10 Language "Facts" Debunked in 10 Minutes 

The one from ur shorts is infinitely adorable :3 The one from this vid is quite cute too

The previous

The one in the video is really cute in my opinion! It's really expressive in comparison with the shorts one. But won't complain if you use any otter you like (pun intended XD)

i love the otter from this video the most, but the realistic one is really charming too either way, keep up the great work!

I love the real one for no reason 😅 adds a lil humor

Whenever I tell people I study linguistics, they always think I'm gonna start judging their speech 😭

@@TheLingOtter the um actually ☝️🤓 crowd is cramping our style

@@TheLingOtter This is exactly how I feel when I tell people I'm an econ major. They think I'm some business major. T-T

I think of grammar nerds as a group is a subset of linguistics nerds.

@@LunaBari not grammar nerds, grammar nazis.

This too! So many languages have double negatives while keeping the negative statement, like Spanish and Japanese. I always tell people that language is not math

Yeah, like when you say in Spanish "No quiero hacer nada" and people say that you actually want to do something.

@@TheLingOtterthere’s nothing wrong with using double negatives in English, but it doesn’t make much sense to justify it based off of other languages- something you condemn in this video

speak understandably then, double negatives make a statement void because u cant determine if it means the complete opposite or not. I will always complain about double negatives

@@saygo-png Nobody uses double negatives to state a positive; they simply state the positive or further clarify their point somehow

It's not. It turned into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Romanian. As languages do. _Classical_ Latin, as in, the Latin spoken by Julius Caesar, is dead.

If latin is so good then why is there no latin 2?

I guess they thought it was perfect because it was only used by nerds who treated it as such. They didn't have to hear how poor, provincial people in the Roman Empire spoke it.

​@@user-hv5tl2ij7oevery single living Romance language is a Latin sequel.

​@@meowtherainbowx4163Medieval Latin and Ecclesiastical Latin, the forms used by the elite in many European countries post Rome's fall, are DIRECT descendants of Vulgar Latin, the various local forms of Latin spoken throughout the Roman Empire. They are NOT descended from Classical Latin, the elite's version. So that's your first mistake. Secondly, the actual reason it was seen as perfect is twofold: A) Because it was Roman, and Rome was considered the pinnacle of an empire, the ultimate nation, and B) Latin was seen as a holy language to Christianity, and for a long time, Christian religious scripture (aside from the Orthodox kind) was not even allowed to be written and published in anything but Latin.

It predates both "isn't" and "aren't" so if those are words now, "ain't" should count.

@@typhoonzebra And if somone wants to be really posh and pedantic they would have to say is not and are not all the time lol

@@amadeosendiulo2137 True, but they rarely deny that they are words.

@@amadeosendiulo2137 Then "ain't" is "am not".

@@matt92hun It ain't so simple tho.

I'm Irish, I thought you'd like to know that in Ireland we still use the habitual "be" in conversation even tho we don't use it in written form (because we were raised to believe it's a lesser, lower way of speaking thar sgouldnt be written). The history is long but if you're interested I'll tell you. Basically we were forced into speaking English and forgetting Irish. As a result in irish-english we say things like "ye" to translate words like "sibh" (you plural) which didnt exist in English.

@@jackathupurtill1948 AAVE is very similar to Irish-English in that sense. It was practically beaten out of me to stop using AAVE because it was “incorrect English”.

Sorry to trouble you, but could you recommend any literature abt AAVE? I can Google ofc, but I wouldn't know how reliable those results may be, so I thought I may as well ask😅

@@silvieskoupilova2909 can’t put you onto any books really. It’s better auditorily explained but I can recommend some black linguists on TikTok: @yeet.capitalism, @everythinglinguistics, and @whatsgoodenglish

That's so cool! I wish my grandmother was still here, because that would absolutely tickle her to know

The "you are speaking english wrong" mfs when i start speaking proto indo-european

​@@TheOwlOf2 I love the thought of that

​@@TheOwlOf2 wrong, we must return to chemical signaling in ocean only, how God truly intended.

Spricst þu Eald Englisc?

Old English is a corruption of Proto-Germanic anyway

I agree its fine but "I won't put up with this" would fix the "mistake" and sound fine

"Put up" is a phrasal verb. You can't split it up or else it's nonsense

But why go through the hassle of using so many words when you could just say "This is something I won't tolerate". It's simpler and easier for newer speakers.

