Well, let’s see, now: Neo has weighed in on the Definite Article Pronunciation/thee-thuh controversy—the meme that Anchoress started, and I responded to. Neo fully supports the custom of using “thee” when the following word begins with a vowel. I had not wanted to think that I did that, but as I listen to myself talk I realize that I do; it’s just that this has been unconscious.
Neo discusses Chaucer, and the way English has changed since he wrote The Canterbury Tales. (I want to write “The Cambry Tales,” but then I’d have to discuss the “pooter leat,” and that would lead us to the fact that the word pooter seems to have two distinct modern meanings: “computer,” and “vagina.” For examples of the first use, see any post at Darleen’s Place. For examples of the second, see every other post at The Ace of Spades Headquarters. The first is an obvious abbreviation; the second appears to be a coinage based upon one of the romance languages, or maybe a product of Ace’s feverish mind.)
This bring us to another issue that I think about a lot, but don’t like to discuss, because it gets me wound up: the evolution of English, especially with respect to the way words are pronounced. It seems to me that the rate of change has accelerated. And as a blogger, I don’t necessarily want to admit that I might. Be. Part. Of. That. Process.
See? I did it. I like to pose as a linguistic conservative, someone standing athwart modern usage, yelling “stop!” But in fact, as that little string of sentence fragments above demonstrates, I am perfectly capable of picking up the worst idioms the internet culture has to offer. (Srsly.)
But what I don’t like—even more than being surrounded by linguistic corruption on television, radio, and the internet, and seeing myself engage in it when it suits my hypocritical fancy—is not being certain how words really were pronounced in Chaucer’s day. Neo writes about the Great Vowel Shift, and my best guy friend, Count Linguist, tells me that we know how English words were pronounced in any given century. And I want to believe; really, I do. But he’s never convinced me, because I have yet to hear any actual recordings from that time.
“We can go by the way things were spelled,” he explains.
“But in English, spellings don’t necessarily reflect pronunciation, ” I reply. “And at any rate, how would you know which sounds went with which particular marks on a page? Particularly given that so many couldn’t read or write so long ago? How many centuries’ worth of extrapolation are you doing?”
“Well, we can tell by spelling,” he answers. Around then, my head usually threatens to explode, and I have to drink a glass of red wine very very quickly and change the subject to something safe, like politics.
I am hoping that there are a few present-day linguists and English-language historians who have managed to accomplish time travel, and that they’ve collected speech samples that a dozen or so others have been allowed to listen to.
Some of these elect, one hopes, have verified the theory of The Great [Post-Chaucherian] Vowel Shift by studying those samples.
Because otherwise everything the linguists tell me just like the sounding of brass, or the tinkling of cymbals. 4real.
; ?>/images/user.png)
; ?>/images/email.png)
; ?>/images/feed.png)
{ 2 trackbacks }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Language is an instrument. One can play jazz therewith, or sound a pedantic ass. Just like I was (deliberately) on your previous post with the talk of the cardinality of the word “data”. đ
This bring us to another issue that I think about a lot, but donât like to discuss, because it gets me wound up: the evolution of English, especially with respect to the way words are pronounced. It seems to me that the rate of change has accelerated. And as a blogger, I donât necessarily want to admit that I might. Be. Part. Of. That. Process.
See? I did it. I like to pose as a linguistic conservative, someone standing athwart modern usage, yelling âstop!â But in fact, as that little string of sentence fragments above demonstrates, I am perfectly capable of picking up the worst idioms the internet culture has to offer. (Srsly.)
I must confess, Liitle Miss A., that I have an immensely hard time understanding your prose. All the sentences are just fine. In fact they are everything an editor such as yourself could want. And you provide your own literary justification in context for your use of the sentence fragments, though you don’t seem to realize it, which is that you are stepping into the metalanguage to discuss language. But I am completely bewildered by the sense of the sentences when they are put together in paragraphs.
We have been brought [somehow] to an issue, contemporary pronunciation, which you really don’t want to talk about since it gets you all steamed up. [Presumably this is the “topic sentence” my English teachers used to get all dithery over.] The only remark that you are prepared to make about it is that the change seems to have accelerated.
Now that part of the paragraph appears to be a logical continuation of the following sentence: Neo fully supports the custom of using âtheeâ when the following word begins with a vowel. I had not wanted to think that I did that, but as I listen to myself talk I realize that I do; itâs just that this has been unconscious. But the connection is obliterated by an intervening paragraph starting with a different topic sentence about Chaucer, which then shifts to a four sentence parenthetical digression and leaves that topic sentence itself hanging undeveloped and twisting in the wind.
