Seeing "phrases" at the end of this comment made me wonder if the accidental switch from p's to f's is how we ended up with"ph" making the "f" sound in English. Maybe before we had a letter for it, someone was trying to write a word and show that the p wasn't being pronounced normally, so they went with ph.
Padre didn't become father, but I know what you mean, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *pəter became in English, while it became pater in Latin, then padre in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese. In general, I am interested but also skeptical in this idea. There are countless examples of bilabials becoming labio-dentals, but the reasons could be totally different. The example you used in the video of /p/ → /f/ is part of Grimm's law, a bigger systematic sound shift that split the Proto-Germanic language from its other Proto-Indo-European relatives. For example, we have /bʰ/ → /b/ → /p/ → /ɸ/. Which means, the voiced, aspirated /bʰ/ sound became the unaspirated /b/ sound, the /b/ became the /p/, and the /p/ became the /ɸ/ (ɸ referring to the bilabial fricative, rather than the labio-dental fricative /f/) This is a shift, where a whole bunch of sounds changed as a chain. It's not fully understood what causes these chain shifts, but it's often supposed that it starts at the other end, not with for example /p/ → /f/, but rather with /bʰ/ → /b/ which pushes /b/ to /p/ so as to keep the distinction of the two sounds, and then again down the chain. A better example is the very common pattern of /w/ → /v/, which we see in Romance language, German, etc. (The veni vidi vici, that Hank mentions was NOT pronounced /v/ by Caesar, but rather /w/, like, weni, widi, wici, and only Later did Latin and it's descendants change the sounds to /v/'s) /w/ is a labio-velar sound, meaning it's pronounced partly with the lips, and partly in the back of the mouth near the velar, but it often has become that voiced labio-dental fricative sound /v/. Professor Justeson of UAlbany suggested to me that this very common transformation is actually example of palatalization. Palatalization is when sounds get pronounced closer to the soft palate of the mouth, where we make a Y-sound (/j/ in IPA, or /y/ in APA). So for example, take the English word . The Proto-Germanic root we think was *kirika (compare German /kirçə/). The two k-sounds became sounds (IPA /t͡ʃ/; APA /č/), which is pronounced closer to the front of the mouth, ie near the soft palate. Changes like these are quite common, often happening before a front vowel like /i/ (which is likewise pronounced close to the soft palate). Justeson pointed out that you could also describe them as "de-velarization" as the sounds are become "less velar." The /w/ → /v/ is also becoming "less velar." He found that this change was also happening often before front vowels like /i/ in the Mayan languages he studies, and hypothesized that in Indo-European language that feature that change started off in a similar way before spreading to all instances of the /w/ phoneme. However, there could still be credence to the theory in question. In the example of Grimm's law, we see how Linguists think the /p/ sound became a /ɸ/ sound before ultimately becoming the /f/ sound it is in English or German, etc. Likewise with the /w/ → /v/ change, if we "de-velarize" the /w/ it becomes /β/, the bilabial fricative, not the labio-dental fricative. It's possible that this preference for, or tenancy toward, labiodentals could still be seen in these examples.
Mar German Vader and English father both come from Proto-Germanic *fadēr. English doesn't descend from German, they both descend from Proto-Germanic, they're sister languages. It's confusing but "Germanic" and "German" are two different labels. Germanic is a label describing the German, English, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, etc. languages, cultures, religion, etc.
@@charlesdeschampsdeboishebe9672 since old english came over from germany with the angles and saxons I'm pretty sure they spoke old german. english descended from old german and did not develop as it's own language from proto germanic like other germanic languages. I know, it's confusing, but you will get it one day.
Mar The Anglo-Saxons came from the Netherlands and Denmark and the little piece of modern day Germany in between in the 5th century. There is no way you can call the language varieties there "Old German" because it was the ancestor of English, Frisian, Dutch, High German, Low German, Luxembourgish, etc.. Any argument for calling it "Old German" can also be used to call it "Old Frisian" or "Old Yiddish."
Way back in college taking paleoanthroplogy, I wondered why all other hominids fossils had that perfect tooth alignment, but we didn't. I never knew it was a juvenile feature.
There are scientists in every (or almost every I guess) field. Like you can be a scientist in linguistics or simply be a linguist. Just like a chemist can simply be a chemist and not work in scientific field but for example in industrial sector.
I’d be interested in knowing how this relates to the quantity of sounds. I know from school that there’s something like 3-4 times the amount of sounds in !Kung that there are in English. It seems to me like the relative sizes of the communities of speakers might select for a more standardized/ streamlined language for the agricultural societies, which have more people. I’d be interested in similar statistical models reporting on that, especially because it adds in factors that I think this study misses (ie potential overemphasis on diet as though that’s the only variable operative here, even though agriculture clearly changed quite a lot about the way people lived).
5:00 -- "Padre" did not become "father". It's really only direct loanwords like "spaghetti" or "taco" that English gets from Italian or Spanish (or Portuguese). A basic word like "father" came from neither. The Latin word giving rise to Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese "padre", and related words like French "père", was Latin "pater", but English doesn't get "father" from Latin either. It's a native English word, Old English "faeder" from proto-Germanic *fader, from proto-Indo-European *pəter -- and THAT'S where the original "p" occurred. In Germanic languages it turned into an F, but not in Italic languages or in its Romance descendants. (Or many other IE branches such as Hellenic. The PIE actually contains a laryngeal after the initial "p" rather than a schwa, but the schwa is close enough.)
@@miguelquinto6003 No. The letter v existed. It just functioned as our "u"s do now. It would still be written veni vidi vici. It would have been PRONOUNCED more like weni widi wici, but the written stroke "V" definitely existed.
@@tomraptile804 Cs in classical latin are pronounced hard like k's. It wasn't until it was italicized (if thats even a word) where writing vici would be pronounced like vichi. So writing it as vici is still proper.
@@tomraptile804 Ah, I see. I only meant that me writing "wici" as a pronunciation of the first consonant was still proper, all other things considered. Cheers.
I know you guys aren’t linguist and I’m no professional, but I know a thing or two on the subject and padre never “became” father. Both words are analogous but neither came from the other. They both came from the indo-European pāter. Also the Germanic peoples were indo-European p->f were more carnivorous then the Romans that retained that p. They were not fully carnivorous, but definitely more so. Another problem with this is the that farming entered Europe from the Mediterranean, and long before the indo-Europeans arrived, and thus it’s unlikely that the p->f of Germanic came from that result.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs umm true though, but in Tagalog's case they somehow didn't develop labiodentals and Indonesian developed labiodentals due to contact with other languages.
@@Kettvnen Sure! I'm just pointing out that the question is sort of meaningless, since languages aren't spontaneously invented out of whole cloth and therefore don't have "first" speakers. They've all been evolving smoothly since the day language first arose in humans, and back then we were all hunter-gatherers.
That does seem like Sundanese, they pronounce F's and V's as P's too. From what I know, Many Far Eastern languages don't seem to have V's, Javanese pronounces V's as F's when speaking bahasa and Japanese doesn't have V's too. Bahasa and BM have though but that's most likely because of the influence from English and Nederlands.
Objection: veni vidi vici was actually pronounced wane-ee wid-ee wick-ee, so that’s not a good example. Maybe you could try facio (fach-ee-oo). Src i took four years of Latin and checked with a guy who took 12 years of Latin.
I thought so too, but then I wondered: A guy born in Rome in 100 AD supposedly said "wick-ee". Then a guy born in Rome in 2000 AD would say "vee-chee". Around which year did the people being born in Rome decide to change how they said 'vici'?
I think I read somewhere that there was another theory that overbites became more common in many places after the invention/introduction of forks. Is that still a discussed theory?
