 Welcome to the Endless Knot. Today, I'm joining forces with the cynical historian to talk about the history and etymology of nation. The word nation entered the English language around the year 1300, with the sense of a group of people united by birth or ancestry. In other words, a distinct people sharing common descent. Coming to English from old French nation, birth, rank, descendants, relatives, and thus by extension, country or homeland. The political geographical sense didn't develop until later, perhaps as late as the 16th century. Old French nation came from Latin natio, birth, origin, breed, stock, kind, species, race of people, tribe. From the past participle natus of the verb nasci to be born, originally spelt gnazki in old Latin, and can thus be traced back to the Proto-Indo-European root genna to give birth beget. Now when combined with the prefix calm together, Latin gnazki produced the adjective cognatus, sprung from the same stock related by blood kindred, and that gave us the English word cognate. Finally meaning allied by blood connected or related by birth of the same parentage descended from a common ancestor. But in linguistics, the term is used to refer to words that have a common etymological origin. So the words nation and cognate are cognates. Another cognate of the word nation is nature, which passed through French from the Latin word natura, course of things, natural character, constitution, quality, the universe, which is formally the future participle of the Latin verb gnazki. Now I said that the modern political sense of nation was a later development, and so too is the concept of the nation state, which my friend cynical historian can tell us about. Nation states are a fairly new concept. They really only date back to the 1840s. Otherwise, most people are actually referring to ethnicity, which is quite a different concept from nationality. Yeah, some nations are newer than the country they were formed out of. National histories in the late 19th century perpetrated the myth of continuity before that. In fact, you could argue the entire history profession was founded on nationalism. What we think of nationality is something that only formed with the thick layering of mythology on top of it. After all, myth informs identity, but you'll have to come over to my channel to find out more on that. As for the word state, it first appears in English around the year 1200, but this is in the general sense, circumstances, position in society, temporary attributes of a person or thing, conditions. It comes in part through old French estate, position, condition, status, stature, station, and in part directly from Latin status, position, place, way of standing, posture, order, arrangement, condition, which could figuratively mean standing rank, public order, community, organization, from the verb stare, to stand, ultimately traceable back to the pyroot, sta, to stand, make, or be firm. But the political sense of the word state, the body politic or polity, was a later development, only appearing in English in the 16th century, growing out of the meaning condition of a country with regard to government, prosperity, etc., from Latin phrases such as status re publicai, condition of the republic, and status kiwi tatis, condition of the body politic. In the ancient world, the dominant political organization was the city state, though this is a modern term coined in the 19th century to refer to what were in the ancient world called by such names as Greek polis, from the pyroot Pella, citadel fortified high place, from which we get such English words as political body politic and polity, or Latin kiwi tas, from kiwis, citizen, from the pyroot k, to lie, bed, couch, beloved, deer, from which we get the word city. Another way we typically think of countries in the pre-modern ancient or medieval worlds is as kingdoms, but it turns out that this too comes back to the same sense of common ancestry. The word king comes from old English kuning, which is itself most likely formed from the word kun, family, race, or kin in modern English. King thus meaning the leader of a people, and kun comes from that same pyroot that lies behind nation, gena, to give birth, begat. But the sense of the English being a people that extended beyond a kingdom took some time to develop. You see, early medieval England was at first a number of disconnected kingdoms ruled by different kings, such as Wessex under the West Saxon kings, Anglia under the Anglian kings, and so forth. The earliest notion of a common English identity can be traced to the writings of a monk and historian in the kingdom of Northumbria called the Venerable Bede, who wrote the historical work Historia ecclesiastica Gens Anglorum, or the ecclesiastical history of the English people. That Latin word Gens, race, clan, house comes from the same root of nation and kin. For Bede much of this sense of English identity was rooted in religion, Christendom, coupled with the national myth of the English coming to Britain at the request of the Britons after it was abandoned by the Roman Empire, and they were left unable to defend themselves from the various non-Romanized local populations such as the Picts to the North. The invited group was led by the brothers Hengist and Horsa, both of whose names mean horse, who decided to take over the land for themselves. But language was an important factor as well, as becomes clear a little later in the reigns of King Alfred the Great and his successors. It was during Alfred's reign that not only was Bede translated from Latin into Old English, but numerous other books were either translated from Latin into English or created in English, specifically what is now referred to as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. The Chronicles repeats that English national foundation myth of Hengiston Horsa, and in later entries recounts the numerous battles between the English and the Vikings, including the Battle of Brunenburg, which tells of a decisive battle driving off the Danes and unifying England under one king, Athelstan, a descendant of King Alfred, who in his own time was at least acknowledged as king of all the English, not under the Danish rule. But even in Brunenburg there is still some sense of the English as being a collection of different peoples, with Athelstan returning to his Kythe, native land, West Saxon Island, land of the West Saxons, after this greatest battle, and the poem ends with the lines, The angles and the Saxons came from the East, sought Britain over the broad sea, proud warsmiths, glorious warriors, overcame the Welsh and conquered the land, a reference to the battles of Hengiston Horsa when they came to Britain. Such foundation myths are common around the world and important for group identity. A famous example involves the patron deity of the ancient city of Athens. According to this myth, Athena, the goddess of wisdom, and Poseidon, the god of the sea, competed to become the patron of the city and the namesake of the as-yet-unnamed city by each providing them with a gift, which the king Kekrops would judge. Poseidon struck the ground with his trident and a spring welled up, though it was saltwater since he was the god of the sea, whereas Athena produced the first domesticated olive tree and the city became named Athens in her honour. Ironically, modern scholars now believe that the goddess's name actually comes from the city, not the other way around, because the ending Athena is common in names of locations, but rare for personal names. In more recent examples, mythic themes such as Manifest Destiny, which saw the newly formed United States as destined by God to expand across the continent and remake the West and cultivate the land due to the unique nature and virtues of the American settlers, coupled with the mythic overtones of the Western frontier with its emphasis on rugged self-reliance and freedom from many of the strictures of societal constructs, informs much of the self-impressions of modern-day Americans, reflected in popular media like cowboy novels, comic books, and films. And once again, Cypher has this topic covered. Now speaking of national myths, another kind of narrative that can help to create a sense of national identity is a national epic. The most famous examples, of course, are the Homeric epics, the Iliad Neodicy, which created a sense of Greek unity, though politically ancient Greece was made up of independent city-states until much later. Many European national epics were only written or synthesized from existing folk traditions during the age of nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries, as conscious efforts at bolstering national identities and nation-states, part of what's often referred to as romantic nationalism. For instance, the Finnish Kalevala was collected and compiled in the 19th century by physician, philologist, and poet, Elias Lönruth, who collected shorter ballads and lyric poems from still-existing oral traditions and then worked them into a long epic, modifying or even composing material himself to produce a coherent narrative. The Scottish poet James McPherson largely composed the poems of Ossian, or Ocean himself, in the 18th century, as what was a hugely successful literary fraud which impressed the likes of Napoleon, Denis Deterot, and Thomas Jefferson, who called Ossian the greatest poet that has ever existed. Didn't fool Samuel Johnson, though, who referred to the work as Another Proof of Scotch Conspiracy in National Falsehood. It certainly demonstrates the importance of national epics in the establishment of national identity during this critical period of nation-state development. If you didn't have existing epics of ancient pedigree like the Homeric epics or the Old English Beowulf, you had to put them together from what you had, or just make them up if necessary. After all, it's not really all that different from what Virgil did in writing The Aeneid, having been inspired by the Iliad and the Odyssey. Now, speaking of the US President Thomas Jefferson, besides Ossian, the other thing he was really into was the Old English language