A brief history of plural word...s - John McWhorter 

Lol, that comment is gold.

lol. so true😄

Yesss, do it! Especially if you studied linguistics.

I laughed at this one though hahahaha

ᚠᛟᛚᛚᚲᛟᚱᚾ ᚹᚨᛗᛈᛁᚱ v

Elizabeta Macovei LOL

I am in therapy and I find it funny

Fabulous!

Slightly upsetting since in French our stuff still have genders😂

Hahaha!

It's similar to German: lamb - Lamm > Lambs/Lambru - Lämmer, egg - Ei > eggs/eggru - Eier, bread - Brot > breads/breadru - Brote. Take a look: Brother - Bruder > Brethren(Brothers) - Brüder.

Jolo Atlantis they would sound "breadren", "eggren" and "lembren" today if they wouldn't have been changed to an -s ending.

This -ru ending is perhaps akin to Norse -r ending and German/OHG -er ending?

Nicu

naisu

I knew it's coming.

more like "doora" the ex-ploora...l

She’s an exploraDORA

@@elmiraarutiunian4072 doora the ex-plural. I love it.

ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-AJ9ZBN4c4vs.html

+Fredreegz What doesn't make sense is to have different rools for the same things in the same languaj. Be it which letters make which sounds, or which letters aren't pronounced at all, or how to make pluralen or how to conjugate verbs. If at all. Each one of these rules makes sense on its own, but when you put them all together in English and stir, then the language doesn't make sense.

"Sing" to "sung" is ablaut, but "goose" to "geese" and "man" to "men" is actually umlaut. Ablaut developed in PIE but umlaut developed much later, in Germanic languages.

it really doesn't make sense, all we can do is to find out why and how it is what it is

Kha Trần if you know the historical sound changes, everything actually make sense. There are many different types of plurals because of the case system, there were 5 in old enlgish, genitive accusative nominative dative and instrumental, all of which have different conjugations for plurals. As languages change, the sounds shift often in a pattern through umlauts and ablauts, but as time goes on, frequently made mistakes become regular which produces exceptions. An example would be “beek”, when children first learn a language, they see the pattern of adding s for plural, then applies it to all situations; it was more intuitive for them to say book-s than beek. Then the next generations may also make the same mistake and perhaps others too. In addition every generation and dialect keep changing and shifting, accounting for more sound changes. This effect gets snowballed over centuries and causes lots of exceptions in an language

I've studied Turkish and its plurals are so damned easy: -lar. It doesn't have a dual or anything like that.

+norcofreerider604 That's Dutch for you :)

Medium-Media

sounds very Germanic. ;)

Actually, Dutch is the English word for German. But psh. xD LOL

actually "boxen" is the German plural of "box". I suppose that word has been taken from the English language although there are German translations

LOL!

lmao

andreas aa *You're welcome

You're welcome

Well, I guess we have to come make it 'Your welcome' then, VIKINGS TO THE RESCUE!

Det var så lidt

Vær så god! Vi lærte dere deres egne språk

Exact what I thought too. The examples eye and tounge convinced me: Öga - ögon, tunga - tungor. To me if I would guess it would rather come from the Roman language influence, as many Roman languages add s for plural.

It's because this video is wrong. It was the Norman French (who have Scandinavian history), who introduced the plural -s suffix to English but not necessarily the "Vikings".

@@redpillsatori3020 The English already had a plural -s for many words, it's just that it wasn't generalized yet. The Normans may have strengthened the use of the plural -s, since their own words were using it and the English borrowed a lot of words from French (it makes around 29% of the modern vocabulary of English), but they didn't introduce it. Old Norse also had influence on the English language because of the Danelaw. But I think either the extent has been exaggerated in this video, or it's oversimplified and there was more going on. As it is, I don't believe the English really needed the Vikings or the Normans to make a grammatical rule more regular. But it's not impossible one or both had an influence in that respect.

