Loving this sudden explosion in collaborations across the RUclips languages sphere! Both you and Luke make me wish I had known about linguistics back in high school, I think I definitely would've pursued it in university. Glad to see you two together!
It’s great fun but you would’ve needed a solid plan. There are plenty of jobs where meta skills like communication is important but there are very few Linguistics-centered positions outside of academia. And academia is usually very competitive. But that also depends where you are; some language-specific departments actually have a hard time recruiting PhD candidates or even master’s students.
Taking Honors Latin in high school (being a household Spanish speaker) which furthered my interest in linguistics, resulted in me finding an interest in Old English (being a native English speaker), so to witness this collaboration between two of my favorite RUclips linguistic channels is a godsend
I have, like, no time for a 2 hour talk between you two, but... I'm going to have to make some this week. I don't care what you both end up talking about. It's going to be worth it.
Listen to things whilst doing other things. I mainly only listen to things whilst cleaning, driving, gardening, organising, working etc. There's so many opportunities.
@@soulfulserenity403 It's a good idea, and I love listening to things while I'm cleaning, folding laundry, etc. But I'm a writer, so if I have to work, nothing with speech is allowed unfortunately. :)
I stopped the video after Luke said that we have different vowels in "лет" and "здесь", repeated them three times, and felt some very slight difference for the first time in my life, struggling to understand if I just convinced myself in its existence or not. Then Simon said about allophonic ranges, and I was like "yeah, here we are". Maybe someday Russian will end up with 2 or 3 vowel phonemes, and we'll still be alright :) Both variants of the vowel in "знаю" would sound normal for a Russian ear. It's even harder for me to catch such differences in Russian than in English (which is pretty challenging as well). Probably because I know that they don't matter in modern Russian. I love Luke speaking Latin, it sounds so natural and beautiful. Thank you both for this collaboration! I haven't finished watching it yet, but I will.
Me too, I really wish there was! Jackson Crawford did do a video with a Sanskrit scholar once, but it wasn't too focused on the language, more to do with culture/mythology
I watched the whole thing and enjoyed every minute, my two favorite language nerds talking together just is so cool for me to watch because you are so different and I could just watch you interact for hours. 10/10
most of this talk was way above my understanding but I've always found language and accent and its evolution absolutely fascinating. so cool to hear two people (who I've individually followed for a while) discuss this! also as a native hindi speaker I was happily surprised to hear a brief mention of sanskrit. Obviously it comes very naturally to me to say the bh and dh th sounds but I remember trying to get a mate's name correct (he's sudanese) and I couldn't quite get the hang of it. Absolutely fascinating!
30:00 You can get the vowel sound in (British, non-rhotic) "car" without a written r. A famous example is in the word "path" in a stereotypically southern English accent. Funnily enough though, Northerners using a different vowel sound in "path" will tease Southerners by saying: "Why would you pronounce it like that? There's no 'r' in path!" So that's both an example of that vowel sound occurring without an 'r' in the written language and an example of that vowel sound implying an 'r' in people's perceptions!
I misread this as Southern and Northern US dialects and felt very disoriented for a second. Picture how someone from Mississippi would say "parth." That said, it makes me think of how some Midwesterners say "bolth" instead of "both."
Here in the Westcountry (Cornwall, Devon etc), the 'r' in 'car' is pronounced, it is a retroflex r. Westcountry English is rhotic. So I would say the Ford Ka is a car, not the Ford ka is a ka. Also 'path' is pronounced with a long 'æ', it is not 'pahth'. In northern England it is a short 'æ'. The pronunciations you mention are typical London and London overspill areas, plus the influence of RP (itself of London origin).
Yes, the word was borrowed into German at a time when the Romans still pronounced the diphthong “ae” and had a “hard k-sound” at the beginning. So German “Kaiser” is a kind of fossilised Latin pronunciation, a bit like Finnish “kunningas” preserves the Proto-Germanic nominative ending of *kunningaz ‘king’.
Having said the above, the word “Kaiser” did undergo a phonological journey within German, going from Germanic *ai to Old (High) German *ei and then back to the /ae/ pronunciation of in Modern German, though spelt .
This 2-hours-long conversation between two of my favorite channels taught me enough material I could learn by reading for hours. I am also happy to hear Raphael Turrigiano and A. Z. Foreman's names. I enjoy and respect all the work you people bring through social media.
Awesome to see this! On the topic of "things preserved a really long time" in English discussed at ruclips.net/video/9KhPVWXpNIc/видео.html , something I'd love to know more about is the preservation of "am" as the first person singular to "to be". This is the case in Farsi as well, but exists as the first person singular suffix (-am) in written Farsi but can be used standalone when spoked as "I am" e.g. "khoobam" -> "I am good."
Thank you for this interesting talk! I've binged though a few polýMATHY videos, they're super interesting - especially the one where Luke talks to Italians in Roman.
Extremely interesting and refeshing. Please can you do more of such interactive videos whereby you introduce someone knowledgeable like you and make a dialogue about the subject matter? Thank you.
My theory for the 'intrusive' R is that it's mostly an indirect product of derhoticization. Because even with final R's gone, they have the potential to reappear when the following phoneme is a vowel. Normally this would require an unconscious memorization of which words gain this phantom R and which do not, so i think the british unconscious just favored giving EVERY word with a final vowel phoneme the phantom R.
I agree entirely with that but confusion arises when people say ‘intrusive r’ to refer to two different phenomena: firstly, the British (mainly English really) habit of saying ‘Laura Norder’ for ‘law and order’; secondly, the random insertion of r’s before consonants and at the end of words by some Americans (eg, ‘warsh’ for ‘wash’ and ‘feller/potater’ for ‘fellow/potato’).
Luke, your Brazilian Portuguese is mostly perfect. It's carnAval; something interesting took place with that old E there and it became A. You're good to go, sir. :)
38:11 when they mention adding an h to the beginning of a word starting with a vowel reminds me of many people from the Appalachian mountains that like to add h to the beginning of words with vowels. Those people are descendants of mostly Scottish, Irish, and I believe northern English speakers. So they would say something like “get on with hit.” Very interesting 🤔
Both enjoyable and instructive! Unlike the modern Greeks, and Italians, I don't think the present-day English consider they have pronunciation rights to older forms of their language. I've found that Swedish students with very little instruction can pronounce Chaucerian English almost "perfectly", far better than English students, who listen amazed.
