Original Pronunciation | The production or performance of works from earlier periods of

Time 2020-11-13 04:02:52

Web Name: Original Pronunciation | The production or performance of works from earlier periods of

WebSite: http://originalpronunciation.com

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This site is devoted to the production or performance of works from earlier periods of English spoken in original pronunciation (OP) that is, in an accent that would have been in use at the time.David CrystalThe present-day movement to perform works in OP began in 2004, when David Crystal collaborated with Shakespeare s Globe in an OP production of Romeo and Juliet. This was so successful that the following year the Globe mounted a production of Troilus and Cressida in OP. Subsequent interest from American enthusiasts led to OP Shakespeare events in New York, Virginia, and Kansas, ranging from evenings of extracts to full productions. As only a handful of works have so far been performed in OP, interest is growing worldwide to explore the insights that the approach can provide. I m sure there must be other OP initiatives around the world, and until now there has been no place where they can be brought together. The time thus seems right to provide a website where people can find out about OP, archive their events, announce plans, and share their experiences of working with it and listening to it.BreadthAlthough Shakespeare was the stimulus for current interest in OP, the notion is much broader. Any period of English history can be approached in this way, and indeed there have been several projects where people have tried to reconstruct the pronunciation of earlier works in Old and Middle English, notably for Chaucer. The British Library exhibition, Evolving English, which ran from November 2010 to April 2011, had an audio dimension which included OP extracts from Beowulf, Caxton, Chaucer, and the Paston letters, as well as Shakespeare. The 2011 anniversary of the King James Bible also prompted readings in OP, some of which can be found on this site. More than literature is involved. There are opportunities for people interested in the vocal dimension of early English music, as well as for those involved in heritage projects which present original practices, such as Plimoth Plantation in Massachusetts. Examples from these perspectives include an OP rendering of vocal music by William Byrd and of the songs that appear in Shakespeare s plays.VarietyIt s important to appreciate that there is no single OP. All periods of English contain many accents, and this allows for variant OP performances. The evidence that allows us to reconstruct what was the case is often mixed, and choices have to be made about which sound qualities to go for. Variations in spelling can point us in different directions. Observations by contemporaries can indicate that some words had different pronunciations (as they have today). Deductions by historical linguists can reach different conclusions about the quality of a sound. Any attempt to reconstruct an earlier period of pronunciation is based on as much scientific evidence as is available, but inevitably involves a certain amount of guesswork. The more OP illustration and discussion we have, therefore, the sooner we will be able to arrive at a consensus about best practice.This site therefore aims to act as a first point of call for those interested in promoting an OP dimension to their activities. It will include only work that is grounded in a serious investigation of the sound system of a period. There are plenty of comic pastiches of the ye oldee speech kind and wild imaginings of how people once spoke, such as the oo-arr voices traditionally given to pirates. These will not be found here. OP performance brings us as close as possible to how old texts would have sounded.It enables us to hear effects lost when old texts are read in a modern way.It avoids the modern social connotations that arise when we hear old texts read in a present-day accent.In relation to Shakespeare and other poets... Rhymes that don't work in modern English suddenly work.Puns missed in modern English become clear.New assonances and rhythms give lines a fresh impact.OP illustrates what is meant by speaking 'trippingly upon the tongue' (Hamlet).OP suggests new contrasts in speech style, such as between young and old, court and commoners, literate and illiterate.OP motivates fresh possibilities of character interpretation. David Crystal says: July 12, 20207:21 pm Proper names are usually a problem for OP, as they’re so prone to personal idiosyncrasy (as they are today); but I think we can rely on hints from older spellings of Biblical names, which are likely to have been more conservative. The online OED can be helpful, as it usually shows spelling variations. In the absence of any evidence to the contrary, I treat the names as following the same sound system as any other word – so Messiah with a centralised diphthong, Jehovah with a pure /o:/ vowel, and Jah the same as today. The only likely difference is Selah, which today has a long vowel, but in OP probably had a short /e/ as in set (there’s a similar example in east, pronounced /est/). Dear David,I ve been working on recording music from the Ainsworth and Allison Psalters from around 1600 and have been attempting to use OP by working from your Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation and videos of you and Ben I ve found online. I m currently working on Psalm 84 from Ainsworth s Psalter, but don t know how to pronounce words like Messiah, Jehovah, Selah, and Jah. Do you know how they might have been pronounced, and could you recommend a resource for working with these names and words particular to biblical texts? Many Thanks!Bianca David Crystal says: May 15, 20204:47 pm Yes, OP goes down very well in schools. I ve only ever illustrated it to A-level students, but son Ben has illustrated it many times for younger kids. They love it because it s closer to their own accents, in most cases, than when they hear RP. And they especially like the way the rhymes work.Take a look at the paper I wrote for a collection on teaching the English language that appeared in 2017: Teaching original pronunciation . You can read it on my website: go to Books and Articles, filter on Shakespeare, and scroll down a bit. Dear David, I hope you are keeping well in this peculiar time. I am a trainee English teacher with a background in Linguistics. I am currently completing a research piece for my PGCE, and I am exploring how OP could be used in the classroom, as an integral part of the curriculum, to enhance pupil engagement in learning Shakespeare.I wondered if you had any thoughts on this, whether you were aware of any initiatives to bring OP into schools, or if other education professionals have discussed or trialled teaching Shakespeare and using OP either to add to student s knowledge of the texts or be able to reinterpret them through the new meanings that OP brings to light.Thank you for bringing such an interesting linguistic and historical discovery to the forefront. As a Linguist and a lover of Literature, the findings around OP research interests me endlessly. Best wishes, Edward Perrins David Crystal says: April 6, 20207:48 pm I ve never studied the N Am evolution, but what you say seems right. Not just London speech, though. There were several dialects in the English of the Mayflower settlers, for example. If you get in touch with Paul Meier (www.dialectsarchive.com), he might have some relevant observations. Rich Rhodes says: April 5, 20202:38 am I ve been using OP as a starting point for looking at the development of North American dialects, in a class I teach. The timing is right 1607-1690. The continued influence of London speech throughout the colonies is provable from the spread of r-vocalization in the period around the American War of Independence. Have you considered looking at N. American dialects as potential evidence for the pronunciation of particular words that might lack attestation in crucial environments in the Shakespearean record? I noticed that OP our is with [o] rather than [əʊ] which the forms in N. America would point to. David Crystal says: March 7, 202010:55 pm Interesting question. A few people have told me they ve experimented with selective OP for certain characters or for certain lines or scenes. I saw this in practice working with Ralph Fiennes when he was playing Richard III. He felt that in the last scenes, when Richard has his back against the wall, it would be interesting to have him revert to his roots which might have been a modern Yorkshire, but he preferred to try the lines in OP. I suppose the principle isn t any different from the multilingual production of Dream from India some years ago, where characters switched from their mother-tongue into and out of English. But the decision has to be a dramaturgical one. As a linguist, all I can do is draw attention to the possibilities: it s up to the director and actors to decide how to exploit them. But as a playgoer, I do think the need for intelligibility should always be respected, so I d be inclined to support your intuition in such cases. And if it doesn t work, for some reason, then well, we ve learned something. Hello David!I m curious about your thoughts in the occasional employment of OP in a production that would otherwise be performed in a contemporary dialect. For example, if a certain pun or rhyme scheme was understood only in OP, do you think it would be grievously distracting to utilize the sounds of OP in only those words? In other words, is it necessary to perform entirely in one dialect if it means sacrificing understanding of certain rhymes, wordplay. etc.?Thank you!Jane Emma Thomas Brown says: January 28, 20203:26 pm Thanks for catching that. I ll take note of it. I suppose I will have to learn at least the small roster of IPA symbols you used in the streamlined notation in your 2005 book. Is there a source for downloading the IPA symbols that I can put into my early-spelling scripts? David Crystal says: January 27, 202010:45 pm Thanks for this. Yes, I know several actors who have developed an individual respelling system, and if it helps, good luck to them! The main problem with a person-based system is that it may not