Writing Proto-Indo-European: *gʷr̥h₃-dʰh₁-o- etc. 

More like [h], [χ], [ʁʷ] (or a glottal stop for the first one and the velar fricatives for the last two), along with a short schwa sound where necessary. It is likely that those three sounds were the actual pronunciations.

if you write the letters as superscripts, then it also lines up with the aspiration and labialization diacritics, which is nice.

@@king_halcyoniirc there's a law in proto germanic that implies h3 was voiceless. not sure

*hₐ is actually used, sometimes

​@@king_halcyonso the laryngeals' relationship of h1, h2, h3 can be analogous to ḱ, k, kʷ?

His Poetic Edda and Saga of the Volsungs are available on Audible, if you didn't know!

@@QuasarKaraoke Aren’t all of them? Havamal at least I’ve heard samples of. But my suggestion was to also record the Old Norse text in the reconstructed pronunciation and sell a bilingual edition.😊

Maybe the mean “ancient” in the sense it’s close to Old Norse?

They might mean that strong verbs themselves are a very ancient conjugation of verbs in the language, which is true of all Indo European languages. This was the original way of conjugating verbs, before the "weak verbs" developed in the Germanic branch with the suffix that became English -ed as in "walk/walked". Strong verbs work by changing the root vowel, which is called "Ablaut", and we can see it in English verbs like "Sing-sang-sung". It could also work by lengthening the vowel sound or shortening/deleting it, but I don't have a good example of that in English. If you study Latin/Greek/Sanskrit or other ancient Indo-European languages, you can see all these Indo-European languages have similar vowel changes between the past/present forms of a verb, just to give one example. In Latin and Greek, I know you have to memorize both the present and past tense of every verb, because the vowel changes between the different forms of the verb are unpredictable, for example, the past tense of the verb "Cado" meaning "I fall" is "Cecidi". In that sense, it is almost like every verb is a Germanic "strong verb", just that after the strong verb, it is also followed by a past tense set of endings in Latin/Greek. By the way, when I say "vowel changes", it is a bit misleading. Most Indo-European roots could appear in multiple forms. For example, we get the Latin root "dent-" as in "dentist", but the Greek root "dont-" as in "orthodontics", and these are called the "E and O grades" of the root, which are thought to generally be front/back vowels. There was also usually a "Zero Grade" of the root where the vowel was deleted completely, and lengthened grade, which is just the long vowel version of the root E or O vowel.

I too grew up with the AHD ID appendix 😀

So it's analogous to the derivation of English an + adder from a + naddere.

I've found this the most confusing when studying PIE roots. This makes sense.

@@marjae2767 or more like newt from an ewte?

It is possible that the "S Mobile" came from words endings that ended in an /s/ sound. But, we can't rule out the possibility that the /s/ sound was a meaningful prefix at one point that was optionally added to the stem, even if it was something as simple as an intensifier. It is still one of the great mysteries of Indo European languages.

Also possible that sometimes there was an s- that was conflated with an -s from a preceding words case ending and got deleted using a made up pair of words for example is it bos skorto > bos korto or bos korto > bos skorto both going through a intermediate stage of slurred speech as "bosskorto"

It is exactly what I was thinking about!

I don't think those are comparable. French and those Spanish dialects underwent regular phonetic changes that predictably delete /s/ in certain environments. What we see in PIE with the S mobile are cognate words where it seems pretty random whether a word has the initial /s/ or not, unrelated to any phonetic shift in the daughter languages. My guess is there was a prefix *s- that had some kind of semantic function we haven't been able to figure out yet, because it wasn't something that drastically altered the core meaning of a word in an obvious way.

