Permission to make “if history had gone down another trouser leg” a well known phrase…

I had the great good fortune to study Chaucer under a prof who actually spoke conversational Middle English. The class was conducted in that language, and we were each encouraged to complete one of Chaucer's unfinished Tales (in rhyming Iambic pentameter couplets, of course) in lieu of taking the final exam. Made an English major out of me.

She looks so proud of her modern lingo she’s acquired, I love it.

As a native Texan i embraced my deep southern accent early in life. I still use words like Howdy and y'all to keep them alive. I love using old euphemisms and sayings my grandparents would use. My people were Slovakian German and French. I heard a lot of German growing up. That has created a unique Dutch Texas dialect that is almost gone now. Great video, not many could make me revisit Canterbury Tales. enriching though they were ild not make it through today.

Funnily enough, in Dutch, you still call “eggs” “eiren,” and pronounced very similarly! In Dutch, egg (singular) is “ei,” and adding -en at the end of most nouns makes that noun plural (with the occasional word becoming plural with an -s, like in English). We can see the Germanic root of the English word for “eggs” in this way! Goodness I love languages. And as a person with a degree in English studying in the NL, I absolutely love this video. ❤️

Honestly, the sociocultural impact of the printing press is one my favorite subjects of history. It's so rare that a historical event creates such a clean break between two periods. For anyone who's interested and needs your reading slot filled for the next six months, "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" by Elizabeth Eisenstein is probably the most comprehensive history on the topic.

That 'Henry Higgins' skill (placing people by their accent) is a real thing. It was, and might still be, something 'security specialists' *cough cough MI5/6* learned for special positions - the one I met was mingling at a British embassy entrance engaging people in conversation. He got my dad to within 2 miles and my mum 10 miles, which is reasonable since she moved several miles aged 14.

Thank you for this; this was my very favorite video of yours of all time. For decades I have taught my students that Chaucer is *AN* example of Middle English, just as Beowulf is an example of Old English (or Anglo-Saxon). But though it seems obvious now (having seen your video) it never occurred to me that Chaucer's work is the reason why anything called "Middle English" is even identifiable today. Oh, and the story about the eggs is one of the most insightful anecdotes (about anything) that I have ever heard. I just really, really liked this video, thank you.

The way you said 'copypasta' was fantastic. Also, I remember my grandad grumbling about modern historical dramas that no one wears any headwear in them - there's clearly a growing demand for wimple representation!

I cannot handle the sheer delight with which you pronounced "copypasta", like sampling a fine delicacy. Very much invited to live in my head rent free hereinafter

My first language (or, to be more accurate, my first words) were Dutch, although I was born and grew up in UK. The first decade of my life was in a mix of Dutch and English. When it came to O level we did the _Nonnes Preestes Tale of the Cok and Hen_ - one of the few clene tales. When it came to my turn to read out a section I did so using Dutch phonetic pronunciation. Teacher (Dorothy/Dot) was astonished, and made me do a longer section at a school assembly.

We did Canterbury Tales in high school. You said these characters were all recognizable to 14th century Britain's. This book stuck with me, because I recognized each character as fitting someone I knew in my life then. Chaucer did a great job capturing human nature in this book.

I love how the egg joke still kinda works for a modern audience. If it had been the exact same joke but backward and the man had asked for eyren then it would be confusing due to the lost context, but “could I get some eggs?” “sorry, I don’t speak French” is absurd enough on its own that I could see it today in something along the lines of the Monty Python spam sketch

I adore this video! Can’t get enough Chaucer. Thank you.

Wow! I wish you had been my English teacher when I was at school. I laboured through Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales prologue with a teacher who couldn’t pronounce it like you do. I understood far more of it with your pronunciation. I have always been fascinated with regional speech. As a boy of about 6 years old, I could barely understand a word from the two farm workers on my uncles farm in Devon during the early fifties. It was not just their accent, but also their vocabulary. As an adult I married a lass from Lancashire and her accent has moderated considerably over the forty plus years we have been married. Interestingly her accent returns when we visit her sister who still resides in Lancashire. I have lived in many parts of England and pick up accents quite easily. So I’m not sure which region I sound like. It may depend on who I am speaking to. Please can you do more videos like this one. Thank you.

