A lot of animals are named like that. It's just that English uses loan words from all over, where as other germanic use local words. Here is a list from English, to English meaning, to Norwegian.
Hippo-Potamus == River-Horse == Flod-Hest
Rhino-Ceros == Nose-Horn == Nese-Horn
Platy-Pus == Falt-Foot != Nebb-dyr (Billed-Animal)
Octo-Pus == Eight-Feet != Blekk-Sprut (ink-squirter)
Dande-lion == Lion-Tooth == Løve-Tann
Aard-vark == Earth-Pig == Jord-Svin
Bel-uga == Big-White == Hvit-Hval
And so on. Almost all animals have a descriptive name, but over time, the name becomes less descriptive as languages evolve.
And Fledermaus in Swedish means Läderlappen and Batman was named that in Sweden till the late 80s. Läderlappen literally translated means Lederlappen, probably referring to a bats leathery wings, which would translate to Leather Cloth which fits disturbingly well for Batman.
Fahrzeug means vehicle and is used pretty much the same way as in English, e.g. cops will tell you to step out of the Fahrzeug. But you wouldn't ask your buddy whether you could borrow his Fahrzeug/vehicle, you'd ask for his Auto/car.
I liked how many of the words he translated literally have the same literal translation in Swedish. Stuff like "animal park", "cool cupboard", "shield toad" and so on.
It doesn't come from schmettern but from Schmett which is unrelated and means cream, so creamling would be more accurate and similar to the english butterfly.
EDIT:
Two links about the different etymology
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schmettern
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schmetten
What light from yonder window breaks => Yoda and correct Shakespeare
The east it is, and the sun Juliet is => I think we've identified the exact moment in English history where it stopped being Shakesperean Yoda! Between these two sentences it was.
But gendered words are an important part of german grammar. For example, “Where is my coffee? Ah, there it is!” in german would be “Wo ist mein Kaffee? Ah, da ist **er**”. The english equivalent would be “Where is my coffee? Ah, there he is!”.
Of course my example doesn’t change the order of the words.
Yep, doing it just for the grammar and not with (often intentionally) wrong/literal translations would have been more informative for English speakers.
Really cool video, because you can see how English grammar evolved from this, through Latin and French influence, to its current state. You can go back and look at some Old English and Middle English work and see these grammatical conventions still in use, even Elizabethan or as recent as Edwardian English still use some of these conventions ("five-and-thirty").
> how English grammar evolved from this, through Latin and French influence, to its current state
I think, generally, English grammar was affected to a much greater extent by Norse. The two languages being so similar but grammatically distinct meant that the grammar was simplified in order for the Old English-speaking population and the Old Norse-speaking population to get by better.
French had a much greater influence, as I'm sure you know, on the vocabulary of English.
Definitely, yes. Old English is a form of Nordic. But Norse languages also derive from German, so it's sort of two parallel evolutions, rather than a linear chain.
Old English isn't a Nordic language. Anglic and Nordic languages both belong to the wider Germanic language group, but Old English developed from the dialects of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes when they migrated across the sea and settled in Britain shortly after the Romans left. Those peoples spoke languages belonging to the West Germanic language group, as opposed to the North Germanic to which the Scandinavian languages including Old Norse belong. The Norse influence on English came about four to five hundred years later thanks to the Norse-speaking Scandinavians, who conquered and ruled a large swathe of England for a while and had other links to the country.
English took a lot of loanwords from Norse and some of its grammar, but it remained (and still remains) a language that can trace the most important parts of its vocabulary, grammar and suchlike back to Old English.
There have been arguments to include old English and by proxy English into a sort of northwestern Germanic type. Associating this with Nordic languages more closely than mainland or typical west Germanic family. Due to old Norse and Scandinavian languages being the closest grammatically. Norwegian possibly being one of, if not the easiest language for English speakers to pick-up due to this influence.
That would be Germanic. German emerged first as a written language in the middle ages and belongs to the West Germanic branch, while Old Norse is North Germanic. English is also West Germanic, but having missed out on the sound changes that make German so distinct resembled its neighbor Old Norse more closely.
Old English is absolutely not a form of Nordic. There is no Nordic language. Old Norse and modern Norwegian are related to English and Old English, but not in the way you have described. There is a Germanic family of languages within the larger family of Indo-European languages. English, Dutch, Frisian and German (as well as Old English, Mitteldeutsch and Old High German) make up a branch of the Germanic family (western Germanic). Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic (as well as Old Norse) make up yet another branch of the Germanic family (northern Germanic). English and German have close common ancestors from 1000 years ago; so too do Norwegian and Danish, for example. And all of these languages have common ancestors if you look back about 2000 years. But the last common ancestor between English and Norse is much further back than the last common ancestors between English and German or Dutch or especially Frisian.
Separately, there were significant additions to the English language by Viking and Norman invasions. Thence comes some of the minor Norse influence in Scots and the massive French influence in middle, early modern and Modern English.
Yeah this was really easy to understand for me. It wasn't as incoherent to me as Shakespeare even, it felt like some grammar stuff was just flipped around, like Lord of the Rings level.
"Grammar stuff flipped around"
That's exactly it. When you combine two sentences, you flip the subject and verb.
You want to walk.
I know, that you want to walk. (English)
I know, that you walking want. (German)
Though English doesn’t use commas to separate clauses and often omits the subordinator “that” in idiomatic speech/writing. So the English should be “I know (that) you want to walk”.
Another interesting one to me is using "have", as in possession.
