Why does Sound Change Happen? 

As a Brit living now in SW France, I can hear myself occasionally adapting my French nasal sounds to match the local pronunciation. It's an unconscious thing, but my brain picks up the change with an almost surprised expression on its face, as if to ask 'why on earth are you doing that?'. My brain then answers the question with 'in order to be slightly less different'. It can't be a conscious thing, as I know perfectly well that my English accent pretty well drowns out any tiny adjustments in particular vowel sounds!

More “rambly” videos! Thoroughly enjoyed it. Thanks.

0:16 POV your friend wakes you up to talk about linguistics for 20 minutes

About your formal linguistics qualifications: one of the things I like about you is, if there's something you don't know, you come right out and say it. Or if there is ambiguity or range of opinions, you tell us about that to the best of your knowledge. There is something to be said for formal qualifications; but with that, sometimes, you get someone who is a bit too full of themselves and their expertise. What I'm saying is, your readiness to concede unknowns is one of the things I like about you.

Ramble on, good sir! These videos are great!

its really crazy when you learn about production vs perception and sociolinguistics because once you start listening to yourself you catch all kinds of utterances and discover patterns eg: ill front my PRICE vowel when im trying to be nice/polite, back my MOUTH vowel when being stern/upset, and shift my TRAP even more with certain people

On how you change your accent, sometimes my Yorkshire accent gets stronger when talking with people from other regions. I think it's because I'm proud of where I come from and what to emphasise it. I'm sure there's situations where I soften it without realising.

Where I live the accent difference between just father and son is radically different. My hoemtown changed from Lancashire to Merseyside in 74, and for some reason the accent changed too. So you can have a parent generation born in the 40s/50s sounding something like Jim Bowen, and their children born in the 70s/80s sounding like John Bishop, even though they spent their whole lives in exactly the same area.

Enjoyed this. I'm currently researching accent bias and a quote that stood out to me and I believe relates to this video: “if one may prophesy, broadcasting will do more than anything else to standardise English pronunciation all over the British Isles” … “a form of speech which will take them [people from remote districts] anywhere” (W. Grant, 1925).

not sure about everyone else, but i like these kinds of videos. they're straight to the point and don't beat around the bush. it feels like talking to a friend. that and i am genuinely interested in this topic. so there's my stance on that!

This video brings to mind a video I watched recently from another RU-vidr, King Ming Lam, regarding Dutch and German dialogue that sounds like English. Of course, the time interval of change from German to English is greater, but the comparison of vowel shifting and alteration of consonant pronunciation are similar. And so fascinating. Thank you for sharing your "unqualified" opinions. Eventually, if one is interested and considers and studies a thing enough, and whether one has a certificate or not, one can become an expert, regardless of what others may say.

Ramble on, Simon. I can listen to anything you put out. I also like your random bits of garden birds, plants, spiders and what not. Regarding vowel shifts, as an older person I know I tend to use a perhaps outdated way of pronunciation, and it catches me out when I sometimes find myself saying something the way younger people would. It feels strange that even how I pronounce some words has changed over my lifetime with the vowel shift you describe (not counting the changes that occurred because I moved to a different county and I absorbed bits of the local accent).

Informative and enjoyable, as always. I like the casual, informal feel of your videos. Like we sitting around having a chat. 🤗

Very interesting! I find accents and how and why they change fascinating. I have 4 kids, and a few years ago I noticed they and their friends were saying certain words in a way that sounded really strange to me. They pronounce “mountain” and similar words like “fountain” by completely dropping the “t” sound: moun-en, foun-en. We live 3 hours south of where I grew up (in Virginia in the United States), but I think it’s more of a generational than regional change because I don’t notice other adults here using those pronunciations.

I'm Canadian. They say the Canadian accent is undergoing a vowel shift. I do know many accents from say, the 1930s, sounded very different from what we're used to today sometimes.

Don't find this style remotely annoying, one of my favorite things about your channel is how many videos feel like sitting down with a friend to talk about linguistics, which feels more easeful and charming than super-structured edited-to-a-higher-power videos. Super interesting. I'm often noticing that I choose pretty different vowels for the last sound in 'thank you', ranging from what I think is my native standard 'oo' sound to a pretty extreme ü kind-of sound, and trying to figure out on what basis I change this vowel since the choice seems to happen automatically but I suspect it has to do with how I feel about the person and how I want to come across in that moment. Very curious about this and the phenomenon in general

I like this style of video. It's interesting to think about why and how sound change happens.

