Your etymology shorts are the most interesting things I've seen in that format.

@fjallaxd7355

2 ай бұрын

Agreed.

@klasnm_5364

2 ай бұрын

Same

@nikburisson9-pissedoffpeasant-

2 ай бұрын

Agreed. Same

@Mr.Patrick_Hung

2 ай бұрын

Agreed, but not such a high bar to clear ...

@ariadne4720

2 ай бұрын

I had no idea until I watched this video that Dr. Crawford has etymology shorts! So much for the YT algorithm.

Speaking of etymology, I always remember reading that the icelandic "tún"(field), the german "zaune" (fence) and the english "town" were once the same word. It´s just that they became to mean different things, the germans fenced off the field and the english built a town in that designated area ;)

@grimble4564

2 ай бұрын

I think its fun that you could make the argument that they're all based on the same root because you don't really find any one of those concepts without the other.

@thorr18BEM

2 ай бұрын

Reminds me of how garden and wardrobe are related.

@Nakiel

2 ай бұрын

@@thorr18BEM "curtain"

@ChristopherRayMiller

2 ай бұрын

And indeed, also Dutch tuin 'garden'.

@fritzp9916

2 ай бұрын

The German word is Zaun, without the e (and capitalized because German capitalizes all nouns). Zaune is an obsolete dative singular, but in modern German, that's just Zaun, too. I imagine it's due to the fact that towns (unlike villages) tended to have some fortifications. Maybe not a stone wall, but at least a wooden fence. OTOH, a field may also be delineated by a fence. It's not unusual for words to change from referring to a dividing line to referring to the two sides of it. A modern example is "watershed". In British English, but also in German for example ("Wasserscheide"), it's the line on top of mountains/hills that divides water flowing in different directions, so the borders of catchment areas. In American English, it is used for the catchment area itself.

Love your content (especially the 2 hour long videos of you and Dr. Yates talking) but the low volume is killing me. When my wife and kid fall asleep I am finally free to watch my historical linguistics videos and I have to turn the volume up all the way to hear you...which means that when the ad comes, it plays at full blast and suddenly my family is no longer asleep.

@michaellastname4922

2 ай бұрын

Ditto the plaint: the microphone is too far from the good doctor, or one that isn't suitable for this usage.

@WilliamMoses355

2 ай бұрын

Especially on windy days.

As a Hellenist/philologist kind of guy, I greatly enjoy your videos. I've dabbled in historical linguistics, mostly Greek dialects. It was a delightful surprise to learn that the English "have" is not cognate to the Latin "habere." What a coincidence of form and sense. But the derivation for PIE *kap- is totally convincing. Thanks!

@WGGplant

2 ай бұрын

It is pretty crazy, it wasnt until a year ago that I learned that Spanish 'mucho' is not cognate with English 'much'. Despite the similar meanings and word.

@jeremiahreilly9739

2 ай бұрын

Well, would you look at that. I checked the etymology. You are right on! Nice to learn something new.@@WGGplant

Etymology is one of if not my favorite aspect of languages, because you can feel the flow of time through even the simplest of words, like 'if' from PG *jabai or 'or' from a combination of OE oþþe and óþer iirc. What was funny tho, is I told this to my linguistics director, who's a child-language-development specialist, and she was like, huh. I never really thought about that aspect before, i didnt care too much until you brought it up😅

I'm not someone that tends to leave comments on videos but I've been loving your shorts on word or name etymologies. As a native Spanish speaker, it's always been an interest of mine to see word etymologies and how how certain English and Spanish words are cognate with each other when they are both descended from proto Indo-European. Thank you for your videos. Please keep posting more!

@casthedemon

2 ай бұрын

I absolutely love etymology. I always try to make sure I'm using words correctly and understand their true meaning. Kind of like how everyone misuses the word queer to mean homosexual when it actually just means very weird.

I started taking Latin in the 9th grade and it inspired me to look at the roots of the words we use in English...Some I find amusing. "Carnival" from the Latin "carnn" or "caro" for flesh...there are probably some more steps in there somewhere. One of my students asked me during class, "Who decides what language each country speaks?" She was dead serious.

