The Invisible World of Language: What You Don't Know That You Know

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[nordoflobsquipple]

Yay, another video! Thank you for sharing your knowledge

[ifnxjnr]

As someone who only knows English, I envy the ability to engage with things not originally written in English on that one-to-one level.

[gastonmarian]

I love the idea of languages as organisms

[abmindprof]

As a linguist, I love these kinds of videos. In fact, you've stumbled on a whole theory called Ecolinguistics, which was developed by U. of Chicago linguist, Salikoko Mufwene. He uses that biological metaphor of language as evolving organism. However, I have to point out that the subject is not necessarily the doer. In Mark was bitten by the zombie, Mark's still the subject, but it's not working out well for him.

[MiciusPorcius]

Something that’s made it a bit more rational to my English speaking brain is thinking of a 18-19th century Londoner that might say something like: "Went to the market they did”

[lapatatadelplato]

Oddly, enough analysing languages syntactically is by far, much easier than figuring out what means what. When I was learning latin, it didn't take long for me to figure out what each word's syntactic role was, however, to go back, and look through what I had heard, and connect the pieces together was far more difficult. The same applies for a lot of computer languages; when writing compilers for programming languages, you have to create rules for creating constructs, and also rules to syntactically parse them. Coming from the literature that Chomsky wrote about these so called "Context-free grammars", which most programming languages employ in order to make sense of nested and recursive definitions, we can actually engineer "grammars" to be easy to parse by a computer, with no backtracking. I wish we could do the same for human languages, but most require backtracking, and storing a buffer of previously seen words, and building up from there.

[drmnc]

The fluidity around word orders in other languages like Latin I've always found confusing. Why did people never settle down on a convention? Was it just for metrical reasons that it gives extra flexibility for composing verse? Or were there reasons beyond that, other than personal preference?

Your passion for languages really shines through!

[leonidaspapanikolaou]

I speak Greek, English and I am currently learning Chinese. Language is crucial, Many times, it is impossible to capture the feeling of the same word for the same thing!

[jackh]

Marc, I gotta say I miss the hell out of your content. Have you ever thought of starting a substack publication? I think it would be a better medium for the kind of work you do as it is more cerebral and you would find your target audience. With youtube you’re competing with cat videos and “influencers” giving out career advice. That’s an uphill battle.

[Caddy]

didnt know you were a latin teacher, explains a lot....'romanes eunt domus' is how i imagine most of your days go. hahaha

[SideWalkAstronomyNetherlands]

So English is bad Dutch mixed with French.