Noooo mom I'm not doing drugs, I'm just watching a thoroughly researched and well put together video that demonstrates obscure and interesting facts about linguistics, presented in a trendy fashion employing the action of going down the icebergs to uncover progressively more niche entries while darkening the tone of narration, for the next 2 hours and 7 minutes

Idk why, but calling a bear “the brown one,” seems infinitely more terrifying then just having an actual word for it

I’m gratified to find that fifty years after I majored in Linguistics, the principles I learned have withstood the test of time.

Pidgin. In college I had an Arab boyfriend and picked up conversational Arabic. His cousin was struggling to learn English, so my boyfriend asked me to help him. This guy just couldn't get it. But after a couple months spending so much time trying, we developed our own pidgin. No one could understand us! One example I remember was 'manager'. He didn't like his apartment manager, so that is what he said when he didn't like something. A woman he found unattractive was a manager. And so our conversations went. Mansour asked what the hell did I do to his cousin? The Arabs found it funny. The cousin went home, never to learn English.

The funniest language story I heard is when an older German couple couldn't have a child, so they adopted an orphan baby from China. They would then proceed to buy Chinese dictionaries and Chinese and German schoolbooks. When asked why they did this, they replied that they wanted to be able to communicate with the baby, once it started speaking.

LEVEL 1 0:34 Octopi 1:39 French silent letters 2:17 Dearest Creature in creation 3:12 Tower of Babel 3:51 Duolingo 5:08 Omelette du fromage 5:42 Pig Latin 6:57 Hardest and Easiest language 8:26 American Monolingualism 9:44 Faux cyrillic 10:18 Quick brown fox 11:10 German is angry 12:24 Very long german words LEVEL 2 15:20 Ampersand origin 16:17 "Untranslatable words" 18:39 Ghoti 19:15 Esperanto 21:19 100 words for snow 22:46 Aoccrding to rscheearch 23:35 Click consonants 24:21 Army and a navy 24:55 Newspeak 25:27 Rosetta Stone 26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi 27:07 Had had 28:12 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously 29:29 Buffalo buffalo 30:42 Gendered articles 31:46 Code-switching 33:39 Boustrophedon 34:10 Sapir-whorf 35:49 Descriptivism and Prescriptivism LEVEL 3 37:26 Great vowel shift 38:30 Bhutanese passport 41:23 Bear taboo 43:23 Tea and cha 43:57 Critical period 44:48 Voynich Manuscript 46:34 Toki Pona 47:48 This is a wug 49:12 cockney rhyming slang 50:43 Pirahã 52:37 Volapük 53:42 Lorem ipsum origin 54:26 Rødgrød med fløde 54:39 Mele Kalikimaka 55:00 Grzegorz brz- 55:07 Hopi time 56:20 Kiki Bouba 57:58 Ye olde 59:02 Loglan 59:42 Pidgins and creoles 1:00:33 Folk etymologies LEVEL 4 1:02:27 Silbo Gomero 1:03:09 Ceceo 1:04:15 Kurgan hypothesis 1:05:00 Wasei-Eigo 1:06:31 Schleicher's fable 1:06:57 Latin wolf taboo 1:08:21 Hreks deiuoskwe 1:08:52 Prisencolinensinainciusol 1:10:10 Migration theory 1:11:16 Russian blue 1:12:39 Dyeus Phter 1:13:30 Labov R LEVEL 5 1:14:33 Foreign accent syndrome 1:16:00 Etymology of OK is unknown 1:17:07 Generative grammar 1:18:26 Koko gorilla 1:20:29 Mbabaram dog 1:21:21 Biang 1:22:12 Solresol 1:23:12 Singapore stone 1:24:51 Hlewagastiz holtijaz 1:26:05 Anglish 1:28:44 Universal Mom and Dad 1:30:04 Glossolalia 1:31:02 Dord LEVEL 6 1:31:52 Ithkuil 1:34:45 Basque-Icelandic pidgin 1:36:21 Butterly refers to their poop 1:36:56 Seaphim glyph 1:37:38 Tsakonian 1:38:34 Proto World 1:39:47 Linear B 1:41:45 Innateness 1:44:13 English is a pidgin LEVEL 7 1:46:11 Stoned Ape Theory 1:48:18 Sun Language 1:49:49 Edo Nyland 1:52:02 Italian gestures from romans 1:53:03 Curse of 39 1:54:37 Codex seraphinianus 1:56:06 Nicaraguan sign language 1:57:15 Zzxjoanw 1:58:04 Phaistos disc 2:00:08 Swedish yes sound LEVEL 8 2:00:32 Indian welsh 2:02:56 Helicopter Hieroglyph 2:03:48 Katakana Hebrew 2:04:23 Proto-Indo-European 'Nine' and 'New' 2:04:48 Neanderthal Language 2:05:32 Learn languages while sleeping really works

