Prologue of Romeo and Juliet in Elizabethan Pronunciation

Just a reading of a passage by Shakespeare in the "original pronunciation" i.e. a reconstruction of how (one variety of) London English was pronounced in the early 1600s, from your friendly neighborhood historical linguist and poetry nerd.
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If you're wondering why it doesn't sound like David Crystal's "OP" it's because Crystal is..um...questionable:
blogicarian.blogspot.com/2018/...
Oh and if you want to hear more from Romeo and Juliet in Early Modern pronunciation: check out my reading of the "what light through yonder window breaks" speech
• "What light through yo...

[@bchristian85]

I find Shakespeare to be far more interesting and engaging when read this way.

[@a.z.foreman74]

I mean, me too

[@GettinJiggyWithGenghis]

@@a.z.foreman74Lmfaooo

[@hotelmario510]

Fascinating how you can hear French and German, but also the beginning of the Scottish and Irish accents.

[@CannibaLouiST]

LOL the ending is gold

[@Birb56]

I very much enjoyed this narration

[@filmzilla]

I geek over OP! Well done.

[@a.z.foreman74]

Thanks!

[@lagomorphcavy6132]

Full version when?

[@godowskygodowsky1155]

Is the stress on burie supposed to be on the first syllable? Indirect textual evidence seems to suggest it's on the second syllable, but I'm not familiar with all the data out there. EDIT: After a quick search of Shakespeare's corpus, it seems that bury/burie/buried is used in places that would indicate stress on either syllable.

[@catherineschmidt1354]

Hello, I came across your channel a while ago, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it so far! I'm trying to learn, or at least become tolerably non-garbage at, London EModE pronunciation in this period. I found Crystal's dictionary quite quickly and thought it was too good to be true, and through this video I found your blog post on the matter. At the top of it, in the section about pale/pail/deal/peel, you have pale arriving at /ɛ:/ or /e:/ depending on lect by the early 17th century. Yet in this video and others words like "take", "make", "rage" are not pronounced with those vowels. Is the reconstruction in this video keeping the /æ:/ instead, and if so, why? Apologies if I've badly misunderstood something, or come across at all rude. I don't have much linguistic knowledge myself, and I'm struggling to find out how reliable different sources are and in the case of partial reliability, which parts I should be wary of. What would your recommendations be to really get a grip on this? Thanks.

[@a.z.foreman74]

