Also the occasional grave accent in native words in poetry to show you are pronounced certain normally silent 'e' vowels, like "blessèd" or "learnèd"

You could say it isn't clichÉ

Also both Florence and Cologne are just borrowed from French.

I love ū

jj also forgot the flex in the bizarre "papier-mâché", which has no reason to still be used

😂 this is amazing. Keep doing what you’re doing cuz it f’n lit😂

I've had the same experience speaking in a ridiculous British accent around Chinese students in high school.

Which is funny, because Elizabethan grammar is closer to German than modern English is.

Same for me in France on the french exchange, we just spoke in broad Yorkshire and not even the teachers knew what we were talking about 😅

That's awesome haha

“trema” refers to the two dots regardless of whether they’re used as an umlaut or a diaresis

Actually it doesn’t matter that much what you call the diacritic. When talking specifically about the underlying phonetic processes? Sure, separate the terminology. But otherwise it’s literally the exact same two dots above the vowel

​@@deadbushinc.5105It matters because that often changes the way these symbols work, changing an umlaut Ü to U in German will turn it into a completely different word while that doesn't usually happen with diaeresis (like naïve)

@@daroguk8071 i guess? I just don’t see the purpose of giving these two functions separate names *when talking about English*. After all ‘doppelgänger’ is no more or less regular of a spelling as ‘naïve’ to an average speaker of English

there's a lot of Americans who just call the dots "umlauts" regardless of the context

Shalom! Great to see you here!

In Los Angeles there is a street called Benedict Canyon Drive, that follows said canyon, but when it crosses into more affluent Beverly Hills, becomes Cañon Drive, and when it crosses the city border again BACK into Los Angeles becomes merely Canon Drive. Always one of my favorite examples of this…

Like? One that I can think of is you can't make an omelet(te) without breaking a few eggs, but I think most non-native speakers can get that one once they understand what an omelette is.

I mean, this is indicative of literally every language in existence. 成语 are infamous for essentially no foreigners (except maybe people like 大山, lol) using them lol.

​​@@yoshilovesyoshi I'm not sure eggs/omelettes is an idiom (it might be, it feels like a grey area). By definition, an idiom is a phrase whose meaning can't be deduced from the words it contains. Breaking eggs to make omelettes might be too literal, I'm not sure, and a lot of typical idioms online are the same. A better example of an idiom would be something like 'break a leg' or 'under the weather', maybe even 'you can say that again'.

@@yoshilovesyoshi That's a metaphor, not an idiom

​@@yoshilovesyoshi The example I use with my students is, "The grass is always greener."

Actually "thou" was familiar and only existed as a singular. "You" was formal, but could be singular or plural.

Interestingly, even outside of the Quaker religion, God was traditionally addressed with the informal "thou/thee". The issue of Quakers refusing to swear oaths actually got so bad that the British Parliament had to pass a law so that Quakers could give affirmations in lieu of oaths. Later, the United States Constitution would include similar provisions, declaring that both oaths and affirmations would be acceptable in all instances.

Dutch has a similar thing, gij/gullie. Still used in the southern dialects

May be wrong - but isn't "ye" just an archaic spelling of "the" (due to the inability of typewriters to type the letter thorn in the past)

@@mindcraft4362 It's both. Yet another set of English homographs.

"He was murdered by a tree."

Just don't cut up in class!

It took me a minute to understand what this.

I've heard some people say that it's good practice to keep the original name of living monarchs, but the localized name for historic monarchs.

In Italy, English translations with monarch names use anglicisation, when in the UK or US, we would now use the Italian form: Humbert I vs Umberto I

In Russian, too, foreign rulers from different eras are spelled differently, for example, when Prince Charles was not king, he was called that, but when he ascended the throne, he was called Karl in Russia

@@TurtleMarcusIn Russia they did that. They use to call Charles “Чарльз” (Charlz), but upon becoming King he became Карл (Karl), to keep with the historical tradition. The name is also the German form, since well, the English monarchs are German 😂. Funny enough all King Louis are called Людовик (Lyudovik), using the Latin form, except Louis XVI. He officially was change to Луи since he was removed from the throne and was remembered by his secular name, instead of his regal one.

Wow. “Filipinos” from “the Philippines” makes a lot of sense now

Very cool!

Did they also monkey with the genitive case? I noticed the mom said “thou lie,” where “thy lie” would have made far more sense in context, within the standard informal mood.

