Are Historical Accent Reconstructions Just Nonsense?

[@whatr0]

I can't even imagine how much of a pain in the ass phonetic descriptions would've been before a standardized system like IPA

[@spooderman9122]

Well most people don't know about the IPA so just ask them😅

[@LisandroLorea]

Using only symbols for math dates from around the 17th century. Imagine trying to solve a complex equation written in plain Hindu/Arabic/Greek/etc with maybe only the numbers having dedicated symbols.

[@qqqalo]

​@@LisandroLorea Symbols in mathematics have been used for millennia. For example, there are equations written by Diophantus of Alexandria (~200AD) in which he uses a standard Greek alphabet in a similar way to which we use the Latin alphabet to solve equations today. There are earlier examples too, such as in Babylon, and Ancient Egypt. Symbolic mathematics has existed for much longer than the past 400 years.

[@SNDKNG]

You should read premodern grammars! They're fascinating. Im particularly fond of the phonetic descriptions of the Tiberian Masoretes and Panini.

[@lenguafranca4524]

I know you're referring mainly to phonetic descriptions in the context of historic reconstructions, but unfortunately there's still quite a few modern day examples of people throwing caution to the wind with this, in my experience the worst of which is phonetic transcriptions of Korean, of which there are way too many and almost none of them match up to the actual phonetics of the language (and of course a much better estimation of its pronunciation could be done in IPA)

[@Mymlinguo]

Historian and linguist here: Simon, you are a massive source of inspiration for me, I barely knew it was possible to reconstitute older languages before discovering your channel. the work you put out there is phenomenal and ofc, since its an expertise it comes across as magical. sure we don't have any recordings from the past but the funny thing is...neither did they! and yet there was a market for books on pronunciation, phonetics, elocution, prosody... I'm onyl specialised in late 18th century French h but as far as I'm concerned, it's all about foreigners wanting to learn French because it was the basic language for tradesmen and diplomats and also non-Parisians hoping to blend in a bit more in Parisian salons. So naturally they had to find ways to note how things were pronounced directly for their customer base's. One of my professor told me (as I was struggling to conduct my research) that being a historian is literally all about being a detective and finding clues that give you a strong inkling towards a certain direction, so it is a best guess but an educated one! When I started researching how John Adams learnt French as an adult, I found out that he had looked for and found handbooks addressing his specific needs and demands. When I started learning languages and couldn't afford the audios, I had this Assimil method that uses approximate phonetics and honestly? it works, you gets the main phonemes, the stressed syllables and connected speech patterns (liaisons like "les_amis", "i sawr-her" are extremely easy to convey in writing). As Simon pointed out, intonation is one element that is the most easily lost to the sands of time but that's ok! People understand that dinosaurs as presented in films are estimations based on fossil records, not actual footage so it's a bit baffling to see a different engery when it comes to language reconstitution.

[@laurachapple6795]

'Meet-Meat Merger' is now my second-favourite piece of weirdly specific jargon, right below 'Cretaceous crab revolution'.

[@sophienussle1135]

…and now I’ve just learned there’s something called the “Cretaceous crab revolution” (cue, immediate detour via search engine). This is one of many reasons I’m addicted to Simon’s videos.

[@rodlavery509]

I don't know why they chose this name when "Meat-Meet Meeting" was right there

[@sophienussle1135]

@@rodlavery509 because it sounds too much like a boy band song?

[@TheBcoolGuy]

@@sophienussle1135more like a man on man song

[@TheBcoolGuy]

'degenerate feet'

[@simonsimon325]

I love how you apply your deep scrutiny and analysis equally to yourself. How you don't allow yourself to bluff and bluster, to blind people with science in order to paper over any cracks, or intimidate people into not challenging you any further. It's not about who's right and who's wrong, or who's intellectually superior. It's just these are the facts as much as we understand them.

[@gyorkshire257]

I think the problem comes in that people don't realise that an "accent" is a result of particular muscle movements in the mouth which can be described. They assume that you hear a "sound" then copy it well or badly to "do an accent", or you simply speak with your own accent which is something that happens automatically. Most people simply don't think about phonetics when producing phonemes.

[@batkinssmart4273]

That was very interesting - and it's made me a lot less sceptical. I think that as a child, confronted with several different "correct" ways of pronouncing Latin (the traditional English way, the Reformed Pronunciation way, the Ecclesiastical way...), I assumed that they were all wild and equally random attempts at speaking Classical "proper" Latin from Rome in the time of Augustus. I had no idea there were any detailed descriptions of phonetics of any language before the late 19th century. So I assumed that "historical English accents" were also pretty random. Thank you for educating me!

[@helenamcginty4920]

Yup. I was a Catholic back in the pre Vatican ll days when latin was used a lot in services. We were taught that church pronunciation was not classical pronunciation. And, as you say, even that changed over even my 5 yrs of learning.

[@jmolofsson]

@@helenamcginty4920 This took me a long time to get my head around. For more than a decade, I was stunned by the different ways Latin was pronounced in the Anglosphere compared to in Germany and Scandinavia. The moment when I began to be less condescending was when I understood how early Rome (and Christianity) had invaded Britain. That I hadn't registered this until then was a true embarrassment. ;)

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

We actually also have extensive writings by Classical Roman authors about how to pronounce Latin, which means that we are actually quite confident in how their language sounded. Of course, it is nothing like the three systems you mentioned haha

[@batkinssmart4273]

@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh But in a hundred years' time, won't people be equally confident about how it sounded? Based, presumably, on the same evidence, and yet their opinion(s) will be quite different from those of today's scholars. Surely a great deal of these extensive classical writings consists of self-referential (or circular-referential) stuff - we might know that the Romans pronounced "Julius Caesar" differently from the way the Greeks did - we might even "know" whether the initial letter was pronounced as a J or an I - but how can we know whether it rhymed with the modern pronunciation of Teaser or Miser?

