My son is studying linguistics, and he has told me how he thinks Icelandic is so beautiful. From his example, it made me think of purring cats.

the t would need to be articulated a little more dental but yeah otherwise perfect

I'm in love with, and in awe of your very fine Icelandic speech. Singing along to songs in Icelandic on YT with added lyrics helps me to learn those accented vowels. These have my admiration. 💙🙏👍

@@juliettebobcat704 Oh Juliette nice Idea of purring cats. I have dogs but love cats as well, and it is so exquisite to feel a purring cat on your lap. It is sound and vibration of happy creature so nice.

ertu frá norðurlandi

I have the faint feeling it's pretty archaic Looked it up on wiktionary, which includes "The word survives only as part of the oral tradition in rural Scotland and Northern England. It is no longer used in common speech." and most of the quotations added were 16th century, which for whatever reason seems to be a reoccurring theme with other words, them going out around that time abouts, but there was I think 2 19th century quotes. Also the etymology of 'hight' in this sense is surprisingly weird and doesn't seem to be a full verb in the normal sense where it has a full spectrum of use or declension. Specifically it seems to have come from a past participle of the old verb, hote, which I presume died out even earlier and that may explain the weirdness Now having watched the video, I think considering the usage of hight, that his 'pronoun + be + verb' construction would probably be most likely, something like "I am hight Wilhelm," "he is hight Mathew," that sorta thing. Also as an odd thing, I swear to god hight looks way too much like height. Kinda makes me wonder if I've been misspelling height all this time lol

It is very obscure! Never heard of it, never used it.. :)

It was apparently known, though archaic, in the 1940s, since Jack Parsons wrote a poem which began "I hight Don Quixote..."

As a reasonably well-read native English speaker, it's the first time I've ever heard of the word in my 40 years on Earth! So I would think it's pretty obsolete, rather than just old-fashioned (or perhaps its use could be very regional I suppose?).

Lived in Scotland and I cannot remember it being used, so I'd say its a demonstration of the complete-ist character of the OED. Literature a few hundred years old can be hard to follow without reference works.

It is :) But - where did your hair go?! I almost always listen to videos rather than actually watch them, is this brand new or did I miss it a few videos back? Also thanks for the robin footage!

Consonant shift checks out hahaha

Is that the same as the videogame Broken Sword? (involving Knights Templar and George Stobbart?)

'Hight" meaning "to be called" is the same form used frequently by Thomas Malory in La Morte d'Arthur, written about 1470, suggesting his audience would have been familiar with the word. So it definitely existed in that form into late Middle English, as a word recognizable to educated people. However, given that the book is a story about England's legendary past, I don't know that we can use it to conclude that "hight" would have been spoken by Malory or his readers. It's usage might have seemed archaic or fanciful already, the same way it does in modern fantasy books.

It"s still used aktive by older or dialect speakers. I renember not long ago our mayor saying : "is mir ganz gleich, wie Sie mich heiße (= nennen).

@luddemanfred5910 THAT is German where heisse is still actively used. We are discussing the English equivalent “highte” which died-out before 1500 AD .

@No U Almost. It’s “genannt”. But you were pretty close 👍🏼

Attention: Auf Geheiß des Königs.../ By order of the King...

Indeed, I don't remember hearing "geheißt" for decades.

@@JosephNoussair : In late 80s an elderly coworker heared two coworkers from in this time existing Jugoslavia speaking in their language. He said to me: I don't understand a word when they do ,welschen'. I was rather surprised then, hearing someone using the old word , welschen' for talking in a foreign language.

Don't forget "Jemanden Willkommen heisse!" - To welcome someone (To call someone Welcomed)

My mother is from Styria (Steiermark) and often when she doesn't recall the name of a "thingy", she says "Wie haaßt ma's denn", which parallels the English "whatchamacallit". Another dialect use of active "heißen". Also being from Austria, it sounds much more natural to me to introduce myself using the phrase "Ich bin der ", which literally means "I am the

This is confusing to me, I thought “heiß” was “hot”? Like Simon is acknowledging what a stud he is.

