Why Americans don't pronounce the H in herbs
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- čas přidán 24. 07. 2024
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I spent a while thinking cilantro was some exotic herb I'd never heard of but turns out it's just coriander lol
Just to clarify: In England we call the seeds "Coriander seeds" and the leaf "Coriander".
Haha yeah i felt the same way at one point
I think, generally, cilantro refers to the leaves (also the stems and roots, which are used more extensively in East Asia). Coriander is more often used for the seeds.
Yeah, it's interesting how American English has more Spanish loan words while it's British English counterpart is from french
Similarly arugula…
It's okay I thought coriander was some random little seed used in indian cooking which i've never encountered.
Herb report
"Herbs" or "Herb" was said 23 times in the video.
This has been your herb report.
Lol
It felt like if was ten times more
Herbál
Thank you :D
what about ther "erb" report? xD
Actually, herb didn't get the silent letter from French. The common Old French spelling when it was loaned in the 1300s was "erbe." In the 1600s, the British added the 'h' to make it look more like its Latin parent, herba. Then it was unpronounced until the British started pronouncing it again in the 1800s because at the time it made them sound "fancy" to pronounce silent h's. They even pronounced it in honor, but only herb stuck.
I am so happy to tell everyone that I totally cured sickle cell anemia with herbs, my mom also cured Athritis after 12 years. Everyone should follow Drewi1 on CZcams and tell him about his health problems. He has natural treatment
The word that drives me nuts, even as a Brit, is "lieutenant!" You Americans pronounce it how it _should_ be pronounced, but in England we've utterly butchered it by pronouncing it "leff-tenant!" My high school English teacher hated me, because I refused to pronounce it with the "leff" sound, instead pronouncing it with the "loo" sound; they used to tell me I was "Americanising" it, but I always replied that I was, in fact, "Frenchising" it, _because it's a French word!_ 😄
But even if you just pronounce the letters the way they read, I believe most people would land on "loo" or "lyoo". Where would someone get "leff"?
I was always taught that someone has to guard the toilet, those would be the aforementioned Lootenants.
As a person with English as my 2nd and French as my 4th language, my rule of a thumb is: "English doesn't exist. If you can, first hear someone else say the word you don't know. If you can't, think of similar languages, like French or German, or Latin, that actually have rules for pronunciation".
Still doesn't help with leftenant, though. Even the French wouldn't pronounce it like that if they followed their own rules (as opposed to English, who don't even have any rules of pronunciation).
Well that explains why Ichabod Crane in the TV show Sleepy Hollow calls his friend "Left- tennent" I knew is was some kind of play on words.
"Leuftenant" is the Norman French equivalent of Lieutenant - this is where the pronunciation comes from, but since that time in history the French language has standardised. English still uses the Norman French pronunciation but some dickhead put it in the dictionary with the French spelling.
I was interested to learn that the pronunciation of the 'h' in 'herb' is a recent innovation in British English. In many regional dialects and accents of British English, an initial 'h' is dropped (e.g. "you're having a laugh" becomes "yer 'aving a laugh", "going home" becomes "going 'ome"). This form of spoken English is pretty widespread in England, but historically (and to this day in some circles) has been heavily stigmatised - considered as 'vulgar', 'low class' and 'not proper English'. I've no idea, but it wouldn't surprise me if the pronunciation of the 'h' in 'herb' began as a hypercorrection by British English speakers who were aspiring to speak a more 'high class' version of the language and simply added the 'h' back in - much like how some English people will say 'haitch' as opposed to 'aitch' when referring to the letter H itself.
Yes when I say aitch for the letter H, I actually get people correcting me with "it's haitch", I correct them back and say "no you are wrong it really is aitch"
The ‘H’ dropped in ‘have’ is different from the ‘h’ dropped in ‘herb’ I’m pretty sure. Even in places where we’d say ‘ave or ‘ome, the ‘h’ in herb is still present AFAIK. If not, its shadow is there in the form of an extended ‘uuh’ sound, but you know it’s *supposed* to be there, the speaker is just being lazy. I think the real difference is the lack of a rhotic ‘r’. Rhotic r’s were dropped towards the south of England in the last couple centuries so you still hear it up in the north, but down south the lack of it is what makes the h in “herbs” more pronounced imo. With the strong ‘r’ sound, the beginning vowel sounds more like an e, and it becomes “ERbs”. Without said R, it’s “uuhbs”. The breath-y “uuh” is much easier to put an “h” on the front of than the harsh “er”, and in some cases it will sound as if it were there. So it was probably a case of people thought it had the pronounced “h” to begin with, rather than them trying to be more “high class”.
@@StephenJohnson-jb7xe That is pretty funny! I mean I couldn't care less how people pronounce letters - for e.g. where I now live in Scotland it's common to pronounce the letter J as "jai" (rhyming with "eye", as oppose to as "jay", rhyming with "hey", which is how I say it). But it's always entertaining to be able to call people on their unjustified pedantry XD
Yes, it's almost certainly a hypercorrection, reinforced by the spelling. Hypercorrections are a pretty common way for language to evolve.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H-dropping#H-insertion
@@kered13 I don't see how you'd reach that conclusion from Adam's video. He cited plenty of examples of both British English and American English pronouncing and not pronouncing the h in French-origin words. Are all the words where we don't pronounce the h 'hypercorrections', or just the ones where British English and American English differ?
I'd say hypercorrections would be things like the use of 'an' to procede a word beginning with h, despite the h not being pronounced silently, pronouning 'lieutenant' as 'leftenant' etc. Pronouncing the 'h' in words I'd just say is natural evolution of pronouncing things phonetically, and if anything I'd guess English will evolve so we end up pronouncing more words with silent h's in that way.
