When one hears modern people talk about how any language sounded 500 years ago, that immediately brings up certain questions. Like "How do you know?". We know there are no recordings of those people speaking. It also seems reasonable to assume that there were regional accents and dialects back then just as there are today.
So while I am in no position to contradict what these folks say, I also have my doubts about the confidence of the claims about how things were pronounced a long time ago.
Certainly agree! Studying Chinese poetry from different periods in history, some seem to have the rhythm using today's pronunciation, some do not. In order to get the true feel of it, the different dialects and change over time need to be taken into consideration.
Of course they cannot be 100%, but there is a lot of meta-analysis that can be done. The article I linked was the result of 12 years research, not 10 minutes down the pub!
From what little I understand, a few of the main tools that are used are
1. looking at contemporary writing and seeing how things were mis-spelt by people. Generally a mis-spelling will be phonetic, so that will give a clue
2. Looking at sonnets and poetry and trying to make things Rhyme that these days do not.
3. Looking at other european languages with a common root (most of them)
In the case of the Shakespeare, making it so there was actually a joke where today there is none would seem to be a strong indication that he is on the right track.
For example the joke that '*****' and 'hour' sounded the same. Hour comes from the Greek/Latin hora So even without looking at the evolution you can see it's no great leap of faith that the two sounded similar at some point in the past.
I've lost my copy so cannot check the references Bill Bryson used in 'made in America' which indicated you can infer a lot about pronunciation in England 400 years ago from modern North American usage. It's nearly 20 years old so research may have moved on.
Just noticed he wrote another in 2009 which I need to read.
Makes a change from magic wires and snake oil 🙂
Yes indeed. It may not be 100% accurate, but it's far from a wild guess. Snake oil it isn't.
For the past 120+ years we do have the luxury of recorded sound. If we can manage to hold on to those for a few hundred more years, they will sound very odd to future generations. 🙂
I was on a rugby tour of England and France in the early 1980s, and next to defeating every English team we played (6), and going a miserable 2 and 5 in France, my biggest surprise was how no one spoke BBC English.
Distances of even just 100 miles made large differences in the accents of British english. Newfoundland - funny, I remember the intro for a sitcom called This Hour Has 22 Minutes-"Good evening, Canada! In B.C., it's 6 o'clock, in Calgary, it's 7 o'clock.In Toronto, it's 9 o'clock.
In Newfoundland, it's 9:37!
Something I found today that really made me laugh. TAS review of a D'Agostino amp
D'Agostino Classic Stereo Amplifier | The Absolute Sound
The mind boggles. I hope to goodness its bad journalism and not something Dan said!
D'Agostino Classic Stereo Amplifier | The Absolute Sound
The mind boggles. I hope to goodness its bad journalism and not something Dan said!
True story: A friend of mine was in Nfld and went to a diner to eat. He saw mushroom soup on the menu and wondered whether it was home made or from a can. He knew a bit of the local idiom so asked the waitress "Is that tin soup?". She gave him a puzzled look and answered "Oh no my dear, it's right t'ick!"
Sometime I'll tell you the story of Hagrid and the security guard at a rugby game in Chicago!
In UK there is an amazing variation in accents. Mainly due to people not travelling far (proven by DNA analysis). And confusing even for us sometimes !
Note: The stereotype ' oh you're from England, I just lurrrve your accent' is real and has happened to me.
Distances of a few miles can sometimes make a difference which locals can detect. I grew up in North-East London, in the valley of the River Lea. Back then, I could often tell the difference between a local accent, and the accent of someone from the other side of the valley - about 3 miles away! I can't do it now, as I have been living away from London for several decades.MITsound said:
Nowadays even the BBC does not speak BBC English, but instead the peculiar mid-Atlantic speech favoured by our youngsters. On the BBC we now have 'bugs' instead of 'flies, wasps, bees, butterflies etc.'. We now 'meet up' with people instead of 'meeting' them. We have 'ongoing' issues instead of 'continuing' issues.
And due to the pronunciation unit being downsized we had two presenters on Radio 3 giving different renditions of 'Dvorak'. Mind you, had a neighbour in Chicago whose surname was 'Dvorak' but he prounounced it 'de-vor-ak'!
Intravenous hangover clinics don't work, could land you in hospital ? The Register
At least no one is offering intravenous aids to hifi pleasure!
At least no one is offering intravenous aids to hifi pleasure!
A nephew of mine notices that the detective novel "Hardy Boys" now are written in a totally different way than the collection we have, even the illustrations had changed.
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