‘Frenssh’ as it was ‘spak’ in medieval England

https://blogs.bl.uk/digitisedmanuscripts/2021/04/frenssh-as-it-was-spak.html

by pepys • 5 years ago

101 46 5 years ago

blogs.bl.uk

ggm5• 5 years ago

I like how people can "mine" historical texts with rhyme structure, to infer pronunciation shifts.

The related cultural overhang is twofold: the english barony probably welcomed the divergence. yes, they wanted to seem posh in french speaking lands, but they had to deny any french right to english (norman) lands. Also, the law demanded that a lot of terms be defined in french and "not french" to ensure there was no ambiguity.

Thus "without let or hindrance" and the other "legal doublets" many of which are bridging the gap as english became dominant.

CobrastanJorji• 5 years ago

It's fascinating, but I wonder how one accounts for bad poets or works that otherwise cheat a good rhyme for artistic reasons? Surely linguists 500 years from now aren't wouldn't want to look back on 2chainz's "My favorite dish is turkey lasagna / Even my pajamas designer" and decide that "lasagna" and "designer" rhymed. (I mean, they'll have recordings, but you get the idea).

cylon13• 5 years ago

They kinda do rhyme with the right enunciation. How is that bad poetry or cheating? Language is complex and bending how you say things is part of good rhyme. I imagine historical linguists are very familiar with this and factor it into their work.

woah• 5 years ago

They do rhyme

jfengel• 5 years ago

It's always a hazard. All reconstructions have to be taken with a grain of salt.

"Slant rhymes" like this have been used throughout history. Shakespeare is known to have used them in some places: some of his rhymes aren't consistent through his works.

It does help that sound change isn't arbitrary. When one sound changes, other sounds change as well. An entire category of consonants may lose or gain voicing, or shift in point of articulation. When one vowel changes to another, a lot of words can become homonyms, so usually every single vowel changes at once. These are called Chain Shifts:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chain_shift

So a single instance of a rhyme is a weak piece of evidence, but when you take into account all of the texts at the time -- and the texts from surrounding times, both before and after -- you can make a good hypothesis. That hypothesis can then be tested against future discoveries, and modify as appropriate.

That's why all Proto Indo European reconstructions are marked with an * to say "We've never actually heard this word so we don't know if anybody ever said it". They're aware that all hypotheses are tentative. But that's how progress is made.

Ichthypresbyter2• 5 years ago

One particularly interesting pair of legal doublets are the old forms of a murder and manslaughter indictment, used in England until 1915.

For murder:

That [the defendant] did feloniously, wilfully and of his Malice aforethought kill and murder [the deceased]

For manslaughter:

That [the defendant] did feloniously kill and slay [the deceased]

In this case, "kill", "murder" and "slay" are all Germanic words, though "murder" may have gone into French and then back into English, which is why it has the extra R compared to German "Mord" and Dutch "moord".

pgcj_poster• 5 years ago

Are there any communities similar to Hacker News where humanities-related stories like this show up more often?

xeromal• 5 years ago

Maybe the english or literature stackoverflow?

sellyme3• 5 years ago

While the various profession Stacks have some extremely high quality stuff that's worth discovering even for someone not in that field, most of them unfortunately have an extremely limited "supply", as the Q&A format limits the ability for people to just discuss interesting things they found.

It's definitely worth reading through the top questions on those two stacks, but sadly it's not an activity that will occupy you for very long.

someperson• 5 years ago

I don't have a direct answer but you may find Xidnaf's YouTube channel's lingustics coverage interesting https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkzVOXKXfQk and TED Ed YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIzFz9T5rhI

You may find watching such YouTube videos produces good algorithm recommendations, and also it may lead you to associated subreddit and Discord communities that you may find helpful

httpsterio• 5 years ago

Jstor Daily is not a community, but a very interesting news site with this type of news.

adrianN• 5 years ago

I enjoy reading language log https://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/

leonry• 5 years ago

I sometimes end up at some blog hosted by Hypotheses (https://hypotheses.org), self-dubbed as a "platform for humanities and social science research blogs". The quality of the posts is usually good. Blogs are in English, Spanish, French or German.