@@MelGibsonFan That's just a coincidence, just as "I am called" sounds exactly like "I am cold". You'd need the verb "to be" tho, as in "Ich bin heiß".

@@Automatik234 oh okay so it’s like a homophone?

@@MelGibsonFan same spelling and same phonetic. "Ich heiße heißer Simon." would be I'm hot Simon , but if it existed it would be similar in english (I hote hot Simon). Well at least spellingwise (different vowel sound)

sounds like what a cat or a dog might do

Good point!

Thank you for appreciating the ongoing evolution of language!

Thank you for excusing people's laziness....

~don we now our gay apparel~

This is region dependent though. While almost everyone drops the -n, in the North-East they drop the e and pronounce the n. So in North-Eastern dialects it's ['heɪt'n]

Interesting, in German it is the other way, the "e" vanishes, while the "n" stays. It was shown in the video too.

It is normal to drop it, but it's not wrong to keep it pronounced either (unlike for example most consonants in French. E.g. œfs "eggs" is pronounced with both the f and the s silent, and pronouncing them is in fact incorrect). In addition to the northern Dutch people that Bob mentioned, there are also people in Flanders who still pronounce the n. But I agree it is very common and never frowned upon to drop it.

@@BobWitlox I don't think it in wrong to keep it per se, though for me personally, when I hear someone speak Dutch, while pronouncing the word-final [n], it immediately makes me think that person is not a native Dutch speaker. I live in the east of the country myself and have for my whole life, so I do not have much exposure to dialects from Groningen or Drenthe, so I could be wrong when it comes to those. That being said though, even if that's true, that would still meaning the vast majority of people do not pronounce the [n], seeing as both said provinces aren't very densely populated. Still though, thanks for the information, I didn't know some Low Saxon dialects dropped the schwa, I myself speak a Low Saxon dialect and so does my whole family, but we definately drop the [n], probably due to influence from Standard Dutch, to be fair.

I would say ['he:tə] when it's followed by a consonant and ['he:tən] when the following letter is a vowel. As an example (written with unpronounced n's dropped): Veel mense verwissele de woorde noemen en hete met elkaar. Heten en noeme zijn verschillende woorde.

It's still not an active form. It's just shortened version of "they call me Andrew"

The "e" wasn't correct though, he pronounced it "hæ:ter" instead of "he:ter". Otherwise not bad at all. BTW in many dialects the final 'r' isn't pronounced at all (one problem solved!), and the "e" may also be a diphthong, "ei".

@@tohaason Yeah, the vowels in Scandinavian languages are basically impossible to get correct unless you are native.

@@RegebroRepairs Just Danish. You can definitely learn Norwegian and Swedish to a native fluency. Danish speakers themselves can pronounce things so very different from eachother at times that finding the commonalities in local dialects is much more difficult than in most other languages.

Fluency, perhaps, pronunciation, no, you can't learn Swedish pronounciation to native language unless you moved to Sweden as a kid. The same is definitely also true for Icelandic, and I expect Norwegian as well.

(pronunciation - comment above): I fully agree. There are many (many!) who have learned Scandinavian langues to full proficiency as adults/older teenagers, but in all my life I've only managed to find two or three adult learners who actually got 100% native level not only for proficiency but also for pronunciation and accent. That part is really, really hard. Fortunately it does not matter for anything, unless you for some mysterious reason want to go under the radar as a born-and-raised native, who grew up in a specific area in a specific town.

Yeah, but "heiß" has nothing to do with "heißen".

"Und das heisst--- Erika!"

@superaids Yes, I was sure. I looked it up now - no relation.

@No U 'das heißt Krieg' is very usefull

@No U As a fun way to learn the usage "heißen" in the context to "to mean," use KZfaq to find the song Hakuna Matata from the German dub of The Lion King. A line from the song is "es heißt die Sorgen, bleiben dir immer fern" (roughly translated back to English is "it means your worries always stay away").

For ß try long-pressing on the s key.

@@alexhajnal107 Thanks. Got it!

