A Millennium of English Pronunciation

Описание: Yes I know I already did a version of this one, but I wanted to include Ben Franklin's fart joke this time.

I don't know where this got posted, but the number of visitors I'm getting on this one tells me this video is in for a lot more attention than my videos normally get. Based on previous experience of what happens when I see that, let me just preemptively answer some potential questions here with a few notes:

The reading from Beowulf by the way is in a reconstruction of Early Mercian, NOT the West Saxon of the surviving manuscript.
The reading from Sir Gawain and the Green Knight uses West Midland features, and restores scribally-dropped /ǝ/ where the poet's dialect metrically requires it.
The pronunciation of e.g. "light" as /lixt/ continues right up through the end of the 16th century, but from well back in the Middle English period in the southeast, it exists alongside other variants ancestral to the modern pronunciation which is merged with the PRICE diphthong. I just used the conservative realization in my readings of the Tyndale Bible and Shakespeare. But at least two other possibilities existed alongside it.
The Keats bit is meant to show a little bit of vestigial rhoticity (mind, personally I can't see a way to avoid concluding that fully-rhotic cultivated speakers in London continued to exist well into the 1820s), and could just as plausibly have been done with /ǝi/ for the PRICE diphthong and /ɑʊ/ for the MOUTH diphthong (different realizations coexisted) but I figured I'd demonstrate a more modern PRICE realization for the end.

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