Preface of the Shahnameh read in a reconstruction of Early New Persian pronunciation @a.z.foreman74

A.Z. Foreman What you hear in this video is a reconstruction of how at least some forms of Persian may have been pronounced (when reading poetry anyway) in Samanid Khorasan in the 10th century.

The text is the prologue of the Shāhnāma, or Shahnameh, Iran's national epic. In this passage, God is praised, & then the creation of the world, humanity, the sun & moon are described, followed by a section in praise of the Prophet & Ali, & discussion of how the book supposedly came to be.

I've noticed that relatively few translators of the Shahnama have done a proper verse translation of the prologue matter into English, & the ones that do exist I mostly don't think highly of. So I did my own. All I omitted was the two panegyrics to rulers, since I did not care for them.

Segmental things to note: the relatively high articulation of /ĭ/ & /ŭ/, the relatively low realization of /ă/, the realization of the ـه suffix as /a/, the existence of the consonants /w xʷ ð β/, a distinction between /ɣ/ & /q/, the existence of the vowels /ē ō/ alongside /ī ū/ & nasalization of long vowels before underlying /n/. Also, the vocalization of certain words is different. One that may particularly stand out is /saxun/ for سخن. (Note the frequent rhyme of with بن /bun/). I avoid lengthening short vowels in closed syllables. So where a modern Iranian might pronounce هست as [hæːst], I simply realize it as [hast] without allophonic lengthening.

In the passage about the Prophet & Ali, I realize a good many Arabic loans with pharyngeal fricatives. This learned practice, still found among clerics in Afghanistan &, to some extent, Sunni clerics in Iran, has signs of being quite old. There's reason to think that, in the medieval period, Persian-speakers who knew Arabic might use these phonemes, in much the way certain types of RP-speakers today pronounce words like "salon" & "genre" with nasalized vowels. Rhymes of ح with ه & of ع with ء are extremely rare, though they do crop up occasionally (as indeed in the text read here, though since there's also a second consonant involved, that may not necessarily imply phonetic identity).

In this reading, when syllables containing anceps vowels (basically any final /a i u/) are metrically heavy, this is realized through phonosyntactic gemination of the following consonant wherever possible, rather than lengthening the vowel. (For more on phonosyntactic gemination in Persian, see this excellent article by Ali Ashraf Sadeghi: https://www.academia.edu/4311788/تشدید_در_فارسی.)

Now about the version of the text being used here.

2 centuries separate the death of Firdawsī from the first known manuscript of the Shāhnāma, dated 1217, the eve of the Mongol invasion which must have destroyed a good deal of written material. After this, there is one other from 1276, & then nothing more before the 14th century at which point the production of Shāhnāma manuscripts explodes, & it becomes the most widely-copied literary text. The result, from an editorial perspective, is a mess. The text was never canonized. Over time it acquired so many accretions & alterations that recovery of the original is impossible. No 2 MSs are identical. We just don't know for certain what Firdawsī wrote. I've opted for a rather eclectic text, to some degree following Khaleghi-Motlagh's edition, to some degree the Moscow edition, & to some degree Barg Naysī's edition. For example, the couplet توانا بود هر كه دانا بود \ز دانش دل پير برنا بود is removed from its usual place in the opening, where it does not belong, & put instead at the end of the section on wisdom where it makes more sense. A number of likely interpolations which make no sense have been removed, as have the sanitizing lines about the Rashidun Caliphs. I did keep the interpolated passages about the Sun & Moon, because I like them. (Personally I have the nagging suspicion that most of the passage on wisdom is an interpolation too, & that the tail end of it beginning w/ "You, authored by the lord who willed the days" should follow directly from the last verse of the opening.) All this means that the words I'm reading do not perfectly match any extant MS. So in addition to a picture of Ibrahim Sultan's MS, I display the Persian text.

If you want to see me read the first story from the Shahnama proper in this style, check out my follow-up video on Gayomart and the Black Demon:

youtu.be/CDsS8Rcvxek

If you liked this video, & want to help me make more things like it, go ahead & make a pledge at my patreon:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you'll be able to access cool subscriber-only stuff including my weekly readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets & the KJV in various 17th century accents. Also you'll be able to see my recordings several days (sometimes a month or more) before I make them available to the public.

Error: in the line كه ايدون به ما خوار بگداشتند I should've read /ēðūn/ not /īðūn/

updated 1 year ago

Preface of the Shahnameh read in a reconstruction of Early New Persian pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-07-08 | What you hear in this video is a reconstruction of how at least some forms of Persian may have been pronounced (when reading poetry anyway) in Samanid Khorasan in the 10th century.

The text is the prologue of the Shāhnāma, or Shahnameh, Iran's national epic. In this passage, God is praised, & then the creation of the world, humanity, the sun & moon are described, followed by a section in praise of the Prophet & Ali, & discussion of how the book supposedly came to be.

I've noticed that relatively few translators of the Shahnama have done a proper verse translation of the prologue matter into English, & the ones that do exist I mostly don't think highly of. So I did my own. All I omitted was the two panegyrics to rulers, since I did not care for them.

Segmental things to note: the relatively high articulation of /ĭ/ & /ŭ/, the relatively low realization of /ă/, the realization of the ـه suffix as /a/, the existence of the consonants /w xʷ ð β/, a distinction between /ɣ/ & /q/, the existence of the vowels /ē ō/ alongside /ī ū/ & nasalization of long vowels before underlying /n/. Also, the vocalization of certain words is different. One that may particularly stand out is /saxun/ for سخن. (Note the frequent rhyme of with بن /bun/). I avoid lengthening short vowels in closed syllables. So where a modern Iranian might pronounce هست as [hæːst], I simply realize it as [hast] without allophonic lengthening.

In the passage about the Prophet & Ali, I realize a good many Arabic loans with pharyngeal fricatives. This learned practice, still found among clerics in Afghanistan &, to some extent, Sunni clerics in Iran, has signs of being quite old. There's reason to think that, in the medieval period, Persian-speakers who knew Arabic might use these phonemes, in much the way certain types of RP-speakers today pronounce words like "salon" & "genre" with nasalized vowels. Rhymes of ح with ه & of ع with ء are extremely rare, though they do crop up occasionally (as indeed in the text read here, though since there's also a second consonant involved, that may not necessarily imply phonetic identity).

In this reading, when syllables containing anceps vowels (basically any final /a i u/) are metrically heavy, this is realized through phonosyntactic gemination of the following consonant wherever possible, rather than lengthening the vowel. (For more on phonosyntactic gemination in Persian, see this excellent article by Ali Ashraf Sadeghi: https://www.academia.edu/4311788/تشدید_در_فارسی.)

Now about the version of the text being used here.