travel well, as people from a different accent background will interpret the respellings differently. That s where the IPA wins, as anyone who has learned it can be sure it will be interpreted in the same way everywhere. But individual systems, such as yours, can have great personal value for people who have a similar phonology.Your transcription reads well but note that there s no ch in natural. Thomas Brown says: January 27, 20209:55 pm Hi David,Now that I am cast as a character in an OP production (Kent in Lear at the BSF), I finally got around to starting your Pronouncing Shakespeare book, which I ve had since 2008. I quickly found your comments on annotation, about having considered and rejected modern-letter spellings in favor of the IPA.I had already experimented with such re-spellings for my own use. I believe that, while the result is certainly imperfect, it provides a fairly helpful version I can read aloud quickly, and correct for the phonic parallax. I m getting better at sight-unseen pronouncing text in OP, but do a whole lot better when reading my spelled-out text because it at least reminds me of all the little things I often botch.Here is one of my attempts, the famous Hamlet passage: Ta beh, uhr not ta beh, that is the Questeeun :   Hwether tis Nohbler in the muhynd ta suhffer Th’ Slings an Aaras of ohtrageeus Fortun, Uhr ta tehk Aarmes agehnst a Seh a trohbbels, An bai opposin’, end um : ta dai, ta slehp Na mahr ; an bai a slehp, to seh weh end The Haart-ehk, an dha t ohsan Natch’rall shocks Thet Flesh is eyre ta ? Tis a cahnsuhmehseeun Devohtlai ta beh wish d. Ta dai, ta slehp, Ta slehp, parchaunce ta Drehm ; Ai, dhehre s the ruhb, Fuhr in dhat slehp a dehth, hwut drehmes meh cohm,   Hwen weh have shufflel d ahf this mahrtall cuhyl, Muhst give s pahz. I only need to bear in mind a couple rules to read it, like: if the terminal -y is spelled ai (bai, mai) the a takes the schwa sound as in about. (This is, after all, the sound in ta in unaccented syllables throughout.) And the i is the European i, as in vino. I used uhi or uhee at first, before trying ai. I welcome your comments. It is quite a pickle. But since many folks don t have the time* to learn the IPA symbols, and can t readily type them, and since we use early-spelling texts cut for production, even the fully-IPA-transcribed texts available (thank you!) won t be usable in practicum, for us anyway. So I may keep at it.Be well.*maybe can t be bothered is more often accurate, but in my case I run a custom woodworking business with five employees, live in an 1860 s house in constant need of work, and pursue the Plays in my spare time. Oy. David Crystal says: October 30, 201910:20 am I give this point quite a bit of space in the introduction to my Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakesperean Pronunciation. There are only 269 rhymes that don t work perfectly out of the 7000 that do, in OP. And of those, 168 differ by only one distinctive feature, including many instances where the phonetic distinction is so slight that the rhymes might well have been perceived to be identical (eg /s/ vs /z/ in cases like amiss/is and precise/flies, where the final /z/ would have had some degree of devoicing). The remaining pairs include 71 instances separated by two distinctive features (eg favour/labour labio-dental vs bilabial, fricative vs plosive), 29 by three (eg opportunity/infamy voiceless, alveolar, plosive vs voiced, bilabial, nasal), and one by four (readiness/forwardness mid-high, front, unrounded, short vs mid-low, back, rounded, long).The best example I know of a plausible visual rhyme is in Sonnet 81, Which eyes not yet created shall o er-read / When all the breathers of this world are dead. Visual rhymes were not fashionable nor reliable, given the uncertain spellings of the day. Dear Professor,I m interested to know whether Shakespeare employed various rhyme patterns in his plays and sonnets, such as: slant rhyme, lazy rhyme, identical rhyme etc. or did he just use perfect rhyme ? It seems that there were many examples of slant rhymes in his works, but I m not familiar what the pronunciation of that time. Can you enlighten me? Thank you. David Crystal says: September 23, 20198:38 am The best way of developing an intuition about a dialect is to study the underlying phonology, i.e. the sound system. In a historical case, the easiest way is to draw up a table in which one column lists all the sounds in the modern system (using whatever accent you know best) and the other lists the historical equivalents. So, for example, any word that contains the diphthong heard in modern English may, say, way, etc will be a monophthong with a more open sound, like the vowel at the beginning of RP air . /r/ will always be pronounced after vowels. And so on. I give a simplified introduction to the phonology in my Pronouncing Shakespeare. There s a very large literature in English historical phonology, and I refer to some of it in the introduction to my Oxford Dictionary. There s no quick way to learn word-stress, as there s so much variation based on the position of a word in a line. So yes, the best way of mastering that is to read as much verse as possible but not necessarily in original spelling. The stress patterns will manifest themselves in modern editions.Listening to modern accents (e.g.on Paul Meier s IDEA site) will help develop a sharper awareness of the nature of sound differences in English, and some will show echoes of OP, but remember that OP isn t identical with any of them. No modern accent sounds the -tion ending as see-on , for instance. Hi David,I was wondering if you had any advice on how to best improve the ability to intuitively guess the pronunciation of individual words and reduce the amount of words looked up in OP dictionaries.I ve been listening and re-listening to the OP recordings I have from you and others, after that would it make sense to start reading long poems in their original spelling, and using the rhymes and meter to start building an intuitive sense of where the stress probably was and what words they rhymed with?Are there specific texts or sources that were most helpful for the linguists who did the work of getting down pronunciations of specific words?Would listening to different modern English dialects possibly help as well, or do you think that would be more likely to cause interference? David Crystal says: July 28, 20198:40 am The s vs z contrast (in items like use, abuse, excuse ) was there in Middle English. Rhymes in Shakespeare show the contrast too: excuses (n) with e.g. sluices in Lucrece, and excused (v) with accused in MA. See the Oxford Dictionary for a complete list. So, if you take the Cor instance as a noun, then it would be /s/. Hello Professor Crystal,I am currently in a rehearsals for a production of Coriolanus and I have a question about the pronunciation of the word excuse . On line 101 of the Arden Shakespeare edition Virgilia says, Give me excuse, good madam, I will obey you in everything hereafter. Would excuse be pronounced with a z sound (as in accuse) or with a soft -ess sound (access)?Thanks muchly,Anthony David Crystal says: June 18, 201910:31 am Nice to hear of your interest, Theo. Counterfeit would have ended to rhyme with set indeed, exactly that rhyme turns up in the Sonnet 53 (and unset in Sonnet 16). The spellings of the word are very variable, but fet is found, as is counterfetting. Dear David,I am an undergraduate student at the University of Bristol reading English. Recently I took a Shakespeare module, and I found some of your research very interesting. I wrote about how OP can contribute to our understanding of Shakespeare s dramatic works in my final assessment. I just wanted to contact you to thank you for your work. Furthermore, I wonder how the word counterfeit might be pronounced in OP? I had in mind Falstaff s speech in 1 Henry IV Act V Scene iv ll. 110-127 where he stabs the body of Hotspur.Regards,Theo Antonov David Crystal says: April 21, 20198:47 am Many examples of the time (most famously, Oberon s speech purple dye speech) indicate that the -ly ending must have had a diphthongal quality, as well as an emerging pure vowel quality (the one RP eventually adopted), so yes, this pair of lines would have rhymed. John Hart, in his Orthographie (1569-70) is one who transcribes the syllable in a way that suggests a diphthong: boldlei, sertenlei, partlei, etc. Name says: April 19, 20198:52 pm Hi David, I have been asking myself whether the last syllable of eternally in John Donne s sonnet Death, be not proud , has been affected by the Great Vowel shift after the poem was written. Otherwise, the final rhyming couplet ( eternally l.13 die l.14), which is so typical of the Shakespearean sonnet would be missing in this poem.I hope you can answer my question.Many Thanks! David Crystal says: April 14, 20197:43 am Yes, I think these features would have been a characteristic. No postvocalic r in Derbyshire today, as in most of the North, so that s an open question. Short a still there, though. Chathan Vemuri says: April 13, 20198:22 am I see. That s very interesting regarding this refined accent from the late 18th century that you mention, which still used the postvocalic r and the short a. Fielding, Richardson, Sterne, Swift, etc would have written before this so I m guessing postvocalic R would probably have been strong in at least some of them. Idk about Richardson as he was from Derbyshire in the East Midlands and I don t know if postvocalic rs and short as would have been used there. Another reason I ask is I m interested in the shared roots of American and British English in this period, the nature of their divergence and to what extent the accent patterns in the colonies and Great Britain would have still more or less resembled each other in the accents of educated speech (as opposed to more regional and colloquial accents) before the rise of RP around 1800 or thereabouts and the general evolution of American English from 1800 onwards as well? Thank you very much!I would very much be interested in the recording on Purcell.I am familiar with at least some attempts to use your work for singing, and have very much enjoyed them.One very interesting (and lovely) feature of some is that vowels that would, in spoken OP, have been r-colored, are