Several of these sounds you will still hear exactly the same if you visit Birmingham today, which is close to Stratford and at that time both being in the same county of Warwickshire. People in other parts of England say we sound uneducated, but I guess it's because our pronunciation sounds old not modern.
I guess that they have prejudices against Birmingham and therefore when they hesr that accent they associate it with the palce the speaker could be from and so they make that assumption
Thank you for using actual Renaissance music in the video. As someone who is really into early music, namely music from the 1500s, it slightly annoys me when I watch a video about the period and Bach is playing in the background or something from the 12th century. It's refreshing to actually hear music contemporary to the period you're talking about.
Reconstructed OP got me actually interested in Shakespeare, and I know I'm not alone. I tried to copy OP for my role in my English class recitation of The Crucible. Unfortunately, it wasn't great, but I was only 16 at the time.
I love this. And I find it hilarious that OP seems to come more naturally to Americans like me than to speakers of British Received Pronunciation afflicted with r-dropping and the Hanoverian vowel shift.
That's because it's the British accent that has evolved whilst the American accent has not so much. In fact, OP should be the ideal accent for medieval films to 18th century films since that's what English used to sound like.
@@kevingutierrez9273 I think you are overgeneralizing a bit. By 1710, according to David Crystal, the Great Vowel Shift has completed and we are at Modern English with pronunciation more like present day than OP - except that r-dropping was not yet fully established in British English. Similarly, using OP for movies set before 1350 or so would assume a Great Vowel Shift that had not yet happened.
@@ericraymond3734 Yes, I am well aware of the facts. It's not like the modern audience could understand Middle English if the film was set during the Medieval Period. Practically speaking, it would be best for a film production to use OP for the Medieval films because modern audiences could understand it better than Middle English. Just like the 2011 film "The Eagle" where they used Scottish Gaelic instead of Pictish since it was the closest & most practical they could get to make you feel that you were living in that period.
The Great Vowel Shift was complete, but there were still a lot of phonetic differences between modern day English and English in 1710. As you say, the language was still rhotic, but the vowels were different and many of them were monophthongs where we now have diphthongs that evolved later. There are other issues too, but both British English and American English dialects have changed enormously since then, and neither of them tell us very much about what english sounded like 300 years ago - both England and the US have rhotic and non-rhotic dialects for example, so it seems strange to claim that one country is more conservative than the other.
@@benmaloney5434 A few months ago I watched a fascinating TH-cam video recorded by a linguist who read sample texts in reconstructed American dialect in about a half dozen versions ranging from 1690 to 1990. I am pretty clued in about this sort of thing in general, but that video held a medium-size surprise for me, which is how early the distinctive characteristics of General American stabilized and how relatively little it has changed since. If that reconstruction is correct, General American was already stable and relatively modern sounding by about 1830.
Fascinating...As a Canadian who spent some time in the West Country of England (Devon) as a child, I can fairly say that this type of spoken English seems to be close to what you can get if you amalgamate both accents! At least I found it surprisingly easy to copy our speakers. Or maybe it was my liking for pirate movies? Avast!
OP sounds a lot like West Country yap or old Stratford Oxfordshire dialect fitting as that's where Shakespeare was from. This is the case with so many languages today, for example the Mandarin spoken in Northern China today is very different from the Mandarin spoken during the early Qing and Ming Dynasties with rounded vowels and unpalatised forms of words along with a different tone system which has been almost completely lost and changed in modern Standard Mandarin, the only place for example where classical mandarin is still spoken is in the village of Peh'shii'tsun in the small city of Hsiang'Chow in Kwong'si province, but overall the dialects of Mandarin spoken in the Southwest of China are closest tonally to Classical Mandarin, my own dialect of Yunnanese spoken in the southwest preserves many aspects of Classical mandarin with the tone contours been virtually the same as they would have been 600 years ago, many old proverbs and sayings that can be traced back to the Ming and Yuan dynasties which are almost completely lost in Northern and Central China.
You have Mandarin mistaken with Chinese, which is actually a language family of many dialects or languages, depending on your definition. Cantonese is more close to how middle Chinese was spoken, but to say the south speaks more standard Mandarin than the north is ridiculous. Standard Mandarin was created from the the Beijing court dialect. And actually, there was rounding in northern dialects during the Ming dynasty.
@@nt8781 Mandarin or 官話 was the language of the court officials, based off of the old pronunciation of 洛陽市 for thousands of years, Cantonese is based off the standard dialect of Guangzhou.