Up here in Northern England a lot/most dialects don't pronounce the h at the start of any word e.g we say " 'istory" instead of "history" and people who speak in received/standard English (usually middle/upper class people from South England) often use it as a means of deriding working class people who speak with these regional accents, so you kinda have the same thing within england
The working class habit of pronouncing H like the French do probably originally came from upper class french people in London. There's a pretty solid theory that dialects progressively get further from London over time and retain certain aspects and thats how some newer dialects are formed. West country is apparently pretty similar to shakespeare era London dialect
Yeah I remember watching a movie with Ricky gervais and the actress who played his mum said “death is an ‘orrible thing” and I’m thinking “an horrible? Shouldn’t it be ‘a horrible?’” But I realized it’s cuz she didn’t pronounce the h
We're guilty of that in America as well. We think of England as having two dialects: "Posh" english (Recieved Pronounciation) and "poor" (although we'd never *call* it Tiny Tim english, I guarantee it's what most Americans are imagining when they try to do this one) english (which is *probably* a bad attempt at a cockney accent)
Culturally and linguistically you have described the natural linguistic habit of a prestige dialect and/or accent.
That is also the case for many of the Estuary dialects of English too (London and the surrounding areas)
The discussion on how languages evolved in their own ways, even in their native country is very interesting. We have the same in French where French Canadians (Quebecois) speak a French that is more like the French we spoke in 16th century France so to us Metropolitan France people it sounds “funny” and somewhat “weird” and is sometimes hard to understand whereas French French has evolved more over centuries notably now including loanwords from English like “weekend”, “sandwich”, “shopping”, etc. Canadian French usually tries to find a Frenchified version of these English words. They translate the stop signs to “Arrêt” when in France they say “Stop”… so as to protect the language from the much heavier cultural influence of English in Canada.
Interesting, In the parts of Finland where they speak Swedish, they also have kept more to the tradition.
Speaking an older form of Swedish than we do here in Sweden.
@@daniel635biturbo Same with Cantonese. The Cantonese that came over to the United States in the late 1800s to early 1900s froze in time while the Cantonese spoken in Hong Kong/Guangdong evolved over the years. For example, Cantonese spoken in the U.S. kept the hard "N" sound in the begging of words while speakers in Hong Kong softened it to an "L" sound.
"Je porte mon jogging!"
"... ton quoi?"
Similar to the Appalachian people continuing English in a more pure way from the 1700's. They kept more of the original essence while England continued to evolve faster.
Australian English is similarly, closer to "original" English than British English
So I just recently found this channel and I got hooked pretty quick, you do a great job! I was trying to figure out why I enjoyed your content as much as I do and it finally hit me, growing up I use to watch Alton Brown's Good Eats almost religiously and the content you make reminds me a lot of that show. You do a great job of blending "here's how I cook a thing" to "here's where this thing you can cook comes from, and why it is the way it is."
Keep up the great work!
Adam's obsession with what the Brits call things is such a meme now, and I love that he leans into it.
He's so whiny
@@johnq4951
Maybe because British commenters are too
@@flamingpi2245 they probably are
Ikr lmao mans so funny without even trying
@@flamingpi2245 as a Brit us Brits do complain a lot
This reminded me of some of my favourite teachers, where they'll just go on tangent after tangent and it'll be some of the most interesting and engaging lessons we have (even if we aren't learning what we're "supposed" to be learning lol)
Lol :P
But you Learn useless trivia during a teacher's tangent, sometimes a moral reinforcement or something terribly funny.
The most important, and often most compelling, lessons are seldom planned
The secret is to make it look like you're going off on tangents when you're really talking about exactly what you meant to from the start.
@@Great_Olaf5 Subtly Socratic but with more humor
This is my favourite video of yours Adam! Thank you so much! Exactly the content I didn't know I wanted/needed -
Adam, just watched a few of your CZcams videos and they are outstanding. Extremely educational, masterfully scripted and edited and the video has tons of attention to detail.
Huh. That point about original languages not existing in a vacuum and always evolving got me thinking about something unrelated, but still conceptually salient to the conversation which happened to me a while ago.
When I was studying abroad in Singapore two years ago, as part of my program’s “immersion” protocol, we ate at an Indian restaurant. As a half Indian American myself, I was surprised to see that there were no chairs, only cushions on the floor. I had seen this in Japan many times, but never once in India or in my household back home. On these cushions, you were meant to sit in a criss-crossed Ayurvedic position. We were additionally not allowed to use cutlery, which I suppose I had followed when eating South Indian food, specifically dosas and chapati, but it just seemed natural to me to eat that type of food that way, similar to a burrito or any carby wrap. It hardly seemed as though not using a fork and knife was compulsory. Peers of mine had never had Indian food in their lives, only to be told that this was the “true” way to eat it. I soon learned there were many, many restaurants just like this across Southeast Asia.
When I called up my Indian mother to discuss this, she laughed because as she explained to me, particularly with regards to the floor cushions and Hindu stance, these were old guard traditions that existed for maybe her mother and grandmother but had certainly changed in the last 100 years, especially with the continued influence of colonial British presence in the region. Many Indians had migrated to Singapore in the 1800s and early 1900s and missed out entirely on the cultural evolution that took place throughout that time.
It was just funny to me that you have this group of people who are very intent on preserving “true” Indian traditions, while also not being aware of, or simply not wanting to acknowledge, the significant changes that have happened back home (although who knows, maybe under Modi’s crazy Hindu nationalist govt they’ll revert back to old customs). Makes you question, what is the definition of “tradition”? What does it mean to be “true” in a cultural sense? Perhaps in America more so than any other country this is something to contemplate, considering how vastly different our nation is and has been affected by other cultures depending on where you go.
