My Grandma was born in Wales and moved to the midlands in her early 20s. She is fast approaching 100 and she slowly becomes less proficient in English so much so that it's difficult for her great grandkids to understand her. I guess you never quite lose your native language - my kids have been learning Welsh for the past 11 months - tricky because we live in Poland but in the age of italki and whatnot, its definitely doable. This xmas period we'll be visiting her and hopefully she'll smile at the progress we've made!

@Ptaku93

4 ай бұрын

wait, are you an Englishman living in Poland? how unusual!

@psikodelriot6754

4 ай бұрын

Do you know "Mari Lwyd"? It´s a spooky welsh tradition around x-mas, with a decorated horse head. The word "Mari" means female horse. In germany we still using "Mähre" for that and in english "Mare", is sill used. Wish u all many fun there!!

@derfelcadarn8230

4 ай бұрын

I'm Breton, but I've also heard of such stories over here, in Brittany: people who've been raised in Breton reverting to their native Breton as they age and approach death, even after decades of practicing the language only sporadically. Apparently, it's quite a sad sight in some nursing homes, because Breton is in rapid decline and, as such, few young people are able to converse fluently in the language, so some elderly people have basically even more difficulties than usual of finding people they can have a basic, decent conversation with. My own grandma was raised in Breton and didn't speak a single word of French before entering elementary school, at the age of 6. She speaks perfect French now, of course, but hasn't really spoken daily, regular, conversational Breton since, well, I don't know when, (probaly since the last native Breton speaker of her family died a few years ago, and even then...) although she still has retained a fair amount of proficiency in the language after all those years -- with some difficulties, obviously. Unfortunately she didn't raise her children in the language. She's still very healthy for her age and has a few years ahead of her, God willing, so I don't know how it'll play out in the end for her. Greetings from France ! I wish you a wonderful time with your grandma during this blessed Christmas :)

@Ethan7_7

4 ай бұрын

"fast approaching" is almost approaching? If so, thats the same meaning as the german "fast"

@LearnHittite

4 ай бұрын

@@derfelcadarn8230 Greetings! Similar stories indeed! We are fortunate that my aunt lives with my Grandma so they support each other. I'm really looking forward to visitng Wales again, my wife loves the place!

One fairly clear example of Irish influence on Irish-English is the so-called "after"-perfect. We say "I'm after giving him a ring there just now" meaning "I have just called him on the phone". "To be after doing X" as a way of saying "To have (just) done X" is a direct translation of the Irish construction "bheith i ndiaidh/tar éis X a dhéanamh", which is how the perfective aspect is expressed in Irish.

@willmosse3684

2 ай бұрын

Yes, I was going to write that one. I am English, not Irish, but I was once out with a couple of Irish colleagues after work in London, and one of them said he had to go because his girlfriend was “after locking herself out of the house”. I was somewhat confused about exactly what he meant, but my other Irish colleague explained that it meant that his girlfriend had just locked herself out of the house, and that this was a direct translation from Irish grammar into English. I am glad you explained it though, because I was worried I would get detail or nuance wrong…

I've seen some Welsh Argentines speaking English, who still sound Welsh (and a bit Spanish) when speaking it. There's a good chance many of them don't know much English so it would be interesting to see how they sound when they learn it

@asdfasdf-dd9lk

4 ай бұрын

According to some of my Welsh friends they used to have Welsh-speaking Argentinian exchange students in their school pretty regularly

@ffosiliaudecymrusouthwales1716

4 ай бұрын

To me, as a Welsh speaker, people from Patagonia have a definite 'Spanish' tinge to their accents.

@capo3645

Ай бұрын

I think it's difficult to really say because the "welsh" accent is actually extremely different depending on where you are in Wales. People from North Wales sound so far removed from the South Welsh accent that they only really share a minority of features. North Welsh accents are closer to North West English accents than they are to South Welsh. That is to say, what does "Welsh accent" even mean?

Was working down in a Gaeltacht (Irish speaking area) and the old lady on the farm was definitely more fluent in Irish. Though her English was excellent as had worked in London as a young lady, it was a bit stilted. I've heard other older people feeling more comfortable speaking Irish. Sometimes it's hard to tell with certain people: is their English "incorrect" because their English is weak (better at Irish) or because they are speaking Hiberno-English? Or both? However, with current generations it's almost impossible to find an adult more fluent in Irish than English. However, many people still only learn English as a second language later in childhood. Though usually their level of English rapidly overtakes their Irish. I know people, even in Dublin, for whom English is technically a second language. They usually learn later in childhood, when start school around 5. However functionally it is usually better than their Irish by time reach adulthood

@craiczaibatsu8930

4 ай бұрын

I know two people in their 20s who would defeinetly say they speak Irish better than they speak English. One from the Donegal Gaeltacht and another form the Kerry Gaeltacht.

@malapertfourohfour2112

4 ай бұрын

Take your meds, ​@@FrozenMermaid666

@Dreyno

4 ай бұрын

@@craiczaibatsu8930And they probably can barely understand each other or at least pretend not to. You haven’t seen a fight until you’ve seen a Donegal Irish vs Connemara Irish fight.

@wegfarir1963

4 ай бұрын

@@FrozenMermaid666 "superior", "pure being" How many impure thoughts did you have today? How many right after you just woke up? Get your new-age fake aess out of here. You narcissists are revealing yourselves now, I don't even have to search for you guys anymore

@garyfrancis6193

4 ай бұрын

Who was working? You have a problem of omitting pronouns require for anaphora.

Afaik Irish English has a "to be after doing something" construction which is lifted from Irish. It expresses that you just did something, like French "venir de"

I know someone who grew up on the Isle of Lewis (born 1960s). As a young child, she only spoke and understood Scots Gaelic and didn’t learn English until starting primary school, this was typical of families living there at the time. She mentioned that this doesn’t really happen nowadays and children grow up bilingual.

@shaddaboop7998

4 ай бұрын

Sadly even bilingualism is dying out in western Scotland. All our road signs in the Highlands are in English and Gaelic but hardly anybody can actually speak the language, certainly not in the North-East. The extent of our Gaelic education was six weeks in Primary 5 of Gaelic music. There was a Gaelic nursery which some parents sent their children to, but none of them grew up immersed in the language afterwards. Supposedly less than 60,000 Scottish people can speak Gaelic today in Scotland. That's very low out of a Highland population 600,000, all of whom would've been native speakers of Gaelic prior to the Highland Clearances of the 18th century.

@Livia9988

4 ай бұрын

@@shaddaboop7998 That’s very sad to hear. I grew up in Angus, and Gaelic just didn’t factor into my upbringing unfortunately. I have ancestors who were from Strathconon and after the clearances, ended up in the lowlands. The older generations were noted as being Gaelic speakers in one of the censuses (I think it was 1901 off the top of my head), but when I found their adult children, they were noted as English speakers only. I found it quite striking

@RealUlrichLeland

4 ай бұрын

Donald Trump's mum is actually a Scots Gaelic speaker from Stornoway

@RealUlrichLeland

4 ай бұрын

​@@shaddaboop7998 To be fair even before the highland clearances not everyone in the Highlands would've been native Scots Gaelic speakers. Orkney and Shetland lost any Celtic language influence all the way back in the dark ages when the vikings invaded. They spoke a Nordic language called Norn which went extinct in 1850. Lots of aristocratic families would also likely have spoken Scots or English as their first language and quite likely Anglo-Norman French as a second one.

@shaddaboop7998

4 ай бұрын

@@RealUlrichLeland The vast majority of people in the Highlands were Gaelic speakers, while the Lowlanders spoke Scots, a Germanic language. Scottish historical revisionism likes to cast the country as a united front against England in the Middle Ages and Early Modern age, but in reality it was a deeply divided country, with Gaelic speaking Catholic tribes in the north and Scots and English speaking feudal, and later also Protestant as well, populations in the south. I wouldn't necessarily include Orkney and Shetland as being a part of the Highlands, culturally and historically they are distinct, like you said much more Norse influence (even compared to the Hebrides).

