[HN Gopher] What did ancient languages sound like?
___________________________________________________________________
What did ancient languages sound like?
Author : mewithoutyou
Score : 113 points
Date : 2021-07-03 14:14 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (antigonejournal.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (antigonejournal.com)
| imbnwa wrote:
| For people who are interested in ancient Greek, Podium Arts'
| YouTube channel is filled with professional readings of Attic
| Greek works, like Apologia[0], Plato's Apology
|
| [0]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k3tlBO3agFU
| yumraj wrote:
| Perhaps this is the right thread to ask the question as to how
| people figured out what ancient Egyptian words sound.
|
| From what I understand Rosetta Stone simply provided a dictionary
| of sorts, so I can understand how they know which words mean
| what. But how do they know that a certain combination of
| hieroglyphs translates into words pronounced as say "Ramses" or
| "Tutankhamen " and so on.
| wl wrote:
| Royal names in cartouches provided a clue. The Rosetta Stone
| provided the spelling of the name Ptolemy in Greek, Hieratic,
| and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Other cartouches with known values
| filled in a lot. One major problem is that Egyptian hieroglyphs
| don't really encode vowels. Another set of clues about
| pronunciation comes from the Amarna letters written in the 18th
| dynasty. They are written in Akkadian cuneiform (then the
| language of international diplomacy), a script that does
| include vowels. These letters contain Egyptian names and
| sometimes loan words.
| kaesar14 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/5NeccdDpO5I
|
| I found this to be a great source on the topic. Your question
| is a great one, and hints as to why Jean-Francois Champollion
| is hailed as the genius he was. The key insight was essentially
| the theory that the Coptic language spoken still as the
| liturgical language of Coptic Christians in Egypt was a modern
| form of the ancient Egyptian language encoded by Hieroglyphics.
| Champollion made a key insight attempting to decipher a
| cartouche (the hieroglyphic form used to write a name) that a
| symbol at the beginning of a name looked extremely similar to a
| sun. The Coptic word for sun was Ra. At the time, they'd
| already identified the symbol used to writes a 'ss' sound, and
| so Champollion was able to guess at the middle symbols spelling
| Mes, leading to the deciphering of Rameses. Note that the
| European world at large obviously already knew the name
| Rameses, which was key here.
|
| I believe in general names were key to deciphering many of the
| sounds used in the language, coupled with pronunciations hinted
| at by Coptic.
|
| I typed this all by memory so I may be off in some details but
| I believe I have the gist right.
| yumraj wrote:
| The video looks great, appreciate the recommendation.
| pcstl wrote:
| We know these names because the Rosetta Stone (and other dual-
| language inscriptions) allowed researchers to figure out which
| Greek letter the egyptian hieroglyphics mapped to. There is
| also the Coptic language, which is a modern descendent of
| Ancient Egyptian.
|
| However, these pronunciations are full of issues and
| uncertainties - in part because, as the OP states, even
| figuring out how exactly Greek was pronounced is sort of a
| challenge, and because Ancient Egyptian did not denote most
| vowels, so some uncertainty is unavoidable.
|
| For example, Egyptologists will usually transcribe the name we
| usually pronounce as Tutankhamen as "twt-nh-jmn". We can tell
| which phonemes are distinct and have _some_ idea of how they
| must have been pronounced, but we can never truly know for
| sure.
|
| So the answer is: The word probably wasn't pronounced as
| "Ramses", the name "Ramses" is an approximation of a Greek
| approximation of the actual name of the pharaoh, optimized to
| be easy to pronounce by English-speakers.
| yumraj wrote:
| Makes sense, BTW I appreciate all the sibling replies as
| well.
|
| So basically it seems they used the proper nouns to start and
| then built up on that. And also used Coptic to fill gaps..
|
| I do get the point about Greek approximation since just as an
| example in modern India, Alexander is referred to as
| _Sikander_. Similar, yet very different.
