I hope to one day get a PHD and specialize in Old Norse, I will keep the enthusiasm and love for Vikings, and Old Norse topic alive as long as I live. Thank you for making your videos that helped me gain more knowledge of the subject and ultimately come to my decision. Keep up the great work and have yourself a nice day.
Interesting that in Danish (no longer in use) a black man - as in someone originating from Africa with a dark complexion - was called “Blåmand” (Blue man). I believe the term was also used in Islandic and Norwegian. I find this strange as the term was used at the same time as “neger” and “sort mand” which both clearly derive from the colour black. It just struck me as odd given the black/blue raven point you raised and I was wondering if @Jackson Crawford had some knowledge of what terms the Old Norse speakers used to refer to Africans and why this word “Blåmand” was used in Danish?
@@osten14 The 10th century Danes most likely encountered North Africans who weren't black. Berbers and native North Africans are white and brown and rarely black (those are the Sub-Saharan Africans). Zinedine Zidane for example is an Algerian berber. What they had however is beautiful blue clothings. Just as berber tuaregs today.
I love that Jackson's idea of a remote throwaway location is somewhere in Scotland, whereas I live in Scotland, so the idea of rural Wyoming is probs a wild and unknown accent for myself.
I teach English to Vietnamese people. Vietnamese has no term for green - they include it as a shade of blue. They split blue into “the blue of the sky” and “leaf blue”. When I ask the children I teach to call out the names of colours in English, green is usually one of the past they’ll think of. They’ll quickly come up with black white red yellow blue, then maybe pink or brown or purple or orange, and green comes after these. Which to me is astounding because green is so obviously a colour, but it can’t be a colour in the same way to them. I guess they are translating in their heads all the colour they know in Vietnamese into English and green is an afterthought
Japanese have Midori for Green and Ao for blue, but originally Ao meant both blue and green and green lights are still referred to as Ao today. Midori originally meant something along the lines of freshness or lushness and due to its connection to describing plants it evolved to represent the color of plants as well.
Try not to think of "Vietnamese blue" as blue. This word just encompasses the whole color space that we tend to split into green and blue. So in fact a more accurate translation of "Vietnamese blue" would be rather "bleen" or "grue".
@@Galenus1234 that’s a good point But when I ask them to recall colours or show flash cards they get blue as quickly as they get red or yellow, but green has more of a delay In this video he says every colour has a kind of center point that we associate with that colour and then shades that go off from it, like how our base point for red is blood red. I think the centre point the Vietnamese have for their blue/green is blue and not green
The Ojibwe language traditionally has Green-Blue and Yellow-Brown-Orange. Due to colonialism and European influence they have developed a much more diverse palette of colours and will often just refer to a thing based on objects of that specific colour, like ash-coloured (kaakazhe/aande (inanimate)/aanzo (animate)/aanzhe (luminate), which is light grey, and coal-coloured (akakanzhe/aande/aanzo/aanzhe), which is dark grey. Or Orange, which is derived from the fruit Ozaawamiin/Ozaawamishiimin depending on dialect (Ozaawa being Yellow-Orange-Brown and Miin being fruit or berry/Mishiimin being apple) so Ozaawamiinagaawaanzhe means the light is orange. While modern Brown is derived from the root Akii, meaning Earth, ground, soil, like in akiiwaanzo ma’iingan (the brown wolf).
A new Roper-Crawford conversation always rocks my world. They are so much fun to listen to and ruminate on for days afterward. Next assignment, boys: Write a galactic maximum shit-post IPA paragraph with musical notation (Tuning may vary from modern equal temperament.) and plug into a voice synthesizer. You might aim for one of your grandfathers, either the voice Jackson remembers from his late grandfather or the voice of Simon's living Cumbrian grandfather.
And Simon, Jackson says something at around the 1 hour mark implying that people may get bored with such a long video on the subject. No way! I love to hear both of you expressing in very down-to-earth terms all these concepts in such a casual, conversational way. Your styles of treating these concepts are laid-back, pleasant, knowledgeable, not stuffy and so friendly. Neither of you are up there in an ivory tower. Just the way I like to teach my students. I want them to feel comfortable in class, and don't want them to think I'm the know-it-all teacher who presumes to have answers to everything. You two also seem to get along like a house on fire, and it's a happy, contagious feeling. So happy you 2 linguists found each other on youtube and can speak about everything in such a friendly way! Thank you both!