To comment on the question marker, "oder" ("or") is the go-to question marker in rather formal language, but in common speech we use other markers way more often. The most common one is a (regionally different) form of "nicht" ("not"). Including "nech" in the Northern dialects, espescially North-Eastern and Prussian, "ne" common in central Germany, "nid"/"nich"/"nh" common in the Southern dialects, espescially South west, "nit" used in Berlin. They are used in all kinds of questions that do not contain a negation, e.g. "Das Video ist echt gut, nh?" ("This video is really good, not?") It originated as a shortened form of the phrase "nicht wahr?" ("Isn't it true?") and this longer phrase may be found in formal speech aswell, although "oder?" seems to be more common in formal speech. Another common question marker in German is "gell" and various forms of it "gelle"/"göll". This marker is believed to come from the verb "gelten" ("to apply"/"to be considered as"/"to be legally enforced") though the exact origin is unclear as far as I know. In contrast to the various forms of "nicht?", "gell?" can be used with any kind of question, including those containing a negation: "Es ist draußen nicht gerade warm heute, gell?" ("It is not particulary warm outside today, is it?"). As well as "nicht?", "gell?" is more common than "oder?" in informal situations, but unlike "nicht wahr?", there exists no form of "gell" (that I know of) that can be used in formal situations. As someone in the following comments has pointed out "wa?" is the most common question in Berlin and the surrounding areas. It's probably a shortened form of "oder was?" ("or what?") as this longer form does exist in Standard German aswell, though it may possibly could be another short form of "nicht wahr" ("isn't it true?"). I do think it's the former though because "was?" ("what?") and similar forms do exist throughout Germany, though this could possibly be a Berlinism that spread through Germany and was reinterpreted as a form of "oder was?", rather than "nicht wahr?". Maybe you'll find this information useful or atleast interesting. Thanks for the video, Simon, I enjoy your linguistic uploads a lot.

@davidjames3787

4 ай бұрын

'Gell and 'gelten' are related to the English word 'yield', I believe.

@danielj.8876

4 ай бұрын

​@@davidjames3787 Looks very much like they are, indeed. Though if true then the meanings drifted apart quite a bit.

@fariesz6786

4 ай бұрын

let me politely disagree to the details: the variant with «oder?» is _not_ formal; it doesn't _sound_ particularly formal, «oder (etwa) nicht?» sounds somewhat formal, as does following «oder» with an alternative tailored to the respective sentence. what it does is sound standard and hardly anyone in Germany speaks true _standard_ German other than some telly announcers. however, for those who do (usually people who are diaglossic or freaks like me who autistically modelled their language after the telly as a child) «oder?» is actually the go-to. i personally do use «ne?» or variants and even «gell?» occasionally, but they also feel like they have a slight difference in meaning (being more expectant of a positive answer, whereas «oder?» can be used when you literally have no clue what the situation is) but that might be idiosyncratic usage. also i just realised we have another form of «oder» at the "end" of a question and that's when a) it is an actual grammatical question and b) that end of the the utterance is an ellipsis. it's probably a bit of a speech quirk to use these but it can be done when the alternative is basically clear and possibly too hard or complicated to put into words at that time, or when there are several possible alternatives and you realise mid-sentence you can't be bothered to list all of them. that one probably translates quite verbatim to English as «or..»

@googlelover13

4 ай бұрын

This is very interesting. I grew up in the south east of Ireland, and people there frequently use "or" at the end of questions, both in speech and in text messages. E.g. "Are we going to the cinema tonight or?" I always interpreted this as implying an implicit alternative (i.e. "Are we going to the cinema tonight or not?"). Perhaps that is indeed the case, but it is interesting that this construct is also present in German...

@SplendidMisanthropy

4 ай бұрын

Berlin and surrounding areas use „wa“.

One feature of Hiberno-English that I have heard could be a holdover from Irish is the tendency of Hiberno-English speakers to answer with the verb used in the question where a standard English speaker would simply use yes or no. So for example "Were you in the office yesterday?" would be answered with "I was" or "I wasn't". In the dialect of Hiberno-English that I speak, this survives but gets paired with a yes or no, so I would answer the question "Were you in the office yesterday?" with "I was, yes" or "I wasn't, no"

@cadileigh9948

4 ай бұрын

and yn gymraeg eto

@drjong2651

4 ай бұрын

I feel like we do this in Australia too, moreso than Americans at least. Something like "Did you go to the shops yesterday?" is usually answered "nah I didn't", or "Have you been to Adelaide?" with "Nah I haven't". Thinking about it now, it sounds weird to just answer "nah/no", almost rude. It probably isn't standard and definitely isn't something we're conscious of, but it happens. Might be influence from Irish English, might be an older feature from England, hard to say, but I'm curious if someone has info!

@mgkernowek

4 ай бұрын

Interesting. I'm from the west of Cornwall and we definitely answer with "I was" ,"I wasn't", etc. Its rare to a get a straight yes or no answer.

@embryomystic

4 ай бұрын

I do this as well, as a Canadian, but I didn't always, and it seems to come from having started learning Irish (aged 18 or so) and spending lots of time speaking it during the summer (with weekly classes and immersion weekends a couple of times a year). In addition, even when I wasn't speaking Irish, I was talking to a lot of Hiberno-English speakers, and when it got into my own idiolect, I endeavoured to keep it there. Reminds me of my early 20s, in a positive way.

@tobybartels8426

4 ай бұрын

As an American schoolchild, I was taught to answer Yes/No questions in full sentences in formal situations, so ‘Yes’ informally but ‘Yes, I was’ formally. It never occurred to me that this might just be natural in some languages.

I normally watch one of Simon’s videos when I’m looking into a certain time period in British history. Like clockwork a Celtic video arrives. Brilliant once again.

@FrozenMermaid666

4 ай бұрын

I am actually learning the 6 modern Celtic languages and all the Germanic languages, including Norse + Icelandic and Dutch and Norwegian etc, which are so pretty, just like English, and these languages are a lot more similar than one may think, even though they look very different at first sight, a lot of the words or most of the words are actually cognates, but the dudes that made the Celtic languages modified the words a lot, so most Celtic words look like a completely different word, but most of the words in Modern Celtic languages were modified from Latin, and Germanic languages come from Latin, so they are kinda related in a way,! There are many words in Welsh that look / sound just like an Old Norse / Icelandic word, and Welsh mostly sounds like Dutch, and also a bit like English as it has some of the sounds found in English! The modern languages have definitely influenced each other a lot, tho the real reason why Modern English uses the verb to do when asking questions is, because Modern English has been modified into a very neutral language with neutral word endings, so it wouldn’t sound right without the verb to do, but if one used the stronger verb endings like eth, one could say something like ‘doeth ye that?’ or ‘dothye that?’ instead of ‘do you do that?’ etc, it’s all about the word endings, English being the only Germanic language with very neutral verb / word endings, while the other Germanic languages have strong verb endings, so they do not need an extra verb like to do!

As an Irish-English speaker, the habitual be wouldn't be "I be" but "I do be" where "do" is mandatory. (Whereas in AAVE it's just "I be"). Maybe there are dialects of Irish-English where it isn't mandatory though and I'm just not aware.

@hiccacarryer3624

4 ай бұрын

I be and even thou/ you bist were preserved right to modern times in the Westcountry dialect derived from West Saxon- a typical construction is "where be (th)ee agoing to? I be gwain to vather's"

@nigelsheppard625

4 ай бұрын

Same in Welsh, the verb to be Bod would literally be translated as rydwi'n (wi'n) - literally I (am) being.

@XBclemX

4 ай бұрын

Depending on dialect of AAVE and West Indian English, “I do be” is also used.

regarding making questions using the auxiliary "do": I know that in Westfries (in North Holland in the Netherlands), they use it, too. When I was a high school student ca. 50 years ago, an aunt from there asked me "doe je graag naar school toe gaan?" (= do you like to go to school). In regular Dutch it is "Ga je graag naar school?". And I'm pretty sure in spoken German (at least in some regions), it's also pretty common to use "tun" in similar situations as in English.

@couchcamperTM

4 ай бұрын

ja. Meine Nachbarin "tut so reden" - wir finden es komisch. het is een zeldzaam ding ;-)

@wilkoufert8758

4 ай бұрын

⁠@@couchcamperTM The practise of using „tun“ in that way is actively discouraged in education and is classified as non-standard, even it seems to have been widespread.

@couchcamperTM

4 ай бұрын

while that's correct, I think education should discourage other things than the "tun" of a 65yo lady, imho ;-)@@wilkoufert8758

@naufalzaid7500

4 ай бұрын

​@@wilkoufert8758 The point is that this "do-support" feature exists in Germanic languages other than English regardless of whether it's seen as standard or not in those Germanic languages.

@joanaloneathome

4 ай бұрын

in Swiss German the do-support is widely used: Duesch koche? - Do you cook? / Due nochär no de abfall use bringe! - Bring the rubbish outside later! / Düen sie gärn danze? - Do they like to dance?

