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Hi.

In the previous video we have seen
that these phonetic things like place

of articulation, or
manner of articulation are not

just nice ways to describe the way
in which people produce consonants.

But they actually really
play a role in language,

they play a role when when children
acquire their language,

they play a role when people
make speech errors, and

they play a role in organizing the set
consonants in an individual language.

Such a set of consonants can typically be
organized in a nice rectangular table.

And that's the rows and
columns corresponding to our place and

manner of articulation.

And I'm going to discuss these issues
more with my students Inge and Marten.

>> So
my first question is about this table but

then from the perspective
of language change.

So we saw in the last module
that all languages change and

that maybe we spoke something
very different 10,000 years ago.

So if we spoke differently
10,000 years ago,

did we also use different
sounds in a certain language?

>> Yes, we can be quite sure about that

We can,
it's absolutely sure that we did because

many aspects of language
change all the time.

And consonants and actually also
vowels are definitely among them.

So the particular way in which
consonants are produced or

which consonants a language has
definitely changes over time.

So 10,000 years ago,

our forefathers definitely had
a different set of consonants.

>> Okay, now that's something
that's strange, because you've

also said earlier that there's no way that
we know how people spoke 10,000 years ago

because there's no record.

Because language is fleeting so how do we
know that the consonants have changed?

>> Yeah right, well, okay, so
here I admit we don't really know

in a sense that of course
we don't have recordings of

people speaking 10,000 years or
even 300 years ago.

So we don't know how people spoke,
we just know that they must have spoken

differently because languages
change all the time.

And that cannot have been
different 10,000 years ago either

>> So what sort of evidence do we have for
that?

>> So, we can figure out certain
things about how languages sounded.

At that time, at some point,
10,000 years ago was too long ago.

>> Mm-hm.
>> But some point in the past

we can figure it out.

And there are several methodologies for
that.

One is by language comparison,
so if you have other languages

which are related to our language,
we can see what consonants they have.

English is related to German and Dutch,

English has a word night,
which has two consonants, an N and a T.

But German and Dutch have a

a third consonant,
they say nacht, both of them say nacht.

So there is this consonant chuh, there.

Because it's two other languages, which
have that sound, that is an indication that

maybe English had that sound as well,
at some point in its inventory.

And fortunately in English we have
another kind of dimension for that

other kind of evidence for
that I should say, and it's spelling.

The wonderful, beautiful thing about English

is that
it has this very conservative spelling.

Spelling didn't change or

at least didn't change all that much in
the course of the past few centuries

But the sounds probably did.

So how do we spell the English word,
night?

Well, we spell it with G-H.

There's G-H in the middle.

A G-H in the middle exactly at
the point where these other

languages have a chuh sound.

And it's not very strange to
think that maybe G-H was a way to

write a chuh kind of
sound in English as well.

So by looking at the spelling, and
by comparing to other languages,

we can discover that probably English
had at least one more consonant

a few hundred years ago.

>> Okay, so then we've established
that there is change, in fact?

And we established how
we can investigate that,

but what I still don't really
understand is why would that change?

>> Yeah, right, yeah, it's,
that's an interesting question.

It is a difficult question but
we do have an answer or