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Great Vowel Shift
- khy 6y agoIf anyone finds this subject interesting, I recommend The History of English Podcast: https://historyofenglishpodcast.com https://historyofenglishpodcast.com.
- throwaway894345 6y agoOh wow, I've never seen anyone rep that podcast elsewhere, but I highly recommend it. It's absolutely fascinating. I'm not much of a podcast listener, but this one pretty much immediately captured my attention and has held it (I'm now a ~70 episodes in IIRC).
- mauvehaus 6y agoCan't upvote this enough; it's a great podcast. If this seems just a little too esoteric, might I appeal to everybody's prurient side and recommend Chaucer's Vulgar Tongue [0] as a gateway episode? [0] https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-chaucers-vulgar-tongue-explicit-language/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/2019/09/25/episode-129-c...
- bps4484 6y agoA a great podcast that has started a personal hobby/interest in linguistics and etymology. I love that history is able break your notion of what is or isn't possible and this podcast is great at that; it repeatedly shows how no language is set in stone, it is a human construct, and how languages are interrelated.
- alamortsubite 6y agoAlso the ITV series "The Adventure of English" with Melvyn Bragg. They're all on YT.
- beermonster 6y agoAnd ‘Mother Tongue’ by Bill Bryson.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoPlease don’t recommend that book. Bill Bryson has no training in linguistics and that book is so bad, that there is a factual error on virtually every page.
- WaldoLydecker 6y agoMein Held!
- Tagbert 6y agoThat is one of my favorite podcasts! I often go back and listen to older episodes.
- gchucky 6y agoThe vowel shift is one of the major reasons why Shakespeare's poetry doesn't rhyme when spoken with modern English. There was a rather fascinating video that went around awhile back of a father and son demonstrating the changes.[1] [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoShakespeare's plays post-date the bulk of the Great Vowel Shift. The reason they don’t rhyme is only partly because of the very last phases of the Great Vowel Shift, and partly due to the changing English dialectal landscape. The classic English author for whom the Great Vowel Shift is most relevant, in terms of audiences today not pronouncing the text anywhere near as society then would have, is Chaucer.
- pablodavila 6y agoAnother slightly related video by Tom Scott https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUnGvH8fUUc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUnGvH8fUUc
- ljm 6y agoIt's fascinating how much of this holds out in various accents across the UK, most particularly outside of London and going up north. My mother and grandparents on her side have similar-ish pronunciation of some words with their thick Lancs accents. Not quite farmers accents but still quite archaic in sound sometimes. (Imagine other examples, like pronouncing 'couch' a bit more like 'cooch')
- coolreader18 6y agoIt's funny, for at least the first example, original pronunciation just sounds like Hagrid from the Harry Potter movies, which is especially interesting considering that's intended to be a less formal/"lower class" accent. Reminds me of something I heard once that the modern american accent is actually closer to the british accent at the time of the revolutionary war, and it's the british accent that's changed more since then. No idea if that's actually true, but it was really interesting when I heard it.
- echelon 6y agoThe article doesn't explain what evidence we have of this. How do we know this happened?
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoEnglish orthography is a dead giveaway. For example, why does the letter "i" in most continental European languages represent the vowel /i/, while in English it represents a diphthong? The way French loanwords or Latinisms are pronounced in modern English is similar evidence. Also, vowel chain shifts are exceedingly common across the languages of the world: compare Tatar and Kazakh to the other languages of their subgroup (Kipchak) within the Turkic family, for instance. Sometimes a vowel chain shift can even be observed in progress, as in the case of the Northern Cities Shift in the USA. [0] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_English#Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...
