What do ancient languages sound like when?spoken?
The Sound of Ancient Languages very Nostalgic
The phonetic differences among ancient languages were just as significant as they are nowadays. Thus it is impossible to give you a proper answer. We can study the particular evolution and archaic forms of one specific language and then make a comparison between the way the modern tongue sounds and the archaic version of it probably sounded (we will never know for sure, but we can at least make a very good — even if flawed — guess). Even so, if we are able to reconstruct the main phonological characteristics of an ancient language, the way those phonemes were actually pronounced varies a lot in the details (but those details may change the way the language “feels” to us moderns, who don’t speak it). Even worse is the fact that, since there are no native speakers of those languages, any attempt to reproduce the sounds of that ancient language, which are already just a likely and substantiated estimate, is inevitably marred by a foreign accent — and we can’t be able to tell whether that accent is strong or weak, because we don’t know exactly how the native speakers pronounced their sentences. Thus, if we could go back in time and speak that language using our modern understanding of how it might’ve sounded, the natives would probably laugh at us for our funny accents and mistaken words, but they would at least recognize that those sentences are — somewhat — spoken in their language, or at least a language/dialect quite similar to it. I myself have made my own attempts to speak a very ancient language without any written documents and totally reconstructed by linguists, which is Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The real PIE was probably a bit different, and my pronunciation is certainly very flawed, but I felt I had to try it because all the other attempts at speaking PIE that I heard sounded extremely unnatural and were, in my opinion, completely discredited by one of these reasons: too obviously English accent, with little effort to depict an entirely different phonological system; a “scary old shaman speaking, or rather whispering menaciously inside an echoing cave” tone; or the kind of accent that I can only call “trying to make the language sound unworldly and exotic, but ultimately sounding like you were choking, gargling and hiccuping”. These are my attempts at Proto-Indo-European, so you can at least have a very vague notion of how one particular language spoken 5,000 to 6,000 years ago sounded. But of course there must’ve been thousands of completely different languages then.
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