But why go through the hassle of using so many words when you could just say "This is something I won't tolerate". It's simpler and easier for newer speakers.

@@coolguy4709 because "to tolerate something" has different meaning nuances than "to put up with". Both words exist and occupy different niches

Of course! Not everyone with ASD struggles with language development, as it's a group of very diverse people. Hopefully I didn't make it sound like everyone with ASD has issues with language development as that wasn't my intention at all

I told my shrink that I think I have autism (I absolutely do) and they were just like "I don't think you have autism, you're too good at socializing."

Ugh, whenever I'm speaking to someone whom I just met​ because I went out for the night with my friend and I say I'm autistic that's exactly what they say, "you can't be autistic you're here socializing with us" and I'm always flabbergasted.@@thrandompug2254

@TheLingOtter I think you did do a pretty good job conveying that. that might also be because i have autism myself and research it a lot so i know it but saying "some individuals" was pretty good at conveying it

I'm in a similar boat. I find I can pick up on and rationalize patterns that help me retain info on other languages (like "Oh, this probably has the same root as this other word, so I understand now why it means this"). But I often think in concepts, not in actual words, so when it comes time to communicate, I end up having to "translate" my own thoughts into words.

@@MKisFeelinSpicy “Thinking in concepts” is the perfect way to describe it.

im autistic too and also love languages! im learning spanish :) i can watch tv but i can barely string together a sentence lol (i dont think thats cuz autism though i just need to get better at the grammar)

Thats exactly how i describe my own brain! Word for word! Awsome!!​@@MKisFeelinSpicy

You described me (except for the fact that I'm not on the autistic spectrum)

Thanks for letting me know! I'll try blocking it out

I love seeing insufferable White progressives make fools of themselves.

what does you skin color have to do with you speaking aave? language is not bound to race, anyone could be a representative native speaker of aave

​@@kingjojojo1 there's a reason it's called AAVE (AFRICAN-American-Vernacular-English). Although you're right in that language cannot be assigned to 'race', (because that category doesn't even make sense to use on humans. We are ONE human race according to science, and that's it), but a language CAN be associated with a culture and a country. And different skincolors can be associated with different countries, mainly depending on how hot it gets there/how much the sun shines. So if you make a sort of chain like this, you'll realize skincolor CAN actually be indirectly linked to language (INDIRECTLY being the key word here). See, when different people of different cultures and different languages meet, their different native tongues might mix. There are different linguistic terms (creole, patois, pidgin) to describe different ways in which such a scenario may play out, which will have an effect on how they mix and interact. To use a random, nonspecific example: If a country, which has an exclusively black population (Africa has a lot of those) is invaded and conquered by an army of countries with (nearly) exclusively white pouplations, and the conquerers decide to enslave the population of the country they invaded and force them to mass-migrate to where they came from in order to serve them, that's a way of mixing different cultures and languages, through means of subjugation and violence. Now, you can probably imagine that the people who've just been enslaved had no way of knowing the conqueror's native languages prior to meeting them. Same obviously goes the other way around. But by just existing in the same space together, and feeling a need to communicate with each other, these languages will, incredibly slowly, start adopting features from one another. Or more accurately, since the conqueror's would've had no interest in learning a language they would've viewed as 'inferior', but on the flipside forced the enslaved to learn their language, it's a lot more one-sided. The enslaved, who now speak two languages (one to keep a small sense of cultural identity, however fleeting it may be, and one out of necessity), will start to mix grammatical, lexical, morphological, and other features of both languages over periods of tens, even hundreds of years until you end up with something like AAVE. That's why you can say only black people speak AAVE without being a racist, because it's just true, and it makes perfect sense when you look at how it came to be. In fact, it's kinda still like the situation I described earlier, where I mentioned the newly enslaved people who speak two languages, and the oppressors who only speak one. The modern equivalent is African-American people being capable of conversing in both AAVE and Standard American English as a part of the population which isn't openly despised or viewed as lesser anymore, but still very much systematically oppressed on the one hand, and white Americans who are only able to converse in Standard American English and are systematically privileged and have some very specific (and sometimes still racist) ideas about what use of language is correct and what isn't on the other. I simplified a LOT in this comment, yet it's still hella long, so I hope my point of this being quite the complex, but also fascinating issue comes across.

