Name: ENGLISH.
Uploaded: 2020-03-30T02:45:18.000Z
Duration: 6 min 58 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Hey, Vsauce Michael here, and today, we're going to talk about this.

What's happening right now— the English language.

A language spoken by more than a billion people with many, many different accents.

And according to last year's Harvard Google study,

a language with more than a million words

growing at a rate of 8500 new words every single year.

But we're getting ahead of ourselves. Where did English begin?

Well, for that answer, we're going to have to go all the way back to the year 400,

and even earlier to this little Germanic peninsula

jutting off at an angle inhabited by people who appropriately were called Angles.

Now, these Angles began immigrating to an island named Britain.

In fact, there were so many Angles there,

you may as well have called it Angle Land.

they wrote their language not in letters, but in what are known as roons.

And everything was fine and dandy until 1066

One of the neatest changes that still affects us today

is the fact that this new Norman ruling class

would refer to the meat they were served using their own words like beef or pork.

But the poor old Anglo Saxons who had to tend to the animals

still used their early old English words, for instance, cow and pig.

And to this day, that is why English is one of the very few languages on Earth

that has a different name for the meat of an animal than the name of the animal it came from.

borrow words from other languages and other people

and just plop it right down into the English vocabulary.

That's right, unlike all of these borrowed words,

the word fun can be traced all the way back to the Angles

which referred to a piece of cloth or  rag.

It eventually came to mean a piece of fabric, say a hoisted flag that flew in the breeze.

And then it just came to mean anything that was high flying

Singling out which words in English were borrowed

could be a pretty fun exercise, for instance, supervise

is derived from Latin, but oversee, that's straight up Germanic.

Well, what would English sound like if we just got rid of all these words

that didn't originally come from the Angles?

Well, what you would have is what is known as Anglish.

Anglish is really fun to read, because it's not really a real language,

it's just an exercise that we can do nowadays.

My favorite is this passage explaining atomic theory.

Of course, you can't call it atomic theory

because, for instance, the word atom is Greek

meaning something that cannot be divided any further, so instead of using the word atom,

There's a link in the description to read all of uncleft beholding.

and as a confession, I'm going to say I'm terrible at impressions—accents, dialects—

Luckily, I read the science, and young children

Nicely done! -Thank you! -Classic Vsauce move.

Now, Todd is from ???, and he is fantastic at accents.

I'm impressed every day. But here's a challenge for you, are you ready?

Challenge. -I want you to do an impression of exactly how you think

Let me just picture him, I've seen him on a quarter before.

Wassup, players? So, y'all gonna vote for me?

I ain't gonna take two terms, just give me one - one shot,

uh, one and done, baby, you know what I'm saying?

Naw, seriously, father, I did not chop down that cherry tree.

I like that, but you know what? There's no way to be wrong.

Well, I mean, there are ways to be wrong, but we don't know the real answer,

because back at the time that America first became a country,

the classic British accent didn't even exist yet.

Yeah, that would be completely foreign to them.

But here's what's really mind blowing about what the British gave to America—

That's right, these people known as the cavaliers

came over to America before it was an actual independent country,

and they brought things like the word y'all,

and they brought the word axed instead of ask,

As well as emphasizing the first syllable of words

Man, I've taken a lot of heat from English people from being from Texas and all that,

was a language spoken on an island off the coast of India,

She was the final speaker of the language.

All I can think about is that lady trying to connect to people like oh, let us share in the cultural joke,

you know, the famous cultural joke of the Bo people.

Yes, yes, it was probably quite lonely, Todd.

Modern English as we know it didn't really begin that long ago.

Think of it this way, there's a time capsule buried

Subtitles ListPlay Video

ENGLISH.

stuff

accent

vocabulary

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