sung with the r-coloration, even though, in modern classical singing diction, r-coloration is dropped. (This may, partially, be because neither RP nor Mid-Atlantic have r-coloration.) The r-coloration does show up in some modern folk singing, (I m thinking in particular of some of Tim Eriksen s Sacred Harp songs); but I d be curious to know if you have any thoughts on its presence in sung English of the 17th and 18th centuries. (Though, admittedly, that s not exactly a linguistic question.) David Crystal says: April 8, 201910:23 pm There are some examples of people who have had a go at these composers in OP, in the archive page of this website, and the feedback I ve had about their performances certainly supports your intuition. As for materials I put together a recording, focused on Purcell, a while back, and I can send this via Dropbox to anyone interested in this period. Contact me at davidcrystal1@icloud.com. David Crystal says: April 8, 201910:18 pm RP as we know it today didn t emerge until the turn of the century, around 1800. A refined accent was being taught by the elocutionists in the last few decades of the 1700s, and John Walker captures aspects of it in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary in the 1790s. But a postvocalic /r/ was still there in Walker, and lasted into the next century. So certainly, local accents would have still been present, though doubtless modified by living in London. Similarly, they probably wouldn t have used the other very noticeable feature of RP, the long /a/ as in bath . Difficult to be more precise without contemporary personal descriptions. Matt Petersen says: April 8, 20198:53 pm I am interested in learning to sing Purcell and Handel in their original pronunciation. Do you know any resources on that? In particular, I m finding relatively little on 18th century pronunciation especially on how their class would have affected their singing. (Ben Crystal comments on how his RP Shakespeare can sound like it s only from the head up, and that using OP makes the language much more earthy: Singers of Handel often end up, similarly, sounding like they re only singing from the head up; and I think changing the accent may fix that.) Dear Professor Crystal, Hi, I hope you re doing well. My name is Chathan Vemuri and I m a 29 year old law student in Chicago, IL, US with a strong interest and passion for English literature. I love your demonstrations of original pronunciation in Shakespeare s era as well as the history of English accents so I thought perhaps you d be a good person to ask about this. I don t know if you work on this particularly but perhaps you might know more than me. I ve often wondered about accents of key authors in the 18th century, the last century in England where rhoticity seems to have been somewhat prevalent in different varieties of regional speech before the rise of RP towards the end of the century and beginning of the next. I watch period dramas based on the work of Henry Fielding, Daniel Defoe, Samuel Richardson, Jonathan Swift and Laurence Sterne, yet all use a standard RP for the characters accents, except for some characters. Do you know if modern RP would have been used by these authors inasmuch as they were working in London? Or would they have rather used their own regional accents that they grew up with? So for instance Fielding would have spoken with a Somersetshire accent with its hard r or Samuel Richardson maybe with a southern English accent? I apologize if any of this sounds like a stupid question and I look forward to hearing your reply if you re available to answer this. Sincerely,Chathan Vemuri David Crystal says: February 13, 201912:58 pm No, it would be ABBA, but not very noticeably so.The lay/obey pair had a mid-open front vowel (close to the sound at the beginning of air). The tree/be pair had a quality closer to the present-day vowel in these words, slightly more open, but enough to distinguish this vowel from the other one. Hi David,I m reading Shakespeare s The Phoenix and Turtle for the first time and it has struck me that although critics have identified the first section of the poem as having enclosed rhymes (ABBA), the first stanza seems to be mono-rhyme in OP (lay/tree/be/obey). Please could you confirm this!Best wishes,Olivia David Crystal says: February 3, 20199:34 am Indeed. Incidentally, the ee spelling in bear was very common in the Middle Ages, with several variants, such as beeyre. The ea spelling is the norm in the First Folio. Thomas Brown says: February 3, 20194:05 am Hi. The other day I came across an excellent one-word argument for OP:The famous 1647 View of London by Hollar shows the Glode Theatre and a Bear-Baiting Arena although I’ve heard they are labeled backward. The thing is, the latter’s label spells bear, “Beere.” Certainly the OP for that spelling is consonant with the modern word. But we also have a word “beer!” So in modern pronunciation (MP?”) the label could easily be read “Beer Garden,” which is not even just plain innocent nonsense, it is actually misleadingly incorrect!If so much damage can be done to a single word on a drawing, how much more can befall the Canon by pronouncing it in MP? David Crystal says: January 28, 20199:27 pm Lots of evidence in the rhymes that haste was pronounced hast, to rhyme with fast, last etc all with short a vowels as in northern British accents. And then lezer and plezer to follow. Very nice sound. Hi David,My choir is working on Thomas Morley s Sing We and Chant It, and I m wondering about the pronunciation of hasteth in the lines Not long youth lasteth, / And old age hasteth; / Now is best leisure / To take our pleasure. It seems like most groups pronounce this HASTE-eth, which just sounds ugly and wrong especially since each other pair of lines clearly rhymes. (as here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciIvhB-zTfc)Any ideas? Should lasteth and hasteth rhyme here? And if so, how? David Crystal says: January 24, 201910:44 am Do you mean how was Othello pronounced in OP? There would have been two pronunciations. The popular one would be Otello no ‘th’ (as in modern Irish accents). Spellings show that medial ‘th’ was often pronounced ’t’, as in words like ‘apothecary’. But people who could read, and who would be influenced by the spelling, would have pronounced the ‘th’. Hi David, I am writing an essay for my English literature A-Level and the question is whether Othello should be written in OP. I would just like to know your opinion and whether this can help my essay and develop it further.Thanks in advance, Lewis David Crystal says: December 5, 20188:29 pm Yes, this is a good rhyme. The -y ending of words like company (and of course throughout Oberon s purple dye speech) had the same diphthong as in eye though, being in an unstressed syllable, it would be said more quickly. Ylva Öhrnell says: December 5, 20184:58 pm Hello David! I would just like to ask you about a line from Shakespeare s A Midsummer Night s Dream ! And thence from Athens turn away our eyesTo seek new friends and stranger companies This is one of Hermia s lines, quite early in the play. I would just like to ask about the pronounciation of the word companies . I found it quite odd these two verses didn t rhyme, given that all of the others do, at least when pronounced in modern English. Did companies have a differnt pronounciation during the Elizabethan Era? And if so, how did it sound?Thank you in advance for your help! (And I do apologize for my English, as I am not a native speaker) David Crystal says: November 28, 201810:11 am Replacement of /wh/ by /w/ is referred to by several writers over a long period of time. It was going on in Middle English in some dialects, but doesn t attract real attention until the 18th century. It seems clear that at the beginning of the century the merger was taking place, e.g. John Jones in his Practical Phonography (1701) says that what, when etc [are] sounded wat, wen, etc by some . By the time of George Johnston (in his Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary 1764), the h is very little heard . Not everyone liked it. John Walker in his Critical Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) says that not sounding h after w is a fault of Londoners. He is thinking mainly of Cockneys. But slowly the vulgar associations disappeared. The merger begins in the south among educated people and moves north (but not as far as Scotland). I grew up in North Wales and never had it. So whether you recognize it in the early 18th century will depend on your interpretation of the social setting.The see-an pronunciation of -tion etc had long gone. This was already shee-an in the 17th century. It is routinely recorded as shun in 18th century dictionariesAs for your timbre question No idea. I doubt it. Hello, DavidI ve been away for a few days and have just read your reply to the Queen Anne question. Thanks.One or two questions that I forgot to ask. Was the wine/whine merger completed by then in England ? Or was the distinction still more or less preserved, as it is (for instance) in Scotland/Ireland today ?What about the -cian/-sion pronunciation ? And beyond all that . is it possible early 1700s voices had in general a timbre or quality that would strike us as odd if we could somehow hear them ? Once again, many thanks John Toyne David Crystal says: November 26, 20186:38 pm It certainly is (to answer your last question first). As for resources, there are two from me. One is the audio file accompanying the third edition of The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, out this week, which has some recordings of Caxton and others from that time. Info via the CUP website. And then there s my recording of the Tyndale Matthew Gospel, available on CD from the British Library, which has an OP from around 1530. Hope these will help. Hello David,I really enjoy your recordings of Shakespeare, and I ve also been listening to any Middle English recordings I can find. I d like to learn to read transitional texts between these periods and texts immediately after Shakespeare in their original pronunciation and possibly do my own recordings one day. Do you have any advice for resources to learn how the pronunciation would be at the various stages from Middle to Early Modern, to Modern English? Is