apparently, the places in the world with the most lightning strikes per year (like Lake Maracaibo) are also the places where people try to keep syllabic structure as simple as possible. Maybe its the humidity and temperature. Beatboxing is complex and occurs in the least electric regions. Maybe beatboxers are compensating for something.
1:54 the big problem with that map is that there are simply more different languages in mountain regions, because they work as language islands (one different language in every valley). So one could make almost any language maps, regions like Caucasia will always have a lot of red dots. Maybe it would have been better to make a map with the number of speakers than with the number of different languages. Also, it doesn't seem to work well with historic languages.
@TheMRB Not really true. Most of the Geography teachers I've had at school you'd expect them to like, be good with, or simply know alot about languages... however each was far from the truth.
For me I'm thinking of using electrical signals generated by some kind of special organs, just like what the electrical eel uses as a means of communication. Maybe, the change in the wavelength of the alternating current could meant some thing, like a rapid pulse of short ones could mean danger.
Hard facts or not, that was highly interesting! I had never considered that location would affect language development. Definitely something to at least consider. Looking forward to the next video!
Tones (in tonal languages) are not actually the musical tones like: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and si. They are more like how high or low your voice is. Now you can create a musical conlang. (Actually, I was just watching a video about musical conlangs.) But they need musical tones rather than spoken tones in normal tonal languages. I hope you understand.
Yup, loud and clear. These last couple of weeks have been full of such discussions. One thing that's become clear to me is that musical conlang is an interesting challenge, but totally doable.
Can't say I'm any good at it or that I can control which overtones I produce...but I got the rudiments down. Check this girl out for help: she's AWESOME! th-cam.com/channels/eQCa6v6qVkseKhgq5q-nzQ.html
@@Artifexian I always thought that was an instrument when I heard it in music.... Thanks for opening my eyes, its amazing! Hahah, sorry for replying to a three year old comment
I made up a conglang in high school and I came up with a few ejective consonants and I had NO idea what they were in technical terms but thanks this video, now I do! :)
Can confirm on sonority and warm climates, here in Colombia coastal (and warm) regions have dialects in which people tend to greatly reduce obstruents, using mostly vowels and sonorants in their speech.
I have been looking for something like this for ages. My linguistics professors had all never heard of anything like geography impacting phonemic inventories.
I had a different theory before this video, and it seems like you predicted my theory - I always thought that languages in harsh climates like deserts, plains and mountains tended to be much harsher, constrictive and consonantal, whereas in forested and lush areas languages tended to be more melodic and breathy.
+SUM1 "melodic" makes me think about tonal languages like cantonese, ancient greek or swedish... Which are very rarely found in forested and lush areas. Highly consonantal languages seem to be often found in little communities, where language has less chances to be altered (more people = more simplifications of pronunciation over time), so more often in "savage" areas like savana (south Africa, Australia) and mountain (Caucasia). But it's also true that the languages with less consonants are found in tropical forests. So I don't think there is a geographical logic here...
Love it! Can't wait for the next language building video. For some reason, I really enjoy writing languages, but I'd like more detail on what I should use for grammar, and sounds. Keep up the GREAT work!
+NeonAutumn All will be covered eventually. I'm a sucker for detail so I like to take my time and really understand a topic before I speak about it. In the mean time I would suggest heading over /r/conlangs on reddit. This a great community of language creators and I'm sure you'll find lots of interesting grammar/sound related things over there. Well worth checking out.
I have to say I much more enjoy your language videos, as I have a nearly over-infatuation with words, but I also find that learning the legitimate, scientific methods to building a whole planet and solar system is incredibly useful when writing works of fiction, as I am known to do.
Could it be that the clustering could be simply explained by the fact that languages in close proximity are more likely to be related, or to share sounds like explained in your clicking video? I'm not a linguist, but that could at least be an alternate explanation.
+Adam 9812 That would certainly be a good filter to use when testing these hypotheses: don't look at all languages, only represenative ones (e.g. take a representative one from each language subfamily, or look at related languages in a much smaller area: obviously any language that is descended from Middle Chinese is going to be tonal, but how tonal are the various Sino-Tibetan languages, and have any of them in colder areas lost some of their tones?.... questions like these help you narrow things down and get closer to the truth. Unfortunately we can't test linguistic hypotheses in the same way as we test mathematical or chemical ones because we are reliant on observation of the real world rather than controlled experiments. Linguistics will move forward in leaps and bounds when realistic human AI can be simulated by a computer, and we can run models of linguistic hypotheses as experiments.
to me as a linguist, these things seem to be connected together. some languages may have developed these sounds as a result of the process in the video, other languages could catch them... although it is often difficult for languages in the mountains to influence each other, because it is harder to move from one settlement to another. many languages in mountainous regions change much slower than those in the plains because people can travel much easier when there's no mountains :) in the Caucasus, for example, there are languages/dialects that are unique to a certain village. however I still think it can be a valid explanation.
But the point is that the concentrations of these different languages are in mountainous regions. if it were only one cluster that happened to be in a mountainous region then yeah the correlation wouldn't mean much. But what is significant is the fact that the vast majority of those languages, and the biggest clusters of them, are in mountainous areas.
Its simple! Just build pressure in your throat by blocking it with your tonge,suck some air,and put the tonge in the correct place of articulation,and then release the pressure and suck some air in,and voilà! I dont know to.make them
So, from what I can tell, an implosive is basically a voiced click. For example, a /ɓ/ can be written as a [ʘ̬] and a /ʘ/ can be written as a [ɓ̥], presuming that you a). have forgotten how the IPA works, b). really want to piss off a phonetician, c). have a burning hatred for broad phonemic transcriptions, or d). are responding to a three-year-old TH-cam comment.
Adyghe language does have a lot( probably the most) ejective consonants, along with a lot of Labialization consonants in it. you did explain why it had the ejective ones, but I'm still curious about the Labialization.
I'd like to thank you for lots of your effort and dedication regarding this subject, my native language also belongs to the one of the indigenous Caucasus languages
a story.. a friend of mine did a singing workshop in Wales with 12 grandmothers from Bulgaria.. This was several decades ago when this was still quite an unusual thing to do.. None of the said Bulgarian singers spoke any English (or Welsh.. thought they may have found that easier..?) so they brought in tow someone from a near by village who spoke English.. She joined the group and translated.. Quite casually one evening in chatting my friends asked this lady if the songs they were learning were similar to the songs she knew from her part of Bulgaria.. Very matter-of-factly the lady replied..."Oh no.. My village has much bigger fields.." My friend cleared this up enough to make sure it was not a mere misunderstanding.. To the Bulgarian lady the size of the field one worked in had a huge influence on the types of songs (and one might assume sounds) one would make.. and they all lived happily ever after.. the end.. ;9)
Workers standing close to each other would presumably be more inclined to sing in unison than workers standing far enough apart that sound delay was noticeable, which I assume would make them favour call-and-response songs instead.
