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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 23 ก.พ. 2017
- Botched rhymes, buried puns and a staged accent that sounds more Victorian than Elizabethan. No more! Use linguistic sleuthing to dig up the surprisingly different sound of the bard's Early Modern English.
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~ Briefly, and without spoilers ~
I'm embarrassed to admit that this is the first time I ever really got into Shakespeare. There's a personal story here, which I'll quickly share in the video.
The idea of reconstructing his pronunciation intrigued me. As I started making trips to the library and downloading old grammars, I just found the questions piling on. I did find some answers for you.
It starts with his odd spelling - well, the spelling he inherited. Chaucer's medieval spelling was followed by modern sound changes, including the start of the Great Vowel Shift. The introduction of Caxton's printing press and the spelling debates put Early Modern English in a state of flux by Shakespeare's time. They also left our first trail of evidence.
Other evidence comes from rhythm, rhymes and - more reluctantly - puns. Many of these don't work the same way anymore, from the rhymes like "sea" and "prey" to the rhythm of "housewifery".
Modern dialects add another layer of evidence, at times preserving features that standard English accents, notably RP, have lost.
The sound of his language is also shaped by his grammar. His use of "thou" and his third-person "-th" vs "-s" verb endings always stand out to English speakers. Finally, though data-crunchers challenge his legendary status as king of all the words, we consider how innovative he was in the way he used words.
We end with a note on linguist David Crystal's Original Pronunciation ("OP") experiment at the reconstructed Globe Theatre, and some thoughts on what studying Shakespeare's sounds as a different pronunciation system says about him and about us.
~ Credits ~
Narration, art and animation by Josh from NativLang. Some of the music, too.
Sources for claims and for imgs, sfx, fonts and music:
docs.google.com/document/d/18...
I believe I was less confused not knowing what Shakespeare sounded like.
Koonta me too. I got lost mid way 😞
Dont blame you. Comfort in knowing nothing. And you're fine with that in your life rather than aspiring for more, so be it.
The more you learn the less you know
@@TheOldSchoolGamer93 Arguably, that's a wise statement.
Old School Gamer lmao
He sounds like he's a mix between a drunk Irish man and a drunk Scottish man
That sounds like a good fun.
I’m reminded of a particularly bad joke now...
I was thinking the same thing 👍
Thegoodstuff I wish Americans knew that there are 1000s of accents in the uk and that Shakespeare’s accent was actually east Anglian/West Country (England). Search them up and listen to them
wut
its nothing like irsh or Scottish, youre american arent you
Normal people: Mom I'm hungry!!
Shakespear: Let it be known to the birth giver that thy stomach consist of emptiness.
I staaaan :)))))
*My stomach
Thy = your/your's
Shut up, pleb.
@@EpicnessYeet No
Art thou fill'd with pangs of hunger
"thou hast" = you have
sounds like the German "Du hast" which means "you have". Mind-blowing.
It would sound even more similar back in the day. People living in the region of modern Germany replaced all the "th" sounds like in "this" or "the" with "d" during the 9th and 10th centuries (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_German_consonant_shift). This shift also affected Dutch and Scandinavian languages but not Icelandic, which like English, still has the th sound!
Germanic English started after Rome got sacked in 410 and the Anglo-Saxons invaded Britain (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-Saxon_settlement_of_Britain).
Etymology bro
It's not actually. You do know that you guys were more or less from the same tribes, right? Anglo-Saxons were Germanic tribes. You guys have the same ancestors.
*Rammstein intensifies*
A lot of English phrases are Germanic, like "that's good"
Everyone's saying he sounds Irish, Jamaican, Welsh or even Dutch when we CLEARLY all know what he really is...
He's obviously a pirate.
haha a pirate accent is a west country English accent!
😭🤣😂🤣🤣🙏🏽😂 I can’t stop my self from laughing 😝
эч ким кам көрбөйт
Yup I got pirate more than anything else lol.
Bristolian 😉
Recipe for Modern English:
1) mix together Anglo-Saxon, Old Norse, Old High German and Norman French.
2) pour into cultural soup mix
3) gradually add in a 2:1 mixture of Latin and Greek
4) allow to simmer for about half a millennium while occasionally stirring the vowels
5) spoon out the spelling but leave the pronunciation to simmer for a couple more centuries
6) serve with a dictionary...
:D
So beautiful, I'm stealing!
Nice recipe! Lol.
Will try at home next time : )
Kids loved it, will make again.
Tal Sheynkman this is perfect
My mother grew up in a holler in southeast Kentucky and she swears that her grandmother spoke partly Elizabethan English, so isolated in the mountains were they. She would say "dee" for "die", "yarb" for "herb", money was "puss" ("purse?"). She was mocked by certain family members, and it wasn't until my mother went away to college that she realized that her grandmother was still speaking the English she had heard her parents and grandparents speak. Our family came to America from England in the early 1600s.
There is still something similar in the Outer Banks of North Carolina.
The Appalachian and southern states persevered the Kings English of King George better than anywhere in the world. They were isolated from outsiders unlike the northern states. While at that time England was the center of the world and influenced by French and other migrants.
Wow. Pretty cool.
Early 1600s? Unlikely. You're most likely descended from the Borderlands migration of 1670-1730. The clue is Kentucky. The three earlier migrations didn't go there.
@@taterkaze9428 We were living in Virginia in 1609. My ggggggggrandfather was church warden for a county in Virginia. I do not know offhand what year we migrated eastwards.
