Saturday, April 06, 2024

Received Pronunciation vs Original Pronunciation

There is a lot of nonsense written about how things were pronounced in Shakespeare's plays, mostly based on people having imprecise ideas of how the pieces fit together in time. If something is "old," then someone is going to announce that it was "in Shakespeare's day" even if it was in 1812 and only halfway back to his time. It is the same vagueness that causes people to imagine that Henry VIII, Robin Hood, and King Arthur were all about the same time, with the thought they might possibly have known each other.* Sometimes times even more recent or more remote than that get shoved in, so that just before WWI or Romans in togas might be considered contemporaneous with one of the characters mentioned above.

Yet we can know Elizabethan pronunciation in London with fair precision. We can tell from what words rhymed when the changes from Middle English to Early Modern English occurred (key item Great Vowel Shift), and what compromises printers made in response to the variations they heard around them.

So from about 13:00 to 17:00 in the above you can hear the prologue from "Romeo and Juliet," first in Received Pronunciation, the newscaster English in Southern England, then in Original Pronunciation, researched with precision by David Crystal, followed by his son Ben Crystal, who reads here.

So now you know. This would be very much the time period of the Authorised Version of the Bible, which we know as the King James Version. 

*Robin Hood would be much closer to Henry II, who would himself be a little more than halfway back from now to King Arthur, when there were no Henry's at all, not even in France or Germany.

1 comment:

Zachriel said...

Very informative. Thanks.