@@iceomistar4302 Yes, and to say southern Mandarin dialects are more standard is hilariously wrong. The South was developed far later than the North in China, as the centre of power has almost always been in the North. Also, many "southern" dialects are actually from 河南， they were just preserved in the South.
Just a note … I would be a bit cautious about taking one linguist's view as gospel on historical phonology. Most of these issues are highly disputed, and although Crystal's reconstruction works well as a practical accent for modern actors to read, and modern listeners to understand in a theatre, it doesn't actually line up with what a lot of the orthoepic evidence of the time suggests.
Salve, Luke! Have you checked out the latest Age of Empires IV yet? The units of every culture speak different stages of their language as the game progresses. I would love to watch a review from you.
No, I don't know of any, but this man: th-cam.com/video/iA0vD2Qgdqk/w-d-xo.html Does his witchfinder general series in the accent, it's really entertaining.
So much of this is still to be heard in modern Dublinese - quite apart from personal/possessive pronouns that are unknown in Standard English: e.g. possessive 'your' is often heard in Dublin as 'yizzer'. And that's just one example. Of curse, as uh Dubihliner OI'm faamilyer wi' dah. 🙂 But usually I use a more standard English. Buh d'yould accen' can comm throo, when I;m back in Dublin. The Hiberno English vowels are also inheritors of the Irish language, which has broad and slender as vowel concepts. These perforce also affect consonants. Ihave been told that when I speak Irish my tonality changes completely;. Fascinating stuff!
@@iceomistar4302 although obviously there are other influences on Irish accents, the Irish language has influenced all forms of speech on the emerald Isle.
@@thenextshenanigantownandth4393 There is very little phonetic substrate influence from the Irish language in the majority of modern Irish peoples speech. There is some of the prosody still there though, as well as some words and turns of phrase, but these too are becoming less common (as are some of the archaic English words and phrases in Hiberno English). The thing about Ireland is, language change (all languages are changing constantly) has always been towards the Anglo power centres of it's world (London in the past, Dublin and America today - this is a vast simplification but you get the picture, Simon Roper has some great videos about how language change happens). Language change in Ireland has never been in the direction of the Gaeltacht fisherman for example, who still speaks Irish with a Gaelic phonology.
@@cigh7445 "There is very little phonetic substrate influence from the Irish language in the majority of modern Irish peoples speech" I think there is some, but that Irish accents are majority from Shakespeare English. Many linguist people have looked into this such as Raymond hickey he concluded it resembles Shakespeare English more than any other accent. I would love to put together a list of the similarities, it's massive. You seem to be trying to make false accusations of American influence, this is a narrative of yours. I don't see traditional Irish accents going anywhere anytime soon one could even view the so called American influence, that I don't think exists, as a reversal of the BBC influence in suparar regional Irish English in the 20th century. I live in Ireland and I don't hear any American accents in Ireland.
it's not about os ... In all languages it is the case that some regional variants are more archaic than others ... English language in Ireland stayed, probably because of geographical isolation, closer to the Cromwellian times (17th century) ...
Why do they suppose that "lot" and "thought" were supposed without lip-rounding? Lip-rounding in these words is not limited to English accents and the development of GA "cloth" has to be kept in mind. Many words in this set must have had lip-rounding earlier as well as much later (in all major accents). So, why do they suppose that the lip rounding got lost in-between?
When they decide on Shakespeare's accent, they do it either because someone of that era actually tells us that is how they spoke by description in the literature of the time, or because the rhyme and meter begin to jump out at you all over the entire play when you do it using a particular inflection, in much the same way I hear the rhyme and meter jump out in certain character's lines within MacBeth when I imagine them said in a Scots accent rather than any other. That second method is conjecturing, or playing around of course, but it's not based on nothing.
There is probably wiggle room here in some sounds, leftovers from the Middle English influenced by Norman French, for instance. Why would words with oi/oy, for instance, have been spelled that way, so differently from long I/Y or the AI/AY and EI/EY? -- OI/OY was probably just like that, or OO-EE (U-I), for instance. Then we have the odd "buoy" /boo-ee/ versus "boy" /boh-ee/. -- So there were likely more variations by region than we postulate for Early Modern English. Also from Norman French and Middle English, I would say it's more likely thee was some difference between a set for /ah-ee/ and a set for /eh-ee/, or some overlap with /ae-ee/ or /ae/, (ae being A as in apple, cat, ash.
