Funny thing is if you speak a Uralic language, every Indo-European language will kinda seem tonal to you because our languages are a lot more "atonal". We literally just put the stress on the first syllable and then that's it
French is in a very similar situation, all words are just stressed on the final syllable, and the stress is pretty weak. English speakers have often said to me that "when you speak french it sounds like you whisper whith no intonation like spspspsps"
@@astra5128 Parisian French sounds like someone falling down as many flights of stairs as there are ideas being expresssed. Sometimes it's just falling down a ladder, which also falls. Does that make sense to you or am I the only one 😅
I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I legitimately did a spit take at seeing the name of my mother-tongue pop up in a language. Very interesting video. I am rather young but I make the distinction between voiced and voiceless ( most of the time ) and do not rely on tone, but I do suspect this has something to do with the fact that I am also fluent in German. Over all, very interesting and well put together video :D
Speaking Afrikaans, in a workplace with a lot of Xhosa speakers, I've noticed this in the newer staff who just finished high-school. The impact was muted for decades because before the 1990s it was practically illegal for people who had a Banto language as home language to interact with people who spoke Afrikaans as a home language before adulthood. That restriction on kids interacting in, for example, school, no longer exists
im from Bangladesh, and there is a language (socalled a "dialect") called Sylheti, it has a tone system with a "flat" and "high" tone. Most Bangladeshi Dialects of Bengali and Sylheti went through a merging of aspirated/Murmured stops and unaspirated/unmurmered stops, so "baha" and "bhaha" merged into "baha" abd "báha" respectively. This is intact a Indo-European langauge too.
Interesting thing about Sylheti is that it is in decline in Bangladesh, but is rising in London England even relative to Standard Bangla, very interesting!
@@TheDrumstickEmpire honestly speaking, out of all the dialects in Bangladesh Sylheti has the strongest supporters and speakers. Unlike most of Bangladesh who inplans to climb the social ladder pick up standard bengali or dhaka koine, sylhetis have started extreme diglossia where they speak sylheti proudly at home and public and use bengali with outsiders. sylhetis are the most proud of their heritage so i think it will survive the longest
Interesting video!! As a native Norwegian speaker, I'm intrigued by the way we and Afrikaans-speakers spell "chocolate" the same - "sjokolade." On opposite ends of the world! We have pitch too, arguably, as you said! The words "bønner" (beans) and "bønder" (farmers) should sound the same, but they don't. "Faren" (the father) and "faren" (the danger) should also sound the same, but they don't. Outside of context, you're supposed to tell them apart by pitch :-)
In my dialect we pronounce faren In two completely different ways 😂 There’s also this song; På Feil Side Av Låven which makes fun of the pitch accent in our language, and I find it hilarious
I don't think the neighbouring bantu languages have anything to do with the development of tone but the Khoesan languages certainly do. Afrikaans speakers have had 350+ years of interaction with native speakers of Khoesan languages. Many areas where languages like Khoekhoe were spoken are now mostly Afrikaans speaking. A lot (if not all) Khoesan languages have tone. Afrikaans speakers don't have a long history of interaction with speakers of bantu languages and barely no intermarriage at all whereas the first marriage recorded in the Dutch Cape Colony was Khoesan/European. Most if not all afrikaans speakers have Khoesan ancestry especially among mixed race people (cape coloureds) and even among the majority of white afrikaans speakers. (Although in smaller amounts) A lot of Afrikaans borrowings come from Khoesan languages like; gogga, dagga, eina, kierie, as well as the names of native plant and animal species. A lot of dialectal differences are influenced by khoesan languages (the dropping of consonant clusters as well as a type of hendiadys) Khoekhoegowab for example doesn't have any voiced stops. (only as allophones between vowels) Usually khoesan people would learn Dutch and then go on to interact with the lower classes as well as the slaves who were brought from other Dutch colonies in India and Indonesia. Mixing the language even more. There weren't a lot of European women in the Cape which meant that Slave women or Khoesan women would either be married to european men or work in their households. Having a large influence on the language of the children. A lot of people (including poor whites, freed slaves and khoe tribes) also left the colony and trekked into the frontiers and carried Afrikaans into Namibia. (The griqua and baster peoples) where you get the largest amount of influence from Khoesan languages. The Khoesan languages were and are mostly spoken in the dry western regions of the country including the Kalahari and the regions with a medditeranean climate around Cape town. Bantu speakers mostly lived in the more fertile tropical regions next to the indian ocean.
"greek-uh, russian-uh" - spot the aussie!!! no, awesome video, Rhea!! I had no idea Punjabi was indo-european but seems obvious now you've mentioned haha. Catch me being a *silly billy*. That thing of differences diminishing in Punjabi between the different stops is really interesting, and reminds me a lot of how different languages shift with consistent use, to make the language 'easier' to speak. Like common verbs' conjucation patterns 'degrading' in comparison to less common verbs in Spanish. tono exodus vs leviticus im dying lmaooooo. tono leviticus would just be 613 perscriptivist rules on how when and where tone is valid and where it isn't 🤣. Rhea you're dog is so pretty omggggggg. omg i speak ingwish too!!! the puppy is back I love them!! ngl I also went on a little dip of a dive into limburgish after this - fascinating stuff omg!!