it feasible to learn a decent pronunciation of these as an amateur enthusiast? David Crystal says: November 24, 20187:31 pm By then it as well on its way to sounding like Modern English, but some properties of Shakespearean OP were still there, notably the pronunciation of /r/ after vowels, which lasted until the early 1800s. Short /a/ (in bath, father, etc.) would still have been there too. And lots of stress differences in polysyllabic words as shown a few decades later in John Walker s Dictionary. Certainly enough to make the accent of the early 1700s sound different to what we have today. Hello, David I saw the trailer for The Favourite , the new film about Queen Anne and wondered how much different from Shakespeare s OP that of the Addison and Steele generation circa 1711 when the Spectator first appeared. I know this is a general question, David. Many thanks, John Toyne David Crystal says: October 30, 20189:58 am Got it wrong.It was Mary COY. She s a voice coach. (I was thinking of her name in OP sorry!) Chris K says: October 29, 201811:27 pm Valuable information indeed thank you. Is Mary Key an actor? A journalist? David Crystal says: October 23, 20188:06 am I don t think I ever knew exactly what they did. I have a vague recollection of some of Hamlet. But the person who would know is Mary Key, as she was the one who was at the Globe performance and who took the idea back. If you can track her down Chris K says: October 23, 201812:01 am Hi David! I m trying to learn more about the OP Shakespeare extracts that were presented in 2006 during the 400th anniversary of Jamestown. (I heard about this event from your 2016 OUPblog article, here: https://blog.oup.com/2016/03/original-pronunciation-shakespeare/.) I can t seem to find any details about Shakespeare in the official record of that Jamestown commemoration; I d be very grateful if you happened to remember which Shakespeare extracts were presented, or if you could point me toward any information about OP Shakespeare in Jamestown. Thank you very much, and thank you for your wonderful scholarship! Albert Soler i Cruanyes says: September 22, 201810:46 am I had only focused on individual words pronunciation, and so I hadn t noticed the syllable timing/stress-timing difference. The more I ve been looking into it these past days, the less I found the resemblance to be strong. Thank you very much for your rapid answer! David Crystal says: September 21, 201810:44 am It s possible to do a phoneme by phoneme comparison of OP to any other accent, to get a rough idea of the similarities. No modern accent is identical, of course. (None,for instance, pronounces -tion endings as -see-on.) When I did this informally, a while back, I found Irish to come closest which corresponds to a common first impression. I didn t do Jamaican, but there are some important differences, such as the j glide heard before the vowel in the second syllable of Jamaican. Also, the syllable timing of Caribbesn English is a contrast with the stress-timing of Elizabethan OP. Hi David! In my own experience, I ve found that, when it comes to Standard Englishes, the one resembling OP the most is Jamaican. Is that really so? Or is there another standard accent that holds a closer similarity? Thank you for your great work! David Crystal says: August 27, 20185:21 pm My recording of all the sonnets in OP are available in the Shop section of this website. Drew says: August 27, 20184:52 pm Hi David, I m a junior in college and for one of my classes one of the assignments is to memorize sonnet 121, I ve already done so (for a previous class) and I think it would be interesting to recite it in the original pronunciation instead. Could you direct me to a recording of 121 I could listen to in order to improve my understanding of how it is meant to sound, or if a recording of this sonnet doesn t exist and you re willing to help out a college student, can you create one? Thank you. David Crystal says: August 13, 20185:59 pm The central quality of the first element of the diphthong is based on an estimate of how far the shift to modern /ai/ would have travelled from its Middle English value as /i:/. The essential difference with immediately is that the final syllable is unstressed. John Hart is one who writes such endings as a diphthong in the mid 16th-century, and this was surely still present in Shakespeare s day, otherwise the rhymes (in e.g. Oberon s purple dye speech) are lost, and the mystical atmosphere evaporates. But there are also some cases where that unstressed ending rhymes with /i/, as today, suggesting that the diphthongal ending was on its way out. The rhymes also show that there were many cases where words had two pronunciations, just as many do today (think scone rhyming with both on and own). Fear is a case in point (and also several other words with an ea spelling). It sometimes rhymes with (e.g.) cheer and deer and sometimes with there and swear.You ll find a complete listing of rhymes in the dictionary you mention. This is the Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, published by Oxford University Press, with an accompanying audio file of all the entries (accessed through a personalized code that you get with the book). Hi David!First of all, just wanted to say that you for all of your work on Shakespeare in OP!! My friends and I just saw A Midsummer Night s Dream last night and so I came back to read Paul Meier s transcription for A Midsummer that was posted on your website and have a few questions about some sound choices:1. /i:/There are several examples of rhymes where modern English now has /aɪ/ and /i/ respectively, cf. nigh and immediately, which are both transcribed as /əɪ/. No? then I well perceive you all not nighEither death or you I ll find immediately I was wondering how you decided that both words would be mid-shift at this point, even though modern English immediately appears to have reverted back to /i/? Is the hypothesis that all /i:/ words began the shift to /əɪ/ but then some reverted back to /i/ and others shifted all the way to /aɪ/?2. Perhaps a similar question with the spelling for /ɛ:/There are some examples where is transcribed as /ɛ:/: And yours of Helena to me bequeath,Whom I do love and will do till my death But others where it is transcribed as /e:/: I will lead them up and down: leːdI am fear d in field and town: fɛːr dIn these cases, modern English has bequeath, lead and feared all becoming /i/, so I was wondering how the choice was made to transcribe them at different points in transition here? Further, do we assume as with death /ɛ/ that if it did not transition in modern English, that it never began the transition at all? Even to words with the same roots? cf the example, with leaden legs is just left as modern English /lɛd/ vs. will lead is /le:d/. Thank you so much! I apologize if you have answered these questions previously! You mentioned in some of these comments having an OP Dictionary? But I can t seem to find it online? If my questions are answered there, I would be happy to look there instead.Thanks again!Colleen David Crystal says: August 8, 20187:18 pm There s been a distinctive Scots accent since the early Middle Ages, judging by the various texts that are spelled in a recognizably Scottish way. and people commented on the Scots way of talking in the 16th and 17th centuries though of course very politely, after 1603. But there were indeed some similarities, such as the pronunciation of /r/ after vowels in southern as well as Scots accents (though probably with different phonetic qualities, e.g. trilled in Scotland, as often today). Northern accents would certainly have been closer than southern, as they are today, but information is hard to come by, as writers of the time don t often describe regional differences. Hello again David,I m halfway through Jasper Ridley s biography of John Knox and was fascinated to learn that he was one of Edward VI s favourite Court preachers in 1552. Would Knox s Lowland Scottish accent have seemed weird to Londoners of that time ? Or was 1552 sufficiently long ago for the lowland Scots accents and the Northern English accents to be more similar-sounding than they are now ? Many Thanks. John Toyne David Crystal says: August 6, 20189:05 pm Thanks for your message. It was a time when half rhymes were coming into fashion, so there would probably have been some degree of assonance between knew and below , but what sphere is doing there can t be explained by any linguistic theory I know of! Similarly, along and sung echo each other but taught is anomalous. It s a curious bit of writing. Or is there a joke in jarring sphere a deliberate non-rhyme? Purcell would have approved of such a thing, I suspect. Tony Bittner says: August 6, 20182:45 pm Dear David,My early music ensemble The Broken Consort will perform John Blow s Ode on the Death of Mr Henry Purcell from 1695 and I ll help the countertenors with the pronunciation of the text; however, I m doubtful about certain rhymes: the 3 last lines of the second stanza (knew, Sphere, below) and lines 3 and 4 of the third stanza (along, taught, Sung). Thank you very much.I.Mark how the Lark and Linnet Sing,With rival NotesThey ſtrain their warbling Throats,To welcome in the Spring.But in the cloſe of Night,When Philomel begins her heav nly lay, They ceaſe their mutual ſpite,Drink in her Muſick with delight,And list ning and ſilent, and ſilent and list ning, and list ning and ſilent obey. II.So ceas d the rival crew when Purcell came,They Sung no more, or only Sung his Fame.Struck dumb they all admir d the God-like Man, the God-like Man,Alas, too ſoon retir d, As He too late began.We beg not Hell our Orpheus to reſtore, Had He been there,Their Sovereign s fear Had ſent Him back before.The pow r of Harmony too well they knew,He long e er this had Tun d their jarring Sphere,And left no Hell below. III.The Heav nly Quire, who heard his Notes from high,Let down the Scale of Muſick from the sky:They handed him along.And all the way he taught, and all the way they Sung.Ye Brethren of the Lyre, and tunefull Voice,Lament his lott, but at your own rejoyce.Now live ſecure and linger out your days,The Gods are pleas d alone with Purcell s Layes,Nor know to mend their Choice.FINIS. David Crystal says: July 20, 20181:56 pm Yes, it s possible. The