tribe) and its empire had significant influence, so it only makes sense scientifically
@@StrawberryLegacy The Empire wasn't influencial linguistically, given that France and Germany speak languages barely related with their common ancestor being indo-european. The Charlemagne Area seems to just be a big coincidence in my opinion.
It's really interesting that Hungarian fits with the Euroversals when it's in a different family, but the Celtic Languages don't when they're from the same language family.
Well I don't know about the Celtic languages but Hungary's been surrounded by European nations for over a millenium, and has had a lot of history with them.
MrTwarner It's most likely that the Celts were the first migrators into western europe, mainly France britan and spain, and had extensive contact with a mostly extinct lagnuage group, the last remnant of which is basque, this nearly dead group once was spoken throughout western europe, pre-celts, the Celts invaded western European, and simply merged somewhat with this nearly extinct family of languages and thusly is the odd man out. meanwhile Hungarian, and thusly magyar has been around Indo European languages possibly since the first Indo Europeans began to migrate, the magyars then invaded eastern Europe, and simply merged with European languages to form hungarian
I have a theory, borrowed from "Stara Baśń"! People from Germanic tribes interacted with Slavs for a very long time. When Slavs spread around Europe and stopped using protoslavic their languages were still very similar and they still understood each other. So when some merchants from Germany arrived to Polanie's lands, they (Polanie) didn't understand what they were talking about - therefore assuming they were "niezrozumiali" and "niemi".
There is some explanation in Old Czech rumors. When Slavs met one another they understand the language as well as their own. But when they met German, they wouldn't speak to them. Up that day Slavs tought everyone speak like them so one who doesn't must be mute. Later they found out there are multiple languages, but because they met German first, the name stayed.
Just asking, Hungarian also is a language of this group, right? They are quite interesting, but a pain to learn for the ones used to speak Indo-European languages.
@@spd7693 Yes, and Finno-Ugric seems today to be a distributed group; if you want to play more certain I think then I should have used the term Uralic. But yes, Hungarian is also seen as part of Finno-Ugric and so also part of Uralic language family, even though I do know that there is in modern Hungary at least some, maybe small and loud, group of people that do not see Hungary as Finno-Ugric/Ugric language. Apparently, some ultra-nationalists that do not see Ugric history good enough for them. Hungary is not very close to Finnish, but the "sound" and the phase of talk sounds quite similar. Example Estonian on the other hand is partly mutually intelligible with Finnish. I do not know "how hard" is learning Finnish for indo-European speakers; maybe just compared to other Indo-European languages. Like I do see that speaking one Germanic language helps quite much-learning others. I speak Swedish(not strong) and English and have studiet litte german, but the latter was so long time ago and have not used it at all, that I think I would be useless in German. English is still hard for me with all it´s silent letters. We in Finnish do not have those. "Finno-Ugric (/ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːɡrɪk/ or /ˌfɪnoʊˈuːɡrɪk/; Fenno-Ugric)[1] or Finno-Ugrian (Fenno-Ugrian), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by some contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio as inaccurate and misleading.[2][3] The three most-spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric, although linguistic roots common to both branches of the traditional Finno-Ugric language tree (Finno-Permic and Ugric) are distant. The term Finno-Ugric, which originally referred to the entire family, is sometimes used as a synonym for the term Uralic, which includes the Samoyedic languages,[4] as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries." en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages
@@5000Kone Aijaa! Miksköhän kun sekin on germaaninenkieli(vai muistanko väärin :D) ja niillä on oma aksentti niin ei pitäis olla kielen puolesta hirveesti mitään samaa🤔
@@5000Kone sorry, but the theory that Hungarian doesn't belong to its allocated language group has nothing to do with 'nationslist'. It also has nothing to do with that this theory is not good enough. That's the narrative of the (all mighty) MTA because noone is allowed to research anything or suggest any theory that goes against what they have 'carved in stone'.
When I went to my friend’s home village in Oaxaca, Mexico I noticed that when they’d speak in Zapotec they would say the days of the week in Spanish. My friend said before the Spanish they would just say something like “when the sun is this high” also certain words from spanish would transform into their language by adding a “sh” sound at the end. Like “concreto” becomes “concresh” And this has been your linguistics porn for the day
@@theunicorn1167 But not all mexicans speak mexican spanish. Multiple mayan languages are still spoken fot example. According to the research I just did, Zapotec is it's own language family and is still spoken in mexico, so the OP's point holds. His friend wasn't speaking spanish, he was speakIng a Zapotec language with spanish loanwords in it. Just like English isn't spanish because it has the words "no" and "tortilla" in it and Japanese isn't portuguese because iT uses "pan" to mean bread.
I mean, it's a pretty established linguistic fact that the colonizers' language will affect the languages of the colonized at least to a small degree. Especially if the culture of the colonized is the target of systemic destruction, i.e. like the indigenous peoples of the Americas by the European colonizers.
Y'know that's kinda similar to how the US uses A.M. and P.M. while talking about the time but continental Europe doesn't and instead will just figure out which it is by using context or by saying things like "6 in the morning". The funny thing about this is that both sides thinks the way the other one does it is confusing, Americans don't understand how you can tell what time you're talking about if you don't have a clear word for which bit it is while Europeans think that AM and PM are very confusing and hard to figure out terms. The secret of course is that Europeans actually think about time on a 24 hour clock and then just translate it to a 12 hour clock in speech so when a European says "6 after work" they think 18:00. But it's interesting because even though we are talking about people literally speaking the same language (English) there is still a really big difference in how people talk about things.
-you might be European if your language has words for "a" and "the" - *aggressively sips tea in Polish* Articles. Pfft! More like Artican'ts am I right...
He didn't say that, he just named distinct languages. And on the map, the languages weren't coloured based on family, but based on the number of SAE Euroversals they follow.
What do the map "holes" really mean? Only this: good data unavailable to the researchers. Feel free to speculate, but I recommend digging into the reported research before filling in the gaps (see Haspelmath and Heine & Kuteva in the info box sources doc). I appreciate all of you who took time out of your day to respond patiently to comments about this!
Macedonian has the same features as Bulgarian. As far as I can see in your sources, they don't even bother to count Macedonian as a separate language from Bulgarian, and thus don't provide info for it. I may be wrong, as I didn't bother to read too closely.
You joke, but think about it; English is the current lingua franca. In an age when communication across the globe is nearly instantaneous. Memes are omnipresent on the internet and English spoken online is constantly adopting more and more absurd features than any other European language. Coincidence? Yesn't.
Yeah, I think this is again just the Western European linguists recognising similar features in languages that have historically interacted the most in, guess where, Western Europe, and thus they're the languages these linguists are most familiar with and calling them the most "european". You see the same thing in history, western historians ignoring Eastern Europe time and again, as if it's had no influence on the Western Europe, when the divide between the two dates back only to the Cold War. You have history books in Western European countries about the history of Europe completely ignoring the countries that are east of Austria and Germany. You don't see many Western European universities teaching history or languages of Eastern Europe either, further deepening the divide between the two halves of the continent.
And here I was thinking I'm the only one coming to this conclusion. It absolutely makes no sense why languages from Celtic family tree score so low on the "European" average.
Because the whole modern linguistics where build on German language (and Latin/Greek). Germans still call European language 'Germanic' and Proto-Indo-European language to them is Proto-Indo-Germanic. Just look at Wikipedia. I just didn't remember why I gave upside down when I first watched this European = Western European bullshit.
the rest of the world, in turn, gets ignored even more than eastern Europe. I think it's just our human nature to be self-centred unless forced to do otherwise. Any group of people with this much influence in the fields of communication(media, linguistics, etc.) would probably do the same.
Well, maybe this is historically true, until the last century. Nowadays, at least in universities (high school programs of History or literature can't extend so much), in Western Europe and North America you can learn practically every language and study the History and literature of every area of the world. National-related programs are still more widespread and compulsory, but in the West we have at least the possibility to learn of and from other cultures. Guess what? The only culture that developed the necessity and even the duty to pay attention to different and distant cultures is the European (and North American) one.
@@lohphat They weren't left out because Nativlang doesn't like them or forgot about them XD only because the data concerning these languages was deemed insufficient by the researchers who published the article to be included So while Denmark might have ruled over Norway, turns out their language is less documented than Norway's... Make of that what you will
Greetings from Iceland Icelandic has in fact a strong relation with gaelic and celtic languages. The most obvius case being the word "Strákur", meaning boy. This word is not found in other nordic countries, whilst a word with the same meaning, "drengur" or dreng is everywhere in the nordic speaking world. Another example is the word Saur, meaning big/great in celtic but means mud/dirt/shit in nordic, There are many names for places, farms and such, which have the word Saur in them, Saurbær being the most notable. If tranlated to celtic it would mean Big/great farm but Shit farm in nordic. Great work though, very interesting videos, keep it going.
4:26 For Spanish do you mean the reflexives SE, ME, TE, OS, NOS and the giving words like MÍ, TI? Would be great if you replied cause I'm learning Spanish and I would love to learn more about the language. Thanks!
Thanks! I was looking for information about Europe as a language area :) But I don't think it's worth mentioning Basque doesn't follow Euroversals, after all it's not Indo-European and there can be languages that do not take part in a linguistic area. On the other hand, it strikes me that on the map of 4:54 Catalan appears in white, does it mean that Catalan does not follow as many Euroversals as Spanish, German or French?
Just that it wasn't tallied in his research, like a number of other languages. Assuming these tallies are representative, why Basque and Irish ended up this way while Hungarian and Russian did not are interesting questions indeed. That the papers I read consistently ruled out the straightforward relevance of common ancestry just makes it more so!
I would be very surprised if Catalan follows less Euroversals than Spanish. Catalan grammar is extremely similar to Spanish grammar (it was not so in medieval Catalan, but Spanish has had a lot of influence in modern Catalan grammar). I have checked Euroversals and all those Euroversals that I understand are fulfilled in Catalan. On the other way, Basque not being Indo-European has nothing to do with the fact that it does not follow Euroversals. Hungarian is not Indo-European either and follows a good deal of Euroversals. And Celtic languages are Indo-European and do not follow Euroversals.
Slovak and Belorussian were probably considered similar enough to Czech and Russian to be unnecessary to the study. Moldovan is close enough to Romanian that it's not usually even classified as its own language. Danish was probably left out because nobody wanted to get involved with a language that has phrases like "rødgrød med fløde."
Kille well the question is: do non-european indo-european languages (like Hindi, Pashtu, Farsi , Kurdish or even Afrikaans) have the same "European" features?
oh ok. So basically it is through interactions throughout history that this standard came into existence. Including the non Indo-European languages in the continent.
Could you do a whole video on Maltese someday? :D the way my language started out and evolved throughout the ages is pretty interesting. And it also has some unique features such as being the only semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.
It didn't Vanish, he removed all countries not included in the study, like Belarus, Macedonia, Slovakia, etc. Denmark stands out because it borders the sea.
