 Have I ever mentioned on this channel that I'm not a real linguist? Because I'm not. I'm just a guy who's read some stuff about linguistics. Don't get me wrong, I do my best to research these videos, but I found it surprisingly easy to be like, wait, is this a thing? Did I read somewhere that this was a thing? I'm pretty sure I read somewhere that this was a thing. Should I look it up to make sure? And it sounds right, I'll put it in. This does not always end well for me. It was especially bad in the beginning when I was in the habit of just regurgitating whatever I read on Wikipedia without fact-checking any of it. But despite my best efforts to be more thorough, I still mess up every now and then. When I do, I do my best to correct whatever I can with annotations, but not everyone has annotations turned on, and I've heard they don't work on cell phones. So I thought I'd just put all of the mistakes I know about in one place so I can give you guys a sense of roughly how often I screw things up, and also maybe undo some of the damage I might have done. And for your viewing pleasure, I've ranked them an order of least embarrassing to most embarrassing. It's gonna start off with some minor nitpicky stuff, but stick around. It gets worse. Anyway, since we're starting off with the least embarrassing stuff, let's just do a quick lightning round of me failing to pronounce words I've only ever seen written. The Melee word for government official by translating it into Melee first, I guess? The country is Malaysia and the language is called Melee, not Melee. Aspirated veller plosive. This part of your mouth is the velum and sounds that use it are called velar sounds. For native or naturalized Japanese words it uses hiragana. No, it uses hiragana. Wait, is that all? I could have sworn there were more. Well, there's probably more I just forgot about. Now we can really start the countdown to the most embarrassing mistake, starting with number 20. Which was inhabited by another group of Northwest Semitic language-speaking people called the Israelis. No, they were called Israelites. Israeli refers to the modern country of Israel, while Israelite refers to all of the ancient stuff. Number 19. Also, there are long and short versions of each one, and they only differ in how long you say them. Ah versus ah, ooh versus ooh, etc. We can't know that for sure. I learned after this that most of the time when languages distinguish vowels by length, they also vary a little bit by quality. So I'd guess that PIE would do the same. Basically, I don't know what I'm talking about here. Number 18. The letter X will be representing the khah sound, just like in my YouTube pseudonym, khibnaf. Firstly, stop pronouncing your name with a sound that doesn't exist in English. You're making things more difficult than they need to be. Secondly, you're not even doing it right. That's more of a uvular trill than a velar fricative. It should be softer, more like khah. Number 17. In 1888, the group published a declaration of purpose and a set of six rules for how the alphabet should be expanded from then on. Five. There were five rules. I put up five on the screen, and then I go on to list five rules. How did I miss this? Number 16. Alright, this one is going to be a little bit heavy in linguistics terminology. Normally, I'd explain what I'm talking about, but I figure anyone who cares is probably already going to know what these words mean. So basically, in this video, I assert that voiced aspirated stops involve a voiceless interval right after the release. But I have sense learned that this is wrong, and they're actually produced with a breathy voiced interval after the release. Hope that clears that up. Number 15. You know, British people make an a sound, or Americans make an a sound a lot. You know, bath, bath, laugh, laugh, grass, grass. I probably should have specified that this whole thing with pronouncing words with an a in them with an a doesn't apply to all of the dialects of English spoken in England, let alone the UK in general. People in Northern England got very annoyed at this. Number 14. It also has a fair amount of influence from old Italian, old French, and old Slavic languages. Moldovan is not a language, and even if it was, it wouldn't be a Slavic language. It's a dialect of Romanian, a romance language. I just put it on there because I guess in my head everything in Eastern Europe besides Greek is Slavic. Speaking of making my illustrations by memory without fact-checking them, number 13. This map is supposed to represent the distribution of Indo-European languages, but it shouldn't include Estonian or the Dravidian languages. This one would rank lower if it weren't for the fact that I used this map like 10 times in this video. Number 12. Now, that explains why we have two letters for the k-sound, but it doesn't explain why we pronounce the letter C as a s-sound sometimes. Well, that's just because of random changes in pronunciation in English that's caused us to pronounce some k-sounds as s-sounds. What? What does that even mean? Look, I don't really know all of the details about the history of the letter C. As far as I can tell, the spelling conventions around it have changed a lot, but I'm pretty sure we pronounce it as an s sometimes because of a sound change in old French where they started pronouncing k as s- depending on the vowel that came after it. Not English, French. Also, sound changes aren't random? What are you talking about? Number 11. Grim's Law also explains house versus casa, lips versus lobbyos, foot versus pie, four versus por, cat versus gato. I was just jotting down whatever came to mind here and it turns out Grim's Law isn't actually responsible for half of these. We don't actually know where the word house comes from and cat was actually borrowing from the Latin cactus. Like, if Grim's Law had affected it, then it would have also affected the T at the end. Obviously, why didn't I notice that? Number 10. When I first learned that you could do this, I tried applying it to England and it threw a big fat monkey wrench into the whole system. Why? Because England is weird. English isn't special! It just looks that way because you happen to know a little bit more about it. I guess there's technically nothing, like, factually wrong here? It's just... No! No! Number 9. Also, Chinese may normally have a symbol for every word, but it's worth noting that almost all Chinese words are monosyllabic, so it could just as easily be described as a syllabary. Figuring out which it is isn't helped by the fact that the few Chinese words that are multi-syllabic are sometimes written with one symbol and sometimes there's one symbol for every syllable. Or so I thought. I mean, why else would Chinese be called a logography if there's always a one-to-one correspondence between