The history of the name York is pretty interesting. The Romans called it Eburacum, likely based on an earlier Brythonic name. (The Archbishop of York still signs himself Ebor) The Anglo Saxons mistranslated the Ebor part, thinking it referred to a boar...which they called eofor...as in Everton...Boar Farm; and called it Eoforwic. The Vikings then simplified this to Jorvik, which got ground-down even further to York.

15:30 that's the exact realization that gave birth to Tolkien's works. He wanted to explain how different groups of elves would have different languages by using fictional historical events to explain it.

What's also interesting is how similar Spanish and Italian are, but how French feels completely different, even tho all 3 descended from latin.

I love Rob Words.  And I love it when two of my favorite YouTubers collide.

13:56 the norwegian snakke sounds like the low german word schnacken  "Einen Schnack halten" = means to converse, chat, or make small talk, especially in Northern Germany. It is a colloquial expression for an informal conversation or chatter

Going to Germany and learning how to get around from day to day really cemented in my mind how Germanic English is. There's so much basic information you can decipher from the text on signs, menus, etc. if you just know which letters to substitute for each other here and there.

And that's a subject covered in another RobWords video, lol.

Absolutely love RobWords. This video in particular was incredibly insightful! Love his podcast with Jess as well!

Not somthing I can see you reacting to, but the Words Unravelled podcast with Rob Words is pretty fun.

What also fascinates me is the sets of words that we had in English but got supplanted by Latin/French loanwords — that is, archaic English.

We used to use “yeartide” to talk about our anniversaries, while our property used to be our “owndoms.” The word “selfsame,” which refers to identical objects, is also falling out of use.

The words for solstice and equinox (both purely Latin in origin) used to be “sunstead” and “evennight.”
Poisons, venoms, and toxins are all ultimately French/Latin but we used to use “atter” to refer to all of those.

And we even have cases of words going the other way around! Some of our Latin-derived words are being supplanted by Germanic ones, mainly because the Germanic versions are easier to use. So take for example the four cardinal directions:

— we still use “oriental” to refer to things from the east, and sometimes “occidental” from the west;
— but “septentrional” and “meridional” have been completely replaced by “northern” and “southern” (respectively) in “quotidian” (everyday) use.

10:28 Actually, English is more conservative with its use of C instead of K. In the past, C was preferred over K in most Germanic languages when the Latin alphabet was first introduced, but this later changed to avoid the ambiguity of C in Romance loanwords which followed the hard/soft C dynamic where the pronunciation of C changes depending on what vowel comes after it. The reason why this change didn't happen in English comes down to French influence and the entrenchment of Romance spelling conventions. Still, you'll sometimes see C in modern words in other Germanic languages like in the ck combination in German, Dutch, Swedish etc.

I'm Dutch and a lot of old English words are extremely similair to modern Dutch words. It is clear that English came from Germanic languages if you are Dutch/German

11:20 Linguistics is so fun and so confusing that it’s the main reason linguistics is so fun to learn about because the confusing part of linguistics is the way sounds shift seemingly without reason.  The great vowel shift in English is the reason why we pronounce certain words the way we do.

I am a huge fan of Rob's channels.   Great to see you do a segment on him.   He also has a video on place names you may want to check out some day.
Enjoy your trip.
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RobWords just put out a really interesting video today about the origins of written numbers. Really interesting stuff, and it bridges a not so obvious gap between his specialty, linguistics of course, and numbers

Is English really a Germanic language? Yes, it's the weird emo brother, that ran away from home 16 times and got brought back 15.

RobWords is a fantastic channel. I hope he sees this video and responds.

English is when German had a younger sister who left home at age 7, was raised by a French family until age 18, then married a Viking :)

Love to see you doing a RobWords reaction!.  I subscribe to RobWords, he does such a great stream on etymology.

This guy is awesome, I hope I’ll see him on this channel again

Man this is awesome. Please, please keep reacting to Rob Words. I love his content and your commentary makes it even better!