As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o) It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
It's amazing how similar they are to the declensions of der, die, das in German. I'd love to see one more about grammatical case specifically, maybe even leaving the Instrumental in place since it's just hypothesis.
Not really amazing at all, since Old English comes from Anglo-Frisian (Ingvaeonic) dialects of West Germanic. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic
@Sophie McCook how are those related exactly? I don't know of any development in English changing y to th or vice versa, except when confusing the þorn glyph with y.
@@weirdlanguageguy it could in theory be related to spelling influencing pronunciation actually. But "thon" is actually related to yon (since it comes from the+yon)
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Brilliant! Perhaps unexpectedly to the layman, some of your hypothetical derivations were actually present in official Dutch until 1951 and still are in German.
I picked up German as a child partly from hearing my grandparents, whose parents immigrated at the end of the 19th century. So, I often have used the old dative plural -e ending, and I have gotten some strange looks.
Well, German retains the same genitive case ending (for masculine and neuter "strong" nouns) that became the possessive form in English and... I can't remember any other similarities with German. The "weak" declension's ending -en in indirect cases has nothing to do with the theoretical English -en, the article forms are different as well (der, das, die, des, dem, den), there's also the ending -e in dative, but it's dated.
@@user-mb4ux7xv4j I haven’t lived in Germany for about 20 years. Are ppl in Europe not using it? What do they do instead, say “von ___,” like they’re French?!
I once did the same thing for Spanish, working out what the noun declension would look like if the Latin case had survived, but after applying the actual sound changes. Spoiler: you could really see why the case system was lost, the resulting paradigms were a mess
@@riversnake6548 Le palabre en lis frasios estíos lengüe castellane teórique serían extrañe y nosotri encontraríamos lo españolo muy dificiliore habladu, gramática algo similare li alemano.
@@riversnake6548 Podíamos mantener la tría génera también -masculino, femenino y neutro- y decir «unos homo, do hombres; una mujer, due mujeres; uno animal, do animaja». Se freiría uno huevo o do hueva. Se visitaría uno museo o do musea.
@@Correctrix oddly enough italian retained what sounds like a masculine / feminine alternance in eggs (uovo masc. sing - uova fem. plur) although it was really a neuter noun II declension in latin.
I'd wish you good luck on your dissertation, Simon, but something tells me that you don't need luck. I have every reason to think that congratulations are in order!
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
I was thinking about all the extra homophones too, and I wonder if other words might have moved out of the way for the sake of clarity, maybe relying on synonyms or something. I mean, /ðər/ can only mean so many things before something breaks.
@@aronocThree years late, but…that feels like a very dialectal issue? For me, and most dialects of English, the /ðiːɹ/ of “thear” sounds very different from the /ðeɪɹ/ of “their,” they’re,” and “there.”
@@tfan2222 They may sound different in isolation, but since they occur in unstressed environments, they're likely to be levelled when reduced. Notice how this happens with "we're" and "were".
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well. I'm from the American Midwest.
Wow! Why did I find your channel at night? I need to sleep but I want to listen to this such perfect topic. I would listen to these stuff for hours. Thank you for the videos. Perfect!
It's an interesting thought experiment. I tried something similar a while back, though the vowels were much more reduced and it included final unstressed /m/ becoming /n/ and þ- being extended to the se/seo forms as happened in late Old English. I ended up with: ///// | Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Pl. Nom. | the - the - that - the Acc. | then - the - that - the Gen. | thess - ther - thess - ther Dat. | then - ther - then - then
@@2712animefreak Yep, it's actually a closer match to the old Dutch system used in the early 1900s, because of some similar changes between English and other West Germanic languages. If I wanted to be a bit less conservative on keeping all the cases, I could have realistically added how unstressed English -en was reduced even further. It leads it to collapsing into a system very similar to the modern Dutch or some Low Saxon ones.
Don't keep second guessing yourself dude. This is great content! I grew up speaking English, but lived in Germany for a while in my late teens and it was such a headfuck suddenly having three different articles as well as dative and accusative. I got there in the end, but interestingly common German people don't seem to be too concerned about using the correct gender in normal everyday communication, it's far more important to write it correctly. Lots of people have adopted using just "d" with a shwar sound for "die, der, das" and "num" instead of "eine, einen, einer, einem" although the dative "eines" seems it be an exception. Could be different in other areas of the cournty this is just from the region I used to live in.
I really like the forms you arrived at, and the example sentences feel surprisingly familiar and natural. I wonder if some of these spellings would have been modeled after their reduced forms, especially see->se (like modern the). And I could see unstressed thome spelled as them, or thone as then. Cool idea!
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case. *) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
Thank you for another really interesting and fun video, Simon. I have one loosely related question: Generally, the personal pronouns of the third person "they, them, their" are attributed to be of wholly Scandinavian origin. I just read a text by a guy who said that this isn't necessarily the case and that these forms are actually remnants of the old English plural forms of the articles, "they" corresponding to OE "tha" (sorry, can't do the thorn), "them" being the dative plural form "tham" and "their" being the modern form of "thara". He backs this up by proving that similar forms were in use as personal pronouns before the Norse invasions and can be traced back to OE times. He doesn't deny that the emergence of these forms as the dominant forms was probably strongly influenced by Old Norse and that the process was facilitated by the many confusing forms of the old personal pronouns system that still exist in German (like "sie" meaning either "she" or "they", depending on the context). Also (and this is "original research", or my personal observation), one could argue that German has a similar workaround to avoid the confusion by using the plural articles "die" instead of "sie", "denen" instead of "ihnen" and "deren" instead of "ihres" in colloquial speech. So even the process of actual article forms taking over personal pronoun forms can be seen in other languages. I find this theory very intriguing as it would mean that more forms of the Old English article have survived, albeit probably influenced in sound by Norse. What do you think?
Just one small correction: It's not she/they that's differentiated by context but you/they. "sie geht" (she goes) != "sie gehen" (they go) == "sie gehen" (you go).
@@HenryLoenwind No, "sie" in the singular means "she" and in the plural it means "they". So your example with "gehen" is actually correct, "sie gehen" means "they go". What you mean is the polite form "Sie" (with a capital S) which indeed means "you". So German "sie" actually has three equivalents in English.
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
@@derdurstigstemann It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
I’d be interested to know why in English some adjectives and nouns which are spoken with the unvoiced end sound /s/ such as close, house advice etc, change to the sound ending /z/ when verbs. What is it about the voiced sound which makes a word feel more like an action? Where does this stem from? Maybe it’s a similar pattern with cloth/clothe too, although clothes would be an exception there.
It's an example of the fossilisation talked about in the video. The noun derives from the Old English hūs and the verb from hūsian. As Simon said in the video, fricatives were voiced in OE when they ocurred between voiced sounds (most often vowels). So the in hūsian would be pronounced as /z/. The vowels at the end of hūsian dropped off by Modern English, leaving us with house. If the OE phonological rules still applied, the fricative would be devoiced but /s/ and /z/ are both phonemes now so we don't bother devoicing it. The same thing happened with clothe, which derived from clāþian (vs cloth from clāþ).
Great video Simon! You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to write a poem (or any kind of artist literature) and take your suggestions to hiw English would today if we kept all the features they had earlier on but lost, translating it into modern English. That would be so interesting to me. What do the others think about this idea?