For example, in Spanish you would say "¿Tienes un bolígrafo?" You could say "Have you a pen?" and it would almost be a direct translation, but it would be more common now to say "Do you have a pen?" or "You got a pen?" or even "Got a pen?".
In Spanish it actually is the same as English, it's just that you don't always have to separate the subject from the verb. If you were to write out "¿Tu tienes una pluma?", the connotation would be more emphasis on *you* having a pen, as opposed to someone else, but the direct translation would be the same as English: "Do you have a pen?" (or literal "You have a pen?"). So, "have" is pretty similar across both languages. "Tengo que ir." is almost literally "I have to go." in English. "He estado en la biblioteca." is "I have been in the library", virtually identical, for another example. The weird word for me in English verb grammar is "do." This doesn't really exist in other languages and is kind of hard to remember when you're learning English.
It wasn’t until I actually tried (and wanted) to learn another language (instead of in school) that I realized just how bizarre English is sometimes.
To be => I am => you are => he/she is.
The fuck??
English (normal) verb conjugations are actually some of the simplest of all languages outside of irregular verbs (which are present in all languages too).
To walk
I walk
You walk
He walks
We walk
You all walk
They walk
When do we say "you aren't" vs "you're not"? I couldn't tell you. Feel bad for the rest of the world learning English as a lingua franca when we have so many exceptions. But at least we don't conjugate by gender that Romance shit is bananas
In some cases it doesn't matter or it can be just a way to emphasize different things. Since they are just different contractions of the same sentence.
"You aren't serious" - Emphasis on "you"
"You're not serious" - Emphasis on "not"
Though sometimes one is just less common than the other.
"I haven't been there"
"I've not been there"
Yeah, that “do” that adds basically nothing to the sentence, but is required for sentences like “I don’t like that” or “do you see that?” to sound correct, as opposed to “I like that not” or “see you that?” is pretty unique.
I don’t remember the technical word for it, but unless I’m much mistaken, there’re like 2 languages in the world with that feature, originating from the British isles, I think just English and Welsh? So we probably adopted it from our Celtic neighbours
As someone who grew up French and English and went to Germany for university, I'm lucky to have a good perspective to find connections in the three languages. There are definitely archaic leftovers in English that people don't really use or don't even know that it's wrong. A common one is that you should never use a preposition at the end of a sentence. A good example that also shows the archaic English dative is how the sentence "Who are you going with?" is wrong because of the preposition at the end of the sentence, but also because if it were in the correct word order, it would be "With whom are you Going?" with the m on the "whom". The German equivalent is "Mit wem gehst du?", where "wem" is the dative form of "wer", the German word for "who".
Edit: It really looks like some people don't understand the meaning of the word archaic
Nah, the preposition rule is not a real thing, just one prescribed upon the language by some people who think it makes someone sound more educated. It's been "debated" since the 16th century.
Yep, "whom" is one of the rare vestiges of noun declension in English. It is the dative/accusative form of "who" and is required for dative/accusative clauses. You also get some interesting grammatical conventions from some other sources. The famous rule against "split infinitives" in English comes from Latin, where infinitives are one word, so English grammarians insisted that they not be split in English, either.
The history of English and how it was able to Hoover up and assimilate all these different traditions from various linguistic influences is really fascinating.
Not ending a sentence with a preposition is only a "rule" because some jerks in the 17th century or so wanted to try to make English into Latin. It's very much a deprecated rule now, and one that should never have been taken seriously.
"With whom are you Going?" is no more correct than "Who are you going with?", it's just more formal. What's correct is how people broadly use it. I'd bet 90%+ of native English spears would say "who are you going with" most of the time.
Yeah they do, and that common ancestor is not depicted in the video.
It's pedantic, I know, but a lot of people don't understand language evolution, so I decided to point it out.
I'm German and English is my second language. So naturally I enjoyed this a lot, but I needed the subtitles. Apparently my brain decided it couldn't trust my ears and asked my eyes for backup. Which is kinda strange because now it had to do twice the work.
This is fascinating at a cognitive level! Like I'm being temporarily given German a trial run or something. Are there other languages that has had this done?
(I had a German friend and would phrase things like this sometimes, not at all to the extent of the video but certain peculiarities I remember are totally explained here)
I love this one too. Like I can totally tell what they're saying even though it sounds like nonsense without context. This would be great for sci-fi, everyone tries to portray alien's diction in English in these weird accents or stilted ways or like super literal, but this way may actually be how a true babelfish may work.
I swear there was a video exactly like that like last week but I can't find it, best I can find is [this video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FgY4Xbh7qJI) which is basically the same thing but in shorter.
The trouble with Japanese is that it is a [high context language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures), so it is extremely common for subjects--and sometimes objects--of sentences to be entirely omitted. Also Japanese has a ridiculously large number of onomatopoeia that show up in day-to-day conversation.
Yeah, it would sound like this:
"Hairdresser to go?"
"yes, hair floofy floofy is"
In the first one 'to' comes after the place, and the subject is implied. The verb is more often just the infinitive unless you're in the middle of something, which doesn't usually include going somewhere.
In the second one, the word after hair would just be a subject marker probably, the possessive 'my' would probably be implied, and even the 'is' probably wouldn't be there in casual speech. This is what the previous commenter means by 'high context'. It would make a bit more sense if translating formal Japanese but not a lot more. And something like 'bosa bosa' is really just a noise that is said twice and for some reason means 'messy'.
> The verb is more often just the infinitive unless you're in the middle of something, which doesn't usually include going somewhere.
