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0:00
Did you know that medieval English is really cool? Now there are people who say that it is a very simple language because it has neither gender nor cases, the verbal forms are practically the same in all people... (be careful, simple or complex is something very relative, eh), the fact is that English was not always like this. The most likely thing is that a language, throughout its history, begins to be isolating (that is, the words never change,
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it does not matter if it is present, past, singular, plural, masculine, feminine, like, for example, Vietnamese), which then becomes an agglutinative (that is, the words have morphemes attached to them that give you information: they tell you if the word is masculine, feminine, singular, plural, present, future... like Turkish, for example), and then , it is normal for that language to become inflected (which would be a bit like the agglutinative, because it also has morphemes,
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but there are fewer of them, so each one has more information, like, for example, Russian) and then, again isolating, agglutinative, inflected in an endless cycle, like the Lion King. Within this classification (which is very simplified), there are different degrees, of course. Spanish and English are also inflected languages, for example, but much less so than Russian. And English is much closer to being isolating than Spanish. All this means that English, before, was not so “simple”,
1:06
that it had many more morphemes that told you the gender, the case, the tense… Well, that is what we are going to see in this video! (Be careful, I have an entire video talking about this entire intro, that is, I have just summarized it a lot and perhaps it is not understood completely well. I leave that video in the description). Hello, good afternoon. Perhaps, to enjoy this topic more, it would be good for you to review your current English a little. Well, we're not going to do that here,
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but you can do it on italki! Italki is the sponsor that has made it possible to pay all the people behind this video (there are already a few of us, eh). You probably already know it, but italki is a platform that helps you find teachers of almost any language you can imagine. I, now, needed an English class to prepare well for this video, so I only had to write it here (you could mark here if you wanted me to also speak Spanish or another language because it would be more comfortable for you),
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I see the one that appeals to me the most. pay attention and try (if you try and you don't like it, you can choose someone else next time because there is no commitment). I chose David (who also has German classes, by the way). Dave! How are you? [David] Hello, Elena. Well, how are you? How good to see you. Okay, so I'll make a video about English. That's why I needed to take a lesson from you. And it's really interesting because I'm going to talk about why English is very weird
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and why there are irregular verbs, irregular plurals. [David] Speaking of irregular plural endings, [David] do you know what the plural of “focus” is? Ah, okay, there might be two. [David] There are two, yes. Now there are two. “Focuses” would be the regular one. [David] The regular one, yes. And the irregular one is “foci”. Like in Latin. [David] Precisely, yes. For “cactus”, the plural is… “Cacti”. [David] “Cacti.” Okay, the pronunciation would be… [David] Exactly, yes.
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[David] I mean, I mean it's obviously an anglicized pronunciation of the Latin ending. There is no fixed price, it depends on the teacher, but the minimum is €5. But, I also bring you an offer of €5 off for classes of at least €10, but only if you use my link and the code LINGURIOSAC2 because by clicking, in addition to reaching C2 in any language you want, Like Dorotea, you are also going to support this content and make it possible for Dorotea to have her daily dose of carrots.
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And then, leave me a comment and tell me what language you have learned and how it went. And now, let's see what has happened to English. The history of English is traditionally divided into 4 phases: 1. Old English or Anglo-Saxon, from the 5th to the 12th century, 2. Middle English, from the 12th century to the year 1500, 3. Early Modern English, from 1500 to 1800 and 4. .contemporary modern English, 1800s to the present.