There's another video where two men do pieces of Shakespeare in the original accent/pronunciation and show how it completely changes the rhyming and often makes for puns and double entendres you wouldn't hear at all with modern accents. For instance "from hour to hour we rot and rot" (from As You Like It) with the correct accent ALSO sounds like "from whore to whore we rut and rut" and both fit perfectly with the rest of the dialogue. Very clever.
Shakespeare obviously loved wordplay but you can't hear most of it now, *especially* not with the upper-class English accent that most people seem to think is the way Shakespeare should be done.
@The Anonymous Sir Backspace Yeah I do. th-cam.com/video/gPlpphT7n9s/w-d-xo.html It's titled Shakespeare: Original Pronunciation by OpenLearn. The bit about old pronunciation bringing out rhymes and puns starts about the middle.
Modern "hour" pronunciation + Shakespeare "hour" pronunciation = "I love bangin who-ers" -Frank Reynolds
That was the same David Crystal mentioned in the vid
Good for you if you really think they figured out what the original accent(s) were.
Travel around the UK a bit and you’ll still hear some of these pronunciations in the regional accents.
The Northern English accent I think still preserves the old pronunciation of "sleep".
@@elsakristina2689 which Northern English accent? I have one and I've no clue what you're referring to.
@@MaximumJoy the one in Lancashire
@@elsakristina2689 which one? Preston, Chorley, Burnley?
@@MaximumJoy Pendle
Ok, fine, but where are my egges?
France, apparently.
@@Sammie1053 cool I live in France.
Yur egges shaleth be inn Franse
😄
What are egges? Do you mean eyren?
I always remember our English teacher back in the 70s saying that English has changed so much since the Baird´s time that most of his jokes, innuendos and hidden meanings are entirely lost on today´s audiences. In other words, while today´s audiences like to think they are being culturally with it as they quietly watch the masterpieces being acted out, Elizabethan audiences would have been either laughing their heads off or drowning in their tears.
What does the expression laughing head off mean?
I still laugh my head off or sob my heart out watching Shakespeare acted well.
Country matters
@@sarahgraham4056 it means you laugh so hard that you might do that thing where toss you back, or really since its just an expression. Just laugh really loudly.
In the spirit of Shakespeare I swear that one day I will go to the globe theatre and watch a Shakespeare play whilst being completely hammered - that's what his target audience was.
I didn't realize that studying shakespearian pronunciation would equip me to improvise in Pirate
Haha, yes and the reason (raisin?) we think of pirates speaking like that is because the golden age of piracy was in the mid to late 1600's, only a few decades after Shakespeare's death. Many English speaking pirates would have had accents similar to what is heard in the above video.
Is it just me, or did Shakespeare sound pretty Irish?
definitely me too
I hear Cornish (as in the dialect of English, not Kernowek) or West Country. Or Tangier Island's dialect.
Unlike everyone who heard a little of their own speech in OP, I hear none of my native Texas dialect!
I can see now how American English developed so differently to British English. The first American English speaking settlers(set-lers or setl-rs?) came around the 1600s. This is over 100 years after Shakespeare sure, but still long ago from modern times to be sure.
What I like is that we see how this earlier modern English split based on the enviornments they were in. In the English colonies, the language developed in isolation, developing freely. In Europe it was still being influenced by the exchange of language with Wales, Scotland and Ireland and other foreigners who spoke english as a second language and the influence of those other languages on English itself.
Fascinating.
No, Welsh, Scottish Gaelic and Irish are Celtic languages (Welsh is Brythonic; the others Goidelic).
Old English is a West Germanic language of the "low German" variety - and this includes its decendents, including Hiberno-English (English as spoken in Ireland), Scots/Doric/Lallans, and all the other English dialects.
English is as distant from Scottish Gaelic, Irish, and Welsh as it is from Romanian and Spanish.
"Gallic" is an adjective that refers to the Celtic languages of pre-Roman France, whose precise relationship to the Insular Celtic languages is still debated.
Welsh, Scottish and Irish are Gaelic (or Celtic), but Old English is Germanic
I spek no frensch
Sounds like fuccin meme language
No step on snek
Hello fren
🤣🤣🤣
@@wegood563 Hello fascist that got their sub deleted.
pp smol.
try again in English
Our Shakespeare class was fortunate in that our professor got his jollies by explaining every, single dirty joke in the plays.
We still pronounce “says” as “sez” in North West England
That’s how it’s said in America as well, since American English was originally closer to Old Pronunciation.
I still pronounce says as sez
nah mate, we say sez, shakespeare said sehz with a long vowel
We says “sez” in Newfoundland.
You do what I say. I did what he sez.
Never heard anyone say says
In my home dialect (kind of Flemish) we still say 'eyren' (written as eieren) for eggs. I find that kind of cool
As I recall, the German for _eggs_ is _eier_. I've heard it said that Flemish is English's closest relative.
Dutch/Flemish are supposed to be the closest major languages to English, Frisian the closest minor language. If you regard Scots as a separate language, and certainly some do, then it would be considered the closest language to English.
I've always assumed that Lowland Scots was a dialect of English, like Danish. Norwegian ans Swedish are of each other.
Lowland Scots evolved separately from modern English, but from the same root. With effort, somebody who speaks one could learn to understand the other.