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

@@batkinssmart4273 First of all, this video is about how we can know these things, so if you want to know how, you can watch the video where Simon explains. Second, I'm not sure what your presumptions are based on, but no, I do not see any reason why people in 100 years would have any different idea about how classical Latin sounded, given that there will obviously not be any new evidence that arises in that time. And finally, the first sound of "Iulius" was neither an English J or I sound, and "Caesar" certainly did not rhyme with either "teaser" or "miser".

[@iceomistar4302]

Simon, you are a linguist, I studied it for 2 years and I'd say you know far more than me and quite possibly as much as any expert on the subject of Phonetics and Historical English. I'd give you an honourary degree if I could.

[@LisandroLorea]

Maybe we can get Geoff Lindsey and Jackson Crawford to sign a napkin saying "Simon knows a lot about language and stuff" and he can put that at the beginning of his videos.

[@jmolofsson]

I've not studied linguistics for as many years as you, so I don't dare to judge. What I can judge, however, is that Simon's pedagogic skills are outstanding.

[@faithlesshound5621]

@@LisandroLorea We already have a system for doing that. It's one of the features of "LinkedIn."

[@greenockscatman]

I for one am delighted that he's documenting his interest in it here on KZbin. He's got such great insight into these things - I know he backs it up with evidence but you can't help but think it's almost an intuition of some sort!

[@ami443]

To be a specialist it takes too many years .. And some books of 500 pages explain those things deeper..

[@dglynch222]

The only reason I was able to tell they were two different recordings was because the first one sounded to me like "Aim from..." and I had to really think hard to try to understand what it meant, whereas the second one was clearly "I'm from...." Even so, I was second-guessing myself a bit!

[@saoirsedeltufo7436]

See I didn't understand how we could reconstruct historical accents (this video has been super helpful for that!) but I can't imagine being so arrogant as to deny it possible, that's so bizarre to me

[@clerigocarriedo]

English spelling makes English speakers even less phonetic sensitive. As a Spaniard, I always found it really weird to hear a Brit say "we have five vowels: /eɪ/, /iː/, /aɪ/, /əʊ/ and /juː/. By the way, did you say /dʒʊdʒmənt/ at 24:05? Is that a trend? A Northern influence? A mishearing on my part? Are the Northerners taking over? Will bath and trap re-merge in SSB? 😊 Thank you for this incredibly interesting video. Btw, how important are comparisons with related languages to reconstruct an accent? Kudos

[@TheDrumstickEmpire]

I’m pretty sure his family’s from Cumbria; the pronunciation thus makes sense.

[@galoomba5559]

The vowel probably gets rounded because /dʒ/ is pronounced labialised. Doesn't sound like [ʊ] to me, more like [ɞ]

[@MaoRatto]

Clerigocarriedo, as an English speaker with a Southern Appalachian accent. When we hear for example the most neutral accents like Mid-Western, it's too many merged sounds at times on our end. As someone studying multiple languages. Swedish and German which isn't as hard compared to our surrounding states due to unintentional long vowels and short being preserved to despite the rhoticism, but mainly due to not having really well articulated T's and D's to begin with. Sometimes the sounds of Dutch are a funny case of " They got a majority of the right sounds, but not the right words", while other dialects in the west " Got none of the vowels or distintions, also sounding too slow and flat " Also confusing F's and voiceless TH's due to the same frequency at times! Same with the voiced versions. The voiced version does 100% get understood, but not the voiceless as it typically follows the british version, but vowels before it typically raise constantly in intonation. So unintentional I want to write double letters instead of single letters for Tolerate like " Tollerate", but the lack of articulatedness really shows when we deal with N's and M's. They are slowly becoming nasal, mainly when back vowels get near N's and M's. So words like "room" from a standard /rum/ becomes a vowel with a formant of 1,490... So closest to /rø̈̃:˥˩ (m)/ ... We typically unround on that word. Same with Moon. Pole and poll AREN'T EVEN SIMILAR. /pö:ɬ/ then /pöɬ/ ( sometimes has a tendency to unround ). Vowel pairings like Age vs. the letter H getting said can become messy. Age = ɛei˨˩(ʤ~ʧ) vs. ejʧ ɛ in 1290 in formant that jumps with vowel clusters.... With a nasty constant vowel clusters and monothongs. How the hell did region's accent become so messy yet so antiquity? Probably something to do with Irish and Scottish heritage, but also we seem to devoice and make vowels lower on voiced final syllables, that can be realized as devoiced? No wonder why the states around us in the Appalachia don't understand us. The Brits struggle due to too many vowel clusters due to being able to vowel with /j/ or /i~y~ɨ/. The reason we got the "worsh" version of wash due to just rounding vs. unrounding happens very often on slightly longer syllables. It's like we took the umlaut system of "Raising vowels into diphthongs" and undoing it due to can't be bothered to have a good constract between voice vs. voiceless and moving sounds in the back of the throat in some cases, or in other cases moving them in front. Look, Hook, and Took don't sound close to other neighbors across the USA, and much like our southern bible belt neighbors, Wool and pool really show the L's impact to umlaut if add any front vowel at the end. Oi just straight up doesn't become (o~ɔ)jə. The R has a tendency to just turn tapped, but in contexts of historical K with aspiration, G, well it is becoming slowly more uvularized. TR, and CHR haven't merged as the r is tapped or the t and d becoming softer. d, t with aspiration and j can become glottal... Sometimes vowels get it like High German. ._. We just don't speak clearly as our ancestors. K and G are migrating in the back, and sometimes when we hear brits. They sound like R -> /w?/ and the Western USA sounds like their V's are becoming B's, but the B's here are weakening into approximates raising our first vowel in words. Submit and summit only care about the vowel before. ɬ here typically raises vowels in some contexts and triggers umlaut by moving a historical vowel to the front. If the word has an i~ɨ at the end of a syllable. It fronts vowels at times or a nasty tendency to unround and erasure of vowels on second syllables that have been in the western accents, bringing back the ɪ or ʌ. While we just pull a German and ignore it, but only show it in modifications. Praat does help realize why we got messier vowels than our neighbors. It's a case of " We understand some of our neighbors, but if did the communication the other way, must use strict grammar, or it constantly means a mistake due to the messier phonology on our side" due to keeping stress in first syllables and sometimes raising vowels due to poor articulation leading to " World and Whirl, we can tell, but an untrained ear would need to focus harder ". . Also Mid-Westerners taking their time too much when speaking while here it is fast and glottal or getting throatier and lenited almost like a Danish vs. Swedish situation. Californians like Kim Kardeshian? Her speech sounds like constant mistakes on adjectives and verbs. Often confusing V for B at times? The V here typically for context has the tendency to raise the pitch of vowels after it, but also rounding the vowels.. ._. K turning into a fricative becoming closer to /x/ or /kx here. like, liken, likes being three not being close anymore thanks to treating LIKEN as /kn/ . So words with /kən/ just modify the vowels before them with the result of /kn/ the Standard: laɪk, ˈlaɪkən, laɪks vs. Regional: ˈlɐj:kx , 'lɐjkn, 'lɐjks ... Do you see how much of a difference the sound has changed? It