@grimble4564

2 ай бұрын

"carne" for meat and "vale" for goodbye. I always liked how Carnival is a multi-layered pun because people historically gave up meat for Lent but then it's also a time to throw social norms out the window and then it's also right before Lent, which is a time for practicing disattachment from physical reality. It's the time of saying goodbye to the flesh, in every possible sense.

I love these connections and explanations. I've been aware of many of them since my teens (I'm 72 now), but your formal explanations are so interesting.

It's also interesting how invasions, especially the 1066's Norman invasion to England, gave way to the introduction of the sound /v/ in words (which did not occur in English prior to that) such as 'voyage', whose second syllable French stress was consequently shifted to the first syllable into the English language. Other changes in vocabulary also came about, such as food terms and all that. Thanks, Jackson!

@deithlan

2 ай бұрын

The sound [v] did occur in Old English, but only as an allophone of the phoneme /f/. Specifically, /f/ turned into [v] between two vowels. So the places where you could find [v] and [f] were predictable, they did not interfere with the meaning of a word. That did change with the Viking invasions, you’re right: their language had the sound /v/ in positions impossible to Old English, and through borrowing new words with these new /v/s, is how the sound /v/ became an actual phoneme of (Middle) English, and not just an allophone of /f/ :D

@alesandro3844

2 ай бұрын

@@deithlan @deithlan right! And that /v/ occurred in words such as 'cnafa' (boy), 'hæfde' (had), bet. voiced sounds as well. What you mean is that 'f' and 'v' letters in 'feel-veal' in OE did sound as /f/ and not as /v/, right? And as regards the Normans, yes, there are no Native English words that start with the 'v' in spelling. And the Normans were regarded as highly prestigious to the English during the 11th Century!

@ArchaicAnglist

2 ай бұрын

​@@alesandro3844 Our host is discussing sounds and sound changes. How languages _write_ those sounds introduces a whole additional level of complication. Here's the alphabet of Classical Latin: A B C D E F G H I K L M N O P Q R S T U X The letter is used only in Greek words. The letters and each have two forms and each can be used to spell either a vowel or a glide consonant. So the letter and its variant can represent [i] as in "machine" or [y] as in "yellow" (or, for that matter, the numeral 1: manuscripts show 'three' as ), and and its variant can spell [u] (more or less as in the American pronunciation of "crude") or [w] as in "window". Oh, and was pronounced pretty much as in English. But Classical Latin did not ever use the letter to spell the sound [v]. So one of the two Latin words for 'calf' (in the sense 'young bovine'l could be spelled VITELLVS or VITELLUS or UITELLUS, and the choice depended in part on whether one was carving in stone (which favors straight lines) or on papyrus (on which curvy letters work better). The Latin alphabet eventually proved to be less than adequate for Latin's Romance offspring. As French, Italian, and Spanish all developed phonemic /v/, it made sense to repurpose the variant as a separate letter to write that sound. By the time of the Normans, the letter V spelled the sound [v] in the French word for 'calf': VEAU, or VEAL, from VITELLUS. So we can blame the Norman's for introducing the phoneme /v/ to English.

Being from South Carolina, I really appreciate Oðin's basic advice of shutten mah fayce

@eleventylevity

2 ай бұрын

Being in Texas, I really appreciate Oðinn's advice, when you find friends visit them often, have them over and be sure to say, "y'all come back now, ya hear?"

We can date borrowings by which changes of which language were applied. Three of these were borrowed from Italo-Celtic at different stages, one is native: "royal" was borrowed from Old French, which inherited it from Latin; "regal" was borrowed from Old French, which borrowed it from Latin; "rich" was borrowed from Proto-Celtic; "rake" in "drake" (clipping of "andrake", equivalent to "anatis rex") descends from PIE in a straight line.

Great video, but is the audio lower than usual? I maxed out my volume but it's still quite faint

@uamsnof

2 ай бұрын

I think is microphone was muffled a little by his clothes. There is a bit of rustling of textiles. But I can still hear him fairly well

@abandoninplace2751

2 ай бұрын

Headphones help, but i find him to be generally a very soft-spoken individual.

