Germanic languages share a common ancestor and are closely related. Normally, most of them are different enough that they’re not mutually intelligible. But is it possible to construct “universal” dialogues of Germanic languages that can be mutually understood by various Germanic languages? In this video I constructed an example. You will hear what it sounds like in various Germanic languages, not just in mainstream Germanic languages, but also in lesser known languages like Frisian and Low German. And what would it sound like in their common ancestor language Proto-Germanic? I shall answer that question and also provide a brief historical and linguistic overview of Germanic languages.
00:00 Introduction
00:50 Same dialogue in each major Germanic languages
03:29 Why are they so similar?
04:56 History of Germanic languages
06:29 Low German and Frisian
08:27 How would it sound in Proto-Germanic?
13:16 Icelandic and why the languages evolved the way they did
18:03 French and English
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#linguistics #languages #history
Thanks very much to everyone who liked, commented or subscribed, I really appreciate it! For a next video, I’m hoping to make a video covering all other Germanic languages that I didn’t cover in this video - a video of “all Germanic languages past and present”. If you’re a native speaker of any Germanic languages or dialects not covered in this video, and you’re happy to help record the short dialogue in this video in your native tongue, please send me an email (you can find it in my channel’s About page)! Also welcome if you speak the languages already covered here but with a distinct regional accent, or if you’re an expert in a particular historical Germanic languages (e.g. Middle Low German, Old Norse etc). With your help, maybe we can create a complete repository of all Germanic languages, dialects, and accents - which would be so cool! Thank you all!
I had written a fairly long comment here that was deleted (maybe because I linked to the Lexicon Poeticum). Any chance you could bring it back?
@@germanicgems Hmm I can't see it anywhere, nothing in the "Held for review" section as well. Can you try posting it again? If it still doesn't appear, please email me it, would love to see it!
@@lamkingming Western Old Norse ca 800: Vintʀ sá hinn kaldi nálgask. Snjóhríð kømʀ. Kom í hús mitt hit varma, vinʀ minn. Vęl kominn! Kom hinig, syng ok dansa, et ok drikk. Þat es ráð mitt. Véʀ hǫfum vatn, ǫl ok mjǫlk, ferska óʀ kú. Já, ok varmt soð! A few loanwords were replaced; stormr by 'hríð' plan by ráð 'counsel, advice, course of action' súpa by soð 'broth'. Note that there is no definite article since that did not yet exist, and r and ʀ are still kept separate. v was pronounced /w/ but is spelled v out of convention. es 'is' still retains the -s, as seen in Runic inscriptions and poetry from the time and even some centuries later. The following words would be different in the east: kømʀ - komʀ hinig - hít syng - siung (in Sweden) véʀ - víʀ hǫfum - hafum óʀ - úʀ kú - kó
That's great thank you! I noticed that you put your adjectives after the noun with the "hit" structure. I've seen some Old Norse texts with adjectives before the noun, I was wondering why couldn't you do that here? Thanks!
@@lamkingming "Hinn kaldi vintʀ nálgask" works, the other just feels more authentic to how a real Old Norse text would put it, since it puts "vintʀ" at the front for emphasis. I suppose you *could* have "mitt varma hús" which is basically just modern Swedish, but that feels even less natural. The possessive almost always goes after the noun in Old Norse, and then you need to move "varma" after the possessive and put "hit" before it. Even today in many dialects of Swedish and Norwegian you say "huset mitt" (< "húsit mitt").
If a Dutch person speaks under water it comes out as English, and vice versa, making a simple bath tub an analog translator. This is because large parts of Holland had been below sea level.
Thank you my friend for your enlightenment 🙏
@@al3xa723 I used this theory to get a pretty Dutch girl into the bathtub with me.
@@davidpitchford6510hahaha
@@al3xa723I always thought the song was more than what was just the language.
@@brendawilliams8062 what song
I think the funniest Germanic word is: English Gift = Present German Gift = Poison Norwegian Gift = Marriage 🤣
same thing xD
That means the English are still naïve about it's true meaning, the Germans have learned their lesson and the Norwegians are about to find out.
Yeah I remember the first time I saw at a WWII Museum a can that said "Gift Gas! Zyklon B" That's a gift nobody wants.
In Norwegian/Danish gift also both marriage and poison, make with that what you will...
It has the same root word. From an archaic form of a word meaning 'to give (away)'. You give poison to someone, when you are married you are given away to someone. Same word, but not same meaning today. And, as someone already pointed out, gift (noun) is poison, but gift-e (verb or adjective) is to marry or to be married.
My wife shouted from outside the other day. She's English, so I was surprised to hear her speaking some Proto-Germanic tongue: "Oupen die duurr, ets mee", she said, " ik heb min hanz voll". It was then that I realised she was carrying four bags of food shopping in both hands, and had her car keys in her mouth.
😂
😂
😂
you can't make jokes
Hahaha
its kind of beautiful that such a simple and warming sentence can illustrate the common germanic heritage of so many modern peoples. As a German myself this really resonated with me.
In contrast, French is so classist and arrogant. With those two words actually coming from French.
Just a little subjective perhaps?
@@erichamilton3373 what do you mean?
@@erichamilton3373 It would fit the context of the Norman conquest.
@@treehugger3615 French is not "arrogant", it is simply a leftover from "Vulgar Latin" mixed with Gaulish (Celtic) and Old Frankish (Rhine-Germanic) elements.
This is grade-A linguistics class material. Much better than most lessons, built like a suspense plot, which is what it really is
Well said
Great comment! 😀
Yeah, but it messes up some dilecate details, which results into some quirkiness and mistakes in some languages - see my comment on rhe missing 'e's of the German verbs. When graded correctly, these are 3 clear errors.
@ImKinoNichtSabbeln I looked at your comment, actually you are the one who is wrong. The German verbs in the video is correct. The verbs in the video are in the imperative form which has no "e" endings. A German friend also told me the German in this video is correct
@@ImKinoNichtSabbeln the -e in the first person or imperative German verbs is hardly meaningful, as it tends to appear and disappear, even if originally it was present (probably was), it isn't necassary at all today, the imperative and the 1st person are really the same form, even if for the 1st person it's artificially kept (the German - Ich mach' es vs. Ich mache es vs. Mach es! same as in English Make it vs. I make it - it's there but oftentimes just conceptually)
My wife is Dutch, and I'm American. My in-laws were shocked that I could read what was written on the side of an old Friesian church, and they couldn't. I just told them that it was very old English. I'm able to speak Dutch now, so the similarities are much more comfortable for me.
That's what I told my eldest sister who lived in the Netherlands. Growing up in a Church that uses 1611 King James Bible & Book of Common Prayer. When I went to the Netherlands, it just seemed like a variant of King James English.
And then they clapped
@@FreePigeonyou're embarrassing
As a native Frisian speaker, I have one very minor nitpick. 'tichtby' usually refers to being close by in terms of place. If you are talking about being close by in terms of time, such as winter being near, words like 'nei' or 'neiby' would sound better. That would also have more closely mirrored the translation in other languages.
Yeah, good point! It would sound like English "nearby" and mirror text from other languages very well.
ive always wanted to know if anyone still spoke Frisian. From my anthropology studies i understand that this is the closest analogue to English. Is this true?
@@jasonhuttermusic424 The six Frisian languages are still spoken by about 500,000 Frisian people, who live on the southern fringes of the North Sea in the Netherlands and Germany. The Frisian languages are the closest living language group to the Anglic languages; the two groups make up the Anglo-Frisian languages group and together with the Low German dialects these form the North Sea Germanic languages. However, modern English and Frisian are not mutually intelligible, nor are Frisian languages intelligible among themselves, owing to independent linguistic innovations and foreign influences. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frisian_languages
@@jasonhuttermusic424 There is a saying that "Good butter and good cheese is good English and good Fries". (I can't spell it in Frisian, but it is pronounced very nearly the same in both languages.)
They used to show Frisian regional TV at night when I was student. It seemed full of Dutch loanwords and calques. How representative was that? Are there dialects with less Dutch influence?
I had two friends, one of German ancestry and one of Danish. Talking to each other (in American English) they discovered their grandparents came from villages only about 20 km (12 mi) apart. Speaking to each other in the dialects they had learned from their grandparents, supposedly Danish and Plattdeutsch, they discovered they could easily understand one another. :) They took a vacation together in Europe and explored their mutual ancestral area, finding that the way to tell if one was in Denmark or Germany was by the roadsigns since the local dialect was the same on either side of the border. :)
You'll find this at a lot of border regions. These dialects evolved long before todays standard languages were established, some are even recognised as languages themselfes
@@kilsestoffel3690 When a grandpa understands a foreigner across the border better than a fellow countryman on the other side of the country.
During Scouts in the Netherlands we would always go on camp in Germany near Köln with a farmer that spoke Low German. Funny thing is, if we spoke in a heavy Brabantian dialect, which is spoken in the south of the Netherlands and a bit of Belgium, he could perfectly understand us, but we had no fucking clue what he said.
Many borders in Europe change quite a lot throughout history. The current borders were fixed rather recently, e.g. the line between Germany and Denmark was last redrawn after WWI. No wonder that the people on both sides of the current border still speak very similar dialects.
