What Are the Retroflexes? | Languages of South Asia

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Get a taste of South Asian linguistics from the perspective of retroflexes, a cross-linguistically rare type of sound that for some reason crops up all around the Indian subcontinent! Follow the retroflexes through the history of the most prominent language family in South Asia, Indo-Aryan, exploring its interactions with surrounding languages over time.
#language #linguistics #southasia #india #history
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8 апр 2021

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Комментарии : 113

@lm7338 Месяц назад

🇸🇪 🤝 🇮🇳 Swedish has n,d,t,s retroflexes. Not represented by separate letters, but when they are affected by a preceeding r.

@religious-pickle 12 дней назад

some dialects*

@lm7338 12 дней назад

@@religious-pickle true, that which is considered standard has them.

@maximiliencarayon4282 Месяц назад

Swedish has retroflex consonants in words such as “bort” or “hundarna” where the r and the following letter merge together

@pumpkin2477 29 дней назад

In my accent of somewhat northern swedish accent words ending with r often merge with the first letter of the next word. So "är det bra" often becomes " Ä-ɖet bra", and "jag ser träd" becomes "jag se-ʈräd". I think that is pretty cool

@maximiliencarayon4282 29 дней назад

@@pumpkin2477 sure is pretty cool

@religious-pickle 12 дней назад

some dialects*

@se6369 8 дней назад

@@pumpkin2477That happens in many Norwegian dialects too

@AngermanskLaere Месяц назад

Amazing presentation on a very interesting topic! We Scandinavians are indeed part of the retroflex gang, especially we who have the retroflex flap!

@jagatdeuri3261 Год назад

Assamese has lost it cuz the Assamese language was spoken, developed by people who speak *Tibetan-burman* languages as their mother tongue and use Assamese as their lingua of franca.

@ashutosharora5885 Месяц назад

That's nagamese I guess. Assamese are more indo Aryan than mongoloid.

@jagatdeuri3261 Месяц назад

@@ashutosharora5885 nagamese is just a cerioal dialect of Assamese ( used by the the naga tribes as lingua of Franca ) just like how Assamese is used as lingua Franca by the Tibeto-burmanese tribes of assam. Also Assamese so not a ethincity in first place it's just a umbrella term for different communities.

@thunkwaltz5571 2 года назад

Wow, blown away by the content, gave me a glimpse into linguistic research.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

Thank you for your support!

@paxyandtobz 2 года назад

LOVE THIS! Can you make a video about the scripts/writing systems of South Asia? Also i noticed that English words written in indian languages use ट and ड but if you were to write spanish words you would use द and त!

@Genespeak 2 года назад

That's a great idea, would be even more interesting to discuss how most of the world's writing systems have Mesopotamian origins! I'd be interested if द and त have actually been used to transcribe Spanish historically, but I would guess that ड and ट are used despite the fact that Spanish has true dentals, because of the mapping I discussed in the video and maybe influence from orthography used for English.

@bhashakids 2 года назад

I absolutely LOVE this video. Well explained, well done! Going to link it on my website to help my clients learn these sounds.

@asitwaghmare01 2 года назад

Great video. I just wanted to say that at 6:52 it should be uतkala and not uटkala

@Studio_salesmen Месяц назад

Got to love the post retroflexive trill

@wifil532 Месяц назад

1:42 amazing to think that Burushaski, a language spoken by a small population in north Pakistan can possibly have such an incredible and profound influence on all south asian languages. This language is one of the few remaining languages which still retain the features of retroflexive affricate sounds.

@ahmedharajli189 9 месяцев назад

Keep up the linguistic videos this is really helpful 🙏

@Tecaluca 3 года назад

Really interesting and high quality video

@rahulkrishna7256 2 года назад

Thank you very much, these video is great, thank you brother

@CheLanguages 2 года назад

As a fellow small RU-vidr, I must say that this video is very professionally made! Perhaps we should work together sometime, nè?