As always a very thought-provoking, intellectually adventurous video, Art-F-X! A few (non-)random observations: the presence of ejectives is not correlated to the absence of voiced plosives, but the explanatory hypotheses offered are more about why there should not be voiced plosives (or voiced sounds at all) at high altitudes, not why there should be ejectives. Many languages with ejectives also have voiced and unvoiced plosives and exhibit 3 way phonemic contrasts between them as meaningfully different sounds. In fact, vowels are generally the “voiciest” features of a phonetic system and the same languages that have ejectives often have rich vowel systems with contrasting long and short vowels (long vowels obviously requiring a lot of air to sustain compared to ejectives). Also, the clustering of ejectives as part of the phonetic inventory in languages of the west coast of North America does not correspond to a high altitude region (that is California, not the Rockies, where the cluster occurs). It is a feature of California languages, the majority of which were spoken at below 1,000m elevation. Sure there are some high altitude California languages (Washo, Sierra Miwok, the Maidu languages, Atsuwegi, Tubatubel) but most are not. More likely the clustering of ejectives was an areal feature in a region with many languages and frequent bilingualism, phonetic inventories of different unrelated languages began to resemble each other. The same happened in California with syntax as well. Another observation: it is a misconception that there are tonal and non-tonal languages. All languages exhibit intonation. The difference is whether intonation is associated with the lexicon or with syntax. So-called “tonal” languages are really just languages that fix intonation at the level of the lexicon (word formation) whereas non-tonal languages affix intonation syntactically at the level of the phrase/clause/sentence to express interrogation, negation, emotion or lexical emphasis. Tone fixed at the level of syntax is the reason why a Norwegian (for example) even when reproducing the phonetic sounds correctly for the pronunciation of every word in an English language utterance might still sound slightly “Norwegian” to an English listener. Even high altitude languages full of ejectives have clear tonal contours to a proper utterance. To illustrate, one can listen to recordings of native Washo speakers, and one of the first, most notorious features is the unique rise and collapse tonal rhythm to the language. On the other hand it is interesting that low elevation warm climate languages such as Bantu languages in central Africa, Tupian and Macro-Je languages in South America tend to have a bunch of voiced consonants (especially labial plosives and nasals... B and M) and fewer unvoiced plosives. Surely areal influence is not the whole story I would think.
This is so cool!!! I'd love to try making a conlang of my own, and have tried in the past, only to sort of get tied up. This is giving me ideas about what sounds a certain culture/race/species WOULD pronnounce. Is there any sort of conlang community that would help me in my thought process and give me advice? I've got a geographical location (mountains) and people/culture in mind (isolated, wary, secretive, but very communal/clan-ish) , and a sort of general idea of what I want it to sound like (somewhere between Latin and Slavic. Rolled Rs, "shh" sounds, other things I haven't decided on). I sort of want a secondary language as well, sort of like Silbo in the Spanish Canary Islands, that while I could never say it or write it, would be alluded to as a means of communication over long distances in the mountains.
Hey, native Topekan here. I was a little shocked when you mentioned us, but it's cool seeing someone else "beatbox" Topeka like I used to. Love the series!
+Απόστολος Τουλούπας it's a Kansa/Osage sentence that means something along the lines of, "A good place to dig potatoes." It's a reference to the Kaw River Valley where they would dig river potatoes.
This video gave me an idea. Imagine a world where People who speak more often such as narrators and such use more ejectives and a lower sonority and vice versa. As literate people are more likely going to be rich who will also read, act (using a script) and speak in public more often it would make sense to reduce the moisture loss so that your mouth doesn't dry out while speaking. For poor people this is the opposite. As they will live in crowded conditions the background noise will be louder (such as in marketplaces), it would make sense for them to speaker louder. Thoughts?
Cameo Shadowness Thanks, really appreciate it. However, this idea by no means is perfect but it could be representative of a city. For example: "You know you're in when the richer they are the softer they speak",
Someone needs to make a rap beat from the linguistic sound-y sounds you make over your Conlang series. Great video as always. Was surprised when you revealed Mountains altering speech wasn't about the languages on either side of said mountain.
Artifexian Unexpected surprised. Because obviously I was absolutely fuming that you dared say mountains altering speech wasn't about the languages either side. lol
Haha...sorry! I misinterpreted your original comment. Ugh...stupid Edgar. Oh, well no better way to finish off a day than by embarrassing yourself on the interweb! :P
Artifexian Of course! Good to know I can beat the man with 7000 subscribers and a pretty damn good knowledge of astronomy and language. Still, I don't make videos thousands of people want to see that take hours upon hours of research and voice acting and drawing, so who's the real winner here?
Ha, thanks. It's really weird to think that people actually watch these videos. Like it's nerd^3 up in here but still people want to watch. Mind blown!
I first suspected altitude might affect language when I heard those High German TZ PF sounds, wondering if these might carry better in the thin air. If I lived in an area where the land was frequently sloped, I might call across the distance to save myself the trouble of walking uphill to talk to someone.
Thank you for this video. I had heard about a couple of these studies and I wanted to partially follow them in my conlangs, but I wasn't exactly sure what the actual pressures involved were, which was a problem since my conlangs exist in fantasy settings that don't quite exist in the real world.
Fascinating stuff. It honestly makes a lot of sense, especially the link between sonority and warm climates, which I didn't know about. But like you said, correlation =/= causation. I'm not even sure how you''d go about testing that.
2:05 I recall reading that it may be more like the mountains prevent people from other lands from easily going into certain lands, allowing for language to be altered without interference. For example, in US English, I believe that there is a slight difference between how people speak east of the Appalachians vs how people speak west of the Appalachians.
The text at 6:00 is not from a constructed language : It is English written with the Elvish writing system, not Elvish. "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights..."
I would want to see whether these languages were related, and if so, that would explain a lot of the clustering of certain sounds. People groups tend to stay in one area if they can help it, and if not they tend to move to areas with similar climates and geography (for example people moving from one mountain range to another). Even if not, the fact that many of these languages are in close proximity to each other might suggest that certain sounds just drifted from one language to another so that they all shared those expletives and implosives. Just my take tho- what do you guys think?
Edgar, but what would you say about my people's language, Navajo? We speak an ejective, plosive language with five tones and we live in a semi arid high plateau region.
+stlouisramsfan03 I'd say awesome! And that the studies I mentioned in the video are not without their problems: many linguistics heavily criticise them. Even if they are true, I think there will always be some language somewhere that bucks the trend.
Interesting as far as the effect of temperature on languages! I remember Bill Cosby talking about going skiing and he had said "My face is frozen!" and his friend said "Why are you speaking with a German accent?"
