German reacts to "The English words nobody can explain" by RobWords

Comments · 540

• FL

  @flyingfiddler90q · 2 months ago (edited)

  Thorne fell out of use in English because the printing presses imported from Belgium didn't have a letter for Thorne, but Icelandic kept it, and still uses Þ even today.

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• QU

  @quadibloc2 · 1 month ago

  In English today, knave is a word. It's another name for the Jack in a deck of cards. But it also means a man who is dishonest, who engages in trickery. In the British national anthem is a line: "Confound their knavish tricks".

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• TH

  @thomassharmer7127 · 1 month ago (edited)

  The double dots in the middle of a sentence that look like a colon : indicate a pause or break in the line of poetry. It is technically called a caesura. Old English poems (and the biblical Hebrew psalms, by the way) often work in two-part thoughts often written along split lines like this. The pause indicated by the : allows the listener or reader to absorb and reflect on the initial thought before hearing its completion/resolution in the second half of the sentence. Historic punctuation is even more variable than historic spelling.

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• HE

  @HeeBeeGeeBee392 · 1 month ago

  Buachaill is the word for boy in the Irish language. If they're speaking English, they use boy. The Welsh for boy is bachgen.

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• SO

  @Sophiedorian0535 · 1 month ago

  Belgian here. My mum called any dog a “Bobbie”. It’s Tintin’s dog “Snowy”, in Flemish.

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• MA

  @markhamstra1083 · 1 month ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fEa56cNow4&amp;t=354">5:54</a> “[T]his ‘p’ letter” is a “thorn”, which comes directly from proto-Germanic and early Germanic runes. It, or at least its ‘th’ sound, still exists in other Germanic languages, but it is almost extinct in modern Deutsch, where it has usually been replaced with ‘d’ (the earlier runic version of thorn also looks like an angular uppercase ‘D’) — hence your <i>Nord</i> instead of the English <i>North,</i> and many other similar examples.

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• MI

  @milesseawind · 1 month ago

  <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fEa56cNow4&amp;t=1582">26:22</a> The reason why the words shown in Ireland are so different from English is because it is from the Indigenous Irish Language known as Gaeilge. Ireland did not speak English until they were Colonized by the British, however Gaeilge is still taught in schools today usually as a secondary language. Partly to keep the connection to their old culture and partly to spite the British who attempted to eradicate the language.

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• TE

  @Teramis · 1 month ago

  &quot;I&apos;m way more excited about words than I probably should be but sorry, this is just so cool&quot; &nbsp;- I&apos;m with you, sister! Your reactions are a delight, and also, I really appreciate that you have truly thoughtful commentary to add as well. Love your channel!

  5

• IM

  @impresarioe6824 · 1 month ago

  We actually still, kinda, use the German word for big in English. &nbsp;For example, we would say the phrase “gross incompetence” as another why to denote an extreme or huge amount of incompetence.

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• KR

  @kroo07 · 1 month ago

  Impressed by your pronunciation of &quot;squirrel&quot;.

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• JU

  @JustMe-dc6ks · 1 month ago

  Knave is also an English word from hundreds of years ago. It meant young man but in kind of an insulting way, implying ruffians, louts, or otherwise uncouth.

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• F0

  @F0NIX · 1 month ago

  I am a Norwegian and I have never heard of the word &quot;bugge&quot; as in a big man. But when searching for it I can find it in our second written language &quot;Nynorsk&quot; (I am mostly used to Bokmål). Yes Norwegian is weird; two written languages that we all needed to learn in school, but only use one of them depending on where we live. <br>It is fun to see how similar tha old english is to the Germanic languages.

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