Do we have any clue how anybody sounded when talking before the

I like to imagane everyone had valley girl accents before recording

Prior to the advent of radio nobody spoke the Queen's English in the UK.

Romans spoke fluent English

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=75UrxueiP-4

you can figure out what words ryhmed with what, the articulation and punctuation of syllables, and general flow of speech from poetry.
You can study prose speech patterns from peoples letters, journals, etc.
You can learn peasant slang from grafitti (e.g Pompeii)

really not that complicated, of course there are bound to be mistakes but i'd say we are remarkably close

>>2310798
It's actually possible to reconstruct extinct and unrecorded spoken languages with a pretty fair degree of accuracy (which obviously decreases as you increase the time depth -- our reconstructions of Vulgar Latin are almost certainly pretty accurate, but the further you go back, the sketchier things get).

It's called the comparative method. We have a fair idea -- with a lot of small individual inaccuracies, and a lot of gaps, but still a reasonable picture -- of how people spoke a good few thousand years before they started writing things down (~3500 BC, not THAT long before the Egyptians and Sumerians started writing things down, but well before any Europeans got the idea). Look up 'reconstruction of proto-indo-european' and 'comparative method', it's pretty interesting stuff, and historical linguists have developed a lot of pretty ingenious tricks over the past century for reconstructing past languages. It's also pretty amazing the kinds of information they can mine from that reconstructed information (like when people domesticated certain animals, or adopted certain technologies, or started eating certain kinds of food).

>>2312720
Also, I just realized I wrote the word 'pretty' five fucking times in that post. Whatever, it's late here, I get a little repetitive when I'm tired.

>>2312461
This, in geordie accent with a slight twinge of cockney.

>>2310798
Yes, they wrote it down. Look up BBC radio 4 Shakespeare in accurate accents. They recite Shakespeare as it would've sounded and talk about how they can tell.

>>2310818
Oh my gaad, like totally, yeah.

>>2313014
And then, like, that betch, run off with Romeo.

>>2312698
Thanks for sharing this, it's fascinating.

>>2312698
Cool.

>>2313885
Like, I literally can't even? You knooow?... like, she's such, a bitch. She should just kill herself. Like, really. Ah.

File: 1390623804497.gif (495KB, 500x375px) Image search: [Google]

495KB, 500x375px

>>2312698

>>2312706
This, it also helps that in many languages spelling wasn't standardized until relatively recently, so people often wrote phonetically.

File: 69634638.jpg (110KB, 1000x381px) Image search: [Google]

110KB, 1000x381px

>>2310818
>>2313014
>>2313885
>>2315032

I used to try denying that reddit killed this board, but you normies are dancing on the fucking corpse

>>2316048
Like, whatever. Nerd.