Which reminds me of a question I've always wanted to ask about: in a Purcell piece (as published by Carus Verlag), the -ed of displeased has its own note. Does this mean it was actually pronounced at the time? When did the vocalic sound disappear?
This thread started on the Orchestralist, and I sent a contribution that never arrived because of an addressing error. The -ed past tense was *always* pronounced in English until abt. the end of the 17th c., when the modern pronunciation began to come in. Jonathan Swift famously inveighed against the new fashion in 1711:
"What does your lordship think of the words drudg'd, disturb'd, rebuk'd, fledg'd, and a thousand others everywhere to be met with in prose as well as verse? where, by leaving out a vowel to save a syllable, we form so jarring a sound, and so difficult to utter, that I have often wondered how it could ever obtain."
The use of the apostrophe to indicate this pronunciation is still to be found, especially in text intended for singing, so the use of it by poets such as Tennyson cannot reliably be taken as a guide to the normal pronunciation of his day. (It's sort of like the way composers kept writing for horns "crooked" in all sorts of keys even after they all had valves.)
The survival of the old pronunciation in words such as blessed and learned is interesting because these words are pronounced both ways, with subtle differences in meaning. For that reason, you very often see an accent on the E to clarify that the formerly universal pronunciation is intended, and there are also the alternative spellings "blest" and "learn'd", for use when the pronunciation and meaning diverge:
Blest powers, receive me! I mount on your wing. O grave, where's thy vic'try, O death where's thy sting?
When I heard the learn'd astronomer, When the proofs, the figures were arranged in columns before me
-- Andrew Stiller Kallisti Music Press
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