[ SECRET POST #2085 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #2085 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 04 pages, 077 secrets from Secret Submission Post #298.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 1 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

[(Anonymous)]

With English specifically, the easiest-to-understand method is going back to the written record; so things like words that have fallen out of use or grammatical constructions that are obsolete are recorded in the early writing. Also, early English spelling was largely phonetic - not perfectly, because some of the letters meant different things back then, but if you, say, go to Chaucer and pronounce every word exactly how he spelled it (even 'knight') you'll be a lot closer to his pronunciation (not really *that* close, but enough closer that Chaucer would probably be able to understand you, unlike if you spoke your modern accent.) And it will rhyme and have much better meter - rhyme and meter being two other ways of figuring out old pronunciation; you probably know some old poems or nursery rhymes with words that *just don't rhyme* even though it seems like they should. Well, they probably did when they were first written.

There's also all sorts of other ways to guess at pronunciation from the written record - puns and jokes, people trying to transcribe other dialects, the way words and names in one language are spelled by speakers of another (this is how they got started on Ancient Egyptian pronunciation), if you're really lucky actual language texts that discuss pronunciation - none of them are perfect, but when you put them all together, you get some ideas about how some things sounded.

(for languages with no written record, this is a lot harder, but you can still get some clues from things like nursery rhymes, and traditional place-names which will often preserve old pronunciations, and so on.)

Then you take all those clues, combine them with general linguistic theory (like anon above me is talking about), and make a *lot* of comparisons. One of the rules is that if a sound changes a certain way in one word, it's likely to change the same way in most words - so if, say, "house" and "mouse" both used to rhyme with "goose", you can guess that "louse" and "grouse" probably did too. (then you look at other comparisons to figure out rules why "goose" *didn't* change.)

There are enough rules like this that with enough comparisons and enough analysis, they can even work out dictionaries for whole ancient languages there is *no* written record of whatsoever, just by deducing back from how modern languages have changed.

As regards British vs. American vs. Age: the idea that there is less change on the periphery of a culture than in the core is part of it, yes. Although that's become less accepted with the british vs. american language thing lately (especially because there's a *lot* of identity politics involved in calling people things like "peripheral" or "more authentic", as you might guess.) But you can also trace back specific pronunciations and word usages and say 'yes, more of this is closer to what was being used in this other place and time'.

A lot of the regional British accents are at least as 'close' as General American to certain Medieval dialects (of which there were many - Chaucer's London-ish dialect wasn't necessarily even intelligible to people writing poetry in northern England at the time - so it doesn't really make sense to talk about *one* medieval English) but RP (aka BBC English, the Queen's English, Public School accent) is specifically more distant from older Englishes than most other dialects - it's been largely an accent of educated, middle-to-upper-class people, and thus is believed to have had a lot more influence, over time, from other modern languages, and from grammarians teaching arbitrary rules, than a lot of the regional and colonial accents.

[(Anonymous)]

This is insanely interesting; thanks so much!

Off to buy a book about the evolution of spoken English.