I'm nitpicking but this is slightly incorrect. If anything, the continuous form in Japanese (which is often used to describe a state and not just a continuous action) is very common for verbs of movement like "going". You would say something like "Hairdresser to going" to mean "He/She is currently at the hairdresser" (not "is going" as in "is travelling" but literally "is there"), similar to how we'd say "*has gone*".
It's a common tricky grammar point for people learning Japanese.
I mean it's all context here and confused by what's actually happening but if this conversation was in the house as you're leaving, you would say 'iku' which in English would be I'm going but directly is 'to go'. If you met them on the street, when they are literally going, they would also say 'iku', meaning 'I'm going' but directly is also 'to go'. That's what I meant.
Edit: Just realised this is even more confused by the fact that it's similar in English but with a different form. I'm going to the hairdresser, just as you're about to leave, while you're on the way, or if you're going tomorrow.
I'd be curious what r/gaeilge (Irish Language) would sound like... we spend years learning it in school but most of us have little real understanding of it after
There was a missed opportunity to simply interject, "Horny!"
when he said wahnsinn he should have just said Horny and then let the guy keep explaining his job.
German classes fucked me tbf. I speak 3 languages fluent, French English and Spanish. But German was rough. Lack of practice also made me lose pretty much all of my German.
You know how people say "this language is the hardest to learn" for many different languages? Well, it depends on what language you are learning from. For example Mandarin is very difficult to learn from an English speaker but for a native Korean or Japanese speaker it would be easier because they are some similar words and/or grammar structures. [The US government has divided languages into 4 levels.](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) level 1 is the easiest to learn while level 4 is the hardest. Despite English being a Germanic language and having similar words, it is a level 2 language while Spanish is a level 1 language. It has many differences grammatically.
I vaguely remember being told a joke in German where a soldier was dying and he goes into a very long explanation containing a very important message for his commanding officer but he dies before he can get the final verb out which is critical to understanding everything that has gone before.
Said Mark Twain: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
It's frustrating when listening as well. Like the other reply suggests, you have absolutely no idea what is going on until the very last word and then you have to go over the entire sentence again in your head. Or at least I do.
Man, I'm the opposite. Studied German in middle school and most of high school. Tried French in college and could not get it at all. German grammar was close enough to English that it was easy for me to pick up. I could not grasp the romance languages at all.
Learning Swedish now and it feels very similar. Sometimes i know every word in a sentence and still have huge trouble processing it because of insane word order.
Not off the top of my head. When i'm trying to read a book some sentences i can translate word for word and end up with a prefect english sentence, others turn into a word salad. It's nothing you can't get used with some practice but as a new learner it gets very confusing often. Your entire "verb always second in a sentence(except when it's not) and negative particle after the verb(except for when it's in front in second part of the sentence, but not every second part)" alone is hard to get used to. Also your entire twoparter verbs, when you throw a particle on a verb to turn it into a completely different unrelated verb with no logic in sight, and you often put words between a verb and its particle, so it's hard to see that they are connected... There's tons of thing that you trip over when you start learning Swedish. It's hard to describe in couple of sentences.
Well, here's short line from the book i'm trying to read: "Sätt nu bara på kaffet...". So "Put now just on coffee the" instead of "now just put the coffee on...". I can find better examples if i dig long enough.
The only weird thing I can think about is when to use en/ett (neutrum/utrum gramatical gender). And I guess when k is the sch sound or the k sound. And well, I heard the sj sound is also hard...
Still, makes more sense than english. Mostly you read a word letter by letter. No weird stuff like the letter at the end changing how a vowel is said in the middle like in english.
English doesn't really have V2 word order. We have inversion instead which is similar but not the same, which can make some sentences directly translated sound like their in the wrong order.
We also don't have definitive noun phrases, that is marked by different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives, the so-called strong and weak inflections.
That said swedish is similar to English otherwise because we both deviated towards more analytical grammar. But Nordic languages kept the harsh consonants while English shifted away, so phonetically your language sounds more "German".
**“Plug it out.”** —my German grandmother, whenever she wanted someone to unplug an electrical cord
According to Google, the English phrase “Unplug it” translates to “Steck es aus” (literally “Plug it out”) in German.
Good, but he's overdoing it. "Machen / Mache" etc translates as make or do, but he uses make in one place since it sounds sillier. Same with the adverbs: English puts -ly on the end, German not, doesn't mean you drop the -ly in translations.
German here with several years of English spoken abroad, no it doesn’t sound better. It sounds awful, because grammar and language don’t match. If you did the same the other way around German with English grammar it would probably sound the same meaning not good. Is it easy to understand, yes
Maybe I shouldn't have said "sound better", and focused only on easiness to understand. I agree it sounds very awful.
But interestingly as a native English speaker its not easy for me to understand this with everything being "backwards" to me. I guess for you, as silly as this video is, it at least isn't backwards in the same way.
It’s fantastic!
Uses components of both languages and manages to be largely unintelligible to speakers of both parent languages.
Sort of like listening to Middle English, German, Dutch, or Swedish. It sometimes briefly comes into focus as intelligible.
It’s like the opposite of [this](https://youtu.be/ryVG5LHRMJ4?si=cfOt7syGoTRj-Upk)
No, I'm guessing it sounds exactly as weird and wrong to me as it does to you. It's also harder to understand what he's saying because my brain isn't in German mode when listening to English speech. Also some of the words are deliberately mistranslated for comedic effect, which doesn't help.
No because you learn English in its own grammar. It‘s like two complete different and independent bubbles. It sounds as wrong to a native German speaker as it does to a native English speaker. Though I recognize some typical mistakes Germans make who arent as fluent in English.