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In the technical world, it is preferred to leave aside the term “old English” for the first phase… then you will understand why. “Anglo-Saxon” is preferred and begins when the barbarians arrive in Great Britain (the barbarians are the Anglo people, the Saxons, the Jutes, who inhabited the area that would now be Denmark and northwest Germany). [Dorotea] Come on, how curious, right? [Dorotea] That is, in the year 1499 Middle English was spoken,
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[Dorotea] but in 1501 Early Modern English was already spoken. [Dorotea] In other words, in one year they had to get their act together [Dorotea] to change everything because otherwise they wouldn't understand each other... Let's see, of course, dates are always conventions. Languages change very slowly over the centuries and everything is always much more complicated, but since people like chronologies and setting dates, they do (and obviously, I include myself among those people
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because, as you may have already Seen, I love chronologies to be able to situate myself a little better in the context, even if it is not the most precise). So we're going to take out the chronology and we're going to go to the end of the 9th century. This man is Alfred the Great, and he is considered the first king of England. Alfredo was super concerned about culture and there are many written testimonies from his time. So in this video we are going to see what was said
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and what was written during his reign. [Dorotea] I mean, old English? Well that's the thing. If I tell you “old English”, you think that it is the English that is spoken now, but in an earlier phase, right? [Dorotea] Well yes... Of course, well, no... Current English does not come from “old English” (which is preferred to be called “Anglo-Saxon” and makes much more sense), current English comes from the Mercian, but we are going to talk from West Saxon
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because it is what has left us the most texts. The trade has left us very few. [Dorotea] But, wait, I don't understand… [Dorotea] If English does not come from West Saxon and we are going to talk about West Saxon… [Dorotea] we are not going to talk about Old English, we are going to talk about another language and that's it, [ Dorotea] but I'm interested in old English... Okay, calm down and wait.
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At this time, Anglo-Saxon was spoken throughout the island and Anglo-Saxon was divided into four linguistic varieties, four languages, four dialects... whatever you want to call it: the West Saxon, Kentian, Mercian and Northumbrian. Well, the one that had the most prestige was this one, the West Saxon , and since it was the one that had the most prestige, logically it is the one that has left us the most texts. But, as I've told you before, today's English was a prestige variety of London,
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basically, and London was an area of confluence between Mercian, West Saxon and Kentian. Be careful, the speech of London was Mercian, but a Mercian that would have more contact with the other two varieties. And, furthermore, the four varieties were close enough so that everyone could understand each other, with greater or lesser difficulty. [Dorotea] Ahhh, okay, I mean, current English comes from a mixture [Dorotea] of Mercian, Kentian and Western English, right? No, it comes from the trade.
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Let's see, when I tell you that Spanish comes from Latin I am also “lying” to you. [Dorotea] I knew it, if a lady on YouTube says it… No, shut up. We always talk about classical Latin, but Spanish comes from the Latin that was spoken in Hispania, which was a variety of Latin and was not exactly the same as classical Latin, but the base is the same and the differences are the typical ones that we can find in the different geographical varieties
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and They do not prevent understanding or having a general vision of the language. [Dorotea] Ahhhh, okay. I understand it now. Let's see, it's not exactly the same, huh. It is just a comparison so that you understand why we are going to talk about Old Saxon. Regarding trade, we have almost no ancient documents because it was not the prestigious variety. That is, there are very few texts until modern English, until Shakespeare. What you have to stay with is that they were
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very close varieties that basically had phonetic differences, but they could all understand each other. [Dorotea] Okay okay, I got it, but then, what was that language like? As I said at the beginning, it was a very inflected language, a bit like Latin, that is, it had declensions, cases, the verbs could be conjugated in four different persons. [Dorotea] But, then, a lot has changed in a very short time, right? Yes, the truth is that it is incredible. We are in the 9th century, at this time,
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English had four cases (nominative-accusative were two, but they almost always had the same form, genitive, other, and dative, the fourth) and had three genders (masculine, feminine and neuter ). At that time it is likely that, except for French and Occitan, which maintained a small decline until more or less the 12th century, well, and Romanian, which still has them, the rest of the Romance languages no longer had cases. In other words, from the 9th century until now,