So when Shakespeare wrote caricatures of Scotsmen,Irish men and Welshmen they are pretty much what we recognise today . Then somehow you step across the border into England and everyone is talking like a Northern English Pirate Farmer. Then after this all the wide range of English accents developed to those we know today and somehow in the case of North Eastern accents went back in time and took up all the Norse influences from the Viking age of about 500 years before Shakespeares time. Fucking (O.E) incredible ( Fr.)
This 'Original Pronunciation' is probably a vague mix of what people here and people there spoke like. It's the accent Shakespeare was supposed to be read in.
@@ThatCamel104 No. it`s a made up accent that has no validity. If Shakespeare represented the basic Scots,Irish and Welsh accents pretty much as they still sound like today how could English be any different? It makes no sense and typically only holds up with people who are not familiar with English accents and dialect.
@@ThatCamel104 The same accents that exist throughout the British Isles today and are commonly represented as being so in Shakespeare's work and characters. I read Shakespeare without trying to force rhymes and I do it without trying to sound like Long John Silver. They seem pretty comprehensible to me and I am not going to start speaking in some synthetic accent that has been hammered out to fit a theory. People study and dissect and discuss Shakespeare's work more than he ever intended and could comprehend
@@billycaspersghost7528 That's a nice story, but do you have any evidence that the accent wasn't the way they say? They didn't just shit the reconstruction out, you know.
There was most likely a cot-caught distinction in most dialects of Elizabethan English. But 'caught' also had the pronunciation [kaft], so that 'after' rhymed with 'caught her'. The pronunciation shift of the 'gh' (Middle English [x]) towards an [f] sound in some words is well attested to, and it still exists in words such as 'laughter'.
Actually in Shakespeare's time,women weren't allowed to be acting in plays and all roles were played by men. Also number 2 on the pronunciation sounds Canadian BTW and also in OP not only sounds like a touch of the US English but also you hear the Carribean primarily the Jamaican accent here too.
It's amazing how "American" many of these words sound. As Chancellor Gorkon would have said: "You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original American pronunciation."
I'll be honest, this sounds nothing like American accents and is eerily similar to a number of modern English accents, west country and other areas near where Shakespeare was from (surprise!).
No, the Irish! It's essentially what we now recognise as a southwest English accent and an Irish accent - a touch of others, but essentially those two.
There is no accent that has the linguistic features of 17th century English … there are merely modern dialects that have coincidental similarities with some of the individual sounds.
And if you don't want to read the book, here's what I know from how we pieced together Latin pronunciation (I studied Latin in university). It's mostly pieced together through examining the different spellings of words, especially what we'd consider 'misspellings'. For example, if a modern Anglophone misstakenly writes 'taken for granite' instead of 'taken for granted', we can surmise they are American and not British. That's because in American English the 't' isn't pronounced as much as it is in British English. And spelling errors most of the time reflect how something is pronounced. When in doubt, you spell it the way you hear it. There are exceptions, because sometimes spelling errors are the result of overcompensation and assimilation towards similar sounding words that are spelled differently. By looking at spelling 'errors', you can already get a lot of information. Furthermore, you can get a lot of information from looking how spellings change over the years, and from region to region, and from author to author. For example, words that were originally spelled with -ae- in Latin got misspelled as -ai- in earlier years, but in later years when Latin was mostly the church's language, you see words misspelled with -e-. You can then theorize that -ae- used to be pronounced like the modern English -i- or -y- in 'like' or 'kite' or 'highway' or 'bystander'. And that consequently, the pronunciation shifted to a sound like the modern English -ay- or -ey- in 'maybe' or 'hey' or words like 'cape' or 'baby'. Another interesting thing is the omission of letters, which can tell you whether sounds were strong or weak. For example, 'associate' comes from 'associare' in Latin, which in turn comes from the combination of 'ad' (to, towards) and 'socius' (ally, sharing, allied). Since the -d in 'ad' faded away into the assimilation of 'associare', you can assume that the -d- sound won't have been very strongly pronounced. Think of it this way: if you're speaking really fast, which letters are the first to disappear? That's also why we have contractions like 'won't'. Start with 'would not' and try saying it faster and faster. You'll get to 'wouldn't', and if you keep accelerating, eventually the -ld- will disappear, and not the -n-. That tells you a lot about which sounds are strong and which are weak, but also which hold meaning and which are 'optional' in a sense. There's more to it, but hopefully this gives an idea.
