The Vowels of Distance
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- čas přidán 26. 04. 2024
- Hey guys! It's finals season where I live so the next uploads are gonna probably be a bit delayed, but I wanted to put this out since it's a topic that has fascinated me for quite a while now: the relationship between certain vowels and which demonstratives they show up in. Enjoy and have a great day!
Music - Water #2 (Unreleased Original)
Some sources:
• [Info on Sound Symbolism] www.thoughtco.com/sound-symbo...
• [Original Paper on Kiki Bouba] web.archive.org/web/201108130...
• [Article about Kiki Bouba] behavioralscientist.org/its-a...
CORRECTIONS / NOTES
• P.-Nyungan better describes Yuwaalaraay's language family (instead of aboriginal-that term needs to go lol istg)
• Hebrew is specifically BIBLICAL Hebrew
• Javanese 'ika' is a little outdated and used mostly in poetry nowadays. The current distal pronoun is 'kaé'
• The Georgian word რომ /rom/ should actually be ის /is/. For safety, I reran the test with this new information and still found statistical significance - Zábava
I heard that this might be related to the Doppler effect. When a siren is coming towards you, you hear a high-pitched sound, when a siren is going away from you, the pitch gets lower. So distant objects get associated with low-frequency sounds.
that's insane. could totally be relevant
doubtful. the doppler effect is rarely noticable in the ancient world. the closest you could get would be spears flying away from yourself, you may notice a lowering of tone. instead i suspect it's something about how different frequencies travel better (specifically: you hear higher better when it's close, and lower better when it's far, relatively)
I’m surprised that you’re the first person to realize this, it feels like something all linguists would be interested in
Agreed! And they absolutely should-this is an incredible field to analyze when it comes to the fundamentals of what makes language the way it is. I myself am gonna continue researching this, but I really want to see what other people come up with!
As a Javanese speaker-my second language-when you mentioned the Javanese distal pronoun "ika", I was extremely confused because I've never heard anyone saying "ika". After a little bit of research on my own language (lol), I finally figured it out. Turns out "ika" was only used in old written tembangs (Javanese poetries), not in spoken day-to-day Javanese. We use "kaé" instead. Also, the "a" in "ika" is pronounced as ⟨ɔ⟩ (open-mid back rounded vowel). Anyway, learned something new from this video. Nice!
Thanks for the heads up! I'll add this note to the description
Edit: I reran the t-test with that new info and the results were still significant with p = 0.000496 for F1 and p = 0.001455 for F2 :)
@@Sundrobrocc glad to hear that. btw good luck for your finals! :)
tysm:)
In Italian we have two words for 'here' (qui [kwi] and qua [kwa]) and two words for 'there (lì [li] and là [la]). Usually both forms are used without too much attention, but they actually imply a subtle difference: 'lì' means 'there, near you or not too distant' while 'là' is definitely 'there, distant from both speaker and audience'; 'qui' means 'here, near me or in a rather well determined place', while 'qua' means 'here, but in a more general, undetermined sense, like the whole place we're in, rather than a single spot.
super cool!
Comrades, this is Big Brother.
Okay so you know how some people claim "English and History" while others will claim "Math and Science" and have split the subjects as though they were opposing? Yeah, this video brought them all together 😭
RIGHT?? I know it makes it easier to teach in our school systems, but really life is just knowledge yk? Everything ties into itself in many many ways and it's why I love linguistics so much since it's so interdisciplinary!
This is very interesting. When learning the constructed language Toki Pona, which only has one demonstrative, "ni" (from the Thai word), this "rule" would sometimes cause problems. I would make up a "na" as a distal version of "ni". This could maybe be be influenced from english (though it is not my native language. My native language is Swedish, which doesn't follow this rule (det här/det där)) but it is still interesting.
that's extremely interesting woah :O
Great video! I’m impressed with the amount of research and analysis that went into it. I’ve never thought about the connection between words starting with gl- or ending with -ump before, really fascinating! Good luck with your finals :]
Thank you so much :)
This is an amazing video. I can tell you've taken a lot of inspiration from great minds such as jan Misali! I'm absolutely delighted there's now people making more videos on linguistics that are not just educational, but also fun and interesting.
HI SUEE THANKS:) conlang critic gotta be the best linguistics content in the world tbh
This is a very fascinating video. Just one constructive criticism: რომ /rom/ is not a demonstrative in Georgian; it corresponds to the English "that" which is is used to form relative clauses (ex. I think THAT she will come) The word ის /is/ is the nominative case form of "that" as a demonstrative.
