In highschool, we were annoyed at the German exchange students having private conversation in German AND speaking English, so we started talking in Elizabethan English, and they had no idea wtf we were saying.
In Los Angeles there is a street called Benedict Canyon Drive, that follows said canyon, but when it crosses into more affluent Beverly Hills, becomes Cañon Drive, and when it crosses the city border again BACK into Los Angeles becomes merely Canon Drive. Always one of my favorite examples of this…
I think the most under-appreciated "advanced" English is all of the idioms we use. So many ESL speakers could master the grammar yet still be confused by all of the idioms we use all the time.
Like? One that I can think of is you can't make an omelet(te) without breaking a few eggs, but I think most non-native speakers can get that one once they understand what an omelette is.
I mean, this is indicative of literally every language in existence. 成语 are infamous for essentially no foreigners (except maybe people like 大山, lol) using them lol.
@@yoshilovesyoshi I'm not sure eggs/omelettes is an idiom (it might be, it feels like a grey area). By definition, an idiom is a phrase whose meaning can't be deduced from the words it contains. Breaking eggs to make omelettes might be too literal, I'm not sure, and a lot of typical idioms online are the same. A better example of an idiom would be something like 'break a leg' or 'under the weather', maybe even 'you can say that again'.
3:50 Acute marks are only called so when they "slant" to the right, like this: ó. When they "slant" left (ò), they're called grave marks. Furthermore, the two "dots" (ö) are only called umlaut when the pronunciation of the vowel they're over changes from the usual sound it makes to another. That usually happens in words coming from german, such as doppelgänger. When the "dots" are over a vowel in order to separate it from another syllable (as in naïve), they're called diaeresis or trema.
Actually it doesn’t matter that much what you call the diacritic. When talking specifically about the underlying phonetic processes? Sure, separate the terminology. But otherwise it’s literally the exact same two dots above the vowel
@@deadbushinc.5105It matters because that often changes the way these symbols work, changing an umlaut Ü to U in German will turn it into a completely different word while that doesn't usually happen with diaeresis (like naïve)
@@daroguk8071 i guess? I just don’t see the purpose of giving these two functions separate names *when talking about English*. After all ‘doppelgänger’ is no more or less regular of a spelling as ‘naïve’ to an average speaker of English
For a long time in English, "thou/thee" was singular and "ye/you" was plural. "Ye/you" was also used to address superiors - similar practices exist in French and Spanish. So by using "thou" with everyone, the Quakers wanted to show that all are equal in the eyes of God. They also refused to use titles, like "your highness" and "your honor", for the same reason, only using personal names or the title brother/sister. This, combined with the refusal to swear an oath", often led to Quakers being held in contempt of the court.
Interestingly, even outside of the Quaker religion, God was traditionally addressed with the informal "thou/thee". The issue of Quakers refusing to swear oaths actually got so bad that the British Parliament had to pass a law so that Quakers could give affirmations in lieu of oaths. Later, the United States Constitution would include similar provisions, declaring that both oaths and affirmations would be acceptable in all instances.
Regarding Anglicization of names, it’s particularly interesting to see in Wikipedia how you have five King Philips of Spain, and then when you get to the current one, he’s Felipe VI
In Russian, too, foreign rulers from different eras are spelled differently, for example, when Prince Charles was not king, he was called that, but when he ascended the throne, he was called Karl in Russia
@@TurtleMarcusIn Russia they did that. They use to call Charles “Чарльз” (Charlz), but upon becoming King he became Карл (Karl), to keep with the historical tradition. The name is also the German form, since well, the English monarchs are German 😂. Funny enough all King Louis are called Людовик (Lyudovik), using the Latin form, except Louis XVI. He officially was change to Луи since he was removed from the throne and was remembered by his secular name, instead of his regal one.
Something I really like about English is the way in which Germanic-derived, French-derived, and Latin-derived words carry different implications and levels of formality. The original examples I saw were the difference between "kingly" (Germanic) which sounds almost sarcastic or casual, "royal" (French) which is fairly straightforward and formal, and "regal" which sounds almost pompous and fancy. This also creates the situation where words have more and less directly-derived adjectives. For example, if you wanted to describe something as being like hell you could literally just call it "hellish", but you could also say "infernal" (Latin). And how some words have only one option; like with "moon" there's no word "moonish" or "moonly", but there is "lunar". Then there's the fact that romance and germanic languages therefore have familiar sounding words used in a slightly different way. For instance, the German for "dog" is "hund" which sounds like "hound", which in English is a type of dog. Or "geld" sounding like "gold" but meaning "money". In French, there's "fatiguée" which sounds like "fatigue" but means "tired", and so on. Lastly, this also makes romance languages sound very fancy and, well, romantic to us English speakers. And though I haven't heard this observation from other people, I do personally find that Germanic languages as a result sound more...humble? Folksy? Old-fashioned, I guess? Part of which probably just comes from the fact that Romantic languages tend to have more emphasis on the vowels, and in the case of French more silent letters, which makes them sound light and airy. While Germanic languages, especially German itself, have lots of consonants and every letter is emphasized. All very interesting!
Well the French did besiege England for like 300 years and of course Englishmen became the peasant lowerclass and Frenchmen the Upperclass, thus words of Latin origin took on a fancier feel than the older Germanic ones
^^ see above reply from @whateverIwasthinkingatthetime. it's not so much about the phonology as it is about the fact that after 1066 french became the language of the ruling class while english was the language of the working class.
Fun fact: Quakers used a form called "nominative thee" where "thee" is used as the subject pronoun (instead of "thou") and with the third person form of the verb instead of the second. So, where a speaker of standard early modern English might say "thou goest home" a Quaker would say "thee goes home." The Quakers didn't originate this usage as it's found in a number of western British dialects, but they were definitely using it (and had dropped "thou" except in very formal instances) by the time Nixon was growing up. How's that for obscure English?
Did they also monkey with the genitive case? I noticed the mom said “thou lie,” where “thy lie” would have made far more sense in context, within the standard informal mood.
@@robertAGC Thanks for this question. It made for a really interesting rabbit hole. As far as I can tell, they seem to preserve the early modern genitive intact; so, "thy" or "thine" (when the pronoun is separated from the thing possessed, e.g., "thy kingdom" but "the kingdom is thine"). I think what's happening with the Stone clip is that he's actually using (or approximating) standard early modern English, either to avoid confusing his audience that knows Quakers use "old fashioned" English but aren't aware of their dialectical variation or because he (or his screenwriter) wasn't aware of it. I guessing that the line "thy father will have to know of thou lying" is supposed to be understood as "your father will have to know about you lying." Edited for clarity.
Most of the Quakers fled from Western England to the US for religious freedom... Several other Ordinum-based faiths typically still use their own German dialect, most notably the Amish.
