The Italian TV series "Romulus" is in a fascinatingly reconstructed Proto-Italic language: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10405220/
What did ancient languages sound like?
81–90 of 154 posts
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#82Earlier 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?
if that'd peace your mind, we call it "Gang" in Russia. But I wouldn't be surprised that it came from greek too, most greek words lost their endings when loaned to Russian
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#83You 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?
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…
Exactly. This transliteration, in eastern India would be 'Shongskrito'. Which is no more right or wrong compared to saying 'Sanskrit'.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#84lovely 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 pronunciation of ancient Greek - it seems strange that vowels should change so drastically across time when for example Spanish and modern Greek have exactly the same vowels.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#85My 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 analysi…
The book says it's a simplified version -- the paper he put out contains hundred+ pages. I'll check out wiki & sources because the book is quite specific about the single vowel thing.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#86If anyone found this interesting, I highly recommend the audiobook/lecture "Language Families of the World" by John McWhorter. The title makes it sound dry, but he's a very entertaining lecturer. It's one of those works that - if you have never been exposed to the subject - is a window to an previously unnoticed detail in everyday life. Similar to when one learns about an architectural flourish and from that point forward sees it on buildings everywhere.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#87lovely 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 think you are remembering a fragment by Cratinus, as quoted here: https://resgerendae.wordpress.com/2012/02/05/weird-and-wonde...
My recollection is that Erasmus was the one who argued, based on that verse, that the letter eta should be pronounced as a long "e" rather than "i" as in "police". I can't seem to find a reference, however.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#88If 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), and labialised glottals are only slightly less so.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#89The 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.
Re: What did ancient languages sound like?
#90lovely 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".
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 syllable to exist at all. /æ/ is a checked vowel in English -- except for this one onomatopoetic word.