In this video, I explore the reasons why a lot of modern reconstructions of Proto-Indo-European only have two vowels: *e and *o. ________ This channel's Patreon (thank you very much to anybody who donates): / simonroper
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@ZeroCiero9 ай бұрын
Simon didn’t come in from the garden due to adverse weather conditions. I want my money back
@arkanon86619 ай бұрын
he found a glitch in the british isles, we’re meant to have way too much rain for such a thing not to happen
@Bildgesmythe9 ай бұрын
I have to watch these videos alone. My family looks at me when I sit here repeating goat, goal, goat, goal.
@simonroper92189 ай бұрын
You and me both!
@JonBrase9 ай бұрын
My parents both studied linguistics, so the whole family's used to it.
@LeifTunteri-lm6unАй бұрын
SAME. I'll watch one of these in school or be reading about language and I'll notice I'm saying stuff and I'll get really self-consious.
@AKnightofIslamicArabia9 ай бұрын
Always exciting when Simon goes back before Proto-Germanic.
@jessicapigg9 ай бұрын
Whoop whoop! 🎉
@DTux52499 ай бұрын
Gotta love vids on Proto-Proto-Germanic
@AKnightofIslamicArabia9 ай бұрын
@@DTux5249 Proto-Proto-Proto English is my favorite reconstructed language for sure.
@skinkroot9 ай бұрын
i see your comments everywhere!
@AKnightofIslamicArabia9 ай бұрын
@@skinkrootI watch a lot of these linguistics guys, Simon, Meta, Luke, Dr. Crawford, etc.
@user-uk7zr4xr7g9 ай бұрын
It might be similar to some languages in Caucasus, for example, Kabardian, which are analyzed to have only two vowel phonemes, /a/ /ə/, but have various allophones, such as [u]
@EvincarOfAutumn9 ай бұрын
It’s not *so* rare for languages to have “vertical” vowel systems like that, which contrast vowels primarily by height. For example, in Mandarin, there’s an old-fashioned system of phonemic transcription called Bopomofo, which nicely shows a two-vowel analysis-glides like /j/ and /w/ can be syllabic or influence how adjacent vowels are pronounced, but the nucleus of a syllable is otherwise just /a/ or /ə/. Whereas, offhand I don’t know of a natural language where the vowel system is primarily “horizontal” like the reconstructed PIE /e, o/ would be, if we took it literally. A vowel system like that could show up in the middle of a vowel shift, but there’s a lot of selective pressure toward something more stable.
@innsj63699 ай бұрын
@@EvincarOfAutumn I've read speculation online that early IE had only one phonemic vowel /ə/, which subsequently developed an unaccented allophone which later phonemicised /ɐ/, under the assumption of Caucasian influence. When syllabic consonants emerged /j, w/ developed syllabic allophones [i, u] and laryngeals neutralised in syllabic position to [ə]. The new laryngeal allophone forced the old /ə/ to front, and pressure from /i/ caused it to gain a fairly low quality, likely /ɛ ~ æ/ shuffled about. /ɐ/ backed to /ɑ/ to remain balanced. Laryngeal colouring by *h₂ produced a new [ä] phone, causing /ɑ/ to raise to /ɔ/. The laryngeal-coloured allophone further backed to [ɑ]. By Late PIE, *a was probably [ɑ] and *o was probably [ɔ].
@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev40169 ай бұрын
I am pretty sure Proto European did not have only 2 vowels - it had all 5 main vowels A / E / I / O / U and then the other ones like Norse and other Germanic languages also got the fancy ones Æ / Ö / Ü etc! I’ve even seen a list of reconstructed Proto European words before and it had words that had all 5 main vowels! There are even some words that haven’t even been changed a lot and some that may still be the same, which is why some words have exactly the same spelling in most European languages, so one could assume those words looked the same in Proto European or were only modified a bit!
@BryanLu09 ай бұрын
@@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev4016If you watched the video, PIE had 2 vowel PHONEMES, which appear as the full 5 vowel ALLOPHONES. Meaning there are only 2 distinct differences in the distribution of vowels. Based on the phoneme, you can tell what the allophone is by the surrounding sounds. It's like how st palatalizes before r in English (E.g. street) and p voices between s and l (e.g. splendid)
@selladore49119 ай бұрын
commenting to save this
@frank3279 ай бұрын
You're an awful lot more well informed than most linguists I know, and everyone makes mistakes, you're brave in putting yourself forward for all our benefit!
@Jaggerbush9 ай бұрын
I'm sure you know a ton of them too... I'm an interpreter and have been for 25 years and I know ONE professional linguist.
@user-ti8sc6up7t9 ай бұрын
@@Jaggerbushmaybe you’d meet more if you weren’t so rude
@infectedrainbow9 ай бұрын
@@user-ti8sc6up7t being obnoxiously polite is how you meet 'linguists' that aren't actually linguists.
@francisdec16158 ай бұрын
Most of my university teachers were fraudsters. At least if you study humanities, it's quite possible to become a doctor or professor even if you're just a super mediocre person with a brown tongue.
@dayalasingh58539 ай бұрын
21:00 as a Punjabi speaker I will say a LOT of very commonly used words such as ਯਾਰ/یار [jäːɾ] meaning friend are loan words, and [j] is actually a phoneme that only shows up in loan words from Persian and Sanskrit (and probably English now), so this sounds believable to me (also Punjabi having Sanskrit loans may sound odd but it's pretty much the same as all the Latin loans in modern European languages, including the Romance languages who are also the descendant of Latin. In regular sound changes from Sanskrit to Punjabi [j] became [d͡ʒ] which is pretty regular). Edit: coming back to this a couple months later, just want to clarify the /j/ to /d͡ʒ/ sound change from Sanskrit to Punjabi is more complicated than that, I think I can be fairly to confident in saying that in initial positions it seems to have become /d͡ʒ/ but in clusters it seems to behave differently. Though my original point still seems to remain that I can't find any native Punjabi words that have [j] (except maybe as a phonological process of vowels in hiatus but I'm not a phonologist), with all examples I could find of [j] being loan words. Also I've been talking to an Urdu speaker recently and he was saying that the voiceless velar fricative [x] (from my understanding the sound that makes in German like in ) is regularly pronounced by Urdu speakers but also only found in loan words (from Persian and Arabic mostly). Punjabi has many of these same loan words, but in Punjabi (at least spoken by non Muslim Punjabis) /x/ is instead realized as [kʰ]. Also just an interesting socio linguistics thing going on here, where the ability to pronounce [x] becomes a marker of ones religion, where it would seem like, Muslim speakers of Punjabi and Urdu want to differentiate themselves from non Muslims by using [x] to show a relation to these other Muslim peoples that do have this phone. I haven't studied this exact phenomenon so I can't be sure if that's what's happening here, but I've seen similar things happen in other cases. One example I remember from a lecture is that on the island of Martha's vinyard in Massachusetts, people who don't feel attached to the island will not have a specific feature in their speech that's found on the island, but not Boston where they'd rather be living. So by not using this feature (it's called Canadian raising and is the "aboot" that Americans hear, though it's not usually that extreme and is also found in a lot of the north east United States) these people are showing loyalty not to the island but to Boston.
