Speaking Proto-Indo-European (with Dr. Andrew Byrd)
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- Опубликовано: 6 окт 2024
- Professor Andrew Miles Byrd (University of Kentucky) answers questions about Proto-Indo-European as a spoken language, and his work on Far Cry: Primal, from Patreon supporters of Jackson Crawford in a Patreon-exclusive Zoom conversation held live on April 16, 2022. See more of Dr. Byrd's work at rota.as.uky.edu/
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Who would think some dudes who really liked horses, drinking milk, and using bronze, would make the most widely spoken language family in the world
they sound like very powerful people
@Riskrunner absolutely correct
And horses, milk, bronze, wheels, mead, etc. are no small trivial things, they revolutionized how they lived and brought them standard for future innovations we take for granted.
@manticore777 and milk = more nutriment, better growth, size, bones...
but Romans couldn't drink milk
In my oral exam for Phonetics in 1983 I got a transcription of a passage in Georgian. I thought God must me mad at me.
Yup. Should have made a sacrifice.
1983 PIE was still spoken
The cruelest joke ever.
😂🤣
After all it is the mother tongue of Josef Stalin. Be glad it was only a phonetics exam and not an exam into grammatical analysis.
It would be interesting to see an Ecolinguist episode with "can Latin, old Norse and ancient Greek speakers understand PIE?"
EDIT: or better yet, how about "can anyone understand PIE?" with speakers of ancient languages as well as modern national or local languages. I'd love to see, say, a modern Greek, a Catalan, a Cumbrian, an Indian, an Iranian and a Latin speaker discussing each in their own languages what the given words/sentences might mean.
the answer is no
Fascinating idea, I imagine you'd need folks who are familiar with/speak some Proto-Italic, Proto-Germanic or Proto-Hellenic for them to have any chance of understanding PIE…Latin, Old Norse, and Ancient Greek may prove to be too distant
If anything, it would be Ḫittite/Luwiyan, Mycenaean Hellenic and Vedic Saṃskṛtam speakers if we're going to make it fair
@@sameash3153 why? If all of those languages diverged into those branches, why wouldn’t they, I saw Luke of Polymathy talk about Proto-Italic
@@seanslawson98 It's just not practical and far more complicated than you are assuming. I have studied Proto-Germanic and Gothic to a great deal, that doesn't mean I can understand PIE, and I even have more resources on PIE in my library than Proto-Germanic.
This channel is basically a never ending book full of lingual information
crazy how people know all this
Literally thanking my parents for having me take Classical Sanskrit classes back in school as a native Hindi/Marathi speaker. Gonna go brush my Sanskrit up and learn Vedic Sanskrit next 😁
Until a white tells "yo Sanskrit is important" till then Sanskrit is an embarrassment to Indians. As soon as white tells , Indians go ga ga over it.
Go for it! I'm so jealous as a member of the Diaspora..I spoke Hindi/Punjabi at home but studied Latin, French & German at school but never had the chance to study Sanskrit 😢
@tinamenon1593 looking for a tutor?🙋🙋🙋🙋
This was an epic conversation. Though my knowledge is a bit limited in this field, I would love to learn more about PIE. And Andrew Byrd is great; I am amazed with what he did with Far Cry: Primal. Please bring him back!
Dr Byrd is a fantastic guest! Thanks y'all
So we've come full circle and "Yeet" is basically akin to the Proto-Indo-European word for throw. WOW language is wild! :D
Let Academics Have Fun, dangit! Cool things happen when academics get to have fun.
I was hoping someone would mention Yeet!
more like "jet"
In Pashto ooth. Usually used as ooth thraia. Meaning throw it.
Pashto= mo nom xhasth.
Jackson Crawford gets me up at 81 years of age on a dull drizzly London UK. Spoiled for choice with my 14 year old grandson. The other day I said what is the history of old Norse? Neither of us had a clue.. I've now got a book reccommended by Jackson. Alex has found a book on Old Norse and now knows more than me. We are dipping into Jackson's videos. Alex is very good at French and Latin. Thanks so much for this talk to which I have listened all the way through. I have always been interested in trying to understand the absolute most basic stuff. So where do we start?
Because of Far Cry Primal me and my friends started a role playing group as winjas who also speak winja :D Thank you for your work Mr. Byrd (& wife)!