With regards to population replacement in Britain due to Anglo-Saxon migrations: it is indeed a controversial subject, in large part due to the many technical challenges of answering the question via current archeogenetic methods (the relatively recent common ancestry of the two ancient populations in question, the heterogeneity of invader populations, later Scandinavian influence being commonly mistaken for earlier continental Germanic, and of course the many challenges of obtaining a representative sample of 1500-year-old genomes). Nevertheless, the general consensus seems to be that the extent of population replacement is geographically contingent, largely on an east-west axis. Eastern parts of England like East Anglia are upwards of 80% continental Germanic, while western places like Cumbria and Cornwall are almost entirely native Brythonic. Most of Britain falls somewhere in between, with the average English admixture being roughly 60% British and 40% continental Germanic. The data do appear to indicate that a significant number of native Brythonic speakers adopted the incoming Germanic languages both for their utility as prestige languages and as a result of intermarriage.

@mytube001

4 ай бұрын

Did the Celtic groups move, or were they just massively outnumbered, so that it looks like a replacement today? If you have an original population of (arbitrary number) 10000, and then 100 000 move there, the native "signal" would almost drown in the archaelogical record.

@lucie4185

4 ай бұрын

Hard to say Sub Roman Britain is very hard to pin down. Did the Britons leave with the armies as families or as servants or slaves to rich Roman citizens who wanted to protect their legacies. The Welsh kingdoms were less dependent on Rome and carried on with their fairly stable governance so maybe it was safer for people to move to wales than stay in the east and get raided by Goths and Saxons.

@norik434

4 ай бұрын

@mytube001 There are no precise numbers for either the native Brythonic speakers or the Germanic invaders, so it's hard to say with confidence. However, we do know for a fact that many Brythonic natives fled from the east of the island, both to the western regions (especially Wales) and to various refuges in continental Europe (most notably Brittany in France and Galicia in Iberia). We also have mixed family burials from the early Medieval period in East Anglia where one spouse (usually the male) will cluster genetically with the modern Dutch and Danish while the other spouse (usually the female) will cluster with the modern Welsh, indicating a fair degree of intermarriage

@willbick7889

4 ай бұрын

I find it hard to believe there was much migration of the native Brits from east Britain to west​. I imagine the practicalities of such a thing in those days would've been beyond most common people@@lucie4185

@willbick7889

4 ай бұрын

​@@mytube001I find it hard to imagine an east Anglian fisherman going off to re-invent himself as a sheep farmer in Wales back then

Such an interesting video. I’ve lived in Llandeilo, a majority Welsh speaking community (60%) about 20 miles north west of Swansea, that’s exists on the fault line of Welsh and English - a fault line that’s been in place for at least a hundred years, going by the different languages in use on the grave stones in the church yard. I’m English but have been living in this community for 10+ years and been learning Welsh all that time, I can only speak from lived-experience. Some points to add from your video: In Welsh in the South, ‘on'd yw e?’ is said at the end of a sentence in the just the way you’ve heard the use of ‘isn’t it’. Welsh teachers I’ve worked with suggest that the ‘isn’t it’ turned up in use in South Wales in English as Welsh speakers adopted English as their second language. There are several dialects of Welsh in Wales as well as several accents, In country joke/finger pointing claim that North Walians speak Welsh with an English accent and South Walians speak English with a Welsh accent. Although many would say that the North Walian accent is very similar to the Liverpudlian accent and that could be due to the amount of North Walians who migrated to Liverpool for work. But Welsh would have died out in Liverpool relatively late - so it could just be the accent remaining regionally. In Llandeilo I was surprised to discover the amount of Welsh speakers who operate with two separate accents - They speak Welsh in the local soft Carmarthenshire accent (think Elis James or Rhod Gilbert) but will speak with more RP when then speak English, they tend to be older - perhaps from a time when Welsh was considered a language that would hold you back. Younger people seem to have the same accent for both their Welsh and English speaking.

As far as I'm aware, the popular singer Enya is a native Irish speaker and learnt English as a second language in childhood.

@68able2

4 ай бұрын

every-time enya comes up i think of peep show

@jon6039

4 ай бұрын

​@@68able2 what a disaster

@EVO6-

4 ай бұрын

There are people that technically learn English as a second language, but realistically they are never unable to articulate themselves perfectly in English like a native past early childhood. Sean ó heinrí was the last monolingual speaker because he *never* learned English, properly at least. He's the last Irish person to do so.

@suziq4394

4 ай бұрын

Simon , have you any interest in the English Romany Gypsy language ? How can I contact you ?

@user-fd4jb8tz7z

4 ай бұрын

@@EVO6- FYI O hEinri was not the last monolingual speaker. There is a KZread video that would give that impression but it isn’t true. There were many other monolingual speakers that lived in Gaeltachts up until the late nineties. My grandfather was one of them. These were people that didn’t leave their own area much.

I'm a native Welsh speaker from Gwynedd. Question tags are not that unusual when speaking Welsh, but aren't as obvious to the ear when used. Listeners might only hear a quick 'de' pasted onto the end of a sentence from the longer 'ynde?', which is the full form. Interestingly, native speakers from the North are less likely to use this when they switch over to English. Instead, you tend to hear question tags from the South East, where Welsh is much less spoken, and less spoken even less as a native language.

@ENGLISHTAINMENT

4 ай бұрын

de - ynde - onid e (ai nid efe) Basically meaning DE is INNIT in North Walian.

@Tina06019

4 ай бұрын

The Mohawk language has a question tag, which is spelled “ken” and pronounced more like “g(uhn),” the last sound being similar to the French sound in “non.”

@ENGLISHTAINMENT

4 ай бұрын

@@Tina06019 niá:wen

@ENGLISHTAINMENT

4 ай бұрын

@@Tina06019 Total coincidence. Today I met a Mohawk speaker from Akwasasne. She told me the numbers from one to five.

Interesting. Spanish also has two forms of "to be," _ser_ and _estar,_ one for more essential and permanent things: _"Soy humano"_ ("I am human"), one for more temporary and contingent things: _"Estoy en la casa"_ ("I am in the house").

Yes, you described the Scottish Gaelic copula and substantive verb well ! I want to add a bit more. ‘S, the copula, is usually used as part of a rather bizarre structure in modern Scottish Gaelic. So, “it is a chair” would be “‘s e sèithear a th’ ann”, which would literally translate to something like “it is a chair that is in (it)”. It’s a bit less common nowadays, but the copula (‘s) can be used for certain emphatic expression. “Nach mór am beud” - “is it not a **great** loss”, with mór (big/great) being emphasised :)

@GdotWdot

4 ай бұрын

Curious. In Polish we describe identity, by using the copula with an object in the instrumental case instead of nominative. Instrumental is the 'in'/'with' case, so it kinda potentially fits this paradigm at a glance.

@pawel198812

4 ай бұрын

​@@GdotWdot I think it's more similar to the 'to' copula, derived from the sing/neuter general demonstrative ten/ta/to. 'To' can be used together with the verb 'być' (to be) to form constructions of the type 'nA is nB', eg: 'mój ulubiony deser to tiramisu' = my favourite dessert is tiramisu. 'To' is also used to indicate the focus of a sentence when it is placed at the front, eg: 'to tiramisu jest moim ulubionym deserem' = my favourite dessert is tiramisu (rather than something else)

@oravlaful

4 ай бұрын

french moment

@marcasdebarun6879

4 ай бұрын

This is, obviously, also a thing in Irish. Though I wouldn't say it's not as common nowadays for us, people still use it prodigiously. If I wanted to simply say ‘it is a chair’ I'd say ‘is cathaoir é’. But if I wanted to place emphasis on the fact that it's a *chair* (instead of a stool, maybe) I'd say ‘cathaoir atá ann’, which basically comes from a longer phrase almost identical to your example, ‘is é cathaoir atá ann’. The ‘X atá ann’ structure is actually really common in speech, especially in Connacht Irish (I think Munster would be more likely to still use the copula here, something like ‘cathaoir is ea é’). Your last example is common also, although it's not necessarily just for putting emphasis on the adjective e.g. ‘ba mhór an chaill dúinn’ (‘it was a great loss to us’), which is just the normal way to say it.

@spencerburke

4 ай бұрын

@@marcasdebarun6879 - Is it yourself that's in it? - 'tis. (- Are you there? - Yes, I am.) Typical English in Ireland...