The disclaimer at the beginning is the reason you’re one of the better creators on this platform. Keep up the good work! Look forward to watching this video with my late night snack lol

Your channel was a random recommendation from RU-vid, but it’s turned out to be one of the most fascinating subjects I’ve ever come across. Is there a single, popular, book that you could recommend that touches on the many things you talk about? Something a beginner could delve into to find out more on the evolution of English, with reference to regional dialects? Looking forward to watching more of your talks.

the way that speakers themselves perceive sounds is something I've found surprisingly influential on my own perception of speech. I speak with an american accent and I always thought of the tap in words like, "butter" or "better" to be different from taps in languages like spanish or italian. But like if you change the ending of, "better" to an o so that you're saying something like, "betto" while maintaining the american tap, you're essentially speaking spanish by saying the word "pero" with very good pronunciation and all you did was change the ending. I always equated the softer "t" in words like this to be a "d" and I thought of that noise as separate from the "r" in languages like spanish but it would seem that they're at least very similar, if not the same. very interesting stuff. btw in the event that you're still unsure about these more casual videos, I think they're chill as hell haha

All your videos are great! Many years ago I borrowed a random old book on sociolinguistics from a friend and it was so interesting! Did/ does mass media effect linguistic change? Radio, TV and the internet? Will the internet lead to changes in the written language? 'You're' becoming 'Your,' for example? Or 'There' and 'Their' becoming interchangeable? Would you consider a video about language isolates, in general, with a couple of examples and how they came to be, please? 🤠💜

You spoke quite a bit in this video about generational and class influences on accent. Closely related, I'd like to hear you comment on the importance (or not) of various influential individuals. Two of the most frequently-cited possible examples of this are (a) test pilot Chuck Yeager (first man to break the sound barrier in the 1950s) as influencing the speech of most pilots and air traffic controllers, and (b) the Castilian Spanish lisped "s" as originating when various courtiers imitated a Spanish king's lisp.

Good question

It sort of seems like the reason behind this if I could think about it as a useful trait in our behaviours as opposed to some strange quirk, id say maintaining social cohesion is the biggest benefit. I'm an american from the praries, moved to eastern ontario 6 years ago. I without a doubt sound canadian. All of my friends are either canadians themselves or have also adopted this accent. While I take pride in my american accent, I cant help but find it appealing to want to sound like those around me, like you said you feel more "socially tuned in". Even if the accents arent incredibly different, my parents are always quick to point it out whenever I return home for christmas. As time ticks on and you get older, the younger generations, and different classes may want to find ways of differentiating themselves from other cliques and demographics by finding it more appealing to change the way they pronounce certain words. Those around them will catch up the same way everyone in a friend group will end up quoting the same movies or inside jokes, and those who speak the same way sort of can *pass the social litmus test*. When one of those social groups or demographics become big or desirable enough for everyone else to find it appealing to speak like them, you have a proper accent on your hands. when this happens enough times and the bracket progresses far enough you end up with distinct languages.

Fascinating as always! Thanks

Love this presentation style

As a psychotherapist, I wonder if the sense of social lubrication that you / we feel when we perform the sound change is that we are demonstrating fluency or familiarity with culture. That is, we have heard the shift enough times to incorporate it into our behaviour. This is evidence, if you like, of being someone who engages in social interaction. It’s like turning up at a party in the ‘right’ clothes - or at least not the jarringly wrong ones. So it’s an in-group cultural signifier, which are often extremely subtle but nonetheless powerful.

I like all your videos, Simon. This kind feels more... real? I like education and conversation both. Keep doing what you do.

I love the conversational style! Keep it up!

This is fascinating, I’d love to hear more about how sound change is occurring today, the anticlockwise vowel shift thing is probably something I do likewise to you, having grown up in the north but now living in the south, but I’ll have to pay more attention to how I speak to really notice

Rural West Virginian here. I don't think my accent is significantly different from my grandparents' but my vocabulary is: I never use the word "yonder", for example.

comment about the notion of the telephone voice: everybody has a phone voice. I thought it was interesting, though that my African-American students always referred to that as their “white voice.“ So that’s another of Code switching, but it’s also about the register, even a higher or lower voice than normal speaking voice. Sorrt of like the one I’m using now. it even extends to recordings!

