I’m absolutely flabbergasted how well you pronounced swedish ’sten’. That upward inclination is really unusual for people to get. Cudos

Sound palatalization of „s“ to “ ʃ before consonants is actually also slowly happening in some varieties of English . Whereas „strong“ and „strained“ both have a plain s-sound in RP English, there is a noticeable degree of palatalization to be heard in American Midwestern and also some British dialects , making them sound like ʃtrong and ʃtrained. I’ve noticed this repeatedly when listening to American non-standard accents but it seems to be a newly evolved and barely researched phenomenon.

I am studying slavic linguistics at college and the lecture on this topic was eye opening. Our professor wrote down cognates like you, but from different slavic languages and german and english as a bonus. His examples were "might", "night", "mast" and "eye". Since that and because I also learnt a few slavic sound changes, it is now much easier to learn new slavic languages and "guess" words for me. Your videos spiked my interest on the germanic side of things.

you were very good with "стена", actually

I wish we do more of this in High School

I'd like to add to the nominative -az ending that we have more evidence of its existance because of Finnish. Finnish has preserved old Germanic loans almost unchanged changing them only to fit the Finnish phonotactics, and these words still show the old -az ending in the form of -as. E.g. PG: *kuningaz -> FIN: kuningas compare - ENG: king; GER: Köning; SWE: kung; ICE: konungur; DUT: koning PG: *druhtinaz -> FIN: ruhtinas compare - ENG: drighten; SWE: drott; ICE: drottinn (PG = Proto Germanic, ENG = English, GER = German, SWE = Swedish, ICE = Icelandic, DUT = Dutch) Germanic languages have dropped the -az, but Finnish has preserved it as -as. The same ending can actually be seen in other Finnic languages too. In Estonian and Karelian the ending is the same, -as. In Veps and Votic it's the original -az. In the case of the latter two, the stem itself has changed a bit more than in Finnish - kunigaz & kunikaz respectively.

A(e)thelstan = noble stone Today we still use the word "ædelsten" [ai'th-el-sten] for "gem" or "jewel" in Danish 😉

In North German dialects, "st-" at the beginning of a word is still today pronaounced as it is in English.

In Bavarian German "Bua" means English "boy". As Bavarian is very related to Lombardic, and the latter having been neighbors to the Angles and Saxons before many of them set foot on Britain I suppose "bua" and "boy" are cognates. "Stone" in Bavarian is "Stoa" in the west around Munich and mountainous Austria and "Staa" or "Staan" in the East of Austria. I suppose that Western Germanic languages must have been pretty mutually intelligible until around 600-650.

In german schools you are taught the letters “st” independently from the regular “s”, same as “ch”, “sch”, etc. it makes it easier for the students to learn the different pronunciations

These videos have become my new favourite. Thank you Simon!

I've no idea why this is so interesting.

As one of your black subscribers, and an avid watcher of your content, I genuinely appreciate your message at the end and the links you’ve provided. Hopefully, your message of social awareness and moral courage reaches your broad and ever-growing audience, and I’ll also be looking forward to your video on Jamaican-Patois influenced-British English.

Simon, your videos are amazing. It's been a pleasure watching your channel grow from 5k subs to where it is now.

It's funny that in the Dutch dialects alone, you can already make a set of stone words (steen, stjeen stein, stien, stjèn, stèn, stain...) all differing in their vowel.

Love your work Simon. Wasn’t much interested in linguistics before, but you’ve changed that.

I think it’s a pitty that you never take notice of Low Saxon / Low German. On the one side it’s often like a bridge language between the surrounding Germanic languages, on the other hand it developed from Old Saxon which was very closely related to Old English. And last but not least Middle Saxon had a huge impact onto the Scandinavian languages in medieval times.

Nice to know that you watch Jackson Crawford too :D

Nice. Any chance of you making a video about why the scandinavian germanic languages has the definite article as a suffix ('a stone' = 'en sten' but 'the stone' = 'stenen')?

Such a complex concept explained with such clarity. Great job, we need more of this on KZfaq.

this is such a patient and well-presented video. thank you so much!