Man, do you have a website or something with all these thoughts and ideas written down? I think you should, as it would be an interesting collection to explore for many of us!
*1.* Why would you want a collection of interesting ideas _of a specific person,_ as opposed to a collection of interesting ideas? That's irrational. *2.* As someone whose possessions have been destroyed and thrown away by other people _many times,_ and who's been advised to throw them away on other occasions, and whose possessions have been naturally consumed by weather, worms and mold over the decades otherwise, and who's wasted a small fortune and a huge chunk of eternity trying to preserve them, I'm forced to ask you: weren't you told by everyone that hoarding is a mental disorder? If so, why are you encouraging it here? *3.* We're in the same boat. I absolutely love these ideas too. But that alone doesn't make them good, and I'm sure some professionals would dismiss them as worthless crap. And definitely such respected authorities as my mother, my cleaner, my social worker, and my psychiatrist would. So let me pass our society's wisdom to you and teach you what I was taught: *everything you value is actually rubbish.*
This was really interesting. I wonder if "that" would merge with the modern "that" and if "see" would adopt a "th-" based on all the other articles having "th-"
Interesting. Gender and cases probably didn't disappear in one go, so it would be interesting to know how it happened - what disappeared first and what was the last to go. Looking at Scandinavian, the case system was in collapse around 1500(?), but the dative didn't die so easily and several dialects still has it, and the gender system is either intact or reduced to two genders (or all gone in some Danish dialects, I believe).
You can more or less make 4 categories for how much is preserved, not counting the leftover genitive clitic: -Category 1: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Only Icelandic. -Category 2: Nominative, accusative and dative. Genitive is mostly dead. Faroese, Dalmål such as Orsamål and early Elfdalian. -Category 3: Nominative and dative. Living accusative and genitive gone. Plenty of Norwegian and some Swedish dialects follow this. -Category 4: Case system dead, except some fixed phrases and the "genitive" clitic. We've seen changes live, as for example Elfdalian went from 2 to 3 in the early 20th century, and plenty of dialects are going from 3 to 4 currently.
@@vatterholm The history of languages seems to be going only in one direction. Makes one wonder what it took for it to go in the opposite direction once and give rise to a language with such a multidimensional grammar as Proto Indo European. Were those prehistoric people even more cultured than ancient Greeks? If so, where's their science, arts, cities and literature? Nothing left beyond a few graves and chariots. Quite a mystery.
@@brexitgreens New cases emerge all the time. The language became much more complex from Proto-Norse to Old Norse by merging the articles into the words. Then even as some cases went away while going from Old Norse to modern dialecs, some have developed new cases like vocative.
@@vatterholm Thanks for bringing up those cases, I didn't know about them. So Old Norwegian had suffix declension, like non Germanic Euro languages… that's fun. I would say that an advanced grammar must be a reflection on intellectual capacity of the speaker - for the simple reason that a dull man wouldn't be capable of it. Advanced grammar seems to imply some cultivation as well, therefore science, literature and poetry. Grammar is similar to algebra: if you can inflect words and build compound sentences, you probably also can perform symbolic calculus.
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch. I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
One complicated idea I've had floating around is creating a Romlang (a Romance conlang based on Late Latin) based on a scenario where the Anglo-Saxons didn't displace the native Romano-British but assimilated with them instead, adopting Late Latin and some Brittonic words while still undergoing the same sound changes as English did in normal history. I wonder whether the resulting language would be any similar to French (as the Franks originally spoke a language somewhat similar to the Anglo-Saxons).
Though, the Romano British was a apparently small minority of people ? most people were Celtic speakers, the population is said to have been four million and had halved by the time or during significant influxes of Germanic people started The Romans were apparently, only an administrative class really, some retries from the military and some Celts who worked for them and became 'Romano British' So, maybe the scenario might work better if in an alternative time, Celtic persisted longer in what is now England ( and Scotland ) would we be looking at an English regional dialect using much more Celtic also ?
@@thumbstruck Ah yes, forgot about those, I think there are a few others of course, I think 'do' ( to do ) is from Celtic ? Where I grew up ( Norfolk ) there is an old slang for a wife or girl "mawther" ( nothing to do with Mother ! quite different pronunciation in the accent ) and it is debated about the origin of this but there is an almost same word in Irish There are theories it is even a Britannic leftover or somehow made its way into dialect a long long time ago, maybe even borrowed from the local Celtic by the Anglians, though this seems on the face of it unlikely, as surely the Brittonic Celtic then, in that area, would be closer to modern Welsh of course but not Irish, I do not know enough about it tbh I think it is plausible though, that Celts persisted for much longer and even side by side with Germanic incomers, maybe even until Norman times. Certainly the place names of the area can be connected to Celtic sometimes
Yes, please - more like this. Quite enjoyable. Imagining what could possibly be the state of the language now is fun, especially if one has had exposure to multiple languages. What that would mean given the befuddling inability of many to distinguish between their-there-they’re is an interesting idea to pursue, as well. Maybe one day you’ll address issues such as, “what causes the transmogrification of languages more: ineptitude among students, laziness, lack of effective teaching, etc.?” Thanks for all your efforts, Simon.
I am highly fascinated by what you do in these videos. I did all this in uni here in Germany some 25 years ago and I always have been really keen on historical language studies (and still I am) and I really like the way you're doing hands-on videos by playing around with linguistic theories. I wish I had had a chance to watch this when I was a student because reading about it in dusty libraries is the one thing but this is the other! You should become a teacher and do this with your students.
I REALLY want to see a fuller version, where all the pronouns and inflections and so on are phonetically modernized! I want to write a segment of the Declaration of Independence in this inflected English; I'd do it all myself, but I lack the knowledge of the finer points of the sound shifts etc.
Dative singular survives fossilised in words like alive (OE on life), as suggested re how house (dat.) could have had a voiced z in pronunciation. One problem not mentioned is that the dat. pl. -um sometimes became -en in ME, and is preserved in names like Nokes (atten okes < at þæm acum), so case endings in -n and -m could well have fallen together in ME even if the overall system had been preserved (though words like seldom look like dat. pl. -um, I think they are re-formations from earlier -en).
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all. I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
I don‘t know if this is relevant, but do we still have remnants of adjective endings in English? For example, as in wooden door (wooden) Lenten services (Lenten) (church services during Lent) and golden pear (golden).
No, these are just the Germanic denominators of substance, meaning "made of", same in German: Gold - golden, metal - metallen (made of metal), in German, often an -r- is added: Glas - gläsern, Eisen - eisern etc. - these forms have nothing to do with grammatical endings but are more like the -y ending (fish - fishy etc.). The only remnant of adjective declension in English that I know of is the -en form of old as in "the olden days".
@@Nea1wood Yes, exactly. That's the only remnant of an adjective with fossilized case markers, if one discounts "olde" as in "the olde shoppe" and similar faux-old formations which date back to the Middle English forms and also show signs of declension, although it is not sure until when the final -e was actually pronounced and used as such.
