 background. There we go. And I believe we are live. Hello, everyone. I apologize right away for the quality of my voice because I have a cold and I feel like my head is a block of stuff that is gooey. I won't say the word because it's a sticky word. Yeah, we've both been fighting off a cold over the past week and have also been talking all week due to the LingCon conference. So our voices are a little strange. A little right. But welcome to the alliterative endless-naught LingFest Q&A livestream. Is that everything? Say hi in the chat if you're here and you want to say hi. We'll probably give it a moment for people to join in before we get really started and I'm going to drink my ginger and lemon tea. I know I promised cocktails but I'm not up for cocktails right now. I have a Tom Collins. It's a cocktail but you know it's a tall drink. It's largely just soda water. It might be possibly because it's only 1 p.m. here so it's a bit early. Swedish and polymath. Soda water and lemon juice so it's probably good for my lots of vitamin C. Your background really does look very cluttered. A lot of things in this room. But he's just seeing this angle of it. So what we're going to be doing we have some questions that people asked us already and we're going to start off by answering some of those but if you have other questions that you want to ask pop them in the chat if you just want to say hi. If you have any follow-ups to whatever we discuss. This is just an opportunity to chat about and nerd about out about anything that we have any expertise on and some things that we don't have much expertise about. Here shove over a little bit because I think you're out of the focus area. So we had a good suggestion for starting off which was from Rehan Khan maybe 343 on YouTube. Anyway a question which said we should start by introducing ourselves and talking about the origins of our names which is a good idea. So we'll start with that. So Mark do you want to tell say your name and explain where it's from. Well my first name is a well known etymology. So Mark from the Roman name Marcus which you know common wisdom holds that it is connected to the god Mars and that seems like probably true but the complication comes in you know in terms of where the god named Mars comes from. So we think of Mars as the god war the Roman god of war who became sort of associated with the Greek Aries but originally Mars was not a god of war it seems. He may have been originally a god of thunder. In any case the name seems to come from pre-Roman from some pre-Roman god. It could be an Etruscan god so of course the Etruscans were you know a powerhouse on the region of Italy before the rise of Roman power. And whenever there's a word in Latin that we don't know the origins of or a word or anything to do with religion immediately they say oh it's probably Etruscan. It's a good get out of jail free card because we don't actually know Etruscan. We haven't we only know a few words of it and we don't know much about it and it's not Proto-Indo-European so it's an easy out. Oh it's probably Etruscan. Yeah it can't go past that. So there was a Roman Etruscan god Mars so it could be from that god. As I said originally Mars himself seems to come from Indo-European god of thunder so from the same god that also produced Thor the Norse god Thor. And so things got kind of shifted around in terms of the associations and so forth. Another possibility is that Mars the name comes from the stem Mawart who again we don't really know where it comes from but there is an earlier form Mawars related to the Oskian. Oskian is another italic language related to to Latin so Oskian Mawars. So I mean we can sort of piece together what the name sort of sounded like what it might have been before but it's all very uncertain. Yeah and it's important to say also that Mars the god might have been a god of thunder but also seems to have been a god of agriculture or at least most of his early rites at Rome are actually to do with agricultural and spring planting and that's why March is the god Mars' month which is a spring month. It also then becomes the thinking goes though it's not none of this is none of this is more than speculation frankly but the thinking goes that because March was also the in which the campaigning season began that's when because in the ancient world or in certainly early Rome fighting was a cyclical thing you did that you went in the spring you fought over the summer and came back in time for harvest and so it's because it was the beginning of this great campaign season over time March became associated with the beginnings of going out to war and so Mars as the god of that time became associated with war and that that's but all of this happens before we have written records so it's hard to tell but there's traces definitely of him as an agricultural infertility god in Roman ritual so that does seem to be like so the next part then is my last name so Sundaram it's an Indian name and it comes from the word Sunara or Sunaram so which means glad joyous delightful and that D gets added in it has nothing to do with the etymology so Sunara becomes Sundar it's just an intrusive letter as linguists turn these things it seems makes time very rude but it's just it's for ease of speech right like because it's easier to say and it makes this clearer the syllable clearer so this this is a you know from Hindi from from Sanskrit this is an Indo-European root and so that soon part the first part of that word comes from essu which is which means good and it is actually an extension of an even simpler more basic Indo-European root s which is the verb to be so I mean that's where we get the word is from um so to be and then to be good is the sort of progression of that the second part of that word Nara comes from the well it means man and it comes from the Proto-Indo-European root nair meaning man and it's most basic sense it probably had something like vigorous vital strong the kind of qualities associated with masculinity um and from that root that's related to for instance the andro all those andro words androgyny androgyny well that's a weird one to decide it was androcentric um yeah actually actually that's a good place to pause because there was a question or Swedish Finn Polymath who turns out his name Marcus um brought up you asked about you mentioned Alexander and that's a good place to stick that in because that ender on Alexander is that word andros nair andros so in Greek so it is Alexander is from Greek and and the word for man that comes from this root in Greek is nair in the nominative and the stem is andro so in the um all the other cases it's andro so nair andros and that in Alexander the alex is uh warding off for protecting so alex andros is the water off the protector of man um either a man who protects or someone who protects men so it can work either way um and so you get it is a very common word name in Greek so Paris for instance in the Trojan war his other name in fact the name by which he's called most often in the Iliad is alex andros uh because he's the man who you know protects the city obviously he it's in that case it's basically an ironic name as many names in myth are because he is the one who brings the downfall of the city he's the destroyer of the city um his birth is presaged by a dream that his mother has that she gives birth to a torch that burns down the city so him being called alex andros could be called uh sort of uh an effort to to ward off what what his birth the omen of his birth so anyway so alexander but we know alexander and the reason becomes such a hugely widespread name in the modern world is of course alexander the great uh who was notable as really the opposite of a protector of men he was a destroyer of many many men but i suppose he may have decided that he was protecting some of them anyway so that's connected to there's the and there there is same root as in unna naras so uh su and nehr or su naras means literally you know good man wait so your um war-like good man um all right so that's mark's name and my name is avan mcmaster i'm less visible on the on the um well my head is so full of you it's a video side of things thank you this is a bad omen um so if you listen to the podcast you're used to me and my name is a little bit um odd in that my first name avan is not typically a name there are more people now with first name avan is starting to grow but i mean it's extremely rare so i'll tell you the origin of where it comes from as a name for me and then a bit about what the in as much as there is a source for the name um i'm named after the mountain avans which is a flower that grows in the rockies um i'll swear as well but in the rockies my parents used to go hiking there and they like the flower and my mom had a dream about them anyway and my parents were hippies in the 70s so they named me uh after