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Comment by mhartl | Hacker News Reader

The subject of the piece (Stephen Booth) has written "400 pages of virtuosic commentary exploring the ambiguity and polysemy of Shakespeare’s verse." Does anyone know if he addresses Step Zero of appreciating the sonnets, which is to use Original Pronunciation (OP)? [1] Many of the sonnets don't even rhyme properly when pronounced in modern British or American English, but they do in OP. [2]

[1]: http://www.pronouncingshakespeare.com/

[2]: See, for example, the recitation of Sonnet 116 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bt7OynPUIY8.

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I find David and Ben Crystal's efforts to promote the Original Pronunciation admirable, but ever since I've heard their version of Sonnet 116 a few years ago, I've harbored doubts about their particular choices. Several books I read on Early Modern English phonetics agree that love-prove, love-move, love-remove etc. are not visual rhymes. But Ben Crystal chooses to pronounce all these words with the short [ʌ] sound (like the vowel of modern 'cut'). And I think it's wrong (well, not on my own authority, I'm not a linguist or a specialist in this area, just someone very interested in historical phonetics of English who read a bunch of books and articles).

Words like move, remove, prove used to be pronounced with the long [o:] sound before the Great Vowel Shift (which is how they got their spelling), and by Shakespeare's time they moved to [u:], which they retained until modern times. I tried to find any evidence other than the love- rhymes that these words could be pronounced with a short [ʌ] sound, and couldn't.

On the other hand, "love" was probably pronounced usually with a short [u] sound, the same sound we use today in "put". All the words with u in a closed syllable used that sound as well, like "cut", "but", "cup" "sun" etc. The change from this [u] to [ʌ] happened after Shakespeare's time, mostly later in the 17th century, resulting in the familiar pronunciation of "but" "cup" "sun", but leaving after it a fair number of exceptions that refused to follow the change, such as "put" "push" etc.

"prove" and "love" did rhyme when Shakespeare used them; but perhaps the rhyme was a bit inexact, rhyming long [u:] of "prove/move/remove" and short [u] of "love" (but still much more exact than modern [u:] and [ʌ] of course). Or, as Charles Barber claims in his "Early Modern English" (unwieldly Google Books links: http://bit.ly/1uI7SWQ), "love" was exceptional in having a variant [u:] pronunciation especially beloved by poets, precisely because they could use it to rhyme it with handy words like "prove" and "move". Either way, the love/move rhyme did not sound at all the way Ben Crystal pronounces it.

The sound we use today in "put" isn't [u], it's [ʊ]. Today, it would definitely not be considered an adequate rhyme for [u:]; would you call "look" [lʊk] an inexact rhyme for "Luke" [lu:k]?

On the other hand, I tend to suspect that [u], if it occurred, would be accepted as an exact rhyme for [u:]. Any line-final [u] in a poem would sort of necessarily be promoted to [u:], though.

On an unrelated note, are there areas that use a [lʊv] pronunciation of "love" today? That might explain the to-me odd use of "lurve" in humor.

"On an unrelated note, are there areas that use a [lʊv] pronunciation of "love" today? That might explain the to-me odd use of "lurve" in humor."

According to http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/lurve:

"Origin - 1930s: as a parody of the pronunciation of love in popular romantic songs."

Thank you for correcting my careless notation. I often forget about the differences between some of the u-sounds, because my native language (Russian) has just one. To me, "look" and "Luke" actually sounds like a passable rhyme, and in general one feature common to nearly everyone who speaks English with a Slavic accent is that they do not distinguish between [ʊ] and [u:]. I know the difference intellectually, and I try to pronounce them correctly, but I probably still get it wrong every now and then.

I believe [ʊ] used to be [u], but I don't remember when this quality change happened.

I think there are still current dialects in the center and north of England where this split didn't happen, so they would have [lʊv]. Here's an interesting self-aware example: http://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/6911/understa...

But you obviously haven't read, for example, Ben Jonson's English Grammar (1616), who says, in his description of letter 'o', 'In the short time more flat, and akin to u; as... brother, love, prove', indicating that prove was pronounced like love, not the other way round. I suggest you do bit more reading.

I saw a video on this recently:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s

He also makes use of puns that you will only notice when using OP. I believe one of the examples they talk about is:

"From forth the fatal loins of these two foes"

Where "loins" and "lines" are pronounced in the same way, so it's actually a pun, where "loins" refer to physical loins and "lines" refer to their genealogical lines.

At a certain point, you have to assume that everything is a pun, "now MOTHER what's the MATTER," etc.

There are still accents in England where those words would be pronounced almost the same :)

As a former student of Booth, he has this covered.

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