Fascinating. In Dutch singular word ending in s sometimes change to z. So 'huis'->'huizen', or 'vaas'->'vazen'. Something similar happens with f and v. So 'beef'->'beven'. This only happens when you have this stronger sounding vowel. In Dutch there is 'a' and 'aa', or 'e' and 'ee', or 'o' and 'oo', or 'i' and 'ie'. Only if the vowel before the s or f is pronounced with the longer vowel it changes from an s to a z or an f to a v
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
I have never commented in here before Simon, but I do so enjoy your videos. This one, in particular was great fun. Thank you
Před 3 lety+1
Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs? Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
The "th" was voiced in the corresponding words in Scandinavian languages too, and later turned into "d". However, some Finnish dialects of Swedish retains the voicelessness and has "t" still to this day. So instead of "du, den, det", they have "tu, ten, tet". Or, it might the case that "th" turned into "t" and then into "d". Not quite sure there...
That was really interesting. Are you familiar with the anglish project by any chance? This seems like something that would add quite a lot to it, although it might be making things too complicated.
As for the modern pronunciation of "then", etc., my theory is that the soft th- requires less muscular effort than the hard th-, and thus the most used words (the, then, that, etc.) reduced to the easier form simply because they were used more.
I feel like se and sēo would have become the, since in our timeline the s- forms were replaced with th- forms by analogy, we see the same thing in Old German with sa becoming modern der, and others if I remember correctly
As a German, I wish English still had grammatical gender. It would make learning and speaking the language much more natural. Your derivations make a lot of sense to me and also feel quite naturally to me. In German, when we use an originally English word, it automatically gets a grammatical gender. And we do not even have to think about the gender. It just happens naturally. But besides this, unlike you say, grammatical gender has a connection to the meaning of the word. It is just the names for the three genders which are flawed. If you think about the grammatical genders as being masculine, feminine and neuter then the attribution of the gender seems totally random, of course. In my humble opinion it is quite strange to derive the names of the grammatical genders from just a tiny subset of words. More than 99 % of all words do not have a natural gender. But, at least in German, all have a grammatical gender. The words and also the attribution of grammtical genders are not wrong, however the categories you group them in are. So, in my mind, we should use different categories and if you look closely there are more logical ones. To find them we have to go quite far back in time. We should probably start from Indo-European. In the beginning Indo-European did not have grammatical genders. But it had a way to show whether a word was the subject or the object of a sentence. If it was the subject or agent of a sentence, it got the ending -s. If it was an object or the recipient of an action, it got the ending -m. These words belong to the category, which has been called masculine gender since roughly 2000 years. But there where also words which just could not perform an action. These are things, objects or products. Those words never got the -s ending but always had the -m ending in the nominative case. Later they also could be the subject of sentence, but they kept the m-ending. Those words belong to the neuter gender. The denote outcomes of an action or abstractions with meaning for an individual case. These words also could come in more than one entity. Their plural ending was -a. Over the time this ending developed in a kind of collective plural. The words started to be used as if they were singular words but with a kind of plural meaning. As a plural word the focus is on the individual elements of an amount but used as a singular word the focus is more on the amount in its entirety. This is what developed into the category which is called feminine gender. But actually the meaning of the words contains usually an abstraction with a general meaning. So we ended up having words ending in -s, -m and -a in the nominative singular case. And these are the three categories. The s-words have no special connotation and have something you could call the standard genus. Maybe indefinite gender would be a porper name. The m-words are results of an action, products or abstractions with meaning for an individual case. Neuter gender still fits. And then we have the a-words which are abstractions with a general meaning, so we could call it probably the abstract gender. In Latin you can see all those mechanisms quite easily: - s-word: animus = mind - a-word: anima -> abstraction of mind = soul But why did females end up as a-words? The Indo-European languages are quite patriarchalic. All denotations for females have been derived by abstractions from s- or m-words. Sometimes it is obvious (e.g. dominus - domina) but sometimes it not so obvious for us anymore today. Some obscure derivations come from body parts (e.g. femen - femina). In German those endings got lost over time but the mechanisms still work until today: der Fahrer (driver) - das Fahren (driving) - die Fahrt (a drive or a ride). And as you can see it works in English as well. Sorry for the really long comment.
@@AntonyMBenedict the weirdest thing is how "der" is masculine nominative, feminine dative, feminine genitive, and plural genitive. also "den" is masculine accusative and plural dative for some reason and the "ein/einer/etc." doesn't even line up with the definite articles, which is even weirder i'm nowhere near that stage of learning german (i only just started, i wouldn't even call myself a "german learner" because of how recently i just started) but honestly i'm hoping that the shock will kind of help me remember all the stuff in a weird way
@@AntonyMBenedict youre seeing it using the english sense of gender in latin genus meant kind basically the same with bantu noun classification etc african areal language
@@KishinAubreyIts just a coincidence that some articles are duplicated, whether by sound change causing two different sounding words to suddenly sound the exact same or just by dumb luck that they ended up sounding the same.
7:20 I was thinking they'd all end up with a schwa but you were faster 😀 The Great Vowel Shift seems to have mostly affected stressed vowels, while most unstressed service words tend to reduce to a mere [ə]. As for the [θ] to [ð] shift, I think this also resulted from "weakening". Unstressed syllables tend to cause lenition.
Comparison to Swedish personal pronouns: see / *thone* / tho - den (Common gender singular nominative / oblique) *thas* / thier - dess (Common/neuter plural genitive) *that* / thome - det (Neuter nominative / oblique) *tho* / thier - de (Plural nominative) tho / *thome* - dem (Plural oblique) *thore* - deras (Plural genitive) Oblique is essentially the accusative and dative combined. Similarly the common gender is the masculine and feminine genders combined.
Hey Simon, I loved the video! It's a really cool topic and I hope you do more English evolution hypotheticals in the future. I was just wondering, though, should "thas" and "that" be transcribed as /ðas/ and /ðat/, though? Shouldn't it be /ðæs/ and /ðæt/?
Good question! I'm using Geoff Lindsey's guidelines for phonemic transcription because they align better with my own accent - I have [a] for the 'trap' vowel. In General American and some UK accents, it would indeed be [æ] :)
@@simonroper9218 Ah, okay, I think I see. I think my issue was that I was thinking of it as the /æ/ vowel rather than the 'trap' vowel, but that just goes to show you we have lexical sets for a reason. I'll have to read a little more on Geoff Lindsey. Either way, thanks for explaining, and I look forward to the next video.
wondering if the "s" in "thaes" would become a "z" sound, in the same way the dental fricatives voiced. I'm just thinking about the modern pronunciation of a common word like "is," though I don't know when the "s" in "is" actually got voiced.
If anything, the hypothetical reduced forms show just why the cases/genders collapsed, especially in the context of having to use a pidgin with Old Norse.
Nice to see a new video of yours. Thank the Cosmos that gender and case have (almost completely) disappeared from English! Interesting experiment, though. Thanks!
Interesting video! It actually made me very glad that English lost grammatical gender and almost all its case forms-they've never been missed, as far as I can tell.
This is a fun idea. I’d be happy to see more videos entertaining alternate histories of English
me too!
Tonal English
Absolutely!
@@user-ou1ff6fg6c no please no the language is bad enough
@@yerdasellsavon9232 I think it's a good mix of utilitarian and romantic.