@@kingsly2275 Not sure, but on a related note, I read that the long-extinct Vampire Fish (ancient ancestors of the modern-day Parrot fish) quickly wore-down their fangs once they introduced coral polyps to their diet.
The mention of P sound becoming F, and B sound becoming V. Two points. 1. The B sound is formed the same way as P, except that B also uses the vocal cords. Same for V and F. 2. In Hebrew, the same letter (2nd letter in alphabet) ב is pronounced B and V. But it's pronunciation in a word depends on grammatical rules. Later, a dot was added to make it easier for the reader to know which to pronounce. The same for P and F, they are the same Hebrew letter פ, and if it's the first letter of a word it is P; if it's the last letter, it's an F. So Pharaoh in Hebrew is Paro.
Quick peeve: "veni, vidi, vici" was pronounced "weni, widi, wiki" in classical Latin... But this theory is fascinating. Basque, one of Europe's oldest languages, traditionally doesn't have the phonemes F nor V, so that may lend credence to this idea. Modern Basque does borrow those letters when used in loan words, but V is always pronounced like a B, and in some dialects F is pronounced like a P (infernua>inpernua).
So many problems about this. For example, Austronesians were the first people to cultivate rice from their homelands in southern China and the Yangtze delta (which were invaded by the Han Chinese at around 100 BC to 100 AD). And yet, Austronesians in Southeast Asia, specifically, do not have a lot of F and V sounds, despite being highly agricultural societies for thousands of years. Conversely, Austronesians in Oceania (Polynesians and Micronesians) have a lot of F and V sounds, despite having more limited agriculture focused mostly on taro, since they lost rice cultivation technology during their initial expansions into the Pacific Islands. It does not match up.
Thats true, I live in the Philippines wherein F and V isn't in our alphabet yet we're an agricultural country, and of course Filipinos (I know it has an F but that's just because of Spanish influence, in our language it's 'mga Pilipino') have trouble with pronouncing those sounds when speaking to foreignera
It doesn't add up for plosives, but if you look at fricatives, I think things become a lot clearer. With an overbite, while [f] becomes easier to pronounce than [φ] (forgive my phone keyboard's lack of proper IPA), the thing that cements the change is that [f] was usually simultaneously unlike any other sounds in the language (exception for Germanic, since [θ] sounds a lot like [f]) (this means that you can substitute /f/ for /φ/ without really harming comprehension) and more different from [p] than [φ] is (so making the shift makes phoneme inventories more distinct). Where [p[+dental]] is concerned, the gaps between teeth would have made it easy to mispronounce it as a fricative, which would have reduced the distinctiveness of the phoneme inventory. So, there'd be more pressure to maintain the place of a bilabial /p/ than a bilabial /φ/.
@@Swenthorian Except [φ] is nonexistent in Austronesian languages as well, both among agricultural groups and the [marine] hunter-gatherer groups (Filipino, Malay, Hawaiian, Maori, etc.). When [f] does replace [p], the direction is opposite that of the study's claims, going from agricultural to hunter-gatherer. e.g. Proto-Austronesian *pitu ("seven"), becoming "pito" in most Philippine languages (agricultural), but "fitu" or "hitu" in most Oceanic languages (hunter-gatherer). [φ] also exist widely among Austroasiatic and Kra-Dai groups (e.g. Thai and [Kinh] Viet) who are also predominantly agricultural. It has not been replaced by [f]. The study I think is heavily based on Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Because it certainly isn't corroborated for East/SE Asian and Oceanic languages.
@@AngryKittens Very interesting! I was thinking about the loss of /φ/ in PIE descendents, but I indeed have not studied non-Indo-European historical linguistics (to be fair, I'm a phonetician (with a BA), not a historical linguist). Anyways, though, this is what peer review is for! Hopefully someone will reply to the study with some of the points you're making. Regarding the languages of Polynesia, though, I wonder if the "rocker" jaw might be relevant to this.
It is true that the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ in PIE became a labiodental fricative /f/ in modern Germanic languages, but it should be stated that it was not an isolated change, but rather it should be seen in the context of the Germanic sound shift as described by the Grimm's law. Voiceless stops /p t k kw/ (and not only /p/) systematically became fricatives in Proto-Germanic, and an edge bite cannot explain the sound shift as a whole. Also, the phoneme /p/ did not disappear in the aforementioned languages, as expected if it were simply easier to pronounce it as an /f /. Instead, it was a chain shift in which /b/ became /p/ and /p/ became /f/. Internally, it is safe to assume that /b/ becoming /p/ caused the latter to turn into an /f/ to preserve distinctiveness. Finally, if /p/ becomes an /f/ in Germanic languages as a result of an edge bite, it would folllw that /b/ should have become a /v/ for the same reason, which is not the case. It seems like they cherry-picked the evidence to support their claim.
I brought these points up too in a comment. They're very important things to bring up. I like the way you explained it. I think the Scishow team likely simplified or misunderstood their sources (or used sources that were already simplified or misunderstanding). /p/ → /f/ is not a good example of this theory I think. /ɸ/ → /f/ or /β/ → /v/ is more likely the kind of thing it could explain. If we consider the maybe better example of /w/ → /v/, the /w/ phoneme could have first "de-velarized" to a /β/, but then a preference for labiodental sounds (maybe brought about by a more agrarian diet) could explain the change to /v/. Likewise, I think it's theorized that Germanic sound shift first turned /p/ into /ɸ/, and again this preference could have then changed it further to the /f/ it is now. I also also thinking of High German /pf/ which developed from /p/. This sound change is CLEARLY part of the larger systematic change of stops to affricates in High German. /t/ → /ts/, or /k/ → /kx/ (found in some High German dialects). However, if we just have a rule that changes these stops to be [+delayed release] (ie an affricate if you aren't familiar with Generative distinctive features), would turn /p/ into [pɸ]. This change to [pf] requires a FURTHER change of a bilabial to a labiodental. This theory could still apply in explaining why that further change happens. I'm still skeptical though of course. It sounds like one of those things that actual linguists don't think is that interesting, but because non-linguistics can understand it, it makes the news. It's like the idea that "higher altitude" or "colder climates" make people speak with more round "O" sounds to keep their mouths shut. Like, correct if I'm wrong, but isn't that more of an outdated, non-linguistics based idea?
@@rdreher7380 I have just finished reading your comment (I hadn't read it before I posted mine, thanks for pointing it out!). I hadn't thought of the fortition of /w/ to /v/ in Romance languages as palatalization, but it does make sense, especially if you call it de-velariation as you mentioned. I have no knowledge on Mayan languages, but I still do not believe that the example from Romance amounts to validating what Hank reports in the video, as the develaritation of /w/ in Romance languages (and in German) took place thousands of years later than when such peoples became agrarian societies. Dating PIE is controversial, but the branching off of Proto-Germanic dates to much later than the agricultural revolution too, so the timing does not add up... What do you think? (Also, /j/, the other semivowel of Latin was also fortitioned to /d͡ʒ/ in early Romance, I have always thought that it was related to /w/ > /v/. I find it curious because Romance tends towards lenition, those are the two phonemes that went the other way) As for High German /pf/ from earlier [pɸ], I don't see how their claim would support that change, as Germans had been an agrarian society for thousands of years before it happened. I don't think their diet changed significantly, either in time from the previous centuries or in space from the other Germanic speaking areas around them which did not undergo such shift. I also thought that maybe Sci-show simplified or misunderstood their claim, we should read the actual paper before completely descrediting it. haha I have never read or heard anything about extra rounding in higher altitudes, but it sounds to me like an exaggeration at best. Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write a reply.
