Proto-Germanic Reconstructed Pronunciation Guide 

Love how he introduces our Polymathy man Luke Ranieri as "one Luke Amadeus Ranieri". Also really cool to see him donating to your patreon. Ancient language bros

Fun fact: the Finnish word for king is "kuningas", a loan from Proto-Germanic retaining its archaic form to this day. It also inflects the same way as many native s-final words, so you get forms like "kuninkaita" (partitive plural), "kuninkaana" (essive singular), etc.

“You can skip the appendix if you want-“ my dude the appendix is the best part, so detailed and has the most information you can’t find elsewhere. Great job!

The German w -> v sound shift is also evidenced in the name William. It comes from the Norman name Willelm, which comes from the German word Willhelm. In regular French, it is spelled as Guillaume because the w sound can't start words. If w was already pronounced like a v in the Middle Ages, it probably would've just been adopted to French as Villelm

35:26 It still surprises me when native speakers of English in Great Britain hear /b/ when I pronounce unaspirated /p/ in English due to my hard to control Spanish accent.

25:55 As a native speaker of Masri-arabic, I believe the vocative would be applicable here, since you'd be addressing the romans directly when telling them to go home. My native language does however only has the vocative case, with all other historic cases having eroded away. I say this to clarify that i may be missing something that a speaker of a language with both the vocative and nominative cases would find self evident. edit: translated, the scentance would be "روحو يا رومانيين" [rɑwːˌɑħʊˌjɛːˈroˌmɛːˌniˌjiːn] (rawwaHu yee romeeniyiin, go-home.3person-plural voc.romans), with the "yee" in front of "romeeniyiin" being the vocative marker. disclaimer: some of these phonemes can have quite a bit of variation, even within the same sentence, so expect especially the "r" "u" and "o" to drift between words.

30:20 Bonus info: The degree of opening for vowels is naturally a little clearer for front vowels than for back vowels because the jaw joint is in the back, so that is often the cause for asymmetries here.

In most daughter languages, the accusative of *haimaz has become an adverb (like English 'home'), so I'd probably just go with that: rūmōnīz gaiþ haimą!

I can confirm that basically all dialects of Spanish, including American ones, have intervocalic allophones of voiced stops. They are closer to approximants outside of emphatic speech, though. Retracted /s/ is limited to Europe and a few Andean dialects, however. Great video, as usual!

29:04 Interestingly, this z -> r change also happened in Latin. For instance, the word "flōs" (flower) used to have a /z/ in most declensions (I assume because it was between vowels), like "flōsem" ([floːzem]) in the accusative, or "flōses" ([floːzes]) for the nominative plural. But then, the [z] became [ɾ] and we ended up with "flōrem" and "flōres", which are the declensions we see in Classical Latin and other forms of Latin further down the line.

I know bugger all about linguistics, but your videos are amazing. Thank you x

I'm not a linguist, nor a historian. But your video are interesting, altho over my head most of the time. Before you posted this video, I had assumed that the linguistic understanding of the proto languages to be distilled and infered from oldest dialects of current languages. I did not know they knew as much as you had detailed in this video. Thank you

Thank you for your fascinating work. These videos deserve 100 million views!

I absolutely adore the direction you're going in, especially the more philosophical and logic-related videos

Simon I haven't been watching your videos as much lately please don't be mad

Fascinating. As a (Canadian) French-speaker - we have a lot more varied vowel sounds than in metropolitan France so a lot of the "strange" ones you go through don't seem so strange to me - I've heard that the nasal vowels in French are a legacy from the Franconian dialect of the early Middle Ages since nasalised vowels don't show up in many Romance languages. I now take it that the nasalised vowels go back well beyond the Middle Ages...

I’m excited for your w-v video! I hope you bring up ablaut (in particular, w-u-ū alternations) and how much more common w => v is than v => w, in addition to going more in depth about the things you mentioned in the appendix.

10:31 I like that you use Dr Lindsey's transcription system for the two diphthongs.

to your question at 27:07 Aþalastainaz / Æþelstan has a cognate, though not a name, in modern German: "Edelstein" IPA: [ˈeːdl̩ˌʃtaɪ̯n] which means gemstone / jewel

I have a pretty good idea of the Proto-Germanic phonetic system myself so the first section was a refresher, but the appendix section was a joy :) From what I’ve seen, names ending in some cognate to “stone” were more of an anglo-saxon thing, so I think calling something like *aþalastainaz a calque is appropriate. Love your stuff, keep up the good work!!