Anyways, just some random musings of mine.
Tradition is just peer pressure from dead people
This is known as the “diaspora problem.” Immigrants and children of immigrants remain attached to the version of their homeland that existed when the family emigrated, while the country itself changes and becomes more modern. It’s why Italian American food reflects what (southern) Italian food was like around 1900. Less positively, it means diaspora populations continue to fund ongoing armed conflicts in their homelands, without having to face the repercussions of the violence, perpetuating conflicts for generations. This is also because it is the losing side that tends to emigrate.
My favorite story is a friend who grew up in a very strict household, with her father telling her “Korean girls don’t wear/do that!” Well, when they went back to Korea, her Korean cousins were all wearing shorter skirts and more makeup than the girls at her American high school!
Thanks for sharing this. I found it very interesting.
What an awesome comment! Languages are so fascinating
super interesting to think about! thanks for sharing that, i didn't know that about sitting/eating in older Indian culture.
I think differences in pronunciation of "herb" are a particularly sticky because they result in differences in the preceding indefinite article - "an (h)erb" / "a herb"
Not saying you're wrong, but if that's the case it's super stupid. How often are you talking about a/an herb? You're talking about *the* herb or herbs you're using.
@@Arobsite 9:05 lol
@@Arobsite That is exactly the case. It is also true of hotel, hospital and other words. You will often find some idiotic pedant who is applying a rule they don’t understand trying to get their mouth around an hotel rather than the correct a hotel or an ‘otel. The rule is simple you use a except where it is followed by a vowel in which case it is an because you need a consonant between two different vowel sounds to smooth out pronunciation so if the “H” is pronounced it’s a if it isn’t it’s an. Just try saying them out loud and it quickly becomes clear.
@@Arobsite "Take a herbal remedy..."
"I'm training to be a herbalist"
"A herb I particularly like using in the kitchen is..."
Ughhh, do NOT get me started on "a historical" and "an historical". Even Merriam Webster says that the h is pronounced (obviously not in dialect, but that is not what triggers me), and Oxford has been doing it for ages, but the amount of people that get all snooty when I try to correct it (I work as an editor), telling me about the "origins of words" and such. I have given up by now. You will not make them see reason.
Wow, great vid!! I've been wondering about this for super-long!
I enjoyed that explanation more than i thought i would. Thanks
I love these wonky history cultural videos. So well done.
I love the idea that the solution to late-stage capitalism's ailments is...stakeholder capitalism!
Johnny Harris is a fan of Adam Ragusa. Second time he left a comment for Adam.
@@Homer-OJ-Simpson actually it seems to be the twelfth time he's commented on this channel
@@WanderTheNomad now that I think about it, I’ve seen him 3 times.
It's you, hey man
"It gets messy" is a very apt description of language in general.
For me it's always a "whatever works" situation. (Though it does sound amusing that I have a pretty British accent - but often use "y'all" because I picked it up while I lived in Texas and I think it's quite a charming term.)
And it’s useful
W’all ought to differentiate between plural you (y’all) and singular you
As we should for inclusive we (w’all) and exclusive we
@@flamingpi2245 "W'all" is fucking hilarious to me and I don't know why
I particularly like multi-compound y’all phrases, such as y’all’d’ve, e.g. “I figured y’all’d’ve bought the Lima beans, not the string beans”
@@evanc.1591 Hahaha I love it
How about y'all'dn't've, as in "I wish y'all'dn't've done that" 😆
@@KalebPeters99 excellent, though I’ve never heard it used in the wild. I’ll try it and see how it works, though!
love love love ur stuff. love that the channel is not just about food but sharing new info making us all a little wiser.
sees "herbe"
says "ERRRRBE"
gotta love that aggressive french pronunciation from Adam
Really surprised you skipped the old French spelling: Erbe which was then the old English spelling for a very long time until the Norman invasion. Also the pronouncing of the leading 'H' was openly mocked in England when it started as a trend, akin to slang in the mid 1800's. It began as a misunderstanding of the attempt to end "H-dropping" where you get the cockney accent from (ie: 'ello govna. Or: 'Ow you doing?). The upper crust (also an interesting culinary phrase) was fighting H-dropping so much that by the time the H in herb was being pronounced widely, they were afraid to fight it for fear of bringing back more H-dropping. (they never did end the H-dropping, but whatever)
So the de-Cockneyfication project cocked up on this one?
@@HansLemurson So that is why it wasn't changed to herb until the 1800s.
Never forget that the british are allergic to any french pronunciations in their language. Fill-it/Fil lay
@@HansLemurson Yep I was reading one of the passages in a book on Early and Middle English that showed a Middle English recipe of sorts with that "erbe" spelling.
@@Weltallgaia You have not heard from extremists such as Boris Johnson who advocate the more frequent use of Anglo-Saxon words to the point of halting speech because of the need for thinking whenever a Norman word comes up.
The banana leaf part is stupidly accurate. I live in PR and my relatives and friends make pasteles, they will fight with every ounce of their being for it to be wrapped in plantain leaves. No parchment, no papel de pasteles and no other substitutes. And dont get them started on cooking them with a lid instead of the same leaves
dafuq is "PR"? Puerto Rico?
These boys are getting out of hand
I was wondering exactly about the title question! Thanks for clarifying.
That was such a polite, informative tell off. Thank you! I enjoyed it.
"Well Brits if you didn't want lots of people to speak your language..."
lmao he went there, love it
Making language discussion videos spicy
But if they hadn't we would all have to speak French.
