🇬🇧Fiery dragons, unruly spelling, and fierce invaders? Grab a paper and get ready to take notes. This is the story of English you were never told in school!
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7 Difficult English Accents You’ll NEVER Guess 👉🏼https://youtu.be/AR8a-SG6l0k?si=tBfNTlOS4Hj8jGP8
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50 Essential English Proverbs 👉🏼https://bit.ly/50englishproverbs
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⏱ TIMESTAMPS:
0:00 – Intro
0:16 – What is English?
0:51 – Celts and Romans
1:50 – Germanic Tribes
2:36 – Old English
4:25 – Vikings
6:09 – Writing
7:16 – Middle English
9:20 – Late Middle English
12:03 – Sword and Sorcery Tales
12:36 – Early Modern English
13:44 – Enter William Shakespeare
15:11 – The Academy Attempt
16:23 – Late Modern English
17:06 – Alphabet and Pronunciation
17:52 – Astonishing Things
📜 SOURCES & ATTRIBUTIONS:
🎬 Video Clips:
Do You Understand the Words That Are Coming Out of My Mouth? – Rush Hour (1/5) Movie CLIP (1998) HD
https://youtu.be/0Rl9Cxc7uZA?si=xeBpG8ZAutQwBJ6t
The Ancient Celtic Languages
https://youtu.be/_O-OMKD-Wbc?t=50
What Was Life like in Medieval England?
https://youtu.be/rV82amRwXEA?t=35
Cædmon’s Hymn 🎵 (Sung in Old English)
https://youtu.be/Lg4mg7q4bSQ
Beowulf (Old English)
https://youtu.be/bLKDasq65q0?t=74
How the Normans changed the history of Europe – Mark Robinson
https://youtu.be/Owf5Uq4oFps?t=5
Where did English come from? – Claire Bowern
https://youtu.be/YEaSxhcns7Y?t=123
General Prologue of the Canterbury Tales (Premiere)
https://youtu.be/nMsp8xHkRnA?t=338
https://youtu.be/5NB2Z6pZBNA?t=71
What Shakespeare’s English Sounded Like – and how we know
https://youtu.be/WeW1eV7Oc5A?t=183
Original Pronunciation – Hamlet | To Be, or not to be… | Ben Crystal
https://youtu.be/qYiYd9RcK5M?t=15
The Queens English
https://youtu.be/3fvmcnRhTP8?t=36
🖼 Images:
“Claudius crop” by Marie-Lan Nguyen is licensed under CC BY 2.5 via Wikimedia Commons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claudius#/media/File:Claudius_crop.jpg
“RP English Monophthongs Chart” by RP_vowel_chart is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RP_English_monophthongs_chart.svg#/media/File:RP_English_monophthongs_chart.svg
source
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You might know languages but your history is really out of date. The Anglo Saxon invasion and ethnic replacement stuff you talk about is pretty much discredited and isn’t reflected in the archaeological record. AS influx is nowadays considered to be a lot more gradual over a longer period amounting to only around 10% of Britain’s genetic inheritance. Language change to English is a lot more top down driven by elite emulation interacting with a fairly static native population. Similar language change happened in Scotland at a similar era, changing from largely Brythonic to Goidelic Celtic, again driven by identity orientation in Aristocracy and Church
Sun day is named for the sun
Monday is named for the moon
Tuesday is named for Tyre, the Norse god of war
Wednesday is named for Oden, the all father
Thursday is named for Thor, the protector of Asgard
Friday is named for Frye, the Norse god of beauty fertility and cats
Saturday is named for Saturn, the roman name for Zeus
Basically a dialect of Scandinavian Dutch with a lot of French words.
3:46 Beowulf obviously
Excellent presentation, Olly!
Some of this was covered, coincidentally, way back in high school German class. However, since it was designed to help students understand the history and development of the German language, the English portion was mostly skipped over while emphasizing the vowel shifts and changes in both.The migration of tribes, invasions and other influences makes for a fascinating study.
