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Phil C.
Guest
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| Posted: Thu Jan 27, 2005 6:51 pm
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 00:23:52 +0100, Giles Todd <g@prullenbak.todd.nu>
wrote:
| Quote: | On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:09:34 +0100, "einde. ocallaghan" <"einde.
ocallaghan"@planet-interkom.de> wrote:
From what I've read this seems to be a gross exaggeration. While it is
true that in some English dialects the plural "eyren" was used (the
example I've heard of was along the Thames Estuary, i.e. a part of
England with close links with the Low Countries) in others at the same
time the plural was "eggys" (most importantly in London, which as
political capital played a major role in forming the standard language).
Caxton, being based in London, would have been most unlikely to use the
Kentish dialect as the basis for his printing instead of the London one.
Caxton mentioned the problem himself:
http://www.uni-trier.de/~multimed/egges.htm
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It was a case of A-S and Scandinavian dialects. The Scandinavian egg
eventually triumphed ober the A-S ey. The latter is sometimes given
with a "g" at the end - "aeg" but that would have been pronounced as
"y" after a vowel.
--
Phil C.
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HB
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 1:06 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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einde. ocallaghan wrote:
| Quote: | HB wrote:
Way back in Shakespeare's time, English was extremely close to
Dutch. It is due to Caxton and similar people that English turned
away from Dutch (and Plattdeutsch).
Just to give an example: in the Middle Ages, English people did not
speak about "eggs" but about "eyren" (in current Dutch: eieren).
Basically, had the English not moved away and had Luther chosen
Plattdeutsch instead of High German for his Bible translation, a big
part of Western Europe would now speak more or less the same
language!
Yet, even today, Flemish/Dutch are closer to English than any other
language.
From what I've read this seems to be a gross exaggeration. While it
is true that in some English dialects the plural "eyren" was used
(the example I've heard of was along the Thames Estuary, i.e. a part
of England with close links with the Low Countries) in others at the
same time the plural was "eggys" (most importantly in London, which
as political capital played a major role in forming the standard
language).
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Well, you're right. I did not express my thoughts precisely enough. I
was indeed referring to the English as spoken in South West England,
and not in the rest.
| Quote: | Caxton, being based in London, would have been most unlikely to use
the Kentish dialect as the basis for his printing instead of the
London one.
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I agree. However, I was not critisizing Caxton for choosing the London
tongue. I just thought it was a shame as his choice has had great
repercussions on the development of the English language.
- Herman - |
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einde. ocallaghan
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 4:11 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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HB wrote:
| Quote: | einde. ocallaghan wrote:
HB wrote:
Way back in Shakespeare's time, English was extremely close to
Dutch. It is due to Caxton and similar people that English turned
away from Dutch (and Plattdeutsch).
Just to give an example: in the Middle Ages, English people did not
speak about "eggs" but about "eyren" (in current Dutch: eieren).
Basically, had the English not moved away and had Luther chosen
Plattdeutsch instead of High German for his Bible translation, a big
part of Western Europe would now speak more or less the same
language!
Yet, even today, Flemish/Dutch are closer to English than any other
language.
From what I've read this seems to be a gross exaggeration. While it
is true that in some English dialects the plural "eyren" was used
(the example I've heard of was along the Thames Estuary, i.e. a part
of England with close links with the Low Countries) in others at the
same time the plural was "eggys" (most importantly in London, which
as political capital played a major role in forming the standard
language).
Well, you're right. I did not express my thoughts precisely enough. I
was indeed referring to the English as spoken in South West England,
and not in the rest.
Caxton, being based in London, would have been most unlikely to use
the Kentish dialect as the basis for his printing instead of the
London one.
I agree. However, I was not critisizing Caxton for choosing the London
tongue. I just thought it was a shame as his choice has had great
repercussions on the development of the English language.
Caxton would have chosen for his model the language of his customers, |
i.e. the burghers of London and the Royal Court. The language of the
political elite of taht time became the standard language in most
European countries, e.g. the dialect of Paris became the basis for
modern French, the dialect of the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman
Empire, which was based on the Saxon dialect of Meissen (near Dresden)
became the basis of modern German (helped on its way by the fact that
Luther, a Saxon, translated the Bible into his own dialect). And so on.