This video is staggeringly fascinating. I've been watching, pausing to make lengthy cross references and investigate topics more deeply, then returning here and watching more. I had no idea when I started that I would be immersed in these things for 5.5 hours.

My high school Spanish teacher helped me understand masc/fem nouns by presenting them as arbitrary categories rather than logically consistent “boy and girl” nouns. So instead of “La barba” being a “girl noun” it was a “la” noun, in a catergory that “niña” and “mujer” also fell into

So 1:12:06, the "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz", refers to an old polish comedy movie titled "how i started the second world war". In one scene the main character named "grzegorz brzeczyszczykiewicz" is asked to indentify himself to a german officer who, obviously, struggles to write it down. Then he is asked to state where he lives to which he replies "chrząszczyrzewoszyce (the city), powiat łękołody (administrative unit)". The entire thing sounds like if you threw 10kg of aluminum foil down a staircase and a plausible polish name at the same time. the reaction of the german officer is pretty entertaining too, especially for a movie made in 1969. It pokes fun at the ridiculous pronunciation and an abundance of difficult and uncommon sounds in polish. The movie and the scene are cult classics in poland to this day (source: im polish)

You missed the absolutely best (and most metal) pangram, "Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow!"

I watched 10-20 min of this video every night before bed for a few weeks now, and it has been such a cozy journey. So interesting and also well edited with funny memes here and there, thank you!! On to the next one :)

5:45 in Finnish there was a "language" called "i-kieli" very popular among kids when I went to school. However it was not as complex as the one shown in the video: children just replaced every vowel in a word with the vowel "i".

Rød grød med fløde is something danish people ask non natives to say, since it uses pretty much all of danishes effed up phonemes resulting in the danes laughing at their poor german friends.

About the Voynich manuscript my personal hypotesis is that it was one of the earliest exemples of a nerd doing worldbuilding. Created a entire new language with its own script and the manuscript is basically worldbuilding hence the non existing plants.

"Octopussies" is also acceptable

This is legit in my top 10 most interesting video of all time. Great to see someone who learnt french in Canada! Cheers

The "taboo bear" thing is literally to avoid attracting the attention of bears. Apparently in Yellowstone the bears have learned the English word "bear" and tend to move towards the source of the sound since it usually means an easy source of food. Thus, we may soon need new euphemisms for both our safety and theirs.

The Bhutanese passport one had me in stitches, and the way people responded to it was even funnier than the original sound recording.

Your meme selection and jokes are S tier! Can't wait for another long format video from you!

Btw, belorussian and ukrainian languages also have different words for blue and sky blue (Maybe other slavic languages too). But in russian language we have one word for violet and purple. I mean we have fancy words for them like cian that you mentioned in the video. But most of the time we just called them both "фиолетовый"(which is more purple than violet i guess) or just called them "cветло-фиолетовый"(light purple) and "тёмно-фиолетовый"(dark purple). When i speak english i never use word "violet" i call it purple too. Even rainbow colours are different in russian. In english there are red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet. But in russian we have kind of red, orange, yellow, green, sky blue, blue, purple. So no signs of indigo at all. For us indigo is blue, and "english blue" is sky blue

1:18:26 one of the most obvious criticisms of the koko gorilla experiment is that none of her handlers could actually speak ASL fluently. there's a really insightful article about a fluent ASL speaker who saw koko and it explains how koko's hand signs were often incorrect or vague but her handlers would interpret them as valid anyway. and it also talks about how koko never actually used ASL unprompted. she would use it when answering questions and interacting with trainers, but she wouldn't use it to communicate something she thought of the way a human would.