But then, linguistically the line between dialect and language seems to be based more on politics than on actual linguistics. Hence why one can have mutually intelligible languages (like the Scandinavian languages) and mutually non-intelligible dialects of the same language (like the Chinese "dialects").
Frisian, not Flemish xP.
so basically hundreds of years of English speakers cutting corners in spelling and pronunciation have essentially ruined any sort of play on words Shakespear had originally intended.
Robert Sides Not cutting corners, evolving and then standardizing.
now we can't get his puns
that's sad
noxious seraph : (
And our current puns have no reasons at all.
All languages are in constant state of evolution.
It makes much more sense when a lot of these words are still annunciated and pronounced the same way in the the north of England. English dialects are very different between counties. In fact people can tell where people live by their accents in the next town only a few miles away. A lot of towns, villages have Norse village names ending in ham and by. We still say things like ‘nowt’
As an American tourist, I stopped once in a fast food joint in Yorkshire. When I told the server my order, she squinted at my mouth, like she was having trouble understanding me. I used to love watching "All Creatures Great and Small" and listening to the Yorkshire accents.
As someone born in South Yorkshire, may I just say "Ey up, ivvrybody. Ow tha doing? Y'oreyt? Avva champion day, wain't tha."
I went to the Shakespeare's theatre actors' reading (not acting) session of Shakespeare. They all read their part of Shakespeare with so much grace, but when they all started discussing what things meant, their understanding was similar level to mine. I thought they all understood very well because they read it so beautifully.
It's like the Bible every one interprets it different but it makes them feel good 🙂
That old English is so Frisian, my goodness.
Bararo Interesting .
I read that in the past English and Dutch could understand each other without a problem.
Bararo so you want eiyres o egges?
hear hear
Eggs in Dutch is: Eieren
It's also important to remember that no one ever actually talked like the characters in Shakespeare: in rhyme and iambic pentameter.
Neferpitou understandably.
Not strictly true. Rhetoric is a lost art nowadays, but in a time before audio recording, people in public discourse needed a way to make their voices heard and remembered. If you thought politicians today don't sound like normal humans, the Romans who went to the Fora Romana had to listen to their politicians banter in perfect dactylic hexameter. Speeches and debates were a performance art back then. Politicians needed a way to convey their views in a way that would make it easier for listeners to remember and replicate, so the tools of the poets and minstrels also became tools for public speaking. This persisted for as long as the art of rhetoric was practiced in the courts of kings and nobles and in the plazas of republics and city-states. In the time of Shakespeare, increasing gentrification and the formation of a politically active middle class meant that many of the newly-minted bourgeois of Europe were also practicing rhetoric in, yes, iambic pentameter, in the salons and pubs and the studies. Poets and playwrights taught rhetoric classes for young gentry who needed the art to progress in life. We are of course talking about the top 10% of society here, but that's definitely not no one. People did speak in rhyme and iambic pentameter in proper circumstances, and Shakespeare reflects this to a great degree in his plays, though he did admittedly overuse the tools.
That's true, but because he put it into rhyme and pentameter, this allows us to match pronunciations. No-one thinks they actually spoke in rhyme all the time!
Shakespeare's characters only speak in verse for important "mannerly" lines of dialog. A good bit of the dialog is in plain prose.
The act of speaking is a lair that acts of the actor to speak.
Just in England, British English is very diverse. Americans always think of RP (how the Queen speaks) or London "chav" ("innit bruv?"). But there are dozens of accents. Some sound Scottish, some even sound similar to this Shakespearean.
Shakespeare's accent sounds very West Country to me, with some Northern flavour to it as well. Very interesting that my own (admittedly diluted and amalgamated from living in different areas) somewhat received pronunciation was only on its way to becoming the basis of the language at the time.
From one of the pilgrims' songs: "Hast thou not seen, how thy desires ere have been"
about 1620. We were taught to say "ben" not "been".
I'm allergic to grapes. I don't know the raisin why that is.
Space Doggo ayyyyyyyeeee!
OI THIS IS SO SMART I LOVE IT
Wow, you will seriously come up with any raisin to wine, won't you?
Michael Glass awesome :-D
Mark Mauk agreed
WOW. I understood *none* of this.
Me being forced to read romeo and Juliet for English
So What Shakespeare's English really Sound Like? He could have read a few sentences.
Imagine if English wasn't your primary language.
@@HotTakeAndy well it isn't mine but i understood everything
Omg get on my nerd level
so in short they all talked with the strongest newfoundland accents ever to exist, gotcha
Great stuff! I love Shakespeare, once it opens up to you it's stunning.
He must have encountered so many characters / dialects and accents travelling between London and Stratford upon Avon and you see it in the language.
His character Holofernes in Loves Labours is a hilarious example of a language pedant. Shakespeare was a linguistic liberal, and he had a childish love of innuendo.
I just found out that my joke pronunciation of reasons as raisins was never a joke. I don't know whether to feel vindicated or angry about being lied to
Well... It was a joke. The original joke that the writer intended, innit? 😂
Some Northerners in england still pronounce it like that, it’s nothing new
Isaac Swanson i'm sure shaky shaky spear boy would have been proud
You mean it was always a joke and you just perceived this line accurately
Isaac Swanson
I pronounce it the same way as a joke and now I feel really weirded out.
when you fall off your house in minecraft 2:43
😂
yes!
Lmfal
😂😂😂
Roblox*****
'Eyeren?...eggs, in Flemish and in Holland also we say 'eieren'. I think, in early ages our language was far more simular.
