I can't even imagine how much of a pain in the ass phonetic descriptions would've been before a standardized system like IPA

'Meet-Meat Merger' is now my second-favourite piece of weirdly specific jargon, right below 'Cretaceous crab revolution'.

I love how you apply your deep scrutiny and analysis equally to yourself. How you don't allow yourself to bluff and bluster, to blind people with science in order to paper over any cracks, or intimidate people into not challenging you any further. It's not about who's right and who's wrong, or who's intellectually superior. It's just these are the facts as much as we understand them.

Historian and linguist here: Simon, you are a massive source of inspiration for me, I barely knew it was possible to reconstitute older languages before discovering your channel. the work you put out there is phenomenal and ofc, since its an expertise it comes across as magical. sure we don't have any recordings from the past but the funny thing is...neither did they! and yet there was a market for books on pronunciation, phonetics, elocution, prosody... I'm onyl specialised in late 18th century French h but as far as I'm concerned, it's all about foreigners wanting to learn French because it was the basic language for tradesmen and diplomats and also non-Parisians hoping to blend in a bit more in Parisian salons. So naturally they had to find ways to note how things were pronounced directly for their customer base's. One of my professor told me (as I was struggling to conduct my research) that being a historian is literally all about being a detective and finding clues that give you a strong inkling towards a certain direction, so it is a best guess but an educated one! When I started researching how John Adams learnt French as an adult, I found out that he had looked for and found handbooks addressing his specific needs and demands. When I started learning languages and couldn't afford the audios, I had this Assimil method that uses approximate phonetics and honestly? it works, you gets the main phonemes, the stressed syllables and connected speech patterns (liaisons like "les_amis", "i sawr-her" are extremely easy to convey in writing). As Simon pointed out, intonation is one element that is the most easily lost to the sands of time but that's ok! People understand that dinosaurs as presented in films are estimations based on fossil records, not actual footage so it's a bit baffling to see a different engery when it comes to language reconstitution.

It's amazing how many people consider themselves experts on subjects they have never really studied. One of the downfalls of the Age of the Internet. Don't let them deter you, Simon.

That was very interesting - and it's made me a lot less sceptical. I think that as a child, confronted with several different "correct" ways of pronouncing Latin (the traditional English way, the Reformed Pronunciation way, the Ecclesiastical way...), I assumed that they were all wild and equally random attempts at speaking Classical "proper" Latin from Rome in the time of Augustus. I had no idea there were any detailed descriptions of phonetics of any language before the late 19th century. So I assumed that "historical English accents" were also pretty random. Thank you for educating me!

One of the possible reasons people object to Accent reconstruction seems to be racism. I read a comment on one post objecting to Shakespearean original pronunciation because it sounded too much like Irish. No discussion of evidence, just didn’t like how Irish it sounded. and quite frankly, to a British ear any rhotic accent is going to sound either American or Irish.

Simon, you are a linguist, I studied it for 2 years and I'd say you know far more than me and quite possibly as much as any expert on the subject of Phonetics and Historical English. I'd give you an honourary degree if I could.

English spelling makes English speakers even less phonetic sensitive. As a Spaniard, I always found it really weird to hear a Brit say "we have five vowels: /eɪ/, /iː/, /aɪ/, /əʊ/ and /juː/. By the way, did you say /dʒʊdʒmənt/ at 24:05? Is that a trend? A Northern influence? A mishearing on my part? Are the Northerners taking over? Will bath and trap re-merge in SSB? 😊 Thank you for this incredibly interesting video. Btw, how important are comparisons with related languages to reconstruct an accent? Kudos

The only reason I was able to tell they were two different recordings was because the first one sounded to me like "Aim from..." and I had to really think hard to try to understand what it meant, whereas the second one was clearly "I'm from...." Even so, I was second-guessing myself a bit!

Just because I don't understand how something is done doesn't mean that no one understands how it is done. Rather sad really.

