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What did ancient languages sound like?

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Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#101

Post by gfaure »

dghughes wrote: post #89
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…

Plays of Shakespeare is similar much of the rhymes and inside jokes are lost now due to modern pronunciation of old words. http://originalpronunciation.com/GBR/Home

Similarly, in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, a young squire is described as conducting himself "in hope to stonden in his lady grace" (in the hopes of standing in his lady's grace).

Some take this to be a bawdy anatomical pun, expressing the young man's hopes of 'standing' in his lady's 'grass' — a distinction lost nowadays that the pronunciation of "grace" and "grass" have grown so far apart.

(Line 88 of Chaucer's General Prologue, https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0)

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#102

Post by escape_goat »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #77
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.

'Topolect' (an English word coined in America by an English-speaking linguist who was describing Chinese languages) has the advantage of being precise and preserving the relationship between Mandarin and Cantonese that the writer was specifically referring to, but that aside, might I suggest that courage is best seen and not heard.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#103

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #92
LAC-Tech wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. I'm not super familiar with the specifics of Mandarin, so I could be wrong here, but it's quite common to come across English words that have fallen out of common use by native speakers but are adopted by non-native speakers as a vehicle for expressing a concept that exists in their native language…

[deleted]

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#104

Post by AussieWog93 »

magicsmoke wrote: post #98
AussieWog93 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>We're speaking English, and we can be brave enough to call mutually unintelligible languages what they are - languages. I'm not super familiar with the specifics of Mandarin, so I could be wrong here, but it's quite common to come across English words that have fallen out of common use by native speakers but are adopted by non-native speakers as a vehicle for expressing a concept that exists in their native language…

Topolect was specifically invented in 1991 by Victor Mair as a translation of 方言 (fangyan) to get around the whole language/dialect bombshell when it comes to Chinese. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/topolect http://sino-platonic.org/complete/spp029_chinese_dialect.pdf It's a way to take 方言 and decouple it from linguistic terms like language and dialects so a proper study and classification of the Chinese language fam…

Thanks for the links and explanations. It seems political definitions of what is an isn't a "language" are more political than I realised.

On a side note, I actually found it a little bit ironic that Afrikaans was listed as a dialect of Dutch in his paper.

Many South Africans would disagree with that classification quite strongly, especially since Afrikaans has its own literature and regional dialects.

In turn, there's a movement to classify the coloured dialect of Afrikaans as its own language (Kaaps), in fear that it will be swallowed up by the more standard "white" form and erode their cultural identity.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#105

Post by canjobear »

bradrn wrote: post #88
canjobear wrote: post #48

If you want a real mind trip, check out the reconstructed pronunciation of Classical Chinese. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology

A video sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyaFKnUumAM . I find myself quite liking the sound of it, in particular the poem which is recited — the writers of the Shijing (from which the poem is taken) paid a lot of attention to rhyme and assonance. Even so, Old Chinese phonology is really weird: pharyngealisation is decidedly odd even for Sino–Tibetan (though some Qiangic language have pharyngealised vowels), an…

This is the reason I’m not fully convinced by Baxter and Sagart’s reconstruction of pharyngealized consonants everywhere: it’s just too weird. In languages like Arabic that do have pharyngealization, it doesn’t apply to every consonant like in the BS2014 reconstruction. Still, I don’t see a better way to explain the Type A / Type B distinction…

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#106

Post by clw8 »

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 did not retain the Latin nasal vowels, it was an independent development after the Latin nasal vowels had been lost.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#107

Post by naveens »

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?

it's tamil-ized as Kangai. Proper nouns are always absorbed according to the target language's own rules. Why quibble?

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#108

Post by thaumasiotes »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #90
Al-Khwarizmi wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

In English it is "baa", with the "aa" pronounced as the vowel in "trap". This is interesting in a couple of ways; the most immediately obvious is that it does not conform to ordinary English spelling. But if you look a little closer, it turns out that it can't conform to ordinary English spelling. There is no conventional way to spell a syllable-final /æ/, because the phonology of English doesn't permit such a syllab…

(In the interest of completeness, it's probably worth noting that while the spelling is often simply "baa", it can be lengthened, and the pronunciation is nearly always several syllables long, ba-a-a-a, with the syllables separated by glottal stops.)

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#109

Post by bradrn »

canjobear wrote: post #105
bradrn wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A video sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyaFKnUumAM . I find myself quite liking the sound of it, in particular the poem which is recited — the writers of the Shijing (from which the poem is taken) paid a lot of attention to rhyme and assonance. Even so, Old Chinese phonology is really weird: pharyngealisation is decidedly odd even for Sino–Tibetan (though some Qiangic language have pharyngealised vowels), an…

This is the reason I’m not fully convinced by Baxter and Sagart’s reconstruction of pharyngealized consonants everywhere: it’s just too weird. In languages like Arabic that do have pharyngealization, it doesn’t apply to every consonant like in the BS2014 reconstruction. Still, I don’t see a better way to explain the Type A / Type B distinction…

Well, Sino–Tibetan is one of the only places I would expect to see pharyngealisation in the first place. I can easily imagine a scenario in which vowels had a uvularisation or pharyngealisation contrast, which then was transphonologised onto the previous consonant. But I don’t know too much about Chinese languages, so until another explanation comes along I can only accept Baxter and Sagart’s conclusion.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#110

Post by Ericson2314 »

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…

Just because they were writing in Literary Chinese doesn't mean pronunciation was retained, or retained very well. Consider Mideval Latin and Church Latin "italianate" pronunciation.

According to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lion-Eating_Poet_in_the_Stone_..., the poem was written by a linguist, so I don't think it it is representative of how most later writers of Literary Chinese thought pronunciation ought to work, but rather a reductio ad absurdum argument again writing in dead languages without using an alphabet.

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