"Snapshots" of English pronunciation

[ilikeverin]

Cool.  I love stuff like this.  Though I wish the "1650 to 1750" pronunciation wasn't in an American accent, which is per se anachronistic. 

Not so fast; the modern American accent is closer to the 1650-1750 English pronunciations than the vast majority of the modern English accents.

Damn good find.  The particulars of the vowel shift, and the evolution of English have always escaped me, because I can't read IPA.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPA

Forget anything bad I ever said about you.

written <a> sounded a bit like the <a> in modern <father>
written <e> sounded a bit like the <a> in modern <table>
written <i> sounded a bit like the <i> in modern <machine>

That's probably the most important bit.

[ilikeverin]

Here, Wikipedia can make it even easier.

Your confusion about the hows and whys of the shift are probably because... as linguists, we don't know exactly why, either!  Language changes do happen, we know that much, but the mechanics of them are fairly confusing to us.  We do know that the Great Vowel Shift was what's called a "chain shift".  To understand this, it's helpful to know how we make vowels.  They're made by the tongue pointing towards certain parts of the top part of the mouth.  Different configurations of where this pointing is happening (at the front, towards the back, or in the middle) and how close the tongue comes to the top of the mouth (very much so or not at all) make different vowels.  For example, the <i> in <machine> is the closest the tongue can get to pointing at the front of the mouth without it becoming a consonant (the consonant <y> at the beginning of <yes>, in this case, but that's not specifically important).

A chain shift happens when, for unknown reasons, one of the vowels in the sound system of a language is bludgeoned in a certain direction.  Because there's only so many combinations of tongue height and roundness possible, vowels like to have a little bit of wiggle room.  So, when that first vowel gets knocked loose, other vowels decide to party.  Another vowel moves in the direction of that first vowel, occupying the vacuum just created by the movement of that previous vowel.  So then vowels close to the newly moved vowel in turn move towards the vacuum, and so on.  Similarly, any vowels that happened to be in the way of that first vowel that moved are either sucked into that vowel (or suck that vowel in, like some sort of horrible vacuum cleaner) or move in turn away from that vowel, so as to create room.  An example of this is happening now in some Northern cities; hence, this shift is called the Northern Cities vowel shift.  It's why I want to hurl something sharp at some of the people who I go to college with whenever they say they're taking "cleyusses" instead of "classes".

Cool.  I love stuff like this.  Though I wish the "1650 to 1750" pronunciation wasn't in an American accent, which is per se anachronistic. 

Not so fast; the modern American accent is closer to the 1650-1750 English pronunciations than the vast majority of the modern English accents.

Update: after listening to the clip, this isn't exactly true, especially with the pronunciation of "thy child" (though some dialects of English are reawakening to a similar pronunciation; witness Canadians and "bite" or "lice" or "writer".  I think part of it is that Alice isn't at her best.  Her speech doesn't always follow the IPA, particularly with "wonderfully".

Though, it isn't quite IPA, as it has [č], [š], [ǰ], and [j] for [t͡ʃ], [ʃ], [d͡ʒ], and [ʒ], respectively.

[ilikeverin]

Silly soulty... Ðe whole point of bringing back þorn is to also have eþ handy as a standby, so ðat English can once again contrast ðe voiced and voiceless interdental fricatives ðat are aching to be contrasted orþographically.  Ðat said, ðough, I'd much raðer contrast eth with ðe digraph "th", representing the voiceless fricative.  Having a three-way contrast between b, p, and þ is annoying in handwriting.

What you say is probably true, by the way; I somehow missed ðat part

[ilikeverin]

I copy-pasted those particular ones from Wikipedia

I do have the US-International keyboard layout, though, which lets me type anything with an acute accent, grave accent, or tilde way easier.

[ilikeverin]

Or an even better example would be Arabic.  In the West, we look on a map and see that almost the entire Muslim world speaks one language; "Arabic".  And the hot new trend for your career path is to learn to speak "Arabic".

But what we think of as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in that region in the Quran, print and news media is not what people there actually speak.  In reality, what someone is Morocco is speaking is totally different from what someone in Egypt is speaking.  Modern Standard Arabic is used in that region the way Latin was used in Europe in the Middle Ages, but just like with that situation, most of what is spoken on the ground has diverged considerably in the last 1000 years.