"_______ is ainm dom" or "______ is name to me" is one modern Irish way of saying your name, which is a pretty close to the PIE example at the end as Jackson alludes to.
Old Irish grammar is super fun! ;)
Along the lines of making a course for learning PIE as a spoken language, and allowing ourselves to be creative with it, just like enthusiasts of Latin and Ancient Greek already do, I would love to see the same for Old Irish!
Looking forward to the future PIE course and game!
Nárbh iontach, muis!!!
This is incredible. I know probably in a real life scenario (if transported back in time) I'd be lost in a conversation, but...
"Hnomn moy x hesti" =
"Numele meu X este" (Romanian, my native language.
It's amazing that across a chasm of at least 5000 years, this is absolutely and immediately intelligible to me!
Anouwne Im X e. (Armenian)
If I had change it to literal translation it would be
"Imię moje X jest" in Polish
But correct would be "Mam na imię X"
Do you put the verb after the name? Nu ar trebui să fie "Numele meu este X"?
@@legonlavia yes, that would be the common usage, verb after the name would sound wierd but it's understandable, it could work better in stuff like poetry
WOW
This is incredible!
I'm astounded at the hard work you guys have put into this! 🌞
Thank you, professors! Fascinating discussion, I just love it.
These conversations are so interesting. Thank you so much.
This was awesome! Always love learning more about PIE
I really enjoyed the flow of the conversation it was very real and relatable and that made it super easy to be immersed in and absorb the knowledge it was almost like a private friendly conversation over brunch with someone new and interesting. Like the beginning of a friendship.
a full of hour of dr. crawford, let's goooo
Oh yes, I'm super stoked to see how that textbook-y project turns out.
This is eye and ear opening. Truly good food for thought. Learned so much that I didn’t know.
"unoverlappingly" just wonderful
Also awesome that PIE for beaver is something like "biveral" -- there's a beaver-like Pokémon called "Bibarel"
bʰébʰrus
@@sameash3153"Bobor" in Slovakian, unfortunately Hungarian words doesn't bear that much resemblance to their "siblings" in the Uralic family
Looking forward to more on this especially that website! And Old Irish if possible, very much appreciate all you're work (both of you)
I really enjoyed this video. Most people who watch this channel understand that it is nearly impossible to construct truly ancient proto-languages, but it is fun to let probability guide speculation in an attempt to understand ancient cultures and languages.
This was so cool! Thank you for hosting it!
SO GREAT !!! Thank you so much for theese. Please do more on indoeuropean things!
Wagons roll around by the grace of PIE pi.
I remember him from the Far Cry Primal behind the scenes videos!
Jackson, I used to have the same shirt! Thanks for another video man!
ohh he was great, ty both
Really interesting talk! Thanks! If I bump into you in Iceland this summer, I’d be happy to treat you to a drink!
Is it a coincidence that the word for name in Japanese is so similar to our own?
Well, that might be Sprachbünd influence from other language families that were close by, which is also harder to disassociate from words and changes in sound, and grammer that occurred by language change from a parent the further you go back. See Japanese, Korean, and Mongolian are probably related and if they originated in the Eurasian Steppe then that puts them in contact with turks and proto-slavs/proto-indo-europeans and thus they could have picked it up as a loan word. That's one reason why he mentioned there being so much noise the further you go back.
I think I speak on behalf of everyone when I say we want more of Dr. Byrd on this channel
23:23 To be precise, in Slavic bear means, honey-knower. Which refers to fact that bears know where to find honey.
that’s folk etymology. It’s indeed “one, who eats honey”
@@xshwei I know that this is official theory and I know how one would come to recognize it as such - for example some other Slavic words may have similar format - lidojed - means man-eater and is Czech word for cannibal. But I have 3 main problems with this.
1. What is V sound doing there? I know it's supposed to have probably somehow originalted from Sanskrt or some older form of unrecorded proto-Slavic but It makes zero sence if you want to think that Slavic speakers wanted this word to mean honey-eater to keep v there? There would be surviving Slavic language that would eradicate this old remnant of useless consonant which actually makes the word harder to pronounce, because of creation of consonant cluster. (Ukranian actually switches the order and it makes it look almost undoubtable to mean know-honey - ведмідь /vedmidʹ/)
2. It actually seem to develop in line with a word *to know* in some languge, whereas word to eat changed to look completely different. Czech - medvěd - vědet - jíst, Slovak - medveď - vedieť - jesť, Polish -niedźwiedź - wiedzieć - jeść. This is tied to the first point - if this word changed over time and replaced diphtong with single vowel sounds, or even m with n, how come it didn't replace v sound, if the word was culturally shaped to mean honey-eater?