Even without Caxton it was most probable that the dialect of London
would become the basis for modern English.
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan
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einde. ocallaghan
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 4:22 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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Brian {Hamilton Kelly} wrote:
| Quote: | On Thursday, in article
vd9gv0d5vl11u1veatokdijrgc7fpr246p@4ax.com
g@prullenbak.todd.nu "Giles Todd" wrote:
On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 23:09:34 +0100, "einde. ocallaghan" <"einde.
ocallaghan"@planet-interkom.de> wrote:
Caxton, being based in London, would have been most unlikely to use the
Kentish dialect as the basis for his printing instead of the London one.
Can one be quite sure about that? After all, he was born in the Weald of
Kent.
Be that as it may, his customers didn't come from Kent, they came from |
London - so as a sensible businessman Caxton decided to use their
version of English.
At that time - or shortly before - it is said that people could
understand the inhabitants of villages up to 15 miles (1 days travel)
from their home village. Beyond that distance it became increasingly
difficult. If this is the case then I suspect that there were several
mutually incomprehensible dialects within the confines of the county of
Kent.
Of course this was a period of increasing mobility, so it is possible
that the level of mutual comprehensibility had increased a bit.
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan |
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Giles Todd
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 7:57 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:00:43 +0000 (GMT), bhk@dsl.co.uk (Brian
{Hamilton Kelly}) wrote:
Sorry, no. The preceding discussion rang a bell and I merely used
Google to search on a couple of keywords until I found the text I had
half remembered.
Giles. |
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Giles Todd
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 8:07 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Thu, 27 Jan 2005 09:00:43 +0000 (GMT), bhk@dsl.co.uk (Brian
{Hamilton Kelly}) wrote:
| Quote: | Because I would take issue with the author's gloss of "atte forlond" as
meaning "near the coast". Surely it's more likely the geographical name
of the headland known (nowadays) as North Foreland, this being where they
put ashore.
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Which came first? The word 'foreland' or the name 'North Foreland'?
OED2:
Forms: 4 forlonde, (farlande), 57 forland(e, (7 furland), 6
forelonde, -lande, 5 foreland. [f. fore- prefix + land. Cf. Du.
voorland; also Icel. forlendi land between hills and the sea.]
1. A cape, headland or promontory.
13+ Gaw. & Gr. Knt. 699 Alle že iles of Anglesay on lyft half he
haldez, & farez ouer že fordez by že for-londez. ?a1400 Morte Arth.
880 See e one farlande with one two fyrez. a1490 Botoner Itin.
(Nasmith 1778) 153 Unum for~land vocat. le Holyhede. 1535 Stewart
Cron. Scot. I. 374 The schippis draif on forland and on craigis.
1551 Recorde Cast. Knowl. (1556) 83 The great forelonde of Affrike,
commonly called the cape of Good hope. 1671 Narborough Jrnl. in Acc.
Sev. Late Voy. i. (1711) 24 At the face of this Foreland lie six
rocky Islands. 1796 Morse Amer. Geog. I. 117 A cape, which+he
[Frobisher in 1576] called Queen Elizabeth's Foreland. 1876 L.
Morris Epic Hades (1878) 35 To where the wave-worn foreland ends the
bay.
[further entries snipped]
Giles. |
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einde. ocallaghan
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 3:00 pm
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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Giles Todd wrote:
found the homepage of a Professor Dr. Jürgen Strauss, who can be
contacted at the following email address: strauss@uni-trier.de
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan |
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Matthew Huntbach
Guest
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| Posted: Fri Jan 28, 2005 7:17 pm
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, einde. ocallaghan wrote:
| Quote: | Caxton would have chosen for his model the language of his customers, i.e.
the burghers of London and the Royal Court. The language of the political
elite of taht time became the standard language in most European countries,
e.g. the dialect of Paris became the basis for modern French, the dialect of
the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman Empire, which was based on the Saxon
dialect of Meissen (near Dresden) became the basis of modern German (helped
on its way by the fact that Luther, a Saxon, translated the Bible into his
own dialect). And so on.
|
At the time of the French Revolution, most French people did not speak
French. They spoke a variety of dialects. If you travelled from Paris to
Madrid you would have come across a variety of languages with a gradual
shading from what became standard French through varieties of Occitan
and Catalan to what became standard Castilian Spanish (not to mention
Basque). Only with universal education in the 19th century did French
truly become a national language. Modern Italian was to a large extent
an artificial language invented in the 19th century and based on the
Florentine dialect. English established a national standard relatively
early, possibly the fact that it was a Protestant country with a
nationally imposed modern language Bible and liturgy helped.