@user-qd8yy9lc4g9 ай бұрын
Also, sounds existing due to loanwords is not that rare - vast majority of [d͡ʒ] in English, both in "soft G" and J, are of Norman French origin, or Latin being viewed through French lens. The presence of [d͡ʒ] in Old English is a contentious topic.
@cuitaro9 ай бұрын
What does ਯਾਰ descend from btw?
@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana9 ай бұрын
Is d͡ʒ even commonly used now?
@aramisortsbottcher82019 ай бұрын
What about the word Punjabi, it does contain a j. Is it a loanword? Is it just the English word and the native word is completely different? If so, how do you call your language?
@dayalasingh58539 ай бұрын
@@UniDocs_Mahapushpa_Cyavana Sorry I don't think I made this clear, [j] is the loan sound, [d͡ʒ] is pretty common in modern punjabi and is the result of Sanskrit [j] (in certain positions) as well as Sanskrit [d͡ʑ] and maybe palatalization of Sanskrit [g] though I'm not sure about that one. So a lot of sounds in Sanskrit merged into modern Punjabi [d͡ʒ].
@ibalrog9 ай бұрын
The example of "simple" reminded me of listening to a Brazilian friend pronounce the names Caio and Kyle almost identically - the trailing vowel/consonant thing really stood out.
@jamiel60059 ай бұрын
That’s funny, I know people from Bristol who would pronounce them both the same too
@modalmixture9 ай бұрын
Yeah, in Brazilian Portuguese /l/ becomes a [w] glide at the end of a syllable. It’s a neat little feature.
@gerardomalazdrewicz75149 ай бұрын
@@modalmixture Yes, and Polish has ł for that sound.
@koyrehme43619 ай бұрын
Another example from Brazilian Portuguese: the same Maicon is pronounced like Michael. The "n" at the end also works like a vowel not completely dissimilar to "l" in English.
@giannixx9 ай бұрын
@@koyrehme4361I would analyze the "n" there as a nasalization rather than as a vowel or glide, so ['mai.kõ], kinda lika the French do with their coda "n". "Michael" will in fact be most likely pronounced as ['maj.kow] if the person is aware of how the name is "supposed" to be pronounced. If not, the Brazillian Portuguese orthographic intuition would lead the person to say [mi.ʃa.'ɛw]
@benedyktjaworski98779 ай бұрын
I can’t believe you didn’t mention Wymysiöeryś! /s
@spooderman91229 ай бұрын
Funny how i've actually never noticed this even though i've been looking at PIE reconstructed forms for years😅
@tonyf34319 ай бұрын
it _is_ a little obscured by the fact that /*y *w *h/ are often written as *i, *u, and *a when they're syllabic.
@askadia9 ай бұрын
I'm not a linguist myself, but when thinking about PIE, I'd suggest we should always keep in mind that the reconstructed language describes what might've been a set of closely related 'dialects', with local/regional variations, as well as class/social differences, within a linguistic continuum, just as any other modern language. A 'standard', unified variaty like the reconstructed PIE tries to describe may never actually have been spoken, as far as we know.
@swagmund_freud66699 ай бұрын
Yeah like, imagine trying to reconstruct modern English from a set of descendants, people would look at it and think "no that can't be, the vowels are way too asymmetrical... And that R-colored vowel being so prominent just seems too unlikely."
@akl2k79 ай бұрын
Plus, there were probably things in the language that couldn't be reconstructed. A parallel can be found if you compare proto-Romance (a comparative reconstruction of the Romance languages most common ancestor) and Latin. There are plenty of things in Latin that didn't make it into the Romance languages, such as the passive voice (romance languages form it differently, eg, amatur vs. se ama, both meaning "he is loved") or the Locative and Vocative cases. Similarly, who knows what could have been in Proto-Indo-European. There could have been 10 or 12 cases instead of 8. Maybe even moods past the Subjunctive and Optative. Glottalic theory could have been right. There could also have been roots that were lost that could tie IE with other families such as Uralic. But we'll never know unless time travel or at least time viewing are invented.
@JonBrase9 ай бұрын
Also, keep in mind that the features of the reconstructed PIE might not even have all existed at the same time even if the language didn't vary too much dialectically at any one time. Features attested by only a few related modern languages may only be reconstructable back to late PIE, and may not have developed until that period, while features attested across the family may give insight all the way back to early PIE.
@swagmund_freud66699 ай бұрын
Yeah, like how far back exactly are the laryngeal consonants affecting vowel quality? Could have been very recent. Or it could have been very old, and also happened 1000 years apart from the Centum-Satam split. @@JonBrase
@HobbesTWC8 ай бұрын
@@akl2k7 isn't PIE to IE languages as PR is to Romance languages?
@AtomikNY9 ай бұрын
The Shuswap language of western Canada provides an interesting parallel to the PIE vowel/resonant system, with a series of phonemes that can either act as consonants or vowels. There's [m]~[əm], [n]~[ən], [l]~[əl], [j]~[iː], [ɰ]~[əː], [w]~[uː], [ʕ]~[aː], [ʕʷ]~[ɔː] (plus glottalized versions of all those phonemes).
@rdreher73809 ай бұрын
"Sonorant consonants" are not simply consonants that can be said "continuously." That definition better describes the distinctive feature known as [+/− continuant]. Stops, or plosives, are by definition [-continuant], while fricatives, glides (approximants), and non-consonantal vowels are [+continuant]. Sonority is a vaguer concept, and has to do with sounds that have a sort of resonating quality. One way to describe it is a sense that you could "sing" them, in a way you can't sing a [z] or a [v]. Vowels are [+sonorant], as obviously you can sing those, as well as glides, trills and most interestingly, nasals. Nasals are important, because nasal stops are not considered [+continuant]. This is because the [+/− continuant] feature is defined by the airflow in the mouth, which in the case of nasals is blocked. You can, however, say nasal "stops" such as [m] and [n] continuously. Because of this sonorous quality they have, you can "sing" them, or rather hum them. Of course this "sing" explanation isn't perfect though, as there are also unvoiced sonorants, which obviously are not "sung" (no vocal chord vibration), but none the less have this resonating quality to their airflow.
@grahamh.42309 ай бұрын
One definition I have heard for sonorance is the ratio of air pressure behind vs. in front of the point of constriction. In a plosive, a lot of air pressure is built up behind the point of occlusion, whereas in an approximant, hardly any is.
