How Americans preserved British English

Americans today pronounce some words more like Shakespeare than Brits do… but it’s in 18th-Century England where they’d really feel at home.

It makes for a great story: when settlers moved from England to the Americas from the 17th Century, their speech patterns stuck in place. That was particularly true in more isolated parts of the US, such as on islands and in mountains. As a result, the theory goes, some Americans speak English with an accent more akin to Shakespeare’s than to modern-day Brits.

That’s not entirely right. The real picture is more complicated. One feature of most American English is what linguists call ‘rhoticity’, or the pronunciation of ‘r’ in words like ‘card’ and ‘water’. It turns out that Brits in the 1600s, like modern-day Americans, largely pronounced all their Rs. Marisa Brook researches language variation at Canada’s University of Victoria. “Many of those immigrants came from parts of the British Isles where non-rhoticity hadn’t yet spread,” she says of the early colonists. “The change towards standard non-rhoticity in southern England was just beginning at the time the colonies became the United States.”

So at least when it comes to their treatment of the 18th letter, Americans generally sound more like the Brits of several centuries ago. So do Canadians west of Quebec – thanks to loyalists to the Crown fleeing north during the American Revolution.

Another divergence between British and North American English has been a move toward broad As in words like ‘path’. The pronunciations of the early colonists (and their English counterparts), in contrast, have stuck around in the US: think ‘paath’ rather than ‘pahth’.

At first glance, these colonial legacies of pronunciation seem especially apparent in certain remote areas of the US – hence the argument that some places in the US have preserved Shakespearean English.

For instance, Tangier Island in Virginia has an unusual dialect which can be unintelligible even to other Americans. Some speech patterns, included rounded Os, seem like a dead ringer for the dialect of the West of England. This has led some observers to claim a strong lineage from early Cornish settlers to the current Tangier dialect.

But linguist David Shores has noted that these claims are exaggerated, and that the island’s isolation, rather than any freezing of Elizabethan speech patterns, is responsible for its linguistic quirks.

Another US area that’s been linked to 17th-Century British English is Appalachia, especially the mountainous regions of North Carolina. Linguist Michael Montgomery has written that the North Carolina tourism division used to issue a booklet called A Dictionary of the Queen’s English, which claimed that the English of Queen Elizabeth I could be found in pockets of the state. Montgomery traced the idea back to an educator-clergyman who, around the turn of the 19th Century, spread the idea that mountain language was a remnant of a much older tradition. This myth helped to counteract negative impressions of oft-maligned mountain people. Turning this around – and claiming kinship with a Shakespearean way of speaking – was a way of bringing status and apparent classiness to a marginalised part of the country.

“Mountain speech has more archaisms than other types of American English, but that’s about it,” Montgomery writes. These include terms like ‘afeard’, which famously appears in The Tempest. Overall, however, “the Shakespeare myth reflects simplistic, popular views about the static nature of traditional folk cultures, especially those in out-of-the-way places.”

Common phrases

It’s a bit surprising that Shakespearean English has come to be associated with high status and education. That’s the other oft-forgotten complication of the concept: even if Americans do speak more like the Elizabethan English than today’s Brits themselves, that doesn’t mean they’re speaking a ‘posher’ version of the language.

“We’ve always had this stigma in the UK that Shakespeare has to be posh… [but] in his time, it was everyday speech,” says David Barrett, who conducted workshops in Shakespearean Original Pronunciation (OP) while preparing a thesis on the subject at the University of South Wales. He’s also transcribed Christopher Marlowe’s poem Hero and Leander into OP. (There have been similar projects for the King James Bible and the Lord’s Prayer).

Even Queen Elizabeth I didn’t pronounce words in a particularly ‘posh’ way. Barrett has researched Elizabeth’s letters for clues to her pronunciation. Since spellings at the time were far from standardised, written texts are one tool linguists use to determine how words would have been pronounced historically. The queen’s habits likely included pronouncing ‘servant’ as ‘sarvant’, or ‘together’ as ‘togither’. These were pronunciation styles of ordinary people of the 17th Century – rather than the nobility. So like Shakespeare, the queen had a down-to-earth manner of speaking... in contrast to the upper-crust accents she is portrayed with in contemporary films and TV programmes. (It’s worth noting that today’s Queen Elizabeth II is speaking in a more ‘common’ way than she once did, too).

“The reason I find the Elizabethan period interesting is that the pronunciation contains many sounds which are far enough removed from modern English to create a challenge for the speaker, but there is also a considerable overlap with modern English,” says Barrett.

