I don’t spend much time on youtube. Usually, I decide I am interested in something, then race around and download a bunch of the videos for later review while I’m doing something else.
That seems to have an odd effect on “The Algorithm” – it goes crazy for a while, offering me more of the same – lots more of the same, and then reverts to offering me random-ish other stuff. Sometimes the offerings are interesting enough to pursue further. This is one:
I had also heard the story of the Rosetta Stone (I’ve walked past the damn thing enough times!) but I never spent any time thinking about the topics surrounding it – my understanding of ancient Egyptian was probably over-influenced by Helen Fouche Gaines’ book Cryptanalysis [wc] which led me to assume that most languages were gussied-up substitution ciphers. That was completely wrong, but it served as a good place-holder for a long time.
My high school Latin teacher used to emphasize that we don’t really know what an ancient Roman sounded like, either, in spite of having a very good idea how they wrote and thought. I suppose that now, for the forseeable remainder of human history, nobody will doubt what an American sounded like; how embarrassing.
Of course there’s a lot more going on, and I thought that the video above is a pretty good, loving, introduction to the topic.
Oooh! Nativlang is a good channel – I like the really ancient stuff that’s so interesting because its such detective work, and the more modern stuff that’s almost uncanny valley to listen to. Like this one on Shakespeare’s english:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeW1eV7Oc5A
Actually, you might also like another channel – ‘voices of the past’, who translates and reads various letters from ancient and modern times. Some of them are depressing, some of them strange, some familiar in pattern if not content.
Here’s a letter from a Japanese diplomatic attache as they traveled across Europe in 1862.
From what I’ve heard and read, we have a very good (of course not perfect) idea how they sounded.
It reminds me of when I somehow stumbled upon this absolutely fascinating effort at spoken Proto-Indo-European.
https://youtu.be/P78SJf8NL2k
I cannot complain much about the U-Tubegorithm. It goes sometimes a bit bonkers after I watch some random movie clip and then starts to offer stuff I could not give a toss about, but it always keeps recommending stuff that genuinely interests me.
It is a bit scary, actually.
Have you ever read China Mieville’s “Embassytown”? A fascinating novel based on the absolute strangeness of trying to understand an alien language created by alien minds.
aquietvoice (#1) –
Agreed. While Langfocus is also a good channel on linguistic, I much prefer listening to NativLang’s narrator, both his voice and friendly presentation.
Embassytown is awesome. That is all.
My grammar school latin teacher said latin was prnounced with a northern (English) accent.
There was an effort a while ago to stage Shakespeare using the original language, pronunciation and inflection intact. Linguists attempted to reconstruct the original sounds based on the idea that certain rhymes and puns in the script require particular words to be homophones.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_in_Original_Pronunciation