@@tomhmc5787 My comment was a joke, a reference to the Simpsons. I don't need convincing that nasal assimilation is possible. Especially not using something that's an example of *nasalization*, not nasal assimilation!
Bom, me desculpe se eu só quis mostrar um exemplo em uma lingua, não como objeção, mas como um exemplo legal que eu encontrei na língua. Porém, novamente me desculpe se eu mostrei um exemplo equivocado sobre o assunto. Mas, sinceramente, você tem problemas, meu caro. Não disse nada demais.
Funfact: a thing some Germans do when speaking German is "swallowing vowels" - basically, sometimes an "e" (in rare cases other vowels) can be lost, which causes the most crazy thing to happen when you listen to someone say the word "Hemden" (shirts) if they do that - the word then starts to sound like "Hemdn" - and that "mdn" sound at the end is completely made with a closed mouth.
@@bondfall0072 personally I'm just watching those videos through to understand them and then go in step by step whilst listening to them again so they'd be familiar when I actually start , but I think I'd just choose the sounds of my native language and a sound or two being added or dropped
@@thereallemon429 I did something crazy and chose a sound inventory devoid of fricatives. Now I'm trying to work out how I want to evolve the proto-lang into its daughter langs.
@@baconbagels5475 I made a phonology where the only manner of articulation where all the places on the chart are used is the fricatives. Opposites, eh?
It has a lot to do with how we physically produce sound and how we streamline the speech process by making words easier to pronounce or to clear up ambiguity so we can communicate more effectively. Basically, refining the phonology.
For me personally, a problem with developing a conlang from a protolanguage is that I become too attached to the protolanguage as a 'classical' form and just don't want to let it go. I think you can be naturalistic without this, too - analogy can produce relatively consistent rules. I suppose a protolang can be devised 'retroactively', if needed.
You are right. I started developing the modern language and then, in reverse, I am creating the proto-language. That's because I had clear in mind how the modern language should be and I didn't want it to be dependent and derived from my first drafts. Instead, I created the main conlang how I liked it, and from there I retroactively made the phonetical evolutions to obtain the proto-language. Tolkien also did this to explain the relation between rohirric words and Hobbitish-Westron ones: for example Rohirric Holbytla=>Hobbit. (In real Rohirric and real Westron, not translated into Old English and English as done in the books, it would be Kûd-dûkan=>Kuduk).
I solve this by taking the protolang, make a small amount of changes to it and call it the "Higher" version of the lang that developed from said protolang. Also I started conlanging with the idea that I was already making the "current" language and was developing the protolang as I went along (well i'm still doing it lol). I'm not sure if this is a good way to go about it, but so far I've encountered no issues. However it is a better idea to just follow what more experienced people (Biblaridion in this case) raccomand to do.
If you wanna be really weird, do it like ancient greek: 1. make EVERYTHING in your language subject to palatalization, all ns, all sibilants and all stops. Then you get a HUGE phoneme inventory which is too huge so you don’t need it anymore so you REDUCE EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SIGN of palatalization. Then you get some nice allophonies. If you have labiovelars you can also delete every sign of the labial element. Because both palatalization and labialization are fundamentally identical to sequences with j and w so it’s a nice symmetry and in fact it happened to Ancient Greek. examples: 1. *treyes → delete the palatal and get trees which get’s contracted to trēs written as τρεῖς. 2. root *gʷem- meaning ‚go, come‘, still present in english come → build a present stem with the suffix *-i̯ó- → *gʷem-i̯ó- → now m assimilates to the y → *gʷen-i̯ó- → n becomes palatalized and geminated because of compensatory lengthening for the glide → *gʷeɲːó- → now the unstressed vowel becomes a → *gʷaɲːó- → now you get rid of the labialization and turn labiovelar gʷ befor a and o into b (and before u into plain g and before e and i into d) so you get *baɲːo- → now the palatal n influences the a and produces a tiny little i sound right infront of the palatal nasal just as you can hear it in languages like Spanish which have the palatal nasal → *bai̯ɲo- (since you now have a diphthong you need to shorten the geminated nasal to keep the rythm) and then you delete the palatal element → *baino → this is basically the ancient greek word for ‚to go‘ which is βαίνω (baínɔ̄). I don’t know how the accent shifted but this is secondary. The palatal doesn’t get deleted in this case because it’s part of a diphthong, that is the only exeption to the tendency. 3. root *klep meaning ‚steal‘ → buildt a io-present → *klep-i̯o → the i palatalizes the p, so you get something like *klepʲo- → now somehow apparently the proto Greeks weren’t able to pronounce that shit, so they reduced it. BUT it’s not like they would do it in a sane manner and just delete the palatal element, no they kept the double articulation, but they made it not palatal but pushed it further to the front. The the ʲ turned into a t → klepto-. And that’s the word for ‚to steal‘ → κλέπτομαι [kléptomai] with a more complex ending. It still baffles me how THAT was more easy to pronounce for them than something like kʷ in queer. This occurs even at the beginning of words.
Imma correct you but who cares anyway , The verb is "βγαίνω"β is pronounced like v, γ is pronounced like w in why and ω is pronounced like a cut o, not oh just o
My favorite phonoligical change is: o -> w -> v It happened in slavic languages with the borrowed word "Leo" which now is "Lev" in most of them. It's really nice if you want to make consonant clusters in weird places and the only change I know which makes a vowel into a consonant.
@@viorp5267 That change happened in my native Language (similar to the english [ t̺ ] / [ d̺ ] not [ d̻ ] or [ d̪ ]) but it was somehow still maintained in prenasalized consonants [ⁿd] and in germinated stops [t:] (my nativlang has [ t̪ ~ t̻ ], [ t̺ ] and [ ʈ ] btw)
You don't have to follow his rules exactly, he's just providing examples of actual sound changes that could occur while a language is evolving.@@Anshu-yq4dn
Agreed, but would it really kill him just to slow down and maybe explain some of the terminology he’s using? Like, bro, you’re not competing in a race, it’s ok!
I think he explained the concepts that he was talking about pretty well. Although I do agree with you in saying that the pacing was a bit quick.@@HowDoUsleeep
11:45 - coda /n/ in japanese is actually a placeless archiphoneme /N/. all of the nasal stops in 三 /saN/ [sä̃ɴ] and 三番 /saNbaN/ [sä̃mbä̃ɴ] are perceived as the same sound. this is still a case of nasal assimilation, but not phonemically; it's just allophonic variation. also, when romanized it's still normally written as as the distinction isn't made. (source: I'm a native speaker)
Could I make those coda /n/ syllables have a nasal vowel instead and put an epenthetic nasal consonant where dropping like this would confuse a listener? With that nasal change which of these is most perceivable or tasteful as saNbaN A) sambã B) sãmbã C) sãban D) sãbã Reasoning: Louisiana french has the alveolar rhotic, and some other archaic things and geographic influences that make me wanna make it part of a conlang pidgin that uses phonation and tone liberally. Japanese and Yoruba would be joining it in the mixing bowl.
That and to create new words for new technologies and concepts without relying on loan words. I think that is quite cool and keeps a language more unique.
Dear language master, I was wondering if you could make a language-learning series... big request... Basically, I mean a series in which you explain why a language (you speak) has become the way it is now "pretending" as if you are inventing it. You know what I mean? It would be amazingly helpful!! Thank you so much for all your time and effort
You can try googling "history of x language" and shifting through the results until you find somethimg like that (Its unlikely that they'd pretend it's a conlang tho)
@@maapauu4282 my native language that is Arabic is heavily documented due to many stuff , yet if someone asks me to explain anything about it I'll be starting at them like an eye-less worm
6:50 Yes, this word does look pretty painful to pronounce. Great content, you're really great at explaining things. I hope to see more of your content in the future.
I will literally watch this video a million times while I’m working on conlangs. I have a proto language and am working on phonological and grammatical evolution. And wow. Complicated, hard to do, and incredibly fun. Love your videos pretty much all the time.
There are 4 ways to assimilate a cluster, depending on whether you want to change the first or second consonant, and whether to change its placement or manner of articulation. For example, 'amda' could become - anda - Placement of 1st consonant - amba - Placement of 2nd consonant - abda - Manner of 1st consonant - amna - Manner of 2nd consonant English tends to change the placement of the 1st consonant, while Korean changes the manner. So 'hapnida' becomes 'hamnida'
me and my friend always loved creating our own script/alphabet as well as learning other scripts we find online. i decided maybe it was time we upgraded to our own language as well. i'm very confused but slowly trying to learn. i even got a notebook for me to take notes and also write down my language making process so one day i can look back and see how it came to be.
I decided to follow this series along but opted to make a language that was slightly more complex, with a CCVC structure. I have a bit more experience with conlanging since this is my second attempt so I thought it would be good. I realized quickly that I needed to come up with some rules regarding not just the clusters allowed within my onset and/or coda, but also intersyllabic clusters. And I'm happy to say that a good number of the rules I came up with are reminiscent of various points made in this video. So, I think I can happily say that I've managed to treat my feasible clusters in a naturalistic manner.
this satisfying feeling when you already know everything basic and speed through the first five videos with double speed and then you slow down here and the voice finally sounds normal
Ehhh, gotta correct you on this one. Natural sound change can actually be restricted by morphology. For example, early middle English lost word final nasals in nouns, but not in verbs (yes, that is cutting it rather short, but that's essentially what happened) Edit: Also, you can technically create new sounds just via positional voicing, without deleting anything. It happens in natural languages, although rarely, I believe. For example, here is Mysterious Language X. Mysterious language X once had a /v~w/ sound of a sonorant nature. Some time in 14th century, this sound would have become [v] in all positions, but later devoiced in some. For a while, /f/ wasn't a phoneme, but then native speakers began coining new, mostly onomatopoetic words (from which nouns and verbs would later be derived) that featured [f] outside of devoicinɡ environments. Essentially, it became a phoneme without going through phonologisation. Now excuse me while I go back to romanising my 45 phonemic vowels (kill me)
@@Alice-gr1kb That was my point. Kids, don't do umlaut. And don't do nasalisation with umlaut. And especially don't do that with several vowel lengths.
Came for the "sound changes don't always apply in everything" comment. Stayed for- DEAR LORD! 45 phonemic vowels? What are you even doing with your life?
