How Can We Know What Language Used to Look Like? Historical Reconstruction

What did our languages sound like before we had written records? How can we work that out? In this week's episode, we talk about historical reconstruction of languages: what methods we can use to rebuild long-dead systems, what groupings of languages we can put together using these techniques, and if there's a limit to how far back we can go.
This is Topic #56!
This week's tag language: Latin!
Last episode:
Let's Talk about Sets - Set Theory and Adjectives: • How Do We Build Meanin...
Other of our historical linguistics videos:
Let Us Be Franca - Lingua Francas: • How Do We Share Our La...
Writing It Down - Writing Systems: • Writing Systems
Sense and Shiftability - Semantic Shift: • Semantic Shift
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Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-56/
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We're going on hiatus for the rest of the year, but we'll be back on January 6. Looking forward to it! We hope everyone has a great holiday season. ^_^

[@_sourgrapes_]

These videos are fantastic! Don't you go giving up, my guy - I'll tell my colleagues and peers to check out your channel when I return to school in a few weeks (I'm a Linguistics undergrad).

[@thelingspace]

Great! Really glad you like them, and thanks for spreading the word. ^_^

[@NEWT-17]

Bagel Burger I'm interested in majoring in linguistics and i just had a few questions that maybe you could answer?: What jobs can you do? Exactly what about linguistics do you study? Is getting a job in linguistics easy or difficult? Do you learn different languages in class?

[@Edralis]

but... WHY DON'T YOU HAVE MORE VIEWS???

[@thelingspace]

+Edralis We just keep trying! If you like our videos, let other people know, and maybe we can get more. ^_^

[@audreymcknight]

I have my Linguistics 101 final exam in 2 hours and I'm sitting here fangirling over your check please merch....

[@3enegerling773]

You definitely deserve more views and likes. thanks for this channel =)

[@thelingspace]

+boe das schaf Thanks for the kind message! Please tell people about us if you like it; that'll help us get more views, I hope. ^_^

[@sadafkhan1679]

Thanks a lot. You are the best Linguistics prof. ever!!!! I've noticed that you have not made any videos in a while. Please keep making informative and interesting videos like this. You're a lifesaver

[@user-tf7sd5fw1c]

These videos are always so easy to keep up with while still being accurate and informative. Thanks for making learning about language an enjoyable experience!

[@thelingspace]

+wizima Thanks so much for the comment! Glad you're getting a lot out of them. We really try. ^_^

[@teacherdkennedy]

This is perfect timing [that is, for me to have seen this since you put this up, um...oh, in December (I will catch up one day!)] because I've been wanting to ask you a question anyway, and this podcast makes it more apropos than random. So, I have studied Spanish some and lived in Guatemala for 8 weeks to do so. This June, my husband and i are taking a trip to Spain and Portugal. So I have been studying Portugal for about a week now, so I'm really just at the beginning. But obviously, they are in the same language family and are super similar. However, it seems to me that one of the biggest differences is in the vowels. Spanish is soooo nice--pretty much five vowels =five vowel sounds. No silent e, really no vowel teams or diphthongs (or at least not common enough ones that I have learned them). And then you move to Portuguese and you get a ton more vowel sounds, lots of vowel teams and at least one diphthong (oi) that i have run into so far. And it seems like vowels change sound not only with other vowels as in English, but with letter placement as well (as far as i can tell, for instance, in the third person singular to drink, bebe, the final e has the long e sound and the middle one has sort of a mix between short e and long e, although I may not be hearing it correctly). And it seems that the consonants are super regular too--no matter where they are, they sound the same. Then in Portuguese, there seem to be all sorts of changes, not only with some digraphs, but also in letter placement--like s between two vowels is more /z/ and between between consonants or at the beginning of the word is /s/. What is more foreign to me is that this happens even if the second vowel is at the beginning of the other word. At any rate, I am not just venting about learning Portuguese ;-) but am wondering how two languages so close together in language family, historical influence and proximity ended up with so many differences in pronunciation, especially given the huge overlap in cognates. If you don't happen to know this off the top of your head, could you tell me how one goes about looking this stuff up? I mean, I googled comparing spanish and portuguese, and got a good wikipedia article, but it doesn't have much why, just what. Sorry about the huge message! But thanks for any insight/info/leads you can give me!

[@c0mmment]

heck yea, really enjoy these videos on the etymology

[@thelingspace]

+c0mmment Great! Glad you're liking them. ^_^

[@alexdavinci9533]

Great stuff!

[@thelingspace]

+Alex da Vinci Thanks! Glad you liked it. ^_^

[@alexandrsergeevich8707]

Great videos, keep it up!

[@thelingspace]

+Alexandr Sergeevich Thanks for the kind words! ^_^

[@joshawnard]

Very good video. Thanks.

[@ClarissaLeninaS]

Por favor, continue com os vídeos. Eles são muito bons e eu aprendo muito! Obrigada! xD

[@thelingspace]

+MrMsClarissa Thanks for the kind words! I wish my Portuguese was good enough to respond that way, but we do appreciate it. Thanks for watching. ^_^

[@noah7172]

Ahaha, my wild and crazy Monday morning has so far consisted of eating a turkey sandwich and re-watching all the ling space videos! Fun!

[@thelingspace]

+Sarah Velick Sounds like a good day to me! Hope you've been enjoying them. ^_^

[@zagadkamisteriya]

Urdu is very young in the Indo-Iranian family tree. During the Afsharid dynasty, There were a lot of persian military camps in Pakistan. Because of this Farsi influenced the local's language and led to the creation of Urdu. The name Urdu comes from the Persian word (اردوگاه) [Ordugah] which means 'camp'.