"ye" in Ireland is considered pretty rural still in my experience. When I went to college in Dublin, the Dublin boys found it hilariously quant that I used it in casual conversation as a plural "you".
In the North of England, I do find most people treat "you" as the new singular and "yous" as the plural 2nd person pronoun. Also, a lot of the time saying "us" instead of "me" especially in a phrase like "give us.../pass us..."
North Midwestern (MN, USA) here. "Hey, how yous doing?" is addressing a group of people in some rural areas in the north west of the state. I am unsure of how common using yous as a plural you is, but I'm sure it bleeds into Canada in many places, eh? Having grown up near Fargo, it is good to hear my home accent on this channel, but I suspect the host on this channel is Canadian, as the accent leans real heavy on the double-o ooh in 'about' and such
Fun Fact about names changed upon immigration - it was almost NEVER the local English speaking government official who made the change. They would rely on the ship manifest for the names of the passengers so any changes to names would have to have been done at some point before departure from the start point. Also the officials all spoke multiple languages so it would not have been due to misunderstanding of the immigrant. At New York's Ellis Island, for example, most of the immigration officials spoke multiple languages to be sure that they would be able to communicate with newcomers. NY Mayor in the 1930s & 40s Fiorello La Guardia (for who one of the 2 NYC airports is named) was certified as an interpreter for Italian, German, Yiddish, and Croatian while working at Ellis Island.
@@TheDanLevy yes that's a pesky little myth. It's hard for us to think people would deliberately change their names now (also there's more legalities involved with that now) so people assume it was changed for them. It's hard to think that often people wanted to assimilate themselves in their new homes. After all it was a fresh start and they probably would never return to their home country ever again.
In Argentina this was indeed the case, so you end up with families where members can have of to four different spelling of the same last name. 😂😂😂😂 at the time they dismiss it, but since some Argentines can request Italian citizenship, this of course is cause for massive confusion lol
Name changing is still a thing that happens to this day. I've noticed Chinese and Taiwanese people in particular seem to often have separate "English" names in addition to their Chinese names and use both regularly depending on who they're interacting with. Though from the people I've known, they don't generally try to Anglicize their Chinese name - they just pick an English name they happen to like. Indian and (non-English) Europeans generally don't seem to change their names, though many end up getting them pseudo-Anglicized inadvertently just because its easier to accept our poor pronunciation than trying to correct us constantly. Not so sure what's "common" for people from other cultures to do - I'm mostly just going by personal experience so I'm limited to just the folk I've known and worked with for the most part. I would imagine for example that people who have clicks in their names (from any of the several "clicking" languages) would struggle in most other parts of the world (English or otherwise) if they didn't modify their name - that clicking is a very unique aspect to only a handful of languages and those of us who never learned how to do it struggle pretty hard to even approximate it. And of course almost all cultures coming our way have to Romanize their names when written, as few languages share the English alphabet. Even (non-English) European names can have all the accents and marks noted in the video. At the very least those tend to get overlooked to the point of forgotten, especially when there's a computer system involved as much of our critical banking and government software - not to mention our keyboards - are still limited to the old ASCII character set.
@@courtneyjohnsonhaber4591 Ehh I'm not so sure about that. How could you legally have a name like 张伟 in an English-speaking country? You'd at the very least have to Romanize it (write it using Roman characters) and it's almost certain anyone trying to read it out would pronounce it in an Anglicized manner (given that the vast majority of us don't know anything about Chinese pronunciation). It also depends when they adopted their English name. If they chose it early enough to get it registered in their home country and have it printed on whatever documentation they bring with them, they may have their English name as their legal name when they come across. Others who didn't choose early enough might not. I'm sure there are rules and common practices for that (and those probably change country-by-country, or even by region within a single country - ie: China is very large and there's a lot of cultural diversity spread across 1.4bn people, much like there's a notable cultural difference between New York and Texas even if both states are just seen as "American" to outsiders). Overall, I imagine there's a bit of everything going on. Which is fine, if it works it works. I was just pointing out that Anglicization isn't entirely a thing of the past. We're not as pushy about it (especially when it comes to names that are still within their home countries - primarily place names) but it's not a dead practice by any means, and never will be as long as we all speak different languages with different writing systems. There's a level of necessity that just will always be relevant even if we think we "should" all somehow know how to read, write, speak and type every name from every language - it's just not possible no matter how much we may want to "respect other cultures".
One fascinating obscure part of English grammar (which Tom Scott did a video on) is adjectival order. For example, one would say "adorable sleepy black cat" and not "black sleepy adorable cat" or any other order.
Similar is 'ablaut reduplication', which explains why clocks go 'tick-tock' and not 'tock-tick', and why the phrase 'live, laugh, love' sounds wrong in any other order. It's also why 'big bad wolf' breaks the order of adjectives.
I've wondered whether George Michael broke this rule when he sang about "little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy". "Hungry little schoolgirl" seems more natural.
Æ was a very common letter in Old English, where it was pronounced like the vowel in "ash"-the name "ash" comes from the rune it replaced. You'll still see it in archaic spellings of names like Ælfred or Æthelthryth. Its usage died out in part because the imported fonts from mainland Europe didn't really use it, so English adapted as it also did with replacing þ "thorn" (also a name of a rune) with a stylized y (hence "ye olde shoppe") or th (what we arbitrarily settled on).
As a native spanish speaker I find very strange the way some english speakers write the name of my country's favourite infusion: "mate" as "maté" to make a distinction form the english word mate. However "maté" in spanish means "i killed". I cannot think of other example of english adding an accent to a word that originally doesn't have it, it is usually the other way around.
As previous poster said, the accent e just means “actually pronounce this e” in situations where it looks like it should be dropped. Another use is poetry, where for reasons of meter sometimes you must read a word like “blessed” as “blesséd” rather than the normal pronunciation of “blest”.
@@revertrevertz5438 Fair, I also think if we had spelling reform ( something I think English is in need of, particularly since it has become the dominant global language,) you'd replace the silent e after consonants with umlauts like German has done.
I've had a hard time explaining to my Korean peers that some words are only "pirate words," "cowboy words," "knight words," etc. Not just historical; historical and occupation specific.
Also, btw, I as an American have had no exposure to this "Royal 'we'" register of speech and did not know it existed before this video. I wonder if Canada's closer ceremonial ties with British monarchy may have something to do with this gap in common knowledge. I can promise my perspective is not unique, I would be willing to bet that if 100 Americans were polled on their knowledge of this linguistic concept, that less than 5 would be aware it exists, if any of them.
@@rkt7414 For a very minor note, it came up in an episode of Recess, where King Bob started referring to himself as Pharoah Bob, and using the Royal We.
I was playing pictionary with my Belgian friends and the words "Swashbuckler" and "Buccaneer" came up and they'd never seen them before. I just said they're both pirates but I have no idea why they exist, let alone how to draw them.
