I will never take P's for granted ever again *sobs uncontrollably*

this channel is the definition of underrated

As a Japanese I'd never realized that native words in my own language don't have P except when it's altered H, until you pointed it out. Wow, linguistics is cool!

On the other hand, Slavic languages have [p] in many native words, but rarely have [f] in them (except interjections), [f] can occur either in loanwords or as a contraction of consonant clusters, usually [x] (or [h]) + [v]. The opposite process also occurs, especially in dialects: words with [f] are pronounced instead with [xv].

The somali language also lacks the "P" sound. It was difficult for me to differentiate between the P and B sounds in English when I was learning it

Here's a list of things I wanted to point out: @0:25 that is correct for modern loans in Modern Standard Arabic but loaning foreign [p] as /f/ in Arabic is not uncommon historically or modernly in an informal manner, many Malay words in the Arabian peninsula are loaned with a /f/ when they have a /p/ in Malay, also historically Ancient Greek /pʰ/ was loaned as /f/ but unaspirated /p/ was loaned as /b/, with some exceptions like Παλαιστῑ́νη /palai̯stǐːnɛː/ being loaned as /filastˤiːn/. @1:45 it's not "pronounced [p] out of convenience" it's that historical /Qp/ [pp] and /Np/ [mp] where not affected by the sound changes that lenited [p] to [ɸ] to [h], similar to how /hu/ isn't pronounce [ɸɯ̟ᵝ] "out of convenience" but rather than original [ɸu] never shifted away from it's original sound because the roundedness (whether protruded or compressed) for the /u/ preserved its bilabial nature, Japanese speakers are capable of saying /Nh/ in compounds like in 半々 /haNhaN/ "half-half" and /Qh/ [hh] in loans like /maQha/ [mahha] for "Mach (number/speed)". @video the overall video lacks looking into why *specifically* [p] gets lost, because all of the cardinal stops ([p t k b d g]) can lenite to sounds like [f θ x v ð ɣ], the thing is it's very frequent for specifically [p] and [g] to be dropped out of the cardinal six, suggesting that there is a tendency to avoid voiceless sounds at the front of the mouth and voiced sounds at the back of the mouth (further hinted at by the extreme rarity of [ɢ] compared to [q]). it should also be noted that with Arabic specifically the story might be more complex, while a very popular theory posits that Arabic only recently before the Islamic conquests lost its /p/ there's actually little evidence for that, Arabic *might* have not had any /p/ sounds for thousands of years for all we know, as most Semitic languages lack a /p/ sound (with Hebrew, Aramaic, and Akkadian being exceptions not the rule!) and many Afro-Asiatic branches also seem to lack a /p/ in many of its languages that might mean that the proto-language might have not had a /p/ (especially Amazigh, Cushitic, and maybe Chadic), and even in the languages that do have /p/ the rest of the labial series looks uneven, for example Middle Egyptian had this /m p β f w/ for it's labials, compared to Arabic /m b f w/, and Proto-Amazigh /m (b) β f w/.

Thanks for the video! This reminds me: I've always wondered why many Sundanese speakers cannot differentiate p, f, and v. They mostly resort to using /p/ for all of them since it's in their alphabet, which is somehow the opposite of Arabic, Vietnamese, and Japanese.

As a member speaker of one of the Haudenosaunee languages (Mohawk), our language family is known for not having any native labial sounds. When we adopt words in Mohawk we normally convert a -b/p- sounds into -gw-, such as the name “Peter” is some dialects is said as “Kwíte.” Then we covert the -m- sound into either -onw- or -w- such as the name for “Mary it can be said as either “Onwá:ri” or just “Wá:ri.”

Here in my country (Philippines), northern luzonic languages don't have the letter p. Most of the time when the tagalog words use "P", it will become "F" on those Northern Luzonic languages like the "Ibanag Language".

Strictly speaking, Japanese does not have an 'F' sound. It has a bilabial fricative, the same sound in Greek that gives us the 'PH' digraph in English being pronounced as 'F'. It's more like an 'F' if you pronounced it with your lips instead of your lips and teeth. In other words, t's a bilabial fricative rather than a labiodental fricative.

Okay, but another crucial detail is that /p/ is slightly harder to pronounce than other voiceless stops. Basically, for phonetic reasons, the further towards the front of the mouth you go, the harder voiceless stops become; the further towards the back, the harder voiced stops become. Which is why /g/ also has a certain tendency to be lost, and why voiced uvulars are especially rare.

