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.
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Fun Fact: The British and American revolutionaries *should* sound basically the same, they should both sound basically American. The British didn’t develop the accent we think of as the standard British accent until after the American revolution. The modern American accent is much closer to how the British sounded at the time.
There’s all these scifi theories that someday it might be possible to extract audio from pottery that was thrown/trimmed on a potter’s wheel.
Spelling wasn’t really standardized in English until quite recently. Shakespeare never wrote his name ‘Shakespeare’ – that spelling became the official one in the 20th century. He wrote it Shakspēr, Shakespere, Shakspeare…
But you can see how you can average out all of those spellings to take a good guess at how he would have pronounced his name.
In a given region, if there were five common spellings of a word up until the 19th century, you can generally infer what sounds the writers were trying to represent with the letters.
Spelling wasn’t really standardized in English until quite recently. Shakespeare never wrote his name ‘Shakespeare’ – that spelling became the official one in the 20th century. He wrote it Shakspēr, Shakespere, Shakspeare…
But you can see how you can average out all of those spellings to take a good guess at how he would have pronounced his name.
In a given region, if there were five common spellings of a word up until the 19th century, you can generally infer what sounds the writers were trying to represent with the letters.
>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?
We don’t and they probably didn’t sound like that. TV shows and movies aren’t even trying to duplicate ancient accents.
>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?
We don’t and they probably didn’t sound like that. TV shows and movies aren’t even trying to duplicate ancient accents.
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