In terms of academic content, this is really interesting. On a more "vibes based" evaluation , This has been such a pleasant watch. i really love how you incorporate garden footage into your videos, it makes for a really comfortable and cosy viewing experience. I just sat down to a cup of tea and this video and it made me very happy

Great video! I'm a native speaker of American English, but I began learning Scottish Gaelic in my teens from a native speaker living in my hometown in California, and I later spent a few stints doing short courses at Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, the Scottish Gaelic college on Skye. I've spent some time in Ireland studying Irish as well, and over the years, I've dabbled in learning Breton. There are certainly still people--old and young--for whom Scottish Gaelic is their native language at home. I've met several Scottish Gaelic-speaking adults (both native speakers and second-language fluent learners) who have gone to great lengths to minimize their children's exposure to English until school age. As late as the 1950s, children in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland were sometimes physically punished if they were heard speaking Gaelic in school. Not surprisingly, this is where you see a "lost generation" of people whose parents spoke Gaelic and who spoke it natively as young children but then transitioned to being monoglot English speakers. An acquaintance who teaches Gaelic calls such people "native non-speakers"; some have returned to the language later in life. Likewise, even though Gaelic-medium education has grown over the past few decades, the pressures of English on young people are immense such that their spoken Gaelic is peppered with English vocabulary, and they may lack confidence in the correctness of their Gaelic even if it's technically their native language. One interesting feature of Highland English is that it tends to be a "milder"-sounding dialect than other Scottish English dialects spoken in the Lowlands. I've heard multiple people from the Highlands and Islands (both Gaelic speakers and monoglot English speakers) insist that this is because Highland English developed as a second language among Gaelic speakers who were keen to avoid prejudicial stigmas about their speech. I don't know to what extent there's any truth to that. In any case, it's not uncommon to hear bits of Gaelic peppered in Highland English ("Right, mach a' seo!", "Alright, ma-tha", etc.) as well as phrases whose construction seems borrowed from Gaelic. One that comes to mind is "I'm/I was just after ___________", e.g. "I was just after coming back from work", or in Gaelic, "Bha mi dìreach air tilleadh bho'n obair," using the pluperfect form of the verb. I've also heard people use this construction in both Irish and Irish English.

There is a village on the West/South Yorkshire border, firmly within the boundary of the old Celtic kingdom of Elmet, which is called Cumberworth. The Cumber comes from the Welsh Cymru, so it's stipulated that that was a community of Welsh speakers. I'm more inclined to believe they were a community that was always there and one that must have maintained their language much longer than the surrounding areas, so we're perhaps speaking Cumbric until much later on.

It is such an interesting thought experiment to think of a Welsh language speaker learning English in adulthood, and seeing how similar the language features are to Welsh English or Welsh/English speakers, and deduce how many features comes from the Welsh language itself and how much is a regional variety of English.

I'm currently studying for an undergraduate degree in Celtic languages at Glasgow and speak semi-decent Gàidhlig (Scottish Gaelic), so I feel I have some degree of knowledge on a few of the points raised in this video. With regards to 15:27, yes - a few of the lecturers I've met didn't learn English until they started school and prefer to speak Gàidhlig outside of classes (I can even recall instances of one professor who speaks Gàidhlig with his children forgetting certain English words). Moreover, the comment on 'th' sounds in Irish is interesting, I can't offer any conclusions but I do find it peculiar that the 'th' at the beginning of these words in Glaswegian (and other western Scottish regional dialects) is often pronounced as it would be in Gàidhlig, for example you'll hear 'cutla hings' instead of 'a couple of things'. The Hebridean accent (in English) is very clearly influenced by Scottish Gaelic, an S next to an i or e is always pronounced as 'sh' (the only exceptions are the copula; is, and loan words). As such, words like horse may be pronounced 'horshe' - although I think this is generally only the case amongst speakers who were monolingual Gàidhlig speakers for the first few years of their lives.

@tadhgoneill6005

4 ай бұрын

The more I hear about Gàidhlig the more I realise how similar it is to Gaeilge (Irish). My Irish teacher in secondary school was from The Gaeltacht which is the name that collectively describes all the places in Ireland where Irish is spoken natively. I was very surprised when he told me that when he went home for an extended period of time he would find himself hearing his thoughts in Irish. This was eye opening to me as being someone who grew up mostly in Dublin, I never knew anyone who had Irish as a first language. As for the 'th' sound. As Simon said, it doesn't exist in the Irish language. This has had a noticeable effect on many accents within Ireland as to how they speak English. I would say the majority pronounce the 'th' "correctly" however many accents will replace the 'th' with 'd' as mentioned in the video. (There to dere.) They also either use the 't' or completely drop the sound at the end of words i.e 'with' becomes 'wih' or 'wit'. An interesting complexity of this effect that you see in a lot of my parent's and grandparent's generation is an overcompensation, putting 'th' where it doesn't belong out of fear of sounding improper. They'll pronounce the 'th' in Thailand or say 'Heighth' instead of 'Height'. My granny even pronounced my own name wrong to the disapproval of my mother from 'Tadhg' to 'Thadhg'.

@CuFhoirthe88

4 ай бұрын

Maybe English copula "is" isn't influence by slenderisation because that "S" in "is" is typically pronounced as a /z/?

I've heard that Thin Lizzy named themselves after a british comic book character, Tin Lizzy, as the pronunciation of both is the same in the Dublin dialect Hiberno-English in particular.

@aLadNamedNathan

4 ай бұрын

In America, "tin lizzy" was a slang term meaning a Ford model T automobile.

Something in Scots language that is pretty common especially in Glasgow area but pops up everywhere is a thing where certain words that begin with the 'th' sound as in θ in IPA get vocalised as h instead. I.e. Hink instead of think, Hing instead of thing. I've often wondered whether this might me related to the Scottish Gaelic 'th' spelling being pronounced just as h much like in Irish as was mentioned for why t is common there. Also, do you have any plans to talk more in depth about Scots in future Simon? I'd love one of those conversation videos you've done where you go back through time, one from London speaking standard English vs one from central belt Scotland in Scots.

@AtomikNY

4 ай бұрын

That is called debuccalization. My dialect of US English often does the voiced equivalent of this sound change with common function words, changing [ð] to [ɦ], e.g. "that one there" [ɦæt wʌn ɦeɹ]

@liamhodgson

4 ай бұрын

Same here in central Pennsylvania but probly for German reasons

@Arviragus13

4 ай бұрын

To add to that, iirc Old Irish used to have a 'th' sound, which was lost before it evolved into modern Irish and Scots Gaelic. Welsh still has both voiced and voiceless 'th' though

@arta.xshaca

4 ай бұрын

Just like in Old Persian!

@jillybe1873

4 ай бұрын

Celtic languages come from there originally. Welsh grammar is similar to aramaic. ​@@arta.xshaca

I think you are a brilliant guy. So nice, so bright, intelligent, sweet, good, humble, different, lovely

Fantastic video, Simon! The TH sound in most Irish dialects is left behind in Modern Irish, with Connemara dialect having something similar but not exactly the same. Do support in Hiberno-English is used mostly with the habitual, as in "I do be goin' to the shops." Both Scots and Yola have do-support (Yola is extinct now) but operates a little differently. Another influence from Cetlic language is the after-construction instead of past perfect, as in "I'm just after comin' back from the shops." As for the question tags, I haven't heard this used in Irish, but there is the so-auxillery in Hiberno-English for emphasis, as in "I'll sit down now so."

@craiczaibatsu8930

4 ай бұрын

I've heard question tags a fair bit in Irish, and use them myself a lot when I speak it. Something like "Tá sé fuar inniu, nach bhfuil?" is common enough.

@chrisjohnston3512

4 ай бұрын

I've heard that after construction in Newfoundland English

@authormichellefranklin

4 ай бұрын

@@chrisjohnston3512 Yep! We still use it, "B'ys, what's after happenin' now?"

I noticed those question tags on British English sentences years ago and have always wondered how that got started.

A French baby's burble has different "intonation patterns" [15:52] to an English baby's: we're born with an ability to mimic the 'music' of our mother-tongue, heard in the womb. This is why accents are so persistent: whatever languages/other accents we later hone, when push comes to shove, we reach for our first love. There's no place like Home.

@differous01

4 ай бұрын

"Perhaps we are in Eden still and only our eyes have changed" [Chesterton] and perhaps we're in Tolkien's Ainulindalë still, and only our Ears have changed.

@Dreyno

4 ай бұрын

French babies are born with a Gallic shrug perfected.

@differous01

4 ай бұрын

@@Dreyno Most babies go 'mom mom mom', those who go 'Meh!' ne pas chercher la femme.

As a Welsh speaker (and teacher of the language) I can confirm that Welsh question tags do, in fact, agree with the subject of the verb. "Mae e'n dda, on'd yw e?" (He's good, isn't he?) "Mae hi'n dda, on'd yw hi?" (She's good, isn't she?) I've never heard the supposedly ubiquitous "isn't it" used in the way you suggest, which suggests to me that either it is a historical form that has passed out of use, or (more likely) its root is in an English stereotype of Welsh English dialects rather than actual usage.

