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[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NORVIN RICHARDS: OK. So last time, we ended on one of these cliffhangers. And so I rushed you through a bunch of Japanese data. And then we got to this new bit of linguistic technology-- [BUZZING] that's going to be annoying-- this new bit of linguistic technology and went through it pretty fast. So what I want to do is do the run up to that again a little more carefully and show you what it is that we're talking about. What we were talking about at the end was the position of accent in Japanese compounds. So here are a bunch of compound nouns in Japanese. And the observation was that when you have a compound consisting of two parts, the result always has one accent. It has accent on one particular syllable. The accented syllable doesn't have to be the accented syllable in either of the original parts of the compound. So "raw egg," which is the first example in this slide-- "raw" and "egg"-- they ...

[SQUEAKING] [RUSTLING] [CLICKING] NORVIN RICHARDS: Here, I'm going to try to answer that. That's a really good question. And in some cases, we just kind have to guess. But in some cases, we have-- especially for languages like Greek and Latin, we have descriptions by people who attempted to describe their own sounds. That's a kind of thing that happens. We can infer things from mistakes that people made at various points. So people who were learning how to spell, or say children, or people who weren't highly educated, when they misspelled words in, say, Greek or Latin, you can infer things. So if you're making-- if a certain kind of misspelling is common, you get to infer that those sounds were kind of common. So in the case of ancient Greek, we think that there was an "Y" [high front rounded vowel] partly because there was a period where people were-- when people misspelled it. They either misspelled it as "u" or as "i". ...