After you have told us that phonological change is accelerating, we are given to understand that “as a blogger”, you don’t like to admit that you are part of “that process”. What process? Turning thuh to thee? The evolution of English as a whole? The evolution of English pronunciation? The contemporary acceleration of this? Or all of them together?
Moreover, since you don’t like to admit it as a blogger, do you like to admit it as a editor, as a person who wears glasses and sometimes brandishes a pistol, or as a hobbyist gourmet cook? Or do you mean that by blogging itself you are part of that process, whatever process it finally turns out to be.
Then we reach the logical false antithesis. Posing as a linguistic conservative is not the opposite of being perfectly capable of picking up the worst idioms the internet culture has to offer. Even being a linguistic conservative is not the opposite of it since you might have picked them up in a fit of absence of mind and without intending to, just like you picked up saying thee.
Also, your use of the sentence fragments in the prior paragraph doesn’t demonstrate your picking up of bad idioms in the least, it is a patent rhetorical device you have assumed for talking about them. This is made clearer by the metalanguage/language distinction above. Had you quoted one of your own passages where you used such fragments without thinking, then your acquisition of bad idioms would have been “demonstrated”.
I gather the point of all this is you want to know how we can know the pronunciation of English from the past. Well, we can’t “know” it, but we can make a reasonably good guess about it, and this from spelling, as Count Linguist states.
What he does not make clear is that we do it in different way PD [pre-Dictionary] than AD [after Dictionary]. Before dictionaries, a writer has no basis for spelling words other than their sound, so text is in this case is a highly likely description of the oral pronunciation. After Dictionaries, we have direct descriptions of the pronunciation an “educated” speaker is supposed to be using.
So what about the uneducated folks? Noah Webster’s first dictionary probably describes very well how Mark Twain pronounced English in private life. And, in Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain himself gives phonetic descriptions of the various white dialects along the Mississippi from Upper Missouri to somewhere in Arkansas ca.1840. In fact, prior to the main text Twain emphasized that he would do this. Huck speaks the Polk County white dialect, Jim speaks the Polk County black dialect.
Huck does not speak quite the same way as the feuding families a little further down the River, who do not speak like Colonel Sherburn, or the townspeople that the King and Duke bilked with the Royal Nonesuch, Or, finally, as Aunt Sally does at the end of the book. So we look to educated speakers schooled to a pronunciation norm to describe the variants.
Finally, poetry is our richest source of evidence for English pronunciation at any given time. Between assonance, consonance, alliteration, stress meters, and quantitative meters we have a rich resource for good guesses about pronunciation contemporary to the poem.
Having said this, I would be curious to know which stage of English pronunciation is the right one, which dialect of the various English speakers here and abroad comes closest to it, and what definitive dictionary describes it?
Why don’t you just ask me on a case-by-case basis? That might be simpler . . .
You mis-spelled vjayjay.
I’m sorry. I was just so full of piss and vinegar when I wrote that post . . .
Imagine for a moment that you’re creating written language for the very first time. You’re trying to represent sounds with these little pictures you borrowed off the Egyptians, or the Phoenicians. The main goal of your work is to enable someone else to look at your item, “read” the little pictures aloud, and produce words they recognize by sound. You’re not going to confuse the issue with “silent” letters. Every letter is going to equate to a recognizable sound in the language. This is how writing began. It’s also why there are eleventy-billion different variations on “spelling” in pretty much every language prior to the invention of the printing press. Our ancestors had no idea of “proper” spelling, they spelled as it sounded, so a word might be rendered quite differently, depending upon the spoken dialect of the writer. So your friend is quite correct; we know “how it sounded” because we can look at documents in various forms of old English and see the regional and chronological variation in sounds. Where did we get all these silent letters and oddly pronounced letters? Language contact. English borrows wholesale from other languages, and tends to follow the original pronunciation from where we got it, in how we spell it. Norman French subbed “Wuh” for French “Guh” and we get warrant and William, not garant and Guillaume. Then sometimes we double dip; and end up with things like “skirt” and “shirt” from the same loanword. Language change happens. Words slur together and pick up bits from the words around them. An “eke” name becomes “a nickname”, a “naranji” becomes “an orange.” Writing preserves earlier forms of a word for posterity; the word changes (as all words do) in the mouths of generations of speakers, but we keep writing it the way we read it. So we end up with words with silent letters, or which preserve sounds that have softened or vanished.