Shakespeare: Original pronunciation (The Open University)

A bit OT but hopefully interesting nevertheless. This is apparently the original pronunciation for the works of Shakespeare [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.

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: [VIDEO]

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] [VIDEO]

Along similar lines, some years ago I really enjoyed [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.

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." [VIDEO]

Sure. For example [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 indoeuropean pel-, with cognates in lating and greek, pella and pellis respectivly. So it's possible that epenthesis was applied on top of filminjan in irish scottish accents (possibly due to pressure of the gaelic substrate), while the dialect which originated RP didn't have this change. I'm sure somebody with better knowledge of the matter can be more precise about that, however, it's strange how little (and often more misleading than uncertain) information is there about one the most widely spoken languages. (Sorry, if I had more time, I would have written a shorter comment :-) )

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: [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.)

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