Conversational English in 1586

the following is based on a script written in 1586 imagine you're a time traveler crouched and listening through a hedge to these people talk good morning cousin Andrew and to you also cousin Ralph how do you well thanks be to God so so from whence come you I come from home and whether go you I go to the market and I also shall go together if you will I'm glad of your company but uh before we go we good to drink a pint of wine whether shall we go at The Bishop's head or uh the Cardinal's heart this was written by a French huso Refugee called Jack Bellow in a book called familiar dialogues Bellow had struggled a lot with English when he was first Refugee there was nothing like duo lingo then and he probably had to learn Street English largely from exposure so he wrote this book to help other people in the position that he'd been in it's a series of scripts of imagined dialogues between people in various social situations a lot of them in a market setting which is maybe one of the more important settings for somebody new to the country who needs to know how to secure resources for themselves he writes in three columns one in English one a French translation and the third a transposing of the English into French spelling to help French readers pronounce it Andre maerin has written an article on the pronunciation aspect which I'd heavily recommend but in this video I've stuck to a fairly generic reconstruction of a 1500's London accent this text is important because its genuine aim seems to be to teach London speech in a pragmatic and realistic way it's descriptive rather than prescriptive it focuses on how londoners do speak rather than how they should speak Bellow sometimes gives options of how a character might phrase a certain thought when asking how much the wine costs he gives Ralph the options what do we owe what have we to pay what must you have let us have a reckoning and what is to pay I think this is interesting because it Sates my desire to know what normality was like in the past but it also doesn't quite hit any of the major subfields of linguistics You could argue it's about syntax how words are ordered but of course it's not just about where the verb comes in the sentence and stuff like that it's also just about you know if a language has 50 grammatically correct ways of saying something which ones do people actually use in practice how are you going is perfectly grammatically correct in English but I'd find it a bit off if I heard it from one of my Southeastern English friends and on the other hand perfectly normal if I heard it from one of my Australian friends hearing historical phrasings of things can be a bit jarring what do you lack sounds kind of weird compared to what do you want but that's just because what do you want has won out historically etymologically both of these sentences just meant what do you not have that you would like to have it's just that one of them is now popular and the other isn't so so what greetings do we find in Bellow's text the word hello in its current form doesn't seem to go back further than the 1800s so it's not surprising that we don't see that here oh Simon God be here welcome if we can say anything about which of these is least formal I'd say how might be a good candidate as the men seem to know Simon already they call him by his name and don't try and Huggle with him over the wine greetings like how now are found in cha even though it's a question word how doesn't seem to function as a question in this context maybe in the same way as you're right often doesn't function as a question in British English nowadays speaking of which asking people how they are how do you how is it with you the first one of these is interesting because it follows the older Germanic pattern of having no do support more recent English had how do you do in the same way you'd say where do you live but the syntax of how do you is more like modern German and Old English like if you were to say where live you interestingly do support seems to have been quite common in London by the 1580s and indeed it's common in Bellow's familiar dialogues why do you not believe me on the other hand some sentences are given numerous times both with and without due support Bellow allows both how do you sell the yard and how sell you the yard perhaps this was a transitional period per where due support was widespread but still optional unlike today when how cellu the yard would be considered so archaic as to be basically ungrammatical on the point of things that are archaic as I mentioned in my video on thou and thee bellet doesn't really use those pronouns in his dialogues only a small handful of times usually in a religious context characters almost always just say you or ye thou wasn't completely non-existent by the 1580s by a long chalk rural dialects still used it as standard and carried on doing so for ages and it seems to have had some religious significance the King James Bible published 25 years later still uses th to refer to God Shakespeare also uses it in the decades after Bellow published his dialogues it was almost certainly not common in normal London speech anymore but londoners obviously still knew what it meant and it's hard to say exactly what its significance would have been to most of them would it have sounded ryal and quaint or the kind of thing an elderly grandparent might say or would it have sounded uh you know Arcane and religious already to some people a lot of theories about the decline of thou center around it being kind of informal and potentially coming across as impolite but I'm not sure if that stigma still