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What did ancient languages sound like?

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Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#71

Post by naniwaduni »

jacobolus wrote: post #63
minitoar wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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...

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#72

Post by selimthegrim »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #13

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...

I would be remiss if I didn't post Tocharian King of the Hill - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNe6nke1HFk

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#73

Post by jltsiren »

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?

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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#74

Post by Al-Khwarizmi »

BillyTheKing wrote: post #3

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: βαί, βαί which could…

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".

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#75

Post by retrac »

mannerheim wrote: post #60
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 s…

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 東 was pronounced in 1000 AD from a fanqie dictionary entry. It would tell us something like that 東 (dong1 in Mandarin or dung1 in Cantonese today) was pronounced in the author's time like the initial consonant in 德 (de2, dak) with a closing syllable pronounced like 紅 (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.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#76

Post by yorwba »

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

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 ﺽ 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

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#77

Post by LAC-Tech »

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…

Why say 'topolect', and not just 'language'?

I realize topolect is a translation of an official chinese term, but as far as I'm aware we're not Chinese officials. We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages.

And before anyone gives me the 'language is a dialect with an army and a navy' - yes it's pithy but there's so many counter examples.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#78

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#79

Post by yesenadam »

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…

Learning about this made Romanian, with all its words ending in -u, not seem strange suddenly!

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#80

Post by gerdesj »

jltsiren wrote: post #73
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?

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 riv…

That's if we can even all agree on how to pronounce "Ganges"! Should it rhyme with cheese or oranges; are the g's hard or soft? In en_GB the first g is hard and the second one soft and the word rhymes with cheese. Oh, and the a is short.

Place names are notoriously tricky. The town I live in is now called Yeovil. It has well over sixty documented spellings since around 500CE. It started off as Gifle - bend in the river. G -> Y is a common Old English/Saxon to modern English thing (-gard and -yard, -burg and -bury, dag or tag and day.) If you squint really hard you can get the rest of the word OK. It was Ival, Givelle, Evil and all sorts of spellings on the way to today. There was also a vowel shift en-route and a generally open approach to spelling.

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