28:27 I noticed a pair of mistakes in your sentence. One is that you put "hundaz" and the adjective in the dative, when they should be in the accusative for this use of "uber". Wiktionary explains the difference as "over (moving across) [+accusative]" and "over, above (positioned above) [+dative]", so it should be accusative since the fox jumped moving across the dog. The other mistake is more minor, you conjugated the verb as though it were in the present instead of the past "jumped". So it should be "Snellô brūnô fuhsaz laskwanų hundą uber hehlaup."

I just found your channel and it already grasped my attention. Although I'm mostly interested in applied linguistics, I still like other linguistics. Hope your channel grows in the future, greetings from Turkiye pal! 💯💯💯

The video I never knew i needed. Looking forward to this

NEW SIMON ROPER VIDEO ABOUT HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS WOOOOO

Thank you Simon! Such a great explanation of language shifts and dialects. 😎

It seems to me quite likely that Proto-Germanic had retracted /s̠/ and /z̠/, for a number of reasons. It seems likely that Proto-Indo-European had a retracted /s̠/ for it to evolve from. Dutch and Icelandic both have retracted sibilants today. And a retracted /z̠/ is more susceptible to changing into a rhotic sound, as it did in Old Norse and in some environments in West Germanic languages (cf. "was" vs "were").

You said you weren't going to talk about the German case system, but I'll just say that as a native German speaker I think it's awesome that we still have it, I love it and how versatile it makes writing. Bit of a tangent, I know, anyway, the video is superb - as always. Wonderful to get insight into and make sense of how all this linguistic chaos that is the languages we speak.

Aðalsteinn Aðalsteinsson was an Icelandic soccer player

I'm not entirely persuaded that 'Romans Go Home' would be translated with the word for a mere domicile. Surely ancient folk had words for homeland (e.g. Roman Patria)? But then again, one challenges the Great Python Montgomery at considerable personal risk.

Thanks for this very comprehensive video! I thought I'd add that PGmc *-z did indeed survive in German! Just not in nouns: the ending -er in strong adjectives like "roter" and determiners/pronouns like "der" or "jener" is descended from it.

regarding retracted s: Middle High German writers were very consistent about the way they wrote s as inherited from Proto-Germanic vs s as developed during the High German consonant shift, so most descriptions of MHG give two sibilant phonemes, /s/, from PG /t/, and /ɕ⁠ ~ s̠/, from PG /s/. There's also corroborating evidence from the way sibilant + consonant clusters developed in modern German. English and other languages later developed /ʃ/ from sk-clusters, which would push /s/ into losing its retraction. So I do think it quite likely, that PG's /s/ phoneme was retracted.

For what it's worth, the retracted z makes the later transition to r make more sense to me (in both Germanic and Latin), so I'd be inclined to support that. It's easier for me to imagine the loss of final z (without passing through r) from this too. For whatever reason, to me [z̄] seems more resilient than [z͇] to changes in manner of articulation.

Fascinating, as ever.

16:00 I don't think the fricative g on the start is considered less alien in European Spanish, although it's the dominant articulation in Galician (see gheada for further development) and Leonese. The fricative g is actually easier to acommodate in these two languages cause there is no voiceless velar fricative for g/j/x. We actually get some confusions when speaking with Spanish speakers sometimes (e.g. vago-bajo) cause this intervocalic consonant is usually much softer in Spanish. I've heard of the word approximant to describe it as opposed to fricative, but I was told there's no meaningful difference.

Proto-Germanic is just the best, and needs to be learnt by any germanic speaking people. It makes communication much easier between us. I must admit I tend to make a mix between an velar and uvular fricative for the "h" sound, in order to make it more distinct compared to the purely velar "g" sound. Much like the Zeelandic people do when they speak standard dutch.

With preservation of the final -z of Proto-Germanic, Faroese also still has it, albeit pronounced as /ɹ/

Hundur and thus the ending you discussed is also used in Faroese

!!! SO EXCITED

“Till” was not originally preposition that triggered genitive. It was a noun meaning “goal” or “endpoint”. The genitive then came from whoes endpoint it was, i.e. ownership. Also the common word ordering when using genitive was the opposite of what English does now. For example “Sturla’s dog” would be “hundaz Sturlu” not “Sturlu hundaz”. This combined gives the impression that it was a preposition triggering genitive, but that was not the case. But as till developed into a preposition in Old Norse, it became a preposition that triggered genitive. So the contruction “till fjalls” in Old Norse (meaning “to the mountain”) actually means “mountain’s till”. So if you walked to the mountain, the “endpoint” till became the object of the sentence and it belonged to the mountain through a gentive.