3. This is just a dubious logic point but it isn't that special trait for bear to eat honey. Almost any animal would eat it and probably more known animal to eat honey is bee or humans. In a society with bee keeping tradition that would proto-slavic society likely be, it is probably more important to remember that bear can find honey, so you need to bee wary of that and keep your hives safe from it.
In many areas of Italy, "wheel" could only refer to that of a wheelbarrow or a pulley (for a water well or for making string) until 80 to 100 years ago, because the mountains made flat, carriage worthy roads an impossibility before modern technology
yes, the problem with inventing the wheel is probably not that it is all that complicated, i would assume lots of people throughout the millenia had had the idea, but that it needs infrastructure to be useful. I can't imagine nomadic hunter gatherers for example having all that much use for it
Six and Seven in Hebrew sound almost identical to their Polish equivalents - Sześć and Siedem.
It might be loaned
Scrap that, I was thinking about the fact that ancient Hebrew is a lot less documented than Latin and had to be reconstructed as modern Hebrew via loanwords from European languages, but seven is certainly present many times in the torah.
@@bacicinvatteneaca The words for 6 diverge when you reconstruct their ancestors, with Semitic being something like shishum and PIE being something like sweks. Seven on the other hand has long been theorized to be a borrowing from Semitic, as the reconstructions shabbum and septm are certainly closer. The problem is though, how could this actually happen? No Semite walked the steppes of Russia, no steppeman of that age lived in the fertile crescent or Arabia. Even if the PIEmen used boats to get to the south coasts of the Black Sea and Caspian Sea, they still have vast mountains full of non-Semites separating them. Alternatively they could have both borrowed it from someone between them, and the prime suspect would be a Hurro-Urartian language. Yet this doesnt fit, as 7 for them is shinti. Curiously though 6 for them is sheshe, which makes one suspect a borrowing from Semitic shishum. Thus it seems to me to just be coincidence, or a relation from such an archaic time it cant tell us anything meaningful.
A word like "please" may not even necessarily exist in PIE. That word isn't there in many other IE. But it's so ingrained in English that it's often the first thing native English speakers ask about when learning phrases - and the one thing people learning English are taught: 'Remember, on this school trip to England, say "please!"'
I’m pretty he meant the verb “to please” or “to like” more broadly. “To please” basically just reverses the agent and object of the verb “to like”.
Hence in French “il me plaît” (possibly?) meaning “I like it” and in Latin “mihi placet” also meaning “I like it” where “I” is actually “for/to me” and the subject of the sentence is the thing that one likes. Older IE languages generally prefer this French/Latin construction that resembles the one in English “to please”
My mother tongue is basque. As far as I know it is the only pre-indoeuropean language alive. I think you should check a bit that , and its relations with the lost iberian language. Also, the toponomy and hidronomy of Europe, the basconic-iberian inscriptions, and the ancient genetic new studies offer, I think, interesting clues of ancient Europe.
1:07:35 In Sanskrit, the prefix "sat-" like the word satya represents both good and true, which came from PIE *es- to be. Or, the 'sat' in Bodhisattva
Scientists in a lab could not more perfectly design content that is exactly my jam.
For the 1:04:39 note on PIE using the dative for "my name is" --- something interesting is the casual "I go by (name)..." in English.
Also that several languages, Romance or otherwise, use both "My name is A" and "I am called ..." or "I call myself..." constructions.
I think a better remnant of the dative of possession syntax in English is something like "there's a package for you", which, is really equivalent to "you have a package"; "there's a name for that" is also "that has a name". There's a few interesting cases where the "there's an X for Y" syntax is universally preferred over "Y has X", so, we would usually say "there's a book for that kind of topic" but not "that kind of topic has a book" which is unusual.
There are also other folksier ways of saying these too, like "there's a car in the driveway with your name on it', like, "the car in the driveway is now yours", "you now have a car".
It’s like meeting up with a new friend and he runs into a friend of his and doesn’t introduce you, so you just stand there while they have a conversation. Luckily it’s a conversation you find very interesting.