Thank you, Simon, for this fascinating glimpse into the development of language over thousands of years. The example you chose, 'stone' is part of our family name, Whittlestone, which we understand to mean 'knife sharpener' derived from Thwytel found in the Reve's Tale in Chaucer: "A Shefeld thwytel bare he in his hose, Ronde was his face and camysed was his nose" - and stone. The Sheffield area is also the birthplace of the name I guess as most with the name live and come from there. Best regards from Switzerland, Rob

Dear Simon, if it were put to a vote I’d cast my ballot to discuss Jamaican-patois-influenced British English. I believe current events shouldn’t delay a scholarly video to grow knowledge about our language. Sharing knowledge whether fact based or educated speculation oughtn’t be quashed to avoid potentially bruising others’ sensibilities. I learn a lot from your videos and my appreciation for my heritage has grown through your unbiased presentations. Keep up the good work contributing to knowledge. P.s. I like the little frogs too.

In romanian too there is the word ‘stană’ which means big rock 🙂 Paul from Langfocus already made a video about english patois. I love your archeological linguistic passion 👍🏻

oof i'm stained right now

Really appreciate your cognates/word reconstruction videos!

In my German dialect the words are often pronounced a bit softer than in standard: Hund Haus Zimmer (sounds more like Dsimma) Zeiche (sounds like Dsaiche, ch is almost a sounded soft sch) Silver (more like Silva) Iwwa Migg dacht (e) Schnegg Schdään instand of Stein More examples: Rään instead of Regen 🌧 Au = Auge 👁 ( if we still used the old Windauge today instead of Fenster.... get it?) Mais = Mäuse daav = taub Määde = Mädchen Kuuche/Guuche = Kuchen (ch sounds very similar to Dutch soft g in geen) Sivve = sieben Nain = neun is = ist ....

I'd be really interested to see you explore Scots and its descent from earlier languages alongside English. So many people dismiss Scots as merely a dialect of English and in so doing not only erase this history but treat Scots as a monolith rather than a language with lots of quite varient dialects of its own.

Yay! I love seeing you pop up in my notifications! 🥰

You actually prounounced стена very close to a native speaker 👌👀 thanks for the video, it was informative

You and Jackson Crawford are my go-to language channels

Elegant, illuminating how subtle local changes in the way a word is spoken can change the language as to be almost unrecognizable one to another over time and distance.

a video on the influence of jamaican patois on british English sounds fscinating, I've noticed from watching the news young people in london seem to have a lot of accent sounds from jamaican

The video was really fun for me as a layperson, my linguist partner said you did well, and the description and exit card are excellent, Simon. Well done.

you did an amazing job with your research. It was very accurate and the video was extremly interesting

"Stena/stina/stijena" in Serbo-Croatian means a large rock/boulder or rock face.

I stumbled upon the English word "maiden name". Without looking up, I understood: "maid" corresponds to the old German word "Maid" for an unmarried woman. Today we use the diminutive "Mädchen" And I immediately understood "name" as a family name. In the US, however, "name" is used for a personal name. The translation is "Mädchen-name"

I love that you mention Dr. Jackson Crawford... he's an inspiration to us all!

In Faroese, the word is steinur, the nominative form is reanalysed from the accusative form stein and the -ur is added, so steinur. Fun fact, this is actually not pronounced /ei/: in the northern dialects it's pronounced /oi/, kinda like how long i is pronounced in certain Hiberno-English dialects; now the Southern pronunciation of thie diphthong is /ai/, so /stainur/ which pretty beautifully brings us closer to the reconstructed Proto-Germanic diphthong.

A point about German. The common pronounciation of Stein does indeed start with the /ʃ/-sound. But if you go to the Hanseatic region (coastal Germany), even today, they pronounce the st as just that /st/. So there Stein is still /stain/

Great video as usual, cheers from Canada!

Wonderful! Thanks so much. To think we could hear the people from so long ago....

Could you make a video on some grammar changes from PGmc to more modern languages? Such as declensions changing and case dropping or person marking on verbs.

