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.
interesting. This germanic word was also loaned to Slavic as *kuningu (which later because of sound shifts became *kunįgu > *kunįdzi > *kunędzi > *kъnędzь). In Polish (my native language) it turned into the word "ksiądz" (nowadays meaning priest), but there is a derivative "książe" meaning prince
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
“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!
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.
In my dialect (General American with the caught-cot merger), the biggest difference between the voiced and unvoiced stops is aspiration (when they appear at the beginning of a syllable) and the length of the preceding vowel (when they appear at the end of a syllable).
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.
the one nitpicky detail I would say is I don't think يا is categorized as a *case*, but instead just a vocative particle. even in MSA يا can be followed by different cases depending on the meaning/context
@@camelcaseco that actually makes sense! we do tend to treat it as a separate word in masri, tho i dont think this interferes too heavily with my point? at least i hope. thank youu!!
While I agree with your prognosis, the fortunate thing is that the nominative plural and the vocative plural in PGmc are actually identical (in fact, I don't know any IE languages where the nominative and the vocative differ in the plural).
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
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.
In some dialects of European Spanish we still pronounce coda s as approximant rhotic [ɹ] before voiced consonants, so voicing of s triggers rhotacism. s (> z) > ɹ dos dedos [doɹ ðeðos] See how we also have lenited allophonic versions of /bdg/. Exactly what Simon mentioned, but that's pretty much Standard In Spanish. Not having those allophones is typical Italian accent when speaking Spanish.
I don’t think most ppl realise that almost all these pretty languages come from Proto European, which was the first logical language created by a dude a long time ago, which was very logical for that time, considering how ancient it was, so the languages that came from it had a very strong base / root words, so to speak, and then other similar dudes also dedicated all the time to studying and observing and modifying the language and turning it into multiple languages, as they had better ideas, and then each language that was made from it got modified again and again, and made into a more modern / better / more refined language - the dude that edited Modern English and Modern Dutch made them into the most perfect looking and easiest to read / spell / pronounce / learn / memorize etc and the most refined languages ever, so the most pretty vowels and consonants were used in most words, and both have the EY / EI diphthong or sound, which is one of the prettiest sounds ever, and he made sure that they would look AND sound gorgeous, so the prettiest and most serious-looking spelling was used for each word, and then the most perfect pronunciation was used for each word, so it’s based on which pronunciation sounds best for each word, as it should be, and one is supposed to learn each word with its pronunciation and spelling, which is the right way to learn a new language or a new word, and over the past century, word use and accents etc was influenced by movies / videos / songs etc that were rełeased in each area / region, which is why there are so many different accents today, technically the pretty languages and accents were created and decided by certain dudes and inspired by nature, and the rest were taught the language / accent at school or via movies / music etc, and the other languages were also inspired by them in one way or another, even the non-pretty ones...
It’s actually kinda funny that most ppl don’t know that most languages come from the same language, and that the other ones were also inspired by them, like, the idea of creating a language itself, even though they were made into a different language, so technically all languages have the same source in one way or another - most of the base words in all Germanic languages and in all Celtic languages and in all true Latin languages and in Slavic languages such as Slovene share the same root words, which were modified multiple times by certain dudes, and many of them are still very similar as they weren’t modified that much, while others were modified more and aren’t easy to recognize anymore, especially many words in Celtic languages have been modified a lot, pretty much turned into a different word, but I am learning the 6 Celtic languages and all Germanic languages and the true Latin languages and Slovene etc, so I have noticed a lot of words that come from the same word, especially many of the basic verbs and nouns and nature related terms, however, most words in each new language that was created are going to be different because they weren’t in the first language, and the first language only had a few thousand words, so the number of words increased over time, with each new language modifying, as more and more items became known to them and more items were created, so those dudes also created new words for those things, in addition to modifying the words that already existed, however, nowadays there are a lot more words than ever before, so now the modern version of those languages contains tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of words created by ágènts, so all these pretty languages have so many words now and are a lot more complex then they used to be, so now it is possible to express very complex ideas while using very descriptive terms and descriptive verbs that didn’t exist back then!
For example... - Sowilo is ancestral to Sun / Sol / Son / Soleil / Sonne / Zon / Sonce / Sunce / Sinne etc... - jera is ancestral to year / jaar / jahr / jiar / år / ár / ári / any / ano / anno / año / bliain / bliadhna / blwyddyn etc... - raido / raiðo / rīdaną are ancestral to raid / road / rida / rit / riða / ri / rijden / ritt / reidio etc... - aþnam is ancestral to any / ano / anno / año / bliain / bliadhna / blwyddyn etc... - isaz / isa is ancestral to isa / is / ice / ys / ijs / ís / eis / eisi / eisia etc... - gebo / gebaną are ancestral to gift / gjöf / geben / ge / geven / gi / gefa / give / gee etc... - fehu is ancestral to fee / feh / feoh / vieh / fioh / vee / fēo etc... While the Latin alphabet and other alphabets are based on Runes, or Runes are based on the Latin alphabet etc, which look almost the same, and were modified a bit - while the exact details aren’t known, one thing’s obvious, that they all come from the same source, and based on the first writing system that came with Proto European... ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚬ ᚭ ᚱ ᚴ ᚼ ᚽ ᚾ ᚿ ᛁ ᛅ ᛆ ᛋ ᛌ ᛏ ᛐ ᛒ ᛓ ᛘ ᛙ ᛚ ᛦ ᛧ ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ ᚷ ᚹ ᚺ ᚾ ᛁ ᛃ ᛇ ᛈ ᛉ ᛊ ᛏ ᛒ ᛖ ᛗ ᛚ ᛜ ᛟ ᛞ
I like it how most of the base words used in Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelic etc were completely modified, so it’s not easy to see that they came from the same words - for example, the verb dar / dare used in Portuguese / Spanish / Latin / Italian etc (meaning to give) was changed to thoir in Scottish Gaelic (dar -> dhar / dhoir / thoir or dar -> tar / toir / thoir etc) and, in Irish it was changed to tabhair (now it looks like a completely different word) but, Welsh still has dyro / ddyro and many other verbs like that which are still quite similar to the Spanish verbs, so it becomes more obvious when comparing them to the Spanish words, because Celtic languages are closer to Latin languages than they are to Germanic languages when it comes to vocab, though Celtiberian was more similar to Greek, so it didn’t look like a true Celtic language at all, but the 6 Modern Celtic languages (Welsh / Breton / Cornish & Manx / Irish / Scottish Gaelic) are really gorgeous and very refined, so they were improved a lot, and they are the true Celtic languages!