The Swedish plural reminds me of German. 1 Buch - 2 Bücher (book)

I think it's because when you grow up speaking a language, you're used to the genders and forms and don't really sit and think twice about them. It's a natural flow to you. But if you were in a different nation, learning a new language, even if it was in character similar to yours, you'd still want it to be as simple as possible. And adding the S was super simple.

Nervously хахахаит

@@significantrichard7718 laughs in millions of characters but instead of being one of the parent languages or the family that such a writing is born and grown up in (and as such handy for), being a language thats system has no resemblance to them parents...... (japaneese)

*laughs in portuguese*

russian is arguably more streamline than english

@@Kzummo Russian have all these cases on one hand, but russian have precise alphabet-pronounce rules on the other hand

halves?

It might very well be though(the whole age thing disallowing complete language learning is a stereotype so it's only sometimes true for some people,it depends on if you're learning a language from scratch like a typical baby does or translating from an already known language like many adults do,the latter is a less effective way)it was the common thing to simplify language suffixes in Danish and Norwegian....in fact all the plurals are typically "er" ending today and gender has been downed to object and living(not fully sure about Norwegian)...the Icelandic language is incredibly conservative in general , Swedish is far from conservative but far more so in word structurising than Danish and Norwegian...a bit off topic but Finnish very much has the different prefixes and suffixes and conjunctions yet it is completely gender neutral and has no masculine or feminine ...different languages shift different ,it's the beauty of language.

I tend to agree. Methinks it was French Normans, and not Vikings. From what is written from the time of the Danish invasions of Britain is that Old English & Old Norse were very much mutually intelligible.

@@MrTangent Both, the Vikings and the Normans - were resposible for the big shifts in English. But the whole process started in the North of England first. Norse and Old English were similar but still had different word endings for their cases. It was easier to cut them and add a preposition in order to avoid confusion.

Opposite

Where is this superstition still known?

UnderTheSun Philippines.

@@VoidUnderTheSun it is popular in Russia for example

@Rafael Dejesus Well, in the Philippines we don't really put gender on our non-living things though some words have kind of pattern regarding gender ex. tita (auntie), tito (uncle), tindero (male vendor), tindera (female vendor)...nouns ending in "o" tends to be male and those ending in "a" tends to be female. I think this superstition is a remnant of our previous colonizer.

+Michelle Von Liechtenstein I want.... PANCAKEN!!!

***** It was just a joke, I guess.

Lambru don't lay eggru.

@@wheedler that like says I got you woolru from the cowru

True

yes and by extension no germanic tribe had any horn helmet back then.

Blablibliblu Yeah, but if they didn't add them some people would claim they forgot to add them.

And they used axes not swords . . . . . . . (may b 🤗)

Or the letter S to denote plural forms.

+Hai Nguyen Long story short because this video is wrong. Slightly less short, this video is a really radical simplification with some good ole extrapolation and wild guessing thrown in. Long story long, Old English, or OE, had five classes of nouns. Class I was made up mostly of Masculine and Neuter nouns, and made plurals with the suffix -as, while other classes used other ending such as a vowel change, -a, -an, or nothing at all. As English progressed, a series of sound changes occurred that essentially caused the English suffix system collapsed in on itself. Because it was no longer easy to tell which suffixes were which, it became basically impossible to tell what gender or class a noun was, and the gender and class system began to be forgotten. Slowly, people started using the common class I ending for more and more words, regardless of their old roles. Maybe those people were vikings, more likely they were just average Joes changing their language the way we all do: subtly and slowly. We'll never know for sure, cause at the end of the day we just weren't there. And of course even this is a super simplified explanation, and I'm sure as hell no expert, just a linguistics geek with a love of historical language. Hopefully I got all this right... at the very least I'd say it's more accurate than the video. Hope it helps.

EmilyEmilyIris It helps. A lot. You made my day Emily :)

Glad you found it interesting! This is the kind of stuff I really like about historical linguistics- the way it can tell the story of average everyday people, and the ways they lived, spoke, and thought.