| csunbird wrote:
| Alexander is pronounced as "Iskender" in modern Turkish as
| well.
| yorwba wrote:
| The Al- most likely got lost in Arabic due to being
| reanalyzed as a determiner instead of as part of the name.
| schoen wrote:
| For the Greeks, it even had an intelligible meaning
|
| https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E1%BC%80%CE%BB%CE%AD%CE%B
| E%C...
|
| I think the a- in the al- in Alexander is supposed to be
| the alpha privative
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_privative
|
| like our "ward _off_ " or something.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| I don't doubt that part of the pronunciation problem is the
| deeper meanings that creep in.
|
| 'CAESAR' sounds positively German and Legio VI Victrix has an
| effeminate sound. I'm afraid that Biggus Dickus had at least a
| little to do with attitudes towards proper Latin.
| dheera wrote:
| Ancient Chinese reconstruction:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIkQSuZbbt0
| gpraghu wrote:
| You mean "What did ancient European languages sound like"
| perhaps? I would submit that Samskruta (NOT the anclicised
| Sanskrit) sounds exactly like how it did in ancient times. How
| come there is no discussion of that at all?
| fooker wrote:
| No Sanskrit absolutely doesn't sound like it did in ancient the
| ancient times. Modern (north Indian) Sanskrit pronunciation
| uses Hindi/Urdu style of pronouncing vowels which was
| significantly influenced by Arabic and Persian.
|
| Ancient Sanskrit pronunciation was essentially similar to what
| we call the Prakrit language, which was a more colloquial
| version and spoken by most people. Bengali, Marathi and
| Gujarati are a bit closer to that pronunciation, but of course
| they have changed a fair bit too.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > Modern (north Indian) Sanskrit pronunciation uses
| Hindi/Urdu style of pronouncing vowels which was
| significantly influenced by Arabic and Persian.
|
| This has to be the most far-fetched and absurd claim I've
| heard so far. Sanskrit has been orally transmitted since
| several millennia and there's no change in its pronunciation
| and grammar since days of Panini. That robust oral tradition
| is well researched and proven to be fool proof.
| AbrahamParangi wrote:
| That would make it the only language in the world to be
| passed down unmodified, which seems... unlikely.
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| I understand it comes across as jingoistic, but truly
| Sanskrit grammar and pronunciation hasn't changed since
| Panini. The word Sanskrit itself means "constructed" and
| there was a rigorous effort to prevent ambiguity.
| fooker wrote:
| Grammar hasn't. Pronunciation has, a lot.
| hawk_ wrote:
| there are no recordings from panini's times and panini's
| texts pertain to grammar. they don't prescribe
| pronunciation - like precise position of tongue lips
| etc...
| fooker wrote:
| I mean, you could listen to samveda chants from different
| parts of India and see the pronunciations are very audibly
| different...
|
| Your kind of hot take about Sanskrit is somewhat common.
| schoen wrote:
| I once went to a wedding involving academic linguists and
| Hindu prayers. A Hindu priest chanted a prayer in
| Sanskrit and then an academic linguist followed up by
| chanting the same prayer with his view of what it would
| have anciently sounded like. Notwithstanding the priest's
| own view of his Sanskrit as an ancient language, his
| pronunciation didn't match up with the academic
| linguist's view of the historical pronunciation.
|
| Relatedly, I went to a spoken Latin event where I (an
| American) spoke Latin with an Italian man. His
| pronunciation and mine were wildly different, although we
| could understand each other. Neither was all that similar
| to the academic linguists' view of what our conversation
| would have sounded like thousands of years ago, though I
| guess his vowels were generally closer and my consonants
| were generally closer.
|
| People retaining ancient languages for liturgical and
| scholarly uses are generally not that great at preventing
| the pronunciation from shifting, and I think that's true
| across the board. ("Atque memento, nulli adsunt Romanorum
| qui locutionem tuam corrigant." -- Henry Beard.)
| prosody wrote:
| It's been a long time since I've done anything with Sanskrit so
| please forgive any misunderstandings, but didn't Vedic l become
| Classical dd, as in niil and niidd ?
