A Millennium of English Pronunciation

Yes I know I already did a version of this one, but I wanted to include Ben Franklin's fart joke this time.
I don't know where this got posted, but the number of visitors I'm getting on this one tells me this video is in for a lot more attention than my videos normally get. Based on previous experience of what happens when I see that, let me just preemptively answer some potential questions here with a few notes:
The reading from Beowulf by the way is in a reconstruction of Early Mercian, NOT the West Saxon of the surviving manuscript.
The reading from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses West Midland features, and restores scribally-dropped /ǝ/ where the poet's dialect metrically requires it.
The pronunciation of e.g. "light" as /lixt/ continues right up through the end of the 16th century, but from well back in the Middle English period in the southeast, it exists alongside other variants ancestral to the modern pronunciation which is merged with the PRICE diphthong. I just used the conservative realization in my readings of the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare. But at least two other possibilities existed alongside it.
The Keats bit is meant to show a little bit of vestigial rhoticity (mind, personally I can't see a way to avoid concluding that fully-rhotic cultivated speakers in London continued to exist well into the 1820s), and could just as plausibly have been done with /ǝi/ for the PRICE diphthong and /ɑʊ/ for the MOUTH diphthong (different realizations coexisted) but I figured I'd demonstrate a more modern PRICE realization for the end.
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[@johncoh7400]

The first several excerpts: beautiful, classic pieces of literature. Benjamin Franklin: We should make farts smell different. And on we go…

[@a.z.foreman74]

It's how I do

[@diezelleprozo6047]

this actually happened, right?

Loved this. Thank you! In Franklin, I noticed that "accompanying" is said with a final /ŋ/ but one line later "discharging" ends in /n/. Were both forms present in the English/American dialects at the time?

[@a.z.foreman74]

It seems that /n/ and /ŋ/ in "-ing" co-varied in educated speech on both sides of the Atlantic (rhymes like "pattern"/"chattering" or "kitchen"/"switching" are found in well-educated poets from the 18th up through the early 19th century). Some people like Walker even tried to create rules for when you should say one vs. the other. Franklin himself probably just said /ŋ/ if his own phonetic transcriptions are anything to go by, but I thought I'd show some of the variability in this aspect of 18th century speech.

@@a.z.foreman74 Fabulous. Thank you.

[@user-td4do3op2d]

Great video! I thought it was interesting how you included “vestigial rhoticity” in Keats’ speech. I’d love to hear more. I live in the uk and I have met a couple of English people (one from the West Country and another from the northwest) who have very occasional or partial rhoticity in their speech. These people probably had fully rhotic speaking parents or grandparents. One of them seemed to almost make a sort of half-R sound so I couldn’t quite tell if their accent was rhotic or not. The other seemed to only pronounce very specific words rhotically, such as “work”. I find it interesting how the w-wh distinction didn’t survive in ANY 20th century English dialects to my knowledge, which seems strange considering it was part of the prestige dialect less than a century earlier. Maybe the continuation of this distinction in RP was somewhat artificial even in the early 19th century.

[@who167]

This channel is so good, I came for the Hebrew stuff but the English is amazing

[@Kite2929]

This is sooo fascinating!! Really appreciate your videos.

[@gabrielkinneavy1853]

🙌🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

[@keeganator6136]

Gorgeous

[@Leofwine]

I just *love* the Old English bits, but everything after Chaucer is... a tad too modern for me.

[@Veritas-dq2hs]

It really do be like that