[@MaoRatto]

@@galoomba5559 ._. That's funny as well as for me that would be... /'jʒɤ:ʒmʷø̞̈̃:(t)/ We don't have a /ʝ/ or /jʒ/ vs. /dʒ/ distinction... ʝ is hard to tell in English for us, d and t here was always weak with a tendency to glottalize. ._. If we stress hard enough of /j/ we get something like /dʒ/ and doesn't help the dental sounds are weaker, often leading to Appalachia with a fight of CH vs. SH. When it comes to South vs. North distinctions. The /dʒ/ made our sound "ʌ" rise, but keep the back quality. How on earth did your accent get [ɞ]?

[@momerathe]

fascinating. re. the original comments, I think people have trouble with the idea that a lot of knowledge in science is probabilistic. They think that if you don't know something with 100% certainty then you know nothing. I think they would be shocked to find out how little that actually covers. People are smart and we can make confident deductions about a lot of things which, even if a few of the details are wrong, still as you say manage to convey the substance of the matter at hand.

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

hear hear!

[@josephatthecoop]

Indeed. As Isaac Asimov said “When people thought the Earth was flat, they were wrong. When people thought the Earth was spherical, they were wrong. But if you think that thinking the Earth is spherical is just as wrong as thinking the Earth is flat, then your view is wronger than both of them put together.”

[@Eronoc13]

Man, how little! I'd love to hear anyone's 100% certain communicable knowledge.

[@joshgreifer]

Would be great to see an animated formant chart showing pronunciation changing over time (and geographically?)

[@j.s.c.4355]

Pretty sure Simon has done that. Church or his video on London Accent from 14th Century to 21st. As he speaks the accent, he shows the chart on the screen.

[@joshgreifer]

@@j.s.c.4355 I don't think that was an animation, was it? Just a new image for each era. I was thinking more of a sort of animated video with a timeline of years

[@penelopehughes-jones5265]

That’s weird. I was thinking, ‘Looking dapper, Simon! Nice hair!’👍 Absolutely freaking fascinating as always, thank you and agree 100% with your POV on this.🙏

[@lisashelleybutterfly]

i love it Simon, this is wonderful. i find it weird how people seem to seek out videos about long-term scientific endeavours to complain because their viewpoint (generally based only on their own gut feeling and ignorance, or sometimes other people's) goes against those of folks that have likely spent at least several orders of magnitude more time truly researching and discussing these topics, and i'm sorry that includes your videos. as a long-time armchair linguist with probably at least a couple orders of magnitude less time invested in learning these things than have you, i always appreciate your videos. every video you put out regarding stuff that i have time to watch helps me learn a little something (and sometimes a lottle something) more about a topic i'm very interested in, but unfortunately have never had time to pursue to the extent you have done. hope you're well.

[@lisashelleybutterfly]

oh, also don't worry, hair is just a canvas! it will be grown out before you know it.

[@j.s.c.4355]

One of the possible reasons people object to Accent reconstruction seems to be racism. I read a comment on one post objecting to Shakespearean original pronunciation because it sounded too much like Irish. No discussion of evidence, just didn’t like how Irish it sounded. and quite frankly, to a British ear any rhotic accent is going to sound either American or Irish.

[@silka4670]

how about Canadian? We always get left out of everything except articles about Poutine.

[@rezza_lynsaii]

But some British accents are rhotic eh

[@michaelmcnally9737]

Thanks to your efforts this American can distinguish some UK accents. I can usually pick out north vs south and I once correctly guessed an actress's Sheffield accent

[@Cchogan]

As a sound engineer and voice producer of many years, I can relate to someone's skepticism. But I also know that recording is not the only way to describe something. I think part of the problem is understanding for how short a time (relatively speaking) humans have been using complex spoken languages. Although it is many thousands of years, in that time (and certainly in the time of language construction as we know it) human beings have hardly evolved at all. So, all the people throughout the world, over the last, say, 10,000 years, have had the same shaped mouth, nose, throat, lungs, and so forth. In consequence, when exploring what might a vowel sound like, we have exactly the same reproduction machine that was used by the original speaker - ourselves. That is wonderfully useful because it puts certain limitations on what is possible. When someone from the past describes how a muscle is used, or where the tongue is placed, we have that muscle ourselves. But I am also fascinated by how much has been explored in the past, and how much really useful information there is. This is where listening to you and others is so much fun. You have done a huge amount of exploration!

[@sja45uk]

I am not sure why you attribute complex spoken language to the last 10,000 years. I would have guessed some time after our split from chimpanzees, so perhaps more in the million year timeframe.

[@RichardDCook]

Thanks for showing what's behind the curtain a bit. As you say, people who haven't done much reading about historical linguistics have no idea how much information exists on the topic. The "bollox" people would be well served by cracking open a book or two.

[@kadmii]

your hair looks fine an interesting exploration of the topic and helps to show people what's under the hood of some of the videos you've made

[@stephanieparker1250]

I’m amazed that people were writing about pronunciation so long ago. Makes me even more curious about old books.