Simon, i always enjoy watching you. I only wish that you would sometimes, where fitting, mention the Lithuanian language, for it is the most archaic living Indo-germanic tongue, and today's lithuanian is comparable in many ways to Latin, Ancient Greek, Old-Church Slavonic, Sanskirt and Gothic, all dead, or used only in liturgies. You mention the proto-germanic masculine singular ending -az, and rightly show how it is like unto Gothic -as, Latin - us, Greek -os; but did you know that Lithuanian even today still has the masculine singular in -as, -us, and -is (ys)? Not to worry though, for Jackson Crawford also forgets to mention LIthuanian in his comparisons. Whereas THomas Rowsell has even made a whole video on ''Lithuania's happy paganism''! Cheers! Albertus

Hälsningar från Finland. Mitt modersmål är finlandssvenska. Det där var mycket givande för mig. (Ett) tack, broder. I vår samma tunga / In our same tongue: Healthings from Finland. My mother's meal is Finnish Swedish. That there was much giving for me. (A) thank, brother.

Hey Simon, I love the linguistics videos but I would also love to see more videos on religion like you have made before or just more historic cultural topics in general. I'm an Atheist but have always been fascinated by the different religions and how they relate to each other because it says a lot about what people thought at the time and how they think now. Like yourself, I'm also just generally intrigued by the people behind the history both culturally and philosophically. Not just the kings and queens but ordinary lives. I had never thought of using language as a way to see what everyday people were like until you talked about why you are interested in linguistics and so far I've learned quite a bit about people back then through your linguistic videos but I love the other videos you do on other topics also. My current favorite topics on religion are particularly the origins of the modern pagan religions/beliefs like Druidism or Wicca and how they used folklore and ancient Celtic, Scandinavian, and Germanic beliefs among others to basically rebuild new belief systems to essentially go back to a more nature based way of thinking. Also the origins of the current day Abrahamic religions. So particularly things like the beliefs in ancient Mesopotamia and how that went from polytheistic/pantheistic religions like that of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to the monotheistic religions of Christianity, Islam and so forth; since there are clear roots there yet now those religions would reel against pantheistic or polytheistic beliefs like they did for example during the burning times. It's also fascinating how there's so much similarity between the two (ancient Anglo-saxon/Mesopotamian), it's probably impossible to tell if there was some kind of common ancestry between the two or if they just simply both tell a universal human story. Obviously like you said in your one video about Anglo-saxon pre-Christian religion that there's no way to truly confirm anything once you get to a certain point in time but I think there's still a lot to be said or learned through the information available about what people may have believed at that time and how they saw the world. Unfortunately, I do not have access to the kind of information you have so I can only go so far so if you're at all interested in that kind of stuff I would love to hear your take on everything. Anyway, rambling on and my coffee is cold now... P.S. Sorry for any grammar/spelling mistakes. I'm not a native English speaker and self taught so...

Ściana is Polish for wall. I’ve been studying the language for a while and hadn’t noticed the connection yet. Thanks!

Well done! I like these videos because they take me back thirty years to the ten hours study of comparative Indo-European philology at university. I went on to study a little Icelandic, on which I completed my dissertation - another echo of recognition whenever you mention yours. One of the features of that language (and the Scandinavian languages) is the suffixation of the definite article. I have never understood how or when that deveoped, in comparison with the the separate pre nominal word of other Germanic languages. Do you have any insight on that? They seem to be quite radically different paths for a language family to take, presumably in the split between West and North germanic? Around 100/200AD or earlier? With the Norse settlements/Danelaw, the two approaches must have lived alongside one another in OE and ON but I can't see any effect that ON had on OE in that particular aspect. Can't have assisted in mutual intelligibility. Anyway just my musings. Keep up the good work. It's strangely comforting to me to hear OE spoken. Cheers Andrew

Sometimes I wonder if we can reconstruct words in languages that have died out. For instance, as far as I known, we don't know exactly how "bread" was called in the Hittite language. The Hittite language is written in cuneiform. It was taken over from the Akkadian language and used phonetically, but as a short-cut, words, that were written with a single symbol in Akkadian, like numbers and often used words like "water", "bread" or "house", were still written with the same Akkadian symbol, of which we known the Akkadian pronounciation, but not the Hittite one.

how reliable are gothic transcriptions? especially for fricatives and vowels. like az seems it could easily be (schwa)z or 'z

2:04 very good, neutral pronunciation of 'steen'

Lots of people praising the content of this video, as usual. I'd just like to add a thank you for those AAVE videos!