Thanks for making me discover A.Z. Foreman! Btw you can clearly hear his native accent in his video titled "Aeneid 1.195-209 (Aeneas comforts his men) read in Latin and English translation"
Thank you both for this amazing collab! [Personal timestamps] 17:29 as a native speaker of Br Portuguese, this made me laugh a bit 22:10 easypronunciation website 30:22 the "linking R thing", and "memory of the sound" 44:11 cultural appropriation 50:20 language changes in its literary tradition 1:19:17 /'coizɐ/ for "thing", right. Also, /'cadɐ 'dʒiɐ/ for "each day", but /'todʊ 'dʒiɐ/ for "every day". 1:39:36 the way people see language will probably mark more as I keep watching
I really enjoy these types of unscripted chats, so thanks to you two for this! As a Brazilian and a language enthusiast myself I can't help but make a few comments about what was said regarding Portuguese throughout the video though. The comment Simon made about Portuguese sounding slavic is mostly true for the European variety because it's stress-timed and therefore makes a ton of vowel reductions, as opposed to BP, which is syllable-timed and pronounces the vowels more fully. Also, /ɫ/ is only a feature in EP. In BP it got completely vocalized to /w/, which leads to the country name being pronounced /bɾaˈziw/, for example. Now towards the end, Luke talked about how PT has lax vowels, which I tend to disagree with for the most part. It may be a part of the São Paulo accent but from my experience even then it really isn't universal. The unstressed "e" and "o" just go straight to /i/ and /u/. In that case, BP only has 8 oral vowels compared to 11ish in French but, as Luke mentioned, the nasalizations are considerably more complex and fun in PT because of all the nasal diphthongs in words like "tem" /tẽj̃/ or "mamão" /mamɐ̃w̃/. If any of you are interested in the Portuguese language there's a great channel that talks about everything from phonology to grammar and other fun things, just type sashyenkaUS on RUclips, I highly recommend :)
1:03:55 PLEASE this would be such a great resource; I've yet to find many OE learning materials that really focus on more conversational phrases and expressions. Of course, learning grammar and vocabulary by examining texts like Bēowulf is vital for anyone learning about OE, but to have a comprehensive collection of words/phrases that feel truly "natural" and conversational would, I imagine, make the language feel a bit more accessible to the average learner
Isn't it possible that the lax pronunciation of short "i" and "u" was dialectal of the speakers that would eventually populate Italy, France and Spain but wasn't present in the variety that would become Sardinian nor in the one that would become Romanian?
This was just great, and such a breath of fresh air. I have one friend in particular who is VERY prescriptive about how English SHOULD be spoken, but what I've noticed is that alot of her arguments revolve around this not amazing notion, tbh, that is simply "America wrong - England right, it's called ENGLISH, after all". And I spend (probably too much time) just calmly pointing out how implausible that really is. "American English" (in its broadest sense) is as legitimate as "British English" (also in its broadest sense, though still problematic), and that's without even accounting for regional variation, and then individual variation. It's so difficult to be prescriptive about a language that has become so fundamentally descriptive in nature.
There is much more regional variation in British and American English than there is a difference between the two. Most American vs British arguments tend to be GA vs RP debates
The linking R. My grandmother was born in New York City in 1903. She used a linking R. My mother, born and raised in Northern California, was always embarrassed that her parents didn’t pronounce her friend’s name as Linda, but rather as Lindar. Old English conversation guide. Yes, do it!! Far better that it be by a bootstrapped enthusiast than that it come from an anemic university professor (having been one in my previous life). Besides, if there are errors, you can fix them for the 2nd edition.
i really don't think the l is velarized in brazilian portuguese (in portugal that may well be the case). but still what i can notice about my accent (i'm from Rio) is that we have different l's depending on the vowel that comes after. when it's a back vowel it's denti-alveolar i think and when it comes before a front vowel then it gets a laminal quality to it
When you talk about the way non-rhotic dialects THINK the /r/ is there even when it's objectively not, and about French Liaison and the like, you don't once bring up the idea of the phoneme or the "phonemic level." Do you guys not know about Chomsky and Generative Linguistics?!? It just seems odd not to bring up the phonemic level in that conversation. I know you two are not linguistics majors, but since you're really, really into this field you should know the basics such such as Chomsky's theory of the phonemic level. You're probably well familiar with the idea that [p] and [pʰ] can be considered two different phonemes in say Ancient Greek, but in English they are both allophones of the single /p/ phoneme. But the phonemic level - the language as it exists in our minds rather than as it does in our exact pronunciation - can also have a phoneme that isn't even pronounced! When Simon's friends insist that there is an R in "car," even though it objectively is not there in their native accent, they aren't exactly wrong, because it kind of is, it is still there phonemically. We know because it effects the vowel quality. This idea of language exists abstractly in our minds is SUPER important to Chomsky's theory of Generative linguistics, the foundation of modern linguistics. So I really felt that the idea of phonemes and the phonemic level should be a part of that conversation.
@1:03 ... YES, YES, YES ... we need a practice book in OE from Simon !!! I'm learning OE and I need more accessible materials. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I must dispell the false impression that Romance languages do not lax the vowels i and u. The French most people know about today underwent drastic changes in pronunciation around the time of the revolution. Quebec, being isolated from France since the 1760s, was not affected by this change. Quebec French maintains a laxing of those vowels, among other vowels. Now, we might argue that French pronunciation was strongly influenced by Germanic pronunciation, but that really has to be discussed before one declares that Romance languages do not lax these vowels.
Tuth, ruff for tooth and roof is quite common in Birmingham & South Warwickshire, UK. Friends from Kenilworth always says tuth but it's still sounds a little odd to people in Coventry, only 20 miles away. Wensdey, thursdey, Fridey pronunciation is strangely quite common throughout the Midlands.
I say ‘tuth’ and I’m from Birmingham originally but I’ve worked in Kenilworth and Coventry and only noticed two other people say ‘tuth’ when working in Cov, one was a native Coventrian and the other was from Leicestershire oddly enough - I didn’t know anyone in Kenilworth who said ‘tuth’ interestingly! ‘Tuth’ is also heard used by some Welsh (only South East Wales?) and Northern Irish speakers. I suspect that Welsh English had more of an impact on Brummie than people tend to realise, the main evidence being the pronunciations of ‘tuth’ and ‘yur’ (for ‘year’). I don’t say ‘ruff’ for ‘roof’ though and don’t remember hearing it anywhere in the West Mids either FWIW.
@Simon, I was born in 1965 in Mississippi and grew up there until my late 20s. I've lost much of my accent now, but I retain many traits of the accent. For example, I maintain the wh sound so that wale and whale are distinctly different, and whether and weather are likewise different in their initial sound. For me their=there but they're is different. One thing that I find strange and now annoying is that I never realized that the are/our distinction seems to be missing in much of the English world. To me are and our are very different and it sounds ignorant to me to pronounce them the same. However, I have recently noticed that many even educated people pronounce them the same. Is the are/our extinction most extinct now? Why did I never notice this until now?
Lots of English words aren’t pronounced phonetically, so a presumption of ignorance is entirely unwarranted and unfair. I have a ‘our/are’ merger, like many if not most people in England and it’s widespread in America and of course Northern Ireland too (though this is a special case as many of them also say ‘power’ as ‘par’). My impression is that the merger does seem to be less present in other English-speaking countries and is far from universal anywhere though.
@@overlordnat yes, my claim was not that the pronunciation is ignorant. But rather that I HAD assumed it was ignorant, until I realized as of late, that it seems to me be in the minority who pronounces our and are differently. One reason I probably considered it ignorant before, was the image of a Donald Trump supporter holding up a sign saying "Save are country!".
