At first the bit about english 'on' being cognate with swedish 'å' really threw me, because the only swedish word 'å' i knew was the one that means 'stream / small river', which is a reflex of the same proto-indo-european word as latin 'aqua' is. Obviously not the word you were talking about, but i just couldn't think of another word that was just 'å'. The preposition that _means_ 'on' is 'på', which I always just kinda figured was some different word entirely that we'd just adapted to mean the same. But another, slightly archaic way of saying 'på' is 'uppå'; it's not a common way of saying it (at least it's not in most swedish dialects, i feel like it's maybe more common in norwegian), and i always just interpreted it as 'upp + på', but actually, it's 'upp + å'. 'Uppå' then got eroded down to 'på' in casual speech. And now that i'm reading up on this, i see that _this_ 'å' survives in all sorts of expressions that i use regularly but haven't ever reflected on. 'På' does not seem very similar to 'on', but 'uppå' and 'upon'? i can't believe i didn't see it. My mind is blown, good sir. I've been going around saying what is essentially " 'pon" my entire life, and i didn't know it.
The change from "å" to "på" is the result of a process known as rebracketing, as you've explained, though not named. Another prominent example in Swedish is "ni", which used to be "i" (cognate with the English "ye"), but as it was often preceded by verbs that used to have plural forms ending in -en, for example "Viljen i...", the "n" jumped across and attached itself to the "i" forming "ni" over time.
As a Swedish-speaking Dane I got to think of ' å andra sidan' - 'on the other hand'. But then you got there in the end yourself. We've also got 'å' for 'på/on' in Jutland dialects 'å æ hors' - 'on the hors'. I just allways assumed that is was a modern reduction of 'på'. Perhaps It is a much older archaic feature? IDK.
Hey Simon, great video as always. Just thought I'd let you know that your Yiddish text at 1:20 is written backwards; it should be right-to-left whereas you've written in left-to-right. Cheers.
Sometimes that happens by itself if you copy & paste from one program to another if the two programs don't handle the reversal the same way. (Weirder yet, sometimes the same kind of issue might leave the spelling alone but affect the order of the words in the sentence/phrase.)
Don’t you think that as Simon was looking at the letter-per-letter comparison in these languages, it makes more sense to write all languages in the same direction, regardless of the writing conventions of some of these languages? The direction in which a language is written has hardly anything to do with its phonology/morphology.
@@hansc8433 in that case, wouldn't it be vastly more helpful to transcribe it in IPA? I dont understand how writing it in the opposite direction is helpful at all. For example, I don't think it would make sense for a Hebrew- or Arabic-language channel to write English right-to-left. If you care about phonetics, just use IPA.
@@davidp.7620 If it's material being presented to an audience that predominantly reads left-to-right, it absolutely makes sense to display it that way; it's not necessarily about accuracy as about conveying meaning.
I would love to see more on voiced and unvoiced and aspirated and unaspirated. Especially how such sounds change according to discovered rules that remain consistent.
Outstanding video. You know a video is good when the last several minutes are just a blank screen yet you are still paying close attention. On the "house" vowel change in English & German, it's interesting how that sound is going back to something closer to proto-germanic in English dialects in parts of Canada and regions of the US near those parts of Canada. Very noticeable in words like House & About. Canadian Raising I believe.
Incredible video and way of presenting this information. Would love to see this sort of presentation applied diachronically to some verbs. Maybe just the copula "to be"?
Simon, as always, so fascinating information in this video. As an Anglo-Saxon archaeologist (though not a linguist, but nonetheless interested in the development of English), coming from Manchester, who has also travelled to various Germanic countries (from Iceland to Austria and Bavaria, and had a quick course in counting in 'Schwyzer-Dutsch' from some Swiss friends some years back, I find all the stuff your talking about really interesting. I had intended to go to University to study French and German when I left school 40-odd years ago, but messed up my French A-levels so ended up being a geographer instead (which led me onto Anglo-Saxon archaeology, so all was not lost). As a result of my interest in langauges, whilst still at school, I acquired a volume by R. Priebsch and W.E. Collinson, called 'The German Language'. My 3rd edition was published in 1952 by Faber and Faber - I'm sure you might have already seen it but if not, although it will probably be dated now, it certainly discusses the evolution of Modern German from its Indo-European roots, and gives details of all the sound changes that appear to have taken place both in German, and also in the various other IE languages and in more detail in its various other Germanic sister languages including the northern and western Germanic languages. I understand (from the book sleeve notes) that there was a series of these volumes (French, German, Spanish with Portuguese Catalan and Basque, Russian and Slavonic, Greek, Chinese, and finally Latin, although I only briefly saw the French volume, many years ago.
I'm just viewing this now, but wanted to point out a possible connection. I learned from Polymathy's channel that the -um ending in Classical Latin pronunciation had the "m" fully nasalized. If this is mostly preserved from PIE -om, then it helps explain the shift to -ã in proto-Germanic. It actually sounds very similar to -om with nasalized "m" except you don't fully close your lips. The only thing left is to excuse the slight vowel shifts.
Great video, Simon! As to the question if a German speaker would understand Proto-Germanic. Well… I‘m a native German and English speaker and most of the time I would try to compare the word to modern German words but it‘s still very hard. I watched a video (by Jackson the Saxon) with a lot of example sentences in Proto-Germanic and it was hard to understand if trying to compare to German. For example the Proto-Germanic word for „booth“ (I can’t write it properly in PrG) would be in German „Bude“, it‘s similar but still very different. Only after I was told that it means a little shop I was able to recognise the German word. Another example was the PrG word for „toy shop“. The actual word that was used for „toy“ is nonexistent in modern English/modern German, but it is still existant in modern Icelandic. A third word was „hundas“ which is easy to understand, it‘s „Hund“ in modern German, „Hound, dog“ in modern English. So I‘d say it depends on the word, the more outfashioned the word is, the harder it is to understand for a German speaker. (I‘m no expert on any of this, I‘m just interested in the history of languages, mostly Germanic languages and enjoy seeing the connections between the languages)
Good explanation. I think if you look at it through averages, the average German native speaker will hardly understand it better or more easily than an English native, at least as long as we`re dealing with the more "basic" Germanic vocabulary. As Simon said, I think at least in terms of sound shifts both languages have gone a far way. A more precise view would also emphasize that of course a lot comes down to (individual) exposure to "phonological variance". As people who are used to using a lot of different dialectal forms of a language will work through peculiarities of another variety more easily (which is something I have talked to some Swiss about, who told me they could deal with Standard Dutch quite alright, even though from the perspective of the dialect continuum these dialects/languages are relatively far apart... of course language and dialect variety and switching from dialect to standard German is quite a thing in Switzerland). I think this applies to historic varieties in the same way, as you mentioned particularly with regard to certain vocab that has gone obsolete or changed its meaning in some dialects and been preserved in others.