I am bilingual in English and German--but I usually cannot understand *spoken* Dutch. Thank you for providing a short monologue in Dutch that I could understand 100%!
Same! I have always thought that is weird though. I can read Dutch (with some effort, but it usually works) but I cannot understand it - or at least no better than I understand Swiss German.
@@ralphhebgen7067 Thanks for confirming that Dutch and Swiss German are about equally far from Standard German concerning mutual intelligibility. It's an argument I usually make when the claim is made that Swiss German is a mere dialect of Standard German.
@@HotelPapa100 Yes that is hugely interesting. I must admit I don’t know what the linguistic definitions of ‘dialect’ and ‘language’ are, so I don’t know what scholars would say about this. Only thing I can say is that as a native speaker of German, I’d expect to understand Swiss German better than I do. I wasn’t exaggerating much when I said I don’t understand it at all - after about a minute into listening to a Swiss-German speaker, I give up and allow the words to wash over me. As a point of reference - I understand a lot more when I listen to a speaker of Bavarian, which I am sure is classified as a dialect. Still I have to admit that I am struggling with that also. The differences are gradual. Same in English by the way - oddly, I understand Scottish spoken in Edinburgh better than that spoken in Glasgow, Lancastrian dialects are pretty opaque to me, and Geordie is - well - that’s like Swiss German again…. 😀
@@ralphhebgen7067 AFAIK there is no clear definition where dialects end and languages begin. Mutual Intelligibility is usually used as a whetstone, but that highly depends on the listener. You could as well go with "A shprakh iz a dyalect mit an armey un flot" (A language is a dialect with an army and a navy), Max Weinreich. That argument certainly drives the distiction between Serbian and Croatian, or Urdu and Hindi.
@@HotelPapa100 Yes that actually rings true to me. The distinction between language and dialect is a matter of group identity, which can turn it into a political issue, and it is not so much a matter of linguistics. From that point of view, modes of human verbal expression (languages) are perhaps best seen as analogous to colours - they blend into each other and at some point become visually distinguishable, or mutually un-intelligible. Still, the dynamics governing the development of languages are manifold, and hard to unravel. One property must surely be a trend to simplify (flexions are being dropped, contractions abound), and that trend appears to happen to languages in isolation, without contact to speakers of different languages. Why languages should start out in a state of ‘low entropy’ and move to a state of ‘high entropy’, however, is unclear to me. Another property is ‘osmosis’, a principle whereby one language borrows words from another. This principle occurs naturally as groups who speak different languages interact, through travel or trade, artificially if one group dominates another (through military occupation, as the Romans, Vikings, and Normans did in what today is England), deliberate enrichment (the English classicist movement borrowed tonnes of words from Latin, as there was an obsession with the ancients as a source of knowledge seen as superior to that of contemporaries) or creativity (Shakespeare coined lots of new words, as did Luther in German, to name only two examples). In the end, an attempt to unravel the dynamics may be as difficult as trying to unpour milk from latte. Still, such efforts are still useful, as this excellent video shows, and our discussion urges me to conclude that it is probably futile to distinguish between languages and dialects. Thanks for the chat!
As a native dutch speaker, the low German dialogue really shocked me, although I am quite proficient in high german, I instantly recognised low german not of my knowledge of high german but of my knowledge of Dutch. It really sounds like a Dutch dialect often spoken in the northeast of the country, which my grandparents also speak.
good, because I would fire you if you wouldn't :)
I had a great uncle whose first language was Pennsylvania Dutch, a form of Low German. I was taken aback to basically hear Gronings with an American accent.
It makes sense that you were able to understand! In this video, it might seem as if Low German/Low Saxon is only spoken in Germany, but the dialects Gronings, Drents, Stellingwerfs, Sallands, Veluws, Urkers, Twents and Achterhoesk (probably missing a few) that are spoken in the Netherlands are also dialects of Low Saxon (so not of Dutch ;))! It's quite easy for a speaker of Gronings for example to understand a Low Saxon speaker from Oldenburg, because the dialects are so similar :) Extra fun fact: Frisian is not restricted to the Netherlands either, as there are areas in Germany where Saterland Frisian and North Frisian are spoken. The variant of Frisian spoken in the Netherlands is called West Frisian, and is the largest of the Frisian variants that are still spoken today.
I had the same reaction as an English speaker. I always assumed Frisian and even Dutch were more similar to English than Low Saxon, at least phonetically.
Do your grandparents maybe even speak low german? In eastern netherlands actually many people speak low german, tho this western version of low german is of course strongly influenced by dutch. As same as low german in general was influenced by dutch, and dutch by low german due to hanseatic league etc. This and the north sea germanic substrate that was absorbed into dutch before that also explains why dutch and low german/frisian are so similar, even though frisian and low saxon are north sea germanic while dutch isnt.
As a linguistic anthropologist who focuses on Old Norse and the Germanic languages, kudos and hats off. This is splendid.
dream career omfgggg
The paragraph you chose for the Germanic languages has such a warm and cozy feeling to it that calls to some core element of experience
Being Icelandic, I was practically shouting at my screen when you forgot to mention the Icelandic word éta! We have both borða and éta! People borða, but animals éta. Specifically because people eat at a table, wheras animals do not. But you could use éta for people too :).
Would éta for people suggest they are eating like animals? i.e. it would be rude to use it
@@markaurelius61 Yes, it's like in Danish with spise and ete. German has three registers: speisen is to dine, essen is to eat and fressen is for animals eating or a person eating very crudely.
@@IdiotAmigo If i understand it correctly, fressen is cognate to English fret, but the meaning is closer to devour / gorge on (something).
@@IdiotAmigo in slovak jesť means to eat, žrať is for animals and vulgar for humans (it's used very often between friends)
Oh, so very similar to German, although we are so far from eachother. I thought that this distinction between 'speisen/ dinnieren (both posh/formal)/ essen (men)/ fressen (animals or colloquial if you don't care for manners)' (to eat) for humans and animals only existed in German. But it seems that's not the case, even though we are geographically far apart.
This can also be done for Slavic languages. Attempts have been made to make an ultimate Slavic language that all Slavs can understand and it actually went pretty well.
Indeed, and sometimes (as I was intrigued to learn only a few years ago) even in the least likely places. The 19th century Austro-Hungarian (or Habsburg) monarchy was very opposed to Slavic national aspirations in all other contexts precisely because so many of its subjects belonged to Slavic nationalities. Yet when it came to the practicalities of running their army, where the main language of command was always German, they didn't hesitate to oblige officers to learn what was called "Armeeslawisch" - a sort of meta-slavic pidgin based, if I remember correctly, on Czech and Croatian. So the obligation to learn languages went both ways: ordinary soldiers would have to learn something like a hundred commands in German, but in turn the officers also had to learn a language that would be (roughly) understandable not just to the many Czech and Croat recruits, but also to their Polish, Ruthenian (= Ukrainian), Slovak, Serb, Bosnian and Slovene soldiers.
There was also an attempt at a pan-romance language akin to pan-slavic to improve dialogue in the language group, but as far as I know, it’s been practically unused.
Would that be like a lingua franca for Slavic languages? I'm not sure if I'm putting that right.
@@rasheed7934Sure, if you are interested in learning more the project is called interSlavic. There is a ton of material about it on KZhead
Pan Romance, you mean reviving Latin?
I am born in the north Germany and Dutch "feels" like family. Some old family members spoke PLATTDEUTSCH when I was young. So it feels warm and makes me sad at the same time. It was the time without the terrors of our modern society. Greetings from Germany.
Is Low German becoming extinct?
@@sarban1653 Ich glaub’s geht generell mit den typischen traditionellen Dialekten zu Ende (außer im Süden natürlich 🙄)
American English speaker here. I was pleasantly surprised I understood 90% of the spoken dialogue. Thank you for sharing.
Duh!?
@@SezerAksit 🤪 Duh
Dutch, Frisian & Low Saxon are by far the easiest for me to understand as American English is my native tongue. I was shocked. I didn't realize I was capable of reading & translating Dutch, let alone so well on my first try. Seeing the written words side-by-side made it easy.
Like the icelandic word for "eat" derives from "board" you can somehow do this in modern german too when it comes to a lofty and festive dinner. Then instead of "essen" you can say "tafeln" from "Tafel", meaning huge table, from latin "tabula".
It is kind of like "room and board" in English
In Dutch we usually say 'eet', but we also have the verb 'tafelen'
The Norwegian word for a Christmas party is ‘julebord’, meaning Yule-table. Any other party is ‘fest’
interesting! The word 'smorgasbord' then comes to mind, which , when you think about it, does look a bit scandi!
@@donpeat7707 "smorgasbord" in English is a loan word from Swedish. "smörgåsbord", or "sandwich table/board"
Fascinating video. I'm from Scotland and it tickles me to hear a lot of the Germanic pronunciations alive and well in Scots. For example, the way words like House, Water, Cow and Cold are pronounced are much closer to the Dutch, German, Danish, Norwegian and Swedish ways (but not in all cases) than than they are to standard English. I think it has something to do with the great vowel shift England went through, and Scotland didn't.
Spot on. Also, of course, Scots descended from Old English speakers in the lowlands with far, far, far fewer Norman influences after 1066.