Thanks for the comment! I've added this correction to the description
my guy, this is amazing.
Here's another language that follows that 'rule'.
The demonstrative pronouns in Hindi (I'm an L2 speaker) happen to be यह (this) and वह (that) which are meant to be pronounced /jəɦ/ and /ʋəɦ/, but in most of northern and central India, they tend be pronounced [je] and [vɵ] as in the Delhi dialect (or [və] in the Eastern states like Bihar and especially Jharkhand). This is cool because despite originally having the same vowel, they gravitated toward the tendencies you described. /e/ has a lower F1 and higher F2 than /ə/ and /ɵ/ has a lower F1 and a slightly lower F2 than /ə/. And for the Eastern states that keep /ə/, that still has a higher F1 and lower F2 than /e/.
Also, the words for 'here' and 'there' are यहाँ and वहाँ which are again meant to be pronounced /jəɦãː/ (that's supposed to be a nasalized /ä/, if only I knew how to type it) and /ʋəɦãː/ but are generally pronounced [jã] and [ʋã]. I guess the symbolism here is that since /ʋ/ is a darker sound than /j/, it almost sounds muffled, as if it's coming from a place farther away than /j/. Interesting, huh.
(My bad if I messed up the brackets and slashes, never properly used IPA before.)
Awesome! Really cool that you bring up consonants since that's definitely something else I want to investigate along with other features like nasalization, tone, etc. We have so much to go but it's such an interesting field of exploration, so we'll see!
I would think something like this subconsciously has to do with imitating sounds that are farther away, and things farther away are generally going to be bigger/louder, therefore deeper, and therefore a more open vowel would be needed. The opposite would be the case for things close by, which could be imitated by something relatively smaller close by. I would imagine there are other word pairings besides just this/that which have a similar property.
Really interesting
That was a really interesting topic to listen to!! I've never thought about that.
Regarding the Diminutive and Aumentative, that's also the case in Portuguese, and I began thinking about that before you gave the Spanish example.
If cão (dog) you can make cãozinho (little and cute dog) and... Hummm "cãozão"... Wait that doesn't really work nor sounds something that exists. (That's probably cuz it's already nasalised and shouldn't be even more)
Ok what about livro (book), from there you can make a livrinho and a livrão.
Awesome!
Lovely video, I always LOVE hearing about sound symbolism stuff like this! I also really like the graphics you used throughout the video, and the general editing style you use! Keep up the great work, and best of luck on finals! o7
thank u sm:) it's really really cool and i'll undoubtedly keep learning about it
That’s cool! Can you make a video on the relationship between linguistics and e-waste?
There's a relationship?
Aaah I always feel weird when I make up words for my conlang based on how concepts "feel" phonetically to me, but it does seem like we do it in real life, a lot more than we realize. I actually believe the first languages probably worked more or less this way.
yeahhh i do that all the time actually!
YAYAYAYAY NEW UPLOADDDD!!!
EHEH AW
Interesting video! Btw I know noise can be hard to control, and it sounded like you were recording this somewhere where you get traffic sounds which can be hard to filter out, but I wonder if the noise which sounds a bit like an orchestra tuning up was added deliberately for aesthetic purposes as it's a bit louder than the other traffic-like sounds 😛(and sometimes more salient than your voiceover). If so it's best not to start adding extra sound complexity until your basic voiceover is noise-free and all syllables are clearly audible (but ignore if this was not a deliberate addition!)
Yeah haha the background sound was actually an ambient song thing I made a while back, so it's on purpose. But some of my friends do agree that it was a little loud at some points, so I'll be more careful next time :)
@@Sundrobrocc Ah sorry if I was a bit mean about it then -- I'm sure it's a great piece without the voiceover (or maybe one ought to play the video twice, first as information, then as art!)
No worries at all haha! Thanks:)
This is actually such an interesting concept I've never thought of until now, and it turns out it's an aspect in all of my conlangs that i've never even realized lol
As for diminutives and augmentatives in portuguese, -ão or -ona are the augmentative suffixes, whereas -inho(a) is the diminutive. So with "cachorro," the augmentative is "cachorrão" or "cãozarrão," and the diminutive is "cachorrinho"
In english, too, words like "over," "mega," "super," for large things, and suffixes "-ling," "-y," or "sie(s)" for small things (like "oopsies >
That's so cool dude! Cuz yea when I noticed it in my conlangs I was like "ok nah I needa look into this" lol
Very interesting
Thanks!!
