I just had a weird realisation. We often talk of old (or foreign) languages in terms of "hrefn means raven". But obviously (though perhaps not intuitively) that was not "really" the case (a hrefn was just a hrefn...) Just like right now, I (Dutch) only know "duif", and make no difference between doves and pigeons (see also: snails and slugs). I also remember visiting Berlin and noticing that the typical urban birds there are different from those I'm familiar with. There are a lot of hooded crows, you just don't see those in the Netherlands. I don't know.. language isn't just a set of new words for the same things. It's like a collective, cultural effort to categorize the world around us, but the way things are categorized also evolves over time.

The rambly videos are just as welcome as the structured ones.

I recently learned that, just as we distinguish doves and pigeons while some languages don't, French distinguishes horned owls, hiboux, from round-headed owls, chouettes.

Interesting. In swedish, some owls are called "Uggla" and some are called "Uv". That sounds very much like the old english distinction. For example, the tawny owl is called kattuggla (cat owl) and the eagle owl is called berguv (mountain owl). I've never thought about it before.

Regarding your question at the end, I enjoy this format personally. As well as the subject matter, sort of a epistemological discussion of linguistics I guess. I would enjoy more dives into various concepts and how they might have been viewed or approached by ancient peoples.

The call to plunder an enemy was to 'cry havoc' - perhaps more semantically linked to the hawk than our modern etymological thinking might suppose. I have yet to read Lacey's thesis but another factor to be aware of is that wild bird numbers are orders of magnitude lower than they used to be. Many species could fill the sky when flocking, especially water fowl. We also tend not to view them pragmatically in terms of food with qualities of taste, desirability and ease of trapping.

For me at least your meandering not to heavily structured videos are perfect, it matches your cinematic style. Your kind of dragged onto a trip through the countryside, loose the sense of time, learn something but won’t get lost. Really nice, thank you!

Speaking of having a different relationship with or perception of the 'same' things; when you said robins are solitary and follow you around, my reaction was "What!? That's not at all how robins are, they're always paired up and stay away from humans" but then I remembered what I call a robin in Canada is a different bird from what you call a robin in the UK.

Rain is just fascinating. It feels, looks and smells so much different depending on the time of year, amount of rain, surrounding etc. It is in fact astonishing that there aren't more words describing different kinds of rain. At least in German, most of the time you need a prefix: Nieselregen = drizzle, Starkregen = heavy rain, Dauerregen = constant rain. That there is a special word for drizzle in English is probably caused by British meteorology. Nice lake btw.

5:10 tangentially related, in my neighbourhood and the surrounding areas in Calgary, Canada, there's this domestic breed of rabbit who has been taking over in the past five years. I actually know the exact person who is responsible for this, they were breeders of domestic rabbits across the streets but then let some of them go. Now they've been breeding with the local jackrabbits. They're very different looking from the jackrabbits. The jackrabbits have light brown fur, which if you look up close actually ranges quite a bit across their body in the exact shade. It's quite effective camouflage. The domestic rabbits are jet black and smaller than the jackrabbits, also they are quite a bit faster, though less reactive. When I walk my dog the jackrabbits always scurry away once they notice him, but the black bunnies don't seem to mind as long as he's on a leash. They've brought bobcats into the area. Ten years ago, a bobcat was a rare site around here and I can't remember ever seeing one, but now they've become quite a bit more prevalent. I've identified at least six individuals based on coat pattern. When I spot one, I quickly notice the lack of black rabbits outside. 200 years ago, no Blackfoot individual (the indigenous people of the area) would have ever seen a black rabbit.

I thought the meandering was brilliant. excellent to listen to while fulfilling medieval belt orders for customers. Thank you.

It’s a great day when a new Simon video comes out

Thanks again for your excellent content. As a native frisian speaker i am always amazed by how much of the old english examples brought by you i can immediately understand or at the very least reason about and come to the right translation. The example for owl for instance has the current frisian translation of "ûle" and is pronounced exactly the same way you pronounced the old english word ūle. Concidering by how few people frisian is spoken today it actually made me aware of how important it is to conserve these endangered languages.

I absolutely loved this approach! It felt insightful and informative but also personal, emotional even poetic in a way. I'd love to see more of these kinds of videos on your channel.

