'The Cost of Code Switching' • The Cost of Code Switc... African American Vernacular English • Lessons from Lucy Lane... www.wecantbreathenational.org/ www.change.org/p/govia-thames... www.standwithbre.com/
Sound palatalization of „s“ to “ ʃ before consonants is actually also slowly happening in some varieties of English . Whereas „strong“ and „strained“ both have a plain s-sound in RP English, there is a noticeable degree of palatalization to be heard in American Midwestern and also some British dialects , making them sound like ʃtrong and ʃtrained. I’ve noticed this repeatedly when listening to American non-standard accents but it seems to be a newly evolved and barely researched phenomenon.
I think this might actually be from the /tɹ/ to /tʃɹ/ sound change which is common in certain areas. It then wouldn't be difficult to see an /s/ also palatalising in context of /tʃ/ So /stɹ/ > /st͡ʃɹ/ > /ʃt͡ʃɹ/
I know that's one of the common ways for ppl to portray being drunk here - turn st into sht. But now that I think about it, when I get talking really fast and/or sloppily, I do tend to do that. I'm from the Midwestern US. I'm curious if any of y'all have really noticed much about the Great Lakes Vowel Shift. It's typically associated with a Canadian accent (specifically how they pronounce "sorry"), but my partner (he's from Wisconsin; I'm from Iowa) definitely has it. It's different enough from the way I pronounce certain vowels that I notice it, but I'm curious if it might be much more similar to how I pronounce my vowels than I think - something someone not from the US would probably pick up on a lot easier.
The same word also exists in Bosnian / Croatian / Serbian. In old dialects it also means wall, but in the modern standard languagages it's only used for rock walls.
I am studying slavic linguistics at college and the lecture on this topic was eye opening. Our professor wrote down cognates like you, but from different slavic languages and german and english as a bonus. His examples were "might", "night", "mast" and "eye". Since that and because I also learnt a few slavic sound changes, it is now much easier to learn new slavic languages and "guess" words for me. Your videos spiked my interest on the germanic side of things.
@@perunski8359 I know another Germanic loanword that become popular in the Slavonic branch. It is Volk before sound shift, it was polkaz. Polish „pulk“, Russian and Ukrainian „polk“. Maybe the word Polka and the word Polak comes from it, too.
I'd like to add to the nominative -az ending that we have more evidence of its existance because of Finnish. Finnish has preserved old Germanic loans almost unchanged changing them only to fit the Finnish phonotactics, and these words still show the old -az ending in the form of -as. E.g. PG: *kuningaz -> FIN: kuningas compare - ENG: king; GER: Köning; SWE: kung; ICE: konungur; DUT: koning PG: *druhtinaz -> FIN: ruhtinas compare - ENG: drighten; SWE: drott; ICE: drottinn (PG = Proto Germanic, ENG = English, GER = German, SWE = Swedish, ICE = Icelandic, DUT = Dutch) Germanic languages have dropped the -az, but Finnish has preserved it as -as. The same ending can actually be seen in other Finnic languages too. In Estonian and Karelian the ending is the same, -as. In Veps and Votic it's the original -az. In the case of the latter two, the stem itself has changed a bit more than in Finnish - kunigaz & kunikaz respectively.
@@Luey_Luey I'm not a linguist so I can only guess. I'd think number one reason for that would be that if Finnish had a nominative singular -as suffix, it'd exist in native words as well. That's, however, not the case. Even if we think that it's a suffix that was attached to every words Finnish got, that's also incorrect because the Baltic loans Finnish has don't have this suffix (e.g. seinä and not seinäs). Another piece of evidence (imo) is that Finnish tends to treat loanwords differently than native words. With words ending in -s the native words get an extra k in e.g. nominative plural Compare native words: kannas -> kannakset vastaus -> vastaukset kysymys -> kysymykset kives -> kivekset With loanwords of Germanic and Baltic origin: kuningas -> kuninkaat taivas -> taivaat rakas -> rakkaat kirves -> kirveet Words ending in -s aren't the only example of this. Words that end in -i also behave differently depending on whether it's an old word or a newer loan. Compare native words: kivi -> kivet joki -> joet järvi -> järvet saari -> saaret With loanwords (even ancient loans): äiti -> äidit vitsi -> vitsit pankki -> pankit paperi -> paperit Notice how in old words the i turns into en e? Taking these into consideration, I feel like that's a pretty good argument in favour of Germanic languages having a nominative suffix -az rather than Finnish adding them
First time I was taught about linguistics was in middle school (I was around 13yo, decades ago 😫). Found it fascinating then and still find it fascinating now.
@@isailing Yeah, I've heard from some older people that back in the day they learned real, formal English. I wish prescriptivism still reigns over the English speak world. It's sad to think that ESL Countries teach better English than native English countries
@@anon8740 I suppose better 'Formal English' would be what I mean. And no, prescriptivism never had control. Language is always and will always change. But that being said, the school's duty is to educate, perhaps learning formal standard English should be the focus of school. After all, outside of schools/workplace, everyone use informal language (normally). There's no need to teach informal English at school.
@aattitude Exactly, it's interesting but quite a niche topic. Phonology is an underrated aspect of language learning, but also a hard one. Hearing my German teacher absolutely butcher Middle High German has stuck with me though.