My conlang is already 9 years old. A lot of sound changes have happened but they came naturally over time with me speaking the language. I don't even want these changes to happen because it forces me to adjust my dictionary all the time. ^^
0:45 All environments There are some exceptions to this principle. "[a] before nasal becomes [e], but *only in nouns*" is unnatural, but there are some ways that morphology and grammar can affect sound changes. The boundary between morphemes in a compound word is often significant. Many English dialects preserve the /h/ in the middle of "threshold." Japanese voices obstruents in compound words - "shime" (tie up) after "ike" (be kept alive, such as fish, fire, flowers) equals "ikejime" (euthanizing fish). Grammatical auxiliaries and redundancy are more likely to be simplified and might be treated differently in sound changes. Inland American English may split the "trap" vowel into two phonemes, so that "tin can" is no longer a homophone with "can do." That's in addition to the typical rule that the vowel in "can" may be elided. Classical Latin poetry usually dropped word-final short consonants before a word-initial consonant - that vowel was usually a case marker, but it's just redundancy and less important than poetic meter. This was in all likelihood a feature of conversational language as well. Some Japanese dialects reduce the "-wa" clitics (contrasting topic, statement that insists on the speaker's perspective) to "ya" after "i" or "e." This can be further reduced to palatalizing the previous consonant. "sore wa" (in that case) to "sorya" or "soryā" and "nai wa!" (not at all / you gotta be shitting me) to "nai ya!" This shift isn't applied to "wa" used to mark performative femininity - that register is precisely enunciated. Further irregularities in phonotactics can easily be introduced if words are borrowed at different points in the history of a language. English "Sri Lanka" ignores a very early change in I-E languages from /sr/ to /str/. (Why /str/ is such a common cluster in European words.) (Sinhalese is also an I-E language, but IIUC the Indo-Aryan languages lost the /t/ from clusters like that.) Japanese "guguru," a very young verb meaning "to Google" breaks two rules: beginning a morpheme with a voiced obstruent and having voiced obstruents in two consecutive syllables. Those rules only apply to vocabulary from Old Japanese, but verbs almost always come from Old Japanese. (Later borrowings use the verb "su(ru)" as an auxiliary to carry inflections.) So forms like "gugutta" (+PAST) sound cheekily modern, which is the point.
13:53 this actually depends on when you’re looking at Latin. In the early days of it, before ‘g’ got its tail, ‘c’ was used for both [k] and [g], as ‘g’ is just a ‘c’ that got its tail to mark the difference.
I am gοing to nitpick a bit on the Greek word in 14:02. In (Standard) Greek, the sound /k/ has the tendency to assimilate to its allophone /c/ rather than undergo tsitakismos (the process in Greek with which a sound assimilates to /ts/). Yes, there are many words that have assimilated /k/, /t/, /s/ etc to /ts/ but this is not a standard in Standard modern Greek, but rather dialects, most notably Cretan Greek. So the word κήπος in modern greek would be pronounced /'cipos/ while in Cretan Greek, that's where you'd say /'tsipos/
Is there any advice you can give to people who want to make a conlang based off of a real world language, e.g. a fictional descendant of Latin? How would conlangers introduce sound shifts and grammar changes in a way that doesn't undergo the exact same changes that other descendants did (unless said changes are universally found in such descendants, I suppose), while also ensuring they are feasible and naturalistic?
I have no idea how you would do that, but that sounds like a really cool idea! I suppose go about it kind of similar to how you make any conlang- take the location and culture into consideration, and then kind of mess about with it until you're happy? Like, try certain things, and if you accidentally end up with Spanish then you know to change some things. Maybe try mixing up the order of changes? Cause he said that can lead to drastically different results.
It’s been done. I suggest you look up “Brithenig,” which is a fictional Romance language that is a hypothetical descender of ancient Celtic languages and Latin. Might give you some inspiration.
I've seen Brithenig before and it has been an inspiration for my conlang concept-wise. My actual conlang is slavic-based, and is meant to create what could've existed in real-world Hungary if the Magyars had not migrated there
I'd say, look at all the shifts that have happened between the ancient language and it's descendants, then choose changes that would go on their own, different direction (maybe instead k>t͜ʃ , g>d͜ʒ/ _i , _e like in Italian, maybe drop final vowels, then k>ʔ , g>k / #_ ) (if you don't understand I can better describe)
I have been intuitively using most of the things presented here (especially various things that happen to H) in my most developed conlang, Orinov, from a very young age (my conlanging journey began in primary school). It is interesting to see that they are natural and have specific names etc.
I feel like you may have missed something in the consonant cluster simplification / vowel deletion section. It's entirely possible that the consonants which end up next to each other after the vowel deletion (sapki, liptu, apto) might just end up in separate syllables. This would be [sap ki] [ilip tu] [ak to], instead of [sapk i] [ilipt u] and [akt o]. The second example I gave has consonant clusters but the first one manages not to because the consonants fell into separate syllables after the vowel deletion. An example of this in natural language is a sound change caused by vowel deletion in Vulgar Latin that led to Spanish. [a pe ri re] ('to open' in Latin) became [ab rir] in Spanish (meaning the same thing). [br] as a cluster is not present here. If it had become a stop-liquid cluster, it would have likely been further simplified in a way similar to how Spanish speakers often pronounce extraño [eks tra ɲo] as [es tra ɲo]. Since it never became a cluster, the loss of consonant for simplification never occured. Not to say that the changes you described and ended up applying to the language aren't realistic. I just wanted to add another potential one to the list because it's very common. Thanks for making these videos! They are a valuable resource in bringing people up to speed with how to make naturalistic languages.
Ah, so it does. Well, not much I can do about it now, unfortunately. That's certainly a possibility for how palatalization could happen, but it's by no means the only possibility.
14:06 Irish has a palatalized r (though nowadays people pronounce the palatalized r as an approximant, and the velarised r as a tap.) and also if you really want to push it, some dialects of Irish contrast dental velarised, alveolar and palatalised l and r
It's worth noting that changes like these happening in different orders across different regions - or indeed different changes happening entirely in different regions - tend to be how dialects emerge.
12:27 I'd just like to point out that /ŋ/ IS phonemic in English. If you take the word /sɪŋ/, and contrast it with the word /sɪn/, /n/ and /ŋ/ occur in the exact same phonetic environment, and therefore are in contrastive distribution.
2:50 I used "h" as a marker to prevent vowel clustering since my script is an abugida. So vowels can't just go alone. Although i no longer include the h when writing with the latin romanization, I still have that "letter" that has no sound; it's simply used as a host for vowels.
Question: if sound changes are suppose to be universal, how is it that /h/ is lost in "hour" but not other words? Also: what are some ways to produce [j] from phonemes other than [i]?
"Hour" came to English by way of French, wherein all instances of /h/ had been lost, so the /h/ was already gone when it was borrowed. [j] can evolve from [l] or [ʒ], or it can appear in vowel breaking (e.g. [i] -> [ye]). Those are just some off the top of my head, but you'll find plenty more if you have a look through the index diachronica.
@@Biblaridion Nope, sorry, that's plain wrong. The word "hour" entered English long before French lost /h/, and was in fact pronounced /hɔʊɹ/ in Shakespeare's day, whence also the pun "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe" in Act 2, Scene 7 of "As You Like It". No, "hour" is in fact a good example of why the Neogrammarian hypothesis (i.e. the notion that sound changes are universal) is incorrect, because there are far too many exceptions of the alternative (called "lexical diffusion"). Another example in English is the totally inconsistent split of "oo" in words like "book" /bʊk/ (from Middle English booke /boːkə/) vs "boot" /buːt/ (from Middle English boote /boːtə/). This is further demonstrated by the fact that some dialects have more /ʊ/s than others; some English dialects have roof /rʊf/ and goose /gʊs/. For more on this, see Labov's "Principles of Linguistic Change", Volume 1!
I feel like there's gonna be a point where: • The English sentence ,,I wouldn't" will get a even shorter counterpar, that'll be used more often: ,,I'dn't" EDIT: Fixed misspellings
While I suspect that while "I'd've" "you'd've" and "wouldn't've" probably aren't accepted by English teachers (or Firefox's spell check), it's common enough that I have characters say it, and I don't feel that I have to explain what it means. "If you'd've told me that I'd've known and I wouldn't've told her she could come with us."
Language teachers are always the last to accept language changes. There are even some totally valid dialect-specific words they still frown on, like "y'all" and the habitual "be" (as in "he be working" meaning "he is a worker" ).
This video is great and super inspiring, always worth a rewatch. The only thing it might serve to clarify a little more is when exactly we're talking about sound changes at a single point in time to comply with a language's phonotactics (as in the dothraki and japanese assimilation examples), and when a sound change actually occured during the evolution of a language, explicitly defining two points in time at which the pronounciation of the two words/phrases was different).
Instead of going through all this mess, I’m gonna leave all the stuff to my grandkids and tell them to pass this on to their kids and tell them to pass it on to their kids and so on. And thus, I made my own family language
3 months ago i had no idea about linguistics and never even heard about this hobby. A fortnight ago i decided to develop my own conlang following this guy advice: Akos "water" + keva "pretty" 1. Coda "s" becomes "sh" before before weak stops 2. "e" dissapears between "k" and "v" or "z" Now I can proudly say that in my conlang the word "Akoshkva" means Booze
1:00 Not necessarily: in some dialects of English, vowel-breaking occurs when long vowels occur in closed syllables unless the syllable coda is a morphological suffix (e.g. "freeze" may be pronounced as /friːəz/ but "frees" is simply /friːz/).
Does anyone know how to obtain: the uvular stop pharyngeals some of the really weird vowels like œ lateral affricates and fricatives voiceless nasals etc. because I want to develop them in my conlangs
Arabic /q/ came from Proto-Semitic */k'/, so if you have ejectives you can do that. The other ejective consonants from Proto-Semitic changed to "emphatic" (uvularized/pharyngealized) consonants in Arabic. Lateral affricates and fricatives can come from clusters of voiceless stop + /l/ or /l/ + voiceless fricative. Voiceless nasals come from a bunch of different things, check out Old Norse -> Icelandic, and Welsh consonant mutations
Hello. If I were making a polysynthetic conlang, (because I am) similar to something like Greenlandic, should I apply these sound changes to the individual morphemes and still link them together in the same way, or should I apply these sound changes to the fully constructed words? Thanks in advance to anyone who responds.
Good video, it is really REALLY helpful especially because I’ve never seen any other sources on this topic. My only concern is that you did basically nothing to the vowels, so I’m a little confused on how to change them. The only methods I know are umlauting then dropping the vowel and simplifying diphthongs into the monophones. I know many languages have changed their vowels a lot, like English, so it’s not unfeasible, I just don’t have a very good idea on how to add or change vowels in a phonology.