[@Zilegil]

I don't know much about linguistics, but I am studying history In the 14th century there was an increased interest in language, mainly ancient, in the Italian speaking world and I believe this transferred, in the 15th, into what's now called the Northern Renaissance when it flooded out to Germany, and eventually England, The Low Countries and France. These groups are now retroactively labelled "The Humanists". It was such a huge I can imagine there must have at least been few who sought to record contemporary, vernacular pronunciations

[@stephanieparker1250]

@@Zilegil That does make sense, I guess I never thought it applied to actual accents. I wonder if there is a resource for all these old books where they can be read online?

[@HuckleberryHim]

Indian grammarians like Panini were writing about pronunciation more than 2300 years ago! They had amazing insights on phonology and even organized their writing system based on it (so aspirated/unaspirated versions of a consonant are together, voiced/unvoiced, etc). They studied a whole lot else too, grammar, etymology, etc.

[@stephanieparker1250]

@@HuckleberryHim interesting! Thanks!

[@morvil73]

Simon, I absolutely love your videos and I even use approaches and ideas of yours professionally, as I coach a lot of singers in OP for 15th, 16th and 17th century music. We have very similar approaches to reconstructing older sounds and it’s absolutely fascinating, so keep’em coming!!

[@infpdreams]

If there is ever an opportunity, it would be so cool to see some kind of collaboration between you and J. Draper. I'm sure you two would have some very cool conversations!

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

I teach Irish language at a university in North America. I'm used to it by this point, but every year the teaching assistants are shocked and baffled by how the students listen to recordings of completely different accents and can't tell them apart at all. The students will ask 'how can you tell the difference between Donegal and Cork?' and the poor TAs can only say 'it's just obvious because they are different in literally every way' hahaha

[@fs5209]

Are these English recordings or Irish recordings? I'd be very surprised if they couldn't tell the Irish ones lol

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

@@fs5209 Irish!!

[@robertpotratz4663]

I really appreciated this. You are a good “apologist” of the method you use. Keep up your excellent work.

[@fghsgh]

omg, i actually noticed that they were different recordings near the end! i feel so proud! at least, i went "huh, that a sounds more backed than i remember" but i figured i must just not have been paying attention the first time, until you confirmed it i still need to get way better at learning how to pronounce all these nuanced differences though but aaa this is so interesting my brain is bouncing off the walls being excited about this

[@marktyler3381]

Just because I don't understand how something is done doesn't mean that no one understands how it is done. Rather sad really.

[@Kerithanos]

True, but blind trust in authority is much more dangerous than blind skepticism of authority, and the former is arguably the biggest problem we have in today's society. That's why this is a great video - Simon isn't hitting anyone with outrage and condemnation, he is modestly defending his position with calm rationalism. Maybe this all doesn't matter so much when it comes to linguistics, but in other spheres, it is the life or death of western civilization.

[@tuggercarlson]

@@Kerithanos The "West" isn't dying nor did it ever exist.

[@marktyler3381]

@@Kerithanos Sure, that is true. I follow Simon because I find his content interesting and it makes me think about the bigger picture.

[@marktyler3381]

@@tuggercarlson hard disagree

[@Kerithanos]

​@@tuggercarlson Sure, sure. Always "it's not happening, but also, it's good that it's happening" with you people. Your lies get funnier and funnier the more desperate you get. Your cult is on its last legs. It is retreating on every front. You have failed, and you will spend eternity paying for what you've done.

[@sparrough]

Great video! Very informative with strong points! Being in the early music business, I've often thought that there might be a slight chance of guessing the intonation of european languages in the 17th and 18th century by studying how the melody is put on texts. Particularly during a recitativo, which is supposed to be a slightly more recitation style, it's very interesting to see where the music goes high and low. Of course there are much more factors determining that, like stressed words having to do with the storyline, or the raising or lowering of the pitch based on mood or affect changes, not to mention harmonic reasons, so it's important to be careful. Of course there are also treatises on acting and declamation in the 18th and 19th century, like f.ex John Walker, which I've seen you mention, but those things generally apply to declamatory style, which definitely was very distict from casual style. Still, it's facinating how the possibilities to derive evidence from the past just tend to get more, the more you dive into it!

[@tonylee6299]

I cut my own hair for a few years (I’ve since let it grow very long). After a few times I started to get better at it, so I wouldn’t give up just yet! Let it grow out a bit and have another go. I thought it looked choppy and cool! Love your videos, Simon. X

[@vampyricon7026]

I keep being amazed at how detailed the phonetic descriptions are for English at the time. I usually look at Sinitic languages and the descriptions are few and far between.

[@arwenwestrop5404]

Hi Simon, thank you for your wonderful videos. I'm amazed at your skill in providing us with so many 'accents'! It was very tricksy of you to make 2 different recordings of your 'river management' tape, but I'm pleased to find that I did hear that correctly. I did wonder whether I'd heard it right and went back over them to make sure and then you told us! Thank you, that confirms that I"m not yet gone mad!

[@scottmckeown1729]

I want a video where you take like 3 paragraphs of text. First you say it in your accent, then you go back like 50 years and say it in that accent and you keep going back 50 years, over and over again through middle English, Old English right through to Proto-Indo European. I imagine it would be a very long video, but I'd watch it!

[@enricobianchi4499]

That would be beyond obscenely difficult, but glorious

[@jaromir_kovar]

Simon actually has a video sort of like this. Not exactly three same paragraphs and not all the way to Proto-Indo European, but he begins with a man speaking about his house in 1346, then his grandson in 1406, then his grandson in 1446 and so on, from 14th century all the way to 2006. It is absolutely fascinating and I'm sure you will love it :o) The video is called "A London Accent from the 14th to 21st centuries".