Biang is also a very unique Chinese character that is almost meme-worthy in my opinion. Biang is a made up character. Yes technically all words and characters are "made up" but Biang is especially so. It's not really even a real official Chinese character. It is not possible to type it out on many digital devices, and its not included in most modern dictionaries either. For most of the Chinese language, one singular pronunciation can correspond to dozens of characters (涯/牙/芽 are all pronounced "ya" and with the same tone), but there is only one word in the entire Chinese language that is pronounced Biang. Also, most Chinese characters also have multiple meanings depending on the context and what other characters they are paired with, but Biang has one and ONLY one meaning, that is Biang Biang Noodles. And and and, the structure of Biang as a Chinese character doesn't even make sense! If you know Chinese you would know that each character is made up of multiple components that hint towards either the meaning or pronunciation of the character. Biang has tons of components, none of which allude to its meaning as a type of noodle nor as an onomatopoeia. Food usually has the component 饣(飠), or 口 for a sound word. Biang has neither of those. There are explanations trying to reason the structure of the character as an allusion to a person selling goods out of a cart but I personally feel like that's a bit far fetched. What I am trying to say is that Biang is a highly artificial character that has absolutely no buisness being so complex. My headcanon is that Biang was created as a marketing strategy by noodle sellers back in the olden days, it was purposely made to look as complicated as it is to draw attention to it and be memorable. According to this Biang would have most likely been created by merchants rather than educated scholars hence why it does not make a lot of sense linguistically. But it achieved its goal and sure is an unforgettable symbol of good food! (If anyone was curious, the Biang Biang noodle is a very wide chewy type of noodle made from wheat with spicy seasoning on top, its pretty good!)

I can’t explain how much joy this brought me, thanks for a great 2 hours, 7 minutes and six seconds of my life

Duncan good job on your videos man, the amount of work you put on them is crazy this are lectures my friend, I can firmly say that you are about to take off!!

Him using actual pigeons when saying pidgin, and transforming said pigeon into a different pigeon when pidgin is evolving always gets me.

Most of you're examples at 1:05:15 are not actually wasei-eigo but are instead the more general gairaigo (or loanwords), which is why we can understand their meaning when translated or spoken. Things like alcohol [arukooru] are only different because Japanese phonetics doesn't have such equivalents for things that include [L] sounds or consonate clusters. Japanese is more of a syllabic type of language. The way it forms syllables, or mora, are also different from English; since all of them end in a vowel except for ん [n]. Thus, Japanese can only get close approximations for gairaigo for it to be physically and comfortably said in Japanese. Many Japanese people can't even hear the difference between [R] and [L] if asked about it. Collaboration [koraboreeshion], hamburger [hanbaagaa], hip-hop [hippuhoppu], keyboard [kiiboodoo], skateboard [sukeetoboodoo], Twitter [tsuittaa], and more that you mentioned are all said this way because of the reasons I mentioned previously, but regardless, are all still /understood/ to mean the same thing in BOTH languages when used. _________ Wasei-eigo however is when gairaigo is taken a step further - when a word from English is used to mean something different in Japanese from what it would originally be understood as in English. Quote "[They] are Japanese-language expressions based on English words, or parts of word combinations, that do not exist in standard English or whose meanings differ from the words from which they were derived." and "Wasei-eigo words [are] compound words and portmanteaus are constructed by Japanese speakers on the basis of loanwords derived from English and embedded into the Japanese lexicon with refashioned, novel meanings diverging significantly from the originals." For example, if I were planning to go somewhere with a friend and I said "I'll be the handle keeper" to them in English, they wouldn't know what I meant. Why would I be keeping or watching over a handle? In Japanese ハンドルキーパー [handorukiipaa] is indeed the wasei-eigo that they use for what we would call a "designated driver" and a "handle" is a "steering wheel" but that isn't how we use those words in English. Another one would be スキンシップ [sukinshippu] "skinship" (portmanteau of "skin" and "kinship") - this is when you're physically affectionate with close friends and family like hugging one another or a parents holding their baby skin-to-skin after it's born. We just call this being affectionate but if someone asked for or talked about "skinship" to you in English it would normally sound weird. Although, this is the fun part about wasei-eigo, is that after this one caught on and became more popular online, it has actually been used in English now and then for the meaning of skin-to-skin contact with another. English has borrowed wasei-eigo words that look English but are entirely novel to Japanese.

Awesome video! Thanks for all the hard work that went into this explanation!