An Indonesian woman once told me "you say a dog is man's best friend. But for me, a dog inside your house is just as weird as a cow inside your house." Dogs belong outside in Indonesia, and are guard animals rather than cuddle fluffs. The Indonesian word _anjing_ therefore refers to the same biological creature as the English word _dog_, but it refers to a completely different cultural creature.

In Arabic, we do not distinguish pigeons and doves. In my experience, pigeons are loved rather than seen as vermin. I am Iraqi. Pigeons are found in large numbers at mosques. That is why a religious person is called a mosque-pigeon, and why pigeon is one of my favourite birds. Wild pigeons are so cute. Rock doves, wood doves, urban, rural, doesn't matter. All of them are the cutest of God's creation.

I, a german, saw the title and was like "Regn? Why does that look like our word "Regen" so much..."

I recently discovered a very satisfying new rain-related word: 'petrichor' which describes the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a long period of dry weather. As someone who works with stone, I appreciate the etymology too.

As an occupant of the British Isles, I always felt that the words of Neil Sedaka emphasised the non-universality of the human experience of rain. "Ooh, I hear laughter in the rain, Walking hand in hand with the one I love, Ooh, how I love the rainy days, And the happy way I feel inside"

As much as I appreciate the more formal videos for teaching me the technical knowledge, this meandering, informal video really helped me to understand on a more visceral level how important it is to understand the culture that a language lives in; without this foundation, one cannot grasp the nuances and deeper meanings of that culture's tongue. Thank you for bringing us both the formal and informal videos, I love them both!

Where I live, in Friesland (incidentelly where Frisian is spoken, could be interesting to cover) there are a lot of old houses that have a "ûleboerd" on the front. This is a wooden board that is made to be attractive to owls, so that they might perch there and enter the house through a small hole. This way they could hunt mice in their houses.

Lovely to hear birds discussed as a connection to the past! Funnily enough while learning German it was exactly the topic of birds that stirred up a similar feeling for me too; realising that English and German words for sparrow are cognates, and that therefore people have been teaching each other to identify sparrows for thousands of years, and that I'm in that chain too, was a wonderful thing.

This was both very interesting and pleasant to listen to while working on other things. As someone with ADHD, I often have a hard time sitting through something educational, but the way you talked about your personal experiences and stories in between the more technical explanations really held my attention :) I learned something new and I have a greater appreciation for rain and how my local birds behave.

Rain Bird, is the Green Woodpecker. Thatchers that worked on a house I lived in said it's call changed to warn of rain, they were right. The people who worked the land observed the changing of the seasons by birds who shared it. Migratory habits and the timing. Early migration of geese herald a bad winter.

always a pleasure to benefit from your intellectual curiosity

In Aotearoa New Zealand it is surprising how many birds are named after the sounds they make. Our modern experience dulls these sounds a lot. During the first COVID lockdown which was very strict there were almost no cars or trains running. The increase in birdsong was incredible over the first week and we saw hunting birds move into the city going after rats and pigeons.

Thoughtful, poignant, as always brimming with your characteristic respectful repose, and the accompanying footage makes it a particularly peaceful treat to watch while listening to you.

These videos are so relaxing it's like doing a meditation. :)

Prague rain being big warm droplets sounds so weird, because I also only experienced rain in the UK. I went to Hejaz, Cairo, and Baghdad, and I stopped in Damascus and Amman, and I never experienced rain there. In Cairo, it was a sandstorm I experienced.

I really enjoy this kind of video. Im a native German speaker coming from the region the Saxons are from (modern day Saxony has wandered because of some medieval noble marriages). I do say the word Regen with an almost non existent second vowel. In the verb the g becomes softened to ch. In modern day Saxony people might say rejen. I could really see how that relates to rain. The German word for owl is Eule. I think if you said ūle you would still be understood. An eagle owl is called Uhu. Early new high German used the word Huhu. It's very onomatopoeic. Seeing how a common language diversified is fascinating to me.

I loved this video. Everything you talked about (categorization, speakers' unconscious knowledge, the importance of context in language use...) I have studied at the university (I study linguistics)-- but of course, in a very dry manner. In this video you made everything come together and made it feel REAL. I also enjoy the simplicity of your videos, it is very relaxing just looking at plants and birds while talking about language. With the lack of decent conversation partners around me, your videos have become a nice substitute. I deeply appreciate your work.