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they have lost many more morphological traits than we have. [Dorotea] Well, come on, but what was it like? Well, each gender had its article: Sē for the masculine. Sēo for the feminine. Ðæt for the neutral. sē mūð, the mouth sēo tunge, the tongue ðæt ēage, the eye I have done what I could with the pronunciation... Well, the 'the' in current English would come from that neutral 'Ðæ'. Then, there were endings that were typically masculine, typically feminine (as we have now in Spanish):
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-dōm -hād -scipe –ere (they corresponded to the current -dom, -hood, -ship, -er). Well, these were normally male. For example: sē wīsdōm, sē cildhād, (Let's see, here there are manuals that say that c+e/i is pronounced like a ch, while others say that it would be pronounced like a ke ki but moving that [k] forward a little towards forward, that is, making a palatalized k, something like [kʲe] [kʲi ] . And then -nes and -ung (they would correspond to the current -ness and -ing,
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curious because in modern German we still say -ung, and those that ended with these suffixes used to be feminine: sēo gelīcnes, sēo leornung, That is to say ) . , 'similar' and 'learning'. [Dorotea] Well, they are quite similar to current words, right? Because heritage words (have been there since the “beginning” and have evolved over time) ) are still similar, what happens is that English has a lot of loans (a lot of loans from Latin too, it is very indebted)
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and most of those loans are from a later phase, from Middle English. [Dorotea] Ahh, okay, what about the verbs? Well, there were two types of verbs, and that is still the case in some Germanic languages: those with a strong conjugation and those with a weak conjugation, and I'm telling you that you are going to hate the strong ones, but at the same time you are going to be amazed because it is the reason why there are irregular verbs in English.
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Let's see, the irregular verbs of current English come, most of them, of the strong conjugation and many of the regular ones of the weak one, there are also many verbs of the strong conjugation that have been softened and are now regular and, then, the majority of verbs that are loanwords have been adapted to the weak conjugation. 'Wyrmas his lichaman ceowað' (which would mean 'the worms chewed/ate his body') And in the past tense it would be 'Wyrmas his lichaman cuwon'
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(which would mean 'the worms chewed/ate his body'). What pleasant examples in either of their two translations… As you have seen, the strong conjugation verbs change their radical vowel to make the past tense. And we also see that in the irregular verbs of current English. For example: 'write/wrote /written' 'bite/bit/bitten' (be careful, that vowel is different, although orthographically it is written with an i) And yet the verb chew (which is the one we had in the example)
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has been regularized: Before we have seen that the present was 'ceowað', which became 'cuwon' and is now 'chew/chewed/chewed'. The word that was used in the example to say body, 'lichaman' is almost no longer used, but there is a small remainder in the word 'lychgate', which is the entrance door to the cemeteries from the churches, which is so Typical in the British Isles. But “almost not used” does not mean that it is not used. The word is still hanging around, for example,
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if you play Warhammer 40,000, there is a type of troop called 'lychguard', which could be translated as 'the guardians of the bodies', and body is understood as 'corpse'. [Dorotea] Wow, that's very geeky, huh. But that doesn't make it any less true... And, well, in modern German, corpse is called 'Leiche', which obviously has a common origin. Furthermore, as is still happening today, in the Germanic languages there was and is no morphology for the future, but rather an auxiliary verb was used
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(just as we used at some point in medieval Castilian and which ended up giving the form we have now. ). [Dorotea] Excuse me? What auxiliary verb? Let's see, in Latin there was morphology for the future tense: “I will love” was AMABO, what happened is that later they began to use an auxiliary verb of obligation with the infinitive, they began to say something like “I have to to love”, “I have to love” because, if we have the obligation to do something, in the end we will end up doing it, right?
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That auxiliary verb is the verb “haber”, which was placed after the infinitive: “amar e”, which ended up giving “amaré”. “to love as” → “you will love” “to love” → “to love” [Dorotea] Ahh, okay okay, if you have said it a thousand times already... Well, in the Germanic languages, the auxiliary that was used was not obligatory, but of desire. 'Will', which is the future auxiliary in English, means 'to wish', so I will love could be understood as 'I wish to love'.