Dropping H's and adding them on is a common feature of some dialects of Newfoundland English. As we say; " 'e drops 'is aches in 'oolyrood h'and picks em up in h'Avondale."
I follow some Québecois/es on RU-vid. (in English; sadly, despite being Canadian, I was taught Standard French in school, not any kind of Canadian French, and not having had a lot of exposure, I find the accent very hard to understand 😿) What I'm about to say is *_not_* meant as criticism towards their skill in speaking English. Some will drop H's from where they should be, and insert them where they shouldn't be... but not consistently! For example, they might say both " 'ave" and "have", or "habout" and "about", in the space of less than, e.g., 30 seconds. I kind of suspect hesitancy over whether there should or shouldn't be an H: "Oh, that sounded wrong. [...] Oh, that sounded wrong, too."
@@Ice_Karma I always interpret it as a case of making a distinction where there was none in the original language. Our /h/ in English, (as in most languages iirc) is more properly described as bare phonation rather than as a glottal fricative or approximant. So when you pick up a second language as an adult without much formal knowledge of phonology, foreign *distinctions,* rather than foreign sounds per se, are most likely to trip you up, in this case voicing/voicelessness before vowels at the beginning of words. For an example for English speakers, an English adult without any linguistic knowledge attempting to learn Mandarin would have a miserable time developing the listening comprehension to pull apart their palatal and retroflex consonant series and the four tones, since that's not *data* (to use a clumsy analogy) they're used to looking for. And so as they begin to learn the language they won't learn what words have what set of sounds. ...which basically describes the first few years of French class in my God-awful BC public education! You can reach Grade 12 and be completely ignorant of what vowels can be nasal, the front rounded vowels, the open-mid close-mid distinction, etc etc...
As a lifelong Wyomingite I was thrilled to hear Jackson bring up the Popo Agie pronunciation. We’re a state with many linguistic peculiarities but that’s the golden example.
I would love to hear more on that topic of increased abstraction in the modern world compared to the past. Because that is something thats really stuck out to me too when reading old texts, even in translation. “an honest man does” vs “honesty is”. And I feel that is a problem I often struggle with too, going on an abstract point to try and be more essential about it, but all the while losing the point because of how disconnected it came by using all these more etherial ideas.
So interesting to listen to the two of you talk. We are equally fascinated by every detail in every pattern of how languages behave. And how we observe and think is so much the same. So it becomes a pure joy to listen to your observations and study results.
Interestingly the modern standard Japanese word for red (adj), "aka-i" comes from the old Japanese word "aka-shi" meaning bright. My great grand mother's dialect didn't distinguish the two 'words' or 'senses of one word' at least phonemically at all. She would say "aka-i" for both. My grandmother also has it to a lesser degree. Also the modern word for black (adj), "kuro-i" seems to be cognate or at least closely related to the modern word for dark (adj), "kura-i". It's such a shame I don't have any systematic knowledge of colour terms in Japanese but the possibility of a system of colour terms prioritising brightness that Simon mentioned certainly resonated with me.
@@dixgun Don't know if you're asking about my great grandmother's dialect or the etymology of that word but it's been a while since she passed away so I may be lying but she probably wouldn't use that word. I think she'd instead say 粋な "sui-na" (not to be confused with "iki-na" which uses the same kanji) in most cases. As for the etymology it doesn't seem like there's an academic consensus.
Interesting as always. How languages change and evolve is always an interesting thought exercise. Having watched some their more recent videos as well, it has been interesting to see the rabbit holes their respective research has led them down. Side note: my Grandma also used to correct everyone with whom. Annoyed the hell out of us, but made us laugh, too. If anyone here wants to know the rule, if you can replace the word with "him", "her" or "them", use "whom". Who is used to refer to the subject; whom refers to the object. Thank you grandma.