This channel is among the best on KZfaq without a doubt, and the level of research and explanation is superb. I would add only one thought, that the statement by Chomsky that "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" makes perfect sense as a metaphor when the superposition aspect of quantum mechanics is borne in mind, another example of the wonderful flexibility of our language. Wonderful video, outstanding channel.

I love how the comment section feels like additional content, like a bonus feature on a dvd. 😅 Thank you to all who have gone in depth on topics from the video, added info or given further insight or different perspectives. I am fascinated and have learned a lot!

As a native Russian speaker, my mind was kinda blown up when I watched the "Russian Blue" entry. It kinda explains the struggle when I was first learning colors in English and trying to translate them into Russian. When I see something described as blue in English, I almost never have the idea if that color is the light blue shade or the darker shade, because of my perception of colours and how I grew up with it. Other than that, that was a really interesting iceberg.

Easily the greatest iceberg out there, very well done and thank you!

What a video! Thanks a lot for putting in the work!

the section of untranslatable words was really eye opening about how we accidentally make other parts of the world way more exotic than they actually are through their language only. Super super reflective, thank you Duncan edit - sept 1, 2023: i appreciate yall and the discussion in the replies, i’m not much of a linguist but cultural priorities and values DO shine through in language, sorry to give this page too much credit for a concept i didn’t fully understand :)

As someone who did French for a few years at high school, oiseaux honestly looks to be spelt exactly how it sounds.

i really appreciate all the efforts to make such great informative and entertaining video

thank you, dude! I really enjoy this video

13:02 I hate to be the akshully 🤓👆guy, but actually German words can be infinitely long, because you can simply come up with new correct words by combining nouns as long as the new word makes sense. The same is true for Dutch, a language closely related to German. It’s just that “Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz” is the longest word in German dictionaries.

The census also doesn't necessarily cover a circumstance like a Spanish professor I had. Her father was a first gen. Mexican immigrant who had met his wife while serving in West Germany. Their common language was English, so their children mostly spoke English at home and school, but learned German from their mother and Mexican Spanish from their father. Neither parent ever learned the others' native language with any fluency.

What a fascinating video. I thought that each entry was interesting. Thanks a lot!

Bro you’re a legend, best video of the year for me.

We want Sociology, Economics, Psychology & Art-history icebergs too. You're the only one on KZfaq who gives me hope on these. Please do them. Would be immensely appreciated by me and certainly by the rest on KZfaq, like the Philosophy & Linguistics icebergs were ♥

Props in making a 2 hour video not only informative, but also entertaining. Keep up the good stuff!

Dang...that was incredibly interesting. Awesome video!

Every single moment of this 2-hour video is worth watching. Thanks

I don't know if someone has already written it or not, but actually there are some sentences that have meaning in two languages but it is completly different depending on the language you read the sentence with. In Italian for example the sentence "I vitelli dei Romani sono belli" means "Romans' calves are beautiful", but the same sentence in Latin means "Go, o Vitellius, at the war signal of the Roman god". I find it pretty interesting and also a bit strange considering how similar Italian and Latin should be. I don't know if there are similar sentences in other languages though.

Personally I found the most iconic example with regards to Japanese borrowing words from other language is the word karaoke. It is an English word adapted from Japanese, which itself is a combination of Japanese and borrowed English word abbriviated. The Japanese word is actually two words combined. Kara, a Japanese word meaning empty, and oke, an abbriviated form of ochestra. Put together, it means an empty ochestra, which is conceptually what karaoke is, someone singing along with an empty band playing music for them.

This things in this video are almost all I think about, everyday, for as long as I can remember. I LOVE THIS. 🙏🏻 THANK YOU!

I love this video, and happily watched to the end. New sub ❤

Three incredible things about Piraha you didn't mention: -They don't have connectives. They connect different phrases. Phrases are connected by context. Everything I said is a rough emulation of how Piraha speak. -They use the same words to describe relevance, distance or time. A distant place can be somewhere that no longer exists, that doesn't matter or is far away. -They have a whole vocabulary that allows them to speak while eating and another to communicate with whistles, so they can communicate while hunting.