Matthew Huntbach |
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Brian {Hamilton Kelly}
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 2:32 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Thursday, in article <35t4cfF4ro70dU1@individual.net>
"einde.ocallaghan"@planet-interkom.de "einde. ocallaghan"
wrote:
| Quote: | At that time - or shortly before - it is said that people could
understand the inhabitants of villages up to 15 miles (1 days travel)
from their home village. Beyond that distance it became increasingly
difficult. If this is the case then I suspect that there were several
mutually incomprehensible dialects within the confines of the county of
Kent.
|
When I first went to live on the shores of the Lake District (in what was
then Cumberland), in 1968, I was fascinated by the broad Cumbrian dialect
spoken by one of our drivers. I got to speak with him for many hours
over the following years. (He told me that shortly post-WWII, some
researchers from the BBC had asked to record his speech, just as they are
currently doing again with the Great British Public, but he'd declined
since they weren't prepared to pay him!)
One of the fascinating parts of his vocabulary was that he would use the
"Cumbrian Sheep Score" numbers[1] quite unpretentiously (OK, many
Cumbrians will say "yan" for "one", but few say "tithera" except when
telling disbelieving off-comers about the way the shepherds "used to
count").
Further questioning of him revealed that he had cousins in the village of
Ulpha; now Ulpha was less than ten miles away as the crow flies, but
nearer to 25mi by road. He recalled how there had been a big inter-
family gathering there back in the early 1950s, and whilst both the
Ulphians and the Bootleites spoke broad Cumbrian dialects, they had great
difficulty in understanding each other (like the eyren vs eggys problem).
So perhaps such dialect problems had persisted far longer, at least until
the coming of the "television age".
[1] In the early 1970s, someone at the University of Lancaster wrote a
PhD thesis on Sheep Scores, and I was able to read a copy. He had
examples from all over England and Wales (the numbers are obviously
cognate with Welsh numbers, so presumably a Celtic hold-over), ranging
from Tudor times to the [then] present-day. Such numbering was recorded
in use in Epping Forest (on the outskirts of London) even until the
C20th. (He also had examples from Maine in the early C16th, which seem
to provide confirmation of Caradoc having reached North America.)
--
Brian {Hamilton Kelly} bhk@dsl.co.uk
"Je n'ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n'ai pas eu
le loisir de la faire plus courte."
Blaise Pascal, /Lettres Provinciales/, 1657 |
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einde. ocallaghan
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 5:27 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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Matthew Huntbach wrote:
| Quote: | On Thu, 27 Jan 2005, einde. ocallaghan wrote:
Caxton would have chosen for his model the language of his customers,
i.e. the burghers of London and the Royal Court. The language of the
political elite of taht time became the standard language in most
European countries, e.g. the dialect of Paris became the basis for
modern French, the dialect of the Imperial Court of the Holy Roman
Empire, which was based on the Saxon dialect of Meissen (near Dresden)
became the basis of modern German (helped on its way by the fact that
Luther, a Saxon, translated the Bible into his own dialect). And so on.
At the time of the French Revolution, most French people did not speak
French. They spoke a variety of dialects. If you travelled from Paris to
Madrid you would have come across a variety of languages with a gradual
shading from what became standard French through varieties of Occitan
and Catalan to what became standard Castilian Spanish (not to mention
Basque). Only with universal education in the 19th century did French
truly become a national language.
|
But it was the literary standard language long before and even had the
Academie Franēaise to protect its purity.
And even today most Germans don't speak the standard version,
Hochdeutsch. They still speak dialect although most can now understand
Hochdeutsch and speak a local variant of it as well as their local
dialect - although admittedly some Bavarian politicians don't even
attempt to speak anything even vaguely resembling Hochdeutsch.
| Quote: | Modern Italian was to a large extent
an artificial language invented in the 19th century and based on the
Florentine dialect.
|
I believe you're correct here.
| Quote: | English established a national standard relatively
early, possibly the fact that it was a Protestant country with a
nationally imposed modern language Bible and liturgy helped.
