Oh my god. This. You nailed it, and all of a sudden im having flashbacks to the ranting swede from sheep in the big city.

Lol

Yes! THAT! Loooool.

I actually have a friend with this exact background (Swedish, practiced English primarily with an Irishman growing up) and honestly you're kinda dead on LOL

Unbelievable, that's what I thought

I'd prefer 568ml though

Sam Allardyce would fit right in

It comes in pints?

I think they did that sadly . It wasn't necessary :(

A cheeky pint of wine

As someone going to Aldi later today, I'll test the waters with it for you! If I do not update, expect the worst...

"Let us have a reckoning" sounds like a Florence and the Machine song

Report, good sir/ma'am?

Fare ye well to Aldi!

I loved hearing that! It's what you'd say today in German, rechnung, or Norwegian, regning, meaning "the bill". You'd call the waiter after you've finished your meal and request it.

Oh wow!!

The interesting thing about this, is it's held it's meaning depending on where you say it. Saying Howdy in the south us usually results in an answer responding to the question. Where it's just a simple greeting in other places

Pint of wine ?

@@dannyboy-ym3uuwe shall go together, if you will

My guess is that it could be a contraction of “How do ye do” to “How’d ye do” to “Howdy do” and finally to “Howdy”.

Totally fascinating! Thank you for an inspiring video.

its funny because more of these sort of language-to-language transliterations are incredibly helpful at preserving a time's pronounciation (in both languages)

It's incredible that we have it.

I am not sure how humble it is to write something and than translate it twice.^^ The only reason I imagine him being so pedanticly is either, because that was his character or he wanted to profit of it.

Regardless, he was just some schmuck as we all are, and probably knew it too! I don’t do much of anything to directly benefit future generations, doubt he did either. Well, he did write a book, he was proud of all the work he put into it over the years, and was happy with the profit it (hopefully) brought him. Love to learn who he was, what he did in his free time, where he lived, was he an introvert or an extrovert (as someone who wrote a book about conversation in another language, it’s kind of a toss up!)

So close to touching it, yet so far

And isopods!

Woodlice everywhere

Rolly-pollies

peak youtube

Colonel? You too here? ;-)

Ah yes, the legendary bushes of time. Not to be confused with particularly overgrown thyme plants.

But the trees speak Vietnamese.

Were you searching for mutilated porn mags?

I hide in the people to hear bushes talk. Built different

It’s actually pretty fascinating as this is in the midst of “god be with you” turning into “goodbye” and then “bye”

In Geordie speak it would be W ye (or w yu) tho the phrase has died since people don't tend to say that phrase now

Elizabethan AF

Just wait til the younger folk start pronouncing English the way they text it! That will be a serious headache for older folk.

@@jimthain8777 well we’ve had texting first 25 years and no sign of that happening lol

'Tis still gets used in Ireland. Hiberno-English retains features of older forms of English alongside influences from the Irish language.Younger people such as myself use "'tis" slightly jokingly, I think, but it keeps it alive. It would be a shame for us to lose our dialect, after all.

Cool

Thanks for this little bit of history. God bless.

Thank you for sharing

As you probabaly know, many words in Northern England are often inferred. I live in West Yorkshire and much of my vocabulary is inferred

I think that sentence structures, pronunciation and vocabulary are unfamiliar to a speaker of modern English, but yet they are understandable (especially when they were spoken slowly). A quite short exposure to this Middle English speech (maybe some weeks just living amongst 16th century Londoners, NOT formal training) should be enough to bridge the language gap. I bet that there are remote *modern* dialects of English, that are harder to understand.

this is early modern English, progressed well past Middle English even of Chaucer’s time. He died 1400. In 1586, the time of Bellot’s book, Shakespeare was 22 years old.

Then you'd miss the lads by 38 years ;)

@@Galenus1234I’m from Northamptonshire, though I’ve lived on the south coast for 30 years. About 18 years ago I was talking to some drunk geordies and I could only understand about two out of every five words. You’d think being from the midlands I’d have had more chance of understanding them than a southerner would… but nope!