Costumes. History. Theater. Linguistics. Humor. A cute accent. I love what you’re bringing ahahaha.. i really appreciate your linguistic takes and you saying YEET with such gusto, dressed like a 14th century person 😂

Can you make a whole video of you joyously reciting modern slang one by one? That was wonderful

You have summarized my 6 years of university in 17 minutes. Thank you, this is a wonderful, delightful video.

Fantastic video! I'm American and hearing all the different regional accents was fascinating! We have a lot of regional ones that are coalescing in much the same way. I remember in college when my professor of Medieval Literature had us all memorize a small section of Canterbury Tales in Middle English and recite it. I loved how the words flowed together, it was really lyrical. And I enjoyed hearing it here too!

I speak danish, german and english, and i find that Middle English, is quite understandable once I just mix the languages together in my head. I don’t know if this has any actual backing, but I just found it fascinating

Linguistics is such an interesting subject. Like archeology of words and language. Being a Dutch native speaker, grammar across Germanic influenced languages are so interchangeable.

I grew up in an industrial town in Victoria, Australia. Almost no one had moved in or out of there for over a century. So when I moved to Melbourne, people were amused by my rather archaic vocabulary. Sadly I rarely say the words I was mocked for using 30 years ago and if I use them now, it seems slightly false and affected.

I don't know how I was recommended this but this is an AWESOME video.

As a history and English teacher, I love your videos. You make my life so much easier. So clear, fun, engaging, and friendly. Legend, legend, legend

This video was wild, out of the gate she hits us with middle English from under a wimple, she goes from Chaucer to a blink and you'll miss it Terry Pratchett reference, and then the rabidly unapologetic smile at the patronage hint. Can we have some more, please?

Keep in mind that Chaucer's Middle English wasn’t the dialect that became Modern English. Thomas Mallory's Arthurian works (written just a few decades later) are considerably easier to read, because his dialect won out.

I love the way she says the word “yeet”

As a German-American, I grew up in a bi-lingual environment. I also learned basic French in high school. I always loved learning about languages and the origins of words :) In German, eggs is "Eier," so very close to "Eyren" I really like how sci-fi TV series like "The Expanse" portray a quite colorful (or "colourful") form of English

Love your videos! I'm a nurse recovering from cancer surgery and I'm feeling a bit useless being on the receiving end at the moment so it's refreshing to watch someone funny, charming and educational as you are. Thank you and keep it up! ❤

"Yeet" is definitely my favourite word to be added to the English language. It's the only one I know of which so many transformations are agreed upon; he/she/it yeets, he has yeeted, he yote.

I remember using "Yeet" for the first time in 2007. My new favorite phrase when I was throwing things.

I never thought history could be so interesting! When I was at school (many years ago!) I hated history lessons - they were so dry and full of names and dates which seemed totally irrelevant. Thank you for bringing life back to a previously dead subject.

GNU Terry Pratchett Lovely to hear the trouser legs of time metaphor.

Thank you for this! It's real "the universe provides" episode. I've been reading a modern English version of The Canterbury Tales, as one does, and it hit me just yesterday to wonder how it could have lasted so long given it was written before Herr Guggenheim's printing press. I'll sleep better tonight. Also, I was in Glasgow and wanted to know of a restaurant that was open late while I waited for my night train to London. I asked the young barman if he could help. Three times he tried to tell me about a place and three times I didn't understand what he was saying. Luckily someone walked by and I asked for a translation. I was truly embarrassed; the young man couldn't understand what my problem was.

The ad section was hilarious! I love these videos.