The /s/ of Proto-Germanic and even Proto-Indo-European was probably realized as an apico-alveolar sibilant (kind of "middle thing" between [s] and [ ʃ ], there is still no IPA sign for it). It was still pronounced like this in Mid-high-german and old Frensh, as can be seen from loanwords (e.g. 'push' from 'pousser' or 'cash' from 'caisse'), and it exists still today in many (especially northern) regions of Spain. My theory about the change to a 'normal' [s] : It was probably pushed forward when a [ ʃ ]-sound emerged in the language, e.g. in Frensh from older [tʃ ] () or in German from older [sx] () or in Italian from older [ʃ tʃ ] ( before e and i).

One minor nitpick: While there are Norwegian dialects that realise the "ei"-diphthong as [ai] (mostly rural dialects close to the mountatins both in the eastern and western country), most Norwegian speakers you ever come across will pronounce it as [ɛi]~[æi] (both the eastern lowlands and the western coast) or as [ei] (northern dialects). Of course, [æi] and [ai] are not that far apart, but it still sounds a bit odd. Given how good your pronunciations are, I guess you would have no problem distinguishing the two. Great video otherwise

Thanks, this is another wonderfully insightful linguistics video. I'd never seen the comparative method used in action, so it was rather pleasant to observe the backwards process of figuring out the word's ancestor form. The one thing I didn't understand is the very final text screen. Why should it matter whether your opinion is "white"? There's nothing impertinent about a person's opinion wholly on the basis of their race; if your input is constructive, then why cower behind excuses like your race? Say whatever needs to be said.

do you think there would be any way to take youtube's automatic transcription of you and improve it? the main areas of confusion are when you do IPA or nonenglish pronunciations generally

simon i was wondering if you knew as to why so many names in various languages mean stone as in names like pierre/ peter from the greek petros or the german stein that is prevelent in many surnames. King Aethelstan's name comes to mind here, why was he called a noble stone, why are so many names relating to stones?

One thing I’ve noticed watching your videos is that dialects in older languages were reflected in spelling. With dictionaries, etc, we don’t see that as much any more. Interested if you have anything to say about that (hopefully that isn’t a dissertation!)

Hello Simon! I was thinking, could you please explain the reconstruction of The ("You") with that TH in it in Proto-Germanic? Thanks!

Very good german ponounciation you pretty much nailed the ü !

I have a question. I came across the word “mysdoaris” while doing some research but I can’t quite figure out what it means. From what I can figure it might mean “Mis-doers” as in criminals but I haven’t found a clear, specific translation yet. Thoughts?

Many places called Stanton where stone circles are. Stanton Moor, Stanton Drew etc.

Concerning German /ʃt-/ the general consensus is that Germanic alveolar /s/ had in Old High German generally changed to palatal /ɕ/. Maybe as kind of a push chain shift due to the newly developed /s/ from Germanic /t/, I'm not entirely sure, but both were kept very much apart in writing up until about 1200 (i.e. /ɕ/ was written while the new /s/ was written ). At that time both sounds started to merge in writing and it is believed that /ɕ/ again came to be more fronted and generally returned to its original value of /s/ (merging with the new /s/ from /t/) but remained a bit more in the back, hence /ʃ/, in initial clusters. In some cases this was represented in spelling (like Modern German "schmal" vs. English "small") in others it wasn't (like "sterben" vs. "starve"). It's also interesting to note that this seems to have happened 100% consistently only in South Western dialects like Swabian or Swiss German, where even "ist" is pronounced /iʃ/ and loans like "Inspektor" or "Institution" are pronounced /inʃpektoɐ/ resp. /inʃtitutsjo:n/. In South Eastern and Middle German dialects (hence modern Standard German) this only happened word-initially, so you have /ʃtain/ but /ist/. This also means that at no point was "stein" ever pronounced /stein/, as unfortunately you are still often taught when it comes to Middle High German poetry. So the somewhat infamous "ich saz ûf eime steine" would have been closer to /iç ɕas u:f eimə ɕteinə/ prior to 1200 and approaching /iç zas u:f aimə ʃtainə/ afterwards.

this was really helpful for me, i'm making a pan-germanic auxlang!