flower and so that my name is avan without the s in the end so that's what i'm named after that flower is the latin name is the dryas octopetala so it's from the dryad family dryas family which is named after the dryads from week smith and the octopetala just means it has eight petals excuse me as i said vaguely um the name avans as it's hard to say because the name of a flower is not um etymologized as much as some others but it's just a common name but it probably comes from the Celtic root ab which means water or river so it's probably cognate unsurprisingly to the word avan like the river um extracted upon avan and there's some other Celtic there's a fair number of Celtic water words that have that ab or av prefix there's also a word in French avan which is a cave formed the kind of pothole cave that's formed by water um seeping down and causing sort of undercutting the the ground so that you get these sort of um direct the kind of caves that you would drop into rather than climb into um and that's an avan and it seems to be associated with that the Celtic word so that's as close as i can get to an origin for that name but my last name micamaster is pretty straightforward um mic is the patron mic prefix mic or mac those are just two spellings of the same one they come from the Celtic uh they come from the Celtic word or the root macos which is sun so it's just very literally sun and um as in son of the father um that word you see in in uh whilst you get map so you an app so you'll find in Welsh names you'll find app or map as a prefix or as a separable prefix that's used to know the same thing and it performs the same it has the same function as the o in like oliri or something like that where it's of just from which again is a patronymic and there's patronymic you get this kind of thing in in um what is it what's the Russian patronymic uh bitch these the suffix bitch like Petrovich is just son of Peter so that is a name that a name formation a last name formation that comes from the period when people were still just saying so and so son of so and so and then at some point it comes fixed as a name and master it so it means son of the master and master in that context almost certainly means teacher master comes from the latin magister which is the same word that gives us magistrates so in general it just means bigger one one with more power because it's from the adjective um from magus which is the adjective or adverb more the comparative form of um well of we get magus and maxima so that's other comparative and the superlatives and they come from the root the Proto-Indo-European root mag which just means great big so magus means bigger or greater and the or more and magister is one with more power one who's in front one who's the leader we get magistrate from it but it also was the term that was used to mean a teacher especially in the middle ages so it becomes the sort of standard term for teacher so what gives us the master's degree you know become a master of something school master school master all of those um the form master is somewhat influenced by maître or what becomes the french maître which is the same word that comes from the same root but developed slightly differently in pronunciation and so then influenced the english word to help the g drop out and have it become master so McMaster means son of the teacher and then so at some point in the past some family member was a teacher and then somebody else got that name um but it's i mean i'm sure no McMaster is a very common name and it's all over the place ironically i am the child of a teacher my father was a teacher a college teacher and also ironically also McMaster is definitely a Scottish name but and my father is Scottish was born in Scotland but his father was born in Plymouth and was English so the McMaster actually comes from the English side of the family while my grandmother's name is an extremely common English name even though she was Scottish and born in Scotland so you know the uh everyone's like oh McMaster that must be because you're Scottish i'm like yes but also no because that's not where that name came from but that's okay so anyway so that's mine um i'm watery child of the teacher i guess a watery flower child of the teacher um oh thank you Topher very much appreciate that that is extremely kind mark do you want to answer the first question Topher has opinions on this question while i make a note of Robert's question to come back to right okay so Topher says enjoy the 12 days of Christmas videos how does your production process differ from your short form versus long form content so the um the i mean so there's the very technical side of the way we we film it the short form content is all directly to camera um whereas the long form content we we always have a little introduction directly to camera uh but um in terms of how it's produced um i record just an audio only um a voiceover for the majority of the video um and then animate uh to to produce the visuals um whereas the the short form since it's done directly to camera we experimented with a few different ways of how to get that but um we uh what we settled on is kind of the same way that we record the little intros to um you know to the longer videos so it's done to camera uh with an iPad serving as a teleprompter and i think the other pieces that they're both scripted obviously and we've been written before the short ones come we're drawing them from the um etymologies that mark has been doing a tweets for a few years now so we've been drawing them so they're already written um there i mean then we just put them you know edit them so that they're going to come in under a minute because right now that's the like limitation on a short and then just you know do them straight they are just etymologies as you know with very occasional in it those are very easy comparatively to produce right mark just has to they come about originally because you come up mostly you just think of one either you see an interesting pair or you think of one word and then find some interesting uh related word that is surprising and write it from there um so we've got a whole backlog of those the reason we started doing them is because they're very quick to do they like we can they're already written we edit them briefly we record in a batch and then i do them on my phone and put in the the words the actual visuals in them i know it's extremely bare bones and not very cool but then i'm not very cool and not very good at it so this is good as i can get the contrast to that is the long videos which take a lot of work as evidenced by the fact we did not manage a long video last year which is a first uh and not something we're particularly proud of we got some in-between length ones yeah we got some shorter ones but none of the big ones because those ones take a huge amount of research and then writing and then rewriting and editing and then finding all the images and then animating them or putting putting it into to the i think sort of one document that has or the one thing that image that has all of those images in putting in all the writing animating that doing the voiceover cutting the voiceover to editing it to um the appropriate sort of unknown mistakes out then and matching those editing on it editing the videos so that it matches to the audio and then putting that out and that is a huge thing and due to life essentially we just happened you haven't really got past the research you've just into the writing finally on the thing you've been working on for yeah about a third of the way into this to a script yeah so there is a script that he's been working on um since last christmas um and that where you could say what it is i think yeah it's another in the series of cocktail uh at a moment yeah so it's going to be another cocktail but it just takes a long time to do the research and these days mark finds so much interesting research that then the more interesting research he finds the longer the script the longer the script the longer all the other pieces of the process are um and so we started doing the shorts partly because youtube is really pushing shorts but also because it's helped really bad not to be putting out material um but there was really they don't really delay the production of the longer one because mark doesn't have to write it research or write anything new it just takes half an hour to do a batch of filming and then i do the production on it and i can't do anything to help him with the other video until he gets further with it anyway so it doesn't um we're not it's not that we are doing the shorts now and that's why we're not doing the longer one because we haven't got a longer one out we're doing the shorts this is the way it's working oh and specifically for the 12 days of christmas shorts um though those came they're sort of excerpted and modified