England got hit hard by the Norman invasion, which added a lot of Frenchisms to standard English. Scots remained more Germanic because the Normans didn't really touch Scotland. Scottish monarchs and nobility remained Saxon and Gaelic.
@@vladskiobiUntil the Norman-English kings started placing puppets on the throne. Then John Balliol and Robert the Bruce came to power, both king’s families, de Balliol and de Bruc respectively, came from Normandy
House in German is Haus and both actually sound almost the same. The Nordic languages pronounce it with a long U. Dutch is different. The Dutch vowel ui in huis is quite unique although Scots and certain northern English dialects are indeed very close. Yet still not entirely spot on. Dutch is my native language and I have yet to find this vowel in another language. Danish also doesn't have it despite its many vowels. Even Flemish which is basically a subgroup of the Dutch languages has a different ui. In Dutch it's a diphthong (a gliding vowel) whereas the Flemish version is a monopthong (a fixed tone).
As a cumbrian I pronounce a lot of those words really similarly when I'm speaking in my accent
In Luxembourgish: De kale Wanter ass no, e Schnéistuerm wäert kommen. Komm a mäi waarmt Haus, mäi Frënd. Wëllkomm! Komm hei, sang an danz, iess an drénk. Dat ass mäi Plang. Mir hunn och Waasser, Béier a Mëllech frësch vun der Kou. Oh, a waarm Zopp!
Old English: Se cald winter is near, snawgebland biþ cuman. Cum in min wearmne hus, min freond. Wilcume! Cum her, sing and sealta, et and drinc. Þā is mine wene. We habbaþ wæter, beor, and meolc fersc from þære cy. Eala, and wearm broþ! Storm means storm in OE, but snawgebland (snow-commotion) is the word that is used in OE texts.
Cum
"Eala" strikes me as an interesting word for "Ah"
I like how soup is broth in old English
snow commotion rofl
Thank you for the OE version. I see there is another word for dance here, sealta. Does anyone know the ethymology for this? Could this be related to the proto-Germanic word for dance?
As an Englishman living in China I went native and only spoke Cantonese and some raw pigeon English for months. Then there were 2 Europeans walking in front of me in the park so i tried to work out where they were from. I thought they were speaking the harsh guttural Dutch but then i got closer and realised they were speaking my own language English. Yes they are very similar.
I also ate some great raw pigeon in Hong Kong, sounds like a cool experience
kzhead.info/sun/rKx6hM16oJ56p6M/bejne.html
It's "pidgin" not a 🕊
@@robert9016 you mean that concentration camp?
@@CannibaLouiSTwhat
The lesson is that the simple things; the everyday sentences - the common man expressed to his fellow man - stayed more or less similar among these lamguages
@@DeReAntiquaIt’d be “I will have eggs.” Which is much closer. Also dialectal. My dialect *would* still say “I will have eiren.”
@@tfan2222what dialect still says eiren to this day?
@@jackholloway1 Dutch
@@ElcoCanon no he's talking about an English dialect
Or just.. I want eggs @@DeReAntiqua
I speak West-Frisian, Dutch, and English while I can also understand basic German and French. When a Danish friend of mine is talking to their family, I can usually understand the broad subject of the story without ever having learnt Danish. It's a lot easier for me to understand foreign written text than it is to understand spoken language, which probably just has to do with the speed at which people talk in their native language and what are for me unexpected changes in pronounciation. This was a really interesting example on the evolution of languages, well done!
English must be the only one out of the numerous Germanic languages featured here that uses them and they pronouns for 3rd person singular.
@@novyymir4439 That is a VERY new development. It's linguistic engineering for ideological purposes, and I don't personally know anyone who uses it.
@@leenorman853 it really isn't, it's been attested as far back as the 1300s
I found the Icelandic an interesting comparison. Interesting to note how the English cognate ‘board’ retains this usage in some contexts. ‘Bed and board’ quite specifically, or ‘boarding school’ for an implied example.
Also, I suspect, in the word smorgasbord, which English borrowed from Swedish.
Board of directors?
@@sarco64 Well, that would translate to either "a sandwich table", or if we want to be silly, a butter-goose-table. (The first one is correct.)
I am glad you pointed that out. I imagine most people don't really consider what board or boarding must be implying in that usage -- it's just something we say. I imagine if I had a concept of what it meant before, I must have thought it meant the room in which the bed was in. Which obviously it couldn't have meant originally unless in the past, no one guaranteed your bed would be indoors.
@@DeveusBelkan To add to your point, it's often said as "room and board". So board definitely wouldn't be referring to the room since that would be redundant.
As a German who has never learned Dutch, it always surprises me how well I understand the Dutch. If I met a Dutch person, I'm sure we could communicate just by speaking our own languages. Fascinating.
That wouldn't really work, unless you're really good with languages. Reading Dutch is relatively easy as a German, but understanding a Dutch conversation in a normal speed is not. How hard it is also depends on the dialect, though. Most Dutch people can at least understand German good enough, but that's because they learn it at school.
@@Nickname-hier-einfuegenI used to live quite close to the German-Durch border for a year and I could actually understand the news spoken on the Dutch radio station. 🤷♀️
@@Nickname-hier-einfuegen I can understand conversations just fine.
@@gownerjones1450I think the speed at which you process speech would be a major factor
nah not in den haag XD
Germanic languages are a huge passion of mine. What a great video. I have been writing these dialogs aswell, for example a short story that most Germanic speakers would understand. But using warfare vocabulary like Helm, sword, shield, spear, wood, bow, hound etc.
Thanks! That's cool, can't seem to see them in your channel though apart from sports video.
Yeah same,I have passion for the GERMANIC languages too,I'm currently trying to learn English but I'm also learning other GERMANIC languages too!......
@@dpsthfxochpg how are you learning the languages? What's your favorite method/source? Any answer is greatly appreciated.
@@ranjittyagi9354To be honest, I'm trying to learn the languages of all countries, because I have a HUGE PASSION FOR LANGUAGES...but I learn all of them from videos, so I can't give much advice at the moment because I can give wrong advice.... I also learn languages in a mixed way, so the advice I give may not be suitable for you ... But I have only one suggestion. And the thing is, you can ask this question to someone who has actually learned a language (I mean you can ask multilingual people)
@@ranjittyagi9354 And thank you for asking a question to me 😊
This is fantastic. Thank you. As a German, I have always wondered why when learning related languages such as Dutch or English you don't first look at the similarities in order to understand the relationship. This makes learning the language way easier.
I found when I was learning German in college that my knowledge of older English (from reading Shakespeare and authors predating the Victorian era) helped in picking up vocabulary. My high school Latin helped with understanding inflection, declensions, and conjugations.
Those first few minutes actually made me pretty emotional. Maybe it's just because I'm not European so I haven't had as much exposure to the other Germanic languages, but as an English speaker, especially a Canadian one who learned enough French to understand 19:07, I've always felt so disconnected from the other Germanic languages. Whenever I pondered the fact that English is Germanic, I would look at the other languages in that category and feel no kinship. It felt like French was so much more similar, in vocabulary if not in grammar. Even though this was partly because I had _studied_ French, it still felt like I should feel more recognition when I looked at samples of German or Dutch or Frisian. They seemed a lot more similar to each other than to English. And it felt kind of… lonely. Like English didn't belong. Seeing the connections laid out so plainly was so affirming, like yes, English _is_ Germanic, even if I can't see it most of the time. English does belong.
I'm a Germanic speaker - Dutch. Interesting comment you wrote down here! The way I see/hear it as a native Dutch speaker English is for at least 70% (if not more) a Germanic language. English, Dutch and German are very closely related. Dutch is literally in the middle of those three. If you would strip all the French (Latin based) from English you'd still be left with a comprehensible language for us Germanic speakers. The French influence on English is mainly vocabularly. But for most of the French loanwords there's a Germanic "original" in English. Dutch and German share more grammar together than English. They have retained a "purer" form of Germanic grammar than English. Probably because of Gaelic, Norse, and French influence on English. But it's only slight... I wouldn't call the English grammar heavily influenced by French, for example.
I find that very interesting since I purposefully exposed myself to other Germanic languages for maybe 7 or 8 years, and I struggle to find similarities between English and French but instead I took German in high school and quickly my mind related them so much so that I sometimes use German words for things in English and very few people actually pick up on me doing it. I'd always look at Spanish and French sentence structure and language and feel as if they were too different to have much relationship to English but after learning a small amount of Spanish there is clearly a small amount of resemblance between the two languages. English is a Germanic language, but I'd view it as it is, a disconnected island from the other Germanics, like a distant cousin of sorts, like say if British Columbia was invaded by Vietnam and left alone for a few hundred years, there would still be the clear relation, but the pronunciation may change, and some words will have different meanings or spelling. That's how I've come to view English in regard to the Latin languages and Germanic languages.
We all use way more Germanic words than Latin in our day to day lives. Only two words in the last sentence was of Latin origin. You can't make a sentence without using Germanic words
@provocaseI I believe that English word order grammar is derived from Scandinavian languages. Despite the large Celtic presence in the British Isles, remarkably little Celtic influence has seeped into English.
@@nahx6205If you use any words ending in "tion" or "sion," you're using French! 29 percent of English words come from French, usually the longer words.