@Jay_Teacher 6 месяцев назад

Incredible ❤

@arta.xshaca 7 месяцев назад

The old Pathan substrate, which I would like to call pre-Haraxvati substrate, also probably had retroflex sounds and extended to Bactria and Margia, through which the early Indo-Aryan speakers very likely travelled in their journey from the southern Ural/northern steppes to Punjab/Saptasindhava.

@parjanyashukla176 3 часа назад

Imagination and fantasy!

@usharaj6904 3 года назад

Amazing

@runningforglory Год назад

Really interesting

@TathagatDarkAssassin 2 года назад

6:30 I am guilty of this! In the past few years my oral posture has changed such that most of my retroflexes are fronted.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

Not a bad thing! Awesome that you are aware of your own linguistic tendencies, but don't expend unnecessary effort in "correcting" them!

@KrisP408 2 года назад

Nice. I'm very interested in historical linguistics and genetics too. I think retroflexion originates from the AASI, as both Andaman Islanders and Aboriginals have it, whilst Elamite does not (Distant Dravidian relative). Also Burushakshi, an isolate has retroflexions. So it seems the original foundation of the AASI gave it to the later superstrates. Most mtdna lineages in south Asia are AASI, whether north or south.

@BurnBird1 Месяц назад

Did you learn anything about linguistics since you wrote this utter nonsense of a comment?

@luit361 2 года назад

Very very interesting video. I wanted to share something. As an Assamese speaker born in Delhi, I never formally learnt the language at school and only stared learning how to write Assamese when I was about 15years old at home. I was bewildered by the amount of sound shifts and mergers that I never realised had occurred. The script has conserved all the sounds of Sanskrit while in speech so many letters do not correspond to the sound or have merged/shifted sounds. Like all the retroflex letters are present in script but the sound is same as the alveolar one. It was very hard to learn how to spell and I had to think about the Sanskrit/Hindi way to spell the word if it was a cognate.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

Thanks for sharing this, really interesting! This makes a lot of sense and it's cool how you use the Sanskrit/Hindi to help you here, wish this was possible for the mergers that have occurred in my native dialect!

@luit361 2 года назад

@@Genespeak what is your native dialect?

@Genespeak 2 года назад

@@luit361 I'm a Tamil speaker in the UK, whose dialect, like most Tamil dialects, is not very conservative with distinctions between r and l sounds.

@pvvttt8156 2 года назад

@@luit361 well, Retroflexe sounds don't exist in Assamese. Historically both merged into alveolar stops due to the influence of the already present speakers of Tibeto-Burman and Austro-asiatic languages in Brahmaputra valley when Indo-European speakers entered Brahmputra valley. Slowly, Assamese developed as a lingua franca between all the tribes of Assam and was used even in neighboring states before the arrival of Hindi and English language. That's why in terms of phonology, it's more similar to it's neighboring languages than other Indo- Aryan languages of India. Assamese is my native language too and I had to learn even simple sounds like j,sh,Ch,v,f while learning about phonetics. Dental fricatives were the hardest for me to learn.

@infinite5795 2 года назад

@@pvvttt8156 your name doesn't sound Assamese.

@katm9877 Месяц назад

Kind of offtopic, but I find your handwriting intriguing - especially the t and f On topic: are there retroflexes outside of the region?

@ori5315 28 дней назад

Yes there very much are. Some Australian Aboriginal languages tend to have quite a few, depends on the language but they often have /ɳ/ /ʈ/ /ɭ/ /ɻ/ Russian and some other Slavic languages have two retroflex fricatives - /ʂ/ and /ʐ/ (represented in Cyrillic with ш and ж). Standard Chinese has four, /ʈʂ/ /ʈʂʰ/ /ʂ/ /ɻ~ʐ/, represented in Pinyin with zh, ch, sh, r. Though in some areas these have merged with alveolar sounds. Swedish and Norwegian have them when r combines with another typically alveolar consonant, where they both combine to make one single retroflex sound. Some American and Irish English dialects have [ɻ] as their realisation of the "r" sound. There are probably many more examples, these are just the first that come to mind. One notable aspect though is retroflex plosives and nasals seem cross-linguistically more rare than retroflex fricatives and approximants outside of South Asia and Australia.