So when actors and audiences hear OP for the first time, it’s a bit of a shock to the system.

“Every English speaker who hears Original Pronunciation for the first time hears something different in it,” Barrett says. Sometimes that sounds similar to Northern Irish or West Country accents, other times South African or American.

Star-spangled Shakespeare

American actors have a head start with performing in OP: it’s “so much more American” than the prestigious Received Pronunciation accent in which Shakespeare’s plays are generally performed now, says Paul Meier, theatre professor emeritus at Kansas State University and a dialect coach who’s worked on theatre productions like an OP version of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

For instance, Americans are already used to pronouncing ‘fire’ as ‘fi-er’ rather than ‘fi-yah’, as most Brits would.

It’s useful to know how words would have been pronounced centuries ago because it changes our appreciation of the texts. Because British English pronunciations have changed so much since the era of Queen Elizabeth I, we’ve rather lost touch with what Early Modern English would have sounded like at the time. Some of the puns and rhyme schemes of Shakespeare’s day no longer work in contemporary British English. ‘Love’ and ‘prove’ is just one pair of examples; in the 1600s, the latter would have sounded more like the former. The Great Vowel Shift that ended soon after Shakespeare’s time is one reason that English spellings and pronunciations can be so inconsistent now.

So what’s popularly believed to be the classic British English accent isn’t actually so classic. In fact, British accents have undergone more change in the last few centuries than American accents have – partly because London, and its orbit of influence, was historically at the forefront of linguistic change in English.

As a result, although there are plenty of variations, modern American pronunciation is generally more akin to at least the 18th-Century British kind than modern British pronunciation. Shakespearean English, this isn’t. But the English of Samuel Johnson and Daniel Defoe? We’re getting a bit warmer.

Dialect coach Meier understands the appeal of the idea that 17th-Century speech patterns have been perfectly preserved an ocean away. “It is a delightful and attractive myth that Shakespeare’s language got fossilised” in parts of the US, he says.

But as sociolinguist Brook explains, “Every actively-spoken dialect is always changing – that’s as true of the rural ones as of the urban ones.” Echoes of older dialects can be heard here and there in different places, but unfortunately there’s no living museum of Shakespeare’s English.

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180207-how-americans-preserved-british-english?ocid=fbcul

Shakespeare's Accent: How Did The Bard Really Sound?

"To be or not to be" may be the question, but there's another question that's been nagging Shakespeare scholars for a long time: What did Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet, Mercutio, Portia or Puck really sound like when Shakespeare was first performed more than four centuries ago?

The British Library has completed a new recording of 75 minutes of The Bard's most famous scenes, speeches and sonnets, all performed in the original pronunciation of Shakespeare's time.

That accent sounds a little more Edinburgh — and sometimes even more Appalachia — than you might expect. Actor Ben Crystal, director of the new recordings, joins NPR's Scott Simon to talk about the effort to perform Shakespeare's works authentically.

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Interview Highlights

On the gradual shift in pronunciation and performance

"There's definitely been a change over the last 50 to 60 years of Shakespeare performance. The trend I think has been to speak the words very beautifully ... and carefully — and some might say stoically — and it's very, very different than how it would have been 400 years ago."

On how researchers study what people sounded like four centuries ago

"We've got three different types of data we can mine — one is the rhymes. Two-thirds of Shakespeare's 154 sonnets don't rhyme anymore. We know that the final couplet in ... Sonnet 116 ... you know it's:

If this be error and upon me proved,

I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

"You can extrapolate those kind of rhyme schemes across the sonnets, and indeed some of the plays rhyme. That's one set of data.

"They used to spell a lot more like they used to speak, so a word like film in Mercutio's Queen Mab speech is spelled philom in the folio, and we know that's a two syllable word like phi-lom. And if you go over to Northern Ireland, and they invite you to the cinema, they'll invite you to see the 'fi-lm.' That's an Elizabethan pronunciation that's stayed with us. ...

"There were linguists at the time and they very kindly wrote books saying how they pronounced different words. And all of that data brings us to 90-95 percent right, which isn't bad for 400 years."

On how this accent feels familiar

"If there's something about this accent, rather than it being difficult or more difficult for people to understand ... it has flecks of nearly every regional U.K. English accent, and indeed American and in fact Australian, too. It's a sound that makes people — it reminds people of the accent of their home — and so they tend to listen more with their heart than their head."