It makes sense, some traditional society dwelling in highlands may include whistling sounds (which themselves are sometimes produced with assistance of fingers sticking into one's mouth) in their nominal phonology (just like clicks among Bushman societies, maybe). This could make your communication more effectively transmitted from mountain to mountain. And when you stop putting your fingers in your mouth (like quitting an outlandish habit), but still have the original noun's (adjacent) consonants reflect the sound when your fingers in, you produce the ejectives.
To combat the "kitchen sink" issue, i try to go low end to fit the brief. Before i start work on a conlang, i collect data on the fictional people who would speak it. Using this data, i create a phonetic range, and range from minimum number of vowels and consonants, to the upper comfortable limit, with the people in mind, and try to start the proto language with the low end, and work up progressively as what feels natural. This yields very distinct and interesting languages, and easy to learn at that. Ive never made a language with more than 30 phones, and i try to avoid doing so because even as a native speaker, languages like English are extremely difficult to keep track of the sounds if im tired or destracted.
So my conlang, Ikxeða, is a kitchen sink language? It has 43 characters (many of them diphtongs). Sounds are similar to Icelandic, Faroese, Czech, and Greenlandic combined. I guess I can back it up with the conpeople speaking it are in volcanic polar windy wrinkly landscape island group.
How do you even pronounce that language name? Btw, I've started a conlang with sounds based off french sounds, and another conlang based off latin/spanish, kinda like interlingua or esperanto.
Sonorous doesn't mean loud. Wikipedia says: In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/: approximants, nasals, flaps or taps, and most trills.
+Artifexian This isn't a linguistics question but a planetary question, specifically a p-system (I hope I got that right, I meant a system with two stars), instead of them orbiting in a venn diagram kind of fashion where they separately, could they potentially orbit on the same course in a singular circle opposite each other at the same speed?
That might be possible, but external forces, such as the gravitational pulls of planets, could possibly influence a star's path. Normally, I believe the smaller star orbits the larger star as though it was a part of the planetary system, such as in the case of Sirius A and B. I don't know why you would be asking an astrophysics question during a linguistic video, though.
As you say, whether or not this is true, it could prove to be invaluable for language creation! I am certainly going to keep this in mind going forward.
The last sentence made me laugh hard. The language I formerly intended to be build had "all" the sounds because I was shoving the ones in, my alien could produce. It's similar to having a human language use all humanly producible sounds... I stopped working on it because 1. it wasn't an important thing to be done and 2. it would've been a lot of work!
+JayFolipurba Off the top of my head, the closest example of real life kitchen sink language is Dahalo. Check it out...it's...em...busy! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahalo_language
They sure look... complex! But I think pronouncing many consonants is fun. A nice challenge for your cranium and tongue. My language was probably closer to Ubykh due to the mix of Asian and European consonants in them.
as a histirical linguist i may say that the actual secret of geographic impact onto languages is not in ejectives or other phonetic stuff, but in number of languages per sq.mile possible and the amount of contacts. e.g., in the vast central eurasian steppes we got only one bunch of turkic languages - kipchak turkic. while in the timy altai-khanggai mountanious region we have three diffrent turkic groups (tuvan, altai kizhi, khakassia), plus some kipchak languages plus some non-turkic languages gone extinct in the late 19th century (local kalmyk, 5 southern samoyedic idioms). with altitude as with same geograohic parameters (like temperature or humidity) it is always the same - the more isolateted settlements are possible, the more food people are able to grow, the bigger amount of languages there will be. altitude plays no role in grammatical, lexical ir ohonetic complexity. in fact there could easily be a huge number of rekatively simple languages (like kiribati or hawai'ian) situated only in the highest mountains, while the plains coul have been resettled with the newky migraited soeakers of some wild thing like scottish gaelige or georgian. or ithkuil/lojban even
Every unvoiced pulmonic consonant and vowel can technically be ejectivized, it's just that ejective sonorants are inaudible. I can implosivise all of them except for trills.
A bit of observation: I'm from Georgia, in Caucasus and we have quite a bit of ejectives and other kinds of "harsher" sounds. However the speech here is not homogeneous and the higher up in the mountains you go the harsher the speech gets in those dialects, for example they retain a consonant we don't use in the lowlands anymore [qʰ] (this is how it's transcribed in wiktionary, I'm not sure if this is a correct IPA representation). My suggestion is that these dialects retain more of archaic vocabulary/phonetics due to isolation, while the lowland speech gradually gets rid of the harsher sounds. The same may be true of other languages and language groups, where ejectives may have existed in the past but now are only present in the highlands.
"How does a Tyrolian say 'Innsbruck?' .. they say, Insbruckkkkkkkh" and "How does a Tyrolian say Banana? ….. they say Bananakkkkh" - common joke in Austria :D
I always prefer not to go down the linguisticly correct route when making a language... I recently discovered a way to get the sounds for a language; 1; choose an accent from the world 2; choose a language from the world Imagine the native speaker saying a sentence in an impression of one language with another accent e.g.: Welsh accent + Xhosa + Spoken by an elf = "meliQamilill ahm aXa" (Q & X representing /ǃ/ & /ǀ/) (ll representing /ɬ/) I then get the individual sounds m l Q ll h X e i a I then create words fron these sounds... Does anyone think that this is an at-least somewhat useful idea ???
I also have a problem when I base a language off of another one... my problem is that when I base my language off of another language I either go too far away from it and at this point I usually dislike my conlang or I go too close and my conlang ends up becoming a 1 to 1 translatable, mutually intelligible, language with the one that it was based on... more of a 'condialect' then a conlang... and at this point I usually give up making the conlang because I become too reliant on the other language and I just end up speaking a bizarre version of the other language... Is there a way to stop this ???
I also have another two problems; 1) I always find the sounds too quickly and I can never think of words 2) I can never ever think of any writing to show my languages... ¡Question Time! 1) How can I obtain words ??? 2) How can I create writing ??? 3) What should I do to stop overdoing ???
I also write my sounds out like this; Sound representation IPA Shown As E.g.: P B M T D N K G Ng p b m t d n k g ŋ p b m t d n k g " This, put more simply, is the sounds, the IPA representations of the sound and then how I will write them... I continue to use this until I create my writing Is this a good idea ???
One more wrinkle on the correlation between loudness of tone and average temperature: if you live in a cold region you probably get a lot of your food by hunting for it, and so probably want to communicate quietly. If you live in a warm place, specifically in proximity to the ocean, you probably beachcomb and fish for your food and so need to make yourself heard over the mother of all white noise generators, the sea.
+Alexander Roderick But tone has nothing to do with "loudness". Tones are basically a pitch difference in a vowel, not increased or decreased loudness.
Does this mean an ejective-only language could be used underwater? Would be cool to make a mini-lang made entirely of ejectives to go along with a mother language used by a culture that does a lot of diving for food. The mother tongue would pick up the ejectives as well, allowing children to be accustomed to the sounds before they ever take their first swim.
