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Originally Posted by Deepwaters
The student made some pretty serious factual errors in that speech, I'm afraid.
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I rarely fail to enjoy your postings.
I confess I was charmed by the expedient allegation about "Pirate English," which provides vivid AUDIO memory examples accessible to almost everyone. I didn't read much more of the student report, as I was content merely to mark its lay provenance as a caveat. I wonder what grade the student got - did he say?
I have not worked through my recall of "Pirate English" to persuade myself it is a faithful illustration of the shifting vowels based on the documented changes. Perhaps you are aware of online audio/videos produced by serious scholars which do the job better, and you can share them with us. The new, cost-free hosting of online audio content is such a wonderful opportunity for that!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Deepwaters
The what of today DOES have the initial H sound. Say it, you'll hear it.
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I would love to ask a native French speaker willing to be frank which aspects of English pronunciation are grist for the humor mill among Francophones. I would not be surprised to hear it is our non-silent (aspirated) letter "H." If so, perhaps there are even some jokes in which a Frenchman panting hard because he is out of breath is comically mistaken for an Englishman. Isn't it interesting that the déclassé Cockney breaks with RP in silencing his "H"? I doubt it is because he aspires to copy the French - and so wonder why.
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Originally Posted by Deepwaters
"Notice that he was called William, rather than the French equivalent, Guillame."
No, he wasn't. He was called "Guillaume le batard" or "Guillaume le duc" or...
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Next you'll be telling us Jesus didn't speak King James English. Or even that the people he knew well didn't call him Jesus at all!
To be serious, the new, free, online availability of original sources attested by recognized scholarly institutions is a great opportunity for students to disabuse themselves of "Lies My Teacher Told Me" in a way which never before was practical.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Deepwaters
...French was the language of the court and the nobility ...if you wanted to get anywhere with the ruling class, you needed to speak French as well... By the time of the Tudors, the transformed English language had replaced Norman French as the court tongue.
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But they kept
Dieu et mon droit. I guess it was just too darn expensive to buy all new towels each time the kids got married!
Quote:
Originally Posted by Deepwaters
The Great Vowel shift is indeed the main difference between Middle and Modern English, a difference in pronunciation rather than in writing.
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Deep, could you speak to the following question? I suppose oft-repeated hand-copying of the Bible and other classics would tend to have a conservative effect on spelling. But I have typically been told that all the same (perhaps because of written messages, charters, etc.) English spelling was highly idiosyncratic for much of its history, typically guided by the personal phonetic principles of the document author rather than any orthodoxy. In the United States, public schools only took up a serious effort to regularize spelling in the late 19th century. As a result, if you do genealogy research which reaches back far enough, you are advised to look for variants of FAMILY NAME spelling, even for educated families! So, in what sense do we mean that the Great Vowel Shift is a "difference in pronunciation rather than in spelling," when spelling is so undisciplined? Do classics like the Bible provide the invariant spelling orthodoxy, despite any popular inconsistency in spelling?
And I think it is interesting to raise methodological questions. In an age before the objective recording of audio (i.e. temporal air pressure variation), our evidence of pronunciation rests on highly imperfect written-evidence tricks like puns and rhymed verse. I guess until we perfect the time machine, there will always be room for new works on pre-audio-recording-era pronunciation as we uncover new written works or look at old ones again with new tools, some of which may rely upon computer analysis too labor-intensive to have been done earlier. You may recall that in the film "Goodbye, Mr. Chips," Mr. Chipping rebels against reformed Latin pronunciation, viz. the change between the soft and hard pronunciation of the letter "C." A naive person might have thought that by Victorian times no new legalistic scholarship might have succeeded in remaking so basic a principle in the absence of undebatable objective evidence.