I'm a native German speaker and I've worked with various medieval texts on Historical European Martial Arts. In my experience: New High German is pretty easy to understand. The spelling is weird and there's a lot of archaic words and phrases, but it's not too bad overall. Middle High German is more difficult, especially because a lot of words have had subtle changes in meaning, and because of the variety of dialects and wide variation in spelling. The overall meaning of a sentence is still understandable with some concentration and after reading it aloud a few times. Old High German (the earliest written form of German) is already mostly incomprehensible. I can often recognize individual words and make a guess at what the sentence might be talking about, but it's basically like reading a foreign language that has some similarities to one you know. I need a translation or at least a dictionary for all but simple sentences. I've looked at a reconstructed version of Schleicher's Fable in Proto-Germanic, and except for a word here and there it would be completely foreign if I didn't already know what it meant. So in my case, knowing German doesn't seem to help understand Proto-Germanic.
@@banana-rs3pv I've only read a dozen or so pieces of Middle High German poetry and some well-known Old High German texts (poetry, prayers etc.) for fun, but as far as that goes I agree with that. Simply put for me MHG has the strangeness of a more or less familiar modern dialect (or Yiddish - unsurprisingly perhaps given the relation), while OHG is more like a strong unfamiliar dialect or even a distinct language. At least, the reading aloud makes a fair difference for understanding OHG as well for me, as the spelling makes many words look much stranger than they actually are, and I think one can get used to some features relatively quickly like the voiceless consonants (vs. voiced equivalents in NHG), or the plethora of unreduced vowels and word-endings.
I kinda wish you had included Faroese, but it would've thrown you off in certain spots. For instance, in is indeed in Faroese like in Icelandic but it's pronounced [ʊi:(j)] and historically, it even had a sharpened (~Holtzmann's Law version 2.0) form íggj pronounced [ʊ(j)tʃ:]. Bread in Faroese is breyð [prɛi:(j)]. Old Norse would most likely have been pronounced as nasal in certain times so [i:] or [ĩ:] though you did bring this up.
A lot of other people have commented on that, but I’d like to add something to the “I as a native German speaker” thing: Even though I don’t believe there is an apparent method by which you can measure better intelligibility, I believe your comment on why German native speakers have no advantage in understanding Proto-Germanic is not correct. Most native speakers of German speak, understand or are exposed not only to Standard German, but a dialect as well. However, only a minority of German dialects are actually Upper-German dialects and therefore have all of the features of the High-German consonant shift. So, for the majority of Germans it is intuitively transparent that “t” and “s” are alternative phonemes (for example “das” and in the Franconian dialects “dat”), “p” and “f” are alternative (“op” and “auf”), etc. The High-German consonant shift is therefore not necessarily something that makes intelligibility harder. I would say that for the majority of Germans words without the shift just sound a bit like a dialectal pronunciation, particularly more “Low German” or more “Dutch”.
In Dutch, as you observed, the D at the end of "brood" is pronounced as T, but written as D because of the plural "broden," where the D is subsequently pronounced more like the friccative you mention for proto-germanic.
But the endings of the words 'brood' and 'bloot' still sound different. In the last the end T is sharper. A young family member moved from Germany to the Netherlands and it took a long while before it sounded correctly. Though I could not explain why it sounded weird... but I could hear the difference.
@@dutchman7623 You may have a point there. Try pronouncing 'bloot' as 'blood', and it almost feels that what doesn't match is the 'l', as if it is spoken by the waiter in a Chinese restaurant (where we used to be served 'witte lijst met botel en suikel'
@@eefaaf Sta maar eens op een druk station en voor je vraagt iemand een letoel Uutelech... Stond er drie personen achter maar de loketbediende verstond mij meteen!
Ik kom uit Brabant, dus met een t op het eind, en dat hoor je. Terwijl ik Brabander ben met een d. De oude spelling Braband voelt niet goed, lijkt op fietsband. Zo hoor ik ook het verschil tussen gebeurd en gebeurt. Wanneer iemand uit het westen die schrijffout maakt, denk ik altijd dat hoor je toch? Zeg maar eens fietsbandje of damhertje. Of haartje en haardje.
Proto Norse regularly used a d rune in these cases, it is arbitrarily transliterated as ð, even though there is a perfectly suitable þ rune available. Also East German is not really another branch - it is arguably just an early North Germanic branch similar to an early East Norse.
More examples of final -d disappearing after a long vowel in Modern West Frisian: rea- for red in many compounds, dea for the adjective dead. Modern Hindeloopen dialect has raa and daa.
20:40 As a native German speaker, I'm pretty sure a construction like the English "the cat's food" isn't allowed in modern German. We'd usually use a compound noun ("das Katzenfutter"), unless it's a specific cat you're talking about and not just food for cats in general. In that case you'd either use the genitive case ("das Futter der Katze") for written and formal speech, or the more colloquial "von"+dative case construction ("das Futter von der Katze").
Addendum: In modern colloquial speech, there is also the construction "der Katze ihr Futter" (dative+possessive pronoun+nominative). Closer to the English "the cat's food", but still not really the same.
@@banana-rs3pv It is allowed. "Der Katze Brot" (The cat's bread) with the genitive at the front is fine too, albeit rather uncommon in modern idioms. Personally I kinda like the poss. pron. construction "der Katze ihr Brot" as well, like in Norwegian grammar, even though I feel it leads to further disuse of the former genitive pattern, which I think sounds very elegant.
@@domsjuk True, but I wouldn't call it "uncommon", I'd call it "archaic". This variant is not used in modern German, except maybe for poetry. I just realized that when "cat" in "the cat's food" is replaced with a name, German and English work the same. E.g. "Rudolph's Haus" = "Rudolph's house" or "Schwedens Küste" = "Sweden's coast". Grammar is strange sometimes...
