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You can hear an example of this kind of OP in the recording from Romeo and Juliet above. Eminent Shakespeare director Trevor Nunn claims that it might have sounded more like American English does today, suggesting that the language that migrated across the pond retained more Elizabethan characteristics than the one that stayed home. Not everyone agrees on what Shakespeare’s OP might have sounded like. Two-thirds of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the father and son team claim, have rhymes that only work in OP. The Crystals demonstrate the important pun between “loins” and “lines” (as in genealogical lines) in Romeo and Juliet, which is completely lost in so-called “Received Pronunciation” (or “proper” British English).

Unlike today’s very frustrating tension between spelling and pronunciation, Early Modern English tended to be much more phonetic and words were pronounced much more like they were spelled, or vice versa (though spelling was very irregular, a clue to the wide variety of regional accents).ģ.

Since, as Crystal points out, the language was evolving rapidly, and there wasn’t only one kind of OP, there is a great deal of contemporary commentary on this evolution, which early modern writers like Jonson had the chance to observe firsthand.Ģ. Shakespeare contemporary Ben Jonson tells us, for example, that speakers of English in his time and place pronounced the “R” (a feature known as “rhoticity”).

Observations made by people writing on the language at the time, commenting on how words sounded, which words rhyme, etc. (In his excellent textbook on the subject, linguist Charles Barber bookends the period roughly between 15.) David Crystal cites three important kinds of evidence that guide us toward recovering early modern’s original pronunciation (or “OP”).ġ. Crystal dates his Shakespearean early modern to around 1600. Shakespeare’s English is called by scholars Early Modern English (not, as many students say, “Old English,” an entirely different, and much older language).

The sun also rises ernest hemingway amazon kindle