Fascinating! In particular, I realized how much colour categorization differs between individuals and even within the same language, culture, and period. I grew up in Vienna as the child of Swiss expats in the 80s and 90s. Already back then, in kindergarten, I became aware that while to me all shades of purple were under the category of "violett", the other children would make a distinction between "violett" and "lila". And they would not consider "lila" to be a subcategory of "violett", but a completely different colour. Then, when I was in my teens, German started adopting the English loanword "pink" to refer to a particularly saturated, flashy and artificial shade of what, when I was 10 years old, we would still have called "rosa" or "rosarot". And when the word "pink" gained popularity in German, it first was, at least to me, a subcategory of "rosa"/"rosarot". However, today "rosa(rot)" seems to refer only to a light shade of pink while "pink" refers to a saturated, flashy shade of pink. So to my daughter "pink" is not a subcategory of "rosa(rot)" anymore. This is a change in the colour categorization system that happened within one generation. I also liked the discussion about how sometimes the concepts of colour are very much dependent on their context (e.g. hair colour, skin colour). Vienna is famously situated "an der schönen blauen Donau" ("on the beautiful blue Danube"). However, I challenge anyone to stand next to the Danube and tell me with a straight face it is not actually dark *green*. If you took a close-up picture of the water and then showed it to any German speaker without telling them that they are looking at water, they would certainly call the colour they see "grün". But in the context of rivers or lakes, we call this "blau". Or traffic lights: There's red, yellow, and green, right? In Switzerland, unlike in Germany and Austria, it's red, orange, and green. Even though the traffic lights themselves look exactly the same. I had discussions with non-Swiss German speakers about why they call the "yellow" light "gelb" even though it is clearly "orange". And they were like: Of course, it's orange, but in the context of traffic rules, it's called "gelb" - as in "bei Gelb fahren". Given that there is so much variation in colour categorization both diachronically and regionally just within the most Southern varieties of Standard German between 1980 and 2020, I would assume that there was a whole lot more variation in earlier stages of the Germanic languages just between villages and single generations. Therefore, I am always quite suspicious of sweeping statements about how "they" thought about colour.
I have never known how to tell the difference between what others confidently call purple, mauve, violet, lilac and lately aubergine etc. Always thought I must have missed that day at school! 😁
The point about the loss of concrete language really got me thinking. I had never considered how much more powerful and even nuanced prose can be when using more concrete terms.
I think the media's effect on our language and Identity is interesting. Jamaican teenagers often use AAVE now instead of our creole, or heavily borrow prononciations and expressions from it and change them grammatically to match the syntax of the creole. I personally very much dislike hearing it but what can I say it's definitely interesting how their identity as being black influences their speech more than the local landscape. As an example we back t's and d's before l to k's and g's so the word bottle is typically realised and bakl and I think it's more common among teenagers to tap that t than back it now even in what is otherwise a creole sentence
20:00 Re - Gold being red - In French a goldfish is literally a 'red fish' - poisson rouge. Black as a skin colour is 'blue' - gorm - in Irish. (Dubh is black)
Regarding Google translate: I recently used it to translate an official Chinese policy 15 page document, and the result was unbelievably clear and simple. Meanwhile, it still struggles translating simple sentences from English to Spanish.
I’m guessing an old Norse language channel might attract some strange QAnon/white power fringe elements looking to use the videos to bolster their lunatic cause
As i get more and more interested in colour languages/expressions in different cultures, this could not have come at a better time! And as someone who is learning Russian, there are two words for blue, but one of them can be used as inappropriate slang (голубой).
I think pink as a slang term for lesbian might be outdated now, and light blue in the meaning "gay man" might be more neutral than it is rude, although i guess it depens on a person. I don't think it's considered a slur but i might be wrong; at the very least it is a lot less rude than a few other words russian has referring to gay people
As a native speaker of Russian, I can point out that _голубой_ is a relatively neutral word - it is just that general societal attitude is crap. _Розовая_ was already pretty rare in '10s, though I cannot say how it is used in-group since I am not _from_ Russia. Here in Ukraine, neither is often used to my knowledge.