existed by 1586 the dialogues include a lot of bartering and Market speak I find this quite fun first ways of introducing a market conversation what B what do you like buy you any apples who buy you my apples what lack you what will you have i' pleas you to Bay and then the buyer responding with what they want give it a the best Wayne you have show me a couple of good and fat rabbits oh money for a penny who sell you the hund have you any Pippins have you any good broad cloth what fish have you so there's lots of do you have this do you have that not too different to nowadays although without that Doe support that we'd now have then Bellow gives long and kind of interesting lists of the kinds of things the sellers have in stock the polter is particularly interesting among the normal geese and ducks you might expect he also has wild birds like sparrows and Larks and even more exotic ones like swans and parrots and then the haggling starts here'll be them that be very good and fat they'd be very stale trly they'd be very new I'll sell you them 10 P the couple it is too much they' be worth but a gr they be not mine for that price tell me your your lowest Ward are you willing to buy yes if you'll be reasonable at own word you shall pay two GRS for them I will pay but six P for I may not sell them so farewell then here you sir cast Penny I'll pay no more for you are a very hard man well you shall have them so I think we learned something cultural through this book about how haggling worked back then but I think we also learn some things about language often the pronoun them is emitted after the word for I'll pay six P for I will pay no more for the word may is used in its older sense I may not sell them so in other words I can't sell them at that price we hear the now stereotypical phrase hear ye used in its natural habitat here you sir cast the penny of all things about this I think it provides a new angle on the common question of how far back in time could I go and still understand people even in a time when pronunciation on paper should be fairly understandable to a modern native English speaker weird sentence constructions would probably get in the way quite a lot one of the Hallmarks of normal conversational speech is that we reduce words and syllables we don't enunciate all of them fully as much as this might seem really informal and messy it actually has language and dialect specific patterns some of those are so common that they've been formalized in spelling it is is contracted to its and not tis tis has existed historically but its has one out for the time being at least in my dialect other contractions like weave I ey and so on are also common as a weak forms of certain function words the instead of the uh instead of a must instead of must y instead of youu and for the dialects that have still used it within the era of audio recording the instead of thou and thee there's extensive evidence for these kinds of contractions all through the history of English but they seem surprisingly absent in Bellow's dialogues there are some obvious instances like cast the penny rather than cast the other Penny and that kind of reduction of the is seen in other texts as well in the first dialogue one of the characters also asks what is clock rather than what is it a clock or indeed what is it of the clock but he normally writes it is and I am in full even in the pronunciation column rather than its te or I'm if he hadn't put in any contractions I think we could be reasonably confident he was just ignoring or not noticing them as all other evidence suggest they were normal in London speech at this time but the fact that he includes some contractions but not others is quite interesting of course some of them might just not have been present at that time in the same way that reducing the other to the isn't common in London anymore but some things like reducing it were to TWR are notably absent in this text but present in others I think he's probably glossing over some of them on a few occasions he does just transcribe y with the letter Y in the pronunciation column which I initially wondered whether it might be a week form yeah but I think this is just his way of transcribing it in French pronunciation by this point in history post Great Vowel Shift would expect the unreduced form of this word to be pronounced ye so maybe this is just the best way he could think of to write that sequence of sounds in French spelling just because it will probably come up in the comments I'll I'll quickly address the of misunderstood factoid that y was pronounced like the so anyway Bell's transcriptions largely lack the reductions that were probably there in real speech but that doesn't stop them from being a useful source of sentence constructions and ways that people at the time might have phrased things we'll end with some ways of saying goodbye maybe most interestingly we get God bu which Bellow seems to acknowledge is a contraction of God be with you this is clearly the expression that went on to become goodbye but it's interesting that at this time it still seems to have been recognizably a contraction of a longer phrase it seems wellc could be a way of seeing off an interaction um I would say that well welcome on its own probably isn't it it doesn't serve that function in English anymore and so could fwell or F Well thank you very much for watching and I'll talk to you again soon

Channel: Simon Roper

Views: 566,964

Keywords: huguenot, history, historical linguistics, historical accents, living history

Id: 6j18ZdlBSBs

Length: 11min 44sec (704 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2024