Nice job on this video! I learned a lot.

Hokkien, Hockchow are the only Sinitic languages that retained the original "p" starting in words where it became "f" in other Sinitic languages. For example, 放 is "pang" in Hokkien, "fong" in Cantonese and "fang" in Mandarin. Not only that but it retained the original "h" initial too, for words where it became "f" in other Sinitic languages. For example, 風 is "hong" in Hokkien, "fong" in Mandarin and "fong" in Cantonese. Even the province that the language hailed from, which is 福建. 福建 is "Hokkien" in Hokkien, "Fokkien" in Cantonese and "Fu jian" in Mandarin. *pronunciation may vary across speakers. Mine is based on the way people in my area pronounce these words.

Hi, I speak Syriac Aramaic and Arabic and would like to add an information regarding Arabic. It seems that Arabic has dropped the letter P because it abandoned a Semitic feature that we call in Syriac as (the Qushai and Rukakh) which means (hard and lean -sounds-) this feature exists in 6 letters : B - G - D - K - P - T These 6 letters have 2 pronunciations, the Qushai which is the main one (the one above) and the Rukakh which makes the sounds become like this : V - Gh - Dh (th as in the) - Kh - F - Th (as in theatre) As you guessed the P sound and the F sound are the same letter ܦ݁ for P and ܦ݂ for F The same word can accept the two pronunciations depending on known rules or cases, for example the word ܦ݁ܽܘܡܳܐ which means 'mouth' is pronounced 'Pumo' but if you added ܕ before it to mean (because of - that of mouth) the word will be become ܕܦ݂ܽܘܡܳܐ 'dFumo' And Arabic doesn't have this anymore and treats the two sounds of 4 of these letters as separate different letters

Arabic writing system is so beautiful

There is very little info on Japanese language history easily accessible on the web, so I very much appreciate the point about Japanese p shifting to h. There more I learn about phonetics (Japanese or other), the more sense the kana system makes. As a European, the connection between h and b/p has eluded me for a long time as opposed to the other dakuten uses. I think what applies to P also applies to B, which likes to shift to V a lot, at least in European languages. I believe it has done that in all Germanic languages bar High German (compare "to have" vs "haben, "love" vs "Liebe"), in Modern Greek Beta has come to represent a V sound, and I think Castilian Spanish doesn't distinguish at all between B and V?

This phonemic shift away from P is super interesting considering it happens in so many different languages! One language that i didnt see being mentioned in the comments is Kannada. A lot of native Old Kannada words underwent the phonemic shift from P to H directly (with no F in the middle i think?). Which is why when other dravidian languages have similar words starting with P, Kannada has it starting with H. Examples include- Milk - pāl(u) in Tamil/Telugu vs hālu in Kannada The number 10 - pattu in Tamil vs hattu in Kannada Pig - pandi in Telugu vs handi in Kannada Name - peyar/pēru in Tamil/Telugu vs hesaru in Kannada and so on... However, kannada keeps the letter p in words that it borrows from sanskrit (and there are a lot of words it borrows from sanskrit) so the phoneme is still pretty common in the language. It's a very interesting phenomenon!

Technically, that wasn't the whole story for Vietnamese; while /pʰ/ did disappear from the language after spirantising to /f/ (likely during the Middle Vietnamese period), that doesn't explain how it lacks /p/ word-initially. Both were likely separate phonemes in Proto-Austroasiatic and Proto-Vietic. Historically, there appeared to be a chain shift in the initials that went somewhat like /p/ > /ɓ/ > /m/ (original *m- stays as /m/) from Proto-Vietic to becoming modern Vietnamese, leading to words like 'bốn' and 'muối' coming from PV *poːnʔ and *ɓɔːjʔ. The same process nearly happened with the dental series as well (via /t/ > /ɗ/ > /n/, where we get 'đẻ' and 'nước' from PV *tɛh and *ɗaːk) but /t/ was preserved as a phoneme from other processes, frequently from the fortition of /s/ > /t/. These changes were applied to Sino-Vietnamese loanwords as well.

I first wondered why in the Cameroonian language Éwondo "French", "français" is "plési". Eventually I got it: The letter "f" is substituted by "p", "r" substituted by "l", the nasalized "an" is substituted by plan "e" and the accent is shifted to the first syllable. Their word for "German", "ndjaman", is more comprehensible.

