Episode 143: The Great Vowel Shift (Part 3)

Welcome to the History of English Podcast, a podcast about the history of the English language.

This is episode 143, The Great Vowel Shift, Part 3.

In this episode, we're going to conclude our look at the Great Vowel Shift.

We'll do that by focusing our attention on the vowels pronounced in the back part of the mouth.

The vowel changes that we know today as the great vowel shift affected all of the long vowel sounds, including the back vowels.

Those vowels also experienced a chain shift, whereby a series of vowel sounds moved in unison.

Those changes caused many words to be pronounced in new ways, but the spellings tended to stay the same.

As a result, this process contributed to the modern disconnect between the way words are pronounced and the way they're spelled.

So, this time we'll explore the impact of the great vowel shift on the vowels pronounced in the back part of the mouth, and we'll see how those changes shaped the way many words are spelled today.

But before we begin, let me remind you that the website for the podcast is historyofenglishpodcast.com, and you can sign up to support the podcast and get bonus episodes and transcripts at patreon.com/slash historyofenglish.

Now let's turn our attention to the vowels pronounced in the back part of the mouth.

As we've seen before, the various vowel sounds are produced by slightly altering the way the tongue is shaped in the open cavity of the mouth when we speak.

Those various shapes are what linguists use to distinguish the different vowel sounds, and sometimes to group those sounds together.

One way that linguists distinguish vowel sounds is to differentiate between those produced in the front of the mouth, the so-called front vowels, and those produced in the back part of the mouth, the so-called back vowels.

A few episodes back, I gave you a mnemonic to help you keep track of where those vowel sounds are pronounced in the mouth.

The order followed a circular motion, beginning with the highest front vowel, then working its way downward to the bottom part of the mouth, and then working its way back upward in the back part of the mouth.

That mnemonic was Eat Aged Eggs Ollie's awesome old uber.

The first sound in each of those words represents each of the major long vowel sounds used in English in the order I just described.

Over the prior two episodes, we focused on those first few vowels, the front vowels.

Now we're going to focus on the last few vowels in that mnemonic, those pronounced in the back part of the mouth.

Those are the sounds represented by the phrase Ollie's awesome old uber

aw oo.

If you pronounce those four sounds in that order, you'll feel the movement from a in the lower part of the mouth up to u in the highest back part of the mouth.

During the great vowel shift, those four vowel sounds in the back of the mouth were raised in a way that mirrored what happened in the front part of the mouth.

Now, as I've noted before, there's no universal agreement about the order in which the vowels shifted around, either in the front or the back of the mouth.

Many linguists think the highest vowel sounds moved out of the way first, and that allowed the vowel sounds underneath to move up and fill the gaps left behind.

That's the view I presented in the prior episodes, and since the back vowels moved in a parallel manner, that's the view I'll present here as well.

As we go through these changes, there are really three major developments to keep track of.

The shift of the high O sound, the shift of the slightly lower O sound, and the shift of the lowest A and A sounds.

So, just like last time, I'm going to divide this episode into three parts, and we'll deal with each of those developments separately.

We'll begin with the changes that affected the highest long vowel sound produced in the back part of the mouth, the

sound.

As we've explored the great vowel shift, there's been one recurring theme, the raising of the various vowel sounds over time.

Generally speaking, the vowel sounds pronounced in the front and back of the mouth were raised one step during the 1400s and 1500s, and some of them were raised another step in the following centuries.

That's why the changes in the front and back of the mouth were parallel developments rather than a larger circular movement involving all of the vowels.

And I think that's a common misunderstanding about the great vowel shift, and it may be where the analogy to a game of musical chairs creates some confusion.

Some people mistakenly think that all of the vowel sounds in the mouth shifted around together in a clockwise or counterclockwise motion.

So as the front vowels moved up, the back vowels must have moved down to fill the gaps as part of a larger circular motion.

But again, that's not what happened.

There were actually two separate but parallel movements.

The front vowels moved up in a chain shift, and the back vowels also moved up in a separate chain shift.

Even though they were distinct from each other, the two sets of changes were very similar, since they happened in basically the same order at roughly the same time, and that's why they are thought to be part of the same larger process that affected all of the long vowels.

When we looked at the changes that affected the front vowels, we saw that the highest front vowel apparently moved first, and the same thing happened in the back of the mouth.

Again, there isn't isn't universal agreement about that, but there is a lot of evidence to support that view.

