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How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

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Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#51

Post by mcv »

gumby wrote: post #50
kwhitefoot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle? Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)? Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?

And then since pronunciation shifts, you’ll periodically want to have international treaties adjusting spelling, hyphenation, capitalization and other rules, as the German-speakers have done. Or freeze it once and for all as the French have chosen to do?

I think the pronunciation shifts might be the real issue with English. All languages shift, but I've got the feeling that English shifts a lot more, faster and more dramatically than most languages. And I'm not sure why.

Dutch seems to be quite the opposite: spelling changes a lot. The best way to read old Dutch texts is to sound them out in your head, because the words look totally different, but they sound the same. Hearing medieval Dutch is probably easier than medieval English, but medieval English is much easier to read.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#52

Post by mcv »

rlpb wrote: post #41
mcv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is definitely leading in terms of genderlessness, but that advantage is more than offset by its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation but no gender.

> It would be nice to have a language with sensible spelling/pronunciation I get the impression that this is impossible in the long term because pronunciation tends to drift, but spelling is more rigid, so over time they mismatch.

Yet there are languages that are much more phonetic than English. In fact, most probably are. But I've been told that Polish is perfectly phonetic without any weird pronunciation surprises. (I don't know Polish, though.)

And spelling is only more rigid in English. Plenty of languages update their spelling over time. Only in English this is useless because there is already barely any connection between spelling and pronunciation, so the break would be far bigger than in other languages.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#54

Post by grozzle »

gumby wrote: post #48
astrange wrote: post #16

I think all the focus on PIE derivatives is boring and we should get Europeans some better languages without pointless features like noun genders.

If you don’t like the use of two or three grammatical genders, Japanese would like to have a word with you (so to speak). There are a lot different classifier systems in language around the world; gender is just a small example. All these mechanisms are kinds of ECC.

presumably means "error correcting code", to save the next person from looking up jargon.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#55

Post by tough »

littlestymaar wrote: post #46
kwhitefoot wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> its complete detachment between spelling and pronunciation. Whose dialect are you going to choose to render phonetically? Mine from the West Country, or that of my friends from Newcastle? Will you standardise on short a in castle (Newcastle upon Tyne, North East England) or long a in castle (Restormel Castle, Cornwall)? Or should each person just write phonetically so that we have millions of idiolects?

Or you do it the French IIIème République way: you crush all linguistic diversity[0] from your country and standardize it all around the way it's spoken in London. Also, in English there's so much detachment from spelling to pronunciation than even choosing to write it down like a random[1] dialect would be an improvement: the problem with English isn't so much about “long a” vs “short a”, it's about “through tough t…

in practice, it's usually the snob/spoken dialect of the capital city.

See parisians thinking they're better than anyone else, non-french and other-french included.

Im guessing london didn't implement this method because it's useful for them to keep differentiating themselves from the masses now that everyone can have education

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#56

Post by tough »

littlestymaar wrote: post #35
jagrsw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

English is increasingly using the singular 'they' as a workaround, since alternative options like 've,' 'ze,' 'zhe,' and 'xer' didn't gain traction. This comes with its own set of issues—initially, it was a bit disorienting for me, and even now it often requires a mental pause to parse what the speaker is referring to. I'd welcome a more authoritarian approach here: globally adopt a new pronoun, go through a transiti…

I actually love “they” because it waves off every ambiguity at once: not only you don't have to care about the gender of the person, you don't even have to bother whether it is an individual or a collective (this super convenient when discussing about open-source projects).

they built this and that and did it all by themselves doesn't sound to bad ymmv

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#57

Post by panick21_ »

lacker wrote: post #24

English, German, and Hindi counting from 1 to 10. one, eins, ek two, zwei, do three, drei, teen four, vier, chaar five, funf, paanch six, sechs, chhah seven, sieben, saat eight, acht, aaath nine, neun, nou ten, zehn, das Seems related to me! Source: https://l-lingo.com/free-lessons/en/learn-german/numbers-1-1... https://www.mindurhindi.com/basic-words-and-phrases-in-hindi...

Lets go to Finish, quite different:

1 – yksi 2 – kaksi 3 – kolme 4 – neljä 5 – viisi 6 – kuusi 7 – seitsemän 8 – kahdeksan

But it almost feels as if its related a little. Or its my brain playing tricks.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#58

Post by forgotpwd16 »

SoftTalker wrote: post #10
turndown wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He mentions his credentials(or lack thereof) as the first thing in the video. Did you even look at the video for a second?

Perhaps he's trying to decide whether it's worth the time. Video is not a good format for skimming around to get a quick overall impression.

>Video is not a good format for skimming around to get a quick overall impression.

True but the question asked is answered at 0th second.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#59

Post by OfSanguineFire »

bobinux wrote: post #9

Recently found this video https://youtu.be/bzRxSVK7qIU where Sanskrit was being compared to Lithuanian. To think, that such geographically distant languages are so similar, as Lithuanian is one of the most well preserved languages in Europe. To get a grasp of what PIE sounded, the closest you can get in Europe is by listening to Lithuanian (especially the older dialects of it)

> To get a grasp of what PIE sounded, the closest you can get in Europe is by listening to Lithuanian

No you can’t. Especially not the “sounded” aspect. Lithuanian is conservative in some matters of lexicon and morphology, but modern Baltic phonology is very different from PIE. The ancestral stages of Lithuanian after PIE lost the PIE laryngeal sounds, then the distinction of three classes of velars and aspirated/non-aspirated stops, and in more recent centuries there has been some palatalization processes and loss of nasal vowels (though the latter are still denoted in writing). The developments in Baltic-Slavic tone after PIE are also an infamous mess.

All in all, when you listen to Lithuanian, you are listening to just any IE language instead of gaining special insights into PIE.

Re: How we know languages like proto-Indo-European existed [video]

#60

Post by forgotpwd16 »

borissk wrote: post #6

Is this guy a linguist, published in peer reviewed publications? It's so easy to make up stuff regarding language, that sounds reasonable, but has nothing to do with reality.

Video should be regarded as science journalism. It's made by someone not doing research in topic but educated enough to follow research and reproduce it in manner suitable for the general public. Preferably though they should've cited the used sources.
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