- bloak 6y agoIt's a good question. It turns out that linguists can discover quite a lot about how some languages were pronounced before audio recording existed. I got some insight into this by reading the first chapter of an academic book on the pronounciation of Latin where there was a summary of the different kinds of evidence that can be used. Unfortunately I don't have the list to hand so the following is just my random brainstorming: * the pronunciation of descendent languages, especially when there are lots of them, or lots of different dialects * comparison with languages that have a common ancestor * how words were transcribed from one language into another * how words were changed when adopted from one language into another * what spelling mistakes were made, particularly in cases where the writer was less educated or being less careful, such as graffiti * rhyme and metre in poetry * in literature, cases where someone is mocked for their pronunciation * puns and wordplay in literature * and of course cases where ancient authors have written more or less explicitly about pronunciation, either descriptively or prescriptively
- jcranmer 6y ago> * the pronunciation of descendent languages, especially when there are lots of them, or lots of different dialects It's worth calling this out as being one of the key elements of historical linguistics. Establishing genetic relations between languages requires proposing systematic sound shift laws that can explain why cognates sound the way they do, and this means that cognates in modern languages may not bear much resemblance to each other (English five and Sanscrit pankan are cognate yet share 0 sounds!). For example, there's a rule in the Germanic languages that shifts /k/ to /h/, so words like Latin "centum" instead become English "hundred" or "canis" to "hound" [1]. Now these pronunciation shifts often have caveats in them, such as shifting only before certain kinds of vowels or consonants. These restrictions can give you some clues as to why certain words seem to undergo a change while other words with seemingly similar pronunciations didn't. In Proto-Indo-European, this leads to the notion that there are several consonants (specifically, laryngeals) which are no longer present in any modern Indo-European language but whose existence in the original is responsible for sometimes shifting vowels that otherwise appear somewhat anomalous in descendant languages. [1] To be clear, Latin is not the initial word and English is not the final word. I'm just using Latin to illustrate a word closer to the original Proto-Indo-European pronunciation and English to illustrate what the Proto-Germanic pronunciation shifts towards.
- fatiherikli 6y agoI recommend to read the following article before reading that wiki post. So we need to understand what does a Vokal (Vowel) mean first. https://github.com/yogurt-cultures/kefir/blob/master/kefir/phonology.py#L28 https://github.com/yogurt-cultures/kefir/blob/master/kefir/p... Also I shifted one Const sound in the wikipedia article.
- zarq 6y agoI learned about another vowel shift yesterday: the (US) "Northern Cities Vowel Shift" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_English#Northern_Cities_Vowel_Shift https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inland_Northern_American_Engli...
- aent 6y agoVery good demonstration of how that sounds: https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k?t=433 https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k?t=433
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dhosek 6y agoOf course, when I first heard of this, it was referred to as the “Great Vowel Movement.”
- smnrchrds 6y agoCanadian English is going through a vowel shift right now. The shift is much smaller than the great vowel shift, but still notable. https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-canadian-vowel-shift/ https://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-can...
- mbroncano 6y agoThanks for the link, it was fascinating!
- perardi 6y agoHuh, glad that is real, and not just my ears. I’m an American, recently back from 2 years in Toronto, and the Toronto accent is just not the stereotypical Canadian accent that I imagined I’d hear. Far less Minnesota, a bit more New Jersey.
- firstplacelast 6y agoIn the US there is a Northern Cities Vowel shift going on right now, that this linguist claims is the biggest vowel shift since “The Great Vowel Shift.” See this video starting at 7:10 https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k https://youtu.be/IsE_8j5RL3k Maybe related to what’s happening in Canadian English?
- anticristi 6y agoAny non-native English speakers feeling like: So is that why we need to suffer a lingua franca that does not map 1:1 spoken and written? This must be the world's largest tech debt. :)))
- gxqoz 6y agoJohn McWhorter has argued a few times on the Lexicon Valley podcast that although English has many problems (especially spelling), it's not a terrible lingua franca. Many complexities from other languages do not exist in it. Obviously, any artificial language is going to be much simpler. But these have never caught on for a variety of reasons.
- keiferski 6y agoEnglish is a great lingua franca IMO because of its inherent decentralization and willingness to accept new words. There is no academy regulating its use, as is the case with French and Spanish.
- soldehierro 6y agoIn the case of Spanish, I can't speak for French, having an academy (the RAE in this case) regulating the language sounds like a problem on paper, but really isn't a problem in practice. The RAE accepts Americanisms and treats American Spanish just as it would European Spanish (referring to the continent(s), not the country) and encourages lingusitic diversity. Anglicisms are only discouraged when an acceptable Spanish alternative is in WIDE use (but never prohibited, as can be evidenced by the sheer quantity of anglicisms in the Spanish language.) Spanish is very willing to accept new words, and as diverse as English in terms of decentralization. Grammar doesn't make or break a lingua franca, number of speakers does, which is where English really shines. So what does the RAE do you ask? They write grammars and compile dictionaries, describe phonology and answer people's questions on Twitter. Just like what Merriam Webster or Oxford would do, but the RAE has official backing and creates consensus among the hispanophone countries. English is a regulated language, just not officially regulated.
- ngokevin 6y agoHere's what it'd look like (taken from Reddit): "The European Commission has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the European Union rather than German, which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, the British Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5- year phase-in plan that would become known as "Euro-English". In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favour of "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter. There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter. In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible. Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away. By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v". During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensi bl riten styl. Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi TU understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru. Und efter ze fifz yer, ve vil al be speking German like zey vunted in ze forst plas."