I live in the east of the Netherlands (Twente region) and also speak Low Saxon. I was surprised that (German) Low Saxon was 90% similar to what we speak. Low Saxon in the Netherlands was under pressure for decades because it was seen as an inferior language. At school we were not allowed to speak Low Saxon, only Dutch. But once outside the classroom everyone spoke Low Saxon again. But for a few years now, Low Saxon and Limburgish have been officially recognized languages. And since then these languages are promoted more. Slightly more than half of the population in the eastern Netherlands understands Low Saxon. About 30% speak Low Saxon at home.
Very nice friend, I admit I'm struggling with Low Saxon/Limburgish as I've moved to Belfeld for work and can only just about get by with Dutch. Some people here switching to different languages or dialects is a struggle but I will achieve it in time, it's a very nice language.
All four of my grandparents spoke Low Saxon (Westphalian) even though they were born in the U.S. and their families had been in the U.S. for several generations. Our region of Ohio spoke mainly Low Saxon until the 1940s. Most everyone in my region descended from people who immigrated from northern Westphalia, Germany in the mid-1800's. I'm glad to hear that there are still people speaking the language today. It has for the most part died out here, but there might be some older people around that still understand it.
Born and raised Limbo here: Same in schools here. It was 'Algemeen Dutch' only, Limburgish was only spoken at home and on the streets. It (or rather everyone here) are still mostly seen as 'dumb peasants'. Luckily, around 48% still speaks Limburgish at home/when not in a formal setting (although we usually only switch to Dutch when there's non-Limburgers present :D). While most assuredly different, the Low Saxon was surprisingly easy to understand (at least when spoken calmly).
im a student in enschede and i have heard so many people (locals and other dutch) say twents is just a dialect of dutch. its interesting how much old stigma affects people's mindset today.
Dat is een goeie zaak! Honderden jaren aan Saxisch erfgoed, daar mag je trots op zijn! Dat is in goeie saak! Hûnderten jierren oan Saksysk erfskip, dêr meie je grutsk op wêze!
I loved this. Being British/Swedish, having grown up in the Netherlands and then having lived 10 years in German speaking countries, this was totally fascinating! I loved seeing the reconstruction in Proto-Germanic.I look forward to your future videos!
What do you make of Swiss German? I was born in Germany and have lived in the UK for the last 35 years or so (not technically bi-lingual but close enough I guess). Still, I can’t understand spoken Dutch (although I can read it) but even then, I’d say I understand more Dutch than Swiss German.
@@ralphhebgen7067 I can follow Swiss German well enough, except, I’ve found, when in a crowd of drunk Swiss at a bar! 😂 I think the mix of Dutch, German and having got used to Alsatian when living in Strasbourg helps. That said, there’s no way I can speak it!
@@milyrouge 👍 I find I understand Swiss German best when I am at a Swiss bar and it is ME who is drunk. 😂
@@ralphhebgen7067 That I can agree with! 😊
Since a number of people have commented regarding the origin of the word “dance”, I thought I’ll write a detailed comment to explain it. Firstly, linguists are certain that the word “dance” we use in the modern Germanic languages is borrowed from French. The word “dance” only appeared in each of the Germanic languages fairly late in history until after that language had had substantial contact with French who already had that word. For example, the word “dance” only first appeared in English around the 13th century (see e.g. Oxford English Dictionary), and only in German around the 12th century. We don’t find the word in Old English or Old High German. Similarly for other Germanic languages. But where did the French word come from? The Oxford Dictionary said the English word is borrowed from French, while the French word is of unknown origin. Similarly, the most authoritative etymology dictionary for German, that of Kluge/Seebold (Etymologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache), also said its origin is uncertain. Some dictionaries, mostly the older dictionaries, suggested with much reservation (e.g. saying “perhaps from” rather than “from”) that the French word might have been borrowed from the Frankish words *dintjan or *þansōn (the fact that two different Frankish words were suggested by different dictionaries indicate how uncertain this is; also note the * here, these Frankish words here are in fact unattested). The claim that the word come from Frankish *þansōn (Old High German dansôn) was suggested by the philologist Friedrich Christian Diez (1794-1876), and as you can see from the dates it’s now very outdated scholarship. Up to date academic scholarships have long rejected this. Why? Even when someone mispronounces a foreign word, they tend to mispronounce it in a predictable and identifiable way, that’s why you can tell from someone’s foreign accent where they’re from. Linguists have studied these kinds of sound change in detail. And the word “dance” as appear in Old French is not what one would expect if it’s indeed borrowed from the Frankish word *þansōn, in particular the “nc” [nts] in Old French would not result from “ns” in þansōn. Furthermore, the fit of meaning is not good, *þansōn doesn’t mean “dance” in Frankish, but rather it means “to pull or stretch” (why would the French import a word that doesn’t even mean “dance” to mean “dance”?) Whilst not impossible, all of this circumstantial evidence makes the claim that the Frankish *þansōn being the origin of “dance” not very likely to be true. The other suggestion *dintjan is also similarly unsatisfactory, hence all the best-informed authorities today says that the origin of the word is unclear - in addition to the Oxford Dictionary and Kluge/Seebold, such is also the view of top linguists in the field today like Don Ringe. When you check dictionaries like Kluge/Seebold for German or like the Oxford Dictionary, make sure to check the current edition that’s up to date, not the 19th century copyright-free edition that you’ll find online in like wikisource. It’s probably easier to find the 19th century edition on the internet for the simple reason that they’re now copyright free, but if you rely on them your knowledge will be more than a century out of date.
I could imagine that the old germanic word for dance would be pushed aside into related, but different meaning. A bit like with soup and broth. Soup clearly comes from french, but broth has a related meaning. So looking for words with a similar meaning that exist in all (or at least some) of the germanic languages might be a way to figure out the old germanic word for dance.
some french bloke just probably made it up and everyone agreed to use it to mean dance
From the sources I've seen, *þansōn is still pretty popular, and it's more attested in other IE languages. Also, the meaning is more "extend oneself" which I can see as shifting to mean "to dance". A similar extended root in the Italic languages came to mean "to have" from "to extend". Semantic shifts happen, sometimes big ones, over time. I haven't seen any sources say that *þansōn is, no pun intended, a stretch.
@@Theo-oh3jk Probably like how the kids use the word "literally" now to NOT mean literally, but more hyperbole.
Soupe and Plan are also of French origin.
I've heard a little bit of Dutch from a game I play. As an native English speaker, you either understand exactly what someone is saying, or you have no clue. It's a pretty good middle-ground between English and German.
The evolution of languages is such a fascinating topic.
The philologists had a better grasp of development. "Evolution" is a fraught word and should probably not be used for languages.
@@mikemondano3624Its literally evolution. It's not just a biological term. Also it's only "fraught" to religious fundamentalists.
@@davidn4956 Yes, "evolution" means the same as "change". It never implies improvement. Most people now associate it with biology (which makes it fraught, though your mention of religion is puzzling) and that was my reason, but it does indeed not have that sole usage to the literate.
@@mikemondano3624 Not puzzling at all: it's only religious fundamentalists that deny evolution in biology. That said, "evolution of languages" is a quite common way of expressing it, and not "fraught" at all.
I remember the first time I visited Amsterdam with my friends and the local news was on the tv in our hotel room. As we were watching, we all the oddest feeling that we "felt like" we understood even though it was complete jibberish to us. The best way we could describe that feeling was Dutch sounded like "another" English but we just didn't know any of the words. The music of the language felt very comfortable to us. It felt like we understood eventhough we didn't, if that makes sense.
When I was as a kid we had Dutch neighbors and I got that same impression that I could almost understand. But my family had been in Germany a few years before and German words were thrown around here and there. They taught me to count to ten in German and of course WW II had stimulated so much German in films and TV, so everyone had some German vocabulary.
Last year I was in Portugal and chatting with another Dutch person who was also on an exchange just like I was at the time, when I went back to where I was sitting I started talking to this British girl and she seemed very confused. She was overhearing our conversation thinking it was English but couldn't grasp any of it! However, as a Dutch person this is very hard to fathom, haha.
It's like Hungarian and Finnish. Hungarians and Finns partly have the same ancestors, namely Huns, who separated after Attilla's defeat on the "Catalunian Fields". Some of the Huns moved to the southeast, to "Pannonia", the other part moved to Scandinavia and helped shape today's Finnish language. Therefore, the Hungarian and Finnish languages have the same sound (syntax), but different words.
@@rolandstoger4925 Very interesting!!
Now all you need is to have a beer or two, shut down concious thought and let your brain do the work. It will click all of a sudden.
As a northern German with mostly high but also a bit low German background, i love to tell the anecdote how i once stood in some queue at a festival and tried to listen to the groups of people before and behind me. It took a while, but i could mostly understand what they were saying, especially the one group. When i listened closer, i realized the group i had understood worse were speaking some swiss variety of German, while the ones i had understood much better were dutch. Knowing English, Low German and High German really gives away a lot of dutch, while only my high German had such close relations to Swiss German
I am French and passionate about Germanic languages, I have been studying them for over 20 years. Thank you for this very good, very interesting video.
This example sentence is seriously interesting. I’m native Dutch, speak english and can understand german. Dutch, German and English in ur example was literally translated word for word 100%. Not even a conceptual slight difference in any of these words translated. Its really interesting indeed
Yes - it's probably because they are some of the most basic words and ideas in our languages, stemming from a time when all of our northern European ancestors were flea-bitten barbarians living near streams in the woods.
