Several people said they'd like to hear Chaucer read in Middle English without the interference from modern phonology (diphthongs, distinction of pale/peal/peel/pail, etc.) heard in most reconstructions. So here you go. I tried, as per usual, to bleed out as much Modern English transfer as I could.

My one compromise is that I didn't throw in two extra vowels. While Chaucer shows ability to distinguish the reflexes of OE /ǣ ā/ from the new mid-vowels created by Open Syllable lengthening (in effect able to distinguish between the vowels of EAT/MEAT and HOPE/ROPE), the phonetics involved are super unclear. I personally would reconstruct an additional /æ:/ and /ɒ:/ for the result of Open Syllable Lengthening in Late Middle English. But that isn't done for the most part and I doubt most people looking up recordings of this kind care too much either way. So this recording gets the traditionally reconstructed Middle English long vowels: /i: e: ɛ: a: ɔ: o: u:/.

A difference between this and whatever IPA transcription you'd find in a handbook introduction to Middle English is that /d t/ are dental, and the voiceless stops are more aspirated than in modern English. By the latter I mean that aspiration occurs in places where it normally would not in modern speech, e.g. [ɔːpʰən].

The earliest description of aspiration comes from John Hart's manuscript of 1551. With his usual accuteness of perception Hart describes the voiceless turbulent airflow accompanying /p t k/, and relates it to the sound represented by and implies that this is peculiar to the English stops as against their counterparts in other languages. But his examples include not just the usual suspects (e.g. for "pipe", "plum") but also and for "apple", "open". No form of modern English has aspiration in this environment. But Hart's apparently did.

Hart's desctiption is also why /d t/ are true dentals in my reading. He states that you pronounce them "by laying of your tongue full in the palate of your mouth, and touching hardest of your fore-teeth". These are unambiguously dentals. (Alveolar articulation, on the other hand, is described clearly a century later by Holder, and then a few decades later we get a few of language-teachers describing the difference between Romance and English /t d/.) Thus "pierced to the roote" = [pʰɛːrsəd̪ t̪oː ðə roːt̪ʰə]. It seemed the least likely option to be wrong in such matters would be to project Hart's phonology back a century and a half. Certain types of voicing assimilation (e.g. rendered [hað] before voiced consonants and vowels and [haθ] elsewhere) also take their cue from 15th and 16th century sources, on the premise that it is more likely Chaucer's English had them than not.

Opening of the Prologue to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Read In Southeastern English Ca. 1350 - 1400

Ode to Liberty, by A.S. Pushkin, read in Russian and English

Al-Mutanabbi's panegyric to Sayfu l-Dawlah on the taking of Al-Hadath

Note: there are five other characters in this scene beside the prince at the beginning. They do not all have identical phonologies. There were quite a few competing types of speech in London ca. 1600.

St. Crispin's Day Speech from Shakespeare's "Life of Henry V" read in late Elizabethan Pronunciation

"A Hundred Years" by Vasyl Stus, read in Ukrainian and in my English translation

"He doth bestride the narrow world..."(Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in Early Modern Pronunciation)

"To be or not to be" (Shakespeare's Hamlet in Early Modern English)

"Is this a dagger which I see before me?" (Shakespeare's Macbeth in Early Modern Pronunciation)

Hafiz' first ghazal, read in Persian and in English translation

"Hon" by T. H. Parry Williams, read in Welsh and in my English translation

"Cymru" by D. Gwenallt Jones read in Welsh and my English translation

This short piece was written by a monk in the margin of an Irish manuscript of Priscian's Institutiones grammaticae (the Stiftsbibliothek MS 904 at the Abbey of St. Gallen). The poem's author welcomes a stormy night free from the risk of attacking Vikings, and supplies us with our earliest attestation of the Irish name for Scandinavia.

"Is acher in gáeth" read in reconstructed Old Irish pronunciation

Natan Alterman's ליל קיץ read in Hebrew and in English translation

"Úar ind adaig" read in Old Irish and in English translation

Hafiz' ghazal "Yārī andar kas namēbīnēm" read in Persian and English

So at first this was a reading of the first five stanzas of Spenser’s “The Faerie Queene”. Then it was the first 18. Now I've updated it for the third time and it's the first 28, covering the whole of the Redcross Knight's battle with the Beast of Errour. 