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!
> "Go home"? This is motion towards, isn't it, boy? > Dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! Oh, the... accusative! "Domum", sir! "Ad domum"! > Except that "domus" takes the...? > The locative, sir! > Which is...?! > "Domum".
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.
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
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!
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").
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 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."
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.
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 In West Germanic, the *-z was normally lost, but there seems to have been a dialectal difference between north and south regarding whether it was lost in one-syllable words, like the pronouns you listed, as well as the articles. In the north it was lost there too, while in the south it was kept there. The nominative -er ending of adjectives is actually a descendant of these pronoun forms: it's the ending of "der" that's been glued onto other words by analogy.
@@ruawhitepaw yep yep, you can see it in say Pa Dutch vs Plautdietsch where you have mir, dir, etc contrasting with mie, die (though "you" is somewhat complicated in Plautdietsch)
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.
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.
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.
@@F_A_F123 Now I haven't studied the details of Slavic linguistics, but I think I think you are assuming that Belarusian ў comes from Russian в. Rather, I think the instances of /v/ in Slavic languages evolved from a /w/ originally. If this is the case, the instances of ў in Belarusian are not an example of a v → w sound change, but rather a w staying w in some positions, while become v in others. If you're right though, and that is an interesting example I forgot about. It looks like in terms of the internal phonology (not the history, but the way you analyze the language as it is now), we have an underlying /v/ → w, and not vice versa. I might posit that the underlying sound is actually NOT /v/ but rather a /β/ becoming either [w] or [v]. Sometimes, if there is good reason to do so, phonologists will analyze the underlying form as an abstraction that doesn't actually appear in the surface level representation of the language.
@@rdreher7380 I don't really know the history of Belarusian language, but I did think w comes from Old East Slavic v (of course it couldn't come from Russian v because Russian isn't an ancestor of Belarusian). Also ł turned into w in syllable codas, merging with it (and, as I remember, [w] and [v] are allophones). On Wikipedia, there is /w/ for south dialects and /ʋ/ for north dialects for OES. And there is a relict (? I think that's how that thing is called) of /v/ being a /w/: it's the only voiced obstruent that doesn't voice the preceding consonant (/svoj/ and /tvoj/ for example)
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.
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.
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.
Also, only the original /s/ phoneme develops a voiced allophone [z]. The /s/ from earlier /t/ never does, it always stays voiceless. Which is why German today has the spelling distinction between s and ß.
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".
“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.
@@RobbeSeolh Yes. And the genitive also comes after, e.g. “Ziel der Reise” (destination of the journey) or “Ziel des Unternehmens” (goal of the undertaking). The word ordering in Old Norse and Proto-Germanic was often similar to modern German genitive (owned first, owner second). It might appear as if ziel triggers genitive in what comes next, but that is not really what happens. In Old Norse “till” (ziel) had developed into a preposition that triggered genitive, for this reason. The transition from noun to preposition probably happed between Proto-Norse and Old Norse. In modern Scandinavian the case system has degreaded, so “til” is a true preposition that commonly does not trigger a gentive, but it can still do this in certain circumstances. The rules for which it now happens is not clearly understood and not written in grammars. It is the same for the dative. It is still used in Norwegian (countrary to common belief), often in singular indefinite, but the rules for it is not described. Norwegians just instinctively know “in time” should be written “i tide” (with a trailing -e, as in older German dative) not “i tid” (as in modern Swedish). The -e is in fact a dative and the lack of inflection is an accusative. This dative does not show up regularly and the grammars do not explain the rules for it. The same ting happens with -s genitive folliwing “til”. One just has to be exposed to enough Norwegian to know when it is appropriate.
The expressions "till fjalls" doesn't mean exactly the same as "to the mountains", the latter can also be expressed, but differently. Doesn't matter much in practice or for the explanation you gave of course. But "till fjalls" has a different feeling, and e.g. in modern Norwegian you have that too, and e.g. "til fots" which basically means "walking" (as opposed to "biking" or "driving"). As for "i tide" and the like, I'm reading newspapers from everywhere as much as possible, and very recently I've noticed that some Norwegian newspapers now have writers who don't know those dative expressions and instead write "i tid" and would probably not be able to use "mann av huse" correctly. Not sure where this comes from, but there's probably a reason somewhere.
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.
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.
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! 💯💯💯
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.
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.
In principle, all North Germanic languages keep the final *-z. It's still there in all the plural noun forms and verbs, after all. Instead, the continental languages seem to have undergone a change in which -r was removed from only the nominative (singular) forms of words but not any others. This is a morphologically conditioned change, not purely phonological. It happened not just in nouns, but also in pronouns, which is why Old Swedish vīr, īr and þēr became modern vi, (n)i and de.
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!)
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.
It's actually not true that there's always more short than long vowels. Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both have more long than short vowels. English as well, depending on the dialect. Mandarin only has four short vowels but a wide array of diphthongs. You're right though that long vowels tend to be more closed
But it's not that unusual either. Ancient Greek is reconstructed with close-mid short vowels and open-mid long vowels. As for the asymmetry, ā is actually a pretty rare phoneme in Proto-Germanic and may have not existed at all, or only very late. Moreover, an asymmetric vowel system can exist at a moment in time, even if it's unstable and has a tendency to resolve itself with future changes. And that's more or less what we see. All Germanic languages reintroduced [o] as a back counterpart to [e] in some form. In Northwest Germanic, the "destabilising" change of ē to ā is then remedied by the reintroduction of a new ē from other sources.
Some direct descendants of PIE had imperfect vowel systems due to various vowel mergers. Proto-Germanic merged short *o and *a as well as long *ō and *ā into *a and *ō. Proto-Albanian also merged *o with *a. Proto-Balto-Slavic merged *o and *a into *o, and then Proto-Slavic merged *ō and *ā into long *a. Proto-Celtic merged *ō with *ū in final syllables but with *ā everywhere else. Although you tend to see long mid vowels to be more open than the short ones in many languages, it's definitely not impossible to see the opposite. Cantonese for example has long open-mid vowels and short close-mid vowels.
