I’m watching Richard III (with Laurence Olivier.) Is this basically an accurate representation of what spoken English during the 1400s would have sounded like? If I were transported back in time to the 1400s would I have been able to carry on a conversation with these people, or would we not understand each other at all due to differences in accents and different words in usage?
I’m no expert in this, but I would have thought that the accent would be different depending where you were in England - even more so than today. Due to travelling less, there wouldn’t be the opportunities for the accents to become homogenised.
Reading Chaucer would suggest that it shouldn’t be too hard to, first, get the gist of what’s being said, and, with practice to become fairly fluent. There would, of course, be words from then and now that wouldn’t be in common usage: klappvisier or machicolation from then, porn or mp3 from today, for example.
It would be tough going, at least for a while, because you’re looking at a very late form of Middle English shading into a very early form of Early Modern English. Richard III was king not long after the Chancery Standard went into effect, which was a standard form of English used in royal court after the English royalty stopped speaking Anglo-Norman (something closer to French than English but quite different from modern French) and Latin. He and his courtiers and the judges and so on would, therefore, be speaking English, but not quite the language Shakespeare knew and certainly not something you would have an easy time with.
For reference, this is how Geoffrey Chaucer was writing about a century prior to Richard III:
(From the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales.) Even when you get over the fact consistent spelling is a modern affectation, you still have words like ‘yronne’ and ‘corages’ that aren’t in Modern English. (OK, ‘run’ is, but the generative rule that produced ‘yronne’ from it doesn’t exist anymore.)
I’ll grant that English was undergoing the Great Vowel Shift at the time and linguistic change was rapidly producing something very similar to what we speak now. The other side of that is the gigantic dialectical diversity that existed at the time: William Caxton, the man who introduced the printing press to English shores in 1476, wrote this in 1483 about some merchants stranded on the Thames who put ashore and asked a Kentish shopkeeper for eggs:
(You laugh at Caxton’s spelling, but Shakespeare’s was no better. Near as I can figure, the fetish for consistent spelling took hold in the middle 19th Century.) Caxton’s English, where that came from, is worth a read.
So I’ll sum up by saying that if you happened to touch down in London, you’d be pretty well set up linguistically in a week assuming the accent is manageable for you. If you wind up in Wales you’d probably have it a bit rougher and if you end up in the Scottish Highlands there’s no hope for you. (Come to think of it, that pretty well sums things up now. ;))
This is a really interesting question for a number of reasons. I’ll start (I’m not bragging) by saying that I have an English degree but it’s probably expired long ago.
The English language is generally recognized as being divisable into Old English, Middle English, and Modern English. Old English would be completely unrecognizable to most present day English speakers except for certain scholars and academics specializing in the subject. I took an “History of the English Language” course at university and, for a couple of years I and my classmates could probably understand Old English to a 60 percent level. Middle English, though unrecognizable to most present day English speakers, is really a significant link to modern English that wasn’t just a gradual evolution. When William the Conqueror invaded and conquered Britain in 1066, English leadership was taken over by the Norman French of William’s culture, and French became the language of government and administration in England. As a result, French became integrated into our language and represents a very significant component of present day English.
Though William III reigned in the second half of the 15th century, the play was actually written in the late 1500s. What’s interesting, however, is that the King James edition of the Bible was written only a few years later, so you can see from two independant documents, how English was formally written at that time. I also just finished reading a book about the Gunpowder Plot, which has a lot of transcripts of correspondence, written at the same time, which shows less formal written English, but still essentially the same. Depending on what you read, Shakespearian/Elizabethian English was either late Middle English or early Modern English - I was taught that it was Modern English.
If you were transported back to that time, that style of English is more or less what you would have to deal with, though possibly without the rhythmic nature of the written text. The vocabulary would be the same as would some of the euphymisms and other conventions of the time. Double-negatives, which are considered incorrect in our English, were commonly used for emphasis, for example. The language was also rapidly changing and evolving also, because there were not yet any reliable English language dictionaries to stabilize it. The first recognized one is Samuel Johnson’s A Dictionary of the English Language (1755), which makes an interesting read.
The important thing here is that, if you ever get into an argument with someone about using a 21st century “translation” of Shakespeare or the Bible, they weren’t written in “better” or “spiffier” English. They were only written in the English of the day for readers, audiences, and congregations who could understand that same English. I am personally convinced that most people who have memorized the Lord’s Prayer, for example, probably don’t actually understand what it means but they would complain vigorously if their church introduced a translated version. How many people even know what “hallow” means, for example?
Thanks Derleth and velomont for furthering the stated purpose of TSD and SDMB. Your posts made interesting reading.
Actually the language of the Authorised Version was not everyday English. It was slightly archaic, and deliberately so. Our familiarity with it also leads us to think that thee and thou were normal everyday pronouns, but the translators used them to emphasise the personal nature of the relationship with God which Protestantism insisted upon. To use them to a stranger would be thought overfamiliar, and to use them to your social superiors would be downright insulting.
And one more thing–while the general sounds of the language spoken then are know, the exact accent is not. That doesn’t carry through very well to the written language, any more than the accent differences between different areas that speak modern English do. To get that fine-grained of linguistic data, you need to actually hear it spoken. And sadly, all phonograph records, cassette tapes, and even mp3’s recorded in the 15th Century have been lost. 
I heard a blurb a few years ago about a group who had reconstructed their best guess about how Shakespeare’s plays would have sounded back in his time. I don’t know how they did their research, but they seemed fairly confident. IIRC, they were staging some of the plays in the original accent. They performed a bit of it on the radio, and it was most similar to the modern West Country (or arrr matey pirate) accent. FWIW.
This brings to mind the complaints from critics and movie fans about Kevin Costner’s notorious lack of an English accent in “Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves.”
Leave it to Alan Rickman, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in that movie, to point out that a modern Englishman wouldn’t sound any more like a 13th century Englishman than Costner did.