Theoretical phonetics. Study guide for second year students. Борискина О.О - 52 стр.

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       Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was
spoken in the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The
answer is that for the most part we cannot know for sure. Most of it is based on
supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have
sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by
examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal
writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from
misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries
that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was
gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on. From the misspellings of Queen
Elizabeth we know that work was once pronounced 'wark', person was 'parson',
heard was 'hard', and defer was 'defar', at least at court. In the same period, short
vowels were often used interchangeably, so that not was sometimes written nat
and when sometimes appeared as whan. Relics of this variability include strap
and strop, taffy and toffy, God and gad.
       Rhymes too tell us much. We know from Shakespeare's rhymes that
knees, grease, grass, and grace all rhymed (at least more or less) and that clean
rhymed with lane. (The modern pronunciation was evidently in use but
considered substandard.) Shakespeare also made puns suggesting a similar pro-
nunciation between food and ford and between reason and raising. The к in
words like knight and knave was still sounded in Shakespeare's day, while words
like sea and see were still pronounced slightly differently - sea being something
roughly halfway between see and say - as were other pairs involving ее and ea
spellings, such as peek and peak, seek and speak, and so on. All of this is of
particular interest to us because it was in this period that America began to be
colonized, so it was from this stock of pronunciations that American English
grew. For this reason, it has been said that Shakespeare probably sounded more
American than English. Well, perhaps. But in fact if he and his compatriots
sounded like anything modern at all it was more probably Irish, though even
here there are so many exceptions as to make such suggestions dubious.
       It is probable, though less certain, that words such as herd, birth, hurt, and
worse, which all today carry an identical [ə:] sound - and which, entirely
incidentally, is a sound that appears to be unique to English - had slightly
different pronunciations up to Shakespeare's day and perhaps beyond. All of
these pronunciation changes have continued up until fairly recent times. As late
as the fourth decade of the eighteenth century Alexander Pope was rhyming
obey with tea, ear with repair, give with believe, join with divine, and many
others that jar against modern ears. The poet William Cowper, who died in
1800, was still able to rhyme way with sea. July was widely pronounced 'Julie'
until about the same time. Gold was pronounced 'gould' until well into the
nineteenth century (hence the family name) and merchant was still often
'marchant' long after Webster's death.
       Sometimes changes in pronunciation are rather more subtle and
mysterious. Consider, for example, changes in the stress on many of those words
that can function as either nouns or verbs - words like defect, reject, disguise,