how pitty than the reader can't correctly pronounce the phonemes which are written in IPA, but that's completely natural for an english mothertongue speaker - they can't loosen themselves from what they are used to. Some foreigner had to recite the IPA to achieve a pure impression (if Crystal's reconstruction is right, which sometimes is a bit critical for me as linguist. He even does not concern himself enough with the consonants, is /r/ rolled? becomes /s/ in "is" etc voiced to [z] or remains always [s], and many more)
@Jordan Rodrigues thats what i say, it was a statement, he didnt ask himself these questions "is r rolled?" etc. to reflect on these. he just ignored the topics. but its not our task to answer them while he is the one making the video -- most people wont scroll through all comments to get missing bits and pieces
@@MonkOrMan people still cant read ---- the topic was not "i have questions, help" but "the video maker forgot some pieces of intormation, like [examples], bad bad, scold scold, rainsing awareness to do better next time", to which i have the answers, im a historical linguist -.- R was still rolled at shakespears time, but its not the commentors responsability to complete videos, we dont get paid by youtube for that either (would be nice)
Haha no not in the slightest. More like modern English west country or east anglian, with various Midland and Northern accents thrown in. Good examples of modern west country here, if you;re not familiar with it, they're not exactly the same, but quite a few similarities: th-cam.com/video/j737oPgPE3s/w-d-xo.html
@@monkeymox2544 Well they are kinda similar..where do you think the American accent came from? I've lived in America for 25 years and the vowels are very close. My friend from upstate NY pronounces "fire" like foy-er. Many English came to America from the same areas. The modern English accent is more pronounced the French way, where the vowels are softer. So I guess we are both right in a way
@Andre Bell I live in California. For several lexical sets, if the speaker were to say the example words at me I would have assumed he was American. Obviously, there are still a lot of differences, but it seems like the qualities many of the dipthongs in Early Modern English were retained or exaggerated in American dialects.
It is funny that once you hear Shakespeare in OP you realize very quickly that the stories are pun-laden. Lot more things rhyme.
Several of these sounds you will still hear exactly the same if you visit Birmingham today, which is close to Stratford and at that time both being in the same county of Warwickshire. People in other parts of England say we sound uneducated, but I guess it's because our pronunciation sounds old not modern.
Maybe it's because your pronunciation sounds more archaic and conservative, and thus superior. They are surely jealous.
I guess that they have prejudices against Birmingham and therefore when they hesr that accent they associate it with the palce the speaker could be from and so they make that assumption
Some of it sounds not dissimilar to Notts either (not entirely but in part)
Sounds like it's they that need educating, not you!
Could've just said talk like Hagrid, mate. lol
Hehe true!
A slightly Irish Hagrid, maybe?
It sounds a lot like Sean Bean as well.
@@casaroli Yeah it's like a cross between Sean Bean, Hagrid, an Irishman, and pirates
@@MerelvandenHurk It sounds exactly like Captain Barbosa from Pirates of The Caribbean!
Thank you for using actual Renaissance music in the video. As someone who is really into early music, namely music from the 1500s, it slightly annoys me when I watch a video about the period and Bach is playing in the background or something from the 12th century. It's refreshing to actually hear music contemporary to the period you're talking about.
Will Kemp's Jigg would be very appropriate accompaniment! The dance for Shakespeare's actor/fool!
Holy hell I've been digging through the Internet to find this exact thing in this exact format. Thank you!!
I’m delighted!
@@polyMATHY_Luke I look forward to watching all of them, thank you so much for sharing!
Reconstructed OP got me actually interested in Shakespeare, and I know I'm not alone. I tried to copy OP for my role in my English class recitation of The Crucible. Unfortunately, it wasn't great, but I was only 16 at the time.
lmao what was people's response?
@@MonkOrMan well, it was novel for a little before it just became expected. It was four years ago now so I couldn't say with certainty...
David & Ben Crystal do a great job of helping to understand this problem!
I love this. And I find it hilarious that OP seems to come more naturally to Americans like me than to speakers of British Received Pronunciation afflicted with r-dropping and the Hanoverian vowel shift.
That's because it's the British accent that has evolved whilst the American accent has not so much. In fact, OP should be the ideal accent for medieval films to 18th century films since that's what English used to sound like.