I don't understand how you have less than 1000 subscribers, you're amazing! Witty, charming, pick interesting topics and talk about them with perfect clarity.
very interesting, but really needed examples of the change in Afrikaans and what exactly you mean. (speaking as a non-Afrikaans speaking but Welsh-speaking Welshman who's interested in Afrikaans). Didn't understand much of the grammatical phrases, but appreciate the need to use them. Afrikaans is such a cool language.
I am a punjabi। Thanks for recognizing my vernacular। Just a small addition, in punjabi voiced aspirated sounds do not lose voice always but always lose aspiration unless u need to speak tabla bols in indian classical music - dha dhin dhin dha 😉
Super interesting video! I wanna add that tone isn't just about pitch, but what your vocal folds do in general. Pitch is a major part of it, but there are also tones in other languages (such as Vietnamese, as you mentioned) that require a mandatory glottal closure in some of the tones. Some languages also require creaky or breathy voice for certain tones.
"Indo-European languages don't have tone!" Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and proto-Indo-European itself: (pitch accent is just tone!) Anyway, as a Mandarin speaker myself: 媽： mother, also turns up in compounds relating to aunts 麻： hemp, pins-and-needles, paralysis 馬： horse 罵： to scold
As far as I know the European languages with pitch accent are Lithuanian, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Swedish, and I'm not sure about Latvian. I was there for a month just before the pandemic and remember it feeling like it would be the easiest to pick up among the Baltics. On Tonogenesis, I was just reading that Khmer has been developing a tone too. I didn't know about it in Korean but it seems that innovations in Korean can be pretty sharply distinguished from region to region and age group to age group, like the vowel in the words for "dog" and "crab".
Latvian does have pitch accent but the system is not usually taught to foreigners and locals are also usually not aware of it unless they had a specialised linguistic education. It's a bit of a mess as not all dictionaries mark tone, the prescribed standard language system has 3 tones while most of the country already switched to a 2 tone system. Anecdotally, in Lithuanian the tone system is better taught and described in books but is in a more precarious state as there are already dialectal varieties of the language where the tone distinction is completely lost, like in Vilnius.
Definitely one of your most interesting videos so far, and it clearly has stirred up a lot of discourse in the comments section!!! Did you promote this video, or have people naturally found it with RUclips recommendations? I love your dog, so cute! Also, I think its funny when you said 'now there's no flies' as one flies across the entire frame behind your head at 10:19 haha
Pitch accent is tone. Tone is just when pitch is phonologically relevant in and of itself. Pitch accent uses pitch to tell you what syllable is stressed. English has stress accent, not pitch accent: "insight?" and "incite?" are both low-high, but the stress is on the first syllable in insight and second syllable in incite.
@@ZadenZane Stressed syllables do not have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables. Listen to "ago" at 0:06 of this video. Stressed syllables are lower-pitched all the time.
I find it funny how pretty much all Korean learning material and videos still teach to distinguish between Lenis and Aspirated stops, but if you just listen to any Korean speak they are very clearly pronouncing them all aspirated at the start of words
Middle Korean was tonal, according to Wikipedia. So maybe the language is just going back to its roots. Burmese is apparently in the midst of tonogenesis with difference in the manner of pronunciation and not just the pitch. So if you say a syllable in a a Kardashian Burmese accent with vocal fry, that's called the "creaky tone". I'm not sure why, as it sounds nothing at all like a creaking door or a creaky floorboard.
Native Afrikaans speaker here. Interesting thought, and while some of us speak in a sing-songy way, I can't think of any examples of tonality here. "Daai pappegaai is fraai, maar kwaai en taai." No tone difference between any of the "aai" vowels, just in stress and length, despite there being voiced and voiceless consonants at the start position. "Sy's bly sy kry hoenderdye met tye." All the "y" vowels are the same. "Sy bêre egte pêrels om êrens." All the "ê" vowels are the same. And so on... Would be interesting to hear if someone can find examples where tonality does appear though.
This is the point though, it’s not tonal *YET*, it’s just a thing that exists in some peoples’ idiolects; that is how language changes, it starts of idiolectal and slowly becomes dialectal.
@@TheDrumstickEmpire Sure, but I'd be interested to see real examples where people really do speak that way. Otherwise, by definition, there's no evidence to support the idea. 😉
The theory that it's becoming tonal becoming of Bantu influence seems very unlikely for Standard Afrikaans , possibly for Cape Afrikaans (especially if you consider they now represent majority of the Afrkaans speakers) because of the Cape Afrikaans speaking communities more often coming from mixed households and the fact that Cape Afrikaans already greatly differs from Standard Afrikaans in terms of vocabulary where they'll use more Malay or Bantu language words
@@SoldierofWotan88 Speakers of the bantu languages might have accents when speaking English or Afrikaans that, with enough interaction, might have an effect on the language. Kind of like how there are dialects of english influenced by mexican spanish in the Southwestern US.
