Corresponding Cognates

so one useful way to learn vocabulary if you're learning a language which is closely related to yours or fairly closely related to yours is to learn the correspondences between cognates in your language and the foreign language so if I were to say fish with a Scottish accent I'd say fetch if I were to say can I have some fish in a Scottish accent although that's not necessarily the way you speak if you're from anywhere other than Scotland you understand what I mean because your brain has learned a sort of algorithm whereby if it is an F in a Scottish accent it turns it into an E and if it hears an R in a Scottish accent it turns it into an app and those are very very subtle changes in in sound so it's not very hard to do as soon as you've picked up the phonology of Scottish which doesn't take very long and you do it as a child you you come to understand an enormous amount of it because your brain gets to the point Rick and the algorithm can make up what a word would sound like even if you've never heard it before just because you know what the patterns are now this might sound this might sound Corbis but it's how Old English speakers probably came to terms with Old Norse when it started being spoken with Norse settlers started appearing in Britain about a thousand years ago and Jackson Crawford's done quite a good video on that on the correspondences between one on the other all you need to do is get used to those correspondences and your brain can start to automatically turn words from one language into what they would be in the other language one issue with this is that meaning shifts happen quite a lot whereby although a work might be cognate for example a German work might be cognate with an English word the meaning has shifted slightly in the 1617 hundred years since they diverged in which case obviously they then don't mean the same thing although you might be able to guess roughly what the meaning is because it normally doesn't stray too far although that's I say normally often often it does you can do the same thing with a lot of modern languages and that's how it helps that's how it's practical in modern terms so for example if you take the I sound in German it often corresponds to if we're talking ancient languages then an a sound in Old Norse and our sound in Old English and they all correspond often with an O sound in modern English so you get stained in modern German then stained in Old Norse Stan in Old English and then stone in modern English you get another example Jackson Crawford used was Haim Haim harm home-buying Bain barn burn I'm Ain hang on a minute this did confuse me quite a bit when I first noticed it because even the spelling of the word is as we would expect it to be in accordance with the other languages reconstructions of Shakespeare's accent or the accent his plays were written in show it pronounced as own some of the rhymes some of the sonnets just wouldn't have worked if it was pronounced with the W the star is in one so since we know the Victorians were saying one that's that gives about 200-250 years in which it switched at some point one of those internet etymology websites gives the date this sort of late 17th century which sounds like when it is sort of makes sense to me but I still don't have any idea why it went from own to one if you're wondering how the vowel can change that drastically just think that in some English accents you have something like storm but in some English accents you have stone and if all can turn into I then in the span of sort of six sixteen hundred years of divergent evolution you can imagine that's that something like oh can become something like I between English and German so it can happen the complicated thing is consonant shifts and in some ways it's complicated because it takes a lot longer for them to have and in other ways it's simple because the span of time it takes for them to happen mean that they're quite consistent between English and German so you can't rely that much on Val shifts being consistent between modern German and modern English because so many little things can change the way a Val's pronounced in an individual word so their end up being so many exceptions and so many little sub rules it's very hard to get them all into your head whereas with consonants it tends to be a lot more consistent so here are some examples so we're in German you have a tip you often have a dip in English German der becomes English all the final sir in German becomes a Turk in English an initial term in German becomes a death in English CK so a cut in German often becomes a jerk in English a DJ at DG sorry sir sound in German represented by Zed often comes a toe in English and a German so PF often becomes just an English / so if I go through some words and we'll see how that works so you have hooked that's good Fahd Mucca Mucca and look so you have the cognates of those which are if you haven't already worked out hood that girdle path bridge niche and ridge but the actual meanings of the words are in some cases slightly different so you end up here with hat that belt path bridge niche and back a back is in the back in Old English it was something like which which makes sense and obviously there in the lick is where we get the rock in rucksack because that's the rock there is a loanword from German and a ger sound in German often totally disappears in English or it becomes a yet sound so this is why the ich or each suffix in German becomes an e in English so it's fancy comes twenty so you have a word like for good the cognitive which is foul and the actual meaning is of bird it's much more common than fowl is in English and then you have Vulcan now Vulcan is a bit of a confusing one because in German in English so we have the word wagon which is a loanword from German the actual English word the native English word is Wayne but nobody really says that it's very rarely used and then we have another example Sagat which becomes tail I think there's also sniggered which becomes snail I think the actual meaning of that is something like slug and one word I found quite interesting with psycheon because the meaning is signed and I was assumed it was a cognate of sign not really knowing the correspondences very well because it sounds a bit like sign but it's not actually it's a cognate of token as you might already have worked out and that goes back to the ie becoming o thing we were talking about earlier and lo and behold in Old English the word token is used for the same thing so although the meaning might shift you can often at least get a good idea of what the word for something might be in a closely related language just by applying these sort of algorithms these patterns and the tend to stick more so in consonants and vowels but obviously that depends how close the language actually is is milk on my hand now thank you I'm gonna try and make some more videos because I now actually have access to my camera and it's summer I've got some ideas in my head we'll see how that goes but I am feeling quite a video at the moment so it's in a bit

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 48,389

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Id: _CSAmA_VYuk

Length: 8min 29sec (509 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 29 2018