[@zak3744]

I'm not sure if this counts as a kind of win for the experiment (I think it probably does), in that it was immediately and glaringly obvious to me that the two recordings were different. But while you mightn't have tricked me into thinking they were the same recording, that was absolutely nothing to do with the phonetic realisation of any of the phonemes! My mind was entirely preoccupied by the fact that they blatantly weren't the same recordings because of the differing cadences of the sentence in each case. (And I'm writing this having only had the initial impressions and not having gone back to relisten at this point) Which I think goes directly to your point about the extent to which people naturally take away overall, impressionistic senses of reconstructions rather than specific detail!

[@infpdreams]

Yeah, same. The first sounded American-ish to my (northeastern American) ears, while the second was where I actually heard anything remotely similar to a western or Irish accent. I just thought that the first clip's vowels sounded so different. I didn't go back and replay the first recording again, though, since I was a little too far from my laptop, and by the time I could rewind, he had already mentioned them being different.

[@micayahritchie7158]

That's interesting. I immediately heard the difference in two of the 3 vowels he talked about. But not the other and I'm not particularly well exposed to any accents that sound anything like that (I'm Jamaican attending uni in North Eastern USA)

[@jaojao1768]

I find that this is the case with classical philology/textual criticism as well. Somehow it is really counterintuitive to many people that we can reconstruct what an ancient text originally said from later, often mediaeval, copies

[@indetif839]

It's amazing how many people consider themselves experts on subjects they have never really studied. One of the downfalls of the Age of the Internet. Don't let them deter you, Simon.

[@capability-snob]

I really enjoy these videos and have never found myself particularly sceptical of anything on this channel, yet I do approve of general scepticism of historical research. It's always worth asking "how do they know" and "what does the evidence really show" vs what is actually reported. Assessing both the techniques used to understand history and the reasoning used to draw conclusions from it should not be treated as if it belongs only to a qualified few. Remember: skip the article, read the paper, look up the references if you can.

[@talatq719]

i would be interested in hearing one of these very old accents and speaking styles speaking sentences with very modern subject matter

[@artugert]

If I had listened to the two recordings at 27:18 & 27:47 back-to-back, and someone asked me if they were the same, I would've immediately been able to tell they are different, particularly from the pronunciation of "I'm". But because they were spread apart, and you primed us by saying "Let's listen to it again", I didn't realize it when watching the first time. My first impression was actually that it sounded like some kind of American accent. (I'm American)

[@jeff__w]

I had exactly the same thoughts on all counts (and, in fact, used the identical word “prime” in my comment). It’s a _really_ short clip-10 syllables-and practically by the time you’re attending to it, it’s gone. As a fellow American, I actually heard the first sentence as something like “Aim for the river management service” (whatever that means) and, by the time the second clip rolled around, I basically forgot or reconsolidated the specifics of the first sentence. The task is more one that might elicit “memory distortion” or “reconstructive memory,” especially being primed the way we were, than anything having to do with discriminating between various vowel sounds.

[@artugert]

@@jeff__w Right, I completely agree.

[@mumps_4626]

A generous interpretation regarding the mistrust you mention might notice the clear and necessary entrenchment of a language in a living social context that differs from broader historical claims about political systems or trade culture, etc. Can we reconstruct a language with a high statistical accuracy? Yes, but I think much of the skepticism is similar to other anti-scientific scepticisms: there is a lived reality, a context for language, that, just as today, attaches to identity, region, and social relations that a pure or authoratative linguistic reconstruction can sometimes underplay or miss altogether. To put it simply, no one simply "speaks" a language isolated as a system, now or 1000 years in the past.

[@galek75]

Excellent point man.

[@leightonolsson4846]

People confuse academic extrapolation with uninformed speculation

[@MCJSA]

In school I had a giant, desk copy of the American Heritage Dictionay that included etymological notes on every head word, often going back to Indo European. This fascinated me and is likely one of the things that initially interested me interested in studying language. Of course, no one really knows what Indo European sounded like, or of its word stock. All we know is reconstruction. David Crystal explains some about his method in reconstructing late 16th c southern British accents in "Originial Pronunciation" recordings of some of Shakespeare's work. Poetry and the rules of poetics are productive sources. Consider Guthrie's "Motorcycle song": I don wanna pickle. I just wanna ride my moto cicle. I don wanna die. I just wanna ride my moto cy....... kal."

[@mesechabe]

There’s an old Arlo fan. I thoroughly appreciate your bringing “the motorcycle song” into this discussion on historical linguistics. I’d buy you a pint if you were anywhere near me.

[@BLacheleFoley]

Re the two recordings at the end: I had trouble understanding the first one, but the second was clear. I was still trying to decide if that was due to the repetition or something else when you said they were different.

[@jessehammer123]

A terrific video- one of my favorites- my only quibble would be that I could tell that the two recordings toward the end were different (though only by the aim-eym distinction- the others eluded me).

[@danielj.8876]

The haircut looks great man and I see you got a shave. Some special event coming up?

[@briantaylor9475]

Excellent video. I enjoy your dedication. Your humor, subtle as it may be, is great. Keep up the amazing work.

[@sheilam4964]

Thx for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.

[@joshuakirkham9593]

This has been an excellent video about how to analyse audio artifacts. Thank you for this break-down of evidence.

[@robmcrob2091]

Hello Simon. Regarding intonation a good source might be modern accents which share an ancestor that split around the time of the reconstruction. For example you recently reconstructed Alexander Hume's Scottish accent. Around that time Ulster was being settled by Scots speaking lowland Scots. In a place like Ballymena you can hear an accent which is distinctly Scottish even today, but it's the intonation which makes it sound Scottish over the pronounciation. Just a thought.

[@TovarichBramble]

I love history and have been reading books since I was 16 so I find this incredible. Im not sure how people can ‘poopoo’ it as there are historical documents covering the language and pronunciations, so historians and linguists would work from them. Even though I’m English, I do struggle to understand English spoken in broad Scottish or Irish accents and sometimes Australian accents - speed, stresses on certain vowels or consonants etc, all have an effect. My mama was from Blackpool and I loved the way she said ‘book’, ‘cook’, ‘look’ - more like boo-k, coo-k, loo-k (sounding like Luke). Was this an older/historical pronunciation which stuck in northern England or a newer development?