@@banana-rs3pv Fair enough, I just wanted to point out that it is a correct and well established form. I guess I prefer uncommon, because I still find it in texts and set phrases occasionally, where it is still readily understood, and I think there is a strong case by case difference as to how archaic it sounds or if it would even be noticed as peculiar (e.g. for feminine substantives without clear declination, it stands out, for other forms not so much), but I agree it has a "poetic", ironic or just literary tone to it ("der Wälder Rauschen", "des Autors gesammelte Werke" etc.) and it isn't really used in everyday speech.
In fact »Katzenfutter* is literally »cat's food«. Notice that »Katzen« in *Katzenfutter* is not the plural, but the genitive (and dative) declension of *Katze*. Probably from Old High German kaza, kazûn, kazûn, kaza (singular)/kazan, kazûn, lazûno, kazan (plural). The same rule applies by *Kräftemessen* : kraft, krafti/krefti, krafti/krefti, kraft (singular)/krafti/krefti, kraftô, kraftôno, krafti/krefti (plural).
Great video as always. Did you say the t/d were more dental-alveolar, similar to Romance languages now, rather than more alveolar in modern Germanic? Is Germanic the only major branch of IE that uses non-dental t/d sound?
An Indo-European-specialized linguist told me that early Proto-Germanic probably in fact still had a nasal stop (so -am presumably) and that the nasal vowel arose a bit later rather than immediately when the Proto-Germanic branched off. Do you happen to know anything about that?
"Proto-Germanic" in this video probably means Late Proto-Germanic, the language before it split into the different Germanic languages. Your friend probably refers to Pre-Proto-Germanic, which is its state after it split from Proto-Indo-European. There was a period of time between Pre-Proto-Germanic and Late Proto-Germanic, during which the nasal stop was lost and the vowel complimentarily got nasalised.
Not much point being the 394th commenter but here goes anyway: All this reconstruction of sound changes reminds me of French spelling, where the written words actually correspond to the way it was pronounced hundreds of years if not a thousand years ago. For instance all the words ending in "an" or "on", which are pronounced ã and õ respectively (same thing for "in" and "en", but my keyboard doesn't want to add the tilde ~). Also e.g. in French verbs, the last few letters are often dropped, e.g. "ils allaient" is pronounced "ils allai"... or rather "ils allè" because "ai" isn't prononced as two different vowels: "main" in English has two separate vowels (or maybe a diphtong?), "main" in French has a single nasalised vowel, maybe "mã". My unqualified guess would be that they originally sounded the same in both languages (in spite of having different meanings), something like English "mine" or German "mein" or Cockney "main" - the Cockney "ai" is an "a" followed by an "i", which is exactly what is written, so it looks IMHO like the original pronounciation.
Because it's presented in the nominative case, for which the ending is reconstructed as *-ɑ̃. 19:00 Simon presents the view that the ending existed in Proto-Germanic, derived from the one in Proto-Indo-European, but was dropped so early on that no descended languages inherited it.
…because it’s a dialect thing and not standard German. Due to modern media dialects are merging more and more with standard language and who knows which construction will become more popular in the future. Examples: “Dem Mädchen sein Papa” instead of “Der Papa des Mädchens“ “Mann von Corinna” instead of “Corinnas Mann” etc. I recommend the Book “Der Dativ ist dem Genitiv sein Tod“ from Bastian Sick. Not new but entertaining. If one understands German. In the Dialect spoken in my Area the Endings “-en” are spoken as “-e” btw. Which results in “Em Määde sei Bappa“.
I don't think this is a major current development, as most case endings or their remnants have already been reduced for a long time before or earlier in Modern German varieties and most of the syntax information has concentrated in the articles. The only example that comes to my mind spontaneously would be masc. dative case endings, e.g. "dem Stocke" > "dem Stock", which feels like a rather recent shift, but I haven't researched this and could imagine this reduction has been around for centuries parallel to the classic "-e" dative.
I would say natural. With English, it happened much earlier due to a confluence of native Old English speakers (at the time) with Vikings (Danes and Norsemen). Simplified cases evolved from that. Not sure if Simon ever covered that but other language channels have (I think Nativlang or Langfocus did a video on it). Not sure how it came about it other Germanic languages but I would speculate that the rules for the changes would be similar.
Modern spoken German is just catching up with the case reduction that's been well underway in all dialects for centuries: the disappearance of the genitive case is virtually universal, and nominative-accusative collapse is widespread outside southern dialects.
your error is that the gothic "th" letter you used at 11:15 is that it only denotes *voiceless* "th" .. the normal stops become fricatives intervocally, so for voiced "th" they wouldve used the "d" (please dont use the algiz rune -- the cirle stars at the bottom, it comes from the greek letter phi and is written like it, just the ring mostly not drawn completely closed)
Some linguists believe that old English (a West Germanic language) at it's beginning and contemporary Old Norse (North Germanic) would still have been mutually intelligible with each other. Which really means that was still within the programing period and that old English and Old Norse along with Old Frisian and the rest of the Germanic languages at the time would really just have been different dialects/accents of Common proto-germanic.
While this is true for North and West Germanic, this isn't true for East Germanic, at least Gothic. In the 5th to 7th century Old English was definitely mutually intelligible with Continental West Germanic and it was for North Germanic.
Could you please make a video touching upon the relationship between Germanic and Slavonic languages? I feel like more people should know about how the two groups shaped each other throughout history.
@@two_tier_gary_rumain might be interesting to do a thorough exploration of their mutual borrowings, though, like the German name Karl becoming the Russian word Korol', "king".
@@kadmii Yes, but borrowings is an entirely different process to a mutual language relationship. Otherwise, you could end up claiming that English is related to Japanese because of words like kimono and katana. And isn't the German word Kaiser derived from the Latin Caesar? And doesn't König mean king? So what does Karl mean? (Sorry, jumping around a bit here with my limited knowledge of German words for rulers.)
When reconstructing Proto-Germanic, Gothic is a good place to look for situations whereas there's equal evidence that the Proto-Germanic word was one thing or the other, such as with "in". In Gothic, the word is "in", and seeing as Gothic seems to be our closest written language to Proto-Germanic, that makes it seem even more likely to be "in" in Proto-Germanic.
