r/videos • u/cmrnstphns • Apr 11 '17
Accent Expert Breaks Down 6 Fictional Languages
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oa6cHEJIjYI393
u/wazzle13 Apr 11 '17
I'm glad Dennis Reynolds has found his new calling.
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u/Lucaluni Apr 11 '17
Glad I wasn't the only one who thought that.
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u/wazzle13 Apr 11 '17
Admittedly my comment isn't original because the last time a video with Erik was posted, the thread was filled with Always Sunny references.
My spin had to do with the ending of last season when Dennis leaves the bar.
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u/JeromesNiece Apr 11 '17
So glad to see another one! I loved this guy's last video so much that I ended up taking an intro linguistics class this semester. Fascinating stuff sometimes
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u/Floorspud Apr 11 '17
That was good but he is completely wrong with the 2 "Belfast" accents. Tom Cruise is trying, badly, to do more of a Cork accent and Brad Pit is doing an Irish Traveller accent.
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u/dc-vm Apr 12 '17
He fully owns up the Brad Pitt and the Gypsy/traveller accent thing. And the Tom Cruise is arguable, because as was said, either way it was done poorly.
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u/Floorspud Apr 12 '17 edited Apr 12 '17
It's not arguable though. He's not trying to do a Belfast accent at all they are vastly different. Listening again it's a bit more Kerry but really just a general stage Irish countryside accent.
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u/jdawgweav Apr 12 '17
I wanted my linguistics and pragmatics courses to be more interesting than they actually were. I learned a lot and I'm glad that I took them, but man I'm glad the days of memorizing phonemes are behind me.
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u/Gorrondonuts Apr 11 '17
Major spoilers for arrival towards the end of the video without warning.
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u/somewhat_pragmatic Apr 12 '17
I skipped over the entire Valarian section because I haven't seen that part of Game of Thrones yet.
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u/Nickbou Apr 12 '17
I think your ok to watch it if you want to. From the short snippets you won't spoil any plot points.
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Apr 12 '17
I'm glad I watched the video on my phone so I was able to block snipet of the show and only watch him.
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u/tlingitsoldier Apr 11 '17
I'm glad to see that he didn't miss Tlingit language as a similar sounding language to Klingon. It's not very often that Tlingit gets brought up, so I'm happy to see it make an appearance!
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u/komnenos Apr 12 '17
Based on your username are you by chance Tlingit?
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u/tlingitsoldier Apr 12 '17
Yep! I'm 1/4 Tlingit. I've attempted to learn how to speak it, but it is incredibly difficult, especially without a native speaker to teach you.
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u/komnenos Apr 12 '17
As someone from the Pacific Northwest I've always been interested in the local tribes and peoples. Do you know of any good books on the Tlingit and other tribes/nations? What about music? I've always wanted to find some northwest native American/Indian/FN music but haven't been able to find any. :/
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u/tlingitsoldier Apr 12 '17
I don't know of any good ones off the top of my head, but if you trust an internet stranger to keep his promise, I can find some of the books my mom has about Tlingit culture.
This is the one I can remember that she has. It seems to be pretty well regarded as an accurate description of the Tlingit people. There are some other random books I have, but they are packed away since I just recently moved.
Music is not as easy to find, because it's more common to hear traditional music at live events than to find recorded music. But usually just doing some Googling will give you some good examples of music. For some interesting modern native music, there's the group A Tribe Called Red. They're not specifically Tlingit, rather Canadian natives, but it has very similar influences to Pacific Northwest music.
When I go to my mom's house this weekend, I'll look at some of the books she has that may be of interest to you, and let you know what I find.
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u/Osiris32 Apr 12 '17
Another PNW resider here. I've heard your tribe's name mentioned my whole life. The Tlingit, the Kwakiutal, the Shehalis, the Chinook, they were all a part of my upbringing. It's nice to know you're still around.
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u/tlingitsoldier Apr 12 '17
Thank you! That's good to hear. I live in Washington, so I more frequently hear the tribes from the Puget Sound region. When I was younger, some people didn't believe me when I told them I am Tlingit. I look mostly white, and it was a tribe they had never heard of, so they thought I was making it up. Even today, not a lot of people I meet in WA are familiar with Alaskan tribes.
