[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by jackm8

Lucy Worsley Investigates: William the Conqueror? I'll try and find it somewhere.

That's it. I also found the other episodes informative and entertaining. I record by time slots instead of by program and her work sometimes pops up when other progams are between seasons

I'm not a linguist, but I often wonder about pronunciations. As soon as you go back in time, as back as Shakespare, and you read Quartos and Folios as they were written, you start seeing words written differently. Not just the long s's, whole words are different. There was Original Pronunciation Shakespare movement, but its validity was never entirely established. We do know that pronunciation was different, we know some basics, but I guess that we'll never know how it really sounded.

I've always wondered how they work out old pronunciations. I only recently learned that some English dialects say "my" as "me" because the "y" sound didn't evolve the same in other dialects. But I can see how that is known much easier than how much older pronunciations can be determined.

I don't understand your point about Beowulf being easier to read than Cantenbury Tales, though. Isn't Beowulf in Old English balderdash to anyone not familiar with it?

Of course the Canterbury Tales are less unintelligible than Beowulf, but there was much less time separating them than between classic and medieval Latin. I was being a bit silly, since the problem in the program was confidence in distinguishing fine and subtle details.

My only exposure to Cantenbury Tales and Beowulf was in high school English class.