* Which, to be honest, would require me to learn it first. Therefore, the pronunciation of words moved well beyond their original spelling, creating issues for schoolchildren and non-native speakers for centuries to come. Printing was standardizing spelling even as pronunciation was going through its evolution. ![]() If you are interested, you might look at the charts and descriptions (with audio examples) of the Northern California vowel shift that is currently underway. The sad part is that England had become a literate culture before the GVS was done. The most famous one in English is the Great Vowel Shift of the 15th through the 18th centuries, but other chain shifts are currently going on in regional dialects of American English. The original pronunciation of the long vowels was very "continental." The GVS took pronunciation further away from that similarity with the continent (remember that much of the English vocabulary at this time had come in with the Norman Invasion). 1359-60 saw a major military conflict between the two, and in 1362 the law courts of London decided to switch from French to English. There may also have been an attempt to distance England culturally from France. So why did it happen? The most common theory is that social mobility after the Black Death brought people from all over England together in the London area where changes were caused by people organically blending the many dialects. Chaucer would have pronounced "knife" something like "ka- nife" that is, both consonants would have been pronounced it was later that we got lazy and stopped bothering with the "k" in "knife" and "knowledge." It was long, but it shortened when followed by consonants such as "d" and "th" so we have "ea" sound like short "e" when "ea" shows up in Modern English dead, head, breath and wealth instead (<-there it is again) of sounding "longer" as in great and break.Ĭonsonants stayed the same, although "silent letters" did develop later. Their long-vowel equivalentsbate, beet, bite, boat, boot, and boutarrived at their modern pronunciations as a result of the Great Vowel. For instance, "ea" took a different path, depending on the consonants around it. All five of those words contain short vowel sounds. The Low-Back Merger blends two vowel sounds that are pronounced with the tongue positioned low and back in the mouth. The Modern English name would have been pronounced by Chaucer to sound like " na-ma" and by Shakespeare as "neem" Modern English root would have been " ro-ta" to Chaucer and "rowt" to Shakespeare. The sounds essentially merge into a single sound. ![]() What did this sound like? Without teaching you the International Phonetic Alphabet*, we will try a few examples. What happened during the Great Vowel Shift is that the pronunciation of those vowels moved upwards and backwards in the speaker's throat. To put it another way: how your mouth forms the space in which the sound resonates determines pronunciation of the vowel sound. Pronunciation of vowel sounds depends on the relative positioning of the tongue and lips and palate (remember, I am simplifying). Not all pronunciation mostly the long vowels that were stressed in the word. Starting about 1350, pronunciation of English started to change. Also, there are no images for it that don't themselves require an essay to explain, so this post could make a dull subject even duller. Why it happened, and why it happened the way it did, are still hotly contested.
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