+EmilyEmilyIris "I'm sure as hell no expert". I'm not either. McWhorter IS a linguistics expert. You reference the collapse of the suffix system. All the experts I've read reference massive Norse settlements as the reason "it was no longer easy to tell which suffixes were which" and "people started using the common class 1 ending for more and more words." McWhorter's explanation is simplified but how is this video "wrong"?

Ok, perhaps I should have phrased that differently. I'm sure as hell no professional, but maybe I should say I have enough knowledge, training, and access to people smarter than me to say I'm an expert. The Norse did invade the British Isles, and they definitely changed English. Every word in the English language that starts with "sk-" is from Old Norse! I'm in no way more experienced or knowledgeable than Dr. McWhorter, but I just believe that simplifying to the point of "the Vikings sucked at learning languages, so they 'decided' to use "-s" all over the place lol!" is a step too far. You lose the real beauty and the real story. You lose the knowledge of how language change actually happens, and like you can see from Hai's original comment, you end up leaving loose threads and confusing people.

It's the same as in italian.

Yes but that’s Portuguese. Lots of languages don’t associate morphology neatly with gender.

+Bathrobe Warrior Learning an proper accent requires paying attention to one's mouth when pronouncing words. I believe the reason so many people still have their native accent corrupting the new language they are speaking is because they are using the oral "gymnastics" from their native language. As a wise person once said, any time you are learning a new language, your mouth should feel uncomfortable.

+gregory brian I agree 100%. When I was learning to speak Italian, I couldn't for the life of me make the "rr" sound, and yet after three months of practicing saying words that felt "uncomfortable" as you put it, I got it. Nowadays when I speak Italian, people tend to assume I'm Italian until I make a silly grammar mistake, at which point they often ask if I'm Spanish. It's not like I'm particularly good at it, it's just because I invested time and effort into figuring out what I was doing wrong and correcting it. Anyone can do the same barring genetic limitations.

Bathrobe Warrior I experienced the same thing when learning French. I believe it's because some people, when learning a language, don't commit 100% to proper pronunciation because they're afraid they'll come across as goofy or pretentious. Once I took a chance and started experimenting with making my mouth "goofy," I was suddenly able to pronounce most French words properly.

The video said difficult, not impossible. A lot depends on motivation also, and invaders typically are not motivated to learn more of the local tongue than necessary to give orders. Spies, on the other hand, ...

+Bathrobe Warrior He said "almost impossible", and you know it's true. Very few people can learn a perfect accent in a foreign tongue after adolescence.

I remember watching a video about Old English at one point, and it included the sentence "Se blōman sindan hēr." That's not that similar to Modern English "The flowers are here," but it sure is similar to German "Die Blumen sind hier"! (Of course Modern English does also have the word "bloom," but the meaning has shifted somewhat.)

Yeah, I totally agree with you. When people complain about how hard English is, I just wanna send them to learn Russian or German😂😂😂Although both English and German are from the Germanic group, the latter is more difficult.

yes!!! me too!! exactly!!!

I'd imagine nordic languages are easier?

You must know that the learner's native language will probably determine the level of difficulty of the language(s) they're about to learn. When a language appears to be easy for you to learn, it doesn't make their complain invalid.

David Rodriguez It depends on the learner. For me, a spanish speaker, french is more easy to learn fast than english

By a curious coincidence, "eye" in Arabic is ":ayn" and the plural ":uyuun." (The ":" represents the letter ayn, a pharyngeal stop.)

Ee & een. Most of what is called Scots these days is no such thing.

방금 당신을 구독했습니다.

Well then, there must be an awful lot of geneticists with red faces in Britain since Viking blood is in most of the indigenous population especially in the north and east of the country! You are perhaps confusing a few leaders with the majority of the settlers. The Danelaw (northern and eastern England) was very thoroughly colonized by the Danish Vikings and they didn't go anywhere. The toponyms, dialects and genetics of the area (about half the whole country) attest to that.