3:03 GREAT job. That's a VERY good sounding and wholly accurate impression of Olde English and what Shakespeare and others like him would have spoken and sounded just like from what I have studied and researched. Most people still have that exaggerated British play accent assumption of them
lord what should a man in these days now write?
*E G G E S* or *E Y R E N*
I imagine the chiefs face 😂 like "shuteth upp your idiots faceth"
@@dru4670 I like your comment a lot. Just so you know. Shuteth upp never, please.
Eyren still sounds like the Dutch "Eieren" today.
The en on the end of eyren is an archaic way of expressing a plural. Henry VIII is quoted as saying "they drown like ratten (rats)" when he witnessed the Mary Rose warship sink. Shoo'n (shoe-en) was a common way of saying shoes long after the use of en had died out for most other things.
500 likes and nobody has pointed out the second word is still found in welsh. The oldest one is going to be eyren which is wyau in welsh. You can see that the "en" part is just there to mean more than one, and was added the danes and saxons, probably to help them trade in multiple eggs. That word is brythonic. The Egges is indeed from later settlers in england.
I have plenty of Raisins to post here.
lol
+Horseygirl85
aye, I know you ;P
+Audrey Lamendola Oh hey, you're that person who roleplays as Undyne in that G+ community! Fancy meeting you here lol x3
Horseygirl85
Yeah XD
Guess we're both nerds xP
+Audrey Lamendola So it would seem lol
Thank you. As a long-time Shakespearean actor, this was truly helpful!
I’m English and this actually makes a lot of sense to me because in the area I’m from we pronounce “here” as “eyre” and it’s common to drop “h” from words. Also in parts of the north people say “ows thaa” for “how are you “
Me as a native german speaker, this Old English very reminds me of German. Knight - Knecht, Should - Sollte, Thou still existed - Like Du in german, Thou hast - You have are like Du hast - Ihr habt - This is all due to that german and english both are germanic languages and share the same roots.
Well, partially. As they say, English is half German, half Latin, and half French.
Also a native German speaker here.
I had the exact same thoughts. You can definitely see how Old English is more similar to German than modern English.
English is like 60% German, 30% French and 10% Britonic, so that makes sense.
Half man, half bear, half pig. Manbearpig
VintageLJ, that isn't correct at all, it's 40% German 30% Romance, 20% Norwegian and a small mix of the rest. Britonic doesn't make up a lot of English, only Britonic word in English I can think of on the spot is Cider. Sistr. Other than that many words are so old that it's shared with all European languages, for instance Cook. Bad example but it's literally older than man and woman. It's so old that even Sanskrit has it. Brother should also be one of those old old words.
I'm learning german, and if you know some german (or other germanic language) you can unlock a lot of this older stuff, like how "eyren" reminded me of the german "Eier" (also means eggs) which is pronounced too similar to be passed of as coincidence.
Interesting is
thou hast = (mod. German) du hast
I live in the south west U.K. and most of us still talk like this lol. Especially my grandfather aha.
Bist du ein studenten?
In dutch we say eieren for the plural of an ei. It even keeps the plural “-en”!
im a native english speaker who speaks both german and swedish and i noticed this as well! interestingly, the swedish word for egg is ägg. Eyren was the west germanic word which naturally evolved into English (noticable by how it's so similar to Eier in German), and an earlier form of ägg is what also gave English "egge" due to Norse contact with English speakers
Thank you for your effort in producing this and Publishing it. Help to bring me back to my love of Shakespeare of a youth
Shakespeare's problem is his stories aren't meant to he read, they're meant to be performed. No wonder everyone thinks they're boring cause you're just reading dialogue.
😂thats the stupidest thought Ive ever heard. Sorry Plutarch. Your dummy.
I have a RICH imagination as everyone should have rich imaginations.
We say "ah ya poor cratur" in Ireland if someone says they feel sick. We say cray-thur, as we have a difference from gaeilge between hard and soft T's and D's. So we can say "drop" with the d sounding like the 'th' in 'though'. The Irish name Peadar rhymes with lather.
I found that some Americans I met while working couldn't hear the difference I made between three and tree, making the joke about "turty tree and a turd". With tree, I bite the t and say the r straight away. With three, my tongue rests against my top teeth and I breathe over my tongue.
My fluent Irish speaking friend pointed out that these pronunciations, like with chinese or german to me, might sound like there is no difference to an outsider, and sometimes can't hear it enough to copy the sound. It made me surprised that there could be such a difference I didn't think about as we speak the same language. There's also a myriad of accents, and that just expands the whole scenario again :p ya poor cratur...
I thought that word meant whiskey xD
No, that'd be uísce beatha.
My Nan has a Munster accent as does the same, but so do my Gambian and my Nigerian friends. Weird, huh?
Irish Missionaries.
[tʰ] for [θ]
It's a pirate accent.
Not exactly, but it closer to the stereotypical pirate accent than almost any other accent still used today.
Exactly. If you listen to David Crystal or Ben Crystal recite some Shakespeare in OP, it sounds like they're “talking like a pirate”. It's kind of amusing, really.
Shall I compAAARRRRR thee to a summer´s day
Great playwriter SheakspeAARRR
aaarrrrggghhhh
This managed to make me interested in Shakespeare, which has never been my thing. Good work!