Thank you for another amazing video!! I was so happy to see the notification haha

your videos bring me such peace and contentment.

posted just as my break's finished 😭 excited to watch later!

Great video and very interesting content. Also the end was a real treat, thank you for that

West Germanic substrate effects have been suggested as an explanation for some differences in verb usage in American English- in this case, the influence of Pennsylvania Dutch (a High German variety from High Franconian and Alemannic German) and New York Dutch (from the Netherlands) by sone colonists. One place where this shows up is that US English is more likely to use subjunctives than British English. This may effect "do" support since Pennsylvania Dutch has a verb form using "tun" plus infinitive which I saw described in an old paper (ca. 1880) as "aorist": "das Hund tut knarre" meaning "that dog does growl", somewhat like a French imperfect. The same paper also points out that there is limited use of past tense in colloquial Pennsylvania Dutch, with the form known to the population from Hochdeutsch Biblical text but not commonly used.

Thanks for another fascinating talk, and kudos for the bonus jay! I love jays :)

Your videos are always different and interesting thank you 😊

Really interesting stuff as always, a whole video on question tags would be cool, its an aspect of English and language in general I'd not really thought about before but is clearly worth a deeper look.

As map men said: "Just a barely detectable hint of Celtic. Trust me, it'll make all the difference."

Man, you're such an inspiration. Love what you're doing.

Faszinating - I'm learning a lot about German in your videos 😀

I only briefly studied some welsh a few years back, but something that struck me as an interesting coincidence was the usage of y(n) as a particle before verbs. Sometimes you can even chain them together. In welsh, y is pronounced as a schwa, and it’s usage reminded me of some similar usage in some English poetry or songs such as “I’m a-singing and a-dancing” I wonder if this a- prefix is an example of Celtic influence in English. (Sorry for my poor description of the feature in Welsh, I don’t want to accidentally say something incorrect, and tbh my welsh is fairly nonexistent at this point)

@Muzer0

4 ай бұрын

Is the a- prefix in (older) English not just from the same root as modern ge- in German (used in modern German for past participles, eg machen "do/make" -> gemacht "done/made")?

@erutuon

4 ай бұрын

​​​@@Muzer0 No, the ge- prefix became i- in Middle English and it's put on past participles, whereas a- is on present participles (or gerunds?). Like with your example, i-made, but a-making.

@Muzer0

4 ай бұрын

@@erutuonAh cool, TIL!

@phyllisbiram5163

15 күн бұрын

You are entirely correct that Welsh 'yn' was taken over into Old English, eventually giving forms such a a-coming and a-dancing. This is more or less proven by the fact that the a- prefix in earlier forms of English was actually -an, so even close to 'yn'. What the video fails to mention is the whole continuous present thing going on in English, 'I am coming' and 'I am dancing', etc. This is very, very odd for a West Germanic language. Very few languages in the world have this but Welsh does and it gave it to English as a substrate.

Enlightening as always.

I think it's more common to say "do be" rather than "be" in the sense you're talking about. E.g. I'd expect to hear "He does be going to England on the regular" / "I do be..." over "He be going to England...".

regarding if the habitual do is Celtic influenced or not, it is clear there is a common sprachbund, and as LLMs (large language models) have shown, connections between internal elements are multidimensional; who knows how Anglic dialects were internally biases such that perhaps marginal features would find themselves 'promoted' in later centuries

Do-support being used in speech, but not in writing is roughly the situation in German today. Young children tend to use it a lot, probably because that way you don't have to know how to conjugate the main verb. Though you don't usually hear it from adults. The situation is similar with many such helper verbs, like the German equivalent of "have/had", as in "I have see that". In writing, you conjugate the main verb ("Ich sah das."), but in day-to-day speech, you use the helper verb ("Ich habe das gesehen."). There are just fewer particular conjugation rules you have to remember.

@climatechangeisrealyoubast3231

4 ай бұрын

where I'm from depending on the village its also not that uncommon in adults, but only in dialectal speech and is still looked down upon like its suggesting poor education. But! in the same dialect its basically a standard feature when used in Conjunctive form like : " Gische morje in die Kirsch? 'Nä, awwa isch *däd* näkschd Wuch ginn.'" = "Gehst du morgen in die Kirche? ' Nein, aber ich würde nächste Woche gehen ' " and there its not seen as a sign of poor education at all.

@TheRavenir

4 ай бұрын

@@climatechangeisrealyoubast3231 In Swiss German, it's in common use even by adults, though overusing it would definitely still make you sound childish. For something like "Tuesch du abwösche?" (Are you going to do the dishes?"), it would be completely normal, but with something like "cho" (kommen), "gah" (gehen), "haa" (haben), "sii" (sein) or any modal verb, it would sound quite odd. So it really depends on the verb.

@climatechangeisrealyoubast3231

4 ай бұрын

@@TheRavenir yes thats very similar in the dialect of my region, which makes a lot of sense as its also spoken in the south west of germany, despite technically being considered as a central german dialect. because standard german influence is more pronounced in germany though, these features are slowly fading away as less and less younger people are taught to speak our dialect or reject it due to social stigma. P.S : how would you express the conjunkive form in swiss german?

Some of the best content on KZread. You'll be on the TV one day doing documentaries.

Have just caught up on your videos from the last month. Excellent quality, and interesting as always! Such a shame you're outside the paywalls now ☹️ I also wanted to say, I visited your zazzle shop (from the spiders episode) and am looking forward to getting my Gyða mid screawan tote bag!

Hi Simon. Some other features of Hibernian English that come over from Irish include using periphrastics instead of yes/no in situations like: "Do you like curry?" "I do" "Is she your sister?" "She isn't". Irish doesn't have words for yes or no. Similarly, to be after doing something - meaning to have just done something - echos similar constructions in Irish. I also say a great video recently about Irish pronunciation in which the speaker talked about his grandparents who had learned English as a second language used bilabials where English usually has labio-dentals: [ɸ],[ β] for/f/, /v/. The same guy also said that many second language learners of Irish in Ireland assume that their Hiberno-English accents must have come from Irish but using that gives them a markedly foreign accent in Irish.

@dazpatreg

4 ай бұрын

That's an loingseach id guess

@DaveHuxtableLanguages

4 ай бұрын

Spot on!@@dazpatreg

@dazpatreg

4 ай бұрын

@@DaveHuxtableLanguages he's excellent. Although I would say mayo Irish is superior. But of course I'd say that...haha

Another great video, thanks :) In response to your thoughts on whether the Welsh accent when speaking English derived from their own accent when speaking Welsh - that's a definite yes! If you listen to a southern or northern Welsh person speaking Welsh, and then hear them speaking English, it's pretty apparent they use a very, very similar accent for both languages. I am learning Welsh myself (first language English) and I definitely sound much more native when I 'put on' a Welsh accent - whether I adopt a northern or southern one - I'm trying to learn a bit of both dialects and accents.

A very interesting and informative video as usual. 👍😊

I've noticed that Welsh 1st language speakers (mainly in the north) have a much less 'welsh sounding' accent when speaking English than their southern Welsh neighbours who are predominantly English 1st language speakers

So good to bump into you! I studied linguistics at Preston and then Lancaster in the 90's. I now live in Spain... How wonderful languages and dialects are. Let's hope that modern languages will carry on to be taught to our children. My son is bi-lngual, the best thing we could do for him and so easy. Look forward to following your papers and a Happy Christmas, Susan.

Was about to go to bed but then i see you uploaded. Bye bye sleep schedule

Thank you for this interesting topic. Please stay warm, put on outdoors clothing if needed, stay safe and healthy. Thank you for sharing your thoughts and insights.

Great video Simon, I've been hoping you would do a video on something Celtic for a while now. In regards to the existense of people who are more comfortable speaking in Irish rather than English, I can confirm that there are people like that in modern Ireland, usually on the older side, but I know a few people in their 20s and 30s who would describe themselves in this way. These are all people from the Gaeltacht, though I have heard of Irish speakers raised outside of the Gaeltacht who are more comfortable in Irish than English, though I don't know any personally. I lived in the Connemara Gaeltacht for a time, and even today, it's still possible to meet people who speak Irish far more often and better than they do English. I recall briefly chatting to a pair of auld fellas from Ceantar na nÓileain (the area of lettermore and garmna, about an 80 mins west of Galway city) who certainly could speak English, but I wouldn't call them fluent in it at all. I spoke to them in Irish, but I heard them speaking English to a non-Irish speaking friend for a bit, and the difference in flunency seemed pretty clear to me. On the bus into Galway City I also once overheard a conversation between a group of young teenagers that started out in English, but as the discussion became a bit more animated (they were arguing about something), the conversation started to slowly drift into Irish, until no more English was being spoken at all, aside from the frequent loan-words that are comon to Connemara Irish. In regards to the influence of Irish in the English of people I've known from the Gaeltacht, I can pretty confidently say that there are features that carry over. For instance, speakers of Connemara Irish often don't pronounce the letter "Z" when speaking in English (zoo becomes sue), which is absent from the Irish alphabet. There other tell tale signs, but I'm no linguist so I won't speculate any further.

