As soon as I got this CD, I fell in love with this song. It sounds exactly like the kind of song you would hear playing in a small italian cafe somewhere in Italy. But really, it is just a fun song. It is about the Juke Box, which the singer calls a “magical invention”. I would have to agree. Music is the spice of life 🙂
It is really tought trying out accents you don’t know well. Some people don’t put a lot of work into their accents and it shows. Make sure you don’t try accents you don’t know that well to native speakers of that accent 😀 But if you wanna have a laugh with some friends, just give it an accent a try and see what happens 🙂
Obviously Beowulf is really important to the history of English and to understand how English came to be. But it probably shouldn’t be read with a lot of pomp and circumstance. It was just a story people would tell around the fire. It was a story to entertain people late at night. It had word play and cool turns of phrase, but really it was about the characters and the story, not about pronunciation everything in a bombastic way.
Shakespeare lived during the late 1500s and early 1600s. This period is known as Early Modern English. For the most part people living today can understand Shakespeare’s work but some parts will need to be explained. But one thing that has changed a lot since then is pronunciation.
People have been painstakingly reconstructing the pronunciation of the language at that point through things like letters where people sometimes made spelling mistakes which reveal how they thought something should be spelled and also by looking at rhymes. Now that we know how the language at that time was spoken, people have been performing Shakespeare in the original pronunciation.