​@@greva2904 I am sometimes a drunk Geordie, and I feel like there's a few similarities especially to the way older people used to speak in the 90s. They would have been born at the turn of the century if you're wondering. I do wonder if we just continue the southern dialect from previous generations as we stubbornly cling on to our regional speech over generations.

hoe gaat het met jou

@@DIOBrando-wl4xq ja, of: hoe is het met jou? Kan allebei :)

@@timoloef fakka met jou

They greet each other "How are you Now?" In Canada

@@robertsaget6918 or: hey bud

A perfect phrase for a passive-agressive goodbye.

@@UmbrellaGent Lol my Grammy is from TN. Whenever I ask her “Grammy aren’t you gonna tip him?” She always says “shit, I’ll tip my hat and say good day, but I’ll be damn if I got any more to pay.”

@@UmbrellaGent I wonder if the dialogue was passive agressive for the time, if this type of passive-agressive was normal, or if it wasn't at all

@@pyrenees2695 Nah I think he was just saying bye.

@@UmbrellaGentit’s like how I say “laters” if I want to be passive-aggressive. Just as in Dizzee Rascal: “playa hatoh? see you latoh!”

I grew up in rural eastern middle Tennessee in the 80s and 90s and this type of expression was absolutely normal

a lot of appalachian communities have been isolated from the rest of the world for quite a bit, so much so that linguistically they're said to be closer to the form of english from just before the period this video discusses.

​​@@rakninjaI'd be interested to see that quantified. Even in isolation language evolves. Is the speech of Appalachia closer to English of the 1500's or just different in different ways? It also depends on which 1500s dialect you compare it to. I hear a number of things I associate with Northern Ireland, but that accent probably hadn't formed yet,

@@Allan_son if i recall the research, it's mostly referencing the great glottal shift. i wish i could help point you to the correct papers, but you know how youtube comments don't like links. it is pretty dang fascinating, though!

I've heard it all my life in west Texas, too. Plenty of people here whose ancestors came from the southern states within the last 150 years or so, of course. But it's pronounced "like" here. For example, if you're short of money when it comes time to pay, your companion (or a friendly bystander) might ask, "How much do you like?"

In the US it’s more like 2 a’clock.

actually yea it does. what about the "i used to do (x)" thingy tho? like now to me in modern english it sounds kinda archaic ngl. like i think its one of the only actual archaic things people still use regularly

@tristantheoofer2 I used to do exercise. How is this archaic? I don’t understand

@pipipip815 I thought it was obvious 2 o’clock was an abbreviation for a longer phrase. “2 on the clock” is what I always thought it meant .

How goes the night? At odds with morning which is which. What's amiss? You are, and do not know it.

them fighting words in some places, be careful mate now

As an American, if I were greeted with the word "how", I would be compelled to include in my reply a phrase such as "paleface" or "smoke-um peace pipe" 🤔

@@Kerithanos I know that the first native American to make contact with the Pilgrims of Plymouth Colony spoke English. His first words were "Welcome Englishmen". I wonder whether the "how" greeting was actually borrowed from English. btw I live in Plymouth England where the Mayflower set sail from.

​@Kerithanos seems the native Americans were speaking good English lol 😊

@@mistressofstones That particular one was - it seems he had actually crossed the Atlantic on an English merchant ship.

In the Guaraní language, the common greeting is "Mba'éichapa", which is basically "How" plus a "pa!" to make it a question 😆

Could you explain the pun? I’m curious but can’t parse it.

@@SupahTrunks7 Southern pronunciation of "like."

@@zeedub8560 Bill Bryson mentions a southern lady who asks him "How d'ya lack Miss Hippy?" and he is quite confused, not being acquainted with one Miss Hippy and certainly not experiencing any lack of her. Of course, she asked him what he thought of Mississippi.

@@DrWhom I was in class one day during my freshman year of h.s., only a year after moving from PA to TX. A girl asked, "Anyone have any type?" I thought, huh? My grandfather was a printer, so I though of printer's type. After a few seconds of confusion, I figured out she was asking for tape.

