How do we know what accents used to be like historically?

[Northern_Piper]

@GreenWyvern

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.

Interesting. Thanks for that.

[Colibri]

@DrDeth

I like it and I use it. If you dont like that spelling I suggest you dont use it.

Moderating

Drop the hijack.

[Folly]

Nativlang on the youtube is good for this sort of discussion.

[Colibri]

@Eyebrows_0f_Doom

Indeed.

Moderating

Let’s avoid this kind of snark in GQ.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

[garygnu]

@Fotheringay-Phipps

@Northern_Piper

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.

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.

It wasn’t just “uneducated people.” There was really standardized spelling in English is a fairly recent invention. There are letters written by American Founding Fathers that spell the same word differently in the same letter.