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| > Vedic l
|
| There is strong evidence that the l came from Substratum
| languages (Dravidian or Munda) and many Indo-Aryan languages
| still retain it e.g. Marathi, Gujarati.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Yes but it's still present in Vedic, literally in the
| second word of rgveda 1.1.1.
| throwawaysea wrote:
| > How come there is no discussion of that at all?
|
| Leaving aside the linguistic debate in the comments here,
| there's often no fair or truthful or representative discussion
| of the ancient East's legacy (or others) for reasons relating
| to imperialism, colonialism, and supremacist thinking. I don't
| mean that in the explicit "we're taking over your country way"
| but in the more subtle or implicit ways. Western world views
| and Eurocentric histories are everywhere, from academia to
| Wikipedia, and due credit or consideration isn't given
| elsewhere.
|
| The problem persists even in the very countries we are talking
| about, like India, since their earlier "original" Hindu culture
| was changed by invasions (whether from the Islamic Middle East
| or Christian Europe). My understanding is that when the British
| finally left India, their academic culture still persisted in
| the form of Western education that replaced earlier forms of
| education, textbooks sourced from Western publishers, taxpayer
| funding into this system, and the adoption of languages like
| Hindi and English as the official languages (rather than say
| Sanskrit or Tamil).
|
| So to answer your question in the broader sense beyond this
| article and discussion, there is no discussion of these things
| in part because of the power of Western spheres and in part
| because Eastern spheres themselves haven't retained their own
| knowledge or promoted themselves adequately either domestically
| or internationally.
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| While it's very true that we have a much better idea of how
| Sanskrit was pronounced millennia ago than we do for most
| languages, we can't make absolute claims like yours.
|
| No, that's not true. there's a bunch of varieties of Sanskrit,
| including Vedic Sanskrit, Classical Sanskrit, and various local
| dialects. Not all of these have been preserved in oral
| traditions.
|
| Second, even within the preserved oral traditions,
| pronunciations vary across schools. For example, the "kru" part
| in your Samskruta is pronounced differently in different parts
| of India; some people do say "kri"
| poisonarena wrote:
| The article is about Indo-European languages, that includes
| 'indic, iranian, and slavic'. You can write a blog about
| Samskruta.
| imbnwa wrote:
| Samskruta is an Indo-European language.
| poisonarena wrote:
| I didn't say it wasn't...
| tweaktastic wrote:
| Are you saying Samskruta is not an Indic language?
| tweaktastic wrote:
| Are you saying Samskruta is not an Indic language?
| poisonarena wrote:
| No, I didn't say that.
| imbnwa wrote:
| A discussion of that would have to also include a discussion of
| why Lithuanian has also not changed much since the vocabulary
| is _filled_ with Samskruta cognates that Lithuanian does NOT
| share with Slavic languages like Russian or Polish, some
| examples from Wikipedia:
|
| - S: sunus, L: sunus (son)
|
| - S: avis, L: avis (sheep)
|
| - S: padas, L: padas (foot)
|
| - S: viras, L: vyras (man, also compare Latin vir [pronounced
| weer])
|
| - S: dhumas, L: dumas (smoke)
|
| - S: antaras, L: antras (other, second)
|
| - S: vrkas, L: vilkas (wolf)
|
| - S: yunje, L: jungiu (I join)
|
| - S: jantis, L: gentys (tribes, also compare Latin gentes
| [a/the people])
|
| - S: dantas, L: dantis (also compare Latin dentes)
|
| - S: naktis, L: naktis (also compare Latin noctes)
| vkazanov wrote:
| Knowing Russian, Lithuanian and bits of Polish I would also
| add that it's amazing how lithuanian is very similar to
| slavic languages in grammar structure but radically different
| phonetically.
