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Comment by ggm | Hacker News Reader

I like how people can "mine" historical texts with rhyme structure, to infer pronunciation shifts.

The related cultural overhang is twofold: the english barony probably welcomed the divergence. yes, they wanted to seem posh in french speaking lands, but they had to deny any french right to english (norman) lands. Also, the law demanded that a lot of terms be defined in french and "not french" to ensure there was no ambiguity.

Thus "without let or hindrance" and the other "legal doublets" many of which are bridging the gap as english became dominant.

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One particularly interesting pair of legal doublets are the old forms of a murder and manslaughter indictment, used in England until 1915.

For murder:

That [the defendant] did feloniously, wilfully and of his Malice aforethought kill and murder [the deceased]

For manslaughter:

That [the defendant] did feloniously kill and slay [the deceased]

In this case, "kill", "murder" and "slay" are all Germanic words, though "murder" may have gone into French and then back into English, which is why it has the extra R compared to German "Mord" and Dutch "moord".

It's fascinating, but I wonder how one accounts for bad poets or works that otherwise cheat a good rhyme for artistic reasons? Surely linguists 500 years from now aren't wouldn't want to look back on 2chainz's "My favorite dish is turkey lasagna / Even my pajamas designer" and decide that "lasagna" and "designer" rhymed. (I mean, they'll have recordings, but you get the idea).

They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. How is that bad poetry or cheating? Language is complex and bending how you say things is part of good rhyme. I imagine historical linguists are very familiar with this and factor it into their work.

> They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation.

Which is a somewhat more positive way of saying that they rhyme with the wrong enunciation. Which is a totally valid way to construct lyrics in music - you have a bit of artistic leeway and the exact "correct" pronunciation isn't exactly important - but it's probably not too helpful for a listener who's trying to work out how those words were actually spoken in conversation.

That said, I'd be far more concerned about a future linguist discovering Prisencolinensinainciusol.

Future linguists are going to be dealing with americanised Korean and Chinese. Mandarin and Cantonese share orthography and not much else. I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other. Farsi speakers tell me Dari speakers (one of the Afghani languages along with Pashto) sound like they speak with a 16th century accent.

Greek has Demotic and Katharevousa. Louis de Bernieres writes in "Captain Correli's mandolin" implying that the English officers in ww2 sounded to the Greek peasantry like Shakespearean actors, all taught Greek in boarding school, but only speaking "high" Katharevousa Greek, not the common Demotic. He does this by using archaic English writing.

English code switching .. is that really that different yo? Yeet me out of here. Valley girl speak.. the list of dialect and pronunciation in contemporary US culture of the last 50 years is immense.

> I still don't understand how Portuguese and Spanish speakers can understand each other.

I bet that without a relatively large amount of exposure they can’t and then suddenly it’s really obvious what the other person is saying. That’s my experience listening to Nigerian English. Didn’t realise the guy working next to me was speaking English with his compatriot for two weeks and then suddenly I understood. Written Portuguese and Spanish are very similar, like Norwegian and Danish levels of similar, or Scots and English.

One interesting thing about Portuguese and Spanish is that the comprehension isn't symmetrical: Portuguese speakers understand Spanish ones all right, but vice versa is a bit of a struggle.

That effect is far less strong with Brazilian Portuguese, which is much more easily understood by other Latin language speakers.

In fairness, Brazilians often also struggle to understand Portuguese as spoken in Portugal. I (native Spanish speaker from South America) can understand Brazilian Portuguese pretty well, even if I've never studied it. Portuguese from Portugal, I cannot really understand when spoken. It sounds very similar to Galician, which I also can't really understand.

There's no "wrong" enunciation in linguistics though. I wouldn't even argue that this rhyme is down to a particular speaker's idiolect.

There are lots of different dialects and accents in the UK, let alone the US. AAVE for example is as legitimate a dialect of English as General American. Bush, Trump and Sanders all speak "American English" yet they sound very different because of their regional accents even before you get into personal quirks.

There's no singular "correct" pronunciation today and there certainly wasn't one in medieval England. We just have "standard" pronunciations based on a rough approximation to one arbitrary dialect we decided to treat as the reference point.

Yes,this is true, for linguists. Colloquially, man-in-the-pub test, I'm less sure. you can rhyme some words in all the dialects, but you can also ask most dialect speakers about RP and they know what you're talking about because they codeshift to RP on-need. RP itself, is somewhat definitionally "correct" for ordinary mortals. Wrongly, but none the less, I am reasonably sure this is widely believed/understood.

> There's no "wrong" enunciation in linguistics though.

Yes there is. If a linguist a century from now claims that English speakers in 2021 pronounced "car" the same way they pronounced "book", they would be wrong.

Similarly, if they looked at one 2chainz song and concluded that in spoken word "pyjama" and "lasagna" rhymed, that would be wrong. Less obviously so, but wrong nonetheless.

The absence of a singular correct pronunciation doesn't diminish the infinite number of incorrect ones. Even the most ardent of descriptivists think that accepting a pronunciation based off of a single occurrence is somewhat taking the piss.

Patrick OBrien wrote historical Napoleonic naval fiction and got obsessive about verified facts from letters. He writes of a captain who cannot stand an "arriviste" lieutenant who stresses balcony on the first syllable not the last. These kinds of things exist right back to roman rhetoric, written accounts of the "nice" way to say things.

Calling Tom Pullings "arriviste" is a slander. He was already a master's mate (midshipman) at the beginning of the series, and advanced through a combination of excellent seamanship and Aubrey's patronage (not always a positive thing!). If anyone was "arriviste" it was the captain who complained who arrived at his station mainly through birth and class instead of seamanship.

It's his class which defines him, not his competency. The captain can't stand a man who breaks social class barriers, the question of his "rank" goes to the socialised meaning, not the naval one. Pronunciation was a class thing.

They do rhyme

It's always a hazard. All reconstructions have to be taken with a grain of salt.

"Slant rhymes" like this have been used throughout history. Shakespeare is known to have used them in some places: some of his rhymes aren't consistent through his works.

It does help that sound change isn't arbitrary. When one sound changes, other sounds change as well. An entire category of consonants may lose or gain voicing, or shift in point of articulation. When one vowel changes to another, a lot of words can become homonyms, so usually every single vowel changes at once. These are called Chain Shifts:

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

So a single instance of a rhyme is a weak piece of evidence, but when you take into account all of the texts at the time -- and the texts from surrounding times, both before and after -- you can make a good hypothesis. That hypothesis can then be tested against future discoveries, and modify as appropriate.

That's why all Proto Indo European reconstructions are marked with an * to say "We've never actually heard this word so we don't know if anybody ever said it". They're aware that all hypotheses are tentative. But that's how progress is made.

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