As a native speaker of a language with grammatical gender, seven cases, paucal and many other oddities, but no articles (Croatian), I found this most fascinating.
Same as for polish person. It seems for me like the slavic's part of languages but simplified a lot :D (we conjugate every naun like that becouse we don't have articles and we have 7 cases not 4). With that english speaker can maybe understand what is the hard part of any slavic language to learn.
@@tymekmarciniak3093 Slovene here, we have one less case than you but with the added bonus of dual grammatical number to really make it hard for new learners (I see no other reason for it).
Hello, Indo-European fossils 😄. It's always awesome to meet someone who does not be in the one true timeline (not hese one offenly).
@@brexitgreens If grammatical gender was good enough for Julius Caesar, it is good enough for us :o)
It is rare that a language receives so many "layers" from various invaders and conquerors, while retaining some of the original substrate, and still be called the same language, as English. No worries, English has enough quirks as it is...
@@brexitgreens Wtf is your about page.
It's amazing how similar they are to the declensions of der, die, das in German. I'd love to see one more about grammatical case specifically, maybe even leaving the Instrumental in place since it's just hypothesis.
I took a whole year of Old English when I was in grad school, and today is the first time I ever heard that there was an instrumental in Old English.
It was only distinguishable from the dative for masculine and neuter singular.of strong adjectives and demonstratives
@@bigscarysteve
By the time consistent, written, records of Old English were being made, it was already falling out of use.
Not really amazing at all, since Old English comes from Anglo-Frisian (Ingvaeonic) dialects of West Germanic. en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Sea_Germanic
Der Werwolf, den Wenwolf, dem Wemwolf, des Wesswolfes: old german joke.
In the NE of Scotland they still say thon cat.
Yes, doric language
@Sophie McCook how are those related exactly? I don't know of any development in English changing y to th or vice versa, except when confusing the þorn glyph with y.
@@weirdlanguageguy it could in theory be related to spelling influencing pronunciation actually.
But "thon" is actually related to yon (since it comes from the+yon)
@@noamto oh, interesting
Scots is still a Germanic language for the most part (with some Goidelic influences)- first time I read Beowulf a lot of it actually made sense lmao
I’d really like to see a video discussing a possible evolution of Old English had the Normans not defeated Harold at Hastings, thereby removing the French elements introduced by the Normans and their French kin. Not only grammatically, but vocabulary and sounds wise too. It would be a fun idea to delve into.
I think, minus the Conquest, English would be much more like Dutch.
There's a book called "how we'd talk if the English won in 1066" it's a good start
People are working on such a hypothetical language - it's called Anglish. The project is detailed on the Anglish Moot wiki, if you're interested :)
@@stevekaczynski3793 ouch 😅
@@ludiprice The problem with these "Anglish" hypotheticals is that they assume that there would be *no* French influence on English without the Norman Conquest, which isn't realistic given that basically every European language adopted French loanwords over the centuries. There would be fewer, for sure, but still some.
Brilliant! Perhaps unexpectedly to the layman, some of your hypothetical derivations were actually present in official Dutch until 1951 and still are in German.
I picked up German as a child partly from hearing my grandparents, whose parents immigrated at the end of the 19th century. So, I often have used the old dative plural -e ending, and I have gotten some strange looks.
Well, German retains the same genitive case ending (for masculine and neuter "strong" nouns) that became the possessive form in English and... I can't remember any other similarities with German. The "weak" declension's ending -en in indirect cases has nothing to do with the theoretical English -en, the article forms are different as well (der, das, die, des, dem, den), there's also the ending -e in dative, but it's dated.
@@zoria2718 I saw it most strongly in those final sentence examples:
thome < dem
thone < den
thore < deren
thier < der (wbl dativ)
@@jasmadams Do use the genitive case when speaking German please, we need to preserve it
@@user-mb4ux7xv4j I haven’t lived in Germany for about 20 years. Are ppl in Europe not using it? What do they do instead, say “von ___,” like they’re French?!
I once did the same thing for Spanish, working out what the noun declension would look like if the Latin case had survived, but after applying the actual sound changes. Spoiler: you could really see why the case system was lost, the resulting paradigms were a mess
Do you have any examples?
@@riversnake6548 Le palabre en lis frasios estíos lengüe castellane teórique serían extrañe y nosotri encontraríamos lo españolo muy dificiliore habladu, gramática algo similare li alemano.
@@Correctrix wow, estoy contento que dejamos caer terminaciones de casos 🤣
@@riversnake6548 Podíamos mantener la tría génera también -masculino, femenino y neutro- y decir «unos homo, do hombres; una mujer, due mujeres; uno animal, do animaja». Se freiría uno huevo o do hueva. Se visitaría uno museo o do musea.
@@Correctrix oddly enough italian retained what sounds like a masculine / feminine alternance in eggs (uovo masc. sing - uova fem. plur) although it was really a neuter noun II declension in latin.
I'd wish you good luck on your dissertation, Simon, but something tells me that you don't need luck. I have every reason to think that congratulations are in order!
Yes, please do more hypothetical videos, I find this sort of thing EXTREMELY fun, as I'm also a fan of Alternate History stories, this is pretty much a linguistic version, and I love it. Great vid as always!
Interesting that we 'almost' ended up with There, They're, Their and Thier in English
I was thinking about all the extra homophones too, and I wonder if other words might have moved out of the way for the sake of clarity, maybe relying on synonyms or something. I mean, /ðər/ can only mean so many things before something breaks.
@@aronocThree years late, but…that feels like a very dialectal issue? For me, and most dialects of English, the /ðiːɹ/ of “thear” sounds very different from the /ðeɪɹ/ of “their,” they’re,” and “there.”
@@tfan2222 They may sound different in isolation, but since they occur in unstressed environments, they're likely to be levelled when reduced. Notice how this happens with "we're" and "were".
It's interesting that you proposed an example using "house" with a fossilized "z" sound. In my dialect, at any rate, in the plural, "houses" has two "z" sounds--not what one would expect if the phonological rules of English were applied consistently. However, I remember being in a linguistics class where about half the students pronounced "houses" with an "s" sound in the root and a "z" sound in the suffix (a consistent application of the English rule). The professor had to take a good chunk of time to draw up a rule to explain one and then another rule to produce the other.
This is interesting and made me think of how I pronounce "house" and "houses". I pronounce the "s" in "house" as a standard "s". The last "s" in "houses" I pronounce as a definite "z". I took some time to randomly say houses throughout the day so I could get a better handle on the first "s". I do pronounce it as a "z" as well.
I'm from the American Midwest.
I've never noticed this before but I do, too.
Wow! Why did I find your channel at night? I need to sleep but I want to listen to this such perfect topic. I would listen to these stuff for hours. Thank you for the videos. Perfect!
It's an interesting thought experiment. I tried something similar a while back, though the vowels were much more reduced and it included final unstressed /m/ becoming /n/ and þ- being extended to the se/seo forms as happened in late Old English. I ended up with:
///// | Masc. | Fem. | Neut. | Pl.
Nom. | the - the - that - the
Acc. | then - the - that - the
Gen. | thess - ther - thess - ther
Dat. | then - ther - then - then
This is almost identical to German.