@@johnhunt1931That is some amusing imagery.
@@johnhunt1931hey some things never change. The Germanic people like their soup, like their beer, suffer the winter (historically speaking), and enjoy singing and dancing. Seems pretty on-brand to me! Kinda wholesome to think if things really hit the fan and we all ended up in an agrarian society again that we could pretty much pick up where we left off from a language pov.
@@JMurph2015 if that happens, you realize that language will fragment again from the stable linguistic nations we have now right? standard language would cease to exist and these languages would no longer be held together by a common state or culture and would drift apart rapidly in every region since communication would be extremely local
It always kills me that North Germanic speakers call beer öl, which is oil in German. Those crazy vikings get drunk on lamp fuel, haha.
Hey, it's not just us! The English call it that too sometimes: Ale!
Dutch expression: In de olie zijn. = Being drunk.
@@dutchman7623Are you sure you’re qualified to speak on this Mr. dutchman7623? lol
@@user-id9bn1ic9v Any Dutchman is qualified to speak about alcoholism
@@GustavSvardInterestingly, while most Germans call beer "Bier", we also have some regional or slang words, like "Schoppe". But in the Low German dialect my grandmother had spoken, beer was also called "Alus", which sounds far closer to ale or øl.
When I have been to Cape Town in 2022, I met a girl from Denmark and onwe from Luxemburg. We went out with a group of South Africans, both black and white, and an Englishman. For some reason we come to talk about language and the guys didn't beliexe that Luxemburgish was a language. And then we started talking, she in Luxemburgish and I in High German and we could hold a conversation quite well. At one point the Danish Girl also took part in it, speaking Danish. The Danish and the Luxemburgish girl had slight problems understanding each other, but we still could hold up the conversation. The South Africans and the English guy were baffled and accused us of faking it all *lol*
Dutch is much easier to understand as a person that has no second language. English is the only language I speak fluently and it’s kind of crazy how Dutch is understandable
well, this specific paragraph in Dutch at least.
The “homey” words tend to be very close between Germanic languages, which is why these sentences were constructed for demonstration.
Dutch is kind of like the bridge between German and English, isn't it?
Lol! I love it. The Dutch is 100% clear. I remember when I went to Amsterdam and the weather channel was talking about storms "aan de kust" and it was like it could have been some dialect of UK English; not even a different language at all.
I was thinking the same, I can understand this!
It goes both ways- as a dutch person, learning English was very easy for me! I will say this person spoke very clearly and slowly and with a very "standard hollands" accent, so with the over 250 dialects in NL it would not be as easy to understand if you went elsewhere in the country, much like some regional UK accents require more active listening for me to understand haha
@@cf6517 You and me both! The Geordies and the Scouse and the Scots... I can barely understand some of them. It's easier to understand Dutch!
This video was fantastic, it really demonstrates the ineligibility that English *does* have with other languages, which is usually quite hard to come by.
"Ineligibility"? I'm sorry my friend, I think you have a small typing error. Did you mean "intelligibility"?
@@goldeneddiehaha
@@goldeneddiehe said what he said 😤
@@goldeneddiena he he meant inegustability
@@goldeneddieheh...ironic
The Low Saxon sentence shocked me! 😮 Wow. I had no idea it was that similar to English. I also had no idea it was that phonetically different from German. Damn I JUST settled on deciding to learn French instead of German, but this video almost makes me want to reconsider. The sound of German literally relaxes me. French has been an acquired taste. I’ll admit I like it the more I study it. That in mind, your ending made me burst out a chuckle because it felt like you were speaking directly to me! 😅 Hats off to you for compiling this.
loow saxon is definitely the worlds most beautiful language :))
Interesting! I am from Germany and I really like French, it is so pleasant to listen to. But it took some years in school to get to an at least intermediate level. Last year, I started to learn Dutch, just for fun. I could hardly believe how easy I got into it, there are so many similarities. Leuk! 😃
I'm an American natively speaking English with only a passing exposure to spoken German. My initial understanding of the dialogue in Dutch and in German was that it's winter and a snowstorm is coming. I'm invited to the speakers house were I'm welcome and may have liquor (the extra words ahead of water made me think "specIal" water such as aqua vitae, spirits etc) beer, milk or cow, which I took to mean the meat, and to dance and sing, and there is a hot meal (Taking soep to mean supper or meal). Close enough I suppose to accept an invitation to party rather than freeze sober and hungry alone lol.
Afrikaans: Die koue winter is naby, 'n sneeustorm sal kom. Kom in my warm huis, my vriend. Welkom. Kom hier, sing en dans, eet en drink. Dit is my plan. Ons het water, bier, en melk vars van die koei. O', en warm sop!
love them afrikaander sneeuw storms ;)
amazing!
I think Low German is very close to being understandable for Dutch speakers, probably easier than Frisian. I remember having no problem reading the passages in Plattdüütsch in Die Buddenbrooks.
can confirm as a dutch speaker
Manntje, Manntje, Timpe Te, Buttje, Buttje inne See, myne Fru de Illsebill will nich so, as ik wol will. (The only platt sentence that i know)
Well, Dutch used to be Low German.
@@mikaelbohman6694 Dutch is Low Franconian, not Low German/Saxon.
My grandma grew up speaking Low German and had no problem communicating with our Dutch neighbors across the border.
Its also cool when you notice the language people speak around you changing. I noticed it with the word "scam" which seemingly everyone started using in Austria since the German word for it "Betrug" doesn't roll of the tongue all that well. Especially when I noticed people who don't know english started using it I was like - damn, this is actually happening.
English has many double cognates of Norse and Old English origin, such as "skirt" and "shirt". "Scam" is a cognate of "sham", which means (more or less) fake. Then there's "scatter" and "shatter", "ship" and "skiff" (or skip, which gives us skipper), etc.
Here’s the Swiss-German version (Aargau dialect): De chalt winter isch nöch, en Schneesturm wird cho. Chum i mis warme hus, min Fründ. Wilkomme! Chum hi, sing und tanz, iss und trink. Das isch min Plan. Mir händ Wasser, Bier und Milch früsch vo de Chue. Oh, und warmi Suppe!
One issue I noticed with the Icelandic translation; “Volga” means something more like lukewarm, and isn’t usually something you’d describe a fresh meal as. “Heit súpa” quite frankly works much better. Other than that, fantastic video! Edit: we also still have a pretty commonly used cognate of “et” in the form of “éta”, which means practically the same thing but is more animalistic in tone.
That makes sense, "hot" has a positive meaning in English mostly in wintertime for some reason (hot soup, tea, cocoa, bath, shower, etc.). I wonder why...
@@brendangordon2168 No doubt an association unique to English
@@brendangordon2168 Agreed. In my Scots translation, I used "het" rather than "warm".
Fun video. I recall my uncle telling me he once had a job translating Danish into Norwegian. There was almost nothing to change!
Well, bokmål Norsk is essentially Danish, from the time when Norway was under Danish control.
@@WouterCloetensonly true for old versions of Bokmål. New versions look just as dyslexic to a Dane as Nynorsk does.
I’m bilingual, English and German, and without ever studying it, I can understand a substantial amount of Dutch. Those three in particular are closer to each other than some of the Alemannic Dialects are to Standard German.
I have always thought that if you ignore spelling, and just listen, a lot of Dutch is quite understandable to an English speaker, especially after a day or two of’ tuning in’. Thanks for proving my hunch!
Damn. When the video started I was like "wow, that dialect DOES sound like English". And then the actual example played.
This was a great video! At first I thought the Dutch portion at the beginning was some odd dialect of English, which really just went to accentuate your point. Well done!
I*am Dutch I have heard a Dutch Linguistic professor once say that Dutch is basically a dialect of German. I have the impression that for a Dutch person it is often easier to read old English, and sometimes old German, but less so, than a native from those respective countries. Especially when we voice the tekst.
@@ttaibe It's really condescending to frame it like that, it's true that German, Dutch and English all share a common ancestor, but none of them are dialects of any of the others, it's like one of the brothers in the family trying to claim they are the dad, it's just... well, maybe possible in Alabama, but basically a blatantly false assertion made with the intent to claim superiority
@@rorychivers8769 it is, or was, the point of view of an academic. He was talking technically. He was not saying one was less than an other. Or one is superior. I think it is only condescending if you think attach emotional value to it. I am not a linguïst. But I kind of get what he meant. Btw, I am Dutch, and so was he. So if we are not offended... Is it really?
@@ttaibe My point is he is wrong, Dutch is not a dialect of German, Dutch and German are descendants of a common language that has long since been lost, it's a subtle but very important difference. It is very important to challenge this kind of casual chauvinism, no matter how harmless it seems, before it spirals out of control, and people start saying things like "well Ukrainian is just a peasant dialect of Russian", which leads to ... predictable results
@@rorychivers8769 I get what you mean. No need to call anyone condescending though.
I tried translating the original sentence to ancient gothic. this is probably full of mistakes but I tried. I think it should be somewhat accurate and it still demonstrates this germanic connection pretty well: Þata kalþso wintrus ist nehwa, ain snaiwskura haban qimda. Qimais in meins razn, meins friends. Wailaqimaza! Qimais her, liuþais jah plinsjais, matjais jah drikais. Þata ist meins plan. Weis haba wato, alu, jah miluks frisrsa fram þo kos. Ah, jah warma bruþ.