Old English word had such spellings as spearua and spearewa, which developed into an e-vowel in Middle English. This was a short vowel, as shown by such spellings as sperrowe. The final syllable in colloquial speech would probably have been a schwa ( sperra compare fellow as fella, etc). The a-spelling develops in Middle English, and eventually became standard, but it would be perfectly usual for the older pronunciation to continue regionally. That would allow a homophone with the second syllable of Shakespeare, bearing in mind that this was also pronounced short, as suggested by such spellings as Shaksper. Dear David,In the play Guy, Earl of Warwick , there is a character named Philip Sparrow who some scholars, such as Katharine Duncan Jones, believe might be a caricature of Shakespeare. I read on a forum that Sparrow may have been pronounced Spear-O In some parts of England at the time, is this likely to be true? Thanks David Crystal says: July 17, 201811:27 am VERDICT Yes, this would have been an alternative form esp among older speakers.SATIRE you mean the second vowel? also a good pointFIERCE I was very much influenced by the ee spellings here, but agree the other pron is possibleSERVILE agreed, the spellings certainly suggest this altINVEIGLE possible, I suppose, but I don t see much evidence in the spelling listsPHLEGMATIC as with VERDICT, the older form I suppose would still have had some currencyRETINUE Yes, this did have an alternative accent, but the only metrical instance (in KL) has stress on the first syllable. In a bigger work (a guide to EME pron), it would have to be there.SUCCESSOR by the same argument, yes, this should have an initial stress recognized. I ve made a note.Thank you for taking so much trouble with all this. David Crystal says: July 17, 201811:03 am Here too I was influenced by the rhymes, with old, sold, enscrolled, and so on. And I recall Walker regretting that the oo form was in his time becoming frequent, replacing the older one. I wouldn t put too much money on it! David Crystal says: July 17, 201810:55 am Also very interesting and plausible, apart from your apparent disregard of the rhymes in 116 a short vowel to love and a long vowel to remove, and then later different values for proved and loved. That doesn t make any sense to me, given the importance of rhymes in the sonnets. And I wonder just how much trust one can put in the distinction you make between, for example, your transcription of speak and disgrace. A lot depends on exactly where in the CV diagram you would locate æ:. There may be a philological point here, but I don t think I could ever get a company of actors to reproduce it consistently. David Crystal says: July 17, 201810:40 am Interesting. Jonson seems to be hearing vowel quality rather than vowel length. I felt that the length contrast in the all set was important, and I carried this through. But I can see the argument that this might not be necessary for ART and the like, and indeed at one point I did try using the same vowel symbol for both, and also for EARTH, but this seemed to be losing too much phonetic distinctiveness. I suppose in the end these points turn on what distinct means phonemic or phonetic. David Crystal says: July 17, 201810:12 am Agreed. I just wish I could find some ee spellings to reinforce the point.Have you considered the following? For VERDICT: a form without /k/ pronouncedFor SATIRE: a form with the vowel of NATUREFor FIERCE: a form with the same vowel as in PIERCEFor SERVILE: a form with a non-tense BIT vowel in the second syllableFor INVEIGLE: a form with the SEA vowelFor PHLEGMATIC: a form without the /g/ pronouncedAlso, the following accentuations: retínue, súccessor
 A.Z. Foreman says: July 16, 20187:05 am Tangential question (sorry to blow up your comment box like this) The pronunciation goold for gold is attested thru the 18th century. It is what you d expect etymologically like Room for Rome. In keeping with the Early Middle English (or perhaps Late Old English) lengthening of originally short vowels before the combinations ld , nd , ng , mb , rd , rl , and rn (when stressed and not followed by a third consonant or third syllable). Thus Anglian ald aald, and then aa evolved like other long aa to ModEng OLD. Anglian gold should yield a long ME vowel producing the pronunciation goold. The MED lists Gold with a long high vowel of the kind that should yield GOOLD. And the spelling variants in the MidEng corpus are consistent with this.I had thought ModEng Gold with an O sound was a spelling pronunciation. But Shakespeare s rhymes using Gold all imply the prototype of the Modern word going back to an open O in Middle English. (On the other hand, Wyatt rhymes Gold with things like WOULD and LOUD and ROOD.)(I currently have a bet going with a friend that the GOOLD form predates the GOLD form in post-1066 Eng.) A.Z. Foreman says: July 16, 20186:52 am Probably the best way to convey my perspective is with a transcription of my own. Since this comment section appears to be rather temperamental about IPA, here s a PDF. It aims at a somewhat cultivated accent of the 1590s. Picture, if you will, a young Ben Jonson getting his hands on a manuscript copy and reading it aloud.https://dl.dropbox.com/s/fef7pc9227zmhnh/TwoIPASonnetsForCrystal.pdf A.Z. Foreman says: July 16, 20186:12 am Say you: that what you reconstruct as a long open back unrounded A must have been a noticeable feature of OP as Jonson, among others, pays special attention to it, contrasting it with the normal use of a (‘pronounced less than the French à’): ‘when it comes before l, in the end of a syllabe, it obtaineth the full French sound, and is uttered with the mouth and tongue wide opened, the tongue bent back from the teeth’. He gives all, small, salt, calm among his examples. But what Jonson actually says in full is With us, in most words, is pronounced less than the French à : as in art, act, apple, ancient. But when it comes before L, in the end of a syllabe, it obtaineth the full French sound, and is uttered with the mouth and throat wide opened, the tongue bent back from the teeth, as in all, small, gall, fall, tall, call. So in all the syllabes where a consonant followeth the L, as in salt, malt, balm, calm. In other words, Jonson hears the words ART and APPLE as both containing the same kind of a-vowel. Furthermore, he finds this kind of a-vowel in ART and ACT is perceptually different from that of all, small etc. Yet you have the same open back unrounded vowel for both SMALL and ART, and then give a different vowel /a/ for words like ACT. It does not really seem to me like your OP is actually the English that Jonson is describing. (As I m sure you know John Hart and others transcribe the SMALL vowel in a different and distinct fashion.)It seems more likely to me that ACT and ART did indeed have the same vowel at this point. The most straightforward inference would be that this vowel was simply /a/ or something fo the kind. And when the vowel of SERVE was allophonically lowered into the neighborhood of AE, it tended to near-merger with /a/ when and where the latter in its turn began to shift higher. While I m on the subject, I m not sure I follow the logic of putting OP through a completed NURSE merger. Over the 17th there seem to be competing Englishes merging DIRT/TURN but keeping EARTH distinct, and others merging DIRT/EARTH while leaving TURN distinct. The merger cannot have complete in normative London English until the 18th century or so. Shakespeare interrhymes all three of these, but not with the same frequency with which he rhymes these words inside their own lexical set. It does not follow from any of this that all three were merged in a single variety of speech at his time. At most it implies that there existed different varieties with different mergers. A.Z. Foreman says: July 16, 20185:55 am Reason/treason/season could be moved together in either direction as a set, I should think. All three of them alternate in ME spellings (but then what doesn t). Etymologically Treason comes from an ME/AN diphthong which in your reconstruction is merged with the reflex ME long a. But Season is listed in the MED as having only an open long vowel of the kind that yields the SEA vowel. I think one would have to assume alternating possibilities for all three words. Even the word Raising itself, having ME /ai/, could rhyme with the normal EA vowel, or not, depending on whether or not the speaker had the Mopseyish merger reflected in the play/sea rhyme in Henry VIII III.i.4-5. David Crystal says: July 15, 20184:16 pm Thanks very much for this. It s the kind of debate I was hoping would emerge, for in so many cases I am aware that I had to take a view . In the present case, I think one has to look beyond this particular pairing: not just reason and raisin, but also treason and season, and the further pun set involving raising (Kökeritz gives examples), which points towards a more open pronunciation. Yes, there was a close-vowel pronunciation, as you say, and I should have mentioned this. But the existence of two pronunciations is acknowledged by Walker, who cites Sheridan and others preferring the diphthong, and himself and others preferring the pure vowel (so the usage isn t a recent one). Sheridan actually gives the diphthongal form [his a2] for raisin. The OED reflects all this too, in its third edition revision, the spellings for reason showing two distinct patterns going back to ME one set, mostly with ei or ey, suggesting a diphthongal pronunciation; the other, mostly with ea, but with a couple of ee, suggesting a pure vowel, presumably quite close. So, I guess I should allow that the Shakespeare pun could have gone in either direction. I ve made a note, in case I ever get a chance to do a new edition. A.Z. Foreman says: July 13, 201811:57 pm You say in the dictionary of OP that the open e of tale .is also used in several words that would later become /i: /, such as reason and season puns provide useful reinforcement here, as wordplay between reason and raisin, for example, would not have worked without some degree of homophony. With raisin I am pretty sure you have it backwards. It is raisin that was pronounced as a homophone for reason. Both would be /re:zn/ (or /ri:zn/ with the see/sea merger.) The pronunciation /ri:zn/ for raisin