"Snapshots" of English pronunciation

[A18]

http://facweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/dialogue.htm

Strangely fascinating.

[12th Doctor]

Not "oddly fascinating."  Just plain fascinating.  Great find.

[12th Doctor]

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.

[paul718]

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. 

[Ban my account ffs!]

Here is somebody reciting the prologue to Beowulf in old english.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4L7VTH8ii_8

And more middle English

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QE0MtENfOMU&feature=related

[12th Doctor]

I should note, that I always understood that everything shifted up, in terms of vowels, and I knew some "then and now" examples, but this is the first I have understood of how, exactly this charted.

[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.

[12th Doctor]

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.

I got most of that, but it was the progression and how those changes all combined that I never could get a good handle on.  Actually, this is very helpful in another way in that this site gives you all the vowels in IPA, which means I know what it sounds like now.

As for your first point, yeah, I didn't catch that, but modern American English pronunciation simply sounds similar to the Southeastern dialect of the 17th century.

[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.

[12th Doctor]

Actually, I wasn't confused about the "why".  I actually knew all that stuff.  When I said "the progression and how all the sounds changed" I meant the actually phonology, not the "process".

[12th Doctor]

Thanks for the chart, but slight problem... I don't speak "General American"... in fact, no one does.  It's a made up dialect.

[12th Doctor]

I don't only say that to be smart, I mean, I speak with a slight Pittsburgh accent, and that accent is becoming less slight the more time I spend here... I always had a "Western, PA" accent but now I am in the epicenter.  Thus, it is difficult for me to be certain if my pronunciation is correct.

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

As an example of this, I had no idea that "caught" and "cot" could be pronounced differently until I started taking an interest in linguistics.  Same with "Mary" "Merry" and "Marry"

[12th Doctor]

And that's not even to mention that, on top of that, I personally have a slight "cluttering" problem.

[paul718]

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.

Really? 

So when the colonists came over, they sounded more "American" than "British"?  And it was actually the Brits who developed an accent, rather than the Americans?

[12th Doctor]

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.

Really? 

So when the colonists came over, they sounded more "American" than "British"?  And it was actually the Brits who developed an accent, rather than the Americans?

Well, it wasn't quite like that.  "Accents" or more properly "dialects" vary quite a bit all over Britain.  In fact, it has often been argued that the primary thing that sets apart Scots from the Southern dialects is that the Great Vowel Shift never really happened in Scotland, or at least that it was smothered in its crib, if you will, because some shifting did occur.  Whether it is true or not, dialects in the North have always been far more influenced by Scandinavian than those in the South, even when the majority languages were still Celtic.

Anyway, people from all over the Britain came to America, and naturally, they spoke English.  The English spoken here, as the dialects started to congeal came to strongly resemble that spoken in the far south of England, particularly around London, partially because most of the higher ranking members of society (the Puritans in New England, the Quakers in PA, and the businessmen in Virginia) came mostly from the South of England.

However, when a language becomes isolated, and does not mix with other ways of speaking as readily, and is not coming out of as many mouths, it tends to seize up a bit.  So, the English spoken in the United States stayed in place, while that in Great Britain continued to change.

In fact, in the 1790's-1820's it had become common place for upper class families in Britain to send their children to America to learn how to speak "properly."  It's funny, people today associate the English spoken, particularly in the Upperlands of the South, as being uncultured, low-class, degraded, a perversion... actually that dialect is closest to what was spoken 200 years ago, and what people in New York speak is the "perversion".

There is one circumstance, however, that was more of a fluke than anything else, that caused American speech to freeze.  Like I said, the dialects in Britain had existed for centuries, so in each one you had slightly different words, and slightly different pronunciations.  When that happens syllables and sounds tend to disappear or get "clipped".  This was already going on in England during the 17th century, but it continued to proceed to the present day, taking pronunciation further from the "starting point" because once one sound changes in a word, all the sounds change, and then this change tends to be systematic, so the same sounds would be "clipped" in different words.

In the United States, however, Webster standardized a guide to English pronunciation that placed even emphasis on every single syllable in a word.  Listen to American and British pronunciations of words and you will quickly see what I am talking about.  That even emphasis "preserved" the sound system alot better, and language here has evolved less readily as a result.

That being said, American English has changed, and it has developed a number of interesting dialects, most of which are dying out to some extent, but the language situation here is more like the language system in (Southern) England than what is going on in England now.

[12th Doctor]

Also, Hollywood has brought American and British English back together to some extent, ironically because of the British patterning what they heard in American films.  British actors also had to make their pronunciations "more American" so that they could be in those films.

My Great Grandfather once said that when he went to England, prior to the mass media exchanges, it was extremely difficult for him to understand what the British were saying, even in the middle class parts of London... and he was not an uncultured guy.  He was an attorney who spoke Latin and French.  Today, most Americans would have no trouble conversing with most Englishmen.

[12th Doctor]

And it should be noted that the Noah Webster situation is very rare.  Normally what the pedants have to say about language doesn't matter.  People just keep right on speaking the way they are speaking, and then in the next generation, you get a new set of changes, and a new set of pedants, who accept the changes of their generation as perfectly "good", but are now complaining about the new changes that are coming happen, and how those signify that the language is going to the dogs.

But, with Webster, you had a country that did not have very well established dialects.. even now, or perhaps, it would be better to say, even 40 years ago when American dialects were at their height, the differences between speech in the United States, and the dialect differences in other countries were minor.  Secondly, Webster's way of speaking became incorporated into the education of every single child who went to school, as Webster's primer for reading in pronunciation became the primer in every American school house.  So these kids, who didn't have ingrained dialects, learned to speak the standard that Webster laid down, and it stuck.

[Ban my account ffs!]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6C4qsQcXvY

I rest my case

[12th Doctor]

I think we should bring back Thorn.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_(letter)

[12th Doctor]

BÞW... one of Þe Þhings I just noticed is Þat Þe woman in Þe example is speaking a more advanced dialect for Þe specific time period, which might be Þrowing off our conception of how faiÞfully she is following IPA pronunciation.  Þe man is meant to represent the conservative speakers.

[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

[12th Doctor]

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?

[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.

[paul718]

Where is the rawest, least corrupted dialect of English spoken?  Scotland?

[12th Doctor]

Where is the rawest, least corrupted dialect of English spoken?  Scotland?

There really is no such thing as "corruption" in language, because the term suggests that there is such a thing as "language integrity" which there is not.  Language is constantly changing.

If you want to find the "least" corrupt version of English, then you have to go back to the first thing ever spoken by humans.  There was no point when that suddenly became the next thing, which suddenly became Proto Indo European, which suddenly became Proto Germanic, which suddenly became Western Germanic, which suddenly became Old English, which suddenly became new English, and so on.  It was just a long continuum of evolution.  One sound, or word evolving into another, while all this was evolving apart in different areas of the world.

To get to the point of your question, though, if you really want the "least corrupt" version of English possible, then its actually Icelandic which is the closest thing, still being spoken, to Old English.