As for "go home", the Gothic bible has (singular) "gagg du garda þeinamma" (Mark 5:19), so "gards" rather than "haims". "Gards" is perhaps more specific, but using "haimaz" when asking Romans to go home does make sense, as the intent is to ask the Romans to go back to their own world or realm, for which haimaz is indeed the right word. And yes, vocative is the right case here. Like in Latin "Marce, i domum" - "Marcus, go home".

fun fact: According to wikitionary, gaizaz is the ancestor of the 'gar' in garfield

I always found fascinating how Castilian Spanish consonant inventory has so much in common with Icelandic. But Proto Germanic consonant system is pretty much modern Castilian Spanish except gemination, z and complex clusters. The th sound, the lenited voiced plosives /bdg/, the x sound, the f sound that's bilabial in many Spanish dialects (Spanish mostly lost inherited f in the late Middle Ages), the retracted s, the absence of v, but presence of w and j, diphthongs that are actually glides... Of course then the nasal long/short vowels are completely alien to our 5-vowel ear.

There are remnants of the proto-Germanic vocative in Scandinavian and English. A notable example is the word folk, that has the vocative form folkens in Scandinavian and folks in English (no it is not a plural or gentive!)

30:00 I think I have a reasonably similar vowel system to you, and I think that I agree with the notation as the most useful way to notate the phonemes. I'm not entirely convinced though about the idea of reading backwards from that notation and saying that the only difference is one of length per se, where the vowel quality (position) is the primary determinant of a phoneme, such that you could theoretically take a particular quality of sound and extend or curtail it to get another phoneme. If I were looking for a word, I'd perhaps choose something like "attack" or "punch" or "staccattoness" rather than length. And I'm pretty convinced that in my perception rather than two different characteristics (short or long) that any vowel phoneme might have, it's more like a single characteristic of "punchiness" that a vowel might have (short vowels) or lack (long monophthongs and diphthongs). Short vowels by nature have an explosive, momentary quality kind of like a plosive consonant and they cannot be extended without losing their phonemic nature, whereas non-short vowels you can play around with the length. If I'm trying to place an unknown vowel sound, I'll only be looking in one of my vowel inventories: short or non-short, regardless of the quality. That's kind of the major schism between vowels I'd say: short vs. non-short. Monophthongs versus diphthongs seems like a sub-category of the non-short vowels and a less important distinction than the initial short/non-short one (and being somewhat arbitrary anyway, all vowels wander around a bit, it's just a question of how much: from looking at recordings my /o:/ vowel seems to slide about quite a bit for instance!). If I artificially extend the vowel in the word "ship" I get something very close to a realisation of the word "shear" with a /p/ sound plonked on the end, for example. But I don't intuitively recognise my /ɪ/ and /ɪ:/ phonemes as a pair in any sense, that they are "sonic neighbours" so to speak. Rather my /ɪ/ phoneme is much phonemically closer to my /ɛ/, /a/ and /ʌ/ phonemes, because they're in that set of short vowels that are the same "type" of vowel (KIT, DRESS, TRAP, commA, STRUT, LOT, FOOT). /ɪ:/ instead neighbours phonemes like /ɛ:/ and /o:/. I'd say /ɪ:/ seems conceptually closer even to /aw/ than it is to /ɪ/. Anyway, I'm not sure how much: a) this resonates with anyone else's conception of their vowel phonemes or it's just me being a weirdo, or: b) whether this means that for old proto-Germanic speakers they may have felt and expressed some sort of (unknown?) distinction between short and long vowels, as sets, that wasn't simply to do with duration, in the same way that for me the long/short distinction actually seems to be "stabby/explosive" vs. "non-stabby/explosive" vowels, or where aspirated vs. unaspirated actually ends up being the distinction for English speakers in determining what we nominally call "voiced" vs. "unvoiced" phoneme sets. I have no idea how "long-short" phoneme distinctions feel in any other language that might feel different to my own.