is attested well into the modern period in 18th century pronunciation dictionaries by Walker, Flint, Sheridan and others. The pronunciation with the SAY vowel rather than the SEA/SEE vowel is the result of a modern spelling pronunciation. Mike says: July 13, 201810:08 pm Thank you so much David. This is extremely interesting! David Crystal says: July 5, 20188:43 am Fascinating. Thank you. No, I ve never worked on OP from the Romantic period other than the occasional foray into individual words (such as my piece on Blake s symmetry in Sounds Appealing. There were lots of differences, especially in stress balcony with the stress on the second syllable, for instance. But these are all features to do with the phonology of the time, not the phonetics by which I mean we can work out the sound system Wordsworth would have used (the same as Keats, given that they eventually did communicate), but exactly what phonetic realizations were interfering with intelligibility is very tricky to establish, in the absence of accent descriptions. David Crystal says: July 5, 20188:35 am A complex history, reflecting both regional variation and differences in formality. The /l/ is always recorded as being pronounced by 16th-c writers, and gradually disappears during the 17th-c. But this will have been the formal pronunciation, reflecting an awareness of spelling. This is shown by the history of could, which originally was never spelled with l. This spelling develops on analogy with would and should in the mid-/late-1400s. But already in the 15th-c for would and should we see spellings with no l OED has 1400 sud, 1449 schude, 1481 whowde, for instance, and such spellings are evidenced into the 17th-c (and of course are still around in representations of dialect today). So clearly there were two pronunciations, varying in locality and formality. I therefore didn t make the /l/ pronounced in my Shakespearean OP a decision that would have horrified Holofernes, of course. Hello David!Around what time did the l in should, would, could stop being pronounced?Thank you! Dear David Crystal,In Peter Bell’s short film “Basil Bunting: An Introduction to the work of a poet” from 1982, there is a brief discussion by Bunting of William Wordsworth’s dialect:“Standard English is a fairly recent invention. It wasn’t in use 150 years ago. There’s a description of Keats’s first meeting with Wordsworth at a dinner in London, and it was a long time before Keats could understand what Wordsworth was saying. And Hazlitt also describes a meeting with Wordsworth in Somersetshire, where, for half an afternoon, he could make neither head nor tail of what Wordsworth said. Wordsworth was speaking Cumbrian, Hazlitt was used to London accent. If you read Wordsworth in beautiful curt Kensington, you are not surprised that the critics say he had no music. But if you hear him in his own broad vowels, it is a beautiful and very sensitive kind of music that he uses all the time.”Likewise, in a 1970 lecture at the University of British Columbia called “The Use of Poetry,” Bunting remarks:“Again, now that we have all been driven to use some approxima­tion to standard English, a koiné, nobody’s native tongue, how much do we lose of those poets who wrote in their native speech before standard English was invented in the Public Schools in the middle of last century?We know Wordsworth spoke with such a persistent northerliness that Keats and Hazlitt found it very difficult to follow his conver­sation; and that he composed aloud, as most good poets do, in good Lake District accents, where water is watter, and rhymes with chatter, and the ‘oo’ sounds last forever, and a stone is a stwoen and a coal cwol. And Keats himself was a cockney, speaking not the cockney of today, which is largely an Essex dialect, but the cockney Sam Weller spoke, which is mainly Kentish. His v’s and w’s must have sounded much alike, and his vowels would have been the thin stuff you can still hear in Kensington. And how many of Hardy’s s’s ought to be read as z’s?”I was wondering: do you have any plans for Original Pronunciation readings of Wordsworth, or do you know of anyone who does? As a native New Yorker, I indeed have found it difficult to discern the “very sensitive kind of music” Bunting hears in Wordsworth’s poetry, but given the testimony of its historic, sensitive listeners I believe it must indeed be there and I’d certainly love to hear it myself. (For that matter, Bunting makes Keats’s and Hardy’s poetry sound ripe for OP treatment as well!) Any thoughts or pointers would be much appreciated.Many thanks for all the work you do — your contribution to literature, and particularly to the recovery of the music of poetry, has been invaluable.All the best,~~~Michael David Crystal says: June 14, 20188:15 am Well thank you. And all the best for your degree. Jack Paul Ryan says: June 14, 20181:27 am Thank you so much for the detailed reply, Mr. Crystal! It means so much to hear from someone whose work I admire so much. I hope one day to know even a hundredth as much about English as you do. I had so much fun reading The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, and your work on Shakespearean English pronunciation inspired me to work as a dialect coach for a 1790s era high-school play and attempt to make my Latin pronunciation as authentic as possible. I am going into my freshman year of college at McGill University this year for a degree in linguistics, and I want to thank you for inspiring me to get involved in that field. David Crystal says: June 13, 20189:35 pm Yes, the sea/see distinction is one of the trickiest aspects of EME OP. It was a clear distinction in Chaucer s day, and the question is how long it remained. Some think it was on the wane during the 16th century, others that it lasted until the early 17th. My view is that the distinction was extremely unstable by Shakepeare s time. Probably older conservative speakers would have retained it, but new tuners of accent would not. The evidence is mixed. The spelling of ea for the more open variant vs ee for the closer is not a perfect guide, as the OED quotation notes. Rhymes sometimes point in different directions. The contrast is further obscured by the phonetic realisations, with the /i:/ phoneme having an articulation closer to cardinal 2 than (as in present-day RP) cardinal 1. Length isn t the issue here. There are words where ea is long (as in seat) and those where it is short (as in feast).When I work with a company, I find it impossible to introduce an easy principle to ensure that the actors make the distinction consistently. (If anyone out there has one I d love to know what it is!) So I simplify, and give both see and sea (etc) the same /i:/ phoneme, but articulating it more openly than in present-day RP. However, I think it s important to be flexible, given the uncertainties, so that, for example, when we seen fear rhyming both with cheer and with wear, we allow the rhymes to motivate alternative pronunciations. This can upset some philological purists, but in an applied linguistic setting one often has to make pragmatic decisions of this kind.Hope this helps. But you don t need to apologise for feeling confused. This is an area where everyone is, some of the time! Jack Paul Ryan says: June 13, 20186:45 pm Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation is my accent of all time. I have a CD with recordings of various scenes in Original Pronunciation and I love letting others listen to it. Thank you for your dedicated service to this important cause! I have been confused about the pronunciation of ⟨ea⟩ and ⟨ee⟩. How are they pronounced in both Shakespearean and in general Early Modern English?Paul Meier in The Original Pronunciation (OP) of Shakespeare’s English and other sources that are specifically about Shakespeare’s pronunciation say they were both either [e] or [e̝] (no lengthening mark). Wikipedia, when talking about Early Modern English in general, not just OP, says ⟨ea⟩ was [eː] or [ɛ̝ː] and ⟨ee⟩ was /iː/, but cites (among other things) David Crystal’s Sounding out Shakespeare: Sonnet Rhymes in Original Pronunciation. Do these sources imply that, for most Early Modern English texts, I should pronounce ⟨ea⟩ and ⟨ee⟩ as long [eː]/[ɛ̝ː] and long /iː/ respectively, but for Shakespeare I should use short [e]/[e̝] for both spellings? Also, there is the following passage from the Oxford English Dictionary in regards to Early Modern English spelling: “Double e (ee) or e..e was used for two different long front vowels: the ‘close’ vowel of meet and the formerly ‘mid’ vowel of meat, mete (the significance of this is now obscured since in most words the two sounds have become identical). The spelling e..e was gradually restricted to the latter while additionally ea was beginning to be introduced as an alternative spelling.By the the fruyte that procedeth of the tree menynge the boode or the floure and the leef.”