@@m.s.5370 i aint be readin all that hell naw. if you need that long to make a point you cant be right

Ha, I like this, it's not the hardest language to learn because of linguistic barriers, but physical and social barriers.

Conversely, every other language would be just as hard to learn for them, because they have no interaction with other languages either. So, we're back to square one with it being individualistic. Unless, perhaps, we go with dead languages that were never written down as the hardest. It might be cheating, but you know that plenty of them existed. Or maybe something like non-human languages, which even people spending their lives studying them still have very little idea of what's being communicated.

We actually have a few words allegedly from their language documented. Mostly because some of their neighbors (other Andamanese people) have interacted with them and then interacted with outsiders and have shared tidbits of their language. I say allegedly because some of those individuals have then interacted with North Sentinelese people and struggled to communicate which either indicates they were lying, mistaken, or that North Sentinelese language actually changes at a rapid pace.

Hardest language to learn is an Dead obscure language with no written record.

Best avatar I've ever seen.

Or they just take from English (or Latin/Greek/etc.) and put der/die/das onto it and give no explanation for which gender it is.

what is majoring in linguistics like?

Second, how is the major? I sometimes wish I had entered that field. It would have been a good match for me. Instead, I buffeted the whole academic arena and then ran away with a little English Lit degree.

lmao

don't forget 3) Never use no AAVE, for it is incorrect

The preposition rule applies to sub clauses I suppose, for example “Avoid circumstances where there is a preposition a sentence ends with”. Because your sentence is actually omitting an “it” I think? “Never use a preposition to end a sentence with (it).”

I would have said "swimmed" too if I wanted to make it regular.

It says 'to swimed,' so it's probably a typo.

​@@matt92hunIf we only applied the rules, indeed, it should be swimmed. Not swimed. When we add -ed to a monosylabic word and it ends in consonant + vowel + consonant, the last consonant should be doubled.

I agree. There is no such thing as "correct" language usage, but there IS standard usage.

meh, those were legitimate examples

won’t stop me from getting drunk methinks

Latin was the language of the Romans so it was seen as educated and refined. As opposed to Germanic languages, which literally stem from barbarian speak. You also absolutely can apply the grammar from one group to another one, that's a big chunk of how all modern languages have been formed.

Rome larpers

@@water1374 most insane nationalist bullshit ever said.

@@somnvm37uhh no? What we said was factual.

Snobbery, basically. The upper class knew Latin. The lower classes didn't learn it.

I would say that calling them PrePositions makes the requirement. You could simply call them adpositions or postpositions instead.

@@elderscrollsswimmer4833 You can even put "with" to the end, like "vade mecum".

whilst order isn't set, there is a norm to it. Its deviated from when necessary, for stylistic choices, and in speech through flow of thought. but we can see from surviving texts that most sentences follow a similar order, and we have cases of writers complaining about weird word order being used

Sorry for being uninformed but what is habitual tense? If I understand it correctly wouldn't "Sally cooks pizza" be in habitual tense for American English? I'm confused

@@erock5722 fair warning, i'm not a linguist, so if what i say here is incompatible with what linguists actually say, ignore me here. the habitual tense (as i understand it) refers to what someone commonly does. the example you gave can refer to that, but the interpretation i commonly encounter is that it's the present-tense version of the verb having another meaning based on context. it's still a present-tense verb and it's conjugated the same way; compare this to, for example, "sally be cooking pizza," which in aave is an example of the habitual tense. essentially: one is the present tense being flexible, the other is another tense added for clarity's sake.

