I'm fascinated in how Scots developed from middle English, the Doric accent, etc
9 months ago | 5
This is amazing to hear! I would absolutely love to see a video where you reconstruct and record some of Alexander John Ellis’s dialects from the 19th century. I don’t think it would be too difficult because he recorded them phonetically. I loved the Warwickshire accent in the latest Shakespeare video. You could record 5 or 10 dialects from around England to create a sort of dialect map of the 19th century. I would pay large amounts of money to see this if I had any.
9 months ago (edited) | 8
Conservative southern dialects with preserved case and gender forms into the 1300s.
9 months ago | 8
I’d like to hear how the Irish accent speaking English evolved into what it is today. I’m Irish/english. Love your channel.
9 months ago | 4
As someone from Australia, where our dialects are much less distinct than UK ones, I'll be fascinated to see what you come up with 🙂
9 months ago | 1
Are there any specific remnants of old/middle English that can be traced through to modern regional dialects?
9 months ago | 18
The AB language of the West Midlands! And a look at the transitional stages of 12th/13th century (southern) dialects like the Winteney Rule of St. Benedict (British Library MS. Cotton Claudius D. III), Bodley MS. 343 and the Hatton Gospels (Bodley MS. Hatton 38). There isn't too much of “pure” South-Western (Wessex) Middle English material, as far as I could see, but we have a song in that dialect: Sumer is icumen in.
9 months ago (edited) | 6
So glad you’re making this content! It’s a crazy amount of effort and specificity and I really appreciate it
9 months ago | 0
I hope to see the great vowel shift being told as a story of vowels pushing on each other, from where it started, how long it took and where it ended. It's just fascinating how people just suddenly begin to pronounce things so drastically differently.
9 months ago (edited) | 0
Scouse please, in this context. Particularly the Satire of the Three Estates by Sir David Lindsay, read out at the opening of Scottish Parliament in 1999. Lindsay is a lesser-acknowledged Scots great, whom James I (Elizabeth I's son and successor), commissioned to write the Satire, in Middle English and in Latin. I'd of course be fascinated to see the intersection of Hebrides Gaelic and Norwegians and the Irish.
9 months ago (edited) | 2
One point which worries me is the two ways of pronouncing modern French, (1) Ordinary speech, in which there are a lot of silent letters, and (2) Poetry and Song, in which final "e" is always pronounced. Was that already a thing in the Middle English period and, since the likes of Chaucer used French spelling conventions, should we also assume that the sounds required to make his verses scan were preserved in prose and everyday speech?
9 months ago | 2
I 1st read Sir Gawain and the Green Knight aged 17 1st year degree. Our Tutor, a southener, commented that its best read by someone with a northern accent. I rather liked Simon Armitage's take on it. But my favourite poem of the Gawain Poet. Is The Pearl. So beautifully constructed. So moving. But in the end hopeful.
9 months ago (edited) | 1
As I understand it, much of English’s influence comes from London but what other accents from that time were influential on English’s development?
9 months ago | 1
Harry Hotspur was known to speak with a northern dialect, from contemporary accounts. More on that would interest me. The difference between northern and southern vowel pronunciation... why and how. 👍
9 months ago | 0
This might be a very niche question (and probably not what you meant by, 'specific questions' but I'll just put this here just in case anyone has any info on the subject) but do we have any evidence on what Middle English might have sounded like in Wales? Obviously, English didn't become the dominant language of Wales until the 20th century, so I wouldn't be surprised if we had very little info on what the varieties of Middle English spoken in Wales sounded like. Like, would Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudur (Or Owen Tudor as he was known in England) have had a distinctly Welsh accent when he spoke English (considering it was probably his second language and so on)?
9 months ago (edited) | 1
I'd like to know how onomatopoeia and animal noises were pronounced.
9 months ago | 8
There is also the difference between this NW Dialect of Gawain and that of Piers Plowman Chaucer, of course, is practically modern. But such fun.
9 months ago (edited) | 0
Simon Roper
I've started to work on the Middle English counterpart to my really long Old English pronunciation video. As we've established something of a baseline in the Old English one, I'm going to be focusing more on the development of different dialects over time. Let me know if there are any specific questions you'd like addressed :)
9 months ago | [YT] | 719