That highest front vowel was pronounced e,

and you can't really make a higher vowel sound in the front of the mouth, so it couldn't shift up any higher.

Instead, that sound fundamentally changed.

It became a diphthong.

What happened is that it started to acquire a slight uh sound at the front.

So instead of e,

people started to say ai.

That

sound is the sound known as schwa, and it's pronounced in the central part of the mouth.

So this change really represented a movement of the vowel sound from the top front part of the mouth to the central part of the mouth.

This change happened very early on in the 1400s, if not before.

Then over time, that initial sound shifted even lower in the mouth from a to a.

So the vowel shifted from I to I,

and that gave us our modern I sound.

Well, the exact same thing happened to the high U sound in the back of the mouth.

Again, it was a parallel development.

So at the same time that the highest front vowel acquired a slight sound at the front, the highest back vowel also acquired the same sound at the front.

And when that diphthong was lowered in the front, the same thing happened in the back.

So let me illustrate that change for you.

Again, that highest back vowel is the

sound.

In the 1400s, if not earlier, the

sound started to be pronounced with that same

sound at the front.

So it shifted from

to,

or

when pronounced

So words that had previously been pronounced with the u sound in Middle English started to be pronounced with an o sound in early modern English, around the time of Shakespeare.

But again, just like with the front vowel, there was an additional change a couple of centuries later.

That initial sound in the diphthong dropped even lower.

It went from a to a.

So the diphthong shifted from o

to o

or

when pronounced quickly.

So again, the evolution of this highest back vowel over time was u

to o

to au.

And this development is almost identical to what happened with the highest front vowel.

The sound went from a high pure vowel to a centralized diphthong to a lower diphthong.

This type of parallel development is what allowed early linguists like Otto Jesperson to conclude that the changes to the front and back vowels were part of the same general process that impacted all of the long vowel sounds.

When all of the pieces were put together, it became apparent that all of these seemingly independent vowel changes were actually part of a larger connected process, and that's why Jesperson called all of these various changes the great vowel shift.

One of the interesting things about the evolution of this

sound over time is the way it impacted English spelling.

So let's consider how this sound was traditionally spelled before the Great Vowel Shift.

This

sound is considered a long sound of the letter U today,

and traditionally the letter U was used to represent that sound.

In Old English, the word house was hoose, spelled H U S,

and the word mouse was moose,

spelled M U S.

Those pronunciations continued into the Middle English period, before the Great Vowel Shift took place.

Sir Geoffrey Chaucer would have pronounced those words the same way with that same u vowel sound.

But the spelling of those words had started to change by that time.

Instead of spelling that sound with the traditional letter u, many writers were spelling it a new way, with the letter combination OU.

So in the Canterbury Tales we find the word house spelled H O U S

and the word mouse spelled M O U S.

There was no E at the end like today, but otherwise those words had acquired much of their modern spelling by that time.

So where did that OU spelling come from?

Well it actually came from French.

French often spelled the O sound with the letters OU, and it still does that to day.

Think about the French word v,

which means you.

It's spelled v ou s.

And the French word nu means we.

It's spelled n-o-u-s.

As we know, Middle English scribes were heavily influenced by French, so they adopted that French spelling as well.

But why did they borrow that spelling, and why did French use that spelling in the first place?

Well, the answer to those questions has to do with certain problems associated with the letter U in the Middle Ages.

I've actually touched on some of these issues in prior episodes.

First of all, in the common handwriting script of the Middle Ages, letters were written in a flowing style where one letter flowed into the next, much like modern cursive writing.

That created a problem for certain letters, like the letter U.

That letter tended to get lost in that handwriting style, and it made the words difficult to read.

The letter U consisted of two up-and-down strokes.

But when the letter U appeared beside an I,

or another U, or a W,

or an M, or N, or L,

what you ended up with was a series of up-and-down strokes, and it was difficult to determine where one letter ended and another letter began.

So in those situations, scribes looked for ways to make the letter U stand out.

But that wasn't the only problem associated with letter U.

Another problem was the fact that the letters U, V, and W had not become distinct letters yet.

The same symbol was used to represent all of the sounds we associate with those letters today, and that tended to create further confusion.

Another related problem has to do with the way scribes often indicated a long vowel sound.

They would simply double the vowel letter, like the way we often double the letter E for the E sound today.