@haharmageddontv65819 ай бұрын
I thought it was just volume Like i have a hunch humans universally scream (actually you could apply this to animals too) something along the lines of ahhh because /a/ is a sonorous (=loud) vowel; the low tongue position and relatively free airway maximises volume for minimal energy (try being loud with a consonant like /t/) and languages like japanese that have simple phonotactics rely on ending loanwords with 'u' or 'i' because they're quiet (=low sonority) vowels and aren't nearly as jarringly obvious as something like 'a' (eg 'dog' would be borrowed as 'doggu', not *dogga)
@rdreher73809 ай бұрын
@@haharmageddontv6581 You have the idea of +/- sonorant tangled up with +/-voice. You can't say [t] loud because it is not voiced. It is an unvoiced sound. Your vocal chords can make sounds much louder than anything articulated in the mouth. You can say a [d] much louder than you can say a [t] because of +voice, but both are -sonorant. Furthermore, I speak Japanese, and know Japanese linguistics very well. The vowels you are talking about, /ɯ/ and /i/, are sonorants. They do not have more or less sonority than any other vowel. Distinctive features are binary; they are not a continuum. The relevant feature that these two phonemes, /ɯ/ and /i/, have in Japanese is that they are often realized as voiceless vowels. This is what you are calling "low sonority," which is not a thing. You are right that sonorant sounds can be said "louder" than obstruent (non-sonorant) sounds. This is because of the resonating quality I described. Resonance makes sounds louder. But sonority is not simply volume. It is a characteristic of the articulation of the phone, not the sound of the phone.
@klop42289 ай бұрын
Regarding "sonorant" - I assume by "sing" you mean "sing resonantly, so that it carries"? Because I assure you, I can sing a [v] :P
@rdreher73809 ай бұрын
@@klop4228 Yes, I am using "sing" in such a sense, like a holding a smooth, clear note. No death metal growls, lol. Again, it's not a perfect description, as you can have voiceless sonorants, but I thought "sing" was a decent way to make the "resonating" quality that defines sonorants more concrete.
@geoffcartridge20799 ай бұрын
Every time i watch and listen to your monologues my head fills with thoughts quite incompatible with activity. Prompting drinking tea and having a lie down. Certainly you have a remarkable ability to get the neurons buzzing. Your videos are so very compelling and i commend your scholarship. Thank you Simon. Thank you.
@gaufrid19569 ай бұрын
An interesting video, Simon. I studied Latin, French and Sanskrit when I was young, and my first wife who passed away in 2015 was from a Latvian family, so you might say I've had experience with a number of Indo-European languages. Back in 2017 I married a Filipina. Her mother tongues are Higaonon Binukid and Cebuano. She speaks Tagalog (Filipino) and a number of other Filipino languages. They are all in the Austronesian language family. I only mention them because prior to the Spanish colonial times in the Philippines, there were only three vowels, "a", "i" and "u". Interestingly, there are also the consonants "y" and "w" which function as vowels in certain cases. In Cebuano, for example, the word for "house" is "balay", where the "y" sounds like "i". The word for "water buffalo" is "kabaw", where the "w" sounds like "u". Loan words from Spanish include the vowels "e" and "o" as required. Sometimes people spell words with "e" in place of "i" and "o" in place of "u", while retaining the pronunciation of the original vowels. The saying goes that Filipinos spell with their ears! Aren't languages wonderful?
@Aucelons5 ай бұрын
You'll be surprised to learn that there exists a fourth vowel phoneme, the schwa, which has largely been merged with the other vowels but mainly with /u/ in Cebuano. It still exists as a separate phoneme in certain dialects of Bohol Cebuano and in other Philippine languages.
@alch3myst9 ай бұрын
I don’t even remember how I first found your channel but I’m so glad I did. I absolutely love your stuff! It’s all so interesting and well done, plus you have a voice that is quite pleasant to the ear :)
@southvillechris9 ай бұрын
Very interesting observation about "L" at the end of words. I always used to notice that Michael Howard (former Tory cabinet minister) would say "local" or any other word ending in L with that L emphasised and it sounded really weird. In fact, it wasn't emphasised, he was just pronouncing the final L like the opening L. I lived in Bristol for 30 years, which is famous for the "Bristol L", apparently unique to Bristol. Words ending in A or O have an L added. "It's a nice areal round 'ere" "Oim droivin moi Ford Fiestal to go shoppin' in ASDAL" and so on. But it's not a hard L - it's as though they're about to pronounce the L but stop, just like Simon's example. In East Bristol, the final L does become a W: "Ford Fiestaw". The most famous example is the name Bristol itself. In Elizabethan England, the city was called Bristow (originally Brigstowe, place of the bridge), but locals added an L to become "Bristowl". And in East Bristol today, you'll still hear it as "Bristawww".
@pmaitrasm9 ай бұрын
Interesting. Thank you for sharing. Do you have any insight into why sometimes English commentators add an R at the end of words ending in a vowel, but keep the R silent when it is actually written? Examples below: Written: Put some water in the radiator of the car. Spoken: Put some wataa in the radiataa of the caa. Written: India and Australia are playing tomorrow. Spoken: IndiaR and AustraliaR aa playing tomorrow.
@southvillechris9 ай бұрын
@@pmaitrasm "R" at the end of a word is called a "rhotic" R. In most of the US and in parts of the UK (especially the West of England), this R is always pronounced. So most US speakers will pronounce "butter" as "butteR", with the R clearly pronounced; most UK speakers will pronounce it as "buttah", unless it's followed by a vowel - so "bread and buttah", but "butteR and jam", where you will hear the R. The reason people pronounce that R when it's followed by a vowel is it's just easier and makes it flow - "buttah and jam" involves a "glottal stop" between the "buttah" and the "and". So in your examples, it's easier (but technically incorrect) to say "IndiaR and Australia", so you'll probably hear British BBC commentators saying "India and Australia", but most Brits will say "IndiaR and Australia". So the "rule" (if one can call it that!) is that if you speak "BBC" English, then you don't pronounce R at the end of a word unless it's followed by a vowel, and you shouldn't put in an unnecessary R with words ending in vowels just because the next word starts with a vowel. But most people people break that last bit of the rule, and do add in an unnecessary R in words ending in a vowel if there's a vowel following.
really appreciated your reading there at the end - lovely
@clarecampbell44819 ай бұрын
Your work is amazing!! Thanks for posting!
@moonostultus9 ай бұрын
I don’t think you’ve ever done the facial expression at 2:28 before on this channel, I’m so used to your usual array of expressions so it caught me so joyfully off-guard
@miketacos90349 ай бұрын
Glad I’m not the only one😂
@t_ylr9 ай бұрын
This reminds you of how no one's 100% sure about the vowels in YHWH in ancient Hebrew
@lakrids-pibe9 ай бұрын
I like the suggestion it was "Yahu-Wahu" from Larry Gonick's The Cartoon History of the Universe
@AKnightofIslamicArabia9 ай бұрын
Yes, but that is a separate issue. We Semites use abjads, and do not write vowels at all. The Jewish people had an unfortunate history of having been separated from their language in daily use.
@calicoixal9 ай бұрын
@@AKnightofIslamicArabiaTruly, it was even before that. The Name ceased to be used even in the few places it was not taboo-- that being the Second Temple, by the High Priest-- even from c. 300 BCE. So even while Hebrew was spoken as the common tongue, the Name's vowels were known theoretically by one or two people who never said it aloud, but whispered it to themselves while others shouted so that none would hear it. An interesting hypothesis for its vowels interprets the Name as meaning, "He Who creates existence", but again, just a hypothesis.
