Historical Linguistics 3130 A

Examples of historical varieties of English

Old English

The example of Old English that I played in class is from The Funeral of Scyld Scefing (click on the large decorative initials to hear it being read). There is also a "Modern English" translation on that site.

The page entitled A (Very) Brief History of the English Language has examples of The Lord's Prayer in Old English (with audio), and (text only) Middle English, and Early Modern English. You might notice that the dates on this page don't exactly match what I told you in class. Exact dates for stages like this are somewhat arbitrary.

Middle English

The Prologue to Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales with audio is at http://web1.umkc.edu/lib/engelond/prologue.htm. If you listen to the whole Web page, you'll hear quite a bit more than what we heard in class. If you have a bit of extra time, see if you can find "rules" for what kinds of changes have happened since then.

Early Modern English

The Early Modern English example we looked at was from King Arthur Aloud. Click on the title, "Malory from The Book of Tristram de Lyones: 'Launcelot and Elaine'" to hear it being read. This is from the very earliest period of Early Modern English, but it is definitely not being read with a Middle English "accent."

I also mentioned the recent performance of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet with the lines pronounced as they would have been performed originally. The book about how this was done is called Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. It was written by Prof. David Crystal, author of The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language and The Cambridge encyclopedia of language among numerous other books. If you follow the Performing Shakespeare link to Amazon.com, there is an except from the book and it might be interesting to take a quick look at it. What you get when you click on "Excerpt" is not very interesting in my opinion, but if you click on "Surprise Me," you'll might like to look at a couple of pages from some random place in the book. There were several issues in setting up the Globe Experiment, including giving regional accents to characters from various parts of England, and giving lower class characters appropriately different accents from higher class speakers.