Відео

It's funny that when You are trying to pronounce voiceless stops without aspiration, I definitely hear [ba da ga] hahae.

Peter Pan I noticed that you had lost a few years with the haircut. Glad you told me they were 2 recordings cos I wondered why the second was easier to decipher. I learn a little every video you put up so Diolch / Thanks

What a load of FUN! I love this channel. This is a topic I've often thought about, thanks!

Some people expect a Time Machine along with iPhone recording as the only way to know how people used to speak. Which would be very very cool.

Thank you.

Excellent 👍👍

A lot of this isn't about debating fact, many of the contrarians in your comments despise linguistics as a science. They hate translation as well. I can see why, somebody shouldn't be able to survive off of the manipulation of words. Plus we just need one language anyway and obviously the internet shows it is English. If I had to make RV windows 60 hours a week busting my ass, I too would hate all "soft work" and root the machine translation and the attack on soft sciences.

Just because we don't have the proof doesn't mean that we don't have the evidence.

There is a long way between nonsense and irrefutable proof. A reconstruction is imo always an approximation and an abstraction to the real thing at the time, especially where protolanguages are concerned, but I do deem it useful and interesting. In fact, even a modern standard language does not describe daily speech but is an abstraction. That does not make it nonsense.

One thing with the FACE and GOAT vowels is that a lot of people think they are monophthongs until you point out that they pronounce them as diphthongs. It's one of the harder bits of IPA to teach because of that. But I guess the fact that this guy can tell that spelling and pronunciation are different suggests he would be able to tell.

In response to something mentioned in the opening, that perhaps your audience would be less interested in the evidence for historical pron, I assure you that some of us are and that if you have the time we'd learn a thing.

How do we know what people sounded like before there was recording devices?

As a 54-yr-old working class Londoner with an MA in linguistics, I can state with some confidence that this is absolute nonsense.

Wouldn’t we be able to solve a large phonetic judgment gap by reading old nursery rhymes or poetry? By reciting these verses it reveals how words sounded during the time of writing.Yesterday i linked a 19th century poem by Percy B Shelley that sounded very much like it would’ve during the time.Maybe its conjecture on my part. ua-cam.com/video/vc7Al2HbIPQ/v-deo.htmlsi=zim9m1KRfN_SKfof

I can understand why so many people have lost faith and trust in many areas other than just phonetics.We’ve put our trust in institutions and governments for a long time but have been betrayed by these same constructs more than ever.It’s going to take a while before many will regain their confidence in them.I think many are just throwing out the baby with the bath water.

The hair is nice. The shirt is as well.

27:35. From my perspective, sounded very Atlantic Canadian.

How did the vowel in 'caught' end up becoming higher than the vowel in 'lot' if the opposite was the case in robinson's time? Also when did the lot vowel become ɒ in RP before going back to /ɔ/ in standard southern british?

As a 1950s child listening to the bbc Listen with Mother radio programme I was always irtitated by the RP pronunciation at the end of the rhyme 'The north wind doth blow....... The robin.......will sit in a barn and keep himself warm..... I just felt the 2 words, barn and warm should rhyme and that the whole should be recited in a proper, not posh, accent. 😊

Pronunciation changes are more difficult for most of us to understand than those bits of history with visible evidence but I found these explanations pretty clear! NB: I was thinking that you had a very good haircut in the first few minutes of this😂

Today someone speaking like this would be told to go back to their country

What a load of bollox'

That was very interesting - and it's made me a lot less sceptical. I think that as a child, confronted with several different "correct" ways of pronouncing Latin (the traditional English way, the Reformed Pronunciation way, the Ecclesiastical way...), I assumed that they were all wild and equally random attempts at speaking Classical "proper" Latin from Rome in the time of Augustus. I had no idea there were any detailed descriptions of phonetics of any language before the late 19th century. So I assumed that "historical English accents" were also pretty random. Thank you for educating me!

One of the possible reasons people object to Accent reconstruction seems to be racism. I read a comment on one post objecting to Shakespearean original pronunciation because it sounded too much like Irish. No discussion of evidence, just didn’t like how Irish it sounded. and quite frankly, to a British ear any rhotic accent is going to sound either American or Irish.

Huh, it sounds like we'd be totally fine in 1586 with our modern day English.

Thanks for showing what's behind the curtain a bit. As you say, people who haven't done much reading about historical linguistics have no idea how much information exists on the topic. The "bollox" people would be well served by cracking open a book or two.

Since all language enthusiasts are gathered in one video, do you think a masters in linguistics or (germanic) philology is a good choice?

What do you think about reconstructions of languages which did not have phoneticians discussing the pronunciation of them to the same extent, like ancient ones?

That’s weird. I was thinking, ‘Looking dapper, Simon! Nice hair!’👍 Absolutely freaking fascinating as always, thank you and agree 100% with your POV on this.🙏

I love how you apply your deep scrutiny and analysis equally to yourself. How you don't allow yourself to bluff and bluster, to blind people with science in order to paper over any cracks, or intimidate people into not challenging you any further. It's not about who's right and who's wrong, or who's intellectually superior. It's just these are the facts as much as we understand them.