from uh a lot a longer video that we did ages in the ages and ages ago um so that's that's where those specifically come from yeah yeah and we may do some other themed ones like that around other events or something if they come up next time the olympics we have a whole bunch of olympics ones but there's no olympics right now so we can't do this um so thank you very much for your contribution and your question uh robert i don't know the answer to that question i beautifully just wrote it down but i don't actually know um oh what the hell um the asian are asian names like european names and having professional titles in them um i don't i can speak a little bit about south asian traditions i don't think i don't know how much of a role professional names play into it but it is a patronymic system um so your last name which is actually your first name the family name the family name the family name is um derived from your father's name and so with every generation that family name changes um it's of course now been interrupted in my case so my last name is indeed from my father's given name um but i have now passed down my last name to my children as their last name yeah and your father your father really was when he started that by by taking me so westernizing his name when he immigrated to england actually um and taking the name that came second in the way that it was in his own uh culture language and saying okay well we'll just call that my second name my last name and then sort of the nickname or the name of his became his first name and that was a name he we knew him by but his family still i'll call them by what we call his last name yeah and that was his first name but now it's just been fossilized as last name so that won't won't have a name anymore so and i yeah i don't know about professional names in other in other cultures unfortunately no i don't know how how that works if anyone in the comments does i'd be interested to know oh goodness again apologies for the voices and the hearty amount of coal that is coming through fortunately you can't catch coal through uh we are all still socially distraught and it's not covered tested multiple times it's just cold with the entire family so um all right well um as i said if you have any other questions please do keep winning them in the chat but we will go back to one of the other questions that was asked um this one comes from a patreon subscriber daniel hoppersberger derryl derryl sorry of course i knew that i just can't see that far away um and this is a multi part question that i might not i don't know do you want to read out the whole question or do you want to just answer it and explain it it's a question about how the early old english and scandinavian languages interacted and how that affected um english simplification of grammar in particular with reference to gender the radical gender so do you want to so um well he starts off um she uh starts off uh with um you know kind of reviewing the sort of common common wisdom um in terms of how grammatical gender disappeared from english uh basically because the uh old english and old norse are both germanic languages so they're fairly similar they've got the same basic vocabulary in terms of the roots of the words but the endings are all different um so they found because of heavy scandinavian settlement particularly in the north of uh england um there was a lot of intermixing of populations intermarriage and so forth and so they found it was easier to communicate if they just stopped paying attention to the endings and just use the roots of the words to communicate because those are pretty similar and therefore the endings kind of disappeared from the language because no one was using them anymore um and as a result of that since there were no endings left there was nothing to clearly indicate grammatical gender and so once you have nothing indicating it you kind of forget and that that is exactly you know how it happened um you know it was old english was already you know gradually losing those inflections those endings anyways uh but the the arrival of norse on the scene really accelerated that process um and you know that did lead to the disappearance of grammatical gender so that's absolutely true um Darian goes on to ask about um did how much old english and old norse differed in what gender various words were well like did they have different genders for the same word is that one of the reasons it was complex or were they the same gender but different endings yeah so it's it's the second number so they genuinely agreed in gender because those words are coming from the same proto-germanic stock of vocabulary um and so unless there was something some reason for the gender of a word to flip or something as it um you know developed over time you know they're they they're going to be the same gender um most of the time i'm not going to say that um there were no differences there probably were a few differences that crept in here and there uh but you know for the most part uh they had this you know the same word had the same gender in the two languages but what was really different is what the endings looked like and so just to kind of demonstrate this uh i'm going to tell you the forms of an old english and old norse word or the two sort of cognate words the word stone which in old english was stawn and in old norse was stain now in old english there's no ending it's it's just s-t-a-n in old norse in the and this is the nominative singular form as it were it's s-t-i-n and then another n is the ending now they sound pretty similar so that wouldn't have caused too much difficulty uh then in the accusative singular they would have both been the same no ending so just stawn or stain single and there the genitive also looks pretty similar so in old english it's stones with an e-s ending whereas in old norse it stains with an s ending so pretty similar then it gets a little more different in what's called the dative singular form so in old english it's stawn with an e and in old norse it's stain with an i radically different but it is a different ending uh then it gets even more different when you get to the plurals so um in old english the nominative and accusative plurals uh ended as stawn us for both the nominative and the accusative plural and indeed that's where our modern english plural s comes from um comes from this a s ending the a just disappeared and we're just left with the s in modern english now in old norse the nominative plural is stawn r a r so that's quite a bit different and then in uh in old norse the accusative plural has a different ending so you you know as i said it's a s for both the nominative and accusative plural in old english in old norse the nominative plural and the accusative plural are different um so whereas it's stawn r in the nominative it's stawn nath in the in the sorry the accusative plural is everyone keeping up with this yeah without having it uh written out in front of you like i've got it written out and i still can't follow it but um obviously the important point here is that there are differences yeah no quizzes we don't have a quiz at the end go ahead and say well and then the rest of the plurals they actually are the same the ending is a for both um old norse stawn a and stawn um and stawn um in norse so i mean and this is one of the ones where they're relatively similar but you'll see that there's some key differences that could lead to confusion especially when you get an ending that means that looks identical but means a different thing in the other language uh that can cause a lot of confusion um and it's almost worse having the endings similar but not the same uh you know anyone who has uh you know been trying to learn a second language can probably attest to that uh you know that the problems when you have two things in in in your two languages that are similar but not quite the same and you get confused all the time um so and and that's just one example of one paradigm across all the different grammatical forms there's all kinds of you know little differences and things here and there so you know it it led to um you know confusion and so hence uh the dropping of those endings at the loss of grammatical gender um and once you've dropped the endings you know there isn't an easy way to tell gender unless you include another word that agrees with the noun so originally you would have the definite article uh or you would have an article an article of some sort um that would have endings that could tell you you know what form of the noun uh you're dealing with um though in um in old english originally you didn't have to include an article it was optional and in fact what becomes modern english's definite article though um originally meant it had a little more force than that it meant really that um and so you don't go around saying that