But you couldn't really do that with a U because some scribes were already using a double U to represent the W sound.

And of course, that spelling eventually gave us the distinct letter that we call W

today.

So a literal double U, U,

only created more confusion.

It wasn't clear if it represented the long U sound or the W sound.

These problems affected scribes throughout Western Europe, not just in England.

Most all of them were using similar scripts, and they all struggled with the best way to represent this sound in a way that was clear and not confusing.

French scribes eventually came up with a solution.

They just adopted the spelling ou for that sound.

English scribes then adopted that same practice from French.

So by the time of late Middle English, we have words like hus and moose being spelled with an ou rather than their more traditional single letter u.

But then, in the 1400s, if not before, the u sound started to shift as part of the great vowel shift.

As I described earlier, it became a diphthong, pronounced as o.

So hus became hose,

and moose became mouse.

And then a couple of centuries after that, the vowel shifted again.

The sound shifted from o to ow.

Thus house became house, and mouse became mouse.

Those words also acquired a silent e at the end when they were spelled, and that gave us the modern spelling of house and mouse.

Other words also experienced that same evolution, like mouth, spouse, south, thou, pound, bound, foul, out, and so on.

Sometimes, scribes modified that spelling from OU to OW.

Again, the U, V, and W were still somewhat interchangeable, interchangeable, and the OU spelling may have been confused in certain situations with OV,

so it may have looked like it was representing the of sound.

At any rate, in some words, the OU was replaced with OW,

and we see that spelling in words like cow, how,

now,

brown, down,

and the American spelling of plow, P-L-O-W.

Now, I should note that that there are quite a few words in modern standard English where the letter combination ou is still used for its original

sound.

That includes words like through,

wound, youth, group, soup, and so on.

So, what's the deal with those words?

Why aren't they pronounced with the owl sound, like those other words?

Why do we say youth and not youth, and soup and not salp?

Well, there are actually two different answers to that question.

First, some of those words with the sound were borrowed from French after the Great Vowel Shift.

So they came into English with their French O sound and their French OU spelling, and neither the sound nor the spelling changed within English because the Great Vowel Shift was already over by that point.

That's what happened with words like group, soup, acoustic, souvenir, and bouquet.

And that's why they're still pronounced with their original ooh sound.

And I can add another interesting word to that list, the word mousse, M O U S S E.

Again, it's a French loan word for a type of creamy dessert, or a similar type of creamy substance, like hair mousse.

It was borrowed in the 1800s, so it came into English well after the Great Vowel Shift.

But notice that Old English also had a word pronounced moose, spelled mus.

It was the word for a small rodent.

And as we saw, that Old English word for a rodent acquired its OU spelling in Middle English.

Then the vowel shifted from moose to mouse during the Great Vowel Shift, and then it shifted again from mous to mouse in the 1600s and 1700s.

So when we compare Old English mouse to French moose, we can see and hear how the Great Vowel Shift affected the former, but not the latter.

So we still have the OU spelling for the O sound in words borrowed from French after the Great Vowel Shift.

But there's also another group of words where we still use that OU spelling for the O sound.

And those words are native English words.

They just happen to be words where the vowel sound was stubborn.

The vowel never shifted in those words during the Great Vowel Shift.

That includes words like through,

wound, and youth.

So we have a few native words, as well as a handful of loan words, where the

sound is still spelled ou, the same as it was during the time of Chaucer.

I should also note that there are a few other words where the pronunciation varies, where some people pronounce the word with the older vowel sound and some people use the modern vowel sound.

For example, think about the pronunciation of the word spelled R-O-U-T-E.

Some people use the original pronunciation, root,

and some people use the newer pronunciation altered by the great vowel shift, rout.

As recently as the 1700s, both pronunciations were common in Britain and North America.

But in the 1800s, the pronunciation as rout largely fell out of use in Britain.

So in Britain, root has fallen in line with words like through, wound, and youth, where the original vowel sound has been retained.

So that's a case where the vowel started to shift to ow, but then it was pulled back to u.

But in the US, both pronunciations of that word can be found today.

So in American English, the vowel in that word has partially shifted, but it remains in a bit of flux.

I should also mention the pronunciation of the name spelled H-O-U-S-T-O-N.

For the city in Texas, it's pronounced Houston.

For the street in New York City, it's pronounced Houston.

The city and the street are actually named after two different people who pronounced their last names differently, and that's why the city and the street have different pronunciations today.