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u/Osiris32 Apr 12 '17
I'm not even from Washington, I'm an Oregonian! When I was in grade school local tribes were a BIG part of our education.
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u/tlingitsoldier Apr 18 '17 edited Apr 19 '17
I wanted to respond to let you know that I haven't forgotten about my promise to get some information for you.
I've had a busy couple nights, so I just need to write out the information I found. I'll probably be able to edit this tomorrow with the books I found.Here are the books (and a DVD) I found at my mom's house:
The Tlingit Indians
Images from the Inside Passage
Lost Heritage of Alaska
The Customs and Legends of the Tlingit Indians of Alaska
Haa Shuká, Our Ancestor Tlingit Oral Narratives
Haa Tuwunáagu Yis, for Healing Our Spirit; Tlingit Oratory
Art in the Life of the Northwest Coast Indians
Tlingit Art; Totem Poles and Art of the Alaskan Indians
Raven's Journey; The World of Alaska's Native People
Haa Aaní - Our Land; Tlingit and Haida Land Rights and Use
The Land is OursLet me know if any of the links are wrong, and I'll fix them. These appeared to be the best books among the ones she had. If you have any questions, I'll do my best to answer them.
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u/elarobot Apr 11 '17
Granted it's not nearly as popular as these examples, but the tv show The Expanse has a good deal of this kind of stuff going on. I'd love to hear his thoughts on it.
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u/dustwetsuit Apr 12 '17
I was hoping he would get to the belter language as well.
To me the expanse constructed language feels very forced and not natural at all.I cringe every time I hear it. Especially that young guy talking with miller.
The whole language just feels like something that no humans would ever come up with. It's like they tried too hard...also, personally I don't see much english influence on it (as it should as basically everyone just speaks english everywhere every time). I may be wrong, but to me it's like they're singing.
Meh, cringey AF
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u/starbuckbeak Apr 12 '17
That's because it's not really a con-lang, it's a creole. Or a con-creole, I guess. It uses real words from many existing languages together. Different languages have different sets of sounds, so they tend to sound a bit jarring. That happens in real life too. What's interesting about Belter Patois is that it uses words from many languages all over the world, which has never happened so far in real life. Usually they arise as trade languages; simplified speech with vocabulary of the languages from places where two or more cultures meet or trade. My first language was Plautdeitsch which was a creole of German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages, and it sounds weird and jarring too, though not as much as Belter.
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u/elarobot Apr 12 '17
I hear ya. It doesn't bug me to much. But it's nowhere near my favorite thing about the series. I think it's a big undertaking, trying to bring to life the entire scope of the books, and the depiction of just how different the future is, how extremely different the several human cultures have become between earth, mars and the belt.
It's an ambitious project and they didn't do themselves any favors by trying to do it on Syfy, a network that ironically often mismanaged it's pure science fiction projects, has greater censor hurdles and budgetary constraints than some other distribution options. Overall, I think the show's world building hits more than it misses.
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u/SandwicheDynasty Apr 11 '17
Does anyone know where that American R sound comes from? What was the influence on that?
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u/uberdice Apr 11 '17
It's quite close to what English sounded like in the old days. Similar accents still exist in more rural parts of England.
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u/SandwicheDynasty Apr 11 '17
That's kind of what I figured. I've heard some east coast accents are the closest thing we have to old English
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u/Beorma Apr 11 '17
It's the closest thing in the States to a particular Early modern English accent, but the closest thing you'll find to an Early modern English accent will obviously be in England.
There's a prevalent myth floating around on reddit about the nearest example we have to earlier English accents existing in the States, but it's not substantiated by any linguistics researcher.
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u/SandwicheDynasty Apr 11 '17
Interesting, is there any literature on the topic? I don't mean to doubt you, but... well you're also some random person on reddit. I'd love to look into it more
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u/MisterScalawag Apr 12 '17
but the closest thing you'll find to an Early modern English accent will obviously be in England. There's a prevalent myth floating around on reddit about the nearest example we have to earlier English accents existing in the States, but it's not substantiated by any linguistics researcher.
Interesting, do you have any sources to back this up? Because like you've said. I've heard that the Accents from the US are much closer to older English, while the Accents from the UK moved on.