Hello. I just wanted to say I absolutely love your content! I actually wanted to comment on the paper you brought up earlier in the video about the genetic evidence of the migration period in England during 3-6 centuries. If I remember correctly, the article more a less mentions there was a large influx of people from What is today Frisia, northern Germany, and south Scandinavia along the east coast of Britain, but the further west you go, the population becomes more mixed and or retains the continuity of the original Brythonic speakers. That being said, along the East Coast of Britain, their were pockets of mixed genetics and there numerous historical records, both legal and non legal documents, that do state the continuity of Welsh speakers living large portions of the Fens in East Anglia, in areas north of York, and etc. I do believe that is some Celtic influence on English but that being said it is still something up for debate. Other than that, this does a very good job of explaining this question.

Your question as to whether a Welsh accent is what a native, first language Welsh speaker would sound like if they learned English is very interesting. I can't attest to that, but in Ireland, although the last monolingual Irish speaker died about 40 years ago, we still have recordings of Irish speakers who learned English later on in life as a second language. Their accents are surprisingly similar to standard Irish accents, and yet sound broken, "incorrect" and have difficulty pronouncing certain sounds like "th", as you would expect from, for example, a French person. Their accents sound, to me, more like the accents very old farmers over 90 years old would use in the local pub. I have no idea what that means, I'm far from a linguist, but it's very interesting. I would love to see a study that delves into this question. There are plenty of recordings of native Irish speakers who have English as a second, learned language. I wonder if anyone has made the effort in analysing their accents yet, and if not, I'd love to do that if I ever won the lotto!!

I have to debate the opening script. It’s actually unseasonably warm right now (for winter) in the UK. 13 degrees Celsius/Centigrade is a typical late spring or early autumn temperature. Still, incredibly interesting to delve into the history of one of the most prolific languages on earth. Edit: I surmise it’s morning, we had some frosty starts last week so your complaint about temperature is forgiven.

very annecdotally and unscientific - i am a 20 something from northeast wales along the coast where everyone speaks english. When i first got into linguistics as a teen, i thought our accent was a branch of the northwest england accents, you can find sources that say we are traditionally a branch of chessire dialect (as well as sources that flatten all of english speaking wales into welsh-english). i have recently started living in northwest wales instead, one of the strongest regions in the country for welsh language speaking. while here, i had attended a course where i had met a young adult from angelsea who was bilingual. when speaking welsh, he sounded like gwynedd and northwest wales to my ears, but when he was speaking english, he sounded just like the youths back home did when i was one. From this experience, the way i thought about the flintshire/ northeast wales accent changed. We didnt sound like the northwest of england, the northwest of england sounded like us. how much of that is old language contact from being a later area to anglicise, and how much of that is newer language contact from welsh communities in liverpool and the like, i cannot say. it could just not be true at all. Also, the welsh language itself has regional dialects and accents. north/south dialectical divide is documented in english language sources, but i hadnt found anything on the accents. I have been trying to learn the welsh language myself, and theres this guy i know who speaks it, and is knowledgable of pronunciation differences between speakers in northwest wales, and the communities up the hill and away from the coast in northeast wales that have welshspeakers. when i become fluent id like to compare and contrast these accents to each other, and how strong geographical or first-language ties are. does a welsh speaker in the northeast say sounds more like an english speaker from the northeast, or a welsh speaker from the northwest? etc. Now that i live in gwynedd i affect a bit of gwynedd in my voice and accent, even use a bit of wenglish when i can. This all automatically dissapears when i travel back home to see family n that. I have an uncle, from the northeast, who travels all along the north coast, and across the wirral to liverpool for work, and his accent is like some kind of futuristic flattening of that whole region.

@cadileigh9948

4 ай бұрын

Welsh accents and words used change from town to town in Gwynnedd and everywhere else I find. I recently was proud to follow a sucession of 3 lectures on one day withaout problem despite learning in De Cymru [ and there is a Learners accent too] but i failed to comprehend all of the 4th lecture and was told 'Well he's from Caernarfon ' by someone who was first language Cymraeg speaker and fluent in both Irish and Scots Gaelic . It took me 2 years to adapt to living back in yr Gogledd after 40 years in Glamorgan

@profeseurchemical

4 ай бұрын

@@cadileigh9948 for sure, when i was a kid, i could distinguish the accents between my village and the next town over that was only a 40minute walk away, much less in the car

Regarding the Welsh "isn't it" - Cockney, of course, has the famous "innit", put at the end of pretty much any phrase to support it: "Cold today, innit?", "Leave it out, innit!" I've noticed a similar-but-decidedly-different thing in Bristol though, where people say "is it" (or "izzit") in response to all sorts of statements, regardless of grammar: "Have you heard, Maz and Baz are back in Bris" "Izzit, no way!?"

Hi Simon. Thank you for your excellent videos. Regarding the Hiberno English use of a continuous present tense (Aimsir Gnath-Láithreach in Irish), "I be in the house." would not really be heard. Far more likely would be "I do be in the house." This is a direct translation of "Bím (or Bíonn mé) sa teach." The Irish equivalent of "I am in the house now." would be "Tá mé sa teach anois." This "do/does" can pass unnoticed to unaccustomed ears as a sentence like "He does be hanging around the town" can be cut to something like "He 'd'sbe hanging..." I have heard (and used) this even in my own urban Dublin accent. You will even hear "He do be..." used as a continuous present in more rural areas. Again, a direct result of the Irish sub stratum.

Great video! As a german speaker I would like to say that we in the south where I'm from but I think also generally in the south would traditionally rather say "ne"(which derives from 'nid(nicht) wahr?' ) as in " Er war gestern da gewesen in der Kirche, ne?" instead of "oder?"

YAY, back to videos about older english intricacies 😊

Morning from Australia ❤ hope everyone has had a great week so far

One thing that seems like an elephant in the room is how phonetically similar English and British Celtic languages sound. It's similar to Greek and Spanish sounding the same at a distance. To me it seems English and Gaelic and Welsh have been influencing each others' pronunciation for a long long time.

When it comes to þ and ð I've noticed thats one of the most difficult english sounds to make for non-native speakers, I'm norwegian and my gf is german. In my gfs German english accent the þ turns into t or d and the ð into s, notably the same sound change the german language went through hundreds of years ago: thee=sie, thing=ding etc

Been curious about this topic for a long time.

At a high level in Gaelic "is" is used to define and "bi" is used to describe, but both can do both with differences in emphasis and permanence. So your summary is accurate and fine for this level of detail.

As far as I’m aware, Old Welsh only had one form of ‘to be’, with the distinction between ‘being’ something - using the verb ‘to be’ - and ‘doing’ something using suffixes.

If you read How Green Was My Valley, you'll see reverse Wenglish where they use Welsh structure of sentances ("There is a fool you are" "we went past Mared the Shop") as these speakers learnt English as a second language during foundation of the English-owned mines and steelworks. Modern Welsh English speakers still say "I'll be there now in a minute" borrowed straight from Welsh. Many First language Welsh speakers from North Wales either pronounce English almost like it's written in Welsh orthography, often with the same accent as in Welsh (especially those in Ffestiniog (almost Russian sounding) and Wrecsam(more scouse/midlands)), many other L1W will sound like BBC presenters, not at all welsh, due to being in such Welsh environments that they learn English through the TV.

Ah, I noticed something rather obvious that I mention in my books in the phonetics. If you look at French compared to Italian, Spanish and etc, and look at English compared to other Germanic languages, there is an obvious flattening of the ends of words like there is in the Celtic tongues, like Uallach and Gwalais pronounced "Wally as well as Wallace." Although I would concede to some flattening being a Danish influence, the fact that it's worse in French makes me think that the whole way in which English was pronounced may have been influenced by the the Celtic tongues spoken there. I think sometimes if you look at very broad movements in language change, you can see the influence of neighbors. I have told my students that if something sounds silly it's probably Celtic, like the word "flimsy." English dictionaries used to search far to find "roots" that had nothing to do with Celtic, which was always amusing when the word was right next door. I do love your videos and the way that you show footage of what is going on outside while you are talking. Keep up the marvelous work. I also LOOOVEE your voice. :D A fine, deep voice it is...

