Long and Short Words: Language Typology
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- čas přidán 10. 06. 2015
- Some languages have longer words than others -- but that's not just a simple choice. There's a lot of different ways to mix up morphemes, even if they all mean the same thing in the end.
Written with GRETCHEN MCCULLOCH: gretchenmcculloch.com - / gretchenamcc
[Update: her book BECAUSE INTERNET is out July 2019! gretchenmcculloch.com/book/ ]
More from Gretchen at ALL THINGS LINGUISTIC: allthingslinguistic.com - / allthingsling
BONUS LINK: Typology illustrations! allthingslinguistic.com/post/5...
Directed by MATT GRAY: mattg.co.uk - / unnamedculprit
And more from me: tomscott.com - / tomscott
Imagine having to reach a word count for an essay in a polysynthetic language
MegaMGstudios Please write a 30 word essay.
You would either have a lower word count target or use different criteria altogether. In Russia for example it's common to use number of pages or sentences instead.
@@pafnutiytheartist Yep here In India for us it is One page or maximum 2.
@@wierdcreations nope it is not entirely, we usually have word count rather than page required essays
@@rajarshibarman334 maybe It's a regional thing but as far as my friends and family go all of them have page requirements,in english it's word limited.
My favorite Finnish word:
Juoksentelisinkohan.
Meaning: I wonder if I should run around aimlessly.
That made me laugh so hard you don't even know!
BTheHeretic In a sense of "Let me run arround aimlessly" or more like "I can do what I want, so I run arround aimlessly"? Just interested
BTheHeretic Beautiful.
MatzeGamer More in the sense "I'm a bit bored. I wonder if I should run around aimlessly to amuse myself." It's like casually wondering if it's worth the effort to run around aimlessly.
It could also imply that running around aimlessly might not be the smartest thing to do in the current situation.
Juoksentelisinkohan alasti jalkapallostadionilla.
I wonder if I should run around aimlessly naked on a football stadium.
Ehm, actually, there's also a word for "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly while naked":
Viuhahtelisinkohan
... I didn't even think of that earlier :D
BTheHeretic That looks like the Scrabble-Winner of 2015 for me. Now I just need to find out, how to pronounce that. :)
Ironic that the isolated languages are lumped together
Not isolated, isolating.
@@MatthewMcVeagh I stand corrected. Guessing I had a brain fart or didn’t notice autocorrect change it
Great pun, whichever version of isolat- you use.
Hungarian: Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért.
It means something along the lines of "because of your actions that made it so you cannot become not a saint".
There's also a similar word about not becoming a cabbage.
wait whats the other word?
@@sjskong elkelkáposztásítottalanítottátok
just for clarification, these aren't used in everyday conversation, people came up with them for the joke of having very long words
but it shows how biased the scale in the video is - Hungarian is agglutinative and yet it has words like these
Just for clarification the word about becoming a cabbage is grammatically incorrect.
@Tyrel Hansen Elkelkáposztásíthatatlanságoskodásaitokért is the word if you were wondering
sorry I can't participate, I'm on an agglutinative language-free diet
3lapsed this deserves more likes
Does that mean you cannot eat Uralic languages? Or does it not count if you're hungary?
*out*
@3lapsed Great one 👍🏻! I’ve always thought agglutinative sounded like gluten. By the way, have there been any 3lapses?
@Rob Col Great pun! Predictable, but great. 😆👍🏻
0:48 There is a spectrum, and it stretches from analytic to full Finnish
*Laughs in Inuktitut*
Ever saw German words?
Investitionsverwaltungsentwicklungsgesellschaft
@@miyuden4118 What does that mean?
@@jage1559 That means, Investment management development company.
@@miyuden4118 So not really a full sentence, huh. Viuhahtelisinkohan is a Finnish word that means "I wonder if I should run around aimlessly while naked." and it can be used as a full sentence.
In Swedish, for instance, one of the most common grammatical mistakes is called "särskrivning", or literally translated as "taken apart writing". It means that you have separated one word into multiple words, which usually change the meaning completely. Let me give you an example:
"En mörkhårig person" "A dark haired person"
*"En mörk hårig person" "A dark hairy person"
*Since two adjectives are used, they should actually be separated by a comma.
Another example:
"Herrcykel upphittad!" "Men's bike found!"
"Herr cykel upphittad!" "Mr bike found!"
Same problem in Norway!
I loled at Mr bike
why dont you use tone as vocal brackets?
If "skriv" is swedish for "write" then the vikings must have brought it to Ireland, in irish it's "scriobh" pronounced Skreeve
It's actually a Latin loan word into Proto-Germanic, and most likely originated already in Proto-Indo-European. According to Wiktionary:
Proto-Indo-European "*skreybʰ" > Latin "scrībō" > Proto-Germanic "*skrībaną" > Old Norse "skrifa" > Old Swedish "skriva"
According to Wiktionary, it was also borrowed from Latin into Old Irish "scríbaid". Edit: The conclusion is that the Romans are to blame for this one.
Ή οι ιοί ή οι υιοί.
I love that Greek phrase because it's pronounced "ee ee ee-ee ee ee ee-ee".