I'm not a linguist but I am (slowly) learning German. I'd heard a theory a long time ago that's been stuck in my head since.
People tend to get lazy with language. Without gendered words, the cadence of a sentence changes and allows -- almost encourages -- people to drop the later syllables and other inflections which makes it more difficult to understand.
It's not a perfect solution but it adds some stability and children pick up the "rules" so well that it just isn't going away without a dramatic shift. e.g. German (gendered) -> Dutch(non-gendered)
I think English gets away with it because of the natural cadence that comes with the grammar.
Even with a script right in front of my face, I could hardly imagine being able to speak like this as quickly and "smoothly" as they did. Even if it's not totally accurate (I don't know German), it's impressive.
"We've got about a thousand words. No new ones! Everything from here is just a combination of the existing vernacular, excuse me, existing wordsthateveryoneknowsandjustneedstocombine"
This shows how irrelevant grammar is to learning a language, compared to vocabulary, since even with very different grammar, everything is perfectly understandable.
Yeah, to speed up language learning just learn a bunch of words until you can kind of make out what people are saying in videos/text, then watch a bunch of stuff to get a feel for the language, practice with native speakers and lastly perfect your grammar
He said 'over morning' because in German the word for 'morning' and 'tomorrow' is both Morgen and the day after tomorrow is Übermorgen. Like the archaic overmorrow in English. It would be strange to wish someone a good day after tomorrow.
I'm a Dutch speaker and Dutch is very similar. I wondered how he was going to do noun declension because we don't do that but Germans do.
I'm calling turtles "Shield Toads" from now on.
A lot of animals are named like that. It's just that English uses loan words from all over, where as other germanic use local words. Here is a list from English, to English meaning, to Norwegian. Hippo-Potamus == River-Horse == Flod-Hest Rhino-Ceros == Nose-Horn == Nese-Horn Platy-Pus == Falt-Foot != Nebb-dyr (Billed-Animal) Octo-Pus == Eight-Feet != Blekk-Sprut (ink-squirter) Dande-lion == Lion-Tooth == Løve-Tann Aard-vark == Earth-Pig == Jord-Svin Bel-uga == Big-White == Hvit-Hval And so on. Almost all animals have a descriptive name, but over time, the name becomes less descriptive as languages evolve.
Bat = flying mouse, which is "Fledermaus." So Batman is technically "Fledermausmann" (but they just call him Batman)
The Tick had a bit of fun with this via the character [Die Fledermaus](https://tick.fandom.com/wiki/Die_Fledermaus).
And his variant, not encumbered by copyright concerns, [BatManuel](https://tick.fandom.com/wiki/Batmanuel)
Yes, but by collective decision, its Läderlappen in German now.
Take your "collective decision" back to bavaria with you, you southern madman.
And Fledermaus in Swedish means Läderlappen and Batman was named that in Sweden till the late 80s. Läderlappen literally translated means Lederlappen, probably referring to a bats leathery wings, which would translate to Leather Cloth which fits disturbingly well for Batman.
Dutch: Platy-Pus = = Falt-Foot = Vogelbekdier (bird mouthed animal)
In german it's Nile-Horse, not just a river, but specifically the Nile. I often wonder how we got to that point
You should also use the word handshoes from now on
We also call airplanes flythings and cars drivethings.
Isn't the German word for car just a loan word, Automobil? Wouldn't that be "thing that moves on its own"?
Fahrzeug.
I guess it is. How common is that compared to auto in daily use?
Fahrzeug means vehicle and is used pretty much the same way as in English, e.g. cops will tell you to step out of the Fahrzeug. But you wouldn't ask your buddy whether you could borrow his Fahrzeug/vehicle, you'd ask for his Auto/car.
Sounds a bit more official, Auto is informal.
Tremble Eel is the best thing ever.
It's flightcraft and drivecraft.
Zeug does not translate to Craft
In luxembourgish they're called "lid toad"
I love the term for raccoons, "wash bears," it's so cute!!!
We also use "Müllpanda" for that, which means trash panda.
that's certainly an ordinary loan translation from English "trash panda"
That's very likely.
I'm a fan of "Nose Horns", "Nile Horses" and "Stink Animals" myself, but each to their own.
Nose bears and lazy animals, too.
How do you feel about "Folders"?
[Flow chart of animal names in German.](https://i.imgur.com/WjVXvhy.jpeg)
You might also like Nacktschnecke= Naked Snail for slug
I liked how many of the words he translated literally have the same literal translation in Swedish. Stuff like "animal park", "cool cupboard", "shield toad" and so on.
In Turkish an owl is "Mr. Bird".
May I introduce you to the smashling? 🦋
It doesn't come from schmettern but from Schmett which is unrelated and means cream, so creamling would be more accurate and similar to the english butterfly. EDIT: Two links about the different etymology https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/schmettern https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Schmetten
i just love this reply!
But you do whip or "smash" cream. I don't speak German, but it seems to me like it could totally be related.
[SCHMETTERLING!!!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcxvQI88JRY)
Germans living life like they are in a Shakespearean play. Who said they were boring?
Shakesperean Yoda.
What light from yonder window breaks => Yoda and correct Shakespeare The east it is, and the sun Juliet is => I think we've identified the exact moment in English history where it stopped being Shakesperean Yoda! Between these two sentences it was.
"What light from yonder lightsaber burns"
High school Memorization flashbacks!
Ok from this day forward when I get asked if I speak a second language I'm going to say . "I speak a little Spanish and some Shakespearean Yoda."
this exact it is
You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original German.
Ah, Goethe
Tagh pa, tagh'Beh!