Intersting, as a persian speaker, it is almost the same we have for Honmn moy x hasti:
Nam man x hast
26:08 Minor correction: It's "kurisumasu" in Japanese. /u/ is the generic filler vowel in loan words, or /o/ after t/d, and in some cases /i/, e.g. text -> tekisuto
/u/ is often reduced, and sometimes dropped in some positions, so some say it more like /kurismas/
Technically, in Japanese it's a /ɯ/, the /u/ with the lips unrounded. It also is devoiced in some positions as you point out, which makes it barely audible.
@@DerpASherpa117 Well, when you get too much into the weeds at some point there’s no point in using phonemic transcription :p
After all, the Japanese high back vowel can also sound more like the ы in Russian
@@keegster7167 true
Asian Studies major here, and I just came to the comments section to say それな!
I'd love to see Jackson speaking Icelandic. Then see him speak with natives
He told a really funny story about that once. I think it's safe to retell here:
He went to a market in Iceland, and he was speaking Icelandic to one vendor and the vendor kept responding in English. Jackson got a little frustrated, he speaks good Icelandic, so towards the end he asked the guy, "Why do you keep responding in English, I'm speaking Icelandic to you." (He said this in Icelandic, btw) In response, the guy said something like, "Oh don't worry, you're Faorese (or Norwegian? I can't remember which he said), you'll learn to speak properly one day." 😂😂😂
I told Andrew’s class at UK. That was just awesome , so much fun
egom tom iskemi ( I like it). My best attempt at Proto Indo European.
It sounds better in Sanskrit: aham tam icchAmi.
It sounds best in PIE, there is no contest.
@@cezarstefanseghjucan I meant I butchered the PIE that I wrote.
The Sanskrit is wrong. Tam is masculine. You should say "ahaṃ tad icchāmi" but that sounds very artificial. Saying both "aham" and "icchāmi" isn't necessary. But besides, "tad icchāmi" is more like "I desire it". "I like it" is more like "[tan] mahyaṃ rocate".
@@carterwood4197 I know, but I don’t know how to do mahyam tad Rocate in PIE. And I thought the default was masculine, I forgot that we use neuter when gender is ambiguous.
Mam bodhayaitavAn iti Tasmai Dhanyavadah
@@AbhiN_1289 *mām bodhayitavān 😁
Spinning wheels (Great wheels) were invented in late medieval Europe and modern spinning wheels with a treadle was invented later than that. Before that everything was generally spun by spindle. (My partner studied textile history at Uppsala university.)
Pottery wheels would have been a better suggestion - but I believe they are younger than the (ordinary) wheel.
@@peterfireflylund I think the pottery wheel is a late Neolithic thing, so earlier than the cartwheel.
Funny thing about having fun - my high school Latin teacher taught us a phrase that has stuck with me to this day: Mihi ad lausanum eundum est. “A going to the bathroom must be done by me.” Or something like that.
Come for the Sagas, stay for the linguistics discussions I can only hope to understand.
I've always found linguistics interesting, but it's a subject that I cannot really grasp. Give me recursion and memoization any day.
regarding the topic around 50 minutes in about things like pitch, accent, intonation, and so on affecting phonology, and the mention of uptalk, I have experienced firsthand as a vocalist that there are a number of things regarding that that can affect voicing of consonants. So when we sing, we are exerting more air pressure than usual, and as we are raising pitch, we often have to compensate even more air pressure to voice consonants. If we rise in pitch, but keep a consistent air pressure, we often devoice consonants. I experienced this firsthand when I sang Mozart's tuba mirum at a concert and sang "tupa mirum". And you can hear this in speeches and on radio. I almost want to make a compilation of every time I have ever heard this: when somebody accentuates a word, and says the word slightly more forcefully than usual, maybe even raising the pitch of the word, often the final syllable is devoiced. I've heard Bernie Sanders says "this is a country that beliefs" instead of "that believes", in the middle of his classic yelling oratory. I've heard people on the radio say "back" instead of "bag", and "moof" instead of "move" and so on. In all of these instances, there's some kind of extra force on these words, either because they're speaking loudly and yelling like Bernie Sanders, or they're accentuating the word, or they're talking with an uptalk and the word ends the sentence; but, the speaker is not compensating with the extra force by adding more air pressure. I've also seen a voice acting coach talk about the same thing on here, where he frequently has students who are speaking in higher registers, but they aren't adding enough pressure to fully voice consonants, and they get this devoicing effect.