@peterhoulihan9766

2 ай бұрын

@@abandoninplace2751 Maybe it's just me, I just thought this video in particular was hard to hear.

@bartolomeothesatyr

2 ай бұрын

Dr. Crawford's videos are often far quieter than the rest of KZread, I always have to crank the volume to understand a word he says.

@cl0udbear

2 ай бұрын

He's been significantly quieter for around the last 10 videos of this format. It's really weird. I used to spend a Saturday morning with several KZread videos queued up that had released over the course of the week, and Dr Crawfords have become massively quieter than the rest. They're even quieter than his own Grimfrost reel. It's really ruined the experience.

Thanks for actually writing out the morphology! I speak a few langs and I can often pick up on cognates in languages I dont even speak due to an unconscious understanding of those sound changes, so its nice to finally see the real rules. It feels like I have a seed of PIE understanding in the back of my brain that lets to ID certain words that most people wouldn't be able to recognize as being related. Very cool stuff. I'm stoked to binge all your content soon.

Etymology is not just a passionate hobby of mine, it's my autistic gift.

@zed739

2 ай бұрын

Omg same

@davidlericain

2 ай бұрын

Mine too! Thought I was the only one.

@Catman3131

2 ай бұрын

It's the most normal and intellectual thing anyone can learn about

@davidlericain

2 ай бұрын

@@Catman3131 Not normal. I don't know anyone who cares about word origins. I've spent hours looking up words and cognates on Wiktionary. That can't be normal. Lol

@hcesarcastro

2 ай бұрын

I can relate to everyone in this comment thread. Actually my work colleagues know they can't start any talk that leads to some language-related topic. They know I will dig the rabbit hole as deep as possible. The problem is: several people there work with computational models to solve natural language processing tasks.

Your content is fantastic but man is it quiet, I would highly recommend you increase the gain on your videos before posting them

@briantaylor9475

2 ай бұрын

He does nearly everything on his iPhone from what I understand. I'm not sure if it really is an option. Plus, he is a quiet speaker as he has said numerous times

@sketchy5782

2 ай бұрын

@@briantaylor9475plenty of ways to make a video louder through a phone!

@cl0udbear

2 ай бұрын

@@briantaylor9475 It didn't use to be this quiet though. This is a problem that's crept in in the last few weeks. Go back to "Mimir: A Head Full of Wisdom" from a month ago, or "Not all who wander..." from two months ago. The volume is good on those videos. I used to be able to queue up videos from the week and just let them play while I was doing stuff on a Saturday morning.

It's neat to think of etymology as essentially layers of drifting accents! All the puzzles of pronunciation shifts and different terminologies are neat to trace through, and I really like the series you were doing on it. (Though I will admit the accent difference between us just on different sides of the US made "have" a little tough to get without looking at the screen lol)

Hi Jackson :) Love your vids! it seems that there are some noise related to the mic placement, and the volume is slightly lower then the rest for videos on youtube - could maybe also be related to the mic placement? :) Just letting you know, if you haven't noticed yourself :) All the best from Denmark ;p

Love this stuff and sit around thinking about it. Thanks!

Anyone know the name of the song that plays in the Grimfost ad?

@Andrew.A.

2 ай бұрын

Sól Tér Sortna by Hindarfjäll

@brothertaddeus

2 ай бұрын

@@Andrew.A. Thank you!

Thanks for the video! Always informative!

Why do some words not show these regular changes. The most clear examples I can think about are: 1. the great vowel shift being incomplete in some words, like "great" not rhyming with "meat", or "bear" and "near", and 2. that Latin FL- became ll- in Spanish, but that did not happen for the word for flower, "flor", which retained Latin initial fl- cluster.

@cindybidwellglaze7698

2 ай бұрын

What is the possibility of it being the one word coming into the language later, like he mentioned?

@weepingscorpion8739

2 ай бұрын

Well, a sound change can be incomplete or not fully fleshed out. This can be both regular and arbitrary. Also, languages can reborrow words from their parent language.

@TinaWiman

2 ай бұрын

Great and meat come from older words that are pronounced differently, "gre-at" (think Scottish accent) and "mete". They were not very similar to start with, and just happen to be spelled similarly in modern English. Same goes for bear and near. They don't follow the same rules because they never came from similarly sounding words and one and the same foreign language at the same time, but took different paths into English.

