Audio Etymological Lexicon

Because there weren't any audio recordings in ancient times, I sometimes have to use roughly similar sounds instead, in which case there will of course be inaccuracies. And since we have no way of knowing exactly how the ancestral forms of words were pronounced, all these simulations are “my best guess, given the current state of our knowledge, the available recordings, and the limitations of my software”. Often I just simulate the main part of the word, ignoring inflections, suffixes etc. I welcome comments, corrections etc. by email to john.coleman@phon.ox.ac.uk , or message me @ancientsounds@mastodonapp.uk on Mastodon . (If you want to learn more about how the simulations of sound change are made, there is a slightly out of date technical article here .)

Rights: Although they are closely based upon audio data from sound recordings of many speakers, in the public domain or owned by the University of Oxford, all of the audio files on this site were created by John Coleman using signal processing and speech synthesis software. These sound files may be used or reused according to the terms of the Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence, without any need to ask for specific permission. Please direct any enquiries to john.coleman@phon.ox.ac.uk.

Note on transcriptions: In the middle column I use conventional philological notation with my own phonetic transcriptions in square brackets. These phonetic transcriptions reflect the audio simulations rather than some theoretically predicted pronunciations. If you are not familiar with these kinds of transcription, the linked audio clips demonstrate what pronunciations the transcriptions try to express. In the right-hand column, especially for languages written in non-Roman scripts, I use a simplified notation based on English spelling. I hope that this will be less confusing to most readers than the diverse specialist notations used for different languages in academic philological works. For the reconstructed ancestral forms, I mainly follow Ringe (2006) and Kroonen (2009), with my own phonetic interpretations.