As a half Swede, half American. But raised in Heston Hounslow, as well as central Stockholm. Bilingual with a dash of Dutch. I find this extremely interesting and entertaining. The three have so much in common historically. A lot of old Swedish words exist both in Britain and the Netherlands. And speaking, not with a swedish accent, but still a little "off" you notice just how important accent's are to the Brits. In EVERY pub, I get that slightly confused look, followed by "Where you from mate?" Then "Oh, SWEDEN! Thought you were Irish!" Which I feel isn't that bad for someone who moved from the UK over 40 year's ago. 😅

The ending of the Miller's Tale almost made me burst out in laughter the first time I read it in school.

As a German, I hear the word ‘eyren’, and immediately think of ‘Eier’, so I guess eyren is likely Anglo-Saxon origin? I come from a part of Germany, where they used to speak ‘Plattdeutsch’ Flat/Nether-German, quite related to Dutch. But by the time I grew up (55 soon), it was only the old folks speaking it, holding on a bit longer in the countryside. Now we have more ‘regional’ dialects, like probably most countries, as you’ve said…

As a linguistics major who never used my degree, your videos are such brain food that reignite those synapses. Love this!

I always laugh when people my age (boomers) say the world is going mad, it always was and no change means no progress. Another Great episode. I have shared with my grandchildren so they too can enjoy.

My favourite word used in The Canterbury Tales but lost in modern English is 'eek', meaning 'also'. The text is just littered with all these little mouse-squeaks. To get an idea of the linguistic diversity that existed in medieval England, compare The Canterbury Tales to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was written around the same time, but in a Staffordshire dialect. Thanks to Chaucer's influence on modern English, it's fairly easy to get the gist of what he's written most of the time if you read it with some explanatory notes, but Sir Gawain really could be written in a completely different language (or at least it seems that way to me).

Referencing the Trouser Leg of Time, I like it. Also, you have not only great content but also the most amazing outfits.

An uncle used to brag that he could pin down an accident to almost anywhere. It did seem to me that the accents I heard when I visited as a kid shifted a lot when I visited again 30 years later. It felt like many pleasant accents had been replaced by regional stereotypes from TV.

Thanks ,I really enjoyed that .At 80 + I still have the remains of an identifiable Geordie accent in spite of living in London for 60+ years .Working at the BBC in the 1950s I tried to lose it,and obviously didn’t succeed.Perhaps every human behavior has regional variations .Being able to imitate is a skill that maybe we’re not fully aware of .Life is wonderful .Peace n love ,J.

My High School English teacher had us memorize the prologue to the Canterbury Tales and recite it in front of the class for a grade. I took the offered extra credit, and memorized it in Middle English. I was pretty happy with myself and thought I was all set for the day we were supposed to perform. I show up to class, and our first direction from our teacher is to write down the prologue on paper to turn in so she can grade it. I had listened to a recording, and memorized it from that. I had no idea how to spell most of the words I could pronounce. Thankfully, she gave me some wide latitude on what I wrote down.

So enlightening! I learned to speak German and on more than one occasion I was told I spoke television German!

I was once told that the Glaswegian accent lends itself to the cadences & intonation of Chaucerian language & therefore made it sound more rhythmically poetic & more readily understandable. I tried it & it works like charm. Cheers.

according to terry jones, most medieval peasants could at least read their own name, and they sued each other like modern americans, so it would be very advantagous if they could also read what their lawyer was writing down, so probably slightly more literate than people think

That's a very interesting take on Chaucer and his tales. Guess we'll never know how much was lost.

I laughed so much at the thought of even Chaucer going "Nah, fuck this shit"

Love it when I click on a video for linguistic content and accidentally get a sneaky Pratchett reference. As someone with a degree in linguistics who also did a thesis on Pratchett, I love when a video caters specifically to my interests. Thank you! 😆

I love historical linguistics soooo much. It’s fascinating to place the internet, as an invention, alongside other major inventions that have made huge ripples in language. It is always sad to see dialects fall out of use, but I’m glad to see you discuss emergent dialects as well. Great stuff!