@aa-zz63289 ай бұрын
@@AKnightofIslamicArabialong vowels are written and short vowels can also be written, with diacritics.
@AriBenDavid9 ай бұрын
This was to thwart pronunciation, so the concept of the right vowels is meaningless.
@elwont6 ай бұрын
you're my hero. nothing but admiration for your knowledge!! I was looking for this information for years!! It was also so shocking to believe, that there was just a reduced set of vowels in the reconstructed version of proto-IE
@oswaldtwistle11939 ай бұрын
God bless you Simon! Love your videos.
@kimfleury9 ай бұрын
There's an opposite development in the "Chippewa" indigenous American language. My spell checker isn't familiar with the proper name of that people, Ojibwa, yet it knows the misunderstood transliteration into European languages (first French, then English). The Europeans heard "Chippewa" because the Ojibwa speakers had a habit of dropping the initial vowel. I don't have the symbols, so I'll just use common letters here. The |j| sounds like |ch| to native French and English speakers; the |b| sounds like |p|, and there seems to have been an added vowel sound inserted following the |b|, or preceding the |w| (probably the latter was the rule). There were quite a few other words that were mis-transliterated by the French and English because of the rules that native speakers internalized and didn't think about. I'm not an Ojibwa native speaker, but live in their region on the Great Lakes. I only found out about this linguistic phenomenon because I read a local newspaper column about boats and ships that sailed the Great Lakes in the past. One of the packet and passenger transport vessels had a name that sounded like an indigenous word, but the author couldn't trace it. An Ojibwe woman who lives in this area and reads the column contacted the author to solve the mystery of the name of the vessel and it's meaning in English.
@evetrescoemes32563 ай бұрын
One of the many things I love about your videos is that you talk about specific linguistic questions, but you always give insight into the deeper way that we think about and engage with language. I never watch one of your videos without leaving with a deeper appreciation of language generally
@EliseCharlotte9 ай бұрын
I hadn't found such an interesting channel in years! As somebody with a college degree in English literature and language, I find your channel really useful and a means to learn further about Modern English and its origins, what we didn't study much at uni. You've got yourself a new subscriber 😊 Eála þā Spania!
@ghenulo7 ай бұрын
Sorry that you had to suffer through college. :(
@renerpho9 ай бұрын
Thanks for the "simple" example, that was very helpful!
@Christina_Paz9 ай бұрын
So, interesting thing here... when you set the wasp and the orange as the background, it became incredibly difficult to comprehend what you were saying. My brain couldn't comprehend both at the same time. But when you momentarily had the camera out of focus and on the "grey" area, it could focus on your words again! Interesting how that happens autonomically.
@crownhouse24669 ай бұрын
Can it be that slavic languages have kept some of this? There is a famous czech sentence without a vowel: "Strč prst skrz krk", meaning "Stick a finger through/into the throat"
@simonroper92189 ай бұрын
Czech is a really nice example of a modern European language with syllabic sonorants! I wish I'd mentioned it in the video, now!
@emilmoen20759 ай бұрын
I believe the syllabic consonants in Czech come from another source than the PIE syllabic sonorants
@JulianAlpsNews9 ай бұрын
The Slovenian word for bumblebee? Čmrlj.
@NellMckay9 ай бұрын
I also thought of the Czech language, could there be a part two? Really interesting thank you.
@swagmund_freud66699 ай бұрын
English too! @@simonroper9218
@novaace24749 ай бұрын
19:40, I may be wrong, but I’m most reconstructions of PIE aren’t the laryngeals different even when syllabic? Based of how in Ancient Greek, when syllabic, h1>e, h2>a, h3>o. I might be wrong, but this is what I remember. Amazing video overall btw!!!
@louisparry-mills91329 ай бұрын
a great topic ! edit: the explanation using h2 at the end was particularly good
@cerberus02259 ай бұрын
One thing I want to add on, there are similar arguments (primarily from Ringe, 2006) that PIE also had phonetic /i/ and /u/ distinct from the syllabic counterparts /j/ and /w/. He follows a similar process to present some words that can't easily be tied to any equivalent with a syllabic counterpart, according to him anyway.
@LearnRunes9 ай бұрын
That's a very good point about how native speakers think of their own language differently to how linguists analyse the mechanics of any given language.
@fuckdefed9 ай бұрын
Great video Simon! An example of the phenomenon of semivowels disappearing when appearing next to vowels that you mention would be the word ‘sword’ - after all it is of course said as ‘sord’ rather than phonetically.
@giannixx9 ай бұрын
Yes. Synchronic evidence for that would be the fact that the "w" in German "Schwert" is still pronounced, even if as a "v". For more substantial proof, Wiktionary tells me the word was pronounced in Old English as /swe͜ord/, [swe͜orˠd], so the "w" in current orthography is an etymological relic/artifact. It would be very cool if there was an obscure English dialect which pronounced "sword" as something like [swo:d] or [swoɹd]
@jeffcampbell15559 ай бұрын
Interested but undereducated viewer here. A lot of your content goes winging off over my head so quickly I couldn't write a reminder to ask about it later. But when you said IF proto-Indo-European speakers had been made to develop a writing system...I stopped the video to ask if they did not have writing. Then I realized of course they didn't: By the time they wanted to keep records they were already speaking descendent languages of Indo-European. What a fascinating field of study. Thanks for communicating clearly enough that I can get excited and curious about linguistics. Subscribed!
@Pepijn_a.k.a._Akikaze8 ай бұрын
I have a degree in Slavic languages and I have studied historical linguistics since I was a kid. I believe an open phoneme *a existed in PIE. I also believe there was only one laryngeal, or two if you count voiceless and voiced allophones as separate phonemes. They did not have a colouring effect though. A long *a was present in the word for Mother, which in my view came from baby language, extended with a suffix. Labials and open unrounded vowels are the first speech sounds a baby produces. There's more evidence for *a. The laryngeals are also present in the so called aspirated consonants. I believe aspiration could not have existed without a separate h sound. I also reject the Semitic view on root structure, I mean words could have a vowel for the initial phoneme. I don't know all the answers but I do believe every piece of the puzzle can still be found in the daughter languages. The linguist I can relate to the most, is Jouna Pyysalo, although I don't agree with everything he proposes, because, as I said, the daughter languages must show the evidence. Let me conclude with the condition that reconstructions should be pronounceable rather than being mathematical formulas. Maybe I will find the time to corroborate my views. Until then, these remain opinions without scientific backup, I do admit. Then again, many theories start with opinions. Thanks for the video. You know enough about the subject to call yourself a linguist. We need more fresh views as linguists are divided and don't seem to have an open mind on new developments in the field.
@BurnBird14 ай бұрын
"Every expert is closed-minded" Is the go to excuse for crackpots to explain why their ideas don't see any acceptance.
@dayalasingh58539 ай бұрын
Oh perfect timing for this video, I've been thinking about PIE vowels for the past few weeks.
@niall2439 ай бұрын
At what point are you going to admit you are a bloody linguist 😂
@renerpho9 ай бұрын
A rose by any other name --
@grahamh.42309 ай бұрын
When he gets his phd
@TP-om8of9 ай бұрын
Proto-Proto-PIE had no vowels at all.
