How to predict the future of a language

Links:

Translations:
10:05: (Proto-West Germanic) (Left) Thank Odin the Roman Empire is falling! (Right) There are three of them now!
10:22: (Proto-West Germanic) I can use this…
10:24: (Proto-West Germanic) (all lines) {word} will become {word with sound shift}
10:30: (Proto-West Germanic) Maybe also at the beginning? (and then the same stuff from above)

[MrPillowStudios]

It's weird how in about 4000 years English could be a long lost common ancestor to hundreds of complex and diverse languages. Makes you think that maybe PIE was just a small language that was apart of a much bigger family.

[Ice_Karma]

Actually, the use of "mother", "daughter", and "sister" to describe languages happens to arise from the word for "language" in German being a feminine noun.

[synkkamaan]

"This is why there is a P sound in "hamster."

There is WHAT?

[alsatusmdA]

Sound shifts also influence grammar. Two well known examples are Latin and Japanese. In Latin, the /o/ in the o-stem nominative and accusative singular became raised to /u/, which led to the u-stem declension assimilating to the more common o-stem class in Proto-Romance. On the other hand, Japanese had a native [p] shift to [φ → h] and then merge with [w] in the middle of a word but ultimately lost [w] outside of [wa] so that the original p-row verbs are now reflected as [wa e i u o].

[AntsAndNature]

I so badly want to understand this video but without knowing the phonetic alphabet I basically can’t.

[coordinateplanefun]

In Bengali, I've pronounced some words differently on accident. For example:
"Taratari" (meaning quick or fast) - To "Tatari" due to fast pronunciation.
"Jono" (meaning for) - To "Juno"
"Ha" (meaning yes (this word is also nasalized)) - To "Ho" (also nasalized)

[dr.seesaw]

I can see word final plosive devoicing being a fully systematic thing for English - especially in the UK where i live since i already notice it pretty often and it'd make sense considering German also already has this feature

[BramVanhooydonck]

I triple double dare you to make future Dutch video.

[bletwort]

This is about Indian languages which may not be relevant to European languages but I'd like to share what I know.

At some stage in the development of Indo-Aryan languages all consonant clusters of Sanskrit were assimilation into doubled consonants. Later the doubled consonant lost its gemination and the preceding vowel lengthened.

Interestingly if one of the consonants in the cluster is a fricative (i.e. sibilant) it made the other consonant in the cluster to become aspirated.

Examples

Sanskrit > Hindi

akshi > akkhi > ākh

hasta > hattha > hāth

mushti > mutthi

mastaka > mattha(g)a > māthā

kaksha > kakkha > kākh

ashta > attha > āth

If there was no fricative then the same process happened but without adding aspiration.

sapta > satta > sāt

sarpa > sāp

danta > dãt

mitra > mīt

Intervocal and perhaps postvocalic consonants were lost altogether.

sūkara > sūar

shata > sada > sau

Note that Hindi kept reborrowing words from Sanskrit as Sanskrit was the language of religion and science. Some of these words borrowed centuries ago are semi-learned. In these words while the consonants were retained the consonant cluster was broken.

varsha > baras

karma > karam (the inherited word is kām)

Modern Hindi also borrows words from Sanskrit but this time retains the structure.

[wehumansmayglow]

Not sure if someone else has already commented this, but for your example of using certain British words for convenience, I have a similar but opposite situation! I instead use "snobby" quite a bit, which I believe is a word more commonly used by Americans 😂

[OnliPhans_Kenobi]

I’m interested in the possible effects of virtual assistants (Alexa, Siri) and chat bots (chatGPT, copilot) on actually slowing down language shift given their largely fixed nature. Ex: you have to speak carefully for Alexa to understand you and vice-versa Alexa’s voice is largely fixed in speaking style.

[NonChildStories]

I suppose the most prominent sound changes we may find when we learn old and new languages are: ai>e, au>o, ke>che, ki>chi, dropping last short vowels. You may find nearly all of them in Latin, Arabic, Common Slavic and their descendants.

[dliessmgg]

5:40 this shift of which dialect is most prestigious has a good example in british english: until the 1960s, Received Pronounciation had the most prestige, and it was very much an upper class accent. for various reasons, it fell out of favour since then, and got replaced by Standard Southern British, a middle class accent. If you look at the royal family, Elizabeth and Charles were/are RP speakers, but William and Harry speak SSB.

[denisdooley]

While linguistics is mostly just a side interest for me, this topic has a practical application to my field. I have worked in hazardous waste for decades and was hired into nuclear waste cleanup. Some of these wastes have half-lives of thousands of years (e.g. Pu-240 t1/2=6, 560 year). The area I work sends drums wastes and grouted nuclear wastes to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad, NM. Some effort has been put into predictive future languages to warn future humans to keep away from these wastes.

[romanvs]

"Urban teenage girls are at the top of the hierarchy and the rural elderly men are at the bottom"

[eljestLiv]

I think ð will become an allophone of d in unstressed syllables in Swedish. I’ve noticed many young women (myself included) occasionally pronounce -ade (past tense suffix) as -að, for instance.

[Moses_Caesar_Augustus]

I'm Punjabi and I can speak Urdu. One change I've noticed is that I don't pronounce /ɦ/, even in formal speech. Where the [ɦ] used to be, there's now a low tone, so if I say /ɦã/ 'yes', I pronounce it has [ã̀] with a low tone. This, I think, is because of Punjabi. Punjabi is the first Indo-Aryan language to become tonal, and Punjabi is the majority language in Pakistan. So it would make sense that under Punjabi influence Urdu would become tonal as well. This is fascinating because Hindi would not become tonal because it is the majority language in India so it would not be (heavily) influenced by Punjabi. Maybe Urdu and Hindi would diverge into separate languages.

[Aesclingua]

This is a very good video. Some things that came to mind while watching: 13:14 I think an obvious example of a language which lacks [ŋ] as an allophone of /n/ before velar plosives is Russian. I speak Finnish near-natively, and the American "foot" vowel sounds very far from Finnish ö. I've recordeed myself pronouncing it (I speak American English natively), analyzed the formants, and I'd much rather transcribe it as [ɵ]. [ø] is simply too far front. Also, I think it odd that you find an affricate realization of English /t/ rare, as its usual pronunciation (for me, you, and many others) is already somewhat affricated. (I transcribe it [t͡s̆ʰ])

[jaimetakoff]

13:55 Progressive voicing assimilation is actually also found in Slavic languages, although less frequently. For example in certain sound combinations in Polish ("kwiat") and Czech ("tři"), and in eastern dialects of Czech.

[crazybfg]

I hate when people say "Gen Alpha is cooked" because they speak a "bad" version of english. It is not bad english that's how English is suppose to evolve.