Quote: (08-17-2015 12:58 PM)Chaos Wrote:
Very interesting Quintus!
I'm curious how they know those ancient languages sounded like that?
Old English took me by surprise, it's sound very Scandinavian! Could recognise a few things there.
This is how I imagine what Scandinavian languages could sound like to a non-native speaker.
Would have loved to see something about Finno-Ugric too.
EDIT: Props to OP (4 posts) for a decent a first thread.
They don't know precisely how an ancient language would have sounded, of course, since these were the days before electronic recordings.
But they have a very good idea. They can very accurately reconstruct these things from poetry, rhyming clues from poetry, existing grammars, word lists, and written records from the period, and even from modern languages.
Ancient Egyptian never really "died"; it just became Coptic, the language of most Egypt before the coming of the Arabs in the 8th century AD. Coptic is still the liturgical language of the Christian Church in Egypt.
From this, they can get an idea of how the sounds evolved over the centuries. It's detective work, but a lot more precise than you might think.
For Latin and Greek, it's relatively easy. There is so much written in these languages that we have a very, very good idea how they sounded.