As per usual, it is in a reconstruction of early modern pronunciation. Specifically the phonology is based the type of English recorded by Alexander Gil the Elder, who was a great fan of Spenser’s and transcribed long passages of the Faerie Queene into his phonetic script.  (For example Gil’s dialect preserved a velar fricative in words like “wright” which he pronounced differently from “write”, and I have read the passage accordingly. Although Spenser’s own rhymes imply a dialect where write/wright had merged. I also am no longer sure about Gil's dialect having /y:/ so I left that out of this iteration.) 

I use variant pronunciations at rhyme that are demonstrably not Gil's own normal ones. For example, the same vowel in "Lord" and "Word" to rhyme with "Adored" and "Scored. Or pronouncing "wound" with the MOUTH diphthong to rhyme with "round" and "sound". These rhymes are of the kind that Gil allows himself. But I did avoid using variants at rhyme which Gil shows an aversion to. 

I've used certain pronunciations which were probably not the most common but did exist in a lot of careful speech including Gil's. For example preserving the diphthong in the final syllable of words like "certain". Gil often gives this vowel even in places where the normative spelling would not indicate it, for example in "sudden" (<- Fr. "soudain"). You could argue that he's influenced by  Spenser's old-timey "suddaine", but that won't do for his rendering "marvel" as "marvail". 

I read "lose" with the GOAT vowel, which is etymologically to be expected, and supported by Bullokar's transcriptions (the GOOSE version arose by conflation w/ "loose"). Note that it's normally rhymed on this vowel in the FQ. Gil happens not to transcribe his pronunciation of it. 

Yes, I am pronouncing "conquerour" with a /kw/. This word had /kw/ in Middle English (note e.g. the spellings cuncweari and conqwere). The /w/ is still attested in Gil's lifetime by Butler and Bullokar. Gil does not record his pronunciation of this word, but as he preserves /w/ in "answer" it seems a fair guess that he preserves it in "conquer". I read the rhyme of "conquerour"/"paramour" as rhymed on the MOUTH diphthong. This was admittedly not Gil's normal pronunciation. There is though a case where he transcribes the word "emperor" as "emperour" in a passage of Spenser where it is rhymed with "power", "hour". It seems likely that he would've permitted himself this license of pronunciation at rhyme. 

I've also used weak or reduced forms of function words like "my" and "by" a fair amount. The former is only rarely transcribed by Gil, and the latter never. But both were almost certainly the Elizabethan norm in unstressed syllables.

First 28 Stanzas of Spenser's Faerie Queene, read in late 16th century English pronunciation

"Karel ende Elegast", a medieval Romance about Charlemagne going out stealing in the middle of night on God’s orders, and in the process discovering a conspiracy on his life, is among the most famous pieces of Middle Dutch literature. Surprisingly, I can't find anyone who has actually tried to record it in full-blown reconstructed Middle Dutch pronunciation. Most of the readings of Middle Dutch literature I can find online seen only to use selective bits of archaism like pronouncing IJ as /i:/. Oh well, if you want a thing done right, you gotta do it your own self, I guess.

Uittreksel van "Karel ende Elegast" in het Middelnederlands vorgelezen

"The Runestone justs into the sea" by Heinrich Heine, read in German and in my English translation

"Forest Conversation"/"Waldgespräch" by Eichendorff, read in German and in my English translation

"The Fall of Macbeth" (Last 7 Scenes of Macbeth in Early Modern Pronunciation)

"Literature taken in through the eyes can attract us, at best, by its content. If the content is dull or beyond our ken, we have no other path to familiarity except stubbornness, and life is really too short for much of that. But by reading it aloud we have the chance become intimate with it first, and that intimacy will hold our attention long enough to let our interest be appealed to a second and third time. Surely that is how many native readers come to learn classical literature in the first place. As in an arranged marriage, love is sometimes born more of familiarity than of passion. That secret of teaching is known in all the long-lived literate cultures of the world, and we would do well to heed it today. We learn must learn to be our own illiterate nannies, and sing Hànbûn into memory like the lullabies of childhood"

— David Branner

A. Z. Foreman

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