and the culture of the people who spoke it in England, before the Norman conquest in 1066. At the time, both typically referred to as Anglo-Saxon on account of Germanic tribes such as the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes who came to Britain in those foundation stories in Beed and the Chronicles. He thought highly of what he saw as a noble and freedom-loving people and of Anglo-Saxon laws which he thought became debased after the Norman conquest. Jefferson was a linguistically gifted man who learned many languages, taught himself to read Old English, and even published his own simplified Old English grammar to make the Old English text more accessible to people. In addition to the Old English text themselves, Jefferson was highly influenced by the book by the Roman writer Tacitus known as Germania, an ethnographic description of the Germanic people in the 1st century CE. Of course, Tacitus himself had his own political axe to grind and depicted the Germanic peoples as what we might now call noble barbarians as a counter-example of, in his opinion, the increasingly over-civilized Romans. For Jefferson, these ancient Germanic peoples were a model of what Americans and their fledgling nations should aspire to and this admiration for Anglo-Saxonism combined with American nativism would lay the groundwork for increased racism and white supremacy in the English-speaking world. But I mentioned a term there, American nativism, so let's bring the cynical historian back to tell us about its history. Nativism runs strong in the US. Even before the country's founding, folks like Benjamin Franklin said, founded by the English, become a colony of aliens who will shortly be so numerous as to Germanize us instead of our anglifying them and will never adopt our language or customs any more than they can acquire our complexion. Imagine thinking Germans were a different skin tone. You can see this kind of xenophobia runs deep. When the Irish potato famine struck, a group of hooligans came together to fight those so-called dirty papists somehow conspiring to invade America. They were called the know-nothings because of their secretive fraternal organization, but they preferred Native Americans. Yes, that's where the term Native American first came from because they were concerned with nativity, as in being born somewhere. Indigeneity is not nativity. Native just means being born somewhere. So nativists want policies that discriminate against immigrants or foreigners of any sort and promote the circumstances of natives over aliens. The know-nothings were so well organized that they became a political party in the 1850s. American nativism continued through the orange riots, Chinese exclusion, and the quota system. Nowadays, it focuses on the southern border where nativism is still going very strong indeed. America first! America first! Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! Build that wall! So in this context of colonialism and the creation of a nation state, Anglo-Saxon became the focus of ethno-nationalism and is inextricably tied to American nativism and manifest destiny, as Reginald Horseman demonstrates in his book Race and Manifest Destiny, the origins of American racial Anglo-Saxonism. And this racial and racist use of the term Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Saxonist has persisted in both the US and Britain as early medieval scholar Dr. Mary Rambar and Ohm has amply demonstrated. So the history of the academic field Anglo-Saxon studies grew up alongside a dark strain of racism, and the studies of early medieval England are now distancing themselves from this problematic term. With one academic group, the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists or ISIS recently changing their name to the International Society for the Study of Early Medieval England or Isemi. The fact is there never was a cohesive homogenous group of people called the Anglo-Saxons. The Germanic settlers never completely replaced Celtic peoples who are already living on the island of other groups such as the Vikings who after raiding for a number of years eventually decided to stay in Northern England. And later the Normans after the Norman conquest in 1066. The name Anglo-Saxon is indeed a reference to the various Germanic tribes that invaded, migrated to, settled in Britain in the 5th century in the wake of the Roman state abandoning Britain as a province, leaving Britain's defend for themselves. These tribes included most prominently Angles, Saxons and Jutes, but probably others as well, such as the Frisians and Franks. But Anglo-Saxon wasn't, at least initially, what they called themselves. It's what's called an exonym, a name for people that those from outside the community use to refer to them. The opposite of an exonym is an endonym, what a people calls themselves. Similarly, the name Welsh is an exonym, which comes from an Old English word Welch, which means foreigner or slave. The endonym is Cymru. Initially, the Germanic settlers referred to themselves by those old tribal names like Saxons and Angles, or more local names such as Kentish and Mercian. The term Anglo-Saxon was first used in Latin in continental sources during the 8th century to distinguish continental Saxons from those in Britain, the English Saxons. So it was a marked term and not a collective compound word to refer to a broader cultural unit. It was first recorded in the writings of Paul the Deacon in Italy. When a more collective self-perception later developed, they referred to themselves in English, most commonly as simply English, Anglefolk, or Anglecun. Remember that Old English word cun from the same root as nation. Not a compound word made up of those old tribal names. From the 9th century, the line of West Saxon kings was generally referred to as Rex Anglorum, the king of the English in Latin. And when they did occasionally use forms such as Anglosaxones, generally only in Latin, it was in the context of West Saxon kings asserting their supremacy over all of Britain. So in early medieval England, Anglosaxon was an exonym not adopted by the English themselves until later and was a marked form only used in certain specific contexts, not a general term. So why did it later come to be used to describe a unified culture? After the Norman conquest of England in 1066, the term Anglosaxon died out and was only resurrected in the 16th century to distinguish between pre-conquest England and everything that came after. So again, a marked term. Interest in pre-conquest England began in the 1530s in order to provide propaganda to justify Henry VIII's break with the Roman church, so he could divorce his first wife Catherine of Aragon by trying to demonstrate that the English church had a separate history that they were simply returning to. This was specifically driven by Archbishop Matthew Parker spawning an interest in the study of Old English materials. In the 17th century, antiquarians such as Richard Verstigen and William Camden continued this interest, celebrating the virtues of the Anglosaxons and their institutions such as the church and the laws. The Oxford English Dictionary lists Camden as the reviver of the term Anglosaxon. In the 18th century and beyond, this celebration shifted from a focus on Anglosaxon culture and institutions to a specific focus on race. In 1787, Scottish antiquarian John Pinkerton, in his dissertation on the origin of the Scythians or Goths, argued for Germanic racial supremacy, stating that the Celts were an inferior people who had been driven out of Europe by the Goths. A term he used quite imprecisely. Pinkerton wanted to purge Scotland of its Celtic heritage and had wild theories that the Picts, who those initial Germanic warriors invited to Britain were supposed to defend against, were actually Gothic and worked out various harebrained etymologies to claim that Scottish place names were actually Germanic in origin, such as the Aber in Aberdeen supposedly coming from German uber. This was all in part a reaction against the Celtomania caused by McPherson's Ossian poems and Pinkerton himself mysteriously found what were meant to have been ancient Anglo-Scottish texts to bolster his national myth-making project. And as we've already seen on the other side of the Atlantic in the fledgling United States, the term Anglo-Saxon began to be used for similar purposes. So the origins of the revival of the term lie in propaganda and politicization at the very least, and at worst outright racism and ethno-nationalism. And these sentiments are still present in current political discourse, such as in the America First caucus recently floated by such House Republicans as Marjorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Paul Gosser, which in a leaked document stated that, quote, America is a nation with a border and a culture strengthened by a common respect for uniquely Anglo-Saxon political traditions and championed, quote, the architectural, engineering, and aesthetic value that befits the progeny of European architecture. Thus calling for an end to immigration from peoples who don't fit those descriptions. This isn't so much a nativist dog whistle as a straightforward racist call to action. Okay, so much for nationalism then, but what about racism? Where did the word race come from? The short answer is, we really don't know for sure, but there are a number of suggestions. First of all, it's not related to that other word race as in to run, which comes from Old Norse Ras, a running, a Russia water, ultimately from proto-Indo-European heirs to be in motion. The earliest sense of the non-running word race include things such as a class of wine, a type of person, and a breed of horse. It comes into English from middle French ras, or rasa, lineage race, from Old Italian rata, race, breed, kind, type, family, descent. That much seems fairly clear, and given that there are cognates in other Romance languages, such as Catalan rasa, Spanish rasa, and Portuguese rasa, etymologists have looked for a Latin root. Latin radix root, though tempting, has been rejected, though it's plausible that it may