|
| I.e. a direct translation, word to word, works (with some
| style issues), but it's hard to recognize the sentence when
| pronounced.
|
| This makes me wonder how sanscrit sounds...
|
| Also, the language is quite complex, probably more complex
| than polish or russian, which is typical for archaic
| languages, afaik.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| Lithuanian in general is considered one of the most
| conservative IE languages. There isn't really any clear
| reason that historical linguistics has produced for whether
| languages change quickly or slowly afaik.
| imbnwa wrote:
| My understanding was that the isolation of the Baltic
| speakers was a big contributor, though off the top of my
| head I wouldn't know the geographical obstacles, hence also
| why they were the last to Christianity in Europe
| hallarempt wrote:
| No, it doesn't. End of discussion.
| gpraghu wrote:
| Could you elaborate please? How do you establish that?
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| I agree with the sentiment but ironically your transliteration
| of the name of that language reveals that it certainly has
| undergone at least some sound changes. Why do people in the
| north pronounce the vocalic "r" as "ri" while in the south they
| use "ru"? Why do people in the north drop word final schwa but
| in the south they add a nasal bilabial?
|
| While it's very easy to pronounce Samskrta in a way similar to
| what was likely used in classical times, there have definitely
| been sound changes to an extent.
| gpraghu wrote:
| In classical recitation, with ghanapatha and other
| techniques, I would expect that pronunciation is strict,
| meters are accounted for, and things have remained relatively
| unchanged in the way the Vedas and Upanishads are recited.
| Unfortunately, there is little exposure of the rigorous
| training in the Western world.
| KhoomeiK wrote:
| I've listened to rgveda samhita patha of what I believe is
| the shakala shakha which is predominant in north india but
| even they seem to mispronounce the vocalic "r" as "ri".
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| The reason there's no discussion about Samskruta is that all
| the scholars of sNskRtm are in India and most of the University
| departments lack the cultural and linguistic nuances that are
| needed to learn sNskRtm. Unless Indians come and share their
| research with the world, there won't be any discussion on it.
|
| I also think this is so because the prevalent narrative is post
| colonial in nature and the (English) Internet is came out of
| Anglosphere. This is not a criticism of the prevalent order,
| it's just the way things have evolved naturally post WW2.
| ta___1254 wrote:
| It's sNskRtm not sNskRtm
| FlyingSnake wrote:
| Another casualty of transliteration keyboards.
| stan_rogers wrote:
| While there is an _element_ of truth to that, it 's largely
| because the language was deliberately fossilized for religious
| reasons, while the "real" language that people actually used
| day to day continued to evolve around it.
| gpraghu wrote:
| How fossilized? While it is not used as an everyday language,
| there is a yet growing library of literature, and vigorous
| philosophical debate that happens in Samskruta. BTW, an
| unrelated rant, the other thing that grinds on me is that the
| Ganga river is ALWAYS referred as Ganges (another
| anglicization)! Ganga is easier to pronounce, so why did that
| get anglicized, I wonder?
| stan_rogers wrote:
| Certainly vocabulary has been added to, but the whole point
| of the work of Panini and others was to prevent the Vedas
| from drifting over time. That freezing of the core of the
| language was deliberate and artificial. (The same thing
| applies to the Arabic of the 7th century. It exists nearly
| unchanged at its core for religious reasons, and a version
| with various additions functions as a _lingua franca_ and
| language of academic discourse - rather as Latin or Greek
| did in other cultures - in the Islamic sphere.)
| Ar-Curunir wrote:
| And Paninian/Classical Sanskrit is not even Vedic
| Sanskrit!
| jltsiren wrote:
| That's how foreign names work. People hear the name used in
| another language, and then they adapt the pronunciation
| and/or spelling to their own language.
|
| As a Finnish speaker, "Ganges" has the familiar form of a
| name borrowed from Greek or Latin, and it does not need
| further adaptation. "Ganga", on the other hand, sounds
| awkward in Finnish. Had ancient Finns been in contact with
| India, we would probably know the river as Kanka or
| Kankajoki ("Kanka river"). The latter in particular sounds
| like a proper Finnish river name.