@@robertAGC Thanks for this question. It made for a really interesting rabbit hole. As far as I can tell, they seem to preserve the early modern genitive intact; so, "thy" or "thine" (when the pronoun is separated from the thing possessed, e.g., "thy kingdom" but "the kingdom is thine"). I think what's happening with the Stone clip is that he's actually using (or approximating) standard early modern English, either to avoid confusing his audience that knows Quakers use "old fashioned" English but aren't aware of their dialectical variation or because he (or his screenwriter) wasn't aware of it. I guessing that the line "thy father will have to know of thou lying" is supposed to be understood as "your father will have to know about you lying." Edited for clarity.

Most of the Quakers fled from Western England to the US for religious freedom... Several other Ordinum-based faiths typically still use their own German dialect, most notably the Amish.

@@WilliamHostman This is well known about quakers in the US

Adjective order is obscure only to native speakers. It's one of the things you teach early on to ESL students.

@@adriannaconnor6471 As someone who is ESL, I have never been explicitly taught adjectival order.

Similar is 'ablaut reduplication', which explains why clocks go 'tick-tock' and not 'tock-tick', and why the phrase 'live, laugh, love' sounds wrong in any other order. It's also why 'big bad wolf' breaks the order of adjectives.

I agree the first way is *more* correct, but I wouldn't correct someone who said it the second way. It just sort of throws off the pacing of speech.

I've wondered whether George Michael broke this rule when he sang about "little hungry schoolgirl's pride and joy". "Hungry little schoolgirl" seems more natural.

Borges has interview where he addresses that. Quite impressive to see a prolific Spanish writer commend English for such nuances.

Well the French did besiege England for like 300 years and of course Englishmen became the peasant lowerclass and Frenchmen the Upperclass, thus words of Latin origin took on a fancier feel than the older Germanic ones

^^ see above reply from @whateverIwasthinkingatthetime. it's not so much about the phonology as it is about the fact that after 1066 french became the language of the ruling class while english was the language of the working class.

Every letter is not emphasised in German! If a word ends with an r preceded by a vowel, the r is not pronounced. "Der" is pronounced deah.

Pittsburgh USA area uses “yinz” I believe.

"ye" in Ireland is considered pretty rural still in my experience. When I went to college in Dublin, the Dublin boys found it hilariously quant that I used it in casual conversation as a plural "you".

In the North of England, I do find most people treat "you" as the new singular and "yous" as the plural 2nd person pronoun. Also, a lot of the time saying "us" instead of "me" especially in a phrase like "give us.../pass us..."

North Midwestern (MN, USA) here. "Hey, how yous doing?" is addressing a group of people in some rural areas in the north west of the state. I am unsure of how common using yous as a plural you is, but I'm sure it bleeds into Canada in many places, eh? Having grown up near Fargo, it is good to hear my home accent on this channel, but I suspect the host on this channel is Canadian, as the accent leans real heavy on the double-o ooh in 'about' and such

“Yous” 😂😂😂😂

@@TheDanLevy yes that's a pesky little myth. It's hard for us to think people would deliberately change their names now (also there's more legalities involved with that now) so people assume it was changed for them. It's hard to think that often people wanted to assimilate themselves in their new homes. After all it was a fresh start and they probably would never return to their home country ever again.

In Argentina this was indeed the case, so you end up with families where members can have of to four different spelling of the same last name. 😂😂😂😂 at the time they dismiss it, but since some Argentines can request Italian citizenship, this of course is cause for massive confusion lol

Name changing is still a thing that happens to this day. I've noticed Chinese and Taiwanese people in particular seem to often have separate "English" names in addition to their Chinese names and use both regularly depending on who they're interacting with. Though from the people I've known, they don't generally try to Anglicize their Chinese name - they just pick an English name they happen to like. Indian and (non-English) Europeans generally don't seem to change their names, though many end up getting them pseudo-Anglicized inadvertently just because its easier to accept our poor pronunciation than trying to correct us constantly. Not so sure what's "common" for people from other cultures to do - I'm mostly just going by personal experience so I'm limited to just the folk I've known and worked with for the most part. I would imagine for example that people who have clicks in their names (from any of the several "clicking" languages) would struggle in most other parts of the world (English or otherwise) if they didn't modify their name - that clicking is a very unique aspect to only a handful of languages and those of us who never learned how to do it struggle pretty hard to even approximate it. And of course almost all cultures coming our way have to Romanize their names when written, as few languages share the English alphabet. Even (non-English) European names can have all the accents and marks noted in the video. At the very least those tend to get overlooked to the point of forgotten, especially when there's a computer system involved as much of our critical banking and government software - not to mention our keyboards - are still limited to the old ASCII character set.

@@altrag yeah I know people adopt English names but they don't usually legally change their names, just go by an English name.

