Posted on 07/14/2024 5:35:04 AM PDT by SunkenCiv
In this episode, we'll trace English back to its oldest known ancestor: an ancestor it shares with almost all of Europe's languages, as well as some Asian languages. That ancestor is called Proto-Indo-European.
I also talk about the controversial Nostratic language family and ask whether there could really be a "Proto-Earth" language. What is Proto-Indo-European? | Tracing English as far back as possible
20:45 | RobWords | 515K subscribers | 126,562 views | July 13, 2024
(Excerpt) Read more at youtube.com ...
Old English evolved as distinct language ca. 550 AD.
I believe he is stating the obvious: YOU don't know what you are talking about.
So how will the world get to a singular, global language per the Jewish prophet Zephaniah?
The English language went underground when the Norman French seized the English throne. It suffered a sort of benign neglect, wasn’t actively persecuted but it was spoken mostly only by serfs. Serfs rarely ever left their master’s estates, which meant there were hundreds of isolated regional pockets where the Old English was spoken. And in all these pockets English was left to evolve over the next couple of centuries to be distinct from that spoken in any other pocket. Which explains why England today has so many strong and extremely different dialects (Cockney, Brummie, Tyke, Geordie, Mancunian, Liverpudlian, etc).
Then English was saved by the Black Death (ca. 1348). When the plague struck, the aristocracy mostly abandoned their city digs for their country estates because the dead bodies piled up so fast in the cities that they simply laid bonfires from them, and the air was full of the stench of death.
These aristocrats didn’t know because they didn’t understand what caused the plague but leaving the cities greatly enhanced their odds of survival. And leaving their servants (serfs) behind to manage their city homes sentenced them to death. When the plague subsided the aristocrats came back to the cities only to find their servants mostly dead and gone. To them there was no point being rich without having servants, but the only place replacement servants were readily available was back on their country estates.
The major malfunction with that plan was that few of their farm hands were trained as household servants, and most only spoke English. So when they brought them to the city, the aristocrats ended up learning some English out of necessity, at the same time their servants were learning French.
The most obvious evidence in Modern English of this interchange revolves around food. If you’ve ever wondered why cows make beef, chickens make poultry and sheep make mutton, this is why. Because the name that stuck to the animal was the one used by the people who tended them, the English-speaking serfs/servants. And the name for the flesh of that animal was the one used by the people who consumed it at the supper table, the Norman aristocrats.
cow = English
boeuf = French
chicken = English
poulet = French
sheep = English
mouton = French
England’s Norman rulers eventually had a falling-out with their former French countrymen, after which they decided that the speaking French was unpatriotic. In 1362, the King Edward III ordered that the Parliament be conducted in English. After existing only in dark corners for near as makes no difference 300 years, English had made its comeback.
The fact there is exactly ZERO commonalty between their alphabets, ZERO cognates, and one is written L-R but the other is written R-L is proof of that.
No, I’m saying, don’t pay any attention to what he writes. He has no idea what he’s talking about.
Thanks PG. The Normans thought the Anglo-Saxons’ talking sounded like barking dogs, particularly as they emerged from what we know as pubs.
At 4:54 he says “proto” is a Latin prefix—actually it’s Greek.
The Hebrew alphabet is basically the same as the Phoenician alphabet, but at some point the Jews adopted the Aramaic letter forms which are a bit different from the early Phoenician letter forms.
So even though the current English and Hebrew alphabets are quite different, they have a common ancestry. There aren't any cognates between English and Hebrew, because they are from different language families, but there are a number of Hebrew loan words in English. Amen, hallelujah.
English has a silent "gh" in many words (daughter, night, light, etc.) where German has a "ch"...the "gh" was originally pronounced but apparently became silent because the Normans couldn't pronounce it.
Silly me, I thought Proto was one of the Baggins family. :^)
Let's explore how the Romans have influenced English down the centuries.
We use words left behind by the Romans every day. Their encounters with the Germanic tribes caused Latin words to slip into our language before it even became "English".
In this video let's explore all the words that we've borrowed from the Romans: from the earliest imports to modern medical Latin.The Latin words you don't know you're using | 12:35
RobWords | 515K subscribers | 541,941 views | September 30, 2023
Old Norse in English: The words the Vikings left behind | 14:09
RobWords | 516K subscribers | 1,358,212 views | September 20, 2022
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