@TinaWiman

2 ай бұрын

You can think of it sort of like layers of sediment or maybe the wear and tear of a very old wooden table that has been patched up and fixed several times. Words from the same source language that enter the vocabulary within a similar timeframe will be changed in similar manners. Words that are from different sources and/or different timeframes will not. And then there's just the odd weirdness too.

@indgeus

2 ай бұрын

Great is just irregular (although there is evidence for great merging with greet in 1700, so must've been dialectal development, shortening and then lengthening or some other weird stuff), flor is likely very early borrowing from Latin or irregular double metathesis flor > frol > flor that prevented regular palatalization from happening (judging from Exstremaduran and Mirandese frol)

Habere traces back to reconstructed *ghabh which also gives English "give", and "have" traces back to *kap. However in PIE both these reconstructed words have similar meanings related to holding or grasping and both have similar sounds. Considering that PIE would itself have been part of a family of languages and that there would have been inter-lingual and inter-dialect borrowing it is very plausible that both these PIE words trace back to a common word in some ancestor language of PIE, similar to the fatherly vs paternal situation in English.

Love this kind of stuff!

Such a great video! Thank you!

I would really like to see a video about how the Norse viewed water places. There is evidence of people depositing weapons in rivers. Can you talk about this in another video?

Very interesting and informative 😮

Yo I noticed your patrons are called Erilaz and I recognized the word from the teaser for Hellblade Senuas Saga. There's a chant thats sung again and again. The game just came out today too! Anyway, I was wondering if youd be willing to do me a solid and either 1) just let me know if the W is pronounced like a W or V, or 2) write the chant phonetically if its not too much trouble. I love etymology so instantly subbed! Chant: Tawol Athodu Ek Erilaz Owlthuthewaz Niwaremariz Saawilagar Hateka Harja

Final g becomes the approximant /j/after front vowels, and "h" after back vowels.

Good video.

Does anyone know what the song in the Grimfrost ad was?

My favourites are actually the few recognizable loanwords from Bronze Age languages we otherwise know little about that have since made it to modern languages, of which I currently know very few: Arabic 'haykal' 'skull', from Aramaic and Akkadian words for 'temple' and 'palace', from Sumerian *he-kal 'house-great'; Spanish 'fulano', 'whoever-it-is', likely from Egyptian p-ren 'his name' by way of the Moorish invasion; and 'cybernetic' and 'gubernatorial', both from Paleo-Mediterranean (/'Pelasgian') ~*kuberna 'steering?'. All the better because both divergent meanings now once more coincide in the person of Arnold Schwarzenegger...

It's worth adding that to me, as a linguist, it's kind of mind-boggling how phonological changes occur: how simple is the set of inferred rules that describes each shift, and how consistently, without exceptions these rules appear to operate. (I'm careful to avoid the sloppiness of calling them "underlying" rules or an implication that the phenomenological laws are _really_ operating; this is fine in professional lingo, but the actual mechanisms are indeed different.) This stands in a stark contrast to most other changes. Take morphology as an example. _Generally,_ Romance languages have lost noun cases as they developed from Vulgar Latin > Proto-Romance, but there are holdouts, such as Romanian that ended up with a two-case system or Romansh that also has two cases, different from Romanian. The phonological explanations-sound changes that made case ending indistinguishable-aren't amazingly convincing: Proto-Romance had to have at least three noun cases well past the time when these sound changes have already completed. To put it simple, it's a mess. :)

Then there is Vanadís - according to Snorri in the Prose Edda, Vanadís is an alternate name for the Brising necklage. Hugo Gering states in a footnote of his translation that Vanadís (Wanadis) means "die Wanengöttin", "the Vanír goddess" (Gylfag. 35).

Yo sound is crazy deep

The more interesting part for me would be to know how are we able to guess the meaning of the common ancestor (in this case, how do we know that "*keh2p-" root meant "grasp"?)