Maybe the people with the overbite that could use the F / V sounds easier ended up communicating better therefore breeding more and had an influence on the outcome also. Communication including verbal communication is the biggest factor when it comes to your Status / potential money you can earn so is all a big factor when comes to your ability to attract a potential partner.
This is super interesting! The "f" and the "v" sounds didn't exist in Basque (one of the few non Indoeuropean languages in Europe, and the only one in the Iberian peninsula), and the Latin spoken in Hispania lost the "f" sound when it got there, and it seems people were pronouncing it as an "h" sound. That is why many words that in Latin had an "f" like "formica", "forno" or "farina" ended up as "hormiga", "horno" and "harina" in Spanish. Perhaps the consumption of vegetables in that area was not developed enough for people to be able to pronounce the "f" sound yet? In any case, it might be too soon to jump to conclusions, but it does seem like an interesting hypothesis to me.
I am an Asian American who studied linguistics, and it seems to me that many of the linguistics related science videos need a huge disclaimer that they are talking about primarily European languages or that the research and data primarily focuses on European languages... the example given in this video about bilabials and labiodentals doesn't exactly apply to a language that remains labiodental free, like Korean, for example.
? The only claim being made here is that it was more *likely* for bilabials to change into labiodentals after the advent of agriculture. There was no claim of invitability being made here. Nor was anyone claiming that labiodentals are *always* from bilabials. Latin got it's voiced labiodental from the velar approximant after all (as multiple people above pointed out). Another common source for labiodentals is of course dentals: th>f is not an uncommon shift, and the opposite direction is just as common. Korean just not participating in the trend doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
Emery Paine -- /p/ pronounced as /f/ is evident not only in the changes between the Germanic "fader" and Latin "pater," but in Asian languages as well. For example Koreans replace the /f/ in "coffee" with a /p/, so it comes out as "coppee". I just want to clarify that /p/ becoming /f/ isn't theory that linguists disagree about. It's specifically the diet part that Hank talked about. It is indeed "neat" but it isn't an "idea", it's literally a fact. (And i mean an actual fact, like it literally happens both in the past, present, and probably will in the future as a linguistic characteristic. Am i coming off as condescending? I hope i'm not coming off as condescending.)
@@NightDoge Maybe a little presumptuous as I already knew that it was an established fact, but I was unclear about the "neat idea"- I was referring to diet being a part of why that shift might have happened.
The Vs in "Veni Vidi Vici" were pronounced in Rome like Ws are in modern English, so that would've marked a step in that progression but not an example of later, harsher labiodentals
In Indonesia, either naturally or a common mispronounciation, stereotipically attributed to Sundanese which often change the F or V into P (so eF into eP or ePh). Example: philosophy which in Indonesian Filosofi (which actually sounded similar to english) is read Pilosopi (pi ~ pin, lo ~ low, so ~ sow). Is it cultural? Or perhaps biological?
Or maybe the English word for Father is Germanic hence why Vater ( in German (sounds like "Fahter")) is the reason why Father sounds like Father, instead of something unrelated like Italian? It would've been a better explanation if you instead related it to PIE, where consonant shifts took place with the multiple different kinds of languages developed.
Nallid -- I concur. If they'd tied a reference to IPE at 1:23, which says, "the difference between the thousands of world languages mostly resulted from things like _tiny_ _pronunciation_ _mistakes_ that spread culturally." it would've been a coherent and persuasive argument. Grimm's law, which is essentially pronunciation mistakes on PIE, could not have been a possibility if the proposed theory (if it's true) hadn't occurred. Personally i see the two as reinforcing each other. Agriculture developed allowing for "pater" to morph into "fader". But then again this isn't a linguist channel so there wasn't a need to introduce PIE into the vid.
I agree, that was a small blunder to say that "father" comes from "padre." Probably the Sci-show team didn't read up enough or oversimplified because they don't understand linguistic family trees and PIE. I'm guessing they read something about the PIE /p/ which we see maintained in words like becoming English /f/ in words like and didn't fully understand it, but the underlying idea that Italian, Spanish, etc /p/ has a correspondence to English /f/ is correct.
It has been noted in that the neck bones of Neanderthals are different than Homo sapiens. Thus, the location and attachment of their vocal cords would be different. Despite common depiction of Neanderthals grunting, their speech would likely be higher pitched as a result.
Wouldn't /p/ and /b/ be more of a form of neoteny than /f/ and /v/, since /f/ and /v/ require teeth to pronounce but human beings are born without teeth? Easiest sounds to make are: /p/, /m/, /k/, /t/, /n/, /a/, /i/, /u/, maybe /l/ (L) too.
Adding neoteny, it ties in with a different interpretation I had while watching video, in which it could have had more to do with having food in your mouth as often, as would have been the case with hunter-gatherers, as opposed to agriculturalists who used milled food. I don't know that there's actually hard evidence that a representative portion of pre-agricultural people ate that much meat before agriculture, but there may be something with languages that developed in and around areas where a lot of fish was eaten, like the Malay languages and Tagalog.
Your example is kinda interesting because as every classical latinist knows ... Iulius Caesar ‘said’ “veni vidi vici” more like “weni widi wiki” !! (V is like the German V, ie like a W, C is a hard, J doesn’t exist - it’s a consonantal I, etc).
What did you think they're standing in front of all this time? An actual poster board/wallpaper of the image you're seeing? Naw, they're way too generic and they change constantly. It's just a pleasant and non-intrusive background.
I have an underbite and have no trouble saying f or v sounds so that is in my opinion a huge whole in this theory. Correlation does not equal causation.
The greek letter φ which is today pronounced as f used to be an aspirated p, an f sound but by using both lips like when you say p. Thats why they transliterate it writing phi. Maybe in those ancient times everybody had their teeth arranged the other way yet(?)
Nicolás Guaman -- Greek nationalists would beg to disagree. According to them Greek _never_ changed and was the same _forever_ since Homer and into time immemorial.
In Europe, anyway. Specifically, the hypothesis is that our bite shifted because we got into the habit of cutting our food into small pieces before putting them in our mouths, rather than biting bits off larger pieces. Support comes from China, where they adopted this practice much earlier and where the overbite also became normalized earlier. (In China food is typically brought to the table already cut up, to accommodate chopsticks.) But it was not always an either-or thing, and the issue of tooth wear can be seen today in, for instance, Australia, when aboriginal people move to the city.
Very neat. I wonder if difference in the grain itself has anything to do with it. Maybe they affect human teeth different. The domestication of grain played a huge role in our evolution, it made our bodies fatter, especially the brain.
What about korean, which literally does not have the f and v sounds? Most esl learners I teach have trouble making the f and v sounds, subbing it with b and p sounds that do exist in korean. How about Japanese, where the "f" sound is actually blowing air through both lips like you are playing a flute, which according to the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) is a separate sound from the labiodental f, and does not have v sounds? And Chinese also does not have v sounds, though the standard f sound does exist. These are modern examples, where these sounds are not found in the speech of a language even after a long time of having agriculture and overbites.
I'm not saying that this study isn't relevant or has some truth, but it also seems to neglect half the world's population/languages when drawing such conclusions
I just googled it, and apparently fish don't have bladders, they dispose of ammonia using their gills. They do have swimming bladders, but that's completely different
Hey, so I have an edge bite because of a minor genetic anomaly (lots of people do). I have not, and have never had ANY trouble producing Fs and Vs in my entire life. I speak 8 languages, 4 of which at perceived native level. While I most certainly have an idiolect (as we all do), those particular consonants have NEVER been an issue to me or anyone else I spoke to that has this same issue I do. 29% more effort? Just how easy can a consonant be?? Cause I surely don't feel saying F is 29% harder for me than saying P. I am aware that I am oversimplifying, but still. What are they on about?