have at least influenced the sense of tribe nation. One suggestion is Latin ratio, ratio reckoning calculation reason, from the verb rary to reckon, calculate, believe, think. From the pi root ray to reason, count. A variant of the root are to fit together. A more tempting Latin source is that it is a clipping of generatio, a begetting, generating, generation from which we get English generation. And if so, that would make it cognate with the word nation, coming from the verb generare to beget, generate, from ganus, race, stock, family, birth, descent, origin. Ultimately, from the same pi root, gene, to give birth, beget. But given that many early uses of the word race, not just in English, but in the Romance languages, often revolved around the sense of a horse breed, some etymologists have looked for a horsey root for the word. One suggestion that has gained some acceptance is Old French harras, horses and mares kept only for breeding, also source of modern French harra, stud farm. But the source of this word is a matter of further uncertainty. Some would derive it from Arabic ras, head, beginning, origin, from a proto-Semitic root, meaning head, top, which is also the source of the Greek letter name ro, related to the Hebrew letter name resh, and the first element of Rosh Hashanah, literally head of the year, and Rastafarianism, via the Amharic language of Ethiopia, literally head or chief to be feared. Another suggestion is the Arabic word faras, horse. Another intriguing horsey possibility is that harras is from Old French har, gray, gray-haired, from Old Norse har, gray-haired, hoary, in reference to the graying of stud horses with age. This can be traced back ultimately to the Pyrute K, referring to various adjectives of color, generally dark colors like gray or brown, and is also the source of the English words hoar and hoary. Alternatively, it might be related to the word hare, in reference to the fact that stud horses are no longer regularly saddled, so in other words, ridden on hare, that is bearback. Coming into Old French from Old Norse har, ultimately from the Pyrute gares, to stand out, to bristle, rise to a point. Not only the source of Old English har and modern English hare, but also of such words as hoar and abhor, think of the hare as standing up on the back of your neck. Whatever the case, it does seem that the word race has a long pedigree in horse-related contexts, and after all, horses and horse breeding are very important to many cultures. And, though there is one recent study that challenges the timeline of this, it seems probable that the reason the Indo-European languages were able to spread so successfully, and so broadly across Europe and Asia, was the domestication of the horse. The horse was essentially the killer app that allowed the speakers of Proto-Indo-European to migrate and dominate, along with words for the wagon technology widespread in the daughter-Indo-European languages, including roots like queklo, wheel, from which we get English wheel, rota, wheel, from which we get Latin rota, wheel, and English roll and rotate, and axlo, axle, from which we get English axle. This is what's called the Kurgan hypothesis, that the original speakers of Proto-Indo-European were nomadic pastoralists located in the steppe region north of the Black Sea where they domesticated the horse. Micro-abrasions on horse teeth from clamping down on a bit forms this really early evidence of horse riding in the region. The name Kurgan is in reference to the Kurgan culture, who are known about through their archaeological record and are named after the Russian word Kurgan, burial mound, a word which, ironically enough, is a borrowing from a Turkic root, either Kori, to protect Defend, or Kur, to erect a building to establish. They are called the Yamnaya culture, similarly named after their burial pits, from the Russian word Yamnaya, related to pits. Of course, there have been other proposals for the original locale of the Indo-Europeans, such as the Anatolian hypothesis, which would have them as sedentary farmers in Anatolia, basically modern-day Turkey, and the out-of-India theory, which would have the Indo-European languages radiating out from a homeland in India. But the weight of modern scholarship, not only logical and genetic, supports the Kurgan hypothesis. The out-of-India theory, or Indigenous Arian's theory, rests on the rejection of the notion that the original Indo-Arian speakers, that is, the speakers of the Indic branch of the Indo-European language family, migrated into the subcontinent, but were always there. In other words, were Indigenous, which would therefore imply that India was the original locale of the Proto-Indo-European language. It must be remembered that there are families in India, including the Dravidian language family, to which the Tamil language belongs. But the language Hindi is descended from Sanskrit, which is indeed Indo-European. This notion of an Indian origin for the Indo-European proto-language, in fact, was one of the original assumptions made by the earliest 18th and 19th century philologists who developed the comparative method and worked on the Indo-European language family, as it was his work on Sanskrit that led William Jones to the idea of apparent language in the first place. It was initially the custom to use the Sanskrit forms as the proto-forms for Indo-European words, but over time it became increasingly clear that this wasn't the case, both on linguistic and archaeological grounds, and a host of other locations for the Indo-European homelands had been suggested, with the Kurgan hypothesis being the most widely accepted, though there certainly is no consensus. There are still some Indian scholars who argue for the indigenous Aryans theory, and it should be noted that there is an important post-colonial anti-imperial aspect to this, with Indian scholars resisting a set of hypotheses developed by 19th century Europeans which grew up alongside European nationalist and racist motivations. But unfortunately the indigenous Aryans theory has been taken up and co-opted by Hindu nationalists who want to demonstrate the origins of the Hindu nation-state in ancient times and thus justify the kinds of bigotry that go along with all nationalist projects. The problem is that this theory is tied up with the evidence provided by the ancient Hindu religious texts, the Vedas, particularly the oldest, the Rigveda. That text seems to make no mention of a migration, though that alone would be an argument from silence. But much rests on the dating of the Rigveda, which according to the indigenous Aryans theory would have to be at least 1,000 to 2,000 years older than the generally accepted range of 1,500 to 1,000 BCE or, as Max Müller estimated in 1859, about 1,200 BCE. You see, there is pretty solid early evidence for the existence of Indo-European languages attested in writing, having already separated from Pai with Anatolian appearing in 1900 BCE and Hittite, Paleic and Luian shortly after that. Furthermore, there are numerous phonological difficulties with the out-of-India theory, such as the vowel sounds in Sanskrit and other Indo-European languages, which only makes sense if we assume Sanskrit came from an earlier parent language that was also the source of the other Indo-European languages. I explained the details of this in a brief end-note video linked in the description. Beyond these and other linguistic indicators, there is the evidence of the horse and the wheel already discussed, especially when looked at in the context of the late arrival of the horse in India, consistent with Aryan migration into the region, along with other paleontological and archaeological evidence tying the existence of Pai roots for things to their existence in the material culture, such as copper, the smelting of iron, and cotton. So, while the original location of Pai can't be demonstrated beyond all doubt and alternate proposals, like the indigenous Aryan's theory, shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, especially in light of the most colonial context of the history of Indo-European scholarship, this is an example of how ethno-nationalism can lead to pseudo-linguistic arguments. The arguments more often come from nationalist readings of religious texts and Hindu-nationalist political ideas than any solid linguistic or archaeological evidence. In fact, the theory involves the rejection of some fundamental historical linguistics work, including the comparative method. And again, it all comes down to a national myth, the Rig Mesopotamia, and its co-option for nationalist purposes. Now, this horsey theory of the spread of proto-Indo-European is not all that surprising since the divestication of species has often played important roles in the course of history. Domestication of natural grasses whose selective breeding turned them into grains like wheat allowed for the formation of cities in places like Mesopotamia and Egypt. Remember those early city states. This is what's called the agricultural revolution. Now, remember the story about the foundation of Athens. Athena won the contest because she gave them domesticated olives. The olive and specifically olive oil was important for more than just cooking. It had huge commercial importance as a cash crop and was used in many other products such as lamp fuel, cosmetics and medicines, and perhaps most importantly had a crucial religious and ritual importance in the ancient world. In another version of the Athens foundation myth, Poseidon's gift was not the saltwater spring but the horse as he was also the god of horses. And as we've seen the domestication of the horse was another civilization triggering innovation. Indeed, many foundation myths involve a figure called the culture hero who brings a superior culture from elsewhere into a place. Sometimes a foundational bit of technology and this might be what lies behind that old English foundation myth of hangist and horse. Remember those horsey brothers who brought Germanic culture into Britain. Now the word agriculture, which is what's really at stake when we're talking about