“P has a pretty frequent habit of turning into F” Arcade game named Puckman:

Now knowing what I know, the question arises as to why the “b” sound was chosen in place of the “p” sound in words adapted into Arabic? Was this just the only choice that would’ve made sense, or is there actually a story behind that choice? Also, this is quite good as an explanation. Very clean and concise as a script. One would even say that this is classroom ready!

An interesting opposite of this is korean, which often uses the P sound and even has two different letters for P sounds (ㅃ and ㅍ), all while having no F anywhere in their language or writing system. Loan words like coffee and sofa are written and pronounced with P.

Good video, subscribed!

that's a cool video, thanks! I'm sure your channel will grow fast :)

I have always thought about it. This is an interesting explanation.

It’s so fascinating and makes so much sense that the Japanese writing systems reflect this as well! For example the character は, it is a devoiced consonant sound, but when you add this mark ば a “ducted” it becomes a voiced sound. HA becomes voiced as BA. Then lastly the plosive mark (don’t know the technical name) can be added ぱ to turn HA into PA. This mark indicates the sound is a plosive sound and requires a larger amount of air to make the plosive noise with your lips.

honestly, the most unpeliavably interesting video I've seen in a while.

kinda unique how a lot of languages shifted some words from p to f. because in Malaysia (it's acual more of malay speakers than malaysians), we tend to do the reverse. instead of pronouncing f, we pronounce it as p. tho, this only happens in dialects and not the entire language itself.

Just a minor correction: "Pirahã" is best pronounced as "Pirahan". Completely eliminating the nasal sound at the end feels very strange to my ears.

very interesting, this is the opposite for indonesian and javanese, where f actually turns into p. For example faham (loaned from arabic) is often pronouced paham. nice vid tho

nice video! im not sure "pee" and "eff" are the most accurate names for these sounds but it certainly gets the message across so i wont complain.. well explained

I'm a Hindi native, the aspirated p फ [pʰ] in my language has largely shifted to फ़ [f]

P is so shy in English. Pneumonia, Pseudo, the P is silent before n and s, then when it meets h, it makes and F sound (Phillip).

meanwhile sundanese struggling to not spell P

The opposite is in Georgian language where there is no F letter so loanwords with F are pronounced with P, same was with old Armenian language later F letter was added into Armenian alphabet. Such F to P transformations are common in some languages of the Caucausus region

Ayy glad to see my language! IIRC the only two words in Vietnamese that start with p that isn’t paired with h (ph) are pin (your example) and pía, part of “bánh pía”, a durian pastry.

Vietnamese historically had two p, /p/ and /pʰ/, the former merge with /ɓ/ while the latter became /f/

before the Malays adapt to use roman alphabet, the Malays were mainly using arabic alphabet which were adapted from the arabian traders but the malay language has some vocabularies that aren't exist in arabic alphabet so the malays added few of their alphabets which became the "Jawi" variant of arabic alphabet which includes the "ch" sound and also the "p" sound.

Brother, if you need any help with the arabic language and it's dialects i can definitely help. There's alot of nuance depending on locale and dialect that could be confusing, especially as "standard" Arabic is still spoken with an accent or even not spoken at all in some places (like the maghreb or egypt)

old irish actually has absolutely no Ps anywhere, not even a letter in ogham, and it's also pretty absent in frequency outside of loanwords. meanwhile then you have welsh which uses it everywhere, but only with a k to p sound shift from the rest of celtic that gauls also had for some reason

Hebrew has this feature where bgdcpt (but in modern hebrew just bcp) have two pronounciations, depending on where in the word are they. A soft b is a v sound; a soft c is a ch/h sound (this is not the english ch or h sound, I dunno what it's called); a soft p is an f sound. I believe the rule is, you use the hard sound if it's the beginning of a word or it's after a stop, and the soft sound elsewhere. You can use a small dot to indicate the hard sound, but nobody does it except sometimes with loanwords that break the rules like jeep

I'm a proud 28th subscriber. You bought me with this video

In my bavarian dialect there's no p. It's almost fully merged with b and the aspiration is completely gone.

In Japanese, /h/ came from /p/ historically

Also phonetically it's easier to pronounce a voiced front consonant than a voiceless one, like with back consonants, but the opposite

So far, you are the first youtuber i have seen to pronounce Maori better than most other channels. I was so glad when i didnt here "Mayory". Thats how bad people are at saying it.

Keep it up!

The channel deserves much more attention than it got

2:37 "except after U" Did you mean "except before U"? F comes before U in Fuji. Great explanation, thank you 👍

The ending was golden

Hindi even differentiates between aspirated (प) and unassisted! (फ) . . . as well as the dotted aspirated version (फ़) standing in for the "f" sound in loan words from Persian or Arabic!

