The invention that ruined English writing
Because it came 25 years too early
Picture yourself in London around the year 1400, during the reign of King Henry IV. As you walk through the streets, trying to distract yourself from the smell, you hear merchants hawking their wares and children playing. Curious, you start to eavesdrop on some of the conversations happening around you.
As you listen, you find that you can actually follow along — the words you hear sound strange to your modern ears, but they are recognizably English.
Suddenly, a child points behind you and cries out, “Moose! Moose!”
As far as you remember, moose aren’t particularly common in London, even in 1400, but you get out of the way anyway. Then you realize that she was actually pointing to a mouse, which scurries away quickly.
“Mouse” sounds like “moose”? Well, of course.
It is, after all, the year 1400, and although you may not realize it, you've traveled to a time before English underwent its most dramatic transformation: the Great Vowel Shift.
The Rise of Modern English
The Great Vowel Shift, which happened between 1400–1650, was such a radical reshaping of the sounds of the English language that it’s used as one of the main markers of the transition between two of the three main stages in the history of English: Middle and Modern English.
The other big marker is technological — the introduction of the printing press to England in 1476. The timing would be fateful — but more on that later.
This means that Shakespearean English is, in fact, technically Modern English, albeit Early Modern English: William Shakespeare (1564–1616) lived after most of the Great Vowel Shift had occurred, and after books in English could be produced en masse.
Of course, Shakespeare’s English — or Early Modern English — is not identical to the English we speak today — four hundred years of change still separate us. But the changes that have taken place during those four hundred years have been much less dramatic than the ones that happened just before.
Now, when I say that Shakespeare lived after “most of the Great Vowel Shift,” that’s because the Great Vowel Shift wasn’t something that occurred all at once: it’s not as if people woke up one morning and started speaking differently. Instead, it was a slow process, as sound changes tend to be — taking place gradually, as one generation replaces another, until the people who spoke the old way are all gone.
But what exactly was the Great Vowel Shift?
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronunciation of the long vowels of Middle English. You see, Middle English had two kinds of vowel — short vowels, which were pronounced for a comparatively short duration, and long vowels, which were (believe it or not) pronounced longer. Aside from that distinction in duration, there was little to no difference between how the long and the short vowels sounded. Some Middle English words are even distinguished only by the length of the vowel.
By the way, throughout this issue, I will write long vowels with a line (called a macron) on top like this — ā ē ī ō ū — for clarity. But Middle English writers didn’t have a consistent way of marking vowel length — sometimes they doubled the letter, but often they just wrote long and short vowels in the same way.
Let’s look at an example:
biten — ‘bitten’
bīten — ‘to bite’
Each of these two Middle English words would have been pronounced with a very similar vowel sound — something like the sound in the Modern English word ship or sheep. The precise sound isn’t entirely certain — no tape recorders in those days. (I should probably update that tape recorder reference, since I haven’t seen many tape recorders around these days either.)
You can listen to the difference here:
The main difference between the long and short i was just that the long ī was held for longer than the short i. And so too for the other vowels of Middle English.
And that’s exactly what the Great Vowel Shift changed.
The Mechanics of Change
The shift operated like a linguistic game of musical chairs — although in this version, no one takes away any chairs while the music’s playing.
First, speakers started to pronounce some vowels differently: the vowels ī and ū. (Actually, there are different theories on which vowels started things off. But this is one of the main ones.)
In Middle English, these vowels sounded like the vowels in see and do, respectively: so bīte ‘bite’ sounded like “beet” and abūte ‘about’ sounded like “a boot”.
But the situation in Middle English started to change — gradually.
Middle English ī and ū started to become diphthongs, that is, sounds made with a smooth transition between two different vowel sounds. The Middle English ī turned over time into an “a + i” diphthong in Modern English — think of how we say eye, for example. And the Middle English ū turned into an “a + u” diphthong, the sound we have in modern English cow.
That’s the first round of musical chairs over. So now we have two seats left open — where ī and ū used to be.
Since the “ee” sound that long ī used to have wasn’t in the language anymore, another vowel could easily take its seat and fill that gap. That vowel was the Middle English long ē — which had been pronounced like a long version of a vowel most dialects of English don’t have anymore. If you know Spanish, it’s the vowel in the Spanish word leche — if not, think of a sound halfway between the vowels in bet and bait. Or listen to it here:
So Middle English bēte ‘beet’ sounded a lot more like “bait” in Middle English — but with the Great Vowel Shift, it came to take on its modern pronunciation.
The same thing happened with Middle English long ō, which filled the gap left by ū.
Here’s a handy summary:
MIDDLE ENGLISH => MODERN ENGLISH
ī sounds like “see” => ie/i…e sounds like “pie”
ū sounds like “too” => ou/ow sounds like “cow”
ē sounds like Sp. “leche” => ee sounds like “see”
ō sounds like Sp. “ocho” => oo sounds like “food”
Or, in audio form:
This was the first phase of the Great Vowel Shift, and it all took place between the years 1400 and 1500.
The game of musical chairs was not done yet: More changes would come in a second stage, which would change still other vowels — after all, the change of Middle English ē and ō also left a gap which needed to be filled. But I’ll save that topic for another issue.
By 1650, the game of musical chairs had finally come to an end, and the Modern English vowel system had stabilized — just in time for English to be spread all over the world and develop new dialects. But these “new” dialects of English — including Canadian, American, Australian, New Zealand English, and many more — all grew out of the same basic 1650-era English vowel system, more or less. The differences between them came later.
Living With the Legacy
The Great Vowel Shift also explains many of the peculiarities of modern English spelling. When the first English printing presses began operating in the late 1400s, they helped to standardize English spelling — but the timing could not have been worse.
The introduction of printing crystallized the spelling of the English language just as its pronunciation was changing dramatically. And the spellings we ended up with didn’t tend to take into account the changes that were already underway as of 1476. As a result, English is spelled more or less like it was pronounced in 1400 — English spelling was trapped as if in amber, preserving pronunciations that were already becoming obsolete.
This is why English spelling is so different from the spelling of other European languages. Nowadays, two e’s in a row sound completely different from a single e: why do we spell them both with the same letter? It’s because, before the Great Vowel Shift, they would have sounded pretty similar: between meet (Middle English mēten) and met (same in Middle English), the main difference was that one was just longer than the other.
And, as it happens, that’s why words like meet and food are spelled with doubled vowels in the middle — as I mentioned earlier, doubling a vowel letter is one way that Middle English signalled that a vowel was long.
If only the first printing presses had been delayed by a generation, English spelling would likely look completely different — and a lot more sensible.
But knowing about the Great Vowel Shift at least brings some sense to the madness. And, if nothing else, it gives you an easy way to tell roughly what century you’ve stepped out of the time machine into.
We have an early American book of nursery rhymes. The only way to make some of them rhyme is to speak like a Scottish pirate.
I enjoyed the article so much, I would like to leave you with a (sophomoric) joke. My linguistics instructor referred to this phenomenon as the Great Vowel Movement. Sorry, not sorry.