This is good advice in general, and even more so if we just tackle a single word without considering evidence from the rest of the language, but it doesn't really work out for the word "in" when having full knowledge of Germanic sound changes: West Germanic "in" points to either "in" or "iną". North Germanic "í" points to "in" or "í". So the two together perfectly define "in" as the right choice. On the other hand, Gothic "in" could come from "in", "iną", "en" or "eną", so it's not as useful as West Germanic, and North Germanic is needed at any rate as Gothic and West Germanic evidence alone would have one hard-pressed to choose between "in" and "iną" if one doesn't use evidence from outside Germanic. Simon's assumption that there are no other phonemes isn't really valid in this case considering would just drop leaving no trace.
@@user-un7gp4bl2l True. But there's at least some merit to Gothic since it's an East Germanic language and it's different from North or West ones. That was my train of thought, at least. But I do understand yours as well, and it makes complete sense.
9:00 Short version: that is definitely a thing German does. Long version: If I recall my course on German phonetics correctly, German generally pronounces voiced consonants as unvoiced ones. I don't know the English term for this, but in German it's "Auslautverhärtung" ("hardening of an end sound"?). A "d" is pronounced more like a "t", a "b" like a "p", & a "g" like a "k" (unless preceded by an "i", in which case it's the German "ch"). My professor, who was a native speaker, did note that there was an exception occurs naturally (owing to "Faulheit der Sprachorgane", or "laziness of the speech organs"?) when the consonant which would otherwise become unvoiced is immediately followed by a voice consonant. For example: "genug" would normally be pronounced like "genuk", but would end up sounding like "genug" in "genug gegessen".
That's true but varies from region to region. This process of revoicing is very characteristic of Western Germany/Rhineland but definitely otherwise uncommon. I also doubt anyone would pronounce "genug gegessen" with such a voiced [g] because that would result in a voiced geminate which is very foreign to German. For this particular sequence in colloquial not careful speech either the first stop just straight up drops out or it is pronounced as a fricative. The fricative pronunciation is regionally restricted mostly to Northern Germany and parts of Central Germany and it's also not specific to this sequence but a general rule for /g/ (but not /k/) at the end of a word/syllable.
@@niku.. Pennsylvania Dutch kinda does something like this, but the plosives go a step further most times. It's closely related to Palatine dialects in the area where it kinda abuts Swabian, and stops will turn to approximants so 'ich habe' is 'ich hab' but instead of 'hab ich' it's "hawwich" (not a fricative, but a non-velar bilabial approximant (some do have a fricative though)) Meanwhile instead of "Apfel" it's "Appel" or "Abbel" The variant spelling is because the P likes to be pronounced as a B sound when it's between vowels
Dutch does this as well, as highlighted by Simon with his entirely reasonable pronunciation of "brood" and the feature is named "final de-voicing" I believe.
Since I usually pronounce "genug" as /ɡə.ˈnʊχ/, that last part doesn't really apply to me. And with other consonants, I don't think I revoice them either. They just either get absorbed into a geminate if they're both the same, or the coda stop gets reduced to an unreleased or silently released stop whose voicing is honestly ambiguous. If that's a thing it has to be in a different dialect. I live in Lower Saxony relatively close to the Dutch and NRW borders.
About a plural invented by a baby --- a 2 yr old baby who lived in my building would yell "abba-day!" when he saw a cat. He would say this no matter which cat he saw. His mother figured it was related to her saying affectionate words of some sort when she petted cats. One day two of my cats were in the hall, and the baby saw them, and yelled, "Abba-dabba-day!" , called his mother over and repeated, "Abba-dabba Day!" It was the first time he had seen two at the same time.
“In” exists in Scandinavian languages as well (written “ind” in Danish). “Ind” in Danish is used as: To the center or middle of something or towards somewhere central Into the woods / in through the window / into the city “Ind i skoven” / “in ad vinduet” / “ind til byen” But also to apply (søge ind), to cover/wrap (indpakke), get involved (indblande), hit something (støde ind i). Very often used with “i” as “ind i” meaning “into”
yeah, practically all the same in Swedish "In i skogen" / "in till byn" "packa/slå in" wrap something, "Inblandad" involved, "stötte in i" walk into or bump into something.
I've started learning Latin after discovering Luke Ranieri and even though I recognize most words through the lens of the romance language I speak, I'm blown away by how many words have obvious Germanic cognates. Whenever I read about Proto-Germanic I'm surprised by how similar it is to Latin
@@meginna8354 He does know Old English and Proto-Germanic so it's not too much of a stretch to assume he understood the general message of this sentence even if not exactly
I can understand Norwegian - this op means ‘I like a lot your videos. Well done!’ or something like that! I am learning Norwegian and Swedish! And the words bra and gjor are also in Swedish, but the verb is spelled a bit different!
@@mike-0451 tf? ignoring the blatent antisemitism, it's not right -> left just to "be different". it's how the whole thing works, as well as other scripts like arabic, aramaic, dhivehi, and persian. you'd for sure complain if english was "siht ekil nettirw ylneddus" (suddenly written like this). so shut up, and educate yourself.
@@alexxxO_O the word for ice "iis" and agreed "iens" are differentiated by the nasal vowel, so /iːs/vs /ĩːs/ (although some accents diphthongize the latter to /ĩəs/. Another example, wise "wiis" vs a town named Wyns are /ʋiːs/ and /ʋĩːs/ respectively.
Great stuff, Simon, keep up the good work! Been following your stuff for around two years now, and I've enjoyed everything you've put out, especially anything related to regional dialects and the evolution of language over time :))
every video “im an archeologist not a linguist” also every video : “hey LANGUAGE” haha love it although mayne you should just switch jobs to linguist, you seem to like it
Thank-you for including Yiddish in your examples, Simon! Most people will use the "lax" vowel, but in some dialects or formal registers of speech, that segment can be realized as [i]. (The only issue I have is that your formatting messed up the word! All the letters are in the correct order, but Yiddish goes right to left: ״אין״) All the best! מיט ליבע פין קאנאדא
To prove that protogermanic had "in" like the westgermanic, rather than "i" like the northgermanic, one only needs to look at the same word in other ancient indogermanic tongues. Latin has "in". Ancient Greek "en". Old Lithuanian "in" (still pronounced thus in compiund words, and in several modern lithuanian dialects where the standard language now has a long i written with a nasal sign). As for the final d in Dutch "brood", the final d is now pronounced "t", but in other forms of this and like words such as "broden" (plural), "god" , "goden" (plural), "dood", "doden" (plural) the sound is still clearly "d" not "t". Thus only d can be considered as the original inherited sound.
