Voices of the Georgian Era.

This YouTube clip (7:44) features the voices of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), Robert Browning (1812-1889), William Gladstone (1809-1898), Queen Victoria (1819-1901), and Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892); the recordings, of varying quality, are accompanied by transcriptions and animated images (which are frankly a bit alarming, and I tried to ignore them). Browning’s voice is surprisingly high, Gladstone goes on forever (as befits a politician), and it’s amazing to hear Victoria at all — alas, the clip is only a few seconds long (they play it twice to compensate). A couple of odd pronunciations I noticed: Gladstone says his middle name, Ewart, so compressedly it sounds like “Yurt,” and Tennyson doesn’t reduce the final vowel of cannon — it sounds like “cannohn.” Thanks for the link go to Bathrobe, who points out “Tennyson appears to be rhotic.”

Comments

  1. David Eddyshaw says

    The unrhoticity of British poshspeak is actually a relatively late development.
    I can’t find the post, but I think we discussed this before in the context of the artist John Martin’s poor mad brother:

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Martin_(arsonist)

    Ah. Found it:

    https://languagehat.com/calf-of-god/#comment-3979170

    We didn’t actually talk much about rhotacism there, though. Still, I recall old recordings of RP-ish speakers who were rhotic. (My own idiolect, though rhotic, is usually heard as RP by my fellow-countrymen, but that is of different origin. I’m not that old …)

  2. David Marjanović says

    Tennyson has /r/ in wondered but not in thundered. He’s check-marked for rhoticity at the end, along with the more rhotic Gladstone.

    Gladstone says his middle name, Ewart, so compressedly it sounds like “Yurt,”

    It sounds as I expected: “you art”, initial stress and non-rhotic.

  3. I agree with you that Tennyson says “cannon” with an unreduced “o”, but it sounds to me like a short o as in “gone”, not a long one as in “bone”.

  4. PlasticPaddy says

    Cannon with unreduced o (i.e., like wonton, not wanton) is still possible in somewhat affected accents here, although to me it sounds stagey or antiquated. Also police carry batons with unreduced o. I think this may be because these words were Norman French or Italian borrowings with final syllable stress (baton has this stress in Am.E, but I do not know if this is a survival or an innovation).

  5. Andrej Bjelaković says

    Re Ewart, it’s the old diphthong /ʊə/, with a noticeably centralized and relatively short initial segment.

    This is not what we would get from most present-day speakers:
    https://www.englishspeechservices.com/blog/the-demise-of-%CA%8A%C9%99-as-in-cure/

  6. Absolutely fascinating — thanks for linking that!

  7. cuchuflete says

    I copied and sent the recording link to my wife, who is British, with a note stating surprise at Gladstone’s rhoticity. She delighted in informing me that said rhoticity had nothing to do with Liverpudlian or English speech at the time of the recording. Rather, she attributes it to the fact that both of Gladstone’s parents were Scottish.

    What say you, speakers of British English?

  8. Andrej Bjelaković says

    Well, first of all people don’t speak like their parents generally, especially if their parents have a markedly different accent, as is the case here, but rather as their peers.

    Second of all, this is Liverpool before the massive Irish immigration, with an accent more like Lancashire, which retains some rhoticity to this day. And most importantly, we’re talking about 1810s and 1820s (Gladstone’s formative years). Proper non-rhoticity hadn’t yet advanced all that much beyond London and generally the south-eastern elites.

  9. I wonder why they are attributed to the Georgian era, especially HM herself who, after all, had her proper one, thank you very much — at the end of which all these soundbites were recorded. Does one really belong to the era one was born (and/or grew up) rather than lived most of one’s life in?

  10. John Cowan says

    I’d say so, yes. My accent clearly belongs to 1958 rather than 2022, though of course there are some changes (I have assimilated to NYC’s nasal TRAP system, for example).

  11. David Marjanović says

    I think this may be because these words were Norman French or Italian borrowings with final syllable stress (baton has this stress in Am.E, but I do not know if this is a survival or an innovation).