@@kevingutierrez9273 I think you are overgeneralizing a bit. By 1710, according to David Crystal, the Great Vowel Shift has completed and we are at Modern English with pronunciation more like present day than OP - except that r-dropping was not yet fully established in British English. Similarly, using OP for movies set before 1350 or so would assume a Great Vowel Shift that had not yet happened.
@@ericraymond3734 Yes, I am well aware of the facts. It's not like the modern audience could understand Middle English if the film was set during the Medieval Period. Practically speaking, it would be best for a film production to use OP for the Medieval films because modern audiences could understand it better than Middle English. Just like the 2011 film "The Eagle" where they used Scottish Gaelic instead of Pictish since it was the closest & most practical they could get to make you feel that you were living in that period.
The Great Vowel Shift was complete, but there were still a lot of phonetic differences between modern day English and English in 1710. As you say, the language was still rhotic, but the vowels were different and many of them were monophthongs where we now have diphthongs that evolved later. There are other issues too, but both British English and American English dialects have changed enormously since then, and neither of them tell us very much about what english sounded like 300 years ago - both England and the US have rhotic and non-rhotic dialects for example, so it seems strange to claim that one country is more conservative than the other.
@@benmaloney5434 A few months ago I watched a fascinating TH-cam video recorded by a linguist who read sample texts in reconstructed American dialect in about a half dozen versions ranging from 1690 to 1990. I am pretty clued in about this sort of thing in general, but that video held a medium-size surprise for me, which is how early the distinctive characteristics of General American stabilized and how relatively little it has changed since. If that reconstruction is correct, General American was already stable and relatively modern sounding by about 1830.
Fascinating...As a Canadian who spent some time in the West Country of England (Devon) as a child, I can fairly say that this type of spoken English seems to be close to what you can get if you amalgamate both accents! At least I found it surprisingly easy to copy our speakers. Or maybe it was my liking for pirate movies? Avast!
OP sounds a lot like West Country yap or old Stratford Oxfordshire dialect fitting as that's where Shakespeare was from. This is the case with so many languages today, for example the Mandarin spoken in Northern China today is very different from the Mandarin spoken during the early Qing and Ming Dynasties with rounded vowels and unpalatised forms of words along with a different tone system which has been almost completely lost and changed in modern Standard Mandarin, the only place for example where classical mandarin is still spoken is in the village of Peh'shii'tsun in the small city of Hsiang'Chow in Kwong'si province, but overall the dialects of Mandarin spoken in the Southwest of China are closest tonally to Classical Mandarin, my own dialect of Yunnanese spoken in the southwest preserves many aspects of Classical mandarin with the tone contours been virtually the same as they would have been 600 years ago, many old proverbs and sayings that can be traced back to the Ming and Yuan dynasties which are almost completely lost in Northern and Central China.
You have Mandarin mistaken with Chinese, which is actually a language family of many dialects or languages, depending on your definition.
Cantonese is more close to how middle Chinese was spoken, but to say the south speaks more standard Mandarin than the north is ridiculous. Standard Mandarin was created from the the Beijing court dialect. And actually, there was rounding in northern dialects during the Ming dynasty.
@@nt8781 Mandarin or 官話 was the language of the court officials, based off of the old pronunciation of 洛陽市 for thousands of years, Cantonese is based off the standard dialect of Guangzhou.
@@nt8781 By your own logic Cantonese is not a language either but a family of dialects that went through a series of levelling in Guangzhou.
@@nt8781 洪武証韻th-cam.com/video/dIl2zqlbk64/w-d-xo.html The tone contours are the same as in 西南官話
@@iceomistar4302 Yes, and to say southern Mandarin dialects are more standard is hilariously wrong.
The South was developed far later than the North in China, as the centre of power has almost always been in the North.
Also, many "southern" dialects are actually from 河南， they were just preserved in the South.
Fun fact: This man is the same person who makes songs in Latin
Dude! I had no idea
Like, he was a composer in ancient Rome?
In John Dowland's "Now o now I needs must part", "mourne" and "returne" rhyme (in Crystal's dictionary, both words have different vowels.
Very cool.
Thanks! I love your channel as well; great stuff! Keep up the great work.
I need this for English, great video 👍🏾😃
Thanks!
Just a note … I would be a bit cautious about taking one linguist's view as gospel on historical phonology. Most of these issues are highly disputed, and although Crystal's reconstruction works well as a practical accent for modern actors to read, and modern listeners to understand in a theatre, it doesn't actually line up with what a lot of the orthoepic evidence of the time suggests.
