On early English pronunciation: with especial reference to Shakspere [sic] and Chaucer, containing an investigation of the correspondence of writing with speech in England from the Anglosaxon [sic] period to the present day means of the ordinary printing types is an 1889 book by Alexander John Ellis.
Since publication, it has been cited continuously by dialectologists of English and Scots, owing to its survey data on the dialects in the 19th century.
Ellis attempted to record the dialect in all areas where English or Scots was habitually spoken.
[1] The data in England were collected through three tools of investigation: In the case of Scotland, most of the data came from a previous survey by JAH Murray, Dialect of the Southern Counties of Scotland, but Orkney and Shetland were surveyed in the same way as England.
Ellis was aware that many speakers were bidialectal and would not speak to him, as an educated man, in the same way that they spoke to their families and friends.
[5] His main job was in the canals department of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway offices.
Anderson cited this as evidence of the difficulties in administering a survey in the days before modern cars and roads.
[8] A transcription of the palaeotype to the modern International Phonetic Alphabet was made by Eustace in 1969.
[13] Eugen Dieth, a co-founder of the Survey of English Dialects, referred to the book as "a tragedy" that "every dialectologist consults, but, more often than not, rejects as inaccurate and wrong",[14] and to the palaeotype as "often incomprehensible and defies all reasonable interpretation".
[17] The other co-founder of the SED, Harold Orton, gave a more favourable assessment than Dieth, describing the work as an "astonishing publication far in advance of anything similar anywhere" but also as "defective and unreliable".
Ellis seemed to be under the misunderstanding that most of Ireland was still Irish-speaking at the time of his research, but some parts of Ulster had abandoned Irish centuries earlier.