I’m not sure if that’s a mistake... I think it’s included in because it’s Indo-European, but because it’s European. It’s geographically in Europe so it’s included in this cluster
@@kharris3352 Then why areFinnish and Estonian grouped separately from hungarian since they all are in europe and all of them belong to the same uralic group?
@@metalsnake869 He did mention Hungarian separately from other language groups because the map is about the linguistic feature count, not the language families. It just happens that most european languages have a similar feature count even if they are not related, except for the finnic languages, turkish, georgian, the celtic languages and the few along on the coast of France and Spain.
@@metalsnake869 If I understood the video correctly, countries were shaded blue or purple when the languages shared at least 5 common features with Standard European. Maybe Finnish, Turkish, etc. have only one less common feature than Hungarian, but that was enough to exclude them.
In Swedish you can create new words by putting two existing words together. This comes very handy for making a super clear and easy to learn kinship system. Litterly translated they would be Mormor - Mothermother / your grandmother on your mothers side Morfar - Motherfather / your grandfather on your mothers side Morföräldrar - Motherparents / your mothers parents Morförälder - Motherparent / gender-neutral term for a parent of your mother Farmor - Fathermother / your grandmother on your fathers side Farfar - Fatherfather / you grandfather on your fathers side Farföräldarar - Fatherparents Farföräldrer - Fatherparent Morbror - Mothersbrother / your uncle on your mothers side Moster - Mothersister (though this is a shortened term, probably from morsyster orginaly) / you aunt on your mothers side Faster - Fatherssister (again shortened probably from farsyster) / your aunt on your fathers side Farbror - Fatherbrother / your uncle on you fathers side. Gammel mormor - old mothermother / your mothers grandmothers, same term used for both of your mothers grandmothers. Gammel morfar - old motherfather / your mothers grandfathers, same term used for both of your mothers grandfathers. Mormors mormor - MotherMothers MotherMother / you grandmothers grandmother (all on the female side). You can mix any combination of the terms for grandmother and grandfather. Example farmors morfar - Fathermothers Motherfather / Your grandmother on your fathers sides grandfather on her mothers side. Gammel moster - Old mothersister / Your grandfather or grandmothers sister. Siblings Syster - sister Lillasyster - Littlesister / a sister that is younger than you Storasyster - Bigsister / a sister that is older than you Bror - brother Lillebror - Littlebrother / a brother that is younger than you Storebror - Bigbrother / a brother that is older than you Barn - child Barnbarn - Childchild / your grandchild Barnbarnsbarn - ChildChildsChild / your grandchilds child Barnbarns barnbarn - ChildChilds ChildChild / Your granchildrens grandchildrin And it just continues in all eternity All your cousins are your 'kusiner', no way to differentiate them from each other. Kusinbarn - counsinchild / your cousins child or children Sysslingar - are you second cousins. This is a old term that was orginally used for when you had cousins on your mother side that was from your mothers sister or sisters, but have since changed meaning. So its a shortned term of sister and a old word for children. So basically directly translates to sisterchild. Now the term is used for all you second counsins. Brylling - are your third cousins. This also had a different meaning originally but have shifted with time. It was the male version of (sysslingar). So your cousins that were your fathers brother or brothers children. It cames from the same old word for children/youngsters. So literal translation would be "brotherchildren". Syskonbarn - Siblingchildren /Your siblings children Systerdotter - Sisterdaughter / Your sisters daughter Systerson - Sisterson / your sisters son Brorsdotter - Brothersdaughter / your brothers daughter Brorson - Brotherson / your brothers son
I'm happy seeing my little island with its own native language written over it. We often get so underrepresented, generally not acknowledged, almost no one outside of Italy knows who we are... It may be nothing to you, NativLang, but it's a nice little thing for me
Yep, I was referring to Sardinia. I actually got mistaken for Sicilian when I was in Scotland, even after I explained where I was from. I literally said "I'm from Sardinia, not Sicily, it's the second biggest island in Italy" then I pointed it on a map... And they still said "oh so you're from the good Sicily then?". I was quite baffled by this.
Hey there! I am just passing through the comments seeking linguistic help, as i have no ideas left! :P So I have this postcard on my wall that i absolutely love, and it has either a poem/expression or something that i have been trying to translate or at least identify the language. Google translate doesn't recognize it, and i've tried italian, latin, and every romanic/latin language. I am portuguese, so i know by reading it that it has to be a latin based language or dialect.... ANY SARDINIAN OCCITAN ITALIAN SPANISH FRENCH GALICIAN ROMANIAN CATALAN SPEAKING PERSON please p.s. - I know about Sardinia and its existence :) i just didn't know how culturally independent it was, or how different the language was until i saw a nativlang video talking about latin languages a while ago (i thought sardinian was more of a dialect, as i know that italy is filled with different dialects throughout the country)...Glad i learned the opposite and now i know something new
Hungary loves Malta :) There are many of them working over the islands! We had billboards installed on streets and trams last year, saying come visit Malta!
Y'all speak English at home (at least the Maltese people I know) so don't show off with your pretend language. It was probably just made up by Tolkien to annoy Italians.
I don’t speak it well, but Welsh - which is obviously Celtic - shares some of the things you mentioned. There are articles and a verb form with “have”.
When I had my major breakthrough in learning English (a.k.a. when first I dived into my internet addiction) I started frequently inserting English phrases while speaking my mother tongue and had a choice of words that was fitting when translating my sentence word to word in English, but rather weird in my native tongue. So I can very much imagine European languages adjusting to one another to a certain extend, as you suggest at 6:08 .
Niku, some languages has no grammatical tense. They use words that discribe time if they need it. Such as now, tommorow, yesterday, etc. If i say «I read this book yesterday», you understand this action was in the past.
Wait, how is Hungarian has that many "European" features? Isn't it from a compleatly different family? and Celtic is also an Indo-European family so shouldn't they havee more features? and what about the Indo- part of the Indo-European, do those languages share features? so many questions. Do you have links to the reserches you quoted, I woyld love to read them.
NativLang always puts a doc full of his sources (plus image/song/sound effect credits) in the description - docs.google.com/document/d/1lQHKbwHr0n2_YsF-U9_ldMfDlyHsBxhRXBNpskyZR3A/
I'd say it's pretty logical that concepts and ideas (in Language and everywhere else) cross borders over centuries. And the Magyars settled there ca. 1000 years ago and where ruled by Austria for around half that time. No wonder they borrowed and where influenced ;)
Celtic is indo European but since it's so old and has been doing it's things on its own without taking that much influnce or inspiration from other languages it is really quite different
+Haxxx5 This whole video's conclusion is that *the similarity between European languages cannot be explained by genetic relationship*. I suggest you watch it all again, and pay the part from 5:50 special attention.
Romanian is a latin language. It's even in its name, "ROM(E)anian". Also, I can fairly understand romanan (and moldovan to some extent) without have studied it, for its structure and vocabulary is quite similar to portuguese.
What happened to Danish? There are at least a few of the 12 features Feature 2: hvem vs hvis (who vs whose) Feature 3: jeg har forvist (I have banished), jeg havde forvist (I had banished). Har/havde is Danish for have/had Feature 4: jeg kan lide musik (I like music). The Spanish is: me gusta la música, which in Danish would have been: musikken behager mig (this is not the way people normally say it. They use the first) Feature 5: jeg er kendt (I am known/famous) Feature 8: ingen lyttede (nobody listened). Ingen is the negative Feature 9: han er større end en elefant (he is bigger than an elephant). End is the comparative like the English than I checked the examples on Wikipedia and I came with corresponding Danish examples to 6 of the 12. I might have misunderstood some, but I believe these fit the given examples of the six features
+Christian Changer To demonstrate how faulty the logic you used to come to this conclusion is, I'll swap the arguments while keeping the proposition: "It seems that since I am 165cm tall, the idea that the average European is 180cm tall is just wrong and doesn't comply with reality".
Your argument is completely invalid as most of the so-called euroversals don't aply to more than a half european languages, not only one. So if I had to use your flawed analogy with height I would put it like this: "Some researchers claim that average height in Europe is 180cm, but in reality in 40 European countries out off 44 the average height doesn't exceed past 176cm, so this previous statement can't be true."
I don't think you understand how research works. The fact that there's a list of "Euroversals" doesn't mean that someone pulled them out of their crevice and is trying to convince you that they correspond to the reality. It means that a researcher - in our case a certain Martin Haspelmath - has pulled together *data* from *actual languages* and *analysed* it for *features* that in his *framework* stood out as European Sprachbund features. What you're saying, without having read his or any other relevant research, or, evidently, even the document accompanying this video, that his conclusions are wrong because some languages miss the features he singled out. Another problem you seem to be having is with understanding the basic idea behindd the proposed concept. A European sprachbund is proposed and the researchers are trying to decide which features are part of it, which allows them to tell which languages belong to this sprachbund and in what measure. *Nobody is trying to define the features common to every single European language.* People are trying to establish *specific features of a specific linguistic area* that happens to centre in the heart of what Western Europeans think as Europe, the European Union and so on, hence "European". If any number of languages - regardless of their precise geographical location or geopolitical classification - are missing half the features characteristic of this linguistic area, this only means that they aren't core members of this linguistic area. It doesn't mean that the area itself doesn't exist or that its core members don't exhibit those features. I hope you will take the time to familiarise yourself with the terms and sources used in the video and in my reply and you will understand that your disagreement stems from confusion and misinterpretation. In addition to the document linked in the video's description, Wikipedia has some good articles on the topic.
Sobakus If some features don't aply to most European languages they shouldn't be claimed to be average, common or defining of a European language. Simple as that. There much common features of languages in Europe, but they are hardly specific. For example claiming that differentiation between "a" and "the" is a common feature of imaginary European sprachbund is preposterous as it is completely foreign to more than one third of languages in question. There are many similarities between neighboring languages, but there is no substential common set of specific language features spread all the way from Portugal to Ural Mountains. The futility of reaserch and disagreement on the matter shown in this video speaks of this clearly.
Great video! The grammatical similarities between French and German and Dutch are also striking for: - Basically the same use of avoir/haben (to have) and être/sein (to be) to form the main tense of the past: J'ai vu/Ich habe gesehen (I saw or I have seen), Je suis venu/Ich bin gekommen (I came or I have come). Italian works the same but not Spanish or Portuguese (They don't use to be and the tense doesn't mean exactly the same). But French uses also être for reflexive verbs, like Italian but unlike German and Dutch. - Same use of a compound tense VS a simple tense for the past (Passé composé VS imparfait), even if the Imperferkt in German is also used as a passé simple (or passato remoto in Italian), so a preterit for remote actions or facts or for litterary purposes. - Unlike Italian or Spanish but like German or Dutch, French tends to reject the past participle after pronouns like tout/tous/rien or adverbs like pas/jamais/plus/bien/mal/mieux/souvent. examples: I ate/I have eaten everything: Fr: J'ai tout mangé, Ger: Ich habe alles gegessen, It: Ho mangiato tutto. I slept well, J'ai bien dormi, Ich habe gut geschlaffen, Ho dormito bene. - Same presence of an article meaning "not a" or "not some" (the zero quantity): "pas de" in French, "kein" in German, "geen" in Dutch. I have a car/I don't have a car: J'ai une voiture/Je n'ai pas de voiture, Ich habe ein Auto/Ich habe kein Auto. VS Italian: Ho una macchina/Non ho una macchina, or Spanish: Tengo un coche/No tengo un coche. I have money/I don't have money: J'ai de l'argent/je n'ai pas d'argent, Ich habe Geld/Ich habe kein Geld, Ho soldi/Non ho soldi, Tengo dinero/No tengo dinero. No problem: Pas de problème, Kein Problem, Niente problema, No problema.
