This is a little article I wrote for the Aug. 10, 2017 edition of the weekly Elf magazine of my New Hampshire hometown newspaper, The Keene Sentinel. I had seen a tombstone in the cemetery of nearby Fitzwilliam, NH which has a poetical inscription that rhymes “calm” with “arm.” This quaint example of a fossilized echo of the famous New England accent (“cahm” = “ahm”) got me thinking about how we know how languages were pronounced in pre-audio-recording eras. Of course, there is a great deal of scholarly work on this issue, especially on spelling mistakes and changes in orthography.