But the difference in the pronunciation of those surnames was caused by this vowel shift that began in the 1400s and 1500s.

Now, this vowel sound not only varies in a handful of words, it also varies from region to region.

And this particular vowel shift explains some very common differences among regional accents.

Again, the traditional view of this vowel shift is that it shifted twice, from u to o

and then from O to O.

But it's important to note that those changes took place in southern Britain and then were extended to the early American colonies.

So that ow sound is part of the standard forms of English spoken in England and the US.

But in some places outside of southern Britain, the vowel didn't evolve the same way.

In some places, the vowel never shifted at all, and in in other places, the vowel experienced the first shift, but not the second shift.

So in those places, the vowel is still pronounced as oo or o.

And before we move on to the next section, let me illustrate some of these regional variations because it helps to explain why English speakers pronounce many of these words differently.

As I've noted before, the impact of the Great Vowel Shift was much more limited in the north of England and in Scotland.

So even to this day, you're much more likely to find words pronounced with their original or older vowel sounds in those regions.

And in some of those places, speakers still pronounce words like house and mouse with their original Old English vowels, as hoose and moose.

Now, over the past few years, I've invited listeners to leave a voice sample at the website for the podcast, and I've provided some sample sentences there to try to pick up on some of these regional variations.

One of the sentences I provided was: the mouse moved about the house.

He snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

That sentence includes this particular vowel sound in words like mouse, house, around,

and outside.

So here's a dialect sample from Malcolm, who's from the Newcastle region in the far north of England.

You'll notice that he pronounces these words with their original ooh sound.

The moose moved about the hoose.

He snooked dooon the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

Now let's move a little further northward into Scotland, and let's listen to a sample from Callum.

You'll notice that his accent shows the effects of the early stages of the great vowel shift.

He pronounces those words with the O sound, which emerged in early modern English, but he also points out that other speakers in Scotland use the older pronunciation.

The mouse moved about the house, he snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the tubble closet.

Now, when I say that one, I don't pronounce

well, I think I pronounce the words fairly normally.

There's other Scottish people I know that will be a lot stronger, so they won't say mouse, they say moose,

and then house is hoose,

Around is around,

outside is outside.

So they would be like

the moose moved about the hoose, he snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

But I don't you really go that far when I with my accent.

That's more of a kinda a Glasgow accent and I'm from Perth in the the cent uh the centre of Scotland.

I'm also younger as well and young people uh don't tend to have the dun for down or tun for town as much as some or the older the older Scots.

Now that O pronunciation is very common throughout Scotland, Northern England, Wales and Ireland.

Remember that this was the vowel sound that emerged during the Great Vowel Shift in the 1400s and 1500s when the sound evolved from oo to o.

So this was the vowel that Shakespeare probably used.

Again, in many of these regions, that early modern English vowel is still used, even though it often exists side by side with the modern owl sound as well.

Some speakers will use one pronunciation, while other speakers will use the other.

Here's a sample from Karen, who's from Wales, and you'll notice that she also uses that early modern English vowel.

The mouse moved about the house, he snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

Now let's move over to Ireland and listen to Nora Ann who uses the same basic pronunciation.

The mouse moved about the house.

He snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

And here's an interesting anecdote from Daniel who's from Northern Ireland.

He talks about teaching English in France and the challenge of teaching in an accent that's considered non-standard.

Notice that Daniel also uses the early modern English vowel sound.

One thing that really got me thinking about how

non-standard my accent is

is that I spent some time teaching English to school children in France.

And a really good way to become self-conscious about how you use your vowels is to model a phrase where your vowels are non-standard in front of a class of 15 to 30 16 17 year olds

and have them repeat your pronunciation back to you.

So listening to the phrase

how are you

be repeated back with an approximation to those

vowel sounds

is

an uncomfortable and funning experience.

Now let's move across the pond, as they say, to North America.

As I noted earlier, the vowel shift from O to OW took place in southern Britain in the 1600s and 1700s, a couple of centuries after the Great Vowel Shift.

And since that included places like London, where standard English emerged, that pronunciation became the accepted standard for many speakers, and it was carried to North America by immigrants in the 1600s and 1700s.

So that owl sound became the accepted norm in North America as well.

And today most Americans pronounce words like house and mouse with that more recent owl sound.

But there is a little pocket of English speakers that still use the older early modern English vowel, the O sound, that was still common when their ancestors arrived in North America in the 1600s.

