4.8 • 1.8K Ratings
🗓️ 9 December 2023
⏱️ 10 minutes
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0:00.0 | The following is an encore presentation of everything everywhere daily. |
0:04.0 | English is a very strange language. |
0:10.0 | It's a Germanic language where half of the words actually come from a romance language. |
0:14.0 | We have a host of words that make absolutely no sense in terms of spelling or pronunciation. |
0:19.0 | But perhaps strangest of all, some of the greatest literary works in the English language are filled with words that don't even exist anymore. |
0:27.0 | Learn more about the English of Shakespeare and how our language has evolved on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily. English is in some ways a very simple language. There are no gendered nouns like there are in German or |
0:54.4 | Spanish. We have one simple indefinite article, The, and two definite articles with a simple |
1:00.7 | rule for when to use them, a an. |
1:04.0 | English also doesn't have formal or informal words |
1:06.9 | that you need to think about based on who you're talking to. |
1:09.9 | In Japanese, for example, you may have to use totally different words depending on if you're talking to a friend or if you're talking to your boss. |
1:16.0 | And it can also change depending on if you're talking to someone older or younger. |
1:20.0 | In French, there's a distinction between how you say the word you. |
1:24.0 | If you're talking to someone close or a child, you would use the word two. |
1:28.0 | And if you're talking to an adult or a stranger, you would use the word vu. |
1:32.0 | Napoleon Bonaparte once wrote an IRA letter to Josephine because she used vu to him in a letter instead of two. |
1:38.0 | German has kind of the same thing. |
1:40.0 | There's a formal distinction between Z and do and when it's okay to use |
1:44.8 | do can be an issue between people. English doesn't have any of this. It doesn't matter |
1:50.6 | if you're talking to a president, a king, or a pauper. |
1:53.6 | You call them all, you. |
1:56.0 | While English eliminates many of these confusing elements from other languages, |
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