Sometimes staring at data you start making spurious connections. You had me with the statistical test though. Just don't go mad trying to look for patterns
Ofc! That's why we do statistics tests-so that we're a little more sure that we're not going crazy :)
how is this not a paper? i mean, i could literally use this as my final undergraduate paper
Funny you ask-that's gonna be one of the coming videos I make (semi-long read, sorry lol)
Last year I wrote a paper on a particular word in French (more details in the coming vid). Thing is, I was 16 last year so I couldn't really publish it in any significant journal (critique #1), so I sought out the help of a professor at one of the universities in my state. She helped out, and everything went well and if nothing comes up, it should be published next month.
While I did have a surprisingly successful experience with academia given I'm still in high school, I learned a lot about it in the process. Unfortunately, I feel that modern universitary academia has taken the wrong path. What is often happening in this kind of research-especially in areas like literature, social science, and the natural sciences-is publishing for the sake of publishing, publishing for money, publishing for prestige, and NOT publishing to genuinely uphold or disseminate knowledge.
That's my biggest problem with research, and it's why I love platforms like CZcams so much. Anyone is able to contribute to knowledge, anyone can ACCESS that knowledge (if everything goes well and my French paper is published, I literally wouldn't even be able to read MY OWN publication without buying a membership to the journal), and anyone can offer suggestions, improvements, et cetera. If you check my videos' descriptions, I'll always have corrections/notes from people in the comments, since I don't care about prestige or any of that, I just genuinely want to contribute to the field of knowledge of the world in a meaningful and accessible way.
TL;DR - Academia sucks. Video on it soon :)
@@Sundrobrocc thats why i am grateful to live in a country such as brazil where research is available for free lol
and i prefer youtube so much because all is more interesting and i dont have to look at a wall of text
That's an interesting observation about the feminine versions of the Russian demonstratives. It seems that in Russian, shorter and higher frequency sounds like 'Ta (that)' and 'Te (those)' are associated with distant objects, while a longer sound like 'Eta (this)' and 'Eti (These)' is used to bring more attention to closer subjects. This linguistic logic of using sound to convey distance and attention is quite fascinating. What are your thoughts on this?
Are you from New York or Philadelphia? :) That is the question regarding your accent.
Yeaah it's interesting. The point I was making though is that the *distal* plural demonstrative has /je/ which is supposed to be found in the proximal counterparts. Point is, this study only works for *my sample* of masculine nominative demonstratives, and I'm not yet quite sure of anything regarding other demonstratives like feminine or plural ones, so it's just something I'd have to investigate further in the future. I do think it's really cool though!
And btw haha nope! Not from those places :)
@@Sundrobrocc Georgia? :)
Closer! Idk why i have you guessing LOL but yea
@@Sundrobrocc :)))) I heard that women may have a higher sensitivity to certain frequencies, particularly in the higher range, which can enable them to hear sounds that men may not be able to perceive as easily. This heightened sensitivity is often attributed to the biological differences in the structure and function of the auditory system between men and women.
The ability to hear higher frequencies can be advantageous in certain situations, such as hearing the cries or sounds of a child. Women may have a better ability to detect and respond to these higher-pitched sounds due to their enhanced sensitivity in that frequency range.
Also regarding why humans have two ears that is to help determine the direction from which a sound is coming. This ability is known as sound localization or auditory localization.
When a sound reaches our ears, it arrives at each ear at slightly different times and with slightly different intensities. Our brain processes these differences and uses them to calculate the direction and distance of the sound source. This phenomenon is known as binaural hearing.
The time delay between when a sound reaches one ear compared to the other ear helps us determine the horizontal direction of the sound source. The brain analyzes this time difference, known as interaural time difference (ITD), to localize the sound.
Additionally, the difference in sound intensity between the two ears, known as interaural level difference (ILD), helps us determine the vertical direction of the sound source. The brain uses this information to determine whether the sound is coming from above or below.
Having two ears allows us to have a more accurate perception of the direction and location of sounds in our environment. This is important for our safety, communication, and overall spatial awareness.
