3 ms·

Sadly the article doesn't explain how we know vowels were pronounced differently back then. There was no voice recording obviously. Did they have some phonetic

• hollerith 5y ago
  We know that German, Swedish, etc, descended fron the same old language that English descended from, and the pronouciation of those languages is very similar to the pre-shift pronounciation of English.
• blahedo 5y ago
  There are a lot of pieces of indirect evidence. They include: * poetry that has a rhyme scheme, so you know that two words rhymed for the author * puns and wordplay (Shakespeare is overflowing with this kind of thing) that only work if words were pronounced a certain way * misspellings or variant spellings, which before the typewriter era would be almost entirely sound based (i.e. unlike typoes in general) * borrowings into other languages, which generally are "frozen" at the time of their borrowing and from then on start mutating by the rules of the other language * related languages with cognate words, if you can devise a coherent set of sound-shift rules to reconstruct the shared ancestor-word and the intermediate forms along the way * complaints from the older generation about how kids these days are mispronouncing words (these are always fun, and usually come with specific, if informal, descriptions of both the old and the new pronunciation)