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Hart's Phonetic Breakthrough
- John Hart's An Orthographie (1569) created a phonetic alphabet to record Elizabethan English pronunciation.
- His work lets modern scholars trace sound changes leading toward Shakespearean original pronunciation.
Voicing Drives Sound Change
- Voiced versus voiceless consonants differ only by vocal-fold vibration and drive many historical sound changes.
- Surrounding voiced sounds often cause intervening voiceless consonants to become voiced over time.
Silent Terminal B Emerges
- Final -mb formerly pronounced (e.g., climb, lamb) but had mostly lost the B by Elizabethan times.
- Hart's phonetic spellings and Shakespeare's rhymes confirm the B was largely silent then.