Another aspect of /w/ vs /v/ reconstruction: w → v is a very natural and common sound change, while the reverse is not, as far as I know. w → v, with a [β] sound likely occurring as an intermediate stage, is develarization. Professor Justison of UAlbany once told me that this develarization is in essence palatalization, which is an incredibly natural and common form of phonetic assimilation. For example, k → tʃ, a typical example of palatalization, is likewise an example of a velar sound becoming less velar, usually before or after a front vowel. Justison posited that examples of w → v sound changes likewise likely occurred first before front vowels before spreading to all instances. I think some of the meso-American languages he studies showed such an example of just thus, something like w → v / _i, but I'd have to ask him again what his examples were. v → w, on the other hand, makes a lot less sense from the point of view of phonology. [w] is a complex sound with two places of articulation, and it's much easier for it to lose its velar component than it is for a [v] to gain this secondary velar articulation out of nowhere. I have never heard of an example of a modern language with an underlying /v/ or /β/ becoming [w], so I can only assume they are pretty rare. * This one way nature of w → v is another important piece of evidence for the proto-Germanic phoneme to be /w/ and not /v/ or /β/. * [edit] I just remembered that Japanese, a language I know very well, had a sound change whereby [ɸ] became [w], I would guess with [β] as an intermediate stage. This happened intervocalically, before /a/ and /o/, while intervocalically before other vowels it was dropped (and at the start of words it mostly became [h], except before /ɯ/ where it stayed [ɸ]). This IS an example of a labial sound velarizing, to assimilate to back sounds it seems. This example does not involve [v] though, and there is likely something one sided about β → v. Nor does it involve the change generalizing to all instances, although I'd like to look into the details a bit, because around the same time /w/ was dropped before /i/ and /e/, so maybe ɸ → w → Ø / _[-back]. If it is accurate to say that this velarization into doubly articulated [w] did not generalize to all instances, I think there is still merit to my claim that β → w is a more complicated change than w → β, as a simple matter of linguistic entropy.

Pro tip on the Swedish pitch accent: "Tomten" as in "the plot", with accent 1, is stressed largely as you would an English word with first-syllable stress. The stressed syllable tends to be either noticeably higher or noticeably lower in tone than the following syllable (depending on dialect and context). "Tomten" as in "the gnome", with accent 2, has a strong (or normal-sounding to Anglophones) stress on the stressed syllable, and the following one has secondary, weaker stress, as opposed to being completely unstressed, like in accent 1. You'll get a decent approximation by just trying to treat both syllables as equally stressed, tbh (although there is definitely a difference in strength of stress for a native speaker). Tone-wise, the stressed and "half-stressed" syllable tend to be much closer together than they would be in accent 1. What you said was a pretty perfect realisation of "tomten"/"the plot" ... twice. 😁 Sidenote: "Tomten"/"the gnome" is also our name for Santa Claus. Sidenote 2: There are enough of these minimal stress accent pairs with identical spelling, and people are aware enough of (1) that they exist and (2) that they are kind of weird, that there are endless jokes and riddles and crap made out of them, plenty of which only work in writing. One chain of petrol stations briefly had a slogan using the fact that "tanken" (the [gas] tank) and "tanken" (the thought) are one such pair, alluding to their brand being something to think a little extra about. It's a whole thing.

Thanks.

23:20 you promounced those two what sounds exactly the same to a swedish speaker. Tomten "the plot/property" was just done twice. Tomten "the gnome/(the) father christmas" has a pitch course similar to an "m", although the first syllable starts a slight bit lower than the second, whereas tomten "the property" works the way you said it, starting high and ending low, and the "-en" is kinda vestigial, in the sense that the emphasis is much more on the first syllable. I think this is because the root words are different, "en tomt" (a property), and "en tomte" (a gnome)

i wuv you simon

Very interesting video, as always. I was wondering, do we know anything about proto-germanic culture?