On Shakespeare being for young people

"I gave a workshop at a school recently with a bunch of 13- and 14-year-old kids. And their idea of Shakespeare, having never studied it or even really read it, was that it would be difficult to understand and it wasn't for them, and I was like: No, listen, he's written a play about two 13-year-olds or 14-year-olds meeting and discovering life and love and everything for the first time. It's a play for you."

Hear a reading from 'Romeo and Juliet' by Benjamin O'Mahony and Natalie Thomas

Listen:http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/03/24/149160526/shakespeares-accent-how-did-the-bard-really-sound

On class distinctions and changes in pronunciation

"You can't distinguish a character by putting on let's say a posh accent, for want of a better word, or a more common accent. How do you do it? The accent was pretty much the same. The accent was changing over Shakespeare's time.

When King James came to the throne after Queen Elizabeth — he was the Scottish King James VI — and everyone in court started speaking with a Scottish twang."

On connecting with the true meaning of the words

"One of the most famous sonnets ... Sonnet 116 ... everybody has [it] in their weddings because it has the word marriage in it: Let me not to the marriage of true minds / Admit impediments. When I started speaking this sonnet, it changed from something highfalutin and careful and about marriage and it became a real testament of love."

Hear 'Sonnet 116' read by Ben Crystal

Listen: http://www.npr.org/sections/monkeysee/2012/03/24/149160526/shakespeares-accent-how-did-the-bard-really-sound

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Audio extracts from Shakespeare's Original Pronunciation courtesy of the British Library Board.

Shakespeare in Modern English?

THE Oregon Shakespeare Festival has decided that Shakespeare’s language is too difficult for today’s audiences to understand. It recently announced that over the next three years, it will commission 36 playwrights to translate all of Shakespeare’s plays into modern English.

Many in the theater community have known that this day was coming, though it doesn’t lessen the shock. The Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been one of the stars in the Shakespeare firmament since it was founded in 1935. While the festival’s organizers insist that they also remain committed to staging Shakespeare’s works in his own words, they have set a disturbing precedent. Other venues, including the Alabama Shakespeare Festival, the University of Utah and Orlando Shakespeare Theater, have already signed on to produce some of these translations.

However well intended, this experiment is likely to be a waste of money and talent, for it misdiagnoses the reason that Shakespeare’s plays can be hard for playgoers to follow. The problem is not the often knotty language; it’s that even the best directors and actors — British as well as American — too frequently offer up Shakespeare’s plays without themselves having a firm enough grasp of what his words mean.

Claims that Shakespeare’s language is unintelligible go back to his own day. His great rival, Ben Jonson, reportedly complained about “some bombast speeches of ‘Macbeth,’ which are not to be understood.” Jonson failed to see that Macbeth’s dense soliloquies were intentionally difficult; Shakespeare was capturing a feverish mind at work, tracing the turbulent arc of a character’s moral crisis. Even if audiences strain to understand exactly what Macbeth says, they grasp what Macbeth feels — but only if an actor knows what that character’s words mean.

Two years ago I witnessed a different kind of theatrical experiment, in which Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing,” in the original language, trimmed to 90 minutes, was performed before an audience largely unfamiliar with Shakespeare: inmates at Rikers Island. The performance was part of the Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit initiative.

No inmates walked out on the performance, though they were free to do so. They were deeply engrossed, many at the edge of their seats, some crying out at various moments (much as Elizabethan audiences once did) and visibly moved by what they saw.

Did they understand every word? I doubt it. I’m not sure anybody other than Shakespeare, who invented quite a few words, ever has. But the inmates, like any other audience witnessing a good production, didn’t have to follow the play line for line, because the actors, and their director, knew what the words meant; they found in Shakespeare’s language the clues to the personalities of the characters.

I’ve had a chance to look over a prototype translation of “Timon of Athens” that the Oregon Shakespeare Festival has been sharing at workshops and readings for the past five years. While the work of an accomplished playwright, it is a hodgepodge, neither Elizabethan nor contemporary, and makes for dismal reading.

To understand Shakespeare’s characters, actors have long depended on the hints of meaning and shadings of emphasis that he embedded in his verse. They will search for them in vain in the translation: The music and rhythm of iambic pentameter are gone. Gone, too, are the shifts — which allow actors to register subtle changes in intimacy — between “you” and “thee.” Even classical allusions are scrapped.