@@courtneyjohnsonhaber4591 Ehh I'm not so sure about that. How could you legally have a name like 张伟 in an English-speaking country? You'd at the very least have to Romanize it (write it using Roman characters) and it's almost certain anyone trying to read it out would pronounce it in an Anglicized manner (given that the vast majority of us don't know anything about Chinese pronunciation). It also depends when they adopted their English name. If they chose it early enough to get it registered in their home country and have it printed on whatever documentation they bring with them, they may have their English name as their legal name when they come across. Others who didn't choose early enough might not. I'm sure there are rules and common practices for that (and those probably change country-by-country, or even by region within a single country - ie: China is very large and there's a lot of cultural diversity spread across 1.4bn people, much like there's a notable cultural difference between New York and Texas even if both states are just seen as "American" to outsiders). Overall, I imagine there's a bit of everything going on. Which is fine, if it works it works. I was just pointing out that Anglicization isn't entirely a thing of the past. We're not as pushy about it (especially when it comes to names that are still within their home countries - primarily place names) but it's not a dead practice by any means, and never will be as long as we all speak different languages with different writing systems. There's a level of necessity that just will always be relevant even if we think we "should" all somehow know how to read, write, speak and type every name from every language - it's just not possible no matter how much we may want to "respect other cultures".

Wii wouldlike to play…

Also, btw, I as an American have had no exposure to this "Royal 'we'" register of speech and did not know it existed before this video. I wonder if Canada's closer ceremonial ties with British monarchy may have something to do with this gap in common knowledge. I can promise my perspective is not unique, I would be willing to bet that if 100 Americans were polled on their knowledge of this linguistic concept, that less than 5 would be aware it exists, if any of them.

​@@rkt7414 For a very minor note, it came up in an episode of Recess, where King Bob started referring to himself as Pharoah Bob, and using the Royal We.

I was playing pictionary with my Belgian friends and the words "Swashbuckler" and "Buccaneer" came up and they'd never seen them before. I just said they're both pirates but I have no idea why they exist, let alone how to draw them.

​@rkt7414 Royal We was referenced by one of my favorite movies. Wreck It Ralph, when Ralph met Vanellope. I have only watched the video once but I forgot what I saw that made me think something similar. I saw something he said and then was like, "I wonder if that is more common knowledge in Canada?" Since I am from the US. I'm kind of suprised he didn't mention the forgotten English letter "thorn" pronounced like "th" and is what the "y" in "ye olde England/Tavern" comes from since they don't have thorn. Ampersand was a letter that faded away and not sure what its prior use was or if it had one besides the modern use but it is now just used as a fancy symbol for "and". "&"

@@rkt7414it’s often used in American pop culture as I said.

It's a great vid!!

Or like the Limmy sketch where he's being robbed by a Glaswegian man who says "Gies your laptop"

A accent over an e in English just means disregard rules about silent e's changing a vowel. If you pronounce the e in Mate it will be spelled Maté.

As previous poster said, the accent e just means “actually pronounce this e” in situations where it looks like it should be dropped. Another use is poetry, where for reasons of meter sometimes you must read a word like “blessed” as “blesséd” rather than the normal pronunciation of “blest”.

I think here the dieresis might be of better use as in “Matë”

@@revertrevertz5438 Fair, I also think if we had spelling reform ( something I think English is in need of, particularly since it has become the dominant global language,) you'd replace the silent e after consonants with umlauts like German has done.

@@revertrevertz5438That would imply that the E is a normal English long E

There is also the possibility that they just didn’t used standard Italian at the time, the name of Padova in the local dialect is “Padua”, so most likely they used how the local referred to themselves at the time

There is a great video on this whole topic! I’m pretty sure it’s by Overly Sarcastic Productions. If you can find the video, it’s worth the watch!!

They also have their own names in the regional languages although they mostly aren't written and enjoy even lower prestige

Some of them have been dropped though, like we used to call Livorno "Leghorn." (Yes, it is where the chickens came from.)

Much less Venexia!

Contractions only occur when all of the words are unstressed. In "yes, it is," the final syllable is stressed, and thus the I in is cannot be elided. This doesn't apply to "not" at the end of sentences. We do say "No, it isn't," though we have to say "not it is *not"* if we add emphasis to the "not" part.

@@ZipplyZane A lot of English language rules are present but not particularly discussed. It's something we know but probably can't explain why as you did above. Trying to explain why to someone speaking ESL might confound us ourselves, so it's easy to understand why someone might make such a mistake speaking ESL.

A similar example is that we only make contractions out of "have" and "has" when using them as an auxiliary verb and not as a synonym for "possess". I can say "I've bought a car," or "he's bought a car", but if I say, "I've a car," it just sounds weird, and if I say, "he's a car," you're going to ask how I met a sentient car.

