(I'm also told that the American accent is more similar to that spoken in Shakespeare's day, too, but I'm doubtful about how anyone would know.)


In a linguistics class I once heard a demonstration of Old English (think Chaucer instead of Shakespeare). It was not intelligible.
Apparently somewhere along the line the vowel sounds moved forward in the pallet--say AEIOU and you'll see they are all formed closer to the front of the pallet. Old English still had the more guttural vowels formed in the back of the pallet, as in the German language (no surprise since they're related). Linguists don't know why the "great vowel shift" happened. ("Hey, listen to me, Nigel, isn't it cool how I can talk with all my vowels moved forward?" "Oh right, Neville, I'm going to talk that way too from now on")(?)As for how they know it happened, or how Old English really sounded....*shrug*

koala"feeling pendantic"mom