Hi, Catherine. Thank you for your interest. You haven't misunderstood exactly, and you're being anything but rude. It's just that my blog entry (which is really disorganized, for which I apologize) didn't include granular enough detail, at least in that place. Yes, there is evidence for a higher PALE vowel by 1600. But there is also evidence that speakers with [æ:] continued to exist at least into the middle of the 17th century. Alexander Gil the Elder (a near-exact contemporary of Shakespeare's) seems to have stilll had [æ:] (possibly even [a:]), and he was writing in 1619. There are major sources (Robert Robinson and John Wallis, the latter born in 1616) right up to the middle of the century that continue to report something that seems to have been [æ:]. I should mention that not all scholars fully accept all such evidence. At the same time, there's also fairly good evidence that a higher vowel existed. The higher vowel is almost certainly implied by the comments of John Florio in the late 16th century, and French-speakers like Bellot describing English prounciation seem to have [ɛ:] in mind (though it's possible they're approximating [æ:]). After 1600 poets become massively more comfortable with rhymes like Fair/Where. Even John Palsgrave (1530) who clearly has a low value for the PALE vowel himself, hints at the existence of higher values other than "where the best English is spoken". In summary, there's good reason to think that, at the time that Romeo and Juliet was published, both [æ:] and [ɛ:] realizations (quite possibly also [e:] realizations too, among advanced speakers) could be heard in London speech. It's quite possible that the former was already a minority pronunciation, but it was one current among educated people of Shakespeare's day. I could well have read this passage with [ɛ:] instead (particularly since I read the PEAL vowel as [e:] in this text) and remained consistent with what is plausibly reconstructable for the period. I just chose not to. Here's me reading Sonnet 24 a more innovative type of English with a higher PALE vowel: kzbin.info/www/bejne/rZi9opxjqbV6itk It's worth noting that definite rhymes which would imply raising of the PALE vowel (like Fair/Where) are, by my reckoning, completely absent in Shakespeare's non-dramatic verse. The seeming exceptions involve a tiny handful of words like "hair" which all had variants in /ɛ̄/ in Middle English. In his dramatic verse (in stuff that we can be sure he and not one of his collaborators wrote) there are a few rhymes that seem to rest on the raising of the vowel, but he nonetheless tends to avoid them which, unless there was some issue with such rhymes, is weird considering how useful they would be. As for your last question: jeez, I don't know. Few works on Early Modern English phonology (indeed few works on historical phonology of any language) go into enough detail to be of real use to people who want to actually perform texts in it. (Linguists who actually care enough about orally producing reconstructed speech rather than describing it on paper are rare, and our colleagues sometimes find it a bit dubious and even a bit irresponsible because reasons.) What's worse, most such books that HAVE been produced with performers in mind (Kökeritz is one such case) are now badly outdated (and Kökeritz had axes to grind anyway). And philological work on the primary sources for this period ground to a crawl after the middle of the 20th century for reasons I do not quite understand. To me it seems that the most honest suggestion I can give you is to read a range of secondary scholarship, if you feel up to it (some of it is rather nastily technical) to get a sense in particular of what the different opinions out there are. Because, well, specialists just aren't unanimous on everything. It's hard to say whether English /a/ (as in "hand") in this period was already the modern-sounding [æ] was still a low [a], or whether this period of English did or didn't have a [y:] sound like in French "Lune". (I've gone back and forth on that last one). Here are a few books that come to mind The Cambridge History of the English Language (Specifically, volume 3, chapter 3, which deals with the phonology of the period you're interested in. It's by Roger Lass who has a very different take on certain sound changes than most scholars. But it'll help to know what the disagreement is about. ) English Pronunciation 1500-1700, in two volumes by E. J. Dobson (a bit dated, but really gives a nice thorough overview of the primary sources) Shakespeare's Works and Elizabethan Pronunciation by Fausto Cercignani (one of the best books out there on the phonology of the period, and probably THE best on the linguistic evidence afforded by Shakespeare's own works) Handbuch der frühneuenglischen Aussprache für Musiker (1500-1800) by Klaus Miehling. (I know, it's in German, but there's nothing like it in Engish. It's the only guide to pre-modern English phonology specifically intended for performers of early texts that isn't desperately out of date, though Miehling does have his unusual takes. Somebody should translate it into English) You might consider taking a look at scholarship that has focused on specific Early Modern individuals who recorded information about their own speech. For example, take a look at "John Hart's Works on English Orthography and Pronunciation" (1551, 1569, 1570) in two volumes (1955 & 1963) by Bror Danielsson. Hart is perhaps our most important source for 16th century speech, as he offers so much evidence both in phonetic transcriptions and in articulatory descriptions, plus Danielsson's edition and commentary is pretty lucid. I know this is a lot and pretty daunting. I would love for there to be a nice handbook overview you could use but there isn't really. Well, to be more accurate: handbook overviews do exist, but at the level of resolution you're looking for, we're way past things like Nevalainen's "An introduction to Early Modern English" (besides whch, he sometimes gets things off about phonology, or otherwise gives his own opinion as if it were settled consensus when it isn't). A work that would allow you to figure out the plausible range of early modern pronunciation(s) for any given word would be nice to have too (since figuring that stuff out is sometimes no simple matter, especially when it comes to words like "dear", "cheer" and the various -ear words). But that simply doesn't exist yet.

[@catherineschmidt1354]

​@@a.z.foreman74 Thank you so much for taking the time to respond! I would love there to be a handbook as well, but I accept the non-triviality of reconstruction and the differences resulting. It will take me some time to work my way in, but I'm grateful to have places to start. Miehling may sadly be off the table unless I put some serious effort into reviving what little German I learnt in school. Or cede the purity of my linguistic soul to using a translator. As for it being nastily technical... I suppose it's unavoidable. Oh well. Studying physics has reasonably accustomed me to reading things where I have to pause every 20 seconds to look something up and weep.