That’s weird. I was thinking, ‘Looking dapper, Simon! Nice hair!’👍 Absolutely freaking fascinating as always, thank you and agree 100% with your POV on this.🙏

As a sound engineer and voice producer of many years, I can relate to someone's skepticism. But I also know that recording is not the only way to describe something. I think part of the problem is understanding for how short a time (relatively speaking) humans have been using complex spoken languages. Although it is many thousands of years, in that time (and certainly in the time of language construction as we know it) human beings have hardly evolved at all. So, all the people throughout the world, over the last, say, 10,000 years, have had the same shaped mouth, nose, throat, lungs, and so forth. In consequence, when exploring what might a vowel sound like, we have exactly the same reproduction machine that was used by the original speaker - ourselves. That is wonderfully useful because it puts certain limitations on what is possible. When someone from the past describes how a muscle is used, or where the tongue is placed, we have that muscle ourselves. But I am also fascinated by how much has been explored in the past, and how much really useful information there is. This is where listening to you and others is so much fun. You have done a huge amount of exploration!

I teach Irish language at a university in North America. I'm used to it by this point, but every year the teaching assistants are shocked and baffled by how the students listen to recordings of completely different accents and can't tell them apart at all. The students will ask 'how can you tell the difference between Donegal and Cork?' and the poor TAs can only say 'it's just obvious because they are different in literally every way' hahaha

Would be great to see an animated formant chart showing pronunciation changing over time (and geographically?)

Thanks to your efforts this American can distinguish some UK accents. I can usually pick out north vs south and I once correctly guessed an actress's Sheffield accent

I think the problem comes in that people don't realise that an "accent" is a result of particular muscle movements in the mouth which can be described. They assume that you hear a "sound" then copy it well or badly to "do an accent", or you simply speak with your own accent which is something that happens automatically. Most people simply don't think about phonetics when producing phonemes.

I’m amazed that people were writing about pronunciation so long ago. Makes me even more curious about old books.

See I didn't understand how we could reconstruct historical accents (this video has been super helpful for that!) but I can't imagine being so arrogant as to deny it possible, that's so bizarre to me

your hair looks fine an interesting exploration of the topic and helps to show people what's under the hood of some of the videos you've made

People confuse academic extrapolation with uninformed speculation

fascinating. re. the original comments, I think people have trouble with the idea that a lot of knowledge in science is probabilistic. They think that if you don't know something with 100% certainty then you know nothing. I think they would be shocked to find out how little that actually covers. People are smart and we can make confident deductions about a lot of things which, even if a few of the details are wrong, still as you say manage to convey the substance of the matter at hand.

God made dinosaur bones and Robert Robinson's Art of Pronuntiation to test your faith.

If there is ever an opportunity, it would be so cool to see some kind of collaboration between you and J. Draper. I'm sure you two would have some very cool conversations!

Thanks for showing what's behind the curtain a bit. As you say, people who haven't done much reading about historical linguistics have no idea how much information exists on the topic. The "bollox" people would be well served by cracking open a book or two.

I want a video where you take like 3 paragraphs of text. First you say it in your accent, then you go back like 50 years and say it in that accent and you keep going back 50 years, over and over again through middle English, Old English right through to Proto-Indo European. I imagine it would be a very long video, but I'd watch it!

i love it Simon, this is wonderful. i find it weird how people seem to seek out videos about long-term scientific endeavours to complain because their viewpoint (generally based only on their own gut feeling and ignorance, or sometimes other people's) goes against those of folks that have likely spent at least several orders of magnitude more time truly researching and discussing these topics, and i'm sorry that includes your videos. as a long-time armchair linguist with probably at least a couple orders of magnitude less time invested in learning these things than have you, i always appreciate your videos. every video you put out regarding stuff that i have time to watch helps me learn a little something (and sometimes a lottle something) more about a topic i'm very interested in, but unfortunately have never had time to pursue to the extent you have done. hope you're well.