​@@SupahTrunks7 In Western North Carolina, they pronounce the i sound in night, kite, bright, and etc very...widely. I'm from the Piedmont, and though we're very Southern it is something we don't do. It's jarring even to us. So, I take it that the long i sound made like and lack almost sound the same, so Buster is saying he doesn't like the work he is having to do and being a smart ass.

How has that been going? I’d like to know!

YES.

Being able to understand the words when text is included is just basic psychology, not anything to do with the era of the speech lol.

It’s archaic but I understood every word. It’s like listening to American hillbilly

as a speaker of new england english, i understood every word with neigh difficulty

Curious, what's your fiction going to be about?

Still is ;)

I think its a precursor to the southern "Howdy"

I still use "howdo" regularly (although it was sometimes frowned upon in formal situations) Lancashire.

Shropshire, Herefordshire and Gloucestershire too.

In Australian it's eryagahn. Mark Twain: "The Australians consume nothing so much as syllables."

I lived in UK for 9 years and my favorite greeting is "ey ya c*** ya alright" 😂

@@almishti So have you taken the hint yet ?

In the village in the North of England where I grew up, "How do?" was a common greeting

'Eyup' is quite common in Yorkshire.

“Yeah No.” is suddenly popular with younger Americans. It annoys me. Is it yes or no? .

being an American no, I don’t remember that, but I remember the word “bits” being used to indicate monetary value. There was a sports cheer in which the usage appeared for a long time, “two bits four bits, six bits, a dollar, all for the Tigers, stand up and holler!” I remember reasoning that if the progression was two bits, four bits, six bits, a dollar, then a dollar must have been eight bits, so two bits was 12 1/2 cents! I asked my dad and he had no idea what I was talking about.

"8-bit coin" or "pieces of 8" was used for divisions of the Spanish dollar in colonial times in the Americas.

@@sluggo206 And Bitcoin itself, of course! How could I have missed that? 🙂

Yes, I remember but there was never a tuppney bit in old money.

@@dibblethwaite You're right, we spoke of "tuppence" but the 2d coin only existed in Maundy Money, which was worth far more than its face value. There was, however, the half penny coin, or "hA'penny bit." It had a galleon on the back: referenced by JK Rowling in the "Galleon," the largest coin in Wizarding Britain. Something cheap or tawdry could be described as "tuppenny ha'penny" or worth 2.5d, which at one time was enough to send a postcard, or an unsealed Xmas card: what later became second class post. Now that costs 85p, or 17 shillings in old money: though inflation means the increase is nothing like as bad as it looks.

A lot of it was conscious and deliberate grandiloquence. Not even the 'nobs' would have gone around speaking in iambic, pentametric verse!

You might call it 'stagey'.

I think Shakespeare wrote in a register that was slightly above the everyday use of his time, but not so much that everyday people would not understand it.

Shakespeare wrote in blank verse, so it was already not a normal speech pattern. And sticking to the rules of the verse would have influenced word choices and and style.

Didn't he write plays set in the past? I know people weren't as educated back then, but maybe it would've still sounded weird if those historical kings sounded "contemporary", same as if we made a WW2 movie where Churchill says things like "cringe", "yikes" or "rizz"

"many street talk" ? you really have been away for a while...

I feel ya! I got back to Australia after 15 years in China, and the service staff in McDonald's were utterly unintelligible. I found myself thinking, "I speak English, German and Chinese, plus a smattering of Swedish. I've taught English for many years, and I have no idea what that kid just said!"

500 years is objectively old, even for a language, so the confusion of lay people (including myself) is understandable.

@@rikwisselink-bijker Old English is more than 1000 years old.

@@jsmithy643 I don't know how to respond, other than with 'ok'. The colosseum is about 2000 years old, but if your house was built in the 1800s I'm still going to call it an old building. Perhaps a useful distinction would be 'old English' vs 'Old English'. The latter is a term of art, while the former is more of a personal opinion.

@@rikwisselink-bijker While Shakespeare's form of English IS old, he did not write in Old English.

@@jsmithy643 I don't believe we disagree, but it sounds to me like you think we do.

You can still hear these phrases in parts of the UK too. I even use them from time to time as well. 😅

"how do ye" became "howdy"

@@bootmii98 Very interesting, thank you! Regarding the use of 'ye' as a plural, I wonder if it was once more often used as an address to a group than to an individual. 'Howdy folks' will be familiar to anyone who's ever seen a Western.