As an example of hyper-correction, my grandfather reported that Spanish speakers in Panama (where he worked as a teacher), would hyper-correct their speech when speaking to him, whom they considered very proper and erudite. So for example, we tend to drop Ds in words (e.g. scraped/shaved -- raspado --> raspao), and he once heard someone say "bacalado" for bacalao (cod).
this one was really good, im a huge fan of both channels and it was really fun and interesting to see the conversation devolve into analyzing different dialects and mergers.
The h has been sounded in herb generally in English from the 19th century. Not sounding it as many but not all in North America do is conservative. The h was added to the spelling sometime in the 1400s by some scholar who knew too much about Latin.
Present day Swedish has the word “blek” - bleikr- which is used in a negative way like it was described in Norse. Or it describes something that is less colourful. Or weak. It makes sense that Norse speakers back them would describe certain colours as “bleikr”. Swedish colour words are specific and more varied compared to English is my impression when colours are described in English. Swedish separates dark from bright/pale colors/hues like “ljusblå” - light blue, “mörkblå”- dark blue, the “ljus”/“mörk” is used for every color except white and black. Swedish is also fond of more specifically detailing colours into sub categories like “vinröd” - red wine, ruby red, brick red, purple, violet, turquoise, moss green, copper, gold, silver, bronze, pink, grey. Look at the Swedish 🇸🇪 and it’s blue turns out to be a somewhat rare shade of blue. It’s in between dark and light blue.
English has bleak, black and bleach all from the same root. It is thought that bleach and black share a common root because of burning forming either white ash or black carbon, or because the root may have carried a meaning of colourless for ancient peoples and then evolved in different Germania languages to be associated with lightness or darkness in different words. We also had the word scimian (whence modern English shimmer originates) and that meant both to give off light or to grow dim, dusky, dark depending on context.
i did not expect to listen to all two hours plus of this, excellent stuff - neither of you may keep a diary but you are contributing so much insight for future generations!
This was a delight to listen to. It gave me some new perspectives on my experience as a native speaker of English who has not had much occasion to use it colloquially since 1973, when I moved to Norway. One thing that did give me pause, however, was the claim that 'The car needs washed" also was the Norwegian way to say it. As a matter of fact, this is not the case. 'Bilen trenger å vaskes.' (passive voice) is the most normal way to express this. In any case, I thoroughly enjoyed this very long ramble on one of my favorite subjects (languages). Thank you.
I'd say "bilen trenger vask", which is not the same as, but structurally more similar to "the car needs washed" (in more idiomatic English we could say "the car needs washing"). But I agree, I'm not aware of any place in Norway where "bilen trenger vaska" would work. I missed this part of the conversion in the video, so I don't know if the was more context to "the car needs washed".
We still differentiate in rural mid Ulster between meat(mayte) and meet, beat(bayte) and beet, meal(mayle, cereal for animal consumption) and me, meal (dinner in a restaurant), tea (tay) and tee, seat (sayte) and see. Birds have baykes, which is a slang term in Belfast for face. We don't differentiate between sea and see.
I appreciate the discussion on abstract language...I was having a hard time figuring out what it is I dislike so much about the way some people speak (or write) at my work, and it's absolutely the throwing around of abstract terms as if they have some sort of universal meaning / application. They are always persons trying to sound smart....
Linguist humor. Thanks for the belly laughs, guys. Re: the Faroese anecdote. The same thing happened in Greece for two years. Folks knew I wasn't a native, but I didn't seem American. So interlocutors assumed I was a refugee from Cyprus.
Something I find interesting in modern English is (from what I’ve observed) generational differences in the description of colours. For example, my Nan and I often disagree on if an egg yolk is yellow or orange, if certain shard like teal or aqua are blue or green, some reds vs oranges. When I’ve asked my Pop or other family friends of their generation, they’re much more likely to agree with my grandparents than with mine, my friends or my siblings definitions of the colours. This makes me wonder how much of this is a cultural thing and how much is taught. Now we don’t just learn colours based on examples in nature but in print outs and colour wheels etc. I wonder if the quality of colour printing in the 40s and 50s could have impacted the colours they associate with different colour terms on the borders of colours.
Gosh, I come really late to this brilliant linguistic buffet! When you mentioned 'galaxy brain' and using music to reflect a certain human voice and accent, I was reminded of someone I knew who is specialised in different systems of music notation and no 'c, d, e, f, g, a, b' but very very different sounding tonalities. He had defretted his acoustic guitar and drawn on the fingering for at least 10 different music systems. And you might be able to get even closer to the voice you want to create using a different music system!