Those are the speakers who live along the outer banks of North Carolina and into the Tidewater region of Virginia.

I've mentioned the very unique dialect of the Outer Banks before because it's somewhat of an anomaly.

Settlers arrived there in the 1600s, and their descendants remained isolated along the Barrier Islands until the past century or so.

And as a result, their dialect retains a lot of the older vowel sounds, and it doesn't show as much general American influence.

Let me play you a few examples of this dialect.

The first part of this clip comes from a documentary about the dialect that's narrated by Professor Walt Wolfram, who is one of the leading experts on American accents and dialects, and he also happens to be one of my professors from way back.

And I've also added a couple of clips to the end to further illustrate the pronunciation of this O vowel sound in words like sound,

downtown, around, and house.

The dialect on this island is sometimes referred to as Hoy Toiters, which is their pronunciation of high tide.

Hoytoit on the sound side, high tide on the sound side.

In the United States, the Okra Coke broke is probably the only dialect that is not identified as being from America.

You know, the first people who came here from England and Ireland and Scotland just stayed isolated.

I'm from Okra Coke.

I am the 10th generation in my family from Okra Coat.

That goes back to the mid-1600s.

The reason this dialect was perpetuated for a couple of centuries was because the people were very isolated.

They didn't have much contact with people from the mainland.

You take it a ride around the island, you take it a little scud.

I've lived on the outer banks.

Actually, I was born and raised right here in downtown Manny.

The ones, and I said I moved away, I lived outside of Raleigh for a number of years after college, and I always would say roof, and everybody would always make fun of me.

And then house, I always say house funny.

It's up to other people to be it sounds right, but they always say that sounds funny.

Now, as that last speaker noted, the use of that older O vowel sound seems strange to most Americans because it's very rare in American English.

But if we move into some of the northernmost parts of the US, and especially as we move into Canada, we start to find this same pronunciation.

In fact, this is a convenient way for Americans to identify a Canadian accent.

For the most part, a standard American accent and a standard Canadian accent are so similar that it can be difficult to distinguish the two, but this particular vowel sound is a quick giveaway.

It's very common for Canadian speakers to use the older O vowel, and let me give you a couple of examples.

First, we have Margaret, who's from northern Quebec and Ontario.

The mouse moved about the house.

He snuck down the stairs and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

And here's Dave from Alberta.

The mouse moved about the house.

He snuck down the stairs.

and crawled around the outside of the towel closet.

Now this type of pronunciation is sometimes referred to as Canadian raising.

It's a tendency of many Canadian speakers to pronounce diphthongs like owl and I by starting the vowel sound a little bit higher in the mouth, closer to the older pronunciations found in early modern English.

But interestingly, it isn't entirely clear if this particular Canadian pronunciation is a holdover from early modern English or if it's a more recent development.

These features aren't really documented until the mid-1900s.

Some linguists think it represents a more recent vowel shift within Canadian English, while others think it developed from the older pronunciation, which was preserved in certain pockets of Canada and gradually expanded outward over time.

But regardless of the source, it is a prominent feature of Canadian English.

Now, many Americans tend to hear this O sound as an odd diphthong, and they often misrepresent this sound when they repeat it.

It's common to hear Americans mimic a Canadian accent by saying aboot rather than aboot.

So Americans will tend to shift the vowel all the way back to its original oo sound, but again the Canadian vowel is actually somewhere between the Old English vowel and the modern American vowel.

It's closer to the early modern English vowel.

Here's a voice sample from Eric in Edmonton, who discusses this pronunciation and the way it's often perceived by Americans.

One thing that's interesting about Canadian English is the presence of something called Canadian raising and so before

an unvoiced consonant our diphthongs sound different.

So when we say words like ice

or house it tends to come across to those who don't have that as is and whoos

because a diphthong moves more towards the end of the diphthong.

And so that's kind of where the joke about oot and a boot comes from, because in Canadian English we would say out and about,

but what ends up being heard is the ooh sound at the end of those diphthongs.

So I hope you found that interesting.

All of those regional variations stem from the evolution of the high ooh vowel sound in the back of the mouth from the 1400s until today.

I think I've thoroughly covered the evolution of that vowel sound, so let's move on to the next vowel.

As we know, the great vowel shift was a chain shift, so when one vowel sound moved, the vowel sound underneath it moved up and filled the gap that was left behind.