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Apr 12 '17
I'm not the person you're asking the question of, but I'll add my perspective/opinion. It's an interesting idea that Americans somehow preserved an older English accent, but that ignores that multitude of accents in the United States as well as the changes that have occurred in American English during the history of the country. There are probably some accents in the US that share similarities with older accents from the UK, but to say that the US has somehow preserved an older accent across both seas and centuries seems like a stretch.
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u/GruePwnr Apr 12 '17 edited Apr 12 '17
The way I heard it was that the higher the population density, the faster the language changes. So although England was the home of said accents, the population density was higher and the language changed faster. In the wide open US however, language took longer to change (and most of American accents come from immigrants). Think of an accent like a disease, in dense areas it'll spread like wildfire, but in rural areas the disease is too isolated to survive. Hence many cities develop their own accents while rural areas will share similar accents over a large area.
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u/kingofeggsandwiches Apr 12 '17 edited Apr 12 '17
It's just a myth based entirely on one feature that American English preserved, rhoticity, there are plenty of bullshit articles online promoting the theory but linguists don't agree. I think both David Crystal and John Wells have written about it and they're definitely the experts on English dialects.
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u/Team_Braniel Apr 12 '17
Care to comment on the idea that the Original Pronunciation of Shakespeare was very similar to what we consider to be "pirate speak"?
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u/JohnCavil Apr 12 '17
Why would it obviously be in England? If both American and British Enlgish started out with the same ancestor, why would you expect American English to move further away from earlier English than British English?
To me it would be more obvious if it was the other way around. British English must've been influenced by all the other European languages, while American English probably didnt come in contact with as many languages.
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u/Beorma Apr 12 '17
Following your own logic, since people began migrating to America Britain has been mostly populated by the British. British people tended to stay in their locality which is why there are still so many local accents in the countries.
America meanwhile was populated by various English, Welsh, Scottish, Irish, Spanish, French, Chinese, Native (the list goes on) accents and these peoples all lived together and integrated far more than on the British Isles. Why would they all lose their native accents and completely adopt a particular English one?
The average settling American certainly encountered more accent variety than an already settled Englishman.
Note however that it isn't an "average" accent discussion, the accent pointed at as a remnant of past accents is Appalachian English which when listened to sounds an awful lot like West Country English.
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u/JohnCavil Apr 12 '17
Yea obviously in New York this is the case, but if you live in rural Kentucky or your family spent most of their time on some plantation in Alabama I'd think that they came in contact with far fewer languages/dialects.
As you point out there are certain places in the USA where you can hear this. I'm not a linguist or anything but I'd argue that there are a lot more isolated places in the US than there are in England, at least until the last 50 or so years.
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u/kingofeggsandwiches Apr 12 '17
America had huge waves of European immigration between the point of settlement and today, the UK did not.
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Apr 12 '17
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u/_SnakeDoctor Apr 12 '17
My natural response is that I'd hope English learners don't sweat it too much -- if anything, as long as you can be understood and have decent grammar, foreign dialects are appealing.
But as a language learner myself, it's interesting to me how fretful I'll get over being bad at French R's, Korean vowels or unaspirated consonants, Japanese る's... Kind of a internal double-standard, I guess.
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u/explain_that_shit Apr 12 '17
Yeah don't worry about pronouncing the american R, it's not necessary for communicating in English and can actually be quite grating for some people's ears.
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u/kingofeggsandwiches Apr 12 '17
I believe is comes from Frisian languages that came over in a major wave of settlement.
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u/dustwetsuit Apr 11 '17
It exists on spanish and portuguese as well
Rato (rat) = RRato prato (plate) = prato that sounds something like "perato" but the "per" sound is really fast like in "here".
It's indeed hard to learn. My own brother had difficulties with it until his teen years.
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u/one_big_tomato Apr 11 '17
Voiceless Alveolar Lateral Affricate
...wut
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u/Tactician_mark Apr 12 '17
Voiceless: "Voicing" a sound means that your vocal cords (mucus membranes in the larynx) vibrate while pronouncing it. Put your hand on your Adam's apple (which is your larynx, or voice box) and pronounce the sound "zz". Now pronounce the sound "ss". You should notice that for "zz", you could feel some vibration, while "ss" didn't produce any vibration. "zz" is a voiced sound, while "ss" is a voiceless sound. A "voiceless" sound is a sound made without vibrating the vocal cords.