the domestication of species for human use comes from Latin agricultura cultivation of the land made up of the words agar field from the pyroot agro field also the source of English acre a derivative from the root ag to drive draw move thus from the idea of a place where cattle are driven and the Latin noun cultura cultivation care from the verb cholera to till tend care for cultivate from the pyroot quell to move around turn about which is also the ultimate source of that proto-Indo-European wheel word quell quell from which we get English wheel and when we talk about the culture of a nation or other defined group of people this is an agricultural metaphor and for a discussion of the philosophical underpinnings of this sense of the word a product of German romanticism again see cynical historians video another word importantly connected with culture is civilization and the two are often used as close synonyms or in contrast to one another though the precise distinction between them depends on who you ask civilization also ultimately comes from Latin from Kiwitas originally meaning state community citizenship and later city Kiwilis civil civic and Kiwis citizen though the words civilize and civilization were formed later from those roots in French the root can be traced back to that proto-Indo-European K to lie, bed, couch, beloved deer the idea here is to settle down as one does in a city instead of being nomadic think of those two theories of the original Indo-Europeans either nomadic herders or sedentary farmers French civilize first appears in the commentary portion of historian translator and philosopher was 1568 French translation of Aristotle's work politics in the passage of the original Greek test Aristotle equates shepherds and other country people with laziness saying that hurting people are the laziest type and people who settle down to agriculture are more industrious it's in Lois commentary on this passage that he uses the word civilize civilized connecting these different categories of food production to the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates theory of climate is believed that one's natural environment affected one's entire being one's health and even one's character what's more if you changed your environment you could change those characteristics the ancient world had a very different conception of race than we do now since ours is the product of colonialism and Euro centrism according to this theory of climate physical features like skin color were the result of the environment darker in hotter regions and paler in colder regions the Greeks and Romans saw themselves in the perfect temperate region in between and if a person relocated then over time those physical characteristics would naturally change the other thing about temperate regions and this is what Lois and other Europeans from the 15th to 18th century took away from all this is that they are ideal for certain kinds of agriculture so places that were conducive to European style agriculture made you more civilized and places that were more conducive to herding or hunting made you less civilized and this way of thinking was the underpinning of the whole colonial project with which European colonizers justified their taking over and taking advantage of all those other parts of the world and in terms of food civilized people ate bread which reflected the experience of the European colonizers going to tropical climates and reacting to the local food and for more detail about the development of the sense of the words civilized and civilization check out this blog post by classic scholar Dr Catherine Bluane called civilization what's up with that but the point is that European languages including English use the term civilized to refer to themselves in contrast to the savage peoples that they were encountering around the world and again and again it comes down to a distinction between the city and the countryside urban versus rural the word urban comes from the other Latin word for city orbs which is usually listed as of unknown origin though more recent etymologists have proposed a pirate warm enclosure based on cognates in Hittite and Ocarian which would originally have been used to refer to an enclosed area for taking auspices later broadening in meaning to refer to the area of the settlement but for our purposes what's interesting to notice is that the related word urbane like the word civilized and cultured can have the meaning sophisticated refined kind of the opposite of calling people rustics from Latin ruse open land country the opposite of orbs the word savage on the other hand originally meaning wild undemesticated comes from Latin silhuaticus wild literally of the woods from silwa forest grove in other words uncultivated land another example of this bias is with the word villain which originally came from the Latin word willa country house farm traceable back to the pirate wake clan social unit above the household which produced the medieval Latin word willanos farm hand which came into old French and Anglo-French as peasant farmer commoner churro yokel think basically villager also related and went in English from meaning base or low born rustic to its modern sense of scoundrel or criminal besides savage the other word the European colonizers used opposition to civilized was barbarous which comes from ancient Greek barbarous foreign strange ignorant from the pie root bar bar echoic of unintelligible speech of foreigners in other words for the Greeks you had to be Greek and speak the Greek language to be civilized everyone else were barbarians making incoherent bar bar bar noises oh and in case you hadn't already guessed the word colonialism comes from the same route that produced culture Latin cholera to till tend care for cultivate from that same route that produced the word wheel and that's exactly what lay behind the Europeans motivation for colonizing the so-called new world they thought the land needed to be cultivated and since it wasn't it was up for grabs and behind the US idea of manifest destiny and its need to cultivate and remake the land into something productive but this was a misunderstanding of the relationship between the peoples who already lived there and the land and the outcome of their colonial activities was genocide for many of the indigenous people there and yes the words genocide and indigenous both come from that same Gena to give birth beget root the word genocide was coined by Raphael Lemkin a Polish lawyer of Jewish descent around 1943 or 44 in reference to the Nazi extermination of Jews in his work Axis rule in occupied Europe from Greek gain us tribe race kind and the suffix side a combining form meaning a killing from Latin Kydera to strike down chop beat Hugh fell slay traceable back to the pyroot Kyad to strike so literally tribe killing Lemkin would go on to draft the UN genocide convention indigenous on the other hand is a holy Latin creation which entered English in the 1640s from late Latin indigenous born in a country native from Latin indigna sprung from the land native or as a noun a native literally in born or born in a place made up of old Latin into in within and Gignore to beget produce the first use of the word in English was in a work of popular science called pseudodoxia epidemic meaning essentially vulgar errors in which writer physician and polymath Thomas Brown sought to the vulgar or common errors and superstitions of his age the particular passage comments on the presence of black people in the Americas were transported there as slaves and are not indigenous there but of course there are peoples indigenous to America were also referred to typically as native Americans in the United States and in Canada collectively as first nations and not only does the word nation come from that same route but also of course the word native from old French native native born in raw unspoiled and directly from Latin nativus innate produced by birth from not to us the past participle of Nasky old Latin to be born related to Gignore beget now of course one can also use the word native to simply mean born in a place as in I'm a native autoan meaning I was born in the city of Ottawa but not that I'm the first person of the Ottawa people though this usage of the word native has come to be seen by some as appropriation also from Latin nativus comes old French naive native natural genuine just born foolish innocent unspoiled unworked which makes its way into English as naive in the 1650s with the sense natural simple unsophisticated art less undergoing a gradual process of pejoration from born innate natural native rustic to lacking judgment gullible now sometimes when we talk of a native language we mean an indigenous language that is the language of the people who are indigenous to a place and as with many indigenous peoples many indigenous languages are endangered by colonialism with many being partially or fully replaced by the languages of the colonizers but the term native language can also be used to refer to a person's first language the language they learn from birth literally birth language regardless of its status as an indigenous language and this kind of language is labeled by linguists as an L1 a person can of course be bilingual having two L1s from birth a language learned later in life is labeled an L2 linguists have historically favored the evidence collected from native speakers of a language as the most authentic representation of that language though this practice has more recently come under the term native speaker has its origins in the nationalism and colonialism of the 19th century the Oxford English dictionary's earliest citation is from 1859 it could both help establish identity as a member of a nation and imply hierarchy within a colonial structure marking out colonizers as the owners of a language in contrast to the colonized subjects who learn the language but were thus characterized as imperfect or inferior speakers and thus tied to racial judgments as well the centrality of the native speaker became particularly important in linguistics in the context