It seems obvious that we weren't going around making the same sounds. Why would anyone think otherwise? Are there papers on people not thinking this before? There are certainly papers about how some sounds came to be.
Look at native american languages and the dramatic shift it the way those sound. Granted, unless you personally know a life long speaker there's a real small chance of being aware of the changes in the ways the languages are spoken. As more European food production and preparation techniques were integrated into native societies the pronunciation of the languages changed. It wasnt really thought of that way but it would make sense considering how the tribes' diets changed over the past 300 years. As someone who grew up not on the reservation and not eating more traditional foods, I quite literally cannot pronounced certain words and phrases the right way simply because I cant make those sounds.
I don't understand the point how studying the differences in languages' evolution could become racist. I mean - these are differences, not comparisons or any competitions. Is F sound any better than P sound? Is red better than green? Is warm better than soft?
Okay... but I have a massive underbite and I can say words like favorite just fine. Like, takes no more effort than any other word. If an edge bite would make it difficult to say an f and v an underbite would be even worse... and that’s demonstrably untrue.
to be fair though, its not like it changed language *that much* all things considered. it added the likelihood of /f/ and /v/, but that's just one pair of speech sounds, and there were a lot of others to choose from as well already haha. adding a phoneme or two does change a language's phonology, sure, but the underlying language hasnt been changed much by this, at least in terms of the underbite labiodental stuff anyway. i could imagine it's changed language in lots of other ways though, like it changed the way humans interact socially in a huuuuuuuge way, and that probably had a profound effect on language. though, probably just sociolinguistically, not like... language-capacity-wise. like it probably affected the things that people choose to say, what systems of formality they might have, and obviously huge things like vocabulary, but it probably didnt change what language actually *IS* in our brains much, because yeah, hunter gatherers still exist and speak languages that are just as advanced as any others, and non-hunter gatherers are capable of learning the languages they speak, and those hunter gatherers are capable of learning the languages spoken by others. by the time agriculture had been invented, language was probably already pretty much at its modern state of evolution, cognitively speaking. every other change that's happened since then has been, essentially, cosmetic. and those cosmetic differences can be huge, for sure, but yeah. oh also, saying that language differences arose from pronunciation mistakes is kind of iffy, "mistake" is a really loaded word. a pronunciation difference isnt really a mistake, imo, especially if it arises in everyone in a particular population. i think its no more a mistake than a naturally occurring mutation (when talking about things like evolution) is a mistake. "mistake" implies that there's something wrong or incorrect about it, when in reality, sound changes are neutral, accents and dialects are just examples of languages beginning to diverge in similar ways to how species diverge in nature
Braces to correct overbites correct to no less than 2mm of an overbite, so even if you have had braces, you still have a bit of an overbite. For most people, their front teeth in the upper jaw also overlap their lower jaw by about two mm, so having no overbite at all would make chewing difficult too
"Padre" didn't become "father"; they both come from a common Proto-Indo-European root (*pəter-) "father" via Proto-Germanic "*fader" and "padre" via Latin "pater," but either way, this is an example of Grimm's Law, which likely has nothing to do with agriculture -- unless one is to say that the Germanic peoples used more agriculture than did Italic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, etc. peoples.
I wouldn't say that there was an elephant in the room. I really don't think most people pay that much attention to consonant sounds to say "oh, you don't say P or V sounds, so I'm better than you."
There are toooonnnnsss of language changes and that we have no way of knowing how or why they occurred, we just assume language changes because it wants too at this point. (like generational differences in speech patterns add up, i would argue "little mistakes" wasnt the best word choice) This study is cool and has merit but framing it as a dietary as a cause and not a factor is misrepresenting the study, good video tho, yall should do a video on grimms law or the great vowel shift, give me more linguistics content
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Wow the whole week thanks from México Brilliant and you guys at SciShow !!!
Yes, I love linguistics. More please
Very valid video for folks forming varying verbiage from fascinating flocks of phrases.
Such an underrated comment
Let me simply say that it's my very good honor to meet you, and you may call me V.
Seeing "phrases" at the end of this comment made me wonder if the accidental switch from p's to f's is how we ended up with"ph" making the "f" sound in English. Maybe before we had a letter for it, someone was trying to write a word and show that the p wasn't being pronounced normally, so they went with ph.
@@sarahdangelo3168 No.
Of course food changes the way you speak.
That's why my mom always told me, "Don't talk with your mouth full!"
Meh 7/10 comment not your best
@@dontknowdontcare1934 wrong, this comment won the internet for the day.
Congrats! Your comment gave me food for thought.
So ... I should swallow all my pride before we could start a conversation?
@@user-jp1qt8ut3s shut it.
Padre didn't become father, but I know what you mean, the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) root *pəter became in English, while it became pater in Latin, then padre in Italian, Spanish, Portuguese.
In general, I am interested but also skeptical in this idea. There are countless examples of bilabials becoming labio-dentals, but the reasons could be totally different. The example you used in the video of /p/ → /f/ is part of Grimm's law, a bigger systematic sound shift that split the Proto-Germanic language from its other Proto-Indo-European relatives. For example, we have /bʰ/ → /b/ → /p/ → /ɸ/. Which means, the voiced, aspirated /bʰ/ sound became the unaspirated /b/ sound, the /b/ became the /p/, and the /p/ became the /ɸ/ (ɸ referring to the bilabial fricative, rather than the labio-dental fricative /f/) This is a shift, where a whole bunch of sounds changed as a chain. It's not fully understood what causes these chain shifts, but it's often supposed that it starts at the other end, not with for example /p/ → /f/, but rather with /bʰ/ → /b/ which pushes /b/ to /p/ so as to keep the distinction of the two sounds, and then again down the chain.
A better example is the very common pattern of /w/ → /v/, which we see in Romance language, German, etc. (The veni vidi vici, that Hank mentions was NOT pronounced /v/ by Caesar, but rather /w/, like, weni, widi, wici, and only Later did Latin and it's descendants change the sounds to /v/'s) /w/ is a labio-velar sound, meaning it's pronounced partly with the lips, and partly in the back of the mouth near the velar, but it often has become that voiced labio-dental fricative sound /v/. Professor Justeson of UAlbany suggested to me that this very common transformation is actually example of palatalization. Palatalization is when sounds get pronounced closer to the soft palate of the mouth, where we make a Y-sound (/j/ in IPA, or /y/ in APA). So for example, take the English word . The Proto-Germanic root we think was *kirika (compare German /kirçə/). The two k-sounds became sounds (IPA /t͡ʃ/; APA /č/), which is pronounced closer to the front of the mouth, ie near the soft palate. Changes like these are quite common, often happening before a front vowel like /i/ (which is likewise pronounced close to the soft palate). Justeson pointed out that you could also describe them as "de-velarization" as the sounds are become "less velar." The /w/ → /v/ is also becoming "less velar." He found that this change was also happening often before front vowels like /i/ in the Mayan languages he studies, and hypothesized that in Indo-European language that feature that change started off in a similar way before spreading to all instances of the /w/ phoneme.
However, there could still be credence to the theory in question. In the example of Grimm's law, we see how Linguists think the /p/ sound became a /ɸ/ sound before ultimately becoming the /f/ sound it is in English or German, etc. Likewise with the /w/ → /v/ change, if we "de-velarize" the /w/ it becomes /β/, the bilabial fricative, not the labio-dental fricative. It's possible that this preference for, or tenancy toward, labiodentals could still be seen in these examples.
father comes from german Vater and not padre
Mar German Vader and English father both come from Proto-Germanic *fadēr. English doesn't descend from German, they both descend from Proto-Germanic, they're sister languages. It's confusing but "Germanic" and "German" are two different labels. Germanic is a label describing the German, English, Dutch, Icelandic, Norwegian, etc. languages, cultures, religion, etc.