This would be virtually gibberish normally, but knowing the text in other languages, everything is actually very clear and recognizable. I wonder how it would be when heard; a word like "Wailaqimaza" might sound more like "wellekomen" than it looks when written
You mostly used the right words, but not the correct grammar. My translation may not be perfect either, but I've studied Gothic a bit, so here's my version: Kalds wintrus nehwa ist, aina snaiwaskura qimith. Qim in mein warm razn, frijond. Waila andanems sijais! Qim hidre, liutho jah plinsei, matei jah drigk! Thata garēhsns meina ist. Weis wato, *aluth jah miluk friska fram *kowa habam. Ah, warm bruth auk. A few explanatory comments: 1. We don't know the words for "welcome", "beer" and "cow" afaik - for welcome, you could say "be well received!" (as I did), while the direct translation would be "wailaquman!" (but we don't know if this existed). For beer and cow, I just used the most probable reconstructions (we would know "calf", but not "cow" btw). 2. For "plan" and "friend" you just used the English word it seems, despite there being attestations which are clearly different in Gothic. 3. The word order is usually such that the verb comes last. 4. You for some reason used the (correct) optative forms as imperatives, which is possible but unnecessarily complicated. 5. If you wanted to say "a snowstorm has come", that would be not "haban qimda" but "habaith quman" I think
@@martinmartin8940 thank you for the correction 👍
It will sound harsh, but as a German speaker, thankfully, I am allowed to sound harsh: I just realized I'm really not mourning Gothic.
@@martinmartin8940 Interesting. It sounds almost like Germanic with Arabic sounds.
17:40 Icelandic has often different words to say the same thing, with sometimes just slightly different meaning. So in the case of “borðaðu”, you could also say “étu” (imperative of the word “éta”). The first is seen as more polite, as the other is more crude. But “éta” is a common word used often.
There is also its old form ‘eta’.
So interesting. Thank you! When my Dutch husband first came to Canada and took English literature courses, he said he understood Chaucer better than Catcher in the Rye!
Dat verbaast me niets.
There's a video on youtube where speakers of English try to understand Dutch sentences. The one guy who knew Old English got them all right. I then found it much easier to make out Anglo-Saxon by code switching with Dutch rather than with modern English.
Old english is easier to understand for a dutch person than old dutch is.
🤔That’s so interesting!
What @@geeache1891 says is true. ‘Old Dutch’ is basically Old Rhine Frankish, whereas in Middle and Modern Dutch there is a thick Frisian substrate, making it much closer to Old English, while Modern English has a heavy infusion of Old Norse and Middle French, removing it further from Frisian and Dutch. For the same reason it is easier for a Dutch speaker (and even easier for a Frisian speaker) to understand Old English than for an English speaker.
This is fascinating. I'm a native English speaker, but I speak fluent Spanish as well, so I can understand most other Romance languages very easily. The Romance languages are probably a little more closely related to each other than are the modern Germanic languages, but this is nonetheless impressive. Well done!
Well that would make sence, since Romance is just one branch of the Italic language family. All other branches have died out. It's more accurate to compare West Germanic or North Germanic to the Romance languages. If you want to compare with Germanic languages as a whole, you'd have to look at differences not between Romance languages, but between Latin and other Italic languages.
@@buurmeisje Good point!
Very interesting, thanks! Here it is in one of the newest Germanic languages, Afrikaans: Die koue winter is naby. ‘n Sneeustorm sal kom. Kom in my warm huis my vriend. Kom hier, sing en dans, eet en drink. Dit is my plan. Ons het water, bier en melk, vars van die koei. O, en warm sop. Ps: Afrikaans is the 5th most spoken Germanic language, it has more speakers than Danish, Norwegian, Low German and Frisian. It is obviously closest to Dutch, but a dialgoue going quite a bit further than this, once in the house enjoying the warmth, with West Frisian and to a lesser extent Low German speakers would be quite easy to imagine.
The word for dance is not necessarily irretrievably lost in Old Germanic languages. To dance is "wairpan" in Gothic, cognate with "warp", with the root wer in PIE, meaning to turn and bend. This might have only existed in Gothic though, not in other Germanic languages.
Apparently that means to throw, but I could see it. I also saw frisky as an option that was loaned into French.
FWIW Wiktionary states that the French word dancer comes from the Frankish *þansōn (“to draw, pull, stretch out, gesture”)from Proto-West Germanic *þansōn, ultimately from Proto-Indo-European *tens- (“to stretch, pull”).
I love turning and bending
sorry, where did you find that? I looked up 'wairpan' in several dictionaries (not the latest one admittedly) and I have also checked most instances of 'wairpan' in the wulfila bible... seems to mean 'throw, cast' in every instance. Only found plinsjan (e.g. Matthew 11:17, "swiglodedum izwis jah ni plinsideduþ", English: We have piped unto you, and ye have not danced. I found 'laiks' for 'the dance', but 'laikan' rather means 'frolic, jump around'. Not wairpan...
That last part was so uncalled for xD Anyway, this gotta be one of the most concise and interesting linguistic video I have ever seen! Even as a Southeast Asian, I can appreciate the intricate relationships of these European languages. Well done!
I am not surprised how close these three languages, Dutch, German and English, but it is surprising how close Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are to English.
It's the area the vikings traveled around. "how close" it is, you cannot say from these samples, cause this is artificially constructed to look close. But 30% of common vocabulary from ENglish to German is often quoted. Common more in the phonetic sense, writing might be quiet different. Like from door to Tor.
It shouldn't be. About half of England was the Danelaw in the 9th and 10th centuries AD. I visited my brother, who was living in Denmark, some 30 years ago, and instantly felt very much at home. I have to say, though, that as an Englishman the least "foreign" country I have ever visited is Sweden (where I attended a friend's wedding in 2000), although that situation is likely to have changed since for demographic reasons.
@@Khayyam-vg9fwyeah theres more pajeets and jamals rn
We have "come ben the hoose" in Scots which is a lot closer to Dutch than standard English.
In my Geordie dialect, hoos, and hyem for house and home are every day words.
Scottish and Dutchies traded more then the English. Therefor more Dutch words ended up in Scots.
@@dutchskyrimgamer.youtube2748 I think (Germanic) Scots from the Lowlands is simply more archaic in pronunciation than (southern) England English (closer to Middle English) while also getting less influence from French, therefore it's more intelligable for EVERY speaker of a continental western Germanic language.
I also thought the Norse extract had a Scots feel to it, in the intonation.
Whether the Scots like it or not, a large proportion of them are Anglo-Saxon. When a Scottish person says 'wee' as in little, he should remember this is an Old English word.
The Dutch and Norwegian sounded downright Scottish! Which makes sense, since Scottish accents are rather conservative, and most sound shifts in English happened down in England itself.
That makes in why I don’t understand them at all!
The Scots leid is much closer to other germanic languages than English. I always call English a dialect of Scots lol
I was thinking the same thing!!! Glad I wasn't the only one
I lived in Holland a while and never thought it sounded Scottish at all (I have one parent from Scotland too). But my ears immediately pricked up hearing the Norwegian, different words but definitely a Scottish sounding twang to it. Fascinating stuff.
I recognized the "fra" in the Norse languages as being in common with Scots.
I love this video. It makes me smarter than I am :). It shows me that can (potentially) understand several languages I didn't know I could. It is interesting to me, as an English speaker that, I can decipher some romance languages based upon the Latin roots, but German has always seemed so alien. It also makes clear to me why, when I spent several weeks in The Netherlands, I sometimes thought I could almost understand something of what was said by those around me who were speaking Dutch. Thank you.
I'm a native English speaker, who learnt Afrikaans, then German (that was very difficult). By the time of conversational proficiency in German, my Afrikaans was fluent. I then basically learnt conversational Dutch in 6 months using Duo Lingo, and virtually fluent in written form. Due to lack of immersion in Dutch media, I struggle with accents from Friesland and Groningen (although my Overijssel grandmother also struggles with understanding them). My German accent understanding is more universal.
i think in general German is the most beautiful of Germanic languages
One time I was watching an interview on the Netherlands Bach Society channel and I realised that I could understand a large portion of the Dutch dialogue without having to read the subtitles. It really blew my mind. This video is excellent.
As far as I know, the old French word from which we derive "to dance" and its counterparts today, was actually loaned from old Frankish *dansian, which in return comes from proto Germanic *þansōnan. This would mean it is actually a Germanic word, though it could very well be that this is no longer the concensus at this point. Edit: The author of the video has pointed out the outdated nature of this notion in a reply to this comment!
I am not a linguist but I was thinking the same thing and that French borrowed the word from the Frankish. The Romance languages are descendants of Latin dialects which have words such as "saltare" and "ballo" (becoming "bailar" in Spanish) for dance.
@@JohnScribbler Yup, in my native tongue German we still have words deriving from the proto Germanic *þansōnan: "(auf-)gedunsen" which means something like "bloated" and "Gedöns" which translates roughly to "stuff" and in certain contexts to "fuss".