This video was so well put together that it made me quiver. Nothing gets me going like authentic Shakespearean pronunciations (except Chaucerian pronunciations!).
Sounds more like a heavy english west country accent than anything else imo. Cornish maybe.
OceanEmbers It has that cornish vibe.
It's the rhoticity. RP and most other English accents don't always pronounce R. Westcountry accents are some of the few that do. H is often dropped in Cockney and others, as well as in Westcountry accents. So just those two alone can make it seem very like a cyder drinking farmer.
That's also probably why most Americans (except Bostonians) perceive OP as sounding more "American" than RP - because almost all of our regional dialects derive from the rhotic dialects from Britain, from before non-rhoticity had taken over most of the island, save for the West Country... and a couple of identical twins from Leith who wouldn't know a single word to say, if they flattened all the vowels and threw the R away.
Ah, makes sense.
i actually moved from oxford to scotland a few years ago, and my Rs slowly all became rhotic. and my a in bath switched. and a lot of other little things like that, actually.
so, "most of the island" isn't quite right! as rhotic Rs are the norm here
Yea cool story and shit but-
Di-Did the guy get his eggs?
Shut up you idiotic cucumber.
Aye speech Frencshe and non,he did non gett hies egges...
He did get a dozen eyren though
'Eyren' is actually understandable for a native Dutch speaker: we say 'eieren'.
Rick Sanchez “What, you egg?” [He stabs him.]
I love etymology! Just discovered your great channel. Very informing along with entertaining. Eyren is like German: Eier, hast is the same word in german.
I would also love a comparison between old high german and the english counterpart.
You are the best TH-camrs I have found yet.
Really: thank you.
I'm not even a linguist and this fascinates me! Fascinating stuff!
Me, too! I don't even have an interest in languages, but I love learning. I accidentally stumbled upon this channel last night and can't get enough of it. He should be a teacher, if he isn't one already.
We use language everyday. Why would you have to be a linguist to find this interesting? :p
Well, boola boola
I'm a mathematician and I'm also amused by this.
That's because English is your mommy tongue. Dummy.
His real name was Willy Wigglestick, but his PR guy said that wouldn't do him any good in the long run and changed it to the now familiar William Shakespeare.
Willy wigglestick?! To me, that sounds kinda nasty. A "willy" and a wiggeling "stick".
Yeah man he'll shake his spear at you
He had enough to shake a stick at.
Bargain Boondocker willy? That means dick you know
looool
“Greetings. I am William Shakespeare, and I wishesh to speak to thee regarding thy automobile’s warranty.”
Fascinating about the vowel shift, sounds, words, spellings. Thank you
2:37 you really missed a good opportunity to say 'vowel movement'
Hahaha
Nobody:
Betacism: *childish pun*
Such a shit joke 😏
lmao
At least he said “vowel shit”, though admittedly “vowel movement” is much more clever.
So basically if we went back in time right now we would literally not be able to understand each other.
not without some work. Look up Original Pronunciation Shakespeare, it's entirely learnable.
as a German, I feel I'd have it much easier to understand the English language back then :D many things sound soooo German!
i would say you would be ok up to like year 1600/1700
You can get that in Liverpool or Scotland.
Idiots who force the word 'literally' are hard to understand. 'I literally died' is a classic example. Wtf are they saying to me? You're a moron.
My Bible app has the Great, Tyndale, Wickliffe, and Geneva versions. Those versions of the Bible have many different spellings of the same word, even in the same sentence!
I find the challenge of understanding what is said to be very fulfilling for both heart and soul.
Hella awesome insight my man! I loved it all, ESPECIALLY Shakespeare!
Omggg So Shakespeare was just reading how i used to when i started learning English! (ya know. when i didnt know what silent letters are. and just read out the words with letters i saw.)
queue has 4 of em! you only say q not qoo-e-oo-e
@@cheemsdog7662 I would think a q on its own would be pronounced like "ck" but maybe less harshly.
The "cyoo" sound is the name of the letter, and does not represent how it sounds.
I think queue has two silent letters: the last "ue" part (or maybe the middle two? But that would be absurd, much like the rest of English)
Soh pepple ein duh oldaen tymmes werre freeae tu ecxperrimente wytth syntacx, spyellinge andde ein fayct duh wholle Einglyishe lyanguyagge...! Noe dedductiones forh badde sppellinges tdhen!!!
Gteat!
I wish school could work that way now
Unicorn Rose same
Nice
Eim ahsooming thet auld Eenglissh saundéd lak thet
*Thet explens Shekspeers graev was spell ed lak thet*
Very well researched and put together for ALL ages.
love the tongue twists. you are one of a kind.congrats.
It's insane how much I love this. Linguistics and the evolution of the English language has been an obsession of mine for as long as I can remember. It would be so wild to see a film set in the 15th century with accurate language (since it's rather unlikely that I'll be able to attend an "OP" performance anytime soon). I really hope that happens one day. Terrific video, and THANK YOU for making it!
Crystal's OP performances of Shakespeare are pretty close to your wish. You just have to travel to London to see it.
There's the recent horror movie called "The Witch" set in 17th century New England
It’s not classic English but I couldn’t understand anything anyone said in Dogwood
Visit West Yorkshire. Some people there still use Yorkshire dialect (e.g. "Thee and Thou"), which is about as close to Early Modern English as you can get in today's world. Ralph Ineson, who plays the father in "The Witch", is from Leeds, which is why his 17th Century accent is so authentic (he's speaking in West Yorkshire dialect).
