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What did ancient languages sound like?

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Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#121

Post by chj »

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…

Shijing is a collection of folksongs, so of course the words must sound very nice at the day, or the music behind them must be good. Jian Jia is in my opinion one of the best, which by the way rhymes well even in Mandarin.

But I don't like how it sounds in the video, and those weird sound bits (no idea what you call them) is not very friendly for singing either.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#123

Post by [deleted] »

AussieWog93 wrote: post #104
magicsmoke wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[deleted]

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#124

Post by samus »

aiilns wrote: post #84
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…

I'd love to see a source for this, never heard this before. In modern Greek it'd be "μπε μπε". With the μ + π giving the b sound. However your example is interesting because sheep make an "eee" sound like in "men" and not an "i" sound like in "flight", which I think is kind of how the erasmian pronunciation says it should be. In modern Greek "αί" is one vowel sound "e" like in "men". I really don't like the erasmian…

The fact is, languages change like this all the time. And sometimes not all the speakers go along with changes, for various reasons, and then the development splits. However, not always does this result in a new language (science uses cross-understandability as a criterion, outside of science it's... more complicated)

Just look at English: the current ortography is so weird because it got frozen before the language underwent a drastic change (the Great Vowel shift).

German changed radically too: during the High German consonant shift, many of the differences that set it apart from English and Dutch happened: t got changed to s, p got changed to pf and so on.

Vowel shifts happened too: the Early New German diphtongization changed many long vowel sounds. For example:

* "latin" to "latein" (the "i" in Latin is like "ee" in English "see", the "ei" like English "eye"),

* "niuw" (almost like English "new") to "neu" ("eu" like "oy" in English "boy"), or

* "mus" to "maus" ("u" as "oo" in English "good", "maus" exactl% like the English word "mouse").

The last example is especially interesting because the Great Vowel shift and the Early New High German diphtongization started almost a continent apart and 800 years after the languages split, but had the same result.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#125

Post by imbnwa »

vkazanov wrote: post #49
imbnwa wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

I find the rhythm/meter is very Romance-like but without identifying with any one specific Romance-speaking region, the phonetics vaguely remind me of Brazilian Portuguese.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#126

Post by bradrn »

chj wrote: post #121
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…

Shijing is a collection of folksongs, so of course the words must sound very nice at the day, or the music behind them must be good. Jian Jia is in my opinion one of the best, which by the way rhymes well even in Mandarin. But I don't like how it sounds in the video, and those weird sound bits (no idea what you call them) is not very friendly for singing either.

> But I don't like how it sounds in the video, and those weird sound bits (no idea what you call them) is not very friendly for singing either.

Could you describe in more detail which bits sound weird? Of course Old Chinese would sound very different to Mandarin, but I didn’t notice anything actually weird about it.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#127

Post by asveikau »

marton78 wrote: post #112
yesenadam wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Interestingly, spoken Catalan and spoken Portuguese also use -u as ending, while -o is written.

And further, latin nominative -us or -um has an -o- in some inflected forms. Example: bonorum, "of the good ones"

The article that mentioned cesor for censor also pointed out that in places where classical latin has -us or -um, early latin inscriptions might have -os, -om, or -o.

Sometimes i feel like when i hear speakers of modern romance languages talk really fast, unstressed o and u seem to get closer to one another. Maybe you could call it a continuum of "roughly that vowel".

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#128

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

Never mind the fricatives. From a modern Greek point of view it's the pronounciation of ἑταίρῳ as "eta-eroy" that is the hardest to stomach.

That's the Erasmain pronounciation, if I remember correctly: saying vowel dipthongs as two separate vowels. That really sounds awful and very much not like Greek.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#129

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

escape_goat wrote: post #102
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.

'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.

Beg pardon. It's a made-up Greek word, comprised of "topos" and "lexis": "place" and "word" (or "saying") respectively.

It's actually very similar to "topology" as a construction - "lexis" comes from "logos".

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#130

Post by YeGoblynQueenne »

asveikau wrote: post #127
marton78 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interestingly, spoken Catalan and spoken Portuguese also use -u as ending, while -o is written.

And further, latin nominative -us or -um has an -o- in some inflected forms. Example: bonorum , "of the good ones" The article that mentioned cesor for censor also pointed out that in places where classical latin has -us or -um, early latin inscriptions might have -os, -om, or -o. Sometimes i feel like when i hear speakers of modern romance languages talk really fast, unstressed o and u seem to get closer to one anot…

>> And further, latin nominative -us or -um has an -o- in some inflected forms. Example: bonorum, "of the good ones"

And also, famously, "Babaorum".

Edit: oh, which btw does what you say, it's pronounced more with an "o" sound in French. Like all the "-um"'s. Otherwise "Petibonum" wouldn't work.

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