Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

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Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby leosmith » Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:36 am

This popped up in my watch list, even though I don't think I've shown much interest in ancient languages on YouTube. Can anyone vouch for the authenticity of any of these languages? I feel like I can for Quechua, even though I don't actually speak the language (I've listened to it quite a bit lately). Definitely can't for Old English, Old Japanese or Middle Chinese, even though I speak the modern versions.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Sae » Sun Jun 04, 2023 11:04 am

For the Old Norse, I guess I would line it up against a Jackson Crawford video and see if the sounds are comparable. I don't really know any suggestions for other languages, but Jackson Crawford generally seems to be a good source for Old Norse things, so if the pronunciations are comparable, then it probably gives some indication of accuracy. Though of course, how we pronounce ancient languages is an educated approximation.

But there are some cool videos out there for old and ancient langauges. Heck, some even go as far as recreating ancient music, like Peter Pringle does with Sumerian, there's a fair for people doing it with Old Norse & Old English, but (especially with Old Norse) it can play more to fantasy than reality as a lot of Norse folk music is more a modern folk with Norse themes than something representative of the real thing. Heck I think the genre is called "neo-folk" so it doesn't even pretend to be the real thing, but people apparently mistake it as such. That said, they probably still do the language closely.

And Farya Faraji with a range of videos of music in ancient languages, but they're a mix of "what it could have sounded like based on what we know" and modern interpretations and Farya Faraji has some pretty interesting videos about reconstructing and understanding how ancient music sounded, though I realise this more to do with music than language, but it loosely ties in enoguh I guess for it to be an interesting subject. Plus the guy looks like Gilgamesh.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Deinonysus » Sun Jun 04, 2023 11:25 am

It's hard to say. A lot of the voices sound muttery and there is no reference text provided so it's hard to tell what they're trying to say. The voices had some artifacts (like the sound of speaking backwards and then being reversed) so I'm guessing that it's AI generated audio, but I don't think there's an Akkadian text-to-speech synthesizer available, for instance. So there has to be some sort of training data, but where did that come from? I'd say that the simple lack of explaining the methods and sources makes this video sketchy. "An AI made it" is not a sufficient explanation.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jun 04, 2023 4:35 pm

"Equator AI" created this. That means AI created this. AI's prime directive seems to be to generate clickbait. This seems to have worked.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Sae » Sun Jun 04, 2023 4:59 pm

Cainntear wrote:"Equator AI" created this. That means AI created this. AI's prime directive seems to be to generate clickbait. This seems to have worked.



Based on looking at the channel, it looks like the AI aspect is for animation and the only bit I saw they mention as being AI.
I'm not sure if it is the same for the audio, but they don't provide the source for the audio, which doesn't help because that would make it easier to check the legitimacy.

But it feels like they may have grabbed recordings and stuck them against a video with AI animated faces. I didn't notice audio articles you often get on AI generated speech and you can hear some recording flaws in some of them, especially the Old Japanese and Ryukyuan ones (and additional background noise in some)

Though these days, I still would not rule out AI on the voices too as they could be added, but they've not put that kind of effort on their AI generated animations as they really stand out as AI generated and it sounds like that it's the main selling point of the AI on their channel.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Cainntear » Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:27 pm

Sae wrote:
Cainntear wrote:"Equator AI" created this. That means AI created this. AI's prime directive seems to be to generate clickbait. This seems to have worked.



Based on looking at the channel, it looks like the AI aspect is for animation and the only bit I saw they mention as being AI.
I'm not sure if it is the same for the audio, but they don't provide the source for the audio, which doesn't help because that would make it easier to check the legitimacy.

But it feels like they may have grabbed recordings and stuck them against a video with AI animated faces. I didn't notice audio articles you often get on AI generated speech and you can hear some recording flaws in some of them, especially the Old Japanese and Ryukyuan ones (and additional background noise in some)

Though these days, I still would not rule out AI on the voices too as they could be added, but they've not put that kind of effort on their AI generated animations as they really stand out as AI generated and it sounds like that it's the main selling point of the AI on their channel.