[@Demian_Garcia]

As a native spanish speaker, I can confirm it wasn't until relatively recently ( acouple of years ago) that I could differenciate the kin-keen vowels (and sometimes still pronounce them the same)

[@damianocampus8020]

me too! also with sheep and ship, it took me so long to be able to tell them apart (native italian)

[@deanregister9666]

I'm pausing to write this immediately after you said something about only watching the first two minutes, but bear with me. First, one of the many admirable features of your work is that, while your research is pretty rigorous, you're in fact Not bound by the same restrictions and professional considerations that a card carrying linguist or philologer might be, and are thus able to speculate a little more freely with your reconstruction. Which I believe you do in good faith, and your transparency in your qualifications adds to my confidence and provides sufficient context. The objections to the practice of reconstructing languages are certainly valid, to varying degrees, but what's the upshot? We can't know so let's not try? That's hardly fun. Besides, you specifically, simon, provide, by lightyears, the most compelling, natural sounding reconstructions (of english) of any this side of alpha centauri. I'm going to continue after I've watched your video.

[@nygren83]

Something that's been on my mind a bit about reconstructions in general, is how much does the things we don't know change the "experience" of the reconstruction. For the sake of argument, let's say that the whitewash in medieval churches and castles was not white but rather a bright pink, only the pigment had faded and become undetectable. This would technically speaking be a tiny detail, but it would massively alter the way we see medieval architecture. How about the puzzling "wine-dark sea" from Homer, could it be that the sea really was dark red for reasons unknown to us, or perhaps wine was in fact a different color (which actually doesn't sound implausible). Since we cannot be certain about any of these things, when you add up the probabilities of all details of our experience of the world; I feel like there is bound to be something absolutely critical about almost any time and place in history that has been lost or mistaken. Considering how many such details must get lost to time, can we really say that our reconstructions point even in the right direction?

[@LanceBuckley]

What a load of FUN! I love this channel. This is a topic I've often thought about, thanks!

[@ralphedwards9839]

In your video on London accents over the years from 4 months ago, you commented that the price vowel once started with the vowel of bug. You probably know this already, but it still does for many, possibly most Americans and Canadians when followed by an unvoiced consonant, or R in the same syllable. Also applies to the house vowel in parts of Canada. Examples: night, ripe, rice, hire. The contrast between Hire and Higher is mostly on the quality of the initial vowel. Also the contrast between writer and rider for those who have lost the contrast between T and D in that context. My accent was largely formed in Chicago and SE Michigan in the 40's through 60's.

[@pierreabbat6157]

I was raised by parents whose native languages were Romance, and we moved a few times during my childhood. So I have a General American accent, but no particular local variety of it, with a Romance twang. I may pronounce words differently depending on where I learned them. Most words ending in "og" I pronounce with /ɑɡ/, but "dog" /dɔɡ/. In Spanish I notice certain traits, such as often pronouncing /n/ as [ŋ] even when it's not assimilated to a following velar, but I don't perceive an accent as being from somewhere. There is something about my accent that marks it as off-Salvadoran ([ŋ] is a Salvadoran trait, but it's also present in other accents). I distinguish /b/ from /v/, which most Spanish speakers don't (but Ladino speakers do). I rhyme "Jesús" with "luz", as does every Spanish speaker I know here, but it bothers me when they rhyme in a song, because I know that lots of Rightpondians don't rhyme them. One can combine an accent with a pronunciation. Once a Jewish Lojbanist posted a link to a video in which a rabbi was discussing business law and quoting verses in Aramaic, in Ashkenazi pronunciation with an American accent. I've also heard Latin in Classical pronunciation with a German accent.

[@cadileigh9948]

Peter Pan I noticed that you had lost a few years with the haircut. Glad you told me they were 2 recordings cos I wondered why the second was easier to decipher. I learn a little every video you put up so Diolch / Thanks

[@psychoprosthetic]

I think it's good that your hair has individual accents.

[@marymcfarlane5108]

Pronunciation changes are more difficult for most of us to understand than those bits of history with visible evidence but I found these explanations pretty clear! NB: I was thinking that you had a very good haircut in the first few minutes of this😂

[@MooImABunny]

I love how many people need to learn on their own that cutting your own hair is a bad idea 😂 at least you didn't try to fix it and end up like my friend who, after many fixing attempts, cut his hair so short that it looked like an army cut

[@Ulriquinho]

I imagine that when people are thinking of accents as separate from phonetics, they are thinking of accent as intonation/prosody. The latter, which indeed, we don’t know anything about (as you pointed out in your video). Obviously you are correct that phonetics are a large part of what makes up an accent. But it is always good to know how lay people are using words, in case we are talking past each other.

[@mytube001]

Brilliant! As always!

[@davenewton9652]

If just one of my high school teachers could have told me - in the pre-internet days when I first got interested in the subject - that we know this stuff not just because of the [false] rhymes etc, but because there's whole bloody books written all those centuries ago about pronunciation etc. Millennia even for some languages. [grump, grumble, moan, etc]

[@randohoward8903]

A wonderful explanation. Thank you!

[@MS5]

I'd love to hear more about what we know or can reconstruct about the variance, distribution or continuum of accents in the past. Empirically, how many data points do we have for any single period and how different are they? Theoretically, what kind of variation should we expect (across regions, or class, or ethnicity, or other social dimensions)?

[@williamrees6662]

Thinking about your example of you and a Scouser being able to understand each other, despite the accents. A somewhat more philosophical question than a linguistic one. Given that each person has a slightly different accent, in that we all pronounce words slightly differently from one another, what is there in the brain that allows us to connect sounds that are differently pronounced to the ones in our own personal phonetic alphabet? I’m thinking of the issue in the way that we can look at two similar but fundamentally different objects, like trees, for example, and our brain connects them both to the category of ‘tree’. Does the ability to comprehend different accents, even those virtually identical to our own, confirm the notion that there exist innate ideas in the brain and the sort of superstructure proposed by Chomsky?

[@MeanBeanComedy]

First accent sounded Midwest American, second sounded Northern Irish.