Romanian is one of those oddball languages. It's in an area where Slavic languages are common, but it's a Romance language. You also have to realize the map was showing shared features, not language groups. So clearly Romanian is missing a component of most Romance languages. Which makes sense if you know it's history.
I'm sorry but you are the really stupid one. When he said "Slavic," he showed English, Romanian, and Greek. You only took notice of Romanian? The order of which he was listing the language families clearly did not correspond to the video.
As a speaker of French and English (and Japanese) I find it relatively easy to understand Spanish and Portuguese, to read Italian and even understanding German or Dutch seem like a possible task, given I focus! However, Slavic languages feel harder to understand aside a few words. So it seems to me that most European languages are kind of cousins, which is way less prevalent in, say, east-Asia.
French is a Latin language, related to Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, and many others, and English is a Germanic language which is related to German, Dutch, danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and many others aswell. Slavic languages are also from indo European just like Latin languages and Germanic languages so that’s why. I hope this helped!
Hello! I just wanted to share that you helped me find my passion for languages, and even though I was out of college, I decided to go back to school to get a BA in Linguistics. Thanks for your enthusiasm, knowledge and uh... being on TH-cam I guess :D
It's funny how people are debating whether Turkey is European or not rather than the actual topic of the video. You have to realise that even if you don't consider Turkey as a European country, Turkish is a language of Europe. There are 10-15 million Turkish speakers living in Europe excluding recent migrants to countries like Germany. That's a larger population than most European countries. Therefore it's quite natural that Turkish is mentioned in this video.
the moment you made Czech look like its a Baltic language and completely dismissed Slovakian, even though they are VERY similar, you lost me... honestly just the fact that you didnt mention all the background for why Whorf was wrong with his concept of different "time" and that it actually cannot be used as a viable evidence for languages impacting our thoughts right at the beginning was actually quite enough, i never heard of this and I am quite into languages, but thanks for the notice, i would just love to see less misinformation on the data that you mention throughout
Native Dutch speaker here. German and Dutch are very similar in both speaking and writing. Dutch does not have much similarities with Italian and Spanisch. Belgium is bilingual. The north speaks Dutch and the South speaks french.
@@iammcwaffles5514 I've read that German speakers in Belgium are only 71.000 so they're quite a minority (Belgium has a little bit more than 11 millions inhabitants)
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle Dutch and Spanish+Italian have absolutely nothing in common or even similarly in common. (I can know because I was raised tri-lingual: Dutch, Spanish, English, by a Dutch father and an Argentinian mother). Dutch has contaminations and borrowed words ("contaminaties en leenwoorden) from French (Galisisms, e.g. "portemonee", "paraplu"), German (Germanisms e.g. "überhaupt", "sowiso"), Latin (Latisms e.g. "exorbitant", "destructief","transpatant") and lots from English (Anglisisms e.g. "overall", "sneakers",), but almost no Hispanisms! Grammar and sentence structure are completely different e.g. "Noord-Atlantische VerdragsOrganisatie NATO" vs "la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte OTAN".
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle Kom maar met goede voorbeelden! Spaans is overigens een Latijnse /West Romaanse taal en niet Indo-Germaans/ West Germaans zoals het Nederlands. ¡Entonces ven con buenos ejemplos! El Castellano es una lengua latina, opueso al Holandés que es un lenguaje indo-germánico / germánico occidental. Then come with some good examples! Spanish is a Latin / West Romance language, opposite to Dutch, being a West German language. I am fluent in these languages and I have lived in these cultures. I know what I am talking about!
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle What is your background? You call me ignorant but you apparently refuse to give any example. Are you a fraud? Be serious or troll elsewhere! And there is always somewhere a common ancestry to almost anything, but that does not mean the modern branches have anything in common with each other. I speak Dutch, Spanish, English, German, French, Turkish and Hebrew.
Isn't Turkish not a European Language? They use the Latin Alphabet currently but throughout the History of the Ottoman Empire the Turks utilized the Arabic alphabet as their main script. It's also not apart of the Indo-European Language family, as it has it's own language family titled "Turkic Languages".
Turkish is veeeeeeeeeeery different from the Romance languages that are spoken widely as it is a *Turkic* language (like uzbek and siberian yakut), so is finnish and hungarian which are *uralic* languages
I speak Slovak and the first 2 points do NOT apply: - no articles - no "have" way to express past tense Also, why is it not on the map along with missing Danish and Macedonian? Include Czech and not Slovak!?
Those points don't apply for any Slavic languages. I'm pretty sure this is centered around Romance and Germanic languages, that's why they had the most features. I think the missing countries either have 3-4 features or there is no data for them.
slovak has articles, but it's not needed to say them like in all slavic languages.. Ten/Ta/To - Nejaky/Nejaka - etc... same with south slavic Ovo/Ova etc.... peace. and as a second.. yes, slovak has "have" for some types of the past tense, like - "malo sa to stat" or "mal som to urobit" etc.... it's just the way how linguists are explaining the patterns.
@@sukromnevideo No. Ten/Ta/to = this it's not article. The same with 'sa' it's not 'have'. It's a part of reflexive verb and I don't remember how in English you call the sentence without subject like in your example.
@@derpauleglot9772 The Pauleglot In Polish we also have this sentences, e.g. Miało się to stać. 'It should have happened'. But they say about sentence with 'have' for past and we in Slavic languages have ASPECT, so we don't need this 'have'. E.g. ZJADŁSZY obiad pozmywałam naczynia. 'I HAD EATEN dinner before I washed the dishes.' JADŁAM BYŁA obiad... - I HAD BEEN EATING dinner (before)... JADAŁAM BYŁA obiady... - I HAD BEEN EATING regularly dinner (before)... Gdybym nie była chora, ZJADŁABYM obiad. - If I hadn’t been sick, I WOULD HAVE EATEN dinner. And more... all without have/had. Of course mal is 'had' becues Slovak have 'to have' :) ' I have been reading a book / I had been reading a book' = Čítal som knihu / Bol som čítal knihu [without 'mal'] You have 'to be' as a part of past verbs but NOT 'to have' - above 'bol' and 'som' are from conjugation of 'to be'. Pozdrawiam, Ania.
You might be a European; tfw Polish does not have 1, 2, and historically could do without 3 (as Russian often does as well), and does not admit 4 (się vs mnie). I guess I might not be a European, after all XDDD
That's a bit weird that almost half of Europe use slavic languages, and of course slavic languages share many features between each other, but they are not in the "core". But OF COURSE German and French are... Is it only me who sees the bias? I do not think feature clustering works this way...
En realidad lo que aparece es Blanco, no dice que puntuacion tiene en la escala esa, aunque siendo Romanica seguro que puntua igual que el castellano, pero si es por el nombre, no se nombra ni el Aragones, ni el Bable ni el Galego por ejemplo y ya me imagino porque, si estas mirando que puntuacion sacan en esa escala no es de locos asumir que las lenguas hipano-romances o como se llamen, vayan a puntuar 99% igual; el catalan aunque se considere distinto idioma (que ojo, no se demasiado), no creo que sea tan distinto como para derrepente, al contrario que el español, tenga casos, no tenga genero y utilice un subfijo como determinante, verdad? Ademas, si tu eres catalan, puedes hacer tu mismo el test ese a ver que puntuacion sacas! Tengo curiosidad hasta yo!
There's a bunch of other languages he didn't show (I'm French so that's why I'm giving example of French languages), like chti, langue d'oc, normand, Corse etc I think that if he included every European language the map would have been a mess so that's why he didn't show them
I did try to understand and make some sense out of this video but I could not because of the very implicit way of you trying to explain things even though I am studying linguistics. The only thing that I have understood from this video is that some so-called scientists have been trying to form a separate branch which would gather the languages of a specific region, and/or specific people or societies by making it look like it's a scientific effort, which is definitely not. This is clearly ethnocentricism which has been being unrighteously disguised as science by some so-called scientists themselves.
I find it interesting that Dutch has less of these features then french since as a German Dutch is if the languages I never learned the language easiest to understand and leagues ahead of French.
Why is Belgium entirely in the dark colour on the map at 5:35 but the Netherlands in the lighter blue colour? Half of Belgium (the more populous half) speaks a version of Dutch, not French. So shouldn't that half be in the lighter blue colour as well?
You've put it as slavic but Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24-26 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova.
The suffixes at the end of the word technically work like the articles in the Western languages. We put the "the" article at the end of the word and don't forget most Slavic languages have cases and add a suffix for the case. The Western languages change the article for that. So technically both work the same way.
Turkic people come from Mongolian lands, the only reason they may be close to Europeans is through mixing with the European people of Greece, Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia (via violence as usual).
+Nadir Kuleli Wrong, because Mongols, or Xian'bei as they were called, were formerly the masters of the Kokturuks, and after their demise, the whole lot of their numbers integrated into the Kokturuks, and other tribal systems of Turkic nature. At Chingiss Khan's time, there were bilingual tribes in Mongolia who spoke both Turkic and Mongolian, to the degree that people had a hard time understanding whether a people were more Turkic or more Mongolian. Fierce enemies? More like allies and contemporaries. What is more intriguing is, that there are accounts of Mongol tribes settling among the Turks in Anatolia, and integrating into the native populace, meaning that even the Turks of Anatolia have Mongols among them. As for racism, your claims that 40% of ethnic Turks in Turkey are actually converted and assimilated native Anatolians is just one example of racism, as you do racial profiling on a segment of the population, although you do not state which segment of the Turkish population that is. As for that, I have neither heard, or read of any mass conversions that took place anywhere in Anatolia or the Ottoman regions where this conversion brought about both a linguistic and cultural shift. Examples would be both the Bosniaks and the Albanians, and other smaller populations such as the Torbesh and Pomak, all of whom are Muslims, but are linguistically and culturally different from Turks. Indeed, being a Turk is about being of that heritage. Its not totally linguistic or cultural, as you claim. No one is contesting the fact that intermarriage has not happened, but to say that 40% of the ethnic Turkish population has no tribal connections is impossible to imagine. Turkic and Mongolic people have always been living together, and are closer to eachother than any other population surrounding them. No one can state otherwise.