At 16:10 Simon’s friends mum may indeed be from South East Wales because of her saying ‘tooth’ with the FOOT-vowel rather than the LOOSE-vowel but she could also be from Birmingham, or just possibly Northern Irish.I say it that way and I’m originally from Birmingham. In the very first episode of the sitcom Gavin and Stacey, Stacey (who’s Welsh) says ‘tuthbrush’ (with the PUT-vowel) but when I spoke to some people from St Asaph in North Wales they said neither they nor anyone from their hometown says it that way. Also the Northern Irish actor playing the lead role in Silent Witness said ‘tuth’ or ‘tuthbrush’ in one episode too,
Maybe Simon could make a video on Canadian English, too. I read something that said we do have dialects here, but the way the author described how people in my province speak was so off that I didn't believe it. (An example: the author said we say "Spendy" as a synonym for "Expensive", which... No, we don't. I've never heard anyone say that in my life. They also said that people from my province pronounce our R differently, and also pronounce "Stick" as "Steck", which, again, no we don't. At least it doesn't sound like that to me.) The only thing I can see as being a dialect would be Newfoundland English.
Sidenote from Germany: In my dialect a ,Stecken' is a stick ( in german Stock) not made by a craftsman ( cane maker) , but only a cut away branch from a bush. So may be Simon heared a german born Canadian.
Regarding the vowel inventory of French. It has: - the 7 (4 frontal unrounded + 3 back rounded) of Italian - a fronted copy of the 3 rounded ones (u has y, o has ø, ɔ has œ) - an old back unrounded long ɑː that is only used in preexisting, fairly rare words and not in all accents, since vowel length is otherwise completely gone from standard french - nasalised versions of the 5 latin vowels (through their long version in old French), then merged to 4 and significantly shifted, then further merged to 3 in most young speakers (in/un = ɛ̃, on = õ, en/an = ɑ̃) Total: 13/14/15 depending on how you count them. There's no ə in terms of phones, there's an ə phoneme but it's always either dropped or realised as ö.
Counterpoint: Latin short vowels were never "lax" in the Germanic sense, aka centralised compared to the long vowel, but they did drift away from the long vowel value while staying fully in the "front unrounded, back rounded" series.
1:15:57 I've never actually spoken to any Swedish speakers with words but I find that if I write to them in Swedish over the internet with slight mistakes in it (like wrong prepositions) many of them will start replying only in English or outright tell me to speak to them in English and it frustrates me. But then I also understand it. I'm Jamaican and when foreigners try to speak like us it sounds so odd and I think most Jamaicans will just flat up tell them to give up. Though in Jamaica this probably is because it's a negative prestige language so it's unfathomable why anybody would intentionally try to learn it to most Jamaicans and that dynamic doesn't exist in Sweden (I don't think) so it's not exactly the same but I understand the impulse to just make communication easy rather than cope with somebody else's mistakes. But it makes it really difficult for me to practice Swedish by actually using it naturally.
When Thatcher was PM she used to bang on about ‘Law and order’ so much that she was given the nickname Laura Norder by Private Eye! Nonetheless as an Englishman I do have to inform you colonials that you in fact say ‘Lah ‘n’ Orrrrderrrrr’ not ‘Law and order’ anyway!
@@overlordnat We do sometimes reduce "and" to "in" in informal speech, but we never reduce "aw" to "ah". Not in general American English at least, and I am hard pressed to think of any North American region dialects that do. In fact sometimes "aw" is even intrusive rather than reduced, changing the "all" morpheme to something more akin to "awl". As far as the rhotic "r", guilty as charged in most regions, though pretty soft and definitely not hammered like the Scots do :)
@@ravenlord4 When most Americans talk about the note ‘la’ in a musical scale, or the film ‘La la land’ it sounds exactly like when they say ‘law’, unlike for most speakers in most parts of the U.K who say ‘law’ with a longer version of the FOOT vowel instead. I presume you’re referring to extreme Southern American accents when you refer to the lengthening and altering of the vowel in the word ‘all’ (which can sometimes rhyme with ‘hole’ or even ‘owl’)? I saw a TV programme where a Texan prison guard was filmed undercover saying “crawl motherfucker, crawl” to an inmate he was abusing and he said it to rhyme perfectly with ‘owl’ both times - I would’ve thought it was a Hollywood exaggeration of Southern speech if it wasn’t for the fact that this was a documentary where he was speaking in his normal voice (he didn’t know he was being recorded of course). Obviously I’m exaggerating the ‘r’ stuff and misspelling for comical effect! (We also reduce ‘and’ in Britain, though always to ‘un’ rather than ‘in’).
@@overlordnat I have never heard "la" and "law" as homophones before. But apparently it is occasionally heard in isolated regions that have the "cot-caught" merger, and those are found on both sides of the pond. That may be what you are hearing. The same goes with "all" morpheme. It is always spoken as "awl", again except is those regions with a "cot-caught" merger. Interestingly enough, the US South is an area where said merger would never occur, and as cited by linguists Labov, Ash, and Boberg. In fact the typical "Southern Drawl" would be most resistant to such a merger. As far as rural Texas, it is atypical and its own thing. It is so large and communities so isolated that no kind of language shift out of there would surprise me.
@@ravenlord4 Surely the distinction is far greater in North Eastern states like New York, where ‘cot’ normally sounds similar to how most Englishmen saying ‘cart’ (but sometimes sounds a bit like how most English people and some Americans say ‘cat’) whereas ‘caught’ has a more English pronunciation (though it’s normally diphthongised as ‘caw-ut’). To clarify, I’m using ‘aw’ to represent the sound in both ‘caught’ and ‘port’, which are identical in most forms of British English. Surely we can agree that the distinction between pairs such as ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ and ‘bother’ and ‘father’ is much greater in most forms of British English than American English?
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 think about it, Indians are perhaps the biggest English speaking country after the United States. And believe me, many people speak English as their first language
@@timurermolenko2013 And most people who speak english are not indians, also nativeness doesnt matter. What is more, their authority in linguistic matters is lover than expected from pure speakers do to the fact that everyone looks down on the way they speak english.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 not most, but believe me at least a third billion people speak English on a sufficient level, which is more than in the United States. Plus, Prestige of a local variety is purely correlated with income of the country. If India will manage to expand as cultural influence and become wealthy, Indian English can become quite so prestigious, and Indian State, quite authoritative in this matter.
