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What did ancient languages sound like?

antigonejournal.com

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Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#21
post #17

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.

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-ꜥnḫ-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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#22
post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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]) -…

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.

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

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#23
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about Indo-European languages, that includes 'indic, iranian, and slavic'. You can write a blog about Samskruta.

Samskruta is an Indo-European language.

I didn't say it wasn't...

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is about Indo-European languages, that includes 'indic, iranian, and slavic'. You can write a blog about Samskruta.

Are you saying Samskruta is not an Indic language?

No, I didn't say that.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#25
post #17

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.

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#26
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/.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#27
post #21
post #17

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.

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 s…

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#28

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...

The Egyptian example sounds like a Mitch Hedberg routine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_6_BpvhdIuU

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#29
post #27
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

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.

The Al- most likely got lost in Arabic due to being reanalyzed as a determiner instead of as part of the name.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#30
post #5

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?

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.
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