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What did ancient languages sound like?

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Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#51

Post by asveikau »

joemaffei wrote: post #45
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.

Portuguese has a lot of interesting stuff going on with nasal consonants. It always strikes me that they go for writing in places other romance languages chose . 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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#52

Post by fooker »

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?

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#53

Post by KhoomeiK »

gpraghu wrote: post #33
KhoomeiK wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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".

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#54

Post by KhoomeiK »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #41
prosody wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but it's still present in Vedic, literally in the second word of rgveda 1.1.1.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#55

Post by bigbillheck »

hzay wrote: post #47

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 l…

> 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 ā and ō, alternating with ǝ, 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 ā or ō).

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#56

Post by FlyingSnake »

fooker wrote: post #52
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?

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 bi…

> 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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#58

Post by csunbird »

yumraj wrote: post #27
pcstl wrote: 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.

Alexander is pronounced as “İskender” in modern Turkish as well.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#59

Post by AbrahamParangi »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #56
fooker wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 bi…

> 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 b…

That would make it the only language in the world to be passed down unmodified, which seems... unlikely.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#60

Post by mannerheim »

gfaure wrote: post #34

The last point, about Ancient Greek read in the "modern" pronunciation (with Φ, Χ, Θ 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…

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.
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