The video didn't say the "s" was of viking origin, but that it was from English. But when the vikings tried to speak English they mixed them up with the rest of the plurals. Then the natives mixed them up too, and they were forgotten. But the "s" came from English. (maybe it came to English from some other language, probably, but not from the vikings)

I can't remember the details of this debate but I'll try to pick up the thread. My apologies if I get the wrong end of the stick. The -s plural inflection is apparently very old. It is found in Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and English much more than, say, French, Italian and German, which is a bit weird. I probably misrepresented the thing earlier but it is the third person singlular -s of verbs that comes from Norse. Interestingly, the natural sounding word order "The house we live in" (as opposed to "The house in which we live") also seems to come from Norse. Prescriptive grammarians have tried for centuries to impose the unnatural sounding syntax ("A sentence cannot end in a preposition") and have always failed because the Norse form comes so naturally to us.

Nicholas John Franklin Sentences ending in prepositions like the one you mentioned are found in Beowulf. If they are similar to Norse structures, it's probably because they are closely related Germanic languages to begin with. Other Germanic speaking tribes invaded large parts of Western Europe, spreading bits of their language with them. As Latin (or variations thereof) were so useful for communication and had such prestige, Romance languages stayed around unlike the Celtic languages. However, the Romance languages took on certain Germanic characteristic, notably "blanc/blanco" replacing the Latin "albus" and the plural -s.

Thanks Matt. Could you give me a line reference or two for the Beowulf lines you mention, please? Of course, there are some fundamentalists in the anti-Anglo-Saxon camp who claim that Beowulf is a Renaissance forgery - but that's another question! (Conspiracy theorist's question: why does the British Library refuse to let Beowulf be carbon dated?).

Danish is a descendant from German.

What I mean is that apparently the vikings (who used eyen) came to England and decided that English was to hard to learn because in English they used eyen. So they decided to switch it to eyes, but they still used eyen in Norse.

Christian Jiang The Proto-Germanic language stems from Scandinavia and goes out to Europe, so Danish is not a decendent of German, it's rather the other way around. Try and look it up.

Martin Jensen Thanks!

Can someone answer my question?

Yes, but given the fact that English's roots are so diverse (being Germanic, and having French, Latin, and Greek influences, etc.), it becomes tedious for there not to be a single standard for a single conjugation. The whole -en suffix only applied to words of proto-Germanic origin.

***** You see, the Latin/French origin is almost only inclusive to technical terms: explain, extrapolate, comprehend, etc. Basic words that earlier civilizations would use to communicate all have Germanic roots: family members, colors, planets, moon, days of week, day, month, year, hand, foot, mouth, nose, ear, hear, see, do, make, cook, wash........... All of these words are almost identical in both English and German, which bespeaks of their close fundamental connection. The French invasion of England only came after the foundation of English were established and did not change the core of the language drastically.

Universe Utopia Duly noted :)

Yuri Ivanov Yes it does

At this point, he's really just saying that English doesn't stem from German, but that doesn't mean it isn't Germanic. Pedantry at it's goddamn finest.

True and we still give genders to objects

The germans, the french, the norwegians... Why don't we have crazy words with genders?

***** Language develop without thinking of these things. Unfortunately for people wanting to learn other languages.

NordicNostalgia and bord

For every foreigner learning English may be hard. For me it wasnt so hard, because I started learning English when I was 6. Its still a bit hard for me to express what I want to say when I speak, though. In Greek (my native language) we have so many synonyms for words and you can also construct words, which makes it kind of easy. For example, theres the verb βάλλω which meant in ancient Greek to throw, to put and to strike and if you add little prepositions to it, you can create 21 verbs deriving from 1 single verb. So, every language has its own features, English has very easy grammar, however I would say that it lacks some syntactic features that make speech easier.