Something like this, it's happening in English right now with the uptalk phenomenon, and it could lead to devoicing of final consonants, but I've often wondered if something like this happened in German at one point, since German systematically devoices final consonants. Could it be that something as silly as a tendency to place the intonation accent on the last syllable of a word lead to the final consonant being devoiced?
Your question. That depends. Is it systematic in German? And if so, what are the factors? Like proximity to other voiced consonants in order to make the word easier to pronounce? I ask, because Polish has a similar system to the latter in its phonology and it is because of that partly, but also due to its penultimate syllable stress. Does German do something similar?
In English, I find it depends on accent alot and particularly if the last letter is an "r" sound. But bear in mind, our stress patterns are quite different, we tend to shout the beginning and whisper the rest. Like we barely pronounce all the sounds or letters in most words.
@@Nikelaos_Khristianos It is systematic in German. The rule is that if a word ends in a voiced consonant, like g, d, or b, it will automatically become devoiced to k, t, or p. So the word Tag is spelled with a g, but in 90% of occasions it will be pronounced with a k. The reason it is spelled with a g is because under certain situations the g can reinsert its voicing, so the plural of Tag is Tage, and because it's in the middle of the word with a vowel after it, it is pronounced g. It might also have a g in instances where the next word begins with a voiced consonant. The only reason the singular has a k is because it ends the syllable and the syllable always ends with a devoiced consonant in German. This also leads to a lot of homophones, like Rad (wheel) and Rat (advice), but they are pronounced differently in their other forms (plural, other cases, etc).
so in German, it's systematic based on word environment. It depends on whether it ends a word, and what the next syllable is. The phenomenon in English that I'm describing isn't systematic based on word environment but is an accident of intonation. So people who speaking with uptalk or in a particularly emphatic voice might remove the voicing of the final consonant in a word, but wouldn't do it in other places when not speaking like that. They recognize a minimal pair of bag and back and that these are two separate words, but when speaking with a lot of emphasis, they might not realize that they accidentally pronounced bag like back.
however I am inquiring as to whether the systematic pronunciation in German originally arose out of a similar accident. This system presumably arose at one point in time, since it wasn't present in proto-Germanic, as the other Germanic languages have minimal pairs between words with final consonants voiced and unvoiced. So it had to come from somewhere.
Oh man I loved farcry primal. A huge part of why was the use of PIE as the basis for the language. I always wondered how that came about.
Updated
From what I know /w/ is still preserved in Eldalian a small North Germanic language and largely in Ossetian, an Iranian language, and conditionally in some Romance languages, and preserved dialectically in many languages, Afghan Persian aka Dari for an example often has it instead of standard Iranian Persian /v/.
Perhaps we should describe 'standard Iranian' Persian as the 'dialect' rather than Aghan Persian. The Persian of Tehran is much less traditional than the Persian of, say, Herat, Kulob, or Mashhad.
Fascinating about "H1su". "Good" as a prefix can be written as "su-" in Gaulish (Su-cellos, the good striker) but Esus is the name of a god (sometimes also written as Hesus) and I think one of the etymologies that have been suggested was it came from a IE root meaning "good", so maybe it's related to "H1su".
Sanskrit SU, EUropean EU, prefix also means ' good' : EUROPE/ SU- RUPA
1:04:20 "There's a name to me" is exactly how possession is expressed in modern Russian. Although with names we usually say "I'm called X", with a lot of things we would say, for example, "u menya est' dom" which can be literally translated to "to/at me there's house."
Also the fact that the verb to be has changed so little (hesti and est') is pretty mind-blowing.
it's "at me", not "to me". The latter is used with the things like "I'am cold" and such
@@heathensein6582 English is not my first language and I may be wrong but I assumed that "at" and "to" can be used interchangeably with little difference in meaning in some situations. Nonetheless, the possessive construction in Russian is still pretty similar to the one in pie.
Can you give an example? How do I say "My name is Paul"?
I do always enjoy reading what other Slavic languages have to say about these sorts of things. I've been learning Polish for about a year and I think literally, ,,mam na imię Nicholas" would be something like, "I have for me the name Nicholas".