Even people who understand that there is a difference will often say that "well, you have Egyptian Arabic, and Gulf Arabic, and those are different dialects."  Well, those two "dialects" are at least as different from one another as French and Spanish, and yet we call those "languages."

Still, Standard Arabic is fairly widely understood, and writing is always in the "Standard".

Question?  Based off of what I know, you create the characters you used with Alt Gr... but when I try to use Alt Gr... well, first I don't have an Alt Gr just another Alt, but mine only opens up window options.  How can I access those characters?

You can use the standard United States–International keyboard layout, but I doubt you'll like what it does to your quotation-mark button.

It took me about a week or two to get totally used to pressing a spacebar anytime after I just want an apostrophe or quotation mark.

[ilikeverin]

Or an even better example would be Arabic.  In the West, we look on a map and see that almost the entire Muslim world speaks one language; "Arabic".  And the hot new trend for your career path is to learn to speak "Arabic".

But what we think of as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in that region in the Quran, print and news media is not what people there actually speak.  In reality, what someone is Morocco is speaking is totally different from what someone in Egypt is speaking.  Modern Standard Arabic is used in that region the way Latin was used in Europe in the Middle Ages, but just like with that situation, most of what is spoken on the ground has diverged considerably in the last 1000 years.

Even people who understand that there is a difference will often say that "well, you have Egyptian Arabic, and Gulf Arabic, and those are different dialects."  Well, those two "dialects" are at least as different from one another as French and Spanish, and yet we call those "languages."

Still, Standard Arabic is fairly widely understood, and writing is always in the "Standard".

Question?  Based off of what I know, you create the characters you used with Alt Gr... but when I try to use Alt Gr... well, first I don't have an Alt Gr just another Alt, but mine only opens up window options.  How can I access those characters?

You can use the standard United States–International keyboard layout, but I doubt you'll like what it does to your quotation-mark button.

It took me about a week or two to get totally used to pressing a spacebar anytime after I just want an apostrophe or quotation mark.

Standard Arabic is widely understood by educated males.  It is not widely understood by the lower classes, women and children.

Also, yeah, the writing system is Arabic, but English is written in Latin.  So?

No, it's not just that the writing system is Arabic, it's that the writing itself is in Standard Arabic.  They don't write in dialect.  It would be like if we wrote in Old English and spoke what we do now.

[ilikeverin]

Or an even better example would be Arabic.  In the West, we look on a map and see that almost the entire Muslim world speaks one language; "Arabic".  And the hot new trend for your career path is to learn to speak "Arabic".

But what we think of as Modern Standard Arabic, which is used in that region in the Quran, print and news media is not what people there actually speak.  In reality, what someone is Morocco is speaking is totally different from what someone in Egypt is speaking.  Modern Standard Arabic is used in that region the way Latin was used in Europe in the Middle Ages, but just like with that situation, most of what is spoken on the ground has diverged considerably in the last 1000 years.

Even people who understand that there is a difference will often say that "well, you have Egyptian Arabic, and Gulf Arabic, and those are different dialects."  Well, those two "dialects" are at least as different from one another as French and Spanish, and yet we call those "languages."

Still, Standard Arabic is fairly widely understood, and writing is always in the "Standard".

Question?  Based off of what I know, you create the characters you used with Alt Gr... but when I try to use Alt Gr... well, first I don't have an Alt Gr just another Alt, but mine only opens up window options.  How can I access those characters?

You can use the standard United States–International keyboard layout, but I doubt you'll like what it does to your quotation-mark button.

It took me about a week or two to get totally used to pressing a spacebar anytime after I just want an apostrophe or quotation mark.

Standard Arabic is widely understood by educated males.  It is not widely understood by the lower classes, women and children.

Also, yeah, the writing system is Arabic, but English is written in Latin.  So?

No, it's not just that the writing system is Arabic, it's that the writing itself is in Standard Arabic.  They don't write in dialect.  It would be like if we wrote in Old English and spoke what we do now.

Oh, yes.  They wouldn't ever think to write in a local dialect.  But, writing isn't language.

No, but I was just making the point that learning Arabic in schools isn't totally useless, especially if you're, say, a religious studies major and want to read the original Quran... or if you're ordering from a menu or looking at shops or trying to read a book.