Comments by "B. Xoit" (@b43xoit) on "RobWords" channel.

  1. Spanish for "left" is borrowed from Basque. This reminds me that the words for "boy" and "girl" seem all over the place in IE languages.
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  2. The objects are not assigned genders; the words are.
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  3. I thought the Jutes came from Jutland and the "Angel cyn" came from Angeln.
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  4. Maybe from European tribes in the Middle Ages? There were the Helvetii, and I forget who else.
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  5. Gōd ƿeorc and cræft.
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  6. No apples, half an apple, an apple and a half.
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  7. I'm a native speaker from the US and all your "fruit" examples sound right to me. "You should eat a couple of pieces of fruit before we leave."
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  8. Old English used a cognate to Vogel and "fowl". "fugol" or something. Brydde, from unknown origins, was eventually used for a young bird, and got expanded to include the adults as well and became modern English "bird". The history of "dog" is similar. OE used "hund". "Dogca" or something like was used for a particularly big hunting dog. Now the terms are reversed, so that "dog" has the general role and "hound" is more specific.
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  9. Theatre, theater.
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  10. English and French have long histories of the speaking evolving faster than the writing.
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  11. No, I think "thou" is from Old English þū.
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  12. Also supposedly a few Frisians along with them.
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  13. Vacuum, vacua.
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  14. "bēoþ", "sind", or "æron".
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  15. Collectively, "extrema".
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  16. Yes, both. The Normans or northmen were Scandinavian fighters who took over part of France, forgot Old Norse, and took up French. Then they took it to Britain and substantially changed the "english" language.
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  17. They spoke Old Norse, which eventually split into those modern languages you mention, in addition to Icelandic and Faroese.
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  18. Farsi is like that, too.
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  19. The modern forms of "to be" come from at least three older verbs, the "be verb", the "am verb", and the "was verb". At a point when they had merged to two, they were "wessan" and "bēon", if I remember correctly (from learning about it, not from the time!). Some dialects of O. E. would say, for "we are", "wē æron" and others would say "wē sind".
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  20. English is regarded by most linguists as fundamentally a Germanic language. Some argue that Middle English (from which modern English is a straightforward evolution) is a creole between Norman French and Old English. Old English is definitely Germanic, in fact West Germanic, like modern German in all its dialects.
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  21. Except that a cobbler does not make shoes from scratch. She repairs existing shoes.
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  22.  @corvuskro5452  "Deor" was wild animal and "feoh" was livestock.
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  23. In order to learn anything about taste in sounds in language, they should have constructed fake languages and carefully engineered them to avoid any similarity to languages the raters could recognize.
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  24. Faar-si balladiiiiiiiiiiid?
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  25. English speakers say "cabinet maker" and "millwright" for the finer variants.
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  26. "Tid", almost the same in Old English, "tīd".
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  27. Burg means mountain or berm, an area surrounded by a berm for defense is a town. Williams is probably son of William. William is Wilhelm, wants a helmet (for war).
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  28. LOL
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  29. No, if I have it correct (not an expert), der Mann is only the male and Mensch (don't know the gender) is both sexes. But in Old English, "man" was both sexes and could be made more specific with se werman or þæt ƿīfman.
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  30.  @paradoxmo  Maybe I don't follow convention, but I would say "point five of an apple" or "point five apple". US native speaker whose father was an engineer.
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  31. "Crochet" is French for "hook". To hang up a telephone on its hook is to "racrochet".
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  32. refudiate
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  33. Brythonic language.
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  34. Hīe wǣron menn.
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  35. "Deor" in Old English meant a wild animal; "feoh" was livestock. I don't know the genders. And in (modern, high) German, (das) Tier is animal. Pet is Houstier.
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  36. US/UK difference.
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  37. That method is called "reduplication" by linguists.
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  38.  @ramamonato5039  The length of that indefinite article surprises me. I was taught that words that occur frequently tend to be shorter. The description of this relation was attributed to Zipf and Estoup.
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  39.  @ramamonato5039  Pioneers in statistical linguistics.
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  40. The phantomnation knows! Ha, ha, ha, ha!
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  41.  @ellentronicmistress4969  "Seax" was, I believe, the specific type of knife the Saxons were known for using.
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  42. I believe "thou" is from Old English "þū".
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  43. English: good, better, best. Farsi: khub, behtær, behtærin. PIE must have had some "beh" adjective.
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  44. They are both Indo-European languages, but not in the same subfamilies thereof.
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  45. "We shall fight in the fields and in the *streets*." -- "street" is from Latin "strat", 'thrown down'.
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  46. Yeah, it's as though the British think a company consists of its officers and workers, but Americans think it's a separate thing from them even though they participate in how it makes decisions.
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  47. I heard that the mix with the Danes knocked down a lot of irregular Englisc plurals into the now-regular form with -s, because the Danes didn't have time to learn them all.
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  48. Influence from expressions in French??
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  49. "Thal" is German for "valley". And the "thalers" were coins made in a specific valley, hence "dollar".
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  50. I don't know how "merde de la merde" falls short, as cursing.
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