Languages & Linguistics
Great Vowel Shift
The Great Vowel Shift was a major sound change in the English language that occurred between the 14th and 18th centuries. It involved a systematic change in the pronunciation of long vowels, resulting in a shift in the vowel sounds of words. This shift played a significant role in shaping the modern English language and contributed to the differences between Middle English and Early Modern English.
Written by Perlego with AI-assistance
Related key terms
1 of 5
10 Key excerpts on "Great Vowel Shift"
- Viola Giulia Miglio(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
Lack of alternations brings about a demotion of the markedness constraint. The offending constraint will be lower, but the ranking of faithfulness constraints will remain undefined. This state seems to defeat an attempt at predicting the directionality of sound change.5.3 The Great Vowel Shift (GVS)The Southern English GVS consisted in a series of changes in vowel quality that affected long vowels during the Middle English period and manifested itself as a stepwise vowel raising. It is not easy to establish the exact period when the change took place, although the 15th century has been suggested as the beginning of the change, and the late 16th or early 17th century as its end.Vowels were affected as follows (chart from O’Grady at al 1997:304, the transcription is adapted to the methods used in this book):Table X – Modern reflexes of the changes called the Great Vowel Shift Middle English “Great Vowel Shift” Modern English [ti:d] [i:]>[ai] /taid/ ‘tide’ [lu:d] [u:] > [au] /laud/ ioud’ [ge:s] [e:]>[i:] /gis/ ‘geese’ [sε:] [ε:]>[i:] /si/ ‘sea’ [go:s] [o:]>[u:] /gus/ ‘goose’ [bro:kə n][o:]>[o:] /brokə n/ ‘broken[na:mə ][a:]>[ε:] /neim/ ‘name’3What we see in this chart are the modern result of the series of changes in vowel quality that have been ascribed to the GVS. Although establishing the GVS as a unitary change is debatable, since interpretation of the data is often controversial, our purpose is here to determine whether there can be one grammar modelling all these changes.
eBook - ePub- Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel Brinton(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Manfred KrugChapter 14:The Great Vowel Shift
Manfred Krug: Bamberg (Germany)1Introduction 2Why “Great Vowel Shift”? 3On the history of Great Vowel Shift theories 4Motivating the Great Vowel Shift and avenues for further research 5ReferencesAbstract: The long-vowel inventories of all modern English accents and dialects differ substantially from the pronunciations that existed around 1400. Most of the relevant changes have been described as being interlinked and part of the so-called “Great Vowel Shift” (GVS), but consensus in the pertinent scholarship is limited. This chapter pursues a discussion of the history of GVS theories, the major issues and arguments. It is seen that some long-standing tenets and theories have a weak foundation and that the GVS is well known only in the sense that it is widely known. Despite a vast literature, many aspects of the changes are still poorly understood and, probably because of the vast literature, most aspects are controversial. Some of the controversies, however, turn out to be definitional rather than factual in nature. In this context, this chapter provides the likely paths of development from Middle to Modern English(es).1Introduction
A handbook article on what has occasionally been called the “watershed” of the history of English phonology must aim at broad coverage and focus on what is common ground. The problem for a chapter on what is traditionally labelled the “Great Vowel Shift” is that few things have remained undisputed in the literature, for this is probably the most-written-about development in the history of the English language. A focus on common ground is thus virtually impossible, as is an exhaustive treatment. And although some of the recent literature seems to converge on the position that only the changes which affected the Middle English (hereafter ME) phonemes/iː/,/uː/,/eː/, and/oː/ are interrelated, and thus part of a shift (a shift which would then not be so great after all and perhaps not merit capitalization and a definite article), this position may turn out to be ephemeral. For the sake of completeness and to give due attention to older accounts, this chapter will discuss all long vowels and thus include also the developments of the lower half of the vowel space, i.e. the developments that affected ME/ɛː/,/ɔː/, and/aː/. The discussion will start with the uncontroversial, proceed to majority views, and conclude with a treatment of conflicting theories.