Eggs - Eyren! Dutch: eieren 😨🤯
English is actually Anglish. As in, the angles, a Germanic tribe. England is actually Angleland, the land of the Angles.
th-cam.com/video/oFX1nbD3dV0/w-d-xo.html
If you speak Dutch then you may be surprised at how much of this ‘interview’ in Old English you can understand
Old English, Old German, Old Dutch, they are all germanic languages. That's why there will always be small similarities.
You won't be seeing any french, spanish or italian people finding any similarities since they are all latin languages.
Afrikaans: eier!
German: Eier
Some of the old English words got taken to America where they still survive; like Plow for instance which was the old English spelling, yet here in England we now spell it Plough.
It starts in Old English as 'ploh' or 'plouh' so both plough and plow are logical.
Thank you for teaching me and all your content your amazing!!
as soon as I saw "I speak no frenshe" I knew what was going down. Early modern English and the great vowel shift, here we go. shout out to historical linguistics. Also the reason this sounds so similar to Scottish and the like is because Scots English completely bypassed the great vowel shift because why not.
I'm hearing Scottish as well. Perhaps the Scots sound more like Shakespeare than the Queen.
sound or sounded, and which Queen?
also eggs in french is oeufs
Theo Yeh love this comment for some reason
It most definitely doesn't sound Scottish.
I'd love to see you treat the British/American dialect split - there's a lot of misinformation out there in the same vein as "Shakespeare sounded like us"
Actually, American English is closer to old English than English English.
@@TheJarOfJam I think it has to do with our multiple language influences from immigration in the beginning of the colonies. I think it is a combination of flatter pronunciation because of Italian, French, and german. French and German being more guttural than Italian, but italian is closer to latin. Then we have the Irish and a few scottish which can trace their version of the dialect to middle or old English and Celtic pronunciations and even some pragmatisms even though English is not a completely pragmatic language.
Americans speak a bastardised Irish.... Canadians speak with a Scots accent...
@@TheJarOfJam no it doesn't. There are certain dialects in both the US and England which are more archaic. For example Appalachian in the US and West Country in the UK, but overall modern American accents are not more archaic.
"British/American dialect split"? - As the Americans say: "Dose english ain't no spittin' english." - Where as what i observe let me wonder why (US)americans say that they speak 'english' isntead of 'american'; I mean let's be fair, 'american' is a 'Stir-it-up', that most of the brain power has to be used to translate the thranslation of the Translation of the … whatever that word meant in the first place, a.k.a. America-Only- -Syndrome, because Yes We Can (kill any Need for Grammar and Etymology in General); And put Always a smile on your face when you backstab a language … - USA! USA! USA! … the greatest trick? let it begone and make the world believe it never existed ...
Don't worry … i have a smile on my face, yay!
I’m happy that Spanish hasn’t changed all that much and I can understand (and appreciate the rhymes) of the classicals. The great ones. :)
@Por Qué? Well, it takes no effort for me to speak Spanish as I’m a native, so I never thought about it that way. But now that you say it I must say you are right. It’s difficult. I’m learning German and it’s a pain in the ass
People 500 years from now are probably gonna look back on Eminem like this...
no
I live in the south west U.K. and most of us still talk like this lol. Especially my grandfather aha.
not for long...it is dying...but that is how we evolve
you should record how they speak, that dialect is going to die, soon...
@@elliykollek In like 10-15 years
@TiKKO Guevara I'am not from the UK
@TiKKO Guevara And stop spreading hate towards The English , not all them are insane a**holes that want the British Empire back.
A classic example of a rhyme that does not exist in modern English is in William Blake's "Tiger:"
"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
Respect my authority!!
How do we know that for certain? Blake's heyday was what the early 19th century? That seems a little late for a pronunciation like that given early modern English was what ended that style of speak.
I think it was a forced rhyme. That's the trouble with reading to much into rhymes for clues to pronunciation... even with a massive lexicon, we are still limited in creative expression if words have to rhyme perfectly.
I wish I found some better sounds no one's ever heard
I wish I had a better voice that sang some better words
I wish I found some chords in an order that is new
I wish I didn't have to rhyme every time I sang
Waat imortaal handery
Cud freme thy fearful simaatery?
So cool! Thanks so much for the video!
nice one, i got into shakey at school, caught by the excitement of macbeth, with a little help from polanski, but it was only, many years later, when i read about the great vowel shift, that i really started to be able to hear him properly. i think the comment about how we all hear own accent in him is 100%, because all of us who speak english have retained some bits of shakespearean pronounciation!
It sounds like a russian speaking lithuanian trying to sound overly brittish without even knowing the orthography
Ahahahahahaha
This comment was done when there was no CoronaVirus
Schools ruin Shakespeare. It was never meant to be read. It was meant to be watched and heard. Reading it makes it boring and you don't get the full effect of it. It's much easier to understand if you're watching someone act it, with emotions and emphasis behind it. Shakespeare is also easier to understand, and sounds much more normal, when spoken with country English accents, like Yorkshire or West Country, rather than RP.
Eils the Daydreamer - Try reading Shakespeare out loud with a strong Lancashire accent - awesome! ;)
I love watching Shakespeare's plays but I honestly enjoyed reading Macbeth.
The only times I've had it in class the teacher read it aloud. Some teachers understand, at least.