| Causality1 wrote:
| Ganges is what the Hellenic Greeks called it. Most English
| words for Indian things come from Greek.
| hassancf wrote:
| I think it is really hard for speakers of European
| languages to believe that a language could have the same
| pronunciation that it had centuries ago.
|
| Obvious example:
|
| Arabic from at least the 7th century AD:
|
| As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way it
| was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly
| understand it.
|
| You cannot say the same thing for European languages.
|
| Probably the same for sanskrit.
| yorwba wrote:
| > As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way
| it was pronounced 14 centuries ago
|
| You probably cannot. Every region with a tradition of
| reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it.
| It would be a strange coincidence if your tradition in
| particular happened to keep the pronunciation unchanged
| while all the others didn't.
|
| E.g. do you pronounce as a pharyngealized voiced
| alveolar lateral fricative? That's the most likely
| reconstruction of the sound:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E1%B8%8C%C4%81d
| anthk wrote:
| > As an Arabic speaker, I can totally read a text the way
| it was pronounced 14 centuries ago and also perfectly
| understand it.
|
| I may be able to do something similar in Spanish. I've
| read Emilianensian /Glosas/ in Navarrese-Aragonese and
| understand near the 95% of it. That being a close Romance
| to Castillian Spanish.
|
| Scroll down and compare, you don't need to understand
| Spanish:
|
| https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glosas_Emilianenses
|
| Also, I can perfectly read Don Quixote. My main issues
| would be the old Medieval slang with things that do not
| exist anymore or they changed a lot. But without the
| footer annotations, I had no issues at all to understand
| the 80% of it.
|
| But, spelling it? Heck, it didn't change at all, our
| Spanish standards (Nebrija's grammar) date back to that
| era.
| gfaure wrote:
| The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern"
| pronunciation (with Ph, Kh, Th read as fricatives rather than
| aspirated stops) reminds me of how Mandarin, which is how Chinese
| poetry is often read nowadays, is not great for representing the
| sounds of the poetry as written, since it's lost all final stops
| (-k, -t, -p) in closed syllables.
|
| Other topolects such as Cantonese preserved them, which makes it
| a better correspondence if you care about hearing something
| closer to the Middle Chinese that Tang poetry was composed in.
|
| How do we know so much about Middle Chinese pronunciation in the
| present day? Check out
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ME8wzyR6pO8 for a layperson's
| introduction.
| mannerheim wrote:
| Depends on when the poetry was written. Classical Chinese was
| in use for over two thousand years, with the written Mandarin-
| based vernacular Chinese only replacing it in the last century.
| So later poetry (e.g. during the Qing) may not have been
| written with Middle Chinese pronunciation in mind. For example,
| the somewhat (in)famous poem, 'Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone
| Den' consisting entirely of homophones in modern standard
| Mandarin was written in the 1930s, so the poem was certainly
| written with Mandarin pronunciation in mind.
| retrac wrote:
| It's hard to overstate the intellectual puzzle this is!
|
| Classical Chinese scholarship had a developed body of proto-
| linguistics, including rime spelling, a system for phonetic
| transcription and analysis, which transcribed sounds using
| Chinese characters purely phonetically. It was used to
| indicate the pronunciation of characters, as well as foreign
| words in bilingual dictionaries and so on:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fanqie
|
| The problem is, it's mostly self-referential. As the
| Wikipedia example gives, we don't _precisely_ know how Dong
| was pronounced in 1000 AD from a fanqie dictionary entry. It
| would tell us something like that Dong (dong1 in Mandarin or
| dung1 in Cantonese today) was pronounced in the author 's
| time like the initial consonant in De (de2, dak) with a
| closing syllable pronounced like Hong (hong2, hung4). And of
| course, a dictionary from a thousand years before that, or
| even just from a speaker on the other side of China, might
| give a different entry...