Do lietuvieši use "in"? We latvieši certianlly dont do it like the germanic people. Our word is "iekšā" and it means "inside", but we dont say "iekšā namā (inside house)" we just say "namā (housā*)", we have a locative case so we dont need the word iekšā (inside). I know lietuvieši have all the same cases +1 so I would be surprised if they feel the need to use the word "in". For example english: the cat in the house eat bread latviski: kaķis namā ēda maizi no word for the, no word for in.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 we use it, but not the same way as germanics, example: įėjau į namą (standard lithuanian) while in dzukian dialect, you could say: inėjau naman ( in/į- is also a prefix, like with iš-, corresponding to latin ex-) the sentence you said in lithuanian would be: katinas namie ėdo duonos/duoną. (you say "name" instead of "namie" in different situations, generally the ending is -e)
A note on the Anglish question: if we keep other things equal and either remove William the Bastard or tilt the result of Hastings the other way, it's quite likely that England would fall (back) into Norwegian or Danish influence, perhaps after a few decades of chaos and civil war on all sides. We often forget that one of the reasons Harold Godwinson was defeated at Hastings in part because his army had been exhausted and depleted by Harald Hardrade at Stamford Bridge a few weeks before. Norse influence on English was already entrenched by then, and would likely have only gotten more so, either by inertia or by active geopolitical measures. Thus there would have been no 'pure' Anglish, just a different evolution, with different influences.
I wonder, does Anglish also replaces Old Norse borrowings, or as they're Germanic, even if not inherited through Old English, they tolerate them? A bit like the Romance languages are full with hundreds (maybe thousands) of, not inherited, pretty recent direct borrowings from Latin and nobody complains (they even tend to prevail in formal speech, over inherited words), but critize other borrowings from other languages
Without the Norman Conquest, England would have gravitated to the Scandinavian rather than the French cultural sphere. The language would have become Anglo-Danish rather than Anglo-French, and the Kings of England would not have spent centuries trying to conquer France (their homeland, after all) and put more effort into subduing Wales, Scotland and Ireland. Not so good for the Celts! King Canute had become King of Denmark and King of Norway also: perhaps the link would have been reestablished.
This was an excellent scholarly video. I'd like to see you having a go at Irish dialects of English and picking apart the interplay between English and Gaelic. Also as an archaeologist I'd love to see you discussing more archaeological topics. Brilliant always, beir bua
Hey, not Simon, but that's because Proto-Indo-European /m/ first becomes [n] at the end of a word, and then final /n/ (which may be original /m/ or /n/) is dropped only after an unstressed syllable, so it didn't happen in one-syllable words like Proto-Germanic "in" or "an". A good example is Proto-Indo-European "tóm", which becomes "þan" (masculine accusative singular of "that", Modern English "then/than" Modern German "denn/dann") and not "þą", unlike "braudą", where the last vowel in earlier "braudan" is unstressed.
0:00 'My qualification is in archaeology, not linguistics, and I will still make mistakes here and there.' Who does not (make them)? It's an amazing job you're doing and it's all the prove I need. Keep it up!
proto-germanic and your videos on it are some of my absolute faves. i hope this brings some semblance of how far reaching your passion is -- your videos have really helped me discover my own love and passion for archaeology and linguistics. saying that, i've decided to pursue my own degree in archaeology and are eagerly waiting with bated breath to hear back from the university i applied to! thank you for these videos and your passion, truly. i look forward to every upload!
In Dutch, words ending in d in singular still get a d sound when made plural. 1 brood [bro:t] 2 broden [bro:den] This is the rule we learn as kids to determine whether to spell t or d: just make it plural and drop the ending again.
Hi Simon! Love your work :) I've always had this doubt but never really asked anyone. Has the comparative method changed much since its inception in the xix century or has it stayed mostly the same? And, if it did change, are old reconstructions revisited often? I don't know much about linguistics, I just took a course in uni, and google didn't help much
Speaking as another amateur - I would say the method (comparison) hasn't changed in principle, but our understanding of the process of sound articulation has improved greatly, and we have a lot more data for comparison than before, which allows for greater precision in reconstructing sounds in proto-languages. But the fact remains that we have no recordings dating further back than 200 years and the only way we can theorize what the sounds were is to start building an intricate puzzle from all the fragmented data we have.
@@kalinpetkov2916 that makes a lot of sense! I'm still intrigued about the other part of the question. If there is like a "dictionary" of reconstructions, do the older ones get revised often, or are they usually taken for granted? I mean specifically with Proto-Indoeuropean
@@sofiadri2638 Yes, they get revised very often. Here is a reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European made in 1868 by August Schleicher. Avis, jasmin varnā na ā ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vāgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhāram magham, tam, manum āku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams ā vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam. Akvāsas ā vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvant-svas: manus patis varnām avisāms karnauti svabhjam gharmam vastram avibhjams ka varnā na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram ā bhugat.
@@sofiadri2638 And here is the same reconstruction, this time done in modern times by Andrew Byrd: h2áu̯ei̯ h1i̯osméi̯ h2u̯l̥h1náh2 né h1ést, só h1éḱu̯oms derḱt. só gwr̥hxúm u̯óǵhom u̯eǵhed; só méǵh2m̥ bhórom; só dhǵhémonm̥ h2ṓḱu bhered. h2óu̯is h1ékwoi̯bhi̯os u̯eu̯ked: “dhǵhémonm̥ spéḱi̯oh2 h1éḱu̯oms-kwe h2áǵeti, ḱḗr moi̯ aghnutor”. h1éḱu̯ōs tu u̯eu̯kond: “ḱludhí, h2ou̯ei̯! tód spéḱi̯omes, n̥sméi̯ aghnutór ḱḗr: dhǵhémō, pótis, sē h2áu̯i̯es h2u̯l̥h1náh2 gwhérmom u̯éstrom u̯ept, h2áu̯ibhi̯os tu h2u̯l̥h1náh2 né h1esti. tód ḱeḱluu̯ṓs h2óu̯is h2aǵróm bhuged.