@@ZipplyZane Now *that's* a rule I beg to differ on.

​@@plasmaballin Although that example is not standard English, that is the way many people (native English speakers) speak in Ireland. "He's a new job", or "I've a computer problem"... is common in rural Ireland.

Amuk comes from the Malay language and was introduced into English by British explorers in Southeast Asia. It means “rushing in a frenzy” or “attacking furiously”

While there's no way of representing crüe in normal English, mötley would be mutly.

@@evanherk apologies I havent done german in a while

​@@evanherk that still doesnt work because theres so many different pronunciations of u

German used ſ in both printing and handwriting till pretty recently (when the Nazis banded Fraktur in 1941). Icelandic still uses þ and ð :)

I love going through medieval manuscripts, where the long as and thorn have more friends, like ash (æ) and eth (ð).

Is the long S anything like ß in German?

Terry Pratchett had a lot of fun with this, often having his characters (in a setting where proper spellings are more of a suggestion, as they were in old-timey England) write long S's as F's since that's what they look like to modern readers.

Whenever I see long s in an old text (which doesn't happen very often), I can't help but read it with an exaggerated liſp.

I remember learning the Spanish alphabet when I was in grade school and wondering why there were two "n"s.

Yeah "enne" vs "enyey"

I can't remember the specific name of the ñ diacritic in Spanish. "Travesaño?"

"Virgulilla." Now that's a cute word

Yeah, some languages do this, which has always seemed curious to me. I think Swedish does this too, the O with the dots is considered a different letter from O without.

I am here on KZfaq a-commenting.

@@jamesparson 🤣

Also why Chiang Kai-Shek is called Jiang Jieshi in the North, and why Hongkong is called Xianggang in Beijing (Hsiang Gang in Wade-Giles)

Can confirm as a Hongkonger.

Peking is not W-G. W-G transcribes 北京 as Peiching. Peking is based on the pronunciation of mandarin spoken in Nanjing (Nanking). While it is different from standard mandarin, it's the same language and is mutually intelligibly. “Southern Chinese” usually refers to non-mandarin variants like Wu, Min, and Yue.

Peking is based off Cantonese pronunciation which is prominent in the South

Peking doesn’t come from wade giles, it come from the Chinese postal system. Wade Giles is kungfu taichi and kungpao chicken.

Yea, it was actually a word-game at that time. You had to think of a collective noun that recalled what the animal was (supposedly) like e.g. parliament of owls (owls are wise), a skulk of foxes (sneaky), an exaltation of larks.

That's a different concept. When you write "we" in an academic paper it usually refers to multiple people - the writer an the reader. The Royal "we" only refers to one person. "We must be careful to define..." means something different than "I must be careful to define..." But, when king Charles says "We will form a government." it means the exact same thing as "I will form a government." Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Yes I thought it was done because papers often have multiple authors

@@redpanda7967Hm, Im not sure how correct this is. As far as I remember, all academic papers in Computer Science Ive ever read were written in the plural form “we”, not the singular “I”. I seem to remember I was also explicitly taught to do it this way. So even if you’re talking about work you did (not something you’re deriving together) you’d use we. Although single author papers are kinda rare nowadays anyway. But I looked up one I remembered (“Distinctive Image Features from Scale-Invariant Keypoints” by Lowe if you’re interested), and he does indeed use “we”.

Or what's called an "inclusive we".

@@perforongo9078 Linguistically, Inclusive vs exclusive 'we' is something other languages have but English does not, where you can make a distinction between 'speaker + listener (and optionally others)' and 'speaker + others (but not the listener)'. English has, essentially 'ambiguous we', in that it doesn't make the distinction and the listener is left to guess (possibly with the help of context, body language, tone, etc) who is and is not included. Unless you're refering to a different discipline using the term differently, in which case 'yay technical dialect induced ambiguity!'. ... seriously, there are people whose actual job as interpreters is to translate between sufficiently divergant technical dialects of English (typically business trained executives vs individuals with highly specialised training in narrow (or not so narrow) technical fields who lack said business training, but sometimes other similar situaitons).

You mean "by accident"😂😂

"Sleight of hand" is my go to example. Or "test your mettle"

@@courtneyjohnsonhaber4591 And many people eggcorn those into "Slight of hand" and "Test your metal"

Reminds me of this exchange from the show, Community: Britta: Shouldn't have worn that petard if you didn't want to be hoisted by it. Jeff: ...What do you think the expression "hoisted by your own petard" is referencing? Britta: I guess I just assumed that in the old days a petard was a special outfit like a leotard, with a lot of fancy buckles and loops on it, and that rich people would wear them when they were feeling especially smug, but then poor people would tie a rope through one of the loops, and hoist them up a pole and then let them dangle there as punishment for being cocky. Jeff: Never look it up. Your explanation is way better.