[@Sandalwoodrk]

its funny, when you played the two recordings of you speaking I noticed a difference but I thought it was because you had suggested that it sounded Irish/west country like that suggestion had caused me to perceive it more that way my initial reaction was that the first recording sounded americany lol

[@michaelbennett9100]

Really interesting. Do you have any videos on when Ich or Ik changed to I? I remember a Thomas Hardy poem suggested it was still in use in Dorset in the 1800's. Fascinating how speech changes.

[@bella-bee]

Hi Simon. Thank you, it’s fascinating! Would you please give us your opinion on what’s happened to the letter L in recent years? I form it consistently by raising the tip of my tongue and placing it behind the top of my top incisors while continuing to sound the preceding vowel. But many now purse and close their lips , so girl becomes ge-uh-ow. Sorry I can’t manage phonetic spelling. But not at the beginning of a word. You used to hear it just in Glaswegian but now it’s everywhere. I don’t find it an attractive development, but that’s because I don’t do it! Glottal stops and vocal fry I’m also not enjoying, but still I find the drift interesting. Thanks

[@jaojao1768]

What do you think about reconstructions of languages which did not have phoneticians discussing the pronunciation of them to the same extent, like ancient ones?

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

Some ancient languages (like Latin, Greek, Sanskrit), we have extensive writings about their pronunciation by their speakers. But some (for example, Sumerian), the consensus among Assyriologists (as far as I have read) is that it's pretty futile to try, we literally have almost no idea. I mean yes, "almost no idea" is not the same as "no idea" but it isn't enough to really justify any confidence.

[@liquidoxygen819]

Curious why these people never enter linguistics to burn it all down with rigor if it's really all just guesswork, while on the other hand, it's important to make note of the fact that nobody ever comes out of studying linguistics saying "I assumed this could be done, but, boy, what a load of babbling guesswork that turned out to be!" That's one thing I'm very proud of myself for: I always understood on a deep level that the ways scholars handle looking at languages of the past are professional, evidentiary, and fact-based. The way the methods were outlined, even broadly, always made sense to me and seemed logical and intuitive.

[@monkeypie8701]

I'd be interested to see a video about the Anglo-Norman and Law French languages

[@rs.matr1x]

I quite enjoy your pontificating on these types of things.

[@stephanieparker1250]

Great information, thanks 🤗 also, I noticed you got your haircut. It’s nice but I think I like your longer hair better. 😉

[@jjhynd7302]

I'm speculating that that's a really nice swing

[@two_tier_gary_rumain]

It's not a swing.

[@axellfonz]

Just because we don't have the proof doesn't mean that we don't have the evidence.

[@SaulKenrick]

"I'm from the river management service" was quite spooky- I think you should do a video where you make up an entire accent

[@owoodward72]

Have you seen the movie Iceman (2017)? The dialogue is entirely a reconstructed proto-Rhaetian(sp?) without subtitles. I immediately thought about your videos when I came across it.

[@jeff__w]

28:17 “And if I asked you whether those two recordings I showed you were the same recording, I think a lot of people would probably just assume that they were.” Well, given that you said 27:38 “So I want you to listen to the recording *again* …” I think that would at least prime people into assuming that they were, in fact, listening to the same recording.

[@tolkienfan1972]

I found it very interesting. I often wonder how things are known

[@carol5763]

Some people expect a Time Machine along with iPhone recording as the only way to know how people used to speak. Which would be very very cool.

[@jesusjoshua]

Love your vidéos ❤

[@morvil73]

Simon, are you interested in doing something on Cornish? Working with reconstructed pronunciations is the daily bread of Cornish linguistics and I’d love to have a conversation with you about it, on- or off-line…

[@johnstanczyk4030]

God made dinosaur bones and Robert Robinson's Art of Pronuntiation to test your faith.

[@1CFcooper]

Lols

[@ryanwani216]

How did the vowel in 'caught' end up becoming higher than the vowel in 'lot' if the opposite was the case in robinson's time? Also when did the lot vowel become ɒ in RP before going back to /ɔ/ in standard southern british?

[@atbing2425]

Long vowels tend to raise (since they are tense), short vowels tend to lower (since they are lax) As to how lot was lowered and then raised recently in Southern England, well it just... did I guess. Some of that may have to do with a chain shift where the trap vowel lowers, and the caught vowel continues to raise, and so the lot vowel raises with the chain.

[@ryanwani216]

@@atbing2425 Thanks for this reply. I also have a question about the north-force lexical set and the horse hoarse merger in traditional RP. From my understanding RP distinguished these 2 sounds with the vowels /ɔː/ and /ɔə/. Overtime the shwa sound disappeared creating the merger. But RP did not actually distinguish between /ɔː/ and /oː/, they just added an extra shwa sound. Even though this can distinguish horse and hoarse, how would you distinguish 'oral' and 'aural' without a raised vowel? I'm presuming they didn't add an shwa to 'oral'.

[@ryanwani216]

Also one more question sorry. RP used to have the 'lot-cloth' split. When it died out, why did it not also create a 'cot-caught' merger in British English. Because you are distinguishing the same two sounds, how did people know the right words to delete the /ɔː/ from? For example when the 'cot-caught' merger occurs in America it necessarily ends the 'lot-cloth' split. How widespread even was this split in the UK and US? Was it as widespread as the trap-bath split in South England at one point. Or was it just a way a minority of people spoke and they ended up just speaking like everyone else. Why is 'lot-cloth' split present in basically every American who distinguishes 'cot and caught' but this is not the case in England? Why did the 'lot-cloth' split endure in America and the 'trap-bath' split not, whereas in England the opposite is true.

[@MrSloika]

Good quality sound recordings go back to the 1880s. I've heard sound recordings of American Civil War veterans...both Union and Confederate. You can find some of these recordings here on KZbin. Some of these men were born in the 1830s. I understand that a person's accent and dialect can change as they get older, but I'll bet that a person's speech patterns are basically the same throughout their lives as when they were in their teen years. From sound recording we know, at least in the United States, how people spoke going back nearly 200 years.