[@maniacmcgee5992]

Pretty good! Just need to work on the "loynes" a bit more. ;p

[@avab4035]

WOW

[@morvil73]

I’d have pronounced OP as [əʊᵊɹ] and as [huːᵊɹ], the latter being similar to a pre-GVS pronunciation of as [uːr]…

[@subramaniankumaran9554]

🎉🎉🎉

[@romuloVG]

For "take" I'd use /e:/

[@benmaloney5434]

I wouldn’t. The pronunciation /eː/ for the FACE vowel was very innovative at this stage, and was stigmatised (or at least, not recommended) by most Londoners of Shakespeare’s generation who wrote about the language.

[@godowskygodowsky1155]

@@benmaloney5434 If I recall correctly, the Great Vowel Shift was still ongoing during Shakespeare's time, and the transition of the FACE vowel from [æ:] to [ɛː] happened specifically during this century. Wouldn't it be more apt to favor the more advanced pronunciation, since Shakespeare's actors would have been part of the lower class? Out of curiosity, where would you place the TRAP vowel? A distinction would have had to exist then for it to persist in today's minimal pairs.

[@benmaloney5434]

@@godowskygodowsky1155 The 'great vowel shift' is in some ways a bit of a misnomer, since the early stages seem to have happened well before the later stages, and what happened between was quite complex. Foreign visitors to London in the early 17th-century seem to have heard a normative four-height vowel system with FACE as [æː] and WAIT distinct as [ɛː]. Actors were rarely members of the aristocracy, true, but I'm not sure it's fair to say they were lower class. Successful actors in London were obviously very well-read and often relatively wealthy. To my knowledge, the first source to explicitly recommend an [ɛː] pronunciation for FACE is from 1625, by which point Shakespeare was of course dead. Vowel length in Early Modern English was phonemic, so FACE was distinct from TRAP primarily via a quantitative distinction. That said, I don't see any reason why [a] couldn't have been the usual TRAP vowel, with the [æ] - first described by Hume c.1617 - being the more innovative pronunciation. We don't exactly know when the latter became more common.

[@funquay2219]

I didn't know Shakespeare was Irish!

[@thenextshenanigantownandth4393]

History is weird isn't it?

[@azieldaly2965]

Every thing sounds Irish to untrained ears.

[@user-td4do3op2d]

Irish people speak like this because this is the kind of English they learnt when they were first forced to speak English.

[@thenextshenanigantownandth4393]

One criticism I have is the rolling or thrilled R, where are you getting that feature from? As far as I know shakespeare nor his contemporaries rolled their Rs, they had a soft R like is found in Irish and American English today for example. The rolling R would be found in old English, but not something I would think would be found in modern English of Shakespeare's time.

[@a.z.foreman74]

