16 March 2016
This video isn’t terrible, but it’s really too simplistic to be useful:
It’s got some problems. It conflates poetic language and everyday speech. It’s focused on the London dialect, as if all English speakers spoke the same way. Some of the “unknown” words are hardly unknown today (abbess, anyone?) The discussion of the Great Vowel Shift is wrong in the timeline; it was pretty much over well before Shakespeare’s day. They don’t attempt to replicate pronunciation until they hit Chaucer; I’m pretty sure that Defoe didn’t sound like the actor who is reading from Robinson Crusoe.
And, while this really isn’t a mistake, you don’t have to go back in time to find hard-to-understand English. There’s a wealth of diversity in English spoken around the world today.
It’s a shame really. The video is very well produced, so why didn’t they take the time to get the subtleties right? It wouldn’t have been difficult.