@johnnyrocketed22259 ай бұрын
That was so cool. Never thought of the end of words like “simple”. Had to say it 10 times before I could hear difference. 👏😊
@brianonscript9 ай бұрын
A couple of other commenters have already mentioned Standard Chinese (Mandarin). This obviously has lots of surface vowel sounds, and there have been several competing phonological analyses to account for these. Edwin G. Pulleyblank even did away with vowel phonemes completely in his system. An example of a two-vowel analysis is that of Mantaro Hashimoto, who posits just /ə/ and /a/ as the vowel phonemes of Standard Chinese. Each syllable can have /ə/, /a/, or a zero nucleus. Then combined with the glides /j, w, ɥ/, they can generate the various surface vowels. For example, -i [i], -u [u], and -ü [y] are just /j, w, ɥ/ combining with a zero nucleus; -ie [je], -uo [wo], -üe [ɥe] are /j, w, ɥ/ combining with /ə/; -ei [eɪ̯], -ai [aɪ̯] are /ə, a/ combining with coda /j/; and -ou [oʊ̯], -ao [aʊ̯] are /ə, a/ combining with coda /w/. Additional codas produce some other vowel qualities, as in -ian [jɛn] and -üan [ɥɛn] which are /j, ɥ/ combining with /a/ and coda /n/. If Proto-Indo-European was spoken today, we might see lots of competing theories about how best to analyze its vowel phonology as well. Of course, it is likely that there never was a moment in time where PIE was spoken with the exact phonological system as we have reconstructed it, as its various components might date from different points in the past.
@cangjie126 ай бұрын
The two-vowel analysis of Mandarin that you mention is what Karlgren called the ‘phonemic craze’. It is just a kind of amusing game that linguists play, trying to see what ‘rules’ they can come up with and how to limit everything to characters available on a keyboard. But in the real world, phonemic analysis has little significance, and is actually misleading. An example of this is how some people have recommended that the word ‘sushi’ in Japanese should be spelt as ‘susi’, because of the complementary distribution of S and Sh in Japanese. But this not only serves no purpose, but also misleads people who don’t know the language, and annoys those who do. Or to spell ‘hachi’ as ‘hati’. I mean, why? It’s just fashionable nonsense.
@brianonscript5 ай бұрын
@@cangjie12 I wouldn't completely dismiss the value of this kind of phonemic analysis, but you do have to be aware of limitations of course. These abstract phonemic analyses can help us understand the distribution of sounds and help us make sense of unexpected gaps and the like. They might offer clues as to earlier stages of the system. But at some point when such analyses get too abstract, they will be less likely to correspond to the intuition of native speakers, regardless of their explicative power. Applying phonemic analyses to romanization is a separate issue. For Japanese speakers, many of whom really do think of the two consonants in 'sushi' as the same sound, writing it as 'susi' might feel more straightforward. But if you're romanizing for people who are not necessarily familiar with Japanese and just want to approximate the pronunciation, there is absolutely no reason to write it as 'susi' which would just be confusing. Romanization for general purposes has to balance phonemic and phonetic considerations.
@theodiscusgaming39093 ай бұрын
@@cangjie12 susi / hati spelling corresponds to the kana system and it's how japanese people type
@grungus9359 ай бұрын
One thing I've realized comparing Simon with other KZbinrs is that the quality of the information presented seems to correlate strongly with the humility of the person presenting.
@Seagull_House9 ай бұрын
11:35 personally, i'd transcribe the south-england "simple" as [sɪmpʰʊw] or [sɪmpʉw] *the /p/ could go either way for me, and so could the quality of the quality of the final vowel. *the word to me seems to end in a closing diphthong (as in, ending with a glide). i believe coda /l/ > /w/ is actually a fairly common sound change, and certainly more common that ut spontantiously becoming a vowel. this is not a critique of the entire video, which i find very informative, i just thought i should point this out. great work!
@theomniglot9 ай бұрын
Your work is brilliant ... you can safely drop the apologetic intro captions ! No need to be overly humble ;)
@chriswatson79659 ай бұрын
It's interesting having been brought up with the paradigm of dividing all sounds into either consonants or vowels that actually on closer inspection there is much more of a spectrum. I can also see the potential for languages to exist where consonants and vowels cannot be defined at all. That they inevitably do probably relates to how our brains function in terms of producing and processing speech.
@wooloolooo0749 ай бұрын
Hey simon! Great video as always, could you do a video on PIE cases?
@zak37449 ай бұрын
11:00 I have an accent that's not a million miles from yours Simon. I think I need an extra three vowels in addition to the set that, say, Geoff Lindsey gives as his standard SSB phonemes. I think I have a "GHOUL" vowel /ow/, a "DOLE" vowel /ɔw/ and a "PULL" vowel /ʊw/ all of which definitely feel like closing diphthongs. And it really doesn't feel like just an allophone of /l/: for me the words "dole" and "doll" are a minimal pair in that the vowel sound is exactly the same, but "dole" has an extra "l" sound on the end, /dɔwl/ versus /dɔw/. The thing that makes me most think they should be analysed this way is comparing to the MOUTH vowel /aw/, another closing diphthong that is uncontroversially accepted as a vowel. Whatever exactly it is that happens with that written "l" at the end of "pull", say, it seems like it's exactly the same thing that happens at the end of a word like "mall", and "mall" rhymes with "cow" and ends in that MOUTH vowel. So if MOUTH is a standalone vowel phoneme, it seems to me so are GHOUL and DOLE and PULL!
@naufalzaid75009 ай бұрын
As a midlands near-SSB speaker who doesn't feel to employ that much if any l-vocalization, this is really interesting to me. Would you say 'pow' and 'pal' have become perfect homophones for you?
@zak37449 ай бұрын
@@naufalzaid7500 Yep, that's my perception at any rate. I think it would feel forced to pronounce "Pall Mall" in any way other than homophonously with "pow Mao".
@tramvajtramvajevic92479 ай бұрын
wow! this exact topic did always blow my mind a bit :)
@thekenneth34869 ай бұрын
This is some complicated s#!+, Simon. It is rather amazing that linguists have done so much with PIE reconstruction. I can see that there is a necessity to be a specialist in this field.
@al3xa7239 ай бұрын
I just learned about this and was confused, then this video pops up.
@anitasteiner57339 ай бұрын
Loved the video. Of the many things I could comment on, I'll stick to the vocalisation of the [ł] into [ʊ] that happens in your dialect of English. It also happens in Portuguese (at least the Brazilian varieties I'm familiar with): "Brasil" /bra'zil/ becoming [bɾɐ'ziʊ] or even [bɾɐ'ziw]. That's one of my tricks for teaching my Uruguayan middleschoolers why the name "Daniel" sounds completely different for them when pronounced in English (vs Spanish). They immediately recognise the phenomenon of vocalisation, because they can all imitate the Brazilian pronunciation for the country, given that we're exposed to the phrase "Brasil, o mais grande do mundo" since infancy 😅
@ghenulo7 ай бұрын
It's not uncommon, even here on the other side of the pond. My father would pronounce "owl" as /ˈæʊ̯w/. He'd also pronounce "iron" as /ˈɑɹn/; that means that there were more homophones than in most varieties of English: "fire" and "far", "tire" and "tar", etc. It also means that in my childhood, I overcompensated with words like "jaguar" and "reservoir", pronouncing them with /aɪ̯ɚ/ instead of /ɑɹ/.