(https://public.oed.com/blog/early-modern-english-pronunciation-and-spelling/) David Crystal says: June 3, 20187:30 am This is where the principles of historical phonology become really important. One establishes a timeline of phonetic change over the centuries, and then estimates where the change would have reached at a particular period. Spelling is a major source of evidence, as are features like rhymes, and the comments of orthoepists and lexicographers. Having reviewed this evidence, I concluded in my Shakesperean OP that the vowel quality was back mid-close unrounded an unrounded equivalent of /ʊ/, closer to schwa, but definitely not as far forard as /ʌ/, which was a much later development. I do say, though, in the introduction to my Oxford dictionary of Shakespearean OP, that a rounded variant was certainly in use at the time the ancestor of the present-day northern rounded sound in words like cup . There are always alternative options when researching OP. David Crystal says: June 3, 20187:22 am Yes, go through a dictionary of surnames, and it s evident from the spelling variations in the same surname how phonological factors must have been involved, in the days before spellig standardized. Kenneth Keown says: June 2, 201811:10 pm This is fascinating stuff. Allow me a question, please. It s clear from S116 that Shakespeare thought of the words prov d and lov d rhyming. Do we have any way to know whether vowel sound he heard as he recited the lines was /ʌ/ or /ə/ or /ʊ/? Kenneth Keown says: June 2, 201810:36 pm Thank you for your reply. I never knew I had an accent until I went to college in Connecticut, and many classmates accused me of having a southern one. I retorted Well at least it s not Bostonian. There was some pejorative implication that one s manner of speaking is somehow better or more correct than the other s. Over the years, I did lose my Southern accent, but it creeps up every time I visit my home town like it or not. What interests me in my present work is how the clerks in early New England towns might have mistaken the pronunciation of surnames when their informants hailed from a different part of England and articulated their vowel phonemes differently. Over the course of a generation of two all the different accents amalgamated into American English, so the problem was short-lived as American English evolved into regional patterns. Imagine of how John Adams, a native of Boston, would have thought about how the Virginian Thomas Jefferson spoke. You can almost feel the role of Benjamin Franklin a native Bostonian who spent his adult life in Philadelphia as an intermediary. We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men /r/ created equal. David Crystal says: June 2, 20182:22 pm Important to distinguish between accent (pronunciation) and dialect (grammar and vocabulary). RP is an accent, not a dialect.It didn t exist in the 16th century. RP develops in England in the last decades of the 18th century, and became the accent of the educated elite but spoken by less than 5 per cent of the population of England. You could get to the top of the kingdom in S s day with any regional accent witness Raleigh and Drake s Devonshire. And of course in 1603 the elite accent became Scots.Yes, S must have begun life with a West Mids accent, but this would have been modified as a result of life in London. Mixed accents would have been very common, just as they are today. But we know very little about the exact phonetic qualities of the vowels used in different parts of the country. Writers like Jonson give only very general clues such as saying that the vowel in words like prove is short. But that s nonetheless invaluable info, as it helps us see why proved and loved (for example, in Sonnet 116) are exact rhymes.OP is a sound system, not an individual accent. Just as today we speak Modern English (i.e. use a modern English sound system) in a variety of accents, so people speaking Early Modern English would also have used a variety of accents. For example, everyone would have said invention as in-ven-see-on rather than Modern in-ven-shun , but it would have come out differently when spoken by northerners, southerners, Irish, Scots, and so on. When we did the OP Romeo at the Globe in 2004 all the actors kept their original accents, superimposing them onto the OP. And that s how it s been ever since. Kenneth Keown says: June 2, 201812:45 am Dear Dr. Crystal: As a trained historian and amateur genealogist, I am interested in how English was spoken by the 17th century settlers in New England. Fortuitously, I found your website for which I offer congratulations. This led me to Ben Jonson s Grammar, a fascinating book for someone who can read Latin. Jonson spent much ink trying to instruct his readers about how to pronounce English phonemes by referring to Latin. Of course he had absolutely no idea about how Latin was spoken by any native speaker of that language. At best he would have learned it from a teacher whose native language was 16th century English. Let s get more to the point. Jonson attended schools in London before matriculating at Cambridge. He spoke a dialect of English that would be called Received Pronunciation today. I m guessing his grammar was an attempt to encourage people from other parts of the country to speak as he did as if his dialect were somehow superior to other dialects. Without arguing about who was the better poet and dramatist, we do know that Shakespeare was from West Midlands and undoubtedly spoke in the dialect of that part of England. We know that Marlowe was from Kent and undoubtedly spoke in the dialect of that part of England. Today, RP is broadcast throughout England so it becomes something of a second language for the population. I m sure that at the end of the 16th century there was no such universality in England. So, how likely were Shakespeare and Marlow to have used London English while ruminating about their works before actually writing them down? David Crystal says: May 12, 20187:52 am Not covered on this site, but a familiar question, indeed. What you have to appreciate is that the first syllable of Satan didn t have a long vowel. It was short, as in the original Latin and Greek. John Walker in his pronouncing dicitonry of 1791 is one who refers to it. Satan is frequently pronounced like sattan, he says and he doesn t like it, so recommends a long vowel, as in Plato. This caught on, and became the norm though the OED says that the short vowel was being used even as late as 1900. Seyton, on the other hand, always had a long vowel though whether this was see or say is an open question. I give both in my Dictionary. Not much basis for homophony, therefore. Chris Pollard says: May 11, 20187:14 pm Dear David, I apologise if this has already been covered, but I would be very interested to know what evidence you have found that could shed light on the old question of the pronunciation of Macbeth s attendant Seyton s name. Would it have been a homophone with Satan? Or would the first syllable have sounded more like modern see ? David Crystal says: March 14, 20185:38 pm Yes, that is a common reaction. As we are talking about the period leading up to 1611, I ve used the same OP system for the KJB as I use for Shakespeare. There was a great deal of interest in the OP version during the anniversary year, and that was when I made a series of short recordings, which you can now find in the Shop section of this website. Cory Howell says: March 13, 20183:58 pm This Lent I ve been reading the Bible from cover to cover. As I ve done so, I have occasionally picked up the King James Bible, and read some of its magnificent passages out loud, in order to better experience the rhythms of its poetry and prose. Today, while reading in Isaiah, I decided to try my hand at reading several of the chapters out loud in as close an approximation of OP as I could manage. It really was a marvelous experience, even though I m certain that I made abundant mistakes in my OP. The rhythm completely changes, and is a totally different experience from reading the Bible in Received Pronunciation, or in my native American accent. I would love it if someday you were to publish a guide to the King James Bible in OP, as you have for Shakespeare s works! Maurine Miller says: February 11, 20187:11 pm Thank you so much for your events posting! By coincidence, I will be in the Baltimore, MD area during the first weekend of their OP production of Othello in April. I am now making arrangements to attend since I may never have another chance to experience an OP performance of a Shakespeare play. David Crystal says: February 9, 201812:59 pm In 1791, John Walker added a comment to the entry on wind in his English Pronouncing Dictionary. He gives both pronunciations and says: These two modes of pronunciation have been long contending for superiority, till at last the former [i.e. with the short i] seems to have gained a complete victory, except in the territories of rhyme. Here the poets claim a privilege, and readers seem willing to grant it them So the older form, with the diphthong, was still around then, though out of use in everyday speech. Shakespeare has only rhymes with find, mind , etc. Pope overlaps Fielding s dates, and he uses the diphthong (eg in Essay on Criticism), rhyming it with find . And Walker also reports that Jonathan Swift, an older contemporary of Fielding, would jeer at those who pronounced wind with a short vowel. So the modern pronunciation was clearly coming in during Fielding s lifetime. Whether he used it in his everyday speech we don t know, but in his poem I would say it would definitely be the diphthong. Rachel Smith says: February 9, 20184:33 am Hi David. Are you able to clarify the correct pronunciation of winds in the final line of this verse of Henry Fielding s Hunting Song:The dusky night rides down the sky, And ushers in the morn;The hounds all join in glorious cry, The huntsman winds his horn:Should it be pronounced to rhyme with minds , or should the i be sort as in win ? (This is a matter of some debate in a choir that intends to sing a musical setting of this poem.) Thanks. David Crystal says: February 7, 201810:04 pm I think a lot would have changed in his social milieu by that date. I doubt whether anyone would still be pronouncing initial silent /k/ etc. I opted not to go for it in my Shakespeare OP, as I felt it would only have been used by the most conservative of speakers by around 1600. So by 1620 I doubt there would have been many left who would preserve it. And, as you suggest, they may well have accommodated to the new norms anyway. Hello David, I m reading a biography of James I and began wondering about Charles Howard, 1st Earl of Nottingham and Queen Elizabeth s cousin. He was born in 1536 and died in 1624 but was still active as late as 1620.Would his pronunciation in 1620 have been what it was decades earlier ? Or would he have unconsciously modified it as the sound system slowly shifted during his lifetime ? Is it likely that any person of his generation circa 1620 was still sounding the K in words like knave , knock etc, and the W in words like sword ? Many thanks, John Toyne David Crystal says: November 24, 20179:02 am Yes, there are several transcriptions online, but I don t need to use them as Ben and I are including my own transcription of the FF along with the relevant Quarto texts (of Pericles, TNK, Edward III, and the poems) in the new edition of Shakespeare s Words, both as line-by-line equivalents to the modern edition and as a separate file. It s a later goal to add an OP pronunciation dimension to the site, but that s another expensive option. We ll certainly implement it as soon