2 centuries separate the death of Firdawsī from the first known manuscript of the Shāhnāma, dated 1217, the eve of the Mongol invasion which must have destroyed a good deal of written material. After this, there is one other from 1276, & then nothing more before the 14th century at which point the production of Shāhnāma manuscripts explodes, & it becomes the most widely-copied literary text. The result, from an editorial perspective, is a mess. The text was never canonized. Over time it acquired so many accretions & alterations that recovery of the original is impossible. No 2 MSs are identical. We just don't know for certain what Firdawsī wrote. I've opted for a rather eclectic text, to some degree following Khaleghi-Motlagh's edition, to some degree the Moscow edition, & to some degree Barg Naysī's edition. For example, the couplet توانا بود هر كه دانا بود \ز دانش دل پير برنا بود is removed from its usual place in the opening, where it does not belong, & put instead at the end of the section on wisdom where it makes more sense. A number of likely interpolations which make no sense have been removed, as have the sanitizing lines about the Rashidun Caliphs. I did keep the interpolated passages about the Sun & Moon, because I like them. (Personally I have the nagging suspicion that most of the passage on wisdom is an interpolation too, & that the tail end of it beginning w/ "You, authored by the lord who willed the days" should follow directly from the last verse of the opening.) All this means that the words I'm reading do not perfectly match any extant MS. So in addition to a picture of Ibrahim Sultan's MS, I display the Persian text.

If you want to see me read the first story from the Shahnama proper in this style, check out my follow-up video on Gayomart and the Black Demon:

youtu.be/CDsS8Rcvxek

If you liked this video, & want to help me make more things like it, go ahead & make a pledge at my patreon:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you'll be able to access cool subscriber-only stuff including my weekly readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets & the KJV in various 17th century accents. Also you'll be able to see my recordings several days (sometimes a month or more) before I make them available to the public.

Error: in the line كه ايدون به ما خوار بگداشتند I should've read /ēðūn/ not /īðūn/

Helen by Paul Valéry read in French and in my English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-06-11 | ...

Saadis Ghazal to the Camel-Driver, read in Medieval Persian Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-06-01 | In which I read Saadi's famous ghazal to the camel-driver in a hypothetical reconstruction of "classical" literary Persian pronunciation ca. 1250 or so.

The Persian text on screen is presented in romanization and in Perso-Arabic script adapted (partly with letters taken from Urdu) to represent medieval pronunciation.

And yes, those are pharyngeal realizations of ح and ع. (Saadi in particular probably even pronounced ث as /θ/ too, though that happens not to occur in this text.) Nasalization of long vowels before coda /n/ is not likely to have been a thing in normal speech at this point (especially in the west), but IMO there's a pretty high probability that it still existed in at least some forms of poetic reading/singing (as it still is in Indian Persian). The mid-vowel /ō/ is pronounced as such here. This may not have been part of many people's normal speech in the west (the prosodist Shams-i Qays of Ray seems to have known about it only from other people's speech and from others' verse) but Saadi in particular is quite strict about distinguishing it from /ū/ at rhyme, and Armenian-letter transcriptions of Persian from the period do suggest that forms of literary pronunciation containing this vowel were known.

If you liked this video, and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead & make a pledge at my patreon:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you'll be able to access cool subscriber-only stuff including my weekly readings of Shakespeare's Sonnets & the KJV in various 17th century accents. Also you'll be able to see my recordings several days (sometimes a month or more) before I make them available to the public.

Shakespeares Sonnet 65 read in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-05-03 | I’ve set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I’m recording them at a rate of about one every week. Most are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them: http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Daughters Song by Zulfiya Atoi read in Tajik and in my English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-29 | I just loved this poem so much when I first read it years ago. So I translated it, because of course I did. I've included a transcription into Perso-Arabic characters.

Lament for his People by Abid b. Al-Abras read in Arabic and English

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-22 | In which I read yet another a Jāhilī poem in Arabic and then in English. This time it is a poem attributed to ʿAbīd b. al-Abraṣ.

Fortunately for the modern reader of Early Arabic (or, at least, fortunately for me) ʿAbīd's language is often as moving as it is difficult, the more so thanks to his most frequent subject: the disaster that befell his tribe, the Banū Asad. The nature of the disaster remains unspecified in the poems and therefore unknown to us, but judging by the evidence from the poems it would have involved some sort of attack by superior forces (presumably one of the sedentary Arab kingdoms) which left many of the Banū Asad dead, and forced most of the rest to flee much of their former territory.

The historical reality underlying the poetry is murky and probably will never be cleared up, barring an extraordinary fortuitous discovery by Arabian archaeologists. The information on ʿAbīd's life accompanying the poetry in Islamic literary compendia does not help much, as it has every sign of being based more on the poems than anything else, though it may contain some refraction of general truth about conflict with Kindite royalty.

Even admitting the qualifications which must attend any corpus which has gone through centuries of oral transmission, I see no substantive reason not to read the body of material attributed to ʿAbīd as (more or less) genuine pre-Islamic poetry. That does not definitively prove, of course, that all (or any) such early work attributed to ʿAbīd is necessarily by him. In pre-Islamic poetry, proving a positive is often much harder than proving a negative. It may well be that only a few poems are genuinely his, and that ʿAbīd as we know him is a half-archetypal figure around whose name various early poems of disparate authorship, containing a particular species of tribal lamentation, coagulated. If true, this would account for some the toponymic discrepancies that perplexed the commentators.

Erratum: the on-screen text has يحبون where I read يمشون. Didn't check to see that I had the correct MS variant when copypasted the text onto the screen.

Shahnama in English Translation: The Tale of Gayomart and the Black Demon

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-14 | Yet another English-language track that I just decided to throw in.

If you want to hear the original text in a reconstruction of late Samanid-era Persian pronunciation, head on over here:

youtube.com/watch?v=CDsS8Rcvxek

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and check out my patreon: http://patreon.com/azforeman

Théophile de Viaus Lament for Clairac read in early Modern French and my English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-08 | Théophile de Viau is my favorite French poet. Here's my reading of a poem by him in a reconstruction of one form of Early Modern French pronunciation, followed by my English translation.

The poem is his sonnet "Sacrez murs du soleil" in which he laments the destruction of his hometown of Clairac.

Here's the story:

Clairac was a bastion of Protestantism in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. In May of 1621, during the Huguenot rebellions, 4,000 Protestant rebels held the city against a siege by Louis XIII under the slogan "City With No King, Soldiers With No Fear." The rebels had not prepared adequately for a siege, and the city of Clairac, faced with imminent famine after two weeks, surrendered to Louis XIII who summarily executed the rebel leaders and gave his men leave to massacre and terrorize the populace.

In 1622, Clairac was held briefly by Huguenot rebels again, and even more thoroughly devastated by urban warfare, and also by the Huguenots themselves just before they left it to the Catholics.

In the spring of that year, Théophile revisited the city of his birth, home to so many memories. ("Philis" was the poetic pseudonym by which he referred to a girl he had known in Boussères, near Clairac, where the family had an estate.) He found it largely ravaged and ruined, much of the surviving population traumatized and impoverished, still busy identifying and burying the dead. Funerals would have been a common sight.

To my mind, the accumulation of descriptive collocations suggests the speaker walking about the ruined town and noting the spectacles of devastation. The various objects spill out of his voice so as to evoke the chaos of the ruins. On one level, the repeated use of the zero-article would give an almost proverbial or generalized tone to it. At the same time, most or all of the poem is an extended apostrophe. By line 5, we tune in to the other sense of the zero article as a vocative, as the copula there is in the 2nd person plural. Théophile is speaking not just about these sites and places but also to them. English poetic tradition doesn't make use of apostrophe nearly as much, and our copula doesn't distinguish between 3rd and 2nd person in the plural anyway. It felt like I couldn't quite manage a way to bring that over into English without sounding a little too treacly.