Do you know how the comparative method landed on the voiced [z] sound at the end of nominative singular nouns in Proto-Germanic when most other examples you gave ended with unvoiced consonants? Thanks for these videos, from America.

You should do videos trying to communicate in Old English people who speak either Dutch, German, and Frisian it would be interesting to see how much they would understand.

Thank you for another great video, and thank you for the links. ❤️🇬🇧🇺🇲❤️

Feoh being the word for cattle does it have any connection to Fee-fi-fo-fum from Jack and the Beanstalk Just watched your quiz video on ecolinguist and thought they seem related. Both refer to "food"

im actually really interested in what you were referring too when you said there were some old runic scrolls written in proto germanic. was this actually something we know about or was it just something that could have happened, but we dont have evidence for?

In scotland, Stone is spelt Stane and pronounced exactly like stain, as in a stain in the carpet, a stain on your clothes.

An awesome video, i would be happy if it gets a series! Also an other video about the vowels variability would be great! What confused me was the use of diphthongs in protogermanic, my dialect (some local very preserved ripuarian) does not have any diphthongs but makes heavy use of pitch accents instead, so the same word can have totally different meaning dependend if the intonation of the vowel goes up or down. Also the o and u are often indestinguishible, as are the e and a, what makes english spelling for me much more natural than standard german i mean i would write words of my dialect exacly the way they are written in english but with a difference in pronounciation. Maybe someone has something similar in his dialect? Were there pitch accents in protogermanic or old high german/old francic? Do pitch accents just get lost over time or can they be reinvented? Anyone having a dialect without diphthongs? Thanks guys ☺️ edit: btw stone is steen for me with long e intonation going up, if it would go down it would be understood as a pronounciation of to stand, what is more commonly pronounced as ston(e) (different o than in english) and steen without any pitch means star xD. I wonder if to stand, stone and star are related...

Thank you for such an interesting video! What I have to say is largely tangential, but I hope you find it interesting! I’m no linguist, but I am a Norwegian-speaker, and I rarely encounter a D, T or N that isn’t either dental or retroflex. I find it interesting that the IPA in the “stein” example didn’t include the symbols for a dental T and N, which is how I’d say it. I’ve not looked at IPA much since university and definitely not Norwegian IPA. I’m just wondering if the IPA here is simplified (it seems to be?), if it’s common practice not to include the placement of these consonants in Norwegian IPA, or if I and the folks I know speak in an accented way (there are so many accents and dialects-I wouldn’t be surprised!). Anyone have any insight? I think the IPA is just simplified, but I’d be curious to know if something else is the case. Cheers!

I'd love to see more etymology videos likethis.

I love how you perfectly pronounced Haus like a typical Austrian person would, but then you used Mücke, which is such a German word 😂 But this topic is super interesting.

I live in a place called Stanley, and was told once it derived from the name Stony Hill, which I'm not sure about, but there's a place about 5 minutes away that is actually called Stony Heap.

Your pronunciation of 'стена' was correct. Greetings from Bulgaria.

I was very slightly familiar with the comparative method, so it was nice to see you go through for a simple word. I also appreciate your note at the end regarding the situation in the US. As an American abroad, it's hard to be away from home during this trying time and unable to physically show solidarity with our black relatives. It is good to see the solidarity from the international community and a thoughtful consideration of how you can contribute in an appropriate way.

You should learn Icelandic, Simon. You would enjoy it very much. I love your videos.

No written Gothic? IS that what you said at 5:40 in the video? What about that passage from Luke that you've read from in Gothic? (Or maybe someone else read it, I don't remember for sure.)

2013 , date at the end of a video I just watched, I noticed you mention your working on your dissertation . Hopefully that went well & I'm interested to know are you still involved in archaeology, studying languages, or history ? I'm nearing the end of my career, within the next 10 years . I hope things are better where you are than how they've become over the past decade for those of us working for the council in herts.

