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Elision of -m and nasalisation and/or lengthening of the preceding vowel was already happening in classical latin, including the one spoken by ruling elites and

Elision of -m and nasalisation and/or lengthening of the preceding vowel was already happening in classical latin, including the one spoken by ruling elites and is attested through poetic metric and other sources. See Classical Latin. W. Sydney Allen, in Vox Latina 30–31 Also youtuber ScorpioMartianus has invested some time into training himself into using reconstructed pronunciation and has talked extensively about that, see for example https://youtu.be/psYM-LvBplw https://youtu.be/psYM-LvBplw

thaumasiotes 6y ago
Granted; I spoke much too broadly. According to the classical sources, -m fully disappears when followed by a vowel. (Though same-word intervocalic -m- does not.) Poetic meter backs this claim up robustly. It's actually a little bit weirder than that; the vowel before -m also disappears. But it's certainly plausible for some nasalization to remain anyway. > and/or lengthening of the preceding vowel You're referring to -ns- / -nf-? You're also right there. As far as I'm aware, this doesn't happen for -nd- / -nt-, though. > Also youtuber ScorpioMartianus has invested some time into training himself into using reconstructed pronunciation and has talked extensively about that While that sounds like a cool project, I don't think it necessarily has a lot to tell us about the historical pronunciation. I think you could develop a pronunciation system that matched nearly every documented feature of a dead language while failing to match a large number of undocumented features.
- ithkuil 6y ago
  > While that sounds like a cool project, I don't think it necessarily has a lot to tell us about the historical pronunciation You could say the same about pronunciation research published in linguistic journals. Let me use an analogy: Imagine looking at the source code of a game. It's technically possible for a reader to technically understand what the program is doing and understand what the game is about, how it works, it's rules and goals. However, if you pass the sources through a compiler (whose behaviour you also can well understand) what you end up with is a game you can run and experience. Reconstructed pronounciations are a bit like that. You get to "experience" rules that are otherwise coded in an abstract language. The effort of translating those rules into something you experience actually requires a lot of effort and expertise. You can in theory become a "compiler" and learn how to do it yourself (aloud or in your head) but it's hard; what's wrong with outsourcing it?
  - thaumasiotes 6y ago
    > Let me use an analogy: > Imagine looking at the source code of a game. It's technically possible for a reader to technically understand what the program is doing This is already well beyond what's possible for a dead language. It's not even possible for living languages, although in that case we can draw empiric conclusions. I've been interested for a long time in the question of how we can determine how a language divides up the space of possible sounds. For example, English [θ] (the sound at the beginning of "thick") is perceived by Mandarin speakers as being the sound [s] (as in "sick"). It is perceived by Cantonese speakers as being [f] (as in "fickle"). The sounds [s] and [f] are both phonemic in both Mandarin and Cantonese. But something about the phonology of each pushes the sound [θ] into one category or the other. The choice is not arbitrary; it is quite consistent across speakers of each language. To the best of my knowledge, we have no way to answer the question "how would language X categorize sound Y?" other than experimentation, which is impossible with a dead language. But it is a fact about the language, and in principle the question can be answered solely by looking at the pronunciation of sounds within the language -- in the ordinary course of events, a Chinese speaker would go their entire life without being exposed to the sound [θ], and yet they would largely agree with each other on what the sound was if they did hear it. I say that this categorization question draws upon rules of pronunciation which we don't presently have a good idea of how to describe or characterize at all. So I say reenactment of a dead language is an interesting project, but you're inevitably going to make choices that are wildly different from the language as it existed in the past. Pronunciation reconstruction is on much firmer ground -- and it gets there by not addressing most questions. But a reenactment cannot avoid addressing every possibility, and it's going to get most of them wrong.
    - ithkuil 6y ago
      > It's not even possible for living languages YMMV. I once watched a short video by an accent coach teaching how to make an Irish accent, a Scottish accent, an Australian accent etc. He talked about place of articulation and made pretty decent (although clearly not native) approximations of the pronounciations. I found his attempts at actively voicing things out quite helpful. I'm fully aware this is just an approximation, but in a way I found that teacher to be more effective at conveying what makes a given accent peculiar, more than what just listening to a native speaker would. Probably it all depends on what you're interested in.