A church is mentioned in the poem. I have translated it in English as "church". In French at this time (and still traditionally at least in European French) there were different words for what we call a church in English. Protestant places of worship were temples and Catholic ones were églises. This was normal usage. But, the word temple when used as a refined "mot noble" (such as one might well encounter in, say, poetry) could also refer to a Catholic church. So is it an unmarked word for a Protestant place or a marked way of referring to a Catholic place? The answer is obvious at one level: he must mean a Catholic church, since he was Catholic and the (Eucharistic) "mysteries" and "altar" are right there anyway. That's how the commentators on this poem take it, anyway.

Personally, I don't think that's all there is to it. The important point is that Théophile is using a word that can mean one of two different things, and the distinction was socially and politically salient. It's interestin to consider where Théophile's head might have been at, at this time in particular. He was born to a Huguenot family, and studied at the Protestant university at Saumur. He had only just converted to Catholicism shortly before writing this poem. In using a word ordinarily associated with Protestant churches in such a way and context as to refer to a Catholic one, my gut tells me that Théophile might also be expressing the generalized senselessness of religious war atrocities when writing about a city that had seen such atrocities from both sides.

Some points of pronunciation: I realized a fair amount of the pretonic instances of "o" as /u/ including cases where they are /ɔ/ in Modern French. Matters could still vary idiolectally on this point even in Théophile's generation, and I've always been partial to ouisme anyway. Note the survival of /ʎ/ in "soleil" and "orgueilleux", as well as the non-rounded vowel in the second syllable of the latter. I wasn't really sure about realizing "tous" with /s/ as an adverb in non-pausal position in this period, and couldn't track down stuff that would help nail down the chronology.

It's not altogether clear to what degree (i.e. in what performance contexts) poetic recitation preserved pausal /s/ in the early 1600s. It does seem to have been a thing, though optional and perhaps even old-fashioned. It cannot have been totally dead since even at the end of the century the language of song and stylized theatrical performance seems to have maintained it.

If you liked this video and want to help me make more things like it, go ahead and join my Patreon: http://patreon.com/azforeman

Preface of the Shahnameh, read in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-07 | This is a reading of my English translation of (most of) the preface to the Shahnama (excluding the panegyrics and several likely interpolations). I wanted to confirm to myself that rhymed couplets can actually work out loud in Modern English. (Also, I've had English audio tracks for a bunch of stuff ready to go for a while in case YouTube ever rolls out multiple tracks to all users).

Also this part of the Shahnama is sometimes skipped in part or whole in translations into English. Dick Davis' acclaimed prosimetric rendering leaves it out entirely and simply begins with the tale of Gayōmart, while Levy's prose translation cuts out the entire passage about the Prophet and Alī. Ironically, in the transmission history of the poem, that section was actually likely more vulnerable to amplification and interpolation, at least some of which served to obscure Firdawsi's Shi'ism by shoehorning mention of the Rāshidūn caliphs into this section.

To hear me read the original in a reconstruction of Samanid-era Persian pronunciation, head on over to this video:

youtube.com/watch?v=tQCWJFODiWw

Edit:
There are some minor discrepancies between the on-screen translation and my reading. I tried to update the text in the video file from my latest revision, but I missed a few spots.

Shakespeares Sonnet 77 in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-04-03 | I’ve set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I’m recording them at a rate of about one every week. Most are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them: http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Pronunciation things to note in this reading:

Weak (monophthongal) and strong (diphthongal) forms of thou and thy alternate here. The words glass, blank, waste and taste all have the same vowel. (There were other forms of speech in which the latter two of these would have had a lengthened version of the same vowel as precious, though.)

The word minute (n.) [mɪnɪʊ̯t] has no schwa. This is reflective of the more careful pronunciation known to schoolmasters like Alexander Gil, who in fact transcribes the second syllable of this word with the same vowel he gives to lute. The more modern (and presumably less cultivated or learned) form /mɪnǝt/ also existed and is given by other orthoepists.

Ulysses and the Siren, by Samuel Daniel, read in (2 different) Early Modern English pronunciation(s)

A.Z. Foreman 2024-03-14 | For this poem by Samuel Daniel, published in 1609, I used two different Early Modern accents that can be reconstructed for the period. Ulysses speaks a conservative dialect of the Elizabethan university type (with no Foot-Strut split, a DEW-DUE contrast, a POINT-JOY contrast, a low MATE vowel etc.) whereas the Siren speaks a much more innovative lect.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon: http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can access my recordings before I make them public, and also get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well.

Got questions? Check my FAQ patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058

You can follow me on twitter and tiktok @azforeman

If you want to hear this recording without the background music, see the file downloadable at this patreon page: patreon.com/posts/67579513

The Song of Moses: Deuteronomy 31:24-32:43 in post-exilic and pre-exilic Hebrew pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-02-27 | This is a phonological reconstruction of Deuteronomy 31:25-32:43 (or, in traditional Jewish terms, the seventh aliyah of Vayelech and the first six aliyot of Parashat Ha'azinu) where I rewind the relative chronology of sound-changes and try to use some rough guides as to absolute dating in order to offer very theoretical snapshots of what the phonology of the Biblical text MIGHT have been like at distinct points in time that are unrecoverable through direct means. The prose part is done as if it were the early Second Temple and the actual song itself in something pretty archaic, with lateral fricatives and fully preserved diphthongs and everything.

While Deuteronomy existed in the First Temple period, there is considerable disagreement as to what it looked like. In particular, the prose portions of the later books are under heavy suspicion of being later additions. Which is not to say that they are necessarily later compositions in the normal sense. Rather, much as early poetry appears to have been sutured into a prose narrative, disparate sources of early material may have been drawn upon to create the text as it now stands. There is an overwhelming but not quite universal view that the Song of Moses originally existed independently of the book of Deuteronomy, and little consensus as to what Deuteronomy (especially this part of it) looked like then or what the editorial process of integrating the Song of Moses into it might have looked like. To illustrate the multistratal nature of the Pentateuch as is stands, I have presented the prose front-matter to the Song of Moses in a chronologically later guise than the poem itself.

There are a lot of notes as to what I did and on what basis I did it, but they proved to be way too much for this video description, so I have put them right into the video at relevant points. If you want to read them, just pause the video at the appropriate place.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, check out my patreon here http://patreon.com/azforeman

Errata:
I neglected a bunch of etymological instances of /ġ/ and /ḫ/ in: ḫimʔat, raġġōt, raġāb, yaraḫḫip. Also I screwed up a couple diphthongs. I went and redid the thing (opting for a different choices, like /a/ in the first person singular pi'el prefix vowel, adopting some different readings for the ending, and giving a new hypothetical vocalization of verse 24 to make it make sense). If you want to hear it corrected, you can find that at my patreon: patreon.com/posts/98189215

Six Degrees of the Shma: Deuteronomy 6:4-6 in Six Historical Pronunciations of Biblical Hebrew

A.Z. Foreman 2024-02-22 | This has been sitting on my queue for a long, LONG time. Thanks to Ben Kantor's recent book on the relationships between the early reading traditions, I was able to lay to rest some of my uncertainties, though not all. I dithered and vacillated about how much of the Shma to do and in what format. Anyway, at this point I think I'd better just post it once and for all, or I'll be tinkering with it forevermore.