- anticristi 6y agoI dont vant tu teik saids, but German haz diklention und konjugation, vich maiks it a suboptimal lingua franka. Not tu mention meni iregular verbs. Mai vot gos tu som nordik languag like Svedish.
- dkdbejwi383 6y agoYou're not going to get a lot of support here, unless you change your vote to Rust.
- soldehierro 6y agoEsperanto > Rust
- automatoney 6y agoFor anyone wondering about the field that studies this sort of phenomenon, welcome to the wonderful field of historical linguistics! Historical linguistics is a really cool intersection between anthropology and linguistics - in short the idea is we can look at languages around today and use certain well-founded assumptions about how languages change to understand the languages of the past; essentially the words we speak and sign today are the fossils of our linguistic history! Suggested reading is Historical Linguistics by Lyle Campbell, and Language Files for a more general Linguistics textbook.
- nemetroid 6y agoThe pre-shift vowels are quite similar to how modern Swedish is pronounced.
- hashmush 6y agoFor the front ones, maybe. But for the back ones Old Swedish went through "stora vokaldansen" (the great vowel dance) leading to "ut" (out) being pronounced /ʉːt/ rather than /uːt/.
- Eric_WVGG 6y agoI used to have an English lit professor who could read and conversationally speak Old English. To my ears, it sounded like a Lord of the Rings style movie, or the Silmarillion come to life. Very musical in a sort of imaginary elvish kind of way.
- kosievdmerwe 6y agoOne of the things I like about Old English is kennings. For instance, "battle-sweat" to mean blood.
- aasasd 6y agoMoreover, there wasn't just one or a few shifts: they happen all the time and there were plenty of them. Apparently a big discovery in etymology (in 19th century iirc, and I forget the guy's name) was that words mostly don't change pronunciation individually, but the same parts in different words change in the same way. Which allows to track those changes over time and thus backtrack how modern words should've sounded in the past. This is why folk etymology usually misses the mark—since it focuses on single similar words that in fact often turn out to be unrelated. Also afaik spelling is irrelevant for etymology, at least until the very recent times.
- QuesnayJr 6y agoIs this Grimm's Law, by Jacob Grimm of "Grimm's Fairy Tales" fame?
- aasasd 6y agoSure sounds like it. Though I'm fairly certain that I wouldn't forget Grimm's name like that (the tales are childhood's staple where I am)—so maybe Rasmus Rask or Karl Verner was instead mentioned when I heard of the general concept being attributed at all. Which, rather weirdly, was only one time in a lecture by Andrey Zaliznyak on Youtube, even though I heard of how shifts work before and after that—you'd think such an important discovery would at least more often bear the name of its author.
- ahazred8ta 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law#See_also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm%27s_law#See_also There were a lot of sound shifts.
- bradrn 6y agoThe very same! He wrote a whole series of books about German — a history of German, a grammar of German, a dictionary of German, and, yes, a collection of old German stories.
- ChrisArchitect 6y agoSome good previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774428 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774428
- User23 6y agoIn German e is a, and i is e. It really is striking.
- lottin 6y agoIt isn't striking for speakers of German nor for speakers of Romance languages. These are the vowels that these letters originally stood for in the Latin alphabet, and they still do in many languages. But English obviously isn't one of them.
- pdevr 6y agoWow. I was (again) reading about this whole thing last week. Lot-cloth, Father-brother, cot-caught, Psalm by itself... If you are interested to know more, take a look at the way native speakers of other languages utter "a" and "o" and their variations. Fascinating, to say the least.
- canadianfella 6y agoCot and caught are different to you???
- kindall 6y agoThey really missed an opportunity by not calling it the Great Vowel Movement
- tabtab 6y agoMaybe because "V" and "B" used to be pronounced the same ;-)
- Koshkin 6y agoIn Spanish they still are.
- brigandish 6y agoIt certainly reinforces what I know about techies that I just had to scroll all the way down to here to get past a group of them not only missing the point of a joke, but then arguing with each other pendantically over the meaning of words that add nothing to the discussion. Is bikeshedding a habit or a temperament? Glad to see someone managed to get the joke, anyway.
- batiudrami 6y agoBut everyone got the joke without the need for the follow up comment? That’s why it’s the top comment.
- eindiran 6y agoVowel shift is a term of art in linguistics, so I'm not sure the pun would be worth it.