("na" is also one of those lovely prepositions that has a dozen meanings in English depending on context, which also includes "to". But "for" is grammatically correct as you would be verbally dealing with me in this sense; I think it would also be a bit weird, even literally, to use "to" as when used with the accusative that normally implies some sense of movement. Like if I'm going to the shops. That being said, I have never had to think about this before, so I'm happy to be wrong!)
Wow. Professor Byrd is a natural borne teacher💫
Fascinating as always. Thank you!
Hey, love the video. I am currently studying Japanese and am pretty sure Christmas is pronounced 'クリスマス[kurisumasu]' and not 'カリサマス[karisamasu]' but I am still both curious and learning. By the way, 'Meli Kalikimaka' makes so much sense for 'Merry Christmas' in Hawaiian after studying Japanese and understanding its use of it's phonetic system to pronounce words from other languages. I believe this use can be referred to as 和製(わせい)[wasei]. Thanks for bring this to light in your conversation.
You are correct
This is kind of like an insight I had with English and the FORCE vowel. -- The vowel + re formulation acts to extend ("lengthen") the vowel, so the "o" becomes the GOAT vowel. That quality has been lost in most non-rhotic accents.
The thing with “nostratic” is it seems far less likely that as you go back in time and human cultures become less centralized, organized, and globalized, that the people living then would speak the same ancestor language. In places around the world even today where indigenous tribes survive: the Amazon basin, outback Australia, Papua New Guinea, etc, and from what is known of indigenous American and Eurasian languages, linguistic diversity is at its highest. So when you think about human societies before centralized governments, before writing, before mass migrations…it seems likely that there would not be a single “nostratic” ancestor, but probably always were many different languages. Probably many of them were related, and probably just like today and just like 4000 years ago, probably many of them weren’t as well.
As far as Hebrew שש and שבע goes: numbers are among the least surprising thing to see similarities in across language families, because they are essential in trade and land management. Those would be some of the most useful kinds of words to borrow from if you are a Proto-Semitic or Proto-Indo-European trading society.
just as a note about spinning wheels - they are WAY younger than most people think of. Most speakers of PIE would have been using some sort of spindle and not a wheel. IIRC spinning wheels at the oldest are 500AD or newer.
Greetings.
Study Basque, you will see the similarities with the ancient spoken languages.
In the Iberian Peninsula we have been studying Basque and Iberian for some time and they are practically identical.
As you say, words were constructed through sound, each vowel acquires a meaning and the different qualifications and uses of the created manifestations were expressed with consonants.
The vowels would be interrelated with the consonants, which were divided into three groups that we can classify as strong, weak, derived and sustained consonants. The number of consonants is reduced to sixteen: strong: K, P, T.
Soft: B, D, G.
Derivatives: TS, TX, TZ
Sharp: L, M, N, R, S, Z and X.
The consonant sounds that our phonic system can boast of are much higher. This consonant scheme forms the scale of consonant harmonics within which numerous chromatic variants can be developed. The consonant system, in its absolute synthesis, was reduced to seven:
P, T, K, N, M, R, and S.
The English word "OLD" is reminiscent of the word OLDA or OLDE "is old or ancestral."
"GUE" is border. From this term almost without hesitation the Semitic word "wadi" is derived, which is a river. The Spanish word "WAR"
It means: “make a border” and you can imagine why wars are almost always fought. Even the English "WAR" also derives from this ancient term.
The "L" sound has a meaning that is directly related to the earth and many of its fruits.
"LE" is earth or more correctly “the earth”, as is "LUR" as well.
"LAN" is “the work that is done on earth” and that in the past was applied generically to the term “work”, as it was the work that almost everyone did to provide daily sustenance.
LANDA means: “it is land of work” and this is the term from which the endings derive
Land, Landa or Landie that many regions and countries receive.
With Basque you can decipher the meaning of rivers, mountains, countries, towns, the hidden meaning of the names of the gods, ancient languages such as Sanskrit or Dogon, Hindi, Indo-European languages.
The word I like the most is: Surtr and refers to "SU" fire, R creation, the T united to the R refers to something elevated in creation, if we unite everything we obtain, a volcano.
The Iberian language seems to us to be the source of all principles.
Study it.
I'd imagine that in the future artificial intelligence would be able to help reconstruct long dead human language, given the right queries and enough training data.