Correct me if I’m wrong. The modern English word egg is a Danish word but in Old English it’s eiren like in modern German and Dutch. In German, eye is auge. The phonology of auge sounds a bit like to egg. Did these two words (eye and egg) flip in English? Eye to egg and egg to eye.

Hey I actually have an unrelated question... How do you input IPA Unicode characters? Do you use a character table or copy paste from some kind of handy online tool or just from web dictionaries?

Loved the message at the end, that was very respectful of you and the video was great as always :)

The differences between German [High Geman] and the other Germanic languages can largely be accounted for by the Second Germanic Consonant Shift (see below - part of an article I wrote for YDS Transactions) - in the case of "stone", however, German 'stein' is a result of a simple shift from an alveolar fricative /s/ to postalveolar /ʃ/ - as alluded to in the comments below, this feature can also be seen in some English dialects (before /t/) - e.g. NW Derbys /ʃtʃʏ:pɪd/ 'stupid' (RP /stju:pɪd/). The apparent differences between Icelandic and the other North Germanic languages are largely because Old Icelandic was geographically (and, subsequently, linguistically) isolated - the effect was that OI remained conservative and did not undergo some of the developments apparent in the other languages descended from ON (see below) Second Germanic (High German) Sound Shift The Second Germanic Sound Shift was to have a far more profound effect upon the Germanic languages than Grimm’s Law, being ultimately responsible for some of the principal differences between West and North Germanic (and thus Old English and Old Norse) and indeed also between the southern varieties of West Germanic and their northern counterparts. It is apparent that the shift originated in the southern varieties of West Germanic dialect continuum between the 3rd and 5th C and was all but complete before the earliest written records of High German in the 8th C. The shift occurred in three distinct northward diffusing phases, involving the 1) fricativisation of voiceless plosives in final position 2) affrication of voiceless plosives in other positions 3) devoicing of voiced plosives. As these changes diffused northwards, the extent and manner of change became less, so that central German dialects were only partially affected while the northernmost remained largely unaffected or wholly unaffected - this included those varieties of continental West Germanic which were to become Old English, in addition to the North Germanic dialects [West / East Old Norse]. This gave rise to three distinct West Germanic dialect areas: High German [sub-divided into Upper [Southern] and Central] and Platte Deutsch and the Low Franconian dialects of the Low Countries (which remain the principal dialect areas today), observable by the following (see features 1, 2, 3 above) - c.f. 1) street (English), straat (Dutch) and strasse (High German); 2) apple (English), appel (Dutch), eple (Norwegian) and apfel (High German); and 3) drink (English), drinken (Dutch), drikke (Norwegian) and trinken (High German). Other sound changes associated with the Second Germanic Sound Shift are apparent from this period, being both limited in scope - e.g. the fricativisation of initial /g/ in the Low Franconian dialects [already fricativised in medial position, according to Grimm’s Law], e.g. modern Ducth goed /Ɣut/ [good] - and far more extensive - e.g. the general replacement of the dental fricatives /θ/, /ð/ by the unvoiced / voiced plosives (/t/, /d/) in all positions. This sound change, particularly, was far more extensive, on a geographical level, than the Second Germanic Sound Shift, affecting the vast majority of the West Germanic dialects as well as the North Germanic dialects. Evidence from the earliest written records of High German (8th C - bruoder alongside bruother) suggests this change was already underway in the early medieval period. The absence of this shift in both OE and Old Icelandic also provides other evidence for the diffusional chronology of this particular sound change - it clearly had not yet diffused to the northernmost dialects of West Germanic during the period of Anglo-Saxon migration to Britain ( mid 5th to late 6th C) and, similarly, had not reached the dialects of West Old Norse before the migration of Norwegian Vikings to Iceland in the mid 9thC - both modern English and Icelandic are the only Germanic languages to retain the dental fricatives /θ/, /ð/. Jon Fyne, Yorkshire Dialect Society

This is a fascinating video. But „Thought“ in German is: Gedanke. Dachte is the past tense of Denken. Which is: To think.

One slight addition regarding modern German pronunciation of „Stein“: usually modern German pronunciation is: Schtein (or: Shtein), however in the Hamburg area the S and t are spoken with a full stop in between, more like the modern English St(one). So Hamburgian dialect is like: St(ein). I hope that makes some sense at all.