True. There is also a noun Geheiß (= behest in English, probably a cognate as well), used in the phrase "auf sein/ihr Geheiß" = "at the behest of ...".

@@hckoenig That's a wonderful discovery - both words are in their respective languages widely understood and just as widely not used. The "behest" derivative from "hatan" is very easy to demonstrate! One Umlaut ((a --> e) and a substantive -st ending, and Bob's yer uncle.

behüten ( behat ) for to place an hat

jemandem etwas verheißen, etwas steht im Akkusativ, jemand im Dativ > jemandem.

Same in Dutch: "Ik heet U welkom", which is ridiculously formal.

@@Kastagaar There's also Nietzsche using "heißen" like "to call something" in English "Ich heiße das Christentum den einen großen Fluch" (I call Christendom the one big curse). However, I don't think most Germans would ever use heißen in this way apart from in the example you two provided.

Also: "das heißt ..." to mean "that is to say", or "X heißt Y" and "X, heißt: Y" is exceedingly common. E.g. "Er hat sonst nichts mehr zu verkaufen, heißt: Er muss sich jetzt von dem alten Kram trennen" (he does not have anything else to sell anymore, meaning he must now sell this old junk) Similarly "Was soll denn das jetzt heißen?" (what is that to mean/say/imply?), and answer "das soll heißen, dass ..." (that's to say that ...)

@@1Cr0w True that. A synonym for that usage would be "sprich" which is actually a bit baffling since it's literally the second person singular imperative but taking the meaning of a third person singular verb.

May be heissen is not the name but more "I define" a situation. 🤷🏼‍♀️

I wish they taught this sort of stuff in Wallonia/Brussels during Dutch class. Most of us learn ABN without realizing that practically no one in Flanders speaks like that so it's always a bit of a shock coming across this type of information lol

@Oliver Anderson Yeah, I've heard this from other francophone Belgians too. Of course it is already great if you just speak ABN, but someone should perhaps develop a fun little book with ways in which informal speech in Belgium differs from ABN. Also, even when they just teach you Standard Dutch, I think they should use learning tools with Belgian speakers, so you are exposed to more southern pronunciations rather than Hollandic pronunciation.

@@belgianvanbeethoven literally the only one who uses perfect ABN to their friends are theater kids and published authors.

@Farahen Den True. Hardly anyone ever speaks pure Standard Dutch. They tried to popularise it in the 60s, but it was too distant and strange for dialect speakers to adopt outside of very formal contexts where it was expected. The effect of this was that most young people now speak a sort of in-between merger with elements from their local dialects and from more standardised Dutch. Today there is a movement away from ABN in general. Even in formal settings you rarely hear very correct Standard Dutch. Which of course doesn't mean that people don't move very much closer to Standard Dutch when in a formal setting. Registers still clearly exist and ABN is still at the top of the hierarchy.

@@oliveranderson7264 Yes, as a Flemish native, it's striking how different the (written) formal and spoken even semi-formal is. I imagine it's very inconvenient for somebody trying to learn the language! I wonder which other languages have this feature that heavily.

Yes, and in the well-known hymn which includes the line "The darkness falls at Thy behest."

bier hijsen means to elevate, to hoist (heben, hissen) in dutch.

I’m not sure if that is correct. My understanding is that it is a term from blacksmithing. You heat a piece of metal, then remove it from the fire, and try to work it as much as possible before it cools. One such cycle of heating and working is called a heat. You try to get as much shaping as possible in each heat.

@@davidkantor7978 You are right, the competitor meaning is not from hatan, but from heat as in temperature.

"He goes", "He's like", and "He's all" are all ways of reporting speech that are familiar to me, but with nuanced shades of meaning. Source: 30yo Inland North American speaker

@AntonioCurtis1 The more I learn about Irish speech patterns and usage, albeit only peripherally from watching Irish movies, the more I realize how much they have influenced the New York City speech I grew up with. I discover that what I frequently think are New York idioms often have their origins in Ireland. “Youse” /youz/ or /yiz/ for plural you is another one. In many American states they’d say y’all but I grew up with youse. ❤️

@@ffvvaacc how interesting. I would love for Simon to do a video on urban speech patterns in the USA, particularly NYC, and Boston. ( Old American movies seem the best sources for these unique speech forms as it seems many of them are dying out).

