Old French
To learn how to chant The Song of Roland
Some sources that I have found on how to maybe pronounce the Song of Roland in Old French, this post is simply gathering of sources. I have a video of Old French that will share here but the video may break some of the following rules, and what would really be helpful would be a list of all the letters in Old French and how they are pronounced:
Master's degree in linguisticsAuthor has 841 answers and 2.9M answer views4y
Originally Answered: Was old French pronounced more clearly than modern French?
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that the other answers are missing the point. I may be wrong since your question could have been worded better and I’m not entirely sure that this is what you’re looking for - anyways, I’ll interpret the question as: “Was Old French still pronounced as it was written, while Modern French has a ton of silent letters?”
The answer is: pretty much yes, and it really doesn’t sound French at all for it. Some key differences are:
Where modern French uses n after a vowel to indicate a nasal vowel, with the n entirely silent, Old French still pronounced it. Thus, you had a nasal vowel followed by /n/. The same applies to ng, which was pronounced as a palatal nasal, like Italian gn.
The /r/, which in Modern French is a uvular trill, was probably still a “rolled R”, like Spanish and Italian have it to this day.
ll is a mere /j/ in modern French, but Old French had it as a palatal lateral approximant, like in modern Spanish.
If you see two vowels, both of them are pronounced as written. So bien was /bjẽn/, droit was /dɾɔjt/, beau was /beaw/, coup was /kɔwp/.
As you can see in the preceding examples, final consonants were usually pronounced - it took them centuries to become silent. So the French of the Middle Ages would have pronounced the name of their language as [fɾãntsejs] Franceis.
H was pronounced in later Germanic loans (leading to the h aspiré phenomenon of later French) but in native Latin words, it had already been lost long ago.
ch was t͡ʃ, as in English.
So the spelling was a far better indicator of pronunciation back then. Of course, Old French was not standardized and in constant flux - the above are just guidelines.
https://www.quora.com/Was-Old-French-pronounced-more-clearly-than-Modern-French
The following is a video:
The following article gets into grammar but I have no interest in that, I am only interested in vocabulary and the way each letter is pronounced: https://lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol/ofrol
This article points in some direction: https://www.wyzant.com/resources/answers/629885/old-french-pronunciation
This article is very important, it is a key to the pronunciation of the IPA, international phonetic alphabet that shows you the pronunciation of each word: https://www.dictionary.com/e/key-to-ipa-pronunciations/
And this is a list of words in old French with an IPA: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Old_French_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation
Therefore since I have been unable to find a good table for old French phonemes, I may have to get look through a lot of words, record the pronunciations of each letters, and then keep a list of letters and cross each one off as I do them, and then create a table that way to help me pronounce the Song of Roland in Old French properly: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Old_French_terms_with_IPA_pronunciation
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Main_Page
The Song of Roland in Old French: http://www.fh-augsburg.de/~harsch/gallica/Chronologie/11siecle/Roland/rol_ch00.html
This article says the letters were mainly as we would interpret them today, perhaps, but I think I should do that decoding work to be sure, if I want to be sure: https://french.stackexchange.com/questions/6004/old-french-pronunciation
Lord’s Prayer in Old French: Old French (12th century)
Nostre pain de chascun jor nos donne hui. Et pardone-nos nos meffais, si comme nos pardonons a cos qui maeffait nos ont. Sire, ne soffre que nos soions tempte par mauvesse temptation; mes, Sire, delivre-nos de mal. Amen.