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Well, since we're comparing languages, let's do something super cool: compare West Saxon to Latin. This is a table with the declensions of a masculine word in West Saxon: The first thing we are going to do is compare it with the Latin declension that most closely resembles it: the first. The curious thing is that in Anglo-Saxon the stems in -a are masculine and in Latin they are feminine. [Dorotea] Let's see, it doesn't seem to me that they are very similar, the truth is...
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Well... let's see, it is true that they have quite a few differences, but if we look closely, we find similarities. Let's look at the word 'hund' and the word PINK. First, let's go with the singular. In the genitive we have an -s. Not in Latin… at that time. Think that this is the declension of classical Latin. In ancient Latin the genitive of the first declension also ended in -s (well, there are more forms in the genitive because they correspond at different moments of evolution).
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In fact, that genitive with s was fossilized in some expressions that were widely used, such as, for example, in PATER FAMILIAS (father of the family) which was never said PATER FAMILIAE, which would have been the form of the genitive in classical Latin. [Dorotea] Ahh, okay. But, then, the Saxon genitive comes from here, right? Of course. Because it is a genitive and it is Saxon. Now the name makes a lot more sense than when we learned it.
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The genitive is the case that usually designates possession and in Spanish we would translate it with the preposition “de”: “Dorotea's carrot” in English would be 'Dorotea's carrot'. [Dorotea] So, the Saxon genitive is nothing more than a case [Dorotea] that has stayed there after so long, right? Currently it does not behave as a case, it is rather a clitic, a suffix, we could say, that forms the possessive. But hey, we're not going to get into controversy.
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[Dorotea] Okay, and what else? I'm liking this... Well, there's another super interesting thing. I already explained in a video why the plural in Spanish is made with an -s, like in English, while the plural in Italian is made with a vowel: The plural “roses” in English is 'roses' (also with <s >) and in Italian it is 'rose' (with a vowel, in this case the <e>). Could that mean that the Spanish plural comes from English? Well no. What it could tell us is that Spanish and English words
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are the evolution of a different case than Italian words. Let me explain: Spanish words come from the accusative. Look again at the Latin table with PINK. The accusative singular is ROSAM, which gave our singular “rose” and the accusative plural is ROSAS, which gave “roses.” However, according to one hypothesis, the words of Italian (and other Romance languages, such as Romanian) would not come from the Latin accusative, but from the nominative, which is this other case here.
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ROSAE would have given 'rose' in Italian (meaning 'roses') and LUPI would have given 'lupi' in Italian ('wolves'). Well, although I have not found anything to support it (this does not mean that there are no studies, it means that I have not found them), in English, the nominative-accusative plural of the themes in -a-, also ended in -s, from what I understand that the plural can also come from there, just like Spanish. That's why plurals in Spanish and English would end in -s,
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but in Italian they would end in a vowel. [Dorotea] And why are there irregular plurals? Well, because they are fossilized plurals. Just as in Latin it had more than one declension and each declension had different endings and made the plural in a different way, as does Anglo-Saxon (just like current German, in fact). We have only seen the declension of the stems in a, but look, for example, at the declension of the word 'fot', which gave 'foot' (that is, 'foot'):
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The plural was 'fet', that is, It has stayed the same and the same thing happened with other words. Because? Well, maybe because they were used a lot. [Dorotea] Come on, how interesting. And what were the verbs like? Well look, here you have the conjugation of the verb 'singen', that is, 'sing', as some of you may have assumed: Well, there were two tenses in the indicative and two in the subjunctive. Easy right? And as you should already know, 'singen' was a strong verb
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because it has a vowel change that affects the past form, both in the indicative and subjunctive. Well now I want you to look at the present, more specifically in the indicative, and more specifically in the third person. Do you see the ending? It would be pronounced something like “singz.” Okay. Now look at this. This verb is 'bacan', which then gave 'bake', which is to bake or something like that: We return to the third person singular present indicative. Same thing again, “bekz”.