We have no objection at all to everyone speaking our language-that makes life easy for us. Furthermore, if they don't use it exactly as we do, we can tell them that they're getting it wrong. 😁
@Jonathan Palfrey not true. Its actually you guys who are wrong by not evolving your language.
@@kaijucifer3544 Not sure who 'you guys' is referring to here. If you mean pedants and sticklers, then sure, if you mean Brits, then Adam mentioned in this very video that the donor language continues to evolve.
this happens in Chinese but not written Chinese. Since the characters are entirely non phonetic, they do not mutate with pronunciation. That's why a modern Chinese person can read Japanese kanji and know exactly what it means without a clue how the Japanese would say it.
I read that the "tone" system in Chinese is actually the vestigal remnants of terminal consonants on words, and the tones indicate how the word would have ended had the ending not been dropped.
You can also hear this in stereotypical "Chinglish" where the speaker will drop the ends of words they say.
It's sort of like French in a way, except that French used a phonetic alphabet, and so you have cities like "Bordeaux" whose spelling exists to mock foreigners.
Chinese characters do have phonetic value to them.
You may not be able to see it, but certain radicals in the Chinese characters give indication of tone and syllable. This is how Chinese is able to write out words phonetically. Because it is able to convey phonetic information.
I'm also not so sure about Chinese being able to read kanji. Maybe in some limited circumstances they might pick up on some, but just like you wouldn't expect an English reader to be able to understand most German thrown in front of them despite both being written with a latin alphabet, a Chinese reader isn't going to get most of Japanese kanji because that borrowing took place over a thousand years ago and a lot of characters have semantically shifted around in the two languages despite constant cultural contact.
I would an average Chinese speaking person can only read about 60% of the Japanese kanji. The best example would be " big husband 大丈夫." Which the Chinese definition and the Japanese are very different.
@@SussyBaka-sv1fj I want to know what a "big husband" is 😆
@@HansLemurson wouldn't really call it vestigal, rather tonogenesis, but that is indeed what's reconstructed for Old Chinese, iirc partly informed by the evolution of tone in Thai/Vietnamese. Happened a looooooong time ago in Chinese.
Also, modern Chinglish dropping coda consonants is just cause their modern form can't accomodate complex codas. Tonogenesis is a language-internal process of consonant lenition, while coda simplification is a result of incompatible phonotactics. Wouldn't really consider them the same.
What a gorgeous room. I’m extremely jealous of that growing space.
Yay for diversifying channel content! I for one would listen to you talk about anything.
In french, we have the "academy of the french language" that settles debates between different pronunciations, expressions, new words, etc. So you can actually say that a certain word is objectively ok or not... Which sounds good, but it can't actually keep up with the natural evolution of the language. One example is that there is no word in french for "To Perform". You can only say "I'm doing a performance" which is long and stupid so NATURALLY everyone borrowed the word "perform" and is using it as a verb (Je performe) but you still won't find it in any dictionary, and your french teacher should technically mark it as a mistake. One EVEN STUPIDER example I can give you is there was not a real french word for "shopping" so in french parts of Canada, most people invented and use the word "Magasiner" (Magasin=shop, and adding er is usually how verbs end, hence magasin+er) and yet, it's objectively wrong. Now the best part, do you know what the official accepted word for "shopping" is in french? "SHOPPING"!!! You're supposed to just pronounce it à la french (Show-peeing-e) Anyways this comment is getting long but if anyone wants more examples there are plenty, just ask me ^^
Very informative and interesting thanks for the insight from a native French speaker.
Canadian French vs. Metropolitan French from Europe is very interesting to me. Great comment, now I'm going to practice my French.
Why hasn't anyone made a dictionary that isn't bound by what the Académie Française says? Isn't there some sufficiently independent minded / independent funded academic body that could write a dictionary and include Je performe et?
I seem to remember when studying French in high school it took a long time for an official word for "compact disc" to be approved with everyone just using the loan word "CD".
I think the Académie Française would be a stupid idea even if it did always keep up to date. Language is an integral part of personal expression and of culture, and it's stupid to think that there is one "objectively correct" way of using it. Sure, it's okay to have some guidelines for formal speech, but it's just dumb to call anything else incorrect.
Fun Fact I just found out: There has not been a linguist in the Académie Française since 1903. No wonder they make stupid decisions!
"The Meaning of Everything," by Simon Winchester, is a great book on this subject. It covers the making of the OED, the first edition of which took 70 years to make. One of the interesting points the book made was that the OED set out to describe how various words were being used, which meant volunteers reading literally (literally!) everything that had been written in English and describing the meanings. Contrast this with the French Academy which prescribed how the language was to be used. That's not to say there are no standards in English, but they do vary regionally and over time, and the self-appointed language police should back the hell off. (I need to take my own good advice on this one, if I'm being honest.)
Another interesting point about the OED is how one of the main original contributors lived in an asylum and chopped off his own penis so the people who stole him away at night and forced him to perform sexual acts wouldn't be able to anymore. Fun times.
I am so happy to tell everyone that I totally cured sickle cell anemia with herbs, my mom also cured Athritis after 12 years. Everyone should follow Drewi1 on CZcams and tell him about his health problems. He has natural treatment
Great video - thank you ! This was a much better explanation of language differences and evolution, than many I’ve seen on channels dedicated to the subject.
God I love learning about etymology, its so damn interesting. Also I'm a French student at 6-th for in the UK and you're pronunciations weren't that much off tbh, love to see it!
I love how you can make a 10 minute episode packed full of science, history and hilarity out of a seemingly mundane topic. This is why I subbed buddy!