A trilled [r] for Southern English is witnessed in the 17th century by several quite clear articulatory descriptions of it, including John Wallis (1653), John Wilkins (1668), William Holder (1669), Christopher Cooper (1685). Even Sir Isaac Newton (yes, that Sir Isaac Newton of gravity-discovering fame) in his phonetic notes (datable to the 1660s) describes the English /r/ as characterized by "the quavering or jarring of the toungs end against the fore parte of palate." And Newton's description isn't even as good as it gets. Other 17th century phoneticians give far more detailed articulatory descriptions that afford no ambiguity. William Holder's Elements of Speech 1669) is a book primarily concerned with teaching deaf mutes to pronounce English, and in describing English /r/ gives a detailed and quite perceptive characterization of one defining feature of trills: directing airflow over an articulator so that it vibrates. Holder states that R is made "...by a Pervious [=non-occlusive] Appulse [=obstruction] of the end of the Tongue, with its edge to the Goums, The Tongue being held in that posture, onely by the force of the … Muscles, and not resting any where upon the Teeth; except onely touching them loosely, so as to close the passage of Breath every where by the sides, and conduct it to the end of the Tongue. And this with a strong Impulse of Breath vocalized, so as to cause a trembling and vibration of the whole Tongue; which vibration being slow, does not tune the voice, but make it jarred; the Tongue not resting but […] agitated by strong impulse of Breath" It's only in the 18th century that we get actual descriptions of a different kind of R-sound in English. Certainly approximant realizations must have existed as well (they exist in this recording, too, just not so much in syllable initial position). But the loss of a trill as the highest strength-grade of /r/ appears to be fundamentally an 18th century phenomenon. Trills and taps even for Irish English are attested into the 19th century, and well into the 18th century for prestigious forms of southern English speech (even Benjamin Franklin appears to describe a trill.) Holder, incidentally, also notes those "unapt" to pronounce "this letter R". He does not specify who "they" were, or what sound they produced. (The one other mention of trill-failure comes from Wilkins (1668) who describes speakers who substitute /l/ for /r/) He may simply be describing the difficulties of deaf learners. The context of this and his other remark on trill-failure suggests he conceived of it as a speech defect. How common such a "defect" was we cannot know. But it is perhaps worth noting that Holder supplies not only one of the clearest articulatory descriptions of a coronal trill, but also one of the first references to speakers without it, a mere seventy years before Flint's (1740) French-language report of preconsonantal /r/ in London as "adouci". The 16th-17th century bilingual witnesses to English /r/ are likewise for the most part simply equative. Florio (1578) reports "The r is pronounced just in the Italian, as it is in the English, or Latine." So too Torriano (1645: 4). Howell (1662:30-1) tells us the same with respect to Spanish. Miège (1685:27) states that "R se prononce en Anglois comme en François." Newman (1674:70) says Italian R is pronounced "as in Latine or English" and that the French R (p. 8) too, is pronounced "as in English". Offelen (1687:31; 1686:18) equates English and German /r/. Sewell (1691:2) says of English /r/ : "het heeft geen andere klank dan by ons." Mauger (1694: 383) reports that English R "ne differre point de l'r François." Even Ben Jonson says of the /r/ sound that "it hurreth in the sound; the tongue striking the inner palate, with a trembling about the teeth. It is sounded firm in the beginning of the words, and more liquid in the middle and ends; as in rarer, riper." Though there are reasons IMO to potentially distrust Jonson specifically as a source. To be clear, I think it's overwhelmingly likely that more approximant realizations existed as well, but that they probably originated in the syllable coda as lenition forms. I have an article forthcoming about the histry of the English /r/ from the 16th to the 18th century. I'll post a link here when it's out.

[@thenextshenanigantownandth4393]

@@a.z.foreman74 You just gave me cherry picking examples of hold outs from olde English I take it or likely also attempts at linguistic modern invention instead of accurate speech at the time. In the rare case of Thrilling R in Irish accents, one could chalk that up to Irish speakers. Given the tudors colonies or plantations in Ireland would have retained this style of speech of the soft r. Johnathon swifts Irish English description describes the rural and Dubliners not of high prestige or having English connections as speaking with a soft R, aqs in Bordeeer, Daeere, at that time Ireland had been a relic colony of Tudor England, so it all fits. I'll post the sources later, but needless to say I'm not at all convinced, Shakespeare didn't speak with a rolling R.

[@a.z.foreman74]