The "fro" in "to and fro" is always my go to example of a fossil word!

@@crusatyr1452 TIL I've been hearing/saying these phrases wrong!

I came here to say this, the average native english speaker could not explain to you why it’s a “big green dragon” as opposed to a “green big dragon” other than the second one sounds weird.

The informal was lost because using “thou” for the wrong person was tantamount to picking a fight with them, so people started using “you” for everyone (except God) just to be safe

@@EnigmaticLucas everyone picking a fight with God

As a quick note: “thou” was the nominative/subjective (ie the same class as “I”, “he”, “she”, “we”, “they”), while “thee” was the objective (ie “me”, “him”, “her”, “us”, “them”). The same goes for ye/you, but just as we dropped one form entirely, the other form was just combined to use the accusative as both the subject and object. They also both have their own possessive forms and reflexive forms just as any other pronoun: thy/thine/thyself and your/youres/youself (both of these are only approximations with modern spellings of course).

My understanding is that "you" was originally only a plural pronoun, for which "ye" was the singular. Though maybe that was only in the objective case? Anyway, it would have been better if we had kept the distinction, because now it is so confusing to say "you" for both individuals and groups that awkward forms like "you all", "y'all", and "you guys" are often used as the plural.

@@robgronotte1 “ye” was the subject form of the plural which also was eventually used in the T-V distinction for the 2nd person formal singular (see: “usted”/“ustedes” in Latin Am Spanish for a similar existing usage). “You” was the equivalent object form for the pronoun (I:me::he:him::she:her::ye:you). It does make it especially funny and strange that “you” became the catch-all since it was the objective case of the plural pronoun, but that is indeed the case.

The word “kaputt” is an adjective and doesn't need to be capitalised. Sincerely, a German.

But many times it is possible to distinguish between words from Yiddish and words from German: you see, Yiddish is written in Hebrew letters, so its words do not have an "official" spelling in the Latin alphabet like the words in German, and usually they are written as they sound in English. By the way, the word for school in German and Yiddish is "Schule", which came to English as "Shul", which is another word for synagogue.

Weltanschauung has been on the decline for decades, eclipsed by worldview.

@@Leofwine Ich glaube, deine sprache hat "das Handy". Auf Englisch ist "Handy" keine Sustantiv, sondern ein Adjektiv. Hochachtungsvoll, -Ein Typ aus den USA.

@@FozzyBBear Yeah, I've never heard it in my life until now as a 16 year old, I was confused till I saw this reply lol

And said replacement was due to the printing presses being used in England lacking type pieces for thorn, so a substitution had to be made. Y was picked because looked the most similar. A kind of similar thing is behind why the letter W is called "double U" in English, while in many other languages it's called what translates to "double V", more accurately matching what the letter actually looks like: When a character for the new "w" sound in English was needed, in the Latin alphabet in use at the time letters V and U weren't yet disctinct from one another, so a double U, i.e. VV, was chosen to represent the sound. Then by the time the V/U distinction rolled around, the name "double U" for the letter had already stuck and has remained in the language as a sort of archaic remnant.

As a native German speaker, this is absolutely correct. The German alphabet is considered to have 30 letters, those being the 26 English speakers will be acquainted with, as well as ä, ö, ü, and ß. So yes, they are typically considered entirely separate letters, not variations of the respective vowels, as might be the case in some Romanic languages.

This one is interesting because it's obscure to native speakers who follow the rule intuitively, but less so to second-language learners who have to memorize it rote

I came here to comment this. It's by far the weirdest thing about english for me because (as far as I know) there's no written rule about it, it's just supposed to be intuitive.

It's one of those 'you just know it' things that are difficult to explain, like German articles.

I think the rule is that the more "fundamental" the adjective is to the noun, the closer it is to the noun. A brown dog is and presumably has always been brown, but hasn't always been old and depending upon the day might be nice.

Huh, I have never thought about this in my life. I don’t recall ever being taught it either.

Interestingly, Bhojpuri has fully replaced "mai" with "ham" in all speech, similar to how in English all forms of "thou" have been replaced with "you"

Fun fact to complement the fun fact: following the RAE dictionary (DRAE) you can call all of those "virgulilla", although i've just seen it being used to indicate the accent of the ñ, so that's how i call it.

Its still an acute accent man...why leave this comment anyway...get off j.j.s glizzy

I came to say exactly this. 🙂

Merci.