Commenting to stay on Yves Malaghast tok😭
EGEHE
I have a theory. In my mind, sounds like i and e are associated with higher frequencies then a, o, u. Maybe that's just me though. And lower frequencies travel further then higher ones. Maybe that could lead people to associate i, e sounds with closer distance then a, o, u. Maybe it could also be related to how wide the mouth is opened when producing sounds.
interesting thoughts!
Do you want to publish this in a small independent journal or anywhere else? I'd like to take a look at the data:)
Data can be found at 3:15 in the video (should be high enough quality to read stuff)
As for the offer, thank you so much! It means a lot but I'm not sure I'd be in a position to do that at the moment. Feel free to email me (email in channel bio) however :)
Out of curiosity, how did you pick the sample of languages?
Someone asked a similar question, so I'll just copy and paste my reply here:
--
I pretty much got a bunch of language families and then looked through their descendants. I tried assuring there wouldn't be multiple languages from any given subfamily (hence French is the only Romance language out of the Indo-European family) to make sure I could represent as much diversity as possible.
In a lot of cases though, I picked more commonly spoken languages since there were many for which I either couldn't find resources for or did not trust resources I found (istg some languages legit just have a (probably) terrible translation of the bible and then some random reference grammar from the 1800s)
I plan to replicate this in the future with more robust sampling and including info on other distances/gender/case/etc so we'll see!
What was your selection process for the 70 languages you tested?
I pretty much got a bunch of language families and then looked through their descendants. I tried assuring there wouldn't be multiple languages from any given subfamily (hence French is the only Romance language out of the Indo-European family) to make sure I could represent as much diversity as possible.
In a lot of cases though, I picked more commonly spoken languages since there were many for which I either couldn't find resources for or did not trust resources I found (istg some languages legit just have a (probably) terrible translation of the bible and then some random reference grammar from the 1800s)
I plan to replicate this in the future with more robust sampling and including info on other distances/gender/case/etc so we'll see!
In Japanese you have "kono/sono/ano" for "this one/that one/that thing over there" and "kore/sore/are" for the adjective forms ("this/that/the … over there"). I'm not sure where "ika" came from
EDIT: in other words "ko-" is proximal, "so-" is medial, and "a-" is distal
DOUBLE EDIT: Whoops, confused Japanese and Javanese!
It's Javanese, not Japanese. There are iki, kiyi (close); iku, kuwi (somewhat far); and ika, kaé (far).
@@veinusch Ahhh.
LOLL it happens!! dw:)
hi :3 UwU
....hi?
HAHAH
0:37 the entry for Hebrew is sort of wrong, "hu" is the third person singular male pronoun, and i guess it could be used as a demonstrative for male nouns (For female nouns you'll use "hi") but I wouldn't say it's more distal than "ze", in truth "ze" is both proximal and distal, hebrew doesn't really have a proximal distal distinction.
That's my fault for not specifying, but the entry in the video was specifically for Biblical Hebrew-the info of which I got from this guy → czcams.com/video/NBmNhnnePbA/video.html&ab_channel=KenSchenck
I'll add this note to the description :)
Not the best at this but maybe it's also related to our intuitive understanding of the physics behind sounds? Think Doppler effect for example 🤔
That would make sense! Like how I said perhaps we're subconsciously thinking of the space created in our mouths and how it's affected by the position of our tongue. Really cool stuff to look into
@@Sundrobrocc Yes! What I was thinking of though is the way noises sound when far from the listener as compared to being right near their ear. I'm not sure if it is correct but maybe a far-away sound/ echo is perceived as a lower pitch?
¿so si quiero un gran mojito me ordeno un mojón?
ASÍ MISMO
Ah but alas, the Sapir Fart hypothesis is proven at last. Through freudian analysis, we can determine that people subconsciously detect the distance between the tongue and the borders of the mouth, which allows them to symbolically understand the real world around them.
grar ...
You could write Yuwaalaraay's family as "P.-Nyungan" to fit in the table instead of just calling it "Aboriginal" (aboriginal to where? and... that's not a language family lol)
Dude thanks for this comment-I've always had a problem with the term "aboriginal" cuz it kinda makes no sense but it's so often used to describe Australian languages and the reference grammar I used to find the demonstratives called it that too. I'll add corrections to the description :)
thank you for injecting brainrot halfway through🙏ko'u attention span iki
Iki, Kiki rānei?
@@Sundrobrocc is that a fucking macron? i think im gonna be sick. Reported!
NOOOO