It's interesting that at least American English speakers hear the Finnish k, p, t consonants (that are unaspirated) closer to b,d,g in their language. Many Finnish American names have thus changed to reflect that in writing, too: for example, the surname "Pekkala" is often found in the form "Bekkala" in the U.S and Canada. Similarly I read a transcript of an interview of Finnish Americans where the name "Durrala" was found - I realized that it certainly meant the Finnish last name "Törölä". I've also learnt that many Finnish people I know can't hear the difference between "a pack" and "a bag" etc.
It's because p, t, and k are all aspirated initially in English (though unaspirated when not initial, eg words like spin). Because of the lack of aspiration, it doesn't sound like the usual letter to us.
@@akl2k7 I believe that's the reason why in many languages without voiced consonants (etc Mandarin and Korean) the Latinisation uses voiced letters b,d,g to represent the unaspirated sounds while using voiceless letters p,t,k to represent the aspirated sounds.
@@Smitology Yeah, I think so too. Plus, b, d, and g seem to be much less likely to end up aspirated out of the blue than p, t, and k. It seems like p, t, and k end up aspirated a lot to the point where some languages such as Scottish Gaelic or Icelandic dropped the voicing and only differentiate the two sets of consonants by aspiration.
@@akl2k7 b,d,g are voiced sounds and cannot be aspirated. Instead, the equivalent concept is called "breathy voiced". I know many South Asian languages used breathy voiced sounds but I don't know where else they are used.
@@Smitology Gotcha. Breathy voiced seems to be the voiced version of aspiration, though. Still, it seems almost more common for those sounds to turn into fricatives (like in Spanish or Old Norse) than gain the breathing voice quality. And, interestingly, some languages, such as Ancient Greek, got voiceless aspirated stops out of breathy voiced consonants.
Is /ʁ/ really a possibility for the r in the second word? I guess it’s using outside knowledge, but in both the listed languages that use /ʁ/ it was a fairly recent development at the scale we’re working with. Is it a case where change can happen quickly?
@@RobbeSeolh The idea it came from french is a pretty common hypothesis, but it being in French is still very recent at the scale we're working with. I'm mostly just curious about whether /ʁ/ really could have occurred in the past.
Yeah regardless of where [ʀ~ʁ~χ] (in Dutch at least) came from, it's relatively recent. I would think that only a (overly) purist synchronic reconstruction would disregard that information. In both the Netherlands and Germany, the distribution between alveolar /r/ and uvular / ʀ/ variants is largely one of countryside (alveolar) versus cities (uvular). That's a hint from sociolinguistics that the uvular pronunciation is (or _was_ until a few decades ago, in case of Dutch) one of higher prestige, and therefore must be the innovative one.
There's enough evidence for German's devoicing in German alone, as the historically voiced stops still show up in spelling and inflected forms: Brot /bʁoːtʰ/, Brote /ˈbʁoː.tʰə/ Hand /hantʰ/, Hände /ˈhɛn.də/
You might be right that the singular actually has a voiced stop underlyingly, but I can't think of any other suffix other than the plural marker with which the stop turns out voiced 🤔🤔
@@ikbintom Oh this stuff is everywhere. I don't think there's any regular noun, adjective, or verb that is spelled with a voiced consonant at the end, but doesn't retain it in any form. For adjectives, pretty much any inflection whatsoever will preserve voiced stops: blöd /bløːtʰ/, blöder /ˈbløː.dɐ/ Verbs will keep them in some forms aswell (du fegst /feːkst/, wir feɡen /ˈfeː.ɡən/). The first person singular present indicative form showcases this sound change perfectly, as the final -e is often left out. Both "ich fege" /ˈfeː.ɡə/ and "ich feg" /feːkʰ/ are valid forms. Similarly, the now less common dative -e does the same thing: Both "dem Hunde" /ˈhʊn.də/ and "dem Hund" /hʊntʰ/ are valid. As mentioned before, most plural suffixes do this too. It's literally any suffix that puts a vowel after the consonant in question, because that moves the consonant to an onset position, which means that devoicing isn't triggered. /s/ after long vowels is also /z/ in those same environments, unless it's spelled with a "ß". Gras /ɡʁaːs/, Gräser /ˈɡʁɛː.zɐ/, but Fuß /fuːs/, Füße /ˈfyː.sə/ (not /ˈfyː.zə/) and nass /nas/, nässer /ˈnɛ.sɐ/ (not /ˈnɛ.zɐ/) To me it seems quite likely that this is /z/ being devoiced, not /s/ being voiced, but I'm not sure. It lines up with how ⟨s⟩ behaves anywhere else: It's /s/ after short vowels, next to voiceless consonants, and word-finally, and /z/ after long vowels, word-initially, or after a voiced consonant while before a vowel (I think, I'm not 100% about these) Sometimes it's just /s/ everywhere, but that's ⟨ß⟩. As for Dutch "brood": I think the High German consonant shift is to blame here, but I'm not sure. Spelling suggests that Dutch originally had /d/, which then got devoiced in most forms, while German only ever had /t/, which obviously isn't affected by devoicing.
You will find „brod“ and „brode“ in older German sources. I guess the pronounciation varied from region to region and has only recently been standardised under the influence of standard spelling .
@@joaquinelorrieta4203 Just to clarify, I meant the southern accents in the U.S.A. Not South America. My dad is from the south, his ancestors are from England, and sometimes I catch him pronouncing words like the brits do. So, I'm intrested in how the English accent changed and evolved during the colonization period.
Older (non-rhotic) Southern American (which is just barely extant, there's probably only a dozen or so living speakers) is quite similar to RP. Modern (rhotic) Southern American isn't any closer to RP than General American is.
@@shesmoonlight514 I believe they meant that American English didn't come from British English. They both stem from older dialects that, while in England, are far removed from the similarities you're talking about. What you're describing is a result of dialectal influence and contact, and possibly idiolectal aspects that may result from his particular family history.