Another interesting opposite point is that the Hochdeutsch speakers tend to pronounce st and sp with sh in foreign words where it should be s - like Schtahlin instead of Stalin.
In Bavarian German "Bua" means English "boy". As Bavarian is very related to Lombardic, and the latter having been neighbors to the Angles and Saxons before many of them set foot on Britain I suppose "bua" and "boy" are cognates. "Stone" in Bavarian is "Stoa" in the west around Munich and mountainous Austria and "Staa" or "Staan" in the East of Austria. I suppose that Western Germanic languages must have been pretty mutually intelligible until around 600-650.
Standard German "Bube". I always assumed they were cognates, but surprisingly the etymonline entry for "boy" says "of unknown origin" and then goes on to speculate. One of the possibilities it examines is indeed germanic, but another is romance. www.etymonline.com/word/boy
there are quite a few other similarities between Bavarian and English that I have noticed that aren't apparent in standard German. Foam = foam , boana = bones, the plural of mouse and louse: mice/lice=meis/leis, oiwei(allerweil)=always, enkel = ankle, weib = wife. Obviously Bavarian has no set spelling and the words are pronounced completely differently depending on the region but the similarities are still fascinating considering the physical distance.
Bavarian is not more closely related to English than any other variety of German. The similarities in vowels and diphthongs are later dialectal developments that are not present in the older stages of Bavarian, where you would indeed find "ei" as a reflex of Germanic "*ai".
In german schools you are taught the letters “st” independently from the regular “s”, same as “ch”, “sch”, etc. it makes it easier for the students to learn the different pronunciations
Small bites of succinct linguistic information plus a groovy channel host who looks like he stepped out of Tolkien’s Oxford who has a dry and silly sense of humor that appears at unexpected times
It's funny that in the Dutch dialects alone, you can already make a set of stone words (steen, stjeen stein, stien, stjèn, stèn, stain...) all differing in their vowel.
Nice. Any chance of you making a video about why the scandinavian germanic languages has the definite article as a suffix ('a stone' = 'en sten' but 'the stone' = 'stenen')?
Tomas Sandberg The “-en” and “-et” suffixes in Scandinavian languages are just the simplified leftovers of Old Norse’s complex case system where nouns were conjugated based on their nominative, accusative, dative and genitive cases. The languages have development enough for there to be no need for all 4 cases anymore. We could think of “-en”, “-et” “-ene” (in addition to “-a” in Norwegian ) as the only remaining nominative, accusative and dative case markers. These suffixes are an intrinsic part Scandinavian languages as the word “the” forming ‘the accusative’, in English, does not exist as a stand-alone word in any Scandinavian language.
-en/-et comes from the Old Norse word '(h)inn', which is cognate with English 'yon' (as in 'yonder'). This is ultimately from Proto-Germanic *jainaz. You can see this in certain important names; for example Erik the Red -> Eirík *hinn* rauða Proto-Germanic had a three way distinction in demonstratives; this (near to speaker), that (further away), and yon (far away/all the way over there). Cross-linguistically, languages tend to derive words for 'the' from demonstratives. English derived it from the masc/fem form of 'that' and placed it infront of the noun it modifies (that stone), while Old Norse derived it from 'yon' and placed it usually after the noun it modifies (stone yon). Over time, the 'h' was no longer pronounced, and it eventually cliticised into a suffix. The various forms (en/et/ene etc) are due to gender/case/number agreement
@@trevkyleaa Are you sure about that? Don't get me wrong, but I always knew that -en -et were the definite article appended to the end of the noun, as others have already pointed out, rather than case markers. As a matter of fact, -s would be a real case marker, namely of the Genitive.
Trevor Kyle That’s not the case. -en and -et are clitics which were forms of the word ‘hinn’ in Old Norse. They just became attached to the noun. That’s why, for instance, a word like ‘mannsins’, ‘the man’s,’ has both an ‘s’ for the noun itself and one for the article, originally ‘manns hins.’
In my German dialect the words are often pronounced a bit softer than in standard: Hund Haus Zimmer (sounds more like Dsimma) Zeiche (sounds like Dsaiche, ch is almost a sounded soft sch) Silver (more like Silva) Iwwa Migg dacht (e) Schnegg Schdään instand of Stein More examples: Rään instead of Regen 🌧 Au = Auge 👁 ( if we still used the old Windauge today instead of Fenster.... get it?) Mais = Mäuse daav = taub Määde = Mädchen Kuuche/Guuche = Kuchen (ch sounds very similar to Dutch soft g in geen) Sivve = sieben Nain = neun is = ist ....
I think it’s a pitty that you never take notice of Low Saxon / Low German. On the one side it’s often like a bridge language between the surrounding Germanic languages, on the other hand it developed from Old Saxon which was very closely related to Old English. And last but not least Middle Saxon had a huge impact onto the Scandinavian languages in medieval times.
In romanian too there is the word ‘stană’ which means big rock 🙂 Paul from Langfocus already made a video about english patois. I love your archeological linguistic passion 👍🏻
I'd be really interested to see you explore Scots and its descent from earlier languages alongside English. So many people dismiss Scots as merely a dialect of English and in so doing not only erase this history but treat Scots as a monolith rather than a language with lots of quite varient dialects of its own.