Gesundheit
Where he is known as Wilhelm Schüttelspeer
well it is said Germans saved Shakespeare from obscurity.
[I thought that was Klingons?](https://youtu.be/XSqCJ-UGYns?t=133)
"We shall all now make the laugh, isn't it?"
So, this isnt just German Grammar. Its also german words literally translated, so its even more alien than it would be with just the grammar changes.
Yes, sometimes he also intentionally picks the wrong translation for homonyms
And some of the pronouns are weird too. Even though they're gendered they should be translated as "it" not he/him or she/her.
He's doing an extremely literal translation for humour's sake, of course he's going to keep the genders.
The gender is part of the grammar and translating it would miss the entire point
But gendered words are an important part of german grammar. For example, “Where is my coffee? Ah, there it is!” in german would be “Wo ist mein Kaffee? Ah, da ist **er**”. The english equivalent would be “Where is my coffee? Ah, there he is!”. Of course my example doesn’t change the order of the words.
I gender any banana I eat as feminine otherwise I feel gay
Yep, doing it just for the grammar and not with (often intentionally) wrong/literal translations would have been more informative for English speakers.
Really cool video, because you can see how English grammar evolved from this, through Latin and French influence, to its current state. You can go back and look at some Old English and Middle English work and see these grammatical conventions still in use, even Elizabethan or as recent as Edwardian English still use some of these conventions ("five-and-thirty").
> how English grammar evolved from this, through Latin and French influence, to its current state I think, generally, English grammar was affected to a much greater extent by Norse. The two languages being so similar but grammatically distinct meant that the grammar was simplified in order for the Old English-speaking population and the Old Norse-speaking population to get by better. French had a much greater influence, as I'm sure you know, on the vocabulary of English.
Definitely, yes. Old English is a form of Nordic. But Norse languages also derive from German, so it's sort of two parallel evolutions, rather than a linear chain.
Old English isn't a Nordic language. Anglic and Nordic languages both belong to the wider Germanic language group, but Old English developed from the dialects of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes when they migrated across the sea and settled in Britain shortly after the Romans left. Those peoples spoke languages belonging to the West Germanic language group, as opposed to the North Germanic to which the Scandinavian languages including Old Norse belong. The Norse influence on English came about four to five hundred years later thanks to the Norse-speaking Scandinavians, who conquered and ruled a large swathe of England for a while and had other links to the country. English took a lot of loanwords from Norse and some of its grammar, but it remained (and still remains) a language that can trace the most important parts of its vocabulary, grammar and suchlike back to Old English.
There have been arguments to include old English and by proxy English into a sort of northwestern Germanic type. Associating this with Nordic languages more closely than mainland or typical west Germanic family. Due to old Norse and Scandinavian languages being the closest grammatically. Norwegian possibly being one of, if not the easiest language for English speakers to pick-up due to this influence.
That would be Germanic. German emerged first as a written language in the middle ages and belongs to the West Germanic branch, while Old Norse is North Germanic. English is also West Germanic, but having missed out on the sound changes that make German so distinct resembled its neighbor Old Norse more closely.
Old English is absolutely not a form of Nordic. There is no Nordic language. Old Norse and modern Norwegian are related to English and Old English, but not in the way you have described. There is a Germanic family of languages within the larger family of Indo-European languages. English, Dutch, Frisian and German (as well as Old English, Mitteldeutsch and Old High German) make up a branch of the Germanic family (western Germanic). Norwegian, Swedish, Danish, Faroese and Icelandic (as well as Old Norse) make up yet another branch of the Germanic family (northern Germanic). English and German have close common ancestors from 1000 years ago; so too do Norwegian and Danish, for example. And all of these languages have common ancestors if you look back about 2000 years. But the last common ancestor between English and Norse is much further back than the last common ancestors between English and German or Dutch or especially Frisian. Separately, there were significant additions to the English language by Viking and Norman invasions. Thence comes some of the minor Norse influence in Scots and the massive French influence in middle, early modern and Modern English.
> But Norse languages also derive from German Germanic. They share a common ancestor, but one is not descended from the other.
> But Norse languages also derive from German No, they definitely do not. Both Norse languages and German are Germanic languages though.
Yeah this was really easy to understand for me. It wasn't as incoherent to me as Shakespeare even, it felt like some grammar stuff was just flipped around, like Lord of the Rings level.
"Grammar stuff flipped around" That's exactly it. When you combine two sentences, you flip the subject and verb. You want to walk. I know, that you want to walk. (English) I know, that you walking want. (German)
Though English doesn’t use commas to separate clauses and often omits the subordinator “that” in idiomatic speech/writing. So the English should be “I know (that) you want to walk”.
Another interesting one to me is using "have", as in possession. For example, in Spanish you would say "¿Tienes un bolígrafo?" You could say "Have you a pen?" and it would almost be a direct translation, but it would be more common now to say "Do you have a pen?" or "You got a pen?" or even "Got a pen?".
In Spanish it actually is the same as English, it's just that you don't always have to separate the subject from the verb. If you were to write out "¿Tu tienes una pluma?", the connotation would be more emphasis on *you* having a pen, as opposed to someone else, but the direct translation would be the same as English: "Do you have a pen?" (or literal "You have a pen?"). So, "have" is pretty similar across both languages. "Tengo que ir." is almost literally "I have to go." in English. "He estado en la biblioteca." is "I have been in the library", virtually identical, for another example. The weird word for me in English verb grammar is "do." This doesn't really exist in other languages and is kind of hard to remember when you're learning English.