Splendid video as always. I must say you’re getting really darn good at this so cudos to you! Regarding the Proto-Germanic nasal vowels @14:53 all later Germanic languages lost the root suffix vowels including those that were nasalized as you mentioned. So those nasalized vowels were lost everywhere. The Proto-Germanic nasalized root vowels how ever (such as *-Vnht turning into nasalized *-Vht which carries down through all Germanic languages, including Old High German and Gothic) were not only still preserved in Old Norse in many dialects. They still are preserved in the Swedish dialect/language Elfdalian/Elfdalecarlian till this very day. Compare Proto-Germanic *ganhtiz which turned into later Proto-Germanic *gãhtiz [ɤɑ̃:xtiz] meaning ”door post”. In Old Norse this was (dura)gátt/gǫ́tt [gã:t:]/[gɔ̃:t:] while in Modern Elfdalian it is still (dörå)gǫt [gõ:t] with preserved Proto-Germanic era nasalization and the same meaning of "door post". Which is quite amazing. Archaic Standard Swedish as well as other Modern Swedish dialects "dörr(a)gåt" how ever no longer have a nasalized vowel here. In the 15-hundreds the Swedish king Gustav Vasa fled west from the Swedish capital "Stokkholm" to get away from the Danes that were attacking. He fled to the region which included the Elfdale to rally the Elfdalecarlians as well as others from the area. King Gustav spoke to them in contemporary Stockholm Swedish and they had no trouble comunicating with each other. Whether Stockholm Swedish had the nasal vowels intact at that time we can not know for sure. We strongly suspect it didn't. Stockholm Swedish went on to change a lot over the following centuries while Elfdalian either didn't or changed in other directions and now the rest of Sweden can't really understand what the Elfdalians are saying any more.
@@pierrebalandras6320 Yes, it is believed that xhleb is an instance of proto-Germanic / proto-Slavic linguistic contact. Most argue that it is a Germanic word, some argue that it is originally Slavic.
Regarding the coincidence at the end, it's interesting that _both_ of the long high vowels underwent this shift in both languages: /i:/ became /ai/ and /u:/ became /au/ in both English and High German. Furthermore, the front vowel went through an intermediate /əi/ stage in both languages (which is where German got the spelling ‘ei’ for this sound). The back vowel went through an analogous intermediate /əu/ stage in English, but I don't know about German. (By the way, the ‘ou’ spelling for the back vowel in English is based on French spelling from when the pronunciation was still /u:/.)
Do you think you’ll go further into the evolution of the grammatical endings like you did at 18:50 some day? I’ve been afflicted with crippling curiosity. I tried (very casually) to track Icelandic verb conjugations back to their PGM ancestors once, but it got too complicated for my layman’s research techniques, what with conjugations merging or becoming identical due to sound changes, words seemingly changing class and so on
So when, how and why did English lose the infinitive forms of "could", "should" and "would", i.e. OE scullan, cunnan & willan - directly corresponding to "skulle", "kunne" & "ville" in modern Danish & Norwegian - ? This seems really strange to us "poor" continental Germanic folks, when we are learning English 😉
Really pleased you’ve included Yiddish in 1:14. I believe it more closely retained the medieval pronunciation. Just a correction to the spelling. The Hebrew letters are reversed, but should be written right to left. So אין rather than ןיא. Also, for the word bread, in Yiddish it is pronounced /bʁɔɪt/ or broyt.
Yiddish has undergone a dramatic change in its vowel system, loosing contrastive length and merging front rounded and front unrounded vowels. If you want to take a look at a pronunciation that more closely resembles MHG, you should take a look at Swiss German varieties, I think.
Even in some Dutch dialects there can be a au-like diphthong in the cognate of “house” (MD “huis” from palatal [y:], present in many varieties still), probably also directly from a [u:]-like sound. One could say all “proper” Dutch dialects have [y:] and diphthongs derived from it and Limburgish (more going towards Ripuarian) and Low Saxon dialects have [u] or derived diphthongs. The u>y shift is considered to be typically west Franconian, so more “Dutch proper”. It expanded into some Low Saxon dialects too. u>y in Frisian is considered to be independent (it is somewhat older and has different conditions, based on dentals following etc., and also occurs in very conservative dialects and even North Frisian (all varieties). A long enduring palatalisation tendency in Frisian?
You mention that /u/ became /au/ independently in English "house" and German "Haus". It's worth pointing out that this coincidentally similar sound shift is also paralleled with the front "price" vowel. The German word is "Preis" /praɪs/, from the same French loanword /priːs/ that yielded English "price".
23:07 in one of you previous video you threw in an interesting conjecture: you said that the loss of declinations in old English was due to interactions with old Norse, as people speaking different language from the same stem can infer the meaning of a root but they are not very good with grammar. Prepositions are easier to "catch" in a phrase then declination of words and are often less changed by language evolution. "In" is the same in old German, similar in old Norse and even in Latin. "for", für, "per", "pour" have similar sounds and are mutually understandable. The loss of declination happened in vulgar Latin, because illiterate people and a lot of non Latin speaker immigrants/invaders were trying to speak Latin but had no clues about how a genitive, a dative or an ablative were constructed, finding easier to apply prepositions.
in the case of Romance languages I think the fall of case marking has mostly to do with a stronger tendency for a CV structure, at least word-finally, in Vulgar Latin (clear even in Imperial times) than in Classical Latin and the neutralization of some vowel final endings. Sure, that alone doesn't explain the complete loss of case markings but when most of the oppositions between endings are lost, even the ones that survive may be deemed not useful enough to be kept If you look at old French grammar, you can see that French hung on to cases for as long as it could: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_French#Grammar that is before -s was devoiced, and then -e too, as part of regular sound changes French has undergone conjugations on the other hand were mostly kept, so even the Latin-Gaulish population was latinized enough to preserve an important feature of the language similar processes must have happened for the other Romance languages but French is the earliest attested by a couple of centuries
@@marce3893 French is an extreme example of coda dropping, so it's to be expected that the case system would fall apart there, but there are no phonological reasons for the fall of the case system in, say, Iberian languages, which are pretty much on the other end of the coda-dropping spectrum. Some declensions in Spanish would look like this if we just evolved them from Latin: nom ojos oje acc ojo ojos gen oje ojoro dat/abl ojo ojes nom casa case acc casa casas gen case casaro dat case cases abl casa cases nom huemo hombres acc hombre hombres gen hombres hombro dat/abl hombre homembo nom/acc tiempos tiémpora gen tiémpores tiémporo dat/abl tiémpore tempuerbo So I'd say a nom/voc and a dat/abl merger could be expected, but there are no phonological grounds to expect fewer than four cases, as the forms are kept almost as distinct as the Classical Latin ones.
