7 ms·

Simon Roper: the 23-year-old reconstructing the past for millions of viewers

180 points by ZeljkoS 5y ago

aasasd 5y ago
See also: about Shakespeare in the Early Modern English pronunciation: https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s Specifically how some puns don't work with the pronunciation of today, like the ‘hour’.
maybelsyrup 5y ago
This guy appeared in my YouTube recommendations a few months before the pandemic. They were there for weeks before I actually clicked on one, strangely persistent given the titles and screencaps on the videos: "What did middle English sound like?" next to this grubby college kid's face. What about my viewing habits to date triggered this recommendation? When I finally relented and clicked on one, it was kind of hypnotic. It's hard to put to words: the content is really interesting for all the reasons laid out in the article, but there's something else, too, an atmospheric thing. The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. It's all pretty dreamlike, I guess. Especially when I stand back and realize I've been watching videos about Cumbrian accents for like two hours. I'm not even interested in this stuff. Kudos to this guy, he's clearly hit upon something, even if he is some kind of witch.
- vmception 5y ago
  Praise the algo!
- jmcgough 5y ago
  > The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. This is how I feel about TheReportOfTheWeek, aka Reviewbrah. He reviews fast food items in his house or backyard in a single take and averages 100k-200k views per video (with some outliers). No fancy editing, no team of video assistants, just a genuinely charming guy reviewing cheap food in a nice suit in front of a fixed camera.
  - cableshaft 5y ago
    As someone who records videos without editing, that one take video could still be 19th or 30th take :) Although he's probably practiced enough he can do it in less than that. For me though, I have to restart a bunch of times. Usually that final take still has flubs, but it had the least glaring ones. The ones I do are usually rules explanations or brief overviews of my game designs that are intended to enter into contests or pitch the game to publishers, often finished right before the deadline (sometimes just an hour before) so I don't have time to video edit even if I wanted to. Like here's the most recent one I did, for a dice puzzle coop zombie themed game (I know zombies are an overused theme, I wasn't even trying to design a zombie themed game at first, it just fit the mechanisms best). Still screwed up a few things: https://youtu.be/uEBKKW7I8RM https://youtu.be/uEBKKW7I8RM
- phreeza 5y ago
  I had almost exactly the same experience. For all it's downsides, sometimes the YouTube algorithm does do some pretty marvelous things.
- Azaks 5y ago
  He hasnt hit upon anything. Other than for himself. Youtube etc is like throwing sugar around a gigantic ant hill and watching ants reacts. The ants dont change into anything sophisticated consuming all that sugar. Learning takes time. Its requires the right environment and experienced guides. There are no shortcuts. And the chimp troupe learns that lesson again and again every single time they think they have discovered one.
  - celticninja 5y ago
    I think you do people a disservice. I'm not sure the video are supposed to do anything other than pass on information to viewers. Some of those viewers my use the information, some may pass it on to others, some may act on it to research further and many will do nothing but absorb the content and move on. Is there a problem with any of that? Is there a difference between this guy and a non-fiction author of a specific subject? We don't expect non-fiction author to revolutionise the lives of everyone that reads their book do we?
- g3e0 5y ago
  > The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. This sounds very much like ASMR. I find the most relaxing/entrancing videos are the ones that are unintentional/not forced, although obviously personal preferences do vary.
  - verytrivial 5y ago
    I watched a video of a friend of mine who's become a semi-prominent Zen teacher. After a few moments of listening to one of his (rather lovely) pandemic/Zoom group meditations, it struck me that this was weirdly close to ASMR too -- intimacy, calm, human "touch". Philosophy too, yes, but the interpersonal dynamic is a mother cooing into your ear. I wonder if this resets you into some calm, receptive mood because that's an evolutionarily advantageous state to be in, and the cooing is a shortcut to it.
tekkk 5y ago
Good to see Simon is getting promotion. It's interesting to watch someone have an authentic and deep passion for something which they enjoy sharing in a down-to-earth manner. For example the vocal shift video was quite revealing. Maybe one day he'll have his own BBC documentary series.
- FartyMcFarter 5y ago
  > For example the vocal shift video was quite revealing. Did you mean vowel shift?
  - kwhitefoot 5y ago
    That's interesting. Vowels in English are vokaler in Norwegian.
    - vidarh 5y ago
      Comes from latin vocalis in most European languages and many non-European languages. English got it via French, which is where the c disappeared.
      - Someone 5y ago
        I expect the w appeared only in English, as the w is rare in French (that’s why it’s a special case in braille. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille#Derivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille#Derivation). And indeed, Google gives me ’voyelle’ as the French for vowel.
        vidarh 5y ago
        Yes, I'm aware. Both modern French and English got it from Old French "vouel" and "voyeul", which if you speak it - especially the first form - makes it clear how it became "vowel" in English. Hence my point that the "c" disappeared when it was borrowed from latin into (Old) French.
cupcake-unicorn 5y ago
Wow, exciting to see Simon on the front page. My background is in linguistics so I've known this guy for a while on Youtube. He adamantly claims his background isn't in linguistics but he's legit. Go Simon!
- e1g 5y ago