@@Haru23a That is so wrong it broke spacetime. Scotland has two official languages other than English: Scots, and Gaelic/Ghàidhlig. Gaelic isn't closely related to Spanish at all - it is a Celtic language like Irish, Welsh, Manx, etc.
@@Haru23a I'll give your more recent comment its more charitable reading possible, and take it as a comment on the pronunciation of the 'Gaelic'. The celtic languages of both Scotland and Ireland are called Gaelic. However, when referring to Irish Gaelic, it is pronounced 'Gay-lik', and when referring to Scots Gaelic, it is pronounced 'Gah-lik'.
Dear Simon, if it were put to a vote I’d cast my ballot to discuss Jamaican-patois-influenced British English. I believe current events shouldn’t delay a scholarly video to grow knowledge about our language. Sharing knowledge whether fact based or educated speculation oughtn’t be quashed to avoid potentially bruising others’ sensibilities. I learn a lot from your videos and my appreciation for my heritage has grown through your unbiased presentations. Keep up the good work contributing to knowledge. P.s. I like the little frogs too.
@The505Guys You're making quite a lot of assumptions about Simon's thoughts. It is a simple fact that many people get upset over a great many things, and the people who are being very vocal about the current "hot topic" have time and again proven to be very easy to offend. Given that, apparently, even not acknowledging certain issues is now considered to be offensive, Simon chose a very diplomatic approach in acknowledging it without presuming and giving in to the demands of either side. The fact that you chose to get offended over even this very moderate approach shows just how polarised people are. I guess my point is this: If someone is blatantly trying to be diplomatic, please try to acknowledge that fact and act accordingly. If someone tries to instigate a confrontation, moderate.
Thank you, Simon, for this fascinating glimpse into the development of language over thousands of years. The example you chose, 'stone' is part of our family name, Whittlestone, which we understand to mean 'knife sharpener' derived from Thwytel found in the Reve's Tale in Chaucer: "A Shefeld thwytel bare he in his hose, Ronde was his face and camysed was his nose" - and stone. The Sheffield area is also the birthplace of the name I guess as most with the name live and come from there. Best regards from Switzerland, Rob
I stumbled upon the English word "maiden name". Without looking up, I understood: "maid" corresponds to the old German word "Maid" for an unmarried woman. Today we use the diminutive "Mädchen" And I immediately understood "name" as a family name. In the US, however, "name" is used for a personal name. The translation is "Mädchen-name"
a video on the influence of jamaican patois on british English sounds fscinating, I've noticed from watching the news young people in london seem to have a lot of accent sounds from jamaican
The video was really fun for me as a layperson, my linguist partner said you did well, and the description and exit card are excellent, Simon. Well done.
Simon, i always enjoy watching you. I only wish that you would sometimes, where fitting, mention the Lithuanian language, for it is the most archaic living Indo-germanic tongue, and today's lithuanian is comparable in many ways to Latin, Ancient Greek, Old-Church Slavonic, Sanskirt and Gothic, all dead, or used only in liturgies. You mention the proto-germanic masculine singular ending -az, and rightly show how it is like unto Gothic -as, Latin - us, Greek -os; but did you know that Lithuanian even today still has the masculine singular in -as, -us, and -is (ys)? Not to worry though, for Jackson Crawford also forgets to mention LIthuanian in his comparisons. Whereas THomas Rowsell has even made a whole video on ''Lithuania's happy paganism''! Cheers! Albertus
All living Indo-European languages have changed in unquantifiable ways. Lithuanian certainly preserves some interesting PIE features, but no one language can really be called generally more archaic than another.
A point about German. The common pronounciation of Stein does indeed start with the /ʃ/-sound. But if you go to the Hanseatic region (coastal Germany), even today, they pronounce the st as just that /st/. So there Stein is still /stain/
In Bremen hört man diese Aussprache des St nur noch sehr selten. In meiner Kindheit fand ich das " stolpern über den spitzen Stein" immer etwas befremdlich. Heute finde ich den Verlust sehr schade. Wir haben als Aussprache das sch ubernommen
Elegant, illuminating how subtle local changes in the way a word is spoken can change the language as to be almost unrecognizable one to another over time and distance.
Hälsningar från Finland. Mitt modersmål är finlandssvenska. Det där var mycket givande för mig. (Ett) tack, broder. I vår samma tunga / In our same tongue: Healthings from Finland. My mother's meal is Finnish Swedish. That there was much giving for me. (A) thank, brother.
@@pierreabbat6157, you are correct. I checked a number of sources, which all agree that while "meal" has a cognate in Swedish "mål" the etymology of THIS Swedish homonym "mål" (speech. ALSO: court case) is actually different: it is related to Old English mal "lawsuit, terms, bargaining, agreement," from Old Norse mal "speech, agreement;" related to Old English mæðel "meeting, council," mæl "speech," Gothic maþl "meeting place," from Proto-Germanic *mathla-, from PIE *mod- "to meet, assemble" (see meet (v.)).
In Faroese, the word is steinur, the nominative form is reanalysed from the accusative form stein and the -ur is added, so steinur. Fun fact, this is actually not pronounced /ei/: in the northern dialects it's pronounced /oi/, kinda like how long i is pronounced in certain Hiberno-English dialects; now the Southern pronunciation of thie diphthong is /ai/, so /stainur/ which pretty beautifully brings us closer to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic diphthong.