@knutholt3486 18 дней назад

You also find all these sounds in most variants of Norwegian and Swedish. Most of them are a contraction of rt, rd, rl, rs. But this does not hold for all instances, and these combinations are not contracted to retroflexes always either. By the way, in many variants of English you can hear the same, for example in words like hard, heart, smart, without the r being pronounced separately.

@verycarla67 2 года назад

FASCINATING! really enjoyed this. love your English orthography, too. :) the way the lower case "f" blends with the next character is beautiful and unique in my experience.

@vishnnuvijay9096 2 года назад

Very very underrated

@kevinninan2137 2 года назад

Can you suggest any good books on Indian languages?

@cuitaro 3 месяца назад

I found a great one known as "Wanderers, Kings, Merchants" by Peggy Mohan. You should have a look at it.

@alyafadhilla4507 2 года назад

Thank you for such a great explanation and ilustration

@soultr549 2 года назад

Make more videos like this

@dyslexictunes248 18 дней назад

hello, im here because sicilian has retroflex d

@chago5624 3 месяца назад

my indigenous tongue muysccubun uses a rare retroflex sibilant fricative too ! :O

@alokakolkar9431 3 года назад

Very insightful video!! - Am glad to see that ‘Speculation’ was indicated as the primary mode of deductive logic used by language historians as its hard to identify an influence one way or the other.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

Many thanks, I think speculation only works here because there are a limited number of possibilities; linguistics is still very rigorous!

@mastrammeena328 2 года назад

I wanted to create some videos about linguistics But you did that before me

@jagatdeuri3261 Год назад

The language map of assam will always be the most amazing one if it was dived based om the language family.

@kriketprayme 3 года назад

Hey Vineeth :)

@kirilvelinov7774 3 месяца назад

Japanese has retroflex t,d,n and s in some words Allophones of ch,j,ny and sh respectively

@Daryavahush 3 месяца назад

i'm pretty sure you meant "javanese"

@josevarela8463 2 месяца назад

You just made a video about a sound, and didn't show the sound for the entire video, wow

@MarcantonioStanga 22 дня назад

Pashto acquired certain retroflex sounds from contact with Lehnda, over the past millennium. It only native developed n and r retroflexes. It’s also not an Indian language, it’s Eastern Iranic and is derivative of Avestan.

@iberius9937 9 месяцев назад

This video was made for linguistic nerds like myself!

@MikeInliters 9 месяцев назад

I can't follow your reasoning when you say "If Indo-Aryan did gain retroflexes from Dravidian, then the retroflex sibilant must've been the feature that was copied". That seems to come out of nowhere. I recognize that you're comparing a few different hypotheses but the chain of reasoning isn't clear. Regardless of whether the internal changes generated the retroflex sibilant, isn't it more likely that IA copied the 4 Dravidian retroflexes? When you refer to the hypothesis of Dravidian "catalyzing" IA retroflexes, where is the mechanism? In the scenario where the internal changes generated a retroflex sibilant and that "triggered" the other retroflexes, that seems to a purely IA-internal development without any involvement of Dravidian.

@MikeInliters 9 месяцев назад

On a separate point, you show the IA retroflexion zone in a certain range of North India in contrast to the location of Dravidian in South India, as if it were an argument against areal transfer from Dravidian to IA, but I understand that to be an argument for such transfer, not against it, given the most likely scenario that Dravidian moved to the south from IVC and had a large presence in north india for a period before those populations shifted from Dravidian to IA. Additionally, the relative absence of Dravidian in the northeast also matches the relative absence of retroflexion in the northeast.

@pikachue602 2 месяца назад

@@MikeInliters anything nonsense...

@andrewtheworldcitizen 8 дней назад

But doesn't the archaic language of Vedic Sanskrit have these retroflex sounds, as well??

@parjanyashukla176 3 часа назад

The first line of Agni Suktam, Rigveda itself as it. There was never a time when Arya speech didn't.