  This is refreshing to hear. So many similar infotainment channels seem enlightening, but as soon as they cover topics or regions of the world I'm deeply familiar with, I get disillusioned by misrepresentations. So often, it's not due to compression but to cherry-picking examples to heighten the drama or their conclusions.
DrBazza 5y ago
This is really interesting. My grandparents were born in near London Bridge around the turn of the 20th century, and their accents were nothing like London/SE accents are now, even my parents (if you consider current London accents to be Thames Estuary / Eastenders / Danny Dyer). Just typing this and watching that, makes me think, who would be the 60 year mid point for that (1900-2020), and the most obvious London actor I can think of is Bob Hoskins, and his accent was different to what we have now. Recognisable as a London accent, because we're familiar with it, and that generation is still around.
Accacin 5y ago
I recently discovered this guy too. I'd highly recommend any of his videos with Jackson Crawford who is a Norse language expert.
mongol 5y ago
In my ears many of the early examples sound like English with strong Swedish accent ("Swenglish"). As if a Swedish AI-voice tried to read out English text. Now, it is more likely influenced by the norse ancestors, and they were not from Sweden as much as Norway and Denmark, but still...
- sillyquiet 5y ago
  You'd probably be interested in seeing the collaboration he did with Old Norse linguist Dr. Jackson Crawford in which he and Dr. Crawford had a scripted but mutually intelligible conversation in Old English and Old Norse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc
- sigg3 5y ago
  Tbh, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish languages are all bastard editions of each other. It's like the weird Northern offshoot of Germanic. Source: am Norwegian. Not an expert by any means.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    It's not just "like" the Northern offshoot of Germanic, they are North Germanic languages, like English is a West Germanic language. The similarity is even stronger if you compare with Low German (most common in the North), which didn't go through the consonant shift of the now dominant High German (e.g. day: Norwegian dag vs. Low German Dag vs. High German Tag)
- vidarh 5y ago
  While there's probably (I'm not a linguist) direct Norse influence too, English is a West Germanic language, and so the further back you go the less Norman and French influence has diluted the Germanic foundation of the language shared with e.g. the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German (the relationship with German is more obvious if you include the now relatively uncommon older Low German dialects that used to dominate Northern Germany - you get a continuous map with much more gradual changes).
xcambar 5y ago
> Did the Nineties really feel like a period of stability? Or does it just feel like chaos now because I’m an adult? I was born a good decade before him but still wonders this very question. I asked my older friends and family, and it appears (empirically) that... there's no clear answer. There's actually something specific about our times (information technology, ecology, western world mostly at peace for 70+ years...) but it very much relates to how much you look and feel about the world surrounding you. The true difference is that much more people are aware and worried about the state of the world in our times than before. In that sense, the chaos seems much more apparent than it used to be. Of course, this is anecdotal, not an evidence in any way :)
- vidarh 5y ago
  A lot of the chaos just wasn't apparent before because the information flow was slower more than because people didn't care. E.g. look at any news event, and consider how differently it looks if you only look at print news and one daily news broadcast vs. if you look at the same event online, with conflicting narratives, easy access to how foreign news media describes something, speculation, and far more granular reporting. Everything looks a lot more coherent and certain with just a few viewpoints and a couple of updates a day because you miss a lot of the mistakes and changing opinions and differences in bias.
_ph_ 5y ago
Faszinatingly and not surprisingly, to me as a German the anglo-saxon was almost understandable, English with a lot of German words. Add in some dialect, some parts sounded rather nordic, others rather like Swiss-German pronounciation.
coldtea 5y ago
>Did the Nineties really feel like a period of stability? Or does it just feel like chaos now because I’m an adult? Yes, the nineties did feel like a period of stability. In some countries this went well into 2005 or so. In others, like the US, I guess 2001 (9/11) was a major turning point. And after the 2008 crisis, things went downhill faster.
- datameta 5y ago
  In countries of the former USSR, the 90s were a period or rapid decline, with the 2000s being a slow return.
- scarecrowbob 5y ago
  It really depends on where you're at and who you're with. In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things). That doesn't touch the reworking of former areas of the USSR, the first gulf war, and the various issues with asian economies. I was in high school; it's much easier for me to think that the feelings of stability I felt at the time came from my parent's professional success and the various booms in markets that they were able to capitalize on rather than some more systematic stability...
  - coldtea 5y ago
    >In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things). Yes, but those are par for the course throughout modern US history, nothing to write home about (in the sense they wouldn't affect the average citizen anyway, and they'd just be off the news in a month or so). For the former USSR areas true - was mostly describing US/Western Europe.
resting123 5y ago
Is anyone else surprised by the fact that he is 23? He looks at least 30 if not 40
WalterBright 5y ago
> He watches TV footage from the 1970s and focuses in on the people strolling about in the background. The pandemic enhanced his sense that the most mundane parts of life are what will make the past come alive in the future. I lived through the 70s. Some movies from them are curiously nostalgic to me, as the way people dress, talk, and behave has significantly changed.