Hm.. as far as I can tell there are exactly as many long as there are short vowels in my own language. For usage I would have to do some statistics on words, but off the top of my head I can't see any obvious difference. There isn't much difference in openness either.
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.
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)
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
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.
It's a retroflex l which is transcribed as /ɭ/, in some dialects of Norwegian and Swedish it occurs as the result of assimilation of /r/ with /l/. For example (hypothetical): /arla/ → /aɭa/ /karl/ → /kaɭ/
@@gtc239 There are also retroflex Rs in Swedish, typically before a dental - in words like BORD and BORT for example. I have only heard those Rs in Indian speakers of English in the UK as most European languages don't have them.
@@gtc239 breakalek10 refers to an i-sound, not an l-sound. It is typically found in Bohuslän, some areas of Närke and in an upper-class sociolect in Stockholm. It's a "retracted i", essentially.
The "nasal" I sound in this "Stockholm" Swedish was a very difficult sound for me to make as a native North American English speaker. After ALOT of practicing at it, I still have a hard time putting the vowel sound into some words. There's something in the sound that irritates me, which is odd, and it may be because I continue to struggle with this in my mouth. This comment is the first time I've heard that it has a Rural root, as it's commonly stated it's a "posh/urban" modern sound.
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.
In german, very old words use -chs to denote a "-ks" or "-x" sound. Fuchs (Fox) Wachs (Wax) Wechsel (Change) Achse (Axel) Dachs (Badger) Lachs (Salmon) in many of these words the CHS turned to an X and many of these words have a protogerman "-hs" in the stead of "chs" or "x" so i wonder wether or not "Fuhsaz" (the fox) would be pronounced like "Fux-saz"
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.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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
Thank you for this correction/elaboration! I realised I'd oversimplified after I rendered the video and saw that I'd used the fricative allophone in a cluster with [r] in one of the example words at the end. Would you mind if I pinned this comment and directed people to it in the description? Of course no problem at all if you'd rather I didn't!
It's also very common for w to change to v, but the reverse is rare. Plus, Germanic loans in Romance languages replace w with gu (guerra, Guillaume). At that time, v was already a fricative in Romance languages, so these borrowings suggest that Germanic w was perceived as a different sound to v, implying that West Germanic languages like Frankish still had /w/.
Oh they definitely still had their [w]'s by that point. German as an example doesn't turn /w/ into [v] until much much later, similar to other Germanic languages. Some dialects of German even to this day don't have a full [v] sound. Pa Dutch for example has a bilabial approximant for it's , which is a bit like an intervocalic B in Spanish. Interestingly, there is a specific isogloss in Romance, at least French, called I think the Joret line. Basically north of the line in dialects like Wallon, Picard, and Norman, Germanic W is kept as is, without changing to Gu. English due to the Norman invasions coupled with later more Paris influenced borrowings, actually has some really fun doublets from this line. Wallop: Norman. Gallop: French Ward: Norman. Guard: French The name william too comes from Norman, and is a Germanic loan which is why the other Romance languages all have G's at the beginning.
That is assuming the entire Proto theories are even solidly correct and that even this idea of 'borrowings' is correct, as many now question that. Seems odd these theories have not ben updated or questioned when they are so old. Rather than borrowings, it is also reasoned to say, that it is possible all these words already existed in these emerging languages and branches that we have today. There was a lot more travel than we assume, say 3000 or 5000 years ago. Many events have taken place not commonly talked about, natural events and war, that leave little tangible text. Even what exists, does not necessarily back up how people spoke. Frankly speaking, Simon and others, present a very good route into an interest in these subjects but ultimately, it is a repetition or re-presenting of very hackneyed academia that needs to perhaps question itself once in a while, as much of it really boils down to 'beliefs' that suit theories, not facts - a lot of bias as well, to choose viewpoints that fit what has been taught for a long time now. Not saying that is deliberate or bad - and indeed, the technical aspects, fricatives and so on, great - but as to how these things evolved, when and where, is massively debatable but a lot of linguistics and historians would have you think otherwise. The near term future ( next 30 years ) will probably bring about a radical re-appraisal of what we think European history has been at this 1000 plus year mark, maybe some things backed up and others altered. Problem is, it will be the Academia hackneyed view points that will rather stay dissonant about that.
@@reeleyes466 I don't even know what you're talking about. Every academic stresses that Proto-languages are reconstructions and there will always be a certain level of insecurity, but that doesn't mean we can't confidently reconstruct a lot. And are you seriously implying that borrowing isn't a thing?
@@reeleyes466 well to be quite frank, I trust them far more than I trust you. So whatever you think of the state of academia, at least to me, matters little
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 I did not ask you to believe anything or trust anything, I merely posed the possibility of a question. What a strange, sad and pointless kind of education, when you cannot pose a question ?
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.
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!
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
Thank you for this information! I'd guessed that some languages must contrast retracted 's' with similar (from an English-speaking perspective) sounds, and it's great to have an example. It's also cool to hear about the ridge below the lower teeth being used. Is that contrasted with the other two?
@@simonroper9218 yes, but it's generally a marginal phoneme. I suppose it might have started as a palatalisation of the z, of which only the inverted curve element remains.
@@simonroper9218 I've thought more about it, and I was wrong/ish. I'm exposed to a continuum between three western-romance subfamilies here (Lombard, Æmilian and Ligurian) and I sometimes mix up which dialects have which sounds. - all of them have [s; z], in the overwhelming majority of varieties they're retracted. - those that DO have postalveolars despite also having a retracted [s], thus running against the common pattern, have them in palatalized form (this happens in Genoese and neighboring dialects); - those that have the lower dental ridge articulation as a marginal phoneme don't seem to have any postalveolars, palatalized or not. So, it seems no one in that area has a [s̠ , z̠] / [ʃ , ʒ] phonemic contrast, but some people realize the sequence [s̠.tʃ] (which appears more or less in correspondence of Italian [skj] ) as [ʃ.tʃ] - kind of like German and Neapolitan strongly retract [s] when followed by a stop
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.
