![]() ![]() But we don’t use the same sound for the O as we do in ‘hot’. We say ‘ee’ for the Y in ‘only’, for example. There are still words in Modern English that pronounce vowels in the same way as in other European languages. And you may be interested to hear that I chose ‘sheep’ for a reason it would have sounded like ‘shep’, with a slightly longer vowel. Notice how your tongue moves to a different position in the mouth in order to make the ‘ee’ sound. Make a vowel sound like the E in ‘bed’, and then say ‘sheep’. We say they moved, because the position of the tongue and the mouth in order to articulate (to produce the sounds) changed. Vowels in English shifted: that is, they moved. The main changes could really be seen during the 15 th century and at the start of the 16 th century, although the process continued well into the 18 th century. It took a long time and many generations. This was not something that could happen overnight people didn’t all wake up one morning and decide all at the same time to pronounce their language differently. The changes began in the 12 th century, but this was only the start. The theory is that older forms of English, up to the period known as Early Middle English, pronounced the long vowels in much the same way as in Latin: like modern Italian or Spanish, or even German. It describes the process that English went through to have such different pronunciation from its neighbours. This term was invented by a Danish scholar, Otto Jespersen, who studied this phenomenon. Why is it communicare, with the final three letters pronounced ah-reh in Italian, but communicate in English, the A with a different sound? Listen to the difference here.Īn important reason for these differences is known as the Great Vowel Shift. In English we say dee-side, but in French the letter i is pronounced /i/ (with an ee sound). Listen to the difference here on Google Translate. Take a look at the French word décider – can you guess what it means in English? If you thought it means decide, then you are right! We can see that it is from the same root, but the pronunciation is very different. Vowels, as you may have learned in school are the letters a e i o u and y. The difference is in the way that vowels are pronounced. But why is the pronunciation so often so different in English? Perhaps you may even have been told that some of them are derived from Latin or Greek, or that they have Germanic roots. ![]() ![]() Philocrites: Friday Middle English recipe blogging.If you have learnt a foreign language, or if you are bilingual in another European language, you may have noticed that there are a number of words that are similar to words in English. The Great Vowel Shift is about long vowels, which were raised (o u, e.g. I'll explain below that some such idea has been proposed for major trends in language, such as the Great Vowel Shift which took place in English from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.īut the one example I cited of language being naturally selected - the theory that the Great Vowel Shift might have a functional explanation - is not of this type. It's pronounced more like "yuleteeth"* than "yuletide", but you can blame that on the Great Vowel Shift. Those who have learned about the Great Vowel Shift - or perhaps heard it in action, thanks to reconstructed audio of earlier varieties of English - may enjoy wearing the T-shirt which proudly proclaims of its wearer "I Survived The Great Vowel Shift." Wymondham (Norfolk) and Wymondley (Hertfordshire) | Linguism | Language BlogĬalled the Great Vowel Shift, the English language changed from the way it had been for generations.Īlex Abella: Obama's Legacy: The Death of the GOP This must all have happened before the Great Vowel Shift started to apply.
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