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Yes and no, around this time english and even anglo before it didn't have a standard way of spelling words, that is to say that each person or region had a completely different way of spelling words phoneticaly based on how they heard or pronounced it.
@Local83 Problem with that is that English isn't pronounced one way. It's way too big a language for that. Short of making a new writing system that acknowledge all vowel mergers and splits in every dialect and somehow writes intrusive and missing letters in some dialects different from others it's straight up impossible. Like you'd have to have a symbol for all the ways to pronounce r and two separate versions as well for when it isn't pronounced after vowels. You'd need a symbol for t that's realized as a tap in American dialects that would have no difference from the basic t. And don't even get started on talking about the English of the Caribbean with reduced 5 vowels from Englishes RP's 13 how do you represent that. Or worse yet West African or Hong Kong English that's tonal how do you deal with that. Let's not even get started on the unique dialects from contact situations AAVE for example or the madness that is northern English moving into Scots. And if you consider that many English creoles consider themselves valid English in a mesolect form then really you've just got a headache to deal with and you'd be much better just using glyphs instead
@@micayahritchie7158 You just expand the alphabet a bit. 42-100 letters in total could be enough if you didn´t add nonsense like "adding unspoken letter" or changing the letter a bit cause it sounds a bit different at the end of some words (like V in germen where it was written as s at the end of words). Anything more is no longer supported by human vocal cords. (You´ve literally ran out of sounds to make if you used the letter system)
As a Dutch speaker, I think Middle English sounds a lot like if you just pronounced English with Dutch phonetics, which makes this sound a lot more comical to me than what was probably intended
@@ashamansedai Of course, as a native Portuguese speaker, Middle English sounds like the way we pronounce English before learning how completely unrelated English spelling and pronunciation are
Old English sounds very Germanic, while Middle English sounds very Latin, and both Germanic and Latin languages play very large roles in the modern English language, so we can see at which points in history each language made it's contribution.
@@dethararjusinnessjukt5408 English has more Latin words than Germanic however it's considered a West Germanic language because of the positioning of the verbs, adjectives and all the other categories that I can never understand. However historians have recently suggested that it might be a North Germanic language, closer related to Swedish and Norwegian than German.
@@silvergunn9354 There are no serious linguists that suggest English is a North Germanic language. It is very clearly descended from the ancestors of the low german dialects. There is a LOT of Old Norse influence on English but that in no way makes a North Germanic language any more than the Norman and Old French influence makes it a Romance language. To be fair, English does seem more superficially similar to Norwegian than it does to German, but that's not because it's more closely related to Norwegian. German just evolved in a different direction than did English. And German is not the only West Germanic language. Frisian is far more similar to English and the area where Frisian is spoken today is not coincidentally the region where many of the original germanic colonizers of the British isles came from.
Even if the spoken language is quite different to modern English (thank you great vowel shift /s) the written word is similar enough that you can at least get a general gist of it
Sounds like Middle English you just read and pronounce all the letters in spelling, like you would in the transliterated phonetic vocabulary of languages say in the Pacific. Eg examples here like "syde" "sai-dee" and "seye" "sei-ee". Unlike today where there are so much silent letters ('syde' to 'side' ie "sai-d" . It's like if old spelling were generally kept similar, but the pronunciation and enunciation of syllables changed ie silent letters etc. It's like as if the olden folks really spelled the way it was meant to be pronounced.
The main reason why English sounds so drastically different today is because it underwent the Great Vowel Shift, when the pronunciation of long vowels changed to become more like how they are pronounced today.
Literally not true. English had already lost gender and most cases by then. And it had already adopted tons of french vocabulary. The main difference bt ME and modern Eng is literally some relativly minor vocab and some easy to understand sound changes. Old English was more like the other germanic languages than Modern English tho.
Beautiful, fascinating, very well done! And - random question here.... there're no dots above the lower case letters i - was that an historical actual thing, or a stylistic choice for the video? Many thanks for sharing!
Aspiration appeared first in southern West Germanic and spread northward. It was the phonological reason for the High German Consonant Shift. Meantime the stops of all Germanic languages and dialects got aspirated - with the exception of Dutch and Low Rhenish. Thus there is the latent trend of shifting to fricatives respectively affricates, especially t > ts (z in German spelling) and k > ch.
I was shocked to see they didn't have words for orders of triple magnitude above a thousand. I mean, I do suppose that they didn't need vastly small orders of magnitude as I don't think they knew jack about cells and molecules and the like, or large orders of magnitude for modern cosmology or the long geologic history in the timeline of nature. But still.
The French influence is huge. A French native speaker with NO knowledge of more modern English prononciation would pronounce it that way. Even some words are right out French spelled, like "lettres".
English is a stressed language. An example of that is the word "photography". It sounds more like "fuh-tog-ruh-fee". It is not "foe-toe-grah-fee". The "tog" part is stressed so it gets the full sound. Unstressed syllables get reduced to "uh" like the "fuh" in photography. The -e in a lot of English words used to be pronounced like the "e" in "egg" and then it became "uh" over time because it was unstressed. Unstressed sounds tend to get "weaker" (i.e. e -> "uh") and eventually disappear all together. It's a natural process in languages
It sounds like my worst English lesson classmates reading a text without having a clue about the pronunciation. I discover after all these years that they were actually reading in 1200s English 🤣🤣🤣 (native Romanian speaker)
You’re probably noticing the vowel sounds. English underwent something called the Great Vowel Shift starting around 1400 where our vowel system shifted enormously. Before that, we pronounced vowels in a similar way to the vast majority of other European languages, including German, French, Italian, etc. Things like pronouncing I as an “ee” sound for example, just as Italian does today.
"As an X speaker, now the spelling makes sense" - quite a few of the comments of this video. Well, as an English speaker this makes absolutely no sense spelling wise. Unless I drive like... 10 minutes up the road into the countryside.... *hmmm, funny that*
@@linajurgensen4698 yeah after hearing german more closely i take it back . but it sound like scandalvanian like swedish norweian may be . dutch has more difficult pronounciation