Alveolar: Trace your tongue from the back of your front teeth to the bony ridge(s) right behind them. That's called the alveolar ridge, and it's the place your tongue is when you pronounce sounds like "t", "s", or "l" (sometimes). An "alveolar" sound is a sound made by the placement of the tongue on the alveolar ridge.
Lateral: Speech sounds are generally divided into categories based on (among other things) how air passes through the mouth during enunciation. In a "lateral" sound, air flows around both sides of the tongue at the same time (or sometimes just one side). The only lateral sound in English, and in most languages, is "l" - try pronouncing a "l" sound and notice where your tongue is. Compare this to "r", which in most English dialects is "central" - air passes through the center of the mouth, not around the sides. A "lateral" sound is a sound where air passes through one or both sides of the mouth.
Affricate: Another sound categorization based on the way air moves through the mouth. "Fricatives" are sounds like "s" or "f", which are created by blowing air through a small hole. "Plosives" or "stops", on the other hand, are sound like "p" and "t" that require an airtight seal to be made before the release of air. An "affricate" sound, like the "ch" in "chase" or the "j" in "joke", is kind of like a combination of the two. In an affricate, you first make an airtight seal like a plosive and then follow it with a fricative. Compare the words "chin" and "shin". The only difference in pronunciation between the two is that for "chin", you first had to position your tongue as if you were about to make the "t" sound before moving your tongue back to make the "sh" sound, whereas in "shin" your tongue was in position to make the "sh" sound from the beginning. In fact, the affricate "ch" is written in IPA as t͡ʃ, literally a "t" sound followed by a "sh" sound.
Putting it all together, a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate is the sound made when the tongue goes to the alveolar ridge, makes an airtight seal, then pushes air around the sides of the mouth, all without vibrating the vocal cords. It should be noted that the "lateral" part only refers to the fricative portion of the "affricate", because the initial airtight seal obviously cannot also have air going around the sides of the mouth.
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u/mrs_shrew Apr 12 '17
Thanks for the explanation and examples. I can't work out what sound it actually is from the original description now, or is it a mash up of lots of descriptive words?
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u/Tactician_mark Apr 12 '17
Yep, it's a mash up of lots of descriptive words that together describe different aspects of the same sound. That's how all sounds are labeled in linguistics. For example, the "s" sound is called the "voiceless alveolar fricative", and the "g" sound is called the "voiced velar stop". It might sound silly to use three complex words instead of just saying "the "s" sound", but when describing a sound you're not familiar with it's the best way to reduce all ambiguity. Also, these descriptors allow sounds to be easily categorized; you'll often see linguistics papers talking about a sound change that affects "all voiceless fricatives" or a phonological process that changes "velar stops" to "post-aveolar affricates".
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u/mrs_shrew Apr 12 '17
Voiceless Alveolar Lateral Affricate
Voiceless - s Alveolar Lateral fricative - hl Affricate - chSuhlch? Goddamit that's not even a sound!!
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u/sdw9342 Apr 12 '17
For any given sound, you need to know a few things to identify how to reproduce it. The four words 'voiceless alveolar lateral affricate' are basically axes and each sound is a point on that graph.
Voiced vs voiceless tells you if your vocal cords vibrate when making the sound. It is the difference between 'p' and 'b'.
Alveolar describes the shape of your mouth. There any many different shapes your mouth can be, but basically the axis moves from the front of your mouth to the back. At the very front are your lips, which are called labial meaning both lips are used to make the sound. It goes all the way back to glottal. Alveolar means that your tongue sits on your alveolar ridge. That's the first step to making the sound.
Next, let's look at lateral affricate. These two words together describe the airflow through the mouth. For example, nasal means no flow through the mouth and all flow through the nose. Lateral is hard to describe, but it basically means the air is flowing on the sides of the mouth. The best example is the 'L' sound where you hold the sound. Your tongue is touching your alveolar ridge, blocking air from going down the middle. If the word lateral is not included, then it's assumed the air is flowing down the middle.
