Are Historical Accent Reconstructions Just Nonsense? 

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

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.

​@@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.

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

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)

…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.

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

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

@@sophienussle1135more like a man on man song

'degenerate feet'

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

@@fs5209 Irish!!

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.

@@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

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.

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

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

@@tuggercarlson hard disagree

​@@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.

hear hear!

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.”

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

@@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?

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.

@@HuckleberryHim interesting! Thanks!

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.

It's not a big deal. Hair grows.

@@OlgasBritishFells I think that's why it's such a sisterly thing LOL

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.

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)

It's not a swing.

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.

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.

@@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'.

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.

That's not being an empiricist, that's lacking object constancy.

@Theovertonwindowshiftednotme ?

@Theovertonwindowshiftednotme being an empiricist can accept information outside of their own direct experience as long as it's credible. Someone who lacks or has issues with object constancy have trouble or plain doesn't have the cognitive ability to process concepts outside of their own direct experience.

@@ANTSEMUT1 I've only heard of it as "object permanence", maybe that's why they're confused; or maybe they're not familiar with the concept at all

@@thatotherted3555 i don't blame them it's hard to explain object constancy, especially since it has overlap with object permanence.

I was thinking somewhere in Western Ireland, maybe Galway as it wasn’t as distinctive as Kerry/Cork, with the second recording sounding more West Country. I do hear some ‘Trailer Paek Boys’ sounds though. I could certainly hear the diff between the 2 recordings in any case.

Each of the places to which you attribute accents actually have many different accents depending on where in that country you go, and what place in the socio-economic structure a person lives in or was raised.

Simon specifically addresses the advantages and disadvantages of this approach in the video. It's very inconsiderate to leave a drive-by comment like this assuming that you know something he doesn't when you clearly didn't take the time to watch it through.

Lmao

@@SirBenjiful”A drive by comment” by assuming I’m unassuming,really now.I’ll leave it at that.

@@SirBenjifulAny opinions on Ai? I thought what i said remained relevant and to the point.

Oh, you're one of those.

Thank you for pointing this out before any more people saw the video! Haha

​@@simonroper9218are you interested in the English Romany language?

@@suziq4394 I suspect that the Romanichal would NOT like Gadgies to take any interest in their language. It would be like looking under a Freemason's apron, or a Scotsman's kilt.

@@faithlesshound5621 that may be the case.. but the language is dying. Many Young people no longer know it (and older ones too for that matter).. some of us still speak it , but less and less..

@@suziq4394 Perhaps it will become more of a ceremonial language, like Coptic or Polari.

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

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

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

@@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]?

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.

@@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. ;)

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

@@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?

@@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".

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.

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.

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

I for one am delighted that he's documenting his interest in it here on RU-vid. 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!

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

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

But some British accents are rhotic eh

Excellent point man.

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

Lols

That would be beyond obscenely difficult, but glorious

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".

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.

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

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

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.

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.