This guy appeared in my YouTube recommendations a few months before the pandemic. They were there for weeks before I actually clicked on one, strangely persistent given the titles and screencaps on the videos: "What did middle English sound like?" next to this grubby college kid's face. What about my viewing habits to date triggered this recommendation?
When I finally relented and clicked on one, it was kind of hypnotic. It's hard to put to words: the content is really interesting for all the reasons laid out in the article, but there's something else, too, an atmospheric thing. The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you.
It's all pretty dreamlike, I guess. Especially when I stand back and realize I've been watching videos about Cumbrian accents for like two hours. I'm not even interested in this stuff.
Kudos to this guy, he's clearly hit upon something, even if he is some kind of witch.
> The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you.
This is how I feel about TheReportOfTheWeek, aka Reviewbrah. He reviews fast food items in his house or backyard in a single take and averages 100k-200k views per video (with some outliers). No fancy editing, no team of video assistants, just a genuinely charming guy reviewing cheap food in a nice suit in front of a fixed camera.
As someone who records videos without editing, that one take video could still be 19th or 30th take :) Although he's probably practiced enough he can do it in less than that. For me though, I have to restart a bunch of times. Usually that final take still has flubs, but it had the least glaring ones.
The ones I do are usually rules explanations or brief overviews of my game designs that are intended to enter into contests or pitch the game to publishers, often finished right before the deadline (sometimes just an hour before) so I don't have time to video edit even if I wanted to.
Like here's the most recent one I did, for a dice puzzle coop zombie themed game (I know zombies are an overused theme, I wasn't even trying to design a zombie themed game at first, it just fit the mechanisms best). Still screwed up a few things:
> The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you.
This sounds very much like ASMR. I find the most relaxing/entrancing videos are the ones that are unintentional/not forced, although obviously personal preferences do vary.
I watched a video of a friend of mine who's become a semi-prominent Zen teacher. After a few moments of listening to one of his (rather lovely) pandemic/Zoom group meditations, it struck me that this was weirdly close to ASMR too -- intimacy, calm, human "touch". Philosophy too, yes, but the interpersonal dynamic is a mother cooing into your ear. I wonder if this resets you into some calm, receptive mood because that's an evolutionarily advantageous state to be in, and the cooing is a shortcut to it.
He hasnt hit upon anything. Other than for himself.
Youtube etc is like throwing sugar around a gigantic ant hill and watching ants reacts. The ants dont change into anything sophisticated consuming all that sugar.
Learning takes time. Its requires the right environment and experienced guides.
There are no shortcuts. And the chimp troupe learns that lesson again and again every single time they think they have discovered one.
I think you do people a disservice. I'm not sure the video are supposed to do anything other than pass on information to viewers. Some of those viewers my use the information, some may pass it on to others, some may act on it to research further and many will do nothing but absorb the content and move on. Is there a problem with any of that? Is there a difference between this guy and a non-fiction author of a specific subject? We don't expect non-fiction author to revolutionise the lives of everyone that reads their book do we?
Wow, exciting to see Simon on the front page. My background is in linguistics so I've known this guy for a while on Youtube. He adamantly claims his background isn't in linguistics but he's legit. Go Simon!
This is refreshing to hear. So many similar infotainment channels seem enlightening, but as soon as they cover topics or regions of the world I'm deeply familiar with, I get disillusioned by misrepresentations. So often, it's not due to compression but to cherry-picking examples to heighten the drama or their conclusions.
> Did the Nineties really feel like a period of stability? Or does it just feel like chaos now because I’m an adult?
I was born a good decade before him but still wonders this very question. I asked my older friends and family, and it appears (empirically) that... there's no clear answer.
There's actually something specific about our times (information technology, ecology, western world mostly at peace for 70+ years...) but it very much relates to how much you look and feel about the world surrounding you.
The true difference is that much more people are aware and worried about the state of the world in our times than before. In that sense, the chaos seems much more apparent than it used to be.
Of course, this is anecdotal, not an evidence in any way :)
A lot of the chaos just wasn't apparent before because the information flow was slower more than because people didn't care.
E.g. look at any news event, and consider how differently it looks if you only look at print news and one daily news broadcast vs. if you look at the same event online, with conflicting narratives, easy access to how foreign news media describes something, speculation, and far more granular reporting.
Everything looks a lot more coherent and certain with just a few viewpoints and a couple of updates a day because you miss a lot of the mistakes and changing opinions and differences in bias.
Good to see Simon is getting promotion. It's interesting to watch someone have an authentic and deep passion for something which they enjoy sharing in a down-to-earth manner. For example the vocal shift video was quite revealing. Maybe one day he'll have his own BBC documentary series.
Yes, I'm aware. Both modern French and English got it from Old French "vouel" and "voyeul", which if you speak it - especially the first form - makes it clear how it became "vowel" in English. Hence my point that the "c" disappeared when it was borrowed from latin into (Old) French.
It really depends on where you're at and who you're with.
In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things).
That doesn't touch the reworking of former areas of the USSR, the first gulf war, and the various issues with asian economies.
I was in high school; it's much easier for me to think that the feelings of stability I felt at the time came from my parent's professional success and the various booms in markets that they were able to capitalize on rather than some more systematic stability...
>In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things).
Yes, but those are par for the course throughout modern US history, nothing to write home about (in the sense they wouldn't affect the average citizen anyway, and they'd just be off the news in a month or so).
For the former USSR areas true - was mostly describing US/Western Europe.
