
Great Vowel Shift - nl
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
======
DJohnBenton
Somewhat related, there was also a "capitalisation shift" in the late 1600s
where everyone (or their editors) started writing more nouns as capitalised
(e.g. "The quick brown Fox jumped over the lazy Dog"), and then switched back
in the mid-1700s. Interesting to know what might have been.

[https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-
goo...](https://github.com/DanielJohnBenton/capitalisation-shift-google-
ngrams#the-great-capitalisation-shifts)

~~~
pavlov
Donald Trump's Twitter account nearly follows this rule, but not quite:

 _" 4.2 million hard working Americans have already received a large Bonus
and/or Pay Increase because of our recently Passed Tax Cut & Jobs Bill....and
it will only get better! We are far ahead of schedule."_ (Feb 11, 2018)

He missed "Schedule" but incorrectly capitalized "passed". Tsk.

~~~
amyjess
Missing "Schedule" isn't a big deal. During that period, English speakers
didn't capitalize _every_ noun, just the ones deemed important. Evidently
Trump doesn't consider "schedule" important.

~~~
pavlov
Makes sense. Trump must spend a lot of time reading 17th century classics in
original editions.

------
ineedasername
Nearly as interesting is "why" there was a great vowel shift: Plague.

While difficult to prove, it's commonly believed by linguists to have been
caused, or very greatly helped along, by the bubonic plague and the extreme
amount of social upheaval and migration it caused over its extended rampage
through that area of the world. I was rather surprised the wikipedia entry
didn't mention that factor, it was spoken of as an established fact when I was
in grad school.

([https://esoterx.com/2016/04/20/language-is-a-bacterium-
the-d...](https://esoterx.com/2016/04/20/language-is-a-bacterium-the-disease-
theory-of-the-great-vowel-shift/))

~~~
markdog12
It's in there

> Some scholars[who?] have argued that the rapid migration of peoples from
> northern England to the southeast following the Black Death

~~~
ineedasername
Oh i missed that, was looking for "plague", thanks

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Slackwise
Just heard of "The Great Vowel Shift" on the "Lexicon Valley"[1] linguistics
podcast, which covered the idiosyncrasies of English spelling, and how the
vowel shift was a large factor in how pronunciations diverged from their
spellings.

[1]:
[http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/0...](http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2018/04/john_mcwhorter_on_english_spelling.html)

------
vidanay
If you are a native English speaker trying to lean a Germainic foreign
language, then retraining yourself that the vowels are pronounced

"ah, ay, e, oh, ooh"

instead of

"ay, e, eye, oh, you"

helps your pronunciation tremendously.

~~~
lhorie
e sounds more like `eh` though (at least in latin-derived languages and
japanese). Pronouncing it `ay` is generally seen as a strong english accent.

~~~
hannele
\e\ is a sound that is basically impossible to represent unambiguously to
English speakers, without falling back to how it's used in words ('e' as in
'ten', for example).

`eh` and `ay` can both easily be read as a dipthong that would be represented
as `ei` in any reasonably spelled language (like Finnish).

~~~
xvedejas
To keep things clear: the notation you'd typically want to use with IPA when
taking about sounds (phones) is [e], as in this case, and use /e/ (with
forward slashes) when taking about phonemes. Not to nitpick on you
specifically, I see a lot of ad-hoc notations in these comments.

------
jrobn
I wish English kept some of its runic hold overs like the letter thorn “þ” (th
sound).

“þe fox ran þurh þe field.”

I could imagine the confusion for non native English speakers when they
encountered:

through thought brought bought daughter

All hold overs from old English when the “gh” came from the throat and was
spelled with a “ȝ”

~~~
js2
If you've never seen Gallagher's routine on English you'll enjoy it:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mfz3kFNVopk)

~~~
bhrgunatha
No discussion about inconsistent spelling and pronunciation is complete
without The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité, a non-native speaker!

[http://www.businessinsider.com/english-spelling-
pronunciatio...](http://www.businessinsider.com/english-spelling-
pronunciation-poem-the-chaos-2017-12)

------
postcynical
Small anecdote from history:

Back in the days, the conservative Swiss looked down on those vowel shift
hipsters in Germany and thought that the simple vowels where good enough as
they were. So the Swiss-German spoken today is basically a pre-vowel-shift
German, "Haus" [pron: house] vs "Huus" [pron: Hoose]. Mid/northern Germans
find it super hard to understand Swiss-German (or mistake it with German
spoken with a Swiss accent).

Perhaps we start to see a similar shift happening in France where yougsters
start to mix up vowels in everyday words.

