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4 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2013–2025
10:22 · 5.6M views · Oct 17, 2011
David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.
Frequently linked as a short, accessible demonstration of how Shakespeare actually sounded.
20 comments from Hacker News
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.
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.
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
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
The idea that American spelling and pronunciation have a better heritage than British English is a compelling one, especially as the idea that Southern and Appalachian accents are closer to those of the Founding Fathers and Shakespearean English is a nice balance to the perception that these accents sound unintelligent and uneducated, but it's simply not true that one dialect has diverged more than another - both have diverged and in many cases substantially. One of the common reasons given is that British accents like RP (there's a lot to criticise about RP but that's another topic), Cockney (featured elsewhere on the thread and the internet in general, oi m8 you got a loicence for that?), and general loss of rhoticity in BrE (and some AmE) accents that are most represented in American media have diverged substantially, but to me the examples of Shakespearean English in classic pronunciation sound closer to the West Country accents than they do any American accent. Note that there could be some bias here as the speakers are British, but you get features like H-dropping which simply don't exist in AmE. It also wouldn't be fair to say any modern accent sounds even remotely close to this. Shakespearean English: [LINK] this video Some good reddit threads on the matter: [LINK] [LINK] [LINK] Another weird one is spelling, given that etymology and spelling is pretty interesting in general, at least up until the advent of the printing press. Both BrE and AmE have made some questionable