I am so happy to tell everyone that I totally cured sickle cell anemia with herbs, my mom also cured Athritis after 12 years. Everyone should follow Drewi1 on CZcams and tell him about his health problems. He has natural treatment
Linguistics student here - love your videos. Old French isn't my specialty, but if I recall correctly, the standard silent 'h' was lost in Early Old French, but Frankish people brought a different /h/ with their Germanic words (h aspiré). Pedants insisted people pronounce it, but "h" aspiré faded, too, but only after speakers developed the liaison in early Modern French. Thus, Latin h is always silent, but h aspiré shows up in liaisons (l'h vs le h)
NativLang has a hilarious video about the history of Old French. And you're right: there were two Hs.
I believe at some point I read that word-initial H was usually silent in classical-era Latin as well. Pronouncing the H in 'honor' (the Latin word) was a class marker. You'd hear it that way in the senate, but possibly the same senator might drop it in a less formal context. And your average urbanite or rural person wouldn't pronounce it ever.
@@stormshaman Interesting! That makes sense - Spanish "h" is silent in most contexts, too.
Do people realize what Norman French means? Yes, from Normandy, but Norman means Northmen, as in Vikings. Normandy was given to invading Vikings to protect France from further Viking invasions. So Norman French was already bastardized by Norse language when it was brought to England. If I recall, the main differences are pronunciation changes, as well as Norse loanwords.
@@elissafanzo1124 this overestimates the influence Norse had on Norman French. though Rollo and his fellow ennobled raiders were indeed given dominion over Normandy, there's simply no way they can change the language spoken there that much-they're just a band of raiders against an entire region's population. they even failed to preserve Norse as a language among themselves because they all intermarried with local folk. as a result, instead of a bastardized French, modern Norman only has like 150 words from Norse, and a Norman and a Parisian would have no trouble at all talking with each other.
Norse had a much greater effect on English. unlike Normandy where the Vikings were immediately dissolved into the local population, entire Viking families conquered, settled, and colonized parts of England called the Danelaw. this contact led to heavy and sustained influence-incredibly basic words like ill, die, and rotten, among hundreds of others, come from Norse.
Terrific video Adam, well done.
Adam.i live the way you include so much information in your video....Continue!
It being a French loan word entirely explains why Americans call it “erb”. Now I know that and what a broiler is, I consider myself an expert and will be retiring from CZcams commenting to become a professor of American English
Broiler is a grill right? But a grill is a barbecue and a barbecue is... only the event and the food served but not the thing itself? Mr prof help
@@smikkelbeer8044 you can (and many Americans do) use the word "barbecue" to describe any kind of outdoor grilling implement. But note it's a dangerous linguistic territory to venture into because of all the gatekeepers.
@@davidfriedland8255 True, as many die-hard 'barbecuers' are adamant about NOT referring to anything 'grilled' as 'barbecue' as the term 'barbecue' is saved for, in the strictest sense, foods (particularly meats) cooked slowly with often indirect heat.
To become a professor of American English you only need to study classical British English. I think the Revolution peeved them off and they've been heading in an odd direction ever since. America has mostly preserved British English over the last two hundred plus years. Meanwhile the Brits are doing their embarrassing rhotic shift, adopting Norman spellings while at the same time Anglicizing their pronunciations, and mocking original Britishism like soccer or aluminum as "Americanisms." Shakespeare would understand a modern Virginian just fine but would have a laugh at someone speaking RP.
@@smikkelbeer8044 to broil is to cook with direct heat/flames from above. Your broiler in your oven does that. A grill is a cooking surface with holes to allow for direct heat/flame to cook objects on the grill from bellow. Most people use an outdoor grill to grill their food. To barbecue is to cook slowly with indirect heat outdoors, and it's also the event.
Never ask a Brit about English. You'll always end up at some strange contradiction they can't explain. If you ask about cookies they'll eventually tell you a scone is the same thing as an American biscuit. 🙄😂
French has an “aspirated h”, but it manifests more subtly as a stop in elision, rather than an audible “rough breath”.
Interestingly, of the loanwords you cited, only hollandaise is aspirated; but as you said, language evolves, even in its homeland.
French lost the sound /h/ in the Middle Ages, but it was used only in some Germanic loanwords (e.g. hareng 'herring'). In words of Latin origin it was a mere graphic fact, such as in "herbe" (Latin lost the sound /h/ way before romance languages began to develop). Curiously enough, French still shows an unetymological usage of H, as in huile 'oil' (lat. OLEU), haut 'high' (lat. ALTU) that was developed in the Middle Ages in order to distinguish some words eg. VILE-HVILE, AUT-HAUT etc.
@@L0L26 I've never heard an aspirated h in french except for when someone sighs.
I read that last word in my head as 'omeland for some reason lol
@@jul3249 yes, French lost the sound in the Middle Ages (it was present mainly in Germanic loanwords)
Never heard anyone talk about owls, huh?
I was super distracted at the beginning of the video admiring that gorgeous greenhouse setup you've got!
Bravo Adam, the final word on it was magnificent.
Finally, the real hard hitting questions
I feel like Tom Scott would appreciate this video.
You really caught me with that 3rd hand... congratulations. That editing was great and very unexpected, thanks for the laugh.
I'm loving the info in this video! You are a shining gem amongst the rough that is 'youtube'
Adam really out here starting a war with the motherland on a Monday
How is it that Adam can compress cooking, language, and history in a single 9 min video!? Great video Adam!
The magic of editing lol :P
@@RedRoseSeptember22 Also he was a professor before the youtube gig.
Probably because these things all relate to one another and as a journalist, he's probably trained to think laterally and generalistically and be able to present these topics to a general audience.
Yes, I am, in fact, very fun at parties.
