So I was wondering what are some examples of things changing in the great vowel shift?
If so, when did it happen? And how did it affect the pronunciation of vowels?
Just why??
Every chart I've seen describing the shift seems to omit the origins of the modern pronunciations of these phonemes, why is this? Were these phones completely unaffected by the shift, or are there current pronunciations explained other different sound changes, if so what were those changes?
More charts:
After rewatching a bunch of videos on OP and the changes in English for the upteenth time, I got to wondering like I usually do about said question. Thanks!
I get that it was a major event changing the pronunciation of the whole vowel system, but surely it is not the only event that affected the pronunciation of vowels in British English? Language is in a constant state of change so I would expect there to be many more shifts in vowel pronunciations, so really, what exactly is so great about GVS? Why not just name it something like 'the first vowel shift'?
I know a bit about the history of english and how it changed from Old English to Middle to Modern English. That got me thinking about Chinese and it's reliance on tones, and was wondering if there were similar events that changed the pronunciations used in Chinese. Thanks.
I'm looking for a dialect of English which wasn't that affected by the Great Vowel Shift. This includes consonant changes that happened during that era.
In theory, if you take a modern speaker of that dialect, and put him in the 1500s (same region), he would be able to have a semi-normal conversation with them
I'm presuming it's through surviving written pre-GVS sources that don't make sense with English's current vowels, but the spelling becomes phonetic when using pre-GVS vowels?
Could we say that Γ¦ used to be a:, or Κ used to be Ε, or was it much more random than that?
I recently watched a video on how far back in time could we go and still be able to understand the English speaking population and something called the "Great Vowel Shift" was brought up. I know it's basically the change from Middle English to modern English and that it took course over 200 years, but I was wondering if historians had any clue as to what sparked the change?
I mean it is commonly accepted as a part of the development of the English language, but we do not have any recordings.
I am sure there are methods to how linguists have come to this conclusion, I am curious as to what they are
We all know from skeletal records that the introduction of utensils in the west changed people's jawlines and created the slight overbite common now. Is there a chance that this could have affected pronunciation such that the vowel shift occured?
I've been dabbling in linguistics, Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and the history of the English language. I'm sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do you know the great vowel shift took place if all you have is written texts? I mean, it's not like you can ask Alfred how he pronounced stuff.
And how do you know how to pronounce texts written in the era when the great vowel shift took place? If they're written in the era of the shift, would they be of mixed pronunciation? Or...I don't even know. I'm confused.
It makes perfect sense to me that a vowel shift could and did take place at the time. I'm just wondering how we know it did, and what evidence made us realize it.
Perhaps this is an easy question. Or perhaps my question covers too broad a spectrum of study for an easy answer. Sorry.
I was reading this thread asking if Modern and Early English speakers would be able to understand each other, and also read the section about the evolution of languages in the FAQ, and it got me wondering, what did English sound like before the great vowel shift, or indeed, how did Early and Middle English sound compared to Modern English? And how can we know what they sounded like, without recordings?
I originally asked this on /r/AskHistorians, but perhaps this is a more logical place.
How mutually intelligible were English and German before the Great Vowel Shift? Given that prior to the GVS English still had the consonant /x/ in the digraph <gh> as in "light" it would have been pronounced much closer to the even the modern German "Licht" pronounced /lΙͺΓ§t/ and "knight" would have been pronounced /knΙxt/ being much closer to the German word for servant "knecht" pronounced /knΙΓ§t/. This leads me to believe that there would also be far more cognates between the two at the time which may possibly result in somewhat conversational mutual intelligibility.
How true is this thought? To what degree did the changes that took place to both vowels and consonants during the GVS degrade the mutual intelligibility of English and German prior to the Great vowel shift, and what was the magnitude of intelligibility between Middle English and the corresponding German ancestor the time?
How similar were the vocabularies and grammar of the languages before GVS? Did German undergo an similar shift at any time?