@@ffvvaacc are you sure that youse comes from Ireland? I haven't researched it myself so I'm not asking to put your knowledge to the test or anything, but rather out of genuine interest. Because I know they say youse in Ireland and that some people say yinz in America, whilst we say youse colloquially where I'm from near Manchester. I think they do in Liverpool as well. So I'd say it could come from Ireland, but maybe it was the other way round and came from northern England?

@@8ofwands300 Interesting you should say that - I was just this morning watching the Netflix documentary on the 1986 space shuttle Challenger disaster and the teacher Christa McAuliffe had a very pronounced (what I would call Boston) accent. (She was from Concord, New Hampshire.) It was the kind of accent that’s routinely shed nowadays when so much of what we hear comes from so many different regional sources and in that way informs our natural speech. I was 17 when the challenger exploded and didn’t hear her voice on the TV back then. Now with so much available on cell phones, I was hearing her for the first time and was so surprised she sounded the way she did. Between you and me, I think Simon should apply for a grant and make a documentary on something, anything, he’s so funny and deadpan. 😀

Interesting!

Wenn schon, dann im "pluralis majestatis": "Wir werden Simon geheißen." ^^

Proper LARP-speak for the next German renfair.

I don't like this

German "heißen" seems similar. Like in you first example: "In der Verfassung heißt es, dass es Meinungsfreiheit geben soll" -> "In the constitution it says / it is written, ..." "Ich heiße dich willkommen." -> I "call" you welcome. ("You are welcome", in the sense of greeting/inviting , not in the sense of being grateful) "Heißt das du magst mich?" -> Does this mean you like me? The is some oldfashioned use, that I am not familiar with, so I maybe my example is wrong. "Ich heiße dich dein Zimmer aufzuräumen." -> I demand you to tidy up your room. There is a noun "Geheiß", which means order/command. Interestingly it can be translated with "behest", a relative of the english "hatan". I think overall "heißen" would be like to demand, to be called, to mean. Maybe one could unite these three under "to determin", so in a way, like you said, it has to do with authority.

In German, someone might say "ich heiße Heinrich, aber man nennt mich Henni" ("My name is Heinrich but I'm (being) called Henni." There's a difference between "heißen" and being called some name. The heißen implies this is your real, immutable name, not just what other people call you.

These other uses described in German are things I don't recognize in Norwegian, except something mentioned in another comment, when used with translation: "Bok" heter "Buch" på tysk, men det heter "book" på engelsk. ("Bok" is called "Buch" in German, but it's called "book" in English.)

My native language is Swedish and we have passive verb forms (-s). Did you mean preserving that specific way of forming the passive?

@@spinnis Yes. The Swedish (or rather, Old Norse) passive form is a new development, that never existed in the other Germanic languages. The Gothic passive on the other hand is inherited from Proto-Indo-European, and therefore cognate with the passive in for example Latin, Greek and Sanskrit.

@@ruawhitepaw its funny that in linguistics, something that happened so long ago can be considered a 'new development"

"Me llamo" is literally "I call myself", isn't it? I don't really speak French, but I assume that it's pretty much the same. It seems that way to me. It's an interesting construction. When you say stuff like "they call me" you use a similar one, and that'd be "me llaman" in Spanish, but you don't really use this when talking about what you call yourself, probably because it's a sorta weird construction, at least in English.

Yeah same in italian mi chiamo.

In Romanian also: mă cheamă/numesc… Cum te cheamă/numești? (Lit. How are you called/named)

At least in my native Italian, the expression "Mi chiamo" would literally mean "I call myself" in the reflexive, but is perceived by speakers as passive in meaning (I am called). I'm fairly sure this is a construct called "si passivante" (where _si_ is a grammar particle whose role is instead covered by _mi_ in my example) but it's been a long time since they taught us this in school

@@enricobianchi4499 analogous constructions in French: Le vin se boit frappé {the wine should be drunk (drinks itself) cold}.