Cos he's wearing all the hats: researcher, presenter, script writer, film crew, janitor
Amazing video! I love how you combine history, politics and language when discussing food. You do such a great and entertaining job. Love all the photography in this one.
Adam this is why you are my favorite food youtuber, these kinds of videos are amazing
Fun fact in Poland and states formerly colonized by her, instead of variation of "Tea" like rest of Europe we use "Herbata" coming from latin "Herba thea" - rest of slavs uses "tea" for tea and "chai" for herbal-fruit drinks. Polish word for herbs is "zioła" coming from word "zielone" - greens.
Polish language borrowed many words from latin and german before language codification so most French borrowings are late second-hand bortowings from Russian or industrial era words.
This is one of reasons why it's harder for Anglophones and Francophones to learn Polish than Russian which got codified later and had many consciously chosen borrowings from English and French.
Thanks for mentioning this interesting linguistic fact and I hope it will get noticed :)
As for the last sentence - this is not obvious at all, but true! When I studied Russian (being Polish and having already learnt English and French) I was very surprised when I noticed a few clearly Germanic-English words in Russian. (for example, an iceberg or a rucksack) Unusual, considering the tense relationship between Russia and so-called western world. The deeper I go in etymology research, the more connections I see!
@@angrypotato_fz The languages spoken by the upper classes have seldom corresponded politically with their nationalist agendas. I refer to the The Willy-Nicky Telegrams which are telegrams between the German and Russian heads of state in the leadup to WW1.
And in French 'tisane'. But somehow in english, 'tea' has become 'generic hot drink that is not coffee' so we break it down to 'tea' and herb tea' !!
@@angrypotato_fz wasn’t tense pre-revolution! The royal families of Britain and Russia were even branches of the same family, the last Tsar looked almost identical to King George his cousin. Eg When the Tsar was trying out railways he traveled to London to learn how his cousin handled it. So I’m not surprised by the loanwords at all!
I love when your videos are just a giant rant backed by research. I dont even know if I say herb or erb but I need more videos like this!
I love this channel.
I’ve really enjoyed the etymological bent in a couple of the recent videos-hope you can do more of that in the future!
I'm loving the linguistic snark. It's honestly amazing how quick language can evolve
What's weird about hearing Americans says "herb" without a H-sound is that it sounds weird to me as a Brit. But as a Northerner I sometimes drop the H in herb and pronounce it 'erb. But it still sounds weird to me when Americans say it! :S
It seems like Americans put something like a glottal stop at the start of the word, whereas I (another Northerner) don't. That'd be my best guess
@@trebucheguevara1052 well put! I was also thinking it was something to do with the glottal stop but couldn't place where and why the American version sounds so out of the ordinary to me. Thanks!
I wonder if that's because it's not a solid rule, like "always drop the initial H." It's one of those weird exceptions that crops up all the time, where we usually say the H, but don't for particular words. It might come across as forced. Even when you know it isn't, it may sound wrong because you hear Americans pronounce the initial H all the time, so it's a bit jarring when we don't, seemingly arbitrarily.
Maybe to do with the R sound, which Adam didn't mention. Most British accents are non-rhotic, i.e. drop most of the Rs, most American accents are rhotic.
Anything to pretend that you're better than us, huh?
Wow. I was not expecting such a history lesson but wow i really enjoyed it! That was fascinating!
Fascinating! Thanks
As a Dutch person I was surprised that we don't have a real word for herb in Dutch. There isn't a distinction between spices and herbs it's all kruiden.
I had thought you'd find it helpful to hear that my friend Herb (short for Herbert) was hurt when he heard his helpful H hadn't been heeded in the word 'herb'. However;
I was honestly honoured to see the hours Adam spent on this, you're a credit to your heirs!
I am so happy to tell everyone that I totally cured sickle cell anemia with herbs, my mom also cured Athritis after 12 years. Everyone should follow Drewi1 on CZcams and tell him about his health problems. He has natural treatment
This was beautifully crafted double alliteration. Painfully underappreciated.
I love this style of video
Trust me, growing up in Scotland and now living in Wales, it gets tiresome hearing people say that no version of English, other than RP is correct. It's just one dialect, from one moment in history, that happened to be that of the ruling class.
Aye. Even in a place as small as the UK, you can find people from one part, who could not understand folk from another part, as their language and dialect are so different. I live in Suffolk, and If I went about sixty miles into Norfolk, I can guarantee I'd encounter someone whose speech I'd have difficulty understanding.
As an anthropologist, linguistics is always fascinating. A particularly fun example is Japanese and how it's effects on English via texting have started to show up. Japanese doesn't like long multi syllable words and tends to shorten all of them down to 1-2 syllables or portmanteaus like Convenience store gets loaned over to "Conbini" or Department Store becomes "Depaato", and Pocket Monster becomes Pokemon. This works REALLY well when you switch to a texting environ, since compression is key, and it's hilariously fascinating to watch as English has started to bend over itself shortening, acrynyming, and emojifying itself to meet our demands to write to each other A LOT but have it fit all of our thoughts into like a paragraph. We are basically adding a syllabary to a phonetic language and it's a trip XD.
Hmm, as a linguist I would not call this an effect that Japanese is having on English. I mean emoji are categorically a japanese invention, but they're unconnected to Japanese linguistically. Rather, I would say it is both Japanese and English speakers responding to similar pressures. As you point out, SMS messaging and its inheritors favor brevity, so you naturally will get creative use of language and symbols to fit this need. I too am very interested in how emoji will evolve, because I could absolutely see them becoming a kind of logographic script. I doubt we will see them abstract from logographs into a logosyllabary though.