Ooh, makes sense. Maybe just my dialect(or just me) for present tense I would use is cooking. But doing some googling, the Sally cooks example is simple present tense, where as Sally is cooking is present progressive, and habitual is it's own thing(though I unfortunately still don't really understand the difference between habitual and simple present). But yeah makes sense, I am also not a linguist, so I could be completely wrong but yeah it's cool none the less. Thanks for the help ❤

@@erock5722 of course! i hope you have a nice day (or whatever time of day it is for you)

@@erock5722 sally be cooking pizza = sally regularly cooks pizza, it’s a habit of sally’s

AND ANOTHER THING-

I can answer for the first two 1) Good is an adjective, and Well is an adverb. You attach adverbs to verbs so that's why people tend to correct others when they say good. However, it seems like good is becoming an adverb as well now so it's correct 2) This one is corrected mainly because "he was hung" vs "he was hanged" have two vastly different meanings (the former having sexual connotations). But still, you're correct that the two past tenses should be accepted in whichever situation if that's how we all are using it

​@@TheLingOtter good is often used as an adverb as well as an adjective, waa explicitly and commonly an adverb long ago, and for at least a decade has been commonly used as an adverb in many dialects worldwide. At this point its difficult to argue it as anything *bur* an adverb. Even prescriptively. Yes an idiolect may consider it to not be, but unless we're emforcing particular subdialects its difficult to argue that it isnt an adverb hung also has itger contexts, it can be used to mean drunk or sick or generally unwell in some places, such as a few Australuan english subdialects. particularly in Ocker ones. This sort of "2 variants for distinct meanings" does show up in other places, and may have played a part in the distinction being held firm. Its also likely that education has some factor. With formal laws and texts being written by those with one type of education, favouring one variation, and a growing literacy amongst those with less access to education favouring a different variation, leading to a prescribed formal meaning of one, and a more common meaning with the other (which would go to explain the origin of my previous point here)

I don't know about elsewhere, but in most-if-not-all American English, the word "hanged" means "put to death by hanging." We use "hung" in cases where the hanging wasn't _that_ kind of hanging, such as when hanging shirts out to dry.

I love that play!

Oh god, I remember that book all too well from almost 20 years ago. We were taught that they spoke in a different accent but were discouraged from doing so ourselves. What's the point then in reading such novels?!

Thank you for watching !!!

They aren't in the same language families. However, due to the amount of Chinese loanwords in both Korean and Japanese, it makes learning new words very easy due to the amount of cognates. Additionally, the grammar of both Korean and Japanese are extremely similar so that helps a lot

@@TheLingOtter Oh, yeah I forgot about the Chinese loanwords...

@@TheLingOtterSo you’re saying that Chinese, Korean and Japanese all sound the same?

@@donnerthereindeer366That's not what they said at all-stop trying to strawman.

True

I think the new one is pretty cute

​@@kallebanan1924 me too

I want it in normal colors

I watch Easy German videos and they do comparing dialects alot.

In Kenyan English, there is no that habitual be, that is uniquely in AAVE

Thank you so much for watching! I'm glad you enjoyed the video,,,and in regard to the loanwords, that's so true!! People think that loanwords make the language less "pure," but by those standards, the majority of English is "impure" because the majority of our words are from French/Latin rather than Germanic

If you think Italy hates lone words, then you should see how Icelandic deals with them.

Prescriptivists be like: "Who is that? Should I ask him or her, who he or she is?

everyone is they/them unless they say otherwise

Nah, I say "who are/is he/she/they/xe/e/dei/hej/hoi/av/inserteveryotherpronounhere?"

@@Spacey_key that's not true. Anyone who appears masculine is "he", anyone who appears feminine is "she", and when you don't know or context isn't there it's "they". If someone says to you they use another pronoun, it's what they said, but default what I said (most people don't say pronouns).

I'd add phonology and linguistic diversity to this. For example standard Danish has a large phoneme inventory and creaky voice is a distinguishing feature, and a study suggests that Danish children take longer to learn to pronounce their language than Norwegian children (though this study's validity is questioned by some experts). Danish speakers aren't exposed to a lot of variety either, so many have trouble understanding regional dialects.

Native Dutch speaker here, and indeed it's literal hell to explain Dutch gender to new learners. Our two genders are "common" and "neuter", with common (= masculine or feminine) words taking extra marking. In theory at least. Because in reality neuter nouns can take the same extra marking in certain circumstances (like "het mooie huis" (the nice house), where the -e after 'mooi' doesn't make sense because that's the common gender marking, but it's wrong to omit it lol. But if you re-arrange the phrase to seperate the adjective and noun, like "het huis is mooi" (the house is nice), suddenly the extra -e disappears, which also happens if the noun was common gender. Also, Dutch people have completely lost their sense to determine what gender a noun is, with no-one except language nerds knowing that words with suffixes like -heid, -ing, etc. are feminine, and most people even treating some common gender nouns like neuter nouns and some nouter nouns like common gender. I heard that Belgians can actually intuitively know what gender a Dutch noun is, even knowing if it's masculine or feminine despite there being no systemic difference. It's fascinating to me how grammatical gender changes and disappears

@@ppenmudera4687 Sama thing in North Germanic languages. Most of them only distinguish common and neuter as well.