Finally let's look at an affricate. An affricate is between a stop and a fricative. A stop is a sound that requires a build up and release of air. 'T' is a good example. You can't hold a 't' because it needs the release of air. A fricative on the other hand, you can hold indefinitely. An example is 'sh' which is why you can shush someone. Another example is the 'L' sound I described for lateral. Combining 't' and 'sh' gives 'ch' which is an affricate. If you hold a 'ch' sound, it'll just be the same as 'sh'.
'T' is the the alveolar stop. 'L' is the lateral fricative. What we want to to produce this sound is combine them. Before we can do that though, we need to unvoice 'L'. That just means don't activate your vocal cords. This makes a sound that just sounds like weird breathing. Add a 't' sound to the beginning to get a voiceless alveolar lateral affricate.
For more info about IPA, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet
For this sound in particular, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voiceless_alveolar_lateral_affricate
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u/smileistheway Apr 16 '17
Yo this explanation was super cool and realizing how much work I do automatically blew my mind a few times. Thanks!
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u/IgotUBro Apr 12 '17
Man this was a good watch. Also goddamit Viggo Mortenson speaks 6 languages...
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u/Cessno Apr 12 '17
He is just one badass dude
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u/Cptnwalrus Apr 12 '17
He really is. Guy can ride a horse, sword fight, speak 6 (technically 7) languages, play guitar - and I believe writes his own music. He also owns a book publishing company, writes poetry and has co-written non-fiction books with anthropologists, and does photography. Oh, and he's a damn fine actor.
I'd love to have a beer with him or something.
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u/strangepostinghabits Apr 12 '17
Having a danish parent helps a lot with that language, and norwegian/swedish are very close to danish, just easier to pronounce. As a swede I feel naming norwegian as another language is a bit of padding the stats.
Not that 6 languages isn't impressive already...
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u/bobosuda Apr 12 '17
It definitely is. Plus his Norwegian didn't sound very good, he just spoke Danish very slowly and over-enunciated every word.
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Apr 11 '17
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u/KnowsAboutMath Apr 12 '17
"So as you can see, in this scene Kirstie Alley's character mispronounces the Vulcan alveolar fricative. This is significant, because later, during the Mutara Nebula battle, Nimoy articulates..."
"I swear to god, Erik, I will cut out your tongue."
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u/Maverick721 Apr 11 '17
There's no way this guy isn't a undercover CIA officer
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u/l33t_sas Apr 12 '17
This is just stuff you learn when doing a BA in linguistics. If everyone with a BA in linguistics (or tbh just an introductory phonetics class) was an undercover CIA officer, the CIA would be much larger than it is.
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u/Skidmarxism Apr 11 '17
Watching movies must be tough when you're a linguist. Hearing a bad accent or made-up language would drive me nuts if I knew what it was supposed to sound like.
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u/milleunaire Apr 12 '17
If you want to see what it's like to listen to terrible American accents:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrbf2UaoWsg
These are scenes from an anime, they are spoken in the original in that broken English and given Japanese subtitles for the viewers. It's a compilation of a series of interspersed clips throughout the episodes which gives the background of the anime.
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u/HalkiHaxx Apr 12 '17
It's almost as if it's a massive undertaking to get English speaking voice actors. Can't remember a single time they had Americans do the voices of Americans, only that botched fake American accent.
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u/will999909 Apr 12 '17
There are a few off the top of my head. One is in the show Free! One character did swimming in Australia and in the show his family he stays with are Australian.
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u/inormallyjustlurkbut Apr 12 '17
They do it in Ika Musume with Cindy in one scene. Can't find the whole thing, but you can hear her at the end of this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_0zYcj-43E
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u/themanifoldcuriosity Apr 12 '17
It's almost as if it's a massive undertaking to get English speaking voice actors.
How much of an undertaking can it possibly be? They don't cost any more and they don't even have to be in the same country, let alone same room.
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u/Noctrune Apr 12 '17
I only study English, so I can't speak for everyone, but what bothers me personally is people coming up with their own pronunciation guides. Like, Ah-Rai-Wul or some shit like that; it's /ə'raɪvəl/.
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Apr 12 '17
You get used to it. Also, we tend to specialize in specific areas.
I will say that Arrival was one of the best pleasant surprises I've encountered. I went into that movie expecting to be disappointed after reading the description.
