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Comment by abjecton | Hacker News Reader

Original pronunciation Shakespeare is a good example of this. It's performed with the sorts of accents people had in 16th/17th century England.

To my ear as an English person, it sounds like a Westcountry accent, an example of an English accent which is still rhotic today. But other people might perceive it as being slightly American or Irish sounding.

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There is a recording of a recent talk by David Crystal, where he gives a brief example of Shakespeare's pronunciation as compared with the British received pronunciation. He also makes a point that the rhotic pronunciation of Shakespeare's time is closer to today's American, and that some sounds typical of Shakespeare's pronunciation are now characteristic of regional dialects, including Westcountry, Yorkshire and Wales.

https://youtu.be/8ErWLOD_udY?t=2429

(Crystal, of course, being the linguist who worked on the reconstruction of Shakespeare's pronunciation, and consulted The Globe on it)

When I first learned about these OP (Original Pronunciation) productions of Shakespeare, from a BBC news article on-line, they commented that it sounded like the English of North Carolina! If you are interested in this, I recommend "Pronouncing Shakespeare" by David Crystal. It documents how he worked with the Globe company on an OP performance of "Romeo and Juliet".

Nice short video featuring the Crystals, the Globe and Shakespeare's OP: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YiblRSqhL04 .

I would imagine that they're not talking about general North Carolina English so much as the dialect of the island of Ocracoke, which has a number of conservative features that date back to Shakespeare's day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Tider

Related, it's such a farce that people will recite and listen to some of the best-regarded _poetry_ in history, and do it in a totally different accent from the original, ruining its auditory aesthetic, and then say that people who don't like it are boorish and low.

> and do it in a totally different accent from the original

Take William Blake's The Tyger:

  Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 
  In the forests of the night; 
  What immortal hand or eye, 
  Could frame thy fearful symmetry?

How are we to know how the word "symmetry" was supposed to be pronounced by Blake? No-one has recorded his pronunciation. Did it rhyme with the word "eye" (as such words must have done several centuries prior) or was it a completely "eye-rhyme" (and not very good at that, either), intended to be seen as a rhyme, but not pronounced as such?

That's what professional students of linguistics are for. Presumably when you see multiple instances of a word or family of words being rhymed in a particular way by different authors of a particular place and time, you start to get a reasonable idea of how it was originally pronounced. Sometimes people also directly comment in writing about contemporary pronunciations.

> That's what professional students of linguistics are for.

Professional students of linguistics will say that the terminal -y was pronounced as "eye" in the time of Shakespeare; but by the time of Blake such pronunciation has already become obsolete. However, this doesn't help us distinguish between two possibilities:

- Blake's -y rhyme is purely visual and is no more than a nod to the tradition; it is not intended to be pronounced as /ai/, or

- Poems of that time used to be delivered in an archaic pronunciation, in which case "symmetry" actually rhymed with "eye".

I don't think linguists have an answer that would convincingly point to either of the two possible pronunciations.

But if you're simply making a narrow point about that pronunciation then I don't see how this particularly refutes what gowld said. That there's uncertainty or ambiguity around one specific archaising use of a word in a Blake poem doesn't change the fact that we (apparently—I'm no expert) know that someone wading through stanzas of Shakespeare in a cut-glass RP accent is doing it badly wrong (at least if any of period-accuracy, rhyme or the author's intentions are important goals) and that our best guess at OP is probably a lot closer to the mark, even if it’s not certain that every single pronunciation is exactly right. (And even if it's all somewhat indeterminate since not every actor and writer in early-1600s London had exactly the same accent, etc.)

I too get upset at readings of Rabbie Burns.

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