Stops are softer during the stop, but I would think [pʰ] is louder than [f] if you include the release. That doesn't affect tenuis stops very much, though.
Hmm... I feel like I made a bit of a mistake. I've only started trying to figure out how to construct a Conlang with the idea that the ones speaking it reside in a cold mountainous area, but the first sounds I was trying to choose seemed to be leaning in the opposite direction: voiced consonants indicating a warmer climate. Guess I need to go back to the drawing board. =)
Those are only theories you know, and there are exeptions anyway. You also can think about an explanation for this "strangeness", like foreign influence
Could the "bouba/kiki effect" be at play here? Perhaps the hard-sounding ejectives aline themselves well with the jagged peaks and pointy trees of mountain environments. Meanwhile, perhaps the rounded lakes, lagoons, sink holes and coiled snakes of your second map are better visualized using the more rounded voiced implosives? Something to chew on. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Silvo Gomero is linked to the geography of the Canary Islands. They use it to speak from long distances away, form one hill to the other. It probably wouldn't be as useful in a flat urban environment.
4:30 If it is hard to create tones in cold, dry climates, why are the major tonal languages in Western Europe Scandinavian? Granted, we do have a different kind of tone, covering more than one syllable.
For Avatar they did LOADS of really good world building And character development but never implemented it into the films Instead it just sat on the bookshelf gathering dust for decades!!!
Speaking of Everest, not many Ejectives in the Himalayas? Seems like a fairly conspicuous hole in the Mountain theory unless there's an interesting reason why that region would differ?
I'm not sure if Temperature effect if the language has Gutteral sounds or not because in The Netherlands and Germany it's cold and wet climate while in the Middle East it's hot and dry yet Dutch, German, and Arabic are all Gutteral language.
The proto-Semitic emphatics are usually reconstructed as ejectives. Are you suggesting, then, that the Semitic Urheimat was mountainous (in East Africa)?
I'm 4 years late, but I can take a stab at this (if anyone still cares). Assuming moisture retention is the major environmental pressure, I'd expect desert languages to favor ejectives, no phonemic tones, and low sonority, with fewer vowels used compared to consonants and more close vowels used compared to open vowels. Come to think of it, several languages in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East fit this general pattern. Aspirated consonants also seem to be fairly common in arid places around the world--of course, aspiration also shows up in many humid places, so who knows what the underlying principle is. Edit: D Sanders below also pointed out that clicks are non-pulmonic, like ejectives, and are used in many languages of the Kalahari Desert.
Maybe we're mixing up cause and effect, and in reality, beatboxing forms mountains.
apparently, the places in the world with the most lightning strikes per year (like Lake Maracaibo) are also the places where people try to keep syllabic structure as simple as possible. Maybe its the humidity and temperature. Beatboxing is complex and occurs in the least electric regions. Maybe beatboxers are compensating for something.
Most curious
Potentially an idea for part of a magic system there: earth bending incantations heavily feature ejectives.
I'd like but there are 420 likes soo
If so, post-beatbox mic drops could cause even more mic damage. Cuz, you know, dropping things off mountains.
So the stereotype that Northern Europeans find Southern Europeans loud might be the actual language at work.
Well, among British people, it's actually the northerners who are the loud and unsubtle ones.
Well if forests and mountains can cause reduced sonority, then I bet city blocks can do it too.
*laughs in Italian*
I speak Spanish and English
Spanish speakers tell me to speak up
English speakers tell me to not be as loud
Magnitogorsk
1:54 the big problem with that map is that there are simply more different languages in mountain regions, because they work as language islands (one different language in every valley). So one could make almost any language maps, regions like Caucasia will always have a lot of red dots.
Maybe it would have been better to make a map with the number of speakers than with the number of different languages.
Also, it doesn't seem to work well with historic languages.
so, multiple related and similar languages?
True, Ancient Chinese didn't have tones, and Ancient Korean didn't have ejectives.
@@Smin-f3hdid korean ever had ejectives
Linguistics and geography are some of my favorite subjects, I love every video you make! keep up the great work!
+Soupy Will do! Glad you enjoyed :)
/X/ and /x/ can be used to replace /k/
@TheMRB Not really true. Most of the Geography teachers I've had at school you'd expect them to like, be good with, or simply know alot about languages... however each was far from the truth.
As a Circassian from the Caucasus Mountains, I loved the shout out to the Kabardian language. I wish so badly to learn my mother tongue!
I'm am kinda curious... if you are an underwater creature, how would you design your language?
Maybe it'd be something like whale and dolphin talk
For me I'm thinking of using electrical signals generated by some kind of special organs, just like what the electrical eel uses as a means of communication. Maybe, the change in the wavelength of the alternating current could meant some thing, like a rapid pulse of short ones could mean danger.
+Artemis Toh I could also work with colour patterns (like cuttlefishes and squids).
How about vibrations? frequency and amplitude of vibration waves could be modified to represent different things.
+SwatTeamExit But wouldn't that affect how those creatures detect earthquakes, especially if there's a group/school of them talking with each other?
The example of Elvish at 6:06 is actually in English, just written with the tengwar elvish script.
Hard facts or not, that was highly interesting! I had never considered that location would affect language development. Definitely something to at least consider.
Looking forward to the next video!
+kalez238 Glad you enjoyed! I think when it comes to genre fiction these studies can be great tools, IRL, however, they are quite dubious.
Yeah, it sounds crazy at first but it seems obvious when you think about it
I'm working on a Conlang that uses music. Can you do anything on tones or tonal languages?
+Jon Michael Swift Possible video on this in the future. Stay tuned.
will do. thanks!
Tones (in tonal languages) are not actually the musical tones like: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and si. They are more like how high or low your voice is. Now you can create a musical conlang. (Actually, I was just watching a video about musical conlangs.) But they need musical tones rather than spoken tones in normal tonal languages. I hope you understand.
Yup, loud and clear. These last couple of weeks have been full of such discussions. One thing that's become clear to me is that musical conlang is an interesting challenge, but totally doable.
Have you seen David peterson’s one?
Would this be why most cold regions have throat singing too?
+buddyltd No idea...but fun fact, I thought myself to throat sing (to an extent) in college.
Wow. Tres impressive. I've tried my hand at it, but I suck pretty badly.
Can't say I'm any good at it or that I can control which overtones I produce...but I got the rudiments down. Check this girl out for help: she's AWESOME!
th-cam.com/channels/eQCa6v6qVkseKhgq5q-nzQ.html
buddyltd there's a good video i saw about a guy teaching how to do it. I can do it decently, which always freaks people out
@@Artifexian I always thought that was an instrument when I heard it in music.... Thanks for opening my eyes, its amazing! Hahah, sorry for replying to a three year old comment
"Lube up those vocal folds"
W-Why did you have to say it like that?