Most common European expressions I can think of (I speak Modern and Ancient Greek, English, Spanish and some French, Italian and latin) are based either on ancient Greek and secondarily to Latin or French because until English came on top of French these languages were the lingua franca in antiquity, middle ages and the early modern era respectively. Ancient Greek came first so it had a founder effect. "Crocodile tears" is Ancient Greek for example. Most Christian expressions were originally written in Ancient Greek. And there are even some that are translated in other languages where they make little to no sense. e.g. "a case of sour grapes" in English.
Some things interest me here. Latin does not have a word for "A" nor a word for "The", as a result it is less European than German in this list. Amusingly, this extends to Italy, Spain, and Albania, all of which were the longest-held Roman provinces. Barring French, no Romance language is as "European" as German in this list. But why is French different? What could possibly make it so different from the remaining Romance languages? Its German roots. Charlemagne was a Frank and the Franks were Germans. French, as a Romance language, still maintains some affectations from its invaders' Germanic past. You see something slightly similar in England where the native Celtic, Welsh, is not at all European, yet English itself is only partway European despite being Germanic. Essentially, the introduction of Germanic and Romance brought the European-ness of the islands up, but not so far as to German itself. One could even say, the existence of Celts brought the European-ness of the Germanic English down. This idea of "Standard Average European" is Germano-centricism at its finest. Also, poor Denmark is just German on that map. I know Danish sounds like a drunken Swede with rocks in his mouth, but you didn't have to make them not exist, NativLang!
My native Lithuanian language is supposedly the most archaic language of the Indo-European family tree, meaning its the closest to what our distant common ancestors spoke and jet we are only a 5. This is not a a video about Euroversals but video about Germanversals. Estonian isn't an Indo-European language so it is no surprise why Estonian scores so little, but then why does Hungarian (another Finno-Ugric language) scored so high in comparison to Estonian ? Its because Hungary was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire so they have German loan words. What a big shock (sarcasm).
To help some confused commenters - the map isn't showing language relatedness, only the number of shared features. Perhaps I should've taken a minute to explain isopleths and isoglosses? Are "language families" just an easier concept for us than "areal" linguistics? Thanks for thinking about this and commenting!
I was wondering why English came up with the Slavic languages, but then noticed that you had actually included a key. I don't think you needed to explicitly mention it - the information was there and it became clear what you were doing once you reached 'Baltic'. It was a bit odd naming language families like 'Germanic', only for French to pop up, and then saying 'Romance' and including Dutch. I think most people are familiar with the main language families (at least people who watch your channel!), but wouldn't necessarily have been familiar with isopleths (I hadn't actually thought of isopleths being related to linguistics before - interesting!). Six minutes is a nice length for a video, so rather than explaining it perhaps you could have included the isopleths and/or arrows on the map showing (rather than telling) the feature count contours?
Anyway, excellent video as always. Do you dare venture further into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis realm?
I was able to follow that. The only thing I'd be curious about is how these features compare to non-European Indo-European languages. Would they have been red on the map?
So explain Belgium. The north speaks Dutch and the South speaks French. I think you have to make a new version of this video. I 'm a native speaker of Dutch, and Dutch and Italian are very different while Dutch and German are very Similar. This video is very confusing.
language families are the superior method of categorization because it includes origins and is more based around the "tradition"
areal linguistics will be less and less pertinent as communication between languages increases
we will share more and more concepts
an example: I'd say most "Hispanic" romance speakers (so Português, Gallego, Castellano, Catalano, etc.), and even a lot of Western Germanic speakers,
most of them would know the concept of a "taifa", and would've conceptualized it similarly to how Arabs, Bedouins, Libyanites, Vandals, etc would have in Umayyadi Iberia
but this is disparate from the concept of taifa in the middle east, where in Iberia it's conceptualized to be like a regnum, a petty kingdom, a dutchy or even county
in most of the middle east taifa tends to be conceptually more like a "group". both are similar to the word "res", and both mean thing, but how they are conceptualized are different
and while this might seem like it's a point in favor of areal linguistics initially, that is only true temporarily. the internet is going to bring both concepts ot both area, one will either erase the other or people will just know the two different concept stogether, and then breaking it up by area will be irrelevant
Language families vs areal contact isn't an either-or choice though. Areal features/Sprachbünde aren't even a method of categorisation as such but simply refer to a phenomenon of languages in close contaxt adopting not just vocabulary but similar syntactical, morphological (suffixed definite articles in the Balkans) and phonological (e.g. retroflexes in the Indosphere, tonal languages in Southeast Asia) features.
You find something similar in the study of language families as well, neither the tree nor the wave model is wholly satisfactory on its own but they work really well when used to complement each other.
How the internet does and will influence language evolution is kind of a different subject that doesn't invalidate the areal model on a historical basis.
Time is an illusion invented by the Swiss to sell watches.
ikr
Time is an illusion. Lunchtime doubly so.
then what is "free time"?
Banarok Lionrage the dems man
Banarok Lionrage When you buy three watches they give you one for free.
Some countries and parts of Europe disappeared, some of them didn’t even appeared.
Watching this again and finding it really interesting. Looking forward to more videos.
Woohoo Cymraeg! =P
Sweet! Kernow here Celtic brethren.
+Vyvyan-Xav Sheldrake Lowena dhis, da yw genev metya genes!
Meur ras! A wodhes'ta kewsel Kernewek? Bo Kembrek?
+Vyvyan-Xav Sheldrake Drog yw genev, na. Ond dysgwyr o Gymraeg ydw i. A wodhes'ta kewsel Kernewek?
Well you're very proficient nevertheless. Would you like to join our Celtic language Discord server? We've got all the Celtic people's on there (Even revived Gaulish I'm pretty sure).
Link: discord.gg/SvAfTfU
Why is Belarus depicted as a sea? Slovakia Moldova and Macedonia too.
I think they didn't conduct this test on the respective languages. Moldova speaks Romanian though so it is really weird.
Reflexive pronouns are like Sig in Swedish or Sin in Esperanto right? I don't speak Spanish and my German is still in progress so, I didn't quite grasp the oneself≠oneself at 4:15 .
I find this interesting because I think of the European/Asian divide as being a purely social construct. Yet, according to this video, linguists still class languages as being "European". But don't European languages have similarities with languages in Asia? Is the European/Asian divide useful in the study of linguistics?
Turkey is not European.
x_MySecretShadows_x no absolutely not. I'm Turkish by the way.
Dadaş 25 They mean the bit west of Istanbul, that is.
Yep, Turkeys are American.
it is part
Sonia IS and also an indo-European one
Proud to be fluent in one of the more non-standard languages of Europe: Irish
Romanian is a romance language, not slavic
He never said it's a Slavic language.
Your comment just states that you didn't pay attention
4:51 He said slavic. You fool
Sisi Love He said slavic but look at what the map is meant to represent.Also if you went by what he said then greek and english would be slavic too since those showed up at the same time when he said slavic.
And then there are the Finno-urgic languages!
I came here for the comments
"[Insert subject] is a social construct"
Society is a social construct
Hey, can you guys do an episode on the Armenian language.
Crocodiles don't even naturally exist in Europe, how peculiar.
nor do they appear in mongolia...
They did, however, appear in Egypt, and both the Romans and Greeks hung around in Egypt a lot.
I would posit that the idiom was actually borrowed from others, and not natively developed. Sort of like how pineapple is "ananas" or some variant of in almost the entire rest of the world - but some of these places have never had pineapples.
So, the crocodile tear idiom likely came from Latin, and was spread throughout Europe until Mongolians used the phrase too - although many have never even seen a crocodile before.
Pretty sure the animal was well known across Europe all the way back to ancient times. It is one of the most ferocious beasts of the earth. I wouldn't be surprised if the phrase 'crocodile tears' to label a faker developed independently, even though knowledge of the beast itself was shared knowledge. It is just an effective description.
You all make good points and I totally agree that it is not surprising that knowledge of an animal such as a crocodile would be wide spread.
Apart from sharing crocodile tears, "needle in the haystack" seems to be found in most European languages, if I'm not mistaken.
i can confidently say the haystack one (direct word for word translation with the same meaning) is limited to neither europe, nor european languages. and was used by my grand grandparents.
Them both are common phrases in spain
greeks say "tick in a haystack" although istead of "haystack" they just say "hay"
Confirm they are both present in Turkish: “samanlıkta iğne aramak” (its Europeannes is debatable but whatever)
In hungary needle in the haystadk is Tű a szénakazalban.
*passive-aggressive tea sipping*
Lmao
*SIP* *Smashes teacup on floor*
I thought it was coffee. That’s a real European universal.
1:45 *tea sipping intensifies*
Gott strafe england
A German dude creates a list for "European-ness" in languages where German conveniently ticks all of the boxes.
_Hmm._
Dodatkowo he NAZI The error od historii ways?
??? Haspelmath is not a German name?
And if you had watched the video you'd seen that French ticks just as many boxes and that the area is called Charlemagne area - aka the area where the Franks (a Germanic tribe) and its empire had significant influence, so it only makes sense scientifically
@@StrawberryLegacy The man *is* German and your rebuttal is a complete non-sequitur.
@@StrawberryLegacy The Empire wasn't influencial linguistically, given that France and Germany speak languages barely related with their common ancestor being indo-european. The Charlemagne Area seems to just be a big coincidence in my opinion.
It's really interesting that Hungarian fits with the Euroversals when it's in a different family, but the Celtic Languages don't when they're from the same language family.
Well I don't know about the Celtic languages but Hungary's been surrounded by European nations for over a millenium, and has had a lot of history with them.
Which is one of the data points that tells linguists that the commonalities they see are not due to genetic relationships, as noted around 6:12.
MrTwarner It's most likely that the Celts were the first migrators into western europe, mainly France britan and spain, and had extensive contact with a mostly extinct lagnuage group, the last remnant of which is basque, this nearly dead group once was spoken throughout western europe, pre-celts, the Celts invaded western European, and simply merged somewhat with this nearly extinct family of languages and thusly is the odd man out. meanwhile Hungarian, and thusly magyar has been around Indo European languages possibly since the first Indo Europeans began to migrate, the magyars then invaded eastern Europe, and simply merged with European languages to form hungarian
Tyler Alexander Hungarians were heavily influenced by Indo-europeans.
Tyler Alexander i speak Irish Gaeilge whooop! And im fucking proud!
"Europe where the language is common"
*while I sip my water thinking how name Germany in polish "Niemcy" comes from word "niemy" meaning mute*
I have a theory, borrowed from "Stara Baśń"!
People from Germanic tribes interacted with Slavs for a very long time. When Slavs spread around Europe and stopped using protoslavic their languages were still very similar and they still understood each other. So when some merchants from Germany arrived to Polanie's lands, they (Polanie) didn't understand what they were talking about - therefore assuming they were "niezrozumiali" and "niemi".
@@jadospis7826 idk, seems like pretty standard shade throwing to me.
@Чичо Радко Because we, Slavs, could understand each other, we were the people of слово.