It means "Either the viruses or the sons".
translation: sons install viruses on computers
Well, I could argue it is actually pronounced "eeh o-ee ee-o-ee, eeh o-ee oo-ee-o-ee"...
... well, in ancient Greek, at least.
As a Greek, *_i approve_*
Reminds me of a sentence we have in Icelandic. Á á á á á á Á. It means "A sheep owns a sheep by the river in Á." The last, capital Á is the name of a place in Iceland
@@karlpoppins no youre wrong, both in modern n ancient greek its pronounced as ee ee ee ee ee ee ee ee bc when u combine the letters ο+ι u create a binocular thats pronounced as -e- so u basically have the letter ι(e) n the binocular οι(e) = ιοί (ee)
his pronunciation of hablo killed me
He apologized for it, haha
HAABLOW
It's definitely weird how he said it: /ˈhæbɫəʊ̯/ instead of /ˈäβlo̞/.
he pronounced it as /hɑbloʊ/
but it's /ablo/
Same
In Finnish we have this word "lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas" and it means "jet turbine engine auxiliary mechanic non-commissioned officer student".
We even have a word for "I wonder if even with his/her quality of not having been made unsystematized" which is "epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän".
+SilliS Remix
lentokonesuihkuturbiinimoottoriapumekaanikkoaliupseerioppilas = Strahltriebwerkunteroffiziershilfsmechanikerstudent :)
german is great too, you could stick words together as long as you want (pretty soon it gets pointless tho)
+Turun Ambartanen Oh, yeah, I also love Grundstücksverkehrsgenehmigungszuständigkeitsübertragungsverordnung.
SilliS Remix a
why
You forgot
kumarreksituteskenteleentuvaisehkollaismaisekkuudellisenneskenteluttelemattomammuuksissansakaankopahan
That doesn't even mean anything but it's a nice word
"Inconceivable" was redefined in Princess Bride: it now means what you don't think it means.
:>>
YES BEST COMMENT
This is referred to in the footnote at 0:34.
i wa sthinking of making a joke similar to this
Unconventional means of torture:
Tom’s pronunciation of “hablo”
"Tom’s" - ha ha, and this "Tom’s" is a relic of Grammar Case by Old English - the possessive case, or Genitive Case... "all sorts of things can be coded"
Spanish native speaker here. I never realized how complex Spanish was until I started to learn English. The word "hablo" that Scott mentioned is a good example. You can imply the time, the person and other things with just one word. Like these:
- Hablo: I talk
- Hablas: You talk
- Habla: He/She talks
- Hablan: They talk
- Hablamos: We talk
- Hablé: I talked
- Hablaste: You talked
- Habló: He/She talked
- Hablaron: They talked
- Hablamos: We talked
- Hablaré: I will talk
- Hablarás: You will talk
- Hablará: He/She will talk
- Hablarán: They will talk
- Hablaremos: We will talk
También:
Hablaría
Hablarías
Hablarían
Hablaríamos
Hablarían
"permítamelo", "entrégueselo",
Those are my favourite Spanish wordd
I Love the past perfect name in spanish (Pretérito pluscuamperfecto del modo indicativo)
It seems complex, but the truth is that it’s only that each verb is quite complex on its own, but all that really does is attach complexity that would be elsewhere in the sentence onto one word. In Spanish, you might say “Qué harías si todos tus amigos se desaparecieron” whereas in English you would say “what would you do...”. The same amount of complexity exists, but it’s just being relocated. Chinese doesnt change words at all, but likewise you can communicate the same thing, albeit slightly differently: “你的朋友都消失的話，你就怎麼辦？” (lit your friends all disappear (marker of possible situation), what would you do then?”
(I don’t have lots of confidence in either of my translations, correct me if they’re wrong)
@@narayana8249 The Spanish seems well translated, but I think you have to change the "desaparecieron" to "desaparecierAn" :) [subjunctive]
*"muvaffakiyetsizleştiricileştiriveremeyebileceklerimizdenmişsinizcesine"*
means
*"As though you are from those whom we may not be able to easily make into a maker of unsuccessful ones"* in turkish.
Word has 70 letters
Muvaffak-iyet-siz-leş-tir-ici-leş-tir-iver-e-me-y-ecek-ler-imiz-den-miş-siniz-cesin-ize
Here is breakdown, it was harder than I thought
Okay that thing about children is *bloody fascinating* because kids in general don't work well with *anything* being separated out, and the world is generally very interconnected for them. Internal from external, ideas from reality, senses from one another, emotional personality states etc etc etc.
English: I have warned you to not do the thing that you have just done, and thus I will not be taking any responsibilities for your actions.
Indonesian: Kan.
Pfft-
We took the shortcut~
But consider the sarcastic
- if only someone could’ve seen this happening
- if only someone warned you
- who could’ve seen this coming
- what a surprise
- *raise eyebrows aggressively*
@@thebestnarcissist5464 the " *Raises eyebrow aggressively* " one killed me-
+ tuh
Tuhkan
Perfection
i think thay could be shortened to "told you!"