I had the same experience. English came very easy to me. Of course, I had the advantage of growing up in an English-speaking country, so it's a little different. I now speak French and Spanish fluently, which I learned as an adult. Keep in mind that the difficulty of a language is significant only as it impacts a foreign learner. We all "learn" our native tongue with great ease, whether it has only one case or 15. (By the way, English does have cases. They are visible in the pronouns and in the Saxon genitive). The supposed difficulty of a language does not reflect the intelligence of its speakers. I agree that certain aspects of English are "streamlined", the relatively simple case system and a limited set of conjugational inflections, and few enough irregular forms to be memorized without too much effort. But there is a lot of arrogance among second language speakers, like yourself, who claim that English is so easy. I lived in Geneva, one of the most international cities in the world, and even taught in the English Department of the University. While an enormous number of people there believe that they speak English perfectly, their use of the language was often very different from that of native speakers. They would speak in a way that is not native, and therefore from a linguistic standpoint, not true English. Some examples are the use of modal auxiliary verbs and word order, but there are many others. If English were so easy, why would such mistakes occur so regularly? With no disrespect to you, Merthalophor, I find several examples of such errors in your comments. You speak (or at least write) English quite well, but not like a native speaker. Sorry.

g cecg I'm sure I'm making many errors, and am also sure that most people who speak English don't sound a native. But I think it doesn't matter if you speak in an English way (the country), as long as you speak the English language (the language). Also, I _didn't_ claim to be able to speak _like_ a native, I claim to be able to speak _with_ a native. Neither did I express at any point that I think that the difficulty or grammatical complexity of a language correlates with the intelligence of its speakers. You are putting words in my mouth I didn't say. What I _did_ say though is that is hard to express yourself in a _precise_ manner, but easy to get up and running. So, it's easy to get an "advanced" degree, and hard to get a "proficiency" degree. Maybe _you_ should practice _reading_ in a precise manner? Also, I think that unless you live in an English environment, you will _never_ speak like a native - simply because you don't use the language like a native, and also because you are constantly surrounded by people who don't speak English natively as well and thus bring in other accents and grammatical errors into your way of speaking.

The hardest thing about English (and all Germanic languages, in general) is the accent. If you think English has 5 vowels (a, e, i, o, u) you're wrong. Well, according to IPA for English, there are *12* vowels in English (æ, ʌ, ɑː, ɒ, e, ɜː, ə, ɔː, iː, ɪ, uː, ʊ). In Greek we just have 5 vowels. Imagine how hard it is for me and everyone else learning English. It requires years of practice to achieve the perfect accent. I say /'tempeɹatʃʊɹ/, a native English speaker (in England) says /ˈtɛmpɹətʃə/.

Απόστολος Τουλούπας I think I've read somewhere that it is only possible to learn any language accent-free to the age of 16 years. But I honestly don't think that this matters. Who cares if you have an accent, important is that you are understood.

They're just being nice

well, that's true but it's still pretty cool. :)

Mr Peapolop He's talking about 100%, you sound like you were born and raised there all your life kind of fluency, which is REALLY hard to achieve. But glad to hear Pimsleur is working for you!

+Mr Peapolop Manila accent, yeah. Since Manila is the best place to study both English and Tagalog. And you said that they can understand you? Filipinos can usually understand a foreigner with a slightly heavy accent tho. So, can i ask, how fluent are you? Not to be rude tho.

The part about the Vikings is that they weren't adding their plural system to English, they just faced the existing complicated English system. It wasn't a matter of adding -er because that's how Norse works, but cutting off -en, ablaut (vowel change) , -ru/-ren, or -a plurals for the most common English plural -s Also, why have a European make this? Any given European is far less likely to know a fraction as much about any facet of language than a PhD holding, Professor of Linguistics who has written multiple books on the history of language in general and the history of English in particular, and who has produced multiple lecture series for the Great Course and TED like John McWhorter

By the time the vikings arrived in England both languages already had very different ways to do the plural. What they did was not take the plural forms from their native old Norse and force them into the English they spoke. Instead, hey learned English and started regularizing characteristics already inherent to the language.