------
marze
So how do researchers determine how words were pronounced historically without
audio recordings?

~~~
tvmalsv
One of the ways can be through poetry. Since many poems tend to include
rhymes, the pronunciation of a word can sometimes be gleaned by comparing it
to its rhyme pair (there's probably an actual word for that). Of course, that
presupposes you know the pronunciation of the other word.

Edit: Pretty much what edanm said. I really should do a page refresh before
replying when the tab has been open for a while :)

~~~
lainga
As Shakespeare wrote in _As You Like It_ :

And then, from hour to hour, we rot and rot / And thereby hangs a tale

Which is wittier when you realise that _hour_ was pronounced like _whore_ in
his day.

~~~
JacobAldridge
The quote I learned about the Great Vowel Shift from was Henry IV, Part I.

 _If reasons were as plentiful as blackberries_ , where the prof explained it
was a pun because "reasons" was pronounced more like "raisins" in 1597.

------
wirrbel
Well, a vowel shift isn't that unusual, with english however, and 17 vowels,
the regularisation of the spelling never happened (and would be difficult now
as folks would have to agree on one prestigious pronunciation to be the
standard).

------
dep_b
The pre-shift vowels are written and sound almost exactly the same as modern
Dutch.

------
glup
For anyone interested, there is some neat but not terribly well-known modeling
work in cognitive science / phonology on chain shifts:
[http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2007/op463...](http://linguistics.berkeley.edu/phonlab/documents/2007/op463-ettlinger1.pdf)

------
richardfontana
See also
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift)
, a significant chain vowel shift that has been developing in some dialects of
American English. It's detectable for example (though in a relatively mild
form) in the speech of Hillary Clinton.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
Wait, wait, wait. Does this article mean to tell me that cot and caught DON'T
sound the same? Also stalk and stock?

Oh no, I've got it ]=

~~~
yorwba
As a non-native speaker, I spent some time obsessing over the "correct"
pronunciation of words, until I found this chart:
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alpha...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Phonetic_Alphabet_chart_for_English_dialects)

Then I decided to just give up and adapt my pronunciation to that of whomever
I'm speaking to.

~~~
sverige
As a native speaker, I grew up in an area where the boundaries of three
American dialects were within about 25 miles, so I did the same. For example,
it doesn't bother me at all to pronounce 'creek' as 'creek' or 'crick,' or
'wash' as 'wash' or 'warsh.' We all figured out where people in our little
town came from by the way they pronounced a few different words. ('Roof' is
another that tells something about you, for example.)

------
sixstringtheory
I’ve been reading a modern english translation of the Canterbury Tales, and
once upon a time had to memorize the first part of the prologue in middle
english. It’s nice to see some of the linguistic theory describing how the
latter became the former.

PS give a ME translation of Canterbury Tales a try, it is super impressive.

------
fouc
> Great Vowel Shift is responsible for the fact that English spellings now
> often strongly deviate in their representation of English pronunciations.

Can someone explain this in simpler terms? I'm too tired to interpret this.

~~~
qalmakka
In layman's terms: people in England around ~1400/1500 started to change how
vowels sounded in almost every word (i.e., /a/ shifted to /ei/, /i/ to /ai/,
..). Given that written languages often evolve much more slowly than their
spoken form, people simply kept writing everything with its middle English
spelling (which now had lots of wrongly placed vowels and mute consonants,
such as [gh] and the [k] in "knight"), giving birth to the messy English
spelling we all use and love.

This is also the reason why English speaking kids find spelling so difficult,
and spelling bees exist - people are actually writing in an older version of
the language they speak.

------
peteretep
So "out" went from "oot" to "owt", "about" went from "aboot" to "abowt", eh?
Thank God for traditionalist Canadians and Northumbrians.

------
macandcheese
Reminds me of
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simplified_Spelling_Board)

------
peter303
'Pirate dialect' was during the vowel shift according to linguist McWhorter.
Longer vowels were replacing the earlier shorter German ones.

------
walterbell
Which languages have fewer vowels than English?

~~~
bassman9000
Spanish has five. Period. No exceptions. And crystal clear.

~~~
egwynn
1\. You deserve my downvote for claiming “no exceptions” in a linguistic
matter.

2\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Exact_number...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_phonology#Exact_number_of_allophones)

    
    
        There is no agreement among scholars on how many vowel
        allophones Spanish has.

~~~
spanxx
Frontera tour link:

> According to Eugenio Martínez Celdrán, however, systematic classification of
> Spanish allophones is impossible due to the fact that their occurrence
> varies from speaker to speaker and from region to region. According to him,
> the exact degree of openness of Spanish vowels depends not so much on the
> phonetic environment, but rather on various external factors accompanying
> speech.

So parent point stands. That's my opinion as well as a Spaniard.

~~~
ithkuil
"no exceptions" sounds like the focus is on rules, in particular on
orthography (correct writing). It's easy to ban exceptions if you make the
rules. This is the realm of prescriptive linguistics.

The very fact that there are individuals and whole group of people who
actually talk differently can, has been, and still often is dismissed as
either ignorance, class, personal idiosincrasies, ...

There is a different way at looking at the thing: observing it objectively as
other things in nature. This descriptive linguistics is endlessly fascinating
to me, as it's less infected by human desires that have nothing to do with
linguistics and all to do with politics.

An example of where those two viewpoints begin to present reality in a quite
different way and yet don't require to be a trained linguist to grasp it is
the definition of where a dialect ends and a language begins.