180 points by ZeljkoS 5y ago

See also: about Shakespeare in the Early Modern English pronunciation: https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s https://youtu.be/gPlpphT7n9s Specifically how some puns don't work with the pronunciation of today, like the ‘hour’.

maybelsyrup 5y ago

This guy appeared in my YouTube recommendations a few months before the pandemic. They were there for weeks before I actually clicked on one, strangely persistent given the titles and screencaps on the videos: "What did middle English sound like?" next to this grubby college kid's face. What about my viewing habits to date triggered this recommendation? When I finally relented and clicked on one, it was kind of hypnotic. It's hard to put to words: the content is really interesting for all the reasons laid out in the article, but there's something else, too, an atmospheric thing. The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. It's all pretty dreamlike, I guess. Especially when I stand back and realize I've been watching videos about Cumbrian accents for like two hours. I'm not even interested in this stuff. Kudos to this guy, he's clearly hit upon something, even if he is some kind of witch.

vmception 5y ago
Praise the algo!
jmcgough 5y ago
> The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. This is how I feel about TheReportOfTheWeek, aka Reviewbrah. He reviews fast food items in his house or backyard in a single take and averages 100k-200k views per video (with some outliers). No fancy editing, no team of video assistants, just a genuinely charming guy reviewing cheap food in a nice suit in front of a fixed camera.
- cableshaft 5y ago
  As someone who records videos without editing, that one take video could still be 19th or 30th take :) Although he's probably practiced enough he can do it in less than that. For me though, I have to restart a bunch of times. Usually that final take still has flubs, but it had the least glaring ones. The ones I do are usually rules explanations or brief overviews of my game designs that are intended to enter into contests or pitch the game to publishers, often finished right before the deadline (sometimes just an hour before) so I don't have time to video edit even if I wanted to. Like here's the most recent one I did, for a dice puzzle coop zombie themed game (I know zombies are an overused theme, I wasn't even trying to design a zombie themed game at first, it just fit the mechanisms best). Still screwed up a few things: https://youtu.be/uEBKKW7I8RM https://youtu.be/uEBKKW7I8RM
phreeza 5y ago
I had almost exactly the same experience. For all it's downsides, sometimes the YouTube algorithm does do some pretty marvelous things.
Azaks 5y ago
He hasnt hit upon anything. Other than for himself. Youtube etc is like throwing sugar around a gigantic ant hill and watching ants reacts. The ants dont change into anything sophisticated consuming all that sugar. Learning takes time. Its requires the right environment and experienced guides. There are no shortcuts. And the chimp troupe learns that lesson again and again every single time they think they have discovered one.
- celticninja 5y ago
  I think you do people a disservice. I'm not sure the video are supposed to do anything other than pass on information to viewers. Some of those viewers my use the information, some may pass it on to others, some may act on it to research further and many will do nothing but absorb the content and move on. Is there a problem with any of that? Is there a difference between this guy and a non-fiction author of a specific subject? We don't expect non-fiction author to revolutionise the lives of everyone that reads their book do we?