@rkt7414 Royal We was referenced by one of my favorite movies. Wreck It Ralph, when Ralph met Vanellope. I have only watched the video once but I forgot what I saw that made me think something similar. I saw something he said and then was like, "I wonder if that is more common knowledge in Canada?" Since I am from the US. I'm kind of suprised he didn't mention the forgotten English letter "thorn" pronounced like "th" and is what the "y" in "ye olde England/Tavern" comes from since they don't have thorn. Ampersand was a letter that faded away and not sure what its prior use was or if it had one besides the modern use but it is now just used as a fancy symbol for "and". "&"
An interesting note is that many Italian cities see exclusive use of their anglicized forms: always Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Padua, Turin, Naples and rarely or never Roma, Milano, Firenze, Venezia, Genova, Padova, Torino, Napoli. The theory is that English adopted these names from their French forms Rome, Milan, Florence, Venise, Gênes, Padoue, Turin, Naples during the period that French had higher literary prestige than Italian.
There is also the possibility that they just didn’t used standard Italian at the time, the name of Padova in the local dialect is “Padua”, so most likely they used how the local referred to themselves at the time
You gotta realise that "thee" and "thou" are still very much spoken causally in some places, like in Leeds in the UK. The killers song "I predict a riot" confused a bunch of people cause they thought they were trying to be old timey. Also singular us/our is very common in northern dialects. "Give us some more cake" is very natural to say when referring to yourself
"Amok" in German has a specific meaning: like "Amokfahrt" or "Amoklauf", amok drive or amok run. It means when someone is intentionally creating harm and mass hysteeria to other people by a killing spree, mostly accompanied by terroristic means or mental issues. Like speeding through a crowded mass, it's a "Amokfahrt" or when someone shoots as many people as possible, it's a "Amoklauf". Oh and there's also "Amokflug", amok fly. The word is originally from SE Asia, Indonesia or Malaysia iirc. Also I would bet many native German speakers even with an ecellent level of English would think that the English phrase "run amok" implies many deaths because of that reason.
Amuk comes from the Malay language and was introduced into English by British explorers in Southeast Asia. It means “rushing in a frenzy” or “attacking furiously”
It's curious that in english an "ñ" is called an n with a tilde. In spanish "tilde" just refers to the regular acute accent while "ñ" is treated as a completely separate letter to "n"
Yeah, some languages do this, which has always seemed curious to me. I think Swedish does this too, the O with the dots is considered a different letter from O without.
Theres a story I read where the members of the band Mötley Crüe didnt actually know that umlauts change the pronunciation of the word in German until they were performing in Germany and heard the crowd calling them “moatly croo”
Native English (USA) speaker here, and a professional editor by trade. A couple of things you could address in a future video: 1. This particular verb use, which I find fascinating: "Here we come a-wassailing" (or "a-caroling") or similar uses like, "Johnny came a-courting, and soon he and Susie were wed." 2. The "vocative O", which is used frequently in the King James Bible ("Hear, O King, and hearken unto my voice and consider my supplication") and occasionally elsewhere (O Come, O Come, Emmanuel). Today it's usually confused with the interjection "oh," but they are completely different words, of course.
I remember talking to a friend who wasn't a native English speaker and one time they were agreeing with me about something and wrote "Yes, it's" which threw me for a second. It's is a contraction of "it is" so technically that would be correct, but intuitively we wouldn't use it like that.
Contractions only occur when all of the words are unstressed. In "yes, it is," the final syllable is stressed, and thus the I in is cannot be elided. This doesn't apply to "not" at the end of sentences. We do say "No, it isn't," though we have to say "not it is *not"* if we add emphasis to the "not" part.
@@ZipplyZane A lot of English language rules are present but not particularly discussed. It's something we know but probably can't explain why as you did above. Trying to explain why to someone speaking ESL might confound us ourselves, so it's easy to understand why someone might make such a mistake speaking ESL.
A similar example is that we only make contractions out of "have" and "has" when using them as an auxiliary verb and not as a synonym for "possess". I can say "I've bought a car," or "he's bought a car", but if I say, "I've a car," it just sounds weird, and if I say, "he's a car," you're going to ask how I met a sentient car.
@@plasmaballin Although that example is not standard English, that is the way many people (native English speakers) speak in Ireland. "He's a new job", or "I've a computer problem"... is common in rural Ireland.
Terry Pratchett had a lot of fun with this, often having his characters (in a setting where proper spellings are more of a suggestion, as they were in old-timey England) write long S's as F's since that's what they look like to modern readers.
English is typically thought of as having a two-way demonstrative system, meaning words like "this" and "here" are used for things close to the speaker, and words like "that" and "there" are used for things far from the speaker. But technically, English has a three-way system. The words "yon" and "yonder" can be used for things very far from the speaker (though only "yonder" can be used for locations like "here" and "there"). Sadly for all funny word fans, "yon" and "yonder" are no longer commonly used in most dialects of Modern English, and "yonder" remains only in reference to location. The only yon-related word that's still commonly used in Modern English is "beyond."
2:59 the two dots here (called a diaeresis) serve the function of indicating that the two vowel sounds are pronounced separately (e.g., reëlection is re-election, not reel-ection; coöperation is co-operation, not coop-eration). another example is coëd. they serve the same function in french; without the diaeresis, naïve would be pronounced the same as nève. (when they function this way, they're called a diaeresis; when they indicate a completely separate vowel sound as in german, they're called an umlaut.) 5:46 i mean, british english still spells words like encyclopaedia, orthopaedic, oestrogen, and manoeuvre like so. it's just that the singular letters æ and œ are becoming less common. 18:46 worth mentioning that "whom" is on track to become a fossil word! we use it in "to whom it may concern", but in every other context its use is gradually fading. 21:51 this is definitely not rare. you still have people (prescriptivists) insisting on saying "[Person] and I" instead of "Me and [person]", using "whom" wherever appropriate, not ending sentences with prepositions, not starting sentences with conjunctions, not splitting infinitives, etc., despite these "rules" being naturally broken all the time by native english speakers.
Not only does knowing the origins of the "royal we" make that one scene from the big lebowski just a bit more funny, but i also noticed that i will use the "royal we" on accident not because of any monarchical influences but because a lot of lets play youtubers would use the word "we" to make the viewers feel more included.
@@perforongo9078 Linguistically, Inclusive vs exclusive 'we' is something other languages have but English does not, where you can make a distinction between 'speaker + listener (and optionally others)' and 'speaker + others (but not the listener)'. English has, essentially 'ambiguous we', in that it doesn't make the distinction and the listener is left to guess (possibly with the help of context, body language, tone, etc) who is and is not included. Unless you're refering to a different discipline using the term differently, in which case 'yay technical dialect induced ambiguity!'. ... seriously, there are people whose actual job as interpreters is to translate between sufficiently divergant technical dialects of English (typically business trained executives vs individuals with highly specialised training in narrow (or not so narrow) technical fields who lack said business training, but sometimes other similar situaitons).