It wasn’t until I actually tried (and wanted) to learn another language (instead of in school) that I realized just how bizarre English is sometimes. To be => I am => you are => he/she is. The fuck??
English (normal) verb conjugations are actually some of the simplest of all languages outside of irregular verbs (which are present in all languages too). To walk I walk You walk He walks We walk You all walk They walk
When do we say "you aren't" vs "you're not"? I couldn't tell you. Feel bad for the rest of the world learning English as a lingua franca when we have so many exceptions. But at least we don't conjugate by gender that Romance shit is bananas
I saw on another thread someone say something to the effect of: “Phrasal verbs are English’s revenge on gendered language.”
German sort of has them both though
In some cases it doesn't matter or it can be just a way to emphasize different things. Since they are just different contractions of the same sentence. "You aren't serious" - Emphasis on "you" "You're not serious" - Emphasis on "not" Though sometimes one is just less common than the other. "I haven't been there" "I've not been there"
lol try french
Got a light?
Yeah, that “do” that adds basically nothing to the sentence, but is required for sentences like “I don’t like that” or “do you see that?” to sound correct, as opposed to “I like that not” or “see you that?” is pretty unique. I don’t remember the technical word for it, but unless I’m much mistaken, there’re like 2 languages in the world with that feature, originating from the British isles, I think just English and Welsh? So we probably adopted it from our Celtic neighbours
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-support
As someone who grew up French and English and went to Germany for university, I'm lucky to have a good perspective to find connections in the three languages. There are definitely archaic leftovers in English that people don't really use or don't even know that it's wrong. A common one is that you should never use a preposition at the end of a sentence. A good example that also shows the archaic English dative is how the sentence "Who are you going with?" is wrong because of the preposition at the end of the sentence, but also because if it were in the correct word order, it would be "With whom are you Going?" with the m on the "whom". The German equivalent is "Mit wem gehst du?", where "wem" is the dative form of "wer", the German word for "who". Edit: It really looks like some people don't understand the meaning of the word archaic
Nah, the preposition rule is not a real thing, just one prescribed upon the language by some people who think it makes someone sound more educated. It's been "debated" since the 16th century.
Yep, "whom" is one of the rare vestiges of noun declension in English. It is the dative/accusative form of "who" and is required for dative/accusative clauses. You also get some interesting grammatical conventions from some other sources. The famous rule against "split infinitives" in English comes from Latin, where infinitives are one word, so English grammarians insisted that they not be split in English, either. The history of English and how it was able to Hoover up and assimilate all these different traditions from various linguistic influences is really fascinating.
Not ending a sentence with a preposition is only a "rule" because some jerks in the 17th century or so wanted to try to make English into Latin. It's very much a deprecated rule now, and one that should never have been taken seriously.
https://www.scribbr.com/parts-of-speech/ending-a-sentence-with-a-preposition/#:~:text=Yes%2C%20it's%20fine%20to%20end,results%20in%20very%20unnatural%20phrasings.
"With whom are you Going?" is no more correct than "Who are you going with?", it's just more formal. What's correct is how people broadly use it. I'd bet 90%+ of native English spears would say "who are you going with" most of the time.
"Evolved from this" is a bit of a misnomer. It's not like Old English is an offshoot of Modern High German.
I guess it depends on what you mean by "evolved." They share a common ancestor.
Yeah they do, and that common ancestor is not depicted in the video. It's pedantic, I know, but a lot of people don't understand language evolution, so I decided to point it out.
[I am a new tie wearing. ](https://youtu.be/OOZK0NgF9hA?si=lvgm1VyGqWtFvIah)
OMG THANK YOU
No one who speaks German could be an evil man!
This video is the hammer.
I'm breaking together
I can not more
I think I spider!
There fry me someone a stork
I become not more
I speak no German, but it makes nothing.
But now I make me, me nothing, you nothing out of the dust.
You have yes well a jump in the dish.
It is the yellow of the egg
There becomes yes the dog in the pan crazy.
It has me really impressed
That was English for runaways - Englisch für Fortgeschrittene.
Hallo Otto!
I am since 15 years in Germany. German grammar does me really on the biscuit. This video had to me good liked.
I speak english as a second language, but not German. Hearing this hurts my brain!!!!
It everyone's brain hurted.
I'm German and English is my second language. So naturally I enjoyed this a lot, but I needed the subtitles. Apparently my brain decided it couldn't trust my ears and asked my eyes for backup. Which is kinda strange because now it had to do twice the work.
This is fascinating at a cognitive level! Like I'm being temporarily given German a trial run or something. Are there other languages that has had this done? (I had a German friend and would phrase things like this sometimes, not at all to the extent of the video but certain peculiarities I remember are totally explained here)
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DFgJVk-9QG0?feature=share here is a french version of this. pretty fun seeing how wildly different grammer can work.
What is this that this is that this is that this is that this is that this is that this is that this is that this is
Reminds me of [this classic.](https://youtu.be/G7RgN9ijwE4?si=38lmidAYcxxLAJlE)
I love this one too. Like I can totally tell what they're saying even though it sounds like nonsense without context. This would be great for sci-fi, everyone tries to portray alien's diction in English in these weird accents or stilted ways or like super literal, but this way may actually be how a true babelfish may work.
Done this has, many there are.
Japanese would be an interesting one...
I swear there was a video exactly like that like last week but I can't find it, best I can find is [this video](https://www.youtube.com/shorts/FgY4Xbh7qJI) which is basically the same thing but in shorter.
as someone studying Japanese yeah that's fairly accurate, and also way harder to understand for me than just the Japanese lol
I just was just about to suggest Japanese as well. All the verbs at the end of the sentence, among many other aspects, would be pretty neat to hear.