The "mixed households" don't typically have Bantu language speakers in their family trees though. It's not unheard of, but there are probably just as many white Afrikaners and Englishmen marrying Cape Coloureds as Bantu language speaking black Africans. Yet the English accent and the white Afrikaans haven't influenced the Kaaps dialect of Afrikaans, have they? I as an Afrikaans speaker have to interact with speakers of Bantu languages regularly and increasingly more often. I think my accent in English (our only common language typically) changed upon extensive contact with them at university, so I think the original theory is still likely.
funny... i'm a native afrikaans speaker and all my family including me still distinguish between voiced and voiceless... i would say however that afrikaans is much more sing-songy than any other language i know/speak..
To my ears, you add an 'ə' after most p/t/k when these end a seperate part of a sentence. This sounds much like what is heard in English spoken with a thick Italian accent. Even the contour of the tone of the 'ə' sounds like that, even though an Italian would've added an /e/ instead of /ə/. Everything else in your speech sounds British or Australian to me. (It's probably 'South African English'.) But I wonder, does what I describe here have anything to do with what you explained is happening in Afrikaans at the moment?
you're right, i definitely do that! i do it fairly often too, not just after voiceless sounds (look for @Nooticus 's comment on my video about Australian English for more examples of me doing it.) I am actually Australian, and a lot of young Aussies my age are starting to do it (it's primarily considered a feminine thing, just like uptalk). If I were South African, though, that'd definitely be an interesting lead!
@@RheaDawnLanguage Then I wonder, could that particular Australian trait be connected to the fair amount of Italian immigrants, in any conceivable way?
@@pepebriguglio6125 given how widespread it is, i'd be doubtful. italians and other immigrants (particularly from the mediterranean) in Australia tend to speak a separate sub-dialect from wadjelas like me, which linguists call Ethnocultural Australian English, among other things, and it tends to be a fairly marginalised way of speaking (and from what I've heard, it seems to be lacking in this feature most of the time, though it could feasibly occur in more recent immigrants from Italy). I'm pretty sure I've heard this schwa-adding in Americans, too, and i suspect that it originated there and is now spreading to younger Australians. like, when i imagine "valley girl" speech, I hear this feature in it, and god knows how long that vocal stereotype has been around for. quite a lot of less perceptible phonetic features, like yod-dropping, are starting to appear in younger Australian English due to American influence, and maybe this could be one of those things? I managed to find this podcast on the topic - I haven't listened to it, but it seems to be talking about this feature if you wanted to find out more about it: www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/03/john_mcwhorter_on_an_english_language_exclamatory_particle.html
Interesting. The question I now have is why now? Afrikaans has been around for a few hundred years and resisted all changes. That's why modern dutch people people say it's like "Old English". So why now, why now allow outside influences in. That's interesting, if you believe language and culture are connected.
Wthin South Africa there's a lot of dynamism in the language, from town to town. Not a sudden change. It's more than vocabulary, it's everything that makes a language.
The main reason is because that fifth tone is a “non-tone,” it doesn’t really count as a tone, but as a byproduct of linguistic development. The neutral tone only emerged as the tones of some characters was gradually reduced over time. All neutral tone characters had tone at some point in history (ex. 吗 ma used to be and still is má, as in 干吗, and is also used in transliterations where it was pronounced mǎ, such as 吗啡. 吗 at the end of the sentence lost its tone likely to how often it was used and its grammaticalization. Same with 的 dì-de)
if you go outside when its more than 37 out, it's too hot for any flies, mozzies, even ants. It's also too hot for humans but you do what you gotta do.
I'm a native German speaker and I've noticed something pretty interesting going on, I don't know quite how to explain it, but the r is less and less pronounced, it usually isn't pronounced at all if it is after a vowel it's more of an -a tonal-ish kinda sound I think, but it still is if it's in front of one vowel, it's replaced by an a-sound, not the English one tho, and uhm... like the German word for "he" er, is more and more only pronounced as just an a, -er morph more and more into just an a sound. It's pretty interesting, since most people thinking of German are probably picturing the hard trilled r, but it's kind of disappearing, behind vowels. Maybe it's moving into some kind of tonal area too, but idk tho
I find this really interesting! I've noticed that German speakers (except Swiss ones) don't usually pronounce R unless it's before a vowel, but this change you're explaining sounds really interesting! I've never noticed it before. I do think that saying it's a tonal thing is probably the wrong words. It could involve tone, but what you're describing just sounds like it's a change in articulation. Still, maybe I'm wrong! It sounds like it's just starting out, so it'll be really interesting to see how it changes in future.
I notice your little friend has Jack Russell Disease. I hope you've found him a good psychiatrist. The one influence of African languages (which would occur at least to some extent because the kids on the farms grow up speaking these, just about before they learn their own languages) is a "vowel stretching feature" used in the Zulu word for "far", which is (roughly speaking) "kude" (and sounds more like "Goodeh" if Anglicized). "Kude" - far. In Afrikaans, "doer". "Ku----de". fa----r. or doe----rrrr. And even "Ku-------------------de" (maybe if talking about Siberia or the Moon). fa------------------------------------r. doe-------------------------------------------------rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. How much "kude" your "kude" is depends on how much puff you have in your lungs. You can also mix English and Afrikaans, while still speaking English. The case that has come to mind is the expression, "doer and gone". Or where the object is "ku------de", you might say it's "doe------r and gone". (The English doer tends not to have much of a trill on the r, ever. In Natal it has none.)