There is some explanation in Old Czech rumors. When Slavs met one another they understand the language as well as their own. But when they met German, they wouldn't speak to them. Up that day Slavs tought everyone speak like them so one who doesn't must be mute. Later they found out there are multiple languages, but because they met German first, the name stayed.
@MrNorthernSol quess where does it come from? e.g, the word "német" in Hungarian, while "Nemec" in Slovak
5:11 R.I.P. Denmark. You will be remembered.
Mr. Stark I dont feel so good
Denmark doesn't exist and NativLang knows it.
did you not notice the other dozen countries that dissapeared?
Moldova,North Macedonia and Belarus too
It was too unintelligible to analyze.
Do a video about Finno-Ugric languages; would like to see your point of view.
Greetings from Finland!
Just asking, Hungarian also is a language of this group, right? They are quite interesting, but a pain to learn for the ones used to speak Indo-European languages.
@@spd7693 Yes, and Finno-Ugric seems today to be a distributed group; if you want to play more certain I think then I should have used the term Uralic.
But yes, Hungarian is also seen as part of Finno-Ugric and so also part of Uralic language family, even though I do know that there is in modern Hungary at least some, maybe small and loud, group of people that do not see Hungary as Finno-Ugric/Ugric language. Apparently, some ultra-nationalists that do not see Ugric history good enough for them.
Hungary is not very close to Finnish, but the "sound" and the phase of talk sounds quite similar. Example Estonian on the other hand is partly mutually intelligible with Finnish.
I do not know "how hard" is learning Finnish for indo-European speakers; maybe just compared to other Indo-European languages. Like I do see that speaking one Germanic language helps quite much-learning others. I speak Swedish(not strong) and English and have studiet litte german, but the latter was so long time ago and have not used it at all, that I think I would be useless in German. English is still hard for me with all it´s silent letters. We in Finnish do not have those.
"Finno-Ugric (/ˌfɪnoʊˈjuːɡrɪk/ or /ˌfɪnoʊˈuːɡrɪk/; Fenno-Ugric)[1] or Finno-Ugrian (Fenno-Ugrian), is a traditional grouping of all languages in the Uralic language family except the Samoyedic languages. Its formerly commonly accepted status as a subfamily of Uralic is based on criteria formulated in the 19th century and is criticized by some contemporary linguists such as Tapani Salminen and Ante Aikio as inaccurate and misleading.[2][3] The three most-spoken Uralic languages, Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian, are all included in Finno-Ugric, although linguistic roots common to both branches of the traditional Finno-Ugric language tree (Finno-Permic and Ugric) are distant.
The term Finno-Ugric, which originally referred to the entire family, is sometimes used as a synonym for the term Uralic, which includes the Samoyedic languages,[4] as commonly happens when a language family is expanded with further discoveries."
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Finno-Ugric_languages
@@spd7693 I have heard, that for some reason, Finnish would be easier to Italian than for many other Indo-European speakers.
@@5000Kone Aijaa! Miksköhän kun sekin on germaaninenkieli(vai muistanko väärin :D) ja niillä on oma aksentti niin ei pitäis olla kielen puolesta hirveesti mitään samaa🤔
@@5000Kone sorry, but the theory that Hungarian doesn't belong to its allocated language group has nothing to do with 'nationslist'. It also has nothing to do with that this theory is not good enough. That's the narrative of the (all mighty) MTA because noone is allowed to research anything or suggest any theory that goes against what they have 'carved in stone'.
When I went to my friend’s home village in Oaxaca, Mexico I noticed that when they’d speak in Zapotec they would say the days of the week in Spanish. My friend said before the Spanish they would just say something like “when the sun is this high”
also certain words from spanish would transform into their language by adding a “sh” sound at the end. Like “concreto” becomes “concresh”
And this has been your linguistics porn for the day
According to my research (aka the wikipedia page that links you to different topic about that topic), mexican is a dialect of spanish.
@@theunicorn1167 But not all mexicans speak mexican spanish. Multiple mayan languages are still spoken fot example. According to the research I just did, Zapotec is it's own language family and is still spoken in mexico, so the OP's point holds. His friend wasn't speaking spanish, he was speakIng a Zapotec language with spanish loanwords in it. Just like English isn't spanish because it has the words "no" and "tortilla" in it and Japanese isn't portuguese because iT uses "pan" to mean bread.
Roda Frog von Sakray
Oh, I didn‘t know that.
Well, you learn something new every day I guess.
I mean, it's a pretty established linguistic fact that the colonizers' language will affect the languages of the colonized at least to a small degree. Especially if the culture of the colonized is the target of systemic destruction, i.e. like the indigenous peoples of the Americas by the European colonizers.
Y'know that's kinda similar to how the US uses A.M. and P.M. while talking about the time but continental Europe doesn't and instead will just figure out which it is by using context or by saying things like "6 in the morning". The funny thing about this is that both sides thinks the way the other one does it is confusing, Americans don't understand how you can tell what time you're talking about if you don't have a clear word for which bit it is while Europeans think that AM and PM are very confusing and hard to figure out terms. The secret of course is that Europeans actually think about time on a 24 hour clock and then just translate it to a 12 hour clock in speech so when a European says "6 after work" they think 18:00. But it's interesting because even though we are talking about people literally speaking the same language (English) there is still a really big difference in how people talk about things.
[aggressively sips tea in polish]
PUT THE CUP DOWN! before you scald you lips - tea is hot; careful, careful
[picie herbaty agressywnie po Polsku]
____ ___ *[agresywnie sączy herbatę po polsku] is better translation :p
[agresywnie bierze łyk herbaty po polsku]
How would you even transcribe aggressively sipping tea in Polish? I feel like there should be an onomatopoeia for that like "slurp" in English
3:50 "you might be European if you have words for "a" and "the"."
Hold it right there! Polish doesn't have articles.
Neither do Russian or Latin
Slavic.
@@TimothyGrabarczyk Bulgarian has articles
In Swedish -it should be the same for Norwegian and Danish too- we don't have a word for the, we add suffix at the end of the word instead.
ew that still is an article, and danish uses a regular definite article with adjectives
I love that Denmark just vanished
revival of #secretdenmark
What Denmark? Can you eat it?
I guess the flat potato speak wasn't proper Baltic speak like Norway and Sweden...
Dean Goldenstar Danish people can't even understand each other :v
"evil laughs of swedes across the ø/öresund
"Whorf is about to make a controversial breakthrough"
Photon torpedoes are always the answer?
you mean flashlights?🙈
That language has no honor!
-you might be European if your language has words for "a" and "the"
- *aggressively sips tea in Polish*
Articles. Pfft! More like Artican'ts am I right...
@Steven Moore You win some, you lose a few hundred ;)
Slavic*
*Aggressively sips coffee in Finnish*
So Poland and Polan't
-*Aggresively sips beer in Romanian* More like no separate article.
Hungarian isn't slavic tho, but finno-urgic.
lithuanian and latvian too
+김하늘 well baltic but they mean that they are this close to standard european
Lithuenia and lativian are baltic....
He didn't say that, he just named distinct languages. And on the map, the languages weren't coloured based on family, but based on the number of SAE Euroversals they follow.
French isn't Germanic and English isn't Slavic either but that's not what is said anyways.
What do the map "holes" really mean? Only this: good data unavailable to the researchers. Feel free to speculate, but I recommend digging into the reported research before filling in the gaps (see Haspelmath and Heine & Kuteva in the info box sources doc). I appreciate all of you who took time out of your day to respond patiently to comments about this!
NativLang if you assume something for cech language . for 99% is ts the same for slovak too
And they are slavic like russia and poland
NativLang But why was the Danish island Bornholm on the map while the rest of Denmark wasn’t. They speak Danish on Bornholm as well.
Macedonian has the same features as Bulgarian.
As far as I can see in your sources, they don't even bother to count Macedonian as a separate language from Bulgarian, and thus don't provide info for it. I may be wrong, as I didn't bother to read too closely.
I think Checks and Slovaks shall share the same number. Pretty close languages
Why has Belarus no language? 5:15 :D
And Slovakia?
No, Belarus and Slovakia is an Ocean 🤷
And denmark
La Castagnette.OFFICIAL they may of not done the experiment in these countries
I think the white ones have 3/4 features
Pretty sure they speak A mix
Hey, can yo do a video on Gaelic or the Celtic languages in the future?
Looks like English is trying to Brexit out of Standard Average European...
Perhaps it should.
LOL!
It's Brexshit.
Where does the British Anthem comes from?
You joke, but think about it; English is the current lingua franca. In an age when communication across the globe is nearly instantaneous. Memes are omnipresent on the internet and English spoken online is constantly adopting more and more absurd features than any other European language. Coincidence?
Yesn't.
Yeah, I think this is again just the Western European linguists recognising similar features in languages that have historically interacted the most in, guess where, Western Europe, and thus they're the languages these linguists are most familiar with and calling them the most "european". You see the same thing in history, western historians ignoring Eastern Europe time and again, as if it's had no influence on the Western Europe, when the divide between the two dates back only to the Cold War.
You have history books in Western European countries about the history of Europe completely ignoring the countries that are east of Austria and Germany. You don't see many Western European universities teaching history or languages of Eastern Europe either, further deepening the divide between the two halves of the continent.
And here I was thinking I'm the only one coming to this conclusion. It absolutely makes no sense why languages from Celtic family tree score so low on the "European" average.
Just replace the word european by western european then, if that is so important.
Because the whole modern linguistics where build on German language (and Latin/Greek). Germans still call European language 'Germanic' and Proto-Indo-European language to them is Proto-Indo-Germanic. Just look at Wikipedia.
I just didn't remember why I gave upside down when I first watched this European = Western European bullshit.
the rest of the world, in turn, gets ignored even more than eastern Europe. I think it's just our human nature to be self-centred unless forced to do otherwise. Any group of people with this much influence in the fields of communication(media, linguistics, etc.) would probably do the same.
Well, maybe this is historically true, until the last century. Nowadays, at least in universities (high school programs of History or literature can't extend so much), in Western Europe and North America you can learn practically every language and study the History and literature of every area of the world. National-related programs are still more widespread and compulsory, but in the West we have at least the possibility to learn of and from other cultures. Guess what? The only culture that developed the necessity and even the duty to pay attention to different and distant cultures is the European (and North American) one.
And Slovakia was ignored again ... Denmark is surprising though.
Yes, how can you include Norwegian and Swedish but leave out Danish? Norway was a county of Denmark until 1814.
Slovaks wanted their own country so they have what they wanted. :-D
@@lohphat They weren't left out because Nativlang doesn't like them or forgot about them XD only because the data concerning these languages was deemed insufficient by the researchers who published the article to be included
So while Denmark might have ruled over Norway, turns out their language is less documented than Norway's... Make of that what you will
I cannot start pointing out how well you've done your homework on a subject, while keeping your videos entertaining. Pozdrowienia z Polski!
Greetings from Iceland
Icelandic has in fact a strong relation with gaelic and celtic languages. The most obvius case being the word "Strákur", meaning boy. This word is not found in other nordic countries, whilst a word with the same meaning, "drengur" or dreng is everywhere in the nordic speaking world.