On hypercorrection, /θ, ð/ are not a natural part of my dialect; I've "added" them (mostly just θ, really) to my speech over the years. Not only has this often led to me hypercorrecting /f/ to /θ/ at the start of words. The fact I know I'm doing it has further led me to "un-correct" /θ/ back to /f/. So the phrase "fingers and thumbs" can become "thingers and fumbs"
@@simonroper9218 Born and raised in Leeds :) My parents are both from Wearside, but I don't know how much that has affected my language outside of vocab
The idea of you pronouncing the phrase as "thingers and fumbs" fills me with an indescribable joy, like idk why but that is just. 10/10 excellent unique dialectal difference
"Have an orange day." I'm going to use that and not provide any explanation 😁 I really enjoyed this discussion - it was super interesting. To be honest, I'm binge-watching all the videos on this channel.
@Mr. Rich B.O.B not “all of america,” but point taken. I think it tends toward more “rural,” or perhaps better said, linguistically conservative language-dialects in the US. in any case, for sure super common
'Bleek' in Dutch means a pale colour, which if I'm not mistaken is cognate with Old Norse 'bleikr' being discussed here. In modern Dutch, 'bleek' can be said of any colour, not just red. I could see 'bleikr' initially being used as 'a pale shade of red', i.e. orange or yellow, and the term later being expanded to a lighter/paler shade of any other colour.
Fascinating! Thank you so much for recording this discussion, which is actually rather like a diary, in the way you both imagine would be to helpful to create for future history lovers. I watched every bit. I don't have much education in linguistics but have always been fascinated by it. I was born on the East Coast of the U.S. and moved to California I always had an uncertain "oo" pronunciation, as in "room." I love hearing all of this.
I think you should read about the notions of congruent and metaphorical modes of expression by Halliday and Matthiessen. They speak about this in two places: 1) Halliday's Introduction to Functional Grammar - Halliday & Matthiessen 2) Construing experience through meaning - Matthiessen They explain when and how our languages became more "metaphorical" and less "congruent" to the phenomena of all day life.
About Simon's point on the width of meaning, like the example of "pebble" in Swedish we call an individual pebble "småsten" meaning "small stone". As far as I know there is no distinct word for pebble. Much like Jackson says afterwards, you can't fine a one-to-one relation
On the subject of mergers collapsing minimal pairs and creating confusion, I was once working with a coworker from Texas who asked me, "Do we have any pins?" I didn't know what he meant. "Pins?" I said. "Yeah, just like a regular pin?" he said. It took a comically long time before I realized he was asking for a pen.
I've picked up "apropos of nothing" into my casual speech recently without even trying, and I can't even construct how I would express that idea in my old ideolect anymore.
@@davidlericain I don't think that really conveys the same idea. Though I think David Woods may be on point with "No reason in particular, but" as a more reasonable way to say it without the "trying at sounding smart" bug.
Dropping in almost a year later to say "needs washed" is a very common construction in the central midwest, so around central Ohio, central Indiana, central Illinois, and into Missouri and Kansas. Having moved to central Ohio from outside of the midwest, this was one of the things that stood out to me immediately. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project has an excellent website on it.
Interesting about dropping to be, ''needs done" for example. I hear it often in the Scots lady who introduces Homes Under the Hammer, also Two Doors Down on BBC, also set in Scotland - and sometimes in speakers from Cumbria. I'm in my mid 60s in the UK and I'm only aware of hearing it in the last few years. Then, once noticed, it seems to be everywhere!
I haven't seen that, although the opposite has become common in Swedish. Replaing the third person object pronouns "honom/henne" (him/her) with the subject pronouns "han/hon" (he/she) I find it very annoying
Exactly! Or "Her and me played tetherball at recess" being corrected to "She and I ..." Kids learned the wrong lesson because noun cases are no longer instinctive in English. They thought, "well, 'me' is always incorrect."
