Many people mistakenly believe that Sukientire has expert knowledge that allows him to present his own theory on the origins of the Japanese language, for example, but unfortunately, he is just an amateur who "pretends" to know. Let's take a look at his ancient Chinese language course together. At first glance, you might think it's impressive. (Continued)
The highlight of this video, the ancient Chinese phonetic symbols (the red letters), were simply copied and pasted from Wiktionary (Wikipedia's language dictionary version). What's more, the person in question has absolutely no understanding of what he has copied and pasted. The proof is in the words "者 *tˤaʔ" and "也 *lˤajʔ." (Continued)
The most recent studies that have reconstructed the pronunciation of ancient Chinese are Baxter & Sagart 2014 (B&S) and Zhengzhang 2003 (ZS). '者' is *tAʔ in B&S and *tjaːʔ in ZS. '也' is *lAjʔ in B&S and *laːlʔ in ZS. For the ancient Chinese pronunciation of other characters, Baxter & Sagart use the B&S pronunciation, but (continued)
I partially referenced ZS because I didn't understand the meaning of the capital "A" that appears in the B&S restored pronunciation of "者 *tAʔ" and "也 *lAjʔ". Usually, if a kanji has the "ː" symbol in ZS, it has the "ˤ" symbol in B&S. For example, "何" is *[ɡ]ˤaj in B&S, and *ɡaːl in ZS. So, (continued)
He saw the ZS "者 *tjaːʔ" and "也 *laːlʔ" and thought that to make them sound more like B&S, he could change the "aː" part to "ˤa" to make them "者 *tˤaʔ" and "也 *lˤajʔ." However, this is proof that he is completely ignorant of ancient Chinese, because the "tˤ" and "lˤ" in B&S are the ta and da sounds in Japanese. (Continued)
For example, "都" is B&S *tˤa, which becomes "to" in Japanese. "者" is "sha", so it's "t" not "tˤ". This is the most basic of basics for those who deal with ancient Chinese, and it's impossible to get it wrong. Anyone can make a typo. But this isn't a typo, (continued)
The only mistake he made was in the part with a capital "A" in the information on Wiktionary, a public website that is the language dictionary version of Wikipedia. The only explanation for this is that when he copied and pasted, he didn't know the meaning of the capital "A," so he tried to fill in the gaps from other information, and failed. (Continued)
There are a number of other problems with his video that make it hard to believe it was made by someone with any knowledge of ancient Chinese. The most obvious is the messy pronunciation. For example, the *-r- in "貓 *mˤraw" is pronounced with a trill, which is very suspicious. But that's not all. (continued)
In his videos, he refers to Chinese people as "Qin people," which suggests he is imagining the Chinese language of the time after the Qin unified the country. However, the pronunciation he uses in his videos is from the Warring States period, and does not reflect the changes such as *-oj > *-waj. (continued)
Another funny thing is this: he took the unnecessary parts of Wiktionary's "盍 *m-[k]ˤap" and rearranged it to "kˤap," which again proves he has no understanding of ancient Chinese. B&S's *m.kˤ- becomes *gˤ-, not *kˤ-. But he doesn't have that knowledge. (Continued)
![Another funny thing is this: he took the unnecessary parts of Wiktionary's "盍 *m-[k]ˤap" and rearranged it to "kˤap," wh](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GhcVnDEacAIteQP.jpg)
To sum it up, it's like this: 1) Sukientire's ancient Chinese course is just copying and pasting the restored pronunciation of kanji from Wiktionary. 2) He rearranges some of the copied and pasted pronunciation, but he does it without proper knowledge, so if you're a complete failure, don't be fooled by this nonsense video.