@@2712animefreak Yep, it's actually a closer match to the old Dutch system used in the early 1900s, because of some similar changes between English and other West Germanic languages. If I wanted to be a bit less conservative on keeping all the cases, I could have realistically added how unstressed English -en was reduced even further. It leads it to collapsing into a system very similar to the modern Dutch or some Low Saxon ones.
A really interesting hypothetical, but also a helpful tutorial for Old English grammatical gender!
Don't keep second guessing yourself dude. This is great content! I grew up speaking English, but lived in Germany for a while in my late teens and it was such a headfuck suddenly having three different articles as well as dative and accusative. I got there in the end, but interestingly common German people don't seem to be too concerned about using the correct gender in normal everyday communication, it's far more important to write it correctly. Lots of people have adopted using just "d" with a shwar sound for "die, der, das" and "num" instead of "eine, einen, einer, einem" although the dative "eines" seems it be an exception. Could be different in other areas of the cournty this is just from the region I used to live in.
Interesting, I think this definitely differs by dialect.
I really like the forms you arrived at, and the example sentences feel surprisingly familiar and natural. I wonder if some of these spellings would have been modeled after their reduced forms, especially see->se (like modern the). And I could see unstressed thome spelled as them, or thone as then. Cool idea!
Whenever I watch your videos I feel like I've literally travelled back in time a thousand years
How you could you think this wouldn't be popular? More like this, please!
For me as a German, this is interesting to watch as German still works almost* exactly the way Old English used to, and so in passing, Simon has done a good job of explaining why it is much harder for native speakers of English to learn German than vice versa. Germans just have to learn that, for example, "der", "die" and "das" (the article's nominative form for masculine, feminine and neutral nouns, respectively) as well as "den" (accusative form for masc. nouns) all translate to "the", whereas native speakers of English who want to learn German have to learn where to translate their own "the" into one of these four forms - and that is before you even start adapting the nouns themselves to whether they are a) feminine, masculine or neutral, and b) in the nominative, genitive, accusative or dative case.
*) Almost, because some distinctions have disappeared in German too. For example, Simon's hypothetical sentence [at 10:42] "The door thore house are all wooden" would nowadays read "Die Türen [pl. of Tür = door] der Häuser [pl. of Haus = house] sind alle aus Holz", with the "der" = "thore" = "of the [i.e. genitive plural]" employed here being identical to "der" = "the [nominative plural]" nowadays. But you only have to go back to pre-1750 German to find that in those days the article for genitive plural [i.e. the equivalent of thore] would still have been "derer", and thus still distinct from nominative plural which was "der" then.
Really enjoyed this one! Please do more hypotheticals.
An an English language teacher I'm so thankful I don't have to deal with grammatical case. I learned German at university and they taught it hopelessly. Some of us "got" it, many didn't and were still just blindly following rules after three years. (For me it only clicked in a lightbulb moment when I connected it to the case relics in our pronominal system and that took 6 months.)
I think cases are just something that comes with practice, you have to get them carved into your brain. I've been learning and speaking Russian for 15 years, and it's only really in the past 5 years where I can get a phrase off in the right case without thinking about it
Well, I'm a native speaker of a language that has 7 cases (Polish). Yet despite that, the case system in German, together with its genders utterly prevented me from making any progress during 12 years of learning. In contrast, English proved WAY easier simply because it lacks case system and genders (or at most only some vestigial forms, like she-her).
this video answered a question I had since about 2008, thank you very much!
What was the question you had?
@@Leofwine ... The title of the video
@@xmvziron yeah, pretty much
Thank you for another really interesting and fun video, Simon. I have one loosely related question: Generally, the personal pronouns of the third person "they, them, their" are attributed to be of wholly Scandinavian origin. I just read a text by a guy who said that this isn't necessarily the case and that these forms are actually remnants of the old English plural forms of the articles, "they" corresponding to OE "tha" (sorry, can't do the thorn), "them" being the dative plural form "tham" and "their" being the modern form of "thara". He backs this up by proving that similar forms were in use as personal pronouns before the Norse invasions and can be traced back to OE times.
He doesn't deny that the emergence of these forms as the dominant forms was probably strongly influenced by Old Norse and that the process was facilitated by the many confusing forms of the old personal pronouns system that still exist in German (like "sie" meaning either "she" or "they", depending on the context). Also (and this is "original research", or my personal observation), one could argue that German has a similar workaround to avoid the confusion by using the plural articles "die" instead of "sie", "denen" instead of "ihnen" and "deren" instead of "ihres" in colloquial speech. So even the process of actual article forms taking over personal pronoun forms can be seen in other languages.
I find this theory very intriguing as it would mean that more forms of the Old English article have survived, albeit probably influenced in sound by Norse. What do you think?
Just one small correction: It's not she/they that's differentiated by context but you/they. "sie geht" (she goes) != "sie gehen" (they go) == "sie gehen" (you go).
@@HenryLoenwind No, "sie" in the singular means "she" and in the plural it means "they". So your example with "gehen" is actually correct, "sie gehen" means "they go".
What you mean is the polite form "Sie" (with a capital S) which indeed means "you". So German "sie" actually has three equivalents in English.
@@thomaseck3210 But only the you/they pair needs to be distinguished by context, the she/they pair uses grammar for it.
If you do end up continuing this sort of thing, may I suggest you take some inspiration from Frisian? I find it a bit disappointing how Anglish constructionists look more into languages like Dutch and German for inspiration when Frisian, a language that's basically a natural version of Anglish, already exists and would make for much better comparison.
I speak german and friesian, so its very good to see that here, because i see how it works
@@derdurstigstemann are you north frisian?
@@arkle519 eastfrisian, see my channel
@@derdurstigstemann It is an honour. Frisians are pretty scarce, especially more so on the internet. It's always great when you come across one, and you're East Frisian too! It's like finding gold in a copper mine. I'll definitely check out your stuff.
@@arkle519 very well said. thank you so much. it is a very rich cultural heritage.
Could you do a video about how romance languages like Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, French would look like if they had preserved Latin cases?
Nice
Also how French would look like If it had preserved the neuter gender like German
I'd just like to briefly chime in on the prospect of more hypotheticals: Yes, please, that was extremely fun!
I’d be interested to know why in English some adjectives and nouns which are spoken with the unvoiced end sound /s/ such as close, house advice etc, change to the sound ending /z/ when verbs. What is it about the voiced sound which makes a word feel more like an action? Where does this stem from? Maybe it’s a similar pattern with cloth/clothe too, although clothes would be an exception there.
In Old English, the voiced versions only occurred between vowels. Many of those vowels have since disappeared but left the consonant voicing behind.
Those esses were largely intervocalic in verbs. Even now, we add -es and -ing. Previously, -est, -eth, -èd and -en.
It's an example of the fossilisation talked about in the video. The noun derives from the Old English hūs and the verb from hūsian. As Simon said in the video, fricatives were voiced in OE when they ocurred between voiced sounds (most often vowels). So the in hūsian would be pronounced as /z/. The vowels at the end of hūsian dropped off by Modern English, leaving us with house. If the OE phonological rules still applied, the fricative would be devoiced but /s/ and /z/ are both phonemes now so we don't bother devoicing it. The same thing happened with clothe, which derived from clāþian (vs cloth from clāþ).