Reminds me of this exchange from the show, Community: Britta: Shouldn't have worn that petard if you didn't want to be hoisted by it. Jeff: ...What do you think the expression "hoisted by your own petard" is referencing? Britta: I guess I just assumed that in the old days a petard was a special outfit like a leotard, with a lot of fancy buckles and loops on it, and that rich people would wear them when they were feeling especially smug, but then poor people would tie a rope through one of the loops, and hoist them up a pole and then let them dangle there as punishment for being cocky. Jeff: Never look it up. Your explanation is way better.
Speaking of the metal dots, there is an old British band called Trojan but they wanted to look cool so they spellt it Tröjan. "Tröjan" in swedish means "The sweater" i bought their records just for that
One interesting tidbit about the old English we see in pop culture is that the cliché "Ye" as in "Ye Olde Shoppe" never existed. It comes from the letter Thorn (which no longer is used) that was basically the "TH" sound. It just happened to look a lot like a Y. So people assumed it was Ye, when in actuality it was pronounced "The Old Shop" just like today
As someone studying linguistics at university, here's a few thing I'd point out. The 'umlaut' symbol (pronounced oom-lout, rhymes with shout) should actually be called diaeresis in English. It's known as umlaut in German since it modifies the sound of the vowel, and that vowels with it are seen as inherently separate to the vowels without it. In contrast, languages that use the double-dot as an accent marking (French, English) call it diaeresis, because it's mainly used to indicate that the two vowels are to be pronounced as separate syllables from eachother. Also, the 'backwards' acute accent is known as a grave.
As a native German speaker, this is absolutely correct. The German alphabet is considered to have 30 letters, those being the 26 English speakers will be acquainted with, as well as ä, ö, ü, and ß. So yes, they are typically considered entirely separate letters, not variations of the respective vowels, as might be the case in some Romanic languages.
The ß is now of the past, Isn'it ? I mean "officially" or in termq of standard. Just as gothic writting is. Also the oe and ue and ae forms tend to be prevalent (eg Koenigsberg) outside of German. German is coming closer to the standard QWERTY English driven alphabet...
RobWords has a great video on collective nouns for groups of animals. It turns out a lot of the more obscure ones (flamboyance of flamingos, dazzle of zebras, etc.) came from English writers in the 15th century inventing collective nouns that men would need to know and be able to use in order to be considered gentlemen. Most of those words have no attested prior history.
Yea, it was actually a word-game at that time. You had to think of a collective noun that recalled what the animal was (supposedly) like e.g. parliament of owls (owls are wise), a skulk of foxes (sneaky), an exaltation of larks.
I think English adjectival order is something we're never formally taught in school and yet we all have an immediate intuitive understanding of which makes learning it as a second language tricky.
I came here to say this, the average native english speaker could not explain to you why it’s a “big green dragon” as opposed to a “green big dragon” other than the second one sounds weird.
In math writing we use something like a Royal We, e.g. "Taking the derivative, we see that..." or "We must be careful to define..." etc. But it's almost implied that the "we" is an inclusive "we" that compounds the author and the audience since math proofs are seen as explorations that both parties go on together
That's a different concept. When you write "we" in an academic paper it usually refers to multiple people - the writer an the reader. The Royal "we" only refers to one person. "We must be careful to define..." means something different than "I must be careful to define..." But, when king Charles says "We will form a government." it means the exact same thing as "I will form a government." Please correct me if I'm wrong.
@@redpanda7967Hm, Im not sure how correct this is. As far as I remember, all academic papers in Computer Science Ive ever read were written in the plural form “we”, not the singular “I”. I seem to remember I was also explicitly taught to do it this way. So even if you’re talking about work you did (not something you’re deriving together) you’d use we. Although single author papers are kinda rare nowadays anyway. But I looked up one I remembered (“Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints” by Lowe if you’re interested), and he does indeed use “we”.
English did use to have a formal version of “you.” It was just “you,” and “thee,” was the informal version, hence Quakers using “thee” and “thou” to stress humility.
The informal was lost because using “thou” for the wrong person was tantamount to picking a fight with them, so people started using “you” for everyone (except God) just to be safe
As a quick note: “thou” was the nominative/subjective (ie the same class as “I”, “he”, “she”, “we”, “they”), while “thee” was the objective (ie “me”, “him”, “her”, “us”, “them”). The same goes for ye/you, but just as we dropped one form entirely, the other form was just combined to use the accusative as both the subject and object. They also both have their own possessive forms and reflexive forms just as any other pronoun: thy/thine/thyself and your/youres/youself (both of these are only approximations with modern spellings of course).
My understanding is that "you" was originally only a plural pronoun, for which "ye" was the singular. Though maybe that was only in the objective case? Anyway, it would have been better if we had kept the distinction, because now it is so confusing to say "you" for both individuals and groups that awkward forms like "you all", "y'all", and "you guys" are often used as the plural.
@@robgronotte1 “ye” was the subject form of the plural which also was eventually used in the T-V distinction for the 2nd person formal singular (see: “usted”/“ustedes” in Latin Am Spanish for a similar existing usage). “You” was the equivalent object form for the pronoun (I:me::he:him::she:her::ye:you). It does make it especially funny and strange that “you” became the catch-all since it was the objective case of the plural pronoun, but that is indeed the case.
There is a whole group of Yiddish and German words that have bled into English like, Gestalt, Kindergarten, School, Weltanschauung, Zeitgeist, Schadenfreude, Doppelgänger, Rucksack, Schmooze, Klutz, Kaputt, Schlep, Mensch, Kvetch, and Gesundheit.
But many times it is possible to distinguish between words from Yiddish and words from German: you see, Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, so its words do not have an "official" spelling in the Latin alphabet like the words in German, and usually they are written as they sound in English. By the way, the word for school in German and Yiddish is "Schule", which came to English as "Shul", which is another word for synagogue.
@@Leofwine Ich glaube, deine sprache hat "das Handy". Auf Englisch ist "Handy" keine Sustantiv, sondern ein Adjektiv. Hochachtungsvoll, -Ein Typ aus den USA.
It's really funny that the company Uber doesn't use the german dots because now that the taxi service is available in Germany, the germans pronounce it as it's written, completely unaware that the Americans were trying to use one of their words.
Considering that English "über" is usually used as an emphatic (like hyper), which isn't all that common in German, it's probably for the best. "Über" would not have worked as a brand name in Germany.
@@haukenot3345 Even worse: 'über' in a transportational context has the meaning of 'via' in German, so a company name like that would be associated with making intentional detours.
@@WatchVidsMakeLists Not really, I'm afraid. In this case, you would say "mit Uber" ('with Uber') or "mit einem Uber-Taxi" ('with an Uber taxi'). 'Über Uber' would only work if Uber were a place.