Actually, my English teacher made us act out the parts xD It was a lot of fun, being able to discuss what the words meant and acting it out.
Eils wrote: 'Reading it makes it boring and you don't get the full effect of it.'
Every individual will have their own opinion on whether reading ShSp bores them or not. Personally I find it interesting to be able to pause and look up anything I don't understand - that's the fun of it for me. When I see a stage production of it, I may grasp the story; but I don't have time to figure out all the turns-of-phrase, or the older words & usages. Also, in most cases I find the conventions of ShSp'ian acting to strike me as stilted & strained. For one thing, this is often an actors big chance to shine, with 'pinnacle' material. So they've usually _way_ over-thought it, and try too hard. :^/ Fantastic if folks enjoy the real deal on stage; but it isn't everybody's cuppa.
What a rad video! Thanks for sharing!
I love this! Well done! 👏
Your videos are always a treat to see in my notification box, keep up the great work!
Watching this as a Dutch woman is pretty damn interesting. It seems like my language made all the different decisions and that's why it's similar to English, but far from the same. Like you guys say egges or, well, eggs. We say a modern version of eyren: eieren
It's like our language has diffrent dads but has the same mom
@@handsomesquidward474 Lmao.
I would say it's the other way around, actually.
@@handsomesquidward474 Or rather, the same parentage, but made different life choices. One went to college, the other fell in with the rough crowd in high school.
I'll leave it to you to decide which is which!
And we say Andaa...🤣🤣🤣🤣
It's funny how tons of languages have different names for the same thing
What I found interesting watching this was how much the sound of the language is similar to how some rural people in the west of Ireland sound speaking english today. Irish English has also retained a lot of the turns of phrase and some other parts of early modern English. You often hear 'ye' being used for the plural you too.
I would love for 'ye' to make a comeback. Almost every European language has a plural for you. Why not English? It can get confusing not having one.
In fact, the lack of a proper English plural has prompted some to invent words for plural you:. In the US, people say "Y'all" (you all) as in "Y'all seem mighty nice people" while in Australia we have "Youse" for plural as in "Are youse coming to the pub?". These informal words only exist because there is no formal plural for you. I vote we bring back ye.
This was fascinating. It would be cool to maybe take a page of script and do a deep dive analysis bridging future and past dialects.
When my grandmother moved from the East End of London to Wiltshire during WW2, she was mystified as to why people kept ending sentences with what sounded like "doss-snow", using what I guess was a rising inflection because she realised it was a question.
Apparently it was a contraction of "doest thou know?". As in "has the bus been dost-know?". That's pretty much died out now. Was it just a West Country thing dost know?
That’s so cool!!
@@christinalim494 It's fascinating how the language seems to be changing but unlike science, not necessarily improving.
And of course ‘doest’ is pronounced ‘dust’, at least in Victorian English.
@@ocd000 Change is directionless and is not necessarily either better or worse, when it comes to language. It just happens over time as languages continue to influence each other.
I live in north Wiltshire. The dialect has all gone now as far as I know. We have all been taught to use only standard English.
English now:
Whom'st've'ly'aint of y'all want a 🅱o🅱a 🅱ola?
Justin Lebet 😂😂😂😂
I 🅱️refer sprit
I 🅱refer 🅱epis myself
Ahh a man of culture, ey?
*we* c a n _🅱ET_ sum 🅱💥NLESS PI🅱🅱A 222
💫💥💦💦🔥🔥🔥🔥😧👌👌👌👆💛💛💛💫💫💫😥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥😣👌👌👌👌👌
"Wither wilt thou lead me? Speak! I shall go no further!" Seriously, I'd love to hear this like it was spaken back in Sheikspeers thyme!
Look up TH-cam videos by David (the father) and Ben Crystal (the son) who've made this into somewhat of a career project.
Much needed ...i am reading Tempest and King Lear.... It made my work easy
So early Modern English sounded like........Dutch?
Robin Brown I wish Americans knew that there are 1000s of accents in the uk and that Shakespeare’s accent was actually east Anglian/West Country (England). Search them up and listen to them
@@mohammedfahad3564 Ah, thanks for the information. It's true that we often don't recognize the subtleties of accents from outside of our own country. Similar to how people outside of the UK are unaware of the accents beyond the regional accents, I've encountered people who are surprised that the US has so many accents (for example, mine has been guessed as everywhere from "southern" to "New England" to "Canadian" to "Pittsburgh", with the last one being the closest).
Actually, old english and dutch were very similar, it's not anything to do with accents
Accents in England are largely created from some regions adopting and not adopting the new sounds from the great vowel shift
@@ninny65 I noticed even today English and Dutch have a lot of similarities. One language I heard about that's slightly mutually intelligible with both English and Dutch is Frisian (although the west Frisian dialect is most similar, north Frisian is more like Dutch and east Frisian has a little German influence). I know there's a sentence that's the same in both languages, something like "butter, bread, and green cheese is good to English as it is to Frisian".
So, it sounded more close to how it's spelled from a latin perspective. Closer to how a french, or spanish, italian, ... would pronounce the words when they first encounter them . Sea is not SEE but Seh ah. Which is ..kind of logical .
yh
Where I'm from we still pronounce many words the same way. Like eat. My wife who isn't from where I am likes to laugh at the way I say it. Like et, or like the way I pronounce root like rut.
