Most movies and shows set in the past e.g. 1700s, 1600s etc will include some sort of accent. How do we know if people actually spoke in those accents?
Edit: this came up is because I was watching the CBS show Ghosts. In it, there are two ghosts from the American Revolution. The British Revolutionary and the American Revolutionary have distinctly different accents and it made me question how we actually know what they sounded like.
In: 8
From letters bitching about pronunciation and from poems mostly.
There’s a wonderful YouTuber who studies linguistics and shows how Latin was pronounced coz some stuffy old philosopher wrote letters bitching like ‘those stupid Pompeii people keep pronouncing the a in tomato wrong, they say tomato like ‘day’ when clearly it’s tomato like ‘aah’ (ok weak example).
And poems, Shakespeare is a good example with his sonnets. Words that we now say in a modern way no longer rhyme.
[What Latin sounded like – and how we know](https://youtu.be/_enn7NIo-S0)
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