I keep on commenting under each of these videos, since I watch the whole playlist :) Say, I create an imaginary world, in which for some reasons I need two or more imaginary peoples to have different but very close imaginary languages. The language of those peoples can "go through" different series of changes. Even leaving the grammar untouched, we can have two or more cognate languages! 👍 And the next vid about grammar shows how many more possibilities we have for creation of an imaginary world with cognate languages in it. Some of those imaginary peoples can speak tongues being dialects to each other, some other peoples can have languages that have notable differences so that they can be called separate cognate languages. Also there’s vast space to play with the level of mutual intelligibility among those languages. Some pair of languages can have very close lexicon and phonetic system (words of each changed a bit differently but just a bit), at the same time one of them can have a more complex grammar and the other one - more simple one. They are mutually intelligible, but clearly different. Another thing is when cognate languages have really close grammar systems, but very different phonetical shape of words (maybe written shapes differ as well). Thus we have cognate, but mutually unintelligible languages. And so on… 😃
may be a bit late but imma say it in 10:20 the inventory of spanish doesn’t have /v/ or /ɣ/ (they are allophones), while (sometimes) having /θ/ and /ʎ/ (tho /θ/ only happens in Spain and /ʎ/ is quite rare), plus /ɲ/
I have 2 questions that I’ve been struggling to figure out after watching this video 4+ times. 1. How do you keep track of phonotactic rules that are made when you make a sound change? 2. Considering I have a lexicon of 20-30 Proto words, when I’ve evolved the phonotactics to my desired place can I create whatever words meet those criteria, or must I make them up in the Proto language and ring them through my history? Thanks!
For question 2, any new words you make should be washed through your history unless they are actually new in the language, like for example being borrowed or created for a new concept (e.g new inventions, etc.). When words are borrowed they are usually morphed to "fit" into the language so should meet your criteria (or partially meet it if the original word was different enough that the changes required to make it "fit" are unfeasible).
Evolution of the numbers one to twelve in English so you can get the feel of evolution: *ONE* óynos - Proto-Indo_European ainaz - Proto-Germanic ān - Old English an - Middle English one - Modern English *TWO* dwóh - Proto-Indo_European twai - Proto-Germanic twā - Old English two - Middle and Modern English *THREE* tréyes - Proto_Indo-European thrīz - Proto-Germanic thrī - Old English thri - Middle English three - Modern English *FOUR* kwetwōr - Proto_Indo-European petwōr - Early Proto-Germanic fedwōr - Late Proto-Germanic fēower - Old English fower - Middle English four - Modern English *FIVE* pénkwe - Proto-Indo_European pémpe - Early Proto-Germanic fimf - Late Proto-Germanic fīf - Old English five - Middle and Modern English *SIX* swékws - Proto-Indo_European swexs - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) sexs - Late Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) siex - Old English (pronounced with IPA x) six - Middle and Modern English (not pronounced with IPA x in either) *SEVEN* septm - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between t and m) sebunt - Early Proto-Germanic sebun - Late Proto-Germanic seofon - Old English seven - Middle and Modern English *EIGHT* okwtōw - Proto-Indo_European axtōu - Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) eaxta - Old English (pronounced with IPA x) eighte - Middle English eight - Modern English *NINE* hnéwn - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between w and n) newunt - Early Proto-Germanic newun - Late Proto-Germanic nigon - Old English (pronounced with IPA ɣ) nyne - Middle English nine - Modern English *TEN* dékwm(t) - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between w and m; optional t) texunt - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) texun - Late Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) tīen - Old English ten - Middle and Modern English *ELEVEN* ainalif - Proto-Germanic (lit. compound of 'one left' referring to the fact that 10+1=11) endleofan - Old English (not sure how it went from ainalif to endleofan that quickly, but OK) eleven - Middle and Modern English *TWELVE* twalif - Proto-Germanic (lit. compound of 'two left' referring to the fact that 10+2=12) twelf - Old English twelve - Middle and Modern English You can guess where 13-99 came from, so how about 100: *HUNDRED* kwmtóm - Proto_Indo-European (pronounced with schwa between w and m) xuntom - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x) xuntaratha - Late Proto-Germanic ("ratha" means count. the root word is "xunta". Also pronounced with IPA x and the 'th' is pronounced as in 'that') xundred - Old English (pronounced with IPA x) hundred - Middle and Modern English
0:59 I'd like to add a little clarification here. Even when what you said is essentially true, there's still a "phonetic change" that can be limited by grammar: analogy. It's not exactly a phonetic change, right, but sometimes its effects can be really similar to one. I'll give an example using my own native language: in Spanish, the first person singular perfective past form for the verb 'andar' is 'anduve' (I walked). However, the real evolution of this word since the original Latin term would be 'andove', as you can find in some medieval texts. This tense used U in many other verbs, like 'supe' (I knew) or 'pude' (I could), so people found weird that O in 'andove' and tended to change it to U. This O > U change just affected to this specific verb tense, it doesn't occur in nouns or adjectives, so here the change is limited by the grammar context: just for being the first singular person of the perfective past tense. I think the power of analogy is usually underestimated in conlangs, probably due to its extremely arbitrary nature. If well managed, it can give a lot of flavor to any conlang.
In the end this was more interesting for learning what has happened in my own mother tongue (how things that don't seem to make sense came to be) than for learning to create an own language.
I've found that repeating a sound/series of sounds to yourself several times in quick succession is a good way to check if your sound changes work It's probably not a 1-1 thing but I HAVE found that most real-life sound changes can be simulated in this way (though on this note - I can get akto->a'to this way, but iliptu turns into iliftu rather than ili'tu) It also has the benefit of making you seem very strange to anyone watching
1-3. /he.'lo:.ti/ Helōti 4-5. /he.'lo:.di/ Helōdi 6-9. /e:.'lo:.di/ Ēlōdi 10. /e:.'lo:d/ Ēlōd Not much of a difference, but it's there. The word means 'the big thing'.
If you elide (delete) unstressed syllables, that can create exceptions to your syllable stress rules. So this could create important exceptions to the original rule, "3rd-from-final (antepenultimate) syllable is stressed, unless the 2nd-to-last (penultimate) syllable has a long vowel, which then is stressed" rule. You could conceivably end up with 2nd and 3rd from last stressed syllables, with or without vowel length, or perhaps new stress patterns, and if final vowels are lost later, you could then end up with 3rd, 2nd, and last syllables getting stress. You'd still have a set of rules for determining it, but they'd be more complex, and you might have to mark it in the writing system, or else rely on memorizing the rules (which, for others to pick up a conlang, isn't such a good idea.)
Wow. This is getting advanced. I did figure out an order of developing language in an earlier attempt. Maybe I could incorperate this in my new attempt. I start with an alphabet with letters and sounds. This is the building blocks. Second I build up the grammar. It is the skeleten. Finally I add in vocabulary. It fleshes things out. This video list does follow this order to some extent. This video of changing language is a surprizing new thing. This is getting advanced. Languages do change in real life. I think languages could even branch out into different dialects as it evolves. The dialects could even become separate languages. English went through a lot of changes. I am a modern English speaker. Yet I find Shakespere very difficult to understand. It is so different that I need a translation. There are so many thees and thous, whatever those mean. Shakepere was an English speaker too, but he lived in a much older time. Britian did colonize a big chunk of the world. Then the English language spread and diversified. There is a significant difference between the English in the isle of Britain and the English in the United States. The United States used to be a colony of Britain. This country celebrates the independence. The language reflect this, as it starts to get different. The accent and sounds are different. It is like the sound differences covered in the video. The biggest sound change is that of an a. That makes a difference in certain words like bath and class. I am from the United States. I have my American way of pronouncing an a sound. I am used to that being a regular A sound. The British way is different. It is more of an AH sound. There are a few words that are different for Americans and British. However those are few and far between. I can actually understand a British speaker. I think it is because I watched a ton of Harry Potter and Beatles. I would have watched British other shows too. The practice gets to the point where understanding is so easy that it is just as easy as understanding another American speaker. My mom is different. She can have difficulty understanding the British. She has complained about it when the tv puts on a show from the BBC. Maybe listening to and understanding a different dialect is like learning a different language. It is on a smaller scale. The Beatles are in an interesting gray area. They are British and they have a distinctivly British dialect. However as British dialects go, they are more similar to an American dialect. The accent sounds more mild to me. The Beatles have a mild accent when they speak. When they sing, the accent disappears alltogether. They sound like american singers such as Elvis. That is funny how the music affects accent. The Beatles do come from a port city in England called Liverpool. I speculate that Liverpool has more contact with Americans because it is a port city. So the accent becomes more similar to aid communication between British and Americans. I recently realized that I can even enjoy British UA-camrs. Biblaridion is from the United Kingdom. I looked it up. I found that the country of origion is in the UA-cam channel. I find this surprizing. I understand Biblaridion speaking in the videos very well. It is so well that I didn't even notice any British accent. Maybe in the future the different kinds of English dialects could turn into different languages. Maybe the dialect I speak will turn into a new American language. This is probably how English parted pays with other languages in the past. There are Germanic languages. So English was distinguished from German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. I did watch brief videos on UA-cam that have samples of the other languages spoken. That stuff is completely incomprehensable to me. It is way more difficult than Shakespere. THe only way I would understand is a translation. IMO Norwegion sounds pretty.
My conlang underwent some truly natural changes; it changed on its own as the phonology and orthography, which predate the grammar and vocab by several years, changed in my mind. It started out almost identical to English, as I was pretty young when I made the phonology/grammar (the writing system still resembles English, and I never changed it. Never will.), but over time changed somewhat.
10:12 there was an /h/ in the coda, allophony made it /x/ (spelled gh), then /x/ commited oof also consanants dont have to be minimal pairs if theyre very dissimilar for example in english /h/ and /ŋ/ are in complementary distribution, but theyre too dissimilar to be thought of as one sound
When you say 'no exceptions' (with the 'a' before nasals example), would it be unnaturalistic for some non-native words not to adhere to these rules? Like in many Turkic languages native words do not start with [l], but there are exceptions in loanwords like the Dungan-derived 'Lagman'.
I have a question related to this topic. Do contractions occur independently of the process of phonologocal evolution? In german and a number of the romance languages prepositions combine with articles, and in the celtic languages prepositions fuse with pronouns. It's mostly ellision going on in these examples, but some changes to vowel sounds too. For instance, in Italian di + il becomes del. But I'm not sure if these sound changes are applying consistently across these languages, or just in these isolated cases.