The main video on their profile page has a text-to-speech voice on it. Their description is in very clearly non-native English
History is not only volumes of academic research, but also architecture, landscapes, and simply faces. The faces of those who made history, those who entered it and even those who existed only in the imagination of artists.
The "Equator" channel strives to preserve and revive the past of mankind, making it closer and more understandable for people of our era.
We really want science to become a great entertainment as well. So that you can rest and relax, while being confident in the quality of the information presented.
We take your relaxation seriously, but we talk about serious things with ease!

And yet they come out with grammatically perfect video text and (computer-voiced VOs).

Most of their videos are just an AI looking at pictures and making them move.

If they could recreate the phonology of early languages, they wouldn't be running a cheap YouTube channel -- they'd be doing state of the art research. I reckon they're using a mixture off the shelf voices aimed at modern languages, and recordings of real people in some instances (eg Quechua is still spoken today, and I reckon that's a recording of a person. I also think the Proto-Celtic has so many lip-smacking sounds that that was a modern recording.

The idea of an AI speaking an ancient language is laughable.

Edit: they didn't credit the speakers. Did they even get permission?
Last edited by Cainntear on Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:29 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Querneus » Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:29 pm

The Latin text at least is the beginning of Cicero's In Catilinam 3:

Rem publicam, Quirites, vitamque omnium vestrum, bona, fortunas, coniuges liberosque vestros atque hoc domicilium clarissimi imperi, fortunatissimam pulcherrimamque urbem, hodierno die deorum immortalium summo erga vos amore, laboribus, consiliis, periculis meis e flamma atque ferro ac paene [ex faucibus fati ereptam et vobis conservatam ac restitutam videtis].

Words are correctly stressed, but I don't hear a lot of the vowel lengths respected, e.g. publicam sounds like pŭblicam (short ŭ) instead of pūblicam (long ū), and fortunas/coniuges sounds like fortunăs/coniugĕs rather than fortunās/coniugēs. The full [m] in "deorum immortalium" would also get criticized.

I'm guessing this was read by a real person and was just animated via some AI technique?
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Sae » Sun Jun 04, 2023 5:33 pm

Cainntear wrote:
If they could recreate the phonology of early languages, they wouldn't be running a cheap YouTube channel -- they'd be doing state of the art research. I reckon they're using a mixture off the shelf voices aimed at modern languages, and recordings of real people in some instances (eg Quechua is still spoken today, and I reckon that's a recording of a person. I also think the Proto-Celtic has so many lip-smacking sounds that that was a modern recording.

The idea of an AI speaking an ancient language is laughable.


Yeah, this is why I think it's just recorded clips they found of the languages and put AI video on top and they probably lifted the audio from elsewere. Nothing stood out to me in the audio as being AI (aside from in other videos) and it would be way too sophisticated if it was.
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Re: Video - The Sound of Ancient Languages

Postby Axon » Mon Jun 05, 2023 2:21 am

As someone who consumes a lot of reconstructed ancient language content, these are definitely just real people's recordings that someone animated these pictures over.

But...

Cainntear wrote:The idea of an AI speaking an ancient language is laughable.


Don't be too hasty. Meta's new text to speech model supports Latin and Ancient Greek. I've listened to them both and they sound just as good as any of the other languages from that model - strange sentence intonation but very realistic pronunciation, like a real person who isn't used to reading a text aloud. It was built using Bible recordings, so you're getting the voice and reconstruction accuracy of whoever recorded those languages. Of course, it also strips out macrons from Latin text, so there's no hope of accurate vowel length, and the speaker in the Meta model certainly wasn't doing an academic reconstruction of Classical Latin.

Any neural text-to-speech model just needs lots of hours of matched audio and text, and the definition of "lots" is shrinking all the time. People like AZ Foreman, Simon Roper, Jackson Crawford, and Luke Ranieri on YouTube have uploaded a great deal of audio that could be used for this purpose. In fact, the new Meta model supports fine-tuning, so someone could be training it on their voices right now.
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