Ow, that’s a huge difference between North and South!
Not so much between the Cockney and the regular one (the A’s sound the same anyway)
I like the Cockney accent better.
But not as much as I like the Northern accent (probably because it’s closer to the Antwerp “A”).
On average that video probably ends up closer to Middle English than not. There are just a few uninformed or humorous choices that throw it off
If you ask nicely perhaps I’ll read you some Chaucer or something in Middle English, but tl;dr English spelling is from the time it sounded like this:
PS Any of us continental Europeans should be able to read Middle English quite well, provided we can pronounce the two th sounds (/θ/ and /ð/). It’s only around Shakespeare’s time that the Great Vowel Shift changed the pronunciation of the vowels.
But @Sushi and I have a leg up on you guys by natively speaking Dutch, since the correct way to pronounce Middle English is essentially to pretend you’re a Dutch speaker who doesn’t know Modern English pronunciation.
I had never heard of this book. I checked it out, and it turns out it’s a pronountiation course especially designed for dutch speakers. That’s interesting. I’d love to find its italian counterpart, but after a quick search, I can only find general pronounciation courses for any mother tongue.
It needn’t be specifically for Dutch/Italian/whatever speakers. For French for example there are books like Phonétique progressive du français avancé which do the same thing. I don’t recall if it’s in that particular book (I merely happen to recall the title), but such books targeting speakers of many/all foreign languages include tables to similar effect. So if you’re Dutch you can pretty much ignore how to pronounce the French /y/ (IPA for u as in déjà vu) because it’s identical to the sound in Dutch; if you’re English or Italian you have to learn it. English and Italian will have a mark in the table indicating you should focus on the /y/ sound.
Of course it’s not quite as quick and easy to grasp as saying a certain sound is basically identical to Dutch but more lip-rounded instead of lip-spread, but it still comes down to roughly the same thing.
I like the chapter dedicated to pitfalls for specific other languages. People sharing the same native language who speak English (at work) tend to create echo chambers where bad pronunciation and wrong vocabulary gets reinforced. Although sometimes literally translated idioms lead to funny situations.