From Newsgroup: sci.lang
James Dow Allen <
user4353@newsgrouper.org.invalid> wrote or quoted:
Did people really talk the way they wrote?
| To understand spoken 16th-century English, historians bypass formal
| literature and analyze texts that captured raw, unedited speech.
| The best sources for spoken Early Modern English are court deposi-
| tions, personal diaries, private letters, and phonetic handbooks.
|
| Court Depositions Witness testimonies from church and criminal
| courts. Scribes recorded exact spoken words, insults, and slang.
| These offer the closest look at everyday speech across social classes.
|
| Private Letters Unedited correspondence like the Paston or Plumpton
| letters. Writers spelled words phonetically based on how they actually
| pronounced them. This reveals regional accents and casual grammar.
|
| Phonetic Handbooks Guides written by 16th-century orthoepists
| (spelling reformers). Books by scholars like John Hart and William
| Bullokar deliberately described exact mouth movements and sounds.
|
| Comedy Plays Low-born character dialogue in theater. While still
| scripted, comic relief scenes used authentic street slang, puns, and
| vulgarities of the era.
|
| Grammar Books for Foreigners French and Italian learning manuals.
| These books contained parallel dialogues showing foreigners how to
| speak naturally in London shops and taverns.
|
| ---------------------------------------------------------------------
| Source Type What it Reveals About Why It Outperforms
| Speech Standard Written Text
| --------------------- ----------------------- -----------------------
| Court Records Slang, insults, and Avoids the polished,
| grammar of the artificial rhetoric of
| illiterate. published books.
|
| Phonetic Texts Exact vowel and Bypasses the chaotic,
| consonant non-standardized
| pronunciations. spelling of the era.
|
| Foreign Manuals Casual, everyday Avoids formal, rigid
| conversational pacing. poetic structures like
| iambic pentameter.
| ----------------------------------------------------------------------
| 1. Court Depositions (Everyday Insults and Arguments)
|
| Scribes in church and local courts wrote down verbal disputes exactly
| as spoken. These records show that 16th-century speech was heavily
| filled with blunt phrases, scatological humor, and aggressive slang.
|
| The Insult "Thou art a cuckold, a long-legged cuckold, and thy wife
| is a hackney whore."
|
| Context A defamation case revealing how neighbors spoke during a
| street fight.
|
| Defying Authority "I don't care a fart for you. Bring the mayor to
| me and I will fart in his mouth."
|
| Context A citizen recorded shouting at local officers, showcasing
| that "fart" was the preferred casual profanity of the era.
|
| General Abuse "Thou art a scurvy, copper-nosed, fat-arsed knave."
|
| Context Common strings of compound adjectives used in daily
| arguments.
|
| 2. Private Letters (Phonetic & Casual Writing)
|
| When regular people wrote private letters, they did not follow
| strict printing standards. They spelled words exactly as they
| pronounced them, revealing regional accents and a much more
| fluid grammar.
|
| Merchant George Cely (Late 15th/Early 16th Century) "I padded the
| way toward London . . . and it rynned so sore that I was wet to the
| skin."
|
| Spoken feature "Rynned" shows they pronounced "rained" like "rin-
| ned", and "sore" meant "severely".
|
| A Commoner's Note: "I pray you send me some money, for I have none
| left, and I am in great need."
|
| Spoken feature Rather than the poetic "Methinks I require coin,"
| everyday spoken phrasing was direct and structurally identical to
| modern English.
|
| 3. Phonetic Handbooks (How the Sounds Actually Looked)
|
| Orthoepists like John Hart (1569) published guides using custom
| phonetic spelling to fix what he called the "chaotic writing of our
| English tongue". When transliterated back into standard letters, his
| phonetic samples show how people talked.
|
| John Hart's Phonetic Sample: "We use as many letters in our writing,
| as we do voices or breathes in speaking, and no more."
|
| How it was actually pronounced In Hart's phonetic system, "we" was
| spoken and spelled as ui, "will" as uil, and "you" as iu. They did not
| drop their Rs, and vowels were much shorter and punchier than modern
| British English.
|
| 4. Foreign Language Manuals (Real Dialogue Mock-ups)
|
| Language books written to teach French or Italian travelers how to
| survive in London provide realistic, scripted scripts of everyday
| scenarios like ordering food or shopping.
|
| Claudius Holyband's The French Schoole-maister (1573):
|
| Customer "God give you good morrow, gossip."
|
| Shopkeeper: "And you also, back again. What do you lack? What is it
| you please to have? See if I have any thing that may serve your turn."
|
| Customer: "Show me the best cloth that you have . . . No, this is too
| coarse, show me a finer one."
|
| Spoken feature: This shows the rapid-fire repetition used by merchants
| ("What do you lack? What is it you please to have?") and the highly
| colloquial use of "gossip" to mean a close friend or neighbor.
Lines marked with "| " come from my editing, where I start by writing
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them for USENET. Chatbots might make mistakes and misrepresent or hal-
lucinate facts.
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