There is nothing more sisterly than honestly informing your brother that he did in fact ruin his haircut.

Excellent video. I enjoy your dedication. Your humor, subtle as it may be, is great. Keep up the amazing work.

Simon, I absolutely love your videos and I even use approaches and ideas of yours professionally, as I coach a lot of singers in OP for 15th, 16th and 17th century music. We have very similar approaches to reconstructing older sounds and it’s absolutely fascinating, so keep’em coming!!

I keep being amazed at how detailed the phonetic descriptions are for English at the time. I usually look at Sinitic languages and the descriptions are few and far between.

i would be interested in hearing one of these very old accents and speaking styles speaking sentences with very modern subject matter

The haircut looks great man and I see you got a shave. Some special event coming up?

A generous interpretation regarding the mistrust you mention might notice the clear and necessary entrenchment of a language in a living social context that differs from broader historical claims about political systems or trade culture, etc. Can we reconstruct a language with a high statistical accuracy? Yes, but I think much of the skepticism is similar to other anti-scientific scepticisms: there is a lived reality, a context for language, that, just as today, attaches to identity, region, and social relations that a pure or authoratative linguistic reconstruction can sometimes underplay or miss altogether. To put it simply, no one simply "speaks" a language isolated as a system, now or 1000 years in the past.

I'm not sure if this counts as a kind of win for the experiment (I think it probably does), in that it was immediately and glaringly obvious to me that the two recordings were different. But while you mightn't have tricked me into thinking they were the same recording, that was absolutely nothing to do with the phonetic realisation of any of the phonemes! My mind was entirely preoccupied by the fact that they blatantly weren't the same recordings because of the differing cadences of the sentence in each case. (And I'm writing this having only had the initial impressions and not having gone back to relisten at this point) Which I think goes directly to your point about the extent to which people naturally take away overall, impressionistic senses of reconstructions rather than specific detail!

What a load of FUN! I love this channel. This is a topic I've often thought about, thanks!

Hi Simon, thank you for your wonderful videos. I'm amazed at your skill in providing us with so many 'accents'! It was very tricksy of you to make 2 different recordings of your 'river management' tape, but I'm pleased to find that I did hear that correctly. I did wonder whether I'd heard it right and went back over them to make sure and then you told us! Thank you, that confirms that I"m not yet gone mad!

Thx for doing this, filming it and sharing it with us.

I really appreciated this. You are a good “apologist” of the method you use. Keep up your excellent work.

I hope my criticism might be constructive: (from around 10:00 to around 10:10) I would mainly cast it into alphabetical terms, i. e. the main pair of ways of reading where the same letter appears as a single vowel nucleus in a syllable (usually of distinct words). (11:12 to almost 11:25) Fine enough for English and perhaps this is your sole concern. In other languages they can be so or not so; a Deutch speaker with orthodox diction can pronounce Gemüse oder benützen oder über with no more change during the ü (eq. to ue) than in (at least some of) your monothong examples. To some extent even for ö/oe and even more for the ä/ae in Mädchen and other words. Thse are officially considered dipthongs. Great stuff in any case!

I'd be interested to see a video about the Anglo-Norman and Law French languages

A terrific video- one of my favorites- my only quibble would be that I could tell that the two recordings toward the end were different (though only by the aim-eym distinction- the others eluded me).

Great information, thanks 🤗 also, I noticed you got your haircut. It’s nice but I think I like your longer hair better. 😉

Hello Simon. Regarding intonation a good source might be modern accents which share an ancestor that split around the time of the reconstruction. For example you recently reconstructed Alexander Hume's Scottish accent. Around that time Ulster was being settled by Scots speaking lowland Scots. In a place like Ballymena you can hear an accent which is distinctly Scottish even today, but it's the intonation which makes it sound Scottish over the pronounciation. Just a thought.