Fun fact: in linguistics, these "accent marks" are all called diacritics; any mark you put over a letter is a diacritic. An accent mark is specifically marking the accented syllable of a word. Additional fun fact: tilde in Spanish just means diacritic; they call the marks on jalapeño, pingüino, and corrió tildes.
Fun fact to complement the fun fact: following the RAE dictionary (DRAE) you can call all of those "virgulilla", although i've just seen it being used to indicate the accent of the ñ, so that's how i call it.
A note on Peking vs. Beijing: The old Wade-Gilles Romanization of Chinese is based on an old version of the South Chinese dialect, so Peking might have been more accurate to how it was pronounced in Southern China back in the 19th century. Pinyin pronunciation is based on modern Beijing-dialect Mandarin, created to push Beijing dialect on much of the rest of China. This is according to my Chinese history professor, who is from Southern China.
Peking is not W-G. W-G transcribes 北京 as Peiching. Peking is based on the pronunciation of mandarin spoken in Nanjing (Nanking). While it is different from standard mandarin, it's the same language and is mutually intelligibly. “Southern Chinese” usually refers to non-mandarin variants like Wu, Min, and Yue.
I believe the thorn symbol Þ is an old English letter meaning the TH sound. Lots of translations would replace the thorn letter with Y, which is why you see stuff like "Ye Olde” rather than "Þe Olde"
And said replacement was due to the printing presses being used in England lacking type pieces for thorn, so a substitution had to be made. Y was picked because looked the most similar. A kind of similar thing is behind why the letter W is called "double U" in English, while in many other languages it's called what translates to "double V", more accurately matching what the letter actually looks like: When a character for the new "w" sound in English was needed, in the Latin alphabet in use at the time letters V and U weren't yet disctinct from one another, so a double U, i.e. VV, was chosen to represent the sound. Then by the time the V/U distinction rolled around, the name "double U" for the letter had already stuck and has remained in the language as a sort of archaic remnant.
whats funny about words that use accent marks in english is that most native english speakers dont even use them when writing out the word and the meaning is still kept intact.
I don't know if this quite fits, but one concept that I've only just learnt about, despite using it for all of my life is the order in which we use adjectives. For instance it's a nice old brown dog, and not a brown old nice dog.
This one is interesting because it's obscure to native speakers who follow the rule intuitively, but less so to second-language learners who have to memorize it rote
I came here to comment this. It's by far the weirdest thing about english for me because (as far as I know) there's no written rule about it, it's just supposed to be intuitive.
I think the rule is that the more "fundamental" the adjective is to the noun, the closer it is to the noun. A brown dog is and presumably has always been brown, but hasn't always been old and depending upon the day might be nice.
My last name has undergone a few transformations over the centuries. It was Germanized from Croismare/Croixmare to Griesemer when they moved from modern-day France to Germany to avoid anti-Protestant bias in the 1500's. They moved to the colony of Pennsylvania and kept Griesemer in 1730. Then it was Anglicized from Griesemer to Grisamore around 1810-1820 when some moved into the Northwest Territories to avoid anti-German bias. Then it was simplified from Grisamore to Grismore by some branches of the family throughout the 19th century. Some members of the family use Grisamore still, and many who stayed in Pennsylvania later than the 1820's still use Griesemer. I've also found many other variations, like Grismer, Gresimer, Griesmer, and Kriesemer.
I am a Hebrew speaker and weirdly, we use the word "amok" as a meaningful word. I had no idea it came from English. We say it differently and it sounds like an Arabic loanword.
I can't think of any Arabic word that sounds similar, but according to Wiktionary & Etymonline, it came originally from Malay, then got into English and Hebrew through Portuguese.
@@youssefbh830 Yeah, probably came from English. We use the phrase "an amok run". I know it's not from Arabic, but the diffrent way it is pronounced in Hebrew sounds like Arabic.
Amuk comes from the Malay language and was introduced into English by British explorers in Southeast Asia. It means “rushing in a frenzy” or “attacking furiously”
@@user-sh3cf7kd6eindeed very interesting, as German has the exact same expression of an “amok run”, the best translation of which is probably a mass shooting (or more generally a killing spree, typically of terroristic nature).
One of my favorite English rules (that no English speaker is ever taught but we all intuitively understand) is the order of adjectives: opinion, size, condition, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. So you could say, "My lovely little polished antique oval green Laotian porcelain storage basin," but never, "My oval Laotian polished little porcelain lovely storage antique green basin".
The umlaut and diaeresis are different symbols that just look the same. Über and doppelgänger have umlauts showing a vowel change. Naïve, Zoë and coöperation have diaereses showing the marked vowel is pronounced separately from the preceding one.
That is a contrived distinction. It would be like saying the sequences of "bass" in "My brother's bass guitar shaped like a bass (fish) is made of bass (wood)." Are different sequences of symbols because they encode different meanings.
Exactly. The umlaut (German use of ¨) actually used to be a tiny E written above the letter, which was simplified into the symbol we know today. BTW, wherever Germans cannot use this symbol, such as in URLs or email addresses, they simply add an E (ueber, doppelgaenger, etc.). The diaeresis (French use of ¨ also known as "tréma") indicates that you have to pronounce the two vowels separately: you don't pronounce Zoë "zoo", or coöpt "cooped"). The New Yorker, being a high-brow, fancy magazine, is therefore using it the way it is supposed to be used.
@@belg4mit Not really. It's more like saying that the letter o and number 0 are different symbols, even though they often cannot be distinguished. Especially in handwriting as opposed to typed text.
I taught some ESL learners about use of "like" for reported conversations. I'm like, no one ever taught you this? And they were like, how did no one mention this before?
@@penguinlim no it won't. It interrupts the flow of the sentence and communicating the thought. It like interrupts the flow of the sentence and like communicating the thought like. ✌
@@jayceewedmak9524 ? The "like" you're (incorrectly) mocking here isn't the one the original commenter was describing anyway. (They were describing the quotative 'like'). But knowing *either* colloquial use of "like" *will* aid in comprehension because people use both of them. Whether you like it or not, people use "like" in different ways from academia English. That's just a fact. (Irrelevant), but filler words actually are shown to improve the flow of a sentence and listener's comprehension within casual conversations. Most sociolinguists will agree on that. There is a book written by a linguistics PhD literally called "Like, Literally, Dude" about this.
11:20 Wow !!! Same is true in Urdu. Higher class Nawabs, Sultans and landlords use the collective noun "Hum" and " Hamaraa" when referring to themselves instead of more common "Mein" or " Mera"
To corroborate the fact that immigrant families will usually have at least one story of a grandparent having this happen, my grandfather was one of the last folks to enter the country through Ellis Island, and they had actually stopped the practice by then, but when he made friends in University they all had trouble understanding his name was Ibrahim and kept confusing it with the English name Abraham, and so after some deciding he decided to lean in, and my grandfather went by Abe for the rest of his long and fulfilling life. Although he had much more of a penchant for tall tales than a certain famous politician who shared the nickname.