- Timothy E. Moore(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Academic Press(Publisher)
ON THE STATUS OF VOWEL SHIFT IN ENGLISH BREYNE ARLENE MOSKOWITZ University of California, Los Angeles. INTRODUCTION Language is a function of the human brain. A description of language ought to reflect that function. It is assumed at the outset of this chapter that any linguistic theory is required to be sensitive to a large range of evidence— from the millennia of language change to the minutiae of language acquisi-tion—bearing on the facts which are to be described. It is also noted that this requirement is met in many covert ways by the theory of English phonology which will be under discussion: that proposed by Chomsky and Halle (1968) in their important and elegant contribution to phonological theory, The Sound Pattern of English (SPE). 1 It is further assumed, in accordance with scientific tradition, that a theory must not only be testable, it must also be tested. THE Great Vowel Shift The Great Vowel Shift (GVS) which occurred several centuries ago sub-stantially changed the qualities of long, tense vowels in English. The particu-1 Whether or not psychological reality is a concept to which the authors of SPE have committed themselves has been a subject of considerable discussion. Without reiterating endlessly the arguments, I will cite only the notion that each morpheme has only one under-lying form in the speaker's mental lexicon as evidence of that commitment. 224 B reyne Ar lene Moskowitz DIAGRAM 1. The Great Vowel Shift. lar changes which occurred have been outlined by Jespersen as in Diagram 1. The shift was quite general, affecting a massive portion of the native vocabu-lary. Diachronie accounts list hundreds of Germanic words whose unique pronunciations changed over the course of the GVS. Some typical examples offered by Jespersen are given in Table 1.
eBook - PDF- Ralph W. Fasold, Jeff Connor-Linton(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
unconditioned sound change, consider the series of changes known as the Great Vowel Shift in which the long vowels of Middle English were unconditionally but systematically raised in Early Modern English. The following examples are taken from Middle English (Chaucer 1340 – 1400), Early Modern English (Shakespeare 1564 – 1616), and Modern English. As Table 8.3 and Figure 8.1 show, the low-central vowel /a:/ and the low front vowel /æ:/ raised and then merged to /e:/, and the mid-front vowel /e:/ raised to /i:/. The low back vowel / ɔ :/ raised to /o:/, and Middle English /o:/ shifted up to /u:/. Since Middle English /i:/ and /u:/ were already high, they changed into the diphthongs /ay/ and /aw/, respectively. What caused this wholesale shift in the English vowel system is still debated, but it may have been motivated by a need for greater ease of articulation and discrimin-ation among the vowels. Every language tends to maximize the discriminability of its sounds, in order to minimize ambiguities of meaning. English before the Great Vowel Shift had a relatively large number of vowels, which seems to have led to “ overcrowding ” of the available phonological “ space. ” Such overcrowding creates ambiguities of meaning ...................................................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................................................... ...................................................................................................................................................................................... ......................................................................................................................................................................................
eBook - PDF- Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr, Irmengard Rauch, Gerald F. Carr(Authors)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
[The reflection of the Great Vowel Shift in modern English dialects.] Avtoreferat kandidatskoj dissertacii. [An abstract of the Candidate of Philological Sci-ences Dissertation.] Leningrad: Leningradskij universitet. Moulton, William G. 1965 Die schweizerdeutsche Hiatusdiphthongierung in phonologischer Sicht, in: Werner Kohlschmidt-Paul Zinsli (eds.), 115-129. Panzer, Baldur-Wolf Thiimmel 1971 Die Einteilung der niederdeutschen Mundarten auf Grund der strukturellen Entwicklung des Vokalismus. (Linguistische Reihe 7.) München: Hueber. Penzl, Herbert 1974 Zur Entstehung der frühneuhochdeutschen Diphthongierung, in: Werner Besch et al. (eds.), 345-357. Plotkin, V. Ia. 1959 O pricinax sdviga glasnyx ν anglijskom jazyke [On the causes of the Great Vowel Shift in English], Ucenye zapiski Karel'skogo Pedagogiceskogo Insti-tuta 9: 95-104. 1967 Dinamika anglijskoj fonologiceskoj sistemy. Novosibirsk: Zapadno-Sibirskoe kniznoe izdatel'stvo. [1972] The dynamics of the English phonological system. (Janua Linguarum, Series Practica 155.) The Hague: Mouton.] 1976 Ocerk diaxroniceskoj fonologii anglijskogo jazyka. [An Outline of English his-torical phonology.] Moscow: Vyssaja skola. Prins, A. A. 1940 The Great Vowel Shift. (Eerste College, gegeven op 1 October 1940.) Gro-ningen-Batavia: Noordhoff. 1940-1941 Frontal tendency en phonologisch herstel, Onze taaltuin 9: 269-273. 1942a The Great Vowel Shift reconsidered, English Studies 23: 161-168. 1942b A new early example of the Great Vowel Shift, Neophilologus, 27: 134-137. Rauch, Irmengard 1967 The Old High German diphthongization. A description of a phonemic change. The Hague-Paris: Mouton. Rauch, Irmengard-Gerald F. C a r r - Robert L. Kyes 1992 On Germanic linguistics. Issues and methods. (Studies and Monographs 68.) Berlin—New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Ringgaard, K.-Viggo Sorensen (eds.) 1983 The Nordic languages and modern linguistics 5.