[@thelingspace]

+Ech Echech Cool! I didn't know that was the etymology of the name of the language. Thanks for sharing that! ^_^

[@sushantsrivastav]

+The Ling Space I agree. Urdu is heavily influenced by Hindi, a language widely spoken in India. Urdu also has loan words from Persian and Arabic. Hindi evolved from Sanskrit.

[@shyamkrishna657]

+Ech Echech The word is actually originally from a Turkic language (ordu, or orda) and interestingly enough, it is cognate with the English 'horde'.

[@zagadkamisteriya]

+Shyam Krishna the Afsharids were of a Turkic heritage, so it won't be much of a surprise. But, that word in Turkish is primarily used when refer to an army; yes it does also mean 'place of staying of the army', but in Farsi it is only used when one was referring to the camp itself. Still I am quite surprised to know the word is a loan word in Farsi. Thanks for sharing :)

[@DenebDulfim]

+Sushant Srivastava And so did Urdu, for Urdu and Hindi were but one and the same language until a recent past.

[@BlinkyLass]

This is a great overview. Would like to see a followup video explore this topic in more depth.

[@thelingspace]

+Blinky Lass Yeah, we'll probably come back to it in the future! There's obviously a lot more to say about it - we'll get back around. ^_^

[@Pakanahymni]

Proto-Uralic representing.

[@thelingspace]

+Pakanahymni Yeah, that's always been a family I've found really interesting! Particularly since it shows how political and population changes over time means that the distribution of languages has really changed. I know it's the same for some of the other families (like, look how far the Austronesian languages spread out, from Madagascar to Easter Island), but for some reason, that's the one that first caught my eye when I started learning linguistics stuff. ^_^

[@InsertTruthHere]

ʦɪmɐ does not mean house in German. It means "room." And note that it doesn't have schwa at the end, but deep schwa.

[@thelingspace]

+InsertTruthHere That's a fair point about its current meaning, but that's probably a result of semantic shift away from the shared PIE root, rather than it being actually not related to the root itself. This happens fairly frequently in doing historical reconstruction; after all, semantic shift happens a lot. But maybe we should have flagged the example there better. ^_^

[@zedernaga9174]

what do you think of the proto-altaic language theory?

[@NmLs42]

Those Proto-Indo-European words for snow and house sound exactly like their modern versions in Russian - дом and снег.

[@thelingspace]

+NmLs42 Cool! We don't have Russian speakers on the team, so we always end up having to look stuff up if we want to talk about it. It's good to hear about how it ties in. ^_^

[@NmLs42]

The Ling Space Is there a way I can contribute? I've studied linguistics in the university, and I speak 5 foreign languages (with varied success).

[@thelingspace]

+NmLs42 Maybe! I'm not sure for just the moment, but maybe email us, and we can keep you in mind for the future if there's stuff we'd like to do that you might be helpful for? That seems like the best approach. ^_^

[@dariuszpawecki9182]

Just like in Polish. "Dom" and "Śnieg" (as Moti mentioned).

[@KateGladstone]

The word you give as German 'house' is actually German 'room.'

[@thelingspace]

+Kate Gladstone This is a fair point! But this is thought to be a result of semantic shift - it's still from the same PIE house root, even if it doesn't describe the whole house anymore. And it's pretty easy to see how that could have happened in this case.

[@KateGladstone]

+The Ling Space Yes, but this should have been stated in the video. You could have said something like: " ... and in German, it became the word for 'room' ... "

[@shyamkrishna657]

Hey, I'm a little new to your channel and haven't seen all your videos, but have you introduced UG and related concepts in your previous episodes?

[@thelingspace]

+Shyam Krishna Yep! Our first video was about UG, although our video technique was a lot rougher then: kzbin.info/www/bejne/g32xd3qNf7SLoKM If you want more of a discussion of principles and parameters, try this video: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fZOuYZ-pbL6JhJY But UG often comes up more tangentially in our videos, as well. Hope you enjoy looking around. ^_^

[@shyamkrishna657]

+The Ling Space Thanks, the second video was especially interesting, though I haven't been able to understand subjacency completely yet. What I was more interested in were the linguistic universals themselves, particularly recursion, with all the fuss about Pirahã supposedly not having it

[@thelingspace]

+Shyam Krishna Yep! We don't have a video with Pirahã yet, but if you're interested in an extended discussion about how it fits in, try this one: www.languagesoftheworld.info/bad-linguistics/the-piraha-controversy-part-1.html

[@shyamkrishna657]

Thanks!

[@sara.1377]

is there a written transcript of this video?

[@piouppioup]

Oh P.I.E./pie and Check please! stuffs, I see what you did there!

[@thelingspace]

+piouppioup Yeah, that's actually why we waited until I could get the t-shirt to do this one. ^_^

[@CoorDaLoor]

are you french?

[@thelingspace]

+Coor DaLoor Nope! American, but I've been in Canada for a long time.

[@CoorDaLoor]

+The Ling Space never heard the name moti b4 so i assumed it had to do with the other two french names in your group. adele and atelier

[@thelingspace]

+Coor DaLoor Ah, yeah. Can't blame you for not having heard it before - I've actually never met anyone else named Moti, either. Looking forward to that happening one day! So it was a reasonable inference. ^_^

[@quinius173]

Your voiced aspirates didn't sound like voiced aspirates... :/

[@niharbehere1584]

Recursion isn’t a universal fight me