I have found that to be the case in the years since. Crystal clearly has chosen to make it as modern as possible to agree with today’s listener.
Salve, Luke! Have you checked out the latest Age of Empires IV yet? The units of every culture speak different stages of their language as the game progresses. I would love to watch a review from you.
He's Guglielmo Sciechispirio from Messina.
Now, if you could teach me to WRITE like Shakespeare, then we'd have something....
This is wonderful, thank you!
Why does it sound like he’s flirting when he says “If music be the food of love, play on?”
Your videos are great!❤️
Jja Hla thank you!
The OP does indeed sound like Dublin Irish accent.
Yes, it does that.
Don't you know if there are some extracts/full plays in OP on the internet? I would be grateful for a link.
No, I don't know of any, but this man: th-cam.com/video/iA0vD2Qgdqk/w-d-xo.html
Does his witchfinder general series in the accent, it's really entertaining.
So much of this is still to be heard in modern Dublinese - quite apart from personal/possessive pronouns that are unknown in Standard English: e.g. possessive 'your' is often heard in Dublin as 'yizzer'. And that's just one example. Of curse, as uh Dubihliner OI'm faamilyer wi' dah. 🙂 But usually I use a more standard English. Buh d'yould accen' can comm throo, when I;m back in Dublin.
The Hiberno English vowels are also inheritors of the Irish language, which has broad and slender as vowel concepts. These perforce also affect consonants. Ihave been told that when I speak Irish my tonality changes completely;.
Fascinating stuff!
As an American, this is so fun to repeat the words after him. 😄
Guy reading sounds like a news reporter off Irish RTE.
That is because English came to Ireland at this time.
@@iceomistar4302 hence the Irish vocab using so many Shakespearen words and pronunciations.
@@iceomistar4302 although obviously there are other influences on Irish accents, the Irish language has influenced all forms of speech on the emerald Isle.
@@thenextshenanigantownandth4393 There is very little phonetic substrate influence from the Irish language in the majority of modern Irish peoples speech. There is some of the prosody still there though, as well as some words and turns of phrase, but these too are becoming less common (as are some of the archaic English words and phrases in Hiberno English).
The thing about Ireland is, language change (all languages are changing constantly) has always been towards the Anglo power centres of it's world (London in the past, Dublin and America today - this is a vast simplification but you get the picture, Simon Roper has some great videos about how language change happens). Language change in Ireland has never been in the direction of the Gaeltacht fisherman for example, who still speaks Irish with a Gaelic phonology.
@@cigh7445 "There is very little phonetic substrate influence from the Irish language in the majority of modern Irish peoples speech"
I think there is some, but that Irish accents are majority from Shakespeare English. Many linguist people have looked into this such as Raymond hickey he concluded it resembles Shakespeare English more than any other accent.
I would love to put together a list of the similarities, it's massive.
You seem to be trying to make false accusations of American influence, this is a narrative of yours. I don't see traditional Irish accents going anywhere anytime soon one could even view the so called American influence, that I don't think exists, as a reversal of the BBC influence in suparar regional Irish English in the 20th century. I live in Ireland and I don't hear any American accents in Ireland.
it's not about os ... In all languages it is the case that some regional variants are more archaic than others ... English language in Ireland stayed, probably because of geographical isolation, closer to the Cromwellian times (17th century) ...
Why do they suppose that "lot" and "thought" were supposed without lip-rounding? Lip-rounding in these words is not limited to English accents and the development of GA "cloth" has to be kept in mind.
Many words in this set must have had lip-rounding earlier as well as much later (in all major accents). So, why do they suppose that the lip rounding got lost in-between?
When they decide on Shakespeare's accent, they do it either because someone of that era actually tells us that is how they spoke by description in the literature of the time, or because the rhyme and meter begin to jump out at you all over the entire play when you do it using a particular inflection, in much the same way I hear the rhyme and meter jump out in certain character's lines within MacBeth when I imagine them said in a Scots accent rather than any other. That second method is conjecturing, or playing around of course, but it's not based on nothing.
There is probably wiggle room here in some sounds, leftovers from the Middle English influenced by Norman French, for instance. Why would words with oi/oy, for instance, have been spelled that way, so differently from long I/Y or the AI/AY and EI/EY? -- OI/OY was probably just like that, or OO-EE (U-I), for instance. Then we have the odd "buoy" /boo-ee/ versus "boy" /boh-ee/. -- So there were likely more variations by region than we postulate for Early Modern English. Also from Norman French and Middle English, I would say it's more likely thee was some difference between a set for /ah-ee/ and a set for /eh-ee/, or some overlap with /ae-ee/ or /ae/, (ae being A as in apple, cat, ash.