I made up a conglang in high school and I came up with a few ejective consonants and I had NO idea what they were in technical terms but thanks this video, now I do! :)
Can confirm on sonority and warm climates, here in Colombia coastal (and warm) regions have dialects in which people tend to greatly reduce obstruents, using mostly vowels and sonorants in their speech.
I have been looking for something like this for ages. My linguistics professors had all never heard of anything like geography impacting phonemic inventories.
I had a different theory before this video, and it seems like you predicted my theory - I always thought that languages in harsh climates like deserts, plains and mountains tended to be much harsher, constrictive and consonantal, whereas in forested and lush areas languages tended to be more melodic and breathy.
+SUM1 Could well be but always bare in mind, correlation does not imply causation.
+SUM1 "melodic" makes me think about tonal languages like cantonese, ancient greek or swedish... Which are very rarely found in forested and lush areas.
Highly consonantal languages seem to be often found in little communities, where language has less chances to be altered (more people = more simplifications of pronunciation over time), so more often in "savage" areas like savana (south Africa, Australia) and mountain (Caucasia).
But it's also true that the languages with less consonants are found in tropical forests. So I don't think there is a geographical logic here...
Napishtim That's not what I said. I meant by melodic, more vowel rich, less intrusive consonants. More melody, sinewaves.
+SUM1
Sinewaves?
If you spoke in sinewaves you'd only have one vowel...
Love it! Can't wait for the next language building video. For some reason, I really enjoy writing languages, but I'd like more detail on what I should use for grammar, and sounds. Keep up the GREAT work!
+NeonAutumn All will be covered eventually. I'm a sucker for detail so I like to take my time and really understand a topic before I speak about it. In the mean time I would suggest heading over /r/conlangs on reddit. This a great community of language creators and I'm sure you'll find lots of interesting grammar/sound related things over there. Well worth checking out.
+Artifexian Thank you, I may have not responded...but I haven't stopped loving your channel! Thanks again!
I have to say I much more enjoy your language videos, as I have a nearly over-infatuation with words, but I also find that learning the legitimate, scientific methods to building a whole planet and solar system is incredibly useful when writing works of fiction, as I am known to do.
Could it be that the clustering could be simply explained by the fact that languages in close proximity are more likely to be related, or to share sounds like explained in your clicking video? I'm not a linguist, but that could at least be an alternate explanation.
+Adam 9812 That would certainly be a good filter to use when testing these hypotheses: don't look at all languages, only represenative ones (e.g. take a representative one from each language subfamily, or look at related languages in a much smaller area: obviously any language that is descended from Middle Chinese is going to be tonal, but how tonal are the various Sino-Tibetan languages, and have any of them in colder areas lost some of their tones?.... questions like these help you narrow things down and get closer to the truth. Unfortunately we can't test linguistic hypotheses in the same way as we test mathematical or chemical ones because we are reliant on observation of the real world rather than controlled experiments. Linguistics will move forward in leaps and bounds when realistic human AI can be simulated by a computer, and we can run models of linguistic hypotheses as experiments.
to me as a linguist, these things seem to be connected together. some languages may have developed these sounds as a result of the process in the video, other languages could catch them... although it is often difficult for languages in the mountains to influence each other, because it is harder to move from one settlement to another. many languages in mountainous regions change much slower than those in the plains because people can travel much easier when there's no mountains :) in the Caucasus, for example, there are languages/dialects that are unique to a certain village.
however I still think it can be a valid explanation.
But the point is that the concentrations of these different languages are in mountainous regions. if it were only one cluster that happened to be in a mountainous region then yeah the correlation wouldn't mean much. But what is significant is the fact that the vast majority of those languages, and the biggest clusters of them, are in mountainous areas.
Yeah. Five out of 6 mountainous regions is a LOT!
The point is the mountains of Asia, Africa, and South America aren’t next to each other...
Creative constrains are so helpful! Thank you for describing these.
Okay, I give up. Ejectives? Ok, I can sort of do this. But those implosive things? No way.
You just gulp while you pronounce a normal plosive. The easiest one is the bilabial plosive which is like a /b/ with a gulp.
Its simple! Just build pressure in your throat by blocking it with your tonge,suck some air,and put the tonge in the correct place of articulation,and then release the pressure and suck some air in,and voilà!
I dont know to.make them
So, from what I can tell, an implosive is basically a voiced click. For example, a /ɓ/ can be written as a [ʘ̬] and a /ʘ/ can be written as a [ɓ̥], presuming that you a). have forgotten how the IPA works, b). really want to piss off a phonetician, c). have a burning hatred for broad phonemic transcriptions, or d). are responding to a three-year-old TH-cam comment.
Extravagant Sobriquet its easy
Backwards ejective
Adyghe language does have a lot( probably the most) ejective consonants, along with a lot of Labialization consonants in it. you did explain why it had the ejective ones, but I'm still curious about the Labialization.
I'd like to thank you for lots of your effort and dedication regarding this subject, my native language also belongs to the one of the indigenous Caucasus languages
a story..
a friend of mine did a singing workshop in Wales with 12 grandmothers from Bulgaria..
This was several decades ago when this was still quite an unusual thing to do..
None of the said Bulgarian singers spoke any English (or Welsh.. thought they may have found that easier..?) so they brought in tow someone from a near by village who spoke English.. She joined the group and translated..
Quite casually one evening in chatting my friends asked this lady if the songs they were learning were similar to the songs she knew from her part of Bulgaria..
Very matter-of-factly the lady replied..."Oh no.. My village has much bigger fields.."
My friend cleared this up enough to make sure it was not a mere misunderstanding..
To the Bulgarian lady the size of the field one worked in had a huge influence on the types of songs (and one might assume sounds) one would make..
and they all lived happily ever after.. the end.. ;9)
Workers standing close to each other would presumably be more inclined to sing in unison than workers standing far enough apart that sound delay was noticeable, which I assume would make them favour call-and-response songs instead.