of the approach to linguistic competence established by Noam Chomsky in the 1960s and 70s now protecting indigenous languages is important when they are endangered but not all indigenous languages are endangered of course sometimes dominant languages which are in no danger of decline even if they are considered indigenous to a place can pose a threat to other minority languages as is often the case in anglophone places with respect to the native languages of immigrants who are often discouraged from speaking their languages in public places sometimes violently ironically languages such as Welsh, Scots, Gaelic and Irish all Celtic languages have been suppressed by the English speaking majority though the Celtic languages in the British Isles long predate the arrival of the Germanic language English the connection between languages of race can result in a type of linguistic xenophobia taken to its extreme the idea of linguistic purity has led some to attempt to recast the English language by removing all foreign influences especially vocabulary from French, Latin and Greek such as the efforts of 19th century dorset poet, priest and philologist William Barnes who coined words such as speechcraft for grammar, star lore for astronomy, bird lore for poetry and mate wording for synonym or 20th century Australian born composer Percy Granger who coined such words as blend band for orchestra, fourth speaker for lecturer and writ piece for article calling such language in very openly racist terms blue eyed English in the 1960s inspired by Barnes humorist Paul Jennings coined the term anglish for this sort of writing in fact arguments about English linguistic purity go right back to the 16th and 17th centuries with some writers such as Thomas Elliott and George Petty feeling free to borrow foreign words into English while others such as Thomas Wilson and John Cheek criticize this practice and such foreign barings came to be referred to derisively as inchorn words seen as redundant and overly pretentious nevertheless such foreign vocabulary kept pouring into English while many writers such as Charles Dickens Thomas Hardy, Gerard Manley Hopkins and George Orwell continued to champion the use of so called pure vocabulary from the languages Germanic roots of course the converse can be true as well with those who see their education as a marker of their superiority using what they see as fancier or more elegant Latinate vocabulary in preference over so called simpler vocabulary in general whether favoring language purity or more educated language the judging variety of a language as superior to another and criticizing non-standard varieties as incorrect or bad is called linguistic prescriptivism the opposite of this is descriptivism the approach that actual linguists take describing the way language is used in the world rather than trying to impose artificial rules on speakers rules such as don't end a sentence with a preposition or don't use split infinitives ironically the prescriptivists of the world who generally know what they're talking about a prime example of the aphorism a little knowledge is a dangerous thing often cry that's not a word it's not in the dictionary misunderstanding completely the criteria all modern lexicographers used to determine what is in the dictionary namely common usage modern dictionaries describe the language as it's used in the real world often to the disappointment of prescriptivists when new words and senses are admitted into the dictionary like the intensifying use of the word literally the kinds of linguistic discrimination that go along with prescriptivism are often thinly veiled prejudice and bigotry directed at social groups such as socio-economic categories that are perceived as being inferior or racial groups as with speakers of african-american vernacular english or ave or even genders as with the frequent criticism of vocal fry or creaky voice when used by women linguists call these different social varieties of language sociolects when the different varieties of a language are regionally based they are sometimes referred to as dialects though this term has come under increasing criticism for one thing it implies that there is one pure or perfect form of a language with various inferior dialects that differ from it and for another it's kind of impossible to scientifically define many language varieties that we traditionally considered distinct languages like the Scandinavian languages are pretty mutually intelligible whereas many so-called dialects aren't a better terminology is to refer to language varieties which may have differing degrees of mutual intelligibility of course the most famous example of trying to distinguish between a language and a dialect is the adage a language is a dialect with an army and a navy though it is not entirely clear who first stated it the earliest published instance is in Yiddish by sociolinguist Max Weinreich who wrote that he first heard it from one of the auditors at a lecture he gave in New York in 1945 about Yiddish in the post war world and though Weinreich didn't invent the aphorism he certainly popularized it and is one of the most closely associated with it one suggestion is that it might have been coined by French linguist Antoine Mayer though there is no recorded evidence of this Mayer was an expert in the study of Indo-European languages specializing in Armenian and is famous for another adage anyone wishing to hear how Indo-European spoke should come and listen to a Lithuanian peasant reflecting the idea that the Lithuanian language is the most conservative still surviving Indo-European language preserving many archaic features of proto-Indo-European that have been lost in other languages he's also famous for having developed the concept of grammaticalization in historical linguistics a process by which content words words with lexical meaning become function words or morphemes which convey grammatical information like athexes and auxiliaries for instance old English wheel on meant to want to wish becoming mostly a marker of future time as modern English wheel Mayer also came up with the idea of oral formulaic theory proposing that formulaic composition was a distinctive feature of orally transmitted epic like Homeric epic and all those other early national epics and wrote Homeric epic is entirely composed of formulae handed down from poet to poet an examination of any passage will quickly reveal that it is made up of lines and fragments of lines which are reproduced word for word in one or several other passages even those lines of which the parts happen not to recur in any other passage of the same formulaic character and it is doubtless pure chance that they are not attested elsewhere so Mayer put his student Milman Parry on to the idea suggesting that he examined a living oral poetry tradition which he did the south Arabic tradition in Bosnia and along with his student Albert Lord Parry revolutionized Homeric scholarship another suggestion for the ultimate origin of the dialect language aphorism though again anecdotally is the French Army General and Colonial Administrator Hubert apparently at a meeting of the Academy Francaise is also known for developing some influential ideas about colonialism and colonial administration the system of colonial rule which favored using pre-established local governing bodies as well as politic de race dealing separately with each tribe similar to the British policy of divide and rule and what came to be known as tach duil literally oil stain drawing on the metaphor of the spreading of a spot of oil a gradual expansion of pacified areas followed by positive social and economic development like markets schools and medical centers in order to convert former insurgents into allies which influence later theories of counterinsurgency now as it happens the later linguist Randolph quirk somewhat modified the aphorism to a language is a dialect with an army and a flag and he too has a place in our story quirk is most famously known for founding the first linguistic corpus the survey of English usage a corpus is a compilation of linguistic data put together for the purpose of linguistic analysis the survey of English usage was originally compiled before modern computing making use of real to real recordings paper transcriptions and index cards but it was eventually computerized and other computerized corpora such as the brown corpus of present-day American English have been created which allow for the computer analysis of the data corpora are fundamental for descriptive linguistics and are now also used to construct dictionaries from the survey of English usage quirk and his collaborators produced a comprehensive grammar of the English language a truly descriptive grammar that reflected how the English language was actually used in all its variation unlike the prescriptive grammars and usage guides which attempt to tell you how you should use English according to those classes and racist biases we looked at before remember for descriptivists there is no one correct English there are many equally valid varieties which all come from the same earlier route so getting back to languages and dialects then the relationships between these varieties are usually expressed using two metaphors the familial metaphor with which we talk about language families and parent languages and the tree metaphor in which we talk about languages coming from the same route and branching out into subgroups like the Germanic branch and so forth but these metaphors though sometimes useful can also be potentially misleading first of all it should be remembered that when we talk about language groups like language families it does not necessarily imply that all the speakers of the languages in that family are in other ways related such as ethnically or even culturally there are a number of different ways a language can spread besides the wholesale migration of a people for instance a relatively small number of speakers of a language could move into an already occupied region and pass on their language to the local population through political