What did ancient languages sound like? • Hacker News Board

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#91

Post by thaumasiotes » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 2:57 AM UTC

yumraj wrote: post #27

pcstl wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We know these names because the Rosetta Stone (and other dual-language inscriptions) allowed researchers to figure out which Greek letter the egyptian hieroglyphics mapped to. There is also the Coptic language, which is a modern descendent of Ancient Egyptian. However, these pronunciations are full of issues and uncertainties - in part because, as the OP states, even figuring out how exactly Greek was pronounced is s…

Makes sense, BTW I appreciate all the sibling replies as well. So basically it seems they used the proper nouns to start and then built up on that. And also used Coptic to fill gaps.. I do get the point about Greek approximation since just as an example in modern India, Alexander is referred to as Sikander . Similar, yet very different.

> So basically it seems they used the proper nouns to start and then built up on that. And also used Coptic to fill gaps..

In the case of Ramses specifically, there is also a piece of biblical evidence, the city recorded in Hebrew as something like "Raamses". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pi-Ramesses#Biblical_Ramesses

The two biblical cities of Pithom and Raamses are traditionally identified as the Egyptian "per-Atum" and "per-Ramesses", for some convention on spelling the Egyptian names.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#92

Post by AussieWog93 » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

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.

>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 but doesn't have a precise translation into English.

Especially since they're talking about the evolution of Chinese pronunciation, "topolect", while jargon-y, seems to be a far more precise vehicle for expressing their sentiment.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#93

Post by thaumasiotes » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:04 AM UTC

wl wrote: post #25

yumraj wrote: post #17

Perhaps this is the right thread to ask the question as to how people figured out what ancient Egyptian words sound. From what I understand Rosetta Stone simply provided a dictionary of sorts, so I can understand how they know which words mean what. But how do they know that a certain combination of hieroglyphs translates into words pronounced as say “Ramses” or “Tutankhamen “ and so on.

Royal names in cartouches provided a clue. The Rosetta Stone provided the spelling of the name Ptolemy in Greek, Hieratic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Other cartouches with known values filled in a lot. One major problem is that Egyptian hieroglyphs don't really encode vowels. Another set of clues about pronunciation comes from the Amarna letters written in the 18th dynasty. They are written in Akkadian cuneiform (then…

> They are written in Akkadian cuneiform (then the language of international diplomacy), a script that does include vowels. These letters contain Egyptian names and sometimes loan words.

I was interested to learn that the name of Ra is attested in these letters! From that, we know the vowel -- it was /i/.

(The "a" in Ra is a consonant which is traditionally rendered as "a" by convention.)

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#94

Post by hassancf » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:17 AM UTC

yorwba wrote: post #76

hassancf wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fricativ…

>> You probably cannot.

Exactly my point.

You’re under the impression I cannot because of your limited knowledge of this topic: even if 1 letter was slightly different (which it is not), how does that discard the prononciation of 99% of the rest?

>> Every region with a tradition of reciting the Qur'an has their own way of pronouncing it

Plain wrong.

If you knew the topic, you would know that the various way to read the Holy Quran are so close that you could just say they are identical.

In my original post, I’m not even necessarily talking about the holy Quran.

What about the vast poetry written in Arabic in pre-Islamic times that anyone today can read the same way?

I will not get into the subject of whether I would understand it or not since you are still debating whether I would pronounce it the same way.

BTW, this is very different from : how does one pronounce Latin etc.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#95

Post by retrac » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:21 AM UTC

yumraj wrote: post #17

Perhaps this is the right thread to ask the question as to how people figured out what ancient Egyptian words sound. From what I understand Rosetta Stone simply provided a dictionary of sorts, so I can understand how they know which words mean what. But how do they know that a certain combination of hieroglyphs translates into words pronounced as say “Ramses” or “Tutankhamen “ and so on.

Another angle I didn't see in the other comments was comparative linguistics. This came later and wasn't used in the initial deciphering, but it's a major part of the modern understanding.

Ancient Egyptian was related to other languages, and was part of the rather large still-existing Afroasiatic language family, which includes Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic and others), Berber (of north Africa), and many others. (Importantly, Akkadian is one of the first written languages aside from Ancient Egyptian itself, and it was a very early Semitic language, and not so dissimilar from Ancient Egyptian in some ways.)

While only reconstructions, this gives us, in a sense, a model of the ancestral language of Ancient Egyptian. This insight provides more data on possible phonetic values and the nature of that language. There is always a great deal of uncertainty though.

By comparison, Sumerian, of similar antiquity, was an isolate and we do not know any language related to it. We have many texts in Sumerian, and many parallel texts between Sumerian and Akkadian, as well as old Indo-European languages like early Persian. We kind of have the sketch of its sounds. But even then, we have less idea what Sumerian sounded like, or how its grammar works, or what its words mean, than we do Ancient Egyptian. And that is despite the fact that Ancient Egyptians didn't write their vowels while the Sumerians did! Having related languages you can compare to is valuable here.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#96

Post by nwatson » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:25 AM UTC

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.

For words ending in "L" as well ... "som" (sound), "Brasil" (Brazil), the last consonants are dropped. Words ending in R like "lar" (home) often get a gutteralized or dropped R.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#97

Post by ummonk » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:28 AM UTC

gpraghu wrote: post #5

You 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?

Which ancient times? It was only frozen after Panini’s time, but there had been changes from original rigvedic pronunciation by then.

And your quibbling is indicative that there have been also been changes today as well - e.g. southern speakers tend to pronounce vowel r as “ru” while others say “ri” and at some point in time the pronunciation was likely more like American English r.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#98

Post by magicsmoke » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:30 AM UTC

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…

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 family and its various languages and dialects can take place without interference from Chinese politics. When someone points out that Cantonese, Hokkien, and Mandarin are 方言 then linguists can nod politely, agree that they are in fact "topolects", then continue classifying them as Sinitic languages within the Sino-Tibetan language family each with their own collection of dialects.

Would be interesting to know if the study of Arabic has similar issues because from a layman's cursory knowledge Arabic has similar diversity when it comes to mutual intelligibility.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#99

Post by ummonk » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:34 AM UTC

hawk_ wrote: post #69

FlyingSnake wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand it comes across as jingoistic, but truly Sanskrit grammar and pronunciation hasn’t changed since Pānini. The word Sanskrit itself means “constructed” and there was a rigorous effort to prevent ambiguity.

there are no recordings from panini's times and panini's texts pertain to grammar. they don't prescribe pronunciation - like precise position of tongue lips etc...

What are you talking about? Panini did detail the pronunciation of each character. And the actual pronunciation (i.e. accounting for things like assimilation) is then encoded in the writing via Sandhi.

Likewise, we have older information on pronunciation as well in the Pratishakhyas.

Ancient Indians cared a lot about accurate pronunciation, especially for mantras where the thinking was that without correct pronunciation, the mantra would not work. Picture the Harry Potter "wingardium leviosa" scene.

Modern don’t actually hew to the prescribed pronunciation for certain letters, but it’s certainly specified by Panini.

Re: What did ancient languages sound like?

#100

Post by gfaure » Sun, Jul 04, 2021, 3:37 AM UTC

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.

Bravery doesn't enter into it -- I used the word because as linguists, we want to refer pragmatically to "whatever Chinese varieties actually are", rather than entering into endless debates about what is a language and what is a dialect.

By the way, I'm a linguist (and a native Cantonese speaker) who is acutely aware of the dialect/language issues surrounding our topolect, so while I sympathise and thank you for recognising that Cantonese would in other times and places be considered a language, using "topolect" allows us to focus on the topic at hand.