Yes thank you, English speakers rarely get this right

That is a contrived distinction. It would be like saying the sequences of "bass" in "My brother's bass guitar shaped like a bass (fish) is made of bass (wood)." Are different sequences of symbols because they encode different meanings.

Exactly. The umlaut (German use of ¨) actually used to be a tiny E written above the letter, which was simplified into the symbol we know today. BTW, wherever Germans cannot use this symbol, such as in URLs or email addresses, they simply add an E (ueber, doppelgaenger, etc.). The diaeresis (French use of ¨ also known as "tréma") indicates that you have to pronounce the two vowels separately: you don't pronounce Zoë "zoo", or coöpt "cooped"). The New Yorker, being a high-brow, fancy magazine, is therefore using it the way it is supposed to be used.

@@belg4mit Not really. It's more like saying that the letter o and number 0 are different symbols, even though they often cannot be distinguished. Especially in handwriting as opposed to typed text.

@@belg4mit Or to follow your example more closely, it would be like saying each of those are different words.

Considering that English "über" is usually used as an emphatic (like hyper), which isn't all that common in German, it's probably for the best. "Über" would not have worked as a brand name in Germany.

@@haukenot3345 yeah that's definitely true.

@@haukenot3345 Even worse: 'über' in a transportational context has the meaning of 'via' in German, so a company name like that would be associated with making intentional detours.

​@TiberentenTV So you could travel somewhere "über Uber?" (via Uber?)

@@WatchVidsMakeLists Not really, I'm afraid. In this case, you would say "mit Uber" ('with Uber') or "mit einem Uber-Taxi" ('with an Uber taxi'). 'Über Uber' would only work if Uber were a place.

Please don't ✌ 😊

​@@jayceewedmak9524Please do 🤪✌️🤭 It's a commonplace colloquial construction. Knowing it will aid comprehension and help them sound more natural.

@@penguinlim no it won't. It interrupts the flow of the sentence and communicating the thought. It like interrupts the flow of the sentence and like communicating the thought like. ✌

@@jayceewedmak9524 ? The "like" you're (incorrectly) mocking here isn't the one the original commenter was describing anyway. (They were describing the quotative 'like'). But knowing *either* colloquial use of "like" *will* aid in comprehension because people use both of them. Whether you like it or not, people use "like" in different ways from academia English. That's just a fact. (Irrelevant), but filler words actually are shown to improve the flow of a sentence and listener's comprehension within casual conversations. Most sociolinguists will agree on that. There is a book written by a linguistics PhD literally called "Like, Literally, Dude" about this.

@@penguinlim I used a simple example. I was not mocking. ✌

most surprising thing i learned today: the new yorker spells reelection reëlection

I can't think of any Arabic word that sounds similar, but according to Wiktionary & Etymonline, it came originally from Malay, then got into English and Hebrew through Portuguese.

@@youssefbh830 Yeah, probably came from English. We use the phrase "an amok run". I know it's not from Arabic, but the diffrent way it is pronounced in Hebrew sounds like Arabic.

Amuk comes from the Malay language and was introduced into English by British explorers in Southeast Asia. It means “rushing in a frenzy” or “attacking furiously”

It’s Malay in origin

@@user-sh3cf7kd6eindeed very interesting, as German has the exact same expression of an “amok run”, the best translation of which is probably a mass shooting (or more generally a killing spree, typically of terroristic nature).

That makes sense. I also think it makes the king sound like he and the country are a single entity.

How douchey

For what it is worth English is not unique in this. The plural you in French (and indirectly in Spanish) developed from a royal plural used by Roman Emperors. I believe the purpose of this was that the Emperor had a conception of themselves not only as an individual person but as representing the entire state and those who form part of it.

@@forthrightgambitia1032 No it was in fact a very common trait of Latin written language, especially in letters, to use the first person plural instead of the singular in order to not appear egotistic. This is called a 'pluralis auctoris' (author's plural) or 'pluralis modestiae' (plural of modesty). Over time, this fashion vanished in everyday writing, but the conservative imperial chancellery kept going with it. From there, the chancelleries of Germanic kings took it on, and so it became a stylistic tradition that survived through the Middle Ages and even right into our time. And that's the reason why the royal 'we' is exclusively used in official writings of ruling monarchs: Because those are the writings that come out of their chancelleries, which adhere to a certain formalistic style of writing that, via tradition, ties them to their historic predecessors. When kings and queens don't use their chancelleries, they also don't use the royal 'we'. By the way there's another realm in which the tradition of the 'author's plural' survived, and that's in literatur: Whenever an author of a book is turning directly to his reader, he is likely to use 'we' instead of 'I'.

