SUPER Advanced English Concepts (Experts only!)

Using some of these accent marks is such a circumflex.

In highschool, we were annoyed at the German exchange students having private conversation in German AND speaking English, so we started talking in Elizabethan English, and they had no idea wtf we were saying.

I think the most under-appreciated "advanced" English is all of the idioms we use. So many ESL speakers could master the grammar yet still be confused by all of the idioms we use all the time.

3:50 Acute marks are only called so when they "slant" to the right, like this: ó. When they "slant" left (ò), they're called grave marks. Furthermore, the two "dots" (ö) are only called umlaut when the pronunciation of the vowel they're over changes from the usual sound it makes to another. That usually happens in words coming from german, such as doppelgänger. When the "dots" are over a vowel in order to separate it from another syllable (as in naïve), they're called diaeresis or trema.

For a long time in English, "thou/thee" was singular and "ye/you" was plural. "Ye/you" was also used to address superiors - similar practices exist in French and Spanish. So by using "thou" with everyone, the Quakers wanted to show that all are equal in the eyes of God. They also refused to use titles, like "your highness" and "your honor", for the same reason, only using personal names or the title brother/sister. This, combined with the refusal to swear an oath", often led to Quakers being held in contempt of the court.

One fascinating obscure part of English grammar (which Tom Scott did a video on) is adjectival order. For example, one would say "adorable sleepy black cat" and not "black sleepy adorable cat" or any other order.

Fun fact: Quakers used a form called "nominative thee" where "thee" is used as the subject pronoun (instead of "thou") and with the third person form of the verb instead of the second. So, where a speaker of standard early modern English might say "thou goest home" a Quaker would say "thee goes home." The Quakers didn't originate this usage as it's found in a number of western British dialects, but they were definitely using it (and had dropped "thou" except in very formal instances) by the time Nixon was growing up. How's that for obscure English?

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In math writing we use something like a Royal We, e.g. "Taking the derivative, we see that..." or "We must be careful to define..." etc. But it's almost implied that the "we" is an inclusive "we" that compounds the author and the audience since math proofs are seen as explorations that both parties go on together

Regarding Anglicization of names, it’s particularly interesting to see in Wikipedia how you have five King Philips of Spain, and then when you get to the current one, he’s Felipe VI

The phrase "I cut the tree down then I cut the tree up" makes perfect sense to me as a native English speaker, but could cause confusion to others.

I've had a hard time explaining to my Korean peers that some words are only "pirate words," "cowboy words," "knight words," etc. Not just historical; historical and occupation specific.

I don't know if this quite fits, but one concept that I've only just learnt about, despite using it for all of my life is the order in which we use adjectives. For instance it's a nice old brown dog, and not a brown old nice dog.

I remember talking to a friend who wasn't a native English speaker and one time they were agreeing with me about something and wrote "Yes, it's" which threw me for a second. It's is a contraction of "it is" so technically that would be correct, but intuitively we wouldn't use it like that.

Fun Fact about names changed upon immigration - it was almost NEVER the local English speaking government official who made the change. They would rely on the ship manifest for the names of the passengers so any changes to names would have to have been done at some point before departure from the start point. Also the officials all spoke multiple languages so it would not have been due to misunderstanding of the immigrant. At New York's Ellis Island, for example, most of the immigration officials spoke multiple languages to be sure that they would be able to communicate with newcomers. NY Mayor in the 1930s & 40s Fiorello La Guardia (for who one of the 2 NYC airports is named) was certified as an interpreter for Italian, German, Yiddish, and Croatian while working at Ellis Island.

bro auto-generated captions are loving the “Royal Wii”

It's curious that in english an "ñ" is called an n with a tilde. In spanish "tilde" just refers to the regular acute accent while "ñ" is treated as a completely separate letter to "n"

In the early 20th century it was more common to write “cañon” than “canyon,” as I’ve learned from a lifetime of collecting old maps.

In Ireland we still use "ye" as "you all" In Dublin, they use "yous". Sometimes you might hear "yis".

An interesting note is that many Italian cities see exclusive use of their anglicized forms: always Rome, Milan, Florence, Venice, Genoa, Padua, Turin, Naples and rarely or never Roma, Milano, Firenze, Venezia, Genova, Padova, Torino, Napoli. The theory is that English adopted these names from their French forms Rome, Milan, Florence, Venise, Gênes, Padoue, Turin, Naples during the period that French had higher literary prestige than Italian.