So when Shakespeare wrote caricatures of Scotsmen,Irish men and Welshmen they are pretty much what we recognise today .
Then somehow you step across the border into England and everyone is talking like a Northern English Pirate Farmer.
Then after this all the wide range of English accents developed to those we know today and somehow in the case of North Eastern accents went back in time and took up all the Norse influences from the Viking age of about 500 years before Shakespeares time.
Fucking (O.E) incredible ( Fr.)
This 'Original Pronunciation' is probably a vague mix of what people here and people there spoke like. It's the accent Shakespeare was supposed to be read in.
@@ThatCamel104 No. it`s a made up accent that has no validity.
If Shakespeare represented the basic Scots,Irish and Welsh accents pretty much as they still sound like today how could English be any different?
It makes no sense and typically only holds up with people who are not familiar with English accents and dialect.
@@billycaspersghost7528 Then how do we make sense of his rhymes? What accents were around back then?
@@ThatCamel104 The same accents that exist throughout the British Isles today and are commonly represented as being so in Shakespeare's work and characters.
I read Shakespeare without trying to force rhymes and I do it without trying to sound like Long John Silver.
They seem pretty comprehensible to me and I am not going to start speaking in some synthetic accent that has been hammered out to fit a theory.
People study and dissect and discuss Shakespeare's work more than he ever intended and could comprehend
@@billycaspersghost7528 That's a nice story, but do you have any evidence that the accent wasn't the way they say? They didn't just shit the reconstruction out, you know.
Is it just me that's kind of skeptical about number 8? It seems very unlikely to me that Shakespeare's English would have had the cot-caught merger...
There was most likely a cot-caught distinction in most dialects of Elizabethan English. But 'caught' also had the pronunciation [kaft], so that 'after' rhymed with 'caught her'. The pronunciation shift of the 'gh' (Middle English [x]) towards an [f] sound in some words is well attested to, and it still exists in words such as 'laughter'.
How do I get an audio book?
I haven’t made one for this, but I have others at LukeRanieri.com
Actually in Shakespeare's time,women weren't allowed to be acting in plays and all roles were played by men. Also number 2 on the pronunciation sounds Canadian BTW and also in OP not only sounds like a touch of the US English but also you hear the Carribean primarily the Jamaican accent here too.
Jason Palacios Not just in Shakespeare's time but in most times I'd say.
Right! Did I say differently?
Great video! OP makes Shakespeare live.
................ you telling me everyone talked like Pirates back then? Yarrrrrrrr Matey.... Y'arrrr.
More like, what accent do you have?
Shakespeare: yęs
It's amazing how "American" many of these words sound. As Chancellor Gorkon would have said: "You've not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original American pronunciation."
I'll be honest, this sounds nothing like American accents and is eerily similar to a number of modern English accents, west country and other areas near where Shakespeare was from (surprise!).
Christ, you Americans are utterly tone deaf.
Sounds almost scottish-like
Whats the point in having the Rs if we don't say them?
Which 'r's do you mean? They are pronounced in OP.
i love it
Thanks! My attempt at Shakespeare's first sonnet in OP is being uploaded now.
Very similar to Irish English.
1:31
3:23
9:08
18:04
So, the closest accent to Shakesperian sound is the skottish accent
No, the Irish! It's essentially what we now recognise as a southwest English accent and an Irish accent - a touch of others, but essentially those two.
Nah. Scottish accents are probably the closest modern accents to Chaucer, though.
@@orchardlea I'd say more West Country than Irish, but the Irish is definitely there.
@@ericraymond3734 I'd say it's South Eastern Irish, maybe with a hint of West Country
There is no accent that has the linguistic features of 17th century English … there are merely modern dialects that have coincidental similarities with some of the individual sounds.
Классс!!!! Спасибки!!!!!!
Is that Irish😗
This reminds me of Sean Bean speaking.
You mean Shaen Baen?
You look soo amaiable to me❤❤❤
U r so comfortable to look at❤❤
How do they really know if there was no audio recordings?
Read the book! :)
And if you don't want to read the book, here's what I know from how we pieced together Latin pronunciation (I studied Latin in university).