I loved thone video! I would love to see more of these.
Them hypotheticals be interesting!
A habitual is weird in this sentence
Simon please do more of this! I, as a german, love this!
Really Fun watch! Hope to see more like this
I love this style of video: it applies your expertise in a way that's interesting, fun and more digestible for non-linguists. I'd love to see more!
Great video Simon! You know what I'd like to do? I'd like to write a poem (or any kind of artist literature) and take your suggestions to hiw English would today if we kept all the features they had earlier on but lost, translating it into modern English. That would be so interesting to me.
What do the others think about this idea?
Man, do you have a website or something with all these thoughts and ideas written down? I think you should, as it would be an interesting collection to explore for many of us!
*1.* Why would you want a collection of interesting ideas _of a specific person,_ as opposed to a collection of interesting ideas? That's irrational.
*2.* As someone whose possessions have been destroyed and thrown away by other people _many times,_ and who's been advised to throw them away on other occasions, and whose possessions have been naturally consumed by weather, worms and mold over the decades otherwise, and who's wasted a small fortune and a huge chunk of eternity trying to preserve them, I'm forced to ask you: weren't you told by everyone that hoarding is a mental disorder? If so, why are you encouraging it here?
*3.* We're in the same boat. I absolutely love these ideas too. But that alone doesn't make them good, and I'm sure some professionals would dismiss them as worthless crap. And definitely such respected authorities as my mother, my cleaner, my social worker, and my psychiatrist would. So let me pass our society's wisdom to you and teach you what I was taught: *everything you value is actually rubbish.*
@@brexitgreens just stop
@@brexitgreens ...
@@MohammedAli-hl4mr I'm glad somebody still reads it. That CZcams comment is my only legacy.
Great stuff Simon and best of luck with the audition for the reboot of Catweazel!
This was really interesting. I wonder if "that" would merge with the modern "that" and if "see" would adopt a "th-" based on all the other articles having "th-"
I find Simon's talks on historical linguistics fascinating.
Interesting. Gender and cases probably didn't disappear in one go, so it would be interesting to know how it happened - what disappeared first and what was the last to go.
Looking at Scandinavian, the case system was in collapse around 1500(?), but the dative didn't die so easily and several dialects still has it, and the gender system is either intact or reduced to two genders (or all gone in some Danish dialects, I believe).
You can more or less make 4 categories for how much is preserved, not counting the leftover genitive clitic:
-Category 1: Nominative, accusative, dative and genitive. Only Icelandic.
-Category 2: Nominative, accusative and dative. Genitive is mostly dead. Faroese, Dalmål such as Orsamål and early Elfdalian.
-Category 3: Nominative and dative. Living accusative and genitive gone. Plenty of Norwegian and some Swedish dialects follow this.
-Category 4: Case system dead, except some fixed phrases and the "genitive" clitic.
We've seen changes live, as for example Elfdalian went from 2 to 3 in the early 20th century, and plenty of dialects are going from 3 to 4 currently.
@@vatterholm The history of languages seems to be going only in one direction. Makes one wonder what it took for it to go in the opposite direction once and give rise to a language with such a multidimensional grammar as Proto Indo European. Were those prehistoric people even more cultured than ancient Greeks? If so, where's their science, arts, cities and literature? Nothing left beyond a few graves and chariots. Quite a mystery.
@@brexitgreens New cases emerge all the time. The language became much more complex from Proto-Norse to Old Norse by merging the articles into the words. Then even as some cases went away while going from Old Norse to modern dialecs, some have developed new cases like vocative.
@@brexitgreens Doesn't have anything to do with how "cultured" a people is.
@@vatterholm Thanks for bringing up those cases, I didn't know about them. So Old Norwegian had suffix declension, like non Germanic Euro languages… that's fun. I would say that an advanced grammar must be a reflection on intellectual capacity of the speaker - for the simple reason that a dull man wouldn't be capable of it. Advanced grammar seems to imply some cultivation as well, therefore science, literature and poetry. Grammar is similar to algebra: if you can inflect words and build compound sentences, you probably also can perform symbolic calculus.
I’ve been waiting for a while for someone to make a video on this
I find your explanation of the s/z very interesting. In Dutch the distinction between s/z in the word for house (huis) still exists; the plural is huizen and a fossilised dative huize is found in some expressions. However because it only happens in some words, not in others, we interpret it differently: as final consonant devoicing because words can't end in voiced consonants in Dutch.
I initially thought this was a Dutch invention because the 'z' in such words only appears in spelling in Dutch and Frisian; however I just realise it is present in German as well where -s becomes pronounced as /z/ if you attach an ending while -ss stays /s/.
I'd seen it in spelling in Dutch, but wasn't confident enough that I understood the Dutch system to mention it here! I think allophonic voicing of fricatives has historically been fairly widespread in Germanic languages. The same applies in some modern English plurals, where 'house' has /s/ and 'houses' has /z/.
*Video starts*
Michael Rosen: noice
Another fine job, Simon. This is very interesting work and you are to be encouraged in continuing. Best of luck with your dissertation!
One complicated idea I've had floating around is creating a Romlang (a Romance conlang based on Late Latin) based on a scenario where the Anglo-Saxons didn't displace the native Romano-British but assimilated with them instead, adopting Late Latin and some Brittonic words while still undergoing the same sound changes as English did in normal history. I wonder whether the resulting language would be any similar to French (as the Franks originally spoke a language somewhat similar to the Anglo-Saxons).
Though, the Romano British was a apparently small minority of people ? most people were Celtic speakers, the population is said to have been four million and had halved by the time or during significant influxes of Germanic people started
The Romans were apparently, only an administrative class really, some retries from the military and some Celts who worked for them and became 'Romano British'
So, maybe the scenario might work better if in an alternative time, Celtic persisted longer in what is now England ( and Scotland ) would we be looking at an English regional dialect using much more Celtic also ?
@@junctionfilms6348 Interesting. English adopted "mom" or "mum" and "dad" or "da" from Celtic.
@@thumbstruck Ah yes, forgot about those, I think there are a few others of course, I think 'do' ( to do ) is from Celtic ?
Where I grew up ( Norfolk ) there is an old slang for a wife or girl "mawther" ( nothing to do with Mother ! quite different pronunciation in the accent ) and it is debated about the origin of this but there is an almost same word in Irish
There are theories it is even a Britannic leftover or somehow made its way into dialect a long long time ago, maybe even borrowed from the local Celtic by the Anglians, though this seems on the face of it unlikely, as surely the Brittonic Celtic then, in that area, would be closer to modern Welsh of course but not Irish, I do not know enough about it tbh
I think it is plausible though, that Celts persisted for much longer and even side by side with Germanic incomers, maybe even until Norman times. Certainly the place names of the area can be connected to Celtic sometimes
There's already Il Bethisad which has a fantasy British Romance; though they just made it to feel like actual Welsh.