symbols and syllables? Well, it turns out that the real reason is that there's a lot of words in Chinese that used to be pronounced differently but are now pronounced the same, but still mean different things. And all of these homophones are always written with different characters. So syllables that are pronounced identically are written with different characters, so Chinese can't be a syllabary. I'm honestly not sure whether or not there are polysyllabic Chinese words represented by one character. I've read conflicting things about it. Number 8. The merger is becoming more and more common in American television and media, and some people predict that eventually the entire U.S. will say the two vowels the same. You do. You predict that. No one else predicts that, and you're an idiot for predicting that. There's a bunch of dialects in the U.S. where the vowels have drifted really far apart rather than merging together. Maybe eventually people in those areas will abandon their local dialect in favor of one with the merger, but at that point, that's not really the merger spreading so much as just the standard dialect spreading. Number 7. Yang is associated with females, darkness, death, intuition, cold, and passivity, while Yin is associated with maleness, light, life, logic, warmth, and activity. Nope, nope, nope, nope. Reverse all of that. Yang is associated with all of these things, Yin is associated with all of these things. This one would be lower on the list, but I still get comments about it like every freaking day, and it is slowly driving me insane. Number 6. So, uh, remember this video? Remember how, like, the whole second half of it is me doing my best to pronounce a reconstruction of the earliest common ancestor of American English and British English? Heh, think about that reconstruction. Uh, I kind of made it up myself, and I made it by going through Wikipedia's list of English sound changes and applying all of them to my dialect of English in reverse. And apparently Wikipedia's list of sound changes is not exactly complete. Also, I'm just kind of crap at doing accents that aren't my own, so this whole video just looks stupider and stupider the more time passes. Number 5. Vocalized, vocalized, vocalized, vocalized, unvocalized, un vocalized, vocalized, vocalized, un vocalized, vocalized, vocalized, un vocalized, voiced. The word you're looking for is voiced. The worst part is, vocalized is also a legitimate technical linguistic term, but it just means something completely different. But for months, I thought that vocalized and voiced meant the same thing. I don't know why, I don't know how that happened or where I picked it up from, but now, unless I remove those videos, it's going to be up there forever. Number 4. Okay, so, four years ago, I was like, hey, I really want to teach people about different writing systems and how almost all of them can be traced back to Phoenician. I wonder how I can frame this in an interesting way. Hey, Vsauce did a video titled This Is Not Yellow with an obviously yellow thumbnail to teach people about the nature of color. I know, I'll do basically the same thing by making my video have a title and core message that's obviously demonstrably wrong. There's no way anyone's going to take it at face value and actually think I'm saying English is a Semitic language or that you can really determine genetic relationships between languages based on their writing systems. That would be ridiculous. And there's definitely not a giant group of people who legitimately think English is, say, descended from ancient Hebrew and that English people are descended from specific characters in Bible. Nah, I'm sure it'll be fine. This does not end well for me. Number 3. Ah, yes, the video that kicked off this whole channel. Have you ever mentioned that I made this video in, like, a couple of hours? I basically just did some very, very basic research on Proto-Indo-European phonology and then I went and did my best to pronounce a sample of it I found on Wikipedia. I wound up not doing a particularly good job of pronouncing it. So, tell Tom Lachem ever quit. For God's sake, aspirated does not necessarily mean unvoiced. Number 2. And in addition to that, there's another method of determining syllable boundaries that I think is incredibly useful and takes advantage of one key fact about syllables that everyone agrees on. They never span multiple words. So, I said that everyone agrees on this basically because, one, it seemed really intuitive to me. Two, there was this one study I read that basically seemed to take it for granted. And three, I was about to get into how no one can really agree on where word boundaries are anyway. So, like, in the end, it's not even that useful anyway. But since then, I've realized that that study might have just been taking it for granted that the syllables in English don't span multiple words. And I never actually read anything anywhere that explicitly said that syllables don't span multiple words. But I also couldn't find anything anywhere that explicitly said that they can either, so, I don't know. At the very least, I shouldn't have said it so confidently. And the number one most embarrassing mistake I've made on this channel. If you plopped a person from 15th century Thailand down in the middle of modern-day Bangkok, they'd probably have no idea what anyone was saying. It'd be like us trying to read Shakespeare times a trillion. But at the same time, they'd be able to read all the road signs and communicate with people with writing just fine because the writing hasn't changed at all in the past 700 years. In the same way, people who live in Thailand today can go up to ancient temples and dig up centuries-old documents and perfectly understand the words written by their ancestors dozens of generations ago. If they were to change their writing system, they would be cutting themselves off from all that heritage, all that culture. So, uh, a lot of Thai people have actually commented on that video going, Wait, what are you talking about? We can't understand stuff that's that old. And it turns out there might have been a bit of spelling reforms in the early 20th century that I didn't know about. So, uh, that giant, passionate spiel at the end of that video turns out might be completely inaccurate. Alright, I think that's everything. I've done my best to learn from these mistakes and make sure to thoroughly fact-check everything I say, but I'm not really sure what to do about all the videos that already have all of this in them. I'm afraid that if I leave them up, I'll be spreading misinformation, but a lot of you seem to really like these videos and have learned a lot from them. I've kept all of them up because I feel like each of them has some core point that still holds, but I don't know. What do you guys think?