I live/grew up in Texas but I don’t have much of the thick Texas accent a lot of Texans have. I’ve been told I sound northern🤷 Though, when I’m around people who do have it, like older family or small town ‘hicks’ (I mean the term endearingly) I automatically start slipping the Texas sounds into my speech. It does feel like an effort to seem more inviting or trustworthy, or maybe I just do it to feel included/inclusive. But it’s not fake; I DO possess that accent in my head. It’s just not the one I consider closest to my identity

I'd be interested to know what you think drives the direction of vowel chain shifts? because in Australia and new Zealand for example front vowels move in a clockwise direction (if I remember correctly) love your videos! I never miss an upload :)

Local dialects have a pass it on effect. Your dad says circle without the Kay and you grow up saying sirtle. Sounds ridiculous but I’ve experienced it from people in Lancashire and Yorkshire.

I suspect climate might make some contribution, people walking with heads down to avoid wind and rain will surely make different noises and this can be prolonged over little Ice Ages etc. Speaking in different accents to fit in is sensible. My clients are of diverse nations and find it easier to understand RP so I use that for work but speak according to those I am speaking with when in South Wales Vallys or Gogledd localy. Allways interesting to have you give a Fireside chat in a nice shirt even without bird action

Just came across this little film from 1979. The accents are interesting. I guess the latter couple are from Lincolnshire but I detect twangs of East Riding. The first woman is interesting for her consciously clear, educated accent.

My understanding is that a language is not like a building that can stand there for many years. It’s taught and learned from person to person, from generation to generation. Imagine a game: 10 people line up. Pass a random sound or word from one person to the next. The outcome from the last person is usually not as same as the initial sound. That is sound change in an extreme setup. Real languages are more stable because they are passed from a group of people to another group. But the gist is the same.

Regarding B/V: Korean had no V sound, and indeed, when they transliterate an English word with a V, they use ㅂ (B) or ㅍ (P) or as a replacement. For example: elves becomes 엘프 (elpeu) and lever becomes 레버 (lebeo).

Rambly videos are what I enjoy most

I do consciously shift certain pronunciations, for example I grew up having the pen/pin merger but now live in a place that doesn't have it, and have learned to say "pen" when I feel a certain properness is called for. LIkewise I grew up where "sit" is pronounced "set" but when at work dealing with customers I've learned to say "sit". Both "pen" and "sit" are quite unnatural to me. Also there's "ain't" but that's another story!

Loving the new thumbnail design. Please consider applying it to your back catalogue!

I'm from Hungary. An I've noticed that gen Z and alpha kids say our "á" which for me is an open front vowel, slightly more closed. It's closer to an æ now. I've told this to people, and they usually say they haven't thought about it, but they also hear it and that it must be due to social media and english being more "spoken"? by kids. Another interesting thing is that our country is 93030 square kilometers and we have 9 million people, and we have 4 accents that have very slight differences. Compare that to Scotland or Austria, they're smaller with less people and have much more, very distinct accents or dialects even.

Re the Spanish b/v...both in my Spanish linguistics courses and in conversations with a Spanish speaking colleague, there was agreement that the sound was dependent on its place in the word. So, "Veronica" is pronounced (more or less) as "Beronica". But Veronica's mother (Spanish only speaker) laughed scornfully at that, not aware that that was exactly what she herself did when she spoke her daughter's name. Language is funny, and so are our ears...

Rambling videos yay!!

16:10 "I didn't mean to say that some accents are objectively superior to others, please don't hate me." I didn't think that you were saying that at all, I thought you were saying that some accents are more socially desirable or acceptable, which seems uncontroversial.

I like to thing of the IPA graph as a swimming pool and the individual vowels as rubber ducks.

ive always wanted to know about how sound changes happen, thisl be fun

Thank you.

Getting into the realms of neuroscience there 🤔

Was good. Thanks, Simon.

As a trans person doing voice training, i noticed that ever since i started doing voice training, while speaking Slovak, i will sometimes slur a [z] between two vowels into a [s]. I do this completely subconsciously, and then i notice as soon as ive said it and get utterly perplexed. I don't do it in any other language, and i don't know anyone else who does this. It is not a common sound change or anything. Must have something to do with how im trying to control vocal fold closure, and failing at that.