@@charlesdeschampsdeboishebe9672 since old english came over from germany with the angles and saxons I'm pretty sure they spoke old german. english descended from old german and did not develop as it's own language from proto germanic like other germanic languages. I know, it's confusing, but you will get it one day.
Mar The Anglo-Saxons came from the Netherlands and Denmark and the little piece of modern day Germany in between in the 5th century. There is no way you can call the language varieties there "Old German" because it was the ancestor of English, Frisian, Dutch, High German, Low German, Luxembourgish, etc.. Any argument for calling it "Old German" can also be used to call it "Old Frisian" or "Old Yiddish."
@@charlesdeschampsdeboishebe9672 maybe stop talking out of your arse?
Way back in college taking paleoanthroplogy, I wondered why all other hominids fossils had that perfect tooth alignment, but we didn't. I never knew it was a juvenile feature.
Thank you for calling linguists scientists!
There are scientists in every (or almost every I guess) field. Like you can be a scientist in linguistics or simply be a linguist. Just like a chemist can simply be a chemist and not work in scientific field but for example in industrial sector.
I’d be interested in knowing how this relates to the quantity of sounds. I know from school that there’s something like 3-4 times the amount of sounds in !Kung that there are in English. It seems to me like the relative sizes of the communities of speakers might select for a more standardized/ streamlined language for the agricultural societies, which have more people. I’d be interested in similar statistical models reporting on that, especially because it adds in factors that I think this study misses (ie potential overemphasis on diet as though that’s the only variable operative here, even though agriculture clearly changed quite a lot about the way people lived).
5:00 -- "Padre" did not become "father". It's really only direct loanwords like "spaghetti" or "taco" that English gets from Italian or Spanish (or Portuguese). A basic word like "father" came from neither. The Latin word giving rise to Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese "padre", and related words like French "père", was Latin "pater", but English doesn't get "father" from Latin either. It's a native English word, Old English "faeder" from proto-Germanic *fader, from proto-Indo-European *pəter -- and THAT'S where the original "p" occurred. In Germanic languages it turned into an F, but not in Italic languages or in its Romance descendants. (Or many other IE branches such as Hellenic. The PIE actually contains a laryngeal after the initial "p" rather than a schwa, but the schwa is close enough.)
It's pronounced "weni widi wici" lol So they would've been able to say it I'm sure.
OfAir and the wici should also be wiki instead
Ivan Samodelkin no it's wici since the Roman C used to sound like a k
@@XiaoMof that's what he meant
Even the Romans didn't say "veni vidi vici" like you pronounced it.
Vs were pronounced like w's then.
@@miguelquinto6003 No. The letter v existed. It just functioned as our "u"s do now. It would still be written veni vidi vici. It would have been PRONOUNCED more like weni widi wici, but the written stroke "V" definitely existed.
*wiki
@@tomraptile804 Cs in classical latin are pronounced hard like k's. It wasn't until it was italicized (if thats even a word) where writing vici would be pronounced like vichi.
So writing it as vici is still proper.
@@johnray6906 👍
I commented because you wrote "wici" in the comment above.
@@tomraptile804 Ah, I see. I only meant that me writing "wici" as a pronunciation of the first consonant was still proper, all other things considered. Cheers.
I know you guys aren’t linguist and I’m no professional, but I know a thing or two on the subject and padre never “became” father. Both words are analogous but neither came from the other. They both came from the indo-European pāter. Also the Germanic peoples were indo-European p->f were more carnivorous then the Romans that retained that p.
They were not fully carnivorous, but definitely more so. Another problem with this is the that farming entered Europe from the Mediterranean, and long before the indo-Europeans arrived, and thus it’s unlikely that the p->f of Germanic came from that result.
No F's and V's? P's for F's? Sounds like Tagalog for me. Does that suggest that its first speakers lived in pre agricultural socities?
Tagalog evolved from Proto-Austronesian, and proto-austronesians were likely hunter gatherers.
Well, I mean, the "first" speakers of _every_ language lived in a pre-agricultural society, if you go back far enough.
@@HeadsFullOfEyeballs umm true though, but in Tagalog's case they somehow didn't develop labiodentals and Indonesian developed labiodentals due to contact with other languages.
@@Kettvnen Sure! I'm just pointing out that the question is sort of meaningless, since languages aren't spontaneously invented out of whole cloth and therefore don't have "first" speakers. They've all been evolving smoothly since the day language first arose in humans, and back then we were all hunter-gatherers.
That does seem like Sundanese, they pronounce F's and V's as P's too.
From what I know, Many Far Eastern languages don't seem to have V's, Javanese pronounces V's as F's when speaking bahasa and Japanese doesn't have V's too. Bahasa and BM have though but that's most likely because of the influence from English and Nederlands.
I always wondered why my braces were designed with a slight overbite. Makes sense with how we tear and chew food
Thanks for the knowledge as usual Hank.
Objection: veni vidi vici was actually pronounced wane-ee wid-ee wick-ee, so that’s not a good example. Maybe you could try facio (fach-ee-oo). Src i took four years of Latin and checked with a guy who took 12 years of Latin.
I thought so too, but then I wondered: A guy born in Rome in 100 AD supposedly said "wick-ee". Then a guy born in Rome in 2000 AD would say "vee-chee". Around which year did the people being born in Rome decide to change how they said 'vici'?
I think I read somewhere that there was another theory that overbites became more common in many places after the invention/introduction of forks. Is that still a discussed theory?
No. Evidence of overbites exists from well before forks were invented (which was in the Middle Ages).
Have they only looked at European languages for this? I'd be curious to see how the p->f sound has impacted the pronunciation of ㅍ.
?
@@gunjfur8633 OP is talking about Korean.
We lost our overbite when we stopped eating BUCKwheat!
Oh, that's just too corny.
@@warrenokuma7264 Ain't that the tooth!
Tim Sullivan u mean kept?
@@kingsly2275 Not sure, but on a related note, I read that the long-extinct Vampire Fish (ancient ancestors of the modern-day Parrot fish) quickly wore-down their fangs once they introduced coral polyps to their diet.
Tim Sullivan that’s a rather neat fact thanks!
The mention of P sound becoming F, and B sound becoming V.
Two points.
1. The B sound is formed the same way as P, except that B also uses the vocal cords. Same for V and F.
2. In Hebrew, the same letter (2nd letter in alphabet) ב is pronounced B and V. But it's pronunciation in a word depends on grammatical rules. Later, a dot was added to make it easier for the reader to know which to pronounce. The same for P and F, they are the same Hebrew letter פ, and if it's the first letter of a word it is P; if it's the last letter, it's an F. So Pharaoh in Hebrew is Paro.
Always interesting, thank you.
Quick peeve: "veni, vidi, vici" was pronounced "weni, widi, wiki" in classical Latin... But this theory is fascinating. Basque, one of Europe's oldest languages, traditionally doesn't have the phonemes F nor V, so that may lend credence to this idea. Modern Basque does borrow those letters when used in loan words, but V is always pronounced like a B, and in some dialects F is pronounced like a P (infernua>inpernua).
5:05 that looks delicious. You have to publish the recipe!!
I'd say australian bread, tuna, potato, egg, red onion, garlic, coriander and some spices.
So many problems about this. For example, Austronesians were the first people to cultivate rice from their homelands in southern China and the Yangtze delta (which were invaded by the Han Chinese at around 100 BC to 100 AD). And yet, Austronesians in Southeast Asia, specifically, do not have a lot of F and V sounds, despite being highly agricultural societies for thousands of years. Conversely, Austronesians in Oceania (Polynesians and Micronesians) have a lot of F and V sounds, despite having more limited agriculture focused mostly on taro, since they lost rice cultivation technology during their initial expansions into the Pacific Islands. It does not match up.