29:00 Concerning *-z. Faroese has also kept these for the most part. So, *hundaz is hundur. We have though often for masculine nouns reinterpreted the nominative from the accusative and thus made the -ur morpheme even more common, and sometimes this has interesting results. An example is the word for bird which in Old Norse and Icelandic is fugl in both nominative and accusative. In Faroese, the accusative fugl was used to reinterpret the nominative as fuglur. This makes it pretty close to PGmc. *fuglaz. *stainaz goes through a similar sound change as PGmc *stainaz becomes steinn in ON/MoIce. and steinur in Faroese. The same goes for adjectives so *grōniz > Old Norse grǿnn (Icelandic grænn) > Faroese grønur. EDIT: There is also no pitch accent in Faroese. I don't believe Icelandic has it either.

min 36:16 -- actually, reconstructed latin "ventus" sounded like "wentus" (and with a retracted "s" at the end) pronounced like you would "wwentush" in english, most probably from archaic latin or proto-italic "gwentos" (also identical with protoceltic "gwentos", so far I'm aware of, anyway). So yes, most probably the "w" sound is more original in PIE and PGER

FYI vocative is the case used for the imperative

Thank you

Hearing you speak the short a it sounds similar to modern dutch short a. So like in words such as man, kat, bal, graf, hand.

There is a reason for the difference in pronunciation of the 2 Swedish words you gave on the topic of pitch: one is the definite version of the noun tomt (en=the) and the other is the definite version of the noun tomte (n=the with e already present). There are 2 stresses in tom-te, the greater being on the second syllable. I don't think you were trying to pronounce it that way, and they are not exactly the same word, if you see what I mean.

On thing that I find very weird about Proto-Germanic: In most languages, vowel inventories are very symmetrical and there are always more short than long vowels. PG, however, has more long than short vowels and far more back vowels than front vowels. Another thing that I find odd about Proto-Germanic is that long vowels tend to be more open than short vowels. This is weird for me because my native language is German and we do it exactly the opposite way. In Modern German, long vowels tend to be more closed than short vowels.

This guy has some great south England vegetation drip going on. Look at those greens!

Although they're not Germanic, the -az ending has survived in the Baltic languages. Lithuanian has -as and Latvian has -s.

Romans go home: generally in older Germanic languages (and also Latin & Greek, possibly elsewhere in IE) we tend to see adpositions taking the accusative with more "active" senses and the dative with more "static" ones, and Bosworth Toller list the OE as also appearing with the genitive or accusative in some instances (with the necessary meaning here, with Mitchell & Robinson also adding the instrumental) so I'd probably have gone for haimą tō here rather than haimai tō. I'd definitely go for vocative in this context, although as you say there is no difference in form here. The Romans are being addressed rather than functioning as an argument of the verb (imperatives not having explicit subjects). So I'd go for rūmōniz gaiþ haimą tō

In some regions of Sweden we have a special I-sound which is spoken with the tongue almost pressed all the way up in the mouth, which sounds a bit posh to some, but actually comes from more rural areas originally. I haven't heard this anywhere else but Sweden.

Good video. I noticed you used a different word order for the imperative sentence than for the declarative sentence(s). (Probably correctly)

Elfdalian also retains the w from proto-Germanic.

You hair is different. It’s looks good this way.

15:10 One theory I've seen is that the "NG-rune" owes its existence to this arrangement. The thinking is that [ŋg] was different enough from [nɣ] to make ᚾᚷ seem insufficient for representing it.

Regarding the nominative marker -z: both Icelandic and Faroese have retained it as -ur. But what about strong masculine German adjectives, as in "ein guter Tag"? Is that historically the old -z nominative marker? As for the pronunciation of -z, I speculate that there were dialectal differences, but it was likely voiced in most dialects (z, zh). Gothic seems to be an exception. Could Gothic still have had a different sound like English "sh" for proto-Germanic -z, so that a word like "stains" had two different s sounds? The Gothic alphabet was based on the Greek alphabet which didn't distinguish between the s sound and sh sound (neither did the Latin alhpabet, Romans would use S for both sounds). The plural -z is retained in all Scandinavian languages as -r, at least in writing (various dialects have dropped it). An interesting feature of proto-Germanic is the -az and -oz (like the plurals) correspond to -os and -az in other IE languages. Even in the modern languages -ar is mostly masculine and -or feminine, as opposed to, say, Spanish, where -as is feminine and -os masculine. At some point "a" and "o" switched places in Germanic. Maybe you can say something about how such an interchange could have taken place. I assume there must have been an intermediate stage. Interestingly, Plautus still latinised Germanic *Mannaz into Mannus.

There were also very short vowels, like yers in slavic descended from short u (a hard yer) and i (a soft yer).

