#simon roper

[squirrelwrangler]

[clatterbane]

What Was the Great Vowel Shift?

Another good one from Simon Roper.

[twostarsinonesphere]

someone: *tries to speak in elizabethan/"ye olde english"*

me, immediately:

[emaya-chan-the-potato-headed]

Person A: 'And I wuid wauk five hoondred moiles and I wuid wauk five hoondred moor, teh be the mahn whuid---'

Person B: Ugh, cut it out with that cringey Scottish accent impression!

Person A: Huh? Scottish? I thought I was doing a 16th century London accent??? (the one YouTube linguist Simon Roper believes they had anyway!)

[dadthinksdoctorwhoisacrimeseries]

This is probably so obscure that no one who sees this will get it and those who’d get it won’t see it

[rendakuenthusiast]

It's always nice seeing Simon Roper's videos doing analyses of historical and contemporary English phonology. The bit starting at 15:45, where he elicits examples from a native speaker of a dialect of English similar to his of the Mary/merry contrast is striking to me - his interlocutor audibly laughs at the idea of wishing someone a "Mary christmas". Whereas for me as an American who merges all of marry/merry/Mary, I can barely hear the vowel contrast he's going for when I'm paying attention to it, and I find his production of his dialect's "Mary christmas" to be completely unexceptional.

[greenjudy]

Simon Roper does a great job of breaking down what Chat GPT is actually doing and how a 'niche' research topic can reveal its limitations.

If you want just the excellent final analysis, it begins around 22:20. (If you want the excellent deep dive, watch the whole thing. It's only about 31 minutes long.)

[oma-goodness]

Really, really interesting thoughts.

Simon Roper most often does videos on linguistics, especially old English/middle English, but once in a while he does one of these amazing videos pondering various things about humans and existence