So what is "Umfahren" in german? The word is written the same but if you put the emphasis on the "Um" it means driving over something, when you put the emphasis on the "fah" jt means driving around something. And even without context, just listening to the pronounciation, you will know which verison is meant.
isn't that just the result of specifying the important part of the word in words that have agglutination/suffixes/prefixes, rather than 'tone'? Also, I dont think you can call it tone when the words mean almost the same thing?
the words mean the opposite of each other, maybe driving over something didn't capture what it means completely. It's the difference between running someone over or driving around someone. It's also not specifying the important part of the word, the "Um" in running someone over basically means "toppling something", the "Um" in driving around someone means "going around", so the part of the word that really changes the meaning of the word is always the "Um". It's basically a compound word where the "fahren" always means "to drive" while the "Um" is a homonym. I struggle to see the difference between that and tones. @@Nooticus
sounds just like regular stress here. With Germanic languages stress does involve an element of pitch (generally the stressed syllable has the highest pitch), but it also typically means the stressed syllable is louder and slightly longer than others. This doesn't count as tone or pitch accent because although pitch makes up a large part of the contrast here, it isn't completely essential to tell the meaning of the word due to the other factors used in conjunction with it. It's like the English difference between "INcrease" as a noun and "inCREASE" as a verb
Sorta related but: Apparently limburgish, another germanic language, has some tonality as well [stæɪn˦˨˧] steĩn "stone" [stæɪn˦˨] steìn "stones" [ɡraːf˦˨] "grave" [ɡraːf˦˨˧] "hole next to a road" [weːʁ˦˨˧ˈkɪ˦˨və˧] "We conquer!" [weːʁ˦˨˧ˈkɪ˦˨˧və˧] "May we conquer!"
@@RheaDawnLanguage it seems to be a feature of Australian English but don't know if it's that prevalent since I'm no Ozzie. However I've been trying to find out if this phenomenon has a name or not. I've tried to Google it but I came up empty handed 😔
I doubt White Afrikaans speakers are influenced by Bantu language. Maybe Coloreds at the Cape. Projecting total fertility rates, Afrikaans will become more marginalised over the decades anyways.
@@NooticusWhen getting robbed maybe, there's a large amount of self-segregation in SA, mostly for safety reasons. Just look at Orania or the Bantustans.
@@NooticusWe absolutely do interact with them on a regular basis. I'd hate to talk too much about politics on a linguistics channel, but they as a demographic are urbanizing at a higher rate than any other and they're specifically coming to areas historically inhabited by whites. They also tend to find work very easily because of South Africa's affirmative action hiring policies and they're also provided with free housing for the same reason. There are fewer and fewer places where Afrikaners could expect not to have to interact with them, especially considering their population size compared to ours. Not passing any judgement on any group, but these are the statistical realities and you can fact check me by googling this. I do think it's possible that tone is developing in Afrikaans because of this.
![Gucci Mane & Sexyy Red - You Don't Love Me [Official Music Video]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/j7IBqyFKT4c/mqdefault.jpg)
Funny thing is if you speak a Uralic language, every Indo-European language will kinda seem tonal to you because our languages are a lot more "atonal". We literally just put the stress on the first syllable and then that's it
I agree, you Uralic people sound to us(slovenian speaker) like old tractors. Te-ta-ke-te-ka
@@Motofanable yes, there's a lot of truth to it
Yeah, I also can't put my finger where the stress is.
French is in a very similar situation, all words are just stressed on the final syllable, and the stress is pretty weak. English speakers have often said to me that "when you speak french it sounds like you whisper whith no intonation like spspspsps"
@@astra5128 Parisian French sounds like someone falling down as many flights of stairs as there are ideas being expresssed. Sometimes it's just falling down a ladder, which also falls.
Does that make sense to you or am I the only one 😅
Afrikaans going tonal is one of the greatest twists in the history of languages. I suppose this will cause tonal Leviticus to finally occur
I am a native Afrikaans speaker and I legitimately did a spit take at seeing the name of my mother-tongue pop up in a language. Very interesting video. I am rather young but I make the distinction between voiced and voiceless ( most of the time ) and do not rely on tone, but I do suspect this has something to do with the fact that I am also fluent in German. Over all, very interesting and well put together video :D
Speaking Afrikaans, in a workplace with a lot of Xhosa speakers, I've noticed this in the newer staff who just finished high-school.
The impact was muted for decades because before the 1990s it was practically illegal for people who had a Banto language as home language to interact with people who spoke Afrikaans as a home language before adulthood. That restriction on kids interacting in, for example, school, no longer exists
im from Bangladesh, and there is a language (socalled a "dialect") called Sylheti, it has a tone system with a "flat" and "high" tone. Most Bangladeshi Dialects of Bengali and Sylheti went through a merging of aspirated/Murmured stops and unaspirated/unmurmered stops, so "baha" and "bhaha" merged into "baha" abd "báha" respectively. This is intact a Indo-European langauge too.
Siloti mentioned
Interesting thing about Sylheti is that it is in decline in Bangladesh, but is rising in London England even relative to Standard Bangla, very interesting!