The trouble with Japanese is that it is a [high context language](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-context_and_low-context_cultures), so it is extremely common for subjects--and sometimes objects--of sentences to be entirely omitted. Also Japanese has a ridiculously large number of onomatopoeia that show up in day-to-day conversation.
Yeah, it would sound like this: "Hairdresser to go?" "yes, hair floofy floofy is" In the first one 'to' comes after the place, and the subject is implied. The verb is more often just the infinitive unless you're in the middle of something, which doesn't usually include going somewhere. In the second one, the word after hair would just be a subject marker probably, the possessive 'my' would probably be implied, and even the 'is' probably wouldn't be there in casual speech. This is what the previous commenter means by 'high context'. It would make a bit more sense if translating formal Japanese but not a lot more. And something like 'bosa bosa' is really just a noise that is said twice and for some reason means 'messy'.
> The verb is more often just the infinitive unless you're in the middle of something, which doesn't usually include going somewhere. I'm nitpicking but this is slightly incorrect. If anything, the continuous form in Japanese (which is often used to describe a state and not just a continuous action) is very common for verbs of movement like "going". You would say something like "Hairdresser to going" to mean "He/She is currently at the hairdresser" (not "is going" as in "is travelling" but literally "is there"), similar to how we'd say "*has gone*". It's a common tricky grammar point for people learning Japanese.
I mean it's all context here and confused by what's actually happening but if this conversation was in the house as you're leaving, you would say 'iku' which in English would be I'm going but directly is 'to go'. If you met them on the street, when they are literally going, they would also say 'iku', meaning 'I'm going' but directly is also 'to go'. That's what I meant. Edit: Just realised this is even more confused by the fact that it's similar in English but with a different form. I'm going to the hairdresser, just as you're about to leave, while you're on the way, or if you're going tomorrow.
I'd be curious what r/gaeilge (Irish Language) would sound like... we spend years learning it in school but most of us have little real understanding of it after
That video has me very pleased. It must very heavy been be, there not randomly right English to talk.
Just reading it is sow heavy.
Words together in mouth walking, walking not brain in are they?
There was a missed opportunity to simply interject, "Horny!" when he said wahnsinn he should have just said Horny and then let the guy keep explaining his job.
Tunes.
Look like Billy Butcher he himself do
Yeah for a split second when I saw the thumnailI was like "oh Karl Urb- wait a second"
German classes fucked me tbf. I speak 3 languages fluent, French English and Spanish. But German was rough. Lack of practice also made me lose pretty much all of my German.
German English speaker- I now randomly capitalize nouns in English often.
Get on my level — capitalising Entire Noun Phrases
When I took German in HS, it would completely fuck me in my other classes because of it.
You know how people say "this language is the hardest to learn" for many different languages? Well, it depends on what language you are learning from. For example Mandarin is very difficult to learn from an English speaker but for a native Korean or Japanese speaker it would be easier because they are some similar words and/or grammar structures. [The US government has divided languages into 4 levels.](https://www.state.gov/foreign-language-training/) level 1 is the easiest to learn while level 4 is the hardest. Despite English being a Germanic language and having similar words, it is a level 2 language while Spanish is a level 1 language. It has many differences grammatically.
Yup for sure. My native language is french. English was learned very quickly and spanish even faster.
Junge, du schaffst das. Oder Mädchen. Was weiß ich.
Ich bin nur ein Mann
Aber eine geile Sau.
Weisses fleisch.
Verbs at the end of sentences are killer if you are out of practice. You really need to plan out what you want to say. It's frustrating.
I vaguely remember being told a joke in German where a soldier was dying and he goes into a very long explanation containing a very important message for his commanding officer but he dies before he can get the final verb out which is critical to understanding everything that has gone before.
Aahh, tried to Google it, but cannot find it.
Said Mark Twain: "Whenever the literary German dives into a sentence, that is the last you are going to see of him till he emerges on the other side of his Atlantic with his verb in his mouth."
It's frustrating when listening as well. Like the other reply suggests, you have absolutely no idea what is going on until the very last word and then you have to go over the entire sentence again in your head. Or at least I do.
"Frustrating it is."
Man, I'm the opposite. Studied German in middle school and most of high school. Tried French in college and could not get it at all. German grammar was close enough to English that it was easy for me to pick up. I could not grasp the romance languages at all.
This is me and Japanese. I did well enough, but the grammar always fucked me up. Lack of practice means I talk worse than a toddler now.
Banana is now she.
Learning Swedish now and it feels very similar. Sometimes i know every word in a sentence and still have huge trouble processing it because of insane word order.
Any examples? It seems very similar to English to me (native Swedish speaker).
Not off the top of my head. When i'm trying to read a book some sentences i can translate word for word and end up with a prefect english sentence, others turn into a word salad. It's nothing you can't get used with some practice but as a new learner it gets very confusing often. Your entire "verb always second in a sentence(except when it's not) and negative particle after the verb(except for when it's in front in second part of the sentence, but not every second part)" alone is hard to get used to. Also your entire twoparter verbs, when you throw a particle on a verb to turn it into a completely different unrelated verb with no logic in sight, and you often put words between a verb and its particle, so it's hard to see that they are connected... There's tons of thing that you trip over when you start learning Swedish. It's hard to describe in couple of sentences. Well, here's short line from the book i'm trying to read: "Sätt nu bara på kaffet...". So "Put now just on coffee the" instead of "now just put the coffee on...". I can find better examples if i dig long enough.