On QI, the British comedy quiz show, they claimed that Royalty used "we" because the Queen or King were direct contacts with God, and therefore speaking in behalf of the both of them.
For what it is worth English is not unique in this. The plural you in French (and indirectly in Spanish) developed from a royal plural used by Roman Emperors. I believe the purpose of this was that the Emperor had a conception of themselves not only as an individual person but as representing the entire state and those who form part of it.
@@forthrightgambitia1032 No it was in fact a very common trait of Latin written language, especially in letters, to use the first person plural instead of the singular in order to not appear egotistic. This is called a 'pluralis auctoris' (author's plural) or 'pluralis modestiae' (plural of modesty). Over time, this fashion vanished in everyday writing, but the conservative imperial chancellery kept going with it. From there, the chancelleries of Germanic kings took it on, and so it became a stylistic tradition that survived through the Middle Ages and even right into our time. And that's the reason why the royal 'we' is exclusively used in official writings of ruling monarchs: Because those are the writings that come out of their chancelleries, which adhere to a certain formalistic style of writing that, via tradition, ties them to their historic predecessors. When kings and queens don't use their chancelleries, they also don't use the royal 'we'. By the way there's another realm in which the tradition of the 'author's plural' survived, and that's in literatur: Whenever an author of a book is turning directly to his reader, he is likely to use 'we' instead of 'I'.
There are two forms of the double dot. When it alters the pronunciation of the vowel, it's an umlaut. When it indicates that two vowels should be pronounced separately, as in the names Noël and Zoë, it's a diaeresis
I have a few notes on the accent marks segment of the video. The first one is less important but the proper pronunciation of umlaut is “oom-lowt” and of cedilla is “se-dee-ya.” Another minor thing is that the à accent in “Déjà” actually has its own name separate from acute, and it’s called a grave accent. As for the umlaut, the interesting thing about it is that it’s actually two different marks. This mark is technically only an umlaut when borrowed from Germanic words, such as “doppelgänger,” where its purpose is to change the pronunciation of the vowel (“gahn-ger” becomes closer to “gehn-ger”) However, when borrowed from Latin languages, such as “naïve” from French, it’s actually called a diaeresis, and it’s purpose is to separate vowels from each other (“naiv” becomes “nah-eev”) Anyways I just felt like adding a bit more detail to that section, but overall amazing video JJ! (Edited for spelling mistakes lol)
He doesn’t speak German or Italian, so I think he is kind of making the point here. One can’t expect to keep the names in the original languages. It’s like when hear Germans say “Sank you” instead of “Thank you”. The point was not to pronounce it flawlessly in German or Italian.
@@maxhatterschannel5140 Kind of, in this case he doesn’t speak German or Italian so I wouldn’t expect JJ to pronounce it “flawlessly” and yet it helps to know the Cologne isn’t named thusly in German.
Lauri Törni a Finnish soilder that fought for the Finnish army, the German army and then the US army had his name anglicized when he came to the US to Larry Thorne
A note, when the dots are used in a word to separate vowels such as in Zoë, they're called a dieresis. And when the acute accent is written top left to bottom right it's called a grave accent.
Even more confusing is when encountering Midwest English where proper nouns have unnecessary “the”s and “s”s as in “I gotta run to the Krogers to pick up a 30-rack of the Hudephols before the Buckeyes game”
Oh that’s common where I live too. British people by contrast often drop “the’s” which I find weird. Like “he’s in hospital” or “it was added to museum.”
@@JJMcCullough I always saw it as being the same grammatical phenomena behind "He's at school" or "I'm at home" There's no obvious reason why we wouldn't say "He's at the school" or "I'm at my home" those dialects just do that for more places than in ours.
Probably a holdover from the German heritage of the area, in German the different words for "the" tell you the gender and declension of the noun, and so it's important to use them in a lot of situations where its pointless in English.
@@rcm926Part of it too is that there’s a lot of stores that actually have the “s” at the end if it’s named after a person, stores like Woodman’s, Kohl’s, Menards, etc. As a result, people just add the “s” to any store name that sounds correct.
As a French guy, I notice that our influence has been pretty big on African-American naming culture especially, with the prefixes "De-" and "La-" being the most common examples, but also many names like André. However there have also been many misspellings made along the way, and one that especially bothers me is how the common feminine ending "-ée" is often spelled as "-eé" which would look like a typo to any French person. Also what's funny is that we most commonly spell Zoé with an acute, not an umlaut (or "tréma" as we call it). Also the acute accent that goes the other way around (like in "déjà", already) is actually called a grave accent. We also still use the ethel in some common words, including fœtus and œsophage, however we just call it an "E in the O"
@@dwaynekeenum1916They're more like transliterations, given that the source language uses a completely different alphabet that doesn't map easily onto ours.
I was taught in school that "amok" is a Indonesian word though not specifically from which language spoken in the Indonesian archipelago. Another word commonly used in English, is née to mean "born" or "originally called". As for German vowels with umlauts, they can usually be written in English by just adding an "e" after the vowel: Göring becomes Goering, Nürnberg becomes Nuernberg, and my late German Shepherd mix's name Schäfer becomes Schaefer.
So for Elizabeth I’s speech at Tillbury, she does use both the formal “Royal We” and the informal I (my people, my army). This was used as a rhetorical device telling the army that not only did the monarchy as an institution rely upon them, but Elizabeth the individual did too.
My favorite subject, linguistics, and my favorite RU-vidr. Tis a grand day. I think one ‘high level’ that ESL learners often don’t learn is what linguist John McWhorter refers to as “back shift”. It’s the way in which we stress different parts of some multi syllabic words depending it’s grammatical category. Ie “REbel”(person) vs “reBEL”(act), REcord vs reCORD, etc… it’s a dead giveaway on people who have otherwise near perfect accent and grammar. Not an L2 learner but I think many native English speakers don’t realize just how many vowel sounds really exist in the language (12-14) as opposed to the 5 orthographic expressions we call vowel letters.
English also has a lot more diphthongs than other widespread European languages like German and Spanish. Actually, some American speakers seem almost incapable of pronouncing clear, non-diphthong vowels when speaking Spanish or French.
@@wernerlindorfer3693 Don't bother with this guy. After watching a couple of his videos, it's clear he's pretty arrogant and doesn't have much integrity.
One aspect of English that a lot of my fellow nonnative speakers struggle with is the fact that actors are *in* movies, but *on* tv shows. For example: Jennifer Aniston was *in* Horrible Bosses, but she was *on* Friends.