@@TheDrumstickEmpire honestly speaking, out of all the dialects in Bangladesh Sylheti has the strongest supporters and speakers. Unlike most of Bangladesh who inplans to climb the social ladder pick up standard bengali or dhaka koine, sylhetis have started extreme diglossia where they speak sylheti proudly at home and public and use bengali with outsiders. sylhetis are the most proud of their heritage so i think it will survive the longest
Interesting video!! As a native Norwegian speaker, I'm intrigued by the way we and Afrikaans-speakers spell "chocolate" the same - "sjokolade." On opposite ends of the world! We have pitch too, arguably, as you said! The words "bønner" (beans) and "bønder" (farmers) should sound the same, but they don't. "Faren" (the father) and "faren" (the danger) should also sound the same, but they don't. Outside of context, you're supposed to tell them apart by pitch :-)
In my dialect we pronounce faren In two completely different ways 😂 There’s also this song; På Feil Side Av Låven which makes fun of the pitch accent in our language, and I find it hilarious
I don't think the neighbouring bantu languages have anything to do with the development of tone but the Khoesan languages certainly do.
Afrikaans speakers have had 350+ years of interaction with native speakers of Khoesan languages. Many areas where languages like Khoekhoe were spoken are now mostly Afrikaans speaking. A lot (if not all) Khoesan languages have tone. Afrikaans speakers don't have a long history of interaction with speakers of bantu languages and barely no intermarriage at all whereas the first marriage recorded in the Dutch Cape Colony was Khoesan/European. Most if not all afrikaans speakers have Khoesan ancestry especially among mixed race people (cape coloureds) and even among the majority of white afrikaans speakers. (Although in smaller amounts)
A lot of Afrikaans borrowings come from Khoesan languages like; gogga, dagga, eina, kierie, as well as the names of native plant and animal species. A lot of dialectal differences are influenced by khoesan languages (the dropping of consonant clusters as well as a type of hendiadys)
Khoekhoegowab for example doesn't have any voiced stops. (only as allophones between vowels)
Usually khoesan people would learn Dutch and then go on to interact with the lower classes as well as the slaves who were brought from other Dutch colonies in India and Indonesia. Mixing the language even more. There weren't a lot of European women in the Cape which meant that Slave women or Khoesan women would either be married to european men or work in their households. Having a large influence on the language of the children.
A lot of people (including poor whites, freed slaves and khoe tribes) also left the colony and trekked into the frontiers and carried Afrikaans into Namibia. (The griqua and baster peoples) where you get the largest amount of influence from Khoesan languages.
The Khoesan languages were and are mostly spoken in the dry western regions of the country including the Kalahari and the regions with a medditeranean climate around Cape town.
Bantu speakers mostly lived in the more fertile tropical regions next to the indian ocean.
"greek-uh, russian-uh" - spot the aussie!!!
no, awesome video, Rhea!! I had no idea Punjabi was indo-european but seems obvious now you've mentioned haha. Catch me being a *silly billy*.
That thing of differences diminishing in Punjabi between the different stops is really interesting, and reminds me a lot of how different languages shift with consistent use, to make the language 'easier' to speak. Like common verbs' conjucation patterns 'degrading' in comparison to less common verbs in Spanish.
tono exodus vs leviticus im dying lmaooooo. tono leviticus would just be 613 perscriptivist rules on how when and where tone is valid and where it isn't 🤣.
Rhea you're dog is so pretty omggggggg.
omg i speak ingwish too!!!
the puppy is back I love them!!
ngl I also went on a little dip of a dive into limburgish after this - fascinating stuff omg!!
I don't understand how you have less than 1000 subscribers, you're amazing!
Witty, charming, pick interesting topics and talk about them with perfect clarity.
very interesting, but really needed examples of the change in Afrikaans and what exactly you mean. (speaking as a non-Afrikaans speaking but Welsh-speaking Welshman who's interested in Afrikaans). Didn't understand much of the grammatical phrases, but appreciate the need to use them. Afrikaans is such a cool language.
swallowed a fly? have you swallowed a spider to solve that problem
I feel they made a book about how an old lady followed this advice
I am a punjabi। Thanks for recognizing my vernacular। Just a small addition, in punjabi voiced aspirated sounds do not lose voice always but always lose aspiration unless u need to speak tabla bols in indian classical music - dha dhin dhin dha 😉
The celebration for getting the Xhosa click was gold
Super interesting video! I wanna add that tone isn't just about pitch, but what your vocal folds do in general. Pitch is a major part of it, but there are also tones in other languages (such as Vietnamese, as you mentioned) that require a mandatory glottal closure in some of the tones. Some languages also require creaky or breathy voice for certain tones.
We do not have example words/sentences just the dog, flies, mosquitos and so on.
"Indo-European languages don't have tone!" Ancient Greek, Sanskrit, and proto-Indo-European itself: (pitch accent is just tone!)