Creating long and exact words is something we Germans are pretty good at.
my favorite example is the english word tank. The official German translation would be "Panzerkraftfahrzeug" or armoured engine powered vehicle"
Of cause noone says it and we just say "Panzer" for short, but well. The long version pretty much describes itself even if you have no idea what a Tank is.
Das ist was anderes. Zusammengesetzte Nomen gehören glaub ich nicht dazu was er meinte. Mehr so sachen wie un-fass-bar.
Rumi on Huh. I just learned something. I took German in high school and college, and never heard the origin of that particular word. I thought "Panzer" meant "panther", and that it was one of the classes or models of tanks. Or maybe someone had gotten really fanciful and thought a tank looked like a panther. Thanks for the lesson!
Pspaughtamus There is a german Tank called the "panther" but else those words are as connected as me and france.
Rumi on punchlines are being fired.
Pspaughtamus german tanks often have animal names like the panther and the tiger... I am however still waiting for a submarine named Squid and a plane named Pigeon
Retro we had German tanks called "maus" or mouse in English that were huge. Also there was a plan for a war machine called "ratte" or rat that could only travel via train tracks. so yeah
I would love to hear you talking about compound words, like in most Germanic languages. (I think all, except for English :D)
Example: In German you have wood (Holz) and it is really solid and hard (hart). The wood is shaped in the form of plates (Platten). But you also need to clean them sometimes with a special cleaner (Spezialreiniger). So you go to the according store (Geschäft), where you can just buy this cleaner and nothing else.
Where do you go to? To the:
Hartholzplattenspezialreingergeschäft
And trust me, everyone will undertsand what you are saying. ;)
DownFlex Does Hartholz designate that the wood is very hard, or that it is a hardwood?
I mean Hardwoodplatesspecialcleanerstore is semi-understandable in English
Rather that the wood is very hard. Hardwood is something different in german.
English also does that, it only doesn't write those words as one - it's just a manner of orthography.
What about Fussbodenschleifmaschienenverleih, or for that matter, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz?
latin being a fusional language is i think one of the reasons as to why people tend to think it’s so difficult, you have to memorize so many verb endings
Absolutely. But unlike English, it´s much more specific so you don´t have to memorize five meanings with every word. Every language has its pros and cons 🙂
@@martavdz4972 no its not, it isnt uncommon for a word to have 10 or more meanings especially if its a verb
@@martavdz4972 what are you on about? Latin is FAR less specific than English. like disgustingly, annoyingly, inconveniently, impossibly less specific. like native Latin speakers talked about having trouble writing in Latin because it wasn't specific enough.
wait til you see Polish or ancient Greek
Just a friendly reminder, H is mute in Spanish. :)
Seani Wu Correct. And "a" makes an "ah" sound, so hablo sounds like "ah blow" with the "ah" syllable stressed.
***** Although a native Spanish speaker still puts a VERY small amount of H sound in words like hablo.
LawffleCopter true
***** Actually it's more like "AH-bloh", not "AH-blow"
LawffleCopter nope, we put a kind of aspiration sound of every word starting with a vowel, the H has nothing to do with it
estonian:
sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus
meaning, "the tiredness one feels on the afternoon of the weekend birthday party”
I really felt that one
Same
sünnipäevanädalalõpupeopärastlõunaväsimus-core is now my aesthetic
"Spårvagnsaktiebolagsskensmutsskjutarefackföreningspersonalbeklädnadsmagasinsförrådsförvaltarens" (94 letters) is a word that can be used (even if someone just wrote something it is still a world). Because swedish grammar is like it is, it make it possible to write infinite length of words. It's hilarious. This one means: "[belonging to] The manager of the depot for the supply of uniforms to the personnel of the track cleaners' union of the tramway company".
Translating that word to Dutch, you get railbedrijfstramrailschoonmakersvakbondsledenuniformsaanvoerdepotmanager, just lacking the "belonging to" part.
Swedish doesn't really allow infinite words if you want to keep a meaning of it intact. But yes we can make long words that you can't cut in pieces and keep the meaning intact.
A very simple example is that "rökfritt" and "rök fritt" are like opposites.
shrdlu or herrtoalett/herr toalett
*laughs in great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent*
would it be any different if i write the english translation without space?
Ah, yes, the language morphology spectrum:
-Isolating
-Agglutinative
-Fusional
-Polysynthetic
-Ithkuil
LMNOP! Why are you in almost every language video I find?!
@@angelodc1652 hi anjeez
@@elemenopi9239
/qʰûl-lyai’svukšei’arpîptó’ks
“Being hard to believe, after allegedly trying to repeatedly inspire fear using a suspicious group of ragtag-looking clowns, despite resistance.”
1:59 "take hHæbLou in spanish"
Quite the butchering for someone that probably knows IPA
@@philiptren2792 definitely knows ipa, and made linguistics videos for ten years!
90% of comments: THaT's nOt HoW yoU pRonoUnCe HABLO
It physically hurts to hear it pronounced like that, so forgive us.
nah it's just people who speak a polysynthetic language either showing off a ridiculously long word or gatekeeping long words.