Same. I was always told it was "bad English" as though only other languages got to have dialects and English was excluded. It's pretty harmful.

Well at least you can conclude that intelligence doesn’t universally influence language acquisition based on these cases

@@fredhasopinionsI have this gripe with nearly all these linguistics popularists. They’re too brash with their arguments and end up not saying much of anything at all.

Linguists do study grammar, but they don't decide what a "correct" grammar is.

@@hlibushok so there are no grammar rules, but only grammar suggestions?

@@the_odd_cat553 There are no grammar rules or suggestions, only grammar facts.

@@the_odd_cat553 There is grammar that is spoken. Nothing else. No rules, no suggestions. Linguist just study how people speak.

@@f1mbultyr So grammar actually doesn’t exist, I can talk any language in any way I want and they are bigots if they find that weird.

It's good, maybe at some point everyone in the US will have one accent

There's already a form of "sign language" that was created historically to basically be a signed form of English with the exact grammar and words, it's called "Signed English" or "Signed Exact English". It was popular in a lot of deaf schools until the mid-20th century, when sign languages started being considered languages in their own right and educators started respecting deaf culture more.

THANK YOU! i hate when people go "oh who cares if literally is being misused and doesn't mean anything anymore? language changes". this isn't about a word slowly over decades or centuries meaning something kind of different, this is people ignoring the definition of a word and misusing it to the point that the word has no purpose anymore and we can no longer indicate what we mean anymore because it now means the opposite of what it used to.

That's the problem with descriptivism, it opens the flood gates to just throw away all meaning by saying "uhmmmm acshually it's ok since it's changing anyways"

some guy basically just made it up. sentence final prepositions were attested long before this rule was invented by some dudeś stuffy grammar book

In Danish you'd say "Hvem går du i parken med?". I think I have a good guess for which language Germans considered perfect in the old days as well. But even in Latin you can write "me" and "cum" together, like "vade mecum", literally "come mewith".

I definitely agree with you that there is a place for a standard when it comes to formal settings, but it is irritating to see people attempt to correct other people's native dialects in a casual setting

​@@TheLingOtter oh fair enough absolutely - there is so much joy and emotion that you can communicate by using language creatively / differently. I was lucky - we studied singlish and pidgin lit as part of cirrculum at school

Yeah it's kinda weird that the video is about how "all forms of English should be treated equally, nobody is correct!". Apparently except the 'proper' way, that's 'unnatural' and 'sounds wrong'. If you were speaking more casually you would just say "With who?", on its own, which sounds very normal. 'whom' is just a bit antiquated to most people.

I'm also curious why the same formulation in Spanish is considered genuinely grammatically correct when in English it isn't. Surely just mixing the words up is valid in other languages too?

very close, both are indo-european, both are germanic, most non-latinate words are cognates

"Every" is a stretch. It was also the language of the rich because only the rich could afford to learn Latin on top of whatever their native language was. Remember it was a major shift in Christianity when churches started holding mass and publishing Bibles in the local language. Before, the average person was sol.

He's not saying that everyone who thinks AAVE is a broken dialect is racist, he's saying that that idea is racist itself. You can hold racist beliefs without being racist yourself, if you didn't know any better.

@@joshuasgameplays9850 lol sorry for the late reply. I would not say that the idea itself is racist. Not everything "against" black people/minorities is racist. I guess it is an idea often used by racist people, but the idea itself is not racist.

Through the movies, I understood AAVE is actually a dialect of English spoken by African Americans, it had its origins in the South of the USA

When people say things like "The Inuit people have 20 words for 'snow', how weird/stupid/etc", without realising that English also has like 20 words for different types of horses. Languages reflect cultures, so of course languages will have more terms for concepts that those cultures find more important. It's exoticisation based on racist and classist views