Leftovers from Older English

[Music] so so now with all of my recent videos there seems to have been some problem with the sound that stopped anyone from being able to hear me and in this video it's looking like that might be the wind but it's not so bad at the moment i might go somewhere else if it gets quite bad um so what i'm going to talk about today is well i'll start off with the story of a 19th century the 19th century linguist studying devonian a linguist studying the devonian dialect in the 19th century noticed that there was a certain peculiarity about the dialect there was a little sound people would make in certain contexts within a sentence so for example um in the sentence i've seen a bird a rural devonian at that time would say i've ever seen a bird in the sentence um i've gone home a rule devonia at that point would say gone home um and to anyone else this might have just seemed like a little rural affectation that you know rural farm people do but of course most things in language have an explanation and most things in language have rules governing them and this was no exception um you would actually have this uh sound either seen or ever gone at the start of a past participle form and the past participle is the form that in english we use with the auxiliary the auxiliary word have so i have been to the shop and it's not to be confused with the past simple which is i went to the shop which doesn't require the auxiliary so to form the past participle in this devonian dialect you had to include this sound this uh sound i have a gone and a few of you will already know already worked out where i'm going with this um the sound is a direct reflection of something old english had but which died out in the middle english period in most dialects and that is the yeah prefix so just like in the 19th century dialect of devon this was shoved onto the starts of past participles and it appeared in some other context as well for example to form a plural in certain words so each habit you say um is reflected in german and dutch with the prefix of having foreground cuisine and then in devonian with i have a scene a bird now all english speakers have some fossilized remnant of this so the word enough the first syllable of the word enough that uh or is a fossilized remnant of this uh this this prefix from old english and all english speakers do that so the the dutch word would be something like i don't know if i'm pronouncing that quite right um but these later devonian dialects were the only ones that kept it as a um a productive part of the grammar of the language um it seems to have died out in the north of england before it died out anywhere else um with a lot of other inflection which also died out in the north of england um and it was probably flickering away towards the end of the old english period in the north of england but it stayed strong in the middle english period in other dialects and clearly well into the modern english period in devon in the west country and there are a few you know there are a few other things um in the west country that are holdovers from um old english or even early old english before norse influence took hold in the rest of the country so for example um the the form of the word be that is best so how best thou which is direct directly cognate and in fact the same word as the german word best as in um the algbestu um and this is this is a word that that existed in early old english throughout the rest of the country but was replaced with the um the norse derived word art in most of the rest of the country by the end of the old english period so how art thou rather than how best now but in devon it's it's you know stuck around well into the 19th century probably into the 20th century and i'm sure there are some older speakers that still use it today in some contexts and if you know any of those older speakers um let us know in the comments because um i'm sure i'm sure it's kind of it's the kind of thing that would still be hanging around today another thing i've touched on before is a kind of religion that was very commonplace in old english and that's the addition of the word near to just at the beginning of certain words and this was so standard in contractions with certain other words that it was actually acceptable in writing in fact by a certain point it was it was standard in writing so it was almost unusual not to write the contraction um so each habbit would become ich nabi um elm would become nil uh what else wall there would become nordi and so on and this this was so standard in speech that it was actually normal in writing and it was standard in writing as well um and this this um this would have been used in conjunction with other um negative forms to make double negatives so in i think the first baldrick video i use the sentence and i pronounced it wrong in the original video but i think that that what i just said was more more true to sort of late west saxon um so what that that what that means with the contractions taken out in modern english is we not have not any children um and if you were to add the contractions in the same way as they work in in old english in modern english it would be we nav nani children but obviously that's not that's not something you can say in modern english that doesn't work um it's not acceptable in modern english in any dialect i know but there are fossilized forms of words that retain this this sort of ghost of the the ne with the allied final vowel so one example of this is the phrase hobnob and before it was a a kind of biscuit it originally meant to sort of give give give and take or to have and to not have and it seems to have come into the language possibly via a dialect that retains some of these negative forms and the original old english would have been something like to have or not to have to have and not to have um another is another example is willy nilly um which which um obviously comes from the word will which uh originally meant to want so the the the earliest meaning was probably something like whether you want it or not whether you like it or not um and this is what we find in in some of its earliest usage um another one which you might have seen on on qi because i think they covered it briefly um is the word nickname now if you're if you're familiar with german if you know any german you'll you'll be aware of the word which means also and old english actually had a cognate of this which meant the same thing and that was arc and they survived into into standard middle english with egg and you'll find this in chaucer's works a fair bit um so for example in the canterbury the canterbury tells the line juan zephyrus egg with his sweeter breath in spirit hath in every halt in heath now if a couple of people you knew had the same nama in middle english you would give them an air nama an air kaname and this was an and also name an additional name to distinguish them by so that you could tell the difference between these two people now the word ich on its own slowly died out as people just stopped using it as words do but the word air kaname was still you know was still in use um and eventually people probably just forgot what the word ache had had even meant in the first place they just used air kaname to mean an additional name you give someone now with the great vowel shift air konami became ikname iknam as it was said rapidly by people over time became iknam because most people were illiterate at that point people reanalyzed the phrase because because they never saw it in writing people reanalyzed the phrase an ick name as a nickname and the word nickname nickname was born which obviously survives as a modern word nickname and also name and name you give someone aside from their normal name uh this this kind of re-analysis happens a fair bit in um communities that don't read or write so so it happened with the word apron which used to be an apron because people started saying an apron instead of an apron i'm sorry this coffee i've got it um i'm going to turn probably predictably to cumbrian at this point and i'm going to give a few examples of prepositions which are scandinavian derived from a time when old norse was commonly spoken in the north and east of england of course cumbrian being northwestern and i think these prepositions were probably used in dialects surrounding cumbria and i just don't know much about those dialects so i can't confirm it but i assume that i know certain ones were used in yorkshire um the most obvious still existing one is the word till which means to but it only means two in the prepositional form so i'm going to school i'm going to church um what else she turned two drugs older speakers still use this very liberally without even noticing it so my grandad who's who's not linguistically aware at all will use it very regularly in speech especially if he's speaking to other people who are cumbrian and he'll usually use it in a an unstressed form a weak form which is cool so for example i went to his horse you can see this in northern english stretching back um all the way into middle english documents um and this this this clearly comes from the scandinavian preposition which is reflected in the modern um scandinavian languages the modern north germanic languages the infinitive marker sense of the english word two is taken up by another scandinavian preposition in cumbrian um which is and a speaker intuitively knows the difference between these two and it's it's still in use in very broad speakers so both both till and at dwindling now in cumbrian um but in broad 19th century cumberland you could say i wanted candle horse and that's not all either so the preposition e for in is another scandinavian one um frey is a more recent iteration meaning from um although in older texts it's always frau which is where we get the expression to and fro now frau is a more understandable development from the old norse word which was frau i've actually yet to work out where exactly freyr the pronunciation freyr comes from um you've got the boon which is from the old english word abbovan you've got an ent which i think is from the old english word on nemnid i'll explain this at some point down the line next time i i do something on cumbrian um but yeah you've got lots of scandinavian loan words in northern dialect but these are a few examples of prepositions which are really core words call vocabulary words um if any of you can think of anything you're aware of um do let me know because there'll definitely be things i haven't mentioned or i'm not aware of but those were just a few fun examples of leftovers from older stages of english so thank you very much for watching and i shall see you soon if i don't perish

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 308,012

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Id: 4kmIV9yOTyg

Length: 13min 45sec (825 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 21 2020