In Swedish, in many accents (or rather, pronunciation patterns, as it's not strictly geographically tied), the normal "r" is very weakly tapped and heavily aspirated, almost to the point of being little more than a "blowy" sound or something close to an extreme version of the retracted "s". To my ears, the very heavily trilled "r" in videos like these sounds a bit overdone. It would be interesting to consider a less trilled variant of "r" for PGmc.
Old Norse reproduction (and Proto-Norse) tend to use these trilled "r" sounds too, so there's probably some good reasoning behind it even if it sounds overdone compared to modern Scandinavian. I wish for a time machine, an audio-only would be fine..
@@mytube001 I guess I see what you mean. A bit like when e.g. American linguists try to emulate current Scandinavian 'r' sounds.. it's nearly never quite correct.
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
I can answer a few of these. - G is reconstructed as fricative because it still is one in Dutch and relatives, and also seems to have been one in early Old English. For the palatalization g > j to happen word-initially in OE, it must have been a fricative, because otherwise it would have ended up as an affricate like the one spelled -dg- nowadays. I don't know what the situation in ON and Gothic was though. - Why v is bilabial is relatively easy: it's spelled with b, in Gothic and some other early texts (including a few OE ones!), and actually becomes a plosive b in German. Why f is bilabial is because of Gothic evidence, that final fricative devoicing turns b into f. That only makes sense if they are articulated the same. - That kw is a single phoneme is supported primarily by Gothic, which uses a single letter for it, just like it does for hw. For the other languages it's less clear, and may have no longer been a single phoneme anymore. - There is no strong evidence within Germanic for h still being a fricative [x], in all positions, that I know of. But it's interesting to note that early Frankish names often spell the sound with "ch" at the start of the word, like in Chlodovicus, Chilperic, Childebert, and is even borrowed as [k] in Romance languages, like Clovis and Clotaire.
@ruawhitepaw >Why v is bilabial is relatively easy: it's spelled with b, in Gothic and some other early texts (including a few OE ones!) idk about the old english ones, but latin v should still be w at the time why wouldnt they use b when thats the closest sound >G is reconstructed as fricative because it still is one in Dutch and relatives, and also seems to have been one in early Old English. its not in german and norse and gothic as far has im aware so between g->gh in english and dutch vs gh->g in german, norse, and gothic, why would it make sense to choose the later, i want to know the reasoning for that >That kw is a single phoneme is supported primarily by Gothic, which uses a single letter for it, just like it does for hw. hw is one sound we use two letters, it might be a single phoneme but that doesnt mean its a single sound >There is no strong evidence within Germanic for h still being a fricative [x], in all positions, that I know of. this is actually the strongest those spellings are convincing, but it depends on whether loans in latin were being transcribed with h normally, i believe h was silent at this point so its possible they mightve used ch based on greek as an approximate, or x could be an initial allophone, although generally tge initial is treated as the standard sound so idk
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 am confused; I was under the impression that earlier Germanic languages stressed the ends of words, as when the stress shifted the declensions weren't being pronounced as clearly leading to a simplification of the case system.
Before the Proto-Germanic period, in an even-more-ancestral stage of the language, stress was more variable, and different words took stress on different syllables - however, by the Proto-Germanic period (just before the descendent branches split off), the stress had shifted to the first syllable of the root of each word. As you say, because the final syllables were now unstressed, they were prone to being reduced and deleted (which is why modern Germanic languages have simpler case systems that PGmc) :)
![Eminem - Temporary (feat. Skylar Grey) [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/ZaK9Wi5ho0o/mqdefault.jpg)
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.
interesting. This germanic word was also loaned to Slavic as *kuningu (which later because of sound shifts became *kunįgu > *kunįdzi > *kunędzi > *kъnędzь). In Polish (my native language) it turned into the word "ksiądz" (nowadays meaning priest), but there is a derivative "książe" meaning prince
say the finnish word for slave
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
The same with english war (also english werewolf, german Wehrmacht) and spanish guerra / french guerre. 😅
“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!
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.
I wonder what I would hear having pretty decent Spanish, and listening to Spanish daily, however I'm both from and in the UK.
In my dialect (General American with the caught-cot merger), the biggest difference between the voiced and unvoiced stops is aspiration (when they appear at the beginning of a syllable) and the length of the preceding vowel (when they appear at the end of a syllable).
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.
the one nitpicky detail I would say is I don't think يا is categorized as a *case*, but instead just a vocative particle. even in MSA يا can be followed by different cases depending on the meaning/context
@@camelcaseco that actually makes sense! we do tend to treat it as a separate word in masri, tho i dont think this interferes too heavily with my point? at least i hope. thank youu!!
While I agree with your prognosis, the fortunate thing is that the nominative plural and the vocative plural in PGmc are actually identical (in fact, I don't know any IE languages where the nominative and the vocative differ in the plural).
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 know bugger all about linguistics, but your videos are amazing. Thank you x
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.
In some dialects of European Spanish we still pronounce coda s as approximant rhotic [ɹ] before voiced consonants, so voicing of s triggers rhotacism. s (> z) > ɹ
dos dedos [doɹ ðeðos]
See how we also have lenited allophonic versions of /bdg/. Exactly what Simon mentioned, but that's pretty much Standard In Spanish. Not having those allophones is typical Italian accent when speaking Spanish.
I don’t think most ppl realise that almost all these pretty languages come from Proto European, which was the first logical language created by a dude a long time ago, which was very logical for that time, considering how ancient it was, so the languages that came from it had a very strong base / root words, so to speak, and then other similar dudes also dedicated all the time to studying and observing and modifying the language and turning it into multiple languages, as they had better ideas, and then each language that was made from it got modified again and again, and made into a more modern / better / more refined language - the dude that edited Modern English and Modern Dutch made them into the most perfect looking and easiest to read / spell / pronounce / learn / memorize etc and the most refined languages ever, so the most pretty vowels and consonants were used in most words, and both have the EY / EI diphthong or sound, which is one of the prettiest sounds ever, and he made sure that they would look AND sound gorgeous, so the prettiest and most serious-looking spelling was used for each word, and then the most perfect pronunciation was used for each word, so it’s based on which pronunciation sounds best for each word, as it should be, and one is supposed to learn each word with its pronunciation and spelling, which is the right way to learn a new language or a new word, and over the past century, word use and accents etc was influenced by movies / videos / songs etc that were rełeased in each area / region, which is why there are so many different accents today, technically the pretty languages and accents were created and decided by certain dudes and inspired by nature, and the rest were taught the language / accent at school or via movies / music etc, and the other languages were also inspired by them in one way or another, even the non-pretty ones...