Thanks for your comment! Firstly, linguists are certain that the word “dance” we use in the modern Germanic languages is borrowed from French. The word “dance” only appeared in each of the Germanic languages fairly late in history until after that language had had substantial contact with French who already had that word. For example, the word “dance” only first appeared in English around the 13th century (see e.g. Oxford English Dictionary), and only in German around the 12th century. We don’t find the word in Old English or Old High German. Similarly for other Germanic languages. But where did the French word come from? The Oxford English Dictionary said the English word is borrowed from French, while the French word is of unknown origin. Similarly, the most authoritative etymology dictionary for German, that of Kluge/Seebold, also said its origin is uncertain. Some dictionaries, mostly the older dictionaries, suggested with much reservation (e.g. saying “perhaps from” rather than “from”) that the French word might have been borrowed from the Frankish words *dintjan or *þansōn (the fact that two different Frankish words were suggested by different dictionaries indicate how uncertain this is; also note the * here, these Frankish words here are in fact unattested). The claim that the word come from Frankish *þansōn (Old High German dansôn) was suggested by the philologist Friedrich Christian Diez (1794-1876), and as you can see from the dates it’s now very outdated scholarship. Up to date academic scholarships have long rejected this. Why? Even when someone mispronounces a foreign word, they tend to mispronounce it in a predictable and identifiable way, that’s why you can tell from someone’s foreign accent where they’re from. Linguists have studied these kinds of sound change in detail. And the word “dance” as appear in Old French is not what one would expect if it’s indeed borrowed from the Frankish word *þansōn, in particular the “nc” [nts] in Old French would not result from “ns” in þansōn. Furthermore, the fit of meaning is not good, *þansōn doesn’t mean “dance” in Frankish, but rather it means “to pull or stretch” (why would the French import a word that doesn’t even mean “dance” to mean “dance”?) Whilst not impossible, all of this circumstantial evidence makes the claim that the Frankish *þansōn being the origin of “dance” unlikely to be true. The other suggestion *dintjan is also similarly unsatisfactory, hence all the best-informed authorities today says that the origin of the word is unclear - in addition to the Oxford English Dictionary and Kluge/Seebold, such is also the view of top linguists in the field today like Don Ringe. When you check dictionaries like Kluge/Seebold for German or like the Oxford English Dictionary, make sure to check the current edition that’s up to date, not the 19th century copyright-free edition that you’ll find online in like wikisource. It’s probably easier to find the 19th century edition on the internet for the simple reason that they’re now copyright free, but if you rely on them your knowledge will be more than a century out of date.
@@lamkingming Wow, thank you for your extensive explanation and the advice on sources! This really goes to show how information can still spread despite being long outdated and how easy it is to get things wrong when only doing surface level research, which you clearly haven't.
It's funny that English speakers understand Dutch as well, because to me as a German, Dutch sounds like someone speaking German after having a stroke.
The Dutch spoken in this video is certain dialect from the most populated area of the Netherlands, and they use the very recently imported American R. There are is a massive part outside of that where people use the rolling R and also a large part in the south that uses the throat southern-German R.
If the Norwegian speaker had spoken in his actual dialect instead of Dano-Norwegian it might have been something like this: "Den kalde vintern e nære, det vil bli snøstorm. Kom inn i det varme huset mitt. Velkommen, kom inn, søng og dans, et og drikk. Det e planen min. Vi har vatn, øl og melk fersk fra kua. Åh, og varm sup."
With "Dano_norwegian" you mean Bokmal I guess ? What version of Norwegian did you show here ?
@@mortalwombat2001 Probably that's what he meant. But of course Norwegian is a language of vast dialect differences, and it's not right to portray one to be more significant than the others. However, for simplicity's sake, in a video like this, I think it's OK that they use something approaching "Urban East-Norwegian". And I'm not East-Norwegian myself. The only thing I found puzzling in the video is that they used the verb "ete" instead of "spise" in Norwegian. Both verbs exist, but "spise" is the normal one for almost all native speakers, whereas "ete" is more poetic or old-fashioned. In Danish, they chose "spise", but I believe they also have the verb "æde". So it's a bit inconsistent.
@@eckligtThat's interesting, in German we have "essen" and "speisen" as well. But "essen" is the basic and "speisen" would be the fancier and more old fashioned one.
how do you know that would have been his regional dialect?
@@GroovingPict the accent is very recognizable
The French dialogue sounds like something a French person would say!
Do you mean : arrogant ?
@@joeie5979 You said it, not me!
@@joeie5979 ah, a french word!
I live in a small village in the Netherlands and my grandpa used to tell me that there is a part of Germany were they told him to just speak his dialect. Those 2 dialect were so alike it was as they spoke the same language
I recently started learning Danish. I'm amazed how much I'm able to understand without actually knowing much of the language, just because I'm a native German speaker with fluent English knowledge. It's a really interesting language.
I am learning Danish for 20 months now as a native German. Indeed reading and speaking Danish is now more or less easy, but I still having large problems to understand fast spoken Danish.
I recently found a song that, as an intermediate German speaker, I could almost understand. Her voice was a bit hard to figure out in the first place, but I kept hearing words that I knew. From the picture, she was a black woman, so I thought it was really cool that an immigrant (or daughter of immigrants) to the Germanic areas learned the language and sung in it. Turns out it was Afrikaans. Which is a combination of Dutch, German, a bit of English, and local African languages. Was pretty cool. I always wanted to learn Afrikaans, just never got around to it.
One note, we do have a word in danish that is like "et" (to eat), and that is æd, (pronounced similarily), its a synonym to spise (which was in the video). But is mainly used with a negative conotation in todays spoken danish. (It would be similar to saying "devour your food").
Yes when I was composing the dialogue I was advised by Danes not to use æd due to its negative conotation (which doesn't fit the friendly context of my dialogue). Interestingly, in Norwegian they have both words like in Danish, but unlike Danish "et" doesn't carry any negative conotation, hence I used that in Norwegian!
In German you can also say "speisen" instead of "essen" (both the German and Danish word are cognate with "spice" believe it or not) but it has very formal connotation sort of like "dine" in English. Although you could also use it ironically I guess. Say when you're tucking into your kebab and canned beer on the park bench.
@@lamkingming It might vary by dialect, but as a native Norwegian speaker, I understand "ete" as something more vulgar -- but also poetic or archaic. I think the situation in Danish and Norwegian is basically the same. Not my area of expertise, but I think a lot of biblical terminology also uses ete/æde, in the sense similar to English "imbibe".
@@eckligt Very interesting. In German the vulgar version of "essen" would be "fressen" if applied to humans.
@@magmalinI can not agree. „Fressen“ is almost always used exclusively for animals, cattle or pets. It is mostly, at least where I live, very rude to say „fressen“ regarding humans. It may be used insultingly to note that someone eats very quickly or immorally. eat and drink Essen und Trinken (neutral, formal) Speis und Trank (elegant, extravagant or ironic) Fraß und Suff (vulgar, insultingly or ironic)
When I heard that first sentence in Dutch, I almost thought you were going to say it was Frisian...maaaaybe even an old form of Scots. I didn't expect Dutch to still be THAT close.
As an English speaker learning Norwegian this is hilarious how easy I can understand it. This makes it seem like my studying is obsolete 😂😂
I recently learned some Dutch as a German speaker and this helped me to understand some of phenomena I experienced while learning. Thanks for posting this.
As a biologist it is always fascinating how linguists face such similar problems as we do when dealing with evolution. Great video!
The two usually go hand in hand.
@@fullmetaltheorist Not really, biological evolution is usually much slower. (Except for virus and bacteria adaptions to vaccins and drugs, or forced evolution by breeding.)
My background is in phylogenetics. The 'evolution' of languages fascinates me as well! I have been learning a few different languages and I am very interested in the shared patterns between them
I’d guess explaining how a fish becomes a human is much harder.
@@anglishbookcraft1516 A fish never became "a human" either... During millions of years, certain kinds of fish slowly and successively became (partly) land living creatures. These are now extinct, but gave rise to early reptiles, some of which then developed into bird-like or lizard like forms. Others developed into simple early mammals, again during millions of years. From that point on however, the evolution of primates, apes and humans was pretty straight forward, although very slow.
Here is the dialog in Yiddish (in both Hebrew and Latin script) דער קאלדע װינטער אוז נאָענט, אַ שנײ-שטורעם װעט קומען. קום אין מײַן װאַרעם הויז, מײַן פרײַנד. װילקום! קום אהער, זינג און טאַנץ, עס און טרינק. דאָז איז מײַן פּלאַן. מיר האָבן וואסער, ביר און מילך פריש פון די קו. אוי, און װאַרעם זופּ! Der kalde vinter iz noent, a shney-shturem vet kumen. Kum in man varem hoyz, man fraynd. Vilkum! Kum aher, zing un tantz, es un trink. Doz iz man plan. Mir haben vaser, bir un milkh frish fun di ku. Oy, un varem zup!
"yiddish" is just butchered german
Oy vey, and warm soup
Fantastic, thrilling seminar on the wonderful Germanic spoken tongues and folk.
Frequently both the French and German may be used in English at the same time. For example, we may have the Germanic "Hearty Welcome', where we grill Bratwurst, and serve beer to our guests in a homey setting. Or, we may have the French, "Cordial Reception", where everyone wears a gown or tuxedo, and drinks champaign, and the Governor comes out to meet everyone, in the grand ballroom of the Ritz Hotel.