Thats true, I live in the Philippines wherein F and V isn't in our alphabet yet we're an agricultural country, and of course Filipinos (I know it has an F but that's just because of Spanish influence, in our language it's 'mga Pilipino') have trouble with pronouncing those sounds when speaking to foreignera
Agriculture allowing sounds does not equal forcing them.
It doesn't add up for plosives, but if you look at fricatives, I think things become a lot clearer. With an overbite, while [f] becomes easier to pronounce than [φ] (forgive my phone keyboard's lack of proper IPA), the thing that cements the change is that [f] was usually simultaneously unlike any other sounds in the language (exception for Germanic, since [θ] sounds a lot like [f]) (this means that you can substitute /f/ for /φ/ without really harming comprehension) and more different from [p] than [φ] is (so making the shift makes phoneme inventories more distinct).
Where [p[+dental]] is concerned, the gaps between teeth would have made it easy to mispronounce it as a fricative, which would have reduced the distinctiveness of the phoneme inventory. So, there'd be more pressure to maintain the place of a bilabial /p/ than a bilabial /φ/.
@@Swenthorian Except [φ] is nonexistent in Austronesian languages as well, both among agricultural groups and the [marine] hunter-gatherer groups (Filipino, Malay, Hawaiian, Maori, etc.).
When [f] does replace [p], the direction is opposite that of the study's claims, going from agricultural to hunter-gatherer. e.g. Proto-Austronesian *pitu ("seven"), becoming "pito" in most Philippine languages (agricultural), but "fitu" or "hitu" in most Oceanic languages (hunter-gatherer).
[φ] also exist widely among Austroasiatic and Kra-Dai groups (e.g. Thai and [Kinh] Viet) who are also predominantly agricultural. It has not been replaced by [f].
The study I think is heavily based on Indo-European and Afro-Asiatic. Because it certainly isn't corroborated for East/SE Asian and Oceanic languages.
@@AngryKittens Very interesting! I was thinking about the loss of /φ/ in PIE descendents, but I indeed have not studied non-Indo-European historical linguistics (to be fair, I'm a phonetician (with a BA), not a historical linguist).
Anyways, though, this is what peer review is for! Hopefully someone will reply to the study with some of the points you're making.
Regarding the languages of Polynesia, though, I wonder if the "rocker" jaw might be relevant to this.
Sorry I don't understand this, I only speak grass
Sorry I dont understand unfunny comments I only speak creativity and fun.
@@dontknowdontcare1934 sorry, I don't know and don't care
Oh, don't be a bad seed.
@@dontknowdontcare1934 sorry, i can't read unneeded comments i only read actualcommentus
It is true that the voiceless bilabial stop /p/ in PIE became a labiodental fricative /f/ in modern Germanic languages, but it should be stated that it was not an isolated change, but rather it should be seen in the context of the Germanic sound shift as described by the Grimm's law. Voiceless stops /p t k kw/ (and not only /p/) systematically became fricatives in Proto-Germanic, and an edge bite cannot explain the sound shift as a whole. Also, the phoneme /p/ did not disappear in the aforementioned languages, as expected if it were simply easier to pronounce it as an /f /. Instead, it was a chain shift in which /b/ became /p/ and /p/ became /f/. Internally, it is safe to assume that /b/ becoming /p/ caused the latter to turn into an /f/ to preserve distinctiveness. Finally, if /p/ becomes an /f/ in Germanic languages as a result of an edge bite, it would folllw that /b/ should have become a /v/ for the same reason, which is not the case. It seems like they cherry-picked the evidence to support their claim.
I brought these points up too in a comment. They're very important things to bring up. I like the way you explained it.
I think the Scishow team likely simplified or misunderstood their sources (or used sources that were already simplified or misunderstanding). /p/ → /f/ is not a good example of this theory I think. /ɸ/ → /f/ or /β/ → /v/ is more likely the kind of thing it could explain.
If we consider the maybe better example of /w/ → /v/, the /w/ phoneme could have first "de-velarized" to a /β/, but then a preference for labiodental sounds (maybe brought about by a more agrarian diet) could explain the change to /v/. Likewise, I think it's theorized that Germanic sound shift first turned /p/ into /ɸ/, and again this preference could have then changed it further to the /f/ it is now.
I also also thinking of High German /pf/ which developed from /p/. This sound change is CLEARLY part of the larger systematic change of stops to affricates in High German. /t/ → /ts/, or /k/ → /kx/ (found in some High German dialects). However, if we just have a rule that changes these stops to be [+delayed release] (ie an affricate if you aren't familiar with Generative distinctive features), would turn /p/ into [pɸ]. This change to [pf] requires a FURTHER change of a bilabial to a labiodental. This theory could still apply in explaining why that further change happens.
I'm still skeptical though of course. It sounds like one of those things that actual linguists don't think is that interesting, but because non-linguistics can understand it, it makes the news. It's like the idea that "higher altitude" or "colder climates" make people speak with more round "O" sounds to keep their mouths shut. Like, correct if I'm wrong, but isn't that more of an outdated, non-linguistics based idea?
@@rdreher7380 I have just finished reading your comment (I hadn't read it before I posted mine, thanks for pointing it out!). I hadn't thought of the fortition of /w/ to /v/ in Romance languages as palatalization, but it does make sense, especially if you call it de-velariation as you mentioned. I have no knowledge on Mayan languages, but I still do not believe that the example from Romance amounts to validating what Hank reports in the video, as the develaritation of /w/ in Romance languages (and in German) took place thousands of years later than when such peoples became agrarian societies. Dating PIE is controversial, but the branching off of Proto-Germanic dates to much later than the agricultural revolution too, so the timing does not add up... What do you think? (Also, /j/, the other semivowel of Latin was also fortitioned to /d͡ʒ/ in early Romance, I have always thought that it was related to /w/ > /v/. I find it curious because Romance tends towards lenition, those are the two phonemes that went the other way)
As for High German /pf/ from earlier [pɸ], I don't see how their claim would support that change, as Germans had been an agrarian society for thousands of years before it happened. I don't think their diet changed significantly, either in time from the previous centuries or in space from the other Germanic speaking areas around them which did not undergo such shift.
I also thought that maybe Sci-show simplified or misunderstood their claim, we should read the actual paper before completely descrediting it. haha I have never read or heard anything about extra rounding in higher altitudes, but it sounds to me like an exaggeration at best.
Anyway, thanks for taking the time to write a reply.
@@rdreher7380
It just occured to me that in Proto-Celtic /p/ also became /ɸ/, though it later disappeared rather than becoming a labiodental.
Maybe the people with the overbite that could use the F / V sounds easier ended up communicating better therefore breeding more and had an influence on the outcome also. Communication including verbal communication is the biggest factor when it comes to your Status / potential money you can earn so is all a big factor when comes to your ability to attract a potential partner.
This is super interesting! The "f" and the "v" sounds didn't exist in Basque (one of the few non Indoeuropean languages in Europe, and the only one in the Iberian peninsula), and the Latin spoken in Hispania lost the "f" sound when it got there, and it seems people were pronouncing it as an "h" sound. That is why many words that in Latin had an "f" like "formica", "forno" or "farina" ended up as "hormiga", "horno" and "harina" in Spanish. Perhaps the consumption of vegetables in that area was not developed enough for people to be able to pronounce the "f" sound yet?
In any case, it might be too soon to jump to conclusions, but it does seem like an interesting hypothesis to me.