That rain experience is the reverse of what happened to me when I went from Hungary to Amsterdam! Our rains last a heeeellll of a lot longer, too. Not the 5-min "shower", but the continental-interior "at least a whole day of misery" lol.

I honestly really enjoyed this video. It was just a nice, calm little video about a topic I find fascinating.

When I lived in Texas, I looked forward to rain at the end of the summer. Texas experiences winter _and_ summer precipitation minima. Summer is just brutal.

I love your videos! Thanks for making them!

Please can you do a video on Common Brittonic before it split in to the regional Celtic languages? It's a fascinating subject. It'd certainly be interested to hear about it from someone who knows what they're talking about. Even better if you could provide direction on resources, as I'd love to try and learn it myself! Keep up the good work with your videos.

Putting aside Little Owls, which, if I remember rightly were not introduced until the 18th or 19th century, I suspect the Tawny Owl would have been the owl most familiar over the longest period in Britain, while the Barn Owl would have superceded it as the countryside became more open. The Barn and Short-eared Owls are the most visible to us, since they regularly fly during daylight hours - however the Short Eared Owl is far less common and is found in far more wilder places, and so must have been a far less common sight. Tawny Owls are common in mature woodland, and are often found being mobbed by other birds during the day, so despite their more nocturnal habits, I'm sure they were familiar to our ancestors, sans fieldguides and binoculars. The Long Eared Owl is a lot more common than we realise - because they are so elusive, but as with the Tawny Owl, their calls must have been a familiar sound a thousand years ago. I think you are right to recognise that the Barn Owl was in an uninhabited house - there's no way they'd tolerate humans so close, and to be honest I don't think humans would tolerate the screeching of a family of young owls either. Stables and barns yes - smokey one roomed house full of kids... I can't see it. If you look at Dutch paintings of the 17th Century, we can only conclude that access to a great many different bird species was pretty easy, and this suggests a familiarity with birds on a general level that, frankly, we have lost in today's world - but I think we must draw a difference between the privileged 'academic' knowledge of birds possessed by the few wealthy natural philosophers, and folk knowledge of people who probably never got close enough to most birds to realise that not all little brown birds ferreting about in the nettles were of the same family, let alone species. A skim through a list of old names for birds reveals that the habitat of the bird and easily observed behaviour (including vocalisations) are perhaps the two commonest criteria when it comes to naming them. Also - the dove/pigeon thing is a relatively modern academic distinction I believe. I'm pretty sure my Ladybird book of birds refers to the Wood Pigeon as the Ring necked Dove - not to be confused with the Collared Dove so familiar to us today, but which didn't breed in the UK until the 1950's. I wonder whether it's one of those pig/pork distinctions we got from the Norman invasion.

Thank you! I love these videos, delving into the finer shades of semantics in older languages.

I was at work and my phone notified me that you had released a video. I couldn't wait to get home to lay down and watch it. I love your videos so much. 😍

An observation on ūle and hūfe: In modern Swedish these words are both still used. They have morphed into "uggla" and "uv" respectively and they are used interchangeable. But presumably there was a time when they had different connotations, though I'm not sure we can divulge what those connotations were.

I always enjoy your relaxed style of videos. They are all great. Thank you

I’m from a place in B.C. Canada (adjacent to S.E. ALASKA) and we get REGN here too. To the tune of 13 feet per year on average. When I was in high school we had a year when we had only 15 days total where the sun fully came out and it didn’t regn. As a child we went to visit my grandparents in the lower 48 of the USA and I remember how SHOCKED I was at how big, warm and *FUN* their “rain” was and it was like “movie rain”to me (not the usual, from my home, painful, freezing, tiny regn). Also, here we have many words for each species of salmon (and many slang/nick names too) but I’ve noticed people from elsewhere just lump them all in together and call them “salmon” or if they are from the east coast of American or from the U.K. or European they’ll say “Pacific Salmon”. 🤷 We definitely have more words for the things we live around and consider important….Thank you for this video! It’s brilliant 🏆* Please do more “rambley” videos!

Loved this video, thank you. It gave me a lot to think about

Great, love this format and hope to see more.

I loved this style of video. Interesting bits of info about Middle Ages and such is always wonderful and I like how you tie those bits into language.

Yes, please more!

I found this very calming, and very interesting. Thanks!