Many southwestern norwegian dialects pronounce Stein as Steidn like in Icelandic.

In Danish, "Sten" is pronounced almost like in Dutch, except the "e" is shorter, and there's almost a glottal stop before the "n" (as in "Ste.n"). It's also a boy's name, but then it's usually spelled "Steen", which is my brother's name.

So if I use the method on another family of languages: Say "House" in the Semitic Family Akkadian: Betu Arabic: Bayt Aramaic: Bayta Assyrian: Beta Ge'ez: Bet Hebrew: Bayit So does this make: House being called 'Bait' in Proto-Semitic? Like I didn't understand the method, if you could explain using more example with multiple language families Please.

What I’d like to know is if anybody has attempted to reconstruct the most immediate common ancestor of Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon, namely Ingvaeonic or North Sea Germanic. Presumably, the various regional dialects of whatever that language was constitute the earliest form of what was to become English to be widely spoken in Britain. I’d love to hear what fifth century “proto-English” might have sounded like. Also, do linguists think that Old English, Old Frisian and Old Saxon were still mutually intelligible by the time they begin to be attested in text? How different from each other are they?

I was already seeing a lot of commonality between Scots and Norse; imagine my surprise at seeing Scots as its own language-branch on the tree! Ta very much, and very well presented in general. Also! Even cooler! The tree already looked familiar but, when you started talking about how we know whether or not a sound would have been present in the root language, it sounded excitingly similar to the way we talk about basal v derived traits in evolutionary science! Which is to say, it's difficult to be sceptical about this method when it's pretty much how we reconstruct everything from dinosaur physiology to human genetic history. Also familiar was the way you spoke about how one change can cascade into others... No wonder I love linguistics. You might enjoy this video for more of that commonality: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/i7FdZtWd3N-vqH0.html - A Scottish Biology Student (if you couldn't guess)

is there any research into proto Germanic as a pidgin or a Creole of pie as I was mere hour ago considering that many of the sound changes implied it or would be more natural as such. sort of on topic

I would love to see how we can tell the different paths of two words that sound similar, but come from different backgrounds. For example, "town" in English and "Zaun" in German have the same origin even though they have different meanings, however "zone" comes from a completely different word even thought it sounds similar to Zaun and has similar meaning to town as being an area of land.

I'm not good in phonetic, but I belive the Norwegian stain is a bit wrong. I've never heard that one. It's more like stein, and sometimes very similar to the Swedish one. I'm from northern Norway.

This video is extremely relevant to me

As a native speaker of German I am baffled by the German (???) word example "Schnegel", which I have never heard or seen written. The German equivalent of the English "snail" is "Schnecke".

I'm german and I never heard of "Schnegel", I only know "Schnecke"

little * here. Gothic was most likely a Monophthong /ɛː/ (when corresponding to PG. /ai/) You can still take the Spelling as evidence for an ancestral diphthongal spelling by making the argument that the spelling was made in the knowledge of an earlier diphthong and the lack of a better way to write it But that is much more vague and most scholars suggest that the was actually inspired by Greek orthography as most of the gothic script is. (If anyone wanna know why we think it’s a diphthong just ask :3 Disclaimer though, i have no formal education yet, just an enthusiast)

4:07 You pronounced it right. I didn't know about that, thx

Modern West Frisian has "stien" [sti.@n], with a falling diphthong. This is the form in 99 % of the dialects (also the islands). Only the rather conservative Hindeloopen dialect has "steen" with [e:], as Dutch also has. This is also the form in the only living East Frisian (Saterlandic): steen. Mainland North Frisian has "stiin" or "stiinj" (Mooring). Old Frisian has "stên" (Holthausen's dictionary). This is one of the regular correspondences to OGerm/OWGerm "ai/ei", the other being "â", which is the regular continuation of OGerm "au" as well. The rules governing whether ai became ê or â are complex and not fully understood AFAIK. In some dialects the ê from ai is kept separate from unrounded continuations of umlauted o: and u: etc. Hoffmann has a nice paper on this.