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I’m fascinated that pronunciation shifts and even stress can be reconstructed from written texts of an extinct language. How is that possible?
by gumby 4y ago
I’m fascinated that pronunciation shifts and even stress can be reconstructed from written texts of an extinct language. How is that possible?
- gostsamo 4y agoJust a conjecture, but poems have rhythm rules and if two words are supposed to rhyme, you can guess where the stress should be. Not sure how it is done in reality though.
- bayesian_horse 4y agoMostly from rhyme and rhythm structures. Also the Brahmic scripts seem to be entirely phonetic, so you'd notice significant changes anyway.
- 082349872349872 4y agowe have checksums; older traditions protected against channel noise with poetic stuctures. (incidentally, the WP article claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brahmic_scripts#Characteristic... had an influence on japanese katakana/hiragana; I wonder how much influence they had —perhaps indirectly, via phonetics?— on the varied western shorthand systems, not to mention Shavian)
- talideon 4y agoThe comparative method is how: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_method