I'm a native Spanish speaker, and to comment on what you guys were talking about: -The five vowel system is surprisingly stable. Almost all varieties of Spanish without foreign influence have the same five vowels with very little variation. There is allophonic variation of the vowels depending on whether they are in closed or open syllables, but in my subjective experience, it is very minor, especially in comparison to the allophonic variation of consonants, which can be much greater. Some southern Spain varieties have open versions of the vowels before dropped "s", which gives them effectively a 10 vowel system and some Mexican varieties neutralize /a/ /e/ and /o/ between "s"s in unstressed syllables (pronouncing both "pesos," "pesas" and "peces" sort of like "pes's"). But other than that, vowels don't change dramatically. I do think they may sound slightly different from accent to accent, but nowhere near as much as the consonants, which vary tremendously. -The English /ɪ/ in isolation is almost always heard as an /i/ by native Spanish speakers, they usually have a hard time hearing the differences between the two. I would say the unstressed version of the vowel, like in "painted" may sound more like a /e/ to a Spanish speaker. It is a bit hard for me to say, because for some reason the distinction between the KIT and FLEECE vowels was one of the first non-Spanish distinctions I started to be able to hear as a child studying English, but I remember the song "We Will Rock You" was very popular when I was a child who couldn't speak English and I always sang it as "wi *wel* rak yu" before I could speak English. I don't know if it was because of the influence of the dark "l" in "will," because of the unstressed nature of the modal verb (which I doubt, since it's not unstressed in the song), or if I heard it closer to an /e/ because I had never actually seen the title written down and the spelling didn't influence my perception. Which brings me to another thing, which is that the way spelling and/or the way the English language was sort of "adapted" to Spanish pronunciation historically affects the way Spanish speakers pronounce English words, and that subsequently influences the way we actually perceive native English pronunciation, and this differs from country to country. One example is the English STRUT vowel, which Argentinians (like me) hear like the Spanish /a/, and therefore unironically, unintentionally confuse it with the TRAP vowels sound, pronouncing both "cat" and "cut" as though they were spelled "cat" in Spanish. However, Mexicans perceive the STRUT vowel like a Spanish /o/, and that's how they pronounce it, so that "cat" sounds like Spanish spelled "cat," and both "cut" and "caught" sound like Spanish spelled "cot." It is something that has often fascinated me, because I honestly believe they hear those vowels differently because of the influence of the historical Spanish adaptation of English. In fact, in Argentina, people can't hear the difference between the "sh" sound and the "j" sound in English, but CAN hear the difference between those sounds and the English "y" sound, whereas Mexicans struggle with the "j" and the "y," but to them the "sh" sounds like the "ch."
Of course you’re both brilliant and I love the concentrated knowledge dump but what’s coming across to me very strongly in this conversation is how kind you both are. Lovely to see!
I've always found fascinating the hard work behind Luke's mastery of Latin.The language really feels alive! Personally, also the sicilian dialects should be used as a proof of the absence of the germanic short "I" and "U". Fun fact: in sicilian "pear" is "piru", and the plural is "pira". Great video!
either of you guys interested in old celtic dialects? Personally Gaulish is absolutely fascinating to me but there are so few easy to digest sources about it... it had some really interesting features to, like for example tau-gallicum, which may have been something like the th in modern English through or it could have been like a German z /ts/, and there is the matter of the cool optative mood which I've heard existed in Gaulish which encodes desire or wish for the event to happen. Gaulish works a lot like Latin and Ancient Greek to, but without the confusing aspiration distinction, and with surprisingly few consonants, all very interesting to me, especially since it was spoken in a wide region from Brittany to the northwest, to central Anatolia to the east, with most of central and western Europe including parts of Italy and possibly Spain included
“I sawr it”- Pronunciation I heard often in the American south in and around New Orleans, but I think in people from rural areas in southeast Louisiana & nearby Mississippi.
I sympathize with Luke as to mid vowels. I learned French as a Spanish speaker and while /ɔ/ wasn't so bad (it often becomes [ʌ]), learning /e/ and /ɛ/ as different phonemes was rough. Because phonemic /e̞/ allophonically varies between them. And as to Simon's question, I work in EFL with Spanish speskers and the KIT vowel is heard as /i/ for both General American and RP, at least.
Hey!! Great video!! .(My english is quite limited, sorry for that) Could I ask for a video about the guttural ''R'' that you can find in (obviously) German and French but also in Portuguese and, surprisingly, in Italian (northern dialects)? If it is not much bother... Thank you
Just pausing the video to say that I checked out Alex Foreman's channel. It's awesome. Be sure to mention him a lot. He needs more subscribers. P.S. No relation.
I understand your struggle: you are probably from a Sicilian speaking area, or from Sardinia. Don't worry, also the northeners mess up with the "e" and the "o": notice how they usually pronounce "béne" with a closed "é"...
@@esti-od1mz nope, I'm from a very peculiar area in Abruzzo. The thing is, I can tell apart the different qualities of the vowels, but i can't really reproduce them and the thing kinda bothers me because i wanted to learn proper pronunciation.
@@esti-od1mz yes, i know, basically every regional accent has a different distribution of vowels "aperte" e "chiuse" compered to the standard language. But at least they have those vowels in their phonological inventory.
@@slowmolife4289 capisco perfettamente la tua lotta... le distinguo, ma faccio fatica anch'io. Non sapevo che in Abruzzo ci fossero aree di dialetto pentavocalico! Mea culpa, i dialetti in Italia sono tanti e non li conosco tutti... saluti dalla Sicilia
Funnily enough, standard Italian formally accepts that é and è have stopped corresponding precisely to unstressed/stressed, but not ó and ò - and yet, to me, as a northerner, it just seems like the distribution of both e and o is completely arbitrary.
I am not catalan native speaker but do not forget catalan!!! it is a very good source to compare!! also foc, or another similarity with romanian is the participes crescut nascut etc.. Catalan is good to take with infintives and sustantives
Loving this sudden explosion in collaborations across the RUclips languages sphere! Both you and Luke make me wish I had known about linguistics back in high school, I think I definitely would've pursued it in university. Glad to see you two together!
It's never too late to learn! Maybe you can take a part time course or something
It’s great fun but you would’ve needed a solid plan. There are plenty of jobs where meta skills like communication is important but there are very few Linguistics-centered positions outside of academia. And academia is usually very competitive. But that also depends where you are; some language-specific departments actually have a hard time recruiting PhD candidates or even master’s students.
I did pursue it in university, but realized I was just as miserable there as I was in computer science, so I quit.
@@WaywardSon1 I did pursue linguistics in college and covet it in these moments but otherwise it collects dust in my closet.
Taking Honors Latin in high school (being a household Spanish speaker) which furthered my interest in linguistics, resulted in me finding an interest in Old English (being a native English speaker), so to witness this collaboration between two of my favorite RUclips linguistic channels is a godsend
I have, like, no time for a 2 hour talk between you two, but... I'm going to have to make some this week. I don't care what you both end up talking about. It's going to be worth it.
Watch in 2x speed
Listen to things whilst doing other things. I mainly only listen to things whilst cleaning, driving, gardening, organising, working etc. There's so many opportunities.
@@soulfulserenity403 thats even batter, do listen to stuff in 2x speed while doing some other things
@@abhinavchauhan7864 yes depending on what it is I'll listen at faster speeds that suit the video and my activity :) excellent combo options available
@@soulfulserenity403 It's a good idea, and I love listening to things while I'm cleaning, folding laundry, etc. But I'm a writer, so if I have to work, nothing with speech is allowed unfortunately. :)
I stopped the video after Luke said that we have different vowels in "лет" and "здесь", repeated them three times, and felt some very slight difference for the first time in my life, struggling to understand if I just convinced myself in its existence or not. Then Simon said about allophonic ranges, and I was like "yeah, here we are". Maybe someday Russian will end up with 2 or 3 vowel phonemes, and we'll still be alright :) Both variants of the vowel in "знаю" would sound normal for a Russian ear.
It's even harder for me to catch such differences in Russian than in English (which is pretty challenging as well). Probably because I know that they don't matter in modern Russian.
I love Luke speaking Latin, it sounds so natural and beautiful. Thank you both for this collaboration! I haven't finished watching it yet, but I will.
They are incredible.... these fellers
Is there a Luke Ranieri except for Sanskrit? That's all I want for Christmas.