55:00 While it's true that Grzegorz Brz(ęczyszczykiewicz) is a meme about how difficult it is to pronounce polish names the story behind it's origin is much more interesting. It originates from a cult classic polish movie "How I Unleashed World War II" where the main character is captured and interrogated by german officers. The movie is more than 50 years old but it legacy continues, and that scene along with many others became part of polish culture.

masterpiece of a video, hats off to you

just graduated with a BA in Linguistics and Anthropology, and i’m starting a MA in Applied Ling in the fall. this video was SO interesting, i’d heard of some of these in class but i have so many more rabbit holes and research ideas now!

1:15:34 the phrase "brain damage" in the context of acquiring a "french" accent from an accident is hilarious for some reason

A note on "English is a pidgin," there's actually a third option: Before the Norman conquest, there was the Danelaw. During this time older Anglo-Saxons lived next to Danish newcomers, and their languages were a lot more similar than modern Danish and English. Although we have very little writing evidence of common speech at the time, the hypothesis goes that the two peoples, who shared a lot of vocabulary but slightly different inflections and grammar, simply dropped a lot of inflections to make communication easier, and that this is the reason why English remains a language that is incredibly light on inflection, even compared to its Germanic relatives. English would thus be a creole descended from this Dane-Anglo pidgin.

As a language sciences and linguistics master student who speaks four languages I'm familiar with most of these concepts, but I enjoyed watching this. Great job putting all that together. I hope you will make another video that encompasses all linguistics theories.

41:24 (Bear-stuff) Well, this is quite interesting because we had a similar practice here in Finland in the not-so-distant past. For example there were beliefs that bears are related to humans or have been humans before or are half-human etc (because of some human-like mannerisms and stuff like that). Using the actual word for bear (karhu) was somewhat of a taboo so there was a bunch of different names and some of them are still sometimes used. I don't really know when this practice faded away but I have an ancestor who was the most accomplished bear hunter in Finland and the euphemisms were still used during his lifetime in the late 18th- early 19th century.

A lot of the words you used as examples of 和製英語 (wasei eigo) at around 1:05:00 are actually just 外来語 (gairaigo) or loan words. Wasei-eigo, or "Japan-derived English" refers specifically to words and phrases specific to Japan that use English as a base. アメリカンドッグ (Amerikan doggu) is Wasei eigo because no one calls a corn dog an American dog outside of Japan スケートボード (Sukeetoboodo) is not because it's just a Japanese transliteration of the word Skateboard. パワハラ (pawa hara) is a good one. "Power-harassment" is when you abuse your authority over someone as their boss/parent, etc.

So the real insight you can find in the "untranslatable" words is that words in different language rarely one on one translate; but that there's usually some slight nuance in meaning. Sure you can make it sound profound by overdiscribing the differences, but what you really need to know is that translating a sentence is a lot more an art than a mathematical function.

Love this stuff !

I just watched this through, great video, man!

Another iceberg can be formed from the Chinese sentence "shi shi shi shi shi施氏食石狮". This sentence is written in Chinese characters and read in Mandarin Chinese. However, when read in Cantonese, it is sounds like "see sea sek sek see"; when read in Hokkien, it sounds like "see see jiak sik sai". when read in Hakka it sounds like “she shi sit sak su“. Cantonese, Hokkien (called Southern Min in the video, the part on "tea/chai"), Hakka and Mandarin are all varieties of Chinese. However, there's been a debate on what to call all those different types of Chinese varieties: are they "dialects" of Chinese or "language"? When we speak of "dialects" of a language, for example "dialects of English", it is understood that they are regional speech patterns of English (i.e. accents and pronunciations), however the differences do not impede the understanding between the speakers. Here's a further example: London Cockney, General London, Northern English, Scottish English, New York English, Philly English, Southern Appalachian, West Coast English, Standard Canadian English, General Australian English, NZ English are all dialects of English. An Aussie can understand a Californian, or a West Virginian's speech can be understood by a Scot with little to no problem etc. If we apply the same definition to regional speech across China, a problem soon becomes obvious. If you have a Mandarin speaker, Cantonese speaker, Hokkien speaker and Hakka speaker talk to each other using only their regional speech, they can't understand each other. Suppose all of them are well literate in written Chinese, there's a high change that they are able to exchange ideas using written words. Meaning that if they all write in Chinese, they can understand each other. Yet, this situation can only be possible if all of them write in Standard Chinese. If they write in their written regional varieties, i.e. a Cantonese speaker writes in written Cantonese; Hokkien speaker writes in written Hokkien; Hakka speaker writes in written Hakka, they may find exchanging ideas through text a bit difficult. That brings us to diglossia. The phenomenon where a language has a "high" and "low" type, that "high" is the standardised language which is mostly reserved for formal situations, which is generally understood by every speaker of that language. However, outside of the formal situations, a speaker of that language uses the "low" type to communicate with "low type" speakers of the same. Like all thing linguistics, not all "low types" are the same. "Low type" A speakers may not understand "low type" B speakers; if there's "low type" C speakers they may not understand "low type" A or "B". Besides Chinese, diglossia is also found in Arabic and Malay to name a few.