Anyway, as a Mandarin speaker myself:
媽： mother, also turns up in compounds relating to aunts
麻： hemp, pins-and-needles, paralysis
馬： horse
罵： to scold
As far as I know the European languages with pitch accent are Lithuanian, Norwegian, Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, Swedish, and I'm not sure about Latvian. I was there for a month just before the pandemic and remember it feeling like it would be the easiest to pick up among the Baltics. On Tonogenesis, I was just reading that Khmer has been developing a tone too. I didn't know about it in Korean but it seems that innovations in Korean can be pretty sharply distinguished from region to region and age group to age group, like the vowel in the words for "dog" and "crab".
Latvian does have pitch accent but the system is not usually taught to foreigners and locals are also usually not aware of it unless they had a specialised linguistic education. It's a bit of a mess as not all dictionaries mark tone, the prescribed standard language system has 3 tones while most of the country already switched to a 2 tone system.
Anecdotally, in Lithuanian the tone system is better taught and described in books but is in a more precarious state as there are already dialectal varieties of the language where the tone distinction is completely lost, like in Vilnius.
Definitely one of your most interesting videos so far, and it clearly has stirred up a lot of discourse in the comments section!!! Did you promote this video, or have people naturally found it with RUclips recommendations?
I love your dog, so cute! Also, I think its funny when you said 'now there's no flies' as one flies across the entire frame behind your head at 10:19 haha
nO WAY i didn't even notice that lmaoooooo
no i didn't promote this at all, it seems people have just found it!
WHOAH!! @@RheaDawnLanguage thats incredible, ive never had youtube naturally promote a video of mine before hahaha
Such a great video! You deserve more subscribers.
By the way, I'm Punjabi.
most normal cuteness agression "you cute lil' shiet"
Pitch accent is tone. Tone is just when pitch is phonologically relevant in and of itself. Pitch accent uses pitch to tell you what syllable is stressed. English has stress accent, not pitch accent: "insight?" and "incite?" are both low-high, but the stress is on the first syllable in insight and second syllable in incite.
Stressed syllables in English do have a higher pitch than unstressed ones, but they're also louder. That's my theory anyway
@@ZadenZane Stressed syllables do not have a higher pitch than unstressed syllables. Listen to "ago" at 0:06 of this video. Stressed syllables are lower-pitched all the time.
Very interesting!
I find it funny how pretty much all Korean learning material and videos still teach to distinguish between Lenis and Aspirated stops, but if you just listen to any Korean speak they are very clearly pronouncing them all aspirated at the start of words
"South Korean Korean" and I thought Language Simp was joking when he talked about North Korean Korean.
Korean language had tones until 15th-16th century, then it disappeared
and it's coming back again in seoul dialect
Middle Korean was tonal, according to Wikipedia. So maybe the language is just going back to its roots. Burmese is apparently in the midst of tonogenesis with difference in the manner of pronunciation and not just the pitch. So if you say a syllable in a a Kardashian Burmese accent with vocal fry, that's called the "creaky tone". I'm not sure why, as it sounds nothing at all like a creaking door or a creaky floorboard.
Native Afrikaans speaker here. Interesting thought, and while some of us speak in a sing-songy way, I can't think of any examples of tonality here.
"Daai pappegaai is fraai, maar kwaai en taai." No tone difference between any of the "aai" vowels, just in stress and length, despite there being voiced and voiceless consonants at the start position.
"Sy's bly sy kry hoenderdye met tye." All the "y" vowels are the same.
"Sy bêre egte pêrels om êrens." All the "ê" vowels are the same.
And so on... Would be interesting to hear if someone can find examples where tonality does appear though.
This is the point though, it’s not tonal *YET*, it’s just a thing that exists in some peoples’ idiolects; that is how language changes, it starts of idiolectal and slowly becomes dialectal.
@@TheDrumstickEmpire Sure, but I'd be interested to see real examples where people really do speak that way. Otherwise, by definition, there's no evidence to support the idea. 😉
great video, mate!
The theory that it's becoming tonal becoming of Bantu influence seems very unlikely for Standard Afrikaans , possibly for Cape Afrikaans (especially if you consider they now represent majority of the Afrkaans speakers) because of the Cape Afrikaans speaking communities more often coming from mixed households and the fact that Cape Afrikaans already greatly differs from Standard Afrikaans in terms of vocabulary where they'll use more Malay or Bantu language words
'seems very unlikely' uhh what!? you're telling me that white afrikaaners don't regularly interact with bantu speakers? that I highly doubt.
@@Nooticus ...in English? not their bantu languages
oh true... @@SoldierofWotan88
@@SoldierofWotan88 Speakers of the bantu languages might have accents when speaking English or Afrikaans that, with enough interaction, might have an effect on the language. Kind of like how there are dialects of english influenced by mexican spanish in the Southwestern US.
The "mixed households" don't typically have Bantu language speakers in their family trees though. It's not unheard of, but there are probably just as many white Afrikaners and Englishmen marrying Cape Coloureds as Bantu language speaking black Africans. Yet the English accent and the white Afrikaans haven't influenced the Kaaps dialect of Afrikaans, have they? I as an Afrikaans speaker have to interact with speakers of Bantu languages regularly and increasingly more often. I think my accent in English (our only common language typically) changed upon extensive contact with them at university, so I think the original theory is still likely.
funny... i'm a native afrikaans speaker and all my family including me still distinguish between voiced and voiceless... i would say however that afrikaans is much more sing-songy than any other language i know/speak..