@nafismubashir2479 2 года назад

6:59 has an error

@infinitycubed9195 2 года назад

Yes, the first character is kannada and the rest are seemingly telugu with the last being a va, and i doubt va is retroflex but also theres andotnunder that makes it a non existent character. But i found the idea of a aspirated va funny.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

@@infinitycubed9195 Thanks for spotting, that was supposed to be a ṣa, got a little confused on that row, because I tried to do it from memory. 😅

@ajintomjoseph 2 года назад

Zh is the most difficult among the retroflexes, exists only in standard Tamil( not in all dialects) and in Malayalam (all dialects)

@santhoshrider9474 2 года назад

Malayalam almost in all dialects. Most Kozhikode people will say koyikode only.

@Ida-xe8pg 2 года назад

Badaga and others langs have it

@ajintomjoseph 2 года назад

@@santhoshrider9474 but they can pronounce zh well

@Ida-xe8pg 2 года назад

@@adityanagare9700 Kannada lost it ~a 1000 years ago, marathi and telugu never had it to begin with, i think you are confusing it with /ɭ/ ळ

@adityanagare9700 2 года назад

@@Ida-xe8pg I don't know much about kannada and telungu but as a Marathi person, who has learned thamizh, MalayaLam and kannada scripts, can assure you that the ळ used in Marathi has a pronunciation intermediate to ള-ഴ; ள-ழ , more leaning towards (ழ and ഴ)

@anandsai9378 3 месяца назад

Dravidian also has Alveolar stops.

@myze3224 10 месяцев назад

I came for abu, stayed for vineeth

@themadpro 3 года назад

Second!

@ekamsat429 3 месяца назад

Very nice. Who cares about such how "risible to the Western world" it might appear (7:05)? Better to avoid such statements and just stick to objective readings of the rich and fascinating history of South Asian languages.

@arta.xshaca 7 месяцев назад

That simpson shit is so crappy. Disliked for that. Otherwise, quite good

@martinomasolo8833 День назад

π 😂😂😂

@varunkj155 Месяц назад

i like how no one thinks about how the categorization of languages in the first place into aryan and dravidian was wrong and all indian languages have common roots.

@-__________abhinavtariyal_5999 2 года назад

Do u believe in Indo Aryan Theory still? U know linguistic but stilll Btw There are also words Whose pronunciation devlop through tradition example शंभो ,but some say this according to tradition ,शंभो,,,,,हो,,,,

@ishanbajpai6940 2 года назад

It's called the Indian subcontinent not South Asia.

@Genespeak 2 года назад

They pretty much refer to the same thing and South Asia is more punchy :)

@xS146roar 2 года назад

Lol Bangladesh Pakistan Afghanistan Nepal vutan don't use Indian subcontinent they say south asia

@ishanbajpai6940 2 года назад

@@xS146roar Yeah, because India is a Country, The Indian subcontinent is the geographical region.

@pankajrao5122 2 года назад

@@ishanbajpai6940 India is the subcontinent; Republic of India is a country that's part of the subcontinent

@ishanbajpai6940 2 года назад

@@pankajrao5122 India doesn't cover the whole subcontinent.

@pankajrao5122 2 года назад

Why can't those "Indo europeanists" accept the fact that PIE most likely did have retroflexes, it's just most language families lost their retroflexes. Scandinavians can easily speak Indian retroflexes because their languages have them too, compared to english speakers who dont have any apparent retroflexes. PIE atm isn't some perfected or revealed language it is an ahistorical reconstructed form of what Indo europeans probably spoke, which today is heavily influenced by a Eurocentric bias.

@Yusuketh443 Год назад

english have retroflex

@natejackman7705 Год назад

Scandinavian languages developed retroflexes later seperately, they certainly haven't retained retroflexes from PIE if there were any.

@Dhruv-Kumar 4 месяца назад

PIE didnt have retroflexes according to current status. Sanskrit got them from Dravidian languages.

@kori228 2 месяца назад

there's no evidence that shows early branches have retroflexes, so it's not posited for it to occur you're looking at this from a very Indic-centric point im of view, insinuating that if it exists in Indic then it must exist in PIE

@parjanyashukla176 3 часа назад

@@Dhruv-Kumar That's just their hypothesis - there is no evidence for this.