Another example is the word Saur, meaning big/great in celtic but means mud/dirt/shit in nordic, There are many names for places, farms and such, which have the word Saur in them, Saurbær being the most notable. If tranlated to celtic it would mean Big/great farm but Shit farm in nordic.
Great work though, very interesting videos, keep it going.
Guðmundur Arnþór Just seen your comment. What do you mean by Celtic, as in "....translated to Celtic ...."?
Also no in/definite article, just "inn", which gets placed at the end for some reason.
"Boy" in Swedish is not from "drengur", it's "Pojke", from Finnish "Poike"
How about a video about the *Uralic languages*?
One of them (Hungarian) already had a video, but I feel you brah.
Do European languages feel more "universal" than they really are? Are they actually exotic outliers?
4:26 For Spanish do you mean the reflexives SE, ME, TE, OS, NOS and the giving words like MÍ, TI? Would be great if you replied cause I'm learning Spanish and I would love to learn more about the language. Thanks!
Thanks! I was looking for information about Europe as a language area :)
But I don't think it's worth mentioning Basque doesn't follow Euroversals, after all it's not Indo-European and there can be languages that do not take part in a linguistic area. On the other hand, it strikes me that on the map of 4:54 Catalan appears in white, does it mean that Catalan does not follow as many Euroversals as Spanish, German or French?
Just that it wasn't tallied in his research, like a number of other languages. Assuming these tallies are representative, why Basque and Irish ended up this way while Hungarian and Russian did not are interesting questions indeed. That the papers I read consistently ruled out the straightforward relevance of common ancestry just makes it more so!
Yes. They go by other names, but the typologists seem to call that second set "intensifiers" when they contrast them with "reflexives".
I would be very surprised if Catalan follows less Euroversals than Spanish. Catalan grammar is extremely similar to Spanish grammar (it was not so in medieval Catalan, but Spanish has had a lot of influence in modern Catalan grammar). I have checked Euroversals and all those Euroversals that I understand are fulfilled in Catalan.
On the other way, Basque not being Indo-European has nothing to do with the fact that it does not follow Euroversals. Hungarian is not Indo-European either and follows a good deal of Euroversals. And Celtic languages are Indo-European and do not follow Euroversals.
So what of Slovak, Belorussian, Moldovan and Danish?
I think nobody bothered to collect the data ☹
No data.
Slovak and Belorussian were probably considered similar enough to Czech and Russian to be unnecessary to the study. Moldovan is close enough to Romanian that it's not usually even classified as its own language. Danish was probably left out because nobody wanted to get involved with a language that has phrases like "rødgrød med fløde."
Huh, at first it struck me as languages with a number of Euroversals from 3 to 4
Løven løber på den ræverøde løber, med rødbeder mellem læberne
0:04 "Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian" Wtf?? Those aren't languages brother.
Why would we need a separate 'THE' word when we can just put "a/an" at endan of wordan?
/Scandinavian
wish we had that
In romanian we do that
Why do you even need "THE"? /Finnish
"Why even have articles?"- All Slavic Languages (except Bulgarian and Macedonian).
@@edim108 Same for Finnic languages
So... is this average for European languages or Indo-European languages?
yo yo Just European, as he says at the end of the video, these features weren't inherited, they were adopted
Just Europe. Haspelmath notes the features in question aren't typical of the ancestral languages, hence the "areal" rather than the "genetic" group.
Kille well the question is: do non-european indo-european languages (like Hindi, Pashtu, Farsi , Kurdish or even Afrikaans) have the same "European" features?
oh ok. So basically it is through interactions throughout history that this standard came into existence. Including the non Indo-European languages in the continent.
hindi as the saying "shedding crocodile tears" as well
Could you do a whole video on Maltese someday? :D the way my language started out and evolved throughout the ages is pretty interesting. And it also has some unique features such as being the only semitic language written in the Latin alphabet.
between 5:09 and 5:13 Denmark is disappearing😂
Alon Grossman It's because of the sea level rise. Denmark has no flood control like the Netherlands. The Danes are drowning.
It didn't Vanish, he removed all countries not included in the study, like Belarus, Macedonia, Slovakia, etc. Denmark stands out because it borders the sea.
super flat too, yeah.
Yes, we do actually - especially around West coast of the Southern Jutland peninsula, just North of Germany.
I llike how it's happen just when speaks about boundaries.
everyone complains about Turkey but no one noticed a mistake on 5:19
Hungarian is not an Indo-European language
I’m not sure if that’s a mistake... I think it’s included in because it’s Indo-European, but because it’s European. It’s geographically in Europe so it’s included in this cluster
@@kharris3352 Then why areFinnish and Estonian grouped separately from hungarian since they all are in europe and all of them belong to the same uralic group?
@@metalsnake869 He did mention Hungarian separately from other language groups because the map is about the linguistic feature count, not the language families. It just happens that most european languages have a similar feature count even if they are not related, except for the finnic languages, turkish, georgian, the celtic languages and the few along on the coast of France and Spain.
@@metalsnake869 If I understood the video correctly, countries were shaded blue or purple when the languages shared at least 5 common features with Standard European. Maybe Finnish, Turkish, etc. have only one less common feature than Hungarian, but that was enough to exclude them.
Neither Finish, Basque, Maltese... No surprise that languages outside the Indo-European family are different in many linguistic features.
In Swedish you can create new words by putting two existing words together. This comes very handy for making a super clear and easy to learn kinship system. Litterly translated they would be
Mormor - Mothermother / your grandmother on your mothers side
Morfar - Motherfather / your grandfather on your mothers side
Morföräldrar - Motherparents / your mothers parents
Morförälder - Motherparent / gender-neutral term for a parent of your mother
Farmor - Fathermother / your grandmother on your fathers side
Farfar - Fatherfather / you grandfather on your fathers side
Farföräldarar - Fatherparents
Farföräldrer - Fatherparent
Morbror - Mothersbrother / your uncle on your mothers side
Moster - Mothersister (though this is a shortened term, probably from morsyster orginaly) / you aunt on your mothers side
Faster - Fatherssister (again shortened probably from farsyster) / your aunt on your fathers side
Farbror - Fatherbrother / your uncle on you fathers side.
Gammel mormor - old mothermother / your mothers grandmothers, same term used for both of your mothers grandmothers.
Gammel morfar - old motherfather / your mothers grandfathers, same term used for both of your mothers grandfathers.
Mormors mormor - MotherMothers MotherMother / you grandmothers grandmother (all on the female side). You can mix any combination of the terms for grandmother and grandfather. Example farmors morfar - Fathermothers Motherfather / Your grandmother on your fathers sides grandfather on her mothers side.
Gammel moster - Old mothersister / Your grandfather or grandmothers sister.
Siblings
Syster - sister
Lillasyster - Littlesister / a sister that is younger than you
Storasyster - Bigsister / a sister that is older than you
Bror - brother
Lillebror - Littlebrother / a brother that is younger than you
Storebror - Bigbrother / a brother that is older than you
Barn - child
Barnbarn - Childchild / your grandchild
Barnbarnsbarn - ChildChildsChild / your grandchilds child
Barnbarns barnbarn - ChildChilds ChildChild / Your granchildrens grandchildrin
And it just continues in all eternity
All your cousins are your 'kusiner', no way to differentiate them from each other.
Kusinbarn - counsinchild / your cousins child or children
Sysslingar - are you second cousins. This is a old term that was orginally used for when you had cousins on your mother side that was from your mothers sister or sisters, but have since changed meaning. So its a shortned term of sister and a old word for children. So basically directly translates to sisterchild. Now the term is used for all you second counsins.
Brylling - are your third cousins. This also had a different meaning originally but have shifted with time. It was the male version of (sysslingar). So your cousins that were your fathers brother or brothers children. It cames from the same old word for children/youngsters. So literal translation would be "brotherchildren".
Syskonbarn - Siblingchildren /Your siblings children
Systerdotter - Sisterdaughter / Your sisters daughter
Systerson - Sisterson / your sisters son
Brorsdotter - Brothersdaughter / your brothers daughter
Brorson - Brotherson / your brothers son
I'm happy seeing my little island with its own native language written over it. We often get so underrepresented, generally not acknowledged, almost no one outside of Italy knows who we are... It may be nothing to you, NativLang, but it's a nice little thing for me
Yep, I was referring to Sardinia. I actually got mistaken for Sicilian when I was in Scotland, even after I explained where I was from. I literally said "I'm from Sardinia, not Sicily, it's the second biggest island in Italy" then I pointed it on a map... And they still said "oh so you're from the good Sicily then?".
I was quite baffled by this.
I am sorry to say I had to check where Sardinia was, despite being European. I didn't know Italians owned that one!
Interesting stuff.
Hey there! I am just passing through the comments seeking linguistic help, as i have no ideas left! :P
So I have this postcard on my wall that i absolutely love, and it has either a poem/expression or something that i have been trying to translate or at least identify the language. Google translate doesn't recognize it, and i've tried italian, latin, and every romanic/latin language. I am portuguese, so i know by reading it that it has to be a latin based language or dialect.... ANY SARDINIAN OCCITAN ITALIAN SPANISH FRENCH GALICIAN ROMANIAN CATALAN SPEAKING PERSON please
p.s. - I know about Sardinia and its existence :) i just didn't know how culturally independent it was, or how different the language was until i saw a nativlang video talking about latin languages a while ago (i thought sardinian was more of a dialect, as i know that italy is filled with different dialects throughout the country)...Glad i learned the opposite and now i know something new
Hungary loves Malta :) There are many of them working over the islands! We had billboards installed on streets and trams last year, saying come visit Malta!
Y'all speak English at home (at least the Maltese people I know) so don't show off with your pretend language. It was probably just made up by Tolkien to annoy Italians.
Hey! My tiny, normally overlooked Faroese language is on there
cool :)
“No one wants to hear that their language is less European than German” 😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂🔥
Why do I find this funny even when i am speaking german?
@MrNorthernSol English have Greek Latin and Germanic all together, I think it is
@@makky6239
English is a Germanic coat hanger hanging Romance, Greek and Germanic clothes.
I don’t speak it well, but Welsh - which is obviously Celtic - shares some of the things you mentioned. There are articles and a verb form with “have”.
When I had my major breakthrough in learning English (a.k.a. when first I dived into my internet addiction) I started frequently inserting English phrases while speaking my mother tongue and had a choice of words that was fitting when translating my sentence word to word in English, but rather weird in my native tongue. So I can very much imagine European languages adjusting to one another to a certain extend, as you suggest at 6:08 .
Sooo how do Hopi speakers express time?
they don't. They're transcendent
Niku, some languages has no grammatical tense. They use words that discribe time if they need it. Such as now, tommorow, yesterday, etc.
If i say «I read this book yesterday», you understand this action was in the past.
Rei Ranmaru so it's pretty much the same as in Mandarin?
Niku, I think so. I described how it in general works.
"I go to town yesterday".
