The
Great Vowel Shift was a major change in the
pronunciation of the English language that took place in the
south of England
between 1450
and 1750.The Great Vowel Shift was first studied by
Otto Jespersen (1860–1943), a
Danish
linguist and Anglicist, who coined the term.
Effect
The values of the long vowels form the main difference between the
pronunciation of
Middle English and
Modern English, and the Great Vowel
Shift is one of the historical events marking the separation of
Middle and Modern English. Originally, these vowels had
"continental" values much like those remaining in
Italian and liturgical
Latin. However, during the Great Vowel Shift, the two
highest long vowels became
diphthongs, and
the other five underwent an increase in
tongue height with one of them coming to the
front.
The principal changes (with the vowels shown in
IPA) are roughly as
follows.However, exceptions occur, the transitions were not always
complete, and there were sometimes accompanying changes in
orthography:
- Middle English (ā)
fronted to and then raised to , and in many dialects diphthongised
in Modern English to (as in
m'ake). Since
Old English ā had mutated to in
Middle English, Old English ā does not correspond to the
Modern English diphthong .
- Middle English raised to and then to modern English (as in
b'eak).
- Middle English raised to Modern English (as in
f'eet).
- Middle English diphthongised to , which was most likely
followed by and finally Modern English (as in
m'ice).
- Middle English raised to , and in the eighteenth century this
became Modern English or (as in
b'oat).
- Middle English raised to Modern English (as in
b'oot).
- Middle English was diphthongised in most environments to , and
this was followed by , and then Modern English (as in
m'ouse) in the eighteenth
century. Before labial consonants, this shift did not
occur, and remains as in room and
droop).
This means that the vowel in the English word
date was in
Middle English pronounced (similar to modern
dart); the
vowel in
feet was (similar to modern
fate); the
vowel in
wipe was (similar to modern
weep); the
vowel in
boot was (similar to modern
boat); and
the vowel in
house was (similar to modern
whose).
The
effects of the shift were not entirely uniform, and differences in
degree of vowel shifting can sometimes be detected in regional
dialects both in written and spoken English, for example in the
speech of much of Scotland
.
Exceptions
Not all words underwent certain phases of the Great Vowel Shift.
ea in particular did not take the step to
in several words, such as
great,
break,
steak,
swear and
bear. Other examples
are
father, which failed to become /
ea,
and
broad, which failed to become .
Shortening of long vowels at various stages produced further
complications.
ea is again a good
example, shortening commonly before
coronal consonants such as
d and
th, thus:
dead,
head,
threat,
wealth etc. (This is known as the
bred-bread merger.)
oo was shortened
from to in many cases before
k,
d and less
commonly
t, thus
book,
foot,
good etc. Some cases occurred before the change of to :
blood,
flood. Similar, yet older shortening
occurred for some instances of
ou:
country,
could.
Note that some
loanwords such as
soufflé and
Umlaut have retained a spelling from
their origin language which may seem similar to the previous
examples, but since they were not a part of English at the time of
the Great Vowel Shift, they are not actual exceptions to the
shift.
History
The surprising speed and the exact cause of the shift are
continuing mysteries in
linguistics and
cultural history, but some theories
attach the cause to the mass immigration to the south east of
England after the
Black Death, where the
difference in accents led to certain groups modifying their speech
to allow for a standard pronunciation of vowel sounds.
The different dialects
and the rise of a standardised middle class in London
led to
changes in pronunciation, which continued to spread out from that
city.
The sudden social mobility after the Black Death may have caused
the shift, with people from lower levels in society moving to
higher levels (the pandemic also hit the aristocracy). Another
explanation highlights the language of the ruling class; the
medieval aristocracy had spoken French, but by the early fifteenth
century, they were using English. This may have caused a change to
the "prestige accent" of English, either by making pronunciation
more French in style, or by changing it in some other way, perhaps
by
hypercorrection to something
thought to be "more English" (England was at war with France for
much of this period). Another influence may have been the great
political and social upheavals of the fifteenth century , which
were largely contemporaneous with the Great Vowel Shift.
Because English spelling was becoming standardised in the 15th and
16th centuries, the Great Vowel Shift is responsible for many of
the peculiarities of
English
spelling. Spellings that made sense according to Middle English
pronunciation were retained in Modern English because of the
adoption and use of the
printing
press, which was invented by
Johannes Gutenberg in Germany around
1440, and introduced to England in the 1470s by
William Caxton and later
Richard Pynson.
Other languages
German and
Dutch also experienced sound changes
resembling the first stage of the Great Vowel Shift. In
German, in the 15th or 16th centuries, long
changed to , (as in
Eis, 'ice') and long to (as in
Haus, 'house'). In
Dutch
the former became (
ijs), and the latter had earlier become
, which became (
huis). In German there also was a separate
which became , via an intermediate similar to the Dutch.
German has, like English, also shifted common Germanic to , as in
Proto-Germanic *
fōtuz 'foot' > German
Fuß (as
well as the rare secondary to ). This similarity however turns out
to be superficial on closer inspection. Given the huge differences
between the structures of Old English and Old High German vowel
phonology, this is hardly surprising. There is no indication that
English long vowels other than did anything but just move up in
tongue-body position (there is no hint, for example, of the
diphthongal features of Modern
bee, bay, bone in any of
the orthoepic
pronunciation manuals of
the 17th and 18th centuries). In German, the process was totally
different, as well as much earlier than the English developments:
already in the very earliest Old High German texts (9th cent.) the
vowel in question is consistently written -
uo-. That is,
it had "broken" into a nucleus with a centering glide. This complex
nucleus "smoothed" as the term has it in Middle High German,
becoming the of Modern German around the same time as the long high
vowels diphthongized. The of Modern German has a variety of
sources, the oldest of which is Proto-Germanic *
aw, which
smoothed before (so
rot 'red',
Ohr 'ear',
Floh 'flea', etc.) Elsewhere the sound was written
-
ou- in OHG. Similarly original *
ai became before
, remaining what was written -
ei- elsewhere.In some German
dialects original remain distinct from these new diphthongs, but in
standard German they fell together with the newly created and
respectively. The latter is still somewhat eccentrically written
-
ei- as a rule, a holdover of the days when was the only
such diphthong. Otherwise, German spelling has been kept far more
consistent than the spelling of English.
See also
Notes
References
-
- Baugh, Alfred C. and Thomas Cable. A History of the English
Language, 4 ed. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall,
1993.
- Cable, Thomas. A Companion to Baugh & Cable's History
of the English Language. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey:
Prentice-Hall, 1983.
- Dobson, E. J. English Pronunciation 1500-1700, 2 ed.
2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1968. (See vol. 2, 594-713
for discussion of long stressed vowels)
- Freeborn, Dennis. From Old English to Standard English: A
Course Book in Language Variation Across Time. Ottawa, Canada:
University of Ottawa
Press, 1992
- Görlach, Manfred. Introduction to Early Modern
English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1991.
- Kökeritz, Helge. Shakespeare's Pronunciation. New
Haven: Yale University Press,
1953.
- Millward, Celia. A Biography of the English Language, 2
ed. Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace, 1996.
- Pyles, Thomas, and John Algeo. The Origins and Development
of the English Language, 4 ed. Orlando, FL: Harcourt Brace and
Company, 1993.
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