What you have here is a theoretical pre-exilic version, a reading based on the dialect of the Secunda, a reading based on Saint Jerome's transcriptions, a reading meant to illustrate what a "Masoretic-type" vocalization might have been like (complete with pausal forms and the long pronoun clitics), followed by readings in reconstructions of Babylonian and Tiberian Hebrew. The reconstructions based on rewinding sound-changes in the relative chronology of Biblical Hebrew, rather than directly attested material, are transcribed in a broad Semiticist notation. The ones based on documented dialects are given in IPA.

For the reconstructions of Jerome's and the Secunda's dialect I'm indebted to Benjamin Kantor, though I have changed a thing or two (notably, I don't think /r/ was dorsal in this period). For the relative chronology of Biblical Hebrew sound changes (which is how two of these readings were arrived at), I'm grateful to Benjamin Suchard and his excellent dissertation.

Most of these recordings are chanted/cantillated one way or another, in part because otherwise it didn't seem like including both the Secunda dialect and Jerome's dialect was justified (his dialect *is* different from that of the Secunda, though the differences aren't super apparent from the passage given here), and in part because I think it's kind of an important point that the phonology of Biblical Hebrew reading traditions was, after a certain point at least, not primarily associated with a normal speaking voice. It's difficult to even make sense of the structure of Tiberian Hebrew unless you envision it chanted. The reading in the theoretical late 2nd Temple para-Masoretic dialect is a very simple chant of my own concoction, and with the reading in Jerome's dialect I was likewise having fun. The Babylonian one is basically bastardized Shaami, and the Tiberian version is bastardized Temani. (I realize it would make way more sense for these two to be reversed, but I liked how my Tiberian one came out so much that I didn't want to part with it.) The greatest uncertainty lies in what Hebrew was like (and indeed whether this passage even looked the same) in the pre-exilic period.

Note: this recording has me pronouncing the actual Tetragrammaton out loud. If you'd rather not hear that, skip the first of these readings. I don't pronounce it in the post-exilic renderings.

Incidentally, if you have not known the pain of trying to get Babylonian vocalization to properly render in a video editor, count yourself lucky. How is it 2024 and we still don't have proper unicode support for Babylonian Hebrew vowels?

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, check out my Patreon here: http://patreon.com/azforeman

Mercutios Queen Mab Speech from Romeo & Juliet read in Early Modern Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-29 | This is a passage from Romeo and Juliet in the so-called "original pronunciation" i.e. a reconstruction of how London English (or rather a couple varieties thereof) was pronounced in the early 1600s, from your friendly neighborhood historical linguist and poetry nerd. For this one I gave Mercutio a somewhat more innovative accent than Romeo, with raising and monophthongization of the WAIT vowel.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon: http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well (this recording for example was made available five days early).Got questions? (Like "Why does this not sound like Crystal's OP!?") Check my FAQ: patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058

Shakespeares Sonnets 27 and 28 in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-22 | I’ve set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I’m recording them at a rate of about one every week. Most are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them: http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now. If you'd like to hear this recording without the background music just download the audio file:

patreon.com/file?h=52707958&i=12331355

Have questions? Check my FAQ first

patreon.com/posts/64053058

For this one I went with a relatively conservative type of speech for the period, preserving the fricative in words like "night", and with fairly low mid-vowels.

Shakespeares Sonnet 6 in Early Modern Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-20 | I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

patreon.com/posts/shakespeares-of-75623729

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Deor from the Exeter Book read in 9th century Old Mercian

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-19 | If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon http://patreon.com/azforeman

(There you can get early access to my videos and see all of my readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English)

The phonology of this reading is not based on the extant West Saxon text in the Exeter Book. That'd be too easy and I wanted to do something different. Trying to date a poem as short as this is difficult, but its subject matter and in particular its preservation of genuine Old English reflexes of mythical proper names suggests that it isn't much younger than the 9th century if that. I based my reading on the Mercian dialect recorded in the Vespasian Psalter. Thus unlike my Beowulf readings, vowel length has collapsed in inflectional endings, /ĕ̄o/ and /ĭ̄o/ have merged, and Mercian second fronting is in full effect. The text shown in the video is meant to give an idea of what the text in the Exeter Book might have looked like if it were copied out faithfully from a Mercian exemplar.

This poem refers to stock characters — real and fictional — from Germanic lore. Some of the figures are now obscure, and most are not known directly from Old English versions of the story. I have modernized many of the names in my translation, giving them forms that would be plausible as Modern English versions of the name. The biggest exception is Wayland, whose Old English name would actually have been Weeland or Weland had it survived into the modern period.

Wayland (Old English Wéland, Old Norse Vǫlundr, Old High German Wiolant) was a smith renowned for his metal working ability. He was forced to work for Nithad (OE Niþhad, ON Níðuðr) who hamstrung him to stop his escape. Wayland avenged himself by killing the king's sons, raping his daughter Beadild (OE Beadohilde, ON Bǫðvildr). Mathild and Geat are opaque. They appear to be famous lovers that met a tragic end, like Romeo and Juliet, or Layla and Majnun. The ablest guess is that they correspond to Magnhild and Gaute of a Scandinavian ballad tale recorded in the 19th century, but even if so the story as it was known to the poet's English audience may well have differed greatly from the version known from Scandinavia a thousand years later. Thedric is Theodoric, the Ostrogothic emperor who ruled in Italy from 493 to 526. Armenric is Ermanaric the Goth, another famous tyrant, known to us from Beowulf and Widsith. (I confected the form Armenric by positing that the vowel of Eormanric underwent pre-rhotic lowering to /a/ in Late Middle English and, as in most native words, failed to raise again in the Early Modern period. Eormanric becomes Armenric just like "feorr", "deorc" do "far", "dark".)

Translation:

Wayland in Wormland　went through harrows,
The strongminded smith　suffered in exile.
Worry and longing 　walked beside him,
winter-raw anguish.　He ached for escape
after King Nithad　cramped his sinews　
and bound a slave　of the better man.

That passed in time.　So too can this.

To Beadild's mind　her brothers' deaths
weren't as wounding　as what she faced
herself when she came　to clearly see
that she was pregnant.　That princess unwed
could not handle　what would become of her.

That passed in time.　So too can this.

We know the tale 　of tragic Mathild.
the Geat bore her　a bottomless passion,
all sleep banished 　by a baneful love

That passed in time.　So too can this.

Tyrant Thedrick　for thirty winters
ruled the Mearings,　as many know.

That passed in time.　So too can this.

We have all heard tell　of Armenrick
and his wolfsick mind.　He was one cruel king,
That overlord　of the outland Goths
whose state was set　in strung-up hearts　
as strong men sat　in sorrow-chains
awaiting the worst,　and wishing so much
for a foe to liberate　the land of their king.