Why is it you say logical? Isn't it totally dependant on whatever language rules you follow or are accustomed too. Maybe your right. It's hard for me to wrap my head around all this as I speak only one language and not even that well 😂
2:42 when you take fall damage in minecraft
That was fascinating! Thank you.
Irish, Scots, West Country and even some US accents preserve some pronunciation traits of Shakespeare absent from today's standard English.
That's a myth about American dialects. Southern Dialect does preserve some features from the 18th century Cavaliers, but not Shakespeare.
Many US dialect are rhotic - a feature of Shakespeare's English - while many UK accents are non-rhotic.
I guess Standard English doesn't count parts of England then?
No. Standard English, especially in its pronunciation. is mainly a variety of English with origins in the London area and perhaps also universities like Oxford or Cambridge. Dialects and accents from the North and West are quite different from it.
I read of one "Everyman" performance from the Middle Ages which took place in the Midlands or the North. One character puts on a southern English accent to appear more sophisticated. Londoners may even have had trouble understanding the speech of people from Yorkshire or Northumberland - in his last work, "A Dead Man In Deptford", Anthony Burgess depicts Londoners assaulting a man from the north because his accent makes them think he is Flemish.
It’s quite fascinating to me how English has evolved so much and so fast. When I was learning English, I couldn’t understand why the spelling didn’t match the pronunciation. Later, when I took History of English in college, it made a lot of sense. This is great content.
The similat accent ended up in the south east of Ireland, and was transferred from there to Newfoundland.
It is the basis of the dominant "interregional accent" that stretches from Rosslare to Sligo.
It’s funny bc the Shakespeare language was made so even the poor “groundlings” at the front of the stage were able to comprehend the play.
These plays were literally basic as fuck and we look at them as the most high educational English lessons
Shakespeare was a genius for his writing style in bringing plays to the masses by making relatable and easily understandable stories
There are videos of David Crystal and his actor son performing Shakespeare in original and modern pronunciations. Seek them out, people: they're fascinating.
TRiG (Ireland) YESSSS
I wonder what "fuck" will sound like five hundred years from now?
2000: Fuck
2100: Fook
2200: Fueck
2300: Fack
2400: Feek
2500: Fauk
Dr Shaym The consonants would probably change too.
In Spanish, some words that used to have an "f" now have a soundless "h". So "fabular/fablar" became "hablar", "Falcón--->halcón", "foja--->hoja", etc. The "v" and "f" sounds, have also been known to switch.
Also the "k" sound had been known to soften in many tongues, yielding sound like "ts, ch, or s".
So maybe in the future it'll sound something like "vach" or "uhs". Who knows?
Just for fun, if I had to guess what would happen to General American based on what I can hear, I'd say this: /aɪ/ will become /aː/, /ɪ/ will become /ə/ like in Afrikaans, /ʌ/ will end up as /ɔ/, /i:/ will gradually move towards something like /e:/ or /ɪ:/ and plosives like /p/, /t/ and /k/ may start vanishing from some words (sometimes leaving a /ʔ/). Additionally something weird might be happening to /z/ but I'm not really sure what and I'd be very surprised if /d/ in between vowels didn't eventually end up always being some sort of /r/. So in 60 years 'fuck' might pronounced /fɔʔ/, or like 'fought' if someone vaporized you with a ray gun before you get to say the t. This is all of course wild speculation.
fekk
Kevin Benoit. Drink,Girls,Fekk, That would be an acumenical matter,
Fuck. Fook. Fuke. Ficke. Wicke. Wikh (they might look back and giggle at our "Wikipedia"). Wegh.
Maybe! But still spelled like "fuck" (or with only the c or only the k) and when people read older literature they won't realize how Fs used to be pronounced. "Aye, wegh ya, (r)Assle!" (adding a linking R they use in Boston and some English accents).
I'd give that more like a thousand years though. Ubiquitous writing, standardized spelling efforts (and dictionaries), and sound recordings are bound to slow down the really wild changes languages have made in the past.
Besides that though, it's hard to really say which direction things will go (I'd lean more towards "feck" as a near-future stage)... or if a word like "fuck" will even survive - though it has survived since the 14th century - originating from Scandinavian words for breeding, apparently.
Hi there! Informative because it shares how the language English has evolced since the time of William Shakespeare as his time was a milestone.
Thanks & regards.
1:54 William Caxton came from my home town in Kent, there is even a pub named after him. Nice place.
"We all come as strangers to Shakespeare's sounds"
Not if you're from the West Country!
Early modern English words sound a lot like modern Dutch. "Eyern" = "Eieren". "Sea(sayh)" = "Zee". "her(harr)" = "haar". And "one:alone" also rhymes "een:alleen".
It's like german (they're all based on the same roots btw)
Eyern = Eier
Sea = See
Her = Sie (ok doesn't count 😂)
one:alone = ein:allein
@@lazrussanschei5372 Yeah, our languages all got Germanic roots. I think that was due to the Saxons who migrated to the British Isles and became the Anglo-Saxons, but I am not 100% sure about that one. (I've also seen a video in which someone spoke low Saxon, which sounds a lot like Dutch too)
It also doesn't really come as a surprise as the Netherlands is located between both Germany and England, so we're bound to sound a little bit like both.
Modern English, Dutch, and German all share common roots, so it's not very surprising.
Very interesting and well informed. I am from the English midlands like William and we have a very distinctive accent and dialect. To me enclosed has three sylables en clow esed and eye and company rhyme.
More!!!! Want to hear whole plays like this