Based on the video the vikings used the form of adding the "S" which was already used by those speaking English and not an "S" from Norse language. And I think you might be right about a European "nowing" more than an American about English language as you suggested it should have been made by a European... although I would suggest a European that Speaks English as a "first" language which leaves only Britain.

Exactly! It don't make much sense to say the Norse brought the -s plural to English!

English already had plural s before the Norman conquest. Plural s comes from old Germanic case endings and is also used in Dutch and Frisian. It doesn't come from French.

During the Roman occupation of Germanic lands, many Latin words were introduced in English / Dutch / German, but these words were "Germanified". For instance, the B in 'tabula' turned into an F. The Normans turned it back into a B: "table". In Dutch, it's still tafel. Dutch also has the word muur (wall) and many others.

Much of what you said has nothing to do with plurals but about english historybin general, and your simplification is not in chronological order which may contribute to why these words that are confusing you as to their origin are jumbled. Many words and scholars have jumped from language to language, receiving change after change before landing in english. The history of plurals described in the video is actually a great summary as it discusses the exact shift in the language.

Norse? The Vikings who came to Britain came from Denmark, so they weren't really Norse, per se, but Danes.

Well, English was derived from a tribe of Germans that went to England (the Angles and Saxons, Angleland), after which it changed due to isolation, the Norse, and the Vikings. So it technically did split off, because the germans just stayed in germany.

That's the very definition of "splitting" with something---they share a common ancestor, and split off at some point.

Liam Clink There were no Germans at that time, the Western Germanic tribes didn't think of them as one people, they just shared the same religion and until roughly 400-500 AD the same language.

Evolution of language share many features of the evolution of species. We are not descendants from chimpanzees. We descend from a common ancestor. Similarly, no language can claim to be "the first" or "the oldest". Languages are created by some majority living in some territory. Everybody is a least bilingual : we all speak the language of our parents and close friend and we all learn at school the official language. It happen that if you are born in Paris, Beijing or North of London, it will be easier since your dialect is almost 100% identical to the official. But there will be some exceptions ; some expression that come from other part of the Country got included in the official language. Languages have tendency to evolve is particular directions close to the borders of country with different languages. For example, the French in the south part of France may borrow some Spanish while the French on the east may borrow some German... . Just kidding, the French never borrow to other languages (except English), they all speak the dialect of Paris. The old way of speaking is gone with the last grand parents. Seriously, all the diversity of the past like the charming accent of Marseille, it is all dead. If you ask: are you sure? They must be some small villages that kept old French or even other languages such as Basque, etc They furiously reply: No, all these accents are dead.

I'm not sure I understand the bilingual remark? I am a native english speaker from America, and I speak exactly the same in formal documentation as I do with friends and the like. Americanized English is a dialect, I suppose, so if you mean that I can converse with people from England with ease, that is true to some respect, but really only the Queen's English. Regional dialects throw me off to the point that I literally cannot understand many native English speakers.

Or how about the German guy and how he suddenly goes from being dressed in a typical Northern European medieval outfit to a Bavarian lederhosen? Just because he's German doesn't mean he's Bavarian.

Antonio G Stereotypes are like symbols; they are sometimes useful for representing broad ideas. I get your point tho.

Antonio G THANK YOU!!

Thanks for that

It's not that serious.. the point and subject of the video was language. Using the stereotypical symbols or designs of a topic is to help people better understand or follow with the video.

Just like German, although it has some minor difficulties like 3 genders and noun cases. I'm currently learning Dutch and I think it is easier for me than English, but I guess that has to do with the similarities between German, English and Dutch (for example a very similar sentence structure as in German and many cognates) and my method of learning.

