Hacker News Reader

Comment by canjobear | Hacker News Reader

If you want a real mind trip, check out the reconstructed pronunciation of Classical Chinese.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_Chinese_phonology

A video sample: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyaFKnUumAM. I find myself quite liking the sound of it, in particular the poem which is recited — the writers of the Shijing (from which the poem is taken) paid a lot of attention to rhyme and assonance. Even so, Old Chinese phonology is really weird: pharyngealisation is decidedly odd even for Sino–Tibetan (though some Qiangic language have pharyngealised vowels), and labialised glottals are only slightly less so.

This is the reason I’m not fully convinced by Baxter and Sagart’s reconstruction of pharyngealized consonants everywhere: it’s just too weird. In languages like Arabic that do have pharyngealization, it doesn’t apply to every consonant like in the BS2014 reconstruction. Still, I don’t see a better way to explain the Type A / Type B distinction…

Well, Sino–Tibetan is one of the only places I would expect to see pharyngealisation in the first place. I can easily imagine a scenario in which vowels had a uvularisation or pharyngealisation contrast, which then was transphonologised onto the previous consonant. But I don’t know too much about Chinese languages, so until another explanation comes along I can only accept Baxter and Sagart’s conclusion.

Shijing is a collection of folksongs, so of course the words must sound very nice at the day, or the music behind them must be good. Jian Jia is in my opinion one of the best, which by the way rhymes well even in Mandarin.

But I don't like how it sounds in the video, and those weird sound bits (no idea what you call them) is not very friendly for singing either.

> But I don't like how it sounds in the video, and those weird sound bits (no idea what you call them) is not very friendly for singing either.

Could you describe in more detail which bits sound weird? Of course Old Chinese would sound very different to Mandarin, but I didn’t notice anything actually weird about it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com