It’s actually kinda funny that most ppl don’t know that most languages come from the same language, and that the other ones were also inspired by them, like, the idea of creating a language itself, even though they were made into a different language, so technically all languages have the same source in one way or another - most of the base words in all Germanic languages and in all Celtic languages and in all true Latin languages and in Slavic languages such as Slovene share the same root words, which were modified multiple times by certain dudes, and many of them are still very similar as they weren’t modified that much, while others were modified more and aren’t easy to recognize anymore, especially many words in Celtic languages have been modified a lot, pretty much turned into a different word, but I am learning the 6 Celtic languages and all Germanic languages and the true Latin languages and Slovene etc, so I have noticed a lot of words that come from the same word, especially many of the basic verbs and nouns and nature related terms, however, most words in each new language that was created are going to be different because they weren’t in the first language, and the first language only had a few thousand words, so the number of words increased over time, with each new language modifying, as more and more items became known to them and more items were created, so those dudes also created new words for those things, in addition to modifying the words that already existed, however, nowadays there are a lot more words than ever before, so now the modern version of those languages contains tens of thousands or even hundreds of thousands of words created by ágènts, so all these pretty languages have so many words now and are a lot more complex then they used to be, so now it is possible to express very complex ideas while using very descriptive terms and descriptive verbs that didn’t exist back then!
For example...
- Sowilo is ancestral to Sun / Sol / Son / Soleil / Sonne / Zon / Sonce / Sunce / Sinne etc...
- jera is ancestral to year / jaar / jahr / jiar / år / ár / ári / any / ano / anno / año / bliain / bliadhna / blwyddyn etc...
- raido / raiðo / rīdaną are ancestral to raid / road / rida / rit / riða / ri / rijden / ritt / reidio etc...
- aþnam is ancestral to any / ano / anno / año / bliain / bliadhna / blwyddyn etc...
- isaz / isa is ancestral to isa / is / ice / ys / ijs / ís / eis / eisi / eisia etc...
- gebo / gebaną are ancestral to gift / gjöf / geben / ge / geven / gi / gefa / give / gee etc...
- fehu is ancestral to fee / feh / feoh / vieh / fioh / vee / fēo etc...
While the Latin alphabet and other alphabets are based on Runes, or Runes are based on the Latin alphabet etc, which look almost the same, and were modified a bit - while the exact details aren’t known, one thing’s obvious, that they all come from the same source, and based on the first writing system that came with Proto European...
ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚬ ᚭ ᚱ ᚴ ᚼ ᚽ ᚾ ᚿ ᛁ ᛅ ᛆ ᛋ ᛌ ᛏ ᛐ ᛒ ᛓ ᛘ ᛙ ᛚ ᛦ ᛧ
ᚠ ᚢ ᚦ ᚨ ᚱ ᚲ ᚷ ᚹ ᚺ ᚾ ᛁ ᛃ ᛇ ᛈ ᛉ ᛊ ᛏ ᛒ ᛖ ᛗ ᛚ ᛜ ᛟ ᛞ
I like it how most of the base words used in Welsh and Irish and Scottish Gaelic etc were completely modified, so it’s not easy to see that they came from the same words - for example, the verb dar / dare used in Portuguese / Spanish / Latin / Italian etc (meaning to give) was changed to thoir in Scottish Gaelic (dar -> dhar / dhoir / thoir or dar -> tar / toir / thoir etc) and, in Irish it was changed to tabhair (now it looks like a completely different word) but, Welsh still has dyro / ddyro and many other verbs like that which are still quite similar to the Spanish verbs, so it becomes more obvious when comparing them to the Spanish words, because Celtic languages are closer to Latin languages than they are to Germanic languages when it comes to vocab, though Celtiberian was more similar to Greek, so it didn’t look like a true Celtic language at all, but the 6 Modern Celtic languages (Welsh / Breton / Cornish & Manx / Irish / Scottish Gaelic) are really gorgeous and very refined, so they were improved a lot, and they are the true Celtic languages!
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 would agree with this as a native Faroese speaker. What Simon suggest would be more like "go to (the) house".
> "Go home"? This is motion towards, isn't it, boy?
> Dative, sir! Ahh! No, not dative! Not the dative, sir! Oh, the... accusative! "Domum", sir! "Ad domum"!
> Except that "domus" takes the...?
> The locative, sir!
> Which is...?!
> "Domum".
@@weepingscorpion8739 hvat er kjansurin at tú eisini ert føroyskur?
@@LFSDK hann er rættilligani høgur
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.
Some Western Danish dialects use w instead of v.
@@anotherelvisit’s probably the other way around.
There's also the fact that both u and w trigger rounding assimilation (u-umlaut) in Old Norse. If w had been labiodental, that seems much less likely.
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
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!
Simon I haven't been watching your videos as much lately please don't be mad
I haven't either but its because RUclips isn't informing me.
Thank you for your fascinating work. These videos deserve 100 million views!
NEW SIMON ROPER VIDEO ABOUT HISTORICAL LINGUISTICS WOOOOO
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").
The same sound change happened in Latin in words such as latus lateris honōs honōris etc.
10:31 I like that you use Dr Lindsey's transcription system for the two diphthongs.
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 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 absolutely adore the direction you're going in, especially the more philosophical and logic-related videos
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.
interestingly also in pronouns by way of ihr, er, wir, etc I do believe
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 In West Germanic, the *-z was normally lost, but there seems to have been a dialectal difference between north and south regarding whether it was lost in one-syllable words, like the pronouns you listed, as well as the articles. In the north it was lost there too, while in the south it was kept there. The nominative -er ending of adjectives is actually a descendant of these pronoun forms: it's the ending of "der" that's been glued onto other words by analogy.