This is basically snobbiness which has its roots in the Norman invasion and the usurping of the saxon nobility with a French speaking upper class high class - the people everyone wanted to emulate to get. The fact that it still goes ok is ridiculous. In Ireland in the last 20 years the people now use the words crepes and goujons to denote pancakes and deep fried chicken. It’s an obfuscation exercise precisely because the Latin equivalent does not mean anything in English and your doctor wouldn’t complain at you for eating greasy food if you give it an exotic name. It’s essentially both a dishonest and classist action. Give me a Germanic word any day
Great vid! It reminded me that Scots (and of course the modern Geordie dialect) both come from the Northumbrian language. My old Professor told me a story once about a Union delegates conference held in Newcastle (pre-WWII) that had representatives from Scandinavia attending. They required translators for the proceedings of course, but, when they adjourned to the local pub after, they were astonished to find that after a few ales they understood each other quite well (especially the Norwegians). I suppose King Cnut's North Sea Empire of England, Norway, & Denmark (with parts of modern Scotland & Sweden) has left echoes down a thousand years!
Here's the dialogue from the beginning in Afrikaans: "Die koue winter is naby, 'n sneeustorm sal kom. Kom in my warm huis, my vriend. Welkom! Kom hier, sing en dans, eet en drink. Dit is my plan. Ons het water, bier, en melk vars van die koei. O, en warm sop!"
I am a German and often go to the lowlands with some dutch friends. When I am too drunk to notice if I am speaking german or english it comes out as dutch
The evolution of languages is such a fascinating topic. It's like genetic evolution. Separated, they evolve but share some similar characteristics. The longer the separation the less alike they will be. But there could be small tells that they have a distant common ancestor
Yes there are lots of parallels to genetic evolution, but there are also lots of differences which give language evolution its own interesting dynamics. For example, different species can't exchange genes (if they can't interbreed), but different languages can always exchange words and even grammar!
Macro-evolution is impossible because the mind is free to think ergo is not a slave, which makes it not a slave to physics, which means it isn't physical (is not the brain), and death cannot end the spiritual mind. Atheists confuse correlation with causation when they cite brain scans like confusing the player with the video game controller. "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God." A language can be created by intelligent design. Coining of words is an example of that on a tiny scale. Atheists have bullshit explanations for why language families have no common root. They need many miracles whereas the Bible has one.
@@lamkingming I've never thought about it this way. Thanks for the wonderful insight.
@@lamkingming it may not be similar to evolution of animals or plants, however bacterial evolution is quite similar - bacteria often exchange genes across species, and change rapidly through mutation. Languages also "mutate" a lot, so it seems to fit perfectly
@@lamkingming Depending on the time of separation between populations, organisms can evolve separate phenotypes and behaviors and yet still interbreed enough to cause slight gene flow between the groups. For a popular example, see humans, neanderthals, and denosivans. So not too different after all.
It also explains why the Dutch and Scandinavians speak the best English.
It doesn't quite explain why they speak it better than the English do
@@9nikolai It kinda does. The English know English so well that we can ruin it all we like and still understand each other
@@jaffa3717 That's what I love about English actually. I can ruin it just whatever I like and its confusionary understandability just gives le goof vibes rather than inducing completely bazonkers. In bunches of other languages, nonsense is never understood, but in English there's no such thing as playing too much with words.
There is a formal grammar to English but it just doesn't matter as much if it is followed or not as in other languages. The Danelaw left a lasting division in the way the language is spoken in the north and east versus the more Anglo-Saxon west and south. Then the Norman invasion affected the grammar again with formal dialects and cryptolects of English having very Romance-influenced grammar, while the ordinary common English on the street was and is a never-ending negotiation between different peoples. In the 19th century there was an influx of people from various parts of Germany who spoke various forms of German. Also lots of Irish arrived in England at this time too who spoke English very differently than the native English people. Add to that the continued existence of dozens of dialects still having currency at the time it's no wonder that ordinary English people are very forgiving about grammar and don't tend to correct one another's grammar. This flexibility and high degree of intelligibility between different modes of English is what has helped English to become so widespread, plus the very large vocabulary that comes from having assimilated dozens of dialects and hundreds of loanwords from three different language families (Germanic, Romantic and Celtic).
As someone with a linguistics degree and who works in a linguistics related job, I have to say that this is top notch
I love this content, I always say this same thing. Another example is the sentence: "That is my house, my friend", which sounds almost exactly as "dat ist mijn huis, mijn vriend"
haha I actually love that kind of bullshit, so don't worry. And I tried to write it in Dutch, but I'm not very fluent, so I tend to mix it with English when I can't say something. So, perhaps I had a spelling mistake or something, I don't know @superaids1510 🤣
slavic languages have a constructed language that is mutually understandable to them all. I learned russian, and I can 100% understand the interslavic language. Really cool to see something like that for germanic languages, even if it is just an example sentence. I wonder if such a language could be constructed for germanic languages? this video makes me think yes
Yes there have been several attempts but I don’t think they’re as successful as their Slavic counterparts, mainly because of how different English is. (Might be more understandable for non English speakers?) some of these attempts are Tutonish, Folksstem, Nordien, Nordienisk, Folkspraak, Middelsprake, Sprak, Frenkisch, and Tcathan/Chathan.
no.
@@oscarthagrouchWhat is your problem
@@greasher926 Slavic languages were separated later than Germanic languages, thus they are more similar to each other.
Here is the Lord’s Prayer in Folkspraak and in comparison to English and German. English (NIV) Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name, your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. Give us today our daily bread. And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from the evil one. Folkspraak Ons Fater whem leven in der Himmel, Mai din Name werden helig, Mai din Konigdom kommen, Mai din will werden, in der Erd und in der Himmel. Geven os distdag ons Brod, Und forgiv ons sindens, samme Weg als wi forgiv dem whem eren skuld to uns. Und test os nihte, men spare os fraum der Sind. German Vater unser im Himmel, geheiligt werde dein Name; dein Reich komme; dein Wille geschehe, wie im Himmel so auf Erden. Unser tägliches Brot gib uns heute. Und vergib uns unsere Schuld, wie auch wir vergeben unsern Schuldigern; und führe uns nicht in Versuchung, sondern erlöse uns von dem Bösen.
I like Dutch and Swedish a lot. Their melody is very fine.
Melodic Dutch is spoken in the more northern parts of the Netherlands, and is ridiculed outside of it. Melodic Swedish is spoken in the large area around Stockholm, and also ridiculed outside of it. Flemish Dutch and Finnish Swedish isn’t melodic in the least. I guess there’s a fine line between cute and silly. 🙂
@@WouterCloetens We don't make fun of that accent. I have that accent myself pretty much and im from around middle Sweden but not Stockholm, but in the city. It's the "standard Swedish". Id est: around stockholm area and cities around lower middle-of Sweden. I think we make more fun of the southern Swedish, skåningar, cause that sounds ridiculous. 😂 It's spoken I think finnish Swedish is a beatuiful dialect. It sounds very cozy to me, but im Swedish. Maybe it's because I connect it to the moomins 😂
Im glad you like our language. For me as a Swedish person, I think Dutch has a lot of "Schhh" sounds? I think all of the germanic languages have their charm
@@LordOfSweden The exaggerated “sh” pronunciation is another regional thing. As Sean Connery would say: it’sch very shilly and shtrange.
@@WouterCloetensmelodic Swedish isn't made fun of, it's the nasally way of speaking that som Stockholmers have that are made fun of.
As a German who is fluent in english I understand everything. And i instantly got it was dutch , they our neibours in europe , why they sometimes understand uns and we them somehow. My Grandparents still speak lower german they born in the Frisian Area. While i speak a pretty decent high German with the most people, i fall into the common dialect we have here when i talk with friends and other locals i know. A certain Type of hessian dialect spoken by the people around Hanau /Frankfurt Area.
I'm gonna tell everyone I'm bilingual now. English/Dutch
i used to play wow in a guild with some guys from the netherlands and belgium. would say the exact same thing when i would hear them talk on voice chat. i can understand like 70% of what you guys are saying.
As a Swede I was suprised how well I understood people in Germany close to the Danish border, while I have trouble understanding Dane.
Hi! I'm from northern Germany and I can read Danish and understand a lot, but when I hear spoken Danish ... it could also be Chinese 😵😅
The Danes need to cut down on eating potatoes!
Don't worry, the *Danes* can't understrand Danish. It's fine. :p
As a native English speaker who knows a bit of German I find Danish quite easy to understand but find Swedish to be a bit challenging. Apparently most native English speakers are the opposite though, finding Swedish to be pretty easy and Danish to be extremely difficult.
I always felt that if English and German had a baby it would be Dutch.
I'll never forget the first time I overheard Frisian. I actually freaked out for a second that I was having some kind of hallucination or psychotic break because I swore they were speaking English but I didn't understand a word.
The fact that "the" isn't used in Icelandic but is used i Swedish reminds me of the dialect of swedish my grandparents speaks. They probably wouldn't say "Den kalla vintern". They could drop the "the" and smash "kalla" and "vintern" together and just say the word "kallvintern".