This usually happens in a conjoined phrase. Even the hypercorrectors won't say, "Join I", but they will say, "Join Tom and I". In other words, I will supplant me every time there are at least two participants in the pronominal phrase.
@@anandashankarmazumdar but that is a legitimate example in standard english you gave. The me there is incorrect, but common, "she and I" would be a legitimate correction and not a hypercorrection.
I grew up in Massachusetts with a mother from South Carolina, and it was interesting to hear about the peer pressure comment for accents, as my mother simply wasn't taken seriously as a woman studying mathematics with a southern accent. I, however, have some of the features she never lost and it's interesting to compare myself to my peers and friends with the slight differences in stress and such that can't be easily pinned down. Also a retroflex r which is fun
these differences include cot/caught merger, pin/pen merger, and some weird stress things. I have been told that after going on trips to south carolina that i develop an accent from there and keep it for a few weeks, which is quite funny. I also have the canadian-sounding ai raising, where the diphthong in "white" would become something like /əɪ/
2:04:00 genius! I love these kinds of brilliant flukes xD. I once met a couple of fit elderly Genovese blokes on a tiny alpine hut in northern Italy, but none of our German group could actively speak Italian, so I tried to make up some pseudo-Italian sentences from Latin and Spanish (both of which I learned in school), and it actually worked amazingly well with certain things, and not at all with others. I guess that was mostly due to my rusty Latin, but apart from that, unfortunately and perhaps unsurprisingly, it is often the words and phrases you use most that also change the most, which I find particularly hard to "reconstruct" or deduce.
Whilst I'm usually watching recordings of my lectures in double-time and would still have plenty to catch up to, I'd rather watch a 2-hour video about a subject that's not even in my field of study in original speed. Thank you for this very insightful video with lots of humour! I'm german and also used to use lots of archaisms. Back then it was more conscious, these days it's mostly what stuck with me. Just as well I'm starting to become more and more aware and interested in changes that are occuring right now in my language. My sympathy to you both! Another thing that I noticed with my use of language: I find myself emphasizing a lot on the literal meaning of common phrases. A good analogy in english would be something along the lines of "I am sorry, in the most literal sense" (as it originally comes from sorrow, in german there is "Es tut mir Leid" - it does me sorrow / it pains me). It probably comes with the history (and it's mindset) of the language. I sometimes reflect on whether it goes down the way of hypercorrection and hope that nobody I know thinks that way as that is something I dislike myself (it's just as common in german, might have to do with globalization, might also have to do with the spirit of our time). I do that to bring back some of the deeper meaning hidden in now generously used phrases. It's probably connected to why we're using archaisms. I also find myself borrowing phrases from other languages in a literal translation, they often sound funny yet still have that "strangeness" about them. That way you won't just go over them but ponder, even a little bit about the meaning of otherwise common phrases. Anyhow, thanks to the both of you. They are really a blast to watch!
What a fascinating watch/listen. I don’t understand everything you discussed (I do have to look various terms up) but the bits I can follow are so interesting.
Today on Swedish we use orange for the color same as in English, but when I grew up it was brandgul (fire-yelow). Today I never hear anyone use brandgul anymore.
Same with W. NY. Do you guys have any local place name shibboleths? I'm wondering if any would be similar to ours. The towns of Medina and Lima are "Medeyenuh" and "Leyemuh." There are many other vowel shifts.
In the bleak mid-winter Frosty wind made moan; Earth stood hard as iron, Water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, Snow on snow, In the bleak mid-winter Long ago.
"Bleikr" in modern Swedish is "blek" which means pale and it is used for any washed out colors. As such pink is a pale form of red so the use of the term "bleikr" in that context makes perfect sense even in the modern language. That is also why pink originally were considered a manly color here; it was seen as form or red which signals blood a warrior ethos which were considered the manly domain. I might add that eggs from freeranging hens have a tendency to have more deep orange yokes the "factory farmed" eggs which gave much much paler - even pale yelow - yoke.