'How goes it' was a standard greeting from a Rhodesian/Zimbabwean (White) friend of mine born in the 1960s. It sounded odd in 1980s England.

As an Australian born in the 1960s, I've both heard and used "How goes it?", "How's it going?", and "How's it hanging?" The first of those is more old fashioned, the middle one still current, and the last is both more casual and more ... crude or uncouth.

An astute observation

​It's interesting that modern English has the opposite trend. The vowel in "the" strengthens before a word starting with a vowel rather than disappearing. "Thə man" but "thee opposite".

@@Allan_son That was the case in classical British Received Pronunciation. But there's an even more modern trend of using Thə before a vowel.

That's because modern English diphthongises every tense vowel apart frombroad a, and at the end of the day this means they all get an optional final semiconsonant, preventing hiatus that English so hates

@Allan_son AS an Anerican I say “the opposite”. I don’t say “thee” unless it’s the actual word thee .

Are you going to cure dyslexia? If so how far along are ye?

What the hell does your interest in dyslexia have to do with this? Nobody asked.

"Come with", at least in American English, has been around for a long time I'm pretty sure! It was a Germanism (or maybe a Yiddish-ism?) originally, but spread from the language of German immigrants to colloquial speech more generally in some regions. Compare also "what gives?" from "was gibt's"?

Yeh I agree I've come with in England. Maybe in the North especially Yorkshire and the North East

Interesting….Growing up in the ‘80s in Northern Virginia in the U.S., I had a friend who always said “come with” without the “me,” and I always found it annoying somehow-like, “Just finish the sentence!!” But now I see there are historical reasons for that expression. I’m not sure where she got it from since no one else in our area seemed to say it that way, but it must have been something passed down in her family.

it’s exactly what they say in Danish: “kan jeg komme med ?” much closer than in German (also the ‘soft d’ in ‘med’ reminiscent to the ‘th’ in ‘with’)

A common mistake for german speakers learning english: Asking for the time. They don't ask "What is the time?" or even "Is it late?", but "How late is it?", implying that they are late at any given moment and just request an estimation of their relative lateness.

Seconded!

Thirded

Forthded 🤣

Veefed

Piąty kurwa ;) to put emphasis on Polish background :) the second Polish word is probably the only one every Brit knows ;)

The Dutch never developed the need for do-support.

SALVE LVKE

As a Lancashire lass living in Sweden, I can only agree! I studied languages and I once read in an authoritative book that the closest language to English is in fact Dutch, but I think the Scandi languages of Swedish, Danish and Norwegian come a close second.

Yes, me too. Cheshire cat.

​@@LMB2301A week ago I was having dinner with two Danish friends. I'm a Lancashire lad, the other guest is from Yorkshire. Half way through, Lars, at of the blue said, why is it so easy for me to understand you two so easily. I couldn't find any explanation, but after your comment, I can now.

If you find someone with a broad dialect in Sunderland or Newcastle, half the worlds are still Dutch and Scandinavian. I'm from Sunderland, and if I was to say "I'm going home" I'd say it in what is basically a pidgin Norwegian: "am gaan hjem".

Dutch and Flemish really are English's closest blood relatives, and the Danelaw saw to the Scandinavian influence being stronger than the French in many dialects. It's interesting seeing a map of the Danelaw reach right up to Lancashire.

You are slow, aren't you?

Yes!

I always assumed it was for on-the-clock.

I learned this in primary school, back in the 1960s!

I knew this as a kid. I'm aged 68 now.

Thank you. Is it much different from today?

@@stephenryan7855 There are some differences, but it's hard to tell because the author wrote it phonetically, but not using a modern phonetic transcription. But when I've read it it doesn't sound too different from some of the oldest people I've met in the North of Stoke-on-Trent near to where the dialogue is supposed to have taken place.

The world is full of cunning linguists, apparently.

There’s an old English folksong (As I roved out one May morning) where a man meets a maid and begs her to stop a while with him. He begins by addressing her with ‘you’ but after they have lain together he addresses her with ‘thou’. One can only imagine why…

In Richard III, the two murderers switch between "you" and "thou" when talking to Clarence before killing him.