@@ikbintom It is "natural" in the sense that it naturally happens, but there must be a reason for the weakening of the system in the first place. It doesn't just happen out of nowhere, and the case of Romance is an extreme one from any perspective, so it can't be dismissed as "this is natural, nothing to see here".
@@user-un7gp4bl2l it is definitely natural in that case as well, it was a process that took hundreds of years. It's very similar to how languages like English, Dutch, Hindi and Bulgarian lost a lot of inflection over time
Hi Simon great video as always! Just something to look out for when typing or pasting right-to-left languages like Yiddish into video editing software, it usually comes out backwards unless you reverse it again yourself, so in this case it should be אין rather than ןיא. Silly really how most software nowadays still can’t recognise this automatically but there you go.
I wouldn't say the cases disappear in German, I would probably say that the inflection on the noun itself when it is a noun declension gets easier, but the articles still are highly inflected. For example a *Beamter* can have three different declensions within only the masculine gender pattern (strong, weak and mixed declension because it is declined as an adjective). In my own German language I recognised that I often use the Dative-e in singular, but also in the feminine declension I sometimes use the Middle High German declension, e.g. auf (der) Erden, in der Ebenen, instead of auf der Erde or in der Ebene. This sound super unnatural to say but is the official pattern. The declension of feminine nouns in the genitive case it still used as compound element, e.g. Marienkirche (Maria's Church literally), Katzenklo (Cat's loo). What happens with the genitive is more like: Northern Germans hate genitive -s at all, which led Goethe to change his original titles *Die Leiden des jungen Werthers* to *Die Leiden des jungen Werther* because all pirate copies took the Northern version of this German. I personally use actually the genitive -s also in Names. When a name ends in an s it usually becomes -ens, e.g. the genitive of Karl Marx is Karl Marxens according to the mixed noun masculine declension as in *der Friede* ; der Friede, des Friedens, dem Frieden, den Frieden. Also most mixed declensions are very productive. I think when German loses the case system then this is probably due to mass migration.
Yes, that's correct. In fact the entire series *b, *d, *g had fricative allophones between vowels and in certain other situations. *gw also had a similar thing going on but its fricative allophone developed into *w very early on leaving only *gw in situations where it was in fact a stop as in the word *singwaną (cf. Gothic [siŋgwan], Old Norse and Old Frisian with metathesis as ). This whole phenomenon accounts for the development of these consonants particularly in High German and basically all other Germanic languages (except Gothic where the original allophonic situation is thought to have remained) because for instance [d] developed differently to its allophone [ð] in Old High German (the former developing into /t/ while the latter became /d/)
@@niku.. The last bit is not true. [d] and [ð] lost the allophony in West Germanic times and became [d] everywhere. This became /t/ in Modern German. "Vater", "Mutter", "Futter", "Garten" are good examples.
The OE grammar I know says ea in OE represents the æa (and the a is probably the mid lower back rounded vowel) diphthong not ea, following the standard change from Germanic a to æ in OE.
Would you consider doing a video on the adoption/:adaption of a pan-american accent in music in Britain and its effect on the vernacular? Plenty of nicely recorded source material, especially considering The Beatles' wide gap between Scouse to the aforementioned hodge-podge and skiffle's treatment of some pretty afro-heavy influenced songs with lower class Southern English thrown in (Thinking of Lonnie Donegan specifically). I had fun trying to wrangle Lonnie's intro to 'Have a Drink on Me' live '61 into IPA, very English shouts if you know what I mean, but that's somewhat beside the point.
Given that we have a Gothic translation of large parts of the New Testament and specifically of John 6:35, I would be surprised if we didn't know what the Gothic word for bread was as, in English at least, Jesus describes himself as being 'the bread of life' in this verse.
Really nice video. You know, you don't need to apologize for making theoretical or even a bit dryish topics. For some of us, it's just what we need to chill after a day of work. And completely unrelated comment : some reconstruction of proto-indo-european looks pretty much easier to understand for speakers of English (i mean of the kind that ants to make a little linguistic effort) than most other indo european languages. And we say, Norman conquest, Norman conquest, but who invaded the land of the good and sweet brittoromans? I'm just asking... Best to you
has anyone had a go at "pro-constructing" future English accents using these rules? could you have a guess at what your local accent might sound like in a few hundred years?
We have a good idea of which sound changes and which ones are rare, and we can use this (and other avenues of evidence) to reconstruct past stages of languages, but unfortunately there are too many variables involved to accurately predict future developments :( There are also a lot of sociopolitical factors involved. A sound change may already have occurred in a geographically limited dialect, but whether that sound change becomes common in other dialects depends on a lot of unpredictable variables.
such a good video! enjoyed you saying 'brood', with a very regional accent there hahah, the more common pronunciation would probably be /broːt/ (okay edit after i asked my professor; apparently this isnt correct lol but the diphthong is not as strongly pronounced as you did here!)! i would love to see a video on aspiration! it might be good to look into prevoicing as well in this case, i think (Ellen, Simon & Leuschner, Torsten. (2010). Laryngeal Systems in Dutch, English, and German: A Contrastive Phonological Study on Second and Third Language Acquisition. Journal of Germanic Linguistics. 22. 10.1017/S1470542710000127.) might be a good source for this!
I believe [oː] is used in Belgian Standard Dutch (and various Dutch and Belgian dialects), but the diphthong is indeed the more common in Northern Standard Dutch (albeit with less emphasis on the second element than in the video, as you point out).
Your professors may vary :). That's to say, discussion about oo or oow in brood and the likes is still not decided. As not all speakers add the w, and for those that do it's mostly very weak, and there is no difference in meaning, I would go for the monophthong for simplicity.
Neither a shout out nor a call out, but I ran across a channel from a fella doing a thing with Proto-Germanic. Check him out if you want...and Roper, let's hear your thoughts: ru-vid.com
Also if we compare India's Indo European languages they evolved very differently than other languages of the same family. like the case system fell in for a postposition system and now the postposition is tagged in spoken languages.