Wow, this is a great primer for how language never merely is, but always is becoming!

Your passion is so infectious! And that sponsor, mwah, chef's kiss, wonderful sketch and so openly critical, I love it!

My accent really confuses people. I was born in Newcastle. My pa is a Gordie but Mother is Scottish and I have lived in Scotland most of my life. Most people think I am Scottish until come out with something like "wor lass". I love how my parents accents are similar like lass/lassie and aye are used in both but they are also very different. Yet another amazing video. I love your content, so informative and entertaining.

I had heard the story of the eggs or eyren before, but it's still a very dramatic indicator of the state of the language at that time. As someone born and raised in Oklahoma, it's interesting to consider how much watching Doctor Who and Monty Python's Flying Circus on my local PBS affiliate when I was a teen influenced me and my language, even my accent.

Language is a living thing that grows and changes. On one hand it is sad to lose some words and dialects, on the other hand it's really great and exciting to see new ones being created from more people and cultures connecting. Thank you chaucer for kicking off an era. I bet he didn't know at the time that it would matter so much.

I’ve got access to my family’s wills from around this time which are in Middle English… it’s surprisingly easy to read once you get over the odd spelling

I remember asking my Dad (a South Londoner like myself) why he said graph with a short a like maths rather than a long one like laugh and he said it was because his teacher at school was from Birmingham.

I worked in a bookstore in Seattle (in the US) for a while, and a British woman came in asking for a mop. I let her know that we didn't have any, but she could go to a store up the street. She looked surprised and asked, "You haven't got any mops? Like, a mop of Seattle?" That's when I realized she meant "maps".

I noticed the blending of accents myself. I thought maybe I was just watching too much British television, as an American. I find it fascinating how many accents are in the British Isles, even in one neighborhood. Compared to American's land mass size, there's a lot of accents here, but there's easily MORE in the British Isles and they are 40 times smaller! Anyway, great video!

Brilliant youtube content. Thanks!

This video exemplifies why I love history. Bringing the strands of history together to show its mirror in the modern world. Really helps make such distant and alien worlds feel so much more real and relevant. Someone at the BBC, give J Draper a history series, now!

JD, your passion for history is both wonderful and infectious. That impish glint in the eye when reciting new slang was absolutely hilarious.

At 14:17, you brought up what I’ve noticed in America. This phenomenon is even more pronounced here. Younger Americans sound almost exactly the same despite living hundreds or thousands of miles away from each other. This is especially true in bigger cities.

A good one. I had a professor from the Midlands who claimed that when he was young if you want 15 or more miles into the adjacent county that the accents (dialects, actually) were so different that one couldn't understand them. (He also said that as a student he could not get into Oxford or Cambridge despite good marks because of his accent. But that's another story and might have been apocryphal.)

I ran into one of those people with linguistic superpowers. After listening to me talk he outlined my family history. He was bang on and I would have accused him of cold reading but I did not know the dark secret of the family history and that my paternal grandfather was secretly from...Kent!

A bloody good tale. It was also the day I realised why we ask 'Can I get a copy of that book' because originally you would be getting a copy of the book you wanted. I feel enlightened and dumb in equal measures. Thank you J.

I found this very interesting to watch, as an American I knew that this was something that happened here, we have many accents and some regional dialects but it seems they're slowly vanishing. Where one use to be able to identify someone's accent to the state, now it's more the region, someone doesn't have a "Florida accent" or "Texas accent" they have a southern accent. Or they may have a New England accent, or Midwestern, or pacific northwest. Knowing that many European countries including the UK are so much smaller (speaking only of land mass) it never occurred to me that there were once so distinctive accents and dialects there and that the same phenomenon, the disappearance of those and emergance of new accents and dialect, was a world wide phenomenon. It's nice for me to learn about other places in the world, it helps expand my world view even just a little bit. I thank you for sharing your history and your culture.