@@sehabel tbf your english looks pretty good

The easiest language depends on your first one

Yeah it's confusing Like I don't get why these words "Rough, Thorough, Though, Through" don't rhyme with eachother, but lonely and bologna does

I agree with you. I' m from Brasil and our language is one of the most difficult to learn, along with Mandarin, Russian and others. This is because our verbs can be conjugated in many different ways, without the use of an auxiliar verb, and our vocabulary is vast. We even have words like "saudade" that don't exist in english. You have to say an expression like "I miss (someone or something)"

There must have been a benefit to it at one point, or it would not have become that way. To be fair though, I have no idea what the benefit of calling inanimate objects "he" or "she" was. And today, it is not as common anymore in many Germanic languages. Icelandic and Faroese and German still do it though.

One: it can provide clarity. Eg, in English if you say "the red table and chairs", that it is not clear if both the table and the chairs are red. In Italian, if you say "il tavolo e le sedie rossi" it is clear both are red. Second: by changing the gender, a word can have a related but distinct meaning. Eg, in Italian, "la porta" (feminine) is "the door", but "il porto" (masculine) means "the port". Third: for living things, it saves having to find a new word. Eg, "il gatto" is a male cat, and "la gatta" a female cat. Beyond that, I have no idea. Please note that in English, certain things are (or used to be) female: ships and nations.

Hungary here and we straight up don't get the concept. Not even a he/she distinction (both are "ő" and pronoun dropping is a thing because you can tell from the verb mostly anyway). German is a PAIN for me for this reason lol

@@cerberaodollam Finnish is related to Hungarian and has only one gender as well.

YINGA DINGEN DURGA

You're right. Funny that the vikings managed to learn that. Or maybe they just always used present tense :-)

Plurals are largely unnecessary. So many languages do without them or make them largely optional.

That's probably because they're sister languages?

The Germanic language family are notoriously awkward for people who speak a sensible language, especially English because it's not strictly germanic so much as it is a linguistic Frankenstein's monster of whatever tongues were floating around Britain at the time.

I learned English and my native language is Spanish and it isn't so difficulty sure for an Arab or a Asian needs to be nearly impossible but for a western is easy

David Rodriguez The Latin tongues are pretty messy as well, but I guess sharing a continent and having a lot of contact down the centuries will make it easier for us. I just feel sorry for people who have to learn to distinguish entirely new phonemes before they can even start.

MrMortull the Japanese that's horrible

But wasn't the Norman conquest of England in the 11th century whereas the vikings mentioned in the video are said to have arrived in the 8th century, maybe directly from Scandinavia then

Thing is, the norse languages do not use the s plural form, we have plural forms similar to how old English used to be. Of course the vikings had accents that were grammatically incorrect that then followed down the generations, but I think the Normans had more to do with this than this video credits them for. In Swedish, for instance, the plural forms of the words mentioned in the video are "bröd/bröd", "ägg, ägg", "broder, bröder", "gås, gäss", "man, män", "hus, hus", "oxe, oxar", "tunga, tungor" and so on. A few of the medieval grammatical rules still live on, especially in certain dialects, like nouns of the female gender always having the plural form "-or", "lampa, lampor", "kvinna, kvinnor", "katta, kattor", "svana, svanor", "trana, tranor", "flicka, flickor"

Plural S does not come from French. At all. It was a common plural suffix in Old English, Old Frisian and Old Dutch. It ultimately comes from Germanic case endings.

The modern plural form evolved from -as, the plural suffix for strong nouns in OE.

He didn't say Scandinavian languages did that. He said that the simplicity of it did. So, the Vikings just decided to use something that was already in English. In this case, the used 's. Did you even watch the video?

A few times actually... Have you ever read old Norse? it's the least simple language English could be influenced by, and the only -s ending is neuter and masculine genitive singular (like 's in english).

I know that. But apparently you did not read my comment I just posted either!

ah come on, do you really think I don't read the comments I answer to?

+Tarin As a Scandinavian myself I completely understand U. It sounds to me like an urban legend the idea that old norse came to simplify english. I don't believe that happened. More likely the celtic or the french. Maybe the celtic languages

It’s certainly for the clarity. Say you’re a layman, and you don’t know that Vikings didn’t have horned helmets. You have the image in your head of a buff killing machine with a horned helmet for what a Viking is. For this video, which is for the layman, it makes sense to have horned helmets.

