The Great Vowel Shift

A     E     I     O     U

In my article on saying I Love you in different languages I mentioned the Great Vowel Shift (GVS) that occurred in the English language, and then I blew you all off and said that it was a discussion for another time.  Well that time has arrived now, and I shall try to explain what I was talking about.  Before I start though I shall explain that OE in my essay means Old English, that is, that which was spoken in Chaucer’s time and before, pre AD 1400.  Modern English shall be referred to simply as ME. 

When I studied Linguistics in Graduate school, we learned all about the phonetic alphabet and sounds that are made by the different parts of the mouth,  and while I think it is interesting I think I should cut to the chase here and get on with it. Most English speakers will know that the English we speak now is a hodge podge of assimilated languages from Saxon, Norse. Latin, French, Greek, and that’s not to mention the words assimilated from colonies.  What was spoken in England in the first millennium was much more of a European sounding language than what English has become today.  

What has changed about it?  Most Americans would have read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in high school senior British Lit classes, but if you were to get your hands on a Chaucer’s original manuscript you wouldn’t be able to understand it.  That’s not to say that Chaucer had bad penmanship, but that OE would almost seem like a foreign language.  You would however still recognize some of the words but you’d marvel at their spelling.

The GVS is an event that happened in the speech of OE speakers in which they shifted how they pronounced their vowels.  Linguists will say that the vowels shifted up and forward in the throat and vocal sounds.  For example, let us look at the ME word ‘wife’, and we see that in OE it was rendered ‘wyfe’.  You say so what, we can still pronounce it the same way, but herein is the GVS, it is not pronounced the same way. OE would pronounce it as  /wifə/ or in our the ME ‘whiffa’.  In the ME ‘wife’ the vowel ‘i’ sounds like ‘eye’  and the ‘e’ on the end is silent.  The ‘eye’ sound is produced in the front of the mouth by curling the lips slightly and expelling the sound from just behind the teeth.  The ‘i’ sound when it is pronounced like /hit/ is made from the back of the mouth or top of the throat.  We can see the origins of this particular word in it’s derivatives, as in midwife, which is pronounced as in ME but midwifery is like the OE pronunciation.