An abridged history of English (and why it's so cursed)

[RandomAndgit]

Notes and corrections:
The evolution of the alphabet was heavily simplified to be easier to fit into the video and communicate. I left out parts like the Etruscans and other letters like the long S and Ampersand. I would recommend doing your own extra research if that sounds interesting to you.

I'm not sure how I managed this but I accidentally said that thew letter Yogh made the "w" sound when it actually made the now largely unused guttural yh sound (Like in the proper pronunciation of loch). I've no idea how that slipped through, sorry about that.
I mispronounced boustrophedon
Ironically enough, I misspelt colonel in the visual showing how poor the spelling of colonel is.
I stumbled over my speech at 2:08 and said that Indo-European was a language spoken by 'The very first people to arrive in Europe and Asia' which isn't true, I wrote 'One of the first languages spoken by a group of people' but verbally hiccupped a little.
Aleph didn't actually make the 'a' sound, it actually made the sound of the global stop but it's easier for the average person to understand 'a'
I mixed around the sounds for thorn and eth.

Sorry for all the inaccuracies!

[cerialxo]

just a few things i noticed:
- 3:05: latin didn't evolve independently from french, italian, and spanish, and technically isn't "extinct" since it just diversified into the romance languages
- 3:50: ic was pronounced "itch" rather than like "ic" in dutch or "ich" in german, although it is indeed related to them. i'm not sure if the statement you make after that intentionally implies that its reduction to "I" is related to french or norse influence, but as far as i'm aware it wasn't and it was just an independent trait of english
- 7:36: the letter yogh wasn't a part of the norse or old english latin alphabet, it was just the lettter g written in the insular script (the version of the latin alphabet used by the celts). when the normans invaded they basically saw the letter g and assumed it was a different letter, especially since it represented a couple of different sounds compared to norman french, and so they just treated it as a separate letter. by this time wynn was also dropped, probably because it looked too similar to p and it wasn't familiar to the normans, so i don't think wynn and yogh were ever used during the same periods
- 8:41: i think eth had already fallen out of use long before the printing press was invented, and thorn ended up taking its place
- 9:01: the letters ash and ethel as they were used in old english were already phased out during middle english since the vowels they represented merged into other vowels, mainly e. identical-looking ligatures were reintroduced in order to spell the latin diphthongs ae and oe, however they were just ligatures and weren't seen as their own letters

another thing that would've been useful to mention is that the printing press came around while the great vowel shift was happening, so a lot of spellings reflect volatile and intermediate pronunciations of words rather than their actual or even historical pronunciations. german also had a vowel shift like the english gvs but it happened before the printing press so words simply got respelt to reflect their new pronunciations. dutch also has something similar - with ij and oe being pronounced similarly to long i and oo in english - but the spellings suggesting a long i or o sound would suggest that it might've happened after the printing press (i'm not sure on this though)

i notice a lot of other criticisms in the comments so i also just want to say your video isn't bad for this, i still think it's really cool and informative. i have some knowledge of linguistics so if you're planning any more videos on them and you'd be willing for anyone to contribute by for example proofreading or adding information i'd be happy to do that

[ariebrons]

Dear sir:

6:49 the Romans adopted their writing from the Etruscans,
who got them from the Graecians of Magna Graecia.

7:12 Y and Z where adopted to translitterate Greek words
Then someone called Gregorius tired of people misreading his name;
Took the letter C and added a Γ to people would stop calling him
Crecorio.
And finaly Emperor Claudius came and standardised the whole thing.

7:23 You forgot the Carolingian standardisation of Latin pronounciation.
Which still affects how we write to this day.
Basically they decided that "C" would be pronounced as "ʧ" for instance.
~They did base it on spoken vulgar Latin, so not arbitrarily~
"V" started out as W/U depending on the context;
But got bastardised into the modern /v/ by peasants and barbarians.
"J" started its life more like how we use "Y",
but people began using it to mean "ʤ" at some point;
Nativelang blames the French, Raffaello Urbani on Late Latin speech.

8:22
You forgot Renaissance poets with their pretentious spelling.

But you did a decent job.

[joshuab]

2:19 The speakers of Indo-European languages were, by far, not the first group of people to enter Europe or Asia. I’m sure it was just a misspeak though

[MrPillowStudios]

This has so much inaccuracies, but it was still good for editing.

[randomguy-tgok]

Oh, and _also, _ the Printing Press came along in the late 15th century. Spelling was standardised by what the Flemish thought the dialect around _roughly_ Cambridge sounded like, and it hasn't been significantly changed since (apart from maybe Webster creating American English spelling).

[poisonhemlock]

Misspelling "colonel" is part of the joke, right?

[MrRhombus]

Aleph didn’t make an /a/ sound, and Latin had no <J>

[nvdawahyaify]

I wanted to let you know that alef didn't represent the a sound. It was a glotal stop. That's why it is seen as being silent in many word...at least by English speakers. In some languages, vowels can be pronounced without a glotal stop at the beginning, but English doesn't do this, so we don't usually recognize the stop at the beginning of words.

You also have the pronunciation of thorn and eth backwards. Thorn was unvoiced, and eth was voiced.

I do enjoy your video i just figured I'd let you know that there were some small mistakes.

[rictusjas]

As a Chinese who is capable of several foreign languages, I think English is one of the easiest languages in the world. I like English. 😊

[PugalshishOfficial]

I'd say it's high time to reform English and bring back the old letters and perhaps adding a few accent marks as well to get rid of silent e

[samuelbucher]

Having my native language lack digraphs and learning about Finnish, a language that is written the same way as it is spoken, made me really hate English, despite having been fluent in it for many years.

[veryconfusedcreature]

The animation quality is getting really good :D

[fratello]

I find the English language very interesting. The fact that it has been influenced by Franch and Norse, while also having its roots in the Germanic branch of the Indo-European languages makes it so unique, charming and pleasant hear. I think that's the reason why it works so well as a universal language, given its many influences. I also think it's one of the most beaultiful languages when written.

[SK-zisr]

The letter y and g aren’t in Latin originally, j came later too ofc

[Mrrpmeowmeowmrrp]

æ is to be used at all times. Never forget Æ

[jeranuspeedruns]

Why does everyone skip over the Etruscans 😢😱😭😤

[danidejaneiro]

What is your evidence that Indo-European tribes were the first humans in Europe? I think the Basques were there before them as well as other human groups for tens of thousands of years before Indo-Europeans arrived.

[Becky_Cooling]

As a dislexic, I phind english speeling reely anoiing
As a Dyslexic, I find English spelling really annoying

[danidejaneiro]

What do you mean by “language was independently invented four times”?