Simon, i have been following you for several yeats and appreciate your videos - and your way of speaking and explaining - very much. I shoukd lije to ask, why in this video you seem to think that Proto-indogermanic vowels were only distinguished quantatively,, and not also qualitatively, as in all modern germanic and baltic languages? A propos, the masculine nominative singular ending -az still exists today in lithuanian as -as. Also, the w sound still exists in various Dutch/Flemish dialects, and in standard dutch in the middle and at tge end of words: e.g., the w in dutch words rouwen, duwen, stuwen, lauw, dauw, pauw - all sound like the english w. In Lithuanian, the v before a is quite loose, and sounds much like an english w: vardas, vanagas (at least in the standard southwestern dialects, and in older speach). Italian qua is pronounced like kwa. So, this sound is not fully extinct outside of english. Thank you so much for this, and all your videos.

It is actually not unlikely that Proto-Germanic had two allophones of /l/, with /l/ perhaps being velarised after certain consonants and vowels. Such a distinction existed in Old Norse, at least, with a backed (possibly velarised) /l/ developing into a retroflex flap [ɽ] in words like "blod" (blood) and "nål" (needle), but a dental [l̪] word-initially and after certain consonants in most modern Swedish and Norwegian dialects. Old Icelandic also seems to have distinguished between two L sounds, but merged them later. The dustinction might have arisen during the Old Norse period, but might just as well be even older.

i think elfdalian also has [w]

In "Romans, go home!" "romans" would be in plural vocative case. Basically, vocative case is used only if you address someone. Imperative is a dead give away for it, but you can also try adding some "attention" particle, like "yo" or "hey" and see if it changes the basic meaning If we imagine that some English dialect has a distinct vocative case "Simon tells us about PG sounds" ("Yo, Simon tells us..." is a very different phrase) would be "Saimon tells us ..." But "Simon, tell us about PG sounds" ("Yo, Simon, tell us..." is the same phrase) would be "SaimonE, tell us..." Just as "SaimonE, I watch your videos a lot" (the same as "Yo, Simon, I watch...") and "SaimonE, I have a question for you" (the same as "Yo, Simon, I have...") Hope that clears it up a bit for you Thanks for your awesome content

In Afrikaans, one could also say "Romeine, gaat huis toe!"

Hi, If you can't do certain sounds, such as some r-sounds, or you have trouble doing those sounds, what's a good way to practice early Germanic pronunciations without reinforcing bad habits?

That garden could do with some reconstruction, too.

Do you have any insights about why the English word “one” begins with a w sound? I checked some etymology websites. All I saw is that at some point (14 century) the w sound appeared. What could be the reason? Is this a systematic sound change? Any similar words with the same change? Thanks!

aðalsteinn is an icelandic name

Northern Albanian (Gheg) has three vowel lengths and the nassals and dipthongs match fully the proto Germanic and also the consonant n has two nassals with ng and nd clusters. And Arbëresh dialect have the γ sound which is actually written as RR.

I bet you were a lot of fun at a Renfaire or in a D&D campaign.

tō trigered the accusative case in proto germanic

Would you consider attempting a primer on the Germanic Parent Language?

In my dialect (in the south east of The Netherlands) 'louse' is pronounced exactly like in Proto-Germanic: /lu:s/. Apart from that and a handful of other words my dialect has developed far from Proto-Germanic, just like all Germanic languages. So I'm the last one to claim that my dialect is even close to Proto-Germanic.

A few tidbits about things that can exist in phonologies : Northern Italian languages often have a retracted s and z, despite having a sh zh pair (and sometimes even a third pair/single, like a v oi ced alveolar fricative pronounced with the tip of the tongue at the Base of the LOWER teeth). Southern Italian languages merge voiced and voiceless stops in unstressed, ungeminated positions, and they have a "semi-voiced" quality - I think they probably have a short voiceless window within the stop, surrounded by voicing

Can anyone help me identify the technical term for the distinction between the "Dance" or "Can't" vowel between British RP and American English? I guess it would be the /a/ vs /ae/? Does this distinction have a proper name? Also, what is the rule in British English which guides WHICH "a's" go from the sound in "apple" to the sound in "art". Thanks!!