@@ruawhitepaw yep yep, you can see it in say Pa Dutch vs Plautdietsch where you have mir, dir, etc contrasting with mie, die (though "you" is somewhat complicated in Plautdietsch)
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.
Aðalsteinn Aðalsteinsson was an Icelandic soccer player
Audawarduz thanks you!
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.
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.
I think Belarusian has v → w in some cases (and it's represented with )
@@F_A_F123 Now I haven't studied the details of Slavic linguistics, but I think I think you are assuming that Belarusian ў comes from Russian в. Rather, I think the instances of /v/ in Slavic languages evolved from a /w/ originally. If this is the case, the instances of ў in Belarusian are not an example of a v → w sound change, but rather a w staying w in some positions, while become v in others.
If you're right though, and that is an interesting example I forgot about. It looks like in terms of the internal phonology (not the history, but the way you analyze the language as it is now), we have an underlying /v/ → w, and not vice versa.
I might posit that the underlying sound is actually NOT /v/ but rather a /β/ becoming either [w] or [v]. Sometimes, if there is good reason to do so, phonologists will analyze the underlying form as an abstraction that doesn't actually appear in the surface level representation of the language.
@@rdreher7380 I don't really know the history of Belarusian language, but I did think w comes from Old East Slavic v (of course it couldn't come from Russian v because Russian isn't an ancestor of Belarusian). Also ł turned into w in syllable codas, merging with it (and, as I remember, [w] and [v] are allophones). On Wikipedia, there is /w/ for south dialects and /ʋ/ for north dialects for OES. And there is a relict (? I think that's how that thing is called) of /v/ being a /w/: it's the only voiced obstruent that doesn't voice the preceding consonant (/svoj/ and /tvoj/ for example)
Most dialects of Irish have v -> w, my dialect from the Isle of Man and most Scottish dialects have maintained the older v realisation
The video I never knew i needed. Looking forward to this
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.
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.
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.
Also, only the original /s/ phoneme develops a voiced allophone [z]. The /s/ from earlier /t/ never does, it always stays voiceless. Which is why German today has the spelling distinction between s and ß.
With preservation of the final -z of Proto-Germanic, Faroese also still has it, albeit pronounced as /ɹ/
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".
gards cognate to hindi ghar??
“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.
Ziel in German means goal, target or endpoint.
@@RobbeSeolh Yes. And the genitive also comes after, e.g. “Ziel der Reise” (destination of the journey) or “Ziel des Unternehmens” (goal of the undertaking). The word ordering in Old Norse and Proto-Germanic was often similar to modern German genitive (owned first, owner second). It might appear as if ziel triggers genitive in what comes next, but that is not really what happens. In Old Norse “till” (ziel) had developed into a preposition that triggered genitive, for this reason. The transition from noun to preposition probably happed between Proto-Norse and Old Norse. In modern Scandinavian the case system has degreaded, so “til” is a true preposition that commonly does not trigger a gentive, but it can still do this in certain circumstances. The rules for which it now happens is not clearly understood and not written in grammars. It is the same for the dative. It is still used in Norwegian (countrary to common belief), often in singular indefinite, but the rules for it is not described. Norwegians just instinctively know “in time” should be written “i tide” (with a trailing -e, as in older German dative) not “i tid” (as in modern Swedish). The -e is in fact a dative and the lack of inflection is an accusative. This dative does not show up regularly and the grammars do not explain the rules for it. The same ting happens with -s genitive folliwing “til”. One just has to be exposed to enough Norwegian to know when it is appropriate.
The expressions "till fjalls" doesn't mean exactly the same as "to the mountains", the latter can also be expressed, but differently. Doesn't matter much in practice or for the explanation you gave of course. But "till fjalls" has a different feeling, and e.g. in modern Norwegian you have that too, and e.g. "til fots" which basically means "walking" (as opposed to "biking" or "driving").
As for "i tide" and the like, I'm reading newspapers from everywhere as much as possible, and very recently I've noticed that some Norwegian newspapers now have writers who don't know those dative expressions and instead write "i tid" and would probably not be able to use "mann av huse" correctly. Not sure where this comes from, but there's probably a reason somewhere.
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.
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.
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! 💯💯💯
This guy has some great south England vegetation drip going on. Look at those greens!
Thank you Simon! Such a great explanation of language shifts and dialects. 😎
Hundur and thus the ending you discussed is also used in Faroese
Fascinating, as ever.
FYI vocative is the case used for the imperative
Elfdalian also retains the w from proto-Germanic.
Yes, and North Jutlandic.
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.
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.
In principle, all North Germanic languages keep the final *-z. It's still there in all the plural noun forms and verbs, after all. Instead, the continental languages seem to have undergone a change in which -r was removed from only the nominative (singular) forms of words but not any others. This is a morphologically conditioned change, not purely phonological. It happened not just in nouns, but also in pronouns, which is why Old Swedish vīr, īr and þēr became modern vi, (n)i and de.
@@ruawhitepaw Well, sure. I was more pointing out where Faroese kept it while others lost it.
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!)
Those are innovations, though.
!!! SO EXCITED
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.
It's actually not true that there's always more short than long vowels. Ancient Greek and Sanskrit both have more long than short vowels. English as well, depending on the dialect. Mandarin only has four short vowels but a wide array of diphthongs.
You're right though that long vowels tend to be more closed
But it's not that unusual either. Ancient Greek is reconstructed with close-mid short vowels and open-mid long vowels.
As for the asymmetry, ā is actually a pretty rare phoneme in Proto-Germanic and may have not existed at all, or only very late. Moreover, an asymmetric vowel system can exist at a moment in time, even if it's unstable and has a tendency to resolve itself with future changes. And that's more or less what we see. All Germanic languages reintroduced [o] as a back counterpart to [e] in some form. In Northwest Germanic, the "destabilising" change of ē to ā is then remedied by the reintroduction of a new ē from other sources.
All Proto languages are just theories and theories we should remind ourselves, are not facts. Unfortunately, it seems many treat them as such.
Some direct descendants of PIE had imperfect vowel systems due to various vowel mergers. Proto-Germanic merged short *o and *a as well as long *ō and *ā into *a and *ō. Proto-Albanian also merged *o with *a. Proto-Balto-Slavic merged *o and *a into *o, and then Proto-Slavic merged *ō and *ā into long *a. Proto-Celtic merged *ō with *ū in final syllables but with *ā everywhere else.