@@TiberentenTVGonna say that, the Royal Plural even used in the Hebrew “Let’s make men…” “Elohim” …

Oh that’s common where I live too. British people by contrast often drop “the’s” which I find weird. Like “he’s in hospital” or “it was added to museum.”

@@JJMcCullough I always saw it as being the same grammatical phenomena behind "He's at school" or "I'm at home" There's no obvious reason why we wouldn't say "He's at the school" or "I'm at my home" those dialects just do that for more places than in ours.

Probably a holdover from the German heritage of the area, in German the different words for "the" tell you the gender and declension of the noun, and so it's important to use them in a lot of situations where its pointless in English.

@@rcm926Part of it too is that there’s a lot of stores that actually have the “s” at the end if it’s named after a person, stores like Woodman’s, Kohl’s, Menards, etc. As a result, people just add the “s” to any store name that sounds correct.

Good insight! Glad I got my personalized episode of “your city is now unique”!

It surely was an English Monoglot Moment.

....and Firenze didn't come out well either.

He doesn’t speak German or Italian, so I think he is kind of making the point here. One can’t expect to keep the names in the original languages. It’s like when hear Germans say “Sank you” instead of “Thank you”. The point was not to pronounce it flawlessly in German or Italian.

@@revertrevertz5438 When you say "It's not this; It's actually this" , then yes, you have to say it correcly

@@maxhatterschannel5140 Kind of, in this case he doesn’t speak German or Italian so I wouldn’t expect JJ to pronounce it “flawlessly” and yet it helps to know the Cologne isn’t named thusly in German.

Meh misspellings for names is cheese, like saying mohamed and muhummad and mohaimed are misspellings

un œuf, un bœuf

african americans for some reason also use some hebrew names even aliyah for some reason

Don't forget French came in two waves. First the Normans and then The later migration of French Protestants.

​@@dwaynekeenum1916They're more like transliterations, given that the source language uses a completely different alphabet that doesn't map easily onto ours.

We pro-DUCE PRO-duce.

English also has a lot more diphthongs than other widespread European languages like German and Spanish. Actually, some American speakers seem almost incapable of pronouncing clear, non-diphthong vowels when speaking Spanish or French.

Similar to a word like ‘blackboard’, a board you can write on with chalk, compared to ‘black board’, a board that is black

Trip-ups for ESL learners: the silent 'w' in sword and silent 'l' in salmon.

Frig off grammar nasi i just googled it its the same thing...🤡

Nasi lemak or nasi goreng?

When you make a video I am sure it will be perfect in every way :) :)

@@JJMcCullough I wasn't trying to be rude or anything, and I enjoy your vids a lot, but I thought I needed to say that there are a lot of holes in this video (especially for one with "experts only" in the title), so many that listing them all would seem somewhat more patronising and take a bit too much time out of my day. I could give specific examples if you'd like, I'd be willing to do it if I know for sure you'll see them. Btw Google Translate has a pronunciation feature (in icon of a speaker that says "listen" if you hover over it) that you can use to get accurate pronunciations in most languages, it says the word out loud so you can easily repeat it. It's an excellent tool and I recommend it to a lot of people.

​@@rcm926Better yet, if it's a person's name you can't pronounce, just go to their Wikipedia page and click on those weird-looking symbols in parentheses after their name. (Or, if you're a real one, spend an afternoon learning IPA and you won't even have to do that much).

What “missoronunciations” do you see, I feel like some of them were done purposefully to make a point like the Montenegrin one. Others is because he’s speaking in English, so of course he won’t pronounce a Japanese name flawlessly.

@@revertrevertz5438 From what I remember, umlaut should rhyme with "shout", not "shot", Köln he pronounced as Klun, wrong vowel sound and wrong placement of the 'l", Firenze he said with the wrong vowel sounds as well, Πέτρος uses omikron (ο) and not omega (ω), yet he pronounced the o as an omega, in 'Ιωάννης I believe you say it like "yo-an-nis" and not "eye-oh-nas", although I'm not sure exactly how the pronunciation was in Koine Greek, the variation that the New Testament was written in. I don't think he did it to make a point, why would he do things incorrectly and misinform people on purpose? And as I said, anyone can easily find the pronunciations of any word quite easily, if you're a content creator who makes videos you script and prepare for there are many ways to find the pronunciations, it's not like he's forced to guess.

I did

noticed too

@@JJMcCullough And they said Klön instead of Köln? Strange...

@@wernerlindorfer3693 Don't bother with this guy. After watching a couple of his videos, it's clear he's pretty arrogant and doesn't have much integrity.

he’s consistently bad with foreign names but that was still surprisingly awful

I think he was making a point of how useless the original spelling to English readers 😂

I think JJ exaggerates this issue, to pronounce his name somewhat well all you have to know is that “c” is pronounced “ch” at the end of south Slavic names, and most European languages pronounce “j” like the English “y”.