It's funny how people tend to think other languages are more mystical than theirs because they don't have the outside perspective on their own language. I'm slightly bilingual with Japanese and there are some thoughts and ideas that are conveyed entirely differently depending on the language. Sometimes you need a whole long phrase in English to say something small in Japanese or vice versa.

The information about Toki Pona gave me goosebumps. I created a symbolic visual language during a period of depression too. It's also very simple, and very philosophical.

Great work, thank you so much

Dang this was such a niche yet in depth iceberg video. This is probably one of the most interesting ones I've seen and I thoroughly enjoyed the watch!

Hamburgers were not invented in Hamburg, but the practice of using ground beef as a meal center was known as "Hamburg steak" (changed to "Salisbury Steak" I think around WWI because, you know, Germany were the bad guys) and that's the dish that was imported from Hamburg (though it's unlikely that this was the first time a culture used ground beef). The "Hamburger" was a sandwich made with this "Hamburg Steak" and was created first in Wisconsin.

Fascinating video. Thank You

I like this channel because every video is interesting enough that I like listening to it while I get ready for and go to bed, and mellow enough that they continue to he pleasant background noise until I wake up without being disrupting

I think the shades of blue thing applies to me. When I was a kid, I had the light blue ikea cup, and my brother had the blue one. That way, we wouldn’t drink from each other’s cups. I thought “lightblue” was its own color for a LONG time. Even now, I catch myself forgetting that blue includes light blue when people are talking about blue things.

The last idea, sleep learning, was in Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World" as "hypnopaedia". And the Welsh Native Americans figure tangentially in Madeleine L'Engle's "A Swiftly Tilting Planet". What a lovely trip down a literary and linguistic memory lane.

Thank you, it was very interesting

I never thought I’d see jerma an hour into a linguistics video

I find meme culture very interestingly different in Mandarin and English. English memes are generally very literal, such as "Everything is fine", "bombastic side eye" or it is just a new made up word such as "rizz". In stark comparison are the metaphorical chinese memes such as "Melon eating audience" (people watching a show or fight from the sidelines), "diving" (lurking in a chat", "big pig trotters" (men who are unreliable romatically). Even though I am a more fluent English speaker, I find myself funnier when I'm speaking Mandarin, whipping out all the internet meme metaphors.

Wasei eigo specifically refer to only the pseudo-anglicisms, not just any loanword taken from English to Japanese. The term translates as "Japanese-made English". "Amerikan doggu", "kanningu", "handoru kiipaa", and "rabuho" are such examples, but "koraboreeshon", "hanbaagaa", "hippu hoppu", and "kiiboodo" are not wasei eigo. Rule of thumb is that if the word originates from English but native English speakers can't derive the meaning even from knowing its etymon, then it's wasei eigo. Many Japanese people are surprised to know that a lot of the wasei eigo aren't used as such in English and won't recognize the actual English translations for them. One other note is that it's not just English that Japanese has pseudo-loans for. It also has wasei kango, for words taken from historical Chinese. These ones are basically compound words that look like they were regularly borrowed, but were actually first used in the Japanese language. In some cases, these compound words already existed in historical Chinese but now gained additional meanings in Japanese to represent modern concepts. And a lot of those wasei kango actually get adopted (loaned) into modern Chinese languages, Vietnamese, and Korean. CJKV words such as 世界 'world', 電話 'telephone', and 自然 'nature' owe their modern meanings to Japanese.

Broooo I love linguistics so much. I didn’t think anyone was enough of a giant nerd to make an iceberg on it. Thank you thank you thank you!!!!