Me too, I really wish there was! Jackson Crawford did do a video with a Sanskrit scholar once, but it wasn't too focused on the language, more to do with culture/mythology
It would be cool if Luke tried learning it, it's surprisingly similar to Latin and ancient Greek lol
Try Gabriella Burnel
Also, ‘Sanskrit Sense’
Two awesome guys having a conversation for two hours?
I'm in.
This is a surprise to be sure, but a welcome one!
Two of my favorite linguistics youtubers talking about languages for 2 hours? Of course I'll always have time for that
I watched the whole thing and enjoyed every minute, my two favorite language nerds talking together just is so cool for me to watch because you are so different and I could just watch you interact for hours. 10/10
most of this talk was way above my understanding but I've always found language and accent and its evolution absolutely fascinating. so cool to hear two people (who I've individually followed for a while) discuss this! also as a native hindi speaker I was happily surprised to hear a brief mention of sanskrit. Obviously it comes very naturally to me to say the bh and dh th sounds but I remember trying to get a mate's name correct (he's sudanese) and I couldn't quite get the hang of it. Absolutely fascinating!
the crossover I've been waiting for!
This was fantastic!! Thank you both for collaborating, its awesome and such a gift.
Two of my favorite channels collaborating!!
Wow a 2 for the price of 1 video! I love these two both! Fan of both!
Captivating discussion. Thank you.
Luke's impression of the Greek historical linguist yelling "Vii vii!" killed me.
Massive props for shouting out A. Z. Foreman! He really is the best at what he does
30:00 You can get the vowel sound in (British, non-rhotic) "car" without a written r. A famous example is in the word "path" in a stereotypically southern English accent. Funnily enough though, Northerners using a different vowel sound in "path" will tease Southerners by saying: "Why would you pronounce it like that? There's no 'r' in path!" So that's both an example of that vowel sound occurring without an 'r' in the written language and an example of that vowel sound implying an 'r' in people's perceptions!
[parːθ] lmao
I misread this as Southern and Northern US dialects and felt very disoriented for a second.
Picture how someone from Mississippi would say "parth."
That said, it makes me think of how some Midwesterners say "bolth" instead of "both."
Here in the Westcountry (Cornwall, Devon etc), the 'r' in 'car' is pronounced, it is a retroflex r. Westcountry English is rhotic. So I would say the Ford Ka is a car, not the Ford ka is a ka. Also 'path' is pronounced with a long 'æ', it is not 'pahth'. In northern England it is a short 'æ'. The pronunciations you mention are typical London and London overspill areas, plus the influence of RP (itself of London origin).
Warsh
'Father' has that vowel too. It's even homophonous with 'farther' in non-rhotic dialects.
That was extremely enjoyable and informative. Thanks to you both.
I feel like an intellectual watching Simon Roper videos
1:48:29 when Luke says Caesar it reminded me of the German word "Kaiser". Is there any link there?
Yes, the word was borrowed into German at a time when the Romans still pronounced the diphthong “ae” and had a “hard k-sound” at the beginning. So German “Kaiser” is a kind of fossilised Latin pronunciation, a bit like Finnish “kunningas” preserves the Proto-Germanic nominative ending of *kunningaz ‘king’.
Having said the above, the word “Kaiser” did undergo a phonological journey within German, going from Germanic *ai to Old (High) German *ei and then back to the /ae/ pronunciation of in Modern German, though spelt .
@@morvil73 Amazing, I forgot I'd asked this - but that's such a cool link. Thank you!
What an absolute pleasure to listen to you two talk. Great job and very informative 😊
This 2-hours-long conversation between two of my favorite channels taught me enough material I could learn by reading for hours. I am also happy to hear Raphael Turrigiano and A. Z. Foreman's names. I enjoy and respect all the work you people bring through social media.
Awesome to see this!
On the topic of "things preserved a really long time" in English discussed at ruclips.net/video/9KhPVWXpNIc/видео.html , something I'd love to know more about is the preservation of "am" as the first person singular to "to be". This is the case in Farsi as well, but exists as the first person singular suffix (-am) in written Farsi but can be used standalone when spoked as "I am" e.g. "khoobam" -> "I am good."
As Luke proposed, it would be huge fun to have Luke and Simon try to imitate each other's accents. 😂
Thank you for this interesting talk! I've binged though a few
polýMATHY videos, they're super interesting - especially the one where Luke talks to Italians in Roman.
Brilliant videos - thanks!
Extremely interesting and refeshing. Please can you do more of such interactive videos whereby you introduce someone knowledgeable like you and make a dialogue about the subject matter? Thank you.
My theory for the 'intrusive' R is that it's mostly an indirect product of derhoticization. Because even with final R's gone, they have the potential to reappear when the following phoneme is a vowel. Normally this would require an unconscious memorization of which words gain this phantom R and which do not, so i think the british unconscious just favored giving EVERY word with a final vowel phoneme the phantom R.
I agree entirely with that but confusion arises when people say ‘intrusive r’ to refer to two different phenomena: firstly, the British (mainly English really) habit of saying ‘Laura Norder’ for ‘law and order’; secondly, the random insertion of r’s before consonants and at the end of words by some Americans (eg, ‘warsh’ for ‘wash’ and ‘feller/potater’ for ‘fellow/potato’).
Luke, your Brazilian Portuguese is mostly perfect. It's carnAval; something interesting took place with that old E there and it became A. You're good to go, sir. :)
Write the book! It would be amazing, I would buy it.
38:11 when they mention adding an h to the beginning of a word starting with a vowel reminds me of many people from the Appalachian mountains that like to add h to the beginning of words with vowels. Those people are descendants of mostly Scottish, Irish, and I believe northern English speakers. So they would say something like “get on with hit.” Very interesting 🤔
Baldric needs to meet Decimvs Helvidivs Rvfvs
Loved this! I am 100% down for an Old English conversational book - maybe something akin to Lingua Latina Per Se Illustrata?
how exciting!!
Both enjoyable and instructive! Unlike the modern Greeks, and Italians, I don't think the present-day English consider they have pronunciation rights to older forms of their language. I've found that Swedish students with very little instruction can pronounce Chaucerian English almost "perfectly", far better than English students, who listen amazed.
Thanks for making me discover A.Z. Foreman! Btw you can clearly hear his native accent in his video titled "Aeneid 1.195-209 (Aeneas comforts his men) read in Latin and English translation"
Thank you both for this amazing collab!
[Personal timestamps]
17:29 as a native speaker of Br Portuguese, this made me laugh a bit
22:10 easypronunciation website
30:22 the "linking R thing", and "memory of the sound"
44:11 cultural appropriation
50:20 language changes in its literary tradition
1:19:17 /'coizɐ/ for "thing", right.
Also, /'cadɐ 'dʒiɐ/ for "each day", but /'todʊ 'dʒiɐ/ for "every day".
1:39:36 the way people see language
will probably mark more as I keep watching
I really enjoy these types of unscripted chats, so thanks to you two for this! As a Brazilian and a language enthusiast myself I can't help but make a few comments about what was said regarding Portuguese throughout the video though.
The comment Simon made about Portuguese sounding slavic is mostly true for the European variety because it's stress-timed and therefore makes a ton of vowel reductions, as opposed to BP, which is syllable-timed and pronounces the vowels more fully. Also, /ɫ/ is only a feature in EP. In BP it got completely vocalized to /w/, which leads to the country name being pronounced /bɾaˈziw/, for example.