Although you tend to see long mid vowels to be more open than the short ones in many languages, it's definitely not impossible to see the opposite. Cantonese for example has long open-mid vowels and short close-mid vowels.
Hm.. as far as I can tell there are exactly as many long as there are short vowels in my own language. For usage I would have to do some statistics on words, but off the top of my head I can't see any obvious difference. There isn't much difference in openness either.
Although they're not Germanic, the -az ending has survived in the Baltic languages. Lithuanian has -as and Latvian has -s.
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.
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)
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
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.
It's a retroflex l which is transcribed as /ɭ/, in some dialects of Norwegian and Swedish it occurs as the result of assimilation of /r/ with /l/.
For example (hypothetical):
/arla/ → /aɭa/
/karl/ → /kaɭ/
@@gtc239 There are also retroflex Rs in Swedish, typically before a dental - in words like BORD and BORT for example. I have only heard those Rs in Indian speakers of English in the UK as most European languages don't have them.
@@gtc239 breakalek10 refers to an i-sound, not an l-sound. It is typically found in Bohuslän, some areas of Närke and in an upper-class sociolect in Stockholm. It's a "retracted i", essentially.
The "nasal" I sound in this "Stockholm" Swedish was a very difficult sound for me to make as a native North American English speaker. After ALOT of practicing at it, I still have a hard time putting the vowel sound into some words.
There's something in the sound that irritates me, which is odd, and it may be because I continue to struggle with this in my mouth.
This comment is the first time I've heard that it has a Rural root, as it's commonly stated it's a "posh/urban" modern sound.
Thanks.
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.
That garden could do with some reconstruction, too.
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.
i wuv you simon
In german, very old words use -chs to denote a "-ks" or "-x" sound.
Fuchs (Fox)
Wachs (Wax)
Wechsel (Change)
Achse (Axel)
Dachs (Badger)
Lachs (Salmon)
in many of these words the CHS turned to an X and many of these words have a protogerman "-hs" in the stead of "chs" or "x"
so i wonder wether or not "Fuhsaz" (the fox) would be pronounced like "Fux-saz"
You hair is different. It’s looks good this way.
In Afrikaans, one could also say "Romeine, gaat huis toe!"
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]
There were also very short vowels, like yers in slavic descended from short u (a hard yer) and i (a soft yer).
aðalsteinn is an icelandic name
Interesting. German still has the "stressing the first syllable of the stem"-system
I imagine that's contributed to the collapse of its various declensions. Old High German had such inflective complexity
There are plenty of fully adapted foreign loanwords with different stress now though.
Yes, and this is the case in all Germanic languages except Icelandic which does stress the first syllable of the stem.
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.
Good video. I noticed you used a different word order for the imperative sentence than for the declarative sentence(s). (Probably correctly)
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.
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
tō trigered the accusative case in proto germanic
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
Thank you
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.
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.
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.
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
Thank you for this correction/elaboration! I realised I'd oversimplified after I rendered the video and saw that I'd used the fricative allophone in a cluster with [r] in one of the example words at the end. Would you mind if I pinned this comment and directed people to it in the description? Of course no problem at all if you'd rather I didn't!
@@simonroper9218 no worries, it's easily done. And you're welcome to pin it if you want
The nominative *-az still survives as -ur in Faroese too.
27:10 It has a cognate in Icelandic: Aðalsteinn [aðal̥s̠t̪ɛid̪n̪]
I found some Icelandic pages that refer to king Edward as Játvarður. Is that common?
@@anotherelvis Yeah it is
Somehow I doubt that the average ethnonationalist understands the term "ethnonationalist."
It's also very common for w to change to v, but the reverse is rare. Plus, Germanic loans in Romance languages replace w with gu (guerra, Guillaume). At that time, v was already a fricative in Romance languages, so these borrowings suggest that Germanic w was perceived as a different sound to v, implying that West Germanic languages like Frankish still had /w/.
Oh they definitely still had their [w]'s by that point. German as an example doesn't turn /w/ into [v] until much much later, similar to other Germanic languages. Some dialects of German even to this day don't have a full [v] sound. Pa Dutch for example has a bilabial approximant for it's , which is a bit like an intervocalic B in Spanish.
Interestingly, there is a specific isogloss in Romance, at least French, called I think the Joret line.
Basically north of the line in dialects like Wallon, Picard, and Norman, Germanic W is kept as is, without changing to Gu.
English due to the Norman invasions coupled with later more Paris influenced borrowings, actually has some really fun doublets from this line.
Wallop: Norman. Gallop: French
Ward: Norman. Guard: French
The name william too comes from Norman, and is a Germanic loan which is why the other Romance languages all have G's at the beginning.
That is assuming the entire Proto theories are even solidly correct and that even this idea of 'borrowings' is correct, as many now question that. Seems odd these theories have not ben updated or questioned when they are so old.
Rather than borrowings, it is also reasoned to say, that it is possible all these words already existed in these emerging languages and branches that we have today. There was a lot more travel than we assume, say 3000 or 5000 years ago. Many events have taken place not commonly talked about, natural events and war, that leave little tangible text. Even what exists, does not necessarily back up how people spoke.
Frankly speaking, Simon and others, present a very good route into an interest in these subjects but ultimately, it is a repetition or re-presenting of very hackneyed academia that needs to perhaps question itself once in a while, as much of it really boils down to 'beliefs' that suit theories, not facts - a lot of bias as well, to choose viewpoints that fit what has been taught for a long time now.
Not saying that is deliberate or bad - and indeed, the technical aspects, fricatives and so on, great - but as to how these things evolved, when and where, is massively debatable but a lot of linguistics and historians would have you think otherwise.
The near term future ( next 30 years ) will probably bring about a radical re-appraisal of what we think European history has been at this 1000 plus year mark, maybe some things backed up and others altered. Problem is, it will be the Academia hackneyed view points that will rather stay dissonant about that.
@@reeleyes466 I don't even know what you're talking about. Every academic stresses that Proto-languages are reconstructions and there will always be a certain level of insecurity, but that doesn't mean we can't confidently reconstruct a lot. And are you seriously implying that borrowing isn't a thing?