Наконец досмотрела. Очень крутой айсберг и хороший разбор:з

french has what i would like to call "loaded letters". those silent letters at the end of words are meant to be pronounced at the BEGINNING of the next word, so long as the next word starts with a vowel. moreover, to an american speaker, these letters SEEM useless, but to a french speaker, they DO impact how letters sound. some words may have a lot of "silent letters", but they are inadvertently impacting how the rest of the word is said. also "omelette du fromage" is also funny because it's grammatically incorrect. if you want to say "cheese omelette", you say "omelette au fromage"

Fun fact about Volapük. The Danish saying for nonsense or "That is greek to me" is also "Volapyk". And it is not just a novelty example. Most Danes wouldn't know Volapük is/was a language, it is simply THE word for gibberish. Speaking of Rød grød med fløde as well, it is there for another reason as well. It is also THE one thing you will hear every Dane try to make a non-danish speaker say, since it's notoriously difficult.

Thank yꙮu for this video. It’s so well-written, and it basically summarised what would have taken 2 years to learn into 2 hours

Really interesting and entertaining video! You obviously put a lot of work into this. Just wanted to point out regarding the section on Schleicher’s Fable, that the version that you show at 1:06:56 isn’t, I believe, Proto Indo European, but Proto, Indo Iranian, a daughter language of Proto Indo European. Thanks!

A few years back I got hung up on the thought on what the plural of "Wombat" was (German) and i was too stubborn to just google it. So over the years I've asked people what they thought the correct plural was and I would throw in that it could be "Wombaten" and people would be second-guessing themselves, that it may be plausible that it, in fact, could be "Wombaten" or "Wombatten". When I felt cheeky, I would suggest "Wombatanten" or with English speakers "Wombatants". This video reminded me of the funny and extended discussions I had with people from all walks of life, friends and family to random strangers to job interviews. I now know that "Wombats" is correct in both English and German, though I still like to dabble in this topic from time to time, these friend-shaped creatures are just too adorable to pass up some funny 5 minutes. The small things in life :)

As someone who lived in Germany for a long time, I don't believe that the "Antibabypillen" from Google translate is actually used very much. "Empfangnisverhütung" is a lot more common, at least in the region where I live. It means something like "protection against catching something", so it is admittedly funny too. Also, in Germany, "Sonntagsleere" takes on a completely different meaning, because almost everything is closed, and most people don't go to church anymore. It's a level of boredom that is difficult to comprehend.

I love languages and it's history! Awesome content 👌.

I usually ignore the "like and subscribe" bit, but yours was so good I'm going to comment too.

Just a comment about marmelada for the record. In portuguese we usualy put "ada" in the end of a fruit name to represent a jam or conserved fruit in sugar. So we have "Goiabada" from "Goiaba" (Guava in english), Bananada for bananas or "Marmelada" for "Marmelo" (Quince in english). The ending "ada" also have the meaning of an action executed, or a hit that was blown. So maybe it was refering to the act of smashing those fruits to make the jams. Also, mildly infuriated by adding Brasil in the lisp/no lisp map of spanish speaking countries.

It's already funny enough that "the Brown Bear" actually refers to a particular species in English, but finding out that it means "the brown brown one" is even more delightful. I know there are other notably un-creative species names but Brown Bear just became my personal favorite.

This is one of the best videos of time, for sure

11:10 Here in Turkey, German is often seen as seductive. The reason why is probably because while we barely learn about WWII in schools, especially before the internet, German adult movies were very popular in Turkey

As a native Portuguese speaker I was always intrigued with color perspective through the languages. Apparently, "roxo" = purple, but we had the word "púrpura" too, but don't actually seems like the exactly same color. Also, "roxo" is kinda similar to "rojo", "rosso", "rouge" or "rosu" which means red in Spanish, Italian, French and Romanian respectively. Portuguese is the only Romantic Language that has "Vermelho" as a word for red, which is intriguing. Edit: yep, I understand that vermilion is red, I just accentuate the rojo/roxo thing