as we can afford it! Recouping the suibstantial costs of preparing the new edition is the first step. Sean Gordon says: November 24, 20171:33 am Thank you for your very kind reply. Chicago has this version of Shakespeare online https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/efts/OTA-SHK/restricted/search.form.htmlAs a strategy, it would have weaknesses, but perhaps if this text were married with the original pronunciations, by rubbing these resources together, something might begin to warm up in publishing and on stage? David Crystal says: November 22, 20179:09 am Yes, I have. The main resource at the moment is my Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation, which comes with a code that gives you access to the audio file of the book. I also have available all the flat audio recordings I made whenever I was involved in an OP production. But I appreciate that these are a long way from the effect of hearing OP in a real production. Theatres have been surprisingly inefficient in capitalising on the sales potential of their OP productions. The Globe showed no interest at all. The only commercially available one I know is the Dream produced at Kansas University: details at Paul Meier s website. It would be great to record all the plays in OP using an experienced group, such as Ben s Passion in Practice ensemble, and we did in fact cost this out a couple of years ago a day a play in a good editing suite. Perfectly possible if there s a spare £100K around! In th emeantime, Ben and I are planning some new podcasts to accompany the revamped Shakespeare s Words website, which will be launched early in 2018. Sean Gordon says: November 21, 201711:43 pm Your excellent publications have just come to my attention, David! I found that your short youtube appearance on the topic of OP was persuasive and quite fun. Even if it costs a few quid, I wonder if youtube will be around in 400 years? And have you thought about audiobooks and/or recorded performances and/or annotated pronunciation editions? David Crystal says: September 12, 201710:10 pm Interesting points. Yes, I have listened to some of the accents along the east coast, such as Roanoke. They are certainly conservative and display several echoes of OP. But none of them, of course, display all the OP features saying the -tion ending (invention, etc) as -see-on, for example. Catherine Bishir says: September 9, 20175:26 pm Wonderful things you are doing!!! I learned about your work through my good friend John N. Wall here in Raleigh NC; your brilliant son read the sermons for John s creation of the preaching of Donne s sermons. I have long been interested in language history and variations. I once knew an English teacher at the University of Kentucky who supposedly could pin a student accent to a county level.Anyway, two items possibly of interest. jI have read a lot of 18th and early 19th century building documents as part of my research as an architectural historians. Some odd spellings gained meaning only when I read them out loud. One of my favorites was for building the peasor, 10 shillings. I decided it meant Piazza, which is an interesting indication of 18th c. pronunciation iin northeastern North Carolina.I expect you have noticed the many similarities with the Hoi Toide accent on NC s Outer Banks, which survives best among older folks. If you haven t already done so, you might enjoy getting some of the old timers out there, at Ocracoke or elsewhere, to read some Shakespearean English in their traditional accent. Alton Ballance out there is a good connection. The rhyming of room and come struck me. Also, in Virginia, they famously say abooot the hoose for about the house and similar. Great work. I love it. My own accent I have discerned is a mix of midwestern and appalachian and southern I am from Kentucky. . David Crystal says: May 14, 20171:40 pm Can I make a general plea to users of this forum to check whether there is an answer to their question in my Dictionary first before writing separately. That s why I compiled it, after all! In relation to the present question, if you look under room you will find that I give the word with two alternatives, one with a long vowel, as today, one with a short vowel (as still heard in some regional eaccents, in fact). Plus a reference to the Rome pun. Evening, Mr. Crystal.According to Sonnet 116, the word doom rhymes with come .In Sonnet 59, the word room supposedly rhymes with doom . That means the vowel isn t long, /u:/, in room, correct?In Julius Caesar, Cassius makes a pun on the word Rome and room thus, Now is it Rome indeed, and Rome enough,/ When there is in it but one only man . If we were to consider the word room rhyming with doom and can have a pun with Rome then Rome is enunciated with a short round vowel, correct?But the note in my version says that Rome was pronounced as Room (modern pronunciation). Which means that room is as in op as in modern English. So the question is, is it Rome with a long or short vowel? Thank you for your courtesies. David Crystal says: May 9, 20179:31 am Yes, the interaction between actors and audience at the Globe is one of the best things about the place. And OP suits that informality very well, I agree.As for initial silent consonants these were going out of use during Shakespeare s lifetime. Scholars disagree as to when exactly they disappeared. I give both alternatives in my Dictionary, therefore. But when I m working with a company, I go for the more modern (at the time) alternative, and don t have these consonants sounded. Hello, again, Mr. Crystal!There s a little observation that I ve come to lately after delving more into OP and watching more productions from the Globe Theatre. We ve seen in our British Literature Survey class that about the 1600s, the South Bank of the river Thames was the locus of the devil , as the Puritans had described it. Our professor told us that there was a lot of means of entertainment that the Renaissance Englishman and woman has the privilege to enjoy, like bear fighting and cock fighting, plays etc. Additionally, Shakespeare s My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun and his Sonnet 29, the part in which he kinda envied other people s art and wealth, and the way your son Ben pointed to some of the audience: adding to that, the sexual jokes like that one As You Like it, from hour to hour we ripe and ripe! and so many others Or the way the fool in Dr Faustus pissed on the audience It s just marvelous! All of this prove one thing: England at that time was the furthest thing from being courtly. The English back then were a very reckless people. Their lives were a mess, and they led such a wild life, and that is reflected on their theatre and lifestyle and most importantly, their language. OP shows all of that perfectly. It flows smoothly. It shows how simple their lives were and shows how wild it is by that /r/ sound which Ben Johnson described as the dog s groaning etc. I m just very grateful for your discovery. And what elates me all the more is the fact that you re very opened about it. You never hold back any information that could be of great use for us. Whether it is in the dictionary or not, you just HELP, and that, Mr. Crystal is what inspires me to become more knowledgeable​about Shakespeare, so thank you!Forgive my incoherence. I just can t find the proper words to write my thoughts Just a question though, was the /k/ pronounced in words like know or knee ? David Crystal says: May 6, 20174:05 pm No, this was not an OP production. The company used their normal modern accents. Twelfth Night has been performed in OP once by a Bangor student company, and once in the USA but not by the Globe. I m afraid the Globe theatre department has rather lost interest in such performances since Mark Rylance s day. Without the education side of the organization taking an interest, there would have been no OP at the Globe at all in recent years. Ian says: May 6, 20172:04 pm Hello David. I am the English Literature to Form 6 students in Malaysia. We have just finished watching the Globe s performance of Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance as Olivia. I understand that the production uses OP but it sounds almost like RP. What should I be looking for? Thanks. David Crystal says: May 6, 201710:25 am More or less. A few noticeable changes, such as the loss of the sion pronunciation in words like salvation and musician, becoming shion. But still quite close to the OP of Shakespeare s time, in my view. Major features, such as postvocalic /r/, are still there. Certainly, the singers who have been working on Purcell in OP have been very happy with doing it that way. David Crystal says: May 6, 201710:15 am You need to look in my OP Dictionary, which will show you that doom had the vowel of come and one of the pronunciations of fiend had the vowel of end. Have you any idea how Samuel Pepys would have sounded ? I m reading some of his diary and am trying to imagine a Londoner of 1660. Was the OP of 1660 basically that of Shakespeare s time ? Thanks Julio Gómez says: May 5, 20176:02 am Hello, Mr. Crystal. Firstly I wanted to congratulate you for the amazing job you have done regarding OP and Shakespeare. Secondly, I wanted to ask something about Sonnet 145 (which I have to recite in my University). There are a couple of rhymes which do not work out when using RP; however they do in OP. The first one is come and doom (dome). The second one, I think, is end and fiend . Even though I know there must be a rhyme in there, I have not been able to find how to pronounce those words in OP.I would be very thankful if you could answer this little doubt to me.Regards from Colombia and keep up the good work Mr. Crystal. David Crystal says: May 4, 20176:02 pm Do you mean the Dictionary? If so, note that with each copy there is an individual code that gives you access to the audio file at Oxford University Press. So you can hear every word and variant in the book. That should help. patrice says: May 4, 20175:29 pm I would love to buy the book, but I am concerned that I won t be able to learn OP via written explanation. Lol, my fault I know, but I think I learn differently. Is there anything like what you do in America?Thanks for reading my message

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