Could you make a video on some grammar changes from PGmc to more modern languages? Such as declensions changing and case dropping or person marking on verbs.
Hey Simon, I love the linguistics videos but I would also love to see more videos on religion like you have made before or just more historic cultural topics in general. I'm an Atheist but have always been fascinated by the different religions and how they relate to each other because it says a lot about what people thought at the time and how they think now. Like yourself, I'm also just generally intrigued by the people behind the history both culturally and philosophically. Not just the kings and queens but ordinary lives. I had never thought of using language as a way to see what everyday people were like until you talked about why you are interested in linguistics and so far I've learned quite a bit about people back then through your linguistic videos but I love the other videos you do on other topics also. My current favorite topics on religion are particularly the origins of the modern pagan religions/beliefs like Druidism or Wicca and how they used folklore and ancient Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic beliefs among others to basically rebuild new belief systems to essentially go back to a more nature based way of thinking. Also the origins of the current day Abrahamic religions. So particularly things like the beliefs in ancient Mesopotamia and how that went from polytheistic/pantheistic religions like that of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and so forth; since there are clear roots there yet now those religions would reel against pantheistic or polytheistic beliefs like they did for example during the burning times. It's also fascinating how there's so much similarity between the two (ancient Anglo-saxon/Mesopotamian), it's probably impossible to tell if there was some kind of common ancestry between the two or if they just simply both tell a universal human story. Obviously like you said in your one video about Anglo-saxon pre-Christian religion that there's no way to truly confirm anything once you get to a certain point in time but I think there's still a lot to be said or learned through the information available about what people may have believed at that time and how they saw the world. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the kind of information you have so I can only go so far so if you're at all interested in that kind of stuff I would love to hear your take on everything. Anyway, rambling on and my coffee is cold now... P.S. Sorry for any grammar/spelling mistakes. I'm not a native English speaker and self taught so...
The /s/ of Proto-Germanic and even Proto-Indo-European was probably realized as an apico-alveolar sibilant (kind of "middle thing" between [s] and [ ʃ ], there is still no IPA sign for it). It was still pronounced like this in Mid-high-german and old Frensh, as can be seen from loanwords (e.g. 'push' from 'pousser' or 'cash' from 'caisse'), and it exists still today in many (especially northern) regions of Spain. My theory about the change to a 'normal' [s] : It was probably pushed forward when a [ ʃ ]-sound emerged in the language, e.g. in Frensh from older [tʃ ] () or in German from older [sx] () or in Italian from older [ʃ tʃ ] ( before e and i).
It's probably the only reasonable way to explain the development of [ ʃ ] within the High German continuum. One major reason, why I'm highly cautious, when it comes to Old and Middle High German text samples read aloud, quite often in some primers, they simplify it to the rule just to pronounce it with an [s], even before consonants as in sn-, sm-, st-, sp-. Yet, it's quite likely, the palatalization started already in the late O.H.G. period.
Dutch has this weird s sound ("middle thing" between [s] and [ ʃ ])? This is the most prominent feature of a Dutch accent in German or English in my opinion.
As one of your black subscribers, and an avid watcher of your content, I genuinely appreciate your message at the end and the links you’ve provided. Hopefully, your message of social awareness and moral courage reaches your broad and ever-growing audience, and I’ll also be looking forward to your video on Jamaican-Patois influenced-British English.
@@user-gj1np9rp4d jan misali's video on folkspraak was actually my inspiration to start this conlang (and how comparitively good interslavic is). i dislike many decisions made in folkspraaks development, so i've been making a new one.
Thanks, this is another wonderfully insightful linguistics video. I'd never seen the comparative method used in action, so it was rather pleasant to observe the backwards process of figuring out the word's ancestor form. The one thing I didn't understand is the very final text screen. Why should it matter whether your opinion is "white"? There's nothing impertinent about a person's opinion wholly on the basis of their race; if your input is constructive, then why cower behind excuses like your race? Say whatever needs to be said.
Sometimes I wonder if we can reconstruct words in languages that have died out. For instance, as far as I known, we don't know exactly how "bread" was called in the Hittite language. The Hittite language is written in cuneiform. It was taken over from the Akkadian language and used phonetically, but as a short-cut, words, that were written with a single symbol in Akkadian, like numbers and often used words like "water", "bread" or "house", were still written with the same Akkadian symbol, of which we known the Akkadian pronounciation, but not the Hittite one.
I love how you perfectly pronounced Haus like a typical Austrian person would, but then you used Mücke, which is such a German word 😂 But this topic is super interesting.