That passed in time.　So too can this.

A man sits mournful,　mind ripped from joy.
His spirit in dark,　he deems himself
foredoomed to endure　ordeals forever.
Then he may think　how throughout the world
the Wise God goes　and works around:
meting out grace,　mercy and certain
success to some,　suffering to many.

Of myself I want　to say just this:
I was high poet　　to the Hedenings once,
Dear to my master.　"Deer" was my name.
For many winters　 I was a man in that hall
And the heart of my lord.　But Herrend came
And reaped the riches　and rights of land
That guardian of men 　once granted me,
And stole my place 　with a poet's skill.

That passed in time.　So too can this.

Evensong/ערבית by Haim Nahman Bialik, read in Ashkenazic Hebrew and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-18 | In which I read a poem by Haim Nahman Bialik in Ashkenazic Hebrew pronunciation, and in my English translation

Shakespeares Sonnet 8 read in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-08 | I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Beowulf 2231-2270 read in Early Mercian: Lament of the Last Survivor

A.Z. Foreman 2024-01-06 | This is the second of my "Early Mercian Beowulf" series, in which I read passages from Beowulf in something likely closer than the extant manuscript to what the original might have been like: an archaic form of Mercian, based on the orthography of the Épinal-Erfurt-Corpus glosses.

This passage is traditionally known as the Lament of the Last Survivor, and it is one of my favorites from the poem. The hero finds treasure in the hoard left by a man of a vanished nation, the last of a people who lived even before the Migration Era in which the poem is set.

The Beowulf poet elsewhere alludes to a number of legendary episodes (often from stories that are now unknown apart from their oblique mention in this poem), and normally names the participants. Sometimes that's all he does. The audience would be expected to know, for example, who Hrothmund, Heorogar and Heoroweard were (the former two names are completely unknown outside of Beowulf, and the latter only from Scandinavian material). This larger narrative context gives point to the fact that the man here is completely anonymized. With no one left to carry on the tribe’s history, the whole heroic ideal of immortality through imperishable fame (or, if you like *ḱléwos *ń̥dʰgʷʰitom) is meaningless. His name is dead, and so too should his story be. And yet, the story lives in this poem. We are hearing a story we ought not to be able to hear. Invited to consider how many tribes and nations have simply disappeared and left not so much as a name, we imagine a memory we cannot really have.

The man himself has no use for the treasures of his nation now, and so decides to bury in a hoard. With no one left to talk to, he addresses himself to the earth as it receives his tribe's now-meaningless treasure.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon http://patreon.com/azforeman

(There you can get early access to my videos and see all of my readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English)

Beowulf 1-227 (Dawn of Things Ferocious) read in Early Mercian

A.Z. Foreman 2023-12-26 | If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon http://patreon.com/azforeman

Round the holidays I try to do something big and different. So here's the first 227 lines of Beowulf. "Dawn of Things Ferocious" (seemed more tonally appropriate than its competitors "Unheimlich Maneuvers" & "Grendel Stole Christmas")

The internet is already full of Beowulf-recitations. But the extant Beowulf MS is demonstrably not in the dialect of composition. So I produced a reading in something likely closer to what the original might have been like: an archaic form of Mercian, based on the orthography of the Épinal-Erfurt-Corpus glosses. (A Northumbrian origin can't be excluded, but balance of evidence suggests Mercian.)

It's unlikely that the poem was originally performed as in this recording, with a speaking voice. More probably it was chanted/sung. But I have no idea where I'd even begin working out a chanted or sung version. I'll stick with the thing I at least have some knowledge of

What you hear in this reading might be called a "reconstructive imagining" of one form of Early Mercian, from around 700 or so, toward the early end of when Beowulf might have been composed (ranging from ca. 690 to 725). The on-screen text is meant to show what a theoretical early MS might have been like, though it is itself in a subtly different type of archaic OE than my actual reading. Its orthography is based on some of the earliest Old English attested in Latin characters (that's why there's no þorn or eð letters, for example.)

I want to emphasize that this is an act of speculative imagination. This reconstruction is far more speculative than, say, my Shakespeare readings are. It's not just that (unlike Early Modern English) we have zero direct evidence for pronunciation to work with beyond sound changes, loanwords, spellings and other scribal behavior. Nor even that, compared to Middle English, the resolution we are working with in terms of dialectal diversity is severely reduced.

This reading assumes Mercian back-umlaut and only the lower half of "Mercian second fronting", like the dialect of the Omont Leaf. On the other hand, it reading retains a contrast between /ĭ ī ǣ/ in inflectional vowels.

Other retained features of the Épinal glosses include: /β/ from Proto-Germanic *b between vowels, inherited /æ/ before nasals. I decided to lexicalize the Anglian smoothing reflex of "ea" before /rC/, so it is sometimes /e/ and sometimes /æ/. Also final fricative devoicing is not complete.

There are several Mercian features here I could point out. Many are relatively minor (like "for" always being disyllabic "foræ" even when unstressed, or the preterite of weak class II verbs having /a/ instead of /u~o/). A major feature absent from the West Saxon taught to students is a /ø:/ vowel represented by œ as in "cwœn" (queen).

I made several other assumptions/choices: I realize palatalized "cg" as [ɟɟ], "sc" as [sç] and "c" as [c~cɕ]. The "g" is a stop only after /n/, a fricative/approximant elsewhere, including initially. These are archaic realizations compared to how OE is normally pronounced. It is difficult to be precise about when the sound-changes involved took place, though it's unlikely that "c" affricated before ca. 650.

There's a reason why the onscreen text is in a slightly different dialect than the recording. The unknowability is real. Don't take this as reconstructing the original dialect of Beowulf but as a general, approximate idea of the type of English proper to the period and broad dialect region in which Beowulf is thought to originate. There's great variety in the choices one could make in such a reconstruction consistent w/ the evidence for the poem's dialectal/chronological origins. We can be pretty sure that the poem at some point existed in writing in a dialect with back-umlaut, and that the Beowulf poet was sensitive to vowel-length in inflections, but we don't know to what degree second fronting was operative, let alone how smoothing affected "ea" or whether he retained /β/.

For a bit more on that see this page on my patreon:

patreon.com/posts/94137461

This reading relies heavily on an unpublished edition of Beowulf by Nelson Goering. To him I am also grateful for inspiring this video w/ his own Mercian retroversion of the first 11 lines, & for putting up w/ my interminable questions about OE diachrony & the Épinal-Erfurt Glosses.

This one was a lot of work. I tried to be careful but in my attempted retroversion into early Mercian, something probably escaped notice. (Edit: it did. I forgot back umlaut in "-stapa" and "clifu", and also the wrong vowel in "reht" and the reduplicative preterite in "heht" and other stuff. Oh screw it. I went and re-recorded. If somehow you're as anal-retentive as I am about diachrony, you can hear the updated recording on my patreon page.)

The translation in the video is my own

Sonnet 54 from Astrophel & Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, read in Late Elizabethan Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-12-22 | I read this one in a very conservative accent, without a diphthong and with a fricative in words like "knight" and with fairly low mid-vowels.