- yesenadam 6y ago> Vowel shift is a term of art in linguistics Aside: I see "term of art" everywhere on HN lately. Why?! What does it add to saying "Vowel shift is a linguistics term" or "a term in linguistics"? Why do people want to sound like patent lawyers? Am I missing something?
- adamrezich 6y agorelated, but has anyone noticed younger Americans pronouncing a few specific types of words differently as of late? I'm 29 and grew up in the Midwest, so in my accent, when I say "button," the "tt" is nearly silent. however, at my last job doing remote web development, one guy who was a bit younger than me (and also American) would pronounce it "BUH 'in," with noticeable "stop" between the two syllables. I have since noticed this in other younger Americans as well, and for other words I cannot recall right now but with the same general pattern.
- TheLocehiliosan 6y agoI'm 46, also grew up in midwest, and I say "BUH 'in".
- skywhopper 6y agoI don’t think it is a new phenomenon in the language. I associate this with Northeast US accents and many British accents. It may be that regional accents which use a glottal stop for this pattern are leaking into younger people’s accents around you simply because YouTube and TikTok are making less common accents heard more widely.
- Aromasin 6y agoFunny enough, this has almost become the common British pronunciation of most "hard t" words. It's quite common for people to say "a bottle of water" like "a boh-ell of wah-er", or "butter" like "buh-ah. The sound comes from the back of the throat instead of the tip of the tongue.
- tabtab 6y agoI had the impression such is considered "lower class" talk, for lack of a PC way to describe it. Please hear me out before giving me negative points. If you are "educated", then you are "supposed to" pronounce the middle constantans, as skipping them is considered "lazy". I'm not making a value judgement, but reporting that this is what parents often tell their kids in private. All things being equal, parents want their children to sound wealthy and well educated. Similar for certain rural or "redneck" talk in the US. Example: "Murica" instead of "America". My mother used to lecture me against certain verbal shortcuts so that I didn't "sound ignorant". Her words, not mine.
- kebman 6y agoI'm amazed! Late Middle English ‘boat’ sounds just like modern Norwegian ‘båt.’ :p I heard the stories that Scandinavians could go to Britain and it would only take a short while to get used to the language. Kind of like Norwegians going to Denmark today. In writing Danish and Norwegian is almost the same, but it takes some getting used to the pronounciation. There's a fantastic dialogue illustrating the similarity of Old Danish / Norse vs Old English by Jackson Crawford and Simon Roper: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKzJEIUSWtc
- simonh 6y agoMy mother’s family is from the Durham area in the north east so I’m very familiar with the broadly Geordie accent. To me Norwegian sounds a bit like German spoken by a Geordie. It’s not really surprising considering that region of England used to be colonised by “Danes” and was called The Danelaw before the Norman conquest, as against the south Germanic tribes that settled southern England. I suppose the Norman french influence peters out the further north you go.
- brabel 6y agoWow, so English sounded just like a Scandinavian language! I knew old English words are often similar to the equivalent modern Scandinavian languages in writing (Swedish, Norwegian, Danish) but I was not sure if they sounded similar.
- kebman 5y agoWell, to be fair, Danish doesn't really sound so similar to Norwegian, but since most of the words are written the exact same way, it's usually not hard to decipher the pronunciation, especially after a day or two among them (I'm Norwegian). We've got some pretty special old mountain dialects in Norway too. Technically they are Norwegian, but it's nigh impossible to understand a word they say lol.
- jbverschoor 6y agoThe recordings sound very Dutch!
- valarauko 6y agoThe Frisian languages are the closest living relatives to old English, so perhaps there's a connection there?
- yesenadam 6y agoI thought this fascinating video lecture[0], History of English - The Great Vowel Shift by Jürgen Handke, explains things very well, using the diagram and by his demonstrating all the vowel sounds in question. It even explains the origin of some other modern English accents. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyhZ8NQOZeo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zyhZ8NQOZeo
- Andrew_nenakhov 6y agoI wonder if our new age of global culture and free information exchange will slow down language mutations? Surely tons of existing movies and songs and other media should give a clear idea of a speaking norm so spoken language doesn't deviate much from it. Or it doesn't?
- ammar_x 6y agoInteresting. Vowels in English has always been hard to find a rule that dictates their pronunciation in words. This is a funny video about that: https://www.tiktok.com/@therealivancohen/video/6921416585412431109 https://www.tiktok.com/@therealivancohen/video/6921416585412...