stone all the time right you you know unless you're trying to call attention to it you just say the stone um so um so you know it wasn't required early on in old english it gradually becomes required as old english becomes early middle english and it becomes more like our definite article um but by that point the definite article forms were becoming less and less distinct and till the point where now you use the for everything right you use just the one form and it doesn't tell you anything so you can't rely on that for help yeah and once you start to substantially not have indicators of what gender things are then you are you know your next generation isn't learning them as gendered nouns and once you aren't learning them as gendered nouns they no longer have gender okay so because it only has gender as long as there's needs as long as there's a requirement in the language to indicate it's that gender so as soon as that's gone it's gone uh and just as a little uh footnote to that you use the example milk those happen to both be feminine i checked just to just to see so yeah old english milk and old norse york york so they're both feminine forms in the languages and then another question was did old english and old norse have two grammatical genders or three like modern german does today so the supportive germanic had three masculine feminine and neuter all english you know and so those three uh you know survived into old english and eventually by modern english grammatical is gender is lost completely um in swedish and danish so old morse had the three at all three um like modern german um but in sweden and danish the masculine and feminine genders merged into what's called the common gender so that's the gender for human beings for living it's sort of animate inanimate in the sense so masculine feminine merged into common gender but they kept the neuter and so swedish and danish have two genders um and modern islamic preserves the three masculine feminine and neuter right and then um did the influence of french on english in middle english did that affect genders um yeah middle english have to grammatical gender yeah so that certainly was uh you know helpful that it was already on the way out by the time french started to have um an influence with that that system of grammatical gender was already beginning to break down and so yeah that made it that made it easy for the french words just to come in and then you don't have to think about grammatical gender because they weren't really paying that close attention to it anymore and by that point english and french do differ on the gender of most nouns they do oh not most not but many many like there's no there's no particular pattern to which ones have what gender it's like there is no there's there's no real common reason that they would have the same gender so they do or don't in a kind of random way so that would have just taken that like sun and moon in in um in french uh le soleil is masculine la lune is feminine um but it's the reverse in old english in in old english sun is uh feminine and moon is masculine yeah so so that what has happened and so they basically i mean there were genders in early middle english but not by late middle english basically like that was that was the end of it yeah yeah so that so those three genders just survive into middle english into early middle english you can still see um you know texts preserving that but they're at that point there's very few places where um you know it's really distinctly shown and so it disappears pretty quickly after that so by the time you get uh any significant amount of middle english being written it sort of reemerges as a literary language um in you know the 14th century by then you know the grammatical genders is gone um so we've got little of course in uh pronouns except in pronouns yeah but for nails um and well it essentially it i shouldn't say what happens is grammatical gender gives way to natural genders really what happens there right because we still have after actress and you know things like that the nouns can be gendered by changing their endings director direct tricks i mean we we know that that's a very common one but there are these different ways um but only when there's we only do that now when we're matching up the natural gender of the person we described as opposed to grammatical gender which doesn't which obviously needs to deplace to inanimate things it's not about um genitalia actually sorry excuse me sorry um i wanted to just say to topper has opinions uh just for the record we prefer the long i mean well sure it's satisfying too we are not in any way stopping doing the longer form stuff we do want to do more of it we would like to get this one done and then like get another one done this year you know we uh we enjoy it as well that is the core of what we want to be doing um the other place of course if you're interested in podcasts if you don't already listen to our podcast not that it's the same but it is long so we love long form stuff an hour to an hour and a half usually but no they definitely will be um some more longer videos coming out this year so um one hopefully very soon as i say i'm well well on the way to writing that script so um then there's another question do you have an opinion on if english should develop differently if the norm has had one in 1066 and maybe i guess what it might have done i think that's a big what if but yeah i mean yeah it's hard just i don't think would have made uh enormous amount of historical difference it would obviously be a huge linguistic difference um so the language would have you know been more like the other germanic languages would have been you know fairly close to languages like dutch that's just dutch and frisian right or that's the closest one to the continent yeah i mean the huge amount of vocabulary that came from french is biggest thing that would have been different it was already losing its gender it was already becoming um all about syntax rather than word editing so that probably i mean it might have been it was accelerated but it would have i'm sure gone that direction anyway but what would have been mainly different so syntax wouldn't have changed all that much no no yeah i mean what the changes that were happening in the syntax were already happening yeah um and the contact with latin and other those you know and those other languages would have continued to sort of have that that kind of you know people would have still tried to write like cicero sometimes in english and that would have affected the way we use clauses and that kind of you know um the uh the amount of embedded clauses and relative clauses and dependent clauses in general that english uses now is a lot more than they did in the past but i think that comes more out of classical attempts to write like classical writers than it does out of french yeah specifically and in french it also comes out of trying to be like classical writers so i think that probably still would have happened but the vocabulary obviously we would still have picked up latin they it worked so and we would continue to do so but not of anything like the rate right like many many synonyms we have for things where we have a french version and an english version we wouldn't have that french version so yeah it would be the vocabulary um i've been points out that it's not just humans of course that we still gender but animals where it's relevant like lion and lioness or nair and stallion or whatever um that one's not of course endings that's a simple different word but yeah we but it's still natural gender in the sense that if we feel like there's actually a meaningful difference in the gender of the of and that matters we'll use an ending to to denote that or at least did um we don't have stone and stonet right because we don't care that the stone is feminine or masculine because we do not think of stones as feminine or masculine um no the chimp uh maybe somewhat like modern scott yeah that's a good good comparison actually because um modern scott is not derived from english modern scott comes from old english and it you know divided up very early now it still has a lot of french influence it does still have french influence but that's because of specific historic connections not not conquest but strong historic connections between scotland and france um due to complicated anti-english sentiment mostly that's why like mary queen of scott's and the french were very connected like that but scott does preserve not nearly as much as english though yeah but scott does preserve a bunch of old english vocabulary that has disappeared from english right um so yeah looking at modern scott is is probably a really good place to to see get a bit of a glimpse at what it might feel like a bit and just to be clear i know you know that but scott's not gaelic which is