@@joahnnaibarra2282 welcome to Hearing English people butcher Spanish. You get used to it (I wouldn't have noticed it if not for the comments-)
@@commanderleo as a spanish speaking person I couldn't agree more.
You should have given examples for the other ones as well.
Would have loved to see a polysynthetic word-sentence and how it's broken down (like you did with inconceivable).
In German you can add infinite morphines so you can have words that are hundreds of letters long.
K
Luuk Achterhof But they still don't equate to whole sentences, correct? In which case it would still be compounding, rather that polysynthetic.
Luuk Achterhof I love that :3
*morphemes
In theory yes, in practice not really. The most complicated it gets are words like "Weltmeisterschaftsendspielstadion" or "Donaudampfschifffahrtskapitän" and those are rare exceptions, and rather trivial to break apart since they are mostly just nouns smashed together. I don't think I've ever seen a word in german that is actually a hundred letters long.
Tom, I just want to say that as a glossophile, I *love* these videos. I've begun sharing them with my family and friends and some of them are FINALLY starting to get why I get all starry-eyed when waxing poetic about languages and the beauty of the way they change and grow over time.
What if I suffer from agglutinative intolerance?
JustOneAsbesto Then I'm afraid a nice meal of Sauerkraut at the köftecisi is simply out of the question :(
I googled that, and the only results are this comment and a website that reuploaded this video w all the comments.
+שגיא קרמן הי! את גרה בישראל?
Jonah Safern yea
+JustOneAsbesto Impossible, how were you able to spell intolerance correctly? Impostor!
With my substantial hearing loss (40 to 60 dB at higher frequencies), before I got hearing aids I often struggled to understand speech in English and went off the rails into confusion- to the amusement of the people I spoke with. The redundancy of polysynthetic languages probably makes it easier for partially deaf people to fill in the gaps and communicate clearly despite their handicap.
One of my favourite things about studying German was the crazy long words you can make!
+WanderingRandomer Compound words is very common in most of the Germannic languages - you can do the same with any Scandinavian language too, for instance.
+WanderingRandomer English is one of the very few Germanic Languages that doesn't allow an infinite word build. In most of the Germanic Languages, you can build a word as long as you want from other words. My Personal Favorite: Donaudampfschifffahrtselektrizitätenhauptbetriebswerkbauunterbeamtengesellschaft.
+Mattsgeekyscience But even germans have problems understanding that words (proof: me )
Weil das Wort ist sehr lang. It is hilariously long. I'm just gonna pick out the intelligible words in it, Donau, we know as the Danube River, Dampfschiff for Steamboat, fahrts from fahren, to travel/ship, elektrizitäten for electricities, haupt, the prefix for main, betriebswerk being like plant/factory, bauunter as contractors, beamten, as in officials, and gesellschaft for company.
Japanese is an agglutinative language and one of my favourite words in Japanese because of this is 食べすぎちゃいましたから tabe (to eat) sugi (from sugiru, too much) cha(from chau, to show that something is accidental or regretted) I mashita (polite suffix to show past tense) kara (in this context used to give reason) Because I accidentally/regretfully ate too much, all in one word.
In Turkish this would be:
Yanlışlıkla fazla yediğimden.... (3 words)
In German it'd be:
Weil ich ausversehen zu viel gegessen habe,.... (7 words)
technically they are all still seperate words like you seperated them right? Japanese doesnt have any spaces so only "technically" its all lumped together? (Ive been taking Japanese for 2 years and never heard anyone consider these to be just one word)
@@Hi-cl7fy i wouldnt consider them seperate words because the morphemes cant be considered words on their own. Ive never really asked if anyone thought of them as singular words before but I suppose most peiple wouldn't
@@Hi-cl7fy No, because you have to change the forms of those parts in the particular way to be able to form this sentence with this particular meaning
食べる → 食べ (required by すぎる)
すぎる ＋しまう →すぎてしまう→すぎちゃう (contracted, casual form)→すぎちゃい (すぎて required by しまう and ちゃい required by ました)
から is the only separated word I guessed.
*propreantepenultimate* -- meaning fifth from last
penultimate = second to last
antepenultimate = third from last
preantepenultimate = fourth from last
looks like someone just _glued_ together all synonyms to the "pre" suffix 😂
"Which one do you mean?"
"Oh you know, the one before the one before the one before the one..."
*3 alphabets later...*
"...before the one before the last one! Wait, why are you a skeleton?"
I thought it only went up to antepenultimate.
I've not heard of propreantepenultimate. I guess that's using the ancient Greek for 'before'. In my own head I invented forepreantepenultimate. I guess we can go with forepropreantepenultimate for "sixth last".
If we wanted to say someone looks like someone who looks like the seventh form the last, you could say the grammatically correct monstrosity “Anteforepropreantepenultimate-looking-like.”
1:38 Fusion is a cheap tactic to make short words longer.
Well, technically not longer. But more complicated. I just wanted to make a joke.
It's joke
Steven Universe
eyyy
For some reason the real gems ruby and sapphire have high pleocroism.
garnets don't.
Great job on the research, guys.