Well done! I like these videos because they take me back thirty years to the ten hours study of comparative Indo-European philology at university. I went on to study a little Icelandic, on which I completed my dissertation - another echo of recognition whenever you mention yours. One of the features of that language (and the Scandinavian languages) is the suffixation of the definite article. I have never understood how or when that deveoped, in comparison with the the separate pre nominal word of other Germanic languages. Do you have any insight on that? They seem to be quite radically different paths for a language family to take, presumably in the split between West and North germanic? Around 100/200AD or earlier? With the Norse settlements/Danelaw, the two approaches must have lived alongside one another in OE and ON but I can't see any effect that ON had on OE in that particular aspect. Can't have assisted in mutual intelligibility. Anyway just my musings. Keep up the good work. It's strangely comforting to me to hear OE spoken. Cheers Andrew
@@jbconnor3 nein, Nacktschnecken sind der Überbegriff für Schnegel und Wegschnecken. Schnegel haben, im Gegensatz zu Wegschnecken, ein rudimentäres "Haus" (entweder als verhärtete Rille am Rücken oder intern im Körper. Während Schnecken ein sichtbares und idR: benutzbares Haus haben. Bekanntester Vertretet der Schnegel ist der Tigerschnegel - verwechseln leider viele mit der spanischen Wegschnecke (die "klassische braune Nacktschnecke, die den Salat verputzt) und rotten ihn aus obwohl der Tigerschnegel mit vorliebe die Gelege andere Schnecken frisst.
One minor nitpick: While there are Norwegian dialects that realise the "ei"-diphthong as [ai] (mostly rural dialects close to the mountatins both in the eastern and western country), most Norwegian speakers you ever come across will pronounce it as [ɛi]~[æi] (both the eastern lowlands and the western coast) or as [ei] (northern dialects). Of course, [æi] and [ai] are not that far apart, but it still sounds a bit odd. Given how good your pronunciations are, I guess you would have no problem distinguishing the two. Great video otherwise
One thing I’ve noticed watching your videos is that dialects in older languages were reflected in spelling. With dictionaries, etc, we don’t see that as much any more. Interested if you have anything to say about that (hopefully that isn’t a dissertation!)
mrgodliak I guess I’m interested in if language develops differently when everyone knows the standard spelling. Like do people resist sound changes when they know how to spell the words and you can lose points in English class for spelling a word like it is pronounced?
zekleinhammer On the other hand, if you encounter an unknown English word as a German speaker, just read it like it is spelt and you will know its meaning. At least the original one 😂
@@louismart : Some time ago, i saw a video about the question, how the english language sounded in Shakespeares time. One comment writer wrote: Give a Shakespeare text to a German and ask him to speak the words in german style.
As a native speaker of German I am baffled by the German (???) word example "Schnegel", which I have never heard or seen written. The German equivalent of the English "snail" is "Schnecke".
I was already seeing a lot of commonality between Scots and Norse; imagine my surprise at seeing Scots as its own language-branch on the tree! Ta very much, and very well presented in general. Also! Even cooler! The tree already looked familiar but, when you started talking about how we know whether or not a sound would have been present in the root language, it sounded excitingly similar to the way we talk about basal v derived traits in evolutionary science! Which is to say, it's difficult to be sceptical about this method when it's pretty much how we reconstruct everything from dinosaur physiology to human genetic history. Also familiar was the way you spoke about how one change can cascade into others... No wonder I love linguistics. You might enjoy this video for more of that commonality: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-UK-3rlwyKxI.html - A Scottish Biology Student (if you couldn't guess)
Same for parts of England that were in the kingdom of northumbria. We use old norse words like bairn and laiking/lekking. Also we in south yorkshire would probounc stone like stuwan which sounds a lot more like some of these Scandinavian pronunciations than RP English. Also in Scots you have toon and doon, we have a similar thing here but its more like tarn and darn. We even still use thee, thy and thyne very common.
@@BUSHCRAPPING That's so interesting! I know that a lot of the big sound changes in England didn't make it too far north, and it's lovely to see that some of the evolution of language is so well-preserved.
The differences between German [High Geman] and the other Germanic languages can largely be accounted for by the Second Germanic Consonant Shift (see below - part of an article I wrote for YDS Transactions) - in the case of "stone", however, German 'stein' is a result of a simple shift from an alveolar fricative /s/ to postalveolar /ʃ/ - as alluded to in the comments below, this feature can also be seen in some English dialects (before /t/) - e.g. NW Derbys /ʃtʃʏ:pɪd/ 'stupid' (RP /stju:pɪd/). The apparent differences between Icelandic and the other North Germanic languages are largely because Old Icelandic was geographically (and, subsequently, linguistically) isolated - the effect was that OI remained conservative and did not undergo some of the developments apparent in the other languages descended from ON (see below) Second Germanic (High German) Sound Shift The Second Germanic Sound Shift was to have a far more profound effect upon the Germanic languages than Grimm’s Law, being ultimately responsible for some of the principal differences between West and North Germanic (and thus Old English and Old Norse) and indeed also between the southern varieties of West Germanic and their northern counterparts. It is apparent that the shift originated in the southern varieties of West Germanic dialect continuum between the 3rd and 5th C and was all but complete before the earliest written records of High German in the 8th C. The shift occurred in three distinct northward diffusing phases, involving the 1) fricativisation of voiceless plosives in final position 2) affrication of voiceless plosives in other positions 3) devoicing of voiced plosives. As these changes diffused northwards, the extent and manner of change became less, so that central German dialects were only partially affected while the northernmost remained largely unaffected or wholly unaffected - this included