History Summarized: Why Is English Such A Mess?

Linguistics is fun because you wonder why LanguageTM is the way it is, then you research it, and then you realize human language is at once the Sturdiest and MOST FRAGILE thing humans have ever created.

SOURCES & Further Reading:
"Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue: The Untold History of English" by John McWhorter
Samples of text from Shakespeare's Sonnets & Plays, Folger Shakespeare Library

MUSIC:

Our content is intended for teenage audiences and up.

[OverlySarcasticProductions]

✨ VIRGO TIME ♍ The Virgo pin is available in our merch shop – The stars glow in the dark because of course they do

[sechran]

Some cultures have a lingua franca. We have a lingua Frankenstein.

[AlkronLoki]

"A Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it"
My mother, as a canadian who knew trace bits of various romantic languages once went to France for a vacation, and one time when she needed to ask a local a question, she ended up mangling bits of Spanish, Italian and French together. The guy she was asking started to say he didn't understand her, stopped and thought for a moment, then was very grumpy that he did in fact understand. I don't know if because he now had to answer a tourist's question, or that he had never considered his lovely French to be so close to Italian and Spanish. Might have been a bit of a language lesson for him that day.

[bielandreu]

1:04 "A Spanish speaker can ask a question, get an answer back in Italian, and both participants understand it"
As a Spanish speaker who has spoken with some Italians, that is an extremely optimistic statement. You can *maybe* get away with understanding about 60% of what the other is saying and fill in the blanks, if both people are willing to talk slowly and ennunciate a lot. And that estimate would probably be noticeably lower if I didn't also speak Catalan to help catch a few latin words that diverged in Spanish.

[michael-olivercousins]

9:11 "Come with me as we blame the french" is just music to my English ears.

[elliotq]

"i invite you to join me as we blame france" truly an english video for the english

[MatthewCSnow]

Oddly enough, the book Ivanhoe joked about this very topic: with how it’s the old English pig when the peasants would raise them but it’s named the French pork when the nobles ate them

[kilotun]

On the subject of gender, as a benighted Anglo Canadian trying to learn French, I asked my Franco buddy from backwoods Quebec just how the bloody hell he knows what is feminine and what is masculine. He kinda shrugged his shoulders and said "If it ends in e, go ahead and call it feminine. It's what I do when I have no idea."

[gwest]

2:16 Actually, his native name was Williame, not Guillaume, because it wasn't just Old French the Normans brought over, it was their Norman dialect with its own weird features, like retaining W where French replaced it with G (hence why we have William and Walter where French has Guillaume and Gauthier, and why we have both Norman warranty and French guarantee). It also didn't shift C to Ch like the rest of France did, which is part of why we say castle and candle instead of chastle and chandle.

[zeyalderson]

Another reason English is weird is that we love our boat idioms:
"Let's wrap this up"
"Are we all on board"
"All hands on deck"
"They're a loose canon"
and many more

[ungainlytitan]

I feel somewhat aggrieved that 16 minutes later no one has made the joke that: English is a language invented by Norman soldiers to chat up Saxon barmaids.

[cee_ves]

i once saw a video about french as the french speak it and it was totally different to how you learn it, and i was like “great, my french lessons were wasted”

then i realised that’s what people learning english feel when i say “gurl, you ate it up, no crumbs”

[rahlly]

My mom, who was a retired English teacher, loves to call our language a bastard she loves to see new people finding out how much of a mess our language is. So I'm going to show her this. The frustration in your voice was just perfect!😂

[TheAbstruseOne]

The way it was told to me, the reason English doesn't have linguistic gender is because Old Norse, Old English, and Old Norman all had grammatical gender but had different gender. And as the languages merged, people got confused because something would be masculine in one but feminine in another. So everybody collectively just went "Screw that, this is too hard!" and just got rid of it. It's why the only gendered words remaining came into the language after the 1700s, like blond(e) and fiancé(e).

[TetsuShima]

Speaking of the evolution of English, I've found some people defending the Indiana Jones 3 plot hole in which the immortal crusader perfectly understands what Indy is saying, claiming that he surely learned English while fighting with English monks during the crusades. Considering how vastly different Old English is, the Crusader should have said while meeting Indy:
"𝒲𝒽𝒶𝓉 𝓉𝒽ℯ 𝒻𝓊*𝓀 𝒶𝓇ℯ 𝓉𝒽ℴ𝓊 𝓉𝒶𝓁𝓀𝒾𝓃ℊ 𝒶𝒷ℴ𝓊𝓉, 𝓈𝒾𝓇𝓇𝒶𝒽?!"

[perogun]

there's one very common thing in languages

if reading it is hard, then the grammar is easy

but if reading it is easy, then the grammar is insane


(there are exceptions to this)

[elizaripper]

As an English and Creative Writing major, this video speaks to me. Deeply. 😭💙

[boringturtle]

As a writer, the messiness of english is what makes it so nice for telling stories. For any given concept I have *so many* synonyms to pull from (even without committing thesaurus heresy) because of all the disparate sources of the language. These words are all different lengths with different connotations and syllabic emphasis. This really opens the door for fun and creative meter for whatever you might want to say.

[thethersyde]

To quote Jay Foreman:
"To make an English language, you start out with a base of Germanic Anglo Saxon, mix in a healthy dash of Old Norse, a huge dollop of Norman French, and just a barely detectable hint of Celtic.
Stir it up for hundreds of years until the vowels have really started to shift, and there you have it. English"


Also for modern english don't forget the shortening and combining of various words that's slowly happened aswell.

[ravenpotter]

Last summer I did a study abroad in Belgium and wow Dutch was a fever dream. It felt like I was crazy reading anything. There was this sign in all the train stations that said “En, Hoe was jouw weekend” and every time I saw it I felt like I was in a fever dream because it sounded almost English but not. I mean how far into Dutch I got was like hello goodbye please and exit/ entrance. Thanks duolingo but I really didn’t study that much and I’ve since forgotten like the few words I learned.