@tovarischkrasnyjeshi

4 ай бұрын

It's pretty much universal that the end of words get reduced and suffer deletions. The "weak right edge" in some circles. It's not a good sign of Celticness. Pretty much the last sound of an utterance is most likely to not be fully realized (because you stop breathing in a way that makes speech noises, because you're done talking), so this has an effect of reducing the sounds at the end. If you look at Italian, you actually see it - the Latin singular noun endings were -am, -um, -em, the plurals -os, -as, -a, -es. Italian saw them become a, u, e, and oi, ai, a, ei, now a, o, e, i, e, i. Spanish sees it too: standard el gato, los gatos is el gato, lo' gato' in the Carribbean and Andalusia. All of the Germanic languages saw it - the IE case system looked like Latin's, with Germanic inheriting -az where Latin has -us, for example, which in old Norse became -r, and in most modern Germanic languages just doesn't exist anymore. Of course outside IE too. It's basically responsible for the tones in languages like Mandarin, Thai, or Vietnamese. Like where Cantonese has bat, sam, or leuk, Mandarin has ba, san, liu. Arabic has a feminine -t ending that goes silent at the end of phrases. Hebrew's equivalent t was already h by bible times. Egyptian to Coptic is even messier than French, with words like ra *ridu, bA *bal, sDm.f *sat'maf coming out as re, bu, fsotm.

@jillybe1873

4 ай бұрын

It was illegal to speak Welsh before 1970 so no wonder the English missed it

@johnbrereton5229

4 ай бұрын

​@@jillybe1873 Welsh was not allowed in court proceedings during the reign of Henry VIII but then he was Welsh himself. But I've not heard of it being completely banned there, I well remember it being spoken in North Wales in the 1970s.

you blow my mind, every time.

In Irish the verbs are 'bí' as in 'bím ag léamh gach oíche' - 'I read every night' and 'tá' as in 'tá tuirse orm' - 'I am tired'. So the former is for regular occurrences whilst the latter is for instances.

Something I've been wondering. Germanic and Celtic contact has a longer history on the continent itself, but continental Celtic is pretty different from Insular Celtic. However early Germanic seems to have absorbed a fair bit of Celtic, at least many personal names of Germanic people around the time of Caesar have Celtic etymology and there being the very common -rich suffix and the word Reiks in Gothic that appear to be Celtic. Yet more influence might not be as visible as Continental Celtic and early Germanic were typologically more similar to each other than early Germanic and Insular Celtic.

On the do be's in Irish English, we were always told at school the Hiberno-English "do be doing" was lifted straight from the Irish language. From continuous present tense in Irish that is not there in English.

I add Chinese grammar to English sometimes. Example if someone asks why sometimes I will accidentally say "no why". I know it should be "no reason" but in Mandarin it is usually translated as no why.

@WGGplant

4 ай бұрын

It's speculated that's where the phrase "long time no see" comes from. Chinese merchants would say that to the British traders as a greeting, who then started using it too. But I don't know how credible that is or even if that structure would make sense in Mandarin or Cantonese.

@tohaason

4 ай бұрын

@@WGGplant The first time I heard that phrase was when I was young (quite some time ago..) and a friend who dropped out of school to start working on a ship kind of brought that phrase home.. he got it from Asian sailors working on the ship. Though I don't think there were many Chinese there among the Asians. Many from the Philippines though.

@revolution1237

4 ай бұрын

If you're interested, you can look into Singlish in your own free time. How is this related to your comment? Well, you'll see.

@xWHITExEAGLEx

4 ай бұрын

​@@WGGplantYes it's a direct translation from the Chinese greeting 好久不见 (pronounced "hao2 jiu3 bu jian4" in Mandarin) literally long-tine 好久 no 不 see/meet 见.

Common to hear “I d’go’ (I do go etc) in the South Wales valleys as well as ‘innit’ added to the end of sentences

In German, we also have do support, but not as a standard feature. For that we have the verb "tun" (perhaps a cognate to "do"?). Example: "Tu das mal da drauf stellen!" or "Tu mir mal sagen ...". When I was a kid the grown ups around me would generally discourage people from speaking like that, suggesting that it is grammatically incorrect. They would always say: "Sag nicht immer tu! Tuten tut der Nachtwächter!". However, I knew 1 or 2 families where even the parents would use do support frequently.

I thought the question about a Welsh native speaker learning English late in life was fascinating. I was relieved when I visited Paris for the first time last year and a woman complimented my French skills and asked if I was from Spain (I speak fluent Spanish but am actually from the U.S.)

Simon could have shown us a blank screen, instead of taking time to record the flowers, rain, etc.. I am appreciative of this. 😊 A great video talk.

My grandparents had a “Do ‘e ‘ave zum more” butter dish. (Grandad Burton grew up in rural Suffolk at the turn of the century.)

I imagine England was a patchwork quilt of areas that had population displacement and others with peaceful integration

As a Gàidhlig learner, I can confirm your take on the two verbs for "to be" was fairly accurate. Bi is for pairing nouns with adjectives, prepositions, etc., while Is is for pairing nouns with nouns.

8:25 Scottish Gaelic distinguishes between aspiration not voicing, I believe this is also true for the ulster dialects of Irish So if you're an English speaker you wouldn't be wrong for approximating them as [b] & [p]-[pʰ]

Old irish and early modern irish had dental fricatives but these became a glotal fricative for the voiceless dental fricative and a voiced velar fricative for the voiced dental fricative

A couple of items you did not mention. Irish speakers of English tend to use the term 'myself', etc. as a translation of the Gaelic emphatic pronouns, 'mise', etc. 'Sure, and tis myself', as emphatic pronouns do not exist in English. Another example is Appalachian dialect use of a' in gerunds. eg "I'm a hopin and a prayin". This is directly taken from the gerundial form in Gaelic, a plus verb.

I wonder what language the average 'Briton' in, say, a town in south-east England during the 4th century (i.e. Roman times) would have spoken? Would it have been a 'Celtic' language? How might they have communicated (if at all) with a Roman soldier? What language would the soldier have spoken? Btw the word 'bist' was still used to mean 'be' until recent times in the Forest of Dean (Gloucestershire)

@highloughsdrifter1629

4 ай бұрын

I'm thinking this too. The area which is "English" (lacking a surviving Celtic language) roughly corresponds to the area of greatest Roman influence. The prestige language would have been Latin, so maybe Brythonic had already been largely replaced. Other originally Celtic areas on the European mainland have ended up with Romance languages, so this has to be at least a possibility. It's also a bit odd to think of proto-English as a prestige language displacing Brythonic quite quickly, but Latin not doing the same in the preceeding 400 years.

@drjong2651

4 ай бұрын

Pretty sure they were all speaking Brittonic, the ancestor language of Welsh, Cornish and Breton that was spoken throughout Britain before the Anglo-Saxon colonisation. As far as I know, Latin wasn't spoken as a native language by anyone in Britain except the Roman officials and their British associates. Your average bloke from a south-east British village would be speaking Brittonic in the 4th century. It gets shakier from the 5th century onwards when the Germanics start colonising that area

A correction and some more examples of Irish influence on Irish-English: 1. We would not say 'I be,' but 'I do be,' so "I do be going to England (every month, every summer, etc)." 2. Another indisputable contribution from Irish is our twist on the perfect aspect using 'after.' We can say "I'm after letting the dog out" for what might be "I (have) just let the dog out." The use of 'after' is a direct translation of the construction in Irish "Táim tar éis an madra a ligean amach," with the English form ending in '-ing' as an approximation for the Irish verbal noun. 3. The way we form embedded questions within sentences is similar to how they are formed in Irish in that the embedded form is the same as standalone questions. "He asked did I have my keys" instead of "He asked if I had my keys." There are more examples, some of which are mentioned on Langfocus's recent video on Irish-English, which I recommend

Do-support seems like the best example of Celtic influence. I've heard old people here in Cornwall say "those trucks that do come down the road" or something in that vein, which is a construction you just don't hear in younger folks, but a construction very common in Cornish! English has had its grammar altered by Norse, what with the switch from SOV to SVO. Could just be wishful thinking that we have an extra-special dialect though :)

@Pippis78

4 ай бұрын

The influence/mixture of Old Norse in english is usually heavily downplayed.