Veen• 5 years ago

I'm not aware of any community, but Arts and Letters Daily often highlights interesting content, as does 3 Quarks Daily.

sorokod• 5 years ago

Not very similar to HN but I am consistently impressed by the amount of knowledge people have on http://languagehat.com/

coldpie• 5 years ago

More on the "community" side than the "news" side, but the Something Awful forums has a subforum with several threads that could be relevant: https://forums.somethingawful.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=1...

anateus• 5 years ago

If you're interested to hear what both Middle English and bits of French and other languages from the time sounded like, here's a reading of John Skelton's "Speke Parott" poem from 1521: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCckcTHWqKw

It's a very learned parrot!

supermatt2• 5 years ago

It seems googling for "what did middle english sound like" often comes up with a link to this video as the definitive example, but how do we know it was pronounced phonetically, or what the phonemes were?

It sounds lovely, and I would like to imagine it sounding like that - but I don't see how we can reconstruct its pronunciation reliably over 500 years later.

laxmis• 5 years ago

You might be surprised. Phonetics and historical linguistics are proper subjects of study, not quackery. I've heard teachers say that in England people used to pronounce Latin much like English until the specialists rescued much of the original pronunciation of Latin for the public. Today every Latin primer, especially the British and the American ones, insist that you read Latin in the reconstructed way.

WS Allen in his book, Vox Latina, actually explains how Latin might have been pronounced in the Roman period. Interestingly his theories have universal acceptance today.

dwohnitmok• 5 years ago

You can't ever be 100% sure, but there's a variety of ways to get confidence that you're getting close.

Rhyming lines in poetry are a great way to constrain what the various phonemes were. The meter is also a great way to back out what sounds were silent and which were not. (Speaking of which I disagree with the video's choice to pronounce a lot of the final "-e"s in words; that's a trait of early Middle English that was already on its way out by the time of Chaucer and its pretty clear from certain rhyme choices that it's silent in a lot of Skelton's words: see how e.g. Skelton rhymes "Jerusalem" with "creme" and how everything is nice iambs, unless you start pronouncing "-e"s everywhere).

500 years is also within a time horizon where you can get pretty reliable internal reconstruction clues (examining inconsistencies in modern English and thinking about what common features might have led to those inconsistencies) to try to get a better grasp of the phonemic inventory of a language.

Spelling also is a great clue into what the phonemes of the language were (although this is complicated by digraphs and trigraphs).

Then you can use a variety of methods to try to get an idea of what the phonetic realizations of those phonemes were. In this poem in particular we have English words rhymed with foreign words which is a great clue. You can also compare different dialects of English to try to figure out what the original sound is of a word that has now fractured into many different pronunciations.

And of course you can examine what people of the time say about the pronunciation of their own language (this is how we e.g. are pretty confident in r being a trill or a tap, based on descriptions from both domestic and foreign speakers, see e.g. https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/298566/why-and-w... for a great summary of some of the evidence).

All in all it's kind of like playing a game of Sudoku. Rhyming and other clues can set up a set of relationships among different sounds and what would seem like an otherwise sparse set of clues (a comment by some writer here, a common misspelling there, some translation here) can cause cascades of phonetic realizations of different phonemes that magnify the impact of those clues.

And the sanity check to make sure that all this makes sense is being able to provide reconstructed sounds that are consistent with new descriptions, rhyming patterns, and foreign transcriptions as new evidence rolls in over time.

dtech2• 5 years ago

Quite interesting how - as a dutch speaker - you can hear English Germanic roots quite clearly. It almost sounds like a Dutch or German speaker is reading the "English" text phonetically without knowing pronunciation rules.

