The Great Vowel Shift, or, Why English Spelling Makes No Sense

The Great Vowel Shift, or, Why English Spelling Makes No Sense

Why does the English language have such weird spelling? Well, there was a time, around 600 years ago, when the spelling made a lot more sense than it does now. One main reason that this is no longer the case is the Great Vowel Shift. This was a major change in the way English vowels work, and it started in about 1400. There are various competing theories as to why this happened, some of which are based on population migrations following the Black Death.

The diagram shows how English vowel sounds have moved around in the last 600 years. English has a rather complicated vowel system compared to, say, the five-vowel system of Spanish. The vowel system of Spanish has not changed very much in the last 600 years, but the relatively large number of distinct vowels in English means that as soon as one of the vowels starts to be pronounced slightly differently, there is a good chance that it will displace a nearby vowel and set a cascade of changes in motion. This is a main reason that if one compares two different dialects of English, one of the main differences between them is the vowel sounds.

A good example of the shift involves the words see and time. In 1400, the vowel in the word see was pronounced like a double E in modern German - that is, something like the first part of the vowel sound in the modern English word hay - and the vowel in the word time was pronounced like the vowel in the modern English word team. (If you had said “there is no i in team” in 1400, you would have been wrong!) However, by 1500, the vowel in the word see had shifted to its modern pronunciation, which caused the vowel in the word time to change into a diphthong: two different vowel sounds that glide into each other.

The full range of shifts is somewhat complicated, and is shown in the attached diagram from Wikipedia. In some cases, vowels failed to be displaced and simply merged together, like the vowels in the words meet and meat. Until about 1600, it made sense to spell meet and meat differently, even though they are now pronounced in the same way.

Some words in English failed to shift, for no obvious reason. A good example involves the words broad and road, where broad retained its original vowel sound, and road shifted to its modern value. In Shakespeare's time, these words rhymed, as they still do in a few dialects of English, including some spoken in Yorkshire.

Another vowel that shifted is the vowel in the word mouse, which in 1400 was pronounced something like the modern English word moose. This vowel changed into a diphthong after being displaced by the vowel in the word moon, and gradually changed into its modern form. Other western Germanic languages, such as German and Dutch, experienced a similar vowel shift in their words for “mouse” and “house”. However, the vowel did not shift in northern Germanic languages like Norwegian, Swedish and Danish, in which the modern forms of these words are still mus and hus. The original vowels in these words are also preserved in Scots, a Germanic language similar to English which is spoken in Scotland.

The Great Vowel Shift was a slow process, and it was not the case, for example, that the word ale displaced the word eel overnight. Despite this, I would like to end by quoting from “Dates in the Month of May that are of interest to linguists”, by Jim McCawley.

May 5, 1403: The Great English Vowel Shift begins. Giles of Tottenham calls for ale at his favorite pub and is perplexed when the barmaid tells him that the fishmonger is next door.

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