thaumasiotes 6y ago

Granted; I spoke much too broadly. According to the classical sources, -m fully disappears when followed by a vowel. (Though same-word intervocalic -m- does not.) Poetic meter backs this claim up robustly. It's actually a little bit weirder than that; the vowel before -m also disappears. But it's certainly plausible for some nasalization to remain anyway. > and/or lengthening of the preceding vowel You're referring to -ns- / -nf-? You're also right there. As far as I'm aware, this doesn't happen for -nd- / -nt-, though. > Also youtuber ScorpioMartianus has invested some time into training himself into using reconstructed pronunciation and has talked extensively about that While that sounds like a cool project, I don't think it necessarily has a lot to tell us about the historical pronunciation. I think you could develop a pronunciation system that matched nearly every documented feature of a dead language while failing to match a large number of undocumented features.

ithkuil 6y ago
> While that sounds like a cool project, I don't think it necessarily has a lot to tell us about the historical pronunciation You could say the same about pronunciation research published in linguistic journals. Let me use an analogy: Imagine looking at the source code of a game. It's technically possible for a reader to technically understand what the program is doing and understand what the game is about, how it works, it's rules and goals. However, if you pass the sources through a compiler (whose behaviour you also can well understand) what you end up with is a game you can run and experience. Reconstructed pronounciations are a bit like that. You get to "experience" rules that are otherwise coded in an abstract language. The effort of translating those rules into something you experience actually requires a lot of effort and expertise. You can in theory become a "compiler" and learn how to do it yourself (aloud or in your head) but it's hard; what's wrong with outsourcing it?
- thaumasiotes 6y ago
  > Let me use an analogy: > Imagine looking at the source code of a game. It's technically possible for a reader to technically understand what the program is doing This is already well beyond what's possible for a dead language. It's not even possible for living languages, although in that case we can draw empiric conclusions. I've been interested for a long time in the question of how we can determine how a language divides up the space of possible sounds. For example, English [θ] (the sound at the beginning of "thick") is perceived by Mandarin speakers as being the sound [s] (as in "sick"). It is perceived by Cantonese speakers as being [f] (as in "fickle"). The sounds [s] and [f] are both phonemic in both Mandarin and Cantonese. But something about the phonology of each pushes the sound [θ] into one category or the other. The choice is not arbitrary; it is quite consistent across speakers of each language. To the best of my knowledge, we have no way to answer the question "how would language X categorize sound Y?" other than experimentation, which is impossible with a dead language. But it is a fact about the language, and in principle the question can be answered solely by looking at the pronunciation of sounds within the language -- in the ordinary course of events, a Chinese speaker would go their entire life without being exposed to the sound [θ], and yet they would largely agree with each other on what the sound was if they did hear it. I say that this categorization question draws upon rules of pronunciation which we don't presently have a good idea of how to describe or characterize at all. So I say reenactment of a dead language is an interesting project, but you're inevitably going to make choices that are wildly different from the language as it existed in the past. Pronunciation reconstruction is on much firmer ground -- and it gets there by not addressing most questions. But a reenactment cannot avoid addressing every possibility, and it's going to get most of them wrong.
  - ithkuil 6y ago
    > It's not even possible for living languages YMMV. I once watched a short video by an accent coach teaching how to make an Irish accent, a Scottish accent, an Australian accent etc. He talked about place of articulation and made pretty decent (although clearly not native) approximations of the pronounciations. I found his attempts at actively voicing things out quite helpful. I'm fully aware this is just an approximation, but in a way I found that teacher to be more effective at conveying what makes a given accent peculiar, more than what just listening to a native speaker would. Probably it all depends on what you're interested in.