Especially "cage" and "beke" are pronounced like you'd do in Dutch nowadays, showing the large shift English 'a' and 'e' have undergone.

billforsternz• 5 years ago

Interesting. But what is "beke" ?

Gibbon1• 5 years ago

taejo2• 5 years ago

I don't know any Old English but whenever I hear the first one (I'm a bit of a bardcore fan) I wonder if "hé is cumende for thé" is accurate or a bit of artistic license. I would have expected a sentence structure more like Early Modern English "he cometh" rather than Modern English "he is coming" (c.f. German which has "kommt" but definitely doesn't have "ist kommend"[1]). Did the copula + present participle form of the present tense already exist in OE?

[1] incidentally, one does sometimes hear things like "er ist am kommen" (lit. "he is at coming"). Is this a new development, and is it a borrowing from English?

M2Ys4U• 5 years ago

French was one of the languages of both spoken and written communication in England for an extended period from 1066 onwards and it was still used in some legal contexts up to the end of the 17th century.

Fun fact: it still is!

The formal process for the passage of bills in Parliament uses Norman French phrases - "La Reyne le veult" ("The Queen wishes it") being the most widely known as it is used during prorogation to signify that royal assent has been given to a bill to make it an Act of Parliament.

Similarly, bills transmitted between the two houses of Parliament are sent with Norman French phrases.

pseingatl• 5 years ago

David Mellinkoff's The Language of the Law deep dives into the reasons for, and shows many examples of, the "doublet" construction in legal language ("to have and to hold," to "cease and desist," to "seise and convey." Originally the idea was to insure that the legal concept was captured by including both the Saxon and the Anglo-French words. Eventually the construction itself became a legal style even when the words on either side of the conjunction shared the same etymology. The article skips over the fact that Law French was the language of the law in England until the 16th century and into the 17th; the law reports (the equivalent of the Federal Reporter today) were written in a strange mixture of French with English words. Any comprehensive law library has the Selden Society's printing of these texts.

sillyquiet2• 5 years ago

Its pretty silly, but I always think of the conqueror as Guillaume le Bâtard and the Angevin/Plantagenet monarchs as Henri, Eduourd, Jean, etc when I think of this period of history.

English history has kind of retroactively claimed them as being English, but they were not, and we miss out on all kinds of interesting dynamics of the politics of the period if we think of them as being English.

Ichthypresbyter2• 5 years ago

Edward is an interesting one- it is an Old English name. Henry III was exceptionally pious, and decided to name his two sons after Anglo-Saxon kings who were saints (Edward the Confessor and Edmund the Martyr).

Of course, William/Guillaume is originally the Norse name Vilhjalmr (the same as the German Wilhelm). While the two elements Wil and Helm exist in Old English names (as in Wilfrid or Anselm), there is no evidence of any Old English name that combines them. Old English sources call the Conqueror "Willelm".

sillyquiet2• 5 years ago

That's interesting, I always assumed Eduourd was named for 'let's appease the Anglo-Saxons' reasons, not for pious ones.

Of course, it's all pretty pedantic, given we are talking about names in Old English and Old French, and an Old French name is as removed from a modern French one as it is from an Old English one, so naming these figures with their modern equivalents for the modern reader makes sense too.

I just like reminding myself these early English monarchs were not, in fact, English, and would not be, and would not consider themselves as such, for a while. It also emphasizes how much of a relatively unimportant adjunct of their French lands the Angevins considered England.

oftenwrong• 5 years ago

If you find this interesting, and you like podcasts, I also recommend The History of English Podcast:

https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/

The host frequently speaks archaic forms of English with correct pronunciation.

It's also one of the highest-quality podcasts I listen to. It's very information-dense and each episode is exceptionally well-organised.

madcaptenor• 5 years ago

Seconded. The surprising thing is that the host is an amateur! (His day job is lawyer.)

I remember when he said it was going to be about 100 episodes, though. #147 came out today and he's at about the year 1500.

‘Frenssh’ as it was ‘spak’ in medieval England

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