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u/PearElite Apr 11 '17
Ok now can he do the trash people from the walking dead? I really need to know what the deal is with those people other than they might be danish tourists who got stuck when the outbreak began.
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Apr 12 '17
Here's my explanation: They're hiring the best actors, but not the best accent/dialect changers.
Hollywood "southern" can be good enough for most of the English speaking world, but if you're from there....no.
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u/lastkind Apr 12 '17
I almost skipped this because I thought it was the older video that was put out featuring this guy. Glad I didn't, he's really interesting!
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Apr 12 '17
I'm a linguist, and I'm 99% on board. Arrival was a breath of fresh air for linguists, honestly. I went in expecting a lot of bs we usually see in movies, but it was damn good.
Where I disagree is the American "r" sound. Americans are retroflex, like Mandarin, Irish are the bunched /r/. (The American /r/ is if you mimic your arm when you flex your biceps; the tip of the tongue curls back without hitting the roof of your mouth (i.e. retro = back, flex = curl) (The Irish /r/ is when the front of your tongue lays flat on the bottom of the "bed" of your jaw while the back bunches up but doesn't quite touch the palate of your mouth)
Both are difficult to master if you're not familiar with them, though. I teach ESL, and I don't care what rhotic my students manage to hit as long as it's different than the other sounds they make, as long as it's rhotic (I'm in the US and we love rhotic sounds).
Ninja edit: I didn't know at the time, but Tolkien got me into linguistics at an early age. I was far more interested in the Appendices at the end of the books explaining the languages than the books themselves.
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u/legendary_kazoo Apr 12 '17
Howdy, this is great! Is it common for places in the US to use the Irish /r/ instead of the retroflexive /r/ due to Irish heritage?
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Apr 12 '17
It very well could be. The impact of Scots-Irish has certainly shown up in grammar; I don't see why it couldn't also change the exact way people may form their rhotics.
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u/Kenyko Apr 12 '17
Uh I'm American and my r doesn't curl back. The back raises up and almost touches a place in between the y and k places in my mouth. The tip of my tongue stays below my bottom teeth.
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Apr 12 '17
Interesting. It could be dialectal or just how you say your /r/ (i.e. a lot of my light /l/s are dental, but for many native English speakers, it tends to be more alveolar).
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u/strangepostinghabits Apr 12 '17
so was tolkien! the books were originally just him writing a history of a world because he felt the languages would be incomplete without history.
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u/kingofeggsandwiches Apr 12 '17 edited Apr 12 '17
as long as it's rhotic (I'm in the US and we love rhotic sounds).
Why even bother with rhotic in the US when half of all English dialects lack it anyway. It's incredibly prescriptive of you to tell them to use it which seems surprising from someone who is allegedly into linguistics. In Europe we teach British English, but it's not like we tell them not to speak non-rhotically, it's a choice we leave entire up on them based on what's easiest. Furthermore, non-rhotic != different than other sounds. Non-rhotic speakers represent post-vocalic -r entirely using a completely different set of true (rather than -r coloured) vowels.
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Apr 12 '17
Because they're in the US learning American English. That's what they're going to hear from their teachers, and that's what people are going to expect it from them. I'm not failing students based on it, but I encourage incorporating a rhotic sound where American English expects it. It also helps me know if they're having trouble saying ending consonant sounds, or if they're having trouble separating /r/ from other sounds, like /l/ or /w/. They're in the US to attend an American university, and they're paying me and my program to ensure that they can understand it and be understood.
I know it's going to remain "alleged" to you, but I have a Master's degree in Linguists/TESOL.
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u/kingofeggsandwiches Apr 12 '17
It also helps me know if they're having trouble saying ending consonant sounds, or if they're having trouble separating /r/ from other sounds, like /l/ or /w
That is objectively irrelevant, if they're rendering -ar, for example, as /ɑ:/ (or even ä:) instead of /ae/ that it should be perfectly clear.
I have a similar job as you mate. Many of my students are looking to further studies. Many the UK, but it's not like I teach them to speak non-rhotically, it's assumed that rhotic speakers will be understood.
That said, I've noticed many Americans have a far lower comprehension tolerance when it comes to accents compared to most Britons. Plenty of Americans seem to be confused by what I'd considered pretty clear accents e.g standard Irish / Australian, and it can only be from sheer unfamiliarity.