"It took me a lot fewer takes to get this one right." 😂 I laughed too loudly at this.

My family's Swiss German, and I lived there as a kid. It might be different now but the accents were still super localized (you could tell who was from the next village over because they used a different word for swimming pool). I reckon it's because TV in Switzerland is almost all high German, so the regional dialects are still sort of separate, and able to survive.

Linen headwear is so underappreciated. I have found that wearing a linen coif on a hot, sunny day actually keeps me cooler than being bareheaded, because linen is a breathable material which protects my head from solar heat gain.

Wonderful. Thank you.

It’s crazy to think that in England you can tell what COUNTY someone came from. In the US, if they have a very strong accent and you have an ear for it, you can identify which five state area they’re from. I wonder if that’s because the US has always had more migration? Very, very few people can say their families have lived in an area for more than a couple of generations, there’s been constant movement for work and land and greener pastures, so there’s less chance for areas to develop a specific identity?

My family has lived in and around Atlanta since the 1700s. My grandmother and her generation all sounded like Gone with the Wind, but my generation has no discernible accent at all. I even heard my son pronounce the second 't' in Atlanta the other day! Shockhorror! I love how multicultural Atlanta is now, and I love my non-accent accent.😊

I grew up in the Peak District, and was relentlessly bullied for being ‘posh’ because I had a much softer northern accent that doesn’t really sound like anything specific. Just using hard vowels so bath sounds like math etc. We weren’t posh - I was one of 4 with a single Mum and we were pretty poor for my youngest years. But Mum and my older sisters grew up in the South so my accent was a bit generic.

It is interesting how the fate of that single printing press...admittedly with the growth of the British Empire along with the cultural influence of the United States...changed not just the regional culture of just London and the area around the Thames but frankly the entire world and how English has become the most common language in the world for commerce and diplomacy. This is a very well done video! Thank you so much for making it.

Your ability to make history come alive is amazing.

Ah, J. Draper!! SOO WELL DONE!! The writing, the performance, the spooky 2-second shots, the passion, the credibly-sourced history & research, the wimple rant at the end...!!!! I LOVE YOUR WORK!!!!!!

We had a bit of a repeat of this play out with those of us who went in the Queue last September. The only thing we had in common was that we all decided to go & see the Queen at the exact same time, & now we share anecdotes with each-other over Whatsapp.

Your stuff is such a great mix of travel, history, wholsomeness and just fun. Thank you.

J, you are so entertaining. And informative. Thanks

As an American who grew up through primary school in East Anglia, has relatives from Middlesex, lived in France and Sicily, and now lives in the southern US, I'm no stranger to dialect melding. I loved your explanation snd comparisons to how technology can shift language permanently - modern meme culture is definitely interesting to watch evolve!

Love the video, I only speak English and have struggled with learning other languages in the past, but etymology like this is FASCINATING to me. I did personally have an egg/eren situation as a kid when I visited the north of Scotland and had to dash into a corner stop and ask where their bread was, the lady was very confused until I said for making sandwiches, when she exclaimed "Oh, y' mean breed?" - it's so fascinating that the regional difference in pronunciation of a word in our shared language is enough to impede communication.

Fascinating. In Dutch we still say “eieren”. And your pronunciation of “night” sounded very much like our “nacht”: you called it pronouncing the “h”, but seems to me that it is pronouncing the “g”. All of which is a perfect illustration of how Germanic Old and Early Middle English were.

As a Dutchman, I vote for revitalising the word 'eyren', it makes me think of its Dutch cognate 'eieren'.

Sophisticated people who are "involved" with your wife's sister. With all credit to John of Gaunt though the fact that Chaucer's granddaughter ascended to the rank of duchess is a testament to the enormous value his support bore for the family.

Honestly, how do you manage to make such consistently high quality content??? Keep up the great work!❤

When you say "write it out word by word," it's worth mentioning that in those days you didn't just pop out to the stationery store to select your paper and choose from a variety of ball point pens or gel pens.