Sounds to me (French Canadian) like an exact parallel of the French use of 'Tu' - singular familiar - and vous - plural, or singular formal/respectful.

@@normandduern2413 Exactly so.

They say it all the time in Barnsley.

"How do" is probably the second most common greeting in the north east after y'allreet.

I'm born and raised northern english and i've never heard anything like this

I'm from Lancashire, 60 years old now and people regularly used thee when I was a kid, pronounced 'the' or 'tha'. There was a joke we'd say, but only works in a Lancashire accent from that time. Someone wants to throw some rubbish away, and asks: "Where's the bin?" In an old Lancashire accent we'd answer ... "Nowhere. Where's you been?"

I used to hear it a lot in Sheffield being a child in the 90’s, such as “how’s tha doing”, “is tha coming to t’pub?”

Im learning Dutch (in Belgium). The first time I went to see Shakespeare since starting, I had a similar surprise. My understanding was improved allot by learning another germanic language.

@@sirkalasnefzenlot That was how I maintained a grasp on Dutch grammar too when I was studying it. I was just sat there thinking "Wow, this feels a lot like archaic English"

Also closer to modern German. I'm curious about when the "do" forms became required rather than optional for questions and negations in English, as in "Where do you live?" rather than "Where live you?" and "I don't live in London" rather than "I live not in London."

This older syntax is closer to other germanic languages in general, not just scandinavian languages. The ‘do’ forms likely arose as a result of the Norman invasion. If I remember correctly, in most romance languages descended from Vulgar Latin, the primary way in which you ask a question is simply with rising intonation, not necessarily with subject/verb inversion like in germanic languages. As the Norman-French speaking upper classes gradually intermixed with the Anglo-Saxon lower classes over the centuries, the ‘do’ form probably arose as a sort of grammatical compromise that tried to reconcile the germanic requirement that a question begin with a verb with the romance tendency to maintain SVO word order.

@@geisaune793 “The ‘do’ forms likely arose as a result of the Norman invasion.” One blog post, summarizing John McWhorter’s view in his book _his book Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue,_ says “What specific elements of the English grammar can be said to be of Celtic origin? One well-studied example of a trait now thought to derive from Celtic is the so-called do-support. In English, a “dummy” auxiliary _do_ must be used to form negative and interrogative sentences; hence, we say _John does not swim_ (instead of _*John swims not_ or _*John not swims)_ and _Does John swim?_ (instead of _*Swims John?)._ Other Germanic languages (German, Dutch, Norwegian, Afrikaans, etc.) do not have this construction (note that the English use of do-support is different from the so-called emphatic _do,_ as in _John does swim!,_ which is found in other Germanic languages). Nor do Romance or Slavic languages have anything resembling do-support. In fact, it’s a rather rare quirk, cross-linguistically. “We now think that English picked it up from its Celtic neighbors. Unlike Germanic languages, Celtic languages like Cornish have had do-support since before English started using it. It is used in Celtic exactly as in English: to express tense and agreement in negative and interrogative sentences.” It then gives several objections to this Celtic hypothesis.

My grandma spoke this way, she'd say ye three be quiet. But you if just one of us. She was from South West Ireland.

Here in Texas, "y'all" is definitely the normal standard plural form of "you".

Don't forget you & you'nz / yinz.

Actually many of us do have a plural for the you pronoun, but it isn't anything like "yee", in my area it "you guys" (regardless of gender), in some parts of North America is Y'all, (which is you+all).

Yous is common in Australia. And I mean common 😊

I second this. I'd love to hear them read.

Doesn't Bugs Bunny say it?

No question about that, I'd say.

Via “howdy-do” (how do you do)

It's from how do ye

Aye, 'tis the way.

Not just that - French's "y" as a particle, is related to Italian "ci" and galloitalic "ghe", meaning it was probably originally a consonant+vowel sequence; it could be that, at Bellot''s time, "y" was still pronounced [ji] or [i:] rather than [i] a in modern French

Surely! Out comes the wrecker ....