Northern and Eastern Germany are also predominantly Protestant with a |
modern language Bible and liturgy which laid the basis for the standard
language (although it's also the standard language of the Catholic
South, too, for otehr reaqsons I won't go into), but nevertheless most
people still speak a variant of the local dialect - many people often
find it difficult to understand people from other parts of the country.
Regards, Einde O'Callaghan |
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Giles Todd
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 7:09 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:17:30 +0000, Matthew Huntbach
<mmh@dcs.qmul.ac.uk> wrote:
| Quote: | At the time of the French Revolution, most French people did not speak
French. They spoke a variety of dialects. If you travelled from Paris to
Madrid you would have come across a variety of languages with a gradual
shading from what became standard French through varieties of Occitan
and Catalan to what became standard Castilian Spanish (not to mention
Basque).
|
The seamless transition of Castilian into Basque (or vice versa) would
be quite a stunt. Where are these dialects spoken?
Giles. |
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Dave Clarke
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 7:43 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Saturday 29 January 2005 00:09 Giles Todd wrote:
| Quote: | On Fri, 28 Jan 2005 12:17:30 +0000, Matthew Huntbach
mmh@dcs.qmul.ac.uk> wrote:
At the time of the French Revolution, most French people did not speak
French. They spoke a variety of dialects. If you travelled from Paris to
Madrid you would have come across a variety of languages with a gradual
shading from what became standard French through varieties of Occitan
and Catalan to what became standard Castilian Spanish (not to mention
Basque).
The seamless transition of Castilian into Basque (or vice versa) would
be quite a stunt. Where are these dialects spoken?
|
I assume he meant that Basque was in the middle there, although Basque is
unrelated to any of the surrounding languages, which is what I think you
are referring to. Then, on the Spanish side you have Fabla (not sure of the
spelling there) and a few of little pyreneean languages as well, which are
still used, some confined to a single valley.
--
Dave Clarke |
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Giles Todd
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 8:17 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 00:43:11 +0000, Dave Clarke
<pinggetridofthisbituino@operamail.com> wrote:
| Quote: | I assume he meant that Basque was in the middle there, although Basque is
unrelated to any of the surrounding languages, which is what I think you
are referring to. Then, on the Spanish side you have Fabla (not sure of the
spelling there)
|
Aragonese? It's a Romance language, unrelated to Basque.
| Quote: | and a few of little pyreneean languages as well, which are
still used, some confined to a single valley.
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Are any of these related to Basque?
Giles. |
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Dave Clarke
Guest
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| Posted: Sat Jan 29, 2005 9:28 pm
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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On Saturday 29 January 2005 01:20 Giles Todd wrote:
| Quote: | On Sat, 29 Jan 2005 00:43:11 +0000, Dave Clarke
pinggetridofthisbituino@operamail.com> wrote:
I assume he meant that Basque was in the middle there, although Basque is
unrelated to any of the surrounding languages, which is what I think you
are referring to. Then, on the Spanish side you have Fabla (not sure of
the spelling there)
Aragonese? It's a Romance language, unrelated to Basque.
and a few of little pyreneean languages as well, which are
still used, some confined to a single valley.
Are any of these related to Basque?
|
Sorry, I didn't mean to imply the languages mentioned were related to
Basque, just that there were still a few languages still being used in that
area, which was a reply to the "WhereĀ areĀ theseĀ dialectsĀ spoken?" question.
--
Dave Clarke |
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moi
Guest
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| Posted: Sun Jan 30, 2005 8:18 am
Post subject: Re: Shakespeare's pronunciation |
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I don't know how they were pronounced by Shakespeare but they still rhyme
for me - from the North East of England.
"Claus Tondering" <claus@tondering.dk> wrote in message
news:uzmyy34u6.fsf@tondering.dk...
| Quote: | Shakespeare happily rhymed "blood" with "good". How were those two
words pronounced in his time? Do we know?
--
Claus Tondering |
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