I am an Asian American who studied linguistics, and it seems to me that many of the linguistics related science videos need a huge disclaimer that they are talking about primarily European languages or that the research and data primarily focuses on European languages... the example given in this video about bilabials and labiodentals doesn't exactly apply to a language that remains labiodental free, like Korean, for example.
? The only claim being made here is that it was more *likely* for bilabials to change into labiodentals after the advent of agriculture. There was no claim of invitability being made here. Nor was anyone claiming that labiodentals are *always* from bilabials. Latin got it's voiced labiodental from the velar approximant after all (as multiple people above pointed out). Another common source for labiodentals is of course dentals: th>f is not an uncommon shift, and the opposite direction is just as common. Korean just not participating in the trend doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
I thought of the relationship between p & f just before he mentioned it. Neat idea.
Emery Paine -- /p/ pronounced as /f/ is evident not only in the changes between the Germanic "fader" and Latin "pater," but in Asian languages as well. For example Koreans replace the /f/ in "coffee" with a /p/, so it comes out as "coppee". I just want to clarify that /p/ becoming /f/ isn't theory that linguists disagree about. It's specifically the diet part that Hank talked about. It is indeed "neat" but it isn't an "idea", it's literally a fact. (And i mean an actual fact, like it literally happens both in the past, present, and probably will in the future as a linguistic characteristic. Am i coming off as condescending? I hope i'm not coming off as condescending.)
@@NightDoge Maybe a little presumptuous as I already knew that it was an established fact, but I was unclear about the "neat idea"- I was referring to diet being a part of why that shift might have happened.
Emery Paine -- Oh, yeah. That is a neat idea. :)
The Vs in "Veni Vidi Vici" were pronounced in Rome like Ws are in modern English, so that would've marked a step in that progression but not an example of later, harsher labiodentals
In Indonesia, either naturally or a common mispronounciation, stereotipically attributed to Sundanese which often change the F or V into P (so eF into eP or ePh). Example: philosophy which in Indonesian Filosofi (which actually sounded similar to english) is read Pilosopi (pi ~ pin, lo ~ low, so ~ sow).
Is it cultural? Or perhaps biological?
Puck this is interesting!
Bhy did you say dat?
Or maybe the English word for Father is Germanic hence why Vater ( in German (sounds like "Fahter")) is the reason why Father sounds like Father, instead of something unrelated like Italian? It would've been a better explanation if you instead related it to PIE, where consonant shifts took place with the multiple different kinds of languages developed.
Nallid -- I concur. If they'd tied a reference to IPE at 1:23, which says, "the difference between the thousands of world languages mostly resulted from things like _tiny_ _pronunciation_ _mistakes_ that spread culturally." it would've been a coherent and persuasive argument. Grimm's law, which is essentially pronunciation mistakes on PIE, could not have been a possibility if the proposed theory (if it's true) hadn't occurred. Personally i see the two as reinforcing each other. Agriculture developed allowing for "pater" to morph into "fader". But then again this isn't a linguist channel so there wasn't a need to introduce PIE into the vid.
I agree, that was a small blunder to say that "father" comes from "padre." Probably the Sci-show team didn't read up enough or oversimplified because they don't understand linguistic family trees and PIE. I'm guessing they read something about the PIE /p/ which we see maintained in words like becoming English /f/ in words like and didn't fully understand it, but the underlying idea that Italian, Spanish, etc /p/ has a correspondence to English /f/ is correct.
It has been noted in that the neck bones of Neanderthals are different than Homo sapiens. Thus, the location and attachment of their vocal cords would be different. Despite common depiction of Neanderthals grunting, their speech would likely be higher pitched as a result.
I saw that BBC documentary as well
I think its more directly related to the advent of dentistry rather than the food itself. Even though the food still has an impact.
This just gives more credence to the *Neoteny* theory
The retention of juvenile features in the adult animal?
@@greensteve9307 exactly
Wouldn't /p/ and /b/ be more of a form of neoteny than /f/ and /v/, since /f/ and /v/ require teeth to pronounce but human beings are born without teeth? Easiest sounds to make are: /p/, /m/, /k/, /t/, /n/, /a/, /i/, /u/, maybe /l/ (L) too.
Adding neoteny, it ties in with a different interpretation I had while watching video, in which it could have had more to do with having food in your mouth as often, as would have been the case with hunter-gatherers, as opposed to agriculturalists who used milled food.
I don't know that there's actually hard evidence that a representative portion of pre-agricultural people ate that much meat before agriculture, but there may be something with languages that developed in and around areas where a lot of fish was eaten, like the Malay languages and Tagalog.
That does lend a creepy aspect to human evolution. Attraction to juvenile characteristics promoted our species' advancement.
Can you make video on past present and future of agriculture . How iot can improve agriculture for middle class farmers.
Or bug agriculture!
Those are very fantastic facts!
I love this show.
Your example is kinda interesting because as every classical latinist knows ... Iulius Caesar ‘said’ “veni vidi vici” more like “weni widi wiki” !! (V is like the German V, ie like a W, C is a hard, J doesn’t exist - it’s a consonantal I, etc).
_this pleases the plant_
In Labrador inuttitut we uses a lot of fs and vs, and we chew a lot so idk u might wanna know
i never realized you all had a green screen until now.
*insert confused jackie chan meme graphic here* ....
Since Hank is hosting, it's a Green's screen
What did you think they're standing in front of all this time? An actual poster board/wallpaper of the image you're seeing? Naw, they're way too generic and they change constantly. It's just a pleasant and non-intrusive background.
I doubt they're using a green screen, it would make Hank invisible. A blue screen on the other hand...
@@LKAChannel 👀
I think diet has very little to do with how a language phonology evolves. Language dynamics should have more to do with cultural interactions.
one of the best science channels ever I am subbed :)
I have an underbite and have no trouble saying f or v sounds so that is in my opinion a huge whole in this theory. Correlation does not equal causation.
Love the video but I should mention that “veni vidi vici” is not a good example of v sounds because Latin V’s are pronounce like W’s
And the padre -> father example was literally incorrect as well, on multiple counts.
What about the hyoid bone? It's absolutely critical to human speech, that I know from A&P, but when did it show up? How?
Didn't think it was what I ate, but what I DRANK that affected my F 'n P
Asparagus
This is super interesting!
The greek letter φ which is today pronounced as f used to be an aspirated p, an f sound but by using both lips like when you say p.
Thats why they transliterate it writing phi.
Maybe in those ancient times everybody had their teeth arranged the other way yet(?)
Nicolás Guaman -- Greek nationalists would beg to disagree. According to them Greek _never_ changed and was the same _forever_ since Homer and into time immemorial.
It sounds like youre discribing a Bilabial Fricative /ɸ/, & not an Aspirated Bilabial Plosive /pʰ/
I thought it was the introduction of the knife and fork several centuries ago that led to the normalization of the overbite in adult humans.
In Europe, anyway. Specifically, the hypothesis is that our bite shifted because we got into the habit of cutting our food into small pieces before putting them in our mouths, rather than biting bits off larger pieces. Support comes from China, where they adopted this practice much earlier and where the overbite also became normalized earlier. (In China food is typically brought to the table already cut up, to accommodate chopsticks.)
But it was not always an either-or thing, and the issue of tooth wear can be seen today in, for instance, Australia, when aboriginal people move to the city.
I have a crazy underbite and can make V and F sounds perfectly...
Not a single mention of the bilabial fricatives?
@Rukkaru bilabial fricatives tend to be common but less stable then labiodental fricatives
/ʙːːːːːːːː/
It’s amazing how things change our lives without us ever knowing about it 🔥
Andre Le Roi Gourhan, ‘gesture and speech’ ... original French version is something like 1951.
