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

[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.