Yes, this is something I probably should have made clearer; phonological reduction does not have to be the result of sound changes. Like in the "I am going to eat" --> "I'm'a eat" example used in the video, none of the steps involved in that were the result of sound changes, they were just due to speakers dropping sounds in rapid speech. Basically, affixes and frequently used grammatical particles (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, etc.), are very likely to get worn down and simplified independently of any sound changes.
13:57 In Greek, velars are _always palatalised_ before front vowels, but not turned into post-alveolars. The word for garden that you've shown there is pronounced /cipos/, not /t̠ʃipos/. However, the second pronounciation is standard in Cypriot and Cretan Greek - which however are not what linguists mean when they refer to Modern Greek. Additionally, when preceding a vowel cluster starting with /i/, all consonants are palatalised either directly (e.g. /n/ to /ɲ) or by interjecting a voiced or voiceless palatal stop (e.g. /ð/ to /ðʝ/) . I also find it kind of funny that the way you said "ki" already sounds palatalised. In fact, I have the impression that English generally palatalises velars just like, say, Greek, but only for some front vowels. For instance, the word "keep" sounds closer to /ciːp/ rather than the established /kiːp/. I should also note that this palatalisation seems to be of a lesser degree than in Greek but I still can't help but hear it.
If I made a language who’s speakers conquered most of the map, could I just add a few additional different sound changes in certain places to make regional accents?
Is it reasonable for, instead of /h/ being lost, that it becomes more pronounced between stressed vowels? As in, /h/ goes to /x/ betweem vowels in stressed syllables? I really like /x/ and i feel like this is a natural way for it to evolve.
Why is the u in Kuhāni not lost at 18:26? As far as I can tell it should be. k and h are both obstruents. hā is the stressed syllable (not ku). What am I missing here because I feel like this is related to why everytime I try to evolve my sounds my words turn into unpronoucable garbage.
In this language, I chose for word-initial and word-final stops to be illegal, therefore a word cannot begin in a /kh/ cluster, so the /u/ is maintained. It definitely didn't have to happen that way, but I just chose for it to here (and in retrospect, I should have explained that much more clearly).
@@Biblaridion Thank you! I'm going to try using that because I quickly found that when I tried this my words became unpronouncable, most often at the beginning.
@Rasho the word apakapāka (at least when I pronounce it) has a secondary stress on the “pa” syllabe /aˌpakaˈpaːka/ so it is more likely that it would evolve into /aˌpakˈpaːka/.
I know it's nit-picky but the velar nasal isn't an allophone of the alveolar nasal. Bear in mind that my native dialect is NZ English, but I'm familiar with others. There's minimal pairs like Sun vs Sung and Bang vs Banged, and only a few dialects of English actually retain the /g/ after /ŋ/ in . Your example with 'sing' /sɪŋ/ doesn't have the /g/ either. Don't get me wrong, I love this series and think it's a great tool for conlangers, but this just irked me.
what about Afrikaans's double negative system where you place two negatives in a sentence instead of one, negatives being words like "no" or "not". in English you would say " I don't like cucumbers" in Afrikaans you would say " Ek hou nie van komkommers nie." nie being the negative.
14:04 Russian doesn't have a Tsʲ sound, only Ts. Tsi doesn't become Tsʲi, but Tsɨ like цирк /tsirk/ [Tsɨɾk]. ʑ is also not a phoneme, but an allophone of ʐ in old-moscow dialect.
I'm following along but only stops can act as coda in my language, and most of my stops are unvoiced, so this vid would change a lot if I followed it exactly
Question about stress: how does it effect compound words? Does the modifier receive the stress, or the root word. For example, in my language, forest is hamipari (ha.MI [tree] I pa.Ri [place]), which turned into amipar (a.mi.par) . This felt like something you didn't mentioned, so which word receives the stress?
I'm gonna have to revisit this and break it down now that I have a goal in mind. Sad that you chose an isolated culture to evolve a language for, because my purpose is going to look at loanwords and cultural cross pollination. Short version: My most immediate question is "what word might evolve from The Mothership" to refer to a "second moon" in a post-post apocalyptic setting. I suppose 1 question is what does the alien language sound like, and 2, consider the changes already in place for an Australian accent, since I'm pondering a future with some unique evolution amid the Great Barrier Reef generates additional setting-unique details.
How would you add more vowels over time? Would the phonetic environment phonemically add that as well? Hypothetically, let's say we have "ik". Instead of the K conforming to the I, could the I be pulled back to be a schwa? (kinda like the dutch/german suffix -ig) Or does vowel inventory generally not deviate from the original set?
Nasal assimilation? That's unpossible!
In portuguese the ancient form of mother was "mai" now is "mãe" /mʌ̃ȷ̃/, "muito" is read like /mũȷ̃tu/, etc.
@@tomhmc5787 My comment was a joke, a reference to the Simpsons. I don't need convincing that nasal assimilation is possible. Especially not using something that's an example of *nasalization*, not nasal assimilation!
? Are u angry? Kkkkkkk
Bom, me desculpe se eu só quis mostrar um exemplo em uma lingua, não como objeção, mas como um exemplo legal que eu encontrei na língua. Porém, novamente me desculpe se eu mostrei um exemplo equivocado sobre o assunto. Mas, sinceramente, você tem problemas, meu caro. Não disse nada demais.
Btw I understood that was a joke.
Funfact: a thing some Germans do when speaking German is "swallowing vowels" - basically, sometimes an "e" (in rare cases other vowels) can be lost, which causes the most crazy thing to happen when you listen to someone say the word "Hemden" (shirts) if they do that - the word then starts to sound like "Hemdn" - and that "mdn" sound at the end is completely made with a closed mouth.
I noticed that when I was in Germany! It was a lot of fun to imitate it while trying to speak the language haha
This also happens in some dialects of Flemish Dutch.
I, as someone who is learning German, do it naturally. I think it's practical lol
So that's what happened
Evolution idea:
mdn - mn - n
Hemden becomes Hen in the future 💀
I need to watch this through two or three times to wrap my head around everything he's saying
Same. I'm still trying to decide the sounds I want.
@@bondfall0072 personally I'm just watching those videos through to understand them and then go in step by step whilst listening to them again so they'd be familiar when I actually start , but I think I'd just choose the sounds of my native language and a sound or two being added or dropped
@@thereallemon429 I did something crazy and chose a sound inventory devoid of fricatives. Now I'm trying to work out how I want to evolve the proto-lang into its daughter langs.
@@baconbagels5475 I made a phonology where the only manner of articulation where all the places on the chart are used is the fricatives. Opposites, eh?
@@baconbagels5475 Also P.I.E apparently had /s/ as its only fricative so you aren't far from familiar real-world protolangs
Part 1-5 wow that's interesting
Part 6 wtf is going on
It has a lot to do with how we physically produce sound and how we streamline the speech process by making words easier to pronounce or to clear up ambiguity so we can communicate more effectively. Basically, refining the phonology.
bruh the syntax episode was the worst, this makes complete sense compared to that hellhole
Me to
I feel like part 6 is just him explaining geology but instead of geological events and formations, it's just fake language tips and tricks episode 6
@@zachnerdydude6605 "fake language tips" as in fake tips for languages or tips for fake languages?
6:02 ah yes the voiced alveolar stop, aka "b"
Squishy Boi loo
lol did he write a backwards d?
@@alejrandom6592 Everyone else: b
Me, an intellectual: *backwards d*
@@jbdbibbaerman8071 Everyone else: b
Me, an intellectual: *upside down p*
H M M M
For me personally, a problem with developing a conlang from a protolanguage is that I become too attached to the protolanguage as a 'classical' form and just don't want to let it go. I think you can be naturalistic without this, too - analogy can produce relatively consistent rules. I suppose a protolang can be devised 'retroactively', if needed.
You are right. I started developing the modern language and then, in reverse, I am creating the proto-language. That's because I had clear in mind how the modern language should be and I didn't want it to be dependent and derived from my first drafts. Instead, I created the main conlang how I liked it, and from there I retroactively made the phonetical evolutions to obtain the proto-language.
Tolkien also did this to explain the relation between rohirric words and Hobbitish-Westron ones: for example Rohirric Holbytla=>Hobbit. (In real Rohirric and real Westron, not translated into Old English and English as done in the books, it would be Kûd-dûkan=>Kuduk).
I solve this by taking the protolang, make a small amount of changes to it and call it the "Higher" version of the lang that developed from said protolang. Also I started conlanging with the idea that I was already making the "current" language and was developing the protolang as I went along (well i'm still doing it lol). I'm not sure if this is a good way to go about it, but so far I've encountered no issues. However it is a better idea to just follow what more experienced people (Biblaridion in this case) raccomand to do.
@@OwlusirieIf you've seen Biblaridion's Conlang Case Study, this is essentially how he does it as well.
You do you. I usually steal most of the phonology from an existing language with a few changes, so I love to evolve it and see where it goes.
If you wanna be really weird, do it like ancient greek: 1. make EVERYTHING in your language subject to palatalization, all ns, all sibilants and all stops. Then you get a HUGE phoneme inventory which is too huge so you don’t need it anymore so you REDUCE EVERY SINGLE FUCKING SIGN of palatalization. Then you get some nice allophonies. If you have labiovelars you can also delete every sign of the labial element. Because both palatalization and labialization are fundamentally identical to sequences with j and w so it’s a nice symmetry and in fact it happened to Ancient Greek.
examples:
1. *treyes → delete the palatal and get trees which get’s contracted to trēs written as τρεῖς.
2. root *gʷem- meaning ‚go, come‘, still present in english come → build a present stem with the suffix *-i̯ó- → *gʷem-i̯ó- → now m assimilates to the y → *gʷen-i̯ó- → n becomes palatalized and geminated because of compensatory lengthening for the glide → *gʷeɲːó- → now the unstressed vowel becomes a → *gʷaɲːó- → now you get rid of the labialization and turn labiovelar gʷ befor a and o into b (and before u into plain g and before e and i into d) so you get *baɲːo- → now the palatal n influences the a and produces a tiny little i sound right infront of the palatal nasal just as you can hear it in languages like Spanish which have the palatal nasal → *bai̯ɲo- (since you now have a diphthong you need to shorten the geminated nasal to keep the rythm) and then you delete the palatal element → *baino → this is basically the ancient greek word for ‚to go‘ which is βαίνω (baínɔ̄). I don’t know how the accent shifted but this is secondary. The palatal doesn’t get deleted in this case because it’s part of a diphthong, that is the only exeption to the tendency.
