Some years ago, I attended a talk on Elizabethan English by a women whose name I can't recall (IIRC, she was a professor at a university in the Netherlands). She said that the closest approximation to Elizabethan English that you could still find was probably in some isolated mountain communities in the northeastern US (the Appalachians, broadly speaking). She didn't give names, and the influence of television and other media may well have diminished or eliminated what was left of the accents in any case.
-----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Stephen Fryer Sent: Monday, December 31, 2012 7:00 PM To: Herbert Ward Cc: [email protected] Subject: [LUTE] Re: English in the time of Dowland. On 30/12/2012 9:27 AM, Herbert Ward wrote: > Suppose one were interested in learning to speak English with an > accent approximating that that Dowland might have had, with the idea > that this might help him understand Dowland's music better. How would > one proceed? A couple of sources to start from thought they go rather beyond the tiny snippet that you are asking for): McGee, Timothy, ed. _Singing Early Music: The Pronunciation of European Languages in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance_ [With CD] Indiana University Press, 1996 ISBN 0253329612 or pbk. 0253210267 A web site that may be of interest is 'The Great Vowel Shift': http://eweb.furman.edu/~mmenzer/gvs/ which covers the changes in English pronunciation from 1300 to 1700 with lots of examples and sound files. > Would any modern British accents be close? I always take any such claims with a large sack of salt. Stephen Fryer To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