eBook - PDF- Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton, Alexander Bergs, Laurel J. Brinton(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Vol. I Sounds and Spellings . London: Allen and Unwin. Johnston, Paul A. 1992. English vowel shifting: One Great Vowel Shift or two small vowel shifts? Diachronica 9: 189–226. Johnston, Paul A. 1997. Older Scots phonology and its regional variation. In: Charles Jones (ed.), The Edinburgh History of the Scots Language , 47–111. Edinburgh: Edinburgh Univer-sity Press. Jones, Daniel. 1909. The Pronunciation of English . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kemenade, Ans van and Bettelou Los (eds.). 2006. The Handbook of the History of English . Oxford: Blackwell. Kretzschmar, William A., Jr., and Susan Tamasi. 2003. Distributional foundations for a theory of language change. World Englishes 22: 377–401. Knappe, Gabriele. 1997. Though it is tough : On regional differences in the development and sub-stitution of the Middle English voiceless velar fricative [x] in syllable coda position. (Special issue on Language in Time and Space: Studies in Honour of Wolfgang Viereck on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. by Heinrich Ramisch and Kenneth Wynne.) Zeitschrift fu ¨r Dialekto-logie und Linguistik 97: 139–163. Krug, Manfred. 2003a. (Great) vowel shifts present and past: Meeting ground for structural and natural phonologists. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics (Selected papers from NWAVE 31 at Stanford) 9(2): 107–122. Krug, Manfred. 2003b. Frequency as a determinant in grammatical variation and change. In: Gu ¨ n-ter Rohdenburg and Britta Mondorf (eds.), Determinants of Grammatical Variation in English , 7–67. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Krug, Manfred and Valentin Werner. 2009. Dobson revisited: Long vowel variation and the Great Vowel Shift. Ms. Bamberg. Labov, William. 1994. Principles of Linguistic Change. I: Internal Factors . Oxford: Blackwell. 774 V Early Modern English Labov, William. 2001. Principles of Linguistic Change. II: Social Factors . Oxford: Blackwell. Ladefoged, Peter and Ian Maddieson.
eBook - PDF- Donka Minkova(Author)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
10 Starting with Karl Luick (1898) and Otto Jespersen (1909), the changes in Figure 8.4 have been treated as a unified set of phonological events, where each new value is supposed to be the result and the trigger of a chain-like reaction affecting all ME long vowels. The position is well represented by Jespersen’s summary statement: The great vowel-shift consists in a general raising of all long vowels with the exception of the two high vowels /i / and /u /, 11 which could not be raised further without becoming consonants and which were diphthongized into . . . [ai, au]. (Jespersen 1909: 231) The structural connectedness among the changes is represented in the often-cited chart in Figure 8.5 from Jespersen (1909: 232), where < > marks vowel length: All ME long vowels: the ones that were long in OE, the ones that acquired length through homorganic cluster lengthening (see 6.4) or open-syllable lengthening (see 7.5.2.1), participate in the raising and diphthongisation shown in Figure 8.5. This all-encompassing, chain-shift view of the GVS dominated the scholarship throughout the early parts of the twentieth century. Hypotheses addressing the initiation, causation 10 Placing ‘Great’ in scare quotes is now common in the literature. For the myth of ‘greatness’ and the history of its debunking see Watts (2003, 2011). Stenbrenden (2010) avoids ‘Great’ in the title of her extensive research project on the shift, and keeps ref-erences to the ‘Great’ vowel shift in scare quotes – a practice adopted here. 11 Jespersen uses the pre-IPA symbol [ ] (= IPA [ ]) for length. ai i u au e o a ε ɔ Figure 8.5 Directionality of the Great Vowel Shift according to Jespersen (1909: 232) 252 A HISTORICAL PHONOLOGY OF ENGLISH and propagation of the putative massive chain shift have been proposed in terms of numerous phonological theories, including structuralism, generative phonology, lexical phonology, dependency phonology, parti-cle phonology, lexical diffusion and optimality theory.