I cut my own hair for a few years (I’ve since let it grow very long). After a few times I started to get better at it, so I wouldn’t give up just yet! Let it grow out a bit and have another go. I thought it looked choppy and cool! Love your videos, Simon. X

This has been an excellent video about how to analyse audio artifacts. Thank you for this break-down of evidence.

As a native spanish speaker, I can confirm it wasn't until relatively recently ( acouple of years ago) that I could differenciate the kin-keen vowels (and sometimes still pronounce them the same)

Re the two recordings at the end: I had trouble understanding the first one, but the second was clear. I was still trying to decide if that was due to the repetition or something else when you said they were different.

I really enjoy these videos and have never found myself particularly sceptical of anything on this channel, yet I do approve of general scepticism of historical research. It's always worth asking "how do they know" and "what does the evidence really show" vs what is actually reported. Assessing both the techniques used to understand history and the reasoning used to draw conclusions from it should not be treated as if it belongs only to a qualified few. Remember: skip the article, read the paper, look up the references if you can.

I love history and have been reading books since I was 16 so I find this incredible. Im not sure how people can ‘poopoo’ it as there are historical documents covering the language and pronunciations, so historians and linguists would work from them. Even though I’m English, I do struggle to understand English spoken in broad Scottish or Irish accents and sometimes Australian accents - speed, stresses on certain vowels or consonants etc, all have an effect. My mama was from Blackpool and I loved the way she said ‘book’, ‘cook’, ‘look’ - more like boo-k, coo-k, loo-k (sounding like Luke). Was this an older/historical pronunciation which stuck in northern England or a newer development?

Brilliant! As always!

"I'm from the river management service" was quite spooky- I think you should do a video where you make up an entire accent

I find that this is the case with classical philology/textual criticism as well. Somehow it is really counterintuitive to many people that we can reconstruct what an ancient text originally said from later, often mediaeval, copies

Love your vidéos ❤

Peter Pan I noticed that you had lost a few years with the haircut. Glad you told me they were 2 recordings cos I wondered why the second was easier to decipher. I learn a little every video you put up so Diolch / Thanks

A wonderful explanation. Thank you!

It's a basic epistemological problem. A majority of people are empiricists and cannot conceive the idea of knowledge about something you cannot see, hear or feel.

I think it's good that your hair has individual accents.

Pronunciation changes are more difficult for most of us to understand than those bits of history with visible evidence but I found these explanations pretty clear! NB: I was thinking that you had a very good haircut in the first few minutes of this😂

In school I had a giant, desk copy of the American Heritage Dictionay that included etymological notes on every head word, often going back to Indo European. This fascinated me and is likely one of the things that initially interested me interested in studying language. Of course, no one really knows what Indo European sounded like, or of its word stock. All we know is reconstruction. David Crystal explains some about his method in reconstructing late 16th c southern British accents in "Originial Pronunciation" recordings of some of Shakespeare's work. Poetry and the rules of poetics are productive sources. Consider Guthrie's "Motorcycle song": I don wanna pickle. I just wanna ride my moto cicle. I don wanna die. I just wanna ride my moto cy....... kal."

I'd love to hear more about what we know or can reconstruct about the variance, distribution or continuum of accents in the past. Empirically, how many data points do we have for any single period and how different are they? Theoretically, what kind of variation should we expect (across regions, or class, or ethnicity, or other social dimensions)?

Really interesting. Do you have any videos on when Ich or Ik changed to I? I remember a Thomas Hardy poem suggested it was still in use in Dorset in the 1800's. Fascinating how speech changes.