@@reeleyes466 well to be quite frank, I trust them far more than I trust you. So whatever you think of the state of academia, at least to me, matters little
@@wilhelmseleorningcniht9410 I did not ask you to believe anything or trust anything, I merely posed the possibility of a question. What a strange, sad and pointless kind of education, when you cannot pose a question ?
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.
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!
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
Thank you for this information! I'd guessed that some languages must contrast retracted 's' with similar (from an English-speaking perspective) sounds, and it's great to have an example. It's also cool to hear about the ridge below the lower teeth being used. Is that contrasted with the other two?
@@simonroper9218 yes, but it's generally a marginal phoneme. I suppose it might have started as a palatalisation of the z, of which only the inverted curve element remains.
@@simonroper9218 I've thought more about it, and I was wrong/ish. I'm exposed to a continuum between three western-romance subfamilies here (Lombard, Æmilian and Ligurian) and I sometimes mix up which dialects have which sounds.
- all of them have [s; z], in the overwhelming majority of varieties they're retracted.
- those that DO have postalveolars despite also having a retracted [s], thus running against the common pattern, have them in palatalized form (this happens in Genoese and neighboring dialects);
- those that have the lower dental ridge articulation as a marginal phoneme don't seem to have any postalveolars, palatalized or not.
So, it seems no one in that area has a [s̠ , z̠] / [ʃ , ʒ] phonemic contrast, but some people realize the sequence [s̠.tʃ] (which appears more or less in correspondence of Italian [skj] ) as [ʃ.tʃ] - kind of like German and Neapolitan strongly retract [s] when followed by a stop
I bet you were a lot of fun at a Renfaire or in a D&D campaign.
Very interesting video, as always.
I was wondering, do we know anything about proto-germanic culture?
I’m watching this before bed because Simon is the best somnolent I’ve cum across on this platform.
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.
you could reference sanskrit for phonemic length it and lot of its descendants retain it
I somewhat confused. Did you retract your message to me?
In Swedish, in many accents (or rather, pronunciation patterns, as it's not strictly geographically tied), the normal "r" is very weakly tapped and heavily aspirated, almost to the point of being little more than a "blowy" sound or something close to an extreme version of the retracted "s". To my ears, the very heavily trilled "r" in videos like these sounds a bit overdone. It would be interesting to consider a less trilled variant of "r" for PGmc.
Old Norse reproduction (and Proto-Norse) tend to use these trilled "r" sounds too, so there's probably some good reasoning behind it even if it sounds overdone compared to modern Scandinavian. I wish for a time machine, an audio-only would be fine..
@@tohaason Trilled, absolutely, but the character of the trill is another question.
@@mytube001 I guess I see what you mean. A bit like when e.g. American linguists try to emulate current Scandinavian 'r' sounds.. it's nearly never quite correct.
It occurs to me that German has Edelstein as a surname, although not as a forename.
Dutch _edelsteen_ is not a (common) name as far as I'm aware, but it is a normal word meaning gemstone.
This must be an Ashkenazi/Yiddish name.
Just like Goldstein..Einstein, Epstein
you're correct that icelandic doesn't have pitch accent 👍
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
I can answer a few of these.
- G is reconstructed as fricative because it still is one in Dutch and relatives, and also seems to have been one in early Old English. For the palatalization g > j to happen word-initially in OE, it must have been a fricative, because otherwise it would have ended up as an affricate like the one spelled -dg- nowadays. I don't know what the situation in ON and Gothic was though.
- Why v is bilabial is relatively easy: it's spelled with b, in Gothic and some other early texts (including a few OE ones!), and actually becomes a plosive b in German. Why f is bilabial is because of Gothic evidence, that final fricative devoicing turns b into f. That only makes sense if they are articulated the same.
- That kw is a single phoneme is supported primarily by Gothic, which uses a single letter for it, just like it does for hw. For the other languages it's less clear, and may have no longer been a single phoneme anymore.
- There is no strong evidence within Germanic for h still being a fricative [x], in all positions, that I know of. But it's interesting to note that early Frankish names often spell the sound with "ch" at the start of the word, like in Chlodovicus, Chilperic, Childebert, and is even borrowed as [k] in Romance languages, like Clovis and Clotaire.
@@ruawhitepawwe still write light and right as if we have that frigging fricative there 😂
@ruawhitepaw
>Why v is bilabial is relatively easy: it's spelled with b, in Gothic and some other early texts (including a few OE ones!)
idk about the old english ones, but latin v should still be w at the time why wouldnt they use b when thats the closest sound
>G is reconstructed as fricative because it still is one in Dutch and relatives, and also seems to have been one in early Old English.
its not in german and norse and gothic as far has im aware so between g->gh in english and dutch vs gh->g in german, norse, and gothic, why would it make sense to choose the later, i want to know the reasoning for that
>That kw is a single phoneme is supported primarily by Gothic, which uses a single letter for it, just like it does for hw.
hw is one sound we use two letters, it might be a single phoneme but that doesnt mean its a single sound
>There is no strong evidence within Germanic for h still being a fricative [x], in all positions, that I know of.
this is actually the strongest those spellings are convincing, but it depends on whether loans in latin were being transcribed with h normally, i believe h was silent at this point so its possible they mightve used ch based on greek as an approximate, or x could be an initial allophone, although generally tge initial is treated as the standard sound so idk
Interesting; I read that Sanskrit also had a trimoraic vowel.
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 am confused; I was under the impression that earlier Germanic languages stressed the ends of words, as when the stress shifted the declensions weren't being pronounced as clearly leading to a simplification of the case system.
Before the Proto-Germanic period, in an even-more-ancestral stage of the language, stress was more variable, and different words took stress on different syllables - however, by the Proto-Germanic period (just before the descendent branches split off), the stress had shifted to the first syllable of the root of each word. As you say, because the final syllables were now unstressed, they were prone to being reduced and deleted (which is why modern Germanic languages have simpler case systems that PGmc) :)
@@simonroper9218 Thanks!
Could the Proto-Germanic extra-long/trimoric vowels haved been the closed(i,e,o and u)ones?