If you liked this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon account: http://patreona.com/azforeman

Shakespeares Sonnet 15 read in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-12-04 | Note that the rhyme "moment"/"comment" is here pronounced as exact. It would be quite justifiable to pronounce it as inexact in a reconstruction. There is no direct evidence for the short vowel in the former word from this period, and a feminine rhyme has particularly weak evidentiary value of phonetic identity, but such a form will have been produced via trisyllabic shortening under inflection in Middle English, so I chose to use it, especially since shortness has aesthetic point here.

I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period. I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Sonnets 1 & 2 from Astrophel & Stella, by Sir Philip Sidney, read in Late Elizabethan Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-12-03 | I read this one in a very conservative accent, without a diphthong and with a fricative in words like "knight" and with fairly low mid-vowels.

Note also the pronunciation of the final syllable of "Muscovite" with the KIT vowel, rhyming with "wit". There was still a fair mount of fluctuaton and variation in how morphemes like "-ice" and "-ite" were realized in any given word.

If you liked this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon account: http://patreon.com/azforeman

Psalm 120 read in a reconstruction of Tiberian Hebrew Pronunciation from the Aleppo Codex

A.Z. Foreman 2023-12-01 | This reading includes the same psalm read twice, once in a normal albeit very slow speaking voice, and again with cantillation.

This pronunciation, used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee, is the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record. I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.

(I realized after posting that my secondary stresses in the spoken version were a little wonky. Always after posting I notice things like this.)

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, consider making a pledge at my patreon http://patreon.com/azforeman

Psalm 117 read in Reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew with and without cantillation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-23 | This reading includes the same psalm read twice, once in a normal albeit very slow speaking voice, and again with cantillation.

A friend noted to me that the Babylonian Talmud (Sukkah 38b and also Tractate Sofrim believed to be composed in Palestine) and, in a more oblique way, the Jerusalem Talmud (Shabbat 16) inform us as to the specifics of communal participation in the chanting of the hallel psalms. Specifically, it was done as a responsory. The practice is not common today, but of a certainty many users of the Tiberian reading tradition would have done so. So, I figured, why not incorporate that in my cantillated version of the reading of this psalm?

This pronunciation, used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee, is the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record. I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.

Shakespeares Sonnets 71-74 read in Early Modern English pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-22 | My readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English pronunciation continue with Sonnets 71-74 including the famous "that time of year thou may'st in me behold".

These sonnets form a closely bound unit, so it made sense to read them in sequence. I used a type of speech largely based on the dialect recorded by Robinson (1617), though I preserve the WAIT/MATE distinction more systematically, and I do not diphthongize long /ō/ before /ld/.

Some notes on pronunciation:

In sonnet 71, note the Quarto spelling "vildest" for "vilest". This /d/ appears to have been a real thing, and I have so pronounced it here. Aesthetically it seems to provide an echo of "world" in the same and previous lines. Note also the rhyme "gone/moan" which appears to rest on the GOAT vowel in both words (which they had in Alexander Gil's dialect) although the short vowel in "gone" was already quite common by the time the sonnets were published.

In sonnet 72, over half the rhymes are imperfect in a modern accent: prove/love, desert/impart, this/is, forth/worth. In the early 17th century, there existed pronunciations making all of these perfect rhymes. "This/is" rests on the strong form of is under heavy stress, which retained voiceless /s/. Prove/love almost certainly rests on /ʊ/ in both words, though there's reason to think that /ʊ~u:/ could be accepted as a full rhyme in the period. Forth/worth rests on /ʊ/ in both words. "Forth" is quite commonly recorded with /ʊ/ by authors on pronunciation in the period. Impart/desert rests on a Middle English sound-change of /ĕr → ăr/ just like ME "derk, hert" became modern "dark, heart". This change appears to have been resisted at the highest levels of education in Romance words, as only a minority of orthoepists really show the change there. (Hodges in "The English Primrose" in 1644 shows it pretty fully though). Resistance to it became more and more strong over the course of the later 17th and early 18th centuries, so that saying "sarvent" for "servent" by the late 1700s was seen as vulgar. In Modern English, only a few Romance loanwords survive with /ar/ intact, like "sergeant", "varnish" (cf. French "vernis") and the British pronunciation of "clerk". A few others survive in buried form like "varmint", varsity ( → "University") and even "tarnation".

In sonnet 74, note that "knife" still has the initial /k/ sound and so alliterates with coward and conquest.

I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period (you might call it "Original Pronunciation" if you must, but it is not to be confused with Crystal's reconstruction). I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Reading of 2 Samuel 1 read in reconstructed Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-20 | This pronunciation, used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee, is the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record. I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.) As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.

In this case, unlike most of my Tiberian Hebrew videos, I used a speaking voice. There's abundant evidence that the Tiberian reading tradition and the pronunciation that went with it did not develop for normal speech. Much of it is only explicable in relation to language that is chanted or else some other form of exaggerated hyperspeach. But what if someone pronounced it as part of normal speech without cantillation? There must have been times when this happened. People must have had occasion quote Biblical passages to each other in conversation and the like. Odds are that when this happened, a less careful and exacting pronunciation was used.

I thought I'd take a crack at trying to make the Tiberian reading pronunciation work in a speaking voice, albeit a rather declamatory one, by loosening the productioin of overlong vowels in stressed closed syllables which Khan reconstructs for the Tiberian reading, and by being more flexible in where secondary stress is applied. It's still pretty close to hyperspeech, but it felt like the declamatory style could accomodate that.

Oh and also I included my translation of David's Lament in alliterative verse, because why not

Slip by Nawal Nafaa, read in Arabic and in English

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-18 | Just me reading yet another poem in Arabic and in English

Lady Macbeths The Raven Himself is Hoarse speech read in Early Modern Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-16 | So what you have here, dear viewers, is a reading of one of Lady Macbeth's speeches from Macbeth in early 17th century English. I couldn't quite pull off sounding like a woman convincingly. But oh well, I'm sure some of the male performers who played Lady Macbeth before the Restoration couldn't either.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon.

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well (this recording for example was made available five days early).

Got questions? (Like "Why does this not sound like Crystal's OP!?") Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058

The Fall by Adunis, read in Arabic and in English ادونيس: قصيدة السقوط

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-13 | Just me reading yet another poem by the great Syrian poet Ali Ahmad Said Esber AKA Adunis, in Arabic and in English.

Richmonds speech to the troops from Shakespeares Richard III in Early Modern pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-04 | This is a passage from the finale of Richard III in the so-called "original pronunciation" i.e. a reconstruction of how London English (or rather a couple varieties thereof) was pronounced in the early 1600s, from your friendly neighborhood historical linguist and poetry nerd. I gave Richmond innovative mid-vowels, and a monophthongal reflex of ME /au/, but a conservative retention of the fricative (with no diphthongization) in words like "night".

Miscellaneous lexical things:

* Note the pronunciation of "qu" as /kw/ in the word "conqueror". The words "conquer" and "conqueror" indeed had /kw/ in earlier English, just like "conquest" still does (the spelling "cw" is occasionally found in Middle English), and just as "answer" was pronounced with /sw/ by some into the early 17th century.