If just one of my high school teachers could have told me - in the pre-internet days when I first got interested in the subject - that we know this stuff not just because of the [false] rhymes etc, but because there's whole bloody books written all those centuries ago about pronunciation etc. Millennia even for some languages. [grump, grumble, moan, etc]

Something that's been on my mind a bit about reconstructions in general, is how much does the things we don't know change the "experience" of the reconstruction. For the sake of argument, let's say that the whitewash in medieval churches and castles was not white but rather a bright pink, only the pigment had faded and become undetectable. This would technically speaking be a tiny detail, but it would massively alter the way we see medieval architecture. How about the puzzling "wine-dark sea" from Homer, could it be that the sea really was dark red for reasons unknown to us, or perhaps wine was in fact a different color (which actually doesn't sound implausible). Since we cannot be certain about any of these things, when you add up the probabilities of all details of our experience of the world; I feel like there is bound to be something absolutely critical about almost any time and place in history that has been lost or mistaken. Considering how many such details must get lost to time, can we really say that our reconstructions point even in the right direction?

Have you seen the movie Iceman (2017)? The dialogue is entirely a reconstructed proto-Rhaetian(sp?) without subtitles. I immediately thought about your videos when I came across it.

I quite enjoy your pontificating on these types of things.

I love how many people need to learn on their own that cutting your own hair is a bad idea 😂 at least you didn't try to fix it and end up like my friend who, after many fixing attempts, cut his hair so short that it looked like an army cut

I found it very interesting. I often wonder how things are known

Thinking about your example of you and a Scouser being able to understand each other, despite the accents. A somewhat more philosophical question than a linguistic one. Given that each person has a slightly different accent, in that we all pronounce words slightly differently from one another, what is there in the brain that allows us to connect sounds that are differently pronounced to the ones in our own personal phonetic alphabet? I’m thinking of the issue in the way that we can look at two similar but fundamentally different objects, like trees, for example, and our brain connects them both to the category of ‘tree’. Does the ability to comprehend different accents, even those virtually identical to our own, confirm the notion that there exist innate ideas in the brain and the sort of superstructure proposed by Chomsky?

any research on intonation you would recommend?

If I had listened to the two recordings at 27:18 & 27:47 back-to-back, and someone asked me if they were the same, I would've immediately been able to tell they are different, particularly from the pronunciation of "I'm". But because they were spread apart, and you primed us by saying "Let's listen to it again", I didn't realize it when watching the first time. My first impression was actually that it sounded like some kind of American accent. (I'm American)

I was raised by parents whose native languages were Romance, and we moved a few times during my childhood. So I have a General American accent, but no particular local variety of it, with a Romance twang. I may pronounce words differently depending on where I learned them. Most words ending in "og" I pronounce with /ɑɡ/, but "dog" /dɔɡ/. In Spanish I notice certain traits, such as often pronouncing /n/ as [ŋ] even when it's not assimilated to a following velar, but I don't perceive an accent as being from somewhere. There is something about my accent that marks it as off-Salvadoran ([ŋ] is a Salvadoran trait, but it's also present in other accents). I distinguish /b/ from /v/, which most Spanish speakers don't (but Ladino speakers do). I rhyme "Jesús" with "luz", as does every Spanish speaker I know here, but it bothers me when they rhyme in a song, because I know that lots of Rightpondians don't rhyme them. One can combine an accent with a pronunciation. Once a Jewish Lojbanist posted a link to a video in which a rabbi was discussing business law and quoting verses in Aramaic, in Ashkenazi pronunciation with an American accent. I've also heard Latin in Classical pronunciation with a German accent.

Just because we don't have the proof doesn't mean that we don't have the evidence.

What do you think about reconstructions of languages which did not have phoneticians discussing the pronunciation of them to the same extent, like ancient ones?

I'm speculating that that's a really nice swing

Some people expect a Time Machine along with iPhone recording as the only way to know how people used to speak. Which would be very very cool.

I imagine that when people are thinking of accents as separate from phonetics, they are thinking of accent as intonation/prosody. The latter, which indeed, we don’t know anything about (as you pointed out in your video). Obviously you are correct that phonetics are a large part of what makes up an accent. But it is always good to know how lay people are using words, in case we are talking past each other.