I LOVE this bit at 15:00 where you list a bunch of internet words

When I was in elementary school, teachers STILL believed that writing things out by hand built character. One of my teacher's favorite punishments was making us copy dictionary pages. Another just liked us to copy the same sentence over and over (in my case, it was usually something like, "I will do my homework on time.")

I'm originally from West Yorkshire. One set of grandparents came from Bingley and the other from Bradford, which are only about 3 miles apart, but their accents were discernibly different. Now, we all just speak with a kind of generic Yorkshire accent which is not even as far removed from the Lancastrian accent as it used to be.

Bloody good. Many thanks

Fun Fact: Jeffery Chaucer was also a footballer for a team that would eventually become Bury FC, a 10th-tier side. He was not a player of any note, as back in that era football was played more in a scrum-style, not the intricate open space and passing style of today. And in Pennsylvania eggs are called "cackleberrys"...

I grew up on the Lancashire/ Cumbria border. Some of the old folks in the village when I was a kid spoke a dialect so deep that I doubt anyone not from those parts would understand them.

Love this, I find accent and dialect and the development of language FASCINATING! I live in S Yorkshire, my dad's a Manc and my mum's a Sheffield/Welsh mix, with her mum being Welsh/Irish, and just from that I've grown up around a real mix. In particular I love idioms - I think it's partially because my parents are a bit older than most of the parents of people my age, but I've grown up around a lot of idioms that just aren't used much any more (although it's also been revealed to me in recent years that some of them are what we now call "nan-isms", turns out nobody outside of my family says "the pot calling the kettle greasy-arse") and take great delight in keeping them alive, and I love learning new ones from other areas, cultures and languages! And maybe I'm biased because it's where I'm from, but I do think Yorkshire has some really interesting history in the local dialect; the fact that a lot of people here still use thee/thou or that we use a lot more words of Scandinavian origin than the south because of the Vikings having more influence up here. A few years ago a Swedish artist I followed on tumblr mentioned the phrase "hej hopp" and to me it seems obvious that the standard greeting here, "ey up", would probably have come from that (though I've only been able to find one other discussion of this and I'm nowhere near enough an actual linguist to state it as fact) and the mental image of Vikings saying "ey up" is wonderful to me.

The way you're saying the word "copypasta" is so funny in it's enthusiasm.

I'm American with a New York City midtown Manhattan accent. I get not being able to fully understand your own countryman. Love you videos. Keep 'em coming!!😊

This was excellent. I humbly request more etymology/ linguistic videos in your lovely style.

That was interesting, Draper. I thought the closest to a generic American accent was your West Country dialect. Almost New Yorkish but without the overlay of Dutch, Irish and Yiddish that comprise that general dialect. Full disclosure, I'm a Boomer. I was born in a Suburb of NYC. My Dad had been an announcer for NBC during WWII. He and my Mom were from Chicago, originally. We moved ''back'' to Chicago when I was 3. [Each of the NY burroughs had once a distinctive accent.] Chicago accents depended on class and location: North Side/South Side,/West Side. There were ethnic inflections. Near North Side Chicago-ese was very close to Manhattan's dialect. When I lived there, locals all said Sh- CAW - go. Out of towners said Shi-kah -go. That pronunciation has now morphed into the locals sounding like out-of-towners to me. But we moved west when I was 16. I turned 17 in LA. Locals there sometimes asked me if I was from England when I was new in town. I learned from new friends that the town name had once been said as Loss Angh' less [with a hard G]. You can listen for it in vintage film noir flix. After 1950, the broadcast networks pushed Talent to use the Network Pronounciation of Los Ann-jell-ess, until even the locals said it that way, or avoided the issue by using the two initials. At 21 I moved to Tucson AZ. Fifty-something years ago, locals had something of a South West twang, but that has become homogenized by the TV accent, plus the old timers mostly moving out of a town they considered ruined by the influx of Snowbirds, Yankees and Californians. Go figure?