g3e0 5y ago
> The guy's voice is almost a whisper, the ambient sounds from the garden or the forest or the road are oddly pleasant, and he's speaking pretty slowly, with none of these glitchy quick cuts you see in a lot of YT content. It's also unusually personal-feeling, like he's just talking to you. This sounds very much like ASMR. I find the most relaxing/entrancing videos are the ones that are unintentional/not forced, although obviously personal preferences do vary.
- verytrivial 5y ago
  I watched a video of a friend of mine who's become a semi-prominent Zen teacher. After a few moments of listening to one of his (rather lovely) pandemic/Zoom group meditations, it struck me that this was weirdly close to ASMR too -- intimacy, calm, human "touch". Philosophy too, yes, but the interpersonal dynamic is a mother cooing into your ear. I wonder if this resets you into some calm, receptive mood because that's an evolutionarily advantageous state to be in, and the cooing is a shortcut to it.

tekkk 5y ago

Good to see Simon is getting promotion. It's interesting to watch someone have an authentic and deep passion for something which they enjoy sharing in a down-to-earth manner. For example the vocal shift video was quite revealing. Maybe one day he'll have his own BBC documentary series.

FartyMcFarter 5y ago
> For example the vocal shift video was quite revealing. Did you mean vowel shift?
- kwhitefoot 5y ago
  That's interesting. Vowels in English are vokaler in Norwegian.
  - vidarh 5y ago
    Comes from latin vocalis in most European languages and many non-European languages. English got it via French, which is where the c disappeared.
    - Someone 5y ago
      I expect the w appeared only in English, as the w is rare in French (that’s why it’s a special case in braille. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille#Derivation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braille#Derivation). And indeed, Google gives me ’voyelle’ as the French for vowel.
      - vidarh 5y ago
        Yes, I'm aware. Both modern French and English got it from Old French "vouel" and "voyeul", which if you speak it - especially the first form - makes it clear how it became "vowel" in English. Hence my point that the "c" disappeared when it was borrowed from latin into (Old) French.

cupcake-unicorn 5y ago

Wow, exciting to see Simon on the front page. My background is in linguistics so I've known this guy for a while on Youtube. He adamantly claims his background isn't in linguistics but he's legit. Go Simon!

e1g 5y ago
This is refreshing to hear. So many similar infotainment channels seem enlightening, but as soon as they cover topics or regions of the world I'm deeply familiar with, I get disillusioned by misrepresentations. So often, it's not due to compression but to cherry-picking examples to heighten the drama or their conclusions.

DrBazza 5y ago

This is really interesting. My grandparents were born in near London Bridge around the turn of the 20th century, and their accents were nothing like London/SE accents are now, even my parents (if you consider current London accents to be Thames Estuary / Eastenders / Danny Dyer). Just typing this and watching that, makes me think, who would be the 60 year mid point for that (1900-2020), and the most obvious London actor I can think of is Bob Hoskins, and his accent was different to what we have now. Recognisable as a London accent, because we're familiar with it, and that generation is still around.