In Wales one hears "He goes as Steve", implying that Steve may not be his real name.

Heissen in german pretty much always refers to your one true name. To say you go by or are called would imply that it is a nick or alias.

Interesting. I know an American with the last name Deutsche (presumably from Germany, though don't know when his family immigrated), and he pronounces it Deutsch-y. Not strictly related to the video, but it's interesting how that vowel at the end of German names gets adapted into English.

ic hate potato😀

I won't reveal my surname, but a similar thing happened in my family. They arrived in America in 1729. The surname is a common one in Germany, and it sounds like a common noun in English. In the 1790's, the spelling was changed to that of the common English noun. A couple generations later, some of my ancestors tried to change the spelling back--but they got it wrong. Now my surname is an orthographic mess.

According toWiikipedia the (very common) surname of Heise in all its variations has nothing to do with the verb heißen (- it would have surprised me if it had). "Heise ist ein deutscher Familienname. Der Name ist die norddeutsche Kurzform zum Vornamen Heidenrich, der Beherrscher der Heiden bedeutet. Andere Formen sind: Heyse, Heidenreich, Heidrich, Hädrich, Heidecke und Heiseke. ""Heise is a German surname. The name is the North German short form of the first name Heidenrich, which means ruler of the heathen. Other forms are: Heyse, Heidenreich, Heidrich, Hädrich, Heidecke and Heiseke."

Well, a lot of german surenames got changed in ww1 because of anti-german sentiments and Propaganda. In ww2 the same thing, but mich extremer. 😅

In Afrikaans this "e" also became a diphthong but the other way round, resulting in something like "ea", "ia" or even "ya" and concerning long "o" in "oa" "ua" and even "wa". I was quite surprised to hear someone pronounce the city of "Keetmanshoop" almost like Kyatmanswap". Here you can hear how it is pronounced by sombody: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iZlgZs-i39e6nHU.html

Same in spanish (and perhaps the other romance languages?) with the yo me llamo Simon.

@@canchero724 ye it's the same and it has nothing to do with ideals of liberty

Look up "Anglish" on the internet. It's kind of an online community that tries to do just that through various means. There's also a book called "How We'd Talk If The English Had Won in 1066." I believe the author is actually a scholar of Old English and he actually went through old english manuscripts and found tons of words that were lost when the Normans invaded and put together sort of a modern/old English dictionary using them. It's very interesting!

@@geisaune793 That would be very interesting. It would involve a lot of guess work because of the vagaries of history.

That's Anglish for you. There's also Britannic, the 100% Romance counterpart of English.

ich heiße es Faulheit ;-) ein weit verbreitetes Konzept: vereinfachen und abkürzen, wo es nur geht.

This is the reason Danish sounds so odd ;-))

@@Tobitobiify One of the reasons, yes. But to be fair, you don't need to be able to use the glottal stop if you want to speak the language, and some dialects don't have it. Same goes for the soft d, actually. :)

​@@jatojo Sure! I said that just as a little teasing. Phonetics is one of my hobbies.

Why is it not "highth", like length, depth, width, breadth?

Yes. The 'eej' pronunciation is totally standard in the Netherlands. In Flanders not as much. Also people from the east of the Netherlands (Twente) commonly retain the older monophthong. I wonder how they say it in Suriname and the Caribbean...

@@ikbintom It's a bit less strong or even absent in some parts of Brabant too, and in Limburg they also keep a monophthong. Though if you really start going into dialects, you have to take into account that many of them distinguish two different kinds of long E, and one of them is a monophthong or "eej" while the other is more like "ië". This distinction is quite common in Belgium, Dutch Limburg and possibly North Brabant too, and is a leftover from medieval Dutch.

@@ikbintom I never noticed it, but i think i use a monophthong e sound in heten. But i'm originally from the north of limburg and went to school in brabant so that could be why. I'll have to pay attention to how my friends from around utrecht pronounce it now...