    These are all more recent than the layer from Norman French; that’s why it isn’t *baston.

    This is not what we would get from most present-day speakers:

    And indeed, Gladstone already has NORTH/FORCE in your (haven’t paid attention if he merged NORTH & FORCE; in any case, however, it’s a diphthong, not yet merged with THOUGHT). Bernie Sanders still doesn’t.

    What’s interesting is that this way I find out I have FOOT followed directly by /r/ in during, Euro, Europe, European, security and tourist, i.e. across a syllable boundary. This is not directly from my German non-rhoticity, which doesn’t care about syllable boundaries and turns every vowel followed by /r/ into a diphthong.

  12. Athel Cornish-Bowden says

    Well, first of all people don’t speak like their parents generally, especially if their parents have a markedly different accent, as is the case here, but rather as their peers.

    I think that may be true for most people, but I don’t think it’s true for me. My way of speaking owes a lot to my father (with whom I always got on badly, so it’s not a matter of admiration) and little to my peers, who sometimes accused me of talking posh when I were a lad, though that was never intentional. It owes probably less to my mother, who had a noticeable Irish accent (though I I was completely oblivious to that until I first talked to her by telephone as an adult).

    I think my father’s way of speaking was a consequence of his history. He was born in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and lived there till he was about 12, when he was sent (alone!!) to school in England. There he was, I think, teased about his Canadian accent (and weird clothes), and as a result of that he made a determined effort to lose it completely and speak like a nice little well-bred English boy. All that was before I was born, of course, and by the time I was around he had no trace of a Canadian accent.

  13. Andrej Bjelaković says

    @DM
    I remember listening to a Polish phonetician and deciding he had an impeccable English accent, with only one slip up: he kept pronouncing Ed Sheeran’s last name with plain KIT.

  14. David Marjanović says

    I wouldn’t do that – simply because of the spelling.

  15. PlasticPaddy says

    @mollymooly
    Maybe you can say something more definite. For me Sheehan is definitely without the KIT vowel but Whelan or Sheeran (I don’t know any of the latter) could be with the KIT vowel.

  16. January First-of-May says

    I wouldn’t do that – simply because of the spelling.

    I don’t think I could distinguish the KIT and FLEECE vowels reliably (Russian doesn’t distinguish those sounds very well, though AFAICT Polish is better at it), but I would have definitely at least attempted to pronounce “Sheeran” and “Sheehan” (if I ever had to pronounce either name) with the vowel of “sheep”, not the vowel of “ship”, for pretty much the same reason as you.

    (This might well be an incorrect pronunciation for all I know; English has a lot of vowels and in proper names in particular they like to replace each other.)

  17. PlasticPaddy says

    @jfom
    Sorry, I meant the second syllable. Did someone else mean the first syllable?

  18. I assumed the first syllable was meant.

  19. David Marjanović says

    Russian doesn’t distinguish those sounds very well, though AFAICT Polish is better at it

    Neither Russian nor Polish distinguishes them. But Polish can resort to its y, which is an [ɛ]-like sound somewhere around [ɘ] most of the time; the Russian ы is considerably more distant from [ɪ].

  20. John Cowan says

    he kept pronouncing Ed Sheeran’s last name with plain KIT

    Half of Anglophone North America does that (the western part): KIT + /r/. The rest of us use FLEECE + /r/. Ditto with the other r-colored vowels.

  21. Andrej Bjelaković says

    Indeed, but in the context of his English English accent, it stood out. As far as I know, Ed Sheeran always belongs to NEAR over there (=[ɪə~ɪː]). In other words it’s like ‘nearer’ not like ‘mirror’, but in accents that merge those two, the question is moot of course.

  22. This is not what we would get from most present-day speakers

    I think Australians would say queue-er for ‘cure’. ‘Kyore’ would sound very British.

    ‘Poor’, of course, rhymes with ‘paw’, as does ‘sure’.

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