3. root *klep meaning ‚steal‘ → buildt a io-present → *klep-i̯o → the i palatalizes the p, so you get something like *klepʲo- → now somehow apparently the proto Greeks weren’t able to pronounce that shit, so they reduced it. BUT it’s not like they would do it in a sane manner and just delete the palatal element, no they kept the double articulation, but they made it not palatal but pushed it further to the front. The the ʲ turned into a t → klepto-. And that’s the word for ‚to steal‘ → κλέπτομαι [kléptomai] with a more complex ending. It still baffles me how THAT was more easy to pronounce for them than something like kʷ in queer. This occurs even at the beginning of words.
Imma correct you but who cares anyway ,
The verb is "βγαίνω"β is pronounced like v, γ is pronounced like w in why and ω is pronounced like a cut o, not oh just o
@@kei8620 honey we're talking about ancient greek
@@johannesschutz780 true, I didn't search it up. My bad. I'm still shit in ancient Greek what can I say
how is γ supposed to be pronounced [w]?
/γ/ is here [γ]
accept in Cyprus maybe
and you forgot to mention the merged diphtongs.
My favorite phonoligical change is:
o -> w -> v
It happened in slavic languages with the borrowed word "Leo" which now is "Lev" in most of them.
It's really nice if you want to make consonant clusters in weird places and the only change I know which makes a vowel into a consonant.
My favorite change is the /d/ to /r/ change some Dravidian languages or how the palatalised stopes changed in Sanskrit /kʲ/ /gʲ/ /gʲʱ/ to /ɕ/ /dʑ/ /ɦ/
@@Ida-xe8pg /d/ to /r/ sounds really neat.
@@viorp5267 That change happened in my native Language (similar to the english [ t̺ ] / [ d̺ ] not [ d̻ ] or [ d̪ ]) but it was somehow still maintained in prenasalized consonants [ⁿd] and in germinated stops [t:] (my nativlang has [ t̪ ~ t̻ ], [ t̺ ] and [ ʈ ] btw)
A Serbo-Croatian speaker here, true. It's here. That's /läʋ/.
You first diphtongize it, then you degrade the w to a v.... I like it even if I don't conlang
you really deserve more subs! Your content is just great, and as a conlanging beginner is really helps me out!
Thanks! I'm glad it's helpful for you.
Can we make phonology evolution according to us
You don't have to follow his rules exactly, he's just providing examples of actual sound changes that could occur while a language is evolving.@@Anshu-yq4dn
Agreed, but would it really kill him just to slow down and maybe explain some of the terminology he’s using? Like, bro, you’re not competing in a race, it’s ok!
I think he explained the concepts that he was talking about pretty well. Although I do agree with you in saying that the pacing was a bit quick.@@HowDoUsleeep
11:45 - coda /n/ in japanese is actually a placeless archiphoneme /N/. all of the nasal stops in 三 /saN/ [sä̃ɴ] and 三番 /saNbaN/ [sä̃mbä̃ɴ] are perceived as the same sound. this is still a case of nasal assimilation, but not phonemically; it's just allophonic variation. also, when romanized it's still normally written as as the distinction isn't made. (source: I'm a native speaker)
@@Ida-xe8pg It's not an official symbol, rarely anyone uses it
So you're saying that 'third' in Japanese is pronounced like the r-rhotic inverse stressed 'sunburn'
@@amitkothekar8406 i'd say japanese is divided in moras, so /N/ (ん) is its own thing
Could I make those coda /n/ syllables have a nasal vowel instead and put an epenthetic nasal consonant where dropping like this would confuse a listener?
With that nasal change which of these is most perceivable or tasteful as saNbaN
A) sambã
B) sãmbã
C) sãban
D) sãbã
Reasoning: Louisiana french has the alveolar rhotic, and some other archaic things and geographic influences that make me wanna make it part of a conlang pidgin that uses phonation and tone liberally. Japanese and Yoruba would be joining it in the mixing bowl.
Damn, your English is good!
0:12 Icelandic has a language preservation board to make sure it doesn't change. Weird to speak, but fun
That and to create new words for new technologies and concepts without relying on loan words. I think that is quite cool and keeps a language more unique.
They're actually killing it that way
@@eumemo4814how so?
Dear language master,
I was wondering if you could make a language-learning series... big request... Basically, I mean a series in which you explain why a language (you speak) has become the way it is now "pretending" as if you are inventing it. You know what I mean? It would be amazingly helpful!! Thank you so much for all your time and effort
You can try googling "history of x language" and shifting through the results until you find somethimg like that (Its unlikely that they'd pretend it's a conlang tho)
Most languages are severely undocumented, so sadly this would be really hard. For the languages that you CAN do this with, it's a really great idea.
@@maapauu4282 my native language that is Arabic is heavily documented due to many stuff , yet if someone asks me to explain anything about it I'll be starting at them like an eye-less worm
@@thereallemon429True, but at least it's better than nothing
6:50 Yes, this word does look pretty painful to pronounce.
Great content, you're really great at explaining things. I hope to see more of your content in the future.
Yes, but it could be worse, nasal consonant clusters...
tbh Gregorian overall is a painful language
@@rougearcana2444 You mean Georgian?
@@markmayonnaise1163 oops yeah sorry
Gvprtskvni
I will literally watch this video a million times while I’m working on conlangs. I have a proto language and am working on phonological and grammatical evolution. And wow. Complicated, hard to do, and incredibly fun.
Love your videos pretty much all the time.
There are 4 ways to assimilate a cluster, depending on whether you want to change the first or second consonant, and whether to change its placement or manner of articulation.
For example, 'amda' could become
- anda - Placement of 1st consonant
- amba - Placement of 2nd consonant
- abda - Manner of 1st consonant
- amna - Manner of 2nd consonant
English tends to change the placement of the 1st consonant, while Korean changes the manner. So 'hapnida' becomes 'hamnida'
me and my friend always loved creating our own script/alphabet as well as learning other scripts we find online. i decided maybe it was time we upgraded to our own language as well. i'm very confused but slowly trying to learn. i even got a notebook for me to take notes and also write down my language making process so one day i can look back and see how it came to be.
I decided to follow this series along but opted to make a language that was slightly more complex, with a CCVC structure. I have a bit more experience with conlanging since this is my second attempt so I thought it would be good. I realized quickly that I needed to come up with some rules regarding not just the clusters allowed within my onset and/or coda, but also intersyllabic clusters. And I'm happy to say that a good number of the rules I came up with are reminiscent of various points made in this video. So, I think I can happily say that I've managed to treat my feasible clusters in a naturalistic manner.
Yeah... I went right into a German inspired conlang with a CCVCCC structure. This sounds like a bad idea but I didn't encounter problems so far.
18:19 even this example looks very cool! I’m definitely gonna try to use it again
My language's phonology is very nice and straightforward.
Now I want to evolve it into something horrific.
Add the french "r" and German "ch" and Arabic "ض" & "ع" , and then jump from the tenth floor because you won't deserve to live anymore
this satisfying feeling when you already know everything basic and speed through the first five videos with double speed and then you slow down here and the voice finally sounds normal
Ehhh, gotta correct you on this one. Natural sound change can actually be restricted by morphology. For example, early middle English lost word final nasals in nouns, but not in verbs (yes, that is cutting it rather short, but that's essentially what happened)
Edit:
Also, you can technically create new sounds just via positional voicing, without deleting anything. It happens in natural languages, although rarely, I believe. For example, here is Mysterious Language X. Mysterious language X once had a /v~w/ sound of a sonorant nature. Some time in 14th century, this sound would have become [v] in all positions, but later devoiced in some. For a while, /f/ wasn't a phoneme, but then native speakers began coining new, mostly onomatopoetic words (from which nouns and verbs would later be derived) that featured [f] outside of devoicinɡ environments. Essentially, it became a phoneme without going through phonologisation.
Now excuse me while I go back to romanising my 45 phonemic vowels (kill me)
Duncan Thaw 45 is extreme
@@Alice-gr1kb That was my point.
Kids, don't do umlaut. And don't do nasalisation with umlaut. And especially don't do that with several vowel lengths.
Duncan Thaw indeed. Then there’s me where I’ve had at most 6 vowels
@@duncanthaw6858 What are your vowels and their romanizations?
Came for the "sound changes don't always apply in everything" comment.
Stayed for- DEAR LORD! 45 phonemic vowels? What are you even doing with your life?
As a student of historical linguistics I relate to this on a spiritual level #lautgesetze
My conlang is already 9 years old. A lot of sound changes have happened but they came naturally over time with me speaking the language. I don't even want these changes to happen because it forces me to adjust my dictionary all the time. ^^
Compensatory Lengthening... heh.
Yeah, I definitely need that one
@@PtakubJ simpo
"and *speaking* of compensatory lengthening..."
@@caenieve my legs are too short
@Great-Wall-Of-Nowhere
I hope your joking, otherwise, you SWEET SWEET summer child
4:30 I wouldn't say that American English uses a [d] sound in "writer" or any other instance of "t" between two vowels. It's more of a flap [r]
[ɾ]*
You either mean [ɾ] ([] is used for accurate transcription) or /r/ (// is used for approximate transcription)
He used approximate
I’m weird in that I pronounce mountain with a t
@@user-jr7ww2gf1h I do that too : /
@@user-jr7ww2gf1h the isn't between two vowels
0:45 All environments
There are some exceptions to this principle. "[a] before nasal becomes [e], but *only in nouns*" is unnatural, but there are some ways that morphology and grammar can affect sound changes.
The boundary between morphemes in a compound word is often significant.
Many English dialects preserve the /h/ in the middle of "threshold." Japanese voices obstruents in compound words - "shime" (tie up) after "ike" (be kept alive, such as fish, fire, flowers) equals "ikejime" (euthanizing fish).
Grammatical auxiliaries and redundancy are more likely to be simplified and might be treated differently in sound changes.
Inland American English may split the "trap" vowel into two phonemes, so that "tin can" is no longer a homophone with "can do." That's in addition to the typical rule that the vowel in "can" may be elided.
Classical Latin poetry usually dropped word-final short consonants before a word-initial consonant - that vowel was usually a case marker, but it's just redundancy and less important than poetic meter. This was in all likelihood a feature of conversational language as well.