German...wo want to do a infinity Long german word :D
I mean its like you can just throw more and more nouns on the word and its getting bigger an bigger lie
Buch
Buchladen
Buchladenverwaltung
Buchladenverwaltungsregel
Buchladenverwaltungsregelhaus
Buchladenverwaltungsregelhausbaustelle
Buchladenverwaltungsregelhausbaustellenarbeiter
And you can even more words row and the end and take sometime a "s" or "en" too...
Funfact: EVERY VERB is german has 221 forms!!!
Buchladenkasse
Buchladenkassenwart
Afrikaans is quite similar as well. Our general rule for words are, if it's one thing, it's one word. So for example, a dog house, is one physical thing, so the Afrikaans word for it is just one word (hondehok ~ lit. dog cage)
The longest one I've ever seen (not accepted in the Afrikaans Woordelys en Spelreëls) can just fill a single tweet at 140 characters:
Tweedehandsemotorverkoopsmannevakbondstakingsvergaderingsameroeperstoespraakskrywerspersverklaringuitreikingsmediakonferensie-aankondiginkie
Translation, more or less morpheme by morpheme
(note that letters in brackets aren't part of the base words/stems that form part of the compound word, but instead are joining letters that don't have any seperate meaning)
Tweede = Second
handse = hand (in posessive form)
motor = motor
verkoop(s) = sales
manne = men
vakbond = trade union
staking(s) = strike/protest
vergadering = meeting
sameroeper(s) = convener
toespraak = speech
skrywer(s) = writer
pers = press
verklaring = declaration
uitreiking(s) = outreach
media = media
konferensie = conference
aankondeginkie = announcement (in diminutive form)
so that word translates to (and here some words may change as context will change the translation of some morphemes to synonyms of the words used above):
(little) Second hand motor salesmen trade union strike meeting convener speech writer press conference outreach media conference announcement.
Note that I added little in brackets as the english equivalent of the diminutive is to add 'little' beforehand.
+Derelict Friend ahh!!! I have never read Afrikaans, but it's sooo similar to Dutch, I thought there would be more different. but take aankondigingeke. or something. in official Dutch it is aankondiging, buy in Brabants I guess we say the same as the afrikaanse form. we just don't write that because of, you know spelling rules....
and I'm actually from brabandt (just a province in the south, in the middle) so that was what I sometimes just say.
we just don't make that long words, but I think it's grammatically still correct.
+Dutchik oh, it was kie, as in smaller, yeah in Dutch that would've been kje.
and some words are similar when you say it, but the spelling is just like old Dutch. I hate it that we aren't allowed anymore to write things however we want, as long as it still sounds the same.
writer is schrijver in Dutch so still kinda the same...
+Dutchik oh, it was kie, as in smaller, yeah in Dutch that would've been kje.
and some words are similar when you say it, but the spelling is just like old Dutch. I hate it that we aren't allowed anymore to write things however we want, as long as it still sounds the same.
writer is schrijver in Dutch so still kinda the same...
Inuktit: ᖃᖓᑕᓲᒃᑯᕕᒻᒨᕆᐊᖃᓛᖅᑐᖓ (qangatasuukkuvimmuuriaqalaaqtunga) - “I'll have to go to the airport”
I think there's were the "Eskimo words for snow" myth came from? They didn't understand the concept of agglitunative languages, which is what the Eskimo-Aleut family is, and Inuktitut is a member of that language family
0:33 I love that the footnote is very formally saying "go read _The Princess Bride."_
Tom, learn a second language already :( I wanna hear you spitting arabic love poetry.
Learning Arabic was one of the hardest languages I ever chose to learn. Beautifully structured linguistically, but when you learn it you essentially have to learn 2 languages, as there is formal Arabic and then dialectical Arabic (I chose Egyptian). Most so instead of having to learn one word you would have to learn two as they were different in formal and dialect. You only spoke in dialect. You NEVER speak formal Arabic, even if you’re talking to a high authority like the president. Formal Arabic is only ever spoken on the news. So you speak dialect and read and write in formal. it was impossible for me to keep straight which word was the formal one and which word was the dialectal one. So I ended up with a weird mish mash of half Formal half dialectical Arabic and I sounded and wrote like a crazy person.
I'm a naitive Arab and believe me english is much better than Arabic. It is ten times easier to get the same idea through to people in english than it is in Arabic. English is a lot more descriptive and way more specific than arabic.
@@katiegunzz8525 Ok so I'm not necessarily interested in ever learning to speak Arabic, slightly more so than polish but only because polish really scares me, but damn do I want to hear the story behind how that happened.
Disturbed Donut one word: bebsi
@@disturbeddonut2151 I have tried to learn Arabic and I do go to Saudi Arabia almost every year but I do find that in Saudi Arabia almost everyone knows English as a second language
I do really wanna learn Arabic tho. Any ideas on how I could start
So In- negates right?
Inflamable? Infamous? Ingenious?
Your language is buggy. :p
Tilman Baumann He did mention that there are exceptions. Besides, while ingenious and inflammable are examples of that, infamous is not. It does mean that you're famous, only for something bad, as opposed to good. He never specified what the prefix negated :P
Tilman Baumann Actually, no rules are being broken. Let me explain.