As always a very thought-provoking, intellectually adventurous video, Art-F-X! A few (non-)random observations: the presence of ejectives is not correlated to the absence of voiced plosives, but the explanatory hypotheses offered are more about why there should not be voiced plosives (or voiced sounds at all) at high altitudes, not why there should be ejectives. Many languages with ejectives also have voiced and unvoiced plosives and exhibit 3 way phonemic contrasts between them as meaningfully different sounds. In fact, vowels are generally the “voiciest” features of a phonetic system and the same languages that have ejectives often have rich vowel systems with contrasting long and short vowels (long vowels obviously requiring a lot of air to sustain compared to ejectives). Also, the clustering of ejectives as part of the phonetic inventory in languages of the west coast of North America does not correspond to a high altitude region (that is California, not the Rockies, where the cluster occurs). It is a feature of California languages, the majority of which were spoken at below 1,000m elevation. Sure there are some high altitude California languages (Washo, Sierra Miwok, the Maidu languages, Atsuwegi, Tubatubel) but most are not. More likely the clustering of ejectives was an areal feature in a region with many languages and frequent bilingualism, phonetic inventories of different unrelated languages began to resemble each other. The same happened in California with syntax as well. Another observation: it is a misconception that there are tonal and non-tonal languages. All languages exhibit intonation. The difference is whether intonation is associated with the lexicon or with syntax. So-called “tonal” languages are really just languages that fix intonation at the level of the lexicon (word formation) whereas non-tonal languages affix intonation syntactically at the level of the phrase/clause/sentence to express interrogation, negation, emotion or lexical emphasis. Tone fixed at the level of syntax is the reason why a Norwegian (for example) even when reproducing the phonetic sounds correctly for the pronunciation of every word in an English language utterance might still sound slightly “Norwegian” to an English listener. Even high altitude languages full of ejectives have clear tonal contours to a proper utterance. To illustrate, one can listen to recordings of native Washo speakers, and one of the first, most notorious features is the unique rise and collapse tonal rhythm to the language. On the other hand it is interesting that low elevation warm climate languages such as Bantu languages in central Africa, Tupian and Macro-Je languages in South America tend to have a bunch of voiced consonants (especially labial plosives and nasals... B and M) and fewer unvoiced plosives. Surely areal influence is not the whole story I would think.
This is so cool!!! I'd love to try making a conlang of my own, and have tried in the past, only to sort of get tied up.
This is giving me ideas about what sounds a certain culture/race/species WOULD pronnounce. Is there any sort of conlang community that would help me in my thought process and give me advice?
I've got a geographical location (mountains) and people/culture in mind (isolated, wary, secretive, but very communal/clan-ish) , and a sort of general idea of what I want it to sound like (somewhere between Latin and Slavic. Rolled Rs, "shh" sounds, other things I haven't decided on).
I sort of want a secondary language as well, sort of like Silbo in the Spanish Canary Islands, that while I could never say it or write it, would be alluded to as a means of communication over long distances in the mountains.
No, it isn't too nerdy. Tell us everything please :D
Hey, native Topekan here. I was a little shocked when you mentioned us, but it's cool seeing someone else "beatbox" Topeka like I used to. Love the series!
Wow that's fascinating! Does the name Topeka come from an Indian language?
+Απόστολος Τουλούπας it's a Kansa/Osage sentence that means something along the lines of, "A good place to dig potatoes." It's a reference to the Kaw River Valley where they would dig river potatoes.
0:24 “The art of physically assaulting vegetables”
Fascinating video. I'd never considered these factors.
+TF8ase Thanks for watching, TF8ase. Glad you got something out of my nerdy digressions. :)
"Glug a D"
Am I immature yet?
+um hi Well, no need to overcompensate. Your profile picture speaks for itself.
"lube up those vocal folds"
Is that Terrible Writing Advice's face on Spongebob?
I don't understand (I'm foreing, is this some national
thing?)
@@cosmopoiesecriandomundos7446 Type D into urbandictionary, you will understand it very shortly.
When at high altitudes, to combat altitude sickness it's equally important to keep regular breathing as it is to limit water vapour in exhalation
This video gave me an idea. Imagine a world where People who speak more often such as narrators and such use more ejectives and a lower sonority and vice versa. As literate people are more likely going to be rich who will also read, act (using a script) and speak in public more often it would make sense to reduce the moisture loss so that your mouth doesn't dry out while speaking. For poor people this is the opposite. As they will live in crowded conditions the background noise will be louder (such as in marketplaces), it would make sense for them to speaker louder. Thoughts?
Sounds reasonable but the public speakers may also have to speak loudly due to (maybe) having to speak to a crowd... Just my 2 bits on your comment.
Cameo Shadowness Thanks, really appreciate it. However, this idea by no means is perfect but it could be representative of a city. For example: "You know you're in when the richer they are the softer they speak",
+CODENAME: I.T.S.J.U.S.T.U.H.G.A.M.E
Hm.. I can see that...
***** Nice. Really Nice and thank you for taking the time write something in such detail.
I had to subscribe to this channel, hope you are still making videos.
Someone needs to make a rap beat from the linguistic sound-y sounds you make over your Conlang series.
Great video as always. Was surprised when you revealed Mountains altering speech wasn't about the languages on either side of said mountain.
+Lelouch Lamperouge Lamperouge Like good surprised or bad surprised?
Artifexian
Unexpected surprised.
Because obviously I was absolutely fuming that you dared say mountains altering speech wasn't about the languages either side.
lol
Haha...sorry! I misinterpreted your original comment. Ugh...stupid Edgar. Oh, well no better way to finish off a day than by embarrassing yourself on the interweb! :P
Artifexian
Of course! Good to know I can beat the man with 7000 subscribers and a pretty damn good knowledge of astronomy and language.
Still, I don't make videos thousands of people want to see that take hours upon hours of research and voice acting and drawing, so who's the real winner here?
Ha, thanks. It's really weird to think that people actually watch these videos. Like it's nerd^3 up in here but still people want to watch. Mind blown!
I first suspected altitude might affect language when I heard those High German TZ PF sounds, wondering if these might carry better in the thin air. If I lived in an area where the land was frequently sloped, I might call across the distance to save myself the trouble of walking uphill to talk to someone.
This is super useful for me! Thanks!
Thank you for this video. I had heard about a couple of these studies and I wanted to partially follow them in my conlangs, but I wasn't exactly sure what the actual pressures involved were, which was a problem since my conlangs exist in fantasy settings that don't quite exist in the real world.
Why the hell doesn't this channel have more views!?!?
I'M FROM TOPEKA AND THIS KANSAS NATIONALIST IS PROUD HIS GREAT STATE'S CAPITAL GOT MENTIONED!
Fascinating stuff. It honestly makes a lot of sense, especially the link between sonority and warm climates, which I didn't know about. But like you said, correlation =/= causation. I'm not even sure how you''d go about testing that.
2:05 I recall reading that it may be more like the mountains prevent people from other lands from easily going into certain lands, allowing for language to be altered without interference. For example, in US English, I believe that there is a slight difference between how people speak east of the Appalachians vs how people speak west of the Appalachians.
This might explain why greek is one of the few european languages where the letter e isn't the most common letter in script.
+BC Fridays Script "e" doesn't mean pronounced "e" in most of European languages. Look at english or french for example.
Napishtim Actually, The letter e in greek only makes one sound sound in greek while the letter a makes two.
Great video man!! I've always think this thing about languages!! :D
+simone uzbazur Thanks, Simone. Glad you enjoyed :)
Artifexian
You're welcome! :D
The text at 6:00 is not from a constructed language : It is English written with the Elvish writing system, not Elvish. "All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights..."
I would want to see whether these languages were related, and if so, that would explain a lot of the clustering of certain sounds. People groups tend to stay in one area if they can help it, and if not they tend to move to areas with similar climates and geography (for example people moving from one mountain range to another). Even if not, the fact that many of these languages are in close proximity to each other might suggest that certain sounds just drifted from one language to another so that they all shared those expletives and implosives. Just my take tho- what do you guys think?