* Note the realization of "corpse" without a /p/. The /p/ here is due to the influence of spelling, and the word is often enough spelled "corse" (sometimes in the First Folio itself, though not in this place).

* Note the realization of "soldier" without /l/. Both pronunciations with and without /l/ existed at the time.

* Note the pronunciation of "murder" with /ð/ (and the spelling "murther'd") in the text shown here

* Note the realization of "thereof" with final /f/ instead of /v/. This word retained the strong form under stress into the 17th century in at least some forms of speech.

* Note the pronunciation of "safeguard" with /v/.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon.

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well.

Got questions? (Like "Why does this not sound like Crystal's OP!?") Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058

At Flickering Sundown by Haim Bialik, read in Ashkenazic Hebrew and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-04 | In which I read the first poem of Bialik I ever encountered, in Hebrew and in English. The original Hebrew is read using traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation, because I refuse to destroy Bialik's rhyme and rhythm with Israeli vowels and word-stress.

From the end of The Procession by Khalil Gibran, read in Arabic and English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-03 | In which I read the last two parts of Khalil Gibran's "Procession" in Arabic and then in my English translation.

Two loves I have (Shakespeares Sonnet 144 read in Early Modern Pronunciation)

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-03 | My readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English pronunciation continue with Sonnet 144.

I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period (you might call it "Original Pronunciation" if you must, but it is not to be confused with Crystal's reconstruction). I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Some pronunciation notes on this sonnet (where I use a fairly conservative type of speech largely patterned on the dialect recorded by Shakespeare's near-exact contemporary Alexander Gil the Elder)

L4:

Spirit: At L2, meter calls for disyllabic pronunciation of "spirit", whereas at L4, a monosyllable is called for. Both existed. The former obviously was ancestral to the modern pronunciation. For the latter, there are two possibilities with syncope either of the first or second vowel: /spirt/ or /sprit/, both byforms that existed in Middle English. The form /spirt/ in particular is attested by spellings into the 17th century. The form /sprit/ would descend from the same form that yielded modern sprite only with a short vowel. Now, /sprit/ seems to have been a favored form of versifiers at least in the 18th century, when poets often spell it "sp'rit" and "sp'ryt". Poets in Shakespeare's period sometimes rhyme the word in a way that may seem to favor this too (e.g. Donne's yet:spiritt) though all such instances are ambiguous given the legality of rhyming a stressed syllable on a supernumerary unstressed one.

"Worser...woman...coloured". All three of these words will have had /ʊ/ as their stressed syllable.

L5-7:

Here a pronunciation of "devil" and "evil" as /(d)ɪvl/ appears to be called for by the rhyme. Such a pronunciation, of both words, is attested by Hodges.

L9-11:

Here it's anyone's guess what vowel the fiend/friend rhyme rests on. Convincing cases can be made for /ɛ/, /ɪ/ and /i:/. If I had to pick, I would chose the second of these. But fundamentally there's no reason why this sonnet couldn't have been pronounced all kinds of ways among its earliest audience.

Prophecy by Adunis, read in Arabic and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-03 | An evocative, surreal poem by Adūnīs/Adonis (AKA Ali Ahmad Said): "Prophecy"

Read in Arabic and in my English translation.

On the Butchery by Bialik, read in Ashkenazic Hebrew and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-11-03 | In which I read Bialik's "On the Butchery", written after the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. I read the original Hebrew using traditional Ashkenazic pronunciation, because I refuse to destroy Bialik's rhyme and rhythm with Israeli vowels and word-stress.

The Book of Judges serves as a not-so-subtle (to the Hebrew reader anyway) textual anchor throughout the poem. In Judges: 6, Israel lies in the hands of the Midianites, suffering under the cruelty of foreign oppressors. The same notion lies at the heart of Bialik's view of the Czarist regime- the foreigners who are slaughtering Jews. In Judges: 6, the Israelite judge Gideon contemplates the plight of his people and sinks into doubt and faithlessness. Eventually, Gideon, after asking over and over for a sign from God, finally receives such an answer in the form of two miracles. Bialik, by contrast, cries out but but receives no answer.

Poem for the Man of Light by Abdulwahhab Al-Bayati read in Arabic and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-25 | In which I read one of a few poems by Abdulwahhab al-Bayati that I've translated, first in Arabic, and then in English.

Poem for the Man of Light
By Abdulwahhab Al-Bayati

The man of light
Goes vagrant through my sleep at night
He stops in the abandoned corner
To extract words from my memory to write
And rewrite them aloud,
To blot lines out.
He looks into the mirror
Of the house sunken deep in the darklight.
He recollects something
And slinks from my sleep.
I wake in dread
And try to recollect some thing
Of what he wrote, of what was said,
In vain. For the light
Has erased the papers and my memory
With daybreak's deadman white.

قصيدة لرجل النور
عبد الوهاب البياتي

يتجول في نومي رجل النور
يتوقف في الركن المهجور
يُخرج من ذاكرتي كلماتٍ
يكتبها
ويعيد كتابتها في صوت مسموع
يمحو بعض سطور
ينظر في مرآة البيت الغارق بالظلمة والنور
يتذكر شيئاً
فيغادر نومي
استيقظ مذعوراً
وأحاول أن أتذكر شيئاً
مما قال ومما هو مكتوب
عبثاً ، فالنور
مسح الأوراق وذاكرتي
ببياض الفجر المقتول .

Moon by Natan Alterman, read in Hebrew and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-25 | In which I read one of Alterman's earlier poems in Hebrew, and then in my English translation. And yes that is my normal way of pronouncing Hebrew. Blame my Mizrahi teacher.

Moon
Nathan Alterman

Even an old landscape has a moment of its birth.
The strange, impregnable
And birdless skies.
Under your window, moonlit on the earth,
Your city bathes in cricket-cries.

But when you see the path still looks to far
Wanderers, and the moon
Rests on a cypress spear,
You ask in wonder "Lord! Are all of these still here?
Can I not ask in whispers how they are?"

The waters looks at us from their lagoons.
The tree in red of earrings
Stays a silent tree.
Never, my God, shall Thy huge playthings' sorrow
Be rooted out of me.

יָרֵחַ
נתן אלתרמן

גַּם לְמַרְאֶה נוֹשָׁן יֵשׁ רֶגַע שֶׁל הֻלֶּדֶת.
שָׁמַיִם בְּלִי צִפּוֹר
זָרִים וּמְבֻצָּרִים.
בַּלַּיְלָה הַסָּהוּר מוּל חַלּוֹנְךָ עוֹמֶדֶת
עִיר טְבוּלָה בִּבְכִי הַצִּרְצָרִים.

וּבִרְאוֹתְךָ כִּי דֶּרֶךְ עוֹד צוֹפָה אֶל הֵלֶךְ
וְהַיָּרֵחַ
עַל כִּידוֹן הַבְּרוֹשׁ
אַתָּה אוֹמֵר- אֵלִי, הַעוֹד יֶשְׁנָם כָּל אֵלֶּה?
הַעוֹד מֻתָּר בְּלַחַשׁ בִּשְׁלוֹמָם לִדְרֹשׁ?