*Level 1* 0:34 Octopi 🐙 🐙 1:39 French Silent Letters 🇫🇷 2:20 Dearest Creature poem ✍🏻 3:11 Tower of Babel ☦️ 3:50 Duolingo 🦉🟩 5:07 Omlette Du Formage 🤓 5:41 Pig Latin 🐷 6:56 Hardest and Easiest Languages. 😫☺️ 8:25 American Monolingualism 🇺🇸 9:43 Cyrillic 🇷🇺 10:16 Quick Brown Fox 🦊 11:09 German Language 🇩🇪 12:23 Very Long German Words 🇩🇪 14:45 Wales gogogoch🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 15:25 Ampersand “et” = & 16:17 Untranslatable words. 🇩🇪, 🇮🇪 18:38 Ghoti 19:14 Esperanto “one who hopes.” 21:18 Snow ❄️ 22:48 According to research.” 23:35 Click Consonants 24:23 Army & A Navy 24:53 Newspeak 📰🗞️🙈🙊 25:27 Rosetta Stone _Weird Sentences_ 26:35 Shi shi shi shi shi shi 28:16 Colorless green ideas sleep furiously. 29:27 Buffalo 8x 🦬 30:35 Gendered Articles 31:50 Code Switching 33:40 Boustrophedon 34:12 Saphir-Whorf 35:49 Perscriptivist/Descriptivist *Level 3* 37:28 The Great Vowel Shift 38:33 Bbutanese Passport 🇧🇹 41:27 Bear Taboo 43:59 Critical Period 👶 46:35 Toki Pona, breaking down complexity into simplicity. 47:49 This is a Wug. 49:11 Cockney Accent. 50:45 Piraha 52:37 Volapük 54:25 Red Porridge with Cream 54:44 Mele Kalikimaka 🎄⛪️ 55:44 Kiki and Bouba 57:58 Ye Old 59:04 Logland 59:44 Pidgens & Creoles *Level 4* 1:02:23 Silbo-Gomero 🇪🇸

Wholeheartedly enjoyed the video to its fullest

As a native swedish speaker I'm laughing so hard about the inclusion of the inhaling "yes" because it caught me completely off guard 😂 I can also confirm that it is 100% accurate and I'd literally never even thought of it as something interesting until you mentioned it. Now that I think of it there actually also is a "correct" way to do it, it's not just a random gasp for air. You use the word "jo" or "juu" (depending on where you're from) and not the word "ja". Also, as you make that "u" shape with your lips and inhale briefly, you tilt your head back. An important thing to remember is that you only tilt your head back for the same duration of time as when you inhale. If, however, you wanna respond with a long "yes", you can also nod as you're inhaling but again, this is only for as long as you're actually inhaling. I would also make it a slow nod that starts with tilting your head back, as opposed to the standard type of nodding where you start by tilting your head forward. There you go, master this and you're basically a native swedish speaker 😂😂

This also touches on the philosophy of language. Language itself is a man made tool that we use to communicate, so of course it will be imperfect and have flaws. The butterfly I think of when reading or hearing the word will be different from the butterfly you think of. As long we’re thinking of all the essential qualities that constitute a butterfly, language has done it’s job.

Epic work!

didnt think i will enjoy this, but man u did a good job!

As someone who speaks Finnish and English fluently, Swedish somewhat decently, and is learning Korean and just so happens to find languages absolutely fascinating, this is exactly the kind of stuff for me to be geeking over. Thank you!

16:45 It should be “utepils” not “utepsils”. It directly translates to “outside pilsner”. In Norway, instead of asking people if they wanna grab a beer/pint, it is more common to ask if they wanna grab a pilsner. “Utepils” refers to drinking pilsner outside on a sunny summer day, often outside a bar/café. I think what makes it such a special moment for us is a mixture of the fact that we don’t get that many nice summer days a year, and that buying alcohol at bars/cafés is extremely expensive here, so we usually only drink at home. These two factors makes the experience of an “utepils” an idyllic moment for us.

An absolutely excellent way to do the “like and subscribe” bit

Interesting video!! Loved the occasional Runescape emotes you slipped in throughout

It is absolutely wild to have seen emoticon/emoji form and mix as it happened. I was in college learning Japanese, and Japanese had emoji before emoticons were commonly used in the US (emotes were primarily ASCII when Japanese already had emoji). I remember in the earlier years of emoji in Japan there also being a bit of a play on words joke of 絵文字 ("emoji") picture letters and エモ字 ("emoji") "emo" characters, like emoting characters. Granted, this joke may have primarily been in multilingual, Japanese as as second language circles. Edit: also curious how the Italian somatic expression for "eff you" ended up in Wisconsin. I totally have used and seen it used growing up, and have been confused since when folks didn't understand it elsewhere.