@oleksiishekhovtsov15649 ай бұрын
12:39 Wonder how much the way native speakers think about the sounds they're making is affected by knowing how a word is meant to be spelled, given that most adults tend to be literate. It would be interesting to see if a child would describe these differently
@elijahmikhail45669 ай бұрын
Most adults would probably still be able to intuit phonemes in their language through morphology. For example, “star” may be realised as /stā/ in non-rhotic dialects, but the r would be clearly pronounced upon adding the suffix “-y” to yield “starry”.
@empyrionin9 ай бұрын
Not quite so clear cut. A lot of people would pronounce it "stahwy" or "Stowey". Etimology could be lost within a single generation.
@marbanak7 ай бұрын
Good grief! You're terrific! The matter of Semivowels/semiconsonants becoming vowels emerges in the language I am grappling to understand: Hebrew. The consonants Yodth, Waw and Heh often operate as "I" "U/O" and "AH". It was dandy to see your describe the phenomenon from a new, crisp perspective. A review of your other video titles suggests gold strikes ahead for me.
@flaviospadavecchia51269 ай бұрын
Fascinating as always :)
@blakewinter16579 ай бұрын
This is really interesting when you think about the extremely rich phonemic vowel structure of Germanic languages!
@ghenulo7 ай бұрын
"Rich" is one way of putting it.
@pierceholston66399 ай бұрын
Liked and subscribed.
@mr.flibblessumeriantransla54179 ай бұрын
This reminds me very much of one of the main problems with reconstructing Sumerian phonology. There was no universal system for syllabic spelling in cuneiform inscriptions, only general conventions, which show mild variation across time and both between and within individual regions. Trying to pinpoint underlying phonological structures thus becomes a matter of assessing individual spelling variations and comparison of the behavior of certain loanwords to ascertain what was most likely the most “common” form of a particular word or morpheme. That’s only the tip of the iceberg and I’d be happy to go into further detail, but for brevity I will just say that reconstructing a dead language’s phonology is one of the most difficult feats in linguistics, and one that ultimately remains forever tentative and somewhat speculative.
@lewis91599 ай бұрын
It's weird to me how similar PIE's reconstructed vowel system is to modern standard Chinese, which also only has two vowel phonemes if you consider /i/ and /u/ as underlying glides. The Chinese vowels are /a/ and /ə/ so it's a bit different but it's weird to think two extremely influential languages millennia apart may have this same very unusual system.
@Silver-qz6mh9 ай бұрын
As far as I remember, this analysis is not the most convincing and widely accepted by linguists.
@user-qh4dr1vy9d9 ай бұрын
PIE is just a half baked guess of how it might have looked like.
@grahamh.42309 ай бұрын
@@user-qh4dr1vy9dGuess, sure. Half baked? No. Reconstructing this language has kind of been the foundation of academic linguistics for a century and a half, so I think a lot of thought’s been put into it.
@phirion63419 ай бұрын
@@grahamh.4230don't think you need to attempt to give nuance to this guy, but nice efforts
@swagmund_freud66699 ай бұрын
It's kinda like how R-colored vowels are extremely rare... Except for the 3 billion people who speak the two most spoken languages on earth: Mandarin and English.
@steampunkstar_raisin9 ай бұрын
I love your work...
@varunachar879 ай бұрын
Maybe another good example in English is the addition of an initial glottal stop (or sometimes an r) to enunciate words starting with vowels. This occurs only when there is no immediately preceding consonant from a previous word. The difference between the presence and absence of the glottal is not phonemic. And native speakers mostly wouldn't even know the difference unless it was brought to their attention.
@ElTuxemo23 күн бұрын
This is my favourite corner of KZbin.
@frankharr94669 ай бұрын
I have wondered that. Thank you. Does the story continue?
@justinrhodes17459 ай бұрын
Can you do a deep dive into proto italic? I love your proto Germanic vids but italic went on to become latin which is pretty cool
@d3ada5tronautАй бұрын
the vowel-glide alternation totally reminded me of the Salish languages, many of which have that exact kind of allophonic alternation. Some languages in that family also have syllabic sonorants making the nucleus inventory of PIE make way more sense
@fbkintanar9 ай бұрын
"You too could have discovered laryngeals." This is the first time I heard or read and explanation of laryngeals that is memorable and motivated. Thanks for the clear explanation.
@tvesarathavrtraghna36883 ай бұрын
Can you do some spoken PG like you do with OE?
@darrengreen63418 ай бұрын
Hey I love your videos. I speak 6 languages including Welsh. I always wanted to learn olde English. I'm a pyglot? But not a linguist But I love your channel I like listening to you and I think you are very handsome. Xxx no offence at all. Keep up your videos. I watch tham. Xxxx
@DaGuyWhoSezHi9 күн бұрын
I know this video was posted a year ago but please tell me where you got that shirt it's absolutely incredible
@rachel_Cochran9 ай бұрын
Whispering "simpulll... simple... simpouu" to myself here at work, getting strange looks
@zacharytaylor56789 ай бұрын
You are too humble Simon, you are a very qualified linguist!
@poudink57919 ай бұрын
In this case qualified probably means going through formal education on linguistics, which as far as I'm aware Simon has not.
@zacharytaylor56789 ай бұрын
@@poudink5791 I think that part was obvious.
@innsj63699 ай бұрын
From 2 vowels in PIE to 26 vowels in Danish
@ovecka179 ай бұрын
im 90% sure danish is a hoax
@tyreesetranh40749 ай бұрын
Had the early PIE speakers simply decided to talk like they had five potatoes in their mouths, they could have shortened the period for that vocalic evolution by several millenia!
@zxbn45662 ай бұрын
I find your sentence construction and diction significantly easier to comprehend than someone like Jackson Crawford. It is surprising that a fair few people in this field have awkward, halting verbal delivery, and swallow key words so you can't quite catch what they say.
@MildlyRabid9 ай бұрын
Proto-Indo-European sounds like it went through a similar process that Proto-Slavic did, where reduced vowels (in Proto-Slavic, front ь and back ъ) began to be assimilated into or reanalyzed as consonants.