So now let's turn our attention to the vowel sound pronounced one step lower than the ooh sound, and that's the o sound.

Earlier, I mentioned the mnemonic device to help you keep track of the vowel sounds that are pronounced in the back part of the mouth, or more specifically, produced by the placement and movement of the tongue in the back part of the mouth.

The final part of that mnemonic was Ollie's awesome old uber,

which represents the sounds a, a,

o,

u.

So those final two sounds are o and u.

When the u sound became a diphthong and moved in the way I described in the prior section, the o sound moved up and filled the gap that was left behind.

To put it a different way, words that were pronounced with the o sound before the great vowel shift came to be pronounced with the

sound after the Great Vowel Shift.

Middle English food, spoon, loos, and tooth became modern English food, spoon, loose, and tooth.

We still have some lingering evidence of that sound change in a few words.

To a certain extent we can hear it in the difference between tone and tune.

Both words are derived from the same Latin root, tonus.

Those words predate the Great Vowel Shift, and they have a complicated phonetic history, but tone retains much of the original Latin vowel sound, whereas tune shows the effects of the Great Vowel Shift.

Another example is the word gold and the surname gould.

They're ultimately the same word.

The name gould actually began as gold, and again the vowel sound was raised during the great vowel shift from gold to gold.

And believe it or not, the word gold for the expensive metal was also pronounced gould in early modern English.

So Shakespeare would have referred to a goulden ring, not a golden ring.

But the pronunciation of the shiny metal shifted back to gold in the 1700s and 1800s.

That left us with the name gould and the metal gold.

By the way, the name of the city of Rome worked the same way.

The pronunciation shifted from Rome to Rome during the Great Vow Shift, and then in the 1700s and 1800s it shifted back down to Rome.

We know that from surviving documents from the period where people wrote about the pronunciation of words, and we also see evidence of it in Shakespeare's plays.

He lived immediately after the Great Vowel Shift, and he famously used the words Rome

and Room R O M as puns.

In Romeo and Juliet, he included the line, Now is it Rome indeed and room enough, when there is in it but one only man.

Today that line loses some of its meaning, but if we change the pronunciation of the city back to the way he would have pronounced it, the line reads, Now it is room indeed and room enough, when there is in it but one only man.

So Shakespeare was saying, is it really room when there's only room enough for one man?

But the pun gets lost on a modern audience since we've shifted the pronunciation of Rome back to its original pronunciation.

Now so far we've seen and heard how this o sound shifted up to the sound.

Now let's consider how that change impacted English spelling, and specifically how it impacted the way we use the letter O.

We use the letter O for a lot of different sounds today, and the great vowel shift is partially responsible for that.

Traditionally, the long O sound was spelled with the letter O.

That shouldn't come as a surprise because we still consider that to be the long sound of the letter O.

And as I mentioned earlier, scribes often indicated a long vowel sound by doubling the vowel letter.

So it was common for scribes to spell the long O sound with double O's, and those spellings were retained even after the sound was raised from O up to O.

And that's why we still use double O's to spell words like food,

mood, boot,

tooth,

soon,

moon, and so on.

That double O spelling has become a somewhat standard way of representing the oo sound.

But let's think about that double O spelling a bit more.

We also find it in words like look,

book, foot,

good,

cook, and so on.

So what's going on there?

Well, the sound in those words is considered a short vowel sound, specifically the short U sound.

Now, since this is a short vowel sound, the development of this vowel is not really part of the great vowel shift.

Remember that the great vowel shift only affected the long vowel sounds.

But the great vowel shift does help to explain why we use the letter O for this short U sound in words like look, book, and good.

Traditionally, this short U sound was spelled with letter U.

We still find that spelling in many words today, like bush, bull, push, pull, put, full, butcher, and so on.

So, if the letter U was traditionally used for the short U sound, how did the letter O come into the picture?

Well, as I noted a few moments ago, the letter O was used for the long O sound in Middle English, and that sound was raised up to U during the Great Vowel Shift, and that led to the use of the letter O or double O for the O sound in words like food, mood, boot, and so on.

But then that long O vowel sound was shortened in some of those words, from long u

to short u.

And when that happened, the vowel sound in those words crashed into and merged with the existing words which already had that short short U sound.

And that gave us two sets of words with that sound.

One set were the words that traditionally had that short U sound and were spelled with the letter U, like bull and bush and put.

