4 ms·
(I apologize for my ignorance, but) without audio recording how can we know what the accents were back then?
by pbz 16y ago
(I apologize for my ignorance, but) without audio recording how can we know what the accents were back then?
- eru 16y agoSpelling gives some hints. One technique is to look for common spelling mistakes. An especially interesting mistake is hypercorrection (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercorrection). For example, there was a time when the K in words like "knee" and "knight" became silent. We can pinpoint this time by looking for Ks in front of words, that never used to start with K. The writer doesn't pronounce the K in "kn" any longer, but remembers that proper spelling has a K for some words. Since pronunciation doesn't help, she has to rote learn those words. And occasionally will make a mistake. Another one, especially in fairly recent times, is too look for prescriptive texts, that lament this or that development in the language.
- barrkel 16y agoYou can also pick up clues in rhyming, jokes, slang and puns that wouldn't otherwise make sense.
- eru 16y agoAnd how words get adapted into foreign languages that happen to write phonetically.
- hugh3 16y agoJust a couple of examples I happened to come across while researching for another comment: In Julius Caesar, Shakespeare makes a pun which only works if "Rome" is pronounced like "room". Also, in Henry IV, Part One, there's a pun resting on the similarity of "reason" and "raisin".
- barrkel 16y agoIn parts of Ireland, you'll still hear "reason" pronounced much like "raisin" is in much of the UK.
- hcho 16y agoSo that means we'll never get to know well educated upper classes accents as they'll have far fewer errors in their pronunciation. No?