Episode 159: Elizabethan Voices
The History of English Podcast
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The History of the English Sound
In the 1540s, a Welsh scholar compared the English sound to the similar sound found in Welsh. Some linguists think that the sound started to disappear there first and then gradually spread westward and northward. By the mid 1600s, it seems that the sound had completely disappeared, except in Scotland and parts of the north. So, licht had become light, and nicht had become night.
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