Week 7 - The Great Vowel Shift

 

This week I looked at something that wasn’t in my original plan. The great Vowel Shift (GVS). A couple times in my research I came across this phrase and I began to wonder what it was. The GVS, simply put was a phenomenon that occurred between the 15^th and 18^th century. Many other languages have undergone vowel shifts, but what made the GVS so unique was the scale that it affected the language and the apparent lack of reason. Where other languages shift one or two vowels over time to change the language, the GVS comprised a shift in almost every single long vowel sound to a more forward on the palate. To get an idea of what that means, you can take a look at this video. Its rather dry in terms of cinematic value but what it lacks in excitement and action, it makes up for in education and understanding.

You can see that the diagram indicates where sounds are made, being high or low in the mouth and forward (left) and in the back (right), with diphthongs being shown in the middle as they slide between different sounds. The GVS shifted the entire set up and forward. It started with the highest vowels shifting to be diphthongs. This opened up space for the rest to shift. Its unclear whether this was a push shift or a pull shift. Pull shift being that the diphthongization (I don’t think that’s actually a word but I’m going to use it) of the upper two monophthong vowels left a vacuum that the other vowels shifted up to take. A push being that the other vowels shifting up happened simultaneously and pushed the upper vowels out to be diphthongs. This shift changes entirely the way English was pronounced such that Chaucer, being from just before the GVS and Shakespeare, being from after, while speaking the same language with almost the same syntax, would have been neigh unintelligible to each other.

You can see here a nice concise summary of the effects of the GVS. Describing the sounds of a vowel through writing is a difficult thing to do. Inherently, the sounds a vowel makes are a personal interpretation affected by your own experiences, dialect, mother language, etc. It is, therefore, neigh impossible to explain in writing the effects of how the GVS affected the language. It easiest for you to hear. Check out the video below as Simon Roper goes through a few phrases and demonstrates the way a shift can happen over generations.    

               The reasons for the GVS is not known but primary ideas on the subject indicate that it may have been caused by a number of factors. First would be that, when the Norman ruling class (which speak French remember) lost their holding in France, the noble men had to rely on their English holdings more. This caused them to incorporate English more into their language repertoire. As the affluent upper class began speaking accented English, the lower class emulated them for prestige cause a vowel shift. Another idea is that the plague, black death, which was rampant during this time, caused the mass migration from rural areas to urban centers. This was a time when most people worlds consisted of the area they could walk to in a day, or ride to if they were fortunate enough to have a horse. This means that regional dialects often formed. When all these dialects collected into urban centers there was mass melding of languages causing the vowel shift and a plethora of accents in cities like London. Last, is the idea that the hundred years war which was actually more than 100 years, caused a great deal of resentment towards the French. As tensions and resentment grew, a distancing from France, French and all things related occurred. In this case the vowel shift occurred as a conscious or partially subconscious need to separate. The history guy explains this part of the GVS very well in this video.

    Now, I know you may be asking, “How does this make English difficult to learn? It’s just pronunciation.” Well, it wouldn’t be a problem, except that the shift happened over such a long time and in a variety of different locations separately, that shifts were not adopted uniformly leading to pronunciation not being uniform with spelling. English is unlike some other languages for that. Take Spanish and Portuguese for example. The languages are really easy to read because spelling and pronunciation coincide with each other (I’m only going off what I have heard about Spanish here because I don’t actually speak the language, but Portuguese I can say this with some certainty.) English is not so. Look at the diphthong “EA” for example.

EA was pronounced “e” like in met. (meat was said like met). A small shift makes it become eh as in “Canadian eh?” now meat would be said like Mate. Another shift and it became the long vowel sound meat as it is today. However, some words got stuck along the way so words like steak, while maintaining the same diphthong remained with the eh sound. This is just one of many examples. Read (the past form) is an example of a word where the vowel sound didn’t shift. This fills English with a whole host of words that have similar spelling with different pronunciation.

We know shifts have happened in other languages so you may wonder why English has so many inconsistencies and other languages don’t. when other languages have had these vowel shifts, they are often accompanied by an updated standardization of writing. So, as a very astute observer noted in a conversation forum on English Language & Usage “what made the pronunciation stray so far from spelling in English was not the Great Vowel Shift; it was the absence of the accompanying Great Spelling Update.” This creates a very confusing disparity for many English language learners. Sadly, there is no easy way to overcome this but to practice. In some cases, recognizing if a word is a loanword from another language will help with recognizing the pronunciation but not always, as loan words acquired before the vowel shift will often have shifted vowels and loan words picked up after will not.