Curious why these people never enter linguistics to burn it all down with rigor if it's really all just guesswork, while on the other hand, it's important to make note of the fact that nobody ever comes out of studying linguistics saying "I assumed this could be done, but, boy, what a load of babbling guesswork that turned out to be!" That's one thing I'm very proud of myself for: I always understood on a deep level that the ways scholars handle looking at languages of the past are professional, evidentiary, and fact-based. The way the methods were outlined, even broadly, always made sense to me and seemed logical and intuitive.

How did the vowel in 'caught' end up becoming higher than the vowel in 'lot' if the opposite was the case in robinson's time? Also when did the lot vowel become ɒ in RP before going back to /ɔ/ in standard southern british?

Good quality sound recordings go back to the 1880s. I've heard sound recordings of American Civil War veterans...both Union and Confederate. You can find some of these recordings here on KZfaq. Some of these men were born in the 1830s. I understand that a person's accent and dialect can change as they get older, but I'll bet that a person's speech patterns are basically the same throughout their lives as when they were in their teen years. From sound recording we know, at least in the United States, how people spoke going back nearly 200 years.

bit of a stupid question maybe, but what is meant by the intonation of an accent? Is that the stresses/rhythm of it? It can't be intonation (pitch) as in music... can it?

"I often get comments somewhere on the spectrum" couldve left it there mate, interesting vid so thx.

Since all language enthusiasts are gathered in one video, do you think a masters in linguistics or (germanic) philology is a good choice?

My impression of pronunciation reconstructions is that they're a bit like someone "faking" an accent, something like a British English speaker trying an American accent. There are always going to be bits of it that aren't quite right, but as you say, Simon, the overall impression can be pretty good.

28:17 “And if I asked you whether those two recordings I showed you were the same recording, I think a lot of people would probably just assume that they were.” Well, given that you said 27:38 “So I want you to listen to the recording *again* …” I think that would at least prime people into assuming that they were, in fact, listening to the same recording.

nice work

Just as a video idea, I’d love to see a conversation between a British person and an American until it converges into the same accent like from 1724-2024.

if the CUT/PUT split happened after 1600 and then only in one certain part of england then why did it transfer over to north america?

Is there a difference between Put-Cut split and Foot-Strut split or are you using alternative words to show the same thing?

Tl;dr: Cauneas sounds like cave ne eas according to Cicero... all that says is people have been describing the way their language sounds since they discovered they could write things down.

This distrust of historical linguistics is no better encapsulated than in how most Greeks react to reconstructed Ancient Greek pronunciation (and I don't mean Erasmian pronunciation).

Thank you.

There is a long way between nonsense and irrefutable proof. A reconstruction is imo always an approximation and an abstraction to the real thing at the time, especially where protolanguages are concerned, but I do deem it useful and interesting. In fact, even a modern standard language does not describe daily speech but is an abstraction. That does not make it nonsense.

Excellent 👍👍

25:58 like how people think my nz accent "sounds like an australian accent"

The hair is nice. The shirt is as well.

I think I believe in the evidence as to how ancient languages might have sounded like because I love to hear experts speaking them. I do have faith in the evidence for more scientific linguistic reasons though.

Are there 'Arthur the Rat' readings in historical accents?

The openness of the "face" vowel in your reconstruction here doesn't strike me as particularly surprising as a speaker of NZE. Our modern equivalent starts at somewhere around [æ] or [a], and I believe the same is true for Australian English and Cockney

I find your historical accent reconstructions entirely plausible. What baffles me about the quibblers is this: given the variation in dialect and pronunciation across Britain today, after the homogenising pressure of a century of mass media and given what we know about how relatively isolated and geographically static previous generations were, what is the chance that people from neighbouring towns or even villages sounded exactly the same? How accurate are you expecting to get? John the baker from Puddleton in 1645 rather than his cousin from Mudborough three miles away?