What did ancient languages sound like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#41

Post by FlyingSnake » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:17 PM UTC

prosody wrote: post #31

gpraghu wrote: 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?

It's been a long time since I've done anything with Sanskrit so please forgive any misunderstandings, but didn't Vedic ळ become Classical ड, as in नीळ and नीड ?

> Vedic ळ

There is strong evidence that the ळ came from Substratum languages (Dravidian or Munda) and many Indo-Aryan languages still retain it e.g. Marathi, Gujarati.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#42

Post by anthk » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:18 PM UTC

hassancf wrote: post #39

gpraghu wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

> 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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#43

Post by kingsuper20 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:25 PM UTC

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#44

Post by ta___1254 » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:26 PM UTC

FlyingSnake wrote: post #40

gpraghu wrote: 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?

The reason there's no discussion about Samskruta is that all the scholars of संस्कृतम are in India and most of the University departments lack the cultural and linguistic nuances that are needed to learn संस्कृतम. 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) Interne…

It's संस्कृतम् not संस्कृतम

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#45

Post by joemaffei » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:28 PM UTC

asveikau wrote: post #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 mod…

Portuguese, especially Brazilian Portuguese, retained this nasalization.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#46

Post by stan_rogers » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:32 PM UTC

gpraghu wrote: post #35

stan_rogers wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Certainly vocabulary has been added to, but the whole point of the work of Pāṇini 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.)

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#47

Post by hzay » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:38 PM UTC

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#48

Post by canjobear » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

If you want a real mind trip, check out the reconstructed pronunciation of Classical Chinese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#49

Post by vkazanov » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:43 PM UTC

imbnwa wrote: post #11

gpraghu wrote: 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?

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]) -…

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#50

Post by FlyingSnake » Sat, Jul 03, 2021, 7:46 PM UTC

ta___1254 wrote: post #44

FlyingSnake wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The reason there's no discussion about Samskruta is that all the scholars of संस्कृतम are in India and most of the University departments lack the cultural and linguistic nuances that are needed to learn संस्कृतम. 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) Interne…

It's संस्कृतम् not संस्कृतम

Another casualty of transliteration keyboards.