What did Old English, Middle English, and Early Modern English sound like?
A National Endowment for the Humanities grant allowed me to build a time machine, and the resulting extensive library of recordings will bear fruit in my Anglo-Saxon Drinking Songs CD, to be released next year. Sadly, I was unable to bring my camera equipment into the theatre when I tried to get the first production of Hamlet on film. OK, my little joke. We don’t really have any way of knowing how English was pronounced before the invention of sound recordings. But we do have some remarkably good evidence, either from contemporary observations or from a technique called linguistic reconstruction. So we can guess at the pronunciation without being too far off. Samples of modern scholars’ recordings of Old English and Middle English can be found online at Chaucer Studio. Sadly, most people read Early Modern literature with today’s pronunciation, so there are no similar collections of recordings of pronunciation between the year 1500 and the invention of modern recording equipment.