With the discussion of the "voiced stops" and their allophones, it's not quite accurate to say they were stops in clusters (or even when following a consonant) This was only true for homoganic nasals and, for *d (after *l, *z, and in some instances, *r), with *b & *g being fricatives after *r, *l, or *z, hence *albiz "elf" > elf in English rather than the *elb we'd expect if *b were a stop after any consonant, and *algiz "elk" > elk in English (via Old English eolh) rather than the *elg (from Old English *eolg) we'd expect if *g were a stop after any consonant The general pattern seems to be that only homorganic consonants trigger the stop allophone, with inconsistent treatment of *r, and noting that as clusters agree on voicing these are the only consonants that could occur before a voiced "stop" I wonder if the inconsistent treatment of *r when it comes to stop allophones could be a result of *r getting backed as *z became rhoticised (so instead of the usual suggestion that *z > *ʐ > *ɻ > and then merges into *r we'd have *z > *r pushing *r > *ɻ, which then merges back into *r) in a period where the voiced stop allophony was still (partially) productive. Unfortunately given the frequent redistribution of the *d and *ð allophones in most Germanic languages it's hard to tell how widespread this inconsistency is

Interesting. German still has the "stressing the first syllable of the stem"-system

Latin American and Iberian (Castilian and other) Spanish agree on the b, d, g, gw consonants; voiced plosives b, d, g, gw at the start of words, voiced fricatives bh, dh, gh, ghw in the middle between vowels, and there are rules in Spanish phonology (pronunciation) for what happens after nasals (m, n) versus liquids (l, r, rr) versus (s) or dialectal (z). Castilian Spanish treats soft c and z (letter zeta, not phoneme) as the unvoiced th fricative (theta); however, Latin American Spanish has soft c, z as an unvoiced (s). Both Latin American and Iberian Spanish, including Castilian, vary soft g, j between (h) and (x) (unvoiced velar fricative), with (x) still occurring after a vowel or at the end of a word. The double LL is (ly-) in Castilian, but (y-) in Latin American Spanish, and it can also further mutate along with (y-) to a (dzh) (English judge) like sound, or a (zh) like sound (French beige, Anjou, etc.). Ch = (ch) as in English, Ñ = (ny-) as in canyon (borrowed from Spanish). The letter X in Spanish is usually (ks), dialectically (gz) if voiced, but in some words, it is an older (h, x) or the even older (sh). Spanish R and RR are very distinct, R is a single flap or tap, RR is a double or repeating trill. CU before a vowel, always (kw); que, qui, quy = (ke, ki, ki). GU is (gw) in gua, guo, guu; but (g) in gue, gui, guy, and (gw) with GÜ in güe, güi, güy. Likewise, QU is (ke, ki, ki) in que, qui, quy, and CW is used when (kw) is needed.

I wish there was a video like this but for Sanskrit. Or maybe a video showing how Sanskrit changed to Prakrit, then eventually Hindi and other Indo-Aryan languages. There’s little to no linguistic content for Indo-Aryan languages.

Interesting; I read that Sanskrit also had a trimoraic vowel.

if your doing a follow up, could you explain why g is reconstructed as a fricative and this isnt assumed to be an independent development in english and dutch maybe related to the platalization that happen later, why f and v are taken to be bilabial, why kw and gw arent already taken to be stop glide sequences, and why h is reconstructed as x rather than something more like the old english system

Isn't it probable that [p] [t] [k] were still ejectives, or at least pre-glottalized stops, in earlier PG? They should have survived in some dialects of Danish, or even of English, but I'm not sure about that.

I’m watching this before bed because Simon is the best somnolent I’ve cum across on this platform.

27:10 It has a cognate in Icelandic: Aðalsteinn [aðal̥s̠t̪ɛid̪n̪]

Could the Proto-Germanic extra-long/trimoric vowels haved been the closed(i,e,o and u)ones?

The nominative *-az still survives as -ur in Faroese too.

0:46 I'm curious, how do we have such a higher degree of confidence in phonetic reconstructions of PGmc than PIE?

33:01 So where do voiced aspirated plosives fit in to all of this? Their existence kind of throws a wrench into the explanation given, does it not? (That said there may be something I'm missing / you may address this later on in the video so feel free to disregard me)

9:30

I would thing that Romans in Romans go home would be voccative. You're addressing them. And Home would be an adverb as apposed to a noun with an adposition. I would NEVER skip the apendix. Unless it were VERY badly done.

you're correct that icelandic doesn't have pitch accent 👍

you haven't put the link to geoff lindsay's video on aspiration in the description