@pawel1988129 ай бұрын
In what Slavic language(s) did the yers get reanalyzed as consonants? As far as I know, they were either lost, remained a shewa (in Bulgarian) or merged with another vowel (a, e, o)
@JoelDZ9 ай бұрын
Overall a great video, but I think its an overstatement to say that phonological systems devised by linguists necessarily closely resemble our own mental understanding of our sound systems. We have no way of knowing whether PIE speakers thought of [i] as a type of /j/, or if they thought of [j] as a type of /i/. It's clear that theres a phoneme encompassing both [j] and [i], but whether it's fundamentally a /j/ or a /i/ is somewhat arbitrary and maybe not even meaningful. Fitting this phoneme in with the other sonorants which can be syllabic is convenient and creates a neat symmetrical system, but it's not necessarily a description of an underlying systematic reality. A great example of where people's intuitions about their phonological systems differ from linguistic models based on systematic sets is the Danish "soft d" approximant sound which may broadly be written /ð/ or /ɤ/, depending on what linguists you listen to. Danish people very much perceive it as a consonant, a kind of d or eth, since that is what it has been historically and it is how it is represented in the written language. Some linguists like Ruben Schachtenhausen argue instead that it is a vowel, since it is both acoustically a vowel (though the acoustic boundary between an approximant and a vowel is arbitrary) and it belongs to a set of halfvowels in terms of its systematic behavior. So linguistic phonological models can absolutely differ from native speaker mental models. A great blog post (in Danish) by Schachtenhausen about the decision to treat soft d as a vowel is called "Utilpasset IPA (bonus): Det bløde d".
@julesgosnell97919 ай бұрын
Re the w/u, y/i thing - you can see this in many English words that are borrowings from Latin - e.g. "solVe" vs "solUtion" - when you understand that in Latin a "V" was actually pronounced as a "W". The Latin verb had the stem "solW-" and the W was realised as a "v" or a "u" depending on where it appeared in the syllable. One thing that you said about syllabic consonants made me think a little: "... and destroyed this kind of symmetry that existed within the system...". The problem is that when reconstructing you are going to choose the most parsimonious (i.e. simple and powerful) solution to your problem i.e. it is almost guaranteed that you will travel from something that is more complex to something that is more simple... So, is the "destruction of symmetry" when you start travelling forwards again merely an artefact of your reconstructive process or did it actually happen :-) ?
@julesgosnell97919 ай бұрын
Thinking a little more about this - I would think it unlikely (although I haven't investigated this) that any child language would inject unnecessary irregularity or complexity into its parent. I would expect that as each generation reinterprets and regenerates their languages grammar they must make a similar number of decisions to their parents about the way that the language is patterned and sometimes these decisions will be different i.e. things will be grouped differently - but perhaps the total simplicity/complexity ratio of the language as a whole does not change [much]. In which case, the reason above for travelling from complexity to simplicity is that you are travelling from a number of child languages to a single parent language and not that any given child is necessarily more complex/less regular than its parent.
@julesgosnell97919 ай бұрын
Classical Latin had no 'y' making do only with an 'i' - for exactly this reason thus the Romans had no problem spelling their God's name "Iupiter" (notice the two 'i's one at the beginning of a syllable one in the middle) whereas we prefer "Jupiter" (OK - you also have to understand that 'j' was pronounced 'y' at some point... :-) - nothing is easy...)
@ronk40739 ай бұрын
This is going to sound weird as hell, friend, but there is like this *one* hair at the corner of your right lower lip that curls in towards your mouth and was making a line over that corner as you talked, and it was super distracting, and I was wondering if it was some artifact of the video recording or something. I eventually got so bothered by it I started pausing and unpausing the video until I caught it. I don't know how it escaped while you were shaving, but that's mad. Anyway, your videos are good and I like to watch them, but that was driving me nuts.
@spacemanbill95019 ай бұрын
Been a minute since I checked in. Looking healthy Simon 💪
@philipthornhill23379 ай бұрын
Really very good: illuminating clarity of explanation (seriously) ! Just one thing: when you summarised IE languages as ' most European and some Indian', what about Persian ? What have you got against Persians ? This is obviously some deep and sinister prejudice ..........
@kamilkardel27929 ай бұрын
I was kind of surprised that despite being English, you had not mentioned words like bottom, bottle and button as examples of syllabic consonants, but the explanation of your own dialect made it clear why you didn't think of that.
@jmanig769 ай бұрын
I have doubts that they would be considered syllabic consonants in his dialect of English It’s way more of a US thing imo
@SamBrev5 ай бұрын
Your remarks about the closing "l" (as in "simple") in English are interesting. It's also something I've noticed before, and although I'm very much not a linguist, I wonder if it's connected to something similar observed in other languages. For example, in Polish the letter "ł" is nowadays pronounced straightforwardly as /w/, but descends directly from standard /l/ (or л) as its orthography, and cognates in other Slavic languages, betray. However I don't know of any further examples of this /l/→/w/ shift, so I can't say how widespread it is.
@footloose32215 ай бұрын
In Belarusian and Ukrainian. The Belarusian “л” turned into “ў” and in the Ukrainian “л” turned into “в”. They are read the same way as “w” (ў) although Ukrainians do not know how to read their language. In Russian the “л” remains as it should. Ukrainian and Belarusian were the same language in the 16th century
@talideon4 ай бұрын
It's been a thing in Southern British English for quite a while. For instance, the city of Bristol is named what it is due to a hypercorrection: the historically accurate name would be "Bristow", but due to the vocalisation of /l/ to /w/, people perceived it as ending in /l/.
@adlamis7 ай бұрын
Many New Zealanders (not all, probably not most) make a vowel of postvocalic l (L). I think this is because we have a couple of vowel segments that are pronounced differently when followed by an l. The vowel in 'fool' is a high back rounded vowel, whereas that in 'food' is a high central rounded vowel. Similarly, the diphthong in 'coal' glides from an upper mid back vowel to a high back one, while that in 'code' goes from a lowish central position to a high central one. So when someone pronounces one of back vowel versions without the following l, the Kiwi brain supplies it. I only notice the lack if I'm listening for it. And these L-droppers have extended this to other sequences of vowel+l, turning it into a diphthong of high back rounded vowel+l. And as in your dialect, a syllabic l, as in 'simple', becomes a rounded high back vowel.
@intergalactic-oboist9 ай бұрын
I think the two vowel system makes a lot of sense considering that PIE had a lot of consonants. This means that there is many distinct syllables you can make with even 2 vowels and you don’t need many to differentiate between words.
@seandemhairr45729 ай бұрын
It’s like the modern languages of the caucuses(idk how to spell it)
@swagmund_freud66699 ай бұрын
I've seen theories that the two consonants may have been an areal feature of the region, since PIE was just north of the caucases which is legendary for their very extreme consonant-to-vowel ratios.
@akl2k79 ай бұрын
@swagmund_freud6669 There's also a fringe theory that Indo-European was related to some of the languages of the Caucasus called Proto-Pontic. Who knows how valid it actually is, but the languages still could have interacted thousands of years ago, even if it's not.
@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev40169 ай бұрын
I am pretty sure Proto European did not have only 2 vowels - it had all 5 main vowels A / E / I / O / U and then the other ones like Norse and other Germanic languages also got the fancy ones Æ / Ö / Ü etc! I’ve even seen a list of reconstructed Proto European words before and it had words that had all 5 main vowels! There are even some words that haven’t even been changed a lot and some that may still be the same, which is why some words have exactly the same spelling in most European languages, so one could assume those words looked the same in Proto European or were only modified a bit!