Can you do a video on mewing? A lot of people swear by it and have shown dramatic improvement but there hasn't been much research done on it.
Brilliant is such a brilliant sponsor
F is one of my favorite letters, so I'm kind of glad I can say it.
Yes - 'puck you' just doesn't do it...
Very neat. I wonder if difference in the grain itself has anything to do with it. Maybe they affect human teeth different. The domestication of grain played a huge role in our evolution, it made our bodies fatter, especially the brain.
That´s so cool!
This is awesome!
What about korean, which literally does not have the f and v sounds? Most esl learners I teach have trouble making the f and v sounds, subbing it with b and p sounds that do exist in korean. How about Japanese, where the "f" sound is actually blowing air through both lips like you are playing a flute, which according to the IPA (international phonetic alphabet) is a separate sound from the labiodental f, and does not have v sounds? And Chinese also does not have v sounds, though the standard f sound does exist. These are modern examples, where these sounds are not found in the speech of a language even after a long time of having agriculture and overbites.
I'm not saying that this study isn't relevant or has some truth, but it also seems to neglect half the world's population/languages when drawing such conclusions
Thumbnail givin me "Chicka Chicka Boom Boom" vibes
*Why do fish have bladders* ?
They are already in the water, wouldn't it be just as effective if they didn't have bladders?
I just googled it, and apparently fish don't have bladders, they dispose of ammonia using their gills. They do have swimming bladders, but that's completely different
@@limiv5272 oh, ok. I knew they had bladders but I didn't know it was that kind of bladder.
The swimming bladder which is used to maintain neutral buoyancy, likely evolved from lungs. Weird, but true.
@@patrickmccurry1563 Other way around. Lungs likely evolved from swim bladders.
This video ticks so many of my nerd boxes!
Oh this is so cool!
Knife and fork lead to overbites. Didn't have as much pressure on the bottom teeth like ripping meat apart.
This is very fascinating and Niche
It’s 5 a.m. here and this is the first thing I watched. This is gonna be a good day.
Must be 5 am tomorrow,'cause it's 6 pm here.
Christel Headington There are countries other than USA y’know.
@@pennyzzzzz8488 -Duh
wow they were right all along
But what about bilabial fricatives?
Hey, so I have an edge bite because of a minor genetic anomaly (lots of people do). I have not, and have never had ANY trouble producing Fs and Vs in my entire life. I speak 8 languages, 4 of which at perceived native level. While I most certainly have an idiolect (as we all do), those particular consonants have NEVER been an issue to me or anyone else I spoke to that has this same issue I do. 29% more effort? Just how easy can a consonant be?? Cause I surely don't feel saying F is 29% harder for me than saying P. I am aware that I am oversimplifying, but still. What are they on about?
It seems obvious that we weren't going around making the same sounds. Why would anyone think otherwise? Are there papers on people not thinking this before? There are certainly papers about how some sounds came to be.
Culture is a flower rooted on biology.
Look at native american languages and the dramatic shift it the way those sound. Granted, unless you personally know a life long speaker there's a real small chance of being aware of the changes in the ways the languages are spoken. As more European food production and preparation techniques were integrated into native societies the pronunciation of the languages changed. It wasnt really thought of that way but it would make sense considering how the tribes' diets changed over the past 300 years. As someone who grew up not on the reservation and not eating more traditional foods, I quite literally cannot pronounced certain words and phrases the right way simply because I cant make those sounds.
Fascinating theory
I don't understand the point how studying the differences in languages' evolution could become racist. I mean - these are differences, not comparisons or any competitions. Is F sound any better than P sound? Is red better than green? Is warm better than soft?
Guys please make one of the different types of drugs and their effects on the human body! (Popers, lsd, glass, etc)
This relates so much to mewing
yay, Brilliant has sponsored us, we can finally be bright people :)
Okay... but I have a massive underbite and I can say words like favorite just fine. Like, takes no more effort than any other word. If an edge bite would make it difficult to say an f and v an underbite would be even worse... and that’s demonstrably untrue.
Actually, the Latin V sound probably sounded more like a W
Take me now science!
to be fair though, its not like it changed language *that much* all things considered. it added the likelihood of /f/ and /v/, but that's just one pair of speech sounds, and there were a lot of others to choose from as well already haha. adding a phoneme or two does change a language's phonology, sure, but the underlying language hasnt been changed much by this, at least in terms of the underbite labiodental stuff anyway. i could imagine it's changed language in lots of other ways though, like it changed the way humans interact socially in a huuuuuuuge way, and that probably had a profound effect on language. though, probably just sociolinguistically, not like... language-capacity-wise. like it probably affected the things that people choose to say, what systems of formality they might have, and obviously huge things like vocabulary, but it probably didnt change what language actually *IS* in our brains much, because yeah, hunter gatherers still exist and speak languages that are just as advanced as any others, and non-hunter gatherers are capable of learning the languages they speak, and those hunter gatherers are capable of learning the languages spoken by others. by the time agriculture had been invented, language was probably already pretty much at its modern state of evolution, cognitively speaking. every other change that's happened since then has been, essentially, cosmetic. and those cosmetic differences can be huge, for sure, but yeah.
oh also, saying that language differences arose from pronunciation mistakes is kind of iffy, "mistake" is a really loaded word. a pronunciation difference isnt really a mistake, imo, especially if it arises in everyone in a particular population. i think its no more a mistake than a naturally occurring mutation (when talking about things like evolution) is a mistake. "mistake" implies that there's something wrong or incorrect about it, when in reality, sound changes are neutral, accents and dialects are just examples of languages beginning to diverge in similar ways to how species diverge in nature
It sure did, now I can speak with my mouth full of bread.
this is actually really interesting lol
According to that theory wouldn't braces to correct overbites revert speech back to pre agricultural eras ?
Braces to correct overbites correct to no less than 2mm of an overbite, so even if you have had braces, you still have a bit of an overbite. For most people, their front teeth in the upper jaw also overlap their lower jaw by about two mm, so having no overbite at all would make chewing difficult too
Great now I know why every word I said when I was a little kid started with a f my mom knew better than to try to get me to say the word truck
"Padre" didn't become "father"; they both come from a common Proto-Indo-European root (*pəter-) "father" via Proto-Germanic "*fader" and "padre" via Latin "pater," but either way, this is an example of Grimm's Law, which likely has nothing to do with agriculture -- unless one is to say that the Germanic peoples used more agriculture than did Italic, Hellenic, Indo-Iranian, etc. peoples.
Given indigenous Australians were separated from the rest of the world for over 40,000 years, how do there languages fit with this?
I was going to post something longer but there is no need since it boils down to: correlation does not equal causation
You should probably just say [p] instead of p-sound, pronounce the symbols like the International Phonetic Alphabet, it might be clearer what you mean
I wouldn't say that there was an elephant in the room. I really don't think most people pay that much attention to consonant sounds to say "oh, you don't say P or V sounds, so I'm better than you."
At 4:32 I was convinced he was about to say "they put their money where their mouths are"
There are toooonnnnsss of language changes and that we have no way of knowing how or why they occurred, we just assume language changes because it wants too at this point. (like generational differences in speech patterns add up, i would argue "little mistakes" wasnt the best word choice) This study is cool and has merit but framing it as a dietary as a cause and not a factor is misrepresenting the study, good video tho, yall should do a video on grimms law or the great vowel shift, give me more linguistics content
I wonder what people thought of the first guy to try and milk some critter.
"Purry..."
Beans, beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you phoot.
So if I don't eat food ever again do I lose the ability to speak
I'm seeing you about quite a bit
@I M lol
Eventually yes
Also if you add non-food items such as large rocks or shards of glass to your diet.
you also lose the ability to do anything, really.