those varieties of continental West Germanic which were to become Old English, in addition to the North Germanic dialects [West / East Old Norse]. This gave rise to three distinct West Germanic dialect areas: High German [sub-divided into Upper [Southern] and Central] and Platte Deutsch and the Low Franconian dialects of the Low Countries (which remain the principal dialect areas today), observable by the following (see features 1, 2, 3 above) - c.f. 1) street (English), straat (Dutch) and strasse (High German); 2) apple (English), appel (Dutch), eple (Norwegian) and apfel (High German); and 3) drink (English), drinken (Dutch), drikke (Norwegian) and trinken (High German). Other sound changes associated with the Second Germanic Sound Shift are apparent from this period, being both limited in scope - e.g. the fricativisation of initial /g/ in the Low Franconian dialects [already fricativised in medial position, according to Grimm’s Law], e.g. modern Ducth goed /Ɣut/ [good] - and far more extensive - e.g. the general replacement of the dental fricatives /θ/, /ð/ by the unvoiced / voiced plosives (/t/, /d/) in all positions. This sound change, particularly, was far more extensive, on a geographical level, than the Second Germanic Sound Shift, affecting the vast majority of the West Germanic dialects as well as the North Germanic dialects. Evidence from the earliest written records of High German (8th C - bruoder alongside bruother) suggests this change was already underway in the early medieval period. The absence of this shift in both OE and Old Icelandic also provides other evidence for the diffusional chronology of this particular sound change - it clearly had not yet diffused to the northernmost dialects of West Germanic during the period of Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain ( mid 5th to late 6th C) and, similarly, had not reached the dialects of West Old Norse before the migration of Norwegian Vikings to Iceland in the mid 9thC - both modern English and Icelandic are the only Germanic languages to retain the dental fricatives /θ/, /ð/. Jon Fyne, Yorkshire Dialect Society
Do you know how the comparative method landed on the voiced [z] sound at the end of nominative singular nouns in Proto-Germanic when most other examples you gave ended with unvoiced consonants? Thanks for these videos, from America.
Jordan, it might be because that sound became /r/ in Old Norse. For some reason, /z/ becomes /r/ in certain contexts. In Latin, it’s what led to the word for “flower” having the forms FLOS and FLOREM.
@@theskv21 This is called "rhotacism" and it happened, surprisingly, in many language families. Even the old Romans noticed that they "rhotacized"/began to rhotacize their words unlike their ancestors in certain contexts and wrote about it! :)
Two methods - because in 'conventional' Old Norse the [z] often ended up as [r], whereas in the equivalent position in Gothic it was [s], and Proto-Norse/Early Old Norse runes use a different character for the 'r' at the end of words to the 'r' in the beginning or middle corresponding to 'r' in other languages, suggesting it was not quite [r] yet, but a different sound value that we usually interpret today as an approximant (roughly similar to the English 'r' sound). This was because the original [z] was rhotacised in Proto-Norse, devoiced in Gothic, and generally lost in other languages, but only [z] could reasonably be rhotacised in Old Norse, as [s] doesn't undergo that sound change without other shenanigans. [z] also became [r] in other positions in North and West Germanic languages, but [s] in Gothic, showing a similar change. The other reason is that the equivalent endings in other related language families (from the first declension nominitive ending, [-os] in Proto-Celtic, Hellenic, and Italic, [-as] in Proto-Indo-Iranian and Proto-Balto-Slavic) through regular sound changes would become [-az] in Proto-Germanic due to Verner's law, where voiceless fricatives became voiced in unstressed syllables, and case endings are very rarely stressed. These patterns are similar in principle to how we discern Proto-Germanic became an initial-stress language, which we know since every descendant of Proto-Germanic either is or is descended from an initial-stress language, by the same logic as Proto-Balto-Slavic having movable accent and Proto-Celtic having a penultimate stress (although that is somewhat controversial, especially for people who like the Italo-Celtic or Italo-Germanic-Celtic macrofamily hypotheses, despite the fairly strong evidence for the penultimate stress)
The Rat Verner’s law applied before Germanic became an initial-stress language, otherwise the outcome would be predictable from the position within a word. Take ‘mōdēr’ and ‘brōþēr,’ which had /t/ in PIE and are both stressed on the first syllable. The difference in the dental is because ‘mother’ was stressed in the last syllable originally: ‘mehtĒr’ and ‘bhrEhtēr,’ where the stressed vowel is uppercase, and the h before /t/ is a laryngeal.
You should do videos trying to communicate in Old English people who speak either Dutch, German, and Frisian it would be interesting to see how much they would understand.
Concerning German /ʃt-/ the general consensus is that Germanic alveolar /s/ had in Old High German generally changed to palatal /ɕ/. Maybe as kind of a push chain shift due to the newly developed /s/ from Germanic /t/, I'm not entirely sure, but both were kept very much apart in writing up until about 1200 (i.e. /ɕ/ was written while the new /s/ was written ). At that time both sounds started to merge in writing and it is believed that /ɕ/ again came to be more fronted and generally returned to its original value of /s/ (merging with the new /s/ from /t/) but remained a bit more in the back, hence /ʃ/, in initial clusters. In some cases this was represented in spelling (like Modern German "schmal" vs. English "small") in others it wasn't (like "sterben" vs. "starve"). It's also interesting to note that this seems to have happened 100% consistently only in South Western dialects like Swabian or Swiss German, where even "ist" is pronounced /iʃ/ and loans like "Inspektor" or "Institution" are pronounced /inʃpektoɐ/ resp. /inʃtitutsjo:n/. In South Eastern and Middle German dialects (hence modern Standard German) this only happened word-initially, so you have /ʃtain/ but /ist/. This also means that at no point was "stein" ever pronounced /stein/, as unfortunately you are still often taught when it comes to Middle High German poetry. So the somewhat infamous "ich saz ûf eime steine" would have been closer to /iç ɕas u:f eimə ɕteinə/ prior to 1200 and approaching /iç zas u:f aimə ʃtainə/ afterwards.
