not only is there a place called sandwich, the food is named after the town. it was invented by the Earl of Sandwich

Welsh makes more sense when you realise that w and y are vowels in welsh. Also once you know how to pronounce each sound you can mostly determine the pronunication from the spelling.

Sandwiches were named after the location Sandwich, after the Earl of Sandwich invented them

Please react more to Map Men. They make excellent educomedy vids.

Hell yeah, Map Men make great videos

"Thorp" is etymologically cousin of "Dorf" btw

4:45 There's also a village roughly 2 miles from sandwich called "Ham" so you can see funny route signs that say ham sandwich

12:07  as an American born and raised I can confirm that’s exactly what we sound like.

im not sure if anyone saw due to the captions but 2400 was beep beep boop boop

In general, spoken language changes faster than writing, because it is more natural. One of the first things you learn in linguistics is that language is first and foremost spoken. Humans spoke long before they started to write, and even today, kids learn to speak before learning to write. Changes in spoken language happen mostly subconsciously and spoken language tends to evolve without people even noticing. With writing, you have to consciously change the spelling of words. So spoken language tends to evolve naturally (often quite fast, in the grand scheme of things), while writing tends to stay the same until people decide to change it.

With English, spelling was standardized in the middle of the Great Vowel Shift, a time where the pronunciation of vowels changed a lot, and it also mixed spelling conventions from multiple dialects. After that, it mostly stayed the same for centuries up until today, without much in terms of major spelling reforms. That's why English spelling is such a nightmare for modern speakers of the language. We speak 21st century English but with spelling from centuries ago.

A lot of other languages either didn't change as much in the past centuries, or had their spelling updated to reflect a more modern pronunciation, so their spelling is more in line with their spoken language.

all the map men videos are so good! and jay's unfinished london series

6:37 Little fact: in Argentina, specifically in the Patagonia, they are name places with Welsh origin (like Trelew, Rawson, Madryn), and that's because a group of walsh people emigrated from England cause political persecution, and ended up making a little colony in the country, then being accepted and now is part of the turistic thing of some places, also as part of the coulture of the place

As a proud... kinda proud... man from Grimsby (a grimsbarian if you will) I'm happy to see the town be used as a meme again in the first 30 seconds of the video

Welsh towns like Ynysybwl are actually super easy to pronounce if you know Welsh to at least a basic degree. They seem hard only because they are not named in English and haven't had those pronunciations changed over time.

It's essentially the same as asking a non-german speaker to pronounce Deutschland.

Going back to Wales, the capital city is known as Cardiff, which is incredibly easy to pronounce, but that's the English name. It's actual name is Caerdydd, which would be a lot more trouble for non-Welsh speakers, but a breeze for anyone with the most surface lever understanding on Welsh.

The same even goes for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. It's actually REALLY easy to pronounce, but if you don't know Welsh, it looks difficult.

One thing that really messed up English good that didn't get mentioned in the video (because it didn't really affect places), but did a number especially on spelling, was, as typical, the French.

In 1066, a French guy named William decided he wanted to conquer England and become "William the Conqueror", which he did.

After that, the former English-speaking nobility became a French-speaking one, which started trying to make English more like French, which succeeded only partially and mostly in writing - Because literacy was biased towards them, and they were now more French than English in linguistic terms.

For example, the word "queen" used to be spelled "cwen" - Which looks really weird, but if you try to sound it out it makes sense (IMO).

This is also why, for example, we have a different word for a cow (animal) and beef (meat from the same animal) - The original English word for the animal that the peasants tended to work closely with stuck, while the nobility ate more of the meat and used the French word for it.

Basically, English was a lot more rule-following than it is now before the French tried to replace many of the English rules with French ones. English therefore ends up being excellent at having many slightly different ways to express the same ideas (we end up having the "elevated" frenchy words and the "lower" germanic or celtic ones), and absolutely terrible at having any sort of consistent rules whatsoever (because there's no one set of rules or predictable way to guess which set of rules a given word might have come from, and then on top of that no one is enforcing the rules so the rules all change).

When they said Latin U was V, what that really means is that Latin lacked the sound of V (as in "virtue"). V and U were just different styles of writing the same letter with the former being the oldest one.

Latin U/V was pronounced as either U in "put" or W in "Water".

5:47 First thing: the written language change over the time, eliminating/adding letters or changing patters to writhe words.

Second thing: The spoken language change faster than the written one, because to change the written language you need to educate two/three generations in that new form, so everyone can read/write in that form and also change sings, change documentation, change evrithing

Thirth thing: the English Language don't have an academy like other languages, so the patterns are decides in common agreements between the speakers. Also, the written is closer to etymolog-type than a phonetic-type, that means the Moder Written English is make to be more closer to the origin of a words (a.k.a etymology) than the way is pronunced (a.k.a phonetic)

If you go to Aberystwyth for some strange reason, the entire British military calls it have a wrist watch, said "av-er-wrist-watch"

We have some vile place names in Germany too. Like Itzehoe and Grevenbroich. Even Lübeck is getting wrong by anyone but locals, and even many of those.
Before there was standardized German spelling, all regions had their own versions of how they used the alphabet, and unlike for anything else, place names never got their spelling updated.

3:30 you were right for the french pronounciation tho x)