The English words nobody can explain

My folk etymology theory about ‘dog’ comes from the fact the Irish language is almost never considered when “officially” recognising the roots of old, middle and modern English words.

In Irish, dog is madú (mad ooh), or madras (depending on dialect), which to an English speaker of a particular time period may have been heard and subsequently written down as something like “maddough” (the ough being the same as through). This may have then been mispronounced by English speakers in Ireland and England, as maddogge - which would also explain the slang term ‘mad dog’.

If this were the case, it stands to reason the Irish version of madogge survives as madú in Irish (its original form) - and madogge becoming shortened to dogge in English (probably due to confusion around My madogge).

The trouble is, British official spelling and pronunciation was and is motivated to exclude other languages and absorb other languages into its definition of Standard British English - thus removing any official recognition of Irish and indeed other Gaelic and Celtic languages. This makes sense from a British academic perspective aiming for accuracy, but it subsequently fails to acknowledge much folk and working class etymology outside of what is considered Anglo


Edit: I’ve come to learn that madog is Welsh for dog!

I would love if you did a similar video for the origins of Welsh words! So many of them seem to really defy the origins of modern English :)

Thanks to you I started to learning English really fun and interesting! This became my hyperfixation now for a year! Thank you, smart man!!

12:31 the fact bird should actually be “brid” is extremely hilarious to me for one specific reason.. so this is really random but the creator of the webcomic Castle Swimmer (I believe her name is Wendy) has been developing a new story idea centered around three bird boys. At some point she considered calling it “Hybirds” - a pun on Hybrid and Bird, since the main characters were human-bird hybrids… but if bird should just be brid, then “Hybrid” is a massive pun all on its own! Haha

Jokes on you, my (great) grandpa's name was (keyword was) Richard, and Dick was his nickname

were there even dogs in Australia before the English brought them?

Layman guess:

Dog:
docile hound
"The word docile traces back to the late 15th-century Middle French word docile. It derives from the Latin docilis, meaning "easily taught", which itself stems from the Latin verb docere ("to show, teach, or cause to know")" - google

also, this was reversed with hounddog which defined domestic canines that were trained to behave as wild (hunting), not pet doggies

I have watched too much @Dankpods. I noticed those are 770's! (After zooming in, those are 'Pros'!)

There are 206 individuals who have tried to alter their algorithm in a different direction.

In mongolia, the word "hero" is Баатар or baatar. In the past, it was spelled "bogatir, and became the word for hero in russian language, even thou geographically distinct, i think it can be related to the word "big"

frog .... frosch? sounds at least a bit similar to me.

Thank you so much for researching all this and educating us about our daily utterings.
I'm southern Dutch and I can see so many similarities, especially in my local dialect.

So, what I am hearing is that "brid" is the word?
And on a more serious note, what are the chances of "ers" just being shortened from another word, like derriere?

I grew up when boy babies wore frilly dresses until they learned to walk. I started walking at 10 months, so I must have been in a hurry to get into shorts. Which were compulsory until 13.

There is no substitute, nor replacement for this channel. I just love this channel so much.

In portuguese we have cão (from canis) but also cachorro (from catulus, meaning puppy❤)

I think there's a pattern amongst English linguists of discounting Welsh as a source for anything. I don't know if there's an evidence based reason for this but it's always struck me as very strange and - just suggesting - given our history, intentional!

Yn Gymraeg:
Dog - Ci
Frog - Broga
Pig - Mochyn
Hog - Hwch is a very similar word and means sow. And as it's suggested that hog meant a castrated pig, I wonder if hog came from the Welsh for sow. As a castrated male pig is effectively now a sow. I guess. It wouldn't be unusual for Welsh w (a sound sort of like oow) to become an O, and for ch (like in Scottish loch) to become a g sound. So hwch becomes hog. Then most likely spelled hogge to fit the pattern of other similar words.
Stag - Carw (probably more related to heart)
Bird - Aderyn
Donkey -Asyn
Big - Mawr
Boy - Bachgen
Girl - Merch

I'd also like to echo someone else who suggested dog comes from Old Welsh Madog meaning someone good/a diminutive of good. But often used for FOX. which makes me wonder if foxes were deservedly called good boys (good kitts?) and that then got used for dogs.

Why does the map show only DOG for Britain? What about the Scots, Scottish Gaelic, Welsh and Cornish words Rob?!

iip sync is way off.

The boy's big donkey puzzled the girl's bird dog. (fixed it for you)

Dog and pig were probably perjoratives and donkey sounds like a donkey call.

i am groot.

you're getting close to 1 million subs! commenting for the algo!

Dog: what about the word "dogue" in french, used about a large dog ??

"Arse predates your Ass by about a thousand years" the best line ive ever heard haha!! Also im curious, do you have a video explaining why the nickname for Ritchard came to be? I had a gandfather that prefered to go by Dick and ive always wondered why...

10:40 SQUIRREL!!!

I haven't scrolled through ALL of these comments (6 months later), yet the first dozen or so comments do not make the statement, so I'll make it now, and apologize if this correlation has already been addressed, that DOG is GOD spelled backwards!!!

There was a nice red squirrel @10:40.

I'm not sure you can really talk about 'bird' without acknowledging more fully that it's sometimes used to refer to human women. These days that's perceived as vulgar (see the whole long history of words for women taking on negative connotations over time); 'broad' has similar connotations; but 'brid', from which they both descend, was a perfectly respectable way to refer to a hlafdige, or lady. The one descendant which has escaped negativity of that sort is 'bride'. These words all fit neatly around the idea of reproduction.

It's curious that you're going through all this with no reference to that other descendant of Old Anglian, Scots, in which 'mickle' and 'erse' are still very much in active parlance.

2:00, another example.
In Isan (North_East of Thailand), to ask if something to eat is good, they ask "saeb bo?", which is very close to French "c'est bon?".

I wonder if the earlier form of dogge was hundogge or something similar, and then it got shortened

Austria: the early nineteenth century from Die Jahreszeiten by J. Haydn (1801) text by Gottfried van Swieten, Jägerchor (hunter’s chorus) “Er flieht, er flieht. O wie er sich streckt!
Ihm rennen die Doggen und Reiter nach.”
Doggen plural of Dogs used in reference to hunting hounds in colloquial rural speech in lower Austria in the early 19th century.. so, Wrong perhaps!
The word Dog certainly had German cognates, though just not used anymore in modern times.

As an American I can just surmise that we were so upset with the British when we left that we even took "U" out of most of our words, something I have to remember when doing crosswords from Britain.

that's easy, as man's best friend he''s the closest thing to god=dog!

Forget all those other words, I say we bring back 'beberketh'

Maybe "dog" was once an onomatopoeia from the barking of large hounds.

There was literally a continent named “Dogger Land”. So yeah the phonetics of “dog” have an origin.

I wonder if the author of 'Clifford the Big Red Dog' (BRIDwell) knew about the spelling as he named Clifford's fictional home BIRDwell Island - presumably a play on his own name? /S

I wonder why they didn't go with pigsworthy

Þþ long live þorn

That question also dogs me.