|
| If you collect all the known fanqie pronunciations given in
| all the eras from all the probable sister languages, and
| especially when you start comparing with our knowledge of
| other languages (Japanese, Sanskrit, etc.) you can start to
| piece together the puzzle and get a rather good understanding
| of Chinese historical sound change.
|
| Chinese scholars back then were aware, on some level, of
| sound change, especially later in the Ming and Qing
| dynasties, but there was no general theory to address it, and
| the apparent contradictions in the ancient poetry and the old
| rime dictionaries were a source of a lot of perplexity.
| marcodiego wrote:
| TLDR:
|
| The difficult task of reproducing the pitch accents in Greek
| might be a step too far for most people, but consider the
| following line from Homer's Iliad 1.345:
|
| os phato Patroklos de philo epepeitheth' etairo
|
| It develops beautifully from sauntering labial alliteration (of p
| and ph sounds) to rapid-fire dental consonance (of th and t
| sounds), but if we pronounce Ph and Th as fricatives here:
|
| https://antigonejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Iliad...
|
| rather than aspirated stops:
|
| https://antigonejournal.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Iliad...
|
| then the distinction between Ph and P and between Th and T
| becomes so great that the sound effect is lost completely. Homer,
| for one, would have cared.
| neom wrote:
| If this is interesting to you, you may also enjoy this ted talk
| on Indigenous languages, personally I found it very interesting:
|
| A history of Indigenous languages -- and how to revitalize them:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BoRXbjGJrI0
| hzay wrote:
| My favorite linguistic/sound story is this:
|
| In 1878, a student called Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that PIE
| had only one vowel sound "e", and that all other vowel sounds in
| PIE languages came that single sound. How? He proposed that all
| other vowels came through a consonant "colouring" the original
| vowel "e". For example, the usage of e + w in words gave birth to
| the sound "u".
|
| But this doesn't explain root words like "pas" that don't contain
| the core vowel "e" or any evidence of a rogue sound like "w"
| colouring it.
|
| Here I will quote from the book: "Saussure conjured up a daring
| hypothesis. Once upon a time, he argued, verbs like pas did
| indeed have a rogue sound after the core vowel e, and this sound
| was responsible for 'colouring' the vowel from e to a. But at a
| later stage, and after it had wreaked all this havoc, the rogue
| sound disappeared from the scene. If one were to use the symbol X
| to represent this elusive rogue sound, then Saussure's claim was
| that pas originated as a regular root peXs, but that some time in
| prehistory X coloured the vowel e into an a, so peXs became paXs.
| Much later on (but still well before the earliest records), the
| rogue X was itself worn away because of [some other changes].
| Schematically, then, the whole development can be represented as
| peXs -> paXs -> pas."
|
| This remained a cool theory, outside mainstream linguistics. Then
| after Saussure died, archaeologists dug up some tablets and the
| oldest PIE language Hittite was deciphered. And there appearing
| in the very place where he had predicted it to be, the rogue
| consonant was found written down in clay.
|
| Source: around page 109 from "The Unfolding of Language" by Guy
| Deutscher.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| > In 1878, a student called Ferdinand de Saussure proposed that
| PIE had only one vowel sound "e", and that all other vowel
| sounds in PIE languages came that single sound.
|
| That's not in perfect agreement with wiki:
|
| > The beginnings of the [laryngeal] theory were proposed by
| Ferdinand de Saussure in 1879, in an article chiefly
| demonstrating that _a and_ o were separate phonemes in PIE.
|
| And: > In the course of his analysis, Saussure proposed that
| what had then been reconstructed as long vowels _a and_ o,
| alternating with _@, was an ordinary type of PIE ablaut. That
| is, it was an alternation between e grade and zero grade like
| in "regular" ablaut (further explanations below), but followed
| by a previously unidentified element. This element accounted
| for both the changed vowel colour and the lengthening (short _e
| becoming long _a or_ o).