@@thenextshenanigantownandth4393 These aren't cherry-picked examples. Besides, what would such cherry-picking be in aid of? I'm a historical linguist who works to understand English linguistic history. I don't actually have anything personally invested in the conservatism, or lack thereof, of the 17th century London /r/. I have no reason to cherry-pick in service of a pre-selected outcome. I go where the evidence goes. You have evidence that suggests otherwise? By all means feel free to share it with me either here or at poemsintranslation-AT-GEE-MAIL-DOTT-cOMM. I'm always looking for more evidence on the history of English /r/. The examples I gave you comprise literally all direct articulatory descriptions of the pronunciation of the English /r/ sound between 1600 and 1700. There are no good articulatory descriptions of any other type of /r/ from the period (whereas matters stand very much otherwise after 1700). I've spent a long, long time looking through the orthoepistic record for them. Honestly, the closest you get to anything other than [r~ɾ] for /r/ is quite indirect implications from one or two Romance-speakers that the English R might not always have had multiple contacts and been occasionally accoustically more similar to a tap. People like Cercignani who want to challenge the idea of [r] in London in this period are forced to use things like the fact that Robert Robinson doesn't describe a tap but simply uses a featural description consistent with a sonorant. I'm not trying to hide or be selective with evidence here. I don't have an agenda. Hold-outs from Old Enlish? I'm not entirely sure what you mean by that. But many of these are sources who would have no reason to record anything other than current educated speech. Some, to be sure, are non-londoners and record very provincial features (Newton, for example). None of these sources offer any attempts at phonetic innovation. The idea that someone like Holder, would be either of these things is preposterous to anyone who has actually read his treatise. (He expressly states that he is not going to describe sounds that don't exist in English. And given his stated goal of teaching deaf mutes to pronounce English, and the way in which he describes conveying the trill to deaf people makes it unambiguous that he is describing a multi-contact trill.) The idea that people like Wallis would be describing a relict pronunciation instead of a widely current one likewise makes zero sense if you read his Grammatica Linguae Anglicanae. "Given the tudors colonies or plantations in Ireland would have retained this style of speech of the soft r." First, I should mention that - despite the overwhelming weight of the 17th century orthoepistic evidence - I don't think that only one type of /r/ was current in this period. That would be inconsistent with other evidence (and also with the nature of multi-contact coronal trills which are almost never the dominant realization in languages where they are found with only one rhotic phoneme). I'm sure that [r] co-varied socially with other realizations, and that alveolar approximants could be heard as well even in onset position. But also what you're saying is not at all necessarily true. I'm not sure if you're aware of the speed with which a sociophonetically salient variable like this can change. It can overtake an entire society within no more than a couple of generations. Just look at the spread of dorsal realizations of /r/ in Quebec within such a span. Rhotic consonants are in particular prone to this kind of thing. Note how the trilled [r] has all but disappeared from mainstream Scottish speech over the course essentially of a single human lifetime. There are plenty of features of 18th and 19th century Irish English that have been entirely lost on the island in modern times but are firmly in evidence for earlier periods. (One which Hickey notes is the pronunciation of /ar/ in words like "serve".) See volume 2 of Wells' "Accents of English" (p. 446) for the trill used into the 20th century in rural Ulster, particularly but not exclusively after dental stops. Finally, let me be clear here: I don't know and neither do you or anyone else alive what kind of /r/ Shakespeare himself spoke with. Shakespeare himself was not a native Londoner and has left us no evidence about his precise type of speech. Rhymes provide extremely uncertain evidence at best. All we have, really, is evidence supplied by contemporaries. This recording is in no way, shape, or form intended as a reconstruction of Shakespeare's own pronunciation, but of one of the many kinds of Englishes that could probably be heard in his day. PS I meant what I said above: the development of English /r/ is one of my areas of greatest interest as a historian of English. If you have data I don't know about, and it sounds like you well might, I'd love to hear about it.

[@thenextshenanigantownandth4393]

@@a.z.foreman74 I think with you it might be a case of investment into a particular POV or theory, that's why you're cherry picking and pushing. Given a tiny selection of examples and calling it "overwhelming weight of evidence" "The examples I gave you comprise literally all direct articulatory descriptions of the pronunciation of the English /r/ sound between 1600 and 1700" Nonsense, now I know you have an agenda. "Note how the trilled [r] has all but disappeared from mainstream Scottish speech over the course essentially of a single human lifetime" Thrilled R is still the most common pronunciation in Scotland. "(One which Hickey notes is the pronunciation of /ar/ in words like "serve".) See volume 2 of Wells' "Accents of English" (p. 446) for the trill used into the 20th century in rural Ulster, particularly but not exclusively after dental stops" Both those pronunciations are still found in Ireland; much rarer yes. The thrill in Antrim for example. In regards to Ulster that feature was brought by the Scottish settlers. This is really the smoking gun, We find no evidence both contemporary or present that Tudor Pale English ever had a thrilled R, likewise outside of the pale reaches in the midlands similar evidence doesn't exist. Even in Munster we don't find any evidence other than those who were Irish speakers and there was alot more Tudor English speakers in that area than is admitted. Your analogy to Scottish dialects is false we do find media representation of the traditional Scottish thrilled R in modern times and regardless the local dialects still have a thrilled R, not so in Dublin or the traditional counties planted, we don't find this in Ireland. Why can we trace linguistic features in those accents to that period, but the thrilled R just so happens to be missing from every dialect, why isn't there a traditional dialect local to Dublin with the thrill?, bar tiny areas around cork or Kerry who were influenced by the Irish language, what a coincidence. Your theory is a fringe one and I'm not convinced. And I don't think you accounted for the above, Edmund spencer influenced much of literature and culture at the time attempted to emulate the speech of olde English. So this was being done at the time and did have a cultural presence even into the 17th century, I'm sure I could find other examples of this being attempted. There's no context to your cherry picked evidence either. I don't think Shakespeare had a Rolling R, unless you find evidence that the majority spoke that way or evidence of Shakespeare speaking like that I will remain unconvinced.