- ineedasername 6y agoThis what frustrates me about grammar fanatics. Clearly language changes and evolves, and grammar is defined as standard usage, not some rule formed 50 years ago that no one follows in common speech. In short, grammar is fundamentally descriptive, not proscriptive.
- beervirus 6y agoIt's both. Language changes, but at any particular time, there's some consensus about what's correct and incorrect. You can ignore it if you want, but people will think you're ignorant.
- bobthepanda 6y agoThere may be an elite consensus, but more often than not that can differ from what is actually being spoken. For example, in linguistics studies AAVE (or “Ebonics”) is considered like other dialects to basically have a grammar of its own that is internally consistent, and it is the first English of a fairly large population. That’s before we get into which English is the “correct” one; there’s British English, American English, etc. for the US and CANZUK, but there’s also Indian English, Singaporean English, Euro English, etc.
- beervirus 6y agoYes, dialects exist. But within any given dialect, there's some consensus about what's correct and incorrect. You can call that elitist if you want.
- pbhjpbhj 6y agoUse of "whom" is a great example of this. If you use it correctly (proscriptively) then people thing you sound strange. There's not just descriptive and proscriptive approaches: utilitarian and apathetically approaches seem distinct (perhaps they're a different axis).
- audiometry 6y agoSadly the article doesn't explain how we know vowels were pronounced differently back then. There was no voice recording obviously. Did they have some phonetic system that we can use to reproduce their pronunciation.
- hollerith 6y agoWe know that German, Swedish, etc, descended fron the same old language that English descended from, and the pronouciation of those languages is very similar to the pre-shift pronounciation of English.
- blahedo 6y agoThere are a lot of pieces of indirect evidence. They include: * poetry that has a rhyme scheme, so you know that two words rhymed for the author * puns and wordplay (Shakespeare is overflowing with this kind of thing) that only work if words were pronounced a certain way * misspellings or variant spellings, which before the typewriter era would be almost entirely sound based (i.e. unlike typoes in general) * borrowings into other languages, which generally are "frozen" at the time of their borrowing and from then on start mutating by the rules of the other language * related languages with cognate words, if you can devise a coherent set of sound-shift rules to reconstruct the shared ancestor-word and the intermediate forms along the way * complaints from the older generation about how kids these days are mispronouncing words (these are always fun, and usually come with specific, if informal, descriptions of both the old and the new pronunciation)
- ggm 6y agoInteresting how in "micro" sense we know people knew it was happening ("young people today.." nothing changes) Yet, its a 300 year process. One of those "I was there" -no, you weren't things. Like sea level rise. You see a bit of it. The totality is a story which spans generations. Nobody owns all of it.
- Cthulhu_ 6y agoAnd yet, people experience changes in accents during their own life; they hear recordings from themselves from the 70's and think "did I really talk like that?". One thing though, take older movies with a grain of salt; in old movies, actors were taught a specific accent (called the Mid-Atlantic accent, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mid-Atlantic_accent).
- ggm 6y agoIt's a sequence of shifts. I guess, significant numbers of people get to experience maybe one shift in a chain. Modern example. Router. Two forms, the British one rooter is being deprecated strongly for rowter. Etc is etcetera. Now, its etsy.
- yellowapple 6y ago> Etc is etcetera. Now, its etsy. I can't say I've ever heard that, anywhere. Definitely have heard a lot of "esetra" / "esedra", though.
- ggm 6y ago/etc etsy has become more current in my (oz) community. there's still a divergence between /sbin (s'bin) and s-bin ess-bin /tmp is pretty much temp to everyone. /var vahr not vair. and luckly, we all think soodoo is pronounced the same. Oh wait, soodough. Damn.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- seanvk 6y agoOne interesting side effect of the Great Vowel Shift occurred when the word Uisce Beatha (Whisk(e)y) was anglicized twice. It was first brought in during the Elizabethan period from Ireland as "Whiskey" and later re-brought in as "Whisky" in Scotland. I've often wondered if that is the same reason behind surname anglicization of Ceallaigh to "Kelley" and later "Kelly".
- bambax 6y agoWikipedia tells me that > Uisce beatha, literally "water of life", is the name for whiskey in Irish. It is derived from the Old Irish uisce ("water") and bethu ("life"). In France, many liquors used to be simply called "eau de vie". They now tend to each have their own name (origin and/or brand), but most people would still understand that you're not looking for water if you ask for some eau de vie.
- 7373737373 6y agoMiddle English, before the Great Vowel Shift, sounded much more Germanic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GihrWuysnrc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GihrWuysnrc