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"This book is mainly concerned with English as it has been spoken during the last four or five centuries."--Introd., p. 1
Alphabetical list of sources, fifteenth and sixteenth centuries (p. [xi]-xiii)--Remarks on phonetic notation.--Table of phonetic symbols used in this book.--Introductory.--Dialect types in Middle English and their survival in the modern period.--The English of the fifteenth century.--The English of Henry VIII and Queen Elizabeth.--The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.--The history of English pronunciation in the modern period; the vowels of accentuated sylables.--The vowels of unstressed syllables.--Change in consonantal sounds.--Notes on inflexions.--Colloquial idiom