[@a.z.foreman74]

​@@thenextshenanigantownandth4393 I'm really not invested in this POV so much as in the question around it. It's little skin off my nose to just re-record things like this (and delist the original videos) the instant I become convinced otherwise on any given point, and I was resolved on that when I started posting videos. I retain the bulky master-files to my videos for many reasons, this being among them. Evidence that complicates the reconstruction of /r/ in the 17th century is not a problem for me. It is more than welcome. "Given a tiny selection of examples and calling it "overwhelming weight of evidence"" if you have evidence of articulatory descriptions I'm avoiding out of bias, by all means tell me about them. It sounds to me like you straight-up just don't want to believe what I'm telling you about 17th century articulatory descriptions and would rather believe that all these descriptions are motivated by weird archaism, cherry-picked from some larger data-pool (whose existence would be news to me), or attempts to describe English as if it contained a sound it did not contain. If you really want to believe that, there's little I can do or say to convince you. "Thrilled R is still the most common pronunciation in Scotland." Multi-contact trills are actually quite rare in Scottish speech now outside of Orkney and Shetland (especially outside of declamatory and formal speech), and have grown increasingly so over the 20th century. Even in the late 1930s McAllister's survey found that not more than three scottish students out of ten used a full-blown trill. I suspect you're thinking of the single-contact tap [ɾ] which is still heard but hardly the most common (and not at all consistent with the descriptions given by people like Holder who report multiple contacts, or at least the possibility of same). Often you just find speakers with no more than a single-tap [ɾ] after dental obstruents, and an approximant everywhere else. See Wells' volume (p. 411) on that. Evidence of relic taps can be found in a much wider area than just Scotland, of course. Listen to how this Scouse speaker says "brother" and "green" for example soundcomparisons.com/#/en/Englishes/language/Gmc_W_Eng_EW_Nth_Lpl_Typ And working-class Liverpool speech used to have a lot more taps. (Hell, you can even find relic taps like that attested in the American South) "Why can we trace linguistic features in those accents to that period, but the thrilled R just so happens to be missing from every dialect, what a coincidence" There are LOTS of features from the period that are like this. I'll give you another example: no dialect-survey of modern Ireland as far as I am aware describes a three-way contrast between the vowels of MATE, MEAT and MEET. They all merge "MEAT" either with the "MATE" vowel or (as is the mainland norm) with the "MEET" vowel. No form of Irish speech as far as I am aware preserves such a distinction today (if you know of one, I can think of a LOT of people who would be very interested in hearing about it.) Yet we have unambiguous documentation (literally as good as anything modern short of audio-recordings) of a three-way split existing among educated southern English speakers almost right to the end of the 1600s. Another is a three-way distinction between the vowels of FUR, FIR and FERN of the kind that survives (largely) in Scottish speech. Even Irish Traveller and local Dublin speech preserve only a two-way split. We nonetheless have unambiguous testimony of such a split outliving the rule of the House of Tudor in London where it appears to have survived at least among conservative speakers into the first two decades of the 17th century. You seem to be under the impression that Irish speech within the Pale must be in all respects peculiarly conservative. But there is just no reason to think that's true in every single phonological regard. We now have a fairly good sense of how dialect-regions form and develop, and the idea of "colonial lag" and associated notions are just not on anymore. "We don't even find any Cromwellian soldiers in the records with a Rolling R who settled in Ireland in the 17th century." Wait hang on. That's kind of a weird statement to make. I mean, how many such settlers recorded ANY of the articulatory properties of their /r/ in writing to begin with? Seriously, if there are any I'd love to hear about them! Calling this a fringe theory is also kind of strange to me. It isn't. It is in fact no more than a slightly tweaked version of a reconstruction that has long been traditional among historians of English going back all the way to the days of Ellis. Not the only one to be sure, but calling it fringe really suggests to me that you haven't actually looked much at the scholarly literature on the matter and have taken the word of somebody who hasn't studied this particular niche field very thoroughly. I'm not inclined to do a full-blown literature review here but the traditional assumption (from Ellis to Sweet to Jespersen to Wyld to Peters to on down to Minkova) has been that the modern realizations of English /r/ developed from a historical alveolar trill, the question being when and how the trill was lost in various regions (exceptions like Lass and Catford have been very much against the grain). Generally 19th and 20th century researchers have allowed for the survival of the trill into early modern London, though with varying (and increasing) levels of agnosticism about it (like Windross' or Gasiorowski's take which assumes that the present-day variability goes back to OE times). If you ask most today, I think they'd decline to be very definite as to what we can know about the pre-1700 /r/ of southern English. But even the trill-hostile Eric Dobson admitted the possibility of a syllable-initial trill for these reasons, and even Lass who thinks that the modern American "molar r" is the prototypical /r/ for Old English accepts the existence of trilled and tapped allophones in 17th century London for precisely the reasons I've laid out here. Likewise the most recent generation of specialists working on 18th century pronunciation (Charles Jones and Joan Beal come to mind most readily) have found good reason to take the trills reported by people like John Walker to mean what they appear to for an even later period. I'm sorry but the idea of [r~ɾ] as a variant alongside [ɹ] for the 17th century really isn't the wild and crazy notion you're making it out to be. If anything I think I'm slightly unusual in discounting some of these 17th century trill-describing sources (like Ben Jonson) as unreliable because of their tendency to plagiarize descriptions of French pronunciation.