I'm a chameleon. I instinctively take on the "protective coloration" of the accent where I live. I have an East Coast Educated accent in general, but having lived in western Pennsylvania, Illinois, South Carolina, New Jersey, Michigan, Virginia and Long Island (New York) by the age of 20, and then lived in Southern California for 41 years and far West Texas for 5 years, and currently living near San Diego, my accent has been forged in the crucible of all that's American.

Do standardised national languages and school education prevent (or slow) sound change from escaping a single dialect? Or in other words: Do the standardised national languages change over time or do they 'freeze' the language, never allowing innovation? I've been reading a book about cultural literacy (not linguistics) and this was an arguement presented - it seems totally wrong but I don't know enough to definitively say so.

Just a note on the words coming to sound alike subject: you used the example of the American “cot-caught” merger, but how you said it reveals there’s a “caught-court” merger in your own accent. It took me a moment to figure out that you weren’t saying “cot” sounds like “court”.

We think mutations are a celtic thing but you may say "a house" and "my head" I will say "an 'ouse", and "me yed"

Ramble away. It’s very interesting!

Within living memory, West Riding of Yorkshire dialects said "meat" to rhyme with "eight" but "meet" as in most standard varieties. This distinction is virtually gone now.

There is also semi conscious change, like how you might intentionally try to sound different from an abusive father, or people trying to sound "cool". The idea of being cool by modification isn't new. There is a reason there are so many different varieties of hat, and most can be made by taking another hat and steaming them into a new shape. The same thing has got to have happened generationally with language. You want to sound like the strong guy even though he started saying "v" instead of "b" rather than the old people. The rapid introduction of the "Valley Girl" drawl all around the anglosphere shows how stuff can happen. Like, ohmy (drop pitch) gooohhhhddd.

Phonemicisation + demographics = sound shift. Your narrative is strongly reminiscent of natural selection, with internal change corresponding with genetic drift and external factors for change related to some changing (socio-) environmental niche. You even raise the issue of barriers between population groups, which is reminiscent of how geographic barriers have been implicated in speciation events. This is interesting, but I suggest that these factors can give insight not only to the microevolution of phonology in language systems, but also some big-picture macro-evolution of the language capacity in various hominins. At this stage, models may be largely speculative, but I do think they could be made precise enough to simulate in software and help guide hypothesis selection. Longer term, there is dramatic progress in archaeology and paleoanthropology, much of it related to available new technologies for research, so hypothesis may become verifiable (or falsifiable) in coming decades. I am interested in lexical semantics (synchronically) but have spent some effort thinking about diachronic change and even macro-evolution of language. I am interested in how the modern phonemic system of language first emerged, and how the sign languages that emerge naturally amongst members of mostly-deaf communities (including hearing children) emerge with structures very similar to phonemes (although perhaps less a single linear stream of features, more opportunity for parallel streams since people sign, for example, with left and right hands posed in different or similar shapes). I would suggest models where an "emic" system emerged that could have been largely gestural (with facial expression) or largely vocalizations or some mixture. The emic structure of contrasting sound-types or gesture-types combined with a temporal structure of syllables. Vocalizations generated CVC-type syllables, with community-specific phonotactic constraints. Sign languages have a Pose-Move-Pose temporal structure that plays a similar role. This presented hominin communities with a combinatorial explosion of available signifiers, which combined with some process of culturally sharing, and eventually conventionalizaing, the semantic content of lexical items. Once reliable intergenerational transfer of the emic forms of vocabulary became widespread, it is arguably already a form of basic functional language, even if grammatical recursion had not yet emerged. It is possible that this process got a big boost from the availability of a largely-shared system of percepts (similarities are directly related to the shared environment that community members perceive and behave in). Once hominin communities developed a behavioral trait of referring to the things they perceive and care about using a culturally-shared emic form (gesture, vocalisation, or some combination), the number of nouns in the communities could grow from dozens to thousands of lexical items in a relatively small number of generations. In other words, with the existence of thousands of perceptibly similar items attended to in community behavior (natural kinds, including processed foods, artifacts and their use and manufacture, relationships and cultural practices), the cognitive structures of a schema of largely-similar percepts could bootstrap the rapid growth of a schema of lexicalized concepts that could be emically performed as well perceived in the behavior of conspecifics. (This type of rapid evolutionary change is sometimes characterized as exaptation or pre-adaptation). I am not suggesting that reference and noun forms came first. In fact I think we should model the possibility that verbs emerged at the same time (or even slightly ahead of nouns, relying on pointing and deictics, as well as personal names). Verbs are generally not stand-alone like nouns, they depend on arguments (most frequently nouns, but also more complex arguments that refer to a situation, e.g. verbs of propositional attitude). I suggest that verbs with their collocated arguments came into use to draw the attention of conspecifics to certain salient information with participants (the referents of arguments of the verb) in some initial configuration, and the reconfiguration of those same participants into some outcome configuration that accomplished the result of the action picked out by the verb. So predication and reference, verbs and nouns, could have evolved concurrently, in some models. Whether models of sound-shift or language emergence, I suggest that more precise (families of) models could be constructed and implemented in software to see if they can account for the facts that actually emerged in history and prehistory.

