@Neckrollios18

Using some of these accent marks is such a circumflex.

@SamAronow

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.

@minuteman4199

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.

@haraldisdead

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.

@darkseraph2009

A note, when the dots are used in a word to separate vowels such as in Zoë, they're called a dieresis. And when the acute accent is written top left to bottom right it's called a grave accent.

@TurtleMarcus

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.

@mariacarolinaoliveira933

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.

@EmperorTigerstar

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.

@limbobilbo8743

Theres a story I read where the members of the band Mötley Crüe didnt actually know that umlauts change the pronunciation of the word in German until they were performing in Germany and heard the crowd calling them “moatly croo”

@tristenm1526

Something I really like about English is the way in which Germanic-derived, French-derived, and Latin-derived words carry different implications and levels of formality. The original examples I saw were the difference between "kingly" (Germanic) which sounds almost sarcastic or casual, "royal" (French) which is fairly straightforward and formal, and "regal" which sounds almost pompous and fancy.

This also creates the situation where words have more and less directly-derived adjectives. For example, if you wanted to describe something as being like hell you could literally just call it "hellish", but you could also say "infernal" (Latin). And how some words have only one option; like with "moon" there's no word "moonish" or "moonly", but there is "lunar".

Then there's the fact that romance and germanic languages therefore have familiar sounding words used in a slightly different way. For instance, the German for "dog" is "hund" which sounds like "hound", which in English is a type of dog. Or "geld" sounding like "gold" but meaning "money". In French, there's "fatiguée" which sounds like "fatigue" but means "tired", and so on.

Lastly, this also makes romance languages sound very fancy and, well, romantic to us English speakers. And though I haven't heard this observation from other people, I do personally find that Germanic languages as a result sound more...humble? Folksy? Old-fashioned, I guess? Part of which probably just comes from the fact that Romantic languages tend to have more emphasis on the vowels, and in the case of French more silent letters, which makes them sound light and airy. While Germanic languages, especially German itself, have lots of consonants and every letter is emphasized.

All very interesting!

@tomtomtrent

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

@jan_Kilan

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

@rkt7414

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.

@scdave_archive

You gotta realise that "thee" and "thou" are still very much spoken causally in some places, like in Leeds in the UK. The killers song "I predict a riot" confused a bunch of people cause they thought they were trying to be old timey.

Also singular us/our is very common in northern dialects. "Give us some more cake" is very natural to say when referring to yourself

@Mogswamp

Etymology is such a fun, addicting rabbit hole to go down. Loved this one

@louisng114

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.

@parmenides130e

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?

@joaquinclavijo7052

As a native spanish speaker I find very strange the way some english speakers write the name of my country's favourite infusion: "mate" as "maté" to make a distinction form the english word mate. However "maté" in spanish means "i killed". I cannot think of other example of english adding an accent to a word that originally doesn't have it, it is usually the other way around.

@Illjwamh

One of my favorite English rules (that no English speaker is ever taught but we all intuitively understand) is the order of adjectives:
opinion, size, condition, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose. 

So you could say, "My lovely little polished antique oval green Laotian porcelain storage basin," but never, "My oval Laotian polished little porcelain lovely storage antique green basin".

@HayTatsuko

Best metal umlaut was the absolutely ridiculous one on the "n" in "Spinal Tap".