I'm curious how many words phrasal verbs and idioms you know anyway to JUST communicate though like a toddler you need to know basics which is about three thousands words also how much you can understand when natives are speaking in their normal pace or even fast please don't brag

because you're constantly exposed to it

I didn't know that! One learns from the video + complement with the comments (in certain cases).

louisng114 What about if someone says "There are cats" without adding a number because they don't know the amount? You would need some form of indication.

CrackaBox You can still say "there are more than one cat." Also, having a cat and having cats rarely affect decision-making. Say you are afraid of cats. Would there be a difference if I say "there is a cat" or "there are cats?" The main message of the sentence is that the object exists. The quantity doesn't really matter. The cases that the quantity matter are rare. There are real languages with a different form for singular, double, and multiple. In other words, "one", "two", and "more than two" call for a different form. Having a separation between "one" and "more than one" is arbitrary. We could have indications to distinguish "one", "two", "three", four", and "more than four", but we just don't bother because having different forms of the same noun just doesn't worth the trouble. The best indicator is stating the number of object with a number or, in case of unknown quantity, state the range of the number (for example, more than seven but less than 52). If accuracy doesn't matter, then "there is cat" would convey just as much information. Of course, I am not suggesting anyone to just ignore a grammar rule that everyone uses; I am pointing out that plural is unfriendly to English-learners in this increasingly connected world.

I don't think adding -s letter is really that unfriendly. Also saying "There're cats" is faster, easier, more practical than saying "there are more than one cat" My native language (slavic) also conjugates verb endings, so instead of saying "I'm cooking" or "You're cooking" you only need to say "Cooking" and because of the word ending, everyone knows what person is doing the activity. Harder for the learners, useful in the end-game.

cauldronjoty Adding -s is not the only thing we do to plurals; the video has plenty of examples on exceptions. The problem does not stop there. Besides the form of plural, when to use plural is also an issue. Suppose a recipe calls for one and a half cups of milk, the phrase uses plural even though it is not two yet. Even more bizarre, half a cup is singular, but 0.5 cups is plural. Similarly, no cup is singular, but zero cups is plural. That was just the tip of the iceberg. This user (english.stackexchange.com/questions/69162/are-these-plural-or-singular) has an interesting list of problematic numbers. Those problems are about nouns, but noun-verb agreement is also difficult to learn when it comes to collective nouns. While it is possible to learn all the rules, and the basic rule of adding -s sounds simple, countless nuances make the plural form more hassle than worth.

+Mirko Cerullo Well they're doing the ELI5 approach so you can't blame them for not going super in-depth

Care to expand upon that? For our benefit as viewers I mean.

+Dylan Furr You're absolutely clueless. Even English and Hindi were once the same language

I hope you are kidding...

+Dylan Furr if they are related they HAVE to come from a common ancestor, they were never the same language, but they both come from the same one

+Gean Guilherme I know. They both come from Proto Germanic which came from Proto Indo European. They are related but one didn't come from the other. They're cousins.

+Dylan Furr it's just that TeBeeeh has no idea what he himself is talking about

That's very similar to the ways Norwegian plural works too. "Bok" (book) becomes "Bøker" in plural, except that Book is feminine in Norwegian. Whilst German have "Die" to represent the definite form of neuter words. we have a Suffix *A* and a singular article "Ei" *o show singular indefinite and definite feminine words. "Ein buch | Die Buch" = "Ei Bok | Boka" Same goes for "Tunge" (Tounge) it too, is a feminine word, but it also gets a suffix *A* in its definite from "Tunga" to show the definite feminine. This also goes for "Doora" and "Handa", who are similar to "Døra" and "Hånda" the definite forms for Door (Dør) and Hand (Hånd) Although Norwegian dosen't have nearly as many grammatical cases and noun endings as German. But we do have the same grammatical genders; Masculine, Feminine and Neuter.