Particularly articulate and interesting. Thank you.

More things like this, please. Loved it.

this is a great video. it's so relaxing and really helps to frame the old english language and to take it out of a purely academic context, and to interact with it the same way the majority of speakers would have interacted with it - with nature and animals.

I deeply enjoy your monologues and dialogues on the nature of medieval consciousness; the ways in which our thinking might have differed, and the extent to which we can even guess at these differences. I sometimes find myself agreeing with your ideas, sometimes disagreeing, but I'm always drawn along by your way of seeing and reasoning. It always feels very well described, very simply but accurately described, and with a very solid style.

Fantastic video. A great many thoughts that I'd never thought. Thank you very much Simon. Your content is always so rich and often surprising, in the very best way 😁

How did this man go from talking about rain to talking about birds and it was a completely seamless transition?

I really enjoyed that. Thank you.

I love the unstructured Simon Roper chats. It's like going for a walk with a chum and having a bit of a chat, lots of things come to mind and I long to join in the conversation. My thoughts this week include: Wood pigeons, collared doves, and rock doves. Town 'pigeons' are perhaps rock doves gone to seed? And a thought about owls - there seems to be an owl in the carving in the so-called 'Gorgon's Head' pediment that is preserved in the museum at Bath. This is meant to be a Gaulish carving, or possibly a native British carving, so I love to speculate on the meaning of the images for the various elements of the population of Roman Bath. I look forward to reading the thesis referenced.

Your meta-analyses of the early medieval mindset is wonderful. Thanks for all your videos.

I really like these types of videos, sets me off on my own meandering thought process:)

"emotions are culturally constructed. As a matter of fact, I think there is no emotion that isn't heavily culturally conditioned." I find this line very fascinating, since I've always seen emotions as something that is objective and based on purely genetic things. I thought emotional variation was a thing between people, but not something ever conditioned. I did believe emotions could be associated with one another thru trauma, but not as something was constructed. I'm going to keep on thinking about that because I think it could lead to some pretty interesting conversations, and as a concept in general, really peaks my interest.

I'd love more work like this!

Personally I find all the different styles of your videos fascinating 🤠💜

More like this, its like having a conversation with a friend. The Accompanied video is always well shot and bring additional interpretation to the idea's and thoughts your sharing.

Love this, very interesting discussion

For some reason, that part at the end with Simon's reflection reminded me of the Neverending Story when Atreyu looks into the mirror and sees Bastion looking back at him.

Super interesting! Thanks ☺️

Rambling videos, both in the audio content and the video content, are enjoyable. 👍

As someone who loves both birds and etymology - amazing video 10/10

This was lovely, thank you!!

fascinating. I am aware that when I was a child learning "geographical features" many of those words did and still do sound strange and are not really used. "bluff", "glade", even "meadow." In the past you would have had dozens of words to describe the terrain, the animals, the sounds, the smells of nature and as you said, nature regularly would be living in your house. If you lived near the beach you might have a word like Dune, Bullrush or Sandbar. Why would a person who lived in the mountains need a word like Dune? Living in the US, we can perhaps imagine what life would have been like linguistically for the indigenous people who lived on the shores of the Chesapeake Bay 1000 years ago, but having no written records is tough.

I thought this was a really interesting video. I'd happily watch more of these!

I enjoyed this ramble quite a bit!

I very much enjoy this type of format. It invites potential readers to explore a topic they wouldn't normally encounter, and do it in as scientifically minded a way as your video is presented. More importantly, this video highlights a very widespread issue of reinterpreting historical (and generally soft-scientific) facts through a distorted lense of modern experience and implicit ideology. I value a lot that you present your intuitions as fallible in this respect. All of which is done to an absolutely delightful visual accompaniment, not to mention your thoroughly pleasant voice. I'll be looking forward to seeing more videos like this, perhaps with more references to specific issues and facts raised and discussed in the article(s) that inspired it. Cheers!

Yes, more things like this please.

More of this please, it was good

‘Word Senses as Clusters of Meaning Modulations: A Computational Model of Polysemy’ gave me a very good intuition on how to visualize words in different contexts. It may be something worth checking out, Simon.

Thank you.

Really enjoying your videos

More meandering, please. This was a beautiful video.

I like this format.

I enjoy your conversational style.

Love the pontifications.

Bomb as. Good work Simon!