Good example! English definitely has particularities with prepositions like "in". I would add that not all difficulties are the same between all learners of English. It depends on the original language of the learner. Spanish and Portuguese speakers are much more likely to mix up "in" and "on" in English compared to speakers of other Romance languages because they use "en" or "em" most of the time for both meanings. This is in contrast to French and Italian speakers who don't mix them up in English nearly as often because they say "dans" or "in" for "in" and "sur" or "su" for "on". When it comes to teaching English, it's important to recognize that speakers of certain languages are far more likely to have a pattern of making certain mistakes. Everyone starts from a different point.
I'm just guessing but the different usages might be because being in a film is similar to being in a play? And you go to a theater to watch a play or a film. Whereas we have televisions and radios in our homes, and their programs are being broadcast "on the air."
You left out in the anglicization section most Roman and many Greek names which we use in very much altered form. For example Octavian is Octavius, Mark Antony is Marcus Antonius, and Julius Caesar is most similar in spelling, but is actually pronounced 'Iulius Kaisar.' And similarly Plato is Platon, Alexander is Alexandros, and Aristotle is Aristotélis. The most amusing is the Roman senator Cicero, who's name is actually pronounced 'Kikero" which is relevant at the time since it was intended to be a humbling name created in reference to his father apparently having a nose that resembled a chickpea
I think JJ exaggerates this issue, to pronounce his name somewhat well all you have to know is that “c” is pronounced “ch” at the end of south Slavic names, and most European languages pronounce “j” like the English “y”.
@@dictatorofcanada4238 That’s the point. To a Montenegrin it might be easy, but imagine having to learn the multiple rules of each language in order to pronounce it correctly.
A fun "advanced" topic is one that builds on your very first category: accents. You conflated two different accents at the start -- the double-dot is actually the symbol for two different accents. You identified the umlaut, which changes the quality of a vowel and shows up mostly in loanwords, most often German ones. The other usage, which appears in names like Zoë and Chloë, somewhat common spellings like naïve, and those pretentious spellings of more common words e.g. coöperate, is a diaeresis, which is used to denote that a vowel sound does not combine with its neighbours. So the ë is Zoë is a diaeresis because the e still makes an /i/ sound, but doesn't combine with the 'o', making a Zo-e kind of sound. The ü in über is an umlaut because it's a German word that is just spelled that way, and it symbolizes an entirely different sound ([ʏ] instead of [ʊ]). You can generally tell them apart as a diaeresis must appear as part of a vowel cluster to be meaningful, though it's still technically possible for an umlaut to appear there as well (e.g. äu). It's also not-uncommon for umlaut 'ö' to be written as 'oe'.
We tend to hellenize a lot of foreign names in Greek, at least in older texts and translations. So George Washington would be "Geòrgios Washington" (or even "Vashington" in some translations), Benjamin Franklin is still called "Veniamin Franglinos" and so on and so forth. Today, other than cases such as Franklin's, the only place you usually see such hellenizations are with the names of monarchs, so King Charles III will be always called "Károlos" in Greek media and such. Many foreign place names are also changed in that way.
The “accent grave” is also used in poetry sometimes: most high school students will come across it when they start reading Shakespeare. Words like “belovèd” or “betrothèd” might get the accent to show that the “-ed” is a full syllable and not reduced
As someone who's into linguistics the frequency of mistakes, mispronunciations and omissions in this video hurts a lot, but I'm glad that J.J. is spreading word of the field.
@@JJMcCullough I wasn't trying to be rude or anything, and I enjoy your vids a lot, but I thought I needed to say that there are a lot of holes in this video (especially for one with "experts only" in the title), so many that listing them all would seem somewhat more patronising and take a bit too much time out of my day. I could give specific examples if you'd like, I'd be willing to do it if I know for sure you'll see them. Btw Google Translate has a pronunciation feature (in icon of a speaker that says "listen" if you hover over it) that you can use to get accurate pronunciations in most languages, it says the word out loud so you can easily repeat it. It's an excellent tool and I recommend it to a lot of people.
@@rcm926Better yet, if it's a person's name you can't pronounce, just go to their Wikipedia page and click on those weird-looking symbols in parentheses after their name. (Or, if you're a real one, spend an afternoon learning IPA and you won't even have to do that much).
What “missoronunciations” do you see, I feel like some of them were done purposefully to make a point like the Montenegrin one. Others is because he’s speaking in English, so of course he won’t pronounce a Japanese name flawlessly.
@@revertrevertz5438 From what I remember, umlaut should rhyme with "shout", not "shot", Köln he pronounced as Klun, wrong vowel sound and wrong placement of the 'l", Firenze he said with the wrong vowel sounds as well, Πέτρος uses omikron (ο) and not omega (ω), yet he pronounced the o as an omega, in 'Ιωάννης I believe you say it like "yo-an-nis" and not "eye-oh-nas", although I'm not sure exactly how the pronunciation was in Koine Greek, the variation that the New Testament was written in. I don't think he did it to make a point, why would he do things incorrectly and misinform people on purpose? And as I said, anyone can easily find the pronunciations of any word quite easily, if you're a content creator who makes videos you script and prepare for there are many ways to find the pronunciations, it's not like he's forced to guess.
Apologies if this is somewhere further down in the comments, but there is a correction on the 'little dots'. Those on German loanwords are indeed umlauts, and indicate the alteration of a vowel sound (and can often be replaced by a letter 'e' following the umlauted letter) By contrast, the 'little dots' over the 'e' in Zoë and the 'i' in naïve are not umlauts, but actually a visually similar, but technically distinct diacritic called a diaeresis, and these are used when in a sequence of consecutive vowels, the one with a diaeresis should have its own distinct pronunciation from those preceding it, and that the full sequence not be confused with a digraph or a diphthong. Metal umlauts are of course nonsense, but undoubtedly cool.
The funny thing about the metal umlouts is that in German words with umlouts are often diminutives or used in words to make them cute sounding, rather than menacing like the metal heads think. I'm having a hard time explaining this, it was something my German speaking wife explained to me.
2:52 It's called a "diaresis" in this case because instead of activating a new vowel quality (which it still does here because English vowel-syllable placement rules but let's ignore that), it splits a dipthong into two vowels. It's like the use in Catalan and Spanish with "païs" and "vergüenza". The other uses mentioned before are called an umlaut because it changes the sound of the vowel in German. 3.49 the "acute slanting the other way" is called a "grave accent", also used in Catalan.
Didn't the Real Academia Espanola 9the Spanish version of the Academie Francaise) recently come out a few years ago and say you don't have to always use the diaresis/umlaut in words that use it?
3:46 The "backwards slanted acute accent" is actually called a grave accent. Similarly, the dots in Zoë or those in the New Yorker are actually not an umlaut, but a diaeresis, signifying the beginning of a new syllable in words that might otherwise be mispronounced. The diaeresis usually appears in words of French origin, while umlauts occur in German and Scandinavian words.