Some Japanese dialects reduce the "-wa" clitics (contrasting topic, statement that insists on the speaker's perspective) to "ya" after "i" or "e." This can be further reduced to palatalizing the previous consonant. "sore wa" (in that case) to "sorya" or "soryā" and "nai wa!" (not at all / you gotta be shitting me) to "nai ya!"
This shift isn't applied to "wa" used to mark performative femininity - that register is precisely enunciated.
Further irregularities in phonotactics can easily be introduced if words are borrowed at different points in the history of a language. English "Sri Lanka" ignores a very early change in I-E languages from /sr/ to /str/. (Why /str/ is such a common cluster in European words.)
(Sinhalese is also an I-E language, but IIUC the Indo-Aryan languages lost the /t/ from clusters like that.)
Japanese "guguru," a very young verb meaning "to Google" breaks two rules: beginning a morpheme with a voiced obstruent and having voiced obstruents in two consecutive syllables. Those rules only apply to vocabulary from Old Japanese, but verbs almost always come from Old Japanese. (Later borrowings use the verb "su(ru)" as an auxiliary to carry inflections.)
So forms like "gugutta" (+PAST) sound cheekily modern, which is the point.
13:53 this actually depends on when you’re looking at Latin. In the early days of it, before ‘g’ got its tail, ‘c’ was used for both [k] and [g], as ‘g’ is just a ‘c’ that got its tail to mark the difference.
I've been so lost trying to understand your conlang case study videos but after watching this series, it's starting to make more sense
I am gοing to nitpick a bit on the Greek word in 14:02.
In (Standard) Greek, the sound /k/ has the tendency to assimilate to its allophone /c/ rather than undergo tsitakismos (the process in Greek with which a sound assimilates to /ts/). Yes, there are many words that have assimilated /k/, /t/, /s/ etc to /ts/ but this is not a standard in Standard modern Greek, but rather dialects, most notably Cretan Greek.
So the word κήπος in modern greek would be pronounced /'cipos/ while in Cretan Greek, that's where you'd say /'tsipos/
What about the changes in Cypriot Greek?
Is there any advice you can give to people who want to make a conlang based off of a real world language, e.g. a fictional descendant of Latin? How would conlangers introduce sound shifts and grammar changes in a way that doesn't undergo the exact same changes that other descendants did (unless said changes are universally found in such descendants, I suppose), while also ensuring they are feasible and naturalistic?
I have no idea how you would do that, but that sounds like a really cool idea! I suppose go about it kind of similar to how you make any conlang- take the location and culture into consideration, and then kind of mess about with it until you're happy? Like, try certain things, and if you accidentally end up with Spanish then you know to change some things. Maybe try mixing up the order of changes? Cause he said that can lead to drastically different results.
It’s been done. I suggest you look up “Brithenig,” which is a fictional Romance language that is a hypothetical descender of ancient Celtic languages and Latin. Might give you some inspiration.
I've seen Brithenig before and it has been an inspiration for my conlang concept-wise. My actual conlang is slavic-based, and is meant to create what could've existed in real-world Hungary if the Magyars had not migrated there
@@Luey_Luey Venedic is slavic based romance language
I'd say, look at all the shifts that have happened between the ancient language and it's descendants, then choose changes that would go on their own, different direction (maybe instead k>t͜ʃ , g>d͜ʒ/ _i , _e like in Italian, maybe drop final vowels, then k>ʔ , g>k / #_ ) (if you don't understand I can better describe)
I have been intuitively using most of the things presented here (especially various things that happen to H) in my most developed conlang, Orinov, from a very young age (my conlanging journey began in primary school). It is interesting to see that they are natural and have specific names etc.
I feel like you may have missed something in the consonant cluster simplification / vowel deletion section. It's entirely possible that the consonants which end up next to each other after the vowel deletion (sapki, liptu, apto) might just end up in separate syllables. This would be [sap ki] [ilip tu] [ak to], instead of [sapk i] [ilipt u] and [akt o]. The second example I gave has consonant clusters but the first one manages not to because the consonants fell into separate syllables after the vowel deletion.
An example of this in natural language is a sound change caused by vowel deletion in Vulgar Latin that led to Spanish. [a pe ri re] ('to open' in Latin) became [ab rir] in Spanish (meaning the same thing). [br] as a cluster is not present here. If it had become a stop-liquid cluster, it would have likely been further simplified in a way similar to how Spanish speakers often pronounce extraño [eks tra ɲo] as [es tra ɲo]. Since it never became a cluster, the loss of consonant for simplification never occured.
Not to say that the changes you described and ended up applying to the language aren't realistic. I just wanted to add another potential one to the list because it's very common. Thanks for making these videos! They are a valuable resource in bringing people up to speed with how to make naturalistic languages.
Notice how the whole point of the deletion was that CODA plosives are difficult to enunciate?
On the ipa consonant chart it says "b" for the voiced alveolar stop at times
Also wouldn't /k/ palatalize to /c/ and /t/ to /tʃ/
Ah, so it does. Well, not much I can do about it now, unfortunately.
That's certainly a possibility for how palatalization could happen, but it's by no means the only possibility.
@@Biblaridion fair point
note: English 'cheese' vs German 'Käse,' both from Proto-Germanic '*kāsijaz'
@@BrazenDirigibles Is it cognate with spanish queso?
@@nicolasglemot6760 Yes. But it's not a native Germanic word as you can see here: en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cheese
14:06 Irish has a palatalized r (though nowadays people pronounce the palatalized r as an approximant, and the velarised r as a tap.)
and also if you really want to push it, some dialects of Irish contrast dental velarised, alveolar and palatalised l and r
11:08 in russian "md" cluster is quite common
вангую што он будет превращацца в "nd" са временем)) типа "мда... -- нда...", или "д" будет выпадать типа "мда... -- мме..."
so is it likely to dissapear in the future?
Yeah, Russian is an uncommon instance where nasal assimilation hasn't occurred at all (yet)
Что интересно нда уже иногда говорят
In Lithuanian mt is very common like in šimtas ,imti ,remti... but md still exists
4:47 Shouldn't it be "Vowel loss between *voiceless* obstruents"?
(I also would add "unstressed" but that's just me)
Indeed it should. And yeah, I probably should have specified.
It's worth noting that changes like these happening in different orders across different regions - or indeed different changes happening entirely in different regions - tend to be how dialects emerge.
This was helpful, thank you.
The first consonant turning into a fricative in clusters of two stops is actually far from rare.
12:27 I'd just like to point out that /ŋ/ IS phonemic in English. If you take the word /sɪŋ/, and contrast it with the word /sɪn/, /n/ and /ŋ/ occur in the exact same phonetic environment, and therefore are in contrastive distribution.
I meant it's not phonemic in the test language.
@@Biblaridion Ah, my mistake, I thought you were still talking about English
lol I was thinking the same exact thing, I sat there for like 10 minutes just saying "sin" and "sing" to myself
What am I doing here, I don't even understand half of the terminology
It's very obvious that you can not.
Yeah they just said so
Rawov Un Lupin neither do I though I would like to learn it then rewatch the video.
@@ItsTheMagicMelon might wanna just watch the previous parts?
@@IntergalacticPotato I actually went back a few days ago, and now I’m starting to make a language
2:50 I used "h" as a marker to prevent vowel clustering since my script is an abugida. So vowels can't just go alone. Although i no longer include the h when writing with the latin romanization, I still have that "letter" that has no sound; it's simply used as a host for vowels.
P.S. this allowed me to incorporate diphthongs
Question: if sound changes are suppose to be universal, how is it that /h/ is lost in "hour" but not other words?
Also: what are some ways to produce [j] from phonemes other than [i]?
"Hour" came to English by way of French, wherein all instances of /h/ had been lost, so the /h/ was already gone when it was borrowed.
[j] can evolve from [l] or [ʒ], or it can appear in vowel breaking (e.g. [i] -> [ye]). Those are just some off the top of my head, but you'll find plenty more if you have a look through the index diachronica.
@@Biblaridion Nope, sorry, that's plain wrong. The word "hour" entered English long before French lost /h/, and was in fact pronounced /hɔʊɹ/ in Shakespeare's day, whence also the pun "from hour to hour we ripe and ripe" in Act 2, Scene 7 of "As You Like It".
No, "hour" is in fact a good example of why the Neogrammarian hypothesis (i.e. the notion that sound changes are universal) is incorrect, because there are far too many exceptions of the alternative (called "lexical diffusion").
Another example in English is the totally inconsistent split of "oo" in words like "book" /bʊk/ (from Middle English booke /boːkə/) vs "boot" /buːt/ (from Middle English boote /boːtə/). This is further demonstrated by the fact that some dialects have more /ʊ/s than others; some English dialects have roof /rʊf/ and goose /gʊs/.
For more on this, see Labov's "Principles of Linguistic Change", Volume 1!
This is the most interesting episode so far :> And it confirms many of my own theories of how words and languages could have evolved :)
I feel like there's gonna be a point where:
• The English sentence ,,I wouldn't" will get a even shorter counterpar, that'll be used more often: ,,I'dn't"
EDIT: Fixed misspellings
I actually use I'dn't XD but I'm the weird guy from Canada
It'd become I'dnt, just based on how we tend to handle contractions.
I'm looking forward to the Scottish I'nae and the English I'n and I'nt.
Im from texas and we actual use i'dn't
While I suspect that while "I'd've" "you'd've" and "wouldn't've" probably aren't accepted by English teachers (or Firefox's spell check), it's common enough that I have characters say it, and I don't feel that I have to explain what it means.
"If you'd've told me that I'd've known and I wouldn't've told her she could come with us."
Language teachers are always the last to accept language changes. There are even some totally valid dialect-specific words they still frown on, like "y'all" and the habitual "be" (as in "he be working" meaning "he is a worker" ).
This video is great and super inspiring, always worth a rewatch. The only thing it might serve to clarify a little more is when exactly we're talking about sound changes at a single point in time to comply with a language's phonotactics (as in the dothraki and japanese assimilation examples), and when a sound change actually occured during the evolution of a language, explicitly defining two points in time at which the pronounciation of the two words/phrases was different).
15:12 why are the palatal plosives and post alveolar fricatives in the same row? Aren't palatal fricatives different from post alveolar fricatives?
Instead of going through all this mess, I’m gonna leave all the stuff to my grandkids and tell them to pass this on to their kids and tell them to pass it on to their kids and so on. And thus, I made my own family language
Really natural!