Feoh being the word for cattle does it have any connection to Fee-fi-fo-fum from Jack and the Beanstalk Just watched your quiz video on ecolinguist and thought they seem related. Both refer to "food"
An awesome video, i would be happy if it gets a series! Also an other video about the vowels variability would be great! What confused me was the use of diphthongs in protogermanic, my dialect (some local very preserved ripuarian) does not have any diphthongs but makes heavy use of pitch accents instead, so the same word can have totally different meaning dependend if the intonation of the vowel goes up or down. Also the o and u are often indestinguishible, as are the e and a, what makes english spelling for me much more natural than standard german i mean i would write words of my dialect exacly the way they are written in english but with a difference in pronounciation. Maybe someone has something similar in his dialect? Were there pitch accents in protogermanic or old high german/old francic? Do pitch accents just get lost over time or can they be reinvented? Anyone having a dialect without diphthongs? Thanks guys ☺️ edit: btw stone is steen for me with long e intonation going up, if it would go down it would be understood as a pronounciation of to stand, what is more commonly pronounced as ston(e) (different o than in english) and steen without any pitch means star xD. I wonder if to stand, stone and star are related...
do you think there would be any way to take youtube's automatic transcription of you and improve it? the main areas of confusion are when you do IPA or nonenglish pronunciations generally
simon i was wondering if you knew as to why so many names in various languages mean stone as in names like pierre/ peter from the greek petros or the german stein that is prevelent in many surnames. King Aethelstan's name comes to mind here, why was he called a noble stone, why are so many names relating to stones?
In Danish, "Sten" is pronounced almost like in Dutch, except the "e" is shorter, and there's almost a glottal stop before the "n" (as in "Ste.n"). It's also a boy's name, but then it's usually spelled "Steen", which is my brother's name.
I live in a place called Stanley, and was told once it derived from the name Stony Hill, which I'm not sure about, but there's a place about 5 minutes away that is actually called Stony Heap.
X It would have been Stanleah in Old English. The modern words are ‘stone’ and ‘lea.’ The original meaning of ‘leah’ is not meadow, though, but rather woodland. Look out for places ending in -ley. There are also some other common elements like -ey, meaning ‘island’ or ‘wick’ meaning ‘place.’
Interesting. Apart from the suffix-like -az, the reconstruction is immediately recognisable in Dutch. Although in Dutch 'stone' is written without an i, 'steen' , the pronunciation is definitely with a clear i before the n, '[stay-n in modern English]. It is curious that it is not written like it is pronounced, e.g. 'steein'. I find the Latin alphabet falls much short of how words are pronounced. As a matter of fact, one could posit that Latin script is a kind of shorthand (called 'sténo' in many languages, i.e. like writing in stone! :-) ) for how words are actually pronounced, i.e. more like a reminder of words than actual representation of pronunciation. This would explain the tremendous need for additions to the regular Latin alphabet in most non-English languages, just look at 'glyphs' in the Insert /Symbols command in Microsoft software, called 'glyphs' in Adobe software. Because the root of a word is often just stable consonants, it is no wonder that the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs only represented consonants, be it with far greater precision than the Latin script does. The use of the Latin alphabet, as in use in English, therefore complicates the study of the development of our languages. This is quite apart from the unusual inconsistency of pronunciation of English words with regard to how they are written. ("Hello, my name is Ghot, pronounced as 'fish'. ")
The reason why Latin script needs additions and changes in many languages, is because it developed as an alphabet for one specific language, i.e. Latin. It was never supposed to be used to represent sounds in languages other than Latin. It's not IPA. A script is also an approximation. Allophones don't need separate symbols, so if your language doesn't consider /s/ and /z/ to be separate phonemes (like German), just using s for both is entirely sufficient. That happens even more frequently with vowels - even Latin had more vowel phonemes than vowel letters but it came close enough, so few people cared. And third, scripts are almost never phonetically consistent (except artificial ones like IPA). In most languages, spelling has a historical component - some languages more (French or English), some less so (Spanish, Finnish). Phonetic representation of a language is only _one_ aspect of a writing system.
Hoping to attend graduate school for historical linguistics, maybe focusing on philology. Any tips for finding a graduate program? No ling. background, only a History BA.
I personally think the Gothic "stains" is closest to the Scots vowel just because this occupies the centre ground of a putative standard deviation graph between English (dark) -o- at one end and German (light) -ei- at the other. The Swedish lilt (which Simon did well) needn't come into this. The idea being that from the protogermanic, vowels dialecticised in all directions.
www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2003.02.0002%3Aentry%3Dof1 Prepositions are tricky to define. 'Of' could be used to mean 'over' in some contexts, at least in Old West Norse. However, I agree that 'yfir' would have been a better example in this context, as the overall structure of the word corresponds to that of 'over' and 'über'!
