Category: Linguistics

Q: I tuned in late to the discussion on WNYC about Elizabethan English, but did Pat really say Shakespeare spoke like an American? How does she know what he sounded like? I didn’t realize Francis Bacon had invented the tape recorder.

A: The short answer is that Shakespeare didn’t sound just like an American, but his accent was probably more NBC than BBC.

We know what Shakespeare might have sounded like because linguists have reconstructed the sounds of Elizabethan speech (we’ll soon explain how), and it’s very different from the standard modern British accent, known as Received Pronunciation.

This isn’t as startling as it sounds. We’ve written before on our blog about the fact that the familiar characteristics of the modern British accent developed relatively recently, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

It was after the American Revolution that the British began using the broad a (as in PAHST for “past”), dropping their r’s (as in FAH for “far”), and losing syllables (saying SEC-ruh-tree for “secretary,” NESS-a-sree for “necessary”), and so on.

Meanwhile, colonists in North America retained many features of pre-Revolutionary British speech.

We know this because people wrote about these changes at the time they were happening—in books on speech and elocution, in articles in contemporary newspapers and journals, in pronouncing dictionaries, and so on.

Now, as Pat said on WNYC the other day, there’s been a revival of interest in reconstructing the sounds of British speech as it was even further back, at the dawn of the Early Modern English period.

This was around 1600, Shakespeare’s time, and it’s appropriate that this new interest in period speech was inspired by a project at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre in London.

The Globe, which was reconstructed in 1997, mounted a production of Romeo and Juliet in 2004 with the actors speaking as they would have in Shakespeare’s day.

Since then, other theaters, directors, and acting companies have joined with language experts and become interested in what’s known as Original Pronunciation.

Several productions have been mounted in Britain and the United States, and an Off Broadway production of Macbeth will be announced later this fall.

The examples of Elizabethan speech that were played during Pat’s appearance on WNYC came from a new CD, Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation, produced by the British Library and distributed by the University of Chicago Press.

To our ears, the actors’ accent sounds like a mix of American and Irish English, with a little Aussie thrown in.

How do scholars know what English sounded like circa 1600? As it happens, there’s plenty of evidence to go on.

For one thing, groundbreaking work had already been done in this area back in the 1950s.

There have been at least two  previous studies of Original Pronunciation, one in the UK by John Barton of Cambridge, and one in the US by Helge Kökeritz at Yale. Kökeritz in fact made the first systematic attempt to identify the Elizabethan sound system, according to several sources.

In a booklet that comes with the British Library CD, the linguist David Crystal explains much of the scholarship that has gone into the reconstruction of these sounds.

First, contemporary authors wrote commentaries on the pronunciation of their day.

Ben Jonson, for instance, who was a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote a book on grammar in which he discussed the proper sounding of r after a vowel, as in “far” and “heart.” He described it as “growly.”

Second, we have the evidence of the spellings Shakespeare used. In those days, spelling was not yet standardized, and people spelled words as they sounded to them.

Shakespeare originally spelled the word “film” (meaning a membrane) as “philom”—so it would have had two syllables, “fillum.” As we know, that’s the pronunciation of “film” used by the Irish today.

Third, there are the rhythms, puns, and rhymes Shakespeare used, many of which don’t quite work in modern English—either British or American.

When we hear some of these passages recited in Original Pronunciation, we can appreciate many of the puns and rhymes that Shakespeare intended.

For instance, in King Henry IV, Part I, Prince Hal demands proof of some story Falstaff has just told, and asks him his reasons. Falstaff says, “If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries, I would give no man a reason upon compulsion.”

Why “as plentiful as blackberries”? Well, there’s a pun there, but it’s missed in modern English. When you listen to that same passage in Original Pronunciation, the pun becomes apparent, because the word “reason” was pronounced “raisin”—“If raisins were as plentiful as blackberries.…”

Many Shakespearean puns that are missed in modern English are naughty ones, since the words “lines” and “loins” sound the same in Original Pronunciation, as do “hour” and “whore.”

The difference that pronunciation has on rhymes is astonishing, too.

Shakespeare wrote 154 sonnets, and two-thirds of them have rhymes that don’t work in today’s English, according to Crystal. But in Original Pronunciation, we’re able to hear them as the Elizabethans did.

To mention just one example, the last lines of Sonnet 116 read: “If this be error and upon me proved, / I never writ, nor no man ever loved.”

In modern English, “proved” and “loved” don’t rhyme. But in Original Pronunciation, they do. They sound like “pruvved” and “luvved,” though even that spelling doesn’t quite get the sound across. There’s a hint of ”oo” in that vowel.

In listening to the recording, we noticed many other important differences between RP (modern Received Pronunciation) and OP (Original Pronunciation). A lot of the OP sounds would be familiar to American ears.

The words “bath” and “France,” for example, sound in OP much as they do today in the US; the a vowel is flat, instead of broad (“ah”).

And in OP we hear the r sounds in “far,” “star,” “return,” “wherefore,” and “world” (which sounds like a cross between “whirled” and “whorled”; in RP it sounds like WULD).

In OP, we can clearly hear both the r and the t in “fortune.” It comes out like FOR-tun. Today, in American English it’s pronounced FOR-chun, while in RP it sounds like FOH-tyoon.