3 months ago i had no idea about linguistics and never even heard about this hobby. A fortnight ago i decided to develop my own conlang following this guy advice:
Akos "water" + keva "pretty"
1. Coda "s" becomes "sh" before before weak stops
2. "e" dissapears between "k" and "v" or "z"
Now I can proudly say that in my conlang the word "Akoshkva" means Booze
I like your funny words, magic man.
Thank you for taking the time to include so many examples! It makes the concepts much easier to grasp
1:00 Not necessarily: in some dialects of English, vowel-breaking occurs when long vowels occur in closed syllables unless the syllable coda is a morphological suffix (e.g. "freeze" may be pronounced as /friːəz/ but "frees" is simply /friːz/).
Does anyone know how to obtain:
the uvular stop
pharyngeals
some of the really weird vowels like œ
lateral affricates and fricatives
voiceless nasals
etc.
because I want to develop them in my conlangs
Emphatic consonants, clusters of [h] and nasals or laterals, and diphthongs. For example, [eu] -> [øu] -> [ø>
The uvular stop has been documented to appear from /k/ next to back vowels
[ˈi.hu.ku]>[ˈi.hu.qu]
Πpronounced like /oi/
@@butterismcigarette6940 They refer to /œ/,the rounded version of ɛ
Arabic /q/ came from Proto-Semitic */k'/, so if you have ejectives you can do that. The other ejective consonants from Proto-Semitic changed to "emphatic" (uvularized/pharyngealized) consonants in Arabic.
Lateral affricates and fricatives can come from clusters of voiceless stop + /l/ or /l/ + voiceless fricative.
Voiceless nasals come from a bunch of different things, check out Old Norse -> Icelandic, and Welsh consonant mutations
Hello. If I were making a polysynthetic conlang, (because I am) similar to something like Greenlandic, should I apply these sound changes to the individual morphemes and still link them together in the same way, or should I apply these sound changes to the fully constructed words? Thanks in advance to anyone who responds.
To the fully constructed words
Good video, it is really REALLY helpful especially because I’ve never seen any other sources on this topic. My only concern is that you did basically nothing to the vowels, so I’m a little confused on how to change them. The only methods I know are umlauting then dropping the vowel and simplifying diphthongs into the monophones. I know many languages have changed their vowels a lot, like English, so it’s not unfeasible, I just don’t have a very good idea on how to add or change vowels in a phonology.
I keep on commenting under each of these videos, since I watch the whole playlist :)
Say, I create an imaginary world, in which for some reasons I need two or more imaginary peoples to have different but very close imaginary languages.
The language of those peoples can "go through" different series of changes.
Even leaving the grammar untouched, we can have two or more cognate languages! 👍
And the next vid about grammar shows how many more possibilities we have for creation of an imaginary world with cognate languages in it. Some of those imaginary peoples can speak tongues being dialects to each other, some other peoples can have languages that have notable differences so that they can be called separate cognate languages.
Also there’s vast space to play with the level of mutual intelligibility among those languages. Some pair of languages can have very close lexicon and phonetic system (words of each changed a bit differently but just a bit), at the same time one of them can have a more complex grammar and the other one - more simple one. They are mutually intelligible, but clearly different. Another thing is when cognate languages have really close grammar systems, but very different phonetical shape of words (maybe written shapes differ as well). Thus we have cognate, but mutually unintelligible languages.
And so on… 😃
may be a bit late but imma say it
in 10:20 the inventory of spanish doesn’t have /v/ or /ɣ/ (they are allophones), while (sometimes) having /θ/ and /ʎ/ (tho /θ/ only happens in Spain and /ʎ/ is quite rare), plus /ɲ/
I have 2 questions that I’ve been struggling to figure out after watching this video 4+ times.
1. How do you keep track of phonotactic rules that are made when you make a sound change?
2. Considering I have a lexicon of 20-30 Proto words, when I’ve evolved the phonotactics to my desired place can I create whatever words meet those criteria, or must I make them up in the Proto language and ring them through my history?
Thanks!
For question 2, any new words you make should be washed through your history unless they are actually new in the language, like for example being borrowed or created for a new concept (e.g new inventions, etc.). When words are borrowed they are usually morphed to "fit" into the language so should meet your criteria (or partially meet it if the original word was different enough that the changes required to make it "fit" are unfeasible).
You did a really great job! This is probably my favourite video on youtube! :)
Evolution of the numbers one to twelve in English so you can get the feel of evolution:
*ONE*
óynos - Proto-Indo_European
ainaz - Proto-Germanic
ān - Old English
an - Middle English
one - Modern English
*TWO*
dwóh - Proto-Indo_European
twai - Proto-Germanic
twā - Old English
two - Middle and Modern English
*THREE*
tréyes - Proto_Indo-European
thrīz - Proto-Germanic
thrī - Old English
thri - Middle English
three - Modern English
*FOUR*
kwetwōr - Proto_Indo-European
petwōr - Early Proto-Germanic
fedwōr - Late Proto-Germanic
fēower - Old English
fower - Middle English
four - Modern English
*FIVE*
pénkwe - Proto-Indo_European
pémpe - Early Proto-Germanic
fimf - Late Proto-Germanic
fīf - Old English
five - Middle and Modern English
*SIX*
swékws - Proto-Indo_European
swexs - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
sexs - Late Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
siex - Old English (pronounced with IPA x)
six - Middle and Modern English (not pronounced with IPA x in either)
*SEVEN*
septm - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between t and m)
sebunt - Early Proto-Germanic
sebun - Late Proto-Germanic
seofon - Old English
seven - Middle and Modern English
*EIGHT*
okwtōw - Proto-Indo_European
axtōu - Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
eaxta - Old English (pronounced with IPA x)
eighte - Middle English
eight - Modern English
*NINE*
hnéwn - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between w and n)
newunt - Early Proto-Germanic
newun - Late Proto-Germanic
nigon - Old English (pronounced with IPA ɣ)
nyne - Middle English
nine - Modern English
*TEN*
dékwm(t) - Proto-Indo_European (pronounced with schwa between w and m; optional t)
texunt - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
texun - Late Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
tīen - Old English
ten - Middle and Modern English
*ELEVEN*
ainalif - Proto-Germanic (lit. compound of 'one left' referring to the fact that 10+1=11)
endleofan - Old English (not sure how it went from ainalif to endleofan that quickly, but OK)
eleven - Middle and Modern English
*TWELVE*
twalif - Proto-Germanic (lit. compound of 'two left' referring to the fact that 10+2=12)
twelf - Old English
twelve - Middle and Modern English
You can guess where 13-99 came from, so how about 100:
*HUNDRED*
kwmtóm - Proto_Indo-European (pronounced with schwa between w and m)
xuntom - Early Proto-Germanic (pronounced with IPA x)
xuntaratha - Late Proto-Germanic ("ratha" means count. the root word is "xunta". Also pronounced with IPA x and the 'th' is pronounced as in 'that')
xundred - Old English (pronounced with IPA x)
hundred - Middle and Modern English
This is basically "how does language work' and it's very informative
0:59 I'd like to add a little clarification here. Even when what you said is essentially true, there's still a "phonetic change" that can be limited by grammar: analogy. It's not exactly a phonetic change, right, but sometimes its effects can be really similar to one.
I'll give an example using my own native language: in Spanish, the first person singular perfective past form for the verb 'andar' is 'anduve' (I walked). However, the real evolution of this word since the original Latin term would be 'andove', as you can find in some medieval texts. This tense used U in many other verbs, like 'supe' (I knew) or 'pude' (I could), so people found weird that O in 'andove' and tended to change it to U. This O > U change just affected to this specific verb tense, it doesn't occur in nouns or adjectives, so here the change is limited by the grammar context: just for being the first singular person of the perfective past tense.
I think the power of analogy is usually underestimated in conlangs, probably due to its extremely arbitrary nature. If well managed, it can give a lot of flavor to any conlang.
I had it so that other vowels nasalise even though they shouldn't because of analogy.
In the end this was more interesting for learning what has happened in my own mother tongue (how things that don't seem to make sense came to be) than for learning to create an own language.
4:53 That could be how a proto-language develops into two very different modern languages.
Exactly
I've found that repeating a sound/series of sounds to yourself several times in quick succession is a good way to check if your sound changes work
It's probably not a 1-1 thing but I HAVE found that most real-life sound changes can be simulated in this way (though on this note - I can get akto->a'to this way, but iliptu turns into iliftu rather than ili'tu)
It also has the benefit of making you seem very strange to anyone watching
Biblaridion Lang, what do you feel about nasal consonant clusters...
1-3. /he.'lo:.ti/ Helōti
4-5. /he.'lo:.di/ Helōdi
6-9. /e:.'lo:.di/ Ēlōdi
10. /e:.'lo:d/ Ēlōd
Not much of a difference, but it's there. The word means 'the big thing'.
At 08:48 he adds voiced stops and accidentally wrote /b/ instead of /d/ for the voiced alveolar stop.
Actually, in English I would argue that [ŋ] is phonemic as it does overlap with [n] in some areas:
singing → [siŋiŋ] vs. sining → [siniŋ]
I meant it's not phonemic in the sample language.
DeluxeTux5249 signing
DeluxeTux5249 yeah but it’s
/n/ in the spot where it was velar
@@Biblaridion Oh, I see. (Thank you for responding btw!)
@@Alice-gr1kb 《Sining》, or more correctly spelled: 《sinning》, deriving from the verb to sin. (although I did misspell it, so the fault is mine)
If you elide (delete) unstressed syllables, that can create exceptions to your syllable stress rules. So this could create important exceptions to the original rule, "3rd-from-final (antepenultimate) syllable is stressed, unless the 2nd-to-last (penultimate) syllable has a long vowel, which then is stressed" rule. You could conceivably end up with 2nd and 3rd from last stressed syllables, with or without vowel length, or perhaps new stress patterns, and if final vowels are lost later, you could then end up with 3rd, 2nd, and last syllables getting stress. You'd still have a set of rules for determining it, but they'd be more complex, and you might have to mark it in the writing system, or else rely on memorizing the rules (which, for others to pick up a conlang, isn't such a good idea.)