I assume you've read "Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language" by Gretchen McCulloch. If not, highly recommend! (I hope you aren't Gretchen McCulloch. If so, nevermind and I loved your book! 😄)
POCKET MONSTER
_WHAT_
@@mattkuhn6634 i also have yet to see emojis used to effectively convey thoughts independent of the text. I have perhaps seen it attempted in ironic "cringe" comments where its intentionally excessive and awkward. But the vast majority of emoji use in my experience is either noise, just emphasis or "spice", so hearts next to an "I love you" or an eggplant in a lewd proposition. I occasionally see it used in place of facial expressions or phrases like Lol to provide a hint for an ambiguous phrase. So someone making a joke about my face might add an upside down smiley to indicate it wasnt meant to offend. Those are the most fascinating to me as they show people compensating for the weaknesses of short form text communication and innovating
@@Vote4Drizzt emoji represent what your hands or eyes would be doing when you speak, it's gestural language
I second the recommendation of McCulloch's "Because Internet"
I was so confused about this when learning english
Keep up the great work, really interesting and information packed
This reminded me how I have recently noticed how finnish language has tons of words to describe weather and natural phenomenon. Like there's a word for temperature going below freezing during growing season (halla). Also there's a word for when a person feels sufficiently warm (tarkenee). This probably has something to do with long cold winters and short and unpredictable summers.
Funnily enough, in finnish language soup is still called soppa.
Should be mentioned that within England itself there are hundreds of dialects, used to be that the village over would have a slightly different dialect to you.
Note that there's a difference between "dialect" and "accent". An accent uses the same vocabulary, grammar, and syntax, but shifts the pronunciation. So, written down, accents mostly disappear. A dialect doesn't have any of those requirements, but has to be similar enough to a language to be recognizable as a form of it.
TLDR. Herb comes from French. It was pronounced “erb” in the UK until it became considered “lower class”. Americans didn’t get the memo
wrong -- watch the video next time
Americans speak the original English. Brits got caught up in classify bullshit.
@@firstname4337 Err, right - that's exactly correct. It was 'erb' till the Victorians somehow decided dropping the 'h' was a sign of lower class.
@@flakgun153 Low IQ take
@@flakgun153 lol this wasn’t a dig at Americans. I just meant nobody travelled to America to tell everyone about an English software update they need
I just want to drop a note to say that I really really love your channel. It’s so informative and interesting!
That aside, I thank you for defending diverse pronunciation of English words. As an American living abroad, I can’t tell you how often I come across English people “correcting” me and lecturing me on how Americans murder their language.
This was by far my favourite video of you Adam. Although I mainly subscribed to your channel to watch easy to follow recipes with usually greater than expected outcomes, but languages/food and language history? that's very very interesting.
I am so happy to tell everyone that I totally cured sickle cell anemia with herbs, my mom also cured Athritis after 12 years. Everyone should follow Drewi1 on CZcams and tell him about his health problems. He has natural treatment
I occasionally interact with some Dutch people online, and my brain always does a hitch when I see written Dutch, since it looks like English with different words (that's not true of most languages). And there's a ton of cognates and loan words, so I might get a third of a way through a paragraph before I realize that I can't actually read what's there.
And a minor language in the Netherlands, Frisian is said to be the closest relative to English, since they were mutually intelligible about 1100 years ago.
Dat is correct :P
(unless you are part of the club that recognises Scots as it's own language)
Although not as close, as a french speaker, I can read roughly one third of a text in italian or spanish, because we have so many words in common ^^
I learnt Afrikaans in school, I find funny how whenever I have to encounter Dutch that I sometimes have to fall back on English to decode what they are saying.
I heard two people speaking what sounded like English and momentarily thought I was having a stroke. They were speaking Dutch.
"you know, brits, if you didnt want lots of other people speaking your language and changing it around, well then maybe you shouldnt have colonized half the world snd forced the people there to adapt your language" LMFAOO adam never misses 💀💀
Shuddupayaface
I like it when he breaks out the spicy recipes.
Oof
Yeah, I think you'll find when we left it was just 14 colonies on the eastern seaboard. What ever happened next wasn't us.
@@DaveF. bro no ones here to deny american imperialism but to say the US is the only place colonized by the brits is just nonsense
I think your best video offering ever. I like the interplay of historical stereotypes, languages issues and culinary items. I lived in Japan for 3 years teaching English and the stories I could tell you about cultural understanding let alone culinary understanding is astounding.
I love your channel and I love your videos and I LOVE your videos about etymology and the evolution of culture!!!
Adam explained everything there is in cooking and now has to grasp for straws.
Just kidding I luv u please never stop.
What's up with that weirdly wrong Union Flag at 0:14 and a couple of other times? That's not what the flag of the UK looks like today but maybe it's some older version I've never seen before. These days, the red diagonal lines are all supposed to be about 1/3 the thickness of the white diagonals and off centre like in the top right portion of the flag shown in the video.
I'm pretty sure it's just a bad flag as the only earlier GB flag was the one without St. Patrick's cross inside of St. Anderw's
Thanks for that :)
I love how Adam just adds a third mutant hand to his body via editing and continues to explain the topic without missing a beat. Great video.
This is a big thing when I was studying sociolinguistics, that as linguists, setting up prescriptive models for what a language (in this case English) SHOULD be, how it should sound and act got in the way of observing what was actually happening and in the case of you know interacting with people, telling them they spoke incorrectly because of the rules people who are long dead made up wasn’t a good way to make friends…
Love it, language is defined by those who speak it.
linguistic prescriptivism is for squares, descriptivism is the way
Are you kidding me? Language police are always the life of the party!
Yet another question I would've never asked myself in a million years, but I'm all the happier that I know the answer to and gotten a lot of context as well!