Accacin 5y ago

I recently discovered this guy too. I'd highly recommend any of his videos with Jackson Crawford who is a Norse language expert.

mongol 5y ago

In my ears many of the early examples sound like English with strong Swedish accent ("Swenglish"). As if a Swedish AI-voice tried to read out English text. Now, it is more likely influenced by the norse ancestors, and they were not from Sweden as much as Norway and Denmark, but still...

sillyquiet 5y ago
You'd probably be interested in seeing the collaboration he did with Old Norse linguist Dr. Jackson Crawford in which he and Dr. Crawford had a scripted but mutually intelligible conversation in Old English and Old Norse. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc
sigg3 5y ago
Tbh, Norwegian, Swedish and Danish languages are all bastard editions of each other. It's like the weird Northern offshoot of Germanic. Source: am Norwegian. Not an expert by any means.
- vidarh 5y ago
  It's not just "like" the Northern offshoot of Germanic, they are North Germanic languages, like English is a West Germanic language. The similarity is even stronger if you compare with Low German (most common in the North), which didn't go through the consonant shift of the now dominant High German (e.g. day: Norwegian dag vs. Low German Dag vs. High German Tag)
vidarh 5y ago
While there's probably (I'm not a linguist) direct Norse influence too, English is a West Germanic language, and so the further back you go the less Norman and French influence has diluted the Germanic foundation of the language shared with e.g. the Scandinavian languages, Dutch and German (the relationship with German is more obvious if you include the now relatively uncommon older Low German dialects that used to dominate Northern Germany - you get a continuous map with much more gradual changes).

xcambar 5y ago

> Did the Nineties really feel like a period of stability? Or does it just feel like chaos now because I’m an adult? I was born a good decade before him but still wonders this very question. I asked my older friends and family, and it appears (empirically) that... there's no clear answer. There's actually something specific about our times (information technology, ecology, western world mostly at peace for 70+ years...) but it very much relates to how much you look and feel about the world surrounding you. The true difference is that much more people are aware and worried about the state of the world in our times than before. In that sense, the chaos seems much more apparent than it used to be. Of course, this is anecdotal, not an evidence in any way :)

vidarh 5y ago
A lot of the chaos just wasn't apparent before because the information flow was slower more than because people didn't care. E.g. look at any news event, and consider how differently it looks if you only look at print news and one daily news broadcast vs. if you look at the same event online, with conflicting narratives, easy access to how foreign news media describes something, speculation, and far more granular reporting. Everything looks a lot more coherent and certain with just a few viewpoints and a couple of updates a day because you miss a lot of the mistakes and changing opinions and differences in bias.

_ph_ 5y ago

Faszinatingly and not surprisingly, to me as a German the anglo-saxon was almost understandable, English with a lot of German words. Add in some dialect, some parts sounded rather nordic, others rather like Swiss-German pronounciation.

coldtea 5y ago

>Did the Nineties really feel like a period of stability? Or does it just feel like chaos now because I’m an adult? Yes, the nineties did feel like a period of stability. In some countries this went well into 2005 or so. In others, like the US, I guess 2001 (9/11) was a major turning point. And after the 2008 crisis, things went downhill faster.

datameta 5y ago
In countries of the former USSR, the 90s were a period or rapid decline, with the 2000s being a slow return.
scarecrowbob 5y ago
It really depends on where you're at and who you're with. In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things). That doesn't touch the reworking of former areas of the USSR, the first gulf war, and the various issues with asian economies. I was in high school; it's much easier for me to think that the feelings of stability I felt at the time came from my parent's professional success and the various booms in markets that they were able to capitalize on rather than some more systematic stability...
- coldtea 5y ago
  >In the US, I remember the insurrections following the trials related to Rodney King, the Branch Dividans being burned to death, and the milita movement blowing up an FBI building (among many other kinds of things). Yes, but those are par for the course throughout modern US history, nothing to write home about (in the sense they wouldn't affect the average citizen anyway, and they'd just be off the news in a month or so). For the former USSR areas true - was mostly describing US/Western Europe.

resting123 5y ago

Is anyone else surprised by the fact that he is 23? He looks at least 30 if not 40

WalterBright 5y ago

> He watches TV footage from the 1970s and focuses in on the people strolling about in the background. The pandemic enhanced his sense that the most mundane parts of life are what will make the past come alive in the future. I lived through the 70s. Some movies from them are curiously nostalgic to me, as the way people dress, talk, and behave has significantly changed.