I’ve heard things before like “the Quebec French accent is closest to how French was spoken in France during the time when Canada was colonized” or “certain new England accents most closely resemble what British English was like back in the day” - how do historians/linguists know what accents sounded like in historical days? I imagine that they can look over texts that show how spelling has changed over the years, but how could they know how people actually pronounced those words?
Often from context, such as rimes in poems. That’s pretty much how we know about the Great Vowel Shift.
Of course sometimes it is a educated guess.
The spelling is also helpful. For example, in older French documents, I’ve sometimes noticed a zed is used in some words, where an ess is used today. That suggests that the sound was voiced in that word back then, rather than unvoiced. That in turn may affect other aspects of pronunciation.
However, I’d be wary of the idea that québécois French or American English sound like the equivalent languages from centuries ago. All languages evolve. The variants in North America have evolved, just like the variants in England and France. It’s just that the evolution may not be in the same ways on different sides of the Atlantic.
There was no standard dialect of French or English. Regional and class dialects differed more than they do today, and were always changing then too.
Besides spelling, there are also rhymes and puns that only work with certain pronunciations. e.g. ‘blood’ rhymed with ‘good’, ‘proved’ rhymed with ‘loved’.
From musical settings we can see from the notes that e.g. ‘asked’ was pronounced as two syllables ‘ask-ed’, as were most words ending in ‘-ed’. ‘Salvation’ and ‘temptation’ were pronounced with an extra syllable, ‘sal-va-ti-on’, ‘temp-ta-ti-on’ .
People at the time also wrote about their own pronunciation. e.g. Ben Jonson mentions in his English Grammar that r’s were always rhotic, or rolled, at the beginning of words, but less so in the middle and the end of words.
Accents do exist across generations even as they change. Younger people remember what their grandparents sounded like.
True, but sometimes a poet stretches a word for a pseudo-rhyme, so one needs to be careful in using poetry.
For example, when Blake wrote the lines in Tyger:
“What immortal hand or eye
Did frame thy fearful symmetry”
Was that a true rhyme or a pseudo-rhyme? I’ve seen it suggested that in some dialects at that time, “eye” was pronounced more like “eee”, so it would possibly be a true rhyme.
Certainly we have to careful, but the experts have looked at many different examples in many texts by many authors before reaching any conclusions.
Even more than that is misspellings. Uneducated people who don’t know the correct spellings tend to spell things phonetically; the way they spelled words would closely reflect the way they pronounced them. Letters from uneducated people (e.g. soldiers writing home) are a major source of knowledge of historical pronunciations.
There is no doubt that in Shakespeare’s time ‘eye’ was pronounced something like ‘ee’, as it still is in some Scottish dialects today, but in Walker’s Pronouncing Dictionary of the English Language (1828), he gives the modern pronunciations of both ‘eye’ and ‘symmetry’, so they didn’t rhyme in educated English in the early 19th century.
Blake grew up in London, not the north of England, so he was probably using a conscious anachronism in the rhyme.
Thanks for all the answers, the idea of rhymes and puns only working with certain pronounciations makes sense.
I saw an article about something similar - “On Top of Old Smokey” from the Appalachians, is a very old song presumably reflects an accent from when the people came from one area of England. It has the lines:
A thief he will rob you,
and take what you have,
But a false-hearted lover,
will send you to the grave."
Basically, “have” and “grave” rhymed once upon a time… and the evidence of spelling suggests that the “A” in grave or have was a long A, hence the “e” at the end.
OTOH, the big problem was that nobody in England (or the rest of Europe) speaks the same - it differs from region to region. Thus, the “what do isolated pockets sound like?” depends where they came from. AFAIK, Newfoundlanders seem to have come from southwest England, the Quebeckers from Brittany area and St. Malo, etc. This tells us nothing about the King’s English or French as she is spake in the capitol region by the educated class.
I remember once many years ago talking to some fellow reminiscing about his time in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Someone was signing up the British volunteers and asked one fellow with a strong accent to spell his name. When the fellow got to the letter “eye” the other said " is that ‘eye’ as ‘A’ or as in ‘E’ or as in ‘I’?" Accents.
Right. American and British English both preserve some older forms, but they are different in each one. Because of this, each one may sound a bit “archaic” to the other. And each one has evolved their own new pronunciations of some words.
Indeed.
When people like Chaucer wrote in metre, it gives us a good clue about pronunciation. Have a listen to this
Simon Callow reads from The Canterbury Tales | The Folio Society - YouTube
Why dont you tell Samuel Taylor Coleridge he didnt know how to spell? Rime is a perfectly acceptable alternate spelling.
Not in any dictionary google searches.
rime noun (RHYME)
[ C ] PHONETICS specialized
→ rhyme specialized
SMART Vocabulary: related words and phrases
(Definition of rime from the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus © Cambridge University Press)
## EXAMPLES of rime
rime
This course is so simple and logical but the schools insist on memorizing lists with no rime nor reason.
From Washington Post
Rimes burst on the music scene in the mid-90s.
From ABC News
Took me less than a minute.
And of course "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner".
I tried telling Coleridge, but sadly, it turns out he died in 1834, so no luck there. Ancient Mariner was written in 1798, so perhaps not the best guide to modern English.
So as Coleridge might have said, now wherefore stopp’st thou me?
(Eftsoons his hand dropt he.)
The WP was alluding to Shakespeare, Comedy of Errors, using his original spelling.
- Was there ever any man thus beaten out of season,
When in the why and the wherefore, is neither rime nor reason?
Country music singer LeAnn Rimes. 
‘Rime’ is an antiquated spelling (suitable for the Ancient Mariner) that was replaced by ‘rhyme’.
I like it and I use it. If you dont like that spelling I suggest you dont use it.