Q: Did “word” once rhyme with “afford” and “sword,” as it seems to do in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 79 and A Midsummer Night’s Dream?
A: Yes, the noun “word” rhymes with the verb “afford” and the noun “sword” in those two works. Here are the relevant passages:
He lends thee virtue and he stole that word
From thy behavior; beauty doth he give
And found it in thy cheek; he can afford
No praise to thee but what in thee doth live.
—Sonnet 79Where is Demetrius? O, how fit a word
Is that vile name to perish on my sword!
—A Midsummer Night’s Dream
In The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation (2016), the linguist David Crystal uses the International Phonetic Alphabet for the pronunciations of the three words: wɔːɹd, əˈfɔːɹd, and sɔːɹd.
The ɔː in Original Pronunciation represents the “aw” sound of “thought” in modern English while the ɹ denotes the “r” sound of “bard” in standard American dictionaries. This “r” isn’t pronounced in standard British dictionaries.
So “afford” and “sword” in the early modern English of Shakespeare sounded much like their pronunciations in contemporary American dictionaries, while “word” sounded like the standard American pronunciation of “ward.”
Crystal writes that “historical phonologists use several types of data to reconstruct the sound system from a period before the advent of audio-recording.”
“For the Elizabethan period,” he says, “chief among them are spellings and rhymes, which—judiciously interpreted, and supplemented by the observations of contemporary writers on language—provide most of the information we need in order to reconstruct OP.”
According to Crystal, Shakespeare spelled the noun “word” variously as “word,” “worde,” “ ’ord,” and “ ’ort.” In addition to “afford” and “sword,” it rhymed with “board,” “ford,” “Ford,” and “lord” in various Shakespearean works.
In a 2012 post about OP, we note that Ben Jonson, one of Shakespeare’s contemporaries, said the proper pronunciation of “r” after a vowel, as in “far” or “heart,” sounded “growly.”
Crystal points out that Elizabethan speakers used various regional accents in OP, just as speakers today use various accents in speaking contemporary English.
“OP is a phonology—a sound system—which would have been realized in a variety of accents, all of which were different in certain respects from the variety we find in present-day English,” he says.
So how did Shakespeare sound when he spoke OP? “We know nothing about how Shakespeare himself spoke,” Crystal writes, “though we can conjecture that his accent would have been a mixture of Warwickshire and London.”
When “word” first appeared In Old English, spoken from around 450 to 1150, it had many senses, including an utterance, a statement, a speech, lyrics, news, gossip, fame, a command or request, a promise or pledge, and a maxim or proverb.
In the late 10th or early 11th century, the noun took on its usual modern sense: a meaningful element of speech or writing used by itself or with others to form sentences.
The OED defines this sense more expansively. Here’s the first half of its definition: “Any of the sequences of one or more sounds or morphemes (intuitively recognized by native speakers as) constituting the basic units of meaningful speech used in forming a sentence or utterance in a language (and in most writing systems normally separated by spaces).”
The dictionary’s earliest example, which we’ve expanded, is from an Old English and Latin passage in a grammar book written by the Benedictine abbot and scholar Ælfric of Eynsham (circa 950 to 1010):
“Of ðam syndon fif VOCALES, þæt synd clypiendlice: a, e, i, o, u. das fif stafas seteowjad heora naman purh hi sylfe and biitan dam stafum ne maeg nan word beon awriten.”
(“Of these [the letters of the alphabet] are five VOWELS, which are called: a, e, i, o, u. These five letters are named for their sounds, and no word can be written without them.”)
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