1. Inflammable
Here, in- does not act as a prefix indicating negation. It is not a bound morpheme, it's part of the root: inflame. If you broke it down you'd have:
inflammable --> inflame + able
Furthermore, the word inflame comes from the Latin word _inflammare_ meaning to excite or set on fire.
2. Infamous
This one has to do with the word origin too. It comes from Latin _infami_ meaning disgrace and dishonour. Again in- is actually part of the root and is not a prefix. It does not mean that someone who's infamous is not-famous. Breaking it down we have:
infamous --> infam + ous
We know what the prefix -ous means. So someone who's infamous is full of disgrace and dishonour.
3. Ingenious
Again, we could figure this one out by tracing the origins of the word. We go all the way back to Latin again. The root of the word comes from Latin _ingeni_. The word could mean either (1) character, (2) natural capacity, (3) innate quality, or (4) talent. Now we have two morphemes. ingeni, the root and the suffix -ous meaning that it possesses the quality of "ingeni". Thus:
ingenious --> ingeni + ous
So therefore someone who is ingenious either possesses a lot of character, has natural capacity, is full of innate qualities, or has a lot of talent.
I hope that clears things up. :)
Dive Like Junk You appear to have done me not just one, but several better. I will step aside, knowing that my honour was not spoiled, for you are truly the worthiest opponent of them all.
Dive Like Junk thanks guys. I wasn't actually too concerned with the exceptions. Languages are messy after all.
But thanks for the great explanation. Perhaps it's less messy than I think. :)
All the languages are buggy because can't be perfect to allow the description of everything, imagination included. So they are inherently ambiguous, buggy.
I always have problems to remember where I have to use 'in-' and where I have to use 'un-', and very often get stuck into searching a word that starts with 'a-' (from greek: 'without'; ex: 'amorphous' means 'without a known shape'). Plus, as said in the video, you can't just apply an 'in' or 'un' in front of something; because some of those words don't exist, are archaic or exist only in UK english but not in US english. Buggy. Because of me, not the language itself.
But... buggy how? Against a reference. What reference? TV news journalists or vocabulary or both? Who keeps the reference in shape both for kids and media operators? And how i? And how many people spend their days reading the vocabolary? Bugs... plenty of bugs...
I'd love to see a video about vowel harmony.
omg yes, here comes hungarian ;D
Just a note: In 2:06, the 'o' doesn't convey singularity. We know it's singular because it doesn't have an 's' :)
i know this is seven years old but the "os" of "hablos" is a different morpheme technically.
In greenlandic one of there longest words are: Nalunaarasuartaatilioqateeraliorfinnialikkersaatiginialikkersaatilillaranatagoorunarsuarooq. It's 94 letters long and translates as something like "Yet another time they attempted to build a giant radiostation, but it was seemingly only on the drawing board."
Which is why greenlandic is so difficult for me to learn, even though my fiancé is from Greenland
"You keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means."
This is true of Tom with 'synthetic'.
Oh dear, my friend. is /'aβ.lo/!
Keep up the sweet, sweet linguistics. This and 'Things you might not know' are what I look forward to in my subscriptions.
*****
Tom has a degree in Linguistics, so I'd imagine he can.
***** To be fair, I'd guess Tom can read IPA, since he's uploading linguistic videos...
Valosken English Linguistics, but still
Everyone should just stop correcting him when he slightly wrongly mispronounces something, it's what becomes of most of these comments.
NavyBlue
I swear he has a degree in Linguistics, not just English Linguistics.
Valosken Who knows, I'll try find a source but for now, idk
In Tamil we have words like "Pogamudiadhavargalukkaaga" which means "for the sake of those who cannot go"
"See Goldman (1973) abridging Morganstern."
...I see what you did there.
Absolutely loving this language typology series, super informative, super interesting and something completely new to me. I don't think there are any others doing videos on this subject matter either.
I love your videos so much! Information-dense, funny, colourful, vulgarised without being dumbed-down... you da man, Tom.
Umm.... Inuktitut is massively polysynthetic, and in so much as you can even compare languages, Inuktitut would be "more" polysynthetic than at least some Algonquin languages like Passamaquoddy. For example, "do you speak Inuktitut" is ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑑᓲᖑᕖᑦ, or Inuktituusuunguvit? Notice how the morphemes all blend together. Typically, intransitive clauses are pronounced as a single word, and it is so much so that a corpus search of the Inuktitut Hansard (the "minutes" from the Nunavut government), found that some crazy large percent (much >90%) of the words that appeared at all appeared uniquely once. This characterization of Inuktitut is not accurate.
Tom is one smart and very interesting guy.
so smart he can't even pronounce hablo
+NonTwinBrothers Beause intelligence is directly proportional with how well you can pronounce foreign languages
I know this is a super old video, but I feel compelled to say this. This channel was what introduced me to Linguistics and got me interested in it. That was about three years ago, and I am now a freshman in college majoring in it! I was assigned to watch this video for my current homework and found it really nostalgic ☺
The Goldman footnote makes this whole series go from gold to stellar!