Interesting supposition
Not worth the human enslavement
Idk, computer ai can be impressive with, normal neutral sentences. But then comes word order variation, irony, Cockney speak, poetry, sarcasm, idioms, solecism, slang etc. Google translate for example won't pick these up and will translate literally. There are improvements in the translation methods of these AI, but there are so many variables in language beyond the bare literal meanings, it will take too much.
In the future certainly. How distant in the future, that is to be seen.
Professor Byrd sounds a lot like my Amish neighbors sound when they speak "english" to us, I do not know if it is his cadence or what he just sounded so much like how they sound.
This made me think about a realization when I (fluent in French and English), decided to brush up my Spanish, and then start learning Russian, Greek, and Arabic, when the word for "tea" came up in _play_ sentences.
Turns out, the English "tea" is directly the same as the Latin "tea", it's very similar to French "thé", Spanish "té", Italian "te", and Greek is "tsay" ("τσάι"). So far so good. But Russian is "tshay" ("чай" ; really close to Greek), which was somewhat a surprise but somewhat not. Starts with the sound 't', is a one-syllable word. And then comes Arabic "shay" (شاي ; sounds like Russian without the 't' sound), and _that_ really surprised me, but ultimately made me realize "holy poop that word comes from a language that is common to all of those modern languages". You guys mentioned semitic languages, so I looked up what the word is in Hebrew, and it is "taay" ("תה").
We kinda learn that languages have ancestors, we kinda learn what those ancestors are, but they're more presented as "groups" of languages that "have similarities" and then completely skipped over (probably because of the lack of knowledge about the details of those languages), but at least for me, it didn't connect until last year when I had that realization. That ancestor went from a "group of languages" to "an actual, potentially intelligible language, even for us modern people". Now I'm not saying I would understand PIE, but _it makes sense_ when presented in front of me, all of it.
Whoah that just made it so clear the way you laid it out made it click for me thank youbso much for posting that. The concept has been just out of focus for me for some time and boom you removed the last blocks to understanding the connection of it all
Thank you I'm a little excited by this new piece of this word puzzle
Tea is a recent loanword into all those languages.
these partly unrelated languages all recently loaned tea from various sinitic languages/each other
In portuguese it's "chá"
There is no sound "t" in the Russian word for "tea". It's "chai".
There are pockets here in Virginia that still pronounce words like they did in England and Scotland a few hundred years ago. Until recently the accents were the same. We've retained the accent probably due to isolation.
This is amazing that so many europeans came up from small portion of land between r. Dnipro (modern Ukraine) and r. Don (modern Russia)
I refuse to ever skip this intro
Hnomn Moy X hesti actually can sound pretty Slavic , especially with the dative 😅
It also doesn't sound terribly far off from English if you put it in English order: "Moy hnomn hesti __".
Same with french "mon nom est" it's terrifying. I think it's even closer with slavic russian yeah
English has something like augmentation, with the A- particle. Not just for verbs, but also for prepositions and adjectives. Adrift. Away. Along. Amidst. Again. Other Germanic languages do the same thing with the "ge-" particle, or something similar. Gesundheit.
What systematic sound changes led from gʷelH to "yeet!" 🤣
gʷ turns into g in proto-germanic and g usually turned into y in old english.
@@pilenai Hence "yesterday" not "gesterday" just to add an example. :) Weirdly, since Medieval Greek (I think!) "g" has had the same relationship with front vowels, it turns into a "y" sound not a "g". Shows it's a somewhat regular sound-change/sound interaction.
LegalEagle turns aspirated stops into [px], [tx], [kx] and sometimes even geminates the [x]
Very interesting lecture!
great video.
I like the realization that a language could be learned when it wasn't comprehended previously.
I was just learning to enjoy playing video games which I hadn't previously even liked because I had not understood how to play them.
The idea is that when taught properly I would be able to understand and thus enjoy. I related this to the instruction of a language, or for that matter, any skill that goes in one ear and out the other or right over our head.
Love this :)
Another great video thank you so much! Interesting thing is, there is a macro language family called Eurasiatic languages which include Indo-European, Altaic, Uralic, Eskimo and also might include Korean and Japanese (due to their connection with Altaic). It supports Dr. Byrd's ideas on connection among some other languages with proto Indo-European
thought i was the only cowboy interested in PIE studies. lol hell probably the only dude in south texas
I am proud of myself because I studied Sanskrit.