Have you ever noticed American vowels? Because they don’t sound very much like English vowels. And they don’t sound like other colonies British descended accents. But they do sound an awful lot like Norwegian accents. And some Danish and Swedish accents as well. We had a large immigration from all three countries to the Midwest. I think this supports your point.

Thanks! I think « influencers » play a key role here. Being herd animals, we are subconsciously preoccupied with the pecking order. Voice fry, e.g. seems to me very much a characteristic of a demographic group. As a person, I immediately tend to judge such a speaker as not one of « us ». She makes a socio-cultural statement.

Ramble-lover checking in

Hello. When people talk about The Great Vowel Shift are they also talking about spelling? Did Middle English and today’s English have the same spelling and just pronounced differently during the shift?? I am really confused over that and I don’t know how to read IPA, but what I always thought Middle English and today’s English spelling was different? And so originally we started out with 5 vowel sounds but then they changed over time? But how does that affect spelling? Thanks for your help!

Would be interested for you to dive into the Lincolnshire accent... I wouldnt know where to start

I found it quite interesting -- I liked it 👍👍

ah, my favourite topic!

I enjoyed this video a lot

Disclaimer: no formally qualified linguists were harmed during filming of this video.

David Anthony (The Horse, the Wheel, and Language, 2007) posits that accents nearly always tend to drift in the direction of prestige - as you mentioned. i wd say it's contemporarily more noticeable and "forced" and accelerated, under the overweight influence of global media, that there's a significant and almost entirely unconscious sociopsychological pressure to assimilate one's speech & communication habits toward what is "popular" (≈ [more acceptable, more "fit" to the social environment, more likely to garner social approbation, more social-security]). i wd actually go further and associate that particular pattern with the tendency in almost all social mammal groups to self-organize by hierarchy, rank, prestige/power/influence, - class systems. alpha, beta, gamma ... omega. (evolutionarily, it all boils down to access to resources: food, social protection, mates.) this all plays out behaviorally, including communication behavior. e.g.: folks around Boston will easily distinguish the social "rank" gap illustrated by comparing a historically very-working-class Southie accent with that of Beacon Hill or Back Bay. it's almost like Deep Throat: Follow the Money. the class with the most money and/social influence will have the most "popular" accent. we Americans also tend to recognize this pattern in British accents: even if we don't know their labels, we can distinguish RP from BBC from Birmingham/Manchester from Liverpool from Yorkshire, even East End from West, and have some idea which are associated with "upper" relative to "lower" class, and greater vs. lesser social advantage. it's socially hearable. I'm sure that this "ear" for rank or influence came into being and evolved along with our whole neuropsychological suite of communication abilities, following the essential "fit"-ness principle - either you are equipped, genetically or epigenetically, with adaptive flexibility to survive to reproduce in an ever-changing environment, or not. so ... ultimately i think it is, for this particular reason and others i can think of, sociopsychologically driven ... plus, yes, energy management, ergonomic efficiency, lenition balanced against articulation & phoneme distinction. sorry. i love thinking about this stuff.

But can one person actually trigger a shift in pronunciation? Such as the Spanish monarch who supposedly introduced the "th' sound to Castillian Spanish?

I like this presentational stylle.

_"Ah! Cat!"_ 🙀

Great video awesome stuff this is a comment to provide some sweet engagement la la

7:28 good Hebrew example there

If this is rambling then just keep rambling to me, I’m here to hear it 🤗

My pronunciation of words such as "onions" is different from my own mother's. Generational shifts happen rather quickly!