@Thekaiser4100

4 ай бұрын

It could be that in Cornwall English the influence of Cornish is causing the do-support but for the language as a whole that’s not necessarily the case since spoken German has a similar feature. For example one might say „Ich tu‘ meine Eltern oft besuchen“ rather than the more formal „Ich besuche meine Eltern oft“ (“I visit my parents often”)

@harrynewiss4630

2 ай бұрын

SVO is the most common word order in OE

From my own knowledge of Irish and the Irish-speaking community as a non-native speaker of the language, there are still people who would have learnt Irish as their first language at home for the first few years, and would only have acquired English when they went to school at 4 or 5 (of course, many might have partially acquired it before this too). It goes without saying of course that this only happens for people living in the traditional Gaeltacht areas, mostly in the far far west of the country. But this is definitely the case for a lot of older native speakers, and there's certainly still people who feel more comfortable speaking Irish than English. For younger people though it's generally far more common for them to be natively bilingual in both languages, and oftentimes they end up using English more because they're working and living outside of the Gaeltacht, only using Irish when talking with their family. I knew one person when I was in college who grew up in the Gaeltacht but had lived outside it for over 10 years and was taking Irish classes to rebuild their competency because they'd basically had no reason or opportunity to use it since they left. I think you'd be hard pressed, if not unable, to find someone nowadays who didn't learn English until adolescence, let alone until adulthood. Also, one thing on the habitual be in Hiberno-English: I wouldn't say ‘I be going to the shop’. Using the bare infinitive is certainly how African American Ebglish handles it, but in HE you have to use do-support with ‘be’, and of course conjugate the verb accordingly. So ‘I do be going to the shop’ or ‘she does be working very hard’. And actually, when you talked about the do-periphrasis in West Country dialects, I realised that I'd say the same sort of the thing myself: ‘I do go to the cinema every now and again’ is definitely something I'd say, and wouldn't necessarily use the habitual there.

Children born in the Gaeltacht areas of Ireland and Scotland are often raised monolingually as Gaelic speakers before learning English through exposure later in their life. Through the internet it is sadly difficult now to avoid the presence of English, even in countries such as the Netherlands whose language has historically been considered “prestigious”. Let’s not forget that colonialism from the UK and neglect from the language’s own speakers led to the position that they now face. I’m from the Isle of Man and my mother is from Ireland so I speak Irish and Manx Gaelic, as well as learning Welsh. Although I’ve spoken Manx since my childhood, I’m not a native speaker because colonialism killed off our dialect as a community language (through legal and social pressure) but I speak Gaelic equally as well as English and do so day to day. People often dismiss the validity of Celtic languages because of their minoritised state, but this is precisely the thing that gives them the value that they have to us

@rorybailey8383

4 ай бұрын

I think the phrase "neglect from the language's' speakers" is too strong in the context of Irish speakers switching from Irish to English in the 19th. Century. Given the adverse social conditions for the native Irish caused by the occupation and the anti-Gaelic laws imposed by the British authorities, it was very much a necessity. It also happened more gradually than is often thought. Less an overnight decision than a slow acclimatisation to a new social reality. The Oxford Publication 'A History of the Irish Language' by Aidan Doyle makes this case very convincingly. The 'blame' mentality was very much a part of the middle and upper class revivalist movement who were frustrated at the Irish speakers' failure to grasp the enormity of what was happening linguistically in the country. But these unfortunate people were just trying to survive.

@owenwilliams8698

4 ай бұрын

@@rorybailey8383 You're right of course, I was speaking more about young people from the 30s to the present-day who have had freedom politically and culturally, yet who choose not to accept the gift of the language offered to them. In the IoM I see a lot of people my age who are clearly guilty in some way about not speaking the language and wish they could, which manifests itself in resentment of the language

@mostlyguesses8385

4 ай бұрын

Modernity and mass work life away from farm killed minority language more than any govt policy. That's one of the prices of no longer being starving peasants. Us Finns know starvation and traded much of old ways to escape it, often with the damn Russians, we chose modernity it wasn't all force and "colonialism"....

@owenwilliams8698

4 ай бұрын

@@mostlyguesses8385 Your language is not endangered; ours is. You have misunderstood my point, and the abandonment of native language is not necessary for progress. This is one of the worst lies of colonisers, you should not repeat it again.

@mostlyguesses8385

4 ай бұрын

My family lost their Karelian dialect of Finnish when they moved to US. In Finland this dialect is being lost ... I know some songs we would sing in Minnesota in 80s when my grandparents were alived. So it happened to my family, losing language.... It's said but a truth. 200 years of growing urbanization into big cities shows as ethnic minorities move to big city for nice jobs, they lose much of old language. Do we imprison the Indians away from big cities to keep language strong, that's evil .... Even in US the Indian Reservations have lower income and people leave for English speaking cities. No way will Sony or Apple or Ford built a factory in a ethnic village, they build in the giant cities with millions of laborers.. AND most upper education is in English or in national language (Portuguese in Brazil), so the smart 10% mostly use these... Only if stay poor and dumb and isolated do these ethnic langauges not lessen. .. This is not a evil plan, big cities pay better and are melting pots. It's not great but it's what's happened since factories started in 1700 England.... the only exceptions are where workplaces spoke the minority language like in Basque since the Basque owned their own factories and are 90% of their region (though just 10% of all Spain).. But a ethnic language with just 1% of nation won't ever be used in a big factory..... In 1850s only 20% of USA population were native English speakers, but they all switched to English for better jobs.... Do you have any example of small language not losing numbers since 1950?????

I'm in West Wales now, was brought up in a half Welsh family there, so have always known it. In the 70s there will still old men with Herts accents, and they would use some Welsh sounding words, like coonigs for rabbits, cowseye for a raised way or bank and coom for a steep valley.

@harrynewiss4630

2 ай бұрын

coonig=coney=a middle English word (originally from Latin)

@ginojaco

2 ай бұрын

@@harrynewiss4630 Hmm, the point is that the Welsh word for rabbit 'cwningen' (pronounced coo-nin-gun) predates the English, but a form of it was still extant in Herts in my childhood, but there is no doubting its Latin origin in cuniculus. 'Cowseye' is very close to a Welsh word for a raised path or causeway i.e. cawsai. And, of course cwm is the generic Welsh for valley.

OMG THE CAMERA QUALITYYYYYY

18:45 I'm Welsh and fluent in the language. In my experience, "Isn't it?" in that context is largely being used how you described. It's just reaffirming the initial statement. I've not personally heard it used differently, though it it is, I imagine it'd be in the Valleys

While researching my family history, I discovered that many of my ancestors lived throughout the British Isles before the 14th century up until the 17th century. This led me to wonder about the linguistic makeup of my family. How many were Celtic-speaking and how many were Germanic-speaking?

@macwinter7101

4 ай бұрын

Chances are most of your ancestors were Germanic unless they came from the Scottish highlands, Hebrides, Wales or Ireland. Germanic groups quickly established themselves along the coastlines (especially eastern coastlines) and in the lowlands of Scotland as well as pretty much all of England. And remember that Germanic tribes started arriving in the 5th century AD, so by the 14th century, Celtic tribes had already been displaced throughout much of the British Isles.

@ronnielovell6280

4 ай бұрын

@@macwinter7101 Thank you for the extra info! a lot of my family came from Northumberland, and Orkney Isles north. A few from villages in west coastal Scotland, plenty from Ireland, and the biggest demographic from London and it's surrounding areas

I'm in Roxburghshire...about 10 miled north of the SE Scottish/NE English border, and our "non posh fur non ootsiders" counting sounds like this....phonetic spellings as best I can.. Yin, twae, thry, fowur, foi', sees, seev'n, ite (rhymes with "height), ni', ten, uleev'n, twaul, th'rteen, fowerteen, fi'teen, sixteen, see'nteen, ighteen, ni'teen, too'ee, too'ee yin, too'ee twae" etc. Me and a good psl from the same home town (Jedburgh) worked in an 8 man squad as fire protection engineers in the late 90s in London. We could (and often would) have full on conversations around the 6 London guys and they would just sit open mouthed & ask for a translation. We tested out talking the maddest sh!t about them just to see if they got anything and they couldn't understand a word. They basically said we were bilingual 😂.

On the notion of two verbs having the same past tense: in Spanish, the preterite forms of "ir" (to go) and "ser" (to be, as an intrinsic quality) are identical. Yo fui, tú fuiste, etc. for both. (But the imperfect forms remain separate. Yo iba vs. yo era, etc.)

scottish gaelic contrasts aspiration and not voicing on stops, are unaspirated and are aspirated (initially, they're preaspirated word internally but this varies by region)

Thanks for another fascinating video. Scots had certainly been influenced by Soots Gaelic but not sure when - there are loan words, most obviously “loch” and likely syntax influence. E.g., the Scots for “today” is “the day” which is like the Gaelic “an diugh” (“an” meaning “the” and “diugh”meaning day). Some of the Gaelic loan words in Scots have subsequently been loaned into Scottish Standard English, again, the most obvious example being “loch.”

thank you!