That is interesting because for most Indonesians it’s easier to say p than f. Most Indonesian words containing f were derived from foreign languages like Arabic. But most of the time we pronounce the f as p.

in my native language, Javanese, the F and P relationship is the other way around. We use a lot of P sound but almost no F sound. When we use word from other language with F (and sometime V), we turn it into P.

Somewhat similar happens with Indo-aryan and Dravidian languages, which somewhat follow Sanskrit grammar( the former ones) or influenced by it( the latter ones). Sanskrit grammar( Astadhyayi) as codified by the Hindu Grammarian Panini in the 8th-6th BCE and Tamil grammar Tollakappiyam( 3rd century BCE), didn't have F, Q, Z sounds originally as the grammar books of other indian languages, which resulted in nearly no native Indian language having it( with some exceptions like Urdu, Punjabi borrowing it artificially from Persian-Arabic and Marathi, Assamese having similar internal developments on their own) . We traditionally have one non-aspirated p and K ( प and ख as in Hindi for instance) and an aspirated p and K( फ and ख़ as in Hindi). Indian speakers can easily make out loanwords from Arabic and Persian which have these aforesaid sounds more specifically and can only pronounce it with effort but out of laziness, we tend to pronounce F, Q, Z as indigenous Ph, Kh, J. We do have P in all our languages though. It is the reason, why Indian scripts didn't have letters for F, Q, Z until recently, many still use the letters corresponding to their native approximate sound value or with slight modifications to them by adding nuqta/Bindu to the already present native letter. For example in Hindi, ph is transcribed in Devanagari as फ, but F is फ़. Kh is ख, Q is ख़ J is ज, Z is ज़ Bonus- the hard guttural g of Arabic( Ghayn) is transcribed as an allophone of native g( ग), that is ग़.

Fun fact, in the past, when Arabs Arabized words with P in them, they turned them into Fs, and now I understand why lol

Arabic: lacks a P sound Jawi: does it for them Malays: calling people pp's now

Hebrew is somewhere in the middle of this shift, by the way. we have the /p/ phoneme which is realised as [p] when it's at the beginning of words or has emphasis in the root, and as [f] (historically [ɸ]) when not.

Arab here: I must watch. Too interesting. Why do we lack a P in standard Arabic? Well, let me tell you, in Iraq, we call a man who fixes flat tyres a "pentcherchy", from the English word "puncture" plus Turkish suffix "chi". The comparison with Japanese was fascinating. I almost forgot about how Japanese turned p into f into h, which I learned when I was curious about why they wrote p as a h with a half-voiced mark. The connection between h, b, and p in hiragana was strange, until I read about the half-voice mark's history on Wikipedia. This video reminded me of that. Did you know that Arabs used to turn the p in loanwords into f? Parsi, Farsi is an example. Plato, Eflaton is another. Now we turn it into b, but I think f is better than b. For example, fentsherjy instead of bentsherjy as a way to write pentcherchy without using Persian letters chim (gim with three dots) and pa (like ba, with three dots).

In arabic we have a letter for p that we use to distinguish it from b but its not that commonly used it looks like this پ and is a loan from persian which does have p

Hebrew also changes /p/ to /f/ depending on the position of the letter for P (פ) and the letter preceding it. פ - F פּ - P

Interesting.

Another thing to note on comparative phonology is Korean has p, but not f, so while the loan word in Mandarin is kafei, in Japanese koohii, in Korean it's something like keopi, or koppi. I don't why it is, but it's interesting to think that the loan words for 'copy' and 'coffee' sound similiar in Korean.

Sometimes I can't pronounce the p in Spanish (native language) while speaking spontaneously. I don't know why. But I change it to a soft b (it's represented similar to ß with IPA). Even words like "papá" (dad) occasionally I'll pronounce it as "babá" (with the soft b)

They aren’t pushing P

the intonation of this guy's voice makes me feel like i'm watching an infomercial, haha. (i'm not complaining)

Also sorta explains how the "F" sound is sometimes represented by "Ph" in english.

it is true that we "mostly" pronounce "p" just like "f" in Vietnamese but it's only when p with h "ph" is more likely to pronounce like "f" other than that "p" is just like "b" and sometimes it can create some funny situations

In my language (Mam) there is no F sound. Some people would pronounce loan words containing an F with a P instead, which is the opposite of what you just discussed.

