The Great Vowel Shift

Brian G Turner

Brian G Turner

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I'd never heard of this until just now while researching The Canterbury Tales.

Basically, the way vowels are pronounced underwent a radical shift between the time of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare.

It's also one reason why English has so many confusing spellings that can sound the same, ie, "been" and "bean".

Wikipedia has a long and technical explanation of what happened:
Great Vowel Shift - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

For non-linguists, here's the simpler explanation of what happened - and why:
The Great Vowel Shift - An Explanation for Kids

I guess now I know why some people say "pasta" and others say "paaaasta" - the change is still happening. :)
 
Does anyone really say "parsta"??? I use the long "a" for words like bath (baath), but I've never dreamed of pronouncing pasta like that -- it must sound very affected! (And very un-Italian!)

Anyhow, I had heard of the Great Vowel Shift, though I'm not sure where I first picked it up, and I can't say I ever bothered to look it up and find out more, even though it crops up in some definitions in the Online Etymology Dictionary.

One word that's interested me viz-a-viz pronunciation is "garage". It comes from the French and when first introduced here would have been pronounced in the French way, ie garrarrge. Most posh and would-be posh people still pronounce it like that, but Anglicisation has led to its being pronounced like most other "-age" words eg porage/porridge, ie garridge. A word like "barrage" though introduced into English earlier, being less used is still pronounced the French way.


As a matter of interest, were you researching this for your novel? If so, don't forget that not only would pronunciations vary from region to region, but also the words themselves. eg the old word for egg was ey, plural eyen, and that would have remained in rural communities and the south long after the change had mostly happened elsewhere -- from the OED:
This Norse-derived northern word vied in Middle English with native cognates eye, eai, from Old English æg, until finally displacing the others after c. 1500. Caxton (15c.) writes of a merchant (probably a north-country man) in a public house on the Thames who asked for eggs:
And the goode wyf answerde, that she coude speke no frenshe. And the marchaunt was angry, for he also coude speke no frenshe, but wolde have hadde egges, and she understode hym not.
She did, however, recognize another customer's request for "eyren."
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And the French had the same kind of shift of pronunciation and word change in medieval times, hence the Languedoc, which comes from "the language of 'yes'"-- in the south of France "yes" was spelled and pronounced as "oc" whereas in the north it was "oïl". The langue d'oïl became modern French.
 
Brian Turner said:
I'm struggling to enjoy The Canterbury Tales, so I thought I'd skip ahead to some analysis, and the issue came up on how English had changed since then. :)
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Ah. I must have done some of the Prologue at school, and on several occasions over the years I've tried to have another go at it -- I've a lovely little hardback version with copious illustrations, including the miniatures from the Ellesmere edition, which is a delight to look at -- but even with a glossary and notes at the end, I've still never been able to get very far, so I can empathise. I have heard the beginning of the prologue narrated which was certainly interesting but to me less intelligible than reading it with the odd spellings!
 
Jo Zebedee said:
I quite like Chaucer. Anyhow, if it helps, a study threw up that the closest dialect to Old English still in existence is the NI (Belfast, iirc).
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I'd heard somewhere that Geordie was closest to Tudor times, but don't quote me on that, and how anyone "really" knows the way people once pronounced words, given "a study" or not, is something I would expect is a subject open to very much heated debate in any case.

Despite living in the South for 30 years I still take a "Bath" (though I would call the place "Baarth") and live on a "Row-ad" rather than a "Road", and go to watch a new "Filim" at the cinema. Otherwise, I'm probably taken as a southerner. (Or, on some occasions, Irish, which I do find quite odd.)

No one calls the shortened word for Mathematics "Maarths" though!
 
Based upon the BBC World Service, the British pronounce aw as ar as in, "I sar many individuals in Laws Anjeleez who objected to the new lar." I have also heard that hard thinking Britons do not sound like a NASCAR race; er, er, erm, errr, errrm...rrrrrrrrrrrr actually is uh and um. Does this mean ar is pronounced aw or ah? (Some claim a difference; they also say cot and caught do not sound the same.)
If so, shouldn't it be parsta(pahsta); the word came from Italian. I have never heard the cat vowel used.
The trap/bath split and non-rhoticity both came about when the southern English gave up the English language to create British in the 1700s*, over a hundred years after the Great Vowel shift.

*Sorry, but after all the accusations over the years of the rest of us changing the language, I couldn't resist. RP has to be one of the most changed dialects in English.
 
So does ar = ah? I don't know which is more confusing IPA or phonetic English. Ahl git it eevintyoolee.

Actually, it's the spelling that gets me on Middle English, too. I heard it's easier if you sound it out, but I always sound it out wrong.
 
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Wiglaf said:
So does ar = ah? I don't know which is more confusing IPA or phonetic English. Ahl git it eevintyoolee.
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I guess. ah to me would be like the phonetic a - ooh ah is for those from certain parts of England and pirates.

Actually, it's the spelling that gets me on Middle English, too. I heard it's easier if you sound it out, but I always sound it out wrong.
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That's why Scots/Doric make it easier to follow. Scots is a spoken rather than a written language so there is no standardisation in spelling. My native dialogue is Scouse which is a relatively modern one.

I find the similarities between traditional dialects interesting. For example in Scots a hare is a maukin. In Old Lancashire it's malkin. I would guess the pronunciation is more or less identical.
 
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