Fun and interesting video as always! Re. zoologists not using the "correct" term to refer to a group of animals -- one of my favourite remarks in the video, being a zoologist (ichthyologist) myself -- not only is this completely accurate, but the relationship between "common" and "scientific" language as a whole is a complex and fascinating one. For instance, scientifically speaking, the plural of "fish" can be "fish" or "fishes", and both are not equivalent in a scientific context. Likewise "schooling" and "shoaling" are two completely different behaviours of fishes, not regional linguistic variants. Anyway, I look forward to more!
That's really interesting. Writing is so much about audience empathy isn't it? You just have to know what people will understand what you mean by your words, or, as often happens in academic writing, spend half the paper defining your terms before you begin haha.
I have two that you've missed. The first is words that can be spelt incorrectly, correctly, only in specific contexts. Drive Thru. Movie Tonite (that aren't slangy). The other is 'Headline English', the super condensed language you'll see in headlines or signage.
A Latin textbook I ordered online just arrived in the mail today. I read the section about the relationship between Latin and other languages, with an emphasis on English, and I then log on to RU-vid and find J.J. published this video. I think it is self-evidence that we can deny it no longer: the (linguistic) Force flows through J.J.
I didn't know Æ was being used in English at a point, which is interesting. I always figured it was one of the "exclusive" additional letters, alongside Ø and Å that exist in Norwegian, Danish, Icelandic e.t.c. The fact that Æ is also pronounced the same in English as in the Scandics and Nordics is facinating!
Umlaut? UMLAUT?! In German loanwords like doppelgänger or über where it changes the vowel, usually to a weaker form, yes, that's an umlaut. But in the name Zoë, and words like reëlection or coördinate, the dots establish that the vowels are pronounced separately. That's called a *diaeresis*.
Once an ESL student who later learned French and Spanish, I wish English had undergone an effective spelling reform. I struggled a lot with linking pronunciation and spelling. Like, why is the “b” in “debt” not pronounced? Why is there only one letter pronounced in the word “queue”? “American English” did a halfway job, and I truly hope someone will finish it one day.
'Debt', like 'island', was attempt by linguistic snobs to make English more Latinate. As Tolkien said of the river, "a Tames with an 'h' is a folly without warrant."
Noah Webster tried it, but he only got a few changes to stick. "Queue" is a French loanword, and it makes sense if you know their pronunciation rules: "Q" is always followed by a silent "U", the "EU" is pronounced "yoo", and the last "E" is another mandatory silent letter.
It's because English has a lot of loanwords (both older and more recent) that were either only light altered or not changed at all. Debt is spelled that way because it comes from Middle English "dett", which came from Old French "dete", which that originally came from the Latin "dēbitum". Basically, the letter "B" was added in the spelling later because people wanted to acknowledge the original Latin etymology, but they kept the pronunciation the same. "Queue" is another word of Old French origin, but I think it's spelled with an extra "ue" just because that's how it is. Anyway, that word in particular ultimately comes from the Latin "cauda", but that didn't seem to affect things much. English has a lot of recent borrowing where they don't change the spelling at all, but native speakers will still mangle the pronunciation, like "karaoke".
In my experience, a lot of Americans write my name by putting an apostrophe after the e; “Andre’”. Instead of doing the accent mark. They managed to do it on my high school diploma😢
The general rule is that you don't need to use the accent marks if you don't use italics. I definitely usually see Maori and angstrom, though I admit I see creme brulee both ways.
The reason the Quakers' use of "thee" was meant to be informal is that "thee/thou" *was* the informal second person pronoun in English when it was in use. "You" was the formal version, equivalent to usted in Spanish or vous in French
One of the bands, hüsker dü, used as an example of the metal umlauts phenomenon, was actually named after the ‘70s swedish board game of the same name. The umlauts in this case were not a stylistic choice but lifted directly from the title. Hüsker Dü translates to “do you remember.”
dunno if it's wrong but it seems like nowadays all global pop culture comes from the anglosphere and even when it isn't is often in english. i really want to see the 70s back imo. when swedish or italian culture was equally as influential.
It seems like an American board game, not a Nordic one. According to wikipedia at least. In any case the umlauts wouldn’t be lifted from Swedish, since the phrase is Norwegian or Danish (in Swedish it would be ”Kommer du ihåg”) and ü doesn’t really exist in any of the three languages apart from the odd loan word like in English (the phrase would be ”Husker du” without umlauts). Swedes use the umlaut in ä and ö and Norwegians/Danes don’t use it at all.
Husker du is norwegian for "do you remember?", not Swedish, and does not use umlauts. No Scandinavian language uses the ü, and Danish and Norwegian only use å.
Actually in English the two dots are called Diaeresis and indicate that the vowels in a dipthong are to be pronounced separately. For Zoë it's telling you it's pronounced Zo-ey instead of Zo (like how you'd pronounce the oe in Oboe). A dipthongs are combinations of two vowels in English - he kind of brushes past them with ae and oe in this vid, but they are real parts of speech in lots of languages.
Diaereses are actually different from diphthongs, which have nothing to do with spelling but vowel sounds. Both the 'o' at the start of oboe and the 'oe' at the end are diphthongs because the character of vowels changes as it is spoken. In both cases the vowel starts with an 'o' sounds but ends closer to a 'u'. Compare the start of oboe with the start of obstruct. Oboe has a diphthong but obstruct doesn't. Diaeresis means that the marked vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable to the vowel before it.
As a non-native, I've never really internalized why (and when) you leave out the verb in sentences like "This page intentionally left blank" or "This message brought to you by".
It's usually used as a sort of formal or authoritative voice in writing. That "This page intentionally left blank" on documents shows that an institution like a bank or college is telling you something. The second one is an announcement by a corporate entity such as a TV station. I hope that helps.😊
The diaresis (dots) actually has a function in English: it marks vowels as pronounced separately. This is how "Zoë" doesn't rhyme with "Joe". The acute accent was used by Shakespeare to denote E's that were pronunced rather than silenced (in order to fit the meter), which is how "nakéd" doesn't rhyme with "baked". These uses are entirely separate from the loanwords with these accents, and both have centuries of history..
My favourite obscure fact about the English language is that it's only 99.99% gender neutral because boats are always referred to with feminine pronouns. I.e. "The Titanic was the largest ship in the world at the time of HER sinking." It always surprises foreigners (and sometimes natives) when I tell them.
@@JJMcCullough countries being feminine is less common these days but it still seems to be the rule for boats in news articles, online encyclopedias, etc.
Is that really mandatory, though? I always thought it was optional, like it was a figure of speech, not that "she" and "her" were literally the pronouns you were supposed to use. I mean, do they write in official documents about countries and ships "she" and "her"? It would be news to me if it were that common.