😂😂

The objective in Dutch is "heten" and the less objective in Dutch is "noemen" which is similar to "to name" a person or an object or to call a person or an object something. "I name it a hammer." "I call it a hammer". "I call him Alex". "I name him Alex". "I am named Alex." "I am called Alex". So "ik heet Alex" would be more like simply "I am Alex", although we say "ik ben Alex" for that.

Lol I love doing that. It's really neat for when you want to speak very exaggerated Swenglish!

Yes, I was going to say that in my American speech I use 'and I was like...' not in a supplanting way of 'I said', but as a marker that my recounting is a paraphrase of what was said. If I use the construction "I said..." than it's a direct quote. I can't say that everyone uses it this exacting way as I'm rather precise in my speech when compared to most.

He goes, he goes... he just goes. 😄

I think one of the reasons that the "he was like" construction is popular is that it doesn't need to indicate a direct quote, and can instead be used simply to convey the gist of what the other person was saying or intended. So if I told you "he said he wasn't ready to leave yet" I would probably mean that as an exact quote, whereas if I said "he was like he's not leaving yet" I would simply mean that he had conveyed he was not ready to leave, though the exact words might have been different. The "he was like" construction can therefore capture subtleties of expression, tone, and body language that would actually take a lot more words to convey through other methods, though it is certainly not always used in this way.

@@johnradclyffehall I think it's still used a bit, though mostly by the older generations. In Dublin there was a period some years ago where "turned around and said" became used almost ubiquitously, but now I think "he was like" and "she was like" are the most popular constructions in informal settings

Yes, when growing up in the Manchester (I am sure it was the same at the time around the rest of the UK...yes?) in the 1990s we always used he goes, she goes, I went, he went, she went to report speech. I would say the ubiquitous 'like' took over with youngsters around 2005 onwards. I am sure there will be some other way in the next generation to report speech. Such is language!

That could be part of it. I think it also conveys the idea of it not being an exact quote. In other words, "and I was like" means "and I said something like".

Nicht "Ich ward Simon geheißen"?

Romanian 🇷🇴 Numele meu este... Bosnian 🇧🇦 Moje ime je...

Just to nitpick, those are reflexive, not passive, forms. For example, "yo me llamo" should be more correctly translated as "I call myself" rather than "I am called" (which would be something like "yo soy llamado"). Merry Christmas and Feliz Navidad ;-)

@@fabim.3167 God, you are right! Thanks and Feliz Navidad ;-)

Looking at the forms, I highly doubt there is a common PIE root for "llamar", "appeler" and "hātan" (as well as "call"). Heck, even for the Romance languages alone, it doesn't look like those are cognates. It seems to me that the similarities in the logic are due to languages influencing each other rather than a common origin, or maybe that's just how the human brain tends to work. This would be fairly easy to verify with a bit of research : If we can find similar structures all around the world, then it's the latter. If it's present only in Europe, especially if that includes non-Indo-European languages, then it's influence. If, however, it's uncommon outside of Indo-European languages, but very common in Indo-European languages even outside Europe, then maybe the logic originated in PIE and got passed down different words through analogy (which I kinda doubt, that seems like a stretch to me, but who knows). Also, as someone pointed out, it's not exactly the same grammatical form anyway, which to me points towards the "It's how the human brain works" answer. (To explain myself a little bit when it comes to the forms, you would probably expect the Romance words to either have "c" and "d" as consonants, to correspond with "hātan", or "g" and "l", to correspond with "call". Grimm's Law would have turned the "k" sound into an "h" sound, the "d" sound into a "t" sound, and the "g" sound into a "k" sound. This is however not what we observe. "llamar" is probably related to French "clamer" which means the two main consonants in Latin, other than the "l", would be "c" and "m", which don't really correspond to the English consonants, and "appeler" has "p" and "l", which don't match either. This is just from Grimm's Law, there are of course other things too look at, but I can't really think of a way this would work, from my knowledge of how these languages evolved.)

@@Charlie-br8wp Be careful. The explanation of Fabi M. is basically wrong. Llamarse is a pronominal verb not a reflexive verb. So he is not right.