It's mostly pieced together through examining the different spellings of words, especially what we'd consider 'misspellings'. For example, if a modern Anglophone misstakenly writes 'taken for granite' instead of 'taken for granted', we can surmise they are American and not British. That's because in American English the 't' isn't pronounced as much as it is in British English. And spelling errors most of the time reflect how something is pronounced. When in doubt, you spell it the way you hear it. There are exceptions, because sometimes spelling errors are the result of overcompensation and assimilation towards similar sounding words that are spelled differently.
By looking at spelling 'errors', you can already get a lot of information.
Furthermore, you can get a lot of information from looking how spellings change over the years, and from region to region, and from author to author. For example, words that were originally spelled with -ae- in Latin got misspelled as -ai- in earlier years, but in later years when Latin was mostly the church's language, you see words misspelled with -e-. You can then theorize that -ae- used to be pronounced like the modern English -i- or -y- in 'like' or 'kite' or 'highway' or 'bystander'. And that consequently, the pronunciation shifted to a sound like the modern English -ay- or -ey- in 'maybe' or 'hey' or words like 'cape' or 'baby'.
Another interesting thing is the omission of letters, which can tell you whether sounds were strong or weak. For example, 'associate' comes from 'associare' in Latin, which in turn comes from the combination of 'ad' (to, towards) and 'socius' (ally, sharing, allied). Since the -d in 'ad' faded away into the assimilation of 'associare', you can assume that the -d- sound won't have been very strongly pronounced. Think of it this way: if you're speaking really fast, which letters are the first to disappear? That's also why we have contractions like 'won't'. Start with 'would not' and try saying it faster and faster. You'll get to 'wouldn't', and if you keep accelerating, eventually the -ld- will disappear, and not the -n-. That tells you a lot about which sounds are strong and which are weak, but also which hold meaning and which are 'optional' in a sense.
There's more to it, but hopefully this gives an idea.
@@MerelvandenHurk But without audio recordings then it's just a speculation.
@@jasonpalacios2705 jesus language too aramic
@@jasonpalacios2705 you underestimate linguists...
Oooh arrr whar’s me zoider.
how pitty than the reader can't correctly pronounce the phonemes which are written in IPA, but that's completely natural for an english mothertongue speaker - they can't loosen themselves from what they are used to. Some foreigner had to recite the IPA to achieve a pure impression (if Crystal's reconstruction is right, which sometimes is a bit critical for me as linguist. He even does not concern himself enough with the consonants, is /r/ rolled? becomes /s/ in "is" etc voiced to [z] or remains always [s], and many more)
@Jordan Rodrigues thats what i say, it was a statement, he didnt ask himself these questions "is r rolled?" etc. to reflect on these. he just ignored the topics.
but its not our task to answer them while he is the one making the video -- most people wont scroll through all comments to get missing bits and pieces
@@eyeofthasky R hasn't been rolled in English for quite some time although it may have been tapped
@@MonkOrMan people still cant read ---- the topic was not "i have questions, help" but "the video maker forgot some pieces of intormation, like [examples], bad bad, scold scold, rainsing awareness to do better next time", to which i have the answers, im a historical linguist -.-
R was still rolled at shakespears time, but its not the commentors responsability to complete videos, we dont get paid by youtube for that either (would be nice)
No matter if spoken by man or woman, but this olde English sounds titillating to me.
Curse our modern ears! Haha
So...it's basically the IRISH accent.
just sounds like a really thick Scottish accent to me lol
So basically...the American accent?
Haha no not in the slightest. More like modern English west country or east anglian, with various Midland and Northern accents thrown in. Good examples of modern west country here, if you;re not familiar with it, they're not exactly the same, but quite a few similarities: th-cam.com/video/j737oPgPE3s/w-d-xo.html
@@monkeymox2544 Well they are kinda similar..where do you think the American accent came from? I've lived in America for 25 years and the vowels are very close. My friend from upstate NY pronounces "fire" like foy-er. Many English came to America from the same areas. The modern English accent is more pronounced the French way, where the vowels are softer.
So I guess we are both right in a way
Andre Bell americans pronounce the r differently
@Andre Bell I live in California. For several lexical sets, if the speaker were to say the example words at me I would have assumed he was American. Obviously, there are still a lot of differences, but it seems like the qualities many of the dipthongs in Early Modern English were retained or exaggerated in American dialects.
Sounds much more similar to Irish English