Nice job. I learned several things from this. Turns out that your phone worked better than your camera did, it seems.
100% agree, i didn't realise how bad the computer looked until editing it...
To my ears, you add an 'ə' after most p/t/k when these end a seperate part of a sentence. This sounds much like what is heard in English spoken with a thick Italian accent. Even the contour of the tone of the 'ə' sounds like that, even though an Italian would've added an /e/ instead of /ə/. Everything else in your speech sounds British or Australian to me. (It's probably 'South African English'.)
But I wonder, does what I describe here have anything to do with what you explained is happening in Afrikaans at the moment?
@Nooticus you've pointed this out before!
you're right, i definitely do that! i do it fairly often too, not just after voiceless sounds (look for @Nooticus 's comment on my video about Australian English for more examples of me doing it.) I am actually Australian, and a lot of young Aussies my age are starting to do it (it's primarily considered a feminine thing, just like uptalk). If I were South African, though, that'd definitely be an interesting lead!
@@RheaDawnLanguage
Then I wonder, could that particular Australian trait be connected to the fair amount of Italian immigrants, in any conceivable way?
@@RheaDawnLanguage
I would love to hear what Geoff Lindsey would be able to say about it. I think it would interest him quite a bit 😁
@@pepebriguglio6125 given how widespread it is, i'd be doubtful. italians and other immigrants (particularly from the mediterranean) in Australia tend to speak a separate sub-dialect from wadjelas like me, which linguists call Ethnocultural Australian English, among other things, and it tends to be a fairly marginalised way of speaking (and from what I've heard, it seems to be lacking in this feature most of the time, though it could feasibly occur in more recent immigrants from Italy).
I'm pretty sure I've heard this schwa-adding in Americans, too, and i suspect that it originated there and is now spreading to younger Australians. like, when i imagine "valley girl" speech, I hear this feature in it, and god knows how long that vocal stereotype has been around for. quite a lot of less perceptible phonetic features, like yod-dropping, are starting to appear in younger Australian English due to American influence, and maybe this could be one of those things? I managed to find this podcast on the topic - I haven't listened to it, but it seems to be talking about this feature if you wanted to find out more about it: www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/03/john_mcwhorter_on_an_english_language_exclamatory_particle.html
can't wait for tonoleviticus
You are talking about voiced and voiceless stops, so d/t and b/p. But Afrikaans also has one fricative pair: w/f. (w sounds like [v])
5:40 such a shit joke I absolutely love it
Korean language(seoul dialect) is also going through the exact same change
I mention that in the video! It’s super interesting
@@RheaDawnLanguage oh i didnt remember that
Interesting. The question I now have is why now? Afrikaans has been around for a few hundred years and resisted all changes. That's why modern dutch people people say it's like "Old English". So why now, why now allow outside influences in. That's interesting, if you believe language and culture are connected.
Wthin South Africa there's a lot of dynamism in the language, from town to town. Not a sudden change. It's more than vocabulary, it's everything that makes a language.
Tonoleviticus is crazy
Actually five tones in Chinese: there is also the neutral tone ma. No idea why people keep not counting that as a separate tone.
The main reason is because that fifth tone is a “non-tone,” it doesn’t really count as a tone, but as a byproduct of linguistic development. The neutral tone only emerged as the tones of some characters was gradually reduced over time. All neutral tone characters had tone at some point in history (ex. 吗 ma used to be and still is má, as in 干吗, and is also used in transliterations where it was pronounced mǎ, such as 吗啡. 吗 at the end of the sentence lost its tone likely to how often it was used and its grammaticalization. Same with 的 dì-de)
if you go outside when its more than 37 out, it's too hot for any flies, mozzies, even ants. It's also too hot for humans but you do what you gotta do.
ahh, if only it were a 47 degree summer day when I recorded this
jacob collier mentioned
did I mention him??? honestly completely forgot
Please give us some examples.
I'm a native German speaker and I've noticed something pretty interesting going on, I don't know quite how to explain it, but the r is less and less pronounced, it usually isn't pronounced at all if it is after a vowel it's more of an -a tonal-ish kinda sound I think, but it still is if it's in front of one vowel, it's replaced by an a-sound, not the English one tho, and uhm... like the German word for "he" er, is more and more only pronounced as just an a, -er morph more and more into just an a sound. It's pretty interesting, since most people thinking of German are probably picturing the hard trilled r, but it's kind of disappearing, behind vowels. Maybe it's moving into some kind of tonal area too, but idk tho
I find this really interesting! I've noticed that German speakers (except Swiss ones) don't usually pronounce R unless it's before a vowel, but this change you're explaining sounds really interesting! I've never noticed it before. I do think that saying it's a tonal thing is probably the wrong words. It could involve tone, but what you're describing just sounds like it's a change in articulation. Still, maybe I'm wrong! It sounds like it's just starting out, so it'll be really interesting to see how it changes in future.
I love the evolution of Germanic rhotics, personally I’ve always associated the uvular R with German and not a trilled one
@@dankmemewannabeGerman dialects display a variety of rhotics. Taps, trills, uvulars and even uvular trills are all present in different regions.