[@spartan.falbion2761]

Edward De Vere was a genius.

[@stercaland]

Sure was. We have all those sonnets and comedies to prove it. I lean more to Bacon for the tragedies and histories though. Ditto for “Venus and Adonis” too. We also have a few scratch marks on paper of the unsteady signature of a wealthy wool merchant from the village of Stratford (not to be confused with the Stratford district in London where a number of Elizabethan playwrights dwelt) 🤫

[@a.z.foreman74]

​@@stercaland Oh good lord, we have a lot more than an unsteady signature, you dork-ass cranks. oxfraud.com/HND-Hand-D-home

[@willjenkinson1682]

"If you're wondering why it doesn't sound like David Crystal's "OP" it's because Crystal is..um...questionable" Thank you so much for saying this. I've been watching some videos of his and he seems to make some astoundingly big leaps. One example is when he and Ben talk about the line "And so from hour to hour we ripe and ripe, And then from hour to hour we rot and rot; And thereby hangs a tale" from As You Like It. They claim it's a dirty joke based on the fact that in EModE 'hour' and 'whore' would be homophones. A basic analysis of Shakespeare's rhyme schemes show no evidence of 'hour' rhyming with anything that would have been pronounced [oːr], but there's evidence of 'hour' rhyming with words like 'power' and 'flower', which also don't rhyme with anything like 'bore', 'more' or 'chore'. I think consensus online suggests 'hour' would have been pronounced like [oʊr] as a diphthong rather than a monophthong. Now, 'whore' may have been pronounced as [oʊr], but records I can find don't confirm this, and the spellings from the Quartos which are known for being inconsistent in spelling to match the pronunciation that it would have been spoken (a very useful resource) never spell it as anything but with an 'ore' at the end. Either way, in the video I watched, Ben Crystal doesn't pronounce the supposed homophone as [oʊr] but rather [oːr], which just doesn't make sense at all. It's bizarre. They seem to not realize the importance of words in Shakespeare's poems *not* rhyming. And I've found more examples of this kind of thing. I'd love to use their resources, but I just don't know what to trust and what not to trust when they make pretty big errors like this.