dominance or cultural prestige so when linguists talk about a genetic relationship between languages this isn't genetic in the biological sense it's drawing on that family metaphor of language by the way the words genetic and gene come from that same root as nation gena to give birth as you might expect from the greek gignomi to be born become happen from the word genesis those similar constructions existed in other languages such as post classical Latin geneticus in reference to the book of genesis German genetisch and French genetic after philosopher Johann von Herder's use of the word in German with the general sense of or relating to origin or development the English word genetic was coined in its heredity sense by Thomas Carlisle proponent of trait theory and Anglo-Saxonism believing that the Anglo-Saxon race was superior to all others Charles Darwin used the word genetic in a more specifically biological sense resulting from common origin and after the work of Gregor Mendel and the development of gene theory by all just William Bateson coined the modern sense of the word in 1905 the word gene was first used in English in 1911 after the Danish botanist and geneticist Wilhelm Ludwig Johansen coined it in German in opposition to Darwin's now obsolete model of heritable traits being passed on by tiny particles called pan genes ultimately from Greek generation race now the tree metaphor of language also has its connections with Darwin and evolutionary theory it was the 19th century linguist August Schleicher who was not only the first person to propose the tree model but also the evolutionary idea of language he claimed that he came to his ideas of the evolution of languages before he had even heard of Darwin's ideas but in any case he began to arrange languages into genealogical trees inspired by the phylogenic trees used to show the evolutionary process Schleicher was also the first to attempt to compose a text in the reconstructed Proto-Indo-European language now known as Schleicher's fable a short dialogue between sheep and horses about which of them was the most hard done by by the humans who had domesticated them over the years other Indo-Europeanists have updated the text to take into account newer theories about the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European in any case it turns out that this tree model doesn't tell the whole story of language development anyway as it doesn't account for things like lateral transmission due to borrowing from one language to another or language contact and the fact that languages don't always develop from single isolated dialects but from a range of dialects present at the same time languages aren't distinct abstractions but instead are shared and spoken by speech communities of numerous people who may all use the language in slightly different ways and while sometimes languages diverge into distinct dialects divided by geography often they exist in a dialect continuum in which each dialect continues to interact with those around them. Furthermore divergence and descent is not the only way linguistic features can be transmitted a linguistic region called a Sprachbund has aerial features linguistic features that are shared by a number of different languages including ones that aren't even related within a geographical area of contact and influence since biological species do not cross breed this kind of language influence is more like the lateral transfer of genetic information between microbes as a result of these limitations of the tree model Schleicher student Johanna Schmidt proposed a wave model in which linguistic innovations spread like concentric circles from a central point with lessening influence much like the ripples formed when a pebble is dropped into water also there is the more recent model of linkages which consists of a network of related dialects or languages which forms from gradual diffusion of a proto-language or rather dialect continuum thus language innovations can be shared between neighboring dialects even though they are diverging from one another but it's interesting to note that these natural processes of language spread interaction and influence have in more recent times been affected by the advent of the nation state with its artificial largely impermeable borders as is the case for instance with the varieties of Korean spoke in North Korea and South Korea and of course there could be other more subtle factors which influence the ways different language varieties interact with each other often studied by sociolinguists now there are various types of language blending that can occur with language contact but important to our discussion of nations and nationalism are creoles the topic of creoles is currently a hotly debated one in the field of linguistics with no real consensus as to what a creole actually is how it forms and what are the hallmarks of a creole a complex debate we can't really get into here but we should come to a basic understanding of some terms at least how they are traditionally defined first of all patois of uncertain and debated etymology perhaps from old French patois a handle clumsily to paw from a paw from vulgar Latin and thus a clumsy manner of speaking is not a technical linguistics term but is used loosely to refer to forms of a language that are considered non-standard dialects pigeons and creoles a pigeon is a simplified mixed language used among people who have no common language and is a reduced language combining features from two or more languages and thus does not possess all the features of a full language having a simplified grammar and limited vocabulary used for special purposes such as trade a pigeon is thus not the native language of any speech community and is learned as a second language by all users the word pigeon originally referred to Chinese pigeon English pigeon used by Chinese speakers to communicate with English speakers that developed between the 17th and 19th centuries and came from the pigeon pronunciation of the English word business by contrast a creole is a fully formed complex and consistent language that possesses all the features of any other language and is learned as a first language of a speech community broadly speaking a creole language is a pigeon that has acquired native speakers though again the exact process of the formation of a creole is a hotly debated topic among linguists the word creole which originally referred to white colonists born in tropical European colonies comes from French and other romance language cognates such as Spanish Creole and Portuguese Creole ultimately from Latin creole to make bring forth produce beget from the pirate care to grow which also gives us words like create creature crescent and cereal talk piss in is a creole language spoken in Papua New Guinea whose name comes literally from English talk pigeon but note it is a fully formed creole language not a pigeon now a pigeon generally arises in situations where two or more very different language groups come into contact and generally there is a pattern balance between the two groups since the two groups are too widely separated culturally and linguistically to have a common lingua franca a term referring to a language which isn't the native language of either group but is known to both to fall back on they develop a pigeon to communicate a pigeon generally draws the vocabulary from the super straight or language of the dominant group and the grammar simplified though it is from the substrate and as we've seen this pigeon could eventually develop into a creole when it becomes adopted by a community as a native language and children learn it as a first language decrealization occurs when there is continued access to the super straight language and the creole becomes more and more like the super straight language this is the case for instance with Jamaican Creole which is generally referred to locally as patois and continues to acquire elements of English it's super straight language now even pigeons can be remarkably expressive and do follow distinct rules of grammar and syntax pigeons have come to have negative connotations largely because they are often associated with European colonial empires but pigeons can be very useful in situations where there are speakers of many mutually unintelligible languages since they are easier to learn than a full standard dialect of a language the relationship between a creole speaker in their language can be complex and often fraught in former colonies European colonizers generally forbade enslaved people from speaking their own languages so subsequently creoles developed based on the enslavers European language such as Jamaican Creole from the colonizer perspective these new varieties were seen as substandard broken and later speakers and writers such as Canadian M nor Bessie Philip originally from Trinidad and Tobago sometimes felt ambivalent about using the language that evoked their ancestors oppressors but no longer had access to their ancestral languages and have further wrestled with the decision of whether to write in some standard or prestige variety or their own local variety but some post-colonial writers have embraced their language varieties as being able to express local experiences and truths such as Louise Bennett who wrote in Jamaican Creole and the poet and historian from Barbados Kamau Brathwaite who coined the term nation language as a more positive term than dialect it has been theorized that proto Germanic the proto language that Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, Gothic and so forth came from arose as a pigeon when migrating Indo-Europeans encountered an otherwise unknown substrate language somewhere in Northern Europe after all the Germanic languages have rather stripped down noun case and verb tense systems compared to other Indo-European languages some scholars have even described modern English as a Creole formed from the contact of Old English, Old Norse and Anglo-Norman French though again as with many topics in dialectology there is no consensus about this classification. Nevertheless the contact