Nice Microtec! I just picked up a Benchmade Claymore...I never thought I'd make that comment here😆⚔️

In some dictionaries etymology can be pretty arbitrary. I don't trust anymore any etymology in romanian dictionaries. "This word originates from slavic languages" even if the word is clearly of latin origin. I look up that word in couple slavic languages, and it says that it is a borrowing from latin. Or they can be pretty insistent that it is a romanian word, even if it looks,sounds and means the same thing as a word in turkik languages. But that is more of a personal grudge for me when it comes to romanian. "Can an italian understand romanian" >romanian speaker proceeds to use all slavic/turkik borrowings he can think of.

@rdklkje13

Ай бұрын

That sounds more like (historical) politics than linguistics 🙃

Dr. Crawford, what exactly is the difference between Philology and Etymology?

@HeadsFullOfEyeballs

2 ай бұрын

I'm not Dr. Crawford, but: Etymology is the study of the origin and development of words. Philology is a very broad term that basically covers the study of a language's entire linguistic and literary/cultural heritage.

@revilo178

2 ай бұрын

I'd say that philology at its most basic is the study of written texts.

Language and Knives- yes!

I find etymology fascinating. Maybe it would be interesting for you to address faux amis / false cognates one day.

Recently I noticed a pattern in European languages in that many (all?) Use both 'have' and 'be' to create past tenses; English has have/has/had and be/is/are/been/was/were, French has avoir and être, German has haben and seine, etc. Makes me wonder if early European languages indicated the past using ownership and adjectives (I have a written letter) and over time shifted to past participles (I have written a letter) There's no way this is an original idea lol, but couldn't find anything online about it and wanted to post this somewhere before forgetting

@talideon

2 ай бұрын

It's a bit more complicated than that. Take the future tense in the Romance languages: Vulgar Latin appears to have lost the future tense and replaced it with the infinitive followed by the conjugated present tense form of habare. In the case of common uses of have/be as auxiliaries to create a past tense, those have generally started life as a present perfect that has taken over many of the roles of the simple past tense.

🤠

09:00 that words wind up looking, sounding and being used similarly, even though their origins are unrelated, is not surprising from a statistical persepctive. There are a finite, and not a large number, of sounds available in for example Indo-European languages. Even if you randomly strung these sounds together to form one-syllable words, after say 1000 runs, you'd wind up with "words" that actually exist in various languages. (I hope I'm making ;)

Lat. cara 'beloved' has an English cognate also.

the way b's, m's, and p's turn into v's through aspiration is really fascinating to me, for some reason. And we KNOW that's what happened cuz we can look at gaelic, where most of those following-h's are preserved in the spelling, and what do we see? Pronounced V's :D :D :D

@talideon

2 ай бұрын

The "h" in Gaelic orthography isn't marking aspiration, historical or otherwise. It serves to mark lenition. Formerly, it was either assumed by context (it's unmarked between vowels in OldIr because it always occurs there) or marked with an overdot where it's not obvious (such as at the start of words), but it became common to always mark it. A bit of history: The use of "h" to mark lenition became the dominant method simply because it was difficult to find typefaces with overdots when printing and typewriters were the final nail in the coffin.

@zenosAnalytic

2 ай бұрын

@@talideonoh, thanks for correcting me on that ^v^ Also that's really neat about 'h' and typefaces

6:04 It's funny, but in Portuguese the consonant changes from Latin were (usually) in the opposite direction: P -> B, T -> D, C -> G.

@hcesarcastro

2 ай бұрын

Between vowels. That happened to basically all West Romance languages, to some going even some steps further. Compare Italian VITA (voiceless stop T), Portuguese VIDA (voiced stop D), Spanish and Catalan VIDA (voiced approximant D), and French VIE (no consonant).

Just compare older versions of the number "seven" in IE languages. It's an easy way to demonstrate a bunch of sound changes.

The usual claim is that eh2 gives long a; short a is h2e or outside of Indo-Iranian h2 alone. Thus, deriving have and capere from *keh2p- is doubtful in that form.

8:00 So the Greek koiloma is a cognate to the english hole.

I just came because I love etymology. Now I gotta save up for a damn $500 knife. That thing is PRETTY.

