# Would we understand spoken Elizabethan English? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [January 16, 2018, 3:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731 "2018-01-16T03:12:01Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Fretful\_Porpentine](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fretful_porpentine/32/2873_2.png) [@Fretful\_Porpentine](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fretful_Porpentine)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2018, 4:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731/21 "2018-01-17T04:18:35Z")
> [@Two\_Many\_Cats](#): > > Is it for certain that “my rewyne unpytted,” translates to “my revenue unpitted,”? Because I read it as “my ruin unpitied,” and darned if it doesn’t sound better following “my follies laughed at”. I agree. Also, I think “yor matye” is almost certainly a contraction for “your majesty” rather than “your master.” ---
**Author:** ![Fuzzy\_wuzzy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a8b319/32.png) [@Fuzzy\_wuzzy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuzzy_wuzzy)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2018, 12:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731/22 "2018-01-17T12:50:04Z")
> [@Merneith](#): > > Meant to answer this earlier. That’s exactly what they were doing. Spelling wasn’t standardized until the dictionary boys got working two hundred years after the period we’re discussing. It just wasn’t important to the writers, compared to word play, elaborate sentence construction and elegant metaphors. > > Printing had an effect on regularizing the spelling, however. Composing the plates for the printing press required the printers to be able to read in mirror writing. This (don’t ask for cites) lead to people thinking more specifically about how to spell a word and do it so that it fit the line length. As printed material became more common, and more people were reading printed to material, the words gradually coalesced into agreed upon spelling rules. > > One of the side benefits of the Protestant Reformation (which was ongoing in the Elizabethan era) was that it increased literacy among the general population. Previously, your salvation depended on talking to a learned priest who would sort things out for you. When salvation depends on understanding God and reading the bible for oneself, then literacy becomes a must have life skill. The Elizabethan era was a riot of printed material and an increasingly literate populace enjoyed a vibrant array of language arts - which, to get back to the OP, are readily understandable to a modern reader, with a little patience. At the risk of going off-topic spelling is one of the reasons experts believe we may have an original Shakespeare manuscript in the play Sir Thomas More. Shakespeare spelt _silence_ as something like \*silense \*or _scilense_. The particular spelling used in the manuscript has not been found anywhere else in Elizabethen manuscripts. A few other spellings in the manuscript are also idiosyncratic or rare. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2018, 12:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731/23 "2018-01-17T12:53:25Z")
> [@Merneith](#): > > Meant to answer this earlier. That’s exactly what they were doing. Spelling wasn’t standardized until the dictionary boys got working two hundred years after the period we’re discussing. It just wasn’t important to the writers, compared to word play, elaborate sentence construction and elegant metaphors. The first Spanish dictionary is Covarrubias’ in 1611, yet Spanish spelling in pre-Covarrubias’ texts appears to me to have been much more homogeneous than the English of the same period. ISTM that there were additional cultural factors at play, whether it was one culture valuing homogeneous spelling more than the other, one language being more straightforward in its morpho-phonetic correspondence (less possible doubts about “how the heck do I spell this”), or something else. Those “same person, same block of text, different spelling” inconsistencies **Shagnasty** points out are even something I see occasionally in modern English but almost never in Spanish (rarely enough to be something I remember). ---
**Author:** ![Fuzzy\_wuzzy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a8b319/32.png) [@Fuzzy\_wuzzy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Fuzzy_wuzzy)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2018, 3:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731/24 "2018-01-17T15:11:39Z")
> [@Nava](#): > > The first Spanish dictionary is Covarrubias’ in 1611, yet Spanish spelling in pre-Covarrubias’ texts appears to me to have been much more homogeneous than the English of the same period. ISTM that there were additional cultural factors at play, whether it was one culture valuing homogeneous spelling more than the other, one language being more straightforward in its morpho-phonetic correspondence (less possible doubts about “how the heck do I spell this”), or something else. Those “same person, same block of text, different spelling” inconsistencies **Shagnasty** points out are even something I see occasionally in modern English but almost never in Spanish (rarely enough to be something I remember). Would the fact that Spanish is derived from Latin be a factor? If any early modern Germanists are on perhaps they could tell us if German was similarly haphazard in its spelling. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [January 17, 2018, 3:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731/25 "2018-01-17T15:14:13Z")
That’s a factor in providing a relatively easy transcription map. But that’s one factor, I don’t know if and which others will be relevant or what would lead to the same person spelling the same word three different ways in a single paragraph. I know seriously lousy spellers and people with multiple degrees of dyslexia, but IME in Spanish they tend to be internally consistant; in English, not so much. There may be other factors there which were already present and different in the 16th century. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/would-we-understand-spoken-elizabethan-english/806731.md?page=1)