Now towards the end, Luke talked about how PT has lax vowels, which I tend to disagree with for the most part. It may be a part of the São Paulo accent but from my experience even then it really isn't universal. The unstressed "e" and "o" just go straight to /i/ and /u/. In that case, BP only has 8 oral vowels compared to 11ish in French but, as Luke mentioned, the nasalizations are considerably more complex and fun in PT because of all the nasal diphthongs in words like "tem" /tẽj̃/ or "mamão" /mamɐ̃w̃/.
If any of you are interested in the Portuguese language there's a great channel that talks about everything from phonology to grammar and other fun things, just type sashyenkaUS on RUclips, I highly recommend :)
1:03:55 PLEASE this would be such a great resource; I've yet to find many OE learning materials that really focus on more conversational phrases and expressions. Of course, learning grammar and vocabulary by examining texts like Bēowulf is vital for anyone learning about OE, but to have a comprehensive collection of words/phrases that feel truly "natural" and conversational would, I imagine, make the language feel a bit more accessible to the average learner
Isn't it possible that the lax pronunciation of short "i" and "u" was dialectal of the speakers that would eventually populate Italy, France and Spain but wasn't present in the variety that would become Sardinian nor in the one that would become Romanian?
This was just great, and such a breath of fresh air. I have one friend in particular who is VERY prescriptive about how English SHOULD be spoken, but what I've noticed is that alot of her arguments revolve around this not amazing notion, tbh, that is simply "America wrong - England right, it's called ENGLISH, after all". And I spend (probably too much time) just calmly pointing out how implausible that really is. "American English" (in its broadest sense) is as legitimate as "British English" (also in its broadest sense, though still problematic), and that's without even accounting for regional variation, and then individual variation. It's so difficult to be prescriptive about a language that has become so fundamentally descriptive in nature.
There is much more regional variation in British and American English than there is a difference between the two. Most American vs British arguments tend to be GA vs RP debates
Amen, brother! 💪
That's a great idea for collaboration
Ayo this crossover finna be lit
There are RUclipss reading Shakespeare in a reconstructed pronunciation of the time. Sounds like Brummie.
What a wonderful first date!
20:00 In Brazilian Portuguese, many "l" sounds have become "u". For instance, the name of the country "Brasil", will often sound more like "Brasiu"
There are vowel distinctions between hoof and hooves, so voicing and umlaut may have an influence.
Lucas mıhı multum placet! Ecce occurens fortunissimus inter duos amicos! Gratiias vobis ago!
The linking R.
My grandmother was born in New York City in 1903. She used a linking R. My mother, born and raised in Northern California, was always embarrassed that her parents didn’t pronounce her friend’s name as Linda, but rather as Lindar.
Old English conversation guide. Yes, do it!! Far better that it be by a bootstrapped enthusiast than that it come from an anemic university professor (having been one in my previous life). Besides, if there are errors, you can fix them for the 2nd edition.
Two of my favorite content creators on RUclips! Finally collaborating!
i really don't think the l is velarized in brazilian portuguese (in portugal that may well be the case). but still what i can notice about my accent (i'm from Rio) is that we have different l's depending on the vowel that comes after. when it's a back vowel it's denti-alveolar i think and when it comes before a front vowel then it gets a laminal quality to it
(this is purely based of what - I - feel my tongue doing, i'm not a linguist)
When you talk about the way non-rhotic dialects THINK the /r/ is there even when it's objectively not, and about French Liaison and the like, you don't once bring up the idea of the phoneme or the "phonemic level." Do you guys not know about Chomsky and Generative Linguistics?!? It just seems odd not to bring up the phonemic level in that conversation.
I know you two are not linguistics majors, but since you're really, really into this field you should know the basics such such as Chomsky's theory of the phonemic level.
You're probably well familiar with the idea that [p] and [pʰ] can be considered two different phonemes in say Ancient Greek, but in English they are both allophones of the single /p/ phoneme.
But the phonemic level - the language as it exists in our minds rather than as it does in our exact pronunciation - can also have a phoneme that isn't even pronounced! When Simon's friends insist that there is an R in "car," even though it objectively is not there in their native accent, they aren't exactly wrong, because it kind of is, it is still there phonemically. We know because it effects the vowel quality.
This idea of language exists abstractly in our minds is SUPER important to Chomsky's theory of Generative linguistics, the foundation of modern linguistics. So I really felt that the idea of phonemes and the phonemic level should be a part of that conversation.
@1:03 ... YES, YES, YES ... we need a practice book in OE from Simon !!! I'm learning OE and I need more accessible materials. I'm sure I'm not the only one.
I must dispell the false impression that Romance languages do not lax the vowels i and u.
The French most people know about today underwent drastic changes in pronunciation around the time of the revolution. Quebec, being isolated from France since the 1760s, was not affected by this change.
Quebec French maintains a laxing of those vowels, among other vowels.
Now, we might argue that French pronunciation was strongly influenced by Germanic pronunciation, but that really has to be discussed before one declares that Romance languages do not lax these vowels.
Tuth, ruff for tooth and roof is quite common in Birmingham & South Warwickshire, UK. Friends from Kenilworth always says tuth but it's still sounds a little odd to people in Coventry, only 20 miles away. Wensdey, thursdey, Fridey pronunciation is strangely quite common throughout the Midlands.
I say ‘tuth’ and I’m from Birmingham originally but I’ve worked in Kenilworth and Coventry and only noticed two other people say ‘tuth’ when working in Cov, one was a native Coventrian and the other was from Leicestershire oddly enough - I didn’t know anyone in Kenilworth who said ‘tuth’ interestingly! ‘Tuth’ is also heard used by some Welsh (only South East Wales?) and Northern Irish speakers. I suspect that Welsh English had more of an impact on Brummie than people tend to realise, the main evidence being the pronunciations of ‘tuth’ and ‘yur’ (for ‘year’). I don’t say ‘ruff’ for ‘roof’ though and don’t remember hearing it anywhere in the West Mids either FWIW.
U remains W in Cymraeg too
@Simon, I was born in 1965 in Mississippi and grew up there until my late 20s. I've lost much of my accent now, but I retain many traits of the accent. For example, I maintain the wh sound so that wale and whale are distinctly different, and whether and weather are likewise different in their initial sound. For me their=there but they're is different.
One thing that I find strange and now annoying is that I never realized that the are/our distinction seems to be missing in much of the English world. To me are and our are very different and it sounds ignorant to me to pronounce them the same. However, I have recently noticed that many even educated people pronounce them the same. Is the are/our extinction most extinct now? Why did I never notice this until now?
Lots of English words aren’t pronounced phonetically, so a presumption of ignorance is entirely unwarranted and unfair. I have a ‘our/are’ merger, like many if not most people in England and it’s widespread in America and of course Northern Ireland too (though this is a special case as many of them also say ‘power’ as ‘par’). My impression is that the merger does seem to be less present in other English-speaking countries and is far from universal anywhere though.
@@overlordnat yes, my claim was not that the pronunciation is ignorant. But rather that I HAD assumed it was ignorant, until I realized as of late, that it seems to me be in the minority who pronounces our and are differently. One reason I probably considered it ignorant before, was the image of a Donald Trump supporter holding up a sign saying "Save are country!".