A lot of people are very reluctant to give up on "It sounds like this so they must be related". And if they know another language, that's where they think English borrowed from. Present company excluded of course.

I find it strange that I see a Texan cowboy in a cold European mountain talking about long lost Ukranian languages.

@liv5645

2 ай бұрын

Those are the Rocky Mountains of Wyoming/Colorado, that's like a cowboy's natural habitat. There's probably loads of them roaming about free-range out there in the hills with their big hats, waxing poetic about various topics as a form of enrichment. Also, I'll give you the technicality of them all ultimately being Ukrainian, but if all the examples besides a few reconstructions are attested in writing, have living descendants, and people who still learn them, I'd hardly call them long lost...

@silmarpinheiro3455

2 ай бұрын

@@liv5645 Long Lost Ukranian is a joke reference to Proto Indo European. Not a good joke I admit.

i'm still annoyed vulgus and folk are not related

@YourCreepyUncle.

2 ай бұрын

Or what about "whole" and Greek "holo" (meaning "whole"). False cognates are funny.

@HeadsFullOfEyeballs

2 ай бұрын

@@YourCreepyUncle.Or Latin "deus" and Greek "theos", both meaning "god". That's an annoying one. The Greek cognate of "deus" is actually "Zeus".

That knife would not be legal in Germany...

@briantaylor9475

2 ай бұрын

So what. It has nothing to do with etymology.

@MusicEnjoyerSLS

2 ай бұрын

I don't think it's legal in a lot of the US either

En við erum ekki með svona hatta hérna.

audio's too low

@briantaylor9475

2 ай бұрын

Get accustomed to it. It is the nature of the speaker.

Speak up. Can hardly hear you, even with a volume boosting addon.

2:05 I must be living in the wrong part of the South, because I've _never_ heard "bride" pronounced "bide". (Heavy, high-pitched emphasis on "IDE"? Yes.)

@demoman1596sh

2 ай бұрын

I think you have misunderstood what the text superimposed on the video at 2:05 is saying. Dr. Crawford is saying that the vowel sound in words like “bide” and “bride” is monophthongized in Southern American English, not that the word “bride” is somehow pronounced the same as “bide.”

@RonJohn63

2 ай бұрын

@@demoman1596sh possibly. He mumbles, and you need to be an expert to know what "monophthongize" means. (Pausing to look it up is beyond my motivation level.)

@demoman1596sh

2 ай бұрын

@@RonJohn63 You don’t need to be an expert to learn what “monophthongize” means, but it is a little tough to describe. Basically, a diphthong is a sound made up of a combination of two vowel sounds that glide smoothly from one to the other within one syllable. A monophthong is, on the other hand, a more pure vowel sound that doesn’t really change from the beginning to the end. So monophthongization, then, is a sound change that converts a diphthong into a monophthong. Think about how Southerners might say the word “eye” versus how a person from California might say it. The Southerner will be more likely to have a monophthongal pronunciation, while the Californian will be more likely to have a diphthongal pronunciation. It’s important to understand that we’re talking about the vowel sounds themselves, not the English letters or letter combinations.

@RonJohn63

2 ай бұрын

@@demoman1596sh how in the heck do you squeeze two syllables into "eye"?

@demoman1596sh

2 ай бұрын

@@RonJohn63 That's not what I said. The word "eye" obviously only has one syllable, as you indicated. A diphthong is a combination of two vowel sounds that glide smoothly from one to the other *within* *one* syllable.

knab hawk

I like to think Celtic Badb [ˈbaðβ] / Morrigan mythology influenced the name and character of Odin. Both involve rage, corvids, death, and selection of warriors in battle. If Badb chose a warrior, he would be considered her perpetually ‘furious’ or ‘raging’ one. If Proto-Celtic speakers at one time liked dropping initial ‘b’ as they did ‘p‘, then Baðβ > Aðβ >> óðr Badb was just one of the manifestations of The Morrigan, and her shape-shifting / multi-appearances quality is extended to Odin as well.

doctor crawdad

It's a shame you insist on speaking so low, and have your mic so far away from your mouth.

Etymology is a science where consonants mean nothing and vowels less. I

OK, just how intelligent are you? I'm intrigued as to what made you study etymology.