No mention of american influence 😊
Also, most grammatical errors that are common among American speakers have their roots in England.
colonialism is what made English popular, one day it used to be Italian, before that it was Arabic, one day it will be… Russian? maybe?
In Australia, “garn” and “carn” mean “go on” and “come on”.
This is a wonderful history of the English language! Thanks for doing all this research.
I can't wait to share all this information with my EFL students.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday are named after Norse gods, with the most obvious one being "Thor's Day."
One of the most contentious Americanisms that was originally British is "soccer" (it's actually North American, since it's the word used in Canada as well). At Oxford, students took the portmanteau “assoccer” (association football) and shortened it to "soccer." The term was adopted in the United States but forgotten in the UK.
Good video, Olly. However, it seems like a missed opportunity not to mention Frisian or, at the very least, Dutch. Its connection is closer than German which was the chosen cognate to demonstrate links with a modern language. The level of intelligibility between the two languages, even after all the grammatical shifts and additional romance vocabulary, is striking! Have a look at Eddie Izzard's attempt to chat with a Frisian dairy farmer for a laugh 😅
Days of the week came from Greek and Roman gods and goddesses.
I'M NOT NATIVE ENGLISH SPEAKER. DON'T DISCRIMINATE
nice 🙂 we had english literature the last year in secundary, but it was all to fast… do you have a video about the dutch language too?
Good luck with introducing an English Language Police. Is it going to be a British or an American institution? It'd be the same nonsense as the French, Spanish or German language polices.
❤❤❤ Excellent. Anyone watching this gets the gist of the book I read recently, The Story of English. Great book, but took a lot more time than the video ☝🏽🫵🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽 English…it has something for everyone! Wherever you're from, there will be a familiar word in English 🥰😎🤷🏽♀️ I intend to share this with ESL people I know. The list of vowel pronounciation with various spellings is GOLD!
2:33 the days of the week, in english, are named for 2 celestial bodies, the biggest two seen from earth, and 5 gods, though only 4 are actually germanic in origin whilst the last god is roman
3:18 "Boring" omg lmaoo
This guy,: championing the rich history of how language grows and evolves.
Also this guy,: eye-rolling at Tiktok and, quoth the man "dictionaries – remember them." Dictionaries still exist and tiktok is fast-tracking the evolution of communication.
Drop the pointless snark, you're not Dr Grande
The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, the Ramies, and the Hemps.
"Cleave" is two unrelated words. One is sometimes weak, sometimes strong (cleft palate, but cloven hoof) and is cognate with dialectal German "klieben". The other is always weak and is cognate with German "kleben".
any chance he can get to plug his story telling merchandise, he'll take. It gets annoying. I bought his story telling for beginners book too. Haven't used it yet. But it's annoying to shamelessly advertise it on EVERY video.
As a native english speaker/ American. It's become really annoying to see the entire world try to learn my native language but for selfish reasons. They don't care about the culture, the history, they don't even like the language. They only learn it because of globalization. It's become superfluous to learn any language that isn't English. This is making the world a boring place. I'm learning other languages and finding it pointless as nobody wants to speak in these languages with me. They only want to practice English , so they can improve their career and life. Very sad and annoying.
Why did you use an image of Henry VII for Thomas Malory?
Are homonyms that have opposite meanings contronyms? EX: raise & raze.
My cousin the Geneologist, found an ancestors will from 1599 in Reading, England before the family emigrated in 1635 to the Massachusetts Colony. Our name today and on the first American ancestor's gravestone was/is HERSEY. In the earlier will however, throughout the will, the name was spelled-Hersey, Hersi, Hearsie!!! We think the name may have come with Wm the Conquerer's French army with Guy D'Hercy. I found all of that so interesting and is one reason I found this video so interesting.
It is so good
😮
Brah, no make li' dat. Why you no include us guyz from da kine? Only mainlandaz cuzz!? We stay pahd ada US, too!! I get one cousin from Waipahu… akamai him… but when da kine stay buss up, ho… no can unnastan nut'teeng. Knowwudahmeen?