"Hablo" is pronounced "ahb-low"
Sean Gref That's the way an English speaking person would say it. In fact (and apart from pronouncing the H like a J; the H is not pronounced at all) Tom pronounced it quite well. The O is pronounced more like AW. It should be AH-blaw.
a arias The one time I don't apologise for my terrible non-English pronunciation, and of course I mess it up! Sorry.
***** lol, there's no need to apologise, but it won't harm to look for the pronunciation of a foreign language word up before publishing it. This is just a petty issue. Fantastic videos nevertheless!
a arias I'd say the final "o" is more like the sound in "box". Would you agree?
Ben McKenna Sure! (if you are British), the problem is with Americans that pronounce box almost like bax.
Love this series. A recurring thought I had going through all the videos in this series was that I wished you'd shown more examples, instead of just mentioning their existence. hoping for more!
I got an example for isolating:i am a worker
U can also say i'm a worker but in vietnamese u cant do that u can just say:tôi là công nhân u just cant shorten the "i am"
In Cree (an algonquian language) we have
“nikînôhtepemiyokinokiyokawasicinânawâw“
“We (exclusive) had wanted to come and have a nice long visit with them”. A whole sentence in one word.
I really like these videos. It's been such a long time since I've done anything with linguistics that I'd forgotten what analytic and synthetic even meant, so it's nice to be reminded.
I take issue with your sliding scale, Tom: I learnt that "analytic" was an intermediate category between "isolating" and "synthetic/inflected", with the latter category being subdivisible (?) into "fusional" and "agglutinating", with the "polysynthetic" being an extreme-case subset of agglutination. Then again, perhaps we've been taught slightly differently?
In my language, a polysynthetic Algonquin language, we have seven different pronoun subjects based on the suffix of the word. Our language is also based upon a journey of life, so if you know core concepts for verbiage, its really easy to deduce meaning without necessarily having heard it
Do you have any examples you'd like to share? It sounds fascinating.
i know you might never see this but i would love to know too! sounds fascinating and i'd love a resource where i could learn more about this if you might know of one if that's okay with you
These are the kinds of videos i start watching this channel for. I love these
0:56 saved for future reference for when my friends ask why I picked Vietnamese as my third language
Agglutinative languages are fun, they allow you to create the most ridiculous word/sentences imaginable.
Iseewhatypudidthere
@@david_ga8490 it doesn't work like that :D you don't write a sentence without space between the words, It is just one word by naturally. Suffixes are not words in agglutinative languages.
@@nomnom7697 ikr it was me 8 months ago I don't even understand what I was saying
Nakakapagpabagabag ba na panatilihin ang pagsusuot ng uniporme sa paaralan?
Now I have a word that explains my ability as a kid to extrapolate the meaning of unfamiliar words from the content of familiar words to the confusion of my peers. I even confidently used the word "malformed" once, having no certain idea that when I looked to the dictionary later I'd find it in plain ink.
Your linguistics videos are solid gold, man.
Tom, your channel is a fabulous part of CZcams. You frequently manage to jam-pack more provocative ideas and interesting content in 4 minutes than you find in many long TED Talks, yet you manage to speak with eloquence and wit. Actually, you're funny as hell when you choose to be. You should really consider doing a Q&A video when you hit 250,000 subscribers.
As for the Spanish silent h, in many cases the h was once sounded (centuries ago) in words like "hablo" and "hijo", which came from Latin "fabula" and "filius" respectively. Eventually the h phoneme was simply lost, hence its silence in modern Spanish.
H represents that the next vowel is blowed
The Old English word for daily in the Lord's Prayer, or Fæder ūre, is 'gedæghƿāmlīcan'. Not as long as some of the other languages, but there are some very cool words like this in Old English.
I'd love that you make more languages videos. You make them so intresting!!
I mean, yor "Things you might not know" and "Amazing places" series are quite intresting but I really love the videos about languages .
Thank you Scott I really enjoy learning about words, etymology and where it all comes from. Keep up the good work.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
jesusnthedaisychain *slow clap*
inconceivable
jesusnthedaisychain Have you ever heard of hyperbole?
K1naku5ana3R1ka: Have you ever heard of The Princess Bride?
jesusnthedaisychain I've seen it before, but I don't remember that line.
Word of the day - Morpheme.
Sounds a lot like morphine.
I love your linguistics videos. Please keep making them.
Your new language videos make proud to be fluent in multiple languages. Keep up, Tom!
Huh. I was taught the spectrum slightly differently, with analytic, agglutinative and synthetic as three points, if I remember, going in a sort of circle (it's been a couple of years). But we were talking about how languages shift from one type to another over time, so that probably explains it (wow, I need to study).
Also in my head I consider English analytic even if its technically not, just because we talk a lot about the difference between Old and later Englishes - OE being actually properly synthetic, so 'the shift from analytic to synthetic' is useful shorthand there.
Tying this back to last week, I kind of think this is why English is so ambiguous - because it has so little inflection and the like, there aren't giant VERB PHRASE HERE signs about the place. But I don't actually know, as I don't speak any other languages and even if I did, I don't know how you would quantify this so you could study the correlation.