eBook - PDF- Edgar C. Polomé(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
1967 On the interpretation of occasional spellings, Publication of the Amer-ican Dialect Society 48: 33 — 50. University of Alabama Press. Stockwell, Robert P. 1972 Problems in the interpretation of the Great Vowel Shift, in: M. Estelle Smith (ed.), 344-362. 1978 Perseverance in the English Vowel Shift, in: Jacek Fisiak (ed.), 337 - 348. Toon, Thomas E. 1983 The politics of Early Old English sound change. New York: Academic Press. Väänänen, Veikko 1966 Le latin vulgaire des inscriptions pompeiennes. Berlin: Academie Verlag. 1981 Introduction au latin vulgaire. (3rd ed.). Paris: Editions Klincksieck. Van Deyck, Rika —Romana Zwaenepoel 1974 Fra^ois Villon, Oeuvres. (Vol. II). Saint-Aquilin-de-Pacy (Eure): Librairie-Editions Mallier. Wilhelm, Gemot 1983 Reconstructing the phonology of dead languages, in: Florian Coul-mas —Konrad Ehlich (eds.), 157 — 166. Wolfe, Patricia M. 1972 Linguistic Change and the Great Vowel Shift in English. Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press. Wright, Roger 1976 Speaking, reading, and writing late Latin and early Romance, Neophil-ologus 60, No. 2: 178-189.
eBook - PDF- Dieter Kastovsky(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Vocalisation of post-vocalic r — an Early Modern English sound change? Angelika Lutz The most far-reaching change of the system of long vowels after the Great Vowel Shift was caused by a development termed r-Wirkungen by Luick and others. The final results of this change may be summarised as follows:' (1) a. Short vowels + /r/ developed into long monophthongs: V + r > V, namely Standard English /a:/, /3:/, /o:/; cf. Modern Standard English hard, star ( < ME sterre); bird, turn, herd; corn. b. Most long vowels + jrj developed into centring diphthongs, some of which have since been monophthongised: V + r > Vv, namely Standard English /ia/, /sa/, /(J)os ~ (j)o: /, /oa ~ o:/; cf. Modern Standard English steer, fear; bare, hair, bear; cure, poor; lore. This change resulted in a considerable extension of the system of complex vowel phonemes: the centring diphthongs /ia/, /ea/, /ua/ (and /oa/) and the central long monophthong /3./ derive exclusively from vocalisation of post-vocalic r and its fusion with the preceding vowel, the long back monophthongs /a:/ and /o:/ partly so (cf. Gimson 1989: 82 — 83, 92 — 146). The South-Eastern varieties of English including Standard English had almost reached this stage by the end of the Early Modern English period (cf. Horn —Lehnert 1954: 913 —921); in this sense the classification of the change in the handbooks as basically an Early Modern English devel-opment may be considered correct. The handbooks have described this sound change in great detail, but their treatment of the change is biased. By this I mean the classification of phonological changes as vocalic or consonantal developments mainly from the point of view of whether the speech sound resulting from the change was a vowel or a consonant and not depending on whether the speech sound affected by the change was a vowel or a consonant. Thus,
eBook - PDFThe Pronunciation of English
A Course Book
- Charles W. Kreidler(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- Wiley-Blackwell(Publisher)
258 Phonological Processes and the Lexicon accomplished by suffixation. In the above examples of vowel change, the replacement of one vowel by another performs some kind of function. Sometimes, however, vowel change accompanies suffixation, as in depth from deep and slept from sleep , or change of suffix, as in ferocious and ferocity . Consider the vowels alternating in these pairs of words: l wise, wisdom 4 profound, profundity 2 extreme, extremity 5 goose, gosling 3 volcano, volcanic 6 provoke, provocative In each pair of words there is an alternation of two stressed vowels, one free and the other checked. The two vowels in each set are quite far apart in Modern English, but our school tradition refers to the two vowels in set l as ‘long I’ and ‘short I’; the ones in set 2 as ‘long E’ and ‘short E’; those in set 3 as ‘long and short A,’ respectively; and those of set 6 as, respectively, ‘long and short O.’ Our school tradition has no name for the pairs illustrated in sets 4 and 5; that is partly due to the fact that these alternations are not as common as the other four. The vowels of each set are quite far apart in the pronunciation of our day, but in the early fourteenth century they were much closer. In each pair the two vowels were phonetically identical except that one was long (and/or tense) and the other was short (and/or lax). Then all the long vowels changed (the so-called Great Vowel Shift). Some of the short vowels changed a little, and others not at all. The consequence of these changes is that what were origin-ally similar vowels in related words have become far apart, as the six pairs of examples above illustrate. To explain the relationships that exist in Modern English we use underlying forms which contain a choice pair of vowels, one free and one checked.
Index pages curate the most relevant extracts from our library of academic textbooks. They’ve been created using an in-house natural language model (NLM), each adding context and meaning to key research topics.
