…or from Chaucer’s time, for that matter?
We’ve had many threads about how English sounds to non-English-speakers (search the archives if you’re interested), but I think this is a different situation.
I would imagine that british accents would sound slightly less foreign, but it’d probably be pretty incomprehensible. The main stumbling point would be shifts in vocabulary as well as pronunciation. They’d have better luck understanding written modern English, much like we can stumble through Shakespeare or Chaucer without too much trouble.
It would definitely sound like a strange accent. And, if say a recording of a talk show were sent back in time, there be the problem of words that came into being through advancement in technology. Such as televison, airplane, etc.
I highly doubt this question has a factual answer, but for what it’s worth, I would guess that modern English in Shakespeare’s time would probably sound roughly the same as Shakesperean English sounds in modern times.
Not necessarily. The following quote should be taken with a grain of salt because I’m not sure what the evidence is, but it’s still worth noting:
(From Mario Pei’s (1965) The Story of Language. J.B. Lippincott Company, Philadelphia & New York. (p. 51).)
Yes. Shakespeare would have had few problems.
Chaucer, OTOH, would find it difficult. For instance, the fact that we never pronounce the silent “e” would confuse him, as would the face that the “-ed” ending is not always a separate syllable. Also, the gutteral “gh” would be gone, and the Great Vowel Shift would have changed the sounds of most vowels.
As an example:
Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
would be prounounced in Middle English:
Whahn that April, with his shor-ez soot-uh
The droot of Mahch hath perc-ed toe the root-uh.
(the represents the gutteral, like the German “Ach”)
Modern English would probably be understandable to Chaucer with a lot of concentration and if spoken slowly, but he would have to get used to a lot of major sound changes. Listen to this mp3s on this page and imagine the process reversed.
sundog66 writes (quoting Mario Pei):
> …when people migrate from their homeland they are more likely to keep intact
> the language of the period of migration than do those who stay behind. …in the
> matter of sounds at least, many linguists hold that “General American” comes
> closer to the English of Shakespeare than does the King’s English of today.
Mario Pei was an author of several popular books on language in the 1950’s and 1960’s. They’re good reads, but take everything he says with a grain of salt. He often gets the details wrong. It’s not at all clear whether Shakespeare’s English would have been closer to American or British English.
It’s important to remember that the language of Shakespeare’s plays is consciously elevated and stylized, making the gulf between Elizabethan English and our own seem wider than it really is. Take a look at some Queen Bess’s speeches, or Walter Raleigh’s letters, and you’ll see that while the style is denser and more prolix than we write today, it actually sounds quite modern. (Hell, just read Thomas Malory—completely intelligible to today’s lay reader, and he wrote a hundred years before Shakepeare.) I imagine someone from Elizabeth’s age would find our brand of written and spoken English faster, cruder, more stripped down compared to how they communicated themselves, but (differences of vocabulary notwithstanding) they’d follow along pretty well.
like this? Note: streaming Audio link
I recently listened to a reconstruction of Shakespearean English (forget where it was, sorry!) It sounded to me like some heavy accents heard in Britain, perhaps most like a heavy Scottish accent. However, it could be the case that it would sound equally bizarre to a Scotsman. One pronounced difference between Shakespearean English and modern British English would be that the dropping of “r” sounds was not common in Shakespeare’s time. If I remember right, it would have been just beginning in London but it would not have been common or normal at all for most speakers.
It’s a mistake to assume that the language stays “purer” or closer to its original form in England simply because it started there. England has much more ancient and deep dialect divisions than most of the rest of the English-speaking world, which means that the modern standard might have had more “fuel” to shift around than in the colonies.