separate it's a Celtic language so modern scott is also not just scott's dialect of english which there is also a scottish dialect of english scottish english there's scott and there's gaelic yeah those are three separate things though um it's a little complicated um are there books of language that you would suggest to read this actually matches up with another question we we had asked about um what what resources um where i'm just trying to find the first actually asked it um yeah jacob pikarski um asked uh if we could share some of the tools that we found useful and trustworthy when when we're asking about like is this word related to that word for instance so in terms of reference um uh reference sources you know the big one is of course the Oxford English Dictionary so it's available online by subscription um yeah pay or many public libraries have access to it um most university libraries have access to most not all right it does still i thought i won that one but they almost didn't uh so you know you can access that that's that that's the sort of prime um one to look at another online one is the american heritage dictionary so the um the link for that is ah dictionary dot com um and it's particularly useful because it has been appendix with the protein the european groups in it um and so if you really want to you know dig deep in etymology that's a you know a useful thing and there is a book version of that that appendix uh this is in fact expanded from that uh american heritage uh dictionary appendix so there's more in here than is on the than is in the online version or the version that you get in the american heritage dictionary that's the american heritage dictionary of the indo-european roots my very basic title so for for english etymology for english um you know for the protein European roots or english words anyways this is uh you know kind of the best place to turn there are of course more complete um dictionaries for indo-european um but they're uh you know they're big and very technical um and well the standard one is written in german um so corny um is the state corny pic corny is that one um two things uh one i think the original question was also partly about like when learning multiple languages if you want to say like is this Spanish word related to that french word do you have a good way of doing that kind of work especially i guess within european languages because that's you know we know much more about european languages than not european languages so this is one that i picked up that does a good job of that um so it's indo-european cognate dictionary by Fiona McPherson um and so what it has is it's got indexes of a whole bunch of different um languages in the indo-european family and so you can look up you know whatever word you want um in in one language and then it will refer you to what the indo-european root is and then when you look up the indo-european root it then gives you root by language all the words come from that root so that's really cool so that does exactly what you're asking for um so it's a really it's a good one for that um the cross cross cross language yeah for indo-european language um we don't have a lot of suggestions for your you know is Hungarian this related to Finnish that that one would you're on your own sorry um then but i think Robert um i don't know what what specifically you're looking for those are reference works in terms of books on language there's been a bunch coming out recently that you might want to find like friends and things well one in particular uh we um interviewed the author recently on the podcast um paul anthony jones uh put out a book that covers like all the kind of basic questions that you might have about linguistics and language uh and it is called why why is this a question why is this a question and it's uh the question is read english you never thought to ask sort of idea and uh paul anthony jones is the guy who does haigard hawks on twitter and elsewhere if you don't if you know him and um so that's a fun it's a fun it's it goes into enough depth that if you do already know some basic stuff you're still going to learn things we learned things from it but at the same time it's written very much for non-specialists so if you are just interested in language but don't know that much about you know terminology and things it's really good so that definitely recommends yeah i would recommend that if you want a general you know um book about language and you know not specifically focusing on one particular area if you want something general about language that's an excellent starting place so yeah um i mean there's lots of other just books about language that are great uh david crystal has good books yeah i think by david crystal um there's a book that we i was recently reminded of that's about very specifically about internet language because internet by betcha mccullough is a favorite of ours it's about sort of what the internet has and hasn't done to the english language and how communication on the internet is different than it is in other aura um there's work works by i'm just trying to think of people we've talked to recently about language book um well grace tirney has some books on etymology she has a book where's the viking gave vikings gave us words the c gave us she's working on more so those are some good books um i don't know some of the other sort of more textbooky ones if you want well if you uh if you want a book specifically about etymology uh there's a book by um anatoly Lieberman called called word origins and how we know them i think okay the title yeah um and so it sort of explains well how how do people do um etymology um so it's um it's kind of fun and there's a recommendation in the chat uh america operates book yeah highly irregular yeah we're also just about to do an interview with a book that's going to be coming out soon uh with no we're going to do the interview with the author the book is about to come out soon in april a book um called like literally dude which is with the sociolinguist about the kinds of things people love to what we can what we can learn or i think the subtitle something like uh the good that can come from bad english or something like that um and it's about the sorts of things that tend to be stigmatized as bad english and what they what they at why they exist and what they where they come from i haven't actually read past the introduction yet because we're interviewing her on thursday and i haven't i just got the pdf yesterday so i can't tell you much more than that but it looks good so far and so keep your stay tuned that will come the book will come out at the end of april but our interview will come out in may so if you're interested in that um some more questions in the chat uh one it's more technical what about the word child where it came from so scott's is baird which is the germanic word we're just or a germanic word child is also germanic so is it related to kind in like kind of kind there i don't know that but okay he'll look that up while i see what else there's in the chat um unicorn daddy yeah um as i've been says latin had three genders um and that's why basically all the romanc languages have some variety of um genders they've mostly simplified down to two but not all of them and that's the basic thing you know everything was every single noun had to have a gender um there are a few common gender nouns and a few exceptions that work in strange ways but every noun had a gender gender simply meant what kind of ending it took kind of system event so germanic languages also had that proto-inter-european had at least three genders there's come yeah discussion about what the genders were um and so that's what you get and some languages drop them and some of them don't yes arcanics um i agree entirely it's a it's a it's a like it's a charming sounds a little bunch of charming sounds like the biggest compliment but i do mean it that way like it's a well-written interesting amusing book um so and it's an easy beat so uh interestingly uh child we don't know where it comes from it's in old english but we don't there's no other cognate in any other germanic language we can sort of recreate what we think it would have looked like in proto-germanic but there's no clear related word to it so a bit of a mystery so good question so not related to kidnap right um word perfect by susie dent yeah yeah susie dent books are always fun she has she has books a little older some of her books are she has books about the like i'm not sure what it's called but it's books about trade words words that are specific to certain in groups especially certain professional groups like the words that london cavities were used in the words that she builds uh you know the army uses and things like that so she's fun i mean words about language are a big a big category uh there's a lot of