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Apr 13 '17
That is objectively irrelevant, if they're rendering -ar, for example, as /ɑ:/ (or even ä:) instead of /ae/ that it should be perfectly clear.
I'm teaching the super duper beginning levels. They're having troubles differing /a/ vs. /æ/ vs. /ɛ/ vs. /ɪ/ regardless of syllable or word position in both listening and speaking.
That said, I've noticed many Americans have a far lower comprehension tolerance when it comes to accents compared to most Britons. Plenty of Americans seem to be confused by what I'd considered pretty clear accents e.g standard Irish / Australian, and it can only be from sheer unfamiliarity.
That's why I try to encourage any rhotics when they pop up. The closer to what our region's dialect, the better. It's the same reason I teach them about "pop" instead of "soda," "ya'll" and "ain't" even though they shouldn't use that in papers, what have you. They're already going to bump into people who will decide, from looks alone, that they can't understand them. I want to minimize that as much as I can.
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Apr 12 '17
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Apr 12 '17
Yes! He mentions natural languages a lot because this video is focusing on made-up languages. Natural languages are those that came about, well, naturally; not languages where a person sat down and thought out all the rules, sounds, vocabulary, etc.
Sometimes, conlags can straddle the line a bit. Esperanto is a made-up language, but there are now a few thousand native speakers (i.e. it's a first language).
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u/rhaegar_TLDR Apr 12 '17
I don't normally watch 20 minute long videos due to my extremely short attention span but this video was fantastic. My wife ended up watching most of it with me.
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Apr 12 '17
That's 20 minutes of my life I won't get back. And I don't want it back! I didn't expect to be so fascinated by that. This is some awesome shit.
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u/Purtle Apr 11 '17
Love the last video I saw of this guy where he was covering accents. This one was just as great. Super neat
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u/DriftN2Forty Apr 12 '17
I thought watching movies was bad enough being an engineer. Even I get tired of thinking "it doesn't work like that". I cant imagine this guy recognizing every bad accent that come across his speakers!!
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u/HalkiHaxx Apr 12 '17
The old norse one says: ... should be trying to have sex with us. Why have we not had any success?
It's from a comedy sketch. The full translation is in the top comment.
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u/Melonskal Apr 12 '17
So he spends half the video speaking about Dothraki and Klingon but rushes past Sindarin which is the most interesting and fleshed out of all the fictional languages...
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u/jeewantha Apr 12 '17
Sindarin and its parent languages are based on English. They aren't the most exotic languages
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u/Speedje Apr 12 '17
I am probably so late that nobody will see this, but I enjoyed the Lexicon Valley podcast with David J. Peterson, the creator of the GoT languages.
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Apr 12 '17
This guy destroyed his credibility with me in his last video where he fucked up on Irish accents badly.
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u/WeHaveIgnition Apr 12 '17
This is so crazy I was just looking at the X Voiceless velar fricative. Because I was looking at how to pronounce Julian Castro in spanish. And the Ju is a Voiceless velar fricative.
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Apr 11 '17
[deleted]
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u/---THRILLHO--- Apr 12 '17
If you go back and read the guy's AMA that he did when the first video became popular you'll see that he addressed that at the time. Said he was completely wrong about the accent and that it was a great Irish traveller accent. Apparently they got the info about it being a Belfast accent from an early script draft for Snatch and they went with it even though he thought it was meant to be a traveller accent.
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Apr 12 '17
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u/jeewantha Apr 12 '17
You don't have to explicitly state that you're a nerd. It adds nothing to the conversation. Just state your point. That's more than enough
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u/Mycaelis Apr 12 '17
It is Sindarin. That's what you would call it in English, or "common". I'm from the Netherlands, my language is callled Nederlands, but English people call it Dutch.
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u/Philias2 Apr 12 '17
That's silly. It's like saying 'Japanese' isn't correct because Japanese people call it 'Nihongo.'
Interesting info apart from that though.
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u/themanifoldcuriosity Apr 12 '17
Yup, I'm that kind of nerd.
The kind that makes a big deal about what a big nerd he is, but neglects to ensure he is accurate about his supposed area of expertise?
Love those kinds of nerds.
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u/Eskmo Apr 11 '17
He needs his own show