" going in a sort of circle" - it's just a hypothesis, the speculation only, this part of that theory.
in general, of course, the Endlish is the analytic and "isolating" language.
I.E. are, in general, flexional-synthetic languages. the Old English was the same.
InTurkish:
Çekoslavakyalılaştıramadıklamızdanmısınız?
Meaning: Are you one of those who we couldn’t make/turn into Czechoslovakian?
I love words and breaking them down to find out their meanings 😍👍🏻
Always a pleasure to learn from you!
here are some cool long Hungarian words (technically their meanings can be explained, but they are rather just meant as a joke, to poke fun at how long you can make words while still maintaining some sort of meaning): elkelkáposztástalaníthatatlanságoskodásaitokért, and
megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért.
Inconceivable!
I don't think that word means what you think it means.
You keep using that word, I do not think it means what you think it means.
I dont care about learning things related to language, but anything Tom teaches I watch because he is just amazing at it.
I love learning about words, something that would astound the English teachers I’ve had in the past. I’m going to have to track down every video you have made about language.
Inconceivable... cue princess bride reference!
Betäubungsmittelverschreibungsverordnung. Good ol' German.
Nah, thats just a long noun.
***** Spezialwindschutzscheibensteingschlagschutzgitterhalterungsschlüssel ;)
Lady vor Edocsil Also just a long noun.
Lady vor Edocsil unzerbrechlich. "un" + "brech" ("brechen") + "lich". That is what he was talking about.
itzJanuary Is a noun not a word?
I was learning about morphemes in my french to english translation class this semester :). Languages are awesome.
I really appreciate that there's a big youtuber getting people into linguistics
I have one thing to say:
Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
Human communication doesn't fit in neat little boxes - except for youtube videos
Thomas L CZcams videos are a mostly one-sided relationship and if there is a misunderstanding, it will not be cleared up... at least not in "conversation" and oftentimes not by the person who made the video. Also +1 for Thomas with Th.
Thomas L Hardy har har.
Your videos are pretty ace Tom...
Right up my street and I love learning about the stuff you post...
Over the years I have watched this video several times but just now I realized that Gretchen Mc Culloch wrote this!!
proud of the clusterfuck of langauge Spanish is
becames even better with accents
"yo hablo sobre este video" = I talk about this video
"(él) habló sobre idiomas en este video" = He talked about langauges on this video
+Molothrus Aeneus Uh, I'm pretty sure what appears to be a clusterfuck to you is found in a great deal of romance languages.
+Sofa King (edited) Well that's true.
Pretty sure their point is that they're proud of how much of a clusterfuck Spanish grammar is, which apparently gets more complicated with accents.
I was just mentioning how accent/tittles affect the time of a verb
and dunno if any other language use tittles as well, correct me if I'm wrong
Molotera Legarreta Isn't a tittle the dot on the i and j? Did you mean tilde?
hey Tom, please explain the "ão" sound on portuguese! I've never met a gringo that could say it correctly. Also, what about the "ç"? How did that come to pass?
thanks, mate! I love your channel!
Tim Stahel that was almost it man. I can't explain how it is using words so I recorded myself doing it. Mine feels more opened somehow, check it out. vocaroo.com/i/s1G9qg9Z5WF2
Loving these linguistics vids!
I think it's so cool that someone is talking about Linguistics on CZcams. If more people knew about it, I think they'd love it.
You said that the 'o' in Spanish was a morpheme. So 'hablo' is two morphemes. Then does it follow that the word "made" contains two morphemes, "make" and also some kind of perfect tense modifier morpheme?
I'm not a linguist, but I'd guess so; it's "make+ed", but since it's irregular the two morphemes merge together to become "made".
French is the only european language spokenly turning polysynthetic, which is cool
i saw the article too
I think that french is becoming a tonal language and English too.
You inspire me and I thank you.
This is quite an interesting video. When explaining Chinese to others I always haven't been too sure how to explain the segmentation of Chinese to them since my audience are generally speakers of languages who see words and I am sometimes not sure whether I should stress on morphemes being words or vocab being words in Chinese, especially when I try to explain names.
"the cold parts of North America"
It does get cold in North America - in winter!
May I ask where German is set in your scale?
An example that makes sense in german: Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz
(Cattle marking and beef labeling supervision duties delegation law)
Another thing to consider could be: Fremdschämen; Waldsterben, abseilen etc.
Malphoga Kempe That's just a compound word, it's not like prefixes and suffixes.
qorilla Yep. pretty much just a long, very precise noun. IIRC, most Indo-European languages construct words that way, and English is an exception. Where it's "jazz trumpet" in English, but "jazztrompet" in for instance Dutch.
Nmat I'd say this is just a question of orthography (spelling). It's a convention of writing, not the language itself. It could also be written like jazztrumpet in English.
See, you can do that with nearly every word in german, but I miss the ability to tell where on his scale german would fit.
Nmat okay that may be. But you have things like befragen, erfragen, befragt, gefragt etc that are the things he meant, are they? There are a lot of things that change the meaning of a word, so where is german placed?
I love this series
Excellent series!