In india we say Sanskrit is the god's language.
Loved the sidenote on Carl Sagan. He sure had a very odd set of consonant sounds!
You would have to look at preserved bodies in peat bogs in northern Europe to get the soft tissues of the larynx and voice box. My MD UWSoM’89
I never thought I’d hear a reference to “Meli Kalikimaka” which recorded by Bing Crosby on this channel.
Perhaps I misunderstood Dr. Byrd, but Polish has a “wuh” sound.
And interestingly, it's a relatively new feature as it began to dominate the famous, Slavic dark "l" just a century ago, so its origin is rather different than in other langs
Byrd was referring to "w" expressed as "wa" specifically in English. Like in PIE it was "wa" and in English it always has been "wa". There was never a point in English where it became "v" for example like in most other Germanic languages, "w" has always been "wa" even in Old English.
Greetings from Northern Ireland - or should I say “hi, cousin”!
_Nōmen mī X est_ is how you introduce yourself in Latin.
'Thank you' should be reconstructible from Latin _grātiās agō_ and Greek ευχαριστώ; there seems to be a common _gharit-_ root.
Why wasn't the Classics department this cool when I went to Kentucky?
@@decimusausoniusmagnus5719 based
Another example is tasha. Northern Mandarin speakers pronounce it tas-ha as in Manchu, whereas Germanic languages speakers pronounce it as ta-sha. tas-ha means tiger in Manchu.
Would love to see a video from Jackson on WHY he thinks we cannot reconstruct pre-historic myths through a process of comparative mythology similar to that of comparative linguistics to reconstruct pre-historic languages. There are others on RUclips who claim quite a lot on this basis. What is the critique of this methodology?
Good stuff
I got chills thinking about how Dr Byrd and his wife designing a computer game to showcase Proto-Indo European is the 21st century equivalent of Tolkien's impulse to create the Eru Illuvitar corpus including The Silmarillion, TLOTR & Hobbit etc, etc.
Surely he and his wife could pitch and get VC funding to progress this?
Wouldn't you have the words for 'day' and 'journey' in the accusative in those greetings? That's what German does in Guten Tag, Guten Morgen etc. It's like an ellipsis of '(I wish you a) good day'
Would that I had more than sophistry to contribute here. ;) Great video, even if only for that! :)
Since you're at UK, Adam in the IT department majored in game design at Shawnee State
Therapist: the cowboy linguist doesn't exist, it won't hurt you
The cowboy linguist:
so the word in indo-european, to throw, sounded like "jekt" is super close to the swedish for for hunting, jakt. wich in the beginning was by throwing stuff at things? it makes all the sense
It‘s „Jagd“ in german
Regarding the topic at 52:00ish about scanning a persons vocal tracks to figure out linguistic hints:
I could see this work for voice-shape, so depth and other particularities (I've seen some "what Pharaoh X sounded like" videos that I think have done exactly that), possibly even deriving a kind of genetic tree out of that; but figuring out what language quirks were likely and unlikely in the spoken language seems hard to see for me.
The difference you see in Dr. Byrd and Dr. Jackson is as mentioned a quite big one already. Now consider also that adopted kids grow up without an accent at all.
Unless it was a full-blown speech impediment I don't think there is enough genetic pressure to have natural selection consider whether you could pronounce a certain combination perfect or just nigh-perfect. And reconstructing proper vocal chords from a skeleton sounds nigh impossible to me (though I am certainly no expert on this).
Very informative conversation, thank you for recording and putting it up for us to learn from!
Ansolutely fantastic discussion. Are there any idioms that can be traced back to proto-indoeuropean?
I believe "Mother Earth" comes from the name of the PIE well, mother earth goddess. Though in English we got the other word for earth.
The root for wheel occurs in Semitic as `-g-l where it seems to be a portmanteau of the root `-g (variant H-g) for a round cake with the root g-l for rolling.
"He's on his way to another Grimm's law". I died.
In Spanish, the capital of Georgia is Tiflis. Some people use, incorrectly, "Tiblisi" in order to avoid the forbidden "tb".
I don't remember where I read it but there's a quote saying "no language changed more in the 19th century than PIE."
My timbre changes when I speak Spanish or English, or even in my pretty rudimentary French or German.