| asveikau wrote:
| One of the more neglected and somewhat mind bendy aspects of
| Latin pronunciation is how often -m was not pronounced. Afaik the
| typical -um ending was a nasalized vowel with no /m/.
|
| There was an article that made HN a while ago about _censor_
| being spelled _cesor_ in an inscription. Probably because /n/,
| like /m/, was serving to nasalize the vowel before and was not
| itself pronounced.
|
| It also starts to hint at how the modern romance languages
| dropped all those case suffices. Eg. if _bonus_ and _bonum_ were
| both pronounced /bonu/.
| joemaffei wrote:
| Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, retained this
| nasalization.
| asveikau wrote:
| Portuguese has a lot of interesting stuff going on with nasal
| consonants. It always strikes me that they go for writing <m>
| in places other romance languages chose <n>. This also hints
| that over the history of latin languages, nasal consonants
| may have been kinda flexible.
|
| I used to look at those topics and think in terms of what is
| "more like Latin", but at one point I realized... All of them
| are probably accurately capturing some form of the history of
| Latin, and there isn't right or wrong.
| canjobear wrote:
| If you want a real mind trip, check out the reconstructed
| pronunciation of Classical Chinese.
|
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology
| anthk wrote:
| On Spanish, Middle Age Spanish had different spellings for v and
| b, and c, s and z were spelt differently, all of them closer to
| Latin.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Of similar note, NativLang on Youtube has a fascinating series of
| narrated videos on how we know what various ancient languages
| sound like [1] (you'll have to forgive the cheesy graphics). I
| particularly liked the one on ancient Egyptian[2].
|
| [1]
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLc4s09N3L2h3d_c5Z5d0J...
|
| [2]
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J-K5OjAkiEA&list=PLc4s09N3L2...
| selimthegrim wrote:
| I would be remiss if I didn't post Tocharian King of the Hill -
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNe6nke1HFk
| zikduruqe wrote:
| The Egyptian example sounds like a Mitch Hedberg routine.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6_BpvhdIuU
| BillyTheKing wrote:
| lovely article! another one of those letters that weirdly
| fascinates me is Beta, in modern Greek it's pronounced as a V
| whereas when we read Ancient Greek we usually pronounce it as B.
|
| There was an excerpt somewhere where one Ancient Greek author
| (unfortunately I have forgotten who exactly) described the sound
| sheep were making, and he did so writing the following:
|
| Sheep make the following sound: bai, bai
|
| which could either be Bae, Bae, or Vae, Vae... (whereas nowadays
| we would probably use an 'm' to describe the sound, as in Mae
| mae) - so while the sound is described, it doesn't really provide
| a definite answer since both seem somewhat possible. But maybe
| the author of this article could help us out here!
| keiferski wrote:
| Serious question: is it possible that the sounds made by sheep
| would have changed over time?
| minitoar wrote:
| Different sheep make different sounds today. Mostly it's just
| yelling. I think our perception of it insists on a leading
| consonant that just isn't there.
| jacobolus wrote:
| The sheep/goats sometimes start yelling before opening
| their mouths, which seems to usually sound like maaaaaa,
| but can sometimes sound more like baaaaa, gaaaaa, waaaa,
| yaaaa. When they open their mouths before starting the yell
| there is no leading consonant sound.
|
| Don't think I have ever heard an initial 'v' sound though.
| naniwaduni wrote:
| I mean, honestly, when we're talking about sheep
| vocalizations, the difference between ma/ba/va/wa is
| something more of a matter of perception than
| sensation...
| kleton wrote:
| You can't really generalize Ancient Greek, since in Attic, beta
| kept the /b/ sound the longest, whereas in many non-Attic
| languages it had already been /v/ for a long time.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| In current Spanish the standard onomatopaeia for a sheep's
| sound is "beee". The b is pronounced like the English b, and
| the e is like the e in "test".
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(page generated 2021-07-03 23:00 UTC)