@@DY142 Though, Welsh is a Brittonic Celtic language, not Latin
Fascinating. Do you have a video which explains how and why English lost its grammatical gender? Thanks
Yes, please - more like this. Quite enjoyable. Imagining what could possibly be the state of the language now is fun, especially if one has had exposure to multiple languages. What that would mean given the befuddling inability of many to distinguish between their-there-they’re is an interesting idea to pursue, as well. Maybe one day you’ll address issues such as, “what causes the transmogrification of languages more: ineptitude among students, laziness, lack of effective teaching, etc.?” Thanks for all your efforts, Simon.
I am highly fascinated by what you do in these videos. I did all this in uni here in Germany some 25 years ago and I always have been really keen on historical language studies (and still I am) and I really like the way you're doing hands-on videos by playing around with linguistic theories. I wish I had had a chance to watch this when I was a student because reading about it in dusty libraries is the one thing but this is the other! You should become a teacher and do this with your students.
I REALLY want to see a fuller version, where all the pronouns and inflections and so on are phonetically modernized! I want to write a segment of the Declaration of Independence in this inflected English; I'd do it all myself, but I lack the knowledge of the finer points of the sound shifts etc.
You need to do a video about extinct letters and phonetic symbols. Thorn and eth were so cool. The crossed d is awesome too
This was great. More please.
Dative singular survives fossilised in words like alive (OE on life), as suggested re how house (dat.) could have had a voiced z in pronunciation.
One problem not mentioned is that the dat. pl. -um sometimes became -en in ME, and is preserved in names like Nokes (atten okes < at þæm acum), so case endings in -n and -m could well have fallen together in ME even if the overall system had been preserved (though words like seldom look like dat. pl. -um, I think they are re-formations from earlier -en).
Very interesting, I hope you do more like this!
A curious discovery I've found in Middle English is that from all the texts I've read - ranging from early 13th anchoritic texts, the Katherine Group, the Matter of England texts to Langland, Chaucer and beyond, I've never seen the word 'second' used. It has always been first, 'next', third, fourth and so on. This is particularly the case in 'Ayenbite of Inwit', which takes taxonomy to the extreme in its classification of vices and virtues. I wonder when 'second' came in to usage.
This is a lot of fun! Very happy to see Geoff Lindsey's SSBE transcription here, I'm a proponent of using it more widely
I think it would alleviate a lot of errors that get made in IPA transcriptions because people have been taught that '[æ] is the vowel in 'cat'' and so on, when those things don't apply in their dialect! It's a really nice piece of work :)
@@simonroper9218 Totally agree. Geoff's article cleared up a lot of things for me. I'd always had a bee in my bonnet about using lax vowel symbols in diphthong transcriptions. I never got a satisfactory answer to why e.g. PRICE should be transcribed /aɪ/, and not /aj/ (when to me, that's clearly a more accurate description!). Realising that /aɪ/ *was* accurate for a true RP speaker made sense of it all.
I also love how satisfyingly tabular the SSBE vowels are. *chef's kiss*
I had to comment because your username is my real life actual name and it was very jarring to see
@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh Whoa, how weird! I thought I'd made it up, never guessed it might be somebody's actual name. I've used it for about ten years in a few different places. I hope you don't mind! Out of curiosity, is it just your first name or is it your full name?
I don‘t know if this is relevant, but do we still have remnants of adjective endings in English? For example, as in wooden door (wooden) Lenten services (Lenten) (church services during Lent) and golden pear (golden).
yes
never thought about that
No, these are just the Germanic denominators of substance, meaning "made of", same in German: Gold - golden, metal - metallen (made of metal), in German, often an -r- is added: Glas - gläsern, Eisen - eisern etc. - these forms have nothing to do with grammatical endings but are more like the -y ending (fish - fishy etc.).
The only remnant of adjective declension in English that I know of is the -en form of old as in "the olden days".
@@thomaseck3210 but what about 'in the olden days'? "Old' is already an adjective, so could this not be a fossilised dative plural?
@@Nea1wood Yes, exactly. That's the only remnant of an adjective with fossilized case markers, if one discounts "olde" as in "the olde shoppe" and similar faux-old formations which date back to the Middle English forms and also show signs of declension, although it is not sure until when the final -e was actually pronounced and used as such.
This is really cool. Be neat if this was expanded to all noun, verb and adjective classes. Really curious to see the result.
Thanks for all of the amazing videos
Very entertaining, very interesting, and very educational. What a great video!
Fantastic videos, by the way. As a fellow linguist, I think your assessment is quite accurate.
Fascinating. In Dutch singular word ending in s sometimes change to z. So 'huis'->'huizen', or 'vaas'->'vazen'. Something similar happens with f and v. So 'beef'->'beven'.
This only happens when you have this stronger sounding vowel. In Dutch there is 'a' and 'aa', or 'e' and 'ee', or 'o' and 'oo', or 'i' and 'ie'. Only if the vowel before the s or f is pronounced with the longer vowel it changes from an s to a z or an f to a v
Thanks for the podcast shoutout! It was great to have you on. Also great topic for a video, thank god English isn't gendered or otherwise learning that would've been worse than French class...
Thanks for having me on! And it certainly wouldn't help the poor L2 learners!
Crazy to me that it’s still so understandable
I want MORE videos that are linguistics filled!
I have never commented in here before Simon, but I do so enjoy your videos. This one, in particular was great fun. Thank you
Love the idea of these hypothetical videos! Next time, you could mention how the declension of adjectives would have been affected - if they would have survived the extensive sound changes at all. Or maybe, you could compare contemporary German (or perhaps even the archaic Dutch) declension patterns with the hypothetical end result in Modern English. I'm also curious how the Old English verb conjugation system would be preserved in a similar way - perhaps English would still use the subjunctive mood or have more strong/"irregular" verbs?
Coincidentally, I was also thinking about the same thing about a year ago. I was attempting to bring these old articles to the modern language, applying the sound changes (at least the ones I could find on Wikipedia, which isn't quite ideal for such experiments), but it was nowhere near as scientifically accurate - though, admittedly, that wasn't my primary goal. Back then, for the dative plural form of the definite article, I was playing with the idea that the original form "thome" would potentially be replaced by "them", the 3rd person plural objective pronoun. My reasoning was that 1) the pronoun "they" almost universally displaced the Old English counterparts, so they would be prevalent in everyday use; 2) articles and pronouns tend to be related to each other; and 3) the phonetic similarities seemed too strong to ignore.
The shortening of 'that' to 'tha' must be an England thing; here in the States that is always that, it is never shortened.
'In thome house' mirrors perfectly German 'in dem Haus' :)
The "th" was voiced in the corresponding words in Scandinavian languages too, and later turned into "d". However, some Finnish dialects of Swedish retains the voicelessness and has "t" still to this day. So instead of "du, den, det", they have "tu, ten, tet". Or, it might the case that "th" turned into "t" and then into "d". Not quite sure there...
That was really interesting. Are you familiar with the anglish project by any chance? This seems like something that would add quite a lot to it, although it might be making things too complicated.
As for the modern pronunciation of "then", etc., my theory is that the soft th- requires less muscular effort than the hard th-, and thus the most used words (the, then, that, etc.) reduced to the easier form simply because they were used more.
I feel like se and sēo would have become the, since in our timeline the s- forms were replaced with th- forms by analogy, we see the same thing in Old German with sa becoming modern der, and others if I remember correctly
This was delightful, like the language in an old tale.