I love this so much.
He was such an hero
As a Brit: Sure, you got me there. There's nothing objectively wrong with saying "erb"
But you did get our flag wrong.
lmfao no one cares.
What's really weird is a quarter of it is correct.
@@mafiacat88 My thoughts exactly.
@@veryimportantperson3657 You sound bitter lol
Not the first time he got it wrong
As a Brazilian I’ve heard so much ‘there is the right way and the wrong way’ and the ‘it’s literally in the name’ that I don’t even pay attention to it anymore. Without the US english would not be the hegomonic lingua franca it is today, without Spanish America few people would speak spanish and without Brazil you’d never know portuguese even existed.
This language history lesson was just as gorgeous as that pot of glossy, glorious basil you kept waving around.
Not sure if he intentionally skirted past the "basil/basil" pronunciation whilst he was referring to it, but I was on edge as he mentioned it several times in quick succession.
That's too banal a topic to use in a video.
The whole language evolved thing is something I've been thinking about for a long time. There has been panic amongst people that English has influenced languages and that we don't use the "proper" word that exists in the current language. Problem is that something that has always happened with languages for milleniums and will continue for the next milleniums as well.
As a Swede for example, a lot of Nordic words we used to have have been replaced by French or German words because those were fashion languages back then as English is today but they have been "Swedified" (as an example, window is called fönster in Swedish which is from fenster in German when originally it sounded very close to window). And if we went back 500 years, no Swede would understand what we were saying because the Swedish then is not the Swedish now.
Same with English, go back 500 years in England and nobody will understand what we are saying and in 500 years, nobody will understand our English because it won't be the same language anymore even if it is called English because languages evolve. One day you Americans might say the h sound in herb or you got in a different direction and say it differently even then. And that's how it should be.
I do wonder how much memes/memetics relates to how evolution works. The memes/genes just seem to go back and forth and sideways and back around. And sometimes they stay separated from each other for a long time until colliding with each other again hundreds, thousands, or millions of years later.
Funnily, the German word Fenster is based on the Latin word fenestra. :D
English is actually a pretty conservative language, perhaps because it spoken on an island, that is why a modern reader can read Shakespeare even though it was written more than 500 years ago. Meanwhile, all continental languages have been influenced a lot in recent times by German and French, and today English
@@matheuroux5134 Yes that is true. But when then, pronunciation has changed over the years even if the words haven't. This video is a great example (I promise this isn't spam) czcams.com/video/gPlpphT7n9s/video.html
In short, the English Shakespeare spoke was a bit different then our modern English and it's why it's a bit hard for some people to read Shakespeare even though it is the same English we speak today. If Shakespeare got to our time, he would've understood us but he would've taken a sec to rerun what we just said.
It's a rant and I'm here for it.
Mr. Ragusea always talks about the most interesting things we don't think about that often
Adam: "Maybe we should defer to the Danes about what is and is not proper English."
Finally! At long last, someone sees the truth.
Til langskibene, mine Vikinger! Bavnene er tændt!
Take the potato out of your throat first 😂
I’m sorry, I didn’t understand that. Could you repeat but with the consonants?
French also have different terms differentiating meat and the animals.
You can call a pig "Un porc" in French but most of the time it's called "Un cochon"
Same is true for "Boeuf" (Beef) and "Vache/Taureau"
This is true. The point, however, is that English borrowed the table words from French, but not the animal words.
I love this kind of videos. So much information and now I can laugh at those H silencing peasants
this is an absolute banger, probably one of my favorite videos from Adam next to "you gotta blanch the tomatoes... NO"
Talking about language policing: you say that in Spanish we don't have a wide dictionary, but we usually have at least 4 or 5 different synonyms for each word. Too many countries talking the same language that got mixed with the native language from the region gave us a miniature version of what happened to Latin a few millennia ago
I'm gonna start using "Anyway, herbs" as a new segue to avoid difficult conversation topics.
"I'm going to water my herbs" .. the man gets it right at the end :D
Your address an amazing teacher😁
Can you do a video like this explaining bologna?
"HHHHHHere" something I learned last Friday.... )
The word Barn ("Grange" in French) comes from the Old English “bere”, for grain (grain is also French), and aern ("Hangar" in French, and newer English), for a storage place. The word bere-ern (GrainHangar.... Grangar, "Grange", where the French name came from), also spelled bern and bearn has acquired more than 60 different spellings over the years.
The first known use of a bearn was before the 12 century.
One might wonder "How these "word-evolution" seems to follow the same trail?"
Answer: Workers.
Simple as that.
People looking for work across different countries, going to work from one country to an other, you learn the language and carry on its slang 😉
This vídeo is good in so many levels
I am a Brit and found this really informative and entertaining. Thanks :)
Yes as a french speaker and learner of the history of french language. Yes the silent letters and all the specifics of the language are there so that you make a fool of yourselves trying to speak french to a french person. It's all about that one guy that went around the world to rewrite french grammar. He came back with a bunch of ideas to make the words more beautiful, adding silent letters so only the knowledgeable can properly speak.
And you should hate him for it, as most french people do when they learn about him.
Who was he ?
Who was this man? Also, what's up with all the bots?
@@VideoGamerabc I think CZcams is having a hard time catching and removing spam from the comments in general, it is really annoying.
English had those people too (though, being 18th century England, it had to be committees not an individual), who made up dumb rules like 'this word originates from Latin therefore we should add extra letters that are not pronounced so everyone knows it originates from Latin' but of course they got it wrong as often as not and weren't even consistent about which words should get this treatment.
@@caiawlodarski5339 Jean-ny Appleseed?