As an aside, I was discussing pronunciation with my kid. I can see a case for keeping the root word as is. i.e. pronounce-iation.

The only reason I was able to tell they were two different recordings was because the first one sounded to me like "Aim from..." and I had to really think hard to try to understand what it meant, whereas the second one was clearly "I'm from...." Even so, I was second-guessing myself a bit!

I find that this is the case with classical philology/textual criticism as well. Somehow it is really counterintuitive to many people that we can reconstruct what an ancient text originally said from later, often mediaeval, copies

If there is ever an opportunity, it would be so cool to see some kind of collaboration between you and J. Draper. I'm sure you two would have some very cool conversations!

As soon as you use the word “should” you are making an *objective* moral claim. If you say that “linguists/anthropologists” should be descriptive rather than prescriptive you are making an objective moral statement and thereby refuting your whole absurd relativistic worldview. The sciences are indeed descriptive, studying states of affairs, or what is, but this is a different question from what ought to be, and it’s erroneous to say that because the sciences only describe what is, that there is therefore no objective metric from what ought to be. This shows the limitations of the myopic scientistic worldview most academics are wedded to. Also, we clearly don’t “all agree” on the need to reduce human suffering, or there would be no need for a justice system, and even if we did all agree, it wouldn’t follow from that state of affairs that we ought to reduce suffering.

Just because I don't understand how something is done doesn't mean that no one understands how it is done. Rather sad really.

‘Historical Accent Reconstructions’ are not ‘Nonsense’ as this is a very interesting subject for investigation. To state the obvious, given the nature of researching anything that happened in the distant past, whilst ‘conclusions’, (however compelling), can be drawn, they will ultimately be impossible to verify.

Long sideburns would suit you

How does this fella know

any research on intonation you would recommend?

Anything that happened after people started writing about stuff has evidence. Not necessarily a lot, but smart people with way too much time on their hands (and, weirdly, funding) will find a way to connect the dots. I find it much more difficult to accept that people can say "look, here's half a tooth, so that's definitely a homo bollocsis that lived three million years ago, we have no other human remains from any other individual 500k years before or after that within 1000 km of the site where we found this bit of bone, but this one probably had blue eyes and was left-handed" (I am exaggerating slightly). I do think that these scientists (mostly) know what they are talking about, though, which is why this type of science and research never ceases to amaze me, as I simply wouldn't have the patience.

A generous interpretation regarding the mistrust you mention might notice the clear and necessary entrenchment of a language in a living social context that differs from broader historical claims about political systems or trade culture, etc. Can we reconstruct a language with a high statistical accuracy? Yes, but I think much of the skepticism is similar to other anti-scientific scepticisms: there is a lived reality, a context for language, that, just as today, attaches to identity, region, and social relations that a pure or authoratative linguistic reconstruction can sometimes underplay or miss altogether. To put it simply, no one simply "speaks" a language isolated as a system, now or 1000 years in the past.

Brilliant! As always!

I'm not sure if this counts as a kind of win for the experiment (I think it probably does), in that it was immediately and glaringly obvious to me that the two recordings were different. But while you mightn't have tricked me into thinking they were the same recording, that was absolutely nothing to do with the phonetic realisation of any of the phonemes! My mind was entirely preoccupied by the fact that they blatantly weren't the same recordings because of the differing cadences of the sentence in each case. (And I'm writing this having only had the initial impressions and not having gone back to relisten at this point) Which I think goes directly to your point about the extent to which people naturally take away overall, impressionistic senses of reconstructions rather than specific detail!

In school I had a giant, desk copy of the American Heritage Dictionay that included etymological notes on every head word, often going back to Indo European. This fascinated me and is likely one of the things that initially interested me interested in studying language. Of course, no one really knows what Indo European sounded like, or of its word stock. All we know is reconstruction. David Crystal explains some about his method in reconstructing late 16th c southern British accents in "Originial Pronunciation" recordings of some of Shakespeare's work. Poetry and the rules of poetics are productive sources. Consider Guthrie's "Motorcycle song": I don wanna pickle. I just wanna ride my moto cicle. I don wanna die. I just wanna ride my moto cy....... kal."

The haircut looks great man and I see you got a shave. Some special event coming up?

Would be great to see an animated formant chart showing pronunciation changing over time (and geographically?)

You know when In Our Time is doing a science rather than an arts episode and Melvyn invariably bangs the table and demands to know what the hell the real world application of all this theory is? What would your answer be with regards to historical phonetics?

I’m amazed that people were writing about pronunciation so long ago. Makes me even more curious about old books.

Simon, you are a linguist, I studied it for 2 years and I'd say you know far more than me and quite possibly as much as any expert on the subject of Phonetics and Historical English. I'd give you an honourary degree if I could.