@@anglaismoyen yea I know it’s just the uvular one is the one I find most iconic
@@dankmemewannabe it's nice but have you ever heard a crisp uvular trill. Gorgeous
this channel is so stylish, right into the basket of subscribeds man
Doggo sealed the deal for me
The Panjabi language has tones and we have a tone marker in the script.
I notice your little friend has Jack Russell Disease. I hope you've found him a good psychiatrist.
The one influence of African languages (which would occur at least to some extent because the kids on the farms grow up speaking these, just about before they learn their own languages) is a "vowel stretching feature" used in the Zulu word for "far", which is (roughly speaking) "kude" (and sounds more like "Goodeh" if Anglicized).
"Kude" - far. In Afrikaans, "doer".
"Ku----de". fa----r. or doe----rrrr.
And even "Ku-------------------de" (maybe if talking about Siberia or the Moon).
fa------------------------------------r.
doe-------------------------------------------------rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.
How much "kude" your "kude" is depends on how much puff you have in your lungs.
You can also mix English and Afrikaans, while still speaking English. The case that has come to mind is the expression, "doer and gone". Or where the object is "ku------de", you might say it's "doe------r and gone". (The English doer tends not to have much of a trill on the r, ever. In Natal it has none.)
So what is "Umfahren" in german? The word is written the same but if you put the emphasis on the "Um" it means driving over something, when you put the emphasis on the "fah" jt means driving around something. And even without context, just listening to the pronounciation, you will know which verison is meant.
isn't that just the result of specifying the important part of the word in words that have agglutination/suffixes/prefixes, rather than 'tone'? Also, I dont think you can call it tone when the words mean almost the same thing?
the words mean the opposite of each other, maybe driving over something didn't capture what it means completely. It's the difference between running someone over or driving around someone. It's also not specifying the important part of the word, the "Um" in running someone over basically means "toppling something", the "Um" in driving around someone means "going around", so the part of the word that really changes the meaning of the word is always the "Um". It's basically a compound word where the "fahren" always means "to drive" while the "Um" is a homonym. I struggle to see the difference between that and tones. @@Nooticus
@@LeksDee @rhea we need your help here!! i dont know the answer to this
sounds just like regular stress here. With Germanic languages stress does involve an element of pitch (generally the stressed syllable has the highest pitch), but it also typically means the stressed syllable is louder and slightly longer than others. This doesn't count as tone or pitch accent because although pitch makes up a large part of the contrast here, it isn't completely essential to tell the meaning of the word due to the other factors used in conjunction with it. It's like the English difference between "INcrease" as a noun and "inCREASE" as a verb
final words of the vid sound like 'pullshit' to me
Sorta related but:
Apparently limburgish, another germanic language, has some tonality as well
[stæɪn˦˨˧] steĩn "stone"
[stæɪn˦˨] steìn "stones"
[ɡraːf˦˨] "grave"
[ɡraːf˦˨˧] "hole next to a road"
[weːʁ˦˨˧ˈkɪ˦˨və˧] "We conquer!"
[weːʁ˦˨˧ˈkɪ˦˨˧və˧] "May we conquer!"
yeah, I talk about that in the video :) it's a really interesting language.
This (1:23): Eskom.
Limburgish is also a tonal Germanic language
As was said roughly about 7 times in the video. You're not a good listener, are you?
Oh my god he knows Latvian exists (btw yes it does have pitch accent)
For free??
feet
Do North Koreans not have that feature?
i'm not sure, but from what i've read it *seems* limited to south korea so i decided to say that
they dont have
Why are you adding ‘ah’ to the end of so many words, randomly.
it's just the way I talk due to social conditioning, lots of people have commented on it already down here. I don't even notice it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
@@RheaDawnLanguage it seems to be a feature of Australian English but don't know if it's that prevalent since I'm no Ozzie. However I've been trying to find out if this phenomenon has a name or not. I've tried to Google it but I came up empty handed 😔
@@DrKleMENGIRmaybe epenthetic schwa could be of service to you? idk tho I’ll need to try some keywords
he must be learning Italian.
English has pitch accent on several words
I doubt White Afrikaans speakers are influenced by Bantu language. Maybe Coloreds at the Cape. Projecting total fertility rates, Afrikaans will become more marginalised over the decades anyways.
you're telling me that white afrikaaners don't regularly interact with bantu speakers? i highly doubt that
Inshallah
@@NooticusWhen getting robbed maybe, there's a large amount of self-segregation in SA, mostly for safety reasons. Just look at Orania or the Bantustans.
@@bustavonnutz boet, die fok sê jy now? Oooo swart = ek steel goed oooo!!! Is jy dom? Is jy vertraag?
@@NooticusWe absolutely do interact with them on a regular basis. I'd hate to talk too much about politics on a linguistics channel, but they as a demographic are urbanizing at a higher rate than any other and they're specifically coming to areas historically inhabited by whites. They also tend to find work very easily because of South Africa's affirmative action hiring policies and they're also provided with free housing for the same reason. There are fewer and fewer places where Afrikaners could expect not to have to interact with them, especially considering their population size compared to ours. Not passing any judgement on any group, but these are the statistical realities and you can fact check me by googling this. I do think it's possible that tone is developing in Afrikaans because of this.