I had a discussion with a friend that dealt with semantic taxonomy: my friend considers a cousin's child to be a nephew or niece, and likewise your parent's cousin an uncle or aunt, whereas I consider them both first cousins once removed
This was fascinating, and I have certainly seen things in person which substantiate some of the things you're talking about, like individual people's accents changing over time based on who they hang out with, or a person who has lived in two very different places.
enjoyed this conversation. Just wanted to mention that Dude and Dud were used as first names for men, especially in the southern US in the mid 1800s. One of my ancestors first name was Dude and he would have been born in the early 1800s. I always assumed it was a nickname or short for something like Dudley but can't find anything to suggest that.
Jackson Crawford mentioned that some people in Wyoming use expressions consisting of 'needs' followed by a past participle, in sentences like 'the car needs washed' (meaning 'the car needs to be washed'). He says he doesn't know if that construction is used elsewhere. I have some data. It is used a lot in central and western Pennsylvania, where I live. In fact, before I learned about its use in Wyoming, I would have guessed that it was unique to this region.
My teenagers and their friends got so fed up with the hyper correction of who to whom, and the insecurity associated with it, that they all started saying "whomst," which they imagined gave it an even more archaic sound.
@@KusacUK Yes. You didnt know this, but Toki Pona is actually a constructed language with vocabulary derived from existing languages. So they are all loan words, technically
I really like the language and so try to spread it unto the internet whenever I can. (also its minimal colour system would be interesting to other, I feel)
Dropped and hypercorrected h. Near us was a railway station called Upper Halliford Halt. I remember one brillant announcement at Clapham Junction that the train would be stopping at Hupper 'Alliford 'Alt!
I find the talk of basic color categories kinda interesting. I remember when I was like 2-4, learning the colors, and my parents had this maroon car, and I was fascinated trying to figure out if it was red or purple (and that's how I learned the word "maroon" before I learned to spell "cold"). I still couldn't tell you if maroon falls more into the red or purple category, but I do definitely think of pink and purple as distinct categories. I also had this shirt around that time, and IDK if it had a red-pink gradient, or it was faded or partly faded in the sun, or if I was looking at it in weird lighting, or what, and I don't remember what clerification I was given when I asked, because then someone started teasing me for wearing a pink shirt. I guess to me, pink is like, pink Starbursts, or the pink Power Ranger, or strawberry icecream. Magenta is more a shade of pink than purple (yes I know that magenta is just bright purple in RGB; the point is, I intuitively put purple and magenta in different categories). I know that hot pink is a thing, but I'd be hard pressed to describe it. The transition between red and pink is a little weird, in that I've seen faded red tanktops that I'd rather describe as pink, or maybe a reddish pink, rather than pinkish red or faded red. Yet, calling skin pink has never made sense to me, other than, like, tongues and lips. Skin has always been on a spectrum from dark brown to whatever you call pale caucasian, with some wiggle-room in the middle for more olive/red/brown that I just called "tan" back in the day. But I've never found a term that covers skin colors specifically, so it remains in this weird nameless limbo.
What I noticed with older Celtic languages was the trade aspect. They had a huge tendency to borrow words and so many color words were similar to who they traded with, like coccineal for purple. Cocra, cocur, etc. I was wondering if you see a great jump in borrowed color words as the Norse began to trade very widely? I also noticed a HUGE difference in the Celtic and Norse/Germanic tongues in the way of abstraction. I think that English and French were influenced hugely by the Celtic love of abstraction, metaphor and, well, hard to convey "dream time" feeling in the Celtic languages.
On topic of "Blàr" Blår in Danish is linseed stalk wool used for stuffing creases around windows, between ship planks, etc. Linseed flowers (hør) are blue.
As someone who studied mostly the sciences, I'm surprised on how much I'm geeking out about the ability to record the differences in language by "shit-posing" IPA notation. I SO enjoy both Simon and Jackson!
The point about people's accents changing depending on whom they're talking to is a good one. I find that my way of speaking has a strong tendency to assimilate to that of the person I'm speaking with, and I think there's something similar to what Simon describes going on. I think there's a half-unconscious thing where I worry that my speecht will come across as pretentious when I'm speaking with some people, partly because I have a northeastern U.S. accent that's not far off from newscaster "General American" and partly because I think there are some sort of middle-class/educated markers in the way I naturally speak. When I'm talking with, say, a blue collar worker from northern Ontario, without meaning to I find myself quite strongly modifying the way I talk.