In Swedish there's also the variant 'ovan' which today only is used in poetic language. I guess it's a derivative (old dative case perhaps?) of 'of'. There's also the commonly used 'compound preposition' (or whatever is the correct term) 'ovanför' which means 'above'.
Thank you for such an interesting video! What I have to say is largely tangential, but I hope you find it interesting! I’m no linguist, but I am a Norwegian-speaker, and I rarely encounter a D, T or N that isn’t either dental or retroflex. I find it interesting that the IPA in the “stein” example didn’t include the symbols for a dental T and N, which is how I’d say it. I’ve not looked at IPA much since university and definitely not Norwegian IPA. I’m just wondering if the IPA here is simplified (it seems to be?), if it’s common practice not to include the placement of these consonants in Norwegian IPA, or if I and the folks I know speak in an accented way (there are so many accents and dialects-I wouldn’t be surprised!). Anyone have any insight? I think the IPA is just simplified, but I’d be curious to know if something else is the case. Cheers!
I would love to see how we can tell the different paths of two words that sound similar, but come from different backgrounds. For example, "town" in English and "Zaun" in German have the same origin even though they have different meanings, however "zone" comes from a completely different word even thought it sounds similar to Zaun and has similar meaning to town as being an area of land.
This reminds me of german "haben" vs latin "habere". One could be lead to believe, that they're cognates, but the actual cognate to "haben" is "capere". Also another funny cognate, got from college would be german "Mast" and slavic "most". Most means bridge. But when you toss over a "Mast" and it maybe even lands on a river, it becomes a bridge.
@@Automatik234'Lunatic' means crazy, while Polish _lunatyk_ means 'sleepwalker.' Both come from Latin LVNATICVS ('moonstruck') and make sense in their own way. The English one, because in the times of little artificial light, the weirdos most often went out during full moon as you could actually somewhat see at night; the Polish because it's as if the night moon commanded one who sleeps to rise.
@@Automatik234 : Mast means in german either pole or giving an animal , for example a pig, a lot of food that it becomes fat in a short time. Most means in german either fresh pressed juice of apples , pears or wineberries, or selfalcoholiced juice of apples and pears.
Formerly a town ( in German Stadt) was fortified, while a village ( Dorf, nowadays Gemeinde) was not fortified. Before stone made town walls had been common, the fortifications had been wood- earth fortifications, ditches, ramparts, pallisades and fences.
is there any research into proto Germanic as a pidgin or a Creole of pie as I was mere hour ago considering that many of the sound changes implied it or would be more natural as such. sort of on topic
The sound changes from PIE to PGmc are completely regular and are no more numerous or complex than say from PIE to Latin or Greek. Also, a creole requires a mix of two+ languages, and the creole usually massively simplifies the grammar from either parent language. PGmc has complex declensions, verb agreement etc that can all be derived from PIE. If it were a creole, this would not be the case. Also, what would it be a creole of? A mix of PIE and what? What influence has this language had on the PGmc?
the term mixture is incorrect or misleading but there are pre indo European languages they have there own phonemic sets. changes of syllabic m n l r to uC is the most noticeable. variable realization of breathy voiced, realization of laryngeals, merging of dorsals, realization of labialization especially I believe the was a case of gw to b, accent related sound changes, emergence of an extreme regular accent, grimms law rendering bilabial f velar h and th when elision renders s in dentals when all the words with f have a labiodental f and its less of a point but h's are usually interpreted as being glottalic but I suppose either way is just as fine h usually has allophones. these changes seems like hear pronunciations you would get in pidgins, given how constant heavy pie is I could believe p t k being interpreted as short or under pronounced libiodental f th and h. I might have some information wrong but its a thought and I think its a consideration to make it seems possible.
not much in it but it seems grimms law is the argument against it but that's where I started thinking the sound change was odd so idk ill shelf it untill something comes up or I ave tind to dig through Scihub
So if I use the method on another family of languages: Say "House" in the Semitic Family Akkadian: Betu Arabic: Bayt Aramaic: Bayta Assyrian: Beta Ge'ez: Bet Hebrew: Bayit So does this make: House being called 'Bait' in Proto-Semitic? Like I didn't understand the method, if you could explain using more example with multiple language families Please.
little * here. Gothic was most likely a Monophthong /ɛː/ (when corresponding to PG. /ai/) You can still take the Spelling as evidence for an ancestral diphthongal spelling by making the argument that the spelling was made in the knowledge of an earlier diphthong and the lack of a better way to write it But that is much more vague and most scholars suggest that the was actually inspired by Greek orthography as most of the gothic script is. (If anyone wanna know why we think it’s a diphthong just ask :3 Disclaimer though, i have no formal education yet, just an enthusiast)
2013 , date at the end of a video I just watched, I noticed you mention your working on your dissertation . Hopefully that went well & I'm interested to know are you still involved in archaeology, studying languages, or history ? I'm nearing the end of my career, within the next 10 years . I hope things are better where you are than how they've become over the past decade for those of us working for the council in herts.
One slight addition regarding modern German pronunciation of „Stein“: usually modern German pronunciation is: Schtein (or: Shtein), however in the Hamburg area the S and t are spoken with a full stop in between, more like the modern English St(one). So Hamburgian dialect is like: St(ein). I hope that makes some sense at all.