Wow. This is getting advanced. I did figure out an order of developing language in an earlier attempt. Maybe I could incorperate this in my new attempt. I start with an alphabet with letters and sounds. This is the building blocks. Second I build up the grammar. It is the skeleten. Finally I add in vocabulary. It fleshes things out. This video list does follow this order to some extent. This video of changing language is a surprizing new thing. This is getting advanced. Languages do change in real life. I think languages could even branch out into different dialects as it evolves. The dialects could even become separate languages. English went through a lot of changes. I am a modern English speaker. Yet I find Shakespere very difficult to understand. It is so different that I need a translation. There are so many thees and thous, whatever those mean. Shakepere was an English speaker too, but he lived in a much older time. Britian did colonize a big chunk of the world. Then the English language spread and diversified. There is a significant difference between the English in the isle of Britain and the English in the United States. The United States used to be a colony of Britain. This country celebrates the independence. The language reflect this, as it starts to get different. The accent and sounds are different. It is like the sound differences covered in the video. The biggest sound change is that of an a. That makes a difference in certain words like bath and class. I am from the United States. I have my American way of pronouncing an a sound. I am used to that being a regular A sound. The British way is different. It is more of an AH sound. There are a few words that are different for Americans and British. However those are few and far between. I can actually understand a British speaker. I think it is because I watched a ton of Harry Potter and Beatles. I would have watched British other shows too. The practice gets to the point where understanding is so easy that it is just as easy as understanding another American speaker. My mom is different. She can have difficulty understanding the British. She has complained about it when the tv puts on a show from the BBC. Maybe listening to and understanding a different dialect is like learning a different language. It is on a smaller scale. The Beatles are in an interesting gray area. They are British and they have a distinctivly British dialect. However as British dialects go, they are more similar to an American dialect. The accent sounds more mild to me. The Beatles have a mild accent when they speak. When they sing, the accent disappears alltogether. They sound like american singers such as Elvis. That is funny how the music affects accent. The Beatles do come from a port city in England called Liverpool. I speculate that Liverpool has more contact with Americans because it is a port city. So the accent becomes more similar to aid communication between British and Americans. I recently realized that I can even enjoy British UA-camrs. Biblaridion is from the United Kingdom. I looked it up. I found that the country of origion is in the UA-cam channel. I find this surprizing. I understand Biblaridion speaking in the videos very well. It is so well that I didn't even notice any British accent. Maybe in the future the different kinds of English dialects could turn into different languages. Maybe the dialect I speak will turn into a new American language. This is probably how English parted pays with other languages in the past. There are Germanic languages. So English was distinguished from German, Dutch, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Icelandic. I did watch brief videos on UA-cam that have samples of the other languages spoken. That stuff is completely incomprehensable to me. It is way more difficult than Shakespere. THe only way I would understand is a translation. IMO Norwegion sounds pretty.
C. D. Dailey yeah these changes are more for a natural feel to a language
Try listening to Geordie. It's fun. 😁
My conlang underwent some truly natural changes; it changed on its own as the phonology and orthography, which predate the grammar and vocab by several years, changed in my mind. It started out almost identical to English, as I was pretty young when I made the phonology/grammar (the writing system still resembles English, and I never changed it. Never will.), but over time changed somewhat.
10:12 there was an /h/ in the coda, allophony made it /x/ (spelled gh), then /x/ commited oof
also consanants dont have to be minimal pairs if theyre very dissimilar
for example in english /h/ and /ŋ/ are in complementary distribution, but theyre too dissimilar to be thought of as one sound
/x/ sometimes turned into /f/
Playih Ngahman
When you say 'no exceptions' (with the 'a' before nasals example), would it be unnaturalistic for some non-native words not to adhere to these rules? Like in many Turkic languages native words do not start with [l], but there are exceptions in loanwords like the Dungan-derived 'Lagman'.
If the word is not native to the language, it can be almost anything.
I have a question related to this topic. Do contractions occur independently of the process of phonologocal evolution? In german and a number of the romance languages prepositions combine with articles, and in the celtic languages prepositions fuse with pronouns. It's mostly ellision going on in these examples, but some changes to vowel sounds too. For instance, in Italian di + il becomes del. But I'm not sure if these sound changes are applying consistently across these languages, or just in these isolated cases.
Yes, this is something I probably should have made clearer; phonological reduction does not have to be the result of sound changes. Like in the "I am going to eat" --> "I'm'a eat" example used in the video, none of the steps involved in that were the result of sound changes, they were just due to speakers dropping sounds in rapid speech. Basically, affixes and frequently used grammatical particles (prepositions, articles, conjunctions, etc.), are very likely to get worn down and simplified independently of any sound changes.
What do you use to make your own dictionary for your conlangs? What do you do? I'm struggling 😂🤦♂️
I know this comment is super late but i’d use a spreadsheet (like Google sheets or Excel) so you can have rows/columns easily
same here, quite late
but I use Lexique Pro
it's free and very good
maybe not too newcommer friendly but it has every option a lexicon could ever need
If you pronounce /b/ is a special way
How would you pronounce/pol/
no
That one's really simple, what I want to know is how you pronounce /mlpol/
kekd
/pol/ becomes /tard/ after /re/
Why do those t's and d's have bridges in the phonological representations of central stops for Spanish at about 10:18?
Those are to specify that they're dental, not alveolar.
Thanks
13:57 In Greek, velars are _always palatalised_ before front vowels, but not turned into post-alveolars. The word for garden that you've shown there is pronounced /cipos/, not /t̠ʃipos/. However, the second pronounciation is standard in Cypriot and Cretan Greek - which however are not what linguists mean when they refer to Modern Greek. Additionally, when preceding a vowel cluster starting with /i/, all consonants are palatalised either directly (e.g. /n/ to /ɲ) or by interjecting a voiced or voiceless palatal stop (e.g. /ð/ to /ðʝ/) .
I also find it kind of funny that the way you said "ki" already sounds palatalised. In fact, I have the impression that English generally palatalises velars just like, say, Greek, but only for some front vowels. For instance, the word "keep" sounds closer to /ciːp/ rather than the established /kiːp/. I should also note that this palatalisation seems to be of a lesser degree than in Greek but I still can't help but hear it.
I am at the chapter of phonetics and phonology in my linguists book, so this is rlly helpful for me, Bib.
If I made a language who’s speakers conquered most of the map, could I just add a few additional different sound changes in certain places to make regional accents?
That would be pretty cool actually (Not a pro linguist, but it sounds like a good idea to me)
Yes
Is it reasonable for, instead of /h/ being lost, that it becomes more pronounced between stressed vowels? As in, /h/ goes to /x/ betweem vowels in stressed syllables? I really like /x/ and i feel like this is a natural way for it to evolve.
I belive so
14:58 [ch] doesn't make sense with what you said earlier in the video, did you mean [tʃ]?
Yes I did.
I am learning so much about English I never knew.
Why is the u in Kuhāni not lost at 18:26? As far as I can tell it should be. k and h are both obstruents. hā is the stressed syllable (not ku). What am I missing here because I feel like this is related to why everytime I try to evolve my sounds my words turn into unpronoucable garbage.
In this language, I chose for word-initial and word-final stops to be illegal, therefore a word cannot begin in a /kh/ cluster, so the /u/ is maintained. It definitely didn't have to happen that way, but I just chose for it to here (and in retrospect, I should have explained that much more clearly).
@@Biblaridion Thank you! I'm going to try using that because I quickly found that when I tried this my words became unpronouncable, most often at the beginning.
Does you first rule make vowel disappear between fricatives like f and s?
And would happen of a word like apakapāka? Would it become apkpāka?
@Rasho the word apakapāka (at least when I pronounce it) has a secondary stress on the “pa” syllabe /aˌpakaˈpaːka/ so it is more likely that it would evolve into /aˌpakˈpaːka/.
I know it's nit-picky but the velar nasal isn't an allophone of the alveolar nasal. Bear in mind that my native dialect is NZ English, but I'm familiar with others. There's minimal pairs like Sun vs Sung and Bang vs Banged, and only a few dialects of English actually retain the /g/ after /ŋ/ in . Your example with 'sing' /sɪŋ/ doesn't have the /g/ either. Don't get me wrong, I love this series and think it's a great tool for conlangers, but this just irked me.
At 12:28 I meant that [ŋ] isn't phonemic in the sample language, it's totally a phoneme in English.
@@Biblaridion Ah right, I totally missed that. Also completely ignore the terrible pairs I showed.
Gonna have to watch this a few times
ayo why is the voiced version of /t/ listed as /b/ in 8:49
what about Afrikaans's double negative system where you place two negatives in a sentence instead of one, negatives being words like "no" or "not". in English you would say " I don't like cucumbers" in Afrikaans you would say " Ek hou nie van komkommers nie." nie being the negative.
Is there any way to automate this process, or will have to go through 200+ words and manually change them, missing some or messing up changes.
So roughly speaking, what's the time to changes exchange rate?
Decades, centuries even
I assume around 1 sound change per century is good enough, unless you want English's 1.5/century
Can geminate voiceless stops turn into ejectives? So,
[p:] becomes [p']
[t:] becomes [t'] etc.
if they live on mountains
14:04 Russian doesn't have a Tsʲ sound, only Ts. Tsi doesn't become Tsʲi, but Tsɨ like цирк /tsirk/ [Tsɨɾk]. ʑ is also not a phoneme, but an allophone of ʐ in old-moscow dialect.
15:58 both become aahhh 😩💖💕💞💓💘💗💓
LOVED THESE SERIES!
I'm following along but only stops can act as coda in my language, and most of my stops are unvoiced, so this vid would change a lot if I followed it exactly
Question about stress: how does it effect compound words? Does the modifier receive the stress, or the root word. For example, in my language, forest is hamipari (ha.MI [tree] I pa.Ri [place]), which turned into amipar (a.mi.par) . This felt like something you didn't mentioned, so which word receives the stress?
I'm gonna have to revisit this and break it down now that I have a goal in mind. Sad that you chose an isolated culture to evolve a language for, because my purpose is going to look at loanwords and cultural cross pollination.
Short version:
My most immediate question is "what word might evolve from The Mothership" to refer to a "second moon" in a post-post apocalyptic setting. I suppose 1 question is what does the alien language sound like, and 2, consider the changes already in place for an Australian accent, since I'm pondering a future with some unique evolution amid the Great Barrier Reef generates additional setting-unique details.
How would you add more vowels over time? Would the phonetic environment phonemically add that as well? Hypothetically, let's say we have "ik". Instead of the K conforming to the I, could the I be pulled back to be a schwa? (kinda like the dutch/german suffix -ig) Or does vowel inventory generally not deviate from the original set?
Vowels can and do change, sometimes randomly, as vowels are all articulated in a small portion of the mouth they can drift around easily.