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That letter is an ancient Germanic rune, it is called 'thorn', and it is still used in Icelandic, for example, it represented the sounds [θ], [ð], like th now. Well, this sound was the mark of the third person singular, and over time its pronunciation changed until it became that of -s: singþ → sings, bekþ → bakes... it is the only mark of all these that you see that has survived. Well... the only thing the only thing... The current verb 'to be' is a verb that has mixed different verbal forms
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of different ancient verbs. Well, a little like our verb to go, which has the present of one verb, the past of another, the infinitive of another (that is why the past has the same form as that of the verb to be...). Okay, well look, this is the verb 'wesan', the verb ser/estar in Anglo-Saxon: Now let's go to the subjunctive, to the first person singular of the past ("were wesde"): you see that there were two forms, one with ry another with s, right?
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Well, it is true that it is becoming more frequent and more normal, in fact, to say 'If I was you', but it is perfectly accepted in formal registers to say 'If I were you', well that 'were' is a subjunctive and it is exactly this subjunctive. Well, if you look, all the plural people already shared the same form. This also happens today in Dutch. [Dorotea] How cool. Hey, what about you and you saying the same thing?
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[Dorotea] So, they use the same pronoun you for both of them, where does it come from? Well, look, it's going to sound very familiar to you: This is the table of how personal pronouns were inflected. The first thing that will catch your attention is the dual, which was indicated to say that there were two of something. So, the pronouns had dual, but only the pronouns, it is something very curious. So, for example, if we say 'Ic', it would be "I", if we say 'wit', it would be "both of us",
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and if we say 'we' it would be "us", that is, a plural indefinite number. Well, the pronouns in English come from this table. From the accusative/dative come the object pronouns, like when we say tell me, tell us, she tells you, tell hvvim, tell hper, tell it and from the nominative, the subject pronouns: Ic We He heo. That is, the nominatives (the case used to represent the subject) are still nominative today, they are still personal subject pronouns
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and the accusatives/datives are still direct object, indirect object pronouns. [Dorotea] Wait a moment, when you said the subject pronouns, [Dorotea] you skipped 'you' and 'they', you skipped 'them' too [Dorotea] for the subject and object pronouns. Well, 'they' doesn't come from Anglo-Saxon. It is a Viking loanword (that is, from Old Norse, which is a language carried by the Vikings). It's pretty cool, I know. And the pronoun you does not come from the nominative, but comes from the dative,
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so, if you notice, it is the only pronoun that has the same form for the subject and for the objects: 'He tells him', but 'you told me' to tell you' (that's what's "strange" because the subject and object pronoun are the same, that is, 'you'. Well, "strange" in quotes because in Italian, for example, the same thing happened: "he, she ” are said “lui, lei”, which are also forms of complement). [Dorotea] Hey, but in German the second person personal pronoun “you”
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[Dorotea] is said du and I have read another pronoun in Shakespeare: thou. Is this how you said 'you' before? Firstly, I highly doubt you've read Shakespeare , and secondly, you haven't. Look at the table again. The nominative singular of the second person was 'þu', well, that 'þu' gave the 'thou' of Middle English. And in Middle English it was used together with the form 'ye', which came from the second-person plural nominative, from that ge.
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It is logical, there are two nominatives that were used as subject pronouns, one from the singular (like our “you”) and another from the plural (like our “you” or “ustedes” for areas where “you” is not used. /ace"). The thing is that in modern English, the dative 'you' has already replaced the nominative 'ye'. [Dorotea] And what happened to 'thou'? Well, it is still used in some dialects of Great Britain and in movies and that is when they want to make an archaizing language
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(just like in Spain we use you). In short, what happened is what happened in Spanish and other Romance languages with vos, it was exclusively second person plural and, as a formula of respect, it began to be used for the singular in formal situations. What happened? That became so generic that it ended up making the 'thou' disappear, come on, the same thing that has happened in River Plate Spanish, said quickly and badly. [Dorotea] Hala, and why…?
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Dorotea, stop, we could spend hours here talking about this, I'll tell you more in this week's newsletter. You have the link below (which is free). [Dorotea] Pfff. Take a carrot, go ahead.
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