Ancient
Sounds
mixing acoustic phonetics, statistics and comparative philology to bring speech back from the past




Oxford University logospeaker
University of Cambridge
 Phonetics Laboratory
 Statistical Laboratory  








What we are trying to do
People
Papers
Presentations
Audio demonstrations
Indo-European digits database
Events/activities/blog

Mastodon
@ancientsounds@mastodonapp.uk


17 November 2016. Symposium on Statistics, Language Change and Variation

Thursday 17th November, 1 p.m.
Centre for Linguistics and Philology, Walton St.


This symposium brought together a local network of researchers and visitors working in various disciplines, with a common interest in quantitative modelling of language evolution, variation and change, and their causes and impediments to change.

Registration is free. If you'd like to attend, please contact enquiries@phon.ox.ac.uk, preferably by FRIDAY 11TH NOVEMBER

1:00 Buffet lunch - let us know your dietary requirements
1:30 Welcome and introductions
1:45 - 5:45 Talks, not yet in order of presentation:

John ASTON, Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge
Title tbc

Alex BOUCHARD-CÔTÉ, Department of Statistics, University of British Columbia, currently visiting Oxford
Title tbc

John COLEMAN, Phonetics Laboratory, Oxford
Estimating the rate and direction of sound changes

Geoff NICHOLLS, Department of Statistics, Oxford
Title tbc

Inés PEÑA NOVAS, Linguistics, CUNY, and & Marco ARCHETTI, School of Biological Sciences, UEA (Norwich) Phonetic robustness and the evolution of phoneme usage

Janet PIERREHUMBERT, Oxford e-Research Centre and Faculty of Linguistics
Modelling the spread of arbitrary innovations in language

Davide PIGOLI, Statistical Laboratory, Cambridge
Spatial modeling of sound change: dialectal variation in the spoken part of the British National Corpus

5:45 Open session, final thoughts and questions
6:00 Glass of something nice
6:30 Finish

25 July 2016. Local TV channel Cambridge TV did a nice piece about the project, focusing on the statistics and starring our photogenic colleagues Davide Pigole and Shahin Tavakoli.

20 July 2016. Dailymail.com carried an article which was a reasonable paraphrase of the Cambridge University news article.

19 July 2016. Cambridge University Office of External Affairs and Communications published a nice news article about our project, "Time Travelling to the Mother Tongue". This piece was widely copied (sometimes as a slightly garbled paraphrase) on various online news sites.

16 July 2016. LabPhon15, Cornell University, Ithaca, USA. "Acoustic-phonetic modelling of historical and prehistoric sound change" Abstract Poster

9 May 2016. 5:15, Taylorian Institute, Oxford, Graduate Linguistics Seminar: "Acoustic modelling of historical and prehistoric sound change"

30 March-1 April 2016. "Modelling the changing rate and direction of historical and prehistoric sound changes." British Association of Academic Phoneticians, University of Lancaster.

Coleman lecturing at BAAP 2016

12 January 2016. The AHRC Science in Culture Innovation Award that has been supporting J. Coleman's research time for the past year has now ended. The summary final report is available from here. Even so, the Ancient Sounds research goes on ... (and on and on, we hope!)

8 January 2016. One-day teach-in in Oxford on acoustic modelling of sound change. Details here. All the materials (presentations, software, data etc.) from the workshop can be downloaded from here.

25-29 November 2015. London Mathematical Society at the Science Museum, London


 12 November 2015. "Statistical Acoustic-Phonetic Historical Linguistics: a short introduction". Cambridge Language Sciences annual symposium. Slides (without audio) are here, and a nice video recording is here:

23 October 2015. Previously I posted demo of "five" from (Lithuanian) "penki". But PIE has *penkwe, not penki. So here done better:

Starting to fill new table of Indo-European digit sounds at New tokens of *treies, *ksweks, quinque and Ancient Gk, and *penkwe, *septm (wrong stress, but hey), quattuor (hybrid of Ladin kwater and Welsh pedwar, maybe too prominent). Comments +/- welcomed.

2 October 2015. A 78 rpm record of Sogdian from the Sorbonne Archive de la Parole, 1911-1914 [Bibliotheque nationale de France]:

Here's the official link: [Archives de la parole]. Langue sogdienne : [énoncé de syllabes] : [chant]
My guess is that it could be a liturgical chant.

24 September 2015. For slides and audio I gave at the British Science Festival or Oxford Alumni Weekend, look here: (NB big file)

22 September 2015. Great thing about acoustic (spectral) modelling of sound change is that you can quantify the rate and perhaps direction of change. At what rate did English "one" change from Old to Middle to Modern English? From 34 to 122 microradians per year.

8 September 2015. My university press office ran a blog post about the project today: http://www.ox.ac.uk/news/arts-blog/what-did-words-used-sound

1 July 2015. Balochi for "three" is [se:], from *tre(yes) via *te:. In this demo, [te:] is from Sindhi:

tre(ye)s has lost final s at least 3 times: *treyes > PGer tre, Latin tres > Ital tre, Iberian Sp tres > American tre We model the loss of final -s by a kind of fade-out rather than an all-or-nothing deletion. This gives an intermediate stage tres > treh.

(Not sure how convincing this one is; maybe we can improve it.)

8 June 2015. dw > b (in eg *dwoH) in a number of I-E languages: Lycian kbi, Avestan bae, bitya, Latin bi-, bis, and Sindhi

tw > p in Ossetic tsuppor (from *kʷetwóres)

26 May 2015. "Three" comes from Proto-Indo-European "*treyes". Not from Spanish "tres", but that's the nearest I've got. Listen: Here's the MP3 version:

25 May 2015. "One" comes from Proto-Indo-European *oinos, via Middle English "oon", Anglo-Saxon "an", Germanic "oin(s)". Listen:

"One" from "oin(s)", MP3 format:

Previously [12th May] we generated a continuum of sounds from "two" to "twa" and vice-versa. Now, we follow "two" all the way back to Proto-Indo-European *dwo(H). WAV: MP3:

or .

18 May 2015. "Eight" came from Proto-Indo-European *Hokto, via changes something like this: (MP3 version )

5.

15 May 2015. "Four" comes from Anglo-Saxon "feower":

15 May 2015. "Five" comes via fif, fimf, pemp from Proto-Indo-European *penkwe. Lithuanian penki is nearest living word. Listen:

Or if you prefer going forwards in time from Anglo-Saxon "twa" to Modern English "two":

1 April 2015. For , we made a ": to show Anglo-Saxon pronunciations (or something close to them) that survived until quite recently in various German dialects.

14 January 2015. AHRC Science in Culture Innovation Awards meeting, London. My presentation is available under "Presentations" (see link to the left).




John Coleman was supported by a Science in Culture Innovation Award from the
AHRC logo

John Aston was supported by a Fellowship from theEPSRC logo