them are more sort of like here's a list of like paul anthony jones has a bunch of here's a list of interesting words and where they come from and why they're interesting or here's a list of just funny words yes he specializes in weird often obsolete words and that sound funny or are interesting but there's also lots of words and then there's the kind of the books about like how language works yeah why it works okay um so the other questions if there are some questions so that was tools oh the other thing that i should just say is if you go to our website alliterative.net there is a page of um i think it's called sources and credit and on that there's a link to general linguistic sources and if you go there it has like all of the reference works that you've mentioned are on there is that one listed on there uh maybe not that one you should add that one because i think that's a nice view of um but it lists the the general sources that mark uses for the sort of entomological side most of the time so there's a big long list both of online and books and articles and things like that that he uses on a regular basis so that's almost a good place to start um all right arcanics 1971 you asked a question um in a youtube comment that just has a sort of discussion question so i'm going to put it to mark you can only choose one area of linguistics to study or discuss for the rest of your life and your choices are either morphology or semantics which would you choose and why i mean probably semantics um just because it kind of goes on forever um morphology can be interesting i you know it's funny because my opinions of these have changed over the years when i was a grad student probably the one i was least interested in was um the phonology side um and and yet now looking at sound changes is one of my most favorite areas of linguistics so um you know these things can change but probably probably semantics i mean in fact i've done way more with um syntax than you know in terms of professional work uh than i have with any of these i mean that's really what my you know graduate work focused on mostly um and so uh but i would say probably semantics there's a lot of different ways to approach semantics and a lot of different um you know kind of theoretical ways of thinking about it so in your interests in um cognitive linguistics would fit best with semantics in general um you know interest in semantic fields and and while etymology is lots about sound changes and morphology it's also you know you spend a lot of time on semantic changes and semantic developments especially in the videos yeah so i'm not going to answer the question because i'm not a linguist so i don't feel i have to and also it would have to be semantics because i know it's a little bit morphology so this is sort of a simple question for me um yeah um there was another question that we don't have um an answer to so i'm just going to quickly say it was from trig uh was about it was about ASL and was stoko really the first person to recognize ASL as a distinct language i mean the only kind of answer that i can give is that um you know it depends what what you mean you know the first person to to recognize it because um there was um i don't know the exact name but there was uh a signed language used by um indigenous people in north america um that was not only useful you know for people who uh were hearing impaired but uh was used as a lingua franca between people who spoke different languages but could use the same signed language so obviously they had some sense that it was you know its own thing um and that must have been you know long before um europeans were in north america so yeah but i mean so that's the question was about ASL specifically i don't know in terms of were there people before who recognized signed languages as signed languages that's a difficult question and really the short answer is neither of us know very much about sign languages so we would have just googled it and no we wouldn't have come up with anything better than you can get through googling sorry um now this question in the chat about whether either of us has ever been involved in a language maintenance or revival project and again short answer is no um i'm aware of and sort of know of people around us doing that so we live in northern ontario and the local indigenous language is anishinaabe here and there is anishinaabe language teaching going on at the university that i used to work at and the mark still works at though not as much teaching as they used to be because they fired that set of teachers so um but i believe there is still some language teaching that's going on there and that is um it's a maintenance that's that language never disappeared but it's it's not a revival it's language maintenance but it is also uh you know it attempts to strengthen uh because of course um of the intense efforts but in by the canadian government to make the language disappear so that is one that is going on around us in for instance we have a colleague who worked on an anishinaabe dictionary um that is very important to that kind of work um we did mean to have her on the podcast before our university imploded and she retired and i'm not sure how easy it would be to do now um um yeah well don't worry lewis it wasn't it only or louis i'm sorry i don't know which um it was not only the linguistics department it was all of the humanities and in fact it wasn't the linguistics department that didn't even exist already it was the modern languages department going yeah but it was also the indigenous studies all of the indigenous studies programs which is what it was taught under um that was canned as well as classics which is mine which is why i lost my job and uh women's studies and uh religious studies and philosophy and um what else um oh also math and physics because we're an engineering school so why would you need a math and a physics department um the physics department had recently produced a noble prize one of the year before or a noble prize has been awarded to somebody top there but you know anyway um not that's something we're a little bitter about or anything look up lorenchen university if you'd like to hear the whole sordid story they declared insolvency in can 110 multi faculty and cut 69 programs so anyway it was fun um you'd think i said at the time oh well maybe this will mean that i have more time to devote to this project and then we immediately ceased to put anything out so there's no looking for an entire new job and career um takes up some time both actual and emotional time and that kind of derailed me a bit but in terms of um language revival and maintenance um we did do a podcast episode uh oh yeah that focused on um scripts on alphabets on the the maintenance um uh and revival of uh of you know endangered uh writing systems that was fairly recently so if you're interested in that and you haven't heard that episode i think it's two episodes ago three episodes ago something like that um on endangered and endangered alphabets and uh that was really interesting so no we haven't either of us worked specifically in done that work but of course we're we know of and are connected to other people we also just recently um we're on a panel well at lingcom um which this is in connection with at lingcom we were on a panel with uh someone who done a podcast called tongue unbroken which is about language in alaska alaska languages indigenous languages and um lots of different elements of the sort of political and linguistic and social world of alaska indigenous languages um the last episode which is the only one i managed to listen to so far but um is about the fight to get indigenous languages of alaska declared official languages of alaska which they won but it's a really interesting sort of first person narration with the host and two other people who were involved in getting getting the bill passed um about the sort of process of doing it and it was totally fascinating so anyway that's um just again and when we we're hoping maybe to have him on i don't know the podcast we have so many people we want to interview on the podcast and we only really have this ability to put out one episode a month and we also want to do other things that aren't interviews and so we just have this ever-growing list of people and not enough time to do it if if i had the money to pay somebody to edit them we would just be interviewing someone every week as far as i'm going to until we ran out of the fascinating people we know but yeah excuse me so yeah so we haven't um we haven't worked on um language revival maintenance but we're interested in the topic um and you know we're always uh gained to post pro it uh and so yeah we're always getting to to talk about it on the podcast with experts who do that work yeah because it's it's something that we can't you can't just get into on a