The other set were the words that were raised from O to U

and then shortened to U.

And those words are typically spelt with a double O to reflect their original O vowel sound.

That includes words like book, look,

took, foot, good,

would,

cook, and stood.

So again, just to trace that sound change for you, book began as book during the time of Chaucer.

The vowel was then raised up to book during the Great Vowel Shift, and then in the 1600s the vowel was shortened to book.

So it was book, book, book.

All of that explains why that short U sound is sometimes spelled with a U and is sometimes spelled with a double O.

The former are older words that still have their traditional U, and the latter are newer words with a sound that evolved from O and are spelled with double O's to reflect that history.

Now so far we've explored the changes that affected the two highest back vowels, u and o.

Now let's turn our attention to the two lowest back vowels, a and a.

In the next section of this episode, we'll look at those two vowel sounds together because their history is fundamentally connected.

In the prior section, we explored how the O sound was raised to during the Great Vowel Shift.

As with the other vowel shifts we've explored, when the O sound moved up, it left a gap, and that gap was soon filled when the next lowest vowel sound moved up and occupied that space.

In this case, that next lowest vowel was the aw sound.

So the aw sound shifted up to the O sound during the 1400s and 1500s.

But there's a lot more to this part of the story.

And those other details concern where that aw sound came from.

And this is where we need to refer back to an earlier episode.

Way back in episode 96, called From Alpha to Omega, I explored a specific vowel shift that took place in the early Middle English period.

And that vowel shift was really the source of this particular vowel sound.

So let's revisit that discussion for a moment.

As I noted earlier, the two lowest back vowels are a and aw.

Well, in the early Middle English period, shortly after the Norman Conquest, words that had that lowest a sound started to be pronounced with a slightly slightly higher a sound.

So the vowel shifted up one step.

And then, three or four centuries later, that vowel sound shifted up again during the Great Vowel Shift from A to O.

Remember the order of the back vowels.

Ollie's awesome old uber.

A

aw ooh.

So this vowel sound followed that same order.

a

o

Hom hom home

bon bon bone

Stan stone

stone

bat bot boat.

The first pronunciation was the Old English pronunciation the second was the Middle English pronunciation and the third pronunciation is the modern English pronunciation after the second vowel shift.

Now, again, that first vowel change happened about three or four centuries before the Great Vowel Shift, so it isn't normally considered to be part of the Great Vowel Shift itself.

But if we take a step back and take a broader view of what happened, we can think of those two shifts as part of a larger, more extended process that converted the Old English vowel system into the Modern English vowel system.

Now, the fact that these two lowest back vowels moved up over the course of the Middle English period does raise an interesting question.

Since those were the lowest vowel sounds, and since we still have those vowel sounds in English today, where did the modern versions of those vowels come from?

Well, there's not a single answer to that question.

The fact is that vowel sounds are constantly shifting around in English.

And over the past few centuries, there have been many changes that aren't considered part of the the great vowel shift itself.

Many of those changes have taken place since then, or they involve a separate process.

And many words that had other vowel sounds have moved in and filled the gaps left behind when the a and ah sounds moved up to o.

Now I'm not going to trace all the changes here because, again, they're not really considered to be part of the great vowel shift.

But I just want to explain why we still have words with those lowest back vowels, even though those vowel sounds were raised upward in the 1400s and 1500s during the Great Vowel Shift.

Now having looked at how these low back vowels changed, let's consider the impact of those changes on the way words are spelled.

The first thing we should do is think back to the previous section where we looked at how the O sound shifted up to O.

We saw at that point that many of the words affected by that change were spelled with a double O, and that spelling was retained when the vowel sound shifted up to OO, and that's why so many words with the OO sound to day are spelled with double O's, like room and spoon and moon.

But notice that the letter O didn't become restricted to that high O sound.

We still use the letter O for its traditional O sound in words like home and stone and bone.

These are words where the vowel sound shifted upward in the way I described earlier in this section, from a to a

to o,

hom to hom to home.

So why do we use the letter o to spell those words?

Why didn't they retain their original as?

It seems to contradict the general rule that words retain their older spellings even after their vowels shifted around.

Well, the answer to that question has to do with the fact that there wasn't a specific letter to represent that aw sound.

So when the vowel in those words shifted up from a to aw in early Middle English, scribes had to figure out how to represent that new sound in writing.