In Elizabethan speech, linguists say, you can find traces of all the modern accents of English. On the CD, you’ll hear sounds of the English spoken today in America, Australia, Wales, Ireland, and the West Country of Britain.

No one’s suggesting that from now on, all Shakespeare should be done in Original Pronunciation. But since many productions boast of authentic period clothing, music, instruments, and so on, it’s valuable that we now can have period speech as well.

As for your comment about Bacon, no, he certainly didn’t invent the tape recorder. But he was the first person to use the adjective “electric” in writing, according to citations in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Bacon used the term around 1626 to describe a substance, like amber, capable of developing static electricity when rubbed.

However, Thomas Browne is credited with first using the adjective (spelled “electrick”) as well as the noun “electricity” in its modern sense, in Pseudodoxia Epidemica, a 1646 book debunking myths about science.

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Q: You’ve written previously that the British habit of contracting the next to last syllable in words like “secretary” and “territory” is fairly recent. What about the contracted British pronunciation of place names like “Worcester,” “Gloucester,” and “Leicester”? I’m a curious Yank who wonders when and how this occurred.

A: As you say, we’ve written on our blog and in our books about the development of those speech characteristics we now associate with the modern British accent.

We’ve had several posts about the subject and we discuss it in Origins of the Specious, our book about language myths. The New York Times website includes a large excerpt from the chapter in Origins about differences between American and British English.

Many characteristics of modern British speech—like the syllable-dropping in “secretary”—developed in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

But that’s not the case with the clipped pronunciation of “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester.” That abbreviated way of pronouncing place names ending in “-cester” is quite a bit older—old enough to show up in Shakeseare and to accompany the English-speaking Colonists to the New World.

As you know, the names of those English cities are much easier to say than to write. They sound like WOOS-ter (with the “oo” of “wood”), GLOSS-ter, and LESS-ter.

The standard pronunciations (and the only ones given in the Oxford English Dictionary) call for pronouncing the final “-cester” as “ster.”

The names of the corresponding counties—“Worcestershire,” “Leicestershire,” and “Gloucestershire”—are pronounced the same way, except that each has another syllable (“sher”) at the end.

The British aren’t the only ones who say the names that way. Massachusetts also has cities named Worcester, Leicester, and Gloucester, pronounced as if they were spelled “Wooster,” “Lester,” and “Gloster.”

The OED doesn’t give etymologies for these place names. But there are clues in the dictionary’s entry for “chester,” a long-defunct noun that originally meant a Roman encampment in ancient Britain.

This word, spelled ceaster in Old English writings, comes from the Latin castra (camp), and is “often applied to places in Britain which had been originally Roman encampments,” the OED says.

“This is one of the best ascertained of the Latin words adopted by the Angles and Saxons during the conquest of Britain,” the dictionary adds.

The oldest citation for the use of the word in writing is from the mid-800s. But it existed even earlier, before English was written. As Oxford notes, it’s been reconstructed as cæstra in the prehistoric Old English of the 400s to 500s.

The word still exists today in place names ending in “-cester,” “-caster,” and “-chester.” Those ending in “-caster” and “-chester” are pronounced as written, as in “Lancaster” and “Winchester.”

Why is “-cester” given a clipped pronunciation in place names? The OED says only that “the history of the form written -cester, of which only -ster is pronounced (in Worcester, Bicester, etc.), is obscure.”

It’s difficult to trace the pronunciations of place names, since we have only written records to go by, and many old pronouncing dictionaries don’t include place names.

Two that do, however, might lead us to believe that the “-ster” pronunciation developed  in the early 18th century.

Thomas Dyche, in A Guide to the English Tongue (1709), gives three-syllable pronunciations for the three cities, which he renders as “Wor-ce-ster,” “Lei-ce-ster,” and “Glou-ce-ster.”

Half a century later, William Johnston’s A Pronouncing and Spelling Dictionary (1764), in a table devoted to “Words With Quiescent Consonants,” says the “c” is not pronounced in “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester.” (This makes them two-syllable words.)

So it would seem at first glance that the “-ster” pronunciation established itself sometime between 1709 and 1764, assuming these lexicographers were in touch with local usage.

However, as a reader of the blog points out, the names “Worcester,” “Leicester,” and “Gloucester” appear dozens of times in the works of Shakespeare, and “scansion almost always requires two-syllable pronunciations of these words.” (Scansion is analysis of verse to show its meter.)

Here are some two-syllable examples from Shakespeare: “At worcester must his body be interr’d” (King John); “He is, my lord, and safe in leicester town” (Richard III); “As ’tis said, the bastard son of gloucester” (King Lear).

Well, that takes us back to square one. It won’t even help us to analyze the spellings of these words in Old English. The historical spellings of place names are hard to pin down with any certainty.

As Randolph Quirk and Sherman M. Kuhn pointed out in a 1955 article in the journal Language, Old English scribes tended to respell place names freely.

As an example, they wrote, “Four spellings of Worcester occur in two copies of a single document.” The spellings were Wigra Ceastre, Weogerna ceastre, Wegerna ceaster and Wigerna cestre.

“Obviously,” Quirk and Kuhn commented, “somebody altered something, and probably not all of the spellings cited represent local usage.”

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