between these languages with heavy north settlement particularly in the north of England a region called the Dane Law and the installation of Anglo-Norman speakers in all the elite positions in society after the Norman invasion did lead to a number of particular changes to the English language with the function words in English remaining mainly from the substrate Old English but a large amount of vocabulary borrowed from the super straight French as well as the sort of simplifications such as the loss of inflectional endings that you would expect in a pigeon. The Old English and Old Norse were related languages in the Germanic branch and thus shared many roots their inflectional systems had developed differently so to aid in mutual intelligibility it would have been useful to just ignore the inflectional endings and focus on the roots which led to the weakening of the inflectional system in favour of the word order system to show grammatical information thus not only did the nouns no longer show grammatical case whether a noun was the subject or object and so forth in a sentence or clearly indicate their grammatical gender a property that Old English Old Norse and Latin had and that modern French still has but similarly other words that modify nouns like adjectives and demonstatives were also no longer able to show such grammatical information meaning that word order became the only way to tell what a word was doing in the sentence and though Anglo-Norman French had grammatical gender the genders more often than not didn't line up between the languages French Lune Moon is Feminine La Lune but Old English Mona is Masculine Se Mona French Soleil San is Masculine Le Soleil but Old English Sune is Feminine Seosune again making this an area of confusion and leading to the loss of gender marking so modern English no longer has any grammatical gender and only a vestige of case marking found only on pronouns as in I me my he him his and so forth but why do these grammatical categories exist if they create so many problems and are so difficult why do languages have all these inflections and endings in the first place if it's so easy for them to just be dropped as English is done well in fact both processes can happen linguists organize languages in this regard according to two types synthetic languages which tend to use inflections like word endings or sound changes within a word like vowel alternation to convey grammatical information and analytic languages which use helper words and word order to convey grammatical information synthetic which means literally in Greek put together means the language tends to combine all the bits of information together into one word and analysis which means literally loosen up means the language tends to break up all the bits of information into separate words in reality no language is entirely synthetic or analytic but all exist somewhere on a continuum between those extremes English has seen the movement from synthesis towards analysis over its history even more so taking into account the loss of inflection from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-Germanic to Old English and this can be seen in a number of other European languages as well but the reverse process happens too though Proto-Indo-European seems to have had no future tense Latin developed one by combining what were originally separate words a verb such as amare to love with a present tense form of bu the verb to be to produce an archaic Latin form that was something like amabo eventually becoming the standard Latin form amabo I will love even more surprising is that although Latin already had a future a completely new future tense was formed out of a parafrastic construction in vulgar Latin combining the infinitive of a verb like amare to love with a present tense form of the verb habeo to have and so Latin amare habeo became amareo and eventually modern French I will love there has been some research to work out why language would move in one direction or another and there is some indication that the size of the speech community a number of adult second language learners in a situation of inter-linguistic contact may be part of the reason so with English the inflectional system eroded why have the verb show person when the pronoun already does that I run we run you run but with the third person it stuck around for some reason he runs and English had already lost many of the eight cases of proto in European with just four left nominative for subjects accusative for direct objects genitive to show possession and data for indirect objects but word order and prepositions can do most of that work so the nouns lost most of their endings with only the genitive apostrophe s surviving as in the books cover and the preposition of can often do that job too as in the cover of the book our old friend may is connected to this too not only is grammaticalization part of this process with lexical words like habeo and English have being converted to auxiliaries to help verbs convey their grammatical information but he also worked on what's called linguistic syncretism which is when two inflected forms come to look identical as nominative and accusative nouns were often already doing in old English and this can be a stepping stone on the way to losing distinct inflected forms with one form doing both jobs his doctoral thesis was titled research on the use of the genitive accusative in old Slavonic looking at the fact that sometimes the accusative takes on a form that is identical to the genitive the word genitive too is connected to our story as you guessed it the word genitive comes from that same root as nation from Latin genitius of generation of birth from gaining to us the past participle of Gignore to produce give birth to ultimately from getting now given that the most common function of the genitive case is to show possession you might think that it received its name from the idea of being the source of something the books cover but in fact Latin casus genitius genitive case is a translation of Greek genicate toses the general or generic case expressing race or kind from Greek genicose belonging to the family from gainos family race birth descent the same Greek word that was used to coin the word genocide which ultimately comes from the same pi root as genitius as our friend Max Müller who is the first to give what became the standard estimation of the date of the Rig Veda put it the Latin genitius is a mere blunder for the Greek word genike could never mean genitius it meant casus generalis the general case or rather the case which expressed the genus or kind so the Roman grammarians blew it misunderstanding the meaning of the Greek term the genitive case implies categorization and really makes a noun function like an adjective limiting another noun to one subset of all the possible reference the red cover the new cover the books cover all of these phrases specified the particular cover you're referring to from a larger set of covers so they're ways of categorizing things ok maybe that explains why grammatical categories like case exist and why the apostrophe s hung around in English when the other case endings disappeared but what about grammatical gender why do languages have genders that go beyond natural gender like male and female you might ask well in spite of the headaches it might have caused you when learning a language that has grammatical gender like Latin, German, French or Spanish grammatical gender exists in language to make it easier to learn as you may have guessed the word gender comes from the same root as old French genre and genre kind species character gender from Latin race, stock, family so gender really just means kind or type and in the grammatical sense just refers to different categories of noun which don't necessarily have anything to do with biological sex human beings like to organize things into categories because it makes them easier to learn and memorize so grammatical gender can be a way of telling you which of those functional endings to use of course not all languages have gender although Wikipedia states that about one quarter of the world's languages have grammatical gender according to Greville Corbett in the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics in a sample of 256 languages a little over half 144 to be precise were found to have no gender system 50 languages in this sample had a gender system with at least two genders and two gender systems were particularly common 26 of the languages had three genders 12 four genders and systems with five or more genders very uncommon so what are the gender categories that languages use to divide up their nouns well a masculine feminine division is common in which the gender categories mostly line up with biological sex where possible with all other nouns then fitting into one of the two sometimes apparently quite arbitrarily such languages include the romance languages the Baltic languages the Celtic languages the Hindustani languages and many Afro-Asianic languages including the Semitic branch and the Berber languages similarly there are languages with a three part division of masculine feminine neuter which again mainly fall in line with biological sex though with some exceptions with the remaining nouns falling into one of the three genders many Indo-European languages apart from the ones already mentioned work this way including Sanskrit Latin Greek and the Germanic languages accepting of course English and the Slavic languages but also common is the animate inanimate system in which mainly humans and animals fall into the animate gender and everything else into inanimate interestingly Proto-Indo-European seems to have originally used an animate inanimate gender system even though many Indo-European languages no longer use that system as the Anatolian branch which was the earliest branch to split off uses system including the Hittite language the earliest attested Indo-European language the feminine gender and its morphology may therefore have developed at a later time and may have started off as an abstract noun class