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400 Year Old Joke Fail ... oops!

3/13/2016

3 Comments

 
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When I was in my teens, I began to wonder, "What would someone living one hundred years from now make of my poetry?  Would it still hold up in the evolved ethos and vocabulary of that future time?"

Johnathon Swift, (1667 - 1745), author of, Gulliver's Travels, was a really snarky guy.  He wrote his novel as a fictitious travel journal, and named his protagonist, Gulliver, from the root word, gullible.

In 1721, he wrote a proposal to Robert Harley, the then Prime Minister of England, in which he penned, "I see no absolute necessity why any language would be perpetually changing,"

But changed it has.

Sadly, many of Shakespeare's puns and jokes are now falling flat, owing to the fact that we no longer speak "Elizabethan."  So too, many of his lovely rhymes no longer rhyme as he intended them to.  

For instance, the word we know as "knife" came down to us from the later era of Old English, which was spoken between 900 and 1066 A.D., and back then "knife" was pronounced more like "kn ee fer."

Fortunately for us, scholars such as Professor David Crystal, author of
The Oxford Dictionary of Original Shakespearean Pronunciation,  spent 12 years pouring over Shakespeare' work, updating it for us.  

Together with his thespian son, Ben Crystal, they have produced a delightful video for The Open University through which we can still experience  Shakespeare's plays in their original form, (shown here).  

They also explain such ironic phrases as, "Brevity is the soul of wit," as spoken by Polonius in Act 2, Scene 2 of Hamlet.  The joke is, old Polonius was never brief, and "wit" refers to a quick, playful mind.

Considering the ever evolving nature of the English language, I do wonder how my work might be perceived one hundred years from now.  Ah well.  The best that I can do is to do my very best, today.  






Image: http://www.thetimes.co.uk
3 Comments
Stanley
3/13/2016 02:47:37 pm

What also changes the language are cultural changes. It all seems to be changing faster than ever. I am willing to bet that the changes that occur in the next 100 years will be greater than the ones in since the last 400 years. Thanks for the interesting blog.

Reply
Janice
3/13/2016 03:04:12 pm

Good point! Hopefully, there will be "translators" working on this then. Thank you, Stanley.

Reply
Allen link
5/26/2022 07:50:16 pm

Thank you for writing thhis

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    About the author:

    I've written many poems over the years.  This blog is a preview of my books: Echoes, Neo-Victorian Poetry (April 2013), Echoes ll, More Neo-Victorian Poetry (May 2014), Echoes lll, Even More Neo-Victorian Poetry, (August 2016), A Compilation of Echoes. (September 2016), and When None Command (April 13, 2019)

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