Nasal assimilation? That's unpossible!

Part 1-5 wow that's interesting Part 6 wtf is going on

I need to watch this through two or three times to wrap my head around everything he's saying

6:02 ah yes the voiced alveolar stop, aka "b"

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.

0:12 Icelandic has a language preservation board to make sure it doesn't change. Weird to speak, but fun

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 really deserve more subs! Your content is just great, and as a conlanging beginner is really helps me out!

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)

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.

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

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.

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.

My language's phonology is very nice and straightforward. Now I want to evolve it into something horrific.

Compensatory Lengthening... heh.

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.

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 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.

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)

As a student of historical linguistics I relate to this on a spiritual level #lautgesetze

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.

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]

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

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/

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. ^^

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.

I like your funny words, magic man.

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 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.

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

OK, I know for a fact that a computer program could be used to automatically process Historical Sound Changes...

The first consonant turning into a fricative in clusters of two stops is actually far from rare.

18:19 even this example looks very cool! I’m definitely gonna try to use it again

Thank you for taking the time to include so many examples! It makes the concepts much easier to grasp

11:08 in russian "md" cluster is quite common

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

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).

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.

4:47 Shouldn't it be "Vowel loss between *voiceless* obstruents"? (I also would add "unstressed" but that's just me)

This was helpful, thank you.

You did a really great job! This is probably my favourite video on youtube! :)

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.

4:53 That could be how a proto-language develops into two very different modern languages.

What am I doing here, I don't even understand half of the terminology

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/

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?

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'.

So roughly speaking, what's the time to changes exchange rate?

LOVED THESE SERIES!

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

Actually, in English I would argue that [ŋ] is phonemic as it does overlap with [n] in some areas: singing → [siŋiŋ] vs. sining → [siniŋ]

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.

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.

This is the most interesting episode so far :> And it confirms many of my own theories of how words and languages could have evolved :)

Biblaridion Lang, what do you feel about nasal consonant clusters...

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… 😃

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]?

I am at the chapter of phonetics and phonology in my linguists book, so this is rlly helpful for me, Bib.

If you pronounce /b/ is a special way How would you pronounce/pol/

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

Gonna have to watch this a few times

15:12 why are the palatal plosives and post alveolar fricatives in the same row? Aren't palatal fricatives different from post alveolar fricatives?

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.

No one gonna talk about the phrase 'compensatory lengthening'?

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.

15:58 both become aahhh 😩💖💕💞💓💘💗💓

What do you use to make your own dictionary for your conlangs? What do you do? I'm struggling 😂🤦‍♂️

14:58 [ch] doesn't make sense with what you said earlier in the video, did you mean [tʃ]?

My brain hurts, but I think I got it. But before that I need to create some words.

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

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.)

I feel attacked at 1:45 I pronounce all as they are spelled except for every. (And I'm not British) 😂

I keep coming back to these videos. It would be nice for you to put together one big long one with all of the parts together! Maybe it can be a Patreon perk? I dunno.

1:42 thanks!

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/).

At 08:48 he adds voiced stops and accidentally wrote /b/ instead of /d/ for the voiced alveolar stop.

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.

This is basically "how does language work' and it's very informative

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

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 change #4, can you pick and choose which voiceless obstruents are voiced between vowels?

I was looking at the sound change dictionary thing in the description and I noticed there are several capital letters corresponding to the English alphabet and also a few others like #,..., Etc. I assume these refer to groups of sounds, like maybe L for liquids, but I'm not sure, and I think it would be useful to me because a lot of the sound changes listed use them. Can someone please help?

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

If it's a mouthful, it's also an earful. I'd recommend pausing more to allow the listener time to process the information.

If anyone knows of any alternate naturalistic changes could you please let me know? (eg, any other way vowels could interact, but I am fine with anything)

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/

another way of finding out realistic sound changes is compare difficulty of saying words with one sound to with a highly related sound (same or similar place and/or manner of articulation and/or voicing)

What you need is uvular and velar fricatives

It’s one of the interests parts!

I am learning so much about English I never knew.

My language is supposed to be in a time like the 1600s so I think it would be a little less developed, but simply speaking it myself, I'm starting to pronounce le (the) like la.

I noticed there is very little mentions on vowel changes or any possible avenues, could you expand on that?

Can we decide how phonetic changes occur as o - on. If yes how?

12:50 can it go the reverse way? For example /i/ becomes /ɯ/ after /k/

My recommendations would be to figure out, when working on the order, which sound change(s) would be the most likely to occur before the following one(s).

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 KZfaqrs. Biblaridion is from the United Kingdom. I looked it up. I found that the country of origion is in the KZfaq 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 KZfaq 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.

What about voicing fricatives or affricates?