what are called a stems like Latin first declension as in Puella girl show up in Anatolian but only as abstract nouns not feminine ones this abstract noun category then later developed the capacity to mark feminine gender after the Anatolian languages split off from the rest of Proto-Indo-European leaving all the other Indo-European languages with the three gender system masculine feminine neuter and many kept that system in these languages there is a high degree of correlation between grammatical gender and the noun class morphology in other words the endings later on many of the languages reduced the grammatical gender system down to only two masculine and feminine as was the case with most of the romance languages some of the Indo-European languages instead merged the feminine and masculine into a common gender but kept the neuter as in Swedish and Danish and some languages lost grammatical gender like English which only has traces remaining of grammatical gender as in pronouns like he she they and it or other languages without grammatical gender at all like Armenian Bengali Persian Assamese Odia, Kaur and Kalasha there are of course other languages and language families besides Indo-European that are based on the animate inanimate system such as the language isolate Basque and Ojibwe of the Algonquian language family in North America and there are other less common grammatical gender systems as well such as human non-human or rational non-rational found in the Dravidian languages of the Indian subcontinent famously there's the non-rational system of the Dierbaugh language of Australia one most animate objects men two women water fire violence and exceptional animals three edible fruit and vegetables for miscellaneous including things not classifiable in the first three which famously inspired the title of cognitive linguist George Lakoff spoke about categories in cognitive metaphor called women fire and dangerous things in addition to categorization and memorization there are some other useful roles of grammatical gender it's easy to express the natural gender of animate beings in languages that have explicit inflections for gender and grammatical gender can be useful in the syntax of a language by often disambiguating the possible antecedents of personal or demonstrative pronouns gender can also sometimes distinguish between homophones if they belong to different gender categories and in more literary contexts gender can be used for the personification of inanimate objects and that last one can have cognitive implications too in studies by various researchers including cognitive scientist Lior Boroditsky the grammatical gender of a noun can affect the way we talk about and even think about things in the world around us influencing the way we describe them for instance when German speakers were asked to describe a bridge in German the feminine gender Brucke they more often used words meaning beautiful pretty and slender while Spanish speakers whose word for bridge is the masculine gendered puente use words meaning big dangerous strong and sturdy more often so our socially programmed stereotypes can actually cause us to see the world in different ways and that can affect our judgment so grammatical gender categories much like the gender categories of people are culturally created and can thus differ from culture to culture there is nothing inherently masculine or feminine about a bridge there is no reason that grammatical genders need to be divided into masculine and feminine just like there is no reason human genders need to be restricted to a simple binary now I mentioned that English only has the vestiges of a gender system left really only visible in the pronoun system leaving aside some old fashion forms like the French derived blonde with an e feminine form this sort of makes sense since the pronouns tend to be fairly stable and resistant to change in languages because they are so frequently used if you use a word over and over again you're not likely to forget the normal way of saying it but as it turns out English pronouns have undergone some fairly important changes over the course of the language's history the old English for he is hey spelled exactly the same and pronounced only slightly differently due to the large scale sound change called the great vowel shift the old English for it hit just losing that initial huh which is only a thin little wispy sound anyway but the old English for she was the very different hail so how did this change come about well there are a number of theories but no real consensus either there's an unusual sound shift that changed how to she or somehow she came from the feminine form of the definite article so or it's something else entirely each of these theories has its benefits and drawbacks and the exact origin of she remains a puzzle but if you want a fuller explanation you can watch the brief end note video linked in the description on the other hand a pronoun change that happened in English that we can explain is the importation of they you see an old English the word for they was one of those h words in this case here or he but because this too was so similar to the other pronoun forms there was a need for it to be disambiguated so this time the English speakers in north of England borrowed the Scandinavian form there from all the Viking settlers in the Danelaw region which came into English as they and it slowly spread south and became standard for a while the two forms lived side by side and Jeffrey Chaucer was able to use the new they form to mark out some of his characters as northerners but eventually the old forms died out or at least they mostly did in modern English when you say M as in let them have it you're actually using the vestiges of Middle English him meaning them when you think about it you're much less likely to drop that distinctive sound as opposed to that thin wispy sound that also dropped off the beginning of old English hit giving us it the other notable thing about the pronoun they is that it is unmarked for gender in fact this was already true of old English here or he as opposed to Old Norse Latin French and many other Indo-European languages which have separate forms from masculine plural feminine plural and neuter plural what's more they which first appeared in English in the 12th century was by the 14th century or perhaps earlier being used as a gender non-specific pronoun in the singular as well as the plural as in sentences like someone left their book on the table and each student should bring their book to class if the gender is unknown unspecified or not defined the pronoun they can be used with a singular antecedent and has been used this way for well over 600 years and this gender non-specific use of the pronoun has more recently been extended further to refer to individuals whose gender identity does not conform to a gender binary of male and female such as trans and non-binary people though some grammarians over the course of history those prescriptivists again have objected to the use of singular they on the grounds that it isn't grammatical which should be pointed out that these objections don't appear before the 18th century well over 300 years after singular they first appeared that's actually pretty normal for English historically the second person singular pronoun was thu in old English which became thou in early modern English and the second person plural pronoun was ye or ye with you as the objective case with ye eventually dropping out and you taking over the subjective case as in modern English plural you came to be used in the singular initially to show respect following the model of singular vous in French but eventually replacing thou all together so the second person pronoun doesn't mark for number it's the same for singular and plural as is the case with the less common use of plural forms for singular in the royal we and editorial we what's more in the pronoun system of English gender is more often not marked there are no separate gendered forms for first person pronouns like I or me in the singular and we in the plural or for second person pronouns like you in the singular or plural or for third person plural they or them the third person singular pronouns are the only ones that it's even possible to mark for gender so an extension of they to act as a non gendered non binary singular pronoun is in keeping with the English pronomial system and what this comes down to not only singular they but indeed this whole discussion including the concepts of nation culture language and all of it is a question of identity and the need for people to define themselves both on the individual level and on the group level and rather than really being a grammatical or linguistic issue it's more a question of being respectful and kind and that's fitting because the word kind comes from that same proto-Indo-European root to give birth beget lies behind the word nation appearing in old English as meaning kind nature race related to that word kin family race but also as an adjective meaning natural native innate becoming middle English kind and modern English kind with the original sense of with the feeling of relatives for each other with a sense shift of with natural feelings to well disposed to benign compassionate loving full of tenderness so let's take that etymology as a reminder that though we humans like to put everything into categories those categories nation race gender and so on are all socially constructed and always malleable so we should strive to be kind to all kinds of people wherever they fit thanks for watching remember to head on over to cynical historians channel from much more about the history of nations and the rise of the nation state if you've enjoyed these etymological explorations and cultural connections please subscribe and click the little bell to be notified of every new episode and check out our patreon where you can make a contribution to help me make more videos I'm at alliterative on twitter and you can visit our website alliterative.net for more language and connections in our podcast blog and more