Sound of ancient languages

[Qwynegold]

OMG I have to share this clip about how various ancient languages supposively sounded like: https://youtu.be/50By01L7uzY

PIE didn't sound consonant-heavy at all, like I had expected. Middle Egyptian sounds kinda nice somehow. Not as harsh as Semitic languages. But Old Chinese is hilarious!

What do you think about this clip?

[M Mira]

OMG I have to share this clip about how various ancient languages supposively sounded like: https://youtu.be/50By01L7uzY

PIE didn't sound consonant-heavy at all, like I had expected. Middle Egyptian sounds kinda nice somehow. Not as harsh as Semitic languages. But Old Chinese is hilarious!

What do you think about this clip?

From the quackery thread:

Have some fun picking this apart.

The Proto-Indo-European, Sumerian and Old Japanese ones are of course speculative (though less so the Old Japanese), and the Old Chinese one sounds like he's just come across the language.

The Latin one pronounces "v" as "v", not "w" as it was, as well as palatalising the velars when he shouldn't (that is, never).

I'm not hearing ejectives in the Mayan.

I'm also not sure that Old English, Middle Chinese, Old Norse, Early Middle Japanese, Quechua and Ryukyuan count as "ancient", especially since two of them represent later versions of languages already represented.

Have some fun picking this apart.

The Old English is relatively good. The only problem is vowel reduction where there shouldn't be, and that could've been there in the actual OE period.

AFAICT, everything else is garbage.

IMO if they don't put the text they're reading in the video then it's rather obfuscating.

[Zaarin]

Many of them sound stilted--you can tell they're reading a language they're not quite comfortable with. I rather enjoyed the Sumerian, though.

EDIT: To add to the problems mentioned above, I wasn't hearing the ejectives in the Akkadian reading, either, though I did in Phoenician.

[Qwynegold]

Oh sorry, I never clicked Kath's link, so I didn't realize this had already been posted. :/

As for the Old Norse, I think it sounds as if it's read by Danes.

[Frislander]

Oh sorry, I never clicked Kath's link, so I didn't realize this had already been posted. :/

As for the Old Norse, I think it sounds as if it's read by Danes.

We've just determined in the Quackery thread that they're both Icelanders and only the first speaker is trying to speak Old Norse.

[Qwynegold]

Ah, okay. I'll take a look in that thread again.

[Ziz]

The "Aramaic" one is taken from the first verses of Chapter 2 of Daniel, and is actually Hebrew. That text doesn't switch into Aramaic until two verses after the sample ends.

Hebrew and Aramaic at that time had very similar phonologies, so the pronunciation is okayish, but there are no ejectives, and of course the whole thing is read haltingly and with unnatural intonation.

[Qwynegold]

Oh no! >__<