I love these musings. More, please, as far as I am concerned. Thanks!

Really enjoyed this, I have similar thoughts and views. Happy Thursday from Ireland 👍

SR: There is no emotion which is not culturally conditioned. Noam Chomsky: Careful now. Whorf and Sapir: *smiles in dead*

This is connected to a discussion the other day about how people prior to our era thought completely differently about history (a la Tolkien's creation of a "history" in Silmarillion). I am of the opinion that b/c every word we used is actually used in a network of words (a semantic field as Roper says above) it is virtually impossible to know fully what any word in an era too far removed from us means in the same way the people of that era knew it. Even our modern tendency to look for meaning influences our undstg as people prior to us didn't do that ... i.e. did not look for meaning in the same way we did. So for instance we might say, "people of the neolithic era thought that monsters lurked in bogs and used language to convey their sense of the unknown and alleviate their psychological terror." But all those phrases, "people of the neolithic era" "monsters lurked in bogs" "to convey their sense of the unknown" "to alleviate their psychological terror" are all analytical terms of an era steeped in psychology based on modern science. People of the neolithic era (and indeed of the Viking era) didn't think that at all. They simply knew there were monsters in the bogs! There was no "we're saying this as a metaphor to compensate for our ignorant superstition" or "we are looking for meaning in the universe and therefore think the bog monsters are real." Our semantic connection to psychological terms, history, and culture prevents us from fully understanding, as did the Vikings or neolithic man, that there really are monsters in the bogs.

Regarding what you said at the end, I really enjoyed the way this video worked! It was interesting and just not something I have ever thought about.

This is a very interesting video, Simon. It really makes me wonder how the early English may have viewed nature. It's hard to imagine that people in the Early Mediaeval period may not have known what we know now because they appear so obvious to us in this modern day. On another note: you may have noticed that Luke Ranieri recently made a video interviewing random Italians in a park to see if they could understand Latin. It made me wonder what outcome you would get if you did the same thing with modern English people. How much Old English would they really understand, if at all?

Phenomenal video Simon.

excellent!

Living in Los Angeles, rain was always a treat to me, since we can go for six months or more without a drop, until, in my early thirtys (early 1980s), I learned to fly an airplane. Suddenly, since my flying was visual flight rules only, rain and clouds were obstructions. Now, since flying has become increasingly out of my financial reach, I've begun to reclaim the sense of rain as a good thing. With regard to pigeons and doves, though I've heard of squab, I didn't grow up eating it, so the idea of eating a pigeon seems disgusting. On the other hand, there were the people who lived in the appartment next to my wife's, before we were married. They were from Guatemala, illegal aliens/undocumented immigrants, who were right on the edge, financially. The husband and son would take slingshots and go to freeway overpasses to hunt pigeons roosting there, which formed a substantial part of their protein. Neither my wife nor I were ever sure whether this were as a result of their financial position or their culture, or both. We have birds we call ravens, and we have birds we call crows. They're both the same genus (Corvus) and look very similar, I've never been quite sure what the difference is, other than that the bird we call raven is bigger than that we call crow. As for rooks, well, we don't have anything we call by that name.

Very interesting!

Boggart, been trying to remember that word for a couple of days!

The part where you discuss the cultural perceptions and distinctions between animal species brings to mind a funny joke we have in Malaysia: where in the two other languages I know there's different vocabulary for squids, cuttlefish, octopus; spoken casual Malay insists on referring to all of them as 'sotong' - essentially forcing a lot of us to juggle between two different linguistic taxonomies at a time. I love taking advantage of it to confuse non-Malay speakers and watch some chaos unfold. (And then in Chinese there's no functional distinction between rats and mice, they're labelled the same thing; classical Chinese gives me a bit of a headache because its vocabulary occasionally throws a curveball that highlights how different Imperial Chinese people perceived the world)

Wow, I knew the total rain experience was different in the different American places I have lived. It is true the total rain experience is very much part of the experience and character of a place. It also evoked different emotions and feeling depending on the geography and climate.

i want more things like this

it was a fun and interesting meandering thought process to follow, in terms of the structure of this video

More please :)

Definitely a good video.

Great content, lovely video… and nice nails!

I liked this video. If it was easier to produce I'd be happy to see more of them but I wouldn't say I liked it more or less than any of your other content. Thanks Simon.