Brilliant
1:23:10 Luke huge NUMBERS of people, por favor!
My two greatest sources for my Business English groups.
At 16:10 Simon’s friends mum may indeed be from South East Wales because of her saying ‘tooth’ with the FOOT-vowel rather than the LOOSE-vowel but she could also be from Birmingham, or just possibly Northern Irish.I say it that way and I’m originally from Birmingham. In the very first episode of the sitcom Gavin and Stacey, Stacey (who’s Welsh) says ‘tuthbrush’ (with the PUT-vowel) but when I spoke to some people from St Asaph in North Wales they said neither they nor anyone from their hometown says it that way. Also the Northern Irish actor playing the lead role in Silent Witness said ‘tuth’ or ‘tuthbrush’ in one episode too,
Quite a lot of Cumbrians migrated to Pennsylvania, be interesting if they left any linguistic markers outside of place names like Carlisle etc.
Maybe Simon could make a video on Canadian English, too. I read something that said we do have dialects here, but the way the author described how people in my province speak was so off that I didn't believe it. (An example: the author said we say "Spendy" as a synonym for "Expensive", which... No, we don't. I've never heard anyone say that in my life. They also said that people from my province pronounce our R differently, and also pronounce "Stick" as "Steck", which, again, no we don't. At least it doesn't sound like that to me.) The only thing I can see as being a dialect would be Newfoundland English.
Sidenote from Germany: In my dialect a ,Stecken' is a stick ( in german Stock) not made by a craftsman ( cane maker) , but only a cut away branch from a bush. So may be Simon heared a german born Canadian.
This is the crossover we needed
Regarding the vowel inventory of French.
It has:
- the 7 (4 frontal unrounded + 3 back rounded) of Italian
- a fronted copy of the 3 rounded ones (u has y, o has ø, ɔ has œ)
- an old back unrounded long ɑː that is only used in preexisting, fairly rare words and not in all accents, since vowel length is otherwise completely gone from standard french
- nasalised versions of the 5 latin vowels (through their long version in old French), then merged to 4 and significantly shifted, then further merged to 3 in most young speakers (in/un = ɛ̃, on = õ, en/an = ɑ̃)
Total: 13/14/15 depending on how you count them. There's no ə in terms of phones, there's an ə phoneme but it's always either dropped or realised as ö.
Second!
You should do an East Yorkshire video …. Old guys sound almost danish
Counterpoint: Latin short vowels were never "lax" in the Germanic sense, aka centralised compared to the long vowel, but they did drift away from the long vowel value while staying fully in the "front unrounded, back rounded" series.
The channel mentioned at 1:51:10 is Hrafna.
1:15:57 I've never actually spoken to any Swedish speakers with words but I find that if I write to them in Swedish over the internet with slight mistakes in it (like wrong prepositions) many of them will start replying only in English or outright tell me to speak to them in English and it frustrates me. But then I also understand it. I'm Jamaican and when foreigners try to speak like us it sounds so odd and I think most Jamaicans will just flat up tell them to give up. Though in Jamaica this probably is because it's a negative prestige language so it's unfathomable why anybody would intentionally try to learn it to most Jamaicans and that dynamic doesn't exist in Sweden (I don't think) so it's not exactly the same but I understand the impulse to just make communication easy rather than cope with somebody else's mistakes. But it makes it really difficult for me to practice Swedish by actually using it naturally.
I just can't get used to Luke speaking Barbaric.
Would love then on spotify or something similar so i could listen whilst i work.
German ,Huf' and english ,hoove' mean the same, speaking is nearly the same in my ears. May be this Pennsylvania sound comes from german immigrants.
Try to make that old English conversation instruction manual please I’m begging you!!
Enjoyed the discussion! Also I got to give the 666th like🤘🏻
Americans: Law and Order
Brits: Laura Nohda ;)
When Thatcher was PM she used to bang on about ‘Law and order’ so much that she was given the nickname Laura Norder by Private Eye! Nonetheless as an Englishman I do have to inform you colonials that you in fact say ‘Lah ‘n’ Orrrrderrrrr’ not ‘Law and order’ anyway!
@@overlordnat We do sometimes reduce "and" to "in" in informal speech, but we never reduce "aw" to "ah". Not in general American English at least, and I am hard pressed to think of any North American region dialects that do. In fact sometimes "aw" is even intrusive rather than reduced, changing the "all" morpheme to something more akin to "awl". As far as the rhotic "r", guilty as charged in most regions, though pretty soft and definitely not hammered like the Scots do :)
@@ravenlord4 When most Americans talk about the note ‘la’ in a musical scale, or the film ‘La la land’ it sounds exactly like when they say ‘law’, unlike for most speakers in most parts of the U.K who say ‘law’ with a longer version of the FOOT vowel instead. I presume you’re referring to extreme Southern American accents when you refer to the lengthening and altering of the vowel in the word ‘all’ (which can sometimes rhyme with ‘hole’ or even ‘owl’)? I saw a TV programme where a Texan prison guard was filmed undercover saying “crawl motherfucker, crawl” to an inmate he was abusing and he said it to rhyme perfectly with ‘owl’ both times - I would’ve thought it was a Hollywood exaggeration of Southern speech if it wasn’t for the fact that this was a documentary where he was speaking in his normal voice (he didn’t know he was being recorded of course). Obviously I’m exaggerating the ‘r’ stuff and misspelling for comical effect! (We also reduce ‘and’ in Britain, though always to ‘un’ rather than ‘in’).
@@overlordnat I have never heard "la" and "law" as homophones before. But apparently it is occasionally heard in isolated regions that have the "cot-caught" merger, and those are found on both sides of the pond. That may be what you are hearing. The same goes with "all" morpheme. It is always spoken as "awl", again except is those regions with a "cot-caught" merger. Interestingly enough, the US South is an area where said merger would never occur, and as cited by linguists Labov, Ash, and Boberg. In fact the typical "Southern Drawl" would be most resistant to such a merger. As far as rural Texas, it is atypical and its own thing. It is so large and communities so isolated that no kind of language shift out of there would surprise me.
@@ravenlord4 Surely the distinction is far greater in North Eastern states like New York, where ‘cot’ normally sounds similar to how most Englishmen saying ‘cart’ (but sometimes sounds a bit like how most English people and some Americans say ‘cat’) whereas ‘caught’ has a more English pronunciation (though it’s normally diphthongised as ‘caw-ut’). To clarify, I’m using ‘aw’ to represent the sound in both ‘caught’ and ‘port’, which are identical in most forms of British English. Surely we can agree that the distinction between pairs such as ‘cot’ and ‘caught’ and ‘bother’ and ‘father’ is much greater in most forms of British English than American English?
Finally some anglophones who accept that they are not incontrol of english for english is the international language.
Indian English intensifies
@@timurermolenko2013 lol, no.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 think about it, Indians are perhaps the biggest English speaking country after the United States. And believe me, many people speak English as their first language
@@timurermolenko2013 And most people who speak english are not indians, also nativeness doesnt matter. What is more, their authority in linguistic matters is lover than expected from pure speakers do to the fact that everyone looks down on the way they speak english.