> He watches TV footage from the 1970s and focuses in on the people strolling about in the background. The pandemic enhanced his sense that the most mundane parts of life are what will make the past come alive in the future.
I lived through the 70s. Some movies from them are curiously nostalgic to me, as the way people dress, talk, and behave has significantly changed.
In my ears many of the early examples sound like English with strong Swedish accent ("Swenglish"). As if a Swedish AI-voice tried to read out English text. Now, it is more likely influenced by the norse ancestors, and they were not from Sweden as much as Norway and Denmark, but still...
Being from Lithuania I noticed that too. These old English words sound just as if some Lithuanian student would be reading English text for the very first time and uttered each letter just how it was meant to sound in Lithuanian.
I suspect that over-time English, for some reason, lost the correspondence between the pronunciation and writing of their language. For example in Lithuanian I cannot think of a world where someone would have trouble reading the word after seeing how its spelled. Also, interestingly, we don't have "spelling bee" type competitions here.
You'd probably be interested in seeing the collaboration he did with Old Norse linguist Dr. Jackson Crawford in which he and Dr. Crawford had a scripted but mutually intelligible conversation in Old English and Old Norse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc
It's not just "like" the Northern offshoot of Germanic, they are North Germanic languages, like English is a West Germanic language.
The similarity is even stronger if you compare with Low German (most common in the North), which didn't go through the consonant shift of the now dominant High German (e.g. day: Norwegian dag vs. Low German Dag vs. High German Tag)
While there's probably (I'm not a linguist) direct Norse influence too, English is a West Germanic language, and so the further back you go the less Norman and French influence has diluted the Germanic foundation of the language shared with e.g. the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German (the relationship with German is more obvious if you include the now relatively uncommon older Low German dialects that used to dominate Northern Germany - you get a continuous map with much more gradual changes).
The phonological history of English doesn't have much to do with French. English could have had its entire vocabulary replaced by French while still being grammatically and phonologically the same.
Internal linguistic processes are much stronger than outside influences.
You're probably right it was less significant, but both Norse and French have certainly contributed sounds to English.
Scandinavian speakers tend to struggle with the w/v distinction at the start of words for example, because most of our dialects do not have a distinction like that and so many of us learn one of them and use it all over the place. English appear to have imported the sound as in vacation when it imported most of the words (including valley) starting with it.
Another example is how when I first learned English in Norway the teacher spent a whole lesson early on drilling the pronunciation of the ch in chair (from Old French; compare "stol", Norwegian for chair vs. English "stool") because the sound was completely foreign to us but confusingly similar to e.g. the skj in skjorte (shirt; the skj is pronounced almost the same as the sh in shirt, depending on dialect)
So it may have had less impact on changing the phonology of Germanic words in particular (though I'm curious about some as Norman French changed the orthography of many words that used to be pronounced in the Germanic way but that now match the Norman orthography - e.g. hus to house - did the pronunciation change first?), but the sheer volume of French words that in at least some cases brought with them different sounds means it certainly contributed to the overall English phonology appearing more foreign to us.
> from Old French; compare "stol", Norwegian for chair vs. English "stool"
"Stol" also exists in French, in a way. Frankish *faldistoel -> Modern French fauteuil.
> though I'm curious about some as Norman French changed the orthography of many words that used to be pronounced in the Germanic way but that now match the Norman orthography - e.g. hus to house - did the pronunciation change first?
The pronunciation of "house" changed with the Great Vowel Shift, that's much posterior to the Norman era and concurrent to the emancipation of English.
> but the sheer volume of French words that in at least some cases brought with them different sounds means it certainly contributed to the overall English phonology appearing more foreign to us.
Don't start from the assumption that your own language represents a purer form of Germanic linguistic features (though it may).
> Don't start from the assumption that your own language represents a purer form of Germanic linguistic features (though it may).
The point is not that its "purer", but that - as was the point of the start of this discussion where someone noted the similarity of the "older" part of the recording to Swedish - that the languages in question certainly appears to have sounded more similar. It doesn't mean the Scandinavian languages haven't diverged too, but moving towards the shared root still sheds many of the changes that have caused the languages to diverge.
You're certainly right that much of that change will have been internal too, though there are certainly examples that still sounds much more foreign to us because the sounds are just not present or not present in the same positions, and at least some of those in English were imported from French. It may well be that they seem more prominent to us because they're typically accompanying words that are extra foreign to us, as so it's quite possible older English "sounds" more Scandinavian to us not because the sounds are that much closer but just as much because the vocabulary is.
This is really interesting. My grandparents were born in near London Bridge around the turn of the 20th century, and their accents were nothing like London/SE accents are now, even my parents (if you consider current London accents to be Thames Estuary / Eastenders / Danny Dyer).
Just typing this and watching that, makes me think, who would be the 60 year mid point for that (1900-2020), and the most obvious London actor I can think of is Bob Hoskins, and his accent was different to what we have now. Recognisable as a London accent, because we're familiar with it, and that generation is still around.
Faszinatingly and not surprisingly, to me as a German the anglo-saxon was almost understandable, English with a lot of German words. Add in some dialect, some parts sounded rather nordic, others rather like Swiss-German pronounciation.
When I finally relented and clicked on one, it was kind of hypnotic. It's hard to put to words: the content is really interesting for all the reasons laid out in the article, but there's something else, too, an atmospheric thing. The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you.
It's all pretty dreamlike, I guess. Especially when I stand back and realize I've been watching videos about Cumbrian accents for like two hours. I'm not even interested in this stuff.
Kudos to this guy, he's clearly hit upon something, even if he is some kind of witch.