מֵאַגְמֵיהֶם הַמַּיִם נִבָּטִים אֵלֵינוּ.
שׁוֹקֵט הָעֵץ
בְּאֹדֶם עֲגִילִים.
לָעַד לֹא תֵעָקֵר מִמֶּנִּי, אֱלֹהֵינוּ,
תּוּגַת צַעֲצוּעֶיךָ הַגְּדוֹלִים.

Poem by Reyzl Zhychlinsky read in Yiddish and in English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-25 | Just me reading a cute little poem in Yiddish and English

Unbegrentzt/Unbounded by J. W. Goethe, read in German and in English

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-23 | Here's my translation of Unbegrentzt, one of many poems that Goethe wrote under the influence of the then-recently translated Divan of Hafiz during his orientalist phase. This one addresses the Shirazi poet directly.

Midnight by Jacob Fichman, read in Hebrew and English translation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-19 | In which I read one of my favorite sonnets in the Hebrew language, followed by my translation of same. And yes, that really is my normal way of pronouncing Hebrew when I read it out loud.

To Say A Prayer by Abraham Sutzkever, read in Yiddish and in English

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-14 | ...

Travel Tickets by Samih al-Qasim تذاكر سفر، سميح القاسم

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-13 | في هذا الفيديو اقرأ احدى اشهر قصائد الشاعر الفلسطيني سميح القاسم بالعربية وبترجمتي الى الانجليزية

In this video I read one of Samih al-Qasim's more famous poems in Arabic and in my English translation

The End of Shakespeares The Tempest, read in Early Modern Pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-10-08 | I decided maybe my next Shakespeare project should involve The Tempest, since I'm kind of sick of Macbeth and Hamlet at this point. This video includes Prospero's epilogue and the tail end of the final scene. The epilogue has often been thought of as Shakespeare's farewell to the theater, since it comes at the end of his last solo-play.

This is yet another passage by Shakespeare in the so-called "original pronunciation" i.e. a reconstruction of how (one variety of) London English was pronounced in the early 1600s, from your friendly neighborhood historical linguist and poetry nerd.

I gave Prospero a fairly conservative accent based on the dialect recorded by Shakespeare's contemporary Alexander Gil the Elder. Alonso speaks a more innovative lect with a raised MATE vowel as would have been fairly common by then.

If you like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon.

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well. (This video in particular, for example, was released two months early to subscribers.)

Got questions? (Like "Why does this not sound like Crystal's OP!?") Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058

A Storm in Dark by Abu Al-Qasem Al-Shabbi زوبعة في ظلام لأبي القاسم الشابي

A.Z. Foreman 2023-09-23 | في هذا الفيديو اقرأ قصيدة "زوبعة في ظلام" للشاعر التونسي ابو القاسم الشابي بالعربية وبترجمتي الانجليزية. انا سئمت من الترجمات الانجليزية للشعر العربي الحديث التي تُهمِل القافية والوزن وغيرهما من الخصائص الشكلية. وتبيّن انو اذا بدك اشي ينعمل مظبوط ،لازم تعمله لحالك.

In which I read "A Storm in the Dark" by the Tunisian poet Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi in Arabic and in my English translation. I got sick of modern English translations of Arabic poetry that ignore the formal features like rhyme and meter. Turns out if you want a thing done proper, you gotta do it your own self.

Moelni/Barrenness by T. H. Parry-Williams read in Welsh and English

A.Z. Foreman 2023-09-22 | Dyma fi'n darllen un o fy hoff gerddi gan un o fy hoff feirdd Cymraeg, yn Gymraeg ac yn Saesneg. Achos pam lai.

Here's me reading one of my favorite poems by one of my favorite Welsh poets in Welsh and in my English translation. Because why not.

My love is as a fever (Shakespeares Sonnet 147 read in Early Modern Pronunciation)

A.Z. Foreman 2023-09-15 | My readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English pronunciation continue with Sonnet 147.

I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period (you might call it "Original Pronunciation" if you must, but it is not to be confused with Crystal's reconstruction). I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Psalm 1 chanted using a reconstruction of Tiberian Hebrew pronunciation.

A.Z. Foreman 2023-08-26 | This pronunciation, used by the Masoretes in Early Medieval Galilee, is the one the Hebrew vowel signs we're all familiar with were actually designed to record. I decided to create such recordings because despite the profusion of data about this reading dialect and its importance for the later history of Hebrew (such as in the the development of the vocalization signs), I couldn't find anybody who had actually taken the liberty of making a recording that used all the most recent research on this dialect to give an idea of what it (may have) actually sounded like (for example, we now know that the vav was indeed labiodental in this dialect, and that vowel length was indeed at least somewhat contrastive.)

As with all reconstructions, this is at more than one level hypothetical. In listening to this, you are doing something less like watching a documentary than watching a well-researched work of historical fiction.

The cantillation is basically a loose adaptation of Yerushalmi/Ḥalabi, and isn't meant to reflect the traditional Tiberian melodies (which we just do not have enough data to convincingly reconstruct, though lots of people have lost their minds in whacky attempts to do so.)

A frequently asked question here is "Were the Tiberian Hebrew resh and vav really pronounced like that? Sounds suspiciously like Modern Hebrew."

The answer is yes, yes they were. For more on these, see Geoffrey Khan's book which is the basis of the reconstruction used here, and available for free from the following site:

openbookpublishers.com/books/10.11647/obp.0163#

To me, fair friend (Shakespeares Sonnet 104 read in Early Modern Pronunciation)

A.Z. Foreman 2023-08-17 | My readings of Shakespeare's sonnets in Early Modern English pronunciation continue with Sonnet 104. This one is available publicly.

I have for reasons not entirely intelligible to my own self, set myself the task of recording all of Shakespeare’s sonnets in reconstructions of what various types of London English sounded like in the late Elizabethan/early Jacobean period (you might call it "Original Pronunciation" if you must, but it is not to be confused with Crystal's reconstruction). I'm recording them at a rate of (well, more or less) one every week. Most of them are subscriber-only on my Patreon account. Go ahead and make a pledge there to access them:

http://patreon.com/azforeman

I am making just a select few, like this one, publicly available right now.

Have questions? Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/64053058

Benedicks monologue against love from Much Ado About Nothing, in Early Modern pronunciation

A.Z. Foreman 2023-08-05 | So what you have here, dear viewers, is a reading of Benedick's monologue against love from Much Ado About Nothing in a reconstruction of Early Modern pronunciation.

I voiced Benedick with a bunch of features that were rather innovative, including a MATE/WAIT merger in /ɛ:/, simplification of "-ing" to /ɪn/, realization of unstressed "he" as /ǝ/.

If you happen to like this video and want to help me make more things like it, wherein I read texts in dead accents, consider making a pledge at my patreon.

http://patreon.com/azforeman

There you can get access to all kinds of subscriber-only stuff like my weekly readings of Shakespeare's sonnets and the King James Bible in various 17th century accents, and you'll get advance access to my public recordings as well.

Got questions? (Like "Why does this not sound like Crystal's OP!?") Check my FAQ

patreon.com/posts/faq-64053058