@@baltulielkungsgunarsmiezis9714 not most, but believe me at least a third billion people speak English on a sufficient level, which is more than in the United States. Plus, Prestige of a local variety is purely correlated with income of the country. If India will manage to expand as cultural influence and become wealthy, Indian English can become quite so prestigious, and Indian State, quite authoritative in this matter.
I know Spanish -ia-, -ie-, and -ue- mark what were long vowels in Latin.
I'm a native Spanish speaker, and to comment on what you guys were talking about:
-The five vowel system is surprisingly stable. Almost all varieties of Spanish without foreign influence have the same five vowels with very little variation. There is allophonic variation of the vowels depending on whether they are in closed or open syllables, but in my subjective experience, it is very minor, especially in comparison to the allophonic variation of consonants, which can be much greater. Some southern Spain varieties have open versions of the vowels before dropped "s", which gives them effectively a 10 vowel system and some Mexican varieties neutralize /a/ /e/ and /o/ between "s"s in unstressed syllables (pronouncing both "pesos," "pesas" and "peces" sort of like "pes's"). But other than that, vowels don't change dramatically. I do think they may sound slightly different from accent to accent, but nowhere near as much as the consonants, which vary tremendously.
-The English /ɪ/ in isolation is almost always heard as an /i/ by native Spanish speakers, they usually have a hard time hearing the differences between the two. I would say the unstressed version of the vowel, like in "painted" may sound more like a /e/ to a Spanish speaker. It is a bit hard for me to say, because for some reason the distinction between the KIT and FLEECE vowels was one of the first non-Spanish distinctions I started to be able to hear as a child studying English, but I remember the song "We Will Rock You" was very popular when I was a child who couldn't speak English and I always sang it as "wi *wel* rak yu" before I could speak English. I don't know if it was because of the influence of the dark "l" in "will," because of the unstressed nature of the modal verb (which I doubt, since it's not unstressed in the song), or if I heard it closer to an /e/ because I had never actually seen the title written down and the spelling didn't influence my perception. Which brings me to another thing, which is that the way spelling and/or the way the English language was sort of "adapted" to Spanish pronunciation historically affects the way Spanish speakers pronounce English words, and that subsequently influences the way we actually perceive native English pronunciation, and this differs from country to country. One example is the English STRUT vowel, which Argentinians (like me) hear like the Spanish /a/, and therefore unironically, unintentionally confuse it with the TRAP vowels sound, pronouncing both "cat" and "cut" as though they were spelled "cat" in Spanish. However, Mexicans perceive the STRUT vowel like a Spanish /o/, and that's how they pronounce it, so that "cat" sounds like Spanish spelled "cat," and both "cut" and "caught" sound like Spanish spelled "cot." It is something that has often fascinated me, because I honestly believe they hear those vowels differently because of the influence of the historical Spanish adaptation of English. In fact, in Argentina, people can't hear the difference between the "sh" sound and the "j" sound in English, but CAN hear the difference between those sounds and the English "y" sound, whereas Mexicans struggle with the "j" and the "y," but to them the "sh" sounds like the "ch."
Of course you’re both brilliant and I love the concentrated knowledge dump but what’s coming across to me very strongly in this conversation is how kind you both are. Lovely to see!
That's very sweet, thank you :) I'll pass this on to Luke!
The greatest crossover event in history
I've always found fascinating the hard work behind Luke's mastery of Latin.The language really feels alive! Personally, also the sicilian dialects should be used as a proof of the absence of the germanic short "I" and "U".
Fun fact: in sicilian "pear" is "piru", and the plural is "pira".
Great video!
He's an inspiration! I really hope to get my fluency up to that level.
@@Correctrix I agree. He should be an ispiration, especially for youngsters!
either of you guys interested in old celtic dialects? Personally Gaulish is absolutely fascinating to me but there are so few easy to digest sources about it... it had some really interesting features to, like for example tau-gallicum, which may have been something like the th in modern English through or it could have been like a German z /ts/, and there is the matter of the cool optative mood which I've heard existed in Gaulish which encodes desire or wish for the event to happen.
Gaulish works a lot like Latin and Ancient Greek to, but without the confusing aspiration distinction, and with surprisingly few consonants, all very interesting to me, especially since it was spoken in a wide region from Brittany to the northwest, to central Anatolia to the east, with most of central and western Europe including parts of Italy and possibly Spain included
Two beautiful voices. Love hearing the British and American tones.
Two of my favourite channels collaborating together is something you rarely see. Truly grateful for this.
“I sawr it”- Pronunciation I heard often in the American south in and around New Orleans, but I think in people from rural areas in southeast Louisiana & nearby Mississippi.
Best collabortions happening. What a time to be alive!
Retvrn to Tradition: The Great Debate
Profesor Croford is one of the people with high education and very noticable regional accent.
I sympathize with Luke as to mid vowels. I learned French as a Spanish speaker and while /ɔ/ wasn't so bad (it often becomes [ʌ]), learning /e/ and /ɛ/ as different phonemes was rough. Because phonemic /e̞/ allophonically varies between them. And as to Simon's question, I work in EFL with Spanish speskers and the KIT vowel is heard as /i/ for both General American and RP, at least.
Hey!! Great video!!
.(My english is quite limited, sorry for that) Could I ask for a video about the guttural ''R'' that you can find in (obviously) German and French but also in Portuguese and, surprisingly, in Italian (northern dialects)? If it is not much bother... Thank you
Many blessings upon this friendship!
my faves collabing :)
Just pausing the video to say that I checked out Alex Foreman's channel. It's awesome. Be sure to mention him a lot. He needs more subscribers.
P.S. No relation.
These are the things that justify YT’s existence.
to add complexity, Animals demonstrate local accents too
"I was trying to distinguish between "e" and "ɛ" and "ɔ" and "o" as italians do".
Me, an italian with a penta-vocalic accent: 😐
I understand your struggle: you are probably from a Sicilian speaking area, or from Sardinia. Don't worry, also the northeners mess up with the "e" and the "o": notice how they usually pronounce "béne" with a closed "é"...
@@esti-od1mz nope, I'm from a very peculiar area in Abruzzo. The thing is, I can tell apart the different qualities of the vowels, but i can't really reproduce them and the thing kinda bothers me because i wanted to learn proper pronunciation.
@@esti-od1mz yes, i know, basically every regional accent has a different distribution of vowels "aperte" e "chiuse" compered to the standard language. But at least they have those vowels in their phonological inventory.
@@slowmolife4289 capisco perfettamente la tua lotta... le distinguo, ma faccio fatica anch'io. Non sapevo che in Abruzzo ci fossero aree di dialetto pentavocalico! Mea culpa, i dialetti in Italia sono tanti e non li conosco tutti... saluti dalla Sicilia
Funnily enough, standard Italian formally accepts that é and è have stopped corresponding precisely to unstressed/stressed, but not ó and ò - and yet, to me, as a northerner, it just seems like the distribution of both e and o is completely arbitrary.
I shouldn't even be awake, but I've needed this video for such a long time! Thank you so much!
I am not catalan native speaker but do not forget catalan!!! it is a very good source to compare!! also foc, or another similarity with romanian is the participes crescut nascut etc.. Catalan is good to take with infintives and sustantives