This channel is like cocaine, but for TH-cam. I want more! More!!
+Michael Winter Like cocaine only good for the brain!
+Michael Winter ikr. This is wonderful!!
As a native Kansan, your pronunciation of Topeka is pretty far into the uncanny valley of familiarity and strange
Edgar, but what would you say about my people's language, Navajo? We speak an ejective, plosive language with five tones and we live in a semi arid high plateau region.
+stlouisramsfan03 I'd say awesome! And that the studies I mentioned in the video are not without their problems: many linguistics heavily criticise them. Even if they are true, I think there will always be some language somewhere that bucks the trend.
Ah, okay haha. I speak an Athabaskan language which is why I ask but our northern cousins they live in Canada where it is obviously moist and cool.
@@stlouisramsfan03 Na-Dene languages do tend to have ejectives
Interesting as far as the effect of temperature on languages! I remember Bill Cosby talking about going skiing and he had said "My face is frozen!" and his friend said "Why are you speaking with a German accent?"
1:21 Is that the Mercator Projection? I'm Trigger 😤
YOUR VIDEOS ARE SO GOOD OMG
0:22 did anyone else literally laugh out loud at that?
I am so happy this channel is no longer crygenically frozen!
+Artifexian Mind explaining what you don't like about Avatar? I'm just wondering as I am with you on the language part
It makes sense, some traditional society dwelling in highlands may include whistling sounds (which themselves are sometimes produced with assistance of fingers sticking into one's mouth) in their nominal phonology (just like clicks among Bushman societies, maybe). This could make your communication more effectively transmitted from mountain to mountain. And when you stop putting your fingers in your mouth (like quitting an outlandish habit), but still have the original noun's (adjacent) consonants reflect the sound when your fingers in, you produce the ejectives.
To combat the "kitchen sink" issue, i try to go low end to fit the brief. Before i start work on a conlang, i collect data on the fictional people who would speak it. Using this data, i create a phonetic range, and range from minimum number of vowels and consonants, to the upper comfortable limit, with the people in mind, and try to start the proto language with the low end, and work up progressively as what feels natural. This yields very distinct and interesting languages, and easy to learn at that. Ive never made a language with more than 30 phones, and i try to avoid doing so because even as a native speaker, languages like English are extremely difficult to keep track of the sounds if im tired or destracted.
Who else noticed the dial that goes all the way up to 11 :D
3:17
That was possibly the harshest rip on avatar and it was delivered in a single sentence.
If tonal languages was bred from hot areas then why isnt Austronesian languages tonal?? They're literally from a humid tropical climate
3:52 lol, I have synesthesia and I always thought that "i" was a cold sound.
So does hearing it make you cold?
@@alexandertownsend3291 no, the sound is cold-like. I don't think you'll get what I mean without having synesthesia
@@cosmopoiesecriandomundos7446 Oksy fair enough
So my conlang, Ikxeða, is a kitchen sink language? It has 43 characters (many of them diphtongs).
Sounds are similar to Icelandic, Faroese, Czech, and Greenlandic combined. I guess I can back it up with the conpeople speaking it are in volcanic polar windy wrinkly landscape island group.
How do you even pronounce that language name?
Btw, I've started a conlang with sounds based off french sounds, and another conlang based off latin/spanish, kinda like interlingua or esperanto.
I love this video and wish I could make videos like this myself. I enjoy this Chanel
Sonorous doesn't mean loud. Wikipedia says:
In phonetics and phonology, a sonorant or resonant is a speech sound that is produced with continuous, non-turbulent airflow in the vocal tract; these are the manners of articulation that are most often voiced in the world's languages. Vowels are sonorants, as are consonants like /m/ and /l/: approximants, nasals, flaps or taps, and most trills.
+Artifexian
This isn't a linguistics question but a planetary question, specifically a p-system (I hope I got that right, I meant a system with two stars), instead of them orbiting in a venn diagram kind of fashion where they separately, could they potentially orbit on the same course in a singular circle opposite each other at the same speed?
*orbit separately
+drawthings555 I don't think this is possible. They will always orbit their common centre of mass. Sorry :(
+Artifexian oh well
That might be possible, but external forces, such as the gravitational pulls of planets, could possibly influence a star's path. Normally, I believe the smaller star orbits the larger star as though it was a part of the planetary system, such as in the case of Sirius A and B. I don't know why you would be asking an astrophysics question during a linguistic video, though.
1:44 No, Korean doesn't have ejectives
If I'm doing it properly, the uvular plosive ejective sounds awesome. All ejectives sound awesome, but especially that.
As you say, whether or not this is true, it could prove to be invaluable for language creation! I am certainly going to keep this in mind going forward.
I made a language where the people don't have lips so they can't say sounds like "F" or "B"
As a poststructuralist, I believe that it's language which forms the mountains.
The last sentence made me laugh hard. The language I formerly intended to be build had "all" the sounds because I was shoving the ones in, my alien could produce. It's similar to having a human language use all humanly producible sounds... I stopped working on it because 1. it wasn't an important thing to be done and 2. it would've been a lot of work!
+JayFolipurba Off the top of my head, the closest example of real life kitchen sink language is Dahalo. Check it out...it's...em...busy!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dahalo_language
+Artifexian Ubykh.
+David Kirby Very true!
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubykh_phonology
They sure look... complex! But I think pronouncing many consonants is fun. A nice challenge for your cranium and tongue. My language was probably closer to Ubykh due to the mix of Asian and European consonants in them.
3:35
I spent several hours learning that at school (and I already knew). Thanks for reminding me of my terrible maths teacher.
For anyone curious, digasyric and stylohyoid are names of jaw muscles.
as a histirical linguist i may say that the actual secret of geographic impact onto languages is not in ejectives or other phonetic stuff, but in number of languages per sq.mile possible and the amount of contacts. e.g., in the vast central eurasian steppes we got only one bunch of turkic languages - kipchak turkic. while in the timy altai-khanggai mountanious region we have three diffrent turkic groups (tuvan, altai kizhi, khakassia), plus some kipchak languages plus some non-turkic languages gone extinct in the late 19th century (local kalmyk, 5 southern samoyedic idioms).
with altitude as with same geograohic parameters (like temperature or humidity) it is always the same - the more isolateted settlements are possible, the more food people are able to grow, the bigger amount of languages there will be.
altitude plays no role in grammatical, lexical ir ohonetic complexity. in fact there could easily be a huge number of rekatively simple languages (like kiribati or hawai'ian) situated only in the highest mountains, while the plains coul have been resettled with the newky migraited soeakers of some wild thing like scottish gaelige or georgian. or ithkuil/lojban even
You for got the frog feeling that sounds like a heartbeat in beatboxing..