I can´t help but wonder why some languages have so much and so fast phonetic change, whereas others (like Spanish) are much more stable. It is mystery to me. I sound just like my grandfather (Spanish): almost the exact same allophones. English, however, seems to bring in changes every decade or two. Any ideas?

Not at all annoying, Simon, quite the contrary, in fact.

so much how Korean works ! The "alphabet" is excellent the language difficult

Isn't it ultimately a matter of something akin to fashion? Subconsciously following an in-group?

Here is a guy I would love to have a chat with

kind of serving today

Hopefully AI will make everywun speak wun high rp axunt.

ambling into rambling usually precipitates incites so carry on ...

Do it a bit more!

In my opinion tne reason why so many languages were created with each language having so many dialects had one reason and that was the lack of communication possibilities that we all have today. Modern internet is actually creating a single earth community. And as any young person can tell you we are slowly developing one commun internet language. So it is my opinion that in a foreseeable future (say 200 years??) we people of planet earth will be speaking one commun language based on modern english. English because it is the commun language of science, politics and internet now and in the future!!

"Everything changes. Nothing remains like it is." - Buddha

Prepared to be cancelled by the mob 😅😅😅

Explain the Basque language differing so much from adjacent languages.

I suspect laziness and authority

i love how you reach into my brain to make videos on the exact topics id love to see someone discuss. hope i can have the means to join ur patreon! bonus- quirks of my accent write [ˈɹəjt̚] ride [ˈɹajd] i confuse cot caught very easily especially before L but not before r

The conversational style of this video makes it feel comfortable, straightforward, curiosity-sustaining, and very high quality. Keep it up.

Speaking for myself, i have been slowly incrementally changing my own accent over time, very slightly each time, on purpose to be devilish

Where I live (suburbs of a town called Worcester Massachusetts -- sort of near Boston), older people (over 55, say) speak with a strong New England accent even if they are from the suburbs or a rural place, even if they are upper-middle class; but the youth rarely if ever speak in that way, unless sometimes they might if they are from the city and are working class. In high school and my early 20s I'd go to people's houses and notice that the kids and youths had general American accents while their parents had strong New England accents (same household). In my neck of the woods, you will not hear someone over 65 (unless from another region) without a strong New England accent, and you will almost never hear someone from outside the city under 30 who has one. People in their 40s, it's a mix. Some people have some features, but they are reduced (in other words it's closer to general American).

This conversational format is a big part of why I subscribed.

Ramble away mate, it adds to the character of the vid, something the AI voiced videos lack in abundance. Asking a politician a question and getting a straight answer.....?! I have learnt so much from this channel, my favourite on YT, many thanks for another excellent vid and interesting content Simon. Curiously, after watching you I always feel like being pleasant to everyone, what's that all about cos I am a miserable auld fart at best.

My three children are bilingual English and Czech and live in the Czech Republic. My two sons have a British English accent because they learned English by listening to @DanTDM's video game commentaries on RU-vid. Thank you Dan! 👍On the other hand, my daughter doesn't watch @DanTDM, as she is far more interested in art and handicrafts than video games. Therefore she watches mostly RU-vid videos made by creators from the USA, and consequently speaks English with a US accent. Don't underestimate the power of RU-vid!

Been watching you for a couple years now. As soon as my financial situation improves, I will be on your Patreon like flies on shit. Hails and cheers from Florida, the dumbshine state.

"Socially desirable" is an interesting way of putting it. I don't think I've noticed this specifically with the anticlockwise vowel shift. I have occasionally noticed when I'm in a group of strangers or only very casual acquaintances all with very similar accents to each other but different to mine, I feel very self-conscious; I'm not usually the sort of person to subconsciously imitate another's accent but I can definitely see this being the sort of place where someone more inclined (subconsciously) to do so would. I've noticed this self-consciousness both when in a group of people with more conservative SSB accents than my own, that is with more upper-middle class connotations, and those with accents more towards the Estuary English end ie with working class connotations. I've also noticed it with different regional accents (eg when in a group of Northerners or Welsh people), though of course since regional accents are still at least somewhat tied with perception of class in Britain it's hard for me to say for sure this is separated in my subconscious mind.