whim we really have to be connected communities who are doing it before you make any efforts um all right one more question that we had from before i won't just go with it's one which is exciting because it isn't it it's something that i'm well i did the answer to i was going to say that i know about my answer's mostly going to be i don't actually know about it but it was from tim hammack who's on patreon um who said i recently read that the romans knew of shiva and they equate equated shiva with diagnosis um i assume this happened before constantine so do we know if they knew of any of the other pantheon um do they know um where their connections with the sort of farther east than parcia um basically what what from the far east did or did not influence the ancient world linguistically or otherwise and this is not something i know a lot about um but that connection between shiva and diagnosis as far as i can tell i was a reasonably quick research that um i didn't go really really in depth to it as far as i can tell that connection was not made in the ancient world at least not by the sources we have we have a few sources so the obvious thing is dianesis was said to have visited india so in his myth he was said to have visited and conquered india so that's in the greek you know early greek sources we have what they mean by india what they mean by dianesis visited it it's all left sort of all that means is he comes back with panthers and leopards in his retinue and he's exotic right so and it was it used to be said oh that means that dianesis comes from the east and the the greeks always sort of talked about him as this foreign god but in fact we have his name in linear b tablets from the mycenaean period as clearly connected to making offerings so he's clearly as old as any of the other greeks deities that we have evidence for that doesn't mean he didn't come from the east originally but i mean as aphrodite seems to have but certainly he's not a newer or more recently introduced foreign god that said the connection between him and shiva which there is scholarly discussion of that but doesn't seem to have been done in the ancient world and the uh so there's one so there's one author in 1979 wrote this book she vented dianesis in french and then daniel uh danielou and i he seems to be referred to all the time so there's like i found a website that sort of goes over the evidence for this connection it's called dianesisandshiva.wordpress.com and it has good citations so there's lots of parallels they both are associated with wild animals and spotted animals that both are associated with the lingam or phallus is the prominent element of the worship of both deities certain kinds of ecstatic and or yes accelerations connections to fertility other elements of their story that are that have connections so it may well be that they're connected but probably if so more from you know indo-european and larger trends or you know they're parallel or maybe they're from the same source a long time ago but that does not seem to have been recognized in the ancient world we have one author in the ancient world in the roman period who's a greek who says that there was a connection between dianesis and an indian god of nisa because that's what dionesis means it means god of nisa nisa was the in miss was the name of the mountain that he was sheltered in as a baby but that mountain is located in a hundred different places like every different place says oh this is mount nisa or says but mount nisa always means it's always outside of wherever you are so wherever you are mount nisa is far away and so at a certain point it starts getting located in india but that doesn't connect and to shiva particularly so there doesn't seem to be an ancient recognition of that particular connection if there is a connection it wasn't recognized in the ancient world in terms of i also couldn't find any particular evidence that the romans knew of other hindu gods in the hindu pantheon but that's not to say they didn't because there certainly was contact between the indian world and the indians of continent and the roman world and in fact there had been contact of course in the greek east between the northern india and pakistan and alexander had you know conquered that part of the persian empire and had had contact and there's this area that's known as gandahar which was a greco-bactrian and greco-parthian and greco-indo-parthian set series of kingdoms where there's something called greco-buddhism which is a it's the place where the first images of the buddha come from the first time that the buddha is represented sculpturally because of the the greek tradition of representing gods sculpturally which was not at that point an indian tradition i gather from the from the sources so if they knew of indian gods and pantheon it would be buddhist rather than hindu it seems most likely because most of the connections seem to have been other connections who have been with buddhist groups um there are various evidences of contact we know that augustus apparently received ambassadors from some kingdoms in northern india and also from tamal areas of southern india um there's evidence that claudius was in contact with the shrillankan court and there's definite evidence both historical and lots of archaeological evidence that there was both direct and indirect trading between india and rom so direct like roman merchants actually sailing to shrillanka and two other places like that um and to other parts of the india not always the parts that are closest because it has to do with the wind and currents what was easiest to reach so in fact it was easier to reach southern india in some ways than it was to reach northern india just because of things i don't understand about the ocean um but there was connection and there seems some people suggest that there were in fact groups of buddhists living in alexandria around the beginning of the roman empire so if there was influence from india on a language i so i don't know of any particular linguistic influence on latin i there may be but i can't i couldn't find anything if there was cultural influence probably buddhism not hinduism and there are arguments that the stories of the birth of the buddha influence the stories of the birth of jesus and that is a fairly controversial point but it is not impossible because of these points of contact um that and alexandria as one of the places where sort of early christianity was forming its stories certainly is a place that they could have been contact because alexandria was a big trading hub so that's a lot of i'm not sure but it is really interesting i mean there are there are caches of roman coins that have been found in various places in india there's indian materials certainly that make it to roman and well past rome as well of course pearls and silky spices being the most important trade items so that's that's everything i can say about that and louis or louis sorry um if you are interested in that i will write i will just check his name and i will write well the unbroken tongue is sorry tongue unbroken is the podcast if you look that up you'll be able to find the name of the person if you're interested in finding all right i think that was all of our previous questions that we were asked ahead of time so are there any other questions or comments or discussion anybody else wants to um contribute in chat about i'm going to let mark talk from it i'm losing my voice and again apologies for not having done a live stream a live stream in so long we quite enjoyed the last time we did one um we just never got around to to doing it again so and we meant to do one to celebrate because we've been marking sort of numbers of subscribers on the videos um and we hit 40 000 and we meant to do one for 40 000 and then didn't so i guess this is also a celebration of hitting 20 000 subscribers um there's a lot of things we've been meaning to do and haven't in the last couple of years and all i can all i can do to excuse us is to point to the general state of the world and also to the specific uh transitions that we've been going through ourselves it's been a up and down kind of last a little while i now have a nine to five job for instance which is a whole new thing i have to figure out how to deal with which i'm sure is not does not make anybody else feel the nine to five job feel very sorry for me but just a different rhythm oh with dachs and crofford yeah that would be fun that would definitely be fun we've talked about it and you also talked about having him on the podcast mm-hmm yeah well that would probably be the way we did that then once we made that connection we could yep yeah we've been a little reluctant to try to do given how terribly we've been doing at keeping up with our own videos we've been reluctant to propose collabs because we don't want to you know disappoint