Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics
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Ranjan Sen
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the pronunciation of the English Romantic poet John Keats — and in particular the likely original sound of one of his final poems, Bright Star — just over two hundred years after his death (1821). Keats makes a particularly fascinating phonological study due to Lockhart’s (1818) denunciation of him as a ‘Cockney poet’. I use evidence from contemporary pronouncing dictionaries and several other treatises and orthoepical works from the early 19th century to narrow down likely pronunciation variants in 1819. I then employ evidence from Keats’s own rhyme schemes (more concrete) and biographical details relating to his location, education, and social and literary milieu (more speculative) to construct a likely rendition of Bright Star in the poet’s own voice.
Abstract
This paper reconstructs the pronunciation of the English Romantic poet John Keats — and in particular the likely original sound of one of his final poems, Bright Star — just over two hundred years after his death (1821). Keats makes a particularly fascinating phonological study due to Lockhart’s (1818) denunciation of him as a ‘Cockney poet’. I use evidence from contemporary pronouncing dictionaries and several other treatises and orthoepical works from the early 19th century to narrow down likely pronunciation variants in 1819. I then employ evidence from Keats’s own rhyme schemes (more concrete) and biographical details relating to his location, education, and social and literary milieu (more speculative) to construct a likely rendition of Bright Star in the poet’s own voice.
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
Kapitel in diesem Buch
- Prelim pages i
- Table of contents v
- Introduction 1
- Resurrecting rhymes, reasons and (no) rhotics 5
- Diachronic phonology with Contrastive Hierarchy Theory 20
- The life cycle of phonological patterns explains drift in sound change 35
- The diachronic typology of retroflex vowels 50
- Diachronic shifts among sound ideophones 62
- The classification of the Plains Algonquian languages 79
- Modelling combined linguistic and non-linguistic evidence in language reconstruction 94
- Dissimilatory constraints discriminate between variants in analogical change 110
- Patterns of suppletion in inflection revisited 128
- Differential object marking in early Italo-Romance and old Sardinian 150
- Semantic factors in case loss 166
- Morphosyntactic borrowing in closely related varieties 184
- Nominal privative suffixes as a diachronic source of verbal negative markers 198
- The emergence of oblique subjects 215
- Grammaticalization of sentence adverbs and modal particles revisited 232
- A discourse analysis of left-dislocation in Old English 249
- The semantics of word borrowing in late medieval English 263
- Approximative adverbs in modern and pre-modern languages 279
- The history of numerals as a history of East African languages 294
- Language index 307
- Subject index 309