2:02 "... p has... frequent habit of turning into f" Explains so much. In South Africa, some languages (eg, Nguni languages) use f (say in the word "funa" = want) while other languages (eg, Tsonga & Venda), not too far from the region of the "f" language will make a pf sound ("funa" becomes "pfuna"). It's sort of this middle ground between a p and an f, but sounds like a very hard f... it's hard for me to make that sound. Interesting

There is such a character in a dialect of arabic, but not MSA I believe. This is a statement from wikipedia. The third letter of the Kurdo-Arabic alphabet. Its name is پا‎(pa) and it has the sound of English P. It is preceded by ب‎ (bi) and followed by ت‎ (ti)‎

In the Japanese's case, The /f/ sound mentioned in the video is actually /φ/, which is bilabial fricative(sound that is pretty simillar to /f/ but you pronounce it only with your lips, which is sound when you try to pronounce "wh"o).

Japanese /p/ only survived when it was geminated intervocalically. It shifted first to a bilabial fricative (not quite an /f/, more breathy and weak) and then happily shifted into an h, probably via an intermediary voiceless labiovelar fricative.

I had a friend whose native language was Arabic and I saw in him that if he really tried, he could pronounce P but during normal speech he defaulted to B. Turning policy into bolicy, for instance.

So you're partly saying that, given time, P tends to shift to F and ultimately H in certain (especially ancient) languages. Makes sense. Would be cool if we had a phonetic term for that shift and/or descriptor for languages in which this tends to happen (or not) the most.

No worries, I'll cherish my peas.

As far as I know, Indo-aryan languages never changed their p's to f. Rather, f only occurs in loanwords for most. However, I have noticed some speakers switch aspirated ph to f. Change in progress

In turkic languages we don't have the sound th and we replace it with a t sound

You have seen my language yet lol😂😂😂 it’s even worse than this except we have P, F, and words so hard to say 😂😂😂

Admittedly, I might need to rewatch the video, but if I'm understanding correctly, this means b is stored in the palls?

F is simply superior to P. Take it.

I've been wondering about this for a long time. I thought Arabic was the oddball in this case.

I thought the text was stylized Elian script for a second

Even in Kannada, the initial [p] sound shifted to [h]. Where Malayalam and Tamil have poovu, pogu and paalu, Kannada has hoovu, hallu and haalu.

It is interesting that even in Japanese P, F, and H are in the same letter but only with a small sign on the top right to distinguish it

interesting, i've experienced the opposite with malay and tamil pronunciations, speakers tend to turn f-sounds to p-sounds. i think it's because F isn't native to the languages.

arabic speakers trying to speak toki pona be like:

In javanese pegon writing system that uses arabic letters, the /p/ sound is represented by ف /f/ not ب /b/

Nitpick, but the Japanese "f" is, outside of loanwords, an allophone of 'h' and is bilabial (and optional in some accents)

Latviešu language does the opposite. We have no f sound instead typically changing it for a p, sometimes for a t. Friedrich becomes Pidriķis.

Modern Khmer is similar to modern Vietnamese lack of initial /p/ in native word. /p/ in Old Khmer and Old Vietnamese are shifted to implosive [ɓ] (not voiced stop) in modern phonology that’s why both languages sound unique because of implosive initials while Mon and other Austroasiatic languages preserve the initial /p/

Now why do the Iroquoian languages lack any labials other than /w/?

I've read somewhere that one reason p often changes to f is because our jaws have become shorter with modern diets. Hunter-gatherers will chew a lot more tough food that causes the jaw to grow larger, and when the jaw is further forward it's easy to make a p sound and somewhat hard to make an f sound but when it's further back the f is easier. So the reason is (maybe) ultimately because of soft food

Japanese also has the P sound,but only used in borrowed words,like Pokemon

I had a Filipino friend in grad school & he said that in their language that they did not have and "F" sound & that the name of their country is pronounced starting with a "P" sound instead of an "F" and that country was named by the Spanish. I hate to assume but his native language was probably Tagalog

pushin 🅿

I'm envious of those with less P, they don't have to visit the restroom as often

my native language tagalog has /p/ but no /f/, so being told that people find it easier to pronounce /p/ as /f/ is wild to me when i myself often slip into pronouncing /f/ as /p/ when i'm not careful 😅

Paie and paa:im not dead

Voiceless what do u mean

That's how Pars became Fars ans Parsi aa Farsi in Arabic for Persian