@@dictatorofcanada4238 That’s the point. To a Montenegrin it might be easy, but imagine having to learn the multiple rules of each language in order to pronounce it correctly.

dunno if it's wrong but it seems like nowadays all global pop culture comes from the anglosphere and even when it isn't is often in english. i really want to see the 70s back imo. when swedish or italian culture was equally as influential.

It seems like an American board game, not a Nordic one. According to wikipedia at least. In any case the umlauts wouldn’t be lifted from Swedish, since the phrase is Norwegian or Danish (in Swedish it would be ”Kommer du ihåg”) and ü doesn’t really exist in any of the three languages apart from the odd loan word like in English (the phrase would be ”Husker du” without umlauts). Swedes use the umlaut in ä and ö and Norwegians/Danes don’t use it at all.

Husker du is norwegian for "do you remember?", not Swedish, and does not use umlauts. No Scandinavian language uses the ü, and Danish and Norwegian only use å.

Interesting, because I would have expected no 's.

Didn't the Real Academia Espanola 9the Spanish version of the Academie Francaise) recently come out a few years ago and say you don't have to always use the diaresis/umlaut in words that use it?

@@mariosportsmaster7662 no, you have to mark in some way that in "vergüenza" the "u" is pronounced.

The funny thing about the metal umlouts is that in German words with umlouts are often diminutives or used in words to make them cute sounding, rather than menacing like the metal heads think. I'm having a hard time explaining this, it was something my German speaking wife explained to me.

Good example! English definitely has particularities with prepositions like "in". I would add that not all difficulties are the same between all learners of English. It depends on the original language of the learner. Spanish and Portuguese speakers are much more likely to mix up "in" and "on" in English compared to speakers of other Romance languages because they use "en" or "em" most of the time for both meanings. This is in contrast to French and Italian speakers who don't mix them up in English nearly as often because they say "dans" or "in" for "in" and "sur" or "su" for "on". When it comes to teaching English, it's important to recognize that speakers of certain languages are far more likely to have a pattern of making certain mistakes. Everyone starts from a different point.

I'm just guessing but the different usages might be because being in a film is similar to being in a play? And you go to a theater to watch a play or a film. Whereas we have televisions and radios in our homes, and their programs are being broadcast "on the air."

The general rule is that you don't need to use the accent marks if you don't use italics. I definitely usually see Maori and angstrom, though I admit I see creme brulee both ways.

crême brulée

I use macrons on latin words when using them in reference to specific roman concepts (ie dictātor vs dictator)

That's really interesting. Writing is so much about audience empathy isn't it? You just have to know what people will understand what you mean by your words, or, as often happens in academic writing, spend half the paper defining your terms before you begin haha.

Oh dang that’s a great one I should have included

Countries, too. I remember my high school history teacher used to talk about Canada “expanding her borders” and things like that.

@@JJMcCullough countries being feminine is less common these days but it still seems to be the rule for boats in news articles, online encyclopedias, etc.

What’s even weirder is that back when English had actual grammatical gender, boats were neuter

Is that really mandatory, though? I always thought it was optional, like it was a figure of speech, not that "she" and "her" were literally the pronouns you were supposed to use. I mean, do they write in official documents about countries and ships "she" and "her"? It would be news to me if it were that common.

Headline language can lead to funny misreadings… “N.J Judge to rule on nude beach”

@@Celestina0I recalled this one form the 80’s: “British Left Wafers on the Falklands” 😂

Diaereses are actually different from diphthongs, which have nothing to do with spelling but vowel sounds. Both the 'o' at the start of oboe and the 'oe' at the end are diphthongs because the character of vowels changes as it is spoken. In both cases the vowel starts with an 'o' sounds but ends closer to a 'u'. Compare the start of oboe with the start of obstruct. Oboe has a diphthong but obstruct doesn't. Diaeresis means that the marked vowel is pronounced in a separate syllable to the vowel before it.

You can think that theres a silent comma there.

You can’t. Neither of these examples are sentences.

I don’t think this is really that big a deal, my brain inserted “is” into both of those sentences when I read them in my head (native here)😅

It's usually used as a sort of formal or authoritative voice in writing. That "This page intentionally left blank" on documents shows that an institution like a bank or college is telling you something. The second one is an announcement by a corporate entity such as a TV station. I hope that helps.😊

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JJ is forty, he won't know what that means😆

@@d_cave486he seems like hed get a kick out of learning about it tho