Shakespeare’s use of resonance and ambiguity, defining features of his language, is also lost in translation. For example, in Shakespeare’s original, when the misanthropic Timon addresses a pair of prostitutes and rails about how money corrupts every aspect of social relations, he urges them to “plague all, / That your activity may defeat and quell / The source of all erection.” A primary meaning of “erection” for Elizabethans was social advancement or promotion; Timon hates social climbers. The wry sexual meaning of “erection,” also present here, was secondary. But the new translation ignores the social resonance, turning the line into a sordid joke: Timon now speaks of “the source of all erections.”

Shakespeare borrowed almost all his plots and wrote for a theater that required only a handful of props, no scenery and no artificial lighting. The only thing Shakespearean about his plays is the language. I’ll never understand why, when you attend a Shakespeare production these days, you find listed in the program a fight director, a dramaturge, a choreographer and lighting, set and scenery designers — but rarely an expert steeped in Shakespeare’s language and culture.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/opinion/shakespeare-in-modern-english.html?_r=1

James Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, is the author, most recently, of “The Year of Lear: Shakespeare in 1606.”

André Markowicz : "La traduction est un exercice de reconnaissance, de gratitude envers l'autre"

Voyage au pays de l'entre-deux avec un écrivain à qui l'on doit la traduction des classiques russes de Dostoïveski à Gogol, mais aussi de Shakespeare et de nombreux autres. Il nous offre cette année dans deux livres quelques unes des facettes passionnantes de son art si particulier, la traduction.

Pour André Markowicz  la traduction n'est pas une histoire de langue mais d'allers-retours entre des mondes, des cultures, des univers esthétiques. Une phrase de sa propre mère peut ainsi lui apparaître comme intraduisible parce qu'il n'a pas connu la faim et ne peut l'imaginer. La langue n'existerait-elle pas, n'y aurait-il que des façons de parler, des concepts adéquats à des cultures, des sentiments, des époques? Reconnaître cette pluralité, c'est faire de la traduction un mouvement vers l'autre qui le tranforme sans lui ôter sa spécificité.

<< C'est beaucoup plus facile pour un francophone de lire Shakespeare en langue originale que de lire le journal d'aujourdh'ui. En fait la traduction n'est pas une question de langue, on ne traduit pas une langue, on traduit des auteurs, on traduit un monde culturel >>.

<< La traduction est un exercice de reconnaissance, de gratitude envers l'autre que nous rendons accessible à nous-mêmes, non pas en le transformant en nous-mêmes mais en trouvant dans notre langue de quoi rendre sa particularité>>.

  Sons diffusés :

- Camille de Toledo, Archive INA, France Culture, 06/01/14

- Barbara Cassin, archive INA, France Culture 30/05/13

Vous pouvez réécouter ici La Grande Table avec Camille de Toledo pour son ouvrage Oublier, trahir puis disparaître.

Retrouvez ici la deuxième partie de l'émission avec les journalistes Stéphane Foucart et Catherine Guilyardi qui se demandent pourquoi le réchauffement climatique a tant de mal à imprégner l'opinion et l'action collectives.

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http://www.franceculture.fr/emission-la-grande-table-1ere-partie-andre-markowicz-la-traduction-est-un-exercice-de-reconnaissance

Estonia: President Ilves uses machine translation to translate Shakespeare

Estonian President Toomas Hendrik Ilves officially unveiled language technology developer Tilde’s machine translation system for Estonian at ICT 2013, Europe’s largest digital technology event, in Vilnius, Lithuania, on November 7.

President Ilves first tried Tilde’s system to machine-translate a phrase from Act 3, Scene 1 of Shakespeare’s Hamlet into Estonian: “Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer / The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune”.

Tilde’s machine translation technology LetsMT was created as a tool for overcoming the language barrier in the European Union, home to 24 official languages. The European Commission has set a target to eliminate language barriers for the European market by 2025.

To develop the technology, Tilde united a consortium of leading universities and research centers, which was selected for support by the European Commission in the framework of the Competiveness and Innovation Programme for ICT. The resulting technology has proven to perform better than Google Translate for small languages.

LetsMT is an example of European innovation’s success in addressing a challenge facing EU citizens in the digital era. Tilde’s LetsMT preserves the linguistic diversity at the heart of the EU while bridging the language barrier between nations, facilitating the creation of a digital single market in Europe.

Founded in 1991, Tilde is a leading European language technology developer with offices in all three Baltic states. In addition to machine translation technology, Tilde’s other popular language technology products include proofing tools, online dictionaries, and the market-leading Tilde Translator app for mobile phones and tablets.

http://baltic-review.com/2013/11/estonia-president-ilves-uses-machine-translation-to-translate-shakespeare/