And some of them decided to use the letter O for that sound.

So when the vowel sound moved up again from AW to O during the Great Vowel Shift, those words just retained the letter O that they already had.

So let me break that down for you so you can see how that spelling evolved.

Let's begin with the Old English version of words like home and boat.

The Anglo-Saxons would have said hom and bot,

and those words were typically spelled H-A-M and B-A-T.

Then around the time of the Norman Conquest, in the early Middle English period, the vowel was raised up one step to aw.

So someone like Geoffrey Chaucer would have said hom and bot.

But that was clearly a different vowel sound, so Middle English scribes had to decide how to spell it.

Now this aw sound was articulated somewhere between the low a sound represented with letter A and the slightly higher O sound represented with letter O.

So those were the two best options.

They could either continue to spell those words with an an A, or they could shift the spelling to O,

even though neither of those letters really reflected the current pronunciation at the time.

As I noted, many of those scribes decided to use the letter O for this in-between AW sound.

But that meant that the letter O was being used for both the AW sound and the slightly higher O sound.

So the letter O was being asked to do a lot of work, and it wasn't always clear which sound the letter O was representing.

Because of that potential confusion, some scribes looked for a different way to represent that AW sound.

Again, that sound was pronounced in-between a and o,

the traditional sounds of letter A and letter O.

So some scribes decided to represent that in-between sound by putting those two letters together.

That gave us the letter combination OA.

That seemed to be a good way to indicate that this AW sound was pronounced somewhere in between the traditional sounds of letters O and A.

And that gave scribes two different ways of representing this aw sound, either the single letter O

or the letters O and A put together.

And then when this AW sound moved up to O during the Great Vowel Shift, those two spellings were retained.

And we still use both of those spellings today for the words that experienced that evolution.

We use the letter O in words like home, stone, bone, holy, ghost, and so on.

And we use the letter combination OA in words like boat, goat, road, loaf, soap, and so on.

Again, all of those words have the same phonetic history, and they have the same vowel sound today, but the difference in spelling reflects the different ways of representing that aw vowel sound in late Middle English, before the vowel shifted up to its modern pronunciation.

Now before we move on, I should probably account for one other group of words with that O sound.

Those are words that are typically spelled with OW, like show, low, grow, blow, and bowl.

Those words have a slightly different phonetic history.

They had a different vowel sound at the time of the Great Vowel Shift.

It was a specific diphthong that shifted to this O sound at a later date in the 1500s and 1600s.

So the vowel sound in those words crashed into and merged with those other words that acquired the O sound about a century earlier during the Great Vowel Shift.

All of that gave us three common ways of representing the O sound today:

O

and OA and OW.

Remember that Middle English scribes also used a double O spelling for that sound, and that spelling was retained in the words that shifted up to O during the vowel shift, in words like food and goose and spoon.

And that's why we don't generally use the double O spelling for the O sound anymore.

That spelling is usually reserved for the long and short U sounds today, as I discussed in the previous section.

Now, before I conclude, let's consider how the O sound has evolved within modern English.

As I noted a few episodes back, the O sound that was used in early modern English was more of a pure vowel sound, so it was more like O.

A word like boat was pronounced bot.

That type of pronunciation can still be heard in parts of the British Isles.

The sound later evolved into the modern pronunciation as O, which is actually a diphthong.

The modern sound is really the O sound followed by a slight O sound, O.

That happened in the 1700s.

And then in the early 1900s, English speakers in southern Britain modified that sound a little bit more to O,

which is a similar diphthong, but it begins a little bit higher in the mouth.

Now that brings us to the end of the long vowel sounds in English.

So we've covered all of the major vowel changes that are known today as the Great Vowel Shift.

These changes affected all of the long vowels in English, and as I've outlined over the past three episodes, the changes didn't necessarily end with the Great Vowel Shift itself.

Many of these vowels continued to shift and evolve over the course of the following centuries.

There were also additional vowel shifts that took place at a later date, and were often limited to certain regions.

Those changes contributed to the various regional accents that we have today, and I'll try to trace out those changes and developments as we move forward into the modern English period.

And speaking of modern English, we can now start to turn our attention to that period.

We'll begin next time with the rise of the Tudors and the discovery of the Americas by Christopher Columbus.

These developments will set the stage for the eventual expansion of English well beyond the shores of Britain.

So next time, we'll pick back up with our overall historical narrative.

Until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.