I like this piece, but this portion just isn’t true. It is a common myth, however.
What’s more: the words that Shakespeare wrote didn’t sound at all the way they did in the early 17th century. If Shakespeare were performed today the way he was performed then, modern audiences wouldn’t even be able to make out words. It would be like listening to someone tell a story in Gaelic.
We actually have a fairly good idea of what Shakespearean-era English sounded like. And it sounded like this.
If you can understand a moderate Scottish accent, you can understand the above.
Hell, my native Southern accent is thicker and harder to understand for most people than Shakespearean-era English would’ve been, as my partner found out when she visited my natal area with me.
However, go back around 200 years and the English of the time would’ve been utterly incomprehensible.
The main reason is that Shakespeare wrote towards the end of the Great Vowel Shift so English pronunciation resembled its modern phonology fairly closely.
I’m a complete language and word nerd so this is something I’ve studied a lot.
I’m open to this, but I know where my belief comes from. Gary Taylor has written often on the subject. He has led me to believe there is a vast amount of research on this and that the sound has been radically changed. I’ll be on the lookout for more information about it.
Thanks for linking to me!
I’m only vaguely familiar with Gary Taylor’s scholarship on this. I’d have to read more to know for sure, but all I’ve read and reconstructions I’ve heard indicate the English of the time sounded like a mix of a fairly heavy Yorkshire and Scottish accent, perfectly comprehensible to modern ears.
Go back even 100 years, much less 200, probably not so much.
It was a liminal period in English so the only way to be 100 percent sure is to build a time machine.
This is also good for the embedded readings. Chaucer era is almost comprehensible. I think if I were back in that era for a few weeks, I could understand it fine.
I need to read Gary Taylor, but I think he’s on the wrong side of the GVS.
The pronunciation was very different from the Southern England pronunciation that tends to be people’s primary association with Shakespeare but yes, some people do overstate how different.
For me, who does not understand Shakespeare (by ear alone) at all (despite being multilingual) the pronunciation is the least of it. The weird syntax and archaic words (and shifts in meaning in non-archaic words) are enough to turn it into white noise for me.