[@BasharLykos]

"I often get comments somewhere on the spectrum" couldve left it there mate, interesting vid so thx.

[@agnesarellano6033]

any research on intonation you would recommend?

[@carolinelauf1836]

Can anyone recommend any plays, movies, tv, media, etc. where actors speak in historically reconstructed accents?

[@thedeutschman9905]

Just as a video idea, I’d love to see a conversation between a British person and an American until it converges into the same accent like from 1724-2024.

[@theduck0]

Since all language enthusiasts are gathered in one video, do you think a masters in linguistics or (germanic) philology is a good choice?

[@PlatinumAltaria]

If you're interested in linguistics then yes, otherwise no.

[@faithlesshound5621]

For an English person thinking of teaching English abroad, an MA in linguistics would give them an edge, and a master's degree in anything would probably get them a higher salary. That may not be the case if they stay at home.

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

Trying to draw on context here -- since you used the term 'philology' I am guessing you are European, maybe Eastern European? In that case, sure, why not? Language degrees can be valuable in Europe in a number of contexts. If I'm wrong and you are in North America or Oceania, then I'd say only do it for yourself, it will be worthless for a career.

[@ad61video]

There is a long way between nonsense and irrefutable proof. A reconstruction is imo always an approximation and an abstraction to the real thing at the time, especially where protolanguages are concerned, but I do deem it useful and interesting. In fact, even a modern standard language does not describe daily speech but is an abstraction. That does not make it nonsense.

[@Tom-sq2yy]

bit of a stupid question maybe, but what is meant by the intonation of an accent? Is that the stresses/rhythm of it? It can't be intonation (pitch) as in music... can it?

[@simonroper9218]

Not a stupid question at all! I should have explained it better. In phonetics it usually means the way your voice gets higher- and lower-pitched over the course of a whole phrase or sentence. For example, the way people's voices might get higher pitched towards the end of a question :)

[@Tom-sq2yy]

@@simonroper9218 Oh now i get it! Thanks for the explanation!

[@morvil73]

Hi Simon, I’m a huge fan of your KZbin-shows. If you ever wanted to do anything on the Cornish language, I’d be happy to oblige. I can talk about reconstructed phonology for traditional Cornish as well as the phonologies of Revived Cornish. Let me know if I’ve piqued your interest. Gen pub bolonjedh da, Dan

[@rory3107]

Hi Simon, I am trying to find your email address to contact you regarding: old English. Very much enjoy your work! Any idea how I can contact you?

[@daviydviljoen9318]

Tl;dr: Cauneas sounds like cave ne eas according to Cicero... all that says is people have been describing the way their language sounds since they discovered they could write things down.

[@iberius9937]

This distrust of historical linguistics is no better encapsulated than in how most Greeks react to reconstructed Ancient Greek pronunciation (and I don't mean Erasmian pronunciation).

[@LydiaMoMydia]

25:58 like how people think my nz accent "sounds like an australian accent"

[@RichardDCook]

I think the same thing applies to music as to accents: those outwith a given musical genre or family of related accents at first only hear the shared features. So "all Country music sounds the same" or "all Classical music sounds the same" is often said by people who haven't done much listening to those genres. The opposite is true of someone who has spent a lifetime listening to a certain musical genre: for them the shared features form the baseline framework upon which all pieces are built, and are thus taken for granted. What they hear when they listen to a piece in their familiar genre are all the unique things which differentiate that piece from the thousands of other pieces of music in that genre. For them the notion that all the music in their genre "all sounds the same" is absurd. Same with accents: the preponderance of vowels are the same (or very close) with most US and Canadian speakers, thus to outsiders, say Aussies and Kiwis, these accents "sound the same". But to us here in North America they cannot be mistaken for each other because rather than hearing the shared features we hear only the differences. Ditto the Aussies and Kiwis, the preponderance of the vowels are the same (or very close) but you don't focus on that, but rather the few vowels which are clearly distinct. (For me the clearest differences are summed up by the words "fish" and "cool".)

[@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh]

Ha well it does and it doesn't. I mean it certainly sounds way more like an Australian accent than it sounds like Vietnamese.

[@RichardDCook]

@@Mac_an_Mheiriceanaigh I haven't actually looked at a chart of the vowels, but I'd guess that General Australian/General New Zealand, and General American/General Canadian, each have two or three vowels which distinguish them from each other, the rest of the 15 or 16 vowels being the same. 90% of the time both Aussies and Kiwis point at the same vowel, the "fish" vowel, just as 90% of the time Canadians and people in the USA point at the "out" vowel. One vowel to distinguish them! At least going by what they point to, but the point is that it only takes one different vowel to make two accents clearly distinguishable, and it really stands out, while the other 15 or so which are similar aren't noticed, and are simply taken for granted, the "background noise" of a group of related accents.

[@colinluckens9591]

But exactly how DID Robinson (and other English speakers of the time) pronounce "fleece" and "meat" differently??? As you said, this seems very strange to modern English speakers as these two words ARE now pronounced exactly the same (at least by me - a TEFL reacher from the south-east!).... So.I'm very curious as to how on earth those two words WERE pronounced differently by speakers of Robinson's time!.... could you enlighten us??

[@simonroper9218]

@@colinluckens9591 By Robinson's time, 'fleece' had more-or-less the vowel it has in most modern English dialects (written in IPA as [iː], whereas 'meat' had the vowel sound represented by the letter 'e' in many modern European languages, such as Spanish. Somebody from Robinson's London saying 'meat' would sound something like a modern Scottish person saying 'mate' :)

[@colinluckens9591]

@@simonroper9218 Ok thanks very interesting!!👍👍👍 (so "meat" would have been roughly equivalent to [eə])

[@claymor8241]

Yes but surely most text descriptions of language tend towards finding a norm, not always representative of day-to-day speech?

[@claymor8241]

Just from watching films from as recent as 1960 it seems even to the untrained ear that norms of UK English pronunciation, especially in London and the southeast, have altered significantly.