Shakespeare: Original pronunciation (The Open University)

What Hacker News said

Recommends keyboardP · 2013-01 · on “When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?”

A bit OT but hopefully interesting nevertheless. This is apparently the original pronunciation for the works of Shakespeare [this video] The entire video has some nice information but if you want to skip to an example of the original pronunciation, you can jump to 2:50.

Recommends zhte415 · 2014-03 · on “Pronunciation errors that made the English language”

I very much enjoyed this quick introduction to Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation (the sound of speech at the time) and how many puns and much interpretation is lost in modern accents. From the Open University: [this video]

Recommends gchucky · 2021-04 · on “Great Vowel Shift”

The vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father and son demonstrating the changes.[1] [1] [this video]

Recommends petercooper · 2021-04 · on “Are We Getting Shakespeare’s Rhythms All Wrong?”

Along similar lines, some years ago I really enjoyed [this video] as an introduction to the realities of the pronunciation of Shakespeare's English. Jump to 5 minutes in for a demonstration of how "lines" and "loins" were pronounced the same and resulted in a pun that's missed in modern pronunciation.

Cites benihana · 2013-01 · on “When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?”

Just for future reference, if you right click on a video on youtube, you can click copy link at current time to lazy link to 2m50s so you don't have to say "jump to this time." [this video]

Cites ithkuil · 2013-01 · on “When Did Americans Lose Their British Accents?”

Sure. For example [this video] 00:04:36, states that film is spelled philome in Shakespeare's work. Unfortunately a google search of "philome" yields only pages about shakespeare pronounciation, especially by these two guys; I don't know what that means. However, I think that thinking about the evolution of a language as a linear progression is misleading. Is certainly possible that modern Irish pronunciation stems from what was spoken at that time, and the modern "mainstream" english pronunciation evolved later from a slighly different root, and epenthesis acted only in one of the two branches. Film derives from west germanic filminjan, which in turn comes from proto germanic fello(m), and proto

Cites brownbat · 2013-09 · on “English has been my pain for 15 years”

Most of English's "problems" come from a sort of natural drift that all languages experience all the time. There's no way to freeze a language in its "most useful" form, because a billion different speakers are simultaneously pulling it in different directions. It either ends up as a sort of democratic consensus, or eventually fractures into mutually unintelligible dialects. 1. Shakespearean pronunciation: [this video] 2. Problems that would be caused by simplifying spelling: [LINK] 3. Power of Babel: [LINK] 4. Toastmasters speech about "Manglish": [LINK] (Toastmasters has its own version of English, full of over the top gestures. Also recommended, search for Singlish on Youtube.)

Cites junto · 2015-02 · on “Is Bilingualism Really an Advantage?”

Funnily enough, some would argue that Shakespeare in modern English also isn't real Shakespeare! Check out the original prenounciation: [this video]