somebody else by not following through so we sort of wanted to be a little more back on a level um getting things done better basically we wanted to be doing being more productive before we clapped but uh yeah so i'll make sure he's on our list mm-hmm um we've got the next two months three months sorted but after that it's open so i'm taking notes thanks louie um so seamor cut the bread with the knife and seamor used the knife to cut the bread are we familiar with that debate i don't know the debate i mean is is it between which of those is clearer i mean those are just two ways of saying the same thing so i don't think i know that the specific debate you're referencing thanks organics i really appreciate you being hanging here and hanging out um we have fun at playing chess yeah yeah we will probably be ending fairly soon just because i am losing my ability to speak and we've been going for more than an hour i don't know if anyone here who's still here was at ling com or went to any of that i don't know if that's something that other people i mean you have to be doing linguistics communication for it to be interesting but if there was anyone who was there and uh i hope you enjoyed it um we had a really good time hanging out without the linguistics communicators and finding out what sorts of things people are trying to do and in what venues and using what platforms and with what purposes oh i see okay yeah whether the underlying forms are the same um i mean i think you know i guess that comes down to a kind of chomsky in uh question you know how much of language is sort of underlying structures and how much of it i you know i kind of more on the behavioralist side of things um and i think even chomsky himself is not so committed to um you know deep structures and categories anymore so it's just the hard line chomskyists who are more hard-line than chomsky himself who would you know see these things as the same structure i guess well because i mean they're both there the question is your i mean both of them are doing an ablative of means or a date of a means or whatever like they're doing it the knife is the means by which the thing is done doesn't matter whether you say that technically see more cut the bread with the knife you've got it what would be in latin and ablative that doesn't mean it is an ablative in english but it's an ablative of use um whereas uh in he see more use the knife to cut the bread you've got technically it's an accusative right he used the knife and so but they're both doing the same thing in sentence so the end result is that the knife is the um the means by which the thing is done so it doesn't matter if it's an ablative of means or an accusative in a verbal phrase are they really equivalent or not as a structure that sounds like the sort of thing that true linguists discuss and i don't so yeah that's those are the kinds of things that they're like the numbers of angels that condense on the pin of a pin of a head of a pin um questions that can be entertaining but don't necessarily get you much further in your understanding do you miss modal particles in english i mean we still have modals by modal particles what are you specifically referring to can't miss them if you don't have if you never had them i i know of modal particles if it's the same thing as they're thinking of i know them in greek greek is where they have particles of the wahoo um with a lot of motin that is what they are they're they're literally express modality um and boy oh boy and well i'm gonna say i don't miss them because they're so annoying but that's actually probably not true okay oh yeah okay so yeah so that's basically the same thing yeah i think to me i mean we've got all kinds of you know little ways um different language so i guess it depends on uh you know it is that question what is the connection between what you see on the surface level and what you see going on below the surface uh you know english has lots of ways to express modality express modality you know we don't use the same particles um in the way that that uh german does well and and it it is true that a certain number of the ways that english does it are um disfavored in standard english so that there's a lot of the modality that we're actually quite good at expressing in spoken english and in dialects of english that aren't really necessarily that dialectal but um dialectical no that's a word of philosophy i don't know losing my ability to dialect i'm losing my ability to language here um the so you know like like like for instance which is one of those things we use to express certain kinds of modality all the time uh but is not considered or you know you know yeah i think those are used functionally like particles really because they obviously don't have the lexical meaning that they theoretically would yeah but but that's what i mean that but they're you know they're dispreferred in formal writing formal writing but also even informal speech to the extent that people you know that this book that's coming out that we're going to be interfering with her it's all about people's dislike of such things and other things like non-standard verb formations like i'm gonna be doing or something you know i'm i'm gonna or i'm i'm gonna do something mean something different than i'm going to or whatever right like there's a lot of um like the irish he's after coming to dinner which doesn't mean the same as he is coming to dinner those are two different things but one of those is you know a dialect but really what it is doing is expressing a certain kind of modality so i think there's a lot of what are seen as informal in english and what i don't know because i don't know german well enough is to what extent things like and even and stuff like that are verbal but not you know discouraged in formal written or to what extent they are considered part of formal language so for instance in greek ageing greek um which is what i know it from those particles are absolutely common in formal both poetic and prosaic uh sources so it is not at all seen as a part of spoken language that shouldn't be any written language like they're it's filled with them on that and the and like in fact they're required they're to a certain degree if you're going to use a subjunctive or a octave you have to use the unparticle or whatever so there's these various things that are absolutely not um discouraged whereas in english i think a lot of them are these days and i think that might be because latin doesn't have that many of them of those kind of ones or at least written latin goodness knows what they wasn't spoken language latin but in written latin you don't have the same type of types of particles that greek does therefore if we have it in english it must be wrong right is the old story of an english grammar anyway that's just not off the top of my head i don't know anything but the fun won't study that a lot of that that work gets done by people working on pragmatics and discourse analysis um because it is you know a lot more common to do that sort of thing in spoken language english um so you know that's where you do find those sorts of discussions and certainly in old english um there were what to my mind were um you know a lot of you call them pleonazans but um like seeming overuse of you know little words that don't strictly speaking need to have there for the meaning of um you know the the strict the strict sense of the sentence but you find them used a lot in certain kinds of um narrative texts and so my theories that they're they're performing um you know discourse functions um they're pragmatic yeah and giving you yeah modal like hype you know foregrounding certain materials certain certain parts of the you know the text of the of the discourse and you know doing those sorts of things well i think maybe it's about time for us to wrap up um unless there's any last questions i just want to say thank you to everybody for dropping by we really appreciate it we also appreciate your interest in the work and the videos in general again we apologize for how long it's taking us to get out more of them we are working on it i promise it is a continued thing and don't worry the little ones are not stopping us from doing long ones because i always feel like some people might be feeling that um they are in in parallel um but we are working on stuff um i don't think mark is drawing out the current one so that he has more excuses to drink the cocktail that he's writing about but it is a small possibility that that's what's going on so i will make sure to keep it keep an eye on him um but we really do are very very grateful for your interest and your presence here and um we hope to keep producing more material and nerding out about language and other related things yeah thanks so much thanks everyone and we'll see you on the youtube excited bye bye bye for now