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 pronunciation
between food and ford and between reason and raising. The k 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 ee 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.
For example, the Elizabethans, unlike modern English speakers, continued to
pronounce many er words as ar ones, rhyming serve with carve and convert with
depart. In England, some of these pronunciations survive, particularly in proper
nouns, such as Derby, Berkeley, and Berkshire, though there are many
exceptions and inconsistencies, as with the town of Berkamsted, Hertfordshire,
in which the first word is pronounced "birk-," but the second is pronounced
"hart-." It also survives in a very few everyday words in Britain, notably derby,
clerk, and—with an obviously modified spelling—heart, though not in jerk, kerb
(the English spelling of curb), nerve, serve, herd, heard, or almost any others of
the type. In America, it has been even more consistently abandoned and survives
only in heart. But the change is more recent than you might suppose. Well into
the nineteenth century, Noah Webster was still castigating those who would say
marcy for mercy and merchant for merchant. And then of course there's that
favorite word of Yosemite Sam's, varmint, which is simply a variant of vermin.
In both Britain and America the problem was sometimes resolved by changing
the spelling: Thus Hertford, Connecticut, became Hartford, while in Britain
Barclay and Carr became acceptable variants for Berkeley and Kerr. In at least
three instances this problem between "er" and "ar" pronunciation has left us with
modern doublets: person and parson, university and varsity, and perilous and
parlous.
It is probable, though less certain, that words such as herd, birth, hurt, and worse,
which all today carry an identical "er" sound—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 devine, and many others that jar
against modern ears. The poet William Cowper, who died in i800, 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 it marchant" long after Webster'sdeath.
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, and so on.
Until about the time of Shakespeare all such words were stressed on the second
syllable.
But then three exceptions arose—outlaw, rebel, and record—in which the stress
moved to the first syllable when they were used as nouns (e.g., we re bel' against
a rebel; we re ject' a re'ject). As time went on, the number of words of this type was doubling every hundred years or so, going from 35 in 1700 to 70 in i800 and to 150 by this century,
spreading to include such words as object, subject, convict, and addict. Yet there
are still a thousand words which remain unaffected by this 400-year trend,
among them disdain, display, mistake, hollow, bother, and practice. Why should
this be? No one can say.
What is certain is that just as English spellings often tell us something about the
history of our words, so do some of our pronunciations, at least where French
terms are concerned. Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century
have almost invariably been anglicized, while those coming into the language
later usually retain a hint of Frenchness. Thus older ch-words have developed a
distinct "tch" sound as in change, charge, and chimney, while the newer words
retain the softer "sh" sound of champagne, chevron, chivalry, and chaperone.
Chef was borrowed twice into English, originally as chief with a hard ch and
later as chef with a soft ch. A similar tendency is seen in -age, the older forms of
which have been thoroughly anglicized into an "idge" sound (bandage, cabbage,
language) while the newer imports keep a Gallic "ozh" flavor (badinage,
camouflage). There has equally been a clear tendency to move the stress to the
first syllable of older adopted words, as with mutton, button, and baron, but not
with newer words such as balloon and cartoon. Presumably because of their
proximity to France (or, just as probably, because of their long disdain for things
French) the British have a somewhat greater tendency to disguise French
pronunciations, pronouncing garage as "garridge," fillet as "fill-ut," and putting
a clear first-syllable stress on café, buffet, ballet, and pâté. (Some Britons go so
far as to say "bully" and "bally.") Spelling and pronunciation in English are very
much like trains on parallel tracks, one sometimes racing ahead of the other before being caught up. An arresting example of this can be seen in the slow
evolution of verb forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that turned
hath into has and doth into does. Originally -th verbs were pronounced as
spelled. But for a generation or two during the period from (roughly) 1600 to
1650 they became pronounced as if spelled in the modern way, even when the
spelling was unaltered. So, for example, when Oliver Cromwell saw hath or
chooseth, he almost certainly read them as "has" or "chooses" despite their
spellings. Only later did the spellings catch up.