An amazing hypothetical, super explanation. Love this content
I really enjoy your content a lot, and it’s probably my favourite videos to watch on youtube.
Great video. As others have been saying, it might be interesting to see you make a video on how you feel about Anglish.
As a German, I wish English still had grammatical gender. It would make learning and speaking the language much more natural. Your derivations make a lot of sense to me and also feel quite naturally to me. In German, when we use an originally English word, it automatically gets a grammatical gender. And we do not even have to think about the gender. It just happens naturally.
But besides this, unlike you say, grammatical gender has a connection to the meaning of the word. It is just the names for the three genders which are flawed. If you think about the grammatical genders as being masculine, feminine and neuter then the attribution of the gender seems totally random, of course. In my humble opinion it is quite strange to derive the names of the grammatical genders from just a tiny subset of words. More than 99 % of all words do not have a natural gender. But, at least in German, all have a grammatical gender. The words and also the attribution of grammtical genders are not wrong, however the categories you group them in are.
So, in my mind, we should use different categories and if you look closely there are more logical ones. To find them we have to go quite far back in time. We should probably start from Indo-European.
In the beginning Indo-European did not have grammatical genders. But it had a way to show whether a word was the subject or the object of a sentence. If it was the subject or agent of a sentence, it got the ending -s. If it was an object or the recipient of an action, it got the ending -m. These words belong to the category, which has been called masculine gender since roughly 2000 years.
But there where also words which just could not perform an action. These are things, objects or products. Those words never got the -s ending but always had the -m ending in the nominative case. Later they also could be the subject of sentence, but they kept the m-ending. Those words belong to the neuter gender. The denote outcomes of an action or abstractions with meaning for an individual case.
These words also could come in more than one entity. Their plural ending was -a. Over the time this ending developed in a kind of collective plural. The words started to be used as if they were singular words but with a kind of plural meaning. As a plural word the focus is on the individual elements of an amount but used as a singular word the focus is more on the amount in its entirety. This is what developed into the category which is called feminine gender. But actually the meaning of the words contains usually an abstraction with a general meaning.
So we ended up having words ending in -s, -m and -a in the nominative singular case. And these are the three categories. The s-words have no special connotation and have something you could call the standard genus. Maybe indefinite gender would be a porper name. The m-words are results of an action, products or abstractions with meaning for an individual case. Neuter gender still fits. And then we have the a-words which are abstractions with a general meaning, so we could call it probably the abstract gender.
In Latin you can see all those mechanisms quite easily:
- s-word: animus = mind
- a-word: anima -> abstraction of mind = soul
But why did females end up as a-words? The Indo-European languages are quite patriarchalic. All denotations for females have been derived by abstractions from s- or m-words. Sometimes it is obvious (e.g. dominus - domina) but sometimes it not so obvious for us anymore today. Some obscure derivations come from body parts (e.g. femen - femina).
In German those endings got lost over time but the mechanisms still work until today: der Fahrer (driver) - das Fahren (driving) - die Fahrt (a drive or a ride). And as you can see it works in English as well.
Sorry for the really long comment.
Actually I wish the other way around. As someone learning German, how genders are determined for an object make no sense.
@@AntonyMBenedict the weirdest thing is how "der" is masculine nominative, feminine dative, feminine genitive, and plural genitive.
also "den" is masculine accusative and plural dative for some reason
and the "ein/einer/etc." doesn't even line up with the definite articles, which is even weirder
i'm nowhere near that stage of learning german (i only just started, i wouldn't even call myself a "german learner" because of how recently i just started) but honestly i'm hoping that the shock will kind of help me remember all the stuff in a weird way
@@AntonyMBenedict youre seeing it using the english sense of gender in latin genus meant kind basically the same with bantu noun classification etc african areal language
@@KishinAubreyIts just a coincidence that some articles are duplicated, whether by sound change causing two different sounding words to suddenly sound the exact same or just by dumb luck that they ended up sounding the same.
I really liked this video. It seems like a really entertaining format so I think you should make more hypotheticals.
Anglish speakers:
WRITE THAT DOWN!
7:20
I was thinking they'd all end up with a schwa but you were faster 😀
The Great Vowel Shift seems to have mostly affected stressed vowels, while most unstressed service words tend to reduce to a mere [ə].
As for the [θ] to [ð] shift, I think this also resulted from "weakening". Unstressed syllables tend to cause lenition.
I love theoretical takes on language! Good stuff 👍
Thanks Simon. Those are a lot of fun for me as a German to follow.
this is a great idea. please do more of these
Thanks for sharing your knowledge, it’s fascinating 😊
I'm really enjoying this channel.
This is so fun!!! Could this also be done for the indefinite particles? I am very interested...
And also personal pronouns!!! that would be most exciting!!!!!!
Comparison to Swedish personal pronouns:
see / *thone* / tho - den (Common gender singular nominative / oblique)
*thas* / thier - dess (Common/neuter plural genitive)
*that* / thome - det (Neuter nominative / oblique)
*tho* / thier - de (Plural nominative)
tho / *thome* - dem (Plural oblique)
*thore* - deras (Plural genitive)
Oblique is essentially the accusative and dative combined.
Similarly the common gender is the masculine and feminine genders combined.
Interesting idea. Would love to see more like this
I want you to read an audiobook, your voice is so soothing.
Another idea for a hypothetical: What if RP never happened?
Extremely interesting video. I like the hypotheticals.
Thome housem is strikingly similar to them houses.
Hey Simon, I loved the video! It's a really cool topic and I hope you do more English evolution hypotheticals in the future. I was just wondering, though, should "thas" and "that" be transcribed as /ðas/ and /ðat/, though? Shouldn't it be /ðæs/ and /ðæt/?
Good question! I'm using Geoff Lindsey's guidelines for phonemic transcription because they align better with my own accent - I have [a] for the 'trap' vowel. In General American and some UK accents, it would indeed be [æ] :)
@@simonroper9218 Ah, okay, I think I see. I think my issue was that I was thinking of it as the /æ/ vowel rather than the 'trap' vowel, but that just goes to show you we have lexical sets for a reason. I'll have to read a little more on Geoff Lindsey. Either way, thanks for explaining, and I look forward to the next video.
wondering if the "s" in "thaes" would become a "z" sound, in the same way the dental fricatives voiced. I'm just thinking about the modern pronunciation of a common word like "is," though I don't know when the "s" in "is" actually got voiced.
The wonderful thing is that in many dialects and accents, this voicing is flexible and partially based on what comes next in the sentence or phrase.
If anything, the hypothetical reduced forms show just why the cases/genders collapsed, especially in the context of having to use a pidgin with Old Norse.
I saw that Jack Adams vid. Is was very illuminating.
Nice to see a new video of yours. Thank the Cosmos that gender and case have (almost completely) disappeared from English! Interesting experiment, though. Thanks!
I want so many more example sentences 😂
Another great video, I love this!
Interesting video.
Interesting video! It actually made me very glad that English lost grammatical gender and almost all its case forms-they've never been missed, as far as I can tell.
I miss them!
@@thinking-ape6483 Haha, that's one!
*WHAT IF RP WAS BASED ON NORTHERN ENGLISH DIALECTS AS OPPOSED TO SOUTHEASTERN ONES?*