Pretty understandable even if no tense is used.
Wait, how is Hungarian has that many "European" features? Isn't it from a compleatly different family? and Celtic is also an Indo-European family so shouldn't they havee more features? and what about the Indo- part of the Indo-European, do those languages share features? so many questions. Do you have links to the reserches you quoted, I woyld love to read them.
NativLang always puts a doc full of his sources (plus image/song/sound effect credits) in the description - docs.google.com/document/d/1lQHKbwHr0n2_YsF-U9_ldMfDlyHsBxhRXBNpskyZR3A/
I'd say it's pretty logical that concepts and ideas (in Language and everywhere else) cross borders over centuries. And the Magyars settled there ca. 1000 years ago and where ruled by Austria for around half that time. No wonder they borrowed and where influenced ;)
Yeah, he specifically says it's not about genetic heredity, but cross-lingual interaction.
Celtic is indo European but since it's so old and has been doing it's things on its own without taking that much influnce or inspiration from other languages it is really quite different
+Haxxx5 This whole video's conclusion is that *the similarity between European languages cannot be explained by genetic relationship*. I suggest you watch it all again, and pay the part from 5:50 special attention.
Romanian is a latin language. It's even in its name, "ROM(E)anian". Also, I can fairly understand romanan (and moldovan to some extent) without have studied it, for its structure and vocabulary is quite similar to portuguese.
Gustavo Coelho Moldovan is not a separate language, it's just an accent or a dialect at most..
@@akkerman9154Moldovan is a language. Moldavian is a Romanian dialect. Yes, I know it's been five years.
What happened to Danish?
There are at least a few of the 12 features
Feature 2: hvem vs hvis (who vs whose)
Feature 3: jeg har forvist (I have banished), jeg havde forvist (I had banished). Har/havde is Danish for have/had
Feature 4: jeg kan lide musik (I like music). The Spanish is: me gusta la música, which in Danish would have been: musikken behager mig (this is not the way people normally say it. They use the first)
Feature 5: jeg er kendt (I am known/famous)
Feature 8: ingen lyttede (nobody listened). Ingen is the negative
Feature 9: han er større end en elefant (he is bigger than an elephant). End is the comparative like the English than
I checked the examples on Wikipedia and I came with corresponding Danish examples to 6 of the 12. I might have misunderstood some, but I believe these fit the given examples of the six features
Maybe this happened: th-cam.com/video/eI5DPt3Ge_s/w-d-xo.html
There is an old brazilian song that said: "chorando, estou chorando lágrimas de crocodilo"
Please make a video about hopi language and their perception of time
TFW you speak a Slavic language and only point 3 on the "You might be a European" applies.
Moarice Yup. It seems that Standard Average European idea is just wrong and doesn't comply with reality.
+Christian Changer To demonstrate how faulty the logic you used to come to this conclusion is, I'll swap the arguments while keeping the proposition:
"It seems that since I am 165cm tall, the idea that the average European is 180cm tall is just wrong and doesn't comply with reality".
Your argument is completely invalid as most of the so-called euroversals don't aply to more than a half european languages, not only one. So if I had to use your flawed analogy with height I would put it like this: "Some researchers claim that average height in Europe is 180cm, but in reality in 40 European countries out off 44 the average height doesn't exceed past 176cm, so this previous statement can't be true."
I don't think you understand how research works. The fact that there's a list of "Euroversals" doesn't mean that someone pulled them out of their crevice and is trying to convince you that they correspond to the reality. It means that a researcher - in our case a certain Martin Haspelmath - has pulled together *data* from *actual languages* and *analysed* it for *features* that in his *framework* stood out as European Sprachbund features.
What you're saying, without having read his or any other relevant research, or, evidently, even the document accompanying this video, that his conclusions are wrong because some languages miss the features he singled out.
Another problem you seem to be having is with understanding the basic idea behindd the proposed concept. A European sprachbund is proposed and the researchers are trying to decide which features are part of it, which allows them to tell which languages belong to this sprachbund and in what measure. *Nobody is trying to define the features common to every single European language.* People are trying to establish *specific features of a specific linguistic area* that happens to centre in the heart of what Western Europeans think as Europe, the European Union and so on, hence "European".
If any number of languages - regardless of their precise geographical location or geopolitical classification - are missing half the features characteristic of this linguistic area, this only means that they aren't core members of this linguistic area. It doesn't mean that the area itself doesn't exist or that its core members don't exhibit those features.
I hope you will take the time to familiarise yourself with the terms and sources used in the video and in my reply and you will understand that your disagreement stems from confusion and misinterpretation. In addition to the document linked in the video's description, Wikipedia has some good articles on the topic.
Sobakus If some features don't aply to most European languages they shouldn't be claimed to be average, common or defining of a European language. Simple as that. There much common features of languages in Europe, but they are hardly specific. For example claiming that differentiation between "a" and "the" is a common feature of imaginary European sprachbund is preposterous as it is completely foreign to more than one third of languages in question. There are many similarities between neighboring languages, but there is no substential common set of specific language features spread all the way from Portugal to Ural Mountains. The futility of reaserch and disagreement on the matter shown in this video speaks of this clearly.
Great video!
The grammatical similarities between French and German and Dutch are also striking for:
- Basically the same use of avoir/haben (to have) and être/sein (to be) to form the main tense of the past: J'ai vu/Ich habe gesehen (I saw or I have seen), Je suis venu/Ich bin gekommen (I came or I have come). Italian works the same but not Spanish or Portuguese (They don't use to be and the tense doesn't mean exactly the same). But French uses also être for reflexive verbs, like Italian but unlike German and Dutch.
- Same use of a compound tense VS a simple tense for the past (Passé composé VS imparfait), even if the Imperferkt in German is also used as a passé simple (or passato remoto in Italian), so a preterit for remote actions or facts or for litterary purposes.
- Unlike Italian or Spanish but like German or Dutch, French tends to reject the past participle after pronouns like tout/tous/rien or adverbs like pas/jamais/plus/bien/mal/mieux/souvent. examples: I ate/I have eaten everything: Fr: J'ai tout mangé, Ger: Ich habe alles gegessen, It: Ho mangiato tutto. I slept well, J'ai bien dormi, Ich habe gut geschlaffen, Ho dormito bene.
- Same presence of an article meaning "not a" or "not some" (the zero quantity): "pas de" in French, "kein" in German, "geen" in Dutch. I have a car/I don't have a car: J'ai une voiture/Je n'ai pas de voiture, Ich habe ein Auto/Ich habe kein Auto. VS Italian: Ho una macchina/Non ho una macchina, or Spanish: Tengo un coche/No tengo un coche. I have money/I don't have money: J'ai de l'argent/je n'ai pas d'argent, Ich habe Geld/Ich habe kein Geld, Ho soldi/Non ho soldi, Tengo dinero/No tengo dinero. No problem: Pas de problème, Kein Problem, Niente problema, No problema.
Great Analysis!
that moment when he said “slavic“ and showed romania... that's really dumb, sorry.
Romanian is one of those oddball languages. It's in an area where Slavic languages are common, but it's a Romance language. You also have to realize the map was showing shared features, not language groups. So clearly Romanian is missing a component of most Romance languages. Which makes sense if you know it's history.
I'm sorry but you are the really stupid one. When he said "Slavic," he showed English, Romanian, and Greek. You only took notice of Romanian? The order of which he was listing the language families clearly did not correspond to the video.
Good point for Breton/Brezhoneg.
Bad point for French, It's a romance language !
Indeed, the commentary was wrong but the map itself was about certain features in languages.
~5:20
What about Danish D:
The only question i have left is .. wtf is covfefe?
As a speaker of French and English (and Japanese) I find it relatively easy to understand Spanish and Portuguese, to read Italian and even understanding German or Dutch seem like a possible task, given I focus! However, Slavic languages feel harder to understand aside a few words. So it seems to me that most European languages are kind of cousins, which is way less prevalent in, say, east-Asia.
French is a Latin language, related to Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Catalan, Romanian, and many others, and English is a Germanic language which is related to German, Dutch, danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Icelandic, Faroese, and many others aswell. Slavic languages are also from indo European just like Latin languages and Germanic languages so that’s why. I hope this helped!
also idk if they’ve mentioned this in the video because I just started watching it but hopefully they did hahahahah
europe is just western eurasia tbh
So true :)
Hello! I just wanted to share that you helped me find my passion for languages, and even though I was out of college, I decided to go back to school to get a BA in Linguistics. Thanks for your enthusiasm, knowledge and uh... being on TH-cam I guess :D
I'm curious as to why Swedish and Norwegian got classified as Baltic, but Danish didn't? They are very similar after all
It's a bit of a mismatch between voiceover and graphics, really; he's listing language families but the languages appear in order of SAE-ness.
Lietvas + Lithuanian are Baltic, Swedish is Germanic.
Wow, your map of Europe shows Belgium as entirely francophone, even though over half the population speaks Dutch!
Why have you put Hungarian as a Slavic language?
He did not. He said: "(...) Slavic, Baltic, Greek, Hungarian, Albnian (...)". The colours do not represent language families.
Agnes, nie czaisz bazy, to nie jest o rodzinach jezykowych - the film is not about linguistic families
Isn’t Dutch Germanic and not romance?
It's funny how people are debating whether Turkey is European or not rather than the actual topic of the video. You have to realise that even if you don't consider Turkey as a European country, Turkish is a language of Europe. There are 10-15 million Turkish speakers living in Europe excluding recent migrants to countries like Germany. That's a larger population than most European countries. Therefore it's quite natural that Turkish is mentioned in this video.
the moment you made Czech look like its a Baltic language and completely dismissed Slovakian, even though they are VERY similar, you lost me... honestly just the fact that you didnt mention all the background for why Whorf was wrong with his concept of different "time" and that it actually cannot be used as a viable evidence for languages impacting our thoughts right at the beginning was actually quite enough, i never heard of this and I am quite into languages, but thanks for the notice, i would just love to see less misinformation on the data that you mention throughout
Native Dutch speaker here. German and Dutch are very similar in both speaking and writing. Dutch does not have much similarities with Italian and Spanisch. Belgium is bilingual. The north speaks Dutch and the South speaks french.
@@iammcwaffles5514 I've read that German speakers in Belgium are only 71.000 so they're quite a minority (Belgium has a little bit more than 11 millions inhabitants)
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle Dutch and Spanish+Italian have absolutely nothing in common or even similarly in common. (I can know because I was raised tri-lingual: Dutch, Spanish, English, by a Dutch father and an Argentinian mother).
Dutch has contaminations and borrowed words ("contaminaties en leenwoorden) from French (Galisisms, e.g. "portemonee", "paraplu"), German (Germanisms e.g. "überhaupt", "sowiso"), Latin (Latisms e.g. "exorbitant", "destructief","transpatant") and lots from English (Anglisisms e.g. "overall", "sneakers",), but almost no Hispanisms!
Grammar and sentence structure are completely different e.g. "Noord-Atlantische VerdragsOrganisatie NATO" vs "la Organización del Tratado del Atlántico Norte OTAN".
