For the Shakespeare Geeks: Sonnet 116 in RP & OP

[neadods]

YouTube link of a man reciting Sonnet 116 in Received Pronunciation followed by original pronunciation.

The weirdest part of all this is that OP sounds like someone who spent 20 years in rural Ireland and followed them up with 20 years in rural West Virginia... something that sounds like hillbilly and yet it's some of the most enduring and erudite English in the world.

Comments

[paratti.livejournal.com]

Doesn't sound Irish at all to me. More Mummerset (Somerset, Devon, East Dorset) with a dash of Northern flat vowel/word clipping.

Which is odd, considering Shakespear was a Warwickshire boy writing in London and our regional accent differences are still marked today and would have been even stronger back then.

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Mummerset to me as well, but northern Mummerset which would work for the Warwickshire bit - a place with converging accents, after all (even pre-Industrial Revolution).

Most definitely not Irish, though. The nearest to Irish I could get is when I lapse into a Somerset accent and I try very hard not to, because I speak with an Irish accent, and I sound like I'm taking the piss. (My husband remains deeply amused, particularly thanks to my habit of saying "thank 'ee" - in my Irish accent! - when we're on his home turf.)

[neadods.livejournal.com]

There is a certain amount of "like this Yankee would know the difference" going on here. West Virginia and productions of The Irish RM I know. Never been to Mummerset.

[easy-living.livejournal.com]

It sounded West Country to me as well, Somerset/Dorset and the Bristol area (although not Bath obviously, where they're far posher and closer to RP, LOL)

[clanwilliam.livejournal.com]

Wouldn't that be about right though - aren't there various dying dialects in the eastern US that still speak Shakespearian English?

BTW, I think it was Terry Jones did a bit about how the Bible in English actually helped standardise the language - I can believe that fully, having suffered through various dialects of Irish as a child.

[tiggerallyn.livejournal.com]

Colonial Williamsburg has a pretty enjoyable podcast they release each week on colonial-era life and culture. In January, they did an episode on the linguistic divergences between the colonies and Britain, and then they talk about some of the Chesapeake Bay islands where the 17th-century accent has ossified. (Download here)

I downloaded another podcast recently where a professor read some Chaucer in the original Middle English accent. It sounded very weird; the vowels were wrong. :)

[starcat-jewel.livejournal.com]

So they would; the defining change between Middle English and modern English is the Great Vowel Shift. I can still do a couple of bits of the Canterbury Tales in a reasonable approximation of a Middle English dialect, courtesy of a very good college professor.

[neadods.livejournal.com]

aren't there various dying dialects in the eastern US that still speak Shakespearian English?

Not in the actual *wording* but the vowels? Appalachia (not a state, but still a region) and Virginia/West Virginia.