@evefreyasyrenathegoddessev40169 ай бұрын
It actually makes no sense not to have at least the 5 main vowels that all kids naturally produce - obviously the dude that made Proto European knew that one can produce at least the 5 main vowels, in fact, it may have even had a schwa sound, at least in pronunciation, not necessarily in spelling!
@HighWealder9 ай бұрын
How did Greek get the PT sound, like in Ptolemy. Did there used to be a vowle between them? Or is it something derived from some other, non Indoeuropean, preexisting language that it speculated that Greek merged with ?
@talideon4 ай бұрын
Syncope. There indeed used to be a vowel between the /p/ and /t/, but it was lost in Ancient Greek. This might have been due to patterns of stress in Proto-Greek triggering vowel reduction and loss. I would guess πτερόν would be a useful example. You can see this lost vowel in a cognate word in English with the same meaning: feather. I expect something similar happened with πτόλεμος, but my knowledge of Ancient Greek is thin at best.
@profeseurchemical9 ай бұрын
i think of the le at the end of simple as a syllable - ul - thats how i say it too, symppul. maybe the ending L becomes a vocal fry on the u instead sometimes - like how an r after a vowel lengthens the vowel
@PasteurizedLettuce9 ай бұрын
Goodness when ARE you gonna go get that linguistics degree?
@kitbekl52929 ай бұрын
The vowel system of Mandarin Chinese comes to mind here, at least some interpretation of it. More structuralist analyses of Mandarin pose two phonemes, a ~ ɛ and ə ~ i ~ ɤ ~ o, with the vowels agreeing on neighbouring consonants' backness and labialisation. Similarly to PIE, this analysis also proposes vocalisation of approximants /j/ /w/ /ɥ/ /ɹ/ when they form a syllable
@mickgorro8 ай бұрын
Viceversa, PIE speakers might have thought of *y and *w as vowels which had consonant allophones in syllable onset. The Romans did indeed spell /i/-/j/ and /u/-/w/ the same, respectively I (i) and V (v).
@miketacos90349 ай бұрын
The /w/ and /j/ being more of consonants makes sense since the Semitic written languages had no vowels but did have letters for /j/ and /w/.
@purple_purpur73799 ай бұрын
At 19:40 you say that all the syllabic laryngeals are neutralized, but then how do you explain Greek (and I believe Armenian?) having separate reflexes for all of them?
@demoman1596sh9 ай бұрын
Armenian may have neutralized the laryngeals outside of word-initial syllables, but of course due to the complex development of the phonology of Armenian, there is some dispute about the outcomes even in word-initial position. It seems there is some agreement that a similar 'triple reflex' to the one found in Greek is also found in the Phrygian language, but it would sure be nice if we had more material in Phrygian than we do. Another thing I'd mention is that when laryngeals were pronounced as syllabic nuclei in Sanskrit, they appear to have been reflected as /i/ rather than /a/, so there are certainly complexities in all of this. This development is not found in the Old Iranian languages.
@dayalasingh58539 ай бұрын
0:50 whoo Tocharian, I am a Tocharian fanatic.
@fuckdefed9 ай бұрын
My previous comment seems to have disappeared, YT can’t like people adding links to Reddit but there’s a discussion there of exactly this phenomenon of PIE having only 2 vowels that’s also worth a read. It’s not covered as well there as here in Simon’s channel though of course!
@thursoberwick19488 ай бұрын
Yachoob doesn't like external links.
@gertrudlehmann48699 ай бұрын
Thanks a lot
@RobRoss9 ай бұрын
I cahn’t believe you didn’t say Celtic!! 😂❤
@AnnaAnna-uc2ff9 ай бұрын
Thank you,
@xaphon899 ай бұрын
Man that wasp is going to town on that orange.
@simonroper92189 ай бұрын
It's now burrowed all the way into it and I'm scared to go near the orange!
@_trupples9 ай бұрын
“As a general rule, very commonly used words are the least likely to be replaced by loan words from another language” -> OK
@edwardkuenzi57519 ай бұрын
I have a question about your English example. Would speakers of your dialect of English have the same intuitive understanding of of their language if it was not a written language?
@rdreher73809 ай бұрын
Likely yes. The idea of the phonemic level is that it's how a language is conceived of in the minds of its speakers. Most speakers of English are not aware that the /t/ in tick is any different from the /t/ in stick, even though they are in fact different allophones. Likewise, most English speakers are not aware of the difference of light and dark Ls, conceiving them as just /l/. Phonologists use the data of language itself to deduce what this phonemic level is, but in theory if they've done it right, it should reflect what the native speaker believes about their own speech. Where things get more complicated, and interesting, is in language change. To Simon, his final L is an L, but if he has a child and that child grows up hearing a [w] sort of sound rather than anything /l/, they could possibly reinterpret it as /w/ instead of /l/. This is called reanalysis, and it's and important part of how languages change. Interestingly, children do instinctively learn phonology. For example, in Russian there is final devoicing, meaning consonants at the ends of words become devoiced. However, morphology will tell you what the sound underlyingly is, like for example if you make it plural: yoʂ , yoʐɨ ← you can tell that this root ends in an underlying /ʐ/. Because of this data like this, that L1 learners are naturally taking in, they do figure these things out without literacy. Where reanalysis tends to happen is when a variant set of rules could explain how the language is operating. For example, intrusive R in non-Rhotic dialects of English is the result of reanalyzing /r/s that don't delete before vowels as [r]s that appear in between vowels, and then applying it to places that the old phonology didn't. You are not wrong to think about the effect of literacy though. I think it does have interesting effects that could use some further examination. I remember when I was a kid, learning to spell, and I would write something like "chrane" instead of "train," because I had reanalyzed the [tʃ] in [tʃrejn] as the /tʃ/ it sounded like instead of the /t/ phoneme. Had I not been corrected that it was a T, not a CH, even though it sounds like a CH, would my idea of what phoneme is being represented in those TR words remain as /tʃ/, or would a little more time taking in the language naturally set me straight? It's hard to say.
@driksarkar66759 ай бұрын
Out of curiosity, were the long vowels *ē and *ō not phonemes in PIE? I thought it had 4 phonemic vowels *e, *o, *ē, *ō.
@LandgraabIV9 ай бұрын
He probably meant "2 vowel qualities" when he said "2 phonemic vowels".
@Axacqk9 ай бұрын
12:27 "In certain situations what's underlyingly a consonant can surface as a vowû"
@Kitsaplorax9 ай бұрын
I know this is an unrelated question, but how accurate are the AI Anglo Saxon speeches I've heard and seen on KZbin? I'm not competent to comment on the AS, but the Latin I've heard rendered by AI sounds wrong in cadence and emphasis.
@renerpho9 ай бұрын
I haven't heard those speeches, but if the Latin sounds wrong (and probably is wrong) then I wouldn't have much hope for the Old English!
@thursoberwick19488 ай бұрын
Sound? I get spooked by those creepy head movements the AI faces make.
@TheAmishGamer7 ай бұрын
You’ll have to do a tasting video of the delicious marmalade that your wasp hive produces!