Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is Episode 160, approximately English.

In this episode, we're going to continue our look at the sound of Elizabethan English.

Specifically, we're going to look at a couple of sounds that modern linguists call approximates.

These are the L and R sounds, and they're some of the most challenging sounds in the language.

They're challenging because they exist somewhere in the gray area between vowels and consonants,

and they have strange effects on the vowel sounds that surround them.

They also have a tendency to disappear over time.

So this time, we'll examine the history of the L and R sounds in English, and we'll see how they shaped the language we speak today.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com,

and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes at patreon.com slash historyofenglish.

Now, last time, we looked at the sound of Elizabethan English by exploring the writings of John Hart.

Hart was a writer and spelling reformer who argued that English words should be spelled phonetically.

He wrote three works about the topic in the mid-1500s, and those works are important because they describe in some detail how words were pronounced at the time.

Hart created a phonetic alphabet to illustrate those pronunciations, and he wrote long extended passages using that alphabet.

As a result, his writings provide us with a great deal of information about the pronunciation of English in the Elizabethan period.

In the last episode, we focused on a variety of consonant sounds, specifically those that are distinguished by their voicing.

Well, this time, we're going to look at a couple of other consonant sounds, the sounds represented by the letters L and R.

And these are actually some of the most difficult sounds in the language to analyze.

Hart described the sounds as liquids, a term that some linguists still use today.

And unlike most of the other sounds of English, Hart didn't really describe how those sounds were pronounced in any detail.

Now, if you've listened to the podcast from the beginning, you may have noticed that I haven't had much to say about the L and R sounds.

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