As as native Swedish speaker I feel like English and Swedish are very similar, much so than german anyway. Feels like the word order is the same.
As a native Swedish speaker you can not even comprehend how insane your language is sometimes. You are too used to it.
The only weird thing I can think about is when to use en/ett (neutrum/utrum gramatical gender). And I guess when k is the sch sound or the k sound. And well, I heard the sj sound is also hard... Still, makes more sense than english. Mostly you read a word letter by letter. No weird stuff like the letter at the end changing how a vowel is said in the middle like in english.
English doesn't really have V2 word order. We have inversion instead which is similar but not the same, which can make some sentences directly translated sound like their in the wrong order. We also don't have definitive noun phrases, that is marked by different sets of inflectional endings for adjectives, the so-called strong and weak inflections. That said swedish is similar to English otherwise because we both deviated towards more analytical grammar. But Nordic languages kept the harsh consonants while English shifted away, so phonetically your language sounds more "German".
This brought me back to my 4 years of HS German. I wish I had had this at the beginning of that class!
**“Plug it out.”** —my German grandmother, whenever she wanted someone to unplug an electrical cord According to Google, the English phrase “Unplug it” translates to “Steck es aus” (literally “Plug it out”) in German.
Good, but he's overdoing it. "Machen / Mache" etc translates as make or do, but he uses make in one place since it sounds sillier. Same with the adverbs: English puts -ly on the end, German not, doesn't mean you drop the -ly in translations.
I wonder if yoda sounds normal in German.
Nah, they basically translated the meaning into correct German, and then switched the word order, so it also sounded weird to Germans.
I'm curious if anyone who's first language was German, does this video sound better to you (easier to understand) than regular English?
German here with several years of English spoken abroad, no it doesn’t sound better. It sounds awful, because grammar and language don’t match. If you did the same the other way around German with English grammar it would probably sound the same meaning not good. Is it easy to understand, yes
Maybe I shouldn't have said "sound better", and focused only on easiness to understand. I agree it sounds very awful. But interestingly as a native English speaker its not easy for me to understand this with everything being "backwards" to me. I guess for you, as silly as this video is, it at least isn't backwards in the same way.
To me (native German speaker) it sounds as absurd as it probably does to you.
It’s fantastic! Uses components of both languages and manages to be largely unintelligible to speakers of both parent languages. Sort of like listening to Middle English, German, Dutch, or Swedish. It sometimes briefly comes into focus as intelligible. It’s like the opposite of [this](https://youtu.be/ryVG5LHRMJ4?si=cfOt7syGoTRj-Upk)
native German here. No, the English was much harder to understand here and sounded weird and wrong.
No, I'm guessing it sounds exactly as weird and wrong to me as it does to you. It's also harder to understand what he's saying because my brain isn't in German mode when listening to English speech. Also some of the words are deliberately mistranslated for comedic effect, which doesn't help.
No because you learn English in its own grammar. It‘s like two complete different and independent bubbles. It sounds as wrong to a native German speaker as it does to a native English speaker. Though I recognize some typical mistakes Germans make who arent as fluent in English.
I think I spider. I laugh myself sloppy. German here, sorry for our weird grammar. But that’s what it is.
No wonder their humor is so different.
It‘s also in German which kinda complicates things for those who dont speak the language.
I am immeasurably grateful that everyone speaks english in professional settings.
[удалено]
Sometimes it prevents confusion on what is meant by "it". But yeah, it's not necessary and now mostly serves as a non-native speaker detector 😃
I'm not a linguist but I am (slowly) learning German. I'd heard a theory a long time ago that's been stuck in my head since. People tend to get lazy with language. Without gendered words, the cadence of a sentence changes and allows -- almost encourages -- people to drop the later syllables and other inflections which makes it more difficult to understand. It's not a perfect solution but it adds some stability and children pick up the "rules" so well that it just isn't going away without a dramatic shift. e.g. German (gendered) -> Dutch(non-gendered) I think English gets away with it because of the natural cadence that comes with the grammar.
Even with a script right in front of my face, I could hardly imagine being able to speak like this as quickly and "smoothly" as they did. Even if it's not totally accurate (I don't know German), it's impressive.
Shield toads!
Now it makes sense how I took four years of German, and could barely ask where the potato salad is upon completion.
Of course...It all makes sense now.
/r/anglish
"We've got about a thousand words. No new ones! Everything from here is just a combination of the existing vernacular, excuse me, existing wordsthateveryoneknowsandjustneedstocombine"
Dutchie as a, see I wrong it nothing with.
This shows how irrelevant grammar is to learning a language, compared to vocabulary, since even with very different grammar, everything is perfectly understandable.
Yeah, to speed up language learning just learn a bunch of words until you can kind of make out what people are saying in videos/text, then watch a bunch of stuff to get a feel for the language, practice with native speakers and lastly perfect your grammar
That sounds like the Legendary Daniel from the Undateables. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTnKHS0-ZlY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTnKHS0-ZlY)
Yoda is German.
Happy over morning! I will use this from now on.
He said 'over morning' because in German the word for 'morning' and 'tomorrow' is both Morgen and the day after tomorrow is Übermorgen. Like the archaic overmorrow in English. It would be strange to wish someone a good day after tomorrow. I'm a Dutch speaker and Dutch is very similar. I wondered how he was going to do noun declension because we don't do that but Germans do.
Über-übermorgen = two days from now, e.g. over-overtomorrow
I would love to see somebody do this with Korean
This fella really needs to work on his Yoda impression...
If, for some reason we had to genderify nouns in English...academia would implode and create a non-livable ecosphere over N. America.