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle Kom maar met goede voorbeelden!
Spaans is overigens een Latijnse /West Romaanse taal en niet Indo-Germaans/ West Germaans zoals het Nederlands.
¡Entonces ven con buenos ejemplos!
El Castellano es una lengua latina, opueso al Holandés que es un lenguaje indo-germánico / germánico occidental.
Then come with some good examples!
Spanish is a Latin / West Romance language, opposite to Dutch, being a West German language.
I am fluent in these languages and I have lived in these cultures. I know what I am talking about!
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle
What is your background? You call me ignorant but you apparently refuse to give any example. Are you a fraud? Be serious or troll elsewhere!
And there is always somewhere a common ancestry to almost anything, but that does not mean the modern branches have anything in common with each other.
I speak Dutch, Spanish, English, German, French, Turkish and Hebrew.
@Your Mom's Creepy Uncle Zo te zien ben je nu aardig uitgeluld. Dikke bult!
Isn't Turkish not a European Language? They use the Latin Alphabet currently but throughout the History of the Ottoman Empire the Turks utilized the Arabic alphabet as their main script. It's also not apart of the Indo-European Language family, as it has it's own language family titled "Turkic Languages".
Turkish is veeeeeeeeeeery different from the Romance languages that are spoken widely as it is a *Turkic* language (like uzbek and siberian yakut), so is finnish and hungarian which are *uralic* languages
I speak Slovak and the first 2 points do NOT apply:
- no articles
- no "have" way to express past tense
Also, why is it not on the map along with missing Danish and Macedonian? Include Czech and not Slovak!?
Those points don't apply for any Slavic languages. I'm pretty sure this is centered around Romance and Germanic languages, that's why they had the most features.
I think the missing countries either have 3-4 features or there is no data for them.
slovak has articles, but it's not needed to say them like in all slavic languages.. Ten/Ta/To - Nejaky/Nejaka - etc... same with south slavic Ovo/Ova etc.... peace.
and as a second.. yes, slovak has "have" for some types of the past tense, like - "malo sa to stat" or "mal som to urobit" etc.... it's just the way how linguists are explaining the patterns.
@@sukromnevideo No. Ten/Ta/to = this it's not article. The same with 'sa' it's not 'have'. It's a part of reflexive verb and I don't remember how in English you call the sentence without subject like in your example.
@@magpie_girl3741 mal - had
@@derpauleglot9772 The Pauleglot In Polish we also have this sentences, e.g. Miało się to stać. 'It should have happened'. But they say about sentence with 'have' for past and we in Slavic languages have ASPECT, so we don't need this 'have'. E.g.
ZJADŁSZY obiad pozmywałam naczynia. 'I HAD EATEN dinner before I washed the dishes.'
JADŁAM BYŁA obiad... - I HAD BEEN EATING dinner (before)...
JADAŁAM BYŁA obiady... - I HAD BEEN EATING regularly dinner (before)...
Gdybym nie była chora, ZJADŁABYM obiad. - If I hadn’t been sick, I WOULD HAVE EATEN dinner.
And more... all without have/had.
Of course mal is 'had' becues Slovak have 'to have' :)
' I have been reading a book / I had been reading a book' = Čítal som knihu / Bol som čítal knihu [without 'mal']
You have 'to be' as a part of past verbs but NOT 'to have' - above 'bol' and 'som' are from conjugation of 'to be'.
Pozdrawiam, Ania.
Very well done. Your passion for languages really comes through in your production quality. :D
You might be a European; tfw Polish does not have 1, 2, and historically could do without 3 (as Russian often does as well), and does not admit 4 (się vs mnie). I guess I might not be a European, after all XDDD
That's a bit weird that almost half of Europe use slavic languages, and of course slavic languages share many features between each other, but they are not in the "core". But OF COURSE German and French are... Is it only me who sees the bias? I do not think feature clustering works this way...
One small question, why doesn't catalan show in the map, i mean, it is a European language
En realidad lo que aparece es Blanco, no dice que puntuacion tiene en la escala esa, aunque siendo Romanica seguro que puntua igual que el castellano, pero si es por el nombre, no se nombra ni el Aragones, ni el Bable ni el Galego por ejemplo y ya me imagino porque, si estas mirando que puntuacion sacan en esa escala no es de locos asumir que las lenguas hipano-romances o como se llamen, vayan a puntuar 99% igual; el catalan aunque se considere distinto idioma (que ojo, no se demasiado), no creo que sea tan distinto como para derrepente, al contrario que el español, tenga casos, no tenga genero y utilice un subfijo como determinante, verdad? Ademas, si tu eres catalan, puedes hacer tu mismo el test ese a ver que puntuacion sacas! Tengo curiosidad hasta yo!
There's a bunch of other languages he didn't show (I'm French so that's why I'm giving example of French languages), like chti, langue d'oc, normand, Corse etc
I think that if he included every European language the map would have been a mess so that's why he didn't show them
What are you talking about check 00:04
Who knows if there is scientifically valid data for those? You can't put what you don't have.
Seeing Denmark slowly fade from the map of Europe at 5:12 broke my heart :(
I did try to understand and make some sense out of this video but I could not because of the very implicit way of you trying to explain things even though I am studying linguistics. The only thing that I have understood from this video is that some so-called scientists have been trying to form a separate branch which would gather the languages of a specific region, and/or specific people or societies by making it look like it's a scientific effort, which is definitely not. This is clearly ethnocentricism which has been being unrighteously disguised as science by some so-called scientists themselves.
Disliked for including turkey.
I find it interesting that Dutch has less of these features then french since as a German Dutch is if the languages I never learned the language easiest to understand and leagues ahead of French.
5:55 As a Dane I disapprove of this map
Denmark doesn't exist so who cares.
Why is Belgium entirely in the dark colour on the map at 5:35 but the Netherlands in the lighter blue colour? Half of Belgium (the more populous half) speaks a version of Dutch, not French. So shouldn't that half be in the lighter blue colour as well?
That half has french influences.
You've put it as slavic but Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24-26 million people as a native language, primarily in Romania and Moldova.
I doubt that many people will consider Turkey to be in Europe (although a small part geographically is) and the turkish language to be european.
I love how Denmark simply fades from the map around 5:00 ..
3:57 slavic languages: Am i a joke to you?
The suffixes at the end of the word technically work like the articles in the Western languages. We put the "the" article at the end of the word and don't forget most Slavic languages have cases and add a suffix for the case. The Western languages change the article for that. So technically both work the same way.
I would absolutely expect Finnish, Basque and Turkish to be different, but Q/P Celtic? That's a surprise?
3:52 jeff foxworthy reference in a linguistics video is crazy 💀💀💀
TURKEY IS NOT EUROPE
Caolho, o Pirata you are right. I always say the same "we Turks are not european as cultural and mentality. We don't want to be a part of europe.
Dadaş 25 Why not? Is it because of religion?
Turkic people come from Mongolian lands, the only reason they may be close to Europeans is through mixing with the European people of Greece, Anatolia, Georgia and Armenia (via violence as usual).
Nadir Kuleli Wow. I suppose you are also dumb.
+Nadir Kuleli
Wrong, because Mongols, or Xian'bei as they were called, were formerly the masters of the Kokturuks, and after their demise, the whole lot of their numbers integrated into the Kokturuks, and other tribal systems of Turkic nature. At Chingiss Khan's time, there were bilingual tribes in Mongolia who spoke both Turkic and Mongolian, to the degree that people had a hard time understanding whether a people were more Turkic or more Mongolian.
Fierce enemies? More like allies and contemporaries. What is more intriguing is, that there are accounts of Mongol tribes settling among the Turks in Anatolia, and integrating into the native populace, meaning that even the Turks of Anatolia have Mongols among them. As for racism, your claims that 40% of ethnic Turks in Turkey are actually converted and assimilated native Anatolians is just one example of racism, as you do racial profiling on a segment of the population, although you do not state which segment of the Turkish population that is. As for that, I have neither heard, or read of any mass conversions that took place anywhere in Anatolia or the Ottoman regions where this conversion brought about both a linguistic and cultural shift. Examples would be both the Bosniaks and the Albanians, and other smaller populations such as the Torbesh and Pomak, all of whom are Muslims, but are linguistically and culturally different from Turks.
Indeed, being a Turk is about being of that heritage. Its not totally linguistic or cultural, as you claim. No one is contesting the fact that intermarriage has not happened, but to say that 40% of the ethnic Turkish population has no tribal connections is impossible to imagine.
Turkic and Mongolic people have always been living together, and are closer to eachother than any other population surrounding them. No one can state otherwise.
European languages have cognates within eachother, I get no cognates with other languages. Mystery solved.
4:28 "I know nobody wants to hear their language is less european than German"
Why?
So... Non indo-europian language like hungarian has more european features than some indo-europian languages?
Most common European expressions I can think of (I speak Modern and Ancient Greek, English, Spanish and some French, Italian and latin) are based either on ancient Greek and secondarily to Latin or French because until English came on top of French these languages were the lingua franca in antiquity, middle ages and the early modern era respectively. Ancient Greek came first so it had a founder effect.
"Crocodile tears" is Ancient Greek for example. Most Christian expressions were originally written in Ancient Greek. And there are even some that are translated in other languages where they make little to no sense.
e.g. "a case of sour grapes" in English.
Some things interest me here.
Latin does not have a word for "A" nor a word for "The", as a result it is less European than German in this list. Amusingly, this extends to Italy, Spain, and Albania, all of which were the longest-held Roman provinces. Barring French, no Romance language is as "European" as German in this list.
But why is French different? What could possibly make it so different from the remaining Romance languages? Its German roots. Charlemagne was a Frank and the Franks were Germans. French, as a Romance language, still maintains some affectations from its invaders' Germanic past.
You see something slightly similar in England where the native Celtic, Welsh, is not at all European, yet English itself is only partway European despite being Germanic. Essentially, the introduction of Germanic and Romance brought the European-ness of the islands up, but not so far as to German itself. One could even say, the existence of Celts brought the European-ness of the Germanic English down.
This idea of "Standard Average European" is Germano-centricism at its finest.
Also, poor Denmark is just German on that map. I know Danish sounds like a drunken Swede with rocks in his mouth, but you didn't have to make them not exist, NativLang!
My native Lithuanian language is supposedly the most archaic language of the Indo-European family tree, meaning its the closest to what our distant common ancestors spoke and jet we are only a 5. This is not a a video about Euroversals but video about Germanversals. Estonian isn't an Indo-European language so it is no surprise why Estonian scores so little, but then why does Hungarian (another Finno-Ugric language) scored so high in comparison to Estonian ? Its because Hungary was part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire so they have German loan words. What a big shock (sarcasm).
arabic has a word for a, thats not an european concept.
I don't know about Latin, but romance languages other than French do have a word for a (um/uma, un/una) and the (o/a, la/lo).
What on Earth are you on about? Spanish has words for a and the.