How come I haven't come across this channel before?!
Every unvoiced pulmonic consonant and vowel can technically be ejectivized, it's just that ejective sonorants are inaudible. I can implosivise all of them except for trills.
A bit of observation: I'm from Georgia, in Caucasus and we have quite a bit of ejectives and other kinds of "harsher" sounds. However the speech here is not homogeneous and the higher up in the mountains you go the harsher the speech gets in those dialects, for example they retain a consonant we don't use in the lowlands anymore [qʰ] (this is how it's transcribed in wiktionary, I'm not sure if this is a correct IPA representation). My suggestion is that these dialects retain more of archaic vocabulary/phonetics due to isolation, while the lowland speech gradually gets rid of the harsher sounds. The same may be true of other languages and language groups, where ejectives may have existed in the past but now are only present in the highlands.
Yes. Here in Norway, where mountains made travel between even close villages hard, and has almost more dialect differences than people...
Deserves a like just for that swipe at Avatar
"How does a Tyrolian say 'Innsbruck?' .. they say, Insbruckkkkkkkh"
and "How does a Tyrolian say Banana? ….. they say Bananakkkkh"
- common joke in Austria :D
this made me think of a language that sounds like beatboxing
I always prefer not to go down the linguisticly correct route when making a language... I recently discovered a way to get the sounds for a language;
1; choose an accent from the world
2; choose a language from the world
Imagine the native speaker saying a sentence in an impression of one language with another accent
e.g.: Welsh accent + Xhosa + Spoken by an elf = "meliQamilill ahm aXa"
(Q & X representing /ǃ/ & /ǀ/)
(ll representing /ɬ/)
I then get the individual sounds
m l Q ll h X
e i a
I then create words fron these sounds...
Does anyone think that this is an at-least somewhat useful idea ???
I also have a problem when I base a language off of another one... my problem is that when I base my language off of another language I either go too far away from it and at this point I usually dislike my conlang or I go too close and my conlang ends up becoming a 1 to 1 translatable, mutually intelligible, language with the one that it was based on... more of a 'condialect' then a conlang... and at this point I usually give up making the conlang because I become too reliant on the other language and I just end up speaking a bizarre version of the other language...
Is there a way to stop this ???
I also have another two problems;
1) I always find the sounds too quickly and I can never think of words
2) I can never ever think of any writing to show my languages...
¡Question Time!
1) How can I obtain words ???
2) How can I create writing ???
3) What should I do to stop overdoing ???
I also write my sounds out like this;
Sound representation
IPA
Shown As
E.g.:
P B M T D N K G Ng
p b m t d n k g ŋ
p b m t d n k g "
This, put more simply, is the sounds, the IPA representations of the sound and then how I will write them...
I continue to use this until I create my writing
Is this a good idea ???
One more wrinkle on the correlation between loudness of tone and average temperature: if you live in a cold region you probably get a lot of your food by hunting for it, and so probably want to communicate quietly. If you live in a warm place, specifically in proximity to the ocean, you probably beachcomb and fish for your food and so need to make yourself heard over the mother of all white noise generators, the sea.
+Alexander Roderick But tone has nothing to do with "loudness". Tones are basically a pitch difference in a vowel, not increased or decreased loudness.
Does this mean an ejective-only language could be used underwater? Would be cool to make a mini-lang made entirely of ejectives to go along with a mother language used by a culture that does a lot of diving for food. The mother tongue would pick up the ejectives as well, allowing children to be accustomed to the sounds before they ever take their first swim.
I immediately recognized the lone language on the Indian subcontinent with voiced implosives as none other than Sindhi.
That's cool! Is Sindhi the only Indo-European language to have implosive sounds?
Stops are softer during the stop, but I would think [pʰ] is louder than [f] if you include the release. That doesn't affect tenuis stops very much, though.
Hmm... I feel like I made a bit of a mistake. I've only started trying to figure out how to construct a Conlang with the idea that the ones speaking it reside in a cold mountainous area, but the first sounds I was trying to choose seemed to be leaning in the opposite direction: voiced consonants indicating a warmer climate. Guess I need to go back to the drawing board. =)
Those are only theories you know, and there are exeptions anyway. You also can think about an explanation for this "strangeness", like foreign influence
Could the "bouba/kiki effect" be at play here? Perhaps the hard-sounding ejectives aline themselves well with the jagged peaks and pointy trees of mountain environments. Meanwhile, perhaps the rounded lakes, lagoons, sink holes and coiled snakes of your second map are better visualized using the more rounded voiced implosives? Something to chew on. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bouba/kiki_effect
Hrm. Fascinating. But I wonder why languages from the Himalayas don't possess ejective slime other language that developed in montane climes.
Silvo Gomero is linked to the geography of the Canary Islands.
They use it to speak from long distances away, form one hill to the other. It probably wouldn't be as useful in a flat urban environment.
4:40 This only may be true for certain dialects of these languages, but I recall reading that Swedish and Danish are tonal languages.
In Sweden we have a general trend that the further north you go, the fewer vowels are used. It's a very tall country.
4:30 If it is hard to create tones in cold, dry climates, why are the major tonal languages in Western Europe Scandinavian? Granted, we do have a different kind of tone, covering more than one syllable.
pitch is different from tone. Somewhat similar but different.
If tonal languages can't exist in cold climates, why are there Chinese classes in NJ schools?
1:50
What about the Himalayas?
5 out of the 6
For Avatar they did LOADS of really good world building And character development but never implemented it into the films
Instead it just sat on the bookshelf gathering dust for decades!!!
Great video!
Speaking of Everest, not many Ejectives in the Himalayas? Seems like a fairly conspicuous hole in the Mountain theory unless there's an interesting reason why that region would differ?
I'm not sure if Temperature effect if the language has Gutteral sounds or not because in The Netherlands and Germany it's cold and wet climate while in the Middle East it's hot and dry yet Dutch, German, and Arabic are all Gutteral language.
that boggles my mind too
The proto-Semitic emphatics are usually reconstructed as ejectives. Are you suggesting, then, that the Semitic Urheimat was mountainous (in East Africa)?
Can you talk about how living in arid/desert areas affect speech? How does the air and moisture level there affect it for instance?
I'm 4 years late, but I can take a stab at this (if anyone still cares). Assuming moisture retention is the major environmental pressure, I'd expect desert languages to favor ejectives, no phonemic tones, and low sonority, with fewer vowels used compared to consonants and more close vowels used compared to open vowels. Come to think of it, several languages in the deserts of North Africa and the Middle East fit this general pattern. Aspirated consonants also seem to be fairly common in arid places around the world--of course, aspiration also shows up in many humid places, so who knows what the underlying principle is.
Edit: D Sanders below also pointed out that clicks are non-pulmonic, like ejectives, and are used in many languages of the Kalahari Desert.
"Beet boxing" lol! That took me a while to figure...