While watching The Tudors, I couldn’t help but wonder how accurate a reflection it was of actual spoken English in the 16th century (among the educated upper class, anyway.) Apart from the words used, did it sound any different (tonally and in terms of accent) than it does today? Would I have easily been able to understand Henry VIII if I were to go back in time and talk to him?
Maybe this is totally unknowable, but I’m still curious.
You certainly could understand him, but his accent would be different.
Generally, my English graduate school professor indicated that a Virginia accent in the US is close to what Elizabeth I sounded like.
Language experts deduce this primarily from poetry – if two words in a poem written back then rhyme, but the same two words don’t rhyme today, then the older poem shows the older pronunciation. By comparing multiple examples you begin to get an idea about how it sounded.
There would be some differences (the -ed ending was still a separate syllable most of the time), but you wouldn’t have any problem understanding.
Of course, The Tudors is not going to worry about such niceties.
I vaguely remember a study that was done a few years ago where they tried to recreate spoken English from Shakespeare’s time. I don’t know what their methodology was, but they played a sample on NPR, and it sounded most similar to the stereotypical West Country ARRRR pirate accent.
Presumably from the original pronounciation productions of Romeo and Juliet and Troilus and Cressida by the Globe Theatre in 2004 and 2005. Their academic adviser, David Crystal, has a website on the subject, which includes recordings.
Crystal’s view, which he argues cogently in his book, is that the idea that it sounds like particular modern accents is an illusion. It is actually a jumble of elements which, in different ways, can be found in most modern English accents, but which most listeners inevitably try to place it by associating it with one particular accent.
This has been debunked by Cecil, but I can’t find the column.
My high school librarian was supposed to be some sort of expert on medieval English and would speak it if asked. It was almost unintelligible. I have no idea how he knew what it sounded like.
Mostly by analogy with similar modern languages like Scandiwegian and Icelandic. I can read aloud in passable Anglo-Saxon and Middle English (I did a summer school course!) but then I also speak Afrikaans, and especially Old English is very similar to Afrikaans in a lot of the sounds. Very guttural.
But the Tudors spoke Early Modern English, not medieval English, and, at least going by their written form, would have been reasonably intelligible. I know I can read Shakespeare or earlier Tudor stuff and make sense of it without footnotes (once you get used to their …let’s say cavalier… attitude to spelling.
I would not look to an English professor as a reliable source on historical phonology, even of English. “English” professors study English literature, not the English language.
Not this one. His field of study was the English language; he created he own phonological transcription (finding the IPA format too limiting); he taught Old English as a language course, and had us learn how to correctly pronounce words in Old English (We all were taught to pronounce “And Ich secge thussum ga, and he gaeth; and ich secge thissum cum thanna cumth he; and ich secge thissum do this and he daeth” correctly. Can you?) He also asked every student in class to pronounce the word “murderer” to see if their local pronunciation was rhotic or non-rhotic (he was an expert on English dialects, among other things). Finally, the course was “History and Structure of the English Language” at the graduate level (and, oddly enough, one of the most useful courses I took in graduate school).
He was certainly an expert on the language. This was about 25 years ago, so the field may have changed, but that was the knowledge at the time.
Middle English, used between the 11th and 15th centuries, is much more different from our English than the Early Modern English used during the Tudor period (1485-1603).
How do you know it’s “passable”. It’s not as though you found you could get by on your trip to pre-Norman England.
Those were later.
That’s the one. And I agree it didn’t sound exactly like that accent - it was just the closest, in my mind, to what I was hearing.
Interesting links. I remember Isaac Asimov, in one of his commentaries on Shakespeare, posited that the evolution of the English language has been slowed - in his view, for the best - by our inchoate social need to always be able to understand Shakespeare! Unprovable, but a fascinating theory.
What will be interesting in the future will be whether movies slow down change, as people will always have access to spoken English from about 1930 onwards. (Sound recordings are a bit older, of course, but I think movies would have a greater influence than songs, etc., on records).
Passable to my course lecturer, as in - I passed the course. He was the AS/ME expert, after all (philologist - do they still make those?)
I knew that;)
Re: the Virginia item. I’d been given to understand that the best preservation of Early Modern (“Tudor”) English was on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, particularly Okracoke Island. Not that it’s perfect preservation – but that it was a very conservative progression that retained a lot of EME phonology.
I think the poster was talking baout Tangier Island. But do you have a cite for the NC fact? I’m just really suspicious of these types of claims.
All of these claims about different dialects of American English being “Elizabethan English” is bunk. It has been said, that I know of, of Appalachian English, Ocracoke English, Tangier Island, etc. These are all very isolated dialects, and isolation has two contradictory effects on language. In some ways, it makes the language more conservative in that they conserve features that less isolated dialects have lost. So, in Appalachian, you get stuff like a-prefixing (“I’m a-buildin’ a bridge”), and on Ocracoke you get a backed pronunciation of /aI/ so that it sounds more like “oy,” among other features that were common in older forms of English. But isolation also promotes rapid change and innovation, like the monophthongization of /aI/ before voiceless obstruents in Appalachian English.
Further, the dialectal splits in American English reflect the splits that were already in play in England hundreds of years ago. So, when you say “Such-and-such is like English was spoken during Shakespeare,” you have to ask, “Whose English?”
So, basically, these comparisons might be helpful in some ways (or at least a good story), but they are simplistic at best, down right wrong and confusing at worst.
Well, since there are NO voice recordings (that I know of) we do not and cannot know what Tudor English pronunciation was like.
So I guess we will have to wait for time travel, to be able to know what Tudor pronunciation was all about.