@@AtomikNY It's not a prefix, the *s- was part of the original root. What is the most commonly-accepted explanation is that the *s- was assimilated and then dropped when the root followed another word which ended in *-s. Considering there are an abundance of PIE suffixes which end in *-s (e.g. nominative singular *-os as mentioned in the video), it was something that clearly happened often enough that words would just become reanalysed without the *s-. Wikipedia gives the example *wĺ̥kʷoms spéḱyont ('they saw the wolves') -> *wĺ̥kʷoms péḱyont. Rebracketing is the name of the phenomenon, and it's happened more recently in English's history too (an ekename -> a nickname; a napron -> an apron, etc.).

​@@marcasdebarun6879 I know that's a common explanation, but I can't think of any other examples where rebracketing occurred on that scale. And I can easily imagine some grammatical prefix or particle getting glued onto words and then leaving us scratching our heads as to what exactly the original meaning was. But I could be wrong, I'm just an amateur here (I mean, I have a linguistics degree, I just never formally studied PIE stuff).

@@AtomikNY Why does the scale matter? Though personally I wouldn't have said the scale was particularly massive, it's just that some roots sometimes arbitrarily lose the initial *s-. The eclipsis which arose in the Q-Celtic languages isn't altogether dissimilar, where a final nasal would mutate the following consonant of the next word, before eventually being assimilated, sometimes into a nasal itself. You can interpret the nasalisation property as having been rebracketed onto the beginning of the next word. That's a rather systematic example which happened throughout the entire language.

The exact pronunciations of *k, *ḱ, and *kʷ are not settled; different linguists endorse incompatible competing theories, some of which reduce them to two sets instead of three while others don't. So the notation {*k, *ḱ, kʷ} stays so people can write about them & have their readers know which speech entities the writers mean even while what they actually sounded like remains unknown & disputed.

There is the famous example used in discussing the history of Greek. You'd arrive at something like *gwoukolos meaning cowherd.

gʷṓwsbʰāt

Cow sees to be gwou-. But there is nothing I can find specifically for child at all.

@@francesconicoletti2547 Yes. The "kolos" part is carer. "*gwouputlos" if you absolutely insist on an absolutely literal translation.

extremely badly if its not outright impossible

I don't think the other reconstructed proto languages are remotely similar enough.

There is internal reconstruction, but even that can only go so far. It does lead to some interesting results (agglutination, the morphosyntactic alignment being slightly different, etc.), but even that can be taken with a grain of salt.

In order to truly reconstruct a pre-Proto-Indo-European, we would need to identify any non-Indo-European languages that share a common ancestor with Proto-Indo-European. Unfortunately, there's quite little agreement among historical linguists as to whether there even are any modern or historical non-Indo-European languages that share a common ancestor with PIE. The Uralic languages (including Finnish, Hungarian, and many others) do seem to have intriguing similarities, but we may ultimately never be able to prove they are related to the Indo-European languages.

This is a claim that is not accepted by historical linguists.

@@demoman1596sh There are quite a few credible linguists who support the Sanskrit origin. The ones whom oppose it tend to have less credibility. ✋

Many languages switch k > s. Not as many switch s > k. Latin centum had a hard k sound, but most of its descendents have a soft s sound. Sanskrit satem *already* had a soft s sound. If we assume the common ancestor had a hard *k in that word, then Balto-Slavic, and Indo-Iranian, both have to switch *k > *s. If that occured during the Sintashta period, that could be a shared innovation among adjacent languages, so 1 easy sound shift. If we assume the common ancestor had a soft *s in that word, then Anatolian, Tocharian, Hellenic, Italo-Celtic, and Germanic each have to switch *s > *k. In some cases, that could be a shared innovation among the western languages, but it still requires separate shifts in Anatolian and Tocharian. So at least 3 harder sound shifts. I'm not an expert, but it seems more likely that PIE had initial *ḱ in that word.

@@marjae2767 Nope. The k sound is similar to semetic speakers like arabs who sound like they are cleaning their throat K while trying to pronounce S-H. Sanskrit is more dynamic & evolved than all the Indo-european derivatives.

@@demoman1596shit’s only ever posited by Indian nationalists

Long-established convention, really.

Maybe takes up too much space in paperwork